Civil war has been averted in Iraq and Iranian intervention there has “ceased to exist,” Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said yesterday.
Super. So what will next week’s American casualties have died for? Let’s go home.
by Tim F| 17 Comments
This post is in: War
Civil war has been averted in Iraq and Iranian intervention there has “ceased to exist,” Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said yesterday.
Super. So what will next week’s American casualties have died for? Let’s go home.
by Tim F| 52 Comments
This post is in: War
Does the Iraqi government have a home video showing mercenaries from the Blackwater firm firing wild into a crowd of Iraqi civilians? If so it could be very, very bad news. Words can inform but pictures, especially moving pictures, carry emotional impact in a way that written accounts almost never do. Fairly specific stories about what we did at abu Ghraib circulated from reporters like Seymour Hersh for quite some time before one CD of pictures blew the story wide open.
A video showing totally unaccountable American contractors firing wildly into a crowd of civilians, unprovoked, could crystallize opinion at home and in Iraq in the same way as that abu Ghraib CD. It could, for example, add instant weight to allegations that the same thing has happened many, many times already. For that reason I hope the video doesn’t show that, or if it does that it doesn’t get out until we have pulled our troops out of harm’s way.
by Tim F| 40 Comments
This post is in: War
As everyone knows, hearts and minds are the key to winning counterinsurgency war. Failing that, they’re also the best place to drop a target with one round.
A Pentagon group has encouraged some U.S. military snipers in Iraq to target suspected insurgents by scattering pieces of “bait,” such as detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition, and then killing Iraqis who pick up the items, according to military court documents
[…] “Baiting is putting an object out there that we know they will use, with the intention of destroying the enemy,” Capt. Matthew P. Didier, the leader of an elite sniper scout platoon attached to the 1st Battalion of the 501st Infantry Regiment, said in a sworn statement. “Basically, we would put an item out there and watch it. If someone found the item, picked it up and attempted to leave with the item, we would engage the individual as I saw this as a sign they would use the item against U.S. Forces.”
Ludicrous as it might seem this “baiting” tactic makes a certain sense as an answer to the maddeningly inchoate nature of insurgent war. Fielding the best-trained shooters on Earth (apologies to british SAS) only takes you so far when the opposition refuses to stand apart from the general population. Obviously if the enemy would stand up and attack us like the Russians were supposed to we would win, but then the enemy knows that if they did that they would lose. We have to deal with the fact that our opposition is not stupid and (mostly) not suicidal.
The same focus on identifying the enemy, what the army calls “separating tourists from terrorists,” shows up in the sales pitch for a new microwave-like active denial system from Raytheon. Hose a crowd with an agonizing pain ray, wait to see who doesn’t run (i.e., insurgents) and shoot them. Hearts and minds!
Look, I appreciate that insurgent war poses real problems for the army, and it makes sense to exercise some American entrepreneurial spirit in trying to fix it. The problem is that all of these “solutions” strike me as tactics smart (if that) and strategy foolish. In both cases the obvious likelihood of false positives (most cities hire people to pick up street trash) pretty much ensures that the system will casually murder any number of innocents among the actual hostiles. We would go berserk if someone operated that way on American soil and we shouldn’t accept it in Iraq.
On a more philosiphical level these micro solutions to a macro problem seem like stopgap efforts to manage a conflict when their necessity proves we have already lost. Granted that we started with one hand behind our back – we failed to plan for post-Saddam Iraq. Modern armies don’t fight insurgencies well. Our genius war cabinet stuck their fingers in their ears long after adapting might have done some good. By the time signs of desperation like ‘baiting’ started to appear the various insurgent groups deeply rooted themselves in the population at the the same time that we became hopelessly alienated from it.
by John Cole| 64 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing
From the comments:
Kinda swamped the next two days, so hopefully Tim can pick up the slack till Wednesday.
Translation:
Hopefully this whole NY Times mess is forgotten by then…
You saw through my scheme! Months ago, when I was scheduling a bunch of work-related things for this for this time period, I was merely planning in advance to dodge the tough questions! Last week, when I posted nothing but open threads with a few quick posts and noted I have a lot on my plate at the moment, it was just part of the dodge!
You are on to me! Seriously, folks- in the half decade this blog has been in operation, I don’t think I have ever avoided a fight or an opportunity to tell people to go fuck themselves (although as of late, I am a little hesistant telling that to our friends on the right, as I am afraid they will misinterpret me and end up in an airport bathroom with a congressional page). I see via the referral logs that the dead-enders at Red State and a certain stay-at-home dad are sending catcalls ourway, so I will make this brief. According to the NY Times, two things:
1.) The Public Editor seems to think the NY Times violated their internal policy about what is and is not appropriate to publish. I could care less about that, as it truly is an internal issue. I would recomend a policy that prints whatever (including pictures of aborted fetuses, Swift Boat ads, etc.) and letting the readers sort it out, but I don’t set the NY Times policy.
2.) The grievous “mistake” the Times is admitting to is that they were insufficiently careful in stating that “yes,” the ad would run on the date in question because there was space available, but that they were not guaranteeing it- at least that is how I am interpreting the following:
Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn.org, told me that his group called The Times on the Friday before Petraeus’s appearance on Capitol Hill and asked for a rush ad in Monday’s paper. He said The Times called back and “told us there was room Monday, and it would cost $65,000.” Pariser said there was no discussion about a standby rate. “We paid this rate before, so we recognized it,” he said. Advertisers who get standby rates aren’t guaranteed what day their ad will appear, only that it will be in the paper within seven days.
Catherine Mathis, vice president of corporate communications for The Times, said, “We made a mistake.” She said the advertising representative failed to make it clear that for that rate The Times could not guarantee the Monday placement but left MoveOn.org with the understanding that the ad would run then. She added, “That was contrary to our policies.”
Pretty thin gruel.
Now, if the NY Times did secretly guarantee it, while charging them the standby rate, then that is a different matter altogether, and to hell with them- they are lying and can rot. Otherwise, it seems to me that with what has been disclosed so far there is not much there, there.
At any rate, there it is. I have addressed this pressing issue, and am glad to contribute to furthering the growth of MoveOn (sending in more money was a master stroke by Pariser- it will guarantee a few days more coverage and they can now pressure Giuliani to pay more, thus keeping the story alive for a few more days. Not a bad 70k spent considering they have taken in over a half a million since the ad originally appeared) and dodging the actual substance of the sketchy Petraeus testimony.
For future reference, I will be busy for the next few days. Thus, I will be unable to blog about the Jena 6, Ahjminialphabets trip to Columbia and the UN, whether OJ is guilty, our new plan to win hearts and minds with snipers, and whatever else is going on that requires my not-so-urgent attention. Again, hopefully Tim will pick up the slack.
PS- We are up to 3798 dead, who knows how many injured, and just threw another 50 billion into operations. Have we won yet?
by John Cole| 51 Comments
This post is in: Sports
Go Steelers.
Kinda swamped the next two days, so hopefully Tim can pick up the slack till Wednesday.
*** Update ***
A decisive Steelers win.
by Tim F| 70 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Republican Stupidity
Nothing in modern politics seems to defy the laws of physics more than the Rudolph Giuliani campaign for the Republican nomination. Watching a thrice-married serial adulterer who supports abortion rights and gay rights and knows less most policy matters than your average rhododendron try to win over Dobson and Tancredo’s loyal minions has the roughly the same feel as watching the test car approach the striped wall in super-slow motion.
Rudy’s latest incoherent policy position concerns an ongoing gun control lawsuit that he himself filed. The suit, which goes on without him, puts an amusingly ironic light on the 9/11 mayor’s newfound need for guns ‘n gays value voters. Giuliani has stuck to his cross-dressing guns better than the other GOP frontrunners, but when he agreed to speak directly to the NRA everyone got ready for philosophical acrobatics worthy of a judge panel. But, BUT, how would a guy who works 9/11 into every third sentence justify such an abject flipflop? Nobody could have anticipated (via Benen):
“That lawsuit has taken several turns and several twists that I don’t agree with,” he said, without going into specifics. “I also think that there are some major intervening events — September 11, which cast somewhat of a different light on the Second Amendment, doesn’t change it fundamentally but perhaps highlights the necessity of it.”
From Benen:
Asked to explain the shift, a campaign spokesperson said Giuliani was “making a point that personal rights such as the 2nd Amendment are even more critical in a post-September 11th world.”
Absolutely right. Indeed this stance dovetails perfectly with the other freedoms that post-9/11 Giuliani has embraced, such as…wait, I can’t think of any. Since 9/11 Giuliani has decided that the government can eavesdrop on anyone it wants without any of that pesky oversight stuff (to be fair, his behavior as mayor suggests that isn’t new). He rejects habeas corpus for foreigners and Americans designated by the president without independent review. He supports torture, approves of unchecked executive power and hates freedom of speech. The few socially liberal positions that Rudy hasn’t yet given up (teh ghey!) hardly count as post-9/11 revelations.
Rudy and the rest of his post-9/11 party seem to want a totalitarian police state, but one where a terrorist can buy an assault weapon without waiting, without a background check and without a permanent record of the transaction. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
by John Cole| 21 Comments
This post is in: Sports
Mountaineers v. ECU.
Go Eers!
*** Update ***
48-7, and kinda boring. Not the kind of game I was hoping for, since I think they needed a tough game before heading to Florida.