MY COMMENTS ABOUT SADDAM’S LIKELY DEMISE have apparently struck a nerve at the Iraqi Information Ministry, which claims to have graphic proof that I’m wrong.
I don’t think that this will convince many people, though. . . .
Archive for 2003
April 3, 2003
THE FILIBUSTER looks like a slam-dunk winner in the “best lefty group-blog” category. And I’m finding it the most interesting lefty blog period, at the moment. Plus, they’re on top of the De Genova story like nobody else.
April 2, 2003
READ THIS POST entitled “Where do they get young men like this?” if you haven’t already.
SOME INTERESTING OBSERVATIONS on traffic at both Big Media sites and weblogs, from The Wall Street Journal. Today’s InstaPundit traffic (about 160,000 pageviews as I write this) is the highest since the beginning of the ground war. It’s not surprising that more people are tuning in again now that there’s more actual news.
(Via Romenesko).
THE AXIS OF WEASELS IMPLODES?
BERLIN – German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said Wednesday he hoped Saddam Hussein’s government would collapse quickly, marking a stark turnaround from Germany’s previous opposition to regime change as a goal of the U.S.-led war.
As a reader notes, this is about as useful — and about as obviously self-interested — as the Soviet Union’s belated declaration of war on Japan, in the summer of 1945. But it certainly leaves Jacques Chirac in an embarrassing position — though France is doing its best to pretend that it always opposed Saddam, too, really.
This is a major diplomatic defeat for Chirac and Schroeder, no matter how you spin it. What’s more Jacques Delors is praising Tony Blair, and taking shots at Chirac now. Heh.
UPDATE: Tabula Rasa says this is evidence that Germany’s stance was always an opportunistic, not a principled one. Yeah.
Meanwhile Megan McArdle wonders what Chirac was thinking.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s the Soviet Declaration of War on Japan, dated August 8, 1945 — after the Hiroshima bomb was dropped.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: A number of readers think I’m being unfair to the Soviets here. (Note: no one has emailed to say I’m unfair to the Germans!) Reader Jim Ingram writes:
The timing of the Soviet declaration of war on Japan was in accordance with the Yalta Agreement which specified that the USSR would enter the war with Japan three months after the conclusion of the war in Europe. Germany surrendered May 8, 1945. Of course, Stalin was an opportunist when it came to keeping agreements as well as breaking them. This last minute declaration enabled the Russians to make a grab for some disputed islands between Russia and Japan at essentially no cost to themselves.
Fair enough.
UPDATE: Here’s more pro-war sentiment in Germany. Here’s a link to the Google translation, but reader Holger Uhl sends this better one:
Biting criticism of the (German) Chancellor
German Chancellor Schroeder, with his peace initiative “betrayed the UN”. The 69 year old publisher of the “Tagespiegel in Berlin who had been the Cultural editor of Der Spiegel Magazine for decades said: “This war must now be ended in the favor of the Americans.”
The present war ” will prevent future and more tragic wars”, he declared. It was a mistake even during the first Gulf war in 1991 not to go after regime change then.
Karasek explained his reasoning towards the USA policy as follows: The Americans were those that built the Germany in which I like to live.” That alone is enough for me to support the USA.
Thanks.
STILL MORE: Brian Micklethwait reminds Megan McArdle that all politics is local.
FROM THE APPARENTLY NEVER-ENDING JOURNALISTIC IRONY SERIES: People are asking “how can you trust blogs when they’re not Big Media?” After yesterday’s fake-broadcast example, we now have a much more serious faked-photograph incident at the Los Angeles Times in which a photographer merged two photos to produce a dramatic — and deceptive — composite image that made it looks as if a coalition soldier was threatening a refugee and child. For shame.
Then, of course, there’s this.
UPDATE: Dale Wetzel sends this link describing how a sharp-eyed Hartford Courant editor caught the fabrication.
HERE’S SOME SATELLITE IMAGERY OF BAGHDAD and related areas, dated yesterday, courtesy of Space Imaging Eurasia. (The item above, cropped from the “Republican Palace” photo, is used with their kind permission.):
Overview of City with Smoke Plumes – 4-meter resolution (4MB)
Republican Palace – 1-meter resolution (1.4MB)
Dawrah area – 1-meter resolution (1.6MB)
Area South of Shaab Stadium – 1-meter resolution (2.7MB)
Abu Ghurayb Palace – 1-meter resolution (2.6MB)
North Baghdad – 1-meter resolution (1 MB)
Saddam International Airport – 1-meter resolution (3 MB)
Pretty cool stuff. Two points. First, only spy agencies had access to this quality imagery last time around. And second, note how much of Baghdad is intact, and how precise the bombing is. This is a useful antidote to Iraqi propaganda and to “peace” activists’ hopeful fantasies of mass destruction due to U.S. bombing.
UPDATE: Reader Gerald Hanner emails:
Saddam International Airport – 1-meter resolution (3 MB)”
Yep. Pretty nifty. Note all the small craters on the runway and taxiways. Neither the runway nor the parallel taxiway is useable, the high-speed taxiways are also punched up a bit. The south end of the runway indicates that it is RWY 33 Right; I wonder where 33 Left is. Also note that AN-Whateveritis parked all by its lonesome.
Meanwhile another reader notes:
Great pictures! Thanks for posting them. Most of the smoke plumes seem to be from the trenches filled with burning oil, not from air strikes.
Yeah, I noticed that.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Daniel Altchek emails:
One other thing about those pictures (of Baghdad at least) – a lot of cars on the roads, don’t you think? Assuming those are civilians – real civilians, I mean – it kind of seems like they are not too worried about indiscriminate American bombing.
Indeed. And sharp-eyed reader Brian Messer notes:
The south end of the taxiway for 33L is near the lower left corner of the picture –and it’s beat all to hell, too. Wonder if we left enough of that access road to the right of the taxiway clean so that a C-130 can touch down….
I know how I’m betting.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Ralph Peters quotes Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker as calling Baghdad
a landscape of death and wanton devastation, all stamped “Made in America.”
Give it up, dude. This is the Internet — and now we can fact-check your ass from orbit.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Another reader writes that the dark marks on the runways at Saddam Airport are probably objects, not craters. Okay. They looked like craters to me. Meanwhile, if you think my comment above about the “peace” people hoping for civilian casualties was too harsh (not that anyone emailed to say so. . . .) well, read this.
FRENCH-CANADIAN CHILD ABUSE:
MONTREAL — A peewee hockey tournament in Montreal became a trip into hostile territory for a busload of Americans who say they encountered such fierce anti-Americanism that they will think twice before returning.
During a four-day visit, boys travelling with their Massachusetts hockey team witnessed the burning of the Stars and Stripes and the booing of the U.S. national anthem. When travelling in their bus emblazoned with a red-white-and-blue “Coach USA” logo, they saw people on the street who extended their middle fingers or made other angry gestures.
On the ice, the Canadian players told their visiting counterparts that “the U.S. sucks” and dispensed other anti-American insults, the Americans said.
“It was a shock to go to a tournament and have kids saying this to us. These are our friends that are doing this,” Brockton Boxers coach Ernest Nadeau said.
“We didn’t expect Canadian players — especially young boys — would take things to that extreme,” he said in an interview.
The 11- and 12-year-old boys from Brockton, 30 kilometres south of Boston, had been looking forward to the hockey tournament in Montreal. But parents who accompanied them said they were unprepared for the depth of anti-American sentiment over the U.S.-led war against Iraq.
One parent, Bill Carpenter, was so upset he cancelled his family’s vacation to Quebec this summer.
I don’t blame him and I doubt he’ll be the only one.
UPDATE: Here’s more bad news from Canada. A Canadian reader, meanwhile, fears that I’m adding fuel to the fires of animosity between Americans and Canadians. I hope not. I hope I’m calling attention to how Canadians — for years proud of their tradition of civility — have abandoned that in an orgy of anti-Americanism. (Especially, of course, in the French-speaking parts of Canada, which are anti-American and which wield disproportionate influence in Canadian politics, much as the French-speaking parts of, well, France, do in the United Nations. . . .).
At any rate, I doubt that Americans will respond in kind. We’re more bemused and disappointed than furious. It’s like having a nice brother-in-law who suddenly loses touch with reality and starts talking about joining a cult. You don’t hate him. You hope he’ll snap out of it after a while. But you’ll never quite trust him the same way again. And, ultimately, that’s a much bigger loss for Canada than it is for the United States.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Canadian Blogger Mike Campbell says I shouldn’t worry:
I don’t think he’s adding fuel to the fire. The fire’s already going. Let the people who started it stand by their convictions and pay the price. There is a price, people. Let’s hope the political and media elites and the rest of the population are willing to pay it. And let the silent portion, if they are a majority, pay it as a price for keeping silent.
He points out that they’re quite pro-American in Nova Scotia as opposed to Quebec, and suggests that Americans adjust their vacation destinations accordingly.
JUSTIN KATZ WRITES THAT THE DE GENOVA AFFAIR presages a revolution in academia as the outside world begins to notice where its money — and children — are going.
UPDATE: De Genova is afraid to go to class. Sheesh. You talk about Mogadishu, and you’re afraid of undergraduates?
(Via Rand Simberg).
It doesn’t count as “crushing of dissent” when you’re just a loudmouthed wimp.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Maybe this “future Marine” is who De Genova’s scared of — though the reader who noted this article and picture suggests that she looks like Mira Sorvino.
CLEVE-BLOG is Eric Olsen’s new feature for the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s site. Currently, he’s exploring anti-semitism at Oberlin.
GERMAN AND FRENCH RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE WAR: Jeff Jarvis notes:
Below, I linked to an amazing story in Die Zeit quoting U.N. arms inspectors saying that German (and French, Russian, and Chinese) refusal to back military force in the U.N. defanged and doomed their effort and made war inevitable. Mind you, this comes from U.N. arms inspectors.
I wasn’t sure I had translated it correctly (if only I’d paid more attention in Frau T’s class!). So I went to my good blog friend Thomas Nephew, who translated the whole thing, and now it’s even clearer that this is an important piece of reporting — all the more amazing for coming from a German paper.
Read it, and then read this. As Jarvis notes:
History will judge every party in this war and whether they like it or not, Germany, France, Russia, and China are parties to this war.
It would not have harmed them to send a token gaggle of soldiers to the Mideast — just a few clerks without guns, even — to show united resolve to truly disarm Saddam. But by standing on some skewed sense of principle (Saddam over Bush, tyranny over democracy, Iraq over the U.S.), they made the disarmament they said they wanted impossible to reach, they made war inevitable.
Indeed, they did. And we should be sure they pay a price for that.
THEY’RE NOT PEACE PROTESTERS — they’re just on the other side:
Even more, when confronted with a camera. one group of these kids started yelling sentiments along the lines of “We’re all Arab mates!” and “Saddam’s our mate, and we Arabs stick together!”
Stupidity like this just underlines the destructive nature of ethnic separatism in free societies. And the blowback from this explicit endorsement of the enemy is going to be tremendous, especially after last year’s epidemic of gang rapes in western Sydney by Lebanese teens. For all the worries that Muslim “leaders” here have about anti-Islamic and anti-Arab prejudice, they sure don’t seem to be doing a lot to stop their fellow hyphenated Australians (hyphenated by choice, it should be noted) from giving the so-called “majority culture” reason to be suspicious, to say the least.
Funny about that. This shows the damage that anti-assimilationist “multiculturalism” does, by positively encouraging this sort of thing.
A CHALLENGE FOR SADDAM AND OSAMA: Speak this phrase on the air, or I’ll declare you dead.
Heh. I win, either way.
ANOTHER LIBERATION STORY:
The occupying forces, from the First and Second brigades of the 101st Airborne Division, entered from the south and north. They had seized the perimeter of town on Tuesday.
People rushed to greet them today, crying out repeatedly, “Thank you, this is beautiful!”
Two questions dominated a crowd that gathered outside a former ammunition center for the Baath Party. “Will you stay?” asked Kase, a civil engineer who would not give his last name. Another man, Heider, said, “Can you tell me what time Saddam is finished?” . .
Then there’s this:
American troops found that the fleeing Baath Party and paramilitary forces had set up minefields on roads and bridges leading out of the city. Late today an American engineering team was clearing the third of such fields, this one with 30 mines, by detonating them with C4 explosives.
Lt. Col. Duke Deluca, noting that the mines had been made in Italy, said, “Europeans are antiwar, but they are pro-commerce.”
Indeed. (Via Daniel Drezner, who’s on a roll.)
MIRANDA DEVINE WRITES:
The facts of the war emerging from the front-line cacophony demonstrate why war was necessary in the first place. When the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told the United Nations that Iraq posed a threat in part because of its links to terrorist groups he was ridiculed. It was just a desperate ploy, said the cynics, to draw a link between Saddam and September 11.
So much for the cynics. It is clear now that militant Islamic terrorist mercenaries have been pouring into Iraq for some time, ready for a showdown. There are credible reports that many of these mercenaries have been trained by al-Qaeda, and have bolstered the so-called Saddam fedayeen, death squads run by Saddam’s son Uday.
Australian cameraman Paul Moran, who was buried yesterday in Adelaide, was killed by a suicide bomber since identified as a Saudi national. . . .
But if war against militant Islamic terrorists didn’t happen in Iraq now, it was going to have to happen somewhere, sooner or later. September 11 and Bali are proof enough.
Better to bring it on now, at a time of our choosing, with all the cockroaches gathered for a showdown out in the open in Iraq, rather than cower at home, our economies shrinking, our civilians picked off, our enemies growing stronger, until we finally wake up to the fact that fighting is necessary, and find it’s too late and we are too weak.
(Via Tim Blair).
ARTHUR SILBER WRITES THAT CAPITALISM IS THE SOLUTION TO ETHNIC ANTAGONISM — and that welfare states encourage it. The example of France, I’d say, supports his position.
THE “BOMBED MATERNITY HOSPITAL” STORY ISN’T TRUE, according to this report in The Guardian:
However the British Red Cross denied an earlier report that a Red Crescent maternity hospital had been bombed and at least three doctors and nurses had been wounded.
He said: “A missile struck the building opposite and the blast was so strong that the windows and roof of the hospital were damaged. But no one inside the hospital was injured – the building was evacuated three days ago.
This hasn’t stopped the usual suspects from trying to make a big deal out of it — after all, everyone knows that the coalition would rather blow up maternity hospitals than Saddam Hussein’s bunkers.