Dear Dirty America

bayerberg

A brick thrown through a shop window, a furniture store torched, a bus burnt out, certainly warrant condemnation, but it’s hard to imagine that David Cameron would condemn the devastation and mass slaughter visited on Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade — or the bombing of Libya — as “sickening violence”.

On the contrary, this is the kind of “sickening violence” that he and the majority of MPs now tripping over themselves to voice their outrage over the rioters trashing high streets across Britain, are quick to justify as motivated by the superiority of  “our values”.

Many of the same MPs who voted along with the majority in parliament for the war that reduced much of Iraq to ruins and killed a million Iraqis, take to the moral high ground when alienated youths from our ghettoes of deprivation commit their mini-version of “shock and awe”.

Beste makes a great point when noting the hypocrisy from those officials who condemn the violence in London, but do not acknowledge the far worse misery and suffering inflicted upon the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq during the ever-going War on Terror.

In fact, the London riot is nothing in comparison to the damage and destruction of unsettling and destroying the nation of Iraq, which is home to 26 million people.

As Donald Rumsfeld once said about the chaos and death and destruction in Iraq: Freedom is untidy. That kind of smug acceptance of murder and mayhem at the hands of Western troops is seen as a messy means to a supposedly better end.