To: All Iraqi (former!) Dissidents
From: Ryan Crocker, Deputy Assistant Sec. of State
Re: Tuesday’s Meeting
Gentlemen;
These are exciting days, yes? On behalf of the State Department, Gen. Tommy Franks, and the whole coalition, I’d like to thank you all for your invaluable help in bringing down the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein. We did it!
And we couldn’t have done it without you. You guys were great, just great! As you might have heard, it seems like some of your intelligence regarding Saddam’s thousands and thousands of highly-trained, unflaggingly loyal, brutal Special Republican Guard might have been a bit outdated. We never actually encountered many of them. Ditto the “billions” of Elite Republican Guard, the devastating armored divisions, and the “legions of killer robots with laser beam eyes.” None of these actually materialized in combat. Our best guess is that Saddam waited too long to deploy them or something.
Anyway, Tuesday’s meeting is what you’ve all been waiting for! We’re going to create an interim Iraqi government, and needless to say we’ll need your insight, your input, and -yes- your leadership. Please bring your “wish lists,” your deeds or titles to any lands you owned pre-Saddam (we’ll only be accepting typed documents this time - I mean it, guys!), and a No. 2 pencil.
Okay, one more thing. And this is really important. I realize these are very busy times and you all have a lot on your minds, but we really need find those vast stores of chemical and biological weapons that you guys told us all about. So far, none of you have replied to my repeated requests for those documents and maps you’ve been promising us.
I don’t want to sound like some kind of hardass here, but we’d really, really like to see something on Tuesday, okay? And yeah, I realize that some of you have really good excuses: Ahmed Chalabi apparently left his at his home outside Baghdad, so we’ll just have to wait on that. And little mishaps like Kanan Makiya’s dog eating the floor-plan to that underground anthrax factory, well, that sort of thing is unavoidable, of course. But surely somebody can remember to bring something, right? You can even point out the locations on a map to some of our intel guys.
Hey, I’ll stop being such a Gloomy Gus now, I promise! See you all Tuesday, and I’ll bring the bubbly! Thanks for everything.
- R.C.
Fanny Roborat
10 comments
elizabeth
April 13, 2003 at 11:34 am
1Fanatical Apathy, you rock!!!
Dave
April 13, 2003 at 6:18 pm
2I second that.
Anonymous
April 13, 2003 at 9:31 pm
3(hey quick note to adam - you put thursday in the last line, but it was tuesday before)
adam
April 13, 2003 at 9:45 pm
4Yikes! You’re right. Consider it changed, and thanks for the copy editing…
Joshua Scholar
April 14, 2003 at 10:14 am
5I guess if they don’t find any WMD or receipts of their sale then we should send all those kids and other political prisoners back to jail and torture, and the whole country back to the Baath party and apologise for impinging on the soverenty of legally held serfs.
That’s the new slogan, “NO WMD, NO FREEDOM”
While we’re at it we can restore slavery in the south.
Ras_Nesta
April 14, 2003 at 1:08 pm
6Joshua, you are certainly no scholar.
Why don’t we get into the “Wayback Machine” and just see how much attention you paid to the plight of the Iraqui people before Dear Leader Bush was elected. Odds are, not much.
And in your new-found role as a humanitarian stalwart, I suppose now you will be supporting measures to help the poor and unfortunate in THIS country. Such as raising the minumum wage and getting health insurance for the 20 million+ children with none.
You conservitards aren’t going to be let off the hook, this elective war cost the lives of 100s of fellow citizens and billions of dollars, and if you are NOW going to hide behind a humanitarian flag, pony up. Don’t immediately become a hypocrite.
David
April 14, 2003 at 4:08 pm
7Actually, Joshua might be on to something. We realy should consider “sending all those kids and other political prisoners back to jail and torture…”
Since the United States, China and Iran accounted for 81% of all of the executions in the world last year and over 2 million of our citizens are held in prison, this would be a logical next step in our public policy.
Naw, let’s invade Syria instead. They’re the real evil doers.
Joshua Scholar
April 14, 2003 at 8:31 pm
8Ras: actually I’m not a conservative (registered Green), I do support socialized medicine (grew up in Canada)…
But for some reason I’m some sort of ingrate who never understood that I’m supposed to hate republicans so much that if there’s a choice between saving people from torture and brutal oppression and spitting a Republican’s face there’s no choice. HAting republicans is more important that caring about mankind.
Elliott
April 14, 2003 at 8:52 pm
9My take on this excellent posting was that since one of the main reasons that we went to war, as stated to the public, was to rid the world of a source of wmd’s. Yeah he’s a bad guy and now because we can’t find no stinkin’ weapons, we have changed our reason for the invasion where we now call it a war of liberation. It seems that this administration is just choosing a convenient reason when it looks like they might have been wrong. The reality is that the hawks in the admin were advocating for war on Iraq long before the president was elected. Though they might think that this war was conducted for noble reasons, where are the hordes of terrorists, where are the wmd’s, and will it change the face of the middle east?
LA
April 19, 2003 at 12:52 am
10It would be funnier if this were written to sound like the State Dept. I have never even seen an informal email like this from a summer intern at State. Let us insiders make fun…