SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS CROSS-BURNING BAN: There’s more over at the Volokh Conspiracy.
Archive for 2003
April 7, 2003
Arab satellite news channels, broadcasting footage of advances by coalition forces on Baghdad, are beginning to question whether Saddam Hussein has put up a proper fight against the allied advances.
Throughout the Arab world there is a mood of disappointment. The initial resistance by Saddam’s forces raised expectations that he would put up a tougher fight around the capital.
Several Arab newspapers highlight the discrepancy between Iraq’s assessment of the war and that of the coalition forces. “The information war is intensifying,” said al-Sharq in Qatar. In Jordan, al-Rai asked “where the real truth lies amid the confusion and contradiction of the news reports?” Nevertheless, on its front page the paper’s main headline read: “Iraq retakes Saddam airport.”
The Lebanese daily al-Nahar went one better, saying that “Saddam led the attack to retake the airport”, while Akhbar al-Khaleej in Bahrain said: “We have wiped out the invading forces at the airport.”
But other Arab papers adopt a more realistic line, with al-Watan in Saudi Arabia declaring that “the Americans have taken the airport and the Iraqis have retreated into Baghdad”.
Heh. Wake up and smell the coffee, guys. You’ve been lied to by yet another tinpot savage, spouting pathetically transparent pan-Arab propaganda because he knows you’ll fall for it.
How many times does it have to happen before you wake up?
But we’ll remember who you were pulling for, and file it for future reference.
ANOTHER GREAT LILEKS today.
I MENTION MARC HEROLD’S BOGUS CIVILIAN CASUALTY FIGURES BELOW, but Dan Drezner has a good example of how they’re uncritically taken up by big media with an agenda — in this case, the BBC. “Shame on the BBC,” writes Drezner. Indeed.
OH, THOSE weapons of mass destruction.
Arundhati Roy, Robert Fisk, et al., will no doubt denounce it all as lies of the zionist media.
UPDATE: Well, this one looks to be pesticide, not Sarin. How can they confuse this? Easily, actually — many pesticides of the cholinesterase-inhibiting variety basically are nerve gas. Some, like methyl parathion, are even rapidly lethal if they get on unprotected skin, I believe. But they’re not actually identical, just close enough to make people sick or trigger false-positives.
Meanwhile there’s this report and photo, which leads The Command Post to ask, “Is this how you store your pesticides?”
Yep. My Raid, Roundup and Bug-B-Gone are all stored in unmarked barrels in buried trenches. On the other hand, the comments to the Command Post item suggest that maybe you would store it that way if you lived in the desert, and couldn’t afford climate controlled storage.
WOW. READ THIS:
HERE is a question for the pollsters to place before the British people: “Does this war make you less proud of your country, or more?”
The reason I ask is that in recent weeks I have lost count of the number of times I have heard commentators, politicians and peaceniks of every hue utter the phrase: “I am ashamed to be British.”
And yet I strongly suspect that for the vast un-mouthy majority of British people, exactly the opposite is true. . . .
I have felt pride in my country every time I see images of British soldiers. Those soldiers are ferocious in battle, magnanimous and humane when the fighting is done. . . .
The war hasn’t quite worked out the way the peace camp must have hoped.
Not enough mindless slaughter.
Yes, there have been deeply disturbing images of dead and burned Iraqi children. But do we honestly imagine that Allied forces, fighting a war unrestrained by political concerns, didn’t kill and maim countless numbers of innocent French, Dutch and Belgian children in the Second World War, never mind the babies we burned alive in Japan and Germany.
We just didn’t see pictures of them.
The peaceniks must be fuming. You would be hard pressed to search through history and find an army that has behaved with the dignity and decency of the British forces in Iraq.
And who can now doubt that it was right to fight this war?
The weekend brought the sickening discovery of a Saddam Hussein death factory in Az Zubayr, an entire warehouse full of the tortured, mutilated and finally executed human beings discarded in bin liners and fertiliser bags.
Their horrific wounds were lovingly documented, their moment of death photographed for Saddam’s records. Some of the victims were women. It seems that most of them were soldiers. Iraqi soldiers. This is how Saddam treats his own people.
And the peace camp still has the gall to call Bush and Blair butchers. They are the war criminals even when the evidence against the bestiality of Saddam’s stinking regime is overwhelming. . . .
Former United Nations worker Vanessa Lough says that over the past two weeks children as young as four have been snatched from their parents and hung from lampposts or burned alive in southern Iraq. Scores of children have been executed as a way of punishing their parents.
ONE man had committed the terrible crime of laughing with British soldiers. They (Ba’ath party goons) told him he had betrayed Saddam in an act of treason, says the former UN worker, who now works as an interpreter for aid organisations.
“He received a broken leg and a severe beating. The men made the father watch as they set his son alight with petrol.”
Bush and Blair are the war criminals?
I hope the peace camp makes it out to Iraq some time soon to explain to the Iraqis that it is actually the West who are the cold-blooded killers.
I hope that George Galloway, Tony Benn, John Pilger and Robert Fisk can make the Iraqi people see the light – that it is the Coalition forces who are neo-Nazis, intent on stealing oil and slaughtering children. Still ashamed to be British? Personally I couldn’t be more proud that British troops are risking their lives to free this ravaged country.
Follow the link to discover that this appeared in The Mirror of all places — and read the whole thing.
THIS ARTICLE IN DIE ZEIT NOTES (Google translation here) that anti-Americanism is losing big in the real world, and that anti-Americans are increasingly inventing their own fantasy world instead.
This is interesting, and fits neatly with Nelson Ascher’s observation about the French being “in denial,” and with his earlier observation that anti-Americanism in Europe might start to resemble Arab politics.
The Dream Palace of the Anti-Americans. It’s waiting to be written, folks. (Thanks to reader Holger Uhl for the link.)
UPDATE: Here’s more evidence.
HOW MANY FREAKIN’ SMOKING GUNS DO WE NEED? How about this one:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. forces near Baghdad found a weapons cache of around 20 medium-range missiles equipped with potent chemical weapons, the U.S. news station National Public Radio reported on Monday.
Yeah, but you can’t trust those warmongering folks at Reuters and NPR. So how about this one:
Mustard gas and cyanide have been found in river water in the Iraqi city of Nasiriya, coalition forces said yesterday. The poisonous substances are believed to have been dumped in the Euphrates either by Iraqi soldiers fleeing from U.S. troops or by local factories that produced weapons of mass destruction.
The WMD stuff is, of course, only one of many reasons for getting rid of Saddam Hussein. But it appears that the critics were wrong about this one, just as they were wrong about all the others.
The real reason for war, anyway, can be seen here.
AFTER SADDAM, DEMOCRACY: Michael Barone has an excellent column on what should come next, and endorses the idea of a permanent trust fund for oil revenue, modelled on Alaska’s. Barone emails:
I was prompted by a posting March 28 in instapundit.com, in which you quoted Lou Dolinar of Newsday as passing on a proposal for a different kind of investment fund. I emailed him and he had no objection to my printing this as my own suggestion. Due to dead tree limitations, I have only 770 words.
Damn dead trees. Read the column, though.
UPDATE: Read this piece, too about a similar model being tried in Chad.
Confounding the Arab media and the pundits who had talked darkly of a new spirit of Iraqi patriotism resisting the invaders, the people of Basra braved gunfire to dance in the streets and cheer for the British troops who finally broke the grip Saddam’s dreadful regime had exerted on Iraq for so long. This reporter saw one Basra citizen even kiss a British tank.
(Via Tim Blair, who’s back posting at his regular venue.) And there’s this, too. Oh, and this! Heh, indeed.
So we’re in downtown Baghdad and it becomes clear what CENTCOM meant when they said Baghdad would “fall from the inside out”. It’s also clear why they are not in the least bit unhappy about having the Iraqis know exactly where they are: they want as many Ba’ath loyalists, Republican Guards, and Fedayeen butchers, foreign auxiliaries and their ilk to come to them as possible. Every one of that lot who gets killed trying to dislodge American forces from the center of Baghdad is one less we have to go searching for in the streets of the city, “house to house” as it were. Let ’em come. That’s what’s been happening at the airport, and now that’s what’s happening in downtown Baghdad.
Yes, this does seem to be the strategy, and I think it’s a good one. But after reflecting on how well things are going, he also offers this appropriate cautionary note:
Don’t get cocky.
That’s good advice, too.
MARC HEROLD’S BOGUS CIVILIAN CASUALTY FIGURES are debunked (again) by Iain Murray. Herold should be embarrassed, but he’s clearly beyond that.
What’s even more embarrassing is that Big Media folks treat these numbers as if they mean something.
WIRED HAS A STORY on the charges, which now appear to be true, that Sean-Paul Kelley has been passing off Stratfor’s stories as his own. That’s very disturbing, and he shouldn’t have done that.
However, to those who are pronouncing this scandal a blow to the credibility of the blogosphere, I should note that (1) he was first caught out by another blogger; and (2) it’s not as if Big Media has been free of such things.
Some people emailed wondering if I knew something was up, and that’s why I haven’t linked to The Agonist much. Well, I knew something was up last week, but didn’t want to post on it until more came out. But the real reason I haven’t linked to him a lot is simpler: most of his posts didn’t have links to sources. I didn’t suspect plagiarism, really, but I’m generally skeptical of secondhand reports without clear sourcing.
LATE START THIS MORNING: The lovely InstaWife let me sleep in, then brought me breakfast in bed. But Andrew Sullivan has been on the job, so go there. This is worth reading, too. Back later.