Don't Panic. -- Cover of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

One always hopes that the guys in charge know something, have some great big-picture plan, that you are just currently not privy to. That everything will turn around tomorrow. But then you get an e-mail like this, from one of the clearest thinkers you know, and, man, don't it sound like what's going down: " I promised myself that I would not agitate until October, but I am very worried that GWB is in deep trouble, and deservedly. The announcements today by Bremmer and Powell that we would leave Iraq if asked to do so by a non-democratically-elected cabal of UN-iks chosen by a doctrinaire anti-Semite are among the most profoundly stupid statements of government policy I can remember in my lifetime. ... That we would turn over to it an enterprise for which over 750 American servicemen have given their lives is shocking enough; that we are now saying we would leave at their request before the job is done is a betrayal I cannot even wrap my brain around. I'm sorry to rail, but what are we thinking about here?"

-- a post by KJK on NRO

What the hell is going on with my conservative brethren? Some pictures of abuse from Abu Ghraib and suddenly everyone's hitting the panic-button with the mechanical repetitive fury of a monkey pulling the lever that delivers fifty mikes of adrenaline straight into its genitals.

Calm. The hell. Down.
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Posted by: Ace at 12:39 AM | Comments (20)
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The US Military is pushing further and further into "forbidden" holy areas in Najaf.

But slowwwwwwly.

They seem to have done the same thing in Karbala.

Is this the new tactic? Rather than storm in from the get-go -- which might set the crazies off -- just keep going a little bit further each time, so that the crazies accomodate themselves to the new reality bit by bit without going berserk?

Dave offers:

Actually, it's standard U.S. urban warfare doctrine, developed after watching the Russians get butchered in Grozny.
-- Cordon off the urban area, no one gets in or out w/o US permission
-- Let out civilians to get them out of harms way, and obtain valuable intelligence
-- Launch quick raids using combined arms at known targets, avoiding the "block by block" slugfest that, while satisfying to watch, can result in lots of fatigue, attrition, and collateral damage.

Such a deliberate process allows us to dictate the terms of the fight by playing to our strengths (intel integration, precision weaponry, and good ISR) and avoiding the enemy's strengths (ability to blend in, harness the media exploitation of casualties and collateral damage, and their general penchant for intimidation through savagery).

The problem is, these methodical tactics are slow, and may or may not pay off (witness Fallujah, where the Marines did it for weeks, until. . . they suddenly stopped doing it, at least publically). I trust our guys know what they're doing, but these tactics require patience-- patience a lot of politicians, let alone our militarily-ignorant media-- don't always seem to have.

Posted by: Ace at 02:39 PM | Comments (16)
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The Patriotic Left again makes us all so very very proud.

They really love America and their fellow Americans. They'll tell you so and everything. They just show how they love their fellow Americans more than you do by laughing at the horrifying, gruesome slow-motion decapitation of an American citizen.

It's very similar to how they "support the troops" by calling for the murder of military officers. If you don't get this, you're just another rabid rightwing troglodyte who has no "nuance."

Meanwhile, of course, patriotic liberal Randi Rhodes calls for the murder of our President on Air America.

Hypoethetically:

If Randi Rhodes thinks it's funny to call for the killing of the President, how chuckle-worthy does she think it would be if some on the right wing began calling for her murder? Or for a political figure she supports?

In a joking, tongue-in-cheek, "witty" manner, we mean.

We don't think she'd find that terribly "funny" at all. Death threats are not funny. Anything that can provoke some sicko on either side of the political spectrum to kill another fucking human being is not funny at all.

But the left just keeps dancing on the fucking line, don't they? It's oh-so-cute. After all, it's harmless-- no left-winger ever shot or tried to shoot a fucking President, did they?

Oh, except for Lee Harvey Oswald.

And Sirhan Sirhan.

And Squeaky Fromme. Don't tell us she was apolitical. She was a race-war radical with a grudge against "pigs." Doesn't sound like a Republican to us.

But it's so damn cute when left-wingers attempt to incite assassinations!

Double-Standard Alert: We feel pretty vile even saying what we said above. We don't know, however, any other make the point to these rotten twats that it's wrong to call for the deaths of people you don't like.

And please-- don't give us that crap about it being a "joke." We say a lot of fucking things here in the form of jokes and we mean almost all of them.

Joke or not, the game a lot of these people are playing is to encourage the less-stable members of their political clique to actually take what the left-wing used to term "direct action." Political violence doesn't just happen. Someone has to get it into their head that it's the right thing to do, that they will be heroes for taking that shot, that they will be celebrated by the people they listen to or read.

Rotten twats like Randi Rhodes.

We're tired of seeing left-wingers append their web-messages with "Sic Semper Tyrannis" and other cutesy allusions to assassinations.

None of this behavior would be countenanced were rightwingers to engage in it.

The very fact we've asked the obvious question in return to Randi Rhodes -- "Well, how would you like it if the same was done to you?" -- will probably draw more furious condemnation than Randi Rhodes' original statement.

And think about it! A mere 1200 people a day read us. Compare that to Air America, which is listened to daily by... well, dozens of people, we guess.

Okay, that was a bad comparison. Ignore that.

Let's be clear: we don't advocate political violence. And we don't fucking joke about it. Ever. It's playing with fire, and we don't even want to step near that kind of fire.

But apparently, once again, there's a special rule for those on the left.

We shouldn't even have to ask Randi Rhodes, "Well, what about if someone with a microphone starts 'playfully' calling for your death?" The very obviousness of that question should have kept her from calling for the President's death in the first place. But apparently it did not; apparently it just didn't occur to her that there was much wrong with joking about Presidential assassinations.

But of course we'll end up the right-wing bad guy for stating the obvious.

Posted by: Ace at 01:40 PM | Comments (14)
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For some time, we've been wondering about the proper function of blogs. Should blogs attempt to emulate what newspapers would be without all that liberal bias, i.e., a digest and analysis of all the day's important news, without regard to partisan rooting interest? Not to say that blogs would be objective in their analysis, but they would be objective in their presentation of subject matter, i.e., they wouldn't just ignore topics and developments which undermine the blogger's pet cause.

Or should they continue being what they largely are now-- a vehicle for partisan reinforcement, a way of scoring points on one's opponents by constantly, and exclusively, linking news and analysis that supports the writer's and readers' beliefs?
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Posted by: Ace at 12:08 PM | Comments (51)
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There seems to be a disagreement of the relationship of expectation and importance. What is unexpected is treated as being important because it is unusual, while what is usual is treated as unimportant because it is expected.

-- Weaver, over at The Perfect World.

Something to bear in mind.

Posted by: Ace at 11:13 AM | Comments (4)
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Via to Kausfiles, who's got a funny take on it, Donald Luskin catches Paul Krugman making, yet again, a flat-out error.

And does he correct his error at the bottom of the next column, clearly labeling it as such, as per the alleged new NYT corrections policy?

No, of course not. Instead, he writes a new column on the same topic -- almost certainly cobbled together as a pretext for revisiting the erroroneous statement -- and quickly mentions the error in a parenthetical note in the middle of that column, claiming, not that he erred, but that he "forgot" what he already knew.

He "forgot" he knew the fact he unambigiously denied as being a fact at all, and NYT Op-Ed page editor Gail Collins "forgot" that she supposedly was enforcing a new corrections policy for columnists requiring them to clearly label errors as such, rather than rowing them back in a subsequent column, as had been -- and continues to be -- the longtime NYT practice.

Luskin deadpans as he twists the knife:

You see, it's not that he didn't research it carefully in the first place, dear trusting reader. It's not that he was wrong. No, he was right all along. There's just so much expert knowledge on all subjects rattling around in that astounding brain of his, he forgot this one!

And that's awfully funny, because that's precisely the same reason we get facts wrong, and misspell words like "embarassing," so frequently. It's not that we're sloppy, slapdash, amateurish, or just frequently practicing the ancient art of rectal ventriloquism; no, what you've got to understand is that we're so damned scary-brilliant it's hard to keep track of all our cornucopiaic smartitude.

We just know far too much for one group of well-paid rightwing propagandists to keep tabs on it all. We really need an intern.

Meanwhile, up a bit from that, Luskin has further details on that Yale economic model showing Bush taking 58% of the popular vote.

Posted by: Ace at 10:45 AM | Comments (6)
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No print cite available yet. FoxNews reports that Berg was interviewed after 9-11 due to a possibly innocent connection with Zaccharius Moussaui.

The mystery would seem to be not quite solved yet.

It could be he's been a CIA hero all along.

It could mean something else.

It could mean exactly nothing.

Update: File it as meaning "exactly nothing." Apparently Berg let others use his email account when in college; the account got out to other people, and one of the people using it was Moussaoui. The FBI thought this was a coincidence then and still thinks so.

Update: Ilyka Damen says in no uncertain terms that the rightwing ought to cool its jets regarding speculation about the murdered man.

We agree with this. To some extent. One has to be careful what one says, because this guy could be a hero, or he could be just an innocent adventure-seeking guy who wanted to do good for the Third World. How awful would one feel about maligning such a person?

And there is the case of mixed-motives. Everyone grieves with Berg's family, but those of us on the right wing are a little peeved that, once again, a longstanding leftist-advocate is trying to claim special expert status on geopolitics on the basis of a lost loved one. So we have to be careful that we're not jumping the gun to say horrible, unproveable things about Nick Berg just because his father, poor grieving innocent American that he is, is also a leftist hump.

But where we depart from Ilyka is that we think, at the very least, the odd circumstances of his past have to be mentioned. What is the alternative? To ignore such a strange datum?

We'll keep saying that all of this means, most likely, exactly nothing. We'll keep saying that, but we really don't know. No one does.

Posted by: Ace at 12:33 PM | Comments (45)
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The Fallujah terrorists and the Sadrists both claim that they want America out of Iraq.

They do not. They want America to stay in Iraq.

They do not want America to cede political control to Iraqis. They want America to retrain control, breaking its promises.

Again, the situation here is strangely counter-intuitive.

America has announced that we are ceding political control on June 30. We are, substantially, giving the country back to Iraqis on that date.

The terrorists claim they want to drive us out of Iraq. What can this mean? That they want to drive us out of Iraq two weeks ahead of schedule? They're fighting in order to advance the transer-of-power date from June 30 to June 17?

They're fighting over a fortnight?

Of course not. The terrorists do not "want America out." What the terrorists want is to be in charge of Iraq whenever it is we leave. And for there to be any chance of that happening, they need us to leave later, not sooner.

There is no chance, currently, of the Ba'athists, or Sunnis generally, taking control of Iraq. If there were such a chance, they wouldn't be fighting us; they'd be cooperating with us, salivating over the soon-to-come day when we'd leave and put them back in control.

Similarly, there is no chance, currently, of the Sadrists taking control of Iraq. The Sadrists would not need to fight us in order to take control. They could simply wait for the elections, at which point the majority of Iraqis, supporting the Sadrist movement, would elect Moqtada al-Sadr Tyrant for Life.

The very fact they're fighting us demonstrates they do not have political power.

Their only real hope for power -- as slender as that hope might be -- is not to drive America out of Iraq, but to drive America deeper into Iraq. Not to force America to leave early, but to force America to stay longer.

They can attack Americans, and those who ally themselves with Americans, because it is a sad fact that the Muslims are a people hateful of Americans, even when the Americans liberate them. There is no major political price to pay for butchering Americans, even amongst Muslim "moderates."

There will, however, be a steep price to pay for killing fellow Iraqis, when Iraqis are in charge of their own country. There will be a hefty political price to pay, but that will be the lesser penalty. The bigger price will be the brutality with which such anti-Iraqi terrorism is put down.

The terrorists, then, are working with a limited window of opportunity. If power is transferred on June 30, as planned, they will not be allowed to run the country, and furthermore, they have no hope at all of fighting to win control of the country through force of arms.

Their goal, then, is to make the situation such that it becomes impossible for America to hand over power on June 30. America would be forced, by the actions of the very terrorists claiming to want us out so desperately, to stay longer. And then they hope that the majority of Iraqis become so enraged by the lingering American presence that they turn to the Ba'athists, or the Sadrists, as saviors.

They hope, at that point, the Iraqis say, "We now find the Americans more intolerable than we find you. Please-- drive them out. Drive them out, and we will give you what you so desperately want-- political control of Iraq."

It is in light of this reality that we must judge the actions of our military.

Do we want to just storm in and kill as many Fallujahans and Sadrists as possible? Yes, of course we do. But killing them is not our goal; killing them is only one tool in our toolbox for achieving our actual goal. Our actual goal is not necessarily to kill them, but to isolate them politically, and to insure that, when we withdraw on June 30, they will not have greater political power than they began their insurrections with.

We do not want to make them heroes, nor saviors.

And we do not want to undertake any action which, while reasonable in terms of achieving justice or vengeance, undermines the likelihood of our achieving our primary goal: creating an Iraq which is stable enough to handle its own internal problems. An Iraq which is stable enough to handle the terrorists itself, with all the sensitivity and mercy that Arab counter-insurgencies are historically known for.

If the terrorists really wanted us to leave Iraq sooner, they would negotiate to lay down their arms and begin cooperating. We're quite sure that, were they to do so, the CPA would be willing to cede authority in early June. And we're quite sure they know that.

Their goal is not to drive us out -- one does not fight to achieve something one already has. They are fighting, as all people fight, for something they don't currently have, and won't have, unless the situation changes: political control of Iraq.

The current schedule does not permit this, and this is why they terrorize.

And that's precisely why we can't deviate from this schedule. We cannot stay in control of Iraq longer, no matter how desperately the terrorists want us to.

Posted by: Ace at 11:54 AM | Comments (15)
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Outstanding post by Instapundit on what the public wants to read about versus what the liberal media wants to write about.

Posted by: Ace at 11:07 AM | Comments (2)
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One bugaboo that we think is purely phatasmal is the prospect of an Iraqi civil war.

It's phatasmal for a simple reason: the Shi'as would win. And they would slaughter their most likely opponents, the Sunnis.

And, we've got to say, at this point we'd be pretty much all right with that outcome. Not that we long for such an outcome; but we're quite done with protecting the Sunnis from their own hateful stupidity.

It's a very strange situation. The Shi'as do not oppose us because we're not giving enough political power to minorities like the Sunnis. They oppose us (politically) because they feel we're yielding too much power to minorities like the Sunnis.

All of the major disputes with Imam al-Sistani have been due to the Shi'a suspicion that we're going to put the Sunnis, or the Kurds, back in charge, or that we're going to yield so much power to them that the Shi'a dream of self-rule will at least be greatly frustrated by limitations imposed by Americans.

The Shi'as are emphatically not opposing us politically because they want us to deliver the country back into Sunni hands.

And thus the strange situation: The people who are killing us -- the Sunni insurgents -- are actually the very folks we are most protecting at the moment.

Let us be clear: We are in Iraq at the moment not to protect the Shi'as from the Sunnis, but to protect the Sunnis from the Shi'as.

And yet the Sunnis are the ones murdering our troops.

If the Sunnis do provoke a civil war: What of it? They will lose, and they will be slaughtered by the thousands.

Is that our fault? No, it's not. We have fought and died to remake Iraq into a tolerant, multiethnic democracy in which the rights of minorities are respected. The Sunnis are the chief opponents of this project. If they provoke a civil war and die by the thousands -- well, that's of course terribly, terribly sad, but they made their own bed.

The only civil war we really fear is a civil war against the Kurds. But we think that's unlikely. Although Sistani and his like-minded Shi'a theocrats desperately want to impose their religion and politics on the Kurds, we think most of the argument and negotiation is occurring at the margins. The Kurds are a fairly well-armed people, and they've gotten used to autonomy, and everyone knows the US wants that autonomy to be respected, more or less. Or else. So, while a war with the Kurds is a possibility, we think the Shi'as understand that the price for keeping Kurdistan part of Iraq at all is granting it significant internal autonomy.

The Kurds would most likely join the Shi'as in massacring Sunnis, should it come to that. The Kurds want back all that land taken from them by the Sunnis; most likely there'd be a deal worked out between the Kurds and Shi'as.

So: An Iraqi civil war. What would be our major concern about it? Would we cry much that the very people slaughtering our soldiers, the very people who simply will not accept majority rule, the very people who continue to insist on a tyranny of the minority and their right to brutally subjugate their fellows, were to be slaughtered en masse in turn?

How many American troops' lives are worth sacrificing to protect such people from themselves? Our answer is zero.

We're not rooting for such an outcome, but again, if that is what the Sunnis wish, so be it. We will not fight and die to protect them, at the same time they murder us for the privilege of doing so.

And further, we don't think that this is even a likely outcome, because the Sunnis understand the likely consequences of their actions. They're killing Americans because they know they can get away with killing Americans. But we don't think they're eager to provoke a war with a majority, now in possession of arms and the nation's oil wealth, whom they brutalized for thirty years.

Arabs fight wars differently than we do.

Who would they call upon for protection? To whom would they whine to for military assistance?

The United States? Hm. That would be so amusing it might almost be worth the carnage.

The UN? The same UN whose headquarters they blew up, and forced to evacuate the country? We think the UN would provide these good folks with words of encouragement and little else.

A Shi'a tyranny which respects some Kurdish autonomy but brutally represses the Sunni minority would not be our first preference. We would rather, actually, a peaceful, tolerant Iraq in which the political rights -- and personal rights -- of Sunnis are guaranteed. Yes, even at this point, we don't wish perpetual misery and brutalization on the Sunnis.

But we will be damned if we're going to spend blood and treasure to guarantee such rights, when it's the Sunnis who are killing our troops.

Actions have consequences. If that is their wish, we will not be murdered by them in order to make a better future for them. That's not a military loss. That's simple common-sense. You don't sacrifice the lives of American troops for the purpose of protecting their very murderers.

Posted by: Ace at 10:43 AM | Comments (16)
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