JOSH CHAFETZ NOTES: “Unfortunately, I appear to have been right.” There’s a story in the Yale Daily News with names and details in support of his earlier report of antiwar student harassment.
I agree with his earlier post that this sort of conduct is appalling, and it’s not something that anyone should be proud of. Leave these sorts of tactics to the black bloc crowd, please.
ANOTHER ONE OF THE BUFFALO SIX has pled guilty, and Eric Muller thinks the evidence is damning.
Strictly speaking, this doesn’t alter my views about “dirty pool” in the plea-bargaining process, posted earlier.
MORE ON THE DISAPPEARING TOURISTS: Nelson Ascher sends this article from Liberation (Google translation here), but there doesn’t seem to be much more information on what’s going on. The story dismisses GPS jamming (unlikely, I’ll admit) and Islamic terrorists (I’m not so sure about that) and kidnapping. So what’s left?
I’d like to see a lot more examination of what’s going on in that area. A surprisingly large number of people drive around in the Sahara on vacation (my brother did it once) and more than a few of them disappear, but their bodies are usually found. It sounds too much like a thriller plot, but this many disappearances in a short period make me wonder if there’s somebody there with something to hide.
STUART BUCK posts on the question of whether, if the Iraqis are all armed, it doesn’t undercut arguments that an armed populace makes tyranny highly unlikely.
It might, if it were true that Iraqis are all armed. But there’s not much reason to think that they are. It’s true that a Tim Noah piece that Buck links repeats that assertion, picked up from a New York Times story. But dictatorships often pretend to arm their people against external threats, while really only arming those deemed politically reliable — typically members of the ruling party. (And the question of who has them does matter. Uday Hussein has — er, had — a newspaper, but that hardly proves that Iraq has a free press.)
That seems to be the case in Iraq, where this story from today reports:
Civilians also took advantage of the collapse of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s authority to grab weapons from an army base, said Group Sergeant Jeff Treiber.
That doesn’t sound like the action of a universally-armed populace to me. Maybe Neil MacFarquhar, who wrote the story for the Times, got his information from Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf. A journalist possessed of a more critical mindset toward those in power, of course, might wonder why a ruler who doesn’t trust his own army, or even his own “elite” Republican Guard, would trust a populace that he terrorizes with guns.
(Thanks to reader Jim Loan for pointing me to Buck’s blog, which I should read more often. And I should stress that Buck’s analysis is far more sophisticated than Tim Noah’s.)
UPDATE: Nelson Ascher emails:
Hypothesis:
An armed populace may be effective BEFORE the appearence of a totalitarian government.But if you arm them when they’re already under such control, surveillance and terror, it is not likely that they would or could revolt. Otherwise no officer in the army of a totalitarian state would issue guns to his own soldiers. Once you have a disciplined organization or state, small arms are rather useless. What is needed is a counter-organization (a party, a movement etc) that’s able to transform thousands of isolated arms in a weapon-system. That’s why many revolutions consist in turning part of the standing army against the government.
Yes, and it’s why such governments do their best to atomize citizens and make them distrustful of one another. I’ve written a little about this subject here, and Indiana University law professor David Williams has written more on it. He has a book out now that I’m working my way through — or was until a student borrowed it for a paper she’s writing for me. Here’s what I wrote a while back, in the piece linked just above:
As the interned American citizens of Japanese descent learned, the Bill of Rights provided them with little protection when it was needed. And, of course, there is no guarantee that a free press will prevail over the long term either. Certainly some tyrannies have arisen in nations where press freedom existed–Weimar Germany, for example. Yet we do not generally require proof of efficacy where other Constitutional rights are concerned, so it seems a bit unfair to demand it solely in the case of the Second Amendment.
It seems to me that Noah is trying to make just such a demand. Nonetheless, I do think that an armed populace is effective — if not foolproof — at preventing and remedying tyranny. And I’ll bet we’ll find out that Saddam thought so too, and that, as the evidence above suggests, reports of universal gun ownership among Iraqis were about as reliable as, well, most reports from the Iraqi government.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Megan McArdle is skeptical of Noah’s premise, too:
Noah tries to counter this by saying that given that McFarquar was in a gun shop where transactions were taking place, the Iraqi people at least have free access to guns. But he knows no such thing. All he knows is that the people in the gun shop in Baghdad were able to buy guns from that gun store owner. We don’t know who you need to know, pay, or present in order to buy a gun in that store.
Then there’s the countervailing evidence:
I’ve read about freelancing Fedayeen who’ve been setting themselves up as local strongmen with nothing more than the small arms they’re able to conceal from coalition troops. If everyone has a gun, how come they’re letting themselves be robbed by one or two guys with some pistols? Why no posse?
I’ve also read about the crowds stabbing, beating, and in some cases, tearing limb-from-limb, the Ba’ath and Fedayeen left behind when the coalition troops move on. If they’ve got guns, how come they need to use primitive human wave techniques? (I know there’s a visceral urge to get up close and personal, but there’s an equally visceral urge, to young men with guns, to be the guy who makes the kill shot, rather than an anonymous member of a crowd. Plus it’s a lot less dangerous than being at the front of a mob storming an armed pack.)
There seems to be a fair amount of hostage taking activity — small bands of soldiers using large bands of people as shields. If you had a gun, and they had your kid, wouldn’t you rise up by then?
Yeah. Megan has more; read it all. And read the comments, too, many of which express astonishment at the willingness of Noah and MacFarquhar to draw sweeping conclusions from virtually no evidence. As one commenter writes:
That’s the entirety of evidence that Noah, no friend of the NRA, found to blunt the criticism that McFarquhar had it wrong? A guy with a record of making fanciful estimates accepts the word of retailers at face value and draws a conclusion about the entire country from observing two gun shops in the capital? And from /this/ it’s reasonable to expect a defense of ideas that contradict this, uh, “evidence”?
If I go to Palo Alto, CA — where there’s a Porsche dealership — and observe that people are doing business at the place and that the owner says sales are up fifty percent since the last gubernatorial election, is there anyone reading this blog who thinks it would be reasonable to draw the conclusion that every household in Northern California either has a Porsche or has easy access to one?
That’s par for the course when many journalists write about guns, sadly. By the way, here is another piece that I’ve written on the subject.
I DON’T KNOW IF I’LL DO A WRAPUP of military predictions that proved wrong, as I did once the Afghan War was settling down. But if I did, I might include this piece by Jeff Taylor, which begins:
The cliché is that generals are always doomed to fight the last war. The reality on the ground in Iraq sure makes it look like the generals have been doomed by their political leadership to fight the last battle.
The ease and manner with which the Taliban were kicked out of Afghanistan seems to have given the Bush war planners a false impression of how things would unfold in Iraq. The two situations were and are radically different.
Not everything in Taylor’s piece is wrong, but the key point — that the planners were trying a repeat of Afghanistan — is about as wrong as can be. But don’t ask me, ask someone who’s actually in the military:
The stunning advance, at a cost of fewer than 10 U.S. combat deaths, would silence complaints by television generals, and even some officers in the field, that the war was being mismanaged. It would also provoke another kind of talk.
”The U.S. advance on Baghdad is something that military historians and academics will pore over in great detail for many years to come,” British Air Marshal Brian Burridge said Monday. ”They will examine the dexterity, the audacity and the sheer brilliance of how the U.S. put their plan into effect.”
Already, military analysts are comparing the advance to Gen. George S. Patton’s brilliant attack across northern France in the autumn of 1944.
Instead of getting bogged down in pitched battles for cities along the road to Baghdad, U.S. forces raced directly to their main objective, pausing to fight only when given the chance to exact a heavy toll on the Iraqis. The speed of the assault and the intensity of the accompanying air campaign gave Iraqi units little opportunity to retreat and regroup; the U.S. advance quickly gobbled up the Iraqi rear.
Compare these two articles, and you’ll see that Taylor appears to have missed out, in ways that go beyond just the aspects I’ve quoted. In a way that’s no surprise, as he was trying to offer criticism of a war plan that he didn’t know (and couldn’t) and that hadn’t unfolded. But, then again, maybe he shouldn’t have tried to do that.
ONE OF THE WEAKNESSES of a totalitarian dictatorship is that even the people running things wind up not knowing much:
Maj. Gen. Sufian al Tikriti left Baghdad on Sunday in a white Toyota sedan, in uniform and alone except for a chauffeur.
Just outside the city, the Republican Guard general came upon a Marine Corps roadblock, where he died.
His sudden death, and a great deal of other evidence, suggests how little Iraq’s military knows about the whereabouts and movements of the U.S. and British soldiers who invaded their country three weeks ago.
“I think they are basically clueless,” said a senior officer of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (IMEF). “They have no situational awareness,” he said, using the military term for knowing the locations of friendly and enemy forces.
That fits interestingly with this report:
A captured Iraqi colonel being held in one of the hangars listened in astonishment as his information minister praised Republican Guard soldiers for recapturing the airport.
He looked at his captors and, as he realised that what he had heard was palpably untrue, his eye filled with tears. Turning to a translator, he asked: “How long have they been lying like this?”
All along, buddy. All along. (Via SgtStryker).
UPDATE: CPO Sparkey links to some more stories along this line and observes:
If you kill messengers for news you don’t like, soon all you’ll hear is happy lies. This can go on for awhile, but eventually the the truth will bring death to your doorstep.
Indeed.
GO DAWGS: Here’s a picture of a University of Georgia flag being unfurled over one of Saddam’s palaces.
THE ANTIWAR CRACKUP — war opponents are a minority even in San Francisco:
Although support for the war was lower in the Bay Area than elsewhere in the state, residents in the nine-county region told pollsters by nearly a 2-to- 1 ratio that they approve of the U.S. attack.
Asked “Do you support or oppose the U.S.’ taking military action in Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein from power,” 63 percent said they favor and 32 percent said they oppose, a result that surprised even the pollsters.
“The stereotype that one would have of the Bay Area would be that it is one of the hotbeds of the anti-war movement,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll, based in San Francisco. “For a poll to show strong support of the war here — that’s major news.”
Indeed it is. And so is this:
A large majority of Canadians — 72% — believe Canada should have supported the U.S. at the start of the war against Iraq, according to an exclusive National Post/Global News poll. . . .
Jean Chrétien is to give a speech in the House of Commons today endorsing the Bush administration’s “mission” in Iraq and asking MPs to declare formal support for a quick victory by coalition forces.
I think it was Fareed Zakaria who said, back during the Afghan War, that “victory is the best propaganda.”
Of course, the “don’t get cocky” advice still applies.
KANAN MAKIYA THINKS that Iraq should be demilitarized. I see the point, but I wonder if that sort of arrangement could be stable.
F.I.R.E. IS REPORTING A BIG DUE-PROCESS VICTORY AT HARVARD. Good.
MONTREAL (AFP) – Nobel peace prize laureate Elie Wiesel said the war on Iraq is justified and blamed unnamed European countries for failing to prevent it through pressuring President Saddam Hussein.
“If some European countries put as much pressure on Saddam Hussein as on (US President George W.) Bush, there would have been no war,” he told a press conference in Montreal.
Meanwhile David Adesnik points out Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter’s support for Saddam Hussein — in 1980! Zbigniew Brzezinski is involved, too. Funny that when these guys were opposing the war, nobody in the press was raising the possibility that their motivation, in part, was to defend their own failed policy.
UPDATE: A few people have sent outraged emails about my “double standard” in not pointing out that some people, like Rumsfeld, backed Hussein in the past.
But what I was doing was pointing out the double standard of the “peace” movement types who have been making that point for months. The difference is, Rumsfeld, et al., have learned from their mistake. Carter — typically — hasn’t.
ERIC MULLER doesn’t think much of the pro-war country song Have You Forgotten? (though he gives appropriate degree-of-difficulty credit for finding a rhyme for “bin Laden”). I haven’t heard it,. (I haven’t even heard Toby Keith’s hit pro-war song) but I’ll assume it’s as dumb as he says.
Still, most hit songs are dumb. But isn’t it a significant cultural indicator that this time around the dumb hit songs about war are pro-war?
UPDATE: Reader Steven Ehrbar emails:
Given that the song doesn’t mention Iraq or Hussein, that the song came out before we moved against Iraq, and that the songwriter himself said that it wasn’t taking a position on whether we should go to war against Iraq, Mr. Muller’s commentary is what’s stupid.
It’s not a song about Iraq, it’s a song about the War on Terror. And it’s a damned good song about the necessity of the War on Terror.
Um, okay. I haven’t heard it, except for about 5 seconds as a bumper on Frank Cagle’s radio show, which didn’t give me the chance to form an opinion. But a lot of people (including Frank) seem to be treating it as a song about Iraq — at least, that’s how it seems to me.
A BOUTIQUE SUBSCRIPTION-ONLY RECORD LABEL — a very interesting business plan from Pat DiNizio of The Smithereens, a band I rather liked.
JAMES CARROLL offers yet another list of lame questions in place of a column. Why is he doing this? How long will he keep this up? Did the Globe get a bunch of question marks wholesale, and assign Carroll to use them up? Are they rationing periods and exclamation points in Boston? Did the Army requisition them all for the war effort? Is that why Carroll seems so angry? Are the Globe’s editors embarrassed by Carroll’s work? If not, why in God’s name aren’t they? Do any readers pay attention? Does he actually think that he’s saying something important? Or is it just easier to keep posing questions without answering them, so that you’re never responsible for stating a clear position? Who knows? Who cares?
UPDATE: Hey, this got picked up over at SillyGlobe! I have arrived.
PALESTINIANS — EVER EAGER TO BACK THE WRONG HORSE — are still supporting Saddam, and are claiming the United States bombed their “embassy” in Baghdad.
The Palestine National Authority, following the lead of many of its citizens who have long protested in favor of Saddam and against the U.S., condemned the “U.S. aggression” of yesterday. American fighter jets bombed the PA’s embassy in Baghdad yesterday afternoon. “The US aggression on the embassy was premeditated and directly singled out the Palestinian embassy, which is located in the diplomatic neighborhood in the Iraqi capital,” a PNA official spokesman said today.
Hmm. I wonder if there’s any connection with this:
On the southwestern edge of Baghdad, just east of the Diyala River, Marines discovered what appeared to be a large-scale training camp for the Palestine Liberation Front as well as documents indicating that Iraq had sold weapons to the PLF as recently as January for the front’s fight against Israel.
Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Regiment, who found the facility said it had lecture halls, barracks, dining halls, an obstacle course, parade deck, administrative offices and bomb-making materials.
“This proves the link between Iraq and terror groups,” said Capt. Aaron Robertson, the battalion intelligence officer.
Probably just a coincidence. Though to quote Gandalf, “where such customs hold, it is also the custom for Ambassadors to use less insolence.”
DICK CHENEY I-TOLD-YOU-SO UPDATE:
Around 150 children spilled out of the jail after the gates were opened as a US military Humvee vehicle approached, Lieutenant Colonel Fred Padilla told an AFP correspondent travelling with the Marines 5th Regiment.
“Hundreds of kids were swarming us and kissing us,” Padilla said.
“There were parents running up, so happy to have their kids back.”
“The children had been imprisoned because they had not joined the youth branch of the Baath party,” he alleged. “Some of these kids had been in there for five years.”
The children, who were wearing threadbare clothes and looked under-nourished, walked on the streets crossing their hands as if to mimic handcuffs, before giving the thumbs up sign and shouting their thanks.
These stories just keep coming.
MEGAN MCARDLE WRITES ON THE ANTIWAR CRACKUP: “You can’t keep a movement going on Centrum Silver.”
UPDATE: Clayton Cramer’s demographic information would seem to be inconsistent with Megan’s observation, though I guess it doesn’t actually contradict it.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Jim Miller has information on support for the Vietnam War by age and says that, contrary to popular belief, young people were always the most supportive of that war, too. The protests simply gave the opposite impression because they made war opposition visible.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s an analysis that says Megan’s right.
SEEING THE LIGHT: Reader Mark Falcoff sends a translation of an article that appeared in Le Figaro today — there’s another one over at The Command Post too:
AFTER THE WAR, WE MUST RENEW OUR ALLIANCES
By Pierre Lellouche, Jean-Jacques Descamps, Herbe Mriton, Jerome Riviere and Michele Tabarot*
[from Le Figaro, Paris, this morning’s edition]
Up till now we have been nothing more than a handful of members of the French national assembly publicly troubled by the official attitude towards the Iraqi crisis, notably insofar as it applies to our traditional allies. We have said quite simply that we should associate our efforts towards creating joint pressure- diplomatic and military–to achieve the disarmament of Iraq without automatically recurring to war, but without excluding that possibility either.
We also said at that time that in declaring in advance and under all circumstances that we would refuse to go to war we were simply encouraging Saddam Hussein to play for more time. We said, finally, that such an attitude did not in fact tend to avoid war but rather would inevitably lead to it outside the framework of the UN, precisely the opposite of the objective supposedly sought by French diplomacy.
For having hewed to that language, very much in isolation, and for having reminded everyone of the million deaths caused by Ssaddam Hussein, we were tarred as partisans of the hateful “camp of warmongers”. The war having begun, we saw the unfolding of a veritable campaign of disinformation, with a view to fashioning France as a kind of herald of the “camp of peace” opposed to the inhumane action of the Anglo-Americans. We also witnessed the procession of Iraqi flags in PAris accompanied by cries, “Long live Saddam, death to the Jews!”
We saw our diplomacy, traditionally jealous of its independence but also in solidarity with our allies, caricatured by a neutralism tainted by pacifism and violent expressions of anti-Americanism. Finally, to our great shame, we saw a third of the French population in opinion surveys openly wish for the victory of Saddam, and still others to profane in a particularly ignoble fashion a British military cemetery at Etaples, in the north of France. . . .
It is not however time to engage in recriminations over the diplomatic failure that has brought about precisely what everyone feared: a war without the approval of the UN, led by those who had the means to carry it out, accepted in silence by those who did not wish the victory of Saddam Hussein, and therefore indirectly of fundamentalist Muslims.
It is time, on the other hand, to signal out those irresponsible people who–still too numerous in our country–sit comfortably in front of their television sets, secretly hoping that the Anglo-American coalition in Iraq will be defeated, or now, when victory seems certain, hope for the “Lebanon-ization” of Iraq, a kind of gigantic Gaza which would transform that country into a new urban Vietnam for America. . . .
Even if our friendships can evolve, the hard nut to crack remains that which links us for more than two centuries, to that country which allowed us to vanquish Nazism and Communism, and not with some adventurer based on tactical or economic considerations wholly at variance with our moral and cultural values. We will have need of the Western alliance in the future, in a world decidedly more chaotic and dangerous than the one to whose stability we had become accustomed during the half-century of cold war.
*Deputies in the National Assembly representing the UMP party, from Paris, Indre-et-Loire, la Drome, and Alpes-Maritimes.
Interesting. I’m glad to see at least a bit of sense dawning. And that some French thinkers are wishing for Iraq to become like Lebanon tells us all we need about the extent to which they actually had the best interests of Iraqis at heart — and makes me wonder how much of a role France has played in making Lebanon turn out the way it has.
WAR BLOGGING: My take on where things stand is up, over at GlennReynolds.com.
I SHOULD HAVE MENTIONED THIS SOONER, but video of the University of Tennessee College of Law symposium on Marbury v. Madison is now online — there’s a menu here. My portion is in Session Two, and in the free-for-all at the end, though you’ll probably find the addresses by Mark Tushnet and Bill Nelson more exciting.
UPDATE: Had the wrong link before. It’s fixed now.
ANGRY AT ITS BIAS, British sailors have switched off the BBC:
Sailors also believe the news organisation places more faith in Iraqi reports than information coming from British or Allied sources.
One senior rating said: “The BBC always takes the Iraqis’ side. It reports what they say as gospel but when it comes to us it questions and doubts everything the British and Americans are reporting. A lot of people on board are very unhappy.”
Ark has replaced the BBC with rival broadcaster Sky News.
Perhaps Tony Blair should promote a new system in which there are competing national services, and people get to choose which one gets their license fees each year. Just a thought. . . .
UPDATE: If this interests you, don’t miss Biased BBC, a weblog devoted to, well, bias at the BBC.
RALPH PETERS is wondering where some people are:
Forget the French and Germans, to whom honesty is an incomprehensible concept. Ignore the Arabs, with their addiction to comforting lies and a culture of blame. What about our bleeding heart celebrities who were so happy to ignore the bleeding people of Iraq?
Why hasn’t the Holier-Than-Thou Club had anything to say about the regime’s use of human shields? Or the use of hospitals as military facilities? Or the executions of Iraqi citizens by death squads? Or the mistreatment of prisoners? . . .
Guess not. They’ve moved on. Not one film star is making an effort to go to Iraq to actually do something for the millions who suffered under Saddam. The antiwar movement was a fad for moral lightweights eager to portray themselves as heroes.
We all know where the heroes are today. They’re in Iraq, making history. Not in film studios.
Indeed.
STRATEGYPAGE REPORTS:
Hundreds of Iraqi exiles have answered the call by the Iraqi National Congress to volunteer for duty in Iraq as translators and negotiators for coalition troops. More are arriving daily and being put to work. The exiles often find themselves revisiting areas they grew up in and reuniting with friends and kin they have not seen for years. Their advice on who’s naughty and who’s nice is preventing a lot of embarrassing incidents. Captured Saddam loyalists have already caused problems by accusing anti-Saddam locals as being pro-Saddam.
U.S. casualties to date are 246 (91 dead). British forces have suffered 30 dead. No reports from Australian or other coalition combat forces.
Lots of interesting stuff, as usual.
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