'Stability First': Newspeak for rape of Iraq

[donsu]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ27Ak03.html

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It's not the first time Baghdad has been sacked. Genghis Khan's grandson did it, and so did Tamerlan. In the good old days, they built pyramids of skulls. This time around, they coin nice names, like "Stability First" and "Redeploy and Contain". "Staying the Course" is out of favor, but no matter, they all amount to the same thing: rape. - Pepe Escobar
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-snip-

Iraq is not simply a US electoral issue. It's a human tragedy of biblical proportions. Hence the urge at this point to situate the tragedy in a historical context.

In AD 750 the Abbasid Dynasty "de-Bedouinized" Islam by defeating the Ummayad Dynasty based in Damascus. The culture of the Abbasid court ceased being Arab-only and started to include Persia and the Turks. Islam turned into a universal religion, no more constrained by geography. "Baldach" - that's what European travelers called Baghdad up to the late 18th century - was catapulted to the center of the world.

From AD 786-809, under fabled Haroon al-Rashid - who established relations with Tang Dynasty China and the "illiterate emperor" Charlemagne - Baghdad gave the world astronomy, alchemy, hydraulics, diplomacy, fiscal administration and the postal service. Up to the early 12th century it remained the most important intellectual center in the world.

Baghdad had been under siege by the Assyrians and later by Cyrus the Great from Persia. But it was only in 1258 that Baghdad was sacked for the first time by what was then the equivalent of Desert Storm - the Mongols riding their lightning-quick horses under the command of Hulagu, Genghis Khan's grandson. Legend has it that he erected a pyramid of 700,000 skulls out of his victims.

In 1401, another foreign invader, the Turco-Mongol Tamerlan ("Timur the Lame"), devastated Baghdad yet again. In 2003, after the devastation of "shock and awe", came the Christian armies of President George W Bush. From the beginning the comparisons with Hulagu and Tamerlan were vivid in the popular imagination. Over time, Baghdadis - Sunni or Shi'ite - were saying, we will dictate our rhythm and impose ourselves over the occupiers. This is already happening.

Quagmire Iraq is not a 21st-century video game of Arabs playing extras in a slow-motion Armageddon. This is a wrenching story with rivers of real blood and a terrible accumulation of real corpses. The story was engineered in Washington - and the plot would not be advancing were it not for the United States. The US bears all the moral and legal responsibility for the destruction of the fabled former capital of the caliphate and the de facto Western flank of the Arab nation.

It is in this context that the current avalanche of Iraq-related newspeak in the US should be placed.
-snip-
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read on


the last paragraph of this long article says:

In sum: a "Coalition of the Drilling" secured by the Pentagon's Long War apparatus. It's up to ancient and proud Baghdad to spoil the party. Baghdad survived and buried Hulagu. Baghdad survived and buried Tamerlan. Baghdad may as well survive and bury George W Bush.

[Mnemosyne]

1. "It's a human tragedy of biblical proportions."

It surely is.:cry:

[donsu]

2. I've often wondered just what or how big are biblical proportions?

people seem to use this term frequently.

can someone define it?

[Mnemosyne]

3. Can't seem to find a basic definition. But I've always

understood it to mean of a gigantic magnitude. ie. the flood that covered the "entire world".

Hopefully someone has a definition better than mine.