Gotcha, you bastard. Repeat endlessly.
So Ahmad Fadhil Nazzal al-Khalaylah (a.k.a. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) is dead. Will he be missed?

Not by me, certainly, nor by the vast majority of Shiites in Iraq, nor perhaps even by most Sunnis there, in their decent heart of hearts. The question is, will he be missed by his fellow jihadists, and the wider insurgency in Iraq? From what I've read about him and Iraq, my guesses are "yes, for a while," and "no."

Accounts like the one by Mary Ann Weaver in the Atlantic Monthly (prescient title: "The short, violent life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi") suggest he was a charismatic leader and a very successful recruiter of those admiring his brutal Salafist outlook. Also, his death wasn't the only thing that happened yesterday -- other people and evidence were reportedly captured in simultaneous raids. There may also have been an insider informant who pinpointed Zarqawi's presence when the time came.

Together, that may mean that Zarqawi's particular network is in for hard times. Fine; good riddance. But there are plenty more where they came from, and Bin Laden and Zawahiri -- remember them? -- are no slouches at mayhem, either.

Meanwhile, just about everyone agrees the foreign jihadists Zarqawi led are a relatively small part of the insurgency facing American troops and their Iraqi allies. More are home grown fighters with perhaps more straightforward nationalist or sectarian aims: kick the Americans out, wrestle for control of the country or region. As Ivo Daalder points out, "Much of the killing in Iraq today isn't the result of Zarqawi's men, but of Sunni and Shite militias engaged in a big fight for control of neighborhoods, towns, cities, and the resources they control."

A different question -- for Americans, at least -- is whether Zarqawi would have become a household name if the U.S. hadn't invaded Iraq. I don't know for sure, of course, but I suspect not -- he was an advocate of the "near war", and was originally focused on the fall of the Jordanian monarchy. Without the stage of Iraq, he'd have been a minor figure in the larger scheme of things.

Our king and vice king are known to enjoy hunting and fishing, of a sort, in preserves stocked with fish and game (or lawyers). While I'm not saying Zarqawi was "stocked," exactly, we certainly turned Iraq into a place where he would flourish, and we certainly managed to save him up for another one of our "most powerfully staged photo ops in the world" -- recall that an opportunity to bomb him in a camp in northern Iraq before the war was passed up, in order to not undercut the case for war, such as it was.

Once upon a time, I would put up these "Gotcha" posts with more unalloyed satisfaction, and some day, if they ever get their hands on Bin Laden or put a bomb on Zawahiri's pup tent, I'll put up another one. I feel about Zarqawi's demise, though, a little like how I'd feel about taking out some nasty garbage I left in the house too long: glad that's done, sorry I helped make the mess in the first place.


=====
OTHER REACTIONS: Pablo Shounin: "finally some good news", Gary Farber (early news roundup), eRobin ("beginning of a very long and bloody road"), Natalie Davis ("He who lives by the sword... Every death is a diminishment, but the really sad news is that the "war" goes on"), Stygius ("May he roast in hell"), WorldWideWeber ("The hydra loses a head") ; see also Steve Benen ("Carpetbagger"), John Robb ("Global Guerilla"): "Unfortunately, Zarqawi proved to be rather good at his role."; Juliette Kayyem ("TPM Cafe").
NOTES: Robb via James Wolcott, Weaver, Daalder, Kayyem via Josh Marshall.

UPDATE, 6/12: Will Bunch ("Attytood") reminds his readers of an April 10 Thomas Ricks article in the Washington Post, "Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi," which discussed a coordinated military propaganda or PSYOPS campaign -- aimed in part at Americans. Ricks:

Although Zarqawi and other foreign insurgents in Iraq have conducted deadly bombing attacks, they remain "a very small part of the actual numbers," Col. Derek Harvey, who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then was one of the top officers handling Iraq intelligence issues on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an Army meeting at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., last summer.

In a transcript of the meeting, Harvey said, "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will -- made him more important than he really is, in some ways."

posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:30:00 PM -- |    

 
Help jailed Egyptian human rights blogger
Human Rights First:

Alaa Ahmed Seif al-Islam, a twenty-four-year old Egyptian blogger [Manal and Alaa's Bit Bucket -- ed.], was detained in central Cairo on May 7, 2006 while taking part in a peaceful protest in support of two judges threatened with removal from the bench for exposing electoral fraud and also to call for the release of protesters detained in earlier demonstrations.

The case of the judges became a focus for public protests during April and May. The authorities confronted peaceful protesters with a massive, intimidating deployment of thousands of riot police.

Hundreds of protesters were taken into detention, many were beaten by police and plain clothes security officers on the street and some suffered torture and ill-treatment while in detention. More than 300 protesters are believed to remain in detention.

On June 4, Alaa's detention was extended for a further 15 days using the powers of administrative detention available under Egypt's emergency law. He faces a variety of charges and accusations, including "insulting the President," but no date has been set for his trial.

Please call for Alaa's immediate release from detention and for the release of all those held in detention for exercising their right to freedom of assembly and expression.

A second Human Rights First web page adds:

...[detained bloggers'] supporters allege that they have been particularly targeted by the police because of their activities as "citizen journalists," reporting news that is ignored by the state dominated media in Egypt. One of them, Muhammad al-Sharqawi has posted his testimony describing torture he suffered while in detention: http://arabist.net/archives/2006/05/28/a-letter-from-sharqawi/

Take a minute and contact the Egyptian Interior Minister and the Egyptian ambassador to the United States.


=====
UPDATE, 6/8: See also a 5/31 Washington Post article by Daniel Williams, "New Vehicle for Dissent is a Fast Track to Prison," or parts Gary Farber has excerpted at his blog. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:07:00 AM -- |    

 
Steelworkers Sierra Club
From the Sierra Club press release:

On Wednesday, June 7th, the Sierra Club, the nation's largest grassroots' environmental organization, and the United Steelworkers (USW), North America's largest private sector manufacturing union, will announce the formation of a historic strategic alliance. [...]

The Alliance will promote a new vision for American public policy--creating jobs by promoting smart energy solutions to global warming; reducing the risks from toxic chemicals in the workplace and the community; and building a responsible trade policy for America. This unprecedented alliance will chart a new direction for the nation's labor and environmental movements, bringing together almost 2 million members around a shared vision of the future.

(Via Climate Crisis Coalition - Daily News.) The "Blue/Green Alliance" is described in a bit more detail in a second press release:

"Good jobs and a clean environment are important to American workers--we cannot have one without the other, said Leo Gerard, International President of USW. "In fact, secure 21st century jobs are those that will help solve the problem of global warming with energy efficiency and renewable energy." [...]

The USW and the Sierra Club have worked jointly on issues of mutual concern for many years, including the Clean Air Act, trade reform, and corporate responsibility. Currently, the two organizations have joint projects in fifteen states. The new Alliance will build on these existing programs and focus initially on three key issues-global warming and clean energy, fair trade, and reducing toxics. The work will begin in four states-Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Ohio, and Washington with plans to expand into at least 10 more states in the next two years.

As the Duluth News Tribune's Lee Bloomquist reports, the partnership extends a model Minnesota collaboration between regional branches of the two organizations, which worked together on the possible discharge of water from a Minntac Mine taconite tailings basin.

"It's not that different than what's already been going on," said Bob Bratulich, United Steelworkers District 11 director. "I see this event as just a formalization of the alliance. We're just going to be working together on projects that we have common interest in." [...]

"We have a lot of the same goals and issues," said Jerry Fallos, a Steelworkers associate member coordinator in Eveleth. "The Sierra Club believes in renewable energy, not just for the economics, but for the environment, and so do we."

It's encouraging to see alliances like this one work against the assumption that fighting pollution and carbon dioxide emissions must threaten jobs and economic growth. If the Steelworkers-Sierra Club alliance does nothing but blunt the political appeal of making that charge at election time, it will have been a worthwhile initiative.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:41:00 PM -- |    

 
Too late for Haditha

...General Casey and his folks are putting a lot of pressure on the terrorists and on the enemies of the government. I -- we frequently call them insurgents. I'm a little reluctant to for some reason.

--- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, November 29, 2005

“They didn’t even want to say the ‘i’ word,” one officer in Iraq told me. “It was the spectre of Vietnam. They did not want to say the ‘insurgency’ word, because the next word you say is ‘quagmire.’ The next thing you say is ‘the only war America has lost.’ And the next thing you conclude is that certain people’s vision of war is wrong.” [...]

The refusal of Washington’s leaders to acknowledge the true character of the war in Iraq had serious consequences on the battlefield: in the first eighteen months, the United States government failed to organize a strategic response to the insurgency. Captain Jesse Sellars, a troop commander in the 3rd A.C.R. [Armored Calvary Regiment -- ed.], who fought in some of the most violent parts of western Iraq in 2003 and 2004, told me about a general who visited his unit and announced, “This is not an insurgency.” Sellars recalled thinking, “Well, if you could tell us what it is, that’d be awesome.”

--- from "The Lesson of Tal Afar," George Packer, New Yorker, April 2006

The refusal to recognize the conflict for what it was meant that established doctrines about fighting insurgencies -- roughly, invest most of your effort in political work and establishing local ties, and much less in military operations -- were not followed systematically. Instead, different units adopted different improvised approaches. Packer:

In the absence of guidance, the 3rd A.C.R. adopted a heavy-handed approach, conducting frequent raids that were often based on bad information. The regiment was constantly moved around, so that officers were never able to form relationships with local people or learn from mistakes. Eventually, the regiment became responsible for vast tracts of Anbar province, with hundreds of miles bordering Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria; it had far too few men to secure any area.

Gladiators versus Hajis
Haditha does not appear to have been a model of counterinsurgency work, either, to put it mildly. And the combat experience, strain, and mind-set of the company involved did not bode well.

In advance of Falluja, according to Newsweek magazine, men of Kilo Company - the one in Haditha - held a chariot race. They rounded up local horses, wore togas, played heavy metal music and made a "ball and chain studded with M-16 bullets."

A company commander shouted a line from the film Gladiator in which the Romans declared before battle against the barbarians: "What you do here echoes in eternity."

Now there is nothing new about warriors psyching themselves up for war. The issue is whether such attitudes became a mind-set for the marines fighting a less intensive, drawn-out and increasingly frustrating anti-guerrilla war. Some were on their third tour in as many years.

The wife of one unnamed sergeant in the unit has said there was "total breakdown" in discipline, with "drugs, alcohol, hazing [initiation ceremonies], you name it". An American soldier jailed for refusing to return to Iraq has said that Iraqis were routinely called "Hajis" as the Vietnamese were called "gooks".

Such a breakdown (of the "soldiers snap in battle" type) might explain an action by a particular unit, but it does not adequately put into context what appears to have been a lack of a proper counter-insurgency philosophy among the US Marine Corps. There was a vacuum in which such incidents were more likely to happen.

--- Haditha blow to new doctrine, Paul Williams, BBC (emphasis added)

It may seem odd and off-putting to dwell on a choice of military doctrine, of all things, after a sickening event like this one. There is much more than this that should be said about Haditha, and others already have: the human loss, the moral failure, the added stain on our country's reputation. But the Haditha Kilo Company mind-set -- seemingly similar to a street gang's creed: revenge for the fallen brother -- may also fit within the story of the hubris and incompetence of this war's civilian leadership: their refusal to see their war for what it would be.

"It's impossible to believe they didn't know"
The other day I was asked why I hadn't written about Haditha yet, given all my past posts about Abu Ghraib. The answer was partly that I hadn't figured out how to think about what had happened. Unlike Abu Ghraib, there seems no evidence of specific policies leading to the (alleged) crime, at least not yet, as far as I know. (Barring the specific policy of invading Iraq in the first place, of course.)

On the other hand, the military's response to Haditha now appears to have been lackadaisical at best, and a coverup at worst. And that is very similar to the glacial progress in investigating and punishing prisoner abuse from Abu Ghraib to Bagram to Gardez. There's no interest in it, because there's no future in it. That's ominous, of course, because it means there may well be other Hadithas out there, initially buried in reports as "collateral damage" or "firefights with terrorists," relying on the lack of interest back home. Indeed, reports of similar alleged crimes are now surfacing, e.g., the Ishaqi incident.

Speaking to the New York Times, an anonymous Marine general familiar with the investigation said of some officers in the chain of command, "It's impossible to believe they didn't know... You'd have to know this thing stunk." As Michael O'Hare ("Reality Based Community") points out,

...it's not about the tiny percentage of troops who do bad when all the others are doing good; it's about the high percentage of the management structure that's learned to hide, lie, and cover up the work that needs doing, and the repeatedly, doggedly, incompetent leadership that made it that way.

Fixing failure
The failure to understand the kind of conflict we were fighting might be a fundamental cause of the shame of Haditha. If just saying the word "insurgency" was a no-no, then it wasn't likely many officers would lead and train units to properly fight a counterinsurgency, instead of leaving individual units to figure out their own methods -- or just relying on firepower and getting even. Reporting the truth about the enemy, their tactics, and our own soldiers' mind-sets could easily seem useless at best, when those issues were recognized at all. After all, some officers in the Haditha chain of command may have also shared the street gang mind-set of Kilo Company -- or the "insurgency? what insurgency?" mind-set of their civilian leadership.

Packer writes that American combat officers are now learning how to wage a counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, despite the slow start their superiors in the Pentagon gave them. That's good, I guess; better a sensible approach than a random or senseless one, barring getting out altogether.

The question is whether it's good enough. The subtitle to Packer's New Yorker article is "Is it too late for the Administration to correct its course in Iraq?" If that's supposed to mean "correct the course to fight and win in Iraq," I suspect the answer is yes, it's too late.

But I'm sure it's too late for Haditha.


=====
NOTES: "impossible to believe" quote via Mark Kleiman; "similar alleged crimes" leads to Gary Farber's valuable weekend roundup of Haditha/Ishaqi/related news .
posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:02:00 PM -- |    

 
The Great Communication: Gore's Inconvenient Truth and 2008
As I've mentioned, I had a chance to see "An Inconvenient Truth" last weekend, and want to share a few thoughts about it.

First and foremost, it is a must-see movie; well done, persuasive, honest, and as many have mentioned, surprisingly watchable for being a slideshow, however whiz-bang that presentation may be. And that's because it isn't just a whiz-bang slideshow, but one designed to (paraphrasing Gore) "explode one barrier after the other in people's minds" standing between them and taking global warming seriously enough to do something about it. Gore has researched, refined, rehearsed, and brought his facts and arguments to the public perhaps a thousand times, and the result is honed to razor sharpness.

But the slideshow is also spliced to a documentary about someone who is driven to show that slideshow over and over again. It's that marriage of facts and someone who won't quit working to teach those facts that is both persuasive and inspiring.

The struggle I've had in thinking about the movie is whether or not to view it in the context of Gore's political past and future. In one sense, it's a silly question. This is Gore's political future, whether it leads him to a White House bid or not. There's more than one way to have an impact on the national politics, and Gore has found a great way to maximize his own impact right now, regardless of what comes next.

The question is, what should come next? Would a return to politics distract from or sully the cause of educating the public about this issue? Maybe. But suppose Gore is right in predicting to David Corn, "Six months from now ... you and I will agree that the period between the spring and the beginning of winter was a period when the country changed dramatically on global warming. Now, I have felt in times past that we were close to a tipping point, and I've been wrong. I don't think I am wrong this time."

Now, say he's right -- would that be enough? Might not settling for that be a premature declaration of victory -- a "Mission Accomplished," so to speak? It would be odd for Gore to work so hard to prepare the field of public opinion about global warming -- and then leave the critical "harvest" of turning that opinion into concrete action to others.

So I think that, yes, this could be the opening salvo of Gore 2008 -- and that there's nothing wrong with that: the activist outlook of the movie itself demands it. And between Gore's message, the efforts of others, and the steady accumulation of facts on the ground about global warming, there could be a voting public rightly ready and willing to entertain a "global warming" candidate.

"An Inconvenient Truth" could prove similar to the Douglas-Lincoln debates or Reagan's nomination speech for Ford in 1976: a "Great Communication" planting the seeds for future victory in the ashes of defeat. If all goes well with the public opinion he wants to affect, Gore will have laid the foundation for a landmark, issues-driven presidential campaign that would be truly his own.*


=====
* What's more, it's not as if Gore has nothing else worth saying; he's been a steady opponent of the Iraq war, and made a memorable Martin Luther King Day speech about Bush administration lawlessness. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:26:00 AM -- |    

 
Who pays for the news?
David Corn summarizes his comments to prospective journalism students at a Center for American Progress seminar:

The problem is, I told the students, that people their age do not want to pay for information. So the long-term question for them is, who's gonna pay you to be a journalist in the years ahead? If people are not willing to buy information, it will be hard to earn money providing information.

Oh, I noted that being a journalist is great. It gives you license to be a busybody and call people up and ask all sorts of questions. And it's a jazz to find out stuff before other people and disseminate it. But I do believe that for all the wonderfulness of the Internet, it has also allowed bad (and cheap) information to compete more efficiently with good (and expensive to produce) information. That's a dynamic that may not shift for a while and that has severe ramifications for those who want to produce good journalism and those who want to read it.

At the risk of a cheap shot, complaints about bad information crowding out good from someone who joined PajamasMedia? But let's focus on "cheap"-- information, that is. Corn obviously knows more about the media business than I do, and he's right that the Washington Post showing good journalists like Thomas Edsall the door is a sad sign of the times.

Is that all that's going on, though? My take on Corn's own status is that the same mixed blessing called the Internet has brought him some well-deserved recognition and (I'm guessing) some amount of direct and indirect income as he hawks his book and other paying propositions and beats the bushes for more. Hence, no doubt, the decision to join up with the otherwise execrable PajamasMedia -- and more power to him.

Meanwhile, who exactly is paying for what exactly with the kind of news coverage we get from the New York Times, the Washington Post, etcetera? At the risk of being unfair yet again, these icons of journalism have repeatedly treated us to reporters and editors apparently more willing to reprint their subjects' lies than their own legitimate stories (at least until they're ready to publish the book).

Is it the circulation itself, the advertising revenues, or the sideline business opportunities that motivate the owners and managers of these papers? It doesn't seem to be the love of pure journalism, at any rate. In the long run, that backfires, as news customers come to suspect that these companies are not so much in the business of finding the truth as they are in the business of managing lies for their allies, be they business, political, or social.

So be it. The Times and the Post can occupy a shrinking but no doubt lucrative niche as stenographers to power, with Cohens, Broders, Woodwards, and Millers ready to serve. Readers less interested in that will demand the output of reporters and writers like Corn, Edsall, Hersh, Dionne and others. And maybe new institutions (like the Center for American Progress, perhaps?) will provide them with new publications and the framework of an honest, upfront political and journalistic philosophy rather than the pseudo-balanced, hand-in-glove attitudes we see today.

It's something I would pay for. In fact, it's something I already do pay for, via a selection of magazine subscriptions. If I could believe that a daily newspaper would not sit on a story like the NSA scandal, or become a fashion accessory to Woodwardian hagiographies, I'd be very interested in subscribing to it. Maybe that's unusual -- but maybe it wouldn't be if there were more newspapers worth subscribing to.

As it is, I feel justified in often not paying up for my news consumption because I think it's just what I'm being allowed to see -- not all there is to see. That's not journalism, it's PR. Why should I pay for that?


=====
EDIT, 6/22: "the media business" for "this" -- that's what I meant, but it might not have looked that way. posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:51:00 PM -- |    

 
Worth reading
"The Center for Union Facts” Fuels Fiction © (Betsy L. Angert, "Be-Think") --- Ms Angert noticed an anti-union advertisement on CNN, and got to thinking:

Why was this maligning message being presented? Who was responsible for this slander? Moreover, how much did this production cost? Forget the money spent to fabricate this ditty; airtime is extremely expensive! Apparently, union busting is no longer a tasteless practice; it is a respected art.

Ms. Angert's post is a spirited and well-linked defense of unions, in addition to informing readers about the Center for Union Facts, its mothership Berman and Company, and its director Rick Berman. Incidentally, Berman and Company touts opposition research as one of its specialties, and brags:

When our clients' interests are at stake, we identify and expose weaknesses in their opponents and their campaigns. To achieve this goal for one of our clients, we acquired and analyzed more than 525,000 pages of IRS documents.

Thereby hangs a tale, no doubt. Address: 1775 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC -- go for it, Washington press corps! Why, it's just a hop and a skip down the road!


The Gift of the Nile (billmon, "Whiskey Bar") --- Wanting to try his hand at travel writing instead of political commentary, billmon posts a nice essay on Egypt, experienced on a train ride along the Nile. One excerpt doesn't do it justice, but anyhow:

Now that the hottest part of the day had passed, the landscape had come alive again. Early evening appeared to be irrigation time, and I could see fellaheen guiding silver fingers of precious water between rows of green. In other fields, which had already received their daily allotment, stripes of darker earth lay moist and muddy under the slanting rays of the sun. Everywhere there were people in the fields: men working ankle-deep in the irrigated mud; a group of women sitting in a circle on a huge cloth, doing some kind of handwork I couldn’t quite see; children chasing each other down the long narrow mounds that divided the rectangular plots, or shooing cows from one meager pasture to another with long switches. I could have sworn I saw one fellow (the word itself is derived from fellaheen) just sitting and watching his crops grow – like Caleb in East of Eden, admiring his bean field. Then again, maybe he was saying his evening prayers.

More to come.


Mace in the Hole (Jon Metcalfe, Washington City Paper) --- A DC Department of Corrections (DOC) sergeant with a taste for petty tyranny and rectal cavity searches sparks a "shitting" -- inmates throwing feces. Metcalfe:

What happened in the following 48 hours is a subject of investigation by the civil-rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice and the focus of an impending lawsuit against the DOC. It is also an example of how a single hated C/O can tip the tense détente between the keepers and the kept into a shitstorm of epic proportions.

I see that's going well (SayUncle) --- Tennessee blogger and gun rights advocate SayUncle discusses some of the hostile responses to a liberal-libertarian substitute blogger at his site, and lists a number of positions that he says will tick off both his conservative and his libertarian readers: abortion should be legal even if it s*cks, anti-death penalty, Iraq war skeptic (now), "the free market also doesn’t do a great job of taking care of workers." And some of the allegedly nonliberal positions aren't -- as I mentioned there, "belief in God and Jesus" doesn't annoy this lefty reader, for one. Maybe R. Neal is right: SayUncle is a closet liberal!


=====
NOTES: Union Facts via Max Sawicky; Mace in the Hole via Rox Populi.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 12:30:00 PM -- |    

 
Cool stuff

Origami crease patterns by Robert Lang: an elegant way of showing how to fold complex paper sculptures, nicely explained.

Do it yourself vinyl record piracy: build a frame, put record in it, pour silicone on it, let it dry, peel it off, pour liquid plastic on that, let it dry, peel it off, use fairly.

Make your own tensegrity structures out of soda straws, paper clips, and rubber bands. So that's what that thing in front of the Hirschhorn is called.

Composer composed of and to "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"

George Washington blasts a hole into the Virgin Megastore by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

The working definition of cool stuff. Miles Davis & John Coltrane- "So What", 1958

=====
NOTES: Origami site via Lindsay Beyerstein ("Majikthise"); vinyl record copying site via Pablo ("Digital Warfighter"); don't think twice via John Holbo; Miles Davis via Michael Berube, Nancy Nall, and The Editors.
EDIT, 6/6: link to photo of Hirschhorn tensegrity structure added.
posted by Thomas Nephew at 5:40:00 PM -- |