The evidence is scant, but it’s there:

 

Ali Yussef / AFP/Getty Images

Children jump and run as Iraqi troops arrive in their neighborhood to distribute food rations in the impoverished Sadr City district of eastern Baghdad. Iraqi troops poured into the Baghdad Shiite bastion of Sadr City three days ago for the first time in eight weeks, without resistance from militias who have fought deadly street battles with US forces.

Iraq violence falls to four-year low, U.S. says

The military says crackdowns by the Iraqi government are working, and that the number of attacks has dropped to about 300 a week from 1,600 in June.

The other day in the Times, Bill Kristol quoted a Marine helicopter pilot:

“I was in Iraq from the 2nd to the 12th this month. In my current job I go over there twice a year for two weeks to collect lessons learned and fly a few sorties …

“The biggest deal for me was the fact that even after we have pulled out thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops, peace continues to hold in Anbar. In fact, I was shocked by two things when flying over Ramadi and Fallujah. First, the streetlights are back on. It is crazy to see Iraqi cities lit up completely, and since they are all on grid power now, you don’t see the crazy black/brown outs when you fly over and the generators pop like you would back in 2005/6. The power now seems to extend even into the suburbs and light industry on the edges of the major cities as well.

“Second, there are people, regular civilians, walking the streets at night. That was very unusual and got the visitor (me) laughed at when I told our terminal controller that I had personnel walking down a street on the radio.”

Most people would mock such “progress,” and of course they’re right to. No one who refers to it as “progress” would ever consider living under such conditions. It’s the height of arrogance to claim this resumption of some normalcy in some pockets of Iraq as a success. It is only a small half-step up from the hell unleashed by the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the “coalition of the willing’s” occupation of an alien country ruled by tribal passions, located in a region little understood by those who made war on it.

This ignorance is evident from what the locals in Basra have told NYT reporter Stephen Farrell, who also reports on progress but (wisely) never uses that word [e.a.]:

With the death squads in hiding and Islamist militias evicted from their strongholds by the Iraqi Army, few doubt that this once-lawless port is in better shape than it was just two months ago. …

Two months after Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki ordered the military offensive, residents of Basra talk of feeling safer, if not yet entirely safe, after years of oppression by armed gangs and “enforcers” of Shariah, or Islamic law. In the four years that British troops patrolled here, from 2003 to late 2007, the outlaws emerged and preyed on musicians, alcohol sellers, Christians, unveiled women, academics — anyone not embracing their extreme vision of Islam.

Now the shops and restaurants in Basra are open later, and alcohol is back on sale, discreetly. The government’s troops seem to have quelled Moktada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and other militias. …

In the inevitable post-mortems, a principal question has been whether the multinational troops in southern Iraq, led by the British, should have rid the city of its gangsters long ago. …

But Iraqis are asking why it didn’t happen years ago …

Aside from the fact that it’s ridiculously impertinent and impudent and nervy for Iraqis to ask why, during the hell on earth that was this war in its early years, the coalition didn’t save them from sharia sooner, it turns out that cultural and demographic differences have played a big role in the outcomes in different parts of Iraq:

[In Basra], mafia-style Shiite gangs rose in an overwhelmingly Shiite town; up north, Sunni and Shiite factions waged civil war in divided cities like Baghdad and Baquba.

This is exactly the kind of thing that the coalition forces didn’t know before launching the war.

There’s also the little matter of cultural differences between the British and the Americans:

“I have been very frustrated at the British,” said Brig. Gen. Edan Jaber, a police commander in Basra. He said the British “gave a high priority to their own security” and “were not forceful with the cases they faced in the street.”

It is a common criticism. “The Americans go in with huge force and hit hard, not like the British,” one Iraqi soldier complained.

And then there’s the cultural difference between Iraqis and free Westerners—the one you’re not allowed to say in public in the West without being accused of being a neocon or a warmonger. That same Iraqi soldier elaborated on his complaint, and made an observation [e.a.]:

““The Americans go in with huge force and hit hard, not like the British. Our people need a powerful force, not a weak one. We had just left Saddam Hussein behind. How could anyone be soft after that?”

That’s a good question, particularly as it relates to electoral politics in America in 2008, where one (presumptive) candidate consistently appears soft and the other one doesn’t.

These two headlines were next to each other at Memeorandum yesterday:

John Bolton to be target of citizen’s arrest at Hay Festival — John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, faces a citizen’s arrest when he addresses an audience at the Hay Festival in Wales this evening. — George Monbiot, the journalist and activist …

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

Discussion: MoJoBlog and A Blog For All

Discussion:

Jonathan Stein / MoJoBlog: John Bolton to Be Target of Citizens Arrest in Wales

Lawhawk / A Blog For All: Journalist Seeks To Arrest John Bolton in UK

New York Times:

Al Qaeda Warrior Uses Internet to Rally Women — BRUSSELS — On the street, Malika El Aroud is anonymous in an Islamic black veil covering all but her eyes. — In her living room, Ms. El Aroud, a 48-year-old Belgian, wears the ordinary look of middle age: a plain black T-shirt and pants and curly brown hair.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

 

Discussion: Jihad Watch, JammieWearingFool, The Poor Man Institute and Danger Room

Discussion:

Robert / Jihad Watch: Muslim woman wages Internet jihad in Belgium

JammieWearingFool: ‘She is Very Radical, Very Sly and Very Dangerous’

The Poor Man Institute: I am beginning to suspect that the War on Terror is composed entirely of horses**t

Noah Shachtman / Danger Room: She Wages Online Jihad

I’ve been saying for a while now that the world is upside down. These headlines underscore that reality:

The former U.S. ambassador to the UN—whose role is to represent the United States in front of the world—is targeted by “progressives” [in this case, a columnist for The Guardian newspaper] as a criminal because he was ” ‘instrumental in preparing and initiating the Iraq war by disseminating false claims through the State Department” while he was under-secretary of state for arms control.’ ”

Meanwhile, an acknowledged jihadist, whose role is “to inspire other people to wage jihad,”gets the front page treatment in the New York Times, which quotes the director of Belgium’s federal police force thus: “She enjoys the protection that [lenient Belgian law] offers. At the same time, she is a potential threat.”

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that “war-mongering” is being treated as a crime on one side—namely, ours—but not on the other. Not very fair, that. Nor very confidence-inspiring for your normal everyday citizen of the West, who wants the authorities to prevent crimes—to act before a terrorist incident occurs, not to react afterward.

After all, anyone can react after a crime is committed—in any number of ways, including the extralegal. If the authorities allow too many such crimes to occur (through lenient laws, or lenient enforcement of laws), eventually the people being hurt by such crimes will start to take the law into their own hands.

It was Michael Blowhard (whose 2 Blowhards site is one of the best treasure troves on the internet) who first suggested*** that bloggers are performance artists and that those of us who “follow” blogs are in fact following serial dramas [scroll down to the comment posted at 3:29 a.m.] [e.a.]:

If you follow blogs, you’re checking in on “characters” — Terry Teachout, Neil Kramer, Alice in Texas. (Each of whom is, to some extent, a kind of performance artist.) And stories semi-sorta evolve out of this. If you’ve got a circle of blogs (and bloggers) you follow, it can almost be like being a fan of a soap opera — all these familiar characters, going on and on …

If “Blowhard” is right about blog readers being voyeurs and bloggers being a species of exhibitionist—and he is—then Andrew Sullivan must be the undisputed barometer (or performance artist) of the political blogosphere. Everyone is watching Sullivan’s political journey to see where he goes next.

Last night, Sullivan quoted one of his readers, who is hanging on his every move:

Herewith, a prediction: by Labor Day, you will have long since given up on Obama and will be advocating the election of McCain. For all the reasons the various villains of the Republican Party hate him, and for the fact that he more closely matches your policy wishes than Obama does or ever will, he will be your man.

I have a feeling, once the prospect of Hillary being president is safely foreclosed, so will your support for Obama be. At least I hope so.

But it’s not just Sullivan’s readers (as well as yours truly, a devoted if often frustrated and irritated fan) who’s   are addicted to the drama queen’s arias. George Packer, who just wrote a piece for the New Yorker dissecting the death of the conservative movement, is also a Sullivan follower:

I read Sullivan every day, partly to find out how far his disenchantment will carry him in the very strange direction of Obama-style uplift—how long his temperament will win out over his ideas.

Wherever Sullivan goes, we follow along (which is different from following, of course). But still …

Hats off!

———-

***I’m not an internet scholar, so I don’t know if “Michael Blowhard” was actually the first to suggest this. However, he’s the first person I read who suggested this, so he’s first in my book.

The other day, the NYT’s Kit Seelye described how slips of the candidates’ tongues play out in today’s world:

The speed at which [Clinton's RFK assassination] remarks were transmitted and reacted to illustrated the new reality candidates are grappling with in this year’s campaign, in which Mr. Obama’s own remarks about “bitter” small-town voters ricocheted around the Internet.

Mrs. Clinton’s remarks were initially reported online by The New York Post, whose reporters were not traveling with the Clinton campaign but were instead watching a live video feed of the meeting with newspaper editors. Its report quickly jumped to the Drudge Report, then whipped around the Internet and on television, with outraged comments piling up on Web sites.

Campaign aides were taken aback by the quick reaction to her remarks, but then quickly realized that Mrs. Clinton had to backpedal. She then spoke to the traveling press corps for the first time in more than a week, at a supermarket here.

Yesterday, Seelye followed up andn described the devastating effect that this latest sensational pseudo-event has had on Clinton’s campaign:

The Clinton campaign began a concerted effort over the weekend to try to “set the record straight” and contain the damage from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s comments Friday about Robert F. Kennedy.

In a letter to The Daily News, published Sunday, Mrs. Clinton said her remarks had been taken entirely out of context.

Her aides also said that the news media and the campaign of Senator Barack Obama were partly responsible for fanning the flames.

Seelye gave a lot of space to the dynamic of the controversy, explaining exactly how it got started and how the flames were fanned:

Shortly after Mrs. Clinton spoke on Friday, the Obama campaign jumped on the story, sending an e-mail message to reporters saying her comment had no place in a presidential campaign. It linked to a online report in The New York Post that said Mrs. Clinton was “making an odd comparison between the dead candidate and Barack Obama” — a phrase the newspaper later dropped.

On “Face the Nation” Sunday on CBS, Mr. Wolfson said, “It was unfortunate and unnecessary, and in my opinion, inflammatory, for the Obama campaign to attack Senator Clinton on Friday for these remarks, without obviously knowing the full facts or context.”

The Obama campaign had also e-mailed to reporters a transcript of a harsh critique of Mrs. Clinton on “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” on MSNBC.

On Sunday, George Stephanopoulos, the host of “This Week” on ABC, asked David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s top strategist, about sending the transcript.

“You say you’re not trying to stir the issue up,” Mr. Stephanopoulos said. “But a member of your press staff yesterday was sending around to an entire press list — I have the e-mail here — Keith Olbermann’s searing commentary against Hillary Clinton. So that is stirring this up, isn’t it?”

Indeed it is. The gaffe wars—aka the “distractions”—are very effective. That’s why both sides have been stirring them up, with the help of an all-too-willing press (to great effect, particularly on the Obama side).

Meanwhile: it is all dirty, stinking politics. Here’s what I mean: while his campaign was stirring the tremendous enmity among Democrats, Saint Barack the Post-Partisan was advising Wesleyan graduates to take a vow of poverty in order to gain personal “salvation” through serving the common good.

This comment, and his crowd-pleasing reference to America’s “money culture” didn’t even get picked up by the usual blogospheric suspects, much less the MSM. I guess they don’t qualify as gaffes.

Or perhaps the media is playing favorites in the gaffe wars, too. Rather than cop to that, The Politico’s John Harris writes a mea culpa about the media’s “lack of proportionality” in reporting the “gaffes”

The signature defect of modern political journalism is that it has shredded the ideal of proportionality.

Important stories, sometimes the product of months of serious reporting, that in an earlier era would have captured the attention of the entire political-media community and even redirected the course of a presidential campaign, these days can disappear with barely a whisper.

Trivial stories — the kind that are tailor-made for forwarding to your brother-in-law or college roommate with a wisecracking note at the top — can dominate the campaign narrative for days.

Who can guess what stories will cause the media machine to rev up its hype jets?

Read the whole thing.

The White House calls bullshit on NBC, and the network digs in, likely to its detriment. David Bauder elaborates:

Through its unusual public criticism of NBC’s handling of Richard Engel’s interview with the president, the Bush administration struck at the soft white underbelly of the news division’s co-existence with the opinionated personalities of MSNBC.

“I’m sure you don’t want people to conclude that there is really no distinction between the `news’ as reported on NBC and the `opinion’ as reported on MSNBC, despite the increasing blurring of those lines,” Bush counselor Ed Gillespie wrote to NBC News President Steve Capus in a letter pointedly released to the public.

Tom Rosenstiel is quoted making an obvious point:

“Getting into the game of trying to attract an audience based on your point of view rather than reporting is dangerous because it does invite this kind of backlash,”

Pshaw, says NBC’s Steve Capus:

“Viewers are savvy enough to know the differences in that kind of programming,” Capus said. “The mission of NBC News hasn’t changed. The difference is that MSNBC has had some success, and success comes with attention and scrutiny.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this laissez-fair attitude from NBC. Nor is this the first time I’ve written about this issue.

A year ago, I wrote [note that I have since then updated some inactive links]:

[Why would an organization like NBC News, which just two weeks ago had to [send representatives] on Oprah to explain why they aired as “news” the Cho sick fantasy tapes, be so sanguine about Olbermann switching between opinion (like his denouncement of Giuliani in a Countdown “Special Commentary”) and “journalism” (like his hosting the Republican debate, which featured Giuliani among others)?

Because infotainment rules (obviously!)—that’s why—and it’s up to us viewers to figure out what we should take seriously or not:

Olbermann knows to leave his opinions at home when he anchors events, said Phil Griffin, NBC News senior vice president.

“Keith’s an adult,” Griffin said. “He can tell when it’s appropriate to express himself in a commentary and when to be a journalist. That’s one of his strengths. He knows exactly the tone and his role when he’s doing anything.”

Of course political campaigns are also a circus, and politicians are the world’s most shameless showmen and -women … so, for all I care, Olbermann can throw tomatoes at all of them the next time he hosts a “debate”—that would be really fun!

But he’s still a despicable hack. And NBC News is inviting a further loss of its credibility by referring to Olbermann’s program Countdown as “news” and by referring to anything he does as “journalism.” At least CNN tries to distinguish between “news” and “views” and Glenn Beck refers to himself as a “rodeo clown.”

Since I wrote that post, Olbermann was of course elevated to serious anchor status, with a prominent seat and voice on primary Tuesdays.

Ann Althouse was intrigued by this post from Emily Bazelton about why women stray (which Bazelton wrote in response to a piece by Philip Weiss in New York magazine).

Althouse quotes Bazelton [e.a.]:

Like everything else about male sexuality, the male desire to lie with another woman is boringly uncomplicated. But why do women have affairs? The judgment of literature (Anna Karenina, Madam Bovary) is that they feel trapped and oppressed, or, less sympathetically, that they’re easily gulled by preying males one or two notches up the social ladder. Two centuries later, I would imagine that life is a bit different. The answer we heard from writers like Erica Jong and Gael Greene back in the swingin’ Plato’s Retreat 1970s was that women crave sexual variety in precisely the same way men do. Three decades later, though, feminism no longer insists that women’s desires and inclinations be identical to those of men. It may even be permitted to recognize that, at least superficially, the female sex drive seems, in the aggregate, less pronounced (or at least less conspicuous) than the male sex drive. You don’t hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex. You do hear stories about women telling their husbands they no longer want to have sex.

Just because you don’t hear stories about such men doesn’t mean they don’t exist!
This “debate” is all just so much intellectual masturbation, not to mention an utter bore.

David Carr, writing in the New York Times, notes the dearth of media coverage of Iraq:

Even as we celebrate generations of American soldiers past, the women and men who are making that sacrifice today in Iraq and Afghanistan receive less attention every day. There’s plenty of blame to go around: battle fatigue at home, failing media resolve and a government intent on controlling information from the battlefield.

According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index, coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has slipped to 3 percent of all American print and broadcast news as of last week, falling from 25 percent as recently as last September.

One “expert” offers the usual bland and unrevealing “explanations”:

“Ironically, the success of the surge and a reduction in violence has led to a reduction in coverage,” said Mark Jurkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “There is evidence that people have made up their minds about this war, and other stories — like the economy and the election — have come along and sucked up all the oxygen.”

There is nothing ironic about the reduction in violence leading to a reduction in coverage. It is totally to be expected. The viewing audience, both for TV and for the movies, has proved to be allergic to the subject of Iraq, as Carr himself notes [e.a.]:

[W]hen Katie Couric, CBS’s embattled anchor, went to Iraq to report the story, she and her network were rewarded with their lowest ratings in over 20 years. Hollywood producers who had hoped there would be a public interest in cinematic perspectives on this war have been similarly punished.

Despite those callous Americans who are “punishing” well-intentioned media types who insist on bringing Iraq to their attention, some noble stalwarts continue to tell the story of Iraq [e.a.]:

Earlier this spring, Alissa J. Rubin of The New York Times wrote about flying in a C-130 in Iraq, accompanied by soldiers, including one in a coffin at the back of the plane.

“I wondered what exactly he had died for. And although I did not know him, I felt melancholy as we flew onward, accompanied now by ghosts and memories of loss,” she wrote.

I wonder if it has ever occurred to Carr that this kind of coverage—or, rather, the mind-set that frames this kind of Iraq coverage—is one of the reasons for the audience’s lack of interest in media coverage of Iraq. It’s poisonous, and worse than no coverage at all.

When a reporter writes that she wonders what exactly a just-dead soldier died for, that isn’t a display of compassion, as Carr suggests. Because while Ms. Rubin is scoring “compassion” points with her own cohort, she is pouring salt into the wound of that soldier’s grieving family.

But never mind. Chances are, his family won’t be reading the New York Times. Chances are, they’ll be at a commemoration like the one I attended today:

—in a district where the supposedly bitter folks cling to their guns and their religion, a district that voted for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama by about 75% to 25%—no one expressed the least doubt about what our war dead have died for, and continue to die for: their country, if it came down to that.

There were no movie cameras recording the event I attended in rural America. There were no luminaries, or representatives from the government. Soldiers, sailors, local guys from the VFW, a pastor, the high school marching band, and maybe 100 local residents gathered to remember their neighbors, and their neighbors’ kids.

It was very moving. I wish David Carr had been there. Perhaps he would have understood that Ms. Rubin’s kind of reporting is worse than no reporting at all.

Memorial Day in rural America

Click here to enlarge.

There are a lot of freelancers doing foreign policy these days, but there is none so reckless as this one:

Britain and other European governments should break from the US over the international embargo on Gaza, former US president Jimmy Carter told the Guardian yesterday. Carter, visiting the Welsh border town of Hay for the Guardian literary festival, described the EU’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as “supine” and its failure to criticise the Israeli blockade of Gaza as “embarrassing”.

Referring to the possibility of Europe breaking with the US in an interview with the Guardian, he said: “Why not? They’re not our vassals. They occupy an equal position with the US.”

Then he went and “revealed” previously unknown “truths” that paint the United States as a party that is playing in bad faith in the Middle East:

Carter said the Quartet’s policy of not talking to Hamas unless it recognised Israel and fulfilled two other conditions had been drafted by Elliot Abrams, an official in the national security council at the White House. He called Abrams “a very militant supporter of Israel”. … “The Quartet’s final document had been drafted in Washington in advance, and not a line was changed,” he said.

Then, for good measure, he inserted himself in electoral politics:

Earlier, Carter, told Sky News that Hillary Clinton should abandon her battle to become Democratic presidential candidate after the last round of primaries in early June.

But that as as nothing compared to the hell he unleashed with another “revelation”:

Jimmy Carter says Israel had 150 nuclear weapons

Israel has 150 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, former President Jimmy Carter said yesterday, while arguing that the US should talk directly to Iran to persuade it to drop its nuclear ambitions.

His remark, made at the Hay-on-Wye festival which promotes current affairs books and literature, is startling because Israel has never admitted having nuclear weapons, let alone how many, although the world assumes their existence.

After a while, one really does begin to wonder whose side that shitbag is on.  However: it’s pretty obvious that he’s preaching to the European elite choir because he can’t get any traction here at home. And that’s a good thing. Still …

We hear a lot about the evil colonial power Israel. Do we hear about the hi-tech mecca Israel? Not so much … till this past week:

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer:

“Microsoft is as much an Israeli company as an American company,” Ballmer said, adding that the proportion of Microsoft employees per capita in Israel was similar to that in the United States.
Over the past two years, Microsoft bought five companies in Israel, adding to its two R&D centers in Haifa, which employ a total of 600 people. …

Ballmer praised the IT sector in Israel for being very advanced, and said Tel Aviv, as the birthplace of many start-ups, was a type of Silicon Valley.

Google’s Sergey Brin:

How has Israel changed since your previous visits?

“It’s pretty impressive just to see how the tech industry has continued to grow. The development, kind of just looking at the city of Tel Aviv. I mean, there are a bunch of buildings. Maybe I’m crazy, but I feel like there are lots of buildings that weren’t here when I was here last. And I’ve just seen some of the companies and their state of development, the levels developed here - it’s just incredible.”

Those are nice endorsements, of course. But something else is afoot in the Holy Land.
An unusual column from the Ha’aretz columnist Bradley Burston, usually a very low-key writer, tells me that things inside Israel are changing, too. Burston writes an open letter to his Palestinian friends:

I understand that you believe that rockets and mortars from the north, south, east, and, eventually, west, can depopulate and peel back and obliterate the borders of pre-1967 Israel until there will be no need to agree to a Jewish state on those borders, no need to compromise on refugees, Jerusalem, settlements, no need to talk, no need for self-scrutiny and reconsideration, no need to bend.

I understand that you believe that this is your right, religiously, morally, politically. I understand why you believe that you can wait.

But this month, three generations since 1948, since your Nakba, this is what I ask you to consider:

Your time is running out.

If you do not begin to act with all of your wisdom in moving toward statehood, you run the risk of becoming the Kurds of the Mediterranean basin, the Native Americans of the Middle East, permanently stateless, eternally denied.

If you do not begin to rethink the course which the Palestinian national movement has taken, you must begin to consider the idea of a world without a Palestine. The world is beginning to feel more and more comfortable with that possibility, and it is time for you to think hard about the reasons why.

We in the post-modern West have spent years educating ourselves to believe that all cultures are equally valid - with the possible exception, of course, of our own. We have taken it on faith that to criticize the culture of an indigenous people is obscenely imperialist, paternalist.

In short, we gave you a pass. And we encouraged you to give yourselves one. In respecting you for your steadfastness, we refrained from calling you on your passivity. In accepting and amplifying your contentions as to Israel’s acts of wrongdoing, we chose not to hold you accountable for your own, or to explain them away as a function of occupation,

You learned, over time, to hold Israel responsible for the whole of your plight. You learned, over time, to ignore, explain away, blame entirely on Israel, or otherwise deny the ways in which your actions and, in particular, your passivity, have deepened and fostered your misery. You learned to excuse your leaders their corruption, and their policy of foiling Israeli and foreign attempts to improve your conditions. You learned to excuse your Arab brothers their duplicity and their lip service and their exploitation and their cold shoulder and their contempt and their consummate failure to come to your aid.

In the process, you may have grown accustomed to a definition of time, and of indigenous peoples, that bears re-examination. There is, first of all, this:

The Jews are an indigenous people here, no less than you.

The Jews have every right to have a nation here, no less than you.

The Jews are stubborn and proud and fundamentally fierce as hell, no less than you.

You have dismissed the Jews as a foreign influence. You have dismissed their history, waved away their blood and sinew tie to Jerusalem, acted as though they have no business here but evil.

But in the decades you have spent misleading yourself about the true nature of the culture and the origins of the Jews, generation upon generation of Jews has been born here. They are natives. They are not going anywhere. And even the leftists among them are willing to die in defense of staying on this soil.

Food for thought … one hopes.