Month: April 2004

This is bad:

A coup d’etat is taking place in Iraq a the moment. Al-Shu’la, Al-Hurria, Thawra (Sadr city), and Kadhimiya (all Shi’ite neighbourhoods in Baghdad) have been declared liberated from occupation. Looting has already started at some places downtown, a friend of mine just returned from Sadun street and he says Al-Mahdi militiamen are breaking stores and clinics open and also at Tahrir square just across the river from the Green Zone. News from other cities in the south indicate that Sadr followers (tens of thousands of them) have taken over IP stations and governorate buildings in Kufa, Nassiriya, Ammara, Kut, and Basrah. Al-Jazeera says that policemen in these cities have sided with the Shia insurgents, which doesn’t come as a surprise to me since a large portion of the police forces in these areas were recruited from Shi’ite militias and we have talked about that ages ago. And it looks like this move has been planned a long time ago.

Damn.

UPDATE: On reflection, maybe this is nothing much. See Instapundit for some surrounding news stories and stuff; it seems that the dentist has overstated things a wee bit.

Tim Blair posts Christopher Hitchens’ list of questions for anti-liberationists:

1. Do you believe that a confrontation with Saddam Hussein?s regime was inevitable or not?

2. Do you believe that a confrontation with an Uday/Qusay regime would have been better?

3. Do you know that Saddam?s envoys were trying to buy a weapons production line off the shelf from North Korea (vide the Kay report) as late as last March?

4. Why do you think Saddam offered “succor” (Mr. Clarke?s word) to the man most wanted in the 1993 bombings in New York?

5. Would you have been in favor of lifting the “no fly zones” over northern and southern Iraq; a 10-year prolongation of the original “Gulf War”?

6. Were you content to have Kurdish and Shiite resistance fighters do all the fighting for us?

7. Do you think that the timing of a confrontation should have been left, as it was in the past, for Baghdad to choose?

To this I would add:

Do you think Saddam’s treatment of the Iraqi people was acceptable and should have been allowed to continue until the UN broke with precendent and acted, for the first time in its history, to overthrow a tyrant?

Fareed Zakaria points out that the Pentagon didn’t see Al Qaeda as a serious threat before 9/11 because they were still focused on states:

In due course, some senior officials in the Clinton administration awakened to the threat: CIA Director George Tenet, national-security adviser Sandy Berger and Clinton himself. But they never proposed a full-fledged assault on it. Their one dramatic attack — bombing the Afghan terror camps and Sudanese factory in 1998 — proved unsuccessful and led to domestic criticism, and they did not think they could do something more ambitious. The Pentagon, which comes off poorly in the commission reports, was stubbornly unwilling to provide aggressive and creative options.

So why the blindness? For one thing, the Pentagon is notoriously slow to react to changing conditions — the “still fighting the last war” syndrome, but for another, the attack on the Sudanese aspirin factory and the lame Patriot attack on an Al Qaeda camp minutes after bin Laden had left the tent were soundly criticized by the Right as “Wag the Dog” responses to the Lewinsky deal. So they do deserve a lot of blame for making such a huge deal out of Clinton’s penis problems, and a little bit of blame for the failure to see 9/11 coming.

The Sudanese aspirin factory is particularly important, because it was a nexus of cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda – bin Laden was an investor in it, and there is documentation of meetings between aspirin factory officials and Saddam’s chem/bio weapons people. For some reason, the Right doesn’t want to talk about these connections, presumably because it makes them look bad for the “Wag the Dog” charges, and the Left doesn’t want to talk about them because they’re so caught up in the firewall rhetoric that can’t afford to admit the connections existed. The Right has a lot less to lose from this, so they should open up a bit, even if to do so might make Clinton look better in hindsight.

That being said, Clinton’s timing in these attacks was as bad as his taste in women, so the bulk of the blame for the public’s bad reaction rests on his greasy shoulders. And that being said, the blame for 9/11 doesn’t rest on any branch of the US government, it’s 99% on Al Qaeda itself, so let’s not lose perspective here, OK?

I’ve been known to say that the opponents of the liberation of Iraq were “objectively pro-Saddam” on account of the fact that their policy choices would have left the Big Turd in power. Now we have evidence that one of their most vocal members, Daily Kos editor Markos Zuniga, is explicitly anti-American in his response to the murder of civilian contractors in Fallujah:

That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.

OK, it’s one thing to vigorously argue a position based on your twisted concepts of sovereignty and international law, but cheering the murder of innocent civilians making life better for ordinary Iraqis at great personal peril crosses the line.

Scum like Zuniga are free to hide behind their screens whipping their demented fans up into a lynch-mob frenzy only because they’re protected by this country’s Armed Forces, including their contractors and their Commander-in-Chief.

Anyone who takes the anti-liberation crowd seriously now is a fool.

Link via Roger L. Simon.

UPDATE: the scum Zuniga has deleted his comments and replaced them with a lame attempt to justify his cheering; now that’s a compassionate man for you. See the original post here.