Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Enemy

I have noticed a new proclivity among the press to call the Iraqi insurgency “the enemy.” No doubt the military sees them as such since they are exchanging gunfire. And, perhaps the CPA and the US government see see them as “the enemy” too. It’s strange, though. I thought “the enemy” was Saddam Hussein and his Sunni “bitter enders.” But, the pictures I saw of the 4 corpses being defiled in Fallujah showed that many of the perpetrators were children. Are they bitter enders, too? Are they “the enemy?”

Now we are calling Sadr and his militia “the enemy,” too. Fred Barnes is saying on Fox that the military has to “take out” the bad guys in Fallujah and Ramadi as well as “take out” Sadr and his followers before the June 30 takeover. Presumably, “taking out” means things like this:

U.S. warplanes firing rockets razed four houses in Fallujah late Tuesday, witnesses said. A doctor said 26 Iraqis, including women and children, were killed and 30 injured in the air-strike. The rockets destroyed the houses in two neighborhoods in the city after nightfall, the witnesses said.

And this:

Coalition troops opened fire on thousands of supporters of Shiite Muslim radical leader Moqtada Sadr headed towards the headquarters of the Spanish-led Plus Ultra Brigade on the outskirts of this Shiite holy city, an AFP correspondent witnessed.

And this:

Italian troops clashed with Shi’ite militiamen in the southern Iraq town of Nassiriya today in gunfights that killed around 15 Iraqis and wounded 12 Italians, the Italian military and coalition sources said.

[…]

The clashes began shortly after (0530 hrs IST) when members of a militia loyal to radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr fired on Italian forces as they began operations to restore public order after two days of violent unrest.

Major Simone Schiavone, a spokesman for the Italian military in Iraq, said Italian forces returned fire, engaging in several extended gunbattles in the middle of the town.

Witnesses said several civilians were killed and wounded in the crossfire. Four Italian military vehicles were set alight and 12 Italian troops, out of a force of around 500 involved in the operation, were lightly wounded, Schiavone said

And then there’s this:

l British officials said they had fought 18 skirmishes in a second day of clashes in Amarah near the Iranian border. Twelve Iraqis have been killed in two days of fighting, hospital officials were quoted as saying.

All those enemies (and all that “collateral damage”) from one end of Iraq to the other actually means, as a lighthearted George W. Bush laughingly explained to the press yesterday, “Well, I think there’s — my judgment is, is that the closer we come to the deadline, the more likely it is people will challenge our will. In other words, it provides a convenient excuse to attack.”

Meanwhile:

Sunni and Shi’ite residents of two Baghdad suburbs, once fierce enemies, said overnight they had put their differences aside to unite in their fight to oust the US occupying force from Iraq.

“All of Iraq is behind Moqtada al-Sadr, we are but one body, one people,” declared Sheikh Raed al-Kazami, in charge of the radical Shi’ite cleric’s offices at a mosque in the Shi’ite neighbourhood of Kazimiya, west of the Iraqi capital.

He spoke following three days of fierce clashes between militiamen loyal to Sadr that left at least 57 people dead and 236 wounded.

Al-Kazami said residents of the Sunni neighbourhood of Adhamiya, a stone’s throw from Kazimiya, had offered their support, as had residents from Ramadi and Fallujah, west of Baghdad, as well as residents of the northern city of Mosul.

The Muslim cleric, surrounded by armed bodyguards, said some Sunnis had even offered to join Sadr’s militia.

To prove his point he displayed about 100 men in the gardens of the mosque who were armed with Kalashnikov rifles and who stood ready to join the battle.

So the dream of a united Iraq may come to pass after all.

First they told us that we went into Iraq to disarm Saddam Hussein, but there were no weapons. Then they said we went into Iraq because Saddam had worked with al Qaeda, but we have found no evidence of those ties. Finally, they insisted that the real reason we went into Iraq was to liberate the Iraqi people from their ruthless dictator. Now, Saddam is behind bars, his sons are dead and yet Iraqis from one end of the country to the other, Sunni and Shi’a alike, are “the enemies” that we must “take out.”

How generous we are. How much we love freedom. Once we “take out” all those ungrateful Iraqis, I’m sure that Iraq will be the democratic paradise we all imagined it could be and the tyrannical dominoes of Arab nationalism and Islamic Radicalism will crash into one another in rapid succession.

Today Tony Blair said:

“Our response to this should not be to run away in fright or hide away, or think that we have got it all wrong,” said Blair.

“Our response on the contrary should be to hold firm, because that’s what the Iraqi people want.”

Which Iraqi people? The freedom lovers or “the enemies?”

Unprepared

Do you think it would be too much to ask that James Carville to do a little bit of homework before he goes on Crossfire and represents the Democrats against the lying sack of excrement that calls itself Robert Novak?

Today, Novak dutifully regurgitates the Wing-nut Times’ claims that since the Clinton administration didn’t use the words al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden more than a handful of times in its national security assessment paper at the end of the last term that they were just as irresponsible about terrorism as Junior and the Retreads.

It’s all over the blogosphere this morning that the article ignores the fact that it did discuss terrorism in great detail throughout the document and even outlined possible military options.

Now, I don’t expect James Carville to immerse himself in the blogosphere, but since this article appeared in the GOP House organ, you’d think it might occur to him to question it or at least have someone on his staff look into what appears to be a total contradiction of all we have learned about Clinton’s priorities. It certainly should not come as a surprise that Cheney’s bitch might bring it up.

This happens all the time with him. Novak or Tucker Carlson hit him right between the eyes with a piece of propaganda and all he does is sputter “I know you are but what am I” instead of having the information at hand to refute the nonsense.

Unctuous Dick

Atrios links today to this NY Times piece exposing Dick Cheney’s long time love for high oil prices.

I’m happy to see the DNC finally doing some real oppo for a change and pushing it into the media with the same finesse the GOP has shown for the last 12 years. It turns out that Dick and Dubious have been for high oil prices much more recently than 1986. Here’s hoping that this gets disseminated as well:

1999: World Oil Said Bush Would Be the Perfect Presidential Candidate to Deal With Low Oil Prices.

In 1999, World Oil wrote that Bush “would be well aware of the fact that oil prices have collapsed” and “would seem to be the perfect individual to lead the charge in doing something about the [low] price of oil.” The editorial said one possibility was that Bush and his father could persuade the Middle East to hold production, increasing prices, and that if Bush was successful in increasing the price of oil, “he could parlay his actions into substantial contributions.” [World Oil, 2/99]

1999: Cheney Praised OPEC Production Cuts That Raised Oil Prices.

According to the Associated Press in March 1999, “OPEC members agreed today to cut crude oil production by 2.1 million barrels a day and maintain lower levels of output for a full year starting April 1, oil ministers said. The group of 11 oil producing nations approved the cuts in an effort to strengthen prices and end a global oil glut.” Then-Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney praised OPEC’s decision. “I’ve been struck by the extent OPEC seems to have gotten its act together,” said Cheney. [Dow Jones, 4/12/99; Mickey Kaus, Slate, 7/28/00; AP Online, 3/23/99]

Freedom

I was always somewhat confused by the comments of our brilliant National Security Advisor when she said:

“How can one mention Hitler and the U.S. president in the same sentence? And above all, how can such a comment come from the mouth of a German when one considers the sacrifices made by the United States when it acted to liberate the Germans from Hitler.”

Seeing US involvement in WWII as a sacrifice made by the United States to “liberate the Germans from Hitler” always struck me as just a tad eccentric. That it came from one of the most powerful people in the government and one who considers herself a “Europeanist” certainly gave me pause. I worried that she might not be as smart as she should be.

Today, John O’Sullivan in the National Review articulates a view of the future of American involvement in Iraq that makes sense of Condi’s statement. “Liberation,” it appears, is a very malleable concept.

The most straightforward solution [to the security situation in Iraq] would be a draconian crackdown on all unrest — curfews, house-to-house searches, firing on armed rioters, mass internment, widespread use of capital punishment for terrorists, and so on.

Western democracies only have the stomach for such harsh methods, however, when they believe they are fighting truly radical evil. The Allies in postwar Germany executed large numbers of German resisters because, among other reasons, Belsen and Dachau showed that Nazism was utterly bestial and the most brutal methods of suppressing it justified. Even so, the Allied occupation of Germany was before CNN, NGOs, and the “human-rights revolution.” It is highly unlikely, even in the aftermath of Fallujah, that either the U.S. government would carry out — or American public opinion support — the execution of terrorists on a similar scale today.

That really is too bad. Some people might think that there is a tiny distinction between Germany, which invaded and occupied a huge portion of Europe, attacked Russia, declared war on the US, tried to exterminate all of Europe’s Jews and created the bloodiest carnage in the history of the world — and Iraq which we invaded and are occupying and which we ostensibly were liberating from a dictator whom we now have in custody. But they would be wrong. Obviously, the Iraqis are behaving just as badly as many of the Germans did when we liberated them from Hitler and they should, in a just world, be treated with the same iron hand.

If it weren’t for the stupid American public, the liberal media and the idiotic “human rights revolution” we could do what is necessary to liberate the Iraqis by killing large numbers of them and thereby showing them what freedom is all about. But we can’t.

Thank goodness O’Sullivan has a fallback position:

A second solution would be to establish order by bringing in massive numbers of U.S. and allied troops, imposing a regime of surveillance and supervision that is widespread and almost totalitarian but not brutal, using both human and technical intelligence to track down and remove the terrorists from society, and settling down to stay in Iraq for at least 30 years. In that way terrorist resistance might be administratively smothered over time. But since the U.S. has decided to reduce troop levels and hand over power to Iraqis in three months, this option has been foreclosed.

This would be the East German example, I guess. (Hey, when it came to occupying a country, the Soviets really knew how to keep a lid on trouble. Word to the wise.) Once again, the pussified US screwed the pooch because we don’t know how handle a bunch of ingrates who fail to realize that we only care about their freedom. Otherwise we could create a totalitarian regime for them to live under for their own good. That is, after all, why we liberated them from Saddam, the totalitarian dictator.

But, we messed up and promised to turn over the country to the Iraqis themselves. What a mistake. So:

That leaves the third option — which also happens to be the most practicable one in current circumstances — namely, handing over power to a new Iraqi government and supporting it in its suppression of terrorism. A new Iraqi government will be in an improved version of the U.S. position a year ago.

It will be feared by its opponents; it will not have shown any psychological uncertainty in the face of “resistance;” and it will have the additional advantages of being (a) Iraqi, b) at least aspiringly democratic, and (c) knowledgeable about all sorts of local conditions. This combination will give it the legitimacy and the moral self-confidence to crack down on any unrest that either last-ditch Saddamites or foreign jihadists try to mount. And it may well conclude that it needs such weapons as the internment of suspected terrorists without trial to restore order and prevent a civil war.

Of course, U.S. troops will still be needed in force to support the new regime. Nor can Washington give a blank check endorsing any methods, however brutal, that it employs. Equally however, we should not seek to impose on Baghdad the kind of constitutional restraints that cripple American police in their everyday battles against conventional crime — and that hobble Washington’s responses today to the murder of Americans in Fallujah.

Ah. Now we’re getting somewhere. We’ve had a little practice at supporting brutal puppet governments. This we know how to do. And the good thing is that we don’t have to “cripple” the Iraqi government with all those unfortunate constitutional restraints that keep the US police from being able to shoot down suspected criminals or round them up and send them to jail indefinitely without a trial. Now that’s what I call freedom.

Our Dear Leader himself said yesterday:

“We are being challenged in Iraq because there are people there that hate freedom.”

Or was it “We are being challenged in Iraq because there are people here that hate freedom?” I’ll have to check.

Confusion

…with Congress and the Bush Administration reluctant to pay for more active-duty troops, the use of contractors in places like Iraq will only grow. A Pentagon official who opposes their use nonetheless detects an obvious if unsentimental virtue: “The American public doesn’t get quite as concerned when contractors are killed.”

Iraq Hacks

Now that Jim Wilkinson has hung up his GI Joe costume and is bustling all over Washington smearing Richard Clarke and saying the word “comfort” 437 times per minute, they’ve had to go to the bench for Operation FUBAR’s spin team:

GOP Operatives Lead at Iraq Press Office:

“Inside the marble-floored palace hall that serves as the press office of the U.S.-led coalition, Republican Party operatives lead a team of Americans who promote mostly good news about Iraq.

Dan Senor, a former press secretary for Spencer Abraham, the Michigan Republican who’s now Energy Secretary, heads the office that includes a large number of former Bush campaign workers, political appointees and ex-Capitol Hill staffers.

More than one-third of the U.S. civilian workers in the press office have GOP ties, running an enterprise that critics see as an outpost of Bush’s re-election effort with Iraq a top concern. Senor and others inside the coalition say they follow strict guidelines that steer clear of politics.

One of the main goals of the Office of Strategic Communications — known as stratcom — is to ensure Americans see the positive side of the Bush administration’s invasion, occupation and reconstruction of Iraq, where 600 U.S. soldiers have died and a deadly insurgency thrives. “

(Other than that, everything is going just swimmingly.)

…The U.S. team stands in deep contrast to the British team that works alongside it, almost all of whom are civil or foreign service employees, not political appointees. Many of the British in Iraq display regional knowledge or language skills that most of the Americans lack.

They speak English, for instance.

The drive to re-elect Bush is a sensitive topic. Several coalition officials angered by what they see as CPA politicking — with U.S. accomplishments in Iraq being trumpeted to help Bush — grumbled privately, but would not go on record with complaints.

But Gordon Robison, a former CPA contractor who helped build the Pentagon-funded Al-Iraqiya television station in Baghdad, said Republicans in the press room intensely followed the Democratic presidential primaries as John Kerry emerged as the presumed nominee.

“Iraq is in danger of costing George W. Bush his presidency and the CPA’s media staff are determined to see that does not happen,” Robison said. “I had the impression in dealing with the civilians in the Green Room that they viewed their job as essentially political, promoting what the Coalition Provisional Authority is doing in Iraq as a political arm of the Bush administration,” he added.

Robison, a journalist who said his political affiliation is a private matter, left Baghdad in March after finishing his contract with U.S. defense contractor Science Applications International Corp. A new U.S. contractor, Harris Corp., has taken over the Al-Iraqiya operations.

One CPA staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity said the press office had sent targeted “good news” releases to American television, radio and newspaper outlets that were timed to deflect criticism of Bush during the Democratic primaries.

Stratcom’s schedule of news releases shows that stories were sent to media outlets in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee and Virginia and other states in the days before their Democratic primaries. But the schedule also shows releases sent to Virginia, Ohio and Florida after the primaries were over. Senor said any correlation to the vote was a coincidence.

Rich Galen, 57, a well-known Republican strategist, oversees the daily news releases sent directly to media outlets in the United States. Before joining the CPA press operation late last year, Galen wrote a GOP insider column and appeared on Fox News to harpoon liberal critics of Bush.

[…]

Outside political analysts, however, said Galen’s vast expertise lies in political campaigning, not shipping radio and TV spots to local audiences. Putting a sharp strategist like him in the press room is a campaign masterstroke, said Bob Boorstin of the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan political think-tank in Washington.

“You know they’re in trouble if they shipped Rich Galen over there,” said Boorstin, who worked on four presidential campaigns, all Democratic.

“They’re desperate to control the story over there. It’s a very smart thing on their part. He knows what he’s doing.”

Galen was Newtie’s flack. He’s a master spinner. His web site says he is “what you get when you cross a political hack with a philosopher.” No joke. Here’s a little deconstruction of some typical Galen spin by Brendan Nyhan from September of 2001. This guy wrote the book.

Like all Republicans, he had himself photographed in an elaborate costume, leaning on a very butch piece of heavy equipment. He looks a little like a chorus boy in the road show of Kismet.

Growing Pains

Oh Lordy. Here we are again in one of those disavowal moments. Normally, I try not to weigh in on blog controversies like this because they are so likely to get me into trouble and I’m nothing but a big baby. However, this one is actually important because it signals a change in the blogosphere.

It all comes down to filthy capitalism, doesn’t it? Once bloggers started taking advertising money they suddenly became answerable to their advertisers. Once they started raising money for candidates they became part of the campaign. It reminds me of those halcyon days when people were arguing about whether public broadcasting was a good idea or not. I think we can see from this little example that money is, indeed, the root of all evil. The times they are a changin’ in the blogosphere.

Matt Stoller has what is probably the definitive take on this controversy, but I think Atrios’s post is more important because he’s so important. He sounds miffed, to be sure, but he’s taken a brave stand. He’s not going to stop expressing his opinion on his own terms, even though he’s been raising a lot of money for the Democrats and would probably like to continue to collect a little cash from his blog ads himself. He’s opting to continue to be a free-for-all blogger rather than a money raising insider. But, I’m afraid he might not get to sit at the table with the big boys again any time soon. This new synthesis of internet fundraising and blogging means that you have to decide what are your reasons for blogging and adjust yourself to the various realities that spring from that decision.

If you are blogging to express your unfettered opinion on public affairs, it’s useful to note that opinion writers generally don’t personally raise money for the political parties even though they are clearly political partisans. Even Rush doesn’t troll for GOP money on his show. This is not just a matter “journalistic ethics” it’s a matter of keeping a certain distance between politicians and those who might express uncomfortable opinions from time to time. Nobody demands that Bush disavow Krauthamer when he says we should nuke Fallujah or some such.

I don’t doubt that columnists show up a fundraisers from time to time or at least socialize with fundraisers and politicians. But, by being able to float ideas or express opinions that the candidates simply can’t express due to the mainstream necessities of our two party politics, they actually serve a valuable service. I think bloggers do this, too.

Columnists do work for newspapers which accept advertising from all political perspectives, but they don’t allow profanity or inflammatory rhetoric such as that at the center of this controversy. And, one of the reasons they edit columnists is because if they wrote the way we do in the blogosphere they’d offend huge numbers of readers and advertisers would pull out. Certainly political advertisers would.

So, if you want to express an unfettered opinion, the online world is a great place to do it, probably the only place outside of your poor hearing impaired family and the bartender at the corner pub. But, you probably can’t use that blog to directly raise money for candidates or run advertising for candidates unless you learn to pull your punches at least somewhat. The reality is that once you explicitly become a fundraiser for that candidate, or become enmeshed with the campaign apparatus, you become a sort of adjunct of the campaign. The real world implication of that is that the candidate’s enemies will use what you say or do against the candidate. Candidates have to return “controversial” money all the time.

As for advertisers, newspapers and networks have all kinds of conventions like “chinese walls” to protect both the advertiser and the content from having to answer for the other. And, needless to say, any candidate is going to need the newspaper and the television much more than a blog to reach the critical mass of people so they will all fight for as much air time and column inches as they can get. Blogging is expendable if it causes too much grief.

So, it appears that we are at a crossroads. If what you want to do is be a fundraiser and political operative for a particular candidate, then you simply have to be aware of the ramifications of what you say and you have to exercise some control over the community you host or risk embarrassing the candidate you represent on your blog. There is obviously big money to be raised on the internet, so this paradigm is here to stay and it is perfectly valid.

If you want to make bucks by selling ads, you have to be aware that they could pull those ads in a hearbeat if you write things they feel are harmful to their products (candidates.) That’s just reality in our happy little laissez-faire world. I would think that there are products out there that wouldn’t mind being affiliated with foul-mouthed polemics, but political candidates are hardly the likliest ones, I’m afraid. So there may be a way to make a few sheckels at this, but partisan politics doesn’t look like a good bet to me unless you are willing to edit yourself accordingly or find a way to persuade people that you have a chinese wall between the advertising and the content. Obviously, this is a perfectly acceptable form of blogging and I imagine that many people will find it tempting.

Or you can take the approach of an old fashioned pamphleteer, which is what blogging has mainly been up to now. Self-publish, say what you want, offer it for free and hope that somebody finds it interesting. On a political level you hope that you have an influence. If you are a big time blogger like Andrew Sullivan you can put up a tip jar and make big bucks, so there’s even a financial model available that leaves you beholden to noone. Or, you could always find a benefactor or sugar daddy who will finance your blogging — sort of a cross between being Sid Blumenthal and Anna Nicole Smith. If you do it this way you are free to tell anybody to go fuck themselves if they don’t like what you are saying. And, if they de-link you? Who gives a damn? If you’re good, people will find you. Stand outside the grinding political process and be proud to support your cause in your own way. Let the politicans play it safe. They’ll thank you for it in the end.

There isn’t anything wrong with any of these models but those bloggers who have a profile are going to have to think about this stuff and the candidates are going to have to find a way to take advantage of the blogosphere’s influence without leaving themselves too open to their enemies’s opportunism.

And, let’s not kid ourselves. I hesitate to remind all of my blogging bretheren, but this “disavowal” movement is a bi-partisan, intra-partisan game. As ye sow and all that jazz…

Last year around this time we had another blogospheric tizzy and bloggers were gnashing their teeth about whether to link or de-link and what all. One blogger responded to a query on the matter and I think his thoughts are pertinent today:

Hi,

Everyone makes mistakes, and Sean-Paul has been very up front, honest and contrite about his. What more do people want? To string him up and flog him?

He provides a good service. I’ll probably be taking his left-hand side link within the next couple of days, but that’s because the war is waning and his coverage is straying into new areas. So the raison d’ etre of running that

extra link is somewhat passing.

But I’m a forgiving guy. He copped to it right away and apologized.

Ultimately, his mistake had little to do with the value of the material

presented so I didn’t even think twice about removing him.

I really hope that some of these bloggers freaking out about it don’t make a mistake themselves someday. Writing has a lot of pitfalls. I’m a former journalist and a J.D., so I have a good idea of how to avoid such pitfalls.

But no one is perfect, and even I may fall into some unforeseen trap.

What comes around comes around. I like to keep a healthy supply of good karma handy.

Kos

Wise words.

Fetid Moldy Cakewalk

The horrifying spectacle of Falluja seems to be, predictably, about more than what they are saying.

The anti-American hatred isn’t confined to Fallujah and it isn’t just in the Sunni Triangle. Civilians and foreigners are being targeted and escalating brutality is the order of the day all over Iraq. Meanwhile, the “contractors,” all ex-special forces who were ostensibly there to protect food convoys (uh huh) are reported to have been part of a 4 vehicle convoy, a fact which the US denies.

You know, I’m really getting tired of being lied to. It’s exhausting. Just what the hell is really going on in Iraq?

Certainly there are few communities where anti-American sentiment is as widespread as in Fallujah. But the savagery and utter abandonment of any sort of civilized conduct, so amply demonstrated on the streets of the city Wednesday, is actually pretty typical of the way the opposition has chosen to fight its war against American occupation everywhere else, as well. Wednesday’s attack itself was hardly the worst thing we’ve seen; in fact, since the victims had been armed, attacking them was arguably within the rules of war.

Many of the attacks we’ve seen in just the past 10 days were clearly not; the victims often were attacked merely because they were civilians, many of them not even from Coalition countries. They included two Finnish businessmen, a German and a Dutchman, four missionaries working on a water project and a Time magazine translator.

It’s become increasingly clear that any foreigner, and anyone working even remotely with foreigners, has become what the opposition regards as fair game, armed, or not. Attacks on Iraqis have been if possible even more savage, and divorced from any possible justification. Suicide bombs and ambushes of Iraqi policemen, who have now lost more men than the occupation forces, are one thing; the Americans chose and trained them. But the Shia who were slaughtered by teams of suicide bombers during the Ashoura festival in Karbala last month were doing nothing more than peacefully exercising their religious beliefs something denied them under Saddam’s Sunni rule.

[…]

What is surprising is that four American contractors would have put themselves into such a vulnerable situation, in such a well-known trouble spot. The victims apparently worked for Blackwater Security Consulting, a North Carolina-based security company that specializes in close-protection VIP details and has the high-profile, no-bid contract to provide bodyguards for L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. civilian administrator. U.S. officials have released little detail about why they were in Fallujah, except to say they were guarding food convoys into the area. Not only does that sound improbable, but there was no sign of any trucks being escorted by them at the time. However, Iraqi eyewitnesses interviewed on the street in Fallujah today say the two SUVs carrying the four victims were actually part of a four-vehicle convoy but that the two other SUVs managed to escape after the attack. Standard operating procedure for close-protection details is to put the people they’re protecting into more expensive and less maneuverable armored cars, and then follow in soft-skinned cars with the shooters. But U.S. officials insist there were only two cars.

The incident is inexplicably mysterious, even two days later. Witnesses in Fallujah insisted that one of the four victims, all of whom had been armed with sidearms and long weapons, was a woman, described as fair-skinned, red-headed and dressed in a military uniform. Military spokesmen, however, described all four as men. When did it happen, even? Witnesses say 11 a.m. or noon on Wednesday, Iraqi police say 9 or 10 a.m. and Coalition spokesmen say about 8 a.m. And why did the Marines, who have troops stationed on the outskirts of Fallujah, fail to respond to the scene, either during or after the attack at least not as of late this afternoon, 30 hours after the incident?

The AP reported the names of only 3 of the victims and all three are men. I don’t know what to make of the reports of a woman being involved. Women are not to my knowledge in front line roles in the US Special Forces, so the military uniform is strange, but perhaps some of these private “security” soldiers are women. Strange.

I wrote about the private security contractors a year ago when it was first disclosed and it appears that we have privatized much of the security duties there and we’re spending big bucks to do it. The LA Times and others report today that security firms are doing a booming business in Iraq

The vast majority of their work in Iraq is government-funded, either through direct contracts with government agencies or indirectly as security for firms that have contracts to help rebuild Iraq.

[…]

Business is booming, security experts said, because a surge in violence has come precisely as a flood of contractors is poised to roll into the country now that $8 billion in U.S. contracts have been awarded.

[…]

They escort convoys of supplies. And some are preparing elaborate tracking systems so that if a contractor’s vehicle runs into trouble, its occupants can be located and rescued.

For months, the presence of security firms has been hard to ignore. Their large four-wheel-drive vehicles whiz along highways, traveling well over 100 mph to discourage insurgents from tailing them. They pull out of heavily fortified compounds and careen into traffic, forcing other vehicles out of their way.

The Western security experts are easily identified. They are muscular men, often wearing flak jackets and conspicuously carrying MP-5 submachine guns a German-made weapon favored by special operations forces. They tuck revolvers into leg holsters.

Experts estimate that the thousands of security professionals in the country probably outnumber workers in any other private industry. They include large numbers of Nepalese Gurkhas, who guard many of the coalition’s headquarters in the Iraqi provinces, and former South African soldiers.

But at the top the pay scale are American and British security workers who are former Navy SEALs, Green Berets, Marines, Special Operations soldiers, CIA workers, British Special Air Services members and British Royal Marines. Many have worked with intelligence units in their former services and continue to have access to information unavailable to civilians.

Blackwater, for example, was founded by former Navy SEAL Gary Jackson and includes many former commandos in its top ranks. A company spokesman said 70% of its trainees come from the military, mainly from commando units.

[…]

A primary appeal to security workers is the money. The best paid of the private security staffers the most experienced and elite former soldiers earn as much as $20,000 a month, security experts in Iraq say.

Most Western contractors rely on Iraqi subcontractors for almost all labor. Security firms, on the other hand, make heavy use of workers from outside Iraq.

The deep experience of the guards goes into the sales pitch offered by security firms that the prospective client is in a treacherous setting but will be getting the best protection. But sometimes no amount of experience or expertise is enough.

“How many private security guys have been killed here? A lot,” said one security expert in Baghdad. “At least 50, maybe more; there’s been six just this week.”

As an aside, can somebody explain why Paul Bremer of all people has private security guards? Isn’t he, at least, an actual member of the US Government and thus shouldn’t he be guarded by actual US soldiers?

Perhaps there’s nothing really wrong with this. I’m sure these guys are patriots and fine gentlemen all. Certainly, they don’t deserve to be dragged through streets and dismembered. However, this practise of privatizing the military (aside from the wet-dreams it gives the libertarians) is a very dicey idea. There is little accountability and a very bad recent history in the Balkans (although there have been no suggestions of this kind of corruption in iraq.) But, the problem remains. They are private contractors, not subject to the direction of the US Military and they work in a gray area which allows them to operate outside of normal law and custom.

It may be a necessary evil at the moment, but I have to believe that most of these elite highly trained special forces guys, anyway, would have stayed in the US military without a second thought if they’d have been offered even a modicum of the big bucks they are offered on the outside. But, that would have cut out the middle man and the middle man is what fuels the Military Industrial Complex. And while Democrats have certainly taken their taste over the last 30 years, the MID remains one of the very special friends and supporters of the modern Republican Party.

Just because the war in Iraq is a cock-up of humongous proportions is no reason that people shouldn’t make a buck, right? At least some good will come of it.

Jeanne D’Arc has the definitive round-up on this topic. Read it now.

Another Grown-Up

Thanks to Kevin at Catch.com (which is called that for a reason) we find that the Senator Jim Bunning, who recently said his Italian American opponent looks like Uday and Qusay, has a history of classy campaigning. He’s one o’ those uniters not dividers:

One ad was shot at August’s Fancy Farm political picnic, where the low-key Mr. Baesler surprised and even shocked a lot of political watchers, Democratic officials and reporters with a speech that many described as over-the-top.

Mr. Baesler ranted, raved, screamed, hollered, pounded the podium and shook his fists. He moved around the podium so much that one Lexington Herald-Leader reporter wrote that Mr. Baesler, a former University of Kentucky basketball player, looked like he was trying to guard it.

But Mr. Bunning had a film crew take some shots of the speech. Music from Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” was added. And according to the Baesler camp some selective edits were made — a charge the Bunning campaign denies — to make Mr. Baesler appear like a frenzied Adolf Hitler in a Nazi propaganda film.

The music, by the way, was by one of Hitler’s favorite composers. It was also used in the film Apocalypse Now during a scene in which a village in Vietnam is blasted.

“It is a deliberate attempt to portray Scotty Baesler in a Hitler-esque image,” said Bob Wiseman, Mr. Baesler’s campaign manager.

Mr. Baesler wants the ad, showing in most of Kentucky, off the air. The Bunning campaign says forget it.

Kyle Simmons, Mr. Bunning’s campaign spokesman, said the music was also used in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and nobody tried to make Mr. Baesler look like Hitler.

What’s up with that, doc? There is nothing cartoonish about that ad. See it, if you can, and make your own decision.

The second ad deals with the vote Mr. Baesler made in Congress for NAFTA, or the North American Free Trade Agreement. Mr. Baesler has since said it was a mistake, but he voted for NAFTA, which is blamed for the loss of thousands of jobs in southern Kentucky to Central America.

The ad criticizes Mr. Baesler’s vote. But right at the end an Hispanic man walks on to the screen, gives a thumbs up and says, “Mucho gracias, senor Baesler.”

Now, I don’t want to accuse Republicans of political hate speech. That would not be correct. Political hate speech is when a Democrat accuses a Republican of lying or makes fun of President Bush. Senator Bunning just has a lively sense of humor and it’s nothing more than typical leftist political correctness run amuck to suggest otherwise.

Get Over It.

Alpha Weenies

Instapundit and his little friends are all in a tizzy about this picture of John Kerry. They are saying things like:

“The whole look, of course, is appalling: the vest, the gloves, the botox.”

“Thanks for posting that picture of Kerry today. Right now the French are pursing their lips and narrowing their eyes in shrewd appraisal: ‘Daisy zipper pull, snowboard with mural graphics, sunglasses hanging from fleece shirt, thin vest-like outer garment. Yes. Clearly this man is the true Alpha Weenie.”

Hugh Hewitt says: “Just the man to instill fear in the hearts of our enemies.”

Oh yes. Alpha Weenies are so icky aren’t they? I know that when I saw this one I got a little bit nervous:

Here’s a little contrast that might be useful in determining the alpha weenieness of the presidential candidates:

Here’s Kerry going down a hill:

Here’s Bush going down a hill:

Look, George Bush can drive!

And his pick-up could go way faster down a mountain than that alpha weenie Kerry could, too. Way faster.

Update: Sadly No has The Scoop on the AlphaWeenie issue