Retroactive Answer to the Well, what would you do, smart guy? question from Mithras:
Since we're outsourcing the war, don't you think it might have been better to pay some Blackwater Security Contractors a few thousand bucks to assassinate Saddam, and then taken the $150 billion we've spent (so far!) and air-dropped it on the Iraqi people? They could have bought themselves a new government and satellite television.
Sure, but would they have had the critical infrastructure in place to govern themselves by the end of Ju - oh. Never mind.
Present at the Creation - I'm actually too upset by the Iraq situation and the politics of it to blog at length this evening. But if you haven't already, read ginmar's LiveJournal. She's a soldier in Iraq. There's a terrific piece on surviving an ambush the other day in a place that's pretty clearly Kut, but really, it's worth starting with her February 20th flight out of the States and scrolling up to the present. This is fine writing from a primary source (authenticity resolved to my satisfaction in a lengthy Making Light comment thread). I would rank its importance with Salam Pax's entries of last Spring and Summer. (And speaking of being upset, here's a contributor.)
UPDATE: GinMar quite reasonably locked the siege entry. Brad DeLong has the most complete quotation I've found.
Look on the Bright Side - Sean T. Collins thinks outside the box about current events. You know, it makes a certain amount of sense.
What Is To Be Done I - I promised the other day that in between the endless carping about the present situation I would try to provide some answers to the constant question hawks ask of doves, Well, what would you do, smart guy? But before we get started, I had a Eureka moment on this very topic a couple of days ago. Think of it as establishing the ground rules by which I play that game. Another mention that "The President warned us it would be a long, hard war and, really, it's going to take a generation to etc." and it hit me: okay, that cuts both ways then. I as a dove am entitled to that much time for any Cunning Plan of my own to work.
The New Minutemen - Flit finds that the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps is on the job. He's too harsh on Glenn Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan, though. It's not like the original Minutemen were helping the British. So maybe the comparison stands.
Nothing to Rice Home About - Condi Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission. Didn't see it. Work for a living. Read various reports. Oddly, Republican commentators tended to view her performance more favorably than Democratic commentatorys. Who knows why. Public commission hearings tend to be one of the worst ways we know to get at important public truths - maybe, a la Churchill, the worst way except for all the others, but plenty bad in its own right. This goes for actual Congressional committees too. The commissioners are there to strike poses as much as explore uncertainties. Because the poses struck typically involve the ritual savaging of whoever is unfortunate enough to be in the witness chair, no sane person sits himself in front of such a gathering but with her quills out and a mouthful of ready mush, to be regurgitated Orangutan-style in the brief silences between commission perorations. The Poor Man imagines an alternate universe where such things function as intended, and if you're feeling especially bitter, it will deepen your mood.
To the extent that such commissions produce anything of value, it's in the staff work phase, away from the cameras. For that reason, it will be interesting to read that August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing, though.
Quick Links - Take them for what they're worth:
Conservative hawk Tish Durbin's Iraq pieces are interesting because she gets out among actual Iraqis. Among the things you learn from her latest article is that our occupation authorities mostly don't. Durbin admits to her first bout of serious pessimism.
Here's the "It's a broad Shiite revolt article" from the NYT that everyone else linked to. I might as well.
Or not just Shiites: AFP reports that a column of Sunni and Shia Iraqis bulled through a Fallujah checkpoint to bring relief supplies to the embattled town. It's like the classic Silver Surfer comics from the 1960s, when the Surfer, appalled by humanity's fractiousness, launched demonstration attacks in hopes that he would inspire Earth to unite against him. Cool, we're the Silver Surfer! But I guess now we know what the government spokesmen meant when they said we were committed to the territorial integrity of Iraq.
Tilt, Game Over - From the Associated Press:
FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) - A U.S. helicopter fired three missiles at a mosque compound in the city of Fallujah on Wednesday, killing about 40 people as American forces battled Sunni insurgents, witnesses said.Cars ferried bodies from the scene, though there was no immediate confirmation of causalities.
Part of the wall surrounding the Abdul-Aziz al-Samarrai mosque was demolished, said AP reporter Abdul-Qader Saadi, though the mosque building was not damaged.
The strike came as worshippers gathered for afternoon prayers, witnesses said. They said the dead were taken to private homes in the area where temporary hospitals have been set up.
Angry residents gathered around the mosque after the strike. The offices of an organization of Sunni clerics next door was also lightly damaged.
We'd like to thank the people of the United States for participating in the Imperial Sweepstakes. Please pick up your "I tried to remake the Middle East, and now I'd be a fool to even take public transportation" t-shirts at the door.
We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire. If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night: the precise moment does not matter. There was no painted sign to say: 'You are now entering Imperium.' Yet it was a very old road and the voice of history was saying: 'Whether you know it or not, the act of crossing may be irreversible.' And now, not far ahead, is a sign that reads: 'No U-turns.'Garet Garrett, The Rise of Empire, 1952
From yesterday's Washington Post:
On Monday, residents of Adhamiya, a largely Sunni section of northern Baghdad, marched with followers of Moqtada Sadr, the militant Shiite cleric whose call for armed resistance was answered by local Sunnis the same afternoon, residents said.
AP story via: The Talking Dog.
Fodder - There's a lot of material in the latest George Will column on Iraq, much of it between the lines. Out from under his stiff upper lip come some pretty damning admissions. ('The transfer is to be from the Coalition Provisional Authority, whose authority does not extend throughout the country. A U.S. official in Baghdad says Sadr will be arrested if he appears "any place that we control." ') And there are the gallingly familiar, unconscious warhawk ironies, such as "freeing" Iraq by establishing our "monopoly of violence."
Consider this one of those bookmark items.
Lexicon - Behind on your gang lingo? Embarrassing yourself in front of your set with faux pas? The City of Houston wants to help. Funny, some of these terms were in my Hardy Boy's Detectives' Handbook back in the seventies, and that book hadn't been updated in twenty years. Others are pop culture commonplaces. Scanning the list for a term that wouldn't be pretty obvious if you heard it used in a sentence, the only one I'm finding is "putting in work." And even that one might be clear in context sometimes. Something tells me at least a couple of these are probably spurious, too.
Anyway, if you hear your child using these terms, there's a good chance he's either hanging out with a very wrong crowd OR watching too much Sports Center.
(Link via Mrs. Offering, who did NOT have to go to the emergency room tonight. The Matron of the Offerings is the official term for my mother.)
Busy Busy - Ferrying the Matron of the Offerings to the emergency room tonight for a recurring, non-life-threatening matter. It's a newsy day, but this site claims to be more about politics than current events anyway. The Command Post is actually a pretty good source for breaking news, and its famously hawkish contributors turn out to be surprisingly restrained in their CP writing. Max Sawicky has an important analysis of the Baby Sadr situation. Meanwhile, on Crooked Timber, John Quiggin vows that he's going to try to stick to saying "what should be done from here onwards" (Aussie for "going forward"), and will "try hard from now on to avoid debating whether the war with Iraq was a mistake." I won't be nearly so noble. Why? Because the people who got us into this would love to do it again down the road. Compiling a record of their misjudgments, misstatements and outright lies is a vital prophylactic - pre-emptive self-defense, if you will. But I will get into "what we should do from here onwards" as well.
CliffsNotes from this week: We can beat the current Sadrist uprising militarily. There's no question about that. Can we do it without two, three, many Groznys? I'm not so sure. We're certainly trying, judging by the altogether sensible words of the commander of the separate Fallujah assault. But what matters is the trendline - more Iraqis violently resisting the US, in more places, in more sophisticated attacks. Insurgents are, briefly at least, holding territory. That's new. Simply putting down the current wave of uprisings will not mean that we've destroyed the desire, capacity and will to resist. Indeed, it won't mean we haven't increased it.
These are bad times.
UPDATE: Yes, "desire" and "will" are two different things. Same with "misstatements" and "lies." So there.
Get Out Your Erasers - From CNN:
In his prewar presentation to the United Nations, Powell said, "Zarqawi's activities are not confined to this small corner of northeast Iraq. He traveled to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment, staying in the capital of Iraq for two months while he recuperated to fight another day."But one senior U.S. official now says that previous reports indicating al-Zarqawi had lost a leg "have been called into question" and that it now appears to be "seemingly true" that al-Zarqawi has both legs and is not impaired.
That official cautioned, "since we don't have him, we can't know for sure." The official would not discuss what is behind the change in opinion.
Pretty soon I'm going to start to doubt there was ever anyone named "Saddam Hussein" running Iraq. (Hat tip: Atrios.)
Seems Like OLD Times - I can commend this Glenn Reynolds item without reservation.
Change Partners - Perry de Havilland sees the bright side:
... in openly taking up arms against the coalition and its Iraqi supporters, radical leader Muqtadar al-Sadr has changed the equation: what could have been a long term intractable political problem has been turned onto a military problem with a fairly obvious and direct solution.
Word is that gas is effective in these situations. You might think, Dude! Then I have to bury all these bodies! but it's not so bad: you just dump a buch of them into the same big hole, cover it over and you're done. Till next time. But Iraq is, as you may recall from the WMD search, the size of California. There's room for a lot of holes.
Meanwhile, Alan Sullivan starts to remember everything he used to know about the effectiveness of government action.
Shall we link to the same Hayek cartoon twice in one evening? Let's.
Walk on the Wild Side - I will absolutely and totally take this one:
Which Famous Homosexual are you?
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey
Via Fresh Bilge.
My Blog Wants to Party All the Time - It's another Blogarama in Kalorama, Thursday, April 8 around 7 at the Rendezvous Lounge. Be there or be legacy media. Love to see some new blood there. Rumors that you can only attend a Blogarama if you've memorized The Road to Serfdom are entirely unfounded.
Watch Your Back - By common consensus, the most important blog item of the day is Zayed's report of what he calls a "coup" by Baby Sadr in Iraq. (I think when you've got armed mobs with a mass base in several cities it's actually, for better or worse, a revolution rather than a coup. Does "revolution" = Good and Just and Wise? By no means. But it's what it is.)
But I'm inclined to nominate this Tex entry on Antiwar.com's blog, collecting a pattern of reports in which, to quote one item
the ICDC, a paramilitary force trained by the Americans, turned on the US soldiers and started to shoot at them, according to Amid.
There's a lot of those, from Basra to Fallujah:
Members of the new Iraqi army and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps were to play support roles in the operation, but some had to be sent home today when they reported without their uniforms or ID cards, Marines said.
I imagine a number of them will make it to the battle anyway.
Well, what do you expect from a rabid anti-American site like Antiwar.com, or a rabid, anti-American public figure like US Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer:
In response to Gov. Abdulah Hassan Rashid's plea for more police officers in his province of 1.2 million people, Bremer said: ``The key is to have professional police, not just to add people who aren't trained. Many of these people who are already in the police force are corrupt, they don't understand human rights, and some of them are engaging in attacks on the coalition.''
That's from Ken Dilanian of Knight-Ridder.
Capsule Comics Reviewsso I'll suck less as a comics blogger.
Ultimates 13 (Millar and Hitch) - Finally, the conclusion to "volume one." Long, apocalyptic battle scene with a lengthy epilogue. The core of nastiness inside this work remains, but isn't as obtrusive this time around. In the right moods, I decide the book is nasty because the State is nasty; the rest of the time, I figure nasty is simply what Mark Millar knows how to do. On balance, I only sort of like this title, but I'll say this: Millar's writing of "Ultimate Hulk" is the best thing about the book. The art is full of detail and very kinetic.
The Moth Special (Martin and Rude) - This would actually make a pretty good kids comic, if there was any chance of a kid (boy) coming across it and deciding to shell out five bucks or convincing a parent to do so for a comic about a character he's never heard of. Which there isn't. The book dispenses with both the genuinely adult and pseudo-adult trappings of recent genre practice - the dialog is the furthest thing from naturalistic (on purpose, I hope); the plot is full of boy-friendly tropes from circuses to cool motorcycles. Artist Steve Rude is commonly called Kirbyesque, but there's more than a little Ditko to him, too. Truly, I'm not sure if this is a comic for boys or for our memory of boys.
Arrowsmith 6 of 6 (Busiek and Pacheco) - Last issue of this miniseries. This book has its old-school aspects as well. Specifically, writer Busiek is very, very chatty in this one. The narrative device is a single letter to two comrades about an experience all three of them shared. By the standards of contemporary comics, this issue feels overwritten. By the standards of latter-day soldier's letters, maybe it passes muster. We should pause here to contemplate the fallacy of imitative form. Carlos Pacheco's art remains magnificent. Too bad he'll be squandering it on the unreadable Superman/Batman book next. I confess to mild disappointment at the wrapup of a series I've otherwise enjoyed hugely.
The Pulse 2 (Bendis and Bagley) - Bendis pulls the same narrative trick here that he did in the recent Daredevil arc, "Hard Core" - basically, this entire issue is a flashback explaining how we got to the last panel in issue one. It's good though. That Bagley, he's an expressive cartoonist: just while writing up this comment I'm flipping through the book admiring the things he does with our (momentary) protagonist's bangs. She's adorable! All of his female characters are adorable! not in a cheescake-y look at her cleavage and gams way, but in a bigeyed, Mary Tyler Moore way. For all I know, his men are adorable too - maybe even the Vulture, who has a cameo, is unusually adorable for the Vulture. The problem comes when series star Jessica Jones shows up (which doesn't happen in issue two) - she's adorable too. Too adorable, too cute and dainty, considering the way she was rendered in her previous series, Alias. I mean, women really do glow in the early stages of pregnancy, but the visual transition between the two books has been abrupt. I'm not reconciled yet. I like everything else about Bagley, but someone needs to feed him some grumpy pills for the pages containing Our Heroine.
Light Brigade 2 of 4 (Tomasi and Snejbjerg) - I almost didn't pick this up, but I'm glad I did. (See review of last issue.) The story takes an interesting turn: all the GIs now know, for sure, that there is a God in Heaven, with Jesus and the saints and all the prophets, and much of the book is about how the knowledge changes or doesn't change the way they act. This wrinkle redeems the premise of the book - as others have noted, by seeming to ascribe the evil in our world to rebel angels and nephilim, issue one threatened to rob the story of moral valence. Issue two provides us with a more than worthy substitute. I'm in all the way now.
It's Time - That NPR Hellboy segment I tipped you to last week is available.
What did I think of the movie? Up and down. Some enjoyable stuff along the way. Ron Perlman was nice. I don't sweat comparatively minor changes like the geographical contraction of Hellboy's origin. However, I have to utter a big "the book was better" about the movie's (anti) climax. The graphic novel version of the story contains a clever, hallucinatory twist on the "true name" concept, to which the film version stands in relation as a blow-up love doll to a sexy human partner. But you gotta love a movie in which a huge red demon lures a chick out of a mental hospital with the line, "I've got beer."
Sean Collins, on the other hand, hated it.
The Wild Colonial Boy - BruceR has more on Zayed and the hawks, including this:
It's time for [Jeff Jarvis] to say whether he stands by Zeyad now, or not. Every day now that he doesn't is one more day we'll think Jarvis only likes to tout the "colonial" bloggers so long as their obeisance level remains high.
I would only add that the structural problem of imperialism is that the cooptation impulse preys on hawks and doves alike. Doves too have tended to adopt our pet Iraqis, based primarily on how much ammo they provide. Does this mean anti-interventionists are "as bad" as interventionists? Not at all. We're either better or worse, depending - worse, because we're supposed to be alert to that kind of thing; better, because this kind of institutional condescension is what we were trying to avoid in the first place.
Old business: On the Salam Pax courage Watch: Salam is working as an interpreter and employee for western media organizations, one of the most dangerous jobs in Iraq. James "Fuck you, Salam" Lileks is still e-mailing columns from his house in Minnesota.
From the Insight magazine link:
The other truly scary aspect of this is that the killings of Omar Kamal (Time magazine) and Selwan al-Niemi (Voice of America) were not random violence. They were threatened for working with American media outlets and then stalked and killed. Selwan was killed with his child and mother. When his wife, who worked as a fixer for Knight-Ridder, returned from out of the country to bury her husband and their child, banners at the mosque announced she was next. She's since fled the country. As has another Time fixer who worked with Kamal.A fixer who worked for the Washington Post had a grenade thrown at his house and was warned to not work for journalists. The Post, as has Time, has moved its bureau to what the newspaper considers a more secure location. The new location is a hotel complex that regularly gets hit by rockets and mortars by insurgents.
These killings and threats not only mean that reporters have become specific fair game for anticoalition insurgents, but it also means that the killers know who we are, where we live and whom we employ.
So, hey: Fuck you, Lileks.
Turning the Wrong $@#*()&%# Corner, Redux - I think history may well decide that the day the CPA closed Baby Sadr's toy paper was the day we definitively lost the Iraq War. They'll disagree on whether it was inevitable, which has been pretty much my position. See Rafe Colburn for historical parallels. Rafe has noticed that there has been history before and after Europe 1938-45. Who knows what other lessons lurk therein?
Dept. of Old Business - I believe generally pro-US Iraqi blogger Zayed was called all kinds of names for insisting that US troops dragged off a couple of locals near Samarra and caused one to drown. Comes today's Washington Post:
The Army is investigating an allegation that U.S. troops killed an Iraqi detainee when they forced him and another man to jump from a bridge into the Tigris River, and a battalion commander has been disciplined for impeding the probe, officers familiar with the investigation said.
Essentially, the soldiers under investigation have admitted forcing the Iraqis to jump into the Tigris. The investigation now comes down to whether both men made it out alive, as the soldiers claim, or only one, as the one known survivor insists.
A body was recovered from the river about 10 days after the incident, Rudesheim said, but military authorities are not sure it is the man who was detained that night. Investigators have received another report that the man is alive in Samarra. To this day, Rudesheim said, soldiers in the patrol "still contend they saw both men getting out of the water, up a slight embankment, as they departed."In any case, he said, "forcing these detainees into the water was very wrong, and soldiers are facing either judicial or nonjudicial action, pending the outcome of the investigation."
Sassaman's "lapse in judgment," Rudesheim said, was in not telling investigators that it was true the Iraqis had been forced into the river.
Just Kos - Am I required to have an opinion on last week's dustup over Marcos Zuniga's deprecation of the contract security personnel killed and mutilated in Fallujah? Crap. That's what I figured. How about if I have a bunch of opinions?
1) Private Military Corporations are inherently problematic institutions. This gets to why I'm not an anarcho-capitalist. All governments are gangs, but they're not the only gangs. Back in my usenet days, someone said something in a discussion of the competitive defense provision advocated by anarchist libertarians that has stuck with me: "Competition in goods and services is a market. Competition in force is war."
And actually, the anarcho-capitalists could be right about both the moral legitimacy and practical effectiveness of private military agencies under anarchy and it wouldn't speak to the valence of such organizations in a state system. In a state system, the PMC has a single customer, the State, and no market to discipline it. The PMC in a state system is, at best, no worse than the government with which it contracts.
2) Kos, a veteran, was upset that the Blackwater victims got more attention than the five uniformed service members also killed that day. But it seems obvious that it was the dishonor, not the death, that determined the headline placement. Ritual humiliation of corpses has more news value than garden-variety death. Homer will explain.
3) Tacitus has a good post getting beyond the notion that All PMC employees care about is profit stereotype. His case makes sense. It also doesn't change the structural problems with PMCs.
4) Blackwater is still maintaining, and various hawkish commentators are accepting, that their employees were guarding a food shipment meant for the Iraqi people when they were killed. Given the apparent lack of any other vehicles than the two SUVs in their convoy, I assume either that a) The Fallujah Papa John's is outsourcing, or b) Blackwater's account lacks completeness and accuracy.
5) I think Kos' remarks were obnoxious and silly, with a big helping of the familiar leftist horror that anyone, anywhere is doing something for money.
6) I've never been a big Daily Kos reader. My Aggregator has hit the limit on partisan Demobloggers. That said, I value space for strong opinions. As commenter Jimm put it on Maxspeak:
Are you free or what? Because, if you accept that there is "official" truth, and that leaders can legitimately "frame" the acceptable bounds of discussion, THEN YOU ARE NOT FREE!
And yes, by the way, I feel the same way about the controversy over Kim duToit's "Pussification of the Western Male" brouhaha of a few months ago. I reject completely Tacitus and Mark Kleiman's attempt to make the shunning of Kos some kind of litmus test of seriousness or patriotism, and tend to think that if Tac were to lay down the moral arbiter scepter for awhile, society would yet escape mass cannibalism and wholesale collapse.
7) I wouldn't go so far as to say the outrage over the Kos remark was either fake or even, exactly, "manufactured." But I do think it has chiefly served to distract attention from events in Iraq to altogether less salient concerns: it's yet more Wish harder, citizen! trying to plug a strategy vacuum.
This Time They've Gone Too Far - Not just mass murder, but now Spanish Islamists step on a perfectly good punch line.
Four terrorists and a Spanish special forces officer died. I feel bad about the Spanish special forces officer.
The special forces officer who died in the explosion was identified Sunday as Javier Torrontera, 41. He was married and had two children.
Vaya con Dios, Sr. Torrontera.