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 was surfing our sidebar blog listing and came across an article on JoHo the Blog called Ambivalence.
A murderous tyrant has fallen. The symbolic money shot was carried live, and it was thrilling. So why isn’t my breast filled with naught but joy? For bad reasons and good.
Bad Reason: Because I hate seeing Bush win a bet that he should not have made. There are political reasons to hate this, but my real reasons are petty and small-minded.
My remarks are not really a criticism directed the author and to give credit where credit is due, he freely acknowledges that his feelings are petty and small-minded… and let he who has never been petty or small-minded cast the first stone.
Yet it seems amazing to me that people can be so caught up in the banalities of American domestic politics (as if the Reps and Dems were actually that different) that the liberation of an entire people leaves them indifferent. It would be like a Republican in 1945 being indifferent to the liberation of France, Belgium and Netherlands from Nazi occupation by the advancing Allied armies because they worried that Roosevelt was a Democrat and fretting that he tended to say things like “God is with us”. It is entirely reasonable to lament the cost in blood and treasure of this war but that some can look on with ambivalence at the liberation itself is sad.
Also on that blog was a commenter’s remarks to the effect that as the Bush propaganda machine was operating at ‘hallucinatory levels’ and thus they got their news from places like www.iraqwar.ru in Russia (note: they halted their English language analysis on April 8th but seem to be offering reports once again).
As a small-L libertarian I am at best indifferent to Elephant Party statists like Bush and his counterparts in the Donkey Party, but the objective facts of what is happening in Iraq are not that hard to pick out from the noise and I do not see why party political affinities (or lack of them) should colour the ability to discern that essential and quite obvious facts of what has happened.
People like that commenter must be heart broken to now discover that far from being a hallucination, the truth is that the overthrow of Ba’athist Socialism in Iraq is very real. The hilarious conspiracy ladened drivel to be found on iraqwar.ru treated the pronouncements of the deluded Iraqi Information Minister as having as much credibility as live video feeds from Iraq showing that the opposite of what he was saying.
If that is where people are getting their news from, the hallucination is their understanding of reality itself.
Eason Jordan, CNN’s chief news executive, confesses to covering up torture and murder by the Saddam regime in the NYT (free registration required; link via The New Republic and Instapundit).
Jordan bleats that he had to protect CNN staffers who were also Iraqi citizens, even if this meant hiding terrible atrocities. If this is true, I fail to understand why CNN employed Iraqi citizens, rather than US citizens who could be brought back to safety. An organisation like CNN could readily train new translators if Iraqi-Americans would not have been granted visas. Failing to report these events, and failing to give a proper characterisation to the brutality of the regime, certainly risked prolonging the suffering of the Iraqi people; either that, or CNN is merely in the light-entertainment business, in which case it should not have been in Iraq at all.
Two days after publication, this may be old news, but with no previous mention here I thought it was shocking (literally, shocking) enough to post belatedly.
That people who hate Anglosphere capitalist civilization should make common cause with a mass murdering tyrant is interesting but to anyone who has spent years observing the incoherence of ‘progressive socialism’ it is hardly a surprise.
What is a surprise is that Vladimir Putin has shown that not only is the Russian state still the enemy, its leaders are not nearly as smart as I had given them credit for, given they have been caught having given active support to the Ba’athists even to the extent of acting as an employment agency for assassins on their behalf.
To have squandered such a large pool of political capital and good will by continuously passing intelligence and weapons to the Iraqis right up to the start of the war is utter madness. Did the Russians think any outcome was possible in the long run other than an Allied victory over the Ba’athist regime? And surely once that fact is grasped, how could they think that news of their treachery would not eventually come to light?
What possible benefit could the Russian state gain from this move? Is this going to make honouring Russian contracts with the fallen Ba’athist regime more likely or less likely in US dominated post-war Iraq? Were they hoping Putin’s good buddy Tony Blair would pressure the Americans into a softer line regarding Russian economic interests in Iraq? If so, I wonder how Blair feels about his private diplomatic conversations being relayed to the Iraqis by the Russian intelligence services.
It is a terrible thing to live in a world filled with enemies, but if Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussain are the measure of our foes then at least we can comfort ourselves that we are facing opponents who are not just weak, they are self-deluded and quite frankly stupid.
One of the oddities of being a samizdatista is that comments are often attached to things you wrote weeks or even months ago, in a way that no one else is ever likely to see. Usually such comments are of no great note, but two yesterday, attached to a posting on a completely different subject, definitely got my attention. First, there was this, from Victoria Miller:
DEMOCRATIZING BEGAN IN IRAQ
coalition troops set heavy weapons
thousands of marine soldiers,
airplanes, tanks, uniformed lapdogs and bulldogs
open and secret machines of modernized war industry
general Shurk in Pentagon says;
we bring democracy.
meanwhile they systematically bombed
showed fake pictures, Ghurka-media served
massacred civil people of Basra, Baghdad, Mosul
like Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin
on the blood of children, they declared victory
at least, the thieves celebreting everywhere
world witnessed similarly scenes under WW II,
americans saving the plunderers
the Jews, steal wealth of whole Continent
and escaped to Jew York, Sweden, London, Australia
like that, looting continues all over Iraq
general Shurk in Pentagon says;
democratizing continues
And then there was this, from Martin Brandberger:
“I AM AN AMERICAN NOW!”
→ Continue reading: Poetry
Is Saddam Hussain dead? It is looking increasingly likely that he was killed in a coalition air strike. On one hand it would have been nice to see him on trial for his life, or better yet, end up like Mussolini, hanging in a public square… but dead is dead and that is good enough.
Sic Semper Tyrannis.
Well, what do you expect? They’ve booked all the buses, printed all the placards, made all the sandwiches, they can’t possibly just call it all off. They’ve got momentum now and they just have to keep going:
Up to a quarter of a million protesters will march in London on Saturday despite the apparent success of coalition forces in Iraq, anti-war groups say.
The Stop the War coalition believes public opposition to the conflict is still strong – in spite of scenes of jubilation this week as American tanks entered Iraqi cities.
Jubilation in Baghdad, agitation in London.
But the police, who will have about 2,750 officers along the route, have said they expect fewer than 100,000 people to take part.
Flagrant fascist Bushista propoganda!!!
Speakers will include MPs Tam Dalyell and George Galloway, who face having the Labour whip withdrawn because of their anti-war stance.
Heroic martyrs!!
The group’s spokesman Chris Nineham said he believed “a great deal more problems” lay ahead for the British and US forces as they tried to take over Iraq’s administration.
Now this wouldn’t happen to be the same Chris Nineham who played such a prominent role in Marxism 2001? But I thought this march was supposed to be representative of ‘public opposition’, a great, spontaneous outburst of ordinary people’s sentiments?
The march is underway about now. I’d say 250,000 is probably a gross underestimation. Expect at least half a million. No, two million. No, twenty million….no, the entire population of the Northern hemisphere!!
Last night I saw pictures of the Iraqi Ministry of Economic Planning in Baghdad burning, set alight by ‘looters’.
Memo to the Iraqi People:
If you want liberty, prosperity and a rational economic future, you now have a golden opportunity that you must not squander… DO NOT REBUILD THAT BUILDING!.
Defences of US marines raising the US flag in Baghdad may have been missing the point. Before that statue fell, the topic was war. As soon as it hit the ground, the question is “What next?”
There are some pretty major fights going on behind closed doors in Washington at the moment, it seems pretty clear. Tony Blair seems keen to side with American doves – and the views of France, Russia et al are even more predictable than they are irrelevant.
The question is this: whose flag shall fly over the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance? At the moment US troops have that special diplomatic immunity that comes from firing big guns. But when things settle down a little, will they be subject to Iraqi law? Will there be a semi-permanent US forces base established in Iraq, under US jurisdiction? Will General Garner, the designated head of ORHA, be answerable to the Iraqi head of an Iraqi Interim Authority, or will it be the other way around? Most of all, will ORHA have a free reign to root out Ba’athists and stamp on ongoing corruption? → Continue reading: Flying the Flag, Part 2
The news that Kirkuk, centre of the northern Iraqi oil industry, has fallen not to the coalition, but to US backed Kurdish Peshmerga has electrified the Kurds and horrified the Turks. I suspect that the Jash (pro-Saddam Kurds) are going to be cut to pieces unless they manage to find the few coalition troops in that part of Iraq to surrender to.
The Turkish foreign ministry has said any attempt by Kurdish forces to take permanent control of Kirkuk would be unacceptable to them. They are claiming on domestic Turkish TV that the US has promised remove the Peshmerga from Kirkuk once order has been restored, and that Turkish military observers will be going there to make sure this happens.
Firstly I do not for one minute believe a word the Turks are saying: I would be astonished if the USA was idiotic enough to make such a rash promise to the Turks, who frankly do not have all that much political capital to call on in Washington D.C. at the moment. The US would be insane to alienate the highly motivated Peshmerga, who it must be remembered have made great efforts to assist the lightly armed US forces in the north. What possible motivation does the US have to get in the middle of this?
Secondly, what Turkey finds ‘unacceptable’ in the Iraqi part of Kurdistan is unlikely to impress or intimidate the Kurds any more. The usual internal Kurdish squabbles have been replaced by the PDK and PUK actually fighting along side each other in displays of uncharacteristic unity (yesterday on TV I saw a veteran BBC reporter marvel to see soldiers from the two groups coming out of the same bus!).
The Peshmerga are not only better situated politically than any time in the last 25 years, they are also better armed, better organised and thanks to the US Special Forces, better trained. Once the Ba’athists are gone, the Kurds will be able to turn their undivided attention towards any Turkish incursions into Iraq and no prize for guessing who is scooping up all the heavy weapons and ammunition abandoned by the defeated Iraqi forces around Kirkuk. The facts on the ground are strongly in the Kurds’ favour.
This problem was entirely predictable and is entirely of the Turkish state’s own making. As I have written before, I have no sympathy for them and it is hard to see how it would be in the interests of the US or UK to try and crush the legitimate desires of Kurds for self determination.
Egged on by their BBC interviewers, a number of pundits and Iraqi exiles have been criticising the use of the American flag as an “execution hood” over the statute of Saddam. It was “inappropriate” and it “should not have been done”. Voiceover commentary on News 24, as I type this article, added “Better judgement prevailed and the flag was removed”.
To me, there seem to be three immediately obvious polite answers to such criticism:
- The Iraqi crowd cheered when the US flag was raised. Rageh Omah, BBC reporter on the spot, could not hear the sonorous commentary in the studio, and made the possibly career-limiting mistake of answering the question “How is the crowd reacting to the American flag?” with the simple truth. This answer has obviously not been repeated in evening bulletins.
- The U.S. flag was raised by an over-exuberant marine, and removed within minutes when seen by a commanding officer. This was no indicator of imperialist policy, quite the opposite. Conquering armies rape and pillage, the Americans leant the use of their M-88 Armored Recovery Vehicle to a celebrating crowd.
- The flag was not raised over a public building or other centre of power. It was attached to a symbol of the old regime that was about to be destroyed. If you insist on reading undue symbolism into this, then the message would be not “America rules the roost now” but “America delivered you from the tyrant whose statue you are destroying”.
But the overwhelmingly obvious response is not so polite: I’m just glad the Iraqi people in the street aren’t such ungrateful SOBs!
Since I usually make a point of balancing jubilation with caution, and being somewhat cynical by nature, I cannot resist the temptation of drawing attention to the depressing synchronicity between British anti-gun phobia as it is practised at home and British anti-gun phobia as it is about to be practised in Iraq:
Residents are being urged to dump their guns in an “amnesty pit” close to one British military compounds.
“Iraq has a culture of weapons. There are a lot of them around, most held quite legally,” said Captain Cliff Dare, of 3 Commando Brigade Engineer Group.
“If we want to give the new Iraq a chance these weapons have to be taken out of circulation.”
I concede that the very real risk of people taking pot-shots at British troops does cast a different light on the situation but I do hope Iraqis don’t finish up going to prison just for defending themselves.
And, as an aside, ‘Captain Cliff Dare’! Is that a comic-book action hero name or what?
But the author, General Mirza Aslam Beg, the former Chief of Army Staff of Pakistan, did not realise it at the time. I particularly liked:
The Iraqi nation has shown its resolve and resilience, to stand up against the over-powering superiority of the aggressor, who has been forced to recoil back, for replenishment and re-enforcement. It is the coalition forces, which suffer from “shock and awe” due to the stiff resistance and the remarkable display of courage and capability, to fight according to a well thought-out war plan, which is holistic in conception, embracing all tenets of operational strategy.
Read and laugh 
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