Articles which have caught my interest. Mostly Israel stuff and other nubbins from the ongoing holy war.

 
Another Quick Dig at the Mendacious Assweasel

I've finally found an excuse to link to Fametracker, one of my favorite sites out there, but one which is generally off-topic for this blog.

FT has an ongoing "Galaxy of Fame" feature where they assign a celebrity to each planet (from Mars to Pluto in order of decreasing fame) and have them say something humorous.

The bit for Michael Moore (ranked as Neptune) reads in part: "It's a good thing you gave me an award for Best Documentary Feature and recognized the one thing I do better than anyone else: championing popular causes in such a way that even those people who agree with me fundamentally despise me for acting as their public spokesman."

Hee.
posted at 4:36 PM

 
Day Eight

The second week gets underway. Coalition forces parachuted into northern Iraq last night, capturing an airfield in the Kurdish zone and effectively opening up a second front. Getting troops into the north has been a real problem so far since the Turkish government refuses to allow the coalition to use its territory as a staging area.

B-52s wiped out an Iraqi convoy racing south from Baghdad to engage coalition forces in Najaf. And further down south you find tank battles. It's still unclear what the strategy is going to be vis a vis Baghdad. Initially, of course, the idea was that coalition forces would race to the capitol city and hit Saddam there. But, due to the combination of bad weather and worse-than-expected fighting along the way, the plan has changed. Who knows to what?

There was a sobering article in the Washington Post yesterday which spells out the challenges facing the war's strategists. Definitely worth a read. Although the article is a bit depressing, its conclusion leaves me with a little bit of hope:

One senior general at the Pentagon, listening to both sides of the argument, said he thinks that in short term the pessimists will look right, but will be proved wrong by mid-April. "There are some tough days ahead," he said. "I think this whole thing is at the culminating point. Within the next week to 10 days, we will find out about the mettle of the Republican Guard." But he concluded, "Once we smash the Medina and Baghdad divisions, it's game over, and I think Baghdad will fall."

posted at 4:28 PM

 
Ya Saddam, Ya Habib

Twelve years ago during Gulf War 1, every time Saddam launched a scud on Israel, Palestinians would go up on their rooftops, dance around and scream "Ya Saddam, ya habib, udrub udrub Tal Abib! (Oh, Saddam, beloved one, strike, strike Tel Aviv). In the days after September 11, people were passing out sweets on the streets of Ramallah and East Jerusalem and driving around honking their horns in celebration.

And now they're at it again. The Palis are pleased as punch that their beloved brother and savior from Baghdad is putting up a bit of a fight this time around. They cheer news of coalition casualties. And in the hospitals of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, a whole little generation of Saddam Khouris and Saddam Khalidis-- the little brothers of all the Osama Khouris and Khalidis from last year -- are being born. Awww.

This cheerleading might be infuriating if it weren't so pathetic. As always, the Palestinians are on the butt-end of history, waiting for Saladin to come charging into Jerusalem on his white steed and drive the Zionist crusaders into the sea. (Their love of Saddam at least has some rational basis; alongside the scuds he rained on Tel Aviv in '91, the Butcher of Baghdad also sends tens of thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers).

As always, they'll be wrong. If their salvation is anywhere it's in the proposed road map for peace, currently being hammered out in Washington. But, given as how the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, it probably won't come from there, either.
posted at 3:57 PM

 
Radical Islam's Ideological Daddy

The NY Times magazine has a lenghty feature by Paul Berman about Sayyid Qutb. Although Qutb is a little-known figure in the West, given that we may be in the beginning of a culture war with the House of Islam, he may very well end up being recognized as one of the most influential political thinkers of the 20th century.

Qutb was an Egyptian writer who received an early education in Islam but turned to more Western and secular studies in the '20s and '30s. Recognizing that the Islamic world was in a state of decay, he began developing a philosophy of how to restore it to its glory days of the 7th and 8th centuries. In the early 1950s he joined up with the Muslim Brotherhood, essentially becoming their house philosopher and began to expand his ideas on political Islam.

The Brotherhood clashed repeatedly with Egypt's leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, and Qutb spent much of the 1950s and early '60s in prison. During his time in prison Qutb's Islamism became even more extreme and it was during this period that he wrote what is considered his main work, a vast Koranic exegesis called "In the Shade of the Koran." In 1966 Nasser finally got fed up with Qutb and had him hanged.

Qutb's followers, however, took his ideas and refined them. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood became the spiritual father of most of today's radical Islamic groups including Al Qaeda.

In his writing, Qutb lays out a lot of the mental groundwork for the Osams Bin Ladens of today.

One of his key points is that Western culture is facing a crisis. The root of this crisis lies in the Western notion of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's, in other words the separation of church and state. In Qutb's view, this is unacceptable and if the Islamic world wishes to regain its glory, it needs to create a society where Allah and the state are one. In effect he envisaged a reborn Caliphate, with society being governed by the laws of Shariah.

Qutb also helped introduce the concept of jihad as it plagues us today and helped establish the cult of the martyr. His writings also feature heavy doses of the Jew-hatred and paranoiac conspiracy theories that are the bread and butter of modern Arab culture.

Berman is a thoughtful kind of guy, and sympathetic to Qutb and his work. The Times piece spells out fairly clearly why Qutb deserves, if not our admiration, then at least that we take him and his followers seriously.

The people who urge us to look for the "root causes" of the conflict between the West and radical Islam would no doubt give a thumbs up to this enterprise. It falls in nicely with the notion that we if we just understood what the problem is then we could heal or somehow alleviate the conflict we face with the Islamic radicals. Berman just about writes as much:

Qutb is not shallow. Qutb is deep. ''In the Shade of the Qur'an'' is, in its fashion, a masterwork. Al Qaeda and its sister organizations are not merely popular, wealthy, global, well connected and institutionally sophisticated. These groups stand on a set of ideas too, and some of those ideas may be pathological, which is an old story in modern politics; yet even so, the ideas are powerful. We should have known that, of course. But we should have known many things.

But what good would it have done us to have known? I have a problem with this approach, since it assumes that the conflict involves two reasonable, rational entities. I would argue that one of the sides views reason and rationality as weak and instead puts its stake in absolute loyalty to the word of God.

Berman's conclusion is also a bit Mr. Rogers-y:

The followers of Qutb speak, in their wild fashion, of enormous human problems, and they urge one another to death and to murder. But the enemies of these people speak of what? The political leaders speak of United Nations resolutions, of unilateralism, of multilateralism, of weapons inspectors, of coercion and noncoercion. This is no answer to the terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things. Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to dispatch armies, for better and for worse.

But who will speak of the sacred and the secular, of the physical world and the spiritual world? Who will defend liberal ideas against the enemies of liberal ideas? Who will defend liberal principles in spite of liberal society's every failure? President George W. Bush, in his speech to Congress a few days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, announced that he was going to wage a war of ideas. He has done no such thing. He is not the man for that.

Philosophers and religious leaders will have to do this on their own. Are they doing so? Armies are in motion, but are the philosophers and religious leaders, the liberal thinkers, likewise in motion? There is something to worry about here, an aspect of the war that liberal society seems to have trouble understanding -- one more worry, on top of all the others, and possibly the greatest worry of all.

A nice notion, but one which misses the point: No one in the West is speakin go the sacred and the secular, because no one has to. The reason Qutb's followers "speak insanely of deep things" is that they come from a society that is rotted to the core and has been in decline for at least 300 years. In a case like this, you need a muscular philosophy in order to get through the day. When your society is advanced and free, the proof is already in the pudding.

At the end of the day, it is almost impossible to persuade people who believe that the Church needs to be the State that they are wrong. And we aren't likely to turn our governments over to Jerry Falwell, the Pope, or Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, let alone the imams. In the end, learnng about Sayyid Qutb is a positive thing, but only inasmuch as it teaches us about radical Islam. It doesn't change the nature of the conflict.
posted at 9:18 PM

 
Day Seven

And here we are a week later. The war has very much turned into more of a war than had been expected, what with the heavy fighting going on as coalition forces are forced to shore up their march on Baghdad. In fact, the coalition has had to switch its tactics and concentrate for the moment on a fight in the South.

There has been some encouraging news in the South, as the citizens of Basra began to rise up against Saddam's forces backed by British artillery muscle. Presumably, the Shiites -- who have been screwed before when the US told them to rise up, then didn't back them up -- have been waiting to see if America is serious this time around. Hopefully, the Basra rebellion will succeed, and give inspiration to others.

Meanwhile, forces are in Najaf, 160 km south of Baghdad, where some of the fiercest fighting of the war has been going on for the control of bridges across the Euphrates. The coalition forces have been fighting a freak sandstorm (the worst in a century, they say). In addition, they've been having problems with the Saddam Fedayeen, a particularly pesky paramilitary group.

The sandstorm is slowing things down. Coalition forces still haven't engaged the Republican Guards in anything resembling a big fight yet. And Baghdad looms on the horizon.
posted at 8:59 PM

 
Suing the Terrorists

And meanwhile, this is going on as well: A number of Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorism are suing the Palestinian Authority for damages incurred. These include people who have have been injured bodily or have lost loved ones, as well as owners of businesses affected by terrorism (such as Jerusalem's Cafe Moment, the Egged bus company, and those employed in the tourism industry which has been decimated).

The legal case behind these claims is fairly straightforward: The PA encouraged the use of terrorism as a technique for making political gains and is thus responsible for the damage done.

As the article details, the Palestinians are falling back on four defenses:

1. The PA is a sovereign entity and is thus immune from prosecution.
2. The PA cannot responsible for all Palestinian terrorism, since it has no control over Hamas.
3. The current intifada is all Israel's fault.
4. These lawsuits are merely political in nature.

All 4 arguments can be addressed fairly easily. Arguments 1 and 2 are self-contradictory insofar as one of the requirements for being a sovereign entity is control of your population. Either the PA is not in control, in which case it is not a sovereign entity, or else it is in control, in which case it is to blame.

Arguments 3 and 4 have no legal standing. Saying that this current conflict (which -- I will tiresomely point out for the umpteenth time -- began as a response to an Israeli peace offer at Camp David) is all Israel's fault is standard Palestinian rhetoric. As far as the lawsuits being political, the plaintiffs maintain that they aren't and in any case they are a lot less political and more legitimate than the court case being levelled by Palestinian plaitiffs against Ariel Sharon in Belgian court.

At the moment, the Israeli courts are waiting to decide the one actual legal matter that has any bearing on these cases, i.e. whether the PA enjoys sovereign immunity.

In the meantime, the courts have put liens on some 2 billion sheckels that Israel is supposed to turn over to the Palestinians if this conflict ever winds down.
posted at 6:29 PM

 
Day Six

The advance on Baghdad continues, slowed down today by a sandstorm which lent the proceedings a freaky, otherworldly air. British Marines have begun to target Basra in a tactical shift that the coalition has decided to undertake on humanitarian grounds.

On the other side of the pincer heading towards Baghdad belongs to the American Marines, who crossed the Euphrates at Nasariyah. And so, the Mother of All Battles as far as Gulf War II is concerned looms nigh. Coalition forces are expected to reach Baghdad in the next day or two, when the real show begins.

You hear all sorts of ominous scenarios being bandied around: There is the fear that Saddam will use chemical weapons once the coalition forces penetrate a "red line" around Baghdad. There is the fear that the hostages will be used as human shields. And god knows what the average Iraqi on the street will do when confronted with US and British soldiers. Rose petals or Black Hawk Down? Anyone's guess.

So far, the Iraqi forces have shown a willingness to use any tactic no matter how abominable. Hence you have the reports of Iraqi soldiers fighting in civilian clothes, of pretend surrenders which turn into ambushes, and the persistent reports that some coalition POWs were executed.

posted at 6:19 PM

 
Fat, Mendacious Assweasel Wins Best Documentary Oscar

Not unexpectedly, Michael Moore took home the Academy Award for "Bowling for Columbine". Moore -- a person who pretty much defines the phrase "10 pounds of shit in a 5-pound sack" -- went up on stage and gave his predictable Michael Moore performance, replete with a full-on attack on GWB and the war in Iraq.

The crowd started off applauding, but ended up booing. (More specifically, as The Weekly Standard points out, the commoners in the balcony booed Moore while the celebrities mainly sat on their hands with pinched faces.)

Full disclosure: I have a visceral hatred for Michael Moore that is almost unmatched. I see his slovenly, piggy unwashed face on TV and I have to restrain myself from spitting at the tube. (My wife gets a bit worried about my mental state any time this happens.)

The big assweasel has made a wonderful career out of peddling his brand of faux populism, trotting out half-truths and mendacious editing in the guise of Speaking Truth to Power.

"Bowling for Columbine" is no different. Moore comes with a thesis and then proceeds to bend the facts to fit it, either monkeying around with the time frame of events (in order to show a false causality) and occasionally just makes things up.

(A blow-by-blow on the Oscar-winning film can be found here.)

Moore's win is unsurprising, given the state of Hollywood at the moment. It isn't the worst attrocity ever perpetrated in the history of the Academy Awards, but it is an attrocity nonetheless.
posted at 9:06 PM

 
Dan Meridor Says Goodbye

An apocryphal tale about Adlai Stevenson has it that when Stevenson was running for President in the '50s one of his supporters came up and told him "Don't worry, Mr.Stevenson, I'm sure every decent American will vote for you." To which Stevenson replied, "That's no good. I need a majority."

Ari Shavit uses this tale as an epigraph to his interview with Dan Meridor in this weekend's Ha'aretz magazine. Meridor, the former Likud MK and Justice Minister who has recently retired from politics, has often been described as an Israeli Adlai Stevenson. Like Stevenson he is an urbane, educated, fundamentally decent kind of guy. Like Stevenson, he is a darling of the highbrows. And, like Stevenson, Meridor seems to find the dirty-dealing part of politics too distasteful and has thus never managed to reach the pinnacle.

Meridor is one of the Herut "princes," children of the founders of the party which eventually became the Likud. (Other prominent princes include former Jerusalem Mayor and current Industry and Trade Minister Ehud Olmert and -- if you stretch the definition of "prince" to include "princess" -- Education Minister Limor Livnat.)

Meridor got on extremely well with the founding fathers of Herut. Begin made him Cabinet Secretary, and under Shamir he bacame Justice Minister. But his relationship with subsequent generations of Likud leaders, wasn't quite as smooth. Meridor had major fallings-out with Sharon and Bibi. The enmity towards the latter was so pronounced, that Meridor actually quit the Likud in order to form the short-lived Center Party.

In the leadup to the most recent elections, Meridor made some noise about re-joining the Likud fray. However, his old party wasn't jumping to have him back and in the end he decided to hang up his political coat.

Meridor has had a number of big political achievements in his career. Unfortunately for him, a lot of his success has been in maintaining the rule of law in a society whose political system has a tendency to veer towards demagoguery and corruption. Nowhere was this more clear than during the criminal-type shenanigans surrounding the Likud Central Committee elections last December.

In order to win over the Likud Central Committee -- and thus to ensure a good spot on the party's election slate -- a politician needs to hand out jobs to Central Committee members, their friends, and their families, after the elections. Meridor opposes this type of political cronyism, and thus effectively made himself unelectable within his own party.

Meridor's problems go beyond his being Mr. Squeaky Clean. His whole style -- cultured, well-mannered, European -- is at odds with the dominant political discourse in general and that of the Likud specifically. For instance, you get quotes like this:

I believe that the Land of Israel and Europe are intertwined. [The early Zionist leader Max] Nordau said that Zionism is an attempt to expand Europe into the Middle East. The Rehavia I grew up in was like that. There was a European public who had come here and wanted to build a European-type Jewish country. Not to emulate the Levant, but to live Europe here, not only in the technological sense but in the cultural sense also.

Statements like this are a kiss of death for anyone contemplating a career in the Likud. Many of the party's members and activists are of Middle Eastern descent. To them, the very notion European culture is prima facie elitist, anti-Mizrahi, and anti-religious. Worse, it is identified with the Labor Party (and, increasingly, Shinui.)

Meridor's unwillingness to dirty his hands is exemplory enough, although you get the feeling that he might be holding
himself too much above the common man. Surely there is a middle ground between hobnobbing with mafiosi at the Likud Central Committee and attempting to live in a kind of rarefied Middle Eastern version of Switzerland.

It says a lot about Israeli politics that the system doesn't have a place for Dan Meridor. And the things it says aren't particularly nice.
posted at 6:38 PM

 
Day Five

To quote Mark Knopfler, some days you're the windscreen, some days you're the bug.

Another rotten day on the Iraq front. More casualties, a couple of Apaches down, possibly more hostages. And Saddam reappears on TV. Even if the GMO's (Great Moustachioed One) speech was prerecorded, as some intelligence analysts are positing, its influence on Iraqi morale is yet another little monkeywrench thrown into the massive machine that is the US military.

At this point in the game I think it is only fair to admit to my own hubris regarding the war. Like many others, I'd assumed that the thing would more or less be a cakewalk. The Iraqis, I thought, would be quick to throw off their old regime and would more or less play ball. And while this has been partially true, the coalition forces have been hindered by fairly tough resistance by fairly unorganized Iraqi forces.

And with the GMO back on the scene, it looks like the Battle for Baghdad will be longer and more brutal than originally expected. Sigh.

However, I don't think the setbacks of the last couple of days are going to weaken the American resolve to get rid of Saddam. Certainly not in the very near future. Don't get me wrong, the Bushies will have a big job dialing down expectations about the war. But I think they'll succeed.

Alongside the casualty figures, we've also heard stories of Iraqis executing POWs, setting up ambushes by waving white flags and pretending to surrender, and shooting into the water and setting fires in an attempt to smoke out a downed pilot.

This kind of stuff only serves to piss Americans off (The NY Post: "Ghouls Parade Our Prisoners"). And pissed-off Americans tend to look for revenge. Just ask the Japanese.


posted at 6:11 PM

 
Day Four

The war continues, developing in directions both positive and regrettable. On the plus side, Um Qasr and Basra are more or less in coalition hands. Nassiriyah, and along with it easy passage across the Euphrates, is also falling despite what looks like fairly heavy American casualties. And the troops keep rolling on Baghdad-wards.

On the minus side, take your pick. The number of accidents involving helicopters and jets seems ridiculous, and lends a vaguely Keystone Kops-like air to the coalition forces. The Iraqis have goten themselves a handful of coalition POWs (who looked understandably fearful from the pictures on Al Jazeera).

And then there is the horrible case of the American soldier, a Muslim, who orchestrated a bloody grenade attack on a tentful of American officers. Early reports said the matter would be treated as a routine homicide, although by any measure this incident counts as treason and one would expect the soldier in question to be put down by execution squad.

(The whole incident reminds me, sourly, of one of the most obnoxious anti-war banners I've seen, spotted at a rally in San Francisco. The banner says "We Support our Troops When They Shoot Their Officers".)

Hovering over the whole thing is the Million-Dollar Question: Whither Saddam, Qusay, Uday, and any of the other thugs who are supposed to be running the show in Iraq? Military Intelligence reports no command and control transmissions coming from the Iraqi leadership, which opens up the tantalizing possibility that the strikes Thursday morning managed to cut off the head of the snake. If it turns out that the big mustache is dead or badly wounded, then this whole ball game will probably end fairly quickly. The Republican Guards may be loyal to the living Saddam, but I can't see why they'd be loyal to a dead one.
And yet, I keep thinking that this is just a matter of wishful thinking . Experts repeatedly point out that during the first Gulf War Saddam was also AWOL for the first couple of days.

What has impressed me most is the pinpointed bombings. A Sky News correspondent reporting with coalition forces on the road to Basra showed a group of bombed-out tanks hidden in embankments in the sand. Nothing interesting there except for the fact that you didn't see any shell blasts anywhere else in the wide-open desert spaces. In other coalition forces were able to take out the individual tanks without causing any other destruction.

This appears to be the same for the aerial bombings of Baghdad. Despite an awe-and-shock-inspiring display of firepower, even the Iraqis aren't reporting more than a handful of civilian casualties in the capitol.

posted at 7:56 PM

 
The Sad Case of Rachel Corrie

Had there not been a war brewing, the sad, dumb death of Rachel Corrie would probably have made front-page headlines all over the place. Corrie, a radical American "peace" activist was accidentally run over by an IDF bulldozer while protesting the demolition of homes in the Gaza Strip. (The IDF employs a controversial tactic of destroying the homes of Palestinian terrorists as a deterrent action).

Her death has sparked a minor bit of controversy within the blogosphere, especially after LGF posted a rather snide entry about Corrie's death, featurning a picture of her burning an American flag at a Palestinian rally. The LGF piece also provided a link to Corrie's online writings.

From Corrie's weblog entry emerges a picture of a fairly common type: a young woman filled to the brim with self-righteous anger and starry-eyed images of "Martyrs [...] ready to defend the honour of Palestine and fight for the freedom of surely the most gentle, generous and peaceful people on earth." As the LGF item points out, these same martyrs then board a bus filled with teenagers and old people and kill 17 of them. In short, Corrie is the type of activist who, like "Movement Lawyer" Lynne Stewart invariably ends up the stooge of terrorists.


LGF reports that the Corrie piece has generated more hate mail than anything they've posted in the last year, which is saying something.


While I agree with the criticism levelled against her political outlook, I do find myself put off by the crowing tone of the LGF piece (and especially of a lot of the people who posted in support of it). She may have been a misguided young woman with unpleasant political views, but she probably has parents who are now grieving for her.

The best summation of this case comes via Meryl Yourish who writes that that Corrie died of hubris, from a feeling of "I'm an American, nothing can happen to me."
posted at 7:56 PM