Zarqawi again

Giving the murderer a name seems to make things even worse, though it’s hard to say why this should be.

Perhaps because it personalises something that otherwise could be construed as inhuman and impersonal and therefore to a degree more distanced. Naming things, particularly, agents on the whole tends to make actions somehow more up close (though not all the time). But this is just a guess.

Although Zarqawi wasn’t personally responsible, the al Qaeda murder of Daniel Pearl in 2002 was almost identical to this case, and had no particular “justification” beyond the fact that Pearl, like Berg, was a Jew1. More generally, claims of this kind are usually a pretext for, or retrospective justification of, crimes that would have been committed anyway.

This is not exactly a new phenomenon, as the case of the four missing trekkers from Kashmir who were kidnapped, by Lashkar-e-Taiba I think, indicates. One of the trekkers, a Norwegian was beheaded in a similar manner and his body recovered by the security forces later, while the others are still missing.

Second, and despite the first point, Zarqawi’s claim will come to be accepted as the truth unless the West as a whole makes a decisive break in the downward spiral we are now watching. This means taking real responsibility for the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

Well, I don’t disagree with the sentiment; but ‘the West’ is probably too broad a label to use here given that the military intervention and occupation was/is the responsibility of only certain countries with the more slippery entity known by the former tag could have been said to be quite bitterly divided over the whole enterprise.

Sadly, I can’t see any of this happening. We will all pay dearly for this disaster in the future.

Mostly likely, true, though again I think the problem is a systemic one; as states (even democratic ones) have not had a good record on facing up to their responsibilities when it comes to such things.

I haven’t see the video, but according to this, he has only one leg (the other was amputated in Baghdad after being wounded in Afghanistan). I know prosthetics are very good these days, but that ought to be a bit of a giveaway.
I don’t think many people buy the ‘retaliation’ explanation, the Daniel Pearl parallel is too obvious. I’d still like to know why Nick Berg was held in a US jail for so long, and, indeed, how he came to be captured.
Abu Ghraib was hated and feared by Iraqis; and some of our own people, like Andy McNab, were tortured there in Gulf War I. The post-invasion rioting destroyed every fixture. I thought that, at the very least, they should have changed the name of the prison. The Army Times said earlier this week, “One can only wonder why the prison wasn’t razed in the wake of the invasion as a symbolic stake through the heart of the Baathist regime.”
I think Rumsfeld should go, not for the recent photos from Abu Ghraib, but for everything since April 9 last year.

More generally, claims of this kind are usually a pretext for, or retrospective justification of, crimes that would have been committed anyway.

Yeah, and funny that, I thought accepting at face value a terrorist’s declared motive for a terrorist act equalled, or was dangerously close to, an apology for terrorism.

Guess the people saying Berg was killed _because_ of the torture photos consider themselves exempted from that rule.

— technical note: John, you left the “h” out of the link to Public Spaces (last link in your article). It starts with “ttp://” so the link is broken.

If we need a thorough investigation into anything to avoid a “downward spiral”, everybody oughta strap on a parachute and swallow a handful of Dramamine, because we’re doomed. Seems to me like roughly half the Republican party is now in favor of torture as state policy.

I don’t think it’s Zarqawi, though. Some commentators have said the Arabic voice reading the statement doesn’t have a Jordanian accent. (Including CNN’s entire Arabic-language staff, apparently.) I’ve listened to an audio recording supposedly attributed to Zarqawi, and it sounds sufficiently dissimilar for me to question it.

So I wonder whether Zarqawi’s name has become associated with his group in the way that one group of terrorists became known as ‘Abu Nidal’. From reading of Zarqawi’s movements, and his apparent rivalry with bin Laden in the 1990s, he seems to be a bit of an egomaniac: someone who definitely wouldn’t settle for being a ‘lieutenant’ in someone else’s organisation.

These were not terrified, broken prisoners. These were prisoners who thought, “Is that all they’ve got? No problem.”

Oh, fuck off. Apart from the reports of released prisoners sufficiently humiliated to be driven from their homes, I’d like to see you cope with being picked up off the street and taken to the cells for a broomstick up the arse. Is your sobriquet of ‘bull’ followed by the surname ‘shitter’?

Oh, to be treated like a woman! Oh, oh, oh!

How smart and funny. Because to be threatened, stripped naked, raped, sodomised with light bulbs and tied up with live wires is how women normally get treated. Everyone knows that. Lynndie England certainly knew that very well.

The video is here, or at least it was yesterday. It’s truly horrifying.
http://www.annoy.com/sectionless/beheading.wmv.

Nick and pepi,

You guys don’t read so good. I don’t condone brutality by prison guards. Anyone who shoves “a broomstick up the arse” of a prisoner or who has “raped, sodomised” a prisoner should be sent to jail for a long, long time.

My statement had two parts. First, the reaction to the pictures has been overwrought. The actions in the pictures were stupid, and no doubt ineffective, but not brutal. Second, I don’t believe that the brutal actions were nearly as prevalent as many people, including the two of you, believe. And the fact that you totally misconstrued what I wrote and accused me of condoning actions I don’t condone, tells me I shouldn’t trust your judgment about anything, including the level of brutality in Abu Ghraib.

hey, bull genius, what does “*Oh, to be treated like a woman! Oh, oh, oh!*” mean?

Is there any other parallel universe where it can be read as a reasonable definition of the treatment of those prisoners?

A more reasonable one than “torture” to you, I imagine?

Or is it just because you just heard about this thing called the “Geneva Convention”, and you thought “Geneva” in there stands for the name of a woman?

And pardon my excessive curiosity for all things trash, but what specific part of the treatment of those prisoners were you thinking of that according to you would fit the “be treated like a woman” description?

Those who deny Abu Ghraib’s significance are as foolish as those who want to believe that Abu Ghraib, as significant as it is, is more important than winning the war.

To be clear, there are two truths here that need to be kept in mind:

1) the abuses at Abu Ghraib were appalling and must be investigated and punished appropriately;

2) we must continue the strong progress we are making in this war and win it, for the sake of the Iraqis, the region and for our own sake.

Abu Ghraib represents a specific moral and practical failure. But it does not invalidate the broader justice of the war– a war that, relative to the other two options of continuing the cruel, vile sanctions regime or lifting sanctions and doing business with Saddam, was the only liberal and moral course of action. We must win this war, and Abu Ghraib must not recur precisely because it hurts our ability to win the war.

Blair and Lieberman both make this case, and make it well. A shame that other politicians (of both parties) and so many editors and journalists seem incapable of any kind of calm and reasoned analysis. Interesting that the benighted American people in the heartland appear now to be making elemental moral and intellectual distinctions that are beyond the capabilities of their betters in Manhattan and the Beltway.

Finally, I’m afraid I’m going to have to decline your and pepi’s kind offers to chat.

Off to do something goofy? Enjoy.

Blair and Lieberman both make this case, and make it well.

Neither do, to my mind: Blair especially not. That’s because you’re putting into his mouth a post facto justification that not even he can deliver with much credibility, having shot his bolt (far more so than Bush) in basing the case for war on WMDs.

Had Blair tried to persuade the Commons to support war with Iraq based only on the justification you cite, he’d be in political retirement by now.

As for Lieberman, it’s quite instructive to see someone who has never passed up an opportunity to play the holier-than-thou card in the debate on culture and mores turn into quite the nauseating moral relativist, defining deviance down in order to preserve his sense of vindication.

Interesting that the benighted American people in the heartland appear now to be making elemental moral and intellectual distinctions that are beyond the capabilities of their betters in Manhattan and the Beltway.

Oh dear. I’m sure that argumentum ad Nebraskam has made it to the list of logical fallacies by now. If not, it should. What a facile piece of nothing.

How cute! Nick knows some schoolboy latin!

A shame his talent for lame sarcasm isn’t matched by an ability to think clearly.

Nick’s preferred solution to the nightmare presented by the Saddam-Uday-Qusay slaughterhouse was, what, exactly?

Maintaining the wretched sanctions regime that Saddam and his pimps in New York, Paris and Moscow manipulated so as to cause the starvation of thousands of Iraqis EVERY MONTH?

Or does Nick propose we should have followed the oilmen’s preferred path: lift the sanctions and sign multi-billion $ deals with a mass murderer who had transformed his state into a hub of international terror? (Not that concern for international law and UN sanctions prevented TotalFinaElf and LUKoil from doing that anyway.)

The only alternative to the above two options was to overthrow Saddam by force–which is exactly what the Democratic Party overwhelmingly endorsed in 1998, and which is the policy pursued by Clinton when he unilaterally attacked Saddam’s Iraq in early 1999. Bush’s war continued Clinton’s war.

Perhaps Nick agrees with this option but believes that such an overthrow should have used other troops–perhaps Saudis? Blue helmets? As much as he likes to evade thought, I doubt even he would urge that states such as France and Russia, for who Saddam was their most proftiable and valuable client in the middle east, would have supported overthrowing him.

The only alternative to overthrowing Saddam was to allow–and in fact, to aid and abet–Saddam and his sons’ continuing slaughter of thousands of Iraqis each month. The crucial fact is that war was the only liberal and humane option, and this is a war that we must and will win.

Regards,

Tombo

Tombo —

Leave aside the fact that the war was not justified to the American people or to Congress as a humanitarian venture. Let’s suppose we’re back at the beginning of 2003. Look about you. There is Iraq. There is North Korea. There is the Congo. There is Sudan. There is Liberia. On a scale, how would you rank these potential humanitarian preemptive wars? If we were going there to invest hundreds of billions of dollars, the entire strength of our military and hundreds of casualties, why choose Iraq?

Obviously, the answer is that this war was not a humanitarian gesture.

Cafl,

Thanks for attempting to deal seriously with the issue. Your question deserves more time and reflection than I can supply now, but here’s a limited, brief attempt to answer it.

Iraq’s exceptionalism has much to do with the enormous vested economic and political interests of France and Russia there.

Ironically, it is precisely because of Iraq’s oil wealth and its strategic position that top French and Russian officals, and the UN’s administrator for Oil for Food, were so keen to preserve Saddam’s grip on power and frustrate any containment effort that would inhibit the flow of billions in kick backs to French and Russian firms, politicians and priests.

Their complicity in Saddam’s manipulation of the sanctions–complicity that was, as they say, “all about oil” related profits– meant that containment of Saddam had the perverse effect of aggravating the humanitarian situation. There was no way to “box in” Saddam without also contributing thousands of Iraqi deaths. The Iraqi humanitarian issue could not be separated from the Iraqi security issue because of the impossibility of “smart sanctions.”

In the other cases you cite I don’t see such a catch-22. I’m not an expert on Korea or Africa but I would suspect that containment could be more effective in those nations, mainly because the ex-colonial western powers are not competing for billions of dollars in contracts and therefore are less likely to undermine UN or other sanctions efforts.

Rgds,
T

The “why not overthrow every tyrant everywhere?” all-or-nothing canard has been answered, repeatedly. Wars of regime change can’t possibly occur simultaneously, and regime change needn’t always follow the rubric of Iraq. Certainly no military action is possible against North Korea because of their strength, and certainly no military action is necessary in Burma because of the existence of reform elements in that country. So no, supporting the invasion of Iraq does not mean one must support military invasion against every country the world over.

Moreoever, these invasions needn’t occur simultaneously. I would be perfectly happy if the United States followed a Wilsonian agenda — utilizing more carrot than stick — over the next few decades, but I would be extremely upset if the US attempted to manage the affairs of 27 formerly tyrannical countries simultaneously.

The “Saddam is not the only thug the world, not even the only one in the Arab world, so why overthrow only him?” critique ignores the concept of a timeline, the importance of tactics, and the fundamentals of long-term strategy.

A better question is “Saddam is not the only thug in the world, so why start with him?” I have an answer to this, but we all tire of rehashing these old arguments.

So many of these long discussions end in a boring argument as to why the Iraq war was started and what was its purpose.

I thought it was about non-compliance with the UN, but what do I know?

Doesn’t that make you wonder? It should be quite possible to establish why the war was started. What did the initiators say was the reason. If we have good reason to doubt the initiators, then someone needs to build up a dossier of proof as to the real reason why the war was started. Keep that dossier on a web-page and then whenever the debate starts again, just refer readers to the information. Or am I being too simple?

I agree: they had the chance, they should have started with Zarqawi. Squandering that opportunity was strategically and morally obtuse, totally unforgivable. If anything, apprehending Zarqawi would have strengthened the drive for regime change. I wonder, did they ever release an official excuse for this failure?

“…In that case either we could threaten invasion and mean it…”

???

As opposed to, er, invading?

rajeev: tsk, tsk, straw man alert…

I did not say the question was “why not overthrow every tyrant everywhere?”, but “why Saddam” – it is different, the emphasis is on the case for war in Iraq and the need to make it clear and coherent.

It’s not a case of all-or-nothing. It’s about accounting for your strategy by explaining why you need to go after Saddam right now, and why, for instance, block investigations into things concerning the Saudis. Or why Musharaf is an ally against terrorism.

And I’m saying this as someone who was not even opposed to the war in Iraq. I went from being totally unconvinced to accepting there might be a more sensible strategy there than it seemed, after all – but I still have no proof for that hypothesis.

And I still feel rather led by the nose by the arguments used and the lack of satisfying response to those other questions about other dictatorships that seemed to have a clearer, overt connection to terrorism. And to 9/11 in the specific.

Wars of regime change can’t possibly occur simultaneously, and regime change needn’t always follow the rubric of Iraq.

Of course, but that is turning the question upside down.

Besides, precisely because regime change doesn’t always have to involve war, that allows for more simultaneous action.

Certainly no military action is possible against North Korea because of their strength

Well see that’s a very counterproductive argument to use. Especially if put in those terms.

So no, supporting the invasion of Iraq does not mean one must support military invasion against every country the world over.

I never said that or believed that either.

So, no, I’m not going for the “all-or-nothing” thinking. And of course an anti-terrorism policy doesn’t have to involve military invasion in each case. It can only be something like allowing an extremely relevant investigation to continue in full.

Investigations surely can occur simultaneously on different entities, right? it seems to be an essential requirement of anti-terrorism.

The “Saddam is not the only thug the world, not even the only one in the Arab world, so why overthrow only him?” critique ignores the concept of a timeline, the importance of tactics, and the fundamentals of long-term strategy.

Yeah, if that strategy had been explained and managed coherently.

A better question is “Saddam is not the only thug in the world, so why start with him?”

Absolutely. That’s exactly what I meant. That is the question and the meaning I had in mind. I didn’t think adding a “start with” would be necessary to make it clearer.

I have an answer to this, but we all tire of rehashing these old arguments.

Probably, yes. But they’re still relevant to the question of what to do in Iraq from now on.

It doesn’t matter what you or me says. What matters is what those in charge reply to that question, today. Instead, now the military invasion part is done, the reasons why are now sort of being taken for granted, no longer accounted for, no longer even brought up. It’s ok to concentrate on rebuilding Iraq. It’s not ok to sidestep accounting for why we’re there in the first place. Because now is the best time to account for it – not with pro or against arguments before the fact, but with results.

Ps – to rajeev: when you say, “Squandering that opportunity was strategically and morally obtuse, totally unforgivable”, well, can you explain how you manage to keep trusting an overall strategy that proves morally obtuse and totally unforgivable in such a relevant aspect (and not just that one either)?

Believe me I have no firm certainties here. No radical positions. Not pro-war, not anti-war, I’m just trying to figure it out. Honestly. When I came to the temporary conclusion that, hey, they might know what they’re doing after all, I was making a leap of faith. Based on nothing other than the US and UK being more reliable and sane than the then Iraqi regime. That’s so not enough.

I’m ok with wallowing in doubt, I’m used to that. I just hope they know what they’re doing. There you go, after two years, after reading all sorts of possible documents and analyses and strategical forecasting, I’m back to being required a leap of faith. It’s not exactly an encouraging feeling.

Heh. Well. Maybe. Still, better to be a coward than a terrorist!

(The above statement is irrefutable in view of the current zeitgeist.)

PS — Apologies about the straw- man argument. I actually have had to make that point before, though :)

Let’s have a political discussion about some life-and-death conflicts in places on the other side of the world.
The rules are:
I get to choose the people we talk about, and the words we use to describe them – “al-Sadr” and “Zarqawi” and “terrorist” and “firebrand”, for instance – since these will be people you’ve never heard of before, you’ll just have to take my word for it. I will provide examples to back up my definitions, but there will be no rebuttal.
I also get to define the actions and conflicts that we’ll be discussing, with morally-loaded nouns like “attack” “defend” “response” and “insurgency”; these terms and definitions will not be open to debate.
I will have complete control of a very tightly-configured bottleneck on all the news on these subjects you get; unless, that is, you want to spend 4 or 5 hours every day online researching nothing but the available internet journalism on the topic under discussion; however, even then, non-mainstream internet journalism will have no value as citation in this argument. First-person eye-witness accounts are inadmissible unless they’re from sanctioned journalists, and I’ll be the only authority for sanctioning journalists.

Aside from that, you can have and defend any opinion that you feel comfortable having or defending, provided you accept the above conditions.
Ready?

After the mystery of Wandering Berg, has anyone yet suggested that the fake photos of British Soldiers were done to deflect attention from the US prison photos?

Judging by the shifting rationales, the denying of the source of the early impetus to pin anything on SH for a casus belli, methinks there was no nobility to the decision for regime change, no liberal vision of a freed people gone democratic amusement park.

Too much reeks of two motivations. Undoing the unsatisfactory result of the first Gulf War (the Inigo Montoya factor) and a garden-variety pursuit of lucre. Whenever the truth seems elusive and complicated, I’ve found it the most reliable to first ‘follow the money’. The evidence so supports that hunch while other theories lead to I-suppose-it-could-happen-that-way, that it remains the best guess among many.

Chalabi, Feith, Perle, Cheney and others, including anyone sharing the Carlyle Group portfolio, have gained great gobs of lucre both today and tomorrow, borrowing their investment capital from their favorite lending institute, the Bank of the Unwitting Taxpayer.

Vindication, the brawny rush of macho power asserted and personal greed remain the most viable rationales and the rest seem like afterthoughts. When honor, resppect, patriotism, God and undeterred determination are invoked and promoted, it’s ALWAYS wise to count the silverware.

The surest clues for this war remain the inability for anyone to quantify its cost within 7 or 8 decimal points and the funds shifted between kitties without Congressional assent.

In retrospect, taking out Zarqawi first would have kept Americans safer. As it wasn’t done, rather than supposition of a judgment error, it suggests that keeping Americans safer was simply not a primary motive.