Archived news and commentary: March 31 - April 6, 2003

2003/06/23 - 2003/06/29
2003/06/16 - 2003/06/22
2003/06/09 - 2003/06/15
2003/06/02 - 2003/06/08
2003/05/26 - 2003/06/01
2003/05/19 - 2003/05/25
2003/05/12 - 2003/05/18
2003/05/05 - 2003/05/11
2003/04/28 - 2003/05/04
2003/04/21 - 2003/04/27
2003/04/14 - 2003/04/20
2003/04/07 - 2003/04/13
2003/03/31 - 2003/04/06

Sunday, April 6, 2003

News and commentary:

"Victim of Saddam makes Galloway shut up" (Charlotte Edwardes, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/04/06)
"For someone who happily consorts with a brutal dictator who has murdered people for just smiling at the wrong time, George Galloway was curiously frightened by a demure Iraqi Kurdish woman last week.
"I am very suspicious of you," George Galloway hissed down the phone to Freshta Raper, a 37-year-old exile and mother of one. "I have a gut feeling about you. What do you want to ask me?" ...
Mr Galloway supports direct action such as marches on Number 10 or the US embassy, although his view is very different when it is his stance that is under scrutiny. "What do you want to talk to me about?" he barked.
"I just want to ask you about Saddam Hussein's human rights record," said Mrs Raper. "As a Western politician, have you ever tried to discuss this in Iraq?"
"I don't have to answer that question," said Mr Galloway defiantly, before adding: "Don't you dare contact me again. If you go to my house again I will have you thrown out and call the police."
The line went dead as Mr Galloway hung up. Perhaps it wasn't so hard to see why Mr Galloway gets on so well with the Butcher of Baghdad." (See also: "People have to know the horrors I've seen" (The Times, 2003/03/29))

"A Question, and Answers - Why Iraqis were slow to embrace their liberators" (Bernard Lewis, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/04/06)
"Their understandable caution was further reinforced by the strong and vocal opposition to the war around the world and more especially in the United States. This manifested itself in many ways and, under their very eyes, in the mostly critical questioning of the military by the media in the press briefings taking place on their doorstep.
For us in the West, this is the normal free debate of an open society. But Iraqis, both rulers and ruled, have had no experience of any such thing since the overthrow of the parliamentary regime and the establishment of the dictatorship almost 50 years ago. What they believe they see is indecision, hesitation, even weakness and fear.
This could only intensify their worry that once again the United States may flinch from finishing the job, and reach some kind of accommodation, if not with Saddam Hussein himself, then with some like-minded but more amenable successor, found among his entourage. There are indeed audible voices advocating just such a resolution of the conflict.
The public debate against the war will be similarly understood - or rather misunderstood - both by Saddam Hussein and by his subjects, and will have the unintended effect of encouraging him and discouraging them. The antiwar campaign will not end the war, but it may turn out to have made it longer and harder."

"A Muslim World Torn" (Daoud Kuttab, The New York Times Magazine, 2003/04/06)
Let's see. Americans are liberating millions of Muslims and Arabs from one of the worst regimes in history. Arab media present the war as an illegal invasion, focusing on the myth of a "massacre of the innocents", treating it, in fact, exactly as the conflict between Israel and "Palestine", with the Coalition as Israelis and the Iraqi people as Palestinians. The "Arab Street" rallies around Saddam and against the United States. It's a strange kind of solidarity, to put it:
"The televised daily scenes of civilian casualties, humiliated Iraqi prisoners of war and triumphant American warriors rolling through southern Iraq have left a bitter taste in the mouths of millions. ...
But there is little doubt that the war has created new sympathy for the organization among Muslims. Ramazan Ucar, imam at the Centrum-Mosque in Hamburg, Germany, the city where some of the Sept. 11 attacks were planned, had publicly condemned the terror attacks. Now, he says, he feels differently.
"I prayed for the victims after the 11th of September," he said, "but today I would say if something like this attack happens again in the U.S.A., I would not pray for them." ...
In Jakarta, Robin Bush, director of the Islam and Civil Society program for the Asia Foundation in Jakarta, said: "The anger against the United States is very strong and is widespread across the board. The repercussions will be felt for a long time."

"Jihad: How Many 'Volunteers' Are Coming?" (The Washington Post, 2003/04/06)
"ORIGINAL REPORT
On Sunday, March 30, Iraqi Gen. Hazem Rawi said at a news conference that 4,000 volunteers from 23 Arab nations had come to Iraq to carry out suicide bombings or other attacks against the coalition forces. ... The next day, Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan put the figure at 6,000, "more than half of them martyrdom-seekers."
WHAT THE MEDIA
HAVE REPORTED
From Arab countries: Based on reports from various Arab capitals, hundreds may be a more accurate number at this point. The Guardian reported from Beirut that 36 Lebanese, Palestinians and Egyptians left there for Iraq on Monday, and hundreds more have applied for visas. The Daily Star of Lebanon reported from Baghdad on Thursday that 150 Yemenis had arrived in Baghdad by bus. The Palestinian group Islamic Jihad announced that it had sent 'several dozen 'martyrdom volunteers.''"

"The Arab TV Wars" (Daoud Kuttab, The New York Times Magazine, 2003/04/06)
"A question of terminology has been a subject of heated debate around the AmmanNet office in recent days - whether to refer to the situation in Iraq as an invasion or a war. Arab television stations tend to use the term ''invasion'' as part of their regular war logo. Al Jazeera uses the logo ''War on Iraq'' (and not war in Iraq). The Lebanese Hezbollah station Al Manar uses the phrase ''Invasion of Iraq''; the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation uses ''Iraq in the Middle of the Storm.'' And the Saudi station Al Arabiya uses a more neutral phrase: ''The Third Gulf War.'' (The Iraqi war against Iran was the first; the war following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was the second.)"

"British General Says 'Chemical Ali' Probably Dead" (Reuters, 2003/04/06)
"A senior British general in the Gulf said on Monday that "Chemical Ali," Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's cousin and commander of the southern region, was probably killed when U.S. planes bombed his house.
"We suspect he (Ali Hassan al-Majid) probably was killed in that strike," Major General Peter Wall, chief-of-staff for British forces in Iraq, told Reuters at headquarters in Qatar.
"A large part of his entourage, including bodyguards, have been reported killed."
The U.S. military has said the body of Majid's bodyguard was found after the bombing in Basra on Saturday but was unsure if Majid himself was dead - U.S. officials believed he had entered the building at the time the air strike was ordered."

Saturday, April 5, 2003

News and commentary:

"A British soldier holds up a book showing the dead bodies..."
(Reuters/Dan Chung, 2003/04/05)
"A British soldier holds up a book showing the dead bodies of who are thought to be Iraqis, discovered along with human remains and coffins at an abandoned Iraqi base near Basra, April 5, 2003. The remains were found in what appears to be a makeshift morgue on the outskirts of the town of Al Zubayr and it is unclear as to how long they have been there."

"Iraq gives up its grim secrets" (Paul Harris, Sunday Herald, 2003/04/06)
"The coffins are laid out in neat rows in an abandoned warehouse. In each lies a crumpled bag of bones, old and dusty but still recognisably human. Out of the open end of one sack, a skull can be seen buried in the fragments of skeleton.
Its eye sockets are empty. Its teeth are smashed. Two ribs point out like accusing fingers.
Something terrible happened here. Something murderous. Something evil.
The proof lies in a cargo container nearby. Its metal door hangs open and inside are pages and pages of files. Each sheaf of notes contains a picture of a man or woman. Each and every one has been shot in the head. Their wounds are mangled and gaping. Many of them barely look human any more as the anonymous photographer chronicled their dead faces. It is a horror almost beyond words. ...
There is little doubt that the bones are at least several years old. No flesh remains on the long brown leg and arm bones or bits of rib. Only a few tufts of tough black hair lie scattered on the floor, where dogs have tugged at a few of the bags and spilled their grim contents on the unforgiving concrete.
But there is no doubt the base was inhabited until only a few weeks ago. Among the buildings are Iraqi army shirts still in their bags, new gas mask respirators, signal huts for an artillery unit and maps with military drawings upon them. Yet the Iraqi soldiers who were living here were literally living beside the corpses of hundreds of people."

"Innocent kids killed by Hussein men" (u.tv, 2003/04/05)
"Barbaric members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party have tortured and killed dozens of innocent children leaving their tiny bodies hung from street lighting it has been claimed.
Kids as young as four-years-old were taken from their parents during the night and murdered after extremists targeted families thought to have been aiding coalition forces.
Some children were hung as their helpless parents were forced to watch.
The atrocity came to light during a water drop on the outskirts of Basra, Iraq's second largest city and Ba'ath party stronghold.
An interpreter formerly attached to the UN learnt of the sickening murders as she helped to distribute aid.
Vanessa Lough, 37, originally from Orange in southern France, now based in Basra, said: 'Three women, one of whom's niece was killed told me what happened.
In one street alone they said three children could at one point be seen hanging from the lamp posts and around the corner one child lay burnt on the road.'"

"Deafening Blasts Rattle Central Baghdad" (Hamza Hamdawi, AP/Yahoo News, 2003/04/05)
"U.S. armor penetrated the city early Saturday for the first time, but quickly moved out and headed toward the airport on Baghdad's western edge, U.S. Central Command officials said.
With the Americans trying to send the message they can strike anywhere, Iraqi leaders maintained a bold front.
They denied U.S. troops had entered the capital and claimed Saddam's forces had retaken the airport — killing hundreds of American "scoundrels," the military said.
"Today, the tide has turned," Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf said. 'We are destroying them.'"

"A Curious reversal of alliances" (André Glucksmann, Le Monde/Watch, 2003/04/04 [2003/04/05])
André Glucksman on "the cult of guaranteed sovereignty", translated by Douglas: "France-Germany-Russia-China-Syria, the “peace camp” intoning the grand aria of “law” over force. The only State with the distinction of having completely razed a capital, Moscow breaks out the kettledrum of hypocrisy. Beijing lays Tibet waste. Syria occupies Lebanon. A merry band that, under cover of the name of “international law,” sing the praises of a State’s limitless right to do what it pleases within its own borders. Every man’s home is his castle. To every butcher his own flocks and abattoirs. Reduced to the principle of absolute sovereignty, international law essentially means giving permission to Saddam to gas his own, to Putin to push his “antiterrorist operations” in the Caucasus to the point of genocide. And why not retroactively recognize the right of the Hutus (the majority in Rwanda) to exterminate the Tutsis? ...
The essence of “sovereignty” being in the privilege of suspending laws and taking decisive action without written or unwritten rules, one comes to understand that this semi-divine privilege, devolved to central authority, is seducing the Chinese, Russian or Iraqi autocrats. One is much surprised at seeing democrats participate in this cult of guaranteed sovereignty “über alles” against all interference despite the crimes this may nurture. ...
Going out into the street to boo and hiss at Bush and Blair is comforting to the Iraqi Stalin and risks inflicting 20 more years of terror on his subjects. Nothing to be proud of: they shout, “down with war!” The echo answers, 'Long live dictatorship!'" (See also the French original: "L'étrange renversement d'alliance" (André Glucksmann, Le Monde, 2003/04/04). Also: "Saddam must go, by choice or by force!" (Pascal Bruckner, André Glucksmann and Romain Goupil, Le Monde/Watch, 2003/03/03 [2003/03/08]))

"U.N. Go Home" (Stephen Schwartz, The Weekly Standard, from the 2003/04/14 issue)
"Kosovar Albanians, a majority of whom are Muslims, lead the Islamic world in their enthusiasm for America. But they hate the United Nations and the European meddlers in whose hands their fate was largely left after NATO's bombing ended. ...
The result has been a wholesale disaster, which, if it can serve for anything, must be taken as a textbook illustration of how not to proceed in postwar Iraq. The acronym UNMIK closely resembles the Albanian word anmik, which happens to mean enemy, and it was not long before this linguistic parallelism became a source of grim humor among Kosovar Albanians. Today, the leading Kosovar journalists fill their newspapers with commentaries on the bitter lessons of "reconstruction" by the U.N., the E.U., the OSCE, and their handmaiden, the "humanitarian mafia." ...
Kosovar journalist Beqe Cufaj, German correspondent for Koha Ditore, summed up the situation eloquently on March 23: 'This morning when Berlin announced that the U.N. secretary general and the Security Council have tasked Germany and its government with compiling an urgent plan for humanitarian aid to postwar Iraq, a Kosovar could not help but shudder. ... Let us hope this really involves humanitarian aid and nothing else. ... Because if the Iraqi people have to undergo anything like what we have in Kosovo, God help them. ... That should be the message to the Iraqis from the Kosovars, a people experienced with the U.N. and exhausted by life in UNMIKistan!'"

"The war? That was all over two weeks ago" (Mark Steyn, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/04/05)
"This war is over. The only question now is whether a new provisional government is installed before the BBC and The New York Times have finished running their exhaustive series on What Went Wrong with the Pentagon's Failed War Plan and while The Independent's Saddamite buffoon Robert Fisk is still panting his orgasmic paeans to the impenetrability of Baghdad's defences and huffily insisting there are no Americans at the airport even as the Saddam International signs are being torn down and replaced with Rumsfeld International. ...
As my colleague John Keegan asked yesterday, "Where is the enemy?" The answer, in terms of a formal Iraqi military presence, is that it's confined to the Baghdad broadcasting studio. On Iraqi TV, every Information Minister or Deputy Prime Minister who turns up to read the late Saddam's latest statement is wearing a uniform. In the Iraqi army, hardly anyone is."

"Professors Protest as Students Debate" (Kate Zernike, The New York Times, 2003/04/05)
Because something is happening here but you don't know what it is. Do you, Mister Jones?: "It is not easy being an old lefty on campus in this war.
At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, awash in antiwar protests in the Vietnam era, a columnist for a student newspaper took a professor to task for canceling classes to protest the war in Iraq, saying the university should reprimand her and refund tuition for the missed periods. ...
Here at Amherst College, many students were vocally annoyed this semester when 40 professors paraded into the dining hall with antiwar signs. One student confronted a protesting professor and shoved him. ...
Now, the departing president, Tom Gerety, is firmly antiwar, as are most professors. The students, however, have yet to be swept up. Last month, the Progressive Students Association asked the student government to ask the faculty to take 15 minutes in class to discuss the war. The government refused. Some professors chose to take the time anyway, but many did not, having seen the reaction to the dining hall protest.
"There was a sense this is a different world," said Austin Sarat, a professor of political science who was active in antiwar protests in 1970 as a graduate student in Madison, Wis."

"Rumsfeld and the Generals" (Bill Keller, The New York Times, 2003/04/05)
"I haven't read the secret war plan. No doubt the negotiations between the Army, which was initially unenthusiastic about the war, and civilians, who suspected the generals of being overly cautious, were tumultuous. But what I see unfolding in Iraq strikes me as impressive: a well-considered strategy, adaptable to the unexpected turns of war and accomplished, so far, with remarkably low U.S. casualties and far, far fewer civilian deaths than the alarmists predicted. ...
The war we are watching is neither a pure old-fashioned, heavy-metal war nor a light and lean "transformational" war. It is, as Mr. Thompson puts it, "a transitional war" — with elements of both old and new.
The new includes much more than those celebrated pinpoint weapons. As in Afghanistan, judging by what my colleagues with the troops report, the cooperative choreography of Army, Marines, air power and Special Operations — rivals who have in the past tended to get in one another's way — has at times been breathtaking."

"The mood changes as the marine invasion gains momentum" (James Meek, The Guardian, 2003/04/05)
"The apparent collapse of the Republican Guard was matched yesterday by the visible collapse of popular Iraqi belief in the possibility of Saddam's survival.
As the marines' 1st Division poured towards Baghdad along the Highway 7 dual carriageway yesterday, preceded by a rolling storm of artillery shells, cluster bombs and missiles, Iraqis by the road - predominantly young men - cheered, waved and gave the thumbs-up sign.
Until yesterday, their enthusiasm for the invaders could have been interpreted as caution in the face of an unknown occupier. Yesterday there was no doubt: they knew Saddam was finished, and they were glad. For the first time, Iraqis could be seen mocking the images of President Saddam which hang at key points along the dusty roadside - Saddam the suited statesman, Saddam the Bedouin, Saddam the general. One youth picked up a stone and hurled it at a mural of the dictator. A larger than life statue of Saddam stood partly destroyed, only two legs and half the body still standing."

"Until Hussein Is Gone, Ambivalence About U.S. Rules" (Susan B. Glasser, The Washington Post, 2003/04/05)
"Hana Asadi heard the war from her bathroom. She spent a week of sleepless nights there, convinced that the bathtub was the safest place for her four children. Outside, British troops battled Iraqi paramilitary forces for control of her city. Seven days ago, a firefight sent dozens of bullets and shells flying into her house.
At the hospital, where she is the head of the gynecology service, there were dozens of civilian casualties, including an entire family. "Not only dead, in pieces," she said. "I saw them myself."
But Asadi does not oppose the war she had eagerly awaited; she fears that it has not yet succeeded in delivering the liberation she imagined to Iraq or to her own family. "We have eyes looking for us and watching everything," Asadi whispered this afternoon. 'We still may be hunted by them.'"

"U.S. Army Tanks Roll Into Iraqi Capital" (David Espo, AP/The Washington Post, 2003/04/05)
U.S. forces fought their way to near the center of Baghdad early Saturday while columns of armored vehicles began encircling the city of 5 million people and seat of President Saddam Hussein's power. Thousands of Iraqis fled the city, fearing urban warfare.
Moving through Republican Guard divisons and fending off sporadic fighting, coalition troops battled toward the city's center late Saturday morning. The advance came as Army tanks and infantry fought off attacks at Baghdad's newly seized international airport.
"We have substantial forces now moving into the city," said Navy Capt. Frank Thorp of U.S. Central Command."

Friday, April 4, 2003

News and commentary:

"An image from Iraqi television..."
(Iraqi TV/Reuters, 2003/04/04)
"An image from Iraqi television shows what it says is President Saddam Hussein visiting a residential area of Baghdad, April 4, 2003. Saddam, dressed in military uniform, was mobbed by cheering, chanting Iraqis. There was no way of verifying when the film was made. Saddam has a number of doubles. The clip was shown on a day when U.S. troops said they had taken control of Saddam International Airport."

"Saddam Appears as U.S. Troops Take Baghdad Airport" (Samia Nakhoul, Reuters, 2003/04/04)
This is looping non-stop on Arab TV right now, according to CNN: "Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, breaking his habit of avoiding the public gaze, was shown on Iraqi television Friday being mobbed by cheering Iraqis in a bombed area of the capital threatened by U.S. troops.
"Our soul and blood we will sacrifice for you, Saddam," the excited crowd, made up mainly of men, shouted. Some kissed his hand, a few waved rifles in the air.
Dressed in military uniform, Saddam's surprise appearance in the streets of Baghdad coincided with the advance of U.S. troops who said on Friday they had taken control of Saddam International Airport, 12 miles southwest of the city.
In some of the television footage, smoke could be seen, believed to be from trenches filled with oil and set ablaze by Iraqis to try to obscure targets from attacking aircraft. It was impossible to confirm the exact date of the video."

"Saddam Urges Strikes In 'New' Speech" (CBS News, 2003/04/04)
"As U.S. troops converged on Baghdad, Iraqi television Friday broadcast what it said was an appearance by Saddam Hussein that made reference to events occurring after the air strikes aimed at killing him.
Saddam's fate has been in question since the war began with those air strikes, and his earlier TV appearances might have been taped before the fighting began.
A few small portions of Friday's appearance suggest it was made since military action started on March 19, a U.S. intelligence official said. The speech referred to the capture of an Apache helicopter March 23, which Iraqi officials have said was brought down by farmers in central Iraq.
"Perhaps you remember the valiant Iraqi peasant and how he shot down an American Apache with an old weapon," Saddam said in the brief speech. Saddam also said the U.S.-led forces had "bypassed your (Iraqi) armed defenses" in the battlefield and urged his followers to 'strike them forcefully, strike them.'"

"U.S. Troops Find Vials of White Powder" (Kimberly Hefling, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/04/04)
April's Fools. Hefling points out this statement, which translated from Saddam-speak (which is rather easy, just negate or invert each allegation) probably means something like: "Of course we have WMD, but when it's found we'll just blame it on you.":
"On April 1, Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan, in a statement on Iraqi television, repeated Baghdad's position that it had no weapons of mass destruction. Referring to reports that gas masks and other chemical gear had been found elsewhere in the country, he said the coalition might plant weapons of mass destruction to implicate Iraq.
"Let me say one more time that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction," he said.
"The aggressors may themselves intend to bring those materials to plant them here and say those are weapons of mass destruction," he said."

"US finds 'suspect vials'" (BBC News, 2003/04/04)
"US troops say they have found thousands of boxes of unidentified white powder and some nerve agent antidote at an industrial site south-west of Baghdad.
They also said they discovered documents in Arabic, which apparently explain how to carry out chemical warfare.
A special team has been sent to investigate the discovery at Latifiya - part of a large military complex frequently visited frequently by UN weapons inspectors before the war began.
US troops have also reportedly found a second site nearby containing vials of unidentified liquid and white powder."

"Blair: coalition did not bomb market" (Matthew Tempest, The Guardian, 2003/04/04)
"Tony Blair today categorically ruled out coalition responsibility for the first of last week's bomb attacks on Baghdad markets.
The prime minister makes the claim in an interview tonight with Abu Dhabi TV, as part of a two-pronged attempt to win over the Iraqi public.
...
Mr Blair urged people to be wary of the reports coming out of Iraq about civilian casualties.
"I would ask people to be cautious of these reports."
"The Baghdad street market bombings, for example - we are sure that the first one is not coalition forces, we are still trying to check out the second one," he said.
"I understand why, when people see the carnage and the bloodshed, they feel very angry about it.
"But I ask people not to treat these reports as correct until they are actually proven. "There will be innocent civilians that are killed but we have done everything we possibly can to minimise this," he said."

"Iraq Promises 'Unconventional' Attack" (David Crary, AP/The Washington Post, 2003/04/04)
"With thousands of frightened residents fleeing Baghdad and U.S. troops in control of its airport, the Iraqi information minister promised Friday that his nation's military would launch an "unconventional" counterattack against the coalition troops.
"We will do something which I believe is very beautiful," said Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf at a Baghdad news conference, adding that the Iraqis planned to strike back "in an unconventional way." Asked if that meant the use of chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, he quickly said no.
"What I meant are commando and martyrdom operations in a very new, creative way," al-Sahhaf said."

Michael Kelly
2003
"Across the Euphrates" (The Washington Post, 2003/04/03)
"Who Would Choose Tyranny?" (The Washington Post, 2003/02/26)
"Immorality on the March" (The Washington Post, 2003/02/19)
"Germany's Mr. Tough Guy" (The Washington Post, 2003/02/12)
"Marching With Stalinists" (The Washington Post, 2003/01/22)

2002
"Exit Hussein" (The Washington Post, 2002/12/25)
"Countdown to Trigger Day" (The Washington Post, 2002/12/04)
"Return of the 'Chicken Hawks'" (The Washington Post, 2002/10/30)
"The Anti-Liberal Anti-War Case" (The Washington Post, 2002/10/23)
"A Nobel Idea of Peace" (The Washington Post, 2002/10/16)
"Look Who's Playing Politics" (The Washington Post, 2002/09/25)
"An End to Pretending" (The Washington Post, 2002/06/26)
"It Is a War, After All" (The Washington Post, 2002/06/12)
"Old, Old, Old. Tired, Tired, Tired" (The Washington Post, 2002/05/29)
"Israel's Phony 'Partner'" (The Washington Post, 2002/05/08)
"Terror Documented" (The Washington Post, 2002/04/10)
"Promises but Never Peace" (The Washington Post, 2002/04/03)
"The Phases of Arafat" (The Washington Post, 2002/03/13)
"As Good as Doctrine Gets" (The Washington Post, 2002/02/13)
"It All Points to Arafat" (The Washington Post, 2002/01/09)

2001
"Non-Judgment Day at Yale" (The Washington Post, 2001/12/19)
"Despite the Naysayers" (The Washington Post, 2001/11/28)
"Phony Pacifists" (The Washington Post, 2001/10/03)
"... Pacifist Claptrap" (The Washington Post, 2001/09/26)
"When Innocents Are the Enemy" (The Washington Post, 2001/09/12)

"Mike Kelly: A man of conviction" (Andrew Sullivan, Salon.com, 2003/04/05)
Sullivan quotes a beautiful piece by Michael Kelly, reporting on his 4-year old son's perspective from his dad's shoulders: "I never met his young sons, but they should know their dad was a hero. His death was in action; his career was dedicated to the same principle of being in the arena and seeing it for what it is. Without him, we will see less clearly; and fight with one less soldier. But he was a good soldier and a beautiful writer and the battle goes on. I wish he were around to celebrate our victory over Saddam. But in a small way, he helped make it happen.

"It stopped. The rain stopped. Why does it rain and then it stops? Now, it's even more slippery, right? It's very hot now, isn't it? I don't want to go back anymore. Let's go this way. I said, go this way, horsey. Why does it hurt when I pull your hair? Okay, I'll only pull it a little bit, okay? This hill is very hard to go down, right? Don't fall. Why did you fall? Where are your glasses? Why are they broken? Why did you step on them? You should not have stepped on them, right? It's okay. Probably we can get some glue and fix them, right? You have a hole in your pants, did you notice that? Probably you made a hole in your pants when you fell down, right? You should not have fallen down, right?"

No, he should not have fallen down. But he was living when he died, writing until he was silent. And his words and example will live on." (See also: "Sunshine on My Shoulders" (Michael Kelly, Jewish World Review, 2000/06/01))

"Michael Kelly, RIP" (Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/04/04)
Amen: "The death of Michael Kelly is a sin against the order of the world. He was a young man on his way to becoming a great man. He was going to be one of the great editors of his time, and at the age of 46 he was already one of its great journalists. And one's first thought about him, after saying the obvious - that he wrote like a dream, that he was a great reporter with great eyes, that he was a keen judge of what is news and what should be news - is this. He was an independent man. He had an indignant independence that was beauty to behold. He knew what he thought and why, and he announced it in his columns and essays with wit and anger. ...
I knew him as most people did, through what he wrote. I'd met him and admired him easily, but the Michael I read I loved. And so today, without a particular right to, I feel heartbroken. When the news broke, Mencken biographer Terry Teachout expressed with concision what I felt and had not been able to articulate: 'This is horrible, horrible news - [Michael] had evolved into a great force for journalistic good, not just as regards this war but in general, and his death will leave a black hole in the sky.'"

Atlantic Monthly Editor Killed in Iraq" (Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post, 2003/04/04)
Strangely, it feels almost like a personal loss. Michael Kelly's last column was published by The Washington Post yesterday: "Michael Kelly, the Atlantic Monthly editor-at-large and Washington Post columnist who abandoned the safety of editorial offices to cover the war in Iraq, has been killed in a Humvee accident while traveling with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division.
Kelly, the first American journalist killed in the war, had also served as editor of the New Republic and National Journal. But his decision to join up with U.S. forces marked a return to his reporting roots, since he covered the first Persian Gulf War as a magazine freelancer and turned his observations into a book, "Martyrs' Day." While one Australian and two British journalists have been killed covering the war, Kelly's death is the first among the 600 correspondents participating in the Pentagon's embedding program." (See also: "Across the Euphrates" (Michael Kelly, The Washington Post, 2003/04/03))

"The Train Is Leaving the Station" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2003/04/04)
While the anti-American left seem to envision a post-Saddam America continuing to enforce its hegemonic "Empire" globally, Victor Davis Hanson argues that the opposite is more likely:
"Many Americans are now dead in part because a NATO ally Turkey not merely refused its support, but did so in such a long and drawn out fashion that it is impossible to believe that it was not preordained to hamper U.S. military operations. And, of course, Turkey’s last-minute refusals to allow transit of U.S. divisions did exactly that by delaying the critical rerouting of troops and supplies to the Gulf.
I would expect that we all will smile, still extend some minor aid, but simmer on the inside and quietly and professionally take steps to ensure that we are never put in such a position again. We should, without fanfare, bow out of Turkish-EU discussions, and let Europe and Turkey on their own decide the wisdom of allowing an Islamic country into the "liberal" European confederation. ...
We do not have to withdraw from a dead NATO, but we should simply grin and spend as much on it as Europe does — and so let it die on the vine. How could we be allies with such countries as France and Germany when sizable minorities there want a fascistic Saddam Hussein to defeat us? ...
And as for Britain, Australia, Spain, Denmark, Italy, and a host of Eastern European countries who are rolling down the tracks with us, waving to the exasperating at the station, we have to show them as much appreciation for their stalwart courage as we do abject disdain for the duplicity of their peers behind."

"The Quagmire Club" (William Powers, National Journal, 2003/04/04)
"There's a ritual, a kind of quagmire Kabuki that never varies. Someone employs the word in a war-news report or one of those deeply important "analysis" pieces that are just opinion columns in front-page drag. The most famous quagmirist, R.W. Apple Jr. of The New York Times, doesn't even have to use the word anymore. He just does an interpretive fan-dance around it and everyone knows what he means. ...
It's only human to think in patterns, and media people have a strange fondness for the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence - strange because it robs the news of its newness. The Vietnam comparison is especially tempting now, because many of the civilian and military leaders who are executing this war came of age just after Vietnam and tend to see all wars through that prism. ...
The quagmire has been replaced by something entirely new: instant delivery of a war's reality, followed by instant questioning of that war. You might call it quickmire. Whatever you call it, we were in one this week, with its disturbing sense of stuckness. But a quickmire is a stuckness that could be unstuck tomorrow, depending on events and how they play in the news." (Note: Found via InstaPundit.)

"Where are all Iraq's soldiers hiding?" (John Keegan, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/04/04)
Keegan on "the great riddle of the Second Gulf War: where have all the Iraqi soldiers gone?": "James Meek, travelling with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force up the Tigris, reported yesterday that the enemy was a will-o'-the-wisp.
"The marines are now pushing up against the territory supposedly defended by the dreaded Republican Guard. Yet there is no sign of them; their menace seems constantly to recede.
"Similar reports of a melting enemy are coming from the US army in Najaf and Kerbala and from other marines at Kut, downstream of Nasiriyah." The marine company commander rubbed home the point, after a very rare exchange of fire with the enemy. "We were a little bit surprised to get some fire but we fired back. It only lasted five minutes. These guys are cowards. This is boring." ...
Of the ordinary divisions there have been no reported signs at all. The Americans do not appear to have seen them, nor have the British. It is as if they have disappeared into thin air. There is endless television footage of M-1 Abrams tanks and Bradley armoured fighting vehicles driving up the long empty roads of central Iraq but they never fire their guns. ...
Have they gone home and hidden their uniforms? Have they drifted across the borders into Iran or Syria? Are they refugees in the Northern No-Fly Zone? No answers.
Unless they materialise soon, this war will fizzle out for lack of an enemy."

"The Ayatollah Who Spared Najaf" (Martin Kramer, Sandstorm, 2003/04/04)
Kramer on the Shi'ite Muslim cleric Ayatollah Sistani, who yesterday issued a fatwa calling on Najaf's inhabitants to remain calm and not to interfere with U.S. forces:
"Ayatollah Sistani now is in a delicate position. For Najaf, the removal and eradication of the Baath regime is a blessing. It offers the prospect of a revival of Najaf as a place of learning, pilgrimage, and creative thought. Sistani leans toward an enlightened pragmatism. His first priority has been protection of the shrine and the seminary, come what may. But Sistani's overseas network incorporates a good number of clerics, including many in Lebanon, who regard the United States as the incarnation of the anti-Islam. These people will be looking to establish a strong base under Sistani's umbrella, and they will do everything to turn Iraq's Shiites against the American presence.
Ayatollah Sistani is someone who warrants an overture at the highest political level, and at the earliest opportunity. At the same time, it would be prudent to omit his name from future briefings in Qatar, and to work quietly and behind the scenes to assure his neutrality, if not his friendship." (See also: "Muslim Cleric Urges Iraqis Not to Resist" (Reuters/The New York Times, 2003/04/03))

"U.S. Forces Secure Baghdad Airport" (Chris Tomlinson, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/04/04)
"U.S. forces seized the Baghdad airport Friday in an all-night tank and infantry assault, securing a potentially vital base for taking the battle into its expected next phase — urban warfare in the streets of Baghdad.
Saddam International Airport was promptly renamed Baghdad International Airport by the U.S. military.
"It is a gateway to the future of Iraq," said Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, U.S. Central Command spokesman."

"Arab Media Portray War as Killing Field" (Susan Sachs, The New York Times, 2003/04/04)
"As the Iraq war moved into its third week, the media in the region have increasingly fused images and enemies from this and other conflicts into a single bloodstained tableau of Arab grievance.
The Israeli flag is superimposed on the American flag. The Crusades and the 13th-century Mongul sack of Baghdad, recalled as barbarian attacks on Arab civilization, are used as synonyms for the American-led invasion of Iraq. Horrific vignettes of the helpless — armless children, crushed babies, stunned mothers — cascade into Arab living rooms from the front pages of newspapers and television screens." ...
The rage against the United States is fed by this steady diet of close-up color photographs and television footage of dead and wounded Iraqis, invariably described as victims of American bombs. In recent days, more and more Arabic newspapers have run headlines bluntly accusing soldiers of deliberately killing civilians.
Even for those accustomed to seeing such images from Arab coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the daily barrage of war coverage in newspapers and on hourly television reports has left many Arabs beside themselves with anger.
"He is 'Shaytan,' that Bush," shouted Ali Hammouda, a newsstand operator in Cairo, using the Arabic word for Satan and pointing with shaking hands to a color photograph in one of his newspapers.
The image, published in many Arabic papers, showed the bloody bodies of a stick-thin woman and a baby, said to be victims of American shelling in central Iraq. They were lying in an open wooden coffin, the baby's green pacifier still in its mouth."

"Von Hoffman Award Nominee" (Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, 2003/04/04)
Sullivan quotes Robert Fisk: "Anyone who doubts that the Iraqi Army is prepared to defend its capital should take the highway south of Baghdad. How, I kept asking myself, could the Americans batter their way through these defenses? For mile after mile they go on, slit trenches, ditches, earthen underground bunkers, palm groves of heavy artillery and truck loads of combat troops in battle fatigues and steel helmets. Not since the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War have I seen the Iraqi Army deployed like this; the Americans may say they are "degrading" the country’s defenses but there was little sign of that here Wednesday." (See also: "Saddam's masters of concealment dig in, ready for battle" (Robert Fisk, Independent, 2003/04/03))

Thursday, April 3, 2003

News and commentary:

"Anti-Semitic Accusations by Pro-Palestinian Organization" (Michel Henry, Libération/Watch, 2003/04/03)
An interesting article about a French Pro-Palestinian organization which published an openly anti-Semitic text by Israel Shamir in its newsletter. This is not veiled, vague anti-Semitism, but rather the current version of the Protocols delivered by a true believer, essentially identical to the anti-Semitism preached by nazis. It's disconcerting, to put it mildly, that lunatic anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing now apparently is viewed as so "normal" that it is considered important and newsworthy by a "radical" organization in Europe: "For Shamir, the “Jews of France secretly purchased and subverted the French media over many years to distort national debate and rush an unprepared France into the horrible and completely pointless Second World War.” And he asks, “Is it completely unbelievable that American Jews should have secretly taken control of their national media and today they should be in the process of rushing the United States into an horrible and totally pointless third world war?”
To denounce the “inscrutable secret of Jewish power,” Shamir published a detailed list of the “media’s Jewish magnates” in the United States and demanded they be prosecuted under anti-trust legislation. For him, “American patriotic forces” must “act now”: “They have an enemy but this enemy is not in Iraq.” It’s the great internal enemy that anti-Semitic literature has been feeding on for eons." (Note: The article is translated by Douglas. See also the French original: "Charge antisémite d'une association propalestinienne" (Libération, 2003/04/03))

"Consecration" (dissidentfrogman, the dissident frogman, 2003/04/03)
A brilliant post, found via InstaPundit:"Those Americans, British, Australians and Poles are fighting for us. All of us. Just like their elders did, 60 years ago. ...
And that brings me to Etaples and the desecration of the British WWI memorial.
I'm not trying to find excuses for the people who did this or for my country, its government, its opinion makers and activists who created and hatefully developed the required conditions for this attack against Joe and Tommy' graves to happen. ...
The insults were written in French, no matter the direction the swastika point at. Unless the Saudi, the Palestinian Authority or even Saddam's ghost sent a team of calligraphers overnight in the north of France, the people who did this, even if they had an Arabic ethnic background, are French.
They're part of the French "multicultural miracle" our elite so frequently compares to the US melting pot 'failure.'"

"What else is new?" (John Podhoretz, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/04/03)
"Join me, if you will, on a brief tour through the brain of the standard-issue mainstream American journalist, surveying the war in Iraq: 'The battle plan is flawed. There are civilian casualties. There are military casualties. ...
Somebody named Kenneth Adelman, who supported the war, said a few weeks before the outbreak of hostilities that it would be a 'cakewalk.' That means President Bush thought it would be a cakewalk.
That means President Bush misunderstood the nature of war. And the nature of Iraq. And the nature of the Arab world. And the nature of hostility to America. And the nature of nationalism.'"

"Baghdad airport 'captured'" (BBC News, 2003/04/03)
"Reports are coming in that coalition forces have taken the Iraqi capital's international airport.
A correspondent for the US network ABC said the airport had been captured by ground forces but other reports spoke only of a battle under way at the airport, 20 kilometres (12 miles) south-west of the city centre. For the first time artillery fire can be heard from inside the city, which is experiencing its first power blackout of the war, despite a strenuous denial by Iraq's government that the coalition is anywhere near the capital."

"Iraq denies coalition near Baghdad" (Ghassan al-Kadi, UPI, 2003/04/03)
"A top Iraqi official denied Thursday as "an illusion" coalition reports that their forces had entered Saddam International Airport and reached the southern outskirts of Baghdad, despite coalition reports that its forces could see the capital's skyline.
"This is completely untrue. This is silly and an illusion. Why don't you take a look at Saddam Airport? This is Baghdad, you can check," Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf told reporters in Baghdad.
"They won't even dare approach Baghdad. We will go and greet them there (at the airport) not with flowers but with bullets and shoes."
Some reports from coalition units place U.S. and British forces were within 10 miles of Baghdad. U.S. Army personnel said, "We have the Baghdad skyline in sight."
Smiling, Al-Sahhaf described coalition reports as continued "lies" which 'do not stop.'"

"Saddam: 'Fight Them With Your Hands'" (Hamza Hendawi, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/04/03)
"With U.S. ground forces closing in fast, Saddam Hussein exhorted the Iraqi people to "fight them with your hands," according to a statement read Thursday on Iraqi satellite television.
The statement, addressed to the people of the region southeast of Baghdad, was read by Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf. Saddam hasn't delivered a speech on TV since March 24, and it is unclear when that address was recorded.
"Fight them with your hands, God will disgrace them. God is great," Thursday's statement said.
At a news conference, Sahhaf disputed coalition claims of battle successes. "All this is to cover their disappointment and inability," he said.
"They are not even 100 miles (away from Baghdad). They are not anywhere. They are like a snake moving in the desert. They have no foothold in Iraq . ... They do not even control Umm Qasr," the information minister said, referring to the southern port city held by British forces."

"Muslim Cleric Urges Iraqis Not to Resist" (Reuters/The New York Times, 2003/04/03)
"The U.S. military said a senior Shi'ite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who had been held under house arrest by Saddam's government, had ordered local people in a "fatwa'' (edict) not to interfere with the U.S.-led invasion troops.
"We believe this is a very significant turning point and another indicator that the Iraqi regime is approaching its end,'' Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks told reporters in Qatar.
A Reuters correspondent in Baghdad just one week ago saw a fatwa issued by Sistani still pinned to the door of a main Shi'ite mosque in the capital saying Iraqis would "stand together against any invasion.'' ...
Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad, is one of Iraq's most important religious centers and home to the revered gold-domed Ali Mosque, which contains the tomb of Imam Ali bin Abi Talib, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed.
Some Najaf residents appeared alarmed by the actions of the U.S. troops. CNN footage showed soldiers trying to calm a crowd who apparently thought they were planning to seize the mosque."

"Iraqi informer angered by treatment of POW" (Juan O- Tamayo, Knight Ridder Newspapers/KansasCity.com, 2003/04/03)
"The Iraqi man who tipped U.S. Marines to the location of American POW Jessica Lynch said Thursday he did so after he saw her Iraqi captor slap her twice as she lay wounded in a hospital.
"A person, no matter his nationality, is a human being," the tipster, a 32-year-old lawyer whose wife was a nurse at the hospital, said in an interview at Marines' headquarters, where he, his wife and daughter are being treated as heroes and guests of honor. ...
After he saw Lynch slapped, the lawyer slipped into her room at the Saddam Hospital in Nasiriyah and told her, "Don't worry." Then he walked six miles to the nearest U.S. Marines and told them where she was."

"Historians Against War" (Ronald Radosh, New York Sun/FrontPageMagazine, 2003/04/03)
"So far, the most egregious example of this phenomenon is a recent op-ed by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in the Los Angeles Times. There, our most distinguished and well-known historian went so far as to write that the Bush administration's foreign policy "is alarmingly similar to the policy that imperial Japan employed at Pearl Harbor." Calling Mr. Bush's policy one of "preventive war" - not even preemptive war, as some critics have allowed - Mr. Schlesinger says that as a result "today it is we Americans who live in infamy." Any sympathy for our nation after 9/11, according to Mr. Schlesinger, has been dissipated in a "global wave of hatred of American arrogance and militarism." ...
He writes that "the Bush doctrine converts us into the world's judge, jury and executioner" and that the "religious fanatic" who is our attorney general has done great damage to 'our civil liberties and constitutional rights.'" (See also: "Good Foreign Policy a Casualty of War" (Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Los Angeles Times, 2003/03/23))

"Alone but for the screams of the tortured" (Stephen Farrell, The Times, 2003/04/03)
"'We kill, we kill,' muttered the Iraqi driver of the pick-up truck speeding through the night-time streets of Baghdad bringing his helpless cargo of handcuffed Western journalists to Saddam Hussein’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
Thus began the first of eight days in Iraqi captivity for Matt McAllester, a British foreign correspondent, the photographers Moises Saman, Molly Bingham and Johan Spanner, and a peace activist, Philip Latasha, who were seized without warning or explanation from their rooms in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad while covering the war on Iraq.
During the week in which neither families nor friends had any idea of their whereabouts, the terrified quintet sat in adjacent, bare-concrete cells forbidden to talk to each other, their solitude punctuated by the screams of Iraqi prisoners being led away to torture from the cells around them, the thud of anti-aircraft fire and the pounding of US bombs that were exploding uncomfortably close. ...
"I frequently thought we were going to die," said Mr McAllester, 33, a London-born Scot raised in Edinburgh and now working for the New York Newsday newspaper.
Describing how Iraqi prisoners were in cells across a narrow corridor, Mr McAllester said that he had to turn his back to avoid watching other inmates being dragged away and tortured each night."

"Across the Euphrates" (Michael Kelly, The Washington Post, 2003/04/03)
Great reporting on the battle for the Karbala bridge, with a brilliant opening: "EAST OF THE EUPHRATES RIVER, Iraq - Near the crest of the bridge across the Euphrates that Task Force 3-69 Armor of the 1st Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division seized yesterday afternoon was a body that lay twisted from its fall. He had been an old man - poor, not a regular soldier - judging from his clothes. He was lying on his back, not far from one of several burning skeletons of the small trucks that Saddam Hussein's willing and unwilling irregulars employed. The tanks and Bradleys and Humvees and bulldozers and rocket launchers, and all the rest of the massive stuff that makes up the U.S. Army on the march, rumbled past him, pushing on."

"'She Was Fighting to the Death'" (Susan Schmidt and Vernon Loeb, The Washington Post, 2003/04/03)
Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital, fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army's 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday.
Lynch, a 19-year-old supply clerk, continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her in fighting March 23, one official said. The ambush took place after a 507th convoy, supporting the advancing 3rd Infantry Division, took a wrong turn near the southern city of Nasiriyah.
"She was fighting to the death," the official said. 'She did not want to be taken alive.'"

"The coalition's other 'enemy'" (Cal Thomas, The Washington Times, 2003/04/03)
"Would Edward R. Murrow, William Shirer or Walter Cronkite have allowed themselves to be interviewed on German radio as a "professional courtesy" during World War II? No, because they correctly viewed the Nazis as the enemy of humanity and American forces as the liberators of Europe. What did they study in school that Mr. Arnett skipped?"

"Exuberant, Shiite Crowd Calls Vainly for Water" (Jim Dwyer, The New York Times, 2003/04/03)
It's interesting to compare the paper version with yesterday's web report from Najaf. A subtle shift from cheers and smiles to crowds calling vainly for water: "In the giddy spirit of the day, nothing could quite top the wish list bellowed out by one man in the throng of people greeting American troops from the 101st Airborne Division who marched into town today.
What, the man was asked, did he hope to see now that the Baath Party had been driven from power in his town? What would the Americans bring?
"Democracy," the man said, his voice rising to lift each word to greater prominence. "Whiskey. And sexy!"
Around him, the crowd roared its approval."

"Allies Close In on Baghdad; U.S. Black Hawk, F/A-18 Hornet Shot Down" (Fox News, 2003/04/03)
"Ground fighting intensified and coalition troops battled within sight of Baghdad's skyline early Thursday - but Iraqis shot down an American helicopter and warplane - killing at least seven soldiers, the Pentagon said. ...
Bombs shook the capital as Army and Marine armored columns took separate, converging paths toward the city from the south. "The dagger is clearly pointed" at the heart of Saddam Hussein's regime, said Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks. ...
Increasingly, there were signs that Iraqi civilians were eager for the arrival of invading forces. Some smiled and waved as Marines rolled through Nasiriyah in tanks and other military vehicles.
There were moments of humanity, as well, in the 2-week-old war. In Nasiriyah, American snipers summoned help for an Iraqi woman in labor in a pickup truck. Navy Hospitalman 1st Class Kyle Morris delivered a healthy baby and named her 'America.'"

Wednesday, April 2, 2003

News and commentary:

"A tattered American flag rides..."
(AP Photo/John Moore, 2003/04/02)
"A tattered American flag rides northward through the Iraqi desert atop a U.S. Army tank with the 3rd Infantry Division Task Force 1-64 near Karbala in central Iraq Wednesday, April 2, 2003."

"Allies Pound Republican Guard Divisions" (Fox News, 2003/04/02)
"U.S. forces advanced even closer to Baghdad Wednesday, wiping out one Republican Guard division and nearly destroying another as they geared up for an all-out assault on the Iraqi capital.
Some American units are reportedly within 19 miles of Baghdad, while others are within 30. ...
Senior Defense officials told Fox News that the Baghdad division of Saddam Hussein's vaunted Republican Guard had been wiped out, and the Medina Division was "almost completely destroyed as well."
"The Medina and Baghdad divisions are no longer credible forces," Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal said at the Pentagon. "There's clearly command and control evident," but 'effective command and control and effective maneuvers are not as evident.'"

"Grim clues to police station's past" (Tom Newton Dunn, BBC News, 2003/04/02)
A report on Saddam's version of a police station in Abu al Khasib: "But though the regime's men who ran it on Saturday have now disappeared, their legacy of terror very much remains. ...
Only after darkness fell did a man in his 30s approach the gates of 40 Commando's new headquarters in an old Iraqi army barracks on the town's outskirts.
Giving his name as Dofia Abdullah, and saying he had important information, he said: "The Baath Party were bad people, they used to hurt people inside the police station."
"You say bad words about Saddam, they take you in there and you never come out."
"Everybody also knew not to ask what happen to them there, then they disappear too."
"The Mukhabarat, they work in there also."
We still cannot say for sure until more town's people are ready and brave enough to come forward and testify about their former oppressors.
But everything we saw inside that building suggested it was not really a house of law and order at all, but used to torture possibly hundreds of local civilians." (See also: "Report: Iraq torture chamber found" (CNN.com, 2003/04/02))

"The First Liberation" (Gretel Kovach, beliefnet/ABC News, 2003/04/02)
A report from Biyara: "They considered themselves the true believers of the faith. But now that the Ansar al-Islam militants are gone, the Kurdish villagers who lived among them in northern Iraq say they were nothing but fanatics.
"How dare they call us infidels! If you say 'There is no god but God and Mohammed is his prophet,' then you are a Muslim," said Osman Wahab, 65, freely puffing on a cigarette for the first time in three years.
In the village of Biyara nestled in the mountains near the Iranian border in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, men were busy this weekend shaving their beards and smoking — reveling in their new freedom. A woman stood in the center of town and tore off her enveloping black abaya. She tossed her hair in the sun for a moment, smiling broadly, before donning a simple headscarf."

"Cheers and Smiles for U.S. Troops in a Captured City" (Jim Dwyer, The New York Times, 2003/04/02)
A report from Najaf: "Hundreds of American troops marched into town at midday today and were greeted by its residents. ...
People rushed to greet them today, crying out repeatedly, "Thank you, this is beautiful!"
Two questions dominated a crowd that gathered outside a former ammunition center for the Baath Party. "Will you stay?" asked Kase, a civil engineer who would not give his last name. Another man, Heider, said, "Can you tell me what time Saddam is finished?" ...
American troops found that the fleeing Baath Party and paramilitary forces had set up minefields on roads and bridges leading out of the city. Late today an American engineering team was clearing the third of such fields, this one with 30 mines, by detonating them with C4 explosives.
Lt. Col. Duke Deluca, noting that the mines had been made in Italy, said, 'Europeans are antiwar, but they are pro-commerce.'"

"Saddam's grip of fear remains" (Ryan Dilley, BBC News, 2003/04/02)
A report from Umm Qasr: "Much has changed in Umm Qasr in one week. The dusty streets around the town's two ports are no longer deserted.
Nor is it just children hoping for a handout of sweets who now wave and smile at passing British soldiers, adults too seem cheerful at the occupation of their town.
UK forces are trying to win over the Umm Qasr population
"We love you," cries one young man, as a convoy passes. ...
So have the people openly turned against their president?
One of the Iraqis returning to work on one of the port's two tugs said he did not want to talk about Saddam Hussein while he was still in power.
"The people who spoke out at Safwan to the television cameras, those who dared to talk about Saddam, the ones who celebrated the arrival of the Americans, they are now dead," he said."

"Saddam Vows Invaders Won't Reach Baghdad, TV Says" (Reuters, 2003/04/03)
"President Saddam Hussein has vowed in a letter that Iraqi forces will stop U.S.-led invaders advancing on Baghdad and will drive them out of Iraq, state television reported on Thursday.
"Damn them, and by God, there will be thousands of soldiers fighting for what is right, virtue and faith in defense of the land of prophets and holy places, of belief and devotion," it quoted Saddam as writing in a letter to his niece on April 1."

"Innocent van victims set up by Saddam: Imam" (Kate Sheehy, New York Post, 2003/04/02)
"U.S. military officials yesterday insisted that the blood of the seven Iraqi women and children killed in a checkpoint shooting is on Saddam Hussein's hands - as a local religious leader said the victims had been forced into the death van.
Sahid Mohammed Bakir Almohari - a prominent Muslim cleric from the town near where the shooting and an earlier homicide bombing occurred - said on Fox News Channel that villagers told him Iraqi militants mercilessly orchestrated both incidents to try to whip up anti-American support.
"These people, children and women, those were put in the bus by Saddam Hussein's forces, their husbands or fathers were taken hostages and the driver was ordered to speed up to the checkpoint and not stop so that they would be shot at," said Almohari, one of many Shiites opposed to Saddam.
As for Saturday's homicide bombing, in which an Iraqi posing as a cabdriver lured four soldiers to his vehicle at another nearby checkpoint and then blew them all up, the cleric said the "bomber" became involved only to save his family.
The thugs had threatened to kill his relatives, including his infant son, if he didn't comply, the cleric told Fox."

"11 Bodies Found With Rescued U.S. POW" (Doug Mellgren, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/04/02)
The Saddam Hospital: "Eleven bodies — some believed to be Americans — were found with prisoner of war Pfc. Jessica Lynch when she was rescued in a U.S. commando raid on an Iraqi hospital, a military spokesman said Wednesday. ...
Acting on a CIA tip about Lynch's whereabouts, U.S. special operations forces slipped behind enemy lines and seized Lynch from the Saddam Hospital under cover of darkness Tuesday, military officials said.
The U.S. forces engaged in a firefight on the way into and out of the building, but there were no coalition casualties, said Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, a U.S. Central Command spokesman. He said ammunition, mortars, maps and a terrain model were found at the hospital, along with "other things that made it very clear it was being used as a military command post."
During the rescue operation, 11 bodies were recovered in and around the hospital. The cause of death was not immediately disclosed.
"We have reason to believe some of them were Americans," said Navy Capt. Frank Thorp, another U.S. Central Command spokesman."

"U.S. POW rescued in dramatic raid" (CNN.com, 2003/04/02)
"Lynch, 19, suffered broken legs, a broken arm and multiple serious gunshot wounds, according to Reuters and Pentagon. Listed in stable condition, she is scheduled to arrive at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in southwestern Germany about 4 p.m. EST, said a U.S. Air Force spokesman."

"Sniping at the 'Plan' Strikes Some Nerves" (Vernon Loeb, The Washington Post, 2003/04/02)
For some reason, I haven't posted anything on the criticism of Donald Rumsfeld's warplan, which has blown up into a minor media storm since Seymon Hersh's latest article made the news. This is a useful summary and analysis:
"It was Rumsfeld, they said, who pushed Franks for months to fashion a campaign premised on the synergy of disorienting air power, faster-moving ground forces, information dominance on the "digital battlefield" and greater reliance on Special Forces. ...
Another truth of the matter, to borrow Rumsfeld's phrase, is that the plan may turn out to be brilliant after all. The war is less than two weeks old; U.S. and British casualties have been relatively light; the advance to the outskirts of Baghdad has been swift; the Iraqi military has few options; and even its harassing tactics have come at enormous price in Iraqi lives and lost equipment. ...
But numerous other analysts inside and outside the military say it is hard to deny that several key assumptions underlying the plan - that the Iraqi military would not fight hard in the south, that the Iraqi government could be knocked off its feet by a precision blast of U.S. air power, and that the Iraqi people would rise up and greet U.S. and British forces as liberators - did not immediately come to pass. ...
Rumsfeld is obviously brilliant, talented and driven, but his vanity is such that he can never admit when he's wrong," Peters said. 'The war is going wonderfully. The performance is just remarkable by any standards. But it's not going according to plan.'" (See also: "Offense and Defense" (Seymour M. Hersch, The New Yorker, from the 2003/04/07 issue))

"Sontag Award Nominee" (Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, 2003/04/02)
Sullivan quotes Hugo Young, "equating today's United States with the Soviet Union": "What Kennedy said of communism, in the same 60s address, could be transposed, with uncanny accuracy, to Americanism today. "The communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others," he contended, "is the primary cause of world tension today. For there can be no doubt that, if all nations could refrain from interfering in the self-determination of others, the peace would be much more assured." The role reversal may not be exact. World terrorism has to be factored into the equation. But as a verdict on Bush's America, this picture of political and economic imperialism rampant helps explain why a peaceful new world order seems out of reach." (See also: "Blair has one final chance to break free of his tainted fealty" (Hugo Young, The Guardian, 2003/04/01))

"Today Baghdad... Tomorrow Paris!"
(Strategy Page, April 2003)

"One in three French backs Saddam" (Charles Bremner and Alan Hamilton, The Times, 2003/04/02)
"Ill-feeling between Britain and France over the invasion of Iraq has plumbed new depths with the desecration of that most sacred of memorials, a war cemetery. ...
Relations will be further rent by a second poll, in Le Monde, showing that only a third of the French felt that they were on the same side as the Americans and British, and that another third desired outright Iraqi victory over "les anglo-saxons".
Eleven thousand Allied soldiers lie buried in well-tended peace at Etaples, on the Channel coast near Le Touquet, victims of the struggle by Anglo-Saxons to liberate the French from the German invaders during the First World War.
Last week the obelisk raised in their memory was defiled by red-painted insults such as "Rosbeefs go home"; "May Saddam prevail and spill your blood"; and, in a reference to the long-dead casualties beneath the manicured turf, 'They are soiling our land.'"

"Battle for Baghdad Begins in Area Surrounding Iraqi Capital" (Michael R. Gordon, The New York Times, 2003/04/02)
"The battle for Baghdad got under way today as American ground forces entered the "red zone."
United States Army and Marine ground forces advanced on separate axes into the swath of territory around Baghdad that is defended by the Republican Guard and has been characterized by American commanders as the most strategically vital and treacherous of the war. ...
This phase of the war is what American commanders call a deliberate attack, which means that unless the government suddenly collapses — an unlikely situation — the Army and Marine assault will not be a blitz to the outskirts of Baghdad but a methodical effort to destroy, piece by piece, the Republican Guard units defending the capital."

"Jessica Lynch, 19"
(AP Photo/Family Handout, 2003/04/01)

"U.S. POW rescued, is 'alive and well'" (Paul Martin, The Washington Times, 2003/04/02)
"Five U.S. helicopters raced up the Euphrates River valley yesterday in a daring mission to rescue Pfc. Jessica Lynch, a 19-year-old West Virginia soldier captured in an Iraqi ambush. ...
Officials said she was rescued from a hospital in Nasiriyah, a town that U.S. forces have dubbed "Ambush Alley" because of repeated attacks by Iraqi paramilitary fighters. Fox News reported that the rescue was carried out by Navy SEALs and Army Rangers. U.S. Marines supported the mission with attacks on nearby Iraqi positions.
"America doesn't leave its heroes behind," said Central Command spokesman Jim Wilkinson. 'Never has. Never will.'"

Tuesday, April 1, 2003

News and commentary:

"Saddam Message Says Victory Within Reach" (Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2003/04/03)
"Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said in a message read by a television announcer on Wednesday that he could scent victory, saying Iraq had so far launched less than a third of its forces against U.S.-led invaders.
"Victory is within our reach... we have used only one third of our army or even less while the criminals have used up all of the forces they brought to commit aggression against Iraq," said the message read on Iraq's satellite channel."

"Purported Saddam Message Calls for Jihad" (AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/04/01)
"The Iraqi information minister, reading a statement he said was from Saddam Hussein, called Tuesday for a jihad, or holy war, against the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
"The aggression that the aggressors are carrying out against the stronghold of faith is an aggression on the religion, the wealth, the honor and the soul and an aggression on the land of Islam," Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf said on national television.
"Therefore, jihad is a duty in confronting them," he added, saying "those who are martyred will be rewarded in heaven. Seize the opportunity, my brothers."
"Strike at them, fight them," the statement said. "They are aggressors, evil, accursed by God. You shall be victorious and they shall be vanquished."
"Fight them everywhere the way you are fighting them today," it said. 'And don't give them a chance to catch their breath until they declare it and withdraw from the lands of the Muslims, defeated and cursed in this life and the afterlife.'" (See also: "Statement Read by Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf" (Reuters/The New York Times, 2003/04/01))

"Iraqis 'shooting children'" (Sky News, 2003/04/01)
"Fanatical pro-Saddam Hussein fighters are shooting children in and around Basra, fleeing civilians told British forces.
One mother told British medics her 12-year-old son was among dozens of youngsters gunned down by death squads.
He was shot in the liver and several times in the stomach in Al Zubayr, just outside Basra, and is now being treated on the British hospital ship RFA Argus.
The ship's interpreter, Lieutenant Commander Nigel Bassett, said: "His mother says he was definitely shot by Iraqis and there were another group of children in the same place who were all gunned down by Iraqis.
"It seems there was an area of the town where people were leaving or going to get food to assist the coalition and there was a group of tearaways who came in and started indiscriminately shooting, trying to teach people not to co-operate." (See also: "Iraqis in Basra Say Terrorized by Saddam's Party" (Michael Georgy, Reuters, 2003/04/01))

"This war is not working" (Peter Arnett, The Daily Mirror, 2003/04/01)
Arnett apparently sees no difference between the Daily Mirror and Iraqi state TV in his first column for the tabloid: "I am still in shock and awe at being fired. There is enormous sensitivity within the US government to reports coming out from Baghdad.
They don't want credible news organisations reporting from here because it presents them with enormous problems. ...
That overnight my successful NBC reporting career was turned to ashes. And why?
Because I stated the obvious to Iraqi television; that the US war timetable has fallen by the wayside. ...
I have made those comments to television stations around the world and now I'm making them again in the Daily Mirror." (See also: "NBC, MSNBC fire Peter Arnett" (MSNBC, 2003/03/31))

"The Folly of Containment" (Robert J. Lieber, Commentary, from the April 2003 issue)
"In the end, the search for alternatives to the use of force bespeaks a failure of imagination — a stark unwillingness, even after September 11, to conceive of what it means for weapons of mass destruction to fall into the hands of monstrous figures like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. In the light of this unfolding and ever more perilous reality, to choose to avoid force at all costs is to choose not the lesser but the greater evil. As one self-described reluctant hawk, Bill Keller of the New York Times, has put it, "In the short run, war is perilous. In the long run, peace can be a killer too." This is a fitting epitaph for the lost, and not soon to be recovered, world that gave rise to the doctrine of containment."

"Columbia VS. America" (Daniel Pipes and Jonathan Calt Harris, New York Post/danielpipes.org, 2003/04/01)
An article on Nicholas "A Million Mogadishus" De Genova's colleagues at Columbia:
"* Edward Said, university professor, calls the U.S. policy in Iraq a "grotesque show" perpetrated by a "small cabal" of unelected individuals who hijacked U.S. policy. He accuses "George Bush and his minions" of hiding their imperialist grab for "oil and hegemony" under a false intent to build democracy and human rights.
Said deems Operation Iraqi Freedom "an abuse of human tolerance and human values" waged by an "avenging Judeo-Christian god of war." This war, he says, fits into a larger pattern of America "reducing whole peoples, countries and even continents to ruin by nothing short of holocaust." ...
* Joseph Massad, assistant professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History, seems to blame every ill in the Arab world on the United States. Poverty results from "the racist and barbaric policies" of the American-dominated International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The absence of democracy is the fault of "ruling autocratic elites and their patron, the United States." Militant Islamic violence results from "U.S. imperialist aggression."
Such sentiments coming from leading lights of the Columbia professorate suggest that De Genova fits very well into his institution. He just made the mistake of blurting out the logical conclusion of the anti-Americanism forwarded by some of his colleagues." (See also: "Goldilocks Warrior at Penn" (Martin Kramer, Sandstorm, 2003/03/31) and "Radicals Speak Out At Columbia 'Teach-In'" (Ron Howell, Newsday.com, 2003/03/27))

"Self-haters who want the West to decline and fall" (Stephen Pollard, The Times, 2003/04/01)
"They come from all parties, and none, but they have one common idée fixe: they hate the West. They hate, in fact, themselves. ...
So consumed are they with contempt for their own society that they cannot bear the thought of the West actually defending itself. When America does just that, the reaction is not to thank heavens for a nation that is prepared to stand up for freedom, but to spit in its face.
That mindset infects the entire political culture. I recently took part in a radio discussion with the BBC's developing world correspondent. During it he informed me and the listeners that "if America was engaged in the rest of the world rather than, frankly, wanting to bomb it and. . . take its resources" then there would be less anti-Americanism around. On Newsnight last week, one correspondent referred disparagingly to "this holy war".
With senior correspondents who seem to think that the US is the real villain, is it any wonder that the BBC reports this as a war between two equally untrustworthy foes — or, as sometimes seems the case, between an evil aggressor, America, and a blameless victim, Iraq? Every incident is reported, almost relished, as a shattering blow. The Today programme described the execution of two British soldiers last week as "the worst possible news". The loss of two lives in defence of freedom is indeed tragic. But it will have made almost no difference to the overall success.
The real decadence of the West is not its alcohol, sex and drugs: it is its inability to make judgments about its own value, and its refusal to treat the likes of Cook with the contempt they deserve."

"This is not Vietnam - the allies are well on the way to victory" (John Keegan, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/04/01)
"The headless chickens whose cluckings and splutterings currently fill the media are more blameworthy. War has been their staple diet for much of their professional lives, but they seem to have made precious little effort to understand what they are paid to report. And in the age of rolling news, even the fair-minded are hampered by the scramble to react to the last reported event. ...
In a conventional military environment, not so heavily influenced by the surveillance of the media, any commanding general might reckon the campaign had made highly satisfactory progress so far. It has secured most of the territory and facilities over which it needs to operate, has a secure base, has acquired its own resupply port, dominates the enemy and is not threatened by large-scale civilian disorder."

"Syria backs Iraqis against 'illegal' invasion" (The Daily Star, 2003/04/01)
The Syrian spokesman's wording when it comes to the United Nations is quite telling. For dictators the UN provides international legitimacy while preserving their peace and security: "Syria said Monday it had chosen to support the Iraqi people against the "illegal" US-British invasion of Iraq, defying a new warning against Damascus from US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
"Syria has chosen to align itself with the brotherly Iraqi people who are facing an illegal and unjustified invasion and against whom are being committed all sorts of crimes against humanity," a Foreign Ministry spokesman said. ...
The Syrian spokesman said Powell, "like the whole world, knows that Syria has chosen to be with international legitimacy represented by the United Nations and the Security Council, whose role it is to preserve world peace and security."
Syria, one of the rotating non-permanent members of the Security Council, "has chosen to be with the international consensus which has said no to aggression against Iraq, the bombardments of cities, the massacre of innocent civilians, the destruction of houses, power plants and water stations," the spokesman added."

"Warning of Doom, Edgy Iraqi Leaders Put on Brave Front" (John F. Burns, The New York Times, 2003/04/01)
"The sharp boom of a new bomb striking a mile, or perhaps 10 miles away, shook the building at times during the news conference at the Palestine Hotel. The ministers, undeterred, or at least determined not to be seen being deterred, affected not to notice. ...
Instead, Mr. Sahhaf, wearing a holstered pistol