THIS MODERN WORLD

If George Bush had already decided to invade Iraq by February 2002, who do you think should have been told about it? I ask because apparently everyone on earth knew except regular Americans.

Everyone? you wonder. Including Australian wheat company executives?

Yes, including Australian wheat company executives:

A SENIOR diplomat tipped off wheat exporter AWB a year before the Iraq war that Australia would join the US-led invasion, new documents show…

The documents, released by the Cole inquiry yesterday, show Australia’s then UN ambassador John Dauth revealed the Howard Government’s position to former AWB chairman Trevor Flugge.

Mr Dauth briefed Mr Flugge in New York in February 2002 – 13 months before the invasion – and the details appear in minutes of AWB’s February 27 board meeting tendered to the inquiry.

“The ambassador stated that he believed that US military action to depose Saddam Hussein was inevitable and that at this time the Australian Government would support and participate in such action,” the minutes said…

“The ambassador believed that the latest olive branch from the Iraqis was likely to stave off US action (for) 12 to 18 months but that some military action was inevitable.”

The award goes to:

• Dennis Perrin on Michael Richards and the reactions thereto.

• No More Mr. Nice Blog for If I Helped Turn Iraq into an Open-Air Abbatoir for Human Beings, Here’s How It Happened by Douglas Feith, and more!

• Max Sawicky on being moved to profanity by the Washington Post’s execrable coverage of Social Security.

• Arianna Huffington on the sad-but-real fear that runs Hollywood.

I just hope this will bring some much needed attention to the awardees, particularly Ms. Huffington, who’s a wonderful writer but all her career has suffered from a crippling shyness.

Hope the mighty Atrios will forgive me for lifting two posts from him in one day, but I’d forgotten how wonderful these lyrics really were — and like a fine wine, they’ve just gotten better over time.

Freedom in Afghanistan, say goodbye Taliban
Free elections in Iraq, Saddam Hussein locked up
Osama’s staying underground, Al Qaida now is finding out
America won’t turn and run once the fighting has begun
Libya turns over nukes, Lebanese want freedom, too
Syria is forced to leave, don’t you know that all this means

Chorus
Bush was right!
Bush was right!
Bush was right!

Democracy is on the way, hitting like a tidal wave
All over the middle east, dictators walk with shaky knees
Don’t know what they’re gonna do,
their worst nightmare is coming true
They fear the domino effect, they’re all wondering who’s next

Repeat Chorus

Ted Kennedy – wrong!
Cindy Sheehan – wrong!
France – wrong!
Zell Miller – right!

Economy is on the rise kicking into overdrive
Angry liberals can’t believe it’s cause of W’s policies
Unemployment’s staying down, Democrats are wondering how
Revenue is going up, can you say “Tax Cuts”

Repeat Chorus

Cheney was right, Condi was right,
Rummy was right, Blair was right
You were right, we were right, “The Right” was right and
Bush was right
Bush was right

Dawson,

I was looking through my blog archives for the post below and ran across a photo of an early prototype of the ill-fated Sparky and Blinky statues. Man, I was excited about that project. They really were extraordinary items, beautifully produced, absolute pieces of art. Anyway, it reminded me that we still have some unfinished business. Sorry to address this so publicly but I don’t have any other way to get ahold of you right now.

Unfortunately, of course, things didn’t work out so well with our partnership. You had some sort of run of bad luck that summer — I don’t know exactly what happened, you never really gave me the details — and eventually shut down production and closed your business. And then sort of disappeared entirely. I don’t know what was going on, but I’m sorry it worked out the way it did. The statues were really quite wonderful, and I’ve always regretted that we weren’t able to make them available to more than the first few customers who were lucky enough to get their orders filled.

That was a disappointment to me, but I understand that sometimes life spirals out of control. I don’t even care about the royalties I never received (for the handful of statues that did ship out). You put a lot of time and effort into this project, and my guess is you took quite a loss in the end. So that’s water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned.

The thing that really disappoints me is that you’ve never fulfilled your promise to send me the remaining stock of statues. At this point, I don’t care if they’re painted or unfinished. They’re the only copies that exist in the world, and I’ve been waiting for you to send them for — what, a year and a half now? Well, I’d still like to get them (as well as the molds if any still exist). So I’m hoping you’re out there, and that you see this.

I’m still at the same address. Send them COD, I’ll cover the postage.

I hope things have turned around for you. The world is a poorer place without your creative efforts.

Your friend,

Tom

(Note to anyone who received a set of these: my standing offer to trade an original strip for a set of these statues is still in effect).

Yglesias (via Atrios):

But still, something must be said. Indeed, the editors of The New Republic have convened a “special issue” dedicated to pondering that sad country. It features, among other things, an unsigned editorial observing that “at this point, it seems almost beside the point to say this: The New Republic deeply regrets its early support for this war.” And, well, so do I regret my support for it. But what is one to do to make up for it? Mostly, nothing can be done. At least, however, when surveying a fiasco one can attempt to learn something about what went wrong and change one’s thinking in the future. Such a change in thinking is precisely why I, at least, having fallen for the Iraq boondoggle one time, was not seduced by the siren song of the Arab Spring. Those of us who chose not to get fooled again were, of course, heartily condemned by a March 2005 TNR editorial that espied a “certain grudging quality” to liberal takes on events in Lebanon. “So far,” they sniffed, Daily Kos “has featured only two short posts on Lebanon’s equally stirring Cedar Revolution — and both were notable mostly for their pessimism.” This was, perhaps, the measured version of the April 11, 2005, take offered by the magazine’s owner and editor-in-chief, Martin Peretz. He analyzed “The Politics of Churlishness” in a cover story dedicated to the proposition that “if George W. Bush were to discover a cure for cancer, his critics would denounce him for having done it unilaterally, without adequate consultation, with a crude disregard for the sensibilities of others.” And, about sixteen months later, of course, these voices so eager to condemn liberals for not celebrating the new freedom of the Lebanese were the loudest in clamoring for Lebanese blood.

“As we pore over the lessons of this misadventure” in Iraq, explained the magazine in last week’s reassessment, “we do not conclude that our past misjudgments warrant a rush into the cold arms of ‘realism.'” Given what else is said in the editorial and in the special issue, it’s fair to interpret this as meaning that, in surveying the scene, they conclude nothing in particular. For my part, at a minimum I’ve concluded that it’s a mistake to entrust the cause of American idealism and Arab reform to a movement led by people who plainly loathe Arabs (Palestinians “behave like lemmings” wrote Peretz two weeks ago before observing last week that Iraqis now lack “even the bare rudiments of civilizations”) and couldn’t care less about their well-being except insofar as pretense to caring is a useful club with which to batter domestic political opponents.:

The term itself reflected an astonishing level of cluelessness. As I wrote at the time:

I’ve noticed that the premature triumphalists of the right have lately adopted the phrase “Arab Spring.” I assume this is a reference to the “Prague Spring” of 1968–the brief period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia which, as you may recall, was brutally supressed in August of that same year.

Small suggestion to my friends on the right: if you’re going to come up with a clever nickname for your triumphalist fantasies, you might want it to refer to, you know, an actual triumph.