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Mercenaries in Iraq

Good long feature
in Monday’s New York Times on the "private security companies"
operating in Iraq. Of course, when I think of "security companies" and
"security guards," I think of some poor guy taking lip from a
late-night patron of White Castle. But the Times piece makes it clear
that, semantics aside, these outfits in Iraq and their employees are
hardly distinguishable from the traditional picture of the mercenary:

 

With every week of insurgency in a war zone with no front, these
companies are becoming more deeply enmeshed in combat, in some cases
all but obliterating distinctions between professional troops and
private commandos. Company executives see a clear boundary between
their defensive roles as protectors and the offensive operations of the
military. But more and more, they give the appearance of private,
for-profit militias — by several estimates, a force of roughly 20,000
on top of an American military presence of 130,000. … By some recent government
estimates, security costs could claim up to 25 percent of the $18
billion budgeted for reconstruction, a huge and mostly unanticipated
expense that could delay or force the cancellation of billions of
dollars worth of projects to rebuild schools, water treatment plants,
electric lines and oil refineries."

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Rich Fudgy Brownies

The Associated Press roundup on the MoveOn.org
bake sale (carried in the San Francisco Chronicle and a handful of
other papers) says that the activists put on about 1,000 or 1,100 bake
sales that brought in a total of about $250,000. Among the smattering
of other coverage, local stories in the Santa Cruz Sentinel and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. The Los Angeles Times had a squib or a squib and a half that I notice the Chicago Tribune picked up.

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Bake Sales

Well, Kate and I spent a couple hours this morning walking around to MoveOn bake sales
in our general neighborhood. On one level, it seems like touchy-feely
naivete: Bake sales to defeat Bush? Yeah, right. On the other hand, it
was really encouraging to see the enthusiasm for the idea around town
and the determination people have that the small things they’re doing
in their own communities, and the money they’re gathering, could build
into something big. Of course, this is Berkeley, and you could get
people to do bake sales for nearly anything; at one gathering, someone
said there were 19 MoveOn bake sales around town; I’ll bet there were
even more. But I wonder how many there were in, say, Kansas.(I just
searched on the MoveOn site for future bake sales within 3 miles of our
zip code, and got five results. I checked for similar events coming up
within 300 miles of Wichita and got three hits. And actually, MoveOn has a map that illustrates where the bake sale hot spots were and weren’t) More on
this tomorrow.

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What People Want and Need

This should have been posted April 13. But it wasn’t because of repeated Radio UserLand finicks.

And now the news:

Kate sent me one of the daily entries from Minnesota Public Radio’s "The Writer’s Almanac."
I like it. That’s an official endorsement, though be assured no money
changed hands for it. It’s a nice collection of daily trivia on
writerly stuff that wanders into historical stuff. The other day was
the anniversary of the opening of Galileo’s trial, so the almanac
contained a short essay on why Galileo mattered and still does.
Yesterday, or now the day before yesterday, the 13th, it was Thomas
Jefferson’s birthday. He was actually born on April 2 in 1743 — so I
count him as a birthday pal — but the date was moved when Britain and
the colonies ditched the Julian calendar for the Gregorian in 1752. No
extra charge for that information — I’ve always been fascinated by the
idea of a bunch of people having their birthdays changed.

But what I really wanted to write about was this note in the little almanac section on Eudora Welty, also born on the 13th:

 

"She tried getting a job in advertising but, she said, ‘It was too much like
sticking pins into people to make them buy things they didn’t need or really
want.’ "

 

So two things:

First, that’s why I think I am/would be no good at selling or promoting
or marketing stuff — goods, merchandise, services that you ought to
pay for if you want to be sated, satisfied, or successful. A voice
inside says, "You know, this is really in my interest, not yours, to
take this off my hands. And is it really as good as I’m telling you it
is? And is it what you need?"

But — and this is point two — I think the reason I’ve stuck to news or
things that closely resemble news is that I’ve always believed and
felt, mind and heart, that it’s something people really do need and
want. Still do, and that’s what makes the job fun still even if you
hear me whining.

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April 14 …

Another significant family date: Anne O’Malley Hogan, our grandmother,
known to some as "Mighty Anne" (though I guess you’d have to see her
coming at you with a broom or other improvised implement of destruction
to really understand why) would be 106 today. But as I said to some
coworkers, she missed the party by 24 years.

She was a college-educated woman from a working-class
South Side Irish family (sorry for the redundancy there) who raised a
pretty amazing crop of kids first in the middle of the Depression (and
whatever other depression was going on) and later after a series of
tragedies that might have been expected to crush her: the drowning of
one of her six kids (and three other family members) and the death of
her husband when the oldest of the five surviving children was 14. I think the
way she brought them through it — not unscathed, to be sure, but
with a sense they could not only survive but thrive — was what got her
the name Mighty Anne.

I don’t have a digital copy of any of her pictures. If I did, I’d post it.

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Me and My Cameraphone

A picture named cabinet.jpg

(Warning: Details of boring,
bourgeois domestic existence follow.)

I was out shopping for a chest of some kind to put in our dining room. I was describing one over the phone to Kate, but wasn’t sure I was really getting the point across. Then I had the following genius inspiration: Take a phone picture  and send it so Kate could see what I was talking about. That’s what I did, and now the chest of some kind is in our dining room. Forget Iraq and al-Qaida and WMD’s —
this is life-changing stuff.

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Out of Compliance

Now here are some folks who know how to sling effective lingo: Our friends at Combined Joint Task Force Seven. They will not falter. They will not fail. And furthermore:

"CJTF-7 conducts offensive operations to defeat remaining noncompliant forces and neutralize destabilizing influences in the Area of Operations (AO) to create a secure environment in direct support
of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Concurrently, conducts stability operations which support the establishment of government and economic development to set the conditions for a transfer of operations to designated follow on military or civilian authorities."

"Remaining noncompliant forces." Beautiful.

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‘Two-Bit Thug’

I feel kind of bad about it, but I can’t make myself watch or listen much to the Bush people running the Iraq excursion. Partly it’s anger about the unapologetic lying, disingenuous self-justification, and
relentless absolutist spin — good vs. evil, democracy vs. tyranny, clean, well-mannered Americans and chosen friends vs. the malodorous of the world — that characterizes our leaders’ approach to their mission. And partly, there’s something about these guys, from the president on down, that’s just creepy and ugly when they’re being challenged in any way.
The latest exhibit for both parts of my unease comes an unblinking, tight-jawed Harvard MBA named Dan Senor, who’s the mouthpiece for the Amercan president of Iraq, Paul Bremer. Senor’s bio, on the White House site, gives no clue what expertise in Iraqi affairs got him into the first U.S. civilian team sent to Iraq last April. But,
the guy can spout the evil-doer rhetoric with the best of them. The New York Times quotes his summing up of this Sadr fellow, the Shiite demagogue who’s managed to raise some genuinely troubling resistance to the occupiers.

“Mr. Bremer’s spokesman, Dan Senor, described Mr. Sadr at a news conference as a ‘two-bit thug’ despised by the majority of Iraqis and said he and his forces would be destroyed.”

Of course, the thug line is just part of the administration’s script. The president himself used it earlier this week (twice, actually — here and here;
and a quick search on the not-too-reliable whitehouse.gov site indicates Bush and his people have used “thug” or “thugs” on 81 public occasions in the last 14 months. But you know, even if you consider Sadr and his guys the scum of the Earth, doesn’t it seem a little intemperate to make statements like this in public again and again? Doesn’t it seem a little bit like emotion has gotten the better of the Iraq excursion team? I mean, what would be lost by turning it down a notch and using a less loaded but very clear word like, for instance, “enemy”?
I like the irony in Senor pointing out that Sadr is despised by the majority of his countrymen. If you go by the 2000 election results, that’s something he and George Bush have in common.