Archived news and commentary: April 21 - 27, 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 27, 2003

News and commentary:

"Islamic Antisemitism And Its Nazi Roots" (Matthias Küntzel, matthiaskuentzel.de, April 2003)
"What kind of ideology pushed the 9/11 perpetrators into acting the way they did? Information from the first trial, of a core member of the Hamburg al Qaida cell which took place between October 2002 and February 2003 in Hamburg, Germany gives a crucial answer to this question. ...
One witness, Shahid Nickels, a member of Mohammed Atta‘s core group between 1998 and 2000, said the following: “Atta’s weltanschauung was based on a National Socialist way of thinking. He was convinced that ‘the Jews’ are determined to achieve world domination. He considered New York City to be the center of world Jewry which was, in his opinion, Enemy Number One.”
Sharid Nickels further testified about the perpetrator’s core group: “They were convinced that Jews control the American government as well as the media and the economy of the United States. … Motassadeq shared Atta’s attitude in believing that a world-wide conspiracy of Jews exists. According to him, Americans want to dominate the world so that Jews can pile up capital.” ...
Recognizing this obsessive hatred of Jews enables us to draw a preliminary conclusion: The concept of Americans as enemies which motivated the 9/11 perpetrators is clearly not based on sound or even a partially reasonable perception of reality but is an obvious phantasmagoria and reveals an antisemitism which strikingly parallels several central concepts of Nazi ideology."

"American Power Moves Beyond the Mere Super" (Gregg Easterbrook, The New York Times, 2003/04/27)
"No other military is even close to the United States. The American military is now the strongest the world has ever known, both in absolute terms and relative to other nations; stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions at the height of Roman power. For years to come, no other nation is likely even to try to rival American might.
Which means: the global arms race is over, with the United States the undisputed heavyweight champion. Other nations are not even trying to match American armed force, because they are so far behind they have no chance of catching up. The great-powers arms race, in progress for centuries, has ended with the rest of the world conceding triumph to the United States.
Now only a nuclear state, like, perhaps, North Korea, has any military leverage against the winner.
Paradoxically, the runaway American victory in the conventional arms race might inspire a new round of proliferation of atomic weapons. With no hope of matching the United States plane for plane, more countries may seek atomic weapons to gain deterrence."

"An Air War of Might, Coordination and Risks" (Bradley Graham and Vernon Loeb, The Washington Post, 2003/04/27)
An overview of the air campaign: "Moseley did not just order more attacks; he rearranged the air battle. In a risky bid to extend strike missions by making it easier for planes to refuel, he ordered tanker aircraft - which are relatively vulnerable, because they lack their own warning radar and armaments - to venture into Iraqi airspace, even though Iraq's dense air defense network had not been eliminated.
At the same time, he shifted large, lumbering and similarly vulnerable surveillance aircraft into Iraq. Among them were JSTARS radar planes, each equipped with a Doppler radar system capable of viewing hundreds of square miles at once - and unaffected by blowing sand.
Information from JSTARS and other monitoring systems was relayed in minutes to target planners on the ground, who then sent attack instructions to AWACS control planes over Iraq, which in turn directed warplanes to the target. "If the Iraqis moved in a coherent formation, they were immediately detected and targeted," said Maj. Jon Prindle, a senior JSTARS director. "Most of them got destroyed."
With such imagery streaming into the air operations center, U.S. commanders "knew the layout of the Republican Guard forces better than their own division commanders did," said Air Force Brig. Gen. Dan Darnell, the center's director."

"Listening to Terrorists" (Paul Berman, The New York Times, 2003/04/27)
A review of Jean Bethke Elshtain's"The Burden of American Power in a Violent World", which seems to be very interesting: "Elshtain is a professor of ethics at the University of Chicago, and during the next months she listened to a great many of her colleagues. And she remained aghast. The professors, some of them, seemed in her eyes stuck in a Vietnam quagmire of their own, in which America was always a villain and never a victim, and American military response was always a catastrophe, never a measured act of self-defense or a humanitarian boon. ...
She notes an inability to make the right distinctions - between, for instance, martyrs and murderers, or between justice and revenge, or between terror and legitimate war. She notes an inability to distinguish between intended deaths (the victims of the terrorist attacks) and unintended deaths (the victims of American military errors). She notes a sloppy attitude toward facts - for instance, a willingness to assume that vast numbers of civilians were killed in Afghanistan, when the actual numbers, according to The Los Angeles Times, were a little over a thousand by midsummer 2002, large enough but not vast.
She notes an inability to listen. Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda have openly expressed their hatred of Christians, Jews and Americans, and their desire for random murder. And yet, in her estimation, all too many people in the universities and in the pulpits profess to be in the dark about Al Qaeda's true intentions, or pretend to know the real reason behind the attack - some modest, real-world complaint about American or Israeli policies."

"Lies and the Left" (David Aaronovitch, The Observer, 2003/04/27)
Aaronitch on the Galloway scandal as seen from the anti-American left: "Tariq Ali, interviewed on television, stated bluntly that it was an intelligence scam. The Guardian cartoonist, Martin Rowson, depicted the Telegraph dog digging up bones in a garden full of past security service frauds, with the caption, 'Weapons of Mass Distraction', the implication being that the documents were a plant designed to divert attention from the truth about the war. And the editor of Tribune, Mark Seddon, wrote in the Times that 'the discovery is a gift for the Government which has still not found a single shred of evidence for weapons of mass destruction... (it) comes at a convenient moment... I am reminded of the Zinoviev letter.'
In this version of events, the Telegraph journalist, David Blair, is either an accomplice to a grand fraud, or else a preposterous dupe who was guided, without his understanding it, towards one of the most audacious and complex forgeries in British history. And all done to wreak post-war revenge on one MP.
To me it just shows how deep in denial some on the Left are. And this is, by the way, an argument with the Left, not with the anti-war movement, some of whose leading figures were themselves suspicious of Galloway. In the London Evening Standard on Friday the anti-war writer Will Self revealed that he had refused to speak on a platform with the MP. 'Anyone,' Self wrote, 'who had paid attention to Galloway's pro-Saddam statements should have realised that his motives for meddling in Iraqi politcs were far from humanitarian.' Anyone except Mark Seddon, Tariq Ali, Martin Rowson and a whole lot of others."

"What Iraqis Think" (Amir Taheri, New York Post, 2003/04/27)
"The advent of liberty has unleashed energies that could both create and destroy. Here you have millions of people, mostly aged below 25 and never allowed to make the smallest decision without the fear of political authority, who suddenly feel no one is in charge. ...
The political vacuum created by the collapse of the Ba'athist regime widens by the day, and there are no signs that the United States (or anybody else for that matter) might have a clue as to how to fill it. ...
President Bush needs to get a grip on this situation before it runs out of control. He must decide who is in charge of the political aspect of the Iraqi project. And, indeed, what that project consists of."

"These Shi'ites stand for the kind of rule that so many Iraqis dread" (James Buchan, The Sunday Telegraph, 2003/04/27)
"Among middle-class Iraqi Muslims of the mainstream Sunni confession in Baghdad's western end, the vigour and organisation of the Shia working-class since the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime is quite horrifying. They fear, as an Iraqi Sunni friend put it, "another 45 years under an ignorant regime". ...
The war in Iraq has disrupted the balance of power between the religious confessions in Iraq more drastically than anything since the mass conversion to Shi'ism of Arab tribes around the shrine cities in the 19th century. Saddam Hussein's Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party was a secular veil for Sunni Muslim dominance. It is now smashed into a million pieces, leaving one chief organism of civil government in Iraq: the famous Shia howzat al-ilmiyah, a theological seminary based round the tomb of the Shia patriarch Ali in Najaf."

"The proof that Saddam worked with bin Laden" (Inigo Gilmore, The Sunday Telegraph, 2003/04/27)
"Iraqi intelligence documents discovered in Baghdad by The Telegraph have provided the first evidence of a direct link between Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'eda terrorist network and Saddam Hussein's regime.
Papers found yesterday in the bombed headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq's intelligence service, reveal that an al-Qa'eda envoy was invited clandestinely to Baghdad in March 1998.
The documents show that the purpose of the meeting was to establish a relationship between Baghdad and al-Qa'eda based on their mutual hatred of America and Saudi Arabia. The meeting apparently went so well that it was extended by a week and ended with arrangements being discussed for bin Laden to visit Baghdad." (See also 'the documents in detail': "'We'll pay all expenses to gain the knowledge from bin Laden and convey a message back'" (The Sunday Telegraph, 2003/04/27))

Note: I'm back from Portugal and Madrid, which means Watch will updated daily starting from today. Portugal was beautiful and I fell instantly in love with Madrid, which I visited for the first time. The art collection at The Prado is completely stunning.
Watch will be "retroactively" updated, filling the 10-day gap, but it will take a while, as I'll do one day at a time.

Saturday, April 26, 2003

"Probe: Famous 'martyrdom' of Palestinian boy 'staged'" (David Kupelian, WorldNetDaily, 2003/04/26)
Was the "martyrdom" of 12-year-old Mohammed al-Dura staged propaganda? Kupelian points to some astounding and revelatory facts:
"And on Oct. 9, 2002, the Metula News Agency published an article by a contributing Palestinian journalist, Sami El Soudi, in which he deplores the way Westerners accept uncritically Palestinian propaganda.

I have had the opportunity in previous articles to speak out against the false friends of Palestinians living in liberal democracies. I asked that they stop encouraging the propaganda buffoonery orchestrated and managed by the corrupt leaders who govern us and take us each day deeper into a strategic impasse. ...

I didn't take part in the specific investigation related to the al-Dura affair … but you should know that our official press reported 300 wounded and dead at Netzarim junction the day when Mohammed was supposedly killed.

Most of the cameramen there were Palestinians. … They willingly took part in the masquerade, filming fictional scenes, believing they were doing it out of patriotism. When a scene was well done the onlookers laughed and applauded. ...

'The rushes [video clips] are full of surprising incongruities: Children smile as ambulances go by. A 'wounded' Palestinian collapses and two seconds later an ambulance pulls up to take him to the hospital. It looks as if the driver had been cued in, knew in advance where the Palestinian was going to fall, or was waiting in the upper right hand corner just out of the photographic field ready to zoom in on signal (there is a scene like this in the France 2 report.)
"In another rush we are startled to hear a Palestinian shouting: 'It's a flop! We have to do the whole thing over again!''"

"The Hamas Challenge to Fatah" (Jonathan Schanzer, The Middle East Quarterly, from the Spring 2003 issue)
"Hamas also seems to have realized that its violence not only demoralizes Israel but also undermines the PA. Every time Hamas attacks an Israeli target, either inside Israel proper or in the Palestinian territories, the attack elicits an Israeli reprisal — against the PA. ...
To put it another way, Hamas is able to kill two birds with one stone. By attacking Israel, it boosts its popularity with Palestinians, and it elicits an Israeli retaliation that, in most instances, damages the PA and possibly paves the way to Fatah's disintegration. Given these tangible rewards for terror, Hamas has no reason to desist.
It then should come as no surprise that the various "dialogues" between Fatah and Hamas have yielded little or nothing in the way of reducing terror. In fact, the only cumulative effect of these talks has been to legitimize Hamas still further, through Egyptian sponsorship of the talks. The Israeli Ha'aretz daily notes that "the Europeans, the Americans, and the Egyptians all treated the Islamic groups as the de facto equal of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority." ...
The only measure that might block Hamas's continued rise is a thorough, far-reaching and even drastic reform of the PA. Only a completely transparent central authority can compete with the claims of Hamas. Without that reform, the scenario of a Hamas eclipse of the PA will become more likely, perhaps setting the stage for an even more comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian confrontation in the years ahead."

"Why I nearly resigned" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2003/04/26 issue)
"Will the Belgian government approve the complaint of 'genocide' against Tommy Franks? The petition accuses the general of 'inaction in the face of hospital pillaging', which apparently meets the Belgian definition of genocide. Unlike the deaths of more than three million people, which is the lowball figure for those who’ve died in the civil war in the Congo — or, as I still like to think of it, the Belgian Congo.
The Congo's civil war is everything George Mohammed al-Galloway claimed Bush’s war would be: there were more civilian deaths in a few hours in Ituri province last week than in the entire Iraq campaign; while the blowhards at Oxfam and co. — the Big Consciences lobby — insist on pretending that Iraq is a humanitarian disaster, there's an actual humanitarian disaster going on in the Congo, complete with millions of children dead from disease and malnutrition. While the lefties warned that Ariel Sharon would use the cover of the Iraq war to slaughter the Palestinians, the Congolese are being slaughtered, and you don’t need any cover. Because nobody cares. Because no Americans or 'Zionists' are involved."

"The Anti-Militant Muslim View" (Tashbih Sayyed, The Washington Post, 2003/04/26)
Sayyed is editor in chief of Pakistan Today: "Your paper opposes Daniel Pipes's nomination to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace because "Muslims" see him destroying cultural bridges to the Muslim world ["Fueling a Culture Clash," editorial, April 19].
This Muslim wishes to protest.
To begin with, "Muslims" are not a single bloc. Yes, apologists for Osama bin Laden and Yasser Arafat take issue with Pipes's work, but many other Muslims support it. To wit: While your paper opposes his nomination, the California-based weekly that I publish, Pakistan Today, endorsed him. Hence, this debate has little to do with a "culture clash." It is rather a "politics clash," in which some Muslims agree with Pipes and some do not. Ditto for non-Muslims.
At best, your editorial confuses Pipes's opposition to militant Islam with opposition to Islam as a whole. At worst, it reduces all Muslim opinion to an enthusiasm for a totalitarian form of the religion. Fortunately, a broader spectrum of Muslim opinion exists. Unfortunately, many anti-militant Muslims do not speak out, fearful of retribution even in the United States." (See also: "WaPo Opposes Pipes Nomination" (Charles Johnson, Little Green Footballs, 2003/04/19) and "Fueling a Culture Clash" (The Washington Post, 2003/04/19))

"Attack on Kashmir radio station, other violence leaves 14 dead" (AFP, Yahoo! News, 2003/04/26)
"Fresh violence by suspected Muslim rebels in Indian Kashmir, including a suicide attack on a state-owned radio station, left 14 people dead and 10 security force personnel injured.
The new deaths came on a second day of bloody violence in the region, after 18 people were killed on Friday, including six in a suicide attack.
Two Indian security men and three Muslim rebels were killed Saturday in a attack on the Radio Kashmir office in the heart of Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian Kashmir.
Seven other security force personnel were injured in the attack.
Police said three militants detonated a car laden with explosives near the main gate of Radio Kashmir, killing a policeman, before they tried to storm into building in the confusion."

Friday, April 25, 2003

"Uh-Oh" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2003/04/25)
"This just in from Iran's Islamic Republic News Agency:

Deputy Commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) for Parliamentary Affairs Brigadier General Hassan Hamidzadeh said here Wednesday the process of the US ruin has begun.

Speaking in a ceremony to mark the memory of 122 martyrs of Qourchi township which is affiliated to Khomein, Hamidzadeh said the US ruin is imminent due to the many challenges coming to surface in the American society.

The United States lacks in a proper culture and moral values and it would collapse shortly, he predicted.

Oh well, it was nice while it lasted." (See also: "IRGC official says process of US ruin has begun due to challenges" (IRNA; 2003/04/23))

"Former Iraqi Spy Chief Taken Into Custody" (David Crary, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/04/25)
"A former Iraqi intelligence official accused of links to al-Qaida has been captured by U.S. forces, American officials said Friday. The announcement came a day after the surrender of Saddam loyalist Tariq Aziz, for years the regime's most public face.
Farouk Hijazi, who most recently served as Iraq's ambassador to Tunisia, was once a senior official in the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein's intelligence service.
Although Hijazi was not on the most-wanted list, he is "the biggest catch so far," former CIA Director James Woolsey told CNN. 'We know this man was involved with al-Qaida.'"

"Time Is on Our Side" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2003/04/25)
"The display of American force in service to values will have a powerful effect on allies, neutrals, and enemies — in Europe, the Korean peninsula, and the Middle East. Another irony of the three-week war is that Americans took an entire country in days from a tiny single front in Kuwait. In other words, nearby allies like Saudi Arabia and Turkey learned that their bases are no longer a means with which to extort money and gain political concessions: If you want us out, then kick us out — we will find either other friends, or at least the means of operating without such hosts. South Korea should take a hard look at all this, learning that the United States can choose when and where to act — and when to go it alone (or go home) if not wanted. ...
We do not need to, nor should we, attack or even threaten a criminal Syria with a force that we probably won't employ. Creating permanent change in Iraq and allowing the world to realign itself to new moral realities will soon enough squeeze Mr. Assad as never before. The future, you see, is on not his, but our, side. It is precisely because the last decade has seen American military power — against Noriega, bin Laden, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein — used for the promotion of human freedom and humanitarian values that our enemies are so exasperated and the neutrals so shrill."

"A Good Deed" (David Ignatius, The Washington Post, 2003/04/25)
A report from Baghdad: "Occasionally you have the feeling here that the door has opened in the trauma ward of a hospital and the patients are walking into the sunlight, half-delirious about the future even as they remain terrorized by the past.
Take a walk to Tayaran Square this week and you'll hear people trading rumors about the secret prisons that Baghdadis are convinced lie beneath the city. One man says he heard voices from a passageway near a highway underpass; another saw some keys to a hidden gate; another says he knows there is a prison beneath the Ministry of Trade because he saw rations delivered there daily; yet another says he is certain there is a seven-story prison beneath his neighborhood, and a 12-mile tunnel linking it to the headquarters of Iraqi intelligence.
Iraqis express a kind of collective hysteria, and why not? For every imaginary prison, there was a real one. For every rumor about torture and death, there are the bones that lie in mass graves discovered here over the past two weeks."

"Newly found Iraqi files raise heat on British MP" (Philip Smucker, The Christian Science Monitor, 2003/04/25)
"A fresh set of documents uncovered in a Baghdad house used by Saddam Hussein's son Qusay to hide top-secret files detail multimillion dollar payments to an outspoken British member of parliament, George Galloway. ...
The most recent - and possibly most revealing - documents were obtained earlier this week by the Monitor. The papers include direct orders from the Hussein regime to issue Mr. Galloway six individual payments, starting in July 1992 and ending in January 2003. ...
The payments point to a concerted effort by the regime to use its oil wealth to win friends in the Western world who could promote Iraqi interests first by lifting sanctions against Iraq and later in blocking war plans.
The leadership of Hussein's special security section and accountants of the President's secretive Republican Guard signed the papers and authorized payments totaling more than $10 million."

Thursday, April 24, 2003

"The Turks Enter Iraq" (Michael Ware, TIME, 2003/04/24)
"Even as the U.S. works to stabilize a postwar Iraq, Turkey is setting out to create a footprint of its own in the Kurdish areas of the country. In the days after U.S. forces captured Saddam's powerbase in Tikrit, a dozen Turkish Special Forces troops were dispatched south from Turkey. Their target: the northern oil city of Kirkuk, now controlled by the U.S. 173rd Airborne Division's 3rd Brigade. Using the pretext of accompanying humanitarian aid the elite soldiers passed through the northern city of Arbil on Tuesday. They wore civilian clothes, their vehicles lagging behind a legitimate aid convoy. They'd hoped to pass unnoticed. But at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Kirkuk they ran into trouble. "We were waiting for them," says a U.S. paratroop officer.
The Turkish Special Forces team put up no resistance though a mean arsenal was discovered in their cars, including a variety of AK-47s, M4s, grenades, body armor and night vision goggles. "They did not come here with a pure heart," says U.S. brigade commander Col. Bill Mayville. 'Their objective is to create an environment that can be used by Turkey to send a large peacekeeping force into Kirkuk.'"

"Tariq Aziz in Custody" (ABC News, 2003/04/24)
"Iraq's former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz is believed to have surrendered to U.S. authorities, ABCNEWS has learned.
Aziz was last reported to be in Baghdad. Intermediaries for Aziz had been talking to U.S. officials about conditions for a surrender on Wednesday, intelligence sources told ABCNEWS.
Aziz was the eight of spades in the deck of playing cards picturing 55 former Iraqi leaders sought by the United States, and No. 43 on the most-wanted list. ...
His ties to Saddam went back to the founding of the Baath Party in the 1950s, and he played a key role in many of the most important moments in Iraq's history. He enlisted U.S. aid during the Iran-Iraq war, and also forged ties with the Soviet Union."

"N. Korea 'admits having nukes'" (CNN.com, 2003/04/24)
"North Korea on Thursday admitted to having at least one nuclear bomb, senior Bush administration sources told CNN.
North Korea's representative Li Gun pulled aside U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly on Wednesday and told him "blatantly and boldly" that the country has at least one nuclear weapon, one official said.
Li then asked, "Now what are you going to do about it?" the official said.
The North Korean representative said his country would "prove" it has the weapon "soon," implying that North Korea may test a nuclear bomb, though he did not explicitly threaten that, a source said."

"Israeli guard dies as human shield in suicide attack" (Joel Leyden, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/04/24)
"An Israeli security guard died Thursday while blocking a suicide bomber from reaching a busy train platform in central Israel.
Fourteen other people were wounded in the attack in Kfar Sava, a town northeast of Tel Aviv. ...
Israeli media reports identified the slain guard as Alexander Kostiyuk, 24, of Bat Yam, a suburb south of Tel Aviv. No funeral plans were yet announced.
Meanwhile, the Al Aska Martyrs' Brigades linked to Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement claimed responsibility for the attack.
The bomber detonated a belt packed with five to 10 kgs. of explosives at the entrance to the station at about 7:20 a.m. local time, while 250 people waited on a platform for the next train to Tel Aviv, police said.
The security guard, perhaps alerted by a black coat worn by the bomber despite the balmy weather, kept him from reaching the platform by asking for his identity papers, police said. Then the bomber reached in his pocket and detonated his explosives, killing himself and the guard instantly."

"Once More, with Feeling" (Jonathan V. Last, The Weekly Standard, 2003/04/24)
Last on doomsday pundits refusing to acknowledge their mistakes: "William Raspberry's April 14 column was boldly titled "No Apologies," and he delivered:
Those who thought it was a bad idea for America to launch what was the moral equivalent of unilateral war on Iraq have nothing to apologize for...
Shouldn't the prime minister and all of us who thought the war was hasty and dangerous and wrongheaded admit that we were wrong? I mean, with the pictures of those Iraqis dancing in the streets, hauling down statues of Saddam Hussein and gushing their thanks to the Americans, isn't it clear that President Bush and Britain's Tony Blair were right all along? If we believe it's a good thing that Hussein's regime has been dismantled, aren't we hypocritical not to acknowledge Bush's superior judgment?
Not at all. ...
But why should anyone take them seriously? They've been proven wrong on the question of the day and then failed to demonstrate any serious capacity for introspection. They're not public thinkers. They're not journalists. They're activists." (See also: "The Cassandra Chronicles" (The Weekly Standard, from the 2003/04/21 issue)

"Galloway's a crook - how convenient" (Scott Ritter, The Guardian, 2003/04/24)
Scott "The defeat of the United States in this war is inevitable" Ritter on George "I regard you as a whore working for a pimp" Galloway is of course priceless: "But I was also shocked because of the timing of these allegations. Having been on the receiving end of smear campaigns designed to assassinate the character of someone in opposition to the powers that be, I have grown highly suspicious of dramatic revelations conveniently timed to silence a vocal voice of dissent." (See also: "Globetrotter's 14 trips paid for by appeal" (Dominic Kennedy, The Times, 2003/04/23) and "The Cassandra Chronicles" (The Weekly Standard, from the 2003/04/21 issue))

"Iraqis Tell of a Reign of Torture and Maiming" (Craig S. Smith, The New York Times, 2003/04/24)
"Thousands of people are missing in Iraq, victims of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, but a more visible legacy are the parts that are missing from people who survived. Missing eyes, ears, toenails and tongues mark those who fell into the hands of Mr. Hussein's powerful security services.
A network of Baath Party informers, intelligence service investigators, secret police operatives and the feared Fedayeen Saddam preyed on the populace to snuff out dissent before it could spread. One man encountered in Baghdad in recent days said he had his hand cut off and a cross carved in his forehead for dealing in dollars. ...
Farris Salman is one of the last victims of Mr. Hussein's rule. His speech is slurred because he is missing part of his tongue. Black-hooded paramilitary troops, the Fedayeen Saddam, run by Mr. Hussein's eldest son, Uday, pulled it out of his mouth with pliers last month, he said, and sliced it off with a box cutter. They made his family and dozens of his neighbors watch.
"I thought they were going to execute me," said Mr. Salman, sitting on the floor in his family's small house in a run-down neighborhood of the capital a week after being freed by a frightened prison warden as Americans took control of the city. "When one of the fedayeen said they were going to cut my tongue out, I said, 'No, please, just kill me.'"

Wednesday, April 23, 2003

"Powell: France Must Face Consequences" (Barry Schweid, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/04/23)
"Secretary of State Colin Powell is warning France it faces consequences for trying to block the U.S.-led war with Iraq, and Bush administration officials are exploring ways to exclude France from some NATO meetings.
A senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Wednesday the recommendations would be based on the notion that the U.S.-French relationship must be altered.
Potential punishments were discussed Monday at a meeting of top assistants to Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser.
These could include excluding France from meetings with U.S. allies and bypassing the North Atlantic Council, of which France is a member."

"France's Headscarf Problem" (Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal, 2003/04/23)
"The wearing of the headscarf has clearly become a matter of the deepest symbolic significance in France, a matter over which it is not impossible to see hundreds or even thousands eventually being killed. What might appear to an outsider as a trivial disagreement is actually one of great philosophical importance - a fact that both parties to the disagreement instinctively understand. ...
The Agence France Presse reports that scarf partisans are duplicitously using a double tactic and a double language to impose their views on Muslim women - their ultimate goal being the destruction of the liberal-democratic state itself. On the one hand, they appeal in public to the doctrine of universal human rights, which are observed only in states such as France; on the other, in private, they use the traditional male dominance of their culture - including the threat of violence - to impose their views on others in the name of Holy Writ. After all, in some giant housing projects surrounding Paris and other French cities, young Muslim women who dress in western clothing are deemed to be fair game, inviting - indeed, asking for - rape by gangs of Muslim youths. In such circumstances, it is impossible to know whether the adoption of Islamic dress by women in western society is ever truly voluntary, and so long as such behavior persists, the presumption must be against it being so.
In short, Islamic extremists use secularism to impose theocracy: a tactic that calls to mind that of the communists of old, who appealed to freedom of speech with the long-term aim of extinguishing it altogether. The parallel is all the more exact, because just as Moscow financed the communists, the Saudis finance many of the Muslim extremists." (See also: "MP booed for telling Muslim women to unveil" (Reuters/IOL, 2003/04/21))

"Islamic Radicals On Campus" (Erick Stakelbeck, Front Page Magazine, 2003/04/23)
A must-read essay on The Constitution of the Muslim Student's Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA): "The limits of the MSA's blind devotion to heinous Islamic criminals will be further tested when the case of Asan Akbar, the black Muslim Army sergeant who killed two and wounded 14 of his fellow U.S. soldiers when he hurled a grenade into a tent in Kuwait during the Iraq War, comes to trial. Akbar grew up attending a Saudi-funded mosque in South Central Los Angeles. He later moved on to the University of California-Davis, where he spent much of his time at the Davis Islamic Center, home to (surprise) the UC-Davis chapter of the MSA. When Akbar, found cowering in a tent after his despicable act, wailed, "You guys are coming into our countries and you're going to rape our women and kill our children," he summarized the MSA's feelings on the current Iraq War in a nutshell. ...
Created and funded by the Saudis but bred in the vast expanse of North America, the MSA has engaged in every form of anti-Western behavior imaginable. Whether marching side-by-side with communists in protest of the U.S. government, supporting convicted murderers, preaching "Death to Israel", funding terrorist activities or worshiping at the feet of Osama bin Laden, the MSA National and its many campus chapters pose an imminent threat not only to the schools they inhabit, but the United States in general. With the war on terrorism escalating at home and abroad, one can only hope that this volatile organization is exposed for what it truly is - the sworn enemy of the United States, conducting a jihad right here in our own backyard." (See also: "Soda, pizza and the destruction of America" (Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily, 2003/03/18))

"He'd give kilts and whisky to a legless Muslim" (Alan Cochrane, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/04/23)
An instantly classic anecdote about George Galloway: "Under the tutelage of Galloway, Dundee - that austere and generally depressed city on the north shore of the Tay - twinned itself with Nablus on the West Bank of the Jordan. It was an unlikely union that saw the PLO flag flying over the Gothic splendour of Dundee's municipal buildings, but it quickly took on a farcical air when, as part of the twinning ceremony, the Mayor of Nablus was presented with a crate of whisky and a kilt by the Scottish delegation. What use a strictly teetotal Muslim, both of whose legs had been blown away in a terrorist explosion, would have had for whisky and kilts was never made clear."

"Globetrotter's 14 trips paid for by appeal" (Dominic Kennedy, The Times, 2003/04/23)
"George Galloway is notoriously sensitive and secretive about who paid for his globetrotting campaign to lift United Nations sanctions against Saddam Hussein.
Even close associates cannot say with confidence who was really paying for the Mariam Appeal and who was benefiting financially from its immeasurable pot of cash.
Mr Galloway chose not to register the appeal as a charity, so avoiding the scrutiny and transparency that would reassure the public about who was subsidising his foreign travel.
He said: "The Mariam Appeal is a political campaign that was involved in a life-or-death struggle against the might of the British and American State. It had no obligation to open its activities to its enemies and it did not do so and will not do so." The appeal was opened in 1998 in the name of Mariam Hamza, a four-year-old Iraqi girl whose leukaemia was blamed by the MP on uranium-tipped weapons used by the Allies in the first Gulf War.
Mr Galloway made a promise to potential donors. He wrote on House of Commons paper pledging that, after paying for Mariam's treatment in a Glasgow hospital, the rest of the money would go to medical aid for Iraqi children. In fact, according to the Register of Members' Interests, Mr Galloway spent the Mariam Appeal's cash on 14 foreign trips to 15 countries, including eight visits to Iraq. ...
Mr Galloway, asked about the Mariam Appeal by The Times, said: 'I regard you as a whore working for a pimp.'"

"Memo from Saddam: We can't afford to pay Galloway more" (David Blair, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/04/23)
"Saddam Hussein rejected a request from George Galloway for more money, saying that the Labour backbencher's "exceptional" demands were not affordable, according to an official document found by The Daily Telegraph in Baghdad.
The letter from Saddam's most senior aide was sent in response to Mr Galloway's reported demand for additional funds. ...
Mr Galloway denies receiving any money from the regime. He claims that any documents purporting to show this are forgeries planted by western intelligence agencies to try to discredit him.
The latest document purported to convey a personal decision from Saddam and was circulated to four of the most senior figures in the former regime, including Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister. It indicates that Mr Galloway's affairs were discussed at the highest level."

"French opinion on war shifts" (Chené Blignaut, The Christian Science Monitor, 2003/04/23)
"Natalie Lavarra is having second thoughts about her position on the Iraq war.
"I still think it was right of [French President Jacques] Chirac to say no to the war," says the secretary at a French pharmaceutical company in Paris. "But when I saw how happy the Iraqis were that Saddam was gone, I had to ask myself whether we didn't perhaps make a mistake." ...
To be sure, the French media are still largely defending Chirac's position. But more and more ordinary people are lashing out at him for what they now see as a political faux pas.
"Chirac was wrong to say no to the war," says bartender Georges Chabat. "The Iraqi people wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein."
Dominique Moisi, senior adviser for the French Institute of International Relations, confirms that public opinion in France is in the process of changing.
"Since they saw the rapid fall of Saddam's empire, the French are asking themselves if they hadn't perhaps been wrong in making themselves irrelevant to the course of history," he says.
Until three weeks ago, 84 percent of the French were opposed to the war. Last week only 55 percent were still of the same opinion, according to a poll in the French Sunday newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche."

Tuesday, April 22, 2003

"Reaping the Whirlwind" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2003/04/22)
"On Sept. 12, 2001, Galloway contributed an op-ed piece to the Guardian titled "Reaping the Whirlwind." He wrote: "In Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and other countries whose populations are in sympathy with those who have been under remorseless US bombardment, people will consider the US to have had to swallow some of their own medicine." Galloway is swallowing some bitter medicine himself right about now." (See also: "Reaping the whirlwind" (George Galloway, The Guardian, 2001/09/12))

"Protocols of the Elders of Neocons" (Hussein Shobokshi, Arab News, 2003/04/22 [?])
Found via Charles Johnson, who points out that Shobokshi "probably thought the title for his latest disgusting anti-Semitic rant was terribly witty", but it's of course rather just very revealing: "In this weekly telephone report Paul Wolfowitz expressed his anxiety to Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister about the situation in the Middle East. "How are you doing?" asked Wolfowitz. "OK, OK," answered Sharon, "but you must go to Syria." Wolfowitz pondered, "this will be tougher to get the president's okay on." Sharon could not help but scream, "He does not know Damascus from Des Moines, Iowa. Move it Paul. You can always tell him that this man of peace thinks it’s kosher," concluded Sharon with a hysterical laugh."

"Iraq's past was just a Saddamite plaything" (Mark Steyn, National Post, 2003/04/22)
"The National Museum fell victim not to general looting but to a heist, if not an inside job, for which the general lawlessness provided cover. Am I sorry it happened? Yes, because it has given the naysayers, who were wrong about the millions of dead civilians, humanitarian catastrophe, environmental devastation, regional conflagration, etc., one solitary surviving itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny twig from their petrified forest with which to whack Rumsfeld and Co. The retrospective armchair generals are now complaining the generals didn't devote enough thought to saving armchairs from the early Calcholithic age. It isn't enough for America to kill hardly any civilians or even terribly many enemy combatants or bomb any buildings or unduly disrupt the water or electric supply, it also has to protect Iraq's heritage from Iraqis."

"PLO gets more than SR 1.8 million from the popular committee for assisting the Palestinian Mujahideen" (IMRA, 2003/04/22)
A dispatch from the Saudi Press Agency: "In line with the directives of Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz, the governor of Riyadh region and head of the popular committee for assisting the Palestinian Mujahideen, SR1,830,693 from the revenues of the popular committee for assisting the Palestinian Mujahideen, were remitted today to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Abdel-Rahim Mahmoud Jamous, the director general of the offices of the popular committee for assisting the Palestinian Mujahideen in the Kingdom, said this remittance constitutes the first installment of the remittances of the popular committee to the PLO during this lunar year."

"Timing Is Everything" (Michael Ledeen, National Review, 2003/04/22)
Ledeen's intimate knowledge of Iran will presumably make for even more essential reading than usual for a while: "We have a very narrow window in Iraq to win the support of the Shiite community, which constitutes a majority of the Iraqi people. If we do not manage that in the next month or two, the radical Iranian regime will almost certainly succeed in its ambitious and, thus far, brilliantly managed campaign to mobilize the Iraqi Shiites to discredit the Coalition victory, demand an immediate American withdrawal, and insist on "international" — that is, U.N. and European — supervision of the country. That would leave Iran with a free hand in Iraq, strengthen the regime in Tehran to our detriment, and give a second wind to the terror network. Our victory, as the old saying goes, would turn to ashes in our mouths. ...
But the true audacity of Tehran lies in their political moves. The Iranians have infiltrated more than a hundred highly trained Arab mullahs from Qom and other Iranian religious centers into Iraq, especially to Najaf and Karbala, the holy cities of the Shiite faith. They are poisoning the minds of the (largely uneducated) Iraqi mobs with a simple slogan, repeated five times a day in the mosques: "America did it for the Jews and for the oil." They are also distributing cash to the Iraqis."

"Galloway was in Saddam's pay, say secret Iraqi documents" (David Blair, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/04/22)
"George Galloway, the Labour backbencher, received money from Saddam Hussein's regime, taking a slice of oil earnings worth at least £375,000 a year, according to Iraqi intelligence documents found by The Daily Telegraph in Baghdad.
A confidential memorandum sent to Saddam by his spy chief said that Mr Galloway asked an agent of the Mukhabarat secret service for a greater cut of Iraq's exports under the oil for food programme.
George Galloway: 'I have never in my life seen a barrel of oil, let alone owned, bought or sold one'
He also said that Mr Galloway was profiting from food contracts and sought "exceptional" business deals. Mr Galloway has always denied receiving any financial assistance from Baghdad.
Asked to explain the document, he said yesterday: 'Maybe it is the product of the same forgers who forged so many other things in this whole Iraq picture. Maybe The Daily Telegraph forged it. Who knows?'" (See also: "The documents: contacts, money, oil and the need for anonymity" (The Daily Telegraph, 2003/04/22) and "Saddam's little helper" (The Daily Telegraph, 2003/04/22): "There is a word for taking money from enemy regimes: treason. What makes this allegation especially worrying, however, is that the documents suggest that the money has been coming out of Iraq's oil-for-food programme. In other words, the alleged payments did not come from some personal bank account of Saddam's, but out of the revenue intended to pay for food and medicines for Iraqi civilians: the very people whom Mr Galloway has been so fond of invoking.")

Monday, April 21, 2003

"MP booed for telling Muslim women to unveil" (Reuters/IOL, 2003/04/21)
"French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy drew boos at a Muslim gathering by insisting that Muslim women must remove their veils for identity photographs.
His words were drowned out when he said Muslims must obey the law, even if that meant baring their heads.
French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy drew boos and whistles at a Muslim gathering by insisting that Muslim women must remove their veils for identity photographs.
Sarkozy made the remark on Saturday at the annual congress of the hardline Union of Islamic Organisations in France (UOIF). His words were drowned out when he said Muslims must obey the law, even if that meant baring their heads." (Note: Found via Little Green Footballs.)

"Iraq: 1,000 graves found" (Sky News, 2003/04/21)
"Nearly 1,000 political prisoners slaughtered by the Iraqi regime are buried in secret graves at a cemetery on the outskirts of Baghdad, news agency AFP has reported.
Other secret cemeteries in the city could take the number of dead to 6,000, the agency said.
"The Ba'ath regime has gone and now we can talk freely with you," the manager, Mohymeed Aswad, told the agency.
"They are all political. Ten to 15 bodies would arrive at a time from the Abu Ghraib prison and we would bury them here."
Mohammad Moshan Mohammad, gravedigger at the cemetery, said the dead were mainly political prisoners.
Those buried in the last three years had been shot or hanged and were males and females aged between 15 and 30.
"The civilians were hanged. Sometimes a soldier would come through and they were all shot. I could distinguish them by their uniforms," he said.
AFP said each grave was numbered rather than having a name inscribed on a tombstone."

"The Job Ahead" (Stanley Kurtz, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/04/21)
An interesting essay on the problems facing democracy building in Iraq, comparing it to the experiences from India: "The influence of fundamentalist Islam in the Arab world reflects a culture deeply inhospitable to democratic and liberal principles. In a perceptive recent article in The National Interest, Adam Garfinkle explains that, whereas democracies take as bedrock assumptions that political authority lies with society, that the majority rules, and that citizens are equal before the law, Arab societies vest political authority in the Koran, rest decision-making on consensus, and understand law and authority as essentially hierarchical. They lack such essential cultural preconditions for democracy as the idea of a loyal opposition or the rule of law or the separation of church and state. ...
Arab Muslim societies remain unmodern and undemocratic not just in their attitudes toward political authority and law but also in their social organization. For men and women living within a universe where tribal identity, the duties and benefits of extended kinship networks, and conceptions of collective honor organize the relations of everyday life, democratic principles will be incomprehensible.
And therefore democracy would be impossible. How could a modern, democratic bureaucracy function, for example, if officials remain loyal primarily to tribe, faction or family? The power of such ties pre-empts any ethic of disinterested public service. A government office becomes a means of benefiting your family and harming your enemies, not applying the rules fairly. Saddam's Iraq largely functioned like one big tribal patriarchy, with Saddam the patriarch. His kin, together with members of his tribe and allied tribes, ruled."

"Palestinian Reality" (Ralph Peters, New York Post, 2003/04/21)
According to Peters, "A Palestinian state is on the way. Palestinian freedom will remain a dream.": "Once there is an independent Palestinian state, Israel will be accused of countless other sins - among them hindering the economic and political development of the new entity. While many Palestinians do, indeed, yearn for freedom and a just society, the hardline killers desire the complete destruction of Israel. Nothing less will do.
For the profoundly unscrupulous Arab governments of the region, the Palestinian cause has been a cherished convenience. All home-grown ills could be blamed on the need to sacrifice for the Palestinians - although the Palestinians never received sufficient aid from other Arabs to build decent lives. The image of Palestinian poverty and deprivation has been essential to the Arab world's myth-making.
Now Arab insistence and rhetoric have backed the myth-makers into a corner: For the region's decayed regimes, continuing Palestinian misery and powerlessness remain preferable to a Palestinian state. But the United States and even Israel now seem to accept the inevitability of Free Palestine. The Arabs have gotten their public wish, but will regret it in private.
The Arabs still need someone to blame for their failures. And they will continue to blame Israel and the United States. The Arabs will find countless faults with Israel's implementation of any accords. Then they will attack the accords themselves as unjust.
The Arab world is as addicted to blame as any junkie was ever addicted to heroin."

"Lift the Sanctions Now" (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2003/04/21)
"Having decided not just to sit out the war but to actively oppose the liberation of Iraq, France, like Russia, has only one card left to play in post-Hussein Iraq. Under U.N. rules, the sanctions can be lifted only by a positive vote of the Security Council, which means that France and Russia have veto power. Their concern about weapons of mass destruction and "modalities" is nothing more than blackmail." ...
But if the State Department sentimentalists who worship at the shrine of the United Nations insist on a pilgrimage to Turtle Bay, we should go to the Security Council and submit a one-line resolution: "Whereas the sanctions were imposed on the regime of Saddam Hussein; whereas that regime is no more; whereas sanctions are now needlessly preventing Iraq's economic recovery; the sanctions are hereby abolished."
No "modalities." No negotiations. No deals. Dare France and Russia to veto.
If they do, if they dare so naked a display of cynicism, we then simply declare that the Security Council has demonstrated its utter bankruptcy and forfeited all moral authority -- transcending mere uselessness and becoming now an agent of harm, deliberately standing in the way of the reconstruction of a suffering and now innocent country.
We then ostentatiously stand up, walk out and declare the sanctions dead. We then open the oil spigots and rebuild Iraq.
It is the right thing to do. It is the only thing to do."

"Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert" (Judith Miller, The New York Times, 2003/04/21)
"A scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade has told an American military team that Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before the war began, members of the team said.
They said the scientist led Americans to a supply of material that proved to be the building blocks of illegal weapons, which he claimed to have buried as evidence of Iraq's illicit weapons programs.
The scientist also told American weapons experts that Iraq had secretly sent unconventional weapons and technology to Syria, starting in the mid-1990's, and that more recently Iraq was cooperating with Al Qaeda, the military officials said."

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