I read the news today oh boy

From Robert Dreyfuss comes this summary of the latest news about Iraq:

The Sunnis, who have been the heart of the resistance to the U.S. occupation since at least the fall of 2003, are virtually unified now. A critical piece of news, overlooked but for a brief mention in the Washington Post, is that fully 300 Iraqi tribal leaders—mostly Sunni, but including some Shiites—met in a town south of Kirkuk, to issue a demand that Saddam Hussein be freed. One of the leaders, whose tribe numbers 1.5 million, said: “If the demand is not satisfied, we will lead a general, sweeping, and popular uprising.” Such a threat would mean, in effect, that the Iraqi insurgency would be adopted officially by the entire tribal leadership of western and central Iraq. This is not al-Qaida. This is Iraq.
The Shiites, meanwhile, are entering the early stages of a fratricidal splintering. Although they have long been divided, current trends would indicate that the Shiite bloc in Iraq is about to collapse. Until now, the Shiites have been the tent pole holding up the entire U.S. enterprise in Iraq—so, if they splinter, it signals the end of the U.S. occupation. It’s a kaleidoscope: The Mahdi Army of Muqtada Sadr is restless, seemingly ready to launch another uprising, as it did in 2004—and Sadr’s army itself is seriously beset by divisions, with armed, rogue elements throughout. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) is pressing hard for partition of Iraq—which it calls “federation”—and one of its leaders (who happens to be the Iraqi education minister) laid out a scenario for full-scale civil war. “Federation will cut off all parts of the country that are incubating terrorists,” he said. “We will put soldiers along the frontiers.”
Deepening the divisions among the Shiites even further, a new warlord is emerging, Mahmoud Hassani, who has built private armies in Najaf, Karbala, Basra and Baghdad, and who is violently opposed to SCIRI and to Sadr’s Mahdi Army. Hassani, who also opposes the United States and who hates Iran, is emerging as a nationalist Shiite leader who could upset the whole Shiite apple cart.
And the pesky Kurds are openly threatening secession. Massoud Barzani, who is the real power in Kurdistan, said defiantly this week: “If we want to separate, we will do it without hesitation of fears.” Should the Kurds launch their widely expected operation to seize Kirkuk and Iraq’s northern oil fields, it will trigger a major escalation of civil war in Iraq.

Meanwhile, back in Washington:

Bush isn’t acknowledging these realities. The Pentagon is only hinting at them—though the generals know what’s going on. But inside the political class, an awareness of realities in Iraq is dawning. Last week, James A. Baker and Lee Hamilton, two consummate political insiders who happen to lead a hush-hush task force on Iraq called the Iraq Study Group, were in Baghdad, where (according to my sources) they got a heavy dose of reality. The Baker task force—which I wrote about in The Washington Monthly—includes top-level luminaries, including Robert M. Gates, Vernon Jordan and William Perry. Returning from Baghdad, Baker’s elite group, which also includes dozens of Iraq experts, met this week to consider a draft plan to exit Iraq, Jack Murtha-style, or alternatively, to stick around for another 12 months and then end up getting out anyway. Increasingly, after the elections, that will be the stark choice forced on the White House—by Washington’s political elite, by the precipitous drop in public support for the war and by the growing antiwar movement that has set up shop at Camp Democracy on the Mall.

Great line of the day

At Talking Points Memo DK writes about the "torture debate" in Congress:

I am beyond being able to assess the political implications, one way or the other, of this spectacle. Regardless of which version of the bill finally passes, this debate is a black mark on the soul of the nation . . . The Republicans have defined deviancy down for the whole world, including every two-bit dictator and wild-eyed terrorist . . . In their fear and their weakness and their smallness, the President and those around him stepped over the line. To do so in the heated days after 9/11 is understandable to a point, though not justifiable. Yet they persisted, first in saying that they did not step over the line and now in seeking to redraw the line . . . They are descending from the morally reprehensible to the morally cowardly.

Emphasis mine.

In the land of the waterboard, the home of the stress position

Billmon writes the Great line of the day:

. . . The sadistic and/or bizarre acts committed in Guatanamo, Abu Ghraib and the CIA's secret prisons can be written off as the crimes of a few bad apples with names like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld -- or, more charitably, as the consequences of a string of bad and brutal decisions made under emergency conditions by men who were terrified by all the things they didn't know about Al Qaeda . . .[but] the question is now formally on the table:

Does Congress really want to make the United States the first nation on earth to specifically provide domestic legal sanction for what would properly and universally be seen as a transparent breach of the minimum, baseline standards for civilized treatment of prisoners? . . .

The answer, at the moment, appears to be yes . . . So now we'll find out, I guess, what we're really made of as a nation -- down deep, in our core . . . What this amounts to (and what Powell was really complaining about) is the final decommissioning of the myth of American exceptionalism -- once one of the most powerful weapons in the U.S. arsenal. Without it, we're just another paranoid empire obsessed with our own security and willing to tell any lie or repudiate any self-proclaimed principle if we think it will make us even slightly safer.
To put it mildly, this is not the kind of flag the rest of the world is likely to rally around, no matter how frantically we wave it.

Emphasis mine.
There have been times in the past when America found itself drowning in a moral swamp -- when Pinkertons and police were beating up unionists in the 30s, when governors were using watercannons and worse on the peace and civil rights demonstrations of the 60s -- and always before there was a vigorous American opposition to such abuses, led by fearless writers and philosophers and politicians and clergy, in whom the best part of America and the world could still believe.
Who will now stand against torture?

Trench warfare

So, the Iraqi government thinks it cam make Baghdad safe by digging a trench around the city. Yeah, that'll do it. Its only about 100 kilometers ....
They're desperate, aren't they?

Pot calling the kettle black?

Today, when Bush was asked about Powell, he harumphed:

It's unacceptable to think that there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective.

Oh no, no comparison at all --because sometimes the United States kills innocent women and children for no reason at all.

My Canada includes the Arar family

Reading about the Arar family's reception in Kamloops made me proud to be Canadian:

. . . The Kamloops Daily News broke the story Aug. 31 on its front page. In an accompanying column, Daily News editor Mel Rothenburger, the former mayor, wrote glowingly about the grace under pressure Mr. Arar and Dr. Mazigh had demonstrated throughout their ordeal. “It's an honour,” the editor wrote, “to have this courageous family among us.”
Mr. Arar's eyes moisten as he recalls reading the column the first time. “Words matter. I could feel the warmth of those words. It shows Canadian people, in general, do care about each other.”
People in Kamloops have been extremely supportive, Mr. Arar said, recalling that the first time the family was spotted on the street. “People wondered if we were on vacation. They were really very excited when we said, ‘No, we are moving here.''' . . . Their new house is a bit of a fixer-upper. Mr. Arar has been painting walls and putting in a small stone patio. Dr. Mazigh wants to put new plants and marigolds in the terraced garden in the back.
Mr. Arar seems to have adjusted to the role of house husband. He's volunteered at the school to help fix up the computer lab. He wants to get the children into soccer. He frets he doesn't get much exercise, and that he has developed a paunch.
There aren't many other Muslim families in Kamloops. Maybe just a dozen. Dr. Mazigh has encountered only one other person, a woman from Egypt, who wears a hijab, the Muslim headscarf.
“I know what they are feeling,” said Gurwinder Singh, a turbaned Sikh who moved here from Saskatoon four years ago. He thought Kamloops might be a cowboy town, but was pleasantly surprised by the range of amenities. “The people here are just so friendly and polite, they won't have any problems.”
Mr. Arar said Dr. Mazigh's hijab draws almost no stares on the streets, which was not the case in Ottawa.
He predicted that as more Muslims move to Kamloops, the community will develop the critical mass necessary to open a mosque and hire an imam.
Until then, he'll spend more time instructing the children in Arabic and introducing them to readings in the Koran.
Baraa has started to wear a hijab to school. It's no big deal at a school where teachers give instruction on multiculturalism as an icebreaker for the new pupils at the start of the school year. They ask the children what languages are spoken at home. Baraa was surprised to learn how many of her new classmates or their parents and grandparents speak languages such as Dutch, German and Italian. But she's the only one who speaks Arabic, English and some French, she said proudly. Each day brings a pleasant little surprise. This week the subscription department of Canadian Living finally got the new address label right.
And Mr. Arar has found a barber downtown who cuts his hair the way he likes it. Even better, the barber is also a member of the city council.
“I can complain to him about the taxes,” he said with a laugh.

Moderate moderating

OK, s0 I'll give comment moderation a try -- and I'll try to be a moderate moderator.
The rowboat image refers to "rowboat" journailism -- the kind that goes "on the one hand this, on the other hand that". It isn't particularly interesting as journalism but its not a bad model for me to try to follow in moderating comments.
Two rules:
1. The comment actually discusses the post I put up (or is about something which I find interesting), and
2. No insults (though if its funny, then maybe . . . )

Shorter Billmon

Billmon's newest post deserves thoughtful consideration, but all I have time for now is to summarize what he says:

The obnoxious arrogance and fear-mongering of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (Cheney branch) is actually creating a Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (Islamic branch).

Hicks

Yeah, sure -- lets send Sean Penn a ticket for smoking in public. And then we can all mutter about how that'll teach them gol-durned New Yawk city slickers a lesson....

Nobody will follow the US troops home

As Jon Stewart asked, if winning the streets of Baghdad is so damned important, why doesn't Bush send enough troops to do it?
It just demonstrates how this "clash of civilizations" stuff is only another talking point trotted out by the Republicans as they try to save their congressional majority and also try to intimidate the Democrats into voting for Bush's Big Brother phone tap bill.
What made Bush's speech ridiculous is simply this -- the US isn't going to "win" in Iraq, no matter how many troops they send, no matter how many bombs they lob, no matter how many Iraqis they kill.
Juan Cole makes a number of good points in this post about getting American troops out of Iraq. I'll try to summarize them:

. . . the US in the Sunni Arab heartland of Iraq is not fighting "terrorists" . . . The US is fighting Iraqi nationalists and nativists, secular, tribal or religious . . . This is Washington's classical Vietnam error. They thought they were fighting international communism in Vietnam, when they were actually fighting Vietnamese nationalists . . . Just as there was no grand global domino effect from our losing the Vietnam War, so there would be no grand terror effect if we left Ramadi . . . Ramadi is not going to follow the US troops back to Ft. Bragg if they leave. Ramadi will celebrate and then go about its business.
As for al-Qaeda, we cannot make policy on the basis of what it thinks of us . . . Al-Qaeda wants to hit us, whether we are in Iraq or not . . . The French Right kept saying that France could not leave Algeria. But it could, and did, and everything was all right. It will be all right if we get our ground troops out of Ramadi. They aren't winning there, and the occupation is causing more trouble than it is worth. As for who takes over Ramadi when we leave, well, the Iraqis can work that out among themselves. We don't care who runs Rangoon. Why should we care who runs Ramadi?

Great line of the day

In a post titled "September 12th", Steve Gilliard writes:

[Bush] denied Americans the one thing they expected from him: a measure of justice. Not of the dungeon or the gulag, but of the courtroom. And they have not gotten that. Not even Osama killed in a last stand with Delta troopers gunning him down. Just dungeons, gulags and the excuse that these pathetic men are so dangerous that not only did they have to be tortured like animals, but now he needs a kangaroo court to try and execute them in. As if his word should end the traditions Americans have died for.
Bush and Cheney do not trust the courts or Congress . . . they do not trust the American people and that will be their downfall. They are not kings, but men elected by and accountable to the people . . . They rule as the weak rule, by fear, fiat and suspicion. And the weak will fail, because those who live in fear can never truly gain the trust and respect of those they attempt to lead.

Leopard tanks

Dave has a good article about Canadian mission creep in Afghanistan.
At 4 pm on a Friday, Ottawa announced very quietly that they're now sending Leopard tanks to Afghanistan.

Just another sign that the mission in Afghanistan is changing from a peacekeeping and development one to a "direct fire" one, without Canadians being told about the change.
But one thing gave me a chuckle. When I googled for photos of "Leopard tanks", this one also came up:



Is it sexist of me to say that no doubt many of the soldiers would appreciate this kind, too?

"Damp Squib"?

Maybe using the 9/11 ceremonies to try to bolster support for a controversial war wasn't such a great idea.
Maybe 9/11 is a day for rememberence and sorrow, not for trying to promote any cause.
I didn't see Harper's speech. But this Canadian Press analysis makes it sound pretty unimpressive -- "damp squib" is one description. It "lacked punch", it "felt staged", and "Harper was so obviously reading a monitor" while the speech itself was "echoing" Bush.
The Globe and Mail said that the military and 9/11 families behind Harper "sat stoically with grim faces on stage during the speech.

Moderated comments?

On my blog comments every now and then an interesting discussion breaks out -- look at the first eight comments for this post -- but then, like toxic mold, one of my right-wing crazies posts something stupid and the blackness descends.
And boy, am I ever getting sick of them. I must admit, I barely read anything they say, its so garbled and meaningless and rude and bigotted.
I can't understand why they bother pestering me -- why don't they start their own blog, or go read Red State or Malkin or Dead Animals or the Blogging Tories or something? I don't read those blogs precisely because I am not interested in anything these people have to say -- so why do they keep putting comments on just about every post I put up, trying to insult me and the commenters whose opinions I do value? The only conclusion I can reach is that they're a bunch of 15-year-old boys who think its "fun" to annoy the grown-ups -- that seems to be about the mental age, anyway, and that's about the level of their reasoning
Anyway, I just can't keep up with banning them -- I try, but I think they're using library machines or something, because they keep getting back, often using new names.
So should I move to "moderated" comments?
I would likely only be able to check comments two or three times a day, once in the morning and maybe twice in the evening, so it moderating the comments would really slow down the conversation, but should I try it? Would people prefer this?

Decline and fall of the American Empire

Shorter Billmon:

We're fallen and we can't get up.