Aces Full of Links

"One, two, three, jihaaad!"

I know the Economist would be informative. But part of the reason I don’t get a subscription is that I don’t want to have to read stuff like this:

“…they detained 70 men from districts indentified by their informant as ‘bad.’ In near-freezing conditions, they sat hooded and bound in their pyjamas. They shivered uncontrollably. One wetted himself in fear. Most had been detained at random; several had been held because they had a Kalashnikov rifle, which is legal. The evidence against one man was some anti-American literature, a meat cleaver, and a tin whistle. American intelligence officers moved through the ranks of detainees, raising their hoods to take mugshots: ‘One, two, three, jihaaad!’ A middle-tier officer commented on the mission: ‘When we do this,’ he said. ‘We lose.’”

Saw this excerpt from an Economist article on James Wolcott’s site.

Iraq these days seems like a whole lot of war-fighting sandwiched between trying to help the Iraqis on one side and events that would scare shitless anyone who lived in such an area.

Faced with stories like this, continuing supporters of the war have to either conclude that

1. the reporters are full of shit (maybe this guy is another Michael Moore with an axe to grind… and there’s another, and there’s another) and/or
2. in the balance, the Iraq war comes out on the plus side.

(There are also the people who say we’re in there and so now we can’t leave, but even they must have an opinion on stories like the above.)

I’m going to pooh-pooh any conspiracy theories that nothing like what appears in this Economist article ever happens. Seeing Michael Moore behind every headline is paranoid, and with the US elections in the past there is no longer the excuse of making Bush look bad to get rid of him. Agenda are still possible, but can any reasonable person believe that these reports are created from whole cloth when we have seen footage to the contrary?

I give the majority of the military the benefit for being noble representatives of our great country, but this isn’t about a general tarring of the military. This is about part “2” above. What happens in the balance.

So, assuming we’re talking about factual events, my question is, how do you figure any sort of balance? Is it even possible to say an actual balance exists when events don’t, in reality, cancel each other out?

We can focus on all of the “good” stories we want over here, (see Steve’s FOX news post) but all that will do is reinforce or influence our own perceptions here, and the perceptions of others here. The perceptions of Iraqis toward us are in the hands of our representatives. However wonderful the majority of those representatives may be, there is evidence that we have some pretty sucky ones as well.

What’s that mean for the future of Iraq and our future? I’m going to say it’s probably not happy things.

“Their contempt for Iraqis is undisguised and dramatically expressed”

I think I need to overcome my squeamishness and cheapness and subscribe to the Economist. Of course, there’s always the library. Support your local libraries, in Iraq and elsewhere!

Posted by James at January 3, 2005 4:50 PM
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