War
drorzel | June 19, 2007My friend Paul, the Official Middle East Correspondant of Uncertain Principles, has been doing another rotation in Baghdad, and has sent an update on the "surge." This latest dispatch describes some... reliability issues with the Iraqui police forces who are supposed to be stepping up to provide internal security. There's a certain Monty Python element to some of this:
The police were mostly stretched out in a building near the mosque, taking a nap, wearing mismatched bits of camouflage. Their sergeant looked like he'd just woken up and said he had no idea how those flags got all over the…
drorzel | May 28, 2007It's Memorial Day in the US, which is the official public tribute to the dead of our various wars. This is marked with parades, and ceremonies at cemetaries in towns all across the country.
When I was a kid, we always went to the parade in town, which went from the center of town out to the main cemetary, where they would have a short ceremony in which the American Legion chaplain would lay a wreath at a representative grave, and they would fire guns in tribute. When I was in junior high and high school, I used to play "Taps" for them on the trumpet.
There was also always a reading of the…
drorzel | May 17, 2007As regular readers know, my friend Paul is a journalist based in the Middle East, and spent a year working as a reporter in Baghdad. He finished that a little while ago, but he's back, and has sent another of his intermittent dispatches.
I've been posting these to the blog when I get them. This one, I'm putting entirely below the fold, because it's a little more disturbing than some-- it's a story about a guy getting killed in a sniper attack. It's not the sort of cheery story that makes you think our little Mesopotamian adventure is going to end well, and it's a little graphic, so read on at…
drorzel | May 4, 2007As mentioned previously, there was a talk on campus last night by a couple of activists, Michael Berg and Joan Mandle. Berg is an anti-war activist, best known as the father of Nick Berg who was infamously beheaded on video in Iraq. He's also a former Green Party candidate for Congress in Delaware. Mandle is the Executive Director of Democracy Matters, a student activist group dedicated to election reform.
Berg's story was mostly personal, and very interesting, but I don't have a great deal to say about it. Mandle's talk was more a straigthforward pitch for public financing of elections…
drorzel | May 2, 2007There's going to be a dinner/ discussion event tomorrow night featuring Michael Berg and Joan Mandle, who I gather are anti-war activists of some standing (I'll post some of the biographical information from the announcement below the fold). Anybody have any questions they're dying to ask either of them? If I get any good suggestions, I'll try to ask them and report back.
Biographical notes:
*****Michael Berg, a retired teacher and antiwar activist, ran for Congress in the state of Delaware on the Green Party ticket in the 2006 midterm elections. He is most well-known as the father of Nick…
drorzel | January 30, 2007Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings points out an honest-to-God terrorist conviction that didn't make a big splash in the news. Guess why:
GREENBELT, Maryland - Robert F. Weiler, Jr., age 25, of Forestville, Maryland pleaded guilty today to possessing a pipe bomb (an unregistered destructive device), being a felon in possession of a firearm and attempting to destroy or damage an abortion clinic located on Greenbelt Road in Greenbelt, Maryland, announced United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein.
As Thoreau notes, had he been a Muslim rather than a right-wing…
drorzel | January 3, 2007As you know if you've been reading these occasional updates, my friend Paul has been working as a reporter in Baghdad for the last year. He's based in Cairo, but has been spending six weeks at a stretch in Baghdad, with breaks of a week or two at home.
His Iraq shift has come to an end, and he's moving back to Egypt full-time. This is the final dispatch from Iraq, in which he reflects on his year as an interpid war correspondant.
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So that was it. The plane took off, we did the familiar stomach churning spin and I looked out and watched the airport dip in and out…
drorzel | December 30, 2006Matt Yglesias nails it when talking about faux-outrage over people complaining about the execution of Saddam Hussein:
Do these guys not understand the concept of principles? The point of the belief that all people are entitled to fair trials before receiving criminal sentences is that all people are entitled to fair trials. The point of the belief that capital punishment is immoral (not a belief I share, incidentally) is that it's always immoral. It's not as if Amnesty International is confused and doesn't understand that Saddam isn't a very sympathetic case. Rather, the point is that…
drorzel | December 19, 2006Over at Inside Higher Ed, Edward Palm gets all Swiftian:
The Department of Defense finds itself desperately short of troops with which to sustain what promises to be a long and increasingly unpopular, inconclusive war in Iraq. The Department of Education finds itself suddenly alarmed by the relatively low percentage of Americans pursuing postsecondary education compared to the rate of participation in other countries. American colleges and universities find themselves bucking the current demographic trend such that some of them are lowering standards as they compete for fewer and fewer…
drorzel | December 14, 2006Here's the latest of the intermittent updates (I actually skipped one, but I'll come back to it on a slow day one of these days) from my friend Paul, who's working as a journalist in Baghdad (and, thankfully, just about done with his tour there). This is one of the most opinionated of the occasional dispatches he's sent, and also probably the sharpest. It doesn't really have a moral, but true war stories never do.
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The word of the air strike came around mid-morning. I was actually the one to take the call from our stringer in Samarra. He said 32 people had been killed in an…
drorzel | November 27, 2006Another update from my friend Paul, working as a journalist in Baghdad, this time on an unfortunate collision between the Sci-Fi Channel and reality:
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Today two suicide bombers walked into a police commando recruitment center and blew themselves up, killing 35 recruiting hopefuls. The night before I watched a TV show where a young cadet blew himself up at the police graduation ceremony - killing, as I recall, 35 people.
That was a bit of a shock.
The moments after I leave the desk at night, after a long shift, are very special to me. I read, listen to music, decompress and…
drorzel | October 23, 2006Here's another email from my friend Paul, who's working as a journalist covering Iraq's descent into civil war. In this message, he describes the hard life of a photographer in Iraq, and reports a downright Rumsefeldian analogy:
"We had our militia phase, maybe the rest of the Iraq will get over its own."
It's a nice thought, that maybe it's just a matter of time before Iraq works its way through this "phase" - sort of like braces or heavy metal music or something.
The full text is below the fold.
They beat up one of our photographers today.
And smashed his cameras. Now that's pretty tough…
drorzel | October 5, 2006For those who are new to the blog (which is a lot of people...), a good friend of mine (best man at my wedding) is a journalist based in Cairo, who does regular shifts as a wire service stringer in Baghdad. He sends occasional email updates about what's going on over there, and I repost some of them here.
Many of these, as you might imagine, are pretty depressing stories about what is essentially a civil war. This one's a little on the lighter side: it's a story about how the wire service system got an Iraqi judge fired.
The full story is below the fold, but I'll put the opening up here.…
drorzel | September 29, 2006John Scalzi saves me some typing:
I'm proud to be an American, but I'm tired of being ashamed of my government. I'm tired of having to count the seconds until this bilious waste of a president is shoved out the door in January of 2009. I'm tired of hoping that some members of the president's political party might actually put principle over political expedience, particularly when it concerns the Constitution. And I'm tired of waiting for the opposing party to actually grow a goddamned spine and become an opposing party. I'm tired of wondering why the people we elect to lead us don't seem to…
drorzel | September 26, 2006Since everybody else left of Limbaugh is linking it, I might as well throw in a pointer to the Fox interview with Bill Clinton, where he lights into Chris Wallace for asking him about Osama bin Laden:
CLINTON: What did I do? What did I do? I worked hard to try to kill him. I authorized a finding for the CIA to kill him. We contracted with people to kill him. I got closer to killing him than anybody has gotten since. And if I were still president, we'd have more than 20,000 troops there trying to kill him.
Now, I've never criticized President Bush, and I don't think this is useful. But you…
drorzel | September 21, 2006Senior Middle East Correspondant Paul Schemm checks in with another email update from Baghdad, this time describing a visit to a tank graveyard.
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It was a graveyard. That was the only way to describe it. The place where old war machines came to die. Row upon row of massive sand-colored metal tanks, their huge guns each raised to a different height, like a frozen image of a clumsy chorus line.
There weren't just tanks either, massive artillery pieces, trucks, strange amphibious vehicles that looked half boat - an automotive mating ritual gone horribly wrong, and all…
drorzel | August 18, 2006As the "binary liquid explosive" plot sounds a little implausible, and the usual lack of, you know, hard evidence regarding the plot begins to become clear, the question has to be asked: what was really up with the terror plot that has banned an entire phase of matter?
Wondermark has the answer.
(Register link via Calpundit Monthly, Wondermark link via a mailing list.)
drorzel | August 13, 2006Via Making Light, Aasif Mandvi on The Daily Show delivers a blistering yet deadpan assessment of American Middle East policy to date.
I deeply resent living in a world where the only worthwhile political commentary comes from a comedy show.
drorzel | August 7, 2006Another update from Official Middle East Correspondant Paul Schemm, working as a journalist in Baghdad. These arrive at irregular intervals, but I figure they're worth reposting when I get them, in case people want a view-from-the-ground perspective.
One officer described it to me as the "new face of violence in Baghdad is senseless indirect fire." It's cold indirect fire because you don't see where it goes. He said once it was bombs in market places or in front of mosques, these days it was just a bunch of guys with mortar launcher and some shells shooting off a few into the nearby…