Tag: iraq

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Saturday Night’s Alright for Dribbling

Why Do You Call It MAY-Hee-Koh? Lydell points out a query posed to the Chicago Tribune’s lingo expert:

Q. Why do Americans pronounce Chicago with a “sh” sound at the beginning (as in “she”), instead of a “ch” (as in “chick”)? You might have noticed that Spanish speakers, even bilingual speakers (such as myself) make a very clear distinction between the CH sound and the SH sound. My lips refuse to conform to anything but a “Chick-ah-go” pronunciation.

— Stephanie Pringhipakis Guijarro, Chicago



To his possible credit, the Tribune guy ignores the multicultural preciousness behind the question and answers it seriously. I would have been tempted to respond. “Dear Stephanie: Where the heck did those people down in México come up with that voiceless velar fricative pronunciation for the X: MAY-hee-koh? What’s with that strange-o accent and wild vowels? You may have noticed Americans (such as myself) say “MeKSiko.” My Midwestern lips (actually, the back of my tongue and my soft palate) absolutely refuse to pronounce X as anything but the most excellent consonant cluster “ks” (except in all the many exceptional cases, such as the “gz” in “exit”). P.S. What’s a ‘Pringhipakis’?”



Doubts Answered: By way of Steve Downey, fellow cyclist and connoisseur of notable sports names, we encounter Lucious Pusey, a linebacker with Eastern Illinois University. Maybe I should say former linebacker, because Pusey reportedly changed his name and the EIU roster now shows him as Lucious Seymour. Mr. Seymour-Pusey’s name has been the subject of frequent blog-based chortling; I join in the chorus only for the most noble of reasons: because I told someone this story and they dared to doubt me.

Blogger Embed: There’s lots of talk about bloggers being the future of journalism, but it’s rare at this point to find bloggers trying to tackle real reporting. An exception: Bill Roggio, a blogger who has embedded with U.S. military units in the past and has just gone back to Iraq to do it again. He’s unattached to any news organization, and his trip is funded by readers. I kicked in 25 bucks despite the fact I’m not in love with his hawkish take on the war. But I think it’s worth supporting anyone willing to put themselves on the line to report independently (or as independently as possible in a situation where staying alive means staying with the troops).

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Mr. Flight Suit

Link: Bush Draws Iraq Lesson From Vietnam – New York Times.

Our president is not lacking for audacity. Or for rocks in his head. He’s in Vietnam and, by way of promoting his administration’s most important product, its Iraq disaster, presumes to even mention a war that he made damned sure he was no part of. The lession of Vietnam, Mr. Mission Accomplished says, is that "we’ll succeed unless we quit." Not that it matters–we”re Americans, and we’re exceptional folks who don’t have to worry about what anyone else thinks–but you wonder what the Vietnamese think about the president’s analysis (one that leaps over the facts of what happened over there; but then again, Bush and facts and his Iraq strategery have never been seen in the same room, either).

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This and This and This and That

John Kerry: You know, a quip that requires a half hour of set up and 72 hours of explanation–it ain’t a quip. Please: Go away, dismal man. Let us remember you as you were in your finest hour: Conceding defeat.

Cruz Bustamante: It’s flattering to California voters that the first words out of your mouth in your campaign spots are, “I was really fat.” Yes, if you don’t live here, you’re missing a real treat: A career pol–he’s a Democrat, for the record–term limited out of his spot at the trough (lieutenant governor) and snuffling and snarfling his way toward another (state insurance commissioner). How ironic to compare him to a swine swilling down slops, because he’s basing his appeal to voters on the fact he went on a diet and lost 70 pounds. It all connects with his hunger to serve the public because he says he promised his family he’d lose the weight, and he did; and now, he’s promising to help us all get cheaper insurance–and he’ll keep that promise, too. If the Republican in the race–Steve Poizner–is not a serial murderer, I may vote for him. (One of the Bustamante ads, on YouTube, is below).

And then there’s David Brooks: His op-ed column in today’s New York Times (you’ve got to be a paid subscriber to get it online, so no link). This former gung-ho Iraq war supporter decides, three years, 7 months, and 14 days into the enterprise (not that anyone’s counting) that it might be a good idea to study up on the history of Iraq to see whether it offers any clues about the challenges the project poses. And–zounds!–it does:

“Policy makers are again considering fundamental chnges in our Iraq poliicy, but as they do I hope they read Elie Dedourie’s essay, ‘The Kingdom of Iraq: A Retrospect.’

“Kedourie, a Baghdad-born Jew, published the essay in 1970. It’s a history of the regime the British helped establish over 80 years ago, but it captures an idea that is truer now than ever: Disorder is endemic to Iraq. Today’s crisis is not three years old. It’s worse now, but the crisis is perpetual. This is a bomb of a nation.”

Later, Brooks quotes Kedourie’s view of the nation’s political future: “‘Either the country would be plunged into chaos or its population should become universally the clients and dependents of an omnipotent but capricious and unstable government.’ There is, he wrote, no third alternative.”

“An omnipotent but capricious and unstable government.” Saddam, anyone?

Despite the finality of Kedourie’s view, Brooks complacently describes the alternatives he sees open to the United States now. Make one last effort to pacify Baghdad–thus, he apparently believes, pouring oil on the restive countryside. Acknowledging that probably won’t pan out, he says Iraq ought to cease to exist.

“It will be time to effectively end Iraq, with a remaining fig-leaf central government or not. It will be time to radically diffuse authority down to the only communities that are viable–the clan, tribe or sect.”

But guess what? Brooks says we’ll still be there–apparently forever. Our “muscular presence” will be needed to “nurture civilized democratic societies that reject extremism and terror.” Uh, yeah, just what the doctor ordered: Having the troops referee the contest among the clans, tribes and sects. Someone needs to give Brooks something else to read to give him a clue about how that’s turning out.

(He might start in his own paper, which features a front-page story today on a combat medic and one of his patients, “Tending a Fallen Marine, with Skill, Prayer and Fury.”

“Petty Officer [Dustin] Kirby, 22, is a Navy corpsman, the trauma medic assigned to Second Mobile Assault Platoon of Weapons Company, Second Battalion, Eighth Marines. Everyone calls him Doc. He had just finished treating a marine who had been shot by an Iraqi sniper.

“ ‘It was 7.62 millimeter,’ he continued. ‘Armor piercing.’

“He reached into his pocket and retrieved the bullet, which he had found. ‘The impact with the Kevlar stopped most of it,’ he said. ‘But it tore through, hit his head, went through and came out.’

“He put the bullet in his breast pocket, to give to an intelligence team later. Sweat kept rolling off his face, mixed with tears. His voice was almost cracking, but he managed to control it and keep it deep. ‘When I got there, there wasn’t much I could do,’ he said.

“Then he nodded. He seemed to be talking to himself. ‘I kept him breathing,’ he said.”

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‘I Want My Neighbor’s Cow to Die’

George F. Will’s latest, on Iraq, by way of my brother John, who notes, “You know the jig is up when George Will sounds like Frank Rich.”

“Many months ago it became obvious to all but the most ideologically blinkered that America is losing the war launched to deal with a chimeric problem (an arsenal of WMD) and to achieve a delusory goal (a democracy that would inspire emulation, transforming the region). Last week the president retired his mantra ‘stay the course’ because it does not do justice to the nimbleness and subtlety of U.S. tactics for winning the war.

“A surreal and ultimately disgusting facet of the Iraq fiasco is the lag between when a fact becomes obvious and when the fiasco’s architects acknowledge that fact. Iraq’s civil war has been raging for more than a year; so has the Washington debate about whether it is what it is.”

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‘Pretty F___ing Ignorant’: Seymour Hersh on Americans and Iraq

A gem in the Montreal Mirror, an alternative weekly in the Great White North. Hersh was making an appearance at McGill University, and the Mirror did a set-up piece. The main subject, unsurprisingly, was Iraq. Hersh sounds taken aback by the interviewer, calling him opinionated, obsessional, and tendentious, and remarking, “This is the strangest interview I’ve ever had.” When the interviewer asks a question about Americans’ “willful ignorance” of the world, Hersh protests that he can’t conclude the lack of knowledge is willful, then adds:

“…Americans are pretty fucking ignorant. What we don’t know is pretty huge. You could never accuse Americans of learning from history or learning from past mistakes. You’re talking about a country that went to war in Vietnam with the theory that we had to bomb North Vietnam in order to keep the hordes of Red China from coming, right? Not knowing that Vietnam and China had fought wars for 2,000 years and would fight one four years after the war was over, in ’79. What we don’t know is just breathtaking in my country. To call this ignorance wilful as opposed to general ignorance, I don’t know. On any issue, Americans can display an incredible lack of information. I doubt if there’s a society which has paid less attention to the facts than any else.”

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Patience

Counting the many blessings of citizenship this election season, one of the things I’m most grateful for is the fact our barely elected president is such a patient guy. I know because. now that the heat is really on in Iraq, he keeps saying how patient he is. When he talked to George Stephanopoulos a couple weeks ago, he said when asked about the situation in Iraq, “I’m patient.” And in his press conference yesterday, he said “we’ve got patience” in working with the Iraqi government,

The more interesting thing the president says when he talks about patience is the footnote he adds. He told Stephanopoulos that “I”m not patient forever, and I’m not patient with dawdling.” And yesterday, he added that our patience–nice of him to speak for me–is “not unlimited.”

What does that mean, exactly? We’ve spent several hundred billion dollars and thousands of lives for the Iraqis to elect a government. The Iraqis themselves are enduring a bloodbath and various sorts of appalling privations. When our patient president says his patience might run out and that he won’t stand for dawdling–who could blame him, three and a half years after he declared victory–what’s he thinking? If the tide refuses to halt, what then?

A reporter tried to ask him about that yesterday: “What happens if that patience runs out?”” he inquired. Tricky formulation in that it’s not clear whose patience “that patience”” is.

The president’s answer:

See, that’s that hypothetical Keil is trying to get me to answer. Why do we work to see to it that it doesn’t work out — run out? That’s the whole objective. That’s what positive people do. They say, we’re going to put something in place and we’ll work to achieve it.

I’m not sure I understand all that, especially the positive thinking part of it, but: Apparently, saying his patience won’t last forever is just a verbal tic. It doesn’t suggest anything. If it did, that would open up “hypothetical” ground the president refuses to tread (“Mr. President, what happens if they don’t throw bouquets at us when we get to Baghdad?”). We’ll just have to trust the president’s instincts and insights to get us through if his patience wears out. Works for me.

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Silence

By way of Marie, a post from Chicago crime writer Sara Paretsky on the cost of going along with the war and the rest of it:

“I’ve recently returned from a publicity tour of Scandinavia, where my recent novel Fire Sale was published in translation. While I was there, 40,000 Hungarians—out of a population of 10 million—stood outside their president’s house in silent protest because he had lied about the economy to get elected. In almost every press interview I gave, journalists didn’t have any questions about my work, my deathless prose or my characters, or about me. They wanted to know why Americans weren’t in the streets, or some place, protesting what has been done in our names. They weren’t asking in an aggressive, or censorious way; they were asking out of anguish, because we are so powerful, and what we do affects the whole world.”

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Vietnam, Iraq

I joined the Organization of American Historians earlier this year, mostly to get access to its online journal archives; besides, you don’t have to be a real historian to be a member. One of the unanticipated perks is the quarterly Journal of American History. The September issue has a sort of roundtable discussion–it was conducted in email–among a group of scholars who have focused on the history of the Vietnam War. The subject is legacies of the war, and among the questions the journal posed to the historians was this: “Why or why not is Vietnam an appropriate historical analogy for thinking about current U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq?”

[The question is in the news, too. The commander-in-chief was asked the other day whether there was some parallel between the Tet Offensive of 1968 and the current bloodbath in Iraq. He allowed there was, then quickly added that since we’ve succeeded in turning Iraq into what it was not before we invaded–a 365-day-a-year, hands-on, post-graduate level training camp for ambitious terrorists–there is no way–no way!–we’ll leave before “the job” is done.]

Back to the historians. They all have much to say about Vietnam/Iraq parallels. But the one who sums them up best (and most dispassionately) is Christian Appy of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He says:

“There is a danger that any effort to compare current events with historical antecedents will badly distort both past and present. I agree that Iraq and Vietnam are vastly different … but surely there are commonalities, at least in a general sense, in the way U.S. officials justified their policies in the two countries, and these analogies can serve public debate. After all … one important connection is that U.S. policy makers then, as now, believed detailed local knowledge was largely irrelevant except in narrowly tactical terms (that is, where are the “bad guys”?) because Washington clung to the hope (in spite of massive contrary evidence) that U.S. technology and military firepower could hold the line long enough for modernization (or nation building) to draw each country into a stable global system amenable to U.S. economic and political power.

“At the risk of gross oversimplification, I’d like to list a few linkages. Then as now, the president claims:

—We face a global threat (Communism/terrorism).

—The enemy we fight is part of that global threat.

—We fight far away from home so we won’t have to fight in our own streets.

—We want nothing for ourselves, only self-determination for them.

—We are doing everything possible to limit the loss of civilian lives.

—We are making great progress, but the media isn’t reporting it.

—Ultimately, the war must be won by them with less and less U.S. “help.”

—Immediate withdrawal would be an intolerable blow to U.S. credibility and would only embolden our enemy and produce a bloodbath.

—Antiwar activism must be allowed but demoralizes our troops and encourages our enemy.

“Then, as now, the president does not say:

—The enemy in Vietnam/Iraq actually does not pose a threat to U.S. security, but we’re fighting anyway.

—We do indeed have geopolitical and economic interests in the region and will never tolerate a Communist/radical Islamist government.

—We are using weapons and tactics that don’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.

—We will stretch and break the law to spy on and sabotage antiwar critics.

—We won’t ask the nation as a whole to make a major sacrifice but will continue to send the working class to do most of the fighting.

—The progress we report is contradicted by our own sources.

—Troop morale is going downhill.

—Most of the people over there don’t want us in their country.”

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The News from Iraq

Link: Number of Embeds Drops to Lowest Level in Iraq.

So, the news from Iraq is bad. But maybe we’re lucky we’re getting any news at all. The Associated Press has a story today on the number of journalists now "embedded" with U.S. troops in Iraq. From a high of 600 at the war’s glorious beginning, participation has dropped recently to 11. Eleven. Fewer than a dozen reporters and news organizations out with the troops to find out what’s happening on the streets and in the countryside. The rest of the news gets reported out of the Green Zone in Baghdad or secondhand through Iraqi stringers.

Not that the embed system is wonderful. It’s not. It puts reporters in an impossible position if their aim is to report events with some sense of independent clarity. As the AP story notes, the military doesn’t censor journalists’ work; but reporters whose coverage upsets commanders have been reprimanded or kicked off their embed assignments altogether. Unfortunately, the situation in Iraq–the omnipresent violence, the insurgents’ tactic of targeting reporters–makes embedding the only way journalists can do something akin to in-the-field reporting without committing suicide.

So: Why are so few reporters embedding now? The story offers three reasons: Declining public interest in the story; news organizations’ unwillingness to spend what it takes to get reporters into embeds; and the bureaucratic and logistical hurdles news organizations must overcome to just get a reporter into an embedded situation. (I find the "declining interest" argument unpersuasive; if people aren’t paying attention to Iraq, then why is Bush working overtime to persuade us all what a necessary thing it is? The other two reasons both hold water.)

Link: Number of Embeds Drops to Lowest Level in Iraq.