Archived news and commentary: March 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, March 16, 2003

News and commentary:

"Saddam: Iraq Set to Fight US Anywhere in the World" (Nadim Ladki, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2003/03/16)
"Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said on Sunday Iraq was ready to fight the United States anywhere in the world if Washington launched a war.
"When the enemy opens the war on a large scale it should realize that the battle between us will be waged wherever there is sky, earth and water anywhere in the world," Saddam was quoted by state-run Iraqi media as telling a group of military officers. ...
Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said Baghdad was ready for war within the hour and had trained tens of thousands of "martyrs" to fight Americans. ...
"Tens of thousands of Iraqi men and women have volunteered to be martyrs in the battle with the American enemy and we have prepared them, he said. "We have prepared ourselves for all kinds of war, including street warfare and desert warfare."
The Arabic term for warriors ready to die for a cause has become associated with Palestinian suicide bombers. It was unclear to what sort of fighters Sabri was referring to, but he did later cite the Palestinians' conflict with Israel to argue that superiority in arms would not guarantee Washington victory."

"Bush: Monday Will Be 'a Moment of Truth' on Iraq" (Mike Allen, The Washington Post, 2003/03/16)
"President Bush ended an hour-long summit in the Azores today by giving the United Nations a deadline of 24 hours to act on a resolution authorizing war with Iraq, marking an abrupt end to six months of feverish but failing diplomacy.
White House officials held out little if any hope that the resolution would pass, and Bush made it clear in word and tone that he is preparing to unleash the 225,000 U.S. troops massing around the Persian Gulf.
"We concluded that tomorrow is a moment of truth for the world," Bush said, joined by the summit's three other participants at an afternoon news conference at a Portuguese air base. 'Tomorrow's the day that we will determine whether or not diplomacy can work.'" (See also the transcript: "President Bush: Monday "Moment of Truth" for World on Iraq" (The White House, 2003/03/16). Also statements of the Atlantic Summit: "A Vision for Iraq and the Iraqi People" (The Washington Post, 2003/03/16) and "Commitment to Transatlantic Solidarity" (The Washington Post, 2003/03/16))

"Rachel Corrie, 23, from Olympia..."
(AP Photo/Khalil Hamra, 2003/03/17)
"Rachel Corrie, 23, from Olympia, Wash., a member of the 'International Solidarity Movement,' burns a mock U.S. flag during a rally in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah in this Feb. 15, 2003 file photo. Corrie was run over and crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer Sunday, March 16, 2003, while she was trying to stop it from tearing down a building in the Rafah refugee camp, witnesses said."

"Israeli Bulldozer Kills U.S. Woman, 23" (Ibrahim Barzak, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/03/16)
"An American woman in Gaza to protest Israeli operations was killed Sunday when she was run over by an Israeli bulldozer, witnesses and hospital officials said.
Rachel Corrie, 23, a college student from Olympia, Wash., had been trying to stop the bulldozer from tearing down a building in the Rafah refugee camp, witnesses said. She was taken to Najar hospital in Rafah, where she died, said Dr. Ali Moussa, a hospital administrator. ...
"Rachel was alone in front of the house as we were trying to get them to stop," Schnabel said. "She waved for the bulldozer to stop and waved. She fell down and the bulldozer kept going. We yelled, 'Stop, stop,' and the bulldozer didn't stop at all. It had completely run over her and then it reversed and ran back over her." ...
Israeli military spokesman Capt. Jacob Dallal said her death was an accident."

"The Arrogant Empire" (Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, from the 2003/03/24 issue)
"In fact, the debate is not about Saddam anymore. It is about America and its role in the new world. To understand the present crisis, we must first grasp how the rest of the world now perceives American power. ...
Or consider Australia, another crucial ally, and another country where a majority now opposes American policy. Or Ireland. Or India. In fact, while the United States has the backing of a dozen or so governments, it has the support of a majority of the people in only one country in the world, Israel. If that is not isolation, then the word has no meaning. ...
But the administration is wrong if it believes that a successful war will make the world snap out of a deep and widening mistrust and resentment of American foreign policy. A war with Iraq, even if successful, might solve the Iraq problem. It doesn’t solve the America problem. What worries people around the world above all else is living in a world shaped and dominated by one country — the United States. And they have come to be deeply suspicious and fearful of us. ...
In its first year the administration withdrew from five international treaties — and did so as brusquely as it could. It reneged on virtually every diplomatic effort that the Clinton administration had engaged in, from North Korea to the Middle East, often overturning public statements from Colin Powell supporting these efforts. It developed a language and diplomatic style that seemed calculated to offend the world. ...
In terms of effectiveness, this strategy has been a disaster. It has alienated friends and delighted enemies. Having traveled around the world and met with senior government officials in dozens of countries over the past year, I can report that with the exception of Britain and Israel, every country the administration has dealt with feels humiliated by it."

"George's big mistake was to listen to Tony" (Anne Applebaum, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/03/16)
"Practically nobody is willing to say it, so let us be as frank as possible: the decision to conduct the invasion of Iraq in consultation with the United Nations - a decision taken by President George W Bush partly to mollify his friend Tony Blair - has been utterly disastrous. Even if it proves possible to bribe Guinea and Angola and Chile into voting for a second UN resolution - even if the French, miraculously, change their minds about the whole thing tomorrow - the diplomatic events of the past week will go down in history as the most embarassing for the United States and Britain in a long time. ...
In the present, the flawed UN process, Mr Bush's lackadaisical attitude to alliances and French obstructionism have brought us to an extremely odd moment in diplomatic history. Weirdly, the fate of Mr Bush, of Mr Blair, and possibly of the international system itself, at least the one we have known since 1945, are now dependent on the results of a war in an obscure patch of Middle Eastern desert."

"We Don't Even Agree On What's Newsworthy" (David Greenberg, The Washington Post Outlook, 2003/03/16)
An interesting comparison of the discrepancy between how U.S. media and European media have treated some recent stories, such as "whether two Afghan detainees who died in December were victims of fatally abusive treatment by American soldiers":
"Public opinion abroad readily accepts intimations of willful U.S. aggression and even depravity; witness the currency among the French and Italians of conspiracy theories holding that the administration engineered the horrors of Sept. 11. ...
The trauma of Sept. 11 marked another turning point. Surging with patriotism, citizens and journalists granted their leaders unwonted latitude in fashioning a response to the terrorists. Although most things returned more or less to normal after six months - people began traveling again, Congress started bickering again, Bush called for tax cuts again - the new readiness to defer to the government on national security matters remained. Ever since, the public, including the press, has ascribed to the president a degree of goodwill unprecedented in the post-1960s era.
Overseas, however, events since Sept. 11 have led people in the opposite direction. Suspicion of U.S. motives has escalated; willingness to cut the Bush administration some slack has plunged. Where Americans' trust in their leaders seems distressingly high, as if the Nixon years have been forgotten, foreigners' faith in us is troublingly low. In that divide lie the roots of our irreconcilable takes on the news, and our contrary fears for the future."

"Iraqis launch campaign of sabotage and defiance to undermine Saddam" (Con Coughlin, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/03/16)
"Open acts of defiance by opponents of Saddam Hussein's regime have intensified in the past week, with saboteurs carrying out attacks against Iraq's railway system and protesters openly calling for the overthrow of the Iraqi dictator.
The most blatant act of sabotage took place 20 miles south of the north Iraqi city of Mosul when members of the Iraqi opposition blew up a stretch of track on the Mosul-Baghdad railway, causing the derailment of a train.
Before fleeing back to their base in Kurdistan, they left piles of leaflets by the side of the track urging the Iraqi soldiers who were sent to investigate the explosion to join the "international alliance to liberate Iraq" from "Saddam the criminal". In a separate incident, a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at a train illegally transporting fuel from Baghdad to Syria.
Demonstrations were also reported to have taken place in Kirkuk, where an estimated crowd of 20,000 marched on the Ba'ath party's main administrative headquarters demanding Saddam's overthrow. Three posters of the Iraqi leader were torn down and a grenade was thrown at the government building. One senior Ba'ath official was reported killed in the attack."

Saturday, March 15, 2003

News and commentary:

"Post-colonial U.N. crutch" (James C. Bennett, UPI, 2003/03/15)
"I have never tried to claim a moral legitimacy for the Anglosphere nations to speak for the world. What they do have is a moral legitimacy to speak for their own peoples. This is conferred by the boring but to date irreplaceable method of an unbroken record of functioning representative constitutional institutions stretching back centuries.
To say that a community of nations with these experiences in common might be able to form a better basis for cooperation than the grab-bag of democracies, semi-democracies, semi-evolving totalitarian and authoritarian states, outright kleptocracies and failed states whose representatives in New York cannot in some cases risk their lives by returning to the countries for which they supposedly speak, is not arrogance. It is simply reality."

"Air Force Base OKs 'Deadly Force' Action" (AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/03/15)
"Security forces at Vandenberg Air Force Base are allowed to use "deadly force" in some cases if any anti-war demonstrators infiltrate the military complex, officials said.
Some anti-war activists have announced plans to trespass in hopes of disturbing Vandenberg's mission and to vandalize sensitive equipment they believe helps the war effort.
Vandenberg officials revealed Friday that military security police have always been allowed to shoot to kill, if necessary, to protect base residents and equipment.
It is more critical now that people understand the severity of that policy, a base spokeswoman said."

"Fifth column watch" (Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, 2003/03/15)
"What to make of the following, reported in Salon by Michelle Goldberg:

[Camp] Vandenberg is about 50 miles north Santa Barbara, Calif. In a few days, activists will start converging on a nearby four-acre plot of land that Bud Boothe, a World War II veteran, donated to the Military Globalization Project. They're going to camp there and train to breach the base's security and possibly vandalize some of its equipment. Lumsdaine, the Military Globalization Project coordinator, is a 48-year-old who has been arrested at Vandenberg twice. He describes the base as "the electronic nerve center of the global-surveillance-targeting, weapons-guidance, and military-command satellites that will largely direct the war." ... Within the base, Lumsdaine says, are "major off-limits security zones," that, when breached, "set off a series of responses in their own security procedures which require disruption and partial shut down of regular activities," which means the base can't operate at full capacity.

This is not legitimate dissent. It isn't free speech. It isn't even wishing victory for Saddam. It's an attempt actually to impede the successful conduct of this war, to fight for the enemy by attacking a U.S. military base. No, these people don't represent most anti-war types. But they exist and they're planning sabotage. It didn't take long, did it?" (See also: "The antiwar movement prepares to escalate" (Michelle Goldberg, Salon.com, 2003/03/14))

"War and psychology" (Mona Charen, The Washington Times, 2003/03/15)
"'War never solves anything.' So say dozens of callers to C-SPAN and left-leaning radio programs (yes, there are some).
The answer to this argument, if you can call it an argument, could almost fit on a bumper sticker: Apart from securing American independence, ending slavery, and defeating Nazism and communism, war has never solved anything.
There is a severe imbalance between the strength of anti-war arguments and the vehemence with which they are advanced. Liberals think of themselves as humanitarians, so it requires a peculiar form of dogmatism to oppose war against a man who is responsible for at least 1.2 million deaths (a conservative estimate), has turned Baghdad into a terror haven, has attacked three neighbors, has proclaimed his implacable hostility toward the United States, has built enough chemical and biological weapons to wipe out nearly everyone on the continent of Asia, has pursued nuclear weapons and has truculently defied countless United Nations resolutions."

"Get Out of the Way" (Thomas H. B. Ewald, The New York Times, 2003/03/15)
Ewald was held hostage during the Gulf war and was used as a "human shield":
"From the moment of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2 until my release a month and a half later, I saw what it was like to live under Saddam Hussein's rule. It was terrible. When a society suffers a loss of civil order, which is what happens in any invasion, little is stable, and the weak are especially vulnerable. But what the Iraqi Army and secret police did was more than violent; it was cruel. On the second day of the invasion, I saw a woman minutes after she had been raped by a member of the Republican Guard. I saw stores and homes robbed. I saw Iraqi tanks shooting at civilians fleeing the country in a small motorboat, and anti-aircraft cannons firing into a residential neighborhood.
In all of these acts of violence, there was one malevolent constant: those who opposed Saddam Hussein could expect torture and execution. Still, I was aided by numerous Arabs who were willing to risk their lives. I am deeply grateful to them. "Human shields" say they are risking their lives to help the people of Iraq — but their actions can accomplish only the opposite."

Friday, March 14, 2003

News and commentary:

"The Loser Left" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2003/03/14)
"Mark LeVine, a history professor at the University of California, Irvine, has a revealing piece on the left-wing Web site AlterNet.org. The headline reads "'Bush Wins': The Left's Nightmare Scenario." The "nightmare" he describes, however, isn't actually Bush winning, but America winning in Iraq:

In this ... scenario, the war is over quickly with relatively low U.S. casualties, some sort of mechanism for transitional rule is put in place, and President Bush and his policies gain unprecedented power and prestige. From my recent conversations with organizers and their latest pronouncements, it is clear that this possibility has yet to be addressed. Waiting much longer could spell disaster for the antiwar movement. ...
In such a scenario, especially if there is no major upsurge in domestic terrorism, the antiwar movement will find itself publicly discredited and politically marginalized; remember the Y2K dooms-dayers? ...
If the movement doesn't move with full effort to lay the groundwork for a Bush Wins scenario the massive organizing and consciousness raising of the last year could well prove fleeting, forcing the movement to start from scratch in mobilizing public opinion a year or two down the road. ...

LeVine is at least somewhat constructive, saying "progressive forces need to accept the removal of Hussein as a great opportunity to build democracy and justice in Iraq." But in what sense does the word "progressive" describe a political movement that hopes for failure and views success as a "nightmare"?" (See also: "'Bush Wins': The Left's Nightmare Scenario" (Mark LeVine, AlterNet, 2003/03/13))

"Just Incredible" (Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, 2003/03/14)
Welcome to The World According To Sweden™: "Whatever remaining respect one might have had for Hans Blix just evaporated for me. Global warming is a bigger threat than weapons of mass destruction?? Then there's this steaming pile of wishful thinking:

So there's no way you can dis-invent that and chemical weapons have been the weapons of choice for terrorists as they were in Japan in the subway a number of years ago, so they will not be gone. But I don't think there's any reason for a rant of hysteria, no.
At the same time, though, one must not disregard and forget the things that are breeding these terrorist movements. Why do they become terrorists? Why do they become so desperate they are willing to blow up airplanes or buildings? Therefore we have to look at the social problems as well.

"Social problems" caused a multi-millionaire religious fanatic to murder 3000 people? Give me a break. You see in this interview every half-baked European rationale for ignoring the threat we face. No wonder the guy eventually sided with the French." (See also: "Hans Blix - Caught Between Iraq And A Hard Place" (MTV, 2003/03/12): "You have the instances like the global warming convention, the Kyoto protocol, when the U.S. went its own way. I regret it. To me the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace and war. We will have regional conflicts and use of force, but world conflicts I do not believe will happen any longer. But the environment, that is a creeping danger. I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict.")

"All The News That's Fit to Print?" (Tom Gross, National Review, 2003/03/14)
A must-read analysis of the slanted coverage of The New York Times on Israel:
"The slants and omissions in the Times extend well beyond basic reporting. For example, in last year's "Year in Review" calendar (December 29, 2002), the Times highlighted the most important events of the year. The entry for March 28 read: "Arab world agrees to relations with Israel if land is returned" (this is hardly news; it is a claim some Arabs have made for decades) — followed directly by, on March 29, "Israel invades Yasser Arafat's headquarters, 5 Palestinians, 1 Israeli die." The reader is left with the impression that Israel's only response to the supposed Arab peace offer was violence.
In fact, on March 27 (on which only the death of comedian Milton Berle was marked by the Times), 29 Israelis — including an 89-year-old Auschwitz survivor, Sarah Levy-Hoffman — were blown up while celebrating a Passover seder at a Netanya hotel, something the Times did not list in its calendar. (The Times does mention the Passover bomb in a footnote to its calendar, but says only that "more than a dozen people died," an odd way to characterize a group of 29 people. Incidentally, six Israelis — not one — were killed by Palestinians on March 29.)
These are the kind of errors that the Times makes almost every day in it Middle East coverage. If the paper were making similar errors in favor of Israel, we might put it all down to sloppiness. But it doesn't."

"Regime change a la Francais" (Arnaud de Borchgrave, UPI, 2003/03/14)
"There was a time when France was not so squeamish about regime change.
In fact, France has intervened militarily - either to change regimes in sub-Saharan Africa or to restore deposed strongmen - no less than 37 times since 1960. In some cases, Foreign Legion paratroopers were dispatched because a local leader (like the Central African Republic's Bokassa before he crowned himself emperor) was afraid his enemies were getting ready to dump him.
There was never any thought of going to the U.N. Security Council when France's national interest was deemed to be at stake in its former colonies. ...
France has been a self-appointed African cop on the sub-Saharan beat ever since French West Africa and Equatorial Africa spawned 13 independent states in 1960.
French public opinion has demonstrated in countless surveys that it isn't too interested in regime change operations in black Africa.
Iraq is a different story."

"The Regime of Oil and Blood" (Stefan Sharkansky, Shark Blog, 2003/03/14)
Sharkansky's commented translation of an article on Saddam's Baath Party from Der Spiegel - "The Dictator's Pool of Cadres" (Markus Deggerich, Der Spiegel, 2003/03/11):
"In the Baghdad slum called "Saddam City", there are only two places with any color: the market place with the fruit that most people can at best walk past with longing glances, and the freshly painted local Baath Party headquarters. Saddam's Baath Party: omnipresent as its secret agents that have inflitrated the society down to the last village. The modest prosperity that Saddam once bestowed upon his people was bought through the abandonment of freedom.
It may be that after a war the history of the Baath in Iraq is finished and a completely different set of memories would be on display. Not everybody counts on it. For in Iraq, there have been too many wounded and too many people have simply disappeared. "Constitutional state" and "human rights" are foreign words for too many Iraqis. The prisons and torture chambers are notorious. Amnesty International estimates that since the Baath regime came to power in 1968, around three million people have been executed. Up to five million, or 15% of the population have fled from Saddam's bloodhounds into exile. Saddam's grandeur and welfare state are built on oil and blood." (See also the German original: "Das Kaderreservoir des Diktators" (Markus Deggerich, Der Spiegel, 2003/03/11))

"Hamas Pointer" (Martin Kramer, Sandstorm, 2003/03/14)
"Time runs an article in the March 17 issue by one Azzam Tamimi, on why it would be better to capture and not kill the "agitator" and "spiritual leader" (the word "terrorist" is not used) named Osama bin Laden. What Time doesn't tell you is that Tamimi is a Hamas mole.
I've written before on Sandstorm about Tamimi's Hamas affiliation and his extremism (which has included admiration for the "courageous" Taliban and full support for suicide bombings). He's the London mouthpiece of a listed terrorist organization, and the three-man supervisory board of his private institute includes another Palestinian indicted with Sami Al-Arian last month.
Tamimi has now reached a readership of millions through TIME, whose editors probably got his name from his American friends—people who really can't tell a terrorist from an agitator. Tamimi's article gives you the impression he is on "our side" against militant Islam, when in fact he is one of them." (See also: "Islam After bin Laden" (Azzam Tamimi, TIME, 2003/03/10) and "Ask Professor Esposito" (Martin Kramer, Sandstorm, 2002/09/26))

"Muscular Independence" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2003/03/14)
"We are well beyond the nuances of debate and chic sophistry; the drama now hinges on to what degree a NATO ally's behavior will increase the number of Americans killed in action. France, remember, did not reluctantly vote against the United States, but actively sent its diplomats throughout Africa and Asia to lobby countries to oppose America, a visceral hostility not matched by either Russia or China — or even any of the Arab League. NATO, in other words, as we knew it, is already dead and buried.
Bases in this baffling new world are a polite mechanism for blackmail and concessions — and are increasingly as much trouble as they are worth. Whether we think we protect them or they think they are exploited by us, it matters little: We are held hostage by our very professed desire to want something they have. Every time we beg for votes in the General Assembly, try to buy a Turkish vote, bully a pacifistic South Korea, or beseech the Saudi kleptocrats for help, we only weaken America. And we end up looking hypocritical in the bargain — as recently as when we thanked the dictator Musharraf while castigating a republican Turkey. ...
The American people are not naifs who yearn for isolationism, but they are starting to ask some hard questions about the way we have been doing business for 50 years, and it may well be time to grant the French, Canadians, Germans, Turks, South Koreans, and a host of others their wishes for independence from us: polite friendship — but no alliances, no bases, no money, no trade concessions, and no more begging for the privilege of protecting them."

"Gossip feeds the chaos and confusion at UN" (Marcus Warren, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/03/14)
"'Another nutty day at the office,' muttered one senior UN official involved with Iraq issues as he arrived for work yesterday morning.
He then took a lift to the upper floors of the UN's towering headquarters. Downstairs, diplomats, UN staff and journalists swarmed over each other in a desperate hunt for titbits of intelligence.
Their motto was the one-liner uttered by a senior diplomat earlier this week: "If anyone tells you that they understand what is going on inside the Security Council, they're wrong."
In the febrile atmosphere sweeping the building the whisper that Guinea would vote against the US on the advice of its president's witch doctor provoked new excitement."

"It's your mess, say French with disdain" (Charles Bremner, The Times, 2003/03/14)
"The contrast in cross-Channel moods is well illustrated by images of the relaxed and beaming M Chirac, his popularity in the stratosphere, alongside the haggard-looking "Poor Tony Blair", as le Monde called him. Capping French glory was the news yesterday that babies in the Arab world were being named "Chirac", in tribute to the "peace-warrior President". In 1990, they were being called Saddam, and more recently Osama."

"Americans turn fire on ungrateful nation" (Roland Watson, The Times, 2003/03/14)
"A Florida congresswoman introduced a Bill on Capitol Hill that would allow the families of Second World War dead to dig up their bones and take them home.
Ginny Brown-Waite said that her American Heroes Repatriation Act 2003 was a response to constituents' concerns that their fathers and grandfathers were lying in "unpatriotic soil". She said: "The French don’t seem to remember that if it wasn't for America, they would be speaking German." ...
In Downing Street, Mr Blair's spokesman accused France of poisoning the diplomatic well: 'I don't think that anyone is under any illusion that if you inject into the diplomatic bloodstream a strategic, in-principle veto, then that's going to poison the system and present very real difficulties.'"

"Explosive messages for every war" (Glen Owen and Michael Evans, The Times, 2003/03/14)
"The message scrawled on the side of an American bunker-busting bomb being wheeled out into the desert was blunt: "Fuque the French" had been scrawled on the side by a member of the US Air Force.
Painting war graffiti and taunts on bombs and shells is one of the great traditions of warfare. But normally it is the enemy that is the target for the abuse, not a Nato ally. However, senior American officers at this munitions plant in the desert — known colloquially as "Ammo country" — said the French gibe "crossed the line" of acceptability.
"I don't think that is necessary,"said Chief Edwards, the plant’s second in command. 'France is still an ally.'"

"US and Britain lash out at France over Iraq" (James Harding et al., Financial Times, 2003/03/14)
"On a day that also saw Robin Cook, the leader of the House of Commons, indicating he would quit the cabinet if the UK went to war without a second UN resolution, Downing Street accused France of "poisoning" the diplomatic process. Tony Blair called the French stance "completely intransigent".
Jack Straw, foreign secretary, said it was "extraordinary" that President Jacques Chirac should have vowed this week that Paris would block a new resolution "whatever the circumstances". ...
The US said it was willing to let bargaining at the UN continue into next week before deciding whether to put the resolution to a vote or withdraw it. Ari Fleischer, the president's spokesman, said: 'The president is going the extra mile for diplomacy.'"

Thursday, March 13, 2003

News and commentary:

"The Pentagon's New Map" (Thomas P.M. Barnett, Esquire, from the March 2003 issue)
A must-read essay by Barnett, a professor of warfare analysis, who "has been advising the Office of the Secretary of Defense and giving this briefing continually at the Pentagon and in the intelligence community". Found via Best of the Web Today:
"Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and — most important — the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap. ...
Freedom cannot blossom in the Middle East without security, and security is this country's most influential public-sector export. By that I do not mean arms exports, but basically the attention paid by our military forces to any region’s potential for mass violence. We are the only nation on earth capable of exporting security in a sustained fashion, and we have a very good track record of doing it. ...
This country has successfully exported security to globalization’s Old Core (Western Europe, Northeast Asia) for half a century and to its emerging New Core (Developing Asia) for a solid quarter century following our mishandling of Vietnam. But our efforts in the Middle Ease have been inconsistent — in Africa, almost nonexistent. Until we begin the systematic, long-term export of security to the Gap, it will increasingly export its pain to the Core in the form of terrorism and other instabilities."

"The Old Cabal and Chain" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2003/03/13)
"On the paranoid fringes of both the isolationist right and the anti-American left, a new conspiracy theory has taken hold to explain the dreaded (by these folks) impending liberation of Iraq. As Pat Buchanan puts it in his inaptly named magazine, The American Conservative, "a cabal of polemicists and public officials" are "colluding with Israel" to "ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests."
Echoing Buchanan is Edward Said, a literature professor at Columbia who by varying accounts is either Egyptian or Palestinian. "An immensely wealthy and powerful republic has been hijacked by a small cabal of individuals," Said writes on the crackpot-left site Counterpunch.org. "Wherever you look in the Congress there are the tell-tale signs either of the Zionist lobby, the right-wing Christians, or the military-industrial complex, three inordinately influential minority groups who share hostility to the Arab world, unbridled support for extremist Zionism, and an insensate conviction that they are on the side of the angels." ...
There's a logical contradiction at the heart of the "Zionist cabal" complaint. ... If Buchanan and Said are right in their predictions of disaster - if the result of Saddam's overthrow turns out to be, as Said puts it, "increasing the world's already ample stores of anti-Americanism" and provoking rather than preventing terrorism, how is this in Israel's interest?" (See also: "Whose War?" (Patrick J. Buchanan, The American Conservative, from the 2003/03/27 issue), "Who's In Charge? - A Tiny, Unelected Group, Backed by Powerful Unrepresentative Interests" (Edward Said, CounterPunch, 2003/03/08) and "A Democrat Speaks Out" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2003/03/11))

"The resentments of old Europe" (William Hague, The Spectator, from the 2003/03/15 issue)
"Without America, France would have lived in a dark age of dictatorship for decades. Without America, Germans could not have rescued themselves from a racist ideology. And without America, Europe's only alternative to Nazi tyranny would have been communist tyranny. American troops left behind them an independent and democratic Japan, and brought Europe the Marshall Plan — both supreme acts of enlightenment in foreign policy. They share with Britain, but not with other European powers, the distinction of leaving democracy and freedom in their wake wherever they can.
That very freedom now gives millions the right to protest. South Koreans now resent the US troops without whom their society could not have survived. The French, it seems, have never got over the indignity of having to be rescued. ...
All over the world, America takes on responsibilities because others shirk them. They got involved in Kosovo because Europeans had neither the means nor the ability to sort it out. They pursue a 'one-sided' policy on Israel because without it the Jews would be driven into the sea. They need a huge increase in military spending partly because France, Germany and others are not prepared to spend a penny more themselves. ...
The sound we can hear from Paris and Berlin is not the march of ever closer union, but the rage of ever closer impotence. Once again, when the world gets dangerous, it is the Americans, British and Australians who respond. The vacuum left by others leaves us no choice. And if America leads us yet again in destroying another murdering despot, I will join the woman in Tucson who has no knowledge of where I live, in saying, 'God Bless America.'"

"The Yanks are going home" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2003/03/15 issue)
"What we've seen in the last few weeks is that for Europeans the real clash of civilisations is not between Islam and the West but between what the French call 'Anglo-Saxon' capitalism and Eurostatism. I was amused by the sheer snobbery of Martin Amis's analysis in the Guardian last week: the condescension to Bush's faith, the parallels between Texas and Saudi Arabia, both mired in a dusty religiosity. America's religiosity, now unique in the Western world, is at least part of the reason it reproduces at replacement rate, also uniquely in the Western world. Besides, for all Amis's cracks, Texas doesn't seem as fundamentalist as the radical secularism of post-Christian Europe. Why would anyone think a disinclination to breed or to defend oneself is the recipe for success? Just because there’ll always be an England? As Bernard Shaw wrote almost 90 years ago in Heartbreak House, of a Europe too smug and self-absorbed to see what was coming, 'Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favour of England because you were born in it?'" (See also: "The palace of the end" (Martin Amis, The Guardian, 2003/04/04))

"The case for colonialism" (Daniel Kruger, The Spectator, from the 2003/03/15 issue)
"Slowly, obscurely, enunciated with difficulty in thick Texan accents, a new doctrine of international order is emerging, of which the imminent war is a crucial outing. It is the doctrine of humanitarian intervention — or, to give it its proper name, neo-colonialism. This doctrine is driven by the firm belief — uncluttered by relativist self-loathing — in the universal principles of liberty and justice. It gives expression to our sense that everyone, not just the West, has a right to live in a decent country — and that the West has a duty to help them do so. In particular, it gives substance to the vacuities of the 'ethical foreign policy'. ...
The task today for Britain’s imperial heir is to reverse the debilitating effects of socialism and tyranny in the developing world. This does not require perpetual territorial conquest; but it does require regime change, where regimes will not change themselves. ...
But as in America, as in Sierra Leone, the seeds of liberty can be planted; the natural instincts of all people for growth and prosperity and peace will flourish of their own accord. Why should the Left get to call themselves idealists? Why, more to the point, should they get to call themselves liberals? Pray that the doctrine of the hedgehog prevails, and we will see the realisation of Thomas Jefferson's dream: an 'empire of liberty'."

"Don't expel Dr Hook" (Rod Liddle, The Spectator, from the 2003/03/15 issue)
Liddle on the fundamentalist cleric Sheikh Abu Hamza al Misri: "A pamphlet from Hamza's organisation, 'Supporters of Sharia', recently criticised the government for reducing the age of consent for homosexuals 'to the same as it is for human beings'. It continued — you want to know, don’t you? — with these words: 'They call it gay. We call it digging filth out of young boys' backsides.' And so on. It's just one example of the epic, almost heroic, levels of intolerance with which Hamza and his people are suffused. ...
He is, you have to say, profoundly anti-democratic, democracies being callow, man-made things, and, as a final irony, he doesn’t even agree with the concept of absolute freedom of speech. Ask him about it and his one good eye gets cloudy and he starts mumbling dark things about Salman Rushdie. Abu Hamza thinks Abu Hamza should have the freedom to speak his mind because, of course, it's not really Abu Hamza speaking, but, in essence, God.
Should we deny freedom of speech to someone who doesn't really believe in freedom of speech? Of course not. We let them have it. We let them have it and allow the injustice and contradiction inherent in such a stance do for them, in the end.
That's the way a civilised nation would behave: allow itself to be described as a toilet without recourse, at times of provocation, to flushing everything we don’t like round the U-bend. In other words, engaging on our terms. Because we're right, aren't we?"

"The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt" (Oriana Fallaci, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/03/13)
"In Europe your enemies are everywhere, Mr. Bush. What you quietly call "differences of opinion" are in reality pure hate. Because in Europe pacifism is synonymous with anti-Americanism, sir, and accompanied by the most sinister revival of anti-Semitism the anti-Americanism triumphs as much as in the Islamic world. Haven't your ambassadors informed you? Europe is no longer Europe. It is a province of Islam, as Spain and Portugal were at the time of the Moors. It hosts almost 16 million Muslim immigrants and teems with mullahs, imams, mosques, burqas, chadors. It lodges thousands of Islamic terrorists whom governments don't know how to identify and control. People are afraid, and in waving the flag of pacifism - pacifism synonymous with anti-Americanism - they feel protected.
Besides, Europe does not care for the 221,484 Americans who died for her in the Second World War. Rather than gratitude, their cemeteries give rise to resentment. As a consequence, in Europe nobody will back this war. Not even nations which are officially allied with the U.S., not even the prime ministers who call you "My friend George." (Like Silvio Berlusconi.) In Europe you only have one friend, one ally, sir: Tony Blair. But Mr. Blair too leads a country which is invaded by the Moors. A country that hides that resentment."

"America, the Rome of the 21st century" (Mark A. Heller, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/03/13)
"For if the administration ultimately ignores the mass and institutional expressions of opposition and wages war on Saddam, the result, assuming the war ends with Saddam gone, will be even greater American preeminence, along with greater contempt for multilateral institutional constraints on American power and even less willingness to consider the views of anyone else except the few allies who stood with the US before and during the campaign.
In other words, the result will be precisely that least desired by American critics: The UN will go the way of the League of Nations (perhaps even to the point of American withdrawal), and the US, instead of being a mere global cop, will become a global supercop.
Alternatively, if the administration backs down because of fear of the possible consequences of acting unilaterally (hostile editorial comment, critical resolutions in the UN, sanctions, even indictments in the International Criminal Court) and leaves Saddam alone, the result will be either a variety of small cops acting independently to take care of their own neighborhoods (Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast) or else multilateral paralysis, that is, no cops and no global order at all.
That would not be a step forward to world government or world law; it would be a step backward to the anarchy of the state of nature, where life, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

"Bin Laden rumour has world press in a tizz" (Stuart Millar, The Guardian, 2003/03/13)
"For what would have been a massive scoop, it began in unspectacular fashion. During a telephone interview with a Tehran radio station yesterday, a Pakistani political commentator dropped, almost as an aside, the earthshattering bombshell that Osama bin Laden had been captured.
Murtaza Poya, deputy leader of the Islamic Awami Tahrik party, confidently informed the station that Pakistani intelligence agents and US troops had picked up Bin Laden inside Pakistan. ...
By lunchtime, journalists were bombarding government agencies on both sides of the Atlantic for confirmation. They were to be disappointed. Pressed for a response during an unrelated press conference in London, the home secretary, David Blunkett, dismissed Mr Poya's claim: "It's totally unconfirmed. There have been several reports of this sort." ...
But last night Mr Poya was sticking to his claims. "He is in the custody of those who were chasing him and the announcement to that effect will be made between March 17 and 18 when the war in Iraq is expected to start," he told the Associated Press."

"Britain Sets Out Tests to Break Logjam on Iraq" (Alan Elsner, Reuters, 2003/03/13)
"Britain set out six tough new conditions for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to avoid war on Wednesday, in an attempt to break the U.N. Security Council stalemate over a resolution to set Baghdad a tight deadline before fighting begins. ...
British officials said they wanted to present the conditions - which include a demand that Saddam appear on television and pledge to give up weapons of mass destruction - as a side statement to a fresh resolution. The deadline for Iraq to comply could be moved from March 17 to March 21, diplomats said. ...
Diplomats thought the list of British conditions would be next to impossible for Saddam to accept without fatally weakening the basis of his power. They included demands that:
- Iraq should allow 30 of its scientists to be interviewed outside the country with their families in tow;
- surrender stocks of anthrax and other biological and chemical agents or produce documents to demonstrate what happened to them;
- destroy banned missiles;
- account for unmanned aerial vehicles;
- promise to hand over all mobile bio-production laboratories for destruction.
But the humiliating demand for a televised "mea culpa" alone is likely to be too much for Saddam, prompting anti-war members of Blair's Labor Party to ask if his wish-list was little short of a declaration of war."

Wednesday, March 12, 2003

News and commentary:

"Eyes wide shut in an orgy of fallacy" (Miranda Devine, The Sydney Morning Herald, 2003/03/13)
Devine on the "dangerously fashionable anti-Bush and anti-Howardism", found via Tim Blair:
"C.S. Lewis, in a 1943 essay, The Abolition of Man, wrote of the dangers of extreme cynicism. "You cannot go on 'seeing through' things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see."
We are all guilty of sometimes choosing sides based on personalities. But so many of those who rail against Bush are so busy "seeing through" his motives, which they imagine are oil, or some Freudian cowboy urge to avenge his father, that the act of "seeing through" has become more important than what there is to see, as C.S. Lewis would say."

"An Afternoon with Saddam" (Alcibiades Hidalgo, Le Monde/Watch, 2003/03/10 [2003/03/12])
An article by the former Cuban ambassador to the United Nations on his meeting with Saddam in November 1990, trying to convince him of the likely outcome of a war in the gulf:
"After having shown us in a grave manner the place where diplomatic reports such as the one he had just heard would crash, he began a diatribe over the colonial injustice that the State of Kuwait had caused. He condemned the ingratitude of the Arab nation toward the only one of its members that had fought against Persian expansion in the Gulf. At first the victim of maneuvers on the petroleum market, he now found himself isolated in his new crusade against he West. He criticized the ingratitude of other friends, hostile to Iraq’s decision not to give in before the enemy, the UN’s impotence and the disloyalty of the Communist nations. He spoke of Saladin, a fellow native of Tikrit, he said, and then spoke of his date with history and of the formidable lesson that the Iraqi people, determined to be victorious, would give to any aggressor.
“You can tell comrade Fidel Castro,” he said getting up, “that I thank him for his solicitude. If the troops of the United States invade Iraq, we shall crush them like that,” he concluded resoundingly, stamping the carpet several times with his shining military boots... The audience had ended." (Note: Translated by Douglas. See also the French version: "Un après-midi avec Saddam" (Alcibiades Hidalgo, Le Monde, 2003/03/10))

"Call the Vote. Walk Away." (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2003/03/12)
"Walk away, Mr. President. Walk away from the U.N. Security Council. It will not authorize the coming war. You can stand on your head and it won't change the outcome. You can convert to Islam in a Parisian mosque and it won't prevent a French veto. ...
If, for Blair's sake, you must have a second resolution, why include an ultimatum that Blix will obfuscate and the French will veto? If you must have a second resolution, it should consist of a single sentence: "The Security Council finds Iraq in violation of Resolution 1441, which demanded 'full and immediate compliance by Iraq without conditions or restrictions.'" ...
If the one-line resolution passes, the violation triggers 1441, which triggers the original resolutions ending the Gulf War. If it fails, you've exposed the United Nations for what it is: the League of Nations, empty, cynical and mendacious. Mr. President: Call the vote and walk away."

"UN lets tinpot dictators rule the world" (Janet Daley, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/03/12)
"The French and the British, whose political cultures gave the world modern democracy, are now vying for the favour of Guinea, whose corrupt, totalitarian government is conducting an auction of promised favours.
And for what? To get the legal imprimatur of the Security Council of the UN. The government of Guinea - with an appalling human rights record and not even an approximation of democratic accountability - might have the power to deliver the ultimate sanction of UN approval for America and Britain to invade Iraq.
How can this be anything but absurd? This is the organisation on which peace protesters and dissident Labour MPs rest their credibility: the great fount of moral legitimacy, the institution which holds that factitious entity called "international law" under its authority. ...
I cannot imagine what keeps the UN true believers going. If the semantic wrangling and the horse-trading of duplicitous self-serving national leaders do nothing to dent your reverence, then surely you must be shamed by the competitive tendering that is now going on for the support of repulsive dictatorships."

"Blair goes wobbly" (David Warren, Ottawa Citizen/DavidWarrenOnline, 2003/03/12)
"The gap is now clearly unbridgeable. Those not already onside with the U.S. are opposed to war under any circumstances at all. The revelations of the last few days - including the discovery by U.N. inspectors in Iraq of such "smoking guns" as a gas-spewing air drone, and delivery devices for chemical and biological bombs; the revelation on Al-Jazeera TV of one of Saddam's suicide-terrorist camps; the public threat by a member of Iraq's cabinet to gas the Kurds again; multiple reports of the placing of explosives in Iraqi oil wells both north and south; the allegation that France has been shipping spare parts for the repair of Saddam's air fleet through third parties in the Gulf - such overwhelming evidence of the true state of affairs is ignored alike by media and diplomats. They have reached their decision, to isolate and damage the United States as much as possible, and grant Saddam a pass. They don't want to know about anything that doesn't advance their argument, just as the appeasers of Hitler in a former generation did not want to know. ...
The French betrayal is as total as it was surprising, after earnest promises from President Chirac to support the U.S. in return for elaborate concessions on U.N. Resolution 1441. They think they now have President Bush in a fox-trap: from which he cannot escape without chewing off a leg. They may be right: he may now have no choice but to chew off the British leg.
But whether they are right or not, they will now reap the whirlwind."

"Saddam ready to kill Iraqis" (Rowan Scarborough, The Washington Times, 2003/03/12)
"Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein is planning attacks on his own people in the event of a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and his top operative, a general nicknamed "Chemical Ali," has been put in charge of southern Iraq to quell any civilian uprisings, U.S. officials say. ...
Mr. Rumsfeld suggested yesterday that Saddam is considering shelling civilians with deadly chemical weapons, as he did in 1988, killing up to 100,000 Kurds in northern Iraq.
"His regime may be planning to use weapons of mass destruction against its own citizens, and then blame coalition forces," Mr. Rumsfeld said. ...
A sign that Saddam is serious about attacking civilians comes in reports from inside Iraq that Gen. Ali Hassan al Majid, or "Chemical Ali," has been placed in charge of military activities in southern Iraq. Considered a war criminal by human rights groups, Majid commanded the 1988 chemical weapons attacks on the Kurds."

"Anti-war hero Chirac finds his destiny" (Charles Bremner, The Times, 2003/03/12)
The White Knight of Peace for Saddam, Champion of All the Oppressors of the Earth:
"Jacques Chirac was basking in ecstatic praise from virtually all of France yesterday after his Monday night pledge to defy America and veto a war against Iraq.
Only a few grumbles from the business world and a squeak of dissent from his own conservative camp marred a symphony of tributes for President Chirac and his redemption as a man of destiny after a long and chequered political career.
Only Joan of Arc was missing from the rollcall of heroes, from Charles de Gaulle to Charlemagne, to which M Chirac was likened.
"In the eyes of the world he has attained the kind of stature that Mandela won in Africa," La Croix, the Roman Catholic daily, declared.
Le Figaro called M Chirac a "white knight of peace, champion of all the oppressed of the Earth" and suggested that he might win the Nobel Peace Prize."

"U.S. Would Accept Short Extension of Iraq Deadline" (Richard W. Stevenson and Felicity Barringer, The New York Times, 2003/03/12)
"The Bush administration said today that it would accept a short extension of United Nations weapons inspections in Iraq beyond the deadline of Monday it proposed last week, but signaled that diplomatic efforts to delay or avert war had all but run their course.
The White House said President Bush would force a vote by the end of the week in the deeply fractured Security Council on an American-backed resolution giving an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader. White House officials said Mr. Bush wanted a vote despite France's pledge to veto a resolution on Iraq and doubts about whether the United States can even muster the nine votes needed to adopt a resolution in the absence of a veto."

Tuesday, March 11, 2003

News and commentary:

"U.S. tests massive bomb" (CNN.com, 2003/03/11)
"The U.S. Air Force tested a new 21,000-pound bomb Tuesday, dropping the device from a military transport plane over a test site at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida just after 2 p.m., U.S. officials told CNN.
The Pentagon hopes the test will pave the way for use of the bomb - should there be a war in Iraq - against critical targets on the surface and underground.
It was the final test of the new Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB, and the first to use actual explosives. ...
MOAB, privately known in military circles as "the mother of all bombs," has been under development since late last year. The bomb carries 18,000 pounds of tritonal explosives, which have an indefinite shelf life. It replaces the Vietnam-era "Daisy Cutter," a 15,000-pound bomb with 12,600 pounds of the less-powerful GSX explosives."

"A Democrat Speaks Out" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2003/03/11)
"A Democratic congressman who opposes the liberation of Iraq is blaming the Jews for threatening Saddam Hussein's hold on power. "If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq we would not be doing this," the Connection newspapers of northern Virginia quoted Rep. Jim Moran as saying last week. "The leaders of the Jewish community are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this is going and I think they should." ...
Moran offered this Trent Lott-style "apology": "I should not have singled out the Jewish community and regret giving any impression that its members are somehow responsible for the course of action being pursued by the Administration, or are somehow behind an impending war." In other words, he regrets giving the impression that he meant precisely what he said." (See also: "Moran: War, Politics and Inevitability" (David Harrison, The Connection Newspapers, 2003/03/05))

"Saddam Reportedly Opens Suicide Camp" (Salah Nasrawi, AP/The Washington Post, 2003/03/11)
"Saddam Hussein has opened a training camp for Arab volunteers willing to carry out suicide bombings against U.S. forces in case they invade Iraq, Arab media and Iraqi dissidents said Tuesday.
The dissidents, speaking by telephone from Jordan, said scores of Arab volunteers have gone to a special camp run by the Iraqi intelligence service near the town of al-Khalis, 40 miles northeast of Baghdad.
Most of the volunteers are Islamic activists who belong to pan-Arab groups that maintain close ties with Saddam's regime, the dissidents said on condition of anonymity. ...
Another volunteer identified as a Libyan called al-Sunusi told Al-Jazeera the volunteers hate the Bush administration, which he says, represents evil.
"I am not afraid. I am not afraid. I came here to carry out jihad (holy war) against the U.S. arrogance," he said."

"Our World-Historical Gamble" (Lee Harris, Tech Central Station, 2003/03/11)
Another must-read essay by Harris: "What Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have in common is that they became rich because the West paid them for natural resources that the West could simply have taken from them at will, and without so much as a Thank You, if the West had been inclined to do so. They were, by one of the bitter paradoxes of history, the pre-eminent beneficiaries of the Western liberalism that they have pledged themselves to destroy. ... All that really matters is the quite unintended consequence of the West's conduct: the prodigious funding of fantasists who are thereby enabled to pursue their demented agendas unencumbered by any realistic calculation of the risks or costs of their action. ...
The principle of self-determination in a world of perpetual peace may not in fact be the panacea for mankind's ills, but rather a means for prolonging these ills unnecessarily, by sanctioning a status quo of despotism and tyranny, by virtually underwriting the brutal caprice of petty dictators and by furthering the fantasies of ruthless fanatics. Self-determination at the level of the nation state may entail complete loss of freedom and dignity at the level of the individual - and all in the name of liberalism. ...
In order to respond to our present crisis, we must begin by realizing that both the "liberal" concept of national self-determination and the "conservative" one of Realpolitik are no longer adequate to the historical actuality that is unfolding before our eyes. And they are obsolete for the same reason: the epoch of history governed by the principle of classical sovereignty is in the process of dissolution."

"What the West just doesn't get" (Barry Rubin, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/03/11)
Rubin on Arafat's March 3 speech to the Arab summit: "Among the points he made there, aside from saying that he is the one who really wants peace:
Israel has instigated a war against Iraq as part of its "own war against the Palestinian people and the entire Arab nation" so that it can build an empire "extending from the Nile to the Euphrates."
It intends to expel all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza.
Israel's war is not only "racist and colonialist" but also a "war of genocide and ethnic cleansing."
Yitzhak Rabin "was killed by these extremist elements that govern Israel now."
Israel started a war against the Palestinians after rejecting all peace proposals and as the result of a "secret agreement between Barak and Sharon to destroy the peace process."
Israel can do these things because the US has given it advanced weapons including "depleted uranium and poisonous gases."
These claims are not just propaganda. They are the operating assumptions of the Palestinian leader. And that is the root of the problem."

"Sontag Award Nominee" (Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, 2003/03/11)
Sullivan quotes novelist Tom Robbins: "Quite probably the worst thing about the inevitable and totally unjustifiable war with Iraq is that there's no chance the U.S. might lose it. America is a young country, and intellectually, emotionally, and physically, it has been exhibiting all the characteristics of an adolescent bully, a pubescent punk who’s too big for his britches and too strong for his age. Someday, perhaps, we may grow out of our mindless, pimple-faced arrogance, but in the meantime, it might do us a ton of good to have our butts kicked. Unfortunately, like most of the targets we pick on, Iraq is much too weak to give us the thrashing our continuously overbearing behavior deserves, while Saddam is even less deserving of victory than Bush." (See also: "War or Peace?" (Seattle Weekly, from the March 5 - 11, 2003 issue)

"Scholars Urge Jihad In Event of Iraq War" (Anthony Shadid, The Washington Post, 2003/03/11)
"Islamic scholars at Cairo's Al-Azhar University, the preeminent seat of Sunni Muslim learning in the Arab world, have declared a U.S. attack on Iraq would threaten all Arabs and Muslims and urged a jihad to defend their interests.
The statement, published in Egyptian newspapers today, said the U.S. military buildup in the Persian Gulf region in preparation for a likely invasion of Iraq is part of a new "crusade," a highly emotive word in the Arab world, where the medieval Crusades still frame relations with the West.
"According to Islamic law, if the enemy steps on Muslims' land, jihad becomes a duty on every male and female Muslim," said the statement by the Islamic Research Academy, the center of religious scholarship at the 1,000-year-old university. It calls upon 'Arabs and Muslims throughout the world to be ready to defend themselves and their faith.'"

"With an Ear to the Ground, Singer Gets Arab World's Beat" (Anthony Shadid, The Washington Post, 2003/03/11)
An article on "the Arab world's newest and most popular hit, 'The Attack on Iraq'":
"'Enough!' demands the singer, an Egyptian named Shaaban Abdel-Rahim. "Chechnya! Afghanistan! Palestine! Southern Lebanon! The Golan Heights! And now Iraq, too? And now Iraq, too? It's too much for people. Shame on you! Enough, enough, enough!" ...
A former laundryman and part-time wedding singer with a wet-perm look, Abdel-Rahim was catapulted to fame in 2001 with his song, "I hate Israel." The manifesto - invective at Israel mixed with wry praise for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak - played on surging resentment unleashed by the Palestinian uprising and what many Arabs saw as Israel's disproportionate response.
Its opening line: "I hate Israel. I say it when asked." ...
With "The Attack on Iraq," he goes after the same target. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon "stays in a swimming pool," he sings, "while the blood falls like rain." "Look at Israel and its army," he says. 'It attacks and it kills, and why isn't that too much?'"

"Al Qaeda plans oil field attacks" (Bill Gertz, The Washington Times, 2003/03/11)
"Al Qaeda is seeking recruits in the Middle East for terrorist attacks on oil fields in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in the event of U.S. military action against Iraq, U.S. intelligence officials say.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials said yesterday that there are signs that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's forces have planted explosives in Iraqi oil fields in anticipation of sabotaging them during U.S. and allied military attacks.
The al Qaeda recruitment is targeting radical Islamists in Saudi Arabia and Yemen who are willing to conduct suicide attacks and other sabotage against the oil fields outside Iraq."

"U.S. Says U.N. Could Repeat Errors of 90's" (David E. Sanger, The New York Times, 2003/03/11)
"The White House declared today that the United Nations Security Council's failure to act against Iraq would not only compound mistakes it made in the 1990's but would also encourage North Korea and Iran as they race to build nuclear arsenals. ...
Mr. Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, made no effort today to minimize the breach between the White House and the United Nations — clearly one of the most severe since the organization's founding after World War II. He essentially argued that Mr. Bush was within his rights to create an alternative, ad hoc organization — out of whatever coalition of nations he could assemble — to enforce the Council's past resolutions on disarming Iraq.
"If the United Nations fails to act, that means the United Nations will not be the international body that disarms Saddam Hussein," he said. 'Another international body will disarm Saddam Hussein.'"

"U.N. vote on Iraq delayed" (Nicholas Kralev, The Washington Times, 2003/03/11)
"The United States and its allies yesterday delayed a vote on a new U.N. resolution, hoping to secure more support for the measure demanding Iraq's disarmament by March 17 as they faced fresh veto threats from France and Russia. ...
With both France and Russia saying they would veto the new resolution, the Bush administration suffered another blow when Pakistan announced that it would abstain. That means five of the remaining six undecided council members must support the resolution for it to achieve a nine-vote majority."

Added in Author index:
Stephen Pollard

Added in archive:
"Britain's role is crucial in next stage of war on terror - Iran" (Stephen Pollard, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/03/07)
"This war has made me a conservative" (Stephen Pollard, The Daily Telegraph, 2001/10/28)

Monday, March 10, 2003

News and commentary:

"Pious Nonsense - The unholy "Christian" case against war" (Christopher Hitchens, Slate, 2003/03/10)
"In one way, the church's "peace at any price" policy is a historical improvement. The last instance I can find of Rome supporting a war was when it blessed Gen. Franco's invasion of Spain, at the head of an army of Muslim mercenaries who were armed and trained by Hitler and Mussolini. And everybody knows of the crusades, which were launched against Christian heretics as well as against Muslims and (invariably) the Jews. But one wonders how the theory of "just war," largely evolved by Catholic intellectuals such as Augustine and Aquinas, ever managed to endorse the use of force. As applied these days, it appears to commit everybody but Saddam Hussein to an absolute renunciation of violence."

"A Just War" (Yves Roucaute, Le Monde/Watch, 2003/03/08 [2003/03/10])
A brilliant op-ed by Yves Roucaute, who is "a professor of common law and political science at the law school of Nanterre university", translated by Douglas:
"Munich's mindset is pacing throughout France. The elites, the media and court intellectuals are hammering "No to war on Iraq!" with such demagoguery, playing on the "nationalism of the poor" (Brecht) and the heart's "proof," on France's "interests" and power, that showing doubt gets you called a traitor to your country for not being one as great as it is itself. ...
Moral necessity would be enough to end the debate. Whether it has any chemical or bacteriological arms, Saddam Hussein's regime, which views humanity as means and not an ends, is immoral. Immoral and criminal. ...
"The hunt for terrorists is declared open": this banner suits me better than the pacifist processions which yesterday applauded the Munich accords, denounced "Ridgway the plague," hailed Fidel Castro or the installation of Soviet SS 20s and who today seek to prevent the ouster of one of the world's bloodiest dictators under the pretense that anything is better than war.
Freedom and dignity aren't worth war? They do not demand that we liberate a people bound in irons? ...
Law without the sword is only a word and morality without will is a hollow dream." (See also the French original: "Une guerre juste" (Le Monde, 2003/03/08))

"France will use Iraq veto" (BBC News, 2003/03/10)
Perhaps they would prefer an ultimatum leading to absolutely nothing instead?:
"France has joined Russia in declaring itself ready to veto a new UN resolution which gives Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein until 17 March to disarm.
French President Jacques Chirac said his country would vote against any resolution that contains an ultimatum leading to war. ...
Speaking on French television, Mr Chirac said France would not support any measure at the UN that would lead to military action against Iraq until the weapons inspectors said they could do no more on the ground. ...
"France will not accept this resolution. France will vote no," Mr Chirac said."

"Russia Says It Will Vote Against U.S.-Backed Resolution on Iraq" (Michael Wines, The New York Times, 2003/03/10)
"Russia said flatly today that it would vote against a revised United Nations resolution giving Iraq until March 17 to show convincing evidence of disarmament or face military action, signaling that a weekend of American lobbying for the proposal had come to naught. ...
"Russia believes that no additional resolutions of the U.N. Security Council are necessary now," Mr. Ivanov said. 'Therefore Russia openly states that if the draft resolution currently introduced for consideration and which contains impractical ultimatums is put to a vote, Russia will vote against this resolution.'"

"U.S. Says Iraq Retools Rockets for Illicit Uses" (John H. Cushmnan Jr. and Steven R. Weisman, The New York Times, 2003/03/10)
"United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq recently discovered a new variety of rocket seemingly configured to strew bomblets filled with chemical or biological agents over large areas, United States officials say. ...
An American official who described the weapon said it was discovered in the last few months, since the United Nations inspectors returned to Iraq in November. At first, he said, Iraq told the inspectors that it was designed as a conventional cluster bomb, which would scatter explosive submunitions over its target, and not as a chemical weapon. A few days later, he said, the Iraqis conceded that some might have been configured as chemical weapons."

"Strasbourg bomb plotters jailed" (BBC News, 2003/03/10)
This one should be pretty hard to pin on Bush or America: "Four Algerians have been jailed for plotting to blow up a Christmas market in the French city of Strasbourg.
A court in Germany convicted the four of conspiracy to murder.
They had planned to detonate a bomb at the bustling Christmas market beside Strasbourg Cathedral on New Year's Eve in 2000.
Aeroubi Beandalis, Fouhad Sabour, Salim Boukari and Lamine Maroni were given jail terms of between 10 and 12 years.
Police who raided their flat in December 2000 found explosives and weapons, and a video tape of the market in which they declared that the people there were the enemies of God, who would be sent to hell."

"The allies don't need to take Baghdad to defeat Saddam" (John Keegan, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/03/10)
"By every sign, America and its allies will open a ground and air war on Iraq during the next fortnight. The Bush Administration has clearly lost all patience with Iraq and retains little patience for the United Nations inspection procedures or for debate in the Security Council. ...
It would no doubt be possible to defeat and overrun Iraq from Kuwait. Indeed, almost any point of departure chosen by the overwhelmingly powerful American expeditionary force would yield victory, and quite quickly. ...
The ultimate question is whether the coalition will attempt to enter the cities. They provide Saddam with strongholds, for no invading army willingly commits itself to street-fighting. It need not be necessary, however, to fight in Baghdad, the key to the campaign, to bring about its surrender. Blockade will achieve the same result.
Saddam isolated within his capital would be Saddam defeated. The coalition would possess his territory, would control his oil fields, the source of his finances, and would be free to uncover the hiding places of his weapons of mass destruction."

"Crocodile Tears" (Ralph Peters, New York Post, 2003/03/10)
"The sorry truth is that Europeans love to cry over corpses, but won't lift a finger to prevent the killing in the first place. They shake their heads over the Holocaust, though their parents were happy enough to pack the local Jews off to Auschwitz. ...
What shall we make of those who would let millions die at the hands of tyrants while accusing America of aggression for opposing the killers?
The short answer is: Not much. In the longer term, though, we must accept the fact that states such as France and Germany have declined to the mentality of yesteryear's Mexico, blaming the United States for all their failures and defining themselves not in positive terms, but merely as the anti-America. ...
We Americans can expect neither gratitude, understanding nor support from the baroque regimes of France, Germany and their fellow travelers. Chancellor Schroeder? Bill Clinton without the moral fiber. President Chirac? The mouth of de Gaulle, the soul of Petain, and the morals of a pimp. Humanitarian Belgium? Yeah, just ask the Congolese. The European anti-war movement? Necrophiliacs licking the corpse of Josef Stalin.
Europeans will always be willing to weep over the dead. The United States must take a stand for the living. In Iraq. And beyond."

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

 

Copyright © Watch 2001-2006. Copyrights of quoted materials belong to their respective owners.

"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)

› AOTW Archive



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)

Weekly archive

2006/12/04 - 2006/12/10
2006/11/27 - 2006/12/03
2006/11/20 - 2006/11/26
2006/11/13 - 2006/11/19
2006/11/06 - 2006/11/12
2006/10/30 - 2006/11/05

› From 2001/09/11 -



Monthly index

December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006

› From September 2001 -



Author index

› Ajami, Fouad - Johnson, Paul
› Kagan, Robert - Ye'or, Bat



Support Watch

Please feel free to donate if you enjoy the daily content and links Watch provides:

Contact Watch

Email:
watch-at-windsofchange.net