THIS MODERN WORLD

The image above (which is available on t-shirts and mouse pads and many other fine varieties of swag in the store) is taken from a cartoon that ran back when the world was young, in June of 2001.

As it turns out, I was more right than I knew. From the NY Times review of Ron Suskind’s new book:

This book augments the portrait of Mr. Bush as an incurious and curiously uninformed executive that Mr. Suskind earlier set out in “The Price of Loyalty” and in a series of magazine articles on the president and key aides. In “The One Percent Doctrine,” he writes that Mr. Cheney’s nickname inside the C.I.A. was Edgar (as in Edgar Bergen), casting Mr. Bush in the puppet role of Charlie McCarthy, and cites one instance after another in which the president was not fully briefed (or had failed to read the basic paperwork) about a crucial situation.

Q: Why is TMW missing from Salon this morning?

I assume it’s just an unfortunate oversight. Will update when I learn more.

… ah, all better now.

The former Wonkette has a peculiar sense of what constitutes “militancy”.

As you may have seen, Noam Chomsky was recently invited to speak to a class of cadets at West Point. For all our flaws, there aren’t many other countries that would allow such an unyielding critic of their foreign policy to speak to their officers-to-be. (In fact, in most places the people here listening seriously to Chomsky would have been hunting down and killing him.)

Moreover, it was broadcast nationwide on C-Span. It’s all such an embodiment of our best traditions it makes me a little verklempt.

Dennis Perrin describes it like this:

The real fun comes during the Q&A, and I hope these young officers were taking serious notes. If Noam could impress someone as gung-ho as Pat Tillman, then he can reach pretty much anyone in uniform. And that’s a good thing.

Notice, too, how much respect the cadets show Noam. Of course, part of this is their training, prefacing each question and comment with “sir.” But I get the impression that the kids kinda dug the old man, who easily and graciously handled every query thrown at him….

When I was in the Army, we didn’t get speakers like Noam. We had to sit through assholes like Woody Hayes, the now-late Ohio State football coach. Hayes blustered on about the glories of war, talking about how we really stuck it to the Japs in the Big One. In fact, ol’ Woody dropped the J-word several times, causing a couple of Japanese-American officers to walk out.

The rest of Dennis’ thoughts, plus links to the C-Span video, are here.

I agree that the Zarqawi letter is unlikely to be real. The Associated Press has the entire text here, and after reading it, I’d put the chances of it being genuine as high as 5%.

But given this section, it doesn’t sound like anything the U.S. would produce:

The question remains, how to draw the Americans into fighting a war against Iran? It is not known whether American is serious in its animosity towards Iran, because of the big support Iran is offering to America in its war in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Hence, it is necessary first to exaggerate the Iranian danger and to convince America and the west in general, of the real danger coming from Iran, and this would be done by the following:

1. By disseminating threatening messages against American interests and the American people and attribute them to a Shi’a Iranian side.

2. By executing operations of kidnapping hostages and implicating the Shi’a Iranian side.

3. By advertising that Iran has chemical and nuclear weapons and is threatening the west with these weapons.

4. By executing exploding operations in the west and accusing Iran by planting Iranian Shi’a fingerprints and evidence.

5. By declaring the existence of a relationship between Iran and terrorist groups (as termed by the Americans).

6. By disseminating bogus messages about confessions showing that Iran is in possession of weapons of mass destruction or that there are attempts by the Iranian intelligence to undertake terrorist operations in America and the west and against western interests.

Instead, it seems transparently to be the work of the Iraqi government, perhaps with an assist from their Iranian friends.

I think there’s a larger lesson here, too. The uranium-from-Niger forgeries were so blatantly stupid you’d assume they couldn’t be the work of the U.S. or Italian intelligence services. But generally speaking, subtlety and competence are not the strong suit of people who do this kind of thing. If they were subtle and competent they’d be in another line of work.