Never before has a single country (including, ironically, Iraq) ever managed to garner so much scorn and outrage from its own citizens and the rest of the world as the USA has now managed to.

And forget everything else, when United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld finally goes on the air, what does he plead? “Please don’t put your oil wells on fire”.

Right. Priorities.

This isn’t war – this is the systematic extermination of undesirable elements (read – native Iraqis) from areas of commercial interest to the USA (read – oil fields), using state-of-the-art weapons.

The last time this was done, it was by Hitler, to the Jews, to get at their banking and financial assets – using gas chambers.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

–Oscar Wilde