THIS MODERN WORLD

FORT EUSTIS — Months before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld forbade military strategists from developing plans for securing a post-war Iraq, the retiring commander of the Army Transportation Corps said Thursday.

In fact, said Brig. Gen. Mark Scheid, Rumsfeld said “he would fire the next person” who talked about the need for a post-war plan.

Rumsfeld did replace Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff in 2003, after Shinseki told Congress that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to secure post-war Iraq.

Story.

The Central Intelligence Agency last fall repudiated the claim that there were prewar ties between Saddam Hussein’s government and an operative of Al Qaeda, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to a report issued Friday by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The disclosure undercuts continuing assertions by the Bush administration that such ties existed, and that they provided evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The Republican-controlled committee, in a second report, also sharply criticized the administration for its reliance on the Iraqi National Congress during the prelude to the war in Iraq.

The findings are part of a continuing inquiry by the committee into prewar intelligence about Iraq. The conclusions went beyond its earlier findings, issued in the summer of 2004, by including criticism not just of American intelligence agencies but also of the administration.

* * *

As recently as Aug. 21, President Bush said at a news conference that Mr. Hussein “had relations with Zarqawi.’’ But a C.I.A. report completed in October 2005 concluded instead that Mr. Hussein’s government “did not have a relationship, harbor or even turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi and his associates,” according to the new Senate findings.

Story.

BAGHDAD, Iraq – U.S. officials, seeking a way to measure the results of a program aimed at decreasing violence in Baghdad, aren’t counting scores of dead killed in car bombings and mortar attacks as victims of the country’s sectarian violence.

In a distinction previously undisclosed, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said Friday that the United States is including in its tabulations of sectarian violence only deaths of individuals killed in drive-by shootings or by torture and execution.

That has allowed U.S. officials to boast that the number of deaths from sectarian violence in Baghdad declined by more than 52 percent in August over July.

But it eliminates from tabulation huge numbers of people whose deaths are certainly part of the ongoing conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Not included, for example, are scores of people who died in a highly coordinated bombing that leveled an entire apartment building in eastern Baghdad, a stronghold of rebel Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Johnson declined to provide an actual number for the U.S. tally of August deaths or for July, when the Baghdad city morgue counted a record 1,855 violent deaths.

Story.

Speaking of old cartoons … it was a very strange thing, to have my job in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. I mean, obviously everyone was freaked out, but conservatives just lost their fucking marbles. And this was back before the liberal blogosphere, before liberal talk radio networks, etc., etc., so there just weren’t that many targets for their fury, which might explain why a relatively obscure cartoonist was the recipient of such an avalanche of inchoate rage. Anyway, I was thinking about this when I was looking for the cartoon link for the post below and ran across this one, which appeared in Salon on September 10, 2001, and ran in many of my papers throughout that week. Man were conservatives pissed. A lot of them didn’t understand lede times and deadlines and thought that this was a cartoon that I had written and drawn after the attacks — okay, we’re not dealing with hugely bright people here — and were ready to lynch me, or better yet, flay me alive, for talking shit about the Preznit in a Time of War. Looking back on it, it’s an incredibly mild piece — but at the time, you would have thought I had committed high treason. Actually from the virulence this one inspired, you would have thought I had personally gone into the homes of the rightwingers who were emailing me and pissed on their carpets and defiled the family pet. It’s easy to forget the insane hysteria of those days. There are still plenty of lunatics who equate criticism of this failed Administration with treason, but at least for the moment, they’re no longer in the ascendency.

… maybe even more appalling were the jackasses who were fixated on debating this cartoon with me after 9/11. I suggested to one moron that I really wasn’t in the mood for some whiny email about tax policy, given that I’d recently witnessed the death of who-knew-how-many thousands of people, probably including friends of mine. (As it turned out, not, but at the time, who knew.) He waited a day or so and then wrote back and said, “I’m sorry about your friends. I hope you are calmer and more rational now. Now about that cartoon …”

Fucking unbelivable:

In THE ENEMY AT HOME, bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza makes the startling claim that the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist acts around the world can be directly traced to the ideas and attitudes perpetrated by America’s cultural left.

D’Souza shows that liberals—people like Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, Bill Moyers, and Michael Moore—are responsible for fostering a culture that angers and repulses not just Muslim countries but also traditional and religious societies around the world. Their outspoken opposition to American foreign policy—including the way the Bush administration is conducting the war on terror—contributes to the growing hostility, encouraging people both at home and abroad to blame America for the problems of the world. He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom—from the sexual liberty of women to the support of gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce, to the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture.

The cultural wars at home and the global war on terror are usually viewed as separate problems. In this groundbreaking book, D’Souza shows that they are one and the same. It is only by curtailing the left’s attacks on religion, family, and traditional values that we can persuade moderate Muslims and others around the world to cooperate with us and begin to shun the extremists in their own countries.

Extremely related cartoon from October 2001 here.