Month: October 2004

After the Election: Iraq Reality Coming Home to Roost

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Via a thought-provoking diary by Spin Doctor on Tacitus
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Freedom may be on the march in Iraq, but it’s very likely about to hit a serious pothole. Regardless of who wins the White House this week, what’s waiting for him to deal with in Iraq is no Inaugural Ball. From Newsweek:

And so the bloody battles of the Iraq war—which never quite ended—are about to start up again in full force. Much depends on the new offensive. If it succeeds, it could mark a turning point toward Iraqi security and stability. If it fails, then the American president will find himself in a deepening quagmire on Inauguration Day. The Fallujah offensive “is going to be extremely significant,” says one U.S. official involved in the planning. “It’s an attempt to tighten the circle around the most problematic areas and isolate these insurgents.” But it will also be “the first major test” of the new Iraqi security forces since the debacle in April, says Michael Eisenstadt, an Iraq expert at the Washington Institute. Their performance, he says, will “provide a key early indicator of the long-term prospects for U.S. success in Iraq.”

For months the American people have heard, from one side, promises to “stay the course” in Iraq (George W. Bush); and from the other side, equally vague plans for gradual withdrawal (John Kerry). Both plans depend heavily on building significant Iraqi forces to take over security. But the truth is, neither party is fully reckoning with the reality of Iraq—which is that the insurgents, by most accounts, are winning. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former general who stays in touch with the Joint Chiefs, has acknowledged this privately to friends in recent weeks, NEWSWEEK has learned. The insurgents have effectively created a reign of terror throughout the country, killing thousands, driving Iraqi elites and technocrats into exile and scaring foreigners out. “Things are getting really bad,” a senior Iraqi official in interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s government told NEWSWEEK last week. “The initiative is in [the insurgents’] hands right now. This approach of being lenient and accommodating has really backfired. They see this as weakness.” (emphasis mine)

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Endorsement

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It has been absolutely clear since my first post that I would vote for the Democratic nominee for President. I would guess most of you also made up your own minds long ago—I would be a little upset with you if you hadn’t. But this is almost certainly the most important election in my life to date, and I find I can’t keep my mouth shut.

I’ve never been able to figure out George W. Bush. I couldn’t figure him out in the 2000 campaign. Here was this man who proclaimed his own compassion, who spoke of his Christian faith with all apparent sincerity—and presided over the Texas capital punishment system, a well-oiled execution assembly line that makes a mockery of equal protection of the law, the right to counsel, and due process of law, and which has probably killed at least one innocent person.

This is the quotation that explains the Bush administration for me, better than any other:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made”–The Great Gatsby

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I Was Wrong

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Apparently I was wrong about Osama being dead. I’m not sure he references anything super-current, but I can’t imagine Al Qaeda would have held on to a video for 2 years after he was dead. So I suspect he is alive after all. How is this for a crazy denial of responsibility though–9/11 was apparently … Read more

Arnold’s Seed Bears Unacceptable, er, Fruit

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I love a good insult. I’m a bit thicked skinned about them so long as I’m free to fight back with the drunken-sailor language that rolls quite naturally off my tonuge. Given license to let loose, I even enjoy a good gutter-level war of words. I’ve had exchanges in the streets of New York that would make Howard Stern blush. But, as with everything in life, there are times and places such actions are inappropriate.

Back when Arnold Schwarzenegger mocked the California legislators who wouldn’t pass his budget as “girlie men,” I understood the uproar among some folks in the gay community, but never really felt it myself. (In fact, if anyone should have been insulted by that it was women, who in my experience are just as tough negotiators as men and don’t deserve the slur.) Even his RNC taunt to not be “economic girlie men” was more embarassing (must he run every one-liner his writers hand him into the ground?) than insulting.

Of course Arnold’s overall record on gay rights comes into play here, buying him some benefit of doubt that he wasn’t slurring the gay community (again, not everyone will agree with me here), but Arnold’s words may have had an unfortunate side-effect in that they lowered the bar of acceptable rhetoric.

Cut to the Kentucky US Senate race between Republican incumbent Jim Bunning and Democratic challenger Daniel Mongiardo. Top state Republicans campaigning for Bunning have been pushing the envelope on acceptable insults, with regards to slurs generally insinuating homosexuality (via Marshall):

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Allies in the War on Terrorism

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One of the key contentions in different outlooks on the War on Terrorism centers around the suggestion that it is in every civilized nation’s best interest to control terrorism. This outlook is part of the intellectual framework that lets Kerry suggest that greatly helpful allies would have been available if only the President were better … Read more

Still More Missing Weapons

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Knight-Ridder has a new story out about looting of weapons depots in Iraq. It’s worth reading in its entirety. A few excerpts: “The more than 320 tons of missing Iraqi high explosives at center stage in the U.S. presidential election are only a fraction of the weapons-related material that’s disappeared in Iraq since the U.S.-led … Read more

More on the Sudan

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I’m not sure how I missed this when looking into the last post on the Sudan. Apparently Syria has been involved in testing chemical weapons on civilians in the Sudan. It makes the European denial of genocide look completely crass.

Al Qaqaa Update

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ABC News, via Josh Marshall: “Barrels inside the Al-Qaqaa facility appear on videotape shot by ABC television affiliate KSTP of St. Paul, Minn., which had a crew embedded with the 101st Airborne Division when it passed through Al-Qaqaa on April 18, 2003 — nine days after Baghdad fell. Experts who have studied the images say … Read more