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.
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French reaction to Saddam’s capture is varied. The media call it a great victory for the US, the politicians are finding it harder to make up their minds what to say and public comment ranges from when will the US come and take Chirac? to No, they can’t have captured him, it’s impossible!.
Coming after the setback over the EU constitution – it will be harder to push through when the other countries join – this is a rotten weekend for Saddam’s pen-pal Jacques Chirac. If the Iraqis stick him on trial, will we hear all about the attempt to sell nuclear technology in the 1970s by a former French prime minister? Now what was his name?
It was wonderful to see the footage of Saddam after his capture as he was given a medical. It fulfilled at least two objectives – it put pictures to the words (an important message in this image driven times) and showed the captured dictator unkempt, disheveled and in an undignified situation. I imagine the contrast between the images of Saddam at the height of his power and those broadcast in the last 24 hours will go a long way in demolishing his personality cult.
This leads nicely to my reference to Stalin in the title of this post. Saddam Hussain is of the same breed as the monstrous Josef Dzhugashvili – a powerful, resilient, personally courageous, charismatic, megalomaniac and psychopathic dictator. It may be banal to compare Hussain to Stalin when there are still people who consider Stalin just a bit authoritarian but let’s face it, the man industrialised Russia and you can’t make an omelette without breaking…blah, blah, blah… I expect the familiar herds of barking moonbats to come out in droves with words ‘human rights, international law, due process and fair trial’ on their lips and the hate of all things American and Western in their hearts and minds. They have already learnt how to look over the mass graves of innocent Iraqis while protesting against the coalition’s war on the Ba’athist regime in Iraq, so it should not be too difficult to gloss over Saddam’s crimes yet again as they attack the coalitions efforts to “give Saddam the justice he denied to millions of Iraqis”.
It is an unfortunate historical fact that Stalin died a natural death. Since Nazism there has been no precedent about how to deal with murderous dictators and the international law, created by the impetus of the Nuremberg trial, has failed miserably to deliver what could be, even remotely, considered justice. The scores of African and Middle Eastern tyrants roam free and inflict untold suffering on their subjects under the benign gaze of the international and human rights community. Genocidal national leaders and their retinue are getting treatment and ‘fair trial’ that make their victims weep with despair as retribution for their crimes disappears in the maze of international law and its convoluted processes. Nowhere the gap between law and justice has been greater than in international law.
So when I hear the commentators calling on international and human rights experts hours after Saddam’s capture, the good news turns sour. I worry that in the coming months justice will be the next concept bandied about and stretched beyond recognition. Tony Blair has already talked about “putting the past behind” and has called for ‘reconciliation and unity’. (Judging from recent actions I fear this means sucking up to the French, Germans and Russian.)
It seems that the lesson from “purging of the fascist elements” in post-war Germany and Japan has been long forgotten. Many of the problems in Central and Eastern Europe originate from the photogenic pseudomoral posturing of the dissidents that rose to power after the communists vacated their seats. “Forgive and forget”, “draw the line behind the past”, “move on to a better future” and platitudes to that effect resonated across the former communist bloc and the West marvelled at the civilised and moral manner of the Velvet Revolution(s).
In my book, forgiveness comes after repentance. In post-communist societies, forgiveness was the only thing left that the battered populations felt had any control over. And so ex-communists, although no longer communists in the name but still embedded in the fabric of the society, unrepentant and powerful, could make sure that the future is to their advantage. Justice does not even get a foot in the door.
Nevertheless, let’s not be unduly pessimistic. For once. We will certainly be following with interest how and what justice will be dispensed to Saddam and his cronies and what the Big Media make of the whole affair. We live in interesting times and with blogosphere there is a way of making them even more interesting.
The estimable Austin Bay has a midstream assessment of the Iraq campaign and occupation. Grades are mixed. Given Mr. Bay’s knowledge of things military and strategic insight (he was a supporter of the Iraqi campaign for hardnosed geopolitical reasons), the mixed grades bear some pondering. Read the whole thing (its not long), but a few excerpts struck my eye:
The number of Free Iraqi police and paramilitary personnel in the field is a rough yardstick, but ultimately Iraqi security is their job. The major U.S. mistake prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom was failing to create a functioning Iraqi constabulary. The United States had 3,000 exiles training in Hungary, but that simply didn’t cut it. Interim coalition grade: D.
The March-April military campaign was a huge success. Saddam’s regime collapsed quickly, with few civilian casualties. The strategic demonstration of American power was dramatic, and it put teeth in the U.N.’s 1991 resolutions. Some day, U.N. sanctions may mean something again. Final Grade: A (No attack from Turkey, so no A+. A northern attack would have swept Tikrit and the Sunni Triangle, conceivably diminishing the current opposition in these Baathist districts.)
International contributions to Iraqi reconstruction, both in number of contributors and total capital is a strategic political measure. Interim Grade: C-
One measure that he does not address is control of Iraq’s borders with neighboring sponsors of terror. Until this occurs, Iraq is not secure. I’m not sure how we are doing on this front, but I read Austin Bay to find out stuff like this!
Interesting, and to my mind somewhat pessimistic, overview of the current situation.
There are no real surprises to the graph this month. It is bad but it has been obvious from the day of the Chinook shootdown that would be so. As I noted last month, I felt it best to delay comments until these numbers were in.
D.Amon, all rights reserved. Permission granted for use with attribution to Samizdata
It is rather obvious to me there has been significant re-organization and re-grouping of the Baathists. They have gone from utterly ineffective to being at least capable of co-ordinating attacks which inflict some damage.
A problem they face is their numbers, while large, are limited. Saddam’s loyal core forces which vanished ‘into the woodwork’ in mid-April numbered perhaps 15-20 thousand. They are at present expending those numbers at an horrendous rate. True, they are doing some damage to the Coalition – but not major damage in any tactical, let alone strategic sense. They attack and they kill some of the Coalition forces… and promptly get their own arses handed back to them on a platter.
It is not as if the Baath have an unlimited pool of personnel and cash. There is no superpower backing them behind the scenes; there is no huge mass of conscripts to fill in the holes left by the fallen. If they fight a war of attrition they will lose unless the populace backs them. Given what the Baathists did to that very same populace for three decades, such a turn about seems unlikely. You cannot turn a butcher into a folk hero in less than a generation.
My crystal ball is rather hazy this month. I expect the casualty rates to drop off a little bit but to remain high for at least several months. The major factor in how long they remain high depends on things for which I do not have the information on which to base a ‘WAG’ let alone a reasoned judgement. I can only say the numbers will stay up until either the reformed Baath command structure is shattered or attrition in the ranks erodes their ability and will to fight.
In the best of worlds, that could take several months.
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.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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