Month: April 2003

The quibblers, the carpers, the second-guessers, the cynics, and the isolationists on right and left now have to read paragraphs like this:

In Firdos Square in central Baghdad, a group of Iraqi men climbed up the pedestal of a 20-foot statue of Mr. Hussein and smacked it with a sledgehammer. Then they put a chain around the neck of the statue and tied it to an armored American military vehicle. The crowd then cheered and clapped as the vehicle pulled away, toppling the statue. Several Iraqis danced and jumped on the fallen statue. Elsewhere in Baghdad, the American military emptied jails overnight, releasing their prisoners. In the neighborhood called Saddam City, a densely populated Shiite area, crowds of men shouted and waved their arms in jubilation. Some carried makeshift flags. One middle-aged man held up a huge portrait of Mr. Hussein, and in the middle of the street used his shoe to beat the face of the Iraqi leader, a particular insult. “This man has killed two million of us,” he yelled as bystanders milled around approvingly.

This is an amazing victory, a victory over a monster who gassed civilians, jailed children, sent millions into fruitless wars, harbored poisonous weapons to threaten free peoples, tortured thousands, and made alliances with every two-bit opportunist on the planet. It’s a victory over those who marched in the millions to stop this liberation, over the endless media cynics, over the hate-America crowd, and the armchair generals. It’s a victory for the two countries in the world that have always made freedom possible and who have now brought it to another corner of the world made dark by terror. It’s a victory for the extraordinary servicemen and women who performed this task with such skill, cool, courage and restraint. It’s a victory for optimism over pessimism, the righting of past wrongs, the assertion of universal truths against postmodern excuses, and of political leadership over appeasement. Celebrate it. Don’t let the whiners take this away from you or from the people of Iraq.

Between the BBC’s commentary and Mohammed Said Sahaf’s? Three days.

POWELL’S POSTURE: “This comment is in reference to Colin Powell’s interview on German television. One of the things that’s obvious from Colin Powell’s measured yet passionate response to the hostile German interlocutor is how much more mature and serious Powell is than so many of the others in the pro-war camp. No rhetoric about “Old Europe,” no frog-baiting “Freedom Toast” in Air Force One, no swaggering gun-toting. Powell just explains the administration’s position in a way that is inclusive rather than divisive, that tries to extend the coalition of the willing rather than extending ultimatums from Saddam’s disgusting regime to our longest-serving allies.” – more contrarian reader comment on the Letters Page.

NO CREDIT DUE: You have to ask yourselves what it would take to get Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd to say anything, anything, positive about this administration and the military force they have just wielded so expertly. Dowd, who simply cannot understand the gravity of the situation we have been in these past couple of years, writes with astonishing glibness: “We were always going to win the war with Iraq.” Oh, really? I don’t remember her saying such a thing before. In fact, all I remember is her constant carping about and lambasting anyone in this administration prepared to take responsibility for the threats to this country’s security. Now, in a Johnny-Apple instant, she’s on to the next carp. Friedman, in his turn, makes good points as usual about the need to restore order as soon as possible, but then he says something like this: “America broke Iraq; now America owns Iraq, and it owns the primary responsibility for normalizing it.” No, Tom, America did not break Iraq. Saddam did that. We liberated it with astonishing precision and with an amazing lack of damage to critical infrastructure. The fact that there’s chaos in the interlude between Saddam’s thuggery and a new government is a simple fact of human life. Tom’s absolutely right about the need to invest time, money and care in rebuilding Iraq. But part of the impetus in America for such a task must come from genuine pride in what we have achieved; and a deeper understanding of its moral significance. Let’s take a moment to absorb that before we launch into yet another spasm of self-criticism.

I wasn’t the first blogger to make the uncanny resemblance between Monsieur Mohammed Said Sahaf (why do I think of these Iraqi nutjobs as somehow French?) and Monty Python’s Black Knight. Sorry, Josh, Josh, Jonah et al. that I was so unaware. To make amends, here’s a link to the sketch. Money script (after the Black Knight has lost both arms):

ARTHUR: Look, I’ll have your leg. [kick] Right! [whop] [ARTHUR chops the BLACK KNIGHT’s right leg off]
BLACK KNIGHT: Right. I’ll do you for that!
ARTHUR: You’ll what?
BLACK KNIGHT: Come here!
ARTHUR: What are you going to do, bleed on me?
BLACK KNIGHT: I’m invincible!
ARTHUR: You’re a looney.
BLACK KNIGHT: The Black Knight always triumphs! Have at you! Come on, then. [whop] [ARTHUR chops the BLACK KNIGHT’s last leg off]
BLACK KNIGHT: Oh? All right, we’ll call it a draw.
ARTHUR: Come, Patsy.
BLACK KNIGHT: Oh. Oh, I see. Running away, eh? You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what’s coming to you. I’ll bite your legs off!

BAGHDAD BROADCASTING CORPORATION: From an Israeli blogger’s reported conversation with an Iraqi relative:

“He also told me that although he seldom speaks Arabic these days (though I heard him conversing with family members), he listens to the Arabic service of the BBC. Without my prompting him, he said that he also couldn’t understand how the British could be broadcasting such lies against their own forces. The BBC service is dominated by Egyptian Muslim fundamentalists, he told me. Can’t they find any moderate Arabic-speaking broadcasters who could present fair coverage? He wanted to write to the British government, but, well, he just didn’t know how. But how could this be? How could this be?”

The BBC, in other words, was actually producing pro-Saddam propaganda to the Iraqi people at the same time as British forces lives were at risk. Someone needs to investigate the Arabic Language Service. Daniel Pipes, can’t you get someone on the case?

“Friendly fire deaths lower than in previous war” – Knight Ridder.
“As Tactics Change and Battle Lines Blur, Risk of Being Killed by Own Side Increases” – New York Times.

GILLIGAN’S ISLAND: This is one of the best eviscerations of the BBC I’ve yet read. Money quote:

Saturday, April 5, will be the day most people will remember as the day when the journalistic standards of the World Service committed suicide. The BBC’s bad day in Baghdad started early: A column of US soldiers had entered southwestern Baghdad just after daybreak. The soldiers – in tanks and armored personnel carriers – drove through the city for several kilometers encountering only sporadic resistance. Near the university, the column turned left, drove out of the capital and parked at the international airport, which was already securely in American hands… Cut to: Andrew Gilligan, the BBC’s man in downtown Baghdad. “I’m in the center of Baghdad,” said a very dubious Gilligan, “and I don’t see anything… But then the Americans have a history of making these premature announcements.” Gilligan was referring to a military communiqué from Qatar the day before saying the Americans had taken control of most of Baghdad’s airport. When that happened, Gilligan had told World Service listeners that he was there, at the airport – but the Americans weren’t. Gilligan inferred that the Americans were lying. An hour or two later, a different BBC correspondent pointed out that Gilligan wasn’t at the airport, actually. He was nearby – but apparently far enough away that the other correspondent felt it necessary to mention that he didn’t really know if Gilligan was around, but that no matter what Gilligan had seen or not seen, the airport was firmly and obviously in American hands. It was important to the BBC that Gilligan not be wrong twice in two days. Whatever the truth was, the BBC, like Walter Duranty’s New York Times, must never say, “I was wrong.” So, despite the fact that the appearance of American troops in Baghdad was surely one of the war’s big moments, and one the BBC had obviously missed, American veracity became the story of the day. Gilligan, joined by his colleagues in Baghdad, Paul Wood and Rageh Omaar, kept insisting that not only had the Americans not gone to the “center” – which they reckoned to be where they were – they hadn’t really been in the capital at all. Both Omaar and Wood told listeners that they had been on hour-long Iraqi Ministry of Information bus rides – “and,” said Wood, “we were free to go anywhere” – yet they had seen nothing of an American presence in the city. From Qatar, a BBC correspondent helpfully explained that US briefings, such as that announcing the Baghdad incursion, were meaningless exercises, “more PR than anything else.” Maybe, implied the World Service, the Americans had made it all up: all day long, Wood repeatedly reported that there was no evidence to support the American claim.

No I haven’t been making this up. Privatize them now.

The British Medical Association has just put out a new guideline on the practice of mutilating the penises of infant boys. It suggests that common sense and medical practice may soon turn against this procedure. Some details:

“…it is now widely accepted, including by the BMA, that this surgical procedure has medical and psychological risks…the harm of denying a person the opportunity to choose not to be circumcised must also be taken into account, together with the damage that can be done to the individual’s relationship with his parents and the medical profession if he feels harmed by the procedure. … The BMA does not believe that parental preference alone constitutes sufficient grounds for performing a surgical procedure on a child unable to express his own view… Doctors should ensure that any parents seeking circumcision for their son in the belief that it confers health benefits are fully informed of the lack of consensus amongst the profession over such benefits, and how great any potential benefits and harms are. The BMA considers that the evidence concerning health benefit from non-therapeutic circumcision is insufficient for this alone to be a justification for doing it.”

Maybe in time, the permanent mutilation of boys’ bodies without their consent will be seen as the anachronism it surely is.

Yes, I know I’m a Python freak. Got ’em all on DVD. But I suddenly realized who Mohammed Said Sahaf reminds me of, declaring victory as allied troops police the streets around him, explaining that the Baghdad Airport is still held by Iraqis, etc. etc. He’s that wounded knight in the “Holy Grail,” with every limb cut off, daring his opponent to have another whack at him. If he weren’t a monster, he’d be quite funny.

BBC UPDATE: A new low. The World Service just described this goon as “the public face of Iraqi resistance.”

Yep, over a hundred children – yes, children – escaped from a Saddam prison today. They had been jailed because they wouldn’t join the Hitler, er, Saddam Youth. They are deliriously happy, along with their parents. They gave the G.I.s two signs: a thumbs-up and then they held their wrists together to signify that they had been chained up. On the same day, James Carroll of the Boston Globe asks this question: “Does your nation any longer know that it, too, is part of the human family? That that family is now warning of a fatal loss of trust in the ideal for which the American flag has so long stood? Are that flag, and all who have carried it, honored by what is being done under its sign today?” Carroll’s answer is no. Maybe he should usher those kids back into prison himself.

Read Jack Shafer’s alternately hilarious and damning piece about New York Times “news analyst,” Johnny Apple. Apple makes MoDo look well-informed. Only in the cocoon of 43rd Street could such a writer, who gets everything wrong, contradicts himself from day to day, and writes in prose worthy of Anne Lamott could still get front-page play day after day. I guess he performs something of a purpose. As Will Saletan notes, “How will we know when the coalition has won the war? The day Johnny Apple says they’ve lost it.” Actually, the day before.

The British aircraft carrier, Ark Royal, has now switched off the BBC. More eloquent than I could ever be. What a disgrace.

As I write, we still don’t know if Saddam has been killed. I sure hope so. But we do know that this war is almost as good as won after three weeks. The Saddam regime no longer controls its two biggest cities; its armed forces seem in disarray; Saddam’s palaces are occupied by G.I.s. Again, measure this against Kenneth Pollack’s neutral projection:

Probably the most likely scenario would be about one third of Iraq’s armed forces fighting hard, limited use of tactical WMD, and some extensive combat in a few cities. In this most likely case, the campaign would probably last four to eight weeks and result in roughly 500 to 1,000 American combat deaths.

Three weeks. Under 100 American casualties, half of which came from accidents. No use of tactical WMD. Extraordinarily targeted bombing; exceptionally light force; oil wells intact; Israel secure; Turks kept at bay. War is terrible, of course. It may flare up again for a while. There’s still a chance of last-minute atrocities. And every civilian casualty is a tragedy. But it’s beginning to look as if this was an amazing military campaign, something of which the American and British people – and their governments – can be deeply, deeply proud.