Bush tells Saudis: I’ll never leave Iraq! . . . → Read More: (at least) 3 more Friedmans
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If you’re in need of proof that proponents of The Surge, the president’s latest plan for accomplishing more dead people in Iraq, are deeply ill at ease with reality, consult Martin Sieff, UPI’s senior political analyst. On April 30, Sieff wrote a story in which he uses an extraordinarily creative statistical analysis to demonstrate that The Surge is Da Bomb.
We have 12-day periods, 28-day periods, 22-day periods and, elsewhere in the story, 9-, 14-, 16-, 18-, 19- and 29-day periods, all being compared to one another. But in the same scientific vein, the 18-day period between April 20 and May 7 has seen 59 US soldiers killed at a rate of nearly 3.3 per day, which is considerably worse than the 28-day and 22-day periods cited by Sieff above, and the seven-day period from May 1 – May 7, inclusive, has seen 26 US troops killed at an average of 3.7 per day. Continue reading Statistical proof that The Surge in Iraq is working
Here’s why: Hagel is the only candidate with both impeccable social reactionary credentials and a credible basis for supporting a withdrawal from Iraq by the time the actual presidential campaign begins. Although he supports the occupation, he’s been a harsh critic of the administration’s conduct of it; the other leading contenders have been falling all over themselves to support it and, for the moment, the president. He can win the primaries because he hasn’t done anything to alienate the base and because he’ll be seen as electable by Republican party heavyweights who recognize that as things now stand, Iraq will dominate the campaign. Take Iraq off the table, which a Hagel candidacy might do, and suddenly Democrats are confronted with a whole new landscape. The current GOP front-runners, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, all have serious problems within the GOP base. Romney’s newborn social conservatism arouses suspicion, plus a good chunk of that base views Mormonism as a cult. McCain actually is a social conservative but two decades of adulatory press have convinced many Republicans that he isn’t, his loyalty to the party is suspect despite his years of sucking up, and his campaign to woo the religious right after dismissing them, in the person of Jerry Falwell, as “agents of intolerance” will hurt him. Giuliani is, as we’ve noted before, a cross-dressing, homo-loving serial adulterer, things his opponents or their surrogates are sure to point out during the primaries. None of those problems would be fatal in the general election in terms of the GOP vote, but the primaries are a different story. Activists dominate there, and they’ll have the knives out for blemishes they’d let slide afterward. Continue reading Meet Chuck Hagel, the 2008 GOP presidential nominee Four years into the occupation of Iraq, national security advisor Stephen Hadley says the administration finally has a plan and all they need now is someone to execute it: an Iraq war czar. Hadley’s insistence that the administration finally knows what they’re doing is in part a response to retired Marine general John Sheehan, . . . → Read More: “We’re at a point now where we’ve got a plan” on Iraq A front-page story in today’s Washington Post says that US soldiers are “at odds with ethics standards.” The story cites a Pentagon survey showing that “one-third of U.S. soldiers in Iraq … believe torture should be allowed if it helps gather important information about insurgents,” while 40% “said they approve of such illegal abuse if it would save the life of a fellow soldier” and 10% said they had “mistreated civilians in Iraq.” I don’t know how those numbers compare to the population at large. I suspect that they’re roughly equal now, when the war is in disfavor, but I remember that when torture was a major issue in 2004 and 2005, polling showed that a majority of Americans were willing to countenance torture either in general or in specific circumstances. While it’s unfortunate that a third of our troops feel that way, it’s also pretty remarkable that after a year or two or three of guerrilla combat, more of them don’t. What makes it even more remarkable is that the soldiers are in Iraq on behalf of a US administration that shows little or no concern for anyone’s human rights, including those of the soldiers they send into combat. If a third of soldiers think torture should be countenanced, that means two-thirds don’t, and that’s way higher than the corresponding percentage of top White House and Justice Department officials, and probably higher than the one in Congress, too. Continue reading Good news and bad news on ethics among US troops in Iraq Among the great occasional pleasures I enjoyed while living in Hawaii for more than a decade were evenings spent lounging around on the lanai of Steve Geimer, the general manager of Arturo’s, and chowing down on his invariably tasty pupus and dinners. The Arturo of the company is Arturo Montoya, who arrived in Hawaii during the 1950′s to attend the University of Hawaii and parlayed his longing for the authentic Mexican foods of his childhood into a company making salsa and tortillas. The salsa features Maui onions, which are large and sweet and irreproducible elsewhere: they grow on the slopes of Haleakala, the massive dormant volcano on Maui, and they give the salsa a distinct flavor that you won’t find elsewhere. It ships well, and I encourage you to buy some because it’s really, really good. It’s available in six varieties, regular and moderately hot in both red and verde. When Steve, who is a very fine cook, took over the day to day operations of the company some 15 years ago, he began looking at ways to expand the product line using local ingredients; what he came up with is a collection of hot sauces named after the major Hawaiian islands, with each sauce using ingredients grown on its eponymous isle. The sauces range from mondo to mild, and for good measure he cooked up three truly hot sauces: the Nitro line. They’re more flavorful than many similarly hot sauces because he doesn’t use the extracts that some manufacturers do; just fabulously hot peppers. His goal was to create something that could serve both as a stand-alone four-alarm firemaker and as a way to add some heat to the salsas and other sauces for people for whom food isn’t food unless accompanied by a massive endorphin rush, but without destroying the flavors. Continue reading Arturo’s of Hawaii: handsome men making great stuff In a delightful bit of performance art, someone has leaked a new Army Operational Security (OPSEC) regulation to Wired magazine. Adding to the irony of the move is that reporters, of whom Wired‘s Noah Shachtman is one, are listed as security threats alongside drug cartels and al Qaeda. This is the document behind the flap about new limitations on blogging and other forms of expression by US military personnel, which is what Shachtman focused on. Steve Aftergood at Secrecy News has more detail on the sections dealing with reporters, and the entire regulation is available in PDF form on the Federation of American Scientists web site, which is where Secrecy News lives. Among the several money quotes from the regulation is the one directing Army personnel and civilian contractors to regard “attempts by unauthorized personnel to solicit critical information or sensitive information as a Subversion and Espionage Directed Against the U.S. Army (SAEDA) incident.” Sensitive information includes things like the regulation, which isn’t classified as secret but is “For Official Use Only.” There are all sorts of through-the-looking-glass implications in the document, but the most obvious one is that the reporters who jumped on Tony Snow yesterday about the restrictions on military bloggers were soliciting critical or sensitive information. (Fortunately for Tony, he didn’t have any so he couldn’t aid and abet.) There Are Doors by Gene Wolfe: A+ The aim of every storyteller, even those who purport to write non-fiction, is to transport the reader to another world. There’s a lot to be said about putting them together believably, and even the most fantastic of these worlds can’t be too far from the fields we know, or else we’d never be able to access them. Sometimes the only difference between the worlds is the stories. The common theme that I used to connect these four books is that they highlight the transition: every trip to Elsewhere needs a door, even if it can be very difficult to find. “There are many forevers” “Please, ponder over this and feed me back as I am in dire need of your assistance at this time.” I get a lot of emails asking me to assist someone in moving tens of millions in stolen or lost funds out of one despotic hell hole or another. Usually the writer is the son of a dead dictator or of a high-ranking official who was executed by a dead dictator. Sometimes it’s a guilt-ridden cancer victim who has foresworn his sociopathic ways and wants me to use the filthy lucre for charitable purposes. My email program, Eudora, has a good junk-mail filtering system but I haven’t trained it to block those particular scam letters because they’re often a lot more entertaining than much of my legitimate email, not least by way of the quirky language. The excerpt above is from a letter sent by someone claiming to be a US Army colonel jailed in Germany for his role in unspecified Iraq prison abuses. He managed, he says, “to successfully smuggle US$ 21.7m out of Iraq to a location in Europe,” and he’s asking my help in disposing of the funds because “I reckoned that being a soldier I would not be in the best position to give a satisfactory account of how I came about such an amount of money.” Indeed. Continue reading “Please for you to be spending my blood-drenched monies” Anne Kornblut described heavyweight pollster and PR honcho Mark Penn as Hillary Clinton’s de facto campaign manager in a front-page story in yesterday’s Washington Post. If a presidential candidate is known by the company she keeps, then the relationship between Penn, whose PR firm shills for some of the world’s largest corporations and includes a union-busting department, and Clinton should give pause to potential Clinton voters. And Penn isn’t the only Hillary fan whose agenda may not dovetail with that of progressive Democrats and liberals: when Clinton started shaking the money tree this year, Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, a lifelong Republican and Bush Ranger — meaning he raised more than $200,000 for the current president during the 2004 campaign cycle — fell out. Doug Schoen, Penn’s partner in the polling shop, has a new book out called The Power of the Vote: Electing Presidents, Overthrowing Dictators and Promoting Democracy Around the World. (The reason I know he has a new book out is that I’ve been getting several promotional emails daily during the past two weeks. Stop it.) Presumably the book devotes a chapter or two to Venezuela, since Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates did some mack-daddy polling work down there in 2004, during the referendum on recalling Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, and in 2006, during the most recent presidential election there. Kornblut’s story gives mad props to Penn’s skill as a pollster but also notes that he’s been accused of “skewing his interpretations to portray clients … in the best light.” Perhaps that’s what happened in Venezuela: in 2004, his firm called Chavez as the loser of the referendum, violating Venezuela’s election laws by announcing their exit poll results well before the polls closed. And you could say that their polling was skewed in favor of their client, which turned out to be a US-funded opposition group: Penn, Schoen called the vote (with a margin of error of 1%) as 41% for Chavez, 59% against. The actual vote was the mirror image: Chavez won in a landslide, 59%-41%. Penn’s firm suggested that the vote, which was certified by any number of international observers as free and fair, was in fact fraudulent, sparking protests and riots. But the fraud, such as there was, appears to have occurred on the polling side of the equation. Continue reading Big money and bent morals line up behind Hillary |
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I know it’s a bit early to call the GOP presidential primaries, especially in favor of someone who hasn’t officially announced, but Chuck Hagel’s the guy.