thedrifter
03-19-05, 06:16 AM
03-17-2005
From the Editor:
So Much News, So Little Time
By Ed Offley
In the halcyon days of late April 1945, while allied forces were racing across Germany and closing in on Japan, a Swiss newspaper captured the flavor of the time with this headline:
“Events Seem to Be Succeeding One Another with Great Rapidity.”
Well, in the halcyon days of March 2005, we can use that same headline (only it won’t fit on our website, so that’s why you just read it here). The avalanche of strange, amazing and downright weird news items affecting our military and the ongoing campaign in Iraq is almost too great to keep up with. Here are three mind-benders from this week alone:
News from Home
From World War I until recently, it was a common understanding that when troops deployed, they and their families had to endure the loneliness and pain of prolonged separation.
As a kid during the middle innings of the Cold War, I recall a poignant public service TV ad showing eager soldiers clustered around the company mail clerk receiving their letters. One poor Pvt. Doak turned away empty-handed, his face crumpled with emotion, as the announcer intoned how important it was for us to write to our loved ones overseas. In fact, even today most military commands give seminars for homebound troops and their families on how to mitigate the stress that will inevitably occur when husbands and wives begin to resume their domestic arrangements after months of separation.
But thanks to the availability of communications via cell phones, email and the internet, the Pentagon has discovered that – no, Pvt. Doak’s problem hasn’t been solved – rather, another problem altogether has cropped up. Troops dodging IEDs and terrorists in Iraq now have to deal with the everyday stresses of life back home as well. As a report in The New York Times on Tuesday revealed:
“Just as television coverage during Vietnam brought shocking images of war into living rooms, so today’s communications technology has the potential to … mir[e] soldiers in domestic problems that distract from the mission.”
The article quoted one young Army captain in Iraq who found the commo links from home a source of irritation and stress: “My wife is having problems with getting yard work taken care of without having to pay out the nose for it.” Unspoken was his probable retort: “Whaddya want me to do, call in air strikes?” A colonel’s wife back home ruefully admitted that when her husband called from Iraq, she let him have both barrels, the newspaper added, because their teenagers “had once again left the bathroom littered with empty shampoo bottles despite repeated lectures on tidying up.”
Solution? Use voicemail. Or turn the damned thing off.
Meanwhile, Back at the WMD Debate:
The Bush administration lied, fabricated, made up, concocted, juiced and otherwise invented the “Iraq is a WMD threat” argument in order to topple the regime in Baghdad, n’est-ce pas?
Well, that’s the overall impression you’d get from listening to the president’s political foes and their allies in the media over the past two years. In the understated words of Sen. Ted Kennedy back in early 2003, “This [allegation on WMD] was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud.”
But what’s this? Two items buried in the torrent of dispatches about the legal woes of Michael Jackson, Robert Blake and Kenneth Lay deserve your attention.
Item: Rolf Ekeus, the Swedish diplomat who headed up the United Nations weapons inspection teams for Iraq during 1991-97 has now revealed that a senior Iraqi official offered him a $2 million bribe to doctor his reports on the search for weapons of mass destruction. He told the Reuters news service this week, “I told the Volcker people [investigating the U.N. oil-for-food program] that [Saddam’s Deputy Prime Minister] Tariq [Aziz] said a couple of million was there if we report right. My answer was, ‘That is not the way we do business in Sweden.’ ”
Since Saddam was desperately trying to convince the U.N. that he didn’t have a WMD program, it doesn’t much make sense to assume that the bribe was intended to persuade Ekeus that the “right” report would have been to conclude Iraq did have labs and production facilities for nukes and chem-bio weapons.
Item: The mainstream media was energized when Iraqis allegedly looted and plundered museums and other sites containing historic antiquities, dishing it out on our troops who failed to interrupt their firefights with the Fedayeen Saddam in order to ensure the stuff was returned.
But it took nearly two years for The New York Times to come up with this shocker: Iraqi officials recently revealed that an organized looting campaign beginning in mid-April 2003 had stripped ten separate industrial sites with what the newspaper described as “tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein’s most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms.” The newspaper added:
“Dr. [Sami] al-Araji, [the deputy minister of industry] said equipment capable of making parts for missiles as well as chemical, biological and nuclear arms was missing from 8 or 10 sites that were the heart of Iraq’s dormant program on unconventional weapons. After the invasion, occupation forces found no unconventional arms, and CIA inspectors concluded that the effort had been largely abandoned after the Persian Gulf war in 1991.”
Or did they? The Times, attempting to square its own circle on this contentious topic, also stated in the same article: “After the 1991 gulf war, international inspectors found that Baghdad was close to making an atom bomb and had succeeded in producing thousands of biological and chemical warheads.”
If there was no WMD threat, why the 12 years of Iraqi officials hounding U.N. weapons inspectors attempting to monitor those sites? And again, why the $2 million bribe offer to Rolf Ekeus?
Solution: Look for additional news media reports in the months ahead that very quietly reveal that the WMD “fraud” came not from the Bush ranch in Crawford, but from the copy editors in Manhattan and Washington, D.C.
The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is – Ourselves:
Meeting with Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers this week, senior Saudi Arabian officials voiced concerns about “about militants in Iraq crossing the border into Saudi territory,” the Associated Press reported.
Myers said to reporters in Riyadh, “I think [Saudi officials] are concerned that some of the foreign terrorists that are in Iraq [who] look for other homes might come here.” The general added that they discussed ways for Iraq and Saudi Arabia to improve border security.
Solution: If Saudi officials are really that concerned about militant Sunni Muslim terrorists posing a threat to the kingdom’s internal security, then do something, such as firing their incompetent Interior Minister, who still argues that 9/11 was a plot by the Jews; suppressing the multi-million-dollar semi-private charity aid pipeline to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups; cleaning out the radical Wahhabi Muslim clerics who are inciting terrorism from Indonesia to Sahelian Africa, and spend some of the kingdom’s petrodollars to close its borders to the hundreds (thousands?) of “militants” who came to Iraq from (where else?) – Saudi Arabia.
There are many other stories out there “succeeding one another with great rapidity,” but I have a headache.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2005 Ed Offley.
Ellie
From the Editor:
So Much News, So Little Time
By Ed Offley
In the halcyon days of late April 1945, while allied forces were racing across Germany and closing in on Japan, a Swiss newspaper captured the flavor of the time with this headline:
“Events Seem to Be Succeeding One Another with Great Rapidity.”
Well, in the halcyon days of March 2005, we can use that same headline (only it won’t fit on our website, so that’s why you just read it here). The avalanche of strange, amazing and downright weird news items affecting our military and the ongoing campaign in Iraq is almost too great to keep up with. Here are three mind-benders from this week alone:
News from Home
From World War I until recently, it was a common understanding that when troops deployed, they and their families had to endure the loneliness and pain of prolonged separation.
As a kid during the middle innings of the Cold War, I recall a poignant public service TV ad showing eager soldiers clustered around the company mail clerk receiving their letters. One poor Pvt. Doak turned away empty-handed, his face crumpled with emotion, as the announcer intoned how important it was for us to write to our loved ones overseas. In fact, even today most military commands give seminars for homebound troops and their families on how to mitigate the stress that will inevitably occur when husbands and wives begin to resume their domestic arrangements after months of separation.
But thanks to the availability of communications via cell phones, email and the internet, the Pentagon has discovered that – no, Pvt. Doak’s problem hasn’t been solved – rather, another problem altogether has cropped up. Troops dodging IEDs and terrorists in Iraq now have to deal with the everyday stresses of life back home as well. As a report in The New York Times on Tuesday revealed:
“Just as television coverage during Vietnam brought shocking images of war into living rooms, so today’s communications technology has the potential to … mir[e] soldiers in domestic problems that distract from the mission.”
The article quoted one young Army captain in Iraq who found the commo links from home a source of irritation and stress: “My wife is having problems with getting yard work taken care of without having to pay out the nose for it.” Unspoken was his probable retort: “Whaddya want me to do, call in air strikes?” A colonel’s wife back home ruefully admitted that when her husband called from Iraq, she let him have both barrels, the newspaper added, because their teenagers “had once again left the bathroom littered with empty shampoo bottles despite repeated lectures on tidying up.”
Solution? Use voicemail. Or turn the damned thing off.
Meanwhile, Back at the WMD Debate:
The Bush administration lied, fabricated, made up, concocted, juiced and otherwise invented the “Iraq is a WMD threat” argument in order to topple the regime in Baghdad, n’est-ce pas?
Well, that’s the overall impression you’d get from listening to the president’s political foes and their allies in the media over the past two years. In the understated words of Sen. Ted Kennedy back in early 2003, “This [allegation on WMD] was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud.”
But what’s this? Two items buried in the torrent of dispatches about the legal woes of Michael Jackson, Robert Blake and Kenneth Lay deserve your attention.
Item: Rolf Ekeus, the Swedish diplomat who headed up the United Nations weapons inspection teams for Iraq during 1991-97 has now revealed that a senior Iraqi official offered him a $2 million bribe to doctor his reports on the search for weapons of mass destruction. He told the Reuters news service this week, “I told the Volcker people [investigating the U.N. oil-for-food program] that [Saddam’s Deputy Prime Minister] Tariq [Aziz] said a couple of million was there if we report right. My answer was, ‘That is not the way we do business in Sweden.’ ”
Since Saddam was desperately trying to convince the U.N. that he didn’t have a WMD program, it doesn’t much make sense to assume that the bribe was intended to persuade Ekeus that the “right” report would have been to conclude Iraq did have labs and production facilities for nukes and chem-bio weapons.
Item: The mainstream media was energized when Iraqis allegedly looted and plundered museums and other sites containing historic antiquities, dishing it out on our troops who failed to interrupt their firefights with the Fedayeen Saddam in order to ensure the stuff was returned.
But it took nearly two years for The New York Times to come up with this shocker: Iraqi officials recently revealed that an organized looting campaign beginning in mid-April 2003 had stripped ten separate industrial sites with what the newspaper described as “tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein’s most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms.” The newspaper added:
“Dr. [Sami] al-Araji, [the deputy minister of industry] said equipment capable of making parts for missiles as well as chemical, biological and nuclear arms was missing from 8 or 10 sites that were the heart of Iraq’s dormant program on unconventional weapons. After the invasion, occupation forces found no unconventional arms, and CIA inspectors concluded that the effort had been largely abandoned after the Persian Gulf war in 1991.”
Or did they? The Times, attempting to square its own circle on this contentious topic, also stated in the same article: “After the 1991 gulf war, international inspectors found that Baghdad was close to making an atom bomb and had succeeded in producing thousands of biological and chemical warheads.”
If there was no WMD threat, why the 12 years of Iraqi officials hounding U.N. weapons inspectors attempting to monitor those sites? And again, why the $2 million bribe offer to Rolf Ekeus?
Solution: Look for additional news media reports in the months ahead that very quietly reveal that the WMD “fraud” came not from the Bush ranch in Crawford, but from the copy editors in Manhattan and Washington, D.C.
The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is – Ourselves:
Meeting with Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers this week, senior Saudi Arabian officials voiced concerns about “about militants in Iraq crossing the border into Saudi territory,” the Associated Press reported.
Myers said to reporters in Riyadh, “I think [Saudi officials] are concerned that some of the foreign terrorists that are in Iraq [who] look for other homes might come here.” The general added that they discussed ways for Iraq and Saudi Arabia to improve border security.
Solution: If Saudi officials are really that concerned about militant Sunni Muslim terrorists posing a threat to the kingdom’s internal security, then do something, such as firing their incompetent Interior Minister, who still argues that 9/11 was a plot by the Jews; suppressing the multi-million-dollar semi-private charity aid pipeline to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups; cleaning out the radical Wahhabi Muslim clerics who are inciting terrorism from Indonesia to Sahelian Africa, and spend some of the kingdom’s petrodollars to close its borders to the hundreds (thousands?) of “militants” who came to Iraq from (where else?) – Saudi Arabia.
There are many other stories out there “succeeding one another with great rapidity,” but I have a headache.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com. © 2005 Ed Offley.
Ellie