Flip flop in Fallujah

California bans necrophilia. Plan your vacations accordingly.

The attempt at the Vietnamization of Fallujah is declared a failure, and the “Fallujah Brigade” dissolved. This was the body created to provide the thinnest of cover for the US’s failure to subdue the city. The US gave a motley group of insurgents, members of Saddam Hussein’s military weapons and vehicles, which they funnily enough don’t seem to be giving back now that they’ve been fired, and put them under the command of a whole series of former generals. It was always unlikely that such a body would serve the interests of the US rather than those of the Resistance, and they haven’t. If they had, the residents of Fallujah would have torn them to pieces. Since Western reporters haven’t been able to get near Fallujah, little has been written about this experiment.

I’ve lost track of the generals appointed to lead the brigade; the LA Times refers to a General Wael as “the brigade’s latest leader,” without mentioning his predecessors, the first of whom was evidently appointed without anyone looking at his file and who then showed up in a Republican Guard uniform and was quickly fired, to be replaced by another of Saddam’s 11,000 generals, who they thought had been an exile, but really wasn’t... for all I know, since then they’ve been replaced once a week, like No. 2’s on “The Prisoner.”

The LAT says the decision to dissolve the brigade was “agreed to by the interim Iraqi government and the Marines,” which makes the decision sound immaculately conceived. Basically, the US just repeated the error it made in dissolving the Iraqi army, only this time the weapons the cashiered troops are bringing with them into the resistance were provided by the American taxpayers. The US has returned to the time-honored method of winning the hearts and minds of Fallujans, bombing the shit out of them.

Does it rank up there with chopping someone’s head off on television?

It sounded too bad-spy-novel to be true, but reporters (2 of them)[the WaPo editorial I hadn’t yet read when I wrote that doesn’t know of the second one] headed towards Beslan to cover the hostage-taking were really and truly slipped tranquilizers.

AP: “Rumsfeld, responding to allegations that he fostered a climate that led to the prisoner-abuse scandal, said yesterday that the military’s mistreatment of detainees was not as bad as what terrorists have done. ‘Does it rank up there with chopping someone’s head off on television?’ he asked. ‘It doesn’t.’”

Are those really the only choices on offer? Naked human pyramids or decapitation? That’s almost as bad a choice as Bush or Kerry.
[Update: Slate’s Today’s Papers terms this “the lowest common abomination.”]

The proof is complete, If only I’ve stated it thrice

It’s that time again, another September 11, and doesn’t it seem that the events of 9/11/01 have been transmuted into Republican Party property, so that it becomes increasingly hard for the rest of us to commemorate the loss of life without being in some way on the defensive? (Kerry, with his unerring populism, will be honoring the dead at the... Boston Opera House). Robert Fisk notes that the oddness of the path by which the US is commemorating by bombing Fallujah, a place very few of us had heard of 3 years ago, in what seems to have become the “war on terror,” which used to be the “war on terrorism,” but in a twist Orwell did not predict, we are gradually dropping from political discourse every word, like terrorism, that George Bush cannot pronounce. In a second Bush term (heaven forfend), people who pronounce the word nuclear correctly will be flogged in the town square.

What Fisk ignores is the indubitable fact that Dick Cheney has said that Iraq was a sanctuary for Al Qaida. It is indubitable because Dick Cheney keeps repeating it, which is all the proof needed by the Bushies:

“Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.”

(WaPo: “Five times in his speech in West Virginia, Bush spoke of making the country and the world ‘safer.’”)

The unicorn is a mythical beast

The Sudanese are responding that there is no genocide--just like there were no WMDs in Iraq, their foreign minister says. Or alligators in the sewers. Or unicorns in the garden. (I guess the Thurber “fable for our time” isn’t directly relevant, but I like it).

Actually, while Powell acknowledged the existence of genocide, he said that “No new action is dictated by this determination.” Genocide is still, like, bad, isn’t it?

Possibly, but our politicians’ focus is elsewhere. Imagine if the energy and political firepower currently being focused on the height of podiums and the temperature of the room in the presidential debates (the NYT reports that the negotiating teams put forth by the Kerry and Bush camps include 3 governors--current governors, mind you--and a former secretary of state. Just show up and debate the issues, how bloody hard could that be?) were focused on the Sudan. Or, with the assault-rifle ban due to expire Monday, there was Sen. Larry Craig on McNeil-Lehrer, explaining how the Senate was too busy to debate loser bills and had more important things to do. Like voting on a flag-burning amendment to the constitution, gay marriage, etc etc. The awesome disproportion in attention and resources--the Bush & Kerry campaign budgets must be larger than the budgets of some African countries--and the laser-like focus on the utterly trivial does not speak especially well for the democratic representative system.

Not just random violence

A New Statesman editorial (link goes to this story for the next week only) on the fact that the Beslan hostage-takers, like the Abu Ghraib guards, took pictures of their victims:

Once, the instincts of people who did terrible things were to destroy the evidence; even the Nazis tried to cover up the Holocaust. Now, depravity shows its face proudly to the world, partly as a kind of existential statement, partly as another branch of the public relations industry. My grievance must be greater than yours, people seem to say, because I will go to greater lengths in pursuit of it. Just as other sections of the media industry resort to ever greater sensation to command attention - bigger newspaper headlines, more violent films, more pornographic advertisements, more intimate reality TV - so now do terrorists.

Colin Powell declares Darfur to be genocide. This might be a good time to point out, as I like to do every so often, that in 1969 Powell did the first “investigation” of My Lai, and declared that no massacre had taken place, and that the relations between US troops and local Vietnamese were excellent. Just sayin’. This time, though, he actually investigated before issuing his findings.

Sudan is not happy, and says foreigners should not “put oil on the fire.” Oil, you say... Now you’re speaking the Bush administration’s language.

Powell says, “This was a coordinated effort, not just random violence.” Just? JUST?!?

Treasury Secretary John Snow was in Florida today, talking about all the sanctions we’ve got on Cuba, and the new ones they’re adding. I’m pretty sure they’re more rigorous than the sanctions Powell is talking about putting on Sudan for, you know, genocide.

Naomi Klein writes that after 9/11, Bush looked for a political philosophy (stick with me, it gets more plausible), and found it in Sharon’s Likud party:

In the three years since, the Bush White House has applied this logic with chilling consistency to its global war on terror - complete with the pathologising of the “Muslim mind”. It was the guiding philosophy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and may well extend to Iran and Syria. It’s not simply that Bush sees America’s role as protecting Israel from a hostile Arab world. It’s that he has cast the US in the same role in which Israel casts itself, facing the same threat. In this narrative, the US is fighting a never-ending battle for its survival against irrational forces that seek its total extermination.

And now, she adds, Russia is also adopting the “Likudization narrative.”

Now go away before I taunt you a second time

Tom Ridge will today declare September National Preparedness Month. Today. The ninth. Preparedness. Can’t make this shit up.

A gazillion dollars in military spending every year, and this is what it comes down to: “The loudspeakers atop the Humvee crackled to life: ‘The Taliban are women! They're bitches! If they were real men, they'd stop hiding under their burkas and they'd come out and fight! I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.’” OK, I may have tampered with the quote slightly.

Catastrophic

Kerry says that Bush made “catastrophic choices” in Iraq, where Bush says there was a “catastrophic success.” Who could have guessed that the common ground between those two would be a four-syllable word?

Salon has an exhaustive piece about Chimpy’s National Guard service, or lack thereof. If you’ve gotten tired of the story, like I had, this will revitalize your interest. This is not just about the distant past: the lies are ongoing. As new information comes out, the Bushies have had to revise their story again and again. Also, the idea that GeeDubya just wandered off one day and never bothered coming back to base--lazy and irresponsible Bush--is untenable. He actively disregarded orders, falsified paperwork, and got powerful friends to pressure his superiors.

Serbian schools drop the teaching of evolution.

Washington, Adams, Jefferson .... Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush. Maybe the Serbs have a point there.

Otherwise occupied

Russia says it is prepared to take preemptive military action against “terrorist bases” anywhere in the world, and will do so with the same level of competence shown in the Beslan crisis. OK, they didn’t say the last part, but they did reassure us that these military strikes would not involve nuclear weapons, something we weren’t even worried about right up until the second they said that.

The GAO says that Thomas Scully should repay all the salary he received as head of Medicare after he illegally ordered that actuary not to report the true cost of Bush’s drug proposals to Congress. That’s actually in the law governing the civil service. The Bush admin is refusing, citing its “executive privilege” to lie to Congress. I’m simplifying their language, but not exaggerating. If only Congress defended congressional oversight with half the energy presidents use in asserting executive privilege, an exceedingly vague and expansive term which is not in the constitution. The DHS investigation of this incident insisted in July that Scully had “the final authority to determine the flow of information to Congress.”


The ONION:

Bush Campaign More Thought Out Than Iraq War

WASHINGTON, DC—Military and political strategists agreed Monday that President Bush's re-election campaign has been executed with greater precision than the war in Iraq. "Judging from the initial misrepresentation of intelligence data and the ongoing crisis in Najaf, I assumed the president didn't know his ass from his elbow," said Col. Dale Henderson, a military advisor during the Reagan Administration. "But on the campaign trail, he's proven himself a master of long-term planning and unflinching determination. How else can you explain his strength in the polls given this economy?" Henderson said he regrets having characterized Bush's handling of the war as "incompetent," now that he knows the president's mind was simply otherwise occupied.

We’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating

Dick “Mr. Sensitive” Cheney said today [yesterday, actually; posting to Blogspot was down for half a day; did you miss me?] that if Kerry is elected, “then the danger is that we’ll get hit again [by terrorists] and we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating.” So instead we should elect the man who claimed to be president the last time there was a devastating terrorist attack? Anyway, this is so far beyond the pale of civilized political discourse that I expect a national uproar to force Cheney to resign from office and leave political life by the end of the week, starting any... minute... now....

Seriously, this is not acceptable, it’s shameful, and it occurs to me that there’s no one with the independence and stature to say that without being dismissed as partisan, at least not with the Daily Show in reruns this week (McCain doesn’t count: he only complained about the Swift Boat stuff because of his own Vietnam War background, and he made it clear that Bush’s despicable refusal to denounce the ads would not affect McCain’s support for him one iota).

1,000 dead, and the Bushies are busy claiming that since Iraq is just a part of the great big never-ending war on terror, we actually reached 1,000 some time ago. Evidently that’s supposed to make us feel better about it. Or feel nothing about it, like they seem to. So I’m sure they can tell us who #1,000 was, and how they marked his death.

Bush supporters and Bush-supporting states have substantially higher fertility rates than (in Bush states in 2000, the rate is 2.11 children/woman, Gore states 1.89), according to a WaPo story I missed last week, giving what the article calls an “evolutionary advantage” to those who don’t believe in evolution.

Rumsfeld says that the thousands of Iraqis killed by “Iraqi forces and the coalition forces” (translation: Americans) isn’t “a lot out of 25 million people in a country.” How many dead people do you suppose he considers to be “a lot”? He also puts American deaths in perspective: sure, there 2 or 3 US soldiers are killed every day, but “if you think about the fact that we have thousands of patrols every day...and look at the number of incidents, they’re relatively small.” So that’s all right then.

All 9/11, All the Time

The Bush admin calls for a political settlement over Chechnya or, in other words, a more sensitive war on terrorism.

In a NYT story on how Congressional R’s plan to force a lot of votes on defense issues, Bill Frist’s spokesmodel says “It will be all 9/11, all the time.” A new slogan: “Vote Republican: All 9/11, All the Time.”

The front-page picture that got the Izvestia editor fired.

What's the Russian for tit for tat?

During the Beslan crisis, the LA Times reports, Russian troops took their own hostages, 40 or so relations--including children--of Chechen rebel leaders. The Russians claim that it was protective custody, because those leaders planned to kill their relatives and blame it on Russian security forces. It all makes sense now.

Let’s not feel too superior: the US has done exactly the same thing in Iraq (not sure about Afghanistan), including the wife of the Saddam Hussein aide who was just reported as captured, and then not captured. His wife was seized in December, and the stories I saw that mentioned that fact didn’t say if she was ever released. Does anyone know?

From the Ironic Times: “CORRECTION: Last week, due to a production error, we quoted President Bush describing his Iraq policy as a “successful catastrophe.” In fact, he described it as a “catastrophic success.” We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.”

Ugly processes which have their own logic

Press Association headline: “Bitterness Mounts in Russia.” This is news?

Putin, the Bitter-Guy-in-Chief, berates Western countries for calling Chechen rebels “rebels” rather than “terrorists.” Of course, when Russia was downplaying the Chechen uprising, it liked to call them “bandits.” He denied that there is any relationship between Russian policies in Chechnya and the Beslan incident. Well, except that the latter justifies the former: “Just imagine that people who shoot children in the back came to power anywhere on our planet. Just ask yourself that, and you will have no more questions about our policy in Chechnya.” So genocide doesn’t justify terrorism, but terrorism justifies genocide, is that right?

Asked about human rights violations by Russian forces in Chechnya, he said that the lower-level people responsible for them are always punished, but “Compare the torture of Iraqi prisoners. This hasn’t happened on the direction of the top US leaders, but because of how individual people behaved in these circumstances. Those who are to blame must be punished.” “In war there are ugly processes which have their own logic.”

The Russian media has begun to do its job, criticizing the government’s actions and analyzing its lies, and some, including the editor of Izvestia, have been fired for it. They’re asking where some of the dead bodies have disappeared to, saying that the rebels/terrorists/bandits/actress/models were in fact willing to negotiate, that no foreigners were present, and that the bloodbath was not caused by explosives going off but by locals with guns trying to prevent the school being stormed.

Putin refuses to hold a public inquiry.

Kerry says Iraq is “the wrong war, in the wrong place at the wrong time,” and he plans to pull out within four years of taking office. Five, tops. Six, at the outside....

A month after being charged with murder, Salem Chalabi has been removed as head of the Saddam Hussein tribunal.

Mission inedible

From the Sunday Times: “A bucket of manure from an Olympic-gold-winning horse has fetched £760 in an internet auction. Leslie Law, who won individual gold on Shear L’Eau in Athens, put the bucket up for sale on eBay. It attracted 35 bids before being won by a sports memorabilia store in Southport, Merseyside.”

The Anglican church in Uganda is sending a missionary to Britain. You know, it’s Labor Day, so why don’t you all make up your own joke here, utilizing the elements: 1) missionaries being eaten, and 2) lousy English cuisine.

That story is actually about African evangelicals hating the liberalism (i.e., women and gay priests) of the mother church.

I’ve been referring, like everyone else, to the TWO kidnapped French journalists, whose kidnappers demanded the lifting of the headscarf ban. Evidently we’ve forgotten someone: their driver/interpreter/fixer, a Syrian refugee, was kidnapped with them, but, typically, none of the media reports have mentioned him. Oops.

Carefree Russians

If you’re looking for a voice on the web supportive of the Beslan kidnappers, this is probably the closest, at least in (broken) English: Kavkaz Center, evidently located in Turkey, a site supposedly close to the guy behind Beslan. It’s nutty, but oddly hard to refute. It’s focused on Putin personally as the enemy, but Putin indeed originally came to power on anti-Chechen rhetoric. The site points out that thousands of Chechen schoolchildren have been killed in the invasion of Chechnya, which explains, while of course not excusing, their inhumanity to the Beslan children. Would you care to explain to Chechens why this incident was so horrible but the world has largely ignored a decade of wholesale murder and rape by Russian troops in their country? The website is full of conspiracy theories, but Russia is, in fact, full of conspiracies and lies and unanswered questions about terrorist acts: the mysterious apartment bombings, the Moscow theater siege, etc.

2 reporters who have negotiated with Chechens in the past were prevented reaching Beslan. One may have been poisoned, the other was first stopped at the airport for suspicion of carrying explosives, then when he was released, 2 airport parking attendants came up to him and picked a fight, all 3 were arrested, and he was imprisoned for 5 days for “hooliganism,” not the first time he’s been seized while trying to cover Chechnya for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

Russia is claiming that 10 of the rebels were from Arab countries, but this is almost certainly a fabrication. The implication isn’t that these Arabs are wandering jihadists, but mercenaries paid for by dark forces trying to dismember Russia. Putin’s speech to the nation yesterday thus made no mention of “Chechnya,” and it sounds from the WaPo like the Russian people still haven’t been told that the rebels’ demand was for an end to the war in Chechnya. Pay no attention to the genocide behind the curtain.

Putin told Russians that they can’t “live in as carefree a manner as before.” Yes...Russians...carefree. Beslan is being described as “Russia’s 9/11.” It’s certainly being used as an excuse for Putin to make his already authoritarian government authoritarianer, just as the Bushies used 9/11 to enact the FBI’s wish list in the Patriot Act, take out Saddam, and silence domestic critics.

Israel is trying to get the EU and other foreign donors to pay for an apartheid road system in the West Bank. Given the settlements and the Wall, Palestinians are banned from roads the settlers use, so Israel wants someone else to pay for separate but equal roads for Palestinians.

Iraq: Going Pretty Much According to Plan

After the Iraqi puppet gov’s one-month ban on Al Jazeera raised no particular objections internationally, or indeed from their American overlords, they have, predictably, followed it with an indefinite ban.

It’s still not clear exactly how many people the Iraqi National Council actually has, and whether Chalabi is a member or not. Anyhow, it just elected 4 VPs, described by Juan Cole as showing that “the US invaded Iraq to install in power a coalition of Communists, Islamists and ex-Baathist nationalists.” Mission accomplished, then.

It’s getting so you can’t tell the hostages without a scorecard. The French journalists haven’t been released, but US-installed PM “Comical” Allawi decided that this was the perfect time to taunt the French, informing them that their anti-war stance had not protected their nationals from terrorist acts. And yes, it’s always a good time to taunt the French, but if Allawi had a diplomatic bone in his body, he might have realized that you don’t give what sounds an awful lot like tacit approval for attacks on French people, especially if you give it at the same time as the terrorists are deciding whether to kill or release the hostages.

Some want to tear a juicy bit of flesh off us (Russia tastes just like chicken)

Subtle this ain’t: the Pentagon is going to investigate Kerry’s medals.

Nor this: Putin in his address to the nation: “Some want to tear a juicy bit of flesh off us ... others are helping them, assuming that Russia ... still represents a threat to them. And that the threat needs to be eliminated. Terrorism is an instrument for achieving these aims.” In other words, this has nothing to do with Chechen independence, but is part of a Sinister Plot to dismember Russia. Rather like pretending that Iraq was behind 9/11, but rather more nebulous. “The terrorists believe they are stronger than us, that they will intimidate us with their cruelty”. Funny, didn’t you try to intimidate Chechens with your cruelty?

It’s not clear whether they’ll lie about the number of dead hostages at Beslan. It won’t be as easy to get away with that as after the Moscow theater siege. But they are claiming to have killed all the hostage-takers, which is simply not true.

The civil trial in Fresno over the assassination of Archbishop Romero (which I discussed here has finished, with Alvaro Rafael Saravia, still a fugitive, ordered to pay $10 million.

We demonstrated our weakness

The print NYT has a somewhat unfortunate jump. Quoting Hillary Clinton: “‘My husband is doing very well,’ she said, noting that he had beaten her” (continued on page A13)

at cards.

By the way, did you know that Bill Clinton is younger than George Bush?

The people who took over the school in Beslan, North Ossetia, loaded with explosives, depriving little children of food and water and threatened them with 15 people being killed if they moved or cried, have obviously reached an unimaginable level of inhumanity. But... Bush said--I can’t find the exact quote, but it was on the BBC World News--something about the lengths “they” will go to attack civilization. A Chechen might ask, what civilization? Stalin forcibly removed the entire Chechen population, Yeltsin and Putin have waged wars of extermination and atrocity.

Putin, of course, takes from this incident the lesson that Russia has been too civilized towards Chechnya: “we failed to react to them adequately. We demonstrated our weakness, and the weak are beaten.” And he will go after those who “foment interethnic hatred.” Have you heard the way Russians speak about Chechens as a group? A combination of the way Hitler spoke about the Jews and Europeans still speak about the Roma.

In this incident, Russia exhibited an impressive level of incompetence, failing to do things as simple and obvious as securing the area and making sure there were ambulances. None of which is what Putin means by failing to react adequately.

Escape train

The London Times says, “Mr Bush had an escape train waiting at Penn Station, underneath Madison Square Garden, in case he had to flee during his speech”

China has been putting censorship viruses on computers without their owners’ knowledge (the “Great Firewall of China”), rendering those computers incapable of googling for certain terms, or using them in instant messages, including liberty, the Tiananmen square massacre, human rights, democracy, truth, sex, brassiere.... I know this site has been accessed from China, although maybe not after this post.

Here a nation rose

Let’s return to the Bush line, “for as long as our country stands, people will look to the resurrection of New York City and they will say: Here buildings fell, here a nation rose.” When composing my last post, that line, which I had scribbled down assuming I would be making a joke about, was just too disquieting. Chris Suellentrop’s subsequent Slate dispatch, which doesn’t mention the line, suggests the reason: the R convention was full of sepia-toned nostalgia for those days after 9/11 when the nation supposedly united as it did after Pearl Harbor. Good times, good times.

The R’s are busily constructing a new vision of American nationhood based on victimhood. This is why the passengers who brought down Pennsylvania flight 93 and saved whatever target Al Qaida planned to fly it into (can you imagine how much worse the American backlash would have been had it hit the White House or Capitol Building? or Three Mile Island, which some early reports suggested was its target?) have gone unmythologized, and why the only soldier whose name you’re likely to know from either war of “liberation” (excluding relatives, friends, etc) wasn’t someone who, for instance, pulled a buddy out of the line of fire, like Kerry did in Vietnam, or performed some other act of bravery, but another victim, Private Jessica Lynch.

Nations that rise out of tragedy and victimization are not lovely things. You do not endear yourself to the world by constantly insisting that you are fighting wars to save their lazy, ungrateful asses, and indeed Western Civilization itself, from the heathen barbarians, alone and indeed vilified by them for doing the hard work that must be done. I’m not referring to the US now; I’m describing Serbia.