Archived news and commentary: January 27 - February 2, 2003

2003/03/24 - 2003/03/30
2003/03/17 - 2003/03/23
2003/03/10 - 2003/03/16
2003/03/03 - 2003/03/09
2003/02/24 - 2003/03/02
2003/02/17 - 2003/02/23
2003/02/10 - 2003/02/16
2003/02/03 - 2003/02/09
2003/01/27 - 2003/02/02
2003/01/20 - 2003/01/26
2003/01/13 - 2003/01/19
2003/01/06 - 2003/01/12
2002/12/30 - 2003/01/05

Sunday, February 2, 2003

News and commentary:

"Arafat gave 'green light' to suicide attacks, says Mofaz" (Amos Harel, Haaretz, 2003/02/02)
"Information directly linking Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat to terror organizations was presented Friday by Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz. Addressing the Economic-Social Club in Nes Tziona, Mofaz charged that Arafat had instructed the heads of the organizations to kill more Israelis. Referring to a never-before publicized conversation between Arafat and the leaders of the terror groups in February 2001, the defense minister charged that "the Palestinian plan was to cause a few thousand Israeli deaths within a number of months, so that Israel would give in to them ... It was tantamount to giving a green light to the suicide terror attacks against Israel." Mofaz said Hamas and Islamic Jihad began the suicide attack campaign and were joined a year or so ago by Arafat's Fatah organization."

"Saddam: We will win by suicide" (New York Post, 2003/02/02)
"Iraq will unleash "thousands" of suicide attackers against the United States if American troops invade, one of Saddam Hussein's top stooges is boasting.
Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan said in a German magazine interview yesterday that Iraq's ability to withstand U.S. military might was "unlimited" and that American ground troops would face tough resistance.
"We have no long-range missiles or bomber squadrons, but we will deploy thousands of suicide attackers," Ramadan told the weekly Der Spiegel. 'These are our new weapons, and they will be used not only in Iraq.'"

"Iraq's thug bares evil poison plot" (Uri Dan, New York Post, 2003/02/02)
"While President Bush is being urged to provide proof of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, Israel has its own proof that Iraq is ready to use deadly poison in terrorist attacks.
"I was told to be ready to spread poison in the major Israeli water pipelines, the River Jordan or the Lake of Galilee," said Mohammed Farouq Abu Roub, a former junior officer in Palestinian intelligence.
"I got these instructions in Iraq, where I was given thousands of dollars to carry out mega-attacks. ...
Abu Roub and the two other recruits were taken to a secret military base called "al-Quds," a 90-minute drive from Baghdad, where they were trained in sabotage under concealed identities.
"There was no problem getting weapons, ammunition, poisonous powders," he said. "Everything was in big quantities. There were no limits."
When Abu Roub had finished training, Abu Abbas told him to prepare for the attack on the Israeli water supply - as well as on kindergartens or school buses that would traumatize Israeli parents."

"Saddam's bodyguard warns of secret arsenal" (Herald Sun, 2003/02/02)
"Saddam Hussein's senior bodyguard has fled with details of Iraq's secret arsenal. His revelations have supported US President George W. Bush's claim there is enough evidence from UN inspectors to justify going to war. Abu Hamdi Mahmoud has provided Israeli intelligence with a list of sites that the inspectors have not visited.
They include:
AN underground chemical weapons facility at the southern end of the Jadray Peninsula in Baghdad;
A SCUD assembly area near Ramadi. The missiles come from North Korea;
TWO underground bunkers in Iraq's Western Desert. These contain biological weapons."

"Hizbollah: Columbia blast shows U.S. not a 'god'" (Reuters/AlertNet, 2003/02/02)
"The head of Lebanon's Hizbollah guerrillas said on Sunday the break-up of the U.S. space shuttle showed the United States was not an infallible deity and gave hope to Arabs and Muslims ahead of possible war against Iraq.
Speaking to thousands of people at a graduation ceremony, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said the Columbia disaster proved that although America was trying to force its will on the rest of the world, it was still subject to God's will.
"What happened yesterday is a message to all humanity, and especially Arab, Muslim and Third World people, a message to those who thought in the past few years that America was a god that couldn't be defeated or defied," he said.
'America, which threatens the whole earth with war, with millions of men and aircraft carriers, and nuclear weapons...stood by in awe, unable to do a thing, as its space shuttle blew up in the sky and plummeted to earth." (See also: "Iraqis Call Shuttle Disaster God's Vengeance" (Reuters, 2003/02/01))

"Support for a War With Iraq Grows After Bush's Speech" (Richard Morin and Claudia Deane, The Washington Post, 2003/02/02)
"After the president's State of the Union speech on Tuesday in which he laid out the case for a U.S.-led invasion, the survey found that 66 percent of Americans favor taking military action against Iraq, up from 57 percent two weeks ago and the most support for war since mid-September. Slightly more than six in 10 Americans also approve of the way Bush is handling the situation in Iraq; two weeks ago, half the country endorsed the job that the president was doing. Bush's overall job approval rating stands at 62 percent, up slightly from mid-January. And for the first time in Post-ABC News surveys, about half of all Americans say the United States should take military action even without the endorsement of the United Nations."

"Ah, Those Principled Europeans" (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, 2003/02/02)
"'Power corrupts, but so does weakness,' said Josef Joffe, editor of Germany's Die Zeit newspaper. "And absolute weakness corrupts absolutely. We are now living through the most critical watershed of the postwar period, with enormous moral and strategic issues at stake, and the only answer many Europeans offer is to constrain and contain American power. So by default they end up on the side of Saddam, in an intellectually corrupt position." ...
I can live with this difference. But Europe's cynicism and insecurity, masquerading as moral superiority, is insufferable. Each year at the Davos economic forum protesters are allowed to march through the north end of town, where last year they broke shop windows. So this year, on demonstration day, all the shopkeepers on that end of town closed. But when I walked by their shops in the morning, I noticed that three of them had put up signs in their windows that said, "U.S.A. No War in Iraq."
I wondered to myself: Why did the shopkeepers at the lingerie store suddenly decide to express their antiwar sentiments? Well, the demonstrators came and left without getting near these shops. And guess what? As soon as they were gone, the antiwar signs disappeared. They had been put up simply as window insurance — to placate the demonstrators so they wouldn't throw stones at them."

"Why the Left is wrong on Saddam" (David Aaronovitch, The Observer, 2003/02/02)
"If you were to draw a map of the world based on the writings and speeches of the most fervent anti-war figures in Britain and America, two names would be found at the far edges of the known world, if at all: Bosnia and Rwanda. In the mid-1990s, events in these places convinced me that Noam Chomsky's definition of the sovereignty of nations as 'the right of political entities to be free from outside interference' had become a millstone around the neck of the world. ...
If leaders must take responsibility for these terrible failures, then so must those who always urge inaction. Over Bosnia, Kosovo and over Afghanistan, voices on both the Left and Right have been consistently raised to object to the use of force. ...
In last week's edition of the New Statesman, one of the latter, John Pilger, takes this newspaper to task for allowing that it might be right to depose the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, by force. Even suggesting such a thing, he said, was a betrayal of the great traditions of the newspaper. Pilger, of course, has a way of turning disagreements with him into betrayals of the entire human race. ...
Nothing about Iraq is hard for Pilger. He was opposed to using force to get Iraq out of Kuwait, opposed to the containment of Saddam through the enforcement of the no-fly zones, dismissive of the threats to the Kurdish people of the North. Many in his camp were in a favour of sanctions when the alternative was force, and were against sanctions when the alternative was nothing."

"Mourning the Bomb" (The Wall Street Journal, 2003/02/02)
An editorial which originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal, June 10, 1981, three days after the Israeli air force destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor: "An atom bomb for Iraq, we have learned in the last 24 hours, has become the latest great cause célèbre of world opiniondom. Various governments, including our own, and a lot of pundits have been busily condemning Israel's raid on Iraq's nuclear reactor. Our own reaction is that it's nice to know that in Israel we have at least one nation left that still lives in the world of reality. ...
This kind of silliness has a mysterious power to blind most who man foreign ministries, think tanks and editorial sanctums. Of course Iraq was building a bomb. Of course its intended target was Israel. Of course, given the Iraqi reputation for political nuttiness reaffirmed again in its starting a war with Iran, its atom bomb would also have been a danger to all its neighbors. We all ought to get together and send the Israelis a vote of thanks." (See also: "Ilan Ramon's legacy: A little faith in ourselves can go a long way" (Caroline B. Glick, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/02/01))

"Unquiet on the Western Front" (Asla Aydintasbas, The New York Times Magazine, 2003/02/02)
An interview with Oriana Fallaci: "Your post-Sept. 11 sermon, ''The Rage and the Pride,'' about the threat from Islamic fundamentalism, is full of anger.
Very. I was bleeding when I wrote. It is an unrestrainable cry, during which I said the truth that I had never said before. ...
People have since countered you by citing the Islamic world's poetry, the discoveries in math -
True, the Arabs used the graphical numerals that we ourselves have adopted - thank you very much. When I interviewed the big mouth named Arafat, he was shouting that his culture was superior to mine.
He shouted so much that I didn't care to tell him that I agree with Karl Popper, that we Westerners are living in the best possible society that the history of mankind has produced. We are on the moon, we are going to Mars, we have mapped the genome, we have fewer cases of cancer.
It's not because of Muhammad that they are curing my cancer - it's the Western medicine."

"War Plan Calls for Precision Bombing Wave to Break Iraqi Army" (Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, The New York Times, 2003/02/02)
"The Pentagon's war plan for Iraq calls for unleashing 3,000 precision-guided bombs and missiles in the first 48 hours of the opening air campaign, an effort intended to stagger and isolate the Iraqi military and quickly pave the way for a ground attack to topple a government in shock.
The initial bombardment would use 10 times the number of precision-guided weapons fired in the first two days of the Persian Gulf war of 1991, and the targets would be air defenses, political and military headquarters, communications facilities and suspected chemical and biological delivery systems, military and other Pentagon officials say.
Military planners said the immediate goals would be to break the Iraqi Army's will to fight, driving large number of troops to surrender or defect — and offering them guarded sanctuary if they do — while cutting off the leadership in Baghdad in hopes of causing a rapid collapse of the government of President Saddam Hussein."

Saturday, February 1, 2003

News and commentary:

"Iraqis Call Shuttle Disaster God's Vengeance" (Reuters, 2003/02/01)
Iraqi reaction to the shuttle tragedy: "Immediate popular reaction in Baghdad on Saturday to the loss of the U.S. space shuttle Columbia and its seven-member crew - including the first Israeli in space - was that it was God's retribution.
"We are happy that it broke up," government employee Abdul Jabbar al-Quraishi said. "God wants to show that his might is greater than the Americans. They have encroached on our country. God is avenging us," he said."

"Ilan Ramon's legacy: A little faith in ourselves can go a long way" (Caroline B. Glick, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/02/01)
"In 1981, IAF Col. Ilan Ramon flew one of the F-16 jets that blew up the Iraqi nuclear reactor in Osirak. In so doing he saved the country and perhaps the entire world from the specter of a nuclear holocaust.
For the past 16 days, as Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon again saved us. This time he was not armed with a payload of bombs on a fighter craft. This time Ramon set off for outer space on the Columbia space shuttle, armed with a picture of the Earth as seen from the moon drawn by a Jewish boy in Theresienstadt concentration camp, a torah scroll from Bergen Belsen, a microfiche copy of the bible, the national flag and the dreams and hopes of the State of Israel and the Jewish people. Ramon saved us this time not by clearing our skies of the threat of nuclear attack, but by reminding us of who we are and of what we can accomplish if we only have faith in ourselves."

"A Friendship Sundered by Muslim Code of Honor" (Seth Mydans, The New York Times, 2003/02/01)
An interview with Norma Khouri, author of "Honor Lost", which tells the story of her childhood friend in Jordan, "a young woman she calls Dalia, who had been stabbed to death by her own father because she had been seen in public walking with a man": "That killing transformed Ms. Khouri, who is now 32. She became her friend's avenger, writing letters and signing petitions against the widespread practice in Muslim nations of what are known as "honor killings." Fearing for her life, she fled to Greece and then to Australia. ...
The lessons are learned early. Like other girls, she said, she was told by her mother the exemplary tale of a woman who had killed herself rather than despoil her family's honor by being raped.
"They buried her in gold," her mother said.
By contrast, Dalia, murdered in shame by her father, was buried without ceremony in an unmarked grave.
Like most other men who kill for honor, Dalia's father spent no time behind bars. The man she loved also avoided punishment, but he has dedicated himself now to helping abused women. ...
The final chapters of Ms. Khouri's book accelerate with grief and passion.
Dalia was stabbed 12 times in the chest, Ms. Khouri writes, and her father stood over her to be sure she was dead before calling an ambulance.
"I've cleansed my house," he shouted when Ms. Khouri ran in through the door, just a block away from her own home. 'I've cut the rotten part and brought honor back to my family name.'"

"The End of Appeasement" (Max Boot, The Weekly Standard. from the 2003/02/10 issue)
"Unfortunately America's record of failure is more glaring, starting with the Suez Crisis, continuing in the run-up to the Six Day War, the oil crisis of the 1970s, the Iranian revolution, subsequent terrorist attacks against the United States by radical Islamists, and the failure to depose Saddam Hussein. A broad generalization may stretch the truth but not break it: America was strong in resisting Soviet designs on the region but weak in the face of Arab nationalism and Islamic extremism. Indeed, the United States usually sought to make common cause with Arabs and Persians against the Soviet Union. This may have been a sound short-term strategy - it did contribute to the defeat of the Evil Empire - but its unintended long-term consequence has been to leave behind a poisonous legacy of anti-Americanism, despotism, and corruption that poses a stark challenge to the 21st-century world."

"Susan Sontag Nominee" (The Daily Dish, 2003/02/01)
Sullivan quotes Kurt Vonnegut: "I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka 'Christians,' and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or 'PPs.'" (See also: "Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@" (Joel Bleifuss, In These Times, 2003/01/27))

"Bush: U.N. Must Act Fast" (Karen DeYoung, The Washington Post, 2003/02/01)
"President Bush said yesterday that he was not willing to wait beyond the next few weeks for a United Nations agreement on waging war against Iraq, and that "any attempt to drag the process on for months will be resisted by the United States."
"This just needs to be resolved quickly," Bush said at a news conference after an Oval Office meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his strongest foreign backer on taking tough action against Baghdad. "Saddam Hussein must understand that if he does not disarm," Bush said, the United States, "along with others," will disarm him with or without U.N. approval." (See also full text of President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair's news conference: "Text: Bush and Blair on Iraq" (The Washington Post, 2003/01/31))

Friday, January 31, 2003

News and commentary:

"Caught on Tape" (Michael Isikoff and Michael Hirsh, Newsweek, 2003/01/31)
"The Bush administration is preparing to release supersensitive electronic intercepts obtained by the National Security Agency that officials say prove that Iraq has repeatedly lied to United Nations inspectors, plotted among themselves about how to conceal weapons material and even appeared to boast afterward at their success in doing so, Newsweek has learned. ...
For the past two months, ever since the U.N. inspectors re-entered Iraq and began searching for weapons of mass destruction, the NSA has been closely monitoring the conversations of Iraqi officials. The NSA intercepts establish conclusively that the Iraqis have been "hiding stuff" from the inspectors, the U.S. intelligence official said.
"They're saying things like, 'Move that,' 'Don't be reporting that' and 'Ha! Can you believe they missed that'," the official said. 'It's that kind of stuff.'"

"Merciless Punishment To the US!"
(Korean News Service/Corsair the Rationale Pirate, 2003/01/31)

"Cool Retro-Commie, Axis of Evil Member War Posters" (Corsair the Rationale Pirate, 2003/01/31)
Corsair has assembled four North Korean anti-American posters with translated captions, including the one above. (See also: "Report: North Korean streets awash with anti-U.S. posters" (AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/01/30): "New anti-U.S. posters have been put up along the streets of Pyongyang and other parts of North Korea pledging to fight American "imperialists," the North's state-run media said Friday. Posters of "high ideological and artistic value" were made by North Korean artists shortly after the communist country withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty on Jan. 10, said the report by the North's Korean Central News Agency." Note: In a truly Orwellian spirit, Indymedia files the article under "anti-war news". I guess lunatic warmongering counts as pacifistic as long as it's aimed at America.)

"Reid: 'I am at war with your country'" (CNN.com, 2003/01/31)
A partial transcript of Thursday's court hearing, where Reid was sentenced to life in prison: "JUDGE WILLIAM YOUNG: ... It seems to me you hate the one thing that to us is most precious. You hate our freedom. Our individual freedom. Our individual freedom to live as we choose, to come and go as we choose, to believe or not believe as we individually choose.
Here, in this society, the very winds carry freedom. They carry it everywhere from sea to shining sea. It is because we prize individual freedom so much that you are here in this beautiful courtroom. So that everyone can see, truly see that justice is administered fairly, individually, and discretely.
It is for freedom's seek that your lawyers are striving so vigorously on your behalf and have filed appeals, will go on in their, their representation of you before other judges. We care about it. Because we all know that the way we treat you, Mr. Reid, is the measure of our own liberties.
Make no mistake though. It is yet true that we will bear any burden; pay any price, to preserve our freedoms." (See also: "Shoe Bomber Sentenced to Life in Prison" (Denise Lavoie, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/01/30))

"Stars speak up for peace" (Ben Davies, BBC News, 2003/01/31)
Or: "Stars speak up for Saddam Hussein": "It read like a list from a showbiz party: Bianca Jagger, pop star Damon Albarn, director Ken Loach, actor Corin Redgrave and top architect Richard Rogers. But it didn't take the formal surroundings of the House of Commons to indicate that these were people in no mood for fun. The sombre atmosphere did that. Their minds were on just one thing: the prospect of war with Iraq. ...
Mr Redgrave said it was not so much a case of whether the war was going to happen, it was more a case of when and how. It was necessary to make very clear to both Mr Blair and Mr Bush that if they should not proceed with an attack. Both men were already war criminals because sanctions against Iraq had claimed the life of "half a million" children.
'If they proceed they will be more odious than the generals and politicians who led people into the slaughterhouse of the first world war. They'll be damned forever.'"

"So Long to All That" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2003/01/31)
"We should accept that, taken as a whole, the current anti-Americanism is beginning either to trump — or to reveal old differences in — our deeper common heritage. Indeed, the only thing that may yet salvage a strategic partnership is a radical change in our political relationship, beginning with the withdrawal of American troops from Germany — quietly, professionally, permanently — and from any other European state that seems uneasy with our presence. Only such action — steady and studied — will bring back an air of reality to our relations. ...
If many NATO allies oppose the United States as it removes a fascist dictatorship, if France expresses daily a visceral dislike of America, and if a continental intelligentsia sees America — not the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, the Iranians, or the North Koreans — as the world's real problem, then surely America already has enough enemies without allies and dependents such as these.
Without rancor or anger, it really is time sadly and quietly to move on and sigh, 'So long to all that.'"

"Promised Land" (David Frum, National Review, 2003/01/31)
An excerpt from Frum's "The Right Man" on "the president and the Middle East, post-9/11": "At last, on June 24, 2002, at a little before four in the afternoon, with just a few hours' warning, he stepped into the Rose Garden with Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice at his side to announce that the United States would support the creation of a Palestinian state only if that state were democratic, tolerant, and liberal. ...
It was a breathtakingly ambitious message, and one much more likely to end in heartbreak than success. But if Palestinian democracy was improbable, the old goal — a Palestinian dictatorship at peace with Israel — had shown itself to be utterly impossible. The cold realists who had promised that only a thug like Arafat could control the real Palestinian crazies had been exposed as the goggly-eyed romantics.
Bush had found what all the great American presidents have believed: America's principles are as real and necessary and powerful as oil reserves, aircraft carriers, and spy satellites. War had made him, as it had made Roosevelt and Reagan, a crusader after all." (See also: "Bush Calls for Removal of Arafat" (Barry Schweid, AP/Yahoo! News, 2002/06/24))

"Italy Arrests 28 Pakistanis in Al Qaeda Probe" (Emilio Gioventu, Reuters, 2003/01/31)
"Italian police have arrested 28 Pakistanis suspected of links to al Qaeda in one of the biggest anti-terrorism operations Italy has seen since the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Military police burst into an apartment in central Naples on Wednesday night as part of a routine sweep against illegal immigration and ended up discovering enough explosives to blow up a three-story building, officials said on Friday.
They arrested all 28 men staying in the apartment after finding 28 ounces of explosives, 230 feet of fuse and various electronic detonators crammed behind a false wall. ...
A judicial source said the maps had various targets marked on them including the headquarters of NATO's southern European command on the city's outskirts, the U.S. consulate in Naples and a U.S. Navy air base at Capodichino, outside the city."

"Politicians With Guts" (Robert Kagan, The Washington Post, 2003/01/31)
Kagan on the open letter by eight European leaders published yesterday: "Such sentiments are pure heresy these days in Europe, where anti-Americanism has reached a fevered intensity. ... Britain's most gifted scholars sift through American writings about Europe searching for signs of derogatory "sexual imagery." In Paris, all the talk is of oil and "imperialism" (and Jews). In Madrid, it's oil, imperialism, past American support for Franco (and Jews). At a conference I recently attended in Barcelona, an esteemed Spanish intellectual earnestly asked why, if the United States wants to topple vicious dictatorships that manufacture weapons of mass destruction, it is not also invading Israel.
Yes, I know, there are Americans who ask such questions, too. We have our Buchanans and our Gore Vidals. But here's what Americans need to understand: In Europe, this paranoid, conspiratorial anti-Americanism is not a far-left or far-right phenomenon. It's the mainstream view. When Gerhard Schroeder campaigns on an anti-American platform in Germany, he's not just "mobilizing his base" or reaching out to fringe Greens and Socialists. He's talking to the man and woman on the street, left, right and center. When Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin publicly humiliate Colin Powell, they're playing to the gallery. The "European street" is more anti-American than ever before." (See also: "United We Stand" (José María Aznar et al., The Wall Street Journal, 2003/01/30))

"U.N., R.I.P." (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2003/01/31)
Krauthammer on the fact that Iraq will chair the U.N. Disarmament Conference: "You can't parody the United Nations. It inhabits - no, it has constructed - a universe so Orwellian that, yes, Iraq is going to chair the May 12-June 27 session of the United Nations' single most important disarmament negotiating forum.
Iran will co-chair. ...
This is the United Nations. This is the institution whose support Democrats insist the United States must have to validate the legitimacy of its actions, such as the forcible disarming of Saddam Hussein. This is the institution to which they turn to test the worthiness of decisions taken by the president and Congress of the United States. It is a kind of moral idiocy: the greatest defender of freedom on the planet, enjoying the freest institutions, seeking its moral yardstick in the looking-glass values of a corrupt, perverse institutional relic." (See also: "Iraq to chair U.N. disarmament conference" (CNN.com, 2003/01/29))

"Left Perversity I" (Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, 2003/01/31)
"'Unless Hussein ... suddenly unzips his skin to reveal he is actually Bin Laden, we are likely to march to war with the support of an 'international coalition' that amounts to a fig leaf named Tony Blair and a motley collection of nations one can buy on EBay.' - Robert Scheer, the Nation. Italy? Spain? Poland? Ebay? Isn't it amazing how quickly these alleged liberal internationalists turn into ugly and arrogant xenophobes as long as it can be used against Bush?" (See also: "Union Knows Its State: Lousy" (Robert Scheer, The Nation, 2003/01/28))

"Satire or anti-Semitism: For and against" (Independent, 2003/01/31)
Considering the misprints, Independent seems to be somewhat stressed about the criticism of their vile cartoon published earlier this week: "On Monday, 'The Independent' published a savage cartoon of Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. It prompted complaints from the Israeli Embassy, Jewish groups, and some of our readers, who were offended by the image. Today, we ask the we ask the question: was this cartoon anti-Semitic, and throw the debate open to our Argument channel" (See also: "Satire or Anti-Semitism? The cartoonist writes" (Dave Brown, Independent, 2003/01/31), where Brown "desribes its creation". Also: "Der Sturmer in the UK?" (HonestReporting, 2003/01/28))

"Satellites Said to See Activity at North Korean Nuclear Site" (David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, The New York Times, 2003/01/31)
"American spy satellites over North Korea have detected what appear to be trucks moving the country's stockpile of 8,000 nuclear fuel rods out of storage, prompting fears within the Bush administration that North Korea is preparing to produce roughly a half dozen nuclear weapons, American officials said today. ...
American intelligence analysts have informally concluded that the movement of the rods, combined with other activity that now appears to be under way at the Yongbyon complex, could allow North Korea to begin producing bomb-grade plutonium by the end of March."

"Al-Qaeda 'was making dirty bomb'" (BBC News, 2003/01/31)
"British officials have presented evidence which they claim shows that al-Qaeda had been trying to assemble radioactive material to build a so-called dirty bomb. They have shown the BBC previously undisclosed material backing up their claim. It includes secret intelligence from agents sent by Britain into al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Posing as recruits, they blended in and reported back. ...
The government says evidence suggests that by 1999, Bin Laden's priority was to develop a weapon of mass destruction. He had acquired radioactive isotopes from the Taleban to do this, officials said, adding that development work on the "dirty bomb" had been going on in a nuclear laboratory in the Afghan city of Herat."

"Afghan blast leaves many dead" (BBC News, 2003/01/31)
"A powerful explosion has killed at least 18 people near the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, authorities say. The victims were travelling on a bus which was crossing a bridge when the explosion occurred. There are conflicting reports as to what caused the blast, with police blaming it on a bomb planted by Taleban or al-Qaeda factions."

Thursday, January 30, 2003

News and commentary:

"Anti-American Studies" (Alan Wolfe, The New Republic, 2003/01/30)
An interesting essay on American studies turning anti-American: "Yet the third generation and the fourth generation of scholars in the field not only reject the writers who gave life to the discipline, they have also developed a hatred for America so visceral that it makes one wonder why they bother studying America at all. ...
When they go abroad to denounce America to foreign students, these scholars practice a kind of imperialism in reverse, informing young idealists abroad that the America they tend to admire is actually a fiction, and a detestable place. The results can be rather comic. One of the contributors to the Pease and Wiegman book, Dana Heller of Old Dominion University, describes her efforts to offer a Marxist interpretation of Death of a Salesman to students at Moscow State University. Fortunately for American diplomacy, her students could have cared less; they were much more impressed by an episode of The Simpsons that parodied one of Willy Loman's speeches."

"The Fire Last Time" (Zainab Al-Suwaij, The New Republic, 2003/01/30)
Al-Suwaij's riveting account of the uprising against Saddam Hussein 1991, when she joined the rebels in Karbala: "With makeshift weapons and our own bodies, we began to confront the Iraqi soldiers who had entered the town in recent days yet who were already weakened by weeks of allied bombing, desertions, and the army's withdrawal from Kuwait. The soldiers started firing on the crowd--the first time I had ever seen live shooting. Caught up in the frenzy of noise and excitement, I didn't run for cover. Instead, I kept shouting along with the others, "Down with Saddam!" Years of anger within me came pouring out.
Even with its guns, the army was no match for us that day. The angry crowds surged toward the soldiers' trucks and jeeps despite the rain of bullets. They swarmed en masse all over the military's vehicles and forced the troops out of their cars so that the soldiers could not possibly shoot at all the waves of rebels. Many soldiers threw down their weapons and ran off down the street, chased by the crowd. Many were caught and some were beaten; most who were captured were taken to the Imam Hussein shrine, which became a makeshift headquarters for the rebels and a detention center for army troops. I saw one older soldier who escaped the crowds banging on my neighbor's door, crying. He asked to be hidden or at least given some civilian clothes that might save him."

"NYT on Iraq - A Fisking" (Andrew Sullivan, Salon.com/andrewsullivan.com, 2003/01/30)
Sullivan dissects a New York Times editorial: "So let's get this straight. Even if Saddam has chemical and biological weapons; even if he is in clear violation of U.N. resolutions; even if he and his proxies amount to a dire threat against the lives of Americans, the U.S. president should do nothing unless the French, Germans and Russians agree. This isn't foreign policy. It's the abdication of foreign policy. And it's certainly a direct assault upon the credibility of the United Nations. ...
The Times believes that Saddam is evil; that he is a real threat to the region and the West; that he has and is trying to gain more wepaons of mass destruction, and that the U.N. inspectors cannot disarm him. But the Times also believes that, even after eleven years of Saddam's defying the U.N., that war should not be an option, that diplomacy can remove Saddam, that the French and Germans should have a veto over American foreign policy, and that time is on our side. That's their position. It is as incoherent as it is cowardly; as weak as it is afraid." (See also: "The Race to War" (The New York Times, 2003/01/26))

"Shoe Bomber Sentenced to Life in Prison" (Denise Lavoie, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/01/30)
"Richard Reid, the al-Qaida follower who tried to blow up a trans-Atlantic jetliner with explosives hidden in his shoes, was sentenced to life in prison Thursday by a judge who warned him: "We are not afraid ... We are Americans. We have been through the fire before." The 29-year-old British citizen cried, "You will be judged by Allah!" before being dragged from the courtroom in handcuffs. ...
"We are not afraid of any of your terrorist co-conspirators, Mr. Reid," said the judge. "We are Americans. We have been through the fire before.
"You are not an enemy combatant — you are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war — you are a terrorist. To call you a soldier gives you far too much stature. You are a terrorist and we do not negotiate with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice."
The judge then pointed to the American flag behind him and said: "You see that flag, Mr. Reid? That's the flag of the United States of America. That flag will fly there long after this is long forgotten."
"That flag will be brought down on the day of judgment," Reid replied."

"Mandela Blasts Bush on Iraq, Warns of 'Holocaust'" (Toby Reynolds, Reuters, 2003/01/30)
Sigh: "'It is a tragedy what is happening, what Bush is doing in Iraq,' Mandela told an audience in Johannesburg. "What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust," he added, to loud applause.
"Both Bush as well as Tony Blair are undermining an idea (the United Nations) which was sponsored by their predecessors," Mandela said. "Is this because the secretary general of the United Nations (Ghanaian Kofi Annan) is now a black man? They never did that when secretary generals were white." ... 'lf there is a country which has committed unspeakable atrocities, it is the United States of America...They don't care for human beings.'" (See also: "Mandela Backs 'Holocaust'" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2003/01/30): "But according to Reuters, Mandela also "said he would support without reservation any action agreed upon by the United Nations against Iraq." So it seems Mandela is all for a "holocaust" - provided the French and Germans approve.")

"United We Stand" (José María Aznar et al., The Wall Street Journal, 2003/01/30)
Amen. An article written by eight European leaders - Jose María Aznar, Jose-Manuel Durão Barroso, Silvio Berlusconi, Tony Blair, Vaclav Havel, Peter Medgyessy, Leszek Miller and Anders Fogh Rasmussen: "The attacks of 11 September showed just how far terrorists — the enemies of our common values — are prepared to go to destroy them. Those outrages were an attack on all of us. In standing firm in defence of these principles, the governments and people of the United States and Europe have amply demonstrated the strength of their convictions. Today more than ever, the transatlantic bond is a guarantee of our freedom.
We in Europe have a relationship with the United States which has stood the test of time. Thanks in large part to American bravery, generosity and far-sightedness, Europe was set free from the two forms of tyranny that devastated our continent in the 20th century: Nazism and Communism. Thanks, too, to the continued cooperation between Europe and the United States we have managed to guarantee peace and freedom on our continent. The transatlantic relationship must not become a casualty of the current Iraqi regime's persistent attempts to threaten world security."

"The Rot in Our Universities" (Daniel Pipes, National Post/danielpipes.org, 2003/01/30)
Pipes on his speech at York University in Toronto: "I spoke in a curtained-off section of the university's main basketball court. The venue had been locked-down for 24 hours before the event. Admission was severely limited. Only students could attend and they had to pick up tickets the day before. At the gymnasium they showed identification, then went through a gauntlet of metal-detectors and friskings. A hundred police officers, some 10 of them on horseback, hovered ubiquitously, tensed for trouble. Substantial parts of the campus were blocked off.
As for me, several bodyguards took me through a back entrance to the gym and sequestered me in a holding room until I entered the gym. But surely the most memorable aspect of this talk was the briefing by James Hogan, a detective in the Hate Crime Unit of the Toronto Police Service, to make sure I was aware that Canada's Criminal Code makes a variety of public statements actionable, including advocating genocide (up to five years in prison) and promoting hatred of a specific group (up to two years).
My visit to York confirms, as if one needed more proof, that the North American university has become - in the words of Abigail Thernstrom - "an island of repression in a sea of freedom." This problem was inadvertently but succinctly captured by a newspaper headline a few days back: "York University to allow talk by pro-Israel academic." Imagine that!" (See also: "York University to allow talk by pro-Israel academic" (Caroline Alphonso, The Globe and Mail/Campus Watch, 2003/01/25))

"No ambiguity" (David Warren, Ottawa Citizen/DavidWarrenOnline, 2003/01/30)
"While Israelis were divided on many issues of personality, tactics, and domestic policy, and were in a grim mood with politicians, they were overwhelmingly clear on one point. Labour, the only political party that still supported the "Oslo process" in any form, was annihilated. The hard fact, for diplomacy, is that a people subjected to constant terrorist attacks will either capitulate or defend themselves; they will not negotiate with the terrorists. And in the case of the Israelis - this Jewish people with the experience of Auschwitz in their blood and in their souls, surrounded once more by murderous hatred - there can be no capitulation." (Note: Thanks to Barry Kaplovitz for pointing out David Warren's site, which I somehow had managed to miss.)

"Mostafa's bride was guilty of a little window dressing" (Ian Cobain and Lewis Smith, The Times, 2003/01/30)
Londonistan V. A profile of Sheikh' Abu Hamza al-Masri "the one-eyed, hook-handed imam of Finsbury Park mosque":
"Abu Hamza lives in Shepherd's Bush, West London, where he is thought to have been paid £100,000 in welfare benefits over the past three years, including three types of disability payments, income support, housing benefit and help with fuel bills.
Meanwhile, Ms Traverso, now Valerie Fleming, is living in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, with her fourth husband, and has refused to speak about her marriage to Abu Hamza. Their son Mohammed, who is now 21, served three years in a Yemeni jail after he was convicted of plotting terrorist attacks on British targets. He is now living with his father and is also believed to be claiming welfare benefits."

Added in archive:
"Lunatic asylum policy" (Rod Liddle, The Spectator, from the 2003/01/25 issue)

Wednesday, January 29, 2003

News and commentary:

"And now for some thoughts from Osama" (Tim Blair, The Australian, 2003/01/30)
"In the interests of fairness and balance we present Osama bin Laden's 2003 State of the Union address, as delivered yesterday to his ecstatic followers: ... We have faced the mildest, most measured attack our enemies could throw at us, and we have been rapidly defeated at almost every turn. The Muslim people have not risen as one to join my lunatic quest, the West has not been intimidated (well, except for the French) and every prediction about a Vietnam-style quagmire in Afghanistan proved false. Why, only this week US and Afghan troops easily put down a small al-Qa'ida uprising. ...
Now to the case of my amigo in goodness, Saddam Hussein. The same people who predicted drawn-out warfare in Afghanistan with many thousands of civilian dead are predicting the same thing for Iraq. This prediction, it is a curse. I fear for Saddam. All of his glorious fundraising for the families of Palestinian suicide killers and the holy slaughter of his countrymen will mean nothing if the reverse-curse of the inaccurate Western commentators again comes true."

"Rashid Redux" (Martin Kramer, Sandstorm, 2003/01/29)
Kramer on the Middle East "expert" Rashid Khalidi: "Now that he's definitely New York-bound, he can say it out loud: this war is the project of "crackpot" neoconservatives who "dominate the commanding heights of the American bureaucracy." And (wink) we know who they work for:

"This war will be fought because these neoconservatives desire to make the Middle East safe not for democracy, but for Israeli hegemony. They are convinced that the Middle East is irremediably hostile to both the United States and Israel; and they firmly hold the racist view that Middle Easterners understand only force. For these American Likudniks and their Israeli counterparts, sad to say, the tragedy of September 11 was a godsend: It enabled them to draft the United States to help fight Israel's enemies."

This is about as close as you can get in America today to the charge of dual loyalty, and the claim that Washington is run by a Zionist conspiracy, without coming across as a "crackpot" yourself." (See also: "Attack Iraq?" (Rashid Khalidi, In These Times, 2003/01/27))

"Iraq to chair U.N. disarmament conference" (CNN.com, 2003/01/29)
"Iraq will chair the United Nations' most important disarmament negotiating forum during the panel's May session. At the rules-minded United Nations, it's not a country's status with international weapons inspectors, but the letters in its name that determine which member state chairs the Conference on Disarmament. "The irony is overwhelming," a U.S. diplomat said."

"Axis of Feeble" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2003/01/29)
"The North Korean "news" agency KCNA "reports" that Pyongyang's decision to withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty "was supported on a worldwide scale." Among those approving of the crazy commie regime's actions: the Latin American Institute of the Juche Idea, the Workers' Communist Party of Norway, the Palestine Liberation Democratic Front, the Syrian Arab-Korea Friendship Association, the New Left Movement of Peru, and the Maracai branch of the Liberators' University of Experiment and Education of Venezuela." (See also: "International support to DPRK Government statement" (KCNA, 2003/01/28))

"Cowboys Welcome in Kurdistan" (Mary Ann Smothers Bruni, The Washington Post, 2003/01/29)
"As American troops move into the Persian Gulf and George W. Bush wags an angry finger at Saddam Hussein, a nervous euphoria is descending on Iraqi Kurdistan, the enclave in northern Iraq protected by the "no-fly" zone and governed by Iraq's rebel Kurdistan Regional Government. The feeling is very different from that in Europe, where the American president is constantly being admonished for his "cowboy" tendencies.
"Occupy us - please!" a Kurdish man on the street demands of an American visitor. Indeed, the main fear of Iraqi Kurds I spoke to is that Washington will not attack.
"Iraqi officials warn us that Bush is all talk, that America will not invade," says Ismet Aguid, a former Iraqi foreign service officer. 'But we remain optimistic.'" (Note: Found via the sharp-eyed Occam's Toothbrush.)

"Europeans Warn of Terror Attacks in Event of War in Iraq" (Marlise Simons, The New York Times, 2003/01/29)
"European investigators have evidence that over the past six months, Islamic militants have been recruiting hundreds of fellow Muslims to carry out attacks in the event of a war against Iraq, according to French and other European antiterrorism experts. A French expert, who requested anonymity, said one threat to Europe came from radical groups who have links with Chechnya and have learned how to make chemical weapons, either at training camps in Afghanistan or while serving in the Soviet Army. He said Chechnya was now a kind of "neo-Afghanistan," a new training ground and staging area for anti-Western terrorists. ...
European investigators said that the shadowy new groups that have moved into Europe, many of them made up of North Africans from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, were well instructed on how to flit from country to country in the border-free European Union, and that they mostly financed themselves — to the tune of $10,000 to $15,000 a week — through common criminal activities like credit card fraud, making it difficult to follow a money trail."

"Blair is a coward" (John Pilger, The Daily Mirror, 2003/01/29)
Or: "Pilger is a balanced historian". I haven't posted anything by Pilger before and this is as good an example as any of his topsy-turvy worldview, comparing America with the Third Reich: "Unelected in 2000, the Washington regime of George W Bush is now totalitarian, captured by a clique whose fanaticism and ambitions of "endless war" and "full spectrum dominance" are a matter of record. All the world knows their names: Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Perle, and Powell, the false liberal. Bush's State of the Union speech last night was reminiscent of that other great moment in 1938 when Hitler called his generals together and told them: "I must have war." He then had it. ...
The current American elite is the Third Reich of our times, although this distinction ought not to let us forget that they have merely accelerated more than half a century of unrelenting American state terrorism: from the atomic bombs dropped cynically on Japan as a signal of their new power to the dozens of countries invaded, directly or by proxy, to destroy democracy wherever it collided with American "interests", such as a voracious appetite for the world's resources, like oil."

"The Left's Silence on Islamic Fundamentalism" (Stephen Brown, FrontPageMagazine, 2003/01/29)
"Another case of leftist tolerance for what it would normally consider intolerable concerns the latest Toronto school board elections, in which two Muslim candidates ran for trustee positions on anti-homosexual platforms. Again, the Left mounted no shrill campaign against them, a striking occurrence when one considers how close the homosexual issue is to its heart. Normally in such cases, leftists would have howled louder and longer than a back-alley tomcat that just had its testicles stepped on, especially if the candidates were Christian fundamentalists. ...
Muslim fundamentalist intolerance is the rock on which Canada's ship of multiculturalism will eventually founder. Some leftists realize this, but fear to confront it, since to do so would reveal they have been wrong about multiculturalism for the past thirty years – and that it was never realizable in the first place. Like with the Soviet Union, Canadian multiculturalism is another failed leftist experiment. But the Canadian Left would rather stay silent and witness a complete collapse of its dream than admit that yet another one of its destructive, social-engineering theories is a catastrophe."

"Answer this: do the people of Iraq deserve freedom?" (Janet Daley, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/01/29)
"But is also about removing a regime that is guilty of genocide, that has made use of chemical weapons banned for generations by international conventions and that has, through its sponsorship of Palestinian suicide bombing, made any peaceful settlement in the Middle East virtually impossible.
This is where I find the case of the more rabid anti-war (which is to say, anti-American) party not only dishonest, but also deeply hypocritical. There are those who argue not only against going to war to remove Saddam, but also that economic sanctions against his regime should be lifted.
Shall we try to imagine what these voices of the liberal conscience would have said if the white South African authorities had used chemical weapons against the black population in Soweto? Would they have been arguing for British inaction and a lifting of economic sanctions against Pretoria?"

"Here Comes the New Europe" (Anne Applebaum, The Washington Post, 2003/01/29)
"Old Europe. If Rumsfeld had been deliberately searching for a way to simultaneously irritate the leadership of Europe's two largest countries, expose their deepest national insecurities and undermine the entire European Union political project, which has long revolved around a "Franco-German axis," he couldn't have found a better way to put it. He was also, as it happens, correct, possibly more correct than he knows. Although all concerned vociferously deny it, Europe is indeed beginning to divide - slowly, unevenly but perceptibly - into two very distinct camps."

"Next Stop: War" (Terry Eastland, The Weekly Standard, 2003/01/29)
"And you can count on this: The war will start soon. ... Bush soberly stated the threat Saddam Hussein presents to the Middle East and the world. He cited credible authorities as to weapons and materials they believe Saddam possesses. And repeatedly Bush said, "He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them." Bush's unequivocal conclusion about Saddam: "The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary, he is deceiving."
That statement was one of three that make me think war is imminent. Bush also related the terrible ways in which Saddam tortures his own people, whereupon he commented: "if this is not evil, then evil has no meaning." That was the second statement, and you could tell Saddam's evil truly infuriates him. The third came just afterwards, when Bush addressed the Iraqi people - absent from the Capitol but oh-so-present - and said, "Your enemy is not surrounding you - your enemy is ruling your country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation."
Colin Powell will go to the U.N. Security Council next week, and Bush himself will probably speak to the nation once more. You can almost hear the tanks of the liberators rolling into Baghdad."

"Neither a Realist Nor a Liberal, W. Is a Liberator" (Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/01/29)
"Realists and liberals approach the world from different directions, but when it comes to Iraq, both ended up in the same place: generating excuses for inaction. President Bush, by contrast, does not speak of merely containing or disarming Iraq. He intends to liberate Iraq by force, and create democracy in a land that for decades has known only dictatorship. Moreover, he insists that these principles apply to American foreign policy more broadly. ...
Hence, the Bush strategy enshrines "regime change" - the insistence that when it comes to dealing with tyrannical regimes like Iraq, Iran, and, yes, North Korea, the U.S. should seek transformation, not coexistence, as a primary aim of U.S. foreign policy. As such, it commits the U.S. to the task of maintaining and enforcing a decent world order. Just as it was with the Bush team's predecessors, Iraq will be the first major test of this administration's strategy.
It will not be the last."

Tuesday, January 28, 2003

News and commentary:

"State of the Union Address by President George W. Bush" (The White House, 2003/01/28)
"Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans - this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known. We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes. (Applause.)
Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option. (Applause.)"

"Sharon's Likud seen sweeping to victory" (Haaretz, 2003/01/28)
"Ariel Sharon crushed Israel's left Tuesday to become the first incumbent Israeli prime minister to win re-election since the 1980's. Television projections released immediately as polling stations closed Tuesday night showed Sharon's Likud sweeping to victory in the elections for the 16th Knesset, garnering 35 seats, with the Knesset's right-wing bloc predicted to capture up to 67 seats in the 120-seat house. ... Labor's showing was the worst in the history of the once-dominant party that ruled Israel for the first 29 years of its existence."

"'What's wrong .... You never seen a politician kissing babies before?"
(Dave Brown, Independent, 2003/01/27)

"Der Sturmer in the UK?" (HonestReporting, 2003/01/28)
A communiqué on the sick cartoon above: "The worst media offense was a political cartoon published in The Independent, which depicts Ariel Sharon biting into the flesh of a Palestinian baby. The background shows Apache attack helicopters firing missiles, and blaring the message "Vote Likud." The cartoon not only misrepresents the real reason for the IDF operations - to stop the incessant missile attacks on Jewish communities, but the imagery is akin to something out of the Nazi "Der Sturmer" or the current Syrian press. That the mainstream British media could publish such a vile depiction of the Israeli leader speaks volumes about the anti-Israel climate sweeping Europe today."

"Pragmatic Pacifism" (Lee Harris, Tech Central Station, 2003/01/28)
"Had the world community been able to debate this question prior to the First Gulf War, someone might have made the following two points: "First of all, if a regime has behaved in a way that has made our sons have to kill their sons, then how can we allow it to remain and look ourselves in the face? Of course we must punish them, or what is the point of any concept of international justice? If a tyrant does not forfeit his power after he has been vanquished in a war that he brought about himself when attacking another country, then let us drop all pretense at aspiring to an universal standard of justice for all the world.
And, secondly, if we are expecting one nation to do this job, we must allow it to do it as it thinks best. Either we do not ask it to act as our agent in the first place, or we must back it up to the full when the time comes for it to act. Those are our only moral alternatives."
But no one faced these questions prior to the First Gulf War. And so there are the questions we are facing now.
If the international community supported the First Gulf War overwhelmingly, which clearly it did, it is morally committed to supporting the current policy of the United States and the failure to realize this connection can be most charitably ascribed to intellectual dishonesty."

"Stupidity Watch" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2003/01/28)
"The Daily Dartmouth reports that Paul Robeson Jr., son of the civil rights leader, spoke at the Hanover, N.H., campus, where he managed to liken President Bush to Stalin, Hitler and Jefferson Davis: "As a scholar of Russian studies, Robeson said that the Homeland Security Act was modeled after a collection of documents authored by Joseph Stalin and that President Bush "is part of a neo-Confederate government geared at destroying the Union." Several times during his speech Robeson mentioned the dominance of the Republican Party and the popularity of President Bush in the Southern states, making allusions to Hitler's support from southern areas of Germany. According to Robeson, there is an over-representation of white southern Protestants in Washington, including Senators Trent Lott and Bill Frist, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and Vice President Dick Cheney. Robeson also said that while certain politicians may be more polite on the outside than Trent Lott they are all 'made of the same stuff.'" (See also: "Robeson: Bush govt. is 'neo-Confederate'" (Jessica Spradling, The Dartmouth Online, 2003/01/24))

"Students freed from Kenyan 'torture'" (BBC News, 2003/01/28)
"Kenyan police have rescued 11 boys from an Islamic correctional centre in the capital, Nairobi, where they were kept in chains and tortured. Most of the teenagers came from Kenya, but others were from the United Kingdom, Sweden and Ethiopia. In a dramatic raid at the Khadija Islamic Institute of Discipline and Education, the police were forced to fire in the air to fight off residents pelting them with them stones - before rescuing 10 teenagers who were being held at the centre. ... Fellow student Abdikalik Jama from Eldoret in western Kenya talked of four months of torture and beatings: 'We sleep in chains, eat in chains, go to the toilets in chains. Sometimes we are hooked on the roof in chains and left hanging. We have to memorise the Koran and get punished if we cannot recite the Koran in the classroom.'"

"A Soldier Reports on Al-Qaida Fight" (AP/Newsday.com, 2003/01/28)
Air Force Staff Sgt. Kevin Vance's story of a battle in Afghanistan last march, has "mysteriously made it onto the Internet": "One team member was on the ramp with a hole in his head. There was no mistaking that he was dead. The second team member was at the end of the ramp face down in the snow.... The last deceased team member was lying on his back at the end of the ramp not moving. These three ... had died from enemy fire... I figured out which way we were being engaged from and I sought cover behind a cutout in the rock face. It was just big enough for four team members to kneel behind it. We set up a perimeter. Two other members were back to my right and three members to my left. I was closest to the enemy. There were two enemies about 50 meters north of us near a tree. There was one enemy behind me and to the right already dead. There were some more enemies to the south coming out. Then we started to engage the enemy." (See also the entire affidavit: "Interview of SSgt Kevin Vance 25 March 2002 Bagram, Afghanistan" (patriotvocals.info, January 2003))

"Scientists get death notices" (Niles Lathem, New York Post, 2003/01/28)
"Saddam Hussein has ordered official death certificates sent to Iraqi scientists' families as a chilling warning against aiding U.N. inspectors, The Post has learned. Word of the death certificates containing prominent scientists' names has reached Iraqi exile groups. "The message is, they will die a terrible death if they cooperate - and the death will be legally listed as an accident or result of an illness," said one exile. Iraqi scientists have refused to speak to U.N. weapons inspectors without government minders present."

"Blair must turn a deaf ear to the siren calls of appeasers" (John Keegan, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/01/28)
"The objection to war now stated is not the danger it threatens to one's own side, but, paradoxically, that it threatens against the other. It has become commonplace for the appeasers to speak of "millions of deaths" among the opponents' civilian population and to warn of widespread ecological and economic disaster. War itself, not the suffering to Britain that it might bring, is now the enemy. So the blacker the horrors painted, the better the new appeasement's cause is served.
Most of this horror is spurious. Western armed forces are now so efficient and their weapons so precise that, as was demonstrated in Kosovo, even an intense bombing campaign kills very few civilians and does the minimum of damage to the opponents' infrastructure.
The appeasers, with half their minds, know this to be the case. That produces a dilemma. If a war to deprive an opponent of his weapons of mass destruction will not harm our own side, will do little harm to the other's population and is unlikely to cause material disaster, what is the point of appeasement?"

"Why Europe Balks" (Daniel Pipes, New York Post/danielpipes.org, 2003/01/28)
"Gelernter proposes that 1920s-style self-hatred is now "a dominant force in Europe." And appeasement fits this mood perfectly, having grown over the decades into a worldview "that teaches the blood-guilt of Western man, the moral bankruptcy of the West and the outrageousness of Western civilization's attempting to impose its values on anyone else."
Which brings us back to the unwillingness of "old Europe" to confront Saddam Hussein. World War II's lesson (strike before an aggressive tyrant builds his power) has lost out to the '20s attitude ("nothing justifies envisaging military action").
This self-hating weakness will lead again to disaster, no less than it did leading up to World War II. The United States finds itself having to lead the democracies away from the lure of appeasement. Iraq is a good place to start." (See also: "The Roots of European Appeasement" (David Gelernter, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/09/23 issue))

"U.S. to Make Iraq Intelligence Public" (Bob Woodward, The Washington Post, 2003/01/28)
"The Bush administration has assembled what it believes to be significant intelligence showing that Iraq has been actively moving and concealing banned weapons systems and related equipment from United Nations inspectors, according to informed sources. ... "The United States possesses several pieces of information which come from the work of our intelligence that show Iraq maintains prohibited weapons," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in an interview published yesterday in an Italian newspaper. 'Once we have made sure it can be done safely, I think that in the next week or soon after we can make public a good part of this material.'"

"Bush to show direct link of Iraq, al Qaeda" (Joseph Curl, The Washington Times, 2003/01/28)
"The Bush administration will present new evidence directly linking Saddam Hussein with the al Qaeda terrorist group to bolster the White House position that the United Nations should get "one last chance" to enforce its resolutions on Iraq, a senior official said yesterday. ... Declaring that the administration has evidence of an al Qaeda-Iraq connection, Mr. Powell said, "The information that we can divulge in greater detail, we will be divulging in the days ahead." The senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Mr. Powell will deliver fresh, "convincing" evidence of a connection between Saddam and the terrorist group after Friday's Camp David meeting between President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair."

Monday, January 27, 2003

News and commentary:

"U.N. Inspectors Issue Tough Report on Iraq Disarmament" (Colum Lynch, The Washington Post, 2003/01/27)
"The U.N.'s chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, told the Security Council today that Iraq "appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance" of its disarmament obligations, citing concerns that Baghdad has failed to disclose key elements of its biological and chemical weapons programs and staged protests in recent weeks to harass the inspectors. But Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, underscored the value of continued intrusive inspections in disarming Iraq. ...
"There is little time left for the council to face its responsibilities," John D. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations told the Security Council. "We see no evidence to indicate that Saddam is voluntarily disarming his nations of its biological, chemical weapons, nuclear capabilities and ballistic missiles."
Russia, France, Syria, Germany and China said that the inspections process is working and they should be given more time to complete their work." (See also: "Text: Blix Delivers Report to U.N." (The Washington Post, 2003/01/27))

"'The Shah Always Falls'" (Fredric Smoler, American Heritage, from the February/March 2003 issue)
A must-read interview with Ralph Peters: "But I do believe the last couple of centuries demonstrate that cultures that oppress women, that don't have freedom of information, that don't value secular education, that have one dominant religion that infects the state and has power over the state, and whose basic unit of social organization is a clan, tribe, or extended family are just not going to compete with the West and especially with the United States. So I'm extremely pessimistic about the old Islamic heartland.
I personally feel that we've made a grotesque mistake aligning ourselves with the most oppressive of the Arabs, with the Arab world's Beverly Hillbillies. Other Arabs built Damascus, Córdoba, Baghdad, Cairo. The Saudis never built anything. The fact that they came into their oil wealth was a disaster, not for us but for the Arab world, because it gave these malevolent hicks raw economic power over the populations of poor Islamic states, such as Egypt. The line about Al Qaeda that's absolutely true is that Saudis supplied the money and Egyptians supplied the brains. So Saudi money, spent to support their grotesquely repressive version of one of the world's great religions, has been a disaster for the Arab world." (See also: "Stability, America's Enemy" (Ralph Peters, Parameters, from the Winter 2001-02 issue) and "Rolling Back Radical Islam" (Ralph Peters, Parameters, from the Autumn 2002 issue))

"The Jihadis' Tale" (Simon Elegant and Jason Tedjasukmana, TIME, 2003/01/27)
An article on confidential documents with confessions made by the two main conspirators in the Bali terror attack: "The biggest revelation from Mukhlas' 30-page confession concerns al-Qaeda and bin Laden himself. A self-professed senior leader in JI, Mukhlas says that "because of [his] Arabic language skills," he was introduced to bin Laden in a town in Afghanistan called Joji in the late 1980s. Mukhlas doesn't describe the meeting in detail, but does divulge that he and other top JI personnel were careful to nurture these ties to bin Laden and al-Qaeda in the years that followed. And Mukhlas says he believes al-Qaeda money was directly responsible for the bombs set off in Kuta, Bali, which were paid for out of a $25,000 grant provided to the plotters by Riduan (Hambali) Isamuddin, then JI's operations chief. ... In summing up their interrogation of Mukhlas, the Indonesian investigators echo this assertion, categorically concluding: 'Jemaah Islamiah's jihad operations were funded by al-Qaeda.'"

"Looking on the Bright Side" (Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, from the 2003/02/03 issue)
Zakaria on the potential benefits of a successful war in Iraq: "Of course, not everyone would be helped by a successful war. The ruling elites in the Middle East — particularly those that remain stubbornly set in their old ways — will be challenged, threatened and eventually overturned. For these potentates and their courtiers it would mean the end of one of the richest gravy trains in history. That is why they will fight change as fiercely as they can. But for the people of the Middle East, after the shock of the war fades, it could mean a chance to break out of the terrible stagnancy in which they now sit.
There are always risks involved when things change. But for the past 40 years the fear of these risks has paralyzed Western policy toward the Middle East. And what has come of this caution? Repression, radical Islam and terror. I'll take my chances with change."

"How the Home Office makes life easy for Algerian terrorists" (Harriet Sergeant, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/01/27)
Londonistan IV: "Our asylum system is a terrorist's social service. We could not do more to welcome the enemy into our country and make him feel at home. We even provide means and a background from which he can operate in ease and safety.
Twenty North Africans have been arrested this month amid fears of an imminent terrorist attack. Of the 16 Algerians detained, including the ricin poison suspects, 10 appear either to be or to have been seeking asylum. ...
Now the authorities cannot find the 3,000 Algerian asylum seekers they want to interview. This will come as no surprise to anyone involved in the surreal world of our immigration service. One police superintendent sought information on the 300 asylum seekers turning up each month to report at his station. The Home Office reacted with an embarrassed silence. Finally it admitted it had not a single record of any of the asylum seekers. ... Events last week demonstrate it is not just Home Office records that have been shot to pieces, but also the concept of asylum itself - not only by terrorists, but also by our own politicians and judges. The interests of the outsider are paramount: the security of the ordinary citizen, surely the first duty of any government, is all but forgotten."

"Said Says Nothing" (Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, 2003/01/27)
Sullivan on Edward Said's latest piece in The Guardian: "Here's his defense of Arab culture today:
"Why is there now no last testimonial to an era of history, to a civilisation about to be crushed and transformed utterly, to a society that, despite its drawbacks and weaknesses, nevertheless goes on functioning? Arab babies are born every hour, children go to school, men and women marry and work and have children, they play and laugh and eat, they are sad, they suffer illness and death. There is love and companionship, friendship and excitement. Yes, Arabs are repressed and misruled, terribly misruled, but they manage to go on with the business of living despite everything."
That's it? An acknowledgment of Arab misrule, but then a celebration of pure banality. Why didn't he add that Arabs also blow their noses and cut their hair? Is there any society in which these everyday things don't go on?" (See also: "When will we resist?" (Edward Said, The Guardian, 2003/01/25))

"'Final Opportunity' for the U.N." (Robert L. Bartley, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/01/27)
"The issue, rather, is whether Mr. Blix, Mr. Annan, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin and the rest were serious in the 15-0 vote supporting Resolution 1441 last November. Point 13 noted that the Security Council "has repeatedly warned Iraq that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its obligations."
"No, no, no," the "world opinion" chorus now chants, "those were only words, never intended to have any consequence." ... So now the United Nations has a final opportunity to prove itself a serious place - or at least for democracies such as Germany and France to show that their words mean something when they vote for Security Council Resolutions. They can't expect to be serious players in the world if they leave President Bush and his "coalition of the willing" to take enforcement of Resolution 1441 into their own hands."

"Powell ties Saddam regime to al Qaeda" (Nicholas Kralev, The Washington Times, 2003/01/27)
"In a major foreign policy speech before political and business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell pledged to work with allies and other countries to disarm Saddam peacefully, but he told a packed hall that "multilateralism cannot become an excuse for inaction." ... He pointed to a direct link between Saddam's regime and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network, although he stopped short of suggesting that Iraq has anything to do with the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington. "The more we wait, the more chance there is for this dictator with clear ties to terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, to pass a weapon, share technology or use these weapons again. The nexus of tyrants and terror, of terrorists and weapons of mass destruction is the greatest danger of our age," he said." (See also: "Remarks at the World Economic Forum" (Colin L. Powell, U.S: Department of State, 2003/01/26))

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

 

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"When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label."

Jacques Barzun

Articles of the week

"Losing the Enlightenment" (Victor Davis Hanson, OpinionJournal, 2006/11/29)

"Allah’s England?" (Daniel Johnson, Commentary. November 2006)

"'Sex in the Park': The latest doings of the Danish imams" (Henrik Bering, The Weekly Standard, 2006/11/18)

"Narcissism on Stilts" (Harold Evans, New York Sun, 2006/11/16)

"Terrorists are recruiting in our schools, says MI5 boss" (Philip Johnston, The Daily Telegraph, 2006/11/10)

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From the archives

Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.

"The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt" (Oriana Fallaci, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/03/13)

"How the West Was Won and How It Will Be Lost" (Oriana Fallaci, The American Enterprise, from the January/February 2003 issue)

"On Jew-hatred in Europe" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2002/04/13)

"Anger and Pride" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2001/12/19)

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