Ruminatrix
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Tuesday, Apr 08, 2003
Military tribunals are ready to roll for Guantanamo's 640 Afghan POWs, reports the NYT. There is a catch, of course:
Despite the fact that there will be a system in place, many officials said that there might not be an actual proceeding anytime soon. The Pentagon hopes that the first handful of prisoners charged will be persuaded to accept plea bargains in which they could plead guilty to lesser charges in exchange for providing new information about Al Qaeda.Gooood morning. I'm Captain X, your attorney, and I advise you to sign this......
In essence, the first tribunal is supposed to serve as a continuation of the plan to get as much information as possible out of the detainees, with the actual prosecution of any crimes as a secondary goal.
"The priority has always been to gather intelligence from these people," one official said. Another official cautioned, however, that there was no guarantee that the defendants would go along with this plan. In that event, the military would be obliged to go ahead with a proceeding.
Monday, Apr 07, 2003
Too busy for long entry today...news of a possible Iraqi sarin stash will wait. So just a quote from a GI in Baghdad outside one of Saddam's palaces: "This is a nice place --they should turn it into a Six Flags." (This has been removed from Yahoo news, along with reports of US soldiers crapping in Saddam's bathroom and looting "souvenirs" therefrom).
Want a Russian equivalent to Israel's Debka, try www.iraqwar.ru, for a Russian perspective on the Iraq war. Link via Guardian UK and the newly-married Agonist.
Meanwhile another French-American dispute is growing on the horizon: and it's all about whose is bigger...from today's NYT (login/password: fmhreader). Kowabunga!
There's a summary of an odd LA Times poll over here. I haven't seen the questions they asked, but then again those answers (Osama/Saddam/Yo Mama) are what you get in wartime when people's heads are full of propaganda. (Lovely whitehouse.org stuff, graphics- heavy)
My technique is more -- dare I say it -- scientific: I dial a number at random, sing a couple of verses of Randy Newman's Political Science.
No one likes us-I don't know why
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try
But all around, even our old friends put us down
Let's drop the big one and see what happens
We give them money-but are they grateful?
No, they're spiteful and they're hateful
They don't respect us-so let's surprise them
We'll drop the big one and pulverize them...
And listen carefully to the response received...
Speaking of pulverizing things, the latest ordnance now ready for (re-)use over Baghdad is the concrete bomb. These improved wonder-weapons (no explosives, just fins and steering vanes) are "precision bombs that are considered effective against fixed targets while minimizing risk to nearby civilian structures," says Reuters. In an old England idiom, That's about as subtle as a flying mallet.
But don't worry about the above-mentioned poll results: they don't count any more. This President is on the record as being not about to set policy based upon a focus group. Therefore he should logically ignore this poll's results. One can go further and say the President must ignore them on firm moral principle, I think -- unless God were to tell him otherwise. But I'm asking God not to -- just in case He is looking at the numbers.
Now I have some polling work to do.
It's not about OPEC oil, is it? A Kurdish spokesman (PUK and KPD) says:
"We are going to 'demonopolise' the oil," Dara Attar, an Iraqi Kurd oil consultant told AFP after two days of meetings in London.In other words -- cheap oil until the end of the world....
"The government is going to be a federal state, therefore the economy will be different. It's going to be done in a way to serve the federal state," said Attar, one of a 15-strong body charged by the US State Department with planning Iraq post-war oil policy.
Iraq will remain a member of the Organisation of Petrolium Exporting Countries, but will not limit its production to stabilize the international oil market if it can produce more -- once its installations have been repaired.
There is some pretty sensible analysis of Iraqi Shi'a wait-and-see politics over at Daily Kos. "While they clearly need Saddam gone from power, they certainly have no intention to exchange a Sunni dictatorship for an American viceroy." Or if you prefer, Please declare victory over the Ba'athists now, so the real contest can begin.
A Puzzle
Evidence: They're long dead, probably from around 1991.
Evidence: Many have gunshot wounds to the head.
Evidence "found at the scene suggests many of the deaths occurred on the premises." So who are they?
i) Iran says they're Iranians (can we tell from the uniforms perhaps, dogtags?)
ii) Human Rights Watch thinks they're Iraqi opponents of Saddam.
iii) Baghdad claims they're corpses of Iraqi troops killed over in Iran and shipped back home for burial.
I didn't realize it yesterday how much it echoes Katyn. Katyn. No-one wanted to believe the Nazis, but they were indeed being truthful. And it took the Russians fifty-odd years to admit it. On a point of personal interest: one of my grandfathers narrowly escaped those quicklime pits in the pine forests near Smolensk. He wound up in a Roumanian internment camp instead and later escaped westwards. But that's another story.
Saturday, Apr 05, 2003
Copy-cat! Doesn't this statement from Pyongyang sound sort-of familiar?
And why did the Secretary of State feel it was necessary to reassure Al-Hayat:
"Nobody in the American administration (has) talked about invading Iran or Syria," Powell said. "It seems that there is a constant desire by everybody to accuse us of invasion operations. That didn't, and won't, take place."The fact that Mr Powell felt a need to clarify this point (if indeed "didn't and won't" does the job adequately) speaks volumes about the state of of the administration's current diplomatic efforts. With all the Syria-bashing that's gone on in the past week -- chronicled in the PST thread -- you would think the US 4th Division's tanks are about to roll up up over the Golan Heights.
Last, could the unearthing of more mass graves convince Iraqi, Arab, (and world?) opinion of the unsavoriness of the Ba'ath regime? Perhaps more so than the so-far unimpressive bio-chem site digs. But then forensic investigations often require neutral experts to convince skeptics.
Baghdad surrounded? Not quite -- there are no US troops immediately to the north of the city yet. But it's a matter of time and US troops are staging rolling patrol reconnaissance raids within the city limits, primarily for psychological effect. Reuters cites a UK official: "US Tanks have gone into Baghdad to make it clear to the people that whatever the regime may say, coalition forces are advancing and there is a determination to see the job through". You can anticipate major media madness when the first US tanks become visible to the TV news cameras in downtown Baghdad.
Because it's largely a war of images, words -- "perceptions" -- now. There's a slipperiness to language in this Looking-Glass world.
i) Baghdad Radio claims some allied paratroops landed at the airport and are surrounded: that's propaganda, of course.
ii) US Central Command says it doesn't matter whether Saddam is dead or alive, or ever found: wishful thinking, at best.
iii) US troops claim to move "freely" in Baghdad: exaggeration, by any common definition of freedom.
Hysteria creeps into each side's claims: desperation on one side, giddy anticipation of victory on the other.
Both surrenders and desertions continue in and around Baghad. But Ba'athist militia, cadres and SRG bodyguards and secret police guys and cousins from Tikrit, of whom there are very many, probably don't have the option to just melt away into the civilian population. Never mind would-be "martyrs."
Lagniappe: Why a Lebanese cleric may be most important to the actions of Iraq's Shiite population and those of the mysterious Badr Brigade.
Tony hasn't given his word as a English gentleman, precisely, but:
"The one thing that I want to make absolutely clear is that at the end of this, Iraq is not going to be run by Americans or by Britons, or by any other outside power.That's pretty straightforward. So I would expect him to resign on principal if the US Government fails to take the same position.
"As soon as the process of transition is over, it's going to be run by Iraqi people and a broad, representative government, not a small clique, an elite around someone like Saddam."
Now Iraq's Information Ministry is promising "non-conventional action" in the defense of Baghdad -- sounds like fair warning of a "martyrdom" suicide attack to me.
Two topical items on disarmament, our casus belli: Some white powder has been found at one Iraqi site, Latifiya. "But a senior US official familiar with initial testing said the white powder found at Latifiya was believed to be explosives, AP reported."
Meanwhile, a report suggests the war could boost the sales of the defense industry -- in Russia. Yeah, makes sense. Remember how the Falklands war boosted interest in the Exocet?: "According to some analysts, there has already been a surge in interest for Russian weapons at the IDEX-2003 arms exhibition, the biggest in the Middle East, which took place on the eve of the war in Abu Dhabi from March 16 to 20."
Gotta go. I can quit any time, I know I can...
Day 15: I have work to do, work I enjoy doing -- and yet, and yet...Could there be a syndrome, call it war fugue, whose sufferers (whatever their position on the conflict) find urgent reasons not to do what they have to. Their pretext for procrastination is that something important (or catastrophic, or ominous, or incomprehensibly weird) may be happening right now -- over there. Somewhere else. Anywhere else. Concentration on tasks at hand becomes inordinately difficult, like swimming against the current. Time passes --the urge to turn on (TV, radio, browser) is irresistible -- yeah, I know...addiction talk
Are most of the afflicted males? Perhaps so, it wouldn't surprise me..but I'm not really talking about that easily parodied boys-with-toys stuff. WF is more akin to generalized anxiety: like those Gulf War I veterans who feel compelled to "watch[ing] to make sure no mistakes are made," to imagine exercizing control.
A key symptom: searching for confirmation of developments that don't really matter. I mean who cares that a US military spokesman has renamed Saddam International Airport "Baghdad International"? Give that man a raise! It isn't news, it's transparent, dumb p.r. talk. I mean, rename the friggin' thing when it's open for business, and you feel safe that planes landing there won't be shot at with missiles or rocket-propelled grenades.
To some extent war fugue is closer to tom's war rant, although this log doesn't have any primary topic. And I feel more like a sleepwalker (or a zombie, perhaps) than someone stuck in a another's nightmare. The essential point of commonality is that the war impedes one from living life fully in the here and now -- it colonizes the mind.
Look, I don't think one can make this war just go away by refusing to discuss it -- and if there's no public pressure to let Iraqis run post-war Iraq, there sure as hell won't be any arising spontaneously in Washington.
We can't levitate the Pentagon and hyperbole -- say, finding no difference between the warped US polity and totalitarianism -- is just as escapist, in my view. And we here, even in ever-anxious NYC, are surely much better off than those who are directly in the line of fire.
But a modus vivendi is necessary. And I'm looking for it. So I can get some things done. Important things. I think.
If economic interests (trade) come into conflict with geo-political goals (subjugating uppity regimes), what happens? Watch the dollar for signs of overseas investors seeking non-dollar denominated assets.
For many economists, the dollar's jagged yearlong slide is just a side effect of an inevitable contraction in the nation's huge trade deficit. But current economic and political conditions are making the process more perilous than it might otherwise have been.
Recently, the dollar's exchange rates have bounced up and down with news from the Iraq war: late yesterday, on news of American military progress toward Baghdad, it reached 118.98 yen, up 0.76 percent from Tuesday. But the dollar's overall trend in the last year has been distinctly downward. Weighted by the volumes of trade with other countries and adjusted for inflation, an average of the rates dropped 4.4 percent from March 2002 to last month.
A steeper decline could be on the way, though. The run-up to the war in Iraq hurt the American economy, and fears of similar conflicts to follow could deter foreigners from holding dollar-denominated securities. With less demand for the securities, there would be less need for dollars."
"Perceptions are very important," said Kermit L. Schoenholtz, chief economist of Salomon Smith Barney. "If people believe that the events we've seen in Iraq are not one-off events, it will affect their investments."
An Iraqi grand ayatollah in Najaf urges Shiites "not to resist" the invasion. Why not before? A pundit interviewed on NPR reckons that -- aside from fear of a repeat of the 1991 massacres -- Shi'ites feared retaliation or just being accused of being pro-US fifth columnists by Sunnis (although Shiites are the majority in Iraq). Haven't seen this online yet.
Are US victories south of Baghdad partly due to NSA intercepts?
The decision to strike on Tuesday may have been influenced by a spy tip. The National Security Agency, the government's eavesdropping and code-breaking organization, intercepted communications between Baghdad and the Iraqi Republican Guard divisions south of the capital ordering the divisions to pull back from their forward positions and move closer to the capital, according to American intelligence officials.So intelligence plus total air superiority overrode the need for the 4th Division's M1 tanks.
...US forces were able to move and close in on the Iraqi divisions before they pulled back, catching them away from defensive positions [emphasis mine] closer to Baghdad. "We were able to get inside their decision," an official familiar with the intelligence said.
The German government is writing off Saddam: could the French be next? Meanwhile Downing Street has repeatedly insisted that Iraqis must be in charge in post-war Iraq (not a popular position in Washington). Moreover, according to UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, the UK won't be party to any US adventures against either Syria or Iran.