I was going to use a few paragraphs from my friend Skip's Blog but he puts up new posts faster than I can link them. If you have some time -- and only after taking the time to read my Blog first -- check out his site. I think you will agree or disagree on some of what he has, but it is thought-provoking nonetheless. I especially recommend reading the post about his parents.
You can get to his site by putting your mouse over the following site and click: http://sladed.blogspot.com/
Don't forget to read mine first!
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Monday, November 28, 2005
News From Canada
Just in case nobody noticed, and I can't think of a single reason why you would, the minority-led government of Canada fell today forcing new elections. By the way, Canada is north of the U.S. and its capital is ... ummmm ... Ottawa?
Anyway, Prime Minister Paul Martin was engulfed in a real scandal and told he no long had the moral authority to run the country. This from a Parliament that wouldn't know a moral from a hole in the ground unless someone through the unabridged King James Bible and hit them on the head with it.
It's pretty weird when you think of it. We are so U.S.-focused that it's doubtful more than a handful of people even knew this was going on. We think of Canada and hockey or snow is about all that comes to mind. Sure, the Canadians have a lot to do with that since many up there have looked down their noses at us in recent years. But having your neighbor become irrelevant is not healthy in any kind of geo-political terms. There may be a salvageable relationship there, but it will take a lot of searching for common ground to find it. Here's hoping we do.
Anyway, Prime Minister Paul Martin was engulfed in a real scandal and told he no long had the moral authority to run the country. This from a Parliament that wouldn't know a moral from a hole in the ground unless someone through the unabridged King James Bible and hit them on the head with it.
It's pretty weird when you think of it. We are so U.S.-focused that it's doubtful more than a handful of people even knew this was going on. We think of Canada and hockey or snow is about all that comes to mind. Sure, the Canadians have a lot to do with that since many up there have looked down their noses at us in recent years. But having your neighbor become irrelevant is not healthy in any kind of geo-political terms. There may be a salvageable relationship there, but it will take a lot of searching for common ground to find it. Here's hoping we do.
Life-Stage Crisis v. Mid-Life Crisis
I was watching the movie Garden State the other night and two thoughts came to mind: the film did a great job of capturing the anxiety that rests in twenty-somethings today and, why on earth didn’t the movie get any Oscar nominations? Since I never agree with “The Academy,” I’ll just have to deal with the angst part.
When I had my first “mid-life” crisis at age 35, I worried it came a bit early and I wouldn’t live past 70. Then I had another at age 45, so I was thinking I’m going to get to 90. If Mrs. Laz will allow, I think I want to have at least one more, perhaps around age 55 because, you know, it would be cool to live to be more than 100.
But something occurred to me during all of these crises: there is no such thing as a midlife crisis, only life-stage crises. All the rest is Hollywood hype.
Guys face their first life-stage crisis either when their voice drops or when they get beat-up by a girl. Girls, I think, (what do I know about girls?) go through their first crisis when they have that awkward stage and nothing seems to fit causing them to beat up a guy. There are other crises to follow and some people get bit by all of them and some can deal with the roller coaster ride life gives us.
However I think there are two very overlooked times in our lives when many of us struggle to cope. One is that tough stage when you’re in your early twenties and either you’ve just finished college or, in my case, just realized finishing college would have been a good idea. At that age, just when you’ve been convinced by others that your college degree means something, you’re thrown into a world where reading Beowulf and memorizing lecture notes in a “Topics in Microeconomics” class has no translatable impact on your miserable starting salary.
You may have graduated in the top 10-percent of your class, but now you’re thrown into a situation where everyone is older, more experienced with the company and the office games played there, and, lest we forget, they all hate you because you’re young and just finished college. The only thing of value you may have learned while going to college was the ability to drink a keg of beer on a Saturday night because drinking it up with your co-workers may be the only way to get them to show you how the copier functions.
This is where the movie Garden State comes in. I thought it pretty much nailed this “what do I do with my life” stage that affects everyone in some way as they enter their mid-twenties. In my generation we couldn’t wait to discover the prize life had holding for us once we became adults and now, looking back at twice the age, we scratch our heads and wonder why this new generation just can’t get a handle on life. Since I remember feeling the same confusion about life in general, I wonder how fair it is to expect this generation to have any handle. It’s really an under-appreciated age group. The fact is, most people that age don’t know what they want to do with the rest of their lives and, if they do, they shouldn’t.
Except for the fact that few in this age group have weight problems, you have to feel for them. They’ve just spent their youth trying to get the best grades possible to get in the best college program possible to get in the best grad school possible and all they can get is a job as a waiter and spill fine wine on Armani pants worn by some idiot who never went to college but hit the stock or mortgage bubble at the right time. While the twenty-something was learning about the differences between the "primary" market and the "secondary" market, this goofball was making the money and blowing it on a fast car, several investment homes, fine wine and Armani pants. Or you can get a job as a “fast food knight,” as one poor unfortunate did in Garden State.
We need to cut these kids some slack and let them know there is plenty of time left in their lives before they ought to commit to anything. Including a career. The only advice I would give this group – and I’m paraphrasing P.J. O’Rourke here – is turn your hat around, pull up your pants, and stop getting so many tattoos.
Now, let’s forget about those twenty-somethings. See how easy it is to forget about them? The other life stage crisis that doesn’t get a movie produced about it, except in abstract ways, is the stage of your life when your kids leave the house for college or prison, depending on one’s particular situation.
This “crisis” often gets tossed in with the generic “mid-life crisis” because, not surprisingly, it comes about the middle of your life about the time your children are ready to leave the nest. You get so used to having the little buggers around the house, leaving their dirty plates and laundry under the bed, that it can be very destabilizing when they disappear.
But, as parents, we’re supposed to be happy about this. We’re supposed to high-five each other and say, “nice going, we raised them well.” They’re off to college and exciting new challenges (like doing what they always dreamed about when the parents weren’t around), and you’re off to the bank to refinance the house to pay for it all. I think I would have handled it better if my kids didn’t seem so thrilled about the prospect of leaving home. Well, you could have at least turned around and pretended to cry why you said good-bye, Kellen. Not that I have any pent-up feelings about that time.
I heard rumors that when the last kid in my family left the house, an audible Ya-Hoo! from my parents could be heard for miles. Then I noticed something funny about mom and dad. They kept inviting us back for dinner and often bribed us with a whiff of spending money and a meal that didn’t include the phrase, “would you like fries with that?”
It turns out they missed us, if you can believe it. Well I do now, because I missed the hell out of my kids when they first left the house. And it’s not like you never see them again or they will never move back in at some time. It’s just that they will never consider our house as their home again. They’re just visiting from that point on and you can tell that’s the case because they never unpack, which is why the garage is full of boxes of books, shoes, and clothes from high school.
Once the kids leave, it’s not uncommon for the parents to think they have the opportunity to run around the house naked and do spontaneous things like go to the movies on a Tuesday evening. That happens. Well, not the running part or, come to mind, the naked part, but let’s keep our focus here.
The point is, we wake up one day and we discover that it’s just the two of us left and it hasn’t been just the two of us for 18 years. What to do about that? The nub of this crisis is that there are only two ways to deal with it: either you say “it’s just you me!” or, “it’s just you and me?” There’s something I learned in college; punctuation can be important in expressing yourself.
Punctuation aside, it’s a difficult transition but, in the end, you make it because over the years you’ve spent with your spouse you discover you’re really best friends, in addition to all the other fringe benefits of married life. Yes, you find yourself wandering in what used to be your kids’ rooms and envision them lying in their bed and refusing to wake up for school without a lot of yelling. And you miss their friends that used to come around. Mostly you miss talking to them because, it turns out, they’re interesting to talk to and, not coincidently, they become your best friends too.
This particular life stage crisis is one of those yank your heart out of your chest and stomp on it times in your life (I wonder if I punctuated that correctly), but you get through it because it’s the only crisis that is stuck together by years of loving each other. And if you have to have a crisis, the one where the answer is “love” ought to have a movie written about it.
When I had my first “mid-life” crisis at age 35, I worried it came a bit early and I wouldn’t live past 70. Then I had another at age 45, so I was thinking I’m going to get to 90. If Mrs. Laz will allow, I think I want to have at least one more, perhaps around age 55 because, you know, it would be cool to live to be more than 100.
But something occurred to me during all of these crises: there is no such thing as a midlife crisis, only life-stage crises. All the rest is Hollywood hype.
Guys face their first life-stage crisis either when their voice drops or when they get beat-up by a girl. Girls, I think, (what do I know about girls?) go through their first crisis when they have that awkward stage and nothing seems to fit causing them to beat up a guy. There are other crises to follow and some people get bit by all of them and some can deal with the roller coaster ride life gives us.
However I think there are two very overlooked times in our lives when many of us struggle to cope. One is that tough stage when you’re in your early twenties and either you’ve just finished college or, in my case, just realized finishing college would have been a good idea. At that age, just when you’ve been convinced by others that your college degree means something, you’re thrown into a world where reading Beowulf and memorizing lecture notes in a “Topics in Microeconomics” class has no translatable impact on your miserable starting salary.
You may have graduated in the top 10-percent of your class, but now you’re thrown into a situation where everyone is older, more experienced with the company and the office games played there, and, lest we forget, they all hate you because you’re young and just finished college. The only thing of value you may have learned while going to college was the ability to drink a keg of beer on a Saturday night because drinking it up with your co-workers may be the only way to get them to show you how the copier functions.
This is where the movie Garden State comes in. I thought it pretty much nailed this “what do I do with my life” stage that affects everyone in some way as they enter their mid-twenties. In my generation we couldn’t wait to discover the prize life had holding for us once we became adults and now, looking back at twice the age, we scratch our heads and wonder why this new generation just can’t get a handle on life. Since I remember feeling the same confusion about life in general, I wonder how fair it is to expect this generation to have any handle. It’s really an under-appreciated age group. The fact is, most people that age don’t know what they want to do with the rest of their lives and, if they do, they shouldn’t.
Except for the fact that few in this age group have weight problems, you have to feel for them. They’ve just spent their youth trying to get the best grades possible to get in the best college program possible to get in the best grad school possible and all they can get is a job as a waiter and spill fine wine on Armani pants worn by some idiot who never went to college but hit the stock or mortgage bubble at the right time. While the twenty-something was learning about the differences between the "primary" market and the "secondary" market, this goofball was making the money and blowing it on a fast car, several investment homes, fine wine and Armani pants. Or you can get a job as a “fast food knight,” as one poor unfortunate did in Garden State.
We need to cut these kids some slack and let them know there is plenty of time left in their lives before they ought to commit to anything. Including a career. The only advice I would give this group – and I’m paraphrasing P.J. O’Rourke here – is turn your hat around, pull up your pants, and stop getting so many tattoos.
Now, let’s forget about those twenty-somethings. See how easy it is to forget about them? The other life stage crisis that doesn’t get a movie produced about it, except in abstract ways, is the stage of your life when your kids leave the house for college or prison, depending on one’s particular situation.
This “crisis” often gets tossed in with the generic “mid-life crisis” because, not surprisingly, it comes about the middle of your life about the time your children are ready to leave the nest. You get so used to having the little buggers around the house, leaving their dirty plates and laundry under the bed, that it can be very destabilizing when they disappear.
But, as parents, we’re supposed to be happy about this. We’re supposed to high-five each other and say, “nice going, we raised them well.” They’re off to college and exciting new challenges (like doing what they always dreamed about when the parents weren’t around), and you’re off to the bank to refinance the house to pay for it all. I think I would have handled it better if my kids didn’t seem so thrilled about the prospect of leaving home. Well, you could have at least turned around and pretended to cry why you said good-bye, Kellen. Not that I have any pent-up feelings about that time.
I heard rumors that when the last kid in my family left the house, an audible Ya-Hoo! from my parents could be heard for miles. Then I noticed something funny about mom and dad. They kept inviting us back for dinner and often bribed us with a whiff of spending money and a meal that didn’t include the phrase, “would you like fries with that?”
It turns out they missed us, if you can believe it. Well I do now, because I missed the hell out of my kids when they first left the house. And it’s not like you never see them again or they will never move back in at some time. It’s just that they will never consider our house as their home again. They’re just visiting from that point on and you can tell that’s the case because they never unpack, which is why the garage is full of boxes of books, shoes, and clothes from high school.
Once the kids leave, it’s not uncommon for the parents to think they have the opportunity to run around the house naked and do spontaneous things like go to the movies on a Tuesday evening. That happens. Well, not the running part or, come to mind, the naked part, but let’s keep our focus here.
The point is, we wake up one day and we discover that it’s just the two of us left and it hasn’t been just the two of us for 18 years. What to do about that? The nub of this crisis is that there are only two ways to deal with it: either you say “it’s just you me!” or, “it’s just you and me?” There’s something I learned in college; punctuation can be important in expressing yourself.
Punctuation aside, it’s a difficult transition but, in the end, you make it because over the years you’ve spent with your spouse you discover you’re really best friends, in addition to all the other fringe benefits of married life. Yes, you find yourself wandering in what used to be your kids’ rooms and envision them lying in their bed and refusing to wake up for school without a lot of yelling. And you miss their friends that used to come around. Mostly you miss talking to them because, it turns out, they’re interesting to talk to and, not coincidently, they become your best friends too.
This particular life stage crisis is one of those yank your heart out of your chest and stomp on it times in your life (I wonder if I punctuated that correctly), but you get through it because it’s the only crisis that is stuck together by years of loving each other. And if you have to have a crisis, the one where the answer is “love” ought to have a movie written about it.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
The Way We Are
Can you believe I'm the "normal" one in this photo? Just thought you would like to know what we all look like these days. There was a photo a million posts ago of the fellow on the left and the one on the right when we were 20 years old. It's amazing how lifelike we are now! Now, the guy in the middle (yes, with the beer bottle) is another story. There is a post about him further down too. I learned all my bad behavior traits from him as well as all my juvenile tendencies.
I wrote a post about each of these two too. I wrote about the one in the middle on the event of his 21st birthday (ancient picture included), which was back in 1911. The one on the left is my old swimming coach who was written about in "Fat Like Me." Do you see how "pudgey" he is? Now you know where we got the nickname. Damn skinny old farts! Don't they know they're supposed to look worse than us when they're 10 years older?All photos used without permission of the photoees. If they attempt to retaliate, I have others....
Turning Down the Rhetoric
I have this urge to stop taking politics so seriously. A couple of things have happened to make me think this is a good impulse.
While listening to talk radio today, the host and a caller were all in a lather over…well I don’t know what they were in a lather over because I have no idea what either said. Both raised the level of their shouting in direct response to the other so it was impossible to decipher what all the yelling was about. Even though it was only radio, it was not difficult to imagine the two as breathless, red-faced, spitting, vein-popping caricatures of what we believe is wrong with the other side. Neither made any sense and neither advanced their argument other than the argument that people like these two shouldn’t be allowed to have an argument.
The second thing was a friend who worked with Kellen and me in New Zealand had her own Blog that was full of whimsy and the occasional political viewpoint. Politics was only a natural area of discussion for her as she worked for a political party. Even so, she was very careful what she wrote about and kept many of her stronger opinions to herself. She is only 19-years-old but far more insightful and knowledgeable than most people twice her age.
After the election in New Zealand, the usual raiding of campaign staff occurred and a few were given full-time jobs working for Members of Parliament. One of the former campaign staff had his own Blog and he was prone to the occasional rant. A few weeks after meeting his new colleagues in Parliament, he decided to write about how ineffective and lazy they all were. What should have been to nobody’s surprise, the Blog was circulated among the offended staff and he was fired over the written slights. Which brings us back to the other Blogger. After she read his post, she wrote about it and provided a bit of advice to him by opining that he should have given his new workmates a bit more time before rushing to judgment.
Believe it or not, this battle of the young Bloggers made it to the national newspaper, which generally causes all people engaged in politics to panic. Our friend was asked to remove her Blog and never Blog again, lest she had a desire to look for other work. Now the Blog is shut down and something that I looked forward to reading every now and again – if only to keep up on the local gossip in Wellington – is gone.
It kind of makes you wonder how something as simple as expressing an opinion gets this kind of notice. I guess it only makes sense when you put this in the context of politics. I have this theory that everyone can do simple math unless you put a dollar sign in front of the numbers and suddenly two plus two doesn’t add up the same way. Makes you wonder if the same twisted logic applies to politics; that everything makes sense unless you put it into a political equation. How else can we explain the profound differences that seem to separate one half of the country from the other? Both sides can't possibly be so right or so wrong.
Yeah, I know, I just wrote about 1,000 words on WMD in Iraq so I suppose I have little room to complain if people disagree with me. But for every “fact” contained in that post, anyone could just as easily come up with their own counter-arguments and post their own response (Oh! How I would love to have a comment posted!). If I was so lucky to have a comment, it wouldn’t be long before I was pecking away on my keyboard looking like a breathless, red-faced, spitting, vein-popping Blogger. And that’s no way to go through life, is it?
So, for now I will calm down a bit on the rhetoric. I don’t expect many to follow, but if I can just take it all a bit less seriously, I could better suppress the desire to live where there is no talk radio, no Internet, no nightly news, no newspapers, and, especially, no Bloggers.
While listening to talk radio today, the host and a caller were all in a lather over…well I don’t know what they were in a lather over because I have no idea what either said. Both raised the level of their shouting in direct response to the other so it was impossible to decipher what all the yelling was about. Even though it was only radio, it was not difficult to imagine the two as breathless, red-faced, spitting, vein-popping caricatures of what we believe is wrong with the other side. Neither made any sense and neither advanced their argument other than the argument that people like these two shouldn’t be allowed to have an argument.
The second thing was a friend who worked with Kellen and me in New Zealand had her own Blog that was full of whimsy and the occasional political viewpoint. Politics was only a natural area of discussion for her as she worked for a political party. Even so, she was very careful what she wrote about and kept many of her stronger opinions to herself. She is only 19-years-old but far more insightful and knowledgeable than most people twice her age.
After the election in New Zealand, the usual raiding of campaign staff occurred and a few were given full-time jobs working for Members of Parliament. One of the former campaign staff had his own Blog and he was prone to the occasional rant. A few weeks after meeting his new colleagues in Parliament, he decided to write about how ineffective and lazy they all were. What should have been to nobody’s surprise, the Blog was circulated among the offended staff and he was fired over the written slights. Which brings us back to the other Blogger. After she read his post, she wrote about it and provided a bit of advice to him by opining that he should have given his new workmates a bit more time before rushing to judgment.
Believe it or not, this battle of the young Bloggers made it to the national newspaper, which generally causes all people engaged in politics to panic. Our friend was asked to remove her Blog and never Blog again, lest she had a desire to look for other work. Now the Blog is shut down and something that I looked forward to reading every now and again – if only to keep up on the local gossip in Wellington – is gone.
It kind of makes you wonder how something as simple as expressing an opinion gets this kind of notice. I guess it only makes sense when you put this in the context of politics. I have this theory that everyone can do simple math unless you put a dollar sign in front of the numbers and suddenly two plus two doesn’t add up the same way. Makes you wonder if the same twisted logic applies to politics; that everything makes sense unless you put it into a political equation. How else can we explain the profound differences that seem to separate one half of the country from the other? Both sides can't possibly be so right or so wrong.
Yeah, I know, I just wrote about 1,000 words on WMD in Iraq so I suppose I have little room to complain if people disagree with me. But for every “fact” contained in that post, anyone could just as easily come up with their own counter-arguments and post their own response (Oh! How I would love to have a comment posted!). If I was so lucky to have a comment, it wouldn’t be long before I was pecking away on my keyboard looking like a breathless, red-faced, spitting, vein-popping Blogger. And that’s no way to go through life, is it?
So, for now I will calm down a bit on the rhetoric. I don’t expect many to follow, but if I can just take it all a bit less seriously, I could better suppress the desire to live where there is no talk radio, no Internet, no nightly news, no newspapers, and, especially, no Bloggers.
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Bin Laden's Demands
The following first appeared in the London Telegraph and I saw it in the Sydney Morning Herald under the headline "Bin Laden, without the filters" and written by Francis Harris. Hopefully it shows what constitutes bin Laden's world view and makes people realize that an Al Qaeda victory would not be healthy.
By Francis Harris
Osama bin Laden wants the United States to convert to Islam, ditch its constitution, abolish banks, jail homosexuals, bar women from appearing in the press and sign the Kyoto climate change treaty.
The first complete collection of the Saudi's statements, published on Thursday by Verso, portrays a world in which Islam's enemies will take the first steps towards salvation by embracing the "religion of all the prophets".
Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden is billed as the first accurate compendium of the terrorist leader's words, threats and ruminations from 1994 to 2004.
Its editors have rooted out many statements which they identified as forgeries and retranslated to correct "horrendous" errors.
Bin Laden's terms for America's surrender appeared after the September 2001 suicide attacks.
Alcoholic drink and gambling would be barred and there would be an end to women's photos in newspapers or advertising. Any woman serving "passengers, visitors and strangers" would also be out of a job.
The West must "stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you" and has become the "worst civilisation witnessed in the history of mankind".
Verso said it expected criticism for publishing the thoughts of a terrorist, but "the idea is to have an annotated, scholarly collection of bin Laden's words", Gavin Browning from Verso said.
"Until now, his words have only been available in poor translations or soundbites." Mr Browning emphasised that publishing bin Laden's views did not imply approval of them by the publishers.
The book's introduction is written by Professor Bruce Lawrence, who teaches Islamic studies at Duke University, in North Carolina, and describes the terrorist as "one of the best prose writers in Arabic". Many past translations of the words of the head of al-Qaeda had been "horrendous" and often wrong, he said.
In the book the terrorist responsible for killing 3000 civilians in September 2001 says that killing the innocent is wrong. In bin Laden's world a global conflict is under way between the umma, or Muslim community, and unbelievers.
By Francis Harris
Osama bin Laden wants the United States to convert to Islam, ditch its constitution, abolish banks, jail homosexuals, bar women from appearing in the press and sign the Kyoto climate change treaty.
The first complete collection of the Saudi's statements, published on Thursday by Verso, portrays a world in which Islam's enemies will take the first steps towards salvation by embracing the "religion of all the prophets".
Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden is billed as the first accurate compendium of the terrorist leader's words, threats and ruminations from 1994 to 2004.
Its editors have rooted out many statements which they identified as forgeries and retranslated to correct "horrendous" errors.
Bin Laden's terms for America's surrender appeared after the September 2001 suicide attacks.
Alcoholic drink and gambling would be barred and there would be an end to women's photos in newspapers or advertising. Any woman serving "passengers, visitors and strangers" would also be out of a job.
The West must "stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you" and has become the "worst civilisation witnessed in the history of mankind".
Verso said it expected criticism for publishing the thoughts of a terrorist, but "the idea is to have an annotated, scholarly collection of bin Laden's words", Gavin Browning from Verso said.
"Until now, his words have only been available in poor translations or soundbites." Mr Browning emphasised that publishing bin Laden's views did not imply approval of them by the publishers.
The book's introduction is written by Professor Bruce Lawrence, who teaches Islamic studies at Duke University, in North Carolina, and describes the terrorist as "one of the best prose writers in Arabic". Many past translations of the words of the head of al-Qaeda had been "horrendous" and often wrong, he said.
In the book the terrorist responsible for killing 3000 civilians in September 2001 says that killing the innocent is wrong. In bin Laden's world a global conflict is under way between the umma, or Muslim community, and unbelievers.
The Mother of All WMD Post
The mantra from everyone about the Iraq war – opponents, proponents, world leaders, and the intelligence community – is that there were no weapons of mass destruction found and no link between Al Qaeda, state-sponsored terrorism and the Iraqi regime. It’s all a load of horse pucky.
Evidence of WMD and links to Al Qaeda are abundant and readily available, even to blind democrats. And what’s available through open sources is just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of other reports that, for national security reasons, have not been made available to the public, but they are well known to Congressional members and staff, some of whom have selectively leaked both accurate and inaccurate accounts.
So let’s get to it. It will seem boring and technical and will lose anyone with the attention span of a Member of Congress or someone who reads People Magazine and thinks they just read a novel.
Iraq’s connection to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups has been around for decades but it’s rarely talked about. For years, Iraqi intelligence recruited terrorists for training from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Chechnya, recnetly most of them Al Qaeda members. They were trained at the Saad military camp located northeast of Baghdad which at times housed as many as 2,500 foreigners who were trained in urban warfare, bomb making, kidnapping, and “specialized urban warfare,” a euphemism for spectacular terrorism such as chemical and biological attacks in the U.S. and Europe. The base was run by Qusay Hussein’s own Special Security known as Amn Khass. The fiercest group of terrorists fighters were trained by Uday Hussein’s Saddam’s Fedayeen Call and was comprised by 700 Algerian members of the Salafist Brigade for Combat and Call. This group was so brutal and unstable that they reported to nobody and were left to do as they wished after the training. Fortunately, once the U.S. and Britain began attacking Iraq in March 2002, most of the Algerians approached U.S. troops in broad daylight and were taken out by air strikes.
Saddam himself encouraged further terrorism against Israel by paying $25,000 to the surviving family members of any suicide bomber who detonated themselves in Israel. This came at a time when the Palestinians began the 2001 Intifada, giving further incentive to strap on the latest in Palestinian fashion. Once Saddam was attacked, the money stopped and suicide attacks were dramatically reduced.
Iraq mixed terrorism and WMD too. In September of 2002, Israeli soldiers captured three members of the Arab Liberation Front who were attempting to cross the Jordan River and enter the Palestinian territory. During their interrogation, the three admitted they were trained in Iraq at a base known as Salman Pak by Iraqi military intelligence. The three were specifically trained to use shoulder-launched missiles to aim at planes landing at Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport. They further admitted that there was a second training facility in which all participants were Al Qaeda members who were being trained in chemical warfare, specifically the use of ricin. The interrogators learned that these operatives were trained to carry out missions on a U.S. base in Turkey, several attacks inside Europe and to help the Chechens in their battle with the Russians. The information was corroborated by other intelligence sources and the plots were thwarted in Turkey and Europe but not in Russia as several Iraqi-trained Chechen and Arab terrorists seized a theater in Moscow and rigged it with explosives, threatening to kill everyone inside. More than 200 people, including the terrorists, were killed when the Russians used a nerve agent to knock out the terrorists before they could detonate the bombs. Unfortunately many of the hostages died from secondary problems related to the nerve agent.
For these reasons and many more, I think it’s safe to say Saddam supported and gave safe haven to terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda. The training the regime gave was not intended for the defense of Iraq, but rather to prepare soldiers for attacks aimed at the West and Israel. None of this is guesswork or unknown. It was written down in detail in papers left behind by the fleeing Saddam and his top leaders, including his two sons. All the above information has also been reported in several U.S. newspapers and magazines and much of it was included in the Congressional 9/11 report. In other words, no honest politician or journalist (assuming there are some left) can say or write that there was no link to Saddam and agents of terror.
The same is true about Weapons of Mass Destruction. The information to follow has also been written about for the past three years and, while you have to dig a bit deeper for some of it, it’s all been in open-sourced publications and de-classified reports.
As Baghdad was falling, hundreds of drums of sarin gas and mustard gas were discovered. It was reported in May 2003 in the New York Times that the drums contained enough sarin gas to kill more than one million people.
In April of 2003, a U.S. Marine Corps unit identified high concentration of mustard gas and cyanide in the Euphrates near Nasiriyah along with hundreds of gas masks and chemical warfare suits at a nearby military base. This suggests the Iraqis dumped their WMD ammunition into the river once they realized the fall of the city was imminent.
Still, these reports never served as enough proof that there were the expected wholesale stockpiles of WMD. There remain only two logical conclusions for this: Iraq did not have huge amounts of WMD; or it did possess them and either destroyed them or shipped them out of the country. There is certainly more evidence that the later was true and that Syria played a significant role.
During numerous U.S. bombing raids, an area around al-Qaim was largely untouched. The reason for this was the assumption that Iraq’s main biological and chemical weapon stockpiles were stored under camouflaged hangars and in the heavy brush around the base. Once American forces got close to al-Qaim, intense activities were observed in the thick foliage along the Euphrates. Under cover of darkness, numerous large objects, tanks, and containers were moved from their hiding places and tracked by drones and U.S. jest being taken across the border to Syria.
On April 5, Saddam failed to show up for an advertised address on Iraqi TC. The regime was falling and Saddam’s family had already fled on a flight to Belarus. Saddam was close behind. Elements of the Russian GRU were in Baghdad quickly destroying all pertinent intelligence data collected through a close relationship with the regime. They were the first to know that Saddam was part of a group of Republican Guard and other units of the regular army from the Tikrit area who were on their way to Syria. As reported by the GRU, the fleeing convoy including three hundred tanks, one hundred GRAD multiple-barrel rocket launchers, many which had chemical warheads, and many other weapons systems, including Iraq’s entire remaining WMD arsenal. The report suggests Saddam was in Damascus for a short time before returning to Tikrit.
Once the fall of Iraq was clear, the Syrians worked diligently to cover their complicity in transferring WMD systems into Iraq. They began to move and hide the WMD that had entered Syria during the last days of the regime to permanent locations inside a maze of tunnels and other permanent stockpile sites in northern Lebanon and central Syria.
According to numerous sources, the concealment of the Iraqi WMD was under the command of General Zou al-Himma al-Shaleesh, a veteran of Syrian-Iraqi strategic cooperation and smuggling. Assaf Shawqat, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law and deputy chief of Syrian military intelligence, personally supervised the undertaking. The first specific account of this action to transfer and hide Iraqi WMD was provided by Syrian opposition journalist Nizar Nayyouf on the basis of maps and notes he had received from a “Syrian senior officer who had become a dissident.” Several Lebanese, Syrian and other Arab intelligence sources later confirmed Nayyouf’s reports and provided additional details about the whereabouts of Iraq’s WMD.
First to be moved were the large tanks containing chemical materials that were put on flatbed trucks and moved to areas of northeastern Lebanon under Syrian military control and buried in deep pits near Hermel and in the northern Bekaa valley. The Iraqi operational weapons and other sensitive military components were transferred to three sites associated with comparable Syrian military activities. Most other items were moved via flatbed trucks or rail cars with the most dangerous and sensitive materials transferred by ambulance. Much of this is stored in the complex tunnel system controlled by Bureau 489 of the Cipher and Document Security Division of Syrian Intelligence – the agency responsible for the security of Syria’s most sensitive facilities. Vital parts of Iraq’s WMD munitions were stored in a Syrian Air Force munitions factory near the village of Tal Sinan.
This has been independently confirmed by several intelligence sources, not all working on the same side. In fact, a recent report from a U.N. source indicates that President Bashar is attempting to leverage the Iraqi WMD to have the U.N. put aside its investigation into the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The negotiations are modeled after the deal struck by Lybian Leader Moammar Gadhafi so he was able to have sanctions removed.
If the U.N. takes the easy route on this – a likely scenario – there will be little doubt left about the origins of the WMD stockpiles. Whether anyone will be willing to admit it is altogether another story. To be honest, I’m not one of those who need the smoking-gun proof that others need. President Bush was handed a choice in September, 2001: treat the 9/11 attacks as a crime and convict all 19 hijackers posthumously or consider the larger scope and realize that we have been under assault from fundamentalist Wahabi Muslims since 1993. President Bush and a majority of Members of Congress opted for the later approach and, while nobody thinks the prosecution of this war or any war is perfect, we’ve accomplished at least one goal in that, knock on wood, there have been no other attacks on targets within the U.S.
Evidence of WMD and links to Al Qaeda are abundant and readily available, even to blind democrats. And what’s available through open sources is just the tip of the iceberg. There are hundreds of other reports that, for national security reasons, have not been made available to the public, but they are well known to Congressional members and staff, some of whom have selectively leaked both accurate and inaccurate accounts.
So let’s get to it. It will seem boring and technical and will lose anyone with the attention span of a Member of Congress or someone who reads People Magazine and thinks they just read a novel.
Iraq’s connection to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups has been around for decades but it’s rarely talked about. For years, Iraqi intelligence recruited terrorists for training from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Chechnya, recnetly most of them Al Qaeda members. They were trained at the Saad military camp located northeast of Baghdad which at times housed as many as 2,500 foreigners who were trained in urban warfare, bomb making, kidnapping, and “specialized urban warfare,” a euphemism for spectacular terrorism such as chemical and biological attacks in the U.S. and Europe. The base was run by Qusay Hussein’s own Special Security known as Amn Khass. The fiercest group of terrorists fighters were trained by Uday Hussein’s Saddam’s Fedayeen Call and was comprised by 700 Algerian members of the Salafist Brigade for Combat and Call. This group was so brutal and unstable that they reported to nobody and were left to do as they wished after the training. Fortunately, once the U.S. and Britain began attacking Iraq in March 2002, most of the Algerians approached U.S. troops in broad daylight and were taken out by air strikes.
Saddam himself encouraged further terrorism against Israel by paying $25,000 to the surviving family members of any suicide bomber who detonated themselves in Israel. This came at a time when the Palestinians began the 2001 Intifada, giving further incentive to strap on the latest in Palestinian fashion. Once Saddam was attacked, the money stopped and suicide attacks were dramatically reduced.
Iraq mixed terrorism and WMD too. In September of 2002, Israeli soldiers captured three members of the Arab Liberation Front who were attempting to cross the Jordan River and enter the Palestinian territory. During their interrogation, the three admitted they were trained in Iraq at a base known as Salman Pak by Iraqi military intelligence. The three were specifically trained to use shoulder-launched missiles to aim at planes landing at Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport. They further admitted that there was a second training facility in which all participants were Al Qaeda members who were being trained in chemical warfare, specifically the use of ricin. The interrogators learned that these operatives were trained to carry out missions on a U.S. base in Turkey, several attacks inside Europe and to help the Chechens in their battle with the Russians. The information was corroborated by other intelligence sources and the plots were thwarted in Turkey and Europe but not in Russia as several Iraqi-trained Chechen and Arab terrorists seized a theater in Moscow and rigged it with explosives, threatening to kill everyone inside. More than 200 people, including the terrorists, were killed when the Russians used a nerve agent to knock out the terrorists before they could detonate the bombs. Unfortunately many of the hostages died from secondary problems related to the nerve agent.
For these reasons and many more, I think it’s safe to say Saddam supported and gave safe haven to terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda. The training the regime gave was not intended for the defense of Iraq, but rather to prepare soldiers for attacks aimed at the West and Israel. None of this is guesswork or unknown. It was written down in detail in papers left behind by the fleeing Saddam and his top leaders, including his two sons. All the above information has also been reported in several U.S. newspapers and magazines and much of it was included in the Congressional 9/11 report. In other words, no honest politician or journalist (assuming there are some left) can say or write that there was no link to Saddam and agents of terror.
The same is true about Weapons of Mass Destruction. The information to follow has also been written about for the past three years and, while you have to dig a bit deeper for some of it, it’s all been in open-sourced publications and de-classified reports.
As Baghdad was falling, hundreds of drums of sarin gas and mustard gas were discovered. It was reported in May 2003 in the New York Times that the drums contained enough sarin gas to kill more than one million people.
In April of 2003, a U.S. Marine Corps unit identified high concentration of mustard gas and cyanide in the Euphrates near Nasiriyah along with hundreds of gas masks and chemical warfare suits at a nearby military base. This suggests the Iraqis dumped their WMD ammunition into the river once they realized the fall of the city was imminent.
Still, these reports never served as enough proof that there were the expected wholesale stockpiles of WMD. There remain only two logical conclusions for this: Iraq did not have huge amounts of WMD; or it did possess them and either destroyed them or shipped them out of the country. There is certainly more evidence that the later was true and that Syria played a significant role.
During numerous U.S. bombing raids, an area around al-Qaim was largely untouched. The reason for this was the assumption that Iraq’s main biological and chemical weapon stockpiles were stored under camouflaged hangars and in the heavy brush around the base. Once American forces got close to al-Qaim, intense activities were observed in the thick foliage along the Euphrates. Under cover of darkness, numerous large objects, tanks, and containers were moved from their hiding places and tracked by drones and U.S. jest being taken across the border to Syria.
On April 5, Saddam failed to show up for an advertised address on Iraqi TC. The regime was falling and Saddam’s family had already fled on a flight to Belarus. Saddam was close behind. Elements of the Russian GRU were in Baghdad quickly destroying all pertinent intelligence data collected through a close relationship with the regime. They were the first to know that Saddam was part of a group of Republican Guard and other units of the regular army from the Tikrit area who were on their way to Syria. As reported by the GRU, the fleeing convoy including three hundred tanks, one hundred GRAD multiple-barrel rocket launchers, many which had chemical warheads, and many other weapons systems, including Iraq’s entire remaining WMD arsenal. The report suggests Saddam was in Damascus for a short time before returning to Tikrit.
Once the fall of Iraq was clear, the Syrians worked diligently to cover their complicity in transferring WMD systems into Iraq. They began to move and hide the WMD that had entered Syria during the last days of the regime to permanent locations inside a maze of tunnels and other permanent stockpile sites in northern Lebanon and central Syria.
According to numerous sources, the concealment of the Iraqi WMD was under the command of General Zou al-Himma al-Shaleesh, a veteran of Syrian-Iraqi strategic cooperation and smuggling. Assaf Shawqat, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brother-in-law and deputy chief of Syrian military intelligence, personally supervised the undertaking. The first specific account of this action to transfer and hide Iraqi WMD was provided by Syrian opposition journalist Nizar Nayyouf on the basis of maps and notes he had received from a “Syrian senior officer who had become a dissident.” Several Lebanese, Syrian and other Arab intelligence sources later confirmed Nayyouf’s reports and provided additional details about the whereabouts of Iraq’s WMD.
First to be moved were the large tanks containing chemical materials that were put on flatbed trucks and moved to areas of northeastern Lebanon under Syrian military control and buried in deep pits near Hermel and in the northern Bekaa valley. The Iraqi operational weapons and other sensitive military components were transferred to three sites associated with comparable Syrian military activities. Most other items were moved via flatbed trucks or rail cars with the most dangerous and sensitive materials transferred by ambulance. Much of this is stored in the complex tunnel system controlled by Bureau 489 of the Cipher and Document Security Division of Syrian Intelligence – the agency responsible for the security of Syria’s most sensitive facilities. Vital parts of Iraq’s WMD munitions were stored in a Syrian Air Force munitions factory near the village of Tal Sinan.
This has been independently confirmed by several intelligence sources, not all working on the same side. In fact, a recent report from a U.N. source indicates that President Bashar is attempting to leverage the Iraqi WMD to have the U.N. put aside its investigation into the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The negotiations are modeled after the deal struck by Lybian Leader Moammar Gadhafi so he was able to have sanctions removed.
If the U.N. takes the easy route on this – a likely scenario – there will be little doubt left about the origins of the WMD stockpiles. Whether anyone will be willing to admit it is altogether another story. To be honest, I’m not one of those who need the smoking-gun proof that others need. President Bush was handed a choice in September, 2001: treat the 9/11 attacks as a crime and convict all 19 hijackers posthumously or consider the larger scope and realize that we have been under assault from fundamentalist Wahabi Muslims since 1993. President Bush and a majority of Members of Congress opted for the later approach and, while nobody thinks the prosecution of this war or any war is perfect, we’ve accomplished at least one goal in that, knock on wood, there have been no other attacks on targets within the U.S.
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Admiration
Woody Allen was once asked what he wanted to be when he grew up and quipped, “Anyone but me.” Well, he could be self-deprecating. I’m not sure I was ever asked that question or wondered what I would do if I ever did grow up. I subscribed to the A.A. Milne theory of going wherever the wind took me and, balancing out a few gales and sudden squalls, I’m reasonably happy where the wind landed me.
If the question had been rephrased as “whom” would you want to be when you grew up, then I might have answered differently. There are some people I have admired over the years and, from a distance, I have fantasized about being them.
This all came to mind last night while Mrs. Laz and I were watching a concert put on by Paul McCartney in the Palace Square in St. Petersburg, Russia. I leaned over
to Mrs. Laz and mentioned that it would have been fun to be Paul McCartney and that he seemed like a decent guy; again from a distance. Had Mrs. Laz been awake, she may have agreed with me. Although I do have to add this one point about Mr. McCartney: I have been told by a well-placed source that the speakers were blaring so loudly in St. Petersburg that the walls inside the great museum at the nearby Hermitage were shaking and, in some places, crumbling. I’ve heard of art imitating life, but never art destroying art.
OK, back to my fantasy life.
What’s not to like about Paul McCartney? He was my favorite Beatle and I think wrote their best songs, Hey Jude and Let it Be. With the song Yesterday, he changed early rock from dance songs to songs you just listened to. He appeared to be the most dedicated to keeping the Beatles together (although in the end, he was the first to leave) and was a savvy investor, buying up the rights to hundreds of songs. While he and his new wife have taken up the cause of eradicating land mines, he hasn’t been militant about it and has used his popularity as a musician to draw attention to what he believes is an important issue.
While Mrs. Laz was sleeping comfortably and I was bellowing out Back in the USSR, I began to wonder if I would rather be Paul Simon. Upon the chorus of ooo, ooo, ooo, Mrs. Laz was wishing I was Paul Simon too. Although I doubt she would have beat Paul Simon about the head and neck with a pillow. Anyway, I always thought Paul Simon was a pretty cool guy too, writing and performing really great music for 45 years. There is no way anyone can listen to any non-hip-hop radio station for a week and not hear Sound of Silence played. And while he was at his peak in the Sixties and Seventies, his recent song Father and Daughter is a good and sentimental song. If only I had a daughter, I would sing that song to her every night.
To understand the symmetry of the two, Paul Simon and Paul McCartney share a bit of trivia. They are the only two to have the lyrics coo-coo-ca-choo in one of their songs. And that’s, you know, kind of neat and takes up space.
A cynic may point to the fact that both Pauls are rich and famous and that is the lure. While the “rich” part may be the big draw for Mrs. Laz, I would just like to be able to walk down the street and hear people whisper, “there goes Paul Simon walking down the street.” Or, “Say, isn’t that Paul McCartney renting Showgirls at my Blockbuster?” Fame can be an aphrodisiac – which should come in handy if Mrs. Laz won’t wake up again – but these two have the full package and that’s what makes me admire them so much.
There are of course other people it would be fun to be, but I’m going to stick to my two choices. Others may be more important, wealthier, and perhaps even more famous, but can any of them say they played at Red Square or Central Park for more than one million people? Now that’s admiration.
If the question had been rephrased as “whom” would you want to be when you grew up, then I might have answered differently. There are some people I have admired over the years and, from a distance, I have fantasized about being them.
This all came to mind last night while Mrs. Laz and I were watching a concert put on by Paul McCartney in the Palace Square in St. Petersburg, Russia. I leaned over
to Mrs. Laz and mentioned that it would have been fun to be Paul McCartney and that he seemed like a decent guy; again from a distance. Had Mrs. Laz been awake, she may have agreed with me. Although I do have to add this one point about Mr. McCartney: I have been told by a well-placed source that the speakers were blaring so loudly in St. Petersburg that the walls inside the great museum at the nearby Hermitage were shaking and, in some places, crumbling. I’ve heard of art imitating life, but never art destroying art.OK, back to my fantasy life.
What’s not to like about Paul McCartney? He was my favorite Beatle and I think wrote their best songs, Hey Jude and Let it Be. With the song Yesterday, he changed early rock from dance songs to songs you just listened to. He appeared to be the most dedicated to keeping the Beatles together (although in the end, he was the first to leave) and was a savvy investor, buying up the rights to hundreds of songs. While he and his new wife have taken up the cause of eradicating land mines, he hasn’t been militant about it and has used his popularity as a musician to draw attention to what he believes is an important issue.
While Mrs. Laz was sleeping comfortably and I was bellowing out Back in the USSR, I began to wonder if I would rather be Paul Simon. Upon the chorus of ooo, ooo, ooo, Mrs. Laz was wishing I was Paul Simon too. Although I doubt she would have beat Paul Simon about the head and neck with a pillow. Anyway, I always thought Paul Simon was a pretty cool guy too, writing and performing really great music for 45 years. There is no way anyone can listen to any non-hip-hop radio station for a week and not hear Sound of Silence played. And while he was at his peak in the Sixties and Seventies, his recent song Father and Daughter is a good and sentimental song. If only I had a daughter, I would sing that song to her every night.To understand the symmetry of the two, Paul Simon and Paul McCartney share a bit of trivia. They are the only two to have the lyrics coo-coo-ca-choo in one of their songs. And that’s, you know, kind of neat and takes up space.
A cynic may point to the fact that both Pauls are rich and famous and that is the lure. While the “rich” part may be the big draw for Mrs. Laz, I would just like to be able to walk down the street and hear people whisper, “there goes Paul Simon walking down the street.” Or, “Say, isn’t that Paul McCartney renting Showgirls at my Blockbuster?” Fame can be an aphrodisiac – which should come in handy if Mrs. Laz won’t wake up again – but these two have the full package and that’s what makes me admire them so much.
There are of course other people it would be fun to be, but I’m going to stick to my two choices. Others may be more important, wealthier, and perhaps even more famous, but can any of them say they played at Red Square or Central Park for more than one million people? Now that’s admiration.
Fat Like Me
Damn those mirrors and tall, wide windows along the sidewalk. Damn photographs and even the occasional video camera. Without these inventions of reflection and electronics that capture the image as is, I would barely be aware that I’m fat. But fat I am.
I haven’t always been fat. I keep my high school year book at the ready to show friends and strangers the thinner, more muscular me. Some even believe those 31-year-old pictures are of me. Once they squint their eyes long enough, that is. On those same tattered and yellowed pages are pictures of my old swimming coach. I’m not sure who came up with his nickname – doubtfully me – but I remember chiming in and calling him “Pudge.” Why, I bet he was a whole 10 pounds overweight back then, perhaps tipping the scale at 175. We’d laugh, knowing we hit a sore spot with him and he’d always snap back that we would never be in as good of shape when we were his age; an ancient 27. Who’d believe that load? Well, talk about your all-time backfires, I pudged past him within five years and now I wish I could fit one leg in his jeans.
When you’re in your weight-gaining training you start to put on enough pounds that people you haven’t seen in a while begin to notice. Your old “friends” make clever references to the fact they’d always wanted to “see more” of you, and later they point out how I am now “twice the man” I used to be, or that I have more chins than a Chinese phone book. You smile back as if their now-common affront is charming. But that silly grin on your face looks more like you just bit into a peanut butter and sand sandwich.
Eventually you make up stories. I remember playing a basketball game with strangers and when it came time to pick teams, the team captain pointed at me and said he’d take the fat guy. I later told him I had weighed 300 pounds and worked hard to lose 100 pounds so he should cut me some slack. He actually began to admire me as all he needed was a change of perspective. I also had a doozey in which I told people I was writing a book called “Fat Like Me” and had to gain weight to live the life of a fatty. But something went wrong with the fat injections and I was forced to live this way the rest of my life. People found my artistic realism “refreshing” after hearing that story.
The thing about fighting the battle with gaining weight is that it’s not something you can claim victory at in a day, or a week or month for that matter. There are days you get indignant and stare at that sagging waistline in the mirror, vowing to defeat it before it defeats you. But you only get annoyed enough for a few skirmishes before you start thinking a few slices of pumpkin pie won’t hurt anything. Ah, but pumpkin pie is like a gateway drug and pretty soon you’re sneaking a giant size Snicker’s bar at the movies and before you know it, you’re strung out on Oreos. Soon you’re walking up to a 7-11 and telling the 19-year-old clerk (who, incidentally, doesn’t have an ounce of fat on him), “Man, I gotta have some chocolate. You gotta give me some. Forget the gas, give me 10 Hershey bars!”
Here’s the part I don’t understand: it took me a good 15 years before I “filled” out. I didn’t gain weight every day. Why the hell do I have to work at losing weight ever day then? This is where I wonder if it would have been a good thing to pay attention in biology class because maybe I missed something important about body chemistry or the wonder of metabolism. Or maybe I shouldn’t have given my father that self-assured smirk when he pointed out I was putting on a few pounds and might end up overweight like him if I wasn’t careful. Geez, dad, I was an athlete! Dieting is for girls and members of the Village People, I told him. If only I could have seen through the fog of teen angst and realized my dad was actually making sense back then, just like he was about getting a good education. It’s why I blame him for everything. If only he’d gotten through to me I’d be an educated, skinny, middle-aged bastard, which has a better ring to it than ignorant, balding, fat bastard.
Thanks to modern culture there is some hope for me. We celebrate nearly every oddball cross section of Humanity on MTV and the major networks, and they have finally gotten around to fat people. There are the shows Fat Actress and the Biggest Loser where fat people shine. Thanks to Hollywood, fat people have become chic. Some day I hope to get on one of these shows, but for now, I can revel in the fact that I was fat before being fat was cool. Perhaps just knowing you’re a trailblazer is enough.
I haven’t always been fat. I keep my high school year book at the ready to show friends and strangers the thinner, more muscular me. Some even believe those 31-year-old pictures are of me. Once they squint their eyes long enough, that is. On those same tattered and yellowed pages are pictures of my old swimming coach. I’m not sure who came up with his nickname – doubtfully me – but I remember chiming in and calling him “Pudge.” Why, I bet he was a whole 10 pounds overweight back then, perhaps tipping the scale at 175. We’d laugh, knowing we hit a sore spot with him and he’d always snap back that we would never be in as good of shape when we were his age; an ancient 27. Who’d believe that load? Well, talk about your all-time backfires, I pudged past him within five years and now I wish I could fit one leg in his jeans.
When you’re in your weight-gaining training you start to put on enough pounds that people you haven’t seen in a while begin to notice. Your old “friends” make clever references to the fact they’d always wanted to “see more” of you, and later they point out how I am now “twice the man” I used to be, or that I have more chins than a Chinese phone book. You smile back as if their now-common affront is charming. But that silly grin on your face looks more like you just bit into a peanut butter and sand sandwich.
Eventually you make up stories. I remember playing a basketball game with strangers and when it came time to pick teams, the team captain pointed at me and said he’d take the fat guy. I later told him I had weighed 300 pounds and worked hard to lose 100 pounds so he should cut me some slack. He actually began to admire me as all he needed was a change of perspective. I also had a doozey in which I told people I was writing a book called “Fat Like Me” and had to gain weight to live the life of a fatty. But something went wrong with the fat injections and I was forced to live this way the rest of my life. People found my artistic realism “refreshing” after hearing that story.
The thing about fighting the battle with gaining weight is that it’s not something you can claim victory at in a day, or a week or month for that matter. There are days you get indignant and stare at that sagging waistline in the mirror, vowing to defeat it before it defeats you. But you only get annoyed enough for a few skirmishes before you start thinking a few slices of pumpkin pie won’t hurt anything. Ah, but pumpkin pie is like a gateway drug and pretty soon you’re sneaking a giant size Snicker’s bar at the movies and before you know it, you’re strung out on Oreos. Soon you’re walking up to a 7-11 and telling the 19-year-old clerk (who, incidentally, doesn’t have an ounce of fat on him), “Man, I gotta have some chocolate. You gotta give me some. Forget the gas, give me 10 Hershey bars!”
Here’s the part I don’t understand: it took me a good 15 years before I “filled” out. I didn’t gain weight every day. Why the hell do I have to work at losing weight ever day then? This is where I wonder if it would have been a good thing to pay attention in biology class because maybe I missed something important about body chemistry or the wonder of metabolism. Or maybe I shouldn’t have given my father that self-assured smirk when he pointed out I was putting on a few pounds and might end up overweight like him if I wasn’t careful. Geez, dad, I was an athlete! Dieting is for girls and members of the Village People, I told him. If only I could have seen through the fog of teen angst and realized my dad was actually making sense back then, just like he was about getting a good education. It’s why I blame him for everything. If only he’d gotten through to me I’d be an educated, skinny, middle-aged bastard, which has a better ring to it than ignorant, balding, fat bastard.
Thanks to modern culture there is some hope for me. We celebrate nearly every oddball cross section of Humanity on MTV and the major networks, and they have finally gotten around to fat people. There are the shows Fat Actress and the Biggest Loser where fat people shine. Thanks to Hollywood, fat people have become chic. Some day I hope to get on one of these shows, but for now, I can revel in the fact that I was fat before being fat was cool. Perhaps just knowing you’re a trailblazer is enough.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Politics Is Not For Girly Men
Just a quick and dirty reading of all the initiatives going down to defeat in California. First, it doesn’t surprise me. Second, I believe it spells the end to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political career.You may know I was involved with Props 74-77 early on. I was told by the “Governor’s People” how much I would be paid (about 20 percent of my normal fee for twice the work) and that I should be excited about such magnanimity because I had the honor of toiling for the Great Arnold Schwarzenegger. Of course you say “yes” to such a lousy offer because in my business, turning it down means losing not only the Governor’s future work, but not working with the “Business Community,” a group that will come to work on Wednesday with a not-so-wise expression on their collective faces.
I’m not sure if it’s part of human nature or just part of me, but I know I grumbled the entire time I was working and cared less about the outcome than I ever had before. Low pay and a lousy work environment do that to me. I put up with a lot of crap for a little money and I am sure it showed in my work effort. I am always more willing to pour my heart into a job when I am working with a client I respect and who respects me enough to pay me for the value of the job. I also like to be treated as if I am part of a team rather than a line-item budget. And, oh yeah, after agreeing to pay me so little, it would have been nice if I hadn’t been stiffed on the final bill. To make matters even worse, I should have taken President Bush’s advice of “Screw me once, shame on you, screw me twice . . . well, ain’t nobody gonna screw me twice” because the money I wasn’t paid just went on a rather large tab that has been accumulating with the Governor over the past three years.
Why is this important other than How It Effects Me? Because Schwarzenegger treated his entire campaign staff the same way. He pressured them, missed appearances, attempted to interject too much of his novice advice, and paid his consultants about five percent of what they normally earn. Take a look at the ads – and his ragged campaign – and it looks like it was all done without enthusiasm. Which I am sure it was.
He got a lot of free advice (naturally) at the beginning and most thoughtful people were telling him he was biting off more than he could chew. I was one of those people and was quite happy when he decided to drop a fifth constitutional amendment dealing with the screwed-up pension system due to severe legal drafting problems. But his ego and natural enthusiasm knows no bounds and you’d be hard pressed to find a consultant willing to talk any politician out of spending money, even if it is a piddling amount. So we got ourselves a Special Election because we just couldn’t wait to fix reapportionment, something that by law won’t even be considered for another five years.
A lot of money and effort was wasted on unbridled hubris on initiatives that just didn’t resonate with the people; not because taken on their own they were not worthy, but because he tried to sell them as a package of unrelated issues and because they were for him, The Governator. I don’t think people ever got the connection. What does teacher tenure have to do with restrictions on union dues, spending caps, and giving the art of redistricting to someone other than Judge Wapner (who, by the way, wins the award for the all-time worse political ad spokesman)? I was told to sell these as “Schwarzenegger’s Reform Package” to mend the state’s ills, but he has a lot less political capital than he believes and this state is far more to the left (as he is) than what he was peddling. IF he didn't learn this tonight, then he never will.
The writing is clearly on the walls now; Schwarzenegger’s foray into politics is about as big a flop as Terminator 3. He has no stomach for personal attacks and no desire to drag his family through more dirty politics that he is sure to face during a second election, this time with 12 months for Maria to grit her teeth rather than the three-month campaign following the recall of Gray Davis. A poll today said that 52 percent would not vote for him today if was running and, in effect, he was running through his initiatives where he faced a tougher adversary than in Predator – the unions. Additionally, his supporters are tapped out and stunned at the turn of events. All they have received for their financial support was worker’s compensation reform and a few vetoes of loony legislation. It’s not enough to show for the enormous tab they’re stuck with tonight.
I suspect the Governor will head off for a vacation, speak with his family, and figure out a way to make the next 12 months as painless as possible. You may even see him working more with democrats. But I doubt you’ll see his name on next year’s ballot. Can anyone say Governor Angelides? Time to stick the for sale sign in the yard and check out real estate in Montana. The only mandate coming out of this election is for the democrats to feel emboldened and every time they feel that way, they come gunning for your wallets.
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Noah and Leaks
There was a great line in the movie Absence of Malice in which Wilford Brimley says, “You had a leak? You call what's goin' on around here a leak? Boy, the last time there was a leak like this, Noah built hisself a boat.’ Here was a guy who knew what a leak was.
We just spent two years investigating whether or not anyone illegally leaked the name of one former covert CIA operative who was likely never going to be given a foreign assignment again, despite what you may have heard about her live being in danger. Since that time, leaks have become the favorite pastime for all those who don’t see the world beyond the Beltway.
There were so many leaks of grand jury testimony during Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation, that leaks about who was leaking sprung up in the press. Grand Jury testimony is not supposed to be leaked. In fact, publicly discussing the testimony brings a prison term with it. If there was so much outrage over the initial leak of Vanity Fair’s pinup girl, Valerie Plame’s name (oops, I just endangered her life again), then where has the outrage vanished to about the Grand Jury leaks?
Today, reporting on several leaks from within the CIA and others, the Washington Post has a story that claims the U.S. has several secret prisons in Asia and Eastern Europe. Per the report, these prisons are housing captured insurgents and, to get around U.S. laws regarding the treatment of enemy combatants, the U.S. has placed them there so they can be tortured to reveal information about future attacks, etc. Further leaks and educated guesses have suggested the prisons, if they exist, are located in Poland and Romania. The European Union, better known as the House of the Timid, has declared these prisons as inconsistent with EU human rights treaties among the member nations and has ordered an investigation. The good news is; the war will be over before they decide which country will lead the investigation.
But what does this say about the press, the leakers, and the way the Valerie Plame investigation played out? I guess it suggests the press will place a news scoop over national security any day, even if it endangers lives (less we forget it was the press that made the decision to use Valerie Plame’s name in the first place). As for the leakers, the public has to wonder about their agenda as it rightfully did with Scooter Libby. I suspect the leaks coming from the CIA shows a deeper fissure between the Administration and the intelligence community, perhaps over the fact the CIA got the brunt of the blame over faulty Iraq intelligence. And I suppose the Valerie Plame case is another example of lost perspective, in this case looking for the villains who were merely defending a political attack, but letting the media off the hook on the actual printing of her name. It’s the same perspective that sent G. Gordon Liddy to jail for five years for having one FBI file in his possession and ignoring the Clinton apparatus for taking – and never returning – nearly 1,000 raw FBI files on political opponents. One is a crime, and the other a “bureaucratic snafu.”
Of the leaks, the one most damaging is the report on the prisons. Why would anyone at CIA want to leak this information? Not only should the leaker(s) have expected the public outcry, but they also must have known the leaks would put all of their colleagues operating in those countries in danger. This news may also make it more likely for terrorist attacks inside the named countries. There may end up being plenty of blood on the hands of the leakers and those who decided to run with this story.
A few years back, a former CIA operative named Philip Agee wrote a book naming undercover CIA agents in various countries. This led to several executions and the destruction of years of asset-building around the world. I believe in a free press and even revel in it when I can. But when should their desire to sell books and newspapers override the public interest and our national security? Apparently, it seems, only when it affects critics of the White House.
We just spent two years investigating whether or not anyone illegally leaked the name of one former covert CIA operative who was likely never going to be given a foreign assignment again, despite what you may have heard about her live being in danger. Since that time, leaks have become the favorite pastime for all those who don’t see the world beyond the Beltway.
There were so many leaks of grand jury testimony during Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation, that leaks about who was leaking sprung up in the press. Grand Jury testimony is not supposed to be leaked. In fact, publicly discussing the testimony brings a prison term with it. If there was so much outrage over the initial leak of Vanity Fair’s pinup girl, Valerie Plame’s name (oops, I just endangered her life again), then where has the outrage vanished to about the Grand Jury leaks?
Today, reporting on several leaks from within the CIA and others, the Washington Post has a story that claims the U.S. has several secret prisons in Asia and Eastern Europe. Per the report, these prisons are housing captured insurgents and, to get around U.S. laws regarding the treatment of enemy combatants, the U.S. has placed them there so they can be tortured to reveal information about future attacks, etc. Further leaks and educated guesses have suggested the prisons, if they exist, are located in Poland and Romania. The European Union, better known as the House of the Timid, has declared these prisons as inconsistent with EU human rights treaties among the member nations and has ordered an investigation. The good news is; the war will be over before they decide which country will lead the investigation.
But what does this say about the press, the leakers, and the way the Valerie Plame investigation played out? I guess it suggests the press will place a news scoop over national security any day, even if it endangers lives (less we forget it was the press that made the decision to use Valerie Plame’s name in the first place). As for the leakers, the public has to wonder about their agenda as it rightfully did with Scooter Libby. I suspect the leaks coming from the CIA shows a deeper fissure between the Administration and the intelligence community, perhaps over the fact the CIA got the brunt of the blame over faulty Iraq intelligence. And I suppose the Valerie Plame case is another example of lost perspective, in this case looking for the villains who were merely defending a political attack, but letting the media off the hook on the actual printing of her name. It’s the same perspective that sent G. Gordon Liddy to jail for five years for having one FBI file in his possession and ignoring the Clinton apparatus for taking – and never returning – nearly 1,000 raw FBI files on political opponents. One is a crime, and the other a “bureaucratic snafu.”
Of the leaks, the one most damaging is the report on the prisons. Why would anyone at CIA want to leak this information? Not only should the leaker(s) have expected the public outcry, but they also must have known the leaks would put all of their colleagues operating in those countries in danger. This news may also make it more likely for terrorist attacks inside the named countries. There may end up being plenty of blood on the hands of the leakers and those who decided to run with this story.
A few years back, a former CIA operative named Philip Agee wrote a book naming undercover CIA agents in various countries. This led to several executions and the destruction of years of asset-building around the world. I believe in a free press and even revel in it when I can. But when should their desire to sell books and newspapers override the public interest and our national security? Apparently, it seems, only when it affects critics of the White House.
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
And Another Thing ...
The anti-war chant “Bush lied and people died” has been tossed around a lot lately. Let’s examine some relevant quotes to see if the chant fits the rant:
"Without question we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator leading an oppressive regime. He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation. And now he's miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction.”
“He’ll use those weapons of mass destruction again as he has 10 times since 1983.”
"We begin with a common belief that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them."
"We know that he has stored nuclear supplies, secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."
“There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. We also should remember that we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in developments of weapons of mass destruction.”
"Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power."
The “lies” go on and on. Since we have not located any WMD in Iraq, quotes like these are the smoking gun democrats have been looking for to parlay partisan gains and force Bush and the neo-cons into admitting that going to war was hasty and based on bad intelligence. The only problem is; Bush didn’t say any of this. All of the above quotes are by democrats and attributed to the following: Sen. John F. (as in Friggin’) Kerry in Jan. 2003, Sandy Burger (and just what intelligence information was he stuffing in his underwear?) in February 1998, Sen. Carl Levin, Sept. 2002, Nit Wit Al Gore, Sept. 2002, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Oct. 2002, and Al Gore again the same month. Thanks to Rush Limbaugh for supplying the quotes that I had been searching the internet to find. There are more at http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/stacks/democrat.guest.html.
Next time you hear that Bush “cooked the books” on pre-war intelligence, please remember that many of the above statements were made when the country wanted a confrontation with Iraq and was only a month or two prior to the 2002 elections. Also remember that many of the above are either on the Senate Intelligence Committee or have security clearances that would allow them to examine the intelligence and draw their own, independent conclusions. Which is it? Did the democrats read but not understand the intelligence? Did they understand the intelligence was bad but wanted to ride a patriotic wave into the elections? Or was the intelligence what Bush said it was, and they understood it perfectly well? I don’t know which answer says more about the depravity of the democrats.
I don’t think there is any question that our intelligence community missed a ton of key evidence in Iraq. In 1993, then-President Clinton slashed funding for human intelligence at the CIA by 50% and added 25% to electronic surveillance. Many of our most seasoned agents were offered and accepted early retirement to save money. The result is that our intelligence capability pn the ground was severely hampered by the move and catching up, especially in an area such as the Middle East, was not an easy or quick task. Our agents and special forces were infiltrated by Iraqi intelligence in nearly everything they did leading up to the war, so it should be no big surprise that the decisions made a decade earlier had lasting consequences and led to poor intelligence gathering.
Going forward, maybe we insist on a new approach of our elected officials. Since Bush didn’t get us into anything in Iraq that did not get the unanimous vote of support from Congress maybe the armchair-quarterbacking could end. It certainly takes no genius to figure out that these public fights have an impact on how the world and insurgents view our resolve. In fact, papers belonging to insurgents and Baathists have been discovered in Iraq that discusses precisely that. They know if American political perseverance ends, the troops will be pulled out and they will fill the void with a radical Islamic fundamentalism that will be tough to uproot.
With further kudos to Rush, he posed a hypothetical question to democrats. Essentially he asked that if it is determined that all the intelligence Bush relied on was wrong, and or it is all been made up to further a war agenda, what do the democrats propose we do? The democrats have proven themselves worthy at ensuring the world knows what we are doing wrong, but where is their solution? Inquiring Bloggers – especially those who have supposedly stopped Blogging – want to know. Oh, and in case I keep doing this, I have a doozey of a post that tracks the WMDs in Iraq’s possession.
"Without question we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator leading an oppressive regime. He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation. And now he's miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction.”
“He’ll use those weapons of mass destruction again as he has 10 times since 1983.”
"We begin with a common belief that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them."
"We know that he has stored nuclear supplies, secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country."
“There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. We also should remember that we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in developments of weapons of mass destruction.”
"Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power."
The “lies” go on and on. Since we have not located any WMD in Iraq, quotes like these are the smoking gun democrats have been looking for to parlay partisan gains and force Bush and the neo-cons into admitting that going to war was hasty and based on bad intelligence. The only problem is; Bush didn’t say any of this. All of the above quotes are by democrats and attributed to the following: Sen. John F. (as in Friggin’) Kerry in Jan. 2003, Sandy Burger (and just what intelligence information was he stuffing in his underwear?) in February 1998, Sen. Carl Levin, Sept. 2002, Nit Wit Al Gore, Sept. 2002, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Oct. 2002, and Al Gore again the same month. Thanks to Rush Limbaugh for supplying the quotes that I had been searching the internet to find. There are more at http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/stacks/democrat.guest.html.
Next time you hear that Bush “cooked the books” on pre-war intelligence, please remember that many of the above statements were made when the country wanted a confrontation with Iraq and was only a month or two prior to the 2002 elections. Also remember that many of the above are either on the Senate Intelligence Committee or have security clearances that would allow them to examine the intelligence and draw their own, independent conclusions. Which is it? Did the democrats read but not understand the intelligence? Did they understand the intelligence was bad but wanted to ride a patriotic wave into the elections? Or was the intelligence what Bush said it was, and they understood it perfectly well? I don’t know which answer says more about the depravity of the democrats.
I don’t think there is any question that our intelligence community missed a ton of key evidence in Iraq. In 1993, then-President Clinton slashed funding for human intelligence at the CIA by 50% and added 25% to electronic surveillance. Many of our most seasoned agents were offered and accepted early retirement to save money. The result is that our intelligence capability pn the ground was severely hampered by the move and catching up, especially in an area such as the Middle East, was not an easy or quick task. Our agents and special forces were infiltrated by Iraqi intelligence in nearly everything they did leading up to the war, so it should be no big surprise that the decisions made a decade earlier had lasting consequences and led to poor intelligence gathering.
Going forward, maybe we insist on a new approach of our elected officials. Since Bush didn’t get us into anything in Iraq that did not get the unanimous vote of support from Congress maybe the armchair-quarterbacking could end. It certainly takes no genius to figure out that these public fights have an impact on how the world and insurgents view our resolve. In fact, papers belonging to insurgents and Baathists have been discovered in Iraq that discusses precisely that. They know if American political perseverance ends, the troops will be pulled out and they will fill the void with a radical Islamic fundamentalism that will be tough to uproot.
With further kudos to Rush, he posed a hypothetical question to democrats. Essentially he asked that if it is determined that all the intelligence Bush relied on was wrong, and or it is all been made up to further a war agenda, what do the democrats propose we do? The democrats have proven themselves worthy at ensuring the world knows what we are doing wrong, but where is their solution? Inquiring Bloggers – especially those who have supposedly stopped Blogging – want to know. Oh, and in case I keep doing this, I have a doozey of a post that tracks the WMDs in Iraq’s possession.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Once More With Feeling
I can’t resist one more post. No, no, this is the last. Please, stop begging. One has to know when he's run an audience out of the room. Time for the hook, and all that. But I have to respond to a news report roaming about the Web and originating from a Canadian news service.
First, where is Canada, anyway? I think it’s north, but not sure if it’s been slowly floating away from North America and, when last seen, headed toward France. Show of hands; how many people can name the Canadian prime minister. Hint: he’s named after a guitar made in a town in Pennsylvania where The Band visited feeling half past dead. For the zero or one who read this Blog and aren’t that obscure, his name is Paul Martin and the only reason I know this is because he’s been in the news lately under a cloud of scandal. He hasn’t been seen much in Canada’s capital these days. Which is in Toronto. I think. Maybe somewhere else. But I digress.
Not to bury the lead again, but the story from our Molson-drinking, hockey-playing, can’t pronounce the letter U neighbors is that the decent Sheikdom of the United Arab Emirates offered Saddam exile, he accepted, and the war all could have been avoided. It would be a good story and enhance other story lines deriding the Bush Administration’s decision to go to war, except for the fact that it’s not true, and the guy who made the offer is dead and the one who supposedly accepted isn’t too happy with us at the moment.
The reason it’s not true is because it was supposedly agreed to at a February 2003 Arab summit hastily called in Egypt to halt the possible spread of self-rule in a region that boasted only free elections in Israel. The summit started, the parties bickered, and ended early without so much as an agreement on a joint press statement to be given several state-run news agencies. It was so bad at the summit that an aging and terminally-ill Muammar Gadhafi had harsh words for the Saudis because they had allowed U.S. troops to get their boots shined within their borders before heading into the Iraqi desert. The Saudis, their panties always in a bunch, returned the volley by reminding Gadhafi who put him in power in 1962 – blowing the cover off a carefully-guarded 40-year-old story in which the Saudis admitted they were behind the military coup. It was not a summit about a unified Arab front. Instead it was a signal to the West that each of the countries was only looking after their own backsides and taking the position: screw Saddam and the camel he rode in on.
The bottom line is that several offers of exile were presented and even some accepted for a period of time. The hitch in all of them was the fact that Saddam wanted guarantees that he wouldn’t be brought before The Hague on war crimes. The guarantees were made but Saddam, being the paranoid that he is, didn’t believe other countries could ensure he wouldn’t be nabbed while sitting on a pile of food-for-oil money by a team of Rangers. Maybe with good measure, too. Perhaps the U.S. could be blamed for not persuing some of the exile plans, but all of them had flaws and nobody seemed willing to negotiate, least of all Saddam who saw himself in the larger light as a modern-day Prophet Mohammed battling Qoreish tribes (i.e. the U.S.) to return to Medina.
The best offer for Saddam came from the Russians but he turned it down on the same grounds, causing grumbling in Moscow, Paris, and Tehran, all centers of high finance profiting off the largess of a see-nothing U.N. The fact is that Bush did not ask his Administration for a go, no-go on the war until March 15, two days before bad intelligence caused the delivery of four 2000-pound bunker busters to be dropped at Dora Farms, thus starting Iraq War, the Sequel. True, the plans had been laid, but the Administration welcomed all reasonable exile offers to avoid war. Anyone who thinks otherwise just doesn’t know this president.
First, where is Canada, anyway? I think it’s north, but not sure if it’s been slowly floating away from North America and, when last seen, headed toward France. Show of hands; how many people can name the Canadian prime minister. Hint: he’s named after a guitar made in a town in Pennsylvania where The Band visited feeling half past dead. For the zero or one who read this Blog and aren’t that obscure, his name is Paul Martin and the only reason I know this is because he’s been in the news lately under a cloud of scandal. He hasn’t been seen much in Canada’s capital these days. Which is in Toronto. I think. Maybe somewhere else. But I digress.
Not to bury the lead again, but the story from our Molson-drinking, hockey-playing, can’t pronounce the letter U neighbors is that the decent Sheikdom of the United Arab Emirates offered Saddam exile, he accepted, and the war all could have been avoided. It would be a good story and enhance other story lines deriding the Bush Administration’s decision to go to war, except for the fact that it’s not true, and the guy who made the offer is dead and the one who supposedly accepted isn’t too happy with us at the moment.
The reason it’s not true is because it was supposedly agreed to at a February 2003 Arab summit hastily called in Egypt to halt the possible spread of self-rule in a region that boasted only free elections in Israel. The summit started, the parties bickered, and ended early without so much as an agreement on a joint press statement to be given several state-run news agencies. It was so bad at the summit that an aging and terminally-ill Muammar Gadhafi had harsh words for the Saudis because they had allowed U.S. troops to get their boots shined within their borders before heading into the Iraqi desert. The Saudis, their panties always in a bunch, returned the volley by reminding Gadhafi who put him in power in 1962 – blowing the cover off a carefully-guarded 40-year-old story in which the Saudis admitted they were behind the military coup. It was not a summit about a unified Arab front. Instead it was a signal to the West that each of the countries was only looking after their own backsides and taking the position: screw Saddam and the camel he rode in on.
The bottom line is that several offers of exile were presented and even some accepted for a period of time. The hitch in all of them was the fact that Saddam wanted guarantees that he wouldn’t be brought before The Hague on war crimes. The guarantees were made but Saddam, being the paranoid that he is, didn’t believe other countries could ensure he wouldn’t be nabbed while sitting on a pile of food-for-oil money by a team of Rangers. Maybe with good measure, too. Perhaps the U.S. could be blamed for not persuing some of the exile plans, but all of them had flaws and nobody seemed willing to negotiate, least of all Saddam who saw himself in the larger light as a modern-day Prophet Mohammed battling Qoreish tribes (i.e. the U.S.) to return to Medina.
The best offer for Saddam came from the Russians but he turned it down on the same grounds, causing grumbling in Moscow, Paris, and Tehran, all centers of high finance profiting off the largess of a see-nothing U.N. The fact is that Bush did not ask his Administration for a go, no-go on the war until March 15, two days before bad intelligence caused the delivery of four 2000-pound bunker busters to be dropped at Dora Farms, thus starting Iraq War, the Sequel. True, the plans had been laid, but the Administration welcomed all reasonable exile offers to avoid war. Anyone who thinks otherwise just doesn’t know this president.
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