Population: One

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.

Another useful resource this week: the BBC’s reporter diaries. The Agonist is also good — Sean-Paul is doing a good job of keeping up with the news. His head will explode within days, no doubt.

Turkey has OKed US overflight, finally. There was a lot of back and forth about this, mostly related to whether or not the US was going to let Turkish troops into Northern Iraq. Turkey wants to make sure the Kurds don’t form their own state, and will do so by force as necessary. No word as to what the final deal was, but Turkey reasserted that it would send troops in after they announced they’d open airspace. That’s not good.

Coalition troops… a side note. I’m going to say coalition, because there is a coalition, which consists for practical purposes of the US, the UK, and Australia. I don’t want to use the word “Allies” for this purpose, because I think it has the wrong connotations. So if you want to mentally add “small” every time I say “coalition,” go right ahead.

Anyhow, coalition troops are more or less moving freely through Southern and Western Iraq. This isn’t a surprise. The serious resistance, if there is any, will come nearer Baghdad. The advance did get bogged down at Nassiriya, where there was strong enough resistance to, well, bog down the advance. Unsurprisingly, Iraqi soldiers turn out to be more interested in fighting back on their home soil — this has not been the kind of wholescale rout we saw in Gulf War I.

We’re not seeing mass surrenders yet; this doesn’t mean we won’t see them in the future. Time will tell. Which, really, says it all for the entire mess. Nothing really unexpected has happened either way, and it’s too soon to tell whether or not anything will.