U.S. sniper used Quran for target practice

The U.S. military reported today that they canned an American sniper after he used the Quran for target practice.

Iraqi police found the bullet-riddled Quran with graffiti inside the cover on a firing range near a police station in Radwaniyah, a former insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad, U.S. military spokesman Col. Bill Buckner said.

I hope there is more veracity to this report than when Newsweek reported a soldier at Gitmo had flushed the Quran down the toilet. Not that I advocate desecrating sacred materials, but that toilet story turned out to be potty talk, and a handful of people died from the Muslim rioting that resulted and America's rep sunk a little lower.

Christians fleeing Iraq; few entering U.S.

There have been long histories of discrimination in the United States against gays and Jews and other non-heterosexual WASPs, and I don't think it is too difficult for Americans to imagine gays in Iraq and Jews in Baghdad living under the hammer. But Christians?

Just like in the Palestinian territories, Christians in Iraq continue to see their situation get worse. The LA Times touches on their plight in a Column One about Robert DeKelaita, an Iraqi-born attorney handling asylum cases in American immigration court.

Repressed under Saddam Hussein, Iraq's Christian population has been decimated since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Muslim extremists have murdered priests and burned churches and Christian-owned shops and homes. Priests in Iraq estimate that fewer than 500,000 Christians remain, about a third of the number as before 2003.

On March 13, the body of the archbishop of Mosul, Paulos Faraj Rahho, was recovered, two weeks after he was kidnapped while leaving Mass. The slaying prompted Iraqi Christians to consider worshiping in secret; church services have also been attacked. Christian leaders say some Christians have been abducted and killed after refusing to convert to Islam.

"No group was happier than Christians when Saddam fell," DeKelaita said. "But no group is more disappointed with the way things played out."

Anguished over mistreatment of Iraqi Christian family members and strangers, DeKelaita long ago decided to dedicate his law practice to defending them. He is among a handful of immigration lawyers nationwide who specialize in representing Iraqi Christians, though he represents other clients.

"I know their pain; I feel it," he said of Iraqi Christians. "These are my people. I don't even have to ask them what they've been through."

Each Christian released from federal custody is a blessing, he said. But for the most part, "I deal in misery, unfortunately."

Frankly, I've never understood why we don't take more Iraqi refugees in. I mean, we unleashed this hornet's nest when we deposed that despot Saddam. Seems like we should take care of those endangered by the aftermath, whether it's because they are ethnic minorities or they work for the U.S. military or contractors. An assistant secretary of State gave this explanation to USA Today:

The United States has been unable to accept more Iraqis in part because of the time needed for background checks, which have become more stringent since 9/11.

To me it seems like a moral imperative that 10 years from now we will look back on critically, just like our response to Saddam while he was cleansing the Kurds.

Last fall, I put the question of what the U.S. should do to Bruce Einhorn, a recently retired immigration judge who is the "house Bolshevik" at Pepperdine, handled the L.A. 8 case and wrote an article about the refugees called "Freed to Flee."

"I find it appalling that having perhaps inadvertantly caused the refugee crisis in Iraq we have essentially pretended it doesn't exist. Clearly we overthrew a vicious, genocidal brute in Saddam Hussein. On the other hand, our occupation of Iraq after his overthrow has been a complete fiasco. Whatever terrorist organizations that didn't exist in Iraq do now, largely in resistance to us. And ordinary citizens are running for their lives," Einhorn told me.

"If the United States intervenes in a nation's affairs, ostensibly to restore or create human rights for the population, then it seems to me our government has assumed the burden of protecting those who become the targets of persecution as an inadvertent result of our involvement."

Catholics against war to deliver ashes to Bush

This is the kind of stunt designed simply to drum up media hits, and I'll oblige. An e-mail from Catholics for an End to the War in Iraq just arrived in my inbox stating that the group will mark tomorrow, which is Ash Wednesday, by delivering ashes to the White House.

The use of ashes at the White House is a sign of atonement for President Bush’s war in Iraq, his continued support of torture and for his squandering of our nation’s moral leadership in the world.

Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, a time when Catholics pray for forgiveness in preparation for the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Catholics believe that Jesus’ death was an act of atonement for personal and social sins.

Fr. Joe Nangle OFM, a Catholic priest serving at Our Lady Queen of Peace in Arlington, will be present to bless the ashes. “The use of ashes is an ancient and sacred sign that we are ultimately accountable to a higher power. If anyone needs this pastoral advice, it is President Bush.,” said Fr. Nangle.

Imagining a newly divided Middle East

Not long ago, in a decrepit prison in Iraqi Kurdistan, a senior interrogator with the Kurdish intelligence service decided, for my entertainment and edification, to introduce me to an al-Qaeda terrorist named Omar. “This one is crazy,” the interrogator said. “Don’t get close, or he’ll bite you.”

Omar was a Sunni Arab from a village outside Mosul; he was a short and weedy man, roughly 30 years old, who radiated a pure animal anger. He was also a relentless jabberer; he did not shut up from the moment we were introduced. I met him in an unventilated interrogation room that smelled of bleach and paint. He was handcuffed, and he cursed steadily, making appalling accusations about the sexual practices of the interrogator’s mother. He cursed the Kurds, in general, as pig-eaters, blasphemers, and American lackeys. As Omar ranted, the interrogator smiled. “I told you the Arabs don’t like the Kurds,” he said. I’ve known the interrogator for a while, and this is his perpetual theme: close proximity to Arabs has sabotaged Kurdish happiness.

Omar, the Kurds claim, was once an inconsequential deputy to the now-deceased terrorist chieftain Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Omar disputed this characterization. By his own telling, he accomplished prodigies of terror against the pro-American Kurdish forces in the northern provinces of Iraq. “You are worse than the Americans,” he told his Kurdish interrogator. “You are the enemy of the Muslim nation. You are enemies of God.” The interrogator—I will not name him here, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment—sat sturdily opposite Omar, absorbing his invective for several minutes, absentmindedly paging through a copy of the Koran.

During a break in the tirade, the interrogator asked Omar, for my benefit, to rehearse his biography. Omar’s life was undistinguished. His father was a one-donkey farmer; Omar was educated in Saddam’s school system, which is to say he was hardly educated; he joined the army, and then Ansar al-Islam, the al-Qaeda–affiliated terrorist group that operates along the Iranian frontier. And then, on the blackest of days, as he described it, he fell prisoner to the Kurds.

The interrogator asked me if I had any questions for Omar. Yes, I said: Have you been tortured in this prison?

“No,” he said.

“What would you do if you were to be released from prison right now?”

“I would get a knife and cut your head off,” he said.

At this, the interrogator smacked Omar across the face with the Koran.

Omar yelped in shock. The interrogator said: “Don’t talk that way to a guest!”

Now, Omar rounded the bend. A bolus of spit flew from his mouth as he screamed. The interrogator taunted Omar further. “This book of yours,” he said, waving the Koran. “‘Cut off their heads! Cut off their heads!’ That’s the answer for everything!” Omar cursed the interrogator’s mother once again; the interrogator trumped him by cursing the Prophet Muhammad’s mother.

The meeting was then adjourned.

In the hallway, I asked the interrogator, “Aren’t you Muslim?”

“Of course,” he said.

“But you’re not a big believer in the Koran?”

“The Koran’s OK,” he said. “I don’t have any criticism of Muhammad’s mother. I just say that to get him mad.”

He went on, “The Koran wasn’t written by God, you know. It was written by Arabs. The Arabs were imperialists, and they forced it on us.” This is a common belief among negligibly religious Kurds, of whom there are many millions.

“That’s your problem, then,” I said. “Arabs.”

“Of course,” he replied. “The Arabs are responsible for all our misfortunes.”

“What about the Turks?” I asked. It is the Turks, after all, who are incessantly threatening to invade Iraqi Kurdistan, which they decline to call “Iraqi Kurdistan,” in more or less the same obstreperous manner that they refuse to call the Armenian genocide a genocide.

“The Turks, too,” he said. “Everyone who denies us our right to be free is responsible for our misfortunes.”

We stepped out into the sun. “The Kurds never had friends. Now we have the most important friend, America. We’re closer to freeing ourselves from the Arabs than ever,” he said.

So goes the opening of Jeffrey Goldberg's amazing cover story for this month's Atlantic and the hope of Iraqi Kurds who believe the American-led ouster of Saddam Hussein was the beginning of the new nation of Kurdistan. In his article, Goldberg imagines a new map of the Middle East, seen above, which he says could be the greatest consequence of the war.

It used to be that the most far-reaching and inventive question one could ask about the Middle East was this: How many states, one or two—Israel or a Palestinian state, or both—will one day exist on the slip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River?

Today, that question seems trivial when compared with this one: How many states will there one day be between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates River? Three? Four? Five? Six? And why stop at the western bank of the Euphrates? Why not go all the way to the Indus River? Between the Mediterranean and the Indus today lie Israel and the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Long-term instability could lead to the breakup of many of these states.

These new nations would largely be drawn along racial and ethnic lines, which certainly would lead to lots of bloodshed, probably like what we saw in Iraq before the sectarian violence slowed toward the end of the year. In fact, many in the Middle East and some pro-Palestinian American academics think this was the goal: an American plot to Balkanize Arab countries for the benefit of Israel. Seriously. The article is so ripe with choice nuggets that I can't possibly mention them all, but here is a poignant one made by a long-quite voice.

The neoconservatives’ big idea was that American-style democracy would quickly take hold in Iraq, spread through the Arab Middle East, and then be followed by the collapse of al-Qaeda, who would no longer have American-backed authoritarian Arab regimes to rally against. But democracy has turned out to be a habit not easily cultivated, and the idea that Arab political culture is capable of absorbing democratic notions of governance has fallen into disfavor.

In December of 2006, I went to the Israeli Embassy in Washington for a ceremony honoring Natan Sharansky, who had just received the Medal of Freedom from President Bush. Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, had become the president’s tutor on the importance of democratic reform in the Arab world, and during the ceremony, he praised the president for pursuing unpopular policies. As he talked, the man next to me, a senior Israeli security official, whispered, “What a child.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“It’s not smart … He wants Jordan to be more democratic. Do you know what that would mean for Israel and America? If you were me, would you rather have a stable monarch who is secular and who has a good intelligence service on your eastern border, or would you rather have a state run by Hamas? That’s what he would get if there were no more monarchy in Jordan.”

After the ceremony, I spoke with Sharansky about this critique. He acknowledged that he is virtually the lone neoconservative thinker in Israel, and one of the few who still believes that democracy is exportable to the Arab world, by force or otherwise.

“After I came back from Washington once,” he said, “I saw [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon in the Knesset, and he said, ‘Mazel tov, Natan. You’ve convinced President Bush of something that doesn’t exist.’”

Gay Muslims: From Baghdad to Berlin

The New York Times has been on the gay-Muslim beat of late, with this piece from Iraq in December and this dispatch from Berlin last week.

Taken apart, each story is an interesting look at people other than Episcopalians struggling to marry their religious identity with their sexuality. Juxtaposed, however, the stories show the differences -- and similarities -- between being gay in an open society and a religiously violent one. From the Gayhane club in Germany:

European Muslims, so often portrayed one-dimensionally as rioters, honor killers or terrorists, live diverse lives, most of them trying to get by and to have a good time. That is more difficult if one is both Muslim and gay.

“When you’re here, it’s as if you’re putting on a mask, leaving the everyday outside and just having fun,” said a 22-year-old Turkish man who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear that he would be ostracized or worse if his family found out about his sexual orientation.

Safety and secrecy come up regularly when talking to guests, who laugh and dance, but also frequently look over their shoulders. To be a gay man or lesbian with an immigrant background invites trouble here in two very different ways.

“Depending on which part of Berlin I go to, in one I get punched in the mouth because I’m a foreigner and in the other because I’m a queen,” said Fatma Souad, the event’s organizer and master of ceremonies.

That photo is of Souad, who looks a lot like Andy Dick.

The danger of being gay in Iraq

The president of Iran might think his country is free of gays, but, for many years, gays and lesbians lived openly in Iraq. No longer, the NYT reports, largely due to increased sectarian violence:

In January, a United Nations report described the increased persecution, torture and extrajudicial killing of Iraqi lesbians and gay men. In 2005, Iraq’s most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling for gay men and lesbians to be killed in the “worst, most severe way.”

He lifted it a year later, but neither that nor the recent ebb in violence has made Mohammed or his friends feel safe. They yearn to leave Iraq, but do not have the money or visas. They agreed to be interviewed on the condition that their last names not be used.

They described an underground existence, eked out behind drawn curtains in a dingy safe house in southwestern Baghdad. Five people share the apartment — four gay men and one woman, who says she is bisexual. They have moved six times in the last three years, just ahead, they say, of neighborhood raids by Shiite and Sunni death squads. Even seemingly benign neighborhood gossip can scare them enough to move.

“We seem suspicious because we look like a cell of terrorists,” said Mohammed, nervously fingering the lapel of his shirt. “But we can’t tell people what we really are. A cell, yes, but of gays.”

Why one UCLA soldier went to war

Lt. Mark Daily was the first UCLA alum to be killed in Iraq. (A plaque was recently hung in his honor in front of the Student Activities Center off of Bruin Plaza.) His death touched thousands upon thousands not simply because he was young and it was tragic, but because of the writings he left behind and a story in the LA Times that was e-mailed around the world.

One recipient was Christopher Hitchens, the atheist superstar and author who Daily credited with convincing him of the moral imperative of the war. In this month's Vanity Fair, Hitchens describes feeling ill upon learning this and seeking out Daily's family to clear his conscience.

In his brilliant book What Is History?, Professor E. H. Carr asked about ultimate causation. Take the case of a man who drinks a bit too much, gets behind the wheel of a car with defective brakes, drives it round a blind corner, and hits another man, who is crossing the road to buy cigarettes. Who is the one responsible? The man who had one drink too many, the lax inspector of brakes, the local authorities who didn't straighten out a dangerous bend, or the smoker who chose to dash across the road to satisfy his bad habit? So, was Mark Daily killed by the Ba'thist and bin Ladenist riffraff who place bombs where they will do the most harm? Or by the Rumsfeld doctrine, which sent American soldiers to Iraq in insufficient numbers and with inadequate equipment? Or by the Bush administration, which thought Iraq would be easily pacified? Or by the previous Bush administration, which left Saddam Hussein in power in 1991 and fatally postponed the time of reckoning?

These grand, overarching questions cannot obscure, at least for me, the plain fact that Mark Daily felt himself to be morally committed. I discovered this in his life story and in his surviving writings. Again, not to romanticize him overmuch, but this is the boy who would not let others be bullied in school, who stuck up for his younger siblings, who was briefly a vegetarian and Green Party member because he couldn't stand cruelty to animals or to the environment, a student who loudly defended Native American rights and who challenged a MySpace neo-Nazi in an online debate in which the swastika-displaying antagonist finally admitted that he needed to rethink things. If I give the impression of a slight nerd here I do an injustice. Everything that Mark wrote was imbued with a great spirit of humor and tough-mindedness. Here's an excerpt from his "Why I Joined" statement:

Anyone who knew me before I joined knows that I am quite aware and at times sympathetic to the arguments against the war in Iraq. If you think the only way a person could bring themselves to volunteer for this war is through sheer desperation or blind obedience then consider me the exception (though there are countless like me).… Consider that there are 19 year old soldiers from the Midwest who have never touched a college campus or a protest who have done more to uphold the universal legitimacy of representative government and individual rights by placing themselves between Iraqi voting lines and homicidal religious fanatics.

Refugees in their own land

Another story from Najaf, Iraq, not about how the drop in killings is hurting gravediggers, but about the sad lives of those stuck in a Shi'ite refugee camp.

The men gather somberly at midday on soiled straw mats under a makeshift canvas canopy in a valiant effort to simulate the traditional Arab formal reception room, but here they have no fans to keep the flies from landing, no sweets or tea to offer strangers.

They hoped that this city, holy to their Shiite sect, would welcome them and begin to heal their grief. But instead they have found themselves in a refugee camp outside the city, far from jobs and shops, squeezed five to a tent, sleeping on squalid blankets smelling of sweat, and drinking cloudy brown water hauled from a nearby ditch.

Most galling for these Shiite refugees is that they feel abandoned by the government, which is run by fellow Shiites. “When Maliki came to Najaf he didn’t even come to see the camp; he didn’t even visit his own people,” said Issa Mohammed, 47, a dignified man wearing the black checked scarf favored by tribal sheiks, referring to Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

The scope of sectarian killings in Iraq and the relocation they have caused have yet to be publicly acknowledged by the Iraqi government. But a visit to Najaf, whose refugee population is typical of the southern provinces, lays bare the vast needs of displaced Iraqis and the rough road ahead for the project of national reconciliation.

Last week, a reporter for The Washington Post was killed while speaking to Iraqis about sectarian violence. One can hope, dream and even pray -- especially pray -- but it's hard to imagine things getting better in Iraq. Sectarian violence is not the kind of conflict that fades over days or even a few years.

Gravedigging down with deaths in Iraq

NAJAF, Iraq — At what's believed to be the world's largest cemetery, where Shiite Muslims aspire to be buried and millions already have been, business isn't good.

A drop in violence around Iraq has cut burials in the huge Wadi al Salam cemetery here by at least one-third in the past six months, and that's cut the pay of thousands of workers who make their living digging graves, washing corpses or selling burial shrouds.

Few people have a better sense of the death rate in Iraq .

"I always think of the increasing and decreasing of the dead," said Sameer Shaaban, 23, one of more than 100 workers who specialize in ceremonially washing the corpses. "People want more and more money, and I am one of them, but most of the workers in this field don't talk frankly, because they wish for more coffins, to earn more and more."

This story from McClatchy Newspapers, courtesy of Luke Ford, puts a macabre twist on all that bloodshed. It reminds me of one of the best stories I've ever read: "Angels of Mercy and Death," by LA Timeser Bruce Wallace in the wake of the 2004 tsunami.

Reporter killed in Iraq covering sectarian violence

Like we need a reminder that things are really bad in Iraq:

BAGHDAD, Oct. 14 -- On Sunday afternoon, Salih Saif Aldin set out for one of Baghdad's most dangerous neighborhoods. He knew exactly where to go. He nodded, smiled, grabbed his camera. There was nothing he needed to say.

Saif Aldin always came back -- from death threats, from beatings, from kidnappings, from detentions by American soldiers, from the country's most notorious and deadly terrain -- but on Sunday he didn't. The 32-year-old Iraqi reporter in The Washington Post's Baghdad bureau was shot once in the forehead in the southwestern neighborhood of Sadiyah. He was the latest in a long line of reporters, most of them Iraqis, to be killed while covering the Iraq war. He was the first for The Washington Post.

"The death of Salih Saif Aldin in the service of our readers is a tragedy for everyone at The Washington Post. He was a brave and valuable reporter who contributed much to our coverage of Iraq," said Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of The Post. "We are in his debt. We grieve with his family, friends, fellow journalists and everyone in our Baghdad bureau."

At 2 p.m., Saif Aldin took a taxi from The Post's office to Sadiyah to interview residents about the sectarian violence there between Shiite militiamen and Sunni insurgents. It was his third trip to the embattled neighborhood within a week. For him, there were no red zones, no green zones, no neighborhoods out of bounds.

Two hours later, a man picked up Saif Aldin's cellphone and called a colleague at The Post to say he had been shot.

Residents of the neighborhood and Iraqi military officers at the scene said Saif Aldin was killed while taking photographs on a street where several houses had been burned. His wounds appeared to indicate he was shot at close range. His body was later observed lying on the street, covered with newspapers.

American soldier goes Harry Caray at Iraqi checkpoint

Wow. Here's an American soldier at an Iraqi checkpoint -- based on the vans and striped shirts, I think it's legit -- impersonating Will Ferrell impersonating Harry Caray, one of the best shticks "Saturday Night Live" has ever had. Considering the death toll in Iraq, I'm not sure it's so funny in real life.




Deadspin says:

It's a delicate maneuver to be sure, but if we can pull this off for laughs, it's only a matter of time before everything else over there falls into place.

Hmmm. I thought Bush said that the U.S. doesn't torture?

'Blood and guts - and tender remembrances of home'

The soldier's messages back to his wife, Diana, father, stepmother and five siblings alternated between gruesome details of the horror of battle - a dog dragging away a corpse's head, a body identified only by its shoes because nothing else remained, trucks awash with blood and guts - and tender remembrances of home.

He called Diana frequently and sent her love poems.

"He'd ask me to pray for him and his soldiers," she said. "He said, `I hope you won't look at me differently for the things I had to do.' I told him, `Don't stop and think, just do what you have to."'

And sometimes, those things were terrible.

He pulled a comrade from a Stryker whose legs stayed behind in the wrecked armored vehicle. He killed at least eight men. He'd smelled the stink of death before and ducked bullets as an emergency medical technician in Compton, but he was profoundly affected by the war.

These are some of the disturbingly evocative words from Brent Hopkins' tale of a grieving father who flew to Baghdad to follow in his soldier son's final steps. It is a searing reminder of what this war is costing us -- humans -- not just in dollars and lives, but in mental suffering and unwashable memories.

Roaming Iraq with a heavy metal mercenary

Washington was abuzz today with the 3 1/2 hour testimony of the head of Blackwater USA, whose appearance reminded some people of Oliver North's two decades ago. Blackwater is the biggest provider of diplomatic security in Iraq, and its been accused of killing Iraqi civilians in firefights that it most often initiates.

The rise of American guns for hire reminded me of a piece from Rolling Stone two years ago that was included in the Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005. It dealt with Wolf Weiss, a rock 'n' roll merc whose father was assassinated when he was 11.

"He was found with over seventy percent of his bones broken, shot twice at point-blank range in the back of the head, wrapped up in a blanket with a yellow ribbon and a bow tie and then put in the back of his Rolls-Royce." Weiss says this in an almost neutral tone, as if he's stating where he went to high school.

The piece is titled "Heavy Metal Mercenary." It's raw, evocative and shows why these "contractors" are risking their lives in Iraq. (Hint: $20,000 a month.)

"Locked, cocked and ready to rock!" Scott shouts to Weiss over the radio. As he guns the Yukon through the crowded streets, Weiss views the drivers all around us not as fellow motorists but as potential terrorists -- and we are their target. The director of a private security company that escorts supply convoys between cities and ferries clients to work, Weiss is a private gun for hire, part of the vast and growing army of for-profit contractors who are providing much of the firepower in Iraq. There are now an estimated 20,000 "operators" or "shooters," as they're known on the ground, making corporate soldiers the second-largest contingent in Iraq after the American military. For better or worse, these private military contractors have become an integral part of the occupation, the only force available to protect workers and officials as they attempt to rebuild schools and restore power. By government estimates, the for-profit militias could wind up costing American taxpayers more than $4 billion - a quarter of the cost budgeted for reconstruction. "A lot of people are calling us private armies -- and that's basically what we are," says Weiss. "This is not a security company. This is a paramilitary force."

Some of the private warriors sport such neat haircuts and tidy polo shirts that they look, at first, more like golf pros than gunslingers. Wolf Weiss, as his name suggests, is not the polo-shirt sort. He wears his body armor, and his bravado, at all times. He is not tall -- only five feet eight -- but his barrel chest is bursting out of his black bulletproof vest. His dark, crinkly hair, which hangs halfway down his back, is pulled back in a braid. His left bicep features a long, curling tattoo of a panther; the right displays a smaller one of the Grim Reaper playing the guitar. Beneath his vest, covering every inch of his back, is a tattoo that Weiss considers "a good representation of myself and my ideals in a nutshell" -- a full-color, full-face rendering of a wolf about to pounce. "If you look into the eyeball," he tells me later, "you'll see a hunter with his hands up." Sure enough, in one of the gleaming oracular pools, there is a tiny reflection of a predator, helpless in the knowledge that he has become the prey.

"The wolf is obviously me," Weiss says. "The man in the eyeball is Evil." As he drives, Weiss keeps changing lanes abruptly, cutting off other drivers in a high-octane dash for the desert. "Speed is security," he likes to say. If anyone evil manages to get close enough to look in on us, the first thing he sees will not be faces but muzzles poised to fire. So when a car pulls alongside the Yukon, Weiss floors it and swerves away. "Kedar, get him!" he yells. "Get him!"

Kedar swings his weapon around and trains it on the car. The driver takes the hint and immediately peels off.

Read the whole thing here.

Hersh: 'Shifting targets' in Iran

When I called Seymour Hersh last month, he was rewriting his next piece for The New Yorker. That story is online now, and it happens to deal with the first question I asked in the interview: Does he still believe President Bush is gunning for Iran?

Yes and no, Hersh writes. The U.S. is no longer looking to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. Instead, the attacks will be more tit for tat regarding Iranian meddling in Iraqi bloodshed and the killing of American soldiers.

Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

Hersh was on Wolf Blitzer this morning, embedded below, talking about these "shifting targets." As for handling Iraq, Hersh told me: "There are only two issues: Option A is to get out by midnight tonight, and Option B is to get out by midnight tomorrow."

Redefining success in Iraq

This is a rather long "Daily Show" sketch, and only marginally worth the six and a half minutes I just spent watching it at work (from an employer's standpoint; not mine). But it offers yet another in the drumbeat of satirical pieces on the ever shifting target for "success" in Iraq.

Bush's message 'a pig wearing makeup'

Phillip Carter, who knows a thing or two about the English language and about the situation in Iraq, calls the substance of President Bush's national address last night "a pig wearing makeup."

We are basically sowing the seeds of civil war with this strategy, and doing little to mitigate the risk.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where we stand today. When President Bush announced the surge in early 2007, it had a simple idea at its core: to secure the population in Baghdad and Anbar in order to facilitate political progress at the national level. Security was always a supporting task in this strategy; the main goal was political. Unfortunately, the political strategy has failed, due to the inability or unwillingness of the Iraqis to resolve fundamental questions at the heart of their society. That's not a ding on them; these are hard questions that any society would be taxed to solve. Now, we're stuck. The White House is trying to do damage control by taking credit for other successes which sprang from the surge, but the overall situation speaks for itself.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled ...

There are a lot of "lies that won't die." The U.S. role in Israel's Six-Day War. The Jewish cabal that orchestrated 9/11. The devil convincing the world he doesn't exist.

But six years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks -- and long after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and ouster of Saddam Hussein, whom investigations had found had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks -- millions of ignoramuses continue to believe otherwise. Heaven help us.

WASHINGTON — On the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, one-third of the American people continue to believe that Saddam Hussein was "personally involved" in the terrorist assault, according to one recent poll.

Other surveys show that a larger number — 40 percent or more — believe that Iraq had some role in the attacks, or that Iraq gave substantial support to al-Qaida.

The 9/11 Commission and intelligence experts never found such a connection, but even after six years of reports and news accounts, the myth of a strong Iraq-Sept. 11 link persists.

(skip)

"The Bush administration has been extremely clever at suggesting connections without being explicit," [Ohio State political science professor John] Mueller said. "And if you support the war, you want to believe it. You hear soldiers in Iraq all the time say that they're there because of 9/11."

'America to the Rescue'

This segment from "The Daily Show" two weeks ago starts a bit slow, but I found it's message about American arms sales worth a sad, tired laugh.

His Eminence, President-for-Life Bush

When I was a student at UCLA, I wrote a story about the former co-director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program who had just been convicted of running one of the largest LSD labs in American history. It turned out, he was hired by the university despite serious previous drug run-ins.
In that article, I quoted Mark Kleiman, then the director of the program and a public policy professor, declining to comment about his former colleague. Nowadays, though, Kleiman has plenty to say on the blog he contributes to, The Reality-Based Community. He's a bit liberal for my leanings, but always a good read. This one from last week is worth a look:

Boy oh boy, did I ever get this one wrong!

No hoax: Family Security Matters, a front group for Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy, really did run a piece by a failed philosopher called Philip Atkinson calling for a genocidal campaign in Iraq followed by the use of the victorious army to establish George W. Bush as President-for-Life with dictatorial powers. (Full text at the jump; has to be read to be believed.)

When this first came out, I was pretty sure I smelled a parody, but it turns out the guy was completely serious.

The argument of the piece, to give it an unduly generous label, calls for a diagnosis rather than a refutation. No wonder FSM "disappeared" not only the article (which has even been wiped from the cache) but the author, who has gone from "Contributing Editor" to "unperson" in record time. Winston Smith of the Ministry of Truth would be proud.

Presumably the scrubbing means that some semi-grownup somewhere in Gaffney's operation noticed that Atkinson had finally parted company with even the neocon substitute for reality.

America's next invasion: Vietnam

I'm not one for opinion columnists, and this piece has little to do with religion (except maybe that our heavenly picked president could use some divine intervention), but Rosa Brooks goes sort of Jonathan Swift on President Bush's speech Wednesday.

Re-invade Vietnam!

Oh yes. You thought the Bush administration was fresh out of ideas? You thought that with Karl Rove leaving, the administration that brought us the war in Iraq and "Mission Accomplished" had no more tricks up its sleeve?

Think again.

On Wednesday, speaking before a Veterans of Foreign Wars audience, President Bush did something he had previously avoided: He compared the Iraq war with the Vietnam War, agreeing that Vietnam does hold lessons for U.S. policy in Iraq.

Can't argue with that. For most Americans, the lessons of Vietnam were reasonably clear before we invaded Iraq and have been painfully reinforced by the ongoing disaster there:

Don't fight needless wars; don't go blundering around in countries where you don't know the language, history or culture; don't underestimate the power of nationalism, ethnicity and religion to bind together -- or tear apart -- people whose interests otherwise seem to diverge or converge; and, most of all, don't imagine that military force can solve fundamentally political problems.

But the president, who has his own very special set of history books, drew the public's attention to some entirely different lessons from Vietnam. To Bush, the "unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens."

Right! To Bush, the tragedy of the Vietnam War is that we didn't let it drag on for another decade or so.