Category: Networks

The blogosphere is a-flutter with praise for Marxist Norman Geras’ criticism of the anti-liberation left, and rightly so. My favorite part was the conclusion:

When the war began a division of opinion was soon evident amongst its opponents, between those who wanted a speedy outcome – in other words, a victory for the coalition forces, for that is all a speedy outcome could realistically have meant – and those who did not. These latter preferred that the Coalition forces should suffer reverses, get bogged down, and you know the story: stalemate, quagmire, Stalingrad scenario in Baghdad, and so forth, leading to a US and British withdrawal. But what these critics of the war thereby wished for was a spectacular triumph for the regime in Baghdad, since that is what a withdrawal would have been. So much for solidarity with the victims of oppression, for commitment to democratic values and basic human rights.

Similarly today, with all those who seem so to relish every new difficulty, every set-back for US forces: what they align themselves with is a future of prolonged hardship and suffering for the Iraqi people, whether via an actual rather than imagined quagmire, a ruinous civil war, or the return (out of either) of some new and ghastly political tyranny; rather than a rapid stabilization and democratization of the country, promising its inhabitants an early prospect of national normalization. That is caring more to have been right than for a decent outcome for the people of this long unfortunate country.

Conclusion. Such impulses have displayed themselves very widely across left and liberal opinion in recent months. Why? For some, because what the US government and its allies do, whatever they do, has to be opposed – and opposed however thuggish and benighted the forces which this threatens to put your anti-war critic into close company with. For some, because of an uncontrollable animus towards George Bush and his administration. For some, because of a one-eyed perspective on international legality and its relation to issues of international justice and morality. Whatever the case or the combination, it has produced a calamitous compromise of the core values of socialism, or liberalism or both, on the part of thousands of people who claim attachment to them. You have to go back to the apologias for, and fellow-travelling with, the crimes of Stalinism to find as shameful a moral failure of liberal and left opinion as in the wrong-headed – and too often, in the circumstances, sickeningly smug – opposition to the freeing of the Iraqi people from one of the foulest regimes on the planet.

But the question this raises is: why is it remarkable that a leftist supports the liberation of an oppressed people all of a sudden?

My, how the Movement has fallen.

Expressing dismay about falling contributions, Howard Dean shrugged-off the deaths of Qusay and Uday:

Questioned about the deaths of Saddam’s sons, Odai and Qusai, in Iraq, Dean dismissed suggestions that it was a victory for the Bush administration.

“It’s a victory for the Iraqi people … but it doesn’t have any effect on whether we should or shouldn’t have had a war,” Dean said. “I think in general the ends do not justify the means.”

As we all know, Howard Dean is a man with great compassion for the downtrodden masses. OK, maybe not for those in who don’t vote because they’re foreign, or, maybe, dead, at the hands of a couple of torturing butchers, but for everybody else, certainly. Except all Republicans and those Democrats who approved of the liberation of Iraq, and his rivals for the nomination, and members of Congress, and a few million others, but he’s still a great guy, for sure.

According to Yahoo finance, markets rallied on news of that the pig-latin boys, Uday and Qusay, are toast:

Close Dow 61.76 at 9,158.45, S&P 9.31 at 988.11, Nasdaq 24.61 at 1,706.02: The death of Saddam Hussein’s two sons helped the stock indices post gains across the board…a modest up open quickly gave way to continued profit-taking such as occurred yesterday…the Dow and S&P quickly sank into the red…the Nasdaq held up better, helped by an upgrade to the semiconductor equipment maker sector by Lehman…then came word from Iraq that Saddam’s sons were probably either captured or killed…that proved the stimulus stocks needed to break the lethargy that had set in and the indices all went solidly positive…

In related news, Howard Dean’s fundraising numbers are likely to decline, for two reasons: an improving economy is bad for Democrats, as is improving cooperation between Iraqi civilians and the Coalition. The pig-latin boys were knocked off on a walk-in tip.

Do the math, you can bet Saddam’s done it, as have the celebrating Iraqis:

Baghdad, Iraq — Red and yellow tracer bullets scythed through Baghdad’s sky in celebration Tuesday night when U.S. officials announced that Uday and Qusay Hussein were dead.

Two down, one to go.

There’s an interesing article in the Mercury News today on the Argentine obsession with beef:

Argentines so revere their country’s 11th Commandment — Thou Shalt Eat Beef — that babies are weaned on steak juice. A curvaceous woman is whistled at and called “a great steak.” Despite recent decades of economic woe, the average Argentine still consumes more than twice as much beef as an American.

Argentina exported so much beef in the early twentieth century that it was one of the world’s ten richest countries, ahead of France even. So if you’d like to help Latin America get its economy back in order, eat more beef.

The best commentary I’ve seen on the John Gilmore airline delaying stunt was left in tin-foil hat wearer Larry Lessig’s comments by Seth Finkelstein:

I’ve finally figured out what bothers me so much about this.

In effect, Gilmore was doing a millionaire’s version of trolling.

Exactly. To the idle rich Gilmore, airline security is a big, fat, joke, but to the people who fly airplanes every day, it’s a reality that they confront every day of their working lives.

Millionaires who delay flights carrying hundreds of people in order to get attention are enough to make me return to the Bolshevik values of my youth and advocate eating the rich, or at least taxing them into poverty. This stunt — reminiscent of a Woody Harrelson protest that shut down the Golden Gate Bridge for several hours, preventing ambulances from reaching hospitals and fathers from being present for the birth of their babies — is on the wrong issue in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Stunt-master John Gilmore was a co-founder of the EFF, a civil liberties organization that’s never done anything of value for any of the sufferers of the major civil liberties threats of the last decade, which should come as no surprise.

UPDATE: Prompted by the Gilmore stunt, Reason magazine rushes an article on civil liberties by Brian Doherty onto their web site (note: this is a correction), which attempts to explain why the government wants a picture ID from all airline passengers:

As you check in, your biometrically encoded national ID (a perennial legislative favorite, though not in active play at the moment) is scanned and your identity is checked against every available database the government can access, public and private. This will likely include, among many others:

…

? the “deadbeat dad” database (a poster child for the inevitable mission creep of all government databases, it has already expanded in just a few years to be used to track down student loan deadbeats and unemployment cheats);

The “deadbeat dad” database Doherty mentions is the “National Newhire Registry”, to which all employers are required to report all newhires, whether they’re child support debtors or not, so cross-referencing this database to airline passengers would be a meaningless exercise. The government wants to know if people on the “do not fly” terrorist watch list are boarding planes, and to do this they need to know who’s flying.

Civil libertarians who like to complain about the maltreatment of terrorists and the idle rich have been silent about the government’s systematic, monthly scans of all bank records and utility accounts for those with names similar to those of known child support debtors. Why is that?

ANOTHER UPDATE: There is also a federal law to the effect that child support debtors lose their passports when they get $5000 behind, which the INS enforces, so once again, Doherty’s “mission creep” argument goes nowhere.

Judge Gilbert Merrit has been given a document naming Saddam’s chief contact with Osama:

The document shows that an Iraqi intelligence officer, Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, assigned to the Iraq embassy in Pakistan, is ”responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group.”

The document shows that it was written over the signature of Uday Saddam Hussein, the son of Saddam Hussein.

The judge, a Democrat serving on the federal appeals court in Nashville who’s currently in Iraq creating a court system, says he believes the document is genuine. We believe it’s the smoking gun.

Via Instapundit.

This article has been up for a while, but I just found it via a link from Christopher Hitchens in Slate. The author, Rolf Ekeus, was the head of UNSCOM from 1991-1997, and now runs the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. He explains the nature of the Iraqi WMD program, why stocks of chemical weapons are hard to find, and what Saddam intended to do with the weapons. Unlike fellow Swede Hans Blix, Ekeus supports the invasion:

The chemical and biological warfare structures in Iraq constitute formidable international threats through potential links to international terrorism. Before the war these structures were also major threats against Iran and internally against Iraq’s own Kurdish and Shiite populations, as well as Israel.

The Iraqi nuclear weapons projects lacked access to fissile material but were advanced with regard to weapon design. Here again, competition with Iran was a driving factor. Iran, as a major beneficiary of the fall of Hussein, has now been given an excellent opportunity to rethink its own nuclear weapons program and its other WMD activities.

The door is now open for diplomatic initiatives to remake the region into a WMD-free area and to shape a structure in the Persian Gulf of stability and security. Moreover, the defeat of the Hussein regime, a deadly opponent to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, has opened the door to a realistic and re-energized peace process in the Middle East.

This is enough to justify the international military intervention undertaken by the United States and Britain. To accept the alternative — letting Hussein remain in power with his chemical and biological weapons capability — would have been to tolerate a continuing destabilizing arms race in the gulf, including future nuclearization of the region, threats to the world’s energy supplies, leakage of WMD technology and expertise to terrorist networks, systematic sabotage of efforts to create and sustain a process of peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the continued terrorizing of the Iraqi people.

This is powerful stuff and it deserves a lot of play.

Dan Gillmor asks a question about the case of the Brooklyn Bridge bomber:

Why are journalists not screaming bloody murder about this case? Sloth no longer suffices to explain our negligence?

My answer: The man (Mohammed Rauf) copped a plea. Criminals do that every day, and it’s not a story.

Next problem?

Via A-list blogger (heh heh) Jeff Jarvis.

Mrs. Bennett insists that the looting of the National Museum of Iraq was never a big deal, on account of all the stuff being catalogued and therefore hard to move. The real problem is the looting of digs where un-catalogued artifacts are getting ripped-off:

Significant archaeological sites have been looted of tens of thousands of objects since the beginning of the war in Iraq, although some of the most famous sites have escaped unscathed, American archaeologists who surveyed the country last month reported yesterday.

I don’t know how credible this latest looting charge is, but it’s probably at least partially true.

It’s important not to let the Administration off the hook on finding Iraqi WMDs. I don’t say this because I believe Bush lied about the WMDs, any more than hundreds of other politicians in dozens of other countries did; we all know Saddam had WMDs and WMD programs, and we do need to know if they were hidden, destroyed, or dispersed for our own safety. So the search remains a priority, and one that’s more important than the relics, artifacts, and oil fields.

In the interest of maintaining Administration interest in a boring pursuit, Sarge compiles a list of quotes from the Administration on the WMD question before the war:

I’m focusing on the official reasons for the war –reasons presented by those who can be held accountable for the decisions they make. The question of Saddam’s actual possession of WMD is not within the bounds of this post.

It’s great service, and I recommend it.