We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I read a lot of Iraqi blogs and journalism. The reason? I don’t believe anything Western journalists have to say any more. If the New York Times printed a headline saying “Sun Slated to Rise Tomorrow Morning”, I’d fact check them with one of my astronomer friends – just to be sure our planet hadn’t recently stopped rotating.
Many Iraqis have made it clear the US isn’t brutal enough in rooting out the old regime. I’m not sure it is always understood over there that we simply cannot act as violently as they would wish. Now that the enemy is dug in behind a screen of civilians we face fairly stiff limits of ‘acceptable behavior’. We are constantly under the scrutiny of the western allies of the deposed butcher. We face terrorist embedded Paris Match ‘reporters’ filming the firing of anti-aircraft missiles at civilian aircraft. We have Reuters reporters digging for any concievable anti-american angle they can find.
The Iraqis themselves have no such constraints. I agree with Alaa in principle. We have to push the control of security into Iraqi hands as fast as we possibly can… but we do have to balance this with progress in the creation of a civil society. That is the gift we wish to leave behind us. It will have far more lasting effects than the burial of Saddam’s spawn.
The day will come when Iraqi police and government take over everything… and very soon afterwards a large number of Baathists will turn up dead.
Problem finis.
According to a report by The Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran (SMCCDI), there will be two conferences held on the situation in Iran during the first week of December. One will be sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC and aired over free Iranian radio and TV; the other will be held Cagliari, Italy with support of various Italian organizations.
If you are near either city you may wish to attend and file a report with us.
This is the subheading of Mark Steyn’s latest Spectator piece:
Mark Steyn lists the countries that must be dealt with if we are to win the war against terrorism
Okay. But the first regime listed gave me a bit of a turn:
New Hampshire
Does the axis of evil have a new member? Has the Governor of New Hampshire been stockpiling weapons of mass destruction? Is the whole article some kind of joke? Steyn is a funny man. Is this a funny piece?
Steyn goes on to list five further targets for regime change: Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and North Korea.
Profound changes in the above countries would not necessarily mean the end of the war on terror, but it would be pretty close. It would remove terrorism’s most brazen patron (Syria), its ideological inspiration (the prototype Islamic Republic of Iran), its principal paymaster (Saudi Arabia), a critical source of manpower (Sudan) and its most potentially dangerous weapons supplier (North Korea). They’re the fronts on which the battle has to be fought: it’s not just terror groups, it’s the state actors who provide them with infrastructure and extend their global reach. Right now, America – and Britain, Australia and Italy – are fighting defensively, reacting to this or that well-timed atrocity as it occurs. But the best way to judge whether we’re winning and how serious we are about winning is how fast the above regimes are gone. Blair speed won’t do.
That all sounds fairly serious, doesn’t it? So what does Steyn have against New Hampshire? Ah. Penny drops. New Hampshire is where he was writing from. The universe makes sense again.
Nevertheless, behind this little joke there is a serious point. Steyn is describing a war against terrorism that does make sense to me. But the opponents of this war say that by the time Uncle Sam has toppled the regimes of Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and North Korea – or by the time it has given up trying to – it will indeed end up governing New Hampshire, and everywhere else in the USA, somewhat differently. War is the health of the state, as somebody once said.
My answer would be that hardly anyone is suggesting that there be no vigorous war fought against Islamic terrorism – and hence that no measures be taken that might infringe the liberties of Americans, or others. The war is being fought and will go on being fought. The only serious argument is about where to fight it. Is it to be fought in places like Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, North Korea, and back home in places like New Hampshire? Or should some or all of the first five be struck off the list?
Either way, New Hampshire is indeed liable to end up a rather different place.
The Opinion Journal has an excellent article by Saad Eddin Ibrahim of the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies in Egypt. Saad not only speaks of liberty; he has spent his time in the hell of an Egyptian prison for promoting it.
I agree with him. The Arab world is no more incapable of living in peace and liberty than anywhere else. As Saad points out, Egypt has been there before and still retains shreds of a once vibrant civil society. The world has forgotten the century of Egyptian history prior to Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser’s 1952 coup.
We of Samizdata wish him and the many others like him success and good fortune in their efforts to bring the blessings of liberty to their homelands.
This remark by ‘G’ posted by Iraqi blogger Salam Pax pretty much perfectly sums up why I have such contempt for most of the protestors:
[T]ell your friends in London that G in Baghdad would have appreciated them much more if they had demonstrated against the atrocities of saddam. And if you could ask them when will be the next demonstration to support the people of north Korea, the democratic republic of Congo and Iran?
Amen to that, Bro!
As always, Glenn Reynolds is the first one on to a fascinating new blog.
The Counter Revolutionary is posting a series of New York Times articles from the period of months after the end of WWII. I suggest starting at the bottom and reading your way up to the top as he is posting them roughly in time sequence.
I think you will agree it sounds very, very familiar.
Paul Staines points up another consequence of pursuit of democracy as an end in and of itself in the Middle East
The latest Al Qaeda action in Turkey is their logical response to the US pushing democracy into the Muslim world. Could it be that Al Qaeda is trying to push democracy out of its only Muslim stronghold? So much for the fly-paper theory (which smacked of an ex post facto rationalisation) that Iraq would draw in the world’s assorted Muslim terrorists into a military battleground of the Pentagon’s choosing.
It may be that in the future Istanbul will suffer more than New York and London. Ironic given that Turkey rejected intervening wholeheartedly in Iraq. Attacking Anglosphere interests in Turkey and other Muslim countries in the Western orbit seems to be the best response of the terrorists. Bombing HSBC and the British consulate in Istanbul is a lot easier than bombing Britain’s biggest bank in London.
My impression of Turkey from my last visit (pre 9/11) is that its elites have firmly decided their future lies with the western democracies, but a vocal minority side with the mullahs. I had lunch with an urbane sophisticated somewhat worldly banker, I challenged him about the recent arrest of opposition politicians, piously telling him that Turkey would never enter the EU if it did not respect political and human rights. Without hesitation he simply said:
Tell me, would you like to see 20 Islamic fundamentalist members of the European parliament?
I did not respond, it is an interesting point, democracy will certainly produce uncomfortable outcomes in Iraq as well.
Paul Staines
I think you will find this DOD transcript a fascinating entree into the current situation in Iraq. Major General Charles H. Swannack, Jr., the Commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, is high enough to have a fairly global view but not too high. He’s still close to the combat and day to day reality.
It is well worth a read.
Glenn Reynolds has a blistering post at his other blog (sheesh – I can barely hold up my end at a group blog, and Reynolds has two of the damn things) about the “anti-war” activists and their willing accomplices in the media.
The picture he paints (and documents) of traditional media outlets is horrifying. Groups raising money to fund the guerrilla/terrorists are “anti-war militants.” Western reporters have hired their former Saddamite minders as interpreters. Massive pro-American protests in Iraq go unreported in the elite media. I would add the major media blackout on the Hayes report discussed below, and the near blackout of the interim WMD report confirming to a large degree Saddam’s WMD capabilities. Punchline:
It certainly seems to be the case that neither Americans nor Iraqis are being well-served, as the press bends over backward to characterize terrorist sympathizers as “anti-war” while doing its best to minimize Iraqi support for peace and reconstruction.
As the man says: Indeed, and, Read the whole thing.
An article called Case Closed by Steve Hayes in American conservative journal, The Weekly Standard has yet to cause much of a stir in Big Media. But it should.
If this story is even partly correct, and frankly given my scepticism about our intelligence agencies, we have to be careful, the findings could be crucial to the war debate. It has been a frequently made point from the anti-war and war sceptic crowd that there was no provable connection between Saddam and radical terror groups linked to 9/11. (They have tended to dismiss this possible link with rather blase haste, as if Saddam was some sort of misunderstood old fellow). Well, that claim of no-link is looking a lot weaker now if Hayes’ article is correct.
I hope this story is properly analysed, the evidence sifted and cross-checked. And please, could bloggers like Jim Henley, who has probably been one of the most articulate anti-war libertarian writers these last few years, and with whom I have enjoyed a friendly email correspondence, do better than just dismiss the Hayes story out of hand?
Okay, I finally found a couple hours free to count and double check the data, relearn how to use an app I used once before, find where I’d left the input data files… So here it is:
Dale Amon, all rights reserved. May be used with attribution to Samizdata.
All raw data is publicly available.
I’ll leave my discussion for the update in December because the October numbers do not really tell a story unless taken in conjunction with the already striking but incomplete November numbers. I will only comment that a brief look at the data to date speaks very loudly that the enemy forces have recreated a command structure.
Note that I updated the September figures to include some fatalities that were not announced until several days into October.
I shall miss the fuss in London on Thursday because of a prior engagement in Brussels, but I will spare a thought for the demonstration of collectivists versus the protectionist.
Mr Bush is in the unlikely position of being a villain during this visit to London because he is defending tariffs on steel imports, and I can hardly praise a man for making the European Commission appear like the good guys!
Some of his opponents will actually be protesting against protectionism on the grounds that opening trade is the best hope for greater prosperity worldwide, with the handy by-product of reducing the number of layabout juveniles dreaming of doing something spectacular and violent: they are too busy doing MBAs or training to become plastic surgeons.
I could even support the demonstration if there were a chance that the message would be received in Washington DC that protectionism is an abomination and a great source of warfare (I believe it even triggered the US Civil War, and in that respect the wrong side won).
As for the occupation of Iraq: I continue to despair at the difficulty that anglosphere writers have in comprehending the humiliation of occupation. Admittedly this is for the best of reasons: Washington DC was last under foreign armed occupation in 1812, London in 1066. The dislike of foreign occupation is neither entirely rational nor without ambivalence. Of course the occupying troops in Iraq overthrew a dictator who committed atrocities against his neigbouring countries, his own people, even his own family.
British soldiers may know that when their predecessors first patrolled the streets of Belfast in 1969 (I don’t remember the precise date, I was about 4 years old at the time), the Catholic inhabitants cheered them, offered them cups of tea, etc. The welcome did not last.
If the purpose of allied occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq is as cynical as attracting potential Islamic fundamentalist terrorists to those countries and fight them (and kill many of them) away from Western cities, it could be a good plan. There is a certain logic to persuading the extremists to make their way to Jalalabad and Tikrit and face professional troops instead of Manhattan or the City of London and kill civilians.
If I thought the ‘War on Terrorism’ were being fought so capably I would be far more confident. But I do not, and I am not.
So let ‘the indefensible pursue the inedible’: I went on the Countryside marches in support of the right of hunters to chase foxes. I shall be in the Grande Place enjoying my Trappist beer with mussels and frites whilst following the sport on the streets of London. Tally Ho! 
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