I'm sorry, but that is one fugly wedding dress. I cannot believe she -- or, more likely, Russell Crowe -- paid £100,000 (over $155,000 US) for it. Then again, looks like Russell shaved and had a wash for the big day, so I guess anything is possible.
02:41 a.m.
Many who assembled in the city square chanted "Saddam is no more!" and "Saddam is dead!" as they pulled on a rope, yanking the Hussein statue from its perch. Once the statue tumbled, many in the crowd jumped up and down, struck their chests and wept.
The statue was erected shortly after Hussein came to power decades ago, according to Karbala residents, and seeing it fall was a moment many would never forget.
"We have been living in fear for so many years, and we have been taught in the schools that Saddam would never die," said Hassan Muhammad, 20, as he helped pull on the rope. "This is a historic day, and we will celebrate this day always."
I can only hope that, as more and more of these stories are shown on TV, in newspapers and on the web, that more and more "peace" protesters will realise what many of us have known all along: that the absence of war in Iraq did not constitute a peaceful existence.
02:21 a.m.
An elderly man added in broken English: “Good, good, good — Mr W. Bush, no Saddam.”
As US troops proudly wore flowers given to them by townsfolk, a 25-year-old said he could not understand opposition to the war.
He asked: “Everyone who refuses this war — why?”
Pointing to the statue [of Saddam], he went on: “Come here and live two days with this man, and then refuse this war.”
02:09 a.m.
Joe Biden must be stopped. I'm calling my Ohio senators, Mike DeWine and George Voinovich (two of the most repugnant politicians on the face of the earth; their Republican party membership is mere coincidence) tomorrow about this shiznit. Read more here about this ridiculous legislation that Biden is trying to sneak through on the coattails of a totally unrelated act.
"Working for the U.S. Marines 24th Expeditionary Unit as an interpreter, Al-Emeri, 43, is hugged by his sister Suhila after being reunited with local villagers after 12 years, Monday, April 7, 2003, in Qal'at Sukkar, 100 kms. north of Nasariyah, Iraq."
[A]any potential tension melted quickly into jubilation when the people of Qal'at Sukkar learned one of their own had come home.
Khuder Al-Emeri, 43, left his Seattle restaurant behind three months ago to join the Free Iraqi Forces, a group of exiles trained by the U.S. military to serve as interpreters and guides in Iraq.
[...]
When news got out that Al-Emeri was back, crowds of men flooded into the streets and pressed around him, cheering and clapping and pushing up against Marines in defensive positions. One man rushed up to an American with a wreath of plastic flowers to hug him, rifle and all, despite the Marine's best efforts to maintain his distance.
"We have had enough!" the crowd chanted, and several young men also shouted "George Bush, yes!"
[...]
His family were among those who rushed out to greet him — including his 15-year-old son, Ali, whom he hadn't seen since he left Iraq. When they first saw each other, they embraced tightly and wept.
Ali Al-Emeri said he was afraid to ever let his father go away again, but Al-Emeri assured him: "Stay home. You are safe. I am here, the U.S. forces are here."
12:38 a.m.
I've removed my sidebar link to The Agonist. Here's why.
12:08 a.m.
Labour MP Tom Watson says that "if [Galloway] thinks that his government really is guilty of war crimes, the only honourable thing to do is resign". I think that's expecting way too much out of a scumsucking Saddamite like Galloway, and I really don't see how Blair can stand for him to remain in the Labour Party, especially after his words and actions of the last week. Galloway says that losing the whip would mean Blair is quashing his right to free speech. As Iain Murray says: "Horsefeathers. Galloway would be free to sound off, but not as a Labour party member."
If you've not had your fill of Galloway's sleaze, check out this article about how he used a fund for the treatment of a young Iraqi girl with leukaemia to finance his trips to Iraq to chill with his homey Saddam. This guy is such a sick fuck. I am embarrassed for this country that he sits in the British Parliament at all, much less as a Labour Party member.
11:47 p.m.
Allow me to launch into full-on Chandler Bing mode and ask: could Margo Kingston BE any more useless? I thought it was bad when she claimed the other week that the US used nuclear weapons in Vietnam, but this might just trump that.
11:32 p.m.
QUESTION:...What many people in Europe will hear, through your words, is this is how the new partition of labor will be: America is looking for its Allies, is going its course with or without Allies, any number that’s available, and be it zero. And then the U.N.’s role is to go in as a good Samaritan and clean up the mess. That’s all they can do. America is already looking at its next destination.
SECRETARY POWELL: That’s absurd. It’s an absurd, simplistic, shorthand response to what people think we’re doing. In fact, we went to the U.N. in the first place with respect to this problem. It was a problem that belonged to the U.N. for twelve years -- this terrible regime that tortures its people, that developed weapons of mass destruction, that used them against its own people and then invaded its neighbors on two occasions. And we finally said to the United Nations, “If you would be relevant, if the international community would be relevant, we must deal with this.”
This is not a regime that will simply roll over and play dead. It will fight back. It will try to avoid consequences. So we got a very strong resolution passed. Unanimously. Fifteen to zero. And when it became clear to a number of members of the Security Council that it was time to apply those serious consequences, we took it back to the U.N. And the U.N. said, “Well, can’t agree on this.”
...Now there were some members of the Council who said, “We’ll veto anything.” And there were others of us who felt we must move forward. We must remove this danger to the world. Especially this regime that developed weapons of mass destruction and might actually allow some of these weapons to fall in the hands of terrorists. We will not apologize for this. We believe that we did what is right and we recognize that there is a great deal of opinion, especially in Europe, that thinks this was not the right approach. But I hope we will change this opinion, when everybody sees that after this conflict we’re not leaving it to be swept up by the United Nations. We are going to work with the United Nations and work with the international community. And guess who will be the major contributor, who will pay the most money to help the Iraqi people to get back on their feet? It will be the United States, as always.
Europeans, especially Germans, should recognize the American record, our history. Our history is not one of getting involved in conflicts just for the sake of it. We get involved in conflicts because there are major issues at stake that have to be resolved, unfortunately, by force of arms. But when you look at our history for the last sixty years, every time we found ourselves in this position, we did not just get up and walk away. We did everything we could to put in place a better system, a better society, than that which we had to go in and fight. And we will do it again this time.
In Kuwait, we fought to save a Muslim people that had been invaded by another Muslim people, Iraq, and we gave Kuwait back to its --
QUESTION: Rulers?
SECRETARY POWELL: -- rightful rulers. Its rightful rulers. Are you defending what Iraq did by invading Kuwait?
QUESTION: No.
SECRETARY POWELL: But the way you just posed that question, they were the rulers. The people of Kuwait were happy with their rulers. Iraq said we don’t care, we’re invading. We restored Kuwait to its rulers - its rightful rulers – and let them find their transition into a democratic form of government, as their people choose.
We went to Kosovo, another very controversial war, in order to save Muslims, in order to protect Muslims. And we went to Afghanistan in order to deal with the terrorist threat that had caused such destruction in the Untied States on 9/11.
And what have we done? Have we decided to make Afghanistan an American colony? No. We spent a huge amount of money and we are putting our young men and women on the line, every day, to put in place a form of government that was decided upon by the Afghan people. And we are helping them to rebuild and reconstruct their society. That pattern is the American pattern. We’re very proud of it. It’s been repeated many times over, and it will be repeated again in Iraq.
As they say in the US..."Booyah!" (Link via Andrew Sullivan.)
09:32 p.m.
I heard again on the radio today a series of talk-radio callers who believed that Bush could be as bad as Hitler, and they all pointed to his unnerving combination of religious faith and willingness to use military power. It makes me laugh, really - one of my favorite clips I saved from the TiVo is some tall scary Iraqi guy in a uniform, replete with meaningless medals, insisting that God is on their side - and he’s waving an automatic rifle at the assembled journalists. Has the President ever done this?
Well, not literally, but metaphorically, he’s -
Whatever. I remember what Robin Williams, the intermittently amusing hairy-backed hyperbabbler, said last week about Bush: “He's like 'We have to get rid of dictators,' but he's pretty much one himself.”
If someone invaded America tomorrow, how many big public posters would they have to tear down? How many airports and hospitals and highways would they have to rename?
How many statues would they have to topple?
Indeed. Watching the news this evening in the pub with someone who's against this war, he/she commented, "Well, I bet the White House is as ornate and opulent as all of Saddam's palaces are."
Some people just don't get it.
09:16 p.m.
Ich bin ein Berliner und mein shorts are too short! If you're really bored, you could do worse for passing the time than playing a round of Gay or Eurotrash? while you eat your lunch/dinner/hair. Lesbian or German Lady? is fun, too.
(The Ed-in-Chief of that site is a psychiatrist, funnily enough, and he's sent me lots of cute stickers and notes scrawled on prescription pads over the years. If only he'd update the site more than once every 18 months or so, I'd be much happier.)
"The UK media has lost the plot. You stand for nothing, you support nothing, you criticise, you drip. It's a spectator sport to criticise anybody or anything, and what the media says fuels public expectation. That may sound harsh, but that's the way it feels from where I sit."
[...]
"If you look at what fills newspapers now, it's the equivalent of reality TV - it's superficial, there's very little news reporting, there's very little analysis, but there's a lot of conjecture. The media thought they were going to get a one-hour-45-minute Hollywood blockbuster, and it's not like that. War is a dirty, disgusting, ugly thing, and I worry about it being dignified as infotainment."
Confounding the Arab media and the pundits who had talked darkly of a new spirit of Iraqi patriotism resisting the invaders, the people of Basra braved gunfire to dance in the streets and cheer for the British troops who finally broke the grip Saddam's dreadful regime had exerted on Iraq for so long. This reporter saw one Basra citizen even kiss a British tank.
I just found out that one of my younger brother's ex-girlfriends, a girl (well, woman) I've known since she was 10 years old, is a Navy nurse on board the USS Comfort in the Persian Gulf, aiding wounded Iraqi POWs.
In the same issue of my local newspaper where I read about that (online), there's also a wedding announcement for one of my younger brother's oldest friends (they started playing baseball and basketball together when they were nine), who got married before he was deployed as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Meanwhile, at Chez Jackie, I just picked some daffodils and tulips out of my garden and made a pretty bouquet. Not bad, eh?
A gathering of senior Army officers on Highway 9 in the city late this afternoon drew an upbeat crowd of more than 100, who alternated expressions of appreciation with petitions for help. Among the shouts from the crowd:
"Thank you very much, Mr. Boss."
"We love you United States."
"Saddam donkey."
"Night and day, no water."
"Hospital. No electricity, no food, no medicine."
"Very happy. I love you George Bush."
Wow. Someone better inform that person that expressing anything but disdain for President Bush is what we westerners call fightin' words.
04:10 p.m.
It is a sound which has echoed down the centuries but which has not been heard here for 15 years - the wailing call to prayer. On Friday however, at 0430 (0130 GMT), in the minutes before the desert dawn, the voice of the Imam rang out.
What Saddam's Baath party had forbidden, the British Army had restored.
But instead of their worship being a secret and dangerous thing, it was freely performed with new joy.
[...]
By next Friday, commanding officer Lt Colonel Tim Collins hopes to have a prayer tent in place so the community can gather for the traditional midday address.
He said: "Banning prayer and denying Muslim people a mosque is simply one more manifestation of the Baath party's evil regime. From the moment we began our hearts and minds campaign here its restoration was a top priority.
"From now they will have their call to prayer five times a day - it will no longer be conducted behind closed doors, it will be done openly, as it should be."
Hold up: I thought this was a "war on Islam"? Someone better tell the coalition forces...
04:03 p.m.
6 April, 2003
Remember Freshta Raper? She's the Kurdish woman who appeared on Question Time a couple of weeks ago and told how she had been kidnapped, raped multiple times by Saddam's thugs, burned by a chemical bomb and seen 21 members of her family members killed or buried alive in Saddam's attack on Halabja. ("People have to know what I have seen,” she said. “I have been made to witness a teenage execution, and the mother of the boy was asked to pay 32p for the bullet. I have seen a mother witnessing her own child chopped in pieces and fed to dogs. In what century do we live?...No human being on this Earth should have to witness what I have witnessed.")
Well, Freshta has gone after Labour MP George Galloway (an old friend of Saddam's, who last week called on coalition forces to stop fighting and urged Arabs to flood Iraq and aid the Iraqi military), and it seems he doesn't like it one bit:
"I am very suspicious of you," George Galloway hissed down the phone to Freshta Raper, a 37-year-old exile and mother of one. "I have a gut feeling about you. What do you want to ask me?"
[...]
Mr Galloway refused to meet Mrs Raper when she initially asked, through The Telegraph, if he would agree to a formal interview to discuss Saddam's treatment of the Kurds.
So, like all good activists, she went to his Westminster office to question him informally. Mr Galloway ducked down into an underground passage when he saw her waiting and drove off in his Mercedes.
[...]
[Galloway] finally agreed to a meeting. "OK, come to my office on Monday," he said, before adding: "On second thoughts, don't."
Mr Galloway supports direct action such as marches on Number 10 or the US embassy, although his view is very different when it is his stance that is under scrutiny. "What do you want to talk to me about?" he barked.
"I just want to ask you about Saddam Hussein's human rights record," said Mrs Raper. "As a Western politician, have you ever tried to discuss this in Iraq?"
"I don't have to answer that question," said Mr Galloway defiantly.
Again, this is a guy who, at one of his meetings with Saddam, told him: "Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem." It's quite telling that Galloway is happy to sit down to tea with Saddam Hussein, but is sent running by one of his Kurdish victims.
08:35 p.m.
For Bassem Ramadan, images of coalition tanks advancing through Iraqi cities do not evoke fear, hatred, or anger.
"Freedom has its price," said the Iraqi refugee, while watching footage of destruction on his television screen in Hayy al-Sellom.
"Everyone in Iraq was waiting for this moment," he said. "Not the Shiites, not the Kurds - everyone. Saddam's regime was equally bloody on all of us, even on women and children," he said...
Ramadan, and other Shiite refugees here dubbed the war a "blessing."
When asked about footage of civilians being killed and dismembered on television, Ramadan replied, "we have to have casualties, it's inevitable."
When asked on the US's motives in the war and on its plans for post-war Iraq, Ramadan replied, "Iraqis are a mature population. We know the US have interests in Iraq. We know they're not doing all this as a charity, but no matter what the consequences this can only be for the best."
The thousands of boxes discovered in a Basra warehouse by men of the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment were given to Iraq by the United Nations as part of a food programme. But instead of passing on the fortified baby food, sugar and tea to the starving Iraqis, Saddam kept it for himself.
The supplies were found in warehouses on a small industrial estate on the outskirts of the city by British soldiers. The store rooms were being kept cool by air-conditioning units, signifying the supplies were still being looked after by Saddam's army.
Captain Richard Clare, 27, said the stockpile was a "shocking indictment" of the regime.
"We have managed to determine the supplies are from the initiative run by the UN to provide food to the people here in return for allowing Saddam to trade some of his oil. The aid should have been distributed to those Iraqis in desperate need of help. Instead it has just been left sitting idle when it could have been feeding tens of thousands of people. Saddam has quite literally taken this food out of their mouths."
Sorry, mate -- did our war interrupt your little TV show?
[Simpson to soldier]: "Oh yes, I'm fine - am I bleeding?"
US soldier: "Yes, you've got a cut."
Simpson: "I thought you were going to stop me. I think I've just got a bit of shrapnel in the leg, that's all. OK, I will - thanks a lot.
"That was one of the American special forces medics - I thought he was going to try to stop me reporting."
Well heaven fucking forbid.
01:19 p.m.
Nick Cohen has written an interesting article on the abiding habit of being cruel to be kind to the Kurds:
They are the largest people on earth without a state of their own. Spread across Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey - and oppressed in all four countries - their fate in the twentieth century was to be played with and persecuted.
[...]
At the start of the war, it looked as if the Turks would occupy their mini-state to stop its own Kurds getting the idea in their heads that they might govern themselves. But because Ankara refused to cut a deal with Washington [Because of the US's insistence that they lay off the Kurds? --JD], the threat has receded and American troops have become the Kurds' protectors. The clever Kurdish leadership has put its guerrillas under US control to emphasise that the Kurds at least are an ally America can rely on. Fear that they will be attacked with poison gas again is receding as the Iraqi regime weakens. Every day last week, there were small reports of the Kurds retaking villages which had been ethnically cleansed by Saddam.
It's as if the Palestinians were to wake up and find that the world's only superpower was on their side and land they thought they had lost forever was back in their possession. The comparison isn't meant frivolously. What Baathism has created in northern Iraq is a West Bank, and even friends of the Kurds are worried about what will happen when the regime falls and the ethnically cleansed go home.
It's hard to see the war as a 'war on Islam', and not only because Saddam has dedicated his career to killing Muslims...
Reading the article, it's easy to see why Cohen is shunned by his fellow left-wingers, but that just makes me respect him more. Thanks to Labour MP Tom Watson for the link.
01:09 p.m.
What a jerk. One of my favourite things about the Tate Modern is that Rodin sculpture. The funny thing is, they've just plopped it in the middle of a hallway, right in front of the entrance to the toilets. You'd think something like The Kiss would have pride of place, but no. ("Yes, Jackie, but that says something about the importance of art in our lives...blah blah blah...")
01:01 p.m.
Oh my gosh, I forgot to post about this totally funny thing Christopher Hitchens said on a Newsnight special that I saw on BBC2 this evening:
If the US army behaved for one day the way the Russian army behaved in Chechnya, there would rightly be outrage. There might even be "peace" demonstrations...
You can watch Hitchens make the comment yourself: go here -- it's at 36.06 or thereabouts.
12:41 a.m.
BBC correspondent Jim Muir has written a moving account of the incident earlier this week which saw BBC cameraman Kaveh Golestan killed by a landmine.
Stuart Hughes, a BBC producer who was injured in the same explosion, has a blog, last updated on the morning of Golestan's death. It's an interesting insight into the bias of those media personnel who are supposed to be objective. For example, a US Special Forces member tells of seeing evidence on a northern Iraq site used by Ansar Al Islam that "in [his] opinion" and "to [his] mind" lends credence to reports of chemical and biological weapons production occuring there. He reiterates, though, that his conclusion is not something that has been confirmed. How does Hughes characterise the US Special Forces member's mindset?
But hey – they’re just terrorist towelheads and we’re honest Americans so no one’s going to question whether we’re telling the truth, right?
Unbiased and objective, my ass. The American was giving his opinion on the evidence, but went to pains to point out that his opinion hadn't been confirmed as fact, as no investigation had been completed. Hughes puts that down to racist, arrogant aggression. You have to try pretty hard to be that obtuse and that much of an asshole, I think.
Equally as interesting is a quote from a Kurdish woman about the war:
I asked her what she thought of the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve taken to the streets of London and elsewhere to oppose the war. “They don’t live in Iraq,” was her blunt reply. “If I was them I’d probably demonstrate too,” she said, “but they don’t know what Saddam is like. All our problems come from him. War is the only answer.”
This was a woman who, as a child, was forced to flee to Iran with her family because of Saddam’s persecution of the Kurds. For several months she lived in a refugee camp until it was safe to return home. On the day I spoke to her she was preparing to leave the city to stay with relatives in the country because she was afraid Saddam might drop chemical weapons on Sulaymaniyah.
I'm sorry Mr Hughes was injured in a landmine explosion, but I am far from surprised that a BBC producer would have such a disgustingly simplistic view of American attitudes. What does surprise me, though, is that he is so open about his bias on a weblog such as his, the URL to which his employer has provided on the BBC website.
12:19 a.m.
5 April, 2003
Heavens to Murgatroyd, the lyrics to Madonna's new album are cringeworthy in the extreme:
There was a time, I was happy in my life
There was time, I believed I'd live forever
There was a time, I prayed to Jesus Christ
There was a time, I had a mother
It was nice
And despite the above, and the Che Guevara thing, I'll still end up buying it.
10:55 p.m.
A young boy looked at the Marines and said something barely understandable that turned out to be an English word - chocolate. A man shouted "Good, Bush" as he drove past.
...Lance Cpl. Brian Cole, 20, of Kansas City, Kan., was bowled over by the 7-year-old girl who handed him a Christmas card with this painstakingly written text: "Thank you for liberate us. And thank you for help us. You are a great army."
"That made my day, after sitting out in the heat all day. It made it seem worthwhile," said Cole.
Wait a sec -- I thought this was an immoral, unjust war?
10:41 p.m.
Last time anyone looked, he’d trousered the thick end of £250,000 in libel damages. A truly principled man would have handed the lot over to his favourite charity, perhaps a Palestinian children’s hospital.
Galloway bought himself a Mercedes.
Recently he threatened to sue Hollywood actor John Malkovich for a throwaway remark to students at the Cambridge Union.
Malkovich was asked which two people he would most like to kill. He replied: George Galloway and Robert Fisk of The Independent [Go, Malko!], another legendary, thin-skinned, Left-wing litigant. Both are pro-Palestinian, anti-American, anti-Israel.
I’d have been flattered that a major movie star had even heard of me. Not George. If there’s one thing he likes more than celebrity, it’s money.
He declared pompously: “In the current climate of terrorism and violence and so on, if it was a joke it is not very funny and if it wasn’t a joke, he will be hearing from my lawyers. His comments are especially dangerous because in a couple of days’ time, I will be in the Palestinian Authority visiting President Arafat and there are a lot of bullets flying around there.”
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.
If there’s one man safe behind Palestinian lines, it’s Galloway. The Israelis wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of becoming a martyr, much as they’d like to put a bullet in him.
The whole thing is hilarious, especially as I imagine Galloway reading it and getting more and more angry. Any man who visits Saddam and tells him, “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. And I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem,” as Galloway did, deserves everything he gets.
05:40 p.m.
Congratulations to Chancellor Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah, who are expecting their second child in October. This news comes fourteen months after the death of their daughter Jennifer Jane, who lived only ten days.
I know it's Saturday, but I'm doing the Friday Five today. I'm just that much of a rebel.
1. How many houses/apartments have you lived in throughout your life? Sixteen, on two continents. And no, I'm not an Army brat.
2. Which was your favorite and why? Hmm. I loved my flat in Sevenoaks, because it was just so big and beautiful, with a great kitchen for cooking and entertaining (and C-list celebrity neighbours). But I'm quite happy with the house and neighbourhood in northeast London that I'm in now, really.
3. Do you find moving house more exciting or stressful? Why? It's stressful from start to finish. The excitement kicks in only when everything's unpacked and the first six pack of Hoegaarden has been consumed.
4. What's more important, location or price? Depends on one's circumstances. My flat in Sevenoaks was in the perfect location, but cost me more in a year than I'd even earned the previous year. That was stupid of me, but I did enjoy my time there. The house I'm in now costs me a third of what that flat did, and while the location is a mixed bag (I'm 90 minutes away from my best friends, twenty minutes from the centre of London, 3000 miles from my family but exactly where I want to be), I'm pretty pleased with the neighbourhood. If you have a thing for cockneys, you'd love it here.
5. What features does your dream house have (pool, spa bath, big yard, etc.)? Pool, hot tub (indoor and outdoor), big garden, big kitchen and a housekeeping staff to do all the dirty work.
Here at Amherst College, many students were vocally annoyed this semester when 40 professors paraded into the dining hall with antiwar signs. One student confronted a protesting professor and shoved him.
Some students here accuse professors of behaving inappropriately, of not knowing their place.
"It seems the professors are more vehement than the students," Jack Morgan, a sophomore, said. "There comes a point when you wonder are you fostering a discussion or are you promoting an opinion you want students to embrace or even parrot?"
Wow. One of the silver linings of this war, I think, is the fact that more people are waking up to a shitty set of circumstances in American institutions of higher learning.
Thanks to David for bringing this article to my attention.
04:29 p.m.
Quote of the day comes from blogger Peter Cuthbertson, on Tony Blair's legacy:
However willing Blair may be to stand up for (certain) British interests, on the domestic front he has been a disaster, and after six years in office, it's almost certainly too late for him to make much difference in reversing this. But this decision to fight with America in Iraq will be seen by history in much the way Harold Wilson's decision not to fight with America in Vietnam is now seen - a rare example of a wise decision taken by n government that was otherwise virtually achievement-free. If this conflict puts some gloss on the history of the Blair government, it will be deserved. But equally deserved will be the abiding image I am sure we will have of a man who had massive effect on the political system, won two landslide victories, made a few constitutional changes, but who left the country and its problems very much as he found them. This war may be the cherry on the top of a very stale and tasteless cake.
Peter should be writing for a broadsheet, really. Even though I disagree with him on many political issues, he is wise and eloquent beyond his years.
04:17 p.m.
I can't be the only one who wakes up every morning and whose first thought is, "Dare I turn on the news?" Waking up to sick scenes like the above makes for an emotional start to the day, but how fortunate we are to be observing them from afar, and not living in the midst of such things.
Another day, another atrocity. I can't believe some people can describe this war as "immoral" and "unjust" with a straight face.
04:11 p.m.
Sheikh Abu Hamza, the extremist Muslim cleric who has praised Osama bin Laden and railed against the US and Britain (you may know him better as the fundie with a hook for a hand), has had his British citizenship revoked:
The move follows the introduction of new powers earlier this week allowing British nationality to be removed from people with dual citizenship who are believed to have acted against the vital interests of the UK.
[Home Secretary David] Blunkett told Today: "Parliament voted for this to make holding our citizenship worth something. People will have to work to earn it and they will be proud to have it. And I'm proud to have done that."
Shadow home secretary Oliver Letwin said it was "important to protect the civil liberties of the country".
"I think it is reasonable that we should regard citizenship as a privilege conveyed to people who have not been born here, with which certain responsibilities should go."
As someone who is not a British citizen but who has lived, worked and paid taxes here for over five years, all I have to say is: damn straight. If you, like me, were not born here, you are a guest in this country. If you, like me, are working and living here because the Home Office has allowed you to do so, that is a privilege allowed you by the British government. I get really sick of the sense of entitlement some people seem to have when it comes to their "right" to live and work in a country in which they are a guest, and am glad the government has made moves to revoke the privilege of citizenship from those who actively seek the downfall of our society.
03:57 p.m.
4 April, 2003
I love Dennis Miller. On a messageboard I frequent, someone just posted his comments on Leno's show last night about Michael Moore:
He's going to wake up every day for the rest of his life, and he's going to tell us how he hates everything about this country except his right to hate it. And then we say that we love it and he's going to tell us what naive sheep we are and that he's the true patriot because he hates it and he sees all the problems in it. Yeah, right, Mike. You know something, if my yawn got any bigger they'd have to assign it a hurricane name, okay? Michael Moore simultaneously represents everything I detest in a human being and everything I feel obligated to defend in an American. Quite simply, it is that stupid moron's right to be that utterly, completely wrong.
WORD.
Also, this is hilarious. It's a transcript of an appearance Miller made on Leno's show in February. Some highlights:
I wish we could get everybody on board. Sean Penn, for instance, is urging restraint. Ya know, what could we possibly say to Sean to get him on board? If only Saddam Hussein was a paparazzi. Listen I've met Sean, he seems like a hail [sic] fellow, well I like him. But he's one of those interesting guys where if I run into him now he'll wanna kick my ass because I insinuated he wasn't peaceful. You know, that's the dichotomy out here.
I don't need to see any smoking guns except the one that just killed Saddam Hussein, quite frankly...I think you should treat him like Peter Graves at the end of Stalag 17, tie pots and pans on him and throw him into a Kurdish village and let the Kurds work on him a little.
Listen, you know that Kim Jong Il has to be a ruthless man because you usually don't get to lead up a country when you look that freaky, do ya? Have you seen this guy? He's like the Buddy Holly of the Pan-Pacific rim... I hope when somebody eventually blows that head off they have the good sense to bring it home in a jar because I know I'd pay a nickel to go see it in a tent show somewhere.
I know psoriasis sufferers who are more comfortable in their own skin than Al Gore.
But the best part is, Miller is depicted as a Nazi on that page for saying these things! You really couldn't make it up. Go look!
08:50 p.m.
Man alive, go read this, either in the original French or in English. It's left me both shaking with rage (over the stupidity and bloodymindedness that is so rife in this world right now, including but not limited to the desecration of that British war cemetery in France) and feeling a quiet pride (in the fight my grandfather and my country fought and won almost sixty years ago, as well as in the fight my countries -- America, Britain and Poland -- are fighting and winning right now).
I'm being as displeased with France these past days (months, years) as the British and American people are today. Maybe more and more legitimately, since I'm a native.
But passed the first anger reaction, I took a moment to pause and to think about the kid I was on Omaha beach.
I remember Joe, I remember Tommy.
But I don't remember Fritz. Only his victims.
Fritz has no face. Fritz is dead for good.
Covering a memorial dedicated to the men who victoriously fought authoritarian and bellicose states 90 years ago, with insults, threats and praises to the dictator their descendants are fighting right now, not only confirms that these men were on the right side - we already knew that - but also that today's Joe and Tommy are living up to their ancestors' expectations, sacrifice and victory. They're still on the right side.
Go read the whole thing.
03:15 p.m.
"Believe me, I love Americans." I can't stop reading about Mohammed, the Iraqi man who told US Marines where to find Pfc Jessica Lynch. Everyone is speculating on how cheesy the inevitable movie of her story is going to be, but I would love to see something -- a documentary, preferably -- that told both their stories. What an amazing spectacle it would be.
02:24 p.m.
SOUTHERN IRAQ (AFP) - (Pool material) Eleven British Royal Marines have come under the kosh on the dusty streets of Umm Khayyal, being handed a 7-3 thrashing by the local football team, resplendent in full strip, boots and squad numbers.
A thousand spectators came from all ends of the town, throngs of screaming men and children marking out the boundaries of the pitch...
Hundreds of children chanted, some sporting the red shirts of Manchester United or Arsenal, carrying playing card pictures of David Beckham and David Seaman.
Football is their passion and, needless to say, "Mister Beckham", Manchester United's star midfielder, is their man.
"Beckham is best, Beckham is best!" shouted Mohammad, a 21-year-old spectator.
"You need him," replied his friend, pointing to the pitch. "You lose bad."
Meanwhile, the commander of the unit, Lieutenant Colonel Buster Howes, attempted to be magnanimous in defeat.
"We want a rematch," he said with a smile.
01:22 p.m.
Bill Clinton has a few choice words for Richard Gere. Man, say what you want about Clinton, but I'm glad someone finally told Gere to stop talking out of his ass. (Admittedly this is what I hope Clinton said to him; let me have my fantasy, please.)
01:18 p.m.
Heh.
05:34 a.m.
"A person, no matter his nationality, is a human being." So says the Iraqi lawyer who tipped off US Marines about the location of Private Jessica Lynch while she was being held as a POW. Choosing just one quote from his story is too difficult -- go read it all.
I've been bitching about the BBC for, oh, weeks now. (Bitching online, that is. I've only been bitching about them offline for a year or so, but in that time I've made one staunch BBC defender foam at the mouth and stalk out of the room while I coolly sipped a drink and cackled internally. Because I am twelve.) A lot of North American bloggers who never really watched a lot of BBC World coverage until this war started have joined the chorus of UK-based voices denouncing the Beeb's obvious editorial slant on this military operation.
But I picked up a copy of Private Eye today, and they put forward an explanation for this bias that hadn't occurred to me:
It's now widely suggested that the American generals misled the public through the media about the likely duration of the conflict. This may be true; but it's also possible the networks convinced themselves of what they needed to believe.
For two reasons execs needed a quick, big bang against Baghdad. The first is modern theories of scheduling. In recent years, the fashion for screening series in one episode a week for several weeks has given way to "event TV" (several hours on one night) or "stripping," in which the three episodes of a series run on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday of one week [British thing, I think]. The conquest of Iraq had been scheduled to be stripped from roughly one Sunday to the next.
Another risidual pressure for a quick win was that advertisers are reluctant to run campaigns (which may be jokey) for products (which may be self-indulgent) when their slots may run up against a news flash announcing thousands of new widows. The BBC doesn't have to worry about that [no adverts on the Beeb] but has other war-time difficulties which made a fast march on Baghdad in its interests as well. Taste considerations -- no war movies, no gangsta rap on Radio 1 [BBC radio station] -- limit their controllers' room for manoeuvre during a conflict.
...[Those] writing to the newspapers have wrongly credited to liberal pacifism the discernible irritation and cynicism with the war and the military which has crept into British news coverage. In fact it stems from capitalist self-interest. The war threatens the product's performance in the marketplace.
Hmm. I think that may explain part of it, but the BBC is biased all the time.
Bottom line: the BBC still makes me want to hurl things through the telly, no matter what the motives behind their shitty-ass reporting.
04:12 a.m.
Against the war...or against feeling guilty about the war? Karmabanque ("Research and advice for anarchists, activists & hedge funds"), has this to say:
[U]nder the surface, Hollywood people are greedy, sadistic whores who would sell their mother for a nickel and they love to see innocent Iraqi babies getting slaughtered.
"Under the surface"?
I'm going to Amsterdam tomorrow, and then to the Hague to turn myself in to the World Court for committing war crimes, as an American who pays taxes, and is, therefore, contributing to this illegal war.
Since I pay taxes to the US government and to the British government, do I have to serve consecutive sentences for my war crimes, or can I serve them concurrently?
Other choice quotes from the Karmabanque site:
"Although the methods of tyrants like Saddam and Kim Jong II are more overtly sadistic, it doesn't mean they are any less pernicious than Bill Gates with his contempt of fair competition and democracy."
"I think the US will lose this war, and I think that's a good thing. A little Vietnam war era humility right now wouldn't hurt."
"The only people who don't seem to understand the US is about to lose its empire are Americans... typical."
"Thousands more 9/11's [are] now justified, and welcomed."
What a clever bunch! I just hope I don't have to share a cell with them when all 300 million of us are in prison for our war crimes; trustafarians don't tend to have the best hygiene.
03:27 a.m.
Stupid Sleb Quote of the Day:
"Kidman went to extreme lengths to capture the true character of novelist Virginia Woolf. ‘I even learned to write with my right hand for it,’ reveals Kidman. ‘People look at me like, that’s crazy, and I’m like, no, it was necessary.’"
More than a year after 9/11, a greater number and variety of voices on the left admit that blame-America-first failed miserably as a response. First, it relied almost exclusively on "blowback" to explain the atrocities: American imperialism understandably generates so much hate for us around the world that some of the haters inevitably turn to mass terrorism. Everything else is left out: no analysis of the Wahhabi brand of fundamentalist Islam, no consideration of the lack of democracy in Arab Muslim nations or the loss of dignity associated with economic underdevelopment or the role of religious brainwashing. Second, blame-America-first leftists have an ingrained ideological aversion to patriotism. They assume it means either a sheeplike loyalty-"my country, right or wrong"-or an aggressive nationalism. They made their disdain for the outpouring of patriotism after 9/11 clear. Some of us saw the desire to fly American flags everywhere as a sign of solidarity and grief (we saw this even when we ourselves didn't care to fly a flag). They saw only jingoism and vulgar sentimentality.
[...]
Ironically, today's blame-America-first leftists, who undoubtedly consider themselves too enlightened to stumble into jingoism, think exactly like Orwell's negative nationalists: they are obsessive and undiscriminating in their anti-Americanism, but they no longer wave anyone else's flag. Orwell's description of Anglophobia in the 1940s fits their attitude: "Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. . . . English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated . . . "
Thanks to David for bringing this article to my attention.
02:20 a.m.
3 April, 2003
Oh my fucking shit. Sorry for the profanity (which has been, I suppose, excessive lately; that said, it's in direct proportion to the amount of outrageously stupid people saying outrageously stupid things and committing outrageously stupid acts at the moment), but check this out:
I apologize for sometimes linking to pieces in foreign languages, but sometimes they're the only source for fascinating stories. Here's one from "Proche-Orient," a French publication covering the Middle East. You may recall an anti-Semitic incident at the poignantly named Albert Camus school last year, where a young Jewish girl was beaten in an anti-Semitic attack. A judge has now fined the parents of the girl - yes, the parents - for talking to the media about the affair. The French authorities deal with anti-Semitic violence the way the Catholic Church has historically dealt with child rape. Why? Because they know they're guilty.
I don't know why I'm shocked anymore by the sort of sick shit going down in France, but I am.
11:54 p.m.
Can I just say that this is fucking retarded? It's fucking retarded.
Thanks to the excellent Pop Culture Junk Mail, I found this page of Britons' reviews of Vanilla Coke. I had some Diet Vanilla Coke for the first time yesterday, and while it wasn't nasty or anything, it was way too sweet. It tastes as if it's been imbued with milk bottles.
Verdict on (Diet) Vanilla Coke: seems suitable for spiking with rum or vodka, less suitable for quenching thirst.
As the victorious major hugged his wife, Mr Tarrant exclaimed on the tape: “Unbelievable! I am so proud to have met you. I am so proud to have met this guy who is an amazing human being.”
Another amusing quote courtesy of PE, this time from Martin Sheen:
“I want to be exposed to all of humanity. I want all of humanity to be reflected in me. I want to know what it is like to be human.”
Keep trying, dipshit.
04:08 p.m.
There is a cyclone in Ted Hughes' grave as I type this. Check out Britain's sad excuse for a Poet Laureate on war in Iraq. He even helpfully included the word "crap" in the poem itself, in case we couldn't think of a suitable adjective to describe the work.
Andrew Motion has always sucked dogs, and the parodies of his shitty poems in Private Eye have given us all a giggle, but really: the time has come to put us out of this fucker's misery.
Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan has admitted the paper's resolutely anti-war stance could lead to sales falling below 2 million for the first time in over 70 years.
But notice how the Guardian and Moron try to explain it away:
The slower flow of news as the campaign has dragged on was also to blame, said Morgan, with sales of all newspapers falling compared with the first days of the war.
"Dragged on"! Lovely. I'm surprised they avoided using the q-word.
03:21 p.m.
In the giddy spirit of the day, nothing could quite top the wish list bellowed out by one man in the throng of people greeting American troops from the 101st Airborne Division who marched into town today.
What, the man was asked, did he hope to see now that the Baath Party had been driven from power in his town? What would the Americans bring?
"Democracy," the man said, his voice rising to lift each word to greater prominence. "Whiskey. And sexy!"
Around him, the crowd roared its approval.
The rest of the article is about the water shortages the forces are working to remedy, but I love the above quote. I want "Democracy, whiskey and sexy!" embroidered on a pillow.
06:53 a.m.
The above photo accompanies a story about the warm reception the British Army has been getting in Safwan. Less heartwarming are the words at the end of that item:
Meanwhile, north-west of Safwan in Al Zubayr, British troops found thousands of boxes of medical supplies hidden by Saddam’s regime.
The tyrant claimed for years that sick children were dying in hospitals from a lack of medicines because of tough UN sanctions against Iraq. But yesterday soldiers of the 1st Battalion Black Watch exposed his lies after raiding a Ba’ath Party HQ.
They found enough medicine for 10,000 kids, including vital antibiotics and pneumonia and tapeworm treatments, in a locked storeroom. The supplies have now been handed to Army doctors to treat local patients properly for the first time in months.
I'm thinking we need to come up with a new epithet in the English language to describe monstrousness of this degree, because I can't think of a word that even approaches adequacy in describing what a reprehensible piece of shit this guy is (was?).
05:59 a.m.
"As Americans and hip-hop artists, we want to show solidarity with the people of Israel. No one thinks that a Hebrew-speaking country has anything to do with hip-hop, but hip-hop is alive in Israel and we are going there to foster the new generation's way of communicating."
My younger brother made friends with the Wu shortly before his 21st birthday, and says they're really nice guys -- despite the fact that, between all the members of the group, they've already served about eight life sentences in prison. (The tale of how my brother hooked up with them is pretty funny, but just illegal enough to make me not post it here.)
05:23 a.m.
I grew up in the shadow of Oberlin College (I was born in Lorain, Ohio and lived there until I was ten; much of my extended family remains in the area), and I even fancied going there after high school -- it was a highly competitive, well-respected institution of higher learning, and had an admirable history of progressiveness (first college to give undergrad degrees to women, for one thing).
It also cost about $20,000 a year at that time, and was thus a wee bit out of my price range. (It's now about $27,000 per year inclusive of fees.) I ended up going to a state university.
So it was with great interest that I read this item on the high tolerance for anti-Semitism on the Oberlin campus. My disappointment could not be greater, but I can't say I'm all that surprised: anti-Semitism seems to be rife amongst the supposedly liberal and tolerant, and few places are as supposedly liberal as Oberlin. (Another one is Antioch College, also in Ohio, which made my long list of desired undergrad schools -- but unfortunately cost about $20,000 per year as well. I got academic scholarships, but not THAT much.) As Eric Olsen points out:
This tendency of many in the far left to identify with the "underdog" Palestinian cause against the "oppressor" Israel is a constant source of wonder to me: how much more underdog can you get than having 6 million of your brethren slaughtered systematically just 60 years ago, being the only democracy in the region, and being despised simply for having the temerity to exist and defend oneself?
It's called anti-Semitism and it appears to be politically correct at Oberlin.
Oberlin is a gorgeous town, green and leafy and a slice of real life, small town Americana. What a shame for it to be tainted by the visible signs of anti-Semitism.
I honestly don't think, especially in light of the dirty and fierce way the Iraqi forces have been fighting, that Iraq would have ever voluntarily disarmed. For fuck's sake, they rebuilt weapons UNSCOM made them destroy as soon as they kicked out the inspectors in the 1990s -- not the behaviour of a régime willing to cooperate with diplomatic efforts.
Blix delivered a more conciliatory situation assessment on February 14. This was the basis for Germany, France and Russia to speak of "functioning inspections" and to increasingly distance themselves from America and Great Britain. The governments in Berlin, Paris, and Moscow felt confirmed in the conviction that their peace strategy would lead to success.
The inspectors in Baghdad saw things completely differently: their position was suddenly weakened. Documents were held back again. Scientists appeared -- if at all -- only with their own tape recorders. After the conversations they had to deliver the cassettes to the NMD. The hope for greater assertiveness that had grown following Powell's speech diminished again. "After February 14 we didn't get much any more."
In hindsight a clear pattern emerged, from the viewpoint of the UN inspectors: "Saddam Hussein followed every step in the Security Council closely. As soon as divisions appeared, cooperation diminished." The officials in Baghdad only became more cooperative when military pressure increased. Rhetoric never impressed Saddam Hussein, the inspectors say, the deeper the quarrels split the international community, the surer he felt more himself.
Hans Blix himself got a taste of the revived self-confidence of the Iraqi leadership following February 14. When the chief inspector asked General Amir Al-Saadi, head of the NMD, where 550 mustard gas artillery grenades were that the UN suspected were still in country, the officer claimed baldly that they had been been lost to a fire in the arsenal. But curiously there were no residual traces of that.
"We were dependent on military pressure", an inspector emphasizes. They made no progress without the US aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf and without the troop deployments to Kuwait. They experienced the diplomatic tug-of-war between Washington and the European peace axis as a historical irony: from their point of view, every demand for a peaceful solution reduced the pressure on Iraq and made peace more unlikely. Success was less a question of time than one of the credible threat of the use of force. "Where," the inspectors ask today, "were the teeth?"...In their opinion, installing the kind of traffic monitoring system important to effective control would only have been possible with a united Security Council backing them up. But to threaten force as a last resort, without seriously preparing for it -- in their view, that could not impress Baghdad's dictator.
[...]
Was the mission programmed to fail? No, say the inspectors: a united Security Council might have forced a peaceful disarmament. But even then an ambivalent thought that sounds surprisingly hard coming from an inspector: "How does one best handle a tumor -- with a quick surgical procedure or with long, difficult chemotherapy whose success is doubtful?"
This is coming directly from the UN weapons inspectors. I'm blown away that they're talking about this already, but I'm glad they are: it's about time people faced a few home truths about who exactly divided the UNSC, and who exactly made the UNSC almost irrelevant in this matter.
12:31 a.m.
The Liberal Democrats yesterday launched their local election campaign by promising to focus on local issues rather than the war.
Despite the party's profile as the only one united in its opposition to the Iraq conflict, its candidates have been told not to campaign on the issue.
"War is an issue, but it's not an issue for local elections," said Edward Davey, shadow spokesman for the office of deputy prime minister, as he launched the campaign. "Our advice to candidates has been not to campaign on the war. With our citizens fighting, it's in poor taste."
Translation: we exploited the war in our typical opportunistic way, offering nothing in the way of alternative, "peaceful" solutions and instead relied on the early unpopularity of the war to boost us as we made clear we would oppose Labour at every turn on this issue. Now that the war has gained majority support, all our plans to capitalise on it have turned to shit. It's a damn shame we have no actual platform on which to run, but that's what happens when you do sweet fuck all and the only things people think of when they hear the words "Liberal Democrat" are "anti-war" and "ugly ginger fuck".
11:45 p.m.
What a fantastic match! England just beat Turkey 2-0 at Sunderland. Wayne Rooney, the 17-year-old dynamo who plays for Everton, made his first start for England. He didn't score, but he showed off some of the amazing footwork and brilliant passes that have impressed the hell out of everyone (including me, a total football know-nothing). Darius Vassell was in the right place at the right time and scored in the second half after a Rio Ferdinand try was deflected by Turkey's goalkeeper (Rustu Recber, who did an awesome job). And in the closing seconds of the game, David Beckham scored an excellent penalty shot.
Rather worrying, though, how after each England goal, so many fans were on the pitch! I thought security was supposed to be extra tight there?
09:55 p.m.
Considering how anti-war the New York Times has been, it's refreshing -- not to mention somewhat surprising -- to read this editorial from them:
As secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld has bruised a lot of egos. Right now, when soldiers' nerves are edgy and the public is concerned about the pace of the war, he can use all the support he can get among the military brass. But many officers — in Iraq and back home — have been stunningly critical. Mr. Rumsfeld tried to fight the war "on the cheap," they say. He amassed far fewer troops than the Army had wanted, leaving supply lines vulnerable to attack and providing fewer troops than needed for the coming confrontations outside Baghdad.
That is an amazing amount of rancor for a war that is less than two weeks old and appears to have gone fairly well so far on the ground. Statements from Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have ranged from irritated to nearly apoplectic when they have responded to the criticism.
In a free country at war, it is natural for the political conversation to focus on whether the military is using the right plan. But it does seem too early to make many judgments. While we disliked Mr. Rumsfeld's role as part of the chorus pushing for a military rather than a diplomatic solution for Iraq, his argument that the military needs to be quicker and leaner, with less reliance on heavy armored divisions, has always seemed reasonable. Part of the backbiting is certainly carried over from battles at the Pentagon over budget priorities — battles in which Mr. Rumsfeld's main error was his imperious style rather than his goals.
The New York Times coming to Donald Rumsfeld's defense. I do believe Saddam may be making snowballs in his new home...
06:47 p.m.
Hundreds of American troops marched into town at midday today and were greeted by its residents. The infantry was backed by attack helicopters and bombers, and immediately destroyed several arms caches and took over a military training facility to serve as their headquarters.
The occupying forces, from the First and Second brigades of the 101st Airborne Division, entered from the south and north. They had seized the perimeter of town on Tuesday. People rushed to greet them today, crying out repeatedly, "Thank you, this is beautiful!"
Two questions dominated a crowd that gathered outside a former ammunition center for the Baath Party. "Will you stay?" asked Kase, a civil engineer who would not give his last name. Another man, Heider, said, "Can you tell me what time Saddam is finished?"
06:43 p.m.
I'm hearing noises about a BBC journalist in Iraq being involved in a "major incident" -- total news blackout on what exactly has happened, but it doesn't sound pleasant (one specific noise indicated a female reporter has stepped on a landmine). Details as they emerge -- and here's hoping it's all a bunch of rubbish...
06:19 p.m.
How pikey are you? My results are shameful, but I will say this: if loving Pot Noodle is wrong, I don't want to be right.
Thank you to the fragrant Catriona for the link.
06:00 p.m.
Not content with pissing on underage girls, R Kelly is now exploiting this war with a new, pro-troops single. Obviously the real aim is improving his image after being indicted on 33 counts of or relating to child pornography. This shit is really beyond sick. Worse, radio stations are actually playing his damn single.
Anti-war protesters are marching with anti-Israeli, pro-North Korea zealots, and those who merely want to show support for the troops are giving a paedophile precious positive PR mileage in the process of doing so. What the fuck is wrong with people?
Maybe someone in the peace movement should figure out that not only Bush could stop this war. So could Saddam — by resigning his unelected post and saving his people any further sacrifice. Yet I’ve yet to see one anti-war placard allude to Saddam’s responsibilities in securing the peace.
Blocking traffic when 74 percent of the American people support the war, or endlessly whining about CNN’s coverage, or grandstanding as Michael Moore did at the Oscars telling America that a president who currently enjoys (for all the sordid reasons we know) stratospheric popularity ratings is “fictitious,” has much more to do with personal therapy than with effective politics. Continue on that tack and you can pretty much count on another four years of Bush, no matter how ugly the war turns.
Protecting the Iraqi people, as the peace movement rightfully desires, is one helluva lot more complicated than merely shielding them from the collateral damage caused by U.S. bombs. (That is, unless you really believe that America is the “greatest terrorist state in the world,” as is so often repeated on KPFK’s drive-time shows. If your world-view is that facile, then indeed we have little more to discuss.)
Those who chant “U.S. out of Iraq” ought to be prepared, then, to offer themselves as human shields to protect the Kurds against threatening Turkish troops (a task currently in the hands of U.S. special forces). Or as shields to protect the southern marsh Arabs against occupation by the theocratic armed forces of Iran. Perhaps all those human shields, idle now after fleeing Baghdad when Saddam’s government ordered them anchored to strategic military targets, could assume these new responsibilities.
If you don’t trust George Bush, as you should not, and you consider yourself part of the peace movement, then you also better start taking an active interest in who will populate a post-Saddam government. And accept it: Protests or not, there is going to be a new government in Iraq, and very, very soon. Better some of our friends and allies in that new regime than only those favored by Wolfowitz and Cheney. But the peace movement will have no anti-Saddam Iraqi allies if it continues to express no real solidarity with those Iraqis who stand in opposition to Saddam and who might — yes — be actively supporting the war.
For a solid week now, I’ve been arguing these points with a dear friend who says that while she very much wants to see the end of Saddam, she just cannot under any circumstances “support this war.” But this isn’t about supporting the war. It’s about accepting the unfortunate fact that the war has been imposed upon us as an irrefutable reality. We can close our eyes and stamp our feet and hope that by chanting enough it will go away. Or we can truly assume our democratic responsibilities and try to influence the situation so that the outcome is as positive as possible.
Cooper goes on to describe for the feeble-minded just how disastrous it would be to stop the war, and even mentions the ugliness of those who are now gleefully celebrating every problem the coalition encounters, hoping for a long war that's as bloody as possible:
Already, “progressive” anti-war Web sites like Commondreams.org are more or less gloating over these troubles, running every report they can suggesting that George W. Bush is about to bog down in a quagmire. But this hope, if you can call it that, is radically ill-placed. Just as a dozen years of draconian American sanctions against Iraq battered everyone except Saddam Hussein, this war going off the tracks would devastate just about everyone except George Bush.
Go read the whole thing.
04:35 p.m.
NEWSFLASH: Noam Chomsky is an asshole. And by "newsflash" I mean "something we already know but it's fun to remind ourselves of occasionally, especially in times like this".
03:35 p.m.
Kate Lawler to replace Edith Bowman on sinking ship known as RI:SE. Jeez Louise, I can't believe Channel Four is still trying to salvage this piece of shit. Morning television is, on the whole, pretty grim. But RI:SE -- or, as it's more commonly known, CR:AP -- is truly the worst morning programme in the history of the world. And bringing Kate "YES!" Lawler on board isn't going to improve it at all. Shouldn't she crawl back under the rock where most of the other Big Brother contestants are?
I actually saw Kate Lawler at Charing Cross train station a few months ago (yes, many of my crap sleb spots occur at train stations), coming off the Beckenham train on platform four. She was very short and looked quite harassed.
02:28 p.m.
"There was the disclosure . . . when the prisons were briefly opened of the gouging of eyes of prisoners and the raping of women in front of their husbands, from whom the torturers wanted to extract information. . . . So if people want to talk about containing [Saddam Hussein] and don't want to go in forcefully and remove him, how do they propose doing something about the horrors he is inflicting on his people who live in such fear of him?"
[...]
An Iraqi in Detroit wanted to send a message to the anti-war protesters: "If you want to protest that it's not OK to send your kids to fight, that's OK. But please don't claim to speak for the Iraqis."
[...]
As John Burns of The New York Times wrote in January: "History may judge that the stronger case [for an American-led invasion] . . . was the one that needed no [forbidden arms] inspectors to confirm: that Saddam Hussein, in his 23 years in power, plunged this country into a bloodbath of medieval proportions, and exported some of that terror to his neighbors."
[...]
"As someone who was very active in the [anti-Vietnam War] protests, I think that the antiwar activists are totally wrong on this one. Granted, President Bush's insensitive policies in many areas dear to liberals (I am one) naturally make me suspicious of his motives. But even if he's doing it for all the wrong reasons, have they all forgotten about the Iraqi people?"
They wish they could forget. Instead, they disregard.
09:31 a.m.
An initiative to recruit Iraqi exiles in the United States to help topple Saddam Hussein has been gaining support in Dearborn, Mich.
The Iraqi National Congress -- a London-based umbrella group of various organizations opposing the Baghdad regime -- is spearheading a project to assemble a pool of Iraqis to help coalition forces gain the trust of the country's people.
"I don't want American people to die for my country -- I want me to be the first one," Alkased said. "I appreciate what American people are doing for my country, but I don't want them to spend their blood. I am ready to spend blood for my country."
The sentiment is certainly appreciated, though I don't think it would be wise for them to actually take part in the fighting, unless they've got the proper training. But if there is a propaganda use for these Iraqis, I can see them coming in very useful indeed.
09:26 a.m.
I'm not a fan of action films. But a few years ago, I saw Three Kings at the cinema and really liked it. I have the DVD, but hadn't watched it until last night, when I watched it with someone who is anti-war. (Don't read any further if you haven't seen the film and don't want any of it spoiled.)
We watched the version that has writer/director David O Russell's commentary on it. His explanations of the history behind a lot of the story, certain scenes and the actors themselves were excellent. They tried to get as many actual Iraqi exiles as possible to play actual Iraqis in the film. In the scene in the garage where George Clooney is trying to negotiate for free use of the luxury cars stolen from Kuwait, the man he's negotiating with is a guy who was actually tortured by Saddam Hussein's thugs and left blind in one eye from where they kicked him. (His character, at the end of the film, says he's going to stay in Iraq and fight Saddam. His fate is pretty certain.)
I don't think Three Kings is necessarily pro-war or anti-war. I think it's about doing the right thing, the very real moral ambiguity over what the right thing is when it comes to Iraq, and the very real horrors that have been suffered by so many Iraqis since Saddam Hussein came into power. It also makes a strong comment about how an ordinary life can seem extraordinary when contrasted with the untold hardships that others in this world have to survive as a matter of their everyday existence. After being tortured by Saddam's goons, Troy Barlow's simple life as a carpet salesman, simply muddling through the ups and downs with his wife and baby, doesn't seem like such a bad thing. It's a wonderful life.
If you haven't seen the film, you should do. If you have seen it, watch it again; in light of current events, it's even more poignant.
The showpiece cenotaph at the graveyard in Northern France was smeared in red paint with the words: “Dig up your rubbish. It’s fouling our soil.”
Other slogans at the Etaples cemetery near Boulogne included “Death to the Yankees” and “Saddam Hussein will win and spill your blood.”
And the vandals wrote “Rosbeefs go home” — the French insult for Brits is roast-beefs. Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George Bush were also branded war criminals.
"[The Dixie Chicks] were made to feel un-American and risked economic retaliation because of what was said. Our democracy has taken a hit," Gore said. "Our best protection is free and open debate."
Man, I am so sorry I voted for his thick ass.
How can he fail to grasp the fact that words and actions have consequences? Forget about them being "made to feel un-American". Whatever. No one can make you feel jack shit. Whether or not it resonates with you is down to, well, you.
But "our democracy has taken a hit" because the Dixie Chicks "risked economic retaliation"? No fucking way, dude. Economic retaliation is how people express their feelings in a capitalist society, like it or not. Our democracy has only taken a hit if the government has made an effort to shut those women up, and I haven't seen any evidence whatsoever to suggest that they have done.
Debate is free and open -- and people are free to openly disagree with you when you open your mouth. It's not just a part of life in a democracy, but part of life in general. (Unless you live in Iraq, where you'll have your tongue cut out of your mouth, be put in a shredding machine or otherwise dealt with by that lovely chap, Mr Hussein.)
The fact that this guy was the Vice President of the United States and he has such a tenuous grip on democratic principles and freedom of speech is depressing in the extreme. No wonder he lost what should have been an easy election to win.
In my Third Reich class, the topic was propaganda and the Nazis. Who wants to guess what the discussion degenerated into? Anyone? Yeah, you got it: American propaganda, specifically by the Bush administration, is the worst propaganda in the whole entire world. The worst!
Never fear, for your ever-vigilant hostess did pipe up. Addressing the severely stupid moron who said, "American propaganda is the worst in the world," I said, "If you really think that, then you're painfully ignorant about the rest of the world." He gave me a dirty look and the professor changed the subject.
Oh, and you'll love this: that same idiot student said that the song "God Bless America" is a racist and xenophobic propaganda song, and that if you sing it, then you believe that every other country on the planet is forsaken by God, which makes you a racist of course. Then he said the song should never be sung again.
I'm not even a Christian, and I don't like singing about God, but criminy, I wanted to kick that kid's ass. I just said, really loudly, "That's a huge load of crap, dude." This time he ignored me completely, without even giving me a dirty look. Sigh.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who's surrounded by idiots.
06:05 p.m.
Remember that United Way function in Flordia that was supposed to feature a speech by Susan Sarandon? The United Way got a ton of protest emails, phone calls and letters from contributors, so they cancelled her appearance, citing a desire not to have their function turned into something divisive and politically-charged.
Now it turns out that for turning up at the event, which was meant to "inspire volunteerism," Sarandon was set to pocket $20,000.
Apart from that irony, the other interesting bit of the story comes when you find out that her $20,000 honorarium was to be paid for by the charity arm of the St Petersburg Times...which employs her brother, who arranged her planned appearance at the event.
I'm not surprised the whole arrangement was dodgy, but it does make me laugh.
04:15 p.m.
One of the unfortunate things about any democracy is that occasionally, you can end up with the likes of George Galloway serving in the legislature.
George Galloway, a Labour MP who has been mates with Saddam Hussein for a while now, has been a prominent figure in this country's "peace" marches. And he has called on British soldiers to disobey what he called "illegal orders". Some other choice comments, made on Abu Dhabi TV, include:
Iraq is fighting for all the Arabs. Where are the Arab armies? Even if it is not realistic to ask a non-Iraqi army to come to defend Iraq, we see Arab regimes pumping oil for the countries who are attacking it. We wonder when the Arab leaders will wake up. When are they going to stand by the Iraqi people?
They attacked Iraq like wolves. They attacked civilians. They encountered resistance from Iraqi forces and Iraqi people who are defending their dignity, religion and country.
It is better for Blair and Bush to stop this crime. It is time for them to return to the UN Security Council and give diplomacy a chance to settle this chaos.
The wolves are Bush and Blair, not the soldiers. The soldiers are lions led by donkeys.
Galloway has always been widely regarded as an absolute fucking nutjob. This is one of the reasons why I found it so risible and ridiculous when the "peace" movement adopted him as one of their most visible spokespeople. Like I said, I have friends who are against this war, and none of them are served by having this wanker speak up on their behalf for the cause of "peace".
03:10 p.m.
More Kim Jong Il fun, courtesy of an email from Frank Sensenbrenner, who posts at the Edge of England's Sword. Frank directed me to Kim Jong Il's official news site. Much hilarity is to be found, like this item, entitled "Anecdote about Kim Jong Il":
Pyongyang, March 31 (KCNA) -- In March Juche 85 (1996) Kim Jong Il was in an inspection tour of a frontline area. It was in the dusk of the evening that he reached the peak of a high mountain.
He got out of his car and carefully read the inscription of a monument to President Kim Il Sung's revolutionary activities built on the peak. He then said the ridge was associated with the president's revolutionary activities and deep love for servicemen.
Kim Jong Il said he wanted to meet a sentry, and waited for twenty minutes, exposed to a biting wind.
That day he met the sentry and take a picture with him.
If Japan continues to run amuck in the preparations for reinvasion with the backing of the U.S., it will pay a very high price.
You know, a lot of people seem to think that North Korea is being ignored by the Bush administration. Well, shit, I don't know if today's talks are what constitutes ignorance, but I doubt it.
At the talks in Washington, the UK and US are expected to agree to seek a United Nations statement urging North Korea to "pull back from the brink" by reversing its decision to withdraw from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
And that's something else people seem to forget. How many UN Security Council resolutions were there against Iraq? Seventeen. How many are there against North Korea? Zero. The US and Britian, far from bypassing the UN completely, are trying to use it in the North Korea situation. Let's all hope that the UN's failure to uphold its own resolutions hasn't diminished the power of its condemnation when it comes to North Korea.
Terror Affirma -- Slate says what few in the mainstream media seem to have noticed:
At face value, these statements dispense with months of debate over covert, indirect Iraqi sponsorship of terrorism. Iraq, represented by its third-highest ranking official, now embraces terrorism openly and directly. Any regime that threatens to "use any means to kill," "follow the enemy into its land," "kill 5,000 people" at one time, and take the battle to "all who support" American and British troops—not just "those who wear the military uniforms"—is implicitly targeting civilians. By any definition, that's the essence of terrorism.
U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441, adopted unanimously last November, threatened Iraq with "serious consequences" based on Resolution 687 of 1991. Paragraph 32 of Resolution 687 required Iraq "to inform the Security Council that it will not commit or support any act of international terrorism … and to condemn unequivocally and renounce all acts, methods and practices of terrorism." Paragraph 33 stipulated that a cease-fire of the Persian Gulf War was contingent "upon official notification by Iraq … to the Security Council of its acceptance of the provisions above." In other words, if Iraq violated its pledge to renounce terrorism, it would void the cease-fire and renew the war.
As permanent members of the council, France, Russia, and China voted for Resolution 687. So did Belgium, which held a rotating membership on the council at the time.
All of which raises two questions. To the government of Iraq: How can Vice President Ramadan's statements be reconciled with your obligations under Resolution 687? And to the governments of France, Russia, and China: If the statements can't be reconciled with the resolution, will you honor the resolution and rejoin the war?
Is anyone stupid enough to think that Iraq has only taken a running leap into official espousal and practice of terrorism because of this war?
01:37 p.m.
I'm listening to the new White Stripes album, which was released yesterday. It's called Elephant, but the Es in the title are represented with red 3s, and the 3s numbering track 3 and 13 are in red. It made me think of this item that I read yesterday:
ALL triplets in North Korea are being forcibly removed from parents after their birth and dumped in bleak orphanages.
The policy is carried out on the orders of Stalinist dictator Kim Jong-il, who has an irrational belief that a triplet could one day topple his regime.
The number three is thought to be auspicious in North Korea and triplets are revered. It is believed they are likely to rise to positions of power, which accounts for Kim's insistence that they are all raised in state-run orphanages, where their development can be controlled.
Link via Gweilo, who comments: "Kim Jong-Il is as evil as Lucifer and as crazy as a rat in a coffee can. I sincerely hope someone in Langley is working on an ingenious way to off his ass."
And, lest we forget, this is the guy to whom the chiefs of International ANSWER -- which has organised some of the largest "peace" protests in the US -- pledge allegience, both in the US and on their regular pilgrimages to Pyongyang. Nuttier than squirrel turds, and millions of people happily march with them.
SHATRA, Iraq (Reuters) - Hundreds of Iraqis shouting "Welcome to Iraq" greeted Marines who entered the town of Shatra Monday after storming it with planes, tanks and helicopter gunships.
A foot patrol picked its way through the small southern town, 20 miles north of the city of Nassiriya, after being beckoned in by a crowd of people.
"There's no problem here. We are happy to see Americans," one young man shouted.
“There are people from Baath here reporting everything that goes on. There are cameras here recording our faces. If the Americans were to withdraw and everything were to return to the way it was before, we want to make sure that we survive the massacre that would follow as Baath go house to house killing anyone who voiced opposition to Saddam. In public, we always pledge our allegiance to Saddam, but in our hearts we feel something else.”
Different versions of that very quote, but with a common theme, I would come to hear several times over the next three days I spent in Iraq.
That these people are even feeling the freedom to speak ill of Saddam and the Ba'ath Party to the media at this point is fantastic news: it means their confidence in an allied victory is not as low as it might have been, contrary to the best efforts of Peter Arnett and his doomsayer cronies.
01:11 p.m.
Nukes were used in Vietnam? According to Margo Kingston's column in the Sydney Morning Herald, they were. Tim Blair fisks her good and proper ("[I]n memory of all those Vietnamese who died in the atomic holocaust...")
(Aside: Kingston, on the right in this photo, doesn't look like the happiest hippie in the world, does she?)
UPDATE: I had to laugh at this video of Kingston interviewing (via phone, from Sydney) a SMH reporter in Baghdad on 26 March. It took a whole twenty seconds before the bombing of government buildings in Baghdad was compared to the September 11 massacre at the World Trade Center!
12:05 p.m.
The shock in this item (time-sensitive link) is not that some popstars were scrapping with one another, or that there was a threat of violence in South London (if one wants a fight, head directly to Crystal Palace), but that there was a basketball game going on in Britain. Whuzzah?
(My local park, St Chad's in Chadwell Heath, has two decrepit basketball hoops. I always feel so pleased when I walk through the park and they're being used. Well, I say "always," but this has only happened twice. Still, I live in hope for the proliferation of America's finest sport...)
Oh great. I've just received an email telling me that an anarchist web site is organising people to occupy the offices of MPs between March 31st and April 13th. Well in West Bromwich that means Simon and Barry who help me with the 2,500 pieces of current casework get to suffer for how I voted. Oh and all the people who have asked me to help them. Still that's democracy for you. I wonder what would happen in Iraq?
The "peace" protesters strike again. And these are the people who would have our leaders follow their opinions on matters such as war? No thanks, assholes.
09:55 a.m.
Bill Hicks was funny, but misinformed. In the question of who armed Iraq, the numbers are stunning -- if you bought the lie about who armed Iraq in the first place.
One of the silly bints on Question Time this week brought up again this myth that the US and UK were the ones who were giving Saddam all his weapons. Just another example of how misinformation spreads like SARS, especially when it comes from the mouths of otherwise likable people.
This is all part and parcel of Saddam's incestuous political and commercial relationship with the defense, business, and political elites of France that will undoubtedly be exposed after the war. As the Weekly Standard reported, Saddam threatened to expose what he saw as France's betrayal in the 1991 Gulf War, saying, "If the trickery continues, we will be forced to unmask them, all of them, before the French public."
The French fan dance with Iraq dates to the 1970s, when Chirac was the point man in selling nuclear reactors to Iraq, including the Osirak plant bombed by Israel in 1981. (The plant, incidentally, was known as the O'Chirac reactor.) It was Chirac who signed the treaty with Iraq allowing for the transfer of French nuclear technology and specialists. It was this same Chirac who lavished praise on Saddam as a "personal friend," a "great statesman," and who invited him to his home. And, yes, it was the very same Chirac who has led the French efforts to sell arms to Iraq, some $20 billion worth. Today, France remains Iraq's biggest European trading partner. Those who believe the United States went to war against Iraq inspired by oil are looking in the wrong direction. Try Paris.
The "freedom fries" shit is pretty dumb, especially in light of the very serious issues behind the French motivation to block any war with Iraq. It seems people are finally catching on, though.
I haven't posted anything on the histrionics of those now claiming that this war has failed and that we were "promised" a "short, easy war". (Even if that had been promised -- and the only quotes I've seen doing so are from Bill Clinton and ex-Reagan administration members -- I seriously question the critical thinking skills of anyone who would accept such ridiculousness as gospel. As Emily Jones puts it, "Never underestimate your enemy to the point where you allow your arrogance to believe that victory will be swift. If that's what you've done going into this war, no wonder you think we're losing after barely over a week.") But now I am posting about it, starting with a quote from Andrew Sullivan:
Fighting ambitiously is no sin. Fighting ambitiously without a back-up is. What I don't understand is why a two-month campaign that ends up with major forces in Iraq, the liberation of Baghdad, and the end of Saddam isn't still a huge success. Just because it isn't an amazing, sudden victory doesn't mean it isn't a victory...It seems crazy to me to panic and point fingers at this point, although I don't begrudge people with axes to grind from doing so (old Pentagon officials who believe in the old methods, neolibs trying to be hawks without being neocons, et al.)
Bottom line: we're not even two weeks into this thing. Go ahead and predict all you want that it's an unmitigated disaster, but you look foolish for doing so. Think back to those who were calling the US action in Afghanistan a disaster. Washington Post writer Alan Sipress's writings give just one example of the similarities between such reporting now and during that conflict:
Sipress is one of the loudest of the "this is turning out to be more difficult than we thought" chorus. Really, though, his own experience should warn him against getting too hysterical. On November 9, 2001, Sipress wrote an article in the Post titled "Vajpayee Says U.S. Wasn't Ready for War", in which he quoted, with obvious approval, the Indian Prime Minister who said that "the United States had not been adequately prepared for the [Afghanistan] campaign;" "it appears the Taliban are well entrenched;" "the U.S. military campaign has suffered from a lack of adequate intelligence;" and "the campaign [will] continue to move slowly" because "it appears America was not prepared for this kind of war."
Kabul fell four days later.
It's quite clear that the most rabid armchair generals at this point are the "peace" lovers who grab on to every knock the coalition takes with an unbecoming amount of glee. And I think that says more about them than it does about this war.
In its annual report on racism in France, the National Consultative Committee on Human Rights said there had been a sixfold increase over 2001 in acts of violence against Jewish property and persons. Of 313 acts of racist violence documented in 2002, 193 were anti-Semitic, it said. In a second category of racist acts — threats, graffiti and insults — more than 70 percent of the nearly 1,000 incidents were aimed at the Jewish community, while most of the rest were aimed at the North African immigrant community, the report said.
And people will still march with "I love France" signs. Ignorance on parade.
09:06 a.m.
"KILL JEWS" = simple protest of this war? You decide. (And the anti-war protesters wonder why they've got such a bad image.)
The failure, no refusal, of the anti-war left to clearly repudiate and disassociate itself from sentiments like these and those of groups like ANSWER, is why I find myself feeling increasingly contemptuous of the lot of them.
As someone said to me just now, how long do y'all reckon it'll be before left-wing extremists try to characterise Peter Arnett's firing as a violation of his Constitutional right to free speech? I'm surprised it hasn't already happened.
05:26 p.m.
If I never accomplish anything again for the rest of my life, at least I can say that I'm the one who suggested to Jurjen that he start a blog. Today, he responds to a (self-described) peacenik. While you're over there, check out his reasons for supporting this war.
Jurjen is a very clever guy, whose off-the-cuff knowledge of politics and history is somewhat daunting, but very impressive. A "pro-UN, left-of-centre quasi-libertarian pragmatist," former soldier and former employee of the UN ICTY, Jurjen's detailed and reasonable arguments contributed in no small part to my switch from the anti-war side to the pro-war side of this issue.
Plus, he and his wife are ferret lovers. Well, somebody's got to be...
UPDATE: Go read more about it here, and watch Arnett's interview on this morning's Today show while you're there. While Arnett says he made a "stupid misjudgment" in sitting for the interview, he neatly sidestepped Matt Lauer's question of whether or not he thinks he's handed the Iraqi government a valuable piece of propaganda (which he clearly has done -- and they've been repeating it constantly), and he failed to take responsibility for misrepresenting American public opinion about the war.
Yep, he still makes me sick. I'm glad he's out of work now. After being fired by CNN, NBC and National Geographic, I'm thinking the only option he has left is Al Jazeera.
02:47 p.m.
I got an awesome care package the other day from my Dad and stepmother back in Ohio. They sent me lots of lovely stuff, including two bags of Creamsavers (the chocolate & caramel "creme" [sic] ones take some getting used to; the American idea of bog standard chocolate flavouring is somewhat unpleasant), family photos and an Ohio State 2002 College Football Champions long-sleeved t-shirt (which I am wearing right now).
I honestly don't get homesick for Ohio very much, though obviously I miss my family and friends. But lately, the more I've been hearing (lots of times from people who have, funnily enough, never been there) what a shitty, awful country I come from, the more I'm reminded of how nice life there really can be. If I didn't love the UK so much, it would not be a hardship by any means for me to go back to Ohio.
Anyway. What I was going to say is that receiving that care package made me wonder just how pleased soldiers must be when they get care packages from loved ones -- and how awful those who don't get anything from anyone must feel. My grandfather served in Japan in World War II, leaving my grandmother and my aunt behind while he did so; I can't help but wonder if anyone sent him care packages while he was away.
If you'd like to support the troops in some way, check out the following links:
All of these are worthy causes, and I will put permanent links to them on the sidebar. If you know of any other good support services for the troops, please email me.
02:11 p.m.
The Sedition Act for Peter Arnett? Hmm, I like the sound of that...
02:10 p.m.
I've been readingJeff Jarvis' blog for a while, but only now got around reading his "About Me" section. He's only the creator of Entertainment Weekly! Very cool. Check out Jeff's post about how it's not easy being pro-war, both in text and vlog (video log) formats.
01:28 p.m.
I just watched the most angering thing I've seen in a while -- well, since the last time I turned on the BBC, anyway. On Question Time on Monday night, a Kurdish woman called Freshta Raper told of the horrors she and her family personally experienced under Saddam Hussein's régime, and how this war is what they want "more than anything in the world".
A columnist for the anti-American, anti-war Independent, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, dismissed her opinion completely. You can watch it for yourself here (till 2 April), but bring your sick bag.
The Times has an interview (registration required) with Freshta Raper. An excerpt:
Her experiences, she told the programme, had included all the worst outrages perpetrated by President Saddam Hussein’s regime. During the Iraq-Iran War, she was imprisoned three times and was raped repeatedly by “Iraqi thugs”. She has been burnt and blistered by a chemical bomb: 21 members of her family and thousands of others were killed or buried alive in that attack on her native Halabja, which was meant to punish the Kurds for siding with Iran against Iraq. She endured a “horrific journey” to escape from her homeland in 1991.
“People have to know what I have seen,” she said. “I have been made to witness a teenage execution, and the mother of the boy was asked to pay 32p for the bullet. I have seen a mother witnessing her own child chopped in pieces and fed to dogs. In what century do we live? Ms Alibhai-Brown insulted me. She said she has friends among educated people in Iraq. She was judging me as an illiterate person. All my family are university graduates and I have become one of the most successful maths teachers in Brent.
What incensed me was Alibhai-Brown’s assertion that she knew what life was like in Baghdad, and that I was using ‘emotional blackmail’ by telling what I knew. She should be grateful that as an Asian immigrant she has a British passport and not an Iraqi one.
No human being on this Earth should have to witness what I have witnessed.”
After watching her smug dismissal of Freshta Raper's experiences, feel free to email Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and tell her what you think of the way she derided Ms Raper. And if you do email her, show her more respect than she showed Freshta Raper; that should shame her more than anything.
The stridently anti-war New York Times describes the BBC's war coverage as "nuanced objectivity". Well, that's the nicest way of saying "biased" that I've ever heard...
11:06 a.m.
[W]e have Peter Arnett, mouthing Ba'ath Party propaganda, lying about declining support for the war in the U.S., sucking up to the Stalinists who control the Iraqi police state, and generally making a huge ass of himself. This interview is disgusting. It is propaganda. It could demoralize Iraqi resistance to Saddam; it could therefore increase the likelihood of a longer war and cost American lives. This after barely two weeks of warfare. Two weeks.
Less than two weeks, actually. Surely Arnett realises that his words will make the Iraqi public more fearful and less confident in victory over Saddam, and can only prolong this war and make it more bloody -- not just for Americans, but for innocent Iraqi civilians as well.
What is happening to journalistic integrity when a reporter can say such things on Iraqi state television, and do it with the support of his employers? Shame on NBC for backing this interview. They, and Peter Arnett, make me sick.
I love people who think that war should be fought out in the open and there's a chivalry about war and how we do it. The U.S. uses B52's that bomb from 60,000 feet, ok? They're pretty hard to hit from the ground. So the fact that Saddam puts his tanks among the population, what's the difference? The U.S. uses cruise missiles that are fired from warships 500 miles away, so you can't fire back at them. So to suggest that somehow there are rules in war and you shouldn't fight wars near civilians, c'mon!...Saddam happens to want to fight in the cities, this is a standard aspect of warfare.
Dick. Head.
10:06 a.m.
I got an invitation to a birthday party via text message last night. The venue? A Stop the War fundraiser on 4 April at a pub near Herne Hill in London. "Featuring drinks and live music!" the invitation reads.
Clearly my friend (who's active in the Socialist Workers' Party) hasn't got the memo that I'm a blood-thirsty warmonger who dreams of the deaths of millions of Iraqi babies. I'll call him later and tell him.
(NB Is it just me who finds it deeply weird that these people who are so very concerned about the fate of innocent Iraqis and torn up about the humanitarian consequences of this war are having a big party to celeb-- er, raise money for their futile cause? If they were really concerned, they'd give the money to the Red Cross.)
08:38 a.m.
Today's issue of the Express (unavailable online) details a recent phone conversation between Bill Clinton and President George W Bush. Bush says that Clinton talks a lot, and that when he asked after Chelsea, Clinton told Bush:
She's got her father's brains and her mother's morals.
As the Express comments, "What Senator Hillary Clinton makes of her husband's definition is not known, although she may not like the inference that all Chelsea's brains come from Bill."
One down, one to go: why isn't the coalition's destruction of Ansar al-Islam -- the Iraqi terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda -- getting more media attention? This is one of the two enemies the coalition is there to destroy, people (the other being Saddam Hussein's régime, in case you're living under a rock), and the fact that they've done so is getting jack shit as far as coverage.
Today I was so depressed I wrote an opera. I want it to come out in the summer which means we have to start casting in the spring, which means I have to order the kidnappings like next week. I am so busy.
Hee.
11:51 p.m.
Siôn Simon MP writes on why the radical opponents of this war are shameless opportunists. It's a great piece, as he explains just how difficult it is to vote to send people to war. He also tells a rather nasty tale of what some "peace" protesters did in the process of one of their temper tantrums:
My local office premises, local staff, family, friends and self have all been abused or assaulted by people supposedly lusting for peace. My office in Erdington was attacked on March 20. My caseworker, who works in that office, has been doing the job for 15 years, and is known by all the people who assaulted the office, has a son - and is universally known to do so - in the Irish Guards, who was in Kuwait on March 20, moving, we, presume, into Iraq the next day (his 21st birthday). I can't tell you how unpacifistic it makes me feel when they assault his mother's office the very day he goes into battle. It's disgusting.
Yes it is. It's also not unusual, and not the most violent tactic used by "peace" protesters to show just how pissed off they are that they didn't get their way.
Link via Tom Watson, Member of Parliament for West Bromwich East, whose weblog isn't too shabby.
I AM SICK of hearing that because Afghanistan isn't already a democratic paradise inside two years, it somehow proves the Anglo-American invasion was mistaken. The Taliban government was removed because of its involvement in the mass murder of thousands of Americans, hundreds of Britons and many others from all over the world. Whatever the success of the nation-building that follows an invasion, it should not be the sole or the main measure of the rightness of taking action against one's enemies. The main measure is the threat the opposing regime poses to us. Even if the Nazi Party had been better for the German people than the regime that followed, it would still have been right to remove it from power if it posed a real threat. This applies to the Taliban just as much.
Here's a challenge: anyone who thinks they can prove or even approach proving that Afghanistan is in any way worse off now than it was before Kabul fell, please, give it your best shot. I'm quite sure you will find it an impossible task.
Is there more still to be done? Uh, yeah. The place was torn apart by over two decades of war before the US even got there. From USAID:
Since October 1, 2001, the U.S. has committed $840 million in humanitarian and reconstruction aid to help the people of Afghanistan with the U.S. fulfilling 95 percent of the $297 million pledged at the Tokyo Conference in January 2002.
More than two million Afghan refugees and internally displaced persons have returned home in the past year. The United States has helped some of the most needy and vulnerable returnees, donating $145.7 million over the past year.
God, doesn't America suck? What a bunch of assholes, eh?
Look. These are the coffins of six members of the United States Air Force. They did not die as a result of enemy fire. They died while attempting to transport Afghani children to a US medical facility for treatment. That is what the United States does. To all those who say, "...but what about Afghanistan? We haven't fixed it yet..." and other such whining, I say: screw you. Six brave airmen died trying to make life better for children and their families who were brutalized under a tyrannical theocratic regime. Show me any other nation that does this as a matter of routine, 99% of the time without any press or media attention. The United States is, quite simply, good and noble...and these six airmen are proof of same.
Like it or not, and some clearly do not, that is undeniably true.
06:48 a.m.
I've spent the last ten minutes doubled over in pain from laughing at this:
Bushington, DB -- In a televised address from somewhere inside one of his 57 palaces, President George W. Bush today issued a fatwa on actress/comedian Janeane Garofalo, calling on "all noble Americans to hunt down the godless dog Garofalo and bring her to me alive." Bush then pressed a button on a large industrial plastic-shredding machine behind him, into which a pair of Secret Service agents slowly lowered a futilely struggling lamb hooves-first. "This is the fate of all who oppose me," Bush intoned, over the grinding of the shredder and the anguished shrieks of the gradually dismembered animal.
[...]
After describing in precise detail how Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin would be cut into pieces with electrically charged wire-saws over a period of days while being doused with buckets of habanero sauce at irregular intervals, Bush then ended the speech by hoisting a bolt-action rifle over his head and bellowing a stream of glossolalia, or "speaking in tongues," for several minutes.
Go read the whole thing. While you're there, check out his hilarious protest signs. In the meantime, I think I may puke from laughing so hard.
05:38 a.m.
Sergeant Kenneth Wilson said Arabic-speaking US troops made contact with two busloads of Iraqis fleeing south along Route Seven towards Rafit, one of the first friendly meetings with local people for the marines around here.
"They had slaughtered lambs and chickens and boiled eggs and potatoes for their journey out of the frontlines," Wilson said.
Khairi Ilrekibi, 35, a passenger on one of the buses, which broke down near the marine position, said he could speak for the 20 others on board. In broken English he told a correspondent travelling with the marines: "We like Americans," adding that no one liked Saddam Hussein because "he was not kind." He said Iraqi civilians living near him were opposed to Saddam Hussein and that most were hiding in their homes and were extremely tired.
Lance Corporal David Polikowsky stood guard over 70 POWs near the broken down bus, saying how grateful he was for food cooked and donated by locals, which included oranges.
Looking on warily at the POWs he was guarding, who included two Jordanians, as well as an Iraqi colonel, captain, major and second lieutenant from special forces and the regular army, he said he had been moved by comments from local civilians.
He said they told him: "We welcome you. What is your name? We will pray for you." He said another group of POWs, largely conscripts, had been moved south.
"They told me they wanted to go to America after the war. I said where. They said California. I said why? They said the song Hotel California and they left singing Hotel California."
Damn, is it impossible to escape the scourge of the Eagles even in Iraq?
"You will see things that no man could pay to see and you will have to go a long way to find a more decent, generous and upright people than the Iraqis.
"You will be embarrassed by their hospitality even though they have nothing."
I think all of us -- and not just the brats throwing temper tantrums around the world because the coalition is going after the man who has oppressed these people for far too long -- could learn a lot from the Iraqi people.
05:00 a.m.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are selling out, pandering to their respective memberships instead of standing up for their (supposedly deeply held) principles. I'm so glad someone with the eloquence of Steven Den Beste has tackled this subject, and why it's important, because it's really been bugging the shit out of me.
Why no mention of Iraqi crimes? For the same reason that AI is strangely silent: because they're afraid of alienating the portion of their membership which is anti-American by seeming to be partisan in the war. Condemning the US for relative peccadilloes, or warning the US about potential problems in the future is popular; after all, it makes HRW seem to be standing up to the Great Satan. But actually telling the truth about what's happening in Iraq is apparently not important. "Censorship" (by America) is to be condemned; mass deliberate slaughter of refugees (by Iraq) is not.
[...]
As a practical matter, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch demonstrate that they are deeply concerned about human rights abuse as long as it's not by anyone opposing the US. Any nation which opposes the US automatically gets a free pass to torture and abuse its people as much as it desires.
Neither organization, nor any others like them, will hold the moral high ground to issue condemnations of American action until they demonstrate their true convictions by honestly and forthrightly condemning Iraq.
I never thought I'd say this, but shame on Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. There is no excuse for their conduct.
04:40 a.m.
More celebrity idiots: this time, they're involved in a pyramid scheme.
Seriously, how dumb can they be?
I have to say, though, that Paul O'Grady was in the ticket queue behind me at London Bridge station a couple of weeks ago, and he seemed nice. Nice but dim.
03:19 a.m.
Simply put, those living in Iraq, the common, regular people are in a living nightmare. From the terror that would come across the faces of my family at a unknown visitor, telephone call, knock at the door I began to realize the horror they lived with every day.
Over and over I questioned them `Why could you want war? Why could any human being desire war?` They're answer was quiet and measured. `Look at our lives!`We are living like animals. No food, no car, no telephone, no job and most of all no hope.`
[...]
From a former member of the Army to a person working with the police to taxi drivers to store owners to mothers to government officials without exception when allowed to speak freely the message was the same - `Please bring on the war. We are ready. We have suffered long enough. We may lose our lives but some of us will survive and for our children's sake please, please end our misery.
`We are not afraid of the American bombing. They will bomb carefully and not purposely target the people. What we are afraid of is Saddam Hussein and what he and the Baath Party will do when the war begins. But even then we want the war. It is the only way to escape our hell. Please tell them to hurry. We have been through war so many times, but this time it will give us hope`.
I'd love to have a "peace" activist explain to these people why they don't deserve to be helped. Really. "Sorry guys, but it's none of our business. See, you may not realise it, but what you're living in is actually peace! Yes, it's true! Plus, we hate George W Bush and...er, well, that's it. You're on your own."
02:02 a.m.
Not a trace of irony:
As an aside, they don't look very enthusiastic about their cause, do they?
"Umm Qasr is a town similar to Southampton," UK Defence Minister Geoff Hoon told the House of Commons yesterday. "He's either never been to Southampton, or he's never been to Umm Qasr," said one British soldier, informed of this while on patrol in Umm Qasr. Another added: "There's no beer, no prostitutes, and people are shooting at us. It's more like Portsmouth."
“It’s a harsh condemnation of these people,” admitted the man holding the sign [depicting the Bush administration as Nazis], although his female companion quickly insisted, “If you know your history, it’s not.” “No, it’s not,” he agreed.
I think the word "sheeple" was coined for just such idiots. When asked how the allies should get Saddam to, in her words, "leave peacefully," the female idiot answered:
[T]here’s you know it’s always you go in and you say look you know this is a coup your own people we’re taking you out we’re just walking you away and you’re going to go to jail or you’re going to be like exiled to another country."
Wow, why didn't we think of that?
A college-age woman with a smile and flowing blond hair shared her perspective:
Why are you here this weekend?
“Because I don’t believe in war, and I think we shouldn’t be over there because without the UN approving it, and we have no right to be there.”
Well, now wait a minute. You don’t believe in war, but if the UN approved of war you would go for it?
“No.”
You’re not in favor of any war?
“No war.”
You’re a pacifist?
“Yeah.”
Did you the think the US was right, that Britain was right in defending themselves against Hitler?
“That actually, I believe, he should have been stopped. The French should have stopped him in the first place.”
Pre-emptive war.
“Yeah, they should have stopped him when he entered the Rheinland. That was their mistake.”
I don't know why these retards can't see that the American government is not ignoring them (though, God, they should): they simply do not agree with them. Reading the above, is it any wonder why?
"If you think the Vietnam War protests were ugly, study the Civil War. The four-day New York draft riots killed at least 105 people, including blacks brutally hung from lampposts. As late as 1864, the North was in a foul mood, with antiwar protesters crying out for any peace. The Democrats had a peace plank in their Presidential platform calling for immediate unilateral cessation of hostilities." - Jay Winik in American Enterprise Magazine, March 2003
Sounds like the "peace" protesters are following on in fine American tradition.
11:12 p.m.
England beat Liechtenstein, Wales beat Azerbaijan, Scotland beat Iceland...and Northern Ireland lost to Armenia, all in Euro 2004 qualifying matches today. England won 2-0, but they didn't play that well. I wish they wouldn't wait so long to put 17-year-old wunderkind Wayne Rooney in the match, because a) he's fantastic and b) when he goes on the pitch, all the players seem to get quite energised.
Then again, I doubt Sven Goran Eriksson will be calling me for strategy advice anytime soon.
10:48 p.m.
Just got a phone call from my friend Paul, who had just been visiting a mutual friend of ours, Kemper, in Camden Town. Kemper's neighbour has a sign on her door reading simply "PEACE". So Kemper put a sign on his door reading simply "WAR". Heh. Good old Kemper. Someday I'll write about why I dubbed him the Unikemper...
01:39 p.m.
Further to Bill Clinton's "This war will be over in a flash" remark on March 16, there's this:
"[Saddam Hussein] is a threat. He's a murderer and a thug. There's no doubt we can do this. We're stronger; he's weaker. You're looking at a couple weeks of bombing and then I'd be astonished if this campaign took more than a week. Astonished."
He's still got time to be proven wrong or right, but the fact remains: the Bush administration didn't tell you this war was going to be short and easy. Yeah, some of their supporters did, but the Bush administration did not. Remember that when someone tries to sell you the lie that they did.*
*I had a brief interaction this morning with someone on a messageboard who said that Cheney and Rumsfeld had said it would be a "cakewalk". I pointed out that they didn't say that, this person responded that they did, I told them to find the quotes for me, and...nothing. Because they didn't say it. You'd think if people were going to make complete asses of themselves, they wouldn't do it over something so easily disproved.
01:20 p.m.
Mohamed Fayed is leaving Britain. Now THAT's a headline I've been waiting to read for a few fucking years. Piss off, asshole, and don't ever come back.
01:00 p.m.
The most realistic "peaceful" solution to this whole deal that I've read yet comes from Jim Treacher -- and it doesn't say anything about "containment" (ie sanctions, 250,000 troops permanently stationed in Iraq to breathe down Saddam's neck while he keeps murdering, torturing and raping while the "Not in My Name" brigade pats themselves on the back for giving "peace" a chance):
First we'll coax Saddam out of his bunker with a trail of delicious candy. Then, once his belly is full and he's all sleepy and happy, we'll calmly explain that we don't approve of what he's been doing and it's not very nice and we wish he'd stop. And he'll be like, "Whoa, I never thought of it that way. You guys are my friends! I like you!" And then everybody will hug and cry, and then get a little embarrassed about crying, and then make some jokes to cover up being embarrassed. And then a beautiful rainbow will appear, and a shy unicorn will walk down it, and Saddam will ride it to the North Pole, and he'll spend the rest of his life helping Santa make wonderful toys for all the good little girls and boys, and there'll be hot chocolate, and, and, and nobody will ever ever die again for any reason ever.
Those who demonstrated against US aggression in Vietnam and Cuba did so because they believed that those people should have more freedom, not less. But does the most hardened peacenik really believe that Iraqis currently enjoy more liberty and delight than they would if Saddam were brought down? If so, fair enough; if not, then they are marching about one thing - themselves. That's why so many luvvies are involved; this is simply showing off on a grand scale.
I've just heard a snippet of the most disgustingly me-me-me anti-war advert by Susan Sarandon, in which she intones, "Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags, and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know - what did Iraq do to us?" Well, if you mean what did Saddam do to America The Beautiful, not an awful lot - but to millions of his own people, torture and murder for a start. Don't they count?
[...]
Anti-war nuts suffer from the usual mixture of egotism and self-loathing that often characterises recreational depression - an unholy alliance of Oprahism and Meldrewism in which you think you're scum, but also that you're terribly important, too...
What these supreme egotists achieve by putting themselves at the centre of every crisis is to make the Iraqi people effectively disappear. NOT IN MY NAME! is western imperialism of the sneakiest sort, putting our clean hands before the freedom of an enslaved people. But even those whose anti-war protests started in good faith now know that when Saddam's regime comes tumbling down, thousands of Iraqis will dance and sing with joy before the TV cameras, and thank our armed forces for giving them back their lives.
How embarrassing it will be for the peaceniks to have to explain to the celebrants how much better it would have been for them never to have been troubled by such joy!
Let me here offer a small confession in the spirit of this piece. I was against the war in Kosovo for a mixture of reasons, some of them ignoble. I could not bear Tony Blair’s messianic conviction, his apparent belief that he was totally right.
Yeah, a lot of people are pretty pissed off that Bush and Blair have the gall to be certain about this war, too. Because being certain is obviously a bad thing, right? Some people think so. I don't.
And yet who could doubt that the removal of Milosevic over a year later marked a turning point for the whole of former Yugoslavia? It was difficult to argue that his demise had nothing to do with his defeat in Kosovo. A part of me had briefly hoped that this evil tyrant would survive, because his survival gave one another argument for saying that the war was wrong.
Big of him to admit it. I foresee no such admissions coming from decidedly anti-war journalists after this one is over.
Now that the allies have embarked on war, it is natural that many of the opponents in the media should want to be proven right. This helps to explain why the BBC and the anti-war press have seized on every small setback as potentially a vast misfortune. There is the war between the allies and Saddam Hussein, and there is the other, hidden war between the opponents of war in the media and those in the field who seem to be prosecuting it with remarkable success.
A friend of mine said to me the other day that he hoped lots of Americans were killed because the United States would be brought down a peg or two. I suspect there are many people, otherwise decent and enlightened, who would like this war to be prolonged and bloody. They may even in a twisted sort of way want lots of Iraqi civilians to be killed because their deaths will vindicate the anti-war arguments. If we did not care about our reputations, if we did not in our silly, selfish way wish always to be shown to be right, we would all ardently hope for the war to be ended as soon as possible with as few deaths as possible, and with Saddam Hussein safely under lock and key. This is, in truth, what every person and every journalist should wish for, whatever their opinions on the war. But I am not sure it is what the Daily Mirror or John Pilger or Robert Fisk of the Independent wants. One feels that, whatever happens, they and their sometimes less openly anti-war colleagues in the media will continue to say that the war is not going as well as the allies expected, and they will declare a successful outcome to be deeply unsatisfactory. The war will go on in the newspaper columns and on the airwaves long after the last shot has been fired, as journalists fight to show that they were right.
And I dread it. I hate the fact that it's happening now, I hate the fact that so many are blind to it, and I dread its continuance long after the war is over. I see the way much of the media is distorting what is going on in Iraq right now -- asking Rumsfeld if this is "another Vietnam" on the fifth day of the war?! -- and I wonder how it will be recorded in the history books. I cannot be certain that it will be done so accurately, and that bothers me. It, like the current media distortions, should bother everyone, no matter what our opinion on this war.
BILL KRISTOL: This man isn't just a pundit. This guy is the former president of the United States saying the war is going to be over in a flash. Totally irresponsible. And then he says, "You can always wait to kill somebody next week. You can't bring them back next week." So that's what the war's about? We are just going to kill people? You know, there are U.S. soldiers sitting there. It's a serious question in terms of when is militarily the best time to go. And Clinton has this cavalier attitude that, well, it's going to be over in a flash. We can kill people whenever we want, so let's just delay. I mean, it's one thing, as I say, for a candidate to say. It's one thing for a commentator to say. But for the most recent president of the United States to be so flip and glib when 200,000 American troops are sitting on the verge of war on a war front is really appalling.
JUAN WILLIAMS: There have been moments when Bill Kristol and I have disagreed about things. I don't know if you remember any of them. But on this one, I've just got to say absolutely right on. I mean, how do we know it's going to be a quick war? I fear also it's a, you know, possibilities that would be so sad. And we don't know...[W]e don't know. And you can't put that out there in the way that Bill Clinton did as if it's a fait acompli.
Well, you can -- if you're Bill Clinton, because you can be fairly certain that no one in the media who believes you're the greatest thing since sliced bread will ever call you on it.
I'm sick of saying this, but I voted for Clinton, and he is just not the amazing politician people think he is. And you don't have to be a member of the vast right-wing conspiracy to see that: you just have to be willing to look at reality.
I then went on a long diatribe about how we're a Christian family and that we do not allow this kind of behavior in our home. It disgusts us and it makes us sick.
I let Susie talk for a minute or two while I scrambled to remember every phrase that parents are supposed to say to make their teenagers feel like shit.
Susie took it to a whole new level. She said this is how serial killers and rapists get started...looking up porn on the web. And she didn't want him going to prison. She called him a "Jeffrey Dahmer waiting to happen".
Hon. I don't think the guy's going to lure young Laotian boys to his apartment, sex 'em up, kill 'em and eat em.
I then took the conversation back over before she started saying she didn't want him to grow up to be an African cannibal with a poor driving record.
Hee.
01:15 a.m.
Frank Sensenbrenner, who posts over at Iain Murray's site on British and American politics and current events, emailed me with some interesting comments on stuff I've posted here lately:
As for the Russians wanting the contracts
in Iraq to be resumed under a new regime, I think
that's fine. As long as they repay outstanding Russian
government bonds from before the Bolshevik Revolution
with compounded interest. 5 billion pounds will look
like a drop in the sea by comparison. Same principle,
no?
Heh. Good point, and I'm not holding my breath on that one.
Don't get me started on the Lib Dems. They're the
worst of both worlds, combining the intolerance of
right-wing religious fundamentalists with the
sanctimony of socialists. At least I can get into a
fun debate with my Labour party friends, but strangely
enough, neither they nor I have any Lib Dem friends.
They're also known for bad typos on their leaflets,
especially in reference to public services, but that
squares with their view on porn, which seems to be the
only libertarian bone in their body. Maybe they just
want to regulate it so they can tax it.
I wouldn't put it past them. As for neither Frank nor his Labour party friends having any Lib Dem friends, perhaps they should introduce proportional representation into their social circle.
01:15 a.m.
Whoa. I was just watching the ITV Evening News*, and one of the reporters was going around Umm Qasr, talking to the people who live there. In a crowd of smiling men, women and children, he spoke to a man and asked him if he had a problem with British troops being there. The man said, "No, no problem. Is very good." The reporter asked him, "Are you afraid Saddam Hussein will win?" He said "No," looking nervously around him with a look of what I can only describe as absolute terror on his face.
These people truly know what it is to live in fear of their leader. I'm so sorry we abandoned them in 1991, and the trustfulness that some of them are now showing the coalition forces is far beyond what we deserve after that cock-up.
*The news anchor was standing at the port of Umm Qasr, with the British supply ship Sir Galahad -- containing 100 tons of water 150 tons of food -- which has now docked there.
“When Coldplay did this gig they banged on about the war, that’s wrong. Chris Martin shouldn’t be using this cause to bang on about his own fuckin’ views on the war.
“If him and his gawky bird [Gwyneth Paltrow] want to go banging on about the war they can do it at their own gigs. That lot are just a bunch of nobhead students — Chris Martin looks like a fuckin’ geography teacher. What’s all that fuckin’ shit with writing messages about Free Trade on his hand when he’s playing. If he wants to write things down I’ll give him a fuckin’ pen and a pad of paper. Bunch of students.
“These gigs are about kids who have got cancer, they’ve got to fight a war every day of their lives. That’s what we’re all here doing this for.”
Except Chris Martin, who's there to shout about the war. (And yes, I'd condemn anyone who used a cancer charity event to voice pro-war sentiments, too.)
During Everything’s Not Lost he urged the crowd: “Don’t be afraid to sing along, sing to end this war.” He also changed the lyrics of A Rush Of Blood To The Head to “I’m going to buy a gun and start a meaningless war.”
With this, and his Brit Awards comment that "When George Bush has his way, we'll all be dead" (uh, Chris? We'll all be dead someday whether George Bush has "his way" or not.), Chris Martin has revealed himself to be just another clueless pop star.
Chris also wound Liam up by playing a section of Songbird, which Liam wrote for fiancée NICOLE APPLETON. Chris said: “It’s the best song ever written.”
But Liam fumed: “That pissed me right off. He’s got my song involved in the war.”
What an ass. I won't be able to listen to my Coldplay records for a while.
01:14 a.m.
Two points -- the first is made by French intellectual Pascal Bruckner:
I am not "pro-war" but "anti-Saddam Hussein". If we had been able to overthrow the latter by peaceful means I would have been overjoyed. But all the pacifists wanted to do was to attack Bush, whom they called “that scabby, mangy [dog]” in order to avoid ever incriminating Saddam Hussein. We have just gone through several weeks of almost Soviet anti-interventionist unanimity, in which the internal French debate over Iraq has consisted in maintaining, throughout the media, that war is the supreme evil. All the French moral and intellectual authorities thought they were obliged to speak up and assure the prince [i.e. Chirac] that he was right to oppose Washington's war machine. In this affair, it’s the "nice" left […] which has set the tone. But to end up where? To propose, as the only solution for Iraqi misery, the reintroduction of the status quo.
Pacifism is an old French passion. It can be picturesque and derisory. What can you say, on the other hand, when "anti-war" protesters chant, without causing a scandal, the slogan "Bush, Sharon, murderers!" but forbid themselves mentioning the name of Saddam Hussein even occasionally. All these young people have begun to speak "Le Pen's text" without knowing it, it's this which has prompted me to put the stakes of the Iraqi conflict in terms which are the opposite of the consensus within France.
For those of you who don't know who Jean-Marie Le Pen is -- and I had the scary experience of seeing his campaign signs stuck up all over the Dordogne region of France this summer -- he's the openly hateful, far-right (think David Duke) founder of the National Front in France who was first runner-up in France's presidential elections last year. (Jacques Chirac is a right-winger as well, but not as much of an extremist as Le Pen.) And what Bruckner says is right on the money.
The second quote is from Cinderella Bloggerfeller, who translated the above text from the original French:
European pacifists suffer a high degree of intellectual turmoil because they realize (even if they don’t openly acknowledge), their freedom to hold their viewpoint has been guaranteed by “Anglo-American” military action and US military spending. This turmoil comes out in the form of resentment against the USA and a squeamishness about using power, even when refusing to act does not guarantee that the world will be a better place.
And I wouldn't just limit that comment to European pacifists: American pacifists must also realise that their freedoms are guaranteed by the government they question (quite rightly -- I, for one, will never stop doing so) and detest (as some of them do) so much. Perhaps this is the root of the trendy American self-hatred that seems to have usurped white guilt as the required accessory for any American who wishes to be thought of as "evolved". I'm not sure, but the connection doesn't strike me as insignificant.
01:14 a.m.
For the record -- and not due to any hate mail or anything (though if you want to send me hate mail, please do), but just because it's something I think about a lot, even though I haven't addressed it here:
Some of my best friends are against this war. I know them, and they're not idiots, but I still think they're wrong. They think I'm wrong. They still think a lot of pro-war people are "blood-thirsty," "stupid" and "Bush lovers". I still think a lot of anti-war people are uninformed and living in a dream world where twelve years of failed diplomacy with a man who freely admits he sponsors, trains and supports terrorists constitutes a "rush to war" with someone who is "not a threat."
When people form opinions based on exhaustive research and careful consideration, then find out that their views don't match up with a friend's, it's bound to be at least a small disappointment. I only have one friend with whom the subject of this war is verboten, and that's because he/she hasn't done any homework on this, and when he/she says something that is patently untrue (not on purpose: he/she just has no idea that it is) and I say, "Well, actually..." and explain why what they've said is inaccurate (and we're talking things like whether or not the UNSC unanimously passed 1441 -- things that aren't even up for debate), he/she gets pissy and says, "Go suck George W Bush's dick."
That's not debate: that's a temper tantrum. Especially considering I'm no fan of the guy myself.
What I'm getting round to, eventually, is posting a quote that I think people should keep in mind throughout this whole thing, which isn't going away anytime soon:
People who agree on everything else, disagree on this and likewise, those who never agree on anything, are finding common cause.
Prime Minister Tony Blair, 18/03/03
And that's all I'm going to say about that.
01:14 a.m.
Look people, despite all of your sincerest beliefs that "peace through traffic congestion" is going to make a difference, it's time to accept the fact that you are now in the minority. Somewhere around three quarters of Americans support this war. The generals are not going to pull their troops because they've gotten word that you've staged a "die-in" in Manhattan; they're too busy worrying about keeping their own men and women alive, and maybe a little pre-occupied with thoughts for those who have died for real. Continue writing your essays plooped with harsh words about "imperialism" and "hegemony", maybe even a "naked aggression" or two, but at this point, give up with the public nuisance business. The only thing you are united in is defeat.
By all means, anti-war people, keep on registering your dissent. That's very cool. Seriously. But the public nuisance stuff is just stupid and makes people less sympathetic to your "cause".
And something else: if you're against this war and haven't written to your elected representatives but have instead opted to march in the streets carrying signs with slogans as intelligent as "I love french fries," what is your logic? And why am I not surprised that you cannot make a cogent argument against this war? I read a comment today from an anti-war person saying that, while they've been out marching and taking photos of the marchers for their website entries about how cool marching against this war is, they haven't actually bothered to tell their elected representatives of their dissent. That boggles my mind, but I suppose it shouldn't.
I suspect that a lot of people out there marching just want to belong to a (somewhat, but decreasingly) popular cause that lets them get angry, rail against The Man, delude themselves into thinking they're trying to save Iraqi babies from the Great Satan and yet not have to do any of that tedious correspondence with the people upon whom they claim they desperately want to impress their dissent. (These are the same sorts who tend to opt for new age "spirituality" that lets them babble on about chakras and vibes, but doesn't require any actual personal sacrifice or discipline.) As Steven Den Beste puts it:
No one really knows for sure why [initiation] makes people more loyal to the group, though there's speculation. One idea is that it leads to a period of rationalization: Yes, I did just go through something awful and demeaning but it was worth it because membership in the group is even more important. Therefore the person will assign offsetting value to the group proportional to the degree of unpleasantness they went through to join it or advance within it. Whether that's why it works, it's beyond dispute that it actually does. And this same kind of thing also tends to show up in cults.
And it's also the case that lesser parts of the group culture can enhance this on an ongoing basis. Even something as trivial as having all members wear some sort of silly hat during all group meetings will work to this end. Yes, this fez makes me look like a moron, but it's worth it because it helps me be accepted in this group that I think is particularly important. Thus group meetings as such come to be valued in direct proportion to the silliness of the display.
“Am I embarrassed to speak for less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No, I don’t. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do. Have we done obscene things? Yes, we have. How did our people learn about them? They learned about them on television. In the newspapers.”
Please remove your ass from the top of your head - it's obscuring your view of reality. Frankly, you have what we in the medical field call an "asshelmet." This condition causes the sufferer to say patently untrue and ridiculous things in an uncontrollable manner. Famous asshelmet sufferers include Michael Moore and Alec Baldwin.
After you've performed this ass-removal procedure, please lay off the bong or the crack pipe, whatever it is you're hitting, and review the factual data of the war. To say that the U.S. does not have the military capability to take over Baghdad is like saying Barbra Streisand is one smart lady or that Tom Daschle possesses testosterone. It's just not true, man!
After you've removed your asshelmet and reviewed the facts, please stop being such an everlasting anti-American jerk. I'd even go so far as to suggest that you're a traitorous lying pig. Yep, a pig. Didn't you receive some money from the Iraqi government some time back? Pig.
If these measures are unsuccessful, and you can't help but continue to be a lying, manipulative, traitorous, pig-like pig, please come to my house and let me kick you in the ass that sits on top of your head. If that is impossible at this time, well, I can't help you.
I don't always agree with her, but Rachel Lucas is hilarious. I love her.
01:13 a.m.
Near Basra, Iraq: British military interrogators claim captured Iraqi soldiers have told them that al-Qaeda terrorists are fighting on the side of Saddam Hussein's forces against allied troops near Basra.
At least a dozen members of Osama bin Laden's network are in the town of Az Zubayr where they are coordinating grenade and gun attacks on coalition positions, according to the Iraqi prisoners of war.
It was believed that last night (Thursday) British forces were preparing a military strike on the base where the al-Qaeda unit was understood to be holed up.
A senior British military source inside Iraq said: "The information we have received from PoWs today is that an al-Qaeda cell may be operating in Az Zubayr. There are possibly around a dozen of them and that is obviously a matter of concern to us."
This is getting very interesting indeed.
01:13 a.m.
We shouldn't be going to war when some countries disapprove. How hard can it be to get everyone in the world to agree on something?
Bush is doing irreparable damage to the U.N. by insisting it uphold its own resolutions.
Los Angles, CA -- Leaders of the anti-war movement announced Tuesday that as the war progressed in Iraq, the movement was headed into a "dangerous quagmire". Angela Hassle-Moore, leader of a recent protest march stated, "We have lost our focus. What are we really trying to accomplish here? Are we fighting for the U.S. to stop the war after it has already started? Are we trying to get another recount of the 2000 election? Are we just bitching and moaning?" Angela added, "If we don't know what our goals are, how will we know if we've won? How many more of our best and brightest youth must throw away their free afternoons and weekends on this hopeless cause?"
