May 20, 2004
Greetings From Vancouver
As some of you may have noticed, I've been blogging even less that normal lately.
And no, it isn't that I've become discouraged with the course of the war. You see, unlike certain Toronto Star columnists (and certain friends of mine, for that matter), I define the war that we're in more broadly. Iraq and Afghanistan are not seperate conflicts. They are simply seperate theatres of a broader war. This was not a war of our choosing. It was a war that was declared on us. It is a war that has come to us in Jerusalem, in Lower Manhattan, in D.C., in Bali, in Kenya, in Milan....
And it is a war we have taken to the enemy in Afghanistan and Iraq. The recent fighting in Iraq reminds us that this is not an easy fight. It is, however, a fight that we must win. We will be better off from staying the course in Iraq, and so will the people of Iraq, whose freedom we are fighting for there.
Anyway, if any of you thought that I might be discouraged, don't worry about me.
I have, however, been busy. I'm done business school, and I've started work. I'm out in Vancouver for a few months and I've been pretty busy. I'm not sure if I'll be blogging much over the next while, but if I have time I will be.
May 17, 2004
Hiatus
Blogging will be intermittent for the next week. Obvisously this is because I have realized that the war party is over. I am mired in quag. I have hawked my last chicken. I have finally been persuaded that the global decrease in terror in the past year demonstrates beyond refutation that Iraq has nothing to do with al Qaida, and that invasion has only spawned a thousand bin Ladens.
Also, I'm flying to Austin tomorrow. More when I get back.
Refuting Hersh
Seymour Hersh's latest New Yorker article, which I credited and which Adam Daifallah questioned at the National Post's 'Across the Board,' is being called an instance of 'journalistic malpractice' by the Pentagon and intelligence sources.
This is the most hysterical piece of journalist malpractice I have ever observed," said Lawrence DiRita, spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in response to Hersh's report.A senior intelligence official said the article contains "fantasy," adding, "I haven't found any truth in it."
The unit described simply does not exist, the intelligence official said.
You can't get much more categorical than that. Also, CNN's current anonymous intelligence officials are somewhat more credible - as far as it goes - than Hersh's former anonymous intelligence officials. As I said yesterday, I think Hersh's allegations are at least plausible. Whether they're credible or not remains, apparently, to be seen.
Deciding the Gag Law
Tomorrow's big news in Canada will be - one way or the other - the Supreme Court's decision on the so-called 'gag law,' a law which restricts the ability of anyone except political parties to engage in political discussion during general election campaigns. The Canadian Press has an article here and Gerry Nichols, vice-president of the National Citizens Coalition - the group behind the legal challenge - has a column on the issue in today's National Post. I've met Nichols, who's a very nice guy, and he's in the right on this one - as a series of lower courts have found. Here's hoping the Supreme Court will decide this case on its merits.
The Oyster Bar Plot
Why is British politics so much cooler than, well, anybody else's?
What WMD?
Hugh Hewitt notes that American troops in Iraq were subject to a nerve-gas attack when a sarin-tipped shell rigged into a makeshift bomb exploded next to a convoy this morning.
The San Fransico Chronicle suggests that " insurgents who rigged the artillery shell as a bomb didn't know it contained the nerve agent," which in turn suggests that the terrorists who rigged the bomb hadn't imported the device from abroad due to its 'WMD' nature. In other words, they just found it lying around.
This story seems to prove, then, that there are sarin-tipped shells lying around somewhere in Iraq. Yes, it's troubling that the Iraqi Survey Group hasn't found a big pile of them yet; still, this seems to undermine the anti-war/Al Franken/Michael Moore/Sean Penn "there never were WMD" argument.
Clarification (12:47 EDT): I suppose I should clarify my remarks, since a number of people seem to think I'm saying something I'm not. I don't mean to suggest that the discovery of this one shell demonstrates the validity of the 'WMD' argument for an invasion of Iraq. I meant simply to point out that the extreme critical view, which suggests that there were never any such weapons in Iraq, and which view seems to be ever more popular, is silly.
UPDATE (13:52 EDT): Here's the AP's story, which features David Kay calling it 'no big deal,' and speculating that the shell came not from an undeclared stockpile but was rather an outlier which was not destroyed after 1991.
Setting Parameters
Reuters has an interesting piece on Israeli security reaction to the Abu Ghraib affair. Coming from Reuters, I imagine it was intended to be a smear piece, but in fact it makes an interesting point:
Israel, perhaps unique in having public debate and legal guidelines on the use of physical coercion against suspects, does not use Abu Ghraib-type methods despite its close ties with the United States on security matters, [Israeli counter-terrorism experts] said.
Some, of course, will see the existence of a public debate over physical coercion as a terrible thing. In fact, such a debate is precisely what America needs in the wake of the Abu Ghraib pictures. I've been struggling to find a language with which to discuss the affair, but my bottom line is that there's a difference between abuse and legitmate physical coercion, which is a necessary component of a serious and robust counter-terrorism campaign and policy. Treating all physical coercion as abuse both obscures the instances of real abuse - which deserve to be investigated and addressed through punishment - and assumes as decided a discussion on the level of coercion we're prepared to accept. That is, I would suggest, a discussion that has not yet happened - but one which must happen if we are to successfully prosecute this war on terror.
The Wall Street Journal takes a step into this debate with their editorial this morning. Let's hope it's the first step of many towards a coherent policy on the coercion of prisoners.
More GMO Sanity
Less than a week after the EU green-lighted GM crops, a UN food agency has endorses genetically-modified foods:
A United Nations food agency is coming out in favor of biotech crops, saying genetically modified organisms have already helped small farmers financially, have had some environmental benefits and no ill effects on health.In a major report released Monday, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said the main problem with agricultural biotechnology to date is that it hasn't spread fast enough to the world's poor farmers and has focused on crops that are mostly of use to big commercial interests.
The FAO has, perhaps predictably, called for more government regulation of GM crops, ostensibly to ensure the production of crops more beneficial to the world's poor rather than to Big Agriculture. The problem with that approach is similar to the problem of forcing Big Pharma to produce only AIDS drugs - if biotech companies can't produce the agricultural equivalent of Viagra, they won't have the funds necessary to make the less lucrative but more 'socially beneficial' crops.
But details are details; the UN agency's endorsement is yet another instance of GM sanity, and yet another blow to the ludditism of the anti-GMO crowd.
Topless Towers
Oxblog's Josh Chafetz has some notes on being pedantic. Marlowe's line has been wonderfully tarnished for me by that scene in Shakespeare in Love, wherein a procession of aspiring actors audition for the Bard by reading his competitor's most famous line. I can't think of Helen of Troy (not that I often think about Helen of Troy) without hearing a thick working-class accent butchering: "Is vis de face what launched a fousand ships..."
May 16, 2004
Schadenfreude
Toronto Star writer Antonia Zerbisias revels in the apparent woes of Canadian warbloggers.
If the above makes no sense to you, then you have not been paying attention to the chest-thumping chaterati of the cybersphere, a post 9/11 class of might-is-right and right-is-might wordsmiths who rode the "War on terror" wave with their warmongering web logs.But now, with the news getting more dire, the quag more mired and the cost of war ever higher, the warbloggers find themselves on the wrong side of history. And so some of them are putting down their mice and putting up a white flag.
I'm not in a position to deny Ms Zerbisias her pleasure. For one thing, I've quite coincidentally entered a period of reduced blogging in the past three weeks as I've moved from the loose schedule of an undergraduate to the regimented (if temporary) daily demands of the private sector. For another, pro-war bloggers have not hesitated in the past to highlight - and enjoy - the troubles of the anti-war left.
There's a lot in the Zerbisias piece, however, that's illuminating, especially her suggestion that "the war party is over."
There is nothing to celebrate any more. (Not that there ever was.) President George W. Bush's folly is a bloody, costly, tragic, world-dividing disaster that has led to more acts of terrorism by more groups.
This, despite the fact that (as Elizabeth Nickson pointed out in yesterday's Post) the uprising by supporters of Moqtada al-Sadr - you remember Sadr, who was going to drive the Coalition out of Iraq - is being put down, its leaders sueing for peace. This, despite the fact that more and more sovereignty is being handed over to Iraqi authorities - as with the recent transition to a sovereign foreign ministry, an institution Canada did not enjoy until the 1930s - some sixty years after its independence.
In fact, Zerbisias' contention that the war party is sunk, demoralized and discredited, reveals the fascinating assumptions of the anti-war set. For in her smug article Zerbisias never once considers the consequences of a failure in Iraq. What if the supporters of the Iraq war really were "on the wrong side of history?" What comes next? Her celebratory and self-congratulatory tone can only suggest that she envisions a return to pre-Iraq normalcy; if, as she suggests, Iraq "has led to more acts of terrorism," the failure in Iraq will lead to fewer.
Those who've supported the war don't believe that to be the case, of course. Failure in Iraq was always a possibility, but the endeavor was necessary in any case. If the Iraqi project is successful - and, pace Ms Zerbisias, it still may be - we may look forward to a gradual trend towards freedom and democracy that will stop Islamism in its tracks. If it fails, as Zerbisias believes it has failed, we will simply have to confront that Islamism in a different theatre, and on a different scale. Zerbisias' assumption that the failure of the Iraqi war is to be celebrated illustrates the continued refusal of the anti-war set to recognize the reality of the wider conflict in which we're engaged; indeed, it illustrates their refusal even to recognize the existence of the enemy.
And, as an aside, Zerbisias' gleeful riposte to those warbloggers who've criticized her in the past also illustrates the reality of subjective journalism. In criticizing Zerbisias - and even in calling her names - bloggers have never claimed the mantle of objective truth. In engaging the warbloggers, in returning the ad hominems, in betraying her own assumptions about the war and its failure, Zerbisias demonstrates that news reporters are no different from web-loggers - servants to their biases, agents of their agendas, partisans in the great debate of our time.
Reference: Responses from Damian Penny, Kathy Shaidle and Charles Johnson.
What I Said Then
Here's something I wrote a week ago (click "continue reading"). If Hersh's allegations, as outlined below, are correct, the parameters of the discussion will shift. Nonetheless, I think my basic assertions remain solid:
1) There is a difference between abuse - the arbitrary, purposeless mistreatment of prisoners - and maltreatment - the application of harsh measures to appropriate individuals for the purpose of coercing cooperation or extracting information.
2) Maltreatment is a necessary component of interrogation in war. But it can cross the line into abuse. Sexual humiliation through the imitation of sodomy, or threats of violence through the exposure to barking dogs, does not constitute abuse. Actual, coerced sodomy, or the application of violence through dogs, does.
3) The identity of a prisoner matters. Hersh suggests that the Abu Ghraib pictures were used to blackmail prisoners who did not want the humiliating images released. This would make sense as a tactic only of the prisoners in the pictures were prisoners of interest. It would be irrational to humiliate men picked up in sweeps - the 'majority' of prisoners said by the Red Cross and others to be held by the Coalition. The unspoken assumption behind the Abu Ghraib outrage has been that the subject prisoners were innocents abused. Their treatment may still amount to abuse, but it's important to determine whether they were in fact innocents - or whether they were subject to humiliation precisely because of their role in anti-Coalition violence.
4) Abuse is not policy; maltreatment is. On this point I was off the mark - I considered Abu Ghraib to be isolated. Critics, of course, have said from the beginning that it is not. The lasting disagreement centers on the distinction I suggest between abuse and maltreatment. Critics who otherwise glory in nuance have suddenly become absolutists on this question. I don't think the distinction is vague - I think it's fundamental and obvious. I'm not confident, however, that many others will agree.
Unfit to Fight
Seymour Hersh has another article in the New Yorker which seems to be spawning two separate story lines in the Sunday papers. The first is that the Abu Ghraib pictures were part of a Pentagon-approved psychological warfare operation initially applied to high-value al Qaida operatives in Afghanistan but later extended to Iraqi insurgents. The story is best summarized by Lorne Gunter at the National Post's 'Across the Board' (inexplicably still no permalinks):
Hersh's main contention is that a super-secret intelligence gathering/prisoner interrogation operation was set up in the deepest depths of the Pentagon following the invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. Known as an SAP (for special-access program), perhaps 200 people knew of it or were involved in it. It used on-the-edge methods to extract intelligence from "high value" al Qaeda prisoners...Only the very best and most knowledgable American operatives are used in SAPs. SAPs have separate command-and-control headquarters, each one of them. And they are used only in the rarist of cases... With just 200 people in the know, and using their shadowy techniques only on the highest level terrorist prisoners -- suspects involved directly in the running of and planning for al Qaeda -- the quality of the program was ensured. Seasoned professionals in special forces and the spy/interrogation game, people who know instinctively how far is too far and don't have to be told, were the only ones working the SAP on al Qaeda. And it was working. Real bad guys were being equeezed for info that led to the death or capture of other real bad guys.
But when the US Army in Iraq found itself blind, intelligence-wise, about the insurgency there, Rumsfeld (if Hersh's sources are to be believed), authorized the expansion of the SAP to Abu Ghraib. Most importantly, the expansion included the Army Reserve military police officers who we have all seen abusing prisoners in those disgusting photos.
The second story-line proceeding out of the Hersh article is the idea that the US, or the CIA, or the Pentagon, is running a worldwide network of prisons which critics - and the media - have started to call a new Gulag archipelago.
There's a lot I want to say about this, but it can be summed up as follows: I think both suggestions are likely true. I think it's quite possible the Abu Ghraib prison photos were not in fact evidence of arbitrary and cruel 'entertainment' but rather part of a program designed to coerce Iraqi prisoners to divulge information. I think that has all sorts of ramifications which will amount to nothing because of the refusal of the media - and all those beating the Abu Ghraib drumb - to distinguish between arbitrary and programmatic maltreatment. I think the public will similarly fail to distinguish between actual torture and programmatic maltreatment. I think any 'backlash' against the media will be in support of the individual soldiers now being court-marshalled, and not in support of the ideas which motivate the program of maltreatment Hersh identifies. I think America's mission in Iraq will ultimately falter because of this inability to recognize the necessity of brutal behavior in war. I think that failure will demonstrate that we, as a society, remain fundamentally unprepared to win the war in which we're engaged.
Hell, we're not even prepared to fight.
May 14, 2004
Hi There
If you're here via Ghost of a Flea, you're probably looking for a link to the Nick Berg video. Before I tell you where I find it, let me abuse my position as author of this blog to say the following:
1) I really, really hope you aren't looking for this video because you get a rise out of snuff. I don't think that's the majority of you - I think that most of us were horrified by the brutality of the murder and frustrated by the complete and purposeful lack of mainstream-media coverage.
2) You might want to read this. Yes, it's self-congratulatory, but it's also quite right.
The URL you're looking for is in the comments to this post. Whether it's still good, I don't know - I still haven't brought myself to watch the video.
Riding Polls
Do any of the major Canadian polling firms do riding-specific party-preference or voting-intention polls during the election cycle? Do the parties? If so, does anybody know where I can find results?
And if not - why not?
Arrests in Talmud Torah Firebombing
Five Montreal residents have been arrested in connection with the firebombing of a Montreal Jewish day-school last month. From the Globe:
Four males between the ages of 18 and 20 and one woman in her 30s were arrested at 6:15 a.m. Montreal police would not specify where they were arrested or release any names.“We are not mentioning much at this point because it's not over,” said Montreal police media relations officer Ian Lafrenière, adding that there may be more arrests.
Notes the CBC:
In April, the library of the the St. Laurent area school was destroyed and an anti-semitic note was left on the door.The note said the fire was in retaliation for Israel's killing of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
CTV News adds:
Since that incident, gravestones at one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in Montreal were vandalized. Earlier in May, police were called in to investigate after swastikas were drawn on several stones, and the word Hitler was scrawled on another at the Back River Cemetery.
The incidents are not thought to be linked. The Toronto Star runs a wire report from the Canadian Press, which adds:
[Montreal police spokesman Ian] Lafreniere did not give the nationalities of those arrested, saying there was some information police did not want to reveal so as not to jeopardize the investigation into other possible suspects.He said any arraignment would not occur before Saturday and that possible charges include arson, mischief and conspiracy.
These arrests indicate clearly that Montreal police have been actively investigating the matter. Their efforts are to be applauded, and we can hope that the perpetrators of that shameful attack are brought to justice.
Corn Laws
The EU has approved in principle a type of genetically-modified corn, but EU laws - and I use the term loosely - will prevent it from being sold and distributed.
If we assume that obesity is a self-correcting problem, will the EU's irrational opposition to genetic modification lead, over time, to a less healthy population than in countries where crops are improved through bio-engineering?
May 13, 2004
Weapons in Space
Matt at Living in a Society has some worthwhile thoughts. I absolutely agree that the opponents of the weaponization of space have never adequately explained quite why space should not be weaponized. In any case, it's already something of a non-issue: as was pointed out to me the other day, certain weapons - namely long-range ballistic missiles - enter space in the course of their trajectory from launch-site to target. Why is it ok for them to transit through space, but it's not ok to place devices in space to block their transmission (as the more 'star-wars' versions of the plan would do)? Of course most opponents of BMD would say that ballistic missiles are not ok, but then we get into the debate over MAD and, beyond that, to Kellog-Briand and so on.
Or something.
Nick Berg Thread
Andrew Sullivan notes that blog traffic was way up yesterday, and he suggests that it was the result of folks looking for information about Nick Berg. (Instapundit also noticed the bump. Sullivan and Instapundit both suggest that this demonstrates the increased interest the American public seems to have about the story relative to the Abu Ghraib scandal.
I have a few scattered thoughts about the issue, but nothing coherent. My interest was piqued by my father's suggestion that there's more to Berg's story than we've heard, and it's certainly true that we haven't heard everything - for instance, we don't yet know (as far as I know, though I haven't had time to look) why he was in custody, and why he was interviewed by the FBI. I'm posting this to offer an open comment thread - let me know what you think, either of the execution itself - I hope we can all agree on its brutality - or on the wider issue of Berg's stay in Iraq and the days leading up to his abduction.
What He Said
I noticed something similar watching the news last night.
