Year: 2003

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 …

Amid all the uncertainty and second-guessing, one thing is worth remembering. Our main fear before this conflict was that Saddam might use chemical or biological weapons against our troops or Iraqi civilians. One reason for the strategy of a short air campaign and then risky troop advances was that a repeat of the 1991 strategy would have allowed Saddam free rein to use such weapons against us. The fact that he hasn’t so far is a big achievement, it seems to me. But it has meant slightly greater risks for the troops on the ground. Still the benefits are also huge in terms of saved lives and the closer we get to Baghdad, the less likely such weapons will be used, since they would backfire on the regime itself. Score one for this plan. But no plan is risk-free or perfect.

FRIEDMAN AGAIN: An elaboration of his email yesterday:

Dear Andrew,

Upon further reflection, it seems to me the argument we are having is an illuminating one and I want to continue it one more round. Maybe my use of the word “unilateral” so often was more indicative than I thought and your heated objection more revealing than you thought. Let me try to explain.

It seems to me conservative hawks are not facing up to two issues here and liberal hawks at least one. Why is it that liberals, such as myself, who were ready to support the war, so desperately wanted U.N. approval for it? It was for a couple of reasons — one that is already apparent and one that will become more apparent. First, because this is such a huge, unprecedented task, taking over a whole country half a world away, that the more international legitimacy we had going in, the more time and space we would have to do it right. I want the world, to the extent possible, rooting for us to succeed. You don’t have that feeling right now, and that has both psychological and material implications, especially if the war drags on. Second, and this comes from having lived and traveled so long in the Arab world, I wanted U.N. approval because I knew that just because many Arabs are anti-Saddam, does not mean that they are pro-American or will automatically embrace whatever we do. This is the biggest mistake the neo-cons make. They deal with a very tiny slice of the Arab world — a slice that has not only bought into our war, but also our story, a slice that also knows how to tell us what we want to hear. That is not true of the wider Arab and Moslem world, which has its own story, which may not be ours or Saddam’s. Indeed, the neo-cons, it seems to me, have always been so caught up with their sense of the justness of this war, they have not paid enough attention to the sheer complexity of the Arab world in general and Iraq particular. I wanted U.N. approval for this war because I felt that it would be easier to win the support, or acquiescence of those Arabs and Moslems who dislike Saddam and America as well. (My views on this have been deeply influenced by a documentary I have been making for the last seven months, based on travels across the Moslem world, on the real roots of 9/11. It’s running this Wednesday night on the Discovery Channel.) The longer the war goes on without the cover of U.N. approval, the more difficult it is for Arab leaders to manage their streets. (They would still be having a difficult time. even with U.N. approval, but, again, their margin of error, like Bush’s, is decreased.) This will be true even when the war is over, as we will be telling the Iraqis they have been “liberated” and many in the world, particularly the Arab world, will be telling them they have been “occupied.” The absence of U.N. legitimacy will be felt in that debate as well.

Upon reflection, I think what our argument was about was that you believe (and this seems to be true of the Administration as well) that because we have allies in this war – from the serious, such as Britain and Poland, to the absurd such as Rwanda – it is the same as having U.N. approval. Or, to put it another way, conservatives want to believe that this war is truly multilateral and that multilateral is morally the same as U.N.-approved. Andrew, it is not, and I think you make a mistake in believing that it is. Some important moral authority was sacrificed in not getting U.N. approval and there is no way around it. (We can debate how much of that failure is Bush’s and how much Chirac’s, but that is for another session.)

But, as I said, now that the war has started we have to win and winning all depends on what sort of Iraq we reconstruct. But here liberal hawks have to be honest with themselves. Gulf War II is different from Gulf War I. Gulf War I was about liberating Kuwait. It was not about nation-building. And it is much easier for America to lead a coalition whose only task was winning a war. Gulf War II is about both winning a war and nation-building. I wish we had more allies for winning the war. I wish we had many more allies for paying for the war afterwards. But, I realize, you cannot do nation-building by committee, especially in Iraq. It will require a firm hand from the top. Or, to put it another way, maybe you can do it by committee in tiny Bosnia and Kosovo, but not in Iraq. Given the problems we had with France at the U.N., I cannot imagine trying to nation-build in Iraq with them. All the factions inside would try to play off the different big powers. Yet, I still hope that the U.N. can be brought in to legitimate such a nation-building project afterwards and help to fund it. I still think that would be useful. But not to run it. This is a dilemma. I don’t know how this gets finessed. My hope is that this rebuilding task, to the extent that it is multilateralized, will be handed over to NATO — which we lead, is serious, and at the sametime has a broader legitimacy. Maybe U.N. approval and NATO forces? I don’t know. I guess it will depend on how the war goes.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. (No need to print them if you don’t want. I have my own column!) I just wanted to take this argument to its conclusion, as it was helping to illuminate my own feelings. Allbest. Tom

Many of Tom’s points are well taken. I wanted the U.N. route to work, of course, and argued for it since last August. But there’s a difference between de facto legitimacy and real legitimacy. I suppose the Arab “street” might feel better if our troops were backed by French platitudes, but I don’t want to give either entity – in Ramallah or Paris – more than minimal legitimacy. And the good faith of Paris cannot simply be left aside. If you believe, as I do, that Paris’s prime foreign policy aim is the weakening of the United States and the collapse of the Blair government, then it seems hard to figure out how they could ever be brought along. But Tom and I are in agreement about the post-war scenario. I see no problem with a U.N. presence in post-war Iraq. But the U.S. or U.K. must have operational authority for a while; and cutting France out of any economic deals with Iraq is essential. If we don’t let Paris know that there is a price to be paid for their hostility, then they will never learn. How we square this circle is going to be hard. U.S./U.K. military authority and U.N. humanitarian aid?

The setbacks the allies have suffered these last couple of days are all due to one thing: some Saddam units acting as terrorists. By pretending to surrender and then opening fire, by relocating in civilian neighborhoods, by shooting prisoners of war in the head, the soldiers apparently still loyal to Saddam are not reversing the allied advance. What they’re doing is trying to inflict sufficient damage to improve their morale and increase the costs of the invasion. They want us to fire into civilian areas; they want us to panic at a few atrocities (as in Somalia); they are counting on an American unwillingness to persevere through serious casualties. And they intend to use the Arab media and their Western sympathizers, i.e. the BBC, NYT, NPR etc., to get this message out. The lesson to learn is that we have cornered the equivalent of a rabid dog. It will fight nastily, brutally and with no compunction. Those units who will go down with this regime will not go down easily. After an initial hope that this thing could be over swiftly, I think it’s obvious by now that we’re in for a nasty fight – and the Saddamite remnants will ally with the anti-war media to fight dirty and spin shamelessly.

THE TACTICS FOR SUCCESS: But at the most important level, these remnants are also surely wrong. It’s still an astonishing fact that in a few days, allied troops are approaching Baghdad, much of the Saddamite government infrastructure in Baghdad has been pulverized, Saddam himself is severely wounded, and the momentum is clear. How seriously should we then take the reports of guerrilla-type rearguard actions? I’m not a military expert. Here’s one from the Washington Post this morning:

Military experts predicted that the resistance in the south was so disorganized and relatively small-scale that it would die out quickly. “Nothing surprising,” said retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, who has played the role of the Iraqi commander in several U.S. military war games of an invasion. In those games, played to probe U.S. war plans for weaknesses, he said, “We came up with much worse.” He noted that the Iraqi attacks were sporadic and small in nature, temporarily stopping small U.S. units but hardly affecting the broad advance toward Baghdad. Getting to the capital quickly is a key U.S. objective.

The question, to my mind, is who these resisters really are. Senior Saddamites who know they could get killed when power shifts? Islamist terrorists? Opportunists? Regular soldiers? It’s extremely hard to tell; and it certainly helps reveal the difficulties ahead for governing a country where such units can melt away into residential neighborhoods. But if the government itself changes, wouldn’t the incentives for resistance shift as well? I guess we’ll know in a few days, when the battles for Basra and Baghdad get fully under way.

WHOSE WAR? I nominate a few architects: the U.N., Bill Clinton, and a few others.

NO: I didn’t watch the Oscars. I loathe those people for the most part, but I’m glad to hear that some of them actually booed Michael Moore. For relief, I watched “Billy Madison.”

A huge chemical weapons plant uncovered by U.S. troops, according to Sky News. We’ll see. My favorite line in this piece, though, is the following: “UN weapons inspectors said they are not aware of any large-scale chemical sites which could be used to make chemical weapons in Najaf.” Imagine that.

TOM FRIEDMAN REPLIES: I got hot and bothered by Friedman’s column yesterday where he invoked the word “unilateral” to describe the war against Saddam. Here’s his defense:

Woh — calm down!! I was not even thinking about the word all that much, even if I used it three times. I was thinking about the perception in France and what is so shocking to them. It is definitely perceived as the U.S., at the end of the day, acting on its own will to launch a major war half a world away. I realize we have Mongolia with us, not to mention Great Britain, and I am glad we do. But this was driven by the unilateral will of the U.S. – as Max Boot points out in his useful piece in the Post today. The most important point, for me, is that this unilateral action will find real multilateral support provided we build something decent in Iraq, which for me is the whole focus. Quite seriously, I don’t understand the sensitivity of conservatives on this issue. It seems to me that conservatives want it both ways. They want to praise Bush for deciding not to be shackled by the U.N. and France in the end, and, at the sametime, want to insist that this is still a multilateral war. This is OUR war, along with England, (maybe I should have said bilateral) and, now that it’s on, I’m glad it is. Judging from what I heard in Paris and Brussels, I am not sure I would bring this back to the U.N. The war must legitimate itself and it can, depending on what we build in Iraq. I think that task is so serious, I am not sure I want to see it shared with anyone, particularly France. I would like the U.N. to help pay for it, though, so I see a dilemma coming. Anyway, thanks for the “generally good!”

Fair enough. But I would also say this about the multilateral left. If you’re so keen on allies, it would behoove you not to ignore and insult the ones we have, while pining for those we could never get. That doesn’t usually apply to Friedman. Despite some disagreement, he’s clearly a good guy in this war.

Unmissable. Good bit:

Sunday, 8 PM Beeb. Top of the hour roundup. Keep in mind that the key stories in America have been the POW tapes, last night’s televised battle, the rapid advance, and the Muslim member of the 101st who rolled grenades into an officers’ tent. Foxis reporting a chemical factory has been discovered, and two bridges over the Euphrates have been secured.
Overview at the top of the ahhr: Heaviest fighting of the woh, and the Arab world is rallying to Iraqi cause. (The audio backing up the latter assertion is from the Iraqi foreign minister. Surely I misheard this; surely they said that “Iraqis insist that the Arab world is rallying.” I must have suffered Temporary Yank-Centric Deafness, but maybe not; the Beeb runs more Iraqi responses than any other network. While driving around on Saturday, the Beeb ran a clip from a Brit spokesman describing a battle, then ran the Iraqi blabberjaw insisting that Iraqi forces were still engaged in battle, killing the enemy, and that the Loser Zionist Rumsfeld tongue should be accursed and struck with shoes, and we should all hope that monkeys defecate in his moustache, etc. Then came a guest from Warshington, and the presenter said “so who should we believe, then?” A charitable listener would ascribe the brief, stunned pause that followed to the natural lapse in transatlantic communications.)

Or maybe not. Then there’s this:

Fourth: Oscars story. And here is the most beautiful moment of this grim day. The announcer flubs a word, and in doing so she birthed a term of surpassing perfection. She was talking about the Holeywud ectors, their deseyah not to seem out of sync with the mood of the times. Two words must have appeared in her brain simultaneously: frivolity and privileged. And so she said of the actors who declined to appear: “They fear the ceremony will appear friviledge.” Was there ever there was a better description of the lives of the Oscar celebrants, and our betters in the entertainment world? Friviledge.

Love it.

THE BBC VERSUS THE UNITED STATES: Just a smattering of emails from people shocked to hear the BBC for the first time:

I’ve watched BBC coverage from time to time in recent years (I live in New York), but have had occasion to watch it with some regularity this week as the war has begun. I know that the Beeb has been a favorite target of yours and I now understand why. While the coverage itself was informative, if somewhat tilted, what truly shocked me was a fellow named Alan George, who was trotted out as a military analyst. If they could have hired a commentator more contemptuous of the coalition’s aims, it’s hard to imagine how. This morning his remarks nearly rocked me out of bed when he suggested that the Iraqi Information Ministry’s credibility compared favorably to Washington’s and London’s.

No surprise here. Then there’s this:

I am an Emmy award-winning, documentary film producer with 30-plus years of experience on five continents. For the last two years I have been working in Europe and stuck in a hotel that has as its only English-language TV channel, BBC World. Fortunately, I have access via the Web to a far wider understanding of what’s going on in the world. I am more than appalled over BBC’s blatant and incessant propaganda; I am deeply concerned to the point of perhaps being, well, frightened. The BBC is clearly and unambiguously the most corrupt and dangerous English-language media force in the world today … Just one slice of the destruction: BBC’s propagandizing effect of fueling wider European anti-Americanism. There’s a whole lot of folks here on the Continent that think the BBC is the voice of great mid-Atlantic (read “objective, middle ground”) insight into what Americans are all about. Most people here are not so much aware that, yes, Americans and the BBC speak the same language, but that’s as far as it goes. So the propaganda, BBC propaganda, is parroted, and it spreads.

Then the latest obscenity came with the capture and shooting in the head of American POWs:

Watching BBC World Service when this remarkable utterance was made in respect of the captured US soldiers – “In a war where public opinion is as important as what happens on the field of battle today saw a true public relations disaster.” Initially I agreed – openly parading your barabarism should clarify for everyone the nature of the Baathist regime – but it rapidly became evident that in the inverted moral universe of the BBC the public relations disaster they referred to was one that affected the Coalition and the US only – it was a PR disaster that these prisoners had been captured. That some of them had been obviously executed in cold blood and the rest were being put through a course in which the Iraqi intended to break every other Geneva convention with just this small group was not something that would reflect badly on the Iraqi’s – and anyway the Iraqi disinformation minister had said that they were being treated well.

It is important to remember, I think, that the war isn’t just between the West and Saddam. There’s also a political and ideological war within the West. The anti-war crowd have lost the argument about going to war; so they are determined to win the case during and after it. They want this war to be regarded as a disaster. And it’s up to the rest of us to fight back, expose them, and keep people focused on reality, not pro-Saddam and anti-Western spin. I need your help in this, so keep those press clips coming. Blogs are another weapon. We should use them.