usa clubs

The Truth is Out There Doug links to a  Seymour Hersh interview by Amy Goodman, whose contents are so self-expressive they need no comment. Here are some of the things Hersh says: We took Baghdad easily. It wasn't because be won. We took Baghdad because they pulled back and let us take it and decided to fight a war that had been pre-planned that they're very actively fighting. The frightening thing about it is, we have no intelligence. Maybe it's -- it's -- it is frightening, we have no intelligence about what they're doing. A year-and-a-half ago, we're up against two and three-man teams. We estimated the cells operating against us were two and three people, that we could not penetrate. As of now, we still don't know what's coming next. There are 10, 15-man groups. They have terrific communications. Somebody told me, it's -- somebody in the system, an officer -- and by the way, the good part of it is, more and more people are ava...

Legitimacy Versus Informed Comment Oxblog asks whether Juan Cole's latest post on Iraq counts as informed comment. Cole said: I'm just appalled by the cheerleading tone of US news coverage of the so-called elections in Iraq on Sunday. I said on television last week that this event is a "political earthquake" and "a historical first step" for Iraq. It is an event of the utmost importance, for Iraq, the Middle East, and the world. All the boosterism has a kernel of truth to it, of course. Iraqis hadn't been able to choose their leaders at all in recent decades, even by some strange process where they chose unknown leaders. But this process is not a model for anything, and would not willingly be imitated by anyone else in the region. The 1997 elections in Iran were much more democratic , as were the 2002 elections in Bahrain and Pakistan. How's that again? Juan Cole as quoted by himself Juan Cole as quoted ...

Did We Win? Juan Cole puts up this post. Guerrillas launched mortar and suicide bomb attacks at polling stations throughout Iraq on Sunday as thousands of Iraqis headed to the polls. As many as 27 were dead by 1 pm Iraqi time, with several times that wounded. Explosions rocked West, South and East Baghdad, as well as many cities throughout the Sunni heartland--Baqubah, Mosul, Balad, and in Salahuddin Province (7 attacks by noon). There was also an attack in the Turkmen north at Talafar, and in the Shiite deep south at Basra. In Basra, Coalition troops raided the al-Hamra Mosque. Four were killed and seven wounded in an attack in Sadr City. These kinds of statistics were common in the election-poll attacks. Turnout seems extremely light in the Sunni Arab areas, where some polling stations did not even open. It was heavier in the Shiite south and in the Kurdish north. Cole earlier characterized the Iraqi electoral process as a "joke" in a Reuters articl...

The Ministry of Truth The Obsidian Order is applying the commonsense test to photos taken by Ali Jasim of Reuters, Ali Al-Saadi of AFP and Khalid Mohammed of AP purporting to show a car exploding in front of a high school scheduled to be a voting center. These provide powerful visual proof of how 'insurgents' are winning in Iraq. The Obsidian Order observes that for openers, the car in the photos is not experiencing any kind of high-order explosion; it is simply burning. (Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds ) What do you see? A car on fire, apparently not close to anything flammable. We are told this is in front of a school, but we do not see the school. The fire looks like petrol, probably in cans in the back of the vehicle, set off with an incendiary WP shell (White Phosphorus - the white smoke and sparks). ... The key and blindingly obvious point: there are at least three photojournalists from different outfits there exactly at the time it goes off! Interpretation: ... th...

A Trip Down Memory Hole Lane Mary Madigan at Michael Totten's site adds another nuance to our understanding of George Orwell's 'memory hole' concept. She reminds us that the practice of obliterating the past in order to leave the field clear for the seeds of new thought is an ancient practice. Her example is the Wahabi destruction of history. Militias from the Islamic courts set up in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, are destroying a colonial Italian cemetery. They are digging up the graves and dumping human remains near the airport. The BBC's Mohammed Olad Hassan says he was horrified to see a large number of abandoned human skulls. Young boys were playing with one as a toy. According to Sunni scholar Stephen Schwartz, grave desecration is a Wahhabi tradition: Saudi agents uprooted graveyards in Kosovo even before the war began there in the late 1990s, and Wahhabi missionaries have sought to demolish Sufi tombs in Kurdistan. Late in 2002, the Sa...

The Wave of the Future Joshua Micah Marshall thinks Simon Rosenberg should be the next DNC Chair. As most all of you know, there's a heated race going on for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee, something that hasn't happened since before the Clinton era. The race will be decided in about two weeks; but so far I've only done a handful of posts about it. ... If I were one of the four-hundred-odd people who have a vote in this race, I'd be voting for Simon Rosenberg. And I'd feel very strongly about the vote and cast it without reservation. Mr. Rosenberg's political ideas are on display in two of his speeches: "Where We Are" , "Some Thoughts on Internet, Politics and Participation" and an NYT article called "Wiring the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" all of which are linked to his site. The NYT article describes the core of Rosenberg's thinking at length. It begins through the eyes of a venture capi...

Colors to the Mast The one unarguable virtue of Ted Kennedy's speech at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies is that it nails his colors to the mast. He wants America to begin pulling immediately out of Iraq after the elections. Going in the first place was in his view a mistake, a strategic dead end in which the Janaury 30 election is a compounded error; another step on the road to another Vietnam. (Hat tip: the Command Post ) President Bush has left us with few good choices. There are costs to staying, and costs to leaving. There may well be violence as we disengage militarily from Iraq and Iraq disengages politically from us, but there will be much more violence if we continue our present dangerous and destabilizing course. It will not be easy to extricate ourselves from Iraq, but we must begin. ...  We all hope for the best from Sunday's election. The Iraqis have a right to determine their own future. But Sunday's elections are not a...

Religious War: East and West The underground diplomats at the New Sisyphus make an eloquent case for listening to those who want to kill us, something which the Munich generation neglected to do to Adolph Hitler. One of the most common observations about World War II was that if only Western leaders had heeded what the National Socialist Worker's Party and its leader Adolf Hitler were saying, they would have known of the grave danger facing the world. After all, it's not as if the Nazi Party or its frenzied Fuhrer tried to hide what they were about.  On the contrary, in speech after speech, newspaper after newspaper and book after book, Hitler and other senior Nazis laid out in some detail their plans for European domination, the destruction of parliamentary democracy and the elimination of the Jewish people. But when we ourselves have supplied the rationale for our own condemnation then listening to the indictments of the enemy is a waste of time. To the que...

The consequences of having to include the base of the Sunni insurgency in the political process yet get on with the process of building a unitary Iraq were highlighted in this href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june05/votes_1-17.html" target="_blank">PBS Online Newshour transcript (hat tip: href="http://instapundit.com/archives/020737.php" target="_blank">Glenn Reynolds ). On opposite sides of the discussion were Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institute and Brett McGurk, late of the CPA and one of the men who helped draft the legal framework under which the elections are taking place. LARRY DIAMOND: Well, Ray, I think Jeffrey Gettleman had it very well analyzed when he said that we'll probably see a very high turnout in most of the Kurdish constituencies and the Shiite constituencies in the South and probably a very low turnout in most of the Sunni constituencies and in al-Anbar Province and Salahadeen Province...

The Kissinger-Schultz Article An article jointly authored by Henry Kissinger and George Schultz in the Washington Post entitled Results, Not Timetables, Matter in Iraq argues that a definite timetable for an American withdrawal in Iraq is not as important as the attainment of a definite goal which represents success. They argue that it is the achievement of the goal which is vital. A precipitate American withdrawal would be almost certain to cause a civil war that would dwarf Yugoslavia's, and it would be compounded as neighbors escalated their current involvement into full-scale intervention. ... We owe it to ourselves to become clear about what post-election outcome is compatible with our values and global security. Much of the article focuses on the what they believe to be the desirable endpoint of the political process, of which the elections on January 30 are but a part. Their recommendations implicitly assume that Iraq must be preserved as a multiethnic, unitary s...

A Leap in the Dark Ruel Marc Gerecht's book The Islamic Paradox (hat tip: reader DL ) argues that America must nerve itself to spreading democracy in the Islamic world even though it will probably result in the emergence of anti-American governments largely hostile to Israel. ... the march of democracy in the Middle East is likely to be very anti-American. Decades of American support to Middle Eastern dictators helped create bin Ladenism. Popular anger at Washington’s past actions may not fade quickly, even if the United States were to switch sides and defend openly all the parties calling for representative government. Nationalism and fundamentalism, two complementary forces throughout most of the Middle East, will likely pump up popular patriotism. Such feelings always have a sharp anti-Western edge to them. That is what Professor Lewis called “the clash of civilizations.”64 Fourteen hundred years of tense, competitive history is not easily overcome, but this...

Armaggedon Neil Prakash, AKA blogger Armor Geddon and a 1ID Armor Officer, won the Silver Star for his actions in Baquba, Iraq. These are extracts from his profile on Blogger. Liverpool H.S. '98 Johns Hopkins '02 Neuroscience Armor OBC Grad '03 Ranger School Grad '03 Currently enrolled in School of Hard Knocks An account of the action from an obviously proud Indian community may be found in The Times of India . In part it reads: Although unable to rotate the turret, Prakash continued in the lead, navigating with a map and manoeuvring his tank in order to continue engaging the enemy with the main weapon system and his .50 calibre machine-gun. He watched as men on rooftops sprayed down at his tank with machine-guns and small arms. "I just remember thinking, 'I hope these bullets don't go in this one inch of space,'" said Prakash. "Looking out the hatch, I'm spraying guys and they're just falling. They would just...