Let’s give Turkey a feel-good tongue-lashing: it’s bound to prevent further genocide

The New Neo Posted on by

This Congress has one of the lowest approval ratings in modern memory. Perhaps that’s because it has accomplished so very little.

Then again, perhaps that lack of success is a good thing, seeing the caliber of many of the bills and resolutions it has tried to pass.

Congressional resolutions are often odd ducks, mostly nonbinding and essentially irrelevant, a collection of affirmations or condemnations of this and that, passed to get members on record as being as pro or con whatever the issue might be.

On the surface, the proposed Congressional resolution passed already by the House Foreign Affairs Committee and condemning the Turks for the Armenian massacre of about ninety years ago, occupies the moral high ground. But the resolution’s sponsors and spokespeople—who seem to be primarily Democrats, although I can’t be sure since I can’t get a head count of just how much Republican support it has—are acting in reckless disregard of its possible consequences.

Or maybe they know full well what they are doing, and this is only the latest ploy in their campaign to stick it to Bush while undermining the Iraq war effort, as Jed Babbin asserts here. If so, it wouldn’t be the first time such a thing has been attempted by the House under Pelosi’s dubious leadership. Continue reading →

What Sanchez really said

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Today’s NY Times prominently highlights a speech by retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, ex-Commander of US forces in Iraq, in which he is deeply critical of the conduct of the Iraq War.

The Times summarizes Sanchez’s speech in its lede front-page paragraph as:

…call[ing] the Bush administration’s handling of the war “incompetent” and sa[ying] the result was “a nightmare with no end in sight.”

The article goes on to explain that Sanchez has a self-defensive dog in this race:

[Sanchez’s] own role as commander in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib scandal leaves him vulnerable to criticism that he is shifting the blame from himself to the administration that ultimately replaced him and declined to nominate him for a fourth star, forcing his retirement…

General Sanchez has been criticized by some current and retired officers for failing to recognize the growing insurgency in Iraq during his year in command and for failing to put together a plan to unify the disparate military effort, a task that was finally carried out when his successor, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., took over in mid-2004.

In earlier years, I would have read the NY Times piece, digested it, come to a conclusion about the events described therein, and gone about my business. But, due to the wonders of the internet—and my own awakened knowledge that media reports of speechs are among the most susceptible to distortion of all MSM activities—I thought it might interesting to look up the text of the speech itself and see what Sanchez actually said. Continue reading →

More on the death of innocents, and the press

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This fairly straightforward article in the NY Times headlined “U.S. investigates civilian toll in airstrike, but holds insurgents responsible” describes a recent raid in Iraq that killed nineteen of the enemy who were the targets but also inadvertently led to the deaths of nine children and six women.

I say the story is relatively straightforward because it neither sensationalizes the deaths of the innocent victims nor demonizes those who killed them. Of course, it initially refers to the targets as “insurgents” and only later reveals they were members of al Qaeda, but that’s very small potatoes compared to some of the twistings and distortions of which the press seems almost infinitely capable.

The Times quotes the succinct explanation offered for the killings by Rear Adm. Greg Smith:

“The enemy has a vote here,” Admiral Smith said, “and when he chooses to surround himself with civilians and then fire upon U.S. forces, our forces have no choice but to return a commensurate amount of fire. Which is what they did last evening.”

No doubt some Times readers will see this as a weak excuse, manufactured by a bloody-minded military either intent on harming civilians, or acting in reckless disregard for their safety. Of course, such critics never quite explain what the armed forces in such situations are supposed to do instead, other than effectively commit suicide by refusing to fire back if there’s any chance of killing innocent civilians—which would be the case in virtually all conflicts against Islamist totalitarian terrorists.

The story reminded me once again that, as I put it in this post, it is an ironic fact and a harsh demonstration of the law of unintended consequences that those who most decry such killings are also an inadvertent cause of them:

It’s an almost inescapable but horrifying conclusion that if US and Israeli and other fighting forces were less intent on protecting children, fewer children would be purposely sent into harm’s way by the fanatics of the Moslem world. And, likewise, if the western MSM were not so intent on publicizing their deaths and criticizing those who kill them more than than they criticize the people who send those children out to be killed, the propaganda value in the West of the whole operation would be nil, and there probably would be less reason for the adults to put them in harm’s way. This represents a conundrum of major proportions.

What’s our own MSM to do? Even if they were well aware of their own dubious role in the matter, would the solution be to not cover such incidents? That doesn’t seem right, either. But in covering them, an effort should be made to prominently include the full context in which they occur. The Times seems to have done that here. If it continues to do so in the future, perhaps such events will lose some of their propaganda value to the enemy, who might therefore be less inclined to set up such situations in the first place.

One can hope, anyway.

Bullish on Iraq

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an interesting summary of events in Iraq so far, bound to infuriate those who believe the whole thing is obviously a failed enterprise.

The annoyances begin with its title, “Mission Accomplished,” harking back to that infamous banner on the USS Lincoln (which, by the way, referred to the ship’s mission, which had indeed been accomplished, as it was going home after tours of Afghanistan and Iraq).

Journalist Bartle Bull (love that name!) is using the phrase in the larger sense, however; he believes the Iraq mission has gone rather well—if one had realistic expectations of it in the first place:

Understanding this expensive victory is a matter of understanding the remaining violence. Now that Iraq’s big questions have been resolved””break-up? No. Shia victory? Yes. Will violence make the Americans go home? No. Do Iraqis like voting? Yes. Do they like Iraq? Yes””Iraq’s violence has largely become local and criminal. The biggest fact about Iraq today is that the violence, while tragic, has ceased being political, and is therefore no longer nearly as important as it was.

Some of the violence””that paid for by foreigners or motivated by Islam’s crazed fringes””will not recede in a hurry. Iraq has a lot of Islam and long, soft borders. But the rest of Iraq’s violence is local: factionalism, revenge cycles, crime, power plays. It will largely cease once Iraq has had a few more years to build up its security apparatus.

It’s easy to forget, when one looks at Iraq and the violence there, that much worse might have happened as a result of the war. It’s certainly possible that Bull is being too bullish on Iraq (can’t resist that pun), and that disaster is just around the corner. But Iraq’s growing unity, with increased Sunni cooperation and participation; and the diminution of the violence there in recent months; bodes well for the optimists on the future of that country.

“Realistic expectations” may be at the heart of the matter. Many on the Left and Right who criticize the Iraq invasion describe those who advocated it as unrealistic, and that’s true: there’s no doubt that at least some who were in favor of the Iraq invasion were far too sanguine in their predictions.

As for myself, although I favored the invasion, I considered it inherently risky and requiring a long occupation with a fairly heavy footprint and a lengthy time of violent jockeying for position in that country. That’s probably the natural pessimist in me, which in this case turned out to be correct.

Those who consider the country to be a chaotic failure today, however, are at least as unrealistic as those whom they criticize. The latter are wrong because they expected it to be too easy. The former are wrong because they demanded it.

Another noble Nobel peace prize

The New Neo Posted on by

Al Gore has won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

And just what has Gore done lately to advance world peace? Nothing, really. But the Peace Prize has become a sort of worldwide Miss Congeniality contest in recent years, when it’s not being awarded to terrorists such as Arafat who’ve done their bit to convince the gullible international community that they’ve changed their wicked ways, or to their apologists such as Jimmy Carter.

The Gore prize, awarded for his efforts to spread the word on climate change, amounts to what I believe is the first example of the Peace Prize and the Oscar being bestowed for the same work and apparently using the same standards.

Why am I so down on Gore? I don’t like the politicization of science and the concomitant twisting of facts in that effort. I certainly don’t mind him presenting a scientific point of view he believes is vital for the world to know, but the evidence is clear that Gore’s devotion to truth in his movie has been only a trifle behind that of Oliver Stone’s biopics.

Even a British judge, in an unusual decision, has ruled that Gore’s film plays fast and loose with the facts. That would be an inconvenient truth for Gore, except that it appears he’s hardly been inconvenienced by it at all.

Justice Barton, who ruled on the Gore film because a school governor had objected to a British government decision that it be shown in all British secondary schools, said that:

…the “apocalyptic vision” presented in the film was politically partisan and not an impartial analysis of the science of climate change.

Barton went on to mention nine significant scientific misstatements by Gore in the film, although the Justice did agree with its basic premise that the bulk of scientific evidence supports the idea of global warming caused by manmade greenhouse gas emissions. He ruled, however, that if the film is to be required viewing in schools, a rebuttal to it must be offered students at the same time.

Judges, of course, are not scientists. There’s no question that many reputable scientists would agree with Gore’s major thesis of human-generated global warming; there’s also no question that quite a few of the same ilk would disagree. This controversy will not be settled in a court of law nor by awarding prizes, however. It will be settled in the usual manner of science: research and evidence, made clearer by the passage of time and the amassing of more of same.

Wearing redux

The New Neo Posted on by

Some time ago I wrote an essay on Clive Wearing, the British musician and conductor who contracted a disease twenty years ago that left him with only his short-term memory. His adjustment has been long and difficult, his disability profound—trapped in an endless present that lasts only a few seconds at a time (read the piece for more of the details of his strange plight).

One of the reasons he is still alive is the power of his love for his wife Deborah, and hers for him. Despite all the words I’ve written on the subject, it’s hard to convey the profundity of his disability and yet the persistence of his extraordinary intelligence and personality through it all.

But I recently discovered through my You Tube forays that snippets of the otherwise unobtainable documentary that originally prompted me to write the Wearing piece have been posted there. So, since a picture might indeed be worth the more than thousand or so words I’ve already written on the subject, here’s one of those segments, filmed some years ago:

[And here are links to many more Wearing videos posted at You Tube, if you’re interested.]

Sanity Squad update–sort of

The New Neo Posted on by

I wrote a while back that the Sanity Squad would be resuming our podcasts for PJ very soon. So, why the delay? It turns out that Pajamas is revamping its general podcast policy and posting methods, so the whole thing is still a work in progress. I’ll let you know further developments as they are decided.

Bush as Comforter in Chief

The New Neo Posted on by

One of Bush’s less well-publicized roles is to pay condolence calls on families of soldiers who have been killed in the war. To date, he has visited:

…more than 1,500 relatives of the 4,255 American troops who have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to White House officials. As he travels around the country, the president often makes the time to console them — one family at a time, often including children — in sessions that he calls “one of the hardest things” about his job.

I’ll bet it is; this must be an almost unimaginably difficult task to add to the other burdens of a Presidency.

Some who think the Iraq War was fought for oil, plunder, hubris, or other nefarious reasons, will say it’s the least Bush should be doing. Others who support him will consider it a mark of his compassionate nature that he spends so much of his time this way.

Although I’ve been unable to document this, it’s my distinct impression and recollection that this sort of intense activity on the part of a President is new. In wars such as World War II, in which the casualties were magnitudes greater, FDR wouldn’t have had the time even if he had the inclination, which he apparently did not. Continue reading →

Memo to Rudy: Hey, I thought of it first

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Michael Hirsh, who thinks Giuliani is suspect for cozying up too much to those nasty, unpopular neocons, offers an interesting quote in his recent Newsweek piece [emphasis mine]:

[Giuliani]’s positioning himself as the neo-neocon,” jokes Richard Holbrooke, a top foreign-policy adviser to Hillary Clinton.

I beg to differ. He’s not positioning himself as the neo-neocon. He’s positioning himself as a neo-neocon.

Actually, I’m not sure what’s so “neo” about Rudy’s neoconism. He’s always been fairly hawkish on foreign policy, as far as I know.

As Hirsh himself points out, Giuliani snubbed Arafat way back in the 90s. He also was less than exquisitely polite to Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who offered a post-9/11 donation of ten million dollars to New York but added that the US needed to rethink its Palestinian policies and its support of Israel. As a result, Giuliani told him to stuff his money:’

“To suggest that there’s a justification for [the terrorist attacks] only invites this happening in the future,” he said. “It is highly irresponsible and very, very dangerous.

“And one of the reasons I think this happened is because people were engaged in moral equivalency in not understanding the difference between liberal democracies like the United States, like Israel, and terrorist states and those who condone terrorism.

Now I’ve got another question: if Richard Holbrooke defines Giuliani as the neo-neocon, what’s Hillary, Holbrook’s foreign policy advisee? The ex-neo-neocon?

[Hat tip on the Holbrooke quote to commenter
Americanneocon.]

Haditha: searching for this war’s “defining atrocity”

The New Neo Posted on by

My Lai was the template. A bona fide atrocity (see this for the complete My Lai story), it not only made the name of journalist Seymour Hersh and won him his coveted Pulitzer, but it profoundly shocked the American public and helped turn them against the Vietnam War.

And ever since the Iraq War began, the media has been searching for its My Lai. Abu Ghraib was an attempt to find one, but although it garnered enormous publicity and shamed the military, it wasn’t a good enough parallel. No one was killed, for example. A comparison of My Lai to Abu Ghraib illustrates the old Marxian adage the history repeats itself the first time as tragedy and the second as farce.

And so the media had to keep looking. They thought they had found what they were looking for in Haditha.

True, the scale wasn’t as great as in My Lai. But Haditha, unlike Abu Ghraib, featured the deaths of civilian innocents at the hands of Marines, and so it was close enough.

Time correspondent Tim McGirk broke the story in March of 2006, having received information and a videotape from Iraqi sources. However:

McGirk received his video “evidence” and contacts from two known Iraqi insurgent operatives already under observation by Marine Corps counter intelligence teams. One of the Iraqi witnesses McGirk relied on had just been released from almost six months captivity for insurgent activities and the other witness was considered a useful intelligence tool by Marines listening to him talk on his cell phone. McGirk never interviewed the Marines…

The contrast between the way the Haditha and the My Lai stories broke is instructive. In the latter, the incident came to light because of reports by American military forces who had themselves witnessed the killings, and an Army investigation was launched which unfortunately turned out to be a whitewash. After that, the American whistleblowers turned the information over to reporter Hersh, who publicized it and sparked a new investigation which led to the prosecution of the perpetrators.

In contrast, in Haditha, reporter McGirk was, by his own admission, actively searching for a story about civilian casualties, and then got in touch with some Iraqi groups who provided it. The investigation and prosecution was launched after the MSM broke the story, and the informants seem to have all been Iraqi, some of them of extremely questionable origin.

And now it turns out there is evidence that the entire thing may have been planned by al Qaeda operative intending to use the US media as a propaganda tool:

The attack was carried out by multiple cells of local Wahabi extremists and well-paid local gunmen from Al Asa’ib al-Iraq [the Clans of the People of Iraq] that were led by Al Qaeda foreign fighters, the summary claims. Their case was bolstered by Marine signal intercepts revealing that the al Qaeda fighters planned to videotape the attacks and exploit the resulting carnage for propaganda purposes….During the November Haditha battle, the insurgents secreted themselves among local civilians to guarantee pursuing Marines would catch innocent civilians in the ensuing crossfire.

Gateway Pundit traces the NY Times’s Haditha coverage. One of the earliest articles states, “This is the nightmare that everyone worried about when the Iraq invasion took place.” I beg to differ; it was the nightmare many reporters hungered for, the story they were eager to break when the Iraq invasion took place, the new “defining atrocity” of the new bad war.

Before My Lai it was considered inconceivable that American soldiers could commit such atrocities. The pendulum then swung so far in the other direction that now it is considered inevitable that they will do so. So reporters have abandoned the healthy skepticism they require in order to ferret out the truth. Instead, all they feel they need to do is find the atrocity stories, write about them, and then sit back and garner their own Pulitzers.

Fortunately, this time I don’t think there’ll be a Pulitzer in it for Tim McGirk.

“We have been waiting for you:” uncovering buried Ukrainian secrets

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Patrick Desbois is a French priest with a special calling: he has dedicated himself to documenting the mass murders of Ukrainian Jews by the Nazis during World War II, committed in the days before the efficiency of gas chamber and oven had replaced the messier business of bullet and pit.

Father Desbois knows that, although most of these estimated million and a half deaths are undocumented, there were witnesses—villagers who watched and remembered. The very young among them are old now, but they are able to lead the inquisitive priest to the places where the unmarked graves lie, waiting.

The death camps have received far more publicity, but the Nazis managed to kill a huge number of Jews in Ukraine, where the bulk of Russian Jewry lived, an inheritance from a Polish past. This is where the famous Babi Yar pits were located, subject of Yevtushenko’s brave poem.

The Nazis were determined to leave no witnesses. But even at Babi Yar and many other scenes of execution and horror, a few people survived by sustaining nonfatal injuries, playing dead, and lying among the pile of bodies to crawl out later:

One of the most often-cited parts of Kuznetsov’s documentary novel [on Babi Yar] is the testimony of Dina Pronicheva, an actress of Kiev Puppet Theater. She was one of those ordered to march to the ravine, forced to undress, and then shot. Severely wounded, she played dead in a pile of corpses, and eventually managed to escape. She was one of the very few survivors of the massacre; she later related her horrifying story to Kuznetsov.

Desbois interviews the other surviving witnesses, those who were neither perpetrators nor victims, but onlookers. Of course, in a way, you might say they were victims, as well—young children or teenagers who were secret watchers of scenes of almost unimaginable horror, leaving them with dreadful memories for all these decades, and feeling somehow complicit in events over which they had no control.

And that is why so many of them greet Father Desbois with a sense of great relief. He is not there to judge, but to witness the witnesses, who have been silent far too long about their terrible burden:

“People talk as if these things happened yesterday, as if 60 years didn’t exist,” Father Desbois said. “Some ask, ”˜Why are you coming so late? We have been waiting for you.’”

You might ask why they’ve not spoken up sooner, if they wanted to so very much? I can only answer that shame is often the psychological experience of children in such situations, and silence is shame’s companion. A priest can help them transcend that feeling, opening mouths that lead to uncovering the location of graves and reclaiming a terrible past.

Seen on Manhattan streets: walking the walk

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I saw her walking ahead of me on a sidewalk in New York, and I knew immediately.

She had the long hair, slicked back into a slightly damp ponytail. The large soft bag, slung over the shoulder. The small stature and the narrow slimness. The straight spine and the long, erect neck. The impression that a plumb line had been dropped from the middle of the top of her head straight down through her torso and solar plexus, from which her body was somehow regally and calmly suspended.

And underneath it all, the feet. Larger than one might think for the underpinnings of this otherwise diminutive person, with toes facing outwards. Her feet would have made her walk seem awkward and ducklike were it not for the style and grace of the rest of her stride.

No doubt about it: she was a dancer. Ballet dancer, most likely. New York is highly populated with them. I know the contents of her large shoulder bag, too: sopping wet leotards and tights, several pairs of shoes, lambs’ wool and tape and bunion pads, a towel to wipe off the sweat, hairpins galore, and an assortment of plastic and woolen leg and body warmers to induce even more sweat and the loss of the last few ounces of fat that might still cling to that pared-down body.

Maybe a yogurt. A bottle of water. Some lettuce leaves in a small plastic container.

And an iron will, a soaring ambition, a denial of the odds, and a love of the thing itself: the sheer pleasure of forcing the body into attempting mastery of something very difficult, very beautiful, and very satisfying.