One bullet

This story in the New York Times of Monday, January 29.

You can do nothing else than have enormous respect for the soldiers who exhibit such bravery in such dangerous and overwhelming circumstances. I hope and pray with all my heart that God (and anyone else who can) protects them from harm.

Staff Sgt. Hector Leija scanned the kitchen, searching for illegal weapons. One wall away, in an apartment next door, a scared Shiite family huddled around a space heater, cradling an infant.

It was after 9 a.m. on Wednesday, on Haifa Street in central Baghdad, and the crack-crack of machine-gun fire had been rattling since dawn. More than a thousand American and Iraqi troops had come to this warren of high rises and hovels to disrupt the growing nest of Sunni and Shiite fighters battling for control of the area.

The joint military effort has been billed as the first step toward an Iraqi takeover of security. But this morning, in the two dark, third-floor apartments on Haifa Street, that promise seemed distant. What was close, and painfully real, was the cost of an escalating street fight that had trapped American soldiers and Iraqi bystanders between warring sects.

Staff Sgt. Leija died.

I have already said on this weblog, but I will say it again: guerilla warfare can almost never be won. Our soldiers are being put into a no-win situation, and the addition of 21,000 troops does nothing to give hope that the situation will improve in the long term.

If I was in the States I would join a peace rally. For a half-decent comparison of Iraq with Viet Nam, click here.

God weeps

"God weeps," Archbishop Tutu told participants in the ecumenical gathering near the conclusion of the World Social Forum in Nairobi, "and says, 'Who will help me so we can have a different kind of world, one in which the rich know they have been given much so they can share and help others?'"
More than 50,000 community activists, social reformers, religious leaders, and movers and shakers met at the seventh World Social Forum in Nairobi, Kenya, this January to compare strategies on transforming global economic systems to benefit the majority world, rather than maintaining economic systems that produce immoral disparities: one percent of the world's adults owns 40 percent of the world's wealth, while the bottom half combined owns less than one percent.

This from God's Politics, the weblog of Jim Wallis.

What can you do, as an unbelievably rich person, to contribute to righting the imbalances in the world?

Words

The New York Times has an interesting interactive site that helps you see what words George Bush used in his State of the Union speeches, how many times he used them, in which speech, and the context of the words.
He has spoken over 34,000 words in these addresses, and you can search for words and find out exactly when and how he used them.
For example, "Iraq" was used 34 times in 2007, "Social Security" twice. In 2005, the year of his big (failed) Social Security push, he used the word 8 times.

Interesting that he clearly says, in 2007, that we are failing at protecting Social Security.
About Iraq he says: Let us find our resolve, and turn events to victory.

He also says that our commitment to Iraq is not open ended. (I thought we couldn't say that, that would be capitulating to the enemy.)
And we learn that Iraq's government has committed itself to a series of benchmarks. During the election campaign, benchmarks were of the devil.

Throughout history, Presidents have begun their State of the Union with the ringing words "The State of our Union is strong".

This year he couldn't bring himself to begin this way. So he slipped it in the last sentence: We've met challenges and faced dangers, and we know that more lie ahead. Yet we can go forward with confidence -- because the State of our Union is strong, our cause in the world is right, and tonight that cause goes on.

Check out the site, it is a lot of fun.

Hillary

Well, she's done it.
She's going to run.

I hope they don't, but the Religious Right is going to have her for dinner, if they can.

Which I don't really understand.

When her husband strayed, she stayed with him.

Sounds like pretty good family values to me.

Crickets

Diplomacy

This is what we need more of, and it is encouraging.

Public American diplomacy in the Middle East: high level (Condoleeza Rice) and public. The Isreali-Palestinian conflict lies at the heart of much of the problem in the Middle East. Anything that will help solve that problem will help reduce terrorism.

Good.

Good.

It appears that Rice also wants to try to sell Bushes' plan for Iraq. I hope she listens well.

A good car salesman listens to his customer.

The latest funnies

"The good news is last night President Bush finally admitted he's made mistakes in Iraq. The bad news is he's planning to make the same mistakes again." --Jay Leno

"After hearing the president's speech, Democrats in the Senate are seeking bipartisan support for a non-binding resolution opposing President Bush's deployment of his military escalation. In response, President Bush said, 'Huh?'" --Conan O'Brien

"President Bush is now calling for sending 21,000 more troops to Iraq. How does he come up with that number? I don't even think 21,000 people in the country think it's a good idea." --Jay Leno

"President Bush announced he's creating 20,000 new jobs. They're all in Iraq." --Jay Leno

"Yesterday Al Sharpton was asked about running for president, and he said, 'I'm not hearing a lot of meat. When the meats hit the fire, we'll find out if there's some real meat there.' Personally, I think it's a shame President Bush can't run again, because that would be one hell of a debate." --Conan O'Brien

Guts

News report today:
A British newspaper reported Sunday that Prince Harry (who is third in line to the British throne) was scheduled to begin final training for deployment to Iraq with his Army regiment -- but the defense ministry said no decision had been made on whether his regiment would be deployed.

John McCain's son may also go to Iraq, now that the President needs more troops.

There were, of course, many stories going around about G.W.'s stint in the military. Who knows what the truth really is, but the very fact that these stories are out there (and no stories of this nature would even be taken seriously if they were about John McCain, his son, or Prince Harry) says something about our Commander in Chief.

Failure according to Bush

You have certainly seen or heard this, but if not, here it is.
And it isn't even a late-night joke!
Apparently Bushspeak and Rumsspeak is contagious.

An interview by CNN with Frances Townsend, Homeland Security Advisor:

HENRY: You know, going back to September 2001, the president said, dead or alive, we're going to get him. Still don't have him. I know you are saying there's successes on the war on terror, and there have been. That's a failure.

TOWNSEND: Well, I'm not sure -- it's a success that hasn't occurred yet. I don't know that I view that as a failure.

They don't have to come

A first reaction to the speech of President Bush.

He said this: The consequences of failure are clear: (..) Our enemies would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the American people. On September the 11th, 2001, we saw what a refuge for extremists on the other side of the world could bring to the streets of our own cities.


116 Americans died in December 2006 in Iraq. The total number of deaths to this point is 3019.
If the violence continues at this same pace (and most - including Bush himself - expect it to get worse) another 1000 Americans will lose their lives in 2007.
On September 11 2001 we lost 2996 Americans.

The terrorists don't have to come to the streets of our cities anymore.
They can kill us right in the streets of Baghdad.

Poll

Another facet

An article by Ryan Beiler on another aspect of Saddam and Iraq. Click here for the weblog.

One salient point that I've found missing from most commentary on the execution is that the specific crime of which Hussein was convicted - the 1982 massacre of 148 Iraqis in the town of Dujail - occurred while Hussein was being aided by the United States.

The infamous photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Hussein was taken in 1983. What's more, the U.S. actively supported Hussein throughout the '80s in spite of reports of such atrocities, including the use of chemical weapons. This isn't conspiracy theory - the report linked above is drawn almost entirely from mainstream media sources like The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. Of course, this isn't news to anyone who's followed Iraq-U.S. politics for any length of time. The joke about how "the U.S. knows Iraq has WMDs because we have the receipts," isn't far off.

It just seems especially ironic that so many Americans are celebrating the death of a tyrant who was executed for a crime committed while he was "our S.O.B." Iraqis had long suffered because of U.S. support for Saddam, and now American servicemen and women have joined them in paying dearly for the war to remove him.

Biting my fingernails

Apparently George Bush is going to unveil his plan for Iraq next week.

I’m pretty nervous about it.

I have just minimal knowledge of how other cultures work, and the culture of the Middle East is not my area of experience. But it seems that some common sense things are being ignored in the Iraq situation that even I can figure out. It is interesting to see people like Zbigniew Brezinski and William Cohen say things on Wolf Blitzer’s Late Edition that echo what I think. A couple of things:

1. Don’t ever make a martyr out of someone. Every culture has its martyrs, who are heroes. The worst thing you can do if you are trying to stamp out a resistance movement is create martyrs for it. That means, I would think, that one would wait with Saddam’s execution until the situation has stabilized in Iraq. Insisting on doing it now only inflames the resistance. And don't tell me that the U.S. did not influence the timing of the execution.

2. A war should always be for just causes and bring justice (at least from our Western perspective). By not making Saddam stand trial for all the crimes of which he was charged you create a deep sense of injustice in many victims. I believe you could heal things in Iraq more quickly by insuring that everyone feels he or she has had the chance to seek and find justice or reconciliation. South Africa provides a fine example of that, it seems to me.

3. Avoid looking like an occupying army. The U.S. fumbled this ball from the beginning, and while it looks like a small thing, transporting Saddam to the execution chamber and his body afterwards cannot have helped things in that regard.

4. The hardest war to fight and win is a guerrilla war. We should have learned that in Viet Nam. World history is clear on the difficulty of winning guerilla warfare. If Bush does increase the troops in Iraq, and only by 30 or 40 thousand, it will show that he and his advisors do not understand this basic principle. We either need to get out of the guerrilla war as soon as possible or send in 400,000 troops and an atomic weapon to finish off the job. Now.

5. You cannot impose, from outside, a political system or a religion on a people. Democracy, for example. You have to win hearts and change the culture from inside. The barrel of a gun will never do it.

The signals we are getting are not at all encouraging to me.

But I still hope.

Attitude toward enemies

A quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Don't forget that he voluntarily returned to Germany from a safe position in New York because he felt he could not minister to his people after the Nazi regime was gone if he didn't suffer with his people under the regime.
And we was finally hanged by the Nazis in prison in 1945, just three weeks before the liberation. He has the right to speak about the Christian attitude towards enemies:

[N]ever be conceited. With respect to our attitude toward our enemies, this means first, remember that you were God's enemy and that, without having earned it or being worthy of it, you were met with mercy. It means second, remember that God hung on the cross for your enemy too, and love God and God loves you.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The secrets died with him

Robert Fisk is a controversial figure. Some say he is in bed with the Arab countries of the Middle East and so his reporting and criticism of the West can't be trusted. I don't really know. It is obvious that he has spent much time in the Middle East and gets to places (partly because he is a very brave man) that other reporters don't. It certainly is worth listening to his voice.

This article (one of a couple) on the death of Saddam from which I reproduce a few excerpts:

We've shut him up. The moment Saddam's hooded executioner pulled the lever of the trapdoor in Baghdad yesterday morning, Washington's secrets were safe. The shameless, outrageous, covert military support which the United States - and Britain - gave to Saddam for more than a decade remains the one terrible story which our presidents and prime ministers do not want the world to remember. And now Saddam, who knew the full extent of that Western support - given to him while he was perpetrating some of the worst atrocities since the Second World War - is dead….

Iran's official history of the eight-year war with Iraq states that Saddam first used chemical weapons against it on 13 January 1981. AP's correspondent in Baghdad, Mohamed Salaam, was taken to see the scene of an Iraqi military victory east of Basra. "We started counting - we walked miles and miles in this fucking desert, just counting," he said. "We got to 700 and got muddled and had to start counting again ... The Iraqis had used, for the first time, a combination - the nerve gas would paralyse their bodies ... the mustard gas would drown them in their own lungs. That's why they spat blood."

At the time, the Iranians claimed that this terrible cocktail had been given to Saddam by the US. Washington denied this. But the Iranians were right. The lengthy negotiations which led to America's complicity in this atrocity remain secret - Donald Rumsfeld was one of President Ronald Reagan's point-men at this period - although Saddam undoubtedly knew every detail. But a largely unreported document, "United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences of the Persian Gulf War", stated that prior to 1985 and afterwards, US companies had sent government-approved shipments of biological agents to Iraq. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax, andEscherichia coli (E. coli). That Senate report concluded that: "The United States provided the Government of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-systems programs, including ... chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings, chemical warfare filling equipment."……

We still don't know - and with Saddam's execution we will probably never know - the extent of US credits to Iraq, which began in 1982…..

The whole truth died with Saddam Hussein in the Baghdad execution chamber yesterday. Many in Washington and London must have sighed with relief that the old man had been silenced for ever.

Happy New Year

In 2007 a new look for this blog, which is not read by too many people. The last count showed an average of 6 persons per day.

That's alright - it gives me a chance to express myself, particularly on politics, Iraq, etc. If you want to read a really good blog that will make you think and laugh, try Jon Swift.

Anyway - a Happy New Year to all 6 of you!

I hope you have a healthy, happy, fruitful and blessed 2007!

Sleeping again.

According to news reports, President Bush was sleeping when Saddam Hussein was executed.
Let's see:
6 AM in Iraq is 4 AM in Amstderdam
4 AM in Amsterdam is 10 PM in Washington.
Bush was not in Washington, but in Texas.
10 PM in Washington is 9 PM in Texas.
And Bush is sleeping.
A week or so ago there was a column in the paper here about the leaders of the "good old days" who slept very little. Churchill was reported to sleep as little as possible, but he always took a nap during the day. Especially during World War II Churchill could bring himself to get to bed early at all.
And now we are in a 'war aginst terrorism', in which our freedom hangs in the balance.
And our leader is already sleeping at 9PM.

The Innkeeper

by Frederick Buechner

“That was a long, long time ago,” said the Innkeeper, “and a long, long way away. But the memories of men are also long, and nobody has forgotten anything about my own sad, queer part in it all unless maybe they have forgotten the truth about it. But you can never blame people for forgetting the truth because it is, after all, such a subtle and evasive commodity. In fact, all that distinguishes a truth from a lie may finally be no more than just the flutter of an eyelid or the tone of a voice. If I were to say, ‘I BELIEVE!’ that would be a lie, but if I were to say, ‘I believe…’ that might be the truth. So I do not blame posterity for forgetting the subtleties and making me out to be the black villain of the piece – the heartless one who said, ‘No room! No room!’ I’ll even grant you that a kind of villainy may be part of the truth. But if you want to speak the whole truth, then you will have to call me a villain with a catch in your voice, at least a tremor, a hesitation maybe, with even the glitter of almost a tear in your eye. Because nothing is entirely black, you know. Not even the human heart.

“I speak to you as mean of the world,” said the Innkeeper. “Not as idealists but as realists. Do you know what it is like to run an inn – to run a business, a family, to run anything in this world for that matter, even your own life? It is like being lost in a forest of a million trees,” said the Innkeeper, “and each tree is a thing to be done. Is there fresh linen on all the beds? Did the children put on their coats before they went out? Has the letter been written, the book read? Is there money enough left in the bank? Today we have food in our bellies and clothes on our backs, but what can we do to make sure that we will have them still tomorrow? A million trees. A million things.

“Until finally we have eyes for nothing else, and whatever we see turns into a thing. The sparrow lying in the dust at your feet – just a thing to be kicked out of the way, not the mystery of death. The calling of children outside your window – just a distraction, an irrelevance, not life, not the wildest miracle of them all. That whispering in the air that comes sudden and soft from nowhere – only the wind, the wind…

“Of course I remember very well the evening they arrived. I was working on my accounts and looked up just in time to see the woman coming through the door. She walked in that slow, heavy-footed way that women have in their last months, as though they are walking in a dream or at the bottom of the sea. Her husband stood a little behind her – a tongue-tied, helpless kind of man, I though. I cannot remember either of them saying anything, although I suppose some words must have passed. But at least it was mostly silence. The clumsy silence of the poor. You know what I mean. It was clear enough what they wanted.

“The stars had come out. I remember the stars perfectly though I don’t know why I should, sitting inside as I was. And my wife’s cat jumped up onto the table where I was sitting. I had not stood up, of course. There was mainly just silence. Then it happened much in the way you have heard. I did not lie about there being no room left – there really was none – though perhaps if there had been a room, I might have lied. As much for their sakes as for the sake of the inn. Their kind would have felt more at home in a stable, that’s all, and I do not mean that unkindly either. God knows.

“Later that night, when the baby came, I was not there,” the Innkeeper said. “I was lost in the forest somewhere, the unenchanted forest of a million trees. Fifteen steps to the cellar, and watch out for your head going down. Firewood to the left. If the fire goes out, the heart freezes. Only the wind, the wind. I speak to you as men of the world. So when the baby came, I was not around, and I saw none of it. As for what I heard – just at that moment itself of birth when nobody turns into somebody – I do not rightly know what I heard.

“But this I do know. My own true love. All your life long, you wait for your own true love to come – we all of us do – our destiny, our joy, our heart’s desire. So how am I to say it, gentlemen? When he came, I missed him.

“Pray for me, brothers and sisters. Pray for the Innkeeper. Pray for me, and for us all, my own true love."

Mideast rules to live by

It would really be good if our government had some understanding of how things work in the Middle East. I know from my experience working in other cultrues how important it is to understand how the other person thinks, without passing judgement as to whether that is the correct way to think or not. The worlde is made up of different cultures, and we need to learn to work within that framework. We don´t have any choice. This article by Thomas Friedman is good along those lines.

For a long time, I let my hopes for a decent outcome in Iraq triumph over what I had learned reporting from Lebanon during its civil war. Those hopes vanished last summer. So, I’d like to offer President Bush my updated rules of Middle East reporting, which also apply to diplomacy, in hopes they’ll help him figure out what to do next in Iraq.

Rule 1: What people tell you in private in the Middle East is irrelevant. All that matters is what they will defend in public in their own language. Anything said to you in English, in private, doesn’t count. In Washington, officials lie in public and tell the truth off the record. In the Mideast, officials say what they really believe in public and tell you what you want to hear in private.

Rule 2: Any reporter or U.S. Army officer wanting to serve in Iraq should have to take a test, consisting of one question: “Do you think the shortest distance between two points is a straight line?” If you answer yes, you can’t go to Iraq. You can serve in Japan, Korea or Germany — not Iraq.

Rule 3: If you can’t explain something to Middle Easterners with a conspiracy theory, then don’t try to explain it at all — they won’t believe it.

Rule 4: In the Middle East, never take a concession, except out of the mouth of the person doing the conceding. If I had a dollar for every time someone agreed to recognize Israel on behalf of Yasir Arafat, I could paper my walls.

Rule 5: Never lead your story out of Lebanon, Gaza or Iraq with a cease-fire; it will always be over before the next morning’s paper.

Rule 6: In the Middle East, the extremists go all the way, and the moderates tend to just go away.

Rule 7: The most oft-used expression by moderate Arab pols is: “We were just about to stand up to the bad guys when you stupid Americans did that stupid thing. Had you stupid Americans not done that stupid thing, we would have stood up, but now it’s too late. It’s all your fault for being so stupid.”

Rule 8: Civil wars in the Arab world are rarely about ideas — like liberalism vs. communism. They are about which tribe gets to rule. So, yes, Iraq is having a civil war as we once did. But there is no Abe Lincoln in this war. It’s the South vs. the South.

Rule 9: In Middle East tribal politics there is rarely a happy medium. When one side is weak, it will tell you, “I’m weak, how can I compromise?” And when it’s strong, it will tell you, “I’m strong, why should I compromise?”

Rule 10: Mideast civil wars end in one of three ways: a) like the U.S. civil war, with one side vanquishing the other; b) like the Cyprus civil war, with a hard partition and a wall dividing the parties; or c) like the Lebanon civil war, with a soft partition under an iron fist (Syria) that keeps everyone in line. Saddam used to be the iron fist in Iraq. Now it is us. If we don’t want to play that role, Iraq’s civil war will end with A or B.

Rule 11: The most underestimated emotion in Arab politics is humiliation. The Israeli-Arab conflict, for instance, is not just about borders. Israel’s mere existence is a daily humiliation to Muslims, who can’t understand how, if they have the superior religion, Israel can be so powerful. Al Jazeera’s editor, Ahmed Sheikh, said it best when he recently told the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche: “It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about seven million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation with its 350 million. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every Arab. The West’s problem is that it does not understand this.”

Rule 12: Thus, the Israelis will always win, and the Palestinians will always make sure they never enjoy it. Everything else is just commentary.

Rule 13: Our first priority is democracy, but the Arabs’ first priority is “justice.” The oft-warring Arab tribes are all wounded souls, who really have been hurt by colonial powers, by Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, by Arab kings and dictators, and, most of all, by each other in endless tribal wars. For Iraq’s long-abused Shiite majority, democracy is first and foremost a vehicle to get justice. Ditto the Kurds. For the minority Sunnis, democracy in Iraq is a vehicle of injustice. For us, democracy is all about protecting minority rights. For them, democracy is first about consolidating majority rights and getting justice.

Rule 14: The Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi had it right: “Great powers should never get involved in the politics of small tribes.”

Rule 15: Whether it is Arab-Israeli peace or democracy in Iraq, you can’t want it more than they do.

"This week a top general at the Pentagon said the War on Terror could take a 100 years to fight. President Bush was furious about the 100-year prediction and said, 'Stop setting a fixed timetable'" --Conan O'Brien

"They had the Iraqi Commission report and President Bush says he will not make a decision about getting us out of Iraq until 2007. He says he wants to give it some careful thought ... unlike getting us into Iraq." --David Letterman

"Did you know former President Garfield could write Latin with one hand and Greek with the other at the same time? That was Garfield. When President Bush heard about it, he said, 'We had a talking cat for president?'" --Jay Leno