I have complete faith that the US military, along with the help our allies are providing, will wind up dislodging Saddam Hussein from power, hopefully sooner rather than later. When that happens, the aspirants to American empire who have sunk their claws into the current administration will no doubt crow about their general brilliance. Before it’s too late, let’s be sure to remember that they’re the same people who thought that no ground invasion was needed to overthrow Iraq’s government — that we could just send a few guns over and provide air support and the Iraqi opposition would take care of these things themselves. It was the military that demanded that the invasion be an all out effort involving lots of troops on the ground. Of all the things the Bush administration has gotten wrong, listening to the military on this one is one thing they got right.

It should be obvious to anyone following the news closely that the coalition forces are doing the best they can to preserve the lives of innocent civilians, even at the cost of casualties on our side. Obviously, too many innocents are still dying, but I shudder to think of how many civilians would have died had we started up a proxy war and let paramilitaries call in air strikes with abandon. War is brutal and awful, but I have a lot more confidence in the US and British militaries to maintain self control than I do a bunch of irregulars with no real military training and little or no accountability. Besides, had we gone the so-called “Afghan” route, or, if you prefer, the Bay of Pigs route, the insurrectionists would have been defeated, and the destruction of a civil war in Iraq would not even have effected the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

My point here is that what the neocons wanted would have in all likelihood turned out to be the worst case scenario for the people of Iraq. As it is, things are awful, but there is some hope that once this is all said and done, things will be better for the Iraqis than they were before this war began. If the people who have so desperately wanted this war for years had gotten their way, that wouldn’t be the case.

Salon has a timely interview with Paul Berman, who wrote the New York Times Magazine article that I linked to this weekend. They also have a Berman’s book, Liberalism and Terrorism, which I’ll probably pick up.

Berman’s critique of President Bush, is, sadly, dead on:

Q: So you think the way he’s presenting this war to the world is really where he’s gone wrong.

A: Yes, it has been wretched. He’s presented his arguments for going to war partly mendaciously, which has been a disaster. He’s certainly presented them in a confused way, so that people can’t understand his reasoning. He’s aroused a lot of suspicion. Even when he’s made good arguments, he’s made them in ways that are very difficult to understand and have completely failed to get through to the general public. All in all, his inarticulateness has become something of a national security threat for the United States.

In my interpretation, the basic thing that the United States wants to do — overthrow Saddam and get rid of his weapons — is sharply in the interest of almost everybody all over the world. And although the U.S. is proposing to act in the interest of the world, Bush has managed to terrify the entire world and to turn the world against him and us and to make our situation infinitely more dangerous than it otherwise would have been. It’s a display of diplomatic and political incompetence on a colossal scale. We’re going to pay for this.

Interestingly, Berman’s theory on the origins of Baathism and Islamism are quite congruent with the Occidentalism article from the New York Review of Books by Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma that I linked to last January. It will now cost you four bucks to read, unfortunately.

Update: a friendly librarian points out that this article can be obtained at no charge at your local public library.

Another member of the foreign service, Mary Wright, has resigned her post in protest of the Bush administration’s policies. I applaud the bravery of someone who’s willing to give up their career and the service to their country that they seem to very much cherish based on their principles. I don’t agree word for word with her problems with the Bush administration, which she explains quite clearly, but for the most part I do agree with her. It’s a shame to see us lose exactly the sorts of people that I think should be representing our country overseas.

Worth reading is this American Prospect article that talks about the neocon agenda for the Middle East. It does a good job of illustrating some future scenarios hoped for by the Richard Perle acolytes that infest Washington these days. Do I think that the neocon agenda is going to catch on? Not necessarily. But they were successful in goading the Bush administration into war with Iraq, and I think that it’s important for us to pay attention to what some influential people have in store for us if they get their way. The thought of war with Iran makes me shudder — unlike Iraq, Iran has not been under severe sanctions for a decade, and they have many more reasons to support government against foreign invaders than do the Iraqi people.

Bruce Rolston is doing a better job of analyzing the hazy news of war than anyone I’ve seen on network TV. You can read his thoughts at Flit.

The Philosopher of Islamic Terror: this week’s New York Times Magazine has a lengthy review of the writings of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian philosopher whose writings underlie the political and theological philosophies of al-Qaeda.

One of the great struggles I’ve gone through since September 11, 2001, is trying to figure out what motivates Osama bin Laden and his followers. Reading this article brings me as close as I think I’ve ever come. Pat answers like “they envy us” or “they hate our freedom” just don’t cut it. Qutb’s theories are, to me, utter and complete madness, but they’re not incoherent, and I can see how they’d be appealing to people who are dealing with the congitive dissonance of feeling pride in their religion and identity while living in the existing circumstances that confront the Muslim world today.

This ideology commands its adherents to sacrifice their own lives if that’s what it takes to nudge the world toward the proper practice of Islam. Unless we understand it and respond to it, simply arresting all the terrorists we can find isn’t going to get the job done.

In The New York Times, Bill Keller says Colin Powell should resign. I do find it amazing that Colin Powell’s basically internationalist views have been completely subsumed to the unilateralist bent of the neocons that seem to be running the circus at the White House.

And on a related topic, is it just me or is the word unilateral being completely misunderstood or at least misused by the Bush administration? Just because you have other people on your side doesn’t mean that you’re not acting unilaterally. When you make a decision that suits only your own interest and team up with whoever is willing to toe the line, you’re acting unilaterally, regardless of how many people end up joining the so-called coalition of the willing. Multilateral means coming together with other parties and deciding on an approach that serves the common good. Claiming that the United States has taken a multilateral approach is roughly equivalent to Saddam Hussein’s claims that he was elected leader of Iraq.

Update: a friend sent me the definitions from the dictionary, and pointed out that unilateral really does mean that an action is undertaken by only one country, and multilateral means more than one country. In that case, though, we’ll never see the US undertake a unilateral action. We’re the most powerful country in the world, I can guarantee that we will always find somebody to go along with us. In this case I think it’s the terminology that fails us, as it often does.

Could there be a more smug bastard than Donald Rumsfeld? Things seem to be going well in the war, but Rumsfeld is over the top in every way. If I were an enemy soldier, I’d die before surrendering to him. Considering all of the great gestures, and eloquent speeches from coalition troops, it’s a shame that their representative in the media is a sleazeball like Rumsfeld. He makes me feel ashamed of my country.

I just wanted to post a little bit about how I’m going to handle the ongoing war with Iraq on this weblog. Mostly, I just wanted to say not to expect a lot of posts about what’s going on in the war itself. The news reports from the war are vague and all too often completely inaccurate — that’s the nature of war. The war in Afghanistan and the day to day incidents in other war zones around the world prove that today’s shocking headline is often tomorrow’s embarrassing retraction. So I’m not going to make predictions about what will happen, or really publicly evaluate what is happening because given the lack of information, it’s pointless to try. I watch people with 30 years of experience and better connections than I’ll ever have make asses of themselves repeatedly on television, and I don’t want a part of that game.

One thing I am impressed by are people who follow the events as best they can and try to distill them down. So far the best site I’ve seen for that sort of running commentary is Sean Paul Kelly’s weblog. So, for minute to minute updates for what’s said to be going on in the war zone, try his site.

A bunch of people have sent me the links to Where is Raed?, a weblog written by an Iraqi who lives in Baghdad. I’ve had this in my bookmarks for awhile, and check in occasionally. Anyway, Paul Boutin is doing some legwork to determine whether “Salam Pax,” the author, is a real Iraqi.