A Death in the Family - Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair

I was having an oppressively normal morning a few months ago, flicking through the banality of quotidian e-mail traffic, when I idly clicked on a message from a friend headed "Seen This?" The attached item turned out to be a very well-written story by Teresa Watanabe of the Los Angeles Times. It described the death, in Mosul, Iraq, of a young soldier from Irvine, California, named Mark Jennings Daily, and the unusual degree of emotion that his community was undergoing as a consequence. The emotion derived from a very moving statement that the boy had left behind, stating his reasons for having become a volunteer and bravely facing the prospect that his words might have to be read posthumously. In a way, the story was almost too perfect: this handsome lad had been born on the Fourth of July, was a registered Democrat and self-described agnostic, a U.C.L.A. honors graduate, and during his college days had fairly decided reservations about the war in Iraq. I read on, and actually printed the story out, and was turning a page when I saw the following:

"Somewhere along the way, he changed his mind. His family says there was no epiphany. Writings by author and columnist Christopher Hitchens on the moral case for war deeply influenced him … "

I don't exaggerate by much when I say that I froze. I certainly felt a very deep pang of cold dismay. I had just returned from a visit to Iraq with my own son (who is 23, as was young Mr. Daily) and had found myself in a deeply pessimistic frame of mind about the war. Was it possible that I had helped persuade someone I had never met to place himself in the path of an I.E.D.? ...

Iraq Exit Logistics - Arnaud de Borchgrave, Washington Times

Watching them drive by at 30 miles per hour, would take 75 days. Bumper-to-bumper, they would stretch from New York City to Denver. That's how U.S. Air Force logistical expert Lenny Richoux described the number of vehicles that would have to be shipped back from Iraq when the current deployment is over. These include, among others, 10,000 flatbed trucks, 1,000 tanks and 20,000 Humvees.

Even in an emergency, said Col. Richoux in DefenseNews, the evacuation of 162,000 troops in 23 ground combat brigades and millions of tons of equipment would take some 20 months. Military shipping containers, end to end, would stretch from New York City to the gates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

The main resupply route for convoys that runs 344 miles from Kuwait (skirts Basra to the north) to Baghdad is already under the constant threat of hit-and-run insurgency attacks, including improvised explosive devices. Driving empty, on their way back to pick up another load in Kuwait, convoys are just as vulnerable…

‘A Way Out’ for Iran – David Ignatius, Washington Post

If you read the liberal blogosphere, and even the stately New Yorker magazine, you get the impression that the Bush administration is itching to drop a bomb on Iran. But talking with senior administration officials this week, I hear a different line:

They worry about Iranian actions, and they are disappointed that diplomatic overtures to Iran so far have resulted in little progress. They believe that Washington and Tehran remain on a collision course over Iran's nuclear program and its destabilizing activities in Iraq. But senior officials say they are seeking to avoid military conflict.

The administration wants Iran to make a strategic shift -- by changing its nuclear policy so that it doesn't have the potential to make weapons, stopping its support for terrorism and working with the United States to stabilize Iraq. Officials continue to believe that the regime is capable of such a shift, despite its internal divisions. But they have concluded that Iran won't bargain unless it feels more pressure -- from tougher economic sanctions and from credible threats of military power.

The bottom line, officials say, is that the United States must avoid a future situation in which its only options are to accept a nuclear Iran or go to war…

The Darfur Deception – David Rieff, Los Angeles Times

The Sept. 29 killing of 10 African Union peacekeepers in south Darfur by a splinter faction of one of the main anti-Sudanese government insurgent groups was shocking -- but especially so to those who have only followed the Darfur tragedy through the lens of activist, pro-interventionist groups such as Save Darfur or institutions such as the U.S. Holocaust Museum, which label the crisis a genocide.

It was shocking because it doesn't fit with the simplistic, mostly-without-nuance view of the conflict in Darfur that such groups have been putting out for the last few years.

Why have these groups -- which, after all, are far more familiar with realities on the ground than all but a few specialists and Sudanese emigres living in the United States -- offered an incomplete picture of what's happening? Because they know that in order to get people to care, they have to oversimplify. Even naming an organization Save Darfur is an oversimplification, in that it implies that there is an innocent victim (the Darfuris) and a group from whom they need to be saved (the Islamist government of Sudan and its murderous janjaweed militia)…

Bribing Troops to Quit – Ralph Peters, New York Post

The problems with military outsourcing go far beyond last month's massacre of civilians by Blackwater USA's hired guns: Wartime profiteers are bleeding our military.

Astonishingly, contractors are free to approach those in uniform, offer them generous salaries to leave their service in wartime, then profit from the skills your tax dollars taught them.

This isn't just about Navy SEALS or other special operators. In intelligence, for example, we train young soldiers for complex missions and expensively process their security clearances - then contractors bribe them to leave the military, raking in big bucks from your investment in their new employee…

Tanking in Air – Oliver North, Washington Times

Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, purports to be concerned about "transparency" and "accountability" in government contracting. It sounds great — but from all indications, this is just a public relations gimmick to justify going after American companies in the midst of a war.

Last week the liberal California Democrat took Blackwater USA Chief Executive Officer Erik Prince to task over how the North Carolina company has carried out its State Department contracts in Iraq.

The day after Mr. Prince testified, one of his civilian-piloted helicopters skillfully landed in a Baghdad street to med-evac Poland's ambassador to Iraq, Edward Pietrzyk, after he was wounded by the blast of a roadside bomb. This lifesaving feat of airmanship earned no accolades from Mr. Waxman. If the Beverly Hills congressman really cared about government contracting, he would suspend his vendetta against Blackwater long enough to look into another looming contract controversy that could well cost Americans jobs, billions of dollars and eventually, lives…

From Military Disaster to Moral High Ground – Tony Judt, New York Times

The “liberal hawks” are back. These, of course, are the politicians and pundits who threw in their lot with George W. Bush in 2003: voting and writing for a “preventive war” — a war of choice that would avenge 9/11, clean up Iraq, stifle Islamic terrorism, spread shock, awe and democracy across the Middle East and re-affirm the credentials of a benevolently interventionist America. For a while afterward, the president’s liberal enablers fell silent, temporarily abashed by their complicity in the worst foreign policy error in American history. But gradually they are returning. And they are in a decidedly self-righteous mood.

Yes, they concede, President Bush messed up his (our) war. But even if the war was a mistake, it was a brave and good mistake and we were right to make it, just as we were right to advocate intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo. (“The difference between Kosovo and Iraq isn’t between a country that wanted peace and one that didn’t,” the Slate editor and onetime war cheerleader Jacob Weisberg, now tells us. “It was a matter of better management and better luck.”) We were right to be wrong — and that’s why you should listen to us now…

Verification Holds the Key - Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Washington Times

Kim Jong-il, North Korea's wily dictator, is used to getting his way. Having eliminated all those in his communist kingdom who would dare contradict him, he has become accustomed to broad smiles and enthusiastic applause at his every pronouncement. This public adulation was again evident at this week's summit with the South Korean president.

Unfortunately, Mr. Kim has also come to expect the same thing from some of America's top diplomats. Last week's announced Six-Party agreement on a partial dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear stockpile is the latest example of Mr. Kim getting his way. Unlike our agreement with Libya, which called for removal or destruction under international supervision of all materials used in Tripoli's clandestine nuclear program, we sought and got much less from Pyongyang. This agreement cannot stop Mr. Kim from restarting his program any time he so chooses, just as he did when he walked away from the ill-fated Agreed Framework in 2002…

How Congress Forgot its Own Strength – Mario Cuomo, New York Times

Senators Jim Webb of Virginia and Hillary Clinton of New York are right to demand that the president go before Congress to ask for a “declaration of war” before proceeding with an attack against Iran or any other nation. But there is no need for this demand to be put into law, as the two Democrats and their colleagues are seeking to do, any more than there is need for legislation to guarantee our right of free speech or anything else protected by the Constitution.

Article I, Section 8 already provides that only Congress has the power to declare war. Perhaps the founders’ greatest concern in writing the Constitution was that they might unintentionally create a president who was too much like the British monarch, whom they despised. They expressed that concern in part by assuring that the president would not have the power to declare war…

All Quiet on the Leadership Front as our Troops Die in Faraway Lands – Simon Jenkins, London Times

Amid the past week’s political sound and fury, one subject slid unnoticed under the platform. Britain is at war. Its soldiers are fighting and dying in two distant lands. Foreign policy, once the stuff of national debate, is consigned to cliché and platitude.

With casualties mounting in Iraq and Afghanistan, politicians dare not mention it, let alone disagree. The prime minister declared to his party conference in Bournemouth that “the message should go out to anyone facing persecution anywhere from Burma to Zimbabwe . . . we will not rest”. Britain will defend the oppressed anywhere in the world. Unfortunately Britain is doing nothing in Burma or Zimbabwe, while the message from Iraq and Afghanistan is that Britain chooses bad wars at America’s behest in which it gets beaten.

All the airbrushing in the world will not remove the greatest legacy that Tony Blair left his successors, that of “liberal interventionism”. Never articulated except in a confused speech in Chicago in 1999, it asserted Britain’s right to meddle in any country to which it took offence, under the rubric of “humanitarian just war”. …

More Torture Memos – Washington Post editorial

President Bush said Friday, as he has many times before, that "this government does not torture people." But presidential declarations can't change the facts. The record shows that Mr. Bush and a compliant Justice Department have repeatedly authorized the CIA to use interrogation methods that the rest of the world -- and every U.S. administration before this one -- have regarded as torture: techniques such as simulated drowning, induced hypothermia, sleep deprivation and prolonged standing.

The New York Times reported last week that the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel issued two classified memos in 2005 to justify techniques that the Central Intelligence Agency had used when interrogating terrorism suspects abroad -- and to undercut a law passed by Congress that outlawed "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment." Those opinions form part of a continuing pattern, beginning in 2002 and extending until this past summer, of secret -- and highly questionable -- legal judgments by Bush-appointed lawyers intended to circumvent U.S. law, treaty commitments, legislation passed by Congress and Supreme Court decisions -- all of which should have prevented the abuse of prisoners…

We Must Confess – Andrew Sullivan, New York Post

I remember that my first response to the reports of abuse and torture at Guantanamo Bay was to accuse the accusers of exaggeration or deliberate deception. I didn't believe America would ever do those things. I'd also supported George W Bush in 2000, believed it necessary to give the president the benefit of the doubt in wartime, and knew Donald Rumsfeld as a friend.

It struck me as a no-brainer that this stuff was being invented by the far left or was part of Al-Qaeda propaganda. After all, they train captives to lie about this stuff, don't they? Bottom line: I trusted the president in a time of war to obey the rule of law that we were and are defending. And then I was forced to confront the evidence.

From almost the beginning of the war, it is now indisputable, the Bush administration made a strong and formative decision: in the absence of good intelligence on the Islamist terror threat after 9/11, it would do what no American administration had done before. It would torture detainees to get information…

A Macedonian Misnomer? - Nick Larigakis, Washington Times

Last week's unfortunate incident in, of all places, the U.N. General Assembly, only underscores the provocative and intransigent attitude of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) toward a member of NATO and the European Union — its neighbor, Greece.

On Sept. 25, 2007, the president of the 62nd United Nations General Assembly, Srgjan Kerim, a FYROM national, compromised the credibility of the U.N. General Assembly by introducing the president of his country, Branko Crvenkovksi, as the "president of the Republic of Macedonia."

U.N. spokeswoman Marie Okabe stressed that within the United Nations, the secretary-general and the Secretariat use the name "The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia," as referred to in Security Council resolutions.

Stability in the Balkans is precisely what we should advocate, not only for the greater U.S. interests but because it serves the interests of every country in the Balkans. The continuing unresolved issue between Greece and the FYROM over the name of the latter contributes to potential instability…

The Protocols of the Elders of Turkey - Mustafa Akyol, Washington Post

Look in just about any bookstore in Turkey, and you'll see some of the strangest bestsellers imaginable. The cover of "The Children of Moses," the first and most popular book in a series of four, shows the country's devoutly Muslim prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in the middle of a six-pointed Star of David. Inside, you'll find a head-spinningly weird argument: that Erdogan and his conservative allies in Turkey's ruling pro-Islamic party are actually crypto-Jews with secret wicked ties to the conspiratorial forces of "global Zionism."

The books are hardly a fringe phenomenon. They're arrayed in chic bookstores along Istiklal Avenue, the funky pedestrian mall that's the heart of secular Istanbul. They're openly displayed alongside Orhan Pamuk novels at Ataturk International Airport. And they're even sold on tiny bookstands on the Princes' Islands, the vacation destinations in the Sea of Marmara that many well-off Turks view the way Manhattanites do the Hamptons. By the publishers' figures, they've sold about 520,000 copies since the books started rolling out this year -- a staggering figure for a nation of about 71 million people…

Talk is Cheap – William Kristol, Washington Post

On Sept. 25, President Bush addressed the U.N. General Assembly. Mostly avoiding controversial topics such as Iraq and the war on terrorism, he called on countries to live up to the freedoms promised at the United Nations' founding six decades ago. He called particular attention to the situation in Burma, expressing Americans' outrage at the "19-year reign of fear" imposed by military dictators. Alluding to the tens of thousands who had been bravely and peacefully protesting in the streets for over a month, Bush noted that "the people's desire for freedom is unmistakable."

Bush also remarked that "[t]he ruling junta remains unyielding." So he took the opportunity to announce "a series of steps to help bring peaceful change to Burma," including tighter economic sanctions on the regime's leaders and their financial backers and an expanded visa ban on the worst human rights violators. He urged "the United Nations and all nations to use their diplomatic and economic leverage to help the Burmese people reclaim their freedom." National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley explained to the New York Times that Bush wanted Burma's government to "understand that there is a time now for a political transition" and to send a warning against harshly suppressing the protests…

Fear of Giving Offence is Killing our Culture - Minette Marrin, London Times

… For at least 20 years there was a debilitating fog of moral relativism in the air, a miasma of guilty self-loathing, to the point when some natives persuaded themselves that although all other cultures were equal, ours alone was less equal than others, or might at least be offensive, and should be suppressed. Even the phrase “host culture” was considered unacceptable.

We have moved on since then, supposedly, and surprisingly suddenly. Many prominent multiculturalists, including the Commission for Racial Equality itself, have recently performed swift U-turns and the bien-pensant orthodoxy now is that multiculturalism has been a divisive failure. Integration is the new big thing.

The host culture is no longer to be demonised, but to be accepted and respected. Even manipulative politicians, such as Gordon Brown, now realise that saying so will do them no harm these days. It might seem, superficially, that the Victoria Climbié report and the massacre of 7/7 in London, among other shocks, have brought us back at last to our cultural senses and our cultural self-respect…

-----

SWJ News Links

SWJ Blog Links