Category: Politics

The first round of talks on the new Iraqi government ended today. The largest Shi’ite group decided to stay away; not an entirely good sign, but not a disaster quite yet.

In Nasiriya, there were protests over American presence in Iraq: “No to America, No to Saddam.” Under the logic that I should recant my opposition to the war because the Iraqi people were happy to be rid of Saddam, I’m assuming that anyone who believes we should maintain a presence in Iraq should change their minds because there’s a significant number of Iraqis who’d be happy for us to leave.

No? You mean there’s more to the morality of politics than just seeing who cheers for what? Damn, didn’t realize it was that complex.

Paul Reynolds has a nice BBC piece about chemical weapons and so on. His only conclusion is that it’s important for both the US and the UK to find the weapons we claimed Iraq had, and I think this is precisely accurate. More on this in a moment.

Best line about the French evah:

“It’s not true that the French are ungrateful for what the Americans did in WW2. In fact they’re so inspired by the American example that they plan to wait two years until they personally are attacked, then join the coalition and pretend the war against Saddam was all their idea.”

Huh. This is really interesting; someone took a listen to the ABC live broadcast of Michael Moore’s Oscar speech and the CNN report on Michael Moore’s Oscar speech and you know what? CNN really has the boos miked way higher. There’s one guy yelling “Booo” really loudly in the CNN version who doesn’t show up at all in the ABC version.

Listen for yourself. I didn’t think I’d hear a difference, but I did. I’m not gonna claim it’s foul play — it could just be a different set of mikes used by CNN — but it is really distinct.

This also tends to explain why a fair number of bloggers perceived nothing but boos, which honestly confused me at the time. I watched the Oscars live, and I was pretty sure I heard mixed boos and cheers. Anyone just watching the CNN footage would certainly have gotten the impression that the boos outweighed the cheers by a country mile.

I got my first piece of spam offering copies of the Iraqi Most Wanted playing cards today. Some yobbo’s selling the PDF on Ebay. You can download it for free from the DoD, of course. Here’s someone who printed out the PDF onto card stock, and is selling the results for 16 bucks a pop; he’s also claiming that you can’t print from the PDFs others are selling.

Just amazing.

Frontline ran an excellent piece on North Korea tonight. As usual, they stuck all the good stuff up on their Web site. Gotta love it.

And, since (as we all know) PBS is hopelessly liberal and biased, they made sure to include an interview with the highest ranking North Korean ever to defect in which he praises Bush to the skies. Cunning, those liberals.

My cynicism aside, I particularly liked the Ashton Carter interview. He has lots of good insights, and he takes a pretty rational appearing line on the implications of a war on the Korean peninsula. Also, he has the quote of the entire piece:

I remember in 1994, when we were dealing with North Korea, the intelligence experts would come in, and they would say, “That’s a very interesting statement by the North Koreans. It’s rather conciliatory.” I’d say, “How can you tell that’s conciliatory?” And they would say, in effect, “Well, you know, it doesn’t say anything about your mother.”

There’s wide-spread looting in Iraq today. Not very surprisingly, the social structure of the country is in chaos. Hospitals are being looted; suspected looters are being killed in the street. On the BBC this morning, a reporter talked about seeing a man beat to death in front of him. The killers said “He wasn’t from this neighborhood.” Was he a looter? Maybe, maybe not. But man, it’s getting rough out there.

This is about as indicative of the future of Iraq as the cheering was yesterday. The fact that Iraqis cheered Americans yesterday does not mean that they will be cheering six months from now. The fact that there is widespread looting today does not mean that there will be looting six months from now.

And that’s why I feel we while we should not be saying “Sure, but…” (an excellent post by Philippe de Croy, btw), I feel we should all be saying “Let’s wait till things have stabilized.”

Philippe de Croy of the Volokh Conspiracy provides guidelines for conservative commentators who want to talk about Iraq’s chemical weapons. It’s a nice public service, really.

(Or anyhow, I assume that’s what he means when he says “Talk a lot about things that ‘aren’t clear’ or that ‘remain to be seen.’ These sorts of assertions are good because they are hard to falsify.”)

Sauce for the goose…

Kurdish forces have occupied Kirkuk; according to NPR this morning, there are about 20,000 Kurdish soldiers in the city along with a fairly token US presence. This is supposedly a trigger point for a Turkish invasion, so we’ll soon see if Turkey and/or the US are bluffing or not. Abdullah Gul, the Turkish Foreign Minister, said Colin Powell agreed to allow Turkish military observers to go to Kirkuk, and that US forces would arrive “within a few hours” to take control of the situation.

Popular right-wing comment of the week: “look what the left has been defending.”

Well… OK. If we’re responsible for the horrors of Saddam’s rule, I’d like the reasonable sensible right wing bloggers to stand up and take responsibility for this:

Osama is a pathetic little bitch. I swear, if I run into his sorry little ass in an alley somewhere, I’m gonna turn that turd into my own personal sex toy.

And I’m not even gay. I’ll still get an orgasm just thinking about the humiliation I’m laying down on his murderous stinking ass.

I’ll come the second time while I murder that prissy little buttfuck.

And this:

I’m not religious though I do remember some of the tales from the book of Revelations. I have to say that I believe if there is an end of time as described in that book, if this is it, then Mohammed is the false prophet spoken of and Muslims are the evil followers who have to be defeated.

Just words? Sure. But words that lead to actions — so how’s about you take responsibility for this:

Several male students, one wielding a wooden plank, broke into the suite of an anti-war activist in Calhoun College March 27 and wrote a hateful note on her bedroom message board, said the victim, Katherine Lo ‘05. Lo said the incident occurred a day after she hung an American flag upside-down from her bedroom window to protest the war in Iraq.

Tut tuts after the fact don’t do much for me on this, frankly. The left has been pointing out that the kind of virulent racist sentiment we see in Little Green Footballs leads to violent action for well over a year now. How’s about a simple admission that the left was right?

It is essential that outlets such as LGF exist. I mean that very sincerely. Everyone, no matter how vicious and vile their views, should have a platform. One of the reasons why is so that they can see how others react to those views. Free speech is pretty meaningless if nobody is listening; ideally, free speech creates a climate in which ideas can be discussed, criticized, analyzed, and otherwise dissected.

Failure to engage something like LGF in a critical fashion, however, is gonna be perceived as approval. Even if you don’t think Charles Johnson is a racist (and honestly, I wouldn’t say he is based on his posts), he has built a site that supports and encourages racism. If he doesn’t take a hose to the stables, he deserves criticism for his failure to act.

That CBS Baghdad webcam is currently showing footage of a tank and a slew of Iraqi citizens trying to tear down a big statue of Saddam. Just in case anyone wants to watch. (Addendum: here’s a rough screenshot.)