Didn't the media know we're in a war?

As much as we criticize the Americans for what they are doing in Iraq, we Canadians think we are still the good guys. And even though a majority of Canadians now want our soldiers out of Afghanistan, we still think our soldiers are the good guys.
So when our soldiers get attacked, the tone of the media coverage is, how surprising! Like, how could they attack our guys? Don't they know we're just trying to help?

. . . Lieut. Trevor Greene was chatting with dozens of elders near his forward base in Gumbad when an Afghan villager pulled an axe with a 60-centimetre handle from inside his clothing. The villager, in his 20s, held the axe high over Greene's head and yelled "Allah Akbar" - God is Great - the signature call of an Islamist suicide attacker.
The man fulfilled his destiny. He delivered his nearly lethal blow and then died where he stood, his body riddled with bullets from Capt. Kevin Schamuhn and two of his fellow soldiers . . . . The notion the act was of a lone maniac quickly disappeared.
While villagers scattered in all directions, enemy small-arms fire broke out from across the river. Canadians and their Afghan allies returned fire. Then, as things calmed slightly, another man moved toward coalition forces and tossed a hand grenade.
The Afghans and Canadians returned fire again as the grenade exploded harmlessly. Schamuhn believes the man was hit but the grenade attacker scurried away in the mayhem.
As things calmed down, a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter whisked Greene away to a Canadian hospital at Kandahar Airfield. He remains there in serious condition, awaiting a plane ride to Germany and home.
The Afghans and Canadians went into the village to find answers. All they found were seven old men and some women and children.
"There were no fighting-age males there," said Schamuhn.
"The leaders we had been speaking to earlier had disappeared and all the young men that we were talking to had disappeared."
No villager would say who the dead attacker was.
The platoon from Company A of the Princess Patricia's Light Infantry brigade in Afghanistan was making a series of stops in small villages Saturday from their forward operating base 70 kilometres north of Kandahar.
Moving into rural areas is a key part of Canada's plan to bring security and reconstruction to Kandahar province.
Villagers in a meeting hours earlier welcomed them with blankets and bread and meats.
The meetings with local leaders are known as shura and are key to getting anything done in rural areas.
The fateful meeting was off to a good start when the
attacker struck, Schamuhn said.
The first hint of trouble could only be seen in the light of hindsight, he said. "About two or three minutes prior to the incident, all the children that were present were escorted away, about 20 to 30 metres away," Schamuhn recalled. "But none of us picked up on this, there was no weird feeling, no gut feeling that something was about to go down."
Schamuhn has grown to trust villagers through dozens of encounters. He and Greene had removed their helmets and set down their arms in a sign of respect and trust. "I'm sure I've shaken hands with some people who have plotted against us," he said.
"You can't tell."
Schamuhn said he had started to believe the oft-repeated Afghan contention that foreigners are causing all the trouble. He doesn't believe it now. "This guy, he was a local villager from this village who was coerced or persuaded by some outside force to do this against us," Schamuhn said. "We were completely vulnerable to them and they took complete advantage of that. There was a lot of people who knew what was about to happen."

Yes.
Well, that would be because there's a war going on over there.
Didn't we already know this?

Have we no shame?

Do the Geneva Conventions and rule of law mean as little to Canada now as they do to the United States? This is just disgusting:

. . . neither the new Conservative government in Ottawa nor its previous Liberal governments seem troubled by [Guantanamo]. . . Not only has there been no Canadian demand for it to close, but Canada's special-forces units in Afghanistan continue to hand terrorism suspects over to U.S. forces who ship at least some of them to Guantanamo. "Canada's silence on Guantanamo is related to the fact that we are complicit in the whole process'" of seizing and holding suspects "in a twilight zone," NDP defence spokesman Bill Blaikie said yesterday. "This is typical of the way both the Liberals and Conservatives have handled the whole issue of Guantanamo," instead of joining with other governments and calling for its closing . . .

Sauce. Goose. Gander.

and all that jazz -- "PM won't co-operate as ethics commissioner looks into Emerson's defection".

Great line of the day

I love James Wolcott. In Hix Nix Crix Pix James Wolcott punctures the Oscar kvetching:

Think of the movies now considered classic . . . such as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, The Last Detail, Five Easy Pieces, Blazing Saddles, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, on and on--do these movies speak to the pieties and platitudes that William Bennett holds dear? Even back then during all the noise and excitement I remember sweet old ladies wondering why they didn't make nice movies like The Sound of Music anymore . . . Get over it, grandma! They're not going to make movies like Sound of Music anymore, they barely made them back then.
The heartland issue is such a crock, especially when it's taken up by pseudo-populist pundits who cling to both coasts and wouldn't move to the middle of the country unless the name of that middle was Chicago. Fuck the heartland. It doesn't exist. It's a metaphor for all the simple good things Americans would believe in if they flattered themselves by believing in simple good things. (Go reread Sherwood Anderson or Sinclair Lewis if you want to savor the loneliness and cultureless vacuity of so much of the bedrock America we insist on coloring with Norman Rockwell nostalgia.) It's true that more Americans than usual are unaquainted and uninterested in the Oscar pics this year, but how many Americans saw McCabe and Mrs. Miller when it came out? Or Mean Streets? Not that long ago, the Oscars noms were panned because for being an index of popularity, not quality; now quality prevails in the judging, tastes have improved even at the Golden Globes, and the kvetching chorus is complaining that the finalists chosen aren't commercial enough, and don't reflect the interests and values of average Americans. There's no such thing as an average American anymore (if there ever was), unless by "average American" you mean (as news producers and pundits seem to do) white, middle-aged, heterosexual Christian small-towners and suburbanites who won't even be watching the Academy Awards because it'll be past their bedtime and they have elk to milk the next morning.

Bombing Iraq back to the stone age

Sounds like the United States is going to "win" in Iraq by bombing it back to the stone age, killing everyone they can kill.
When everything looks like Fallaujah does -- see above -- then they can declare victory and leave.
They tried this in Vietnam, too -- at least then the anti-war movement was strong enough to stop Nixon from using nuclear weapons to "win" that war, though it was a near thing -- and it didn't work there either.
But they get despicable when they're desperate. AP is reporting that AC-130 gunships are now returning to Iraq:

The left-side ports of the AC-130s, 98-foot-long planes that can slowly circle over a target for long periods, bristle with a potent arsenal - 40 mm cannon that can fire 120 rounds per minute, and big 105 mm cannon, normally a field artillery weapon. The plane's latest version, the AC-130U, known as 'Spooky,' also carries Gatling gun-type 20 mm cannon. The gunships were designed primarily for battlefield use to place saturated fire on massed troops. In Vietnam, for example, they were deployed against North Vietnamese supply convoys along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where the Air Force claimed to have destroyed 10,000 trucks over several years. The use of AC-130s in places like Fallujah, urban settings where insurgents may be among crowded populations of noncombatants, has been criticized by human rights groups. . .

They're buying more depleted uranium shells, too.
But what's one more war crime as far as today's Pentagon is concerned?

Bush cargo cults

Thanks, Tbogg -- I hadn't realized before that the person who invented "the Clenis" and "101st Fighting Keyboarders" was Tbogg. Now he had another turn or phrase, the Bush Cargo Cult to describe people like Kate O'Beirne who will always, always think that Bush is doing the right thing and try to give him cover for his behaviour, no matter how incomprehensible it is.
The Cargo Cults, as I understand it, arose in the islands of Malaysia and Indonesia after WWII when the Americans left -- the island tribes believed that the airplanes were operated by gods and these gods would return if the islanders worshipped them in the right way, so they constructed runways and "airplane" icons to which they prayed.
And here's a few more Bush jokes:
"On Wednesday President Bush will fly to India. See, last week he met with American workers. This week he will go to India and visit their old jobs." --Jay Leno
"President Bush is on his way to India. I guess he had to go, he lost the number for tech support." --Jay Leno
"After Afghanistan, President Bush flew to India, where he was greeted by 10,000 angry protestors. As a result, most Americans spent all day on hold with computer problems." --Conan O'Brien
"He was only in Afghanistan for four hours. That may not sound like much, but it's more time than he spent in the Texas National Guard." --Jay Leno
"President Bush also going to visit Pakistan. I think he wants to put them in charge of our airport security." --Jay Leno
"President Bush is so unpopular now, in fact Dick Cheney has a higher approval rating among quail." --David Letterman
"Actually, they're going to hold off on that Dubai ports deal for 45 days while Congress debates it. 45 days, well that's good. Those problems in the Middle East tend to clear up pretty quickly." --Jay Leno
"Looks like some kind of civil war brewing in Iraq. Well, who could have seen that coming? That came out of left field, huh? They say it is total chaos over there. People are roaming the streets with guns. It's like everyone is Dick Cheney now." --Jay Leno

Broke

Well, I see Chuck Guite has a fool for a lawyer.

Faith-based chemistry

I couldn't resist sharing this one:

Gonzo bulls--t!

I hate this kind of gonzo reporting.
Sun media is trumpeting to a breathless public that "Federal justice department employees have played fast and loose with travel and hospitality rules and cost taxpayers a bundle, an internal audit reveals"
This isn't true at all. Its an inflated story manufactured to embarass the government and a bunch of civil servants who have done virtually nothing wrong.
Here's the actual report Travel and Hospitality - March 2005. The auditors reviewed 331 travel expense claims from a two year period, and found 4 (that's right, four) where the civil servants submitted incorrect claims for personal travel combined with business travel, and one or two where there was some kind of fraud -- the report notes that a civil servant has been fired. Oh, yeah, and there were a few instances where the travel permission form wasn't filled out in quite as much detail as Treasury Board requires, like sometimes it didn't specify the exact kind of air travel authorized, and sometimes the form didn't explain why a government-approved hotel had not been used. The report also notes in its Introduction, however, that the these travel claims are mostly small beer:

. . . a large percentage of the Department's travel transactions are small. For example, in the two fiscal years 2002–2003 and 2003–2004, on average, approximately 70 percent of travel that was classified as Travel–Public Servants was for claims of $500 or less. Similarly, over the same two fiscal years, approximately 85 percent of departmental hospitality claims were for $500 or less.

Its too bad nobody bothered to read the report before writing this story. At least the story admits, rather grudginly, that the department cut its travel expenses in half from 2002-03 to 2003-04, though apparently saving us taxpayers $6 million a year isn't deserving of any credit.

Accident update

Well, so for the last 18 months we've been planning this trip to Britain -- my first time ever overseas, going with my husband and sister and brother to see the Crufts dog show, spend St. Patricks day in Dublin, plus see London and Edinburgh. Trip of a lifetime and we were supposed to leave next Wednesday.
So today my doctor tells me that its not likely that I will be well enough to go -- I still have pain in my chest from the broken ribs, and in my neck from whiplash, I cannot sleep for more than about three hours at a time, I am still using Tylenol #3s, my knee is still bunged up so I cannot walk very well, and I still have enough problems with edema in my legs that I might not be able to tolerate the flight either.
But, but, but...
So my sister and brother are likely going to go anyway, but my husband and I will likely stay behind -- we have to use the airmiles by next August, so hopefully we'll go somewhere by then, maybe still to Britain if we can.
And yes, I'm happy to be alive and that it wasn't worse and all that, and as my husband said, England will still be there even if we cannot get to it until later. But damnit all anyway, I had PLANS...
When I broke my leg ten years ago, I remember lying there in the hospital, and I had this vision that somewhere my real life was still going on, and that even though I had taken this sudden detour sideways, somewhere there was another Me, the Real Me, who was going on with life as usual.
So I now see, next Wednesday, the Real Me getting on that plane and flying off to a wonderful holiday in England -- leaving me behind.

Ideas that kill people

Odd, isn't it -- when we look at history, the "idea" is frequently blamed for bloodshed and mayhem -- I'm thinking about the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, when catholics fought protestants, and various kinds of protestants fought each other, and it was pretty clear that the basic cause of the conflict was their differing ideas of God. And likewise in the 20th century, when fascism fought democracy, and when communism fought capitalism. Nobody had any problems with the concept that some ideas are proven to be right by history, while others are proven to be wrong.
So what is so different now about the loss of the war in Iraq? It was a bad idea in the first place and lots of people said it was a bad idea -- illegal, for one thing, because the US didn't even dare ask the Security Council to vote on the war for fear that not only would the war be vetoed, they wouldn't even get a majority in favour -- and immoral, a war which caused more people around the world to march against it than any other war in world history.
And even now, the pro-war neocons refuse to accept that their idea was wrong. Digby sums up the neocon narrative:

. . . neocon shills like Kristol will soothe the rubes with tales of how the Bush administration tied the military's hands. If they'd have let them go they could have gotten the job done in a couple of weeks. We could have bombed em back into the stone age if necessary. After all, everything turned out just great with Japan and Germany. But, no. They wouldn't let our brave men and women get the job done. (Of course you can't blame them too much. It was the dominant Democrat hippies who made them do it.)
It gives the Republicans a good excuse to run on 'restoring honor' to the country. The rubes eat it up and get all excited about proving ourselves in the next war. A war we must fight for freedom and democracy, of course. Because we're so good . . .

Darn it, yes, the United States is good. But this war was bad, and now its broken and no one knows how to fix it.

Revising history before its even written

It is both outrageous and ridiculous that American wingnuts are blaming the loss of the war in Iraq on Democrats and liberals -- who didn't want to go to war in the first place, and have been in charge of absolutely nothing since six months before the war even started.
But I guess the wingnuts will soon learn how it feels -- Iran is going to blame the Iraq civil war on America and Israel, instead of on Al Quaeda. And there is nothing that will change this perception among Muslims. From Iraq Dispatches: Who Benefits?:

"Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, urged Iraqi Shia not to seek revenge against Sunni Muslims, saying there were definite plots "to force the Shia to attack the mosques and other properties respected by the Sunni. Any measure to contribute to that direction is helping the enemies of Islam and is forbidden by sharia." Instead, he blamed the intelligence services of the U.S. and Israel for being behind the bombs at the Golden Mosque.

Living deja vu

I'm living my life in reverse. When did someone hit the rewind switch?
Battles I had in my 20s an 30s, which I thought were settled, done-with, bought-the-tshirt OVER, I find myself fighting again.
Yesterday, it was abortion. Today, it's women's rights -- ie, this column about how society would be better off if women stayed home with their kids instead of running off to be lawyers or engineers or, I suppose, columnists. Yadda, yadda, yadda.
Tomorrow, I suppose I'll be reading something about how women shouldn't complain about doing all the housework because, after all, its just so important that the family laundry be done really well.
Well, I was going to write some sort of brilliant reply to Cohen but then I ran out of energy -- have to wax the kitchen taps this afternoon, as well as crocheting my spring wardrobe, so I just don't have time...

Weekend open thread

And I just couldn't resist this photo.
By the way, I haven't done an accident update lately so here it is: slowly healing. It is taking a lot longer than I ever thought, but the ribs are healing now and the swelling in my legs is going down and the bruises are fading. The knee is still sore when I move it, particularly when I stand up, but the doctor says we'll see in a couple of months if that has improved because if not then I would need arthroscopic surgery for which there is a nine month waiting list anyway.

Oh, darn, isn't that just too bad...

This story on the Libby request for intelligence briefing materials notes that

the judge . . . is concerned that Libby's request could 'sabotage' the case because President Bush probably will invoke executive privilege and refuse to turn over the classified reports. 'If the executive branch says, 'This is too important to the welfare of the nation and we're not going to comply,' the criminal prosecution goes away.'

Well, duhhh -- that's exactly the point.
Libby and the White House are engaged in a complicated little dance here -- trying to get the judge to agree that Libby needs some particular classifed document for his defense, which then the White House can refuse to turn over, so that the prosecution falls apart.
And then everybody says, Oh, darn, isn't that just too bad...