9-6-06, 6:00 a.m.
In another year, New Orleans will still be a shadow of its former self -if it survives at all. More effort has been spent making excuses than has been done to restore one of America's great cities. There will be more empty words and in yet another year nothing will have changed. In the meantime, there is Southern Lebanon -already rebounding with help from an organization that Bush deems 'terrorist'.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah, the force fighting and defending the villages, at the same time started helping the population as soon as the Israeli bombing began. The Lebanese resistance provided the ambulances and scores of searchers who pulled people from the rubble. They helped organize getting tens of thousands of refugees to schools, public parks and private homes. (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 16)
'In Beirut alone, Hezbollah organized 10 mobile medical teams that cared for 14 schools each, in two-day rotations, helping 48,000 people. Another 70,000 were treated in houses by other professionals.
In a Hezbollah kitchen near downtown Beirut, volunteers prepared 8,000 hot meals a day-part of a daily total of 50,000 they distributed across Beirut, reported the Monitor.
In New Orleans, families evacuated from the Superdome and the Convention Center were scattered all over the country. Parents were sometimes separated from children. Some didn't know if loved ones lived or died. Three months after Katrina hit, 6,500 people were still unaccounted for, and more than 400 bodies still unidentified, according to the National Center for Missing Adults.' -Joyce Chediac, Lebanon rebuilds, New Orleans waits
So -who are the terrorists? Bushco or Hezbollah?
If I had been a New Orleans resident victimized by the shoddy job done by the US Army Corps of Engineers and, later, by the Bush gang of crooks and incompetents, I might be inclined to call the US government a terrorist organization.
If I were an Iraqi citizen with family members among some 140,000 civilians murdered in Bush's initial wave of bombings -Shock and Awe -I might be inclined to call Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld terrorists.
If I had family members murdered in cold blood by US troops at Haditha, I might be inclined to label the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld a terrorist organization.
If I should find myself thrown into Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, or an Eastern European gulag where I am tortured, sodomized, electrocuted, humiliated or, possibly, murdered, I might be inclined to use the term 'terrorists' to describe and denote Bush, the Pentagon, the Military/Industrial Complex, a private army of un-accountable private contractors, and the enablers of the GOP!
Significant progress by Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon will finish Bush politically at a time when the US has no leverage anywhere in the world. Surely, no one believed Bush when he declared Hezbollah defeated; by contrast, probably everyone believed Hezbollah when it declared 'victory'. Bush is testy and anxious and it shows. Billions of people know him to be a liar, a fraud, a war criminal, and an incompetent!
How did Hezbollah -called 'terrorist' by Bush -win? For one thing, Hezbollah was in much better touch with its 'base' than Bush with anyone but a tiny, wealthy elite. Hezbollah began a defense of villages as soon as Israel began a widespread bombing campaign. When Bush is forced by reality and an increasingly livid American populace to pull out of Iraq, who will undo the harm done there by Bush and his criminal gang?
Who will rebuild Baghdad?
Will we withdraw the troops and send in FEMA?
Can Brownie do a heckuva job in Baghdad where everyone else has failed?
Will anyone go to Baghdad in order to take the fall for Bush?
I suppose Bush hasn't thought that far down the road. It might have been David Hume who said that there is a moral imperative to be intelligent. Iraq was a 'war of choice'. Likewise, Bush's stupidity is the result of a deliberate choice. No one but Bush is to blame for Bush's stupidity. Less privileged people must learn quickly and choose wisely in order to survive. Bush did neither and winds up ruling the world. What's up with that?
-Len Hart is a Houston based film/video producer specializing in shorts and full-length documentaries. He is a former major market and network correspondent; credits include CBS, ABC-TV and UPI.
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