Month: July 2003

“And on the al-Qaida link, it seems to me [the press] are just not doing their job at all. There are innumerable links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida that have been demonstrated very many times. And now every broadcast and every utterance by the Ba’ath Party is as if it was written by Osama bin Laden, and half the fighters in Iraq, half the bandits there, are imported from outside jihad forces. This relationship did not begin yesterday. They are, in effect, now a fusion of those who believe in the one party and those who believe in the one-God state. But the press does a very bad job of reporting that–and I go by, let’s say, The New York Times; we can’t [use] ‘the press’ too generically as David knows, but The New York Times refers to that kind of gangsterism as the ‘Iraqi resistance’… and it refers to the American presence in the country as the ‘American occupation.’ Now just tell me what you think the subliminal effect of those two terms is… , I think you and I could both agree that we know a mentality when we see one. I would say even during the war, when I was partly in the south of Iraq and mainly in Kuwait, I could tell what the press corps thought in general when–remember that slight sag in the first few days of the campaign? It looked as if the Rumsfeld plan wasn’t quite working. There was practically no one in the press, I’d say, that wasn’t pulling for that happen. They all wanted to be able to report a quagmire, a defeat, a disaster; either some of them for ideological reasons or some of them because it’s a better story.” – Christopher Hitchens, telling it like it is, on CNBC yesterday.

BORK CONVERTS: Judge Robert Bork is the latest conservative to become a Catholic under the auspices of Opus Dei, the hyper-orthodox order. Father Jim McCloskey, who has also brought other leading right-wingers into the church, emailed to let me know.

“FRUITCAKE” AND “COCKSUCKER”: Yes, Rep. Pete Stark used both terms against another Congressman. But he’s a Democrat, right? He can’t be a bigot, can he? (By the way, the only reference I can find on the Human Rights Campaign website to Pete Stark is celebrating his voting record on gay rights. But the good news on the website is that HRC is finally rallying people to support marriage rights. Yay! Ten years too late, but it’s progress.)

“Our leaders deserve a bow for this one, too, after everyone from buck privates to nine Democratic presidential candidates have called for their scalp: the battle plan is working, the enemy is on the run, and Iraq is already a better place than it’s been for 35 years. Only the “Ace of Spades” remains. The theory/ hope here is that high-profile success like this turns off most of the “bitter-enders.” Sure hope that’s the case.” – blogger Tacitus has an email from a marine in Baghdad as the news of Saddam’s sons’ deaths spread.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I watched the coverage of the deaths of Saddam’s poor sons last night, and wondered what the post-Raines NYT would say about this victory. First thing this morning I looked at the lead editorial–which I almost never bother with–to check the barometer, as it were. How would they spin this?
Under Raines, the tenor of the piece would undoubtedly have been: We can’t let this distract us from the central fact that the lying Bush administration tricked us into a quagmire by using faked evidence that got us into a war that despite the news yesterday we still aren’t winning and here are all the ways that we still aren’t winning it and did I mention the quagmire?
To my surprise, the “new” New York Times” largely played it straight. The editors did manage to be both platitudinous (Yes, there’s plenty left to do. No kidding.) and out of touch (Are you really “frustrated” that we haven’t captured Mullah Omar? Is anyone?). Yet I couldn’t help but be impressed that the editorial ended on a positive note. Killing these thugs has made America’s mission in Iraq easier. The Times, under Bill Keller, just conceded an important victory to the Bush Administration, without sneaking in a snide attack. I thought I’d never say this again, but hooray for the Times.” Amen. But typically classy of Bush as well to let the military hog the limelight yesterday. More feedback on the Letters Page.

Strange congruence between my post earlier this morning and this opinion:

We should be pulling for America on this. We should be pulling for the people of Iraq. We can have honest disagreements about where we go from here, and we have space now to discuss that in what I hope will be a nonpartisan and open way. But this State of the Union deal they decided to use the British intelligence. The president said it was British intelligence. Then they said on balance they shouldn’t have done it. You know, everybody makes mistakes when they are president. I mean, you can’t make as many calls as you have to make without messing up once in awhile. The thing we ought to be focused on is what is the right thing to do now. That’s what I think.

Clinton is politically shrewd, whatever else you think of him. Far, far shrewder than the current political pygmies in his party.

CNN AND IRAN: A truly disturbing story, if true. Will CNN confirm? Are they still sucking up to the mullahs?

The basic and under-reported news – of slow but measurable progress in Iraq – got a fillip yesterday with the killing of Saddam’s two vile sons. Of course, no one but a few crackpots can be anything but thrilled by this news. But the best part of this event is that it focuses us back on what really matters: not quibbles over intelligence lapses months ago, but the war against terror and tyranny now. What happened yesterday will help remove the fear among some Iraqis that the Baathists might return; and so help the reconstruction immeasurably. It’s wonderful news. But of course this focus – on our current progress and on how we now move from one success to another – is exactly the kind of topic the anti-war left (and right) want to avoid. It is vital to them that we forget just how evil the Saddam regime was, that we ignore the immeasurably better life Iraqis (and Afghans) now have, that we do not build on this success to take the cause to Iran and Syria and Saudi Arabia. Why? Because all that will merely strengthen Bush and weakening Bush – regardless of its effects on the wider world – is the prime obsession of the antis. And his success will only legitimize the future use of American power and that again is something these types want above all to prevent. Boy, did they love those 16 banal words. How much easier to obsess on that than on the true dangers that confront us in the Middle East, the growing confluence of state terrorism and WMDs, the rise of fanatical Islamo-fascism, and on and on. Sure, some criticisms of our current strategy in Iraq are well-intended and helpful. We need more criticism of that type. But the relentless negativism and cynicism from much of the media springs from something deeper – and more fundamental.

THE PRE-9/11 MIND: The more I read emails or talk to anti-war types, I get a sense that 9/11 never really happened. Or if it happened, it meant nothing more than a discrete crime with discrete criminals who alone deserved justice. The notion that it meant that we were and are actually at war with a series of terrorist entities and the tyrannies that support them never truly took hold on the far left (or right). As the months have passed, their complacency and denial have undoubtedly metastasized among others as 9/11 recedes from our collective consciousness and its emotional wound begins to heal. These people, it’s worth remembering, believe that the exercise of American military power is almost always more morally problematic than any foreign tyranny or even a serious security threat to the homeland. They can only justify American military power if it is wielded under imminent, grave danger that can be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. That’s why they are so exercised about tiny pieces of evidence today. They still believe we were wrong to remove Saddam from power without incontrovertible proof of WMDs of a type unobtainable in police states; they still believe America had no moral sanction for such an action; and they are even more determined to prove the superiority of their case now that the war was such a military success. So they have to turn the fallible evidence before the war into “lies”; and they have to turn the difficult but worthy post-war reconstruction into a “quagmire.” They know the only chance they have is to turn American public opinion against the war so as to prevent any such exercise of military power again. In that sense, they really cannot simply be mocked. They must be challenged at every turn. For they are engaged in a process that will not only stymie efforts at reforming the Middle East but will make Americans and others more vulnerable to the designs of the Islamofascists and their terrorist allies. The war abroad cannot therefore be extricated from the debate at home. We will not win the former without winning the latter.

With that in mind, here’s an appeal to anyone out there with firsthand experiences in Iraq today – in the military or elsehwere – to send me your own impressions of what’s going on. I don’t trust most of the journalists, I’m afraid. Here’s part of one email I just received:

I left early this morning for Mosul then to a town in Northern Iraq called Duhok. It is a Kurdish city and a bigtime market place. The people there really love the Americans… more than anywhere else. It was a very cool experience. Kids wanting to touch you and thank you for getting rid of Saddam. I had one kid saying… “mister… Saddam very bad … bush very good…” and repeating it over and over. It was a very long day and I am glad to be back at Qwest… Northern Iraq is soo pretty with the mountains and some water. The Kurdish people are very friendly and honest. One of the soldiers dropped money accidentally out of his pocket and didn’t notice. A whole group of kids came up and pointed to it saying ” Mister your money…” Most kids in shitty places like this would just steal the cash and run.

News you won’t get on the BBC. Then there’s this fascinating blog from a soldier in Iraq calling himself “Chief Wiggles.” My favorite passages:

0900 The workday begins with a quick meeting with the major. We review what has gone on over the last 24 hours and what we should focus on over the next 24 hours. We are getting prisoners every day, up to hundreds at a time, along with the ones we already have. We have a screening team, an interrogation team, counter intelligence team, our analysts, an OCE section and the rest of the operation people. Each team has a mission and responsibility for a different area of the total overall operation. We are all busily engaged in extracting and compiling information regarding the most important issues at hand, like weapons of mass destruction, etc. I can’t say in detail but we have been instrumental through our intel in capturing people, preventing hostilities, and a variety of other things. We are making a difference in the overall effort here.
0945 I go through my government email from various people stationed around the country who are forwarding information or who have requests for information.

Just an average day, making things a tiny bit better for the people of Iraq. And it’s not easy:

These are tough times for all, not just for the prisoners. All of us here are away from our families, away from our lives and have our own degree of sacrifice and suffering. There are young men here who got married right before they were mobilized, others who had a wife they left with small children, many that left a pregnant wife missing the birth of their first child, others with illnesses and deaths at home, many with financial situations, many interrupting their education or other planned events, and just missing out on our lives back home. But we chose to serve. We chose to be a good neighbor to our brothers and sisters here in Iraq. We chose to do our part to bring about the liberation of these people, to put them back on their path towards freedom and democracy.

I find such sentiments and such lives deeply moving. This is the core of what is going on: a brutal dictator was deposed and a country rescued and brought fitfully back to life. The men and women who accomplished this are, to my mind, heroes. For them we should apologize? For them we should even explain?

Here’sa fascinating piece of data comparing Ronald Reagan’s spending record in his first three years woth George W. Bush’s. Some highlights: education spending was cut by 33 percent by Reagan; it has grown 27 percent under Bush; “community and regional development” saw its budget cut by 33 percent by Reagan; Bush increased it by 32 percent; transportation was down 11 percent under Reagan; it’s up 16 percent under Bush. The man just can’t stop spending our money. With Clinton gone, the era of small government is over.

BAATHIST BROADCASTING CORPORATION: Here’s how they headlined yesterday’s news about the killing of Saddam’s sons: “US celebrates ‘good’ Iraq news.” Yes, that “good” again. The Beebers must be truly sad to see two mass murderers brought to justice. One BBC journalist even pronounced that the deaths might cause an intensification of anti-American violence. Wishful thinking. Oliver Kamm nails it:

The BBC’s output of news and current affairs is in chaos; it lacks adequate controls; it is consistently ill-informed; certain of its correspondents are frankly ignorant of the subjects they’re supposed to specialise in; it is sentimental rather than analytical; it introduces – not even covertly, for its practitioners know of no other way of making sense of the world – a bias that treats pressure groups as invariably disinterested and political authority as deceitful; and it reports on the security policies of western democracies, specifically the United States and Israel, as if no terrorist threat existed and these countries’ military actions were evidence of malign intent rather than defensive necessity.

Abolish it, I say.

THE NEW NEW YORK TIMES: The Onion has an infograph.

I keep hearing – anecdotally and from forwarded emails, that things are going far better in Iraq than the anti-war media wants you to believe. Here’s an extract from a letter from a soldier out there doing God’s work in putting back together a ravaged country. It was posted on Free Republic, but it seems genuine to me. Here’s a small extract:

The only reason the GIs are pissed (not demoralized) is that they cannot touch, must less waste, those taunting bags of gas that scream in their faces and riot on cue when they spot a camera man from ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN or NBC. If they did, then they know the next nightly news will be about how chaotic things are and how much the Iraqi people hate us.
Some do. But the vast majority don’t and more and more see that the GIs don’t start anything, are by-and-large friendly, and very compassionate, especially to kids and old people. I saw a bunch of 19 year-olds fromthe 82nd Airborne not return fire coming from a mosque until they got a group of elderly civilians out of harm’s way. So did the Iraqis.
A bunch of bad guys used a group of women and children as human shields.The GIs surrounded them and negotiated their surrender fifteen hours later and when they discovered a three year-old girl had been injured by the big tough guys throwing her down a flight of stairs, the GIs called in a MedVac helicopter to take her and her mother to the nearest field hospital. The Iraqis watched it all, and there hasn’t been a problem inthat neighborhood since. How many such stories, and there are hundreds of them, never get reported in the fair and balanced press? You know, nada.
The civilians who have figured it out faster than anyone are the local teenagers.
They watch the GIs and try to talk to them and ask questions about America and Now wear wrap-around sunglasses, GAP T- shirts, Dockers (or even better Levis with the red tags) and Nikes (or Egyptian knock-offs, but with the “swoosh”) and love to listen to AFN when the GIs play it on their radios.
They participate less and less in the demonstrations and help keep us informed when a wannabe bad-ass shows up in the neighborhood.
The younger kids are going back to school again, don’t have to listen to some mullah rant about the Koran ten hours a day, and they get a hot meal.
They see the same GIs who man the corner checkpoint, helping clear the playground, install new swingsets and create soccer fields. I watched a bunch of kids playing baseball in one playground, under the supervision of a couple of GIs from Oklahoma. They weren’t very good but were having fun, probably more than most Little Leaguers
The place is still a mess but most of it has been for years. But the Hospitals are open and are in the process of being brought into the 21stCentury. The MOs and visiting surgeons from home are teaching their docs new techniques and One American pharmaceutical company (you know, the kind that all the hippies like to scream about as greedy) donated enough medicine to stock 45 hospital pharmacies for a year.

Read the whole thing. Why do very, very few of these stories appear in the press? I think we know the answer. My sympathies lie with these men and women doing a difficult job extremely well. We are making progress. Don’t let the BBC or Dick “Chicken Little” Morris get you down.

The mullahs get a “divine” missile. Aimed at the Jews.

My liberal readers have just about had it with me on the Africa-Uranium story. They think I’m deliberately ignoring it; in denial about the collapse of the occupation of Iraq; and still swooning for Dubya. Well, they might be right about the third. But the reason I’m unmoved by this story is that I can’t see why it matters. Intelligence is always a somewhat dubious enterprise. There is little certainty, only grades of uncertainty. No one – left, right or center, European or American, Democrat or Republican – believed that Saddam had come clean about his WMD ambitions in the months before the war. Does anyone today? That refusal is the entire reason for the war. Not our intelligence – his refusal. The notion that a single minor piece of evidence which is still defended by British spooks somehow undermines the case for war against Saddam is just loopy. Should we investigate to see where our intelligence might have failed? You bet. Should we worry, as one letter writer today does, that our credibility has been tarnished? Absolutely. Did the Bush administration “lie” about the intelligence it received? There is no evidence whatever that the president deliberately misled the American people. If he had one fault, it was veering on the side of caution when faced with Saddam’s record in a post-9/11 world. Count me as someone who is glad he didn’t veer toward complacency instead. This non-scandal, as Bill Kristol has argued, may well hurt its advocates more than the Bush administration, just as the BBC may end up (here’s hoping) mortally wounded by its own attack on the war.

THE VITAL TASK: What matters now – the only thing that matters – is that we get the current end-game in Iraq right and find and kill or capture Saddam and his dead-enders. As for the dangerous situation in that country: who can be surprised? Did people really believe it would be one Tocquevillean orgy as soon as the Baathists were deposed? Did we really hope that the vast Baathist military that disappeared at the climax of the war would literally evaporate? The fact that the three major groups – Sunni, Shia and Kurd – are still on board for a representative government is far more significant than the resilience of a few Baathist left-overs, coordinated by Saddam. Safire was right yesterday. We are still at war over there against the Baathists and much of the current criticism of the occupation as a whole is ultimately designed to weaken domestic support for the vital task in front of us. That’s what the anti-war left and right are now trying to do. They lost the battle before the war and during the war. They now desperately need the U.S. to lose the post-war. It’s time for those of us who supported the liberation of Iraq to fight back against this potentially catastrophic gambit. For the U.S. to give up now, to withdraw, or to show any vacillation in the face of great progress in the Middle East, would indeed make matters far worse than if we had never intervened in the first place. We have an obligation to make it work. If some Democrats continue to argue that we should cut our losses, they are simply not ready for government.

Yes, he kept one during the war. Another blogger kept notes.

CREATIONISM UNLEASHED: I presume this is a parody. But in some areas, it’s sometimes hard to tell.

IS BUSH A CONSERVATIVE? I examine the arguments against.

IS ADULTERY STRAIGHT? A fascinating report in the Christian Science Monitor posits some fascinating future issues, when gay marriage gets established. A New Hampshire court is trying to decide if a woman who committed adultery with another woman is indeed guilty of the crime/sin. My view is: absolutely. When gay marriage comes, it should have the same expectations of monogamy as straight marriage and adultery should be regarded with the same degree of social stigma. If couples don’t want those rules they can stay ummarried or remain domestic partners or the like. A major gay group, Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, agrees:

“Gay and lesbian relationships are as significant as non-gay ones and therefore pose the same threat to the marital union… New Hampshire courts should treat gay adultery the same no matter the gender of the person with whom a spouse engages in an extramarital relationship,” they wrote.

Amen. The point of marriage is responsibility. That should apply as stringently to gays as to straights.