Mail 259 May 19 - 25, 2003

There was a fair amount of mail over the weekend. You might want to look at that.

I am told that as I left it last week, it appeared I believe the story was in fact a hoax. No. Read on. Let us see the entire claims first.

The Toronto Star had this story a couple of weeks ago. I don't have a copy around, as it had quite an unremarkable impact. The article might have been co-written by a Brit, as many Canadian journalists (including the one from the Star that found the possible Sadaam-Al Queda link) have teamed up with reporters from elsewhere whilst over there.

It didn't cause much of a ripple here because the basic alleged facts had been out there for a while. It was also mentioned briefly, I think in suspect terms, in Time or Newsweek. Those magazines seem to be only places where I'm ready much critical analysis of American policy these days. I'm certainly not seeing it on TV. I joined the western world in chuckling derision over Pravda's innocent name and co-operative nature back in the pre-American Empire days. My guessing is that after the Soviet Empire fail, more than a few ex-Pravda execs found work at Fox [G].

Given the now-obviously fictitious WMD excuse for the war, American veracity isn't in question anymore. It's assumed to be non-existent in a large portion of the world.

A country that has done so much good for this world, possibly nothing greater than espousing that "Better a 100 guilty go free rather than imprison a single innocent," has invaded a country with a warrant that even the most backwater judge in the country would throw out. "Truth, justice and the American way." Or has it come down to "Truth. Justice. Or the American Way?"

America is better than this. Be more like Tom Cruise and a lot less like Jack Nicholson. Demand the truth.

There are many things to note here. One, was the story really scripted? If so, who was in on it? The Marine Gunny here in San Diego who was one of those carrying the stretcher certainly thought it was all real, and has said that he was more scared on that raid than in anything he had previously done in the Corps. He is retiring this year. He is entirely believable. He made nothing up.

Assuming it was all cynically done by the higher ups doesn't mean the troops involved were told that this was anything other than what it was: an act of courage to rescue one of our own.

But, assuming it was all cynically done, that is not entirely astonishing, nor is the cynicism of others astonishing. This is the kind of thing empires do, and it comes with the job. Legends are terribly important in the empire business; the more people believe the legend, the fewer troops you need send, and the less often you need to send them. Empires ruled by legends are far less bloody than empires ruled by cold steel. Poul Anderson had a very odd series of science fiction stories on that theme, beginning with one called "The Double Dyed Villain."

On the other hand, to stage anything like that and expect the scheme not to be found out is more stupid than I can believe. It is really stupid, mind-boggling stupid, and thus unlikely. But suppose even so.

Canadians have been accusing the United States of being imperialists for a long time. Perhaps their fears are coming to pass. But let me point out that there is an old phrase: may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. Many of us down here learned it in our childhood.

Here is a URL where the BBC "story" (in the sense of "sea story", "bedtime story", or perhaps "just so story") is elegantly dispatched. It is on Professor Glenn Reynolds' site, "InstaPundit":

Which is certainly true as far as it goes: they weren't firing blanks. This was no stage show, and the BBC is way off base to suggest that it was.

One possibility: we were told she was being held in durance vile. There was the story of the intelligence officer slapping her. That story got to the troops. A rescue was planned. And the troops were coldly angry.

Meanwhile, back at the hospital, the word got out: the Americans are coming. The Iraqi Army did what it usually did, faded away into the dusk. The Americans came, expecting resistance. There wasn't any but the adrenalin was flowing, the NCO's were shouting "GO Go GO" as they do, and probably there were some shots fired, perhaps our troops starting at shadows -- to this day I am convinced the first shots fired at Waco were by BATF agents -- and when one hears gunshots while rushing into danger the effect is to make one more than ready to fire at anything threatening or remotely threatening. These were soldiers, and this is not NYPD Blue sending in a SWAT team with the homicide detectives. These are soldiers and they break things and kill people, and when you send them in you expect things to be broken and people to be killed.

They took her out. It may not have been under fire, but they went in expecting opposition, and they went in ready. I suspect you will have a hard job convincing those involved that they used excessive force or that the Iraqis, who after all were forcing their own civilians to drive cars into our check points in hopes that we would kill some civilians for Al Jaziera, were all saintly people whose only ambition was to take care of the wounded American girl.

Whatever happened, one thing was made clear: the US takes care of its own. And the world should understand that.

Your comments on the Jessica Lynch rescue may be right on. I mentioned earlier that I saw a certain amount of myth making already in progress. I believe that Lynch herself may not remember the events surrounding her capture. This is fairly common with POW's, and even among those who serve in combat. My own memories of Vietnam are rather foggy, but I've always attributed that to the Agent Orange exposure.

I note a certain amount of debunking already in progress from the foreign media. I had words last week (literally) with an Australian colleague who originally contacted me regarding commentary on the Jayson Blair matter I posted on Romnesko's Media News at Poynter.org. He went off on a tangent about how bad the American media was about reporting war stories and alleged that he had seen tape of Mike Spann, the CIA agent killed in Afghanistan, heavily interrogating John Walker Lindh, which he alleged had been withheld from the American public. My reply was to the effect that there was not a whole lot of sympathy for Lindh, who I view as another spoiled Marin County rich kid who made bad choices (hardly a new problem) and that if such a tape existed and were shown, people would be cheering Spann on. Probably shocked the hell out of him. I haven't had a response.

I doubt if such a tape exists, myself. One of the articles I did for the Britannica back in the early 60's was on Disinformation. This smells like that. It is a legitimate tactic of war and we are, however much people might wish it otherwise, at war. Raw data, such as this alleged tape, can inflame an audience. Context is in the eye of the beholder.

I can see someone wanting to put a gloss on the circumstances of Lynch's rescue and with the "fog or war" factor, it very much becomes a matter of point of view, affected, for better or worse, by a lot of emotion and hormones. Hey, they got her out. That's what really counts.

As for the circumstances of her capture, if everyone else around her was KIA, we may never know the truth. Awards for heroism require direct testimony of soldiers who were involved in the action. She may never receive what is due her. Somehow I doubt she really cares. Probably just happy to be alive.

My Australian friend ranted a bit about how ill trained and ill prepared our troops were for Afghanistan and Iraq. My reply was that, if the big hero(ine) of the war is a nineteen year old supply clerk with nine weeks of Army Basic, imagine what the so-called front line and special ops people are like. The truth is that we are currently scaring the hell out of much of the rest of the world because of our disproportionate military power and prowess. This is not necessarily a good thing.

We have been forced into the role of policeman of the Global Village. The question is whether of not we will will take the traditional motto of "serve and protect" as our mantra, or like so many small town cops, get by with bullying the citizenry.

Don't kid yourself. We are not "better" than that because good soldiers are not good policemen. We don't have the money to train a world constabulary as well as a world class army; given one or the other, we'll take the army. Armies break things and kill people. They are not the village constable.

The way empires work, eventually, is that the Empire has an army that can defeat anything. Then it gets client states to do the police work and tax collection and suppress most of the dissent, and generally provide imperial security. A client state that refuses the job, or doesn't do it well, finds itself punished. The technique works pretty well, but it's still Empire: governing with powers not derived from the consent of the governed.

We'll probably be good at it, perhaps as good as the British Empire was, perhaps even better.

I don't know where the stories about PFC Lynch firing her weapon until she was out of ammo came from. One hopes they were true. As to her injuries, that's a matter of objective fact that sooner or later will be reported.

But she is out, and as you say that is the important point; and a salutary lesson was given: we take care of our own.

Incidentally, Edmund Burke warned against appearing too overwhelmingly powerful, as it begets enemies you didn't really want.

Web Vigilantes Give Spammers
Big Dose of Their Own Medicine
They Find Mass E-Mailers
And Play Tricks on Them
By MYLENE MANGALINDAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

When all 24 office phones at Scott Richter's e-mail marketing company started ringing at once, with nobody at the other end of the line, employees knew they were under attack again.
Daniel Dye, the systems administrator, could do little. After 15 minutes into the lunchtime assault last month, Mr. Dye recalls yelling, "Go ahead and pull your phones out of the walls for now. It'll be easier to think about what to do." Examining the phone system's central computer, Mr. Dye found that someone had hacked into it and programmed a feature that caused all the phones to ring at the same time.
Mr. Richter's company had been "flamed" -- attacked by a shadowy group of vigilantes who have taken to harassing spammers using just about any means they can dream up. Spam, or unsolicited commercial e-mail, has set off a war between marketers and people who hate spam. Mr. Richter, who is a mass commercial e-mailer, has become a frequent target of attackers known as antispammers.
They form a loose affiliation that uses the Internet to coordinate attacks from around the world. E-mail marketers often feel powerless against them. "It's an underground cult running it," says Mr. Richter, whose Westminster, Colo., e-mail marketing business, Optinrealbig.com (www.optinbig.com), pitches mortgages, adult-related products and Viagra. "You don't know who they are."
Here's one of them: Mark Jones, a 26-year-old software engineer in Enterprise, Ala., who calls himself a "soldier" in the war against spam. From his home at night, he tracks down spammers by tracing the complex routing code hidden in e-mail messages. He reports them to what antispammers call "realtime blacklists," Web sites that track known spam sources and allow computer administrators to block certain Internet addresses.
Then, he fights back. "Anytime we find a source of spam," he says, "we spam them back."
After his three children were asleep late one Saturday night last November, Mr. Jones sat down at his PC for a bit of spammer-flaming. First, he says, he visited a Web site, slashdot.org (www.slashdot.org), that's a favorite among techies; he pulled down a list of about 10 alleged spammers. He programmed his personal computer to send a letter to each supposed spammer in the same way many spammers do: through so-called open relays and mail servers that forward e-mail in ways that make it hard to track down the sender. As his finishing stroke, he had his PC send the message to each spammer 10,000 times.
"We use the same methods the spammers use," says Mr. Jones, chuckling. "It's a bombardment."
< snip>

Heh. Optin Big has sent me messages for years. Opting OUT has done no good, and needless to say I never opted IN. If they were near me, I fear I might encourage juvenile gangsters to take an interest in them.

The Internet Engineering Task Force, the global group that set Internet standards, is working on solving the spam problem. Some alarming statistics and interesting solutions.

On the same note, my ISP's spam catcher averages about 750 spams a month on my email account. At that, 3-4 porn emails get through each week.

"The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something." Robert Browning

Needless to say this is no small sum, and there is much we could have done with that much money...

Very interesting take on modern warfare, esp American technology vs "the rest of the world." As Steven Den Beste tells it:

"One usually thinks of the paradigmatic soldier is the frontline rifleman, or maybe a guy buttoned up in a tank. Think of ancient armies and one imagines the Roman legionary, or a knight on horseback. Basically, we think of the guys who are doing the fighting. That's quite natural.

But in order for guys like that to be where they are, doing what they're doing to the enemy, there are other people elsewhere doing other less glamorous jobs...I've referred to the U.S. military as being the first true Information Age force, as distinct from the Industrial Age armies used by nearly everyone else (though the British are straddling the boundary)."

Wellington famously said that it was as important to get a biscuit to his troops before battle as to have the trooper armed and ready. He paid a lot of attention to logistics troops. But indeed...

May 1, 2003, 9:30 a.m.
Rising Up From Flanders Fields
Where you stand depends in part on where your soldiers lie.

By Father Raymond J. de Souza

aster is the season of empty tombs and lilies, but the war-torn Lent of 2003 has kept my thoughts on full cemeteries and poppies.

Here in continental Europe, the preponderance of public opinion and public argument has been strongly against the morality of this war, with the Holy See taking a leading role.

For this Canadian in Europe, though, the shape of the debate has indicated that we, like our fellow North Americans in the United States, think rather differently about war than do most Europeans. Different moral lessons were learned on opposite sides of the Atlantic from the wars of the past century. It is not so much a question of this war but of war in general; not so much the morality of war but the moral of the war story.

North Americans learned from the First and Second World Wars that noble causes could be fought for nobly. It is historical commonplace in Canada to say it was on the battlefields of World War I that we grew to maturity as a sovereign nation, having paid the price in our soldiers' blood.

WHERE POPPIES GROW
Like most Canadian schoolboys, my first introduction to public thinking about war was during the annual commemorations of Remembrance Day, Nov. 11. An indispensable part of the day was the reading of the poem, "In Flanders Fields." In fact, I doubt there is another piece of literature that is so universally taught in Canada � every Canadian knows it.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The image of the passing torch is so deeply ingrained in the national psyche that those words from the final stanza were inscribed on the walls of the Montreal Canadiens' dressing room in the old Montreal Forum � the most important shrine of our national sport.

The poem was written by Major John McCrae during the second battle of Ypres in May 1915, where he fought as part of the First Brigade of the Canadian Field Artillery. Canada suffered 6,000 casualties at Second Ypres, which was only a prelude to the horrors of World War I � a war the Canadian prime minister of the day, Robert Borden, privately called "the suicide of civilization."

Amid all that, McCrae was able to write of flowers and birds and crosses, and of bravery and love and fidelity. It not a poem about the horrors of war; it is a paean to the heroism of warriors.

That is not the common European experience. While Canadians visit Juno Beach at Normandy with pride and Americans visit Omaha and Utah Beach, there are no such places of unalloyed national pride associated with the Second World War for the French, the Germans, the Austrians, or the Italians.

George Weigel, the papal biographer, once asked his subject what he learned from the Second World War. Pope John Paul II answered instantly: "I learned the experience of my contemporaries: humiliation at the hands of evil."

The moral of the war story for so much of Europe is just that: humiliation and evil.

When a German thinks about World War II, he does not think about the "finest hour" but of national shame. A Frenchman does not think of triumph in a noble cause but of defeat and collaboration. Austrians bought their safety at the price of their honor; Italians needed, as it is wickedly observed, to "be liberated from their allies." The low countries were crushed; the Iberians and the Swiss declined to participate. Russia suffered terribly to win the war and then inflicted further suffering on her own people and throughout her empire during the peace.

The Holy See, too, felt the pain of humiliation, with the tiny Vatican City State surrounded. The Church felt compelled to moderate her voice to preserve the neutrality upon which her freedom depended. It was a defensible policy but there was no glory in it � there was only humiliation in the face of evil.

Indeed, with the exception of Poland � which fought bravely and lost � and Britain � which fought bravely and won � the moral of the war story for Europe was that, as John Paul is fond of saying, "nothing is solved by war." The subsequent Cold War only reinforced the view that war brings more evils in its wake and further underscored the impotence of free Europe to combat evil in its own neighborhood.

Americans used to talk about a "Vietnam Syndrome." Long before Vietnam, Europe was stricken with doubt that it was possible to fight well, to fight nobly and to win. Europeans do not speak, as Americans do, of the veterans of World War II as "The Greatest Generation."

FACING IRAQ
All of this is important to understand the deep divisions that exist over war in Iraq.

It would be a mistake to dismiss Europe's dark memories as the irrelevant fears of "Old Europe." Europe is old enough to have learned some important lessons in thinking about war and peace, the first of which is that war is often just that: humiliating, shameful, degrading and evil.

But Europe also needs to recover the North American sense that evil can be fought, that it is shameful to appease aggressors and that wars can be won with pride and decency.

Both are necessary elements in the Christian moral tradition on war and peace.

In the light of the current war, the lessons of the past do not determine current political positions, but they do give a sense of how the debate is framed.

The Canadian government opted not to join its historical allies � Britain, United States and Australia � for the first time, but the leading opposition party is in favor of the war, and the premier of the largest province has endorsed it in defiance of the national government. Canada is perhaps the only antiwar country where leading voices are criticizing the government for not joining the Coalition. The arguments one hears emphasize duty, loyalty to allies and the demands of a just cause � not unlike the themes of In Flanders Fields.

Here in Italy the opposite is the case. The government has joined the Coalition, but public opinion is against it. The ordinary Italians I speak to seem completely convinced that only base motives exist for this war � money, power, oil. The torch of Flanders Fields does not figure in the public imagination � the hands of war grasp only after gain.

So the Iraq war has produced an odd situation. President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair are men of deep Christian faith, explicitly motivated by the morality of their policy and committed to the role of religion in public life. Yet the Holy See has opposed them every step of the way.

That happens sometimes in the practical application of moral principles. Disagreements are to be expected in those situations where the starting points for moral reflection are so different. Where you stand depends in part on where your soldiers lie � in Flanders fields, in Normandy, or somewhere else.

Flanders fields are in Europe. But their legacy is elsewhere.

� Father Raymond J. de Souza writes from Rome. This originally appeared in The National Catholic Register and is reprinted with permission.

CHAOS MANOR MAIL

Mail 259 May 19 - 25, 2003