Stranger Than Fiction

This past month has seen some pretty strange occurrences. I am not just talking about watching Martha Stewart wannabes walking around in prison drab, but about events in the Middle East.

While the headlines tell the tale pretty succinctly, there is more to these stories:

Saddam Hussein Gets 100% of the Vote
This particular election was never in doubt. There were no hanging chads, just Chad hanging if he thought of voting against the party line. The Hussein regime has tried so hard to soften its image worldwide, that it thought that it could improvise an election where there was only one candidate running, Hussein, and the only vote that would count was YES.

If you thought of voting for someone else, you had to be somewhere else. The makers of Ivory soap were envious of the whole process. They've struggled for years knowing that the best they could do was 99 and 44/100% pure. Saddam topped that, and his prior record for approval.

Those who watched this sham of an election could barely contain their snickering - although it had to be done at a distance because of the fear of retribution.

Iraq Opens Prisons in Amnesty; Families Wonder Where Loved Ones Went
In another attempt to forestall action by the UN (subject of unflattering headlines itself), Hussein opened up Iraq's prisons, releasing many petty criminals and others who had crossed the government in years past. Problem is, such little thought went into the process that prisoners and family members were trampled in the stampede to get out of the prisons, some prisons were opened up Bastille-style, and unfortunately there were many who could not find their family members because Saddam "Why Can't They Love Me" Hussein simply had them tortured and killed, throwing away the evidence.

UN Action Against Iraq Seen As Unlikely
No kidding. The UN has degenerated into a bickering group of high schoolers who think they know more than the teachers, the teachers are complaining about the kids, and the administration has problems with kickbacks and the bureaucracy. The General Assembly (the high schoolers) gives everyone a voice, but that doesn't mean that they're worth listening to. Trying to listen to Syria or Libya discuss human rights abuses in Israel or elsewhere is laughable when they have conducted some of the most serious abuses in the last 50 years.

The Security Council (the teachers), made up of both the rotating members, and the five permanent members (the administration), can't get anything done because Russia and France want to get a piece of the Iraqi pie. France has had a cozy relationship with Saddam Hussein - giving billions in arms sales in the past, and Russia has billions in debts owed to it.

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