Month: January 2007

"Even as [Bush’s] entire presidency has tanked, he shows no signs of acquiring psychological complexities. He remains the ‘simple,’ ‘resolute’ man that his hagiographers once venerated. If you put Bush on the couch, I’m afraid he’d still take a nap," – Frank Foer, in New York magazine.

Intellectual honesty from the neoconservatives:

"This is not our plan. The White House is not briefing our plan."

(Hat tip: Isaac.)

Mohammed at Iraq The Model sees evidence of Sunni insurgents decamping to Syria to sit out "Plus Up." A good sign? An ominous sign? We’ll see. If the surge works in the short term because its targets have simply gone into hiding, could that provide a window for Maliki to gain traction? Or does it simply mean postponing the battle until U.S. forces have withdrawn? Are U.S. forces going to achieve some success against Sunni insurgents before handing over the rest of the job to the Shiite government? I have no idea. Plus Up begins in earnest in a week.

Not the National Review summit – but one account of the reported clash in Najaf between one murky force and another. Juan Cole offers a helpful primer on the various interpretations of the various reports. Money quote:

It seems most likely that this was Shiite on Shiite violence, with millenarian cultists making an attempt to march on Najaf during the chaos of the ritual season of Muharram. But who knows? It is also possible that the orthodox Shiites in control of Najaf hate the heretic millenarians and the threat of the latter was exaggerated. Darned if I know. The reports of the Army of Heaven being so well armed make no sense if it was a ragtag millenarian band. But those reports could be exaggerations, too.

From the reports I’ve read, it looks most likely this was a whack-job Shiite sect, aiming at the Shiite leadership during Ashura. Quite how fissiparous the Shiite forces are in Southern Iraq remains an open question.

(Photo: preparing for Ashura/Getty Images.)

A reader replies:

I am on the side of the US (what will best serve the interests of my country) and on the side of freedom (which I think will best serve the interests of everyone). As for the sides in Iraq, I first and foremost think we in the West have a debt to the Kurds. They expected a state in 1919 and got the shaft (mostly because the British wanted the oil fields in northern Iraq to remain in Iraq). In  other days, they looked to the West for support against anti-Western governments in Syria and Iraq and got nothing but grief and chemical attacks.  These days they seem more interested in making money and rebuilding their country than killing each other, so I think we should encourage that.

Secondly, I also feel sympathy for the Shia. In the post World War I era, the British did not get the Shia involved in the new Iraqi government, and gave the kingdom to Faisal partly because he was seen as reliable and partly in order to  defuse a potentially explosive problem in French Syria. But even under Turkish rule, the Shia were kept down, as the Turks saw the Shia as threats – politically due to the influence of the Persian Shia leadership (sound familiar?) and religiously as the Sunnis see the Shia as not being real Muslims (sound more familiar?).

We will see if the "surge" is the solution.

We will. But this reader’s response is helpful. The dumb way in which the president continues to portray this war – freedom versus totalitarianism – obscures the actual choices we have to make. Will siding with one faction in a Muslim civil war make us safer or less safe? If we have to pick one faction, which one? Is our ultimate objective keeping Kurdistan free – or maintaining the unity of Iraq? How feasible is it to support an Iran-backed government while attacking Iran’s agents? Once you start unpacking the decisions, you realize how crude and unhelpful the president’s formulations are. He doesn’t even know which war he’s fighting, let alone how to win it.

The linguistic architect of Gingrich-conservatism quits D.C.

We’ve had the technology for forty years. Only now are we exploiting its full potential:

Video in 2007 is not the exclusive medium of technicians or specialists or journalists or artists–it is the peoples’ medium. The potential of video as a decentralized communications tool for the masses has been realized, and the twenty-first century will be remembered as the video age.

Surveillance and counter-surveillance aside, video is the vernacular form of the era–it is the common and everyday way that people communicate. Video is the way people place themselves at events and describe what happened. In existential terms, video has become everyperson’s POV (point of view). It is an instrument for framing existence and identity. There are currently camcorders in twenty per cent of households in North America.

As digital still cameras and camera-phones are engineered to shoot better video, video will become completely ubiquitous. People have stories to tell, and images and sounds to capture in video. Television journalism is far too narrow in its perspective. We desperately need more POVs.

Webcams and video-phones, video-blogs (VLOGS) and video-podcasting will fuel a twenty-first-century tidal wave of vernacular video.

More here. (Hat tip: Jesse.)

A take on Senator Clinton’s joke – and resilient paranoia.

The president almost didn’t bother.

"They kidnap 10 Sunnis, they get ransom on five, and kill them all, in each big kidnap operation they make at least $50,000, it’s the best business in Baghdad," – a Shia man close to the Mahdi Army, in the Guardian.

Of course, it’s actually quite hopeful to think that the sectarian murders and kidnapping are motivated in part by financial gain. Better than religious zeal – because it can be bought off. But the enmeshment of the police and the militias in Baghdad is now complete. Their interaction with the Iraqi "national" army is routine but not universal. From a Mahdi Army warrior:

"We have specific units that we work with where members of the Mahdi Army are in command. We conduct operations together. We can’t ask any army unit to come with us, we just ask the units that are under the control of our men. The police are all under our control, we ask them to help or inform them that shooting will take place in a street and it involves the Mahdi Army, and that’s it."

(Photo: Mohammed Sawaf/AFP/Getty.)