Month: May 2003

It looks like the whole looting question has been more or less cleared up. Various people were quick to jump on reports that only a handful of artifacts were missing. Turns out that there are only a handful missing… now. Because Customs did its job and found thousands of missing items (mostly manuscripts, some artifacts).

Praise is due to the US for making a strong and serious effort to fix the initial mistake. People who can’t wait for the full story to be in before mocking those who mourned the initial loss might want to consider getting a little more patient.

Dear Raed is back, with the assistance of Diana Moon. (Via Metafilter.)

So, this cartoon. It’s from a newish online comic strip, which has found an audience by being fervently right-wing. The art isn’t bad. OK, all well and good. Occasionally I see right-wing bloggers chuckling at a strip and I can usually see why.

But, y’know, that cartoon.

I gotta ask. Is the artist aware that the Dems are in fact blocking only a handful of nominees? Jeff Sutton got through, no problems. Deborah Cook just got through. Michael McConnell got through. Dennis Shedd got through. Timothy Tymkovich got through.

The claims that the Democrats are trying to block all of Bush’s nominees are just, well, lies. Do a little hunting and you can find a number of progressive groups bitching about the nominees who aren’t being blocked.

You wouldn’t know it from the cartoon, though.

Quick little followup on Jimmy Wynn:

Jay Bookman wrote an editorial about Wynn in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (Read it while you can; it’ll move to a paid archive at some point.) From the summaries of his past columns, I wouldn’t call him a conservative — he looks pretty liberal to me. He defended Wynn and praised the decisions made by the GBI. So, I guess that’s who’ll speak out against this injustice. Liberal columnists.

I dropped Mr. Bookman an email discussing the question of Wynn’s propensities towards violence, by the by, and he kindly replied. He went out and did the kind of real research that local journalists can do, and talked to some of Wynn’s friends, so his conclusions regarding Wynn’s personality are based on more palpable evidence than my Web searches. I’m still not totally convinced, given the tendency towards obfuscation that exists in the militia movement, but I’m not unconvinced either.

How times change.

April 24, 2003:

The world must focus on the issue of nonproliferation, says President George Bush.

“One of our goals and objectives must be to strengthen the nonproliferation regimes and get the whole world focused on proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” he told Tom Brokaw of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) during an April 24 interview aboard Air Force One on his way to Canton, Ohio.

Of the U.S.-China-North Korea meetings held in Beijing this week, Bush said the message to the North Koreans and the world is: “(W)e’re not going to be threatened.”

“On the other hand we, the world, must come together to make sure institutions like the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) are effective at stopping proliferation,” he said.

May 5, 2003:

A senior U.S. official said on Monday Washington saw no immediate role for the United Nations in its quest for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The remarks by U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton spelled further frustration for International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei, who along with chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix hunted for the banned arms, at being kept out of post-war Iraq.

“I don’t think there is any role for the U.N. in the short term in searching for, or identifying, or securing weapons of mass destruction, but we do not necessarily rule out some kind of U.N. role down the road,” Bolton told reporters in Moscow.

The facilities that the IAEA wants to inspect were under IAEA seal. Nobody’s ever denied that there were potentially dangerous materials inside ‘em. However, Iraq didn’t unseal them. Had they done so, the IAEA would have reported this and provided a causus belli, which perhaps speaks to why Iraq left them the hell alone. The IAEA has good records of what was inside and is the agency most capable of determining the extent of the looting.

The IAEA acts in Iraq under the authority of UN Security Council Resolution 687 (PDF). This is one of those Security Council resolutions that we treat with such respect, even when the Security Council itself won’t. We won the war, but that doesn’t make the resolution vanish. Consider: if Iran had invaded and defeated Iraq, would that mean inspections were unnecessary? Nah. We can trust ourselves, of course, but if the IAEA wants to inspect the nuclear sites, where’s the harm?

It doesn’t create any dangerous precedents other than that the IAEA has the right to carry out actions decided upon in the Security Council. That seems pretty safe to me. What’s more, it’s precisely what Bush said they should do on April 24th — and that’s the meat of the issue. I could respect a consistent stance vis a vis international bodies, but it’s hypocritical to talk about making the IAEA effective while refusing their legitimate, Security Council-backed request.

How effective does the IAEA look when Bush is turning them down out of hand? Not very.