Just So You Know - I am not even a "middling blog." On the other hand, my resting pulse is back below sixty - not bad for a forty-three-year-old man, huh?
Congratulations are in Order to various folks:
My soon-to-be-neighbor Oliver Willis, for making blogging pay. And Oliver, we have the best blog parties down here too. See you soon!
Matthew Barganier, for his new paid job as editor of Antiwar.com. This can only be a good thing for both him and the site. See his condemnation of the Daily Mirror for its photo fakery yesterday for a taste of what I mean.
Timing Lag - Reading James Taranto making sport of the abuse of Reuters employees this morning reminded me of how so much of the historical discussion around the Iraq War and Bush-branded "War on Terror" (as opposed to the other wars against terrorists we might have fought) is bedeviled by bad frames of reference. For instance, disputants debate whether Iraq is "like Vietnam," but focus for the purpose of comparison on Vietnam in 1968 or later, when the better analog is 1963. (Last summer it was 1954 - see the recent film version of The Quiet American: time flies.) If Kerry really means it about needing more troops, then next year might be 1965.
Similar problems bedevil the infamous "Bush = Hitler" comparison. Bush isn't Hitler - don't be ridiculous. He's Kaiser Wilhelm at best. And Taranto and his ilk - columnist, blogger, message board or comment thread denizen - aren't Germans of the late 30s. They're Germans of the middle teens, soon enough to be Germans of the 20s. ("Stab in the back," anyone?)
Of course, things do move faster now than they did then.
As I Was Saying - Matt Hogan clues me in to partial confirmation of my speculation yesterday about Iraqi notables being tortured last year as part of the "special access program." From Michael Moffeit of the Denver Post:
The deaths include the killing in November of a high-level Iraqi general who was shoved into a sleeping bag and suffocated, according to the Pentagon report. The documents contradict an earlier Defense Department statement that said the general died "of natural causes" during an interrogation. Pentagon officials declined to comment on the new disclosure.Another Iraqi military officer, records show, was asphyxiated after being gagged, his hands tied to the top of his cell door. Another detainee died "while undergoing stress technique interrogation," involving smothering and "chest compressions," according to the documents.
It was a year before that, actually, that Gary Farber wrote, "This is dark territory, and I fear it." People should have listened. More from Moffeit
"Torture is the only thing you can call this," said a Pentagon source with knowledge of internal investigations into prisoner abuses. "There is a lot about our country's interrogation techniques that is very troubling. These are violations of military law."
Something else is clear: the titillating pictures of naked dudes and bondage chicks serve to distract from the stories of the greater abuses. They are a diversion from garden-variety beatings and chokings and stompings and we don't yet know what else. So long as we can be conned into eyeballing photos of "sexual humiliation," apologists can spin their woolly coverings about "hijinx" and "not so bad." Don't fall for it.
New Frontiers in Comment Spam - My LiveJournal has - gasp! - comments. Today I got a clear non-sequiter comment from a LiveJournal user that was, well, not strongly connected with anything the post was actually about. It read like comment spam, but didn't have a URL to an actual porn site or anything.
But that's the fiendishly clever part! Out of curiousity I click through to her LJ, and what do I see in the top post?
"I finally got a webcam!!"
Well of course you did, honey. And clicking through to the webcam site I discover, surprise surprise, it costs money to join!
Truth is, I have a certain admiration for the subtlety of the approach. I reported her anyway, mind you, and no, I'm not putting a link here.
PowerPoint Hate? You Want PowerPoint Hate? - Well you should, and Brett Peters is your portal. All the links you need: Tufte, Norvig, Textism, Abraham Lincoln and even Tufte in PowerPoint form. I have to say, it speaks to me.
My favorite excerpt from Edward Tufte's new jeremiad:
Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.
There's plenty more to be had, via Brett's site.
Drip Drip Drip - If there's no pattern to this Iraqi prison abuse business, why do we keep getting official statements that are patently ridiculous, like this one in CNN today:
Sanchez said he put the prison under the command of a military intelligence brigade in November to improve the facility's defenses after a series of mortar attacks in late 2003.
Really? The way you keep a prison from being shelled is to put military intelligence in charge of it? That makes a whole lot of sense.
Campaign 2004 FWIW - Mrs. O's job brings her into contact with a lot of normally pro-Republican business people in political settings. Twice this week she's encountered, in those gatherings, frustration with and even hostility toward the President. Bill of particulars includes the War and the Administration's strictly so-so "pro-market" policies. And they all wonder why the hell they have to listen to a lot of talk about gay marriage rather than the economy.
On the other hand, a coworker of hers rides the subway with people she pegs as mostly ex-military or defense contractor types. She evesdrops on their conversations and they are all anti-Kerry.
Between the Lines - Rereading the latest Hersh story on Abu Ghraib and the "special access program" known, sometimes, as "Copper Green," I was struck by the following transition:
In mid-2003, the special-access program was regarded in the Pentagon as one of the success stories of the war on terror. "It was an active program," the former intelligence official told me. "It's been the most important capability we have for dealing with an imminent threat. If we discover where Osama bin Laden is, we can get him. And we can remove an existing threat with a real capability to hit the United States-and do so without visibility." Some of its methods were troubling and could not bear close scrutiny, however.By then, the war in Iraq had begun. The sap was involved in some assignments in Iraq, the former official said. C.I.A. and other American Special Forces operatives secretly teamed up to hunt for Saddam Hussein and - without success - for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But they weren't able to stop the evolving insurgency.
My emphasis. Now here's the possibility that the article does not confirm: The methodology of the SAP against Al Qaeda is described as 'Grab whom you must. Do what you want.' There is a later stage, after the SAP has been expanded in Iraq to "cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets" Hersh's possibly self-serving intel source describes the CIA as balking. But there's also this, about the early days of the insurgency:
In the first months after the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld and his aides still had a limited view of the insurgency, seeing it as little more than the work of Baathist "dead-enders," criminal gangs, and foreign terrorists who were Al Qaeda followers. The Administration measured its success in the war by how many of those on its list of the fifty-five most wanted members of the old regime-reproduced on playing cards-had been captured.
Putting it all together:
The Special Access Program was involved in Iraq since the beginning of the post-invasion phase of the war.
The SAP's methods were, euphemistically, rough.
Everyone involved in the SAP was cool with the methods being used against "high-value" targets in Al Qaeda.
Early in the post-invasion phase of the Iraq War, the Pentagon focused on "high-value" targets among the former Baath regime.
The SAP was involved in both the hunt for Saddam and for "weapons of mass destruction."
Elements of the SAP infrastructure and superstructure only developed qualms once its purview expanded to the ordinary shlubs populating the Army prison system in Iraq.
So the question that arises is, did we, as part of the SAP, torture former regime scientists last summer as part of the WMD search? Last I checked, some of these people had never been released by US authorities, even though they pretty clearly had nothing much to tell. Is it because of what has happened to them while they're in custody?
A Bowl and Gram - Reformed paleo Gene Callahan is showing the influence of his new intellectual lodestar, Andrew Sullivan, at The Daily Douche.
Don't Be Fooled - Hiatal Moon has actually done quite a lot of blogging lately, on everything from Israeli-Palestinian issues to Abu Ghraib, all despite not blogging. NB Diana: On the question of Palestinians attacking Israeli soldiers rather than civilians. I'm pretty sure there was a journal article about this in 2002. If I recall correctly, the second intifada began with mostly non-suicide attacks mostly against military personnel, mostly by Fatah and allied secular groups. Problem was, they rarely succeeded in killing anyone. (Apparently the Israelis are even better at the "force protection" business than we are.) Then Hamas et al began detonating themselves in discos and pizza parlors (fuckers) to spectacular if ignoble effect, and the Fatah-ish changed strategies to keep up with their domestic constituency.
Let me be clear that I'm not defending the practice of targeting civilians. I condemn it. I'm just offering an explanation I saw for how things got this way.
If anyone can validate this memory with a source or link, I'd be grateful. (Mr. Jimmy, you out there?) And if any Blogger gurus can make Diana's item-specific anchors work, there will be much rejoicing on my part.
Maybe We Can Blame the Prison Scandal on Him Too - An INC spokesperson claims the US is cutting off Ahmad Chalabi's allowance. I say, check your wallet before believing, but maybe that Iranian money is all the fellow needs. Christopher Hitchens must be, as the French say, désolé.
Via Outside the Beltway, where I was actually looking for further sarin test confirmation. If we can't count on our leading conservative bloggers to give us the latest news on Weapons of Some Destruction, where can we turn?
Early Returns - Anent this morning's item, Nell Lancaster writes
I vote for lied to us, not themselves. Otherwise we'd have had confident, official lowball projections of cost, occ. length, etc., instead of "too great a range to say" and most of the cakewalk talk coming from deniable sources like Adelman and Woolsey.If this was really about the bases, and I believe it was, then they figured we'd be there a long, long time. They (Rumsfeld and Cheney) _may_ have lied to themselves about the ease of installing a remotely operable "democratic strongman" Chalabi & Co., so that they could continue to believe the basing could be pulled off with the troops available. The panicky ratcheting-up of counterinsurgency tactics, most fatally the interrogation debacle, does indicate clueless flailing more than cool "we knew it would come to this" decision-making.
This sounds likely. And I do think it was always about the bases. Which means things could get very interesting over the next few months.
Watch This Space - We may have discovered an actual chemical weapon in Iraq, as you've probably read by now. Donald Rumsfeld warns us not to be too sure yet. Citizen Smash is collecting reactions from different corners of Opinionland (he also has a sensible take on what the preliminary reports may and may not mean). Interested parties should feel free to pigeonhole me as minimizing the importance of the discovery even if it proves out. You want reasons? Sure. Here's a quick list:
o My opposition to the war did not rest on the belief that Saddam had no chemical or biological weapons. I wrote a big long thing poo-poohing the notion that chemical weapons were really "mass destruction" weapons in the summer of 2002. The misadventure with today's IED can't prove my contention, but it sure didn't refute it.
o The shell was unmarked and, like a mustard gas shell in a report Smash also uncovered, its contents were apparently in a state of advanced decay. This tends to bear out the thesis that any chemical weapons Iraq had not destroyed were too old to be any use.
o I'm a libertarian. I believe a government that set out to destroy all of its stock of anything could overlook the odd remnant here or there. When we have the President's tens of thousands of tons and liters of stuff, I'll be impressed, though not swayed as to its political meaning.
o There are two ways to approach the question of any WMD find: 1) Is it big enough to provide what we might call "legal cover" for the Iraq conquest, that is, does this provide a plausible excuse based on UN resolutions etc? 2) Does it demonstrate that Iraq was a threat to the United States that only escalated war could remove? Does it demonstrate the capability and intention to launch a major attack on the United States? (I would class the September 11, 2001 atrocities as a major attack, if you're keeping score.) I only care about the second perspective. I profess only a spectator's interest in the first, because I was never, unlike the government, looking for an excuse to escalate the twelve-year war with Iraq.
Finally, I will be annoying and make an "It's all bad" claim. If this is the worst there is, it's garbage as far as justifying our hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of dead and maimed and their larger tally of dead and maimed. But if it's a sign that there really is a lot of stuff out there, so much the worse for the hawks - and for the rest of us. Because one of the reasons we gave for avoiding war in the first place was that, if Saddam possessed usable chemical and biological weapons, war itself was the most likely vector of putting them in the hands of terrorists. (See Gene Healy for an Advantage: Me! item on that score.)
No You're Not Missing Something - Kevin Drum figures it out :
But it's not that simple, is it? After all, we don't have several hundred thousand troops. I've heard some reasonable sounding suggestions that by mobilizing more reserves and doing a few other things we could dredge up another 50-60,000 troops or so, but nothing that would get us up to the 300,000 that Shinseki wanted. They just aren't there.So it wasn't really a matter only of Bush and Rumsfeld wanting to wage war on the cheap. Rather, if they had accepted Shinseki's advice, they wouldn't have been able to wage their war at all - at least, not in the timeframe they wanted.
That's right, isn't it? Or am I missing something?
The only remaining question is whether the only lied to us - about troop strength, occupation length, financial cost - or to themselves too. The latter would move us into "worse than a crime, it was a mistake" territory.