…Refurbished treadmills look and function like brand new treadmills……

Your blog posts are insightful. I will take them into deep thought and consideration. Your point of view is very smart and intellectual. Charlie…

International, Diamonds International. Diamonds International Watch and Design stores are. Last week, I boarded the Carni……

Stop worrying about offending our host and and post what is on your mind. Is inflammatoriness independant of accuracy?

Are war crimes vague and arbitrary or are they subject to clear and strict interpretation?

Reg,

Just like my being the filling in a Salma Hayek/Scarlet Johansson sandwich is a success that hasn’t occurred yet. Neither is my scoring the game winning goal on a 35 meter free kick to win the US it’s first World Cup Championship.

It was what they could convict him on most easily and quickly, through something resembling due process, to get him into the ground as soon as possible — which, as we can see from the haste of this execution, was obviously the goal. 148 deaths is a drop in the bucket of blood, but in this case there was a direct line of causality and clear motives — an attempt on his life, followed quickly by disproportionate and collective punishment.

For a good many large-scale massacres in Iraq, you might find much longer reporting chains (thus much more potential for Saddam deniability) and a plausible rationale for draconian measures: Iraq was in a state of civil war, with proven external enemies — the U.S., Iran — supporting rebellions against the central Iraqi government. Civil wars are very bloody, and typically feature serious crimes against civilians. When you add external threats … well, that’s a considerable hatred-amplifier. Having been one of those external threats also gets you into legal trouble. Congress passed “regime change” legislation in the late 90s, a clear declaration of its lack of regard for norms of international sovereignty, after having approved, in the early 90s, a war against Saddam in the name of the shining principle of national sovereignty.

Noam Chomsky has said that, as war crimes are currently defined, every post WW II president is guilty of one war crime or another. That’s an inflammatory way of putting it (no, really!), but nevertheless accurate on some level. If national sovereignty is “organized hypocrisy”, so is your average war crimes tribunal.

Osama isn’t laughing his ass off. He’s experiencing a sense of anquish at having been caught…which just hasn’t occured yet.

http://movies.crooksandliars.com/TSR-Townsend-Denial.mov

Of course one fairly sensible, measured view of Saddam’s well-deserved death was being promulgated in the Middle East, so maybe things aren’t as bad as I fear. Iran seemed very pleased, as they clearly are with the entire turn of events for which we’ve taken 25,000 combat casualties…

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-12/30/content_5550896.htm

Saddam’s worst war crimes and crimes against his own people weren’t what he was tried for. He was tried for what were clearly the least of these. I’m convinced the reason he was executed without being tried for undeniable and massive war crimes during the Iraq-Iran war was because players wiithin the U.S. government were complicit and providing direct assistance to his efforts at the time, not to mention that the option of violating international law to strike against Iran is something that our current administratioin wants to leave on the table with the fewer questions asked the better.

Trying Saddam for crimes against his own people in the wake of Gulf War 1 was also problematic because it raised a thorny issue – not of why the U.S. didn’t march into Baghdad in ’91, which would have been stupid, but of why the U.S. allowed Saddam to fly helicopters against the rebels who Bush’s dad had incited and had our implied support. That wasn’t a war crime on our part, but it was “criminal” in any moral sense not to destroy Saddam’s ability to respond with a superior force from the air, which could have been easily done and which no international body would have criticized in the circumstance of an internal rebellion. (That last clause doesn’t really matter much, but it’s the explanation that the Crazy Right uses when it’s convenient, i.e. the UN resolutions forced us to invade Iraq or UN resolutions kept us from toppling Saddam in ’91. Weird folks, they, but they have their widdle blankies when such issue are discussed, so one has to take their lack of seriousness and meandering logic into account.) It’s also the case that the Kurds haven’t had the opportunity to use a court to prosecute their brief agaiinst Saddam. My bet is that, although Kurds must be enjoying the image of Saddam swinging at the end of a rope, the Kurdish judiciary and political class would have preferred to see their own considerable case against Saddam through in a public trial.

As it occured, the bizarre trial and hanging of Saddam for ordering 148 executions that were no doubt arbitrary and vindictive comes across as…arbitrary and vindictive rather than a serious effort to call Saddam to accounts before his people, the region and the world or to reinstitute a consistent standard of law in a country where any official avenues of justice have long been denied. At this rate, they should have just shot the bastard when they first found him in his hole.

I’m not given to conspiracy theories and am politically someone who would no doubt quickly part company with Ed Watters on most issues, but it’s hard not to imagine that this was timed to stir up some internal shit to rationalize Bush’s next move. My theory – pulled directly from my ass, which has unfortunately been a better source of likely scenarios than the mainstream press throughout this mess – is that they want to set off a series of events to justify officially partitioning Baghdad into “security” zones (which will need “more troops”, yes Lord) and to go with guns blazing into certain enclaves of resistance. Won’t work because the countyr is now a crazy quilt, but they gotta give the grand scheme another shot and stick this sucker out.

(Otherwise the hair on the neo-cons’ chests will stop growing, Victor Davis Hansen will have to settle down and live out his golden years coming to terms with the fact that he’s just a goddam Classics Professor, even Rupert Murdoch will have second thoughts about paying Bill Kristol the big bucks to put out a money-losing magazine with zero credibility and Fred Kagan will have little left to do save write another book with the word “Delusion” in the title, although this time it will be his memoir.)

PS. Has anyone else noticed how deeply the Right-Wing has mired itself in exalting a bunch of university professors (and the occasional son-of-somebody) who’ve never really spent any time anywhere actually doing anything outside of academia or the Beltway as their oracles? Wierd.

Let’s see he was killed for killing a few hundred people. Hell, we do that almost daily in Iraq. In Baghdad alone! And we execute him during the Haiji? During Ramadam? What Bush never fried anyone in Texas on Good Friday? And can’t you just see him mincing around the White House (or Crawford) making jokes the way he did when he whacked Karla Faye Tucker (as reported by Tucker Carlson in the WEEKLY STANDARD)?

Putting aside Saddam’s guilt does anyone here think the trial was fair? Amnesty International sure didn’t. Human Rights Watch Didn’t. And does anyone think it was an IRAQI Court and not the US behind the sentence? See the piece at HUFF POST – what did Hussain do to us? And then there is the death penalty. The President of Italy opposed it. Tonight the candles will burn in the Colleseum for a “Martyr”. And how does this help Tony Blair who claims to be anti-death penalty? Bet the papers there will love this.

And Saddam? Well I understand he went to his death clutching the Koran. Great! nother holy martyr to Islam slain by the Western Infidals! Think that’s how it will be seen all over Sunni Land – and I don’t mean only Iraq. And a great way to teach the Shia moderation while we waste our enemies.

Somewhere, in an undisclosed location on the NW Frontier Osama Bin Laden is laughing his ass off. “Wanted Dead or Alive”?

Right?

A peculiar strategy, perhaps half-credible if you permit a rough analogy: for Sunni vs Shi’a, read Soviet Communism vs. Maoism. If you want a new Cold War, you also want the enemy divided against itself.

I don’t know if that’s what Bush & Co want, and I don’t know if the analogy works anyway.

If there’s some strategic purpose behind the timing of moves so as to create more friction, I think it’s more likely it’s something like this:

Iraq itself is now a strategic weapon. If we leave it in chaos, we leave the region to that chaos, which might metastasize. An analogy I’ve used before is that it’s like we’re holding a grenade with its pin pulled, and can teleport out of the way after letting go. That’s leverage against regional actors. But only if they can see the fuze fizzling. All the time.

This works on a strategic regional scale in the Middle East, but perhaps also on a tactical provincial scale within Iraq. Consider:

U.S troops *have* been able to go into cities and towns, take them back from the insurgents, and stabilize them. However, there aren’t nearly enough of troops in there to pacify all of Iraq, so they have to keep moving around, and every time they move on, the local situation slides back into militia/insurgent rule. Also, you can’t do this in a very large city like Baghdad, at least until it is fairly neatly divided regionally along fracture lines that are still more social than regional (thoug this appears to be happening — a local “ethnic cleansing.”)

Looked at one way, this is a treadmill. There is, however, another way to look at it: how local mentalities change in the process, possibly to the benefit of ultimate U.S. control.

In WW II, we firebombed the Japanese into submission. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were little more than particularly advanced firebombs, proof that our industrial and technological might, our ruthlessness and our unwillingness to take more casualties on our own side knew no bounds. But, as Bush pointed out in a speech some years back, those days (of mass slaughter of civilians to compel total surrender) are over. It’s, y’know, immoral? But something like that is perhaps sometimes necessary to subjugate a nation. So what we need is some passably *moral *equivalent of urban firebombing. How do we get that? Through a combination of adequate and inadequate security — controlling an area, then letting it go, giving the hapless subjects a taste of both. That way, we’re not the perpetrators (directly) of the heinous massacres.

Now, I’m not asserting that this has been the secret Bush strategy all along (or even their strategy after it became clear that our troops would be pelted with objects considerably harder and hotter than flowers). Nor am I saying I believe that it would work. I don’t know, but I lean towards doubt. What it is, however, is a strategy that *might* be thought to work under the constraints: limited U.S. forces, no prospect for any dramatic increase in those forces, limits on the ruthlessness of force application; and no shortage of kindling for “virtual urban firebombing”, in the form of hostility among Iraqis, whether the animosity is born of differences that are clan-based, sectarian (or in the degree of religious fervor within a sect), racial, political, whatever.

The Lancet Report offered estimates of the number of violent deaths since the invasion that roughly compare with violent death rates from Allied aerial firebombing attacks on the cities of Japan. Yet most of these deaths in Iraq were at the hands of other Iraqis. (A great many of them might not even have been politically motivated — the conditions are such as to promote a high rate of homicide, suicide and accidental deaths from gunshot wounds.) It takes a lot to turn a nation away from internal leadership and swallow the indignity of indefinite control by foreigners. But I do know it can happen to a nation, because I live in a nation where it happened. Any strategy for Iraq from here on out, one that’s even halfway workable, will probably take into account the crushing conditions Iraqis live under now, and try to use that suffering for its political leverage. But it can only work if there is realistic hope of a better life under U.S.-proxy subjugation. And I think we’re a long way from establishing that as credible, with the average Iraqi. The lever is useless without the right fulcrum, and I don’t think examples like a cleaned-out Tal Afar and Fallujah are likely to be enough.

Good going all around.

If you think those trials could have been fair and that what Saddam did in that case was not a war crime, you’re pretty far around the bend.

There was another assassination attempt allegedly involving Iraqis, around 1995. But this time, the target was ex-president Bush. When the plot was discovered, there were no arrests, no trials and, of course, no convictions. There were, however, executions, delivered at the behest of President William Jefferson Clinton via cruise missile attacks. Scores of innocents were killed and no one yet has been held responsible in a court of law. How can Saddam’s slaughter be a war crime and Clinton’s not?

Perhaps the fate of America’s current foray into Iraq is but a measure of justice for that seldom acknowledged war crime.

Strange editorializing indeed. I linked to a blog from Al Jazeera where the case was being made that bombs were being planted in Iraqi cars and trucks at US-run check points. Some were found bfore exploding. Anyway,alot of bloggers seemed convinced that at least some of the bombing in Iraq is perpertrated by the US.

The above, plus the timing of Saddam’s execution (and so much of what’s been labeled as the “incompetent handling of Iraq’)seem to indicate Bush’s strategy for Iraq: incite the locals to each others throats.

Speaking of death in high places, while Ford’s passing is attended by considerably less mournful pageantry than Reagan’s, they are taking the unusual step of having him lie in state at the House and the Senate. And this news comes not longer after the posthumous revelation that he believed invading Iraq was a mistake.

Ford wasn’t a great president, certainly not an ideal one. However, despite not having been elected, he was a better example of how to be president than a great many who were — not least including the twice-elected one we have now. He was no giant, but Bush will now have to pedal furiously to get out from under his shadow any time soon.

Perhaps there will be a salutary psychological impact on Congress, just seeing him (though dead) over a period of a few days, more frequently than they saw him (living) over the past 6 years. Ford was very much a creature of Congress, particularly of the House — he confessed to having no greater ambition than to be Speaker there one day. Perhaps, in death, he will speak louder to Congress than any words from the living can at this point.