Salam over at Where is Raed told us to basically f*ck off, which, considering everything, is perfectly within his pervue and quite understandable. What surprised him, but didn't surprise me, was the huge, angry, mouth-breathing, so-dumb-it-scares-you set of replies he got in his comments (you have to click the comments to read them, can't link them here). So he wrote this as a reply.

What irritates me is there are people who will visit his site from ours who will agree with the comments but not the post. Look folks, reality check time:

• The Iraq thing is our mess. We made it. This is what happens when you treat governments like they're things and not like they're big piles of extremely clever people scamming angles on your ass every chance they get.
• The Iraq thing has little if anything to do with terrorism, and most, if not everything, to do with national pride.
• Saddam is a lot brighter than a Palestinian housewife, and when those towers fell he was emphatically not out in the street dancing around. I have yet to see anyone provide any proof that he did anything other than run like a scalded monkey as far away from it as possible. I have yet to see any proof that he wasn't just as surprised as anyone else when it happened.
• There are a bunch of old white men out there who think the reason Cuba is not an American territory is because a Democrat got in the White House and screwed it up. They look at forty years of sanctions against Cuba and see Castro is still waving his wank at "us" every chance he gets.
• These men, and their sons (not just Bush), look at Iraq and think "never again". What many of you do not seem to understand is it's not the towers they have in mind, it's a small Caribbean island just off our coast.
• Unfortunately, these men are in charge.
• Because our media is too stupid to actually do a little research and stop regurgitating press releases from groups with obvious axes to grind, the American people by and large do not see these and other extremely obvious connections that have little to do with terrorism and everything to do with darker, uglier, irrelevant things.
• The rest of the world does not have this problem.
• If I lived in a country who's leader was kept in power for a decade by the US, and who's region was kept unstable because of the US, and who's people were kept in poverty because of the US, I'd want to send a big ol' "F*CK YOU" out as well.
• This is what a "normal" Iraqi sees. They do not care about international law, or liberty, or terror. They care about food and shoes, clean hospitals and full pharmacies, national pride and prosperity. We may say we're bringing those things, but to a mother who can't get her baby vaccinated because of our embargo it sure as hell doesn't look like it.

Is it your fault our government was an obsessive-compulsive crackhead obsessed with communism in the 80s? No. Is it your fault a crazed leader for whom no less than Donald Rumsfeld himself helped arm up in the 80s decided to point those guns at the wrong country? No. Is it your fault our government decided to back off of throwing this nutjob out the first time because an unstable region was a profitable region? No.

So why are you so angry about it? Why do you care? Are you actually willing to send your own child out there to die just to salve the white conservative establishment's pride?

I'm about to become a father. If someone provided clear and incontrovertible proof Saddam was directly involved in the 9-11 attacks, I would have no problems sending my daughter/son (not sure yet, give us a few weeks) over there to kick him down the darkest hole on the planet. If someone provided clear and incontrovertible proof that he was planning to attack Israel, Britain, hell even France I would have no problem sending them over to protect those, or really any other country's, citizens. If someone provided clear and incontrovertible proof that Osama bin Laden was actually dumb enough to take shelter inside a country we have been bombing every single stinking day for the past ten fucking years I would support the leaders who sent my child to put both their heads on pikes.

But I haven't seen anything like that. And neither have you. And neither have they. And that's why Salam is pissed off, along with millions of his countrymen.

And if you think he's unreasonably stupid and nasty when he says "F*ck you United States" then you're just not paying the hell attention. Because if a dumbass redneck from Arkansas can see these connections and understand these emotions then I don't know what the hell is wrong with you.