We haven’t had one in a while.
Archives for September 2006
About That August Decline In Baghdad Civilian Deaths
Somebody made it up. Never happened. Head over to Michael Stickings’s blog for the whole story.
Both the U.S. military and Iraqi authorities, after all, had good reason to report a significant drop in Baghdad’s death toll — that is, to lie. For both, as well as for America’s civilian leadership back in Washington, a drop would have indicated that real progress was being made in establishing order in Baghdad, in protecting Iraqi citizens from the insurgents and more generally in combatting and overcoming the insurgency itself, transferring security responsibility from U.S. forces to Iraqi forces, and in setting up a stable political climate from which the U.S. could comfortably withdraw and in which the fragile Iraqi government could govern effectively.
But, again, it was all a lie. The violence continues. The killing continues. The truth can be found at the Baghdad morgue. And throughout the rest of a country in chaos.
Like Michael I always thought that moving troops to Baghdad would be like squeezing a balloon, securing some of Baghdad at the cost of increased violence somewhere else. Now it turns out that even that didn’t work. In retrospect I guess that renders my ‘modest proposal‘ below somewhat moot. Maybe at this point the various violent factions have dug their trenches deep enough that they will go on killing us and each other no matter what we send in. When faced with an unpleasant reality (getting out and leaving chaos) and an impossible solution (pacifying Iraq) serious thinkers generally accept the reality. Refusal to do so doesn’t fix problems, it only postpones the pain.
About That August Decline In Baghdad Civilian DeathsPost + Comments (66)
The Harris Syndrome
In The China Syndrome filmmakers proposed a hilariously misinformed scenario where the melted-down core of a nuclear reactor escapes containment, bursn its way through the Earth’s core and comes out the other side in China. Besides the gravity-defying second half of the putative reactor’s trip the scenario also ignores what happens when the core meets the water table about thirty feet down (think geyser).
So the film was nuts, right alongside awful works like The Day After Tomorrow and The Core. Yet somehow whenever I hear news about the Katherine Harris Senate campaign these days I keep thinking of a self-sustanining meltdown defying the laws of physics and common sense, tirelessly tunneling past the Earth’s crust and into uncharted regions of embarrassment. Two recent reports from Steve Benen, for example. The campaign is apparently working with its third management team after the first two consecutively resigned and denounced Harris as a delusional dragon lady. Who knows, maybe she will go for four. The campaign seems to follow a weird kind of movie logic.
The latest news: deep-Earth geologists report that the Harris campaign has won the Florida GOP primary by a wide margin. Democrats and bad movie fans celebrate.
***Update***
The self-correcting blogosphere in action! The movie didn’t take the China idea seriously either. My apologies if anybody involved with the movie reads this blog.
The ABC Mockumentary
Let’s say off the bat that somebody will get fired for this. After ABC has to eat its $30 million investment they might sack whoever decided to aggressively promote a fictionalization of the events leading to 9/11, written by a known conservative activist and promoted exclusively to rightwing blogs and allied news outlets like Rush Limbaugh and NewsMax. Sensible managers would cut loose the genius who decided to chase the evaporating FOX News demographic and influence an election with blatantly untrue efforts to shift the blame for 9/11 to a previous administration. Glenn Greenwald has a thorough rundown, of course, and via Glenn I will take this opportunity to wholly agree with Mark Coffey at Decision ’08:
Again, the partisan aspect interests me not at all; this is 9/11, and ‘reasonably accurate’ isn’t good enough. Either go completely fiction or stick to the facts. This sounds an awful lot like the Dan Rather excuse for the National Guard fiasco (that the essence of the story was true, even if the details were fabricated), and I’m not interested in this sort of clever parsing of words.
I understand the need to do composite scenes and characters in media with a limited duration, but this is going a bit far. I’ll probably still watch it, but my enthusiasm has dimmed considerably.
The hype around the Reagan docudrama always struck me as incredibly inane given the nature of the “offenses” and the overall relevance to our modern political scene. It seems inarguably true that whatever your political standing defacing the memory of 9/11 is far uglier than any damage done by dramatizing the life of Ronald Reagan. Tell ABC that it is time to pull the show:
ThinkProgress page
Contact ABC directly
***Update***
Editor & Publisher reviews the film. The “drama” in “docudrama” apparently consists of indicting Clinton for things that never happened, and glossing over anything that might make the current president look bad.
If ABC really thinks that this is a “dramatization” (their current defense) then why have they distributed study guides to over 10,000 students? You don’t ask students to study made-up history. Somebody honestly thought that they could get away with rewriting the history of the most traumatic even in recent American history. Nauseating.
Saber Rattling
This is not the kind of news I want to read:
US President George W. Bush branded Iran’s president a tyrant and compared leaders in Tehran to Al-Qaeda terrorists who cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons.
“America will not bow down to tyrants,” he said in the second of a series of election-year speeches defending his handling of the war on terrorism and Iraq. “The world’s free nations will not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.”
Bush accused Iran of funding the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah and other groups “to attack Israel and America by proxy” and said Hezbollah was second only to Al-Qaeda in the number of US citizens it has killed.
I tend to agree that the Iranian president is a tyrant. I agree they are developing, trying to develop, or dying to develop nuclear weapons. I also agree they should not be trusted with them.
But I honestly do not know what can be done about it, what should be done about it, or whether I trust the current adminstration to do anything about it.
You could say I am gunshy.
Three Four Opinions On Iraq
Attacks and civilian deaths in Iraq have risen sharply in recent months, with casualties increasing by 1,000 a month, and sectarian violence has engulfed larger areas of the country, the Pentagon said Friday in a strikingly dismal report to Congress.
The quarterly report, based on new government figures, showed the number of attacks in Iraq over the last four months had increased 15% and Iraqi casualties had risen by 51%. Civilian and military deaths and injuries have surpassed 3,000 each month since May.
Over a longer period, the increase in violence is more dramatic. Weekly attacks have nearly doubled, from 423 in spring 2004 to 792. More than 110 people a day died violently in Iraq in the last three months, the report said, up from fewer than 30 a day in 2004.
[…] Overall, the tone of the 63-page report is markedly less optimistic than previous quarterly assessments, which the Pentagon has been required to make since last year.
“This is a pretty sober report,” said Peter Rodman, the assistant secretary of Defense for international security. “The last quarter has been rough. The level of violence is up. And the sectarian quality of the violence is particularly acute and disturbing.”
The report noted an early August dip in civilian deaths which corresponded to the major redeployment of US troops to Baghdad. Even though the dip did not last through August, the simple effectiveness of boots on the ground makes you wonder what would have happened if we had entered Iraq with enough boots to provide credible security. We did not of course, because Rumsfeld and the neocons had separate ideological visions that could only be served by using a light, inexpensive force with no preparations for postwar operations whatsoever. At this point we might as well file that in the same place that we put speculation about what would have happened if JFK had lived through two terms.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, widely regarded as the ultimate bellweather for Iraq’s chances at a peaceful resolution to sectarian strife and civil war:
The most influential moderate Shia leader in Iraq has abandoned attempts to restrain his followers, admitting that there is nothing he can do to prevent the country sliding towards civil war.
Aides say Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is angry and disappointed that Shias are ignoring his calls for calm and are switching their allegiance in their thousands to more militant groups which promise protection from Sunni violence and revenge for attacks.
“I will not be a political leader any more,” he told aides. “I am only happy to receive questions about religious matters.”
It is a devastating blow to the remaining hopes for a peaceful solution in Iraq and spells trouble for British forces, who are based in and around the Shia stronghold of Basra.
[…] Hundreds of thousands of people have turned away from al-Sistani to the far more aggressive al-Sadr. Sabah Ali, 22, an engineering student at Baghdad University, said that he had switched allegiance after the murder of his brother by Sunni gunmen. “I went to Sistani asking for revenge for my brother,” he said. “They said go to the police, they couldn’t do anything.
“But even if the police arrest them, they will release them for money, because the police are bad people. So I went to the al-Sadr office. I told them about the terrorists’ family. They said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get revenge for your brother’. Two days later, Sadr’s people had killed nine of the terrorists, so I felt I had revenge for my brother. I believe Sadr is the only one protecting the Shia against the terrorists.”
From the story, who does Sabah Ali mean by the terrorists? The simplest reading of that quote is that he means Sunni Iraqis in general. It seems highly unlikely that the actual killers of his brother were ever found and even less likely that Sadrist gangs would need prompting to kill actual, active terrorists. Needless to say nine Sunni families now want a fair share of reprisal blood of their own, and on it goes.
President Bush on Saturday kept up his pre-election offensive on Iraq despite a new Pentagon report describing a deteriorating security situation there.
Initial results from a new U.S.-Iraqi campaign to improve the security situation in Baghdad are encouraging, Bush said, and insurgents have failed to drive Iraq into full-blown civil war.
“Our commanders and diplomats on the ground believe that Iraq has not descended into a civil war,” Bush said in his weekly radio address. “They report that only a small number of Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, while the overwhelming majority want peace and a normal life in a unified country.”
The president acknowledged “a bloody campaign of sectarian violence” and the “difficult and dangerous” work of trying to end it.
Amazingly enough, none of those statements are outright lies. Neither al-Sistani nor the Pentagon believe that Iraq has already fallen into civil war, they merely think that the outcome is practically inevitable. Similarly it may be true that a “small number” of Iraqis have engaged in sectarian bloodshed. That means a bit less when that small number has an astounding work ethic and little to nothing in the way of government security to oppose it. As I pointed out before people will naturally respond to the violent power vacuum by forming or firming up their own sectarian militias for self-defense and the occasional reprisal killings. Passive migration and ethnic cleansing (currently well underway) will clear up the geographic battle lines, opposition governments will form and then the real fun will get underway.
If America wants to do anything other than get while the getting is good, let me make a modest proposal. Iraqis need law enforcement authority from either us or the current government or else, as is happening right now, they will take “security” into their own hands. Literally nobody thinks that the Iraqi forces are capable of that on their own. The U.S. could help, but our current force protection posture keeps our troops bottled up in FOBs and high-speed combat patrols which could care less what happens around them as long as it doesn’t happen to a U.S. troop. Real security will only come from having enough boots to make every carjacker and street thug think think that a soldier might be looking over his shoulder – and willing to get involved. Hence the 500,000 troops projected by Gen. Eric Shinseki. We, via the Pentagon and Paul Bremer, made the decision to liquidate Iraq’s entire security infrastructure and we need to either put up the manpower to replace it or accept the inevitable consequences.
Obviously I realize the alternate plane of reality that we are talking about here. Acting as a real security force in Iraq would require an immediate draft and a willingness to accept Vietnam-level casualties. We might still fail, in fact we probably would regardless. But if one wants to feel hope without the shame of self-delusion then there it is. So why do serious thinkers like Jack Murtha (as opposed to the “serious” clowns who followed Curveball down the garden path) think that the time has come to pull up stakes? Nobody seriously believes that 500,000 troops will ever station in Iraq at the same time. Faced with the choice between an unpleasant reality and an impossible solution the serious thinker will accept reality and deal with it, not pull into a protective ball of denial. You cannot just make up choices if reality presents you with ones you do not like, and the time has long passed to fish or cut bait.
***Update***
Talk about synchronicity. From the comments, I beat John Murtha by about one hour:
If we are to fight this war with the same sense of dedication and vigor as we did prior wars, we cannot do it without a surge in force.
It is unlikely that the President will call for a draft. A draft is politically unpopular. But we cannot continue to allow the President to pursue open-ended and vague military missions without a change in direction.
Two years ago, I was one of only two in the House of Representatives who voted for a draft, because I believe if we are a country truly at war, the burden should be shared proportionately and fairly. So Mr. President, you have two options, either change the course in Iraq and reduce the burden on our overstretched active force or reinstitute the draft. We cannot sustain the current course.
Exactly, fish or cut bait. “Stay the course” isn’t a decision, it is a refusal to make a decision.
RIP Steve Irwin
This sucks:
Television personality and environmentalist Steve Irwin has died from a stingray wound while filming off north Queensland.
Friends believe he may have died instantly when struck by a stingray as he filmed a sequence for his eight-year-old daughter Bindi’s new TV series.
Irwin’s friend of 20 years, Ferre De Deyne said Irwin had been struck by the stingray while filming. “The stingray just happened to be swimming around and out of the blue whacked his tail at him,” he said.
“It is absolutely tragic. I have dived so many times with stingrays and they are usually very placid things,” he said.
Known worldwide as the Crocodile Hunter, 44-year-old Irwin was famous for his enthusiasm for wildlife and his catchcry “Crikey!”Z
It will seem shitty of me to say this, but anyone who didn’t see something like this coming is blind. Well, maybe not seeing him die from a stingray tail to the chest, but something along the lines of an animal attack. I always loved the show, but in the back of my mind during episodewas that I felt doing this sort of thing with a wife and children was supremely irresponsible.