Friday, May 23, 2003
BACK TO THE ORIGINAL IDIOCY
Apparently the Des Moines Register editorialists haven’t made big enough fools out of themselves in their opposition to the Iraq War. Now they want us to believe that Iraq was just a distraction from the “real war.”
In fact, the "battle of Iraq" might not have affected al-Qaida and kindred terrorist groups much at all. The resurgence of terrorist activity lends credence to the suggestion of Florida Senator Bob Graham that the war in Iraq was a distraction that diverted attention from the main war on terrorism.
Yep, you keep that up Senator Graham; and you keep egging him on Des Moines Register. That’s a surefire election strategy to get a Democrat back in the White House. Really. Honest.
Meanwhile, the editorialists haven’t kept up on their reading:
No link has ever been established between Saddam's secular government and the religious fanatics who carried out the attack of 9/11.
Like I said, need to keep up on that reading.
Naturally, they also interpret recent terrorist attacks as evidence that al-Qaeda is not “on the run”:
The nation is supposed to be on high alert - again. This comes in the aftermath of recent terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco that look suspiciously like the work of al-Qaida.
So much for the belief that al-Qaida is "on the run."
Since when is an organization that’s “on the run” unable to engage in destruction? By that logic, during WWII the Nazis should have been unable to fire on Allied soldiers as they high tailed their jack-booted butts out of France.
Indeed, the recent al Qaeda attacks are more like a sign of their weakness, as this article by Peter Wallison argues:
these attacks are necessary to the survival of the organization. It must continue to make news and generate publicity, or it will be perceived as a defeated force by the Arab youth on whom it relies for recruitment and cannon fodder. Al Qaeda's leaders know that the ever-credulous Western press will treat each bombing as a renewal of its vigor, when in fact these bombings signal just the opposite.
If we look at the targets chosen in each of these cases, what they have in common is both their defenselessness — their "softness" in the current jargon — and their failure to damage the power or image of the United States. If al Qaeda were truly resurgent, and had both the leadership and resourcefulness evidenced by its initial attacks on U.S. embassies, warships, and the World Trade Center, there is no doubt the organization would be attacking targets of this quality. But the fact is that these targets are now largely out of reach — in part because the United States and the rest of the civilized world have increased the quality their defenses but also because, as President Bush has said, the organization is on the run.
One theory is that these attacks were undertaken by freelancers-al Qaeda cells that are acting without central direction or without any overriding strategy. That would certainly account for their apparent self-destructiveness by choosing targets in countries where they have bases or at least government tolerance. But if this is true, it only further emphasizes that the organization's leadership is unable to exert overall strategic control, or perhaps even communicate with its operatives.
Of course, we wouldn’t expect the Register to look at it this way. That would require actual thinking.
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Thursday, May 22, 2003
NO BLOGGING TODAY
Will be back tomorrow. In the meantime, take a look at this post at Zonitics about Iraqi civilian casualties.
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Wednesday, May 21, 2003
BASU BITES IT AGAIN
Well, the writer of the Des Moines Register’s Worst Column Ever, a.k.a. Rekha Basu, has managed to step in it again. (Yes, I know, you’re not surprised.)
Today she has picked up on the increasingly questionable story that the rescue of PFC Jessica Lynch wasn’t really all that it was cracked up to be. According to Basu:
There's only one problem: What actually happened may be a far cry from what you've been told.
According to reports first in the Toronto Star and later on the BBC and ABC Nightly News, whatever the military believed, there never was a need for the April 1 raid on the Nasiriyah hospital. Iraqi forces had fled it nearly two days earlier while U.S. forces planned their action. Iraqi doctors say Lynch was not being held against her will when troops swarmed in with four helicopter gunships, blasting through 12 locked doors, trashing equipment, handcuffing patients and medical staff. Not only was there no enemy fire against them, but hospital staff had tried to deliver Lynch in an ambulance to American troops nearly two days earlier and were forced to retreat after being fired on.
Apparently it doesn’t occur to Basu that when the military engages in a rescue mission, perhaps—just perhaps—it is best if they assume the worst: that there is an armed enemy nearby. I guess Basu thinks that the rescue mission should have begun with the Special Forces politely knocking on the hospital door. I can just imagine:
KNOCK, KNOCK.
Iraqi Hospital Worker: Who’s there?
Soldier: U.S. Military.
IHW: What can I do for you?
Soldier: We’re looking for Jessica Lynch. Do you know her?
IHW: Wait while I check the admittance list. Hmmm…well, we did have a blonde, American-looking woman in fatigues admitted the other day…
Soldier: That’s her! May we come in?
IHW: Okay, but could you wipe your feet first?
In an interview with Fox News, Colonel Hunt stated that knocking down doors, handcuffing staff, etc. is standard operating procedure in a rescue operation. I imagine that’s because if you do it the polite way, more often than not you’ll end up dead.
She continues:
The [Toronto] Star interviewed a businessman near the hospital who said he had told troops before the raid that the Iraqi military had fled. What especially bothered the hospital staff, it said, is that while most accounts depicted her treatment as brutal, they provided Lynch attentive care. They gave her the special bed (which was destroyed in the U.S. raid) and assigned her a nurse who treated Lynch like her child, and feed her special food. Doctors there operated on her leg, installing three platinum plates that were in demand by Iraqi patients. After the raid, an Iraqi doctor said they were visited and thanked by a U.S. military doctor.
Does Basu know how to do a Google Search? I’ve run various terms like “Jessica Lynch”, “Iraqi hospital”, “brutal”, “treatment” through the search engine and I can’t find any reports saying the hospital staff mistreated Lynch. Many stories mention Lynch’s “brutal captors” but that refers to the Iraqi soldiers that captured her (and killed the other members of her team), not the hospital staff. I wonder if the Iraqi hospital staff is confused about the news reports? I could understand if they are, but what’s Basu’s excuse?
Next, Basu gets it wrong when she writes that the doctors installed “three platinum plate” in Lynch’s leg. The Tornoto Star reported:
The procedure involved cutting through muscle to install a platinum plate to both ends of the compound fracture. "We only had three platinum plates left in our supply and at least 100 Iraqis were in need," Raazk said. "But we gave one to Jessica."
Furthermore, this is one of those things that should have made Basu go “hmmm”. Why hasn’t it been revealed up until now? Did the doctors in Germany or at the Walter Reed Hospital miss the plate in Lynch’s leg? It would seem that such a detail would have been reported in the media by now.
There are lots of other things that should have given Basu pause before repeating this tripe, like one of the Iraq doctors’ ludicrous claims—as reported by the BBC—that U.S. Soldiers were firing blanks. Nor did author John Kampener’s subsequent backing away from the story, not to mention the Pentagon’s dismissal of the BBC story.
Yet we shouldn’t expect it too. Basu doesn’t hesitate to repeat questionable stories when it serves to do damage to her perceived enemies. In a recent column canonizing the deceased Rachel Corrie, Basu wrote:
News reports and her grandmother say she was wearing a bright orange jacket and talking to the bulldozer driver through a bullhorn before he plowed her down. Israeli officials called it "a regrettable accident" and said the driver didn't see her. No charges were filed against him. But Doris Corrie says the driver is looking Rachel in the eye in a photo taken right before. "He ran over her and backed out and went back over her again," she said, "and never got out or said anything."
Her column prompted Charles Johnson to respond:
Blatant, ugly Palestinian propaganda, repeated for the Nth time. Rachel Corrie died under a pile of gravel and dirt. The driver never saw her. And the bulldozer did not run over her even once, much less twice. If this had happened, her body would have been unrecognizable as a human being; the photos taken that day show her quite intact, and even able to speak.
I’ll add that Basu was shameless enough to quote the grieving grandmother to add weight to the lie.
And lies are what it’s all about. Basu thinks the entire Operation Iraqi Freedom was predicated on a lie, so why wouldn’t she believe that the rescue of Jessica Lynch was too?
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Tuesday, May 20, 2003
RADIO DEBATE
I will be on WSUI, 910 AM, this morning from 10-11. I will be debating David Osterberg from the Iowa Policy Project on subjects like taxes, government spending, and economic growth in Iowa.
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LIBERAL LEXICON
The Des Moines Register editorial page employs the liberal lexicon to describe Representative Jim Leach’s vote against the Bush tax cuts. The headline blares “In Praise of Integrity”, the editorial calls his vote an “act of conviction” and his voice as “one of reason.” Integrity, conviction, and reason: In liberal-speak those mean any Republican who votes against conservative ideas.
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IT ALL HINGES ON WMDs
Just in case anyone is unaware of it, the new liberal line on the war with Iraq is that the post-hoc justification for it all depends on finding weapons of mass destruction. That was the main point in Paul Krugman’s column from last Friday. If this editorial is any indication, the op-ed staff at the Des Moines Register received the same DNC talking points at about the same time:
The Bush administration pushed a war in Iraq on the idea that former leader Saddam Hussein was a threat to the world. But with no weapons of mass destruction found to this point, one can't help but wonder if Iraq was the threat it was portrayed to be.
As I pointed out last Friday, I guess Hussein’s links to terrorism are irrelevant.
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Monday, May 19, 2003
THE RETURN OF THE FRIVOLOUS LAWSUIT
My new column at the American Prowler.
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RUMMY AND BOBBY
Yesterday I stumbled upon a Senate hearing on C-SPAN featuring Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Senator and former KKK member Robert Bird proceeded to ask Rummy about by recounting the history of Hannibal’s invasion of the Roman Empire. He also noted the Napolean had said Hannibal was the great military general of antiquity. While Rummy was deferential in his response (I didn’t even see him roll his eyes) it’s fun to imagine what was actually going through his mind. Do you think it was:
A. Hannibal? Wasn’t he that guy on the show “The A-Team”?
B. Wow! Bobby really knows his history! I’m so intimidated!
C. Too bad tradition says I have to be nice to this doddering fart. I could crap six of him before breakfast.
D. Hannibal, huh? You actually served under him, didn’t you Senator?
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