Archived news and commentary: January 24 - 30, 2005

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Sunday, January 30, 2005

News and commentary:

"An Iraqi woman smiles after dipping her finger to ink..."
(Mohammed Uraibi, AP, 2005/01/30)
"An Iraqi woman smiles after dipping her finger to ink, before casting her ballot in a polling station in Baghdad, Sunday, Jan. 30, 2005."
(See also: Gallery: Iraq National Election, Sunday, January 30, 2005)

"The people have won" (Mohammed and Omar, Iraq the Model, 2005/01/30)
"We could smell pride in the atmosphere this morning; everyone we saw was holding up his blue tipped finger with broad smiles on the faces while walking out of the center.
I couldn't think of a scene more beautiful than that.
From the early hours of the morning, People filled the street to the voting center in my neighborhood; youths, elders, women and men. Women's turn out was higher by the way. And by 11 am the boxes where I live were almost full!
Anyone watching that scene cannot but have tears of happiness, hope, pride and triumph.
The sounds of explosions and gunfire were clearly heard, some were far away but some were close enough to make the windows of the center shake but no one seemed to care about them as if the people weren't hearing these sounds at all. ...
I walked forward to my station, cast my vote and then headed to the box, where I wanted to stand as long as I could, then I moved to mark my finger with ink, I dipped it deep as if I was poking the eyes of all the world's tyrants.
I put the paper in the box and with it, there were tears that I couldn't hold; I was trembling with joy and I felt like I wanted to hug the box but the supervisor smiled at me and said "brother, would you please move ahead, the people are waiting for their turn".
Yes brothers, proceed and fill the box!
These are stories that will be written on the brightest pages of history."

"Arabs Mesmerized by Iraqi Elections" (Donna Abu-Nasr, AP/Yahoo! News2005/01/30)
"RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - A young man smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee in a Saudi cafe worries that Iraq's elections could lead to civil war. On the banks of the Nile, a student strolling with his girlfriend dismisses the polls as a sham meant to place a pro-American government in Iraq. Yemenis, chewing their mildly stimulating khat leaves, express hope the United States will pressure other tyrannical regimes to change. ...
A veiled Egyptian flower vendor who gave her name only as Um Abdel Rahman dismissed the poll as "a sedative for the people. Democracy is just a decoration."
Wouldn't she like to participate in free elections? "Women speak their minds all the time. I don't need to vote," she said. ...
The Egyptian student, Ahmed Abdel Rahman, openly spoke about not trusting U.S. intentions in Iraq, saying the new Iraqi ruler "will be a follower of America."
But when asked if democracy can grow in Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak is widely expected to seek a fifth term in power, the 20-year-old looked over his shoulder and said:
'Let's talk about Iraq. Let's stay away from talking about Egypt.'"

"The Iraq vote is making me sick this morning" (ShinerTX, Democratic Underground, 2005/01/30)
Where the far left veers into fascism: "All this makes you wonder when the left forgot the proper name for people who bomb polling stations, kill election workers and assassinate candidates. The right name for such people is fascists.":
"All the media keeps talking about is how happy the Iraqis are, how high turnout was, and how "freedom" has spread to Iraq. I had to turn off CNN because they kept focusing on the so-called "voters" and barely mentioned the resistance movements at all. Where are the freedom fighters today? Are their voices silenced because some American puppets cast a few ballots?
I can't believe the Iraqis are buying into this "democracy" bullshit. They have to know that the Americans don't want them to have power, because they know that Bush is in this for the oil, and now that he finally has it he's not going to let it go. This election is a charade. The fact is that the Iraqis have suffered during the past two years more than any people on earth at the hands of the American gestapo. Maybe they're afraid and felt they had to vote. That's the only way I can explain it to myself. ...
Let's hope the resistance got voted in, or if not, they only increase the fight and take down those who betrayed their country today by voting in this fraud election." (Hat tip: The Corner.)

"Polls close on country's first free vote in a half-century" (CNN.com, 2005/01/30)
"BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Polls have closed in Iraq's first free election in a half century, with the independent election commission reporting a 72 percent turnout of registered voters nationwide by mid-afternoon amid attacks and threats of attacks to disrupt the vote.
The commission's Adil Al-Lami and Safwat Rashid did not release figures for Iraq's largest province, al-Anbar -- west of Baghdad, including Falluja and Ramadi -- or the northwestern Nineveh province, which includes Mosul.
"There has been a vast turnout in Iraq," Rashid said.
"The news is freedom has won," Al-Lami said. "We have conquered terrorism."
The commissioners reported turnout as high as 95 percent in some parts of the capital, Baghdad, but did not offer total numbers of voters."

"'I am voting for peace. I would have crawled here if I had to'" (Jenny Booth, The Times, 2005/01/30)
"Some couldn't read, but knew their party's identification number on the ballot. Others couldn't see, but were led to the polls by police.
Across Iraq, and especially in the Shia south and the Kurdish north, Iraqis went to the polls expressing determination and pride, together with hope that the election will improve their hard lives.
Samir Hassan lost his leg in a Baghdad bombing but that did not stop him reaching the polling station.
"I would have crawled here if I had to. I don't want terrorists to kill other Iraqis like they tried to kill me," said Hassan, 32, propping himself up on worn metal crutches as he queued in the working class district of Hurriya, a mixed Sunni and Shia neighbourhood near the old city.
"Today I am voting for peace. It is the only way, we must vote against them," he added."

"Iraqis Brave Bombs to Vote in Their Millions" (Luke Baker, Reuters, 2005/01/30)
"BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Some came on crutches, others walked for miles then struggled to read the ballot, but across Iraq, millions turned out to vote Sunday, defying insurgents who threatened a bloodbath.
Suicide bombs and mortars killed at least 27 people, but voters still came out in force for the first multi-party poll in 50 years. In some places they cheered with joy at their first chance to cast a free vote, in others they shared chocolates.
Even in Falluja, the Sunni city west of Baghdad that was a militant stronghold until a U.S. assault in November, a steady stream of people turned out, confounding expectations. Lines of veiled women clutching their papers waited to vote.
"We want to be like other Iraqis, we don't want to always be in opposition," said Ahmed Jassim, smiling after he voted.
In Baquba, a rebellious city northeast of Baghdad, spirited crowds clapped and cheered at one voting station. In Mosul, scene of some of the worst insurgent attacks in recent months, U.S. and local officials said turnout was surprisingly high."

"Iraqis Cast Their Votes, Despite Attacks" (Mariam Fam, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/01/30)
"BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraqis defied threats of violence and calls for a boycott to cast ballots in Iraq's first free election in a half-century Sunday, and insurgents seeking to wreck the vote struck polling stations with a string of suicide bombings and mortar strikes, killing at least 44 people, including nine suicide bombers.
Women in black abayas whispered prayers at the sound of a nearby explosion as they waited to vote at one Baghdad polling station. But the mood elsewhere was triumphant, with long lines in many places in the city: civilians and policemen danced with joy outside one site, and some streets were packed with voters walking shoulder-to-shoulder toward polling centers. ...
Officials said turnout appeared higher than expected, although it was too soon to tell for sure. A few hours before polls closed at 5 p.m., one Iraqi official, Adel al-Lami of the Independent Electoral Commission, said 72 percent of the 14 million eligible voters cast ballots but offered no overall figure of the number who participated. ...
Rumors of impending violence were rife. When an unexplained boom sounded near one Baghdad voting station, some women put their hands to their mouths and whispered prayers. Others continued walking calmly to the voting stations. Several shouted in unison: 'We have no fear.'"

"Elections Are Not Democracy" (Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, from the 2005/02/07 issue)
"By the time you read this, you will know how the elections in Iraq have gone. No matter what the violence, the elections are an important step forward, for Iraq and for the Middle East. But it is also true, alas, that no matter how the voting turns out, the prospects for genuine democracy in Iraq are increasingly grim. Unless there is a major change in course, Iraq is on track to become another corrupt, oil-rich quasi-democracy, like Russia and Nigeria. ...
The United States has essentially stopped trying to build a democratic order in Iraq and is simply trying to fight the insurgency and gain some stability and legitimacy. In doing so, if that exacerbates group tensions, corruption, cronyism, and creates an overly centralized regime, so be it. ...
Perhaps some of these negative trends can be reversed. Perhaps the Shia majority will use their power wisely. But Iraqi democracy is now at the mercy of that majority, who we must hope will listen to their better angels. That is not a sign of success. "If men were angels," James Madison once wrote, 'no government would be necessary.'"

"The Uncommitted" (Michael Ignatieff, The New York Times Magazine, 2005/01/30)
Not just uncommitted — in Madrid they actually held a demonstration today protesting against the Iraqi election:
"All this makes you wonder when the left forgot the proper name for people who bomb polling stations, kill election workers and assassinate candidates. The right name for such people is fascists.":
"The election in Iraq is without precedent. Never, not even in the dying days of Weimar Germany when Nazis and Communists brawled in the streets, has there been such a concerted attempt to destroy an election through violence -- with candidates unable to appear in public, election workers driven into hiding, foreign monitors forced to ''observe'' the election from a nearby country, actual voting on election day a gamble with death in at least 4 of the 18 provinces and the only people voting safely the fortunate expatriates and exiles in foreign countries.
Just as depressing as the violence in Iraq is the indifference to it abroad. Americans and Europeans who have never lifted a finger to defend their own right to vote seem not to care that Iraqis are dying for the right to choose their own leaders. Why do so few people feel even a tremor of indignation when they see poll workers gunned down in a Baghdad street? Why isn't there a trickle of applause in the press for the more than 6,000 Iraqis actually standing for political office at the risk of their lives? Have we all become so disenchanted that we need Iraqis to remind us what a free election can actually be worth?"

"Whatever the result, this is a triumphant election" (Andrew Sullivan, The Sunday Times, 2005/01/30)
"If they have the courage to vote should we not stand with them? Are we really going to side with the alternative: a bunch of Ba’athist has-beens and jihadist theocrats? Here’s the theology guiding the people we are still fighting: “We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy and those who follow this wrong ideology.” That was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the beheader and murderer who is trying to become the next Osama Bin Laden. Are we really going to side with him against those brave enough to vote today? ...
I can’t say I’m brimming with optimism. But hope and optimism are different things. Optimism comes from clairvoyance. I don’t have that. Hope comes from the knowledge that, for all our failings, we are trying to do the right thing; that our enemies are worth having and fighting; that our principles are the only hope for a Middle East that can be prosperous and free.
One more conviction that makes hope possible: the belief that freedom is a universal value, that it knows no cultural limits, and that all societies have a chance to achieve it. Many Iraqis tell us they believe it too. “I don’t just see light at the end of the tunnel, I see light at the start and throughout the tunnel,” one told the Associated Press. “It’s one of my wishes to die at the gate of the polling station. I want to be a martyr for the ballot box,” one told The Washington Post.
If they can hope, how can we not?"

"Q&A: ElBaradei, Feeling the Nuclear Heat" (The Washington Post, 2005/01/30)
"In an interview with The Washington Post-Newsweek's Lally Weymouth at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland last week, ElBaradei, 62, discussed his frosty relationship with the administration and his goals for a third term -- curbing Iran's nuclear program, possibly engaging with North Korea and making sure that nuclear equipment has not fallen into terrorist hands.":
"Do you believe some terrorist groups have actually acquired nuclear materials?
It is a real possibility. If it were to happen, it would have disastrous consequences -- a terror group could acquire a stolen nuclear weapon, or enough material to develop a crude nuclear weapon. We know there has been a lot of illicit trafficking of nuclear materials -- even some kilogram quantities of highly enriched uranium.
Do you think a terror group actually has a nuclear device?
I cross my fingers . . . but I cannot say 100 percent that it hasn't happened. Remember, after the Cold War, there was a period of time when lots of nuclear material was not adequately protected in the former Soviet Union. I hope nothing significant went to a terrorist group, but it would be irresponsible for me to exclude it."

"This is al-Qa'eda Rule 18: 'You must claim you were tortured'" (Alasdair Palmer, The Sunday Telegraph, 2005/01/30)
"Feroz Abbasi, Martin Mubanga, Moazzam Begg and Richard Belmar finally arrived back in Britain last week after their three-year imprisonment in Guantanamo, to near-universal acclaim and sympathy. Their lawyers insist that they are totally innocent of any involvement in terrorism. The men themselves say that they have been tortured, and that the admissions made by three of them – that they had been recruited by al-Qa'eda, and undergone training in terrorist camps in Afghanistan – are completely false. ...
The men's claim that they were tortured at Guantanamo should also be set in the context of the al-Qa'eda training manual discovered during a raid in Manchester a couple of years ago. Lesson 18 of that manual, whose authenticity has not been questioned, emphatically states, under the heading "Prison and Detention Centres", that, when arrested, members of al-Qa'eda "must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by state security investigators. [They must] complain to the court of mistreatment while in prison". That is not, of course, proof that the Britons were not tortured in Guantanamo. But it ought to encourage some doubts about uncritically accepting that they were – which seems to be the attitude adopted by most of the media."

"The UN's PR coup" (Anne Bayefsky, israelinsider, 2005/01/30)
"On Monday, the United Nations marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp with a day-long special session of the U.N. General Assembly, followed by the opening of an exhibition. Throughout the event, the words "never again" were repeated many times. But what exactly did they mean to U.N. members and officials?":
"Widening the lens, we notice that last month the U.N. adopted 22 resolutions condemning the state of Israel, and four country-specific resolutions criticizing the human-rights records of the other 190 U.N. member states. Also in December the public entrance of the U.N. sported the annual solidarity with the Palestinian people exhibit, featuring a display about Palestinian humiliation at having to bare midriffs at Israeli checkpoints. (No mention was made of the purpose of the checkpoints or the Israelis who have died from suicide belts on Palestinians who circumvent them.) ...
In March the U.N. will begin its annual session of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, at which Israel will be the only U.N. member state not allowed to participate in full because U.N. states continue to prevent it from gaining equal membership in a regional group. The U.N. remains without a definition of terrorism, never having transformed the names of Palestinian terrorists from abstract entities into the targets of specific U.N. condemnation or consequences of any kind. And any day now we can expect the secretary-general to continue his pattern of denouncing Israel's lawful exercise of self-defense as "extrajudicial killing" or as a morally reprehensible contribution to "a cycle of violence." In other words, U.N. demonization of Israel and the green light to the killers of Israelis that such demonization portends will not skip a beat. This is the face of modern anti-Semitism." (Hat tip: Melanie Phillips.)

"In Europe, an Unhealthy Fixation on Israel" (Robin Shepherd, The Washington Post, 2005/01/30)
"Instead, the intense antagonism toward Israel [in Europe] appears to be a subset of the wider European hostility, emanating mainly from the left, toward the United States. ...
Over dinner in Berlin not long ago, a Frenchwoman told me emphatically that Israel was "America's policeman in the Middle East." Her companion, nodding in furious agreement, insisted that the two countries are partners in a "new imperialism," leading the world inexorably into war. ...
Mixed with the supercharged ideological hostility of the European left, the demons of the continent's past can make for an intoxicating cocktail of anti-Israeli sentiment There is undoubtedly room for criticism of Israel and its policies in the Middle East, but reasoned criticism appears to be giving way to emotional and irrational antipathy that is coloring the wider debate. And as that sentiment grows, American support for the Jewish state will continue to scratch raw nerves in the Old World.
There is much, of course, that the United States should be doing to improve its relationship with Europe. But repairing transatlantic relations is a two-way process. Americans should now be aware that on one crucial issue, at least, it is Europe, and not America, that needs to clean up its act." (Hat tip: Rochi Ebner again.)

"'If you don't take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits'" (Clare Chapman, The Daily Telegraph, 2005/01/30)
Off topic of the day: "A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.
Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners – who must pay tax and employee health insurance – were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.
The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.
She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her "profile'' and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.
Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit."

"Arafat's tomb a shrine in Mukata" (Mitch Potter, Toronto Star, 2005/01/30)
The National Committee for Immortalizing the Symbol of the Immortal Leader Yasser Arafat:
"Like a perpetual memory machine, the tomb of Yasser Arafat grows more elaborate with each passing day.
Just 11 weeks ago, as Arafat lay dying in a hospital bed outside Paris, this bare-dirt corner of the iconic Palestinian leader's debris-strewn Mukata headquarters was one of the most blighted sights in the entire West Bank.
Today, a national shrine is rising from the rubble, replete with landscaped gardens, newly transplanted mature olive trees and Palestinian flags framing a steel-and-glass burial chamber whose doors open toward the holy city of Mecca. ...
Habash is now executive director of the National Committee for Immortalizing the Symbol of the Immortal Leader Yasser Arafat.
The astonishingly fanciful title means he oversees a 50-person committee charged with reinventing the Mukata compound as a kind of Arafat theme park.
What exists today, he says, is just the beginning. Plans are being hatched for a mosque, a library and a national archive on the grounds of this former British police headquarters." (Hat tip: Rochi Ebner.)

"Kofi Annan’s son admits oil dealing" (Robert Winnett and Jonathon Carr-Brown, The Sunday Times, 2005/01/30)
"The son of the United Nations secretary-general has admitted he was involved in negotiations to sell millions of barrels of Iraqi oil under the auspices of Saddam Hussein.
Kojo Annan has told a close friend he became involved in negotiations to sell 2m barrels of Iraqi oil to a Moroccan company in 2001. He is understood to be co-operating with UN investigators probing the discredited oil for food programme. ...
Potentially more serious is his connections with Hani Yamani, the son of Sheikh Yamani, the wealthy former Saudi oil minister who set up Opec. Kojo acted as a director for Hani Yamani’s company and was a close business associate. The pair represented the coming together of two of the world’s most influential families.
In 2001 Yamani lined up a deal to sell about $60m worth of Iraqi oil to a Moroccan company. The Sunday Times has statements from two close business associates of Yamani who claim that Kojo was involved in the deal."

"The Vote, and Democracy Itself, Leave Anxious Iraqis Divided" (John F. Burns, The New York Times, 2005/01/30)
"It will be Iraq's first multiparty election since 1954, four years before King Faisal II was assassinated in the military coup that led to the rise of the Baath Party and Saddam Hussein, who had Mr. Atiyyah condemned to death in absentia. But Mr. Atiyyah is hoping, now, that the voters will reject him.
"I don't want to have on my hands the blood of any candidate or voter," he said in a telephone interview from Amman, Jordan. ...
For every moderate like Mr. Atiyyah who has turned against the elections, there is another who spoke to reporters with bursting enthusiasm at the prospect of Iraqis at last having the chance to choose their own leaders. One of them, Salama al-Khafaji, a 46-year-old Shiite dentist, has survived three assassination attempts, including one last year in which insurgents killed her 20-year-old son and a bodyguard.
"We have principles, we believe in democracy and human rights," she said. "If I die, it is better to have died for something than to have died for nothing." As she spoke, she struggled into a bulletproof vest and a traditional black cloak to return to Baghdad's streets for a last round of campaigning."

"Several Explosions Heard Across Baghdad" (Dexter Filkins, The New York Times, 2005/01/30)
"Several explosions broke out across Baghdad on Sunday morning, especially in the southwestern section of the city. American attack helicopters circled over the city center, and the roar of fighter jets could be heard from high above.
Still, two hours after polls opened, voters appeared to be turning out in large numbers in the capital. ...
At the Arabiya school in the Karada district of central Baghdad, plastic ballot boxes already had scores of large, folded ballots stacked inside just an hour after voting began.
Qasim Muhammad Saleh, 45, walking with his two sons, Sajad, 5, and Jowid, 12, had just come from voting at Lebanon High School. The boys were carrying Iraqi flags, and Mr. Saleh's right index finger carried the ink marks showing he had cast his ballot.
"We now have our freedom," he said. "After 35 years, we finally got rid of Saddam and now we can vote for whoever we want."
"After casting my ballots, I'm hoping that the situation will improve."
Nearby, at the Nawfal primary school in Karada, there was a steady stream of people lining up to go through the barbed wire checkpoint in order to vote. Inside, people were shrugging off the sounds of explosions, and the mood was upbeat, even enthusiastic, as they went through the voting process."

Saturday, January 29, 2005

News and commentary:

"Young members of the Palestinian security forces..."
(Abbas Momani, AFP, 2005/01/29)
"Young members of the Palestinian security forces take part in an exercise session at the Muqataa in the West Bank city of Ramallah."

"Liberation day in Iraq?" (Martin Kramer, Sandstorm, 2005/01/29)
"On April 9, 2003, the day Saddam's statue came down in Baghdad, National Review Online asked me for a quick response. In the midst of the exuberance, and the facile comparisons with the fall of the Berlin Wall, I struck this cautionary note:

The Iraqis, in the end, did not rise up. They waited to see the whites of American eyes before they headed into the streets. They did not earn their freedom; they had it delivered to them, U.S. federal express. It is doubtful they are ready to assume its responsibilities. ...
"Liberation Day" will come only when the Iraqis go to the polls, and convene a parliament. ...

That day is here. The Iraqis did not turn out to join in the overthrow Saddam, because they were afraid. Now they must turn out to forge an alternative, and if they fail to do that because they are still afraid, then they are lost. They will slip slowly beneath the waves of some new despotism, condemned to reenact yet another cycle in the tormented history of a country that should never have been.
America owes Iraq this day, but beyond it there is no enduring obligation to sacrifice more for Iraqi freedom than the Iraqis are prepared to sacrifice. No people has achieved and sustained democracy that did not have men and women prepared to fight and die for the right to place a ballot in a box. Iraq is no exception." (See also: "As the Cheering Starts" (Martin Kramer, National Review, 2003/04/09))

"Iraqi election is a story of great courage" (Salim Mansur, The Toronto Sun, 2005/01/29)
"Yet what is remarkable in Canada and elsewhere -- places where the media are dominated by lib-left thinkers certain of their own moral and intellectual superiority -- is the doubt cast on the legitimacy of Iraq's election due to the conditions under which it is being held, which they say will prevent a large segment of the population from participating out of fear.
The same lib-left media, however, did not discount the legitimacy of the recently held Palestinian election in which somewhere around 30% of Palestinians did not, or could not, vote due to circumstances beyond their control. ...
During the last century, communist fellow-travellers in the West found nothing right in the effort of Americans and others who supported the cause of freedom in communist-controlled societies of the East.
A similar lib-left mindset, presently at work in Canada and Europe, is unwilling to go beyond its petulant anti-Americanism and see for itself how raw the struggle for freedom is, as being witnessed in Iraq.
The real story of tomorrow's election is not its flaws, but rather the common courage of people to defy insurgents as they quietly work to build a decent society." (Hat tip: Melanie Phillips.)

"Group cites Saudi 'hate' tracts" (Katherine Clad, The Washington Times, 2005/01/29)
"The government of Saudi Arabia is spreading "hate propaganda" in religious tracts sent to mosques throughout America, telling Muslims to hate Christians and Jews and to kill any Muslim who converts to another religion, a leading human rights group charged yesterday.
Saudi government literature collected during the past year from American mosques also tells Muslims living in the United States to "behave as if on a mission behind enemy lines," says an 89-page report released by the Human Rights Group Freedom House.
The report, titled: "Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Fill American Mosques," is based on a yearlong study of more than 200 original documents, all published and disseminated by the government of Saudi Arabia. ...
Says one document: "Those who reside in the land of unbelief out of their own choice and desire to be with the people of that land, accepting the way they are regarding their faith, or giving compliments to them, or pleasing them by pointing out something wrong with the Muslims, they become unbelievers and enemies to Allah and his messenger."
One particularly chilling tract urges Muslims to kill any Muslims who convert to another religion.
It says of Muslims who accept Judaism or Christianity: 'If you do not repent, you are an apostate and you should be killed because you have denied the Koran.'" (See also the report [PDF]: "Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Fill American Mosques" (Freedom House, 2005/01/28))

"Iraqis Abroad Begin Voting With Joy, and Safety" (Hassan M. Fattah, The New York Times, 2005/01/29)
"AMMAN, Jordan, Jan. 28 - With a determined optimism tinged with melancholy, Iraqis in 14 countries outside Iraq voted Friday, in the first of three days of expatriate balloting that will culminate in Iraq's national election on Sunday.
Thousands of eligible Iraqi voters throughout the world took part in the first free Iraqi elections since 1954, and for the first time got a glimpse of the lists of candidates, which was kept secret throughout the campaign for security reasons. ...
Many voters proudly showed off their index fingers, dipped in indelible ink to prevent repeat voting. Unlike their countrymen in Iraq, expatriates vote only for the national assembly, which will write a constitution, and not in local council elections, which will be held simultaneously in Sunday's election in Iraq.
"This was my first time ever, and I didn't know how to do it," Ammar Hussein said giddily. 'But the hardest part was trying to decide who to vote for.'"

Friday, January 28, 2005

News and commentary:

"THE DAY THE TORY SUMS ADD UP."
(Labour/The Evening Standard, 2005/01/28)

"Labour's pig poster insult" (Paul Waugh, The Evening Standard, 2005/01/28)
"The Labour Party was today embroiled in an anti-Semitism row over posters depicting Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin as pigs.
One day after Tony Blair's Holocaust Memorial Day speech, his strategists stand accused of being "tasteless".
One of the designs for Labour's proposed general election posters superimposes the faces of the Conservative leader and shadow chancellor Mr Letwin - who are both Jewish - on the bodies of flying pigs. The slogan states: "The Day Tory Sums Add Up".
Andrew Mennear, Tory candidate for Finchley and Golders Green, said the poster was tasteless and would cause offence because there was nothing more distasteful for a Jew than being associated with a pig. Mr Mennear, whose constituency has a large Jewish community, said: "I am shocked the Labour Party finds it remotely clever or amusing to impose the faces of probably the two highest profile Jewish politicians on to flying pigs.
'I urge Labour to apologise and withdraw this tasteless campaign poster immediately.'"

"No substitute for elections" (Ali, Friends of Democracy, 2005/01/28)
"The first step along this Holy road is elections. Enemies of Iraq do not want them to take place, but Iraqis, despite all scoundrels, will take part in elections, so as not to be ruled by a new despot, to gain their independence without bloodshed, to preserve their security and national unity and to ensure a free, secure and stable life for them and their children. ...
Those who holler in satellite stations and in the media about the future war that will burn Iraq are only actors in a vile, mischievous plot that will never succeed in destroying the Iraqi liberation project. The elections experience is the greatest experience Iraq will go through in its modern history. There is no substitute for it."

"Iraqis Brave Long Trips, Cold to Vote in U.S." (Michael Ellis, Reuters, 2005/01/28)
"DETROIT (Reuters) - Emotional and jubilant Iraqi expatriates braved long trips and frigid weather to cast their votes across the United States on Friday, their enthusiasm making up for their low numbers.
Poll workers applauded, cheered and whistled as a trickle of voters submitted paper ballots in the Detroit suburb of Southgate during the first of three days of voting.
Pointing to his blue-stained finger, dyed with indelible ink to indicate he voted, Khadim Al-Khafaji said: "This is my finger I push in Saddam's eye. The Saddam regime is gone. Thank you United States," said Al-Khafaji, who moved to Detroit from Baghdad six years ago. ...
Still, only about 26,000 Iraqis registered to vote in the United States, far fewer than the estimated 240,000 eligible, according to the International Organization of Migration, which is administering the out-of-country voting in 14 countries, including the United States, for Iraq's Jan. 30 balloting.
Four smaller countries -- Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom and Iran -- registered more Iraqis than the United States."

"'It is our country, our voice, and our duty to vote'" (Rory McCarthy et al., The Guardian, 2005/01/28)
"Pledges to vote despite threats from Zarqawi, the new Saddam":
"Haider al-Rubaie, 26, stationery shop owner, Shia
I will vote and I'm not scared by Zarqawi. Every single Iraqi should vote. Zarqawi is not God. His people are acting just like the Ba'athists did and they are saying anyone who plays any part in the election will be executed. We are used to hearing these kinds of threats, but we have only one God. ...
I think all these problems we have are a punishment from God, but I believe God will also compensate us. I want to have a government that represents all Iraqis and respects the people. I am a Shia and I am against the idea of an Islamic state. I want every single person to have their rights.
We need the multinational forces, and I am so sorry to say that. If a tank passes in the street, no one will dare fire a bullet. They respect the tank. But if it is a convoy of Iraqi police no one will respect them. If the multinational forces leave there will be confusion. There should be a timetable to end the occupation, but after we have built our army."

"On Campaign Trail, a Single Shot" (Steve Fainaru, The Washington Post, 2005/01/28)
"MOSUL, Iraq -- The 21-ton Stryker attack vehicles pulled into the neighborhood of al-Whada just after noon. Their rear ramps dropped simultaneously, disgorging dozens of American infantrymen into the cold rain.
The soldiers had multiple tasks on this day. In addition to hunting insurgents and searching houses, they were to help get out the vote for Sunday's national elections. For the next three hours, soldiers armed with assault rifles and election fliers moved warily through al-Whada's muddy streets, trying to get Iraqis to embrace democracy.
The inherent danger of the mission was driven home at 3:30 p.m. A single shot rang out, and 1st Lt. Nainoa K. Hoe, 27, the popular leader of the 2nd Platoon, C Company, 3rd Battalion of the 21st Infantry Regiment, fell dead in the street. ...
The elections, more than any previous event, highlight how dramatically the U.S. military's role has changed since the March 2003 invasion. In this increasingly complex environment, infantrymen are called upon not only to fight a deadly insurgency but also to perform civil affairs missions and "information ops" normally the province of noncombat military units and nongovernmental organizations.
After a day of handing out election fliers in the driving rain, Hoe was cut down while escorting members of a military intelligence team to a medical clinic. The team wanted to know why the clinic had turned down free medical supplies."

"Hamas wins big in local Gaza elections" (AP/The Jerusalem Post, 2005/01/28)
"The Hamas scored impressive victories Thursday in local elections in three of four Gaza towns, according to exit polls. ...
In Deir el-Balah, the largest of the communities in the sample, Hamas won 13 of the 15 seats on the local council, and Fatah, the party of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, won the other two. Deir el-Balah has 60,000 residents.
The Hamas victories reflected widespread support in Gaza for the violent Islamic movement, which provides welfare, schools and kindergartens to the impoverished people in the territory, alongside its attacks against Israel."

Thursday, January 27, 2005

News and commentary:

"The railway tracks of the Auschwitz death camp..."
(Vadim Ghirda, AP, 2005/01/27)
"The railway tracks of the Auschwitz death camp are illuminated with fire as leaders from 30 countries gather to remember the victims of the Holocaust on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis' death camp by Soviet troops in Oswiecim, southern Poland Thursday, Jan. 27, 2005."

"The Last Casualty: The Tragic End to a Liberal Iraq" (Lawrence F. Kaplan, The New Republic, 2005/01/27)
"If Iraq the place has for some time now borne scant resemblance to Iraq the abstraction, the distance only became greater with President Bush's inaugural address. The president spoke not only of supporting democracy, but of "support[ing] the growth of democratic movements and institutions." To the world's "democratic reformers," Bush pledged, "America sees you for who you are: the future leaders of your free country." But in Iraq, the very centerpiece of the U.S. campaign to export democracy, "democratic movements and institutions" are dying, the result of illiberalism, U.S. neglect, and, above all, sheer physical insecurity. As it grinds into its third year, the war for a liberal Iraq is destroying the dream of a liberal Iraq. ...
But even an Iraq blessed with the political culture of Sweden would find it impossible to cultivate liberalism in this blood-soaked landscape. War and liberalism, as even U.S. history attests, do not coexist easily. To demonstrate the point, an Iraqi friend drops me off one night at the house of Mashal Sarraf, Iraq's deputy defense minister. ... From the vantage point of his post in the defense ministry, war has made liberalism impossible. "We have to admit the terrorists have won," he says. "People cannot engage in civil society; the war has stopped progress; liberalism is over for now." Asked what, if anything, can be done to revive the liberal project, Sarraf replies, 'We need an emergency government that does nothing but security. When there is stability, then liberalism will begin to emerge, but only when there is stability.'"

"Abundant Life All Around" (Tim Blair, timblair.net, 2005/01/27)
"The Melbourne Age, by running this obscene piece, has transformed “mainstream broadsheet” into 'fiesty new competitor for tiny pro-terror niche market.'":
"Terry Eagleton is professor of cultural theory at Manchester University, which possibly explains his attraction to suicide:

While insurgents have been blowing themselves apart in Israel and Iraq, a silence has prevailed about what suicide bombing actually involves. Like hunger strikers, suicide bombers are not necessarily in love with death.

Their head-removing comrades respectfully disagree.

They kill themselves because they can see no other way of attaining justice; and the fact that they have to do so is part of the injustice.

Got the interview transcripts to back this up, mate? As well, suicide bombers don’t merely kill themselves; they kill others. At what point will Eagleton consider the murders of those targeted by his human justice-seeking missiles?

It is possible to act in a way that makes your death inevitable without actually desiring it. Those who leapt from the World Trade Centre to avoid being incinerated were not seeking death, even though there was no way they could have avoided it.

You might think this the single most revolting comment you’ll likely read all year. Perhaps it is, although Eagleton immediately attempts a yet more disgusting observation:

Ordinary, non-political suicides are those whose lives have come to feel worthless to them, and who, accordingly, need a quick way out. Martyrs are more or less the opposite. People like Rosa Luxemburg or Steve Biko give up what they see as precious (their lives) for an even more valuable cause. They die not because they see death as desirable in itself, but in the name of a more abundant life all round.

Abundant life for all! Through the gift of suicide bombing!" (See also: "A different way of death" (Terry Eagleton, The Guardian, 2005/01/26))

"Digging Into Seymour Hersh" (Max Boot, Los Angeles Times, 2005/01/27)
Hersh II: "Hersh, on the other hand, is the journalistic equivalent of Oliver Stone: a hard-left zealot who subscribes to the old counterculture conceit that a deep, dark conspiracy is running the U.S. government. In the 1960s the boogeyman was the "military- industrial complex." Now it's the "neoconservatives." "They overran the bureaucracy, they overran the Congress, they overran the press, and they overran the military!" Hersh ranted at UC Berkeley on Oct. 8, 2004.
Hersh doesn't make any bones about his bias. "Bush scares the hell out of me," he said. He told a group in Washington, "I'm a better American than 99% of the guys in the White House," who are "nuts" and "ideologues." In another speech he called Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft "demented." Hersh has also compared what happened at Abu Ghraib with Nazi Germany. (Were American MPs gassing inmates?) He has claimed that since 2001 a "secret unit" of the U.S. government "has been disappearing people just like the Brazilians and Argentinians did." And in his lectures he has spread the legend of how a U.S. Army platoon was supposedly ordered to execute 30 Iraqis guarding a granary. ...
It's hard to know why anyone would take seriously a "reporter" whose writings are so full of, in Ted Kennedy's words, "maliciousness and innuendo." That Hersh remains a revered figure in American journalism suggests that the media have yet to recover from the paranoid style of the 1960s."

"We've Been Taken Over By a Cult" (Seymour Hersh, Counterpunch, 2005/01/27)
Hersh I. A transcript of remarks by Seymour Hersh at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York:
"On the macro, we're hopeless. We're nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere. Every four-star General I know is saying, "Who is going to tell them we have no clothes?" Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything. That's just the way it is. It's a system built on fear. It's not lack of integrity, it's more profound than that. Because there is individual integrity. It's a system that's completely been taken over -- by cultists. ...
I'm not suggesting we're going to have mutinies, but I'm going to suggest you're going to see more dissatisfaction being expressed. Maybe that will do it. Another salvation may be the economy. It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. And the third thing is Europe -- Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us." (See also: "Seymour Hersh: 'We've Been Taken Over by a Cult'" (Seymour Hersh, Democracy Now!, 2005/01/26): "...the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way.")

"FOUR MORE WARS!!!"
(cafépress, 2004)

"Bush means business" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2005/01/29 issue)
"Idealism is the new realism. Or as one of my disaffected conservative neighbours summed up the Bush speech: ‘Great. We’re gonna invade every country and shove freedom down their throats, whether they want it or not.’ Or in the words of a newly popular bumper sticker on the back of Vermont granolamobiles: 'FOUR MORE WARS!'":
"Even on the Sunni side of the street, there are signs that the smarter fellows understand their plans to scupper the election have flopped and it’s time to cut themselves into the picture. The IMF noted in November that the Iraqi economy is already outperforming all its Arab neighbours.
You might not have gained that impression from watching the BBC or, indeed, reading The Spectator. The Western press are all holed up in the same part of Baghdad, and the insurgents very conveniently set off bombs visible from their hotel windows in perfect synchronisation with the US TV news cycle. But if they could look beyond the plumes of smoke, they’d see that Iraq’s going to be better than OK, that it will be the economic powerhouse of the region, and that the various small nods toward democracy going on in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere suggest that the Arab world has figured out what the Robert Fisk crowd haven’t — that the trend is in the Bush direction."

"Sharon: 'We are on verge of historic breakthrough'" (Herb Keinon, The Jerusalem Post, 2005/01/27)
"Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, not prone to exaggerated optimism when it comes to the Palestinian Authority, made his most upbeat assessment of the situation to date on Thursday, saying he believes conditions are now ripe for a "historic" breakthrough.
"I believe that the conditions have been created which will enable us and the Palestinians to reach a historic breakthrough in relations between us, a breakthrough which would lead us towards quiet and security and – in the future – even the hoped-for peace," Sharon said at a conference of the Contractors Association in Tel Aviv. ...
Sharon, in a marked departure from his standard comments that the PA is doing nothing to fight terrorism, told the Contractors Association: 'We are monitoring recent developments in the Palestinian Authority with great interest, and it seems that there is a positive approach there regarding the war on terrorism and advancing the diplomatic process.'"

"Fears prompt withdrawal of Van Gogh film" (The Guardian, 2005/01/27)
"The Rotterdam international film festival has pulled the last contentious work by Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh at the eleventh hour, amid fears that the screening might trigger further acts of religious violence. The short film, Submission Part One, was due to form the centrepiece of a debate on freedom of speech on Sunday night. It will now not be shown.
Submission Part One is a ten-minute film about a Muslim woman forced into an arranged marriage where she is beaten by her husband, raped by her uncle and finally accused of adultery. Explaining the decision to withdraw it, the film's producer Gijs van de Westelaken said: 'We do not want to take any chance of endangering anyone else who participated in the film.'"

"Van Gogh murder accused wanted to 'become a martyr'" (Wendel Broere and Paul Gallagher, The Scotsman, 2005/01/27)
"A Dutch-Moroccan man accused of murdering a filmmaker critical of Islam believed he was doing God’s will and wanted to die a "martyr" at the hands of the police, prosecutors told a pre-trial hearing yesterday.
Mohammed Bouyeri, 26, is charged with the 2 November shooting and stabbing of Theo van Gogh, whose film accusing Islam of condoning violence against women outraged many Muslims.
The suspect, who was injured in a gun battle with police before he was arrested in eastern Amsterdam, was not at the hearing.
"In a letter to his family he said he had chosen to do his duty to Allah and to give his soul for paradise," the prosecutor, Frits van Straelen, said.
'[He] wanted to become a martyr.'"

"Iraqi Sheik Struggles for Votes, And Against Religious Tradition" (Anthony Shadid, The Washington Post, 2005/01/27)
"Sheltered as it is, Yusufan is still suffused with the talk of Sunday's election, and the worry of what it might bring.
"People say we're going to cast our votes but we're going to die," said Raed Amir, who owns a small grocery store, its door adorned with portraits of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the godfather of Iran's Islamic revolution, and Moqtada Sadr, the young Iraqi cleric and nemesis of the U.S. occupation. "I'm 90 percent sure there will be a bomb, with everyone there together."
In big cities like Basra and some neighborhoods in Baghdad, the degree to which people acknowledge the threat of violence is matched only by their determination to vote. It is no different in Yusufan. Nearly all of the men gathered around the store, built of mud, palm trunks and tin, nodded their heads yes when asked if they would walk the two miles or so to the school to cast their votes.
"We have to participate," said Amir, standing before a shelf lined with small packets of cardamom, pepper, sesame, shredded coconut and baking soda. "We don't want to feel regret in the future that we didn't participate."
A customer, Munir Ahmed, jumped in: 'We wish the election was today, not tomorrow.'"

"Across Baghdad, Security Is Only an Ideal" (John F. Burns, The New York Times, 2005/01/27)
"BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 26 - When American troops entered Baghdad and overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein 21 months ago, Raad al-Naqib felt free at last.
But Dr. Naqib, a 46-year-old Sunni dentist who opposed Mr. Hussein, will not vote Sunday when Iraqis will have their first opportunity in a generation to participate in an election with no predetermined outcome. It is, he said, far too dangerous when insurgent groups have warned that they will kill anybody who approaches a polling station.
Starkly put, Baghdad is not under control, either by the Iraqi interim government or the American military. ...
Instead, daily life here has become a deadly lottery, a place so fraught with danger that one senior American military officer acknowledged at a briefing last month that nowhere in the area assigned to his troops could be considered safe.
"I would definitely say it's enemy territory," said Col. Stephen R. Lanza, the commander of the Fifth Brigade Combat Team, a unit of the First Cavalry Division that is responsible for patrolling a wide area of southern Baghdad with a population of 1.3 million people."

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

News and commentary:

"'Kill A Jew – Go To Heaven': A Study of the Palestinian Authority’s Promotion of Genocide" (Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, Palestinian Media Watch, January 2005)
"PMW has found that the Palestinian Authority (PA) teaches an ideology of virulent hatred of Jews and Israel that mandates the killing of Jews solely because they are Jews. The murder of Jews is presented not only as beneficial to Muslims and Arabs, but as necessary for all humankind. These findings are based on a thorough study and analysis of eight years of official PA television and PA-controlled daily newspapers. This report documents how this hate ideology has been taught consistently for years, well before the war started in September 2000, and continues even after the death of Yassir Arafat":
"The PA case against the Jews has three stages:
Stage 1 defines what characterizes the Jew.
Stage 2 demonstrates how these characteristics endanger the world.
Stage 3 instructs how to fight back against the Jews. ...
A solid prosecution has been built: Jews represent a threat to all humanity. Since this menace is a consequence of Jews’ evil nature and traditions and is unchangeable, the sole solution is that Jews must be fought, subjugated, killed and annihilated. Killing Jews is promoted as an act of self-defense and self-preservation, necessary to save Muslims, Arabs and all humanity. ...
The killing of Jews is thus absolved as an act of murder and justified as an act of self-defense. Murder of Jews is elevated from the abhorrent to the service of God and humanity.
This three-tiered PA ideology demanding genocide is neither the strategy of a fringe PA sect, nor the haphazard ramblings of private individuals behind closed doors. Rather, the hatred of Jews is promoted by the religious, political and academic elites, and taught through cultural, educational, religious and even entertainment frameworks, all of which are under the control and direction of the PA political leadership."

"If Palestinians want an independent state, their new chairman must coalesce forces and disarm terrorists" (Emanuele Ottolenghi, Newsday/emanueleottolenghi.com, 2005/01/26)
"Dismantling Palestinian terror networks is not only indispensable if Abbas genuinely wants to establish a democratic Palestinian state, but also unavoidable if Palestinians will want a state at all.":
"No democracy can survive, no peace can emerge, unless the state crushes independent armed groups challenging its sole and supreme authority. The state's inability to assert its power over armed gangs leads to anarchy and failed states. Palestine is no exception. Those who advocate a cease-fire in the hope that bringing extremists into the political process will turn them into moderates forget the lessons of history. Extremists must first be disarmed: leaving them with their weapons will only allow them to challenge state power and blackmail elected authorities.
That is why a cease-fire is but an illusion, unless Abbas resolves to fight terrorism. ...
Democracy cannot tolerate private armies, whether paramilitary units, armed militias, terror groups or street gangs. Their strength, when left unchecked, always led to the collapse of democratic institutions and anarchy. Arafat's legacy has been to abandon Palestine in a state of chaos, at the mercy of terror groups. Abbas' task must be to restore one authority, one law and one army for Palestine. His victory was welcomed as a sign of democratization. But elections will have meant nothing, ultimately, if Abbas cannot impose his authority over Palestinian society. Unless terror groups are disarmed, neither democracy nor peace will emerge from this hopeful moment." (Hat tip: Melanie Phillips.)

"Iraq's Summer Soldiers: Liberal hawks as ideological deserters" (Tim Cavanaugh, Reason, from the January 2005 issue)
"When the invasion of Iraq was still in its notional phase, a coalition of liberal hawks joined the president in arguing for the war as a Progressive intervention. Figures from academia, politics, and media — Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, Fred Kaplan, Kenneth Pollack, Fareed Zakaria, Jeff Jarvis, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Ignatieff, and many others — defended the forward strategy as the main objective of the war. ...
It is in the open-ended occupation that they lost their nerve — even though this was when their arguments for regional transformation could have had the most impact. ...
Thus, Ignatieff dismisses the humanitarian intervention as a “fantasy.” Sullivan seizes on the disappearance of explosives at Al Qaqaa as evidence that Bush failed to keep order in postwar Iraq. Jarvis tells reason, “The aftermath has been really fucked up.” Friedman declares, “Iraq is a terrible mess because of the criminal incompetence of the Bush national security team.” ...
I want to know whether the liberal hawks understood the nature of war at all. Apparently, they thought you could invade and occupy a foreign country and still quibble over the niceties, carrying along caveats with your ammo. ...
In the event, they must now either admit they were wrong or stick with the war Bush delivered for them. If it succeeds, perhaps they’ll take some of the credit. They’ve already shown they won’t take any of the blame." (See also: "Desertion In the Field: Twilight of the liberal hawks" (Tim Cavanaugh, Reason, 2004/11/01))

"Deadliest day for U.S. in Iraq war" (CNN.com, 2005/01/26)
"BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Thirty-one Marines were killed in a helicopter crash near Iraq's border with Jordan, bringing the number of U.S. troops killed Wednesday to 36 -- the deadliest day for U.S. forces since the start of the war in Iraq.
Four U.S. Marines were killed during combat in Iraq's Al-Anbar province, and a U.S. soldier died when insurgents attacked a combat patrol north of Baghdad, according to the U.S. military.
The cause of the chopper crash was not immediately known and is being investigated, according to the military. ...
The CH-53 Sea Stallion chopper crashed near Ar Rutbah in western Iraq about 1:20 a.m. local time (5:20 p.m. Tuesday ET). It was carrying personnel from the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing and the 1st Marine Division.
Military officials said a search and rescue team was at the site and an investigation of the crash was under way."

"Iraq Pessimists' Real Fear" (John Podhoretz, New York Post, 2005/01/26)
"So let's talk turkey about the dark talk emanating from the media and opinion leaders this week.
Their pessimism isn't really based in concern about Iraq's elections. It's really based in concern about the success of American policy in Iraq.
Anti-Bush partisans — both Democrats and Leftist ideologues — understand that if the elections are seen as a triumph, they will be seen as Bush's triumph, and they cannot stomach it.
And for those who are still mired in the foreign-policy conservatism of the past, success on Sunday will place them permanently on the shoulder of the road to the future, thumbs outstretched.
Once they were the drivers. In a world with a free Iraq, they will be hitchhikers. Maybe what they're really pessimistic about isn't Iraq's future but their own."

"A New Iraq" (Fouad Ajami, The Wall Street Journal, 2005/01/26)
"Leave aside American liberalism's hostility to this venture and consider the multitudes of America's critics in Arab and European intellectual circles. It is they today who propagate a view of peoples and nations fit -- and unfit -- for democracy. It is they who speak of Iraq's "innate" violence. For their part, the men and women in Iraq -- who make their way to the ballot box, past the perpetrators of terror -- will be witnesses to the appeal of liberty. In their condescension, people given to dismissing these elections say that Iraq is the wrong place for a "Jeffersonian democracy." (Forgive the emptiness of that remark, for America itself is more of a Hamiltonian creation, but that is another matter.) No Jeffersonianism is needed here. A kind of wisdom has been given ordinary Iraqis -- an eagerness to be rid of the culture of statues and informers and terror. It takes no literacy in the writings of Mill and Locke to know the self-respect that comes with choosing one's rulers. Though it would not be precisely accurate to speak of the "restoration" of democracy in Iraq, older Iraqis have a memory of a more merciful history. Now Iraq has to be rehabilitated. These elections -- flawed, taking place alongside a raging insurgency -- are part of the rehabilitation of this deeply wounded country."

"Starting the day with a sneer" (Alice Miles, The Times, 2005/01/26)
"Ed Stourton, Today’s man in Baghdad, lingered long and lovingly in the course of an interview with the British Ambassador yesterday upon the illegitimacy of any election result. “It’s quite difficult, isn’t it, to see how people can vote intelligently in some areas of the country when there isn’t the sort of campaign we would recognise,” he even suggested. Poor, stupid Iraqis.
I find this astonishing. Regardless of one’s view of the US-UK attack on Iraq — and I speak as one sceptical about it, at best — surely one should wish the elections on Sunday to be a success. And I don’t mean just want them to be, but will them to be, and certainly not help those seeking to disrupt and undermine them. ...
People will risk their lives going to the polls in areas of Iraq this weekend, and some parts of the media — in other countries as well as in ours, I assume — have already written off those efforts as worthless, the elections as fatally flawed. What blinkered arrogance. Who needs Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to shoot down a nascent democracy when they have some of Britain’s best-loved and respected voices? ...
I have yet to hear a broadcaster deliver a factual report about these elections, one which seeks to raise its sights beyond the suicide bombers and the British political angle (will it help Tony Blair or Gordon Brown?)."

"Ready or not, democracy is coming" (Janet Daley, The Daily Telegraph, 2005/01/26)
Inaugural Address XIII: "What is bizarre (but not surprising) is that the very people who attacked America for its double standards back then - the notorious "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch" theory of global power play - attack it now for trying to "impose" its own political system and structures on the rest of the world."...
"Yes, indeed: freedom and democracy are dangerous things, as so many of the Left-wing commentators are saying with a cynicism that beggars belief. Do we really want to hold elections [in Iraq], they ask, in a country where the outcome might give power to the majority Shia and thereby aggravate the insanely dangerous Sunni terrorists? What?
What? Can you imagine what these good liberals would have said if it had been America that was insisting on forestalling elections because the results could be dangerous or unpredictable? There goes America again, they would shriek, sustaining a puppet government that is under its control, rather than allowing a country to choose its own leaders.
What exactly is being argued here? That we should withhold democratic elections out of a fear that the majority of the population will finally get political power?"

"Democracy on the Wing" (Michael Rubin, The Washington Post, 2005/01/26)
"On the streets of Baghdad, the campaign is also in full swing. Iraqis ponder voting by the number. There are more than 250 election slates, representing approximately 7,000 candidates. A lottery assigned each slate a ballot position between 101 and 365. Driving to Kadhimiya, a largely Shiite neighborhood in Baghdad, I see walls covered with posters for Slate 169, the Iraqi National Alliance. The posters alternately show a burning candle or the images of Sistani and the late Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq Sadr superimposed over the number 169. Streets along Baghdad's now-decrepit Abu Nawas corniche are emblazoned with posters advertising the Constitutional Monarchy Movement's leader, Sharif Ali bin Hussein, a Sunni businessman who has managed to attract significant tribal support. In a sign of tolerance and political maturity, competing campaigns do not obstruct one another's posters.
To Iraqis, the elections are no longer theoretical. With voting less than a week away, there is electricity in the air. Pundits and politicians can discuss whether the elections should go forward, but for most Iraqis, such debates are moot. Democracy may be a process, but it is one in which Iraqis are ready to take the first step."

"A Test on 'Tyranny'" (Anne Applebaum, The Washington Post, 2005/01/26)
Applebaum on the report by Human Rights Watch on Iraqi police abuse of Iraqi citizens: "More to the point, torture, if it persists, and human rights violations, if they continue, will eventually destroy the legitimacy of the U.S. presence in Iraq altogether. Myself, I never needed weapons of mass destruction, and I accept the idea that the destruction of a regime such as Hussein's can sometimes be just cause for invasion. But it is illogical to expect anyone, anywhere, to accept the straightforward substitution of one hideous regime for another. For these reasons alone, the Human Rights Watch report should not be treated as the final word. It should inspire a public U.S. government investigation and, if necessary, a public U.S. government condemnation -- even if that means a public disagreement with our new allies in Iraq just after their elections." (See also: "Iraqi forces accused of torturing detainees" (Roula Khalaf and Steve Negus, Financial Times, 2005/01/25))

"Insurgents Vowing to Kill Iraqis Who Brave the Polls on Sunday" (Dexter Filkins, The New York Times, 2005/01/26)
"BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 25 - The black sedan made its way down Madaris Street, the young men inside tossing leaflets out the window.
"This is a final warning to all of those who plan to participate in the election," the leaflets said. "We vow to wash the streets of Baghdad with the voters' blood." ...
The leaflets, like many turning up on sidewalks and doorsteps across the capital, were chilling in their detail: they warned Iraqis to stay at least 500 yards away from voting booths, for each would be the potential target of a rocket, mortar shell or car bomb. The leaflet suggested that Iraqis stay away from their windows, too, in case of blasts.
"To those of you who think you can vote and then run away," the leaflet warned, 'we will shadow you and catch you, and we will cut off your heads and the heads of your children.'"

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

News and commentary:

"U.S. Hostage Pleads for His Life in Iraq" (Sameer N. Yacoub, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/01/25)
"An American hostage pleaded for his life with a rifle pointed at his head in a video released Tuesday, while nine Iraqis, including a senior judge, were killed in a series of attacks that highlighted the security risks ahead of this weekend's elections. ...
In the video, hostage Roy Hallums spoke slowly, rubbing his hands as he sat with the barrel of the rifle inches from his head. He said he had been arrested by a "resistance group" because "I have worked with American forces." He appealed to Arab leaders, including Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, to save his life.
Hallums, 56, was seized Nov. 1 along with Filipino Robert Tarongoy during an armed assault on their compound in Baghdad's Mansour district. The two worked for a Saudi company that does catering for the Iraqi army. The Filipino was not shown.
"I am please asking for help because my life is in danger because it's been proved I worked for American forces," the bearded Hallums said. "I'm not asking for any help from President Bush (because I know of his selfishness and unconcern for those who've been pushed into this hellhole."
Hallums said he was asking for help from 'Arab rulers especially President Moammar Gadhafi because he's known for helping those who are suffering.'"

"Ahmad Again" (Christopher Hitchens, Slate, 2005/01/25)
"While the fascists and the fundamentalists make common cause in opting to ruin the society rather than let it breathe, the advance of semi-secular concepts among the Shiite majority and the Kurds is rather better than one might have dared to hope. ...
This contrasts rather boldly with the pathetic liberal default position that violence, and ethnic and religious difference, demand that the elections be "postponed." To do so would be an open surrender to violence and, if sincerely meant, would further mean that no elections could ever be held, lest they inflame sectarian differences. These divisions arose, before we forget, as the consequence of a divide-and-rule fascist regime that engaged only in rigged plebiscites. ...
The extraordinary and undeniable thing is that, in a country that was dying on its feet and poisoning the region a couple of years ago, there is now a real political process that has serious implications for adjacent countries. The way back to Baathism and personal despotism is blocked, and the task of the clerical fanatics is in the long run an impossible one. (Ask yourself: When was the last time you read about Muqtada Sadr's supposedly unstoppable "Mahdi Army"?) Crudely but firmly, the coalition forces are meanwhile acting as the militia for those who have no militia. Whatever happens next week, this is some cause for pride."

"Results, Not Timetables, Matter in Iraq" (Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz, The Washington Post, 2005/01/25)
"The debate on Iraq is taking a new turn. The Iraqi elections scheduled for Jan. 30, only recently viewed as a culmination, are described as inaugurating a civil war. The timing and the voting arrangements have become controversial. All this is a way of foreshadowing a demand for an exit strategy, by which many critics mean some sort of explicit time limit on the U.S. effort.
We reject this counsel. The implications of the term "exit strategy" must be clearly understood; there can be no fudging of consequences. The essential prerequisite for an acceptable exit strategy is a sustainable outcome, not an arbitrary time limit. ...
A calibrated American policy would seek to split that part of the Sunni community eager to conduct a normal life from the part that is fighting to reestablish Sunni control. The United States needs to continue building an Iraqi army, which, under conditions of Sunni insurrection, will be increasingly composed of Shiite recruits -- producing an unwinnable situation for the Sunni rejectionists. But it should not cross the line into replacing Sunni dictatorship with Shiite theocracy. It is a fine line, but the success of Iraq policy may depend on the ability to walk it."

"Closing the Neocon Circle" (Michael Hirsh, Newsweek, 2005/01/25)
Inaugural Address XII: "Natan Sharansky can bestow no higher praise than to call George W. Bush an honorary “dissident.” And the Israeli cabinet minister says he is elated that the U.S. president, in his second inaugural speech last week, appeared to fully embrace Sharansky’s vision of foreign policy. “It’s clear to me that he read my book,” Sharansky, a squat cannonball of a man with a heavy Russian accent, told NEWSWEEK. “I only wish that my mentor, Andrei Sakharov, were alive to see this,” Sharansky added, referring to the Soviet nuclear scientist who risked his life and career to help open up the Soviet Union.
Bush, in his Jan. 20 address, did prove himself a dissident in one sense. When the president declared that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,” he was delivering a dissent from traditional U.S. foreign policy, one that could have been lifted whole from the pages of Sharansky’s new book, “The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror.” (Public Affairs; New York). Bush, in fact, has been pressing the book on aides and friends in recent weeks and urging them to read it. And it is clear that Bush’s speech — as well as Sharansky’s influence — could have huge consequences for America in the coming years."

More on and by Natan Sharansky:
"Wanted: Israeli neocons" (Caroline Glick, The Jerusalem Post, 2004/12/17)
"The Case for Democracy" (Jamie Glazov, FrontPageMagazine, 2004/12/17)
"Two Great Dissidents" (Joel C. Rosenberg, National Review, 2004/11/19)
"The View from the Gulag" (The Weekly Standard, from the 2004/06/21 issue)
"The prisoners' conscience" (Natan Sharansky, The Jerusalem Post, 2004/06/06)
"On Hating the Jews" (Natan Sharansky, Commentary, from the November 2003 issue)
"Free Palestine Can Become a Reality" (Natan Sharansky, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/07/03)
"What Are We Fighting For?" (Natan Sharansky, The Wall Street Journal, 2001/10/10)

"The Democratic Ideal" (Joshua Muravchik, The Wall Street Journal, 2005/01/25)
Inaugural Address XI: "Wouldn't. Couldn't. Shouldn't. These were the refrains of the cognoscenti in response to President Bush's inaugural address. ... Peggy Noonan, writing on this page, reminded the president that "this is not heaven, it's earth." In a similar vein, Mark Helprin called the president's advocacy of "evangelical democracy" a "manic idea." ...
Those who are skeptical of injecting issues of freedom, democracy and human rights into the conduct of foreign policy call themselves "realists," and they accuse their opposite numbers -- the so-called idealists -- of an almost juvenile enthusiasm. But a sober reading of the historical evidence shows that President Bush and his fellow idealists are more realistic than the "realists." ...
Despite the skeptics, all historical evidence suggests that democracy can indeed spread further, that America can serve as an agent of its advancement, as it has done all over the world, and that democracy's spread will make the world safer. And for those who doubt that President Bush is earnest about his campaign for freedom, I refer them to Mullah Omar or Saddam Hussein."

More on the Inaugural Address:
"Moore Award Nominee" (Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, 2005/01/25)
"Our Blindness" (Mark Helprin, The Wall Street Journal, 2005/01/24)
"High Hopes, Hard Facts" (Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, from the 2005/01/31 issue)
"He's a worldbeater, all right" (Mark Steyn, Chicago Sun-Times, 2005/01/23)
"A Higher Realism" (Robert Kagan, The Washington Post, 2005/01/23)
"Oh, say can you see..." (David Aaronovitch, The Observer, 2005/01/23)
"Ideals and Reality" (David Brooks, The New York Times, 2005/01/22)
"On Tyranny" (William Kristol, The Weekly Standard, from the 2005/01/31 issue)
"Way Too Much God" (Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal, 2005/01/21)
"Smiles for the family, a fiery warning for the world" (Julian Borger, The Guardian, 2005/01/21)
"Inaugural Address by President George W. Bush" (The White House, 2005/01/20)

"Europe has taken over the Holocaust" (Mark Steyn, The Daily Telegraph, 2005/01/25)
Steyn on the Holocaust commemoration: "But look at how my colleagues at The Spectator chose to mark the anniversary. They ran a reminiscence by Anthony Lipmann, the Anglican son of an Auschwitz survivor, which contained the following sentence: "When on 27 January I take my mother's arm - tattoo number A-25466 - I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah."
Jenin? Would that be the notorious 2002 "Jenin massacre"? ...
Yet, despite the fact that the Jenin massacre is an obvious hallucination of Fleet Street's Palestine groupies, its rise to historical fact is unstoppable. To Lipmann, those 52-56 dead Palestinians weigh in the scales of history as heavy as six million Jews. And what's Fallujah doing bringing up the rear in his catalogue of horrors? In rounding up a few hundred head-hackers, the Yanks perpetrated another Auschwitz? These comparisons are so absurd as to barely qualify as 'moral equivalence.'" (See also: "How I became a Jew" (Anthony Lipmann, The Spectator, from the 2005/01/22 issue). Also: "The Spectator sport of Jew-baiting" (Melanie Phillips, melaniephillips.com, 2005/01/21))

"So now we are to confront the crazy truth about asylum? Of course not" (Camilla Cavendish, The Times, 2005/01/25)
"If our political class are past masters at ignoring uncomfortable realities, immigration and asylum must top the list. The more often people tell pollsters that they think there are too many immigrants, the more the politicians retreat to a bunker marked “do not disturb: knee-jerk soundbites only”. Now that Michael Howard has braved the Great Unmentionable, the issue will get more airing. But if that airing is to resolve anything, we must be prepared to say what we really mean.
It is completely wrong to characterise this debate as xenophobic. If you dig behind the headlines, most people are not angry about Sudanese families fleeing hideous conflict, or Indian doctors setting up shop in Harley Street. They do not care whether their newsagent is Arab, Hindu or Slav. What they are incandescent about is that their Government has apparently doubled the number of people entering the country, without telling anybody that is its policy. They fear that the official calculation of a doubling is a wild underestimate because Britain has lost control of its borders. And they wonder why the Government goes on tinkering with its complex process for accepting and rejecting applications, consigning many desperate people to a hellish limbo, when almost 90 per cent of those who are eventually rejected stay here anyway." (See also: "Howard calls for asylum cap" (Matthew Tempest, The Guardian, 2005/01/24))

"Moore Award Nominee" (Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, 2005/01/25)
Inaugural Address X: "'George Bush's second inaugural extravaganza was every bit as repugnant as I had expected, a vulgar orgy of triumphalism probably unmatched since Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French in Notre Dame in 1804. The little Corsican corporal had a few decent victories to his escutcheon. Lodi, Marengo, that sort of thing. Not so this strutting Texan mountebank, with his chimpanzee smirk and his born-again banalities delivered in that constipated syntax that sounds the way cold cheeseburgers look, and his grinning plastic wife, and his scheming junta of neo-con spivs, shamans, flatterers and armchair warmongers, and his sinuous evasions and his brazen lies, and his sleight of hand theft from the American poor, and his rape of the environment, and his lethal conviction that the world must submit to his Pax Americana or be bombed into charcoal.' - Mike Carlton, Sydney Morning Herald." (See also: "The emperor of vulgarity" (Mike Carlton, The Sydney Morning Herald, 2005/01/22))

"Rising UK anti-semitism blamed on media" (Chris McGreal, The Guardian, 2005/01/25)
"Britain suffered the sharpest rise in anti-semitic attacks of any country last year, and British press coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a leading cause, according to an Israeli government report.
Natan Sharansky, the cabinet minister responsible for the diaspora, said the report found that violent attacks on Jews in Britain rose by almost half.
The government's global forum against anti-semitism, which wrote the report, said France again topped the list of anti-semitic violence with 96 attacks, but the number in Britain rose sharply to 77. ...
Mr Sharansky attributed the British figures to "years of hostile reporting and commentary about Israel in the British press now spilling into the streets".
His officials singled out the Guardian and the BBC, accusing them of "likening Israel to a Nazi state". The Independent was also criticised."

"Iraqi forces accused of torturing detainees" (Roula Khalaf and Steve Negus, Financial Times, 2005/01/25)
"The last justification for the war?". No, we are not biased...: "Iraqi security forces stand accused by a leading international human rights organisation of committing systematic torture against detainees, raising alarm over the conduct of Iraq's post-war interim government less than a week before the country's first democratic elections.
In a report issued on Tuesday, the New York-based Human Rights Watch calls on the Iraqi government to investigate widespread abuses and urges the US to increase the number of advisers at detention centres run by the Iraqi ministry of the interior. ...
“The last justification for the war is that we want to make life better for Iraqis but then at least we must have a government that honours and respects people,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of HRW's Middle East and North Africa division." (See also the full report: "The New Iraq?: Torture and ill-treatment of detainees in Iraqi custody" (Human Rights Watch, 2005/01/25))

"Al Qaeda's New Front" (Frontline, 2005/01/25)
"In "Al Qaeda's New Front," airing Tuesday, January 25, at 9 P.M. on PBS (check local listings) FRONTLINE, in association with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and The New York Times, investigates the alarming threat radical Salafist jihadists pose to Western Europe and its allies, including the United States.
"It might come as a surprise to many Americans," says correspondent Lowell Bergman, "But the most pressing threat to the United States is not the suspected Al Qaeda cells at home, but rather the cells operating overseas, especially in Western Europe."
Home to an estimated 18 million Muslims, Western Europe has become the new and deadly battleground in the war on terror. That's because disenfranchised Muslims‹inspired by local radical imams and jihadist Web sites‹are taking up the cause of jihad. And Al Qaeda, once just a loose organization on the continent, has morphed into a powerful ideological movement.
"The threat is before us, not behind us," France's top antiterror judge, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, tells FRONTLINE. "And we are quite concerned....I think that the terrorist threat today is more globalized, more scattered, and more powerful...than it was before September 11."

"Militant Imams Under Scrutiny Across Europe" (Don van Natta Jr. and Lowell Bergman, The New York Times, 2005/01/25)
"LONDON, Jan. 24 - In nightly sermons broadcast on the Internet, Sheik Omar Bakri Muhammad, a 46-year-old Syrian-born cleric, has urged young Muslim men all over the world to support the Iraq insurgency on the front line of "the global jihad," investigators say.
He struck a similarly defiant tone this month at a rally attended by 500 people at a central London meeting hall, where a giant screen behind him showed images of the World Trade Center falling. "Allah akbar!" - "God is great" - some audience members shouted at the images. ...
News of the central London rally, which was first reported by United Press International, and portions of Sheik Omar's nightly Internet sermons, have alarmed senior British officials. In one sermon last week, Sheik Omar called Al Qaeda "the victorious group" that