Michael Kelly in Kuwait City on the anniversary of its liberation from Iraq:
” The last time I was here was on the occasion of the liberation, and on that day, and for several days thereafter, the whole city was a parade and a party. Everyone was in the streets, cheering and screaming, and driving around 10 to a car, madly honking and shooting guns in the air.
“You could easily find grief and wretchedness, though. To be part of a country that has been raped by an invading force is nearly incomprehensible—incomprehensible at least, to a modern-day American; it is a routine part of life’s education in many places at many times. To begin with, Kuwait City itself had been savaged—shot up, blown up, torched and, of course, thoroughly looted. The major buildings of state and commerce had been used for artillery practice. The beaches had been salted with land mines and strung with concertina wire. Garbage and human filth were everywhere, and the place stank.
“About 400 Kuwaiti civilians had been killed during Iraq’s seven-month occupation, and many more had been brutalized in one way or another—ritualistically humiliated (forced to urinate on the Kuwaiti flag or on a photograph of the Kuwaiti emir, for instance), robbed, beaten, raped, tortured.”
Memo to Janeane Garafaolo and the other Hollywood Half-wits opposed to the war: Read it.