Month: April 2003

I really wish we’d turned up a big cache of WMDs — chemical, biological, nuclear — in Iraq by now.

Because I’m sure they’re there. Hell, there’s not a government around (including the ones that opposed the war) who didn’t think Iraq had WMDs. They were all in favor of an ongoing inspections regime, remember? Not even Chirac could say, with a straight face, “No war. No sanctions. Iraq has no WMDs.”

There were tons of biowarfare and chemical materials known to be in Iraq when UNMOVIC was there. Iraq admitted it. They admitted it again in their grudging report to the UN in December. Except they claimed they’d destroyed it all. But they didn’t keep the receipts, and did it in secret, and couldn’t provide any proof of it.

Nobody, not even France or Russia or China, took a look at that, shrugged, and said that inspections were no longer necessary.

Iraq is the size of California.

Give me twelve years — hell, give me one year — and, even without military and a reign of terror and complete control over the territory — and I’ll bet you I could hide several semi-trucks, several tanker trucks, many tons of materials of various sorts somewhere in California, and it wouldn’t be found in a few weeks of sporadic searching. Even by an invading army. Perhaps especially by an invading army.

(How large of a force do we have in California, just in the northern part of the state, looking for marijuana farms? How many of them go undiscovered?)

I’ll even do it with satellites overhead. Heck, I’ll bet I could do it without resorting to smuggling any of it over the border into Oregon.

I wish it had been found already, some of it at least. I hope it is, soon. I hope it isn’t discovered when it starts leaking into the Tigris, or we start finding mysterious cancer clusters in isolated towns in Kurdistan, or when someone rediscovers an ancient ruin somewhere and suffers from “Saddam’s Curse.” Or when someone else, in Syria, or Saudi, or even Iran or Iraq, starts using them.

I hope. Because sooner or later they will come to light.

At least some of the Left are criticizing Cuba for its recent crackdown and executions. Bully for them, even if they can’t help but slip in the obligatory “But Bush is a tyrant, too” schtick.

Cuba, in turn, isn’t happy.

The government responded by publishing rebukes in the Communist Party daily Granma. In one letter published Saturday, a group of well-known Cuban intellectuals urged their colleagues to stop criticizing the island.
Entitled “Message from Havana to our friends in faraway places,” the letter said the recent statements by leftist intellectuals “are being used in the great campaign trying to isolate us and prepare the stage for military aggression by the United States against Cuba.”
Cuba made a similar assertion about several of its Latin American allies earlier this month, calling them U.S. “lackeys” after the nations backed an amendment calling for a U.N. rights monitor to visit the island.

In other words, don’t criticize us for our actions, because that strengthens our foes.

Jeez, isn’t that just the logic that folks have been slammnig the “Don’t criticize the President” camp about?

(via Ad Orientem)

I’ve been tending to stay away from serious Iraq posts for a while, for a variety of reasons. First off, I’m feeling a bit burnt-out over the whole thing. Secondly, a lot of the rhetoric being slung around out there is still stuck in January, debating whether a war should be fought at all. Thirdly, there’s so much stuff coming to light about Iraqi government horrors and French (et al.) collusion in the whole mess that I can hardly keep up, and, frankly, I don’t want to risk an aneurysm by dwelling on it too much. And, finally, a lot of the current political goings-on over there are complex and uncertain enough, full of he-said-she-said and knee-jerk blame and hidden agendas that it’s unclear what’s A Major Thing to Worry About, and what’s Ruffled Feathers Du Jour.

Be that as it may, off to the east, there’s Afghanistan. And things there are either progressing along as well as can be expected, or else are sunk in a quagmire of inaction and mismanagement, depending on who you talk to and whether they simply want to blame the US for everything. But the US isn’t the only folks calling the shots there — are the people calling for the UN to come in and take over the Iraq reconstruction following how things are going in Afghanistan?

It’s awful to be on the losing side in a war.

It’s even more awful when nobody is interested in you afterwards.

Iraq’s former information minister Mohammad Said al-Sahhaf, who denied to the end the presence of US forces in Baghdad, was turned down by US troops after trying to turn himself in, said the London-based Arab newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, citing a Kurdish official.
Sahhaf had been at his aunt’s house in Baghdad for the past four days and wanted US troops to arrest him so that “they can protect him” but they refused since he was not on their “most wanted” deck of playing cards, said the paper, citing Adel Murad of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK).

How embarrassing.

Surely someone wants to smuggle this guy to the US to get him a job on American TV. He could become a new cross between Joe Isuzu and Rodney Dangerfield.

He’d have at least one fan:

Even Sahhaf’s “archenemy” US President George Bush said in a recent interview with NBC television that he enjoyed Sahhaf’s briefings so much that he used to interrupt some of his meetings just to watch him.

… deserve to be whupped upside the head with it.

While I can’t find the source article (at least not in a language I read), this reference to a planned anti-American march in Margraten, Belgium, has me shaking my head.

The demonstration on May 25 is against the US invasion of Europe in 1944-1945, against the presence of US troops in Europe, and to demand the withdrawal of those troops. It is also directed against the American soldiers buried at Margraten: they fought as conquerors, to subject Europe to American values and American interests. They deserve no honour, and certainly no gratitude. They should be reburied in the US.
The demonstration is against the Europe of the Nation States – supported by the US – and for the formation of a continental state. It is against nationalism and liberalism, and against Atlanticism – which combines both these ideologies with uncritical admiration for American society. It is also directed against the slavish attitude of the national elites in western Europe, who kneel before the American flag, and unjustly honour the American dead.

Can I just say … yeesh?

(via GoaF)