The Dish

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.

Am I the only one to be a little taken aback by the tone of David Sanger’s piece this morning on the president? I guess it’s a “notebook”-style piece and some wry comments are merited. But the unremitting loathing of the president in the prose, the sneers at anything he might say, the contempt for him that oozes out of every sentence: is this supposed to give us confidence that the worst of the Raines era is now over?

It’s worth recalling that the suspect BBC journalist in the David Kelly tragedy has a record. Yep, it was Gilligan who refused to believe that U.S. troops had reached Baghdad the day they did. His deep hostility to the war against Saddam has been his motivating force as a reporter since the conflict began. Here’s a link to a story explaining his role that day:

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.

What are the odds that this guy hyped the modest criticisms made by David Kelly in order to wound the Blair government? The BBC, it seems to me, broadcast something they knew to be untrue for political purposes. I have one suggestion: believe not a word the BBC is reporting on Iraq right now. They cannot be trusted. They want the liberation of Iraq to fail.

Readers of this blog will not be surprised to find that the tragedy of British scientist David Kelly’s death may well be linked to the corrupt journalism of the BBC. It was clear to anyone with eyes and ears that at some point in this past year, the BBC decided to launch a propaganda campaign against the war against Saddam and to tarnish, if not bring down, the premiership of Tony Blair. When news organizations turn into political parties – as we saw with Howell Raines’ New York Times – it’s only a matter of time before they over-reach. May 29 was such a moment. On that day, the BBC produced a story claiming that a “senior intelligence official” had told them that the Blair government, in the person of Alastair Campbell, had “sexed up” its dossier on Iraqi WMDs against the wishes of the intelligence services. One central claim was the notion that Saddam could launch WMDs within 45 minutes. We learned yesterday that David Kelly was indeed the source of such a claim. But Kelly denied that he had made such broad claims when he was alive; he was never a “senior intelligence source,” but a mere, if excellent, scientist; and it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the BBC reporter, Andrew Gilligan, sexed up his own story in order to further the BBC’s campaign against the Iraq war. Kelly’s member of parliament, Robert Jackson, has drawn the obvious conclusion:

“I think the fact of the matter is that Gilligan, under pressure from his news colleagues for a scoop, for an exclusive story, under pressure from the wider BBC establishment and its general vendetta against the government on the question of the war against Iraq, I believe he sexed up the whole story and this created the situation that led to the death of my constituent.”

That’s a very serious charge, and we may not yet know every detail of this story. It is certainly not to the credit of the Blair government that, when Kelly told his superiors of his contact with the BBC, they pushed Kelly into the limelight in their defense. But they are still not ultimately responsible for this tragedy. Kelly deserved to have his views accurately represented by the BBC, rather than hyped in a way that made him the center of a grueling public storm. That very hype destroyed his privacy and led this very private man to despair. Someone at the BBC must be held accountable. And resign.

My defense of Lawrence vs Texas, in response to Jeffrey Rosen’s article in the New Republic, is now posted.

MARRIAGE AND PROCREATION: One of the lamest arguments against same-sex marriage is that it violates the principle that marriage is for procreation. Tell that to Pat Buchanan, who has no kids, or to the hundreds of thousands of childless couples who consider themselves rightly married. But there’s even a statute in Arizona, a legal scholar/friend of mine notes, that takes this discrepancy further. It grants marriages on the grounds that at least one of the parties is infertile. Here’s the statute (the cite is A.R.S. Section 25-101):

Void and prohibited marriages
A. Marriage between parents and children, including grandparents and grandchildren of every degree, between brothers and sisters of the one-half as well as the whole blood, and between uncles and nieces, aunts and nephews and between first cousins, is prohibited and void.
B. Notwithstanding subsection A, first cousins may marry if both are sixty-five years of age or older or if one or both first cousins are under sixty-five years of age, upon approval of any superior court judge in the state if proof has been presented to the judge that one of the cousins is unable to reproduce.
C. Marriage between persons of the same sex is void and prohibited.

Note how same-sex marriages are prohibited but explicitly non-procreative near-incestuous marriages are not. A similar discrepancy occurs in the Catholic Church, which allows marriages between the infertile or the post-menopausal but denies such marriages to gay people partly on the grounds of thier inability to reproduce. When John Kerry invokes reproduction, he needs to address this argument. So do all who agree with him.

It’s tough being an intellectual, journalist, or even pollster when you live in a place that’s run by a bunch of thugs. Dan Drezner has a round-up of how the Palestinian Authority and its compliant mobs keep free thinking at the end of a gun.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “[P]eople should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into… [Marriage] is regulated by the states. I think different states are likely to come to different conclusions, and that’s appropriate. I don’t think there should necessarily be a federal policy in this area.” – vice president, Dick Cheney, in the 2000 Vice-Presidential debate. A pretty convincing stand against the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, I’d say.

Here’s a useful webpage on the gruesome practice. Here’s another. Most scholars seem to think that victims were commonly tied to crosses; and that if they were nailed, they were nailed through the wrists, not the hands. Another reader says the jury is still out:

I have followed the debate over the nail entry points with some interest.
There are two schools of thought – each with some archeological support. The first is that the nails would have had to enter the wrists and ankles to support the weight of the victim. The newer theory holds that indeed the hands and feet were entry points, but that wooden washers made from the cut trunk of young trees were used for additional support.
I don’t think there is a consensus.

Interesting. The trailer also shows that rope was used – which may make nails in the palms more plausible. Then there’s this:

You should also note the apparent inaccuracy of showing Our Lord carrying a complete cross, i.e., with the horizontal beam affixed to the vertical beam.- As far as I know, this is not how it was done.- Victims had the horizontal beam tied across their shoulders (as depicted in the 1977 mini-series “Jesus of Nazareth,”-a very Catholic depiction of Our Lord)-which they would then carry some 600 yards to Calvary.–After having the wrists nailed to the beam, they would be lifted by means of ropes through over a scaffolding that was permanently planted into the hill for the purpose of crucifixions.- Once the horizontal beam was dropped into a slot, one foot (or one heel) was placed over the other, with a single nail driven through.- Constructing-complete crosses for victims would seem to be more expensive, inefficient and clumsy.
I suggest we keep an open mind as to why Gibson is depicting the Passion with these traditional yet apparently unhistorical details.- It would seem that a traditional Catholic should have no fear of depicting things accurately, even if they conflict with traditional (small “T”) artistic interpretations.- But I’ll be waiting for an explanation.

I doubt we’ll get one. I also noticed that the Latin pronunciation is more Catholic 14th Century than Roman First Century. If my own years of Latin lessons hold up, the Romans pronounced, “Ecce Homo” “Ekke Homo” not “Eche Homo.” Oh well. I’ll wait for the movie.
UPDATE: Josh Claybourn has more details.