In case you have missed it, Bill Roggio reports first-hand from Kabul - what caused the U.S. military vehicle accident [brakes], police weren’t stellar, but the situation appears quiet after two days. Bill compares favorably to France, but we don’t know enough to draw that inference:
Kabul, Afghanistan: The city of Kabul has settled down after Monday’s violent outbreak that followed a traffic accident involving a runaway U.S. military vehicle and Afghan civilians. The riots were suppressed in eight hours, and the Karzai government instituted an overnight curfew, which has been extended for Wednesday night. While many businesses were closed on Tuesday (I ventured out to pick up a cell phone on Tuesday but the business was closed), there was plenty of traffic and Afghan police and army on the streets. Several long-time residents of Kabul stated today it was business as usual, and the level of security on the streets was not out of the ordinary. Today I saw the streets filled with taxis, civilian cars and bicycles, businesses and markets were open, and the entrepreneurial street vendors selling phone cards, newspapers and other items were everywhere.
The preliminary investigation shows the accident was caused by “a mechanical failure of the vehicle’s brakes.” The convoy was traveling down a steep hill and the vehicle was described as “a heavy cargo truck.” From one to six Afghanis were killed in the accident, and up to a dozen were killed and over a hundred wounded in the waves of demonstrations and riots that followed. There are accusations the U.S. Army and Afghan police fired into crowds, but this is still under investigation.
This Washington Post op-ed by Eugene Robinson is just the first commentary I came across on the report of the Independent Levee Investigation Team:
The evidence, by now, is overwhelming: Beautiful, decadent New Orleans wasn’t doomed by Hurricane Katrina but by decades of human incompetence and neglect. As far as the drowned city is concerned, the greatest natural disaster in the nation’s history would have been just a messy inconvenience if not for the fumbling hand of man.
The mortal threat to New Orleans, as Katrina plowed into the Gulf Coast, was not the powerful winds — Mississippi took the brunt of those — but the massive storm surge the hurricane generated. We now know that the levees, floodwalls and other barriers protecting the city were, for the most part, plenty tall enough and theoretically strong enough to keep the waters at bay. On paper, New Orleans should have ended up wet and wounded, but basically intact.
What happened instead was “the single most costly catastrophic failure of an engineered system in history,” according to a report issued last week by the Independent Levee Investigation Team, a blue-ribbon panel led by experts from the University of California at Berkeley and funded by the National Science Foundation.
Some of the flood barriers were built using inadequate materials, the report says. Others were designed so poorly that they provided weak spots for the waters to exploit. Still others were left unfinished for lack of funds.
…etc.
Sadly, Katrina wasn’t caused by Bush, and worse, Bush didn’t cause the devastation. Oddly, CBS News carried a brief May 22 report marking the release of the draft ILIT report - though the CBS story doesn’t mention their own hysterical Katrina reports. No doubt CBS will be correcting their original Katrina coverage any day now…
Thanks to Cori Dauber for highlighting this perceptive piece by Owen West. Ex-Marine Owen is the son of ex-Marine and former assistant SecDef Bing West, discussed in this recent post. These two gentlemen know a thing or two about matters military.
This confusion, in turn, affects our warriors, who are frustrated by the country’s lack of cohesion and the depiction of their war. Iraq hasn’t been easy on the military, either. But the strength of our warriors is their ability to adapt.
First, in battle you move forward from where you are, not where you want to be. No one was more surprised that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction than the soldiers who rolled into Iraq in full chemical protective gear. But it is time for the rest of the country to do what the military was forced to: get over it.
If we can put 2003’s debates behind us, there is a swath of common ground on which to focus. Both Republicans and Democrats agree we cannot lose Iraq. The general insurgency in Iraq imperils our national interest and the hardcore insurgents are our mortal enemies. Talking of troop reductions is to lose sight of the goal.
Second, America’s conscience is one of its greatest strengths. But self-flagellation, especially in the early stages of a war against an enemy whose worldview is uncompromising, is absolutely hazardous. Three years gone and Iraq’s most famous soldiers are Jessica Lynch and Lynndie England, a victim and a criminal, respectively. Abu Ghraib remains the most famous battle of the war.
Soldiers are sick of apologizing for a sliver of malcontents who are not at all representative of the new breed. But they are also sick of being pitied. Our warriors are the hunters, not the hunted, and we should celebrate them as we did in the past, for while our tastes have changed, warfare — and the need to cultivate national guardians — has not. As Kipling wrote, “The strength of the pack is the wolf.”
Finally, today’s debates are not high-spirited so much as mean-spirited. To allow polarizing forces to dominate the argument by insinuating false motives on one side or a lack of patriotism on the other is to obscure long-term security decisions that have to be made now.
We are clashing with an enemy who has been at war with us in one form or another for two decades. Our military response may take decades more. We have crossed several rivers and the nation is hoping that ahead lie streams. But if they are oceans, we should heed Lincoln’s call: “With malice toward none, with charity for all … let us strive on to finish the work we are in.”
I highly recommend Bing West’s books, such as No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah. Owen West has two novels published, which I hope to read soon.
Homeland Security Watch examines the new National Academies report “Terrorism and the Chemical Infrastructure: Protecting People and Reducing Vulnerabilities”. I’m not ready to spend $30 to purchase the report-paperback, so I appreciate Christian Becker’s summary - looks like excellent work.
Bing West, former assistant secretary of defense and former Marine, is again filing dispatches from Iraq. These are an excellent source of perspective on current status, and What Lies Ahead, filed May 25th.
West has been on patrol in Baghdad, Fallujah and Ramadi - arguably the worst locales in Iraq today. In this latest dispatch West surveys what he has learned about the core problem with Iraqi leadership, plus what to watch for to gauge the progress of the Iraqi army and police, and a workable compromise between the Shiite-majority government and local Sunni insurgents. Excerpt:
At this stage, no one can predict how Iraq will turn out. American leadership is not the determining factor. The criticism of the secretary of defense from six retired generals had scant impact among the battalions and training teams I visited. Soldiers on the front lines have more important things to think about and little time to gossip about matters far removed from them.
The problem is the lack of Iraqi leadership. The singular intelligence failure was not the missing weapons of mass destruction; it was not understanding that 30 years of dependency enforced by murder had eradicated both trust and initiative.
Yet the three critical tasks demand Iraqi, rather than American, leadership. First, the government in Baghdad must drive a wedge between Shiite extremists and the Shiite militias and similarly split al-Qaida and the religious extremists from the Sunni “mainstream” insurgents. Second, the ministries in Baghdad must support their police and army forces in the field. As matters stand, U.S. advisers and commanders have to apply pressure repeatedly before Baghdad will respond. At all levels in the Iraqi system, there is an instinct to hoard—and too often to steal and skim—that deprives the fighting units of basic commodities. Third, the police must be reformed. How Sunni police can be effective and not be assassinated in their own cities is still unclear. Conversely, the Shiite police in Baghdad have lost all credibility and trust among the Sunnis.
On the positive side of the ledger, three major hurdles were cleared during the last 12 months. First, elections were held and a government was chosen. Second, an Iraqi army at the battalion fighting level emerged. Third, Iraq weathered the sectarian strife in February without a political collapse.
With U.S. forces drawing down and a bisectarian government emerging in Baghdad, the “mainstream” rejectionists have lost their rationale. The insurgent leaders, however, avoid risk in battle by paying impoverished youths $40 to emplace IEDs. Spending more than $300 billion in Iraq, the United States never created a jobs program to compete with $40 IEDs. As for the insurgent leaders, if captured, they face a porous and corrupt judicial system that frequently releases them. Before they quit, they will ask what reward they will receive and how they can stay alive to enjoy it. What’s more, the insurgency enjoys the support of hundreds of Sunni imams who preach sedition knowing the judicial system will do nothing.
In Ramadi, al-Qaida must be destroyed before there can be any local settlement. Watch Ramadi to see if the Iraqi army and police will fight together.
In Fallujah, though, al-Qaida does not control the local insurgents. Watch Fallujah to see if a political settlement can be reached between a predominantly Shiite national government and the local Sunni insurgent leaders.
The “Print” link produced all four of his dispatches from this tour, in increasing chronological order. It isn’t clear whether there will be further reports.
Jonah Goldberg examines the real story of how Katrina revealed ineptitude–of the press, that is.
…This barely captures how badly the press bungled Katrina coverage. Keep in mind that the most horrifying tales of woe that captivated the press and prompted news anchors to scream—quite literally—at federal officials occurred within the safe zone around the Superdome where the press was operating. Shame on local officials for fomenting fear and passing along newly minted urban legends, but double shame on the press for recycling this stuff uncritically. Members of the press had access to the Superdome. Why not just run in and look for the bodies? Interview the rape victims? Couldn’t be bothered? The major networks had hundreds of people in New Orleans. Was there not a single intern available to fact-check? The coverage actually cost lives. Helicopters were grounded for 24 hours in response to media reports of sniper attacks. At least two patients died waiting to be evacuated.
And yet, an ubiquitous media chorus claims simultaneously that Katrina was Bush’s worst hour and the press’s best. That faultless paragon of media scrupulousness Dan Rather proclaimed it one of the “quintessential great moments in television news.” Christiane Amanpour explained, “I think what’s interesting is that it took a Katrina, you know, to bring us back to where we belong. In other words, real journalists, real journalism, and I think that’s a good thing.”
But in the race to prove the federal response incompetent, the “real journalists” missed some important details. As Lou Dolinar exhaustively documents, the National Guard did amazing work in New Orleans. From the Superdome, the Guard managed some 2,500 troops, a dozen emergency shelters, more than 200 boats, 150 helicopters (which flew more than 10,000 sorties moving 88,181 passengers, 18,834 tons of cargo, and saved 17,411 survivors), and an enormous M*A*S*H operation that, among other things, delivered seven babies.
Also left out of the conventional tale of Katrina is the fact that the hurricane hardly singled out New Orleans. Obviously, the flooding there was worse because of the levee breaks. But, as Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour noted, the people of his state and Alabama and Florida have the same federal government. And despite awesome destruction, they managed to do okay.
None of this is to say that the federal government and the Bush administration didn’t make mistakes. But, if we’re looking for poster children for arrogant incompetence in response to Katrina, there are better candidates than George W. Bush.
For more of the true Katrina story…
CWCID: Tigerhawk.
Seekerblog is a signer of the Euston Manifesto. From Norm Geras’s talk at the Euston Manifesto launch:
But there has been another discourse of opposition to the Iraq war, starting with the banners and slogans for that Saturday on 15 February 2003, from which one would never have known what kind of a place Saddam’s Iraq was. It has been a discourse of denial, evidenced by the numbers of those on the left unwilling to allow, or even comprehend, why others of us on the left supported the war; by a rancorous hostility towards the pro-war left; and, most seriously of all, by the lack of interest in initiatives of solidarity with the forces in Iraq battling for a democratic transformation of their country, itself part of a wider lack of enthusiasm for the success of this enterprise.
To those who now say that such criticisms leveled by the Euston Manifesto at a large part of the anti-war left are misdirected, applying only to a small number of people on the far left, I have two answers. (1) Not true. (There’s a more forceful way of putting that, but it violates the rules of public civility.) (2) That it isn’t true has been documented at length.
In any event, this takes us back to those shameful responses to 9/11 from which I started - because some of the themes of what I’m calling the discourse of denial in argument about the Iraq war are for their part shameful too: a tendency to go silent about, or at least to minimize, the horrors of Baathist Iraq; a manner of distributing blame for everything that has gone wrong in that country in such a way that the daily killing of civilians by so-called insurgents figures only as one of the lamentable consequences of coalition failure, and barely at all as the result of the actions of those who are directly responsible - as if they were merely a hive of bees stirred up and not people making choices; only the most grudging acknowledgment - if that - that millions of Iraqis voting for a different kind of future for themselves was a matter of some significance.
One has to draw a line. This is not the authentic voice of the left, and it is not a voice which any self-respecting liberal should be willing to own. It is a disgrace to the best aspirations of the progressive and democratic tradition.
So, some people - bloggers, the owners of other websites, trade unionists, other kinds of activists - come together last May. We know there are others out there who share our sense of non-belonging to the left-liberal consensus on such issues. We know because of the feedback we get. ‘Thank goodness, I found your blog. Thank goodness I’m not the only one who feels that this left doesn’t speak for me.’
We decide to produce a document setting out some general principles, some common positions. The Euston Manifesto steps out into the world. What it says I hope many of you now know, and I won’t try to rehearse it here.
But thank you all for coming this evening. We need to insist that there is a different tradition which socialists and democrats and liberals can speak out for. There’s been quite a chorus of voices these past few weeks saying that the Euston Manifesto is of no account - though a lot of those saying so seem rather animated about it. Well, we make no extravagant claims. It’s a beginning, that’s all.
Technorati Tags: Euston Manifesto
I wish I had written this:
The treatment given Lieberman and McCain raises the question of whether it is possible to build a consensus policy on the war against terror. Is there any political figure willing to fight terrorism in a minimally effective way who will not be targeted and vilified by a substantial percentage of one of America’s major political parties — and perhaps by its press and “intelligentsia”? That is probably what Hillary Clinton is trying to figure out.
One unintended effect of the September 11 attacks is that it put a defining question to different modes of American political consciousness. Until then it was possible to treat many ideologies respectable since the 1960s as harmless forms of iconoclasm, posing “provocative” but fundamentally hypothetical views. But when attacks on the US homeland made it categorically necessary to answer the question: ‘are you willing to fight our assailants’, many sincere ideologues paused, shook their heads and said: ‘No. In fact I am morally obligated to help our assailants’. When Noam Chomsky went out of his way to support Hezbollah it wasn’t inexplicable, it was logical. His long articulated hypotheticals have simply become actuals.
The murky concept of sedition, with which freedom of speech must uneasily coexist, is founded on the notion of a threat. Radical Marxist thought derives protection from its status as a defeated mode of political action. The Cold War was fought against armed Marxism on every continent and clime for half a century. But when the Cold War was over, or in places where Radical Marxists did not actually take up arms they were allowed to keep their narratives and tolerated, as the Muslim Ottoman Empire once countenanced Jews and Christians for as long as they posed no threat. No physical threat. But although Marxism was defeated by the largely economic process of Globalization it flourished — even dominated — in the cultural institutions of the West at a time when Islamism was triumphing over secularism in the Middle East. From the Marxist perspective at least, the Cold War ended not in defeat, but in a negotiated armistice; with surrender on the economic front offset by a capitulation to it by the West on cultural matters. People might have to work in private companies, it’s true, but all the accompanying baggage of traditional culture like religion, sexual mores, notions of objectivity, etc were forfeit; and that was more than compensation. That was the tacit ‘deal’ and the EU, UN and cultural institutions were going to carry it out. By slow degrees the Western world was going to be politically corrected, multiculturalized and transnationalized. “Imagine there’s no countries/It isn’t hard to do”. And as the 1990s drew to a close it didn’t seem all that far away.
September 10, 2001 was the last day on which which hypothetically incompatible modes of thought could coexist in a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” environment. When the planes smashing into the Twin Towers forced everyone to nail their colors to the mast Marxists no less than the conservatives indignantly found themselves facing an unanticipated rebellion. Liberal rage over Bush — and maybe Lieberman and McCain — for behaving “illegitimately” and “turning back the clock” is incomprehensible until one realizes that from a certain perspective it represents a double-cross. The West was supposed to die; slowly and comfortably but ineluctably. And we were supposed to buy off the Islamists until we could finish the job ourselves. Bush declaring his intention to fight for the survival of the West was just as logical as Chomsky’s pilgrimage to Hezbollah and just as infuriating to his enemies.
Until September 11 it was possible for the more “enlightened” segments of society to regard patriotism, religion and similar sentiments with the kind of amused tolerance that one might reserve for simpletons. Nothing that a little institutionalization and spare change couldn’t straighten out. The problem for the Democratic Party is that the Great Polite Silence is over. People like Chomsky and President Bush have stopped being hypothetical and become all too real. Bring it on.
Richard Fernandez has a priceless commentary on a Time Magazine article.
If journalism were held to the same standards as fiction, the courts would be clogged with accusations of plagiarism. Although plot details may vary, news “narratives” bear a closer resemblance to each other than Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code did to Baigent and Leigh’s Holy Blood, Holy Grail. That plaigarism case went to court, though Baigent and Leigh lost; and Time doesn’t have to sue itself. The real function of an editorial room isn’t to maintain stylistic consistency. Its true purpose is to enforce a certain point of view. The mainstream media’s strength lies in its role as a foundry of news objects; as the creator of stories and masters of its lifecycle. Media power consists in being able to determine a narrative’s birth, evolution and its final fate. The media has, as Orwell said, the power over history; a history which as Marx observed and Time demonstrates, always appears twice, first as tragedy and the second time as farce.
More pointed comments from Tigerhawk:
The Turner restructuring indeed may have rendered the CIA safe, insofar as it no longer sallied forth to destabilize foreign governments or reverse putatively democratic elections, but those very reforms destroyed its capacity to anticipate and confront threats that were less conservative and bureaucratic than the Soviet Union. An intelligence organization that is culturally and legally cautious is not going to attract the rough men who have what it takes to recruit and run agents in the ugliest corners of the world. In Michael Ledeen’s well-framed question, “[h]ow else can you explain the fact that as of September 10 [2001] we had not a single human agent in Iran, Iraq, or Syria?”
Latest Comments
RSS