It’s getting uglier. The Brits release details of France’s trade with Saddam. I can’t wait till we get the receipts.
KUWAIT BLAMES FRANCE: At least that’s what this interview suggests.
RAINES WATCH: “As the Pentagon expressed satisfaction with the early stages of the war, 16 U.S. marines and British royal commandos were killed.” – the snide, self-satisfied sentence from Howell Raines’ chief stenographer, Patrick Tyler, in the New York Times today.
A first-hand account from the epicenter of fifth columnism. Here’s another report from a pathetic protest in D.C. And another from Paris. Lamer? Then there’s this story about a puke-in in San Francisco. Yes, a puke-in. Hey, guys, why not just start defecating on the sidewalks? Here’s what I don’t quite understand: If you’re trying to persuade mainstream Americans that this war is wrong, why do you stop rush-hour traffic, rely on school kids playing hookie and set up a public mock-vomitorium? I guess asking obvious rational questions of these people is pointless. And then you’ve got the senior contingent. What has happened to old journalistic warhorses like Jimmy Breslin and Richard Reeves? Breslin just compared the president directly to Adolf Hitler. Reeves just predicted that the president will be assassinated because of the Iraq war. Can you say political suicide?
Here’s an investigation. It looks like he checks out.
FINALLY, “SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES”: It does seem, after all, that the French do understand the term they wrote into Resolution 1441. They just meant it not for Saddam, their ally, but for the U.S.
Here’s one reason the anti-war movement has been a failure:
I had some problems getting to work today. A few people (not a lot) blocked some city streets to protest the war. Just a few minutes ago, the whole group of protesters (maybe one hundred and fifty) walked down the middle of-Second Street-trying to put up barricades by rolling garbage bins and dragging newspaper boxes into the street. They spilled a lot of “Bay Guardians” – a far-left free daily – in the process. The police followed behind, cleaning up after them, but not really arresting anyone. Really, what would be the point? I watched the proceedings from my office window with a co-worker. He’s a strong Democrat and he opposes the war. Looking down at the pathetic-looking group and their shenanigans, he shook his head and said “It makes me want to support Bush.”
Someone-needs to tell the protesters that trying to shut down San Francisco, the city that loves France, is not going to have any effect of America’s foreign policy. All they’re doing is pissing off their choir.
Only one problem with this analysis: these protests are about no-one but the protestors. It’s their anti-Bush therapy. They’re going to need much more of it in the near future.
“For US citizens living overseas, President George W Bush’s unilateral ultimatum to Iraq makes us all ugly Americans. We were potential targets for terror and abuse, like our fellow citizens back home; now we are representatives of the world’s leading bully. Our flag, which stood for the hopes of humankind now stands for disdain for diplomacy in favor of military intimidation. As they say in the cartoons, ‘Thanks a lot, George, thanks a lot.’ It remains an incredible feat that the United States has forfeited all of the world’s goodwill it won after the September 11, 2001, attacks, barely 18 months ago, and legitimized the view that Bush, not Saddam Hussein, not Osama bin Laden, not Kim Jong-il, is the greatest threat to world peace. It’s hard to imagine a term for a US attack on Iraq, as threatened by Bush, except for ‘terrorism’.” – Gary Lamoshi, Asia Times.
The more I look at it, the likelier it seems.
EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Listened this morning-to a report from NPR reporter Sylvia Poggioli on world reaction to the beginning of the war.- She quoted the official responses from the following countries only: France, Belgium, Russia, Greece. Apparently, Senator Daschle was not available…”
NO, TOM, IT’S ‘HIGH NOON’: Geitner Simmons has a movie analogy for the Bush-Blair posse.
BAND OF BROTHERS: Literally.
The one reason I think the footage of Saddam is not a taped-in-advance fake is that if you wanted to ensure people still believed you were posthumously alive, you’d look a little better prepared than Saddam looked. He had that KSM “I-Just-Woke-Up” look and those grandma glasses and bizarre notepad did not exactly inspire fear. If the intelligence was half-way reliable, a good gamble. Too bad it doesn’t seem to have paid off.
Worth keeping an eye on. From Baghdad itself, the vivid, real-time blog of a young Iraqi. Then at The New Republic, a daily war diary from Iraqi exile and dissident, Kanan Makiya.
RAINES WATCH: Now that the war has begun, you can rest assured that the New York Times will go into overdrive to discredit it. Today’s offering has the following headline: “Move to War Leaves Some Feeling Alienated.” In fact, the story is about liberals in California, a somewhat odd subject for a story the day hostilities begin. Readers are hereby asked to keep an eye out for the Times’ forthcoming attempts in news stories to broaden and focus on dissent at home.
As events now unfold swiftly and unpredictably, it’s worth, I think, taking a step back and reading books on our current predicament. One I’ve found particularly helpful is Bob Kagan’s “Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order.” The thesis of this slim tome is now quite familiar. What Kagan argues is that in the post-war period, the Western European powers, particularly Germany and France, have constructed a post-modern political settlement. By pooling sovereignty, substituting gradualist economic and social integration for warfare, and all but gutting their militaries, they have grown used to a certain way of dealing with international problems. They recoil from the use of force in almost any circumstances. And their military weakness has led them to try to wield their power through international institutions, like the U.N. and the E.U., that depend on soft rather than hard power. In contrast, after the Cold War, the U.S. has become militarily supreme, dominant in hard power in unprecedented fashion, as well as economically open and dynamic. Put these two trends together and add an intractable problem like Iraq and you have an almost predetermined clash: unavoidable, profound, and to be repeated.
AND TODAY’S DIVIDE: But what makes Kagan’s argument more than just smart is that he sees through this construct how the current international clash is therefore the result of deep tectonic changes, not of some burst of anti-Americanism, or the presidency of George W. Bush, or the alleged neocon cabal now running the country. He points out how under the Clinton administration, for example, the same deep tensions were evident in Bosnia and Kosovo (far less geo-strategically significant matters than Iraq). He notes that Clinton never envisaged actually implementing Kyoto and had deep qualms about the International Criminal Court. And these differences between Albright and Vedrine or Powell and de Villepin were not just philosophical; they reflected the natural interests of strong military powers and weak ones respectively. What 9/11 did was present a genuine international crisis of security in the context of this deep schism. I don’t see how it will be resolved – after Iraq or at any time in the near future. And until you’ve absorbed this dynamic, it seems to me that the blame game regarding individuals can get overblown. Of course, Kagan’s ultimate sympathies lie with the U.S., as do mine. But that’s not because it wouldn’t be lovely to live in paradise – but because at the edges of the Elysian fields are weeds and jungles, and someone has to police them. Europe’s paradise, in the last resort, is only possible because of U.S. power in the Second World War and the Cold War. So Europe should get out of the way of the police action or join in. We’re not policing the Belgians. We’re dealing with crazies like Kim Jong Il or Osama bin Laden. Neither is likely to join the euro any time soon.
A “peace” protestor chains himself to the headquarters of a local charity, mistaking it for a federal building:
Police officers used heavy-duty bolt cutters to free Mason. “He asked for help because he didn’t have the key,” Olympia police Cmdr. Steve Nelson said… Mason, who identified himself to a photographer, said he had looked up the Department of Energy in the phone book. The phone book, under the Department of Energy, lists a Bonneville Power Administration Office at 924 Capitol Way S.
No, this isn’t from the Onion.
JOHN BURNS ON IRAQ: Here’s the great New York Times’ reporter’s comments on PBS last night:
Iraqis have suffered beyond, I think, the common understanding of the United States from the repression of the past 30 years here. And many, many Iraqis are telling us now, not always in the whispers he have heard in the past but now in quite candid conversations, that they are waiting for America to come and bring them liberty. It’s very hard though for anybody to understand this. It can only be understood in terms of the depth of the repression here. It has to be said that this not universal of course… All I can tell you is that as every reporter who has come over here will attest to this, there is the most extraordinary experience of the last few days has been a sudden breaking of the ice here, with people in every corner of life coming forward to tell us that they understand what America is about in this. They are very, very fearful of course of the bombing, of damage to Iraq’s infrastructure. They are very concerned about the kind of governance, the American military governance, that they will come under afterward. Can I just say that there is also no doubt – no doubt – that there are many, many Iraqis who see what is about to happen here as the moment of liberation.
As Donald Luskin notes, it’s good to see this fine reporter unconstrained by the New York Times’ attempt to spin this war against the United States.
THE TIMES ON ALTERMAN: The Rainesians get the dean of Berkeley Journalism School, a contributor to the Nation, Salon, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books, to endorse a book endorsing the notion that there’s no liberal bias in the media. And they don’t even seem to notice the irony.
The Dish 