Archive for March, 2003

RALPH PETERS WRITES:

On one level, Arabs know that Saddam Hussein is a monster. They know he has killed more Arabs than Israel ever could do. Saddam has been the worst thing to happen to Mesopotamia since the Mongols razed Baghdad. But Arabs are so jealous and discouraged that they need to inflate even Saddam into a hero. They have no one else.

Try to understand how broken the Arab world must be, how pitiful, if the celebrated Arab “triumph” of this war is the execution of prisoners in cold blood and the display of a few POWs on TV.

We would be foolish to descend to their level and gloat. The world would be better off were Arab civilization a success. We all should pray that the Arab world might, one day, be better governed and more equitable, that Arab peoples might join us in the march of human progress, instead of fleeing into reveries of bygone glories.

Indeed. Read the whole thing, to see why Iraq matters.

WARBLOGFOGVERGNUGEN: Suman Palit has coined the term.

MAX BOOT WRITES ON THE NEW AMERICAN WAY OF WAR:

Watching images of the bombing of Baghdad brought to mind another American bombing campaign 58 years ago. On March 9, 1945, more than 300 B-29 Superfortresses attacked Tokyo. Their napalm bombs and magnesium incendiaries turned 16 densely packed square miles into an inferno. An estimated 84,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed, making this one of the deadliest days of warfare ever.

The enormity of the destruction is almost impossible to comprehend today, because the American armed forces fight so differently now. The new way of war emphasizes precision and aims for minimal casualties on both sides. This approach represents a considerable advance, but it also brings its own set of problems.

Although air strikes on Baghdad have intensified, leading to what Iraqi officials claim are more than 70 civilian casualties, the city is hardly being pounded into rubble. Electricity and other services remain. In the war’s early days, Baghdad residents even stood on their balconies to watch bombs and missiles pummel their city — secure in the knowledge that only a handful of government buildings would be hit.

This is a bit reminiscent of the first Battle of Bull Run in 1861, which drew as spectators the crème de la crème of Washington society. It is almost as if the United States has left behind the total war of the 20th century and returned to an earlier time of more limited combat, when columns of professional soldiers marched toward each other across open fields and civilians were hurt only by accident.

Boot’s not entirely sure that this is a good idea.

SARS UPDATE: U.N. politics may be trumping health concerns in the region:

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) When a deadly flu-like virus began spreading through Asia earlier this month, a group of Taiwanese doctors sent an e-mail to the World Health Organization asking for help in investigating the mysterious bug.

No one responded. No investigators from the U.N. agency visited. . . .

WHO is apparently waiting for permission from the People’s Republic of China. Odd.

REMEMBER NORTH KOREA? Looks like some pressure is being brought to bear:

BEIJING – For three straight days in recent weeks, something remarkable happened to the oil pipeline running through northeast China to North Korea – the oil stopped flowing, according to diplomatic sources, temporarily cutting off a vital lifeline for North Korea.

The pipeline shutdown, officially ascribed to a technical problem, followed an unusually blunt message delivered by China to its longtime ally in a high-level meeting in Beijing last month, the sources said. Stop your provocations about the possible development of nuclear weapons, China warned its neighbor, or face Chinese support for economic sanctions against the regime.

Such tough tactics show an unexpected resolve in Beijing’s policy toward Pyongyang, and hint at the nervousness of Chinese leaders about North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and North Korea’s tensions with the United States.

With the Bush administration asking China to take a more active role, Beijing’s application of pressure could convince North Korea to drop its demands for talks exclusively with the United States – a demand that Washington rejects. . . .

“We can’t afford to shield North Korea any longer,” Zhu Feng, an international security expert at Beijing University, said in an interview last month. “There is increasing recognition here if North Korea is finally armed with nuclear weapons, it will be a big threat to China.”

Very interesting. And what surprises me is how long it’s taken the Chinese to realize that nobody, but nobody wants a regime as kooky as North Korea’s on their border, armed with nuclear weapons. Read the whole story, which is chock-full of interesting stuff.

UPDATE: How kooky? This kooky:

ALL triplets in North Korea are being forcibly removed from parents after their birth and dumped in bleak orphanages.

The policy is carried out on the orders of Stalinist dictator Kim Jong-il, who has an irrational belief that a triplet could one day topple his regime.

Sheesh. If I were the Chinese, I’d be worried, too.

THE NATIONAL GUARDSMAN WHO CHANGED HIS NAME TO “OPTIMUS PRIME” now has a weblog. This seems to me to be a moment of deep cultural significance.

MICKEY KAUS is asking a lot of questions about strategy that are also being asked by others. I don’t know the answer to these questions, and I’ve refrained from this kind of speculation because I think it’s largely meaningless in the absence, of, you know, actual facts. But his post offers a nice central repository of the “what’s Rumsfeld’s hurry?” school of thought.

Kaus also asks:

But I’m still skeptical about the Iraqi claims that two U.S. missiles have now struck crowded marketplaces and killed dozens. Why do these errant missiles always fall in crowded marketplaces and kill dozens? Why don’t they ever fall in back alleys and kill one or two people?

The answer appears to be that they’re errant Iraqi SAMS rather than errant U.S. missiles. A reader adds:

For the last few days, I’ve been wondering how come Bob Fisk hasn’t been jumping up and down waving bits of metal with “Raytheon” printed on it. Surely the Iraqis have enough of the stuff lying about the place by now…

Heard Iraqi caller to BBC phone-in yesterday (not some sort of coalition media shill, his English was lousy and he didn’t “project” as the saying goes); he said that from calls to Baghdad, the locals all believe that the Saddam regime is behind these attacks.

Interesting.

UPDATE: Well, ask and you shall receive. Fisk is jumping up and down, and may even be right, sort of — though if it’s American it’s a HARM missile that was probably fired at an Iraqi mobile radar placed in the market area. Tim Blair has more.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Tim Blair has even more here.

JIM TREACHER HAS SO MANY FUNNY POSTS that I can’t figure out which one to link to. So just go read ’em all.

SEVEN HABITS OF HIGHLY EFFECTIVE BLOGGERS. You kind of want to make fun of a series like this, but it’s actually good.

REVERSE-ASYMMETRICAL WARFARE: Edward Boyd has a suggestion.

MARK STEYN WRITES:

After little more than a week, is this war coverage in trouble? Already questions are being raised about whether the media’s plan was fatally flawed. Several analysts are surprised that, despite overwhelming dominance of the air, television and radio divisions have so quickly repeated the mistakes of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, on the ground, rapidly advancing columns become stalled in Vietnam-style quagmires around the second paragraph.

He has a lot of eminent retired military guys critiquing the journalists’ strategy, too.

JUDICIAL WATCH IS GOING AFTER CHIRAC: You can read the complaint here. Here’s an article summarizing things.

WHY OIL IS BAD for national economies, and democracy.

AZIZ POONAWALLA has some interesting observations regarding asymmetric warfare. In a not-unrelated note, Fred Kaplan says the war is vindicating Van Riper. I think it’s a bit early to say that, but the piece is worth reading.

Meanwhile, this story says that Saddam has sacked his air-defense commander for doing more damage to Baghdad than the allies have. The usual skepticism toward, well, everything is appropriate here, of course, but it’s interesting.

(Via Tacitus).

AN EDITOR OF THE COLUMBIA POLITICAL REVIEW, which has an interesting group blog that I don’t think I’ve seen before, is distancing himself from Prof. Nicholas De Genova’s remark that he’d like to see the United States lose in Iraq to the tune of a “million Mogadishus.” What’s interesting, though, is that the real anger is reserved for Nader supporters.

This post from the same blog, however, betrays muddled thinking, or at least writing:

It’s amazing to me how quickly conservatives forget the first amendment when attacking their ideological opponents but cling to it staunchly whenever a conservative academic makes remarks that draw criticism. DeGenova may not be an enlightened political thinker (his comments were both ridiculously inflammatory and uninformed, and are worthy of much criticism), but the day Columbia starts making hiring and firing decisions based on a person’s politics is not a day we should look forward to.

“The First Amendment” is not actually a synonym for “free speech,” which is what the writer here presumably actually means. Not being the government, Columbia isn’t directly bound by the First Amendment. But principles of free speech should bar firing De Genova — though as someone else commented, it’s doubtful that Columbia would be as enthusiastic about De Genova’s free speech rights if he had called for “a million Matthew Shepards.”

And as for the part about dreading the day when politics start affecting Columbia’s hiring and firing decisions, well, the most charitable thing I can say is that it reveals a charming naivete.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Actually, Columbia’s President is wrong. Columbia U. does not protect free speech. They have a draconian hate speech code that prohibits hate speech on campus. So it seems that by their own rules, they SHOULD fire De Genova for what he SAID (just as they could legally punish anyone who called for a million matthew sheperds). I’d love it if someone put this question to Bollinger.

Interesting. I’m not very familiar with Columbia’s speech code. Neither, I’d bet, is Columbia’s President, Lee Bollinger, who is a pro-free-speech guy, generally.

THOUSANDS OF CANADIANS SHOWED UP at a pro-America rally in Ottawa. Follow the link for a story and pictures.

NELSON ASCHER WRITES:

I don’t know how the antiwar Europeans will react to Anglo-American-Australian victory, but one thing is sure: they won’t identify with it and from this to a feeling of also having been defeated is just a small step. Their sense of impotence after so many protests might be overwhelming. I wouldn’t be too surprised at seeing the Western European psyche beginning [to] resemble, in many significant ways, the Arab one.

Worrisomely plausible: the same mix of entitlement, infatuation with an imagined grand history, and impotent fecklessness in the present. It fits well with this column by Steven Glover in which we learn:

A friend of mine said to me the other day that he hoped lots of Americans were killed because the United States would be brought down a peg or two. I suspect there are many people, otherwise decent and enlightened, who would like this war to be prolonged and bloody. They may even in a twisted sort of way want lots of Iraqi civilians to be killed because their deaths will vindicate the anti-war arguments. If we did not care about our reputations, if we did not in our silly, selfish way wish always to be shown to be right, we would all ardently hope for the war to be ended as soon as possible with as few deaths as possible, and with Saddam Hussein safely under lock and key. This is, in truth, what every person and every journalist should wish for, whatever their opinions on the war. But I am not sure it is what the Daily Mirror or John Pilger or the (admittedly brilliant) Robert Fisk of the Independent wants. One feels that, whatever happens, they and their sometimes less openly anti-war colleagues in the media will continue to say that the war is not going as well as the allies expected, and they will declare a successful outcome to be deeply unsatisfactory. The war will go on in the newspaper columns and on the airwaves long after the last shot has been fired, as journalists fight to show that they were right.

As Iain Murray comments: “It is saddening to think that these people probably think they are behaving ‘ethically’. They aren’t, and this needs to be pointed out time and time again.”

Indeed it does. Even in Tennessee.

DOESN’T THIS MEAN THAT THE UNITED STATES CAN TARGET ARAFAT NOW?

Hundreds of Palestinians living in Lebanon have been sent to Iraq to carry out suicide attacks against American and British soldiers.

Colonel Munir Maqdah, one of the top commanders of the Fatah movement in Lebanon, said his men were already in Baghdad, prepared to launch suicide attacks. Another group of Fatah suicide bombers are due in Iraq shortly, he added.

He just took the other (losing) side in this war, I think. What, do they use lead pipes on the West Bank?

GUESS WHERE THIS APPEARED:

Contrasting British servicemen and women with the appeasers, it is hard not to laugh. Are these two sides even the same species, let alone the same nationality? On one hand the selflessness and internationalism of the soldiers; on the other the Whites-First isolationism of the protesters. Excuse me, who are the idealists here? And is it a total coincidence that those stars most prominent in the anti-war movement are the most notoriously “difficult”and vain – Streisand, Albarn, Michael, Madonna, Sean Penn? And Robin Cook! Why might anyone believe world peace can be secured by this motley bunch?

Anti-war nuts suffer from the usual mixture of egotism and self-loathing that often characterises recreational depression – an unholy alliance of Oprahism and Meldrewism in which you think you’re scum, but also that you’re terribly important, too. For instance, what about the loony who offered to be crucified on live TV if George Bush promised not to invade Iraq? “Send your troops home and take me,” she wrote to the White House, adding later, “I don’t want to appear as some nutter.” Similarly, there are the human shields – now limping homewards after being shocked to discover, bless ’em, that Saddam wanted to stick them in front of military installations as opposed to the hospitals and petting zoos that they’d fondly imagined they were going to defend.

Follow the link. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you anyway. Why, it’s almost something you might read here.