Turning the Wrong @#$*(&%# Corner - As Atrios notes, US military deaths are going back up this month after February's low. I'm wondering why, sincerely. I'm convinced that a big reason casualties dropped was that we were keeping our troops out of harm's way as much as possible. (We are conducting a new anti-guerrilla sweep of Baghdad this week, though.) This is what pisses the ordinary Iraqi the most: they blame the US for not providing better security.
In this, they're like a lot of Democratic bloggers, who criticise the Administration for not doing more to provide safety in post-invasion Iraq. I suspect the Dems are wrong on this, and that if we did have our troops out there in full "helpful mode" the Iraqis would like it a lot less than they think they would. That ABC News poll reports that 3 out of 4 Iraqis have never seen an American soldier, an astonishing number. But it also reports that, of those who have encountered American troops, half formed a favorable impression and half an unfavorable one.
That's a bad ratio.
Yes, man bites dog and Henley says the government is probably pursuing the best available policy - within their own self-set parameters, at least. "Doing more" would just piss off more Iraqis. We've always known that 100,000 troops was going to be inadequate for the occupation. That was assuming the occupiers did stuff. Might as well be inadequate but piss fewer locals off while doing so. (Counter argument: the current policy annoys everybody, because the people who don't see any Americans resent us for the lack of security. Ah, but remember, the idea is to minimize the production of new terrorists. Abstract resentment for a service unprovided lacks the special tang of up close and personal humiliation by an actual overbearing foreign soldier. Counter argument two: The Marines have gone the high-contact route with some apparently genuine success. Yes, and when the Army becomes the Marines, and dismounted cavalry become trained infantry, then we can try again.) Given that Iraqi attitudes remain largely hopeful (again per ABC), and that twice as many Iraqis trust the new Iraqi police and army as trust the CPA and occupation troops (rightly or wrongly), it's hard to say the Administration has made the wrong call.
But it does leave the mystery of why casualties are going up. Is it because of the current troop rotation? Or have the insurgents come up with some new wrinkles?
Dilatory News Blogging - If Ayman al-Zawahiri did escape, it's too goddam bad. It's pretty obvious that if he's not already running the show, he's being positioned as heir apparent upon OBL's trip the the 72 brand-new dialysis machines in Paradise. If he was within the Pakistani cordon in the first place and the whole thing wasn't staged to give us a little pick-me-up after a bad week.
King Conscience Is Dead - Prominent hawkish pundit David Warren on the lesson of the Spanish elections: "Then as now we made a lot of blather about "democracy". But screw democracy . . . "
Via Flit, noted convert to Firefox.
I H8 Eerie Prescience! - A poem I never finished to my satisfaction written after the 2000 election included the line "the future belongs to caudillos in mufti." I was actually thinking about the Gore campaign's lawyers and symps on certain elections boards, but the concept may have other applications. (Via Electrolite Sidelights.)
Fiendishly Clever - The Nielsen Haydens decide to drive traffic to their weblogs by providing updated content. Well, hey - it worked on me. Making Light recounts the latest incident of Passion-inspired violence, and Electrolite notes that - actually, I'm speechless. Simply speechless.
When Titans Clash! - Late-Night Conversation at a Herndon Citgo:
Me: Jeez, it really wasn't about the oil!
Eve Tushnet: How much?
Me: Dollar seventy-nine a gallon!
Neilalien: Come on, Jim. You didn't think the savings were going to trickle down to your level, did you?
Thus went part of the comics blog-semi-comics blog crossover event of the year. The Mysterious Palindrome was a lot of fun to meet, and among the three of us, we settled every single extant issue related to comics, blogging and comics blogging over a Ruby Tuesday's Big Easy appetizer plate. We even found out how Neil became such a big Doctor Strange fan: he looks exactly like the character, and has since he was seven years old. (There were other reasons too, some of them actually factual.)
Anyway, tons of fun, and Eve left me with a bagful of stuff to read. Can you believe she, for the sake of politeness, sat through a 25-mile car ride with copies of the newest issues of New X-Men and Daredevil next to her and forebore reading them because it would be unsociable? If that's not Lenten self-discipline, I don't know what is.
If You Can't Say Something Nice at least say it in rhyme. Politics aside, Frederick Turner's imprecation against the Spaniards is not bad for one day's work, though the second stanza could use some attention:
El Cid has risen from his tomb, he's parted with Ximene, His people, whose bright honor still has never suffered stain, Now run from battle, hide their heads: he is ashamed of Spain.
That word "still" is all wrong. Turner is saying that until now there has been no stain on Spain's honor.
I'll confess to a level of personal pain here: Turner's epics and his early nonfiction were a huge influence on me. His "popular" treatment of his themes, The Culture of Hope, was weak - a book's worth of thesis statements looking for supporting paragraphs - but his earlier essay collections, Natural Classicism and Tempest, Flute and Oz were superb. We once shared a cab which I determined probably held every single American poet who had ever had to check his poem's math on a calculator.
But I'm all for poets mixing it up in the public sphere. Left wing poets have done this for decades now, and right wing poets ought to be able to mix it up too.
Speaking of poetry, Obsidian Wings decided to have an online poetry slam last night. UO represents. (See comment thread.)
TV Guide - Kelly Jane Torrance, whose picture appears in the "Target Demographic" section of the New Criterion's marketing plan, praises a Spike TV cartoon. It's not just the idea of a TV show where "the conservative [s]sn't the idiot" that appeals. This Just In sounds technically innovative too:
The show is made using the digital Flash animation system. This bare-bones technique, widely used on the Internet to create everything from punk rock kittens to fake political ads, allows the creators to write and produce each episode the very week it airs, thus giving the show a just-torn-from-yesterday's-headlines feel.
If I ever find myself in front of the TV with no basketball game on, I plan to check it out. (Hey, I've seen two episodes of Monk this year. That's more television fiction than I watched all last year. I'm lightening up!)
UPDATE: Preempting any smartasses, yes, I know perfectly well that Flash animations are not, in themselves, technically innovative. But their use here - reducing production time on a cartoon by, most likely, orders of magnitude, is. So I'm claiming.
Good News and Bad News - Working on an article tonight, and thus no time to discuss the newest ABC News (et al) poll of Iraq. So this link is pretty much a sticky-note. My immediate impression is that the reporting on the poll is pretty darn good, in contrast to a lot of articles about polls. I do wish that they had been able to break Sunni and Shia out from the "Arab" category, and been more consistent in breaking out Arab from Kurd. (They do it for some major questions but not others.) Lots and lots of discussion fodder here.
Brief note: Hesiod is mad at Glenn Reynolds for scanting the percentage of Iraqis who say it's "acceptable" to attack Coalition troops, publishing a dismissive Reynolds e-mail that reads:
Nah. Lots of your antiwar cronies think it's "acceptable" for Palestinians to blow up school buses. But that doesn't mean they'll strap on the bombs themselves.
Actually, I could sort of see Glenn's point here, except for the sleight-of-hand involved. Firstly, he's partly right. (There remains the problem of Iraqis who won't strap on bombs themselves but will either abet those who do or look the other way in specific cases of actual attacks. They are a problem for us. Viz. Northern Ireland or the urban drug wars of the 1990s here.) The problem is that Glenn's "cronies" consider that Palestinians who find it "acceptable" for others to blow up Israeli civilian targets constitute a "culture of death," even if they are not personally strapping bombs on. So the Palestinians somehow excuse the Iraqis without themselves being excused. How? Magic!
Culture, Commerce and Cred Crap - The Dual Lens calls a couple of critics on the destructive (sometimes fatally so) mania for "authenticity" in rock music:
Coley is particularly venemous, he is a critic who assumes that if anyone beyond he and his friends have heard a song, it automatically sucks-and even his friends are suspect.
Lots more good stuff, embedded in a review of a documentary about the legendary band, Half Japanese.
Check Your Calendars and tell me if it's April Fool's Day yet:
WHAT do you give someone who's been proved innocent after spending the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn't commit?An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if you're David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, the choice is simple: you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty's Pleasure in British prisons.
On Tuesday, Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than £3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted. The logic is that the innocent man shouldn't have been in prison eating free porridge and sleeping for nothing under regulation grey blankets.
Blunkett's fight has been described as "outrageous", "morally repugnant" and the "sickest of sick jokes", but his spokesmen in the Home Office say it's a completely "reasonable course of action" as the innocent men and women would have spent the money anyway on food and lodgings if they weren't in prison. The government deems the claw-back 'Saved Living Expenses'.
Warning: British Press! (In this case, the Sunday Herald.) But man. (Via the Modulator.)
That's One Way to Do It . . .
In order for us to reach a broader market, RAIJIN COMICS, RAIJIN GRAPHIC NOVELS, and MASTER EDITION will be placed on hiatus for the time being.
Via Grotesque Anatomy.
In Memoriam - Bob Zangas is dead. He was a civilian volunteer with the Iraqi Coalition Provisional Authority, murdered by rogue Iraqi policemen last Tuesday, on the road between Hilla and Karbala. He was also a blogger. Here is his final entry. I find it terribly sad. Before volunteering for his reconstruction job, he did five-months in Iraq as a marine reservist, and planned to wrap up his civilian work in time to return to Iraq with the marines in June. He leaves behind three children. He was clearly one of the big-hearted, cheerful young men this country has a genius for producing. His weblog remains as an excellent primary source on America's involvement in Iraq, for good and ill. Would that he too remained.
(Via Outside the Beltway.)
More Pain in Spain - At last it can be revealed: the "one of my top sources" for Spanish-language analysis was Matthew Yglesias, who e-mails his take on the Spanish-language coverage of the pre-3/11 Rajoy campaign. Rajoy, to remind people, was the chosen successor of outgoing Prime Minister Aznar. His name does not come up nearly as much as you might expect, which is surprising since he's the guy who lost the election:
My reading of those stories is that Rajoy was trying to avoid bringing the issue up -- the war was unpopular and, from the Spanish perspective, basically over. Just a few troops over there, miniscule casualty rates. The fact that the Socialists seemed to bring it up way more than the PP makes me think this is some unpopular policy the PP was stuck with, but that the electorate didn't regard as a big deal. Like how the Democrats are hoping they can just run and hide every time someone says "gay marriage."
This tends to confirm the English-language reporting I found from before the Madrid atrocities.
And there you go, my hawkish friends: your stalwart, brave allies, true leaders for sure, spent the election campaign hiding from their policy like a - like a simile! An apt simile! Probably one involving little kids or housepets.
Funniest Spain quote of the day comes from my colleague Sean T. Collins: "The thing is, though, that thus far Zapatero has shown no sign that his lip-service to getting tough on terrorism is anything but lip-service:" I mean, what the fuck, right? The man's been elected for hours now. He probably hasn't actually taken office yet - he may not have even had a bowel movement since the vote - but that's no goddamned excuse. Down with the Do-Nothing Zapatero Administration!
Fistful of Euros has a long analysis that, on the plus side, betrays some preexisting understanding of Spanish politics, and on the minus side, contains the phrase "Spain is a society of contradictions." Read it anyway.
The Fistful of Euros item ties in with something I read in an Obsidian Wings comment thread: Discussing the apparent Moroccan origin of several of the bombers, the commenter suggested that perhaps the lesson of the bombing was that maybe the United States should be doing more militarily in North Africa. Well, I don't know - how about Spain doing something militarily in North Africa? They know the territory better and may soon have 1,300-odd extra troops to spare. Could that be what Zapatero means by "making terrorism a top priority?" We shall see. Sometimes the hawks are like a Mom who complains that Dad never does enough around the house, then insists "Let me do that!" when he bestirs himself. (No, Loyal Reader, this simile is not autobiographical in origin.) Even if Spain is not already highly-motivated to do this, a nimble US government would suggest it take over the North African account in exchange for reduced unpleasantness about the Mesopotamia situation.
And hopefully Thomas Nephew has finally had the chance to read the rest of my item on the politics of the Spanish election. His assertion that "Jim Henley suggests even if the PP had won, Aznar's successors might not have stuck with the US in Iraq -- a theory based on an article about rightist Spanish resentments about their lost empire" is an accurate characterization of the entire article up until the many, many paragraphs that follow the first pull-quote. But I probably should have also excerpted the passages from the first Herald-Tribune article that detail the structural reasons why Spain can't long sustain the Iraq deployment on top of its commitments in Afghanistan etc. Thomas, by the way, is an eminence gris of blogging, with archives back to September 23, 2001, and has become the closest thing going to "Unqualified Offerings Watch" lately. If you're looking for frequently critical and sometimes indignant takes on what you read here, Newsrack Blog is your likeliest source. He also provides particularly in-depth coverage of German-language news.
The Pain in Spain - Follow-ups on last night. Atrios e-mails
Mrs. Atrios is intimately acquainted with Spanish politics and a native spanish speaker, so we spent Sunday listening to/reading spanish media sources.Short version - people turned out to vote out PP because they though (correctly or incorrectly) that they'd tried to play politics with the bombing and kept pushing the ETA story even after they should've known better.
When I was convinced that the election results represented, in an uncomplicated way, a referendum on Aznar's Iraq policy prompted by the bombings, I discovered that what I intended to write had already been written by Diana Moon. See here and here. I'd have put some things differently and changed some emphases, but she covers the important points.
Let's stick with the American conventional wisdom for a second, that the election was all about us, meaning, the Bush Administration's construction of the meaning of "War on Terror" and Spain's role in same. From that perspective, the election results do indeed look for a victory for Al Qaeda. But from this, the hawks draw the wrong conclusions (as usual).
Aznar joined a war that 90% of his countrymen opposed. He was a fool to do so. People around the world have shown themselves willing to endure great hardship for wars they think necessary. For wars they think unnecessary, or wrong, or evil, they are not. Aznar's policy could only sustain itself so long as it exacted only minimal costs from an electorate that opposed it almost universally. That is the most hubristic assumption about war that one could make. It is deeply, deeply irresponsible politics. And yes, what happened will, rightly or wrongly, embolden Al Qaeda to try this stunt again. But like I say, the hawks totally misunderstand the significance - what it really means is that Aznar should not have joined the Iraq War in the first place, and the US should not have inveigled him to do so. "We" went out of our way to weaken our own alliance in advance.
To-Do List, en Espanol - We are all talking about the message of the Spanish elections and it occurred to me that we may, as a class, have no fucking clue. For instance, I didn't fully realize (blatherspeak for "plain didn't know") that PM Aznar himself was voluntarily stepping down already - today's election pitched his Popular Party successor against the Socialists, not Aznar himself. (Hat tip: The Talking Dog.)
This may be a clue. A clue to what puzzle? This one: 95% of Spaniards opposed Aznar's decision to join Gulf War Phase II. So even before the terrible bombings of Thursday morning, why was his Party doing so well? Among the possibilities I considered:
o Man, even in Spain people hate socialism;
o Modern Western countries don't sweat seemingly low-cost overseas wars, so long as they remain low-cost.
But it turns out there may be more: maybe Spanish voters doubted the post-Aznar Right's commitment to his Iraq policy in the first place. Consider a poorly edited Herald-Trib chin-puller about Spanish politics that came out the morning of March 11 by Dan O'Brien. Its thesis is that Aznar's foreign policy will not survive him, and not just because the Socialists oppose it:
Less obvious, but arguably more important given the likely outcome of the election, is that the Spanish right also does not feel a strong bond to the United States. A traditional distrust of the great Protestant nation in this most Roman Catholic of countries is one reason.But more important was the U.S. role in depriving Spain of its last colonies. In the Spanish-American war of 1898, the United States ejected Spain from her last remaining colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. For many on the right this humiliation is still seen as the beginning of Spain's decline.
Aznar's successor, and the Popular Party's candidate for prime minister, prime ministerial candidate for the Popular Party, Mariano Rajoy, avoids talking of foreign policy when he can. Unlike Aznar, who has come to seems almost uncomfortable not taking sides, Rajoy is an altogether more emollient figure and is likely to seek, at the least, to steer a middle ground between Europe and America if new divisions emerge.
There are other reasons to believe that Aznar's foreign policy is likely to be reversed.
The implication here is that the Right's performance in pre-election polls was not a sign of support for Aznar's Iraq policy at all.
Now, back in November, Rajoy "ruled out a withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq in the short term," saying it would be "irresponsible" to "abandon 26 million people whose future is extremely worrying."
A John Vinocur think-piece from the March 7 Herald-Trib declares both that
Rajoy's tactic appears to be one of letting the Socialists go on about the war without response. After all, the method largely worked when the Popular Party easily won regional elections just after Saddam Hussein's ouster.
and
The Socialists' platform on Iraq comes down to Zapatero saying, if he gets in, he'd pull out the Spanish contingent on June 30 - although on the not terribly likely condition that the United Nations has taken over responsibility for the country.
and notes both that the Socialists were explicitly arguing before March 11th that Aznar's Iraq policy had made Spain a primary target for terrorism and that
In fact, a senior official who works with both Aznar and Rajoy in the Moncloa executive complex believes the Socialist attempt to tie the government's good relations with the Bush administration to an alleged new element of daily danger in Spanish life may have backfired.
And then backfired again, apparently.
Here's the thing: you can find a few official Rajoy statements of support for the government's Iraq policy in English-language reports Google pulls up. That makes the case that Rajoy was with the program. What you can't get from most of those reports is a sense of how Rajoy was campaigning. You may have heard that George W. Bush considers himself, first and foremost, a "war president." And he's going to make sure you know it. Support or oppose the US President's Iraq policy (and I'll leave you in suspense re my own opinion on the matter . . . ), he isn't soft-pedalling it.
What about Rajoy? The Herald-Trib says the Popular Party have mostly not said anything about Iraq - they've left that to the Socialists. Are they right? Let's see: A Google Site search of Rajoy's official website for "Iraq" finds a single result - the same November quote discussed above, in Spanish. A similar search of georgewbush.com finds 23 pages of hits.
Other links: Expatica.com from January. ("But support for the war, which Spaniards largely associate with Aznar himself, only dented the PP support for a few months." My emphasis.)
And it can't have helped Rajoy that he was prominent in blaming ETA in the early hours and days after the Madrid atrocities. See News 24 and the Hindustan Times. Leave aside that, apparently, many Spanish voters suspected the PP, and therefore Rajoy, of dissembling about the ETA's role for political reasons - what they saw days before the election was Rajoy himself getting it wrong. That can't help your case to be Prime Minister in the electorate's eyes, and the problem may have been compounded by the fact that Rajoy was, as Aznar's Interior Minister, responsible for fighting the ETA in the first place. Jeez, buddy, if you don't know this what do you know? seems like a plausible reaction by some voters.
Let me be clear: I am not saying it doesn't look to the outside world, including Al Qaeda, like Spain turned out the PP as a reaction to being attacked. It does look like that. I'm saying that, based on various reports, it may not look like that to Spaniards themselves. And on the available English-language evidence, the PP appears to have been playing down its Iraq policy in the first place.
I may be wrong about that. English-language reporting on non-English-speaking nations is always fragmentary. I have sought an expert opinion on the Spanish-language evidence from one of my top sources. But because our information on such things is inevitably fragmentary, and because we never get around to paying attention to these things until it becomes about us, we should be slow to declare their significance.
And We Are Not Saved - Duane's Interminable Ramblings (in MT's unfortunate hard-to-read default grey type) makes the case that when it comes to spam, all proposed solutions are doomed, doomed! to fail. Doomed!
The real problem here is economic and sociological. At the moment you can sell other people's attention for much less than they value it at. No technology is going to reverse that - on the contrary. It is only going to get cheaper to deliver larger volume, more sophisticated, more precisely targeted data. Email technology itself is actually irrelevent. If everyone abandons it the pressure just shifts to the next communications channel. USENET is dead; long live USENET.So what do we do then? We get used to it. In the future you will have vastly better and easier access to everyone. And everyone will have better access to you. It is a tradeoff; a concept much beloved of engineers. You will still be able to restrict/improve personal access, just as you can today, and with similar costs and benefits. In the future we will lead different lives - richer in some ways, poorer in others.
To this layman his case is compelling. Read the whole thing (as we bloggers say). He's got a set of links to more technical versions of the argument.
This Should Be Grimly Interesting - The Socialists have apparently won the Spanish elections. So! How many of those who were falling all over themselves with solidarity and compassion yesterday will suddenly discover, and unburden themselves on, deep weaknesses in the national character of our Spanish brethren? I haven't felt savage enough to start looking yet. Maybe it's already begun.
Spanish Embassy Contact Information - The Embassy in DC is at
2375 Pennsylvania Av. NW
20037 Washington D.C.
Mrs. Offering set off with the kids today to bring flowers but . . . couldn't find it. She's going to try again tomorrow.
Grimly amusing conversation with the Matron of All Offerings this afternoon.
Me: [Mrs. Offering] is taking the children down to the Spanish Embassy with some flowers.
Mom: So they'll learn a lesson. Good!
Me: The Spaniards?
If you're not in DC, you might wish to check the list of consulates.
The latest news, of course, is the arrest of five non-Spanish men apparently tied to Muslim extremist groups. I refuse to tell you What It All Means. Much pedagogy has been written in the blood of the dead this weekend already, but I'm convinced lessons can bear waiting another day or two. Saturday was the final of Spain's three national days of mourning. Perhaps Sunday we may all begin explaining to them exactly what their loss means.