ABSOLUTELY MY LAST POST FOR A WHILE ON AGING: Over at GlennReynolds.com.
Archive for June, 2004
June 30, 2004
PEACE THROUGH S.U.V.’s: Well, it’s a bold approach. . .
ALLAWI 1, BROKAW 0: Why, oh, why, can’t we have decent news media?
HARDY AND CLARKE’S BOOK ON MICHAEL MOORE is now up to number three on Amazon.
BEATS ME: Reader Michael Greenspan emails:
What I find most interesting about the column by John Keegan is its contrast with Michael Rubin’s piece on NRO a few days ago. Keegan writes that “the American occupiers should not have dissolved the Iraqi army or police or civil administration, whatever the number of Ba’ath Party members they contain.” Rubin writes that “[t]he failure of the Fallujah experiment undercuts the conventional wisdom that Bremer erred with his decision to dissolve the Iraqi military.” I’ve long felt vaguely that I should have an opinion on this sort of issue, but I don’t. Plain disagreement between two smart, experienced supporters reassures me that I’m right to keep out of it. If an expert can be undeniably wrong — and either Rubin or Keegan must be — how can I possibly know what should be done?
Yes. It’s hard to know about that sort of thing — especially when, as we’ve seen, the information that we get out of Iraq is fragmentary and often unreliable. In this regard, William Safire’s column on the dangers of certitude is well worth reading. We can be certain about principles; about tactics, and even strategies, we have to make our best guess.
THIS WEEK’S Carnival of the Vanities is up. Don’t miss it.
The US and other international actors have called on Sudan to rein in the Arab “Janjaweed” militias responsible and to provide security for the displaced. This is the political equivalent of imploring the fox to guard the henhouse. The Sudanese government has been directly involved in the killings. And it has a long history of sponsoring local militias to destabilize regions of the country and, for that matter, neighboring African countries, with which it is at odds. This “outsourcing” of military operations provides the government a low-cost and plausibly deniable device for advancing its political aims. Counting on the government to ensure the security of a population it wants to exterminate is reminiscent of recent government-sponsored pogroms in Kosovo, Kurdish northern Iraq after the Gulf War, and East Timor.
The upshot: by the predatory and abusive violation of its citizens, the dictatorial government of Omar Hassan al-Bashir, like those of Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, has relinquished its claims of sovereignty in Darfur.
Read the whole thing. (Via Passion of the Present).
UPDATE: Then there’s this report:
Arab militiamen in Sudan use rape as weapon
‘We want to make a light baby,’ woman says fighter told her“They grabbed my donkey and my straw and said, ‘Black girl, you are too dark. You are like a dog. We want to make a light baby,’ ” said Sawela Suliman, 22, showing slashes from a where a whip struck her thighs as her father held up a police and health report with details of the attack. “They said, ‘You get out of this area and leave the child when it’s made.’ ” . . .
In Sudan, as in many Arab cultures, a child’s ethnicity is attached to the ethnicity of the father.
Strange that Kofi Annan is unwilling to call this genocide.
ANOTHER UPDATE: James Moore has satellite images “consistent with ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocide.”
HILLARY AS VP? I’m hearing that again, though I’m skeptical. Personally, I’d rather see her at the top of the ticket. I told you that the war on terror is my number one issue, and I think she’d be tougher than Kerry. She certainly has been so far.
UPDATE: Hmm. She’s certainly photographing well these days!
ANOTHER UPDATE: Some people are less enthusiastic than me regarding a Hillary candidacy.
WILL BAUDE writes on Scalia and Thomas, in The New Republic.
IN THE MAIL: Two interesting books. One (nicely inscribed) is Joe Trippi’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, The Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything, and the other, coincidentally, is L. Brent Bozell’s Weapons of Mass Distortion : The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media. Though there are differences (they come from — obviously — different political directions) in a way they’re talking about the same thing, which is how information gatekeepers are losing their hold, and how that’s good for democracy.
I think they’re right, and I think that trying to force the changes brought by the communications revolution into an old-fashioned left/right mode, though understandable in an election year, makes little sense. To quote from BT (who thinks the revolution will be televised):
The revolution will be fought in all forms of media
The revolution will be fought on phone lines and cable modems and cellphones
The revolution will be a war of attrition, against the great dumbing down of our people.
Attrition, indeed. I suspect that Bozell and Trippi agree on that, and — based on a quick look at the books — a lot of other things. (I can’t find this song online, but it’s on this collection that I was just listening to in the car the other day). Left/Right, Democrat/Republican — that stuff’s important (sometimes) in the short run, but the overall changes are much bigger than that.
“Let freedom reign,” wrote President Bush as Iraq regained sovereignty Monday.
“Today, the secretary-general welcomes the state of Iraq back into the family of independent and sovereign nations,” said a United Nations statement.
In the gap between those two statements, you can see the world of difference that lies between the U.S. and the U.N. in approaching the worst troubles of our time. For America, and Mr. Bush, the struggles now upon us are basically about freedom, and rule of, by and for the people. For the U.N., and Mr. Annan, it is all about paternalism, consensus, family. And I’m sorry to say that the family that springs first to mind has a lot less to do with Gramps, Grandma and the kids than with the Mafia clan of TV fiction fame, the Sopranos.
Close, but no cigar. Actually, I think it’s more like this family:
The former underboss of the Bonanno crime family yesterday detailed the murders of three capos — allegedly orchestrated by his brother-in-law and boss, Joseph Massino — that called for him and a team of masked hit men to burst from a closet in a social club, armed with of pistols and a machine gun, to carry out the slayings.
But turncoat Salvatore “Good Looking Sal” Vitale admitted his job was marginalized to simply “guarding the door” with his tommy gun after he goofed up and hit the trigger as the thugs were setting up, spraying a wall with gunfire.
Criminal, and dangerous in a way, but not terribly competent.
UPDATE: Yes, it’s the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. “Five years after international armed intervention and UN administration, Kosovo doesn’t even have an effective police force, and no one wants to speculate on its ‘final status.’ This past March, as ethnic violence flared up again and Albanians attacked Serb homes, businesses and churches (a reversal of 1999’s violence), UN ‘peacekeeping’ forces essentially stood by and allowed mobs to continue their destruction. ”
NEOCONS PLAN IRAQ INVASION BEFORE 9/11! Reader Thad McArthur points to an interesting bit from the John Keegan article I linked earlier:
The plan for Operation Iraqi Freedom began to be drawn up as early as 1995, when Saddam’s combination of deviousness and intransigence persuaded Washington that it might not be possible to avoid a military confrontation if his determination to develop and deploy weapons of mass destruction were to be quashed.
The Clinton Administration: Just another set of marionettes for the Evil Neocon Puppetmasters!
ANDREW SULLIVAN: “Sometimes you don’t need Michael Moore connecting the dots, do you?”
TOM MAGUIRE has interesting stuff. Just keep scrolling.
THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS is up. Enjoy the business- and econo-blogging from all sorts of folks.
VIRGINIA POSTREL has lots of interesting stuff, including a hot new publicity photo.
DAVID HARDY AND JASON CLARKE’S NEW BOOK ON MICHAEL MOORE is now up to #8 on Amazon.
UPDATE: Blogosphereans may be interested to know that it features chapters by Tim Blair and Andrew Sullivan.
DARFUR UPDATE: I’m not all that surprised to read this:
EL FASHER, Sudan (Reuters) – The Sudanese government has disappointed Secretary of State Colin Powell in talks on the crisis in the troubled western region of Darfur, a senior U.S. official said Wednesday.
Powell, on the second day of a visit to Sudan, arrived in Darfur Wednesday for a first-hand look at some of the million people displaced by marauding Arab militias in what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. . . .
“They are in a state of denial. They are in a state of avoidance. They are trying to obfuscate and avoid any consequences,” said the official, who asked not to be named.
More here:
Human rights campaigners accuse Sudan’s pro-government Arab militia of carrying out genocide against black African residents of the Darfur region.
They are accused of forcing some one million people from their homes and killing at least 10,000.Many thousands more are at risk of starving due to a lack of food in the camps where they have fled.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has refused to use the term genocide, which would carry a legal obligation to act.
But of course.
UPDATE: Stephen Manning emails that there’s a double standard here:
Imagine, if you will, that Sudan is actually a Catholic country and marauding Catholic militia were raiding, say, Muslim blacks in the region, murdering and reducing them to slavery. It might be imagineable a couple hundred years ago, but now it would be unthinkable. And the uproar would make the planet deaf. Islam is the Religion of Peace. Yeah.
And where are the fatwa’s against this behavior? If people don’t think the war on terror is not about a serious structural problem with the religion of Islam, they are living in PC paradise, where only white males can be bad.
Well, sort of. In fact, both the victims and the perpetrators here are Muslim. And the perpetrators are white (Arabs) while the victims are black. I suspect that the real reason for the world’s disinterest is that nobody’s figured out a way to blame the United States, or Israel.
Some people, however, are noting the hypocrisy.
More thoughts here.
THOUGHTS ON THE WAR, over at GlennReynolds.com. Where the John Kerry campaign is advertising!
BLACKFIVE WRITES that journalists are making fools of themselves via their ignorance of things military:
The military is not calling back discharged and retired individual soldiers. They are dipping into the Individual Ready Reserve. There is a big difference between calling up IRR soldiers and recalling retired or discharged soldiers.
When you sign a contract to enlist or get a commission, it is generally for EIGHT years. You perform four years of Active Duy, then you have four left in the Reserves or National Guard.
He dissects a number of stories that get it wrong. You know, this kind of thing might have been excusable before, but we’ve been at war for going on three years. You’d think somebody would have bothered to learn this stuff.
UPDATE: Here’s a related post from SgtStryker.com.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Rob Matteo emails:
Kudos for your post from Blackfive and Sgt. Stryker. I am a retired Army Officer and the minute I started hearing the reports of a “backdoor draft” etc. I knew that once again, the press has no clue on all things military. Any soldier would know there is a huge difference.
How is it possible that there is no editor or writer who has ever served in the miltary? Not very representative of our society I’d say.
They’ve got a diversity problem.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Shaun Evans emails:
It is bad that no journalists have served in the military. But it is
inexecusable to go to press with a story that could have been corrected
with a 15 second google search (including typing the query): LinkIndividual Ready Reserve (IRR), a manpower pool in the Ready Reserve,
primarily consists of: Individuals who have had training, have served
previously in the Active component or the Selected Reserve, and have
some period of a military obligation remaining. IRR members are in an
active status, but do not perform regularly scheduled training.
Indeed. It’s almost like they want to get it wrong. Meanwhile Dan Williams emails that the confusion is widespread:
It’s not just the media getting it wrong. Teachers and parents are taking in the info and passing it to teens. I’m a scout master and deal with a lot of teen boys. Many seem to be convinced that the draft is coming back and the Bush admin is going to draft them all into the military.
I try to explain the politics to them when I get the chance, but it’s far more complex than they expect politics to be.
Charles Rangel with his Draft bill ain’t a Bushie.
And everybody’s happy about that, at least . . . .
THE LAST IN MY series of TechCentralStation columns on aging is up.
June 29, 2004
THE HATRED JUST GETS WORSE. (Via Petrelis, via Sullivan).
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS DISCOVERS Iraq’s Greg Packer. Or something like that, though this is probably unfair to Greg Packer.
ADDED SOME NEW PHOTOS over at the Exposure Manager site — both new stuff in the Tennessee Backroads gallery, and an entire new gallery of thematic stuff. I’m still way behind in reviewing and processing (via PhotoShop) images I’ve already taken.
Not all the photos are as pretty as some I’ve posted before, but they’re more in accordance with the Walker Evansish style that characterized my work some years ago.
And for those who wonder, I remain very happy with the Nikon D70. It’s hard to get a bad picture with that camera, though I’ve risen to the challenge from time to time. . .