| Thursday,
May 20, 2004 Dr. Pournelle,
It sounds like some of the information that helped us
find Saddam was obtained the old fashioned naive American way: we helped
someone and made friends.
I heard this on the radio, but the only web source
I've found is here:
http://www.trentonsun.net/stories/2-18/3.htm
Tom
PS According to the article, if a patient dies, in
Iraqi culture the family considers the doctor a murderer, so doctors over
there don't get near any patient that might die (I would guess oncology
isn't a popular career there). Think of all the implications from that
alone.
The old fashioned way...
Jerry
Proof positive the Martians knew about us:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap040519.html
Ed
Woo---
Jerry:
Iraq is changing...
Clayton Craymer has added a new blogger to his blog
roll, and quoted his comments on how things have changed in at least one
bureaucracy:
Today, my brother in law and I went to the passports
office to get an interim travel document, cause he wants to travel to Syria
for some work, so I decided to get a document for me , who knows, probably I
might travel oneday.
I was shocked by the new behavior of the officials and
the new procedures there, I thought that I were in another country!
There was an organized queues of about 200 man and
woman, the boss got out of the building and took the application forms from
the elderly people who were standing there checked them and said: ‘ that’s
it, come here at 1:00 PM’ ! We were surprised by the polite behavior of the
boss! Not only that, he said: ‘ anyone has a problem in getting the document
or any obstacle just tell me’ !!
We were used to hear: ‘ HEY..READ THE NOTICE WELL
BEFORE ASKING US ANYTHING’ and ‘ BE SURE OF YOUR APPLICATION FORM, OTHERWISE
WE WON’T TAKE IT, DON’T BOTHER US’.. And in addition to the bribes,
unexplained demands, the disgusting loop between the passports office and
military offices with their insults and disrespect....and and and.. If I
write about what was going on to an Iraqi who wanted a passport I’ll write a
book about different stories, tragedies and those doctors who were
imprisoned because they dared to try to get out from Iraq !
http://www.claytoncramer.com/weblog/
2004_05_16_archive.html#108499715439847115
Well, sir, you ARE in another country. Here's hoping
you like it better than the old one....
................................Karl Lembke
Another country, and Mesopotamia at
that...
Subject: Rumsfeld & Wolfowitz
He said that by contrast, he had been "struck at how
many fairly senior officers have come to me" to tell him that he and
Rumsfeld have made the right decisions concerning the Army.
But you note that neither quote comes from anyone we
can identify.
After the example set with General Eric Shinseki and
his pre-war estimate of the larger required Iraq occupation force, not
identifying yourself is a sign of self-preservation. These people have
mortages to pay and kids to put through college. If they are fired no one
will hire them for mega million jobs such as await Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz
irrespective of the outcome of their war.
Given that former CENTCOM CINC General (Ret) Anthony
Zinni publicly opposed the war before it began and has since all but joined
the anti-war movement, I'm confident there are a great many pessimists in
the active serving GO Corps.
From my very distant perch it seems the new Army CofS,
General Schoomaker, is trying to do wonderful things to restructure the Army
for the 3d Millenium. Rumsfeld's contributions came earlier in killing a
series of useless Cold War dinosaurs such as the 100 ton Crusader SP
artillery system. It's a neat question whether Rumsfeld did this from deep
insight into the future of land warfare or he simply got lucky in the course
of arbitrarily asserting himself against The Generals. The present results
in Iraq support the theory of random coincidence.
Mark & Elena
Gallmeier
Crusader was an Imperial weapon. Properly
run empires don't fight a lot: they keep equipment with the capability of
defeating any client state, and let the client states fight the wars.
Crusader was that kind of weapon.
A proper empire would have heavy combat
legions capable of taking on and destroying any army they would ever face;
and smaller special operations units for the smaller missions where imperial
power is to be employed directly. But most power projection would be through
client armies.
That kind of military and attitude isn't
really suitable for a self-governing republic.
The problem with the American military at
the moment is that no one knows what the mission is; and many are persuaded
that the only way to stand between their loved homes and war's desolation is
to be ready and willing to meddle in other people's countries, and if need
be rule overseas for our good (and persuade ourselves that it is for the
good of the people ruled, without regard to their consent). If that be true,
if the only way to be safe at home is to rule others for our benefit, we
will not remain a republic.
Understand: that may be correct. But I at
least am persuaded that it is not a correct view, and that America can be
defended in America, by forces that believe that governments derive their
just powers from the consent of the governed. But I seem to be nearly alone
in that belief.
Empires need heavy legions. An empire that
has only a new model lightly armed army has many problems.
Subject: Department of Pre-Terrorism
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040520/D82M9B400.html
- Roland Dobbins
Ain't freedom grand?
Subj: Marines' alt TV in Iraq - gear arrives in Iraq
http://www.spiritofamerica.net/blog/archives/000074.html
Rod Montgomery==monty@sprintmail.com
Sometimes things go right.
Jerry
Yesterday on Court TV - Catherine Crier Live - they
had an interview with one of the lawyers for Lyndie. One of their defenses
is that she had no where to turn to. Her superiors were telling her to do
these things. If she refused she could be Court Martialed for refusing a
direct order! They did not consider that she had a right to refuse an
illegal order.
Now back in 1971 in Basic Training we were brought
together and had a session on the Geneva Convention. We were told that we
could not use the excuse of "Just Following Orders". We were told that we
had the right and responsibility to refuse illegal orders.
Has the Army stopped giving this training?
History repeats itself.
Chris Landa US Army 1971-1974
It is one thing to be told you must not
obey illegal orders, and quite another to stand up to a superior and
disobey.
One can also ask for written and signed
orders.
The usual recourse for soldiers in those
circumstances is to go to the Chaplain, or make a formal request to see the
Inspector General. That latter often gets attention. But it takes some
courage to do that.
Do not believe this is the last time this
sort of thing will happen.
And see below
Subject: What's the passage from that letter you so
often quote?
The one refering to the "blood of the Legions"; I
can't quite remember. Just as well, most of our Congressthings have neither
heard nor contemplated it in the first place.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/bminiter/?id=110005092
What's Needed in Iraq Soldiers are up in arms
over up-armoring.
BY BRENDAN MINITER Tuesday, May 18, 2004 12:01
a.m. EDT
"We spent the entire day running through a
gauntlet of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices). Four in all. These were big
rounds, not soda cans. They were mortar rounds and 152/155 mm artillery
rounds. Big explosions. I was inside the blast radius on the first one, but
no scratches. By the Grace of God we have no casualties. We put armored
doors on all of our vehicles, and the reinforced glass on the windshields
worked. I pulled golf ball size pieces of shrapnel out of the windshield
that were stuck in it, but did not penetrate."
--Sgt. Maj. Dale W. Miller, First Battalion,
24th Marines
The above dispatch was sent from the frontlines
to thank Marine acquisition officers for "up-armoring" their vehicles before
shipping them out for Iraq a few months ago. "Myself and several other
Marines are alive and grateful to you all for spending the money," Sgt. Maj.
Miller wrote in an e-mail in March.
As the Abu Ghraib scandal swirls around the
Pentagon, this is also a message many soldiers in Iraq hope isn't lost on
Donald Rumsfeld. There's a war on, and chief among the soldiers' concern is
whether they will get the gear they need to win. <snip>
For if we find that we have left our bones
to bleach in these desert sands in vain, beware the fury of the legions.
Subject: Syria, North Korea, and "fertilizer"
explosion paranoia?
from www.boortz.com, click "nealz nuze"
Monday, May 15, 2004
WHAT'S GOING ON WITH SYRIA
First ... let me ask you this question. If we
discovered that Syria was not only hiding some of Saddam's chemical and
biological weapons, but was producing some of its own, what would we do
about it? What should we do about it?
<snip?
Let's go back a few weeks. Remember that huge
explosion in Korea? At first we heard that thousands were killed. That
number was eventually reduced to hundreds. The explosion, however, was huge.
North Korean authorities are trying to float a story that it was fertilizer.
Are you buying that? Now we learn that there were technicians from Syria on
that train .. and that these technicians were accompanying some unidentified
equipment. The damage from the explosion was greatest in that portion of the
train carrying the equipment from Syria. Reports in Japanese newspapers say
that North Korean military personnel arrived soon after the explosion and
removed materials, but only from the Syrian portion of the train. The
soldiers doing this work were wearing protective suits.
<snip>
Jim Woosley
====
" It was time U.S. occupying troops
left Iraq, said Chalabi, who lost U.S. funding for his political party
earlier this week. "
Progress.
Gregory Cochran
Ouch.
=============================
I didn't know there were quite so many groups. Seems
incomplete.
It also seems to me that the gung-ho imperialists
includes the Telegraph people. That is, the people really urging
capital-E-Empire (as opposed to controlling the oil, or spreading democracy
or just assisting the Israelis) are all British or Canadian and long for
jodphurs and afternoon tea service from turbined servants under the tropical
sun. La Belle Epoche II 1.0. (If they can't get it from the Queen, then the
Americans will just have to do. Still in beta, evidently.)
ash ['Not exactly the American ideal there.']
http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/001311.html
Where are conservatives on Iraq?
Reihan Salam has a great TNR Online piece that breaks
down where the various tribes of conservatives fall on Iraq -- or, as Salam
puts it, a "Guide to the Right on Iraq Gone Wrong." The relevant categories
(NOTE: I've added some names that Salam omits where I think they apply -- my
additions are in italics):
1) "The Neo-Paleos: We Shoulda Known": Burkean
conservatives who never bought the democracy-building line, but did by the
"Iraq has WMD" line (George F. Will, Tucker Carlson, Fareed Zakaria);
2) "The Neo-Neocons: Operation Chalabihorse":
True-blue believers convinced that Colin Powell is the devil and Ahmed
Chalabi is the answer to all of the troubles in Iraq (Michael Ledeen,
Richard Perle, Michael Rubin, David Frum, Laurie Mylroie).
3) "The Standard Neocons: Dude, Where's My Neo-Reaganite
Foreign Policy?" Cared more about democracy-building than WMD but are
flummoxed by the Bush/Rumsfeld insistence on insufficient troop strength,
suspecting that this is due to an aversion to casualties that impairs the
mission (William Kristol, Robert Kagan, David Brooks, Andrew Sullivan, and
yes, Daniel Drezner).
4) "The Neo-Imperialist: Bush Gets the Boot from
Boot": Gung-ho empire-builders that share the Standard Neocons' discontent
with the Bush administration -- but unlike them, believe that constructive
engagement with the Bush administration is pointless, and have gone full
frontal with their criticism (Max Boot, Niall Ferguson)
For the immediate future, I'm interested in two
things:
A) Will the latter two groups merge? What separates
them is not the ends but the means of advancing those ends -- gentle vs.
not-so-gentle criticism. I've been feeling myself shift slowly over this
calendar year, and I strongly suspect others are as well (Matthew Yglesias
shares my suspicions).
B) Who will be the last neo-neocon standing? To be
fair, I haven't read Frum and Perle's An End to Evil -- and I'm sure there
are a lot of ideas in there that the current situation in Iraq does not
undercut. However, a key tenet of this group has been the inherent goodness
of Ahmed Chalabi, and the U.S. decision to raid his headquarters today (plus
the decision earlier this week to terminate his funding) may just signal a
souring of the DoD-INC relationship [UPDATE: Chalabi's home was also
raided]. If that doesn't do it, this anecdote from Salon's Andrew Cockburn
just might:
Why did the Bush administration turn against its
former favorite Iraqi? Almost certainly because it realized that Chalabi,
maddened by the realization that he was being excluded from the post-June 30
hand-over arrangements, was putting together a sectarian Shiite faction to
destabilize and destroy the new Iraqi government. "This all started since
[U.N. envoy Lakhdar] Brahimi announced that Chalabi would be kept out of the
new arrangement," says an Iraqi political observer who is not only long
familiar with Chalabi himself but also in close touch with key actors,
including U.S. officials at the CPA and Iraqi politicians....
U.S. disenchantment with Chalabi has been growing
since it dawned on the White House and the Pentagon that everything he had
told them about Iraq -- from Saddam Hussein's fiendish weapons arsenal to
the crowds who would toss flowers at the invaders to Chalabi's own
popularity in Iraq -- had been completely false. Some months ago King
Abdullah of Jordan was surprised to be informed by President Bush that the
king could "piss on Chalabi." (emphasis added)
Who will the neo-neos go with -- Bush or Chalabi? My
money is on Chalabi.
UPDATE: Josh Marshall has further thoughts on Chalabi
and the neo-neocons. One point he makes confirms my theory about which way
the neo-neos go: "I don't doubt that some of Chalabi's Washington supporters
have encouraged him to take a more oppositional stand toward the occupation
authorities to bolster his own popularity."
ANOTHER UPDATE: Just got one of Laurie Mylroie's mass
e-mails. She condemns "today's outrageous, and totally uncalled for, raid on
Ahmed Chalabi's compound" and asks, "Just what is the U.S. doing in Iraq?"
Yeah, she's stickin' with Chalabi. posted by Dan on
05.20.04 at 12:56 PM
[...]
There are a few who didn't buy the WMD claims as well
as "democratization":
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/mail296.html#Cochran
I used to think they were nuts, but their stock has
definitely gone way up with me. posted by: tc on 05.20.04 at 01:59 PM [permalink]
Ash
Call me Paleo-Paleo, I guess. I have been
a Burkean Conservative for most of my life, once I got over my youthful
fling with Communism. Somehow lukewarm social engineering never appealed to
me.
I neither bought nor cared about the WMD
issue. Saddam clearly once had such weapons; he clearly was willing to use
them; and if he were in control of a national state he was only months from
having them again even if all had been destroyed. That is a non-issue.
If he was a danger to the US he should
have been removed; and I was willing reluctantly to rally around the
flag once the President decided to send in the troops. My differences were
first that I thought we had a better used for the resources this cost, and
that we would be safe spending the money on the Fleet, a Space Navy, and
energy independence; and second that if we were going in, it ought to be to
topple the madman and get out again.
You will recall I asked many times here
just what would we do with Iraq once we had it.
Well, we will find out.
So Our Man In Iraq, the Frum Favorite,
turns out to be a con man with ties Iran. Imagine my astonishment.
Subject: Not "nearly alone"
Hello, Jerry,
You wrote:
"But I at least am persuaded that it is not a correct
view, and that America can be defended in America, by forces that believe
that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
But I seem to be nearly alone in that belief."
You are not even close to being nearly alone in your
belief. I have been surprised and encouraged that more and more people seem
to be coming back to "that belief".
It is as if Americans went into a coast-to-coast
star-spangled, blurry-eyed, daze: the slogan last April was "everyone wants
to take Baghdad; real men want to take Tehran!" (from "New Yorker" article
describing the neo-con delirium around Washington). We're coming out of the
daze...vision is clearing...people are beginning to ask the questions they
should have asked in 2002, like:
- why do we need to do this?
- how will we know when we've done it?
I don't have much hope for the professional
politicians...absolutely none for those whose loyalty is to their party
first, and to the country second (or third, or only by accident...). But
others, normal people, seem to be moving, shifting, waking up, becoming
alert.
*
I'm encouraged that people are waking up, but
discouraged at the depth of the hole we are in over in Iraq, a place to
which one of my kids will be deployed. I've been reading Dante
lately...finished the Inferno, and now most of the way up the Purgatorio.
Sometimes, I think we need a Beatrice and Grace, right now, because human
reason does not seem able to save us.
Yes, this is ending in a grim way, but, at least on
views of our government and America, we need not be without hope.
Regards,
John Welch
I can hope you are right.
n
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