The Billiken's Bluff

Henna Stained and Heading for the Hills

Riddle me this ... can you be accurately described by the US as the radical cleric leader of the Islamic Court Union, the de facto government of Somalia based out of Mogadishu, (disbanded by Ethiopian troops and John Bolton's blessing over the holiday week) when you look this damn merry?




Orange goatee. Bright blue shirt. Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys looks downright chipper.



like Scott Spiezio in the 2006 NLCS



Bin Laden, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, or Muqtada al-Sadr he is not.





Speaking of Muqtada. Reports, circulating, swirling, critiquing THE execution - the timing (on a holy day, Eid al-Adha, i.e., a slap in the collective Sunni face), motivations (al-Maliki seeking revenge for his country or on behalf of his radical comrade in Sadr City) and etiquette (unruly guards, out of Abu Ghraib or an al-Zarqawi video). Another rousing success on the international stage.

When the appeal was denied on Dec. 26, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, described as “frantic” to see his enemy executed, signed a death warrant of dubious legitimacy in violation of Iraqi law. On a secretly recorded video, the hanging looks and sounds much like an old-fashioned lynching. The noose is fitted and the trap door springs while a jeering mob screams “Muqtada! Muqtada!” in homage to Muqtada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite warlord.

Nervous, no?

The trial and punishment of the late Saddam Hussein ought to have been accomplished with respect for law and human dignity—not necessarily because the former dictator deserved such consideration, but because all who have died in the name of democracy over the past three years certainly do.

I went to see Alfonso Cuaron's (Y Tu Mama Tambien) movie Children of Men yesterday which was based on a science fiction novel where women become infertile in the not too distant future and the world goes to shit - fear, panic, depression, government issued suicide machines, closing borders, persecuting foreigners, forced refugee camps - an Orwellian police state (not an Orwell novel).

I don't need to write the review, applauding cinematography, and Clive Owen's acting, you can read that here. Worth mentioning though is that despite the setting of movie, in the nearly apocalyptic 2030s,



it couldn't be anymore about Iraq.





Scenes from a refugee camp featured newly intaked foreigners perched atop boxes, live wire attached to hands, hood over head, Abu Ghraib style. The culture of closing borders and Homeland Security was out of our (this) world (!!!)



But this wasn't comic book violence, fancy daggers and silly masks with undeserved references to Operation Iraqi Freedom like the Weinsteins' V for Vendetta.



This was ear drum rupturing, ashen urban warfare. With words or images like
terrorist
insurgents
death squads
roadside bomb
refugees
preachers
politicians
evangelists
and
Allahu Akbar.

The last battle scene fought between British soldiers and a combination of opposition groups, random refugees, foreigners and thugs was relentless (like Danger Mouse's remix of Jay-Z's Encore w/ Beatles' White Album, which is to say - a relentless beat, bullets, bombs (over Baghdad)). And after the battle scene fought on the streets and apartments of the refugee camp you felt uncomfortable at how visceral it was and then like a bad dream you were relieved because it's only a dream or only a movie and whatever adrenaline was racing or hands were sweating aren't really real but then you think, oh yeah - urban warfare, insurgents, apartment buildings blown up_out - it is real and happening and you hear about people dying 80 from a car bomb at a police station or fish market or school, 300, 400 per day citizens, soldiers, insurgents, everyone and it doesn't mean much other than a number we've heard for 3, 4 years each day but if it looks anything like it did in this movie, which it must, and worse - than it is completely brutal and gratuitous.