Tuesday, September 30, 2003
[posted by jaed at 9:46 PM]Good question.
Peeve Farm wonders:
Most importantly, why has post-war success in Iraq been reduced to an underground secret, passed around from friend to friend like fish symbols in the dirt? Why do hundreds of thousands of Stalinists get to march in the streets, supported by relentless "quagmire" mumbo-jumbo from the major media, and wave banners about how Bush and Ashcroft crack down on all dissent and unpatriotic speech? (And why do so few people see the immensity of the irony inherent there?)
Saturday, September 27, 2003
[posted by jaed at 10:21 PM]Slippage
A lot of masks have slipped in the past two years. (I may return to this theme soon.) The indispensable Watch offers an English translation of an essay in the French periodical Liberåtion: "<La pente savonneuse de l'antisémitisme (The Slippery Slope of Anti-Semitism)":
But another group of people, far more dangerous to my eyes, also have an definitive view of things: they are all those highly respected intellectuals for whom anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism can never, no, never, contain an ounce of anti-Semitism. One could say anything about Israel and the support that Jewish communities have for it, unleash a torrent of insults on the Israeli people, define the Israeli-American axis as a new axis of Evil, name what happened at Jenin as an “Auschwitz” (dixit Saramago), compare Israeli soldiers to the SS, treat the Jewish state as a pariah among nations, without ever being accused of anti-Semitism. For them, anti-Semitism is confined to Le Pen and to Mégret. Besides, there has not been any rise in anti-Semitism in France ,the Jews are exaggerating. They’re hysterical. There is no anti-Semitism in the outer city housing estates, the fire-bombings of synagogues and the assaults on Jewish schools are “embellished” by the Jewish community...
What is serious in my view is that the perverse efforts of this little group are starting to bear fruit in French society: more and more people are saying and writing things about Israel and the Jews that they never would have allowed themselves to say or write a few years ago. They would never have allowed themselves to say such things because they would have been immediately put in their place by their neighbors, their friends and acquaintances, because their co-workers, at university or in the laboratory, would have turned their backs on them. Apparently, such opprobrium no longer exists, which is why they can say whatever they want.
[posted by jaed at 9:56 PM]
Eamon Fitzgerald's Rainy Day is one of those blogs with a bit of everything, refreshing to the mind because it's all filtered through a literate and generous sensibility. It should have massive readership. My three loyal readers (well, maybe it's two by now - I may well have lost one during the most recent unexplained hiatus) are very much urged to check it out.
One frequent feature of Rainy Day is its excerpts from diaries of the past. Today's caught my eye:
Diarist of the day: David Gascoyne, 27 September 1938I wonder whether some blogger will make a similar post a few years from now, a few weeks after a nuclear bomb goes off in Chicago, about a president of the United States.
"Listened this evening to Chamberlain's wireless address. He spoke slowly, in a sad and exhausted voice, and expressed a pathetically sincere horror of war. However much one may have disliked, even despised this man before, the crisis, and however true it may be that the futile policy of his government in the past is responsible for the present situation, one cannot deny that during the last few weeks he has done everything one could possibly expect him to do; and his attitude has been human and dignified, in stark contrast with the crude mock-heroic posturing of the Nazi villain."
Thursday, September 25, 2003
[posted by jaed at 3:21 PM]Rumsfelt talks sense, film at eleven
Today's WaPo has a Rumsfeld piece discussing Iraq. There is the expected reiteration of the positive statistics he rolled out a couple of weeks ago:
We have made solid progress: Within two months, all major Iraqi cities and most towns had municipal councils -- something that took eight months in postwar Germany. Within four months the Iraqi Governing Council had appointed a cabinet -- something that took 14 months in Germany. An independent Iraqi Central Bank was established and a new currency announced in just two months -- accomplishments that took three years in postwar Germany. Within two months a new Iraqi police force was conducting joint patrols with coalition forces. Within three months, we had begun training a new Iraqi army -- and today some 56,000 are participating in the defense of their country. By contrast, it took 14 months to establish a police force in Germany and 10 years to begin training a new German army.And there's also some philosophizing about the concept of "nation-building":
Why is enlisting Iraqis in security and governance so important?The concept of nation-building has always bothered me - not least because it conflates a number of different kinds of projects, some of which are more realistic (and more helpful) than others. The first time I remember seeing the term widely used was in reference to Somalia, where it seemed to represent a grandiose vision of creation of a nation out of nothing. I don't think that's ever going to work well.
Because it is their country. We are not in Iraq to engage in nation-building -- our mission is to help Iraqis so that they can build their own nation. That is an important distinction.
A foreign presence in any country is unnatural. It is much like a broken bone. If it's not set properly at the outset, the muscles and tendons will grow around the break, and eventually the body will adjust to the abnormal condition.
People have lately been using the term "nation-building" to describe what was done in Germany and Japan after WWII, but both Germany and Japan were nations before that. What we did is more like "nation-reconstituting" - taking apart and rebuilding political structures, taking measures to change political attitudes, along with financial aid and investment to deal with immediate material needs and get the economy on the road to recovery.
This is drastic, but it's not the same as creating a nation out of the raw stuff of human beings; if these countries hadn't already had deep national identities, what came out the other end of the process wouldn't have been a nation. Anarchy, perhaps. Or perhaps a conglomerate of polities stuck together with tape and ready to come apart when stressed, like Yugoslavia.
These ruminations of course invite consideration of which category Iraq falls into. Iraq started life as an artificial state, one of many that European colonialism left behind. Various groups are stuck together with duct tape into one country, inside one set of borders, and most of those groups extend outside the borders. If people identify with their group - Kurds, Arabs, whoever - more closely than with the country, it's a recipe for disaster. I'm not sure myself whether I think Iraq is a viable country in the long term.
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
[posted by jaed at 1:32 PM]Today's "oh for fuck's sake!" moment of the day
In the middle of a UPI story about the Iraqi Governing Council's temporary ban on al Jazeera and al Arabiya, I find this, dropped in insouciantly:
Subhy Haddad - the former head of the Iraqi News Agency as well as a long time contributor to Reuters and the BBC - said he had mixed feelings about the decision to stifle the two networks. [emphasis mine]Oh, I'll just bet he does. The head of Saddam's official news arm also reported for Reuters and the BBC? I google his name, and yes, so it seems. He is identified by the BBC as "a BBC reporter and resident of Baghdad". Christ on a pogo stick.
Cautious disclaimer: I was not able to find any Google mention of his alleged former position as head of the Iraqi News Agency. It could be a mistake in the story.
Monday, September 22, 2003
[posted by jaed at 11:13 AM]The virtue (? maybe if you're a "paleoconservative") of unnecessary hard work
Regions of Mind has an interesting post on modernity, technology, and conservative views of same. It starts out as a review of a book review, but keeps right on going:
My mother is a (miraculously capable) lady in her 80s. When she grew up on a farm in North�Carolina�in the 1920s and '30s, her family made its own candles and sewed its own clothes. (The family did own a Model T, however.) When I took my kids down to the historic downtown of Brownville, in the far southeastern corner of Nebraska, about a month ago, we stopped by the quaint little broom shop there. The owner makes brooms of all sizes right in front of visitors. When I talked to my Mom by phone the next day, I told her about the store and asked her if her family had made its own brooms when she was a girl. Mom's reply: "We sure did." She told me the basic mechanics of how they did it."Let it be read by you," as Amritas is fond of saying.
Sunday, September 21, 2003
[posted by jaed at 12:40 PM]Late out the gate again
(Everyone's already linked this too, but I want to put a link here for my own use.) An anti-war judge visits Iraq for five weeks, as part of a delegation to help evaluate the Iraqi justice system. here (more readable format) and here (more complete text).
Like virtually every first-person report that hasn't come through the conventional media, he tells us that the story we're getting from said media doesn't reflect reality. (It startles me how close to unanimous this view is. And it scares me, since most people don't have access to non-conventional views.)
Having decided to topple Saddam, we cannot abandon those who trust us. I fear we will quit as the horrors of war come into our living rooms. Look at the stories you are getting from the media today. The steady drip, drip, drip of bad news may destroy our will to fulfill the obligations we have assumed. WE ARE NOT GETTING THE WHOLE TRUTH FROM THE NEWS MEDIA. The news you watch, listen to and read is highly selective. Good news doesn't sell.(emphasis in original)
It's a very interesting read, with both plaudits and complaints about both Iraqis and US forces. If by some chance you haven't read it yet, you should.
[posted by jaed at 11:07 AM]
(Everyone and their siblings have already linked to this, so if you're reading this you've probably already seen it). John Burns on the press and its responsibilities:
Editors of great newspapers, and small newspapers, and editors of great television networks should exact from their correspondents the obligation of telling the truth about these places. It's not impossible to tell the truth. I have a conviction about closed societies, that they're actually much easier to report on than they seem, because the act of closure is itself revealing. Every lie tells you a truth. If you just leave your eyes and ears open, it's extremely revealing.As various people have already remarked, this makes an interesting bookend with Eason Jordan's piece about how CNN just couldn't help slanting its news for years to accommodate a dictator.
We now know that this place was a lot more terrible than even people like me had thought. There is such a thing as absolute evil. I think people just simply didn't recognize it. They rationalized it away.
Saturday, September 20, 2003
[posted by jaed at 9:07 PM]Le Frog, C'est Moi
Gene Weingarten goes in search of French rudeness (among other things) in the Washington Post. And he finds it, but only by employing subterfuge and unsubtle techniques:
I began by assuring M. Gaymard that confrontation and controversy were the last things on my mind; that my role was conciliatory; that my questions were designed to elicit an open and frank exchange of views, so vital to the healing process. The minister inclined his head graciously, and I began.Heh heh heh, as Instapundit might say in a voluble mood.
"I think we can both agree that the diplomatic situation between our two nations is both regrettable and unnecessary . . . Perhaps the worst part is that it has resurrected in the United States some ugly, unfair, inaccurate and totally unsupportable stereotypes about the French. You know: that you are elitist, that you are rude, that you are cowards, that you have an insufferable air of superiority, that your fashion shows are nothing more than elaborate parades of clown costumes . . ."
The minister waited for translation.
". . . that your movies are long and boring and unbearably pretentious, that you lack personal hygiene and let your dogs poop all over the streets, and indeed, that your national pet, the poodle, is a ridiculous life form better never to have survived the evolutionary process."
The minister shifted slightly in his chair.
"I will not insult you, or dignify these preposterous, obviously untrue stereotypes by asking you to respond to them. But I was just wondering if the French have any equally preposterous and obviously untrue stereotypes about Americans that you might enumerate here for the purpose of my not dignifying them with a response."
Friday, September 19, 2003
[posted by jaed at 9:40 AM]Iraq and al Qaeda:
Another good summary article, this one on intelligence about collaboration between the Baathists and al Qaeda leadership.
As with other such articles, I didn't notice anything new, but it's a handy all-in-one-place kind of thing. As with most intelligence summaries, it's not definitive courtroom-quality proof, but it's well worth reading, especially if one's basis for thinking the two organizations could never ever cooperate is "But Saddam was Secular, and al Qaeda was Religious, and they Hated Each Other!!!"
Thursday, September 18, 2003
[posted by jaed at 11:57 PM]"This isn't a game. This isn't about poking a stick at George Bush. This is our lives."
Johann Hari writes about a group of young Iraqi exiles who went back in June and July to see the situation for themselves, returning recently. Their experience pretty much corroborates what we've learned from polls: Iraqis are hopeful, sensible, and realize there's a lot of work yet to do.
One thing that's bothered me lately is that without exception, reports from Iraq from people who have spent some in-depth time there and aren't mainstream-media journalists have, shall we say, differed from the official media view of Iraq-as-quagmire, Vietnam in the making, everybody-hates-us-why-don't-we-eat-some-worms, etc. This from an on-site observer explains it as cogently as anything I've seen:
Rather, Yasser says, there are several reasons why the reporting from Iraq is stressing the negative over the positive. "First, buildings being bombed is a much better story than the formation of the Baghdad city council to clear up the rubbish and sort out the sewers. Angry Iraqis make a better story than hopeful Iraqis."You know what to do next.
"Second, a lot of the media was openly anti-war, so now that there are hundreds of thousands of mass graves being opened up and all the evidence shows that the Iraqis supported [the war], the media are latching on to the few things, like the looting and, of course, the weapons issue - that was always a red herring - that seem to vindicate their position. And third - I know this sounds like a petty point, but it's very important - a lot of journalists are using the same guides and translators that they used before the war, because they know them. They don't seem to realise that those people were carefully selected by the regime because of their loyalty to Saddam's line. So most journalists are getting a totally distorted picture."
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
[posted by jaed at 12:43 PM]What's the Sanskrit for "magnificent rant"?
Amritas seems to be on a roll lately:
Ahhh, AmeriKKKa, whipping boy of the world! Got a problem? Blame it on us - yes, US with two capital letters! Nurture your Amerikahass (America-hate). It's a German term. Deutsch is sehr cool since it's not the forked tongue of the Busch-Blair Axis of Evil. Let your Amerikahass overflow. Impress your friends, including AmeriKKKans ashamed of themselves. Everybody knows that soPHISticated people HATE AmeriKKKa. Intelligence and patriotism never mix. Don't just question - denounce! Protest at every opportunity! Wait for that moment when the Gestapo takes you away, when you can die as a martyr to The Cause™! (Yeah, it'll never happen, but you can dream, can't you? You too could be Mumia. Wait and see!) You are a member of la résistance! Doesn't it feel exciting to be part of a Movement™? There may only be a few of you bright enough to see through der Busch's plot right now, but eventually entire mobs will storm the White House (what a racist term!) and liberate AmeriKKKa from its self-appointed Führer (NEVER FORGET FLORIDA!!). Then true Democrat (you were expecting democratic?) elections would be held, AmeriKKKa would withdraw from the world, and all would be right again, with Leftist yuppies sipping overpriced coffee in their SUVs - dying every now and then (hey, THEY DESERVE IT!!) - while millions outside the Satanic borders suffer under Great Leadership™. "Suffer"? Who's to say they don't like it?As with any satire, you can derive this sort of thing by taking the actual rhetoric and giving it a twist of the broiler knob. The frightening thing is that you don't need to twist the knob all that hard these days to come up with something like this.
Friday, September 12, 2003
[posted by jaed at 5:11 PM]Fun With IP Law
Apparently someone has a patent on plugins, or at least on automatic launching of plugins to play data external to the page. (Flash developers, that bell you hear may be tolling for you.) Why I haven't heard about this before now is one of those mysteries - I suppose I haven't been paying enough attention to tech news. The patent holder Eolas has already won at trial against Microsoft, but of course this potentially affects all browsers with plugin capability (not to mention all web pages that use external data). Sounds like a mess.
Thursday, September 11, 2003
[posted by jaed at 7:40 PM]September 11th
I was still asleep when it happened. The phone rang at about 7:30 Pacific time, and I ignored it and went back to sleep. By the time I got up, it was 9:45. The message was from a friend saying "Major terrorist action in New York! Check it out!"
I went through that moment of blurrily thinking she was kidding.
Then I turned on the television. Flip, flip, several channels of Portland's useless mayor talking about how "the city is secure" - no actual information to be had, but the same thing was on all the networks, so I knew something was going on. I don't have cable, so there weren't many choices. Flip, flip. PBS had Barney: no. Fox News, at the end of the dial, had a live shot of a city skyline, obviously New York, with lots of smoke, and someone talking about reports of a car bomb outside the State Department, something happening at the Pentagon. I'm not very familiar with New York, so it took me a minute to understand what I was seeing. I was thinking that with all that smoke, there must be a terrible fire somewhere in New York, this must be what was happening.
Then I thought wait a minute, isn't there supposed to be a building there where all that smoke is?
And then the announcer recapped, and I understood that what I was looking at was the World Trade Center, which wasn't there any more (nor any of the people who had been in it), because someone had flown a passenger jet into it.
No theme music, no clever logos, no titles - all that offensive garbage came later, after the news producers had had time to get their breath back - just a video feed along with about twenty words of simple recitation of the facts. And two thoughts in my head:
"Oh, my God."
"We're at war."
Sunday, September 07, 2003
[posted by jaed at 7:05 PM]Are democracy and Islam compatible?
Free Thoughts on Iran hosts a lengthy discussion ondemocracy and Islam. I won't excerpt it (primarily because I don't think a brief excerpt will do it justice), but various interesting thoughts from Muslims approaching the question from different angles, the distinction between "democracy" and "guaranteed rights", etc. Well worth reading the whole thing.
Saturday, September 06, 2003
[posted by jaed at 11:15 PM]"When the phone rings, it's us."
Natalie Solent offers a creative way to deal with telemarketers:
Hi, my name is Shelley and I'm calling to ask if you'd be interested in a new service offered by British Orangecom."Indeed (TM Instapundit).
[Very enthusiastically] "Yes!"
"Wo-? Um. It's about 'Friends & Family 2003', a new call tariff that--"
"Yes. Oh yes."
"A NEW CALL TARIFF THAT OFFERS-"
"Yes! Yes! Yes! Oh, oh, oh yes!"
[Click.]
See, it is quite possible to dispose of these creatures while maintaining an entirely positive attitude.
