Public Nuisance |
|
|
Random commentary and senseless acts of blogging.
The first Republican president once said, "While the people retain their virtue and their vigilance, no administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can seriously injure the government in the short space of four years." If Mr. Lincoln could see what's happened in these last three-and-a-half years, he might hedge a little on that statement. Blog critics Gryffindor House Slytherin House Ravenclaw House House Elves Beth Jacob Prisoners of Azkaban Muggles
Party Animals:
Jewish Bloggers Join >>  
|
Monday, March 31, 2003
Staying Power At the moment, support for the war is strong and actually growing. That has an obvious cause in the tendency of the country in wartime to rally around the President. It's still possible that resistance in Iraq will crumble as it did in Afghanistan. If it doesn't, it's a real question how long the country will accept a war that is causing significant American casualties. The man who Saddam Hussein reportedly takes as his political model once famously said, "One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." It's an understanding that should be respected; the author was an expert on death with few peers. For us every death, at least among our own soldiers, becomes a tragedy. We are routinely shown photographs of the dead soldiers, interviews with his or her family. The result is that the number of deaths very quickly comes to seem overwhelming, even if our casualties, by normal military standards, are incredibly low. (At the last count I heard, a day or two back, the US and UK had 55 killed, a rather low number for what has been accomplished.) Monuments to our earlier wars depicted triumphant Generals or heroic soldiers; the monument to our last names carefully every one of the 50,000 Americans killed.
A country that counts its casualties in this manner seems to me unlikely to be willing to sustain a long war, unless the war is absolutely necessary or our own casualties are extremely low. This isn't necessarily a bad thing: war is sometimes necessary but always an evil. The political restrictions thus placed on Presidents are probably desirable on the whole; particular as a counter balance against the immediate surge in popularity that Presidents always receive in war. When this war began, I was quite certain there would be another set for next year to help Bush's re-election; if the war does come out a success, I still think that very probable. Monday, March 24, 2003
Glenn pointed a few days ago to a friendly reception for American troops entering the southern Iraq town of Safwan and said, "This is the 'peace' movement's worst nightmare, isn't it?" One day later, another journalist reported (via Tacitus) much more ambiguous support for coalition troops in Safwan - a Shia city that joined the revolt in 1991 and ought to be ecstatic over Saddam's eminent demise. And this account of haterd for Americans in Baghdad, a city of several million that we will have to occupy to end the war, is downright grim.
Along with recent acounts from Nasariyah, this suggests that hopes the Iraqis would throw down weapons and greet American soldiers as liberators look to be wish fulfillment fantasies. Josh Marshall also noticed this, in discussing that we still don't seem to really control Basra:
Basra is in heavily Shi'a southern Iraq. And it's garrisoned by the regime's least reliable troops. So if the regime's military were going to fold quickly or be overwhelmed by restive civilians, you'd expect it to be there. The fact that it hasn't makes it much less likely that that sort of happy outcome will happen in Sunni central Iraq, among the Special Republican Guards, Saddam's Tikriti tribesmen, and others closely associated with the regime. In short, Saddam seems to have a good number of troops who are willing to fight and die for what appears to be a doomed regime.
We doves and doubting hawks may not get much of our 'worst nightmare', Instead, we're likely to get a nasty and bloody war, serious casualties on both sides, and an ugly mess, possibly involving bio/chemical weapons, when we finally go into Baghdad.
Which, oddly enough, really is our worst nightmare.
Sunday, March 23, 2003
I Knew There Must Be Something Finally, thanks to google, a useful function for this blog has been discovered. Mostly bad news from the field today. Heavy casualties in Nasariyah, officers of the 101st fragged by a Muslim soldier, soldiers captured in the south, and now a copter crash in Afghanistan with 6 deaths. The worst element of this is that there are signs of sinificantly more willingness to fight by Iraqi soldiers than we had hoped for. It hardly changes the overall outcome, but if this is widespread the victory is likely to be ugly, with substantial casualties for our soldiers and Iraqi civilians. I haven't heard anything new on the messy situation in the North today, where Turkish troops have crossed into Iraq, unless they haven't, in which case they're about to, unless they're not. Following a war in real time there is going to be a certain amount of confusion. Diane points out that Salam Pax is now hitting the big time, having been noticed by the Washington Post. He's even become popular enough to rip off. This article from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, already republished by at least one other online service, is quite clearly an edited version of Salam's posts from this week. But nothing on the page mentions the source of the article or links to the "Where's Raed" blog. The sole attribution is to "an Iraqi in Baghdad". IWPR's online republication conditions state that:
Those conditions are fair. You would think that IWPR's authors, including the pseudonymous ones, are entitled to the same consideration.
Update: Now that Salam is back, I sent e-mail requesting confirmation that the usage was unauthorized. However, his in box is full and the message bounced. Even if the message had gotten through, it's always possible that Salam has other concerns than IP rights at the moment.
Friday, March 21, 2003
It's too early for a final judgment, but after a few days of war, the containment policy of 1991 - 2003 appears to have been very effective. I have to assume that Saddam has nothing that could hit Israel or he would have already tried to do so. So far, he hasn't been able to hit our base in Qatar, or even Kuwait City, which is practically next door to his borders. He did keep illegal Scuds, at least according to the official US claims, but they've been completely ineffective. It's been claimed that Patriots have been successfully knocking down the Scuds fired at Kuwait City. The same claims in 1991 turned out to have been grossly exaggerated, in careful post-war analysis. It will be interesting to see if the Patriot system has improved sufficiently to be really effective. Unfortunately, even if it is effective, it would probably work only against the sort of missiles Saddam has, which are at least 20 years out of date.
As for the famous WMD, not a peep. The truth is, it's far harder to make such systems effective than some hawks have been suggesting. It's easy to say that a liter of botulin poison could kill 100,000 people, or whatever the number is, but that assumes you can divide it into that many doses and give one to each victim. Biological weapons are very difficult - nobody has ever yet successfully created any truly effective weapon for delivering biotoxins, or at least demonstrated such a weapon if it does exist. If an enemy does manage to hit us with some kind of bio nasty that goes out of control, it will be the ultimate blowback weapon: wealthy nations like the US and EU will have the resources to control and stamp out the resulting plagues relatively quickly, but before it is fully eliminated it is almost certain to spread back into the Third World where far less advanced medical infrastructures will be overwhelmed.
Manufacturing sarin or other deadly agents is also in the capability of any reasonably advanced country; again equipping it with a dispersal mechanism and ensuring that the agents can be stored safely while you wait for an opportunity to use the weapon are harder. When Saddam used gas, believed to have been mustard gas, against the Kurds, it was dumped out of helicopters. That sort of delivery system only works if your anti-aircraft defenses are rather inferior to those of the US.
Nuclear weapons are easier to build and pack an unmatched destructive impact, but putting one into a missile is far harder. You have to be advanced enough to make a bomb of small mass in a specific shape with internal components that will survive the G forces of a missile's flight, which is vastly harder than just making a bomb. And of course putting your package into a missile guarantees that the recipient will have a return address.
The real WMD threat against the US continues to be nukes, and nukes smuggled in rather than fired at us. Tuesday, March 18, 2003
Slate doesn't exactly need my encouragement, but this piece showing how competent diplomacy, which in our case we have not got, can build a real coalition is indispensable. Countdown Several bloggers are currently writing from the front lines. You probably already know about Raed, who, along with some others, is allegedly blogging from Baghdad. I've always been a little suspicious that anyone would actually blog from Baghdad - Raed doesn't make any pretense at genuflecting to Saddam, and Iraq doesn't exactly have freedom of speech - but other than the question of why they haven't been hauled away by the Muktabarrat (which can probably be explained by a lack of technical skill in the Iragi police state), it seems utterly real. There's a war correspondent blogging from Iraqi Kurdistan, and Imshin is building a security room in Israel. From half a world away, it's a little surreal hearing from people who are about to be in the middle of a war. My country will be at war in about 30+ hours, and how is my own life affected? Pretty nearly zero. The local buses, which I often use anyway, seem more crowded lately due to runaway gas prices and my long term investments are mostly sinking at the moment. And obviously I'm affected in general by the shaky economy. I'm worried, but if I feel like it, there's nothing to stop me from forgetting about the whole thing and stepping out to enjoy a beautiful spring day. The war is happening to other people in other places.
It's always been like this for American civilians, at least since 1865. In this as in so many other ways, we are the fortunate, and sometimes spoiled, children of history. Death comes to everyone, but the other three horsemen ride largely through other, less happier lands. This is partly why 9/11, and the threat of future attacks, has been such a shock to us. Before it we had a feeling of safety in our cocoon, even if it was often imaginary. For years, whenever terrorists struck in London or Paris, the US media would always play stories in the days following about Americans who had cancelled travel plans to those cities, or others hundreds of miles away, to stay home in Chicago or New York, where they would be safe except for the 5 or 6 murders and a few hundred other violent crimes that were committed every day. Today, it's largely the opposite. Unless you live or work in a handful of major cities, your chances of being hit by a terrorist attack are fantastically remote. But people in Connecticut and Wisconsin are busy sealing off their homes with duct tape. The Greek ideal of moderation and balance is a trick we've never mastered.
I have one other advantage over most people on the verge of a war: I know we're going to win. I worry over the long term consequences, especially in the hands of the proven incompetents who will be running the war and the more challenging reconstruction. I worry for those who are about to die. But combat itself holds few terrors for the most powerful military that has ever existed, a machine that was able, a few years back, to devastate an enemy with ruinous bombing for weeks without suffering a single casualty. Such power breed hubris, a fault that will surely hurt us someday, but if it happens in Iraq, it will more likely be in the occupation than in the conquest. The Answer Is Blowing in the Wind (Between Your Ears) This weeks funniest attack againgst politicized celebrities comes courtesy of Charles Dodgson. It seems these letter writers were upset at hearing anti-war comments between songs at - a Joan Baez concert! Hey, I just came to hear her sing. Who knew she was into this anti-war stuff? Joan Baez performed beautifully in song and on guitar, but again and again between songs, she returned to her theme of bashing President Bush. During the encore, when she channeled herself into a young Arkansas girl complaining about Bush in a poem set to percussion, we had had too much and walked out.
And if that isn't bad enough, she's probably going to start doing Dixie Chicks covers. At least she still has a better voice than them.
Monday, March 17, 2003
Howard Kurtz has a rather peculiar piece on the Weisman letter in today's column. After giving a statement by a Post editor that newspaper policy is to reproduce quotes accurately, he then cites the White House: White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan says that the practice is "infrequent" and that it was done "to accommodate Jonathan," who had told her by e-mail that the unnamed official was "very skittish about even talking on background." But Weisman says he was told the arrangement was the only way the interview would be granted.
That's the end of the piece. He doesn't ask what is meant by the vague term 'infrequent', a non-denial denial which is an implicit confirmation that the practice has been applied in other instances. He doesn't inquire into the strange claim that it was done for the benefit of the reporter, who obviously would have required this 'benefit' only if his source was afraid to be quoted even anonymously. As a professional journalist who lives in DC and must know hundreds of reporters who use White House sources for their stories, he probably knows if this practice is widespread and could certainly find out, but he doesn't say. He doesn't raise the question of whether other, similarly doctored, quotes have appeared in the Post, nor does Jill Dutt, the editor whose assertion that such quotes violate policy appears both in Kurtz's column and on Romanesko's letter page. Instapundit has yet more proof of sweeping liberal bias in the media. It seems that a reporter at a Texas newspaper sent a nasty e-mail to a group called Young Conservatives of Texas - and was fired the same day. I suppose by the wacky logic of Conservoland this makes a certain sort of sense - in spite of the fact that expressing conservative opinions probably gets you a TV pundit gig at least and expressing liberal opinions gets you fired, some journalists are still daring to express liberal opinions. Although at least one fewer than a few days ago. The Young Conservatives of Texas are pleased to have come one step closer to their goal of assuring a fair shake for conservatives by eliminating all other voices: "In light of revelatory recent books by Ann Coulter and Bernard Goldberg on media bias, it is encouraging for conservatives that steps are finally being taken to address this widespread problem."
Overall, the YCT seem pretty sane for a group of this kind, even if their legislative agenda does sound a bit like a parody of frat house conservatism. They are, needless to say, big fans of the Second Amendment, and advocate allowing college students to keep guns in university-owned housing, as well as the right to carry concealed guns without a permit. Their enthusiasm for the remainder of the Bill of Rights is more restrained. Here is the YCT's full list of "Personal Freedom" legislative objectives:
In an era when the Attorney General claims the right to label American citizens as 'enemy combatants' and hold them indefinitely without charges or access to counsel, some of us might think that there are more pressing personal freedom concerns. But YCT is too busy protesting Janet Reno speeches to bother with such trivialities. (It is true that the 'legislative agenda' I used was from early 2001, before 9/11 and the Patriot Act. But the news page contains numerous items from the past year, not one of which mentions any concern over government overreaching since 9/11.)
YCT also describes itself as non-partisan, which presumably allows it to operate as a 501(c)(3) organization. And it's true that they don't exclusively support one party - I looked over 45 of their endorsements, and found that only 44 of them were Republicans. Clearly a group with no partisan tendencies at all. I watched Chris Matthews on Sunday. Matthews has not only retained his MSNBC show, he also has a new show on NBC, or at least the local affiliate, despite having lower ratings than Donahue, who has been cancelled. This obviously has nothing to do with the fact that Donahue is a liberal and Matthews, who was himself somewhat liberal when he was a journalist instead of a TV loudmouth, a right winger. I can't find a transcript for the Matthews show, which makes it impossible to really illustrate my point here, but is otherwise a very endurable loss. (It turns out there is a transcript site for this show here, but, as of Monday, the weekend show isn't up.) Matthews, Joe Klein, and a few other guests, were discussing the thorough failure of US diplomacy in the UN - only a week after a news conference in which the only major development was a Bush pledge to get a new Security Council vote, win or lose, the US has now decided not to force a vote on a resolution which will not only receive multiple vetoes but probably an absolute majority of 'No' votes. The guests were debating who should be blamed for the mess - was it the French, Powell's moderates, or Cheney's hardliners? The one prospect never even raised was that some part of the blame might belong to George Bush himself. It all sounded very much like a Royalist discussion - the Crown by definition can't make a mistake, so when the Crown quite obviously has f@#*ed the pooch in a big way, the question is which minister has to accept blame. You can see the same thing going on in this otherwise intelligent post-mortem by blogger Daniel Drezner, and to some degree in the Times and Post articles it references, although these do have limited criticism of Bush.
The diplomatic fiasco has Bush's prints all over it. The lack of compromise, sticking to one policy and refusing to modify it in changing circumstances, and using heavyhanded threats to gain votes are pretty much trademarks of this administration. It works in domestic politics due to the Republican majority in Congress, the supine media, and the frequently spineless character of the opposition, but it clearly hasn't worked on the global stage. Last summer, I contrasted Bush's approaches in domestic and foreign policy, offering some mild praise for the latter; today it seems that the relative openness that marked Bush's earlier post-9/11 foreign policy either has departed or was always a construct of wishful thinking. Sunday, March 16, 2003
Last night's SNL was soft on Bush as they almost always are, but made up a little in the opening sketch by being brutal on the invertabrate delta-minuses in the White House press corps. The opening sketch was a parody of Bush's press conference with questions even dumber than the real ones. My personal favorite was a reporter from the 'Homeless Street News' who asked, "Mr President, can I have a dollar? And I have a follow-up. Can I have another dollar?" The only reporter in the sketch who asked hard questions, obviously intended to be Helen Thomas, was gagged and then tranquilized with a dart. Saturday, March 15, 2003
Best opening sentence of a post this week: If I have learned anything from the last year of Victor Davis Hanson editorials, it is that while the effete and impotent eunuchs of Europe obsess over American opinion, crippled with jealousy and self-loathing at their own weakness, the United States strides boldly forward, jaw firm, shoulders square, gleaming eyes transfixed on the brave future just now dawning over the horizon of destiny. Tuesday, March 11, 2003
The Fajitas that Ate SFPD Earl Sanders and Alex Fagan Sr, the top two officers indicted in the SFPD coverup case, have been dropped from the indictment, after the DA determined there was insufficient evidence to proceed against them. The cases against the other 5 officers accused of conspiracy and obstruction and the 3 accused of beating two men who refused to hand over a take out meal of steak fajitas will go forward. While those cops willing to speak publicly have supported the indictees, there is clearly a minority who support the indictments, but feel intimidated and will only speak anonymously. That includes some gay officers - one other victim of alleged excess force by indicted officer Alex Fagan Jr is Kevin Jordan, a gay man who is now suing the city and alleges he was victim of a hate crime. There are reports that gay officers have avoided working with Fagan, as well as a controversy last year over the demotion of the SFPD's highest ranking out gay, former Deputy Chief Melinda Pengel. It also includes many who feel that the current command team, largely hand-picked by Willie Brown, is a corrupt insiders club. There have been many incidents of questionable police conduct in recent years, several resulting in deaths, while the SFPD has consistently cleared its own people of all misconduct.
Willie Brown himself is an interesting case. He has been a political legend in this area for a long time. Brown grew up in Texas in a poor family - his parents were sharecroppers, IIRC. His local career dates back to the 1960s, when he litigated and won key cases to open up SF neighborhoods that had previously been segragated. He went into the California Assembly and became Speaker for many years. He was an extremely powerful Speaker, with a legendary ability to control which bills died and which were passed. For a long time, he was probably the most powerful liberal politician in the state. After a term limits initiative forced him out, he became mayor.
Brown is admired for his intelligence, ability, and flamboyance, but has never been regarded as particularly clean. Through his career in office he has maintained a private law practice, routinely taking clients who had important interests with various public bodies he could influence or control. The law office has made him a rich man, and he is famous for his expensive suits and, since his divorce, the string of young beautiful women who accompany him to social and political events. The fact that he has never been indicted, although he was rumored to be the main target of an FBI operation that did result in some state lawmakers being jailed, has always been attributed more to cleverness than honesty. Brown's reputation for dubious deals has done little damage to his popularity. He is personally popular and has been seen politically as somewhat like the Teamsters - effective enough for his constituents that they are willing to wink at the rumored corruption.
He is being term limited out again, but he wants to designate his own successor. He is backing Supervisor Gavin Newsom to be the next Mayor, and anybody other than Terence Hallinan as the next DA - perhaps at least partly because he is nervous at the thought of a maverick DA being able to investigate his administration after he retires. Hallinan is also a local progressive legend - his father Vincent worked (sometimes along with mine) to defend alleged, and sometimes real, Communists in the 1950s.
I would have voted for both Brown and Hallinan four years ago, but wouldn't back either today. Brown's whiff of corruption is turning into a festering stench, and both Hallinan and Brown have been ineffective at guarding public safety and fighting crime.
I mentioned in my earlier posting on this topic that SFPD is statistically among the worst big city police departments in solving major crimes. Perhaps one reason for this can be found in this article alleging an earlier incident of illegally withholding evidence by Chief Earl Sanders:
The tension doesn't let up: later that night, at an emergency Police Commission hearing, a couple of undercover narc cops threaten to eject community activist Van Jones, who is loudly declaring District Attorney Terence Hallinan "a hero."
Now I'm no expert in police procedure, but this was an emergency meeting held just after a heavily publicized indictment, covered by every local news organization with 10 or more TV cameras recording the proceedings. Is that really the best place for an undercover cop to make a statement of his support for the police brass? Wednesday, March 05, 2003
It's easy to pass by this administration's latest acts of breathtaking depravity. After all, you miss one, and another will be along tomorrow - in, fact, a few more probably came up today that you missed. But even for this bunch, the following bit of evil is pretty startling. This took place when American diplomats were trying to blackmail Mexico into supporting a new resolution against Iraq in the Security Council: "One American diplomat has given warning that a Mexican No could 'stir up feelings' against Mexicans in the United States. He draws comparisons with the Japanese-Americans who were interned after 1941, and wonders whether Mexico 'wants to stir the fires of jingoism during a war.'"
Tuesday, March 04, 2003
Guns and Snoozes The new movie Gods and Generals is strikingly open in its secessionist sympathies. At no time during the many long speeches delivered in the movie by the Confederate officers who are the focus of the vast majority of the film does anybody so much as hint that slavery is any portion of the controversy between North and South. They speak only of unstated outrages and violations committed against their states. The Union characters, who get far less screen time and are in this film ahistorically far less numerous than their Confederate opponents, do mention slavery and the Emancipation Proclamation several times. The impression left is that the North had a belief, entirely delusional, that slavery was somehow connected with the war, whose actual cause was - well, we really aren't ever told, but it must have been something just awful, because all those peace-loving God-fearing Virginia men wouldn't have gone to war without a mighty good reason. Something else which seems, on the evidence of this film, to have been a myth, was unhappy slaves. The few slaves portrayed are passionately loyal to their masters, who are equally loyal to them. In a movie that is over 3 1/2 hours long, and has time for Christmas carols, metaphysical debates, biblical quotations, a deathbed scene that seems to run an hour all by itself, and enough battlefield violence to sate the most bloodthirsty viewer, there is not a single frame that shows any kind of mistreatment of any slave.
If the Union men are rather confused about why they are fighting, they seem even more confused about how it is done. The pre-Grant Generals who faced off unsuccessfully against Robert E. Lee presumably deserve their bad reputations, but it's hard to believe they were quite as incompetent as the generals in this film, whose main plan seems to be to find an open space where their men will be exposed to maximum fire, then march around in it until there's no-one left.
The main character in this film is Stonewall Jackson. He is the one southerner in the film who mentions slavery, only to assert that it will soon die out of its own accord. This may be an accurate rendition of the beliefs of Jackson, who was, like Lee, an ardent advocate of neither slavery nor secession, but it hardly reflects more typical southern opinion. Jackson's profound faith, heavily emphasized in the movie, is also historically accurate, but the film fails to really explain or explore the contradictions between the meek religious man it presents and the military genius who spilled rivers of blood without apparently suffering greatly from a guilty conscience.
Although Gods and Generals is too much propaganda to be a good Civil War movie, it isn't a good enough movie to be effective propaganda. With too many characters, too many battles, and too many speeches, the film is simply too dull to keep an audience interested. Cops and Lawyers All defendants pleaded not guilty today in the SFPD alleged cover-up case. There were no major developments, although the hearings did produce the first public look at the indictments in the case, which an attorney on a local news program criticized as problematic on several technical grounds, including the fact that some counts were apparently tacked on in handwriting after the first draft was signed. The indictments don't seem to be on line yet, but that will presumably change soon. Three officers were indicted for assault for a fight that took place outside a bar last November. The officers were off duty at the time. One of them, Alex Fagan Jr, is the son of the Assistant Chief of the SFPD, and also has an alarming pattern of using severe force since becoming a cop in 2001. After the SFPD allegedly refused to conduct a full investigation of the incident, Chief Earl Sanders, Alex Fagan Sr, two Deputy Chiefs, a Captain, and two other senior officers were charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice. Since the indictments were issued on Friday, there has been a blizzard of charges, counter-charges, and political maneuvers.
At the moment, the story is obscure. The indictments were put out by a runaway Grand Jury, or they weren't. An unusual attempt was made to get state DA Bill Lockyer to take over the case from SF DA Terence Hallinan, a leftist who has never been popular with police or his own career staff - and lately is even less popular with Mayor Willie Brown. Depending on whom you belive, that came from Brown, or else Brown was furious when he found out that Sanders had done it without his knowledge. And not knowing what the precise alleged overt acts are, or what evidence is behind the charges, hasn't discouraged lots of people from lining up to declare the defendants innocent or guilty.
What is known is that the SFPD has the worst record for solving major crimes of any big city force in California or the country. It seems unlikely that this flurry will change that. |
