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October 30, 2005
The Scandal etc.
Frankly, from where I look, the acute "scandals" are over, as far as the Bush administration is concerned.
Lewis Libby is a person of very little consequence, in the larger scheme of things. He'll go down, perhaps even be convicted -- and promptly pardoned.
Miers has bowed out and will now likely be replaced with someone much smarter, also someone whose more developed ideology better masks their humanity -- Miers merely seemed a bit slow and very much a loyal team player. She would have voted along the party lines, but that's not enough. They need someone who can justify torture with long words, someone who can throw out the constitution while producing coherent sentences littered with Latin.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of someone who will put their loyalty to this team in power above their sense of decency. Still, my impression of the argument over Miers in the right wing was that they feared that she was still a bit of a human. "Movement conservatism" seems more and more to demand that one accept a theory, a cold and cruel theory, above and beyond everything. By "constitutional scholar", they mean someone who has digested the theory so deeply that they will not be swayed by consequences.
Assuming Lewis Libby is not an idiot, a safe assumption I would say because you have to be very, very, very stupid to lie so very, very, very stupidly, I figure this is it. He's covered up whatever it was he was trying to cover up. Most likely Cheney's involvement. He'll go down, and he'll probably feel good doing so he'll convince himself this is just one more sacrifice that a man has to make in the big battle against evil.
The problem for the administration, however, isn't that these scandals are here to stay. Their problem is that people don't trust them anymore. It is not that people supported their Iraq policy because they understood or cared. Most of their support came from people who assumed that these guys knew what they were doing. Hurricane Katrina, continuing carnage in Iraq, Miers nomination, etc. has shattered this impression; many people now seemed to have lost their confidence in the ability of this administration to steer things.
That is very hard to fix for any political party, so, yes, the administration is in trouble. But that is not necessarily good for progressives because I see no evidence that values we care about have been or about to be injected into the debate. And no amount of waiting for Fitzgerald to expand his investigation and/or indict Rove and/or look into the Niger documents will accomplish that.
Posted by zeynep at 05:52 PM | Comments (0)
October 25, 2005
Counterinsurgency: Another Name for "You're in the Wrong Country When..."
Here's an interesting bit from this week's NYT magazine story about the killing of an Iraqi youth -- the two unarmed men, cousin, were forced to jump into the Tigris. Zaydoon Fadhil died that day, an incident I wrote about earlier.
But that's not what I want to talk about here. Note this passage below:
But as a consequence of its overwhelming power and prowess, the American Army is not likely to face an enemy similar to itself. It is more likely to face guerrillas. Guerrilla wars typically begin when a smaller army is confronted by a larger one, forcing it to turn to the advantages it has: its ability to hide amid the population, its knowledge of the local terrain, its ability to mount quick and surprising attacks and then melt away before the larger army can strike back. This is more or less the case in Iraq, as it was in Vietnam, yet the leadership of the American Army is still wary of preparing the bulk of its troops to fight a guerrilla war. Most American soldiers are trained to use maximum force to destroy an easily identifiable enemy. Waging a counterinsurgency campaign, by contrast, often requires a soldier to do what might appear to be counterproductive: use the minimum amount of force, not the maximum, so as to reduce the risk of killing civilians or destroying property. Co-opt an enemy rather than kill him. If necessary, expose soldiers to higher risk. In the American Army, that sort of training is mostly relegated to forces like the Green Berets, who account for a small percentage of the Army's manpower."It's a chronic problem that runs deep in the DNA of the Army," says John Waghelstein, a retired colonel in the Special Forces who helped to conduct the American-backed counterinsurgency campaign in El Salvador. "The Army has never taken counterinsurgency seriously. The Army's doctrine hasn't changed since the 1840's." At the Army's Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., attended by all American officers hoping to rise above the rank of major, students must pass a rigorous program consisting of roughly 700 hours of instruction. Of that, not a single required course focuses on how to fight guerrilla wars.
For one thing, the constant need to fight counterinsurgencies is portrayed as a consequence of the size of our Amry. But that is not it at all. It is simply because we are fighting against populations, who by nature aren't armies, in their own soil. The key passage is this: "Guerrilla wars typically begin when a smaller army is confronted by a larger one, forcing it to turn to the advantages it has: its ability to hide amid the population, its knowledge of the local terrain, its ability to mount quick and surprising attacks and then melt away before the larger army can strike back."
Think for a minute. Why can they hide among the population and we can't? It's not the size of the army. The U.S. army could well hide among the population in this soil if we were attacked by a foreign nation. It is simply this: we fight and/or support unpopular wars in foreign countries.
And this is another way in which media bias works. They portray things as consequences of things that are at most questionable and often plain wrong. It's just stated as fact: our Army is large so we fight guerilla wars. Not: our "enemies" fight guerilla wars because they can, and we can't because we are foreigners.
And maybe that's just too hard for the U.S. Armed Forces to even admit this fact to themselves so that they could do it better:
Waghelstein says that the Army's leaders actually decided to de-emphasize counterinsurgency following Vietnam. When Waghelstein was an instructor at the Command and General Staff College, the school eliminated several courses that dealt with guerrilla war or turned them into electives, he says. Kalev Sepp, a retired Special Forces officer and a counterinsurgency adviser to the American command in Iraq, told me: "It's a cliché that the Army is always fighting the last war, but with the American Army, that's not true. When the Vietnam War ended, the Army tried to pretend it never happened. The typical officer in the military knew far more about the Battle of Gettysburg than he did about Vietnam. Initially, in Iraq, they were just making it up."
Posted by zeynep at 07:31 PM | Comments (1)
October 23, 2005
Lady Boys and Burnt Corpses on Video
WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 - The Pentagon announced Wednesday night that the Army had started a criminal investigation into allegations that American soldiers in Afghanistan had burned the bodies of two dead Taliban fighters and then used the charred and smoking corpses in a propaganda campaign against the insurgents.The events were shown on an Australian television program, broadcast there on Wednesday night, depicting what is described as an American psychological operations team broadcasting taunts over a loudspeaker toward a village thought to be harboring Taliban fighters and sympathizers, according to a transcript of the program. It was posted on the Web site of the Special Broadcasting Service, http://news.sbs.com.au/dateline/. An American soldier, an Afghan soldier, and two Taliban had just been killed in fighting there, the transcript of the program said.
According to the program's translation of the taunts, which were delivered in the local language by American forces on the scene, a soldier identified as Sgt. Jim Baker, said: "You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burned. You are too scared to come down and retrieve the bodies. This just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be."
From what I understand, there is video of this:
The program's video was taken by Stephen Dupont, a freelance Australian photojournalist who was embedded in the American unit to document its operations. Mr. Dupont's photographs from the region have been widely published.In a separate interview posted on the network's Web site on Wednesday, Mr. Dupont said soldiers from an unidentified airborne unit appeared to believe they were doing the right thing in laying the corpses of the two dead Taliban toward Mecca, and then setting them on fire.
The video shows flames swirling around two charred corpses, their legs and arms outstretched, and a group of five American soldiers watching from a rocky ledge.
Posted by zeynep at 12:17 AM | Comments (1)
October 20, 2005
A Treat
Last year I wrote an entry about Abe Osheroff, Spanish civil war veteran and so much more. There is now a wonderful new resource, a lengthy interview with him conducted by Robert Jensen.
I highly recommend that you go and read it here. It's delightfully long.
Posted by zeynep at 10:08 PM | Comments (0)
October 19, 2005
Longevity Wishes to Many
So, Saddam's trial starts. Leaving aside the obvious problems with the process, it's hard not to be pleased that at least he has to face some sort of court. I know, the lack of proper structure for court may damage the proceedings but I personally don't see the court as totally illegitimate. Depends on how they proceed. After all, just because they are under occupation doesn't mean the Iraqis don't have the right to try their former tormenter -- or that all attempts to do so will be illegitimate.
In the Nuremberg trials, the " tu quoque" defense --you did it too, you hypocrite-- was not allowed. I suppose they will now have to ban the mention of any co-conspirators, co-criminals, supporters, enablers, financiers, and, of course, the largest category --what-do-I-care-as-long-as-my-strategic-goals-are-accomplisheders.
At this point, I extend my best wishes for longevity to all the above mentioned. May they all live long enough to face a docket. And that's another reason to be against the death penalty, even for Saddam. May he live long enough to think about what he did every day, and may he see his friends and supporters join him.
Posted by zeynep at 06:58 AM | Comments (2)
October 17, 2005
Ignorant Fools
I have lost track of the number of stories of this kind:
Helicopters and warplanes bombed two villages near Ramadi in western Iraq on Sunday, killing about 70 people, the US military says.It said all the dead were militants, although eyewitnesses are quoted saying that many were civilians.
One of the air strikes hit the same spot where five US soldiers had died on Saturday in a roadside bombing.
The US statement said a group of insurgents was about to place another bomb, although local people deny this
Somehow, the dead and the survivors can never figure out their proper designation. Surely, we can't leave Iraq until they do.
Posted by zeynep at 07:09 AM | Comments (5)
October 13, 2005
No, Not the Smurfs!
Seeing that cuddly blue cartoon characters might elicit more sympathy that cuddly black babies, UNICEF just launched a new ad campaign, which apparently got strong reactions in Belgium where it was debuted recently:
The reasoning is pretty straightforward. Of course, they had to tone it down because one cannot show smurfs mutilated, as that would invoke too strong reactions:
Philippe Henon, a spokesman for Unicef Belgium, said his agency had set out to shock, after concluding that traditional images of suffering in Third World war zones had lost their power to move television viewers. "It's controversial," he said. "We have never done something like this before but we've learned over the years that the reaction to the more normal type of campaign is very limited."Belgium prides itself on being the home of some of the world's most famous cartoon characters - from Tintin to Lucky Luke and the Smurfs, known to the Dutch- speaking half of the country as "Smurfen" and as "Schtroumpfs" to Belgium's French speakers.
The advertising agency behind the campaign, Publicis, decided the best way to convey the impact of war on children was to tap into the earliest, happiest memories of Belgian television viewers. They chose the Smurfs, who first appeared in a Belgian comic in 1958.
Julie Lamoureux, account director at Publicis for the campaign, said the agency's original plans were toned down.
"We wanted something that was real war - Smurfs losing arms, or a Smurf losing a head -but they said no."
You can see the video in Flemish at this site -- click on Video. The very upsetting smurf video is preceeded by the kind of images that do not move the world anymore: injured and mutilated black children. (You can also see it what seems to be a better connection here, Flemish original dubbed over in French.)
I must say, I think it's a very good idea.
It's just very, very sad that this is what it takes.
P.S. It turns out they only show it after 9 pm to not upset children. I'd say children should see this. Maybe not when they are three, but certainly by the time they are old enough to learn about the world.
Of course, unlike adults, they might not need this proxy, this circumlocution, to reach their hearts. They probably could still be moved by the real images of real children and not need cartoons.
Yeah, they'd be upset. Being upset is the appropriate reaction.
<Link> The appeal is meant to raise money for UNICEF projects in Burundi, Congo and Sudan, Henon said. However, due to its graphic and disturbing scenes, this cartoon is not for everyone. The advertisement is aimed at an adult audience and is only shown after 9 p.m. to avoid upsetting young Smurfs fans....
UNICEF traditionally uses real life images of playing and laughing children but decided to change it for something that would shock people, Henon said.
“We wanted to have lasting effect of our campaign, because we felt that in comparison to previous campaigns, the public is not easily motivated to do things for humanitarian causes and certainly not when it involved Africa or children in war,” he said.
Henon added that UNICEF would never cross the line and film real-life war scenes in its appeals.
Frankly, I'm for showing it all. Maybe not around the clock, but often enough so that we cannot forget or ignore the reality. It's certainly happenning to the people who have no choice and no escape, why should we be allowed to escape even the slightest exposure to their reality?
Posted by zeynep at 12:22 PM | Comments (3)
October 11, 2005
Getting Angry at the Weather
I like to consider myself relatively rational, and not prone to outbursts of anger at natural weather events.
But torrential rains and hail in Muzaffarabad is just too much. Grrr.
Posted by zeynep at 09:15 PM | Comments (0)
October 09, 2005
From Katrina to Kashmir: Lost Lessons from the Medians and the Lydians
The terrible quake in Kashmir appears to have killed tens of thousands of people. Such calamities are in one sense natural: the Indian tectonic plate is pushing north right at the Himalayas.
However, just like Katrina, this too will disporportionately kill the poor, who live in substandard housing with lesser materials, and it will kill proportionately more people compared to a rich country because building codes and materials are worse in general.
In other words, a 7.6 quake in San Francisco or Tokyo would claim far, far fewer victims and that's another price people pay for living in the third world, or being dirt-poor and black in New Orleans. (The 1989 quake San Francisco killed 62 people, most of them in a single spot where an overpass collapsed. Of course, that quake was much less powerful, measuring 7.1 in the Richter scale, which is logarithmic and not linear -- I believe that's about 31 percent the power of this one. Still, the number of victims is always strikingly disporportionate between the rich and the poor).
Here's another question. There were muliple reports that Al Qaeda sympathizers around the world had called Katrina a sign of "wrath of God" on the United States. So, what does that make a quake in the muslim-controlled Kashmir, right at the beginning of Ramadan at that? (While we in the United States are not much aware of this, the status of Kashmir is a big issue in the Muslim world, especially among the would-be-jihadis and their sympathizers. It probalby ranks right after Iraq and Palestine.)
Maybe, just maybe, this devastation will spur a movement towards peace. Unfortunately, it's also possible that now the Hindu-fundamentalists will call this a wrath of God on the muslims and feel empowered until, oh, a typhoon, tsunami or an earthqake hits some part of India. And the jihadis just might conclude this earthquake is a sign they are not fighting hard enough.
One wonders what it would take: a hurricane, interrupted by an earthquake followed by a Tsunami with intermittent fires and/or hail? Wouldn't a nice, long eclipse do, as it did for the Medians and the Lydians?
Posted by zeynep at 08:56 AM | Comments (3)
October 06, 2005
Really, why on earth could they hate us?
What a puzzle, it all is. What could possibly be the reason?
Boeing and its joint-venture partner Bell Helicopter apologized yesterday for a magazine ad published a month ago — and again this week by mistake — depicting U.S. Special Forces troops rappelling from an Osprey aircraft onto the roof of a mosque."It descends from the heavens. Ironically it unleashes hell," reads the ad, which ran this week in the National Journal and earlier in the Armed Forces Journal. The ad also stated: "Consider it a gift from above."
The ad appears at a time when the United States is trying to improve its image in the Muslim world and Boeing seeks to sell its airplanes to Islamic countries.
And why is Boeing apologizing? What else do people think that piece of machinery is meant to do, deliver bread and roses?
And what is that throwaway line in the story, "the United States is trying to improve its image in the Muslim world"? Oh, is that what this Operation Iron Fist is about? Good to know.
Posted by zeynep at 08:36 AM | Comments (4)
October 05, 2005
90 to 9
I haven't read the text of the amendment, but in some sense that's not important. At this point in history, what's important is that the Senate voted 90-9, prohibiting "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of detainees:
The Senate's 90 to 9 vote suggested a new boldness among Republicans to challenge the White House on war policy. The amendment by McCain, one of Bush's most significant backers at the outset of the Iraq war, would establish uniform standards for the interrogation of people detained by U.S. military personnel, prohibiting "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment while they are in U.S. custody. ...In its statement on the veto threat, the White House said the measure would "restrict the president's authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bringing terrorists to justice."
Posted by zeynep at 10:51 PM | Comments (3)
October 04, 2005
“I have an uneasy suspicion that it relates to the nationality of the victim.”
Surprise, surprise. When and if U.S. soldiers are tried for crimes against people of Iraq, the sentences are unusually lenient, if not outright dismissed, according to analysis by Dayton Daily News:
n analysis by the Dayton Daily News of previously undisclosed records from the Army Court-Martial Management Information System database found that 226 U.S. soldiers were charged with offenses between the first deployments in March 2003 and Jan. 1, 2005.Of the 1,038 separate charges, fewer than one in 10 involved crimes against Iraqis. Virtually all of the rest involved crimes against other soldiers, property drug or alcohol offenses, and violations of military rules, the Daily News said.
Charges involving Iraqi victims were three times more likely to be dismissed or withdrawn by the Army than cases in which the victims were fellow soldiers or civilian military employees — 44 percent compared with 15 percent, the newspaper said.
The Daily News also said that despite evidence and convictions in some cases in which the victims were Iraqis, only a small percentage resulted in punishments approaching those routinely imposed for such crimes by civilian justice systems.
The newspaper cited one case in which two U.S. soldiers were convicted of robbing an Iraqi shopkeeper. One soldier was sentenced to five months' confinement and the other to one month.
The median sentence imposed for all types of robbery in the United States, with or without the use of firearms, is five years.
“I've been surprised at some of the lenient sentences,” said Gary Solis, a former military judge and prosecutor who teaches military law at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “I have an uneasy suspicion that it relates to the nationality of the victim.”
Meanwhile, Lynndie England reveals that she knew much worse was going on in Abu Ghraib:
But [Lynndie] England, appearing on NBC's "Dateline" program, said the pictures did not convey the full extent of the abuse that took place in the cell block."I know worse things were happening over there," admitted the 22-year-old convict.
She said one night she heard blood-curdling screams coming from the block's shower room, where non-military interrogators had taken an Arab detainee.
"They had the shower on to muffle it, but it wasn't helping," she recalled. "They never screamed like that when we were humiliating. But this guy was like screaming bloody murder. I mean it still haunts me I can still hear it just like it happened yesterday."
Really, where is the outrage? What more needs to happen?
Posted by zeynep at 07:18 PM | Comments (1)
October 03, 2005
The Crony Ways
Cronyism runs both ways, you know. You pick your buddies, they pick themselves. I help you, I help me, you help me, I help me.
The current supreme court nominee, whose dazzling accomplishments include being a city council member in Dallas, had been "leading the White House effort to help Bush choose nominees to the Supreme Court."
Remind you of anyone?
Dick Cheney, of course, who had been leading the vice-presidential search for the Bush campaign back in 2000 before he came back to nominate himsef -- a move apparently described, with admiration as "'the most Machiavellian fucking thing I’ve ever seen" by Cheney's "longtime friend Stuart Spencer.'"
It's all pretty funny if these guys weren't running the world, with their fingers on nucler triggers and all.
Posted by zeynep at 05:01 PM | Comments (1)
October 01, 2005
Lesser People
There seems to be two results of the widespread belief that the poorest black people of New Orleans were raping babies and shooting at one another almost at random. One is that everyone felt a little better, a little superior. It couldn't have been us because our community wouldn't have behaved like those animals.
The second is, of course, that it meant things were much worse during the crisis. Rescue workers stayed away after being told of a chaotic, unsafe scene of untold horrors.
What became clear is that the rumor of crime, as much as the reality of the public disorder, often played a powerful role in the emergency response. A team of paramedics was barred from entering Slidell, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, for nearly 10 hours based on a state trooper's report that a mob of armed, marauding people had commandeered boats. It turned out to be two men escaping from their flooded streets, said Farol Champlin, a paramedic with the Acadian Ambulance Company.On another occasion, the company's ambulances were locked down after word came that a firehouse in Covington had been looted by armed robbers of all its water - a report that proved totally untrue, said Aaron Labatt, another paramedic.
A contingent of National Guard troops was sent to rescue a St. Bernard Parish deputy sheriff who radioed for help, saying he was pinned down by a sniper. Accompanied by a SWAT team, the troops surrounded the area. The shots turned out to be the relief valve on a gas tank that popped open every few minutes, said Maj. Gen. Ron Mason of the 35th Infantry Division of the Kansas National Guard.
Even those "shots at rescue" helicopters have turned out to be false. Even if there had been one or two such shots, it should not have been reason for all flights to stay away. We drive everyday on highways where one or two accidents occur, surely rescue workers know better than to stop completely flying into a city because of an unsubstantiated rumour. But, it turns out, even that wasn't true:
For military officials, who flew rescue missions around the city, the reports that people were shooting at helicopters turned out to be mistaken. "We investigated one incident and it turned out to have been shooting on the ground, not at the helicopter," said Maj. Mike Young of the Air Force.
Again, it wasn't that nothing unseeming happened. About a million people were left behind in destitute conditions; I'm sure not everything was dandy. But the reports were so outrageous, so outside the sphere of the normal human experience. If we were a decent country, there would be deep soul-searching not just about how it is that we abandoned those people, but we believed --all of us, even they themselves-- the absolute worst about what they would do without strong external authority imposed upon them.
Posted by zeynep at 09:52 AM | Comments (0)