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

The New Neo Posted on by

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

The New Neo Posted on by

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

The New Neo Posted on by

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.

Reports of neoconservatism’s death greatly exaggerated?

The New Neo Posted on by

When I decided to call myself neo-neocon, I was only vaguely aware of how much hatred the term engenders. But many trolls and hate mail letters later, I’m far better informed on that score.

I’ve done my bit to explain the current state of neoconservative thought and to try to correct misunderstandings about what neocons stand for (click on the topic “neocons” on the right sidebar for the links).

I’ve been impressed by a recent effort in that direction written by Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute and appearing in that well-known neocon rag Commentary. It’s long and yet succinct, packing a great deal of thoughtful information into one piece, well worth reading for anyone who retains an open mind and a serious interest in the subject.

Muravchik’s thesis could be summarized—to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s famous dictum on democracy—as “neoconservatism is the worst way to deal with Islamofascism, except for all the other ways that have been proposed or tried from time to time.”

Muravchik takes the long view, starting with the birth of neoconservatism and its successes against Communism and the Soviets, and segueing into a cogent analysis of the Iraq War so far (its not as good as one would have hoped, not as bad as critics say, and—more importantly—showing signs of progress if we don’t give up prematurely).

Here are Muravchik’s four tenets of neoconservatism:

(1) Our struggle is moral, against an evil enemy who revels in the destruction of innocents. Knowing this can help us assess our adversaries correctly and make appropriate strategic choices. Saying it convincingly will strengthen our side and weaken theirs. (2) The conflict is global, and outcomes in one theater will affect those in others. (3) While we should always prefer nonviolent methods, the use of force will continue to be part of the struggle. (4) The spread of democracy offers an important, peaceful way to weaken our foe and reduce the need for force…..

[A] coherent approach, essentially similar to the one by means of which we won the cold war. By contrast, liberals and realists have no coherent approach to suggest…

The extremity of the hatred of neocons has a number of origins (see this and this). It’s become a phrase that’s almost devoid of its true meaning, and used as a substitute for pejorative terms such as “Fascist” or “bigot” or “warmonger.” Agree or disagree with neocon philosophy, but at least learn what it actually is. Muravchik’s article is an excellent way to go about doing just that.

[NOTE: The title of my post comes from Mark Twain’s response to his obituary that appeared prematurely in the New York Journal.]

[ADDENDUM: The NY Times chimes in on the demonizing of “neocon,” comparing it to the process by which “liberal” became a dirty word a while back.]

Israeli Press Office: al Durah a hoax

The New Neo Posted on by

Israeli Government Press Office director Daniel Seaman has issued a statement declaring the al Durah incident to have been staged, the first such official Israeli government pronouncement.

In the al Durah incident and its aftermath, so far only Charles Enderlin and France2 have been litigious; they’ve sued private individuals who have criticized them (for my coverage of these events, please see the posts listed on the right sidebar under the category “Paris and France2 trial”).

But now Pajamas Media correspondent Nidra Poller reports that Shurat HaDin, the activist Israeli law center, is planning a lawsuit of its own: against Charles Enderlin, for damages resulting from the al Durah blood libel. And until the videotapes are released, they want the Press Office to cancel France2’s credentials to work in Israel.

This promises to be very interesting.

If Enderlin had refrained from trying to defend his august reputation by suing Karsenty and the others, would any of this have happened? Perhaps he wishes he’d let sleeping dogs lie, so that lying reporters could sleep. But perhaps in the same way that David Irving’s swollen ego drove him to sue Deborah Lipstadt for libel and the ensuing trial ended up vindicating her and exposing Irving’s own mendacity, so Enderlin may ultimately regret his own attempt to clear his name through a defamation suit.

And if he were smart, Dan Rather ought to be reconsidering his own lawsuit right about now.

Russian missile defense systems: you don’t get what you pay for

The New Neo Posted on by

The Syrians are not happy.

The details are all very hush-hush, but rumor has it in the intelligence community that earlier this month something what very wrong with the shiny new missile defense system they had recently ordered from Russia.

It seems that Israeli air strikes were able to fly over Syria unimpeded and take out what is said to have been a fledgling nuclear facility. This was not supposed to happen; the Syrians paid good money for the state-of-the-art defense system, and yet it failed abysmally.

Why, and how? I certainly have no inside information, and I’m not especially tech-savvy. But it seems to me that it’s in the nature of a graft that has not taken—at least, so far.

Notwithstanding their glorious past, Arab and Muslim cultures have not been science-friendly for many centuries. Technology is imported to these areas and used by them, to be sure, but there is little that is developed or invented there, and the creative habits of mind that would foster scientific inquiry are not only missing but often actively discouraged.

That means that high-tech weaponry is imported rather than organically developed. Training in its use also encounters other built-in barriers to a quick and effective response:

Damascus’s air defenses tend to be rigid in their doctrine and employment; air defense crews depend on higher echelons to identify and assign targets. If those echelons fail–or they’re blinded by enemy countermeasures–they leave individual fire units in an autonomous mode, an environment they’re unprepared for.

A military reflects the culture in which it is embedded. All militaries must be hierarchical, and depend to a great extent on following orders. But societies in which individualism is highly valued find a way to allow members of their armed forces to think for themselves when circumstances permit, and to be flexible, reactive, and somewhat autonomous when needed.

Russia is an interesting case. It has always straddled the line between East and West, between modernism and stagnation. The Soviets emphasized scientific development and threw vast resources into it, achieving no small measure of success.

But it was at a cost. Some say the arms race nearly bankrupted the USSR and helped lead to its downfall. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, it’s become more and more apparent that Russia is not a first world country but occupies some sort of in-between state. Its technology is for sale, but its expertise can sometimes be hard to export.

[NOTE: Some will no doubt use this argument as an excuse to ignore the threat from the Islamic totalitarian world as inconsequential. This is a fallacy, unfortunately. They don’t have to be consistently successful in order to do major damage, if they have the requisite weaponry and are willing to keep trying and correcting when errors are made.]