We will not acknowledge this reporter’s attempt to stain the engagement with the misnomer “killings.”

NATO spokesmodel Nick Lunt responds to Afghan PuppetPrez Karzai’s criticisms of all those NATO bombings that have killed civilians in large numbers recently, sounding like one of those infuriating oh-so-calm customer-relations phone reps. Karzai, he says, “has a right to be disappointed and angry,” and NATO will try to “do better.” He added, “But unlike the Taleban, we do not set out to cause civilian casualties, and that is a critical difference.” Not to the civilian casualties, it isn’t.

Headline of the day (AP): “Man Throws a Log at a Bear, Killing It.”

Today’s must-read: the NYT has excerpts (I want to see the whole thing! I want it I want it I want it!) from a memo written in response to emailed questions from Time magazine reporter Tim McGirk, who would break the Haditha Massacre story by Marines on Col. Chessani’s staff, including the egregious Lt. Mathes. Actually, I’m just going to reproduce all the excerpts. I love the one bit that goes off in increasingly paranoic terms on the need to avoid runaway sergeant storylines, My Lai, and “Platoon” analogies.

McGirk: How many marines were killed and wounded in the I.E.D. attack that morning?

Memo: If it bleeds, it leads. This question is McGirk’s attempt to get good bloody gouge on the situation. He will most likely use the information he gains from this answer as an attention gainer.

•

McGirk: Were there any officers?

Memo: By asking if there was an officer on scene the reporter may be trying to identify a point of blame for lack of judgment. If there was an officer involved, then he may be able to have his My Lai massacre pinned on that officer’s shoulders. ...

In the reporter’s eyes, military officers may represent the U.S. government and enlisted marines may represent the American People. Given the current political climate in the U.S. at this time concerning the Iraq war and the current administration’s conduct of the war, the reporter would most likely seek to discredit the U.S. government (one of our officers) and expose victimization of the American people by the hand of the government (the enlisted marines under the haphazard command of our “rogue officer.”) Unfortunately for McGirk, this is not the case.

One common tactic used by reporters is to spin a story in such a way that it is easily recognized and remembered by the general population through its association with an event that the general population is familiar with or can relate to. For example, McGirk’s story will sell if it can be spun as “Iraq’s My Lai massacre.” Since there was not an officer involved, this attempt will not go very far.

We must be on guard, though, of the reporter’s attempt to spin the story to sound like incidents from well-known war movies, like “Platoon.”

In “Platoon,” Sergeant Barnes, the movie’s antihero, is depicted as a no-nonsense, war-haggard platoon sergeant who knows how to get things done in the bloody jungles of Vietnam — and it ain’t always pretty. During one scene, Sergeant Barnes is shown on the verge of committing war crimes in front of his platoon by threatening to kill women and children as a means of interrogation. This is a classic “runaway sergeant” storyline wherein the audience is supposed to be sickened by the sergeant’s brutality and equally sickened by the traumatic effects war has on soldiers. This schema is especially fruitful for Mr. McGirk because if he tries to adapt our situation to this model it simultaneously exposes a “war crime cover-up” and shows the deteriorative (albeit exaggerated) effects of war on U.S. marines (the best of the best), which could be expanded by the general press as a testament for why the U.S. should pull out of Iraq.

[Colonel Chessani later shortened this answer to “No.”]

•

McGirk: How many marines were involved in the killings?

Memo: First off, we don’t know what you’re talking about when you say “killings.” One of our squads reinforced by a squad of Iraqi Army soldiers were engaged by an enemy initiated ambush on the 19th that killed one American marine and seriously injured two others. We will not justify that question with a response. Theme: Legitimate engagement: we will not acknowledge this reporter’s attempt to stain the engagement with the misnomer “killings.”

•

McGirk: Were there any weapons found during these house raids — or terrorists — where the killings occurred?

Memo: Again, you are showing yourself to be uneducated in the world of contemporary insurgent combat. The subject about which we are speaking was a legitimate engagement initiated by the enemy. ...

•

McGirk: Is there any investigation ongoing into these civilian deaths, and if so have any marines been formally charged?

Memo: No, the engagement was bona fide combat action. ... By asking this question, McGirk is assuming the engagement was a LOAC [Law of Armed Conflict] violation and that by asking about investigations, he may spurn a reaction from the command that will initiate an investigation.

•

McGirk: Are the marines in this unit still serving in Haditha?

Memo: Yes, we are still fighting terrorists of Al Qaida in Iraq in Haditha. (“Fighting terrorists associated with Al Qaida” is stronger language than “serving.” The American people will side more with someone actively fighting a terrorist organization that is tied to 9/11 than with someone who is idly “serving,” like in a way one “serves” a casserole. It’s semantics, but in reporting and journalism, words spin the story.)

Don’t they just.

A symbol of our resolve

Military code name of the day: Operation Phantom Thunder. One of the elements of Operation Phantom Thunder: “aggressive shaping operations.”

Name of the day: a 16-year old in England suing her school for banning her wearing a “purity” ring is called Lydia Playfoot.

Mitt Romney vows that if elected he will make some totally meaningless changes in the structure of the military for the sake of looking like he’s doing something different. It’s called leadership, people. Specifically, he will establish a Special Partnership Force to fight... oh, who cares what it would do, it’s the acronym I like.

There’s even a PowerPoint presentation, including this delightfully Magrittean slide:

He also said that “Guantanamo is a symbol of our resolve.” So Gitmo is a bumper sticker?

To celebrate Black Music Month, George Bush, who is all about the black music, forced some African-American violinist to kneel before him.

They’re looking for power vacuums into which they can move their ideology as well as their strategies

From the London Times: “The Pakistani government minister [Religious Affairs Minister Ijaz ul-Haq, son of 1970s military dictator Zia ul-Haq] who claimed that the award of a knighthood to Salman Rushdie could justify suicide bomb attacks announced yesterday that he plans to visit Britain on a mission to promote interfaith dialogue.”

By the way, note to the Muslim world: these days knighthoods are purely honorific; they aren’t actually required to put on armor, get on a horse and join the Crusades.

The Pakistan Ulema Council responded by giving the equivalent of a knighthood, the title Sword of God to Osama bin Laden. That may very well require putting on armor, etcetera.

Poland is demanding greater voting rights in EU councils once they are restructured to account for new members. Currently, it has disproportionate power, but the new system will match population. Poland says it deserves votes proportional to the population it claims it would have had if not for World War II (66 million versus its actual 38 million), although it is proposing voting being weighted according to the... wait for it... square root of a country’s population.

Yesterday, Bush attended a fundraiser for Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions of Alabama. He said to the attendees, “I thank you for your hard-earned money, which will make it clear to the people of Alabama that this guy is the right man to represent you in the United States Senate for six more years.” Because nothing makes someone’s senatorial fitness clearer than money. We know Republicans believe that, they just don’t say it in public as often as they did under, say, McKinley or Eisenhower.

Bush loves to talk about Al Qaida and vacuums, and it’s always comical gold: “And remember, al Qaeda and the extremists love chaos. They’re looking for power vacuums into which they can move their ideology as well as their strategies.” And then they’re all, hey dude, can you help me move my ideology as well as my strategies into my cool new vacuum, and I’ll like order some pizza?

For a man with a not-very-large vocabulary, he doesn’t actually know the meanings of all that many of the words he does use. On Democrats: “Well, first of all, you can’t raise enough money on the rich to whet their appetite.”

Do you think Bush would like a knighthood, a horse and a suit of armor? Would that Cervantes were alive to chronicle the adventures of the Knight of the Simian Countenance.

You’ve really put yourself on the wrong metric

Secretary of War Gates and the alliterative Peter Pace held a press conference today.


Gates, asked if ignoring (as he plans to do) the recommendation of a Pentagon study on the mental health of combat soldiers that soldiers who go through 90 days of heavy fighting then be rotated off the front-lines for 30 days won’t increase the number of serious mental-health problems, said, “Well, we’ll just have to wait and see.” Won’t we just. He then added that we’ll just have to have to have more resources to treat them.


Asked about the possibility of seeing violence in Iraq actually go down, Gates said, “Well, I think, first of all if you try to define this in terms of level of violence, you’ve really put yourself on the wrong metric. It isn’t about X number today, Y number tomorrow, because the enemy gets a chance to vote in that. And he will take a look at what you’re measuring and try to defeat that measurement, so to speak.” So the reason violence is the wrong “metric” is that the enemy can commit as much violence as they want. Isn’t the point supposed to be to stop them doing that?

So what’s the right metric? “The metric really should be for Iraqi citizens, do they feel better about their lives today than they did yesterday? ... If you had zero violence and people were not feeling good about their future, where are you?” Alive?

So it’s about perceptions. It’s also about denying perceptions. Gates says that “the security environment is providing what it should be providing” if Iraqis “see that their country is moving forward without regard to the specific instances of violence”. You know, progress, except for all the killing and explosions and shit. How are they supposed to look at the state of Iraq without regard to specific instances of violence? Repression. Earlier in the Q&A, Gates showed how it’s done:

Q: Yes. Mr. Secretary and General Pace, it’s been a pretty bad couple of days in terms of losses -- American losses in Iraq. I think it’s 12 in the last two days killed. Is this something we’re going to expect and to be bracing for in the coming weeks and months as we have the tempo of operations increase and we have the surge forces on the ground?

And if I could also, just picking up on the question about the 1920s Brigade, do you have some concern or pause about working and joining forces with groups that so recently had been aiming some of their fire power or affiliated with those that have been aiming their fire power at American forces?

SEC. GATES: Remind me again what your first question was.

Q: It was about the 12 deaths in the last few days.

See? It only takes him 12 seconds to forget all about 12 deaths. Oh, he’s good.

Safe

Subject line of a spam email I did not read: “Big your piano, be a real man.”

Bush’s budget includes a quintupling of funds for “democracy” programs in Cuba. An effort in the House to keep it at the old level was easily defeated. The White House issued a statement: “The reduction would have the United States step back from supporting independent Cuban civil society...” They must be using a definition of the word “independent” with which I am not familiar.

Today, George Bush went to Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant. “Nuclear power is safe,” he said. Here he is inside the control room of a nuclear power plant.


Does everyone feel safe?

Is it just propaganda for their alleged kindness?

We’re sending troops back into combat who are on lithium or Prozac?

I don’t know much about this (but when has that ever stopped me from commenting?) (that was a rhetorical question): evidently there is a big problem with child abuse among Aboriginals in the Northern Territory of Australia, which the government blames on alcohol and pornography. So John Howard will ban both for Aboriginals in the territory, restrict how welfare recipients can spend their money, abrogate Aboriginal self-government, etc etc. Child abuse is bad, of course (I feel silly having to start a sentence by spelling that out), but Howard has practically built his career on expressions of racist contempt for the original peoples and is simply not to be trusted with the degree of control over Aboriginals’ lives he plans to grab on the pretext of protecting their children from them. He will make welfare payments dependent on children going to school, but in the past, before all this alleged abuse came to light, he advocated conditioning welfare on children washing their faces twice a day.

Maybe we can make that one of the benchmarks in Iraq. We’re not withdrawing troops until every single Iraqi child washes their faces, including behind the ears, twice a day. The US army reported that it found 24 children aged 3 to 15 in a Baghdad orphanage who were being starved (while food was piled up in a stock room), tied up, naked and covered in shit in a windowless room. (The announcement by the US military came ten whole days after the discovery, with no explanation offered for the delay, at least that I’ve seen.) Said Gen. Vincent Brooks: “We’re very fortunate to have the kind of soldiers we have who are willing to take action, even at personal risk, to save the lives of others. These soldiers in a literal and figurative sense are the best chance for Iraq, just as they were for these boys.” Yes, the entire occupation is now justified. As social work. Although the orphanage was run by the government we put in charge.

A government that includes Labor and Social Affairs Minister Mahmoud Mohammed al-Radi (SCIRI), who said the whole thing was propaganda. “Are they really concerned about how well the children are treated in that shelter, or is it just propaganda for their alleged kindness?” he asked. Er, both actually. We can be complicated that way. Radi claimed the real brutality was the invasion of the orphanage by US troops in the middle of the night. The middle of the night!




Speaking of children, remember the seven killed by an American air strike in Afghanistan Monday? NBC, citing anonymous military sources, says that the military knew there were children present, contrary to what they’ve been saying, but considered the target, some Al Qaida guy you’ve never heard of – no doubt the #3 guy in Al Qaida as per usual – was worth the deaths of a few children. No word on whether they succeeded. Bush said yesterday, “Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical.” He didn’t pronounce on the ethicality of destroying human life in order to destroy other human life.

That was a fun post, wasn’t it? Abused and dead children, and lots of them. Some days the news is just like that. A palate-cleanser is called for:

This time, why not the best?

Correction

Yesterday I reported that Bush called Palestinian IAPM Fayyad “a good fellow.” I have reviewed the tapes, and Bush in fact called him “a good fella.” I apologize for the error.

We stand on your side in an ethically responsible way

Bush again vetoed stem cell research, then talked to the press, using as props a spina bifida patient and someone who “has whipped cancer twice by using adult stem cells. In other words, adult stem cells have saved her life.”


“America is a nation that leads the world in science and technology. Our innovative spirit is making possible incredible advances in medicine that could save lives and cure diseases,” he said, and he plans to put a stop to all that. Why aren’t these scientists out finding ways to run Hummers on switch grass?

Actually, he claims to be supporting scientists, only, you know, ethical and moral scientists. “We want to say, we stand on your side in an ethically responsible way.”

“Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical,” he said, obliviously. Possibly he’s afraid embryonic stem cells can cure hypocrisy.


Or condescending assholery.

A different hope (updated)

George Packer (The Assassins’ Gate) has a blog (2 entries so far) at the New Yorker site.

Military code name of the day: Operation Arrowhead Ripper.

Yesterday Condi Rice held a press conference about events in Palestine, which gave her the opportunity to use the words “responsible” and “legitimate” over and over and over, as in “the United States supports [Abbas’s] legitimate decision to form an emergency government of responsible Palestinians” and “Our view, very strongly, is that what President Abbas has done is legitimate and it is responsible and we’re going to support that action.” By legitimate, she doesn’t mean democratic or constitutional, of course. Indeed, “I think we will leave to the Palestinians issues of how they work through their own constitutional issues.” That’s one way to describe it. Of course, Abbas’s side will be “working through” those constitutional issues with weapons we provided.

Since Abbas’s coup is blatantly illegal, from whence does that legitimacy derive? Good old-fashioned organic nationalism. Said Rice, “there is one Palestinian people and there should be one Palestinian state” and that “Mahmoud Abbas is the President of all of the Palestinian people”. Ein volk, ein reich... you get the idea.

Today, at a press conference with Israeli How-The-Hell-Is-He-Still-Prime-Minister Olmert, Bush also, twice, called Abbas “the President of all the Palestinians” (now that I think of it, that also sounds like True Czar of All the Russias), adding, “He was elected; he’s the President.”

(Update: Eli of Left I on the News points out in comments that the roughly 3.5 million of exiled Palestinians didn’t have a vote in that election. Of course the point Bush was trying to make with the phrase “President of all the Palestinians,” which Olmert also used, was that he claims authority in both the West Bank and Gaza. Now, there’s a word for “both the West Bank and Gaza,” and that word is Palestine. Since Bush and Olmert would sooner kiss the corpse of Yasser Arafat on the mouth before uttering the word Palestine, they’re stuck with a phrase, “President of all the Palestinians,” which does not have a geographic referent.)

Bush also said Abbas is “a voice that is a reasonable voice amongst the extremists in your neighborhood.” And he called Illegally Appointed Prime Minister Fayyad “a good fellow”. He says that when the President of All the Palestinians and the Good Fellow are “strengthened,” they “can lead the Palestinians in a different direction, with a different hope.”

Bush also spoke about the great work he’d be doing with Olmert “to promote a alternative ideology, based upon human liberty and the human condition.” An ideology based on the human condition, that would be novel. Honestly, I have no idea what Bush means by that. He added that Olmert “said he’s willing to have discussions with the forces of moderation in the Palestinian Territory, laying the groundwork for serious discussions.” So he’ll have discussions laying the groundwork for discussions. “That’s -- that is a statement that shows that the Prime Minister is willing to move with a -- to promote an alternative vision.”


Olmert made it clear that his vision is alternative to that of “the Palestinians”: “We have been very, very attentive to the needs of the -- humanitarian needs of Gaza... Israel will not be indifferent to the human suffering in Gaza. Israel will be different from the Palestinians, themselves, because the reality is that all this suffering is caused by Palestinians against their own people.” He could have said Hamas or extremists. I don’t think it’s going to far to say that his choice to blame “the Palestinians” is a racist one, indicating that they’re all barbarians.


The reporters’ questions were all about Palestine, except one about Iran. But Bush kept talking about Iraq, because he sees the two things as exactly the same problem, you know, the one where “We face extremists and radicals who use violence and murder as a tool to achieve objectives,” and we have to spread democracy because “You can only defeat them so much militarily.” Indeed, in this bit, one can’t be entirely sure that he remembers whether he is talking about Palestine or Iraq:

Matt, what you’re seeing now in this part of the 21st century is going to be played out over time. This is an ideological struggle. We’re looking at the difference between a group of people that want to represent the Palestinians who believe in peace, that want a better way for their people, that believe in democracy -- they need help to build the institutions necessary for democracy to flourish, and they need help to build security forces so that they can end up enforcing what most of the people want, which is to live in peace -- and that’s versus a group of radicals and extremists who are willing to use violence, unspeakable violence sometimes, to achieve a political objective.

Bush & bathing suit

At an event in the White House yesterday with NCAA teams, Bush was presented with a bathing suit. And now I present you with the pictures. You’re welcome.


Please leave any caption suggestions and/or death threats in comments.

Nefarious activity was occurring at the site

US bombed a “compound” in Paktika province, Afghanistan, in which, they say, “nefarious activity” was occurring. The bombs killed 7 or more children, so if there wasn’t nefarious activity occurring before, that pretty much counts. The Independent comments, “The statement gave no indication what such nefarious activity might be”. One might add an additional note of skepticism about intel that is evidently capable of detecting nefarious activity but not children.

The children were killed in a school. The US military says it didn’t expect there to be any children in a school (they used the word madrassa). C’mon, they said, it was Sunday, shouldn’t those kids have been in church?

Military spokesmodel Major Chris Belcher belched spoke: “This is another example of Al Qaida using the protective status of a mosque, as well as innocent civilians, to shield themselves.” Protective status? Shield themselves? Fat chance of that working. Burping Boy continued: “We are saddened by the innocent lives that were lost as a result of militants’ cowardice.” Nefarious cowardice. Or possibly cowardly nefariousness. Al Qaida fighters probably aren’t taking any advice about bravery from a man with a funny name whose job is to talk to reporters. Or from people who drop bombs on schools from airplanes high in the air.

The story the US is putting out is that the fighters kept the children with them by force. If true, then they’re shits too. Although, as Eli at Left I on the News asks, “wouldn’t that only work if the shields were, you know, visible?”

The War Against Nefariousness (TWAN) continues.

Destiny

Nouri al-Maliki was interviewed by Newsweek Friday (link, other link) .

He claimed that the people who attacked the Shiite Samarra mosque would probably also go after Sunni mosques in order to provoke rioting. Sure they would. He took credit for the relative lack of sectarian violence in the aftermath of this week’s attack, due to the “quick and wise reaction” of his government.

He said of the parade of American officials coming to pressure him this week that “Iraq is an Arab country and it is an Arab tradition to welcome guests, so, everyone is welcome to Iraq,” and would they please stop using the word pressure, he really doesn’t like that. And it’s not even necessary because “I am the person who most believes in national reconciliation.” He says he needs more time so that his work will be “written in stone.” That does tend to slow down the steno pool.


Evidently, every time he and Bush speak, they try to one-up each other by denouncing their respective elected legislatures: “Every time I meet President Bush through the videoconference I tell him that I have a hard time dealing with the Parliament or the political blocs. He says, ‘I have a worse time dealing with the Congress.’ And when he says, ‘I have aggravation in the Congress,’ I say, ‘I have bigger aggravation with parliament.’” They do this for hours. Good times, good times.

Maliki denounced the new US policy of arming Sunni sheiks slash warlords slash death squads in Anbar, saying “I believe that the Coalition forces do not know the backgrounds of the tribes” and “They make mistakes by arming tribes sometimes, and this is dangerous because this will create new militias.” I wondered how long it would take him to respond publicly to the news that the US was supporting military forces not subordinate to the central government. And then only to an American magazine.

He described the American invasion and occupation of Iraq in this way: “Destiny wanted to bring together two people who strongly stick to their principles.” Destiny has a sick sense of humor.

Fashion

Now Lou Dobbs is complaining that Mexican lepers are coming into this country and taking jobs away from American lepers, or something.

Secretary of War Robert Gates has made a “surprise” visit to Iraq. How does he stack up against previous surprise visitors?

more at twiigs.com...

There is terror going on

Romney on Bush: “Everything he does, he does from the standpoint of what is best for the American people.”

Romney channeling Bush: “If you look across the world you can recognize that there is terror going on.”

I just found some old clippings of New York Magazine competitions from the ‘90s (and one from 1982!). I’ll type up selected entries from some of them and post them every so often. I did this in old posts, and have collected those comps here.

This is from the 4/20/92 issue, songs from the crap musicals based on a good book, movie etc. You’ll have to guess the original source; New York didn’t list them because its readers are soooo literate that, unlike me, they didn’t have to google the entry
“Can’t This Be Our Little Secret?” – Arthur Dimmesdale
because they’d already know that that referred to The Scarlet Letter. If I had to figure them out, so do you. If I didn’t figure them out, I didn’t bother typing them up. Some have multiple songs, which I’ve grouped together. You’ll get the idea.

“If I Were a Hit Man” – Michael Corleone
“We’re Going to the Mattresses, They’re Sleeping With the Fishes” – Entire Company

“Can’t We Get Some Ice Cream First?” – Lolita

“A Lovely Day for a Ride in the Cah” – JFK
“Waiting for President K to Come Our War” – Oswald and People of Dallas
“The Grassy Knoll” – CIA and Mafia
“Oh, My Suit, My Poor Pink Suit” – Jackie

“How Can We Ignore the Guy Next Door?” - Nick
“What’s New, Old Sport?” - Jay
“Is This Absolutely Where You Live?” – Daisy
“Shirts, Shirts” - Jay
“East Egg, West Egg, All Around the Sound” – Entire Cast

“Look at Me, I’m Madame B!” – Emma

“Honey, I’m Home” - Agamemnon

“The Silence of the Lambs When You Are Gone.”
“Hey, There’s a Moth in Her Mouth” - Clarice

“Decisions, Decisions” – Solomon

“I Hate Spunk” - Mr. Grant
“Hey, Mare” - Rhoda

“My Mama Done Ptolemy” - Cleo
“It’s Only a Papyrus Moon” - Antony
“B-A-D-D- A-S-P-P, Bad Asp” - Cleo

“Here’s Atticus” - Townspeople
“Boo Who?” - Arthur Radley

“Don’t Cry for Me, Oklahoma” - Ma Joad
“I’m Gonna Wash That Dust Right Outta My Hair” - Rose of Sharon

“Call Me Ish, My Game Is Fish” - Ishmael

“There is Nothing Like a Thane” - Chorus
“I Enjoy Being a Churl” - Macbeth
“Greymalkin’s Gonna Clear Up, Put On a Happy Face” - Three Weird Sisters
“Ripp’d Untimely Rag” - Macduff
“Into the Woods” - Macduff

“Boo” - Voice on the Battlement
“Are We Having Fun Yet?” - Gertrude, King
“I’ve Got Those Uncle-Killed-My-Father-Stole-the-Throne-and-Married-Mother Blues” - Hamlet
“Nothing Could Be Finer Than to Be in Asia Minor” - Agamemnon
“Oh, the Hoplites and the Helots Should Be Pals” - Achilles and Myrmidons
“The Last Time Paris Saw Me” - Helen
“A Big Wooden Horse, of Course, of Course” - Priam and Trojans

“A Suitcase Full of Dreams” - Willy
“Attention Must Be Paid” - Linda
“What Am I, Invisible?” - Happy

“We Got Trouble, Right Here in Theban City” - Mr. Oed
“It’s a Wise Child” - Oedipus
“Break the Jinx, Go See the Sphinx, You Little Minx” - Village People
“I Know Something You Don’t Know” – Tiersius
“Uh-Oh” - Jocasta
“I’m A – What?” - Oedipus
“It’s Funny Till Somebody Loses an Eye” – Creon

Or not at all

Bush, in his weekly radio address, called for the abolition of the American government. “The American people expect us to spend their tax dollars wisely, or not at all”. “The American people do not want to return to the days of tax and spend policies.” No taxing, no spending, no government, no problem.

Wherein your humble blogger’s motives are reconsidered

Headline of the day: “Rushdie ‘Humbled’ by Knighthood.” Er, isn’t that rather missing the point of the whole knighthood thing?

Kurt Waldheim, in a document released after his death yesterday, still denies having committed any war crimes, but does acknowledge having taken an “unambiguous position far too late on Nazi crimes,” because, he says, of the “hectic pace of an overloaded international life.” Busy busy busy, what with running the UN and covering up his past, there just weren’t enough hours in the day. He even reached out to the people who hounded him: “I pay respect to all those who confronted me critically and ask them to reconsider their motives and, if possible, grant me reconciliation.” Hmm, let me reconsider my “motives.” Reconsidering... Reconsidering... Reconsidering... Nope, I still don’t like Nazis or torture or mass murder, so I would have to say no, Kurt.

Current UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon managed to come up with this to say about his predecessor: “He was a man who had lived history.” Yeah, that was kind of the problem.

Speaking of war crimes, the Haditha hearings continue. Sharratt’s lawyer says he should get a medal. Sharratt says the reason he went into the house with guns blazing was that he saw male Iraqis repeatedly “turkey peeking” at him over a wall. Clearly they were asking for it.

The Haditha massacre is the subject of a forthcoming motion picture by the director of the documentaries (although the Haditha film is a dramatization) “Kurt & Courtney,” “Biggie and Tupac,” and “Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam.” Which may just make him uniquely qualified to make sense of the Iraq war.

Plus ça change...

Holy Joe Lieberman has another Wall Street Journal op-ed article on Iraq. He insists that in the five months between his trips to Iraq in December 2006 and May 2007, “almost everything about the American war effort in Baghdad has changed”. Except for Joe Lieberman’s Wall Street Journal op-ed pieces, which haven’t changed in the slightest.

He castigates critics of the war for failing to understand, um, something:

Some argue that the new strategy is failing because, despite gains in Baghdad and Anbar, violence has increased elsewhere in the country, such as Diyala province. This gets things backwards: Our troops have succeeded in improving security conditions in precisely those parts of Iraq where the “surge” has focused. Al Qaeda has shifted its operations to places like Diyala in large measure because we have made progress in pushing them out of Anbar and Baghdad.

Yay! Al Qaida is killing people in Diyala province! That means we’re winning!

Lieberman doesn’t say if he’s planning another trip to Iraq, perhaps to Diyala to explain the good news to them.

I’ve been told I’m done

The alliterative Peter Pace explained that he had refused to just retire, he made Gates fire him. Because it would be a bad message to the troops if he “voluntarily walked off the battlefield. That is unacceptable as a leadership thing, in my mind.” How does this thing called leadership thing work?: “I need to be told that I’m done. I’ve been told I’m done.” So, having made some point, now he’ll be retiring. In other words, he’d have happily stayed in the military another two years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but (and I guess this is a good message to the troops) give him anything less than the top job and he’s outta there. By the way, Pace may have convinced himself that this is a leadership thing, that he’s acting all manly and leadership-y, but one way or another he was going to be out of a job in September, so all he’s actually doing is spinning a decision made by others. If he had known the difference between those two things, maybe he’d have been a little better at his job.


This morning, Bush attended the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast. “This prayer breakfast has come a long way since it started five years ago. We could have held it in a little tiny closet. And now, as Luis tells me, it’s oversubscribed the minute it gets announced. It’s a good sign for our country, isn’t it? People want to come together in prayer.” 1) Why does he assume it’s the prayer part and not the breakfast part that is popular? Who doesn’t like huevos rancheros? 2) Yes, there is something about the last five years of your presidency that makes people want to pray, in a no-atheists-in-foxholes kind of way. Good sign for our country, though? Not so much.

This is Bush afterwards, in the White House Rose Garden, clearly uplifted by all that national Hispanic praying.


Little known fact about Rose Garden protocol: one must sieg heil the white roses, but never, ever, the pink ones.


Then he hopped to Air Force One


for a trip to the Boys & Girls Club of South Central Kansas, which he called “a beautiful facility full of beautiful people,” where he was amazed by an exhibition of levitation. Or maybe the Secret Service took away their jump ropes.

Astonishing signs of normalcy

John Negroponte, now in the State Dept, says that the enemy in Baghdad is “increasingly desperate.” As I said in some old post, for four years now the enemy has always been described as becoming more desperate, never once as getting a little less desperate. So that’s pretty desperate, is what I’m saying. Here’s a 2003 Billmon post on this particular cliché, which was getting old even then, and now just seems a little, um, desperate.

Negroponte called the bombing of the minarets at Samarra both “a deliberate attempt by al Qaeda to sow dissent and inflame sectarian strife among the people of Iraq” and “further evidence of the enemy’s indiscriminate violence”. Dude doesn’t know what the word indiscriminate means.

You know, even if Petraeus is right that “If you drive around Baghdad, you’ll find astonishing signs of normalcy in perhaps half to two-thirds of the city,” he’s probably missing a sign of lack of normalcy: the convoy of armored vehicles that is the only way he can drive around Baghdad and live to tell the tale.

Bush gave yet another damn speech, to the Associated Builders and Contractors, and I only skimmed it, so there.

PAST TENSES ARE NOT HIS FRIEND: “Since I’ve took office...”

Most of the speech was on the immigration bill, because if there’s one thing builders and contractors can’t stand, it’s illegal alien workers. “And so the bill we’re talking about says, okay, enough is enough when it comes to document forgery”. This is Bush’s new favorite phrase. In the past couple of weeks, he’s declared that enough is enough in Darfur, and enough is enough for Kosovo independence.

In Iraq, he says, “The population is tired of al Qaeda. They’re tired of murder.” As Samuel Johnson said, when you’re tired of murder...

ON THE SURGE, THE DECIDER DECIDED: “The sectarian violence was getting more severe. And I had a choice. It’s what Presidents do. They make decisions. And that’s what you do. You make decisions. I made a decision.”

CAPTION CONTEST:





And here’s a bonus – if that’s the word I’m looking for – picture of Bush & Cheney in the Oval Office this morning.

An unqualified success

Tonight Bush went to the aptly-named and no doubt delicious “2007 President’s Dinner,” of which he said, “The only way to call this dinner is an unqualified success.”

In his speech, he only found two things “interesting”: 1) “It is interesting that David Petraeus, our commander on the ground, has declared that al Qaeda is the number-one enemy to the people of Iraq.” 2) “Isn’t it interesting, my dad fought the Japanese, I’m making peace with the Japanese.”

If you’re wondering about that last one, no, he hasn’t started and ended a war with Japan without you noticing. He means that 60 years after World War II, he can sit down with the Japanese prime minister and “talk about peace in the world.” Which isn’t really the same thing as making peace. But then they also, he says, “sit at the table talking about making sure that the leader of North Korea doesn’t get a nuclear weapon.” Um, has no one told him that North Korea has had nukes for a while now?

Anyway, now he’s making peace with the Japanese. “Something happened. What happened was, liberty took hold in Japan. Liberty has the capacity to convert enemies into allies.” You know what else happened? We “converted” two of their cities into charcoal. Somehow in all these anecdotes about Koizumi and Graceland and “Japanese-style democracy” that he tells over and over and over, that part always gets left out of his little just-so story. Maybe Japan isn’t really a template for how the United States should, in Bush’s words, “spread freedom far and wide across the globe.”


But for Bush, it is. Elsewhere in the speech, he says, “Our strategy is, in the short-term, to take the fight to the enemy and defeat them where we find them. In the long-term, the way to defeat an ideology of hate is with an ideology of hope.” Got that? Short term: mass slaughter; long-term: ideology of hope. How could that possibly fail?

He doesn’t see why, correctly and repeatedly and simply explained, that policy wouldn’t be tremendously popular in this country: “And I believe if our candidates take the message of doing what is necessary to protect the American people, and take the message, the hopeful message of helping others realize the blessings of liberty, that we will retake the House and retake the Senate, and hold the White House in 2008.” Can’t wait to see the bumper stickers. 2006 elections or no 2006 elections, dude still thinks his policies are wildly popular.


Speaking of wildly popular, it does seem as if Bush’s surprisingly cheap Timex was not stolen, that he really did take it off because he was afraid some Albanian would steal it. This action has made him just a little bit less popular in Albania than he was.

The price is worth paying

Bush issued a statement about the latest attack on the Samarra mosque. He’s against it. The US will send troops to the area to guard the rubble, and to “restor[e] calm and security to the area.” The Samarranians will no doubt be interested to hear that their area was calm and secure right up until this morning. Bush also said, “The United States also stands ready to help the Iraqi people rebuild and restore this holy shrine.” As I said last year, when he made the same offer about the dome, the Shiites really don’t want your infidel fingerprints on their holy site.

Iraqi PM Maliki, who just yesterday said, “we have eliminated the danger of sectarian war,” has an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal today, suggesting that “Americans keen to understand the ongoing struggle for a new Iraq can be guided by the example of their own history,” specifically, the American Civil War, which “took hundreds of thousands of lives but ended in the triumph of freedom and the birth of a great power.” And Iraq is just like that. Well, the taking of hundreds of thousands of lives part; obviously not the triumph of freedom part or the birth of a great power part.

He gives a little history of Iraq. Under the Baathist Party, “Countless people were put to death on the smallest measure of suspicion.” Thank god that could never happen in Iraq today. Also, “Wars were waged by that regime and our national treasure was squandered without the consent of a population that was herded into costly and brutal military campaigns.” I can’t even imagine what it would be like to live under such a regime. Oh, wait.

He uses the word “national” a lot, as if repetition will convince us that Iraq isn’t irreconcilably fragmented: national army, national government, national interests, national ideas, and, most laughably, national reconciliation.

He says that freedom “is never cheap but the price is worth paying if we are to rescue our country.”

He doesn’t say precisely what that price will be.

Also, I don’t recall Iraq being a whole lot of help during our Civil War.

Where we know what to do...

Bush today received the report he commissioned after the Virginia Tech shootings. The key to preventing another such event seems to be “information sharing,” a phrase Bush repeated three times in a single sentence.


From the grins on these clowns’ faces – Jeebus, just look at Gonzales, he looks like a 5-year old just told he’s getting ice cream and pony rides – I can only assume that the information that 32 people were slaughtered at Virginia Tech less than two months ago was not shared.

This picture from the White House website shows how serious Bush is about the report. He has his special readin’ glasses on and everything.


My favorite recommendation in the report: “Where We Know What to Do, We Have to be Better at Doing It.”

Meanwhile, the House passed a bill that would require states report to the federal government people who aren’t supposed to buy guns because of mental problems. Veterans receiving disability benefits because of mental-health problems, however, will have their gun-purchasing rights restored automatically. Oh good.

He’s the Understander

Polls show that if Fred Thompson entered the presidential race, he would be preferred by Republicans over everyone except Giuliani. Does that mean Republicans think that “9/11” is a better tv show than “Law and Order?”

Bush met with Republican senators today, to push them not to block the immigration bill, which he ominously called “the product,” saying he hoped Harry Reid “has that same sense of desire to move the product that I do”.


In his brief statement after the meeting, he used the word “understand” twice. He uses it often, and in two distinctive ways. Applied to himself, it is meant in the usual cognitive sense. Today, for example, he said, “Some members in there believe that we need to move a comprehensive bill, some don’t, I understand that.” Often he says that he “fully understands” something. That’s usually good for a giggle. But when applied to other people, he quite often means that they agree with some opinion of his. Because he does not acknowledge the legitimacy or often even the existence of other people’s opinions, he treats his own opinions and preferences as if they were factual statements about the universe. Thus this peculiar construction: “I want to thank those senators on both sides of the aisle who understand the time is now to move a comprehensive piece of legislation.”

Our spirit is not broken. Although everything else is.

Haditha massacre hearings update: last week Lt Col. Chessani tried to call an expert witness on Islamic culture, to prove... well, what exactly we’ll never know because the court decided hearing from a Benedictine monk would look bad in Iraq. This week we’ve learned that Corp. Justin Sharratt said in a 2006 statement that he believed the entire Haditha area (pop. of city 90,000) was hostile, so he was free to “use any means necessary and my training to eliminate the hostile threat.” For example, after shooting one armed man (or so he says), he took out several others. That’s the “any means necessary” part. Here’s the “training” part: “I could not tell while I was shooting if they were armed or not, but I felt threatened.” Of course he felt threatened; after all, there were Iraqis around, and he considered every single Iraqi to be hostile.

Although, to be fair, I don’t imagine Sharratt is the most popular guy in Haditha.

There has been a parade of Americans visiting Maliki to tell him to, you know, accomplish something. Anything, really. Maliki, while saying that “There are lots of difficulties that are not well understood from outside,” also claims that there have been many successes that aren’t well understood from outside Maliki’s head. He says that Petraeus’s report in September “should list the accomplishments.” For example, “Our spirit is not broken.” I’m not sure “accomplishment” is the precise word for “our spirit is not broken.” What else’ve ya got? “Another success is that no one is above the law.” Or below it, because, really, what law? Also, and I’ll reprint in full the every-so-slightly sceptical NYT sentence containing the quote, “Without providing evidence, he added, ‘we have eliminated the danger of sectarian war.’”

Bush in Bulgaria: I call him George

Bush went to Bulgaria today.


He met with its President Parvanov, of whom he said, “I call him George. He calls me George.” Parvanov probably calls himself by his actual name, which is Georgi.

He praised Bulgaria for joining the EU and NATO: “These are big achievements for this country, and the people of Bulgaria ought to be proud of the achievements that they have achieved.” Cuz they’ve, you know, achieved them.


The forthcoming confidence vote on Alberto Gonzales made George positively incoherent with rage: “I, frankly, find it interesting that in -- a so-called important subject they need to get to would be to pass a political resolution on my Attorney General that’s going to have no bearing on whether he serves in office, or not. ... this process has been drug out a long time, which says to me it’s political.” You know, because of the drugging. “[H]e -- they haven’t said, here’s -- you’ve done something wrong, Attorney General Gonzales. And therefore, I ascribe this lengthy series of news stories and hearings as political. And I’ll make the determination if I think he’s effective, or not, not those who are using an opportunity to make a political statement on a meaningless resolution.”


Sounds like he needed a little something to take the edge off. Fortunately, there was a lunch, with toasts,


and that got him in a more mellow mood. “And I care deeply about the Bulgarian nurses,” he said.

Don’t we all, George, don’t we all.

The Sopranos conclusion (no spoilers)

I have a few thoughts. But so anyone who hasn’t seen it yet and plans to do so won’t accidentally read about the thrilling series finale – who expected Furio to come out of nowhere and throw himself in front of the bullet the Russian from the Pine Barrens meant for Carmela? – I’ve put it here.

We cannot let them get away with it

An Orthodox rabbinical court has placed a curse on anyone who participates in a gay pride parade in Jerusalem. And the cops guarding the parade. “[T]hey will feel in their souls a curse, a bad spirit will come over them and haunt them, they will never be cleansed of their sins, from the judgment of God, in their bodies, their souls and their finances.”

Ousmane Sembene, Senegal’s most famous novelist (God’s Bits of Wood) and film director (I especially like “Ceddo” and “The Camp at Thiaroye”) has died. Yes, it’s a small country to be the most famous novelist and director from, but he was still pretty good.

Holy Joe Lieberman went on Face the Nation (pdf) (or video if you can bear it) and called for bombing Iran, because if we bomb Iran, everything will be fine in Iraq. In a five-minute interview he said that Iranians and/or people trained in Iran are: “killing American soldiers and Iraqis,” “killing Americans,” “killing Americans in Iraq”, “coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers”, “coming in and killing Americans”, “have killed as many as 200 American soldiers”, and “come in and kill Americans”.

“It’s just--we cannot let them get away with it.”

I’d say something sarcastic, but it’s time for The Sopranos.

They love him in Albania (they can keep him)

Thomas Ricks of the WaPo writes of Pentagon plans for Korea-style bases in Iraq, “One of the guiding principles, according to two officials here, is that the United States should leave Iraq more intelligently than it entered.” Talk about setting the bar low.

Speaking of WaPo journalists, Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” will be made into a movie. With Matt Damon.

George Bush is in the only country in the world that actually likes him, the only country where he could risk going out in public,


the only country whose prime minister would describe him as “the greatest and most distinguished guest we have ever had in all times” (well, almost the only country, but Tony Blair’s out by the end of the month).

Oh, sorry, it’s Albania, which Bush called “a country that has casted off the shackles of a very repressive society”.


(And by the way, headline of the day, from the White House website: “President Bush Makes Toast in Albania.” White or wheat? No, wait, I’ll bet it was raisin.)

Bush uttered a prime example of the “in other words” genre: “I commended the Prime Minister for the progress that Albania has made in defense reform -- in other words, part of becoming a member of NATO requires a reformation of the defense forces.” Followed two sentences later by another: “In other words, you’re just not accepted into membership; you just can’t say, I want to join”. He suggested that, “The politicians have got to work together now to meet the standards. They’ve got to set aside political differences and focus on what’s right for Albania.” It’s generally considered bad form to lecture condescendingly to politicians in other countries as if they were Democrats and to accuse them of partisanship.


On the subject of Kosovo, a rather sputtering “in other words”: “In other words, I put a sense of -- I made it clear that -- two things, one that we need to get moving; and two, that the end result is independence.”


A reporter began a question, “Yesterday you called for a deadline for U.N. action on Kosovo...” Bush responded, “A couple of points on that. First of all, I don’t think I called for a deadline. I thought I said, time -- I did? What exactly did I say? I said, ‘deadline’? Okay, yes, then I meant what I said.” Here is what he did say yesterday:

Q: And the deadline for the Kosovo independence --

PRESIDENT BUSH: What? Say that again?

Q: Deadline for the Kosovo independence?

PRESIDENT BUSH: A decline?

Q: Deadline, deadline.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Deadline. Beg your pardon. My English isn’t very good. (Laughter.)

For example, as with Iraq, he literally does not know the meaning of the word deadline.

Here Bush is seen arriving at Tirana Airport and receiving the traditional gift of flowers and a 12-year old girl.