(Note to literalists: the Watched column presently contains only a smattering of 'warblogs' because the facilitator of the template-change--Dr. Menlo--is not very familiar with them, and will be adding more as they are sent to him. Also, this blog may contain areas of allusion, satire, subtext, context and possibly even a dash of the surreal: wannabe lit-crits beware.)
Control
[Watch this space for: Pentagon and Petroleum, The Media is only as Liberal as the Corporations Who Own Them, Wash Down With, and Recalcify]
WARBLOGGER WATCH
Friday, February 28, 2003
I wonder what warblogger Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Hitchens, and the other Administration flacks friends of the Kurds made of Patrick Cockburn's piece in yesterday's Independent:
The first meeting of the Iraqi opposition in the heart of Iraqi Kurdistan was overshadowed yesterday by the presence of heavily armed Americans.
The occasion was meant to be a momentous one for the combined Iraqi opposition factions launching a democratic future for the post-Saddam era. However, the Americans dominated the meeting, loudly demonstrating their views on the process of nation building.
US special forces are known to have entered the country covertly but those who were waving their weapons yesterday were members of the Diplomatic Security Service, according to tags on their body armour.
"Stop filming and friggin' listen to me," one of them shouted as Zalmay Khalilzad, an American envoy, told the heavily guarded meeting that the US wanted the Iraqi people to determine their future.
The bodyguard, wearing black Aviator sunglasses, held a machine-gun in one hand and had a pistol strapped to his thigh. "This is non-negotiable and anybody who doesn't like it can leave," he yelled as he explained the stringent search procedures for anybody entering the building in the hilltop town of Salahudin.
Kurdish officials looked a little embarrassed at the swift takeover of their headquarters by Mr Khalilzad's burly and heavily armed guards. Half a dozen Kurdish soldiers peered with expressionless eyes at the Americans as a sudden blizzard of snow covered journalists and bodyguards alike with a coating of white.
Inside the building, Mr Khalilzad sought to reassure 54 Iraqi opposition delegates that Saddam Hussein's dictatorship would not be replaced by the complete control of Iraq by the United States.
The envoy denied that "the US wanted Saddamism without Saddam". He told the delegates, many of them privately sceptical of American intentions, that "the US has no desire to govern Iraq. The Iraqis should govern their own country as soon as possible". Inside the hall, veteran opponents of President Saddam waited to see what role the Americans envisaged for them in a post-Saddam Iraq.
At a meeting in London in December, they believed that the US had agreed to an Iraqi interim civilian government headed by a council of three from Iraq's three main communities of Kurds, Shia and Sunni Muslims and a temporary legislative body.
Earlier this month, American officials had appalled the Kurds by saying that, instead, there would be a US military government supported by a US-nominated advisory council with limited powers.
Mr Khalilzad did not spell out what was going except to say that the Americans didn't want "Saddamism". The Iraqi opposition is dominated by the two Kurdish parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Masoud Barzani and the Patriotic Union Kurdistan of Jalal Talabani. Both are alarmed at a Turkish plan to invade Iraqi Kurdistan, ostensibly to prevent an exodus of Kurdish refugees, but in practice to make Turkey an important player in northern Iraq. The Kurds have said that they will fight any Turkish invasion.
Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, who is close to hawks in Washington, spoke in laudatory terms of the US yesterday but he risks being sidelined because he has no support within Iraq.
The fear of Turkish attack has terrified ordinary Kurds. Karim Sinjari, the powerful Kurdish Interior Minister, told The Independent yesterday: "Only a week ago the main topic in the streets among Kurds was Saddam and the fear of chemical attack. Now the only thing people talk about is Turkey and the Turkish advance."
Yesterday, Turkey closed the road from Iraqi Kurdistan into Turkey to oil tankers in what may be another sign of its deteriorating relations with the Iraqi Kurds.
No clue what Hitch is up to, but Sullivan's blathering about the rosy picture of Afghanistan (Kabul, actually; as they are for Bush, the two are the same for Sullivan) painted by "a reporter."
For reasons inaccessible to me, Rod Dreher and Kathryn Jean Lopez are often allowed to pass as journalists. Today both registered expressions of outrage at NRO's Corner over CBS's alleged refusal to allow The Administration a response to the content of Dan Rather's interview with Saddam Hussein. Dreher was the first to fume, expressing disbelief over "CBS' COJONES" while no doubt contemplating the inadequacy of his own. "According to our spy in the White House press corps," Dreher allowed, CBS "turned down a White House request to have a senior official on tonight to rebut Saddam" unless that official was POTUS himself. Lopez apparently bypassed copy edit to commit a post which, typical of her work, contributed precisely nothing to reasoned discourse: "...CBS us [sic] just showing it's [sic] loyalties. Iraqi government says 'No, Mr. Rather, you can not use your own crew. No, Mr. Rather, you can not air on Tuesday morning.' ETC. White House ASKS, 'How about a White House response now that you handed your network over to a tyrant?'
A few calls such as those completed by competent Guardian staffers would have revealed what actually happened:
Mr Fleischer said CBS had refused to give a right of reply unless it came from Mr Bush in person, an offer the administration spurned "in the name of not making a moral equivalence between a dictator and a democracy".
But the network denied the charge, saying it had only refused an offer to have Mr Fleischer appear intermittently throughout the broadcast to counter President Saddam's remarks. That "wasn't appropriate for the form of our broadcast, but [the producer] said in an offhand way, 'We'd be happy to have President Bush on,'" said Sandy Genelius, a CBS spokeswoman.
"I think there was a misinterpretation. So we went back and said, 'Look, how about a senior administration official - the president, the vice-president, or secretary of state Powell?' And they came back and declined that."
But the White House was interested in "equal time", Mr Fleischer said - "in the same interview and the same time".
Ms Genelius said: "The issue of equal time ... is a little curious, because the truth is that the American people see the president and his administration virtually every day. We report the White House position on key issues virtually every day."
Of course the practice serious journalism is seldom as exhilarating as mounting your hobby horse and heading out for a ride on moral high grounds, perhaps accounting for Dreher and Lopez's obvious preference for the latter over the former. posted by Anonymous12:06 AM
Russia is disgusting. In a way, they are worse than France and Germany. Both France and Germany can at least say they give their citizens a decent lifestyle. Russia's a mess, a failed state, run by fascists and gangsters. The only way a Russian can make a decent living is by emigrating.
They slaughtered thousands of Chechens, and claim that Chechnya is part of Russia, when it is not. In their desperation, the Chechens have foolishly accepted help from the Saudis, and I imagine this connection has, sadly, opened up their ranks to terrorists from al Qaida. The attack on the theater was, of course, unforgiveable [sic]. I guess when you are desperate, your judgement [again, sic] is clouded, and the Saudis have a knack of insinuating themselves into every corner of the Muslim globe.
The second paragraph is truly remarkable. Diane, no fan of 'root cause' analysis of Muslim grievance (much less Islamofascist terrorism) against the U.S. and its friends, doesn't feel the need to foreclose all avenues of inquiry by hollering that they "hate our freedoms." If only she admitted to herself that some anti-Bush and anti-Sharon animus was intelligible as something other than crypto- or overt anti-Semitism.
Which is very much beside the point, chiefly because the likelihood of such an admission is so remote. It would presuppose learning and understanding, both scarce quantities at Letter From Gotham. Diane, her recent entry suggests, is oblivious to the fact that those who allegedly "claim that Chechnya is part of Russia" gave the region de facto autonomy in 1996, that the Chechens would subsequently attack Dagestan, and would begin kidnapping across several Russian territories, most spectacularly in the instance of General Shpigun, the Russian internal affairs representative snatched from Grozny airport on arrival for talks with the Maskhadov government.
A military campaign against Chechnya is certainly unlikely to rectify the whatever inspired the preceding. It does nothing to correct the retrograde social formations prevailing in Chechnya, the infrastructural devastation of the country, the near absence of an economy, the "heroic" nationalism degenerated to a dangerous mania, and the squalor unrivalled outside of Afghanistan. Again, these are complex problems of a sort not suitable to Diane's atrophied and bigoted mind. She invokes Chechnya solely as a gambit to bash Russia.
In many ways Diane is carrying on the Sovietologists' project of inventing narratives that don't bear sustained or even perfunctory scrutiny. What inform both the Sovietology of yore and Diane's outburst are smugness and a refusal to engage both historical fact and the humanity of ones purported object of study. That the current campaign in Chechnya is anything but a war of imperial acquisition is patent to anybody reading a newspaper - even an American one - with regularity. Whatever enthusiasm there is in Russia for military intervention, and public opinion research has suggested that there isn't much, is more an artifact of Russian fear of the gangsterism Diane accuses the Russian government of. In the Russian mind, Chechens and other dark, Muslim people (handily called "blacks") are commonly assumed to be criminals. Russia is a "failed state" in Diane's estimation. "The only way a Russian can make a decent living is by emigrating," she continues, though those unable to effect an emigration often resort to crime in an effort to secure one of the ever lessening number of crumbs falling from the table. Russian bigotry often conflates Chechen "blacks" with criminals, and postulates the necessity of a collective punishment. I would have thought that the same Diane who flees in terror when a black youth enters her subway car would have felt some measure of simpatico with the Russians on this score. posted by Anonymous3:59 PM
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Tuesday, February 25, 2003
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, employing a euphemism fashionable among the killbloggers, lets it be known that he’s “pro-liberation.” His affirmation follows a lengthy excerpt from a José Ramos-Horta Times op-ed piece. At first blush it seems curious that GHR, an avowed enemy of multilateralism who never lets pass an opportunity to deride the UN, gives several column inches to someone discussing upholding the efficacy and moral rectitude of the UN’s conduct. But, given that the exercise was successful, it’s not that surprising.
For Reynolds, the salience of the fact that intervention worked overrides the nest of inconveniences couching that fact - most notably that the actors in East Timor are not coterminous with the actors in the approaching shock and awe of the Iraqi people. A more appropriate point of comparison would have been the war in Afghanistan. As anyone reading regularly across the spectrum of pro-liberation press - from Instapuppet to the reliably martial Raines Times - soon realizes, nobody’s much interested in depicting what U.S. bomb-induced liberation looks like.
An exception is Robert Fisk. On the eve of the February 5 meeting of the UN Security Council Fisk was certain that:
Colin Powell will not be boasting to the Security Council today of America's success in the intelligence war in Afghanistan. It's one thing to claim that satellite pictures show chemicals being transported around Iraq, or that telephone intercepts prove Iraqi scientists are still at their dirty work; quite another to explain how all the "communications chatter" intercepts which the US supposedly picked up in Afghanistan proved nothing. As far as Afghanistan is concerned, you can quote Basil Fawlty: "Whatever you do, don't mention the war."
Fisk’s piece concerned itself mainly with recent American military setbacks, mentioning "the anarchy in the cities outside Kabul, the warlordism and drug trafficking and steadily increasing toll of murders" secondarily. Reynolds and his supporters don’t treat the preceding at all, nor do they treat the refugees of the Jalozai and Chaman camps whose family members perished in the bombing.
Their preference is to catalogue the boons of liberation, a novel take on which was recently provided by Human Rights Watch:
The United States blocked proposals by Afghan leaders, including President Hamid Karzai, and the United Nations, for an expanded ISAF to patrol the countryside and act as a deterrent to renewed fighting and human rights abuses by warlords and their subordinates. The solution offered by the U.S., to have warlords provide security outside of Kabul while the international community trains a future Afghan army, has proven to be a failure.
Failure in the instance of Afghanistan took the form of racist violence perpetrated by rampaging ethnic militias, of further devastation and ruin, and of the continued repression of women. Professor Reynolds, safe behind the burqa with which he shrouds his intellect, is determined not to let this obvious and inconvenient parallel dim his enthusiasm for liberation.
It's causing some rather lively debate over on MetaFilter.
"This is the ceremonial, eleventh hour release of a gaudy red herring. This is unintended consequence become anthem. This is duplicity on steroids.
"Everyone is supposed to yell "Freeborn!" and start swinging a sword?
"I do love a good diversion, but does anyone really believe that, without the WTC backdrop, WMD props, and a terrorist score, the Bush administration could have sold any tickets to The War To Liberate Our Iraqi Brethren? Does anyone really think they would've even tried?
'Please. Much of this war's support rests on the naive belief that there is a mysterious-but-valuable ulterior motive driving it - no one knows exactly what that motive is, but no one seriously believes it is selfless dedication to human rights. A right-thinking hawk would realize that, and not seek to disturb the precarious status quo." - A MetaFilter poster posted by Emmanuel4:39 PM
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Sunday, February 09, 2003
The sometimes awful, sometimes better than awful Matt Welch is today, well, awful. That's what happens when you allow Andrew Sullivan to function as your assignment editor.
Welch alerts us to the "Noxious Moral Equivalence of the Day," a Guardian columnist's assertion that, "Nations that were once the vassals of the Soviet Union are now in danger of becoming vassals of the US." A large scale fit ensues, with Welch hollering, "No, they are not. They are democracies, with governments they can peacefully replace, and a free press they can bitch about."
Even a third-rate dictionary tells you that a 'democracy' is a government by the people, executing their will. Of course, governmental arrangements such as these are unavailable in America. On the score of the threatened war against Iraq, it seems that Welch's democracies are anything but. Consider that the most formidable of these countries, devastated by unemployment, recently borrowed $3.8 billion from the U.S. Congress to buy 48 F-16 jets. Never mind that, according to last week's Economist, a rival bid - submitted by a manufacturer whose product was "just as high-tech" and lower in price - "included an offer to build an assembly plant in a depressed part of Poland, with knock-on jobs for up to 50,000 people." If you trust the disreputable Raines Times - and the wagging, warblogging fingers of disapproval suggest you shouldn't - read its write-up of the deal and ask yourself if it doesn't seem if the Poles are practicing a bit of anticipatory self-defense and jockeying for better ground under America's thumb.
As an overly facile additional exercise, you might want to ask Taskmaster Sullivan, the self-professed friend of Kurds and oppressed persons everywhere to whom Welch links, how those "Eastern Europeans [who] have a better appreciation of what tyranny is" are treating their Roma populations. posted by Anonymous5:37 PM
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Saturday, February 08, 2003
SECRET ARRESTS COME TO AMERICA
The last thing I want to do right now is push down another great Grady post, but the following news item needs immediate and widespread attention: Plans for Patriot Act II Leaked. Although in some ways this startling (?) piece of news features some correlations with Grady's post: ironic that the warbloggers have targeted the permit-permissioners of at least several peace rallies in Washington D.C. for being "Stalinists," and by association, everyone who participated in those rallies and every peace protest across the country and world. (I, myself, was surprised to learn that anyone today respects Stalin, because everyone knows that communists aren't necessarily Bolsheviks, and vice versa . . . so if you are sympathetic to the original communist doctrines, choosing the brutal dictator Stalin as it's spokesperson who really in no way represented or encouraged actual communism is a bit of a mystery to me . . . ) Ah, but back to the irony: you see, because the warbloggers who recently so vociferously gave multiple hatchet jobs to the entire 'No War' contingent for their slight (and I do mean slight, as in Olive Oil slight) association to the 'Stalinists' by marching in a 'No War' demonstration that the 'Stalinists' happened to secure the permit to . . . also support a war being pushed by an administration who at this very moment is planning to turn America into a Stalinist state.
There's genetically-modified egg on your faces, killbloggers. Now us peacebloggers better make preparations for the police state that is no longer in question being planned for America. If you don't hear from me for a while--in addition to jumping for joy--you can also file my mysterious disappearance under 'American Secret Arrest.'
Warblogger-watching is a generally tiresome and thankless task. Note the absence of an alms bowl hereabouts. We realize no profit from the present project and actually suffer great injury in its pursuit. Listening to Bill Quick's under-informed hyperventilations tends to fray the nerves and dull the mind. Brian Lamb has provided a clinical account of the effects of prolonged exposure.
That said, the exercise is at times instructive. In the past few weeks alone I've stumbled upon data I certainly wouldn't have had a limited myself to the pedestrian world of research libraries and sane discourse. For instance, I now know Ben Shapiro's "sexual status," and have been told by Herr Professor Doktor Reynolds and his hangers-on that because a regrettable front group had secured permits for and organized attendance of a peace protest that, as someone who shares that group's presumption against war, I am a Stalinist/apologist for Stalinism/irrelevant. I'm still unsure of the formulation, but he is Professor Reynolds after all; he's probably just operating above my lowly level of comprehension.
If it is logically and intellectually defensible to depict the constituents of a growing and vast grassroots movement as endorsing the politics of its most marginal members - and GHR's frequent resort to the practice suggests that for him it is - we must assume that weighty and influential sub-groups can be substituted for marginal ones.
Quite a few of today's conservative stink tankers were stillborn of Yale's Party of the Right. Nowhere have the Party's alumni figured more prominently than at National Review, historic home of Frank Meyer and current quarters of Big Dick Brookhiser (a blogger of mass destruction favorite) and Smaller Dick Vigilante. The relevant Audit Bureau of Circulations elude me, but I'd wager National Review beats Worker's World in both paid subscriptions and newsstand sales.
Nation columnist Doug Henwood, an apostate Partyer, recently attended a POR alumni conclave, later reporting on the events:
But things really livened up once the mediocre food was cleared away and the toasting session began. A POR toasting ritual is organized around a "green cup"--a large silver cup filled with a vile green punch. The first toaster is always the current chairman (so called even though the current officeholder is a woman), who began with the traditional reading of the speech given in 1649 by the party's hero, King Charles I of England, just before his head was lopped off by an executioner. It's strange enough that American conservatives would support a monarch against the claims of Parliament, but the speech is even stranger: "I must tell you that the liberty and freedom [of the people] consists in having of Government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having share in Government, Sir, that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things." Having performed her task, the chairman passed the cup to her right (of course), to another officer, who performed the ritual recitation of the British monarchs, starting with Egbert. So much for the Declaration of Independence.
Rightward passage of the green cup continued, and the content of the toasts evolved from the odd to the repulsive. There were toasts to: the Catholic Church (inspiring some hisses from the Episcopalians); the "brotherhood" of the POR; the "possession of absolute truth," which is one of the "incidental perquisites" of party membership; to the murder of Ben Linder, the American Sandinista sympathizer who was killed by the Nicaraguan contras in 1987. The toasting was interrupted to sing an apparently well-known song, "Stomping Out the Reds." Toasts resumed: to the Crusades; to the "British empire and its American successor"; and to the prospect of building "a Basilica in Riyadh, and a cathedral in Mecca." The last prompted a call from the audience, "What about Jerusalem?"
GHR and his friends have never shied away from taking up the white man's burden or urging an imperialistic war on whoever's inconvenient at the moment. We know that from their public pronouncements. Thanks to Henwood's report and the innovations in logic pioneered by the killbloggers, why now know what they're thinking privately.
Someone tell Hitchens about the threatened Church-building spree. It sounds vaguely Thocraticfascistic.
Noted in passing: Hitchens appears to have lost his weakening grip on empirical reality, outing himself as a full-on Bush supporter. He tells an interviewer: "Is a candidate completely serious about prosecuting the war on theocratic terrorism to the fullest extent? Only Bush is." Ignore all those X-ian fundamentalists and Moonie nutters Bush surrounds himself with as well as the essentially theoligical Good v. Evil mission Bush has charged himself with. Also ignore the remoteness of the threat posed by Saddam and the historical secularism of his party.
Also, Jeff Hauser picks another fight to great success, writing of Herr Professor Doktor G. Harlan Reynolds: "InstaPundit, a self-described libertarian, wants to spend your money to facilitate his geeky love of space, which of course proves that his lack of support for helping the poor isn't a consequence of libertarianism but selfishness run wild -- although his support of an anti-civil liberties administration made that clear long ago." posted by Anonymous1:10 AM
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Saturday, February 01, 2003
SPACE POLICY AND PRO IDIOTARIAN THE FIRST: I actually don't have a bunch to say about the shuttle explosion, because if you're serious about space travel you had better get used to death. Just two thoughts: While nuclear powered rockets probably would provide a faster ride, it's clear that transporting the "fuel" with current shuttle technology might not be such a safe bet. Before we go about conquering the stars perhaps we should put our efforts into research for cheap and affordable low orbit delivery. It looks like the space elevator could be the best shot. I noticed that Oliver put forward a very articulate argument for the space program. But for space proponents it's clear that we not only don't spend the money we have very wisely, but we don't spend enough. Now, of course, space will probably play second string to a United States dedicated to imperialistic occupation. It's estimated that if Iraq sets fire to its oil wells it could cost 40 billion to get those pumps up and running again. That's a cost that will be added or included to an estimated 100 billion dollar price tag for war. That's money that can't be spent on Zubrin's Mission to Mars or alt fuels or even rebuilding Afghanistan (remember them?) Two: Evil Glenn, or Pro Idiotarian the First, finds a way to make this thing political. Apparently, the Iraqis (every single one of them apparently) are happy that one of our shuttles blew up. You would think that Iraq would feel the pain of seven lost souls, six American and one Israeli. You would think they wouldn't be so selfish and wouldn't remember the estimated half million Iraqis that died because of our sanctions, the ominous gathering of a 100,000 troops at their borders and the openly aired threat that we will use nuclear weapons not in defense, but whenever our oil-addled plutocracy thinks it's a swell idea. Some nerve those Iraqis have...Of course they don't like us Glenn. It's called history, past and present.
In other links: William Gibson offers the most poetic summing up of the tragedy. He's one of the few science fiction writers who aspires to poetry with his every line. Evil Glenn, Pro Idiotarian the First, even links to it. Remember Pro Idiotarian masses: Gibson fled to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War. I'm guessing he's not wild about our new American role of Global Nuclear Terrorist. Just a hunch.
Philip Shropshire
PS: By the way, I'm offering the phrase "Pro Idiotarian" under the Creative Commons or Abbie Hoffman license, which is Steal Often and When Necessary. Look, Prospect fellas, who I suspect are the usual lot of priveleged white males who have attended private schools all of their lives, if they call you Idiotarian, then call them Pro Idiotarian. It makes about as much sense and it will go further than whinin' about namecalling from the bullies.
Judging by whom he links to, GHR, when not launching palpably silly attacks on Atrios, reads mainly warblogs. If unemployment strikes that sub-group disproportionately, I'm forced to score one each for the market and for American meritocracy. Not, of course, that I like to see anyone out of work. posted by Anonymous10:55 AM
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The Watchers
WBW: Keeping track of the war exhortations of the warbloggers.
