Archived news and commentary: February 10 - 16, 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 16, 2003

News and commentary:

"'Bin Laden' tape urges 'jihad': Excerpts" (BBC News, 2003/02/16)
"A new message said to be from the fugitive al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden has been broadcast on several Arabic-language websites.": "Jihad today is compulsory for the entire ummah and she will remain in sin until she produces her sons, wealth and power to the extent of being able to wage jihad and defend all Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere against the evil of the disbelievers.
It is incumbent upon believers to wage jihad to establish the truth and eradicate falsehood...
It is incumbent upon the ummah to protect the jihad that exists today and support it with every means, as this jihad is a very valuable asset to us, as in Palestine, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Indonesia, the Philippines and other Muslim lands.
Despite the enemies' vicious attacks, the banner of jihad in these lands is not remaining aloft except by the grace of God and the extreme efforts and sacrifices of the mujahidin with their blood and skulls..."

"The marchers are doing Saddam's work" (David Pryce-Jones, The Sunday Telegraph, 2003/02/16)
"Behind the demonstrators' slogans lies the assumption that Arabs should be left alone: they don't mind being brutalised, tortured and murdered by a fascist thug like Saddam. Where they come from, it is the natural order of things.
That line of thought is nonsense. More than that - it is racist nonsense. No one knows better than the Arabs the horror of being oppressed. No one knows better than they that tyrannical oppression is all that they will get so long as Saddam and his family are in power. Saddam's despotism is not a denial of "Western" freedom: it's a denial of the freedom that every person needs to be able to live a worthwhile life. To imagine that the Iraqis don't want to be freed, or are not entitled to it, is simply to suppose that they are less human than us. ...
When he was in Rome recently, Barham Salih, the Prime Minister of Kurdish Iraq, said that he saw around him a parliamentary democracy in a country liberated by America from the fascist Mussolini. So it would be with Saddam. Salih's implication that a democratic, prosperous Iraq is the most likely outcome of an American invasion is absolutely right. It is a testament to the power of ignorance and prejudice that so many people in Britain cannot see it. Anyone looking for evidence of the decline of this country's moral and intellectual authority will find it in the thoughtless stampede with which the peace party has assembled."

"The Left isn't listening" (Nick Cohen, The Observer, 2003/02/16)
"The Iraqis made a fruitless appeal for fraternal solidarity last month. The Kurdish leader Barham Salih flew to a meeting of the Socialist International in Rome to argue for 'the imperative of freedom and liberation from fascism and dictatorship'. Those marchers who affect to believe in pluralism should find his arguments attractive, if they can suppress their prejudices long enough to hear him out. ...
...what he wasn't prepared for was the enmity of the anti-war movement. Foolishly, he tried to reason with it. He pointed out that the choice wasn't between war or peace. Saddam 'has been waging war for decades and he has inflicted hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.' Indeed, he continued, the ethnic cleansing of the Kurds who are still under Baghdad's control continues to this day. 'I do not want war and I do not want civilian casualties, nor do those who are coming to our assistance,' he said. 'But the war has already begun.' ...
The democrats are struggling without the support of Western liberals and socialists because they don't fit into a pat world view." (See also: "Speech presented by Dr Barham Salih Prime Minister, Kurdistan Regional Government - Iraq" (Barham Salih, PUK, 2003/01/20))

"Our hopes betrayed" (Kanan Makiya, The Observer, 2003/02/16)
"The United States is on the verge of committing itself to a post-Saddam plan for a military government in Baghdad with Americans appointed to head Iraqi ministries, and American soldiers to patrol the streets of Iraqi cities.
The plan, as dictated to the Iraqi opposition in Ankara last week by a United States-led delegation, further envisages the appointment by the US of an unknown number of Iraqi quislings palatable to the Arab countries of the Gulf and Saudi Arabia as a council of advisers to this military government. ...
The bureaucrats responsible for this plan are drawn from those parts of the administration that have always been hostile to the idea of a US-assisted democratic transformation of Iraq, a transformation that necessarily includes such radical departures for the region as the de-Baathification of Iraq (along the lines of the de-Nazification of post-war Germany), and the redesign of the Iraqi state as a non-ethnically based federal and democratic entity. ...
All of this is very likely to turn into an unmitigated disaster for a healthy long-term and necessarily special relationship between the United States and post-Saddam Iraq, something that virtually every Iraqi not complicit in the existing Baathist order wants."

"The Left versus Iraqi Democracy" (Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, 2003/02/16)
"I think yesterday's massive marches represent something deeply, deeply corrupt in the soul of the left: a form of Western self-loathing that, unless it is resisted, will lead not just to tyranny for more people in the Middle East, but for the slow erosion of Western freedom itself in the face of terror. The only response is resistance. Not from the governments in Washington and London; but from the rest of us. The lies must be challenged day by day, hour by hour. The self-hatred must be countered with calm recitation of the West's proud history; the excuses for tyranny opposed by a growing demand that the Arab world not be tool in the Western left's attempt to destroy Western freedom, but seen as a part of humanity that deserves the freedom that the rest of us enjoy. No justice. No peace. As the left used to say."

"The Other Front" (Ahmed Rashid, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/02/16)
"But Western diplomats in Kabul, Afghan leaders and secular Pakistani politicians are convinced that Pakistan is now pursuing a dual strategy that constitutes another U-turn on top of the U-turn after Sept., 11, 2001, when Gen. Musharraf dumped the army's support for the Taliban and sided with the U.S. ...
Western diplomats in Islamabad and Kabul, Afghan officials, and U.S. army officers at Bagram now strongly believe that elements of Pakistan's intelligence services and its religious parties are allowing the Taliban to regroup on the Pakistani side of the border. U.S. officers at Bagram say 90% of attacks they face are coming from groups based in Pakistan. ...
All this is part of a larger power play where Gen. Musharraf can claim to the Americans that he needs greater U.S. support because he is threatened by fundamentalists. This is a game that every Pakistani regime since the 1980s has played with Washington, and it has always worked. Western silence on these latest antics of the military is deeply demoralizing for Pakistan's liberal forces and secular democratic parties, not to speak of the hapless Afghans, who want to see stability and economic development."

"Anatomy of the Threat" (Daniel Klaidman and Evan Thomas, Newsweek, from the 2003/02/24 issue)
"The Code Orange warning was based on a pastiche of evidence, none of it definitive. The first clue turned up in a cave in Afghanistan many months ago, according to a knowledgeable official who has been extensively briefed on intelligence findings. American soldiers looking for Qaeda fighters found some documents suggesting that the terrorists had many of the elements it needed to build a radiological device, or dirty bomb. But they were missing an essential piece, possibly a mechanism of some kind for dispersing the radioactive particles. ...
Then in late January came a seemingly critical piece of human intelligence: the internal security service of an unnamed country said that a source had reported that the missing piece was now in place for a dirty-bomb attack — though the informant offered no date or place. ...
By the time the hysteria was peaking, intelligence officials were already second-guessing their dire warnings. The informant who warned of the attack on the Virginia Beach hotel, knowledgeable sources tell Newsweek, last week flunked a lie-detector test. And the tip from the informant that Al Qaeda had perfected a dirty bomb "didn't pan out," said another well-placed source, who added, 'This is what happens when you pay for intelligence.'"

"When the Enemy Is a Liberator" (John F. Burns, The New York Times, 2003/02/16)
A report from Jordan: "Almost to a man, these Iraqis said they wanted the Iraqi dictator removed. Better still, they said — and it was a point made again and again — they wanted him dead. The men, some in their teens, some in their 50's, told of grotesque repression, of relatives and friends tortured, raped and murdered or, as often, arrested and "disappeared."
But their hatred of Mr. Hussein had an equally potent counterpoint: for them, the country that would rid them of their leader was not at all a bastion of freedom, dispatching its legions across the seas to defend liberty, but a greedy, menacing imperial power. ...
The men refused to accept that their image of the United States might be distorted by the rigidly controlled Iraqi news media, which offer as unreal a picture of America as they do of Iraq. But when it was suggested that they could hardly wish to be liberated by a country they distrusted so much — that they might prefer President Bush to extend the United Nations weapons inspections and stand down the armada he has massed on Iraq's frontiers — they erupted in dismay.
"No, no, no!" one man said excitedly, and he seemed to speak for all. Iraqis, they said, wanted their freedom, and wanted it now. The message for Mr. Bush, they said, was that he should press ahead with war, but on conditions that spared ordinary Iraqis."

"Millions Worldwide Protest Iraq War" (Glenn Frankel, The Washington Post, 2003/02/16)
"Several million demonstrators took to the streets of Europe and the rest of the world today in a vast wave of protest against the prospect of a U.S.-led war against Iraq. ...
In London, a sea of protesters estimated by police at more than 750,000 flooded into Hyde Park and clogged streets for several miles on a crisp, clear day in what observers and organizers said was probably the largest political demonstration in British history. ...
Nearly 1 million people turned out in Rome, where Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has also supported the U.S. position. Between 300,000 and 500,000 people demonstrated in Berlin, at the largest rally since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. About 100,000 demonstrators poured through the streets of Paris."

Saturday, February 15, 2003

News and commentary:

"Peace in our time"
(Toby Melville/Reuters, 2003/02/15)

"Echoes of Appeasement" (Charles Johnson, Little Green Footballs, 2003/02/15)
Historically challenged. Johnson on the photo above: "Neither the protester holding this sign nor the Reuters copy editor who captioned the photo have any idea of the historical significance of its message, or what it says about the so-called "anti-war movement."
In September 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from the Munich Conference after throwing Czechoslovakia to the ravening Nazi wolves, and gave a speech that lives in infamy as a symbol of craven appeasement: Peace in Our Time. ...

"We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries, and we are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference, and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe."

Chamberlain read this statement to a cheering crowd in front of 10 Downing St. and said; "My good friends this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace in our time."

Having learned nothing from history — indeed, having learned no history at all — the fools above rush gleefully into the arms of dictators who promise peace."

"The latest from Paris" (The American Kaiser, 2003/02/15)
An eyewitness report from the "peace" rally in Paris, found via Little Green Footballs: "The rally today was hysterical. Iraqi and Palestinian flags were everywhere, and signs openly declared that the United States and Israel are Nazi regimes. One sign showed Bush with a Hitler mustache, and another featured Ariel Sharon slaughtering a Palestinian baby at a chopping block, with the words "Israel wants Palestinian blood." One of the rallying cries was "Kill Bush." Another, delivered in English, was "Hey Hey Ariel, Your stinking ass should go to jail." I kid you not. This rally was a display of anti-American and anti-Semitic sentiments the likes of which I have never before seen. But I had the opportunity to see French soldiers, which was nice. After all, there are no French soldiers on battlefields."

"I want to solve the Iraq issue via the United Nations" (Tony Blair, The Labour Party, 2003/02/15)
Blair's address to the Labor Party Conference in Glasgow: "There will be no march for the victims of Saddam, no protests about the thousands of children that die needlessly every year under his rule, no righteous anger over the torture chambers which if he is left in power, will be left in being.
I rejoice that we live in a country where peaceful protest is a natural part of our democratic process.
But I ask the marchers to understand this.
I do not seek unpopularity as a badge of honour. But sometimes it is the price of leadership. And the cost of conviction.
But as you watch your TV pictures of the march, ponder this:
If there are 500,000 on that march, that is still less than the number of people whose deaths Saddam has been responsible for.
If there are one million, that is still less than the number of people who died in the wars he started." (Note: In the speech, Blair quotes from an e-mail by an Iraqi exile - "PM wants UN to solve issue of Iraq" (10 Downing Street, 2003/02/15): "I have attended the permanent rally against Saddam that has been held every Saturday in Trafalgar Square for the past 5 years. The Iraqi people have been protesting for YEARS against the war - the war that Saddam has waged against them. Where have you been? Why is it now that you deem it appropriate to voice your disillusions with America's policy in Iraq, when it is actually right now that the Iraqi people are being given real hope, however slight and precarious, that they can live in an Iraq that is free of the horrors partly described in this email?")

"Anti-war march: what the speakers said" (The Guardian, 2003/02/15)
A digest of what some of the speakers said at the march in London: "The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, launched a scathing attack on the US president, George Bush, during his address to crowds in London's Hyde Park. ... "This is a president who uses the death penalty with complete abandon and disregard for any respect for life. This is no example," Mr Livingstone said. "So let everyone recognise what has happened here today: that Britain does not support this war for oil. The British people will not tolerate being used to prop up the most corrupt and racist American administration in over 80 years." ...
The playwright Harold Pinter described the US as "a country run by a bunch of criminals ... with Tony Blair as a hired Christian thug".
"The planned attack on Iraq is a pre-meditated attack of mass murder," he added. 'Resistance is embodied today in this massive gathering, and the word I want to direct to Tony Blair is resign, resign, resign.'"

"Protesters Plead to Bush Give Peace a Chance" (Paul Majendie, Reuters, 2003/02/15)
Calling for Saddam to adhere to the UN resolutions to avoid war and with slogans such as "Saddam - Give Peace a Chance!", "Saddam - Butcher!" and "Save the Iraqi People - Saddam Must Go!", thousands of... Oops, sorry, wrong world: "In the biggest demonstration of "People Power" since the Vietnam War, peace campaigners from Antarctica to Iceland poured scorn on President Bush's hawkish stance.
"I look at Bush but see Hitler," proclaimed the banner of a Bulgarian protester in Sofia.
"The whole world is against this war. Only one person wants it," said Muslim teenager Bilqees Gamieldien as she protested in the South African city of Cape Town. ...
One Russian protester's banner in Moscow showed a photograph of the U.S. president with the words: "Butcher: Get out of other people's lands." ...
And the rallies offered a boost to Iraq's own cause.
Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz, in the Italian city of Assisi to pray at the tomb of St. Francis, said: "The people of Iraq want peace and millions of people around the world are demonstrating for peace, so let us all work for peace and resist the war."
"This is a day all good women and men in the world will show the protest against the war of George W. Bush," he told Reuters. 'Our hearts are with them.'"

"Marching for terror" (Mark Steyn, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/02/15)
"As far as Saddam's subjects are concerned, the "peace" movement means peace for you and Tony Benn and Sheryl Crow and Susan Sarandon, and a prison for them. I was in Montreal last week, which has the largest Iraqi population in North America. I've yet to meet one who isn't waiting eagerly for the day the liberation of their homeland begins. ...
Marching for "peace" means marching for, oh, another 15 years of Saddamite torture and murder, followed by a couple more decades under the even more psychotic son, until the family runs out of victims to terrorise, gets bored and retires to the Riviera. ...
Marching for "peace" means marching against the Iraqi people: it's the equivalent of turning them away as, to their shame, many free nations in the 1930s turned away refugees from Germany. ...
Today's demo is good for Saddam, but bad for the Iraqi people, and the Palestinian people, and the British people. One day, not long from now, when Iraq is free, they will despise those who marched to keep them in hell." (See also: "...And why I will not" (Dr B Khalaf, The Guardian, 2003/02/14))

"This march is about Iraq, not Palestine" (Howard Jacobson, Independent, 2003/02/15)
"Just how compromised you can find yourself, when you march to inextricabilities which have been fashioned elsewhere, was demonstrated embarrassingly last week when the Evening Standard columnist AN Wilson recommended to his readers' attention a book by Michael Hoffman, the prominent white supremacist and Holocaust denier – author of a comic book entitled Tales of the Holohoax, among other works of undisguised ill-intention.
So that readers should experience no difficulty laying hands on Hoffman's book, Wilson considerately included in his column an address from which it could be ordered. In mitigation of which act of incendiarism, the Evening Standard took the unusual but wise step of printing an apology in its leader column, explaining that Wilson had not realised the status of the writer about whom he had enthused. Which can only mean, considering the openness of Hoffman's virulence, that Wilson had either not read him or can't read.
Let Wilson himself decide, when night falls, which is the greater offence, which the deeper shame. Both, anyway, point in the same direction – to Wilson's need to join the ranks of the like-minded at all costs, to dance daisy-chained in the circle of the righteous, to prove his peace credentials by speaking incontinently of Israel, whatever the source of his information." (See also: "Standard apologises for Holocaust-denier boost" (Jenni Frazer and Stefan Bialoguski, The Jewish Chronicle, 2003/02/14))

"Bin Laden son, al Qaeda terrorists spotted in Iran" (Bill Gertz, The Washington Times, 2003/02/15)
"U.S. intelligence agencies say Osama bin Laden's oldest son, Sad, is in Iran along with other senior al Qaeda terrorists, as Iranian military forces have been placed on their highest state of alert in anticipation of a U.S. attack on Iraq, according to intelligence officials.
Sad bin Laden was spotted in Iran last month, according to officials familiar with intelligence reports. Sad is believed to be a key leader of the al Qaeda terrorist network since U.S. and allied forces ousted the ruling Taliban militia in Afghanistan.
Officials said it is not clear what relationship Sad has with the Tehran government, which on Thursday denied congressional testimony by CIA Director George J. Tenet that al Qaeda terrorists are in Iran."

Friday, February 14, 2003

News and commentary:

"All across the world, the peace demonstrations begin" (Kathy Marks et al., Independent, 2003/02/15)
The Pro-Saddam Weekend begins: "The biggest peace protest in Australia since the anti-Vietnam war marches of 30 years ago kicked off a weekend of rallies around the world against the threatened American-led action against Iraq.
Melbourne, Australia's second largest city, came to a standstill last night as a crowd of at least 150,000 gathered to hear speeches of defiance from politicians and union leaders. Organisers put it at 200,000. ...
Millions of people are expected to turn out this weekend for more rallies in hundreds of cities, including London, Rome, Dublin, New York, Vancouver, Mexico City, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney, Canberra and Berlin.
Today's protest in Rome is almost certain to be the biggest anti-war demonstration in Europe. Organisers boast that it will be "the biggest peace demonstration in Italy's history", and they predict at least a million marchers. ...
"When this weekend is over, there will never have been so many people in the world in a co-ordinated protest," said L A Kauffman, an organiser with the umbrella group, United for Peace and Justice, based in San Francisco."

"Standard apologises for Holocaust-denier boost" (Jenni Frazer and Stefan Bialoguski, The Jewish Chronicle, 2003/02/14)
Found via Stephen Pollard: "Writer and columnist A. N. Wilson this week stood by the content of his stridently anti-Israel piece in Monday's London Evening Standard — despite the paper’s public apology for his having recommended the work of a Holocaust-denier.
The Standard’s deputy editor told the JC that "an error was made" in citing the work of revisionist Michael Hoffman. The paper also issued an apology in its editorial column in the late editions of Wednesday's paper.
Under the headline, "Israel’s record speaks for itself," Mr Wilson's column used a question-and-answer format to criticise Israel, and then recommended "The Israeli Holocaust Against the Palestinians by M. Hoffman and Professor Moshe Lieberman" for further reading.
The book is published by the Independent History and Research Press, part of a Holocaust-denial organisation operated from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, by Mr Hoffman.
Mr Hoffman, 51, also runs a website called the Campaign for Radical Truth in History, largely devoted to attacks on Israel and Jews. According to the Southern Poverty Action Centre, a leading US authority on extremist groups, a number of white-supremacist websites offer links to Hoffman's site. He has also been billed as a guest speaker at several events of Christian Identity, a white-supremacist group." (Note: Wilson's column has "mysteriously" disappeared from Evening Standard's archive.)

"Cupid told to go fly a kite" (AFP/The Washington Times, 2003/02/14)
"The student wing of Pakistan's fundamentalist Islamic party, Jamaat-i-Islami, has condemned Valentine's Day as a day of shame and lust.
"This is a shameful day. The people in the West are just fulfilling and satisfying their sex thirst on this day," Khalid Waqas Chamkani, a leader of the Islami Jamaat Talaba in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) bordering Afghanistan, said this week." (Note: Found via Best of the Web Today.)

"Iraq Bans Weapons of Mass Destruction" (Niko Price, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/02/14)
"Saddam Hussein banned nuclear, chemical and biological weapons on Friday, meeting a longtime U.N. demand even as top weapons inspectors told the Security Council they have found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
The presidential decree, sought by the United Nations for more than a decade, prohibited the production or importation of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and of all materials used to make them.
"All ministries should implement this decree and take whatever measures are necessary to punish people who do not adhere to it," the decree read.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer reacted skeptically, saying: 'If one would want to make believe and pretend that Iraq is a democracy that could pass meaningful laws, it would be 12 years late and 26,000 liters of anthrax short.'"

"It's Over" (Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, 2003/02/14)
"We now know that, barring a miracle, there will be no second U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq. We know that European public opinion has hardened against any such military action, and that large sections of world opinion regard the United States as more morally abhorrent and internationally dangerous than the genocidal murderer in Baghdad. We know in other words that we will have to wage this war with an international coalition that is not synonymous with the U.N. The U.N. route has been a failure. But it was still worth trying, even if only to give it one last chance. The U.S. and the U.K. have shown amazing patience in trying to force the U.N. to live up to its own resolutions. That very effort gives the lie to those who argue that the Anglosphere nations have no interest in mulitlateralism. But those resolutions - specifically Resolution 1441, demanding immediate Iraqi compliance with disarmament - have been revealed as meaningless, in as much as those countries that signed on to them have no intention whatsoever of enforcing them. The notion that inspections are working is simply ludicrous on its face. The fact that that position was warmly applauded at the Security Council today is a signal that it has decided to engage in unreality."

"Remarks to the United Nations Security Council" (Colin L. Powell, U.S. Department of State, 2003/02/14)
"Force should always be a last resort. I have preached this for most of my professional life, as a soldier and as a diplomat, but it must be a resort. We cannot allow this process to be endlessly strung out as Iraq is trying to do right now - string it out long enough and the world will start looking in other directions, the Security Council will move on, we'll get away with it again.
My friends, they cannot be allowed to get away with it again. We now are in a situation where Iraq's continued noncompliance and failure to cooperate, it seems to me, in the clearest terms, requires this Council to begin to think through the consequences of walking away from this problem with a reality that we have to face this problem; and that, in the very near future, we will have to consider whether or not we've reached that point where this Council, as distasteful as it may be, as reluctant as we may be, as many as - there are so many of you who would rather not have to face this issue, but it's an issue that must be faced."

"Arms report deepens UN split" (BBC News, 2003/02/14)
"The latest United Nations weapons inspectors' report on Iraq has deepened divisions on the Security Council.
United States Secretary of State Colin Powell said the Council should "in the near future consider serious consequences" - code for war on Iraq.
But France, China and Russia said inspectors should be given the time they need to complete their task.
"The use of military force is not justified today," said French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin. ...
Earlier, chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix told the council that Iraq still needed to provide evidence to back its claims it does not possess banned weapons.
But he took a more positive line than in his report two weeks ago, saying Baghdad had made progress in a number of areas." (See also a transcript of the report: "Iraq Inspection Report to U.N." (The Washington Post, 2003/02/14))

"U.N. MEETS - Weasels to hear new Iraq evidence"
(New York Post, 2003/02/14)

"...And why I will not" (Dr B Khalaf, The Guardian, 2003/02/14)
"I write this to protest against all those people who oppose the war against Saddam Hussein, or as they call it, the "war against Iraq". I am an Iraqi doctor, I worked in the Iraqi army for six years during Iraq-Iran war and four months during Gulf war. All my family still live in Iraq. I am an Arab Sunni, not Kurdish or Shia. I am an ordinary Iraqi not involved with the Iraqi opposition outside Iraq.
I am so frustrated by the appalling views of most of the British people, media and politicians. I want to say to all these people who are against the possible war, that if you think by doing so you are serving the interests of Iraqi people or saving them, you are not. You are effectively saving Saddam. You are depriving the Iraqi people of probably their last real chance get rid of him and to get out of this dark era in their history.
My family and almost all Iraqi families will feel hurt and anger when Saddam's media shows on the TV, with great happiness, parts of Saturday's demonstration in London. But where were you when thousands of Iraqi people were killed by Saddam's forces at the end of the Gulf war to crush the uprising? Only now when the war is to reach Saddam has everybody become so concerned about the human life in Iraq.
Where were you while Saddam has been killing thousands of Iraqis since the early 70s? And where are you are now, given that every week he executes people through the "court of revolution", a summary secret court run by the secret security office. Most of its sentences are executions which Saddam himself signs.
I could argue one by one against your reasons for opposing this war. But just ask yourselves why, out of about 500,000 Iraqis in Britain, you will not find even 1,000 of them participating tomorrow? Your anti-war campaign has become mass hysteria and you are no longer able to see things properly." (Note: Found via InstaPundit.)

"Why Germany Isn't Convinced" (Paul Berman, Slate, 2003/02/14)
Berman defends the "sincere motives" of the radical "anti-Nazi" stance of the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer in the 70's. I'm not convinced, though. For one thing, you could say the same thing about the Nazis - that they had sincere motives in their anti-Communism stance. Berman's claim that Bush has failed to present "the current war and its impending new Iraqi front in terms of a democratic struggle against totalitarianism" is more to the point: "It should be obvious that, in the Arab world, fascist and Nazi-like movements — political tendencies that call for random mass murder in the name of paranoid and apocalyptic ideas — have gotten completely out of hand. In the last 20 years, Baathist and Islamist movements — the two branches of what ought to be regarded as Muslim fascism — have killed millions of people and might well kill many more, and not just in the Muslim countries, as we have reason to know. A war against Muslim fascism ought to be seen as a continuation of the long struggle against Nazism and fascism in Europe — a continuation of the same decent and necessary cause that people like Fischer have always wanted to support, even if they have not always known how to do so in a sensible way. ...
Maybe Fischer is not convinced because the Bush administration has presented a series of side arguments about weapons, U.N. resolutions, and dark terrorist conspiracies and has failed to present the main argument, which is the single huge argument that has always sustained the Western alliance. This argument is the one about totalitarianism. It is the argument that says: The totalitarians are dangerous to themselves and to us, and we had better fight them." (See also: "Germany's Mr. Tough Guy" (Michael Kelly, The Washington Post, 2003/02/12) and "The Passion of Joschka Fischer" (Paul Berman, The New Republic, 2001/08/22))

"The Boomerang Effect" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2003/02/14)
"So too a petulant, though wealthy, Germany and South Korea resent their dependence as American protectorates, reflecting their own sense of impotence through face-saving unease with the same benefactors who kept psychopaths like Milosevic and Kim Jong II out of their comfortable and opulent havens. Gnash your teeth at an American who saved Germany, never a Russian who tried to flatten it — the ex-KGB Putin is now more welcome in Berlin than is the ex-NATO official Mr. Rumsfeld. And so it goes. A lip-biting Clinton's bombing of a mass murderer is one thing; a Texas-drawling, Bible-reading Bush is another.
Still, besides the revelation of hypocrisy, the effect of all this has also been quite remarkable in creating a growing sense of American solidarity — precisely in terms of being so unlike those who criticize us. Has anti-anti-Americanism fueled a growing new sense of Americanism? We owe the U.N., the EU, the radical Islamic world, Mr. Mandela, the French, the Germans, and a host of others, I think, some thanks in this hour of crisis. By reminding us so often that they are not like us and often don't like us, we of all political persuasions and backgrounds finally are remembering that they were perhaps right all along — we really are a very different people."

"It's not really about Saddam" (Mark Steyn, National Post, 2003/02/14 [?])
"America has never been isolated. Oh, sure, concede the cynics, Bush's Anglosphere poodles in Britain and Australia are snuffling his gusset, but no one else. Well, there's those seven Continental countries that signed that letter to The Wall Street Journal. Hah! scoffed Robert Scheer of The Los Angeles Times, nothing but a bunch of nations "you can buy on eBay." Really? Italy? Spain? Next, the Vilnius Group got on board: That's pretty much every country in the Baltic and Eastern Europe. "Everyone's feeling better. Albania signed on," sneered Mark Shields on CNN.
Oh, dear, oh, dear. Are there no foreigners good enough for Shields, Scheer and the other "multilateralists"? Brits, Aussies, Italians, Poles, Lithuanians: none of 'em count. During the Great War, Irving Berlin wrote a song about a proud mother watching her son march in the parade: They Were All Out Of Step But Jim. In this war, according to the picky multilateralists, they're all out of step but Jacques."

"The Saddam Papers" (Martin Kramer, Sandstorm, 2003/02/14)
"Saddam soon will be history. It's important that the United States collect and preserve as much of it as possible. I refer to the vast archives of the various arms of the Iraqi regime: the presidency of the republic, the Baath Party, the Republican Guard, the intelligence and security organizations, the ministries of foreign affairs and information, and more. ...
In the protocols of the meetings held around Saddam's long table, decisions of war, repression, and evasion are carefully recorded for further action. These are the real "smoking guns." As Human Rights Watch put it in 1994 (in regard to the Kurds), "it is not unlikely that the strongest evidence of genocide will only be found in the event of a change of government in Baghdad and the opening up of security archives there." That's probably true for a whole range of highly sensitive subjects, from elimination of dissidents to support for terrorism. ...
Personally, I'd like to see the documents from the foreign and information ministries. I want to read the evidence of the Baghdad regime's cynical use of the soft-headed scholars and the gullible journalists, the do-gooders and the fellow travellers, the Ramsey Clarks and the John Pilgers. Send in the xerox machines."

"Holiday From History" (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2003/02/14)
"On Sept. 11, 2001, the cozy illusions and stupid pretensions died. We now recognize the central problem of the 21st century: the conjunction of terrorism, rogue states and weapons of mass destruction.
True, weapons of mass destruction are not new. What is new is that the knowledge required to make them is no longer esoteric. Anyone with a reasonable education in modern physics, chemistry or biology can brew them. Doomsday has been democratized.
There is no avoiding the danger any longer. Last year President Bush's axis-of-evil speech was met with eye-rolling disdain by the sophisticates. One year later the warning has been vindicated in all its parts. Even the United Nations says Iraq must be disarmed. The International Atomic Energy Agency has just (politely) declared North Korea a nuclear outlaw. Iran has announced plans to mine uranium and reprocess spent nuclear fuel; we have recently discovered two secret Iranian nuclear complexes.
We are in a race against time. Once such hostile states establish arsenals, we become self-deterred and they become invulnerable. North Korea may already have crossed that threshold. ...
Those are the stakes today. Before our eyes, in a flash, politics has gone cosmic. The question before us is very large and very simple: Can - and will - the civilized part of humanity disarm the barbarians who would use the ultimate knowledge for the ultimate destruction? Within months, we will have a good idea whether the answer is yes or no."

"UN appeasers let rogues call the shots" (Stephen Blank, Asia Times, 2003/02/14)
"Nonetheless, the UN's role (or lack of a role) in the Korean crisis indicates its essential uselessness at keeping the peace either there or in Iraq. And the UN's shameful performance in these (and other recent) crises highlights the fatuity of the claims that inspectors should continue searching Iraq even though everyone knows that whatever they will find, the "do nothing" claque will find other excuses for inaction. ...
And what will the UN do about this systematic, regular, and overt flouting of the cornerstone of civilized international life, the doctrine that treaties must be observed? It is not hard to see that the answer is: absolutely nothing. ...
As the US phrase observes, these governments' response to international crises affecting their own interests is "let George do it". But of course, they do not want George to do it either. For them the United States is somehow the enemy, not the only force, misguided or not, that seems ready to stand up for principles of international security and order. Certainly it is obvious to any unbiased observer that the UN is utterly unwilling and unable to confront either of these aggressors of its own accord so it is a useless reed insofar as the defense of peace is concerned."

"The new Iranians" (Caroline B. Glick, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/02/14)
"Americans were shocked this week to discover that while their attention was focused elsewhere, Europe or large swathes of Europe has become a hotbed of Iranian-like anti-American sentiment.
The same irrational, insurmountable hatred of America that fuels Iranian rhetoric and dictates its policies against the Great Satan also characterizes much public opinion throughout Europe and informs the policies of the governments of Belgium, France and Germany.
The major difference today between Iranian America-bashing and the axis of America-haters in Europe is the god in whose name this hatred is justified. While the Iranian mullahs justify their hatred of America in the name of Allah, the French, Germans, Belgians and Scandinavians bow their heads in hatred of America before the alter of Envy and in the name of their idiosyncratic doctrine of human rights."

"A Sense of Fine Qualities Trampled and of Something 'Terribly Wrong'" (Sarah Lyall, The New York Times, 2003/02/14)
This is pathetic. Europeans who have denounced US constantly since Vietnam are suddenly claiming that they in fact have admired America until, well, 9/11. And when decades of outrageous insults for once changes direction they complain that the debate has "descended into vicious name-calling": "But European anti-Americanism is more than just straightforward opposition to the policies of the current administration. There is a growing sense here, reflected in interviews with writers, cultural figures and other intellectual leaders in Western Europe, that many of America's most admirable qualities — its respect for its great cacophony of voices, its belief in freedom, its proud democratic principles — have been so trampled in the debate over war as to have been rendered toothless or even nonexistent.
"Something has gone terribly wrong in America," said Jacqueline Rose, a feminist scholar in Britain. "America established a certain tradition of public dissent, with the civil rights and feminist and anti-Vietnam movements. But post-Sept. 11 there is a feeling that the American left has largely gone silent." ...
In The Guardian today, Annick Cojean, a commentator from the French newspaper Le Monde, said the debate had descended into vicious name-calling from America's politicians, supported by a too-complacent news media. "This torrent of insults against France and Germany, these are insults that one thought belonged to a bygone century," she wrote." (See also: "We all now know what Americans think of the French. Here a leading Paris journalist bites back." (Annick Cojean, The Guardian, 2003/02/13))

"Key role for young Muslims in struggle for peace" (Jeevan Vasagar, The Guardian, 2003/02/14)
Or: "Key role for young Muslims in struggle for Saddam". Note the weasel description of "the row over Salman Rushdie's book": "Unprecedented numbers of British Muslims will take to the streets tomorrow in what one protester has described as "the biggest Muslim political mobilisation this country has ever seen".
If the row over Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses 15 years ago was a wake-up call, these protests are a coming of age for a more assertive generation.
Burning copies of Rushdie's book left Muslims looking extreme and isolated, but new tactics and new allies show how much the community has changed."

Thursday, February 13, 2003

News and commentary:

"Demand to indict Belgian officials for 1961 murder" (IMRA, 2003/02/13)
"Shurat HaDin - Israel Law Center, an Israeli civil rights organization has written Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein today demanding that his office file a criminal indictment against several former Belgian officials who were responsible for the assassination of the leader of the Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, in 1961. ...
On January 17, 1961, Lumumba was dragged from his cell and brutally tortured by Belgian police officials. In the evening he was brought, along with two other members of his party, before a police firing squad and executed.
Days later, a Belgian police officer was ordered to exhume Lumumba's body, dismembered it with a hacksaw and dissolved all traces of it with sulfuric acid. ...
"The government of Belgium murdered millions of Africans during its decades of occupation and economic rape of the Congo," stated attorney Darshan-Leitner, 'The Belgian officials who assassinated Lumumba have never been indicted nor punished in any manner for this loathsome murder. Given Belgium's new found interest in international law enforcement, Israel should indict all the former Belgian officials involved and commence a criminal prosecution of Lumumba's murder in Jerusalem.'" (See also: "Belgium asserts right to try Sharon" (Ian Black, The Guardian, 2002/02/13))

"British Agency Claims New bin Laden Tape" (AP/ABC News, 2003/02/13)
"A second tape attributed to Osama bin Laden has the al-Qaida leader saying he wants to die a martyr this year in the "eagle's belly," in an apparent reference to the United States. ...
In Thursday's tape, the voice says: "In this final year I hurl myself and my steed with my soul at the enemy. Indeed on my demise I will become a martyr."
"I pray my demise isn't on a coffin bearing green mantles. I wish my demise to be in the eagle's belly," the voice continued.
Imran Khan, who runs Al-Ansaar, said experts contacted by the news agency believed the "eagle" referred to the United States and the quote revealed bin Laden's wish to end his life in a final act of terrorism."

"False Alarm?" (Brian Ross et al., ABC News, 2003/02/13)
"A key piece of the information leading to recent terror alerts was fabricated, according to two senior law enforcement officials in Washington and New York.
The officials said that a claim made by a captured al Qaeda member that Washington, New York or Florida would be hit by a "dirty bomb" sometime this week had proven to be a product of his imagination.
The informant described a detailed plan that an al Qaeda cell operating in either Virginia or Detroit had developed a way to slip past airport scanners with dirty bombs encased in shoes, suitcases, or laptops, sources told ABCNEWS. The informant reportedly cited specific targets of government buildings and Christian or clerical centers.
"This piece of that puzzle turns out to be fabricated and therefore the reason for a lot of the alarm, particularly in Washington this week, has been dissipated after they found out that this information was not true," said Vince Cannistraro, former CIA counter-terrorism chief and ABCNEWS consultant."

"Outside View: Saddam's winning tragedies" (Robert L. Maginnis, UPI, 2003/02/13)
Maginnis on Saddam's use of human shields - "staging tragedies for television as a tactic to win sympathy": "Last month, in anticipation of another American-led attack, Saddam started packing his bunkers and critical infrastructure with more innocents. Iraqi deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz publicly welcomed foreign volunteers to come to Iraq and serve as human shields. Saddam plans to assign these human shields to hospitals, water-treatment plants and other civilian installations to dissuade U.S. commanders from targeting those facilities. No doubt, those facilities have military value otherwise they would not be assigned to human shields. ...
Today around Baghdad, Saddam has placed air defense missile systems near civilian areas, including parks, mosques, hospitals, hotels, religious sites and even cemeteries. He has parked surface to air missile systems in civilian industrial centers and rocket launchers next to soccer stadiums that are in use.
In April 2002, commercial satellite imagery showed that Saddam constructed 15 military revetments - holes in which military vehicles are parked to protect them against air strikes - near a school outside Baghdad. Some of the revetments were only a few yards from the school wall.
Last year, Saddam directed civilian taxis and buses be painted military colors to look like army vehicles. Camouflaged-painted vehicles could become targets for coalition laser-guided bombs."

"My lefty friends are wrong" (Phil Craig, The Spectator, from the 2002/02/15 issue)
"I was in Florida researching a book on the second world war on 11 September 2001. ... One question dominated, the same one I heard in bars, shops and around dinner tables: 'Why do they hate us so much?' 'It's just a minority,' I said.
I returned home and realised that it wasn't a minority at all. To my astonishment, it included many of my liberal and left-wing friends, and writers and thinkers I admired. ...
It struck me then that, after so many years of opposing American foreign policy, the Left could not see beyond Vietnam-era slogans. It could not recognise that a toxic stew of rogue regimes, apocalyptic weapons programmes and a perverted form of Islam posed a deadly threat. It posed a particularly deadly threat, come to think of it, to the values of the Left itself: to women's rights and gay rights; to secularism, pluralism and multiculturalism. In fact, you name the liberal 'ism' and Osama was against it. But one 'ism' still trumped all: anti-Americanism."

"Understanding the Europeans Better" (Patrice de Beer, Le Monde/Watch, 2003/02/12 [2003/02/13])
The French perspective II. Patrice de Beer is a former Washington correspondent for Le Monde, who once told a New York public radio station that Jews obviously felt no problems living in France because "there is no exodus." Personally, I don't think the problem is that Americans don't understand Europeans, but rather the other way around. This article is just another indication of that. Note for instance that he doesn't even once mention the actual threats of terrorism and rogue states with WMD. For him the threat seems to be the "messianic fundamentalism" of the White House: "The hurt caused by the the White House's tactics — a combination of brutal pressure and messianic fundamentalism — is patent. ... In sum, how can one make the Europeans act even more warlike than American public opinion, 47% of which still wants UN approval before attacking Iraq? Can one ask them to be even less circumspect about the strategy and methods for the Second Gulf War than General Norman Schwarzkopf, head of the American expeditionary corps during the first war (Le Monde, 31 January)? Are Mssrs. Aznar, Berlusconi and Blair more convincing when they suggest that the survival of transatlantic bonds depends on European docility? Beyond the debate on the principle of preventive war, the Europeans' new incomprehension of the United States is a reaction against the behavior of its leaders." (Note: The article is translated by Douglas. See also the French original: "Mieux comprendre les Européens" (Patrice de Beer, Le Monde, 2003/02/12))

"A War for Oil? Not This Time" (Max Boot, The New York Times, 2003/02/13)
"This doesn't mean that oil is entirely irrelevant to the subject of Iraq. It does matter in one very important way: Oil revenues make Saddam Hussein much more dangerous than your run-of-the-mill dictator, because they give him the ability to build not only palaces but also top-of-the-line weapons of mass destruction.
Americans recognize this. Europeans don't. Why not? Here's my theory: Europeans are projecting their own behavior onto us. They know that their own foreign policies have in the past often been driven by avarice — all those imperialists after East Indian spices or African diamonds. (This tradition is going strong today in Russia and France, whose Iraq policies seem driven at least in part by oil companies that were granted lucrative concessions by Saddam Hussein.)
Nobody would claim that America's global intentions have always been entirely pure. Still, our foreign policy — from the Barbary war to Kosovo — has usually had a strain of idealism at which the cynical Europeans have scoffed. In the case of Iraq, they just can't seem to accept that we might be acting for, say, the general safety and security of the world. After more than 200 years, Europe still hasn't figured out what makes America tick."

"A View from the Left: Auschwitz, Munich and Iraq" (Jeffrey Herf, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung/FrontPageMagazine, 2003/02/13)
"For despite the fact that "coming to terms with the Nazi past" has preoccupied Germans in recent decades, this discussion has not included extensive discussion of the issues of appeasement, the breakdown of collective security and the absence of preemptive war in the late 1930s. ...
It is sad to see a country with so many talented and capable people led by a government which so manifestly seems unable or unwilling to absorb basic lessons from the failures but also victories of the democracies in World War II and the Cold War. Many people in Washington and New York this winter have been reading Kenneth Pollack's book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. Before dismissing the parallels with an air of no longer convincing European sophistication, one hopes that Germans will think again hard about the threat Iraq poses to Germany. In the short run, however, much damage has been done and we in this country cannot count on the good judgment and historical perspective of, at least this, German government."

"The Urgency of Offensive Counter-Terrorism" (Angelo M. Codevilla, FrontPageMagazine, 2003/02/13)
"For example, at the outset of "the War", President Bush uncritically accepted the CIA's contention that terrorism is the work of "shadowy networks" of rogue individuals rather than the work of Arab regimes working through cut outs. The CIA's view, in turn, came from sources that have not been subjected to strict scrutiny.
On the basis of these unexamined decisions, the "War on Terrorism" has been about "bringing to justice" individual plotters "one at a time." Note well that even were U.S. intelligence much better than it is, it could not contribute significantly to fighting a war thus conceived. That is because defensive anti-terrorism is mission impossible. ...
Hence honest intelligence would not waste its energies on futile retail searches for the soldiers of terror. Rather, it would devote itself to a task both feasible and fruitful: searching out the physical, military, and political vulnerabilities of the causes for which terrorists fight, and of the persons who embody these causes.
Countering terrorism is possible only offensively. CI can help restore the integrity of intelligence. Thus restored, intelligence can help us successfully wage war against the regimes that are the living embodiment of the causes of terrorism."

"Racism, rude names and the children of McCarthy" (Anthony Browne, The Times, 2003/02/13)
Browne has been denounced for his criticism of British immigration policies: "I am beyond the pale. My views, said the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, "border on fascism". David Aaronovitch claimed in The Observer that I am guilty of the "stock-in-trade mendacity of the anti-immigrants"; Yasmin Alibhai-Brown called me a "xenophobe" in The Independent; The Guardian's Polly Toynbee dubbed me "the particularly pernicious Anthony Browne", guilty of "naked hate"; on Radio 4's Moral Maze I was told by the scientist Steven Rose that my arguments were "tinged with racism". ...
I take these personal attacks as an implicit admission of intellectual defeat: if they had counter-arguments, they would have used them. As the joke goes: what's the definition of a racist? Someone who is winning an argument with a liberal. ...
But the neo-McCarthyites don't deal in arguments, they indulge in character assassination. The aim is simple — not to win arguments, but to make opponents shrivel up in silence, and to frighten decent people from expressing their views. Instead of winning arguments, they create taboos, hate and fears.
As John Lloyd, the former editor of the left-wing New Statesman complained recently, the Left has "abdicated analysis for denunciation". It may not be right, but it certainly feels virtuous: those it opposes are not just wrong, but wicked. It has made the tag "right wing" a stigma in polite society." (See also: "Britain on the Brink" (Anthony Browne, vdare.com/FrontPageMagazine, 2003/02/03))

"The myth of international law" (Frederick Grab, The Washington Times, 2003/02/13)
"It is clear that the Security Council and its resolutions have none of the characteristics that would give rise to the dignity of international law. For one thing, Saddam Hussein has been free to disregard resolution after resolution for 12 years without the imposition of meaningful sanctions or penalties, the underlying requirement for any system to qualify as law in the first place. ...
The United Nations is a debating society. It was set up to prevent conflagrations between superpowers: The United States, the USSR, Great Britain, France, China and eventually Germany and Japan after World War II. It was never meant to be a world legislature, and certainly not in a world with today's demographics. To think otherwise would be like allowing a referendum of European nations to decide the outcome of World War II on December 7, 1941. Talk about infamy."

"Would you share your currency with this lot?" (Boris Johnson, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/02/13)
Just for the record: it was of course Groundskeeper Willie, not Bart, who uttered the famous phrase: "Just as everyone was laying into the Number 10 spin machine, the French did something so disgusting, so selfish, and so French, that the British media have had no choice. The press has dropped Alastair Campbell's dodgy dossier, in favour of that time-honoured staple of the British journalist - the orgy of frog-bashing. ...
For the first time in the build-up to action against Iraq, the newspapers of the Anglosphere are united in a blizzard of abuse against the French. In Paris, Le Monde has finally been obliged to translate Bart Simpson's phrase that is now on everyone's lips.
The French, say the mass-circulation papers in Britain and America, are nothing but "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" (les primates capitulards toujours en quete de fromage), and, you know what, I couldn't agree more. ...
What is so cynical, and so French, is that they know they won't push their position to its logical conclusion. ... They can posture, and preen, and strike neo-Gaullist attitudes, safe in the knowledge that they will never have to make sense of their policy, or justify it to posterity. They have simply decided to play to the gallery of public opinion."

"Belgium asserts right to try Sharon" (Ian Black, The Guardian, 2002/02/13)
And I assert the right to try Belgium for bigotry: "Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, can be tried for genocide in Belgium once he has left office, the Belgian appeal court ruled last night.
The judgment opens the way for survivors of a 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees in Beirut to press their case against the Likud leader when his retirement loses him his immunity from prosecution. ...
The Israeli foreign minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, immediately recalled his ambassador in Brussels, Yehuda Keinar, for consultations, and will call in the Belgian ambassador today to deliver a protest, a senior Israeli source told Reuters.
"This decision is a scandal and it legitimises terror and helps those who fight terrorism, Mr Netanyahu said in a statement.
'Belgium is not only hurting Israel but the entire free world and Israel will respond to it very severely.'" (See also: "Belgian Lawlessness" (Nissan Ratzlav-Katz, National Review, 2003/02/13): "In contrast, there has been no international suits, no Arab outrage, as a result of the massacre carried out in the same Shatila camp, just three years later, by Muslim militiamen. In that bloodbath, according to United Nations officials, 635 people were killed and 2,500 wounded. All told, Lebanese factions and sects spent a good part of the 1970s and '80s repeatedly attacking each other, leading to the deaths of about 95,000 people.")

"UN declares N Korea in nuclear breach" (BBC News, 2003/02/13)
"The United Nations nuclear watchdog has declared North Korea in breach of UN nuclear safeguards and asked the UN Security Council to consider the issue. The move - the most severe the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) can take - raises the possibility of economic or political sanctions being imposed on the North. Pyongyang earlier said that it would consider sanctions to be tantamount to a declaration of war but has not yet reacted officially to the IAEA declaration."

"Experts Confirm New Iraq Missile Exceeds U.N. Limit" (Julia Preston and Eric Schmitt, The New York Times, 2003/02/13)
"A panel of arms experts convened by United Nations weapons inspectors has confirmed that a missile Iraq has developed exceeds range limits set by the Security Council.
The panel's conclusion will add fuel to the United States' argument that Iraq is defying Security Council disarmament resolutions, and it is likely to deepen the discord here over whether to go to war against Iraq or allow inspections to continue, as several critical Council nations insist."

"Hysteria runs riot; networks fuel the fear" (Jennifer Harper , The Washington Times, 2003/02/13)
"'Are you ready?' asked ABC News yesterday, trotting out a "Good Morning America" home-improvement editor to demonstrate how to turn a laundry room into a fallout shelter with duct tape and plastic dropcloths.
"Duct tape sales rise amid terror fears," noted CNN. ...
TV reports were immediately emblazoned with orange "high alert" banners and rife with talk about poison gas, microbes and imminent threats. Even pet owners were advised to pack an emergency kit for their dogs, complete with 'bottled water and food supply.'"

Added in archive:
"The Global Fight against Terrorism: Status and Perspectives" (John McCain, Munich Conference on Security, 2003/02/08)

Wednesday, February 12, 2003

News and commentary:

"US and UK on terror alert" (BBC News, 2003/02/12)
"Batteries of anti-aircraft missiles have been set up around Washington amid warnings that a terrorist attack is expected.
Fighter jets are also patrolling the skies around the United States capital after the Pentagon activated increased security.
In Britain, 1,500 armed troops and police were deployed to protect London's Heathrow airport which ministers believe could be a target.
The action follows the release of the latest message said to be from Osama Bin Laden, which called for armed opposition to any attack on Iraq, which could be led by the US and UK.
Intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic have warned they believe an attack - possibly by Bin Laden's al-Qaeda network - could happen within days."

"U.S. Lawmakers Weigh Actions to Punish France, Germany" (Jim VandeHei, The Washington Post, 2003/02/12)
Found via Best of the Web Today: "'France and Germany are losing credibility by the day, and they are losing, I think, status in the world,' House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said yesterday. "They are walking a fine line that is very dangerous." ... "I was at a celebration of India's Independence Day," he told reporters, 'and a Frenchman came walking up to me and started talking to me about Iraq, and it was obvious we were not going to agree. And I said, 'Wait a minute. Do you speak German?' And he looked at me kind of funny and said, 'No, I don't speak German.' And I said, 'You're welcome,' turned around and walked off.'"

"America Defends Muslims" (Stephen Schwartz, National Review, 2003/02/12)
A brilliant and ferocious look at America vs. Old Europe: "America defends the oppressed, and America defends Muslims, even as the states of Western Europe claim they can settle crises like that in Iraq by sending in their own cowardly, black-marketeering, and vice-ridden troops — the same personnel that patronize prostitution and protect the traffickers of women in the Bosnian Serb zone and in Kosovo; the same "soldiers" that tried to entice Muslim boys in Srebrenica to barter sex for food. They are the same heartless scoundrels that prevent NATO from arresting the Serb monster Radovan Karadzic, who helped revive the specter of genocide in Europe, with mass graves, mass rapes, and concentration camps.
The meddling, failed imperial states of Europe have ever pursued such mischief. Once, long ago, Britain and France dreamed of intervening in our civil war, as France and Germany now prate about their ability to bring calm to Iraq. The British held Canada and the French seized Mexico. Together, they planned to recognize the Confederacy and then divide our territory, sharing out its benefits for themselves. Imagine that outcome: an America reduced to occupation zones, our independence stolen from us. Read that chapter in our history and you will understand what old Europe means when they claim they can pacify Iraq. They uttered the same rhetoric when they promised to end the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and 250,000 Muslims were killed. Old Europe cannot change. Thank God wise Britain has chosen to stand by us."

"Some Muslim Pilgrims Overjoyed by Bin Laden Tape" (Issam Dakroub, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2003/02/12)
Happy Days II: "Nonetheless, some pilgrims urged the fugitive al Qaeda leader to maintain his armed struggle against what they called infidel nations such as the United States.
"I am very happy he is alive because he has made a lot of sacrifices for God and Muslims," said Abdulrahman, a young Egyptian, as he angrily threw stones at a pillar representing the devil - one of the rituals of the pilgrimage.
"May God help him in his struggle against the infidels until total victory."
Practically all pilgrims approached by Reuters supported bin Laden, accused by the United States of masterminding the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington."

"Arab press welcomes Nato split" (BBC News, 2003/02/12)
Happy Days I: "'We would like to present one million roses from the gardens of Arab presidential palaces to Germany and France,' Sudan's Al-Ray Al-Am says. "With this gesture we would like to express our appreciation to them."
The paper has a very different view of Washington: "The US is a dreadful military power, a cowboy frightening the whole world." But "the US is scared to death of Bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network, scared of Saddam Hussein and of North Korea." ...
London's Al-Arab Al-Almiyah also finds hope in the French-German-Belgian stance within Nato.
"The salvation of the whole world," the paper says, 'is linked to the extent of Old Europe's steadfastness in the face of the deadly American storm which aims to suppress the entire world to serve American interests over the corpses of millions of innocent people.'"

"Viewpoint: Help us get our country back" (Kanan Makiya, BBC News, 2003/02/12)
"Regime change in Iraq will provide a historic opportunity - one that is as large as anything that has happened in the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. ...
Out of the Iraqi opposition - as difficult and fractious as it may be - could emerge a new kind of Arab politics. One that I believe is far healthier than the politics that dominates the Arab world today.
Since 1967, Arab political culture has largely been dominated by Arab nationalism of one form and another. This has been an obsession to the exclusion of everything else.
And today, the spectrum of what is politically possible to talk about in Arab politics runs from Palestine at one end to Palestine at the other, with no room for the plight of the Iraqi people.
But, if you live in Iraq, Palestine is not the central question of your life - your home-grown tyrant is.
Part of the driving force of Arab politics since 1967 is the attribution of all of the ills of one's own world to either the great Satan America or Israel. ...
All we saw in Afghanistan were people cheering in the streets. I expect Iraqis to do the same - to throw sweets and flowers at the American troops as they enter our towns and cities."

"The Mark Steyn Interview" (John Hawkins, Right Wing News, 2003/02/12)
"John Hawkins: Let's say that things go well in Iraq and that we dispose of Saddam in short order with a minimal number of American and Iraqi civilian casualties. What do you think our next step in the war on terrorism should be?
Mark Steyn: The next step should be to quarantine the Saudis. The US has a moral distaste for imperialism, which is fair enough, but, on the other hand, when it scuppered the British and French over Suez in 1956, all it did was deliver the Middle East out of western influence and into the hands of what it thought were pliable strongmen. That's no more morally superior than western imperialism and in practical terms it's been a lot worse. We need to reform the entire region. To those cynical Europeans who say, "Oh, it's absurd to think Arabs can ever be functioning members of a democrat state", I'd say, in that case why are you allowing virtually unrestricted Muslim immigration into your own countries? So I'd say: after Iraq, Iran won't be far behind; we then quarantine Saudi Arabia and explain the realities of life to Egypt and Syria."

"Francophobia" (Le Monde/Watch, 2003/02/11 [2003/02/12])
The French perspective I. A Le Monde editorial, translated by Douglas: "Let's sum things up to avoid repetition. We, the French, are profoundly weak-kneed. Our souls are in "Munich." We are venal, more or less anti-Semitic and, this goes without saying, wildly anti-American. Let's not forget: we are "old," too. This is how a certain American press sees the French. One of the Washington Post's most famous commentators writes that France has cultivated only one art since 1870: retreat or flight. The New York Post accuses France of ignoble ingratitude: the GIs' sacrifice in World War Two forgotten! In its "free opinion" page, the Wall Street Journal published an essay by Christopher Hitchens, who wrote of Jacques Chirac as a "roaring rat" in the process of making France into "Saddam's pimp." All this for which crime? Paris dares not to adhere to the Bush administration’s Iraq policy... The most widespread press comment is that there can be only one reason for Paris’ position: base material interests that smell of gasoline." (See also the French original: "Francophobie" (Le Monde, 2003/02/11))

"Germany's Mr. Tough Guy" (Michael Kelly, The Washington Post, 2003/02/12)
Kelly on Joschka Fischer, the German Foreign Minister: "As Berman reported, Mr. Fischer, you rose in public life as an important figure in the anti-American, anti-liberal, neo-Marxist, revolution-minded German radical left of the generation of 1968. This was the left that produced and supported the Baader-Meinhof Gang (or Red Army Faction), which, as Berman wrote, "refrained from nothing," including "kidnappings, bank holdups, murders." You were not a terrorist yourself, but you were a good and active friend to terrorists, weren't you, Mr. Fischer?
In 1976, to protest the death in prison of Baader-Meinhof founder Ulrike Meinhof, you planned and participated in a Frankfurt demonstration in which, Berman wrote, "somebody tossed a Molotov cocktail at a policeman and burned him nearly to death." You were arrested but not charged. ...
In 1969, you attended the meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization in which the PLO resolved that its ultimate aim was the extinction of Israel - that is to say, the extinction or expulsion of the Jews of Israel. ... You are the man for whom Munich wasn't enough, the man who needed Entebbe to convince him that murdering Jews was wrong. You ask to be excused. You have been excused." (See also: "The Passion of Joschka Fischer" (Paul Berman, The New Republic, 2001/08/22))

"Al-Qaeda chief's tape may signal the end for Saddam's regime" (Richard Beeston, The Times, 2003/02/12)
"Osama Bin Laden's announcement last night, urging fellow Muslims to fight the US-led military campaign against Iraq, was a naked piece of political opportunism that, paradoxically, may hasten the demise of President Saddam Hussein and his regime.
For weeks the Bush Administration and Tony Blair have been trying to draw links between the fugitive Saudi terrorist mastermind and the regime in Baghdad, despite their historical and ideological divisions.
Last night bin Laden made the connection in one brief audiotape, which undermines Saddam's claims that he has no connections to bin Laden or his al-Qaeda organisation. The support was not only given in a general manner to fellow Muslims but also offered specific advice to the Iraqi military on how best to fight the Americans and their allies.
"It does not harm in these circumstances that the interests of Muslims and socialists (Iraqi Baathists) criss-cross in the fight against the Crusaders," bin Laden said.
Washington jumped at the chance to prove the connection between its two enemies. Last November it took the CIA six days to authenticate a bin Laden audiotape. This time Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, indicated its authenticity even before the address had been made public by the al-Jazeera television news channel in Qatar."

"Top U.S. Officials Tell Lawmakers of Iraq-Qaeda Ties" (David Johnston, The New York Times, 2003/02/12)
"Senior Bush administration officials intensified the effort to make the case for military action against Saddam Hussein today, with testimony by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, linking Iraq and Al Qaeda.
Mr. Powell seized on a new audiotape believed to be of Osama bin Laden, urging Muslims to help Baghdad defend itself against an American attack, as evidence that the Qaeda leader was 'in partnership with Iraq.'"

"America's 48 hours to kill Saddam" (Roland Watson, The Times, 2003/02/12)
"American war planners believe that they have little more than 48 hours from the start of a ground war to kill President Saddam Hussein if they are to avoid a protracted conflict and a complicated peace. ...
The American failure to get bin Laden "dead or alive", in Mr Bush's words, has provided an unsettling background to war planning in Iraq. "Osama bin Laden hangs very heavy over Iraq," the official said. "We can't afford another repeat."
There are formidable difficulties in finding Saddam, who has numerous body doubles and rarely sleeps in the same place two nights running, and America is hoping that its massive show of force will prompt a "palace revolt.'"

Tuesday, February 11, 2003

News and commentary:

"Purported bin Laden tape: Muslims should fight U.S." (CNN.com, 2003/02/11)
"In an audiotape broadcast Tuesday on the Arabic television network Al-Jazeera, a voice purported to be that of Osama bin Laden called on Muslims to fight any U.S.-led attack on Iraq -- and warned leaders of Islamic nations not to help the enemy.
"We are following very carefully the preparation of the crusaders to invade the Iraqi land and take the wealth of the Muslims and install a regime that has Tel Aviv and Washington on its head to run you, in preparation for the establishment of greater Israel, God forbid," it said.
Calling on Muslims to "fight those who believe in Satan," the voice quoted the Koran as saying 'you shouldn't take the Jews and the Christians as friends and whoever helps them becomes one of them.'" (See also the transcript: "Osama bin Laden Urges Attacks on the U.S." (The Washington Post, 2003/02/11))

"Troops deployed at Heathrow against terror threat" (Paul Sims and Neville Dean, Independent, 2003/02/11)
"More than 400 soldiers were drafted in to provide extra security at Heathrow Airport and a number of other unspecified sites across London today to combat a new terrorist threat.
Troops began to take up their new positions at one of the world's busiest international airports at 6am and will be deployed throughout the rest of the day as part of a "contingency plan" authorised by the Government and the Metropolitan Police.
The "precautionary measure" is linked to a new fear that al-Qa'ida could use the end of the Muslim festival of Eid, which runs from tomorrow until Saturday, as a trigger for attacks."

"The sacred heart of darkness" (Spengler, Asia Times, 2003/02/11)
"What is it about the French? Even Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who wears a "world citizen" badge on his tweed jacket like a ski pass, has had enough. He excoriates French "duplicity" at the United Nations, adding, "France is so caught up with its need to differentiate itself from America to feel important, it's become silly." Which brings to mind Karl Marx's quip about Louis Napoleon: history repeats itself, but the first time was tragedy, and the second time was farce. Today's French farce is the remnant of something tragic: the confusion of French national peculiarity with divine providence. ...
By contrast, the United States, a melting-pot nation of immigrants, achieved a transcendant kind of universality, and thereby became the world's dominant power.
It is this that France cannot abide in its sacred heart of darkness. Habsburg Austria was a competitor, but America is an obsession. The fact that America twice saved France during the 20th century merely reinforces the French sentiment of ultimate irrelevance. Centuries of accumulated bile ooze and gurgle in mortification. None of it matters. France has no military power and a sclerotic economy. Along with the rest of Europe, its population is aging and soon will decline. Its protest against American hegemony is the last echo of an evil age in Europe whose passing will go unmourned."

"Aspidistra" (Leon Wieseltier, The New Republic, 2003/02/11)
Wieseltier on Louis Menand: "Menand thinks that truth is merely a warrant for terrorism, that objectivity is just an early form of fanaticism, that certainty only kills. "Moral certainty of any kind can lead to bloodshed," he asserts in Raritan, in a piece that is critical of the abolitionists of the nineteenth century. ...
And so he notes that "in defining the United States as a civilization in opposition to militant Islam, even President Bush found himself, in his speech before Congress right after the attacks, explaining that moral certainty is precisely what makes the enemy so dangerous." Do you follow? A war against jihad is itself a jihad. There is no distinction between a just war and a holy war. What a haul of irony! In this way "the modernist paradox is complete: Americans now find themselves in the position of fighting, and being willing to die, for the belief that no one should be made to die for a belief." Menand is fond of that miserably apathetic sentence: He published it also in The New Yorker last fall, in a review of books about the catastrophe of September 11, adding there that "Americans hold it to be a transcendent truth that it is possible to live a good life without loyalty to a transcendent cause." Philosophy is finished. Go shopping. ...
With their metaphysics, Menand writes, the world of the abolitionists and the world of the slave-owners "seem to have more in common with each other than either does with our own." There speaks the pragmatist: fascinating at a dinner, useless in a struggle." (See also: "Honest, Decent, Wrong" (Louis Menand, The New Yorker, from the 2003/01/27 issue))

"Failure and Fantasy" (Lee Harris, Tech Central Station, 2003/02/11)
Harris on scapegoating and fantasy ideology, found via Occam's Toothbrush: "But, tragically, the Arab world seems to be united in wishing to choose the same balm that the Germans chose after the Great War, the indispensable fantasy of those who refuse to face up to reality, "It was all someone else's fault."
This is simply not our tradition in the United States. We blame ourselves, and at our best universities there are professors who are paid quite nicely to find as much fault with our society as it is humanly possible to do. An insane policy by any standard you might wish to chose, except that of pure pragmatic success - the most self-critical nation in human history is also the first nation to achieve absolute superiority over all the other nations of the world; and perhaps, by some dialectic irony, it is more through the efforts of men like Noam Chomsky than Rush Limbaugh that we possess supreme military might. ...
But it is this peculiar penchant for self-criticism that explains why Americans have trouble even acknowledging the fantasy ideology of so much of the Arab world today. It is because we are not fond of shifting our blame to others. We do not seek out bad guys to explain our faults and failures. Hence, when we are attacked, our first response is often the classic line, "Why do they hate us so?"
In fact, they hate us because we are the bad guys in the black hats that the Arab world so desperately needs to comfort themselves for their own failures and defeats." (See also: "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology" (Lee Harris, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/08/13))

"Palmerston versus pirates, pacifists and parasites" (Michael Gove, The Times, 2003/02/11)
"Can you hear the laughter? A low throaty guffaw emanates from a cellblock in The Hague. A rasping chuckle breaks the silence in Baghdad. And in a deep corner of Hell there's a chorus of hilarity from ghosts who haven't had anything to celebrate in decades. For Slobodan Milosevic, President Saddam Hussein and the spirits of politburos past, these must be the most delicious of days. The alliance which was their enemy is now fighting itself. Nato, the physical embodiment of the West's willingness to defend its values, is a squabbling, sundered, supine mess. ...
There is a philosophical division among member states which will only grow as the alliance is set to expand. It can be characterised as a split between old and new Europe, but it is fundamentally a division between those who believe that foreign policy should involve ethics backed with force and those who don't. It is a divide between Palmerstonians on one side and pacifists, parasites or pirates on the other."

"Rabid Weasels" (Brendan Miniter, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/02/11)
"'Saddam is a bad guy,' German Interior Minister Otto Schily conceded, "but he is no Hitler." Hitler was much, much worse, he explained; he well understood the history of the 1930s and '40s. It was as if Mr. Schily, and the half dozen German officials at his side, thought everyone else was listening to their accents and imagining them wearing Nazi uniforms. He seemed determined to show that his nation had learned that aggression was wrong. The inspectors are working, he pleaded; we just need more of them, "perhaps as many as 5,000." As the meeting broke up, the minister's spokesman said plaintively: "I hope we can still be friends."
These are not the words of a self-confident leader meeting the security challenges of today. They are the mumblings of a defeated nation, perpetually holding its head in shame for its past atrocities. Even today, more than 50 years since World War II ended, German officials cannot attend a conference or take to a public stage without in words or demeanor apologizing for their country's past. It is no surprise then that Germany cannot muster the will to make a moral, military stand."

"Inspections Are A Total Waste of Time" (Khidhir Hamza, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/02/11)
"Second, France, Germany, and to a degree, Russia, are opposed to U.S. military action in Iraq mainly because they maintain lucrative trade deals with Baghdad, many of which are arms-related. ...
In the two decades before the Gulf War, I played a role in Iraq's efforts to acquire major technologies from friendly states. In 1974, I headed an Iraqi delegation to France to purchase a nuclear reactor. It was a 40-megawatt research reactor that our sources in the IAEA told us should cost no more than $50 million. But the French deal ended up costing Baghdad more than $200 million. The French-controlled Habbania Resort project cost Baghdad a whopping $750 million, and with the same huge profit margin. With these kinds of deals coming their way, is it any surprise that the French are so desperate to save Saddam's regime?" (See also: "Germany's leading role in arming Iraq" (Marc Erikson, Asia Times, 2003/02/05))

"Standing With Saddam" (The Washington Post, 2003/02/11)
"France and Germany have finally responded to Iraq's flagrant violation of United Nations disarmament orders by mounting an offensive. Yet the target of their campaign is not Saddam Hussein but the United States - and the proximate casualties look to be not the power structures of a rogue dictator but the international institutions that have anchored European and global security. ...
That their slogans are being mimicked by Baghdad's thugs ought to trouble French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. And perhaps they would be uneasy if their priorities were to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, restore the credibility of NATO and the Security Council, and steer the Bush administration into a multilateral approach to global security. More and more, however, the two leaders behave as if they share the same overriding goal as the Iraqi dictator: thwarting U.S. action even when it is supported by most other NATO and European nations. They have next to no chance of succeeding, but they could poison international relations for years to come."