Liberal-oriented columns, commentary and archived articles on national and international news, politics, and the communication arts--with emphasis on China--by Joseph Bosco, author, journalist, director and actor; Professor of Drama and Communications at Beijing Foreign Studies University. 

Sunday, November 30, 2003

Two U.S. Soldiers Killed

We Grieve, But We Cannot Quit.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Guerrillas ambushed a military convoy in western Iraq near the border with Syria, killing two American soldiers, the military said Sunday.

The attackers opened fire on the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment task force with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades near the border town of Husaybah, 180 miles northwest of Baghdad, the statement said.
A.P.
  

10:05 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Winners In Kristof's Name That War Contest

And the Winners are:
Honorable mention in this contest goes to "Operation Unscramble Eggs," by Russell Schindler of New York; "Desert Storm und Drang," by Robert Proctor of Connecticut; "The 'Raq," by Jeff Schramm of Missouri; "A'bombin'nation," by Kent Moore of North Carolina; "Tigris by the Tail," by Paul Reeves of New Mexico; "War of Mass Deception," by Scott Dacko of New York; and "Iraq: A Hard Place," by Chris Walters of Texas.

The five winners, each of whom gets a 250-dinar note left over from my last Iraq trip, are: Brad Corsello of New York for "Dubya Dubya III"; Richard Sanders for "Rolling Blunder"; John Fell of California for "Desert Slog," Will Hutchinson of Vermont for "Mess in Potamia"; and Willard Oriol of New York for "Blood, Baath and Beyond."

More seriously, during this holiday weekend, I hope we'll think often and appreciatively of those Americans who are in Iraq right now. Humor cannot erase their fear and loneliness in the face of Washington's policy failures, or the heartbreak here in so many homes where bereaved parents, spouses and orphans are struggling in this season to remember why they should be giving thanks.
In The New York Times...
 

1:28 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




This Is News? To Whom? Dubya, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfowitz & Company

And This Is A Surprise? Hello? Did the administration really believe all of these "coincidences?" Right. This is exactly the kind of war Saddam had to fight; Christ, he even told us his strategy--which is as old as "The Art of War."
WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 — Bush administration officials are increasingly concerned that anti-American forces in Iraq are using simple but effective means to monitor activities and coordinate attacks against the American military, civilian administrators and visiting dignitaries.

As evidence, Pentagon and military officials cite a recent raid by troops of the 101st Airborne Division during which they broke up an apparent plot to assassinate an American colonel. The would-be assailants, they said, had observed and charted the Army officer's daily routine — including his jogging route and schedule of public appearances — to plan their attack.

Evidence gathered by investigators also sheds new light on the rocket attack that struck the Rashid Hotel during the overnight visit to Baghdad by Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, in late October. Military intelligence officers have reported that the hotel staff was infiltrated over the summer by at least one former member of Saddam Hussein's secret service.

Mr. Hussein's government operated a Stalinist-style domestic security apparatus to control Iraqis, so there is no shortage of agents skilled in traditional surveillance techniques.

In the case of the Rashid, which had become home to Americans and other foreigners working for the Coalition Provisional Authority, "the hotel was penetrated," according to a Pentagon official.

Military intelligence officers discovered that, at least as early as summer, the Rashid's catering service had on its staff a former member of Mr. Hussein's intelligence agency, officials in Washington and Iraq said.
In The New York Times...
  

1:26 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




What A Hell Of A Mess This Is

Very Bad News, that does not bode well for the near future; which, of course, is why we are, in effect, starting the war all over again. This time with the light, moblie infantry troops needed to wage an urban street fight. I hate to say, I told you so, but I did.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- There is no evidence that al-Qaida terrorists have taken part in the long string of attacks on U.S. or Iraqi targets, but some U.S.-trained Iraqi police appear to have coordinated some of those assaults, the top U.S. military official in Iraq said Saturday.

U.S. military officials are concerned that some attacks on Americans have been coordinated by a few of the numerous Iraqi civilians hired by the U.S. military, who may glean intelligence on troop movements and travels of high-ranking officers, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez told reporters at the Baghdad Convention Center.

"Clearly those are concerns we have. We try to do the vetting (of Iraqi employees) as close as we can,'' he said. "There have been instances when police were coordinating attacks against the coalition and against the people.''

He said the insurgency was becoming particularly bloody for Iraqi civilians. Guerrillas launched more than 150 attacks on Iraqi civilian and police targets, killing scores during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which ended last week.

Sanchez also said the United States is boosting the number of infantrymen in Iraq and moving from a force based on tanks and heavy armored vehicles to one specializing in urban raids.

A new phase in the Iraq war, known as Iraqi Freedom II, would begin as current forces are rotated out of Iraq and replaced by new units, including several thousand U.S. Marines, Sanchez said.

"We are going to change the composition of our forces,'' Sanchez said. "We'll have more infantry. We're moving to a more mobile force, one that has the right blend of light and heavy.''
In The New York Times...
  

1:22 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Moving On Up...

MoveOn.org Is Moving On Up, Fast, and it's making waves, not ripples. There is something new under the sun of political campaigns, and this is it. An analysis by the UPI explains what is happening, and what is happening is remarkable
WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 (UPI) -- When former Vice President Al Gore wanted to blast George W. Bush on Iraq he chose a forum of the MoveOn.org organization to do it.

And when Democratic presidential hopefuls obsessed on savaging each other in the run up to the hotly contested Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary early next year, it was MoveOn.org that paid out $175,000 to hammer the president over the 2 million jobs lost during his presidency with an ad blitz in Washington and in 15 other cities in sing presidential states over the past week.

Suddenly MoveOn.org is everywhere. And as Gore's choice of its venue to delivering his blistering Nov. 9 attack on Bush shows -- in a development that may come to signal his eventual availability as a "stop Howard Dean" candidate for the Democratic right -- the upstart Web-based Internet organization has suddenly become the market place for aspiring Democratic national leaders to hawk their wares and reach out to the party grass roots.

It is quite a leap for a group that was founded half a decade ago. But MoveOn.org, started in 1998 by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, has come a long way fast by flouting conventional wisdom and making visionary leaps that so far have paid off amazingly often.

The group seeks to revive liberal fortunes by marrying middle-class, baby-boom yuppie frustration, and even horror, at the repeated political triumphs of President George W. Bush and the conservative Republicans with the wonders of Internet technology and it has swept the high-tech, suburban middle-class Web-surfers like a tidal wave.

Even before the extraordinary success of Vermont former governor Howard Dean's Internet drive for activists and funds had put MoveOn.org and its Internet reach firmly on the political map, the organization already claimed a network of 1.4 million activists around the United States with another 700,000 wired in from around the world.

By last June, it had raised $6.5 million for candidates it supported and its leaders remain confident they can double that amount in the current election cycle.

Now compared with the quarter-of-a-billion-dollar war chest that Bush is methodically raising for his re-election campaign that appears to be still pocket change. But MoveOn.org's soaring national visibility and exponential growth has Republican strategists concerned. This is especially the case as the group has linked up with the almost limitless deep pockets of billionaire financier George Soros.

Soros, who is loudly and repeatedly expressing his determination to help drive Bush out of office, announced in mid-November, along with Progressive Insurance founder Peter Lewis, that they would match contributions to MoveOn.org's Bush-basing ads on job losses in the targeted cities.

That campaign could prove to be the prototype for many more. MoveOn.org organizers are looking at a $10 million ad campaign on those lines over the next year's run up to the presidential vote. It could go as high as $15 million, thanks to the Soros-Lewis matching funds.
UPI...
  

1:17 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




We Grieve Mightily, But We Cannot Quit

The Ultimate Sacrifice is so willingly made by courageous young men and women so that the rest of us can live free.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 29 — At least 75 U.S. soldiers have died so far in Iraq in November, making it the deadliest month for American troops since the U.S.-led invasion began on March 20, U.S. military statistics show.

A TOTAL OF 436 U.S. soldiers have died since the start of the war, according to the Pentagon and the latest casualty figures released by the U.S. military in Baghdad. They include 299 soldiers killed in combat, while the others died from other causes such as accidents.

Seventy-five soldiers from other allied nations - including 52 from Britain and 17 from Italy - also have died, bringing the total number of coalition deaths since the war started to more than 500.

U.S.-led occupation authorities in Baghdad say they do not have a number for Iraqi deaths. A survey by The Associated Press counted at least 3,240 civilians killed during the invasion, which lasted more than a month. The total number is believed to be much higher.

A tally of all reports of fatalities released by the U.S. military command and compiled by AP showed that at least 75 American soldiers died since the start of November, surpassing deaths recorded in any previous month since the invasion.

Until now, the deadliest month was April, when 73 troops died at the height of the war. The single deadliest day was March 23, when 30 U.S. soldiers died.

President Bush declared major combat over May 1.

Since the start of military operations, 2,094 U.S. service members have been injured as a result of hostile action, according to the Defense Department’s figures as of Wednesday. The number of soldiers injured in non-hostile incidents was 350.
MSNBC...
 

1:14 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Saturday, November 29, 2003

The Future Ms. President Visits Iraq

Hillary Clinton Also Goes to Iraq, but she does it in the full light of day and even takes a look around. Of course, she is not the target that Dubya is: She isn't hated world-wide.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (Reuters) - Senator Hillary Clinton called Friday for a wider international role in running Iraq, but doubted the U.S. administration would cede much control in the country it invaded and occupied.

"I'm a big believer that we ought to internationalize this, but it will take a big change in our administration's thinking," Clinton, a Democrat from New York, said during a nearly 10-hour visit to Baghdad where she met with U.S. troops, military chiefs and civilian officials including U.S. administrator Paul Bremer.

"I don't see that it's forthcoming," said the wife of former President Bill Clinton.

Clinton, who has ruled out a 2004 presidential bid, arrived in Baghdad with Democrat Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island a day after President Bush's surprise Thanksgiving visit to U.S. troops and Iraqi officials in the capital.

Bush's trip was widely seen as a move to boost the flagging morale of a U.S. military facing mounting casualties at the hands of a deepening guerrilla insurgency nearly eight months after the overthrow of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

The Bush and Clinton visits also come as senior Iraqi officials on the U.S.-backed Governing Council struggle to define terms of an agreement for the handover of sovereignty to Iraqis.

Clinton said the United Nations -- which pulled all but a handful of foreign staff from Iraq after the August bombing of its Baghdad headquarters -- could still play a role in administering Iraq, easing the burden on the United States.

"We're in a very difficult political situation, trying to expedite a process for self-governance that will be very challenging," she said.

"It's no longer sufficient for our military to win battles, but they have to win the hearts and minds. It's a very big challenge," Clinton said.
Reuters...
  

10:58 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Dubya Is On A Roll

A Pretty Good News Cycle For Dubya, All in All. The question is how many can he put together in a row, or at least better than five out of every ten; that's called "playing .600 ball," which is what Dubya needs to do if he's going to have a successful "World Series" next fall.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 27 — The American plan to transfer power to Iraq regained some momentum on Thursday, after a meeting between two leading Iraqi political figures.

Jalal Talabani, the president of the Iraqi Governing Council, traveled to Najaf to confer with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the senior Iraqi cleric who had raised objections to the American plan for indirect elections for a new provisional government. Afterward, both sides appeared to be moving toward a possible compromise.

Ayatollah Sistani exercises strong influence over Iraq's majority Shiites, and on Wednesday his spokesmen said he was insisting that the election planned for next June must be a direct, popular ballot and not the indirect caucus election called for in the American plan.

That threw the future of the plan for speeding up self-rule into doubt. The American authorities have maintained that popular elections are impossible in the absence of a census, which cannot be completed by next summer. But at a news conference on Thursday night, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a Shiite cleric and member of the Governing Council who is close to Ayatollah Sistani, said there was room for negotiation.

"There are different proposals for getting the opinion of the Iraqi people," he said. "The best way would be to have a census and election law, and elections. But in these circumstances, there are other ways you can reach the views of the Iraqi people."

"The most important thing," he added, "is to end the occupation."
In The New York Times...
  

12:19 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Dubya Wins A Round

Hell of a Good Idea From a Man Who Isn't Known For Having Many; even the harshest critics need to spot Dubya on his "Thanksgiving Surprise," not to shows spitefulness and ignorance. If you don't credit your opponent when he makes a good move, you run at least two risks: 1) Demonstrating your stupidity; 2) If you do it often, you might lose the objectivity to recognize a good idea from a bad idea.
With his Thanksgiving Day excursion to Baghdad, President Bush moved to regain control of an issue that Democrats have increasingly viewed as a political liability, reinforcing his commitment to the war while displaying solidarity with troops his rivals had accused him of neglecting, Democratic officials said yesterday.

The surprise visit stunned and confused his rivals, who struggled — in the midst of Thanksgiving dinner — to balance praise for the president's gesture with renewed criticism of his Iraq policy, which they said would be among his greatest vulnerabilities in next year's election.

"It's nice that he made it over there today, but this visit won't change the fact that those brave men and women should never have been fighting in Iraq in the first place," said Jay Carson, a spokesman for Howard Dean, one of the biggest critics of the war among the nine Democrats vying for the party's presidential nomination.

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts issued a statement saying that the trip was "the right thing to do for our country." But, he added: "When Thanksgiving is over, I hope the president will take the time to correct his failed policy in Iraq that has placed our soldiers in a shooting gallery."

David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, described the visit as a "daring move and great politics," but added: "I think these kids need more. I'm sure they were buoyed by his coming, but they need more."

David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, described the visit as a "daring move and great politics," but added: "I think these kids need more. I'm sure they were buoyed by his coming, but they need more."

The trip came at a time of rising criticism of the president for not attending the funerals of the returning war dead. It also came in the same week that Mr. Bush met with families of 26 soldiers killed in Iraq, and thus appeared to be a concerted effort by the White House to deal with a political problem.

And now, in a single day, Mr. Bush may have managed to supplant what has become the single most problematic image of him in this war: The picture of him swaggering across an aircraft carrier in front of banner reading "Mission Accomplished."

That image, which already has shown up in an advertisement by Mr. Kerry attacking the president, now seems likely to be overtaken by the picture of Mr. Bush, his eyes glistening with tears, addressing cheering troops on Thanksgiving Day. It was a moment fraught with imagery that was certainly a central subject of discussion at Thanksgiving tables.

Even aides to Democratic presidential candidates expressed grudging admiration for the political skills of this White House.

"Those guys can do some pretty smart stuff sometimes," a senior adviser to one of the Democrats said.

Matt Bennett, the communications director for Gen. Wesley K. Clark, said: "We're not going to throw stones at the guy for trying to do a nice thing for the troops. When the president goes and spends time with the troops, that's a good thing."
Yep, better to let it play to the applause it deserves--politically--otherwise you're taking shots at Thanksgiving (a uniquely American ideal) and G.I.'s who got the thrill of a lifetime amidst a situation where that lifetime might only be until tomorrow. Well done, Dubya--but I'll betcha the ranch it wasn't your idea.

In The New York Times...
  

12:15 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Good News

Some Good News From Mr. Krugman, if for no other reason than to taunt the neocons who froth at every word he writes. I also offer Paul Krugman because he's a fine wordsmith who makes sense to me, but then I am definitely not an economist.
[Yet] I keep coming back to the big good news of the past 25 years: in a world with more or less free trade, development is possible. We are not, it turns out, condemned to live forever on a planet where only a small minority of the global population has a decent standard of living.

Will this good news continue? Growing tensions over world trade worry me. The steady trickle of U.S. protectionist moves, against everything from steel to Chinese bras, hasn't yet become a torrent. But there's a definite sense that the grown-ups have left the building.

What's particularly striking is the contempt this administration has for the rules. I was on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Reagan administration (those were nonpolitical jobs back then); one thing I remember was that if the experts said a proposed trade restriction violated international trade law, that was that. By contrast, just about every protectionist step taken by the Bush administration has been clearly in violation. And if the major economic powers stop honoring the rules that preserve open global markets, the chances of future development in poor nations will be much reduced.

But none of this cancels the fact that over the past 25 years more people have seen greater material progress than ever before in history. That's something to celebrate.
In The New York Times...
 

12:11 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Commentary: Strengthening Sino-US relations

Here's another interesting piece from the People's Daily. It is a pretty damn good analysis of our world today. Yes, it is the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party and the Central Government, and censorship is not just rigid, it is the expected, ordained, routine rule. But the writing and research is often first-rate, and the range of issues covered widens constantly.
It is risky to forecast trends in the Sino-US relationship, one of the world's most influential yet volatile state-to-state ties, due to its complexity.

Veteran diplomats from both sides have sent a message that relations between the world's most powerful country and the most populous country are at an all-time high.

These words struck a chord among experts and scholars in world affairs at an international symposium on Sino-US-European relations co-hosted by the China Institute for International Strategic Studies (CIISS) and the Hotung Institute For International Relations in Beijing from November 18-20.

Dr Henry A. Kissinger, former US national security advisor and secretary of state, once said the power of politics is to transfer divergence into consensus.

The fight against terrorism mirrors that convergence of interests between China and the United States and can serve as a catalyst for a strengthened rapport.
In the People's Daily...
 

12:05 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Friday, November 28, 2003

Roll Over Vladimir, Tell Mao Zedong the News

Transsexuals in China: The Times They Are A-Changing, and it's in the People's Daily! This is a place where homosexuality is still a secret even to many homosexuals. The New China amazes me at least once every day--and almost always for the better.
Mainland tabloids have recently entered a phase of sudden fascination with transsexuals (TS). Rarely has a month gone by without a detailed account of some out-of-towner with a French-sounding nickname pleading with big-city doctors for a sex-change operation.

Chen Huanran is one of these doctors. The plastic surgery department at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, where he works, is one of the few of its kind in Asia that specializes in the surgery.

"As many as 3,000 people come to us every year," Dr Chen told China Daily. "However, we are very rigorous in screening and approve only a very small number for the actual surgery."

The patients have to go through a lengthy process of psychological counselling and physical checkups before a decision is made.

Dr Chen disapproves of the many sex-change cases in Thailand as "induced by external influences". In China, doctors would not recommend it unless absolutely convinced that the patient's urge is fuelled by innate needs, says Dr Chen.

He calculates that, using a rate of one out of 50,000, China would have 24,000 who suffer from a TS drive. So far, about 500 people on the mainland have undergone surgery.
You will enjoy reading the rest of this story. I am not excerpting more because I want to encourage you to visit the People's Daily and read the news from their perspective. Go ahead, it won't bite you.

The People's Daily...
  

11:46 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




From the People's Daily

Beijing's Response to Chen Shui-bian's idiocy, in the People's Daily, as expected, was measured and NOT provocative. The leaders of the New China are not given the credit they deserve as novice statesmen now playing on the world's biggest stage, and doing it exceedingly well. From the middle east to North Korea to Africa, they are serving the world community with a maturity that would be a credit to the former super powers of Europe.
Taiwan lawmakers Thursday passed a watered-down version of referendum law put forward by the opposition Kuomintang Party and People First Party by 113 votes to 94. The bill excludes future referendums on issues such as changing the island's name, anthem, flag and "constitution."

"Although the imminent danger of Taiwan independence has been get rid of, the so-called defensive referendum clause may give rise to more potential troubles in bilateral relations,'' said Liu Guoshen, director of the Taiwan Research Institute at Xiamen University in East China's Fujian Province.

"After all, the referendum law has managed to create a legal basis for Taiwan independence, which the mainland has strongly opposed.''
Read it in the People's Daily...
  

11:35 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Chen Idiocy

The Mouse-Mouth That Almost Roared has now overtaken George W. Bush for the top spot as the world's most stupid head of state. Mr. Chen Shui-bian is taunting China over the biggest canard left over from the Cold War--that Taiwan is not a part of the People's Republic of China. Not only is he taunting the elephant that can sit on him without feeling more than what the Princess did of that pea under her mattress, but he is trying to put the United States into the terribly awkward position of having to publicly "disown" its former adopted orphan or face a military confrontation it cannot win without destroying civilization as we know it. China cannot and will not let Taiwan assert a sham "independence." But it is perfectly willing to let the current status quo go on almost indefinitely. Mr. Chen is playing with the biggest fire there is for the purpose of his re-election campaign. What a stupid, stupid man.
TAIPEI, Taiwan, Friday, Nov. 28 — Taiwan's legislature took a half-step back on Thursday night from an immediate confrontation with China, passing a bill that would allow national referendums on constitutional and sovereignty issues only under very narrow circumstances.

Chinese officials had tried to dissuade Taiwanese politicians from endorsing any bill to provide for referendums, but had devoted most of their criticisms to a rival measure, supported by President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan, that would have made it easy for him to call referendums. Most provisions of that bill were defeated in the legislature on Thursday night.

Chinese and American officials had feared that legislation permitting a referendum on Taiwanese independence from the mainland would lead to a showdown in the Taiwan Straits that neither China nor the United States wants now.

China is trying to pay more attention to economic growth, especially in its interior provinces, while the United States has been preoccupied with Iraq and with seeking China's cooperation in trying to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program.

The Bush administration has reaffirmed repeatedly the principle that there is one China encompassing Taiwan and the mainland, but Chinese officials have called for the United States to do more. China regards Taiwan as a renegade province and has threatened to use military force to prevent it from becoming a fully independent nation.

Mr. Chen and his Democratic Progressive Party have tried to move Taiwan gingerly toward somewhat greater independence status and had sought a referendum bill for that purpose. But most of the provisions in the final bill came from amendments by the opposition, which opposes full independence and has more seats in the politically fractured legislature than Mr. Chen's party.

Even a narrowly written referendum bill could still irk Beijing's leaders, by establishing a precedent for holding any referendums at all on what Beijing regards as Chinese soil.

The final bill bars referendums on changing the flag of Taiwan or Taiwan's official name, the Republic of China. The legislation also makes it extremely hard to hold a referendum to amend the constitution and bars referendums to draft a new or completely rewritten constitution.

Following approval of the bill, lawmakers from Mr. Chen's party were so upset that they tried to schedule additional votes to undo it. They contended the law involved an unconstitutional transfer of power from the executive branch to the legislature, by allowing the legislature to call referendums but making it hard for the president to do so. ...

Justin Chou, a spokesman for the Nationalist Party, said that the party was "very happy with the result" of Thursday's voting. The party was not acting because of the threats from China but because of what it saw as the best course for Taiwan, he added.

There was no immediate reaction to the bill from Beijing, where officials sometimes mull events in Taiwan for a day or two before issuing a response.
In The New York Times...
  

11:18 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments






We Grieve, But We Cannot Quit.
MOSUL, Iraq (AP) -- Four mortar shells hit a U.S. military compound Friday in the northern city of Mosul, killing a soldier from the 101st Airborne Division, the military said.

An Iraqi worker in the compound was slightly wounded in the attack at around 11 a.m. local time, Master Sgt. Kelly Tyler said.

Attacks by Iraqi insurgents on U.S. troops in Mosul have increased in recent weeks. Two American soldiers were shot and killed on Sunday.

The 101st Airborne is based in Fort Campbell, Ky.
A.P.
  

10:48 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Duh...

Well, It's About Time, I wonder who figured this one out? And all along I've been maligning the brain power in the White House. Silly me.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 26 — Dozens of the American intelligence experts and linguists sent to Iraq to search for illicit weapons have been reassigned to an expanding effort to learn more about the insurgents attacking United States troops, senior government officials said Wednesday.

The shift in the last two weeks appears to reflect a decision that the hunt for insurgents is becoming a more urgent task than the quest for chemical and biological weapons, which has so far proved unsuccessful despite the involvement of hundreds of people in the search.

In recent weeks as many as 40 attacks a day have been conducted against American troops in Iraq, and American commanders have acknowledged that they know relatively little about the attackers.

The question of whether to assign some of the intelligence experts to counterinsurgency has been debated for weeks within the Bush administration. Government officials say the work for now is being carried out informally, with no decision yet on whether to make the reassignment official or permanent.

But they said the switch meant that some of the linguists, intelligence analysts and other experts on the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group were now reporting only to Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, a top official of the Defense Intelligence Agency who heads the survey group.

Previously they reported further up the chain of command to David Kay, the civilian American official who oversees the weapons hunt as a special adviser to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence.

A Defense Department official said the group had been reinforced in recent weeks with "additional assets" focused on counterinsurgency.
In The New York Times...
  

1:20 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




There Goes Plan C

Oops! Plan D, anyone? This would be a Marx Brothers movie if human beings weren't being blown up everyday, for real.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 26 — The American plan to turn over power in Iraq more quickly was thrown into disarray on Wednesday when the country's most powerful cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, made public his opposition to a proposal for indirect elections.

"All of us are groping around right now," an administration official said in Washington, acknowledging that the plan worked out earlier this month by the Iraqi Governing Council and L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator of Iraq, would have to be revised.

Spokesmen for Ayatollah Sistani, who exercises strong influence over Iraq's majority Shiites, said he insisted that the election, planned for June, be a direct ballot and not the caucus-style vote called for in the American plan. He also insists that the new Iraqi government have a more overtly Islamic character.

"The people should have a basic role in issues concerning the destiny of their country," Abdul Aziz al- Hakim, a Shiite cleric and politician, said in an interview. Mr. Hakim said he discussed the American proposal with Ayatollah Sistani on Tuesday.

Shiites account for about 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people and so could benefit from a direct vote.

Under the current plan, which has been fraying almost since it was approved by both sides on Nov. 15, council members and local governments are to choose a transitional assembly — several hundred Iraqis from every region and social sector. That assembly is to choose an interim government in June, and that indirectly elected interim government is supposed to draft a constitution. ...

In Washington, administration officials said a plan establishing Iraqi self-rule by June 30 would have to at least partly accommodate the ayatollah's insistence on a popular vote.

Such a ballot in the next several months is widely seen as impractical, however. Instead, administration officials said, a system of provincial and local elections, town meetings and caucuses of civic leaders throughout Iraq might be acceptable to Ayatollah Sistani.

"The nub of this is, how do we get to enough elections in enough places to satisfy the ayatollah's insistence on elections," one official said. "We should be able to do it." ...

Ayatollah Sistani's objections were a further blow to a plan that had already begun to unravel. Earlier this week, leaders of the Governing Council said they would like to back away from their agreement to dissolve the council as soon as elections are held in June, and instead to preserve it as a second legislative body, a kind of senate. ...

Communications between official Iraqis and official Americans have been difficult from the start of the occupation in May. On Wednesday, for example, Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the first American administrator, acknowledged in an interview with the BBC that his office had made a "bad job" of communicating with Iraqis.
Uh...can't anybody here play this game? Is this a Big League club or a Single A rookie league squad?
American officials have insisted that a direct election cannot be held now because there are no voter rolls. A census must be taken first, and that cannot be completed until late next year at the earliest.

But a senior Shiite leader on Wednesday pushed a United Nations proposal to use its food-rations registry as a voter list so elections could be held next spring.

Both American and Iraqi officials have said they believe the real motivation for insisting on direct elections is that the clerics hope the nation's Shiite majority will empower religious leaders to form an Islamic government, an idea the United States opposes.

Mr. Hakim himself said one of Ayatollah Sistani's objections was that "there is no emphasis on the role of Islam and the identity of the Muslim people."

"There should have been a stipulation which prevents legislating anything that contradicts Islam in the new Iraq," Mr. Hakim added, summarizing the ayatollah's views. ...

"Some Iraqis perceive the process as being too rushed to fit the American presidential elections," said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a member of the Governing Council who is close to Ayatollah Sistani. "We don't mind helping our partners. We understand their requirements. And we will consider helping them."

The view that the United States elections play a major role in shaping Iraq's political future is widely held among council members.
Geeze, you mean these folks also see through Dubya's motives? That would imply that they're at least as sophisticated regarding democracy as most Republicans.
Ahmad Chalabi, another council member, said: "The whole thing was set up so President Bush could come to the airport in October for a ceremony to congratulate the new Iraqi government. When you work backwards from that, you understand the dates the Americans were insisting on." American officials deny that electoral concerns played a role in their planning.
Yeah. Right. Everybody got that?

In The New York Times...
  

1:16 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Classical Guerrilla Warfare: A Roundup

This Is The War Saddam Planned to Fight, and Rummy & Wolfie fell for it hook, line and improvised explosive devise. Gracious, it's certainly not new in the annals of warfare--in fact it is just about the oldest and most popular way to wage war on a superior force that is away from home: Let 'em in, let 'em get settled, then start picking fights at a time and place of your choice. Something akin to "death by a thousand cuts." Of course, it doesn't always succeed. But then it often does. The primary determinant for success or failure is directly related to how determined the superior force is in sticking around. If it never quits, and it's superior numbers and supplies continue to be superior, it will not lose. It is that simple; it is also that complex. The public and political will must be as determined as are the forces in the field.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the Italian mission in Baghdad, damaging the building but causing no injuries, the U.S. military said Thursday. In a political setback for the U.S.-led occupation, key Shiite Muslim leaders criticized the U.S. plan to transfer power to Iraqis.

A U.S. military convoy came under attack Thursday on the main highway west of Baghdad near the town of Abu Ghraib, witnesses said. An Associated Press Television News cameraman filmed two flatbed military trucks that were abandoned and left with their cabs blazing fiercely, as dozens of townspeople converged to loot tires and other vehicle parts. The military had no immediate information.

And in the northern city of Mosul, unidentified gunmen on Thursday shot dead an Iraqi police sergeant, Brig. Gen. Muwaffaq Mohammed said.

The overnight attack on the Italian mission underscored the precarious security situation in the Iraqi capital, despite a reduction in attacks on U.S.-led coalition forces in recent days. Two weeks ago, a suicide bomber detonated a truck bomb outside the Italian barracks in Nasiriyah, killing 19 Italians and 14 others in an apparent attempt to weaken the resolve of Washington's coalition partners.

In Mosul, U.S. troops on Wednesday killed a girl and injured three people in a pickup truck that was approaching American soldiers who had been shot at, the U.S. military said. No weapons were found in the truck. Assailants had fired at two shuttle buses traveling from a U.S. military compound, but no American troops were hurt.
In The New York Times...
  

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Friedman Pens a Letter

Thomas L. Friedman Nails It, and he does it with a literary devise that could be disastrous in less skillful hands. This is simply MUST reading. I will only excerpt enough to set the hook. Please. Please, read it all.
Memo to: President Bush

From: Saddam Hussein

Dear Bush: Well, it's been a while since we last communicated. It's not easy getting tapes out from this basement in Tikrit, but I thought it was time we had a little chat. Heard your speech on Arab democracy on the BBC Arabic Service. I'll give you this, Bush, you and Blair do understand the stakes. It's your willpower I doubt.

You see, Bush, this really is "The Mother of All Battles." You may not have meant to, but you have triggered a huge civilizational war — the war within Islam. Who wins in Iraq will have a big impact on this war — which is now spreading to Indonesia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

By now you've realized that I was prepared for this war. I got rid of all my W.M.D., hid explosives and set up an underground network to fight you once you were in country. But God bless the Turkish Parliament. By not allowing you to use Turkey to invade from the north, my boys in the Sunni Triangle were spared. By the time you got here from the south, we just receded into the shadows. You occupied our Sunni towns, but never defeated them. Had you been able to sweep down from the north, my boys would have had to engage you, and you would have killed them wholesale by the hundreds. Now you have to kill them retail — one by one.
Thomas L. Friedman, in The New York Times...

 

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Give Life A Chance

Read A Very Different Maureen Dowd Column; on this day of giving thanks, I give thanks for the heart of Ms. Dowd and her talent for expressing it.
WASHINGTON — Maybe it's so touching because Alonzo Mourning seemed so tough.

"A cartoon image of toughness," as our sports editor, Tom Jolly, puts it, "a rugged 6-foot-10, larger-than-life guy with a great work ethic, an aggressive player who had been the Knicks' archenemy when he played for Miami."

The enduring image of "Zo" to many fans was the night of April 30, 1998, when the Miami star slugged it out with the Knicks' Larry Johnson in the last second of a playoff game, with Knicks coach Jeff Van Gundy hanging on to Mr. Mourning's leg in a vain attempt to stop him.

But now that virile image has been supplanted with a vulnerable one: the 33-year-old walking away from his $23 million comeback deal with the Nets because his doctor says that his chronic kidney disease has grown so bad he can no longer play without risking cardiac arrest.

Upon learning that Mr. Mourning would need a kidney transplant, dozens of people from across the country, including some Knicks fans, called the Kidney and Urology Foundation to offer their kidneys.
Please read the rest of this column; it is not a sports story, I assure you.

Maureen Dowd, in The New York Times...
  

12:49 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




We Are Still At War

There Is No Good News Story Here; for all the new schools and clinics built and polls taken about a better life courtesy of the U.S. military, this story about the gleeful murder of two American soldiers is too telling for me. This is still a war, it is not yet country building, or peacekeeping until democracy buds and blooms. To argue that it is only a few hundred Iraqis fighting this guerrilla war in any one concentration, while true, is not meaningful. The proportion of a people actually doing the fighting in an insurgency is always a small percentage of the populace. The numbers that are meaningful are how many people sympathize with the fighters, or at least do not in any way attempt to deter them--such as providing information to coalition forces, or denying insurgents food or shelter, anything that would lead to their inability to fight effectively.
MOSUL, Iraq, Nov. 26 — Since the Americans came to town seven months ago, the firefighters in this northern Iraqi city have gotten new trucks and new uniforms, American training and salaries 10 times larger than they used to be.

But when word came Sunday afternoon that two American soldiers had been shot in the head and killed a block away, the men of Ras al Jada fire station ran to the site and looked on with glee as a crowd of locals dragged the Americans from their car and tore off their watches and jackets and boots.

"I was happy, everyone was happy," Waadallah Muhammad, one of the firefighters, said as he stood in front of the firehouse. "The Americans, yes, they do good things, but only to enhance their reputation. They are occupiers. We want them to leave."

It was not supposed to be this way in Mosul, an ethnically diverse city of two million people and the economic and cultural center of northern Iraq.

As places like Ramadi and Falluja and Tikrit burned and their residents rebelled against the American occupation this summer, Mosul stayed calm, the one city with a Sunni Arab majority where most people still seemed to regard the Americans as their friends. A vigorous and far-reaching effort by the 101st Airborne Division to rebuild the city's roads, schools and public buildings seemed to cement an unusually warm bond.

That appears to be changing very fast. The money the American occupiers once doled out freely has dried up, and other reconstruction aid has yet to arrive. Attacks on Americans, which have killed more than 25 in the Mosul area this month, have highlighted what local Iraqis say is a rapidly deteriorating relationship. ...

A network of former members of Mr. Hussein's Baath Party, stretching from the universities to government offices, openly flout the Americans' edicts and, some Iraqis say, quietly support the resistance.

"I would say that the number of people who are opposed to the Americans here numbers in the thousands, the tens of thousands," said Hunien Kadu, a professor of economics at Mosul University and a city council member. "There are deans and assistant deans who were high-ranking members of the Baath Party. There are Baathists all through the government. The Americans can't continue to let these people operate."

Many Iraqis complained that the recent American crackdown had pushed potential supporters away. Mr. Barhawi, for instance, cited a local cleric detained on suspicion of encouraging attacks against the Americans in his weekly sermons. He said American troops had handcuffed, hooded and slapped the cleric. Word of that, he said, was helping to alienate many Iraqis here who were still more or less receptive to the American enterprise.

The cleric, Abdul Satar al-Jawiri, was released after a search of his home turned up nothing, Mr. Barhawi said. A spokesman for the 101st Airborne said Wednesday that he could not confirm the incident.

"I am not defending the cleric, but he was humiliated in public," Mr. Barhawi said. "Do you realize what he is going to say in his sermons now?"
To expect young American soldiers who know they are targets to have more civil attitudes is delusional. Soldiers are trained to kill and intimidate lest they be killed. It is war; a cleric gets slapped and the war goes on with more fuel in the belly of the war-beast. It is an equation as old as stone axes and flint arrowheads.

In The New York Times...
  

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Garner: Mistakes Were Made

Garner Fesses Up; the general takes to the radio for a cathartic confession. Let's hope he feels better now. They say it is good for the soul.
The U.S.-led coalition's handling of postwar Iraq came under sharp criticism from Garner, who said he should have deployed more troops in Baghdad and communicated better with Iraqis from the start.

The retired general also said his successors made a mistake in disbanding the Iraqi army.

Garner, who was replaced by L. Paul Bremer after less than a month on the job, made the comments in London during an interview broadcast on British Broadcasting Corp. radio.

"I think there was a lot of thought . . . on how to do postwar Iraq," Garner said. "I just don't think that it unfolded the way everybody expected it to unfold."

He said he could have done better at communicating with the Iraqi people and that the coalition should have moved more quickly to establish a government in Iraq and put more troops in Baghdad, including more infantry.

"If we did it over again, we probably would have put more dismounted infantrymen in Baghdad and maybe more troops there," Garner said, when asked what the biggest mistakes of the occupation had been.

"We should have tried to raise a government a little faster than we did," he said. "I think we are finally placing more trust in Iraqis, which we should have done to begin with."

He criticized Bremer's decision to disband the Iraqi army as "a mistake."

"You're talking about around a million or more people . . . that are suffering because the head of the household's out of work," providing potential recruits for the anti-U.S. insurgency, he said.
In the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
  

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Wednesday, November 26, 2003

Another Great One Gone But Never To Be Forgotten

Warren Spahn Dies at 82. As pretty as a picture, he was a pitcher's pitcher. Lordy, Lordy, was he fun to watch and tough to beat. R.I.P. Mr. Spahn.
Warren Spahn, who in a career spanning 21 seasons won 363 games, the major league record for a left-handed pitcher, died yesterday at his home in Broken Arrow, Okla. He was 82.

Confounding batters with a fluid, high-kicking motion and an assortment of pitches that nicked the corners of the plate or darted just outside the strike zone, Spahn was a craftsman on the mound.

Pitching 20 seasons for the Braves — 8 in Boston and 12 in Milwaukee — and a final season with the Mets and the San Francisco Giants, Spahn had a record of 363-245, fifth on the career victory list. He won the Cy Young award as baseball's best pitcher in 1957, was an All-Star 14 times and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1973, his first year of eligibility.

"For the years I was watching him, Koufax was tops," Johnny Podres, a Dodgers pitcher and later a pitching coach, told Donald Honig in "October Heroes." "But for the long haul, for year-after-year performance, Warren Spahn was the best I ever saw. He was just a master of his trade. I couldn't take my eyes off him. Watching him was an education."
In The New York Times...
  

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A President Who Reads Books, How Refreshing

What A Real President Reads; of course, the cowboy who calls himself President is proud that he doesn't read, so it isn't a fair comparison. But then Dubya comes up 7 days late and 7 bucks short in any comparison with William Jefferson Clinton.
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. Nov. 21 — Ah, nothing like curling up in front of the fireplace with 21 of President Clinton's favorite books.

To coincide with the opening of a Clinton Library-related exhibit of books and gifts he received while president, Clinton has released a list of his 21 favorite books from his wife's "Living History" to Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" to Thomas a Kempis' "The Imitation of Christ."

Clinton's presidential library is to open next November on the south bank of the Arkansas River in downtown Little Rock. A nearby office building, the Cox Creative Center, has hosted a number of preview exhibits, and on Monday opens "America Presents: A Collection of Books and Gifts of the Clinton Presidency." The exhibit runs through Jan. 3.

Copies of Clinton's 21 favorite books will be on display at the Cox building.

Besides Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's autobiography, Ellison's soaring novel of a black man's journey through white America and Kempis' 15th-century treatise on Christian living, other books of note include Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" and Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again."

The entire list of Clinton's favorite books, listed alphabetically by author:

"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," Maya Angelou.

"Meditations," Marcus Aurelius.

"The Denial of Death," Ernest Becker.

"Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963," Taylor Branch.

"Living History," Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"Lincoln," David Herbert Donald.

"The Four Quartets," T.S. Eliot.

"Invisible Man," Ralph Ellison.

"The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-First Century," David Fromkin.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude," Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

"The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes," Seamus Heaney.

"King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa," Adam Hochschild.

"The Imitation of Christ," Thomas a Kempis.

"Homage to Catalonia," George Orwell.

"The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis," Carroll Quigley.

"Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics," Reinhold Niebuhr.

"The Confessions of Nat Turner," William Styron.

"Politics as a Vocation," Max Weber.

"You Can't Go Home Again," Thomas Wolfe.

"Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny," Robert Wright.

"The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats," William Butler Yeats.
What? No "Blood Will Tell"? Or surely "The Boys Who Would Be Cubs"? I'm heartbroken. But I am excited to learn that our last elected president reads Thomas Wolfe and Bill Styron.

ABC News
  

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Bush Meets With Families of Fallen Soldiers

Apparently Dubya Reads Maureen Dowd After All. This is not really the occasion to make punditry-hay with a memorial service for fallen heroes, but not to note that Bush has suddenly chosen to publicly honor our war dead and their families after the hammering he's taken--and given--over the issue from his critics, led by Ms. Dowd, would be negligent journalism.
FORT CARSON, Colo., Nov. 24 — President Bush offered personal condolences on Monday to the families of 26 soldiers killed in Iraq, meeting privately with 98 parents, spouses, children and other relatives of the dead at a time when his handling of war casualties has become a political issue.

"I want to thank the families of the fallen soldiers who are here with us today," Mr. Bush said in an address to troops before the private meeting. "Our prayers are with you."

How to deal with the casualties of war is a quandary for any president, and particularly so for Mr. Bush, whose handling of Iraq has become a central issue in the presidential campaign. A further challenge, White House aides have said, is how to express sympathy for those killed without showing favoritism for one family over another or drawing attention to the mounting number of deaths.

Among the people he met after the speech here were family members of some of the 16 soldiers killed when a missile brought down a Chinook helicopter near Falluja on Nov. 2.

On the day of that attack, Mr. Bush, who was at his ranch in Texas, made no comment on the casualties, and the White House limited its response to a general statement of regret for all loss of life in the conflict.

The president's decision not to make a direct statement was seen by some of his critics as an effort to avoid political fallout from the mounting death toll in Iraq, and as part of a pattern in which the administration has also restricted photographers' access to scenes of coffins arriving in the United States.
In The New York Times...
  

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Tuesday, November 25, 2003

The New York Times’ "Starter Blog"

The New York Times is Blogging on the Q.T. The Venerable Grey Lady is putting her toes into the Blogosphere, testing the waters with one of her best, Nicholas Kristof. Go figure. Glenn Reynolds will choke on his rah rah cheer-babble taking his lame licks at this turn of the tables.
During the “Back to the Future” panel at the Online News Association conference this past weekend, NYTimes.com editor in chief Len Apcar said, “We have a starter blog. We’ve had it for a few months. I’ll let you figure out where it is. And we’ll have more.” For those wondering where it is as the New York Times figures out its blogging strategy, it's this page, where Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed columnist for The Times, addresses reader e-mail and gives the story behind the column.
CyberJournalist.net
  

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So What's Up With Hezbollah?

Only In Love, War and Geopolitics, so go figure this. Honor among terrorists; or pragmatic expediency with a dollop of fear? Whatever it is, it is very interesting, to say the obvious. Me? I don't have a clue. Do you? Or maybe that guy over there waiting for a bus? Ask him.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 — Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite group, has established a significant presence in Iraq, but is not taking part in attacks on American forces inside the country, according to current and former United States officials and Arabs familiar with the organization.

Iran is believed to be restraining Hezbollah from attacking American troops, and that is prompting a debate within the Bush administration about Iran's objectives, administration officials said.

Hezbollah's presence has become a source of concern as it is recognized by counterterrorist experts to have some of the most dangerous operatives in the world.

Both American and Israeli intelligence have found evidence that Hezbollah operatives have established themselves in Iraq, according to current and former United States officials. Separately, Arabs in Lebanon and elsewhere who are familiar with the organization say Hezbollah has sent what they describe as a security team of up to 90 members to Iraq.

The organization has steered clear of attacks on Americans, the American officials and Arabs familiar with Hezbollah agree. United States intelligence officials said Hezbollah operatives were believed to have arrived in Iraq soon after the end of major combat operations last spring, and had refrained from attacks on Americans ever since. The Central Intelligence Agency has not seen a major influx of Hezbollah operatives since that time, officials added.

"Hezbollah has moved to establish a presence inside Iraq, but it isn't clear from the intelligence reports what their intent is," one administration official said.

Based in Lebanon, Hezbollah is a Shiite Islamic group that is under Tehran's control. Syria, which dominates Lebanon and controls Hezbollah's supply lines from Iran, also plays a powerful role with the group. ...

In recent months, American troops have faced a deadly guerrilla campaign waged largely by the remnants of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party government in the Sunni-dominated region of central Iraq. Some foreign Arab fighters are believed to have infiltrated Iraq, but their role in attacks against American troops now appears to be less significant than United States military and intelligence officials originally believed.

But Iran's role in Iraq's Shiite community has been a wild card for the Bush administration. Shiite-dominated Iran has a strong interest in influencing the political and religious direction of the country, particularly because some of the Shiite world's holiest sites are in the Iraqi cities of Karbala and Najaf. Iran's powerful clerical leaders are deeply concerned about which clerics emerge as the dominant figures in those cities, American officials say.

"We are very aware of the rivalry between Iranian Shia and Iraqi Shia for dominance in that community," one administration official said. "It's possible that Hezbollah is there to help the Iraqis politically, to work in the Shia community," and have no plans for terrorist attacks against Americans, the official added. ...

Another critical concern of the Iranians is the American policy toward the People's Mujahedeen, an anti-Iranian terrorist group that operated for years on the Iraqi side of the border under the protection of Mr. Hussein's government.

Since the American occupation of the country, the Bush administration has been deeply divided over how to handle this group. Pentagon officials and conservatives inside and outside the administration have been open to the idea of using it against the Iranians, but State Department officials have argued that the group should be disarmed and rendered ineffective to improve relations with Iran. ...

"I think it is a little bit of the carrot and the stick," said one administration official. "They want a dialogue, and they also want to get their hands on" members of the Mujahedeen.

"I think sending Hezbollah to Iraq is about Iran's desire for us to take them seriously, both in terms of their interests in Iraq and their broader concerns in the Middle East," observed one former American official familiar with the intelligence reports on Hezbollah's presence in Iraq. "They want a dialogue with us, and they are signaling they can help us or hurt us."
In The New York Times...
  

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Monday, November 24, 2003

The Second Front In World War III, A Report

The Other War: a truly fine writer and reporter, The New York Times' David Rhode writes with verve, telling detail, color and insight about the "other war" American troops are fighting and dying in, Afghanistan, as the Taliban is slowly but surely staging a comeback attempt. I will quote just enough to hook you with David's prose and then hope you click onto the rest of a great piece of writing and war reporting.
LOZANO RIDGE, Afghanistan, Nov. 23 — As Sgt. First Class Vernon Story's column of Humvees climbed a desolate ridge a mile from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border here on Sunday morning, the sergeant got the feeling that someone was watching. The five unexploded land mines he and his men had found along this same ridge in a firefight with Taliban rebels here less than two months ago lingered in his mind.

"Hey, don't be driving down the tracks," Sergeant Story warned his driver.

Just after he spoke, the front of his Humvee abruptly lurched into the air as a mine or remote-controlled bomb detonated under the right front tire. It severed the lower left leg of a young soldier in the front passenger seat and tossed the 6,000-pound vehicle violently on its side. Sergeant Story, seven soldiers and four journalists traveling with them in the back of vehicle were thrown to the ground.

Scrambling to his feet, his face cut, the sergeant cursed, suspected an ambush and ordered his men to fire at the surrounding hillsides.

No one shot back.

So went a typical engagement in the grinding conflict for the 10,000 American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, overshadowed by the larger conflict in Iraq.

Casualties are not as high here, but fatal clashes with a shadowy enemy continue.
In The New York Times...
  

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Safire: Missing Links Found

Safire Thinks He's Found Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein Missing Links, and it's not improbable that he has. Or rather he leads us to sources he believes have found the links; he's a wonderful and honest wordsmith and he does not claim to have done the investigative journalism he points us toward. Of course, he's also honest enough to display that he has a horse in this race: He wants Dubya & Company to be proven right. Well, being a brilliant wordsmith does not mean that the ideas expressed in that eloquent, pristine syntax can't be a modest load of wrong minded wishful thinking.
WASHINGTON — Two blockbuster magazine articles last week revealed evidence that Saddam's spy agency and top Qaeda operatives certainly were in frequent contact for a decade, and that there is renewed reason to suspect an Iraqi spymaster in Prague may have helped finance the 9/11 attacks.

On weeklystandard.com, you can find chunks of a 16-page letter by Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, responding to a Senate Intelligence Committee request for evidence of Saddam-bin Laden collaboration. Fifty specific instances from C.I.A., N.S.A., F.B.I. and Pentagon files are described, many from 'sensitive reporting' never made public.

The Defense Department acknowledged the Oct. 27 letter included a classified annex of 'raw reports or products' of U.S. intelligence agencies on 'the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda,' cautioning that it 'drew no conclusions.' But with so much connective tissue exposed — some the result of 'custodial interviews' of prisoners — the burden of proof has shifted to those still grimly in denial. ...

Deniers derogate as "cherry picking" Feith's intelligence summary available to senators: "The Czech counterintelligence service reported that the Sept. 11 hijacker [Mohamed] Atta met with the former Iraqi intelligence chief in Prague, al Ani, on several occasions. During one of those meetings, al Ani ordered the IIS [Iraq Intelligence Service] finance officer to issue Atta funds from IIS financial holdings in the Prague office."

If true, that would implicate Saddam's regime in the murder of 3,000 Americans. Though the C.I.A. can confirm two Atta trips to Prague, in 1994 and 2000, it cannot confirm the two other visits the Czechs reported, including one on April 9, 2001, with Saddam's top European agent, al-Ani, then vice consul in Prague. C.I.A. chief George Tenet testified that the meeting reported by the Czech service was "possible," but the F.B.I. floated hints that car rental records showed Atta to be traveling between Virginia and Florida that week.

Enter the writer Edward Jay Epstein in the liberal online journal Slate: "All these reports attributed to the FBI were, as it turns out, erroneous. There were no car rental records in Virginia, Florida, or anywhere else in April 2001 for Mohamed Atta, since he had not yet obtained his Florida license." You cannot rent a car without a driver's license.

Epstein went to Prague this month to interview Czech officials who want to cooperate with the U.S. to get to the bottom of the Atta-Iraqi story but have been stiffed by the F.B.I., whose bureaucracy is sensitive to charges of failed surveillance. Read his detailed Slate report and subsequent commentary on edwardjayepstein.com.

Since July, al-Ani has been in U.S. Department of Justice custody and I wonder how effectively he is being interrogated. Have we learned the whereabouts of his Prague and Baghdad aides and secretaries, and taken their testimony? Have we asked M.I.5 to let us speak to Jabir Salim, his Prague station-chief predecessor, who defected to Britain and may know which employees and which banks could transfer $100,000 to an account accessible to Atta? ...

F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller is duty-bound to examine the full transcript of the interrogation to see how seriously this is being pursued; same with Senate Intelligence. I'd also assign new agents to follow up leads in Prague.

Intrepid journalists will ultimately bring the full story of the Saddam-bin Laden connection to light. In the meantime, the F.B.I. should stop treating 9/11 as a cold case.
In The New York Times...
  

11:15 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Good News Is Usually Bad News To Someone Else

"South of the Border, Down China Way," the new words to an old song? It is a sad song, really. Success coming at the expense of others--must it always be that way? Of course, there is an answer to the problem, radical though it will sound to almost all--Mexico should become part of the United States. Ouch! The curses from all sides hurt the ears even in cyber space. But, it will happen someday; it is inevitable in the march of time and progress. I'm serious.

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- It's a trade war being fought in the streets: Mexico's army of 1.6 million street vendors is resisting police attempts to confiscate imports from China, and the government has responded with everything from buy-Mexican ads to a special anti-import police squad.

Long known for the work of its artisans, Mexico now imports such handicrafts as painted figurines of Mexican saints and leather sandals from China. This year, China also displaced Mexico as the second-biggest exporter to the U.S. market, leaving Mexicans feeling cheated and worried the country is being left behind.

"It's not just fear, it's panic," said Mexico City historian Lorenzo Meyer. "We were supposed to be the ones moving ahead. We had free-market reforms, and now we're losing out to a communist-run country. In 500 years, this country has never been able to get ahead economically."

Newspapers regularly run stories on the threat. "The Chinese want Mexico's oil," "Chinese products proliferate in handicraft markets," and "Border factories fight Chinese threat" are just a few recent examples.

The damage is everywhere. China is producing statuettes of Mexico's patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe. And plastic Chinese flip-flops are the preferred footwear in many parts of rural Mexico, replacing Mexican leather sandals that had been worn here for centuries.

In the north-central state of Guanajuato, dozens of shoemaking businesses have closed recently, including Botas Fox, the family business of President Vicente Fox. Shoemakers complain they are being driven out of business by cheap Chinese imports.

"We just can't compete with the labor costs," said Sandra Santamaria, project director for Mexico's Apparel Industry Chamber. "Labor in China costs 48 cents per hour, and in Mexico it's $1.20." ...

Some Mexicans blame themselves. "We've never been able to defend ourselves against the Americans, or the Chinese," said one anti-import sign posted outside a Mexican clothing store. "But, then again, we haven't seen any Chinese. All we see are disloyal Mexicans who don't want to pay for Mexican goods." ...

The Chinese have argued Mexico should improve its own products, rather than complaining about other countries.

"China was inundated with foreign products, but we did not blame those countries. Instead, we learned how to produce like them," said Xingmin Yin, the deputy director of Fudan University's China Center for Economic Studies in Shanghai.
Syracuse.com
  

10:58 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Roll Over Vladimir, Tell Mao Zedong the News: Baseball In China

Glory Be! Baseball In China! My life is now almost complete: Baseball in China! Truly amazing. I went over to Tsinghua University a few weeks ago to watch an intramural game and while the baseball was bad, the spirit was wonderful. Frankly, baseball was the only thing I missed about the States in the year-and-a-half we've been in China. I have always managed to live my life since childhood with feet firmly planted in what many think are two disparate worlds: The Intellectual and The Jock. I was lucky enough to get to play ball longer than most--football (American) and baseball--and get to work and earn part of my living in it (baseball), while all along living and working in the Fine Arts. So, my luck is still holding. I love my intellectual life here in the New China, and now with baseball here also, "It's a Wonderful Life," to steal a phrase at this Holiday Season. "All right, gimme a batter up here. Let's go--play ball!"
BEIJING -- When Jim Small eyes China, he dreams big: seventh-inning stretches in Shanghai, home runs in Harbin, scouts scouring Suzhou for the new Sammy Sosa. In short, baseball -- pure, old-fashioned American baseball -- barnstorming its way across the land of Mao.

Small is Major League Baseball's vice president of international market development. And there's no international market larger than China, where it's estimated the number of school-age athletes is larger than the entire population of the United States.

On Sunday, MLB and its fledgling counterpart, the China Baseball Association, announced they would formally team up to promote baseball in every corner of the communist nation ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It's a decision both romantic and lucrative.

"Baseball was born in America. Now it belongs to the world," Small said Sunday. "But if baseball is truly to be considered a global sport, it needs to be played in some key countries -- and China is at the top of that list."

Now, professional and collegiate coaches will stream into China to work with young prospects. Top Chinese coaches will travel to America for stints with major-league clubs. Chinese umpires will receive training. Youth development programs -- including possibly the famed Pitch, Hit and Run that so many American youngsters have competed in -- will flourish.

Most significantly, MLB will start scouting in China, finding the country's top players and grooming them for big-league play. No details were given.

While Japanese have reached stardom in America, a Chinese has never played in the major leagues even though more than half of today's big-league players were born outside the United States. The only Chinese in the system, Wang Chao, plays for Seattle's farm system.

"We want to develop stars. Baseball in China could use its own Yao Ming," said Shen Wei, secretary-general of the China Baseball Association.

About five dozen Chinese universities have varsity teams, and the four-team China Baseball Association -- the Beijing Tigers, the Tianjin Lions, the Shanghai Eagles and the Guangdong Leopards -- is trying to draw bigger crowds with local sponsorships and outreaches to children.

But this is a land dominated by soccer and, more recently, basketball. Yao, the Houston Rockets' center, has become a folk hero across China and generated a spike in interest in the NBA, which is talking about holding exhibition games here.

That's the challenge for baseball. "We need to make it part of the culture here, so kids are playing in the streets," said Tom McCarthy, a New Englander and Red Sox fan who helps run the Chinese league.

Players and coaches with big-league experience are already working with China's national team, and former Milwaukee Brewers and Seattle Mariners manager Jim Lefebvre spent three months this year managing it through the Asian championship in Sapporo, Japan. China fell to Taiwan in its final game, 3-1.

The national team also spent a month in Arizona this fall training at the Mariners' facility and playing minor-leaguers from the fall instructional league -- and, once, defeating the San Diego Padres' Class A team.

Still, a spot check of five sporting-goods stores in the Chinese capital hints at the road ahead. The first four had no baseball equipment. The fifth, Li Sheng Sports on Wangfujing, Beijing's premier shopping street, said it carried a bat and a glove.
ESPN...
  

10:44 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Sunday, November 23, 2003



We Grieve, But We Cannot Quit.
BAGHDAD (CNN) -- Three U.S. soldiers were killed Sunday in separate attacks on their military convoys in Iraq, according to the U.S. military.

Two soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division were killed Sunday when their convoy came under attack by small arms fire in the northern town of Mosul, according to a U.S. Army spokesman.

Another U.S. soldier was killed and two were wounded Sunday morning near Ba'qubah, north of Baghdad, when a military convoy hit a roadside bomb, according to a spokesman for the 4th Infantry Division.

The wounded soldiers are in a stable condition, the spokesman said.
CNN
  

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"F.B.I. Scrutinizes Antiwar Rallies"

Very Ugly Deja Vu All Over Again. For those of us who lived it, the repressive abuses of our governmental law enforcement agencies during the 60's are still very real and not just marijuana memories. Those of us who lived under the constant threat of its boot also know that we must remain ever vigilant lest it happen again. Well, it appears it is. This is a very dangerous slippery slope, do we really want to go down it again?
WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 — The Federal Bureau of Investigation has collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and has advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counterterrorism squads, according to interviews and a confidential bureau memorandum.

The memorandum, which the bureau sent to local law enforcement agencies last month in advance of antiwar demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco, detailed how protesters have sometimes used "training camps" to rehearse for demonstrations, the Internet to raise money and gas masks to defend against tear gas. The memorandum analyzed lawful activities like recruiting demonstrators, as well as illegal activities like using fake documentation to get into a secured site.

F.B.I. officials said in interviews that the intelligence-gathering effort was aimed at identifying anarchists and "extremist elements" plotting violence, not at monitoring the political speech of law-abiding protesters.

The initiative has won the support of some local police, who view it as a critical way to maintain order at large-scale demonstrations. Indeed, some law enforcement officials said they believed the F.B.I.'s approach had helped to ensure that nationwide antiwar demonstrations in recent months, drawing hundreds of thousands of protesters, remained largely free of violence and disruption.

But some civil rights advocates and legal scholars said the monitoring program could signal a return to the abuses of the 1960's and 1970's, when J. Edgar Hoover was the F.B.I. director and agents routinely spied on political protesters like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

"The F.B.I. is dangerously targeting Americans who are engaged in nothing more than lawful protest and dissent," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "The line between terrorism and legitimate civil disobedience is blurred, and I have a serious concern about whether we're going back to the days of Hoover."

Herman Schwartz, a constitutional law professor at American University who has written about F.B.I. history, said collecting intelligence at demonstrations is probably legal.

But he added: "As a matter of principle, it has a very serious chilling effect on peaceful demonstration. If you go around telling people, `We're going to ferret out information on demonstrations,' that deters people. People don't want their names and pictures in F.B.I. files."

The abuses of the Hoover era, which included efforts by the F.B.I. to harass and discredit Hoover's political enemies under a program known as Cointelpro, led to tight restrictions on F.B.I. investigations of political activities.
In The New York Times...

 

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Bombers Kill 14 in Iraq; Missile Hits Civilian Plane

This Is War, Not Terrorism, and we must understand that; we must obliterate from our minds those empty, bragging "End of major conflict" words by our Politician-in-chief. This is the war that many members of the American military command and strategic planning groups predicted would be fought in Iraq, but were shoved aside by the ideologues who had Persian fairy-dust in their heads, not military realities. This is the only kind of war the Baathists could wage with any hope of effectiveness. No, they cannot win; but they will take many down with them before it is over. They also know that every day they fight on, we lose more than soldiers and Iraqi citizens. We lose who we are and the ideals we fight and die for.
KHAN BANI SAAD, Iraq, Nov. 22 — A missile hit a civilian airplane in Baghdad on Saturday, American military officials said, as suicide attackers exploded huge bombs at two police stations, one of them in this town north of Baghdad, killing at least 14 people, including two young girls, and wounding at least 50.

With the continuing chaos and violence in Iraq, which American soldiers have been unable to snuff out, a top Iraqi politician, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, was attacked by a mortar shell on Friday night at a mosque in Baghdad. But the shell failed to explode and Mr. Hakim, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council and brother of the slain pro-American Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, was not hurt.

The airplane, operated by the courier company DHL, was hit by one or two surface-to-air missiles just after taking off from the main airport in Baghdad, the military said. The plane, an Airbus A300 jet, was apparently hit in a wing, an engine caught fire, and it was forced into an emergency landing at the heavily guarded airport that is a major base for United States soldiers in Iraq. None of the three crew members were hurt.

Military officials said there had been at least 12 other attempted attacks on the few civilian flights that operate in Iraq, and this first successful hit of a civilian aircraft might further delay opening the airport to civilian traffic and thus postpone one major marker for stability in Iraq.

Attackers have been increasingly successful in hitting aircraft in Iraq: 39 American soldiers have been killed in four helicopter crashes since Nov. 2, in which enemy fire either brought down the crafts or probably caused them to fall.

Forces hostile to the occupation here apparently intended to show their increasing sophistication and firepower by exploding two huge bombs — reportedly identical devices detonated almost simultaneously — at police stations about 20 miles apart north of Baghdad.

Six police officers and three civilians were killed in this small town about 20 miles north of Baghdad, and in Baquba, a restive city another 20 miles to the north, four policemen were killed along with a girl walking with her father. There were unconfirmed reports of several more dead.

The Iraqi police, trained and paid by the Americans, have been a frequent target, and on Saturday several policemen said they needed more support — in money and equipment — to prevent further attacks and take over, as the Bush administration is planning, more day-to-day security operations in Iraq.
In The New York Times...
  

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Dubya Dowded Again

Another Dubya Gotcha From Ms. Dowd. In a biting, bull's eye column with the headline, "Scaring Up Votes," Ms. Dowd reminds those of us who do not watch television in Iowa and are critics of Bush & Company exactly why we have to pull back whatever bit of grudging respect we might have had for Dubya's speech in Whitehall last week. This doomsday ad reaffirms everything I previously believed about this dangerous man at the helm of our ship of state. If you are not disgusted by its blatant pandering to the basest instincts of the conflicted collective conscious of the American people, then you are part of the problem, not the solution--exactly what this anachronistic, tin-horn, pop-gunslinger is at a time when solutions are not just needed but are absolutely paramount lest our world spin further into total, endless warfare.
WASHINGTON

First came the pre-emptive military policy. Now comes the pre-emptive campaign strategy.

Before the president even knows his opponent, his first political ad is blanketing Iowa today.

"It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known," Mr. Bush says, in a State of the Union clip.

Well, that's a comforting message from our commander in chief. Do we really need his cold, clammy hand on our spine at a time when we're already rattled by fresh terror threats at home and abroad? When we're chilled by the metastasizing Al Qaeda, the resurgent Taliban and Baathist thugs armed with deadly booby traps; the countless, nameless terror groups emerging in Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia and elsewhere; the vicious attacks on Americans, Brits, aid workers and their supporters in Iraq, Afghanistan and Turkey? The latest illustration of the low-tech ingenuity of Iraqi foes impervious to our latest cascade of high-tech missiles: a hapless, singed donkey that carted rockets to a Baghdad hotel.

Yet the Bush crowd is seizing the moment to scare us even more.

Flashing the words "terrorists" and "self-defense" in crimson, the Republican National Committee spot urges Americans "to support the president's policy of pre-emptive self-defense" — a policy Colin Powell claimed was overblown by the press.

"Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike?" Mr. Bush says.

With this ad, Republicans have announced their intention: to scare us stupid, hoping we won't remember that this was the same State of the Union in which Mr. Bush made a misleading statement about the Iraq-Niger uranium connection, or remark that the imperial idyll in Iraq has created more terrorists. ...

The president is trying to make the campaign about guts: he has the guts to persevere in the war on terror.

But the real issue is trust: should we trust leaders who cynically manipulated intelligence, diverted 9/11 anger and lost focus on Osama so they could pursue an old cause near to neocon hearts: sacking Saddam?

The Bush war left our chief villains operating, revved up the terrorist threat, ravaged our international alliances and sparked the resentment of a world that ached for us after 9/11. ...

James Goodby and Kenneth Weisbrode wrote in The Financial Times last week that the Bush crew has snuffed the optimism of F.D.R., Ronald Reagan and Bush père: "Fear has been used as a basis for curtailing freedom of expression and for questioning legal rights long taken for granted. It has crept into political discourse and been used to discredit patriotic public servants. Ronald Reagan's favorite image, borrowed from an earlier visionary, of America as `a shining city on a hill' has been unnecessarily dimmed by another image: a nation motivated by fear and ready to lash out at any country it defines as the source of a gathering threat."

Instead of a shining city, we have a dark bunker.

But the only thing we really have to fear is fearmongering itself.
In The New York Times...
  

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The Genie Is Out of the Bottle To Stay

The Genie Won't Go Back Into the Bottle, and that fact is becoming more and more apparent every day here in the Middle Kingdom. This is a fascinating look into the online world in China. As an American journalist and professor teaching, writing and blogging here in China, I can report that it is also an accurate look at what the Internet has done for the dissemination of news here.
China's government has long controlled the information its citizens receive through official media, but that may end as the Internet burrows deeper into the fast-changing communist country, a Chinese Internet expert says.

"I won't say China is democratic, but you no longer can control information," says Guo Liang, deputy director of the Research Center for Social Development at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government-supported think tank in Beijing.

"SARS is a good example of that," he said in a recent interview in New York. "Even 10 years ago, people could hardly criticize anything. The government could easily hide something and people would hardly dare to expose anything."

Special filters block Web surfers in China from seeing sites run by overseas Chinese dissidents, human rights groups and some news organizations, though the enforcement is spotty and often inexplicably random. Guo and others dispute the filters' effectiveness and don't think they have much effect.

"You cannot control Internet. That is my basic theory," said Guo, who recently completed a survey on Internet use in 12 smaller Chinese cities. "People can receive all sorts of information. The filters cannot scan a graphic." ...

Guo's survey, funded by the New York-based Markle Foundation, queried 4,100 people between the ages of 17 to 60 in 12 Chinese cities. Although that sample is not considered representative of the overall population, the survey's findings offer an unusual window into how the Internet is transforming politics in China ? providing citizens with a platform to express opinions, as well as providing a window to the outside world.

For example, 72 percent of the Internet users surveyed agreed that "by using the Internet, people have more opportunities to express their political views." Sixty-one percent think the Internet gives them more opportunity to criticize government policies and 73 percent said government officials "will learn the common people's views better" because of the Net.

Only 13 percent said they favor controlling political content.

China has about 68 million Internet users among its 1.3 billion people, according to figures provided in July by the China Internet Network Information Center. Internet usage is highest in China's largest cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, with about 30 percent of residents going online.

But a similar percentage ? about 27 percent ? of the people surveyed in 12 of China's smaller cities go online, too. "I did not expect that," Guo said.

In Guo's survey, 63 percent said they have home access, while 41 percent, mostly in outlying areas, use Internet cafes. Smaller numbers have Net access from work or school.

Fifty-seven percent of the Chinese Internet users questioned said they go online to browse websites, while 51 percent use e-mail and 49 percent download music.

Only 5.3 percent of those surveyed used the Net for online shopping. Those who do spend a yearly average of $50 on small items such as books, magazines and CDs.
Wired...
  

6:55 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




China - India - Pakistan: Potential Conflagration Point?

The Mideast Isn't the Only Potential Major Conflagration Point the world needs to be aware of. The China - India - Pakistan geopolitical waltz is of great import not only because together they are inhabited by almost 2.5 Billion people but because each possess a fully deployable nuclear arsenal. It is important to remember that there have been armed disputes amongst all three in contemporary times. In the case of India and Pakistan, their armed conflict is current and sporadically ongoing.
Observing that China-Pakistan nexus in nuclear and missile proliferation continues to cause 'serious concern', External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha on Saturday said that as a 'friend' India expected China to show "greater sensitivity" to its security concerns.

"Some aspects of China's relations with Pakistan, including their nexus in nuclear and missile proliferation, however, continue to cause serious concern in India as they have a direct and negative bearing on our national security environment," he said while delivering the Admiral RD Katari memorial lecture in New Delhi.

"Some aspects of China's relations with Pakistan, including their nexus in nuclear and missile proliferation, however, continue to cause serious concern in India as they have a direct and negative bearing on our national security environment," he said while delivering the Admiral RD Katari memorial lecture in New Delhi.

"We regard China as a friend and we expect friends to show greater sensitivity to our security concerns," Sinha said.

The minister's remarks come close on the heels of a CIA report to the US Congress contending that China continues to help Pakistan in its nuclear programme despite assurances otherwise.

Without naming Pakistan, Sinha said there were some in the neighbourhood who sought to play their "China connection" or "China card" to "counter" or even "contain" India.

Sinha said the bankruptcy of this approach was becoming increasingly evident. "Destinies of the countries of South Asia are interlinked by the overwhelming logic of history, geography and economics," he said.

Maintaining that India does not judge its relationship with China in the context of its bilateral relations with any other country, he said, "it also means that other countries need to adjust their own equations with both India and China to factor in the reality that it is no longer a matter of playing one against the other".

He felt that the increasing cooperation between India and China in the multilateral arena would have a positive cascading effect on the region, especially on issues relating to the interests of developing countries.

Rejecting the notion that India's relations with the US could be used as a counterforce against China, he said these were based on outmoded concepts like balance of power. "We value our relations with both China and the US and both have their own compelling logic".
Read the rest in the Hindustan Times...
  

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We Are Letting The Terrorists Win

We Are Letting The Islamic Terrorists Win. Notice I did not say they are winning, I said we are LETTING them win. No, they have not won a single engagement on the field of battle. But, yes, we have let them win everywhere else: In our daily lives. For readers of this blog, it is no surprise that I am an admirer of the writing and wisdom of Thomas Friedman, columnist at The New York Times. And that is surely still true at this moment. His column today is particularly brilliant and necessary. There are times in a writer's career when he will read something and remark inwardly, 'Damn, I wished I'd written that!' That sentiment is overwhelming as I type these meager words. I will stop typing and instead present in full Mr. Friedman's column, "The Way We Were":
LONDON

We've all had our ups and downs since 9/11, but last week's events in London tested even my congenital optimism. I was a participant in the 50th anniversary celebration of the Marshall scholarships. The Marshalls were created by the British government to honor Secretary of State George Marshall and to express Britain's gratitude for the Marshall Plan. Over the last 50 years, some 1,400 Americans have attended Oxford, Cambridge and other British universities on Marshall scholarships, paid for by British taxpayers. Twenty-eight years ago, I was one of those lucky Americans.

On Wednesday, for the 50th anniversary, the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission gathered all the Marshall scholars now in Britain and British dignitaries who have supported the program, with Prince Charles presiding. The event, held at the University of London, was timed for the Bush visit, because Secretary of State Colin Powell, the keynote speaker, was one of five Americans being presented with the first Marshall medals. There were a few protest banners waiting for Mr. Powell around campus, but nothing extraordinary. Prince Charles showed up with what appeared to be one security guard.

But there was no Colin Powell.

A few hours earlier, the organizers were told that Mr. Powell was canceling, because of "security concerns." Every American I talked to was both sad and embarrassed — sad that an event intended to affirm the Atlantic alliance turned into another small victory for terrorists; sad that all these young Marshall scholars didn't get to see their secretary of state being honored and to hear his thoughts; and embarrassed that some nameless security officer decided Mr. Powell couldn't brave a few protesters, but Prince Charles could.

But this is more lament than criticism. I wouldn't want the responsibility of deciding when the president or secretary of state should appear in public.

These are tough calls. It's always hard to know where the line should be. But I fear we're starting to cross it in ways that could actually be dangerous for us all. Whether we're talking about our public officials or your family deciding whether to vacation in Istanbul, we all have to learn to live with more insecurity. Because terrorists are in the fear business, and every time we visibly imprison ourselves, they win another small victory and become more emboldened. Indeed, we could learn from the British. The I.R.A. murdered the queen's cousin and almost blew up Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in her hotel — yet life in London goes on and the police here still don't carry guns.

I fear that the kinds of security officials who pulled the plug on Mr. Powell are becoming the new priesthood of our age. If the 1990's were the era of "Davos Man," the 2000's are the era of "Security Man" — and like a priesthood, these "terrorism experts" have unchallenged authority to curb our freedom in the name of freedom. Some of them deserve respect and know their stuff. But some wouldn't recognize the 6-foot-5 Osama bin Laden if he walked past them dribbling a basketball and dragging his dialysis machine.

Bin Laden is supposed to be on the run — not us. What good is driving bin Laden into a cave if our secretary of state has to live in a bubble? When Mr. Powell can't deliver a speech in London — London — then why travel anywhere? And if diplomats can't travel or circulate, then diplomacy becomes virtual. And virtual diplomacy leads to virtual allies and virtual allies lead to no allies at all. If communities of shared values can't share their values, where are we?

I called an Israeli friend, the political theorist Yaron Ezrahi, to fulminate about this and he perked me up. He told me he had just been to the reopening of the Cafe Hillel in Jerusalem, which a suicide bomber just blew up a few weeks ago. "It was so crowded you couldn't find a seat," said Mr. Ezrahi. "Freedom is the only guardian of freedom." Which is why Israelis insist that any bus stop blown up by suicide bombers be rebuilt by the next day. Message to suicide bombers: You're dead and we're not afraid. That is the best deterrence.

The events of 9/11 were a new and dangerous form of terrorism — "terrorism not meant to stimulate political concessions but to destroy our way of life," notes John Chipman, head of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. We had to react, but we must stop overreacting. Terrorists win when they prevent us from enjoying and spreading our values. We defeat them not just by how we react, but by how we don't react.
The New York Times
  

1:48 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Abandonment Rate of Many Blogs is Not Bad News

Perseus: The Skinny On Blogging, Is a Fascinating Statistical Look at the Blogging Phenomenon. If you are a blogger, a prospective blogger, if you read blogs, and especially if you are a professional writer who is also now blogging, or journalist who is thinking about starting a blog, you should read this piece in full, it's fascinating and also very instructive.
The Blogging Iceberg - Of 4.12 Million Hosted Weblogs, Most Little Seen, Quickly Abandoned

Perseus Development Corp. randomly surveyed 3,634 blogs on eight leading blog-hosting services to develop a model of blog populations. Based on this research, Perseus estimates that 4.12 million blogs have been created on these services: Blog-City, BlogSpot, Diaryland, LiveJournal, Pitas, TypePad, Weblogger and Xanga.

Abandoned Blogs

The most dramatic finding was that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months, representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned. Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate. In fact, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days. The average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned blogs was 126 days (almost four months). A surprising 132,000 blogs were abandoned after being maintained a year or more (the oldest abandoned blog surveyed had been maintained for 923 days).
Perseus.com
  

3:18 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




100,000 in 2006

There Are White House Political Realities and Army Realities, the former is about reelection, the latter is about rations, fuel, trucks, tires, ice cream, bullets, night vision goggles, etc., everything an Army on foreign soil needs. Which of the two is more like to be the truth in the end?
WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 — Army planning for Iraq currently assumes keeping about 100,000 United States troops there through early 2006, a senior Army officer said Friday. The plans reflect the concerns of some Army officials that stabilizing Iraq could be more difficult than originally planned.

The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, warned that maintaining a force of that size in Iraq beyond then would cause the Army to "really start to feel the pain" from stresses on overtaxed active-duty, Reserve and National Guard troops.

The officer was offering a senior-level Army view on the issue, but the size of any future American force in Iraq will ultimately be decided by President Bush and a new provisional Iraqi government that is expected to assume control from an American administrator by June. The Army plans nevertheless give a view of top-level Pentagon thinking about the size of the American force that may be needed in Iraq well beyond the time next year when Washington expects to turn political control of Iraq back to Iraqi leaders.
The New York Times...
  

1:36 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




David Brooks On Gay Marriage: He Thinks It Is A Moral Imperative

This Is Compassionate Conservatism, and it is a breath of fresh air, scented with tolerance, reason and love of humankind. Boy, is he going to catch hell from the Bubba & Dubya breed of conservatives.
You would think that faced with this marriage crisis, we conservatives would do everything in our power to move as many people as possible from the path of contingency to the path of fidelity. But instead, many argue that gays must be banished from matrimony because gay marriage would weaken all marriage. A marriage is between a man and a woman, they say. It is women who domesticate men and make marriage work.

Well, if women really domesticated men, heterosexual marriage wouldn't be in crisis. In truth, it's moral commitment, renewed every day through faithfulness, that "domesticates" all people.

Some conservatives may have latched onto biological determinism (men are savages who need women to tame them) as a convenient way to oppose gay marriage. But in fact we are not animals whose lives are bounded by our flesh and by our gender. We're moral creatures with souls, endowed with the ability to make covenants, such as the one Ruth made with Naomi: "Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried."

The conservative course is not to banish gay people from making such commitments. It is to expect that they make such commitments. We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.

When liberals argue for gay marriage, they make it sound like a really good employee benefits plan. Or they frame it as a civil rights issue, like extending the right to vote.

Marriage is not voting. It's going to be up to conservatives to make the important, moral case for marriage, including gay marriage. Not making it means drifting further into the culture of contingency, which, when it comes to intimate and sacred relations, is an abomination.
In The New York Times...
 

1:32 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Saturday, November 22, 2003

Patents, Patients & Big Dollars

Kristof: Death by Dividend. This column must be read. I have excerpted only the provocative opening in hopes that you will click onto the rest of this important message.
COATEPEQUE, Guatemala
In this impoverished corner of southwestern Guatemala, lush with jungle and burbling brooks, you can just about see people dying as an indirect result of America's trade agenda.

Even now, some governments in Central America choose to let their people die rather than distribute cheap generic AIDS drugs, which would save more lives but might irritate the U.S. And now America is trying to make it more difficult for these countries to use generic drugs.

That's why I decided to write about the Free Trade Area of the Americas, or F.T.A.A., not from Miami, where the negotiations were under way this week, but from rural Guatemala. Here it's easier to appreciate the stark choice that we Americans face: Do we want to maximize profits for U.S. pharmaceutical companies, or do we want to save lives?
Read Kristof, please, in The New York Times...
  

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Ass Backwards Warfare?

The Donkey Militia isn't to be laughed at. It's not the first time in recent military history that pack animals and cobbled-together weapons have proven effective against major modern armies. Indeed, it can be offered that such tactics are the only way a partisan insurgency can "level the playing field" against vastly superior opposition. Such methods surely should not be construed as "desperation" but in fact as a demonstration of a level of organizational logistics that includes planning, assembly and delivery. There is an ancillary benefit other than the military strike to a guerilla force in deploying such methods: recruitment. The allure of the David versus Goliath syndrome is often irresistible to impressionable young men with ideological hatred preached into their brains and nothing much to lose but their "martyred" lives.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 21 — Faced with an American military crackdown using all the paraphernalia of high-technology warfare, Iraqi insurgents resorted today to the humblest of creatures and the simplest of transports to carry out what American officers called 'spectacular' strikes against heavily fortified targets in Baghdad.

The attackers used four donkey carts disguised as hay wagons to haul homemade multiple rocket-launchers close to several of the most heavily defended sites in the city, including the 20-story Palestine and Sheraton hotels on the banks of the Tigris River, and the Oil Ministry, which manages the resources on which Iraq's hopes for resurgent oil wealth depend.

One American working for Kellogg, Brown and Root, one of the largest American companies involved in reconstruction here, was seriously wounded when his 15th-floor room at the Palestine Hotel took a direct hit. The American military command said the man, who was not identified, was in critical condition with head and chest wounds and would be evacuated to the American military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany.

Another donkey cart carrying rockets was spotted by a suspicious shopkeeper and disarmed before it could detonate near the Italian and Turkish embassies and the headquarters of a Kurdish political party in another part of central Baghdad. Yet another donkey cart was found near a law school and an adjacent American military camp farther down the Tigris, with still more rockets under a mound of hay. It, too, was disarmed. ...

Although the attacks fell short of the horror of recent suicide bombings that killed dozens at the United Nations compound and the Red Cross headquarters here, they appeared intended to have maximum psychological impact on Baghdad's increasingly fearful 5.5 million people.

"These are spectacular attacks," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, chief spokesman for the United States military command. He described those mounting attacks across Iraq as "an adaptive, ingenious enemy," but said they knew that they could not prevail in a direct confrontation with the 155,000 allied troops, all but 25,000 of them Americans.

"They realize they can't defeat us in a conventional war," he said. "What they're trying to do is to break our will and grab headlines." ...

The attacks on Friday offered a taste of how difficult that task is likely to be, given the insurgents' quickness in exploiting any American weakness and their readiness to resort to low-technology tactics that can help them escape detection.

The donkeys were tethered to trees, with the rockets inserted inside home-made launchers linked to car batteries and time-fuses, and hidden under hay. But these "contraptions," as one American officer called them, were armed with powerful battlefield rockets. Several feet long and as big around as a fire hose, they were said by American officers to have been either Soviet-made 107-millimeter or Brazilian-made 122-millimeter rockets, two types that were stockpiled by Mr. Hussein's army before the American invasion. They have a range of up to 10 miles.

Only luck appeared to have averted far more serious damage. At least 50 of the rockets failed to fire. Those that did struck with great force. Four holes as big as soccer balls were punched in the outer walls of the Palestine Hotel, throwing concrete chunks and glass into three upper floors and filling corridors with thick, grimy dust.

At the adjacent Sheraton, a rocket severed the cables of an external, glass-encased elevator and sent it plunging to the ground, smashing the glass roof of the atrium and sending shards showering into the lobby. Miraculously, there were no injuries.

An upper floor of the Oil Ministry caught fire, but there were no reported injuries in a building that, unlike the hotels filled with foreign journalists and other outsiders, was virtually deserted at the start of a Muslim prayer day.

The United States military command swiftly issued a citywide alert after the attacks. Many carts plying the city's streets, delivering hay, collecting scrap and other loads, then came under stone-throwing attacks and curses from jumpy Iraqis if they lingered anywhere for long.

The donkeys, all of which survived, appeared to have played a part in limiting the severity of the attacks.

Iraqis who were outside the Palestine Hotel at the time of the attack there said the donkey there had started so violently after the first volley of rockets singed his backside that he upset the cart, toppling the launcher onto its side, spilling the battery onto the street and disrupting the firing mechanism. Outside the Italian Embassy, Iraqis said the donkey there had begun munching on the hay, exposing the rocket launcher before it could fire.
Laughable? Well, there are a lot of donkeys in Iraq; surely some of them will prove to be more compliant with regimentation.

In The New York Times...
  

4:40 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Case Closed? Not Even Close

Case Closed? Try Again. Yep, Murdoch's rag almost pulled off a fast one--but we aren't playing horseshoes, and Newsweek's intrepid duo of Isikoff and Hosenball pry the "Case" wide open.
A leaked Defense Department memo claiming new evidence of an “operational relationship” between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein’s former regime is mostly based on unverified claims that were first advanced by some top Bush administration officials more than a year ago—and were largely discounted at the time by the U.S. intelligence community, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials.

CASE CLOSED blared the headline in a Weekly Standard cover story last Saturday that purported to have unearthed the U.S. government’s “secret evidence of cooperation” between Saddam and bin Laden. Fred Barnes, the magazine’s executive editor, touted the magazine’s scoop the next day in a roundtable chat on “Fox News Sunday.” (Both the Standard and Fox News Channel are owned by the conservative media baron Rupert Murdoch.) “These are hard facts, and I’d like to see you refute any one of them,” he told a skeptical Juan Williams of National Public Radio.

In fact, the tangled tale of the memo suggests that the case of whether there has been Iraqi-Al Qaeda complicity is far from closed. The Oct. 27, 2003, memo, prepared by Deputy Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith’s office, was written in response to detailed questions from the Senate Intelligence Committee about the basis for intelligence pushed by Feith and other senior Pentagon officials during the run-up to the Iraq war.

With a few, inconclusive exceptions, the memo doesn’t actually contain much “new” intelligence at all. Instead, it mostly recycles shards of old, raw data that were first assembled last year by a tiny team of floating Pentagon analysts (led by a Pennsylvania State University professor and U.S. Navy analyst Christopher Carney) whom Feith asked to find evidence of an Iraqi-Al Qaeda “connection” in order to better justify a U.S. invasion.

Within the U.S. intelligence establishment, the predominant view—then as now—is that the Feith-Carney case was murky at best. Culling through intelligence files, the Feith team indeed found multiple “reports” of alleged meetings between Iraqi officials and Al Qaeda operatives dating back to the early 1990s when Osama first set up shop in Sudan. But many of these reports were old, uncorroborated and came from sources of unknown if not dubious credibility, U.S. intelligence officials say. (Not unlike, as it has turned out, much of the “reporting” on Iraq’s ever-elusive weapons of mass destruction.) Moreover, other reports—some of which came foreign intelligence services and Iraqi defectors—were selectively presented by the Feith team and are, as one U.S. official told NEWSWEEK, “contradicted by other things.”
Read the rest of this report as it takes the "memo" apart piece by piece, in Newsweek
 

1:56 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Friday, November 21, 2003

Iraq Update

More Rockets In Baghdad.
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Explosions shook Iraq’s oil ministry on Friday morning, witnesses said, and thick black smoke poured from the heavily guarded compound.

Fire trucks moved about the ministry and U.S. soldiers kept journalists away.

Imad Ahmed, a retired civil servant who lives near the ministry, said he heard five explosions at about 7:30 a.m.

The attack occurred minutes after at least three rockets were fired into the Palestine and Sheraton hotels in downtown Baghdad where many U.S. workers and foreign journalists are staying.
The Washington Post....
 

2:38 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Another Routine Day In Iraq

Rockets Flying in Baghdad and They Aren't Ours. The bad-guys are organized and apparently still want to fight--and die, which is why the insurgency is so worrisome. It's very difficult to defeat folks who don't mind dying.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Two adjacent hotels in central Baghdad were rocked by explosions early Friday, apparently the result of rocket attacks.

Witnesses said at least two rockets hit the upper floors of the Palestine Hotel, where CNN is based.

One person was carried from the hotel on a stretcher, soaked in blood, according to CNN's Jane Arraf.

The nearby Sheraton Hotel also appeared to have been attacked about the same time, also with rockets.

Both hotels are heavily guarded with coalition forces, surrounded by tanks and concrete barriers.

CNN staff said they could see damage to the 12th, 15th and 16th floors of the 18-story building from the attack that took place about 7:10 a.m. (11:10 a.m. ET).

The hotels host many international journalists staying in the Iraqi capital, as well as many Western contractors.

Video from inside the hotel showed debris scattered through an elevator lobby and large holes in the wall.

On Thursday, a U.S. soldier was killed and two others wounded when a homemade bomb struck their convoy east of the central Iraqi city of Ramadi, U.S.-led coalition officials said.

Ramadi, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of Baghdad, also was the scene of a bombing late Wednesday in which at least two people died. It was one of two insurgent attacks apparently targeting Iraqi leaders.

A second blast killed five bystanders Thursday outside a Kurdish party's office in the northern city of Kirkuk.
CNN...
  

2:30 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Saddest Story In Show Business,

This Is One of the Saddest Stories In Show Business, and, yes, it will be a spectacle like none other save the O. J. Simpson case if it does go to trial. Thank goodness I am in China and will not be asked or tempted to cover this story. Guilty or not, the ugly baggage that this will dredge up from the bowels of the American psyche will ravage and scar so many. But, we apparently have no choice now but to hold our noses, temper our outrage and prejudices, and try our best to rise above the scandal-mongering, the lurid, the hypocritical self-righteousness as we constantly remind ourselves that, no matter the outcome of verdicts, all of us played a role in this sickness that took a cute, extraordinarily talented five year-old child and through our cult of celebrity produced this sordidness.
SANTA BARBARA, Calif., Nov. 20 — Michael Jackson, with his hands cuffed behind his back, was led into the county jail here on Thursday afternoon and booked on charges of child molesting, beginning what promises to be one of the biggest legal spectacles in years.

As Mr. Jackson was being photographed and fingerprinted inside the Inmate Reception Center at the Santa Barbara County Jail, his lawyer, Mark Geragos, stepped before a small forest of microphones and called the charges against the entertainer "a big lie."

"He is greatly outraged by the bringing of these charges," Mr. Geragos said. "Michael has given me the authority to say on his behalf these charges are categorically untrue. He looks forward to getting into a courtroom, as opposed to any other forum, and confronting these accusations head-on."

The authorities set Jan. 9, 2004, for an arraignment before a judge in Santa Barbara Superior Court. Mr. Jackson posted $3 million bail and surrendered his passport before he was released, officials said.

The sheriff's department posted Mr. Jackson's booking photograph on its Web site on Thursday afternoon. The picture showed a hollow-cheeked Mr. Jackson with his head turned slightly to the right, his eyebrows sharply arched and his eyes wide open and staring directly into the camera. His lips are thin and bright red and his nose bears a distinctive chiseled look that Mr. Jackson acknowledges was achieved surgically.

Officials did not disclose any more details of the charges against Mr. Jackson or identify the victim of the alleged acts in any way. They said Mr. Jackson would be charged with multiple counts of lewd and lascivious acts with a child under the age of 14, charges that could send him to prison for 10 or more years. Prosecutors indicated that formal charges would be filed in coming days, but offered no explanation for the unusual delay.

The charges involved a 12-year-old cancer patient who was an overnight guest at Mr. Jackson's ranch, Neverland, on several occasions last winter, said an acquaintance of the boy's family. The acquaintance said the patient's family had been under psychiatric care and was not seeking monetary damages.
In The New York Times...
  

1:28 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Isn't It Really World War III?

We Must Call It What It Is, World War III, it is not a "war on terrorism." Read this analysis and ask yourself if it is not a conflict between large segments of the world's population; a conflict between large populations with greatly different values and geopolitical imperatives. Isn't it a war between large populations, one the aggressor wanting to spread its territory of influence, its sphere of ideology, the other defending freedom and tolerance and justice, a way of life? The "War on Terror" is no longer a large enough concept to encompass the vastness of the battlefield or the enormity of the issues at risk. If we continue to trivialize it as a "War on Terror" we will never galvanize enough resistance to defeat it on all its fronts. Think about it.
ISTANBUL, Nov. 20 — Turkey's worst fears were realized Thursday when the second major bomb attack in a week confirmed that this land has become a new battleground in the struggle over terror.

The attacks appeared aimed at disrupting the pro-Western secular axis many people in the Middle East believe the United States and Britain are trying to drive through the region with Iraq war. Such an axis would create a swath of territory friendly to the West from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.

"Turkey will continue to walk on her path and exert efforts for world peace, in the country and the region," the country's foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, told reporters.

Turkey, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's only Muslim member, has carefully cultivated and jealously guarded a European-style secular political culture that is crucial to the American program to send pro-Western values percolating through the tribal and theocratic grid of the Middle East.

With its foothold on the European continent and the bulk of its territory in Asia, Turkey has been the site of sweeping ideological battles before. Once part of the Christian Byzantine Empire, and later the center of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the country in its modern incarnation has tried to finesse its identity by paying lip service to the Islamic world while defining its future among the dynamic economies of the West.

Turkey was the first among Muslim nations to recognize Israel and has developed extensive ties with it since then. It has been a model NATO member and has tried hard in recent years to win the favor of the European Union, which Turkey wants to join.

All of this has made the country suspect among Muslim countries, particularly in the Arab world.

Meanwhile, decades of economic malaise have haunted a generation of frustrated, underemployed youth and turned many toward conservative Islam.
In The New York Times...
  

12:36 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




"Body Parts" Update

The Death Toll Mounts, as does the evilness of criminals who murder the innocent in the name of their blood-lusting devil-god. These people have no cause but irrational hatred of all who are superior to them in every way we measure civilization. If they were truly warriors in a cause, they would engage soldiers only, on a battlefield, not busy market streets full of innocents living a life until instantly they are exploded into "body parts"--was ever there a more ugly phrase in any language: body parts? We now hear it routinely, yet cringe every time, and I have been a crime reporter for many years. Goddamn them! If only there was a hell for these demented creatures to burn in for eternity.
ISTANBUL, Nov. 20 - Two huge truck-bomb explosions wrecked the British Consulate and a British bank here on Thursday, killing at least 27 people and wounding 450 in an assault that coincided with President Bush's state visit to London.

As Mr. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain prepared for a joint declaration of anti-terror resolve, the 18-story Istanbul headquarters of HSBC bank, and minutes later the British Consulate several miles away were blown apart by bombs that witnesses said were contained in pickup trucks driven up to the buildings.

The British consul general, Roger Short, a 58-year-old career diplomat, was among those killed. Distraught people, screaming for help with blood streaming from open wounds, ran through the busy streets that surround both the bank and the consulate. Rescue workers dug into rubble searching for the dead and injured, and guided others from the carnage via second-story windows or wrecked storefronts.

In London, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said before flying to Istanbul to see the devastation first hand that the bombings bore ``all the hallmarks of international terrorism practiced by Al Qaeda.''

An anonymous caller to the Anatolian news agency said the attack on Thursday was a joint effort of Al Qaeda and a Turkish group, the Islamic Front of the Raiders of the Great Orient, or IBDA-C, the agency reported. The same group also claimed responsibility for the twin bombings of two Istanbul synagogues on Saturday, in which 23 people were killed.

Just before the Istanbul attacks, a suicide bomb killed five people Thursday in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, a major center for Iraq's Kurds.
In The New York Times...
 

11:52 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




CIA: No evidence of WMD transfer, AND THE LIES IN THE WEEKLY STANDARD

CIA: No WMDs and the truth about the "Truth" in the Weekly Standard leaked memo STORY. Add Feith into any such story and you know you're about to get fed a ration of what comes out of the ass end of a Mule.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 — The CIA’s search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found no evidence that former president Saddam Hussein tried to transfer chemical or biological technology or weapons to terrorists, according to a military and intelligence expert.

ANTHONY CORDESMAN, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, provided new details about the weapons search and Iraqi insurgency in a report released Friday. It was based on briefings over the past two weeks in Iraq from David Kay, the CIA representative who is directing the search for unconventional weapons in Iraq; L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civil administrator there; and military officials.

“No evidence of any Iraqi effort to transfer weapons of mass destruction or weapons to terrorists,” Cordesman wrote of Kay’s briefing. “Only possibility was Saddam’s Fedayeen [his son’s irregular terrorist force] and talk only.”

One of the concerns the Bush administration cited early last year to justify the need to invade Iraq was that Hussein would provide chemical or biological agents or weapons to al Qaeda or other terrorists. Despite the disclosure that U.S. and British intelligence officials assessed that Hussein would use or distribute such weapons only if he were attacked and faced defeat, administration spokesmen have continued to defend that position

Yesterday, allegations of new evidence of connections between Iraq and al Qaeda contained in a classified annex attached to Feith’s Oct. 27 letter to leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were published in the Weekly Standard. Feith had been asked to support his July 10 closed-door testimony about such connections. The classified annex summarized raw intelligence reports but did not analyze them or address their accuracy, according to a senior administration official familiar with the matter.

Last Thursday, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith defended the administration’s prewar position at the Council on Foreign Relations. “The idea that we didn’t have specific proof that he was planning to give a biological agent to a terrorist group,” he said, “doesn’t really lead you to anything, because you wouldn’t expect to have that information even if it were true. And our intelligence is just not at the point where if Saddam had that intention that we would necessarily know it.”
MSNBC...
  

12:56 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




When Protecting Dubya From Our Allies, No Weapon Is Too Much

Isn't this a bit excessive? Or am I too naive? But this "mini-gun"? Sounds like more than defense capability--neat sounding weapon, though.
Home Secretary David Blunkett has refused to grant diplomatic immunity to armed American special agents and snipers traveling to Britain as part of President Bush's entourage this week.

In the case of the accidental shooting of a protester, the Americans in Bush's protection squad will face justice in a British court as would any other visitor, the Home Office has confirmed.

The issue of immunity is one of a series of extraordinary US demands turned down by Ministers and Downing Street during preparations for the Bush visit.

These included the closure of the Tube network, the use of US air force planes and helicopters and the shipping in of battlefield weaponry to use against rioters.

In return, the British authorities agreed numerous concessions, including the creation of a 'sterile zone' around the President with a series of road closures in central London and a security cordon keeping the public away from his cavalcade.

The White House initially demanded the closure of all Tube lines under parts of London to be visited during the trip. But British officials dismissed the idea that a suicide bomber could kill the President by blowing up a Tube train. Ministers are also believed to have dismissed suggestions that a 'sterile zone' around the President should be policed entirely by American special agents and military.

Demands for the US air force to patrol above London with fighter aircraft and Black Hawk helicopters have also been turned down.

The President's protection force will be armed - as Tony Blair's is when he travels abroad - and around 250 secret service agents will fly in with Bush, but operational control will remain with the Metropolitan Police.

The Americans had also wanted to travel with a piece of military hardware called a "mini-gun", which usually forms part of the mobile armoury in the presidential cavalcade. It is fired from a tank and can kill dozens of people. One manufacturer's description reads: "Due to the small calibre of the round, the mini-gun can be used practically anywhere. This is especially helpful during peacekeeping deployments."

Ministers have made clear to Washington that the firepower of the mini-gun will not be available during the state visit to Britain.
"Peacekeeping deployments"? With that kind of firepower? It sounds as if it lays out a wall of small calibre, high velocity lead. Do they think there might be an infantry charge coming down a London street?

It's in the Guardian...
  

12:33 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




With A Little Help From Our Friends

You Gotta Read Thomas Friedman because he's doing what he does best, making sense out of a sea of complexity in an ocean of uncertainty surrounded on all sides by inconsistency. I will excerpt this important column in three parts, beginning, middle and end. Please read the rest because we all must be involved in a solution; our world is in greater danger today than at any time during the Cold War--in this war there are madmen aplenty with bombs by the suicide car-load.
LONDON — So I step off the plane in London and the British customs guy sees on my form that I'm a journalist and asks, "Is it true there are more police to protect your president in London than there are in Baghdad?" Then I pick up The Independent to read in the taxi and I see that London's left-wing mayor, Ken Livingstone, has denounced President Bush as 'the greatest threat to life on this planet that we've most probably ever seen.' Then I check out The Guardian, which carried open letters to the president, one of which is from the famous playwright Harold Pinter, who says: "Dear President Bush, I'm sure you'll be having a nice little tea party with your fellow war criminal, Tony Blair. Please wash the cucumber sandwiches down with a glass of blood."

No, Dorothy, we're definitely not in Kansas anymore." ...

Tom Malinowski, from Human Rights Watch, perfectly described Mr. Bush's core problem: When you look at the muted reaction to the president's important speech on the need for democracy in the Arab world, you see that "President Bush has moral clarity, but no moral authority." He has a vision — without influence among the partners needed to get it moving. His is a beautifully carved table — with only one leg.

The Bush team's decision to change course in Iraq, and to transfer authority by July 1 to an interim government indirectly elected by community leaders from each of Iraq's 18 governates, is a good new start for generating legitimacy for the U.S. presence in Iraq. I do not know if this plan will work, but those who dismiss it as a cut-and-run strategy have it wrong. This plan is actually the only way America can stay. Only a legitimate Iraqi authority can give cover for a long-term U.S. presence and do what it takes to finish the war. ...

Friends, Iraq is the most audacious nation-building project America has ever engaged in. But to succeed, we need partners — not only to help, but to provide legitimacy so we can sustain it. Right now, though, we are operating in a context of enormous global animosity. We are dancing alone. We can't let this stop us. We can't cater to every whim — but we can't just ignore it all, especially when it comes from our friends. Because there is no country in the world that we can't smash alone, and there is no country in the world we can rebuild alone — certainly not one as big and complex as Iraq.
Read it in full in The New York Times...
  

12:22 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Thursday, November 20, 2003

Dubya and the Queen, Both of Them

God Save Queen Dowd. I can't help it, many would say it's a tragic flaw that will eventually bring me low if not down, but I love every thrust and parry of the queen of dueling punditry, Maureen Dowd. She spares no Christian cow and takes no bullyboy prisoners as she plays with those of lesser talents.
WASHINGTON ? President Bush thought he had at last found someplace even more sequestered from the real world than the Republican fund-raisers and conservative think tanks where he makes his carefully controlled 'public' appearances.

Swaddled in the $8.5 million security blanket of reinforced concrete, wire mesh and 14,000 bobbies designed to protect him from the ungrateful citizens of our one ? I mean, our closest ? ally, Mr. Bush was a blithe spirit in his rented tails with his English cousins behind the high gates of Buckingham Palace. ...

Everything Mr. Bush did in London reinforced the idea that this was a trip made not so much to thank the British people for their friendship, but to send a message to the voters back home that he was at ease as a world leader.

The White House spared Mr. Bush from having to endure a session with the rowdy Parliament and flew him by helicopter over the protesting rabble, who think a bullying Bush administration dragged Britain into the war under false pretenses. (Scotland Yard even wanted to keep the president in a "mobile-free bubble" that would block cellphone calls in his vicinity, but the phone companies refused, calling it "Bush hysteria.")

The White House packaged the visit for the viewers at home.

How else to explain the same Bush advance geniuses who brought us the "Mission Accomplished" banner putting up a blue PowerPoint-ish backdrop for the president's speech at Whitehall Palace that stuttered, "United Kingdom," "United Kingdom," "United Kingdom."

The people in the United Kingdom already knew he was in the United Kingdom. And the kingdom isn't very united at the moment.

Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, captured the spirit of the moment when he told NPR that the Republican National Committee should foot the bill for Mr. Bush's extraordinary security, the largest police operation ever in Great Britain. All this, he harrumphed, "just so George Bush can use a few clips of him and the queen in his campaign advertisements for re-election next year."
In The New York Times...
  

9:26 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Goddamn Them, Goddamn Them One and All

The Murderous Savages want a World War. Perhaps that is what we will have to give them.
ISTANBUL, Turkey (CNN) -- At least 15 people were killed and 320 others injured after at least two explosions rocked Istanbul, CNN Turk quoted local officials as saying.

The first blast destroyed part of the HSBC Bank headquarters near a shopping mall, and the second hit the British consulate, both located in crowded areas of Turkey's largest city.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said he had information there were as many as five coordinated explosions, which he described as "a clearly appalling act of terrorism.
CNN...
  

8:24 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Wednesday, November 19, 2003

I Reserve The Right To Change My Mind, Even About George W. Bush

What's a seasoned, hardened Bush detractor to do? Speak the truth, is a good start. President George W. Bush just delivered one of the finest speeches of our times. I was speechless. I was flabbergasted. I was incredulous. Even harder to admit in public, I was MOVED. The man spoke like an old time Democrat. The man went against 60 years of conservative Republican gospel. The man actually condemned decades of U.S. support of right-wing dictators only because it was strategically, geo-politically expedient to our self-interests of the moment.

Imagine that! He was condemning his father and his grandfather and their powerful political cohorts of the last half Century, the roll call is infamous: Dulles, Harriman, Lansdale, Nixon, Kissinger, Baker, McFarland, Westmoreland, Haig, LeMay, Reagan, Liddy...the list could go on for miles.

He condemned a morally bankrupt foreign policy that gave the world another list, a list of murderous thugs we birthed and supported so long as they were anti-communist and anti-socialist: Pinochet, Noriega, the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein, Diem, Marcos, Battista...this list could also go on and on.

But, tonight, according to the words that came out the President's mouth, the days of appeasement of criminal regimes, be they friend or foe, is over. Can it be that this man for whom I had less than no respect could be the man to do what Truman couldn't, what Kennedy wouldn't, what Johnson didn't, what Carter wasn't allowed to do, and what Bill Clinton only started to do?

I know that from November to November in the fourth year of a presidency the president is actually just a "candidate" again--and this is particularly true of this president, given the polls and the memories of his father's one term--and that he was also making a campaign speech. But not all of his constituent base will necessarily like this new era of national altruism.

I must digest all of this more before I put on the sack-cloth and ashes and beg forgiveness for being so wrong about this anti-intellectual cowboy. So I will stop this uncertain flow of uncertain words and thoughts, for now...

But, damn! It was one hell of a speech.
  

11:37 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




China The Amazing

China The Amazing. Have so many ever come so far so fast? I think not. And I marvel at it every day. That's China, as we say several times a day.
GUANGZHOU, China, Nov. 17 — The Chinese government is preparing to impose minimum fuel economy standards on new cars for the first time, and the rules will be significantly more stringent than those in the United States, according to Chinese experts involved in drafting them.

The new standards are intended both to save energy and to force automakers to introduce the latest hybrid engines and other technology in China, in hopes of easing the nation's swiftly rising dependence on oil imports from volatile countries in the Middle East.

They are the latest and most ambitious in a series of steps to regulate China's rapidly growing auto industry, after moves earlier this year to require that air bags be provided for both front-seat occupants in most new vehicles and that new family vehicles sold in major cities meet air pollution standards nearly as strict as those in Western Europe and the United States.

Some popular vehicles now built in China by Western automakers, including the Chevrolet Blazer, do not measure up to the standards the government has drafted, and may have to be modified to get better gas mileage before the first phase of the new rules becomes effective in July 2005.

The Chinese initiative comes at a time when Congress is close to completing work on a major energy bill that would make no significant changes in America's fuel economy rules for vehicles. The Chinese standards, in general, call for new cars, vans and sport utility vehicles to get as much as two miles a gallon of fuel more in 2005 than the average required in the United States, and about five miles more in 2008.
In The New York Times...

 

1:49 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Right Wing Rag Is Dissing Dubya

Even This Right Wing Rag Is Dissing Dubya! The World Net Daily? Boy, if this isn't the pot calling the kettle black.
Most people living in Great Britain – America's closest ally – believe George W. Bush is a threat to world peace, and at least 1 in 3 characterize the U.S. president as stupid, according to an opinion poll conducted by Britain's Sunday Times and published over the weekend.

Bush is scheduled to arrive in London tomorrow, preparatory to a three-day state visit.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who staunchly supported Bush during the war, has seen his own approval ratings plunge over Iraq.
Right Wing Rag Nut Daily...
  

12:56 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




A Father's Pain

A Sad and Bitter Story that Needs Little Comment. We should offer, however, that it will probably get pretty nasty for Dubya in England; it is a shame that he is our identity in the eyes of the world. Yet, he is truly only a minority in this great land. Sure, the majority espouses many of the themes he gives lip service to, but most of those folks are sincere--there is nothing sincere about him; he is almost the perfect example of the "dry drunk."
A father of a British soldier killed in Iraq today said he felt deceived by US President George Bush’s decision to go to war when Saddam Hussein posed no immediate threat.

Mr Bush will be met with an unprecedented policing operation when he arrives in London tomorrow ahead of the first state visit by a US president.

The widespread opposition to his visit and political decisions will be clearly visible to Mr Bush, with protests planned across the three days of his visit – something the president has brushed off. ...

President Bush will meet relatives of the British dead during his visit and said: “I’ll explain to them as best as I can that the sacrifice their loved one has made is for a noble cause – and that’s peace and freedom.”

But Reg Keys, father of Lance Corporal Thomas Keys who died in Iraq, said the US president was just using “propaganda words”.

“He’s trying to say that they died for a noble cause, but in my opinion soldiers in the First World War and the Second World War died for a noble cause because they were trying to repel a country that was invading our shores,” he told GMTV.

“What threat was Iraq to us?

“We were all led to believe that he possessed weapons of mass destruction that were about to be unleashed on us but it hasn’t materialised, so Thomas goes off to war along with his colleagues – I feel deceived.”
It's in the Scotsman...
  

12:46 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Sunday, November 16, 2003

Case Closed?

Case -- Something Fishy About This -- Closed. While the 16 page intelligence memo leaked to the Weekly Standard certainly isn't a counterfeit--I don't believe even the Bush-is-the-devil crowd will attempt to make that case--I can't help but wonder why this material wasn't used by Dubya & Company a long time ago--and I mean a long, long time ago. Why wasn't it made available to a few select heads of state--under strict security--and others in the world's policy-making community? Most of the information included was pre-war. Some of it was even years old. It surely would have shut up the less radical peaceniks (with its direct link to 9/11), and greatly influenced members of the Security Council; it may even have made the "Coalition of the willing" into a "Coalition of many" if not most of the militarily capable members of the U.N. Frankly, this is much better ammo for the objective than was the WMD canard. This was why the world backed our play in Afghanistan--al Qaeda's deeds around the globe, not just 9/11, made Osama Bin Laden a wanted man everywhere except in the most radical Islamic circles. Linking him to the WTC attacks was enough for gung-ho alliance by the world. Linking Saddam Hussein directly to al Qaeda would have been enough to silence almost all but the most die-hard anti-all-war nuts of the world on the invasion of Iraq.

So, again we come back to the major complaint against this administration: its incompetence, or its stupidity if you want to call it what it would be if it is indeed the reason the information wasn't used; or its xenophobic mistrust of almost everyone except Bible-thumping Bush insiders, which includes almost no objective legislators or world leaders.

If we accept the document for what it appears to be, and we give the administration a very big benefit of doubt as to why it wasn't used pre-invasion, such as for reasons of national security, then we have to wonder why it wasn't used in the past recent weeks and months. Why didn't it secretly accompany the President's address to the UN when we were supposedly lobbying hard to get help from the world community to save American lives, Iraqi lives, U.N. lives, Red Cross lives, not to mention billions of dollars in reconstruction aid?

Again, we ask: isn't it imcompetent at best and paranoid at least not to have used it before now, when the only thing really at stake is Dubya's political future? Its release now is not going to bring troops from other nations into the bloodbath that Iraq has become this month. It might have earlier, though.

So, I just don't get it. Something is missing from this picture. I hope like hell it is not truth that is again missing. Stupitity we have overcome before; xenophobia and geo-political paranoia we have also muddled through. Mendacity of the scale of this might be another matter. Although I am not making a case for the latter, what are we to think now of the explicit denial of evidence linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11 that Dubya made a few weeks ago in response to Cheney asserting it to be fact?
OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

The memo, dated October 27, 2003, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was written in response to a request from the committee as part of its investigation into prewar intelligence claims made by the administration. Intelligence reporting included in the 16-page memo comes from a variety of domestic and foreign agencies, including the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency. Much of the evidence is detailed, conclusive, and corroborated by multiple sources. Some of it is new information obtained in custodial interviews with high-level al Qaeda terrorists and Iraqi officials, and some of it is more than a decade old. The picture that emerges is one of a history of collaboration between two of America's most determined and dangerous enemies.

According to the memo--which lays out the intelligence in 50 numbered points--Iraq-al Qaeda contacts began in 1990 and continued through mid-March 2003, days before the Iraq War began. Most of the numbered passages contain straight, fact-based intelligence reporting, which some cases includes an evaluation of the credibility of the source. This reporting is often followed by commentary and analysis.

The relationship began shortly before the first Gulf War. According to reporting in the memo, bin Laden sent "emissaries to Jordan in 1990 to meet with Iraqi government officials." At some unspecified point in 1991, according to a CIA analysis, "Iraq sought Sudan's assistance to establish links to al Qaeda." The outreach went in both directions. According to 1993 CIA reporting cited in the memo, "bin Laden wanted to expand his organization's capabilities through ties with Iraq."
Please read the piece in its whole, it is damning eveidence takien at face value, in the Weekly Standard...
 

11:45 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Laughing With China

China Has Arrived. When they start making TV series about a place and culture you know it's on the mainstream map to stay.
Forget the ancient stereotypes about stale prawn crackers, kung fu, Chinese laundries and 19th-century opium dens. The BBC is planning to emulate the success of the award-winning Asian sketch show Goodness Gracious Me with Britain's first ever all-Oriental comedy series.

Satay Night Live, a blend of stand-up and sketches, aims to introduce mainstream audiences to what its producers see as the UK's most misunderstood and neglected sense of humour: that of the British-Oriental community. They hope to do as much to challenge stereotypes about Chinese, Japanese and other Far Eastern minorities as stars such as Meera Syall and Sanjeev Bhaskar have for British-Asians with their series Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at Number 42.

News of the proposed BBC3 series has received a generally positive welcome from prominent performers, although some were sceptical about the claim that there is such a thing as a "British-Oriental sense of humour". The actor Burt Kwouk, 73, best known as Cato, Inspector Clouseau's sidekick in the Pink Panther films, said he approved of the idea in principle, but disputed the notion of a homogenous Oriental sense of humour.

"It would be dangerous to approach it that way," said Mr Kwouk, who was born in Manchester but raised in Shanghai. "I'm Chinese, and I don't really know much about Korean or Japanese culture. China is vast, a continent almost, and different parts of it are different.

"There's also a generational gap in the Chinese community. There's a generation that came over from foreign parts, which includes me, and then there's the generation that was brought up here, which has slightly different ideas about things."

Mr Kwouk said he hoped the new series would question the stereotypes used in the past to portray people of Oriental descent, adding: "I've faced all of them. When I started as an actor 50 years ago every Chinese character had to say 'flied lice'. Now, thankfully, that's finally changing and we are allowed to say 'fried rice' like in real life."
It's in the Independent...

 

8:12 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Giant Sleeps No More

Enough China Bashing Already! Here is a dose of rationality and objective truth about the incredible phenomenon that is the New China as an economic factor the world over. It is real, and it is an exciting time to be here and watch it happen. It is even more exciting to be a small part of it. Accuse me of boosterism if you will, but I say 'Y'all com'on over for spell.' You will have a great vacation, surely; but you will also be constantly amazed and in awe of what you see and learn.
China has been the big story waiting to happen for so long that most people have given up. Over two centuries ago, Napoleon referred to it as "like a sleeping giant and when she awakes she shall astonish the world". ...

Direct observation of China has come from the large trade imbalance with the US, which has fuelled the protectionist flame that always burns ahead of US elections. Talk of tariffs and uncompetitive exchange rates abounds - though how anyone with even elementary maths can think that a 40 per cent revaluation of the Chinese yuan (it is pegged to the dollar) will address the difference in labour costs is beyond me. US labour is $16 an hour, while China is 60 cents.

Statistics on China astonish. Massive urbanisation means the country has, in effect, to build a city the size of Phila- delphia every month. And that takes a lot of raw materials. This is where we start to see the impact of China on the world around it. For all the talk of global recession, a spectacular bull run has been going on in commodities, almost unnoticed. Base metals, precious metals and raw materials have all risen sharply. For example, nickel, used in stainless steel, is up 75 per cent on the year. While the US was going through its cyclical slowdown, China provided all the growth in demand for metals globally for two years. Now America is back, demand is exceeding supply. And some.

The country's infrastructure is poor, so it is easier to import from Australia and South Africa than transport from central China. Guess which have been two of the strongest currencies in the world this year? Meanwhile, Argentinians are benefiting from Chinese demand for soya, cotton, diamonds and timber. Shipping costs are up fourfold, while the stock prices of many shipping companies have tripled.

To pay for all this, China is accumulating large amounts of foreign currency through exports - particularly to the US - and is also the world's biggest recipient of direct investment. This is a key reason why China will resist US attempts to revalue the yuan. It needs the peg against the dollar like the US needed the gold standard a century earlier - so it can use the developed world's banking system to both attract and recycle capital. China is, of course, one of the biggest buyers of US government paper. Indeed, with the yuan pegged, it is probably useful to think of China as a special administrative region of the US. Solve your trade problem at a stroke.

In fact, China is following a very successful blueprint for success. It is no more stealing US manufacturing jobs than America stole European agricultural jobs a century ago. This is shaping up to be the Chinese Century.
As I have said and written many times, China will define the 21st Century. The western world had best wake up to that reality or else be left behind the dragon's curve.

Read the whole story in the Independent...
  

8:06 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Chinese Cops Say No More Mickey Mouse Murders

Rats! Hey, what's a fiend to do in a country where it is almost impossible to get a gun? So, you have a grudge? Get some really heavy-duty rat poison and throw a feast for thine enemies.
BEIJING — Each story is ghastlier than the last. A shop owner poisons the snacks at a rival's store, and 38 people die. A widow spikes the lunch at her husband's funeral, killing 10. A man seeks vengeance against his married lover by targeting her children.

Across China, aggrieved parties are increasingly turning to an outlawed but easily available weapon: a particularly lethal form of rat poison called "Dushuqiang."

With case after lurid case being described in the state-controlled media, the Chinese government has had enough.

Authorities are executing perpetrators and seizing hundreds of tonnes of Dushuqiang, which translates as "strong rat poison." Police are warning that those caught supplying poison used in fatal attacks could face the death penalty, too.

Last month, Deputy Agriculture Minister Fan Xiaojian told an anti-Dushuqiang task force that while most illegal poison producers had been forced underground, the fight was not over.

"Local governments at various levels should wage large-scale and effective activities to investigate this poison, especially in the countryside," said Fan, quoted by the Communist party newspaper People's Daily. "We should do this household to household and confiscate Dushuqiang from the hands of the masses."

Dushuqiang (pronounced doo-shoo-CHIANG) is said to be 100 times deadlier than cyanide. Just five milligrams — a dusting — can kill a human being, and it remains widely available despite a ban dating to the mid-1990s.

Yesterday, in the south-central province of Hunan, a man upset because his affair with a married woman was ending tried to poison her children, state media reported.

One died, but not before he shared rat poison-laced popcorn and oranges with his young classmates, killing a second child and sickening 25 others. The man, Wei Entan, 26, tried to kill himself with poison, but police stopped him, the Beijing Morning Post reported.
This you have to read in full, in the Toronto Star...
 

7:04 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Never Say Nader Again!

Nooooooooo! Please! For the sake of us all, someone please convince this man to go away, to anywhere, and do anything he wants EXCEPT RUN FOR PRESIDENT. How much ego-gratification does this valiant old publicity hog need? Tie him to a Redwood tree with triple-strength canabis hemp; give him 728 new SUVs to test for unsafe at whatever speed; send him on a fact-finding mission to a third-world needle & hay factory where one lost needle holds the truth behind global warming! Please, pretty please! Anything but put that revered-but-now-accursed name on a ballot in any State of the Union next November! Does the man have no sense of proportionality, rationality, cause and effect, decency, modesty, the greater good, his fellow men and women, his nation...? The very, very sad answer is probably "No." And goddamn him for it.
Will Ralph Nader, the man who, depending on how you reckon, either did or didn't capsize Al Gore's campaign in 2000, run again in 2004? And, if he does, what impact will he will have on votes this time around? Never Say Nader Again!

After three years under George Bush, even some Greens are cool to a 2004 Nader run. Nader's defining argument in 2000, that centrist Democrats and Republicans are effectively the same party, is looking a little shakier (see, among other evidence: the environment, the war on terror, John Ashcroft's Justice Department, the federal bench, massive tax cuts...) than it did back then, whatever grain of truth it still contains.

Nader won't officially declare until the end of this year, but some say this is pure formality, that he'll be back, no question. Nader-watchers say he will soon announce the formation of a committee that will allow him to start raising money and gaining staff.

But that doesn’t mean that Nader will bag an endorsement from the Green Party. Many Greens point out that the party is making valuable progress in smaller races throughout the country (for instance, a Green is in a run-off election for mayor of San Francisco)—and getting into large, "unwinnable" races like the presidential election just detracts from these efforts. There are currently about 175 Green office-holders throughout the country.
Daily MoJo...
  

6:32 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Louisiana Proud!

Louisiana Proud! Having lived in New Orleans for almost 25 years, after being born and raised but a spitting distance away on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and living and struggling in the civil rights movement of both states, I can exult in this truly wonderful day. Racism and sexism both going down in ignominious defeat in the heart of the Old South consolidates the achievements of the New South. We are all winners in this race!
NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 15 — Lt. Gov. Kathleen B. Blanco, a Democrat, held a slim lead over Piyush Jindal, the Republican whiz kid, in the race to be the next governor of Louisiana, according to early poll results from the historic runoff on Saturday.

With more than 85 percent of the precincts reporting, Ms. Blanco, who has had a long political career and is from Cajun country, was leading with 51 percent of the vote, Mr. Jindal, the son of Indian immigrants, who had 49 percent.

"It's really exciting," Ms. Blanco said about 9:30 p.m. "But the night's not over."

Whatever happens, the outcome will mark a first. Up until now, Louisiana has sent an uninterrupted line of white men to the governor's mansion. The only exception is P.B.S. Pinchback, a black Republican who served as acting governor during Reconstruction for 35 days.

The race has drawn much interest, with news media from across the country and even India closely following Mr. Jindal's prospects. The last time Louisiana politics drew this much attention was in 1991, when Edwin Edwards, a four-term governor dogged by scandal, ran against David Duke, a former Klan wizard. Both men are now in prison.

In The New York Times...
  

1:08 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




War Is Hell and We Grieve but We Cannot Quit

War Is Hell and We Grieve but We Cannot Quit. We must not lose our resolve as our soldiers die. As harsh and unfeeling as it may sound, casualties are the consequence of their duty: soldiers die so that we can live free.
(CNN) -- Seventeen U.S. soldiers were killed, five were injured and one was missing when two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters crashed Saturday in a residential neighborhood in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

Military officials believe one helicopter may have climbed to avoid gunfire and collided with a second Black Hawk, causing them both to crash.
Authorities had no reports of Iraqi casualties, but a military official said the crashes set buildings on fire.

Initial reports indicated that when the first helicopter rose to avoid groundfire, it "caused a rotor strike with the second helicopter," a military source told CNN.
CNN...
 

12:19 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Saturday, November 15, 2003

Strong Medicine?

Strong Medicine? And folks say the Chinese Central Government isn't serious about corruption. Would this deter some of the white-collar crooks in the States?
A former tax chief in China has been executed for corruption.

The former taxation official in the northern Chinese province of Hebei was executed for taking huge bribes and embezzling millions of dollars in public funds.
ABC Radio Australia...
  

7:49 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Plan C

Plan C? Plan A and B--if they can be called plans instead of wishful thinking--didn't work, so why not? Although, frankly, I think Bush & Cohorts are setting up their "cut and run" strategy, even as they protest to the contrary.
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 14 — The Bush administration has agreed to restore independence to Iraq as early as next June, apparently hoping the move will change the perception of the United States as an occupying power and curb the mounting attacks on American forces in the country, Iraqi and American officials said Friday.

The plan to accelerate the transfer of power was put forward by Iraqi leaders this week, and taken to Washington by L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq. Late on Friday, officials said, a newly returned Mr. Bremer hastened to tell members of the Iraqi Governing Council's inner leadership circle that the White House had broadly accepted the plan. ...

"This is good for everyone," said Ahmad Chalabi, a council member who saw Mr. Bremer on Friday night. "We will have the U.S. forces here, but they will change from occupiers to a force that is here at the invitation of the Iraqi government."

The plan to give power to an Iraqi provisional government represents a sharp change in American policy, which had been focused on retaining control until a new constitution was adopted and elections held.

The switch occurred as American deaths have mounted rapidly, with 22 soldiers killed just this month when two helicopters were shot down. Three soldiers were killed and five were wounded in two roadside bombings Thursday and Friday. The increasing danger has prompted more questioning in Washington of the Bush administration's policy and planning for Iraq after Saddam Hussein was ousted in April.

Over the past month, it also became clear that the Iraqis in the Governing Council — the only native political authority, albeit unelected — were not willing to risk a public split over the process of drafting a constitution, which would inevitably open up a divisive debate over the future role of the Muslim clergy.

The deadlock demonstrated the new muscle of Iraq's majority Shiite Muslims, long oppressed by Saddam Hussein and his predecessors. They now hold a majority of seats on the Governing Council and insisted that it adhere to a ruling by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the leading Shiite authority in Iraq, saying that only an elected body should write a new constitution. ...

Mr. Bush told British reporters it was "inconceivable" that he would consider pulling all American troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan anytime soon. "We're not pulling out until the job is done. Period," he told the reporters, who saw him in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

"And that includes finding those two?" the reporters asked, referring to Mr. Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

"Yes, that's part of it," he said. "But an even bigger is a free and democratic society. That is the mission."

By defining the mission that way, Mr. Bush appeared to set a relatively high standard — that American troops, at some level, would be in Iraq and Afghanistan until there was an assurance of a stable democracy. But after sovereignty is returned to Iraq, one senior American official said, the United States forces would be in the country at the "invitation of the new government."
In The New York Times...
  

7:26 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




So We Are Really At War: What Else Is New?

So We Are Really At War: What Else Is New? That it is news to Dubya is probably new; with his cypress stump brainwave activity, there is a pretty good chance he thought the war was going just fine.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 — The senior American commander in the Middle East said Thursday that the Unites States-led occupation in Iraq faces no more than 5,000 guerrilla fighters, but that they are increasingly well organized and well financed, and are gradually expanding their attacks to the previously calm north and south.

His estimate of the scale of the shadowy armed opposition, the most precise from a top commander, came in a broad outline of the military obstacles his forces face.

The officer, Gen. John P. Abizaid of the Army, said loyalists to Saddam Hussein — not foreign terrorists, as some Bush administration officials have said — pose the greatest danger to American troops and to stability in Iraq. He said these militants were capitalizing on the political and economic turmoil to hire unemployed "angry young men" to do much of their "dirty work."
In The New York Times...
  

1:56 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Friday, November 14, 2003

Dubya Is Going To Cut and Run

"Cut and Run" Strategy? I knew it would not be long before Dubya and his Nervous Nellie Rangers would start floating an "exit with honor" weather balloon over the geo-political landscape. And here it comes--it will show itself in drips and drabs, clouded over by protestations to the contrary. The Top-Gun tin-pot phony warrior-in-chief would far rather lose the peace in Iraq than his reelection campaign.
Delivering his bleakest assessment to date of the crisis in Iraq, Mr Bremer argued that big changes were needed in the US plan. He recommended in a two-page memo that the process of transferring sovereignty, writing a constitution and holding elections be accelerated and completed within a year.

Mr Bremer also said he agreed with a Central Intelligence Agency report that rattled the administration with its own grim findings. The CIA warned that the insurgency was gaining in strength and co-ordination and could spread from central Iraq to the north and south.

The insurgents had better intelligence than the US and were gaining more recruits as the belief grew among Iraqis that the US would fail. The CIA also warned that the reconstruction process would come under threat as more contractors and non-governmental organisations fled the violence. ...

The administration and the US military are equally divided over how to respond to the insurgency. Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, and Dick Cheney, the vice-president, appear to be prevailing in their argument that the US should reduce, not increase, US troop levels as more Iraqis are trained and put into uniform.

Other senior figures say this is the start of a "cut and run" strategy. Mr Rumsfeld denies this, but his own criteria for "success" in Iraq, which he defined this week as transferring sovereignty and helping Iraqis achieve security, appear at odds with the president's grander vision of a model that will usher in a flowing of stable, democratic states throughout the Middle East.
In the Financial Times...
  

6:05 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




This Is The Real War

Finally the Obvious is Spoken. This war never ended; in many ways we can say that it only really started this summer. It does not take a graduate of the War College to figure this out. Saddam Hussein gave every indication that this was the only way he could fight this war. If a journalist and historian could see this from the beginning, why are our military leaders only now speaking the obvious? Could it be they were instructed--perhaps indoctrinated might be a better word--to not see or think or surely not to speak the obvious? It matters little at this point, however, the real-world issue is the same: We Cannot Quit Now. Two wrongs cannot make right in this situation. When the battle is over, we can lay blame and pass judgment upon those who mislead and misplanned. That is the strength and beauty of our system.
BAGHDAD, Nov. 12 -- The recent string of high-profile attacks on U.S. and allied forces in Iraq has appeared to be so methodical and well crafted that some top U.S. commanders now fear this may be the war Saddam Hussein and his generals planned all along.

Knowing from the 1991 Persian Gulf War that they could not take on the U.S. military with conventional forces, these officers believe, the Baath Party government cached weapons before the Americans invaded this spring and planned to employ guerrilla tactics.

"I believe Saddam Hussein always intended to fight an insurgency should Iraq fall," said Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division and the man responsible for combat operations in the lower Sunni Triangle, the most unstable part of Iraq. "That's why you see so many of these arms caches out there in significant numbers all over the country. They were planning to go ahead and fight an insurgency, should Iraq fall."

In an interview Wednesday at his headquarters northwest of the capital, Swannack said the speed of the fall of Baghdad in April probably caught Hussein and his followers by surprise and prevented them from launching the insurgence for a few months. That would explain why anti-U.S. violence dropped off noticeably in July and early August but then began to trend upward.

Not everyone in Iraq agrees with that theory. An alternative view is that the current resistance was not planned in advance; rather, Hussein loyalists were in disarray after the invasion and took several months to develop a response. In either case, the insurgents clearly gathered intelligence during that time on the vulnerabilities of the U.S. occupation force. ...

Lt. Col. Oscar Mirabile, a brigade commander credited with running a sophisticated and largely successful security operation in the Sunni Triangle town of Ramadi, agreed that the Baathist attacks were long planned.

"He released criminals out onto the streets," said Mirabile, a Miami police official and former homicide detective who commands the 1st Brigade, 124th Infantry Regiment of the Florida National Guard, which has been operating in Ramadi since May. "Why would anybody do that? Saddam knew he couldn't win a war head to head against coalition forces. He was setting the stage for what you're looking at right now."

A CIA report from Iraq received over the weekend supported the commanders' views, saying that agency officers in the field believe that most of the insurgents are "former regime types" who were disorganized by the speed of the U.S. invasion but are now regrouping.

The CIA report also warned that if coalition forces cannot get the situation under control, Iraqi citizens may stop cooperating in the fight against the insurgents. "There was a time when the public was relieved the Saddam Hussein regime was gone, and we were the most significant force on the ground," a senior administration official in Washington familiar with the new report said Wednesday. "But now they are getting worried about retribution from them [the insurgents] more than us." He added: "When that becomes a critical mass, it all could go south." ...

"The enemy is waging a campaign against the occupation," said retired Army Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, who teaches strategy and security issues at Boston University. "In some respects, their campaign manifests greater coherence and logic than does our own."
Read it in the Washington Post...
 

10:56 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




My Kind of Rich Man

Can A Billionaire Win a Nobel? If so, this is the man. This is surely the best "good news story" of this blighted month! Talk about putting your money where your heart is--and where it will do the world the most good.
NEW YORK -- George Soros, one of the world's richest men, has given away nearly $5 billion to promote democracy in the former Soviet bloc, Africa and Asia. Now he has a new project: defeating President Bush.

"It is the central focus of my life," Soros said, his blue eyes settled on an unseen target. The 2004 presidential race, he said in an interview, is "a matter of life and death."

Soros, who has financed efforts to promote open societies in more than 50 countries around the world, is bringing the fight home, he said. On Monday, he and a partner committed up to $5 million to MoveOn.org, a liberal activist group, bringing to $15.5 million the total of his personal contributions to oust Bush.

Overnight, Soros, 74, has become the major financial player of the left. He has elicited cries of foul play from the right. And with a tight nod, he pledged: "If necessary, I would give more money."

"America, under Bush, is a danger to the world," Soros said. Then he smiled: "And I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is."

Soros believes that a "supremacist ideology" guides this White House. He hears echoes in its rhetoric of his childhood in occupied Hungary. "When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans." It conjures up memories, he said, of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit ("The enemy is listening"). "My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me," he said in a soft Hungarian accent.
Could that be because he's hearing the echoes of Prescott Bush, Dubya's grandpappy? You know, the patriotic American whose businesses were take from him by Congress in late 1942 under the Trading With The Enemy Act (he was still Hitler's banker well into World War II; don't believe it, punch his his name into Google and read the Congressional Record).
In past election cycles, Soros contributed relatively modest sums. In 2000, his aide said, he gave $122,000, mostly to Democratic causes and candidates. But recently, Soros has grown alarmed at the influence of neoconservatives, whom he calls "a bunch of extremists guided by a crude form of social Darwinism."

Neoconservatives, Soros said, are exploiting the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to promote a preexisting agenda of preemptive war and world dominion. "Bush feels that on September 11th he was anointed by God," Soros said. "He's leading the U.S. and the world toward a vicious circle of escalating violence."

Soros said he had been waking at 3 a.m., his thoughts shaking him "like an alarm clock." Sitting in his robe, he wrote his ideas down, longhand, on a stack of pads. In January, PublicAffairs will publish them as a book, "The Bubble of American Supremacy" (an excerpt appears in December's Atlantic Monthly). In it, he argues for a collective approach to security, increased foreign aid and "preventive action."

"It would be too immodest for a private person to set himself up against the president," he said. "But it is, in fact" -- he chuckled -- "the Soros Doctorine." ...

Asked whether he would trade his $7 billion fortune to unseat Bush, Soros opened his mouth. Then he closed it. The proposal hung in the air: Would he become poor to beat Bush?

He said, "If someone guaranteed it."
Forget the Nobel--this man's a candidate for Sainthood!

In the Washington Post...
  

1:36 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Their Master’s Voice

Cheney The Great's Been Dowded And the lady gets the dangerous fool but good! We will "cherry-pick" just a few of the zingers.
Their Master’s Voice

Dick Cheney's dry Wyoming voice has the same effect on some male Republicans, starting at the very top, and even some journalists, that a high-pitched whistle has on a dog. How else to explain the vice president's success in creating a parallel universe inside the White House that is shaping the real universe? ...

This week's Newsweek cover story on the vice president characterized a recent article by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker as raising the question of whether "Cheney had, in effect, become the dupe of a cabal of neoconservative full-mooners, the Pentagon's mysteriously named Office of Special Plans, and the patsy of an alleged bank swindler and would-be ruler of Iraq, Ahmad Chalabi."

Mr. Cheney's parallel universe is a Bizarro world where no doubts exist. He indulges in extremes of judgment, overpessimistic about our ability to contain Saddam and overoptimistic about the gratitude we would encounter as "liberators" in Iraq. ...

But while some have suggested that the president feels let down by Mr. Rumsfeld, he still seems seduced by the siren call of that deep Cheney voice and lugubrious Cheney world view. As Newsweek suggested, quoting those who know him: "Cheney has always had a Hobbesian view of life. The world is a dangerous place; war is the natural state of mankind; enemies lurk."

Mr. Cheney's darkness ends up dominating Mr. Bush's lightness.

As Newsweek noted, the vice president cherry-picks the intelligence, then feeds his version of reality to Mr. Bush. The president leaves himself open to manipulation because, by his own admission, he doesn't read the papers and relies on his inner circle to filter information to him.
Maureen Dowd, in The New York Times...
  

12:58 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Thursday, November 13, 2003

Something's Up...

Something's UP, And Josh Marshall is Pondering it.
I've heard every rumor under the sun today. And all that seems really clear is that something major is about to happen on the ground in the US occupation. ...

What strikes me as most revealing here is that Bremer is the one getting yanked out of the country on short notice to talk with his superiors and the generals running the show on the ground -- namely, Sanchez and Abizaid --- suddenly seem to have their voice and are volubly taking the initiative. ...

But the truth is I don't know.

What's clear is that something is coming to a head over there and we look set to get a big dose of reality out of Iraq.
Talking Points Memo...
  

1:36 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




If This Is True, Then the Whole World Is In Big Trouble

If This Is True, Then the Whole World Is In Big Trouble. This news comes from Mr. Kristof, so I have little reason to doubt it, I have only great sadness and even more fear. If there were a god, folks, none of this would be happening, unless this god is even worse than the humans he allegedly created. All in all, it's a good time to be in China.
The most striking cleavage is the God Gulf, and it should terrify the Democrats. Put simply, liberals are becoming more secular at a time when America is becoming increasingly religious, the consequence of a new Great Awakening. Americans, for example, are significantly more likely now than in 1987 to say they "completely agree" that "prayer is an important part of my daily life" and that "we all will be called before God on Judgment Day to answer for our sins."

The Pew survey found that white evangelicals are leaving the Democratic Party in droves. Fifteen years ago, white evangelicals were split equally between the two parties; now they're twice as likely to be Republicans. Likewise, white Catholics who attend Mass regularly used to be strongly Democratic; now they are more likely to be Republican.

Since Americans are three times as likely to believe in the virgin birth of Jesus as in evolution, liberal derision for President Bush's religious beliefs risks marginalizing the left.
Kristof, in The New York Times...
 

1:13 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Strategy: U.S. Aide in Iraq in Urgent Talks at White House

Is Bush Panicking? Probably. He would rather "lose" the peace in Iraq than lose the election. He is right now looking for a way to spin a "Victory Accomplished" and a bye-bye strategy.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 11 — L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, made a hurried return to Washington on Tuesday as Bush administration officials held an urgent round of meetings to discuss ways of speeding up the transfer of power to Iraqis.

The meetings reflected dissatisfaction with the pace of progress in Iraq and a growing conviction that Mr. Bremer must abandon his methodical plan to move gradually toward the election of an Iraqi government over a year or two, officials said.

As President Bush gave a Veterans Day speech vowing to stabilize Iraq, officials including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, huddled with Mr. Bremer in the White House Situation Room to plot ways of speeding the transfer of sovereignty.

Several administration officials said there was no evidence that Mr. Bush had lost confidence in Mr. Bremer, although the president wants him to move more quickly.

But Mr. Bremer's visit had an unusually urgent air. To be here, he had to break an appointment in Baghdad with Leszek Miller, the prime minister of Poland, the only country other than Britain to contribute substantial numbers of troops to the occupying force.

The White House meeting came as the top American military commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, spoke of a "turning point" in the conflict.

General Sanchez outlined a new get-tough approach to combat operations in areas north and west of Baghdad, strongholds for loyalists of Saddam Hussein. Dispensing with euphemisms favored by many officials in the Bush administration in recent months, he described what 130,000 American troops were facing as a "war."
It's about time for someone to start talking truth. Mendacity has a way of becoming habit-forming. Bush & Cohorts are too far gone for a "cure" but apparently the Army isn't.
One Defense Department official said Mr. Bremer had returned to defend his approach as the White House re-examined some of his biggest decisions, including disbanding the Iraqi Army.
Yep, more buck passing from the Texas cry-baby.
Heading into an election year, Mr. Bush also has his own domestic political considerations, especially with the steady killing and wounding of American troops in Iraq.

Reflecting the impatience even within the president's own party at the pace of progress in creating a viable Iraqi government, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, told reporters on Tuesday that the members of the Iraqi Governing Council "aren't doing their job."
Politics as usual, the essence of being a Bush.

In The New York Times...
  

1:12 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Italy Stands Tall

Italy Stands Tall When Others Hide. I have always been proud to be an Italian-America. Today I am prouder still. Where is France? Where is Germany? But then, who needs them?
A truck crashed into the entrance of an Italian military police center in Nasiriya, Iraq, today, followed by a car that blew up, leaving at least 22 people dead, Italian military police officials in Rome said today.

Fourteen of the dead were Italian, including three soldiers, the officials said. Eight Iraqis were also reported killed. ...

About 2,300 Italian troops are serving in southern Iraq as part of the British-led multinational force based in Basra. Nasiriya, on the banks of the Euphrates River, is about 52 miles northwest of Basra.

Today's blast was the first attack on Italian forces since their arrival in Iraq earlier this year. Last week insurgents shot dead a Polish major serving in a separate multinational force in central Iraq.

The blast is part of a widening pattern of daily attacks by insurgents against coalition forces. Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the American commander in Iraq, said on Tuesday that attacks on United States troops averaged six a day when he took command five months ago. In the last 30 days attacks had risen to 30 to 35 a day, he said.

The Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, said that "no intimidation by a bombing will budge us from our willingness to help that country rise up again and rebuild itself with self-government, security and freedom."

He added: "Pain is at this time a feeling shared by the entire nation. But we also feel pride for the courage humanity with which our troops have worked and still work to make the situation tolerable for children, women, the elderly and the weak who live that martyred region."

During Pope John Paul II's regular Wednesday audience, the pontiff expressed his most firm condemnation for the latest terrorist attack, which he called "a vile attack against a mission of peace."

President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi said: "My first thought is for the families of carabinieri killed by this ignoble act of terrorism. I express to the carabinieri my complete solidarity. They are soldiers who have fallen as they performed their duty."

An opposition leader, Piero Fassino, said: "It's a grave fact that confirms the barbarous nature of terrorism, for which there can be no justification."
In The New York Times...
  

1:01 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Wednesday, November 12, 2003

We Grieve But We Cannot Quit

We Grieve But We Cannot Quit. This is the time when they think they will break our spirit. Will they be right?
TIKRIT, Iraq, Nov. 12 — Two U.S. soldiers were killed and four wounded in two separate bomb attacks in Iraq on Tuesday, the American military said on Wednesday.

North of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, one soldier was killed and two wounded when their vehicle drove over a bomb planted on a road on Tuesday evening.
"A 4th Infantry Division soldier was killed by an IED (improvised explosive device) which detonated under the vehicle he was travelling in," spokeswoman Major Josslyn Aberle said.

A military statement said a bomb attack in Baghdad earlier on Tuesday fatally injured a 1st Armored Division soldier and wounded two. He died of his wounds around 9 p.m. (1800 GMT) on Tuesday, five hours after the attack.

The attacks brought to at least 155 the number of U.S. soldiers killed in action since Washington declared major combat over on May 1.
The New York Times...
  

11:34 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Baathist Thugs Want To Rule Again

The Baathist Thugs Want To Rule Again, and this is the proof. This isn't just Islamic Jihadists. Someone does not want other countries to come in and help; they know that the American public's resolve might weaken quickly and Bush will claim some kind of victory and split. In the vacuum, either Saddam Hussein or someone just as bad, will then win the resulting civil war after a wholesale bloodbath. And what of Iran in the east, Syria in the west, Turkey in the north? Wouldn't they move in to take what territory or revenge they feel is their historical due. This is a mess, folks. There is only one way out: The long road home, AFTER a military victory by U.S. troops and a UN-supported political turnover. We cannot cut and run. We must not cut and run. The South Vietnamese government wasn't worth American lives, but the center of Eurasia, the center between East and West, the cradle of civilization, the oil reserves, the people of Iraq, the tinder box that is the Middle East, they are.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Two vehicles crashed the gate of the Italian military headquarters Wednesday in Nasiriya, Iraq, and one exploded, killing at least 22 people, coalition and Iraqi hospital officials said.

The blast killed 14 Italian troops, according to coalition and Italian officials. Italian police in Rome said that 11 Italian military police and three army soldiers died and seven Italians were wounded.

Iraqi hospital sources told CNN that at least eight Iraqis also died. There was no immediate information on the number of Iraqis wounded.

The blast leveled the building, and Italian defense officials said they expect the death toll to rise because some people are reportedly trapped under rubble. (Berlusconi defiant about Iraq)

A car had a detonator and was loaded with explosives, but it wasn't clear whether a truck also was carrying explosives, defense officials said.

The Ministry of Defense said there are 2,500 Italians based in Iraq.

The blast occurred in the wake of a CIA report warning that security problems in Iraq will worsen.

In other violence, a roadside bomb hit a U.S. military convoy late Tuesday near the Iraqi capital, killing one U.S. soldier, according to a military spokeswoman.
CNN...
  

10:27 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Clinton, in Beijing: This Is How An American President Should Represent US

Clinton, in Beijing: This Is How An American President Should Represent Us. Not to belabor the point, but isn't this how to win friends and influence people around the world? Can you even imagine Bully Bible Dubya putting his arm around a young man with AIDS? Calling him up to the stage after he has just asked a hard question? In China? That is leadership. That is a man who is comfortable with who he is and isn't afraid of his masculinity or his "image" or his place in history.
BEIJING, Nov. 10 — Former President Bill Clinton, speaking at an international conference on AIDS here, today called the price of AIDS drugs in the developing world "an international scandal" and warned that AIDS could threaten China's economic boom and claim millions of lives unless government leaders moved quickly to stem its spread.

Mr. Clinton, whose private foundation works to reduce the cost of AIDS drugs for developing nations, was the featured speaker at the conference, which punctuated six days in which AIDS has held an unusually high profile in Beijing. Another major conference was held last week, and a leading health official announced that poor people with AIDS would gradually be given free medical treatment.

Mr. Clinton also met with President Hu Jintao and former President Jiang Zemin. Each meeting lasted more than an hour, though no details were released. Earlier, Mr. Clinton said he hoped to talk to the two leaders about helping the government broker deals with pharmaceutical companies to buy cheaper drugs.

Last month, the Clinton Foundation H.I.V./AIDS Initiative announced an agreement with four generic drug companies to slash the prices of certain AIDS antiretroviral drugs for a number of countries in the Caribbean and Africa. In his speech here, Mr. Clinton said the yearly price of drugs could be as low as $150 a person.

The conference, held by Tsinghua University, was notable largely for the public stage it provided to AIDS and to some advocates for improved treatment who at times have been out of favor with the government. ...

Following his speech, Mr. Clinton took questions from audience members, including Song Pengfei, a 21-year-old man who was infected with AIDS after a tainted blood transfusion six years ago. Mr. Clinton called Mr. Song up to the stage where Mr. Clinton shook his hand and draped an arm over his shoulder. By contrast, Chinese leaders have been criticized for failing to visit AIDS patients openly.
Read it in The New York Times...
  

12:55 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




A President Who Knows How To Act Presidential

Clinton In China: A President Who Knows How To Walk and Talk Presidential. Ah, if only...? But "if" was a "skiff" we'd be boating now and we aren't, we used to say way back when in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. What was cannot be again. This man gave us leadership and prestige around the world for almost a decade. From whence will his like come now? Does any one of the Democrats running have that great intangible: The Presence of Leadership? Obviously, Bush doesn't have it. At least not from the perspective of other countries and cultures. It is so instructive to see the same visceral reaction to Bush here in China as there is in liberal circles at home: Disgust, Distrust and Derision. This is from the informed and sophisticated view of advanced graduate students at the elite Foreign Affairs University in Beijing, most of whom are employed by the Chinese Foreign Ministry or the military. They know American history and its foreign affairs better than most upper-level civil servants in the States ever will. They can recite speeches from most of our 43 presidents! They can recite and explain our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence. They quote FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Nixon (of course), along with Jefferson, Lincoln, Madison, et al.--they have Churchill down pat--and none of it is used condescendingly, or derisively, they love the ideals of America. It is our actions and motives that come into question and confusion. Bill Clinton? They admire and respect him and wonder why so many Americans do not.
Today in Beijing, former President Bill Clinton called on China and the United States to overcome their differences on trade, saying the two powers must learn to cooperate to conquer common threats like AIDS, terrorism and global warming.

"Rather than have a big public trade fight, we need to have a private careful analysis of where we want our economic partnership to go," Clinton told Chinese business executives. He said although China's $103 billion trade surplus with the United States is "controversial," most Americans do not realize China uses much of its overseas earnings to buy US government debt, which helps keep US interest rates low.

Clinton expressed gratitude that China is trying to dissuade North Korea from making nuclear weapons, and he praised Beijing's decision to give free treatment to some of its poorest AIDS patients. "We all have a stake in turning this AIDS epidemic around," he said. Earlier today, he attended the opening of a new AIDS research center and met six Chinese AIDS patients.

Clinton urged the businessmen to pay attention to the environment and global warming as China rapidly industrializes. In addition, he expressed hope that the United States and China could work toward "positive interdependence" and lessen the negative effects of globalization exemplified by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
AEGiS...
  

12:51 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Give Me That Old Time Liberalism

He will speak like Democrats used to. She will speak the words we need to hear from a citizen leading the greatest experiment in Freedom the world has ever known. We are a people who believe in freedom so much we will pay the price of an open society rather than accept the slavery of a closed one only for some dubious promise of safety. That is not America. The lesson of 9/11 wasn't how vulnerable we are. America has always been vulnerable to those who will use our freedom to strike at us. But how often has it happened? Rarer than hen's teeth. The lesson of 9/11 was and is how a great and open nation of free people living free have the built-in durability of our precious system to shake off everything from our great Civil War, to the two wars to end all wars, the assassination of presidents and great leaders, even the stealing of an election, and still have the ship of state right itself everytime and remain the envy of all people who yearn to live free.

There was honor in never striking first. There was greatness in climbing up off the bloodied ground and striking back with justice and the unquestioned might of a nation united. Those days can not come again, but the principles can, we just need real leaders who truly believe in the American way. We need men and women of vision; we do not need men and women who vent in revenge and rage and bully talk! We are America. We beat Hitler and Tojo at the same time, and we did it with unquestioned right on our side. We did it with absolutely no brag, or arrogance from the White House.

We cannot let anyone change us because we are afraid of being hit first. When did we become the weakling on the school playground that cried for sympathy and railed in self-pity and self-righteousness when he was sucker-punched by some loudmouth bully? Give us back our honor and our freedom--give us back men and women who know that being American means that we have to act above the fray of lesser nations with old and corrupted systems. Give us leaders. Give us men and women who have the superiority of the rule of law and rationality not the rule of arrogance and born-again AA true-believers who revel in their dependency upon only their own kind. Give us men and women who are not afraid to be wrong and say so. Give us leaders who lead, not preach and hide. Give us leaders who lead with big ideas, not small ideology. Give us leaders who love words and books and art and all the things that lift up our eyes and minds to see what we can become, not what we have been. Give us leaders who have known war and peace and love peace more because they saw the blood and felt the fear.

But mostly give us leaders who know that above all America is a state of mind, not a state of mine or yours or us or them...then no one but the most evil and base will feel the need to strike it down because it is not theirs. But when they do, give us leaders that will lead us as we strike back with deliberate pace, united.
  

12:37 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Tuesday, November 11, 2003

The Man Who Should Be President Speaks that Old Time Truth

The Man Who Should Be President Speaks that Old Time Truth. Yes, he may be dull at times, he may have an overly pious wife, he may look too much like Clark Kent. He may speak a truth that is misconstrued because he does not expect to deal only with devious people and therefore speaks his mind and not a sound bite; but, yes, give us leaders such as Al Gore.
In his second major policy speech in three months, former vice president Al Gore took aim yesterday at what he said was the Bush administration's exploitation of the terrorist attacks of 2001 to justify an undemocratic suspension of domestic freedoms and to create a government built on "secrecy and deception."

"I want to challenge the Bush administration's implicit assumption that we have to give up many of our traditional freedoms in order to be safe from terrorists," Gore said during the one-hour speech sponsored by MoveOn.org and the American Constitution Society (ACS).

"Rather than defending our freedoms, this administration has sought to abandon them. Rather than accepting our traditions of openness and accountability, this administration has opted to rule by secrecy and unquestioned authority. Its assaults on our core democratic principles have only left us less free and less secure," he said.

Gore, who described himself as "a recovering politician," urged Congress to repeal the Patriot Act, with its broad enhancements of government powers that allow federal agents to "sneak and peek" at citizens' private records; enter citizens' homes in secret; and hold citizens indefinitely without access to legal counsel or a hearing before a judge.

"I believe strongly that the few good features of this law should be passed again in a new, smaller law, but that the Patriot Act must be repealed," he said.

Gore made no reference to the 2000 election in which a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on contested votes in Florida left him losing to Bush even as he won the popular vote. But Lisa Brown, ACS acting executive director, found a way to remind everyone of that decision, introducing Gore as "President, oh, nope, vice president Al Gore."

Gore harked back to eras in which Americans had been denied civil liberties at home through government actions that in retrospect were judged to be of questionable wisdom -- among them the suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the aggressive investigations of citizens by the FBI and CIA during the Vietnam War era.

In all those cases, he said, the nation managed to recover its equilibrium and "absorbed the lessons" of fear-inspired suspensions of freedoms.

But there is reason to worry, Gore said, that the Bush administration's actions may represent not just a new cycle but also the beginning of a new and lasting era of repression. For one thing, he said, "the new technologies of surveillance, long anticipated by novelists like Orwell and other prophets of the 'Police State,' are now more widespread than they have ever been."
The ELECTED President Speaks that Old Time Truth, in The New York Times...

 

9:50 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Paul Krugman Wins Another One

Paul Krugman Wins Another One. Lordy, Lordy, I can hear those right-wing crazies right about now grinding their teeth, pounding their keyboards, straining their itty-bitty brains, and flecking the frothy venom build-up from the corners of their twisted little mouths, straining their hyped-up vocabularies trying to deflate THE MAN they can't lay a sticky finger on. Ya gotta love it.
One of George W. Bush's major campaign themes in 2000 was his promise to improve the lives of America's soldiers — and military votes were crucial to his success. But these days some of the harshest criticisms of the Bush administration come from publications aimed at a military audience.

For example, last week the magazine Army Times ran a story with the headline "An Act of `Betrayal," and the subtitle "In the midst of war, key family benefits face cuts." The article went on to assert that there has been "a string of actions by the Bush administration to cut or hold down growth in pay and benefits, including basic pay, combat pay, health-care benefits and the death gratuity paid to survivors of troops who die on active duty." ...

Yet one might have expected the administration to treat the military differently, if only as a matter of sheer political calculation. After all, the military needs some mollifying: the Iraq war has turned increasingly nightmarish, and deference toward the administration is visibly eroding. Even Pfc. Jessica Lynch has, to her credit, balked at playing her scripted role.

So what's going on? One answer is that once you've instilled a Scrooge mentality throughout the government, it's hard to be selective. But I also suspect that a government of, by and for the economic elite is having trouble overcoming its basic lack of empathy with the working-class men and women who make up our armed forces.

Some say that Representative George Nethercutt's remark that progress in Iraq is a more important story than deaths of American soldiers was redeemed by his postscript, "which, heaven forbid, is awful." Your call. But it's hard to deny the stunning insensitivity of President Bush's remarks back on July 2: "There are some who feel like that, you know, the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring 'em on. We got the force necessary to deal with the security situation." Those are the words of a man who can't imagine himself or anyone close to him actually being in the line of fire.

The question is whether the military will start to feel taken for granted. Publications like Army Times are obviously going off the reservation. Retired military officers, like Gen. Anthony Zinni — formerly President Bush's envoy to the Middle East — have started to offer harsh, indeed unprintable, assessments of administration policies. If this disillusionment spreads to the rank and file, the politics of 2004 may be very different from what anyone expects.
It's Krugman in The New York Times...
  

9:25 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Buck Doesn't Stop With Rummy

A Futile Gesture Aimed Too Low, the buck doesn't stop with Rummy. We can't fire Dubya, and impeachment shouldn't be used as recklessly as the GOPers did. No, this regime change should be done at the ballot box; this is America, not a banana republic, but everybody seems to have forgotten that.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A group of more than two dozen House of Representatives Democrats on Monday said they had introduced a resolution urging President Bush to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"This resolution would make official what so many members of Congress already believe -- that the soldiers in Iraq and America's foreign policy would be helped greatly if Donald Rumsfeld would leave," Rep. Charles Rangel of New York said in a statement.

Rangel said he so far had 25 co-sponsors to the resolution who were "willing to stand up and say what so many policy makers know, that the first step to bringing our troops home is to send Donald Rumsfeld home."

The resolution said Rumsfeld misled the American public on assessments of progress in the war and occupation, sent U.S. forces to Iraq "without adequate planning and sufficient equipment," and "demonstrated a lack of sensitivity" in statements on the war and U.S. casualties.
Reuters...
  

8:32 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Monday, November 10, 2003

Our Arabic General is a Fighter We Can Win With

Our Arabic General is a Fighter We Can Win With. In fact, he believes militarily we are winning, it is the "battle of perceptions" that has him worried. And worry we should. The American public may react progressively negative to dying American troops. That is why they must always be told the truth about why we are there, the mistakes we made in getting there, and the mistakes we made in planning an end-game strategy. I firmly believe that an informed citizenry will do the right thing when they are made to feel a part of the process. If Dubya had real Texas guts he would level with everyone and say many mistakes were made, that there were distortions of truth regarding the immediacy of the need to invade--but that the final intentions were good and still are. Saddam Hussein should have come down in '91, but Bush 1 didn't have any more guts than his son and thousands of Iraqis died because of it. We are there now, and we must finish the job this time. There is no other tolerable solution. If he loses the election, so be it; he would go down with some honor rather than exiting the arrogant fool the world sees him as now.
[But] Army Gen. John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, said in an interview Friday that he was concerned about a surge of attacks against U.S. forces that have enabled the enemy fighters to create an impression in the news media worldwide that "they are stronger than they are."

"I am concerned about it from the point of view that there's an increased level of violence," Abizaid said. "I am not concerned about it from the point of view militarily that they can defeat us. However, this is a battle of perceptions. We need to understand that they are adapting their tactics . . . and also developing stronger organizational structures, and we've got to break into these structures and destroy them."

Abizaid said that commanders throughout the country remain convinced that Baathists loyal to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein are their main enemy, with Izzat Ibrahim, one of Hussein's most trusted aides, playing an important role in coordinating attacks.

Ibrahim, who served as vice chairman of Hussein's Revolutionary Command Council and commanded military forces in northern Iraq, was one of only three people allowed to carry a weapon in Hussein's presence, according to his U.S. military biography.

"I think he's a very important cog in the machine, and I think it's important to get him, absolutely," Abizaid said.

But Abizaid said there was also evidence suggesting that some Baathists were beginning to coordinate attacks with Iraqi religious extremists and foreign fighters, particularly in the Fallujah area.

Meeting with commanders over several days last week, Abizaid challenged them to probe the nature of these linkages and to consider why the success that U.S. forces had in May, June and July in rooting out Baathists and reducing the level of attacks had given way to an upsurge in violence.

"Why is it, after we talked about turning the corner about a month ago, that we haven't turned the corner?" Abizaid said. "We are not as far along as I would have liked to have been by November."

His division commanders assured him, however, that they were winning a difficult fight and were confident that they would continue to prevail, despite the intensifying attacks.

Abizaid urged commanders to remain highly aggressive in killing and capturing the enemy. "You want to take risks to get the mission accomplished," he said in a meeting with Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, and commanders from the division's 3rd Brigade. "Don't count casualties; honor casualties. Don't be deterred by what happens in the way you pursue the enemy. You must defeat the enemy."
Read it in the Washington Post...
 

11:48 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Sunday, November 09, 2003

What A Great Poet and Patriot Believed About Reporting the True Images of War

Read What A Great Poet and Patriot Believed About Reporting the True Images of War. It is powerful; it is timeless; it is important. It is by Adam Cohen in the oped pages of today's The New York Times.
What World War I's Greatest Poet Would Say About Hiding Our War Dead:

When World War I broke out, the English saw going off to battle as a fine thing to do. They embraced the Latin poet Horace's dictum, 'Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori' — It is sweet and proper to die for one's country. But four years later, that romantic notion had been shattered by the grim reality of the mustard-gas-laced killing fields, and by the bitter words of Wilfred Owen, a British officer now recognized as the greatest poet of the Great War. Owen reported from the battlefields of France that, contrary to the prettified accounts being served up, the war he witnessed was full of blood "gargling" up from "froth-corrupted lungs" and "vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues."

Owen's subject was, he declared, "war, and the pity of war." He expressed it through dark word portraits, in which dead and dying young men were stripped of any glory or sentimentality. Owen himself became one of these inglorious casualties when he was killed in action at the age of 25, just days before the war's end, 85 years ago this week.

A revered figure in England, Owen found a large American following during the Vietnam War. He is often portrayed as antiwar, which he was not. What he stood for was seeing war clearly, which makes him especially relevant today. The Bush administration has been loudly attacking the news media for misreporting the Iraq conflict by leaving out good news. Owen would counter — in vivid, gripping images — that it is the White House, with its campaign to hide casualties from view, that is dangerously distorting reality.
Do yourself and humanity a favor and read the rest of this wonderfully written piece of literary history and timely comment on the tragedies of today, in The New York Times...
  

11:07 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Pride and Humiliation

Pride and Humiliation, one emotion enobles the spirit and enlarges the heart, the other breaks the spirit and hardens the heart. That simple, but so often neglected, basic human phenomenon is what Thomas L. Friedman's column explains so well in today's The New York Times.
Why have the U.S. forces never gotten the ovation they expected for liberating Iraq from Saddam's tyranny? In part, it is because many Iraqis feel humiliated that they didn't liberate themselves, and America's presence, even its aid, reminds them of that. Add the daily slights and miscommunications that come with any occupation, and even the best-intended liberators will wear out their welcome over time. I was with my Iraqi translator one day in Baghdad, trying to enter the office of the Governing Council. The American private security guard at the door ordered me to shut my mouth until I was told to speak. Then he told my translator to sit in the 130-degree heat while he escorted me — the American — inside to see if the Iraqi leader we were seeing was available. Both of us felt like punching that guard in the face.

"Iraq is full of angry men," Mustafa Alrawi, managing editor of Iraq Today, wrote in Beirut's Daily Star. "For example, in the area unfairly labeled as the `Sunni triangle,' the population was badly hurt by the decision to disband the army and the policy of de-Baathification. . . . Thousands of men, many of whom took pride in their rank and status, were left bewildered and confused. It must be remembered that the army . . . did not fight the U.S. invasion, effectively giving their stamp of approval to the plan to topple Saddam Hussein. They have wounded pride to restore. Entire tribes feel embarrassed that they supported the invasion, only to be left out in the cold by the coalition's myopic vision of how Iraq should be run."

Never, ever underestimate a people's pride, no matter how broken they might be. It is very easy for Iraqis to hate Saddam and resent America for overstaying. Tap into people's dignity and they will do anything for you. Ignore it, and they won't lift a finger. Which is why a Pakistani friend tells me that what the U.S. needs most in Iraq is a strategy of "dehumiliation and re-dignification."
Please read all of Mr. Friedman's column in The New York Times...
  

11:03 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Ms. Dowd Proves She's Tougher Than the Ninny's of the Right and Twice as Smart

Ms. Dowd Proves She's Tougher Than the Ninny's of the Right and Twice as Smart. After a great opening gambit quoting Sean Connery's character Malone in "The Untouchables" explaining to Eliot Ness that you can't play nice when you're going after Al Capone, that you have to make some hard choices, she gets to the same point about Bush & Company in Iraq.
As the president offered his lofty 'vision thing' for spawning democracy in the Middle East, America was at a rough juncture. The administration opened the can on these worms in Iraq. Are Americans now prepared to do what it takes?

The Bush crowd hurtled into Baghdad on the law of Disney: Wishing can make it so. Now they're ensnared in the law of the jungle: the rules of engagement don't apply with this scary cocktail of Saddam loyalists, foreign fighters and terrorists, who hold nothing sacrosanct, not human rights organizations, humanitarian groups or Iraqi civilians.

The gangsters are getting ever bolder about picking off our soldiers on land and out of the sky. With three Army helicopters hit in the last two weeks, killing 22 Americans, soldiers are reduced to flying low and fast, as they scan for the glint of sunlight coming off the rockets of the invisible guerrillas. It's an eerie flashback to the 10-year war of attrition Afghans waged against the mighty Soviets, when worn-down Soviet soldiers complained that the Afghan fighters were "ghosts" who would shoot down their helicopters with American Stinger surface-to-air missiles and fade back into the mountains.

On Wednesday, Senator John McCain offered a vinegary critique of the Bush team, urging the president to be more engaged on Iraq, and not leave decisions to subordinates. He also swatted Donald Rumsfeld's assertion that troop levels are fine, saying 15,000 more troops should be dispatched to avoid risking "the most serious American defeat on the global stage since Vietnam."

Senator McCain, nervous about both Army morale and Iraq shattering, believes we must get in deeper to make progress.

Administration officials, nervous about President Bush's election chances shattering, believe we must show progress by starting to pull out.

That is why the Pentagon announced last week it would reduce the number of troops by next summer, replacing them with Iraqis.
I will leave the rest of this heat seeking missile-like column for you to enjoy in The New York Times...
  

11:00 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Polls Put Dubya in a Dead Heat

Polls Put Dubya in a Dead Heat. But the real story here is the finding of an historic disparity in basic values between Americans who consider themselves Republicans or Democrats. Indeed, it appears that Liberal is no longer as dirty of a word among Dems as it was only a few years ago; this is countered by a likewise enhanced entrenchment of more hawkish hawks and get-government-out-of-my-life GOP conservatives embracing outright Libertarianism over traditional big business Republicanism in greater numbers.
Partisan differences over both national security and domestic issues are at a historic high a year before Election Day, according to an in-depth voter poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

Andrew Kohut, the center's director, said the survey showed that the Republican Party has gained parity with the Democrats but because of public concern about Iraq and the economy, President Bush is locked in a dead heat with a generic Democratic opponent.

The result, the center says, is that the United States "remains a country that is almost evenly divided politically -- yet further apart than ever in its political values."

The findings were based on a pair of surveys -- a late July study of a broad set of issues that reflect basic voter values and a mid-October follow-up that asked a different sample of voters about Bush, Iraq and other current topics.

By comparing the results to similar studies dating back to 1987, Kohut was able to chart a growing gap between GOP and Democratic partisans on both defense-security questions and issues testing the role of the government here at home.

The average difference between those partisans on questions testing political and policy attitudes reached 17 percentage points -- the highest in the 16 years of data, topping even 1994, the year when Republicans ended Democratic control of Congress.

What has happened in essence is that Republicans have become more hawkish on national security, in support of Bush's policies, while Democrats have become more dovish, reflecting their growing disapproval of the war in Iraq. On domestic issues, Democrats are trending more liberal than they were during the Clinton years, while Republicans have moved more toward support of smaller, less expensive government.

The numbers are often dramatic -- suggesting not only why another polarizing, partisan election is in store but also why it is so difficult for the parties in Congress to reach agreement on everything from taxes to prescription drugs to judicial appointments.
Read the rest of this very interesting, and troubling, look at the American electorate in the Washington Post...
  

10:57 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Doctor Who Would Be President Gets Closer to the Cure

The Doctor Who Would Be President Gets Closer to the Cure. Wow. This train appears bound for glory, or at the very least one hell of a crash if it should be derailed by the vagaries of modern electioneering in America. Frankly, I think it is still a race, but perhaps not for much longer.
Former Vermont governor Howard Dean is shaking up the Democratic presidential race by busting federal spending constraints, locking up two of the campaign's biggest endorsements and, for the first time, threatening to pull away from the pack.

Dean yesterday became the first Democrat ever to opt out of the taxpayer-funded presidential system, providing his campaign what could be a decisive long-term financial edge. This week, two of the nation's most politically powerful labor unions -- the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) -- plan to endorse Dean, a decision that has stunned people inside the labor movement and rattled the other candidates.

These two unions have 3 million members combined and tens of millions of dollars to spend on the presidential election.

Together these developments provide Dean an opening for a quick-kill strategy: winning Iowa and New Hampshire, developing substantial momentum, and unleashing superior money and manpower to prevent anyone from becoming a serious challenger.

"This is their big play," said Bill Carrick, senior strategist to Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.). "It's a sweepstakes approach to the whole thing."

Joe Trippi, Dean's campaign manager, said: "We feel we're really well-positioned now to take it."

But not without a fight -- and probably starting with the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 19, the first major contest on the calendar. The path to victory may look brighter inside the Dean campaign because of what happened in the past seven days, but he still faces a serious obstacle course. His opponents will both gang up on him in attacks and attempt to isolate him into a series of one-on-one battles in various states. With his profile as high as it is today, the other question is whether Dean has the temperament and candidate skills to go with the grass-roots energy his campaign has aroused. The former governor's penchant for making comments he later has to clean up could cause him further problems.

As several advisers to Dean's rivals said, there is not much the other candidates can do to alter the race, other than hope Dean does himself in. It is difficult to break through with new and innovative policies because the candidates have rolled out their biggest ideas and, most will acknowledge, there is little difference between Dean and his rivals. They all want to extend health coverage to the uninsured, repeal some or all of the Bush tax cuts and build a more multilateral foreign policy.

Their best hope -- attacking Dean for switching positions on politically popular programs or making controversial remarks -- does not appear to be working, either. Dean has survived the biggest controversy of his campaign this past week after telling a reporter he wanted to be the candidate of southerners who display the Confederate flag on their pickup trucks. Under heated criticism from the other candidates, Dean reluctantly apologized, and most said they accepted his apology.

Strategists for several candidates said the campaign is going to get even nastier and more personal in the weeks ahead. Their plan is to try to drive a wedge between Dean and his liberal base by hammering his past or present support for gun rights and for changes in the Social Security and Medicare programs. "The more liberals find out about his record as governor of Vermont, the more they're going to be uncomfortable with him," said Jim Jordan, campaign manager for Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.).
For the full analysis, read it in the Washington Post...
  

10:49 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Anybody Got Any Good Ideas, Please?

Anybody Got Any Good Ideas, Please? It appears that Dubya has reached the point where he might start letting other folk's ideas be heard--and maybe even tried. This problem is far too large to be solved by one-tracked minds or prayer meetings.
Increasingly alarmed by the failure of Iraq's Governing Council to take decisive action, the Bush administration is developing possible alternatives to the council to ensure that the United States can turn over political power at the same time and pace that troops are withdrawn, according to senior U.S. officials here and in Baghdad.

The United States is deeply frustrated with its hand-picked council members because they have spent more time on their own political or economic interests than in planning for Iraq's political future, especially selecting a committee to write a new constitution, the officials added. "We're unhappy with all of them. They're not acting as a legislative or governing body, and we need to get moving," said a well-placed U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "They just don't make decisions when they need to."

Ambassador Robert Blackwill, the new National Security Council official overseeing Iraq's political transition, begins an unannounced trip this weekend to Iraq to meet with Iraqi politicians to drive home that point. He is also discussing U.S. options with L. Paul Bremer, civilian administrator of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, U.S. officials said.

The United States is even considering a French proposal, earlier rejected, to create an interim Iraqi leadership that would emulate the Afghanistan model, according to U.S. and French officials. During the debate before the new United Nations resolution on postwar Iraq was passed Oct. 17, France and other Security Council members had proposed holding a national conference -- like the Afghan loya jirga -- to select a provisional government that would have the rights of sovereignty.

Among several options, the administration is also considering changing the order of the transition if it looks as though it could drag on much longer than the United States had planned. The United States has long insisted that a new constitution was the essential first step and elections the final phase in handing over power.
There aren't any solutions in this article, but the situation is laid out fairly well. The Washington Post...

 

10:43 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Some Good Advice For Dubya From Jim Hoagland

Some Good Advice For Dubya From Jim Hoagland. Of course, since he doesn't read, he will get it only through the filter of people who tell him only what they think he wants to know or, perhaps even worse, what they want him to know.
Iraq's killers have learned to exploit the zone of confusion that now lies between the Bush administration's urgent goals in Iraq and its lofty ideals in the Middle East. The assassins seek to turn President Bush's declarations of goodwill for the region against him and the still-strangely unfocused U.S. campaign to break the costly insurgency in Iraq's Sunni heartland.

The administration risks making the perfect the enemy of the good. Taking their cue from the president's vows to make Iraq a catalyst for a democratic, peaceful Middle East, U.S. civilians and commanders are hesitating to adjust well-intentioned policies that inadvertently help the killers operate with little fear of being caught and punished.

Six months after the end of "major combat operations," U.S. policy in Iraq is a medley of counterinsurgency, nation-building and regional political modeling. This fluctuating mix of priorities has led to a dispersal of American resources and attention in an environment where there is neither peace nor a conventional war in which U.S. strength can be brought to bear with full force.

From May 1 through yesterday, 149 American soldiers died from hostile fire in Iraq. Juxtapose against that grim statistic this number: 0. That is the total of legally sanctioned executions or lengthy prison sentences announced for anyone aiding, planning or carrying out these attacks.

Those arrested in American roundups disappear from public view. While there may be rough battlefield justice in U.S. operations, there is no visible retribution against Saddam Hussein's dead-enders or foreign jihadists for Iraqi civilians to see and to take into account. There is instead the appearance of a cat-and-mouse game in which American troops, who know little of local conditions, personalities and languages, stumble endlessly down blind alleys or into ambushes.

To change this, the occupation authorities should immediately empower Iraqi militias and other local security forces to help hunt down and deal with the ex-Baathists who form the core of the insurgency. This is the quickest and most effective way to cut the American casualty toll. It comes with risks, but those risks are less than the ones Americans already run.
Read some good answers to some tough questions, in the Washington Post...
  

10:40 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




What Price Mendacity?

What Price Mendacity? Whatever credibility Bush and cohorts have left in the world is sinking relentlessly. Below is a view from Great Britain spurred by the shameful use of Private Lynch for political gain. The administration's callous behavior has given rise to the accusation of racism. With Dubya, blowback is lurking behind every decision his White House makes.
Beneath the gloss of the US media and the machinations of an administration eager to show a 'good news' angle of the Iraq conflict against the reality of a rising body count, Lynch has become a metaphor not for the heroism of pretty young Americans captured by a devilish foreign enemy, but for the confusion that has marked Bush's Operation Iraqi Freedom from the start.

Misgivings characterising Lynch's story are coming to a head: last week she accused the administration of manipulating her story for propaganda, saying she was not a heroine at all; accusations that she'd been raped were disputed by appalled Iraqi doctors who first treated her, and the army was accused of insensitivity and racism for awarding Lynch a full disability pension while others from her ambushed maintenance company, including Shoshana Johnson, the black cook wounded and captured by Iraqis, will receive barely a third of Lynch's discharge package.

While Johnson is living on $500 a month, Lynch stands to make millions from her book, I Am a Soldier, Too. She has been romanced as the media target of the moment, photographed by Annie Liebowitz for Vanity Fair, and stands to make millions more from a movie deal.

'There is a double standard,' said Johnson's father, Claude. 'I don't know for sure that it was the Pentagon. All I know for sure is the media paid a lot of attention to Jessica.'

And America is deter mined that Lynch will be a heroine, despite the fact that she never fired a shot, and instead got down on her knees to pray as her unit was surrounded by enemy forces. As she pointed out herself, it was her dead colleague Lori Piestewa, a Native American mother of two, who went down fighting.

Lynch says the circumstances of her rescue was dramatised and manipulated by the Pentagon. She was not rescued in a 'blaze of gunfire' as reported by Defence Department officials last April, but picked up from compliant Iraq doctors who had saved her life.
The Guardian...
 

10:30 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Whose Side Is Their God On?

Whose Side Is Their God On? The criminals who blew up the compound in Riyadh killed in the name of Allah those who are devout to Allah? How many Allah's are there? Or are these people exactly what good citizens all over the world say they are: Terrorists with no cause but the death of modernity, peace and rationality? I believe that question has long been answered. They are also thugs and cowards without honor of any kind. Courage involves knowing great fear and overcoming it in the service of others. Suicidal lunatics by definition overcome no fear: They crave instantaneous martyrdom without pain for the sensual pleasure that they believe will embrace them in another world at the expense of great suffering by those who want only to live another day at peace in this one. Goddamn them into eternal nothingness.
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) - Suspected al Qaeda suicide bombers mounted a devastating attack on a Riyadh compound housing foreigners on Sunday, killing between 20 and 30 people and injuring up 100, diplomats said.

The huge explosion that gutted the Muhaya compound in the west of Saudi Arabia's capital occurred after Western nations issued fresh terror alerts and Washington shut its missions in the kingdom, the world's biggest oil exporter.

Saudi officials said however virtually all the residents at the bombed compound were Arabs. One resident said most were Lebanese, Egyptians and Syrians.

"This is a crime against innocents which is in the style of al Qaeda. It is an al Qaeda operation," a security source told Reuters. "This is a suicide operation."

As rescuers searched amid rubble and raging fires, a Saudi-based senior Western diplomat said: "We don't have an exact toll and this is initial, but our best guess is that between 20 to 30 were killed and 50 to 100 were injured."

One American was wounded and another was reported missing, a U.S. diplomat said, but it was unknown if they were of dual nationality. In Washington, a State Department spokeswoman said: "It appears that no U.S. diplomats live at the compounds."
Reuters
  

10:08 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




This Is What Happens When Journalists Play the Role of Press Agent

This Is What Happens When Journalists Play the Role of Press Agent For an Ideology, Not the Truth. Throughout his career, Frank Rich has written with power and importance across the spectrum of the fine arts. Thus some would say that it is surprising he would accept the assignment of trying to put the spectacle of two instant books and a quickie made-for-TV movie about Pfc. Jessica Lynch into perspective. We should all be glad that he did. All except for Bush and Cohorts, that is, who would surely take umbrage at almost every word of Mr. Rich's essay deflating the primo blow-up caricature of the war in Iraq they almost successfully foisted off on the American masses.
Ah, the dazzling pyrotechnics of "shock and awe." The finality of the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue. The thrill of that re-enactment of "Top Gun." The sense of closure provided by the banner reading "Mission Accomplished." Like all wars of the TV age, the war in Iraq is not just a clash of armies, but a succession of iconic images. Those who control the images, and the narratives they encapsulate, control history. At least until a new reality crashes in.

Few of this war's images have had such longevity or proven more pliable than that of the smiling face of Pfc. Jessica Lynch. In the seven months of virtual silence since her rescue from a Nasiriya hospital, she has become the Mona Lisa of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Americans have been able to read into her pleasant but unrevealing snapshot whatever story they choose. Those stories, usually imposed on her by others, have become a Rorschach test for homefront mood swings.

When American forces were bogged down in the war's early days, she was the happy harbinger of an imminent military turnaround: a 19-year-old female Rambo who tried to blast her way out of the enemy's clutches, taking out any man who got in her way. When those accounts turned out to be largely fiction, she became a symbol of Bush administration propaganda and the press's war-time credulity in buying it. Then came her months of muffled recuperation: a metaphor for the low-grade fever of inertia and unease that has set in at home in the months since that Saddam statue fell.

But Private Lynch is not a passive player in her narrative any more. At a crucial moment in Iraq, as American casualties pile up and the poll numbers of support for our "post-victory" engagement there go down, she's getting ready for her close-up. Tonight NBC broadcasts its unofficial dramatization of her rescue, the movie "Saving Jessica Lynch," timed to jump the gun on the Tuesday publication of Private Lynch's own book, "I Am a Soldier, Too." The days ahead bring her whirlwind tour of the promotional stations of the cross, starting with appearances with Diane and Katie, punctuated by a visit to the Letterman couch for spice.

Few authors deserve book sales and attention more than this brave young woman from Palestine, W.Va., who joined the Army to see the world after failing to land a job at Wal-Mart. But now, as in every other step of her time in the spotlight, the way her story plays out may tell us more about a country at war than it does about our hero.

Take, for instance, tonight's surprising "Saving Jessica Lynch," as written by John Fasano and drawn in part from the account of Mohammed Odeh Al-Rehaief, the Iraqi lawyer who has written his own book about how he risked his life to lead American forces to Private Lynch. The movie begins with the inevitable disclaimer that "some characters, scenes and events in whole or in part have been created for dramatic purposes." Even so, given the facts as we know them to date, it is startling in its relative accuracy — more than earlier reportage by The Washington Post (which attributed its initial Rambo version to "U.S. officials") and The New York Times (whose reporter Jayson Blair fictionalized some of the paper's Lynch coverage).

The Lynch of this film has not been pumped up with steroids. She's a supply clerk gravely injured in a Humvee collision, not G.I. Jessica spraying bullets in a shootout. (She has only a sprinkling of lines in the entire movie, many of them in flashbacks to prewar West Virginia.) The American forces that rescue her encounter no "blaze of gunfire," as was described in an early Los Angeles Times account attributed to "defense officials and reports from the battlefield," but instead confront only compliant doctors and nurses. The White House is portrayed as being disproportionately focused on the urgency of this single mission, for no apparent purpose other than p.r. As for Iraq itself, it is presented as a shooting gallery whose citizens despise Saddam but can also be skeptical of their American liberators. Al-Rehaief's own wife tells him that he has been "poisoned" by all "those John Wayne movies."

What does it say that "Saving Jessica Lynch" is more candid than much of the reportage on the war? It wasn't that long ago when correspondents on NBC's sibling network, MSNBC, were enthusing about President Bush's aircraft-carrier landing as "the president's excellent adventure." The movie even pays a dramatic price for its integrity; a reasonable approximation of the truth is less exciting than the bogus reports of Lynch-as-John Wayne. While its title character is still a hero, as she must be, the movie portrays Private Lynch as a lowly pawn of larger, mysterious forces operating in the shadows, whether in Baghdad or Washington.
I will leave the rest of this fine writing and thinking for you to read in The New York Times...
  

9:51 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Saturday, November 08, 2003

The Numbers Rise and We Grieve; But We Cannot Quit

The Numbers Rise and We Grieve; But We Cannot Quit.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP)--Insurgents killed two U.S. paratroopers and wounded another west of Baghdad on Saturday as the U.S. military cracked down on residents of Saddam Hussein's hometown after guerrillas apparently shot down a Black Hawk helicopter there.

The two 82nd Airborne Division soldiers died when a homemade bomb exploded beside their vehicle about 8:30 a.m. in Fallujah, a center of Sunni Muslim resistance 40 miles west of Baghdad, the military said.

Their deaths brought to 34 the number of American soldiers who have died in Iraq this month as resistance escalated during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. ...

In Mosul, 250 miles north of Baghdad, guerrillas fired six mortar rounds at a police station in the city, Iraqi police said Saturday. Several shells missed their target and fell on nearby houses, slightly injuring a resident.

The city, which was once considered to be relatively free of guerrilla activity, has seen dozens of attacks on U.S. forces in recent weeks, indicating that the rebellion has spread northward from its original stronghold in the so-called Sunni Triangle north and west of Baghdad.

Lt. Col. Steven Russell, commander of the 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, also said U.S. forces had reimposed the 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. curfew on Tikrit, which had been lifted at the start of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan last month.

``This is to remind the town that we have teeth and claws and we will use them,'' Russell said after his troops blasted two abandoned houses and a warehouse with machine gun and heavy weapons fire.

U.S. troops late Friday also fired mortars and jets dropped at least three 500-pound bombs around the crash site, rattling windows over a wide area. Other U.S. jets streaked over Tikrit after sundown. At least three mortars were also fired onto the U.S. compound but caused no damage.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution...
  

9:25 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Killed in Iraq: We Grieve, But We Cannot Quit

Killed in Iraq: We Grieve, But We Cannot Quit.
The Department of Defense has identified 382 American service members who have died since the start of the Iraq war. It confirmed the death of the following Americans yesterday:

BENSON, Robert T., 20, specialist, Army; Spokane, Wash.; First Armored Division.

CHANCE, James A. III, 25, specialist, Army National Guard; Kokomo, Miss.; 890th Engineer Battalion.

FISHER, Paul F., 39, Sgt., Army National Guard; 106th Aviation Battalion.

RIVERA, Jose A., 34, Sgt. First Class, Army; Bayamon, Puerto Rico; Third Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry.

WOLF, James R., 21, specialist, Army; Scottsbluff, Neb.; Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 52nd Engineer Battalion.
The New York Times...
  

9:23 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Stupidest Thing Dubya Could Ever Do Is Make China Believe We Are Not Her Best Friend

The Stupidest Thing Dubya Could Ever Do Is Make China Believe We Are Not Her Best Friend. We need China as an ally more than any other nation on Earth. It is a fact, folks; for good or for bad, China will define the 21st Century.
China says recent stopovers in the United States by Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian were aimed at "splitting China" and sabotaging improving Sino-US relations.

A foreign ministry spokeswoman said China had many times expressed its strong dissatisfaction with the US for allowing Taiwan's leader to make stopovers.

Mr Chen this week stopped off in the US twice on his way to Panama to attend the Latin American country's 100th anniversary celebrations.

During a stopover in New York, Mr Chen met with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, accepted an award from the International League of Human Rights and delivered several speeches.

China warned last week of consequences for Sino-US relations if Mr Chen was allowed to engage in "unsuitable" activities while in the US.
ABC Radio Australia


For an in depth view of the Taiwan Issue, may I suggest you read my article: The Greatness of China: A Rebuttal
 

9:21 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Dot.com Millionaire Marries Chinese President's Daughter

Another refrain of: Roll Over Vladimir, Tell Mao Zedong the News.

Hu Haiqing, the daughter of China's president, Hu Jintao, was reported this weekend to have married one of the country's new millionaire internet tycoons - Mao Daolin, also known by his western name Daniel, who used to be chief executive of Sina.com, one of China's top three Internet companies. Mao, who obtained his masters degree from Stanford University, remains on the board and his net worth has been put at $61 million, as shares in Chinese dotcoms have been among the highest risers in the world this year.
 

9:14 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Seek and Hide Isn't a Parlor Game

Seek and Hide Isn't a Parlor Game. And hide-the-ball was made illegal in football almost a century ago. Dubya, you have to show your cards sooner or later, unless you're going to fold.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 — The federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks stepped up pressure on the Bush administration to cooperate by issuing a subpoena on Friday to the Pentagon.

Members said they were still weighing a subpoena to the administration for Oval Office documents President Bush received in the days before Sept. 11, 2001, although the panel chose not to issue one today.

The 10-member panel said in a statement that it had encountered "serious delays" in obtaining information from the Defense Department. It voted to subpoena the Pentagon for documents, tapes and transcripts involving the actions of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, on the morning of Sept. 11, as the suicide hijackings were being carried out. The Defense Command is responsible for protecting American airspace.

"In several cases we were assured that all requested records had been produced but we then discovered, through investigation, that these assurances were mistaken," the panel said. "We are especially dismayed by problems in the production of the records of activities of Norad and certain Air Force commands on Sept. 11."

Commission members say they are trying to determine how Norad responded to the first reports of the hijackings and whether the military could have done anything to prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, possibly by using fighter jets to shoot down the passenger planes.
In The New York Times...
  

9:09 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




What's Up With Dubya?

What's Up With Dubya? Is he going somewhere with this? There is something afoot: the White House is planting seeds of Saddam not only being alive but maybe directing some of the insurgency; the administration let Vanity Fair have some confirmed nuggets regarding the long-known but only vaguely reported issue of the 140 plus Saudis that were allowed to hit the friendly skies of otherwise shut-down American airspace in the days immediately following 9/11 for a ride home to the Kingdom--including more than a dozen of Osama bin Laden's family members; putting out the fairly explicit warning of terrorist attacks in the U.S. by al Queda using cargo jets; and this scolding of some Bush family friends of very long standing--we're talking more than half a century. Are we and the world being prepared to accept something? Hmm. But what?
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush is urging Arab countries to replace the rule of authoritarian regimes and royal families with democratic governments. But some experts wonder what the United States will do to push its new policy.

"No new programs announced, no new money for promoting democracy. Just rhetoric," said Martin Indyk, who was assistant secretary of state for the Middle East in the Clinton administration.

"The rhetoric isn't going to move the hardliners in Iran, [Palestinian leader] Yasser Arafat or the governments in Saudi Arabia and Egypt who are now scared of the consequences of the kind of political liberalization that the president is preaching to them," Indyk said after Bush issued his challenge in a speech Thursday.

Bush's speech appeared aimed at complaints in the Arab world that the United States has long tolerated corrupt, undemocratic regimes in return for stability and a reliable supply of oil. Washington began to rethink its policy after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the emergence of deep hostility in the Mideast toward the United States. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.
CNN.com
 

9:05 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Bear In Winter Is Salty As Hell

The Bear In Winter is Salty as Hell! It seems the former KGB officer who was thought to be more than a little "wooden" and even "faceless" has a true Russian heart--and tongue. As the friend and biographer of President Putin's former boss, General Leonid Shebarshin, the last Chairman of the KGB, I was aware of this trait in Mr. Putin which he mostly hid from view early in his political life in the new Russia; apparently, recent political bumps notwithstanding, he has loosened the lid a bit.
President Vladimir Putin has a reputation for foul-mouthed asides, but Italian journalists sitting in straight-backed chairs in a Kremlin reception room cannot have expected what was coming.

Opposite them, Vladimir Putin, immaculately dressed and statesmanlike, answered a question about one of the country's notorious billionaires. The interpreter's voice petered away into embarrassed silence. "You must always obey the law, not just when they've got you by the balls" is a rough equivalent of what Mr Putin had said.

For a western politician such a salty choice of words, shown on national television, might mean political embarrassment, even censure. ...

Moscow liberals are appalled and say he is betraying his lack of pedigree for the highest office in the land.

But many ordinary Russians adore Putin's earthy indiscretions for the grit and defiance of convention that they convey. ...

Mr Putin had only just come to power when he uttered his first corker, saying he would deal with Chechens by "wiping them out in the shit house".

Last year when a French journalist asked a hostile question at a European Union summit in Brussels, the Russian president said: "Come to Moscow. We can offer you a circumcision. I will recommend a doctor to carry out the operation in such a way nothing else will ever grow there again."

When the translation was released, European Union officials expressed their fury. In Russia it ruffled few feathers.

When the cameras stop rolling, Mr Putin is even reported to resort to mat, the bawdy and highly taboo domain of Russian invective that forms the mainstay of prison, military and teenage street slang.

According to the Russian writer Victor Erofeyev, Mr Putin told the veteran Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov: "We don't fucking need a military base in Cuba!" ...

At a recent meeting of leaders of the former Soviet states, he urged them to work harder and to stop "just chewing snot from one year to the next".
C,mon, ya gotta love a politician who can get down with the rest of us from time to time. Read in the Telegraph...

You also might enjoy the true story of Putin's former boss, the last Chairman of the KGB: The Bear in Winter
  

8:58 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Paul Krugman Gets It Right Again

Paul Krugman Gets It Right Again I was born and raised in Mississippi and came of age in the 60's during the worst of the race wars over going to school with folks of a different color. I was considered a "traitor" by most of my neighbors as I joined with the Freedom Riders who came south to fight the fascists that were then in control of my beloved state. It wasn't easy, it wasn't fun, it was always dangerous, and I was forced to live as an outlaw in other states for a period of time. Consequently, I believe I have the legitimacy of the cause to say, "Yes, Mr. Krugman, you know of which you write."
Howard Dean's remarks about the need to appeal to white Southerners could certainly have been better phrased. But his rivals for the Democratic nomination should be ashamed of their reaction. They know what he was trying to say — and it wasn't that his party should go soft on racism. By playing gotcha, by seizing on the chance to take the front-runner down a peg, they damaged the cause they claim to serve — and missed a chance to confront the real issue he raised.

A three-sentence description of the arc of American politics over the past 70 years would run like this: First, Democrats and moderate Republicans created institutions — above all, Social Security and Medicare — that provided a measure of financial security to ordinary working Americans. The biggest beneficiaries of these institutions were African-Americans and working-class Southern whites, and both were part of the moderate-to-liberal coalition that dominated American politics until the 1960's.

But the right opened an increasingly effective counterattack, with a strategy that included using racially charged symbolism to get Southern whites to vote against their own economic interests. All Mr. Dean was saying was that Democrats need to understand and counter this strategy.

I know these are fighting words. But the reliance of modern Republican political strategy on coded appeals to racism is no secret. Controversies over efforts to remove the Stars and Bars from the top of the South Carolina Statehouse, and to reduce its size on the Georgia flag, played a significant role in Republican victories in 2002. And the evidence that race is still a crucial factor is as fresh as Tuesday's election.
Please read the rest of this important column in The New York Times...
  

1:46 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




We Grieve, But We Cannot Quit

We Grieve, But We Cannot Quit It is a sobering truth but it must be thought and remembered: Soldiers die in combat so that the rest of us can live free. It is their job; we honor them for doing it so well and with "the last full measure of their devotion."
Six American soldiers were killed when their helicopter crashed near Saddam Hussein's hometown and a soldier died in an ambush on his convoy in separate incidents in Iraq on Friday, the military said.

The Black Hawk helicopter from the 101st Airborne Air Assault Division, which was ferrying the six passengers, went down on the East side of the Tigris river near Tikrit, Iraq at 9:40 a.m., a military statement said. The aircraft caught fire upon landing. The statement did not release the identities of the passengers, but a military spokesperson said they were all soldiers.

The cause of the crash was being investigated, the statement said.

In the northern city of Mosul, a soldier was killed and six others were wounded when gunmen ambushed their convoy with rocket-propelled grenades, a second military statement said

In an almost daily occurrence, American soldiers and forces working with them have been attacked by guerrillas opposed to the occupying troops.

American officers based at one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces in Tikrit, a hotbed of anti-U.S. sentiment and the former Iraqi leader's hometown, said it was unclear whether guerrillas had shot down the Black Hawk helicopter.

"At this stage we don't know if it was due to mechanical failure or another reason," Major Josslyn Aberle of the 4th Infantry Division told reporters, according to a Reuters report.
In The New York Times...
  

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Well, It's About Time, and Good Hunting, Guys!

Well, It's About Time, and Good Hunting, Guys! I suppose it is uncharitable to wonder what the other folks have been doing for all these months. What's important is that the sons of bitches are caught and PUT ON TRIAL. Best way to kill a myth is to let the world watch it wither under the onslaught of justice and its evidence.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 6 — The top American military commander for the Middle East has created a covert commando force to hunt Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and key terrorists throughout the region, according to Pentagon and military officials.

The new Special Operations organization is designed to act with greater speed on intelligence tips about 'high-value targets' and not be contained within the borders where American conventional forces are operating in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gen. John P. Abizaid, who commands all American forces in the strategic crescent from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, decided over the summer to disband two Special Operations missions, Task Force 5 in Afghanistan and Task Force 20 in Iraq, officials said.

Military officers say a broader, regional mission was given to the new force, which has become one of the Pentagon's most highly classified and closely watched operations.

Much about the force, which is commanded by an Air Force brigadier general, remains classified, and Pentagon officials declined to discuss the rules under which the new force operates throughout the region or whether its would require the permission of a foreign government to operate in its territory.

Military officers say that focusing the intelligence, and the Special Operations firepower, within one organization, called Task Force 121, streamlines the effort to use information on these targets and mount an attack.

The new, more flexible force already has shown results, according to Pentagon officials and military officers, who say it has gotten close to Mr. Hussein. Officials declined to give any details.
In The New York Times...
  

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Friday, November 07, 2003

Thomas L. Friedman is "at the Wheel"

Thomas L. Friedman is "at the Wheel" and he is doing some nifty driving in his column in today's The New York Times.

For the past six weeks the news from Iraq has felt like the movie "Groundhog Day." I get up each morning, fire up my Internet and read that a roadside bomb has killed another U.S. soldier. I search for any good news, but rarely find it. Lord knows, we desperately need a new movie, and not 'Apocalypse Now.' The movie we need is the Iraqi version of "Mr. Chips Goes to Baghdad."

Here's what I mean: There is much talk now about the need for "Iraqification" of the police and armed forces, so Iraqis can take over for U.S. troops. No question, this is necessary. But it's not sufficient. We could have 100,000 Iraqis in the police and Army and it would not be enough — without one other person. We need an Iraqi leader (or a leadership council) elected as a result of an Iraqi constitutional or political process.

When you have an army and a police force, but no real legitimate government, it means that your army and police are always floating — unconnected to either a governing body above or to the people below. Security forces that are floating that way will never have the authority they need to keep order or crack down on retrograde elements trying to restore Baathist rule. The security forces must be anchored in an Iraqi political authority that is itself anchored in an Iraqi-written constitution.

This should be our drop-everything priority. ...

The more stake Iraqis have in running their own lives — through writing a constitution and by letting the ministers (and the G.C., if it would get its act together) take the lead — the more the Iraqi Army and police will be ready to protect that stake.

I repeat, yet again, Lawrence Summers dictum: "In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car." Too many Iraqis still feel that they are renting their country, first from Saddam and now from us, so they aren't really washing yet. We cannot just toss the keys to anyone, as France suggests. But we can insist — much more vigorously — that they begin the constitutional process that will produce a legitimate body of Iraqis to accept the keys and eventually drive off on their own.
Read the rest of a typically on-target Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times...
  

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Thursday, November 06, 2003

Ms. Dowd Won't Be Cowed

Ms. Dowd Won't Be Cowed by Dubya's apologists in the right-wing of the press corps; and Golly Damn do I love her for it. Of course, it's her writing that I truly love--the lady can do more with 800 words than just about any of her peers, right or left, with the possible exception of Mr. Safire, who also is a wordsmith's wordsmith even when he's writing ideas I can't abide. Now, it's fortunate that with Ms. Dowd I not only treasure the style but almost always the ideas behind her razor-sharp sentences. I also love her spunk--the more livid their sputtering condemnation of her gets within hours of every word she writes, the better she spits more back at 'em. You'd think a Texan would admire that kind of spirit--and wouldn't that be something? What if Dubya is a secret reader of Ms. Dowd? What if the man who brags that he doesn't read, actually slips into some secluded place every few days and satisfies his Jones for Maureen Dowd? Is it possible? Nah. But you can enjoy her work right here and now. Below is an excerpt of her "Death Be Not Loud" column:
At fund-raisers, Mr. Bush prefers to talk about the uptick in the economy, not the downtick in Iraq. On Monday, arriving for a fund-raiser in Birmingham, he was upbeat, not somber. As Mike Allen of The Washington Post reported in his pool report, "The president, who gave his usual salute as he stepped off Marine One, appeared to start the day in a fabulous mood. . . . An Alabama reporter who was under the wing shouted, `How long will U.S. troops be in Iraq?' The president gave him an unappreciative look."

Raising $1.8 million at lunch, he stuck to the line that "we are aggressively striking the terrorists in Iraq, defeating them there so we will not have to face them in our own country." He didn't want to depress the donors by mentioning the big news story, the loss of 15 American soldiers, or sour the mood by conceding the obvious, that the swelling horde of terrorists fighting us there will not prevent terrorists from coming after us here. Maybe we should all be like President Bush and not read the papers so we don't get worn down either.

Perhaps the solution to Mr. Bush's quandary is to coordinate his schedule so he can go to cities where he can attend both fund-raisers and funerals.

The law of averages suggests it shouldn't be hard.
In The New York Times...
 

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Saddam's Deal Offer: Can This Be True?

Saddam's Deal Offer: Can This Be True? There appears to be too much smoke here for there not to have been at least a kindling fire. Why wasn't it followed up? Obviously, that question will be asked many times of many people in the days to come. This is one hell of a story. It reads like a Le Carre novel or an Oliver Stone screenplay. Wow...yikes!
WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 — As American soldiers massed on the Iraqi border in March and diplomats argued about war, an influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman: Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal.

Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, had told the businessman that they wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction, and they offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search. The businessman said in an interview that the Iraqis also offered to hand over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 who was being held in Baghdad. At one point, he said, the Iraqis pledged to hold elections.

The messages from Baghdad, first relayed in February to an analyst in the office of Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy and planning, were part of an attempt by Iraqi intelligence officers to open last-ditch negotiations with the Bush administration through a clandestine communications channel, according to people involved.

The efforts were portrayed by Iraqi officials as having the approval of President Saddam Hussein, according to interviews and documents.

The overtures, after a decade of evasions and deceptions by Iraq, were ultimately rebuffed. But the messages raised enough interest that in early March, Richard N. Perle, an influential adviser to top Pentagon officials, met in London with the Lebanese-American businessman, Imad Hage.

According to both men, Mr. Hage laid out the Iraqis' position to Mr. Perle, and he pressed the Iraqi request for a direct meeting with Mr. Perle or another representative of the United States.

"I was dubious that this would work," said Mr. Perle, widely recognized as an intellectual architect of the Bush administration's hawkish policy toward Iraq, "but I agreed to talk to people in Washington."

Mr. Perle said he sought authorization from C.I.A. officials to meet with the Iraqis, but the officials told him they did not want to pursue this channel, and they indicated they had already engaged in separate contacts with Baghdad. Mr. Perle said, "The message was, `Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad.'"
This story must be read in full, in The New York Times...
  

8:34 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




InstaPundit Playing the Fool, Again

InstaPundit Playing the Southern Fool, Again. As a proud Mississippian with a sense of justice and rationality I think it is high time some of us progressive folks from Deep Dixie called Reynolds on his reactionary crap, such as the following from his cheerlog:
ZELL MILLER WEIGHS IN on the Democratic intelligence memo scandal:

"Heads should roll!"
Check out the dangerous foolishness: InstaCheerleader

Then you might want to read a story about another cheerleader Republican Southerner: Missississippi Sorrows
  

7:52 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




The Toady Fox and The Hypocritical Mules

The Toady Fox and The Hypocritical Mules with a straight face are actually trying to sell THE MEMO as evidence of...what? Sound internal strategy points by the loyal opposition involved in an issue as partisan as it gets. Did a Republican administration mislead Congress, the American people, its allies, the UN and the whole world on the reasons for a preventative invasion of Iraq? That is the issue and always has been. It wasn't the intelligence agencies making speeches and doing the Sunday TV shuffle. Of course, it is also about what a multi-party system of democratic government is about: winning elections on issues where the incumbent party's actions or policy is weak or contrary to the best interests of the Republic in the eyes of the opposition. Isn't that the kind of system we're trying to install in Iraq?
WASHINGTON — Fox News has obtained a document believed to have been written by the Democratic staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee that outlines a strategy for exposing what it calls 'the administration's dubious motives' in the lead-up to the war in Iraq.

The memo, provided late Tuesday by a source on the Committee and reported by Fox News' Sean Hannity, discusses the timing of a possible investigation into pre-war Iraq (search) intelligence in such a way that it could bring maximum embarrassment to President Bush in his re-election campaign.

Among other things, the memo recommends that Democrats "prepare to launch an investigation when it becomes clear we have exhausted the opportunity to usefully collaborate with the [Senate] majority. We can pull the trigger on an independent investigation of the administration's use of intelligence at any time — but we can only do so once ... the best time would probably be next year."
Duhh! When would the GOPers use their best re-election ammunition? After either Clark, Dean, Kerry, et al. is writing his or her inauguration address? Welcome to politics, folks, it's a dirty business but someone has to muck themselves up with it, otherwise a whole lot of over-paid suits from Ivy League schools would have to get a real job or suck up to an emperor. THIS, and this is much ado about same ol', same ol' (I must say that Professor InstaPundit is increasingly becoming as substantial as a Volunteers Cheerleader--in the non Peyton Manning years, of course).

The Self Righteous Toady Fox and The Hypocritical Mules...
  

7:13 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Wednesday, November 05, 2003

For Shame: The EYE of Murrow and Cronkite Blinked and Then Shut

For Shame: The EYE of Murrow and Cronkite Blinked and Then Shut. As a professional journalist, novelist and screenwriter, I know the difference between a news story and a TV mini-series based on actual people or events: The latter is art, or rather art imitating life--after a fashion, to be sure--if you wish to put a finer point on it, but it is more art than life. Why is CBS censoring art? Because it is a corporate conglomerate running scared of lost revenues and of powerful people in powerful places of government, which happen to be mostly Republicans these days. It is a completely regrettable decision; it is a completely cowardly decision; it is a completely bad precedent setting decision. Does anyone really doubt that the Gipper said something similar to the line of alleged dialogue quoted about his early view of AIDS: "They that live in sin shall die in sin." No one in Hollywood, that's for sure. Does anyone believe that it is likely that a portrait of Nancy Reagan in words and pictures would not at times be unfavorable? Again, no one in Hollywood. Both Mr. and Mrs. Reagan are strong, forceful, willful people who pushed their agendas with vigor, not to mention their personal philosophies. Such people do not live lives that can be told as one would a fairy tale. As actors and movie stars long before they became president and first lady, they understood the difference between a motion picture and a news story. Now, of course, through politics, they became powerful enough to control the media that is the message of art as life. They win. CBS loses.
Swamped with accusations that it had done a hatchet job on an ailing former president, CBS announced it had yanked 'The Reagans' miniseries off its November sweeps lineup.

The network has licensed the four-hour miniseries to pay cable network Showtime; both networks are owned by media conglomerate Viacom.

CBS insisted in a statement that it had not succumbed to pressure from Reagan supporters and that the decision was "based solely on our reaction to seeing the final film."

"The Reagans" had been flying under the radar, despite the fact that it was being produced by liberals Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, who have worked with Hollywood heavyweight Democrat activist Barbra Streisand on several projects and that Streisand's husband James Brolin had been cast as President Reagan. Both the producers and the network billed the project as a love story about Ronald and Nancy Reagan set against the backdrop of his tenure in the White House.

But fans of the 92-year-old former president, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease, exploded in anger when a story ran in the New York Times in which the script is described as portraying Reagan unfavorably and Nancy Reagan even worse. In one scene Reagan says of AIDS sufferers, "They that live in sin shall die in sin."

The reporter had obtained the script from Zadan and Meron, according to sources familiar with the situation. The reporter, Jim Rutenberg, declined to comment.
For the rest of the sordid story, the Washinton Post...
  

5:07 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Alterman Busts Linda Tripp and CNN: Altercation

Eric Alterman Busts Linda Tripp and CNN--and the press in general--in his Altercation Weblog. It's a great piece of reporting by him and Jane Mayer of the New Yorker. The snippet below is just to get you rolling, hopefully to click on over to Altercation:
Damn! There’s that face on my AOL pop-up screen again. Oh to be free of Linda Tripp and her lies. This CNN report is a complete bunch of crap; a perfect example of how to spin a lazy reporter. The piece totally swallows the garbage put out by Tripp’s attorneys part of a long-running spin campaign that turned all coverage of her upside down. Tripp was arrested on grand larceny charges as an adult, and in a court plea bargain, she pled guilty to reduced charges, of loitering. The case involved her alleged theft of wrist watch from a guy whom she spent time with one night.
For the rest of the story, Altercation...
  

3:40 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Deception Better Than Delusion, Kristof Believes

Deception Is Better Than Delusion, Nicholas Kristof Believes. In other words, having a lying president is preferable to having a stupid one. While it is a fine column, with typically sound internal logic, I'm afraid Mr. Kristof is being a bit too charitable. I would offer that the evidence so far presented indicates that George W. Bush is both a liar and a dummy. But Mr. Kristof makes a good case. After a telling and horrific personal anecdote demonstrating the loss of reality he discovered in Saddam and his sadistic henchmen regarding the true will and nature of the Iraqi populace, he goes on to correlate the same to the Bush administration--the delusion, not the sadism:
Critics complain that they [Bush and Company] lied to the American public about how difficult the war would be, but I fear the critics are wrong: they didn't just fool us — they also fooled themselves.

Evidence suggests that Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney may have actually believed that our troops would be, as Mr. Cheney predicted, 'greeted as liberators.' The administration chose to rely not on intelligence but on wishful thinking, and it became intoxicated by the siren calls of Ahmad Chalabi, a silver-tongued charlatan.

I wish administration officials were lying, because I would prefer hypocrisy to delusion — at least hypocritical officials make decisions with accurate information.

Policy by wishful thinking is crippling our occupation. Initially, U.S. officials didn't restrain looting because they regarded it as celebratory high jinks. Then, confident that security was in hand, they disbanded the Iraqi Army. They didn't push hard to bring in international forces.

The foreign forces they suggest introducing are Turks, which adds to my fear that administration officials have been more deluded than duplicitous. It is a crazy scheme: anyone who has spent time in Iraq knows that Iraqis will never accept their former colonial power policing them.

Mr. Cheney has cited a Zogby International poll to back his claim that there is "very positive news" in Iraq. But the pollster, John Zogby, told me, "I was floored to see the spin that was put on it; some of the numbers were not my numbers at all."

Mr. Cheney claimed that Iraqis chose the U.S. as their model for democracy "hands down," and he and other officials say that a majority want American troops to stay at least another year. In fact, Mr. Zogby said, only 23 percent favor the U.S. democratic model, and 65 percent want the U.S. to leave in a year or less.

"I am not willing to say they lied," Mr. Zogby said. "But they used a very tight process of selective screening, and when they didn't get what they wanted they were willing to manufacture some results. . . . There was almost nothing in that poll to give them comfort."

Sure, we're making some progress in Iraq. A hand grenade sells for $2.50 now, compared with 10 cents a few months ago. But U.S. troops now face 25 to 30 attacks daily, compared with 15 to 20 in September. Last month 33 Americans were killed, twice as many as in September.

One of Mr. Bush's strengths as a politician is his optimistic nature, but I now fear it is also his central weakness in governing. Reckless overconfidence led him to adopt fiscal policies that will leave our children indebted, and this same cockiness led us into Iraq. Brash optimism perhaps has its roots in Mr. Bush's hometown, Midland, Tex., an oil town that regularly rewarded hard work with a gusher, a place where everybody you meet displays this same hearty can-do confidence. In Midland, Mr. Bush unfortunately absorbed the lesson that risks in the desert pay off.

So the scary thing is, Mr. Bush and his aides may not be lying when they look at Iraq and boast of a cheering population that a Western press sourly refuses to acknowledge. There's a precedent: Saddam Hussein.
Kristof, in The New York Times...
 

3:10 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Tuesday, November 04, 2003

We Grieve, But We Cannot Quit

We Grieve, But We Cannot Quit. Anger for the almost criminal lack of planning and the horrific mendacity from the Bush administration, those we must feel and share, but we cannot quit this fight until it's over.
FORT CARSON, Colo., Nov. 3 — Sgt. Ernest Bucklew was a 5-foot-3-inch coal miner's son who got laid off from a vitamin factory, then joined the Army. For a time, he loved it.

On Sunday, Sergeant Bucklew was on his way home from Iraq after a death in the family. Then, in a flash, he was gone, too.

Sergeant Bucklew was one of the 16 soldiers killed when a missile tore a troop transport helicopter out of the sky. He was 33 years old, a father of two, a supply clerk for the Third Armored Cavalry based here and headed home for the funeral of his mother, who died suddenly on Friday.

The news was almost too much to bear for a family already heartbroken and for a base that seems to be paying a steep price for the occupation in Iraq.

Though not a single soldier from Fort Carson was killed during the invasion of Iraq, more than 20 have died since President Bush declared an end to major combat hostilities on May 1. Four Fort Carson soldiers were killed in Sunday's helicopter crash alone.

"It was a pretty tragic day in the regiment," Lt. Col. Tony Aguto, executive officer with the Third Armored Cavalry, wrote on Sunday in an e-mail message to The Colorado Springs Gazette.
The New York Times...
  

1:50 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Good News From China

More Officially Good News From China. Maybe a little light-weight, but all things considered, it's pretty amazing.
BEIJING, Nov. 3 (Xinhuanet) -- China's first digital pay TV channel focusing on hair dressing, body building, costume and etiquette is expected to open on January 1, 2004, in Jiangsu Province, east China.

The TV channel, dubbed "Liangzhuang (Beautification)", will include news and information, special reports, interactive programs, and dramas.

It has signed agreements with a dozen domestic and international TV channels such as French "Fashion TV", according to Xu Chengyong, head in charge of preparations for the new TV channel.

As pay TV is still new to China, the "Liangzhuang" channel is likely to become profitable by the end of 2005, Xu said.

The government has encouraged the development of pay TV channels, as part of its effort to reform the country's TV industry. According to the government plan, by 2005 digital pay TV channels will be opened in big cities, with a total of 30 million viewers.
Xinhua Online
 

12:24 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Conservatives Eating Their Own?

Ultra Cons Eating Their Own? There is no honor among thieves and now also the wacky ultra right. It's kind of fun to watch, I must admit.
Let's start with a simple, albeit apparently unasked question: Who got fired for permitting Wolfowitz to stay at a hotel in Baghdad, when there was abundant evidence that Iranian-sponsored terrorists had been instructed to target the hotels? When a relative of mine recently asked for advice before making a trip to Baghdad, I had just one strong recommendation: "Never, ever, set foot in a hotel in Baghdad."

Evidently nobody told the deputy secretary of defense.

Placing Paul Wolfowitz in such a place at such a time was a criminal blunder, and everyone who okayed the decision should be fired, along with the people on the ground in Baghdad who seem unable to understand that we are really at war, and that our men need proper protection and intelligence, whether they are in helicopters or in convoys or in hummers. And if my information is correct, the terrorists now have anti-tank weapons, which we may see in action in the near future.

It's long past time — since September 12, 2001 to be precise — for people to be sacked for failure, and the fact that virtually no one has — except for Larry Lindsay (seemingly for insufficient aerobic exercise) and a couple of others dealing with "the economy" or with faith-based initiatives and volunteerism — is the greatest failure of this administration. The bureaucracy has learned that there is no penalty for failure. The only way to change their mindset is to do to them what Reagan did to the air controllers.

Unfortunately, Dubya has embraced the Loyalty Thing that is one of the Bush family's most cherished values. He doesn't turn on his own loyal aides, even (perhaps especially) when they come under attack. But this is no way to wage a war, where the only thing that matters is victory.

As of now, there is reason to think that this administration does not understand that we are at war. The president occasionally reiterates the old themes (we make no distinction between terrorists and the states that support them, etc., etc.) but his administration does not act on them. This was obvious in last week's instructive testimony by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Armitage first said United States policy is "to support the Iranian people in their aspirations for a democratic, prosperous country." If that were true, then we would (as we should) support regime change in Iran, since the country today is anything but democratic and prosperous. ...

As if our goal were to improve relations with the Islamic Republic! What happened to the Axis of Evil and the war against terrorism? It got gutted by Powell and Armitage, that's what. Never mind the president, who said, after all, that we would not distinguish between the terrorists and the states that support them. Never mind that Iran is the foremost supporter of terrorism in the world — the State Department says so every year; Powell and Armitage do indeed distinguish between the Iranian regime and the terrorists Iran supports.

And the hell of it is that they make this distinction, and work very hard to improve relations, even though they know that Iran actively supports the terrorists who are killing Americans in Iraq (anyone who thinks that these well-planned attacks by well-armed professionals are the actions of die-hard Saddam loyalists, rather than of the intelligence organizations of Iran and the other terror masters, should stop reading now and simply subscribe to State Department transcripts).
My, my. The fact that this fool Ledeen is allowed to walk--and talk and write--unrestrained amongst living things is testament supreme that this is still the greatest experiment in freedom this spinning rock has ever known.

You have to read the rest to believe it, at NRO...
  

12:12 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Officially Good News From China

Officially Good News From China, courtesy of Xinhua Online. Hey, it may be state-owned and controlled, but it beats bad news like that of the bad old days.
BOAO, Hainan, Nov. 3 (Xinhuanet) -- China and the United States are experiencing the first prolonged period of calm relations in about 15 years as their economies grow more closely linked, former US trade representative Charlene Barshefsky said at the 2003 annual conference of the Boao Forum for Asia Monday.

She said the United States and China share an interest in trade and the long-term success of economic reform in China, and have common ground in regional issues including the Asian financial crisis and the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula.

The leaders of both countries are aware of the consequences should the relationship go fundamentally wrong, she added.

She said China's economic emergence can be traced through a shift in regional policy making.

"First with its approach to the Asian financial crisis, more recently its proposal for a China-ASEAN free trade area, its position in the G-20 at Cancun and its new role as the largest local market for Asian exports, China is assuming an Asian economic leadership role," she said.

She said the political and diplomatic influence of China in the region is in large part a function of its emerging role as the economic driver of Asian growth.
Xinhua Online
 

11:25 AM / Editor / permalink    0 comments



Monday, November 03, 2003

Calpundit Endorses General Clark

Calpundit Endorses General Clark. Kevin Drum, one of my most favorite bloggers, has thrown caution to the wind and has made his call for the Democratic nomination: General Wesley Clark. I like the good General myself; I also like(d) Kerry and Dean, so I'm holding off a while yet before choosing definitively. Call me wishy-washy, I can handle it.
Well, hell, when he's right, he's right. For a variety of reasons having to do with both his fitness for office and his electability, I think Clark is the best candidate out there — something I'll explain at greater length in a future post. I'll vote for whoever gets the nomination, but I hope it's Clark.
Read all about why, at Calpundit
 

5:40 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Politics Is Not a Gentlemens' Game

Politics Is Not a Gentlemens' Game. At least not on the Republican side of the fence. According to the Washington Monthly "Who's Who" feature, just shaking hands with an old friend who happens to be running for the Democratic presidential nomination will get you canned if you work for a GOPer.
The outing by senior administration officials of Valerie Plame, an undercover C.I.A. counter-terrorism expert and wife of Bush critic and former ambassador Joseph Wilson, is undoubtedly the signature example of contemporary GOP vindictiveness. But there are others. For instance, there is Eric Massa, until recently on the majority staff of the House Armed Services Committee, chaired by Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.). Massa was a lifelong Republican whose first taste of politics was serving as a page to candidate Ronald Reagan during the 1976 presidential race. But before joining the committee staff, Massa had served in the armed forces, where, among other things, he was a top aide to Gen. Wesley Clark (Ret.) during Clark's tenure as NATO supreme commander. The two were close, so when Clark came to Washington in early October to meet with Democratic congressional leaders at a private residence a few blocks from the Capitol, Massa walked over to say hello. But as the former comrades-in-arms greeted each other warmly on the street just outside the event--Massa never went inside, say other attendees--Republican operatives stationed nearby noticed his presence, and reported back to his staff director, Robert Rangel. Soon after, sources tell "Who's Who," Hunter and Rangel repeatedly told Massa that, given his friendship with Clark, he could no longer work at the committee, but when reporters from a few big-name newspapers heard the story and began calling around, Hunter claimed that Massa had never actually been fired. Fed-up, Massa resigned. No one from Hunter's office was available for comment. Contacted by WW, Massa commented, "I don't hold ill will for anybody. This is about issues, and Clark the man, and I'm going to do everything I can to get him elected."
Washington Monthly
  

4:16 PM / Editor / permalink    0 comments




Josh Marshall is writing well about the war and words.

Josh Marshall is writing well about the war and w