licentious radio

Monday, April 21, 2003
[9:13:45 PM]

My list: Names of Iraq war dead. Mostly the names are from news articles on the internet. The list includes Americans, British, soldiers, journalists, civilians, Iraqi fighters: names of people who are now dead.

The list is mostly from internet news sites, plus a few from print newspapers.

Creating the list was a weird experience. I became skilled at recognizing articles that would give names of the dead, not just a count, or names of survivors.

"Success" in my search was when I found the name of a dead person. Of course it's sad to find out that someone died, but I'm still glad to have found a few people's names.

What great names we have! Safia, Fernando, Veronica, Abdul, Noor....

Wouldn't you have liked to know Zainab Akram Abid, or Fatema Zaboon Maktoof, or Christopher Muzvuru, or Jay Aubin?

Seeing a list of names and ages is different from seeing names and pictures. It's nice that the dead American and British soldiers got their pictures onto websites, too. But no one collected pictures of the Iraqi dead. All I got were names and ages, and not even many of those.

I guess all of this is to say that I'm not going to put as much effort into this from now on. Sorry to everyone I missed. If you know some names that I didn't find, I'd be glad if you would let me know, and I'll add them in.

[7:55:19 PM]
But Syriasly....

Name one reason for making war on Iraq that doesn't apply to Syria. (Besides *oil*, that is.)

Repression, support of terrorists, alleged to have bio and chemical weapons, alleged to want nukes, wars against our allies (Israel, in this case). All 'check'.

Differences? (Besides oil....) Assad and Poppy Assad were never our boys. Saddam was a CIA man all the way back to JFK.

Poppy and the gang helped Saddam, but he turned around and gave the oil deals to French and Russian companies. (Oops -- there's that oil, again.) That's when Poppy gave Saddam the green light to take Kuwait out, heroicly pushed the Iraqi conscripts out of Kuwait, and had Kuwait give the new oil contracts to Chevron.

So I'm not really saying this is an *oil* issue, I'm saying that the Assads never got caught up in double/triple/quadruple double-crosses with the Bush family, so Junior Bush don't hate Junior Assad like he hates Saddam and the Juniors Saddam. No "F--- Assad! We're taking him out" soundbytes from the Whitehouse under Bushlette.

"Tried to kill my Daddy...." We only have the word of the Kuwait Secret Police that Saddam sent a goon to assassinate poor Poppy. Why shouldn't the Kuwaiti secret police arrest some local dissident -- someone who thinks women should have the right to vote, maybe -- and *tell* the world he was out to hit Pops? They look good, Pops is sure to be glad not to be dead -- it's a win-win! Kuwaitis were known to be lying dog propagandists -- remember the incubator babies -- so why should anyone believe the Kuwaiti secret police about an assassination attempt when they provide no evidence and execute the patsy -- I mean the alleged perpetrator. Poppy was probably like "nice touch". Why should Poppy complain if people think he survived an assassination attempt?

But seriously....

There are some distinctions. It's just that the distinctions weren't given as the arguments for making war on Iraq. So if you get your news from Fox, how could you understand the reluctance to conquer Syria? That's easy, if you get your news from Fox, you just think what you're told to think, and you're not out to understand anything.