Under The Same Sun

Free Burma!

Posted by zeynep at 09:19 PM | Comments (0)

Back

The site went into a technical black hole while I was traveling last month. I will continue with my irregular posting schedule.Thanks to all who inquired.

Posted by zeynep at 07:00 PM | Comments (2)

So It Goes

"Meticulously planned," with "multiple victims." "Carnage," "tragedy," devastation." Those were the words used to describe a regular day in Iraq, yesterday, a day when 230 people met a violent death.

That's a 9/11, by the way, proportional to the population.

Many people have pointed out that the carnage in Virginia Tech is a small window into daily life in Iraq. Everday, they lose about a hundred of their sons and daughters. Millions have fled, an uncertain future awaits them. There seems to be no end in sight to the massacres, I discern no signs of political will from any of the involved parties towards trying to come up with, not a solution as that word seems unfit for any result that may come from the current horror, but a means to stop the blood flowing in the streets.

Meanwhile, I watched the PBS "America at Crossroads" series. While it clearly made by people who dislike Bush, it was so shallow that I can't t find another word to describe it. The Iraqis, it seems, just aren't properly trained. Somehow, they can blow up Americans and each other without running into skill shortages, but their lack of training holds them back from performing their duties. This was the narrative upon which the series mostly revolved.

Even when squeezed into the ill-fitting narrative, the segments still made it clear that the problem, as far as the occupation goes, is that the Iraqis are unwilling to do the bidding of an occupation army. They aren't untrained, per se.

And it is also clear that the American military has no idea what it wants to do. The soldiers, dressed as robocops, go around rounding up people that they have been told are the "bad guys," a phrase used repeatedly by the soldiers. Told by whom? A rival? A neighbor? Not clear. What happens to these bad guys? They disappear into a Gulag.

While American soldiers are going around attempting to round people up, IEDs explode on the roads. The soldiers carry their wounded and dead back into the base. Next day, they try to clear other roads of IEDs that are there because American soldiers are driving through those roads. Meanwhile the Sunni sectarians blow up markets and the shi'ite government death-squads execute sunnis, two serious problems the American soldiers are clearly incapable of doing anything about.

So it goes. Americans hunt IEDs, more of which blow up while they patrol the roads hunting for IEDs. Bombs go off in Shia neighborhoods. Sunni men turn up dead, shot execution style. Americans round up some men, reasons unclear. Another bomb goes off. All Iraqis who work with Americans cover their faces, which tells you all you need to know about the nature of the occupation. More men turned up strangled. PBS tells me that the Iraqi army is untrained. So it goes.

Posted by zeynep at 03:18 PM | Comments (2)

What? No Waterboarding?

So the British sailors were blindfolded near men with guns, and that is accepted as prima facie evidence that everything they said in captivity was coerced.

And we are somehow supposed to take admissions of guilt by waterboarded, sleep-deprived, locked-up for life people seriously.

Posted by zeynep at 08:46 PM | Comments (0)

Hello, apologies and update

Hello blog-readers: it is taking longer than planned for me to get back to regular blogging. I expect I can return in early April. Meanwhile, it is depressing how little has changed. The war (both ours and the rising civil war) goes on with full savagery. At this rate, Iraq will be emptied of people.

I suspect we will not care (or possibly even notice) until the oil flow is more severely impacted.

Posted by zeynep at 10:26 AM | Comments (0)

back up this weekend

The blog is taking a break until this weekend... Meanwhile, my must-read piece for this week is this story.

This is what we have come to.

Posted by zeynep at 08:55 PM | Comments (1)

What is this "this"?

There is an illuminating story in today's NYT about American soldiers going through Haifa street... It's well worth reading in full. At one point, one of the American soldiers exclaims that it might be better to "do this" without the Iraqis. I kept reading and rereading the article to try to understand what "this" they thought they were trying to do was.

They were supposed to clear the street but it wasn't clear from whom. They were being shot at but they weren't sure who the shooters were, or even if they weren't the Iraqi soldiers they were with that were shooting at them. The Iraqi soldiers with them were absolutely not on board with whatever "this" was and the problem clearly isn't "lack of training" as the punditocracy, Republicands and Democrats keeps parroting. They simply do not want to do "this", whatever it may actually be, in cooperation with the Americans.

Meanwhile, Iraq plunges further into secterian mass murder. Who knows how many we kill? So it goes on.

Posted by zeynep at 11:37 AM | Comments (1)

As the blood flows

At least a hundred people were killed violently today in Iraq.

The U.N. reports that this is merely an average day, with 34,000 killed the previous year. So flows the blood.

Posted by zeynep at 06:01 PM | Comments (0)

This isn't about selling toothpaste

Newsweek has a piece titled "How the U.S. Is Losing the PR War in Iraq.

The P.R.War?

And here's some of the problems they highlight:

Most large-scale attacks on U.S. forces are now filmed, often from multiple camera angles, and with high-resolution cameras. The footage is slickly edited into dramatic narratives: quick-cut images of Humvees exploding or U.S. soldiers being felled by snipers are set to inspiring religious soundtracks or chanting, which lends them a triumphal feel.

....

The U.S. military's response, on the other hand, usually sticks to traditional channels like press releases. These can take hours to prepare and are often outdated by the time they're issued.

So is that what we are supposed to think it comes down to? We need better-edited footage? Faster turn-around time with press releases?

The article would be very, very funny if it weren't all very tragic.

Posted by zeynep at 12:42 PM | Comments (1)

Hagiographs and Repressed Guilt

I presume that most decent men and women have already had it with the Ford hagiographies that just don't seem to stop. The men pardoned his buddy who gave him the presidency, proceeded to close the Vietnam chapter as far as we were concerned as if a great wrong had not been done to a people, and let war loose on East Timor. So he's as bad as most and not as bad as some of them. Why this non-stop flow of tears of adoration and tales of decency? At least that was the thought in my head as I rolled my eyes and clicked my mouse on the latest by Time, "Gerald Ford refused to take his private faith public" (I head he was good to puppies too, although surely not as good as Nixon was to Checkers.)

Then I got it, I think. The press corps is playing out its guilt. Most of the articles I read are barbs at the Bush administration, disguised as admiration of Ford. At this point in history an article, of all things, about not flaunting one's born again status can only be a barb against the W administration. Who would ever think about dragging that out from that era unless you were specifically looking for things one could use as comparisons?

I think the press corps is fuming at the W gang for exposing them as spineless lackeys who went along with power until it didn't matter. I think there is strong, real hatred mixed in with strong, real self-hatred and guilt... Will this mean that they will behave better the next time around? Don't hold your breath. Repressed, unresolved, unconfronted guilt is rarely the path towards decency or integrity.

(P.S. I believe I deserve credit for the repeated use of the word decent. I think it was very decent of me in this decent week of decent Ford's and not so decent Saddam's death.)

Posted by zeynep at 04:01 PM | Comments (2)

You know Your Country is in Trouble When

A deadly death toll near 100 from mass violence is reported as a sign that things are not out of the ordinary:

Iraqis awoke Saturday to television images of a noose being slipped over Saddam Hussein's neck and his white-shrouded body, the pre-dawn work of black-hooded hangmen. They went to bed as new video emerged showing Saddam exchanging taunts with onlookers before the gallows floor dropped away and the former dictator swung from the rope. ...

There was no sign of a feared Sunni uprising in retaliation for the execution, and the bloodshed from civil warfare was not far off the daily average 92 from bombings and death squads.

Posted by zeynep at 02:39 PM | Comments (0)