Ha-ha

What do the kidnapping of a pro-Palestinian British activist and her family; the assault on the Rafah border crossing by disgruntled policemen and firing on the Gaza residence of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas have in common? My guess: Palestinian politics. Probably the most atmospheric of these three pieces is the description of the kidnapping of Kate Burton and her parents, which not so coincidentally, involved the Rafah crossing that was subsequently seized in the course of Palestinian in-fighting. From the Independent:

The party got into the taxi and headed for the Rafah crossing ­ which reopened after the Israeli pullout from Gaza in a deal brokered by the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, and is monitored by the European Union ­ to allow Palestinians from Gaza to travel in and out of Egypt. Mr Khulab said: "They wanted to see the suffering of the Palestinian people and the destruction of the border but also to see how the crossing was working."

They got to see something else: the muzzle end of a "militant" gun.

Mr Mansour said: "It all happened so quickly no one had time to say much. I said, 'What are you doing' to one of the men but he pointed the gun in my face. Kate told her father to get in the [kidnappers'] car. She was calm. No one was screaming or anything. If there was anything I could have done to stop it I would have done, believe me." Neither he nor Mr Khulab had a weapon. Mr Khulab tried to call for help on his mobile phone but the network was busy so they drove to the Rafah police station, five minutes away, and told officers what had happened. The two men stayed in Rafah until midnight desperately hoping for news. Two of Ms Burton's friends, Celine Gagne, 25, and Roberto Vila, 33, have arrived in Gaza from Ramallah hoping for news. Like her, they work for an non-governmental organisation passionately devoted to helping Palestinians under occupation.

Burton was just incidental, a way of sending a message to Abbas that there were other players in town. And whether she was conscious of it or not, probably did the right thing by calmly going along with the kidnappers as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Just another day in Gaza, which of course it was. The Mad Zionist chortles at the precipitate flight of European Union monitors from the Rafah border when it was rushed by gunmen, who turned out to be cops.

The assigned troops from the Effeminate Union, who are stationed at the Rafah border to monitor any terrorist infiltration since Sharon unconditionally surrendered Gaza, fled in a crying panic from the Gaza/Egypt border today after moslems from the PA scared them off with intimidating threats, very mean looks, and frightening hand gestures.

But in fairness, the EU monitors probably understood they were props put there for appearances; nobody actually expected them to do something, so there was no sense getting killed over the incident. They lit out for the Israeli side of the border at the first sign of trouble and waited until things settled down and they could get back to monitoring the crossing. Which of course raises the question: who's jerking around whom? Armed political movements around the world have made an art of turning instruments of Western intervention -- whether from Left wing NGOs or international peacekeeping bodies -- against themselves. For example, in the case of the Ethiopia-Eritrea border dispute the UN Peacekeeping force -- the very force meant to keep the warring parties apart -- has become the hostage to the parties. CNN reported on December 8, 2005:

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) -- Eritrea's expulsion order for some U.N. staff threatens the entire peacekeeping mission along the country's border with Ethiopia as concerns deepen that the two nations could return to war, a senior U.N. official said Thursday. Eritrea has given the U.N. mission's North American and European staff 10 days to leave, a demand the U.N. has rejected. Eritrea has offered no explanation for the order. A preliminary assessment of the order's effect on the U.N. mission showed it would threaten supplies, transport and communications, said Joel Adechi, the mission's deputy head, via video link from the Eritrean capital, Asmara.

Readers will recall that after the UN "imposed" a regime of sanctions on Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War which included weapons inspections, he regularly threatened to cancel the inspections unless he was given concessions. North Korea routinely threatens to starve its citizens to death unless it is given what it wants. And the EU is practically begging the Iranian President to diplomatically humiliate them just one more time. Sanctions, food aid, inducements: there's apparently no foreign policy lever that can't be turned around to hit its wielder over the head with. It's an absurdity seemingly apparent to no one, least of all those whose careers are invested in keeping these farces going. But it's been argued that "jaw-jaw is better than war-war" so that no matter how apparently futile a "process" or "engagement" is, it ultimately serves the cause of peace if prolonged for a sufficient number of decades. Yet if diplomacy were judged by its fruits it's amazing how unfailingly these processes have yielded nothing but misery and fighting. Maybe the Gaza politicians have a better idea: "jaw-jaw while you do war-war".

The back of beyond

There's a roundup of the circumstances surrounding the dismissal of Putin adviser Andrei Illarionov at Pajamas Media. Illarionov was one of the obstacles in the way of Putin's total control of the Russian oil resource which the Russian President wants to use as a lever on the Ukraine and Continental Europe. The principal agency for controlling Russian oil supplies -- and adjusting its influence -- will be Gazprom, which has a surprising new executive on board. According to a Washington Post article dated December 10, 2005, "Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder landed a job Friday as board chairman for a Russian-German gas pipeline that he championed while in office, a post that deepens his already close relationship with the Russian government and President Vladimir Putin. ... Alexei Miller, the chief executive of Gazprom, the Russian energy giant that holds a majority stake in the pipeline partnership, said the Schroeder-led board would be involved in 'reaching all strategic decisions on all areas of the company's activity.'"

To wiggle off the Russian hook, Europe is looking to bringing oil through a pipeline from Iran, which Dr. Zin calls the Pipeline to Trouble, "But in hitching its energy star to the Islamic Republic, Ukraine runs the risk of endangering the new diplomatic and economic bonds it has begun to build with Washington in the wake of the Orange Revolution. Iran is steadily emerging as America's cardinal strategic challenge in the post-Saddam Middle East." China, which is becoming more energy dependent by hour is also looking to obtain oil supplies from Central Asia, but wants to keep its lifeline out of the clutches of the Russian Bear. Stratfor says " All told, the Chinese plan aims to connect half a dozen pieces of independent infrastructure -- some Soviet-built, some Chinese-built, others built by yet other entities -- then reverse the flow of some of them and cobble together a new export corridor stretching from Kazakhstan's oil-rich Caspian basin through a series of western- and central-Kazakh oil zones, and ultimately into China proper. For the first time, China will have a source of imported energy not vulnerable to such pesky things as U.S. aircraft carrier battle groups."

Commentary

There was always something odd about calling OIF a "war for oil". Oil from the Middle East has been shipped through established marketing channels for decades. OIF is unlikely to alter those arrangements. Perhaps the real war for oil, in the sense of a struggle for arrangements that do not yet exist is over the reserves in Central Asia. In that struggle Russia has the key advantage of geography. It lies right across the Eurasian landmass and the petroleum roads of the 21st century must pass within or close to her borders. The future oil fields are redoubts of the Islamic fundamentalism and the traditional arena of the Great Game power rivalry between Russia, China and the leading maritime power, once Britain, now the United States.

Information Operations

Captain Jeffrey Poole, the Marine Public Affairs Officer, sends the Belmont Club this explanation of Information Operations:

Richard,

Marine Corps Doctrine defines the goal of Information Operations as to ‘influence a target audience’ while the goal of Public Affairs is to ‘inform a target audience’. When people hear the term IO they think of some sinister manipulation of the truth; however, the 2nd Marine Division’s IO campaign is designed to distribute information local Iraqis need to know such as rules for approaching a checkpoint, what sets you need to take when approach by a convoy or patrol, also basic news. As Bill Roggio pointed out when he went on an IO patrol with an Army PsyOps team, they were busy posting handbills of where the polling sites for the elections would be located.

Public Affairs, on the other hand is strictly information designed to educate a target audience. All my press releases conform to the Associated Press Style Guide for journalists. These rule don’t allow for editorializing, deceit, or lies of omission or commission. Phrases such, “huge weapons cache discovered”, “operation will deal a huge blow to the insurgency” will not be found in our releases. Nor will any demonizing of insurgents or terrorists.

The Courier Journal of Louisville, Kentucky describes lays out it misgivings about relationship between the military and the media from one correspondent's point of view.  What follows is excerpted.

Just the process of working on that story has revealed many things to me about my own country. I'd like to share some of them with you:

• Lesson One: Many journalists in Iraq could not, or would not, check their nationality or their own perspective at the door.
• Lesson Two: Our behavior as journalists has taught us very little. Just as in the lead up to the war in Iraq, questioning our government's decisions and claims and what it seeks to achieve is criticized as unpatriotic.
• Lesson Three: To seek to understand and represent to an American audience the reasons behind the Iraqi opposition is practically treasonous. ... "Dexter Filkins, who writes for The New York Times, related a conversation he had in Iraq with an American military commander just before we left. Dexter and the commander had gotten quite friendly, meeting up sporadically for a beer and a chat. Towards the end of one of their conversations, Dexter declined an invitation for the next day by explaining that he'd lined up a meeting with a "resistance guy." The commander's face went stony cold and he said, "We have a position on that." For Dexter the message was clear. He cancelled the appointment."
• Lesson Four: The gatekeepers -- by which I mean the editors, publishers and business sides of the media -- don't want their paper or their outlet to reveal that compelling narrative of why anyone would oppose the presence of American troops on their soil.
• Lesson Five: What it's like to be afraid of your own country. ... "Once the story was finished and set to come out on the street, I was rushing back to the States -- mostly because we could no longer work once the story was published -- and I found I was scared returning to my own country. And that was an amazingly strange and awful feeling to have. Again, you could call me paranoid, but the questions about what might happen to me once in America -- where at least I would have more rights -- kept racing through my brain."

The imperative was to tell all sides to the story, including the enemy's.

Commentary

Implicit in the model of Western warfare is that the warrior should never seek to persuade. That job has been assigned to the diplomats and civilians -- including the press. The most subversive thing imaginable is a military as good with words as it is with guns. That division of labor has been coextensive with the origins of uniformed armies. As old as the distinction between men in uniform and franc tireurs. Men under discipline might  be allowed the occasional inarticulate "hoo-ah" but politics was to be left to civilians. But in the second half of the 20th century a strange thing happened. The neat division between uniformed and un-uniformed combatants collapsed; and the firewall between man-at-arms and man of letters disappeared. For example, the man who conceived the screenplay of the Battle of Algiers was Saadi Yacef, himself was a combatant in the Algerian War. The Village Voice has this interview with him.

It's been almost 50 years since Saadi Yacef, revolutionary hero of the Algerian war of independence, leapt across the terraces of the Casbah in Algiers, fleeing from French forces. (Later, he'd play a character very close to himself in the legendary film he co-produced, The Battle of Algiers, which was based upon his memoirs.)

He got to star in his own play. The Western warrior was only allowed to die upon his shield. There was in the enemy camp no distinction between the uniformed combatant and civilian, no line between the word and the deed; and they considered this a natural state of affairs. For the journalist at the Courier Journal there was the conviction, sincerely held, that a hard wall should separate the men who kill and the men who convince; between the profession of journalism and that of arms. And so Dexter Filkins had no problem with the unnamed American military commander until that commander had the temerity to stray into territory that was Filkins' and Filkins' alone. "We have a position on that", the commander said. And the problem of course, was that the commander should have no position on that, whatever the cost in lives, whatever the consequences.

The problem was less acute when as in the past Hollywood and the newspapers could be relied upon to fight the information war. Bugs Bunny made fun of Hitler. Humphrey Bogart outwitted Major Strasser. Gary Cooper played Cloak and Dagger. But when journalism decided that convincing the enemy was not their department; that their function was more akin to providing check and balance they left a huge hole in the US military's capabilities, which all of a sudden found the enemy had abilities (think Al Jazeera) in an information-critical world it could not match; and whose members, since they wanted to live, keenly felt the need to redress. For example, they wanted to counter the idea that it was a holy thing to blow up women and children; wanted to promote the notion that democracy was a good in and of itself. They wanted to 'influence a target audience' not simply in Iraq, but throughout the world. In a world where the military was not allowed to use its full force they sought to compensate with the power of words. And that proved the most forbidden act of all.

If there is any evil greater than war itself it must surely be to make war without meaning it; to recruit allies without intending to stand by them; to send men into battle without purposing victory; to embark on campaign of arms that we ourselves do not believe in; and to kill in preference to persuasion. But maybe there's a greater. One writer at Slate argued that a worse danger is the conceit that any message is worth persuading others to believe. "The notion of evil has become profoundly maladaptive. Today, saying our enemy is 'evil' is like saying a preventable tragedy is 'God's will': It's a way of letting ourselves off the hook for crimes committed in our name. Not incidentally, it's also a way for our enemies to let themselves off the hook." They don't need to be let off the hook; they were never on it.

Who is a journalist?

A Washington Post story about information warfare in Iraq mentions Bill Roggio. The WP article said:

Retired soldier Bill Roggio was a computer technician living in New Jersey less than two months ago when a Marine officer half a world away made him an offer he couldn't refuse. Frustrated by the coverage they were receiving from the news media, the Marines invited Roggio, 35, who writes a popular Web log about the military called The Fourth Rail ... to come cover the war from the front lines. ... He raised more than $30,000 from his online readers to pay for airfare, technical equipment and body armor ... Scrutiny of what the Pentagon calls information operations heightened late last month, when news reports revealed that the U.S. military was paying Iraqi journalists and news organizations to publish favorable stories written by soldiers, sometimes without disclosing the military's role in producing them. ... Roggio could not be issued media credentials unless he was affiliated with an organization, the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning research organization in Washington, offered him an affiliation, according to an entry on Roggio's blog"

The article occasioned a lot of commentary in the blogosphere. Blogger Scout Prime says "Blogging isn't journalism. I am not a journalist. Though I have many problems with journalism today in America I certainly do not advocate substituting the function of the press with blogging and certainly not propaganda blogging brought to you by the military and the American Enterprise Institute." Matt at Blackfive says: hold on, there were journalists before there were newspapers, except that formerly recollections took longer to publish. "In the past, the experiences of war have produced poetry and novels and memoirs. ... In real time, on the Internet, officers and enlisted men and women are chronicling the war on weblogs". Others are not convinced. A poster at Livejournal says bloggers are government propagandists and should be identified as such. "One needs to ask who supplied the $30 k for Mr. Roggio's trip. Such a payment could be hidden monetary support for the Bush administration as Roggio's are manly but syrupy sweet paeans to the wonderful war in Iraq effort." Michael Yon, himself the subject of the Washington Post story, faces the issue of propaganda squarely and asks readers to compare a photoessay on the Iraqi elections prepared by an unattributed source which he had posted on his site and a photoessay prepared by MSNBC and asks, what the difference is between the two in terms of accuracy of content and presentation? He argues that both relate true events and are crafted for effect. If the flag of legitimacy does not fly from within the internal construction of the photoessays themselves, where is it grounded?

Commentary

I think Ranting Profs comes close to the essential issue when observing: "Finally, there's a recognition that the enemy is engaged in information operations, that there needs to be some critical reflection regarding what they do and how they do it, that there's a strategy underlying their behavior. On the other hand, that's treated with equivalence to information ops American forces engage in. The difference is American forces are trying to influence the way articles are placed by, you know, influencing the way articles are placed, while the enemy are trying to influence the way articles are placed by staging events -- meaning by killing people. It ain't quite the same thing."

But the weakness of this argument is that it reduces everyone to a propagandist working for one side or the other. To avoid unfairness in dishonesty, dishonesty must become general. That renders the question of legitimacy moot, but I believe it is not. Legitimacy is rooted within an a journalistic piece itself; it is not an added on at an editorial desk in a famous building. Consider Patrick Cockburn's report on the Iraqi elections at the Independent:

Iraq is disintegrating. The first results from the parliamentary election last week show the country is dividing between Shia, Sunni and Kurdish regions. ... The election marks the final shipwreck of American and British hopes of establishing a pro-Western secular democracy in a united Iraq.

It is totally irrelevant to question Mr. Cockburn's motives, intelligence or literary style. The only source of legitimacy that matters is whether Mr. Cockburn's journal of events is accurate. If Mr. Cockburn's description of Iraq as disintegrating proves true then his tidings, however unwelcome, will not be propaganda any more than reporting the sinking of the Titanic was. But by the same standard, most of Bill Roggio's work at the Fourth Rail and Threats Watch will pass muster as legitimate journalism in terms of accuracy, his lack of regular press credentials notwithstanding. Mr. Roggio has written many accounts of operations in Iraq which have not been contradicted by subsequent events. The clear mark of a propagandist is one who consistently misrepresents events, allowing for occasional errors which every human being must make. Track record matters. The reason that John Burns of the New York Times may be better regarded than Robert Fisk is because Burns has consistently proved the better observer of events. Moreover, the longer the retrospective, the better Burns looks.

The Ranting Professor correctly says that both the US and enemy sides are consciously engaged in an information war. What is overlooked, I think, is that in the battle for credibility accuracy matters. If their claims to superior accuracy were undoubted, the mainstream media can easily afford to ignore the amateurish efforts of a few soldiers and bloggers to get 'the other side of the picture' out. In terms of professional writing skill, press credentials and technical support, Mr. Roggio with his scrounged up $30,000 can hardly hope to compete with professional journalists backed by Fortune 500 companies. That he and others like him are considered a threat says more about the mainstream media than anything else.

As a child, I listened to my grandfather recall how, during the War, Japanese-controlled radio nightly reported sinking half a dozen American battleships, a score of destroyers and countless aircraft carriers -- day after day. MacArthur, they said, would never return. Then one morning in late 1944 as gramps was walking along Manila Bay he heard the strange drone of approaching aircraft. As it happened, my father (he had not yet met my mother) was walking along the outer perimeter of Nielsen Field some miles away at that same moment and saw two Zeros begin to roll down the runway in a desperate scramble to get airborne. They got a few hundred feet into the air when Hellcats came right down onto the deck and shot them both down before his astonished eyes. Bam, and they were gone. Grandpa climbed the highest building he could find and watched, amazed, as carrier aircraft sank every Japanese vessel in the harbor, until but one resisted, settled on the shallow bottom. On the fantail of that single vessel, one dogged Japanese sailor kept up a steady fire with his Hotchkiss until a naval fighter came right to the water and traded tracers with the brave Japanese sailor until he was no more. What died that day wasn't simply the shipping in the harbor; nor even the Zeros at Nielsen Field, but the credibility of every Japanese-controlled radio station. What propaganda fears above all is truth.

Update

Bill Roggio questions some of the Washington Post's facts and responds to his critics. For example Mr. Roggio says that contrary to the Post's article, he was not accredited by the American Enterprise Institute. Nor was there anything special about the process through which he was embedded with units in Iraq, pointing out that it's a well-worn route which one of his critics was actually invited to join. He also provides details on the $30,000 he raised to fund his trip and how small the donations individually were.

Read the whole thing.

The lost world of 1938

A reader sends a link to a 67-year old Time Magazine article of November, 1938 headlined "After Munich". The snippet reads:

Just before leaving London to visit Paris this week, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the House of Commons that he is once more appealing to Adolf Hitler to continue the Munich work of "appeasement" in general. In so doing he revealed what may yet prove to be the most important international event since Munich, the efforts which the British Government is making to find a home for Germany's Jews. Having queried all the colonies, he revealed that the Governor of Tanganyika has put at his disposal 50,000 acres on which to settle Jewish men, their families to follow if the...

The rest of the article behind the registration wall describes His Majesty's Government's efforts to settle "700,000" victims of "Nazi pogroms" in Tanganyika or in 10,000 square miles of British Guiana.

If the past seems a familiar story with one conceivable ending, those living in it had no presentiment of the future. In 1938 Neville Chamberlain could unashamedly continue the "Munich work of 'appeasement'" and Time Magazine could think that finding a Jewish homeland in Africa or South America was a viable proposition. The Nazi invasion of Poland was less than a year away and the ancient  institutions which formed the fabric of the Time's world were not going to last another twenty. The European colonies would disappear; and America would become a world power and the saga of Israel would begin.

But not everything would be unfamiliar to the modern reader. A contemporaneous Time movie reviewer lamented the tendency of Hollywood to distort history.

Sixty Glorious Years (Imperator-RKO Radio) should be an enlightening experience for U. S. cinemaddicts whose notions about 19th-Century history may have been slightly confused by recent Hollywood versions. Suez, for example, portrayed Ferdinand de Lesseps, who actually had two wives and ten children, as a lovesick young bachelor, and explained England's participation in his canal-building as the result of a General Election which never occurred.

And there were miracle tans even then.

At an unnamed beach summer before last an unnamed hypogonadal (undersexed) man lay down in "an abbreviated bathing suit of peculiar cut." He lay there for seven broiling August afternoons and scarcely changed color. ... The scientists examined him, began to treat him with male hormone substance. To their astonishment, "within three weeks there appeared, along with the bronzing of the face, a tanning of the body...

The kindness of strangers

Pajamas Media has a roundup on paid punditry. The scary thing is that there's very little statistical information on how widespread it is. Anecdotal information suggests that it affects think tanks, medical journals and much else. Rand Simberg asks if we can define when the actual moment of corruption comes.

If I write the piece that I want to write (perhaps partially based on material provided to me by them), and they like it sufficiently to make a donation of an amount of their choosing, is there anything wrong with that? The only way I've been influenced is by the idea of writing the piece in the first place. Where is the line crossed? Only when there's an explicit quid pro quo, in which one is being a stenographer in exchange for an agreed-upon amount?

Vdare Blog says payment does not always come in cash: "there a million 'impure' reasons, from invitations to the Bush White House, to the desire to impress women, that cause journalists to take the positions they do ... " Douglas McCollam at the Columbia Journalism Review talks about another form of coinage used in paid punditry: access. He comprehensively reviews the question of whether Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize should have been revoked.

Duranty worked within the system, trading softer coverage for continuing access ... When Walter Duranty left the Times and Russia in 1934, the paper said his twelve-year stint in Moscow had "perhaps been the most important assignment ever entrusted by a newspaper to a single correspondent over a considerable period of time." By that time, Duranty was a journalistic celebrity — an absentia member of the Algonquin Roundtable, a confidant of Isadora Duncan, George Bernard Shaw, and Sinclair Lewis. He was held in such esteem that the presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt brought him in for consultations on whether the Soviet Union should be officially recognized. ...

In Moscow ... he enjoyed generous living quarters and food rations, as well as the use of assistants, a chauffeur, and a cook/secretary/mistress named Katya, who bore him a son named Michael ... was driven through the streets in a giant Buick outfitted with the Klaxon horn used by the Soviet secret police.

When Duranty began to describe food shortages in 1932, Stalin showed his displeasure. "In a meeting with the British ambassador to Moscow ... Duranty said government officials had threatened ... "serious consequences" for him ... he was afraid his visa would not be renewed. ... It's clear he was trying to serve two masters." When Malcolm Muggeridge filed one of the first real reports on the famines, smuggling his story past the censors, Duranty was afraid he would be scooped. "Confined to Moscow and perhaps alarmed at being scooped, Duranty began to openly criticize the famine reports." At any rate, after Duranty left Russia, he wrote a best-selling memoir of his days as a fearless foreign correspondent entitled I Write as I Please, which you can still purchase today from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Nothing of the discussion on Duranty should be construed as a tu quoque or excuse for paid punditry by think tanks, bloggers or academics. It's included because of all the forms of payment for opinion enumerated, journalistic access is probably the single most common -- and subtle -- form of quid pro quo.

Commentary

I was asked at a discussion on blogging whether an anonymous writer could compete with an established expert. My reply was that an anonymous author had the advantage of never being able to never argue from authority. The sole force of his argument came from the proposition 'does it follow?'. Yet that was not wholly accurate and I knew it: people liked to know who you were and to trust you, even though you did not want to be trusted. I added, "when you are read by ten people a day you can say what you please, and no one, not even yourself, will care; but when you are read by ten thousand a day, everything changes and people -- you -- start to care". Punditry is one of those strange activities where for the good of your character it is best not to be too successful. One hope is the Internet, by spreading out readership among different sites will make it hard for dominant voices to arise. While human nature may not change, relative temptations might. Howard Kurtz described in the Washington Post how a Cato Institute scholar was accused of accepting $2,000 for every favorable editorial column he wrote. Which is sad: no one's opinion, except a doctor's or some similar specialist -- should be worth $2,000 -- and even then you should always ask: 'does it follow?'.

But he'll remember, with advantages ...

If the defining youthful experience of the 1960s were the civil-rights and antiwar movements, what is today's? Robert Kaplan writing in the LA Times thinks he knows.

If you want to meet the future political leaders of the United States, go to Iraq. I am not referring to the generals, or even the colonels. I mean the junior officers and enlistees in their 20s and 30s. In the decades ahead, they will represent something uncommon in U.S. military history: war veterans with practical experience in democratic governance, learned under the most challenging of conditions. For several weeks, I observed these young officers working behind the scenes to organize the election in Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city. ... Throughout Iraq, young Army and Marine captains have become veritable mayors of micro-regions, meeting with local sheiks, setting up waste-removal programs to employ young men, dealing with complaints about cuts in electricity and so on. They have learned to arbitrate tribal politics, to speak articulately and to sit through endless speeches without losing patience.

I watched Lt. John Turner of Indianapolis get up on his knees from a carpet while sipping tea with a former neighborhood mukhtar and plead softly: "Sir, I am willing to die for a country that is not my own. So will you resume your position as mukhtar? Brave men must stand forward. Iraq's wealth is not oil but its civilization. Trust me by the projects I bring, not by my words." Turner, a D student in high school, got straightened out as an enlisted man in the Coast Guard before earning a degree from Purdue and becoming an Army officer. He is one of what Col. Michael Shields, commander of the 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team in Mosul, calls his "young soldier-statesmen."

Commentary

The third thread of 1960s youth experience was service in Vietnam; but it had to go underground. Hollywood took a long time to make a movie about the Vietnam experience and then only from the perspective of outsiders looking in, as in the Deer Hunter. Cultural historians would have called it the losing thread -- or the odd threat at least -- in this sense: whereas in veterans of World War 2 were universally asked 'Daddy, what did you do during the war?',  more people were willing to talk about watching Grace Slick at Yasgur's Farm than in recalling the Ia Drang Valley. William Shakespeare described what it was to miss truly defining moment of a generation.

And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

That sentiment, for some reason, did not apply to Vietnam. But Robert Kaplan has reason to think that the times, they are a-changin'.

The drawdowns (see update)

Michael Lopez Calderon describes the debate between Daniel Pipes and Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute -- neither of them men of the Left -- on the subject of whether the United States should support Islamists. Gerecht argued that the process was foremost, and if democracy meant that the side you didn't like occasionally won, well it was a feature, not a bug. Pipes retorted that it was insane to let radical Islamists play in a game they wanted, above all to abolish; against "democratic elections in which the result could be 'one person, one vote, one time.'" Of course, both Pipes and Gerecht might as well have been debating the problem of bringing democracy to Iraq, where election in a Shi'a majority country could be expected to produce a Shi'a dominated result.

In that election, the Sunnis and the secularist parties are bound to be unhappy with the result. And perhaps rightly so. The last post argued that accusations of cheating had to be addressed in such a way that all parties -- the Kurds, Sunni and Shi'a -- felt that their interests could be protected within a nonviolent electoral system.

The US will be probably be relied upon by all parties, to keep the level of cheating down to where results are acceptable. That probably means that the vote count itself will only be one source of input in a hybrid system that will eventually be (in my view) be a negotiated electoral result. The balance will be correct when nobody rushes out to restart hostilities.

Could this be done? One proxy indicator of its feasibility was provided by two key events: the arrival of Tony Blair on the one hand; and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumselfeld on the other hand, in Iraq. Tony Blair strongly hinted that he would soon be drawing down British troop strength in southern Iraq. The War in Context, quoted the London Times as suggesting that preparations were already under way.

"Senior defence sources said that the 800 British troops in Maysan province and 300 in Muthana province had switched to a 'tactical overwatch'; role -- remaining in their barracks and only going out on patrol with the Iraqi security forces when they asked for help. This is the first stage in withdrawing altogether from the provinces, following a similar pattern adopted in Northern Ireland.

Donald Rumsfeld announced that President Bush authorized a drawdown, not only of the additional troops sent to augment security forces for the election period, but two brigades below the base level.

Addressing U.S. troops at this former insurgent stronghold, Rumsfeld did not reveal the exact size of the troop cut, but Pentagon officials have said it could be as much as 7,000 combat troops. Two army brigades that had been scheduled for combat tours one from Fort Riley, Kan., the other now in Kuwait will no longer deploy to Iraq. That will reduce the number of combat brigades in Iraq from 17 to 15.

An American Forces Press Service press release says that not only will American numbers go down, but their role will change. Iraqi forces will take center stage and the American troops will begin to fade into the background. "U. S. forces will shift from a focus on combat operations to a focus on supporting the Iraqis as they take the lead in operations ... more U. S. engineer and logistics units will deploy instead of combat units to help the Iraqi units function." Nor was this a spur-of-the-moment decision. The US Army Ranger Association weblog carries what are described as notes from a speech by General John Abizaid at the Naval War College, at which Abizaid said: '2006 will be a transition year in Iraq and that will see the Iraqi forces take much more of the mission from the US forces. This is necessary to bring stability to Iraq. We need to be fewer in numbers and less in the midst of the people for the moderate Iraqi government to succeed.'

Commentary

This is not necessarily the correct response to post-election Iraq, but the troop drawdowns, both hinted and announced reflect a confidence in the way events are likely to transpire. Of course, not everyone is convinced. Blogger Norman Solomon believes this is another Bush lie.

"Three days before Christmas, the Bush administration launched a new salvo of bright spinning lies about the Iraq war ... the Bush administration will strive to put any real or imagined reduction of U.S. occupation troop levels in the media spotlight. Meanwhile, the Pentagon will use massive air power in Iraq. ... independent journalist Dahr Jamail -- who worked on the ground in Iraq for more than eight months of the U.S. occupation -- pointed out in a mid-December article titled 'An Increasingly Aerial Occupation.'"

Simple Life   says "Bring them all home & NOW!" And maybe they'll turn out to be right. Maybe Patrick Cockburn of the Independent is correct when he says, "Iraq is disintegrating". But if actions speak louder than words, the drawdowns suggest that both Blair and Bush think they can afford to ease off. The difficult process of building lasting and fair post-Saddam government in Iraq remains ahead. The Sunni and secular political parties should receive their due share of the seats. But certain things are already in the past, and one of them, maybe, is Vietnam.

Update

Austin Bay links to a news article indicating that the Shi'ite parties are willing to enter into coalition negotiations with the Sunnis. Iraq the Model has details on how this is happening. Key line from Iraq the Model: "So far, the rival parties are using dialogue and peaceful demonstration and no one has resorted to violence and this is a positive sign that makes us think we still have the chance to resolve the dispute through negotiations."

Florida on the Tigris

Pajamas Media has a roundup of the controversy surrounding the fairness of the Iraqi elections here and here. It also features updates from correspondents at Iraq the Model. The situation is potentially serious. Freedom Fighter's Journal has a roundup of possible scenarios. Austin Bay, a veteran of Iraq and no Left-wing mouthpiece says "I expected sturm und drang and accusations after the election, and what else is new? Check out Omar at Iraq the Model for the push and pull. Omar reports that initial leaks weren’t quite accurate. The big story: Everyone has whetted expectations." Essentially, the Sunnis are claiming that the Shi'ite parties have exaggerated their already large numerical superiority by cooking the counting. Iraq the Model cites some instances. The Independent has gone so far as to conclude that "Iraq is disintegrating". The bottom line is that the situation requires very careful watching.

Commentary

This was one of the first elections of its type in that part of the world, and it's likely, in my opinion, that there were problems in the voting and the counting. The US will be probably be relied upon by all parties, to keep the level of cheating down to where results are acceptable. That probably means that the vote count itself will only be one source of input in a hybrid system that will eventually be (in my view) be a negotiated electoral result. The balance will be correct when nobody rushes out to restart hostilities. That means it's acceptable.

There are two possible problems attendant to this process. The first is the immediate challenge of addressing electoral irregularities in such a way that everybody, if not happy, is not terribly unhappy. The second arises from the longer term reality that, while the US might square the problem this time, it cannot do so indefinitely within the concept of Iraq as a sovereign nation. That probably requires sailing close to the wind: enough intervention to keep things from going haywire, but not so much as to foster dependency. Yet it's important to realize that to this point, the dissatisfaction has been expressed in words, and not as in days past, with TNT and packed ball-bearings. The media focus right now is on the NSA wiretaps and Tookie William's funeral, which is all very Washington and Hollywood. But the really important thing is to focus on finishing the Iraqi electoral process which began with the voting, but must now continue through tabulation and on to the formation of a new national government.

What is truth?

The Second Draft, producer of Pallywood, has a new movie called the Birth of an Icon, which examines the circumstances surrounding the alleged shooting, by Israelis, of Muhamed al Durah and his father Jamal at Netzarim Junction. Dhimmi watch reproduced the original introduction to the movie from Second Draft in a post dated December 16, 2005, which described both the background and the Birth of an Icon's intent.

Who can forget the image of Muhamed al Durah, gunned down in a "hail of Israeli bullets" at the very beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifada? The impact of this dramatic footage on global culture is close to incalculable. It is one of “the most powerful images of the past 50 years,” one of the shaping images of this young 21st century. ...

it constitutes one of the greatest media manipulations in modern media history: a lie that has killed many and a shameful MSM cover-up. And therefore, correcting it offers a critrical starting point for both media reform and a reformulation of how we think about the Arab-Israeli conflict. ...

Second Draft, which has already posted raw footage from that day, now offers citizens of cyberspace a look at the available evidence specifically about Al Durah, and, as with Pallywood, analyses of the media’s “first draft” of this story.

The issue of who killed the Palestinian boy, if indeed he was killed, continues to be debated to this day, as the comments on Dhimmi Watch show. The producer, Richard Landes, approaches the subject in the manner of a documentarist unraveling a mystery. For example, Landes asserts that five scenarios are possible in the context of the raw footage

• Israel on purpose;
• Israel by accident
• Palestinians by accident;
• Palestinians on purpose;
• Staged

Israpundit, however, didn't like it, principally because Birth of an Icon didn't set out to debunk what Israpundit thought was an open and shut lie in the service of Palestinian propaganda.

Second Draft should make the charge first to provoke maximum interest and then go on to prove it. It should not ask a question. It should start with an assertion it wants everyone to accept. "The French colluded with the PA to produce the biggest blood libel of the twenty first century with disasterous effect."

Too wimpy. But Second Draft is unrepentant. In the current preface to the movie it says, "We put the evidence before you and the five possible scenarios with arguments for and against. Judge for yourself." Now it's entirely possible that Israpundit is right about the conclusion and yet for Second Draft to be right about the process. For example, odechadangloblog thinks Landes has proved that "the 'killing' of Mohammed Al-Dura was faked by a Palestinian cameraman working for France 2, who are still trying to cover it up. See with your own eyes." Curiously enough, Landes himself, in his debate with Israpundit, didn't think the boy was even killed! "I don't think he was killed", and offers this bit of evidence: "no blood, he moves in take 6, the last take". That's also the view of Justify This! which notes "the boy being seen in unscreened footage covering his face and moving when he is supposedly dead".

Solomonia notes that the MSM has taken to covering the Second Draft project. MSM covers blogs; man bites dog. Unfortunately, the links to the MSM examples are all expired. However, a search on Google News turns up this link to Newswire, which covers the story in a very basic way.

Commentary

One of history's most ancient questions, in fact the one asked by Pilate of Christ before his crucifixion, is "what is truth?". (John 18 37:38) Pilate turned away to address the crowd before hearing the answer, possibly convinced that one answer was as good as another, in what may have been the earliest recorded instance of post-modernism. And the truth according to Pilate, was that Christ was innocent, and therefore after a little slight of hand with Barabbas, liable to be turned over for execution.

The imperative to action, whether in mundane life or in life-and-death situations has forced humanity, from earliest times, to act as if it were certain even when it was tormented by questions. While both faith and skepticism require each other to exist, they are uneasy companions. Maybe that's why news items are called stories, because it is simply too hard to lay out events without a narrative, as if the facts themselves would vanish without a framework to hold them. One of the nice things about the blogosphere is that it comprises multiple stories and allows the contradiction to be endured: Israpundit articulates the need for action; and Richard Landes thinks he knows the truth, but is careful to preserve, in his garden of ideas, the bloom of doubt.

Notes from all over

What does a life sentence mean?

Berlin, Dec. 20 -- The German government disclosed Tuesday that it had freed a Hezbollah member who had been convicted of hijacking a TWA airliner in 1985, allowing him to return to his native Lebanon despite long-standing requests from the United States to hand him over for trial. ... Hammadi served nearly 19 years of a life sentence for air piracy, possession of explosives and the murder of Robert Dean Stethem, a U.S. sailor from Waldorf, Md. Stethem, a passenger on board TWA Flight 847 from Athens to Rome, was singled out for brutal treatment by the hijackers because of his military service.

For some, a life sentence is, for all its defects, the preferred alternative to the death penalty.

Dec 21, 2005 -- Hundreds of people have gathered for the funeral of executed former US gang leader Stanley "Tookie" Williams. Civil rights campaigner Jesse Jackson, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and rapper Snoop Dogg were among those to attend the Los Angeles service. ...  He said: "Tookie is dead. We're not safer, we're not more secure, we're not more humane."

Who is being judged?

 "A nation reveals itself, not only by the people it produces, but also by those it chooses to honor." -- John Kennedy

Let's hear it again from Albert Camus.

"On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself."

Update

The Lebanese blog YaLibnan, and the mainstream media too, are suggesting Germany traded Hammadi for Susanne Osthoff, a German archaeologist and convert to Islam who was critical of the 'looting of antiquities' after the fall of Saddam.

The tightrope

Pajamas Media has a roundup of blog discussions, pro and con, on the subject of whether the President had the authority to conduct wiretaps, one end of which involves a US person, without a court order. However the legal arguments play out, a slightly different question already has a definite answer: the President does not, apparently, have the reliable ability to conduct surveillance of the enemy without the fact being revealed in the New York Times. Former intelligence officer Emily Francona points out that two possible instances of lawbreaking are being discussed, but one instance is more cut-and-dried than the other.

Whether the President acted under proper executive authority will undoubtedly be determined during hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But he did follow requirements for legal review of his orders by consulting with the NSA Legal Counsel and the U.S. Attorney General. He also followed congressional oversight requirements by notifying the appropriate congressional committees in a timely manner. And it is customary for more sensitive activities to be briefed only to a limited number of senior oversight committee members to avoid leaks of classified national security information. ...

The most serious legal problems are posed by those who leaked this highly classified national security information to the media, an unauthorized recipient of any classified information. Any NSA or intelligence community official concerned over an intelligence activity has an internal oversight system available to address these concerns in a legal and classified environment: NSA's internal Inspector General and/or the Intelligence Community's Inspector General.

Johnathan Alter writes in MSNBC that the New York Times knew about this "highly classified national security" operation for a year, and decided, despite appeals from the President, that they had a duty to make it public.

I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting, but one can only imagine the president’s desperation. ... Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story—which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year—because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker.

Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy thinks that President Bush's actions were illegal, but feels it is not a slam-dunk case. Hugh Hewitt believes the President was within his rights. But whatever the legalities of the wiretapping, the fate of this particular operation was effectively decided -- not by the New York Times, it's fair to say -- but by whoever took it upon himself to leak it to them. The judgment on the wiretap's operational security had been handed down, as effectively as a unanimous decision from the Supreme Court. If your life had to depend on this operation's secrecy, then kiss your a... goodbye. President Bush had futilely lamented an earlier leak.

"In the late 1990s, our government was following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone. And then the fact that we were following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone made it into the press as the result of a leak," he said.

Once upon a time signals intelligence was considered so important that considerable efforts were taken to prevent its compromise. Captain John Philip Cromwell, who was privy to the secrets of signals intelligence, elected to go down with the USS Sculpin rather than risk capture by the Japanese and reveal his knowledge under torture. Cromwell agonized over a problem the NYT editorial board might have found easier to resolve.

The destroyer quickly destroyed the bridge, killing Connaway, the XO (LT Nelson Allen), and the gunnery officer (LT Joseph De Frees – son of Rear Admiral De Frees). LT G. E. Brown, another reservist, was now the senior officer assigned to the submarine and quickly took command. He chose to scuttle the boat and gave the order, "abandon ship." The crew struggled into life jackets as the Chief of the Boat opened the vents. Captain Cromwell, division commander with only 13 days at sea on his first war patrol, was faced with a predicament. He could abandon ship and face the possibility of severe torture in a Japanese prison camp or go down with the ship. Knowing full well the possibility of the enemy gaining information about Operation Galvanic and the secrets of Ultra during torture, Cromwell chose to take the secret information to the bottom. He told LT Brown that he "knew too much" and would stay onboard. Ensign Fielder, perhaps feeling responsible, made the same decision. These two brave men – and ten others – rode the ship down for the last time. ...

When Admiral Lockwood learned of Sculpin and Captain Crowmell’s fate, he recommended Cromwell for the Medal of Honor. It was approved and awarded to his widow after the war. Admiral Lockwood went on to say, "Captain Cromwell's selfless act of personal sacrifice represents what our submarine force is all about. It stands for dedication, courage and honor in the face of adversity." "John Cromwell is a true American hero," he added.

Commentary

No one is above the law and the President's actions will be judged in the manner provided. But it's also important to ask -- and the answer is of more than academic interest -- when and to what extent an individual or corporation can divulge a secret military operation on the basis of a self-appointed duty. The mantle of secrecy is not absolute and few would argue that German officers with a knowledge of the Holocaust should keep it quiet out of a regard for operational security. But the wiretapping case, as Orin Kerr points out, is much more marginal. Two factors are probably relevant in making that determination. The first is competence. To what extent is an individual whistleblower or organization like the New York Times competent to judge what operations of war should or should not remain secret? The second is responsibility. Assuming that an individual or news organization were qualified to weigh operational security requirements against their duty to inform, who takes responsibility for any deaths or injury that may result? It will be argued that Scooter Libby cannot dismiss these questions as irrelevant. Why should they be irrelevant to the leakers in this instance?

Looming Large

In Latin America, Left-wing and anti-American leader Evo Morales was elected President of Bolivia by a substantial margin. According to the International Herald Tribune:

Morales, 46, an Aymara Indian and former coca farmer who also promises to roll back American-prescribed economic changes, had garnered up to 51 percent of the vote, according to televised quick-count polls, which tally a sample of votes at polling places and are considered highly accurate.

Publius Pundit, a blog that closely watches developments in Latin America says it wasn't even close. "There was nothing fraudulent about it, and voter turnout was an amazing 80%. Bolivians who are celebrating this are happy because Morales is the first-ever indigenous Aymara president the nation has ever had. For people who have been shut out from the existing system, for whatever reason, it’s a great step forward to see one of their own in the highest office in the land." In These Times has an interview with Evo Morales in which he claims that he is 'like Che' except that he doesn't believe in the armed struggle. Marc Cooper argues that Morales, as well as the ascent of left wing leaders in Brazil and Venezuela, portend the end of the Washington Consensus' in Latin America characterized by "free enterprise, free trade, a rollback of the state and social services, a sort of trickle-down economics for export". Cooper asks whether this is cause for jubilation -- or alarm. Indeed, Morales is likely to go down the same road as Hugo Chavez, who is rapidly ruining the very Venezuelan economy he promised to rescue from the oligarchs.

Commentary

Politics in the Third World has long been principally a synonym for plunder. The sole variation from this boring theme lay in finding new and innovative alibis under which to commit the intended looting. Throughout the 1990s traditional elites operated under the banner of the free trade, economic liberalization and privatization -- while doing nothing like that. Each time, the local elites were at pains to emphasize their theft was at the behest; indeed the compulsion of international lending institutions. Though economics in the Third World very often consisted of banditry planned locally; it was always attributed internationally, preferably to Washington; and for decades no one was overly concerned at this sickening charade because these dens of corruption were distant from the centers of world power. Until September 11.

While radical Islam is the best known form of chaos from the Third World it was merely the worst -- but not the only -- form of dysfunction. There were many other countries where things simply didn't work, and where their overlords made a career of covering their crimes by claiming subservience to an 'international' program, as simple misdirection. The post-colonial world fell to pieces in a million ways; united only in a single, agreed-upon scapegoat: the USA. Chavez can be depended on to destroy his own country; as did Castro and as probably, will Evo Morales. Yet in the end, they too, will attribute their failings to America. What's needed is some way to make each nation consciously responsible for its own destiny. Whether in Iraq or elsewhere, that's the only way to go.

Election pictures courtesy of the Marine PAO

BARWANA, Iraq- Iraqi voters stand in line and wait to enter the polling center during Parliamentary Elections here today. Haditha, Haqlaniyah and Barwana were cleared of insurgents by Iraqi Army forces and Regimental Combat Team - 2 during Operation Rivergate in October. (Official U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Michael R. McMaugh 2nd Marine Division Combat Camera)

Preliminary reports on the Iraq Elections

Early reports (see these two reports from Iraqis reporting on behalf of Pajamas Media) on the Iraqi elections emphasize that much of the visible security presence wears a local face. Excerpts:

The deployment of Iraqi security forces on the streets was heavy with a noticeable absence of American forces except for their presence in the skies; there are many Apache helicopters and jet fighters as well as small surveillance planes al over Baghdad. ...

the Peshmerga, police and “Asayesh” security corps are doing a great job in providing a safe environment for the voters.

Update

There's an update. Things are still quiet, except for some back and forth about the truck of ballots from Iran, whose existence the Iraqi defense minister apparently denies.

Boring Iraq elections? Salon talks about the tedious Slate coverage by Tamara Chalabi. Elections. In Iraq. That's the kind of boredom people have been fighting for. I had forgotten that in the headline grabbing business, good news is bad news. Realistically, there's bound to be incidents. But there's nothing wrong with being grateful for small mercies.

06:04 December 15, 2005 EST. ABC news is reporting Mortar Lands Near Green Zone As Polls Open.

---

For one Kurdish writers view of the situation see Kurds should take lessons from past.  His basic take:

"The U.S. Administration is desperately searching for a magical political formula to reassemble Iraq as a unified state, and to weaken the increasing ties between Iraqi Shiites and the Iranian theocracy, which reaped the beneficial fallout of the 2003 Iraqi war. Regardless of the Administration’s rhetoric of spreading democracy in the Middle East, it wants to reassure its traditional allies that the U.S. is mindful of their concerns about the stability of their governments and that it would not embark on any radical program that would jeopardize their interests. The U.S. as well as Arab states have become increasingly wary of the close ties between Iraqi Shiites and Iranian theocracy, which they would like to weaken at all costs."

Israpundit sees America as having won the military war but as losing the peace.

"If America comes to the conclusion that their ultimate goals are not achievable, they will settle for destroying WMD and then install a Shiite regime in the south that is dependant on them and a Kurdish regime in the North that is dependant on them and whoever they can in Bagdad. Then they will get the hell out. It will all have been for naught with more negative fallout then positive benefits."

From either of these premises the "insurgency" is now a sideshow. Neither assigns much importance to troop numbers, or WMDs or anything else that the international press saw as important. The real concerns of both articles is how OIF has changed or will change regional balances.

In retrospect, almost everybody saw Iraq through their parochial prisms. Israel through the lens of its regional insecurities and the Lebanon experience. The Kurds from the viewpoint of their own national aspirations. In probably the strangest perspective of all, many Americans saw Iraq as Vietnam.

My own view is that America's position resembles Britain's vis-a-vis early 19th century Europe, when it held the balance of power on a continent racked with rivalries, switching sides to maintain the equilibrium. This is precisely what the Kurds (in the article above) now think Khalilzid is doing when he sweetalks the Sunnis. Alliance politics is a marvelous and cynical thing. I wouldn't be surprised if Saudi Arabia made nice to Israel if it were worried enough about Iran.

What OIF did was make America a direct factor in Middle East politics, not just from an offshore vantage, but on a much more direct basis. Was this good? Was there a choice?

Marine Captain Jeffrey Poole, who is the PAO says:

Though we have no official numbers, the voting in Al Anbar far surpassed our expectations. This is especially true in the Western Al Anbar cities, such as Husaybah and Barwana, which, until recently, were under al Qaeda in Iraq-led insurgents’ influence.

On the eve of the Iraqi elections

Readers may want to listen to an NPR broadcast describing what will probably be heavy turnout of voters in Fallujah and throughout the Sunni triangle. Or read a post by Captain Ed called Has The War Turned The Corner ... At Home?. Alastair Macdonald of Reuters now talks about what experts foresee may be irritants of long term US basing agreements with the new Iraqi government. Closer to the ground the Mesopotamian tells us which candidate he will probably vote for, and why, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The discussion has shifted almost unnoticed from the question of whether the US will win in Iraq, a goal recently denounced as impossible by Howard Dean, to a debate about the consequences following it.

Some pundits will now qualify their past analysis to say that predictions America would be defeated in Iraq did not really mean a military defeat like Vietnam, when NVA tanks rammed down the presidential palace gates in Saigon, but a more subtle political defeat, still certain, yet to come. One of the nice things about discussing post-modern warfare is that definitions of defeat and victory have become so elastic that the one may be impersonated by the other. Yet historical revisionism cannot amend the fact that once doubt has entered into the church of defeat there is no return to perfect faith. Honest men of the Left must recognize that the US might actually have already won the military battle, a horror in itself; and even worse, might actually win the political fight ahead.

David Ignatius of the Washington Post is still uncertain about the wider victory. But he is no longer doubtful, if he ever was, about the wisdom of the fight. He wrote, in his emotional salute to the recently assassinated Lebanese politician and writer Gebran Tueni:

The shame for America isn't that we have tried to topple the rule of the assassins but that we have so far been unsuccessful. ... it's still there, in the shadows of the shadows. George W. Bush gets a lot of things wrong, but he knows that he's fighting the assassins. On days like these, I'm glad that he is such a stubborn man. ... Amid the Bush administration's mistakes and lies about Iraq over the past three years, it's easy to lose sight of what is at stake in this battle. But this week brings it back to square one: It's about breaking the power of the assassins. ... People like the Tuenis who refuse to be intimidated should inspire the rest of us. So should the millions of Iraqis who will vote tomorrow. They are trying to break the culture of intimidation and death. Americans should feel proud to be on their side.

And what he feels, apart from pride I think, is a resurgence of hope. The most lasting achievement of enemy propaganda in Vietnam was to destroy hope; to eliminate any possibility of the conception of victory, so that in the end it became, as it did for Howard Dean, a bad word. For that reason it necessary to rescue the idea of victory from its fallen state, not to revive it as gaudy triumphalism, but to restore it as a real measure of achievement; and to recognize in it the fruit of sacrifice. There's a distance yet to go, but -- and let no one deny it -- a long road behind.

The empty cell

The sideshow around the main event, the execution of Tookie Williams, was endlessly fascinating. Probably the best place to start is at Michelle Malkin's. Then Captain Ed. Baldilocks says a lot that's worthwhile and Cobb, too. The most interesting debate, if you exclude the Jesse Jackson freakshow, where he couldn't remember the name of a single one of Tookie's victims, was at Captain Ed's. Captain Ed was disgusted by the histrionics over Tookie, but for religious and moral reasons preferred Life Without Parole. Fair enough. But his commenters ran with the argument and pointed out that it was precisely because Life Without Parole couldn't be guaranteed -- that it was more than likely some future political campaign would let stone killers free on a fraction of their sentences -- that the Death Penalty made sense. Commenter Abdul Abulbul Amir (do you know the song?) said: "folks are murdered by criminals serving life sentences with unfortunate regularity. The fact remains we simply cannot ensure that that a lifer can kill no more. However, we can be certain that after tonight, 'Tookie' will never kill again." It would be ironic if the single most compelling argument for the Death Penalty turns out to be the anti-Death Penalty lobby itself.

But when you think about it, every alternative to the Death Penalty is premised on the assumption that jail provides an better way of removing dangerous persons from society. Once the impermeability of jail can no longer be guaranteed -- because holes in the cell walls are being poked by 'activists' --  then it makes sense to execute perps while you can. Of course, there's something nigglingly wrong with this. After some thought I realized what I thought it was. Issues of guilt and innocence; crime and punishment have been distorted by the political process. How else do you have Ramsey Clark defending Saddam and European investigators refusing to provide cooperation because it might lead to the Death Penalty? Crime stops being about criminals and their deeds and becomes yet another battleground in the culture wars. It becomes less about human beings and more about political agendas. Baldilocks said:

Leaving aside those who oppose the death penalty for moral/religious reasons, few of you have seemed motivated to move into my South Central LA neighborhood to see what “Tookie” and his Crip co-founder Raymond Lee Washington (who’s burning in Hell right now) have wrought for the last thirty-odd years. And I know that you won’t be choosing to live here anytime soon. That’s understandable ...

True but irrelevant; not logically, but politically. Nor does this factoid figure in the picture.

7 July 1975 - U.S. News & World Report: A Senate subcommittee, also investigating school violence, reported that one gang in Los Angeles calls itself 'Crips' -- described by the subcommittee as 'a short form of cripples, which in turn is derived from the gang's trademark of maiming or crippling their victims.'

That's ancient history. What's current is this:

Najee Ali, a friend of Williams and a civil rights campaigner in Los Angeles, yesterday said: "We're all stunned. Tookie's actions have demonstrated that he has become a voice for peace, a voice against violence, and has become an influence for the good for young people around the world.

It's about the politics. Not about the crime, nor the victims, nor even Tookie himself. How we have betrayed.

Breaking: Violence breaks out again in Cronulla

Many emergency vehicles are converging on the site of the Sydney beach riots. Radio reporters are suggested a large number of "incidents" are taking place. Car windows have been smashed and bloodied individuals have been sighted by radio reporters. Residents are being advised to stay at home. More as information becomes available.

Several cars have been pulled over by policemen and persons have been arrested. The cars have been attacked by baseball bats. One witnesses is reporting by cell phone from behind bushes and trees.

Now there are reports that the attackers are from the largely Muslim suburb of Lakemba. Unconfirmed reports say the 'youths' are attacking cars and individuals at random. More unconfirmed reports that a mosque has been attacked. These reports are being compiled while listening to live coverage on 2GB. You can listen online at this site.

Commentary

Too early to tell now but it looks like the Lebanese gangs have struck back. The radio reporters are talking about "white Australians". The PC front is fraying. People are angry and I don't blame them. But the cops can't cope with the guerilla tactics because the raid on Cronulla has been in the kind of hit and run that was reported in Paris.

Interesting. Very interesting. I think Oz is the middle of the biggest political crisis of the decade. This is going to polarize the population, not fatally, but as never before. More importantly, it has made the issue of Muslim immigration and impossible one to ignore.

Look for this to spread because the modus operandi of the 'youths' is to fan out and hit other areas. Lebanese Christians are calling in and saying that they're different from Lebanese Muslims. There's a Lebanese Christian who is on and saying "they've taken Christmas away from us". Multiculturalism may not be dead, but it's certainly taken a hell of a ding.

My comment from the previous post about 8 hours before this news broke:

My two cents worth on the Maroubra beach riots (Eastern suburbs) is this. There's a perception, justified or not, among some Anglo Australians that authorities are not cracking down hard enough on Middle Eastern gangs, who are in Western Sydney. Some days ago, a Lebanese gang supposedly attacked lifeguards, who are an iconic part of Australian beach culture. That's a little bit like spitting on the Flag and writing grafitti on the Liberty Bell. So guys revved up by beer decided it wasn't just Miller Time, but payback time.

I have no doubt that some of the Middle Eastern guys beat up were innocent. But that's what happens when perceived political correctness undermines public confidence. We rely on the state to dispense justice, when that is thought to fail then mob rule steps in and punishes innocent and guilty alike.

I've been warning about this for some time now, both with respect to the torture debate and in an old post called the Three Conjectures. Like most people in Oz, I have Muslim or Middle Eastern friends and the way I got it figured is if we don't start cracking down on the Osamas and the Zawahiris and the al-Arians because they are draped in this bogus human rights shield, then the Joe Samadis and the Bill Mansours of the world are gonna start catching it. What's the use of being innocent if the guilty go scot free? One day if a nuke goes off in Sydney or Manhattan all the bets are off.

I get a little emotional sometimes watching these peacenik types defend blatant murderers because by frustrating justice they are building up tectonic pressures that will go snap one day, and it won't be their necks at the end of a rope. What the world needs isn't the fake sympathy of the Euro-human rights crowd but justice. They should remember that in the absence of justice there is only revenge.

Little did I know what was coming 8 hours later, a little sooner than I thought.

The ten-foot tall midget

Consider stories like these from San Francisco, which talk about starting projects in the Chinese city where protesters were just shot:

"SAN FRANCISCO -- Entrepreneurs from China's Guangdong Province presented more than 150 business projects to potential American investors yesterday at the 2005 Hong Kong-Guangdong Business Conference in the U.S. ... The hotel was packed with 300 Chinese officials, including the Guangdong governor and mayors of all of the cities, and 600 business executives from America. ... Twenty-two officials from Shanwei attended the conference, including the mayor. ...

Huang brought pamphlets, video discs, and a thick business project book to introduce Shanwei city and its business opportunities. In the book were 180 business projects advertising foreign investment. The investment amounts for each project ranged from $ 100,000 to $50 million."

The growth is so fast and furious that there's effectively a Chinese government push to expand industrial sites from the city centers into the cheaper outlying areas. 

Guangdong will soon introduce a new policy to facilitate the relocation of factories to lower-cost regions within the province in view of rising land and labour costs in the Pearl River Delta ... Hong Kong-invested factories will benefit from this new policy as they can look for less expensive yet suitable locations within Guangdong to continue their operations.

An article from People's Daily describes how the hunger for electrical power is driving China to build any source of power it can imagine including large wind farms in Guangdong, in places like Shanwei. The Standard describes the scale of the effort. "Shanwei already has a large wind farm on an offshore island, with 25 turbines. Another 24 are slated for construction." The incentive to take land from farmers in exchange for pittances is hard to resist in a command society. News Release Wire Com says:

Construction of a U.S.$743 million power station in China’s booming southern province of Guangdong has been stalled for weeks amid a dispute with local residents over compensation.

Residents of Dongzhou village, near Shanwei city in the eastern part of the province, rejected government proposals to pay them 600,000 yuan (U.S.$74,000) a year in compensation for land taken up by the power plant.

"Dongzhou has a population of around 30,000 people, so that works out at between 10 and 15 yuan per person per month," a local representative surnamed Huang told RFA’s Mandarin service.

'Toilet paper'

"To put it bluntly, that’s not even enough to buy toilet paper. We villagers think that this is unreasonable."

Unreasonable, maybe. But not everyone may be aware of how the common folk feel. Consider this World Bank environmental review summary of possibly the very coal fired power plant that the Shanwei fishermen were complaining would end their livelihood.

Guangdong Shanwei Power Plant Project (coal-fired, 8 units x 600MW, planned start of operation for initial 2 units 2006-2007, located in Shanwei City, Guangdong Province):

GDIH owns 25% of the project. The project is being developed in two phases (Phase I 4 units x 600MW, and Phase II 4 units x 600MW). The Phase I plant is designed to adopt supercritical steam technology, more energy efficient than conventional subcritical steam technology. In addition to FGD, Electrostatic Precipitator, Low NOx burners, and 240m stacks, the project will also have an indoor coal storage facility to minimize fugitive dust and to protect coal pile from typhoons. The Environmental Impact Review Report concluded that proposed once-through cooling system will have limited impacts on marine environment. The plant is under construction on land largely reclaimed from the sea. The project covers a total area of 230 ha, relocated 10 to 20 households, affected some 200-300 people who lost some portion of their cultivated land. Ash from the project is planned to be comprehensively reused. However, a backup ash disposal site will be developed at an inland location about 6km from the plant. This may need to relocate about 60 family grave plots. GDIH is working with other Shanwei Power Plant Project sponsors to improve environmental and social performance targeting to

• minimize risks,
• achieve compliance with the World Bank Group policies and guidelines and
• enhance sustainability.

Shanwei, unfortunately for the Chinese authorities, also turns out to be home to pirates -- with potential Muslim connections, who are not used to be shot at without shooting back. One wonders how many of these the World Bank environmental review team spoke to.

China executed 13 Chinese and Indonesian pirates in South China's Guangdong Province ... the executions of Weng Siliang, Indonesian citizen Soni Wee and the other 11 who committed the crimes on China's territorial waters in the South China Sea were enforced in Shanwei City of Guangdong.

Jamestown.Org has a special article entitled The Costs of China's Modernization by Harbin-born Wenran Jiang.  Excerpt:

According to a recently People's Daily online special, over 5 million "public accidents" occurred in 2004 alone, causing the death of 210,000 people, injuring another 1.75 million, and resulting in the immediate economic loss of over USD $57 billion (455 billion Chinese yuan). It is estimated that the direct annual cost of such disasters for China is more than USD $81 billion (650 billion yuan) on average, equal to six percent of the country’s annual GDP.

Commentary

The Jamestown.org article, written before the shooting incidents in Shanwei, describes the 'costs' resulting from uneven growth when parts of a society are allowed to grow while related aspects, such as its legal and political system are artificially stunted. The Frankenstein-like freak that emerges from this process is one in which economic disputes are resolved in fights between PLA bullets and pirate bombs rather than in courts of law, a procedure which cannot continue indefinitely without something snapping.

Yet some Western institutions, for reasons they prefer to think altruistic, continue to encourage this process of distorted growth, as men two centuries ago desired women's bound feet, mistaking the twisted for the beautiful. The Kyoto climate conferences, for example, consciously exempted China from any Greenhouse Gas generation restrictions thereby encouraging further distortions; though they mean well of course. Nor are human rights organizations particularly strict with China, 210 thousand fatal accidents a year notwithstanding. They are accidents after all. With private sector companies driving the economic engine upward while political correctness simultaneously stunts civic expectations the world will get -- not the complete man it has no use for; nor even the consumerist coolie it expects, but something darker, and not wholly undeserved.

Inherit the Wind

It's interesting to note that the cited cause over the shootings of protesting farmers in Dongzhu, China is over land taken for wind farms. The Intelligence Summit says the compensation may have been pocketed by officials. It quotes Amnesty International's response in part: "There is lack of guidance from the central government about what kind of force is allowed to be used." Inadequate rules of engagement for shooting citizens internally. Way to go Amnesty. Tseming Yang at Citizen Yang says that while the Hong Kong papers have been following the incident there has been little coverage from Mainland Chinese media: "... something that I am especially troubled by ... is that many of the clashes ... have resulted from disputes about environment-related matters ...".

Update

Here's what I've been able to find about the city of Dongzhou village, Shanwei city. This is where the recent shooting of protesters has taken place, according to the Epoch Times, which has very good coverage of the event including photos. Using the Falling Rain website, we can get the coordinates of the Shanwei city, which are: 22° 46' 60N 115° 20' 60E. The place is 81 NM northeast of Hong Kong and about 450 NM from Taiwan and appears, from Google Earth, to be a built up area along a deep water port near Honghai bay.

Consider stories like these from San Francisco, which talk about projects in the Chinese city where protesters were just shot:

"SAN FRANCISCO -- Entrepreneurs from China's Guangdong Province presented more than 150 business projects to potential American investors yesterday at the 2005 Hong Kong-Guangdong Business Conference in the U.S. ... The hotel was packed with 300 Chinese officials, including the Guangdong governor and mayors of all of the cities, and 600 business executives from America. ... Twenty-two officials from Shanwei attended the conference, including the mayor. ...

Huang brought pamphlets, video discs, and a thick business project book to introduce Shanwei city and its business opportunities. In the book were 180 business projects advertising foreign investment. The investment amounts for each project ranged from $ 100,000 to $50 million."

The odds are good that one of those investment proposals is going to require land on which some farmers happen to be raising a crop. Maybe it'll be for a wind farm. Well who knows?

Comment

The NYT's Howard French has a detailed accounts of the events in Dongzhou. Key sentences:

"From about 7 p.m. the police started firing tear gas into the crowd, but this failed to scare people ... At about 8 p.m. they started using guns, shooting bullets into the ground, but not really targeting anybody. Finally, at about 10 p.m. they started killing people." ... By the government's own tally, there were 74,000 riots or other significant public disturbances in 2004 alone, a big jump from previous years.

I'm willing to believe that the Chinese authorities are telling the truth when they say 'agitators' are behind the recent disturbances. French's story, with its references to community opposition to new power plants and filling in the bay and displacing fishermen, remind me of Saul Alinsky-style organizing campaigns. Normally, firing tear gas into a crowd will disperse it rapidly unless there are a committed cadre of leaders who will hold fast: hold fast even in the face of live firing.

Of course the word agitators is pejorative only in the eye of the beholder, as a press free with the use of the word 'insurgents' is prone to remind us. There's a high probability there are underground organizers of some sort in Dongzhou, and indeed, throughout industrializing southern China, and the really fascinating question is who they are and what they represent.

I think a Western community organizer, if he were candid, would have to say that whoever these Chinese underground dudes are, they are in the top rank. It's one thing to coordinate a pyro attack on a Starbucks Cafe in Seattle hoping to be carted away by fascist pig American policemen in the strobe effect of a dozen flashbulbs. That's only playing at organizing. It's another thing to sneak around in southern China against security forces that have never heard of the McCain Amendment and to stand fast against live ammo. That's the real thing.