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The official blog of Fausta's Blog Talk Radio show.

Friday, July 30, 2004

Playing the Blame the Americans game
Chrenkoff has an article by Hitchens Christopher Hitchens: It happened, Mr Adams, responding to Phillip Adams's article that tried to white-wash mass-murderer Saddam enough to make Bush and Blair look just as bad. Hitchens states
It is quite conceivable that this horrific fact has in itself led to some over-counting. Tony Blair, scorned by Adams, has mentioned a figure of 400,000. The late UN special representative for Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, specified a figure of 290,000 Iraqis over three decades. (That was before the Saddamist-jihadist alliance put an end to de Mello's life by blowing up the UN headquarters in Baghdad last year, thus adding to a toll that is by the way still rising.) Bear in mind that those are only statistics of Iraqis. But perhaps Adams doesn't wish to take the word of the man who assisted East Timor to liberation, and who was sceptical of the intervention in the first place.
Very well, he can consult the still-extant UN resolution that demanded in vain that Iraq provide an accounting of what happened to the many hundreds of Kuwaiti prisoners who vanished during the illegal obliteration of Kuwaiti statehood in 1990. Or he can inquire after the hundreds of thousands of young Iranians and Iraqis who perished as a consequence of Saddam's lunatic invasion of Iran. If he wants to do Baathist body counts, I can keep him busy for the rest of his journalistic career.

Also in Chrenkoff, Médecins sans Frontières blames America first. No matter that the doctors were killed by either Taliban remnants or opium growers. It's the Americans' fault because of their "attempts to use humanitarian aid to win hearts and minds. That jeopardises the aid to people in need and endangers the lives of humanitarian aid workers ... These soldiers are often out of uniform. It's hard to know what nationality they are." The BBC News broadcast repeated the sentiment.

Likewise, this op-ed article (in Spanish) lays the blame for the March 11 train explosions in Madrid on the Americans, since "they didn't win the war in Iraq" and coudln't protect Spain from terrorists.
Since when is it America's duty to protect Spain -- a sovereign country, a democracy, with years of experience in terrorist attacks -- from terrorists, may I ask?

Not lagging behind, yesterday's France2 news (no link) interviewed two relatives of the victims of the Bakuba car bomb, who said the explosion was caused by an American rocket. Taking those two at their word, the France2 commentator (yes, commentator, not reporter) finished his report saying "the locals fear the next American attack".

Clearly, none of these people asked Mohammed as to who's to blame.

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