Hearts and minds

-- Girls & Corpses is sort of like Maxim Magazine meets Dawn Of The Dead.

"They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman."
— Dhia al-Shweiri, former Abu Ghraib prisoner under both Ba'ath and US occupation.


"We're functioning in a — with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a war-time situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon."
--Donald Rumsfeld

"The US used to talk about sort of winning hearts and minds, but they don't even talk about that anymore, now it's co-opting the Iraqis . . . commanders will tell you that, we don't win hearts and minds....
So now they hand out things . . . . this is a pack of cigarettes with a symbol . . . with a little sticker on it... now the sticker tells you to inform on your neighbor . . . you know, if there are any terrorists in your neighborhood it gives you a number to call . . ."
--Anderson Cooper, Feb. 4, 2005


--Anxiety Peace We

In 1947, the USA was in the middle of occupying and democratizing both Japan and Germany. In 2004, we have troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, and scads of other places, once again trying to bring the blessings of democracy to former enemies....Each of the occupying powers was territorial and for the time being each of the four sectors or "zones" was almost a separate country. The only "universal" in the Germany of 1947 was that the American cigarette was accepted everywhere in lieu of currency.
--(link)


"The Revolution is not a tea party"