The Review
March 8, 2003
Administrative Announcement
I guess it kind of slipped my notice, but it appears I have been blogging for one full year now.
How the time flies.
Thanks to all of you who come by the site.
March 7, 2003
Barbarians
(Review) Just another little anecdote about daily life when dealing with Iraqi government officials.
Our "allies" the French
(Review) Bill Gertz reports for the Washington Times:
A French company has been selling spare parts to Iraq for its fighter jets and military helicopters during the past several months, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
The unidentified company sold the parts to a trading company in the United Arab Emirates, which then shipped the parts through a third country into Iraq by truck.
The spare parts included goods for Iraq's French-made Mirage F-1 jets and Gazelle attack helicopters.
An intelligence official said the illegal spare-parts pipeline was discovered in the past two weeks and that sensitive intelligence about the transfers indicates that the parts were smuggled to Iraq as recently as January.
Other intelligence reports indicate that Iraq had succeeded in acquiring French weaponry illegally for years, the official said.
The parts appear to be included in an effort by the Iraqi military to build up materiel for its air forces before any U.S. military action, which could occur before the end of the month.
Bâtards!
A plea for appeasement
(Review) Charles Krauthammer is pleading for appeasement for North Korea. Sometimes, he argues, appeasement is the best policy. So we should appease them now.
Until we're done with Iraq.
Seeing the future
(Review) Victor Davis Hanson looks ahead to a Press Conference at US Central Command's Headquarters in Iraq, on April 15, 2003.
On our side
(Review) Alexandra Richie writes that the nations of "New Europe" know who their allies are.
The Certainty Crisis
(Review) David Brooks writes for the Times of London that the US is in the grip of a certainty crisis, caused by George W. Bush.
The American commentariat is gravely concerned. Over the past week, George W. Bush has shown a disturbing tendency not to waffle when it comes to Iraq. There has been an appalling clarity and coherence to his position. There has been a reckless tendency not to be murky, hesitant or evasive. Naturally, questions are being raised about President Bush’s leadership skills.
The United States is in the midst of the certainty crisis. Time magazine is disturbed by “The blinding glare of his certainty”, as one headline referred to Bush’s unwillingness to go wobbly on Iraq. “A questionable certainty” was the headline in the Los Angeles Times. “This kind of certainty worries Bush’s critics,” noted US News and World Report. “Moral certainty, for the most part, is a luxury of a closed mind,” observed William Lesher, a Lutheran school of theology professor, who presumably preserves a subtle open-mindedness about the Holocaust and other such matters.
...
But the main difference between Bush and his critics is that he is in a position of responsibility and they are not. On the colloquium couch, everyone can show off their full appreciation of the strategic ambiguities. In the parlour of intellect, timing is never a problem, because battle plans never have to be made, actions never have to be put in train.
But those who actually have to lead and protect, and actually have to build one step on another, have to bring some questions to a close. Bush gave Saddam time to disarm. Saddam did not. Hence, the issue of whether to disarm him forcibly is settled. The French and the Germans and the domestic critics may keep debating, which is their luxury, but the people who actually make the decisions have moved on to more practical concerns.
Read the whole thing.
What would we do without Mark Steyn?
(Review) Steyn is Handicapping the war on terror for The Spectator. A few gems follow.
On Mike Farrel and "Usama bin Forgotten":
I never thought he could do comedy, but, in his new role as chief pitchman for Artists United to Win Without War, he’s hilarious. On NBC’s Meet the Press, he hammered home his big talking-point: the administration’s ‘priorities are misplaced’ — the obsession with Iraq is draining resources from the war on terror. ‘That is the threat that should be being pursued,’ he huffed.
It’s good to know that the anti-war arguments are now so unreal they’re impervious to any actual developments back in what we call the real world. This artful formulation — that war with Iraq is a distraction from the war on terror — was designed to enable Democrats to oppose Bush without sounding like a bunch of sissies on national security. The war with Germany is distracting us from the war with Japan.
On KSM:
The best evidence for this is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself. KSM is known in al-Qa’eda circles as ‘The Brain’, and his picture on the FBI ‘Most Wanted’ list shows a cold but dapper fellow with a trim beard — like the Westernised Arab academics who play the talkshow circuit or, indeed, an assistant choreographer on a Broadway revival. By contrast, the fellow seized in Rawalpindi is a wreck — haggard, bleary, unshaven, a loser who’s run out of everything except back hair. Asked to account for the stark difference in appearance, several experts pointed out that he’s a ‘master of disguise’. In that case, the master of disguise is doing a great job of convincingly passing himself off as a guy who’s been sleeping in a hedge for a month.
On bringing democracy and freedom to the Mideast:
True, many on the Right think this sort of talk is barking mad applied to Baghdad and beyond. What’s more surprising is that practically everyone on the Left does. Right now, progressive opinion couldn’t be less interested in root causes, preferring instead to parrot M. de Villepin’s talking points: ‘Containment works’. Maybe for M. Chirac, but not for the Iraqi people and, given what North Korea managed to accomplish under the dozy eye of UN inspectors, not for us in the long run. A wholesale reconstruction of the Middle East is a gamble, but an attractive one weighed against the certainty of disaster if the Baathists and Wahhabis and Ayatollahs and Mubaraks are allowed the run of the joint for another 40 years. I don’t know whether Egypt and Saudi Arabia can be transformed into functioning democracies, but I’m modestly confident that Iraq and Iran can. And, if you want to scoff at the Bush vision, I think the least we’re entitled to hear is what your alternatives are.
I love this guy!
Villepin's American TV Outing
(Review) George Will grades Frtensh Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin's appearance on ABC's This Week. And he doesn't grade him very highly.
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, on ABC’s “This Week” last Sunday, said: “Do you want me to tell you, really, what France is worried about? How many boys, American boys, are going to die in Iraq.” The effrontery of his expectation that gullible Americans will believe that French policy flows from compassion for American “boys” is exceeded by that of his innuendo that France has more concern for those “boys” than does their commander in chief.
Such smarminess is the least offensive of current French stances, some of which, if successful, would increase the threats to American troops. No longer in any meaningful sense an ally, France does not disguise its aim to be a counterweight to the United States. It seemed uninterested in the fact that the deployment of defensive missiles to protect Turkey from Iraqi attacks, a deployment France opposed, also would protect U.S. forces at Incirlik air base in Turkey.
Many in the Bush administration believe that France is comprehensively complicating NATO actions for no better reason than that the United States favors the actions. For example, because the buildup around Iraq requires increased shipping through the Strait of Gibraltar, the United States has favored increased NATO maritime patrols there. Although France in the end acquiesced, it did so only after NATO was forced into diplomatic and institutional contortions to counter French bloody-mindedness.
Asked about anti-French feelings in the United States, Villepin said, “We’ve known that in the past. I’ve known that in the past. I was in the French embassy (in Washington) in ‘86 when happened the crisis of Libya.” Thank you, Mr. Minister, for reminding us that in 1986 France, true to form, tried to encumber one of the most effective blows ever struck against terrorism — the bombing raid President Reagan ordered in response to Libyan involvement in a terrorist bombing targeting Americans in Berlin. France denied U.S. planes fly-over rights.
Yeah, and as someone who helped take part in that strike, I certainly remember.
Time to lay 'em down
(Review) John Podhoretz writes about W's challenge to the rest of the world to show by their UN votes where they stand on Iraq.
Ignorance is Blix
(Review) The UN weapons inspectors make the big report today. Let's see if I can guess what they will say.
Hmm.
"Iraq is not cooperating on substance in most areas, but they've destroyed some missiles, and let us talk to a few scientists, so we need more time. Perhaps several months."
Now, let's see if I can predict the US response.
"Nice try, Hans."
What was that wisecrack about "Osama bin Forgotten"?
(Review) More good news out of Pakistan today:
Two sons of Usama bin Laden were arrested in southeastern Afghanistan in a joint operation involving Pakistani and U.S. forces, Pakistan's provincial home minister Sanaullah Zehri said.
"They were arrested from Rabat area in Afghanistan," he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. He did not identify the sons, but said that seven other Al Qaeda men were killed in the operation.
Wow. UBL's sons captured an 7 dead terrorists. That is good news.
Oh, and by the way, I guess Osama, or Usama, or whatever the hell his name is, is actually alive. I thought he was dead, which seemed the best conclusion given the available evidence. I wasn't convinced that the audiotapes were really him, either, mainly because he had always been such a big video boy in the past. But, it looks like he is still breathing.
For now, anyway.
I think this great for another reason, though, because it keeps fools like Mike Farrel from repeating the stupid "Osama bin Forgotten" wisecrack. Looks like there hasn't been much forgetfulness after all. Earlier this week, Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) had a speech, the written text of which castigated W for forgetting about the war against Al-Qaeda. When he actually gave the speech, however, he had to leave all those bits out because KSM had just been captured, but the prepared text had already gone out to the press, so he ended up looking like a bit of a dunce as well.
Sweet.
UPDATE: Uh-oh. Us government officials are now disputing this story.
The Press Conference
(Review) FOXNews wraps up the President's press conference of last night.
As an aside, the one question that really got my attention was the following exchange:
Q Thank you, sir. Mr. President, millions of Americans can recall a time when leaders from both parties set this country on a mission of regime change in Vietnam. Fifty thousand Americans died. The regime is still there in Hanoi, and it hasn't harmed or threatened a single American in the 30 years since the war ended. What can you say tonight, sir, to the sons and the daughters of the Americans who served in Vietnam to assure them that you will not lead this country down a similar path in Iraq?
THE PRESIDENT: That's a great question. Our mission is clear in Iraq. Should we have to go in, our mission is very clear: disarmament. And in order to disarm, it would mean regime change. I'm confident we'll be able to achieve that objective, in a way that minimizes the loss of life. No doubt there's risks in any military operation; I know that. But it's very clear what we intend to do. And our mission won't change. Our mission is precisely what I just stated. We have got a plan that will achieve that mission, should we need to send forces in.
W gave a much nicer answer to that question than I would have. My answer would have been something like the following:
That's an interesting question, Bob. Mainly it's interesting because it displays such an abysmal lack of knowledge about the Vietnam War. At no time was our mission ever one of regime change in North Vietnam. Indeed, I'm shocked and surprised that you could even imply that it was. Our sole mission in Vietnam was to prevent the takeover of South Vietman by the North Vietnamese communists. I suspect that you are using an intentionally revisionist interpretation of our effort in Vietnam for no other reason than to try to make a subtle "quagmire" argument about a possible war in Iraq.
To answer your basic question, however, I can say that if military action becomes necessary, it will be fought in a totally different manner than the war in Vietnam was. There will be no prohibited targets, no gradually increasing "pressure". We will unleash the full power of our military forces, and the war will not end until the Iraqi Army has been destroyed as a fighting force, the regime of Saddam Hussein has been toppled.
But, of course, W was much nicer than that. I suspect my lack of tact is something that would prevent me from ever obtaining elected office.
My TCS Column
(Review) My TCS column is up. This time, I discuss exactly what "shock and awe" means.
March 6, 2003
9th Circuit's Record stays intact
(Review) The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals maintains its reputation as the most overturned circuit in the nation. As LAPD officer "Jack Dunphy" writes:
Like a favorite hymn learned in childhood, the words are as comforting as they are familiar: "The judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, accordingly, is reversed."
Yesterday, the Supreme Court upheld California's Three Strikes Law. "Dunphy" has some background interesting on the cases.
Why is Eric Shinseki still in Uniform?
(Review) Let me be clear: I honor Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, for his service. But this guy opposes the Bush Administration on practically everything. Why is he still there?
Shinseki's successor as Army chief of staff was announced about a year ago, yet he remains at his desk, almost daring the administration to fire him. Shinseki was opposed to Army involvement in Afghanistan. Now he's publicly questioning the president's policy on Iraq.
As soon as the war began, Shinseki began trying to keep the Army from having to fight it. When the Army was asked what it would take to destroy the terrorists in Afghanistan, Shinseki responded that the entire XVIII Corps — about 50,000 men — would be needed, and would require several months of training, mobilization, and deployment. As a result, the Afghanistan campaign began without the Army. In November 2001, Rumsfeld asked Shinseki what it would take to defeat Iraq. Shinseki assured him it would take a huge number of troops — a number, in fact, that actually exceeded the active-duty strength of the entire Army. Instead of finding ways to support the president's policies, Shinseki has repeatedly resorted to obstruction and delay. Last week, he did something much worse.
On February 25, Shinseki testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Senator Levin asked him to "give us some idea as to the magnitude of the Army's force requirement for an occupation of Iraq…" Any general officer — especially one as political as Shinseki — would have corrected the question before answering it, because the very premise of an extended "occupation" is antithetical to President Bush's policy of liberation. (It also plays right into the hands of opponents in Europe and the Middle East who claim that our real objective is only to occupy Iraq and seize its oil.) Instead of correcting Levin, Shinseki answered that "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would be required. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were both angered by the response, and the next day Wolfowitz issued a pointed statement noting that Shinseki's estimate was "wildly off the mark." According to one report, Wolfowitz went out of his way to repudiate Shinseki, adding that "Shinseki's prediction came at a delicate time when the Bush administration is trying to piece together a broad-based coalition to support an invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein." And still Shinseki remains.
If you don't like the administration's policies, then you can resign, or you can shut up and soldier. Your job as a soldier is NOT to make policy. That's the job of your civilian overseers.
No, really. It's in the Constitution and everything.
Doing what Gen. Shinseki has been doing would be intolerable for me if I were SecDef or President. He'd be long gone.
Thank goodness he retires in June.
Rights on the Rack
(Review) Jonathon Turley writes that the US appears to be torturing terrorist suspects in Afghanistan and other foreign locations. He is outraged, especially since at least two of the victims have inconveniently died, launching a murder investigation.
Frankly, so am I. Torture only works in a limited number of situations. For the most part, you end up with a torture victim telling you whatever he thinks you want to hear. Sure, there may be time-sensitive situations in which torture works, because you can verify any information the suspect gives you. But those are the exceptions, rather than the rule. In general, a torture victim tells you whatever you want to hear, just to stop the pain.
Trust me, If I want to, I can get you to confess to the Lindbergh kidnapping. For the Star Trek fans out there, if I say there are five lights, eventually, you'll say that, too.
Besides, we're supposed to have drugs that take the place of this sort of thing anyway. Sure, that's a violation of someone's dignity, too, but its a heck of a lot less violating than strapping the electrodes to his genitals, and more reliable besides.
Delaying BMD
(Review) The opponents of Missile defense never rest. They are bound and determined to ensure that America can never defend itself from a ballistic missile threat.
A compromise resolution
(Review) Britain is working on a compromise UN resolution that would set a short deadline for Saddam Hussein to prove he has disarmed or face military action.
Give Freedom a Chance
(Review) William Safire hit the nail right on the head today.
How should free people feel — in our hearts, brains and guts — about launching a pre-emptive strike?
Note that we are not "starting a war" with Iraq. That was begun by Saddam more than a decade ago. We won the first battle, but he has since been secretly violating the terms of surrender. Either we will allow him to become capable of inflicting horrendous casualties in our cities tomorrow — or we must inflict and accept far fewer casualties in his cities today.
That's a Hobson's choice, which is no choice at all. We will now get on with it. We will not whip ourselves into jingoism, or become fascinated by our exercise of ultra-tech superpower or suppress our sadness at the pictures of Iraqi civilians Saddam will thrust into the line of fire as human shields.
But we should by no means feel guilty about doing our duty. War cannot be waged apologetically. Rather than wring our hands, Americans and our allies are required to gird our loins — that is, to fight to win with the conviction that our cause is just. We have ample reason to believe that Saddam's gangster government is an evil to be destroyed before it gains the power to destroy us.
Read the whole thing, it gets better.
Here Comes the Judge
(Review) Mike Isikoff and Mark Hosenball write that, with four major Al Qaeda operatives in U.S. custody, a conspiracy trial is now a real possibility. A trial before a Milkitary tribunal, no less.
More Anti-War Myths
(Review) This must be the day for addressing the Anti-war crowd's silly arguments. Fred Barnes tackles them here with a look at the ten most popular objections to war and some common-sense responses to them.
The right course
(Review) Lou Dobbs writes that freedom is our greatest export, and we've been exporting far too little of it to the Mideast.
The critics of the war against terror and the absolute disarmament of Saddam Hussein must overcome their partisan myopia and do their best to understand that there's nothing at stake here less than the very survival of our nation and democratic civilization.
In my opinion, the president has set us upon exactly the right course on the Middle East. Yes, it is in the interest of this energy-hungry nation to have stability in the region. But far more important is the elimination of dictators and despots who oppress their people and deny them even basic freedoms whether in the name of the secular Baath Party or radical Islamist ideology.
We have imported their oil and exported our dollars far too long without exporting as well democratic and capitalist market values. Democracy and markets offer the people of the Middle East their best hope for prosperity and freedom. The widespread impoverishment and unchecked extremism among radical Islamist factions will breed only further dangers to our way of life and democratic civilization everywhere.
I think there is real fear in the capitals of the Mideast that a free and democratic Iraq will destabilize all of the other regimes in the region. I certainly hope they're right.
Demythologizing the war
(Review) James Taranto deconstructs the biggest myths of the anti-war movement for the Wall Street Journal.
March 5, 2003
The Penatgon's new map
(Review) Thomas Barnett, professor of warfare analysis at the US Naval War College, has defined what he believes to be a new national security paradigm for the US. I'm not sure I agree with all the details after reading it through once, but I suggest it is an important article to read.
Thanks to reader Mike Daley for the link.
An odd offer
Review) A New Zealand woman says she's willing to be crucified by President Bush if he pledges not to attack Iraq.
Mary Grierson said she had emailed the challenge to the White House and as an open letter to leading U.S. newspapers.
"Send your troops home and take me instead, on behalf of everyone in the world who does not want war and oppression," she wrote.
But the deal has a catch -- Bush would have to personally hammer in the nails.
"I don't think he would have the courage to do it quite frankly, but that is the measure of a man," she told Radio New Zealand.
In other words, she knows it's perfectly safe to make the offer, because she knows no one will take her up on it. Notive, she isn't offering to allow Saddam Hussein to crucify her if he gives up his WMD stockpile. Of course, there is a real danger that he'd take her up on it.
Notice also that she's says she's against "war and oppression". That can't actually be true. Since it is Saddam Hussein who oppresses the people of Iraq, and the US who would liberate the Iraqi people, she's actually against war and for oppression.
But, of course, it isn't oppression if the US isn't involved.
But the Translation was 100% accurate
(Review) This is a bit odd.
Is Dan Rather’s face red yet? The famously hard-working CBS news anchor got an interview with Saddam Hussein, one of those mega-exclusives that his rivals would have given their right arm for — and now it turns out that CBS used an actor who apparently faked an Iraqi accent for Saddam’s “voice.”
The Los Angeles Times reports this morning that CBS hired Steve Winfield, a translator who has “a particular flair for foreign accents” and who is listed as a member of the Screen Actors Guild, to read Saddam’s answers in English translation to Rather’s questions.
The Times reports that “the accent ... was meant to provide ‘a voice compatible with the piece,’ ” according to a CBS statement, and “didn’t violate CBS News standards and practices.”
So, evidently they just faked an Iraqi accent on the translation for...dramatic purposes.
Gotta love that Big Media.
Give war a chance
(Review) Debra Saunders points out some typical leftist hypocrisy.
What about Osama bin Laden?
That's a question antiwar activists ask as an argument against the use of force in Iraq. On "Meet the Press" Sunday, activist Mike Farrell revealed that "the real villain" in the war on terror is "Osama bin Laden, who some now call Osama bin Forgotten."
Apparently the antiwar left -- as typified by groups like moveon.org, for whom Farrell was speaking -- doesn't have a problem suggesting that President Bush isn't doing enough about Osama bin Laden, even though the antiwar left opposed U.S. military action that targeted bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
I think they were kinda hoping nobody remembered that.
When will the Americans Come?
(Review) Asla Aydintasbas is in Northern Iraq, talking to the people about the future of the country. The result: He says they're getting impatient for freedom.
It is hard to imagine another place where Americans are more popular these days. "We like the son of 'Haji Bush,' because he will fight Saddam for us," a young Kurdish driver tells me plain and simple. Others--young and old, Kurdish or Turkmen, shopkeepers and politicians--echo similar sentiments about ending the reign of brutality in Baghdad.
Iraqis inside government-controlled areas have quietly nicknamed President Bush "Abu Abdallah," an endearing name, or "Abu Jinan"--a pun on "Father of Jenna"--meaning "Father of Paradises." A well-known religious leader at the central mosque in the regional capital, Suleimaniyah, says "I welcome even the Jew Sharon if he can liberate us from Saddam." In fact, just about the only people who oppose a war on the Iraqi dictator here seem to be the Western journalists who have flocked to the Irbil Towers Hotel to await its arrival. Why are the Iraqi voices still so distant for the chattering classes in the West?
Good question. We already know the answer.
The roughly seven million Iraqis who live outside the regime's control--in exile, or in the Kurdish safe havens in the north--have developed strong democratic traditions which they now want to transplant inside the country. In the smoke-filled meeting rooms, conferences and workshops in London, Washington or northern liberated Iraq, they have been discussing Iraq's new constitution, the "de-Baathification" of its institutions, truth and reconciliation, and disarmament. One exile admits that they are looking at Germany's de-Nazification, and even at the Federalist papers.
"Despite what many in the West say, the Iraqis are largely in agreement about the fundamental issues of transitional democracy," says Kanan Makiya, the Brandeis University professor and Iraqi author.
All they need is a chance. We should have given it to them in 1991. Now's the chance to rectify that, and several other mistakes.
Cui Bono?
(Review) I'm shocked--shocked!--to learn that France, Germany, Russia, and China benefit from keeping Saddam Hussein in power.
Lincoln's Lessons
(Review) Duane Freese writes that sometimes, war is the answer.
Would the world have been better off if Lincoln had not waged war, if he had given in at the start to the better angels of his own nature?
Some fanciful writers have imagined that had the South seceded peacefully it would have forsaken slavery and lived peacefully, ultimately reuniting with the North. What happened in South Africa suggests a different, less friendly outcome.
And if war was not the answer in the 1860s, America likely would not have been the power it became. Would it have been there at the time of World War I? Would it have been capable of supporting England and France and opposing Germany and Japan in World War II?
Those wars were not answers, either. But as the ancestors of slaves and children of Holocaust survivors know, an aversion to war can pave the way to a crueler despotism. Their pain doesn't fit neatly on a bumper sticker.
But the conclusion is no less true for that.
The countdown continues
(Review) Colin Powell says the clock is still ticking on Iraq, even though France, China, and Russia have announced their intention to veto any UN Security Council Resolution that authorizes force against Iraq.
At the White House, spokesman Ari Fleischer said, "Don't leap to conclusions about the final vote. You will continue to hear various statements by various people around the world."
"What you are observing is a fluid situation as different nations make different statements that all lead up to the one day which is the most important day, which is the day of the vote," Fleischer said.
As President Bush and senior American diplomats labored to round up votes, Powell said Tuesday that "nobody really knows who has the votes until the votes are taken."
Uh-huh.
I'm not sure I'd hold my breath waiting for nine votes and no vetoes.
Shock and Awe
(Review) Gen Richard Meyers, the CJCS, outlines the attack plan for Iraq. He calls it the Shock and Awe plan.
For some reason, it sounds like being on the receiving end of it will be a Bad Thing.
Three strikes, you're out
(Review) California's Three Strikes law for habitual offenders was upheld by the Supreme Court. The case concerned a gentlemen who had a long history of felonies for burglary and robbery. Then, with two strikes against him, he stole a set of golf clubs and was sentenced to 25 to life.
He argued that the sentence was way disproportionate to the crime. The Supreme Court's response was that he should direct his complaint to the California Legislature.
The main event
(Review) Stanley Kurtz Writes that the current moves against Iraq are merely the sideshow. The main event is North Korea.
Whether we want it to be or not.
Europe's Decline
(Review) Gleaves Whitney comments that the Decline of Old Europe may cause more trouble for us in the future.
So when Secretary Rumsfeld perceptively speaks of the old Europe, much more is at stake than cobbling together a coalition against Saddam Hussein. If Barzun is right, if it is true that decadent countries see no clear line of advance, then Washington should brace itself for deeper fissures among our allies. The old Europe is not just annoying; it is a problem in its own right, one that Washington will have increasingly to deal with. Boredom and fatigue are indeed powerful historical forces against which to contend.
The Atlanticist movement is sickened, and may be dying. At the moment, France and Germany seem uninterested in restoring it to health.
With friends like these...
(Review) Christopher Hitchens isn't very happy with the Turks.
It may now be argued that, in order to shorten the period of hostilities with Saddam Hussein and minimize casualties, the Iraqi border should be secured from all directions. But the Turks do not propose to help guarantee this border or to protect those who live within it. Rather, they propose to cross the frontier for no better reason than to aggrandize themselves and to prolong the subjection of their own Kurdish population. This doesn't just disgrace the regime-change strategy. It actually destabilizes it. And it's humiliating to see the president begging and bribing the Turks to do the wrong thing and to see them in return reject his offer. He should take their ugly egotism and selfishness as a compliment to his policy, cut off their aid, leave them to put their own case to the European Union, and tell them to get out of Cyprus into the bargain. Then we could be surer that we were really "remaking" the region.
No, not happy at all.
Further UN Action is Pointless
(Review) France, Russia and China have apparently agreed to Veto any UN Security Council resolution that directly or indirectly approves the use of military Force against Iraq.
The UN route is closed, and any further action there is pointless. This is, of course, hardly a surprise. The UN did nothing in the former Yugoslavia, nothing in Rwanda, and Nothing in the Mideast, except to declare the Israelis to be racists.
What a waste of time.
March 4, 2003
Rank Hypocrisy
(Review) Democrats have been thundering that Miguel Estrada didn't answer enough questions to their satisfaction, so they can't vote for his confirmation. So the White House made the following offer: Ask any questions you want, and estrada will answer. He'll even meet with Senators who desire it.
Unsurprisingly, the Democrats posed not a single question to Estrada, while hypocritically claiming that he hadn't answered their questions satisfactorily. That's par for the course for Democrats, though, so no reason to be surprised.
Bye-Bye Europe
(Review) William Richard Smyser writes that American power will be leaving Europe bit by bit, as America returns to it's traditional role as a maritime power.
Sea powers behave in predictable ways. Strategically, they try to dominate the oceans (and now the skies). They abhor large and fixed land deployments, preferring to use local auxiliaries. They like to control or at least to neutralise the opposite shores of contiguous seas and oceans.
Diplomatically, they have no fixed alliances but only fixed interests. They can make commitments, but they want to feel free to leave. And they always like to have long strings of bases around the world. Britain sought all these things in its heyday and America wants to return to them now. That is the true meaning of the phrase "coalition of the willing".
Interesting analysis.
The high price of waiting
(Review) Mort Zuckerman writes that there is a cost to NOT overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
KSM's Capture: What it means
(Review) Mansoor Ijaz describes just how useful the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed really is.
On the hard drive of KSM's Quetta safe-house computer, Pakistani police officials found a goldmine of information — names of other senior al Qaeda operatives, e-mails, telephone numbers, wire-transfer information (KSM is also Chief Financial Officer for all al Qaeda operations around the world), travel itineraries, future terror scenarios — the list goes on.
One e-mail was addressed to Abdul Qadoos, the son of a microbiologist in Rawalpindi and resident of the house where a haggardly but clean-shaven KSM was nabbed on Saturday morning when ISI, CIA, and FBI officials had concluded the stalking and surveillance was no longer yielding sufficient data to warrant the risk of losing him. A series of lightning raids followed, netting KSM, an as yet unidentified Egyptian man known only as "Ahmed" (and some suspect, possibly a relative of Egyptian-born al Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri), and Abdul Qadoos in round one, and seven Arab and Pakistani men, as yet unidentified, in round two. More arrests of significant al Qaeda operatives are expected in the coming days.
So unaware was KSM that he was being stalked that even his cell phones and audiotapes, some reportedly with instructions from bin Laden, were found amid the mess in his uptown flat. The data his computers, audiotapes, and handwritten notes yield will in all likelihood supersede in importance what we get from his hardened criminal mind, even under the most severe interrogation. As Husain Haqqani at the Carnegie Endowment has articulated with great clarity, KSM is not chief executive officer of a corporation called al Qaeda. He is a franchise owner who knows all the other franchisees. Or at least his computer knows where the key ones are.
Equally importantly, this has positive implications for war against Iraq.
KSM's arrest therefore represented an opportunity, if done right, to dismantle the Middle East retaliation infrastructure before launching the war to disarm Saddam. Pentagon planners have long fretted about the cauldrons of fire al Qaeda's Saddam-enabled retaliation cells could unleash on weak Middle East governments if and when the U.S. decided to move against Iraq.
Decapitating al Qaeda's nerve center with KSM's capture could lead to a collapse of its Middle East cells, much the same way one intercepted phone call between al Qaeda biochemical czar Zarqawi and one of his Jordanian operatives led to the dismantling of much of the ricin-poison network throughout Europe.
We may have short-circuited that rise in terrorism in the wake of another Gulf War that everyone was so afraid of.
Like Spoiled Teens
(Review) Stuart Taylor writes that some of our allies act like spoiled teenagers who badmouth their parents while they're living off of them.
March 3, 2003
Law and Conscience demand war against Iraq
(Review) William Rees-Mogg writes that both international law, as well as conscience, demands action on Iraq, if only due to the predatory nature of the government.
First of all one needs to consider what international law says about intervention to stop genocide. Lady Nicholson asserted that “the duty on state parties to the genocide convention is to stop the genocide and to punish those engaged in this ethnic mass murder. If the Security Council cannot be persuaded to act, an operation should be mounted by any signatory to the convention to secure the perpetrators and bring them to trial ... Has genocide been committed against the Marsh Arabs? Yes; then action is imperative.”
Lady Nicholson sits as a Liberal Democrat and she was therefore speaking against the pacifist line of her party. Lord Goodhart, who is a highly respected international lawyer, stayed with his party’s anti-war line. That adds weight to his legal opinion in support of the right to intervene. He summed up the state of the law in this way: “Let us look first at humanitarian intervention. This is a new principle which has risen outside the charter. It was most clearly recognised in Kosovo. It is widely, but not universally, accepted by international lawyers. In cases such as genocide by rulers against their own people, as in Rwanda and Cambodia, it is hard to deny that such a principle exists.”
Hard, indeed.
Crying "peace" when there is no peace
(Review) Suzanne Fields sizes up the Anti-war movement.
Andrew Sullivan, the blogger columnist, gets it right. The war against Saddam Hussein, he writes, has taken on the contours of the culture wars: "Almost the whole academic class, the media elites, the college-educated urbanites, the entertainment industry and so on are now reflexively anti-war." The dogma is as inflexible and non-debatable as political correctness. And yet everything that Saddam Hussein stands for is an anathema to the people who make up these categories.
In Iraq there is no free speech. Amnesty International has carefully documented the torture of Iraqi women and children in the presence of their husbands, brothers and fathers. Iraqi dissidents are tortured with cigarette burns and electric shocks, and then murdered.
George W. Bush and Tony Blair are routinely derided on the posters and placards of demonstrators as "baby killers," but it was Saddam Hussein who gassed whole Kurdish families. At least 100,000 Kurds were killed in 'near-genocidal" proportions, the first ethnic group since the Holocaust to be targeted for death by its own government. Most of the Kurds were not murdered by poison gas, writes Jeffrey Goldberg in the New Yorker magazine, "rather the genocide was carried out, in large part, in the traditional manner, with roundups at night, mass executions, and anonymous burials."
In Amman, Jordan, where a number of dissident Iraqi exiles have fled, men show their scars from the regime's torture chambers. "The people who are protesting the war don't know what the regime is like," says one young man, showing cigarette burns on a shin and scars on neck and breast from a brutal whipping with a power-cable. He says to a reporter for the Village Voice: "You tell Bush my people are waiting for him."
How much longer will they have to wait?
The Horrors of "Peace"
(Review) The Iraqi people overwhelmingly want liberation from Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist tyranny, as Steven Barnes writes in The Weekly Standard. And opponents of removing Saddam's Regime simply don't get it.
Advocates of his overthrow are fond of pointing out that "he gassed his own people," but this often has the feel of a bulleted talking point, not an argument. Their opponents readily concede that "Saddam is a brutal dictator," and that "the world would be better off without him." But they usually grant these things as a rhetorical device, as if to buy credibility on their way to opposing the one step sure to end that brutality--removal by force.
Those who oppose taking action say we can safely ignore Saddam Hussein because he is "in a box." Even if they were right and Saddam were no longer a threat, they would ignore this other urgent problem: the 23 million Iraqi people who are in the box with him.
And they really, really, don't like being in that particular box.
I've got good news and bad news
Big goings on this weekend.
First the good news.
Al-Qaeda mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was captured this weekend. This is the guy who apparently planned the 911 attacks. He probably knows where Bin Laden is (Assuming he's still alive), knows where most of the active Al-Qaeda cells in the world are. Here's a picture of the guy:
It looks like he's getting over a three day bender in Hong Kong, doesn't it? And does this guy have more body hair than Ron Jeremy, or what?
I'd give anything for a chance to "question" this guy.
Repeatedly.
The bad news, of course, is that Turkey screwed us. No US troops in Turkey for any military action in Iraq. That makes things tougher for us, in that we can't have a two-front operation in Iraq if it comes to that. That makes it easier for Saddam Hussein to defend himself against us, and frees up Iraqi troops for use in the south.
Upon opening this morning, the Turkish stock market went into the tank over the news.
Tough.
