Month: April 2003

Hard to beat this:

In the giddy spirit of the day, nothing could quite top the wish list bellowed out by one man in the throng of people greeting American troops from the 101st Airborne Division who marched into town today. What, the man was asked, did he hope to see now that the Baath Party had been driven from power in his town? What would the Americans bring? “Democracy,” the man said, his voice rising to lift each word to greater prominence. “Whiskey. And sexy!”

“Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy.” Not quite “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” – but a lot more reliable.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “Europeans are antiwar, but they are pro-commerce,” – U.S. Lt. Co. Duke Deluca, after his men had successfully rid an area near Najaf of land-mines sold to Saddam by Italy.

THE OTHER LIBERATION: Yes, we’re freeing the Kurds from some Islamofascists right now as well. I don’t know why this story hasn’t gotten more attention.

We’re an amnesiac short-attention span culture. Only three weeks ago, we were in the middle of a debate about war; now we’re in the middle of the war. In the frenetic news cycles, we scarcely find time to relate what we now know to what we once argued. But we need to make time. Here’s a short list of what we know now about Saddam, two weeks after the outbreak of war: that he runs a more horrifying police-state than some of us imagined; that he uses terroristic measures to maintain his rule; has close contact with other terrorist groups whom he has invited into his country in his defense; invokes Islamic justifications for his despotism far more often than any secular justifications; is capable of actions very few other human beings are capable of; and will not give up an ounce of real power even at the point of an actually loaded gun. In other words, the prudential justification for the war is now far stronger than it was only a couple of weeks ago: no one can plausibly now argue that this monstrous regime would have voluntarily disarmed itself at the polite and constantly negotiable behest of a mild-mannered Swede. Inspections would never have worked, if by “worked,” we actually mean succeeded in disarming Saddam. But more importantly, the moral justification for war has been deepened. More Americans today can absorb the true horror of murderous totalitarian rule, by watching its hatchet men defend themselves by all means necessary – using women and childern as shields, murdering POWs, deploying suicide bombers, and the like. Ending that kind of evil anywhere any time is always a good thing. You can argue the costs but you can’t argue the moral good of it. We will save many lives; we are rescuing many people who are oppressed in ways those who constantly talk about “oppression” do not really know or understand. These are good things to know. They are vital things to remember.

Doesn’t look too much like it:

At the Pentagon briefing, Army Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal said the Medina Division has been incapacitated to nearly the same extent as the Baghdad Division, which he described as “incapable of effective maneuver or defense.” He said elements of both divisions are putting up sporadic resistance, but not enough to slow the advance of U.S. units. “The Medina and Baghdad divisions are no longer credible forces,” he said.

Two out of six divisions now “destroyed.” Four to go.

BAGHDAD BROADCASTING CORPORATION: Here’s how the BBC told the news of the rescue of Jessica Lynch. Alas, it was a brief reporter’s log and no longer online:

Washington :: Philippa Thomas :: 1403GMT
Every headline and every morning show here is talking about the rescue of Jessica Lynch. It’s a rare good news story in a week when there’s been a lot of talk of set backs.
It’s a very all-American tale of a teenage soldier who’d never left the United States before she went to the Middle East three weeks ago.
She comes from a small farming community in the state of West Virginia called Palestine where yellow ribbons were put up around her community in honour of her. She had written home before her capture to say that when she came home from the Gulf she wanted to become a teacher.
Last night they had fireworks and celebrations in her home town – this one small success story has really hit the headlines here.

“A lot of talk of setbacks … one small success story.” They just can’t help themselves, can they? Imagine how crushed they’ll be if Baghdad falls.

P.R. HELL: If Saddam’s thugs can’t even persuade Robert Fisk that some alleged allied bombings are for real, then they’re really in trouble.

“It’s the worst administration I’ve seen since I went there in 1951. The whole [conservative] trend is a very artificial one made up essentially of three main currents. One is the Christian current, which is isolated from the rest of the country. [But] it’s a lot of people, 70-80 million. This is George Bush’s main constituency. Second, the neo-conservative movement, which has been developing over the period since the end of the 1960s, as a reaction to the 1960s. But it is now narrower and narrower and more focused. That’s why you have people like [Richard] Perle and [Paul] Wolfowitz in positions of power, because they’ve made an alliance with the isolationist right wing within America… And the third group that feeds into this is the Washington establishment, these think tanks in Washington which have taken the intellectual class and turned them into policy salesmen who have no peer review… The opposition to the war is, I think, an opposition to all of that. It’s an opposition to the fundamentalists, who stand, for example, against the theory of evolution. And these are the people pushing for the war. And that’s why I think the movement against the war, despite the fact that it is flagging a bit because of loyalty to the boys and girls abroad, as some of the Democrats are saying now, will grow. I think that Bush will not have a second presidency. In fact, I and many others are convinced that Bush will try to negate the 2004 elections: we’re dealing with a putschist, conspiratorial, paranoid deviation that’s very anti- democratic.” – Edward Said, hallucinating with the editors of Arab News. Wolfowitz in an alliance with the isolationist right? But then, I guess, where do you start?

IN DEFENSE OF THE BEEB: “In light of all the bashing of the BBC, in which I have enthusiastically participated, please let me note a counter-example: Yesterday (Monday) there was an absolutely superb BBC interview with Amir Mousa, head of the Arab league. Mousa was wily and wanted to make only 2 points: the war in Iraq is unjust and opposed by most Arab governments and virtually all the Arab people, and give back the “occupied territories” (not clear whether this meant just the west bank or Israel proper too). The interviewer was respectfully persistent, and did an excellent job, let Mousa blather but pressed him on the hard questions, to which Mousa’s responses were pathetically flat and unconvincing. Mousa babbled development and democracy, the interviewer pointed out that very few Arabs have either. Interviewer did not allow PC notions of not offending Third World sensibilities limit his questioning. Excellent job, vastly superior to the vapidity of CNN or the cheerleading of Fox.” – more reader dissent on the Letters Page.

“How easy to forget that our own war for independence was largely fought by ‘irregulars’ condemned as terrorists by the British because they would snipe from behind scattered trees rather than fight from the tight parade formations that were the civilized form of warfare in those days. Ours is a long history of covert actions, political assassinations, special ops, anti-democratic coups and dirty tricks that are, even today, being used in Iraq. And we claim that the ends of U.S. policy are so noble that even clearly illegal means, such as a preemptive invasion, are justified.” – Robert Scheer, equating Saddam Hussein’s methods with the founding fathers’, Los Angeles Times.

DEAR SALON: I loved this letter to the editors about Anne Lamott’s recent drivel:

Dear Sir:
I force myself to get through these articles because I usually read most of what you put up on your site.
Do you get positive feedback from this kind of writing? Just curious. Knowing that someone actually likes this will make it possible for me to hug myself, buy myself a felt pen or maybe a pair of socks, and begin to love again. That is, unless it’s raining, because that scares me, all the lightning and thunder and big nasty black clouds, but then I feel better because I know someday the sun will come out and warm the earth with its tender golden rays, and then I realize that hey, life is great and if we would all just love each other like I love everyone even though they don’t love me, the world would be this great lovefest and that would be lovely, wouldn’t it?
Until then, I am going to hide out at home with a big bucket of Haagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream until the world comes to its senses.
– Brian Asmus, Taipei, Taiwan

I smell a new as.com reader, don’t you?

If you’re a member of the Rummy screwed-it-up department, it must be a little disconcerting to read the New York Times editorial this morning. When the viscerally, uncompromisingly anti-Bush Times pooh-poohs the notion of a military miscalculation, then the media tide must surely be turning.

BAGHDAD BROADCASTING CORPORATION: Is the BBC now spewing out anti-Zionist conspiracy theories? A listener to their Arab broadcasting service thinks so.

HOME NEWS: March was another record traffic month: 1.88 million visits to the site from almost half a million separate people. 2.5 million page views. But my favorite piece of data is from Alexa.com. They rank websites, and like most such rankings, they’re fallible, so don’t put too much weight on this little piece of information. But according to Alexa, this site is now neck and neck, in traffic terms, with the Nation. In fact, the very latest data show this site just ahead of the Nation: we were ranked 6,116 Monday; they were ranked 8,728. No, I’m not putting out a full-fledged magazine, but the more you think about that simple statistic, the more remarkable it is. This site didn’t exist three years ago; the Nation has been around for a century. This site, thanks to you, is comfortably in the black with no debt. The Nation has bled money for decades, as most such magazines do. Moreover, compare the stats for last month with the same month a year ago: we had 805,000 visits in March 2002 and 1,880,000 in March 2003. Yes, the war has boosted traffic this month, and that may subside in the future. But the trend is really strong. Thanks so much for your support, your faith and your constant criticism.

Josh Marshall has a detailed rebuttal to my recent criticisms of his criticisms of the Iraqi campaign so far. Josh is easily the most credible liberal blogger, so let me take his counter-arguments one by one. (I don’t agree with Josh, by the way, that this kind of back-and-forth is insidery. We’re not discussing ourselves; we’re debating the issues. Isn’t that what opinion journalism should be all about?) I argued that the plan made sense in as much as we shot for the moon in trying to decapitate the regime quickly, but still have the resources to fight a less triumphant campaign. Josh counters:

If it were true that we were just shooting for the moon knowing that it might fail and that we’d then hit them with a more conventional infantry and armor attack, we’d already have our infantry and armor in place. We don’t. So I don’t find that argument particularly credible.

But from what I can tell, we do have our infantry in place. Moreover, our air superiority is helping destroy the Republican Guards before we encounter them on the ground. I see no evidence that we are holding back from Baghdad because we don’t have sufficient troops. I see evidence that we’re trying to avoid street-fighting, by luring the Saddam shock troops out into the open, while we pulverize them from the air, and get reinforcements from Kuwait. (According to the Washington Post this morning, the first real battle between the army and the Republican Guard is pitting 20,000 U.S. soldiers with 21st century armaments against 6,000 Saddamite troops, half of whom have no formal military training, and whose artillery has been pounded from the air for days.) Even Barry McCaffrey concedes that

“the 100,000 troops en route to the battle will give the operational commanders the ability to control the pace and tempo of the fight if we sense trouble.”

Like Josh, I’m not expert enough to tell whether we have enough troops for the job at hand. But Franks says we do; Pace says we do; the latest reports suggest we do; and even arch-skeptic McCaffrey says we soon will have. What difference does it make if we take Baghdad in four weeks rather than two?

LIBERATION: Josh’s second point is the following:

The administration premised virtually all of its strategy and most of its tactics on the assumption that the civilian population would treat us as liberators. Unfortunately, that basic assumption has been shown itself to be fundamentally flawed. Our military strategy was based on the idea that the Iraqis would be so happy we’d shown up that they wouldn’t harrass our supply lines on the way to Baghdad. That hasn’t panned out.

But ordinary Iraqis are not harrassing our supply lines. Paramilitary Saddam loyalists are. We did indeed under-estimate the legacy of 1991, and the power of a police state to intimidate people – and I’ve been more than candid about that. But, as Josh agrees, it’s still unclear what the general Iraqi population feels about our intervention. Which brings me to a different point. What if we’d done what Josh seems now to support: a massive 1991-style 500,000 troop, lumbering onslaught through the deserts? Wouldn’t that have looked much more like an invasion than the current action? And would that have been more useful in getting rid of fedayeen in street-fighting? I can see the Arab press now writing up the huge invasion force as a new imperialism; and a whole bunch of military commentators pointing out how the army was fighting the last war. I can also see the dangers in that approach of not being able to move quickly and deeply enough to secure the Western airbases (to protect Israel) and the oil-fields (critical for reconstruction). It seems to me that the flexible Franks-Rumsfeld plan was therefore a pretty good one. Perhaps the Turkish refusal to allow border-crossing from our troops hindered things a lot. All I can say is that this quibbling and second-guessing is based on an incredibly high standard for military success after less than two weeks of combat. No harm in that, I suppose. As long as we don’t let perfection become a means of under-appreciating something that’s perfectly good.

THE MOVING GOAL-POSTS: Then Josh shifts the goal posts for success even further. Here is the only scenario in which he will feel chagrined for his political pessimism about this war:

Presumably, I’ll be haunted one or two months from now when we’re off on an easy occupation of Baghdad, governing a peaceful nation of thankful Iraqis, and resting easier since we’ve cowed Syria, Iran and the Palestinians into quiescence.

Come on, Josh. I don’t think anyone has promised that. If, in two months, we have liberated Iraq from Saddam, brought its oil back on line, set up a new provisional government, and begun the process of de-Ba’athification, then I think most Americans will think of this war as huge success. And they should. The attempt to stem the rise of Islamist terrorist totalitarianism in the Middle East will take a generation at least. But it’s worth trying. The alternative is to sit back, watch it fester and wait for it to come at us with weapons of mass destruction. Some of what we’ll do won’t exactly endear us to the Arab world. But in the long run, we’re not looking for love; and the experience of fledgling semi-democracies in Jordan, Turkey and Iraq could well change many minds. That’s my hope. And it’s not a hopelessly quixotic one.