Owing to some weekend travel, I'm making a unilateral withdrawal from blogging about the war -- and from blogging in general until next Monday. Try to get along without me until then.Â
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It’s a second best. First best is to win. But that will take more commitment than the administration was prepared to offer yesterday. If we forfeit the best outcome, and refuse to plan for *second best *, we stand in very grave danger of ending up with the worst.
Cute, but thats not what he said.
It’s a second best. First best is to win. But that will take more commitment than the administration was prepared to offer yesterday. If we forfeit the best outcome, and refuse to plan for *second best *, we stand in very grave danger of ending up with the worst.
So, it’s a “distortion” because he obviously recognizes, for whatever reason, that a “win” just isn’t in the cards. Frum is saving face with his “win” caveat – and of course the talk of a “forfeit” gives the neocon crazies the fallback position of blaming the press and the American people for their own manifest failures. (If I had this one on my hands, I’d be pretty desperate for scapegoats as well – because it’s obvious the Frums, Feiths and Perles are too cowardly to take their licks like men.) But go ahead and tell me how what Frum is putting forward as the most pragmatic approach to his FUBAR is any different from what Jack Murtha has been proposing in the wake of the disintegration of a tenable military sollution – for which he’s been subjected to a torrent of the usual defamatory spew from the wingnut and GOPers Uber Alles contingents ?
For one of the neo-con wildmen to climb this far down is about as close to an admission that their hubris and incompetence has created one of the worst strategic disasters in American history as we’re liable to get – not that I give a shit what these crazies believe. Just can’t help but marvel at the irony. And I’m curious as to how Davie Frum’s attempt to kick the sauce and sober up will be recieved in his little wackjob NRO clubhouse.
Actually, I think if Frum gets crucified by the deadenders, it would be more appropriate to nail him between Buckley and Fukuyama. Sullivan should be saved for a double gibbet with Pat Buchanan. That is, if mobs are capable of mixing a bit of irony with their hysteria.
“Hands up, everybody who believes that the “hundreds” of troops that the Pentagon plans to move from the rest of Iraq into Baghdad will suffice to secure the capital against the sectarian militias now waging war upon the civilian populations of the city? Anybody? No, I didn’t think so.
To take back the capital from the militias that now terrorize it will take thousands, not hundreds, of American plus tens of thousands of Iraqis. No sector in Iraq can spare the loss of so many forces (our current troubles in Anbar date back to the decision in 2004 to shift troops from Anbar to the siege of Fallujah – when they returned, they discovered that every pro-US informant and ally in the province had been murdered, usually horribly and publicly). So a real plan for success in Baghdad will have to be built upon additional troops from out of area, potentially raising US troop levels back up to the 150,000 or so of late 2005.
Manifestly, neither the administration nor the Congress will contemplate such a move. Which means, most likely, continuing violence in Iraq and a continuing rise in the power of the militias, especially the Iranian-backed Shiite militias: the Hezbollah of Iraq.
What then? Well, then …
(snip)
Gradually, Baghdad will come to look like Basra, Iraq’s Shiite-dominated second city, now effectively ruled by Iranian-backed Shiites with the tacit acquiescence of the British military authorities.
Baghdad – and therefore central Iraq – will in such a case slide after Basra and the south into the unofficial new Iranian empire. (Classically minded readers will remember that the pre-Islamic Persian empires of the Parthians and Sassanids were ruled from Ctesiphon, about 20 miles southeast of Baghdad. And here is a map of the boundaries of the Safavid empire in the 1500s, the last time the Persians counted for much of the history of the world: Pretty much all of present-day Iraq except Anbar is on the inside.) American troops will be free to stay or go, depending on whether we wish to deny or acknowledge defeat.
The consequences for the region and the world will be grim.
Averting such a fate means fighting to win Baghdad. But if the president decides against such a fight – either because it would be too bloody or too politically costly or even because he doubts that the US can ultimately succeed – then we need a backup plan. The present plan – “as the Iraqis stand up, we stand down” – has not worked to date, as the president admitted yesterday, and there seems little reason to hope it will work better over the next months than it has in the recent past.”
(end clip)
Remember when Wolfie and Kristol told us there was no liklihood of ethnic strife ? Remember when Big Dick told us the war would last “weeks, not months”. Remember when we’d toppled the Saddam statue and declared victory? Remember Mission Accomplished ? Remember when we were greeted with “sweets and flowers” by liberated Iraqis ? Remember when the “purple fingers” meant that cynics and skeptics about the occupation weren’t just wrong but downright evil ? Remember when the insurgency was in it’s last throes ?
What the fuck happened ? Apparently this war was a wonderful idea that the American military and the American people just haven’t measured up to because they lacked the iron will and steel resolve of the neocons. And, of course, we were surrounded by turncoats and traitors among the media and other various & sundry elites. (I think something like this was Hitler’s rationaler, hunkered down in his bunker, just before he put a bullet in his brain. We won’t be so lucky with these guys.)
Incidentally…and I know I’m running this into the ground, but I’ll not be commenting after this morning because of work…if anyone needs a clue as to how bogus Frum’s fantasies about a “win” scenario – that he acknowledges Bush himself is too much of a wimp to act on – he bases it on “raising US troop levels back up to the 150,000 or so of late 2005.” Right. See, if we only had as many troops as we had LAST YEAR we could likely pull this thing out !!!!
Thanks for http://tinyurl.com/kgbge Reg — a neat summary for e-mail handouts to those requiring a clue. Wow, posters with Nasrallah AND Nasser on them, floating in a crowd in Cairo. And Nasrallah doesn’t even have a real country with a U.N. seat. I can imagine Qaddafi ordering up a variant where he sits between the two. Followed by Bashar Assad fingering his chin in the mirror, wondering if he looks more distinguished with the eyebags or whether he should call that cosmetic surgeon he knows in London, but then deciding that discretion is the better part of valor.
Frum’s (really, Peter Galbraith’s) “backup plan” is an essential component of what I’ve taken to calling the Kurdistan Petrostate Quasi-Exit Strategy. I have trouble believing that nobody in this administration thought out such a plan even before invading Iraq, maybe even before invading Afghanistan. C’mon, there must have been some bright analyst who began doodling on it when he started noticing how tedious Paul Wolfowitz’s flights of fancy could become after the third or fourth presentation. Perhaps some shrewd staffer made sure it was filed way back there with the contingency plan for invading Canada, but only so as to camouflage it from the prying eyes of potential leakers or worse: raging neo-cons. Discretion being the better part of valor and all that.
Yes, Frum says that winning (however you define that) takes precedence. But he’s a pretty sharp tack. Surely he can feel the shift in the wind–this administration’s disastrous poll numbers, the upcoming mid-term elections, U.S. generals in Iraq getting more worried about sectarian violence in Baghdad than about insurgents in Anbar. Not to mention a Republican like Arlen Specter starting to go after the White House for its distention of executive power, which is all rationalized with “Hey, there’s a war on, doncha know?” Frum is merely recognizing some simple facts: Iraq isn’t going well. We live in a democracy. The voters are increasingly unhappy about Iraq. This administration might have to wake up to these things rather than lose the support of its own party at a critical time.
Democracy in America was always the Achilles Heel of the project for Democracy in a Unified Iraq. And I’m sure Saddam Hussein himself could have told us that. Maybe he will, if we arrange a hasty firing squad for him shortly before the last helicopter pulls away from the Green Zone. “It is a glorious thing,” he will shout defiantly before the hail of bullets, “to be the last man to die for a mistake!”
I don’t always agree with Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) on everything, but I am going to enter this dispatch from them, just received, into the discussion. I have argued in earlier posts that the primary blame for the current situation lies with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and this article gives some interesting recent history. You don’t have to agree, but do yourselves the service of reading it (before commenting, as Marc always says.)
I agree with you Michael about where most of the blame lies for the current situation. But we don’t need to agree on who is more or less or earlier or later culpable in this whole affair to be able to agree that those who stand in the way of an immediate cease fire and the beginning of multilateral, comprehensive peace talks need to be pushed to do so. We again might differ on who is reluctant to engage in these and who stands the most to lose with an end to hostilities, but these negotiations should be the first order of business.
It is futile to try to engage anyone whose only arguments can be reduced to “these people are very bad” or “they started it”.
Kudos to Michael Turner for demonstrating more wit than most of the rest of us combined and approaching some thorny, emotional subjects with a quirky complexity that manages to skirt the common impulse to simply play choirmaster, cheerleader or prosecutor.
Personally speaking, while we pat each other on the back thinking what a great job we have done putting down crazy neocons, there is more than meets the eye with what is brewing in the Middle East – I think these nuts are going to opt for World War III.
You have Nutjob Newt already running around talking about this “option.” With all the failure in these gyrations after 9/11 this is the only option left, Gingrich already told the Seattle Times that he wants Bush to declare a new world war. I have one question – do you think after all the changes domestically to re-make society, that this was leading to anything less than global war?
With all the failure in Iraq, the ressurection of the Taliban in Afganistan they believe the people must be persuaded that these were just small battles in a global war – it is their only way out. These nuts believe that with this announcement that they will be able to silence all dissent – WW III.
This is what took place to get us involved in WW I, it was a massive propaganda campaign, because most Americans opposed it. When the Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918 was passed 900 people went to jail that opposed and wrote against the war. Those laws are still on the books – and these nutjobs want to revive them.
WW III propaganda is the only way they feel that they can clear the deck , along with laws to silence dissent, and to give them the power to do whatever they feel is necessary. Don’t you know that these maniacs will do anything they can to stay in power? I believe many have misjudged the depth of depravity here.
I hope I am wrong, but I want you to remember this post. If you begin to see what I am writing about here take shape, we have to do everything in our power to stop it from taking place.
Newt Gingrich can pop off about this being WW III, James Woolsely can grind away at his WW IV axe, and it doesn’t mean a thing. Those guys are attention-starved and probably will be to the ends of their largely-eclipsed political careers.
I think all sides using their brains recognize that perpetual low-intensity conflict covers the situation. Even what’s going on now in Lebanon is just a higher grade of low intensity.
For example, Israel has said it will demolish 10 multi-story buildings in South Beirut for every missile that falls on Haifa. That’s not total war. That’s “negotiation” with bombs. And it’s the extension of politics–or more properly “policy”–by violent means. After all, for years, Israel responded to terror attacks by demolishing the houses of Palestinians implicated in those terror attacks. It wasn’t “eye for an eye” — It was calculated under-response, an attempt to stay on what could be made to look like higher moral ground. And it was policy.
By putting South Beirut on notice of their intent to destroy 10 mulistory buildings for every rocket landing on Haifa, the Israelis minimize civilian casualties by effectiively clearing that part of the city of anyone who values their skin. Nobody *has* to die when Israel takes out yet another multi-story building in South Beirut. It doesn’t work for Israel to have anybody die in those attacks except combatants. Compare Hezbollah’s rocketing of Haifa, where they *hope* somebody dies, preferably a *noncombatant*. But now Hezbollah knows what the response will be. It allows both sides to calibrate their messages, it gives both parties a grip on the intensity dial. All it is, really, is a scaling up of policies already applied with the Palestinians.
Anybody who calls Lebanon a battle in WW III is just shrieking for attention. Doesn’t sound like they are getting it, though.
“I have one question – do you think after all the changes domestically to re-make society, that this was leading to anything less than global war?”
I think this administration would be happy to continue trying to remake American society as long as it doing it with more stable oil supplies. It would take another 9/11, and the right kind of 9/11, to get Americans committed to total war, and to a true war-powers dictatorial president. Daniel Ellsberg thinks that could happen.
But who really gains from WW III? Probably not even Al Qaeda, which would be peeing its pants in joy just to see the Muslim Brotherhood take Egypt, and the Saudi royal family swept from power by forces sympathetic to Al Qaeda’s Salafist reversion ideology. A draft callup of millions of Americans to go secure oil supplies in the Middle East would be an obstacle to any such goals. What they want is to make large swathes of the region too hot to handle, from the point of the American voter, and without seriously endangering the oil flows that American voters want to take for granted. This is, of course, why my eyes keep drifting back to Kirkuk’s oil fields, and to the Kurds, who seem to like us. That’s a coal that can plausibly be raked from the fire, and its hardly fertile territory for Al Qaeda anyway.
The Middle East is a forge, hostility is the fire, propaganda is the bellows, low-intensity conflict is the hammer being used by all sides, and the end product will be a re-shaped Middle East that’s at least acceptable, if not ideal, for all those with interests in it. I don’t see any larger conflagration because I can’t see how it works for anybody with any real say in the matter, even those supposedly most committed to violence, and most opportunistic in the face of added violence.
I hope your right Michael, because I was not talking about outside forces, I was talking about this present administration in the United States. Perhaps it is wasted brain power, much ado about nothing.
It just seemed strange to me that these fights keep being picked in different areas – giving the appearance of spreading. Than there was all the talk about “limited tactical atomic weapons,” it was just a bit over the top for me. The phrases used right after 9/11, combined with the ensuing events looked like an attempt of escalation. That’s all – however paranoia might be setting in, and that is never a good measuring rod.
So far Ive heard folks here use the following langauge to describe what Israel is doing to Lebenonese society: “proportionality”, “overkill” or “poor professionalism”. Perhaps we ought to think abut the questions Robert Fisk puts forward.
“How soon must we use the words “war crime”? How many children must be scattered in the rubble of Israeli air attacks before we reject the obscene phrase “collateral damage” and start talking about prosecution for crimes against humanity?
The child whose dead body lies like a rag doll beside the cars which were supposedly taking her and her family to safety is a symbol of the
latest Lebanon war; she was hurled from the vehicle in which she and her family were travelling in southern Lebanon as they fled their village – on Israel’s own instructions. Because her parents were apparently killed in the same Israeli air attack, her name is still unknown. Not an unknown warrior, but an unknown child.”
Just in case anyone misses Ahmed’s Web link. I am sure that dead Israelis look the same, another reason why escalating conflicts is immoral and cheerleading during a war–as some here continue to do–is reprehensible.
This is depressing, but … not as depressing as those photos just linked.
50% of Americans believe that Iraq had WMD prior to the invasion. According to a Harris poll. It was 36% in early 2005. It went up. What happened?
Best theory: Santorum and Hoekstra happened. Even though David Kay, the Pentagon and even Fox News pointed out that Santorum and Hoekstra were being shrieking idiots, a large percentage of Americans may nevertheless have been left with a certain impression. The power of wishful thinking.
The phrasing of the question doesn’t leave much room for doubt:
“”Do you believe that the following statements are true or not true?” …..
“Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded.”
And 64% still believe Saddam had strong links with Al Qaeda.
My brain is numb: I just watched George Bush attempt to give a spellbinding speech about … um … something, in response to a reporter’s question in a presss conference about how Maliki has come down against Israel in Lebanon, and so have other Arab governments originally voicing criticism of Hezbollah, and how Bush is being ignored (to which Bush immediately responded “Hmph”), and, y’know, what can you say about all that?
Bush’s answer was very long. I think my brain went numb right when he was talking about how we can defeat terrorism with two concepts: liberty, and freedom. Or maybe it was freedom and liberty, in that order. I forget.
It was politically brilliant, in a way — he never answered the embarrassing question, for one thing, and it was a real off-the-cuff speech featuring floating blobs of classic neo-con rhetoric, and it was also so long and vacuous and mind-numbing that most viewers would just forget what the question was. It was like good ol’ time politics, just like I remember it.
It’s on youtube.com somewhere. I had to click out of it so that I wouldn’t turn into a pillar of salt, so I don’t have the link anymore, sorry.
Michael, you raise some very interesting questions about why so many Americans still think there were WMD in Iraq (one right here on this blog, no need to mention names.) I find it hard to believe that it is entirely due to Bush, Cheney and others trying to subtly imply that it is so. I think there is something deeper in the American psyche involved, a denial that our leaders could actually send young American men and women off to die on false pretenses. This might also be why those who still support the war in Iraq also seem unbothered by the bait and switch stunt that Bush pulled (WMD, oh no, it was really to get rid of Saddam and foster democracy), as odious as that was. This type of denial is the political form of the denial that we sometimes use to protect ourselves from a painful loss or experience. That’s my hypothesis, anyway, even if it means that Bush-Cheney can’t be held entirely responsible for it even if they got the ball rolling.
It might be a distracting detail that has little impact on most people’s lives, thus their relative confusion. But on the core issue of support for the war, Americans have consistently opposed the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, especially if it goes beyond roughly causing 500 deaths of human beings [i.e. American GI's].
The average American’s confusion isn’t that much different from cruise missile leftists who think that there has to be some way that America can ‘get it right’ in Iraq and that that is the policy they should push as an ‘alternative’ to Bush’s war prosecution style.
As Robert Dreyfuss put it so well:
“Dealing with Realities in Iraq and Washington
By Robert Dreyfuss
One of the most unfortunate myths pervading American culture, the American psyche, and the whole American weltanschauung — and it’s one for which we might as well go ahead and blame movie director Frank Capra — is that in most situations the good guys win. Morality triumphs. The greedy and self-interested, the cruel and mean-spirited are defeated. Ultimately, or so the myth goes, the bad guys win some of the battles, but in the end the good guys win the wars.
Sadly, in the real world, good doesn’t always win. Sometimes, good isn’t even there. When it comes to Iraq, the left, the liberals, the progressives (for the sake of argument, the good guys) sometimes seem to have their heads in the clouds. That’s true in regard to the crucial question of whether President Bush’s stay-the-course strategy can succeed. The answer, unfortunately, is: Yes, it can.
The Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq today, as in the invasion of 2003, is: Use military force to destroy the political infrastructure of the Iraqi state; shatter the old Iraqi armed forces; eliminate Iraq as a determined foe of U.S. hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf; build on the wreckage of the old Iraq a new state beholden to the U.S.; create a new political class willing to be subservient to our interests in the region; and use that new Iraq as a base for further expansion.
To achieve all that, the President is determined to keep as much military power as he can in Iraq for as long as it takes, while recruiting, training, funding, and supervising a ruthless Iraqi police and security force that will gradually allow the American military to reduce their “footprint” in the country without entirely leaving. The endgame, as he and his advisors imagine it, would result in a permanent U.S. military presence in the country, including permanent bases and basing rights, and a predominant position for U.S. business and oil interests. ”
I think the polling about Americans believing Saddam “had WMDs” isn’t very consequential because the operative definition of “WMDs” has been effectively dumbed down to the point where I could answer “yes” to the same question if I accepted the idiot’s version being passed off by Beltway weirdos like little Ricky, while knowing full well that totality of Saddam’s weapons – or suspected weapons for that matter – weren’t even close to being a substantive threat to us and that the entire issue was being shamelessly hyped to justify a pre-fab design to invade Iraq. The significant polls on Iraq are the ones showing that, while Americans will overwhelmingly tend to give Presidents the benefit of the doubt in an apparent “crisis” or confrontation and predictably, if unfortunately, did so when Bush first sounded the drumbeat, most of the citizenry now recognizes that the rationale for this thing was, at the least, wildly overblown and that the entire project is a fiasco, whether through ill intent, incompetence or some measure of both.
Jesus Wall…reading that transcript and having seen a clip of Mathews bending over for Ann’s dildo on C&L or some such site, I’m deeply ashamed to have put in a few good words for Chris this past week. Mea culpa!!!!
reg, does it bother you in the least that Hussein was attempting to illegally buy uranium from Niger which could be enriched to produce a nuclear weapon?
(Was there good reason to suppose that Iraqi envoys visited Niger in search of “yellowcake” uranium ore?
In a series of columns, I have argued that the answer to this is “yes,” and that British intelligence was right to inform Washington to that effect. Iraq—despite having yellowcake of its own—had bought the material from Niger as early as 1981 and had not at that time informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (weapons inspectors effectively stopped Iraq’s domestic yellowcake production after 1991). On Oct. 31, 1998, Iraq announced the end of its cooperation with the U.N. inspectors, who were effectively barred from the country. A few days later, the U.N. Security Council condemned this move in Resolution 1205, dated Nov. 5, 1998. The following month, the Clinton administration ordered selective strikes in and around Baghdad. A few weeks after that—on Feb. 8, 1999, to be precise—an Iraqi delegation visited Niger. It was headed by the improbable figure of Saddam Hussein’s ambassador to the Vatican. But the improbability becomes more intelligible when it is understood that this diplomat, Wissam al-Zahawie by name, was a very experienced Iraqi envoy for nuclear-related matters.http://www.slate.com/id/2146475/
I just want to know if that bothers you. Would that affect your decision as to whether or not the overthrow of Hussein had justification?
A failed attempt, noted by Joseph Wilson and found to be irrelevant by CIA analysts by that time does not constitute a threat. Context is something conservatives don’t seem to understand.
Here’s a different perspective on this story, from Time. But Woody can always find what he is looking for, as I said before all of his brains are in his Googling finger.
Reg, Matthews two step with the truth makes for some high low comedy. Not surprisingly, he’s not always been quick to cop to his Coulter low when called on it:
Good gravy, Woody!!!! You’ve really got to be kidding! Hey, I can cite “references†to prove that Flight 93 really never crashed, but all the people were actually off-loaded in Cleveland and are now being held by….well, I forget who they’re being held by. But that doesn’t make it anything resembling truth. Jeez-us!
Now for a brief break to entertain a bit of refreshingly rational thought, might I suggest the following essay about Spinoza from today’s NYT:
REASONABLE DOUBT
By REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN
“THURSDAY marked the 350th anniversary of the excommunication of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza from the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam in which he had been raised.
“Given the events of the last week, particularly those emanating from the Middle East, the Spinoza anniversary didn’t get a lot of attention. But it’s one worth remembering — in large measure because Spinoza’s life and thought have the power to illuminate the kind of events that at the moment seem so intractable and overwhelming.
“The exact reasons for the excommunication of the 23-year-old Spinoza remain murky, but the reasons he came to be vilified throughout all of Europe are not. Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly claim infallible knowledge of the Creator’s partiality to its beliefs and ways. After the excommunication, he spent the rest of his life — he died in 1677 at the age of 44 — studying the varieties of religious intolerance. The conclusions he drew are still of dismaying relevance…..â€
I’m not up to doing Woody’s homework yet again, but I did click around, and I can’t really see what Hitchens thinks he’s got here.
Hitchens calls Zawahie Iraq’s “top nuclear goon”, after Ekeus calls him Saddam’s “top nuclear negotiator”. Problem is, being Saddam’s “top nuclear negotiator” in 1995 hardly amounts to anything in the context of 1995. Iraq had no nuclear weapons program to negotiate about, at that point. The question is whether his visit to Niger reflected some attempt to develop sources for yellowcake, and whether he was picked for that visit because of some technical qualifications.
Zawahie claims he stopped in Niger as part of a political junket to develop support for ending sanctions against Iraq. Why stop in Niger? Well, Niger has a major role in diplomatic junkets around North Africa — the crushing boredom of being posted to Niger is the impetus behind a very enthusiastic push on the part of the unfortunates employed in diplomatic posts there to make Niger’s capital the number one air-transport refueling stop in the region.
Zawahie claimed in a Time Magazine piece that he didn’t even know at the time that Niger produced yellowcake. If his main role as Iraq’s “top nuclear negotiator” was to go to conferences and denounce the hypocrisy of Israel having a nuclear program while pretending to be compliant with the NPT, it’s unlikely that doing his homework for that assignment would make him an expert on the entire nuclear fuel cycle. In a role like that, why would he be more likely than you or I to know that Niger was a yellowcake supplier? Did *you* know that Niger could produce yellowcake before the whole 16 words fiasco blew up?
While people make a big deal out of the fact that Niger has uranium mining, the fact is, its mines were flooded, and were operated by the French in any case. It would be a bad place to go for yellowcake, and kind of pointless for Iraq anyway given that Iraq already had huge stockpiles of yellowcake when Zawahiri visited. It’s not a matter of lining up supplies of yellowcake, it’s a matter of having the equipment to turn it into something dangerous. (See “aluminum tubes — Condi gets it wrong.”)
It is, of course, deeply, *DEEPLY* suspicious that Iraq’s Ambassador to the Vatican AND Iraq’s “top nuclear negotiator” would be trotting around Africa, isn’t it? Yeah, but at a time when Iraq had very litttle high-level ambassadorial representation around the world, Zawahie was perhaps Iraq’s representative about almost everything during a time when there was almost nothing to talk about anyway. There was almost nothing for Zawahie to do at the Vatican, and not a whole lot more for him to be doing anywhere else.
Thanks for the Vanity Fair link, Michael. I hadn’t read that story.
You realize, of course, that Woody will completely discount it because Vanity Fair is left-leaning, therefore Stalinist, and Saddam was an admirer of Stalin, therefore Vanity Fair is just a Saddamist mouthpiece?
Here’s my favorite bit from that article, because it reminds me so much of Woody himself:
—
[After the Niger deal has been disproven over and over and over ... the 16 words slip through anyway]:
The neocons were not done yet, however. “That was their favorite technique,” says Larry Wilkerson, “stick that baby in there 47 times and on the 47th time it will stay. At every level of the decision-making process you had to have your ax out, ready to chop their fingers off. Sooner or later you would miss one and it would get in there.”
—
Isn’t this Woody’s MO, but *exactly*? He repeats the same crap over and over and over, and when finally you miss one, he dances the victory jig. Facts make no dent — like the fact that Iraq already had enough yellowcake for 50 bombs (if it could only figure how to make bombs under the sanctions, which it couldn’t) and yet we’re supposed to believe that it risked exposing its (supposed) WMD program by shopping for more yellowcake for some reason?
Yeah, good work MT. Of course, Woody has distracted us from the most important point, which is that even if the Niger story were true, the events of 1999 do not change that in 2003 Iraq had no WMD. And yet we were told they did to sell us the war. Why aren’t we invading Ira
Yeah, good work MT. Of course, Woody has distracted us from the most important point, which is that even if the Niger story were true, the events of 1999 do not change that in 2003 Iraq had no WMD. And yet we were told they did to sell us the war. Why aren’t we invading Ira
“but at a time when Iraq had very litttle high-level ambassadorial representation around the world, Zawahie was perhaps Iraq’s representative about almost everything during a time when there was almost nothing to talk about anyway.”–MT
I once went to a party on the Maltese island of Gozo, after the local opera house did Tosca. The guests included the Swedish ambassador to Malta–who was also the ambassador to Mozambique and the Seychelles.
Woody will soon trot out the Butler Report Defense. Why? Because he’s tried that crap over and over and over, but he has not gotten up to his 47th attempt to “stick that baby in there”.
Reasonable conclusion: “Africa” in the 16 Words could only have been “Niger”, and British intel that Lord Butler said was “good” could only have been based on forged documents about a deal with Niger.
Of course, the only part of this post that Woody will notice is the “left” in “theleftcoaster”, a blogger who can (by way of reasoning already outlined above) only be described as a Saddamist.
By now everyone will have heard about the latest Israeli atrocity. The BBC adds this note:
“Israel’s military said it had warned residents of Qana to leave and Hezbollah bore responsibility for using it to fire rockets at the Jewish state.
Qana was the site of an Israeli bombing of a UN base on April 1996 that killed more than 100 people sheltering there during Israel’s “Grapes of Wrath” offensive, which was also aimed at destroying Hezbollah.”
Let’s see some of Israel’s apologists explain to us it is the civilians’ own fault for not evacuating the entire south of Lebanon. Maybe some people have no place to go and can’t travel on the roads that Israel has bombed. Maybe some don’t have friends and family in the north and can’t afford hotels. Maybe some don’t have transport or are too ill to travel. Does Israel care? No.
This BBC news story points out that the Qana massacre of 1996 may not have been an “accident,” and I think that the same thing can be said about the Qana massacre of today. As I have said before, it does not really matter whether Israel is “deliberately” targetting civilians–the wanton disregard for civilian life amounts to the same thing.
The Niger story is false. But as we’ve seen the evidenciary bar just gets lower and lower until one digs up an old shell from the 1980′s and hurrah! We’ve found them. Just because someone passes through doesn’t mean they struck a deal and the goods were delivered. Hitchins buys it because he’s painted himself into the corner as the others pitching this farce. The bigger question is this: should we ever get involved in this way for any reason?
Israel is heavy-handed but it is Hezbollah who is holding hostages and responsble for the deaths. And firing missles. That’s an act of war. Innocent victims are on the back of these radicals, but the image as you all prove is the other way around. I’m sure Hez likes that.
Since Israel knows that Hezbollah is operating near civilians, and since Israel knows that its bombs are killing civilians, and since Israel continues to bomb anyway, Israel bears responsibility for the consequences of its own choices and actions. It’s that simple, despite the dishonest obfuscations of York and the rest of the Israel cheerleading squad.
As for the missiles, I condemn those attacks, but let’s not lie through our teeth and rewrite history two weeks after it happened: the missile attacks started AFTER Israel began bombing and cannot be used as a justification for the escalation after the fact.
I’m curious where Israel’s right wing defenders will fall on this one: apparantly Mel Gibson was arrested for drunk driving and alledgedly spent some time spewing anti-semitic rhetoric.
How will the right wing Christian community react? How will those who are so quick to toss out political firebombs like “anti-semitism” to political opponents react when a christian hero is actually accused of despicable anti-Jew behavior. Will Mel’s defenders admit that those who saw something offensive in Mel’s Passion of the Christ might have been a little more attuned to some anti-Jew bias? Another exciting moment. I can hardly imagine the upcoming spin.
“I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested ….”
Well, he IS an actor. And he DOES have experience with acting like a person completely out of control. I’ve seen it on screen quite a few times now.
I never took him for a Method actor, though. Nor for such a virulent anti-semite (The Passion notwithstanding). Ouch. Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world? I mean, that’s actually the irrational core of a *theory*, not just some randomly acquired prejudice. A theory with an uncomfortably long history stretching back well over a century, like a tapeworm that gnawed its way through the Czarist Russia, Nazi Germany, Stalin, various islamist ideologies… with maybe just a leetle bit of quavery moral support at various times from the Holy See.
Y’know, this can’t be the first time he’s gotten this drunk, and said things something like this. And yet we’re hearing about it now, in the early twilight of his long career (unless this episode marks the sudden drop of the curtain, for good.) I wonder who’s going to come crawling out of the woodwork now, with more detailed reports?
As the governments of the US and Israel continue believe that they alone in all the world understand what is right, true and righteous. The arrogance is staggering.
Both Hezbollah and Hamas have promised to avenge Qana.. It is likely they will keep their word.
Meanwhile, Amir Peretz said today that Israel will keep up all this up for at least another two weeks.
Welcome to the doors of hell.
PS: Michael B. —It seems that most credible evidence points to the 1996 Qana bombing not having been accidental. (For one thing, there was a pre-bombing video tape taken by a UN guy and later recovered from the wreckage that was all but a smoking gun. I posted links on an earlier thread. Robert Fisk, among others, reported on it.)
Mel has never renounced the Catholic Church’s original anti-semitic stance. So, after his movie depicting Jew’s as scum, and his embrace of the early errors of Catholicism, his screed is no surprise to me.
Outside of that, Israel’s government continues it’s dispicable behavior. They do more to promote this incorrect view of Israel than any anti-semtic group, and they endanger their people. The US and Israel need a enima to remove these scum from office.
You guys make it so easy for me by making my arguments for me, then “discrediting” them, and making my counter-arguments, which you “discredit.” Of course, when you do that, you always end up with the wrong conclusions. Since I have two minutes before I have to go and haven’t really read everything, this will be short.
Whom do you trust to analyze things…someone with analytical skills (me) or someone who believes things because he feels that they are true or wants them to be true (most of you). You use biased sources whose intent is not to report the truth but to convince you to accept their leftist agenda–and you fall right into it.
I can cut through the propaganda and know which reports are misleading, while those who are good in the arts or social work are terrible at analysis. Believe me, I’m a lot more trained and have a natural talent for that then most of you right-brained people. The only difficult thing is that you want to feel important, so you will never admit to this or the fact that most of you have trouble even balancing your checkbooks.
To take just one item, do you actually think that Joe Wilson did extensive research in Niger and that his report was complete, accurate, and unbiased? If you do, stop right there. Your mindset may be good for some things (we’re still working on what), but they are not good for discernment.
If you don’t believe this, then the next time you need to get your taxes done or need an audit, hire a mime or an actor. Otherwise admit that sometimes you just need to trust skilled and impartial experts.
Woody, I’d hire you to do my taxes in a heartbeat, and would no doubt enjoy chatting and laughing with you on the back porch over lemonade and/or Jack Daniels (as long as we stayed off the subject politics.)
But foreign policy analysis? Uh, don’t think so, darlin.’ Your numbers continually come out wrong—not because you aren’t smart— because you’re always starting out with faulty (make that cooked) data.
Mel’s father is is a certified conspiracist and anti-semite too. No doubt he had some influence on Mel. Michael Balter no one is apologizing for the bombing although wasn’t there an incident that instigated it? A raid and then fired missles? I just don’t see a solution for you that involves more than condemning Israel at all costs to reason. They claim if they wanted they could just level the place, and that targeting Hez strongholds is indeed trying avoid civilian casualties. We know this is never completely possible. There needs to be more than one note in this Samba.
Woody is no expert on anything. He buys into the same whackjob conspiracies every time while discounting factual reporting and scientific publications.
Hey, Mark Y., very sorry about the death of your dad. The obit was elegant and touching.(Tried to post on ur site to say as much but was defeated by the software.)
I went through the same thing with my mother two months ago. Still reeling.
Mark York, my condolences also on the loss of your father. And good to see your defense of the environment!
I see you folks in Cooper’s blog world are being entertained by the Twisted Balter Show.
Yes, today’s tragedy in Lebanon is sad and horrible, and believe it or not, Balter, I believe Israel and its defenders are not – as Hezbollah, Hamas and company so often seem when they murder Israeli children, women and civilians, which is what they try to do 95 percent of the time — overjoyed about this. To the contrary.
I agree with the Lebanon govt. — a full, independent, preferably UN-led, investigation is warranted for this tragedy and other preceding civilian tragedies. And I have no doubt that, when and if such an investigation is done, we will find, much to the dismay of the Hez apologists, that the Hez rocket launchers are and were being set up near such civilian buildings and homes and, as such, got got in the cross fire by an Israeli military seeking to stop the rain of 100-150 rockets per day on their civilian buildings and home. Much has been made of the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who have fled their homes, but about the same large quantity has fled their homes on the other side of the border (or are buried night and day in bomb shelters, fortunately for them they have that option, otherwise we might see similar carnage in Israel more often).
In my view, if my prediction is correct, and the Hez has been shooting its rockets under cover of civilian villages, homes and buildings, then most of the blame in the horrific deaths of civilians in southern Lebanon are the Hezbollah. Think about it.
And, while the rocket barrage from Hez did start up after Israel responded to their murders and hostage taking, as one Israeli analyst put it on BBC this morning, the roots of the Israeli war right now are moreso because, in the six years since they withdrew from Lebanon, there are at least 24 documented, unprovoked incidents of Hez firing rockets over the border at Israeli civilians. Couple that with the Hez mission of destroying Israel and refusing to recognize its right to exist, and its not a threat to brush off by launching back doves and saying, poor Hez, we forgive you for killing 8 soldiers and kidnapping 2, ok, here, we will release your terrorist friends, some of whom apparently killed innocent Israeli families.
I do hope there will be a cease fire, and that as part of that this whole mess can be solved through a political agreement. I was optimistic after hearing the Lebanese cabinet decision yesterday on resolving this diplomatically. But lets stop being naive: stop absolving Hezbollah of their large share of blame (which is greater than or equal to the denunciations doled out to Israel for its unfortunate, disproportionate response involving hitting Beirut, gas tanks and other unnecessary targets) in this sad war.
The nations and political leaders all around the world who are now condemning Israel for what it did at Qana are hardly apologists for Hezbollah, even if anon falsely and dishonestly tries to characterize me and others here that that way. Events have already passed anon by: Israel has completely isolated itself by its outrageous actions, and even the US and the UK now realize that it is not in their interests to go down with this ship. Let’s hope that the 48 hour halt in bombing will turn into a permanent ceasefire.
Ps–thanks to rosedog for the Observer post and Qana 1996 info. When even Israel’s best friends have had enough, there may be hope. Israel’s actions aren’t defeating Hezbollah, they are making them and other extremists stronger and more popular than ever and giving huge stocks of ammunition to terrorist recruiters. Taking the moral high road is something that Israel has rarely done in its history, possibly because it goes counter to the crude tribalism that is Zionism.
You know I have had absolutely enough of this bullshit regarding the right of Israel to exist – most certainly it does have a right to exist, it does not have the right to create unending havoc in the region by it’s unrighteous activity. This is not the attempt to just exist, it is not the claim of a persecuted Zionism – and a holocaust of the Jewish people is not in the making (unless you want to attribute that to the people in the surrounding region), resistence to the current corrupt Israeli government is in the offing.
There are approximately 10,000 prisoners in Israel, and a thousand of them have been rotting there without trial (sound familiar?). If you want justice bring them to court, but do not do what you did with the other 9,000. Do not set up military tribunals with no ability to face your accusers and argue the charge. Do not exact confessions through torture, which is CODIFED in Israeli law – because any confession can be given under torture, including being a little teapot!
You cannot maintain an apartheid by design in both treatment and in stolen land. International law cannot be flaunted as it has since it’s ruling after the 67′ war – in case you do not know, in the preamble ruling, the lands CANNOT be kept as a booty of war (in short).
You cannot run incursions in Gaza and other forcefully restricted areas and kill innocent people pell mell, including the recent 10,000 shells indiscriminately lobbed into Gaza. Do you get it? Is it clear? Do I have to innumerate the atrocities again and pull out all the documents, beyond doubt proof of this activity by human rights organizations above a shadow of a doubt? Is this required again?
So it is getting awfully tired hearing the “they started it” bullshit all over again. What you have in Lebanon is the escalation of what has gone on in Palestine for decades. What is taking place in Lebanon is war crimes, and it is the continuation of business as usual since Israel left this territory in 2000 – with all of the intrigue that has taken place up until this time – it did NOT begin with the killing and kidnapping of two soldiers, is this clear?
I do not care how much horseshit is spewed from the corporate media. This has been a plan in the works for years, I have the briefings, I have the dates and times of proposal and this has been discussed both here and in Israel – it is common public knowledge, get it?
In the meantime Lebanon is dying by diplomacy. As world players from the US and Israel act like they are trying to hammer out a solution, while the US id helping Israel to further lock and load to engorge the military-industrial complex. Anon got one thing right, more have died in Iraq at this point – so where is the logic in letting a lying piece of shit government that murders a civilization to be a chief negotiator (US)? You don’t like my language? To bad!
In the meantime we are treated to this play by two chief aggressors who have no intention of halting the destruction, while the American people have a ring side seat sipping their martini’s in their hot tubs and digress into consumer oblivion – and as long as this is not interrupted nothing will be done. I might be wrong but I think there is more than an outside chance for escalation, and it might just be a matter of time before this administration tries to claim the World War rhetoric.
To all who agree to this, I say screw you and your “world war on terrorism,” it is the old war against the poor and oppressed people of the world. No doubt, some of you might be raptured (according to some fruitcakes), I hope everyone one who agrees with this current situation as valid does disappear – and I am prepared to stay on my knees if that is what it takes to make your disappearance a reality.
Off the topic of the Middle East, but a very revealing article on the crackpot ideology, rampant bigotry, unbridled corruption and blatant criminality of the Republican Party in one of it’s gerrymandered, rigged-elections “strongholds”:
(And this, by the way, as Michael B. said, does NOT mean in any way siding with or excusing Hezbollah for lobbing rockets on civilians. So don’t go there.)
He will appreciate that anon whoever you are. It shows you at least look at backgrounds before leaping to a conclusion. If they agree with Virgil the position is so far left there is no return to sanity. If one justifies the constant pecking by whackjob groups and no matter what they do the blame is always something Israel did at some point in time including fake massacres what’s the point of a discussion?
For the purpose of discussion, let’s stipulate the invasion of Lebanon is the Lebanese people’s fault.
As even the Israel supporters here have acknowledged, there is a self-perpetuating cycle of violence here that must be broken before there can be any chance of peace.
What matters most, then, is how to go about breaking that cycle.
The U.S. has no lever it can pull to control the Hezbollah. As we have stipulated, the only available lever is escalating violence. But it is plain for even Israel’s supporters here to see that escalating violence cannot and will not lead to peace.
Whatever meager diplomatic leverage the U.S. once had that it could apply to the Arab side of this conflict was fully squandered in Iraq and Condi’s visit last week spelled that out for the semi-literate.
Moderate Arab states that once may have been counted on to ally, if only implicitly, with the U.S. are now firmly backing the Hezbollah. Saudi Arabia has committed something like 5 billion dollars to rebuilding Lebanon, money that will almost certainly flow directly through Hezbollah.
What’s left, then?
The leverage the U.S. has on Israel. As Israel’s bankroller, weapons supplier and diplomatic client, the U.S. has life-or-death power over the country, which can be exercised WITHOUT RESORT TO VIOLENCE.
It is not an exaggeration to say that George W. Bush could halt the invasion of Lebanon tomorrow without firing a shot, threatening an attack or implementing a blockade or sanction of any kind.
He could simply tell Israel that as it can only use the immense financial, military and diplomatic resources of the U.S. if it is willing to halt the invasion of Lebanon and exit the occupied territories and negotiate a compromise on the return of Palestinian refugees.
Israel’s leaders are nutty, but not that crazy. They would have no choice but to comply. Conversely, Israel will never pursue peace when it can plainly see that it benefits more from military aggression.
The U.S. has more diplomatic, nonviolent leverage on Israel than on, perhaps, any other party in the world.
Unless and until the U.S. demonstrates a willingness to use that leverage, the militarists who are in control of Israel have zero incentive to consider a strategy that would, in the end, cede their power to leaders willing to live in peace with a Palestinian state. Rather, their incentive is to perpetuate the violence with the long-term goal being wiping out the Palestinians and establishing Greater Israel as a de facto empire and, eventually, de jure.
Ironically, the U.S. and its European allies POTENTIALLY have significant financial leverage over the Palestinian Authority. But that leverage can only be realized after the U.S. demonstrates to Palestinians that is not directly colluding with Israel to destroy it. At the moment, Palestinians know that whatever aid the U.S. gives them is insignificant compared with the resources it deploys against Palestine’s survival. No surprise, then, that they chose to ignore any U.S. threat to withdraw that support.
By taking a more sustainable policy toward Israel, the U.S. would increase its leverage with Arab governments as well.
Again, if you want to stop violence – denounce it everywhere.
Your anguished cries of bitterness about the Palestinean plight don’t justify the fanatical fringe lHamas, Hez and company murdering the Israeli children, women and others out of sheer hatred, Virgil. Where were you when they strapped bombs to Palestinean kids and blew up Israeli cafes, restaurants, buses, street corners, more? Where were you when Israel made sustainable peace with Egypt, Jordan? When they pulled out of Lebanon and Gaza but were thanked with continuing rockets and barbaric, suicide freaks? Where were you when, since the Rabin years, Israel, at least the majority of Israelis, have time and again made it clear they want to negotiate peace -and will recognize and support a state of Palestine in West Bank and Gaza – but then see such aspirations torpedoed, again and again, by the insanity of suicide bombs. I know, I know, I don’t understand. Palestinean attacks on innocent Israelis must be UNDERSTOOD. Its merely the result of Israeli apartheid and occupation, how can I not understand. So lame.
You appear to be knowledgeable on the situation, Virgil. Look up Taba. See there: room for compromise on 67 borders and the like. Possible for a win-win plan. Let go of the pain and anguish and support negotiating no more war through a peace treaty.
Get over it, Virgil. Time for the Left to stop encouraging this losing, painful descent into hell — put the Zionist tribalism crap, the “occupation” and “apartheid” and “other slogans of pain behind you and for once do something constructive and help make a better life for Palestineans. Denounce violence everywhere, don’t rationalize it.
Yes, Israel did not start it, and thats the point. When their enemies seek a real peace, you can be sure Israel will be there to help make it happen. They were and are sincere, despite your imagination to the contrary. And if they are not sincere, as you suspect, you can be sure the US and others will make them sincere. Get over this cynical bullshit about the US imperialistic control over the Middle East for oil, etc, with Israel as its proxy garbage, etc. etc. Actually, nothing would please Bush and his oil buddies more than a solution to the Israel problem –the oil will be flowing westward faster than ever if that were to happen.
Rosedog, will not accuse you of Hez apologies, but when one agrees with heaping all the blame on Israelis for this conflict in Lebanon, it smacks of being an apology for Hez. Lets just call it what it is, what you say? Its not about, and can’t be justified by, some existential pyschological scream of rage over Israeli occupation, as Virgil would describe it — rather, its pure and simple stupid provocation from a group(s) not interested in dialoguing for peace with Israel.
And yes, some may brush this off with, ahh its “getting old,” but ever read an Arab newspaper? The Arab world is rife with anti-semitism, and, while I don’t think that a Holocaust 2 is in the offing, there is no doubt there is enough sentiment in the Arab world against, yes, Jews, and not just Israelis, to organize one.
“When their enemies seek a real peace, you can be sure Israel will be there to help make it happen.”
Why are they building a wall through Palestinian territory and expanding their stolen colonial suburbs in the West Bank?
And…Anon’s demand that people stop repeating stuff about Palestinians as victims, etc. while he regurgitates every single AIPAC talking point ad nauseum, including the risibly dismissible anti-Semitism canard. His hypocrisy on that is a perfect example of the double standard he uses in analyzing the conflict.
Why can’t/won’t Israel stop expanding settlements? Why can’t/won’t Israel drop its precondition that the status of Jerusalem as exclusively Jewish controlled is non-negotiable? Why can’t Israel drop its precondition that the return of refugees is nonnegotiable?
None of these issues have any reasonable connection to Israel’s security. Israel’s stated, formal unwillingness to peacefully settle these specific issues is proof positive that they have no intention of settling their religious land grab peacefully through negotiations. They will negotiate only after the Palestinians and supporters such as Hezbollah are destroyed and have no choice but to accept Israel’s chauvinistic, expansionist terms.
and Fareed Zakaria? really. I don’t think he’d give you the time of day, Anon…but I see why you’d want to dress up your shabby little ad hominem by dropping a prominent name. pathetic!
Great analysis of the situation overall, but I question Washington’s ability to rein in the Israelis. Even if Bush had the will to do it (and you can imagine the political “hay” the Democrats would make out of any move in that direction!), Israel has indicated a willingness in the past to defy the US when thier perceived self-interest is involved. Given thier possession of a significant nuclear arsenal (developed independently of the US) the question of whether or not thier defiance would extend beyond the level of rhetoric has far reaching implications to say the least!
Given the Bush administration’s ineptitude in diplomatic matters, clearly these are not the people we would want to have in charge of any major re-shaping of our “special relationship” with Israel. With the Democrat’s obsequiousness to AIPAC and the Jewish-American voting bloc, it is hard to imagine them doing anything but inducing the Israelis to become even more belligerent.
Although I’m familiar with the “all it would take is one phone call from Washington” argument, no one on this end has the political will to make that call. The post-WW II US planners that envisioned and manifested Israel as a giant “aircraft carrier” to assist in our military command and control of middle east oil, along with subsequent US administrations, have enabled the most “hawkish” elements of Israeli society to sieze the political agenda.
It is a sad irony that the moderate, peaceful element of Israeli society has been effectively marginalized because of the very real threats to Israel’s security which were (and are), at the very least, exacerbated by the actions of the jingoist element of Israel.
Publius opines: ““ its pure and simple stupid provocation from a group(s) not interested in dialoguing for peace with Israel.â€
It is far from pure, and far from simple. But I agree that Hezbollah, Hamas and many others have no interest in “dialogue” with Israel. Why should they? Israel formally and by demonstration insists that the key points: Jerusalem and refugees, are not negotiable. While Israel hasn’t formally annexed the West Bank, it has shown every indication that it intends to, once it kills off enough Palestinians to solve what it calls the “demographic” problem there.
You like it simple, Publius. Here’s a simple question: what could Hezbollah or Hamas or the Palestinians possibly gain by negotiating with Israel UNDER THE CURRENT CIRCUMSTANCES? Are you suggesting that Israel has indicated that it is willing to negotiate on Jerusalem, refugees or the West Bank? Israel is made clear it intends to negotiate only one thing with the Palestinians: Surrender. The only wiggle room there are the specific terms of capitulation.
As long as the U.S. regime gives Israel carte blanche to expand exclusively Jewish colonial land-theft suburbs in the West Bank, build walls through Palestinian territory and assassinate public officials at will NEITHER SIDE has a practical, near-term incentive to negotiate in good faith.
Randy Paul said: What Rosedog said….
Randy wants me to do his taxes or has he been been into the Jack Daniels with rosedog? ( They do have a good on-line tour, and Junior is the guide to pick. Jack Daniels )
rosedog, you guys have it backwards about who has the faulty data, but I’ll let you continue to believe that the New York Times is an American newspaper rather than an research arm of Al Qaeda, that Whittaker Chambers was a middle-of-the-road reporter instead of a communist with Time magazine, and that journalists who vote for the Democrats can be trusted to report objectively.
———-
On Mel Gibson, I haven’t really kept up with what appears to be his out-of-control response to being stopped. However, he was no more out-of-control than all of you hysterics on the left who were sure that his movie “The Passion of Christ” should be banned as it would turn Christians into anti-semites (hey, much like many of you) and bring violence against them. It didn’t and, once again, the left was wrong and overreacted. I’m pretty sure that the Hizbollah has not shown this at the theaters in Lebanon, but they might have it the movie did what you guys predicted.
Here’s what happened: Lebanese protesters broke into the United Nations headquarters in Beirut on Sunday, smashing windows and ransacking offices, after an Israeli air strike killed at least 40 people in south Lebanon. …Demonstrators tore down a United Nations flag outside the building and ripped it to shreds and called on Hizbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah to launch rocket attacks on Tel Aviv. …the building had been stoned and furniture smashed …a small fire was started.
So, this was the response from the U.N: Geir Petersen, the personal representative of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in Lebanon, condemned the Israeli attack on the village of Qana and called for an immediate investigation.
Huh? Where’s the outrage and condemnation for attacking the U.N. in this case. When Israel blasts a U.N. site that provides cover for terrorists, it is condemned. When the other side destroys the U.N. offices, their actions are overlooked so the U.N. can condemn Israel again. There doesn’t seem to be outrage for the terrorists.
Frankly, I don’t blame Israel and I wouldn’t even give a 48 hour grace period for Hizbollah to regroup. Maybe if the U.N. wanted to be productive, they could start getting the terrorists our of south Lebanon before more civilians get caught in the cross fire.
“that Whittaker Chambers was a middle-of-the-road reporter instead of a communist with Time magazine”
This has to be one of the weirdest bits I’ve yet seen injected into these comments. Unhinged doesn’t even begin to describe this one as an attempt at…something. Presumably we’re to believe that because Whittaker Chambers was a reporter for Time, the Henry Luce enterprise was – and continues to function as – some sort of propaganda outlet for Stalin and his heirs. If anyone ever doubted that Woody was completely fucking nuts – and quite desperate in his political pathologies – no need to temporize any further.
When a person refuses plain facts there is no basis for dialogue. Many should just go blog about the Easter Bunny, that is all I have to say at this juncture. Finis
Okay, you want the violence on all sides condemned? No problem. Here it is. Written in very gentlemanly, albeit heartbroken terms by the late King Hussein’s brother, Prince Hassan.
It was published in Ha’aretz 3 or 4 days ago, before everything really went to hell. (Again, the opinion section of Ha’aretz can’t be accessed unless one registers, thus I’m posting thing.)
WAGING WAR OR WINNING PEACE
By HRH Prince Hassan bin Talal
ONCE again, the region rings with the all-too-familiar cries of hatred, anger, violence and bloodshed. It seems we have been rendered unable to disable violence – whether the perpetrators be state or non-state players. Where is the voice of reason or the eye that sees beyond the immediate? Where is the ear that is prepared to listen?
Only last September, at the UN World Summit, world leaders agreed in a historic statement that states have a primary responsibility to act to protect their own populations and that the international community has a responsibility to act when these governments fail to protect the most vulnerable among us. Yet what we are witnessing today in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Iraq and in Afghanistan is no less than the punishment of the powerless, escalating humanitarian crises of mammoth proportions, coupled in Lebanon with the destruction of the very infrastructure of civilized existence.
We are a dishonest lot in the Middle East. Maddened by grievances real and perceived, each of us clamors to call for peace when we have all, through trauma and intransigence, become mesmerized by war. We may fool our media allies from far away, or fulfill the requirements of sloganeers who do not share our air and soil, but we know, you and I, that lasting peace will only come when we look each other in the eye and translate hatred into words that begin a difficult conversation. The people of Israel have made an easy decision not to talk to extremists. Perhaps the bravest step is to engage with moderates and acknowledge that our troubled neighborhood needs the courage of compassion and the wisdom of longer-term self-interest to undo the damage of macho militarism. The gunfire around us makes it even harder to hear the voices of our marginalized communities. Honesty is the only way to save our grandchildren from the fear and asphyxiation of hope, which we have all known for so long. Our clustered cities of Amman and Tel Aviv, Beirut and Damascus are too close to each other to avoid a tangled future.
We, the Children of Abraham, may claim to look in different directions for culture and custom, spirituality and succor, but this small patch of scorched, embattled earth cannot be divided by fences and false borders of the mind. If the political play does not allow us to admit this to those whose map of our region is distorted by self-interest and misguided strategic obstinacy, then at least let us have the sense to admit it to each other.
Enlightened self-interest must compel us to foster human dignity and integrity by addressing the full spectrum of basic human rights, spanning from the rights of children to full respect for the rule of law on a national, regional and international level.
The events of the past three weeks have brought us to the edge of the abyss. They are the result not of timeless and inevitable conflict, but of intransigence, fear and a shocking lack of creativity by leaders in our region and beyond. The indiscriminate loss of life on all sides has polarized our populations and shown diplomacy for the devalued and scorned art it has become. The focus on polemics and the ensuing escalation of violence has sidelined the very real and dangerous concerns that underlie our region’s spiraling decline.
Aggressive ideology is nurtured by an increasing lack of economic equality, poor social mobility, a denial to many of human security, and the exclusion of the silenced majority. It is evident to us all that military might cannot cure the evils of our region. Violence begets violence, and the mass bombings of civilians can only result in increased use of terror tactics further down the line.
It has become exceedingly clear that the current crisis requires the application of a two-fold solution if we are ever to hope for a secure and stable peace for all our citizens. The conflicts that rule our daily lives must be addressed on the political level, but we cannot afford to ignore the effects of military overkill on basic humanitarian issues. Human rights are the first casualties of war, and the degradation of human dignity in our region has undone generations of agreement and convention on the rights of civilians to protection and well-being. The anger and trauma created by hundreds of dead and injured and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians so far can only have violent repercussions for a hitherto democratic, pluralistic and multicultural Lebanon reality. The shockwaves are felt by our entire region.
A conference for security and cooperation in the region must be a priority for our leaders if human security is ever to become a reality. Diplomatic avenues must be opened and explored, and this arduous process should include Syria and Iran. War and it’s tragic repercussions are inclusive of all; surely a model for peace should strive for such inclusiveness.
In memory of my late brother, His Majesty King Hussein, and Yitzhak Rabin, we must strive not to wage wars, but to win peace. Real peace must be built; it is not just the absence of war. We need to talk about the end-game, to develop regional understanding, to address the energy issue that is at the heart of so much instability, and to devise a multilateral approach to such thorny issues as the proliferation of WMD, together with a regional concept for human rights, prosperity and security.
Ideally, it could lead to a regional code of conduct and a cohesion fund that establishes principles of common interest, responsibility, transparency and a collective defense identity, reflecting the fact that interdependency is the reality today. Anthrocentric policies, policies where people matter, is the way to close the human dignity divide. Through good governance, we must empower the poor and dispossessed who find expression for their frustrations in extremist ideology.
The sooner a cessation of hostilities is achieved and international peacekeeping forces are deployed on both sides of the border, the sooner a collective strive toward institutionalized regional stability can begin. I cannot emphasize enough the need for diplomacy to transpose violence and this call echoes former U.S. president Eisenhower’s appeal that the “table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.”
The writer, brother of the late King Hussein of Jordan, is president of the Arab Thought Forum.
Woody raves: “Whom do you trust to analyze things…someone with analytical skills (me) or someone who believes things because he feels that they are true or wants them to be true (most of you).”
Woody, you’re a CPA, right? And that takes a brain, I agree. However, it’s pretty common for people who assess their own intelligence in terms of honed skills in their area of expertise to assume that they can be similarly skilled right off the bat in some other area. I knew a guy here in Tokyo who used to bilk foreign exchange traders all the time, by flattering their intelligence while selling them bad insurance policies. These guys knew the foreign exchange market, so they assumed they were geniuses when it came to anything about money.
“You use biased sources whose intent is not to report the truth but to convince you to accept their leftist agenda–and you fall right into it.”
When those “biased sources” cite government sources, and use logic to support their conclusions, yeah, I “fall right into it”. When the use of sources and the logic is better than others.
“I can cut through the propaganda and know which reports are misleading, ….”
I’m sorry Woody, but you’ve fucked up on this very thing over and over and over. Almost every supposed slam-dunk you post here falls apart on closer inspection. Which tells me: if something is aimed straight at your confirmation biases, you don’t subject it to closer inspection.
“…. while those who are good in the arts or social work are terrible at analysis.”
Not necessarily, but what makes you think I’m bad at analysis?
“Believe me, I’m a lot more trained and have a natural talent for that then most of you right-brained people.”
Yeah, Woody, but how about when a left-brainer has a left hemisphere practically oozing out of his left ear, and he or she still disagrees with you? What’s your rationalization then? “Too logical and analytical to be sensible”?
“The only difficult thing is that you want to feel important, so you will never admit to this or the fact that most of you have trouble even balancing your checkbooks.”
Yeah, Woody, but how did you do in physics when you got to deBroglie’s equations? In math when you got LaPlace transforms? In computer science when you got Rice’s Theorem in recursive function theory?
Oh, you never got anywhere near that far?
“To take just one item, do you actually think that Joe Wilson did extensive research in Niger and that his report was complete, accurate, and unbiased? If you do, stop right there.”
I believe Joe Wilson did NOT do extensive research in Niger, but for a good reason: he quickly figured out that extensive research would be a waste of time. The French were running the only mine from which any uranium might be had. The perpetually-resident nuclear proliferation regulatory apparatus was in place in that country and was functioning just fine. And there really was not a whole lot else to do. Especially considering that if Iraq actually had been shopping for yellowcake around Africa, it would have been rock-stupid of them to risk tipping their hand in the process, when they already had enough yellowcake for 50 bombs sitting on their own territory
Analyze THAT, Mr. Super Left Brain CPA. (Or more likely, just ignore it, as you do over and over and over in the face of embarrassing facts.)
The CIA still gave Wilson’s orally-debriefed report a grade of “good” in the face of what are now obvious pressures within the White House to avoid conclusions like his. I figure Wilson decided that B- effort was fine in this case, treating the task rather as you might have treated an accounting course assignment to come up with the optimal way to estimate capital equipment depreciation in a nation with an annual inflation rate randomly varying between 2000% and 3000% from quarter to quarter (“the whole country’s gonna go tits-up soon anyway, so what’s the point?”), or an econ course assignment to write an in-depth 15-page term paper analyzing the linkages between GDP growth in Byelorussia and the price of eggs in Wisconsin (“I hear the professor spends all his spare time playing D&D on Ecstasy, so why bother?”).
And for what must be the bazillionth time: I am not a leftist. But I am pretty stupid anyway, obviously. Beause I keep arguing with you, don’t I? Even though it’s clearly a waste of time.
I … am … powerless … over … my … need … to … respond … to … Woody ….
“Huh? Where’s the outrage and condemnation for attacking the U.N. in this case. When Israel blasts a U.N. site that provides cover for terrorists, it is condemned. When the other side destroys the U.N. offices, their actions are overlooked so the U.N. can condemn Israel again. There doesn’t seem to be outrage for the terrorists. ”
You seem to have missed a key difference: U.N. *property* (repairable) was destroyed in a violent protest. U.N. observer *lives* (irretrievable) were *lost* in an Israeli strike. If you can’t understand why one is small news and the other is big news, you have no analytical qualifications worth bringing to bear on the issues we discuss here. Go back to your bean-counting. Sounds like you’re actually good at that.
OK, I gotta get outa here. Because I just noticed that Woody called the New York Times the research arm of Al Qaeda. My analytical left brain has rebelled and gone on strike for better working conditions.
However, a few scabbing logic circuits that are still at their desks after the labor negotiations meltdown must signal desperately, as follows: I suppose Woody agrees with Ann Coulter when she jokingly (?) said that someone like Tim McVeigh ought to bomb the NYT after everybody but the reporters and editorial staff have been vacated? Say it ain’t so, Woody: you believe some terrorism is actually justified?
David Brooks? William Safire? Nah, they are just ideological camouflage for the NYT, they couldn’t possible be the patriots they claim to be while also accepting pay from the research arm of Al Qaeda …. so toast them too while you’re at it, Tim.
“My analytical left brain has rebelled and gone on strike for better working conditions.”
A genuine, tea-spitting laugh before bedtime! Thanks, Michael. I needed that.
(Oh, no, you did NOT put your CV up! It was kinda cool though. My inner adolescent was sorely tempted to start trotting out creds a little earlier today. But I asked her to please sit down.)
“I … am … powerless … over … my … need … to … respond … to … Woody ….”
A compulsion we all suffer from. But when you see all the witless ignorance of the American rightwing crystallized in one blogger, you can’t really be blamed for wanting to dispel it with a wave of the rhetorical magic wand. Problem is, all the waving doesn’t make it go away!
You know Woody, I’ve always been good with analysis of political issues and seeing the bigger picture, but didn’t use to be that good with numbers. I could do basic things like balance my checkbook, but the idea of involving myself in issues relevant to accounting scared the hell out of me.
However, in my last job, my employer saw that I had good analytical skills and was capable of getting through my fear of numbers (I only took the first calculus course in college). I eventually learned enough basics about accounting that I was able to defend audits conducted by the auditors that worked for my employer. I settled audits with broadcasters such as CBS, Clear Channel, Infinity, etc.
What enabled me to do that was a lot of hard work: first learning enough about the industry to understand how it works, secondly learning enough about accounting to understand how items were expensed, learning basics such as such cash receipts v accrual, etc. and third and most important, gaining an empathy witht eh braodcasters and trying to see things from their point of view. The problem that my predecessor had in the same positon was that he assumed every audit that we conducted that resulted in a deficiency was due to deliberate cheating and nefarious efforts by our customers. While there was some of that, much of it was due to honest errors.
When I started settling the audits, there was more than $5 million in open, unsettled audits. Two years later I had the total down to less than one million.
There’s a lesson in there for you if you want to learn it.
Michael Turner, I have realized that you are an anomaly in that you have an engineering background and typically defend the left, while claiming not to be one (which I will accept, but you are closer to them than the middle.)
On who can do what, my experience and that of everyone I know from the plumbing guy at Home Depot to financial planners is that it is the engineers who think that they can do everything. You won’t believe the tax returns that I’ve had to correct because some engineer didn’t like the way that his tax program calculated the taxes, so he did numerous overrides to get to the numbers that he manually computed.
On other analogies that you raise, you dispel your own claimed logical thought process. Whether or not one is left-brained and logical is more a process of how he assembles and interprets data, not whether he had the same math and physics courses as you. May I assume that you’re not logical if you can’t compute the tax effects on a Section 1031 exchange, or should I grant that you have the mindset but just not the experience to do that? My illustration of balancing a check book would be valid, though, because that is an excercise conducted by the overall population rather than just some nerds stuck in a room with no windows who want to sound wise because they know what all the computer acronyms mean.
Simply put and back to the topic, I’m logical enough to know that when a publication reports dishonestly, then I’m not going to trust that publication so easily the next time. You don’t have to know pi to the 100th decimal point to reason that. I’m logical enough to know that assumptions are not the same as facts. You, the leftist media, and, yes, Joe Wilson do a lot of assuming. And, I’m logical enough to know that you wasted a lot of time trying to dispel my claim that logical people are better at analysis than right brained people. They are.
I do have to give you credit in that you feel such intensity for certain liberal issues that you take such time trying to defend them. However, I find it interesting that you, for example, defend Joe Wilson with defenses that were not in his report and that he didn’t raise, but that you concluded. It’s a joke when you have to cover for him rather than explain what he actually reported. Further, you mention “obvious pressures within the White House” that are only your assumptions. Were there any motivations on Joe Wilson to lie? Yes.
If you’re good at interpreting technical manuals from one language to another, do you try to be accurate or do you try to cover for what you perceive were mistakes by making, on your own, additions and changes that are not true to the original author? Maybe you’re the guy that makes those hilarious “how to assemble” guides translated into what is supposed to pass for English.
Michael Turner, your resume is fine. (It does strike me funny, though, that you would link it–similar to Randy Paul giving an abbreviated resume one time on his foreign travels. Do egos need that much stroking?) However, the only people that you impress are the ones who already wanted to believe that I’m wrong–and, those are the right-brained people who aren’t logical and never could be. As for me and others like me, we see through your feeble attempt. Think logically about it and quit defending the left when they are wrong.
Randy, our posts are crossing in the mail, so I hope that doesn’t create more problems. On your audits, I can make a lot of conclusions from them, but one is that the type of audit you conducted is not an audit in the same sense as a CPA audits financial statements. But, I will give you credit for cutting through the technical jargon. I could learn to play a piano and my fingers are accurate strinking a ten key, but I would never have the proficiency of a natural artist. BTW, as an auditor, I make no assumptions about fraud or wrong-doing, either way, when I go in. Your predecessor was wrong in his approach in that regard.
A lesson from your story is that we can often do what we have to do whether or not we want to. Still, some people are better at certain tasks than are others. Further, unless forced, you would resort to your natural and comfortable way of viewing the world–which is not the way you did the audit. The world needs both right and left brained people. Just recognize when to appreciate the contributions of each in the right places.
———
MT, on the U.N. post destruction, Israel did not intend to take U.N. lives and the action occured because the enemy fired from that location and sought shelter around the facility. That post was in a battle zone and could have been evacuated.
On the more recent one with the Hizbollah supporters, they actually took over that U.N. headquarters in Beirut and willfully ransacked and set fire to it while the U.N. employees had to take refuge in the basement.
Do you not see the difference in those actions? Whether or not one is repairable of not is not the point. One, the Israeli attack, was an inadvertent consequence of the battle for which the enemy and the U.N. bear some responsibility. The other was a direct and intentional action by terrorist supporters who put the lives of the U.N. staffers at risk–and, those personnel were far outside the battle zone.
It’s no different than if someone accidentally ran into your car versus intentionally ramming it.
———-
On my journalism comment, I didn’t realize it at the time, but I connected journalists, communists, terrorists, and Democrats all in one sentence. Quite a feat!
———
Well, I have to go to a funeral for my wife’s family. That will be it for a while. Carry on with your right brains.
And just for the record, Woody, they were financial audits conducted by our staff auditors, some of whom were CPA’s. I settled them using my knowledge of the industry and perhaps my ability to step outside of my narrow interests and see the world through their eyes and not assume that they were fundamentally dishonest or evil.
“Israel is made clear it intends to negotiate only one thing with the Palestinians: Surrender”
I don’t think this is true at all. They’ve done no such thing. It is the Palestinaians who never accept anything offered by anybody. Oh I know none were what they wanted. This is known as a compromise. Both give up something. One side has shown it won’t. Is that simple enough for ya?
It is certainly indicative of my sick fascination with Woody’s obtuseness that, after his last post here, I found myself closely scrutinizing press reports I closely scrutinized fully TWO YEARS AGO.
The NRO article Woody links makes smug assertions bolstered by a link to a Washington Post article by, yes, Susan (“Mikey”) Schmidt. And it rung a bell.
The storm of controversy over that Schmidt article forced an editor at WaPo to issue this not-quite-retraction:
which I’m sure Woody missed. Schmidt got at least one of the facts plainly wrong, reporting an apparent attempt by Iran to buy uranium from Niger in 1998 as an attempt by Iraq. One of facts in this WaPo quasi-retraction that happens to be relevant to the current discussion is:
“Actually, the CIA fought hard, and successfully, to keep the material about Africa, aspects of which were a matter of dispute, out of a major speech Bush gave in October 2002.”
The 16 Words happened not because the CIA stopped fighting them, but because, as Colin Powell’s aide Wilkerson put it so piquantly, somebody kept “sticking that baby in there” until they reached the magic number of 47 attempts.
Thus, when Woody writes “Further, you mention “obvious pressures within the White House†that are only your assumptions.”
No, they are not only my assumptions. The CIA did fight hard, but (ultimately) unsuccessfully, to keep this highly questionable conclusion out of the case for war.
As for Wilson’s debriefing actually bolstering the case for an Iraqi fishing expedition for uranium sources in Niger, that’s a matter of interpretation. I don’t agree with the Senate report’s conclusion, and I don’t know why any sensible person would. It’s like talking about Mars being closer to the Earth making an earthquake more probable, when the supposed earthquake didn’t even register on the Richter scale. The best that can be said about it is that it makes a highly improbable case negligibly more probable.
According the Nigerien officials meeting with Zawahie et al., the issue of uranium supplies was never even discussed, discussion were only about possible trade in the future. Everyone jumps on the mention of “trade” as slam-dunk evidence of an Iraqi interest in uranium because uranium is a major Niger export product. What nobody notices, somehow, is that Iraq was an oil exporter, Iraqi oil exports were under sanctions control, and Niger is a net oil importer. If Iraq’s actual purpose for the trip was to drum up a campaign of international civil disobedience of the sanctions, and get more UN votes to end the sanctions, they would have been happy to line up support from any sovereign nation anywhere, even if it only needed two barrels of oil a year. People also don’t seem to notice or care that Niger is one of the few places in that vast expanse of nothingness in North Africa where you can refuel your plane. Zawahie et al weren’t just visiting Niger on that trip. When you consider all the other improbable elements of the supposed uranium shopping tour, it’s not hard to conclude that they wouldn’t even have stopped in Niger if they’d had a plane with bigger fuel tanks.
Niger was in no position to sell uranium to Iraq under the circumstances. But Zawahie et al were on their way westward across Africa. As long as they were making a needed pit stop in a capital city anyway, it makes perfect sense that they’d spend an hour talking about possible business relationships in some post-sanctions future that a Nigerien UN rep might vote for. That’s a lot more credible than the idea that these Iraqis were going to Niger specifically to shop for yellowcake that Iraq already had plenty of — 50 bombs worth, by estimates made by our own defense analysts–even though, if Zawahie really had any chops as Iraq’s “top nuclear negotiator”, he would have noticed that Niger was a pointless place to shop for such a commodity, not to mention that taking surreptitious delivery of 500 tons of yellowcake while Iraq was under the sanctions would be next door to impossible anyway.
OK, Woody — read those last three paragraphs. above. Focus on them like a laser welder. Take them apart with your powerful analytic mind, which is so forbiddingly honed in the understanding of practically everything within your view by your years of CPA practice. Check every fact. Tell me what’s wrong with my argument. Demolish every aspect of the case I just made.
Heck, if you destroy even one aspect of it, you’ll have shown far more powers of analysis than I can ever remember seeing from you.
C’mon, you can do it! You’re CPA!
Oh, and by the way, I don’t “support the left”. I support the truth. I don’t care where it comes from.
Yes, that was simple enough for me – it told me that you “simply” know nothing about what has transpired in any attempted peace process. You and Anon, don the dunce cap and sit in the corner till further notice. Is that simple enough for ya?
Woody: “And, I’m logical enough to know that you wasted a lot of time trying to dispel my claim that logical people are better at analysis than right brained people.”
Where, in anything I wrote above, did I “dispel” that claim? How masterfully illogical! All I asked was: can you explain how it is that someone who is thoroughly logical and analytical can possibly disagree with you on an issue?
You sneer that your opponents on these issues are “good at making assumptions.” You’re leaving something out of the discussion: probabilities. So work a probability issue for me, Woody.
You believe Hitchens, say, 99%, when he signs up for the idea of Zawahie as Saddam’s “top nuclear negotiator”. And you believe, say, 99%, that Zawahie is such an expert on uranium sources that he knows where to go, if asked to look. And you believe, say, 99%, that he went to Niger as a likely source of uranium. But what probability do you assign to Iraq actually being able to get Nigerien uranium under the circumstances? I would argue that the probability of Iraq actually laying its hands on Nigerien yellowcake under those circumstances was near zero (let’s call it 0.01% just for fun or false exactitude, whichever turns you on the most), and I argue that way for reasons that nobody bothers to dispute.
So what’s the probability that this “top nuclear negotiator” Zawahie, supposedly so well-versed in the nuclear weapons supply chain, was, despite his expertise, somehow unaware that getting uranium from Niger was massively improbable? And what’s the probability of Saddam’s “top nuclear negotiator” being unaware that Iraq already had 500 tons of yellowcake anyway, so why bother shopping in the first place, it just risks exposure?
Yes, some people who make assumptions are actually good at making assumptions. How about you? Do you realize there’s actually a tiny, but non-zero probability that Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden might be hiding under your bed tonight? Does that realization make you wonder whether you should check under there?
Sometimes I’ll go for a probability of zero. Like, the NYT being Al Qaeda’s research arm. I mean, why would someone ever even consider a notion like that, unless … no … could it be? That their analytical abilities, honed through years of CPA practice, actually … failed them? I’d assign that a probability of zero to any such failure. Wouldn’t you, Woody?
“Maybe you’re the guy that makes those hilarious “how to assemble†guides translated into what is supposed to pass for English.”
As someone who would never second-guess your work on my taxes, Woody, don’t second-guess what I have to say here on this point.
Japanese “how to” guides are technical writing. Technical writing is seldom perfect anywhere you go, but is more often laughably poor in Japan. So there’s a certain Garbage-In-Garbage-Out phenomenon at work even if you’re a native English speaker who can write well and who knows the technology. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve complaint, “the important information is not in this garbage I’ve been given, please put me in contact with the engineers!” only to told that it was impossible, for reasons that nobody was willing to give.
There is another phenomenon at work: most J-E translation is actually done by Japanese who can’t speak English acceptably well. And this is my competition. There’s a pervasive prejudice in this country that nobody can really understand Japanese except the Japanese, and that the English they learned in school is not an absurd hodge-podge, but is actually the real language. Occasionally, you even get Japanese trying to correct you on points of English usage, arguing in the most inane terms, and finally saying, “This is what I was taught in school, and this is what we do here.”
That said (for anyone who cares), let me conclude thusly: Woody, you’re a pathetic twat. You can’t win on standard debating merits, so you just resort to insults. Well, then, I will too. It may be the only language you understand, after all. Most of what you try to pass off here as “proof” of your points consists of little more than drive-by insults anyway.
Michael, I wasn’t insulting you. That was a joke about those crazy translations on assembly instructions. But, what emotional responses from you! We’re going to have to revoke your membership in the left-brained club. I’m far from home and don’t have time to even read everything you ranted about, but I will take a look later. Man, I need to invest in Prozac with what you guys must require. (I loved your saying that I resort to insults right after you called me a pathetic twat.)
Well says you. I know you aren’t satisfied with the offers and so reject them all as anti-Palestinian. One thing anyone can say with confidence is Virgil Johnson is no objective journalist.
You need to invest in an argument that doesn’t come from ignorance and blind belief. I don’t care where the truth comes from as long as it’s true, and not relative to who is claiming it.
“That was a joke about those crazy translations on assembly instructions.”
Yeah, Woody, like I can imagine that you, in the middle of heated argument, would take it well if your opponent said, “Oh, you’re a CPA? You mean, like those guys who cooked the books at Enron?”
Ha ha. Just joking, Woody.
The context makes it clear you were trying to insult me, in ignorance of what I actually do.
“If you’re good at interpreting technical manuals from one language to another, do you try to be accurate or do you try to cover for what you perceive were mistakes by making, on your own, additions and changes that are not true to the original author?”
First of all, I do translation, not interpreting. Interpreting is oral. Translation is textual. You wouldn’t know that because you don’t know anything about what I do.
I do not try to “cover” for what I “perceive” are mistakes. I sometimes find mistakes, and point them out, and offer corrections and translations that reflect the corrections. Technical writing is often done by people who don’t really understand what they are writing about, they just keep going back to their engineer informants for corrections until the informants lose patience and sign off on the crap, especially as deadlines loom. Good translators get good reputations not just by knowing languages, but by knowing specialized subjects, and staying away from translation jobs on subjects they know little or nothing about. Good translators are often in a position to determine that the source text is wrong.
I don’t know your profession, Woody, but if I coudn’t do a job that required analysis of news stories and reports issued by political appointees, with considerable contention over points of fact vs opinion, most of it along partisan lines, I would sooner assign a professional translator than a CPA. Translators deal in meanings, and resolve (or at least identify) ambiguities. And if the task also touched significantly on a technical subject, as issues of weapons proliferation often do, I might even prefer a technical translator to one who translated political reporting. Of course, in this case, what I’d really want is somebody who knew diplomacy, who knew Iraq, and who knew weapons proliferation issues, with lots of hands-on experience in all those areas. That’s hard to find, but I might settle for someone who was less strong in one of those areas, like the technological and logistical issues in proliferation, if (just as an example mind you) he happened to be married to a CIA analyst who was an expert in that field.
It’s good that you’re willing to take a look at all this, Woody, but I advise you to start slow. Maybe with a warmup exercise. You might, for example, go to some website promoting the idea that the Apollo missions were staged. And then check each purported “fact” used in support of that hypothesis against sources. Then move on to the Flat Earth Society. Get a lot of experience with analyzing fallacious and mendacious argumentation in *increasingly* political discourse after that. Then tackle the Sixteen Words and How They Came to Be.
MT, that is far too much writing than which justifies my reading time on this subject. You have violated my 200 word limit.
Were one of your professional translators responsible for this: All your base ?
———-
Randy, I truly mean no disrespect, but the “audits” that you did bear no relation to financial audits that an outside CPA firm certifies. I’m not going into great detail, but the standards and reviews required for certified opinions are extensive and controlled by the AICPA and the SEC. The internal “audit” that you describe is more an internal bookkeeping function controlled solely by what management accepts and contract agreements require. Without seeing the details, I could not conclude, for instance, that you did a better job than the internal accountants who had CPA designations, but the materiality standards applied by you may have been considerably different. Nevertheless, your discussions about lessons from this are from an very uneducated viewpoint about audits and indicates to me that you might believe that you have a better understanding of other things than you really do.
Without seeing the details, I could not conclude, for instance, that you did a better job than the internal accountants who had CPA designations, but the materiality standards applied by you may have been considerably different. Nevertheless, your discussions about lessons from this are from an very uneducated viewpoint about audits and indicates to me that you might believe that you have a better understanding of other things than you really do.
Woody,
Since you appear to have a reading comprehension problem, I’ll type this slowly.
I didn’t conduct the audits. I defended the results, which is what I wrote time and again. Apparently you chose to ignore that.
In any event my larger point which still eludes you (to the surprise of no one who dares wade through your flatulent commentary) was that I had to learn to adapt and use my analytical skills as well as persuasion and empathy in achieving my goals.
I was put in a position where I had to expand my skills and my way of viewing my work. I grew from that.
Compared to your constant repetition of the administration and RNC talking points, the idea that you possess any skills along the lines of analysis beyond accounting is risible.
You’re not analyzing here, Woody: you’re spewing out things by rote and by imitation. That’s what parrots do.
Randy, my point is that you don’t know what you’re talking about when you’re in my realm (believe me), but that you think that you do. So, why should it be any different on politics? Now, excuse me while I eat my cracker.
That would explain a lot about Woody, wouldn’t it? Just tell him some lie that plays into his biases, and that can’t be refuted in under 200 words. Wow, Now I really wish I had the analytic powers of a CPA! Life would be so much simpler.
Randy, my point is that you don’t know what you’re talking about when you’re in my realm (believe me), but that you think that you do. So, why should it be any different on politics?
Woody, that wasn’t the issue and you have consistently evaded the point I was trying to make. So typical of your intellectual vacuity. You are incapable of an original thought.
I thought I’d appeal to your sense of intellectual honesty and decency. How silly of me to think that you had them.
July 27th, 2006 at 10:39 pm
There’s nothing like having strategic geniuses on your side.
http://tinyurl.com/kgbge
July 27th, 2006 at 10:57 pm
“Axis of Evil” NeoCon NROer concedes defeat. “Murtha was right!”
http://nitpicker.blogspot.com/2006/07/david-frum-murtha-was-right.html
Coulter and Co. better go pick out a rope to hang this bastard. Better yet, crucify him between William F. Buckley and Andrew Sullivan.
July 28th, 2006 at 6:27 am
Cute distortion, but thats not what he said.
It’s a second best. First best is to win. But that will take more commitment than the administration was prepared to offer yesterday. If we forfeit the best outcome, and refuse to plan for *second best *, we stand in very grave danger of ending up with the worst.
Cute, but thats not what he said.
It’s a second best. First best is to win. But that will take more commitment than the administration was prepared to offer yesterday. If we forfeit the best outcome, and refuse to plan for *second best *, we stand in very grave danger of ending up with the worst.
http://frum.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTgyMTUzNmY3OGZhNTg5MDVlMGZkNzFjMTc5MTRhZTM=
July 28th, 2006 at 6:28 am
/sry for the dbl post, my editor is in Vegas again
July 28th, 2006 at 7:23 am
So, it’s a “distortion” because he obviously recognizes, for whatever reason, that a “win” just isn’t in the cards. Frum is saving face with his “win” caveat – and of course the talk of a “forfeit” gives the neocon crazies the fallback position of blaming the press and the American people for their own manifest failures. (If I had this one on my hands, I’d be pretty desperate for scapegoats as well – because it’s obvious the Frums, Feiths and Perles are too cowardly to take their licks like men.) But go ahead and tell me how what Frum is putting forward as the most pragmatic approach to his FUBAR is any different from what Jack Murtha has been proposing in the wake of the disintegration of a tenable military sollution – for which he’s been subjected to a torrent of the usual defamatory spew from the wingnut and GOPers Uber Alles contingents ?
For one of the neo-con wildmen to climb this far down is about as close to an admission that their hubris and incompetence has created one of the worst strategic disasters in American history as we’re liable to get – not that I give a shit what these crazies believe. Just can’t help but marvel at the irony. And I’m curious as to how Davie Frum’s attempt to kick the sauce and sober up will be recieved in his little wackjob NRO clubhouse.
July 28th, 2006 at 7:41 am
Actually, I think if Frum gets crucified by the deadenders, it would be more appropriate to nail him between Buckley and Fukuyama. Sullivan should be saved for a double gibbet with Pat Buchanan. That is, if mobs are capable of mixing a bit of irony with their hysteria.
July 28th, 2006 at 8:04 am
Frum’s money quotes:
“Hands up, everybody who believes that the “hundreds” of troops that the Pentagon plans to move from the rest of Iraq into Baghdad will suffice to secure the capital against the sectarian militias now waging war upon the civilian populations of the city? Anybody? No, I didn’t think so.
To take back the capital from the militias that now terrorize it will take thousands, not hundreds, of American plus tens of thousands of Iraqis. No sector in Iraq can spare the loss of so many forces (our current troubles in Anbar date back to the decision in 2004 to shift troops from Anbar to the siege of Fallujah – when they returned, they discovered that every pro-US informant and ally in the province had been murdered, usually horribly and publicly). So a real plan for success in Baghdad will have to be built upon additional troops from out of area, potentially raising US troop levels back up to the 150,000 or so of late 2005.
Manifestly, neither the administration nor the Congress will contemplate such a move. Which means, most likely, continuing violence in Iraq and a continuing rise in the power of the militias, especially the Iranian-backed Shiite militias: the Hezbollah of Iraq.
What then? Well, then …
(snip)
Gradually, Baghdad will come to look like Basra, Iraq’s Shiite-dominated second city, now effectively ruled by Iranian-backed Shiites with the tacit acquiescence of the British military authorities.
Baghdad – and therefore central Iraq – will in such a case slide after Basra and the south into the unofficial new Iranian empire. (Classically minded readers will remember that the pre-Islamic Persian empires of the Parthians and Sassanids were ruled from Ctesiphon, about 20 miles southeast of Baghdad. And here is a map of the boundaries of the Safavid empire in the 1500s, the last time the Persians counted for much of the history of the world: Pretty much all of present-day Iraq except Anbar is on the inside.) American troops will be free to stay or go, depending on whether we wish to deny or acknowledge defeat.
The consequences for the region and the world will be grim.
Averting such a fate means fighting to win Baghdad. But if the president decides against such a fight – either because it would be too bloody or too politically costly or even because he doubts that the US can ultimately succeed – then we need a backup plan. The present plan – “as the Iraqis stand up, we stand down” – has not worked to date, as the president admitted yesterday, and there seems little reason to hope it will work better over the next months than it has in the recent past.”
(end clip)
Remember when Wolfie and Kristol told us there was no liklihood of ethnic strife ? Remember when Big Dick told us the war would last “weeks, not months”. Remember when we’d toppled the Saddam statue and declared victory? Remember Mission Accomplished ? Remember when we were greeted with “sweets and flowers” by liberated Iraqis ? Remember when the “purple fingers” meant that cynics and skeptics about the occupation weren’t just wrong but downright evil ? Remember when the insurgency was in it’s last throes ?
What the fuck happened ? Apparently this war was a wonderful idea that the American military and the American people just haven’t measured up to because they lacked the iron will and steel resolve of the neocons. And, of course, we were surrounded by turncoats and traitors among the media and other various & sundry elites. (I think something like this was Hitler’s rationaler, hunkered down in his bunker, just before he put a bullet in his brain. We won’t be so lucky with these guys.)
July 28th, 2006 at 8:09 am
Incidentally…and I know I’m running this into the ground, but I’ll not be commenting after this morning because of work…if anyone needs a clue as to how bogus Frum’s fantasies about a “win” scenario – that he acknowledges Bush himself is too much of a wimp to act on – he bases it on “raising US troop levels back up to the 150,000 or so of late 2005.” Right. See, if we only had as many troops as we had LAST YEAR we could likely pull this thing out !!!!
Pass the crack pipe.
July 28th, 2006 at 8:14 am
One more bit of essential and related reading. (Since the cat’s away.)
http://www.harpers.org/StabbedInTheBack.html
July 28th, 2006 at 8:18 am
Thanks for http://tinyurl.com/kgbge Reg — a neat summary for e-mail handouts to those requiring a clue. Wow, posters with Nasrallah AND Nasser on them, floating in a crowd in Cairo. And Nasrallah doesn’t even have a real country with a U.N. seat. I can imagine Qaddafi ordering up a variant where he sits between the two. Followed by Bashar Assad fingering his chin in the mirror, wondering if he looks more distinguished with the eyebags or whether he should call that cosmetic surgeon he knows in London, but then deciding that discretion is the better part of valor.
Frum’s (really, Peter Galbraith’s) “backup plan” is an essential component of what I’ve taken to calling the Kurdistan Petrostate Quasi-Exit Strategy. I have trouble believing that nobody in this administration thought out such a plan even before invading Iraq, maybe even before invading Afghanistan. C’mon, there must have been some bright analyst who began doodling on it when he started noticing how tedious Paul Wolfowitz’s flights of fancy could become after the third or fourth presentation. Perhaps some shrewd staffer made sure it was filed way back there with the contingency plan for invading Canada, but only so as to camouflage it from the prying eyes of potential leakers or worse: raging neo-cons. Discretion being the better part of valor and all that.
Yes, Frum says that winning (however you define that) takes precedence. But he’s a pretty sharp tack. Surely he can feel the shift in the wind–this administration’s disastrous poll numbers, the upcoming mid-term elections, U.S. generals in Iraq getting more worried about sectarian violence in Baghdad than about insurgents in Anbar. Not to mention a Republican like Arlen Specter starting to go after the White House for its distention of executive power, which is all rationalized with “Hey, there’s a war on, doncha know?” Frum is merely recognizing some simple facts: Iraq isn’t going well. We live in a democracy. The voters are increasingly unhappy about Iraq. This administration might have to wake up to these things rather than lose the support of its own party at a critical time.
Democracy in America was always the Achilles Heel of the project for Democracy in a Unified Iraq. And I’m sure Saddam Hussein himself could have told us that. Maybe he will, if we arrange a hasty firing squad for him shortly before the last helicopter pulls away from the Green Zone. “It is a glorious thing,” he will shout defiantly before the hail of bullets, “to be the last man to die for a mistake!”
July 28th, 2006 at 10:42 am
I don’t always agree with Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) on everything, but I am going to enter this dispatch from them, just received, into the discussion. I have argued in earlier posts that the primary blame for the current situation lies with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and this article gives some interesting recent history. You don’t have to agree, but do yourselves the service of reading it (before commenting, as Marc always says.)
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2928
July 28th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
I agree with you Michael about where most of the blame lies for the current situation. But we don’t need to agree on who is more or less or earlier or later culpable in this whole affair to be able to agree that those who stand in the way of an immediate cease fire and the beginning of multilateral, comprehensive peace talks need to be pushed to do so. We again might differ on who is reluctant to engage in these and who stands the most to lose with an end to hostilities, but these negotiations should be the first order of business.
It is futile to try to engage anyone whose only arguments can be reduced to “these people are very bad” or “they started it”.
July 28th, 2006 at 12:24 pm
Marc, I totally agree.
July 28th, 2006 at 5:25 pm
Kudos to Michael Turner for demonstrating more wit than most of the rest of us combined and approaching some thorny, emotional subjects with a quirky complexity that manages to skirt the common impulse to simply play choirmaster, cheerleader or prosecutor.
July 28th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
Personally speaking, while we pat each other on the back thinking what a great job we have done putting down crazy neocons, there is more than meets the eye with what is brewing in the Middle East – I think these nuts are going to opt for World War III.
You have Nutjob Newt already running around talking about this “option.” With all the failure in these gyrations after 9/11 this is the only option left, Gingrich already told the Seattle Times that he wants Bush to declare a new world war. I have one question – do you think after all the changes domestically to re-make society, that this was leading to anything less than global war?
With all the failure in Iraq, the ressurection of the Taliban in Afganistan they believe the people must be persuaded that these were just small battles in a global war – it is their only way out. These nuts believe that with this announcement that they will be able to silence all dissent – WW III.
This is what took place to get us involved in WW I, it was a massive propaganda campaign, because most Americans opposed it. When the Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918 was passed 900 people went to jail that opposed and wrote against the war. Those laws are still on the books – and these nutjobs want to revive them.
WW III propaganda is the only way they feel that they can clear the deck , along with laws to silence dissent, and to give them the power to do whatever they feel is necessary. Don’t you know that these maniacs will do anything they can to stay in power? I believe many have misjudged the depth of depravity here.
I hope I am wrong, but I want you to remember this post. If you begin to see what I am writing about here take shape, we have to do everything in our power to stop it from taking place.
July 29th, 2006 at 12:13 am
Newt Gingrich can pop off about this being WW III, James Woolsely can grind away at his WW IV axe, and it doesn’t mean a thing. Those guys are attention-starved and probably will be to the ends of their largely-eclipsed political careers.
I think all sides using their brains recognize that perpetual low-intensity conflict covers the situation. Even what’s going on now in Lebanon is just a higher grade of low intensity.
For example, Israel has said it will demolish 10 multi-story buildings in South Beirut for every missile that falls on Haifa. That’s not total war. That’s “negotiation” with bombs. And it’s the extension of politics–or more properly “policy”–by violent means. After all, for years, Israel responded to terror attacks by demolishing the houses of Palestinians implicated in those terror attacks. It wasn’t “eye for an eye” — It was calculated under-response, an attempt to stay on what could be made to look like higher moral ground. And it was policy.
By putting South Beirut on notice of their intent to destroy 10 mulistory buildings for every rocket landing on Haifa, the Israelis minimize civilian casualties by effectiively clearing that part of the city of anyone who values their skin. Nobody *has* to die when Israel takes out yet another multi-story building in South Beirut. It doesn’t work for Israel to have anybody die in those attacks except combatants. Compare Hezbollah’s rocketing of Haifa, where they *hope* somebody dies, preferably a *noncombatant*. But now Hezbollah knows what the response will be. It allows both sides to calibrate their messages, it gives both parties a grip on the intensity dial. All it is, really, is a scaling up of policies already applied with the Palestinians.
Anybody who calls Lebanon a battle in WW III is just shrieking for attention. Doesn’t sound like they are getting it, though.
“I have one question – do you think after all the changes domestically to re-make society, that this was leading to anything less than global war?”
I think this administration would be happy to continue trying to remake American society as long as it doing it with more stable oil supplies. It would take another 9/11, and the right kind of 9/11, to get Americans committed to total war, and to a true war-powers dictatorial president. Daniel Ellsberg thinks that could happen.
But who really gains from WW III? Probably not even Al Qaeda, which would be peeing its pants in joy just to see the Muslim Brotherhood take Egypt, and the Saudi royal family swept from power by forces sympathetic to Al Qaeda’s Salafist reversion ideology. A draft callup of millions of Americans to go secure oil supplies in the Middle East would be an obstacle to any such goals. What they want is to make large swathes of the region too hot to handle, from the point of the American voter, and without seriously endangering the oil flows that American voters want to take for granted. This is, of course, why my eyes keep drifting back to Kirkuk’s oil fields, and to the Kurds, who seem to like us. That’s a coal that can plausibly be raked from the fire, and its hardly fertile territory for Al Qaeda anyway.
The Middle East is a forge, hostility is the fire, propaganda is the bellows, low-intensity conflict is the hammer being used by all sides, and the end product will be a re-shaped Middle East that’s at least acceptable, if not ideal, for all those with interests in it. I don’t see any larger conflagration because I can’t see how it works for anybody with any real say in the matter, even those supposedly most committed to violence, and most opportunistic in the face of added violence.
July 29th, 2006 at 12:48 am
I hope your right Michael, because I was not talking about outside forces, I was talking about this present administration in the United States. Perhaps it is wasted brain power, much ado about nothing.
It just seemed strange to me that these fights keep being picked in different areas – giving the appearance of spreading. Than there was all the talk about “limited tactical atomic weapons,” it was just a bit over the top for me. The phrases used right after 9/11, combined with the ensuing events looked like an attempt of escalation. That’s all – however paranoia might be setting in, and that is never a good measuring rod.
July 29th, 2006 at 1:03 am
So far Ive heard folks here use the following langauge to describe what Israel is doing to Lebenonese society: “proportionality”, “overkill” or “poor professionalism”. Perhaps we ought to think abut the questions Robert Fisk puts forward.
“How soon must we use the words “war crime”? How many children must be scattered in the rubble of Israeli air attacks before we reject the obscene phrase “collateral damage” and start talking about prosecution for crimes against humanity?
The child whose dead body lies like a rag doll beside the cars which were supposedly taking her and her family to safety is a symbol of the
latest Lebanon war; she was hurled from the vehicle in which she and her family were travelling in southern Lebanon as they fled their village – on Israel’s own instructions. Because her parents were apparently killed in the same Israeli air attack, her name is still unknown. Not an unknown warrior, but an unknown child.”
http://tinyurl.com/zgch6
July 29th, 2006 at 4:26 am
Just in case anyone misses Ahmed’s Web link. I am sure that dead Israelis look the same, another reason why escalating conflicts is immoral and cheerleading during a war–as some here continue to do–is reprehensible.
http://209.67.212.138/~lebanon/
July 29th, 2006 at 6:22 am
This is depressing, but … not as depressing as those photos just linked.
50% of Americans believe that Iraq had WMD prior to the invasion. According to a Harris poll. It was 36% in early 2005. It went up. What happened?
Best theory: Santorum and Hoekstra happened. Even though David Kay, the Pentagon and even Fox News pointed out that Santorum and Hoekstra were being shrieking idiots, a large percentage of Americans may nevertheless have been left with a certain impression. The power of wishful thinking.
The phrasing of the question doesn’t leave much room for doubt:
“”Do you believe that the following statements are true or not true?” …..
“Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded.”
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=684
And 64% still believe Saddam had strong links with Al Qaeda.
My brain is numb: I just watched George Bush attempt to give a spellbinding speech about … um … something, in response to a reporter’s question in a presss conference about how Maliki has come down against Israel in Lebanon, and so have other Arab governments originally voicing criticism of Hezbollah, and how Bush is being ignored (to which Bush immediately responded “Hmph”), and, y’know, what can you say about all that?
Bush’s answer was very long. I think my brain went numb right when he was talking about how we can defeat terrorism with two concepts: liberty, and freedom. Or maybe it was freedom and liberty, in that order. I forget.
It was politically brilliant, in a way — he never answered the embarrassing question, for one thing, and it was a real off-the-cuff speech featuring floating blobs of classic neo-con rhetoric, and it was also so long and vacuous and mind-numbing that most viewers would just forget what the question was. It was like good ol’ time politics, just like I remember it.
It’s on youtube.com somewhere. I had to click out of it so that I wouldn’t turn into a pillar of salt, so I don’t have the link anymore, sorry.
July 29th, 2006 at 8:12 am
Michael, you raise some very interesting questions about why so many Americans still think there were WMD in Iraq (one right here on this blog, no need to mention names.) I find it hard to believe that it is entirely due to Bush, Cheney and others trying to subtly imply that it is so. I think there is something deeper in the American psyche involved, a denial that our leaders could actually send young American men and women off to die on false pretenses. This might also be why those who still support the war in Iraq also seem unbothered by the bait and switch stunt that Bush pulled (WMD, oh no, it was really to get rid of Saddam and foster democracy), as odious as that was. This type of denial is the political form of the denial that we sometimes use to protect ourselves from a painful loss or experience. That’s my hypothesis, anyway, even if it means that Bush-Cheney can’t be held entirely responsible for it even if they got the ball rolling.
July 29th, 2006 at 8:32 am
It might be a distracting detail that has little impact on most people’s lives, thus their relative confusion. But on the core issue of support for the war, Americans have consistently opposed the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, especially if it goes beyond roughly causing 500 deaths of human beings [i.e. American GI's].
The average American’s confusion isn’t that much different from cruise missile leftists who think that there has to be some way that America can ‘get it right’ in Iraq and that that is the policy they should push as an ‘alternative’ to Bush’s war prosecution style.
As Robert Dreyfuss put it so well:
“Dealing with Realities in Iraq and Washington
By Robert Dreyfuss
One of the most unfortunate myths pervading American culture, the American psyche, and the whole American weltanschauung — and it’s one for which we might as well go ahead and blame movie director Frank Capra — is that in most situations the good guys win. Morality triumphs. The greedy and self-interested, the cruel and mean-spirited are defeated. Ultimately, or so the myth goes, the bad guys win some of the battles, but in the end the good guys win the wars.
Sadly, in the real world, good doesn’t always win. Sometimes, good isn’t even there. When it comes to Iraq, the left, the liberals, the progressives (for the sake of argument, the good guys) sometimes seem to have their heads in the clouds. That’s true in regard to the crucial question of whether President Bush’s stay-the-course strategy can succeed. The answer, unfortunately, is: Yes, it can.
The Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq today, as in the invasion of 2003, is: Use military force to destroy the political infrastructure of the Iraqi state; shatter the old Iraqi armed forces; eliminate Iraq as a determined foe of U.S. hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf; build on the wreckage of the old Iraq a new state beholden to the U.S.; create a new political class willing to be subservient to our interests in the region; and use that new Iraq as a base for further expansion.
To achieve all that, the President is determined to keep as much military power as he can in Iraq for as long as it takes, while recruiting, training, funding, and supervising a ruthless Iraqi police and security force that will gradually allow the American military to reduce their “footprint” in the country without entirely leaving. The endgame, as he and his advisors imagine it, would result in a permanent U.S. military presence in the country, including permanent bases and basing rights, and a predominant position for U.S. business and oil interests. ”
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=93289
July 29th, 2006 at 8:37 am
And how could American’s be led down such a road? Who sets the standards for debate?
http://www.dailyhowler.com/
July 29th, 2006 at 11:21 am
I think the polling about Americans believing Saddam “had WMDs” isn’t very consequential because the operative definition of “WMDs” has been effectively dumbed down to the point where I could answer “yes” to the same question if I accepted the idiot’s version being passed off by Beltway weirdos like little Ricky, while knowing full well that totality of Saddam’s weapons – or suspected weapons for that matter – weren’t even close to being a substantive threat to us and that the entire issue was being shamelessly hyped to justify a pre-fab design to invade Iraq. The significant polls on Iraq are the ones showing that, while Americans will overwhelmingly tend to give Presidents the benefit of the doubt in an apparent “crisis” or confrontation and predictably, if unfortunately, did so when Bush first sounded the drumbeat, most of the citizenry now recognizes that the rationale for this thing was, at the least, wildly overblown and that the entire project is a fiasco, whether through ill intent, incompetence or some measure of both.
July 29th, 2006 at 11:26 am
Jesus Wall…reading that transcript and having seen a clip of Mathews bending over for Ann’s dildo on C&L or some such site, I’m deeply ashamed to have put in a few good words for Chris this past week. Mea culpa!!!!
July 29th, 2006 at 11:35 am
reg, does it bother you in the least that Hussein was attempting to illegally buy uranium from Niger which could be enriched to produce a nuclear weapon?
(Was there good reason to suppose that Iraqi envoys visited Niger in search of “yellowcake” uranium ore?
In a series of columns, I have argued that the answer to this is “yes,” and that British intelligence was right to inform Washington to that effect. Iraq—despite having yellowcake of its own—had bought the material from Niger as early as 1981 and had not at that time informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (weapons inspectors effectively stopped Iraq’s domestic yellowcake production after 1991). On Oct. 31, 1998, Iraq announced the end of its cooperation with the U.N. inspectors, who were effectively barred from the country. A few days later, the U.N. Security Council condemned this move in Resolution 1205, dated Nov. 5, 1998. The following month, the Clinton administration ordered selective strikes in and around Baghdad. A few weeks after that—on Feb. 8, 1999, to be precise—an Iraqi delegation visited Niger. It was headed by the improbable figure of Saddam Hussein’s ambassador to the Vatican. But the improbability becomes more intelligible when it is understood that this diplomat, Wissam al-Zahawie by name, was a very experienced Iraqi envoy for nuclear-related matters. http://www.slate.com/id/2146475/
I just want to know if that bothers you. Would that affect your decision as to whether or not the overthrow of Hussein had justification?
July 29th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
A failed attempt, noted by Joseph Wilson and found to be irrelevant by CIA analysts by that time does not constitute a threat. Context is something conservatives don’t seem to understand.
July 29th, 2006 at 2:42 pm
Here’s a different perspective on this story, from Time. But Woody can always find what he is looking for, as I said before all of his brains are in his Googling finger.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,491666,00.html?internalid=ACA
July 29th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
And here is a little more.
http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/printables/060619roco02?print=true
July 29th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
Reg, Matthews two step with the truth makes for some high low comedy. Not surprisingly, he’s not always been quick to cop to his Coulter low when called on it:
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh082503.shtml
July 29th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
Good gravy, Woody!!!! You’ve really got to be kidding! Hey, I can cite “references†to prove that Flight 93 really never crashed, but all the people were actually off-loaded in Cleveland and are now being held by….well, I forget who they’re being held by. But that doesn’t make it anything resembling truth. Jeez-us!
Now for a brief break to entertain a bit of refreshingly rational thought, might I suggest the following essay about Spinoza from today’s NYT:
REASONABLE DOUBT
By REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN
“THURSDAY marked the 350th anniversary of the excommunication of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza from the Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam in which he had been raised.
“Given the events of the last week, particularly those emanating from the Middle East, the Spinoza anniversary didn’t get a lot of attention. But it’s one worth remembering — in large measure because Spinoza’s life and thought have the power to illuminate the kind of events that at the moment seem so intractable and overwhelming.
“The exact reasons for the excommunication of the 23-year-old Spinoza remain murky, but the reasons he came to be vilified throughout all of Europe are not. Spinoza argued that no group or religion could rightly claim infallible knowledge of the Creator’s partiality to its beliefs and ways. After the excommunication, he spent the rest of his life — he died in 1677 at the age of 44 — studying the varieties of religious intolerance. The conclusions he drew are still of dismaying relevance…..â€
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/29/opinion/29goldstein.html?ex=1154318400&en=a006d8b0795244b0&ei=5087
(the whole thing is really worth reading)
July 29th, 2006 at 7:57 pm
I’m not up to doing Woody’s homework yet again, but I did click around, and I can’t really see what Hitchens thinks he’s got here.
Hitchens calls Zawahie Iraq’s “top nuclear goon”, after Ekeus calls him Saddam’s “top nuclear negotiator”. Problem is, being Saddam’s “top nuclear negotiator” in 1995 hardly amounts to anything in the context of 1995. Iraq had no nuclear weapons program to negotiate about, at that point. The question is whether his visit to Niger reflected some attempt to develop sources for yellowcake, and whether he was picked for that visit because of some technical qualifications.
Zawahie claims he stopped in Niger as part of a political junket to develop support for ending sanctions against Iraq. Why stop in Niger? Well, Niger has a major role in diplomatic junkets around North Africa — the crushing boredom of being posted to Niger is the impetus behind a very enthusiastic push on the part of the unfortunates employed in diplomatic posts there to make Niger’s capital the number one air-transport refueling stop in the region.
Zawahie claimed in a Time Magazine piece that he didn’t even know at the time that Niger produced yellowcake. If his main role as Iraq’s “top nuclear negotiator” was to go to conferences and denounce the hypocrisy of Israel having a nuclear program while pretending to be compliant with the NPT, it’s unlikely that doing his homework for that assignment would make him an expert on the entire nuclear fuel cycle. In a role like that, why would he be more likely than you or I to know that Niger was a yellowcake supplier? Did *you* know that Niger could produce yellowcake before the whole 16 words fiasco blew up?
While people make a big deal out of the fact that Niger has uranium mining, the fact is, its mines were flooded, and were operated by the French in any case. It would be a bad place to go for yellowcake, and kind of pointless for Iraq anyway given that Iraq already had huge stockpiles of yellowcake when Zawahiri visited. It’s not a matter of lining up supplies of yellowcake, it’s a matter of having the equipment to turn it into something dangerous. (See “aluminum tubes — Condi gets it wrong.”)
It is, of course, deeply, *DEEPLY* suspicious that Iraq’s Ambassador to the Vatican AND Iraq’s “top nuclear negotiator” would be trotting around Africa, isn’t it? Yeah, but at a time when Iraq had very litttle high-level ambassadorial representation around the world, Zawahie was perhaps Iraq’s representative about almost everything during a time when there was almost nothing to talk about anyway. There was almost nothing for Zawahie to do at the Vatican, and not a whole lot more for him to be doing anywhere else.
July 29th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
Thanks for the Vanity Fair link, Michael. I hadn’t read that story.
You realize, of course, that Woody will completely discount it because Vanity Fair is left-leaning, therefore Stalinist, and Saddam was an admirer of Stalin, therefore Vanity Fair is just a Saddamist mouthpiece?
Here’s my favorite bit from that article, because it reminds me so much of Woody himself:
—
[After the Niger deal has been disproven over and over and over ... the 16 words slip through anyway]:
The neocons were not done yet, however. “That was their favorite technique,” says Larry Wilkerson, “stick that baby in there 47 times and on the 47th time it will stay. At every level of the decision-making process you had to have your ax out, ready to chop their fingers off. Sooner or later you would miss one and it would get in there.”
—
Isn’t this Woody’s MO, but *exactly*? He repeats the same crap over and over and over, and when finally you miss one, he dances the victory jig. Facts make no dent — like the fact that Iraq already had enough yellowcake for 50 bombs (if it could only figure how to make bombs under the sanctions, which it couldn’t) and yet we’re supposed to believe that it risked exposing its (supposed) WMD program by shopping for more yellowcake for some reason?
July 29th, 2006 at 9:05 pm
MT nails it. That’s the Woody technique in a nutshell. Isn’t that where one finds a nut?
July 29th, 2006 at 10:46 pm
Yeah, good work MT. Of course, Woody has distracted us from the most important point, which is that even if the Niger story were true, the events of 1999 do not change that in 2003 Iraq had no WMD. And yet we were told they did to sell us the war. Why aren’t we invading Ira
July 29th, 2006 at 10:46 pm
Yeah, good work MT. Of course, Woody has distracted us from the most important point, which is that even if the Niger story were true, the events of 1999 do not change that in 2003 Iraq had no WMD. And yet we were told they did to sell us the war. Why aren’t we invading Ira
July 29th, 2006 at 10:47 pm
… (sorry) Iran right now? Answer: They know they can’t pull the same stunt twice.
July 29th, 2006 at 10:55 pm
“but at a time when Iraq had very litttle high-level ambassadorial representation around the world, Zawahie was perhaps Iraq’s representative about almost everything during a time when there was almost nothing to talk about anyway.”–MT
I once went to a party on the Maltese island of Gozo, after the local opera house did Tosca. The guests included the Swedish ambassador to Malta–who was also the ambassador to Mozambique and the Seychelles.
July 30th, 2006 at 12:18 am
Woody will soon trot out the Butler Report Defense. Why? Because he’s tried that crap over and over and over, but he has not gotten up to his 47th attempt to “stick that baby in there”.
My preemptive strike:
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/004909.php
Reasonable conclusion: “Africa” in the 16 Words could only have been “Niger”, and British intel that Lord Butler said was “good” could only have been based on forged documents about a deal with Niger.
Of course, the only part of this post that Woody will notice is the “left” in “theleftcoaster”, a blogger who can (by way of reasoning already outlined above) only be described as a Saddamist.
July 30th, 2006 at 1:36 am
By now everyone will have heard about the latest Israeli atrocity. The BBC adds this note:
“Israel’s military said it had warned residents of Qana to leave and Hezbollah bore responsibility for using it to fire rockets at the Jewish state.
Qana was the site of an Israeli bombing of a UN base on April 1996 that killed more than 100 people sheltering there during Israel’s “Grapes of Wrath” offensive, which was also aimed at destroying Hezbollah.”
Let’s see some of Israel’s apologists explain to us it is the civilians’ own fault for not evacuating the entire south of Lebanon. Maybe some people have no place to go and can’t travel on the roads that Israel has bombed. Maybe some don’t have friends and family in the north and can’t afford hotels. Maybe some don’t have transport or are too ill to travel. Does Israel care? No.
July 30th, 2006 at 7:58 am
This BBC news story points out that the Qana massacre of 1996 may not have been an “accident,” and I think that the same thing can be said about the Qana massacre of today. As I have said before, it does not really matter whether Israel is “deliberately” targetting civilians–the wanton disregard for civilian life amounts to the same thing.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5228554.stm
July 30th, 2006 at 8:11 am
The Niger story is false. But as we’ve seen the evidenciary bar just gets lower and lower until one digs up an old shell from the 1980′s and hurrah! We’ve found them. Just because someone passes through doesn’t mean they struck a deal and the goods were delivered. Hitchins buys it because he’s painted himself into the corner as the others pitching this farce. The bigger question is this: should we ever get involved in this way for any reason?
Israel is heavy-handed but it is Hezbollah who is holding hostages and responsble for the deaths. And firing missles. That’s an act of war. Innocent victims are on the back of these radicals, but the image as you all prove is the other way around. I’m sure Hez likes that.
July 30th, 2006 at 8:47 am
Since Israel knows that Hezbollah is operating near civilians, and since Israel knows that its bombs are killing civilians, and since Israel continues to bomb anyway, Israel bears responsibility for the consequences of its own choices and actions. It’s that simple, despite the dishonest obfuscations of York and the rest of the Israel cheerleading squad.
As for the missiles, I condemn those attacks, but let’s not lie through our teeth and rewrite history two weeks after it happened: the missile attacks started AFTER Israel began bombing and cannot be used as a justification for the escalation after the fact.
July 30th, 2006 at 9:18 am
I’m curious where Israel’s right wing defenders will fall on this one: apparantly Mel Gibson was arrested for drunk driving and alledgedly spent some time spewing anti-semitic rhetoric.
http://www.tmz.com/2006/07/28/gibsons-anti-semitic-tirade-alleged-cover-up/
How will the right wing Christian community react? How will those who are so quick to toss out political firebombs like “anti-semitism” to political opponents react when a christian hero is actually accused of despicable anti-Jew behavior. Will Mel’s defenders admit that those who saw something offensive in Mel’s Passion of the Christ might have been a little more attuned to some anti-Jew bias? Another exciting moment. I can hardly imagine the upcoming spin.
July 30th, 2006 at 10:18 am
I liked this part of Mel’s statement:
“I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested ….”
Well, he IS an actor. And he DOES have experience with acting like a person completely out of control. I’ve seen it on screen quite a few times now.
I never took him for a Method actor, though. Nor for such a virulent anti-semite (The Passion notwithstanding). Ouch. Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world? I mean, that’s actually the irrational core of a *theory*, not just some randomly acquired prejudice. A theory with an uncomfortably long history stretching back well over a century, like a tapeworm that gnawed its way through the Czarist Russia, Nazi Germany, Stalin, various islamist ideologies… with maybe just a leetle bit of quavery moral support at various times from the Holy See.
Y’know, this can’t be the first time he’s gotten this drunk, and said things something like this. And yet we’re hearing about it now, in the early twilight of his long career (unless this episode marks the sudden drop of the curtain, for good.) I wonder who’s going to come crawling out of the woodwork now, with more detailed reports?
July 30th, 2006 at 10:41 am
For once Jack Straw gets it dead on.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1833538,00.html
As the governments of the US and Israel continue believe that they alone in all the world understand what is right, true and righteous. The arrogance is staggering.
Both Hezbollah and Hamas have promised to avenge Qana.. It is likely they will keep their word.
Meanwhile, Amir Peretz said today that Israel will keep up all this up for at least another two weeks.
Welcome to the doors of hell.
PS: Michael B. —It seems that most credible evidence points to the 1996 Qana bombing not having been accidental. (For one thing, there was a pre-bombing video tape taken by a UN guy and later recovered from the wreckage that was all but a smoking gun. I posted links on an earlier thread. Robert Fisk, among others, reported on it.)
July 30th, 2006 at 11:04 am
Mel has never renounced the Catholic Church’s original anti-semitic stance. So, after his movie depicting Jew’s as scum, and his embrace of the early errors of Catholicism, his screed is no surprise to me.
Outside of that, Israel’s government continues it’s dispicable behavior. They do more to promote this incorrect view of Israel than any anti-semtic group, and they endanger their people. The US and Israel need a enima to remove these scum from office.
July 30th, 2006 at 11:24 am
You guys make it so easy for me by making my arguments for me, then “discrediting” them, and making my counter-arguments, which you “discredit.” Of course, when you do that, you always end up with the wrong conclusions. Since I have two minutes before I have to go and haven’t really read everything, this will be short.
Whom do you trust to analyze things…someone with analytical skills (me) or someone who believes things because he feels that they are true or wants them to be true (most of you). You use biased sources whose intent is not to report the truth but to convince you to accept their leftist agenda–and you fall right into it.
I can cut through the propaganda and know which reports are misleading, while those who are good in the arts or social work are terrible at analysis. Believe me, I’m a lot more trained and have a natural talent for that then most of you right-brained people. The only difficult thing is that you want to feel important, so you will never admit to this or the fact that most of you have trouble even balancing your checkbooks.
To take just one item, do you actually think that Joe Wilson did extensive research in Niger and that his report was complete, accurate, and unbiased? If you do, stop right there. Your mindset may be good for some things (we’re still working on what), but they are not good for discernment.
If you don’t believe this, then the next time you need to get your taxes done or need an audit, hire a mime or an actor. Otherwise admit that sometimes you just need to trust skilled and impartial experts.
July 30th, 2006 at 11:52 am
Woody, I’d hire you to do my taxes in a heartbeat, and would no doubt enjoy chatting and laughing with you on the back porch over lemonade and/or Jack Daniels (as long as we stayed off the subject politics.)
But foreign policy analysis? Uh, don’t think so, darlin.’ Your numbers continually come out wrong—not because you aren’t smart— because you’re always starting out with faulty (make that cooked) data.
Hate to oversimplify, but there you have it.
July 30th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
About Mel Gibson, much as I hate to say it, the loathsome Nikke Finke has been most on top of this. (Although she seems to be sleeping in today.)
http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/
July 30th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
Make that “Nikki”. (If one is going to both insult and praise someone, it seems fair to get their name right.)
July 30th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
Mel’s father is is a certified conspiracist and anti-semite too. No doubt he had some influence on Mel. Michael Balter no one is apologizing for the bombing although wasn’t there an incident that instigated it? A raid and then fired missles? I just don’t see a solution for you that involves more than condemning Israel at all costs to reason. They claim if they wanted they could just level the place, and that targeting Hez strongholds is indeed trying avoid civilian casualties. We know this is never completely possible. There needs to be more than one note in this Samba.
July 30th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
Woody is no expert on anything. He buys into the same whackjob conspiracies every time while discounting factual reporting and scientific publications.
July 30th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
Hey, Mark Y., very sorry about the death of your dad. The obit was elegant and touching.(Tried to post on ur site to say as much but was defeated by the software.)
I went through the same thing with my mother two months ago. Still reeling.
July 30th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
Mark York, my condolences also on the loss of your father. And good to see your defense of the environment!
I see you folks in Cooper’s blog world are being entertained by the Twisted Balter Show.
Yes, today’s tragedy in Lebanon is sad and horrible, and believe it or not, Balter, I believe Israel and its defenders are not – as Hezbollah, Hamas and company so often seem when they murder Israeli children, women and civilians, which is what they try to do 95 percent of the time — overjoyed about this. To the contrary.
I agree with the Lebanon govt. — a full, independent, preferably UN-led, investigation is warranted for this tragedy and other preceding civilian tragedies. And I have no doubt that, when and if such an investigation is done, we will find, much to the dismay of the Hez apologists, that the Hez rocket launchers are and were being set up near such civilian buildings and homes and, as such, got got in the cross fire by an Israeli military seeking to stop the rain of 100-150 rockets per day on their civilian buildings and home. Much has been made of the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese who have fled their homes, but about the same large quantity has fled their homes on the other side of the border (or are buried night and day in bomb shelters, fortunately for them they have that option, otherwise we might see similar carnage in Israel more often).
In my view, if my prediction is correct, and the Hez has been shooting its rockets under cover of civilian villages, homes and buildings, then most of the blame in the horrific deaths of civilians in southern Lebanon are the Hezbollah. Think about it.
And, while the rocket barrage from Hez did start up after Israel responded to their murders and hostage taking, as one Israeli analyst put it on BBC this morning, the roots of the Israeli war right now are moreso because, in the six years since they withdrew from Lebanon, there are at least 24 documented, unprovoked incidents of Hez firing rockets over the border at Israeli civilians. Couple that with the Hez mission of destroying Israel and refusing to recognize its right to exist, and its not a threat to brush off by launching back doves and saying, poor Hez, we forgive you for killing 8 soldiers and kidnapping 2, ok, here, we will release your terrorist friends, some of whom apparently killed innocent Israeli families.
I do hope there will be a cease fire, and that as part of that this whole mess can be solved through a political agreement. I was optimistic after hearing the Lebanese cabinet decision yesterday on resolving this diplomatically. But lets stop being naive: stop absolving Hezbollah of their large share of blame (which is greater than or equal to the denunciations doled out to Israel for its unfortunate, disproportionate response involving hitting Beirut, gas tanks and other unnecessary targets) in this sad war.
July 30th, 2006 at 3:26 pm
The nations and political leaders all around the world who are now condemning Israel for what it did at Qana are hardly apologists for Hezbollah, even if anon falsely and dishonestly tries to characterize me and others here that that way. Events have already passed anon by: Israel has completely isolated itself by its outrageous actions, and even the US and the UK now realize that it is not in their interests to go down with this ship. Let’s hope that the 48 hour halt in bombing will turn into a permanent ceasefire.
July 30th, 2006 at 3:46 pm
Ps–thanks to rosedog for the Observer post and Qana 1996 info. When even Israel’s best friends have had enough, there may be hope. Israel’s actions aren’t defeating Hezbollah, they are making them and other extremists stronger and more popular than ever and giving huge stocks of ammunition to terrorist recruiters. Taking the moral high road is something that Israel has rarely done in its history, possibly because it goes counter to the crude tribalism that is Zionism.
July 30th, 2006 at 4:04 pm
You know I have had absolutely enough of this bullshit regarding the right of Israel to exist – most certainly it does have a right to exist, it does not have the right to create unending havoc in the region by it’s unrighteous activity. This is not the attempt to just exist, it is not the claim of a persecuted Zionism – and a holocaust of the Jewish people is not in the making (unless you want to attribute that to the people in the surrounding region), resistence to the current corrupt Israeli government is in the offing.
There are approximately 10,000 prisoners in Israel, and a thousand of them have been rotting there without trial (sound familiar?). If you want justice bring them to court, but do not do what you did with the other 9,000. Do not set up military tribunals with no ability to face your accusers and argue the charge. Do not exact confessions through torture, which is CODIFED in Israeli law – because any confession can be given under torture, including being a little teapot!
You cannot maintain an apartheid by design in both treatment and in stolen land. International law cannot be flaunted as it has since it’s ruling after the 67′ war – in case you do not know, in the preamble ruling, the lands CANNOT be kept as a booty of war (in short).
You cannot run incursions in Gaza and other forcefully restricted areas and kill innocent people pell mell, including the recent 10,000 shells indiscriminately lobbed into Gaza. Do you get it? Is it clear? Do I have to innumerate the atrocities again and pull out all the documents, beyond doubt proof of this activity by human rights organizations above a shadow of a doubt? Is this required again?
So it is getting awfully tired hearing the “they started it” bullshit all over again. What you have in Lebanon is the escalation of what has gone on in Palestine for decades. What is taking place in Lebanon is war crimes, and it is the continuation of business as usual since Israel left this territory in 2000 – with all of the intrigue that has taken place up until this time – it did NOT begin with the killing and kidnapping of two soldiers, is this clear?
I do not care how much horseshit is spewed from the corporate media. This has been a plan in the works for years, I have the briefings, I have the dates and times of proposal and this has been discussed both here and in Israel – it is common public knowledge, get it?
In the meantime Lebanon is dying by diplomacy. As world players from the US and Israel act like they are trying to hammer out a solution, while the US id helping Israel to further lock and load to engorge the military-industrial complex. Anon got one thing right, more have died in Iraq at this point – so where is the logic in letting a lying piece of shit government that murders a civilization to be a chief negotiator (US)? You don’t like my language? To bad!
In the meantime we are treated to this play by two chief aggressors who have no intention of halting the destruction, while the American people have a ring side seat sipping their martini’s in their hot tubs and digress into consumer oblivion – and as long as this is not interrupted nothing will be done. I might be wrong but I think there is more than an outside chance for escalation, and it might just be a matter of time before this administration tries to claim the World War rhetoric.
To all who agree to this, I say screw you and your “world war on terrorism,” it is the old war against the poor and oppressed people of the world. No doubt, some of you might be raptured (according to some fruitcakes), I hope everyone one who agrees with this current situation as valid does disappear – and I am prepared to stay on my knees if that is what it takes to make your disappearance a reality.
July 30th, 2006 at 4:13 pm
What Rosedog said with such typical pithiness and eloquence here.
July 30th, 2006 at 4:14 pm
48 hours my ass
July 30th, 2006 at 4:20 pm
Off the topic of the Middle East, but a very revealing article on the crackpot ideology, rampant bigotry, unbridled corruption and blatant criminality of the Republican Party in one of it’s gerrymandered, rigged-elections “strongholds”:
http://tinyurl.com/qa8ej
July 30th, 2006 at 4:39 pm
I think Virgil’s pretty much got it right.
(And this, by the way, as Michael B. said, does NOT mean in any way siding with or excusing Hezbollah for lobbing rockets on civilians. So don’t go there.)
PS: Thanks RP.
July 30th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
Rosedog,
My pleasure. It was long overdue.
July 30th, 2006 at 5:00 pm
He will appreciate that anon whoever you are. It shows you at least look at backgrounds before leaping to a conclusion. If they agree with Virgil the position is so far left there is no return to sanity. If one justifies the constant pecking by whackjob groups and no matter what they do the blame is always something Israel did at some point in time including fake massacres what’s the point of a discussion?
July 30th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
He thanks rosedog too.
July 30th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
For the purpose of discussion, let’s stipulate the invasion of Lebanon is the Lebanese people’s fault.
As even the Israel supporters here have acknowledged, there is a self-perpetuating cycle of violence here that must be broken before there can be any chance of peace.
What matters most, then, is how to go about breaking that cycle.
The U.S. has no lever it can pull to control the Hezbollah. As we have stipulated, the only available lever is escalating violence. But it is plain for even Israel’s supporters here to see that escalating violence cannot and will not lead to peace.
Whatever meager diplomatic leverage the U.S. once had that it could apply to the Arab side of this conflict was fully squandered in Iraq and Condi’s visit last week spelled that out for the semi-literate.
Moderate Arab states that once may have been counted on to ally, if only implicitly, with the U.S. are now firmly backing the Hezbollah. Saudi Arabia has committed something like 5 billion dollars to rebuilding Lebanon, money that will almost certainly flow directly through Hezbollah.
What’s left, then?
The leverage the U.S. has on Israel. As Israel’s bankroller, weapons supplier and diplomatic client, the U.S. has life-or-death power over the country, which can be exercised WITHOUT RESORT TO VIOLENCE.
It is not an exaggeration to say that George W. Bush could halt the invasion of Lebanon tomorrow without firing a shot, threatening an attack or implementing a blockade or sanction of any kind.
He could simply tell Israel that as it can only use the immense financial, military and diplomatic resources of the U.S. if it is willing to halt the invasion of Lebanon and exit the occupied territories and negotiate a compromise on the return of Palestinian refugees.
Israel’s leaders are nutty, but not that crazy. They would have no choice but to comply. Conversely, Israel will never pursue peace when it can plainly see that it benefits more from military aggression.
The U.S. has more diplomatic, nonviolent leverage on Israel than on, perhaps, any other party in the world.
Unless and until the U.S. demonstrates a willingness to use that leverage, the militarists who are in control of Israel have zero incentive to consider a strategy that would, in the end, cede their power to leaders willing to live in peace with a Palestinian state. Rather, their incentive is to perpetuate the violence with the long-term goal being wiping out the Palestinians and establishing Greater Israel as a de facto empire and, eventually, de jure.
Ironically, the U.S. and its European allies POTENTIALLY have significant financial leverage over the Palestinian Authority. But that leverage can only be realized after the U.S. demonstrates to Palestinians that is not directly colluding with Israel to destroy it. At the moment, Palestinians know that whatever aid the U.S. gives them is insignificant compared with the resources it deploys against Palestine’s survival. No surprise, then, that they chose to ignore any U.S. threat to withdraw that support.
By taking a more sustainable policy toward Israel, the U.S. would increase its leverage with Arab governments as well.
July 30th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
Woody if it makes you feel any better, the Mel Gibson thing shows Hitchens finally got one right.
Still love “Beyond Thunderdome” (his one good movie)
though…….
July 30th, 2006 at 6:16 pm
Again, if you want to stop violence – denounce it everywhere.
Your anguished cries of bitterness about the Palestinean plight don’t justify the fanatical fringe lHamas, Hez and company murdering the Israeli children, women and others out of sheer hatred, Virgil. Where were you when they strapped bombs to Palestinean kids and blew up Israeli cafes, restaurants, buses, street corners, more? Where were you when Israel made sustainable peace with Egypt, Jordan? When they pulled out of Lebanon and Gaza but were thanked with continuing rockets and barbaric, suicide freaks? Where were you when, since the Rabin years, Israel, at least the majority of Israelis, have time and again made it clear they want to negotiate peace -and will recognize and support a state of Palestine in West Bank and Gaza – but then see such aspirations torpedoed, again and again, by the insanity of suicide bombs. I know, I know, I don’t understand. Palestinean attacks on innocent Israelis must be UNDERSTOOD. Its merely the result of Israeli apartheid and occupation, how can I not understand. So lame.
You appear to be knowledgeable on the situation, Virgil. Look up Taba. See there: room for compromise on 67 borders and the like. Possible for a win-win plan. Let go of the pain and anguish and support negotiating no more war through a peace treaty.
Get over it, Virgil. Time for the Left to stop encouraging this losing, painful descent into hell — put the Zionist tribalism crap, the “occupation” and “apartheid” and “other slogans of pain behind you and for once do something constructive and help make a better life for Palestineans. Denounce violence everywhere, don’t rationalize it.
Yes, Israel did not start it, and thats the point. When their enemies seek a real peace, you can be sure Israel will be there to help make it happen. They were and are sincere, despite your imagination to the contrary. And if they are not sincere, as you suspect, you can be sure the US and others will make them sincere. Get over this cynical bullshit about the US imperialistic control over the Middle East for oil, etc, with Israel as its proxy garbage, etc. etc. Actually, nothing would please Bush and his oil buddies more than a solution to the Israel problem –the oil will be flowing westward faster than ever if that were to happen.
Rosedog, will not accuse you of Hez apologies, but when one agrees with heaping all the blame on Israelis for this conflict in Lebanon, it smacks of being an apology for Hez. Lets just call it what it is, what you say? Its not about, and can’t be justified by, some existential pyschological scream of rage over Israeli occupation, as Virgil would describe it — rather, its pure and simple stupid provocation from a group(s) not interested in dialoguing for peace with Israel.
And yes, some may brush this off with, ahh its “getting old,” but ever read an Arab newspaper? The Arab world is rife with anti-semitism, and, while I don’t think that a Holocaust 2 is in the offing, there is no doubt there is enough sentiment in the Arab world against, yes, Jews, and not just Israelis, to organize one.
July 30th, 2006 at 7:04 pm
“When their enemies seek a real peace, you can be sure Israel will be there to help make it happen.”
Why are they building a wall through Palestinian territory and expanding their stolen colonial suburbs in the West Bank?
And…Anon’s demand that people stop repeating stuff about Palestinians as victims, etc. while he regurgitates every single AIPAC talking point ad nauseum, including the risibly dismissible anti-Semitism canard. His hypocrisy on that is a perfect example of the double standard he uses in analyzing the conflict.
Why can’t/won’t Israel stop expanding settlements? Why can’t/won’t Israel drop its precondition that the status of Jerusalem as exclusively Jewish controlled is non-negotiable? Why can’t Israel drop its precondition that the return of refugees is nonnegotiable?
None of these issues have any reasonable connection to Israel’s security. Israel’s stated, formal unwillingness to peacefully settle these specific issues is proof positive that they have no intention of settling their religious land grab peacefully through negotiations. They will negotiate only after the Palestinians and supporters such as Hezbollah are destroyed and have no choice but to accept Israel’s chauvinistic, expansionist terms.
July 30th, 2006 at 7:29 pm
AIPAC, right..
Bunk: As Newsweek Fareed Zakaria would say: you are living in a parallel universe and are deranged.
Right, he was talking about Rumsfeld. Good grief, am now comparing you to Rumsfeld — you must be in the other parallel universe.
July 30th, 2006 at 7:47 pm
Ah, the “deranged” canard.
That’s the second-most hackneyed AIPAC dupes’ talking point used against people who don’t follow the Israel lobby’s instructions. Have you missed any?
July 30th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
and Fareed Zakaria? really. I don’t think he’d give you the time of day, Anon…but I see why you’d want to dress up your shabby little ad hominem by dropping a prominent name. pathetic!
July 30th, 2006 at 7:59 pm
“rather, its pure and simple stupid provocation from a group(s) not interested in dialoguing for peace with Israel.”
That’s the way I see it.
July 30th, 2006 at 8:18 pm
Bunkerbuster:
Great analysis of the situation overall, but I question Washington’s ability to rein in the Israelis. Even if Bush had the will to do it (and you can imagine the political “hay” the Democrats would make out of any move in that direction!), Israel has indicated a willingness in the past to defy the US when thier perceived self-interest is involved. Given thier possession of a significant nuclear arsenal (developed independently of the US) the question of whether or not thier defiance would extend beyond the level of rhetoric has far reaching implications to say the least!
Given the Bush administration’s ineptitude in diplomatic matters, clearly these are not the people we would want to have in charge of any major re-shaping of our “special relationship” with Israel. With the Democrat’s obsequiousness to AIPAC and the Jewish-American voting bloc, it is hard to imagine them doing anything but inducing the Israelis to become even more belligerent.
Although I’m familiar with the “all it would take is one phone call from Washington” argument, no one on this end has the political will to make that call. The post-WW II US planners that envisioned and manifested Israel as a giant “aircraft carrier” to assist in our military command and control of middle east oil, along with subsequent US administrations, have enabled the most “hawkish” elements of Israeli society to sieze the political agenda.
It is a sad irony that the moderate, peaceful element of Israeli society has been effectively marginalized because of the very real threats to Israel’s security which were (and are), at the very least, exacerbated by the actions of the jingoist element of Israel.
July 30th, 2006 at 8:42 pm
Publius opines: ““ its pure and simple stupid provocation from a group(s) not interested in dialoguing for peace with Israel.â€
It is far from pure, and far from simple. But I agree that Hezbollah, Hamas and many others have no interest in “dialogue” with Israel. Why should they? Israel formally and by demonstration insists that the key points: Jerusalem and refugees, are not negotiable. While Israel hasn’t formally annexed the West Bank, it has shown every indication that it intends to, once it kills off enough Palestinians to solve what it calls the “demographic” problem there.
You like it simple, Publius. Here’s a simple question: what could Hezbollah or Hamas or the Palestinians possibly gain by negotiating with Israel UNDER THE CURRENT CIRCUMSTANCES? Are you suggesting that Israel has indicated that it is willing to negotiate on Jerusalem, refugees or the West Bank? Israel is made clear it intends to negotiate only one thing with the Palestinians: Surrender. The only wiggle room there are the specific terms of capitulation.
As long as the U.S. regime gives Israel carte blanche to expand exclusively Jewish colonial land-theft suburbs in the West Bank, build walls through Palestinian territory and assassinate public officials at will NEITHER SIDE has a practical, near-term incentive to negotiate in good faith.
July 30th, 2006 at 8:44 pm
Randy Paul said: What Rosedog said….
Randy wants me to do his taxes or has he been been into the Jack Daniels with rosedog? ( They do have a good on-line tour, and Junior is the guide to pick. Jack Daniels )
rosedog, you guys have it backwards about who has the faulty data, but I’ll let you continue to believe that the New York Times is an American newspaper rather than an research arm of Al Qaeda, that Whittaker Chambers was a middle-of-the-road reporter instead of a communist with Time magazine, and that journalists who vote for the Democrats can be trusted to report objectively.
———-
On Mel Gibson, I haven’t really kept up with what appears to be his out-of-control response to being stopped. However, he was no more out-of-control than all of you hysterics on the left who were sure that his movie “The Passion of Christ” should be banned as it would turn Christians into anti-semites (hey, much like many of you) and bring violence against them. It didn’t and, once again, the left was wrong and overreacted. I’m pretty sure that the Hizbollah has not shown this at the theaters in Lebanon, but they might have it the movie did what you guys predicted.
———-
Speaking of hating the Jews, can you figure this out?
Lebanese crowd breaks into U.N. HQ in Beirut
Here’s what happened: Lebanese protesters broke into the United Nations headquarters in Beirut on Sunday, smashing windows and ransacking offices, after an Israeli air strike killed at least 40 people in south Lebanon. …Demonstrators tore down a United Nations flag outside the building and ripped it to shreds and called on Hizbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah to launch rocket attacks on Tel Aviv. …the building had been stoned and furniture smashed …a small fire was started.
So, this was the response from the U.N: Geir Petersen, the personal representative of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan in Lebanon, condemned the Israeli attack on the village of Qana and called for an immediate investigation.
Huh? Where’s the outrage and condemnation for attacking the U.N. in this case. When Israel blasts a U.N. site that provides cover for terrorists, it is condemned. When the other side destroys the U.N. offices, their actions are overlooked so the U.N. can condemn Israel again. There doesn’t seem to be outrage for the terrorists.
Frankly, I don’t blame Israel and I wouldn’t even give a 48 hour grace period for Hizbollah to regroup. Maybe if the U.N. wanted to be productive, they could start getting the terrorists our of south Lebanon before more civilians get caught in the cross fire.
July 30th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
“that Whittaker Chambers was a middle-of-the-road reporter instead of a communist with Time magazine”
This has to be one of the weirdest bits I’ve yet seen injected into these comments. Unhinged doesn’t even begin to describe this one as an attempt at…something. Presumably we’re to believe that because Whittaker Chambers was a reporter for Time, the Henry Luce enterprise was – and continues to function as – some sort of propaganda outlet for Stalin and his heirs. If anyone ever doubted that Woody was completely fucking nuts – and quite desperate in his political pathologies – no need to temporize any further.
July 30th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
When a person refuses plain facts there is no basis for dialogue. Many should just go blog about the Easter Bunny, that is all I have to say at this juncture. Finis
July 30th, 2006 at 11:13 pm
Okay, you want the violence on all sides condemned? No problem. Here it is. Written in very gentlemanly, albeit heartbroken terms by the late King Hussein’s brother, Prince Hassan.
It was published in Ha’aretz 3 or 4 days ago, before everything really went to hell. (Again, the opinion section of Ha’aretz can’t be accessed unless one registers, thus I’m posting thing.)
WAGING WAR OR WINNING PEACE
By HRH Prince Hassan bin Talal
ONCE again, the region rings with the all-too-familiar cries of hatred, anger, violence and bloodshed. It seems we have been rendered unable to disable violence – whether the perpetrators be state or non-state players. Where is the voice of reason or the eye that sees beyond the immediate? Where is the ear that is prepared to listen?
Only last September, at the UN World Summit, world leaders agreed in a historic statement that states have a primary responsibility to act to protect their own populations and that the international community has a responsibility to act when these governments fail to protect the most vulnerable among us. Yet what we are witnessing today in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Iraq and in Afghanistan is no less than the punishment of the powerless, escalating humanitarian crises of mammoth proportions, coupled in Lebanon with the destruction of the very infrastructure of civilized existence.
We are a dishonest lot in the Middle East. Maddened by grievances real and perceived, each of us clamors to call for peace when we have all, through trauma and intransigence, become mesmerized by war. We may fool our media allies from far away, or fulfill the requirements of sloganeers who do not share our air and soil, but we know, you and I, that lasting peace will only come when we look each other in the eye and translate hatred into words that begin a difficult conversation. The people of Israel have made an easy decision not to talk to extremists. Perhaps the bravest step is to engage with moderates and acknowledge that our troubled neighborhood needs the courage of compassion and the wisdom of longer-term self-interest to undo the damage of macho militarism. The gunfire around us makes it even harder to hear the voices of our marginalized communities. Honesty is the only way to save our grandchildren from the fear and asphyxiation of hope, which we have all known for so long. Our clustered cities of Amman and Tel Aviv, Beirut and Damascus are too close to each other to avoid a tangled future.
We, the Children of Abraham, may claim to look in different directions for culture and custom, spirituality and succor, but this small patch of scorched, embattled earth cannot be divided by fences and false borders of the mind. If the political play does not allow us to admit this to those whose map of our region is distorted by self-interest and misguided strategic obstinacy, then at least let us have the sense to admit it to each other.
Enlightened self-interest must compel us to foster human dignity and integrity by addressing the full spectrum of basic human rights, spanning from the rights of children to full respect for the rule of law on a national, regional and international level.
The events of the past three weeks have brought us to the edge of the abyss. They are the result not of timeless and inevitable conflict, but of intransigence, fear and a shocking lack of creativity by leaders in our region and beyond. The indiscriminate loss of life on all sides has polarized our populations and shown diplomacy for the devalued and scorned art it has become. The focus on polemics and the ensuing escalation of violence has sidelined the very real and dangerous concerns that underlie our region’s spiraling decline.
Aggressive ideology is nurtured by an increasing lack of economic equality, poor social mobility, a denial to many of human security, and the exclusion of the silenced majority. It is evident to us all that military might cannot cure the evils of our region. Violence begets violence, and the mass bombings of civilians can only result in increased use of terror tactics further down the line.
It has become exceedingly clear that the current crisis requires the application of a two-fold solution if we are ever to hope for a secure and stable peace for all our citizens. The conflicts that rule our daily lives must be addressed on the political level, but we cannot afford to ignore the effects of military overkill on basic humanitarian issues. Human rights are the first casualties of war, and the degradation of human dignity in our region has undone generations of agreement and convention on the rights of civilians to protection and well-being. The anger and trauma created by hundreds of dead and injured and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians so far can only have violent repercussions for a hitherto democratic, pluralistic and multicultural Lebanon reality. The shockwaves are felt by our entire region.
A conference for security and cooperation in the region must be a priority for our leaders if human security is ever to become a reality. Diplomatic avenues must be opened and explored, and this arduous process should include Syria and Iran. War and it’s tragic repercussions are inclusive of all; surely a model for peace should strive for such inclusiveness.
In memory of my late brother, His Majesty King Hussein, and Yitzhak Rabin, we must strive not to wage wars, but to win peace. Real peace must be built; it is not just the absence of war. We need to talk about the end-game, to develop regional understanding, to address the energy issue that is at the heart of so much instability, and to devise a multilateral approach to such thorny issues as the proliferation of WMD, together with a regional concept for human rights, prosperity and security.
Ideally, it could lead to a regional code of conduct and a cohesion fund that establishes principles of common interest, responsibility, transparency and a collective defense identity, reflecting the fact that interdependency is the reality today. Anthrocentric policies, policies where people matter, is the way to close the human dignity divide. Through good governance, we must empower the poor and dispossessed who find expression for their frustrations in extremist ideology.
The sooner a cessation of hostilities is achieved and international peacekeeping forces are deployed on both sides of the border, the sooner a collective strive toward institutionalized regional stability can begin. I cannot emphasize enough the need for diplomacy to transpose violence and this call echoes former U.S. president Eisenhower’s appeal that the “table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.”
The writer, brother of the late King Hussein of Jordan, is president of the Arab Thought Forum.
July 30th, 2006 at 11:15 pm
Geeze. Make that, “thus I’m posting the whole thing..”
Proofreading R not me.
July 30th, 2006 at 11:35 pm
Woody raves: “Whom do you trust to analyze things…someone with analytical skills (me) or someone who believes things because he feels that they are true or wants them to be true (most of you).”
Woody, you’re a CPA, right? And that takes a brain, I agree. However, it’s pretty common for people who assess their own intelligence in terms of honed skills in their area of expertise to assume that they can be similarly skilled right off the bat in some other area. I knew a guy here in Tokyo who used to bilk foreign exchange traders all the time, by flattering their intelligence while selling them bad insurance policies. These guys knew the foreign exchange market, so they assumed they were geniuses when it came to anything about money.
“You use biased sources whose intent is not to report the truth but to convince you to accept their leftist agenda–and you fall right into it.”
When those “biased sources” cite government sources, and use logic to support their conclusions, yeah, I “fall right into it”. When the use of sources and the logic is better than others.
“I can cut through the propaganda and know which reports are misleading, ….”
I’m sorry Woody, but you’ve fucked up on this very thing over and over and over. Almost every supposed slam-dunk you post here falls apart on closer inspection. Which tells me: if something is aimed straight at your confirmation biases, you don’t subject it to closer inspection.
“…. while those who are good in the arts or social work are terrible at analysis.”
Not necessarily, but what makes you think I’m bad at analysis?
Not this, I hope?
http://www.idiom.com/~turner/resume.html
“Believe me, I’m a lot more trained and have a natural talent for that then most of you right-brained people.”
Yeah, Woody, but how about when a left-brainer has a left hemisphere practically oozing out of his left ear, and he or she still disagrees with you? What’s your rationalization then? “Too logical and analytical to be sensible”?
“The only difficult thing is that you want to feel important, so you will never admit to this or the fact that most of you have trouble even balancing your checkbooks.”
Yeah, Woody, but how did you do in physics when you got to deBroglie’s equations? In math when you got LaPlace transforms? In computer science when you got Rice’s Theorem in recursive function theory?
Oh, you never got anywhere near that far?
“To take just one item, do you actually think that Joe Wilson did extensive research in Niger and that his report was complete, accurate, and unbiased? If you do, stop right there.”
I believe Joe Wilson did NOT do extensive research in Niger, but for a good reason: he quickly figured out that extensive research would be a waste of time. The French were running the only mine from which any uranium might be had. The perpetually-resident nuclear proliferation regulatory apparatus was in place in that country and was functioning just fine. And there really was not a whole lot else to do. Especially considering that if Iraq actually had been shopping for yellowcake around Africa, it would have been rock-stupid of them to risk tipping their hand in the process, when they already had enough yellowcake for 50 bombs sitting on their own territory
Analyze THAT, Mr. Super Left Brain CPA. (Or more likely, just ignore it, as you do over and over and over in the face of embarrassing facts.)
The CIA still gave Wilson’s orally-debriefed report a grade of “good” in the face of what are now obvious pressures within the White House to avoid conclusions like his. I figure Wilson decided that B- effort was fine in this case, treating the task rather as you might have treated an accounting course assignment to come up with the optimal way to estimate capital equipment depreciation in a nation with an annual inflation rate randomly varying between 2000% and 3000% from quarter to quarter (“the whole country’s gonna go tits-up soon anyway, so what’s the point?”), or an econ course assignment to write an in-depth 15-page term paper analyzing the linkages between GDP growth in Byelorussia and the price of eggs in Wisconsin (“I hear the professor spends all his spare time playing D&D on Ecstasy, so why bother?”).
And for what must be the bazillionth time: I am not a leftist. But I am pretty stupid anyway, obviously. Beause I keep arguing with you, don’t I? Even though it’s clearly a waste of time.
July 30th, 2006 at 11:49 pm
I … am … powerless … over … my … need … to … respond … to … Woody ….
“Huh? Where’s the outrage and condemnation for attacking the U.N. in this case. When Israel blasts a U.N. site that provides cover for terrorists, it is condemned. When the other side destroys the U.N. offices, their actions are overlooked so the U.N. can condemn Israel again. There doesn’t seem to be outrage for the terrorists. ”
You seem to have missed a key difference: U.N. *property* (repairable) was destroyed in a violent protest. U.N. observer *lives* (irretrievable) were *lost* in an Israeli strike. If you can’t understand why one is small news and the other is big news, you have no analytical qualifications worth bringing to bear on the issues we discuss here. Go back to your bean-counting. Sounds like you’re actually good at that.
July 31st, 2006 at 12:19 am
OK, I gotta get outa here. Because I just noticed that Woody called the New York Times the research arm of Al Qaeda. My analytical left brain has rebelled and gone on strike for better working conditions.
However, a few scabbing logic circuits that are still at their desks after the labor negotiations meltdown must signal desperately, as follows: I suppose Woody agrees with Ann Coulter when she jokingly (?) said that someone like Tim McVeigh ought to bomb the NYT after everybody but the reporters and editorial staff have been vacated? Say it ain’t so, Woody: you believe some terrorism is actually justified?
David Brooks? William Safire? Nah, they are just ideological camouflage for the NYT, they couldn’t possible be the patriots they claim to be while also accepting pay from the research arm of Al Qaeda …. so toast them too while you’re at it, Tim.
July 31st, 2006 at 12:47 am
“My analytical left brain has rebelled and gone on strike for better working conditions.”
A genuine, tea-spitting laugh before bedtime! Thanks, Michael. I needed that.
(Oh, no, you did NOT put your CV up! It was kinda cool though. My inner adolescent was sorely tempted to start trotting out creds a little earlier today. But I asked her to please sit down.)
July 31st, 2006 at 1:01 am
“I … am … powerless … over … my … need … to … respond … to … Woody ….”
A compulsion we all suffer from. But when you see all the witless ignorance of the American rightwing crystallized in one blogger, you can’t really be blamed for wanting to dispel it with a wave of the rhetorical magic wand. Problem is, all the waving doesn’t make it go away!
July 31st, 2006 at 5:42 am
You know Woody, I’ve always been good with analysis of political issues and seeing the bigger picture, but didn’t use to be that good with numbers. I could do basic things like balance my checkbook, but the idea of involving myself in issues relevant to accounting scared the hell out of me.
However, in my last job, my employer saw that I had good analytical skills and was capable of getting through my fear of numbers (I only took the first calculus course in college). I eventually learned enough basics about accounting that I was able to defend audits conducted by the auditors that worked for my employer. I settled audits with broadcasters such as CBS, Clear Channel, Infinity, etc.
What enabled me to do that was a lot of hard work: first learning enough about the industry to understand how it works, secondly learning enough about accounting to understand how items were expensed, learning basics such as such cash receipts v accrual, etc. and third and most important, gaining an empathy witht eh braodcasters and trying to see things from their point of view. The problem that my predecessor had in the same positon was that he assumed every audit that we conducted that resulted in a deficiency was due to deliberate cheating and nefarious efforts by our customers. While there was some of that, much of it was due to honest errors.
When I started settling the audits, there was more than $5 million in open, unsettled audits. Two years later I had the total down to less than one million.
There’s a lesson in there for you if you want to learn it.
July 31st, 2006 at 6:21 am
Michael Turner, I have realized that you are an anomaly in that you have an engineering background and typically defend the left, while claiming not to be one (which I will accept, but you are closer to them than the middle.)
On who can do what, my experience and that of everyone I know from the plumbing guy at Home Depot to financial planners is that it is the engineers who think that they can do everything. You won’t believe the tax returns that I’ve had to correct because some engineer didn’t like the way that his tax program calculated the taxes, so he did numerous overrides to get to the numbers that he manually computed.
On other analogies that you raise, you dispel your own claimed logical thought process. Whether or not one is left-brained and logical is more a process of how he assembles and interprets data, not whether he had the same math and physics courses as you. May I assume that you’re not logical if you can’t compute the tax effects on a Section 1031 exchange, or should I grant that you have the mindset but just not the experience to do that? My illustration of balancing a check book would be valid, though, because that is an excercise conducted by the overall population rather than just some nerds stuck in a room with no windows who want to sound wise because they know what all the computer acronyms mean.
Simply put and back to the topic, I’m logical enough to know that when a publication reports dishonestly, then I’m not going to trust that publication so easily the next time. You don’t have to know pi to the 100th decimal point to reason that. I’m logical enough to know that assumptions are not the same as facts. You, the leftist media, and, yes, Joe Wilson do a lot of assuming. And, I’m logical enough to know that you wasted a lot of time trying to dispel my claim that logical people are better at analysis than right brained people. They are.
I do have to give you credit in that you feel such intensity for certain liberal issues that you take such time trying to defend them. However, I find it interesting that you, for example, defend Joe Wilson with defenses that were not in his report and that he didn’t raise, but that you concluded. It’s a joke when you have to cover for him rather than explain what he actually reported. Further, you mention “obvious pressures within the White House” that are only your assumptions. Were there any motivations on Joe Wilson to lie? Yes.
Here’s something that is factual: Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV…has been thoroughly discredited. (The) bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report concluded that it is he who has been telling lies. Our Man in Niger
Exposed and discredited, Joe Wilson might consider going back.
If you’re good at interpreting technical manuals from one language to another, do you try to be accurate or do you try to cover for what you perceive were mistakes by making, on your own, additions and changes that are not true to the original author? Maybe you’re the guy that makes those hilarious “how to assemble” guides translated into what is supposed to pass for English.
Michael Turner, your resume is fine. (It does strike me funny, though, that you would link it–similar to Randy Paul giving an abbreviated resume one time on his foreign travels. Do egos need that much stroking?) However, the only people that you impress are the ones who already wanted to believe that I’m wrong–and, those are the right-brained people who aren’t logical and never could be. As for me and others like me, we see through your feeble attempt. Think logically about it and quit defending the left when they are wrong.
July 31st, 2006 at 6:56 am
Randy, our posts are crossing in the mail, so I hope that doesn’t create more problems. On your audits, I can make a lot of conclusions from them, but one is that the type of audit you conducted is not an audit in the same sense as a CPA audits financial statements. But, I will give you credit for cutting through the technical jargon. I could learn to play a piano and my fingers are accurate strinking a ten key, but I would never have the proficiency of a natural artist. BTW, as an auditor, I make no assumptions about fraud or wrong-doing, either way, when I go in. Your predecessor was wrong in his approach in that regard.
A lesson from your story is that we can often do what we have to do whether or not we want to. Still, some people are better at certain tasks than are others. Further, unless forced, you would resort to your natural and comfortable way of viewing the world–which is not the way you did the audit. The world needs both right and left brained people. Just recognize when to appreciate the contributions of each in the right places.
———
MT, on the U.N. post destruction, Israel did not intend to take U.N. lives and the action occured because the enemy fired from that location and sought shelter around the facility. That post was in a battle zone and could have been evacuated.
On the more recent one with the Hizbollah supporters, they actually took over that U.N. headquarters in Beirut and willfully ransacked and set fire to it while the U.N. employees had to take refuge in the basement.
Do you not see the difference in those actions? Whether or not one is repairable of not is not the point. One, the Israeli attack, was an inadvertent consequence of the battle for which the enemy and the U.N. bear some responsibility. The other was a direct and intentional action by terrorist supporters who put the lives of the U.N. staffers at risk–and, those personnel were far outside the battle zone.
It’s no different than if someone accidentally ran into your car versus intentionally ramming it.
———-
On my journalism comment, I didn’t realize it at the time, but I connected journalists, communists, terrorists, and Democrats all in one sentence. Quite a feat!
———
Well, I have to go to a funeral for my wife’s family. That will be it for a while. Carry on with your right brains.
July 31st, 2006 at 7:11 am
Obviously, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks in your case, Woody
July 31st, 2006 at 7:25 am
And just for the record, Woody, they were financial audits conducted by our staff auditors, some of whom were CPA’s. I settled them using my knowledge of the industry and perhaps my ability to step outside of my narrow interests and see the world through their eyes and not assume that they were fundamentally dishonest or evil.
That’s the lesson lost on you.
July 31st, 2006 at 10:39 am
“Israel is made clear it intends to negotiate only one thing with the Palestinians: Surrender”
I don’t think this is true at all. They’ve done no such thing. It is the Palestinaians who never accept anything offered by anybody. Oh I know none were what they wanted. This is known as a compromise. Both give up something. One side has shown it won’t. Is that simple enough for ya?
July 31st, 2006 at 10:45 am
It is certainly indicative of my sick fascination with Woody’s obtuseness that, after his last post here, I found myself closely scrutinizing press reports I closely scrutinized fully TWO YEARS AGO.
The NRO article Woody links makes smug assertions bolstered by a link to a Washington Post article by, yes, Susan (“Mikey”) Schmidt. And it rung a bell.
The storm of controversy over that Schmidt article forced an editor at WaPo to issue this not-quite-retraction:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58334-2004Jul17.html
which I’m sure Woody missed. Schmidt got at least one of the facts plainly wrong, reporting an apparent attempt by Iran to buy uranium from Niger in 1998 as an attempt by Iraq. One of facts in this WaPo quasi-retraction that happens to be relevant to the current discussion is:
“Actually, the CIA fought hard, and successfully, to keep the material about Africa, aspects of which were a matter of dispute, out of a major speech Bush gave in October 2002.”
The 16 Words happened not because the CIA stopped fighting them, but because, as Colin Powell’s aide Wilkerson put it so piquantly, somebody kept “sticking that baby in there” until they reached the magic number of 47 attempts.
Thus, when Woody writes “Further, you mention “obvious pressures within the White House†that are only your assumptions.”
No, they are not only my assumptions. The CIA did fight hard, but (ultimately) unsuccessfully, to keep this highly questionable conclusion out of the case for war.
As for Wilson’s debriefing actually bolstering the case for an Iraqi fishing expedition for uranium sources in Niger, that’s a matter of interpretation. I don’t agree with the Senate report’s conclusion, and I don’t know why any sensible person would. It’s like talking about Mars being closer to the Earth making an earthquake more probable, when the supposed earthquake didn’t even register on the Richter scale. The best that can be said about it is that it makes a highly improbable case negligibly more probable.
According the Nigerien officials meeting with Zawahie et al., the issue of uranium supplies was never even discussed, discussion were only about possible trade in the future. Everyone jumps on the mention of “trade” as slam-dunk evidence of an Iraqi interest in uranium because uranium is a major Niger export product. What nobody notices, somehow, is that Iraq was an oil exporter, Iraqi oil exports were under sanctions control, and Niger is a net oil importer. If Iraq’s actual purpose for the trip was to drum up a campaign of international civil disobedience of the sanctions, and get more UN votes to end the sanctions, they would have been happy to line up support from any sovereign nation anywhere, even if it only needed two barrels of oil a year. People also don’t seem to notice or care that Niger is one of the few places in that vast expanse of nothingness in North Africa where you can refuel your plane. Zawahie et al weren’t just visiting Niger on that trip. When you consider all the other improbable elements of the supposed uranium shopping tour, it’s not hard to conclude that they wouldn’t even have stopped in Niger if they’d had a plane with bigger fuel tanks.
Niger was in no position to sell uranium to Iraq under the circumstances. But Zawahie et al were on their way westward across Africa. As long as they were making a needed pit stop in a capital city anyway, it makes perfect sense that they’d spend an hour talking about possible business relationships in some post-sanctions future that a Nigerien UN rep might vote for. That’s a lot more credible than the idea that these Iraqis were going to Niger specifically to shop for yellowcake that Iraq already had plenty of — 50 bombs worth, by estimates made by our own defense analysts–even though, if Zawahie really had any chops as Iraq’s “top nuclear negotiator”, he would have noticed that Niger was a pointless place to shop for such a commodity, not to mention that taking surreptitious delivery of 500 tons of yellowcake while Iraq was under the sanctions would be next door to impossible anyway.
OK, Woody — read those last three paragraphs. above. Focus on them like a laser welder. Take them apart with your powerful analytic mind, which is so forbiddingly honed in the understanding of practically everything within your view by your years of CPA practice. Check every fact. Tell me what’s wrong with my argument. Demolish every aspect of the case I just made.
Heck, if you destroy even one aspect of it, you’ll have shown far more powers of analysis than I can ever remember seeing from you.
C’mon, you can do it! You’re CPA!
Oh, and by the way, I don’t “support the left”. I support the truth. I don’t care where it comes from.
July 31st, 2006 at 11:20 am
Publius/York,
Yes, that was simple enough for me – it told me that you “simply” know nothing about what has transpired in any attempted peace process. You and Anon, don the dunce cap and sit in the corner till further notice. Is that simple enough for ya?
July 31st, 2006 at 11:20 am
Woody: “And, I’m logical enough to know that you wasted a lot of time trying to dispel my claim that logical people are better at analysis than right brained people.”
Where, in anything I wrote above, did I “dispel” that claim? How masterfully illogical! All I asked was: can you explain how it is that someone who is thoroughly logical and analytical can possibly disagree with you on an issue?
You sneer that your opponents on these issues are “good at making assumptions.” You’re leaving something out of the discussion: probabilities. So work a probability issue for me, Woody.
You believe Hitchens, say, 99%, when he signs up for the idea of Zawahie as Saddam’s “top nuclear negotiator”. And you believe, say, 99%, that Zawahie is such an expert on uranium sources that he knows where to go, if asked to look. And you believe, say, 99%, that he went to Niger as a likely source of uranium. But what probability do you assign to Iraq actually being able to get Nigerien uranium under the circumstances? I would argue that the probability of Iraq actually laying its hands on Nigerien yellowcake under those circumstances was near zero (let’s call it 0.01% just for fun or false exactitude, whichever turns you on the most), and I argue that way for reasons that nobody bothers to dispute.
So what’s the probability that this “top nuclear negotiator” Zawahie, supposedly so well-versed in the nuclear weapons supply chain, was, despite his expertise, somehow unaware that getting uranium from Niger was massively improbable? And what’s the probability of Saddam’s “top nuclear negotiator” being unaware that Iraq already had 500 tons of yellowcake anyway, so why bother shopping in the first place, it just risks exposure?
Yes, some people who make assumptions are actually good at making assumptions. How about you? Do you realize there’s actually a tiny, but non-zero probability that Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden might be hiding under your bed tonight? Does that realization make you wonder whether you should check under there?
Sometimes I’ll go for a probability of zero. Like, the NYT being Al Qaeda’s research arm. I mean, why would someone ever even consider a notion like that, unless … no … could it be? That their analytical abilities, honed through years of CPA practice, actually … failed them? I’d assign that a probability of zero to any such failure. Wouldn’t you, Woody?
July 31st, 2006 at 11:38 am
As for this particularly low blow,
“Maybe you’re the guy that makes those hilarious “how to assemble†guides translated into what is supposed to pass for English.”
As someone who would never second-guess your work on my taxes, Woody, don’t second-guess what I have to say here on this point.
Japanese “how to” guides are technical writing. Technical writing is seldom perfect anywhere you go, but is more often laughably poor in Japan. So there’s a certain Garbage-In-Garbage-Out phenomenon at work even if you’re a native English speaker who can write well and who knows the technology. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve complaint, “the important information is not in this garbage I’ve been given, please put me in contact with the engineers!” only to told that it was impossible, for reasons that nobody was willing to give.
There is another phenomenon at work: most J-E translation is actually done by Japanese who can’t speak English acceptably well. And this is my competition. There’s a pervasive prejudice in this country that nobody can really understand Japanese except the Japanese, and that the English they learned in school is not an absurd hodge-podge, but is actually the real language. Occasionally, you even get Japanese trying to correct you on points of English usage, arguing in the most inane terms, and finally saying, “This is what I was taught in school, and this is what we do here.”
That said (for anyone who cares), let me conclude thusly: Woody, you’re a pathetic twat. You can’t win on standard debating merits, so you just resort to insults. Well, then, I will too. It may be the only language you understand, after all. Most of what you try to pass off here as “proof” of your points consists of little more than drive-by insults anyway.
July 31st, 2006 at 3:28 pm
Michael, I wasn’t insulting you. That was a joke about those crazy translations on assembly instructions. But, what emotional responses from you! We’re going to have to revoke your membership in the left-brained club. I’m far from home and don’t have time to even read everything you ranted about, but I will take a look later. Man, I need to invest in Prozac with what you guys must require. (I loved your saying that I resort to insults right after you called me a pathetic twat.)
July 31st, 2006 at 5:29 pm
Well says you. I know you aren’t satisfied with the offers and so reject them all as anti-Palestinian. One thing anyone can say with confidence is Virgil Johnson is no objective journalist.
July 31st, 2006 at 5:36 pm
You need to invest in an argument that doesn’t come from ignorance and blind belief. I don’t care where the truth comes from as long as it’s true, and not relative to who is claiming it.
July 31st, 2006 at 9:56 pm
“That was a joke about those crazy translations on assembly instructions.”
Yeah, Woody, like I can imagine that you, in the middle of heated argument, would take it well if your opponent said, “Oh, you’re a CPA? You mean, like those guys who cooked the books at Enron?”
Ha ha. Just joking, Woody.
The context makes it clear you were trying to insult me, in ignorance of what I actually do.
“If you’re good at interpreting technical manuals from one language to another, do you try to be accurate or do you try to cover for what you perceive were mistakes by making, on your own, additions and changes that are not true to the original author?”
First of all, I do translation, not interpreting. Interpreting is oral. Translation is textual. You wouldn’t know that because you don’t know anything about what I do.
I do not try to “cover” for what I “perceive” are mistakes. I sometimes find mistakes, and point them out, and offer corrections and translations that reflect the corrections. Technical writing is often done by people who don’t really understand what they are writing about, they just keep going back to their engineer informants for corrections until the informants lose patience and sign off on the crap, especially as deadlines loom. Good translators get good reputations not just by knowing languages, but by knowing specialized subjects, and staying away from translation jobs on subjects they know little or nothing about. Good translators are often in a position to determine that the source text is wrong.
I don’t know your profession, Woody, but if I coudn’t do a job that required analysis of news stories and reports issued by political appointees, with considerable contention over points of fact vs opinion, most of it along partisan lines, I would sooner assign a professional translator than a CPA. Translators deal in meanings, and resolve (or at least identify) ambiguities. And if the task also touched significantly on a technical subject, as issues of weapons proliferation often do, I might even prefer a technical translator to one who translated political reporting. Of course, in this case, what I’d really want is somebody who knew diplomacy, who knew Iraq, and who knew weapons proliferation issues, with lots of hands-on experience in all those areas. That’s hard to find, but I might settle for someone who was less strong in one of those areas, like the technological and logistical issues in proliferation, if (just as an example mind you) he happened to be married to a CIA analyst who was an expert in that field.
It’s good that you’re willing to take a look at all this, Woody, but I advise you to start slow. Maybe with a warmup exercise. You might, for example, go to some website promoting the idea that the Apollo missions were staged. And then check each purported “fact” used in support of that hypothesis against sources. Then move on to the Flat Earth Society. Get a lot of experience with analyzing fallacious and mendacious argumentation in *increasingly* political discourse after that. Then tackle the Sixteen Words and How They Came to Be.
August 1st, 2006 at 11:37 am
MT, that is far too much writing than which justifies my reading time on this subject. You have violated my 200 word limit.
Were one of your professional translators responsible for this: All your base ?
———-
Randy, I truly mean no disrespect, but the “audits” that you did bear no relation to financial audits that an outside CPA firm certifies. I’m not going into great detail, but the standards and reviews required for certified opinions are extensive and controlled by the AICPA and the SEC. The internal “audit” that you describe is more an internal bookkeeping function controlled solely by what management accepts and contract agreements require. Without seeing the details, I could not conclude, for instance, that you did a better job than the internal accountants who had CPA designations, but the materiality standards applied by you may have been considerably different. Nevertheless, your discussions about lessons from this are from an very uneducated viewpoint about audits and indicates to me that you might believe that you have a better understanding of other things than you really do.
August 1st, 2006 at 12:14 pm
Without seeing the details, I could not conclude, for instance, that you did a better job than the internal accountants who had CPA designations, but the materiality standards applied by you may have been considerably different. Nevertheless, your discussions about lessons from this are from an very uneducated viewpoint about audits and indicates to me that you might believe that you have a better understanding of other things than you really do.
Woody,
Since you appear to have a reading comprehension problem, I’ll type this slowly.
I didn’t conduct the audits. I defended the results, which is what I wrote time and again. Apparently you chose to ignore that.
In any event my larger point which still eludes you (to the surprise of no one who dares wade through your flatulent commentary) was that I had to learn to adapt and use my analytical skills as well as persuasion and empathy in achieving my goals.
I was put in a position where I had to expand my skills and my way of viewing my work. I grew from that.
Compared to your constant repetition of the administration and RNC talking points, the idea that you possess any skills along the lines of analysis beyond accounting is risible.
You’re not analyzing here, Woody: you’re spewing out things by rote and by imitation. That’s what parrots do.
August 1st, 2006 at 12:55 pm
Randy, my point is that you don’t know what you’re talking about when you’re in my realm (believe me), but that you think that you do. So, why should it be any different on politics? Now, excuse me while I eat my cracker.
August 1st, 2006 at 5:12 pm
Anyone see that Alex Jones 9-11 conspiracy show on C-Span? Boy what a bunch of nuts they are.
August 3rd, 2006 at 1:16 am
Woody: “You have violated my 200 word limit.”
That would explain a lot about Woody, wouldn’t it? Just tell him some lie that plays into his biases, and that can’t be refuted in under 200 words. Wow, Now I really wish I had the analytic powers of a CPA! Life would be so much simpler.
August 4th, 2006 at 5:50 pm
Randy, my point is that you don’t know what you’re talking about when you’re in my realm (believe me), but that you think that you do. So, why should it be any different on politics?
Woody, that wasn’t the issue and you have consistently evaded the point I was trying to make. So typical of your intellectual vacuity. You are incapable of an original thought.
I thought I’d appeal to your sense of intellectual honesty and decency. How silly of me to think that you had them.
April 14th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
Interesting comments..
April 25th, 2007 at 5:43 am
Hi Sam! Photos i send on e-mail.
Green
January 21st, 2011 at 9:14 am
Watching TV and surfing the web on my laptop. Too damn cold to travel out today.
February 12th, 2011 at 9:37 am
Hey, I’ve just observed that your RSS feed is not working duly. I thought i would let you know !