2020 Hindsight

Economist on America and the Middle East

From the print version of the May 29-June 4 issue, a coupla excerpts from an article reviewing America's role in the middle east; these excerpts come from the "gee I didn't know that but once stated, why, it makes a lotta sense" department.

On brokering peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict. In 2002, Bush proposed a forum to promote Palestinian peace. After the war, he settled down to work, "to urge progress."

A year on, there has been none, and the appearance of failure on both flanks of the Middle East has become self-reinforcing. In just the way that many Americans see no distinction between the terrorirms of al Qaeda and the terrorism of the Palestinian intifada, so many Arabs see no distinction beteen Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and America's occupation of Iraq. Both conflicts are portrayed on Arabic satellite channels as similar dramas of national or Islamic resistance.

And from the conclusion of the article,

America could do more in Palestine. After Iraq, it needs to more than ever. Note, though, how many of the people who believe that it is impotent in Iraq also assume that it is all-powerful when it comes to ending a conflict that has perplexed the great powers for a century.

(We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog-drivel; this Memorial Day weekend attempt at seriousness now draws to an end.)

Iraq and the Arab illusion

Zayed at Healing Iraq posts a translation of an article by Dr. Shakir Al-Nabulsi. The illusions that the Arab World held about itself with the end of colonialism....and, instead the realities, and how the illusions are carrying forward in viewpoints held by Arab intelligensia about Iraq. It's a provocative read.

I'm trying to find out more about the author. A google search reveals that he's Jordanian, president of something called the American Association of Jordan (which may be a publisher?), and lives in the U.S.

Illusion remained the major player of the incredible Arab scene. Illusion remained a drug that allowed us to sleep in delicious numbness until the information revolution exploded and exposed the Arab situation. The Arab world was classified in all fields at the bottom of the list of the world's nations, as revealed in UN reports for 2002-2003. The Arab world was shocked for living under a false illusion.

Religion did not lift us from the bottom.

Pan-Arab nationalism did not lift us from the bottom.

Our glorious ancestors did not appeal to prevent us from falling into the pit.

Our Hamasa and heroism poetry did not save us from falling.

Our Friday prayers sermons which assure us that we are "khaira ummatin ukhrijat lilnas" (the greatest nation brought out to people) did not save us.

The fiery speeches of leaders immortalised in the collective Arab memory did not save us.

Sorcery, magic, djinn, Sufi hymns, Darawish prayers, fatwas, and blessings of saints all did not help save us from falling into the void.

No way to run a war

by Mark Helprin: The Democrats are guilty of ideological confusion and the Republicans of disdain for reflection.

Iraq blog roundup

Check it out. [via Glenn Reynolds]

Also worth checking out --it's from Saudi Arabia, not Iraq-- a blog called Religious Policeman explains the royal family--using Watership Down. [via Roger L. Simon]

It's the economy, stupid

Iraq the Model on the fate of the Iraqi Dinar. [via Jeff Jarvis]

Jeff Jarvis has the Iraqi blogger update

Perspectives on what's going on in Iraq by Iraqis. Read it, follow the links.

And read Zayed at Healing Iraq. The most recent post recalls Iraqi history from the 1920s.

Washington Post follows up a story that broke on an Iraqi weblog

Back on January 8 I linked to a story that Zayed told -- An Iraqi Family's Tragedy. Lots of weblog-related discussion at the time (is it a lie? is it for real? One post here offers the opinion that the story was BS).

Yesterday, The Washington Post reports on the ongoing investigation about the incident. [via Glenn Reynolds]

The Army is investigating an allegation that U.S. troops killed an Iraqi detainee when they forced him and another man to jump from a bridge into the Tigris River, and a battalion commander has been disciplined for impeding the probe, officers familiar with the investigation said.

[...] [Lt. Col. Nate] Sassaman, well-known in the Army since he was a star West Point quarterback two decades ago, received a reprimand for helping subordinates mislead Army investigators as they began their inquiry, an officer familiar with the situation said. Several other soldiers received similar punishment.

Army officers said they are working to understand what happened on the bridge Jan. 4 near the Sunni Triangle town of Samarra, including such basic facts as whether anyone died in the river that night. The soldiers have admitted they forced the two men into the river but say they saw both men swim to shore and emerge, officials said. [Read More]

They're still unsure about the death in question, but Zayed's post did get the investigation ball rolling.

Speaking of Iraqi bloggers, after my recent Fallujah-related atomic blathers I never got around to posting about all the Iraqi blogs I read for their responses to Fallujah, but Doc Searls did link and excerpt them. Like he says, "I don't know what to think, but I do know what to read."

On Fallujah

I thought, maybe I can get by without posting anything about Fallujah. And of course, once I create a new post and begin typing, for some reason, I'll want to write way too much.

Like about a conversation I had the night of the 31st, the day it happened, and the other person said, "Just nuke 'em!" And I said, "No! No! not *that*!"

See, I've been on my atomic reading kick again; have been for about a month, occasioned by a writing/publicist friend loaning me a copy of a new play by Peter Cooke and William Lanouette called Uranium and Peaches (they're looking for a producer to put it on), about a conversation that took place between physicist Leo Szilard and James Byrnes (whose appointment as Truman's new Secretary of State was decided but not yet announced), about the decision whether to drop the bomb or to instead have an international demonstration of its power.

Okay. So that got me re-reading Rhodes' The Making of The Atomic Bomb, and on the day that I heard about the attacks, I had been reading about Hiroshima -- not the leadup, not the Trinity Test at the first Ground Zero, but That Day wherein the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Rhodes has pages of quotes from survivors later interviewed by Robert Jay Lifton, telling what they did and what they saw. Ten pages of one-paragraph-long accounts of people with swollen bodies, of people whose skin was dangling off, of a man holding his eyes in the palm of his hands.

A fifth-grade boy: The river became not a stream of flowing water but rather a stream of drifting dead bodies. No matter how much I might exaggerate the stories of the burned people who died shrieking and of how the city of Hiroshima was burned to the ground, the facts would still be clearly more terrible. [p 726]

Um. yeah. That kinda stuff-- ten pages of it--that's what I was reading, because that grisly scene is the sober climax to an absorbing story about all these physicists toiling away on a mesa and in a nearly unpopulated valley in northern and southern portions of New Mexico.

Wake up in the morning, read that, go do other things, and later that day, hear the shocking news of the death and dismemberment of some American men in Fallujah. That night, when the other person says, "just nuke 'em" and I say "no!" my response comes with all the recent urgency of one who'd been reading -- just that morning, mind you-- details of what exactly transpires when a nuclear bomb is detonated in the midst of a large city filled with people going about their day.

(strange side note re: my bomb obsession. Is it twisted? sane? Don't know, but since Weapons of Mass Destruction is A Topic Of Note, and when I hear a radio interview wherein the person is asked how big are those "small" tactical nuclear devices--they're the size of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs--well, maybe my bomb obsession isn't so off the mark after all.)

So. Anyway. I feel I can't start posting news story links without all that preamble (and no doubt I've lost you with this excessive verbage, so if you've made it thus far, congratulations. And thank you.) I'm obviously going against the saying, "If you can't say anything nice short, don't say anything at all."

And that link that I wanted to post? Esquire has a story of Hired Guns where Tucker Carlson describes going along for a ride with those mercenary guys. Just read it.

Weapons inspector Kay resigns; contradicts Bush on WMD

A postscript on the State of the Union address.

In a direct challenge to the Bush administration, which says its invasion of Iraq was justified by the presence of illicit arms, Kay told Reuters in a telephone interview he had concluded there were no Iraqi stockpiles to be found. "I don't think they existed," Kay said. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War, and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the nineties," he said.

... Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said Kay's resignation and his statement to Reuters implicitly contradicted both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. "Kay is a very careful man who chooses his words with great precision. He is trying to set the record straight and be true to his profession," he said.

Also, USA Today on SOTU quotes Bush then provides reality check.

An Iraqi Family's Tragedy

A letter from an Iraqi mother addressed to Bush, Blair, Chirac, Pachachi, Bremer, Anan, Red Cross, Human Rights Organization...

Dear Sirs,

I write to you in a very distressed state of mind and that may burst my emotions and passions because of the weighty calamity that struck me and my husband after losing our oldest son who was at the tender age of nineteen years. He was looking forward with eyes full of hope and optimism to a bright and eventful future...

UPDATE: Tons of discussion on the veracity of the incident over at Instapundit, and Zeyad at Healing Iraq adds more details in response to voluminous comments on his site. (If the story turns out false, then is this the Iraqi blogworld's Kaycee Nicole.)