Archived news and commentary: July 28 - August 3, 2003

2003/09/29 - 2003/10/05
2003/09/22 - 2003/09/28
2003/09/15 - 2003/09/21
2003/09/08 - 2003/09/14
2003/09/01 - 2003/09/07
2003/08/25 - 2003/08/31
2003/08/18 - 2003/08/24
2003/08/11 - 2003/08/17
2003/08/04 - 2003/08/10
2003/07/28 - 2003/08/03
2003/07/21 - 2003/07/27
2003/07/14 - 2003/07/20
2003/07/07 - 2003/07/13
2003/06/30 - 2003/07/06

Sunday, August 3, 2003

News and commentary:

"Tony Auth's inspiration" (Stefan Sharkansky, Shark Blog, 2003/08/03)
I missed Stefan's post yesterday on a syndicated anti-Semitic cartoon by Tony Auth, published in the Seattle Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. A really sickening sign of the times in itself and now that Mike Silverberg has pointed out a Nazi propaganda cartoon from the mid 1930s which is essentially identical, the profound similarity between the current anti-Zionism of the left — among self-proclaimed "progressives" and "humanists" no less — and Nazi anti-Semitism is glaringly obvious. Note that I had to downsize the pictures, so it's preferable to view the originals:

The Israeli fence as star of David
(Tony Auth, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 2003/07/31)

"The wall between nations"
(Josef Plank, Red Letter Day, 2003/08/03)
"'The wall between nations,' no date/Germany/Seppla (Josef Plank)."

(See also: "Big media anti-Semitism" (Stefan Sharkansky, Shark Blog, 2003/08/02)
and "Disgusting" (Mike Silverberg, Red Letter Day, 2003/08/03))

"'This is the "smoking gun" the U.S. is looking for'" (Maria Gners, Svenska Dagbladet/Watch, 2003/08/03)
A partial translation of an article in today's paper version of the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. This is a big story in today's Swedish newspapers, with Expressen, for example, publishing "sensational", "world exclusive" pictures "which might prove that Saddam Hussein had WMD's" in its paper edition:
"Experts from FOI [Swedish Defence Research Agency] accompanied the Monte Carlo based production company World Television Network, when they were doing a report in Iraq with a team fronted by the Swedish journalist Wera Maria Cedrell. Wera Maria Cedrell claims that she has evidence proving that Saddam's regime produced weapons of mass destructions as late as the last year.
"This is the 'smoking gun' the U.S. is looking for," she says.
The allegations made by the TV team is based on tips from two Iraqi scientists. ...
The evidence consisted of files, documents and maps. ... After having been informed of the findings by telephone, FOI chose to send down two men.
"They flew down immediately and worked with us for a week. After a preliminary investigation they assessed that the findings were very interesting and almost to good to be true," Wera Maria Cedrell says.
The TV team and the experts visited buildings and locations pointed out by the Iraqi scientists. They describe the production of WMD's as small-scaled but copious.
"We visited about ten locations. Everything was looted, but only for chairs and tables — not documents. We found a lot of documents and blueprints, and also material and boxes." ...
The evidence will be presented in a series of books, which Wera Maria Cedrell currently are writing together with the American journalist Nate Thyer and an Iraqi member of the Governing Council." (Note: It's of course difficult to assess the reliability of this story. It should be noted that World Television Network doesn't even seem to have a site of their own and the only former mention of Wera Maria Cedrell I can find is in a dispatch on a meeting with Iraq's former information minister.)

"Dead scientist revealed Iraq dirty bomb" (Nicholas Rufford, The Sunday Times/The Herald, 2003/08/03)
"David Kelly, the British weapons expert at the centre of the Iraq dossier row, had amassed firm evidence to show that Saddam Hussein built and tested a "dirty bomb."
Designed to cause cancer and birth defects, the radiological weapon could have been used by terrorists to create panic and widespread contamination in a crowded city.
Kelly, who committed suicide last month, presented evidence of the bomb to the government in 1995 and recommended to Foreign Office officials that it feature in the government's intelligence dossier on Iraq. However, despite secret Iraqi documents being produced to prove its existence, it was not included.
In an interview with The Sunday Times in June, Kelly said the dirty bomb was originally built by Saddam for use against Iranian troops during the Iran-Iraq war as a tactical weapon and an instrument of terror.
He said Iraq still "possessed the know-how and the materials to build a radiological weapon." The threat was potentially more serious than some other weapons of mass destruction, he said, because Iraq still retained the main ingredients - nuclear material and high explosives."

"The time has come for us to get out of Iraq" (Edward Luttwak, The Sunday Telegraph, 2003/08/03)
The concept of instant democratization is perhaps only natural in a culture hooked on instant gratification. Never mind that it is unrealistic in the extreme and makes for severe myopia. This goes for both sides by the way. The Coalition is lambasted for not turning Baghdad into Copenhagen overnight. The WMD-question is another case in point. For many critics the case already seems to be settled — not finding WMD immediately, in the chaos following the sudden implosion of a totalitarian state, is taken as evidence that they never will be found. On the other hand, the Coalition seems to be determined to transform the Saddam nightmare into California within a year:
"It is not that the troops are frightened by the sporadic attacks against them - total casualties remain too small for that - but most are utterly disgusted by the futility of their duties. They are repairing schools in the furnace heat of the Mesopotamian summer while able-bodied Iraqis nearby are idly watching, if not jeering. They are clearing playgrounds for children who have been taught to throw stones at them. They are guarding hospitals from looters while being cursed even by the visitors of the patients they are protecting, one of whom recently justified the killing of three soldiers on the grounds that they were wearing shorts off-duty, exposing their knees. The officers who now govern towns and entire districts are constantly besieged by local leaders and imams demanding more of everything, from electricity to well-paid jobs, but who resist any suggestion that they themselves could act, for example by getting their followers to clean up the garbage-strewn streets. They prefer to keep them listening to interminable speeches and sermons.
It is thus not just the successive delays in rotating forces home that are ruining morale, but the mission impossible of turning Iraqis into democrats in short order."

"The War Over the War" (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, 2003/08/03)
"So what Mr. Blair (and Mr. Bush) did was to make a war of choice — but a good choice — into a war of necessity. Because people in democracies don't like to fight wars of choice. To make it a war of necessity, they hyped the direct threat from Iraq and highlighted flimsy intelligence suggesting that Saddam was not just a potential problem, but an immediate, undeterrable threat to the British and American mainlands. This was so, they argued, because Saddam retained hidden stocks of W.M.D.'s, in violation of U.N. resolutions, which he could deploy at any minute.
Unless real W.M.D.'s are found in Iraq, Gulf War II will for now and for years to come be known as "the controversial Gulf War II" — and the hyped reasons for the war will obscure the still good ones. Only future historians will be able to sort out this war's ultimate validity. It is too late or too early for the rest of us.
It's too late, because no one will ever know what Saddam would've done had Messrs Blair and Bush not acted. And it's too early, because the good reasons for this war — to unleash a process of reform in the Arab-Muslim region that will help it embrace modernity and make it less angry and more at ease with the world — will take years to play out."

"Iran's Nuclear Program: For Electricity or a Bomb?" (Valerie Lincy and Gary Milhollin, The New York Times, 2003/08/03)
"But the uncomfortable reality is that the equipment and raw material Iran could use to power Tehran can also give it an ability to build a bomb. There is no technical incompatibility between such programs, only a legal one — Iran's signature on the nonproliferation treaty, obliging it to abstain from using its nuclear fuel for arms instead of electricity.
In practical terms, that means international monitors have little chance of saying for sure whether a supposedly peaceful program will be turned into a military one until a bomb is very nearly ready for assembly. Meanwhile, preparations can go on perfectly legally.
At the moment, Iran plans to mine uranium, convert it to a gas and transform it into nuclear fuel with gas centrifuges, which it is allowed to do as long as monitors can watch. It will have 1,000 centrifuges in hand by year's end — enough to make one bomb annually — and says it will import or build some 50,000 for its site at Natanz. The result, it claims, will be reactor fuel for electricity."

Saturday, August 2, 2003

News and commentary:

"Europe: plea for a common foreign policy" (Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Libération/Watch, 2003/05/31 - 2003/06/01 [2003/08/02])
Ironically, this is — as far as I know — the first time this plea for a common European foreign policy and a common European identity is made available in English:
"Europe must add its weight to the scales on the international level and within the United Nations and it must be a counterweight to the hegemonic unilateralism of the United States. ...
This also explains why “Old Europe” feels challenged by the merry hegemony enacted by the allied superpower. And why many in Europe, while hailing the fall of Saddam as a liberation, nevertheless condemn a unilateral, mendaciously justified and preventive invasion insofar as it was contrary to international law. It remains to be seen how stable this mentality is and whether its roots will take hold in our historical experiences and traditions. ...
All of Europe’s greater nations had a moment of imperialism and, more importantly in this context, had to face the loss of its empire. This experience of decline was in most cases part of losing colonial empires. Now this era of domination and colonial history is sufficiently distant for European powers to analyze themselves — which is lucky — from a contemplative distance. From the perspective of the vanquished, they could thus learn to see themselves in the dubious role of vanquishers who are now called on to account for what they have done — namely, the forced modernization of cultures that they severed from their roots. It could well be that this is what has encouraged a particular aversion to eurocentrism among Europeans and given hope to the Kantian belief in a global domestic politics."
(Note: Translation to English by Douglas. For an introduction to the debate, see "Europa, Europa" (Jefferson Chase, The Boston Globe, 2003/07/20). In a way, the rather vague manifesto is a proudly affirmative response to Robert Kagan's "Power and Weakness" (Policy Review, from the June & July 2002 issue). "The Europe and the America we want" (Ralf Dahrendorf and Timothy Garton Ash, Le Monde/Watch, 2003/07/09 [2003/07/18]) is in its turn a response to Habermas and Derrida. Personally, I think it's preposterous to allege that many in Europe were "hailing the fall of Saddam as a liberation", but even if this was true, condemning liberation seems to be an absurd position in itself.)

"At Funeral for Hussein Sons, a Call for 'Death to America'" (Dexter Filkins, The New York Times, 2003/08/01)
"The brothers Hussein were buried today here in their hometown 11 days after they were killed by American soldiers. The funeral touched off an outpouring of nostalgia for their fugitive father and was filled with angry calls to rid Iraq of its American occupiers.
Coming out of seclusion, more than 100 members of Saddam Hussein's family gathered in a parched cemetery here and laid the bodies of Uday and Qusay side by side, and then, to conclude an emotional ceremony, buried a third relative killed in the American raid, Qusay's 14-year-old son, Mustafa. A group of American soldiers kept watch at first, then slipped away. ...
The end of the ceremony, attended by as many as 200 people in all, set off a frenzy. Family and friends seemed to stop mourning the passing of the sons as they began chanting for the return of the father.
"Our blood, our souls, we'll sacrifice for Saddam!" the crowd roared, repeating the line.
When friends and family lined up in a traditional prayer to mark the end of the funeral, one of the members rose from his knees and exploded in anger, jabbing his finger at a small number of Americans standing by.
"Death to America!" he shouted, with murmurs of assent behind him. 'Death to America!'"

"Briton charged over Morocco suicide bombs" (Sean O'Neill et al., The Daily Telegraph, 2003/08/02)
"One of the two Britons being held in Morocco has been charged with direct involvement in the Casablanca suicide bombings which killed 44 people.
The Foreign Office named the Britons as Abdellatif Merroun, who has lived abroad for several years, and Perry Jensen, a convert to Islam from west London.
Merroun has been charged with direct involvement in the bombings in May, which the Moroccan authorities say were carried out by sympathisers of the group Salafist Jihad.
Jensen, 42, who became a Muslim in 1994, had travelled to Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia and Azerbaijan before arriving in Morocco but denies receiving any military training at terrorist bases."

"Report on 9/11 Suggests a Role by Saudi Spies" (James Risen and David Johnston, The New York Times, 2003/08/02)
"The classified part of a Congressional report on the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, says that two Saudi citizens who had at least indirect links with two hijackers were probably Saudi intelligence agents and may have reported to Saudi government officials, according to people who have seen the report. ...
People familiar with the report and who spoke on condition of not being named said that the two Saudi citizens, Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Bassnan, operated in a complex web of financial relationships with officials of the Saudi government. The sections that focus on them draw connections between the two men, two hijackers, and Saudi officials. ...
Investigators said that the role of the Muslim cleric who the report says served as a "spiritual adviser" to the two hijackers is central to an understanding of what happened in San Diego. The cleric is not named in the declassified section of the report, but officials identified him as Anwar Aulaqi. He is said to have held meetings with the two hijackers, and when he moved to Falls Church, Va., in 2001, the two hijackers moved as well and began to attend the mosque with which the cleric was now associated. Officials said that the report made clear that the cleric's role needs to be investigated further." (See also the report: "Congressional Reports: Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001" (GPO Access, 2003/07/24) and "Exclusive - The 9-11 Report: Slamming the FBI" (Michael Isikoff, Newsweek, from the 2003/07/28 issue))

Friday, August 1, 2003

News and commentary:

"French pr0n" (Merde in France, 2003/08/01)
"The literary scene is getting ready for their post-vacation kick-off in September and writer Frédéric Beigbeder is doing to do what any self respecting member of the Paris Intelligentsia does: make money off the victims of 9-11. His new book 'Windows on the World' uses the pitch 'the only way to know what happened in the restaurant at the 107th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center on September 11 2001, between 8:30 and 10:29 AM is to make it up.' In an excerpt from the book entitled 'Loving to death', published in a special edition of 'Technikart', the trapped office workers are portrayed as victims of the consumer society (and not as victims of those nice well behaved Muslim zealots) who decide to partake in some furious sex as their office burns and crumbles around them. Beigbeder joins the moaning drunk Renaud among French 'artists' making vile efforts at profiteering on the dead of 9-11. In a country where Thierry Meyssan can sell 200,000 copies of a scandalous book, so great is the French desire to celebrate 9-11, Beigbeder's novel is set to be a best seller. Remember, there never was any French sympathy for 9-11."

"28 Pages" (John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman, The New Republic, 2003/08/01)
"But an official who has read the report tells The New Republic that the support described in the report goes well beyond that: It involves connections between the hijacking plot and the very top levels of the Saudi royal family. "There's a lot more in the 28 pages than money. Everyone's chasing the charities," says this official. "They should be chasing direct links to high levels of the Saudi government. We're not talking about rogue elements. We're talking about a coordinated network that reaches right from the hijackers to multiple places in the Saudi government." ...
The Bush administration has, of course, good reason for not wanting to ruffle the Saudis by declassifying the 28 pages. Saudi Arabia sits atop 25 percent of the world's proven oil reserves and, through its dominant position in OPEC, essentially controls the global energy market. ... A serious conflict with the Saudis could not only disrupt an already turbulent Middle East, but could halt the economic recovery here and perhaps even precipitate a global downturn. ...
The official who read the 28 pages tells The New Republic, "If the people in the administration trying to link Iraq to Al Qaeda had one-one-thousandth of the stuff that the 28 pages has linking a foreign government to Al Qaeda, they would have been in good shape." He adds: 'If the 28 pages were to be made public, I have no question that the entire relationship with Saudi Arabia would change overnight.'" (See also the report: "Congressional Reports: Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001" (GPO Access, 2003/07/24) and "Exclusive - The 9-11 Report: Slamming the FBI" (Michael Isikoff, Newsweek, from the 2003/07/28 issue))

"Russian Hospital Blast Kills at Least 22" (Sergei Venyavsky, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/08/01)
"A suicide bomber rammed a truck packed with explosives through the gates of a Russian military hospital near Chechnya on Friday, destroying the building and killing at least 22 people.
Seventy-six others were wounded in the attack, the latest in an upsurge of suicide bombings that have killed more than 100 people since May.
The blast demolished the four-story red brick hospital in the city of Mozdok in Russia's North Ossetia region, the region's Emergency Situations Minister Boris Dzgoyev told The Associated Press.
The building, which had 115 people inside, including medical workers and patients, collapsed like a house of cards, killing at least 22 people, Dzgoyev said. He said 76 people were wounded. A fire broke out, but it was contained in less than two hours."

"Saddam Daughter Says 'Betrayal' Gave U.S. Victory" (Reuters, 2003/08/01)
"Saddam Hussein's eldest daughter Raghd accused close aides of her father Friday of betraying the former Iraqi president and said he had told her to leave Baghdad as U.S. forces closed in.
Describing the collapse of her father's 24-year iron rule in April, Raghd told Dubai-based Al Arabiya television in an interview she was in Baghdad with her sister Rana sitting by the radio all night following the news and praying.
"I kept telling my sister it was all over," said Raghd. "Shortly after 12 noon my father sent us cars from his special protection forces with a message saying 'Leave'." ...
Raghd gave no details on her accusation that Saddam had been betrayed by close aides.
"This is an act of treason," she said. 'It was a big shock. It was clear, unfortunately the people who he had absolutely trusted, his right hand men...as I understood, the main betrayal was by them..'"

"A Call to Arms in Latest Purported Hussein Tape" (Steven R. Hurst, AP/The Washington Post, 2003/08/01)
"An audiotape broadcast Friday purporting to be from Saddam Hussein issued a new call to arms against American forces, while U.S. soldiers raided two houses in Tikrit, capturing two men said to be "important associates" of the deposed dictator.
The speaker on the tape, which was aired by the Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera, said the former leader will "at any moment" defeat the American occupation forces and return to power." (See also: "Text: 'Saddam Hussein' tape" (AP/The Guardian, 2003/08/01)
"The balance has shifted, after the military confrontations [with insurgents] and this has not changed. They [the Americans] will not be able to stop this. I say that this shift in balance has happened because of the great mojahedin and faithful fighters who have worked and struggled to confront the occupation and throw the invaders outside Iraq so that Iraq can return to its normal state after that.")

"Blood Money" (Ralph Peters, New York Post, 2003/08/01)
"The outrageous double standard the "world community" applies to Iraq just reached a new height of hypocrisy.
In a statement worthy of the French diplomat he apparently aspires to become, World Bank President James Wolfensohn concluded his meeting with the Iraqi Governing Council with the disdainful remark that "a constitution and an elected government would constitute a recognized government, but what do we do in the meantime?" ...
Saddam seized power in a coup, slaughtered his opponents, started successive wars of aggression, pursued weapons of mass destruction and never held a single honest election. But he was just fine with foreign ministries, the United Nations and world financial institutions.
Yet Iraq's representative Governing Council lacks legitimacy as it seeks to build democracy? And Iraq doesn't qualify for reconstruction loans?
This is a double standard of such a disgraceful magnitude that the only appropriate adjective is 'European.'"

"On Killing the King" (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2003/08/01)
"When the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in 1958, Prime Minister Nuri Said, fleeing disguised as a woman, was caught, castrated and hacked to pieces by a crowd. When the strongman who took power, Abdul Karim Kassem, was overthrown five years later, he was shot and his body displayed on television. When Najibullah, deposed dictator of Afghanistan, was killed by the Taliban in 1996, he too was castrated, shot and hung, still alive, from a lamppost.
Given the neighborhood, the complaint about the offense to local sensitivities by the American treatment of the bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein is hard to fathom."

"Debunking political correctness" (Diana West, The Washington Times/danielpipes.org, 2003/08/01)
West on Daniel Pipes' nomination to the U.S. Institute of Peace: "Just as more Americans are starting to understand that unreformed Islam and, by extension, the law (sharia) that flows from it, are indeed more likely to encourage violence than other religions, a serious scholar who has long applied himself to devising ways to defuse such deadly fanaticism is slowly being undermined and even marginalized in the U.S. Senate. ...
Based on what? The CAIR-led anti-Pipes blitz would seem to have scored some direct hits. With the words "provocative" "highly controversial" and "decidedly one-sided," Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, dismissed Mr. Pipes, careful scholarship and reasoned analysis, in the end belying the senator's own ignorance of, let's say, the provocative, highly controversial and decidedly one-sided centuries of jihad Mr. Pipes has studied. ...
This is the same political correctness that searches my 75-year-old mother-in-law or Al Gore as much as it searches young male Arab or Muslim airplane passengers. It is the same political correctness that, as retired FBI special agent Don Lavey recently told WorldnetDaily.com, still inspires "the continued reluctance on the part of the entire FBI to ever use 'Islamic' and 'terrorism' in the same sentence."
And it is the same political correctness that Mr. Pipes, through serious study and forthright truth-telling, has long labored to debunk. Which is all the more reason that Mr. Pipes should be confirmed without further delay once Congress reconvenes in September. Anything less is nothing less than a victory for our deadliest enemies."

"Accepting our limitations" (Caroline Glick, The Jerusalem Post, 2003/08/01)
"It's summer camp season. As Israeli Jewish children are learning to macrame and swim, 300 of their Israeli Arab friends in the Galilee are learning other lessons. Channel 10 Wednesday broadcast footage from "Camp Return" by Kabul village in the Western Galilee. The story was picked up Thursday in Ma'ariv.
At Camp Return, children are not taught how to make beaded jewelry and popsicle stick houses. They are taught to aspire to kill Jews in suicide bombings. ...
Their camp songs have lyrics like, "We don't want flour. We don't want sardines. We want bombs, the rule of the bombs." Another ditty the children sing says, 'Lift up your head, recognize your holiness. Defeat to Washington. We don't want ID cards [Israeli citizenship]. We will glorify in the blood of the martyr.'"

"Extracts from Gilligan's cross-examination" (The Guardian, 2003/08/01)
Extracts from evidence given in secret session to the foreign affairs committee by the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan:
"Stanley ... If what you are now saying is the case, I think that you have led this whole committee, and the wider public, up the garden path in a most staggering way ... This is very, very serious, Mr Gilligan. I cannot tell you how serious it is to mislead a committee. I must ask you very, very straight: are you saying Mr Campbell did or did not have responsibility for inserting into the document the 45-minute claim?
Gilligan I have never said in respect of the insertion of the 45-minute claim that Mr Campbell inserted it. I simply quoted the words of my source. ... We may draw the inference, and indeed the committee may reasonably draw the inference, that the decision to include the 45-minute claim was made by Mr Campbell. That was the allegation of the source ...
Stanley You know absolutely that was the interpretation being placed on your remarks. You know perfectly well, from what you have said to us now, that there was no justification for such an interpretation ... Can I ask whether you wish to consider before the committee moves to private deliberations, which I think will be extremely serious, whether you now wish to make a very full and frank apology to this committee for having, in my view, grievously misled this committee?
Gilligan I think that would be a mistaken view. I have never, ever misled the committee."

"Evidence of WMD plotting found in Iraq" (David Rennie and George Jones, The Daily Telegraph, 2003/08/01)
"The United States has found evidence of an active programme to make weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, including "truly amazing" testimony from Iraqis ordered to dupe United Nations inspectors before the war, the man leading the hunt said yesterday.
David Kay, a former UN inspector and now the CIA's leading consultant who is joint head of the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), offered an unprecedentedly bullish assessment of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction.
Although he called for patience, he predicted that doubters were in for a "surprise" by the time his work was done.
His 1,400-strong team of American, British and Australian experts scouring Iraq has not yet found actual biological or chemical weapons, Mr Kay told private Senate hearings in Washington. But there was mounting evidence of an active WMD programme, he said. ...
Briefing officials and Congress on the first five weeks of work by the coalition team, he said: "We have found new evidence of how they successfully misled inspections of the UN and hid stuff continuously from them.
'The active deception programme is truly amazing once you get inside it. We had people who participated in deceiving UN inspectors now telling us how they did it.'"

Thursday, July 31, 2003

News and commentary:

"A Dictatorship at the Crossroads"(John R. Bolton, United States Embassy - Seoul, Republic of Korea, 2003/07/31)
A speech by the undersecretary of state for arms control delivered in Seoul: "The brazenness of Kim Jong Il’s behavior in the past year is striking. While nuclear blackmail used to be the province of fictional spy movies, Kim Jong Il is forcing us to live that reality as we enter the new millennium. To give in to his extortionist demands would only encourage him, and perhaps more ominously, other would-be tyrants around the world. One needs little reminding that we have tested Kim Jong Il’s intentions many times before — a test he has consistently failed. Since 1994, billions of dollars in economic and energy assistance have flowed into the coffers of Pyongyang to buy off their nuclear weapons program. Nine years later, Kim Jong Il has repaid us by threatening the world with not one, but two separate nuclear weapons programs — one based on plutonium, the other highly-enriched uranium. ...
Kim Jong Il, of course, has not had to endure the consequences of his failed policies. While he lives like royalty in Pyongyang, he keeps hundreds of thousands of his people locked in prison camps with millions more mired in abject poverty, scrounging the ground for food. For many in North Korea, life is a hellish nightmare. ...
Postponing the elimination of Kim Jong Il’s nuclear weapons program will only allow him time to amass even more nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and to develop even longer range missiles. Any doubts that Kim Jong Il would peddle nuclear materials or nuclear weapons to any buyer on the international market were dispelled last April when his envoy threatened to do just that.
This will not stand. Some have speculated that the U.S. is resigned to nuclear weapons on the peninsula and we will simply have to learn to live with nuclear weapons in the hands of a tyrannical dictator who has threatened to export them. Nothing could be further from the truth."

"Remember Tet Offensive" (John O'Sullivan, UPI/National Review, 2003/07/31)
"The international community, the United Nations, the "humanitarian" nongovernmental organizations, those American allies that opposed the Second Gulf War, and the mainstream Western media all insist that the United States is failing in Iraq and that Washington needs to be rescued by the United Nations, the international community, its skeptical allies, the NGOs, etc. They cite the current state of Iraq to justify these claims but, as we have seen, the picture of Iraq painted by the Western media (with respectable exceptions such as Hess and the Washington Post's Jim Hoagland) is darker than is really justified. And they do not acknowledge — or correct for — their own ideological interests that direct them toward pessimistic conclusions. ...
As Mark Steyn has written: "At the BBC and Le Monde and the Sydney Morning Herald, anti-Americanism is the New Universal Theory: It explains everything; it's the prism through which every event is viewed." In this case, it's the prism through which the situation in Iraq is viewed — and, more important, the prism through which the media presents Iraq for us to view.
In other words, we are at a moment like the Tet offensive. The actual situation in Iraq is unstable but improving, but the mainstream media has a vested intellectual interest in depicting it as a yawning quagmire. This time we had better make sure that, whatever decision we make, it is based on the reality on the ground and not on the prejudices of the messenger." (See also: "Bush playing his cards right in Iraq" (Mark Steyn, Chicago Sun-Times, 2003/07/27))

"U.S. teams seeking weapons find Iraqi warplanes buried in desert" (John J. Lumpkin, AP/SFGate.com, 2003/07/31)
"Some of Iraqi's missing air force has turned up down below.
Search teams, some hunting for Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, found dozens of fighter jets from Iraq's air force buried beneath the sands, U.S. officials say.
At least one Cold War-era MiG-25 interceptor was found when searchers saw the tops of its twin tail fins poking up from the sands, said one Pentagon official familiar with the hunt. He said search teams have found several MiG-25s and Su-25 ground attack jets buried at al-Taqqadum air field west of Baghdad."

"The Clausewitz Curse" (Lee Harris, Tech Central Station, 2003/07/31)
"The phrase is frequently used: America is at war. But the war metaphor presents us with a problem, a domestic one. Saying we are at war inevitably conjures up the familiar narrative line of the various Clausewitzian wars that we have fought in our past -- wars in which there was a constant and on-going military exchange between us and our enemy. Here, in order to remind us that we are at war, we have only the images of 9-11, and the possibility that it might happen again -- but who knows where or when. And this yields the nagging doubt: If we are really at war, shouldn't our enemy be attacking us? And if he is not attacking us, then how can we say we are at war? ...
And this means that it is entirely up to the present administration to keep Americans alert to the standing danger of further attack. But this very duty places the current - and indeed any - administration in an odd bind, a bind made worse by the very metaphor of war as it is currently deployed. For the enemy's failure to play his part in the traditional narrative of wartime - one in which there is an ongoing exchange of blows - places any administration in the position of needing to manufacture a sense of war footing among its population." (See also: "Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology" (The Wall Street Journal, 2002/08/13))

"A different picture" (Jack Kelly, The Washington Times, 2003/07/31)
"It's amazing how many people who've never been to either place say Iraq is "another Vietnam." There are a few differences worth noting.
To begin with, at no point in the Vietnam war did the United States utterly destroy the North Vietnamese Army; occupy North Vietnam; send Ho Chi Minh into hiding, and kill or capture most of his Politburo. Had we done so, the war might have had a different outcome. ...
Finally, those who draw the comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq tend to forget that the U.S. military did not lose the Vietnam war. The U.S. military did not lose a single battle in the Vietnam war. It was American politicians who lost the war, by failing to come to the aid of the South Vietnamese in the face of a North Vietnamese invasion three years after almost all U.S. troops had come home.
The one similarity between Vietnam and Iraq is that the only way we can lose in Iraq is the way we lost in Vietnam — through a failure of political nerve."

Wednesday, July 30, 2003

News and commentary:

"Financing Terror?" (Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, Newsweek, 2003/07/30)
"Even as the White House tries to tamp down the furor over alleged Saudi links to the September 11 terror attacks, a U.S. Senate panel is poised to stoke the fire even further. At a hearing this Thursday, Newsweek has learned, it will unveil new allegations that the Saudis are continuing to funnel millions of dollars through Islamic charities that are winding up in the coffers of organized terror groups.
U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials have assembled fresh data showing that Saudi government-sponsored charities have actually stepped up their financial support of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas—even while the Saudis insist they have dramatically intensified their own internal crackdown of Islamic extremists, according to sources familiar with evidence that is to be presented at a Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on terrorism financing."

"Iraqi refugees make joyful return" (BBC News, 2003/07/30)
"The first Iraqi refugees to be repatriated since the fall of Saddam Hussein have made an emotional return to their homeland.
More than 240 refugees set foot in Iraq on Wednesday after 13 years of exile in neighbouring Saudi Arabia.
There were tears of joy as the families, most with small children, embraced relatives upon their arrival in the southern port town of Umm Qasr. ...
The convoy of 10 buses and trucks carried refugees from the Rafha camp - housing 5,000 in the Saudi desert - over the border into Iraq.
Similar convoys will run every 10 days to move others from the camp, which was established in 1991 for those who fled after a Shia uprising was brutally suppressed by the Iraqi regime.
"I feel like my soul has returned to my body," said a tearful Ali Salman upon his arrival at Umm Qasr.
"I can't believe I am actually home and that I will see my family again. I just can't believe it."
He is one of half a million Iraqi refugees in Saudi alone, and among four million around the world."

"Confessions of an Anti-Sanctions Activist" (Charles M. Brown, The Middle East Quarterly, from the Summer 2003 issue)
"On May 22, 2003, the United Nations (U.N.) lifted the sanctions regime it had imposed on Iraq twelve years earlier. The end of the economic embargo invites a review of the "peace" activism that was aimed at bringing down the Iraq sanctions while Saddam Hussein ruled. Anti-sanctions groups sought to relieve the suffering of the Iraqi people. In fact, they became — whether wittingly or unwittingly — mouthpieces for Saddam in the United States. I should know: I have the dubious distinction of having been one of them. ...
But I got derailed when I realized that in order to return to Iraq with the group I represented — the Chicago-based "Voices in the Wilderness" — I and other group members could not speak publicly about issues that would embarrass the Iraqi regime. These included its horrendous human rights record, its involvement with weapons of mass destruction, and the dictatorial nature of the regime. We were allowed to speak only of one thing: the deprivations suffered by ordinary Iraqis under the sanctions regime.
This one-dimensional depiction of life in Saddam's Iraq was pure Baath propaganda, and I (as well as other group members) knew it. As I came to see this as a complicity and collaboration with one of the most abusive dictatorships in the world, I tried to get the rest of my group to acknowledge that our close relationship with the regime damaged our credibility. I failed to persuade them, so I quit. Unfortunately, it seems that my former colleagues have regarded this decision as a kind of political "defection," and it has cost me several friendships, which were apparently contingent on my continued willingness to toe the (Baathist) line." (Note: Found via Best of the Web Today.)

"Betting On Terror" (Ronald Bailey, Reason, 2003/07/30)
Bailey on why "futures markets in terror and assassinations are a good idea": "'Appalling,'" repugnant," and "incredibly stupid" were a few of the choice words used by two U.S. Senators, Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) over a Pentagon proposal to create a futures market aimed at predicting events in the Middle East. Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle chimed in, "I must say this is perhaps the most irresponsible, outrageous and poorly thought-out of anything that I have heard the administration propose to date." In reaction, an embarrassed Defense Department swiftly canned the project. ...
For example, futures markets similar to PAM already operate with real money in the real world and have proved themselves to be very useful. "The Iowa Electronic Markets" provides more accurate election results than do opinion polls; weather futures markets are better at predicting weather than the National Weather Service," says Hanson. Do Senators Wyden and Dorgan find it "disgusting" that people with lots of money to lose protect themselves by betting on whether Florida will get hit by a hurricane or not? ...
In the end, a promising research program that might have enhanced U.S. intelligence gathering was killed off by cheap moral posturing on the part of a couple of U.S. Senators. Who's incredibly stupid now?" (See also: "Pentagon axes online terror bets" (BBC News, 2003/07/29))

"Baghdad Blogger" (Salam Pax, The Guardian, 2003/07/30)
"I can not really say it was very wise to go to Tikrit with foreigners two days after the death of Uday and Qusay was confirmed. They are not very friendly up there in Saddam's home town at the best of times, and now they border on the hostile. I am now Salam "the spy" Pax in Aujah. ...
His actual birthplace is a small mud hut. It had fallen down and Saddam had it rebuilt in brick, then covered with mud. The funny thing is that there is an American army base right beside it and they had no idea what that "tool shed" was. They just told us that they have been here for a long time and nobody gave them that piece of information. Well, I bet there is a lot they are not telling you about.
The question in Aujah now is how the family is going to get the bodies back "to bury them properly". Someone in Baghdad later told me that proper burial for these two is to dig a hole somewhere in the desert and have the family look for them for years. How can they expect a proper burial for people who have denied it for hundreds of thousands? I know, we need to start dropping the hate and concentrating on our future."

"Memo Warns Of New Plots To Hijack Jets" (Sara Kehaulani Goo and Susan Schmidt, The Washington Post, 2003/07/30)
"Terrorists operating in teams of five may be plotting suicide missions to hijack commercial airliners on the East Coast, Europe or Australia this summer, possibly using "common items carried by travelers, such as cameras, modified as weapons," according to an urgent memo sent last weekend to all U.S. airlines and airport security managers.
The "information circular" issued July 26 was drawn from recent intelligence reports that detail the most specific terrorist plots involving passenger aircraft in the United States since four hijacked jetliners were used in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, crashing into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in western Pennsylvania."

Tuesday, July 29, 2003

News and commentary:

"No terror attack today" (Jane Magnusson, Dagens Nyheter, 2003/07/29)
A view of Sweden through the travel report of a Swedish journalist touristing in New York. There are plenty of more outrageous examples of the kind of free-floating anti-Americanism found daily in Swedish media, but this is a telling example of the current level of the intellectual debate in Sweden. It sounds like it is written by a 13-year-old revolutionary school kid in a high school paper, but Jane Magnusson is a prominent Swedish journalist, Dagens Nyheter is Sweden's largest quality daily and this travel report got almost the whole Page 2 of its culture section. The basic idea of the report seems to be to ironize over New Yorkers fear of another terror attack. For example, Magnusson is singing "You like al-Qaida and I like al-Qaida ... Let's call the whole thing off" on the subway etc.:

"Later the same evening, during the dinner I was heading for when the train stopped, I get the question if people in Sweden are afraid of terror attacks.
"No," I answer, "we are afraid of America. The whole thing about 'either you are with us or against us'scared the shit out of us. We don't like capital punishment, not even when there are plenty of incriminating evidence against the criminal in question. How could we possible sanction the executions of a lot of Iraqis who are not proven guilty of anything? We didn't protest. But not because we are afraid of weapons of mass destruction. We are afraid of America." ...

I celebrated Independence Day out of the city barbecuing and eating 400 grams of "premium ground serloin". Afterwards, I set fire to the small American flag stuck on a toothpick which was stuck in the burger I've just gorged on — a trick I've learned in Sweden when you get a Swedish flag with the food. Here nobody appreciated my little joke."

(Note: My translation. The article is only available in Swedish.
Ironically, in the very same issue there's this great quote by the legendary Swedish writer and politician Ture Nerman, from his booklet "Europe 1940", which was confiscated by the Government under the shameful censorhip laws in effect during World War II:
"Every neutrality of the mind regarding this war and Nazi barbarism is treason against humanity and culture, whether it is because of cowardice or pacifism or supposedly religious reasons."
But, then, Jane Magnusson is of course way beyond neutrality of the mind as she actually sides openly against America and thus objectively for, in this case, the continued rule of Baathist barbarism.)

"The War in Iraq" (Norman Geras, normblog, 2003/07/29)
Pearls before swine. An edited version of "a talk given to the Workers' Liberty summer school in London on 21 June under the title 'After the Holocaust: Mutual Indifference and Moral Solidarity'":
"I could just about have 'got inside' the view - though it wasn't my view - that the war to remove Saddam Hussein's regime should not be supported. Neither Washington nor Baghdad - maybe. But opposition to the war - the marching, the petition-signing, the oh-so-knowing derision of George Bush and so forth - meant one thing very clearly. Had this campaign succeeded in its goal and actually prevented the war it was opposed to, the life of the Baathist regime would have been prolonged, with all that that entailed: years more (how many years more?) of the rape rooms, the torture chambers, the children's jails, and the mass graves recently uncovered.
This was the result which hundreds of thousands of people marched to secure. Well, speaking for myself, comrades, there I draw the line. Not one step. ...
You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed - and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug - opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet." (Note: Found via Stephen Pollard.)

"Maid Tortured to Death" (Mahmoud Ahmad, Arab News, 2003/07/29)
"An 18-year-old maid has died as a result of severe burns inflicted by her employers, Al-Madinah reported.
The woman of the house poured scalding water on the maid because she could not understand Arabic, the paper said, while the husband tied her up. Both husband and wife are teachers. When the maid's condition worsened following the assault, the woman took the maid to her mother’s house with the intention of having her deported for failure to fulfill her contractual obligations.
The mother attempted to treat the maid with aspirin, but the girl, of Asian nationality, succumbed to her injuries soon after, the paper said.
A court sentenced the husband to four years and the wife to two years in jail. The wife's mother will receive 80 lashes for conspiring to conceal the crime." (Note: Found via Best of the Web Today.)

"'Saddam' Tape Acknowledges Deaths of Sons" (Nadia Abou El-Magd, AP/Yahoo! News, 2003/07/29)
"A new audiotape attributed to Saddam Hussein and broadcast Tuesday on Arab satellite station Al-Arabiya acknowledges the death of the ousted dictator's two sons last week.
The tape — the third attributed to Saddam this month — begins with a verse from the Quran. The speaker says Odai and Qusai, killed in a gunfight with U.S. forces, would be martyrs in heaven.
"Even if Saddam Hussein has 100 children other than Odai and Qusai, Saddam Hussein would offer them the same path," the voice on the nine-minute tape said. ...
The speaker called Odai and Qusai's deaths 'good news, that is the hope of every fighter for God's sake, as another group of noble souls of the martyrs have ascended to their creator.'" (See also: "Transcript of 'Saddam tape'" (BBC News, 2003/07/29))

"Notes from the Previous War" (Denis Boyles, National Review, 2003/07/29)
Boyles on the "Bizarro Broadcasting Company": "Saturday, April 5: this will be the day most people will remember as the day when the journalistic standards of the World Service committed suicide. The BBC's bad day in Baghdad started early: A column of U.S. soldiers had entered southwestern Baghdad just after daybreak. ...
Cut to: Andrew Gilligan, the BBC's man in downtown Baghdad. "I'm in the center of Baghdad," said a very dubious Gilligan, "and I don't see anything... But then the Americans have a history of making these premature announcements." Gilligan was referring to a military communiqué from Qatar the day before saying the Americans had taken control of most of Baghdad's airport. When that happened, Gilligan had told World Service listeners that he was there, at the airport — but the Americans weren't. Gilligan inferred that the Americans were lying. An hour or two later, a different BBC correspondent pointed out that Gilligan wasn't at the airport, actually. He was nearby — but apparently far enough away that the other correspondent felt it necessary to mention that he didn't really know if Gilligan was around, but that no matter what Gilligan had seen or not seen, the airport was firmly and obviously in American hands.
It was clearly important to the BBC that Gilligan not be wrong twice in two days. Whatever the truth was, the BBC, like Walter Duranty's New York Times, must never say, "I was wrong." So, despite the fact that the appearance of American troops in Baghdad was surely one of the war's big moments, and one the BBC had obviously missed, American veracity became the story of the day. Gilligan, joined by his colleagues in Baghdad, Paul Wood and Rageh Omaar, kept insisting that not only had the Americans not gone to the "center" — which they reckoned to be where they were — they hadn't really been in the capital at all."

"Bush Refuses to Declassify Saudi Section of Report" (David Johnston and Douglas Jehl, The New York Times, 2003/07/29)
"President Bush refused today to declassify a 28-page chapter of a Congressional report on the September 2001 attacks. He said that disclosure of the deleted section, which centers on allegations about Saudi Arabia's role in financing the hijackings, would "would help the enemy," and compromise the administration's campaign against terror.
Mr. Bush's decision came after Saudi officials sought the release of the still-classified section of the report, which was bitterly denounced today by the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal as an "outrage" that "wrongly and morbidly" accused Saudi Arabia of complicity in the attacks."

"Saudis and Bush To Meet Over 9/11 Allegations" (Glenn Kessler and Dana Priest, The Washington Post, 2003/07/29)
"Saudi officials, furious over a congressional report issued last week alleging possible links between individuals in the Saudi government and some of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers, have requested and been granted a meeting today between Foreign Minister Prince Saud Faisal and President Bush. ...
A key issue in the dispute is that 28 pages of the 900-page report, in a section dealing with allegations about Saudi Arabia, were entirely classified - but well-publicized - and some U.S. officials said it appeared the Saudi government was moving toward asking the president to declassify those pages. ...
Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, and the report cited a CIA memorandum that said connections between some hijackers and some Saudis living in the United States amounted to "incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists" from Saudi officials." (See also the report: "Congressional Reports: Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001" (GPO Access, 2003/07/24) and "Exclusive - The 9-11 Report: Slamming the FBI" (Michael Isikoff, Newsweek, from the 2003/07/28 issue))

Monday, July 28, 2003

News and commentary:

"Global warming a weapon of mass destruction, says British scientist" (AFP/Yahoo! News, 2003/07/28)
Ever since Maltheus some scientists have warned of an imminent major catastrophe. Catastrophe sells, of course, but the affinity between these scientifically made Apocalypses and traditional religious Millenarianism is also apparent.
Seen in this perspective, analyzed as secularized versions of the Apocalypse, it should probably come as no surprise that America is cast as Evil. After all, anti-Americanism is probably the most popular secularized religious movement of our time:
"Human induced global climate change is a weapon of mass destruction at least as dangerous as nuclear, chemical or biological arms, a leading British climate scientist warned.
John Houghton, a former key member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said Monday that the impacts of global warming are such that "I have no hesitation in describing it as a weapon of mass destruction."
He said the United States, in an "epic" abandonment of leadership, was largely responsible for the threat. ...
For example, pre-monsoon temperatures this year in India reached a blistering 49C (120F), 5C (9F) above normal.
"Once this killer heatwave began to abate, 1,500 people lay dead - half the number killed outright in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre," Houghton said."

"The Globalization of Gaza" (Michael J. Totten, Tech Central Station, 2003/07/28)
"Suicide-bombing is spreading. In May 2003 five simultaneous attacks ripped through Casablanca, Morocco. Earlier this month two female suicide-bombers triggered explosive belts at an outdoor concert in Moscow. On the same day three Sunni Muslims blew themselves up in a Shi'ite Pakistan mosque.
From the point of view of extremists, suicide-murder pays. Apocalyptic acts like those unleashed on September 11 provoke an overwhelming military response. But small-bore acts by Palestinians against Israelis produce an opposite reaction. Endless media coverage stokes a rising public sympathy and encourages calls for appeasement and even surrender.
It is time to ask ourselves honestly: Is it possible to support a Palestinian state without encouraging terrorists elsewhere? ...
There is a moral case to be made for a Palestinian state. There's a strategic and "realist" case to be made for it, too. But it is trumped by the need to contain a fast-spreading barbarism. No country on Earth should appease or surrender to terror. Peace at any price has a price tag too high. A devastating wave of suicide attacks in Moscow, London, New York, and Bombay is a real possibility and would distort and deform our societies beyond recognition.
Palestinians will have to wait for their state no matter how long it takes. The alternative is the globalization of Gaza."

"In the Sunday book pages..." (James Lileks, The Bleat, 2003/07/28)
"In the Sunday book pages of the Strib was an article about the women of Afghanistan. It was discussing the new-found freedoms of women in the post-Taliban society, about girls queuing for school after years of oppression. Quote: "No matter what one's political misgivings about the war might be, the sight of those girls was a thrilling shock."
That sentence stuck in my head, and made me think back to October 01, to all the discontent over the Afghan campaign. We’ve forgotten what that was like - the marches in Europe, the predictions of mass casualties, the accusations of empire-building, how it was all about (cue Twilight Zone theme) an oil pipeline, how it would become a quagmire, how it was a quagmire, how we should have used international law to bring OBL to justice. It was the dress rehearsal for Iraq. The same blind sputtering fury; the same protests with Bush = Hitler posters and giant mocking puppets; the same inability to accept that a byproduct of the campaign would be a freer society for the very people the protesters supposedly cared about.
Any mass executions at the Kabul soccer stadium recently? No?
Wonder why." (Note: Found via InstaPundit.)

"'This Was a Good Thing to Do'" (Paul A. Gigot, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/07/28)
"Most reporting from Iraq suggests that the U.S. "occupation" isn't welcome here. But following Mr. Wolfowitz around the country I found precisely the opposite to be true. The majority aren't worried that we'll stay too long; they're petrified we'll leave too soon. Traumatized by 35 years of Saddam's terror, they fear we'll lose our nerve as casualties mount and leave them once again to the Baath Party's merciless revenge.
That is certainly true in Najaf, which the press predicted in April would be the center of a pro-Iranian Shiite revolt. Only a week ago Sunday, Washington Post reporter Pamela Constable made Section A with a story titled "Rumors Spark Iraqi Protests as Pentagon Official Stops By." Interesting, if true.
But Ms. Constable hung her tale on the rant of a single Shiite cleric who wasn't chosen for the Najaf city council. Even granting that her details were accurate - there was a protest by this Shiite faction, though not when Mr. Wolfowitz was around - the story still gave a false impression of overall life in Najaf. On the same day, I saw Mr. Wolfowitz's caravan welcomed here and in nearby Karbala with waves and shouts of "Thank you, Bush."
The new Najaf council represents the city's ethnic mosaic, and its chairman is a Shiite cleric. Things improved dramatically once the Marines deposed a corrupt mayor who'd been installed by the CIA. Those same Marines have rebuilt schools and fired 80% of the police force. The city is now largely attack-free and Marines patrol without heavy armor and often without flak jackets. The entire south-central region is calm enough that the Marines will be turning over duty to Polish and Italian troops.
This is the larger story I saw in Iraq, the slow rebuilding and political progress that is occurring even amid the daily guerrilla attacks in Baghdad and the Sunni north."

"U.S. Hunts for Saddam Around Tigris River" (D'Arcy Doran, AP/The Guardian, 2003/07/28)
"American forces focused their hunt for Saddam Hussein around his Tigris River hometown and reported a near-miss Sunday in a raid to capture his new chief of security - and perhaps the ousted dictator himself. A U.S. soldier was killed south of Baghdad, the latest death in a spike of guerrilla attacks.
Troops of the 4th Infantry Division, acting on tips from informants, hit three farms in the Tikrit region in a pre-dawn attack but learned their specific target - the security chief - had left the area the day before.
"We missed him by 24 hours,'' said Lt. Col. Steve Russell, who led the operation that was witnessed by an Associated Press reporter."

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

 

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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)

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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)

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