[Correction: My ninth grade Latin teacher warned me. Later, French and Chinese teachers predicted terrible linguistic fates for me in my various struggles to master any language other than English. All proved correct. If ever I have the hubris to use a foreign phrase or sentence in the title of a dispatch again, may I be consigned to some appropriate circle of Hell. All this is to say that my Latin title on yesterday’s dispatch left a tad to be desired. Among the many readers who wrote in to correct my gaffe, invariably with great politeness, my favorite correction came from Steven Rutledge, an associate professor of classics at the University of Maryland College Park, who adds an SPQR after his name, which, he adds, is the ancient Roman abbreviation for Senatus Populusque Romanus (The Senate and People of Rome) and which “you actually still see on modern Roman manhole covers.”
He writes: “I’m afraid to say that the quotation of Caesar on your site today (Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est) is incorrect. It is “Gallia est omnis divisa in partis tris“. The Latin as cited in the article makes no sense otherwise. I know there is a much larger and more burning issue here than Latin and that I am going to seem a crusty and pedantic fossil of sorts – just wanted to make sure that the error could be changed if caught. All that aside, I find this site a breath of fresh air in the imperial universe of Fox News. Keep “bringing it on” (or, “hoc age” as the Romans would say!)”
Whatever the Romans may say, in the future I’ll try to stick to English.]
Quotes of the day from that ur-Iraqi Paul Wolfowitz:
“‘I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq,’ said Wolfowitz, who is touring the country to meet U.S. troops and Iraqi officials.” (Reuters)
And here’s another, passed on (though without a source) by a most reliable reader with the comment, “Now he tells us!”: ”’Even though we can do many things, we’re not gods,” Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, told members of the city council. It was a message Wolfowitz repeated throughout a five-day tour of Iraq, which included stops in the cities of Karbala, Hilla, Najaf, Basra and Baghdad.'”
I would add that, as far as I know, this is one of the rare times any of the major neocons has gone out of his way to correct the record. My only curiosity is: Who suggested that he was a god?
Whatever the Romans may say, in the future I’ll try to stick to English.]
Quotes of the day from that ur-Iraqi Paul Wolfowitz:
“‘I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq,’ said Wolfowitz, who is touring the country to meet U.S. troops and Iraqi officials.” (Reuters)
And here’s another, passed on (though without a source) by a most reliable reader with the comment, “Now he tells us!”: ”’Even though we can do many things, we’re not gods,” Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, told members of the city council. It was a message Wolfowitz repeated throughout a five-day tour of Iraq, which included stops in the cities of Karbala, Hilla, Najaf, Basra and Baghdad.'”
I would add that, as far as I know, this is one of the rare times any of the major neocons has gone out of his way to correct the record. My only curiosity is: Who suggested that he was a god?
My guess, by the way, is that Wolfowitz’s statement about “foreigners” may be his way of signaling the latest neocon move — perhaps we plan to convince the Iraqi “Governing” Council to apply for entry into the Union as our 51st state, or perhaps Wolfowitz just thinks that Iraq is his (or more politely put, ours). In any case, this is an interesting moment in terms of those “foreigners.” Because we seem to be threatening various moves to a) keep the foreigners off of our turf and b) turn at least one of Iraq’s neighbors into the 52nd state.
In Iraq itself, while more American soldiers die and reports come in today that Saddam’s sons may have been killed in a gun battle in Mosul, the 51st state is, Neela Banerjee and Douglas Jehl report in the New York Times, beginning to protect itself against those “foreigners” (U.S. Said to Seek Help of Ex-Iraqi Spies on Iran) The Pentagon, through its Iraqi favorite Ahmed Chalabi’s political party, is reportedly moving “to resurrect parts of the Iraqi [Baathist] intelligence service, with the branch that monitors Iran among the top priorities, former Iraqi agents and politicians say. American officials, [the Iraqi official responsible for the recruiting program said], are fully informed about what the party is doing. Iraqi intelligence officers who have been asked to rejoin the branch contend that the United States is orchestrating the effort.”
Of course, Americans have a long, proud history of recruiting intelligence officials of defeated and previously heinous enemies, especially Nazi and Japanese officials after World War II. As is often the case with reportage in the mainstream, it’s well worth reading any piece backwards because the last paragraphs are where a reporter can stash the crucial stuff, knowing that only the news junkies are likely to make it that far. In this case, the last paragraph reads: ” The officials said it was unclear to whom a new Iraqi intelligence service would report. But they said the C.I.A. now had a sizable operation in Iraq, with at least several dozen officers on the ground.” And if you’re a former state now run by the world’s last empire, the truth is you don’t need a local government to have a local intelligence service. The government to which you’re going to report, after all, is already in place and, as Paul Wolfowitz made clear, they’re not even foreigners.
One other interesting sentence in this piece: “People close to the Iran branch [of Saddam’s former intelligence service] said the Americans had also expressed interest in reviving the intelligence service’s Syria branch.” Only last week, Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay, of Knight-Ridder News Service reported (CIA: Assessment of Syria’s WMD exaggerated):
“In a new dispute over interpreting intelligence data, the CIA and other agencies objected vigorously to a Bush administration assessment of the threat of Syria’s weapons of mass destruction that was to be presented Tuesday on Capitol Hill. After the objections, the planned testimony by Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, a leading administration hawk, was delayed until September.
“U.S. officials told Knight Ridder that Bolton was prepared to tell members of a House of Representatives International Relations subcommittee that Syria’s development of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons had progressed to such a point that they posed a threat to stability in the region.
“Bolton’s planned remarks caused a ‘revolt’ among intelligence experts who thought they inflated the progress Syria has made in its weapons programs, said a U.S. official who isn’t from the CIA, but was involved in the dispute.”
And yet that didn’t stop the president yesterday from warning “Syria and Iran that they ‘will be held accountable’ if they fail to cooperate more with the administration’s campaign against terrorism. (Bush Warns Syria, Iran on Terrorism, Washington Post). “Foreigners,” after all, are always held accountable — except perhaps for the North Koreans where an overstretched, troop-shy administration is at least temporarily backing off, even as the North Koreans seem to be getting readying to declare themselves a nuclear state in the most definitive way possible — by testing a weapon. The Washington Post reports,” The diplomatic activity — including a willingness to bend on the administration’s previous insistence that its next meeting with North Korea must include South Korea and Japan — suggests the administration is actively looking for ways to defuse the crisis.” Indeed and if you look at American troop deployments globally you’ll know why.
At the moment, the question seems not to be whether the US will launch a strike on North Korea, which can defend itself and potentially initiate an almost unimaginably destructive war on the Korean peninsula, but whether in the chaos of Iraq our neocons will call the subs in the Axis of Evil games onto the field — in this case, Syria, another relatively defenseless, if despotic land. In Is Syria Next? in the London Review of Books, Charles Glass offers a long, detailed, vivid analysis, well worth your bother to read, of embattled Syria , asking whether it wasn’t the real goal of the neocons in the Iraq war all along. He writes in part:
“[Syria] frozen in the political rhetoric of a 1960s Soviet client, is now surrounded. Jordan, Israel and Turkey host American forces and are formidable foes in their own right.Iraq has become an American protectorate, and America has told Syria that it must, like a rare breed of bird, adapt to the new environment or die
“An American Administration whose style is diplomacy by diktat has no interest in listening to a rehearsal of Syria’s case: that the Palestinians are waging a legitimate, legal struggle to end military occupation; that the Syrian people, like Arabs elsewhere, believe in Palestinian national rights; that Hizbollah is a legal political party in Lebanon with nine elected members of parliament; that Israel has far more weapons of mass destruction, including at least 250 nuclear warheads, than Syria has or could afford to acquire[and so on]”
In the meantime, while Wolfowitz roamed Iraq, defending his homeland against foreigners, George W. Bush struck out against other potentially destructive foreigners who, his administration feels, should hand over some money on the toll road of empire and otherwise keep quiet. Of any effort to bring the UN and NATO into the Iraqi occupation, the president said (in the above quoted Washington Post piece), “The reconstruction effort shouldn’t be viewed as a political exercise It shouldn’t be viewed as an international grab bag.”
William Pfaff, the sober-minded columnist for the International Herald Tribune, entitled his most recent column, about various conferences he attended in Europe, Bush policy risks terminal strain in NATO:
“The Europeans simply no longer agree with the United States. They don’t agree about the terrorist threat. They don’t think Osama bin Laden is a global menace. They don’t take Washington’s view of rogue states. They don’t agree about pre-emptive war, clash of civilizations, the demonization of Islam, or Pentagon domination of U.S. foreign policy. Neo-conservative officials from Washington who spoke demanded apologies from the Europeans for having failed to support the United States.” The Europeans had heard it all before. This time they laughed, or walked out for a coffee.
“Well meant appeals by American Atlanticists for U.S.-European reconciliation are politely received, but are irrelevant. We are past that point. That statement advised Europeans on what they should do to recapture America’s confidence, and “make the U.S. feel welcome in Europe.” It’s the other way around. It’s the Americans that have lost the Europeans’ confidence. Unless the United States can recapture it, the alliance is finished.”
James Carroll of the Boston Globe and John Helmer, journalist and former Carter administration official both consider below the lies piled on lies that underpin our war in, and occupation of, Iraq. Carroll’s column in particular brings into the mainstream perhaps the last antiwar charge to be raised in the Vietnam era — and the first to disappear — war crimes. It’s a powerful statement about where we may be headed. Tom
Was the war necessary?
By James Carroll
The Boston Glove
July 22, 2003Why does the apparent suicide of David Kelly strike such a chord? The British weapons expert found himself in the middle of the controversy over the Bush-Blair hyping of the Saddam Hussein threat. Unsourced BBC reports, an aggressive parliamentary interrogation, the stresses of weapons inspection, a government’s credibility in jeopardy, a rat’s nest of deceptions – all of this together could weigh too much on one man.
Though the private demons of any suicide remain mysterious forever, it seems that being snagged into this dispute sparked an anguish in Dr. Kelly that he could not bear. ”He told his wife he was taking a walk,” an AP report said. ”A local farmer said Kelly smiled as he passed.” Some hours later, early Friday, he was found near a woods, his left wrist slashed.
To read more Carroll click here
DANCES WITH BEARS
Perfidious Albion and the lying American
By John Helmer
Asia Times
July 22, 2003Wars usually start with one large lie. Throwing more troops into the breach requires a great many little lies. Wars usually end when the lying can’t staunch the bleeding, and the stench.
According to the wife of the David Kelly, the British Defense Ministry expert on Iraqi weapons who committed suicide last Friday by cutting his left wrist, and bleeding to death while on painkillers, “this was not really the kind of world he wanted to live in”. But the kind of world prime ministers of England and presidents of the United States hatch, when they go to war together, should have been familiar to Kelly, as he was old enough to remember the Vietnam War.
The big lie for which Kelly killed himself was no different from the one that created the Tonkin Gulf incident, the invented Vietnamese attack on US warships which purported to justify the first landings of US troops 40 years ago.
John Helmer , since 1989 the longest-serving Western correspondent in Russia, was an official of the Carter administration in Washington between 1977 and 1981. In 1975 he published Bringing the War Home: The American Army in Vietnam and After, a celebrated analysis of disintegration in the US Army