Archived news and commentary: June 16 - 22, 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, June 22, 2003

News and commentary:

"Iraqi debt, like war, divides the west" (David Mulford and Michael Monderer, Financial Times/Jubilee Iraq, 2003/06/22)
"A new conflict has begun among western nations over Iraq's future, this time over its foreign debt, estimated at more than $100bn. Like the pre- invasion skirmishes, the battle lines reflect divisions between France, Germany and Russia, and the US.
Senior US officials initially called for debt forgiveness in the light of Saddam Hussein's evil regime. More recently they have backed off, employing the term "debt relief", which covers anything from short-term deferral to forgiveness. US Treasury officials have also agreed that Iraq's debt should be handled in the Paris Club of creditor nations. Germany, however, has made clear that this means rescheduling only - a position probably shared by France and Russia.
The US should resume its original position on forgiveness but for a different reason: assisting Iraq's recovery. And the Paris Club should not be the forum for negotiations. Anything less would compound the tragedy suffered by the Iraqi people during decades of Ba'athist oppression. ...
Iraq is a world-class debtor on a par with Argentina but its gross domestic product - estimated at $32bn in 2000 - is an eighth of Argentina's. Even assuming a resumption of oil exports at 2m barrels a day, Iraq's debt/export ratio would exceed 700 per cent, the highest in the world. Clearly, Iraq cannot rebuild its economy, establish conditions for growth and development and simultaneously service all its outstanding debt.
France, Germany and Russia believe that Iraq's debt should be rescheduled without write-offs or forgiveness and with interest continuing to accrue and compound. Those countries - the most vociferous opponents of the war - have the most to gain by conventional Paris Club treatment." (See also: "'Squeezing blood from a stone'" (Harald Schumann, Der Spiegel, 2003/06/02))

"Greek Forces Find 680 Metric Tons of Explosives on Ship" (Reuters, 2003/06/22)
"Greece said on Sunday its special forces found 680 tonnes of explosives on board a Comoros flagged ship owned by a Marshall Islands registered company named Alpha Shipping.
Greece's Merchant Marine Ministry said it had transferred the vessel, which it identified as the Baltic Sky, to a western Greek commercial port for further checks after special forces boarded the ship and found the explosives.
"After acting on confirmed information, special forces checked the ship carrying 680 tonnes of explosives inside Greek territorial waters," the ministry statement said. ...
"It looks certainly like a suspect ship. And it seems it was en route to Africa but we do not yet know exactly to where," government spokesman Telemachos Hytiris told Reuters."

"Israeli Troops Kill Senior Hamas Official" (VOA News, 2003/06/22)
"The Palestinian militant group Hamas has vowed revenge for the killing of a senior Hamas official, in a raid that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has hailed as a "successful operation."
Israeli officials say Abdullah Qawasmeh was shot to death late Saturday as soldiers tried to arrest him in the West Bank city of Hebron. Palestinians dispute that account, saying Israeli troops made no attempt to detain the Hamas official before gunning him down near a mosque. ...
Israeli officials said Mr. Qawasmeh was the mastermind behind a series of suicide attacks carried out by Hamas, including a recent bus bombing in Jerusalem that killed 17 people."

"The legacy of relativism" (Kenan Malik, kenanmalik.com, June 2003)
"I want to suggest, to the contrary, that relativism is so embedded in our lives that we often don't recognise it as such. The way we think of issues such as pluralism or tolerance, our understanding of personal identity, our attitudes to science - all are deeply shaped by the relativist outlook. ...
The blurring of fact and belief is also at the heart of such controversies as those over GM foods or the MMR vaccine. For what we see in these debates is the promotion of the idea that how one feels about an issue matters as much as what may be factually true. It's an argument that can only open the way to irrationalism and quackery.
Relativism undermines intellectual debate in a broader sense too. One legacy of relativism is that we've come to view pluralism not as a description but as a prescription. ... I've lost count of the number of times I’ve been prevented by both newspaper and radio editors from quoting from the Satanic Verses because it causes offence to Muslim believers. Either way the consequence has been to close down debate rather than open it up."

"We, The Maya" (John J. Miller, The Corner, 2003/06/22)
"Yesterday I read one of the oddest and least convincing pieces of civilizational doomsaying. The author is Jared Diamond - who also wrote the runaway bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel - and it appears in the current issue of Harper's... It starts out in an appropriately gloomy way: "One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse." True enough, I suppose. Most of the article is a reasonable review of why scholars believe Mayan civilization fell apart 11 or 12 centuries ago: overpopulation, overfarming, drought, warfare, etc. It seems that just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong for those poor folks in the Yucatan, who built such marvelous monuments in the jungle. (They're definitely worth seeing; my wife and I went to Chichen Itza, Uxmal, and several other sites on our honeymoon.) Diamond, however, believes there are some pretty clear lessons for us in all this. "We do indeed differ from the Maya, but not in ways we might like: we have a much larger population, we have more potent destructive technology, and we face the risk of a worldwide rather than a local decline." What's more, we have "Enron" (mentioned twice in this survey of Mayan history) and "advocates of tax cuts for the rich." I'm not going to be so hubristic as to say our own civilization won't ever crumble, but I'm willing to bet that lowering marginal rates won't ever be the cause. This is hysterical leftism at its finest - or worst, I should say." (Note: Jared Diamond's article isn't available online.)

"May the ayatollah go the way of Saddam" (Mark Steyn, The Chicago Sun-Times, 2003/06/22)
Steyn on why the West should support the protesters in Iran: "Yes, folks, it's WMD all over again! And maybe they don't exist any more than the Iraqi ones do, according to the Dems and the Europeans. But I'm happy to take Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani at his word. He's Iran's former president and now head of the Expediency Council, which sounds like an EU foreign policy agency or a State Department think-tank but is, in fact, Iran's highest religious body. Rafsanjani said last year that on the day the Muslim world gets nuclear weapons the Israeli question will be settled forever ''since a single atomic bomb has the power to completely destroy Israel, while an Israeli counter-strike can only cause partial damage to the Islamic world.''
Oh, my. But what about the Palestinian right of return? ...
It was Ayatollah Khomeini who successfully grafted a mid-20th century European-style fascist movement onto Islam and made the religion an explicitly political vehicle for anti-Westernism. It was the ayatollah who first bestowed on the United States the title of ''Great Satan.'' And it was the ayatollah who insisted that this Islamic revolution had to be taken directly to the infidels - to the embassy hostages, to Salman Rushdie and, ultimately, to America itself. Twenty years ago, there was a minor British pop hit called ''Ayatollah, Don't Khomeini Closer.'' He came too close. And the end of a regime built on his psychosis is good news for Iranians and Westerners alike." (See also: "Former Iranian President Rafsanjani on Using a Nuclear Bomb Against Israel" (Special Dispatch No. 325, MEMRI, 2002/01/03))

"Pipes's effective route to peace" (Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe/danielpipes.com, 2003/06/22)
Jacoby on Daniel Pipes: "To hear his critics tell it, Pipes is an "Islamophobe" and an anti-Muslim bigot whose ignorance about Islam is matched only by his hostility toward it. Their smears of him are poisonous. "Daniel Pipes has a problem - his obsessive hatred of all things Muslim," writes James Zogby of the Arab American Institute. "Pipes is to Muslims what David Duke is to African-Americans." ...
The truth, however, is that far from nursing a "hatred of all things Muslim," Pipes has devoted most of his life to an appreciation and understanding of Islamic culture. ...
But one theme has predominated: the menace of Islamism. "Militant Islam is the problem," Pipes says. "Moderate Islam is the solution."
He has been forthright in his denunciation of Islamist extremism and relentless in calling attention to the threat posed by the likes of bin Laden and his adherents in the West. If Pipes's admonitions had been heeded, there might never have been a 9/11.
Pipes in 1995: "Unnoticed by most Westerners, war has been unilaterally declared on Europe and the United States." He has been, at times, eerily prescient. Just four months before the attack on the twin towers, he and Steven Emerson wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Al Qaeda was "planning new attacks on the US" and that Iranian operatives "helped arrange advanced ... training for Al Qaeda personnel in Lebanon where they learned, for example, how to destroy large buildings." (See also: "There Are No Moderates: Dealing with Fundamentalist Islam" (Daniel Pipes, National Interest/danielpipes.org, from the Fall 1995 issue) and "Terrorism on Trial" (Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes, The Wall Street Journal/danielpipes.org, 2001/05/31))

"The new anti-Semitism" (David Aaronovitch, The Observer, 2003/06/22)
"We got to Abdel-aziz al-Rantisi a couple of weeks before the Israelis almost did. Our yellow taxi-bus had taken us down an anonymous side-street in Gaza city, and stopped outside a grey-black four-storey apartment block. There was no decoration on the ground or first floors, just bare concrete steps, with no banisters. One flight up we passed a room in which a sub-machine gun sat, ownerless, on an armchair beside a sunny window. Mr Rantisi was in the room above.
The Hamas leader, a famous hardliner in that organisation of hardliners, was going, I hoped, to answer a specific question. Why, in article 32 of the Hamas covenant, was there an approving reference to a document, an anti-Semitic forgery of the early twentieth century, once described by a leading historian as a 'warrant for genocide'? ...
So what on earth is it doing in the twenty-first century manifesto of an Islamic movement? The Covenant says that 'the Zionists' want an Israel that extends from Cairo to Basra, and then next stop, the world. 'Their plan,' says Mr Rantisi's Covenant, 'is embodied in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.'
Rantisi is serious and measured (he was once a paediatrician). His windows are veiled against surveillance, there is a picture of Hassan al Banna, murdered leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, on the wall. 'When I first heard about this document,' says Rantisi reasonably, 'I didn't want to believe it, but then I saw what was happening in Palestine, and I could see that it was genuine.' That is his answer."

"DNA tests after missiles strike 'Saddam convoy'" (Jason Burke, The Observer, 2003/06/22)
"American specialists were carrying out DNA tests last night on human remains believed by US military sources to be those of Saddam Hussein and one of his sons, The Observer can reveal.
The remains were retrieved from a convoy of vehicles struck last week by US forces following 'firm' information that the former Iraqi leader and members of his family were travelling in the Western Desert near Syria. ...
The convoy, composed of several four-wheel-drive luxury vehicles, was attacked after the telephone call was intercepted. An air strike was then organised.
The sources confirmed that Uday Hussein, the deposed dictator's eldest son, was thought to have been travelling with his father in the convoy. The convoy is believed to have been heading for the Syrian border and was intercepted near the frontier town of Qaim. Several such convoys heading for the border were destroyed during the conflict in March and April."

"GIs find big cache of arms records" (Jim Krane, AP/The Washington Times, 2003/06/22)
"U.S. forces acting on an intelligence tip raided an abandoned Baghdad community hall early yesterday and seized documents that may contain information about Iraq's suspected weapons of mass destruction.
The documents, bearing the seal of Saddam Hussein's secret service, were being handed over to senior intelligence analysts. Some papers referred to Iraq's nuclear program. ...
Some of the documents seized yesterday included manifests for the delivery of communications equipment to the Iraqi nuclear agency. One letter, dated Feb. 7, 1998, from the National Security Council of Iraq was addressed to the Iraqi Nuclear Organization, with a carbon to the Mukhabarat, the secret intelligence service."

Saturday, June 21, 2003

News and commentary:

"A protester hurls a petrol bomb at riot police..."
(Reuters/Yiorgos Karahalis, 2003/06/21)
"A protester hurls a petrol bomb at riot police during an anti-capitalism demonstration in Thessaloniki in northern Greece following a meeting of the EU summit, June 21, 2003."

"Anti-Capitalists Protesters Torch Greek Shops" (Michele Kambas and Phillip Pangalos, Reuters, 2003/06/21)
"Police fired volleys of teargas in Greece's second largest city on Saturday to disperse 200 self-styled anarchists who smashed shops and set fire to buildings including a McDonald's.
The anarchists were among 25,000 mainly peaceful anti-capitalist protesters who marched in late afternoon through Thessaloniki's center, about 80 km (50 miles) west of where a European Union summit ended earlier in the day. ...
About 30 shops as well as three branches of Greek banks were badly damaged with windows smashed and petrol bombs thrown inside. ...
About a dozen shop and building entrances as well as five cars were on fire more than two hours after the violence broke out. Thick smoke and clouds of teargas billowed from the city center.
"This is like an urban war zone, everything is on fire," said resident Maria Hounda..."

"Malaysian govt. officials hand out copies of 'International Jew'" (Amir Mizroch, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/06/21)
"Officials of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's party gave out translated copies of US industrialist Henry Ford's anti-Semitic book "The International Jew" to delegates at the annual United Malays National Organization (UMNO) conference in Kuala Lumpur. ...
According to media reports delegates at the conference were handed free copies of an abridged version of Ford's book, translated into Bahasa Malay and published in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Ford's book, first published in Ford's own newspaper, 'The Dearborn Independent' in the 1920s , was inspired by and contained sections from the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". ...
The Malaysian prime minister has frequently used Jews as a scapegoat for political and economic setbacks. He blamed Jews for his country's 1997 financial meltdown.
"We do not want to say that this is a plot by the Jews, but in reality it is a Jew who triggered the currency plunge, and coincidentally [George] Soros is a Jew. ..." Mahathir said at the time." (Note: Online versions of Ford's book are quite common on neonazi and anti-Semitic websites, such as Radio Islam, Stormfront or, as here, JBBooksOnline - "A White Nationalist Literary Resource": "The International Jew - The World's Foremost Problem" (Henry Ford, JBBooksOnline, orig. 1920s). See also: "The International Jew - Anti-Semitism from the Roaring Twenties Revived on the Web" (ADL, July 1999) and "Henry Ford and the Jews" (Neil Baldwin Books, 2001))

"U.S. Army Sgt. Phillip Lorino from Birmingham, Al. perspires while on patrol..."
(AP Photo/John Moore, 2003/06/21)
"U.S. Army Sgt. Phillip Lorino from Birmingham, Al. perspires while on patrol in the back of a Bradley fighting vehicle in Abu Faisal, Iraq 55 kilometers west of Baghdad Saturday, June 21, 2003. Temperatures in the heavy armored vehicles often reach up to 50C by afternoon. Anti-American insurgents have fired on U.S. forces almost daily in this area."

"When the Cheering Stops" (Angelo M. Codevilla, Claremont Review of Books, from the Summer 2003 issue)
"In a nutshell: President Bush ended up making war on Iraq more or less correctly only after having courted political and diplomatic disaster. Immediately after winning the battle, he resumed the policies that had forestalled military success. He reassured the terror regime of Syria, rewarded the terror regime of Palestine, did not scrub the remnants of Ba'ath rule in Iraq, and sought to relieve pressure on the Saudi royal family. Most important, any "regime change" abroad remained less certain than the permanence of the post-September 11 changes wrought by security measures in the American regime. Victory or defeat may well depend on George W. Bush's threshold of embarrassment.
In 1991, as in Vietnam, and as in Korea, America specialized in winning the battle and losing the war. Whether military success in Iraq, 2003 would break that pattern would depend on the resolution of intellectual conflicts in Washington. ...
Coercive diplomacy is the ingredient that translates the near magic of military success into victory. It shows foreign governments that it is better for them to adjust themselves to the reality created by our military success, however painful that might be for them, than to suffer our forcing on them whatever consequences of that new reality we choose. In the aftermath of America's military success, the magic agenda of cleansing the Syrian, Palestinian, and Saudi sources of terrorism was not about to happen because the U.S. State Department did not practice coercive diplomacy. It had its own agenda. By presenting to these governments proposals that differed only cosmetically, if at all, from those that State had pursued for years prior, State effectively told them that they need not be concerned with any of the things that America could do to them as a result of its military success. Predictably, these governments took this as further reason for contempt towards America."

"Democrats Go Off the Cliff" (David Brooks, The Weekly Standard, from the 2003/06/30 issue)
"Have the Democrats totally flipped their lids? Because every day some Democrat seems to make a manic or totally over-the-top statement about George Bush, the Republican party, and the state of the nation today.
"'This republic is at its greatest danger in its history because of this administration,' says Democratic senator Robert Byrd.
"I think this is deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States of America," says liberal commentator Bill Moyers. ...
Asked what Democrats can do about the Republicans, Janet Reno recalls her visit to the Dachau concentration camp, and points out that the Holocaust happened because many Germans just stood by. "And don't you just stand by," she exhorts her Democratic audience. ...
Second, there is the frequent and relentless resort to conspiracy theories. If you judged by newspapers and magazines this spring, you could conclude that a secret cabal of Straussians, Jews, and neoconservatives (or perhaps just Richard Perle alone) had deviously seized control of the United States and were now planning bloody wars of conquest around the globe. ...
In this version of reality, Republicans are deviously effective. They have careful if evil plans for everything they do. And these sorts of charges have become so common we're inured to their horrendousness - that Bush sent thousands of people to their deaths so he could reap government contracts for Halliburton, that he mobilized hundreds of thousands of troops and spent tens of billions of dollars merely to help secure favorable oil deals for Exxon.
Sometimes reading through this literature one gets the impression that while the United States is merely attempting to export Western style democracy to the Middle East, the people in the Middle East have successfully exported Middle Eastern-style conspiracy mongering to the United States." (See also: "Lionized in Winter" (Matthew Cooper, TIME, 2003/05/29), "Populism Without People" (James Taranto, Best of the Web Today, 2003/06/10) and "Reno spurs Boca's Democratic Club" (Pilar Ulibarri, PalmBeachPost.com, 2003/05/29))

"Mein Gott! America is the new Germany" (Matthew Parris, The Times, 2003/06/21)
In this bizarre column Parris raises the Spectre of an Ominous German Cabal, arguing that America is the "reincarnation of our former European enemy". Note the never explicitly drawn implication that this German Cabal has its ideological roots in German Nazism - or at least in militaristic German Nationalism:
"America's cousins are the Germans. This is true literally — in blood lineage — but also the personalities of the two nations. Modern America has become more Germanic than it is British. ...
Still, the roll-call of names is impressive, Donald Rumsfeld's being only a latecomer to the pack. George W. Bush's partly German ancestry — Amish and Mennonite through the Demuth family, who were 18th-century immigrants from Saxony — is well-known. Surnames (if you seek them) tumble from the books of modern American history — Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kissinger.
But this argument is not about amassing names or imagining conspiracies. ...
Spookier for me has been reading the way German statesmen used to talk, and listening to the way Donald Rumsfeld talks now. Italian and Irish America have made their own distinctive mark on political life in the US. It would be surprising if Germanic attitudes were not contributing in different ways." ...
But is it not uncannily like George W. Bush's America? Is it not as close an approach as we are likely to get to a definition of the neoconservative personality?" (See also: "This hysteria is the most potent poison of them all" (Matthew Parris, The Times, 2003/01/11))

"No, Mr Galloway, you're not in the clear yet" (Charles Moore, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/06/21)
"Yesterday the Christian Science Monitor in Boston confirmed that papers it published purporting to show that Mr Galloway accepted Iraqi largesse running into millions of dollars were "almost certainly" fakes. The Mail on Sunday has already exposed as crude forgeries further papers from the same source.
These revelations have no bearing whatsoever on our story, but in telling Sky News yesterday how the Monitor's experts had unmasked their documents as forgeries, Mr Galloway promised that ours too would "meet the same fate". He was ignoring the fact that those experts went on to say they believed ours to be consistent with genuine Iraqi documents. ...
We have complete confidence in our story, in the authenticity of the documents and in David Blair." (See also: "Galloway papers deemed forgeries" (The Christian Science Monitor, 2003/06/20) and "Galloway was in Saddam's pay, say secret Iraqi documents" (David Blair, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/04/22))

"Missing Iraq uranium 'secured'" (BBC News, 2003/06/21)
"The United Nations nuclear watchdog has accounted for most of the uranium feared stolen from Iraq's largest nuclear site, Tuwaitha, reports say. ...
Tuwaitha was heavily looted for a period during the war, and there has been particular concern about barrels which once stored low-enriched uranium, known as "yellow cake".
The barrels were emptied and sold to local people for $2 each by looters. Many used the barrels to hold drinking water or food, or to wash clothes. ...
About 1.8 metric tons of "yellow cake" and 500 tons of unrefined uranium went missing as the Iraqis left Tuwaitha unattended during the war.
Although an estimated 20% of the containers which stored the uranium were taken from the site, it appeared that looters had dumped the uranium before taking the barrels.
Much of it appears to have been on or near Tuwaitha, unnamed diplomats said, quoted by the Associated Press news agency."

"Two men torch themselves in London as Iranian protests continue" (AFP/Yahoo! News, 2003/06/21)
"Two men set themselves on fire outside the French embassy in London as part of widening protests in Europe against a French crackdown on the Iranian armed opposition group, the People's Mujahedeen.
The torchings bring to 10 the number of self-immolations in European cities to protest the crackdown launched by French police Tuesday. One woman died Thursday in France of her injuries. ...
A total of 10 people have torched themselves - four in London, three in Paris, two in Rome and one in Bern - since Wednesday. An 11th man in Bern was stopped before he could ignite his petrol-soaked clothing."

"Protests in Iran Spread, and an Imam Urges Severe Punishment" (Nazila Fathi, The New York Times, 2003/06/21)
"Protests here spread to at least eight other cities around the country today as a high-ranking imam called for the severe punishment of protesters.
Scores of student arrests continued. The total is not known. In Tabriz, student Web sites report the number so far may be as high as 135.
The Amir Kabir University Web site in Tehran reported that 50 students had been arrested in Yazd and 105 in Sabzehvar.
Children of prominent reformist politicians, including two members of Parliament, Ahmad Shirzad and Mohsen Safai Farahani, were among those arrested in Tehran."

"Captured Official Is Said to Tell U.S. Hussein Survived" (Douglas Jehl, The New York Times, 2003/06/21)
"A top lieutenant to Saddam Hussein has told American interrogators that the Iraqi leader and his two sons survived the United States-led war in Iraq and that he himself had fled to Syria with the sons after the conflict, Defense Department officials said today.
The officials said they had not yet assessed the accuracy of the claims by the aide, Abid Hamad Mahmoud al-Tikriti, who was arrested in Iraq earlier this week. But they said that the United States regarded the information as having enormous potential significance, and that it had ignited an intense burst of clandestine American military activity aimed at capturing the sons, Uday and Qusay, and perhaps even Mr. Hussein himself."

Added in archive:
"Saddam's spokesman and the big lie" (Ian MacLeod, The Ottawa Citizen, 2003/04/09)

Friday, June 20, 2003

News and commentary:

"Commencement Address at the Naval War College" (Paul Wolfowitz, U.S. Department of Defense, 2003/06/20)
A commencement address by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz: "Our purpose is not to manage terrorism or simply to arrest and prosecute terrorists after they have attacked us. Our goal is to destroy and delegitimize it the way slavery and piracy were delegitimized in the 19th Century. ...
As I'm sure you're all aware, the Naval War College has been one of the great generators of innovation for the U.S. military. During the period before World War II, naval officers here first thought about the concept of mass carrier operations. It was here that Plan ORANGE - the prophetic concept for operations for a war against Japan - was developed, long before Pearl Harbor. More recently, under the leadership of Admiral Art Cebrowski, this college developed the concept of network-centric warfare.
And at the same time this institution maintains a curriculum that is traditional in substance, with a focus on the Great Books and lots of history. Some of you probably say too much history, because you had to work at it. But that combination of innovative and classical thought has enabled the Naval War College to produce military leaders who harness an understanding of the past and the potential of technological progress to produce new ideas for the future." (Note: Thanks to Barry Kaplovitz for the pointer.)

"Winning After All" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2003/06/20)
"In Afghanistan #1 we once kept our distance, armed the locals to fight Russian expansionist Communism on their own, left when the common enemy was defeated, accepted noninterference in Afghan affairs — and were blamed as cynical Cold War realists when the inevitable chaos followed. In Afghanistan #2, we defeated an equally odious force, stayed on to promote consensual government, attempted to provide aid — and are now being blamed as either cynical imperialists who lust after some mythical pipeline or naïve Pollyannas who are squandering blood and treasure to change people who cannot be changed.
In Iraq #1 we stayed within U.N. mandates, limited our response, went home after Kuwait was freed — and were censured for allowing Shiites and Kurds to be butchered and not going to Baghdad when the road was open and the dictator tottering. In Iraq #2 we removed the tyrant at less cost than the liberation of Kuwait during the earlier war, stayed on to ensure freedom and fair representation for various groups — and are being castigated for either using too little force to ensure needed order or too much power that stifles indigenous aspirations and turns popular opinion against us. ...
First, the events of September 11 demonstrate that Clintonian lip biting and a few cruise missiles amid Middle East aggression earns disdain, not thanks, for magnanimity. Leave a Taliban Afghanistan alone or let Saddam's Iraq be, and in a decade you win 20,000 al Qaeda operatives training with impunity and the sons of Saddam re-armed with nuclear weapons, unless one prefers another twelve years of 350,000 sorties and $20 billion in no-fly-zones — three or four times over. The Middle East is not static and will not cease its anti-Americanism if left to its own good graces — inasmuch as the conditions that promote terror do not derive from American provocation, but arise out of indigenous pathologies."

"Two British MPs compare Gaza to Warsaw's Jewish ghetto in Nazi era" (AFP/Al-Jazeerah.info, 2003/06/20)
Moral equivalence at its worst, comparing Israel's defense against fanatical anti-Semitic terrorism with Nazi Germany's genocidal campaign against Jews:
"Israel is subjecting Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to the same suffering endured by Jews in the Warsaw ghetto during the Nazi era, two British MPs said Thursday on returning from a trip to the Middle East.
"Gaza is the same in nature as the Warsaw ghetto," said Labour MP Oona King, and a member of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality.
"As a Jewish person I hoped I would never live to see the day I was ashamed of the actions of the Jewish state," she told a press conference, adding no government should be acting like Israel was.
But she said Israel's treatment of the Palestinians was "the same in nature, but not extent."
"There is a very, very big difference. Palestinians are not being rounded up and put in gas chambers," she cautioned. ...
Liberal Democrat MP Jenny Tonge also compared the situation to the Warsaw ghetto saying the people in the Gaza Strip could not move in and out.
"They can't work, they can't sell anything. There is this gradual squeeze. ... I feel it was an apartheid system and it is certainly getting worse — the area where the Palestinians live is getting smaller."
In 1940, several months after invading Poland in September 1939, the Nazis forced some 500,000 Jews into the Warsaw ghetto, surrounding it with a high wall.
About 100,000 died inside from hunger and disease, and more than 300,000 were sent to death camps, mainly Treblinka in eastern Poland, where they were killed." (Hat tip: IMRA. See also: "Israel can halt this now" (Oona King, The Guardian, 2003/06/12): "The original founders of the Jewish state could surely not imagine the irony facing Israel today: in escaping the ashes of the Holocaust, they have incarcerated another people in a hell similar in its nature - though not its extent - to the Warsaw ghetto.")

"Palestinian words since Aqaba more telling than deeds" (Itamar Marcus, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/06/20)
"A new Palestinian video clip that has been broadcast regularly since January, and especially since Aqaba, includes a variety of abhorrent scenes acted out by Palestinian actors.
It opens with a girl laughing on a swing, which turns into a flaming inferno, which then engulfs a child's rocking horse as well. The message: Israelis firebomb children at play, leaving behind flaming swings and rocking horses.
Children are then shown playing football, until a bomb hidden by Israel inside the ball explodes when a child kicks it. Then a father reads his young son a section from the Koran that calls for fighting enemies, and actually hands him a stone to throw. Actors then depict Israeli soldiers murdering an elderly man by shooting him in the head; this is followed by a mother and her infant being blown up by Israeli soldiers.
All this and much more is depicted on one video, set to music for Palestinian children."

"Hamas's big victory" (Caroline B. Glick, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/06/20)
"That Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of the State of Israel through genocide is known by all. So why is no one pointing out how dangerous it is to be negotiating with these murderers? The time has come for the citizens of this country to demand that our leaders contend with reality. We need to be able to tell ourselves that there is something pathological about a people that insists on repeating its mistakes."

"EU will not match US Aids donation" (The Guardian, 2003/06/20)
Talk is cheap: "Tony Blair conceded today that a European Union donation to help fight Aids, TB and malaria would fall short of the $1bn (£600m) pledged by the United States.
The prime minister had made a joint call with French president Jacques Chirac for the EU to match America's commitment to the UN's Global Health Fund, set up to fight the three killer diseases.
But speaking at the EU summit in Greece, he said the smaller of the 15 existing EU members and 10 countries joining next year were not prepared to commit the money for 2004 because of 'budget problems'."

"Galloway papers deemed forgeries" (The Christian Science Monitor, 2003/06/20)
"On April 25, 2003, this newspaper ran a story about documents obtained in Iraq that alleged Saddam Hussein's regime had paid a British member of Parliament, George Galloway, $10 million over 11 years to promote its interests in the West.
An extensive Monitor investigation has subsequently determined that the six papers detailed in the April 25 piece are, in fact, almost certainly forgeries.
The Arabic text of the papers is inconsistent with known examples of Baghdad bureaucratic writing, and is replete with problematic language, says a leading US-based expert on Iraqi government documents. Signature lines and other format elements differ from genuine procedure." (See also: "Newly found Iraqi files raise heat on British MP" (Philip Smucker, The Christian Science Monitor, 2003/04/25))

"Saving Private Jessica" (Nicholad D. Kristof, The New York Times, 2003/06/20)
"The hospital staff also said that on the night of March 27, military officials prepared to kill Ms. Lynch by putting her in an ambulance and blowing it up with its occupants — blaming the atrocity on the Americans. The ambulance drivers balked at that idea. Eventually, the plan was changed so that a military officer would shoot Ms. Lynch and burn the ambulance. So Sabah Khazal, an ambulance driver, loaded her in the vehicle and drove off with a military officer assigned to execute her.
"I asked him not to shoot Jessica," Mr. Khazal said, "and he was afraid of God and didn't kill her." Instead, the executioner ran away and deserted the army, and Mr. Khazal said that he then thought about delivering Ms. Lynch to an American checkpoint. But there were firefights on the streets, so he returned to the hospital. (Ms. Lynch apparently never knew how close she had come to execution.)" (See also: "A Broken Body, a Broken Story, Pieced Together" (Dana Priest et al., The Washington Post, 2003/06/17))

"Hue and Cry on 'Whiteness Studies'" (Darryl Fears , The Washington Post, 2003/06/20)
At least "30 institutions - from Princeton University to the University of California at Los Angeles - teach courses in whiteness studies": "The field is based on a left-leaning interpretation of history by scholars who say the concept of race was created by a rich white European and American elite, and has been used to deny property, power and status to nonwhite groups for two centuries.
Advocates of whiteness studies - most of whom are white liberals who hope to dismantle notions of race - believe that white Americans are so accustomed to being part of a privileged majority they do not see themselves as part of a race. ...
David Horowitz, a conservative social critic who is white, said whiteness studies is leftist philosophy spiraling out of control. "Black studies celebrates blackness, Chicano studies celebrates Chicanos, women's studies celebrates women, and white studies attacks white people as evil," Horowitz said.
"It's so evil that one author has called for the abolition of whiteness," he said. "I have read their books, and it's just despicable."
Whiteness studies, said Matthew Spalding, is "a derogatory name for Western civilization." ...
The students, about three-quarters of them white, slid into desks and unloaded giant book bags, which were stuffed with required reading. The books included Theodore Allen's "The Invention of the White Race: Racial Oppression and Social Control," which argues, in part, that the collection of European immigrants into a white race was a political act to control the country."

"Truth from the mouths of terrorists" (Kenneth R. Timmerman, The Washington Times, 2003/06/20)
Timmerman on an interview he made with Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantissi six years ago: "I was curious when I met him about the rising tide of suicide bombers, who suddenly burst onto the scene in 1994, shortly after Yasser Arafat set up his Palestinian Authority in Gaza under the Oslo Accords. I asked him what could possibly motivate young men to take their own lives, just to kill Jews. "They know that these bombings are the same as fasting and observing Ramadan," Dr. Rantissi told me. "They increase their blessings with God." ...
Fasting and observing Ramadan are two of the Five Pillars of Islam, which the Prophet Mohammed exhorted his followers to observe. In the hierarchy of traditional Islam, prayers performed during Ramadan are believed to have a greater intercessionary value, as do prayers uttered in one of the Two Holy Mosques in the Arabia Peninsula.
It is a testament to just how perverse the terrorists and their supporters have become to learn that murdering innocents has been elevated to this same level by Dr. Rantissi and by other senior Muslim clerics I interviewed over the past year for an upcoming book, "Preachers of Hate." And yet, that is precisely what Dr. Rantissi meant when he said that by carrying out a suicide attack, young Palestinians could hope to "increase their blessings with God."
Think of it: Murder has become the sixth pillar of Islam, according to the terrorists. Where are the Muslim leaders to denounce this?"

"Saddam's Bombs? We'll Find Them" (Kenneth M. Pollack, The New York Times, 2003/06/20)
"Still, no matter what the trailers turn out to be, the failure so far to find weapons of mass destruction in no way invalidates the prewar intelligence data indicating that Iraq had the clandestine capacity to build them. There has long been an extremely strong case — based on evidence that largely predates the Bush administration — that Iraq maintained programs in weapons of mass destruction. ...
As for the estimates the Bush administration presented regarding Iraq's holdings of weapons-related materials, they came from unchallenged evidence gathered by United Nations inspectors (in many cases, from records of the companies that sold the materials to Iraq in the first place). For instance, Iraq admitted importing 200 to 250 tons of precursor agents for VX nerve gas; it claimed to have destroyed these chemicals but never proved that it had done so. Even Hans Blix, the last head weapons inspector and a leading skeptic of the need for an invasion, admitted that the Iraqis refused to provide a credible accounting for these materials.
And it wasn't just the United States that was concerned about Iraq's efforts. By 2002, British, Israeli and German intelligence services had also concluded that Iraq was probably far enough along in its nuclear weapons program that it would be able to put together one or more bombs at some point in the second half of this decade. The Germans were actually the most fearful of all — in 2001 they leaked their estimate that Iraq might be able to develop its first workable nuclear device in 2004."

"Reshaping Pakistan Along Religious Lines" (John Lancaster, The Washington Post, 2003/06/20)
Lancaster on the "creeping Talibanization" of Pakistan: "Lahore is one of Pakistan's most cultured and cosmopolitan cities and capital of Punjab province, home to Pakistan's moderate mainstream culture and long known more for food and festivals than religious zealotry. Yet here student couples have been physically attacked on college campuses for holding hands. The bar association recently elected a lawyer from a fundamentalist party as its head. And on the streets lately, night-riding vigilantes have been splashing paint on billboard images of unveiled women.
Clerics have mounted a partially successful campaign to curb the spread of pedestrian-friendly "food streets" in Lahore's historic walled city. Such amenities, the clerics say, promote mixing of the sexes and prostitution. ...
And then there was the flap over English literature, which began when Haq ordered a member of the department, Shahbaz Arif, to scrutinize the curriculum for offensive material.
Arif compiled a long list of examples, including Jonathan Swift's description of "a monstrous breast" in "Gulliver's Travels" and the title of Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock," according to a copy of the memo he supplied to colleagues in the English department. Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises," was deemed especially offensive: "All characters sexually astray: men homosexuals; females lesbians/promiscuous," he wrote."

"Transcript: Released Bomber Ahmed Jbarra - bombing for peace" (BBC/IMRA, 2003/06/17 [2003/06/20])
A transcript of a BBC interview with Ahmed Jbarra, "the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner, recently released by Israel":
"JR: Hi Sarah. Thanks. Now back in July 1975, not far from here in the centre of Jerusalem, a man left a refrigerator, packed with explosives in a square. It blew up, killing 13 people [IMRA: 14 were murdered in the attack], and the bomber, Ahmed Jbarra also known as Abu Sukkad [IMRA: Ahmad El-Sukar], arrested, convicted and jailed and he stayed in prison until the start of this month. Now, at the age of 67, he is free and he has become a leading Palestinian figure. He's just been appointed a special adviser to the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. I spoke to him in a hotel in Ramallah and my first question: Do you have any remorse for the bombing?
AJ: When we fight, we fight for peace. We never fight for (to) kill people. But, before you ask this question for me, ask for the Israelis if they make the same thing.
JR: But I often do - I often ask Israelis in the aftermath of attacks, which kill Palestinians how, they feel, and that's the question I asked you as 13 Israelis were killed.
AJ: They never feel sorry about that - they never.
JR: But what about you?
AJ: I had a home. I had land, I had a state, but now I didn't have
anything. I didn't have anything now.
JR: Nevertheless 13 people were killed because of what you did.
AJ: The Israeli people, they killed many, many people of us.
JR: Does that justify killing on the other side?
AJ: Because they kill us. They kill us, they kill many children.
JR: But again, does that justify killing 13 people in the centre of
Jerusalem?
AJ: The operation killed 13 people and injured over 78 people. But this is just (because) we (are) fighting for peace."

"'Either the people who did this must be brought to court or we should ask for the authority to kill them'" (Rory McCarthy, The Guardian, 2003/06/20)
"They were taken with hundreds of other prisoners, blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their backs, to a muddy field about 15 minutes drive outside the small town of Hilla, 60 miles south of Baghdad.
"We were all in the army then and they told us we were returning to our units," he said. "Soon we started to get a feeling of what would really happen."
Ali can still find the exact spot by a canal filled with tall, green reeds where he was taken. At that point on the path today are the now familiar tokens of Iraq's mass graves: some vertebrae, a rib bone, one button and 11 long, creamy-brown teeth.
"There were three of us and they told us to sit down there," he said pointing to the side of the path. A gunman with a Kalashnikov executed the man to his left and the man to his right. Inexplicably Ali was shot only in the right thigh; he was badly wounded but alive.
He lay silent in excruciating pain as a mechanical digger lifted their three bodies and dropped them among the tall green reeds in the canal. They were covered with dirt and left to rot, but Ali crawled free and escaped. "I was saved by God for a reason that I will never know," he said. His brother was executed that night and his body has never been found."

"North Korea has nuclear ballistic missiles: report" (AFP/Sydney Morning Herald, 2003/06/20)
"US authorities have unofficially told their Japanese counterparts that North Korea already possesses several small nuclear warheads for ballistic missiles, a news report said today.
It is the first confirmation that Pyongyang has nuclear missiles that can immediately strike Japan, the Sankei Shimbun said, citing sources related to Japan and the United States.
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other US officials have publicly confirmed that North Korea was developing nuclear weapons.
Until now, however, they have not been clear about what stage of development North Korea was at, the Sankei said.
Washington has told Tokyo that the number of nuclear warheads that North Korea has is "not just one or two," the Sankei said."

"Hussein Is Probably Alive in Iraq, U.S. Experts Say" (Douglas Jehl and David Johnston, The New York Times, 2003/06/20)
"American intelligence analysts now believe that Saddam Hussein is much more likely to be alive than dead, a view that has been strengthened in recent weeks by intercepted communications among fugitive members of the Saddam Fedayeen and the Iraqi intelligence service, according to United States government officials. ...
The intercepted communications between some of Mr. Hussein's supporters have included credible discussions indicating that the former Iraqi president is alive and must be protected, two Defense Department officials said. Military officials indicated tonight that new operations in the hunt for him were under way."

"Trucker Pleads Guilty in Plot By Al Qaeda" (Susan Schmidt, The Washington Post, 2003/06/20)
"An Ohio truck driver who met with Osama bin Laden and other top al Qaeda leaders plotted to bring down New York's Brooklyn Bridge and launch a simultaneous unspecified attack in Washington as recently as a few months ago, according to officials and court papers unsealed yesterday.
Iyman Faris, a Kashmiri-born naturalized American citizen who is in federal custody, pleaded guilty May 1 to providing material support to a terrorist organization in a case filed under seal in federal court in Alexandria. None of the attacks he planned with top al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheik Mohammed was carried out.
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, who announced the plea agreement yesterday, said that while Faris appeared to be a hardworking truck driver, he "had a secret double life" that included carrying cash for al Qaeda, providing bin Laden with information about "ultralight" aircraft and scouting equipment for sabotaging railroad tracks and cutting suspension bridge cables. ...
After scouting the Brooklyn Bridge early this year and concluding the plot would fail because of the bridge's security and structure, he sent another coded message to his unnamed friend that 'the weather is too hot.'"

Thursday, June 19, 2003

News and commentary:

"The First Casualty" (John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman, The New Republic, 2003/06/19)
A critical look at the "selling of the Iraq war". This is what Bush said in the State of the Union address: "The British government has learnt that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." He didn't say anything about a "uranium deal between Iraq and Niger":
"In some cases, the administration may have deliberately lied. If Bush didn't know the purported uranium deal between Iraq and Niger was a hoax, plenty of people in his administration did - including, possibly, Vice President Cheney, who would have seen the president's State of the Union address before it was delivered. Rice and Rumsfeld also must have known that the aluminum tubes that they presented as proof of Iraq's nuclear ambitions were discounted by prominent intelligence experts. And, while a few administration officials may have genuinely believed that there was a strong connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, most probably knew they were constructing castles out of sand.
The Bush administration took office pledging to restore "honor and dignity" to the White House. And it's true: Bush has not gotten caught having sex with an intern or lying about it under oath. But he has engaged in a pattern of deception concerning the most fundamental decisions a government must make. The United States may have been justified in going to war in Iraq - there were, after all, other rationales for doing so - but it was not justified in doing so on the national security grounds that President Bush put forth throughout last fall and winter. He deceived Americans about what was known of the threat from Iraq and deprived Congress of its ability to make an informed decision about whether or not to take the country to war." (See also: "State of the Union Address by President George W. Bush" (The White House, 2003/01/28))

"Left out to dishonour war glories" (Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 2003/06/19)
"One thing I've always admired about the Left in Australia is its obsession with history – not understanding history but controlling it.
For an ideological movement, controlling the past is much more important than preparing for the future.
In particular, the construction of certain defining myths that determine the orthodox interpretation of key events is a critical task. ...
In the aftermath of the Iraq war, we can see this process unfolding. Our troops performed magnificently in a just cause, liberating 25 million people from a murderous dictator, ending his program of weapons of mass destruction and enhancing our prestige.
But that's not going to be the commentariat's orthodoxy. Two myths are being constructed. One is that Saddam Hussein never had weapons of mass destruction. The other is that our participation in the war damaged our standing in Asia. ...
The WMD argument is, of course, nonsense. We know that up to 1998 Hussein had vast quantities of chemical and biological weapons. We know this because the UN inspectors discovered the stuff. When Hussein threw the inspectors out in 1998, he kept the WMDs....
Eventually the whole story will come out. It may well be that George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard presented best-informed intelligence judgments as known facts. But the reality that Hussein had WMDs is indisputable. ...
But the myths no doubt will prosper, the absence of facts notwithstanding."

"Osama bides his time" (Sanjay Anand, The Spectator, from the 2003/06/21 issue)
"Osama bin Laden is alive and living in north-west Pakistan, probably near the Afghan border, in an area which neither the Pakistani government nor the Americans control.
He is protected by the fundamentalist state within a state which controls Pakistan's north-west province; only last week that government banned cinemas, destroying them on the grounds that they were incompatible with Islam. General Musharraf's regime is unable, or unwilling, to do anything to stop it. Islamic thugs have also started to force women to wear the burka, and to attack those who have the temerity to appear in public with any part of their flesh visible. As this new Taleban regime is created around him, Osama bin Laden sits in the shade planning mass murder on an ever larger scale."

"Others can do the caring" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2003/06/21 issue)
"There is, of course, a real humanitarian crisis in the world today — in the Congo, an environment blessedly free of blundering Yanks, where 'international law' has ridden to the rescue and, as in the Balkans and elsewhere, the UN is providing the usual genteel multilateral cover for ethnic slaughter. But, because it doesn't accord with the New Universal Theory of Texan-Zionist neocon aggression, nobody cares.
In Iraq, the Americans and British are muddling through; in the Congo, 'international law', as represented by the French and the UN, is failing big time. That's my view and it happens to fit my prejudices. But it also fits the facts."

"Shocking Silence" (Andrew Sullivan, Salon.com/FrontPageMagazine, 2003/06/19)
Sullivan on the left's silence regarding the student protests in Iran: "You'd think that this would be the central story on the left in this country. As blogger Don Watkins explained: "Here are a bunch of brave souls fighting a tyrannical regime through the old liberal favorite of massive protests. Here's the chance for them to get behind the cause of freedom without having to support war."
So take a look at Indymedia, one of the activist left's prime Internet Web sites. Blogger Meryl Yourish did. What did she find on the armed struggle against theocracy? Nada. Zilch. ...
Much of the antiwar left has sadly long since stopped caring about the actual freedom of people under oppressive regimes, except, of course, if their plight is a way to blame or excoriate the United States. The antiwar left's blindness toward the evil of Saddam is now compounded by its refusal to grapple with the next great part of the struggle against Islamo-fascism.
Check out some of the more mainstream publications of the left: The Nation's home page has nothing - nothing - about Iran on it. ...
Until the left attends to its principles as meticulously as it attends to its resentments, it will lose the battle for ideas for good. There's still time to reverse this - and help the cause of human freedom as well. Let's hope the left comes to its senses before the revolution is over." (See also: "The story that must not go away" (Don Watkins, Anger Management, 2003/06/17))

"In volatile Iraq, US curbs press" (Ilene R. Prusher, The Christian Science Monitor, 2003/06/19)
"The once occasional attacks on US soldiers here are growing deadlier, and more frequent: Wednesday, a US soldier was killed and another wounded in a drive-by shooting. And outside the former Republican Palace, now the headquarters of the US administration, US troops killed two Iraqis during a protest by former Iraqi soldiers that spiraled out of control.
At least some of the fuel for the anti-American fire, US officials here charge, is being pumped out by new Iraqi media outlets.
L. Paul Bremer, the top US official here, says a new edict prohibiting the local media from inciting attacks on other Iraqis - and on the coalition forces - is not meant to put a stopper on the recently uncorked freedom of speech. ...
Among the scores of new publications that have flooded Iraq's newsstands since the US-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime, the broadsheet As-Saah is one of the most widely read. In a front-page editorial Wednesday, the paper's senior editor let readers know what he thought of the country's liberators: "Bremer is a Baathist," the headline reads. ...
"Mr. Bremer, you remind us of Saddam," the column continues. "We've waited a long time to be free. Now you want us to be slaves." ...
To be sure, many papers are full of scathing rebuke for the US forces, and sometimes peppered with far-fetched and incendiary reports. The average Iraqi reader might be led to believe that American soldiers are raping Iraqi girls, and undressing Iraqi women with night-vision goggles."

"Bush Takes Strong Stand Against Iran Nuclear Plans" (Scott Lindlaw, AP/The Washington Post, 2003/06/19)
"President Bush said Wednesday that he and other world leaders will not tolerate nuclear weapons in Iran and he urged Tehran to treat protesters seeking the ouster of the Islamic government with "the utmost of respect."
Iran is thought to be developing nuclear weapons, though the government denies it.
"The international community must come together to make it very clear to Iran that we will not tolerate construction of a nuclear weapon," Bush told reporters at the end of a meeting in the White House Cabinet Room. "Iran would be dangerous if it had a nuclear weapon," he said."

Added in archive:
"Arab Press Fans the Flames of Hate" (J. Michael Waller, Insight on the News, 2003/06/13)
"Mona Charen Exposes Menace of Senseless Liberals" (Arnold Beichman, Human Events, 2003/02/17)

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

News and commentary:

"An Iranian runs on the road after setting himself on fire..."
(AP Photo/KR Images Presse, Nicolas Marques, 2003/06/18)
"An Iranian runs on the road after setting himself on fire during a protest near the headquarters of the French counter intelligence agency, Wednesday, June 18, 2003 in Paris. At least three Iranians set themselves on fire Wednesday after the agency led a massive raid on Tuesday on the offices of an Iranian opposition group, The People's Mujahedeen of Iran."

"2 Iranians set themselves on fire at Paris protest" (AP/USA Today, 2003/06/18)
"Two Iranian women set themselves on fire Wednesday during a protest in Paris against a major raid at the offices of an Iranian opposition group, police said.
It was the latest in a series of dramatic protests in Europe against Tuesday's crackdown on the Mujahedeen Khalq, which is accused of terrorism by the United States and the European Union. ...
At the Paris protest, which began early Wednesday morning, 42-year-old Marzieh Babakhani doused herself with a flammable liquid and lit a match, according to police and the National Council of Resistance of Iran. She was rushed to the hospital after other protesters put out the flames.
Several hours later, a supporter identified as Sedigheh Mojaveri set herself ablaze and was hospitalized with serious burns." (See also: "France Raids Compound of Iran Opposition" (Elaine Ganley, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/06/17))

"Saddam's closest aide captured" (BBC News, 2003/06/18)
"Saddam Hussein's presidential secretary - number four on the US most wanted list of Iraqi leaders - has been captured in Iraq, US officials say.
Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, one of the former Iraqi president's closest aides, controlled access to Saddam Hussein and was frequently at his side.
Mahmud al-Tikriti is said to have directed matters of state and handed down many of the regime's repressive orders.
The US says he was also authorised to deploy weapons of mass destruction."

"The Hard Edge of American Values" (Elizabeth Shelburne, The Atlantic, 2003/06/18)
Speak Victorian, Think Pagan. An interview with Robert D. Kaplan about the American empire and the "Rules for Managing the World": "You state that "a world dominated by the Chinese, by a Franco-German-dominated European Union aligned with Russia, or by the United Nations … would be infinitely worse than the world we have now." Why is that the case? Can you give examples of why each of these would be worse?
Let's go down the list here. Let's use the Iraq crisis as an example. Or let's use the Balkans in the 1990s. In these cases, removing a terrible oppressive dictator was the primary aim—and remember, Saddam Hussein is responsible, directly or indirectly, for killing two to four times as many people as Slobodan Milosevic. The Europeans claimed that they could handle the whole problem in the Balkans at the end of the Cold War. They wound up calling upon us. It took the United States to get rid of Saddam Hussein. I think a world operated by the French, the Germans, and the Russians would have a kind of realpolitik that is more of the seventeenth century than the twentieth century. It would be so cold-blooded, and yet it would be dressed up with self-righteous moral statements, like the "world community" and "every country is sovereign." The result would be that some horrible dictators would flourish. And remember, Russia is not really a democracy. Germany has never really exhibited much wisdom in foreign affairs. If you look at how the French have operated in sub-Saharan Africa, how they operated supporting the Serbs in the Balkans, you will see that despite all the statements, their actual operations on the ground in many parts of the world have been, by any moral standards, worse than ours." (Also: "...Kaplan has come up with a list of "Rules for Managing the World":

1. Produce More Joppolos
2. Stay on the Move
3. Emulate Second-Century Rome
4. Use the Military to Promote Democracy
5. Be Light and Lethal
6. Bring Back the Old Rules
7. Remember the Philippines
8. The Mission is Everything
9. Fight on Every Front
10. Speak Victorian, Think Pagan")

"Not so stupid white men fight back" (Clive Davis, The Times, 2003/06/18)
The Calculated Hysteria of Michael Moore: "A hero to many on the Left in Europe and the US, Moore is hailed as the principled voice of the anti-Bush, anti-capitalist movement. With the Democratic Party still in disarray, and with conservative "shock-jocks" storming America’s airwaves, he functions almost as a one-man opposition party. When he came to London last year to deliver a curious mixture of satire and speechifying at the Roundhouse, in the heart of liberal North London, the atmosphere was as reverential and ecstatic as a Billy Graham rally. ...
Richard Schickel, arguably America's most distinguished observer of the cinema, was rather more forthcoming about Moore’s general approach: "I despise our gun laws in the States, too. But Moore's tactics, I think, give aid and comfort to the enemy. In short, he's careless with his facts, hysterical in debate and, most basically, a guy trying to make a star out of himself. He's a self-aggrandiser and, perhaps, the very definition of the current literary term, 'the unreliable narrator'. This guy either can't or won't stick to the point, build a logical case for his arguments. It's all hysteria — but, I think, calculated hysteria."

"Stop bleating about WMD and listen to how Nasir's mother was executed in a pit" (Ann Clwyd, The Times, 2003/06/18)
"The UN could have gone on passing resolutions and sending in inspectors and rapporteurs for the next 50 years, but in the end there was no realistic alternative to war. Those who bleat about weapons of mass destruction or question the legality of war should talk to the Iraqi people. They are irritated. They ask, "Don’t they care about us? About mass graves? About torture?" Stand at the mass grave at al-Hillah where up to 15,000 people are buried, hands tied behind their backs, bullets through their brains. Examine the pitiful possessions found so far: a watch, a faded ID card, a comb, a ring, a clump of black hair. Watch the old woman in her black chador, tattoos on her gnarled hands, looking through the plastic bags on top of unidentified, reburied bodies, for something that will help her to find her son, who disappeared in 1991.
Stand at the mass grave near Kirkuk, where huge mechanised trucks churn the earth in clouds of dust. Look at the skeletons now tenderly reburied in simple wooden coffins. Talk to Nasir al-Hussein, who was only 12 at the time of the 1991 mass arrests. He, his mother, uncle and cousins were piled on buses. They turned off on to a farm road and the executions started. People were thrown into a pit, machinegunned and then buried with a bulldozer. Nasir crawled out of the mass grave, leaving his dead relatives behind." (See also: "See men shredded, then say you don't back war" (Ann Clwyd, The Times, 2003/03/18))

"MI5 says dirty bomb attack is inevitable" (Nick Hopkins and Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian, 2003/06/18)
"Renegade scientists have provided al-Qaida with the technical knowledge to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and it is "only a matter of time" before an attack is launched against a city in the west, the director general of MI5 warned yesterday.
In her first public speech since she became head of the service last year, Eliza Manningham-Buller said that "we are faced with the realistic possibility of some form of unconventional attack" from Osama bin Laden, or one of the Islamist networks loosely affiliated to him. ...
'Sadly, given the widespread proliferation of the technical knowledge to construct these weapons, it will only be a matter of time before a crude version of a CBRN attack is launched at a major western city and only a matter of time before that crude version becomes something more sophisticated.'"

"Romania backs down in Holocaust row" (BBC News, 2003/06/18)
"The Romanian Government appears to have backed down on a statement it made last week which suggested there was no Holocaust within the country's borders during World War II.
A second statement issued on Wednesday said administrations between 1940 and 1945 were "guilty of serious war crimes" and used "methods of discrimination and extermination" against the local Jewish population.
It followed a protest by Israel on Tuesday and a warning that relations between the two countries had been strained." (See also: "Romania denies Holocaust" (Shamillia Sivathambu, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/06/14))

"I was in Iraq on day alleged in memos, admits Galloway" (Sally Pook, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/06/18)
Christmas the Galloway way: "George Galloway confirmed for the first time yesterday that he was in Iraq on the day that documents found by The Telegraph allege he met an Iraqi intelligence officer there to discuss "continuous financial support".
The suspended Labour MP also admitted that he was "not yet" in a position to disprove the documents, which he claimed were forgeries and which were discovered in the looted foreign ministry in Baghdad.
The papers purport to show that Mr Galloway received money from Saddam Hussein's regime - a slice of oil earnings worth at least £375,000 a year. ...
Yesterday, however, in an interview with the Radio 4 programme On The Ropes, he said: 'I was in Iraq on Boxing Day of 1999 and I spent Christmas Day with Tariq Aziz.'"

"Gunmen Kill Israeli Girl After Truce Talk" (Mark Lavie, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/06/18)
"Armed resistance" Palestinian style: "Palestinian gunmen who crossed from the West Bank killed an Israeli girl and wounded her sister, just minutes after the Palestinian premier met with militant leaders and failed to persuade them to stop attacks. ...
The shooting took place just inside Israel, close to the West Bank town of Qalqiliya. The military said gunmen used a water passage to get around a protective wall between the West Bank and a main north-south highway and opened fire on the car, carrying a family of eight. The assailant then escaped back into the town.
A 7-year-old girl, Noam Leibowitz, was killed, her 5-year-old sister seriously wounded. Two other family members, a child and grandfather, were slightly wounded, the military and rescue workers said."

Note: I've updated the Iran-section in links, with the help of The Daily Dish and BuzzMachine's useful list of Iranian webloggers. ("Iran and its 10,000 Salam Paxes" (Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine, 2003/06/17) and "The Online Revolution" (Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, 2003/06/18))

Iran
IranMania
Iran va Jahan
tehrantimes.com
IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency
Student Movement Coordination Committee
the eyeranian
Lady Sun
Notes of an Iranian girl
Pejmanesque
Persian Blogger Chronicles
Right-Wing Arab

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

News and commentary:

"France Raids Compound of Iran Opposition" (Elaine Ganley, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/06/17)
"Masked and heavily armed police raided the compound of an Iranian opposition group Tuesday, detaining activists on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks in France and building a support base for operations abroad.
The dramatic raids came a month after U.S forces disarmed the military wing of the group, the Mujahedeen Khalq, in Iraq. The organization, which the United States and European Union classify as a terrorist group, seeks to topple Iran's clerical regime.
French authorities detained 159 people in the raids on the compound north of Paris and 12 other sites outside the city. The authorities seized $1.3 million in U.S. currency, mostly 100-dollar bills, along with computers and satellite telecommunications equipment.
"This is about fighting against eventual acts of terrorism perpetrated on French territory," Justice Minister Dominique Perben said on France-Info radio."

"The Blood of Iranians" (Koorosh Afshar, National Review, 2003/06/17)
Koorosh Afshar is a "pseudonym for a student in Tehran": "During the past few nights, we Iranian youth have been agitating — at great risk to our lives — to remove the 24-year-old plague that has stricken our homeland. Our goal is to topple the theocratic regime of the mullahs. Our opponents are barbarian vigilantes — members of Ansaar-e-Hezbollah — who are backed by heavily armed Iranian riot police. ...
They got shields from the police and entered the dormitory. There were about 600-700 of them — armed with swords, sticks, daggers, iron chains, and tear-gas guns — to 700 of us students, mostly in pajamas. We had run out of stones to resist any longer….
They entered the dormitory and shot tear gas, sending all the students fleeing to their rooms; then they entered the buildings, and started kicking in and breaking down the doors....
They were shouting "Rahbaraa az maa bepazir" — "Leader accept this from us." They captured my roommate and tried to stab him in the stomach with a dagger. He managed to grab the blade of the dagger, holding it tightly in his hands. His attackers pulled it out and struck him on the back. He now has a wound 15 centimeters long and 3 centimeters deep. As a result, he has been hospitalized, his thumbs almost detached from his hands....
Three attackers found an unlucky student alone in his room. Two held his hands at his sides while a third sodomized him with a dagger, inflicting a wound 12 centimeters deep. The student was taken to a Shariati hospital and bled for hours. He is still fighting for his life...." (See also: "Hardline vigilantes in Iran beat up students in their bed inside dormitories" (AP/Canadian Press, 2003/06/14))

"Bohemia in Baghdad" (Max Rodenbeck, The New York Review of Books, from the 2003/07/03 issue)
"The scene at the deserted National Library in Baghdad looks almost too staged to be true. Ignoring the occasional tock-tock-tock of nearby gunplay, a tethered donkey lunches on flowers in the garden. A statue of Saddam is still standing out front, but someone has looped a noose around its neck. A hot gust of wind sends singed catalog cards scudding across the tiled terrace of the four-story building, along with curls of half-melted microfiche that turn out to be pages from The New York Times of November 1979. Through smashed windows one can see blackened corridors and heaps of sooty debris. On the iron grill of the entrance, locked now to the pillagers who stripped the library clean before torching it, hangs this neatly lettered cardboard sign:

A library has the sanctity of a hospital and the holiness of a house of God. Behave here as you would there.

The sign appears to be the only intact article of literature left, out of a collection of one million volumes, twenty million periodicals, and many original manuscripts. ...
The scale and seeming purposefulness of the sabotage has been the source of countless rumors. Iran's slick, twenty-four-hour Arabic-language news station — the only television available for weeks after the war — helped popularize one in particular. "The Christian right wing which controls Washington seeks to wipe out Eastern civilization," declared one commentator, adding that this evil intent was 'based on the ideology of Francis Fukuyama that says ancient cultures have no value because America's superior culture has replaced them.'"

"They should be ashamed" (William Shawcross, The Guardian, 2003/06/17)
"Tony Blair's enemies have behaved in a shocking manner over the liberation of Iraq and its elusive weapons of mass destruction. Opponents of the war predicted all manner of disasters - millions of refugees, famine, thousands of deaths in battle, and revolution on "the Arab street" throughout the region. None of these horrors happened. Instead, it is obvious that the coalition has indeed freed Iraqis from a monster and created a new reality in the Middle East - one which just might offer the region hope.
All that is unbearable to those who preferred the Saddam status quo. So they have used the missing weapons to turn on Mr Blair with self-righteous fury. They declare that the war was "a monumental blunder" (Robin Cook) and that we have been "duped" (Clare Short). This is opportunistic, irresponsible and self-serving rubbish. ...
Was this a man to whom we should indefinitely have given the benefit of the doubt on such a dangerous matter? He had already invaded two neighbours, killed more than a million Muslims in his war with Iran, used chemical weapons against his own people, the Kurds of Halabja, and tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands more. ...
Sadly, Mr Cook and Ms Short are unable to forgive Mr Blair for seeing through the hypocrisy of the left and for allying himself on this occasion with Saddam's only effective enemy, the United States, the great satan of the left, as well as of Islamist terrorists."

"Road map rescue mission" (Jack Kelly, The Washington Times, 2003/06/17)
"Diehards loyal to Saddam Hussein have been ambushing American soldiers in Iraq. Our soldiers are not attempting to negotiate with the Ba'athists. They are hunting them down. There will be no peace in the Middle East until the Israelis do to Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the West Bank and Gaza what we have been doing in Afghanistan and Iraq.
There has developed among liberals the notion that killing Jews should be, at worst, a misdemeanor. But it is hypocritical for us to launch a worldwide war on terror when our women and children are killed, and to demand that Israelis show "restraint" when theirs are slaughtered.
The deliberate targeting of noncombatants is evil. No cause in the world can justify it. Only when this truth is recognized by the Palestinians — and by our diplomats — can there be peace in the Middle East."

"How the West grew rich" (Dinesh D'Souza, The Washington Times, 2003/06/17)
"Did the West enrich itself at the expense of minorities and the Third World through its distinctive crimes of slavery and colonialism? This thesis is hard to sustain, because there is nothing distinctively Western about slavery or colonialism. The West had its empires, but so did the Persians, the Mongols, the Chinese, and the Turks. The British ruled my native country of India for a couple of hundred years. But before the British came, India was invaded and occupied by the Persians, the Mongols, the Turks, the Afghans, and the Arabs. England was the seventh or eighth colonial power to establish itself on Indian soil.
If colonialism is not a Western institution, neither is slavery. Slavery has existed in every known civilization. The Chinese had slavery, and so did ancient India. Slavery was common all over Africa, and American Indians had slavery long before Columbus arrived on this continent.
What is uniquely Western is not slavery but the movement to abolish slavery. There is no history of anti-slavery activism outside of Western civilization. Of course in every society, slaves have strongly resisted being slaves. Runaways and slave revolts occurred frequently in all slave cultures. But only in the West did a movement arise, not of slaves, but of potential slave-owners, to oppose slavery in principle."

"Saddam loyalists ally with Islamists" (Paul Martin, The Washington Times, 2003/06/17)
"A shadowy group of Saddam Hussein loyalists calling itself al Awda, meaning "the Return," is forming an alliance with Islamist militants linked to al Qaeda for a full-scale uprising against the U.S.-led occupation in mid-July.
The information comes from leaflets circulating in Baghdad, as well as a series of extended interviews with a former official in Saddam's security services who held the rank of brigadier general.
Al Awda is aiming for a spectacular attack and uprising on or about July 17 to mark the anniversary of the Ba'athist revolution in 1968, the former general said."

"A Broken Body, a Broken Story, Pieced Together" (Dana Priest et al., The Washington Post, 2003/06/17)
A balanced report on the capture and rescue of Jessica Lynch. Sounds decidedly more heroic than staged to me: "The Iraqis heard shouts of "Go! Go! Go!" and soon the commandos were upon them. They said no shots were fired in the hospital and no one resisted, that there were only doctors and staff and a few hundred patients left. "It was like a 'Rambo' movie," Uday said. "But we were not Rambo. We just waited to be told what to do."
"There was not a firefight inside of the building, I will tell you, but there were firefights outside of the building, getting in and out," Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks told reporters at Central Command in Qatar.
The commandos found Lynch in a private room, atop the hospital's only bed used to ease the pain of bedsores, a special sand-filled tub. She was accompanied by a male nurse in a white jacket.
"Jessica Lynch, we're the United States soldiers and we're here to protect you and take you home," a Special Forces soldier called out, according to Air Force Maj. Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr., who briefed reporters three days later.
"I'm an American soldier, too," she answered from her hospital bed." (See also: "What actually happened to Pfc. Jessica Lynch?" (Brendan Nyhan and Bryan Keefer, Spinsanity, 2003/05/28))

Added in archive:
"The Future of 'History'" (Stanley Kurtz, Policy Review, from the June & July 2002 issue)
"Charmed by Tyranny" (Steven Menashi, Policy Review, from the February & March 2002 issue)

Monday, June 16, 2003

News and commentary:

"Poll suggests world hostile to US" (BBC News, 2003/06/16)
Anti-Americanism trumps the liberation of 22 million people from one of the worst regimes in the history of mankind. That nearly two-thirds of the French would prefer the tyranny of Saddam's nightmare reign is a national disgrace: "Nearly two-thirds of respondents to an international poll for the BBC say they have an unfavourable opinion of George W Bush.
The survey of 11 countries - for the television programme What The World Thinks of America, to be aired this week in the UK - revealed that 57% of the sample had a very unfavourable, or fairly unfavourable attitude towards the American President. ...
Over half the sample felt that the US was wrong to invade Iraq - this included 81% of Russian respondents, and 63% of the French response.
Thirty-seven per cent thought it right to invade - including 54% of the UK response, 74% of the US response and 79% of the Israeli sample.
Asked who is the more dangerous to world peace and stability, the United States was rated higher than al-Qaeda by respondents in both Jordan (71%) and Indonesia (66%)." (See also: "What The World Thinks of America" (BBC News, 2003/06/17))

"EU Split on Blacklisting Political Arm of Hamas" (John Chalmers, Reuters, 2003/06/16)
Say that again? So a fanatical terrorist organization who sees any conceivable peace agreement with the "Zionist entity" as unthinkable, indeed, whose outspoken goal is the obliteration of Israel and nothing less, is considered as a necessary player in the peace process?: "Britain and France clashed on Monday over whether the European Union should blacklist the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which is resisting pressure to accept a cease-fire with Israel.
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw pressed his EU colleagues at a meeting in Luxembourg to outlaw Hamas' political wing, but French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin was adamant it remained a necessary player in the peace process. ...
And de Villepin made a distinction between "mass movements" and "terrorists." "It is in our interest to have Palestinian interlocutors, I distrust a strategy based on cutting off dialogue," he said." (See also: "The Genocidal Hamas Charter" (David G. Littman, National Review, 2002/09/26))

"Iran rejects tougher nuclear checks" (BBC News, 2003/06/16)
"Iran has confirmed that it will not sign up to tougher, short-notice inspections of suspected nuclear sites.
The European Union joined growing international pressure on Iran on Monday, saying Tehran should comply with the measures "urgently and unconditionally".
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has also urged Iran to agree to strengthened inspections under an additional protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
But Iran said a ban on the country's access to nuclear technology would have to be lifted before it can agree to such a move."

"Iran's leader urged to accept he is not God's envoy" (AP/Toronto Star, 2003/06/16)
"More than 250 university lecturers and writers have called on Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to abandon the principle of being God's representative on earth and to accept he is accountable to the people.
In a statement, made available to The Associ