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Cry Me A Riverbend II

Saturday, May 22, 2004

Riverbend and her friends the insurgents

I'm still having trouble figuring out how to make anonymous posting easier (such as you see on Jeffery's site). Anyone who knows more about this than I do, please let me know what to do.

Scott commented on my last posting. He didn't seem to disagree with anything I said, he just has a problem that I exist:
Don't you have any more originality than to heckle other people? and not only that but to set up a blog stictly to ape a defucnt heckler.

I still think it still serves a purpose. I don't see any difference between commenting on Raed and Riverbend and commenting on a Washington Post article. Heck, I wouldn't have even known about Riverbend or Faiza or a lot of other sites if it hadn't been for Cry Me A Riverbend.

As for originality, Riverbend (for example) seems to mostly just repeat the assertions of insurgents and Muqty's henchmen. I consider this site my chance to comment on people who think that insurgents are forced to kill soldiers and NGO workers but that the Coalition does everything it does out of a desire to be cruel. Since Riverbend and Faiza and Raed aren't interested in permiting commentary at their sites (a typical Bathist tradition from what I can tell of Saddam's and Syria's regimes), they are welcome to respond here or on their own sites if they think their arguments have enough foundation.

But, on to Riverbend's most recent posting (En Kint Tedri, May 22)...

She's very happy that the Coalition is looking closely at Chalabi, but she asks:
Chalabi was America's lapdog- why is he suddenly unsuitable for the new Iraq?

Err...well maybe it's because the Coalition doesn't care about having a "lap-dog". (gasp!) It can be surprising for some when they add two to two and get four. Fortunately for Riverbend, she does not arrive at so unsetting a figure; she grasps wildly at 9, 42, 182, whatever:
Why this sudden change of heart towards Mercenary #1? People are saying that it is a ploy to help him rise in popularity, but I can hardly believe that. Could the decision-makers currently mulling over the Iraq situation be so ridiculously optimistic? Or could they have really been so wrong in the past?

Actually, they gave a reason: They suspect that possibly Chalabi himself, but more likely his chief security officer has sold himself to Iran. The Coalition does not seem to be willing to tolerate the Iraqi democracy being undermined by Iran whether it be through Chalabi or a self-important religious pretender. Riverbend may be correctly assessing Chalabi's credibility but her default bigotry prevents her from reaching the obvious conclusion that Coalition's ultimate goal is a stable and free Iraq.

Next she goes on to deride the Coalition for taking on the difficult task of excising from Iraq a band of kidnappers, of bomb-planters on public streets, of sabatours of oil pipelines and electrical lines, of terrorizers of non-government organization volunteers:
Meanwhile, a couple of days ago, 40 people were murdered in western Iraq while they were celebrating a wedding- an American helicopter fired at the civilians, killing women and children. Apparently, the guests at the wedding were shooting klashnikovs into the air. You'd think that the Americans would know by now that shooting klashnikovs into the air is a form of celebration and considering the fact that the party was far from any major town or city, the shots were virtually harmless.

Riverbend, from her perspective, knows no more about what went on there than I do from mine. It is not inconsistent for the Iraqi insurgents to muster and attack from positions near bystanders and women and children. Actually they are known to attack from houses with the intention of having them destroyed in the fighting. Anyway, the Coalition forces seem to having come to that site based on intelligence that foreign insurgents were gathering there, not just because people were shooting in the air.
There's more to this story than a lil' o wedding. As Maj. Gen. Mattis pointed out:
"How many people go into the middle of the desert 10 miles from the Syrian border to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?"

This story is still developing.