Needlenose

NYT on last-minute peace overtures
Kristof on death by self-delusionRiverbend — “everyone is tired”

The moment we hear explosions, there’s a rush to get to the roof and try to determine the general direction of the smoke (there is usually smoke). Then there’s a rush to check the news, if there’s electricity. If it’s in a residential area, we immediately think of all our relatives and acquaintances in the area and wonder if everyone is alright, how close it was to a specific home/person/shop/school. Almost everyone has relatives living all over Baghdad- there’s always someone to worry about. We then try to contact someone from the bombed area and if there’s no telephone, we try to contact someone who might have extra information. The process has become too familiar.

There have also been a number of assassinations these last few days. The ones that are making headlines are the judges. Yesterday, a judge was kidnapped and killed in Najaf. Today, a judge was killed outside of his home in Mosul and another judge was shot twice in the head in his car in Kirkuk. It seems, these days, that judges in Iraq are caught ‘bayn il mattraqa wil sindan’, as one Arab reporter said, which means ‘between a hammer and an anvil’. This is because while the judge in Najaf was killed by loyalists, it seems, the one in Kirkuk was killed by American troops who said he got caught in ‘cross fire’. The one in Mosul is still a mystery.

These last few days have been particularly difficult. There’s a strain on everybody. People are tense and worried. They’re worried about their children, worried about their jobs or lack of employment, worried about the security situation, worried about jumpy troops. The attacks are becoming more sophisticated and the troops are becoming more brutal in some areas… It’s like we graduate from one phase to another. Everyone is so tired.

Needlenose regulars know that I spent lots of time railing against the super-nationalist Israeli government and its illegal and brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. But Israeli is not the worst country out there doing this kind of thing, just the one whose occupation we directly subsidize. Far more evil is China, the nation that King George I (The Clueless) granted ‘most-favored nation’ status. Aside from the fact that the country remains a one-party, totalitarian dictatorship run by corrupt, oppressive and venal ‘evil-doers’ (a state that we ourselves are rapidly becoming accustomed to), it has its own ‘occupied territory’ that it seized by ‘right of conquest’ and is steadily colonizing and Sino-sizing: Tibet.

The lastest in a string of colonial outrages is China’s plan to build a railroad into the Tibetan Plateau to support China’s “Go West” campaign; a policy directed at filling ‘empty’ Tibet with exported Han Chinese. So what if the region is already sparsely populated by nomadic Tibetans – it’s not like they can complain or anything.

Don’t expect our reactionary Administration to complain about this state of affairs either – we only invade non-nuclear evil-doer nations. In fact, about the only criticism of China you’ll hear from wrong-wing politicians and blow-hards is a little dispirited whining over the ridiculously skewed trade inbalance between our nations; not like they’re going to do anything about it, with all the cheap goods produced by Chinese prison- and child-labor!

NK chillin’
or maybe notMore outstanding “progress” to report from Iraq:

The U.S. occupation headquarters in Baghdad has been shelled on consecutive nights (so now Jerry Bremer and his staff are able to sense the guerrillas’ “desperation” firsthand!) The regional U.S. headquarters in Mosul was attacked directly as well.

In another major city, Najaf, the local governor has called for a general strike to protest the lack of security after a high-ranking judge was assassinated by guerrillas.

One reason that the guerrillas are able to get away with all this is that they have better intelligence than we do:

U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement officials say that after six months of intensifying guerrilla warfare, Iraqi insurgents know more about the U.S. and allied forces — their style of operations, convoy routes and vulnerable targets — than the coalition forces know about them. Indeed, U.S. intelligence has had trouble simply identifying the enemy and figuring out how many are Iraqis and how many are foreign fighters.

With local knowledge and the element of surprise on their side, the guerrillas are exploiting their intelligence edge to overcome the coalition’s overwhelming military superiority. Insurgents routinely use inexpensive explosives to destroy multimillion-dollar assets, including tanks and helicopters. Using surveillance and inside information, the guerrillas have assassinated many Iraqis helping the coalition, gunned down a member of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, killed the top United Nations official in Iraq and blasted the heavily guarded hotel in Baghdad where Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying.

Fortunately, where intelligence fails us (insert your own joke here), the U.S. can always respond by surrounding towns with barbed wire:

Today, all but one of the entrances to Al Auja have been sealed. No one can go in or out without the U.S. Army’s permission. Every male older than 15 must register with police and show a newly issued identification card at the gate. All vehicles are searched coming and going. U.S. trucks and tanks patrol the streets.

. . . U.S. Army Capt. Brent Harrington, who heads the troops guarding the community, said the security fence was installed because occupation forces would soon build a bridge across the river that would increase traffic in the area. The concertina wire, he said, was to keep strangers from entering Al Auja.

“They have a level of security most people don’t have,” he said. “Once they get their ID cards, they are free to come and go. You could compare it to one of those gated communities.”

In another panic move decisive measure demonstrating American progress, colonial ruler Jerry Bremer has apparently reversed himself on using factional militias to help establish security in Iraq. The original fear was that such militias would become the basis for the kind of warlordism that has strangled Afghanistan, but apparently Jerry has decided that given the (non-)alternatives, a little warlordism may not be such a bad thing after all.

How much more “progress” can the U.S. occupation stand? Stay tuned to find out . . .