Rhinocrisy

A bit late, as usual, I finally got around to watching some of the “Winter Soldier” hearings, testimony by anti-war Iraq veterans about their war-time and post-war experiences. For the unlettered, the hearings were conducted by Iraq Veterans Against the War and mimic the eponymous hearings of yesteryear held by Vietnam veterans. As expected, the testimony is sometimes nauseating and sometimes heartbreaking, and quite often insightful. The sort of thing you should show to your mom. Check it out, if you have ten minutes to spare.

So, as you’re surely aware, the Iraqi government is apparently following up on my complaints about mercenaries. They’ve banned Blackwater, an American security company, from operating in Iraq, after they killed somewhere between 8 and 20 people. Blackwater insists that they were attacked and were merely returning fire. The US embassy more softly suggested that the Blackwater mercs were spooked by a car bomb and started shooting as a result (at what, I’m not sure). Iraqi officials, meanwhile, insist that none of these stories are true, and the Blackwater people simply opened fire on a crowd of unarmed civilians. The New York Times has the gory details on what sounds like Blackwater transgression followed by a firefight with confused Iraqi cops:

[Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh] said the convoy had initiated the shooting when a car did not heed a police officer and moved into an intersection.

�The traffic policeman was trying to open the road for them,� he said. �It was a crowded square. But one small car did not stop. It was moving very slowly. They shot against the couple and their child. They started shooting randomly.�

In video shot shortly after the episode, the child appeared to have burned to the mother�s body after the car caught fire, according to an official who saw it.

In interviews on Tuesday, six Iraqis who had been in the area at the time of the shooting, including a man who was wounded and an Iraqi Army soldier who helped rescue people, offered roughly similar versions.

The Iraqi soldier, who said he was standing at a checkpoint on the edge of the square, said he thought the convoy believed the small car was a suicide bomber and opened fire. According to the wounded man, recuperating in Yarmouk Hospital, the car with the family was driving on the wrong side of the road.

The convoy began throwing nonlethal sound bombs, several witnesses said, to keep people in the area away. That drew fire from Iraqi Army soldiers manning watchtowers that are part of an Iraqi Army base on the square. Iraqi police officers, witnesses said, also appeared to be shooting.

The Iraqi soldier, who did not give his name but said he was from a company of Iraqi commandos, said he saw another soldier trying to motion to the convoy to move on, but he was shot as well.

The Blackwater attitude, based on their statements, seems to be “we will kill pretty much whoever we have to in order to keep our clients safe.” Mercs are ostensibly subject to State Department rules of engagement, but there’s no oversight governing them, and per a CPA order from a few years back, they are completely immune from Iraqi law. Unsurprising that Iraqis have had enough of this kind of permitted lawlessness. The FUD from Blackwater that’s being passed around is that this is merely a shakedown for bribes from the Interior Ministry, but it seems readily clear, given the seriousness of the steps taken by the Iraqi government (including statements by al-Maliki) and the response on the part of the State Department, that the anger is genuine and something will have to change.

This nice Monitor article about Iraqi graffiti contains the following excellent joke:

Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon’s favored exile, enjoys little popular support in Iraq. But pro-Chalabi slogans crop up in certain neighborhoods. “Chalabi is the engineer of democracy” is a common inscription near his headquarters in the upscale neighborhood of Mansour.

But these graffiti sound bites can bite back. “Chalabi, symbol of sacrifice,” proclaims one Chalabi supporter - in Arabic, “Chalabi, Ramz al-Ikhlass.” Underneath it, some wit adds “Chalabi, Ramz al-Ikhtilass” - changing the meaning, with the addition of one syllable, to “Chalabi, symbol of embezzlement.”

It’s not often you get to see an old-school Washington reporter tear apart a political operative. Th’other night 60 Minutes did that, and even if they were stabbing the mammoth that was stuck in the tarpit, it was still something to see.

Tenet: There’s lots of technical data. And you put all this together and it’s not evidence in a court of law. Remember, when you write an estimate you — when you estimate you’re writing what you don’t know down. You might win a civil case you’re not going to win a criminal case. In terms of evidence.

60 Mins: We’re going to war. Tens of thousands of people are going to be killed. And you’re saying you have evidence to prove a civil case but not a criminal case?

Tenet: …This was very painful for us…

60: A conservative estimate of 100 to 500 tons [of chemical and biological agents]? I mean, how can you be so wrong?

Tenet: Scott, we’ve gone through this. It’s what we believed. It’s what we wrote.

60: Where do these numbers come from?

Tenet: From our National Intelligence Estimate. You don’t make this kind of stuff up.

60: Wait a minute. You did make this kind of stuff up.

Now Tenet will sell lots of books and will enjoy a long career in the reality-starved hallways of Georgetown University. The residents of Iraq, which didn’t have any chemical or biological weapons, will live with his mistake.

I agree with the woman who wrote to CNN today who said he should keep his medal of freedom and should be required to wear it every day.

Since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Liberation, the U.S. has spent about $410 billion on the war. The head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office has said it will cost at least $1 trillion. Iraq had 26 million people in it at the beginning. So far, the U.S. has spent about $15,800 per Iraqi. In a country where the per-capita income in 2003 was about $255. The U.S. has spent enough money there that it could have given everyone their per-capita income for each of the last four years and still had enough on hand to keep paying those people their salaries for another 57 years. Meanwhile Iraq would still have functioning industries, farms and infrastructure, which would give people there a much higher quality of life.

If the killing rates found in last year’s Johns Hopkins study have continued, about 730,000 Iraqis have now been killed, along with the UN’s new estimate of 2 million refugees. So to calculate it another way, the U.S. has spent about $562,000 per Iraqi killed. Which is pretty efficient compared to, say, California’s death penalty, which costs the state about $250 million per corpse, according to the LA Times (cited at Death Penalty Focus).

The next-generation U.S. bomber should be outfitted with bomb bays that release $20 bills. I am not joking.

A deep and disturbing essay by William Arkin on his Washington Post page. He points out that the President of the USA is motivated by good and sees the bulk of Americans, never mind people elsewhere, as being naive sops who must be ignored in the formulation of policy.

I think this gets to the heart of why demonstrations and letter-writing do no good — we can’t establish our basic credibility to get in the mental door with the people who matter, so the details of what we say becomes irrelevant. This is a president who thinks the Iraq Study Group was a bunch of idealistic flakes, while he is The Protector.

Arkin also recommends against using fear as a motivating principle for anti-Bush politics. He says that when liberals say Bush is making the threat of terrorism greater, they inadvertently play into his message and strengthen his grip. If he’s right, it’s too bad, because he is increasing the risk of terrorism, and he does make me feel physically threatened.

I’ve desperately been in need of a laugh, and this column by Jonathan Chait in the LA Times gave it to me! The article is titled “Bring Back Saddam Hussein”, with the tag: “Restoring the dictator to power may give Iraqis the jolt of authority they need. Have a better solution?”

I find this astoundingly funny. What can we do with it? Let’s try our best:

• “Euthanizing cancer patients may help reduce our bloated health-care budget. Have a better solution?”
• “Exterminating the Kulaks might allow me to get some sleep at night. Have a better solution?”
• “Keying my boss’s car may compensate in some small way for my years of useless busywork in this dead-end corporate job. Have a better solution?”
• “Punching that fucking rhinoceros in the jaw may make him stop charging our car. Have a better solution?”
• “Bubble gum might be just the thing to stop up the six-foot long tear in our silk hot-air balloon. Have a better solution?”
• “Stapling my car-keys directly to my wrist may prevent me from misplacing them so often. Have a better solution?”
• “Wearing these spandex shorts might get that girl to notice how big my johnson is. Have a better solution?”
• “Opening the pressurized door above the wing might allow some fresh air into this stuffy airplane cabin. Have a better solution?”

I could do this all day.

A beast is congealing from the clouds of acrid smoke in Iraq. It is the automaton horror-baby of American policy. Before March 19, 2003, no one was sure which badness would be conjured when the U.S. destroyed Iraq. Now, if the reporters on the ground are to be believed, we can see its shape: Religion-based genocide.

“There are already signs of what technically could be declared ethnic cleansing.” -CNN

“Iraq’s Sunni minority [is] “embroiled in a daily fight for survival,” fearful of “pogroms” by the Shiite majority.” -Washington Post, citing a Marine Corps memo

“These are electric drill-holes… Those accused of supporting this daily carnage are the same people America has put in power to shape the future of Iraq… A group of MPs showed up at one of Saddam’s prisons that should have been closed. But the police had taken it over unofficially. Inside they found several hundred men, all Sunnis. Almost none of them had ever been charged with any crime.” -U.K. Channel 4 (Link to the full video killed by Mr. Google.)

“M., a childhood friend, came to say goodbye before leaving the country. She walked into the house, complaining of the heat and the roads, her brother following closely behind. It took me to the end of the visit for the peculiarity of the situation to hit me. She was getting ready to leave before the sun set, and she picked up the beige headscarf folded neatly by her side. As she told me about one of her neighbors being shot, she opened up the scarf with a flourish, set it on her head like a pro, and pinned it snuggly under her chin with the precision of a seasoned hijab-wearer. All this without a mirror- like she had done it a hundred times over… Which would be fine, except that M. is Christian.” -Riverbend

“In some mixed neighborhoods, Shiites provided shelter to Sunnis targeted by Shiite militiamen, even though they risked being branded as collaborators. Others took care of Sunni children or bought groceries for Sunni neighbors who feared walking to the local market.

Outside their houses, the revenge attacks raged on. Gunmen wearing Iraqi army uniforms rounded up 21 men, including a 12-year-old boy, from two Shiite homes in the village of Balad Ruz, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad in Diyala province. On Saturday morning, their bodies were found, all handcuffed, blindfolded and shot to death, said Bahaa al-Sodani, a provincial police official. The attacks were in apparent retaliation for assaults by Shiite militiamen on Sunni mosques in Baghdad and Baqubah the previous day…

As Sammaraie watched from his front gate, two militiamen stopped a Sunni man who worked in an electrical shop. A local informant looked at him and nodded. One of the gunmen shot him dead and left. Two weeks ago, the electrician had complained loudly when Shiite gunmen attacked a nearby Sunni mosque.” -Washington Post

“Sheathed in powder-blue body bags are the remains of 72 men, many of them bearing signs of terrible torture–holes in the skull made by power drills, mutilated genitals, burns. They are the signature of the shadowy Shi’ite groups that have been kidnapping and murdering hundreds of men and boys, most of them Sunnis, in a campaign that has terrorized Baghdad’s neighborhoods.” -Time

(Later) I was about to update with this word of hope from Nir Rosen:

The only source of hope is that both the Shia militia members and the indigenous Sunni, who constitute the majority of the resistance, are fierce Iraqi nationalists. They have come together before to assert their Iraqi identity, and their leaders are sure to rein their forces in eventually. The best way for the Americans to support this constructive outcome is to withdraw quickly-even to begin the withdrawal now. It is encouragng that the Sunni resistance has shown an increased willingness to negotiate, and former Sunni and Shia rejectionist leaders, observing the government’s composition and the drafting of the new constitution and feeling left out, have decided to participate in politics and the government, even if they have not relinquished their arms. Once the Americans leave and Sunnis are taking part in the government, which they will no longer view as collaborationist, they will have no common cause with foreign mujahideen, only a conflict of interests that will be quickly and violent solved, resulting in no more foreign fighters enjoying Iraqi hospitality.

Then I noticed it was dated from this time last year. His latest interview shows a bit less hope:

AMY GOODMAN: And what would happen if the US just withdrew troops?

NIR ROSEN: The same thing happening now, the civil war would continue. At some point Shias will make a move, a large move against the Sunnis in Baghdad. You’ll find a day when there are no Sunnis left in Baghdad. Saudi Arabia and Jordan are of course panicking about this, and they are hoping that the US will in some way arm or support Sunni militias. It’s hard for me to imagine that Sunni nations in the region will stand by and watch Sunnis pushed out of Baghdad. And Baghdad becoming really a Shia city. Because there is this Sunni terror of the Shia threat. So you’ll see greater support from Saudi Arabia, from Jordan, perhaps from Yemin, from Egypt, for Sunni militias. Funding, things like that. And the civil war will spread and become a regional one. And I think Jordan will cease to exist as it does now. Eventually, because you’ll have the Anbar Province of Iraq joining somehow–you already have one million Iraqi’s in Jordan at least. You walk down the streets of Jordan, you hear Iraqi Arabic as much as any other kind.

After all,

a rapid withdrawal could have “disastrous consequences.”

Instead, we should all keep going until Dec. 22.

Anti-war activists Donna Sheehan and her partner, Paul Reffel … want everyone to have an orgasm on the same day. On Dec. 22, they’re asking the world to contribute to the Global Orgasm for Peace….

Pentagon spokesman Air Force Maj. Dave Smith said he has never heard of coordinated global energy affecting the battleship movements before.

“But I’ve only been here since June,” Smith said. “I’ve been told that there are no absolutes about anything.”

Our colleagues in the on-line world have done a good job of defending last week’s study that tried to show the true extent of the violence in Iraq. I think the best defense was here^*and here.

The funny thing that comes through as right-wingers, war supporters and other innumerates try to debunk the study is that people appear to believe words before they believe numbers. They have more faith in the blandishments of their political leaders than they do in empirical, statistically verified evidence. This reminds me of Saheli’s^† post almost a year ago about the need for more people to learn quantitative methods.

^*Maybe I’m just pointing you this way because Majikthise, the author, has taken as her name that of the head of the philosophers’ union in the Hitchhikers Guide series, which gives her big nerd cred.

^†Why, just tonight she mentioned that she had heard a lecture and afterward regretted not asking for “the graph of the derivative” of global temperature over time. I realized that even though I’m pretty numerate, calculus is still enough of a foreign language to me that I wouldn’t have thought to ask this perfectly reasonable question in such an elegant way.