In the wake of the leaked British memo describing a possible UK/US partial withdrawal from Iraq, I thought I’d give a short recap of the “good guys” that will be taking over security duties.
1) For starters, there is the Kurdish Peshmerga and related militia who have been accused of sectarian-based murder and torture. The Kurds were brutalized by Saddam Hussein in a deliberate campaign to marginalize them in the oil-rich region around Kirkuk. According to a Human Rights Watch report, the initial Kurdish response in post-Saddam Iraq was to abuse Iraqi Arabs in a similar fashion. This outburst of violence was quelled but soon erupted again, this time also involving the other sizable Kirkuk minority group, the Turkomen. As it stands today, the Kurds, Turkomen and Iraqi Arabs have avoided flat-out civil war but as this May 23rd, 2005 article in USA Today states,
‘In January, four Kurds were dragged into the street in Hawija, a mostly Arab town 20 miles southwest of Kirkuk, and shot to death. Then in March, an Arab police major and three officers were killed in Kirkuk by a roadside bomb during a funeral procession for a fellow officer who was killed the day before by another roadside bomb. The Iraqi Institute for Human Rights in Kirkuk, an independent group, has documented more than 300 cases of vanished Arabs during the past two months. “Every day, someone is in here complaining about it,” says Jalal Ibrahim, deputy director of the institute. Armed Kurdish militia, called peshmerga, or “those who face death,” still patrol the streets in pickups. Other members of the militia have joined the local police.’
You may notice that USA Today (not my favorite media source btw) tries to put a positive spin on the story but even they can’t make death squads sound good.
2) The Mehdi militia. I can’t find much current info except for this article from The Guardian stating that some have joined the Basra police force. Moqtada al-Sadr is obviously still an important figure.
3) The Badr Brigade. This Iranian-trained militia has been targeting Sunni religious figures. The above link and this one also contain some information on this group. There has been a good deal of speculation that the Badr Brigade has been killing ordinary Sunnis as a possible prelude to civil war.
4) The Iraqi Ministry of the Interior. Really not good. There are rather graphic descriptions in this link. The human rights abuses may not reach the volume of Saddam Hussein’s regime but the techniques appear to be the same.
With friends like these . . .
It’s patriotic!
Rules:
Predict the date that Karl Rove announces his resignation to the press. It’s that simple. Here are the nitty gritty details.
1. Give your prediction as a reply to this post. Use conventional nomenclature for dates — i.e., 00/00/00, or April 14, 1999. “Tomorrow” or similar predictions will be disqualified.
2. Review previous replies to make sure your prediction hasn’t already been taken by another player. If things start hopping around here, I’ll post a running list of ‘taken dates’.
3. If you accidentally choose a date that has already been taken, and that date becomes the winning date, the earliest contestant to choose that date will be the winner.
4. Prizes:
If you pick the winning date, I will mail you a brand spanking new copy of Cory Doctorow‘s urban fantasy, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. (If you win, you’ll need to email me with your shipping address.)
If you pick the winning date, and if you hype this contest on your blog or website, I will also send you a $US 20 gift certificate to Amazon.com, and a copy (through Amazon) of George Orwell’s 1984.
5. Hmm. Do I really need to mention that you can only enter once?
6. If Rove never resigns, we all lose.
It’s about freedom. It’s about poetic justice.
You can’t afford not to play.
D.
For all the lovely folks at Technorati: karl rove
I’ve been lurking at HuffingtonPost.com since they have all the latest info on the Karl Rove/Valerie Plame case and tonight, as I obsessively surfed through news sites, this came up. It appears that Rove may really have screwed up, i.e. Bush’s brain had a cerebral infarct. Everyone was sure that he was just too damned smart to get caught; personally, I thought he had ordered someone else to do the dirty deed, like Scooter Libby, for example. Recently, however, I noticed a crack in the White House stone wall.
If nothing else, most Washington pundits will admit that the Bush Administration has excellent discipline on keeping the party propaganda line consistent. When talking to the media, everyone, up and down the hierarchy, uses the same language to describe the same subjects like good little apparatchiks. This isn’t by accident; it’s Karl Rove’s trademark. (Well, that and incredibly sleazy smear campaigns.) So, a few weeks ago, it was surprising to see Dick Cheney spout off that the Iraqi insurgency was in its last throes while Donald Rumsfeld said it could last for more than a decade. Was Karl Rove sweating over the Plame investigation and blew off the Bush Administration propaganda synchronization?
I can thank Ishbadiddle for the link to this great LA Times piece by Rosa Brooks, which has a fine discussion on the ethically appropriate application of journalist privilege:
The Judy Miller Media Hug-fest
Honestly. When you see right wing slugs waving the banner for the First Amendment, that’s when you know you’re living in The Poseidon Adventure.
D.
Since I’m not quite as big a jerk as I make out sometimes, I’m not going to bother tagging this one for Technorati. It’s not like I have anything original to say about the London bombings, nor useful, nor insightful.
Instead, I’ll give you one trite thought, and one remembrance.
The trite thought: as the Chinese curse goes, we live in interesting times. Lucky us.
The remembrance: my thoughts keep returning to the movie Brazil. With its depictions of urban terrorism and government oppression, Brazil seems more prophetic than ever — perhaps even more than 1984.
And I’m wondering if there’s any way out of this mess. Seems we’re only managing to dig a deeper hole — and we’re all in this hole, every single one of us.
D.
Friday: also my day to let Karen rant about foreign policy. (She’s a news junkie, but doesn’t claim to be an expert.)
Most people were expecting Rehnquist to resign due to poor health, so when Sandra Day O’Connor left, the pundits were shocked. The mainstream media swung into action, eulogizing O’Connor’s career, handicapping the race among likely replacement candidates, and interviewing pro-choice Democrats who sounded the alarm that Roe v. Wade was under serious attack. As a pro-choice feminist, I agree that abortion-rights are in deep trouble from the far-right ideologues, but people are missing the main point.
Enter-finger-twitchy downloaders will have to wait for their free copy of Google Earth, Google’s new software toy designed to provide you with satellite images of our planet:
The whole world is covered with medium resolution imagery and terrain data. This resolution allows you to see major geographic features and man-made development such as towns, but not detail of individual buildings. Additional high-resolution imagery which reveals detail for individual buildings is available for most of the major cities in the US, Western Europe, Canada, and the UK. 3D buildings are represented in 38 US cities (the major urban areas).
I suspect this may be sufficient resolution so that you, too, can discover the next Amarna, which you have to admit would be way cool, but not enough resolution to allow you to figure out if your neighbor’s boobs are real. Oh, well.
As it stands, however, this nifty freeware’s attainability ranks somewhere between cold fusion and time travel:
Google Earth downloads temporarily delayed
Thanks for your interest in Google Earth, but we’re sorry we can’t offer you a download right now. As you know, Google Earth is in beta, and we’re still building out our ability to take on new users. We’re making good progress, and expect to be able to accept new downloads shortly, so we recommend you check back daily at earth.google.com. We hope to be able to welcome you and other new planet surfers soon.
We appreciate your patience,
The Google Earth Team
Stay tuned.
***
Has anyone seen the cover art for the July 4th issue of The New Yorker? Sadly, I can’t find a link for you on this. You’ll just have to check your friendly neighborhood magazine vendor, or settle for my description.
Title: “Party of One”
Artist: frequent New Yorker contributor Barry Blitt
Content: Uncle Sam, cheeks red with embarrassment, sits alone in a room decorated with balloons and red and blue streamers. The table is set with red- and blue-themed party hats, cups, and plates, and a great big Happy Birthday! cake sits before poor Sam. The chairs are all empty.
Sorry to get all political on you guys, but this image struck me as surprisingly incisive. The expression on Sam’s face — sad, petulant, humiliated — makes you want to give him a hug. It’s okay, Sammy. Maybe next year, your friends will come.
We can hope.
D.
Technorati tags: google earth
The New Yorker
From the New York Times Forums, by way of my wife:
If Jesus were alive today, he would be ethnically profiled and put on the United States’ No Fly list.
Okay, your turn. If Jesus were alive today . . .
(More later. Just taking a blog break from my NiP.)
D.
Here’s a link to blogger Hossein Derakhshan, AKA Hoder, an Iranian-born Canadian presently planning a trip back to Iran. He recently posted this plea for help should he be detained, or worse.
I have no idea where this fellow falls on the political spectrum (I haven’t read that far down in his blog) nor do I care. He’s a journalist who speaks his mind and he’s fearful of the price he’ll pay for it. I’m going to follow his progress, and I’ll hope you do the same.
D.
Yesterday, while doing my 45-minute shvitz on the elliptical trainer, I watched CNN’s Wolf Blitzer interview Tim Robbins regarding his play, Embedded. The play has been out since 2003, but a film version was just released on DVD; hence Wolf’s urge to hold Tim accountable. But I’m guessing here.
My ears pricked up as Wolf ran down the play’s premise: five reporters embedded in Iraq must decide whether to report the truth or succumb to military brainwashing (as well as pressure from their own networks). This, with a few changes*, is the core of my novel-in-progress. I desperately need to know how much overlap exists. Have I been scooped? Will publishing house readers throw out my manuscript, calling it “a thinly veiled Embedded”?
CNN showed a few clips from the play. Painful stuff, and by ‘painful’ I mean ‘Saturday Night Live ever since Eddie Murphy left the show.’ Satire with all the subtlety of a jackhammer, characters that give cardboard a bad name. But wait (says I): CNN and their ilk are the targets of Embedded; perhaps they’re showing the crappy bits on purpose.
Enter Tim Robbins, in two days’ growth of beard, black tee shirt and brown sports jacket, left eyebrow permanently arched — possible evidence of a forehead lift gone bad (although, thanks to Jacko, the bar for celebrity plastic surgery disasters resides somewhere in the Kuiper Belt. But I digress). Unflappable, he deflected Wolf’s criticisms by pointing out (repeatedly) that two of the play’s five journalists are stand-up folks who risk all to report the truth. Two of Wolf’s guests, both of whom did their time as embedded journalists, provided counterpoint. One, a young woman who had actually seen the whole play, was sympathetic to Robbins’s satire and said there was a lot of truth in it (as well as some distortions). The other journalist hadn’t seen the play and basically read from a prepared statement.
By now, I was confused as all hell. Is the play any good? Is it garbage? Can I trust FoxNews.com’s review calling it “not so realistic”? (Stop laughing. Jeez, just because I said trust and FoxNews in the same sentence.) Would I be wasting my money buying the DVD? Our contractor delivered the most recent bill today for our remodel; do I even have the money to waste on this DVD? It wouldn’t be the craziest thing I’d done to research The Brakan Correspondent. That would be buying The Alamo on DVD (the John Wayne version, naturally).
Embedded is being distributed by the self-styled Emperor of marginal film marketing, Netflix. They’re the people who brought us “Eve Ensler’s ‘Until the Violence Stops,’ a look at the global effect of her ‘Vagina Monologues.'” Is this relevant? No. I just really like the phrase, “the global effect of her ‘Vagina Monologues.'”
As I read the story of the DVD’s release, reported in LATimes.com, all of my problems were solved. It turns out Embedded will air on the Sundance channel this August. I can hang on to my twenty bucks for a few more days.
I promise to get back to science fiction. I promise.
***
Karen News Flash:
Female tarantulas groom frantically after doing the nasty.
Karen figures I can work such details into my story line; I keep trying to tell her that she and her arachnid-lovin’ e-buddies are the only ones who would understand these in-jokes, and I don’t know how many of them read fiction. About a year ago, she posted a link to my sixteen-legged love scene, and did any of her spider pals come by to take a look? Noooo. I ain’t gonna be selling too many copies to that crowd, even though I’m pandering to them like there’s no tomorrow.
D.
*As far as I know, Robbins’s play doesn’t have any birds. Or pigs. Or flies. Or spiders. Or Colonel Kirbys.