2003-05-07T23:52:00.000-07:00

Some recent verse: Peacemonger!
November 1998: Blair - Having Bombed Baghdad, again! - Speaks from the Doorway of No. 10.
“The world’s a safer place tonight!”
- with babies in their graves,
& some of them in more than one...
Resourceful paleface braves
fire off their missiles, & recoil
at twice the speed of light
to wash their hands. They’ve made the world
a safer place tonight.

The Ballad of S.Hussain
in the dim & distant eighties
well before the last hurrah,
the wicked people of Iran
had ditched their saintly Shah.

with forty million fervent
Shia Muslims on the boil
the West preferred the Sunnis
to be managing the oil.

& Rumsfeld came to Baghdad
in nineteen-eighty-three:
"would you think of standing up to
Ayatollah Khomeini;

"this letter from our President
tells all there is to say.
Ronnie & the Pentagon
will back you all the way.

"all the arms & money
that you could ever need,
& patriotic principle,
& where that fails, there’s greed."

they cosseted, supplied him
they armed him to the teeth,
lauded & hero-worshipped him;
they stoked his self-belief.

the CIA approved him
a golden boy was Saddam;
they gave him a list of lefties
& straightaway he shot’em.

he wanted something nuclear -
"right here! inside the gate?"
(it stayed; UN inspectors found it,
nineteen ninety-eight.)

"we know you don’t mean any harm,
- though if perchance you did
be sure we’d come & get you
& screw down your little lid.

"you’d like to use a chemical?
we wouldn’t make a fuss -
this gink is fighting on our side
he’s just like one of us!

"what’s he doing that’s out of place?
we’d really like to know -
didn’t we use agent orange
not so very long ago?"

they didn’t throw their hands up,
they didn’t roll their eyes,
they didn’t point a finger
at "evil undisguised."

they didn’t turn their face away
they never mentioned guilt -
& they didn’t just encourage him
they backed him to the hilt.

Kuwait

Iran-Iraq fought eight long years;
about a million died -
the West was very happy
that Saddam was on on its side.

he asked Ambassador Glaspie
how the US ranked Kuwait.
said she "we’ve no position there."
thinks he: "well well! why wait?..."

& then they turned against him
for taking them at their word.
(ought one credit diplomats?
now now, don’t be absurd.)

they made themselves a demon -
no finer to be had;
& they killed a hundred thousand
in the bombing of Baghdad...

& with Kuwait set "free" once more
the human rights abuses
were twice as monstrous as before
(Amnesty has its uses.)

The Brits: their Ersatz Outrage.
so who first bombed civilians?
it’s there in white & black.
not the wicked Germans but
the British in Iraq.

not only rebel towns, but ones
who didn’t pay their taxes
they bombed. who were these pioneers?
Britishers, not Nazis;

nothing like a load of bombs
to make the meek feel meeker!
the Germans copied that approach
years later at Gernika...

(turn on the full Churchillian blast:
the greatest Brit inscribes)
“about using poison gas against
uncivilisèd tribes,

“I frankly cannot understand,
my dear old Colonel Gossage,
why you should feel so squeamish!” (“what?
who? me sir? not a sausage!”)

lies for King & Country
“it was never about oil -
white man’s civilising burden,
missionary toil!

“those promises to Arabs,
that guarantee to Kurds?
quoth Hamlet to Polonius
words words words...

“some manageable emirates -
partition off Kuwait;
& those bits beside the ocean
no more than six or eight.

“let’s put a King in Baghdad -
we’ve got this Faisal fellow;
his brother’s in Trans-Jordan,
we put him there: Abdullah.

“they’d better vote him in to show
a democratic bent -
say popular approval runs
at ninety-six percent.”

that was how they ran things back
in 1933.
something somewhat similar
went on in Germany.

but this was done by our chaps
& New Labour is the heir -
who better to defend it than
the ethical Mr Blair.

Corporate Control of Media
when Atta’s magic passport
came floating from the sun -
did they know who they were looking for
before the deed was done?

it’s like the magic bullet from
Lee Harvey Oswald’s gun
they said caused seven wounds
in one swift blow - not one by one.

it turned up on the trolley
they were wheeling Connally on;
what could have caused this mayhem?
it piped up “I’m the one!”...

the journalists can see all that.
so why no scrutiny?
if they really cared for justice they
would surely mutiny.

but then they get these ukases
& memos from on high.
“tell it how we want it or
you lose your job!” - (or die.)

so who owns all the media
since 1996?
four or five conglomerates - or
at the outside six.

even the fabled BBC
in the U.K. (call it Uck):
beautifully modulated
platitudes & muck.

“Israelis kill a dozen Pales-
-tinians” - no news.
“two settlers die” - another fearsome
outrage against Jews!

what Bush & Blair are saying
now, twists & contradicts
the conclusions just arrived at by
the UN’s man, Hans Blix;

& when Blix tells the press-corps
how his words have been distorted,
it simplifies the whole thing if
they leave him unreported.

Powell of My Lai
that little ‘anthrax’ phial which
the Secretary showed
‘could cause’ untold destruction...
some explanation’s owed.

the one that did the damage
- so the Bureau told the press -
originated in the old
American Mid-West.

the one that did the damage came
from Iowa State at Ames;
so ‘good cop’ Colin Powell’s playing
very bad cop games.

but what should we expect from one
deputed to deny
that Charlie Company massacred
the children of My Lai.

then it was Major Powell
first took the public eye
& every word he uttered
was a demonstrable lie.

so now he talks of ‘terror,’
& a ‘poison factory’
& ‘links to Al Qa’ida’
(which only he can see)

weapons of mass destruction &
an ‘imminent nuclear threat’
are we to swallow all he says?
yes sir! right on! you bet!...

the Al Qa’ida outfit is
no more than five years old,
so ‘decades of collusion’
is imaginative, bold.

Saddam’s link to Al Qa’ida
has been forcefully denied
by Pentagon, by CIA,
by British MI5.

it ‘foundered,’ that relationship,
it sank - no ifs nor buts.
Islamists & Ba’athists
- they hate each other’s guts.

Bin Laden tells his followers
‘according to Islam
it would be quite all right to kill
the infidel Saddam!’

(imagine Blair saying ‘Dubya
has to go - & that’s official!’
hardly the sort of comment that
would keep their friendship special -

though when they talk & Bush suggests
he bow his head to pray, it’s
thoughts like that run through his head -
he’s too polite to say it...)

there are no nuclear weapons
- the Pentagon knows that -
& he hasn’t any rockets
for the nukes he hasn’t got.

as for the ‘poison factory’ run by
Ansar al Islam
(Kurdish fundamentalists -
enraged against Saddam)

they asked reporters in next day -
empty rooms, bare walls,
no plumbing... & no ‘smoking gun,’
no factory at all.

the State Department spokesthing held
that ‘poison factory’
would have to stand, since faute de mieux,
‘I can’t retract,’ said he,

in a moment of rare insight,
& speaking from the heart:
‘it’s not a description of the fact
but more a term of art!’

o holy mother of us all!
so that’s what speech is for!
he’s hit on a magic formula
to send the world to war.

what an imaginative coup!
that takes the golden biscuit.
a casus belli! fight for art!
it’s worth a chance! let’s risk it!...

a dozen worse dictators,
seven real nuclear powers,
resolutions scouted by
illicit occupiers?

let not a lucid vision mock
investigative toil;
the chessboard has been well described
this war is about oil,

say Rove, Brzezinski, Rumsfeld, Cheney,
Wolfowitz & Feith.
everyone can read it,
it’s not like it was Fate!

& if a half a million
get blown to kingdom come,
the ‘West’ will save its living standards,
not like some.

Bush’s Last Word to the Children of Iraq
you’ve got them hidden somewhere -
doesn’t matter what you say,
so it’s no good your pretending -
we’ll get you anyway!

but we’ll bomb with that compassion
that democracy holds dear -
& we wouldn’t change our mind
for all the oil in North Korea.

Writing