Remember Bahrain? Falujah?

Bahrain is a bit of a problem for US imperialism these days, a bit like Yemen.  The two repressive regimes are friends of the US and are making it much harder for Washington to obscure its distaste for violence when it suits US capitalism as with Syria, and acceptance of it when its profitable.

The Wall Street Journal had a 2" by 11/2 " column today on the trails in Bahrain.  These trials are pretty important as they are trials of medical personnel who treated the injured during the height of the protest for reform there before the US asked their Saudi friends to wade in and squash the movement for democratic rights and support the absolute monarchy.

According to the Journal, 47 doctors and nurses were arraigned yesterday in a closes hearing held under emergency rule.  This is in an absolue monarchy with 30,000 US troops stationed nearby.

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On another note, the US is going to spend $3 billion of taxpayer's money to hire a 5,100  strong private security force to protect diplomats in Iraq as well as the US embassy and related buildings.  The mercenaries will also operate a fleet of aircraft as well as armored vehicles; five US troops were killed in Iraq yesterday.  The mercenaries are part of a discussion taking place on how to protect the US embassy for example which is a target for rocket attacks. So contractors will carry out "military style missions" the Wall Street Journal adds that aren't "inherently governmental" describing that as "providing emergency medical evaluation, operating systems to detect and warn against incoming rocket or artillery fire, or rescue diplomatic personnel under attack."

It appears that the US occupation of this country is not too popular with the locals, nor is the US's puppet regime there. There have been many demonstrations and protests that are pretty much kept out of the US mass media.

Falijah will not be on the mind of most Americans as it is not something that those who control the media in this country want us to think about.  But Falujah will forever be a shrine to a heroic resistance by the Iraqi people against a brutal occupation of their country by the most powerful military machine on earth. It was a slaughter to teach the Iraqi's a lesson for killing those four mercenaries.  All occupiers do this, the British did it in Ireland and all over the world. It was a brutal attack but we are taught to think of these mercenaries as just your average GI, not the case, they' contractors.

Gift from the US: What Depleted Uranium does

Commenting on a report from Iraqi doctors, Phil Dickens writes on Countercurrents. org that in the US strategy in Falujah was that  the "women and children were allowed to escape, the men were contained within the city walls to await their fate." "There is a strong parallel here with events in the Srebrenica Massacre during the Bosnian war." Dickens adds,  "There, Serb forces separated the men and boys from the broader group of Bosniak refugees at Potočari, busing out the women and children, and slaughtering the men."  The difference between Falujah and Srebrenica, Chomsky pointed out, "with Fallujah, the US didn't truck out the women and children, it bombed them out."  The extent of deformed births and other illnesses due to the use of depleted uranium and who knows what in Falujah constitutes a war crime but non of the criminals, Rumsfeld, Bush, etc, will be punished for it.

And we need to think about how dear our history is, how they portray the rebellion of the colonists here against British rule.  That was Falujah was. If we want to wonder why ordinary Iraqi's a decent and friendly people I found while I was there, would treat people so brutally perhaps we might remind ourselves what our tax money has brought the people of Iraq: "up to one a half million dead, one million widows nearly five million orphans and nearly five million displaced." read more