Month: January 2007

A reader comments about this post:

Somewhere out there Stephen Colbert is kicking himself that he didn’t think of this first.

R.W. Johnson surveys the human wreckage of Robert Mugabe’s dictatorship. Money quote:

Suffer the little children is a phrase never far from your mind in today’s Zimbabwe. The horde of painfully thin street children milling around you at traffic lights is almost the least of it: in a population now down to 11m or less there are an estimated 1.3m orphans.

Go to one of the overflowing cemeteries in Bulawayo or Beit Bridge and you are struck by the long lines of tiny graves for babies and toddlers.

A game ranger friend tells me that hyena attacks on humans, previously unheard of, have become increasingly common. “So many babies, not all of them dead, are being dumped in the bush that hyenas have developed a taste for human flesh,” he explains.

A split within the CIA has emerged over the policy of sending terror suspects abroad to be tortured and interrogated. It’s important to remember that many, many people in the CIA and the military do not support the brutalist policies of Bush. And they’re fighting back.

It seems to have emerged from the chaos. This one doesn’t show the actual hanging, but shows the body afterward and detail of what the rope did to Saddam’s neck. It’s gruesome, so don’t look if you’re squeamish. But here’s the link.

Jon Chait cleans up his act.

Just when you thought Sean Hannity could not descend further into fascistic diatribes, he unveils a new Sunday show feature: "Enemy of the State." No word on whether Hannity will be requiring two minutes’ hate to accompany it. A reader adds:

Wow. It makes me wonder if Hannity has anything above a 4th-grade level education when it comes to the history of totalitarian movements. Seriously, "Enemy of the State"? Who doesn’t immediately associate that phrase with Communism or Nazism?

I guess the best I can say is that at least Hannity doesn’t have the authority to send the secret police to arrest the weekly "Enemy of the State", but it does show you the mindset behind most of the far-right’s media thugs.

The far-right blogosphere cops to yet another fact-free smear.

The Vatican comes around – over a century after the great Irishman’s death.

Here’s a tough quote from Joe Biden:

"I have reached the tentative conclusion that a significant portion of this administration, maybe even including the vice president, believes Iraq is lost. They have no answer to deal with how badly they have screwed it up. I am not being facetious now. Therefore, the best thing to do is keep it from totally collapsing on your watch and hand it off to the next guy — literally, not figuratively."

This is, of course, a central feature – again! – of the decision we have to make on Iraq. Is this president proposing something that he genuinely believes will work? Or is this political cover until he is out of office? Can we, in other words, trust him? 

I’m sure some advocates of a two-year permanent surge with sufficient troops to make it work are completely sincere. Their position is respectable, if somewhat unpersuasive. Their laudable goal now is simply to prevent a completely failed state in the Middle East. I’m not so sure, however, about the president’s motives. I don’t believe he’s ever been serious about the war in Iraq – because he has never committed sufficient resources to match his rhetoric, and took his eye off the ball in the critical period in 2004 and 2005. In the end, you observe what a man does, not what he says. And everything Bush has actually done (forget the highfalutin rhetoric) is to telegraph a clear message: Iraq is not that big a deal; my ego comes before candor; as president, I can do what I want anyway. We will soon be faced with an excruciating choice between what looks like another half-measure and trying to make the best of a swift exit via Kurdistan. Under both scenarios, we will have the current president, who is obviously incapable of the kind of deft diplomacy and military focus that we desperately need in either case.

The choice, then, is pretty simple. Should we give the president another chance: six months, say, and see where we are? At least then we will not have to endure the taunts from those who’ll declare the Democrats lost the Iraq war, or the predictable stab-in-the-back chorus (take it away, Sean Hannity!) At the same time, isn’t it basically immoral to send young Americans to die for a piece of political cover that no one seriously believes can work? Isn’t it immoral to ask young Americans to perish in brutal street-fighting so that we won’t have to endure the crowing of the stab-in-the-back right?

It now looks possible that we could have an even worse mess: the president will declare a surge, and the Democrats will refuse to pay for it, while continuing to fund the troops already enmeshed in a failed policy. Gridlock in Iraq; gridlock in Washington. The worst of all worlds. I guess we’ll have to listen carefully to the president this week, and make our minds up when all the data is in.

(Photo: Jim Cole/AP.)

Scientists have been able to turn off the gay switch in adult rams. Are humans next? My thoughts on the intersection of science and morality in the Sunday Times.

(Photo: a Romney Marsh ram of undetermined sexual orientation.)