Saturday, January 29, 2005
NEWS BRIEFLETS
* Yet more torture: “For 12 days before his release, terror suspect Mamdouh Habib was so excited about the prospect of seeing his family again he could not sleep.”
* Ray Peterson, who wrote “Tell Laura I Love Her”, has died. In a flaming car wreck! Well, no; of cancer, at the surprisingly young age of 65. He was only 20 when that song was released.
* Check out the new ad at left. This site is now sponsored by the United Nations! Kofi Annan will be deeply concerned.
* Daily Kos predicts: “I believe sports blogging will be the next ‘Big Thing’, which is why I’ve started a company in that realm (details coming soon).” Given recent revelations, Kos should call his new sports site blacksox.com. Too bad it’s already taken.
* Latham advocate Alan Ramsey hands over half his column to someone identified only as a political friend. This entity seems to function as a kind of Hobbes to Ramsey’s elderly Calvin. Speaking of whom, Matt Welch links to some recreated Calvin and Hobbes snowmen.
RITTER THE FLIPPER
Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter in 1999:
I have grown convinced that there has been a total breakdown in the willingness of the international community to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein is well on the road to getting his sanctions lifted and keeping his weapons in the bargain. A resurgent Iraq, reinvigorated economically and politically by standing up successfully to the United States and the United Nations, will be a very dangerous Iraq—one that sooner or later will have to be confronted by American military might.
And Scott Ritter in yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald:
The White House’s acknowledgement last month that the US has formally ended its search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq brought to a close the most calamitous international deception of modern times.
This decision was taken a month after a contentious presidential election in which the issue of those weapons and the war in Iraq played a central role. George Bush was unwavering in his conviction that Iraq had such weapons.
Ritter screamed that Saddam had those weapons, and now seeks to blame people who listened to him. Maybe Bush shouldn’t have listened to Ritter; few do, these days, apart from undercover cops posing as Burger King jailbait.
ABDUCTION SOLVED
As usual when the big science news breaks, an Australian is involved:
Weekly World News has learned from a respected scientific source that rescuers searching for survivors of the December 26 monster wave stumbled across a UFO half buried in the beach on Hong Island, a remote isle off the coast of Thailand.
The source tells WWN that the drowned corpses of two space alien astronauts were found in the saucer-shaped craft’s cockpit. Even more incredible, a human abductee—a Missoula, Mont., woman missing since October 31—was found strapped to an examination table in a water-tight chamber. The source says she was naked, babbling incoherently and was possibly a guinea pig for ghoulish experiments.
“The human survivor, identified as 27-year-old Wendy Carpsdale, has been airlifted to a medical facility in Bangkok,” reveals Dr. Robert Wilton, a leading Australian physicist with high-level contacts in the Thai scientific community.
The man is connected! Weekly World News has a habit of placing its various “experts” in Australia; there may be a few Australians on the WWN staff. Here’s more on Ms Carpsdale:
“She turned out to be a Montana schoolteacher who vanished on her way to a Halloween party,” says Dr. Wilton. “Her clothes, including the Martha Stewart mask she was wearing at the time, were found neatly folded in a cubbyhole.”
SHOUTY MARXISTS
Democracy’s enemies are disrupting Iraq’s election—in Australia:
A Sydney polling booth for Iraqis voting in their country’s historic election was shut down for an hour today after a punch-up involving protesters and a subsequent bomb scare.
Organiser of Australia’s overseas voting program, Bernie Hogan, said the fight erupted when a group of around 20 protesters started yelling at voters leaving the Auburn centre.
“They were on one side of the road protesting against the election while voters were coming out proudly with ink on their hands,” Mr Hogan said.
Here’s one of the protesters. Check the t-shirt. More:
Mr Hogan said [the protesters] were holding the same black flag with white lettering that has appeared as a backdrop in videos released by Iraqi insurgents featuring foreign hostages.
International Organisation for Migration Iraqi adviser Thair Wali said the protesters’ flag and Arabic slogans identified them as Wahabis, or followers of an austere brand of Sunni Islam practised mostly in Saudi Arabia.
Mr Wali said the fight was sparked by protesters taking photographs of voters leaving the station.
WAR PREDICTED
Ali, a Friends of Democracy correspondent in Missan province, has his say on anti-election hollerers:
Those who holler in satellite stations and in the media about the future war that will burn Iraq are only actors in a vile, mischievous plot that will never succeed in destroying the Iraqi liberation project. The elections experience is the greatest experience Iraq will go through in its modern history. There is no substitute for it.
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul McGeough has been hollering about a future war for nearly two years. Apparently it can be caused by anything: invasion, occupation, Saddam’s removal, US withdrawal, elections ...
March 27, 2003:
Such an uprising has the potential to explode into a civil war between the Shiite and Kurdish majority ethnic groups and Saddam’s minority Sunnis, which many analysts fear could erupt before the coalition can impose law and order on Iraq.
April 15, 2003:
As happened in Yugoslavia after the death of the dictator Tito, would the country descend into a nightmare of civil war?
November 19, 2003:
Bush’s plans for a quick getaway ahead of next year’s US presidential election may set the scene for civil war in post-Saddam Iraq.
March 3, 2004:
The organised nature of last night’s attacks heightened fears of Iraq descending into a religious civil war ...
March 4, 2004:
The sadness, and the real threat that the same schism is being manipulated dangerously close to civil war in Iraq, comes from a hopeless layering of history’s violence and enmity.
March 10, 2004:
The Shiite leadership cast doubt on the document’s viability, immediately diminishing hopes that Iraq’s parallel politics - the Americans and their predominantly exile-run administration on one hand, and the sheer weight of Shiite numbers over Sunnis and Kurds on the other - might be steered away from descent into civil war.
March 13, 2004:
The fraught nature of that contest, which seems to edge steadily towards civil war ...
March 20, 2004:
The violence that might yet reduce the country to civil war ...
March 22, 2004:
It might be a civil war that gives birth to the new Iraq - not Bush’s liberation.
April 9, 2004:
The former UN weapons inspection chief Hans Blix told a French publication: “The country is on the verge of civil war today.”
April 10, 2004:
In the March 2 attacks, non-Shiite hands were assumed to be at work - an attempt to turn Iraq’s Shiite majority against the Sunni and Kurdish minorities, trying to provoke the much-feared Iraqi civil war.
May 15, 2004:
The fear now is that the real American success in Iraq has been the creation of the perfect environment for a protracted guerilla war which, at any time, could become a civil war.
June 26, 2004:
The only brake on the very real risk of civil war is the Iraqis’ abiding knowledge of their own brutal history.
June 28, 2004:
Shiite leaders in Baghdad are pressuring the Shiite tribes to give the new interim government an opportunity to resolve the crisis, warning them that to begin a tribal war would start the civil war they believe many Sunnis want.
September 11, 2004:
Iraq is showing all the signs of descent into an ugly civil war.
January 21, 2005:
Many voters will resort to religious and tribal edicts, decrees and urgings on how they should vote, thereby locking in Iraq’s sectarian divide and perhaps setting the scene for the full-blown civil war that some observers now fear is inevitable.
January 29, 2005:
Hanging over Iraq will be the threat of civil war.
UPDATE. It continues ...
January 30, 2005:
The leaders of the world are urging 15 million Iraqis to stare down guns and bombs today to vote in a fraught election that promises a democratic future - or a descent into civil war.
FLEE THE OLDSMOBILE
Iowahawk is overrun with guest commentators. Here’s Senator Edward Kennedy:
It is time for us to recognize that our continued presence in this volatile region is a hinderance to the Oldsmobile and its people.
And eighth-year journalism student Keanu Burge:
With every passing day under BushCo, this country creeps farther and farther beyond the ragged edge of mass political madness, into a sickening extremist mobius strip Texas twilight zone of fat, hydra-headed oilmen electrocuting the innocent while money-green puke gushes from their eye sockets across a basketball court covered in Eggo toaster waffles.
OUT DAMNED BUT
James Lileks:
However the election goes will be one thing; how it’s reported is another. The thing to watch is the position of the Damning But, the old DB. The DB will probably bob up in the first or second paragraphs of most dispatches. “The election went as planned in 95 percent of the country, but violence marred polling in the disputed Sunny D Triangle, where insurgents opposed to Tropicana Juice fired automatic weapons into an juice concentrate factory.�
Front page of the New York Times:
For Iraqi Expatriates in the U.S., a Chance to Savor the Vote
But even as they exulted in the opportunity to vote, many expatriates expressed deep fears about Sunday’s vote in Iraq.
UPDATE. The ABC included a DB within the first dozen or so words of its lead item on tonight’s news.
VOTERS SLIGHTED
The Associated Press reports:
Hundreds of Iraqis streamed into polling places in five U.S. cities Friday, the first day they could vote in their homeland’s election. Nearly 26,000 people have registered to vote in five U.S. metropolitan areas with heavy Iraqi populations: Detroit, Chicago, Nashville, Tenn., Los Angeles and Washington. Tens of thousands more are expected to vote in 13 other countries during balloting that runs through Sunday.
In Iraq and around the globe, the voting has been a cause for jubilation among Iraqis who have long been tormented by Saddam, but the threat of violence is still present. Insurgents bent on disrupting the election process have killed U.S. soldiers—two more died Friday in Baghdad—set off suicide car bombs, assassinated officials and bombed polling places.
Adim Altalibi struggled to hold back tears Friday after voting in an Iraqi election for the first time. All he could think about were his five nephews, all killed under Saddam Hussein’s regime.
The article, a very good piece compiled by four AP writers, goes on to cover several other aspects of the election. Overall, its tone is positive ... but the New York Times (unimpressed by “tens of thousands” voting and tearful Iraqis celebrating democracy) decided on this sour headline:
Slight Turnout Is Expected as Iraqis Abroad Begin to Vote
They’ll run this election down any chance they get, even if they look like idiots in the process. That headline, by the way, has since been removed.
(Via Alan R.M. Jones)
UNFILTERED VIEW
The Indiana Gazette had the considerable foresight to hire National Guardsman Sgt. Thomas Foreman Jr., serving in Baghdad, as a weekly columnist; surprisingly, few other newspapers have followed the Gazette’s example. In his latest piece, Sgt. Foreman considers the election:
Every Iraqi I talk to has hope. I’ve written several times on the power of hope, and right here is a living, breathing 24-million-strong testament to it. As long as some hope endures for the Iraqi people, my time here will not have been wasted.
It will not be perfect. This very well could be the most dangerous period we face while we are over here. There will be some violence against election workers, voters, even the candidates themselves. That precedent has been set already in the past few weeks.
We are ready. The Iraqis are ready. And we all know what we have to do to see this vital task through to its conclusion.
Well said.
“LOWLY ECONOMIC’S EXPERT”
Iraq War Was Wrong writes to the NYT’s Paul Krugman:
I’m a BIG fan from wayback and I just wanted to, drop you a line. To thank you for you’re excallent commentaries (as always). I hope this address email’s is the right one? To describe about me: I’m an aspiring writer (like you but just starting out) hope to be a pundit one day when Im older. I’m still learning the ropes (it’s a process) But when I see people like you who reached the heighths (rise from lowly economic’s expert to New york times) it gives me hope. (By the way this reminds me: Can you as New York Times columnist, give me any advice how to move up? Right now I’m still local).
My question(getting to the point): Do you think in this country people will ever FINALLY come to understanding that The Iraq War was wrong?
Hilariously, Krugman replied. Hit the link.
UPDATE:
I’m an enormerse fan of your’s from a long time. The posts you post are the best on the web with any doubt. Terrifying stuff - keep it up! (Right email address I hope). A little me: I want to write for the Bullertin one day so hav you any tips to reach this object? You climbed up from Sports Illustrations and I think I can move with the hopeliness of that. Now just a plane blogger but am trying for a job on Wall Strete or maybe in the Thames. Goodness the columns you write!
Another question for you again: when do you think Australians will FIANLLY realize Iraq is a completly incorrect country?
Respectfully,
Friday, January 28, 2005
FILM VIEWED
A devout Baptist couple who bought a Doris Day DVD were shocked to find a sex film instead. Still, they got their money’s worth:
Alan and Anne Leigh-Browne, from Wellington, Somerset, had been expecting to enjoy The Pajama Game.
Instead they were confronted by Italian sex film - Tettone che Passione, which translates Breasts, What a Passion.
“It was a pretty raunchy, explicit film, it certainly pulled no punches,” Mr Leigh-Browne said.
“My wife and I were very shocked but we watched it until the end because we couldn’t believe what we were seeing.”
Thursday, January 27, 2005
DEMOCRACY ON THE MARCH
The Iraq elections have begun:
The first votes in the world in the Iraq elections were cast in Australia this morning.
Polling centres in Sydney and Victoria opened at 7am (AEDT) for nearly 12,000 Iraqi expatriates who have registered to vote.
The Australian head of the Iraq Out-of-Country Voting Program, Bernie Hogan, said a crowd of people was waiting outside the Fairfield centre when he arrived.
“We had a line-up of probably 60 or 70 people at the front door at seven o’clock,” he said.
Beautiful.
Meanwhile across the road, a small group of protesters from the World Communist Party assembled to demonstrate against the elections.
These clowns apparently haven’t heard that the Iraqi Communist Party is fielding candidates in these elections. Whatever happened to “solidarity�, comrades?
ABUNDANT LIFE ALL ROUND
Terry Eagleton is professor of cultural theory at Manchester University, which possibly explains his attraction to suicide:
While insurgents have been blowing themselves apart in Israel and Iraq, a silence has prevailed about what suicide bombing actually involves. Like hunger strikers, suicide bombers are not necessarily in love with death.
Their head-removing comrades respectfully disagree.
They kill themselves because they can see no other way of attaining justice; and the fact that they have to do so is part of the injustice.
Got the interview transcripts to back this up, mate? As well, suicide bombers don’t merely kill themselves; they kill others. At what point will Eagleton consider the murders of those targeted by his human justice-seeking missiles?
It is possible to act in a way that makes your death inevitable without actually desiring it. Those who leapt from the World Trade Centre to avoid being incinerated were not seeking death, even though there was no way they could have avoided it.
You might think this the single most revolting comment you’ll likely read all year. Perhaps it is, although Eagleton immediately attempts a yet more disgusting observation:
Ordinary, non-political suicides are those whose lives have come to feel worthless to them, and who, accordingly, need a quick way out. Martyrs are more or less the opposite. People like Rosa Luxemburg or Steve Biko give up what they see as precious (their lives) for an even more valuable cause. They die not because they see death as desirable in itself, but in the name of a more abundant life all round.
Abundant life for all! Through the gift of suicide bombing!
Suicide bombers also die in the name of a better life for others; it is just that, unlike martyrs, they take others with them in the process.
Key phrase: “It is just that ...� Such a minor distinction. Why quibble?
The martyr bets his life on a future of justice and freedom; the suicide bomber bets your life on it. But both believe that a life is only worth living if it contains something worth dying for.
Teenage poetry meets Islamofascism. Sweet.
On this theory, what makes existence meaningful is what you are prepared to relinquish it for. This used to be known as God; in modern times it is mostly known as the nation. For Islamic radicals it is both inseparably.
On the contrary; for Semtex-swathed Islamic radicals, separation is inevitable.
The bomber forces a contrast between the extreme kind of self-determination involved in taking his own life and the lack of such self-determination in his everyday existence. If he could live in the way he dies, he would not need to die.
Living in the way he dies would require the rest of us to die.
At least his death can be his death, and thus a taste of freedom. The only form of sovereignty left to you is the power to dispose of your own death.
Eagleton has already forgotten the suicide bomber’s primary aim.
Suicide, as Dostoevsky recognised, means the death of God, since you usurp his divine monopoly over life and death. What more breathtaking form of omnipotence than to do away with yourself for all eternity?
To remind Terry: they kill other people. Children. The elderly. Innocents.
Suicide bombers and hunger strikers are out to transform weakness into power.
The Melbourne Age, by running this obscene piece, has transformed “mainstream broadsheet� into “fiesty new competitor for tiny pro-terror niche market�. Send a letter.
NAMES NAMED
Nobody is safe! Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh reviews the pre- and post-Iraq attitudes of some prominent opinionists:
If President Bush’s re-election demonstrated wide support for his “forward strategy of freedom�—the aggressive region-building scheme embodied in the Iraq war—you never would have known it from the people who took that strategy most seriously and argued most eloquently for it.
Cavanaugh then launches into Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Fred Kaplan, Kenneth Pollack, Fareed Zakaria, Jeff Jarvis, Andrew Sullivan, and Michael Ignatieff. You may disagree with much of Cavanaugh’s analysis - I do - but his eloquently brutal conclusion is irresistible:
Perhaps in their ideal world, where President Kerry and Secretary of State Biden run the show, such precision is possible. In the event, they must now either admit they were wrong or stick with the war Bush delivered for them. If it succeeds, perhaps they’ll take some of the credit. They’ve already shown they won’t take any of the blame.
Reactions from those mentioned above will be lively. Maybe they should be posted here.
FLEX ROXX
AFP reports:
Four Britons who were released Wednesday after their return from a US military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba still pose a “significant threat” that British authorities have assured they will take steps to address, a Pentagon spokesman said.
The United States understood, however, when they transferred custody of the detainees to British authorities that they would be released if no charges could be brought against them, said Lieutenant Commander Flex Plexico.
Interesting and all, but the main reason I’ve posted this is so we can rejoice in the name “Flex Plexico�, as so many others have done before us.
UPDATE. Scroll down: Flex takes pix!