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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‘Our man in Basra’ is back in the UK, with some first hand stories and a different perspective on what is going on both in Iraq and in the media. His first post (out of three planned so far) is about his view of the media and why they report the events in Iraq the way they do.
Most people have an implicit, nebulous, and generally unthought through understanding of the media and what their job is. It has to do something with getting the facts and reporting the truth or at least the reality to the best of their abilities. The media is a sort of civilian intelligence agency. This is how the military, in particular, view them and when the media are not reporting the facts, they are seen as failing in their job.
The media do not see their job in this light at all. Their job is to find and sell stories. Of course, these should not be completely divorced from the facts, but facts are merely the raw materials of the stories. More importantly, the media do not feel obliged to report all the facts, especially in a place like Iraq, where there is either very intense competition among reporters and therefore not much time to investigate the story in detail. Alternatively, the interest is fading a bit, so it is not worth investing the time. Either way, the result is the same.
What has become obvious to me while in Basra and helped me understand the media better is that they have now decided what their story is in Iraq. They have signed up this story as their product before they even arrive. They are not there to research ‘the facts’ – they are merely looking to illustrate their story. → Continue reading: The media story
Samizdata.net often makes references to the importance of the ‘meta-context’ in explaining and determining events around us. A question to consider: What would happen if the mainstream media were somehow forced to refer to Saddam’s old regime by its own official title, which is The Arab National Socialist Party or Arab NAZI Party? What a thought…
Many of us are aware bin Laden was not US funded. Fewer of us have the information at hand to prove it when faced with an adamant statement that “the US funded and trained bin Laden!”.
Osama paid his own way. Through his wealthy Saudi friends he helped finance a jihad against the Russians by forces entirely seperate from other, less religiously fanatical, guerrilla forces. Even those forces were not funded directly by the CIA. The money went to Pakistan and the arms went in via the Pakistani ISI. In hindsight this had some some serious downsides. It made the ISI nearly independent of the central government. Later the ISI did indeed back the Taliban during the post-Russian Kabul free-for-all.
But not bin Laden. The linked story by Richard Miniter (author of Losing bin Laden) has an extra nice touch to it. This bin Laden quote:
“We were never, at any time, friends of the Americans. We knew that the Americans supported the Jews in Palestine and that they are our enemies.”
comes from an article written by… Robert Fisk.
That lonely, marginalised, oppressed siren voice in the wilderness John Pilger has managed to escape from the daggers of the vicious McCarthyite witch-hunt that has cowed so many into a silence that has prevented them from speaking the truth about America and the war in Iraq.
This brave, determined peace-campaigner has finally succeeded in casting off the shackles of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy that has, hitherto, so ruthlessly crushed his dissent with a one-hour television special screened earlier tonight on ITV1, Britain’s most popular TV channel. There is no link here, mostly because I couldn’t be bothered to go and look for one.
Neither could I actually be bothered to watch the programme. I have been exposed to enough of Pilger’s toxic, manipulative propoganda to know in advance exactly the kind of things he was going to be whining about. In fact, I think I can even summarise them:
Bush. Warmongers. Neo-Conservatives. Oil. Conspiracy. World domination. Capitalism. Globalisation. Unfair trade. Bush. Oil. Rumsfeld. Wolfowitz. CIA. Mossad. Inequality. Poverty. Despair. Hopelessness. Arms trade. Environment. Sharon. Zionist thugs. Oppression. Cruelty. Palestinians. Bush. Oil. Blair. NATO. Poodles. American bullying. Human rights. Amnesty International. Unilateral. Nuremburg trials. Nazis. Aggression. Bush regime. Conquer the world. Crush dissent. United Nations is our only hope.
And those were the good bits!
In the heated discussion prompted by my statement that “I hope we win”, commenter Julian Morrison posted the following comment, much of which I disagree with but which struck me as worth “promoting” to a post to give it better visibility and its own discussion. I have removed the quotes from other comments in the discussion so it can be read as a stand-alone.
Terrorism is a tool to influence governments, via scaring the electorate. In the absence of governments to scare, it would be a pointless tactic, just stupid and non-effectual murder. By analogy with the famous quote, “terrorism is the continuation of lobbying by other means”.
There is no war.
I hear “terrorists”, but all I see is (a) “clerics” with more mouth than sense, but more sense than balls, failing to convince the rest of Britain’s moslems to rise up in Jihad (they would rather sell you groceries) (b) the security state having a big happy “who needed civil liberties anyway” party.
The western world is not under attack by moslems. It is, at most, “under rant” by a few hotheads, if that’s even a phrase.
There are no WMDs. Iraq didn’t have any. The terrorists don’t have any. They’re a bunch of illiterate backwater arab yokels. They wouldn’t know a nuke from a microwave oven. The nearest they come to microbiology is the infestations upon their own scabrous hides.
If there were real terrorists in Britain or the USA, then they wouldn’t need WMDs. They could drive either country into a blue shivering funk by randomly suicide-machinegunning a few crowded malls, while screaming “allahu akbar!” Far more bang for the buck. There’s nothing effectual preventing them. They haven’t. They don’t exist.
9/11 wasn’t indicative of a national malaise. It was a fluke.
James Lileks has a piece today on the war and its critics that is worth reading (scroll down a bit, although the first few paragraphs about his daughter culminate in a nice insight into diplomacy).
James can certainly speak for himself, but his point is that there is a war on, and wars are all about who wins, which means that anyone who cares about the war has to pick a side sooner or later. He hopes that we win (as do I). While it is certainly possible to criticize a war effort in order to help it succeed (and indeed, such criticism is very helpful to ensuring success), it is clear, and has been for awhile, that some critics of the war do not particularly care if we win or lose. Some are quite open about their desire for us to lose, others seem simply not to care that the result of their preferred policies is the advancement of terrorism.
Quick sample, but you really should read the whole thing:
→ Continue reading: “I hope we win”
Two problems in subdeveloped countries: dumping of subsidised argicultural produce in local markets which destroys local agriculture, and in Iraq, I am told the big bottleneck in getting electric power services restored is the looting of power cables.
I wonder how expensive this problem is in financial terms, we certainly know that power outages are a powerful symbol of the failings of the coalition forces. I wonder if we could employ one of the EU’s most wicked weapons for a good cause?
I propose the dumping of a massive copper wire mountain in Iraq and neighbouring countires. Basically troops should hand out 500 yards of copper wire to every Iraqi who asks for it, in exchange for the price of a cup of coffee. For reasons which would be obvious to any British healthcare user, there had better be a price, or demand will be unlimited. The result of such a Cable Dumping Plan would be the destruction of the black market in wire theft from power lines as there would be no effective market to sell the looted product: the looters would find undercutting the subsidized rates very hard. Even if all the looters start saving their coffee money to buy miles of cable, they are not disconnecting the power supply.
We are left with the problem of deliberate sabotage, but this can be solved by normal occupying power policing techniques. The equation is: political cost of failing to get the power working versus the economic cost of a cable dumping policy.
It is terrific news, not just for those who like his writing, but for the blogosphere in general (and therefore even for those bloggers who don’t like his writing), that Stephen Pollard has now got himself a brand spanking new blog, which really is a blog, and that it is now no harder to link to his blog postings than it is to anyone else’s, which wasn’t the case with his previous arrangement.
Consider his piece for today’s Sunday Telegraph, which he has also put up at stephenpollard.net, entitled, in his (to quote the top of the new blog) “never knowingly understated” manner, Why Israel is right to assassinate Hamas leaders.
The comparison with the IRA is entirely specious. If the IRA had espoused not merely the separation of Northern Ireland from the UK but also the murder of every Unionist and every Anglican in Great Britain, the abolition of the United Kingdom and its replacement with a Catholic state, run by the IRA and dedicated to converting the rest of the world to Catholicism by force, then there might be some merit in the comparison.
Hamas is explicit about its aims. In August 1988 it published the Islamic Covenant, which makes clear its opposition to Israel’s existence in any form. It states that “there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad (holy war)”. Any Muslim who leaves “the circle of struggle with Zionism” is guilty of “high treason”. It calls for the creation of an Islamic republic in Palestine to replace Israel. Muslims should “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine”.
In a statement released on May 19, after a wave of suicide murders in previous days, Hamas said: “These attacks will continue in all the territories of 1948 and 1967, and we will not stop attacking the Zionist Jewish people as long as any of them remain in our land.” A Hamas member explained to an interviewer last month that: “The Jews have destroyed your Christianity just like they are trying to destroy our Islam. You should read the words of the Prophet. Join us. We do not just want to liberate Palestine. We want all countries to live under the Caliphate. The Islamic army once reached the walls of Vienna. It will happen again.”
If Stephen Pollard were the average waffling egomaniac blogger, the fact that linking to him used to be a combination of an obstacle race and an egg-and-spoon race wouldn’t have mattered all that much. It would have been a pity, but no more than that. As it is, and quite aside from whether you happen to agree or disagree with Pollard’s attitude to all this (personally I’m pretty much in complete agreement), this is heavyweight journalism. Facts are being assembled and deployed, not just impressions or feelings. Those gruesome quotes are for real. This man is not merely clearing his throat and finding his voice. He has found his voice. And he has the regular, big-media columns, like this one, to prove it.
And now, his blog-microphone, so to speak, is also in full working order. Other Pollard pieces, not originally for a big print newspaper, can now also be linked to by the rest of the blogosphere with impunity. → Continue reading: All hail the new Stephen Pollard blog
Here’s another Rumsfeld quote, this one from his talk at the The National Press Club:
My view is — maybe it’s because I’ve been a business man for so many years, but my view is that governments can do relatively little for people, and that investment, outside investment, inside investment, people voting with their dollars that they want to make something work in a given place, is what really is the engine that drives things. Government doesn’t create the jobs, the opportunities, the wealth in our country; it doesn’t create the jobs and opportunities in most countries. Private investment does, human capital does. And that’s ultimately what will have to be the case in Iraq. Although they have the benefit of oil, and with some significant investments in their infrastructure, they could get significant increases in revenue from oil above where they currently are. But there’s no one thing that is the answer, in my view.
It’s rather hard to disagree with.
I’m in the midst of my nightly reading and this dialogue from Donald Rumsfeld on Jim Lehrer’s News Hour caught my attention:
Now, there’s another reason it’s a bad idea. If you go to Afghanistan, the Soviet Union had 300,000 troops in Afghanistan and they couldn’t do the job. We have 10,000 in there and it’s making steady progress. Why? Because we don’t want to occupy a country. The Soviets wanted to own Afghanistan.
We don’t want to own Afghanistan. We don’t want to own Iraq. We want to help them get on their feet and then move out. We do not want to put so many forces in there that we create a dependency on us and then have to stay. We want to keep creating an environment where they can take over their security.
Maybe our way of looking at things is catching on.
The second anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is as good a time as any to take quick stock of progress in World War IV:
(1) Afghanistan. The Allies (America and its ad hoc coalition) have driven the Taliban from power and deprived the Islamic terror network of one of its primary bases. The Islamists still in Afghanistan are now on the defensive, and are focussing, apparently, on trying to regain control of one of the world’s poorest countries, rather than exporting their theology to other countries. Despite ongoing difficulties, this is a clear win for the West because Afghanistan is less of a threat now than it used to be.
(2) Iraq. Pretty much exactly the same analysis applies in Iraq. The Baathists are no longer funding any part of the Islamist terror network, and are no longer a potential source of WMD for the islamists. Based on current information, I would say that this is also a clear win for the West because Iraq is less of a threat now than it used to be. Ultimately, of course, Iraq still has miles to go, etc., but it certainly does not seem to be on course to be a net exporter of terror. Right now it is a net importer of terrorists, and that is fine be me – better to kill them in Iraq than in Iowa.
(3) International Islamist terror network. Clearly on the defensive and less capable than it was before 9/11. Many of its leaders or members are dead, in hiding and emasculated, or in prison. Many of its resources, including terrorist havens, are gone. Recent attacks have been directed, not against Western targets, but against Middle Eastern and South Pacific ones. Offhand, I can’t think of any theaters where radical Islamism is stronger now than it was before 9/11.
(4) Middle East. So far, it is hard to say that the Islamists have gained any ground even in the Middle East. Syria is going multi-party and has made some, admittedly not terribly significant, stand-downs in Lebanon. Arafat is isolated and his days certainly seem numbered. The Saudis have executed a number of their princes that had ties to al Qaeda, and seem to be going after al Qaeda with a little more credibility since it broke its promise not to operate in Saudi Arabia. Lots of fulminating and bitching about the Great Satan everywhere, of course, but that isn’t new and doesn’t really count on the debit side of the ledger. It is still early days, of course, but all told, I would say that the Middle East is certainly no more hostile to the US than it was, and in significant ways is less dangerous, if no more friendly, than it was.
(5) Diplomacy. The common complaint is that the US has sacrificed or damaged many good relationships in order to pursue its war. I think that this is complaint is overstated, at best. Rather, World War IV has tested relationships and revealed which of them were shallow and weak.
I am willing, on the whole, to say that the diplomatic front has been a break-even for the US. On the one hand, many erstwhile “allies” are more vocal in their criticism of us, and possibly even have withheld substantive aid that they might have offered a different diplomatic team. On the other, the UN has permanently devalued, the true colors of the transnational progressives have been revealed, and many of the other impediments to a new and much more functional international order have been weakened or cleared away.
(6) Homeland security. Well, we Americans may or may not be marginally safer from terrorist attacks on our own soil than we were before 9/11. Its hard to say; in spite of the obvious idiocy of most of the high-profile homeland security measures, we haven’t had a terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. Measured against the baseline of 9/10/01, I think it is hard to say that we are much safer than we were. Measured against where we should be two years on, I would say that homeland security is a major disappointment.
But the war won’t be won or lost based on America’s homeland security. That is purely a damage control issue, because no matter how good the homeland security is, we will surely lose the war if we do not succeed with our “forward defense” of draining the Islamist swamps where terrorists breed.
The schwerpunkt of America’s offensive is in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both of those campaigns were crushing military and strategic victories for the US, victories that have not (yet) been frittered away. They may not turn into little Swedens, but there is really very little chance that either nation will return to being a terrorist haven bent on exporting mass murder to its enemies. That counts as victory in my book.
At this point in history, the Islamists cannot defeat America, but America can certainly lose the war through loss of will and resolution. So far, the will is there.
Here is today’s press release from an Iranian student group with ties to those inside Iran. I think you will appreciate it.
The 2nd anniversary of September 11th Tragedy and the Iranian Nation
SMCCDI (Public Statement)
September 11, 2003
Two years have passed since the “Tragedy of September 11th”. A tragedy resulting from an unprecedented terror attack on the US soil and which took thousands of innocent lives and left many grieving families behind.
Without the shadow of any doubt, this infamous attack was the true manifestation that fanatical Islamic Terrorism has no boundaries and is hell bent in uprooting all the advances achieved by the civilized World, replacing it with archaic beliefs along with an intolerant value system inherent in all overzealous religious sects.
September 11th occurred while the Iranians were commemorating their loved one’s massacre at the hands of the fascist-theological Islamic Republic regime. This is exactly why the Iranians, immediately felt in their bones the impact of this murderous act and sympathized with the Americans. Few hours later and in thousands, they took to the streets to support the wounded American Nation and to share its sorrow while undergoing the brutality of the regime’s shock troops. .
“America, America…. Condolences, Condolences!” and “Death to Taliban, whether in Kabul or Tehran” they chanted while holding their candle lights despite the brutal attacks of Hezbollahi thugs!!
Since then, Iranians have become more determined than ever to stand up against intolerance and tyranny as they saw the trueness of the unprecedented declaration of President George Bush on “War against Terror” and his revelation of the hideousness of religious fanaticism. They’ve regain hope by witnessing the overthrow first of the backwarded Taliban rulers in Afghanistan and then of the Iraq’s Bathist regime, two of the most notorious supporters and purveyors of global terrorism in contemporary international politics.
Without the shadow of any doubt, the Iranians, themselves the first victims of terrorism for nearly a quarter of a century, not only sympathize with the Americans, but they identify with them in this “Just war”. They’re are engaged in a daily battle to rid themselves of their monstrous regime known for being the “Mother of Islamist Terrorism” and a notorious member of the “Axis of Evil”.
More than ever, the struggling freedom loving Iranians are looking for the moral support of the Americans in their global quest to rid the world of this unholy, demonic menace. The Iranian people are in search of a democratic government separate from religious fanaticism, and a free and peaceful society. In pursuit of these goals they ask the American people to join with them in opposition to any reform or reformist movement within the Islamic republic, and to ask of their representative not to embrace or endorse any such sham reform in Iran, as they are nothing but an illusion and they do not represent the Iranian people.
The “Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran” while honoring all those who perished during the horrific September 11 attack and expressing once again its deepest sympathy with the families of the victims, declares that will do what ever is necessary to strengthen the bond and cooperation between the two great nations of Iran and America in the fight and struggle against Global Terrorism and Religious Fanatism.
It’s of this committee’s strongest believe that the Iranian and American peoples will emerge victorious in their noble mission of contributing to a safer and peaceful World!
September 11, 2003 (20th Shahrivar 1382)
The “Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran” (SMCCDI)
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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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