Iraqi interim President Ghazi al-Yawer said his government will soon offer an amnesty to those who have fought against the U.S.-led coalition, a British newspaper reported Monday.
“We are offering an amnesty definitely, for people who have not committed too many atrocious acts,” al-Yawer was quoted as telling The Financial Times. “Everybody except murderers, rapists and kidnappers.”
Too many atrocious acts? I wonder how many are OK?
Hey, Gene – that happened to us, too! We managed to prolong the agony by signing up for our new DSL with an appalling company that rivals AOL for crayola colored useless software that tries to take over your life, a really bad modem that refused to work with our wireless router and tech support that told us the only router they supported was one we could buy from them – the thing was set up for a week and I never once got my email working. To get rid of them and get our old DSL company back we are sending people up poles twice – a ten day ordeal. I’m still on a dial-up and likely will be for three or four more days. On the bright side, this dial-up is faster than the stupid crayola DSL we kicked out. I’m hoping that I’ll get back to normal blogging in the next couple of weeks.
Here’s an interesting post at Lenin’s Tomb on the plight of the Chagossians – Another “Right of Return” That Will Not Be Honoured. “Staring blankly at the screen?” he asks. Yeah, actually, I was. Thanks for the background and analysis.
Bush/Cheney ’04 – Go F*** Yourself! And a bumper sticker, too.
The mortar attack in Samarra July 8 was much worse than generally reported. Thanks to Jeremy for blogging this Financial Times article by Nicholas Pelham that includes these ominous details:
Witnesses said they saw insurgents and looters overrun the base, which the US had recently turned over to the Iraqi National Guard.
Aqeel Hussein, a reporter for the UK-based Institute for War and Peace reporting, said he saw helicopters evacuating troops, as looters and rebels overran the last base…
Witnesses said insurgents wearing the uniforms of the old Iraqi army and the red boots worn by Mr Hussein’s Reublican Guard saluted their superiors before firing rocket launchers in the air.
Jeremy comments: Initial reports yesterday suggested that 3 mortars had hit the building implying a relatively minor attack. Pelham reports today that 38 mortar shells followed a car bomb and a ground assault.
Predictably the US military was still claiming to be in complete control. If they qualified that with “as much as we are in the rest of Iraq anyway” I might believe them.
I read Juan Cole first thing every morning. He’s the go-to guy for understanding events in Iraq, but on economics? Quick, somebody send Juan this or this!
Matt Barganier pointed out an interesting debate between Jacob Levy of The Volokh Conspiracy and Roderick Long of Liberty and Power on the subject of Michael Badnarik‘s anti-war statements and position. The debate is still ongoing as the Catallarchy blogger Brian W. Doss joins in with comments from the Badnarik campaign’s communications director Stephen Gordon, as well as Seth Cohn for Badnarik’s blog. It’s a little tough following the entire thing chronologically, but all the posts are well worth reading, liberventionists and antiwar libertarians alike. One thing that impressed me about the debate is that it is on a level unheard of in ordinary R and D type political party debates. Imagine someone who could utter this sentence:
“I don’t feel like I’ve got all that much too important to say on the kind of big national issues.” – George W Bush, 20/20 ABC, 15th September 2000
trying to participate in the debate.
Oh, and for you liberventionists in the debate. Read this. And this. And this.
There’s a good piece on Chris Albritton of Back to Iraq in Online Journalism Review:
Anyway, Mark Glaser of Online Journalism Review has a piece on B2I with some interesting comments from editors and readers. Somehow he has managed to sum up the challenges of juggling TIME, the New York Daily News and the blog better than I’ve been able to. I guess distance and perspective can help on that one.
When I was lad I served a term as security guard at a ship repair firm. Navy guys my age told me tales of rural recruiters’ lies: they’d expected to be learning useful radio technology skills while romancing exotic ladies in foreign ports, instead they were cleaning toilets in South Boston, counting down the weeks. Verbal contracts aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, as PT Barnum (or somebody) is said to have said. Now Jeremy’s caught a recruiter admitting to including an untrue statement in his recruiting pitch (“More Outright Lies from Your Hometown Military Predator“). Can the kids he’s recruited opt out now? Didn’t think so.
The lie (“Join the US army – because Iraq’s far safer than Miami“):
‘I tell them straight up. Miami is the biggest war zone we’ve got,’ he said. ‘Every time you turn on the TV we see someone shot.’ Bass uses simple figures. Nine people from southern Florida have died in Iraq, compared with 338 murders in the Florida region last year: ‘They have a better chance in the army than on the streets of Miami.’
The way I figure it, there are about 300M Americans and about 150K of them are in the military and stationed in Iraq. That means that about 1 of every 2000 Americans (and probably Floridians) are in Iraq. If the murder rate were equal in Iraq and in Florida, there should be about 2,000 times as many murders of Floridians in south Florida. According to the recruiter’s numbers, however, there are only 38 times as many murders in Florida (That is, 338 divided by 9). Iraq is, then, about 50 times more deadly for Floridians than is south Florida (since 2000 divided by 38 = 53).
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July 12, ’04 Update:
Christopher Draco writes in:
The quote “An oral contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on” is from Sam Goldwyn, though it could easily be one of his publicity department’s fabrications. Goldwyn himself tired of the popular Goldwynisms, as reported by Garson Kanin in his book Hollywood: “Don’t bother me with Goldwynisms–if you want to hear Goldwynisms, talk to Harry Cohn.” So he really did make them all the time.
Saturday must’ve looked like a promising day to Palestinians.
The International Court of Justice had just declared the Israeli wall illegal, the UN was in the process of drafting resolutions criticizing Israel about it. Ariel Sharon’s position was weakening, he had just turned to Shimon Peres, who made his cooperation conditional to speeding up the pullout from Gaza.
Of course, anyone who has paid any attention to the last half century of this war knew that couldn’t last.
So today, al-Aqsa, a militia affiliated with Fatah, decided this would be a good idea to blow up a bus in Tel Aviv, killing one innocent woman. So now Sharon has postponed his meeting with Peres and is childishly blaming the attack on the ICJ. One can only assume he’ll respond with some kind of retaliatory attack.
Yassir Arafat, for his part, condemned the attack. But it still leaves me sitting here thinking “he’s the leader of Fatah, right?”. I mean, I know al-Aqsa and the other militias operate independently of the parent group, but surely if he had called for an end to attacks beforehand, perhaps while cheering the ICJ ruling the other day, it might’ve been prevented. Even if it hadn’t, calling for an end to attacks would’ve been more meaningful if he’d done it before, rather than after.
Moreover, as he so often does, he suggested that Israel was responsible for the attack. Now, assuming that was true, why would al-Aqsa take credit for it? I mean, again, he’s the leader of Fatah… surely he could’ve at least convinced the militias not to take credit for the thing if they really didn’t do it. That’s almost as stupid as blaming the ICJ for it.
So now Sharon has another excuse to escalate the conflict, and that retaliation will lead to more retaliation from groups like al-Aqsa. Fifty plus years in you’d figure one side or the other would’ve figured out retaliation ad-infinitum isn’t going to end this war.
Senator Edward Kennedy has called the Iraqi prison scandal “the steepest and deepest fall from grace in the history of our country,” “Saddam’s torture chambers reopened under new management.” As a result, “America is being vilified throughtout the Middle East and in other parts of the world.”
“Now, the image of America the liberator has been replaced by the image of America the occupier and America the torturer,” writes Michael Lind in the Financial Times. “It will take a generation or more to rehabilitate America’s image.”
Thomas Friedman starts a piece “I have never known a time when America and its president were more hated around the world than today.” Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a columnist in London, ends one “I have never had so much correspondence from readers openly expressing their loathing for America, for Bush and now, as violently, for Tony Blair, and increasingly for the American people” (The Independent, May 31, 2004).
“To hold on to the essential and humanising distinctions” between people and “their brutish leaders and cruel orthodoxies” can be difficult. “Don’t blame all Americans,” she implores.
Keeping in mind the prospect of “all Americans” being “vilified” for at least “a generation,” consider the assessment of one Michael Mylrea in The Capital Times: “Madisonians have little in common with the people or the city they hope to adopt in the controversial Madison-Rafah sister-city proposal.”
He is reporting from Rafah, “where the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is conducting an incursion to root out terrorists…Operation Rainbow began May 18th after Palestinian terrorists killed 13 Israeli soldiers.”
Say what? How does he know that the Palestinians who killed the Israeli soldiers are “terrorists?”
He doesn’t, of course, if he was ever aware that “terrorist” is a word with a dictionary meaning, he’s forgotten. As a letter to the editor points out, an article written by a supposed peacenik, while “purporting to discuss the hardships of Rafah…serves as a vehicle to juxtapose the words ‘terror’ or ‘terrorism’ with ‘Palestinian’ 13 times.” Whatever the intentions, the result is “the usual subliminal propaganda.”
Yep, I checked, counting Mylrea’s own usage, his quoting of the Madison Jewish Community Council and a Rafah resident denying he’s one, there are 13 “terrorists.”
The letter reminds me of one I had written in 1993 after Israel had deported 400 Palestinians from Gaza to Lebanon. At a hearing before Israel’s High Court, “the government’s advocate explained that membership in a ‘terrorist organization’ can be grounds for deportation. ‘How many people in Gaza are members of such organizations?’ asked the court. The advocate answered, ‘I think they all are.'”
The point of the letter was that Palestinians “over the years” have been “dehumanised.” The Capital Times titled it “Not all Palestinians are terrorists.”
So, if for at least a generation Palestinians have been “dehumanised” as “terrorists” and for at least a generation Americans are to be “vilified” and “dehumanised” as “occupiers” and “torturers” (not to mention as sex perverts), then it appears that Mylrea is wrong, Madisonians and Rafahites do have something in common. It appears that the people of Madison have something to learn from the experience of the people of Rafah.
