The reality That Is Not There

In all the mess I have been dealing with today, I almost missed this. The Washington Post is NOT on board the Iraq Study Group's recommendations - not by a long shot.

THE IRAQ Study Group's recommendations for shifting U.S. military tactics in the war are specific, focused and aimed at incremental improvement over the next few months; they are also close to what the Pentagon and Iraqi government already were hoping to achieve. By contrast, the group's diplomatic strategy is sweeping — and untethered to reality. The Bush administration could and should adopt some version of the military plan, though it would be right to ignore the unrealistic timetable attached to it. But to embrace the group's proposed "New Diplomatic Offensive" would be to suppose a Middle East very different from what's on the ground.

Start with the supposition that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is somehow central to ending the chaos in Iraq. In fact, even if the two-state solution sought by the Bush administration were achieved, it's difficult to imagine how or why that would cause Sunnis and Shiites to cease their sectarian war in Baghdad or the Baathist-al Qaeda insurgency to stand down. It's no doubt true, as study group chairmen James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton have said, that every Arab leader they met told them that an Israeli-Arab settlement must be the first priority. But the princes and dictators of Riyadh, Cairo and Amman have been delivering that tired line to American envoys for decades: It is their favorite excuse for failing to support U.S. initiatives and for refusing to reform their own moribund autocracies. In fact, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other Iraqi neighbors have vital interests in the ongoing Iraqi power struggle. They can and should be moved to help stop the slide toward anarchy on their borders whether or not peace breaks out in Jerusalem.

Mr. Baker, who pursued a Mideast diplomatic strategy 15 years ago focused in large part on Syria, also conjectures that its regime can be "flipped," so that it abandons its current alliance with Iran and support for extremist movements in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. The problem with his theory is that since 1991 Syria has acquired a new leader: Bashar al-Assad is very different from his father, Hafez, with whom Mr. Baker negotiated. Bashar al-Assad, along with several senior members of his retinue, has been personally implicated in a United Nations investigation into the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. Judging from its recent actions,….

What Baker appears to be more than willing to do is to sell Lebanon - cheap. He's done it before, why not now? The problem is - as it was in the past - that Baker's ideas here amount to nothing more than pushing the problem off to the future generations to deal with. Well, if he gets his way here, even though he was not elected in any way shape or form to make these decisions, then one has to hope - vehemently - that he is not around to "solve" the problem when payment comes due from this round.

And it will come due.

Alas, Captain, We Hardly Knew Ye

AllahPundit catches a very likely shift by the Associated Press. They will no longer quote unauthorized spokesmen - they will simply call them anonymous sources! Problem solved in the AP's eyes!

We’ve got an AP article about an attack in Baghdad written by Qais al-Bashir quoting a police source. The stage is set for a cameo from our favorite Iraqi officer.

But what’s this?

On Sunday morning, clashes erupted between Sunni and Shiite militants in Baghdad’s mixed western Amil district, a policeman said. One Shiite militiaman was killed and six people five Sunnis and one Shiite were wounded, the officer said on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the media.

Could the mystery source be the one and only Capt. Jamil? According to the e-mail from Centcom to Flopping Aces that started all this, no one below the rank of chief is authorized by Iraq’s MOI to comment on police matters. Sounds like the AP is going to start following that policy, not by changing its sources but by no longer printing their names. Which, conveniently, will spare them a lot of grief from the blogosphere. From here on out, no names.

Look - if the incident happened, then honest reporting is not a problem. What is a problem is that the whole six burning Sunnis story appears to have been completely made up and the AP will not admit, correct or even investigate. That is a real problem and they are very deserving of all the abuse that can be piled on to them right now.

I have an anonymous source that says the AP produces fraudulent stories. Is my statement more credible than the AP's defense? Just asking.

Well, That’s A Surprise

Jimmy Carter lies.

This morning Newsweek publicist Natalia Labenskyj emailed us the political stories in Newsweek's new issue. One of the items in Labeskyj's email is Eleanor Clift's softball interview with Jimmy Carter, which I happened to read. Here is one question and answer that caught my attention:

[CLIFT:] You're obviously aware of your main critic, Mr. Stein, who used to be with the Carter Center.

[CARTER:] Thirteen years ago! He hasn't been associated with the Carter Center for 13 years.

I'm rather obviously no fan of Jimmy Carter, but his credibility - even for his sycophants - has got to be at rock bottom. This is a truly foolish, self-centered individual and, quite frankly, a disgrace to himself.

Fiji Fallout

Well, the coup in Fiji is having an unpleasant effect on Australians (and others as well) who have canceled vacations to the popular tourist destination. The government bank there is capping refunds to people who have decided they really don't want to visit under the circumstances. There will be a limit of $500 on all refunds, no matter how much was paid in advance. Fiji's finances appear to be in a bit of trouble at the moment.

FIJI'S Reserve Bank has decided against devaluing the country's currency in response to last week's coup and will instead strictly control foreign currency flows, including imposing a $500 cap on the refunds of holiday deposits for Australians who have cancelled their travel plans.

The decision comes as the implications of last week's coup continue to resonate, with the Commonwealth suspending Fiji's membership on Friday.

Reserve Bank of Fiji Deputy Governor Sada Reddy is due to meet Fiji's military leader, Frank Bainimarama, today to brief him on the nation's finances. It is believed Fiji has enough foreign reserves to meet its commitments for about four months.

The Australian understands the central banker will recommend not devaluing the currency, as experience has shown only a short-term benefit to the country.

The Fijian dollar was devalued by 33 per cent after the country's first coup in 1987 and again by 20per cent in 1998. The Fijian dollar is currently worth 76c.

The military is still hunting the country's finance department chief executive, Paula Uluinaceva, who froze the military's accounts and put spending limits on government departments as a precaution against a junta raiding the nation's bank accounts.

What happens in four months is another question. Maybe they will run more help wanted ads. This coup seems to have been rather badly thought through from the start, doesn't it?

The Incredible Disappearing Bird Flu Panic

Remember the wall-to-wall coverage of the menace of bird flu? Remember the international conferences about it? Remember all the frantic and ominous pronouncements? Remember?

Oops, just kidding.

LONDON - Earlier this year, bird flu panic was in full swing: The French feared for their foie gras, the Swiss locked their chickens indoors, and Americans enlisted prison inmates in Alaska to help spot infected wild birds.

The H5N1 virus — previously confined to Southeast Asia — was striking birds in places as diverse as Germany, Egypt, and Nigeria, and a flu pandemic seemed inevitable.

Then the virus went quiet. Except for a steady stream of human cases in Indonesia, the current flu epicenter, the past year's worries about a catastrophic global outbreak largely disappeared.

What happened?

Part of the explanation may be seasonal. Bird flu tends to be most active in the colder months, as the virus survives longer at low temperatures.

"Many of us are holding our breath to see what happens in the winter," said Dr. Malik Peiris, a microbiology professor at Hong Kong University. "H5N1 spread very rapidly last year," Peiris said. "So the question is, was that a one-off incident?"

Some experts suspect poultry vaccination has, paradoxically, complicated detection. Vaccination reduces the amount of virus circulating, but low levels of the virus may still be causing outbreaks — without the obvious signs of dying birds.

"It's now harder to spot what's happening with the flu in animals and humans," said Dr. Angus Nicoll, influenza director at the European Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

While the pandemic has not materialized, experts say it's too early to relax.

I'm not saying that governments should not be prepared for things like this at all, by the way. In general, this is one of the things government is meant to help cope with. But at times these hyped up scares end up being counterproductive. In the long run they wear people down and tend to make it more likely a real threat will be disregarded. The boy Who Cried Wolf is a fairy tale with a real life lesson in it. Aesop wasn't a stupid man.

Anthropomorphizing Trees

In yet another sign of the decline of the West, a British "organic gardening guru" has decried the custom of Christmas trees saying that the practice is "torturing" the trees to death.

In his column in Amateur Gardening magazine Bob Flowerdew, 52, a regular panellist on Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time, challenges the way that Britons take real trees into their homes and "slowly torture them to death".

He says buying an artificial tree - and saving a real tree from death over Christmas - is more environmentally friendly.

Christmas tree growers in Briton are rightly angered by this, pointing out that the growing of the tree is an environmental positive. When the trees are cut, fresh ones are planted. One can safely assume that considerably more pollution is emitted during the production of the artificial tree than during the growing of the live one. One can also point out that the artificial tree presumably uses plastic. Said material is derived, of course, from oil. So saying that use of a real tree is less environmentally friendly than use of an artificial tree is rather foolish. One suspects that Mr. Flowerdew is a bit misanthropic about this matter.

For an interesting discussion of misanthropic behavior and the anthropomorphizing tendencies of those people, see this month's Smithsonian. Paul Theroux is discussing it in relation to animals, but it holds true for trees as well.

Animal lovers often tend to be misanthropes or loners, and so they transfer their affection to the creature in their control. The classics of this type are single species obsessives, like Joy Adamson, the Born Free woman who raised Elsa the lioness and was celebrated in East Africa as a notorious scold; or Dian Fossey, the gorilla woman, who was a drinker and a recluse. "Grizzly man" Tim Treadwell was regarded, in some circles, as an authority on grizzlies, but Werner Herzog's documentary shows him to have been deeply disturbed, perhaps psychopathic and violent.

Faith Based?

Jeffrey Goldberg writes a review of Jimmy Carter's latest screed and finds the book lacking in just about everything except hubris and smug self-righteousness.

Jimmy Carter tells a strange and revealing story near the beginning of his latest book, the sensationally titled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. It is a story that suggests that the former president's hostility to Israel is, to borrow a term, faith-based.

On his first visit to the Jewish state in the early 1970s, Carter, who was then still the governor of Georgia, met with Prime Minister Golda Meir, who asked Carter to share his observations about his visit. Such a mistake she never made.

"With some hesitation," Carter writes, "I said that I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures and that a common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God. I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of her Labor government."

Jews, in my experience, tend to become peevish when Christians, their traditional persecutors, lecture them on morality, and Carter reports that Meir was taken aback by his "temerity." He is, of course, paying himself a compliment. Temerity is mandatory when you are doing God's work, and Carter makes it clear in this polemical book that, in excoriating Israel for its sins — and he blames Israel almost entirely for perpetuating the hundred-year war between Arab and Jew — he is on a mission from God.

That is an interesting insight. Despite his execrable record as president he still feels he needs to inject himself into American foreign policy. Despite the fact that he knows full well he no longer has the right or the authority to do so since the voters turned him out. Yet he persists. Does he believe he is on acting directly on God's orders? I have no idea. But if you look at it in those terms, it does, indeed, explain an awful lot of what he has done, doesn't it? 

Longtime Readers Will Have Noticed

That I am posting very lightly today. The reason is these ongoing attacks on the site. I'm spending an awful lot of time trying to figure out what to do to stay online. The site has been down at least once this morning already.

“A Fatuous Process Yields, Necessarily, Fatuous Results.”

Eliot Cohen judges the effort of the Iraq Study Group and comes to a very harsh conclusion. The problem of having unelected officials with no real expertise in the fields they are passing judgment on coupled with an up-front agenda yields what is essentially a collection of platitudes and vague generalities.

The administration's congressional critics (including those of its own party) came up with a different solution: the Iraq Study Group (ISG), which has now produced a document that consists of 50 pages of recommendations, preceded by a 40-page thumbnail sketch of the current situation in Iraq and 50 pages of maps, lists of people, and full-length biographies of the commissioners. This is a group composed, for the most part, of retired eminent public officials, most with limited or no expertise in the waging or study of war. It consists of individuals carefully selected with an eye to diverse partisan and other irrelevant personal characteristics. These worthies, with not one chairman but two (for balance, of course), turned to several score experts known to disagree vehemently with one another about the best course of action to be pursued in Iraq.

Some of the commission members and their advisers cordially detest the president and his administration and opposed him and his war from the outset; others were equally passionate in their defense of both the man and the conflict. And yet this diverse group had an overwhelming mandate, from the beginning, to produce a consensus document. The commission members spent four days in Iraq, and with the exception of a one-day foray by former Marine Chuck Robb, they stayed in the Green Zone, that bubble of palaces and residences that has little to do with the real Iraq of Basra, Kirkuk, Ramadi, Baquba and Mosul. At the end, they had breakfast with the president and a few hours later posted their conclusions on the Internet for all the world to ponder. There is something of farce in all this, an invocation of wisdom from a cohesive Washington elite that does not exist, a desperate wish to believe in the gravitas and the statecraft of grave men (and women) who can sort out the mess in which the country finds itself.

A fatuous process yields, necessarily, fatuous results. "Iraq's neighbors are not doing enough to help Iraq achieve stability"–a statement only somewhat ameliorated by the admission that some are even "undercutting stability," which sounds as though Syria and Iran were being downright rude, rather than providing indispensable assistance to those who have filled the burn wards of Walter Reed, the morgue in Baghdad, and the cemetery at Arlington. The selected remedy is, first and foremost, rather like the ISG's credo for its own functioning, consensus. "The United States should immediately launch a new diplomatic offensive to build an international consensus for stability in Iraq and the region," as if our chief failure with Bashar Assad or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad lies with the hitherto unnoticed laziness or rhetorical ineptitude of our diplomats, or as though Europe, Saudi Arabia and Israel have not yet figured out that stability in Iraq is a good thing. "Syria should control its border" and "Iran should respect Iraq's sovereignty."

The whole thing is worth reading. I have pointed out all along that the "realists" are not dealing in actual reality but rather in what they wish to be. Cohen's assessment is brutal, he takes the ISG and their report apart in detail. The  ISG report comes down to wishes and dreams, not a real solution.

Expert Help

Comments are still turned off and may be for the foreseeable future. I have been emailing with Michael Hampton, the person behind the Bad Behavior plugin for WordPress and he's looking at the logs to see what the heck blasted past all the protections and killed the site again yesterday. Hampton, by the way, is also a finalist for the Weblog Awards. He also answers email in an astonishingly short time.

Jefferson Wins Reelection

William Jefferson, he of the large amount of cash stuffed inside his freezer has been reelected to Congress in a runoff election in Louisiana.

Louisiana's 2nd District was one of the nation's last unresolved midterm races, and the runoff election put Jefferson in danger of becoming the only Democratic incumbent to lose this election year.

In her concession speech, Carter embraced family members and pledged to work with Jefferson, particularly on the area's recovery from Hurricane Katrina.

"I guess the people are happy with the status quo," she said.

Jefferson, Louisiana's first black congressman since Reconstruction, has been the target of a wide-ranging investigation into allegations that he took bribes — including $90,000 allegedly found in his freezer during an FBI raid — from a company seeking lucrative contracts in the Nigerian telecommunications market. He has not been charged with any crime and denies any wrongdoing.

Yes, he has not been charged. But his reelection will make Nancy Pelosi's pledge to clean things up that much more difficult. The public knows that there is no legitimate reason to keep $90,000 in a freezer. And the public now sees this man returning to Congress. Meet the new boss.

UPDATE: There is a certain amount of bipartisanship out in the blogospere about this today. It is, frankly, refreshing. There are some major left leaning blogs decrying this as well as a chorus of voices on the right.

MyDD, Talking Points Memo, Don Surber, Gun Toting Liberal, Extreme Mortman, the talking dog, Middle Earth Journal, Iowa Voice, Wizbang, Blogs for Bush, Joust The Facts, The Moderate Voice, Assorted Babble,Captain’s Quarters, Pirate’s Cove,

Fundamentally Depressing

Ann Althouse links to a Bloggingheads TV interview with Glenn Reynolds then discusses blogging.

Glenn Reynolds says he said that back in 2002. He's talking about blogger burnout with Bob Wright on Bloggingheads.tv. The point is that the news is "fundamentally depressing," and the assumption is that blogging requires you to keep up with the news more than you otherwise would.

But you don't have to blog about the news. You don't have to provide any particular service to your readers or even try to maintain your existing set of readers. I started blogging with the idea of just seeing what struck me over the course of the day, primarily as I sat down with the New York Times every morning.

Anything might be bloggable. Something someone said, a TV show, a passing thought, a street scene, a new Supreme Court case … and the news was just one more thing that had the potential to grab my attention. The thing I'm most likely to be criticized for, by commenters and other bloggers, is the failure to write about some particular subject. They tend to assume that the more important a news story is, the more I am obligated to write about it. So, for example, if I don't write about the treatment of the detainees or the war, that in itself constitutes a statement that I don't care or I think everything that is going on is just fine. But in fact, the failure to write may only mean that I respect the difficulty of the subject. Learning to put up with that criticism and not letting it drag me into obligatory blogging has been crucial to preserving the energy and fun of blogging.

It has been a very interesting experience for me, this blog and blogging in general. But longtime readers know that I do range widely in what I blog about and I do try to have some humor in here every day. Even though that can be very difficult some days. I've run into that same phenomenon that Ann describes, having people criticize because I don't choose to blog about a certain subject.