Tag: iraq

Taibbi on the Friedman syndrome, again

No one rips into Thomas L. (don’t forget the ‘L’!) Friedman than Matt Taibbi:

Tom Friedman is the oracle of this crowd, the tormented fat kid with a wedgie who got smart in his high school years and figured out that all he had to do to be successful was shamelessly and relentlessly flatter his Greatest-Generation parents, stroke their outdated prejudices, sell them on the idea that the entire aim of the modernization process is the spreading of their amazing legacy through the use of space-age technology.

So he goes into America’s sleepy suburbs with his Seventies porn-star mustache and he titillates the book clubs full of bored fifty- and sixtysomething housewives with tales of how the Internet is going to turn Afghanistan into Iowa. The suburban guys he ropes in with a half-baked international policy analysis — what’s “going on” on “the Street,” as Friedman usually puts it — that he cleverly makes sound like the world’s sexiest collection of stock tips: “So I was playing golf with the Saudi energy minister last week, and he told me…”

This is just a modern take on the same old bullshit rap that traveling salesmen all over America have been laying on wide-eyed yokels at 99 Steak Houses and Howard Johnsons hotel bars for decades: So I was having lunch with Jack Welch at the Four Seasons last week when I heard about this amazing opportunity…. And these middle-manager types who live in Midwestern cubicles or in the bowels of some federal bureaucracy in Maryland eat it up: They buy every one of Friedman’s books, treat his every word like gospel and before you know it they’re all talking about Israeli politics and “the situation” in Yemen or Turkey or wherever like they’re experts.

And so this is how we got where we are. You get a whole nation full of people who spend 99 percent of their free time worrying about their lawns or their short iron game, you convince them that they know something about something they actually know nothing about, and next thing you know, they’re blundering into a 1,000-year blood feud between rival Islamic groups, shooting things left and right in a panic, and thinking that they can make it all right and correct each successive fuckup by “keeping our noses to the grindstone” and “making lemons out of lemonade.”

The article is actually about Saddam Hussein’s execution, described as a “fuckup” because of its PR effect on Iraq and the region. I think all these “oh-no-they-killed-Saddam-during-Eid” whines aren’t terribly important to most people in the region (although they may become important to some Iraqi Sunnis), but perhaps I’m wrong. A very funny article nonetheless.

(And don’t forget his great first column on Friedman.)

Letter from a Marine in Iraq

IraqSlogger has linked to a letter from a US Marine stationed in Iraq — some excerpts:

Most Surreal Moment – Watching Marines arrive at my detention facility and unload a truck load of flex-cuffed midgets. 26 to be exact. We had put the word out earlier in the day to the Marines in Fallujah that we were looking for Bad Guy X, who was described as a midget. Little did I know that Fallujah was home to a small community of midgets, who banded together for support since they were considered as social outcasts. The Marines were anxious to get back to the midget colony to bring in the rest of the midget suspects, but I called off the search, figuring Bad Guy X was long gone on his short legs after seeing his companions rounded up by the giant infidels.

Coolest Insurgent Act – Stealing almost $7 million from the main bank in Ramadi in broad daylight, then, upon exiting, waving to the Marines in the combat outpost right next to the bank, who had no clue of what was going on. The Marines waved back. Too cool.

Best Chuck Norris Moment – 13 May. Bad Guys arrived at the government center in a small town to kidnap the mayor, since they have a problem with any form of government that does not include regular beheadings and women wearing burqahs. There were seven of them. As they brought the mayor out to put him in a pick-up truck to take him off to be beheaded (on video, as usual), one of the Bad Guys put down his machine gun so that he could tie the mayor’s hands. The mayor took the opportunity to pick up the machine gun and drill five of the Bad Guys. The other two ran away. One of the dead Bad Guys was on our top twenty wanted list. Like they say, you can’t fight City Hall.

Most Profound Man in Iraq – an unidentified farmer in a fairly remote area who, after being asked by Reconnaissance Marines if he had seen any foreign fighters in the area replied “Yes, you.”

Tariq Ali on Saddam Hussein

This is a pretty weak piece (and has some facts wrong, notably on the silence of European leaders over the death penalty — they did make token protests) but I liked the title, “What’s Good for Saddam May Be Good for Mubarak or the Saudi Royals.” One lives in hope.

That Saddam was a tyrant is beyond dispute, but what is conveniently forgotten is that most of his crimes were committed when he was a staunch ally of those who now occupy the country. It was, as he admitted in one of his trial outbursts, the approval of Washington (and the poison gas supplied by West Germany) that gave him the confidence to douse Halabja with chemicals in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war. He deserved a proper trial and punishment in an independent Iraq. Not this. The double standards applied by the West never cease to astonish. Indonesia’s Suharto who presided over a mountain of corpses (At least a million to accept the lowest figure) was protected by Washington. He never annoyed them as much as Saddam.

And what of those who have created the mess in Iraq today? The torturers of Abu Ghraib; the pitiless butchers of Fallujah; the ethnic cleansers of Baghdad, the Kurdish prison boss who boasts that his model is Guantanamo. Will Bush and Blair ever be tried for war crimes? Doubtful. And Aznar, currently employed as a lecturer at Georgetown University in Washington, DC , where the language of instruction is English of which he doesn’t speak a word. His reward is a punishment for the students.

Saddam’s hanging might send a shiver through the collective, if artificial, spine of the Arab ruling elites. If Saddam can be hanged, so can Mubarak, or the Hashemite joker in Amman or the Saudi royals, as long as those who topple them are happy to play ball with Washington.

Incidentally, even if you don’t agree with Tariq Ali’s far-left politics (or the whiny tone of pieces like this one that don’t really tell us much we don’t already know), his book Clash of Fundamentalisms has some very interesting chapters on Pakistan and Indonesia, which were quite a revelation to a South Asia novice like me.

Saddam Hussein hanged

I really wish that they didn’t bother with that ridiculous trial and just killed him when they found him, as they did with Uday and Qusay Hussein. And so much for those people who predicted an endless appeal process.

I do regret, however, that more information was not obtained out of Saddam Hussein. About his life, his regime, his relationship with various countries. He would have been a fascinating source of information for regional historians. A real trial, at the International Criminal Court, the Hague or elsewhere, would have yielded real, valuable information.

The Telegraph has an interesting account of the hanging, although it’s not clear whether it’s first-hand or not. Angry Arab has an interesting, long, paragraph break free rumination on Saddam’s death, including some well placed criticism of al-Jazeera’s melancholy coverage (it was also poor coverage, they got the news late since they are not allowed to operate in Iraq officially). I really tire of seeing, as I did in the Nasserist Egyptian rag al-Arabi a few weeks ago, odes to Saddam Hussein “al-batal” (the hero.) It’s pathetic. I hear Abdel Bari Atwan did something similar a few days ago. What is it that Arab “nationalists” and some leftists have for other Arab countries’ dictators? Probably simply that over the years many of them took money from them.
I’m off to read Neil MacFarquhar’s long obit in the NYT…

That’s it for now (23)

December 19, 2006

So that was it. The plane took off, we did the familiar stomach churning spin and I looked out and watched the airport dip in and out of view, watched Camp Victory go by, idly pointed out too myself the various Saddam palaces that have become military headquarters and tried to remember which ones I’d been in.

It was a sick and tawdry story and I didn’t want to tell it anymore. I walked into a bad situation one year ago and actually watched it get worse, with the fairly certain belief that it will continue to do so.

One year ago, I left Cairo as the Arab League was holding a reconciliation conference to bring together Iraq’s disparate factions, to get them to talk to each other, to resolve the ever growing crisis.

Continue reading That’s it for now (23)

That’s it for now

So that was it. The plane took off, we did the familiar stomach churning spin and I looked out and watched the airport dip in and out of view, watched Camp Victory go by, idly pointed out too myself the various Saddam palaces that have become military headquarters and tried to remember which ones I’d been in.

It was a sick and tawdry story and I didn’t want to tell it anymore. I walked into a bad situation one year ago and actually watched it get worse, with the fairly certain belief that it will continue to do so.
Continue reading That’s it for now

The plot thickens…

Two must-reads if you’re following the al-Turki / Obaid story, from the WSJ and the Washington Times.

From the first:

Despite the continuing high oil prices, for once U.S. difficulties with Saudi Arabia do not appear to be dominated by immediate energy concerns. The main challenge appears to be to steer Riyadh between a near holy confrontation with Shia Iran and an equally destabilizing alliance with radical Sunnis. As an experienced and well-liked envoy, Prince Turki will be hard to replace.

One early danger is that the kingdom is close to acquiring nuclear weapons rather than continuing to rely on the longstanding security guarantees and understanding of successive administrations in Washington. Last month a Saudi official privately warned the kingdom would not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran. Pakistan (for bombs) and perhaps North Korea (for rockets) are potential allies. There are already credible reports of facilities in the desert that the Saudis claim are oil-related, although there are no pipelines in sight. Also, North Korean personnel have been spotted at military facilities.

And the second:

Of the 77,000 active members of the insurgency, the “jihadis” number about 17,000, of which some 5,000 are from North Africa, Sudan, Yemen, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
The remaining 60,000 are members of the former military or Saddam’s paramilitary Fedayeen forces. The officer corps of the insurgency has “command and control facilities in Syria as well as bases in strategic locations, where Sunnis constitute the majority of the urban population.”
Given the centuries-old tribal, familial and religious ties between Iraq’s Sunnis and Saudi Arabia, the assessment concludes that “Saudi Arabia has a special responsibility to ensure the continued welfare and security of Sunnis in Iraq.”
Its recommendations to the Saudi government included a comprehensive strategy that would include overt and covert components to deal with the worst-case scenario of full-blown civil war.
It also calls on the government to communicate the assessment to the United States; make it clear to Iran that if its covert activities did not stop the Saudi leadership would counter them; and extend an invitation to the highest Iraqi Shi’ite leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to reassure the Shi’ite community.

But it’s really worth reading both fully — there are some fun anecdotes in there too.

Bad cops, good cops

The word of the air strike came around mid-morning. I was actually the one to take the call from our stringer in Samarra. He said 32 people had been killed in an American air strike somewhere to the south according to local government official Amr something-or-other and he was heading towards the site, then the line went dead.

We tried to call him back later, because you can’t give a story based on the word of Amr something-or-other, certainly not an Americans-killed-dozens-of-people kind of story, but he’d either moved out of coverage area or the appalling Iraqi mobile networks were having another miserable day.

Then the press release came. “20 Al-Qaeda terrorists killed� in a midnight airstrike about 80 kilometers north of Baghdad. The wording in these things are key. As US ground forces approached a target site, they were suddenly fired upon, forcing them to return fire – killing two “terrorists�. “Coalition Forces continued to be threatened by enemy fire, causing forces to call in close air support.�

They really had no choice, it seems.

Eighteen more armed terrorists were killed, and a subsequent search revealed that two of them were women. “Al-Qaeda in Iraq has both men and women supporting and facilitating their operations, unfortunately,� said the statement.

So it was back to the telephones, talked to the official US military spokesman, “um, how did you know the women were terrorists?� Apparently in the post-air strike “battlefield assessment� done at 1 am in the rubble of the building revealed this fact.

“If there is a weapon with or near to the person or they are holding it, they are a terrorist,� he replied. Continue reading Bad cops, good cops