Reader Michael G., remembering my fascination with inexplicable Japanese action figures, alerts me to this archive of Pepsiman commercials.

You’ve seen the various Sensible Liberals arguing that any opposition to the ports deal is just uninformed and/or xenophobic, that it’s really No Big Deal, that we need to consider both sides of the issue, blah blah blah. (In many cases, these are the same sensible voices who sensibly pointed out that we must sensibly consider the sensible case for war in Iraq a few years back–but that’s another rant.) Now, obviously I know essentially nothing about the operation of ports in America, and not too much more about the UAE. But I do know that the UAE was one of a small handful of countries that recognized the Taliban as a legitimate government. I know that the UAE was considered a financial safe harbor by al Qaeda. I know that members of the UAE royal family used to hang out in the desert with their buddy Osama bin Laden. This morning, I learned that the UAE boycotts Israel, and that dealing with countries that boycott Israel is apparently against US law.

The UAE may be a progressive state by regional standards. The people of the UAE may be the finest you’d ever hope to know. But the government of the UAE clearly plays both ends against the middle, and that’s the point here.

And via Kos, here’s a terrorism expert with solid, real-world reasons to be wary of this deal:

Joseph King, who headed the customs agency’s anti-terrorism efforts under the Treasury Department and the new Department of Homeland Security, said national security fears are well grounded.

He said a company the size of Dubai Ports World would be able to get hundreds of visas to relocate managers and other employees to the United States. Using appeals to Muslim solidarity or threats of violence, al-Qaeda operatives could force low-level managers to provide some of those visas to al-Qaeda sympathizers, said King, who for years tracked similar efforts by organized crime to infiltrate ports in New York and New Jersey. Those sympathizers could obtain legitimate driver’s licenses, work permits and mortgages that could then be used by terrorist operatives.

Dubai Ports World could also offer a simple conduit for wire transfers to terrorist operatives in the Middle East. Large wire transfers from individuals would quickly attract federal scrutiny, but such transfers, buried in the dozens of wire transfers a day from Dubai Ports World’s operations in the United States to the Middle East would go undetected, King said.

Kristoff:

A new poll to be released today shows that U.S. soldiers overwhelmingly want out of Iraq — and soon.

The poll is the first of U.S. troops currently serving in Iraq, according to John Zogby, the pollster. Conducted by Zogby International and LeMoyne College, it asked 944 service members, “How long should U.S. troops stay in Iraq?”

Only 23 percent backed Mr. Bush’s position that they should stay as long as necessary. In contrast, 72 percent said that U.S. troops should be pulled out within one year. Of those, 29 percent said they should withdraw “immediately.”

That’s one more bit of evidence that our grim stay-the-course policy in Iraq has failed. Even the American troops on the ground don’t buy into it — and having administration officials pontificate from the safety of Washington about the need for ordinary soldiers to stay the course further erodes military morale.

While the White House emphasizes the threat from non-Iraqi terrorists, only 26 percent of the U.S. troops say that the insurgency would end if those foreign fighters could be kept out. A plurality believes that the insurgency is made up overwhelmingly of discontented Iraqi Sunnis.

Kristoff’s ensuing and predictable argument that we must not withdraw prematurely is neither here nor there — the numbers are what’s interesting here. If this is true, then it pretty much belies the constant refrain that the troops on the ground overwhelmingly support the war because they see the progress the lying liberal media won’t report. (The soldier-bloggers may remain gung-ho, but that’s a self-selecting group.)

Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, in 2004:

Should national unity prevail, Iraq’s chances of becoming a stable democracy will improve dramatically. I’d like to see one other thing in Iraq, an outbreak of gratitude for the greatest act of benevolence one country has ever done for another.

David Lawrence, editor of US News & World Report, in 1966:

What the United States is doing in Vietnam is the most significant example of philanthropy extended by one people to another that we have witnessed in our times.

(Barnes quotes thanks to Roger of Limited, Inc..)

Reporter Lawrence Kaplan recently spent time in Iraq for the New Republic. Among the things he witnessed was this:

On the day the preliminary results of December’s elections were announced, [Iraq’s Prime Minister Ibrahim] Jafari invites the election commissioners for dinner. The liberal activist Mustafa Al Kadhimiy wrangles two invitations…

As a television in the corner of the room conveys images of the carnage outside, Jafari admits to being partial to the works of Noam Chomsky. Why won’t Chomsky come to Iraq? he asks.

I think it’s safe to say that—of all the possible futures the Bush administration may have considered when they invaded Iraq—one thing they didn’t anticipate was ending up with a Chomsky fan as prime minister.

Is it really possible that Andrew Sullivan is only now learning about something that’s been common knowledge since 2002?

The most revealing items, of course, are the following: in discussing whether Iraq could have been involved, the notes say: “judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. at same time.” Later comes: “Hard to get a good case.” Then there’s this: “Go massive … Sweep it all up. Things related and not.” My confidence that there was no deliberate misleading of the American people after 9/11 just slipped a notch.

Unbelievable. I’ve asked this many, many times, but why exactly is it that anyone takes this guy even remotely seriously?

… puts the Orwell quote at the top of his page (“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle”) into context, doesn’t it?

Just looking at that picture takes a little of the edge off, doesn’t it? One of the (many) things I miss about life on the West Coast is the ability to take spontaneous trips down the coast to Big Sur, so this inspired some wistful memories. One thing, though — apparently no one told the writer about my favorite place to stay in the area, Ripplewood. You can camp there, which I have done, but I prefer their cabins, several of which have kitchens, bathrooms, even fireplaces. I haven’t been there in many years, but if their website is up to date, it looks like they’re still the area’s best bargain.

Or else the terrorists have won.

Seriously, I really do need to make a good showing with this one. I could have stayed with St. Martin’s, putting out a compilation every two years that got absolutely no promotional support and sold respectable but modest numbers. Instead I took a risk on a new publisher, and they’re excited about this one and putting a lot into it — I don’t even want to tell you how optimistic they’re being with the first print run — but if it doesn’t do well, I’m sure that excitement will cool down quickly, and I will find myself with even fewer options than before.

As far as my future book publishing career is concerned, I’ve basically put everything on red 23 and the roulette wheel is spinning.

Ad’s over to your left if you want to pre-order.

Since dimwits like Michelle Malkin are jumping to the conclusion that liberals who are wary about the UAE ports deal somehow validate their own prejudices (as if they ever cared about our opinions anyways), here’s my question : How would a policy of scrutinizing every brown-skinned male with a funny name help us catch people like the infamous American Taliban John Walker Lindh :

…or Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols :



…or Chechen suicide bomber Zulikhan Yelikhadzhiyeva :



…or Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph :



…or Belgian suicide bomber Muriel Degauque :



…or alleged al Qaeda members with normal-sounding (to Western ears) names like Richard Reid and Jose Padilla?

Concentrating on superficial details like skin color and gender doesn’t help when you’re at war with an ideology or a tactic or whatever the hell the “war on terra” is supposed to be. I know the indignity of taking off your shoes at the airport has fueled your dream of replacing metal detectors with a “paper bag test”, but racial profiling doesn’t work. You may get a false sense of security, but trying to justify your own racism by scrutinizing people who fit your stereotype of what sort of person constitutes a threat isn’t just offensive, it’s counter-productive. Not only does racial profiling have the side-effect of making it easier for non-brown dudes to skip through the system, but it also can alienate many of our allies whose support we need if we’re ever going to catch Osama Bin Laden and his million or so second-in-commands.

The Bush Administration wants to hand over control of vital ports to a state-run company controlled by an oligarchy whose ruling family used to go on hunting trips with their Taliban buddies, apparently including Osama himself.

And if this doesn’t seem quite right to you, according to David Brooks you are a racist and a xenophobe.

As Bush said yesterday, “This deal wouldn’t go forward if we were concerned about the security for the United States of America.”

Chances are — like a lot of inexplicable Bush administration behavior — this is all about backroom deals and shady connections and things we can only guess at. And I hope that somebody, someday, writes the secret history of all this crap and tells us what the hell was really going on.

"This is 9/11 in the United States." – Adel Abdul Mahdi, one of Iraq’s two vice-presidents.

Many a day I’ve rolled my eyes at the number of times George Bush can work the word "terrorists" into a sentence, as often as not one having nothing to do with terrorism. Sometimes the sheer, mindless repetition of it is comic, despite the serious danger of having a president who lumps every opposition to him into the category of evil. The use of the word, however, never made me hissing angry until now.

Yesterday morning I read with some apprehension Juan Cole’s post on the al-Askariya shrine bombing, which he described as "very, very bad, in a way that most Western observers will miss." The London Times has a very good piece on the significance — and apocalyptic symbolism — of the shrine.

The response wasn’t hard to predict. Dozens of Sunni mosques have been attacked. Six people, including three Sunni clerics, have been killed. Three journalists  working for Al Arabiya were also killed. Boding even worse for the future, Christopher Albritton points out that this event probably ends any meaningful participation by Sunnis in the Iraqi government. The main Sunni bloc has already withdrawn from negotiations over forming that government. Even Ayatollah al-Sistani, while calling for peaceful demonstrations, had these ominous words:

In what could be interpreted as a threat, al-Sistani said in a statement that "the Iraqi government is invited today, more than any time before, to bear its responsibility and stop the criminal actions that target the holy places. And if their security forces are unable to provide the necessary protection, then the believers can do that, with God’s help."

Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the head of SCIRI, was more direct. He blamed Ambassador Khalilzad for giving a "green light to terrorist groups" when he recently said that the United States was not going to spend money on Iraq’s security forces if those forces were "sectarian" — in other words, if it was about nothing but giving Shiites the tools to attack Sunnis. I love the New York Times’ wide-eyed innocence on this:

The Shiite leader, Abdul Aziz al Hakim, said he thought Mr. Khalilzad’s public comments on Monday, in which he drew attention to apparent death squads operating within Iraq’s Shiite-led Interior Ministry, were a provocation to the bombing. He did not explain how.

If you live in America, you know that the whole point of blaming people for encouraging the enemy is that no one will ever be so rude as to ask you to back up the statement. I believe it’s in Chapter 1 of Miss Manners’ Guide to Demagoguery.

Khalilzad’s was a stupidly provocative statement, no doubt, and a hollow one. You don’t spend billions on bases if you plan to pick  up your ball and go home. Still, although it’s difficult to criticize this administration and be wrong (pick a vice, any vice…), Hakim’s comments were an absurd slander. Telling the Shiite-controlled government that it should not make torture and death squads its policy for dealing with opponents, however hypocritical on Khalilzad’s part, is hardly giving aid and comfort to "terrorists." It’s a stupid formulation, designed, in much the same way the bombing was, to increase divisions. And, of course, it works both ways.

So guess who plugged in to the same stupid formula?

"The terrorists in Iraq have again proven that they are enemies of all faiths and of all humanity," Bush said.

Who, exactly, are the terrorists here? The Sunnis (presumably) who bombed the shrine? The Mahdi Army, brandishing AK-47s and vowing revenge? And is there another source of terrorism in Samarra?

Five days after the grenade attack, Lt. Call and his men from the 2nd platoon were planning an afternoon "hearts and minds" foot patrolto hand out soccer balls to local kids.

As Call sat in the schoolhouse, preparing to go out, he heard two loud bursts from the .50-caliber machine gun on the roof.

Specialist Michael Pena, a beefy 21-year-old from Port Isabel, Texas, had opened fire. Boom-boom-boom. Boom-boom-boom.

Call and his men dashed out the front door. Pena had shot an unarmed Iraqi man on the street. The man had walked past the signs that mark the 200-yard "disable zone" that surrounds the Alamo and into the 100-yard "kill zone" around the base. The Army had forced the residents of the block to leave the houses last year to create the security perimeter.

American units in Iraq usually fire warning shots. The Rakkasans don’t.

A few days later, Call said his brigade command had told him, "The Rakkasans don’t do warning shots." A warning shot in the vernacular of the Rakkasans, Call said, was a bullet that hit one Iraqi man while others could see.

"That’s how you warn his buddy, is to pop him in the face with a kill shot?" Call said incredulously. "But what about when his buddy comes back with another guy … that and the other 15 guys in hisfamily who you’ve made terrorists?"

It’s all a sad lesson in something painfully obvious: The term "terrorists" describes nothing meaningful when all involved parties are playing variations on the same theme.

The simplistic denunciation of terrorism was not Bush’s only statement on the bombing:

"I ask all Iraqis to exercise restraint in the wake of this tragedy, and to pursue justice in accordance with the laws and constitution of Iraq. Violence will only contribute to what the terrorists sought to achieve," he said.

Surprisingly wise words coming from a man who could think of nothing but violence and revenge when his own country faced a similar tragedy, and one who continues to have contempt for our laws and constitution. If he had followed his own advice four and a half years ago, it’s unlikely he’d have to be giving it today.

Saddest of all, I doubt that even now he has the slightest comprehension of his own words’ meaning.