Iraq News Roundup
from Informed Comment, Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and ReligionGuerrillas assassinated an Iraqi female member of parliamentWednesday, women's rights activist Lamia Abid Khadduri Sakri. Al-Zaman says she was a member of the Iraqiya List of Iyad Allawi, which is dominated by secularists and ex-Baathists. Earlier, failed assassination attempts were made against Iyad Allawi and Mishaan Juburi, both of whom are MPs. There is no specification in the interim constitution as to how a vacant seat is to be filled. The Iraqi press had earlier reported at least on resignation by an MP, so there appear now only to be 273.
Not only are deaths from terrorism way up in 2004, but Iraq alone topped the terrorism charts compared to the year before.
There are still 400 guerrilla strikes a week in Iraq.
Al-Zaman: President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt said Wednesday that he expect violence to go on in Iraq for some time, in part because of the country's ethnic diversity. He advised the Americans to withdraw their troops from the cities to outposts in the desert. Mubarak maintained that the US dissolution of the Iraqi army had been a "true national catastrophe."
Amnesty International says that, incredibly enough, torture and abuse of prisoners has continued in Iraq even during the past year after the Abu Ghraib revelations: 'In February, three men died in custody after being arrested at a police checkpoint, the rights body said. The bodies "were found three days later, bearing clear marks of torture from beatings and electric shocks", it said.
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The number of babies born in Iraq with birth defects has risen by 20 percent in the past two years. Iraqi physicians are blaming the increase on pollution and on depleted uranium shells used by the US military and still unrecovered in the Iraqi south.
Sunni-Shiite tensions and violence are increasing daily in Iraq.
Many US bureaucrats in the Coalition Provisional Authority did not bother to do proper paperwork when giving out contracts to civilian contractors. The new Iraqi government is baulking at the big bills being presented, provoking at least one major riot.
Now their physicians are fleeing abroad.
To Advance in the Bush Administration, Be Wrong
[A second theme I will cover in the coming months as well as a retroactive examination is the idea that in order to advance in the Bush administration, you must do something illegal, immoral or at the most, highly questionable. I will argue that anyone advancing in this administration must foul up, see the foul up and demonstrate their ability to continue right ahead with rhetoric or damage control.]My first example of this particular Bush administraton phenomenon is the hiring of TV and radio personality Armstrong Williams for $240,000 to tout the administration's No Child Left Behind education initiative. Anne Kornblut at NYT reports today in the article
Inquiry Finds White House Knew of Pact With Writer that former deputy director Norquist and chief of staff Rice voiced their concerns:
The "concerns were so strong" that when it came time for the contract to be renewed a year ago, Ms. Nordquist and Ms. Radice each contacted David Dunn, an adviser to Ms. Spellings, who was Mr. Bush's domestic policy adviser. Mr. Dunn is now chief of staff at the department.
The point: Ms. Spellings was advised of two key personnel's concerns of paying Williams and President Bush makes her Secretary of Education. The person to which they voiced their concerns, David Dunn, now chief of staff at the department.
Protecting Your Bottom Line (also known as CYA)
When Democrats claim that Republicans are playing politics, oftentimes they are wrong in that they have misnomered or mischaracterized what is occurring. Oftentimes, it isn’t playing politics, it is simply protecting the bottom line by any means necessary. Their bottom line is anything that makes them look bad, anything that refutes what it is that they have definitively declared and their major blocs or constituency. For example in the Knight Ridder Newspapers article,
Bush Administration Eliminating 19-year-old International Terrorism Report :
The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.
Rep. Henry Waxman response was “that the Bush administration should stop playing politics with this critical report.” This isn’t politics. This is the administration covering up, not looking bad by strong arming the National Counterterrorism Center. Pres. Bush is supposed to be strong on the ‘war on terror’ and yet it has to cancel a report that sheds light on how ineffectual this ‘war on terror’ is.
[In the future, I will continue to catalog actions where the Bush administration changes the rules, suppresses information or misrepresents the facts in order to mask their ineffectiveness or inefficiency.
Out and About
Headed for a wedding in Newport Richey. Ugh it is too early for the suit and tie thing. I'll take a picture.
WWII Prisoner Abuse Punished More Severly than Abu Ghraib
Jeanne at
Body and Soul in analysis of a
Wall Street Journal article points to the hypocrisy of minimalizing and excusing military abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib when these same offenses were intolerable according to U.S. military tribunals following WWII.
Living in a country whose soldiers literally get away with murder, in which beating a man to death is called "involuntary manslaughter," and only radicals dare to use the words "war crimes," I found myself gobsmacked by history today:
"In the annals of law, the case of Masatomo Kikuchi is all but forgotten.The former Japanese prison guard was tried by the Allies after World War II for war crimes. In 1947, a U.S. military commission, citing the Geneva Conventions and customary international law, convicted him of compelling prisoners of war to practice saluting and other military exercises for as long as 30 minutes when they were tired. His sentence: 12 years of hard labor. " [WSJ article]
Just try to imagine the warbloggers' reaction if an American were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for forcing Afghan or Iraqi prisoners to salute for 30 minutes when they were tired.
American Novelist Saul Bellow Dead at 89
From the
NY Times online:
Saul Bellow, the Nobel laureate and self-proclaimed historian of society whose fictional heroes - and whose scathing, unrelenting and darkly comic examination of their struggle for meaning - gave new immediacy to the American novel in the second half of the 20th century, died yesterday at his home in Brookline, Mass. He was 89.
Iraqi Blogger Idea for Reality TV Show
Iraqi female blogger Baghdad Burning has a fabulous post concerning the bombardment of the Arab world with
American Media so head on over there and read her post. Her comment on our innundation with reality shows and her suggestion for a reality tv show:
Furthermore, I don’t understand the worlds fascination with reality shows. Survivor, The Bachelor, Murder in Small Town X, Faking It, The Contender… it’s endless. Is life so boring that people need to watch the conjured up lives of others?
I have a suggestion of my own for a reality show. Take 15 Bush supporters and throw them in a house in the suburbs of, say, Falloojeh for at least 14 days. We could watch them cope with the water problems, the lack of electricity, the check points, the raids, the Iraqi National Guard, the bombings, and- oh yeah- the ‘insurgents’. We could watch their house bombed to the ground and their few belongings crushed under the weight of cement and brick or simply burned or riddled with bullets. We could see them try to rebuild their life with their bare hands (and the equivalent of $150)…
I’d not only watch *that* reality show, I’d tape every episode.
Atty General Gonzalez, Poor Analogy Defending Patriot Act
From the NY Times online:
Mr. Gonzales's forceful defense of the expanded antiterrorism powers granted under the USA Patriot Act came at the start of what is expected to be months of hearings in both the Senate and the House. Sixteen provisions in the law are to expire by year's end, and a decision over whether to extend them, and whether the government's expanded powers have eroded civil liberties, is shaping up as one of the biggest legislative battles in the current Congress.
Noting that the Justice Department had not used the law to demand library records, Mr. Gonzales said: "It should not be held against us that we've exercised, in my judgment, restraint. It's comparable to a police officer who carries a gun for 15 years and never draws it. Does that mean that for the next five years he should not have that weapon because he had never used it?"
That is an absurd analogy, Mr. Gonzalez. The new powers of intrusion given to the Justice Department by the passing of a bill that the MAJORITY of Congress did not read before casting their yea vote are not the same as the gun police officers have been carrying since this country began. Now if you gave the police officers expanded powers, say, to pull people over for "No Blood for Oil" bumper stickers and breathalyze them but the police officers didn't do it, to argue that they've shown restraint does not legally or morally justify the new powers granted to them.
Reflecting on the Mourning of the Pope
Watching the crowd at St. Peter's Basilica to view the body of the Pope, I am steeped in the tradition of Catholicism. There is something poetic, something majestic about this entire event. The diamond anniversary motto of my alma mater was "some traditions are forever." Tradition is care and being careful to precisely give the wisdom gained from the divine and from experience to those that follow. It is the recognition of the sacredness of life and the sacred in life.
When one of my best friends got married, it was in a Catholic church and I found myself intensely measuring the detail of the figurines that completely surrounded the church walls, telling the stories of the Bible and the intricacies of the stained glass windows.
Mourning is a tradition that I cherish. It is a cry to God, a plea for the care of the soul that has left us. It is a lamenting thankfulness for the entire life that we were privileged to share. It is our last collective action for the body that lies before us. It is the tears of our soul because they are forever gone.
When my baby brother died and my mother went back up to the casket as the minister was about to commence the service, I paused to let her linger, to touch his hand, to see his beautiful little face and then I went to get her because our tradition is that we speak on his life, the minister gives us precious words about life, death and salvation and we bury the shell for the soul has gone. I grew that day, I sometimes mourn him still.
So I join in the vigil, the tradition, the mourning of Pope John Paul II. I celebrate his herculean leadership. I, with deep respect and admiration, quietly disagree with some of his stances and I shout from the rooftops his blow against the evils within Communism, his demonstration of faith, his tireless crusade for the least among us and his unwavering campaign for the sanctity of life which went beyond abortion to the poor, the hungry and the downtrodden.
My tears are the tears of my Catholic brothers and sisters. We are all one and the Pope demonstrated that ecuminicism as he traveled the world with the message of love, of faith and of hope.
"And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. " - Matthew 25:40
