The long-delayed National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq is out. It’s a Friday so it must suck.
More at WaPo.
by Tim F| 164 Comments
This post is in: War
The long-delayed National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq is out. It’s a Friday so it must suck.
More at WaPo.
by Tim F| 41 Comments
This post is in: Blogospheric Navel-Gazing
Greenwald joins Salon.
In response to some reader complaints Glenn wrote:
But there is a more nefarious sentiment underlying some of these complaints, and it is pervasive and significant. There is a strain of belief, found among some on the left (and again, I think it’s a very small minority), which perceives issues like funding and income-generating models as some sort of insult, as something unethical and impure. And then there is another strain which is about unbridled personal entitlement — the belief that they are entitled to access whatever they want, and have everything they want, without the slightest amount of expenditure or effort on their part (all the effort, expenditure and sacrifice should be from others).
I’m sorry that there are people who think that clicking through an ad (or subscribing to avoid it) is a grave insult and an outrageous imposition. It also can be an inconvenience for bloggers (or political analysts or activists of any kind) who — driven by passion and a desire to contribute in some way to improving the state of the country — spend 3 hours per day or 8 hours per day or 12 hours per day on their work without being able to earn a living. To begrudge someone the ability to do so — or to act as though they are engaged in an act of betrayal or even some kind of corruption — because they find a way to work on behalf of their political ideas and earn a living doing it is truly bizarre.
I have a hard time understanding this “controversy.” The blogosphere isn’t one uniform place. There isn’t one way to be a blogger, there isn’t one way to be a liberal blogger (whether Glenn is actually liberal is a topic for another day). Nobody has written a uniform blogger code of conduct, and if someone did nobody would sign it.
However, the small number of talented bloggers who have decided to make their writing into a primary career have to pay the mortgage, feed kids and occasionally see a dentist using nothing more than money that comes in from words that they put out for free. It seems like a positive development in terms of the quality/quantity of their output and a good sign for the growth of our medium that people are even able to do that now. Take it as a sign that traditional forms of media know that we’re important. Whatever means (legal of course and if conflicts may be involved, disclosed) that full-time bloggers find to pay the bills and keep free words coming strikes me as entirely their prerogative.
As for me, I have a career that I enjoy quite a bit. I don’t take any money from blogging and if somebody offered it to me I would turn it down. The last thing my busy day needs is more pressure on top of the expectations of my readers and that annoying writer’s itch. But it seems like nothing but good news that the medium has matured enough that the best can go pro.
by Tim F| 465 Comments
This post is in: War
Unlike Dick Cheney most of us are having a hard time finding signs of progress in Iraq. Al Qaeda is stirring the pot as enthusiastically as ever, reconstruction has basically ended while violence makes building unfeasible. Bloody civil war, reprisals and counter-reprisals and even the safety of our own troops (how many helicopters have we lost in the last two weeks?) seem to indicate a country that is slowly, inexorably circling the drain.
It could be that Cheney had in mind the 300,000+ new Iraqi forces that we’ve trained and equipped. In a happy world where everything works exactly as advertised, that would be a great point. Too bad we don’t live in that world.
U.S. Army commanders and enlisted men who are patrolling east Baghdad, which is home to more than half the city’s population and the front line of al-Sadr’s campaign to drive rival Sunni Muslims from their homes and neighborhoods, said al-Sadr’s militias had heavily infiltrated the Iraqi police and army units that they’ve trained and armed.
“Half of them are JAM. They’ll wave at us during the day and shoot at us during the night,” said 1st Lt. Dan Quinn, a platoon leader in the Army’s 1st Infantry Division, using the initials of the militia’s Arabic name, Jaish al Mahdi. “People (in America) think it’s bad, but that we control the city. That’s not the way it is. They control it, and they let us drive around. It’s hostile territory.”
[…] After U.S. units pounded al-Sadr’s men in August 2004, the cleric apparently decided that instead of facing American tanks, he’d use the Americans’ plans to build Iraqi security forces to rebuild his own militia.So while Iraq’s other main Shiite militia, the Badr Brigade, concentrated in 2005 on packing Iraqi intelligence bureaus with high-level officers who could coordinate sectarian assassinations, al-Sadr went after the rank and file.
His recruits began flooding into the Iraqi army and police, receiving training, uniforms and equipment either directly from the U.S. military or from the American-backed Iraqi Defense Ministry.
The infiltration by al-Sadr’s men, coupled with his strength in Iraq’s parliament after U.S.-backed elections, gave him leeway to operate death squads throughout the capital, according to more than a week of interviews with American soldiers patrolling Baghdad. Some U.S.-trained units carried out sectarian killings themselves, while others, manning checkpoints, allowed militiamen to pass.
Keeping in mind that the army and the militias are one and the same, it seems difficult to come up with a workable strategy for imposing American will on Iraq. By ourselves we lack the manpower to do much more than defend our own bases. Even when we “surge” in to Baghdad we won’t have the force to clear neighborhoods and then hold them. Without the help of the militia-infused Iraqi forces we end up stuck in an endless game of whack-a-mole while the bandits clear out ahead of us and then reform after we move on.
Real power in Iraq now rests with the major Shia power brokers, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Iranain-backed parties. America can’t change that. All that we can do now is go on bleeding until either politics or readiness constraints pulls the plug.
The Sunni minority, of course, knows what’s coming and our Sunni allies in the mideast are understandably frantic about it. We owe it to the mideast to maintain enough force to dissuade Turkey and Iran from going in and to prevent the bloody civil war from going out, but to be honest I expect that the president’s quixotic windmill quest won’t even leave us with that option. By the time reality makes it through the bubble there may be nothing left to do but come home.
by John Cole| 84 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics, General Stupidity
Because we are too stupid to know the difference between an ad campaign and a terrorist attack:
Two men pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges they created panic by placing electronic light boards that caused a bomb scare Wednesday in Boston.
The boards depicted a cartoon character making an obscene gesture at passing motorists.
Assistant Attorney General John Grossman called the light boards “bomb-like” devices and said that if they had been explosive they could have damaged transportation infrastructure in the city.
Give me a damned break. Charge them with littering- that makes sense. Creating a panic does not, especially since it was theidiotauthorities who created the panic.
by Tim F| 95 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
From the online news service of the journal Nature:
‘The vision’, as it is often referred to within the agency, was first outlined by President George W. Bush on 14 January 2004. It marks a radical new direction for America’s human spaceflight programme. For the past two decades, NASA has been preoccupied with shuttling people to and from a low Earth orbit, mostly to visit the International Space Station. But the vision “is fundamentally different”, says Shana Dale, second in command at NASA. “It’s about extending human presence on another world.”
This extension, however, can’t be built on the cheap; NASA’s early estimates put the cost of the programme through to 2018 at around $104 billion. To meet this bill, the agency is committed to grounding the space shuttle fleet in 2010 and cutting back its spending on the space station, which should be completed by then (see chart). It is also delaying and cancelling space-based science missions in astronomy, planetary science and Earth observation, as well as aeronautics programmes. Louis Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, a Pasadena-based educational organization in California that regularly criticizes this reallocation of resources, complains: “This is attacking exploration to supposedly pay for exploration.”
Noted without comment.
***Update***
Might want to divest your coastal property.
Climate factors such as sea-level rise may be changing more rapidly than predicted, according to a new survey of global trends since 1990. The figures suggest that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which publishes a fresh assessment of climate change tomorrow, may have previously underestimated the changes that lie ahead.
Researchers led by Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany studied the most recent data for atmospheric carbon dioxide, global temperatures and sea level. They calculate that carbon dioxide levels are rising in line with predictions, but that temperatures are rising in line with the upper limit predicted by the IPCC, and that sea-level rises are on the very edge of the worst-case predictions of climate models.
Look for a very gloomy news day when the IPCC releases its final report.
At one point in my life I felt a sense of urgency about this. Back in my personal environmental heyday, roughly the 1990’s, I had the feeling that we could still stop short of the invisible threshold, and I had a sense that we might soon have leaders who knew the right thing to do. Amory Lovins was my hero.
Then America elected profoundly stupid people, the kind who had powerful ideological and mercenary reasons to ignore the obvious. Disturbingly, during the period when I patiently waited for normal people to take charge “interesting” things started happening very fast. Polar ice started disappearing, permafrost defrosted, glacier melt accelerated, the sea began acidifying and now, right on cue, sea level has proved the most pessimistic models right.
At this point I don’t have anything particular to offer. In the unlikely event that we stopped greenhouse emissions today the lag effect would go on driving Earth in the direction of “interesting” for some years to come. Climate often has a funny threshold effect where the feedback balance (natural forces which either resist or encourage change) switches from positive to negative to positive (dyslexic me). Ice at the poles reflects sunlight while open water absorbs it, so the more water we have at the poles the more heat energy the Earth will absorb. Thawed permafrost will burp huge amounts of methane, a far more effective greenhouse gas than CO2. At some point what we do with our emissions won’t really matter anymore.
Better men than myself – Al Gore, Hunter Lovins – have fought this fight for thirty years or more, back when a relatively painless transition to sensible policies might have done real good. After some years of thinking about it I finally decided that the pain has to come first, the frog has to find itself in a good rolling boil, before the confidence artists and paid hacks are shamed into silence. Of course by then the only possible solutions will be so insanely draconian that we will probably just learn to live with a new quality of life, and a new climate regime, a new coastline.
This post is in: Politics
Tim has already linked to the Biden issue, but it is just sooo juicy and soo delicious I felt the need to break out of my hibernation and talk about it. Let;s frist clear some things up- Biden will never be the President. Never ever ever. So maybe this disastrous performance this early has saved you, me, and the American public a lot of time, energy, and money. On to his money quote:
“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
I don’t think Joe Biden is racist, and I don’t think that statement was racist- I think he meant exactly what he meant- Barack Obama is the first black guy running who actually has a chance to win. When he says “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” he means electable.
And he is right. Sure Jesse Jackson is bright and articulate, and his speech in 1988 is one for the ages. But he was so far out of the mainstream that he would never be elected. The same for Alan Keyes. Al Sharpton is articulate and entertaining, but has a track record of evil behavior (Tawana, anyone?) that will keep him out of the office.
What Joen Biden meant is that Obama is the first black man who has run for President who has a shot at actually winning. I don’t think that can be disputed.
The larger story here is that Biden’s unwise word choice is merely a symptom of his larger problem- the reason he will never be elected. Biden loves the cameras too much- almost as much as he loves the sound of his own voice. When Biden talks (and we have all heard him, as not a week goes by without him on a talk show), people do not know whether he believes what he is saying, or if he is saying what he thinks you want to believe, or if he is just saying things to hear his own voice.
I am sure Biden defenders/supporters can point to things Biden has been right about, and can come up with a list of reasons why he would be a good President, but I think Biden’s image with the American public is one of the guy who had two or three beers, talked freely to let you know what he really thinks, and left you wishing he hadn’t.