Salam Pax update
: Aussie blogger John Quiggan reports:
A colleague has emailed me to say that, according to Al Jazeera, salam pax is wounded in hospital. He seems to be in the city of Najaf. The doctor said that he was on his computer when his house was hit by a bomb.
Third-hand without real attribution. Like everything about the Baghdad blogger, take with salt.
Getting to the point
: I’m revealing one of my great secrets to reading the New York Times: I always start reading editorials at the last paragraph and usually can stop there; that’s where they get to the point. It works. Give it a try. Today’s sucked thumb:
From the beginning, the great challenge of Iraq has seemed to be less about winning the war than about securing the peace, and everything that has happened in the last two weeks reinforces that assessment. While the administration works overtime to swat down complaints about military planning, we hope there is at least as much attention being given to what the U.S. will do in this large, dangerous, hard-to-read country after it wins.
MREs, delivered
: Been hearing a lot about the MREs — meals read to eat — the soldiers and embeds have been noshing in Iraq. Curious to try some? You can get MREs — where else? — at eBay.
Terrorists… hooligans… take your pick
: What a weird damned world we created.
A bomb goes off by the British consulate in Istanbul and the ITV story says:
It is not yet clear who is responsible for the bomb, or whether it is connected to Britain’s involvement in the war against Iraq or with England’s 2-0 win over Turkey in a crucial European Football Championships qualifying match.
Proud blog parent
: I’m proud to be giving birth to a whole damned litter of blog puppies.
The latest, born today, comes from blog star Eric Olsen in our site, Cleveland.com. More Cleveland blogs here.
Our Western Mass site, Masslive.com, has had lots of good blogs and is spawning more.
New Orleans — rich turf for fascinating tidbits — has two local blogs by our editor, Jon Donley (also a star of online TV there) and a Saints blog.
Mlive, our Michigan site, has a blog I quoted the other day.
And there are more coming soon, including sports blogs from NJ.com and AL.com.
And, of course, there’s my war news blog on all these sites.
Saddam Dead! (?!?)
: Glenn Reynolds throws a challenge out to Saddam (and Osama) to speak up or be presumed dead.
I’ve been thinking that Bush and his generals should just start saying that Saddam’s dead. What’s the harm? If Iraqis start to realize that’s quitely likely true, their weltanschauung will change radically. If it’s not true, then Saddam finally has to show himself. We win either way. So you heard it here first:
Saddam is dead!
Let’s sing it together: Ding, dong, the dictator’s dead. The wicket dic, the dictator’s dead. Ding, dong, the wicked dic is dead….
: Speaking of catchy ditties, Howard Stern has been spinning his new hit: “50 Ways to Kill Saddam.”
German and French fault for the war
: Below, I linked to an amazing story in Die Zeit quoting U.N. arms inspectors saying that German (and French, Russian, and Chinese) refusal to back military force in the U.N. defanged and doomed their effort and made war inevitable. Mind you, this comes from U.N. arms inspectors.
I wasn’t sure I had translated it correctly (if only I’d paid more attention in Frau T’s class!). So I went to my good blog friend Thomas Nephew, who translated the whole thing, and now it’s even clearer that this is an important piece of reporting — all the more amazing for coming from a German paper.
For Thomas’ translation and his savvy comments (plus the translation of a related story about German responsibility) click here. Some excerpts:
Could this war have been prevented? Yes, say some [inspectors]. But with a surprising argument: Germany, France and Russia made war unavoidable with their purported peace politics. Gerhard Schroeder’s categorical ‘no’ to military deployment was simply “crazy.” “We might have been able to fulfill our mandate,” one hears in the hotel lobby….The 120 inspectors noticed soon, though, that they would not reach their goal without the full cooperation of Iraqis. But they waited in vain to be approached. A warning presentation by Hans Blix on January 15 in the Security Council didn’t change things. Iraq made its first concessions when Secretary of State Colin Powell presented sensational pictures, videos, and tape recordings of mobile bioweapons labs, rocket launching ramps, and munitions bunkers. And as the American threat of war became more and more clear and found more support….
Blix delivered a more conciliatory situation assessment on February 14. This was the basis for Germany, France and Russia to speak of “functioning inspections” and to increasingly distance themselves from America and Great Britain. The governments in Berlin, Paris, and Moscow felt confirmed in the conviction that their peace strategy would lead to success.
The inspectors in Baghdad saw things completely differently: their position was suddenly weakened….
The officials in Baghdad only became more cooperative when military pressure increased. Rhetoric never impressed Saddam Hussein, the inspectors say, the deeper the quarrels split the international community, the surer he felt more himself….
Success was less a question of time than one of the credible threat of the use of force. [emphasis added] “Where,” the inspectors ask today, “were the teeth?” More time, the demand of Germany and France for inspections, would have been well and good. But: “They should have sent their own troops and ships.”…
History will judge every party in this war and whether they like it or not, Germany, France, Russia, and China are parties to this war.
It would not have harmed them to send a token gaggle of soldiers to the Mideast — just a few clerks without guns, even — to show united resolve to truly disarm Saddam. But by standing on some skewed sense of principle (Saddam over Bush, tyranny over democracy, Iraq over the U.S.), they made the disarmament they said they wanted impossible to reach, they made war inevitable.
Media criticism, from over there
: The Kuwait Times goes on the attack against Arab TV coverage of the war: “Kuwaiti media figures agreed yesterday that the coverage of most of the Arab news networks on the current events in the region are biased, ignoring their announced principles of unveiling facts and defending rightful issues.”
