The Rag Blog

For Bush, who has failed at every task ever put before him, from work, to the military to school, this was going to be his vindication. He so desperately wanted to be a hero and Iraq was going to solve all of his issues. He would defeat an enemy, prove himself worthy and gain the respect from his family he so desperately wanted.

Which is why he chose men his father kept at arms length. Bush never wanted advice, he wanted confirmation of his beliefs. His narrow world view, shaped by the dust dry plains of Midland as much as any movie, this idea that a man didn’t need or want questions, he just did.

When the admirable Tiberius upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous. “Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?” He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: “How eager you are to be slaves.”
— Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Amid the onrush of Caligulan sex scandals, suspension of the Constitution, depressing bulletins from the Babylonian front, and all manner of bogus “events,” a recent news item has passed with remarkably little public stir, despite being featured above the fold on the front page of The Washington Post, a bulletin board as eagerly read by the capital city’s strivers as Pravda in its day by the fellow-traveler, or Osservatore Romano by the untramontanist Catholic.

The article [1] informs us that the President has signed off on a “National Space Policy.” The cornerstone of this new policy is the administration’s intention to “oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space. Proposed arms control agreements or restrictions must not impair the rights of the United States to conduct research, development, testing and operations or other activities in space for U.S. national interest.”

The document adds elsewhere that the new policy must “enable unhindered U.S. operations in and through space to defend our interest there.” Note the unctuous use of the modifier “our”–as if the interests of parasitic contractors, government placemen, and neoconservative scribblers constituted the res publica.

If the English language means anything, the plain intent of the policy is to assert that the United States (or rather its governing clique) can do anything it likes, and treaties be damned, including the Outer Space Treaty currently in force. This conclusion would be consistent with the administration’s treatment of other judicial impedimenta, such as the Geneva Convention or the late Constitution. Similar to the Senate’s craven grant of plenary power to the Roman Emperor, a supine legislative branch has encouraged the administration to believe its own whim is law–to make war, to torture, to “unsign” treaties.

Yet the Post journalist, in the idiot-savant manner made famous by Bob Woodward, stenographically quotes a “senior government official who was not authorized to speak on the record” as saying “This policy is not about developing or deploying weapons in space. Period.”

Ah, just as the Military Commissions Act was not about torture! How like the administration to assign one of its “senior” functionaries to pretend to speak without authorization in order to add verisimilitude to an assertion that it plainly wanted to disseminate–an assertion at odds with the plain text of its policy. And the Post’s reporter fell for it like a yokel at the Barnum circus. Thus the rest of the article becomes a fraudulent “debate” between the administration’s allegations and those of its critics; thereby lending weight to the presumption that there are legitimately “two sides” to any issue involving the administration.

While the Establishment press (other than the Post) gave little attention to the space policy story, the blogosphere (to the extent it paid any attention) behaved in a predictable fashion: the usual hand-wringing about the militarization of space, the unilateralism of the Bush administration, and forecasts of dark tidings generally. There is some truth to these assertions, but they are subsidiary to a more significant point.

The space policy document is not so much a blueprint as a symptom. But of what?–of fiendish Machiavells, plotting to storm the very heavens? Perhaps that is the intent of these laptop Flash Gordons, but between the desire and the fulfillment falls the shadow: the shadow of utter incompetence.

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice … until we got out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartner scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

I was standing in the Roof with my AK-47 and just stared at them.

Rumsfeld said he had “information that shipments of military supplies have been crossing the border from Syria into Iraq, including night vision goggles.”

“We consider such trafficking as hostile acts and will hold the Syrian government accountable for such shipments,” he told a Pentagon press conference. He didn’t say what the other equipment was, and several senior Defense Department officials said they didn’t know.

Syrian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Bouthaine Shaban rejected Rumsfeld’s statement as “unfounded and irresponsible.”

“He only brings problems for his country and humanity at large,” she told Britain’s Channel 4 television in a telephone interview from Damascus. “It is an absolutely unfounded, irresponsible statement, just like his statements that brought his country and the allied countries into a terrible war, unnecessary war on Iraq.”

Syrian President Bashar Assad has described the military action against Iraq as “clear occupation and a flagrant aggression against a United Nations member state.”

Rumsfeld also said that Iraqi militants opposed to Saddam Hussein’s regime were streaming into Iraq from Iran, where they had been in exile. He said their presence was complicating U.S. war plans.

Sharing a Pentagon briefing with Rumsfeld, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Iraqi government has lost control of 35 percent to 40 percent of its territory and that allied air forces have supremacy over 95 percent of Iraq’s airspace.

Rumsfeld said that Iraqi forces were being helped by shipments from Syria, Iraq’s neighbor to the West.

“There’s no question but that to the extent that military supplies or equipment or people are moving across the borders between Iraq and Syria, it vastly complicates our situation,” Rumsfeld said.

Asked if the United States was threatening military action against Syria, Rumsfeld said: “I’m saying exactly what I’m saying. It was carefully phrased.”

“These deliveries pose a direct threat to the lives of coalition forces,” the defense secretary added.

Rumsfeld also said that “hundreds” of Iran-backed militants opposed to Saddam’s regime, known as the Badr Brigades, were entering Iraq and complicating U.S. war plans drawn up by the on-scene commander, Gen. Tommy Franks.

“To the extent that they interfere with Gen. Frank’s activities, they would have to be considered combatants. And therefore we’re suggesting they not interfere,” Rumsfeld said.

“They are Iraqis….They have been housed in Iran, armed by Iran, sponsored by Iran,” Rumsfeld said. “Gen. Franks and the coalition countries are busy, they’ve got a complicated task. We’d prefer it not be made more difficult by the neighbors.”

Rumsfeld and Myers briefed as America’s battle plan for Baghdad was taking shape, with U.S. forces now in position to strike the Iraqi capital from nearly all sides – or to mount a siege and wait for Saddam Hussein’s regime to fall to internal opposition.

Myers said that Republican Guard units defending the city are ”dug in.”

“They could be consolidating to make a defense. It doesn’t make any difference. The outcome is certain,” said the Joint Chiefs chairman.

The Bush administration’s accusations against Syria follow complaints that Russia had sold anti-tank guided missiles, jamming devices and night-vision goggles to Iraq.

“They control their border,” he added. “We’re hoping that kind of thing doesn’t happen.”

As sporadic battles raged between American infantry and defiant Iraqi troops and paramilitary guerrillas, more armor and at least 100,000 reinforcing U.S. and allied troops are on their way to join the coalition force over the next few weeks.

In the interim, the American game plan is simple: bombs, bombs and more bombs.

The Army’s senior ground commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace of V Corps, told reporters of The New York Times and The Washington Post on Thursday that unexpected tactics by Iraqi fighters and stretched supply lines were slowing down the campaign. “The enemy we’re fighting is different from the one we’d war-gamed against,” the papers quoted Wallace as saying during a visit to the 101st Airborne Division headquarters in central Iraq.

Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, at the daily briefing at U.S. Central Command in Qatar, insisted U.S. war planners had not underestimated Iraqi fighting capabilities, but said unexpected developments were inevitable in any war. He accused the Iraqis of using “terrorist death squads” who changed in and out of civilian clothes.

Meanwhile, a U.S. official involved in military planning and intelligence said Iraqi troops have been spotted between U.S. and Iraqi lines wearing full chemical protection suits and unloading 50- gallon drums from trucks. U.S. intelligence doesn’t know what was in the drums, but fear it could be chemicals.

Officials have said that the closer invading forces get to Baghdad, the higher the possibility that a cornered regime will launch an attack with chemical weapons or other weapons of mass destruction, which Saddam as denied he has.

A senior U.S. diplomat has criticized his country’s role in Iraq as President George W. Bush said the United States is still expecting to win the war, but is changing its tactics.

“We tried to do our best but I think there is much room for criticism because, undoubtedly, there was arrogance and there was stupidity from the United States in Iraq,” Alberto Fernandez, an Arabic-speaking diplomat in the State Department’s bureau of Near Eastern affairs, said on Al-Jazeera television on Saturday.

An administration official wondered whether the translation was accurate, the Associated Press reported. The unidentified official said Fernandez was not repeating the administration position.

KHARTOUM, Sudan (Oct. 22) – The Sudanese government Sunday ordered the chief U.N. envoy out of the country after he wrote that Sudan’s army had suffered major losses in recent fighting in Darfur.

Jan Pronk was given 72 hours to leave — an order that is likely to complicate international efforts to halt the killings, rapes and other atrocities in the strife-torn region of western Sudan.

“The presence of the United Nations is vital to hundreds of thousands of citizens of the Darfur region,” said a European Union spokesman, Amadeu Altafaj Tardio, in Brussels.

In a statement distributed by the official Sudan News Agency, the country’s Foreign Ministry accused Pronk of demonstrating “enmity to the Sudanese government and the armed forces” and of involvement in unspecified activities “that are incompatible with his mission.”

In New York, U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Secretary-General Kofi Annan had received a letter from the Sudanese government asking that Pronk be removed from the post.