The Quiz.

9. Who commented on Bush’s “almost giddy readiness to kill”?

(a) Senator Chuck Hagel (R Nebraska).

(b) MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.

(c) CBS’s Dan Rather.

(d) General Tommy Franks. The New Yorker

“It’s time to phase out housing projects. Whether

old-fashioned or newfangled, they blight surrounding neighborhoods and prevent them from reviving.” — Howard Husock, City Journal

Yo La Tengo interviewed: “They remain the proverbial elephant examined by blind men, different things to different people. Which is okay, as far as Ira Kaplan is concerned. I asked him what he’d say if the dictionary people came knocking, wanting a definition. ‘That’s their job, isn’t it? Finding definitions. We’re happy just playing the music.'” 3am Summer Sun is their new recording, and I can’t wait to hear it…

According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to save humanity by destroying part of it. This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the name of the need to radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political reality over which it is supposed to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism, with the genocide of indigenous peoples, and the African slaves. This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles, which caused millions of deaths in two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was under Stalinism, with the Gulag, and under Nazism, with the Holocaust. And now today, this is how it is in neoliberalism, with the collective sacrifice of the periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world system. With the war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the Western illusion: destroying all of humanity in the illusion of saving it. — Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Bad Subjects

An interview with Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. identitytheory

…(T)here is a pattern to the Bush administration’s way of doing business that does not bode well for the future — a pattern of conquest followed by malign neglect…. One has to admit that the Bush people are very good at conquest, military and political. They focus all their attention on an issue; they pull out all the stops; they don’t worry about breaking the rules. This technique brought them victory in the Florida recount battle, the passage of the 2001 tax cut, the fall of Kabul, victory in the midterm elections, and the fall of Baghdad.

But after the triumph, when it comes time to take care of what they’ve won, their attention wanders, and things go to pot. — Paul Krugman, NY Times

The baseball Hall of Fame has canceled a 15th anniversary celebration of the film “Bull Durham,” and the shrine’s president said it was because of anti-war criticism by co-stars Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon.

Reached Wednesday night, Robbins said he was “dismayed” by the decision. He responded with a letter he planned to send to Petroskey, telling him: “You belong with the cowards and ideologues in a hall of infamy and shame.” SF Chronicle

Are psychopaths running our government? The heart of this essay counterposes, paragraph by paragraph, a recent media portrait of Bush’s personality style and daily behavior with a detailed description of the psychopath in the workplace. Clinically, one would never make a diagnosis from a distance, sight unseen, and the concept of the psychopath is rather diffuse, but it draws a thought-provoking picture. digby [via the null device]

The Godwin’s Law FAQ: One of the most famous pieces of Usenet trivia out there is “if you mention Hitler or Nazis in a post, you’ve automatically ended whatever discussion you were taking part in”. Known as Godwin’s Law, this rule of Usenet has a long and sordid history on the network – and is absolutely wrong. This FAQ is an attempt to set straight as much of the history and meaning of Godwin’s Law as possible, and hopefully encourage users to invoke it a bit more sparingly. Of course, knowing Usenet, it won’t do an ounce of good… Rebecca Blood brought my attention to Godwin’s Law and discusses some of its implications here.

Nicholas de Genova, a 35-year old assistant professor of anthropology and Latino studies at Columbia, who is upsetting alot of people, is interviewed for the first time since his controversial remarks. Chronicle of Higher Education

says Rafe Coburn, “reserved for those people who use feigned concern for the injustices heaped upon the Iraqi people to bludgeon those who made arguments against the war in Iraq. To those people, I would ask what makes the Iraqi people special when you make it obvious that you don’t give a crap about the billions of other impoverished, oppressed, and miserable people around the world.”

The accompanying mugshot captures the essence of someone you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. The Smoking Gun

says Independent/UK columnist Natasha Walter.

But: Net Trounced By Cable for War News: “Two separate surveys show the same thing: Americans rely on cable TV for war news vs. the Net. That aside, online news is making gains, and might provide a clearer picture in the fog of war.” Online Journalism Review

In a previous column, Walter cautions us, “Don’t idealise the soldiers fighting this unjust war.”

Do you think that Tony Blair would feel it necessary to state and restate that civilian casualties will be kept to a minimum if he were not conscious of the outrage that would otherwise result? Do you think that officers would keep briefing their soldiers on the need to treat prisoners according to the laws of war, if it were not for the scrutiny of the dissenters back home?

It is all very well to hear about how vulnerable and heroic our troops are, but we should not forget that the truly vulnerable people are not the healthy young men who chose to join one of the best-equipped armies in the world, but ordinary Iraqi people who did not choose to be caught, utterly defenceless, between a tyrant and a destructive army. Independent/UK

With victory in Iraq assured, hawks outside and inside the Bush administration have begun taking a notably aggressive stance toward its neighbor to the west, Syria.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and their main ideological ally at the State Department, undersecretary John Bolton, have all made menacing public remarks about Syria in recent days. Newsday

Is there some element in the US military that wants to take out journalists? Independent/UK Found via an important, if you appreciate his contentious writing, compilation page of Reports by Mr. Robert Fisk.

A group of German university professors, angered by the US-British war against Iraq, have launched a campaign to replace many popular English-language words used in Germany with French terms.

Saying they are appalled by the way the United States and Britain defied the will of the United Nations and attacked Iraq, the four professors declared war on borrowed English terms in German such as “okay”, “T-shirt” and “party”. Sydney Morning Herald

And, while we’re on the topic of words (how’s that for a segue?), this is from Waxy [via Looka!]: Armed with a list of spelling errors and my old friend Google, I decided to see if I could find the most commonly misspelled word on the Web. If you can do better, leave a comment.

a gallery of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning Works.

This LA Times piece points out that the uranium stocks, which it says could be enriched to weapons material, lay unguarded after their Iraqi custodians fled. US forces were not even aware of their existence for several days. Garret Vreeland pointed to this, noting how much background on the search for clandestine weapons it contains. As readers know, I’ve remained skeptical about the WMD rationale for the attack on Iraq. The article notes that Saddam may have had any chemical weapons the regime had moved to the Tikrit area, which has not yet fallen to advancing US forces. There’s also speculation on why, if he did indeed have CBW and was backed against the wall as he has been, he did not use them against massing American troops. It has been my point that the restraint he exercised in this regard in the face of US military intimidation, the potential harsh judgment of world opinion and/or the threat of war crimes prosecution, gives the lie to Bush’s “imminent danger” argument.

A House debate over gun rights legislation erupted into a racially charged dispute yesterday when a Republican lawmaker from Wyoming seemed to equate African Americans with drug addicts or people undergoing drug treatment. Washington Post

says Noam Chomsky in this April 2nd interview with Frontline India.

“Trusted Blog Search Tool, a search box that lets readers search the web, your site, or blogs you read.”

An extraordinary communication from the United States to UN representatives around the world has been leaked to Greenpeace. In it, the United States warns that the simple act of support for a General Assembly meeting to discuss the war will be considered “unhelpful and directed against the United States.” They further threaten that invoking the Uniting for Peace resolution will be “harmful to the UN.”

Greenpeace has been actively lobbying at the United Nations against the war, and many delegates have expressed both publicly and privately their distaste for what they see as US attempts to “strongarm” the world community to do as it is told. One delegate was so incensed with the memo circulated by the US that he leaked the full document. [via Liberal Arts Mafia]

Japanese electronics giant Sony has taken an extraordinary step to cash in on the war in Iraq by patenting the term “Shock and Awe” for a computer game.

It is among a swarm of companies scrambling to commercially exploit the war in Iraq, which has killed more than 5,000 soldiers and civilians in the space of three weeks. Guardian/UK

Mitsu said: The problem with this war (the “war on terror”) is that the connection between actions and consequences are far separated — the outrage expressed by many Arabs over this war in Iraq will likely bear fruit in asymmetrical warfare far down the line — but it will be years, not months, before we truly see the fruit of our actions. This disconnect in time creates a tremendous problem, since one of the chief mistakes people make when evaluating the success of their actions is to assume that there is no time delay. Although military victory in Iraq is likely, the mistakes our leaders made when ascertaining the reaction of the Iraqi people leads to the conclusion that they will similarly misjudge their political reaction in many other ways. Iraqis have not been fleeing the country to refugee camps — they’ve been trying to get back in to fight us. There will certainly be some who cheer our troops as they roll in — but, as one Arab history professor put it the other day, there are always people who cheer troops as they roll in: there were Lebanese who cheered the Israelis when they came in. They stopped cheering pretty quickly. synthetic zero

A key Iraqi opposition leader says he has information that Saddam Hussein survived an airstrike in Baghdad and escaped from the capital with at least one of his sons.

However, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he did not know whether Saddam was dead or alive.

“He’s either dead, or he’s incapacitated, or he’s healthy and cowering in some tunnel someplace trying to avoid being caught. What else can one say?” Rumsfeld said. CNN

Rumsfeld has made several comments about Saddam’s cowardice that are about as mature as the schoolyard taunts I remember from childhood. Pretty disingenuous considering this country’s leaders’ lack of military service themselves and how far they are from harm’s way in the prosecution of the attack on Iraq. In fact, Rumsfeld’s gibes could be considered an insult to our own troops’ bravery. (I mean, Jessica Lynch might be able to jeer at Saddam for cowering in hiding, but Donald Rumsfeld??)

Could there be a relationship (could there not??) between the above news item and this? MOAB Bomb Moved to Iraq War Region:

Military officials hoped the MOAB would create such a huge blast that it would rattle Iraqi troops and pressure them into surrendering or not even fighting.

Now that Iraqi troops have surrendered in large numbers, it was unclear what the possible targets might be. CNN

Or is it just that the boys with their toys will be damned if they’ll let this little escapade in Iraq end without the chance of a whizz-bang full-scale ejaculation?

The coalition’s hollow victory in Baghdad marks a fittingly surreal climax to a war that was always empty of meaning. Saddam’s regime has simply imploded like the wretched, ruined state that any objective observer of Iraqi affairs knew it to be. The US and UK authorities claim that a powerful regime has been brought down by their well-paced, patient prosecution of the war over the past three weeks. In reality, we can now see that the enfeebled Iraqi state all but collapsed the moment the coalition forces rolled across its borders.

Was there a war at all? There were certainly plenty of bombs dropped, guns fired and Iraqis killed by the American and British forces. But there has not been one single clash with Iraqi forces that could remotely be described as a battle. — Mick Hume, sp!ked

Results promising, say researchers: An epilepsy drug combined with a reduced-calorie diet may result in significant weight loss for obese adults, according to one of several obesity studies in this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association.

The epilepsy drug research was prompted by reports of unintentional weight loss in epilepsy patients using zonisamide to prevent seizures. CNN As a physician (who prescribes epilepsy drugs as part of my neuropsychiatric practice and also because we use them in the control of impulsive-aggressive-labile behavior disorders), I’ve already been receiving requests from patients to be placed on zonisamide given these news reports. In fact, that is how I heard about this research finding. This is a phenomenon that has repeated itself whenever the media report that a drug shows promise for weight loss. But people should stop hoping for passive weight loss miracles, of course. Stop calling, for three reasons —

• the weight loss effect is not going to turn out to be very robust or very sustained
• the increased activity level is more important to any weight loss than the medication effects
• and the cognitive slowing and other potential side effects of taking most anticonvulsants are not pleasant enough if you do not absolutely need these medications for cause

My reading suggests there may be some promising, specific weight loss agents that work by novel mechanisms on the physiology of appetite and satiation, or on metabolism coming down the pike, but not zonisamide or topiramate or Prozac.

Tape purportedly from bin Laden urges suicide attacks. CNN

Okay, so finally some Iraqis recognize they’re being ‘liberated’. CNN

A communique received in Jerusalem from the American administration this week says the United States is operating with strong resolution to neutralize the Iraqi threat to Israel. After the war, the message continued, the United States will deal with other radical regimes in the region – not necessarily by military means – to moderate their activities and fight terrorism. Ha’aretz

Now, apparently, is the time for all good radio and TV stations to come to the aid of their country’s war.

That is the message pushed by broadcast news consultants, who’ve been advising news and talk stations across the nation to wave the flag and downplay protest against the war.

“Get the following production pieces in the studio NOW: . . . Patriotic music that makes you cry, salute, get cold chills! Go for the emotion,” advised McVay Media, a Cleveland-based consultant, in a “War Manual” memo to its station clients. “. . . Air the National Anthem at a specified time each day as long as the USA is at war.”

The company, which describes itself as the largest radio consultant in the world, also has been counseling talk show stations to “Make sure your hosts aren’t ‘over the top.’ Polarizing discussions are shaky ground. This is not the time to take cheap shots to get reaction . . . not when our young men and women are ‘in harm’s way.’ “ Washington Post

in a sign that the perceived threat of chemical or biological attack by forces loyal to President Saddam Hussein was diminishing.

“Whatever intelligence they have is telling us the threat level has been reduced,” U.S. Marine Lieutenant Peter Rummler told Reuters correspondent Matthew Green. Reuters AlertNet

…(R)esearchers announced yesterday that numbers of great apes in Gabon have declined by more than half in less than 20 years. Experts fear the decline is even greater outside Gabon and that, unless trends are reversed, great apes could become effectively extinct in as little as two generations. National Geographic

The NYC Transit Authority eliminates the subway token in a few days, and with it passes out of existence what is dubbed by some “the most disgusting nonviolent crime ever to visit the subway”. You have to have some sympathy, however, for the desperation of the perpetrators… NY Times [vai Richard Homonoff]

A Suggested Addendum for the DSM IV: “Editor’s Note: The following diagnostic regimen has NOT been approved by, or for that matter even submitted to the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) as such, but considering the press of world events and the headlong expansion of the American military presence in the Middle East and elsewhere, we felt it behooved us to help our readers get ahead of the global game…”

Thank you, Mark, for welcoming me back from my vacation. I have to point to your compilation of pointers to George Lakoff resources, including the “Metaphor” series, essential reading on how to think about the war (scroll down). And, on the same day, Mark observes the sixth anniversary of Allen Ginsberg’s death, reverently.

Our origin springs from the discovery that we are part of some 50 million socially and environmentally concerned people who value and support a worldview of compassion, peace, and less materialism, and who view nature as sacred — a group identified in the book The Cultural Creatives (Ray and Anderson, 2001).

Over the past few decades, iconic musician Lou Reed has worked with a gallery of talented visual and performing artists — Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, his girlfriend Laurie Anderson, just to name a few. Now he’s tackled what he says is his toughest challenge yet: dramatizing the works of Edgar Allen Poe in music, sound and spoken voice. NPR

One Woman Enrages War Rally with Her Heartfelt Message. They have come carrying flags, wearing patriotic caps and jackets and sweatshirts — one family in a minivan plastered with praise for President George W. Bush and a bumper sticker that says “If 90% of you are for military strikes, the other 10% should be tried for treason.”

She has pasted a photograph of a young Iraqi woman on the sign and written below: “Are you willing to kill her to get to Saddam? “ If it is not already clear, I love the abstraction my country, but there’s much that sickens me about my countrymates, the jingoist boosters of the war, at this point. Dubya’s disingenuousness as to the reasons for the war aside, how is support for the au courant justification, that we are trying to liberate the Iraqi people, compatible with the “kill the gooks” sentiment that has overtaken the population as it does in all American wars? It appears that only the most cursory capacity for discriminating levels of abstraction exists in the common thought process. That Iraq is ‘the enemy’ maps inexorably to demonization of Iraqis.

truthout‘s senior writer William Rivers Pitt has just come out with his second book, The Greatest Sedition is Silence. The book details the last four years of politics in America, and delves into topics of discussion that have been left aside by the mainstream media. The mysteries and morality surrounding the 9/11 attacks, Enron and the economic meltdown, the 2000 Election, the media and a myriad of other important issues are discussed. Through it all, Mr. Pitt exhorts his readers to get involved in the workings of their country, and to not remain silent in the face of so many calamities.

The LA Times spins this around the likelihood that Saddam was killed in the airstrike, while the NY Times‘ report on the bombing is more cautious.

America’s war with Iraq in the tender years of the 21st century comes as a shock to many of us. Like Europeans in 1914, we had come to believe that our country had to a large extent renounced war as an instrument of national policy.

This may be a short and efficient war. But already there has been death, in limited numbers among our own troops, doubtless in far greater numbers among those we call our enemies. Homes, buildings and infrastructure have been destroyed and will continue to be, however precisely aimed our bombs; there will be hunger and disease; there will be the misery of refugee camps and orphanages.

What one misses in most talk about the current war is any sense of its human cost. What is wholly lacking in current political discourse is any recognition of the obscenity of war. It’s as if we’d reverted smoothly to that primitivist thinking about death identified by Freud: We must be heroes, and the death of our enemies is greatly to be wished. I don’t doubt our leaders’ desire to minimize casualties and to control, to the extent possible, “collateral damage” — our nice euphemism for the inevitable killing of civilians by mistake. But it would be more honest if our death-dealing were discussed openly and fully.

War may be a failure of conflict resolution by peaceful means. It is also a kind of failure of civilization.

— Peter Brooks, Sterling professor of comparative literature and French at Yale University and author of several books, including Reading for the Plot and Troubling Confessions, LA Times [via CommonDreams]

“Smoking gun” site in Iraq turns out to contain pesticide. A facility near Baghdad that a US officer had claimed might finally be “smoking gun” evidence of Iraqi chemical weapons production turned out to contain pesticide, not sarin gas as originally thought.

A military intelligence officer for the US 101st Airborne Division’s aviation brigade, Captain Adam Mastrianni, told AFP that comprehensive tests Monday determined the presence of the pesticide compounds. Agence France Presse [via Yahoo]

ruling Monday the history of racial intimidation attached to it outweighs the free speech protection of Ku Klux Klansmen or others who might use it. Washington Post. A good precedent, upholding the sometimes less than obvious principle that particularly odious speech crosses the line to become action (although therein, of course, lies a slippery slope, with discretion in the hands of the wrong people…) Interestingly, the Court voted 6-3 to uphold the ban but only thought that it did not violate constitutional free speech guarantees by a 5-4 margin. The outlier, with some tortured reasoning, was — you guessed it — Clarence Thomas. It is hard to say whether it is better or worse since he started presuming to think on his own in the past few years, rather than silently vote the conservative party line. Certainly more entertaining to watch his foot-in-mouth disease.

I continue to be sickened by the enthusiasm the evangelists are showing for the war and its perpetrators. Here’s one of the latest examples. ABC News

Jury finds parents guilty of assault, endangerment for baby’s strict diet: …Assistant District Attorney Eric Rosenbaum said the couple treated their daughter, Ice, like a gerbil, feeding her a diet of ground nuts, juice, herbal tea, beans, cod liver oil and flax seed oil and no breast milk or formula. SF Chronicle

Sean-Patrick Kelley of the noted Agonist site has been lifting items word-for-word without attribution from Stratfor, says Wired News. Kelley admits it.

“Rouse yourself! Sit up!

Resolutely train yourself to attain peace.

Do not let the king of death, seeing you are careless,

lead you astray and dominate you. “

Sutta Nipata II, 10

I was privileged to be incommunicado on a tropical island for a week, not following the war news until I devoured a New York Times when we got to the airport yesterday afternoon. Unsurprisingly, no WMD have yet been found in the advance to Baghdad (Reuters/Yahoo!), and the “nerve gas antidote” of last week turns out not to be (Ananova). According to Al Jazeera, Britain may be admitting there may in fact be no WMD to be found in Iraq. The civilian death toll continues to mount horrifyingly (CTV.ca). Areas “pacified” and “secured” by US-UK forces remain unwelcoming and chaotic (Le Monde) and humanitarian crisis is looming if not already upon the people of Iraq (Al Jazeera). The hardliners in the dysadministration seem to be winning the internal battle (Independent/UK [via Commondreams]) over whether we will ‘rebuild’ or ‘annex’ Iraq (NY Times) and whether we will continue to undermine the UN as facilitator of any of the higher aspirations of the world’s nations toward peace, cooperation or prosperity. Tony Blair by some accounts (Sydney Morning Herald) isn’t faring so well politically; price to pay for allowing one’s best intentions to be co-opted by American rapacity. Unsurprisingly, the Arab world sees through the US propaganda line (NY Times)

More surprising to find in taking the pulse of the war after a week’s absence is the seemingly rapid and wholesale drift in American public opinion, how malleable to the propaganda effort the public’s mind and will appear to be. When US forces were bogged down halfway to Baghdad, even generals on active duty were brimming with contempt (Guardian/UK) for Rumsfeld, calling him another McNamara and denouncing him for prosecuting this war “on the cheap.” The dysadministration spin has been an ever-shifting crafty attempt to soften the public underbelly (Washington Post) about how the war might take much longer than anyone had been promised and to obfuscate its purpose enough that the public will no longer recognize how it is being lied to.

It seems to have worked. Just a week later, as the invading forces encircle Baghdad, , things are little different than what was expected — US forces are still taking heavy casualties (Al Jazeera), with accumulating friendly fire incidents (Al Jazeera)

(and who killed those fleeing Russian envoys?) not to mention the many thousands of Iraqi soldiers slaughtered (Boston Globe: “…to send a message to both the Iraqi leadership and civilians that coalition forces could move into the city at will…”) and inestimable civilian deaths — and yet, while there is little rejoicing in Iraq, Americans are swept up in the euphoria of ‘winning’… Meanwhile, outside the US, doubts about US pie-in-the-sky claims to have the situation nearly licked and disdain for US ‘liberation’ rhetoric (Pacific News Service) accumulate… with the worst yet to come, street-by-street and house-by-house through the Iraqi capital.

The effort to turn Iraq into a democracy, in other words, is making the U.S. less of one. Our opposition party has disappeared, corporate interests dictate public policy, and the feds may be rummaging through your e-mail.

There’s a dirty secret no one has told you, and here it is: This war is not about changing Iraq, it’s about changing America. LA Times

Technology is sexy again.: A San Francisco art and technology group’s latest production is a calendar featuring naked babes posing with machines. It’s the perfect gift for your favorite technology fetishist.

The Survival Research Labs calendar release is a part of a benefit being held Tuesday for kinetic artist and musician Tim North, who was diagnosed with cancer early this year. Wired News

via American Samizdat: Marine who said no to killing on his conscience:

The first American conscientious objector from the Iraq war will give himself up at a marine base in California this morning. He said he believed the war was “immoral because of the deception involved by our leaders”. [thanks, brooke]

Fighting not to fight:

Of 2.7 million men and women in the active and reserve forces in the US, 29 were discharged as conscientious objectors in 2002.

The Center on Conscience and War in Washington, which counsels prospective COs, reported 3,500 calls for advice in January, twice the normal rate.

Who ever said that impassioned political discourse can’t be zany fun?!! SpazOut NY [thanks to Thomas Schmidt]

“Every time any media outlet mentions the Iraqi Republican Guard they always preface it by calling it elite. However, there is no internationally accepted definition for ‘elite.’ I think we face the real possibility of cheapening the use of the word if standards aren’t set,” said United States Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Powell continued, “I think it’s sad that we’ve degenerated into some sort of elite relativism where you only have to be better than the next guy to be considered elite even if that next guy sucks. Any person that goes through two weeks of training shouldn’t be called elite.”

As part of the standard settings procedure the U.N. plans to send in an elite team of inspectors to measure the Iraqi troops’ eliteness level. BBSpot

In this dry desert world near Najaf, where the Army V Corps combat support system sprawls across miles of scabrous dust, there’s an oasis of sorts: a 500-gallon pool of pristine, cool water.

”It’s simple. They want water. I have it, as long as they agree to get baptized,” he said. The Miami Herald

Related: Are Christian evangelists eyeing Iraq? Dedicated workers of the Southern Baptist Convention and the Samaritan’s Purse — two of the biggest evangelical Christian missions in the US — are reportedly waiting on the Jordanian border for the signal to enter the battle-scarred country.

Baghdad under attack: attempts to preach Christianity in Iraq is bound to set off alarms

Both organisations insist that their priority will be to provide food, shelter and other needs to the victims of the war. But they don’t deny that if the situation presents itself, they will preach their Christian faith in a country that is predominantly Muslim. Al Jazeera

Visualizing the Costs: A lot of people don’t really understand how much money is at stake with the Iraq “crusade”. This diagram could help you to understand what the USA is doing, and what are its main goals. [via walker]

Technology is sexy again.: A San Francisco art and technology group’s latest production is a calendar featuring naked babes posing with machines. It’s the perfect gift for your favorite technology fetishist.

The Survival Research Labs calendar release is a part of a benefit being held Tuesday for kinetic artist and musician Tim North, who was diagnosed with cancer early this year. Wired News

My family and I will be away, and I will not be adding anything here, for a week. Please follow me back here on the 5th or the 6th. My best to all my readers until then.

“The best — and perhaps only — hope of leaving Iraq with a democratic political structure is by making its rebuilding an international effort.” NY Times editorial

And: Hearts and Minds: “Americans should be able to find common ground, for all sides dream of an Iraq that is democratic and an America that is again admired around the world.” — Nicholas Kristof, NY Times op-ed

“In the last two years Dick Cheney and other top officials have gotten it wrong on energy, on the economy — and their mistakes keep getting bigger.” — Paul Krugman, NY Times op-ed

“A second health care worker has died of a heart attack after receiving a smallpox vaccination, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported yesterday…

She was among seven health workers to suffer heart problems 4 to 18 days after receiving the vaccine voluntarily, as part of the United States’ effort to prepare medical teams to cope with bioterror attacks. Three volunteers had heart attacks, including another woman who died; two had chest pain; and two had heart inflammation.

In addition, 10 military recruits had heart inflammation after being vaccinated for the first time; all recovered, said Col. John D. Grabenstein, the Army’s deputy director for vaccines…” NY Times

Could Hans Blix have done anything to stop the war? An interview with The Guardian:

His office, on the 31st floor of the United Nations, with a striking view of the Chrysler building, is decorated with aerial pictures of Baghdad. “A lot of these buildings have probably been bombed now,” says his press spokesman, dashing his pen across vast swathes of the city, pointing out the government ministries.

Blix believes there was nothing he could have said that would have convinced the Americans not to go to war at this time. “They would have wanted a clear-cut guarantee that [the Iraqis] did not have weapons of mass destruction,” he says. “I could not have given them a guarantee that if they had waited a few months more there would have been results.”

Could anyone have given them a guarantee?

“Not at this stage. Now we’ll see if occupation does it. If we had come out and said on the basis of what we had and said, ‘We can solve this in three months,’ they would have said, ‘You’re not credible.’ “

The new alliance between anti-war protesters and foreign-policy realists: “What does an antiwar movement do with a war likely to be over in a matter of weeks? Plenty, it turns out.

The antiwar movement is actually two rather different movements that partly overlap. One movement is in the streets and on the internet — often led by radicals, sometimes joined uneasily by liberals. The other is pragmatic and mainstream. Both were nonplussed but only temporarily by the outbreak of war, and neither has gone away.” — Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect

Rumsfeld Adviser Resigns as Head of Pentagon Panel: Richard N. Perle has resigned as chairman of an influential Pentagon advisory board following disclosures of business dealings that included his meeting with a Saudi arms dealer and a contract with a bankrupt telecommunications company seeking Defense Department permission to be sold to Chinese investors. NY Times Is this another news event driven by webloggers’ revelations and hounding?

The biggest war game in US military history, staged this month at a cost of £165m with 13,000 troops, was rigged to ensure that the Americans beat their “Middle Eastern” adversaries, according to one of the main participants. General Paul Van Riper, a retired marine lieutenant-general, told the Army Times that the sprawling three-week millennium challenge exercises, were “almost entirely scripted to ensure a [US] win”. Guardian/UK I was pointed back to this August, 2002 article by someone who speculates that this might have something to do with the hard time the invading forces are having this week. The current war is scripted too, only they failed to persuade the majority of the players.

The United States does not have the military means to take over Baghdad and will lose the war against Iraq, former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter said.

“Every time we confront Iraqi troops we may win some tactical battles, as we did for ten years in Vietnam, but we will not be able to win this war, which in my opinion is already lost,” Ritter added. News24.com (South Africa)

Rebecca Blood wrote in response to my ‘conscientious objector’ post below to point out, quite rightly, that ‘conscientious objector’ status requires a military draft, and doubted the appropriateness of the word in an all-volunteer military. To which I would reply that this is true legalistically, but I was using the term conscientious objector more figuratively — no, really more literally — to indicate any who come to have objections as a matter of conscience. It is also worth pointing out that a volunteer army does not necessarily fill up with people in ethical agreement with their country’s military policy. More typically, enlistees, especially in peacetime, have not troubled themselves about the morality of joining the military in the face of the opportunity it represents. Rebecca comments, “But I have difficulty seeing military enlistees as unwilling victims in a terribly unfair scheme: a willingness to fight when called is an important–and obvious–part of the deal, not a hidden clause in the contract.” I beg to differ. Recruitment ads emphasize all sorts of fun and exciting things one will experience as a member of the military, and none of them are warfighting. And, even without conscription, many joining the military do not experience themselves as having much choice in the matter. Lives are being wasted tragically for misguided and devious reasons, and it is a comforting illusion to tell ourselves that dying soldiers knowingly assumed the risk. In that sense, developing and acting on conscientious objections is an opportunity waiting to happen. Rebecca: “…if you are in the military and have suddenly come to the conclusion that killing other people isn’t the career you had hoped for, objector.org is interested in helping you.” (And don’t forget, parents, while we’re on the topic, that the ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act requires schools to give military recruiters and the Selective Service access to the names of all students unless the parents specifically notify the school that sharing their child’s name is prohibited.)

As Rebecca points out, the Selective Service has always recognized the moral validity of objecting to war on the grounds that it is wrong — with several important constraints. It is fairly easy if you are a devout member of an established religious church or sect with well-defined pacifist doctrine. But if you come by your war objection through a less conventional route, the burden is upon you to justify it. During the Vietnam era, when I registered as a C.O., I had to jump through hoops to make the argument on the basis of my homegrown and eclectic theology, not exactly Jewish, not exactly Christian, Buddhist or animistic, nor secular humanist… (These days, as a mental health professional, I might also construct an objector’s position based on my familiarity with the core tenet of post-traumatic stress disorder, that something unutterable is done to the essence of being human by exposure to experiences outside the bounds of what it is equipped to endure, but that’s for a different conversation…) . And the Selective Service has always been inflexible about the requirement of absolute pacifism, i.e. objection to all war rather than a specific war. To make an intellectually honest assertion that one deserved C.O. status, one would have to search one’s soul for a position of conscience on challenging but predictable questions like the one about intervening against Hitler. Again, in asking here where the conscientious objectors are, I am broadening the term to encompass the plausible position of objecting specifically to this illegitimate ill-intentioned ill-advised morally compromised dirty little war. But, Rebecca, you’re right, it is probably more confusing than it is worth to have called them ‘conscientious objectors.’

Rafe Colburn:

“I have complete faith that the US military, along with the help our allies are providing, will wind up dislodging Saddam Hussein from power, hopefully sooner rather than later. When that happens, the aspirants to American empire who have sunk their claws into the current administration will no doubt crow about their general brilliance. Before it’s too late, let’s be sure to remember that they’re the same people who thought that no ground invasion was needed to overthrow Iraq’s government — that we could just send a few guns over and provide air support and the Iraqi opposition would take care of these things themselves. It was the military that demanded that the invasion be an all out effort involving lots of troops on the ground. Of all the things the Bush administration has gotten wrong, listening to the military on this one is one thing they got right.” rc3

Colburn, whose levelheaded clarity I usually appreciate, goes on to make a ‘lesser of evils’ argument I find insidious. Bringing down the Iraqi regime with a proxy war or airstrikes would be far worse for the Iraqi people than the status quo invasion scenario, he suggests, since the ground forces are taking such measures to prevent civilian casualties. Is this war a lesser of evils? Only if you buy into many questionable assumptions about inevitability or necessity. And then there’s the one about how long we are going to be able to afford the luxury of preventing civilian casualties. Although we’re denying that we targeted them (which isn’t really the point, is it?) and suggesting that it might have been an Iraqi missile rather than one of ours (will we go on to say they did it deliberately to frame the US and reap the propaganda benefits?), at least fifteen were killed in an errant missile strike today on a Baghdad marketplace. CNN

It also may be a fiction to assume that the efforts to avoid civilian casualties come from our commanders’ humanitarian scruples. I think the policy is more likely to be a function of our efforts to preserve the last tattered vestiges of the goodwill of the civilized world we used to have as our allies. In other words, a function of the Bush administration’s utter failure at diplomacy leaving the military in the untenable position of not being able to defend themselves adequately because of stringent PR restraints. As such, our calculation of the profit-risk balance of maintaining that effort may be very volatile. Prepare yourself to see the Pentagon quietly ignoring such constraints when it is expedient or necessary; and, of course, taking no responsibility for the consequences to the Iraqi populace.

Not Our Fight: William Saletan enters a plea that we continue to fight a different war than the Iraqis in this sense. This would be a morally determinative choice to differentiate us from the terrorists, he feels. He is not so naive as to believe the unsubstantiated (and ludicrous) claims of direct links between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda, but follow his logic. I’m not sure, however, we haven’t definitively lost the battle to be any better than the terrorists we claim to oppose already.

(I)n 1991 we and the Iraqis were waging the same war: They were trying to destroy us, and we were trying to destroy them. Now we’re waging two different wars: Saddam Hussein wants a war of destruction while we want a war of decapitation that leaves Iraq intact. The current “war” is really a struggle between those two wars. If we fight a war of destruction — even if we “win” it — we lose.

Remember this as you’re reading the latest news or watching the latest video from Iraq. Many developments that look like gains are really losses, and many that look like losses are really gains. When U.S. or British troops go into Basra, Umm Qasr, or Nasiriyah to finish off Fedayeen fighters, that’s a loss, not a gain. Every shot we fire in a city, and every bomb we drop, increases the probability of civilian casualties, which in turn raise the level of civilian anger against us and make it harder to separate Saddam from his people. Every day we spend hunting snipers in outlying cities, even if we kill them all, is a day in which we’re stalled on the way to Baghdad while U.S.-friendly regimes in the Muslim world grow more unstable

(…)

The killers of Sept. 11 exploited the fact that they were willing to shed the blood of civilians and we weren’t. The killers of Basra, An Nasiriyah, and Baghdad are exploiting the same difference. While ruthlessness in attack is worse than ruthlessness in defense, the logic of asymmetry binds them together. I don’t know whether Saddam’s henchmen should go to The Hague for sponsoring terrorism. But they certainly ought to go there for using human shields.. Slate

“(The charges in) William Safire’s recent two part series “The French Connection” in The New York Times, reprinted in the International Herald Tribune… have been relayed around the globe, in newspapers, magazines and Web sites, fueling the rising storm of outrage against the French.

But Safire’s double broadside is more Francophobia than fact. He is way off beam; his articles are filled with error and innuendo. What makes matters worse is that editors at both The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune knew there were serious questions about Safire’s charges, yet the papers went ahead and published the second part of his series.” TomPaine Are people finding any serious Francophobia out there? Even the most pro-Bush pro-war people I brush elbows with seem disdainful of the ‘Freedom fries’ jingoism, and I’m hearing about all sorts of corporate lobbying on behalf of the preservation of the trans-Atlantic alliance, since European subsidiaries of American firms are usually a significant contributor to their gross.

a commenting system here again, using Enetation. I played around with several of these when they first started appearing several years ago and they seemed to slow down the loading of the weblog page intolerably for me and at least some of FmH’s readers. There was also a question of the intermittent overload of the comments server making the comments system unavailable. Recently, I woke up to the possibility that these systems have matured; they’re being used broadly and I don’t hear any griping. I don’t know how Enetation compares with some of the other tools out there; perhaps, if you have one to recommend, mention it in a comment to this post? I’m particularly interested in knowing if you have found a system to be stable, reliable and perennially accessible. In any case, can at least a few people try to post test comments to this post to be sure that Enetation works for everyone?

I won’t know if this is slowing down page loads for some of you with a slower net connection unless you tell me either. Please do. For now, I’ll keep the little ‘speech balloon’ icon which lets you send me an email comment on a post too, but if Enetation or something similar works out, expect that to go away. I much prefer the potential for cross-conversation among my readers. So please try out the system…

How to watch Iraqi TV on the Web. Slate

Former Senator dies at 76: “The lanky, pink-faced lawmaker, who preferred bow ties and professorial tweeds to the Senate uniform of lawyer-like pinstripes, reveled in speaking his mind and defying conventional labels.

Known for his ability to spot emerging issues and trends, Moynihan was a leader in welfare reform and transportation initiatives, and an authority on Social Security and foreign policy.” The Nando Times