Month: March 2003

It seems to me that this is where the real weakness is. We don’t have enough troops or materiel yet, thanks to the Turks. And if the Turks start anything, we could have a nightmare response from the Kurds. So far, so good. But unless we get major troops in there soon, we’re at real risk of things getting out of control. That’s why telling the Turks to cool it is probably the most important message we can send out right now. Sources reiterate to me that the sand-storms are our friend. We’re a little ahead of ourselves. Anything that can keep them in the dark while allowing us some rest and reinforcement can only be for the good. Meanwhile, I can’t help feeling that the Iraqi war crimes are only hardening morale and nerve at home.

COME, FRIENDLY BOMBS: From Kanan Makiya’s latest war diary: “”I have friends and relatives in Baghdad … But still those bombs are music to my ears.”

One report says the Brits are going in. Another says there’s a civilian uprising against the remnants of Saddam’s regime. I pray for both. If we can start getting humanitarian supplies to the Iraqis, it can only help relations with civilians. Meanwhile, sand-storms will presumably help us get more troops into position around Baghdad.

From the invaluable David Warren:

You wouldn’t know it from reading most of the papers, but the war in Iraq is going fabulously well. After just five days the U.S. Third Infantry Division and supporting units are approaching Baghdad. The immense steel column continues to drive reinforcements across the Iraqi desert, while its leading edge rumbles through the fields, villages, and waterways of Mesopotamia. To its rear, the “sleeper cells” of Ba’athist and terrorist hitmen waiting in ambush are being eliminated one by one. Special forces have seized bridges, dams, airstrips, oil and gas fields, and weapons sites all over the country. The U.S. Air Force has devastated leadership targets, military infrastructure, and the physical symbols of the Saddam regime, across Baghdad and elsewhere. Allied troops have Basra, Nasiriyah, now Karbala, and other Iraqi cities surrounded, and are tightening each noose. Snipers in the towns are being patiently deleted. The “Scud box” of western Iraq is in allied hands, daily more secure, and allied forces are building with endless air deployments to the northern front. In all, the allies have taken only a few dozen killed, and a couple hundred lesser casualties — many of these from small accidents within the most amazing and vast logistical exercise since our troops landed in Normandy (when we lost men at the rate of up to 500 a minute, liberating France). In just five days all this has been achieved! And while the most grisly parts of the campaign still lie ahead, all the worst fears have gone unrealized, so far.

I second that. And if we weren’t bending over backward to act scrupulously while the enemy behaves like barbarians, we’d be even further along.

THE MAIN WORRY: I’m not a military expert, so I offer this piece from the Washington Post just as food for thought. Do we have enough troops in time for the final battle? Have we gone too fast too soon? Those seem reasonable concerns to me, although I’m not qualified to take a side in the argument. But it is not too unreasonable to worry that with one northern front denied us, we need overwhelming force to smash through to Baghdad quickly enough. Do we have enough? And do we have enough humanitarian follow-through available soon enough to build support in the South? That’s what I want to know. If you see any useful information out there on this, please send it to me and I’ll link and post.

I guess I should mention: the BBC is not Britain. Check out these front-pages from today’s British press. The reason that the press is more supportive than the BBC is because there’s real competition among the papers and the Beeb is a mandatory government-run service staffed with the usual people who go into government-run media, i.e. left-wing hacks. Meanwhile, polling shows an enormous swing toward the pro-war camp. From the Guardian:

The 15-point swing in public opinion recorded by the ICM survey means that there is now a clear majority, 54 percent, who back military action, after a sharp rise from 38 percent just a week ago. The results represent a sudden and widespread shift in public mood in Britain. Opposition to the war has slumped in the past seven days from 44% to only 30% of the public, the lowest level since the Guardian began tracking public opinion on this issue last August.

I predicted this, but not to this extent. Blair too is reaping a sudden huge windfall of new support:

Both a weekend ICM poll and the latest YouGov poll also show significant strengthening of Mr Blair’s approval rating. In the ICM/News of the World poll, Mr Blair registered a plus-18 approval rating for his Iraq policy (compare that with his minus-11 showing in our own poll just a week previously). In the YouGov/Daily Telegraph poll, the improvement in Mr Blair’s standing runs well ahead of the growing support for the attack on Iraq. Labour’s own internal polling shows the swing is particularly strong among the skilled working-class voters, whose loyalties tend to determine elections, and lowest among the middle-classes.

Heck, I’d vote for him next time. Blair is teaching an old lesson: if you lead, they will follow.

It’s too hard to tell. It seems to me that we may have under-estimated the psychological effect of president George H. W. Bush’s brutal betrayal of the Iraqi people in 1991, at the behest of the U.N. No wonder Iraqis are still skittish about Americans and fearful that this interlude may end. The allied strategy of simply skirting past major cities also means that Saddam’s henchmen may still be in control there, and so feelings are still deeply skeptical, mixed or shrouded. I also think that we hawks might have under-estimated the Iraqis’ sense of national violation at being invaded – despite their hatred of Saddam. That’s what this piece suggests and what Salam Pax reveals. And yet we also have evidence of their obvious joy at the possibility of ending the long nightmare of Saddam. We simply don’t know for sure, and the mood may vary dramatically from area to area. In fact, we may not know at all until Saddam is finally gone. Like so many other things in this conflict, we’ll see.

Well, at least he put himself on the record. 3,000 casualties. The man who was Clinton’s drug-war fig leaf will now be held accountable. Let’s pray he’s wrong. But the BBC lapped it up.

CHIRAC AND BLAIR: A superb and judicious over-view of their struggle for power in Europe.

REUTERS AND CORRIE: How some clearly misleading photos from an ideological group came to be presented as “news” by Reuters.

THE LATEST FROM THE BBC: A report on “the fickleness of American public opinion.” Teased with the headline: “Will US public opinion prove to be Saddam’s secret weapons?” The piece tries to suggest that Americans are rallying against the war. No polling data is provided (which would suggest the opposite). One bereaved African-American father of a serviceman is featured. And a visit to the Vietnam Memorial. It’s pieces like these that are responsible for slips of the tongue on the Beeb about the “increasingly peacenik public.” They wish.

They’re all but hoping for allied casualties and failure. Of course, they tend to exaggerate and panic at the slightest whiff of military difficulty as history attests. Here are some details from the Times of London about the astonishing unity among the French in their contempt for the Anglo-Americans:

France 2, the state television network, reported from London yesterday that “fear is now beginning to set in among a large part of the (British) people”. The main commentary on France-Inter’s equivalent of the BBC Today programme said that the allies had committed the serious error of underestimating their adversary. “They have lost the information battle to the extent that the communiqués from Baghdad are often more credible than those of Washington,” it said. “More than that, they are in danger of defeat in the battle for opinion.” Le Figaro’s scornful editorial was headed: “Neither shock nor awe.”

Worth remembering this. It seems to me that the alliance with France is now over. Any country that hopes for American defeat cannot be treated as an ally under any serious meaning of that term.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “The UN confers political authority, not moral authority. It accomplishes virtually nothing else.
Would flushing Saddam be moral if the French had approved of the exercise? (We’d almost certainly have had UN approval in that event.) Nope. It would still be whatever it is today.
The UN is amoral by its very nature and composition. A pluralistic body comprising good and evil states that actively struggle against one another is necessarily morally neutral.
That’s the why the UN is worse than useless. Much worse. Moral neutrality that masquerades as good is affirmatively destructive: It obscures the line between good and evil.
The political approval the UN offers helps to mute criticism, which many — Tom Friedman included, to my surprise — confuse with the good. (Of course, the desire to withhold that kind of approval from the U.S. and the U.K. is precisely why the French refused to go along, isn’t it?)
The UN is institutionalized postmodernism. It isn’t bad because it doesn’t operate in the interests of the US. It’s bad because it is fundamentally incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong.
I do not believe that individual men are morally neutral. It follows that states that protect individual liberty and freedom are not morally neutral. The UN should draw its authority from those resources, not from mere pluralism, and if it doesn’t, we need to oppose it, not work within it.” – more sharp comments on the Letters Page.

Okay, so I did watch the Oscars for a few minutes – in the “Billy Madison” commercial breaks. And I did catch a very cute young man, talking about how Frida Kahlo, the unibrowed icon of the multi-culti left, would be in agreement with all the actors, luvvies and moguls in the audience. I didn’t know till now how right he was. Kahlo was an unrepentant Stalinist, supporting the monster long after his atrocities were documented. The Politburo and Volokh have the goods.

I’ve been getting a reader shellacking for being too polite to Tom Friedman. The basic point he misses, I think, is that the notion that the U.N. confers “moral authority” is itself a highly questionable assumption. As an empirical matter, it may be true that the U.N. gives “moral” authority in the eyes of many Arabs. But that is in part due to their delusions about their own position – delusions we need to challenge not appease. More broadly, a reader nails it:

I’m a little surprised that you let Thomas Friedman off so easily in his latest response. He writes that “some important moral authority was sacrificed in not getting U.N. approval and there is no way around it.” I would agree with this statement if the intent were to highlight the abdication of moral responsibility that we have seen on display at the United Nations. Unfortunately, the claim made here by Mr. Friedman and echoed by countless others seems to be that without the sanction of the U.N. any action undertaken by one of its members is a priori lacking in moral authority (or at least that authority is diminished to some degree). This is a rather curious claim, since it implies that an action’s moral quality is conferred upon it by the pronouncements of a deliberative body — in this instance, a deliberative body composed of a number of countries whose own moral stature is questionable. Leaving aside the objections raised by ethical relativism or the thornier issues concerning the ultimate seat of moral authority, I’m sure that Mr. Friedman would agree that sticking hot needles into the eyes of newborn infants is a morally reprehensible act regardless of whether the Pope, the U.N., the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, or the New York Times takes a stand against it. The moral worth of the current actions conducted by the United States against the perpetrator of acts no less evil is neither diminished nor determined by the objections of nations whose moral compass is guided by self-interest and opportunism.

Amen. In fact, I think the absence of France in the coalition is a far more convincing piece of evidence of its moral authority.

You guys are on the ball. Here’s another Freudian slip from the BBC:

Read your note mentioning ITN’s Freudian slip this morning, then drove out of town from Prague, where I live, to a meeting. I had the radio tuned to the World Service most of the way. During a morning segment on what the world papers had to say about the war, the reader was describing a Syrian front page that, along with its headline, showed pictures of the dead and captured soldiers thoughtfully broadcast by al jazeera. “And here,” she said, “are the pictures evidently showing the murderers, er, rather the murdered, soldiers.” Not, as they, making that one up.

Then there’s this lovely interaction:

Mitchell Switch-(of the BBC): Nobody thought this was going to be simple, but, given the degree of resistance, which I think you concede has been unexpected — the level of casualties, now the prisoners of war — is it not the case that this is proving to be significantly more difficult than you might have hoped?
GEN. ABIZAID: No. (Laughter.)

And the BBC is not beneath active deception in its propaganda campaign. Here’s an email from a longtime BBC employee:

Earlier in the evening I saw CNN (Pool pictures I guess) of Kurds in Ebril moving out of the town and away from the possible Iraqi incusion into the Kurdish area. An interview with one villager saying life was tough and she and her family wanted to be safe etc etc. Imagine my suprise to find the same pictures and interview turn up in a BBC report about how citizens of Bagdad were fearing the US bombing to come. Withoput explaining that the people of Ebril were escaping Saddam’s violence, the commentary said, “And as in Bagdad so it is throughout Iraq” – cue Ebril material and interview. The implication being the Kurds (they weren’t described as such) were afraid of US bombs. (in fact later in the oriinal piece, they welcome US intervention). Just one small example. I am wondering how I can go about shaming my former employer (30 years working in the Beeb). Any suggestions?

One suggestion is to appeal to anyone at the BBC who’s witnessing these monstrosities to relay me as much inside dope as they can. Hey, it works at the NYT …