Happy(?) New Year

Watching the fireworks in the city seemed like a good idea for celebrating the New Year. We spent 15 minutes watching the bay bridge before the huge series of fireworks starting exploding in the sky. That looked pretty cool, but it reminded me as usual of the war bombs and explosions. Thank god niki and some of her Iranian friends recalled the same war memories. Otherwise, I would have started my PTSD therapy.

Iraqis had the same fireworks-sound-fx, but as a result of 13 bombed cars in the first day of the New Year. I hope this year will be better and more peaceful, but I know it won’t be.

One of the most interesting parts of the last prime-time bush speech about Iraq was the fact that he admitted the huge tragic catastrophic disastrous devastating mistake/lie about the Iraqi WMDs in one cold and short sentence. He mentioned it as if it was a small bad luck incident caused by bad weather or something. Admitting the baselessness of what was presented as the reason for why this war was justified and marketed by the administration passed without any big reactions.

Finding the Iraqi WMD was the bush administration’s fig leaf. The entire world witnessed in the last three years how Iraqis lost most of the good aspects they used to have in their life before the occupation while all the bad aspects grew and increased. Iraqis have the same type, if not worse, of an authoritarian regime killing and torturing anyone with different politics or ideologies, but at the same time they lost their security, their free health care, their semi-free electricity and oil supplies, and they’re on their way of losing the rest of their monthly food rations and their free educational system. Bush sacrificed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and left the rest with a mullah dictatorship instead of a secular one. All the lies about importing democracy and freedom to Iraq fell a long time ago, and the lie of finding Iraq’s WMD just fell in the last couple of weeks leaving the administration’s “bush” exposed.

If bush and his administration, along with the remaining minority of the war supporters, had any dignity or honor, Bush would have admitted the disaster he caused in Iraq, pulled out the occupation troops, and started paying compensation to Iraq and Iraqis.

I’m planning on starting a new project estimating the compensation that should be paid by the occupation countries to Iraq as a country and to Iraqis as individuals. This project will be based on the legitimate and fair UNCC compensation scale that Iraq followed in the last decade in paying compensation to Kuwait.

This compensation-to-Iraq project is a must, and I’ll appreciate any suggestions or ideas about it. You can take a look on UNCC’s website, it's good for brainstorming.