Month: April 2003

This passage from the BBC about Abu Abbas simply defies belief. No use of the term “terrorist,” of course:

A wanted Palestinian fugitive, Abu Abbas, has been detained by US forces in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad. He led the Palestinian Liberation Front, which hijacked a US cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, in 1985. During the hijack, an elderly American passenger died. Abu Abbas had been mentioned by US President George W Bush as an example of the kind of figure given refuge by the former regime of Saddam Hussein.

In subsequent versions, the BBC seems to have substituted the term “was killed” for “died.” I guess even they have their limits in terrorism apologetics.

If you live in or near Austin, Texas, I’m going to be speaking at the University of Texas on blogging and the media tomorrow night, April 15. It’s at 7pm at the Texas Union Ballroom. Always happy to meet readers. So drop by, if you feel like it.

I’m taking a breather this week. After round-the-clock blogging since the new year, it’s time for a break. Thanks for being there each day and night. Have a great week. See you next Monday, bright and early.

“Among the attacks that had a strong political edge were those on the German Embassy and the French cultural center, both in east Baghdad. Few Iraqis were unaware, in the weeks preceding the war, that France and Germany were leading international efforts to force President Bush into accepting an extension of United Nations weapons inspections here, and to delay military action against Mr. Hussein. The French and German buildings were stripped of furniture, curtains, decorations, and anything else that could be carried away. At the French cultural center, where looters burst water pipes and flooded the ground floor, books were left floating in the reading rooms and corridors, and a photograph of Jacques Chirac, the French president, was smashed. French reporters said the French Embassy, also on the Tigris’s east bank, appeared to have been spared because it remained under the protection of French military guards. The German Embassy was unprotected.” – John F. Burns, New York Times today.

“Perhaps we cannot make this a world in which children are no longer tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children,” – Albert Camus.

“The prison in question was inspected by my team in Jan. 1998. It appeared to be a prison for children – toddlers up to pre-adolescents – whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene. Actually I’m not going to describe what I saw there because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I’m waging peace.” – Scott Ritter, Time Magazine.

Rick Hertzberg would never be so crude as to get something so obviously wrong. But this piece is so revealing about the mindset of the Manhattan chattering class that it deserves re-reading in the aftermath of liberation. Beneath the polished prose, unvarnished partisan glee.

Anti-war writer, Gary Kamiya, does some admirable soul-searching in Salon:

I have a confession: I have at times, as the war has unfolded, secretly wished for things to go wrong. Wished for the Iraqis to be more nationalistic, to resist longer. Wished for the Arab world to rise up in rage. Wished for all the things we feared would happen. I’m not alone: A number of serious, intelligent, morally sensitive people who oppose the war have told me they have had identical feelings.
Some of this is merely the result of pettiness — ignoble resentment, partisan hackdom, the desire to be proved right and to prove the likes of Rumsfeld wrong, irritation with the sanitizing, myth-making American media. That part of it I feel guilty about, and disavow. But some of it is something trickier: It’s a kind of moral bet-hedging, based on a pessimism not easy to discount, in which one’s head and one’s heart are at odds.

Let me say I’m disturbed by some of what Kamiya confesses, but extremely heartened by his honesty. It seems to me that a real anti-war liberal, with a heart and a head, is bound to feel deeply conflicted by all this. Contrast Kamiya with the apparatchik Krugman this morning and you see the difference between someone trying to figure this all out and someone who thinks he figured everything out years ago. (And notice Krugman’s use of the term ‘conquest’ rather than liberation. Telling, don’t you think?)

You can see it now. Chaos. Looting. Disorder. Losing the peace. It’s not that there won’t be some truth to these stories; and real cause for concern. The pent-up fury, frustration and sheer anger of three decades is a powerful thing, probably impossible to stop immediately without too much force. And the last thing we want is fire-power directed toward the celebrating masses. The trouble is that they could become the narrative of the story, especially among the usual media suspects, and erode the impact and power of April 9. By Sunday, or sooner, you-know-who will probably have a front-page “news analysis” that will describe the joy of liberation being transformed into the nightmare of a Hobbesian quicksand of ever-looming cliches. Speaking of whom …

… BAKED APPLE: The only good thing about R. W. Apple still producing his “stories swollen to the point of corpulence with clichés, platitudes, and the most foolish sort of conventional wisdom,” is that Jack Shafer is around to write about them. If this piece doesn’t have you on the floor laughing, then I guess … it’s just me.

Now we’re seeing it. This piece from MEMRI makes for encouraging reading. It’s a piece of withering criticism of the Arab media by the editor-in-chief of the London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed. Maybe the Arab populations will realize that their media simply spews lies and begin demanding greater accuracy and accountability. Money quote:

I know that adopting an impartial stand in the [Arab] media world is akin to suicide, because there are many who push the media into extremes, and take ‘nationalistic’ positions, and maintain that whoever thinks differently is committing treason against the [national] cause. [They maintain] that lying for the sake of the cause is moral and honorable. The Arab media [of today], in these hard times, is slowly turning into the 1967 media; at that time, radio announcers, analysts, and journalists exaggerated acts of courage and covered up defeats, which – historically – became a mockery… The Arab media today, with its clear inclination towards exaggerations and false promises of victory, is feeding the public stories that have nothing to do with the real events in the field. Hence, it is replicating the old media, despite the fact that it is broadcasting in color and using electronic technologies …

And so the effort for a real change begins.