HERE’S A SUGGESTION that policymakers in Washington ought to be reading Iraqi blogs — starting with this one and this one.
It’s a good idea. Bloggers aren’t necessarily representative, of course, but they’re an additional source of information, one with a different agenda than either government folks reporting up the chain of command, or media folks reporting, well, what they report.
INTERESTING OBSERVATION:
I have a sneaking suspicion that if the U.S. were manipulating tariffs in an attempt to influence European elections, reporters would be putting it a little higher in the story than the final paragraph.
I suspect that this tactic would likely backfire, though the Bush Administration looks likely to put an end to the offending steel tariffs, which is a good thing.
SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO TOMORROW:
PARIS — Political kickbacks, luxury villas bought with public money, illegal party funding. The corruption trial surrounding oil company Elf has already tarnished the French establishment and ruined careers.
Now the decade-long investigation into the former state-owned company comes to its climax on Wednesday, with the announcement of verdicts in France’s biggest-ever graft scandal.
I hope that justice is done.
UPDATE: But if the end of this scandal makes you sad, don’t worry: Edward Boyd points out new developments relating to Credit Lyonnais. And this may lead to trials in the United States, he says. Hmm. . . .
Baghdad, Iraq — At least two of the four suicide bombers who struck Baghdad on Oct. 27 appear to have been Saudis, another sign of the growing role of foreign fighters in the Iraqi insurgency, a senior Iraqi security official said. . . . A fifth would-be suicide bomber, who was shot by Iraqi police on Oct. 27 as he approached his target, is a Syrian national who was born in Yemen.
Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia all have reasons to want the United States to stay busy in Iraq. Of course, they could experience blowback. . . .
UPDATE: Hmm. Now we’re hearing new reports of Syrian and Iranian nuclear programs.
JULIAN SANCHEZ has a link-rich piece on problems with Diebold and electronic voting, over at Reason.
There’s a technological solution available.
KRUGMAN COMPLAINS ABOUT LUSKIN, but he doesn’t know the half of it. At least I’m starting to get apologies! Er, and like Krugman, my critics sometimes use graphics. . . .
LT SMASH says that Tom Tomorrow just doesn’t get it.
No, he doesn’t. Maybe he should visit MilBlogs, a collection of military blogs with the slogan “Free Speech From Those Who Help Make It Possible.”
You can learn all sorts of things from reading those blogs.
UPDATE: I notice that some people are comparing Tom Tomorrow to Ted Rall. I think that’s quite unfair. Rall is a loathsome human being. Dan Perkins, who does Tom Tomorrow, seems to be a decent — if deeply misguided — guy. I think there’s a big difference there, and one that we shouldn’t lose sight of.
ANDREW SULLIVAN IS FISKING WESLEY CLARK, who rather incoherently says that the war in Kosovo was “technically illegal” because the Security Council didn’t approve it, but that it was still okay, while the war in Iraq wasn’t:
Let’s go back here. Clark essentially concedes that the war in Kosovo was, under international law, indistinguishable from the war in Iraq. Actually, even that’s not entirely true. It should be recalled that the United States and its allies, particularly Great Britain, secured a 15-0 Security Council Resolution demanding complete and unfettered access to potential sites of WMD development–or else–in Iraq. The “else” was subject to debate, but the notion that it ruled out any military action is one only Dominique de Villepin would argue with a straight face. No such 15-0 vote occurred at any time before the Kosovo war. So, if anything, the war against Iraq had more international legitimacy than the war in Kosovo. If viewed as a continuation of the 1991 war–the terms of which cease-fire Saddam had grotesquely and systematically violated–it was impeccably legitimate. The 1991 war, after all, was one of very few post-World War II conflicts that had unimpeachable U.N. credentials.
The real problem with the Iraq war is that it’s (1) waged by a Republican President; and (2) obviously in the United States’ national interest. To some people, those characteristics are enough to brand it evil.
Sullivan goes on to call Clark’s latest claims about Bush “Ross-Perot crazy.” Read the whole thing.
GREGG EASTERBROOK’S Tuesday Morning Quarterback has a new home at FootballOutsiders.
ANOTHER PERFECT FALL DAY, but I’m in my office reading rough drafts of student papers. I should be outside, shouldn’t I? I got out for a bit earlier, but now I have office hours. Maybe I should stick a note on my door: “Look for me under a tree.”
OKAY, I haven’t actually seen the results of this Gallup poll on Iraqis’ attitudes (it’s subscription-only) but a generally reliable media reader sends this summary:
Wanted to pass along the results of the latest Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing Baghdad survey regarding Baghdadis’ priorities for a new Constitution.
Virtually without exception (98% “agree,” 1% “disagree”), Baghdadis agree that the new constitution should guarantee all Iraqis the right “to express their opinion on the political, social, and economic issues of the day.” No demographic group appears to view freedom of speech as anything other than the most basic of civil rights.
To a large extent this freedom is already realized, even in the absence of a formal constitutional guarantee. Seventy-five percent of Baghdad’s residents told Gallup they now feel freer to express their political views in public than they did before the invasion that ousted Hussein’s regime.
Similarly, the vast majority of Baghdad’s residents — nearly 9 in 10 (86%) — agree that the country’s next constitution should include a provision “allowing all Iraqi citizens to observe any religion of their choice and to practice its teachings and beliefs.”
The proposed constitutional provision receiving the least popular approval is freedom of assembly — a guarantee “allowing all Iraqi citizens to assemble or congregate for any reason or in support of any cause.” Approximately two-thirds (68%) of those interviewed support such a guarantee, while 25% do not.
Interestingly, I suspect that there’s more support for free speech in Baghdad than on many university campuses these days. Further proof, I guess, that we’re facing an educational quagmire! [98%? — Ed. That’s what it says.]
REAPING WHAT YOU SOW: More on the Goose Creek incident, here.
UPDATE: It’s yet another example of America’s educational quagmire!
ACADEMIA IN ACTION: A reader notes these calls for papers from a planned meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology on “The Political Psychology of Hegemony and Resistance:”
The events of September 11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and their aftermath continue to affect the political situation in the world. The role of the US as a hegemonic power brings into sharp focus the political psychology of hegemony through the exercise of power over politics, media and discourse. At the same time we are seeing increasing contestation of such hegemony among both Western and non-Western societies, as witnessed through terrorist activities, popular resistance, nationalist/religious politics, cultural diversity and through the growing importance of the politics of recognition. Submissions that address any aspect of these themes, as well as those which address the full range of theory and research in political psychology, are welcomed.
Then there’s this:
The failure of the Bush administration’s facile assumptions about the ease and speed with which post-invasion Iraq could be transformed into a secure democratic state and thriving free market economy was painfully apparent by late summer, 2003. Especially egregious was the lack of serious planning for nation building in Iraq where all eyes were on the United States that could not walk away as it had in previous military adventures in Lebanon in 1983 or Somalia in 1993, or get away with quarter measures in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003. Opponents of American hegemonic policies used the weapon of the weak, terrorism, to great and depressing effect. The long apparent ideological difficulty of European Zionism to recognize the moral and psychological requirements for a humane accommodation of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine continued to exact a costly and bloody toll on Jews and Palestinians alike. The United States bore heavy responsibility in the eyes of the world – but especially Muslim – opinion for the failures of Arab-Israeli peace diplomacy. The terrible attacks by Arab terrorists on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, were powerful evidence that American engagement in the Arab and Muslim world had to be reconceived. Moral debts incurred by successive Washington governments as they fought the Cold War with the Soviet Union and ignored the implications of alliances of convenience with corrupt and authoritarian regimes required a reckoning.
The failed foreign policy of the Bush administration based on Hubris called for a major transformation in American domestic thinking on the way to enhance regional and international security through respectful collaboration with the UN and other multilateral organizations, through extending the rule of law, including the International Criminal Court, and recognition of the complex tasks of nation building and transformation of brutalized political and economic systems in post-conflict and recovering nations.
This workshop invites submissions on the flawed thinking behind hegemony and the institutional political, economic and moral dimensions of a caring community of nations. It also welcomes prescriptions on the most creative and effective role the United States could play in working toward this vision of a caring international community.
Those beastly Zionists. They’re behind everything! And their hubristic American lackeys!
Bear in mind that this isn’t an opinion piece — it’s a call for papers. The International Society of Political Psychology is, according to its constitution, “a nonprofit scientific, educational, and non-partisan organization.” Sounds kind of partisan to me.
But, hey, this is just one conference. Perhaps next they’ll sponsor a symposium on “Academics’ Tendency to Identify with the Enemies of Civilization: Treason, Psychopathology, or Entirely Justified Self-Hatred?”
Now that would be interesting.
UPDATE: Is it an educational quagmire? I think it may be.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jim Hogue emails:
“The terrible attacks by Arab terrorists on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, were powerful evidence that American engagement in the Arab and Muslim world had to be reconceived.”
Huh? I thought that was what our military action in Afghanistan and Iraq were all about, “reconceiving” our engagement in the “Arab and Muslim worlds.”
Personally, I’d like to continue “reconceiving” in Saudi Arabia and Iran next!
Yes, “root causes” analysis was supposed to produce inaction, not action. . . .
THE PERIODIC TABLE OF THE BLOGGERS? Someone has too much time. . . .
GOOSE CREEK UPDATE: Here’s some more on what happened:
Then the principal, George McCrackin, patted him down, checked his shoes and took out his wallet, asking him where he got the approximately $100 he was carrying, Sam said. The student said he told McCrackin he had just gotten paid at his job at KFC.
“The people I hang out with are not drug dealers,” Sam said. “We play basketball. We have nice clothes because we have jobs.”
Down the hall, Josh was standing with his friends when he heard a rustling and felt something hit him in the back. When he turned around, he said, he saw a police officer standing behind him with his gun drawn.
“He told me to get down on the ground,” said Josh, who then was instructed to put his hands behind his head and stay down.
Sam and Josh said that when the search was over, police told them that any innocent bystanders in the crowd should blame the search on the people bringing drugs to school.
Bah. Tar and feathers are looking better all the time. This guy should be fired, now, as should the police and prosecutors who approved this raid and these tactics. Michael Graham notes:
What makes this even more problematic is that this kid, and about 70% of the kids who had guns pointed at them, was black. At a school where most of the students are white. So now we have a scene straight out of “In The Heat Of The Night,” with the white principal asking the black kid “Boah, where’d YOO git yo’se’f a hunnert dollars?”
Fired. Now.
STEPHEN GREEN: “Will someone please remind me again what the Campaign Finance Reform Act was supposed to accomplish?”
PAYOLA IN THE NEWS BIZ?
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate two cases, reported by The Washington Post, in which NBC affiliates in Tampa and Jackson, Miss., have charged as much as $2,500 for companies and individuals to tout themselves and their products. He also cited a New York Times report on Sky Radio Network, which serves several airlines, charging organizations as much as $5,900 for interviews.
Sheesh.
THE EUROPEAN UNION CONSTITUTION: Another loser at the polls:
Support for the 230-page document was negligible among key states certain to hold a vote, falling as low as five per cent in Holland and three per cent in Denmark, said the EU-wide poll yesterday.
Most people with any view on the matter wanted the text “partially” or “radically modified” or abandoned, though most supported the abstract principle of an EU constitution.
Britons were the most hostile, with 35 per cent calling for outright rejection. But citizens in all of the EU’s current and future states appeared disdainful of the document.
Support for the draft stands at 11 per cent in Germany followed by France (10 per cent), Spain (seven), Austria (six) and Finland (four). . . .
The survey is a blow to Valery Giscard d’Estaing and the EU establishment, who have insisted that the text elaborated by the 105-strong drafting convention of MPs and MEPs reflects the collective will of Europe’s peoples and must not be “unpicked” by national capitals.
Ah, the “collective will of Europe’s peoples.” So much more convenient than, you know, what people actually want, as it always seems to coincide with the “collective will” of Europe’s apparatchiks. Prediction: They’ll try to find a way to approve it without a vote. Another prediction: The legitimacy of the EU will be further tarnished.
CRAIG HENRY WONDERS if the popular “men are dumb” theme in advertising is one reason why male viewers are deserting TV in droves.
I certainly find it a turnoff, and I’m unlikely to buy a product whose advertiser portrays me as stupid. I don’t know if I’m typical that way, though.
UPDATE: Reader Ronnie Schreiber emails:
It’s not just commercials. Borrowing, at some risk, a little from Naomi Wolf and other feminists who harped about the unreasonable expectations that society places on women and how they look, the image portrayed of the average man in popular culture on one hand is such a loser and the ideal male being pushed by the media/entertainment complex on the other is unattainable for most (the ‘metrosexual’ thing is just another way of saying that today’s ‘ideal’ male, a sensitive guy who knows how to dress well and has a hairless buff body with a six pack and small tuchas, is gay) has led many men to abandon traditional media sources.
I happened to watch the new reality tv show, Average Joe, where a former beauty queen has to pick from a variety of geeks, ‘nice guys’, nerds, and other guys who have experienced plenty of rejection from average women, let alone beauty queens. One guy had a partial hearing loss, another was at least 6′ 5″ tall and maybe 350 lbs. with a bad case of eczema. You get the picture. The show is edited to show them to look as pathetic as possible.
I asked a friend if he could see a show being made called Average Jane, where average looking women compete for a rich, good looking guy. His response was “that would be cruel”. Of course Average Jane would have a hard time finding an audience today. Average Joe can find an audience because average men will tune in to watch the beauty queen and engage in the fantasy of winning a competition like that while ignoring how pathetic the men look. Women, average or otherwise, will always tune in to watch men be pathetic losers. On the other hand, with Average Jane, who would watch? Average men won’t watch a show with a good looking guy and a bunch of average women and average women wouldn’t be comfortable watching the behavior of the women on the show. I think that in today’s culture you just can’t say anything bad about women or show a woman in poor light.
I think that double standard is what most men find most irritating.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Ann Haker writes:
Believe me, it’s not just the guys who are turned off! Women are looking for partners in life, not another baby to care for, but that is how so many men on TV are portrayed: as bumbling fools who have to have their wise and long-suffering wives clean up after their messes.
Women don’t want to see long-suffering wives on TV! They want to see mature, responsible men.
One hopes.
MORE: Megan McArdle thinks that it would help if men shopped more. Hmm. Maybe. But I don’t think that excuses the double standard.
COUNTING THE COST of the war in Iraq — here’s a counter featuring a running death toll. I wonder how he gets those numbers?
CAPTAIN ED REPORTS that the Rock The Vote debate was not just lame and uncool — according to the Los Angeles Times it was scripted by CNN: “CNN, which has marketed itself as an outlet for serious news, planted a question about computer preferences at last week’s debate of the Democratic presidential candidates, according to the student who posed the query.”
UPDATE: On the other hand, the LAT’s coverage of Europe gets a bad review from Spanish blogger Franco Aleman.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Kevin Aylward isn’t surprised: “the whole event just seemed too contrived.”
IRAQ: The good news is that the bad news is dead:
The death of an American soldier is front page news, while the death of his attacker is buried deep inside the paper, if reported at all. But there’s another reason why the response to attacks are rarely reported. The military judiciously applies force, which means there’s often no big explosion to show the viewing public back home. The enemy blows up civilians, while coalition forces use precision strikes to remove enemy combatants. But more to the point, the media are a lazy beast and, it seems, the Pentagon hasn’t been doing a good job feeding it.
They’re probably afraid of looking too “bloodthirsty.” But I wonder if some of those people Katie Couric cites as disapproving the President’s handling of Iraq might be unhappy because they think we’re being too gentle, not because they want to bring the troops home. I can think of a few.
The EU has done a grand job of trumpeting its weakness as strength, but the fact remains that there’s something hollow at the heart of European identity. You can’t be a great power without great power: Slobodan Milosevic called the EU’s bluff on that a decade ago.
Indeed.
CORI DAUBER DECONSTRUCTS KATIE COURIC on Iraq polling data, which she says Couric misrepresents:
Look what she’s done there. She uses the question about the president’s handling of Iraq as if it is the only available proxy for people’s attitudes for whether or not Iraq is worth the cost — when in fact, there is specific on point polling data that speaks to that question. Remember, by 58 to 38, the Washington Post poll shows people thinking it’s worth seeing Iraq through even with continued casualties.
Another attempt to convince people that, whatever they think, other people think Iraq isn’t worth the cost now.
Yes. We’re seeing a lot of that sort of thing. Glad it’s being pointed out.
UPDATE: Reader Leslie Spiller has abandoned The Today Show because of Couric:
I have a confession to make: this morning I turned on Good Morning America… and I watched it without once changing the channel. That’s big stuff for me because I have watched NBC morning news, especially the Today Show, for years. However, my disgust with Katie Couric has been deepening daily and this morning I just couldn’t go there again.
What happened to her, anyway? She used to be (at least appeared to be) charming, fresh and down-to-earth. She used to do decent interviews that actually involved real give-and-take dialogue. I guess when she got the whopping big pay raise she got the mother of all egos to match.
To me, she has become smug, self-righteous and downright smarmy. Salon-tanned, highlighted, porcelained, Simonized and buffed to a high sheen — she appears totally unnatural. Blech. And she doesn’t do interviews any more — instead she gives passionate, theatrical monologues and *occasionally* allows the person about whom she is giving the monologue one or two words to agree with her pronouncements. Cripes, she steers her “interviewees” so blatantly that you can practically see the training wheels and handlebars attached. There is no flow — just torque, and lots of it. Even more disturbing, time and again she has shown deep personal biases, most strikingly against GWB and the war in Iraq in her selective use of polling numbers (for example, your post at http://www.instapundit.com/archives/012450.php) and “facts” (hah). If I’m going to get editorial opinion instead of solid news reporting, I wish the networks would make it clear from the outset that’s what they’re delivering.
Yes, the networks all show some bias — but Her Lip-Glossiness has gone way over the top. This is NOT what I turn on the morning news for.
Heaven help me, on November 11, 2003 I became a GMA gal. I hate having to give up my Al Roker and Matt Lauer — but I just can’t stomach That Woman any more and I refuse to turn on the Today Show again until she reenters the atmosphere — let alone lands on Planet Earth. Care to join the boycott?
I’m already there.
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