Category: Politics

The Globe and Mail reports that friendly fire killed 52 Kurds in the last few days. The dead were members of the Islamic Group of Kurdistan, which is an Islamic Kurdish group that has worked with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan at least up until now.

This does not constitute an emergency, but it does further unsettle the situation in Northern Iraq. The Islamic Group of Kurdistan was theoretically willing to help fight Ansar, the Al Qaeda-related group that holds another patch of Northern Iraq — but now there’s more tension and we could wind up with additional anti-American sentiment up there. The more tense things get, the more likely it is that Turkey will decide to just move in.

We tend to think of the Kurds as a united group, and allies, but the truth is that you’ve got Kurds who just want to be Kurds, Islamic Kurds, and (in Turkey particularly) Marxist-Leninist Kurds. They all want an independent Kurdish state but that’s as far as the agreement goes. Right now, you’ve got Iran, Turkey, the US, the PUK, the IGK, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, and Ansar all jostling around in one small chunk of the world.

The Balkans didn’t settle down too quickly either.

Pakistan and India are testing missiles again. South Korea is sending troops to Iraq — or maybe not. Curse that public opinion. North Korea is getting more isolationist.

Busy times.

In the first week of the war, we haven’t seen:

• Widespread civilian casualities
• Evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
• Iraqi forces rolling over and surrendering en masse
• Worldwide terrorist attacks
• The fall of Tony Blair’s government
• Coalition troops in the streets of Baghdad
• Saddam’s head on a pike

On the other hand, North Korea’s still rattling the old sabers, so some expectations haven’t been confounded.

Unrest continues in Southern Iraq; there are reports of an uprising against Saddam in Basra, however. While the quick dash for Baghdad failed, it’s not clear that this represents a serious setback. It looks like the next few days are going to be dedicated to shoring up the coalition position before we launch the attack on Baghdad proper. The troops badly need rest.

Northern Iraq, meanwhile, is a big question mark. Anyone’s guess as to what’s going on up there.

“You are obviously trying to get around the fact that you are Canadian.” Yeah, I see that kind of thing all the time. Sneaky Canadian bastards. Apparently there’s an EBay seller who won’t sell to Canadians — or anyone else who isn’t part of the anti-Iraq coalition. Mind you, if you dig up their EBay policies page, it looks like they’ve never shipped anywhere outside the United States. Which would make this fuss about not shipping to non-coalition countries look a lot like a marketing scheme.

Link courtesy of the non-Canadian kodi. (Or is he?)

David Neiwert updated with another post on fascism, this one discussing the risks of abusing the word itself. Like the rest, it’s good reading.

There’s a new blog out there called The Command Post. It’s kind of a group news warblog, but the bias of the contributors is distinctly conservative and they can’t help but let it seep through. A lot.

So t.rev dropped me a line pointing out this post, which discusses the Fedayeen Saddam, Saddam’s — actually, they sound like his special forces units. The poster compares them to the NKVD, and to illustrate the nature of the NKVD, he links to… Delta Green. As in the game. He links to a discussion of how the NKVD battled a secret US intelligence group over Cthulhoid horrors.

To make the irony complete, the very next post calls the BBC to task for being out of touch with reality.

In 1972, Munich was awarded the 18th Summer Olympic Games. It was the first Olympics in Germany since the propaganda-inflected Games of 1936; as is always the case, hosting the Olympic Games was a matter of some national pride. There were 7,173 athletes from 121 nations present.

Mark Spitz won his seven gold medals at that games, with seven world records. Ulrike Meyfarth became the youngest person to win a gold medal in an individual event, in the high jump, at age 16. Olga Korbut became a media star and ushered in an era of gymnastics obsession.

At 5 AM on September 5th, eight Palestinian terrorists broke into the Olympic Village and knocked on the door of Moshe Weinberg. Weinberg was the wrestling coach for the Israeli team. The terrorists killed Weinberg and Joseph Romano, and took nine other Israelis hostage: Kehat Shorr, David Berger, Yaacov Shpringer, Mark Slavin, Andre Spitzer, Zeev Friedman, Yosef Guttfreund, Eliezor Halfin, and Amitsur Shapira. At 9:30, the terrorists — members of Black September, which later proved to be a PLO faction — demanded the release of 200 terrorists (most Arab, but two Germans, the leaders of the Red Army Faction) and passage out of Germany.

Golda Meir, then Prime Minister of Israel, refused to make concessions. In conjunction with Israeli officials, the German police on hand planned to get the terrorists to an airport under the pretense of negotiation, and to kill the terrorists there. Tragically, they underestimated the number of terrorists involved and did not provide enough snipers for the operation.

By 3 AM the following morning, the crisis had ended with the deaths of all the Israeli hostages and most of the terrorists. Three terrorists were taken prisoner. On October 29th, a plane flying from Syria to Germany was hijacked; the hijackers demanded the release of the captured terrorists. Germany capitulated.

In the years following, Mossad operatives were tasked with hunting down and killing those responsible for the Munich tragedy. For the most part, they succeeded. In one case, they killed the wrong person — Ahmed Bouchiki, in Lillehammer.

Germany has not hosted an Olympics since. In April of 1998, the Red Army Faction officially disbanded following a long period of inactivity.

I chronicle this because the Vice President of the United States of America forgot.

The evidence is in; some people really want an excuse to hate. So OK, Dixie Flatline. Hate away. Put yourself in that dangerous little corner of the human psyche. What happens when you cage yourself is simple; on Sundays, the tourists walk by and take pictures and discuss your strange case. Consider me a tourist. Here’s my discussion.

In your rant, cloaked in the pretense of rationality, you claim that the loyalties of American Muslims must be suspect. You claim that we must watch them closely; the implication, bitter as quinine in your mouth, is that there is no other way to be safe from the threat.

You elide the fact that the soldier who killed his fellows was a malcontent. You elide the fact that he had been resentful; that his officers told him he couldn’t go to war. You choose, in your bile, to seize on one particular identifying mark and shake it in your jaws until it provides you with the blood you so passionately want.

And further, the blood you get is not enough for you. It doesn’t satisfy. It seems that our soldier was a convert, a member of that fanatical Muslim splinter epitomized by Farrakhan and his racist ilk. Is that significant? Is that a useful knife with which to segment the pool of those scrutinized?

No. You can’t be bothered to make such fine distinctions. You can’t be bothered to ask if this man became a Muslim because he thought it was a way to express earlier hatred. He’s just a Muslim, and Muslims must be watched. All of them. No matter what their differences with this man.

Let us turn, then, to the purely practical.

You are an officer. You have been charged with determining which of your soldiers is likely to take action against his own people. It’s an important task; you intend to save lives.

In a camp of, say, 1,000 men, there are 20 Muslims. And there is one soldier who has been acting up, malcontented, angry. So angry you’ve decided he can’t go on the next mission.

What, do you think, is a better scalpel with which to make your determinations? Is it better to spread your resources among 20, or to focus on the clear and evident danger?

Dixie Flatline would have you spread your resources among 20 Muslims. He doesn’t think it’s worth even mentioning that the one man is acting like someone with a grudge. The Muslims have split loyalties, even if they’ve never shown any signs of that in the past. The fact that the one man is so insubordinate that he can’t even be allowed to fight with his unit isn’t even worth mentioning.

See, here’s what makes Dixie Flatline a bigoted man in my eyes. He — or she — is so eager to paint the Muslims with the brush of hatred that he is willing to ignore a better, more productive way of noticing disloyal soldiers. Getting the Muslims under careful watch is more important to him than keeping our soldiers safe. There’s a better way than religious profiling and he doesn’t even mention the possibility.

I think I’ve spent enough time in front of this cage (self-created, self-incarcerated, and only Dixie Flatline can get Dixie Flatline out of it).

One of the common worries expressed by anti-war protestors was the possibilty of backlash during the war. We were forced to close our embassy in Pakistan yesterday, and all US citizens are advised to leave Pakistan. Why? Seems there are intensifying protests over there, and things are getting violent.

Meanwhile, the Instapundit thinks Iraqis who are happy to be liberated are my worst nightmare. As Unqualified Offerings notes, my worst nightmares involve things like militant Islamic coups in Pakistan, a nation that has a number of nuclear weapons. Iraqi citizens happy to be liberated? That’s a good thing.

By the by, that BBC diary page I recommended earlier changes daily; you’re better off going to the top page and finding the link to the current one there. Surrenders are picking up (which is making the advance a lot easier), there’s still resistance in the port city of Umm Qasr, and somewhat worrisomely, we’ve targetted a radical Islamist group in Iraq. This is the sort of thing that will encourage the protests in Pakistan and elsewhere; I’m not saying it’ll have a bad result, cause how would I know? I’m just saying it’s inflammatory and serves to drive militant Islamic sympathies for Iraq.

Two things.

First, Amiri Baraka is an idiot and a pig and quite possibly a racist. (Although, you know, do some research. “It is a narrow nationalism that says the white man is the enemy… Nationalism, so-called, when it says ‘all non-blacks are our enemies,’ is sickness or criminality, in fact, a form of fascism.” You’ll never guess who wrote that. Still, set that aside: once you start with calling people a whore during your lectures, you get slotted into the idiot and pig categories. At the very least.)

Second, I take it all back. If we’re going to have to hear the words “Trent Lott moment” every time someone says something stupid that should be condemned, I want to go back and undo the entire Trent Lott furor. Leave him as Senate Majority Leader. It’s not like he suffered that much; he still has a prestigious post. And I am already getting really, really tired of the analogies. If you can’t make the case against someone without comparing them to Trent Lott, you don’t have a case.