Matrix 3 Preview. Well so I'm told. I always did wonder how they did those those special effects.

Norman Geras' blog gets off to a flying start with his views on the war in Iraq, which completely demolish the arguments for non-intervention.

"The liberation of Iraq. Something similar has now been repeated over the war in Iraq. I could just about have 'got inside' the view - though it wasn't my view - that the war to remove Saddam Hussein's regime should not be supported. Neither Washington nor Baghdad - maybe. But opposition to the war - the marching, the petition-signing, the oh-so-knowing derision of George Bush and so forth - meant one thing very clearly. Had this campaign succeeded in its goal and actually prevented the war it was opposed to, the life of the Baathist regime would have been prolonged, with all that that entailed: years more (how many years more?) of the rape rooms, the torture chambers, the children's jails, and the mass graves recently uncovered."

He also berates the left over it's response to September the 11th:

"On September 11 2001 there was, in New York, a massacre of innocents. There's no other acceptable way of putting this: some 3000 people (and, as anyone can figure, it could have been many more) struck down by an act of mass murder without any possible justification, an act of gross moral criminality. What was the left's response? In fact, this goes well beyond the left if what is meant by that is people and organizations of socialist persuasion. It included a wide sector of liberal opinion as well. Still, I shall just speak here, for short, of the left. The response on the part of much of it was excuse and apologia.

"At best you might get some lip service paid to the events of September 11 having been, well, you know, unfortunate - the preliminary 'yes' before the soon-to-follow 'but' (or, as Christopher Hitchens has called it, 'throat-clearing'). And then you'd get all the stuff about root causes, deep grievances, the role of US foreign policy in creating these; and a subtext, or indeed text, whose meaning was America's comeuppance. This was not a discourse worthy of a democratically-committed or principled left, and the would-be defence of it by its proponents, that they were merely trying to explain and not to excuse what happened, was itself a pathetic excuse. If any of the root-cause and grievance themes truly had been able to account for what happened on September 11, you'd have a hard time understanding why, say, the Chileans after that earlier September 11 (I mean of 1973), or other movements fighting against oppression and injustice, have not resorted to the random mass murder of civilians."

Read the whole thing.

Biased BBC have a good report on what's going well in Iraq.

Carl Bernstein on why the media is missing the big picture:

"I think we have created an atmosphere that has a kind of 'gotcha' environment. A new reporter is assigned to go to the county fair, and instead of looking at the cows and the exhibits, he is looking at the cookie jar and somebody with their hand in it. What happens is you lose context, so that if you're covering the city hall, what you're really looking for most of the time is to catch the mayor saying something that's a little untrue and turn it into a big story - when, in fact, the sewer system of the whole city is falling apart and people can't get their water and they're getting poisoned. You're missing the news. And I think that's a big problem."

I find the media's obsession with individual pieces of intelligence in Iraq bemusing, when evidence for acting in Iraq has so clearly been found.

Walter Moseley joins the long line of people willing to claim September 11th for their own purposes in his piece entitled Ignorance is not bliss


"Afghanistan was the poorest nation in the world before the World Trade Centre attack. And while Aids decimates Africa, we only have to look at our recent history to see the carnage that we've created on a worldwide scale: the bombing of Cambodia and the senseless, endless war on the Vietnamese people; the slaughtering of thousands in Guatemala, and the invasion of Panama. We have embargoes against the leaders of nations who never suffer want, leaving only the innocent populations to endure our punishments. Our freedom and comfort comes at a great cost for our own citizens and peoples around the world. Middle-class white America and its aspirants have been blissfully ignorant of this situation.

But black Americans are not so lucky."

He argues that the "The race riots of the 1960s civil rights struggle were motivated by the same alienation that fuelled the September 11 attacks" So Osama was doing his bit for race relations was he?