Somethings been put on the heart of me and some of my friends.  We’ve been talking about this for a few days now and we came to a conclusion that we need to let other people know.  Of course, we are at war.  There are a lot of protesters out there, but there are also a lot of people for the war.  Yes, I agree that we need to be there, but there is a point that a lot of people are missing.  Yes, Hussein is our enemy and a very evil man, but he needs our prayers.  I know the odds of him ever changing are slim, and the chances of him converting are even slimmer, but I believe that God can reach even the deepest seeds.  Most people want him dead, I don’t believe that is right.  I do believe we need to stop him and get him out of there, but all I’m saying is to pray for him and the members of his reigm.  God ask us to love our enemies and this is just another case of that.  Just a really extreme case.

Hrm not much to say today, compared to these last few days.

I’m sorta tired of warblogging, but I need to say one thing.  A lot of people are acting ridiculously and saying ridiculous things regarding this war.  Ridiculous is being surprised that there are casualties and POWs.  Ridiculous is being surprised that the Iraqi regime violates laws and human rights of our POWs -- they’ve been doing those things as long as anyone can remember.  Ridiculous is asking if the war is a failure, or asking if we are "getting off track," because there have been casualties and POWs and human rights violations.  Ridiculous is asking "what’s taking so long" 5 days into the conflict.  Ridiculous is being willingly ignorant of all history and logic, because that is the only way a person can ask such questions.  It is mind-boggling how supremely unreasonable people can be.

I feel better having gotten that out.  Den Beste has an in-depth analysis and explanation of all this, and after reading that I felt the need to comment.

It was really nice out today, about 60°, and I rode my bike 11 miles.  It never fails to amaze me how happy I get from just riding around to places I’ve never been.  I ended up in this really awesome neighborhood with big, beautiful houses.  All custom, too, not like the suburban-sprawl-induced clones that are springing up like weeds everywhere.  Most of them were on about 2 acres, some on 3 or 4 or 5, and all the lots were partially wooded, with big, tall, old trees.  And the neighborhoods were hilly, which gives them so much more character.  I suppose it was still State College out there, about 6 miles from my house, probably greater State College.  You certainly don’t see real estate like that in State College proper.

I had 231 visitors today!  The old record was 190something.  That’s exciting.  Lately I’ve noticed that when Google indexes my webpage, it often indexes nodivisions.com/ directly, instead of indexing a post like nodivisions.com/?197.  So when someone finds my site that way, the post they’re looking for may well have gotten pushed off the main page because there are newer posts.  So I added a search box at the top of the page, from which you can search this whole blog/messageboard.  Hopefully that will help some people out.

"There was a machine designed for shredding plastic. Men were dropped into it and we were again made to watch. Sometimes they went in head first and died quickly. Sometimes they went in feet first and died screaming. It was horrible. I saw 30 people die like this. Their remains would be placed in plastic bags and we were told they would be used as fish food . . . on one occasion, I saw Qusay [President Saddam Hussein’s youngest son] personally supervise these murders."
...
Another witness told us about practices of the security services towards women: "Women were suspended by their hair as their families watched; men were forced to watch as their wives were raped . . . women were suspended by their legs while they were menstruating until their periods were over, a procedure designed to cause humiliation."
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For more than 20 years, senior Iraqi officials have committed genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. This list includes far more than the gassing of 5,000 in Halabja and other villages in 1988. It includes serial war crimes during the Iran-Iraq war; the genocidal Anfal campaign against the Iraqi Kurds in 1987-88; the invasion of Kuwait and the killing of more than 1,000 Kuwaiti civilians; the violent suppression, which I witnessed, of the 1991 Kurdish uprising that led to 30,000 or more civilian deaths; the draining of the Southern Marshes during the 1990s, which ethnically cleansed thousands of Shias; and the summary executions of thousands of political opponents.

Many Iraqis wonder why the world applauded the military intervention that eventually rescued the Cambodians from Pol Pot and the Ugandans from Idi Amin when these took place without UN help. They ask why the world has ignored the crimes against them?

All these crimes have been recorded in detail by the UN, the US, Kuwaiti, British, Iranian and other Governments and groups such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and Indict. Yet the Security Council has failed to set up a war crimes tribunal on Iraq because of opposition from France, China and Russia. As a result, no Iraqi official has ever been indicted for some of the worst crimes of the 20th century. I have said incessantly that I would have preferred such a tribunal to war. But the time for offering Saddam incentives and more time is over.

"I was a naive fool to be a human shield for Saddam," says Daniel Pepper:

I wanted to join the human shields in Baghdad because it was direct action which had a chance of bringing the anti-war movement to the forefront of world attention... So that is exactly what I did.
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I was shocked when I first met a pro-war Iraqi in Baghdad - a taxi driver taking me back to my hotel late at night. I explained that I was American and said, as we shields always did, "Bush bad, war bad, Iraq good". He looked at me with an expression of incredulity.

As he realised I was serious, he slowed down and started to speak in broken English about the evils of Saddam’s regime. Until then I had only heard the President spoken of with respect, but now this guy was telling me how all of Iraq’s oil money went into Saddam’s pocket and that if you opposed him politically he would kill your whole family.
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Of course I had read reports that Iraqis hated Saddam Hussein, but this was the real thing. Someone had explained it to me face to face. I told a few journalists who I knew. They said that this sort of thing often happened - spontaneous, emotional, and secretive outbursts imploring visitors to free them from Saddam’s tyrannical Iraq.
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"Don’t you listen to Powell on Voice of America radio?" he said. "Of course the Americans don’t want to bomb civilians. They want to bomb government and Saddam’s palaces. We want America to bomb Saddam."

We just sat, listening, our mouths open wide. Jake, one of the others, just kept saying, "Oh my God" as the driver described the horrors of the regime. Jake was so shocked at how naive he had been. We all were. It hadn’t occurred to anyone that the Iraqis might actually be pro-war.

The driver’s most emphatic statement was: "All Iraqi people want this war." He seemed convinced that civilian casualties would be small; he had such enormous faith in the American war machine to follow through on its promises. Certainly more faith than any of us had.
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[After returning from Iraq] I went to photograph the anti-war rally in Parliament Square. Thousands of people were shouting "No war" but without thinking about the implications for Iraqis. Some of them were drinking, dancing to Samba music and sparring with the police. It was as if the protesters were talking about a different country where the ruling government is perfectly acceptable. It really upset me.

Anyone with half a brain must see that Saddam has to be taken out. It is extraordinarily ironic that the anti-war protesters are marching to defend a government which stops its people exercising that freedom.

That makes me want to go find every anti-war American I know and punch them in the face and scream WAKE UP!  This is about the 80th example I’ve seen of how horrible life is for Iraqis.  It’s not propaganda coming from "educated" sissy college students, nor from blind-to-all-logic leftist liberals... it’s coming from IRAQIS.

What the heck is wrong with people?  I’m hearing reporters and spokespeople saying we are "slowly but surely" winning this war.  Since when is securing the vast majority of a country and reaching its capital within a week considered "slow"?

I am watching war on live TV.  Some Iraqi infantrymen are returning small-arms fire on a coalition tank.  A stinking TANK.  It’s futile, but it does waste our troops’ time effectively.

Here’s the situation.  At Umm Qasr, there’s a handful of Iraqi soldiers in a building.  They fired on our troops with small arms, so we sent a few tanks down a road next to the building, the road maybe 50 or 100 meters from the building.  On the other side of the road, maybe 200 or 300 meters back, a dozen or so marines are laid out with their weapons trained on the building, some with binoculars.  This is where the cameraman is.  He’s talking to one of the marines to learn the situation, and he’s filming the whole thing.  We’re watching the tanks receive fire (and watching it bounce off), watching the tanks fire back, watching these marines lay patiently on the hot ground in the hot desert, and listening to one of them give the play-by-play on the situation.  This is so surreal and amazing.  It’s been going on for over 2 hours now and I’m riveted.  I can’t turn away.

I saw and heard some funny stuff in the past day or two.

Method Man and Redman did a commercial for Powerstripe deodorant.  It’s not "ha, ha" funny, but sad-funny.

Saw a Navy commercial that said, "Life. Liberty. And the pursuit of all who threaten it."  Very cool.  It even had decent music.

On David Letterman last night, the Top Ten list was "Top ten ways Kim Jong-Il [the murderous North Korean dictator] can improve his image."  One of the ways was "Goodbye weapons of mass destruction; hello cookies of mass tastiness."

On All Things Considered Wednesday, there was a commentary by Andrei Codrescu about a talking fish recently reported in the New York Times.

I don’t subscribe to cult news letters, so I have no idea if signs and miracles have been multiplying out there.  So when a Hebrew talking carp made the New York Times front page, I paid attention.

The carp was about to be chopped up by two fish-mongers, a Ecuadorian and a Jew, when it started spouting prophecies.  The Ecuadorian heard it first, and couldn’t understand what it was saying so he thought it was Satan.  But then his Jewish colleague listened, and it was saying Biblical things.

Despite their differences as to the import of the voice, they chopped up the talking carp anyway and sold it.  I can understand the Ecuadorian getting a little spooked because the carp wasn’t talking Latin or Spanish, the two main languages of non-human miracle messengers.  But what’s with the Jew?  He knew both what the carp was saying, and what a talking carp might be worth whole.

The New York Times report was kind of jocular too, and I didn’t like that.  Catholics have been receiving messages via tortillas, trees, and sheep for years, so the Jews get one turn through a fish, and the world laughs?

What gets me is that unaware people ate the carp.  I mean, there are people out there now with a piece of talking Gefilte fish in their bellies.  Everybody listens when their stomach rumbles.  But now they’ve got to listen extra carefully because the message, which was apocalyptic as I understand it, has gotten scrambled like a Dada poem and it’s all bits and pieces among the gurgles and growls.

The Jews say that thirty-six just men keep the world going.  Now there are thirty-six bellies out there, each one holding part of the message, and it’s a matter of some urgency that they be found, sat next to one another, interviewed by Rabbis, put in the right order, deciphered, and translated, first into Latin, then into English.  The Jews don’t have a Pope that can certify the message, but we can put it to a vote, and then have Joe Lieberman introduce it to the world.

Joseph recently pointed me to radioU.com which, unlike most internet (and other) radio stations, is actually pretty good.  But the best thing about it so far is that they have 2 interviews with the brothers Chaps, creators of HomestarRunner.com.  (If you’ve never been there to see Strong Bad emails, your life is not complete.)  And these interviews are stinking hilarious.  Here’s the page they’re on, and here are direct links to the first interview and the second one.

Finally, Protesting the Protesters is really funny too.  My favorite answer to the "real reasons for the war" question was that it’s for the control of water in the middle east.  Ahh, of course, how sinister!

Charlie Daniels speaks his mind!

We received a press release from Charlie Daniel’s people regarding the issues in Iraq. Read on...

for immediate release March 4, 2003

An Open Letter To The Hollywood Bunch:

Ok let’s just say for a moment you bunch of pampered, overpaid, unrealistic children had your way and the U.S.A. didn’t go into Iraq.

Let’s say that you really get your way and we destroy all our nuclear weapons and stick daisies in our gun barrels and sit around with some white wine and cheese and pat ourselves on the back, so proud of what we’ve done for world peace.

Let’s say that we cut the military budget to just enough to keep the National Guard on hand to help out with floods and fires.

Let’s say that we close down our military bases all over the world and bring the troops home, increase our foreign aid and drop all the trade sanctions against everybody.

I suppose that in your fantasy world this would create a utopian world where everybody would live in peace. After all, the great monster, the United States of America, the cause of all the world’s trouble would have disbanded it’s horrible military and certainly all the other countries of the world would follow suit. After all, they only arm themselves to defend their countries from the mean old U.S.A.

Why you bunch of pitiful, hypocritical, idiotic, spoiled mugwumps. Get your head out of the sand and smell the Trade Towers burning. Do you think that a trip to Iraq by Sean Penn did anything but encourage a wanton murderer to think that the people of the U.S.A. didn’t have the nerve or the guts to fight him?

Barbra Streisand’s fanatical and hateful rankings about George Bush makes about as much sense as Michael Jackson hanging a baby over a railing.

You people need to get out of Hollywood once in a while and get out into the real world. You’d be surprised at the hostility you would find out here. Stop in at a truck stop and tell an overworked, long-distance truck driver that you don’t think Saddam Hussein is doing anything wrong.

Tell a farmer with a couple of sons in the military that you think the United States has no right to defend itself.

Go down to Baxley, Georgia and hold an anti-war rally and see what the folks down there think about you.

You people are some of the most disgusting examples of a waste of protoplasm I’ve ever had the displeasure to hear about.

Sean Penn, you’re a traitor to the United States of America. You gave aid and comfort to the enemy. How many American lives will your little, "fact finding trip" to Iraq cost? You encouraged Saddam to think that we didn’t have the stomach for war.

You people protect one of the most evil men on the face of this earth and won’t lift a finger to save the life of an unborn baby. Freedom of choice you say?

Well I’m going to exercise some freedom of choice of my own. If I see any of your names on a marquee, I’m going to boycott the movie. I will completely stop going to movies if I have to. In most cases it certainly wouldn’t be much of a loss.

You scoff at our military who’s boots you’re not even worthy to shine. They go to battle and risk their lives so ingrates like you can live in luxury. The day of reckoning is coming when you will be faced with the undeniable truth that the war against Saddam Hussein is the war on terrorism.

America is in imminent danger. You’re either for her or against her. There is no middle ground.

I think we all know where you stand.

What do you think?

God Bless America! Charlie Daniels