Mea culpa. In yesterday’s column I referred to my dad as the only delegate at the 1980 Republican National Convention to vote against George H.W. Bush for vice president. Not true, he informed me; he was the first to announce he was going to do so, and the only delegate from his state to do it.
After this successful (albeit unintentional) foray into mythmaking, I’m now considering applying for work at the New York Times and the Weekly Standard.
Shiite gunmen seized a police station in the holy city of Najaf and held it for two hours Thursday in the first outbreak of fighting since an agreement to end weeks of bloody clashes between U.S. troops and militia forces. Four Iraqis were killed and 13 were injured, hospital and militia officials said.
[…]
Chaos swept the southern city of Najaf after gunmen loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr overran the Ghari police station, which is 250 yards from the Imam Ali Shrine, witnesses said. The station was looted and police cars were burned.“We sent a quick reaction unit to assist the policemen defending the station, but they were overwhelmed by al-Sadr fighters,” said Najaf Gov. Adnan al-Zurufi. “We will solve this problem as soon as possible. We will ask for the help of the Americans, if necessary.”
Hours later, al-Sadr’s forces withdrew and disappeared. Rioters looted the cars that had been attacked outside the station.
Fighting ebbed Thursday around the main police station, which came under fire Wednesday night, when the attacks began.
How could this be possible? As Sadr’s army was defeated.
“The Moqtada militia is militarily defeated. We have killed scores of them over the last few weeks, and that is in Najaf alone,” said Brigadier General Mark Hertling, one of the top US commanders in charge of Najaf.
“Over the past several days, Moqtada’s militia has lost much of their stomach for fighting,” he said, also declaring victory in the central cities of Kut, Diwaniyah and Karbala, dogged by fighting over the past two months.
“We have also destroyed their weapons stores and their offensive capability,” he said.
“What remains of them, which is a very small force, will take advantage of the governor’s announcement to disperse if not disband.”
Looks like Brigadier General Mark Hertling, continuing the established tradition for Americans in Iraq, was wrong.
Iraq’s new Oil Minister Thamir Ghadhban has reportedly said that all coalition advisers will leave Iraqi ministries after the 30 June handover.
Quoted by the UK’s Financial Times, he said that the ministry would reassert full control over the country’s lucrative oil industry.
[…]
“When sovereignty is regained it means that there will be no more US advisers, not only in the ministry of oil, but in every ministry in Iraq,” he was quoted as saying in Thursday’s edition of the FT.
Uh-oh. I wonder what Neocon Central will have to say about that? Let’s see what Bureaucrat Man has in mind:
A Board of Supreme Audit—also appointed by Bremer—will have representatives in every Iraqi ministry, with powers to monitor all contracts and expenditure. The US-installed members of the board will have a five-year term of office and cannot be removed except by a two-thirds vote in an elected Iraqi parliament—when one exists. US “advisors” will remain in every ministry, reporting to a virtual parallel government operating out of the American embassy in Baghdad, which, with over 3,000 staff, will be the largest in the world.
That darn pesky “sovereignty” thing. Some people are actually taking it seriously.
Here’s a bizarre post by a person named Clayton Cramer that I wandered across. It’s titled “The Sheer Injustice Of It!” and he has linked an article about some lawyer who claims to be representing Saddam Hussein making allegations that the US has tortured Saddam while he has been in detention. Clayton, who describes himself as “a conservative with libertarian sympathies” isn’t disputing the allegations. He seems rather more gleeful at the idea that they might be true because there would be “a certain justice to it.” He goes on to recount some old stories about Saddam, like the discredited people shredder story, to demonstrate why it would be just to torture Saddam.
This is a common argument among the type of “conservatives” who would make an old rightist shudder and they’re pretty much the Bush base, which is one of the reasons the US ended up in the Abu Ghraib mess in the first place. As an example, get a good look at Mary L. Walker, the born-again lead lawyer on the DoD torture-justification memo.
By this logic, Bush should have a Tomahawk missile fly up his butt, shouldn’t he? After all he did it to Ali first, right? Anyone who wished to dispense “justice” could unleash Shock and Awe on the White House. (That might not be such a bad idea, but I wouldn’t call it just.) I wonder how far “conservatives” would be willing to go with this argument? If they ever have Islam Karimov in custody are they going to start boiling people?
So, to return to Mr. Cramer, what can we say about a person who expresses humanitarian outrage about human rights abuses and then abuses the person they were so outraged about? What makes atrocities just if someone else does them first? The conservatives – or is it the Republicans? – should consider making “Saddam did it first!” their slogan.
But the big thing is this: President Bush is absolutely responsible for everything that happens in his administration, and to the extent that the Pentagon memo conditioned policy, he is first in line for blame. HOWEVER. President Bush is no one’s idea of a legal mind. He may have initiated the project that became the memo, but he didn’t draft the thing. High-level government lawyers, most of them undoubtedly political appointees, did that. What that means is that there is systemic corruption in the Republican Party as an institution – “Bush’s Willing Torturers” we might call them. These are people that came up with the idea that the Constitutional phrase “he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” meant
authority to set aside the laws is “inherent in the president.”
They represent a deadly danger to the American system and they are multiple. It’s not one guy somewhere, it’s a movement. Until the Republican Party roots them out, that Party is the enemy, not just of libertarians, but of anyone who values individual freedom and republican government. From the standpoint of liberty, there can no longer be any justification for preferring the Republicans to the Democrats.
UPDATE: To clarify, this isn’t just another Unqualified Offerings anti-torture item. The issue now goes beyond torture to the very structure of American government. Torture is the symptom. The concept that the President is not just himself above the law, but a supralegal authority, is the malady.
[emphasis mine]
On Sunday, AP reported that the US military is "lowering its profile" in order "to avoid alienating its Iraqi allies who take power at the end of the month." The military has been criticised for it "heavy-handed tactics," hence the softening of once-rigid demands.
Unfortunately, that report came on heels of one a few hours earlier from Karma, described as a suburb of Falluja. An Iraqi interpreter has been kidnapped. Marines cordon off the crime scene, a "house-to-house search" fails to find him. Lt. Col. Brennan Bryne "demands" that the Iraqi be released and announces he is "’indefinitely suspending’ all assistance and construction projects." Of course, house-to-house searches have been known to be conducted with a bit of "heavy-handedness."
That was Sunday in Karma. On Tuesday, eleven Iraqis, including women and children, were killed when heavy fighting broke out there. It appears as if the tactics and demands were hard enough to provoke more resistance.
On Wednesday (today), it appears the violence spread to Fallujah itself, "Rebels kill 12 Iraqi soldiers." Al-Jazeera reports "Occupation tanks poised to enter."
I find it funny that the Bush campaign has chosen to highlight the same Reagan speech I alluded to in my column today; I find it downright hilarious that they titled the speech “Empire of Ideals.” What did Reagan say about empire in the speech?
Hardly a ringing endorsement of the neocons’ “Invade the World” project, especially given that Reagan was explicitly contrasting this “empire of ideals” with the military/political aggression of the Soviet Union. They wanted to “liberate” Afghanistan and the rest of the Third World, too.
