Goodness gracious, on to Syria!

I’ve mentioned that Israel banned a Palestinian film on the massacre of Jenin. Well, the director of that one just petitioned to stop Israeli tv running a pro-massacre, I mean pro-Israeli, film. He was turned down. And the George Orwell award of the day goes to the Israeli High Court for this: “The right of expression exists in full force even when a differing viewpoint is forbidden due to a legislative arrangement.”

The Guardian explains in more detail exactly what Ahmad Chalabi did to earn that prison sentence he never served in Jordan.

So now our Kurdish allies are ethnically cleansing Arabs. Isn’t that special. And Rumsfeld thinks the looting is ok because everybody will probably give all that stuff back when we ask them. And now the national library has been torched. Book-burning--ain’t freedom grand? At least it gives more scope for those American companies that’ll be providing the new textbooks, and Franklin Graham to bring in lots of Bibles. And Al-Jazeera won’t take commercials from PETA showing animals being killed.

I guess it’s official that we’re going to war with Syria, now that that’s been threatened by Bush and Powell and Ari Fleischer as well as Rumsfeld. At first I wasn’t sure; it could have just been Rumsfeld shooting off his mouth. Think about that: we now have certain people, like Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz, who will casually threaten some country with military devastation in an off-the-cuff comment. That’s how arrogant these people are. Worse, Rumsfeld will probably use some phrase like “goodness gracious” while he’s doing it. Bush said that N Korea is backing down (very very slightly) because they took the lesson of the war in Iraq. In other words, the US position everywhere in the world is now implicitly backed by the threat of military force; we don’t even have to make the threat out loud, it’s just a given. So, Canada, we don’t really want to hear any more whining about soft wood lumber.

What exactly is Syria supposed to have done? There was the night-vision goggles thing--but like Iraqi WMDs, none have actually ever been found. Evidently we also accused Syria of sending gas masks, like (Robert Fisk argues in the Ind.) one country can’t help its neighbor with defensive clothing against an illegal war (and as Fisk doesn’t say, Bush authorized the use of tear gas, in contravention of international law). And some Syrians, like other Arabs, went to Iraq to help fight off the Americans, but, Fisk comments, don’t Jews from all over flock to Israel to help fight all of its wars? I’d add, what about all those foreigners the US uses in its military, who they’re talking about rushing naturalization for. Hell, my great-grandfather was drafted into the Spanish-American War right off the boat. Syria might well have chemical weapons--who doesn’t?, especially in the Middle East--but have for decades without using them and it isn’t against international law because they never signed the chemical weapons convention. And Syria may or may not be “harboring” Iraqi officials, as opposed to, what, honoring its non-existent extradition treaty with the US? And like the US really knows where any of those people are. Probably sharing an apartment with Osama, Mullah Omar et al. We managed to “lose” the entire Republican Guard, the whole Cabinet, and where did all those Saddam doubles go anyway? Can you believe we haven’t found a single Saddam double?

There clearly is no COW for a Syrian war. That and the exclusion of the UN from Iraqi reconstruction are a major kick at Tony Blair, a way of saying that no matter how much support he gives, he has no actual influence.

The Post says the obvious, that the Pentagon plans never to issue a count of Iraqi civilian dead. Because if we don’t count them, they don’t exist.

They say they found downloaded porn at Uday’s palace. I told Chris a couple of weeks ago this would happen. WMDs or not, we always manage to “find” porn in the palaces of people we depose, Noriega and the like.

Am I right that the Iraqi kid Ali with all the missing limbs is not plastered over the American news like he is everywhere else in the world? He’s certainly a big deal in Britain, where they’re all set up to do the surgery that might save his life, and have been for days but the Pentagon, which controls all air flights in and out of Iraq, obviously, has been obstructing it.

A Guardian writer talks about the Gettysburg address. The main speaker was the former governor of Mass., who spoke for two hours, followed by President Lincoln, who took 3 minutes. “and oratory was mercifully never the same again. Nor was the civil war. For Lincoln's conclusion gave the war an overarching purpose: "That the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom, and that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth." This was not Lincoln's original purpose, which was to preserve the union, but it has given the war an unarguable retrospective justification. To that extent, there is an analogy with the Iraq war, where the liberation veneer was added belatedly to the original casus belli about weapons of mass destruction, which it seems Saddam literally could not use to save his life. But as American wars go, Iraq is far closer to the Mexican war of 1846, another adventure in which the result was preordained and the rationale fuzzy.”