Month: April 2003

Andrea opines that Side-Show Mohammed, Minister of Information in Iraq, is “showing all the signs of sleep-deprivation-induced dementia.”

“They are lying every day. They are lying always, and mainly they are lying to their public opinion,” al-Sahaf said. “What they say about a breakthrough is completely an illusion. They are sending their warplanes to fly very low in order to have vibrations on these sacred places.
“And I think this will agitate, this will be scorned by all Shiites all over the world because those tombs are the most sacred to Shiites all over the world, and they are trying to crack the buildings by flying low over them.”
[…] The minister also said that coalition forces were throwing booby traps in the form of pens and pencils into Iraqi villages and townships.
“The authority of the civil defense … issued a warning to the civilian population not to pick up any of those pencils because they are booby traps,” he said, adding that the British and American forces were “immoral mercenaries” and “war criminals” for such behavior.
“I am not talking about the American people and the British people,” he said. “I am talking about those mercenaries. … They have started throwing those pencils, but they are not pencils, they are booby traps to kill the children.”

I hope Mr. Al-Sahaf survives the war. He can mellow out a bit, become Baghdad’s Emperor Information Minister Norton over the remaining years of his life. “Ah, see all the happy, healthy, well-fed children? The smiling, prosperous people? Surely Saddam loves his faithful Iraqis here in this year 2010. Would you happen to have any brandy? I’m good for it; I have Saddam’s own credit chit here.”

It’s nice to have dreams.

We’ve all heard (and complained) about the US military code name for the Iraq War: Operation Iraqi Freedom.

So what’s the British code name?

Continue reading “Today’s War Trivia”

I’m not blogging about chemical weapons finds, drums of this, warheads of that. Wait for a week. The lab results will be back. The finds will be confirmed, one way or another. Don’t let the news reporters’ bid for Pulitzers, and accompanying throwing of caution to the wind when conjuring headlines, make you jump to the same assumptions they are.

I’m not blogging about what a blithering dolt Robert Fisk is. He does a good enough job of it himself.

I’m not blogging about the increasing number of towns that, freed from the Fedayeen Saddam, seem to be welcoming Coalition forces with smiles and cheers. Some people are reading the stories and believing them. Some are reading them and disbelieving, or ascribing ulterior motives. Still others are reading the stories and think they don’t make any difference.

I’m not blogging about the torture chambers, the warehouses full of meticulously recorded executions. See above.

I’m not blogging about dubious body counts. Folks will believe what they will.

Is Saddam alive? Dead? Fled? Nobody knows. Yet.

Well, I guess I did blog about that earlier. But there’s nothing new worth blogging on it, save further alarums and excursions. Heck, folks still aren’t certain if they got Chemical Ali yet. But they will be, soon enough.

The informal motto of the military is, “Hurry up and wait.” That’s our situation on the side lines, too, even with embedded reporters and the Internet — or maybe especially so.

I’ve not run across it on any of the pages I visit, but it’s only a matter of time. And I did have someone e-mail it to me, so I might as well comment:

George W. Bush did not say:

We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of our great nation.

The quote is from Bob Woodward’s Bush at War, and sometimes this is mentioned (Woodward’s name giving it a certain cachet).

But Woodward never attributes this quote to Bush. Instead, he records it as being said by an unindentified CIA or Special Forces trooper at a 9/11 memorial they’ve built in the Afghan mountains during the first mission into Afghanistan.

Call it a pre-emptive correction.

Just ask the folks at the Bagdad Online Access Centre, who have seen hits on their site more than double to 15,000 a day over the last two weeks.

Except those folks think they’re visiting Baghdad-with-an-h, the capitol of Iraq. As opposed to Bagdad-without-an-h, a small town in Tasmania, population about 650.

(via Command Post)

As in a gift that makes you …

First off, not only would any trooper in Iraq positively shudder to be so portrayed, most of them, I suspect, would rather use something like this for target practice.

Second off, while it’s nice to think that As the brave members of the U.S. military head out to defend our freedom, it’s comforting to know that each one is sheltered in the loving hands of God, theologically speaking, God loves everyone on the battlefield, not just brave US soldiers. And this sort of blanket lionizing of every US soldier over there seems … well, a bit simplistic.

Worst of all, imagine if this ad got into the hands of al Jazeera? Our troops would be a lauging-stock …

Some folks aren’t too sanguine about turning administration of Iraq, post-war, to the UN.

‘If the UN has a say in Iraq, the first thing they’ll probably do is put Saddam back in power.’ Or, more likely, they’ll do the next worst thing: install as high commissioner a non-Iraqi Arab bureaucrat — say, Hans Blix sidekick Mohamed el-Baradei or Boutros-Boutros Ghali, currently underemployed at the ridiculous Francophonie. He’d effectively wind up as an Arab League minder, there to ensure that the Iraqis didn’t get any funny ideas (rule of law, representative government) which might unduly discombobulate the Egyptians, Saudis et al.
Even if you wound up with a benign — indeed, comic — authoritarian like Lord Ashdown of the Balkans, that’s not what Iraq needs. The UN doesn’t solve problems, it manages them in perpetuity: it turns them into Les Misérables; come back two decades later and it’s still running. Even without the corruption and drugs and child-sex rings, it’s not an impressive record. Any German contemplating Palestine’s ‘refugee’ ‘camps’, now celebrating their golden jubilee, ought to be grateful his country enjoyed the straightforward benefits of victors’ justice.

Ideally, and ultimately, it has to be up to the Iraqi people. But handing out ballots today seems a foolish gesture. In the interim, somebody needs to administer things. An American adminstration, whatever its nature, is more likely to be short — indeed, the danger is that it will be too short, and that political and econmic patience with rebuilding Iraq will wane, or we’ll undergo our own “regime change,” before the moment is right.

As to the “legitimacy” of an American provisional government in Iraq in the eyes of the UN — well, I don’t see how it can be any less legitimate a representative of the people than, say, the current regime, 100% vote or not. The UN is full of representatives of revolutionary governments, one-party governments, puppet governments, and coup leaders. The difference here eludes me.

(via NZPundit)

UPDATE: Here’s a quite bit more on how the UN and EU have handled Kosovo, as a comparison. Via Power Line.