THIS MODERN WORLD

Not sure what’s inspired the recent spate of Paypal donations, but I do appreciate the vote of confidence. And as you can see, the blog is slowly getting back up to speed…

It may have been a fake — but Bush was AWOL. (Link via TBogg.)

This is how arguments are won in the internet age — focus on trivialities and ignore the larger picture. If there’s a typo in your message board post, then you are clearly a worthless asshat who should be ignored by all reasonable people, blah blah blah. If you got suckered by somebody with forged memos — and god knows what agenda — then your entire career should be deep-sixed.

A few months back, the Times op-ed page asked various bloggers — mostly right wingers — what they thought the most important story of the election was. Some of the give-em-an-inch-and-they-think-they’re-rulers crowd nominated themselves, and their obsession with these memos, as the most important story of the 2004 election cycle. And maybe they were right, in one sense: maybe they’ve helped usher us into a new era. Call it the Age of Obsessive Nitpicking. (Or, more accurately — for the obsessive nitpickers in the audience — the Age of Obsessive and Generally Misinformed Nitpicking.)

But that’s not exactly something to celebrate.

…there’s a good overview of the whole mess here.

Forcing naked Iraqi prisoners to pile themselves in human pyramids was not torture, because American cheerleaders do it every year, a court was told today.

A lawyer defending Specialist Charles Graner, who is accused of being a ringleader in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, argued that piling naked prisoners in pyramids was a valid form of prisoner control.

“Don’t cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year. Is that torture?” said Guy Womack, Sergeant Graner’s lawyer, in opening arguments to the ten-member military jury at the reservist’s court martial.

. . .

The prosecution showed some of those pictures in their opening argument, including one of naked Iraqi men piled on each other and another of Ms England holding a crawling naked Iraqi man on a leash.

Mr Womack said that using a tether was a valid method of controlling detainees. “You’re keeping control of them. A tether is a valid control to be used in corrections,” he said.

This much, I believe:

Apart from arguing that the methods were not illegal, Graner’s defence is that he was following orders from superiors. Mr Womack said: “He was doing his job. Following orders and being praised for it.”

Story.

Prognostication is tough. Even when you get the generalities right, you’re likely to be wrong on the specifics. Nonetheless, almost every writer Andrew Sullivan holds up to ridicule in this blast-from-the-past (link via Atrios) was far more prescient than Sullivan himself. Yes, he’s exhibited some vague semblance of rationality on the war lately, but I’ll take him seriously when he starts apologizing to the various recipients of his snarky little awards, and acknowledges that overall, they were right and he was very, very wrong.

…scroll up past the entry linked and there are more oldies-but-goodies, like this one:

V-H AWARD VIII: “Have you ever seen such amazing arrogance wedded to such awesome incompetence?” – Molly Ivins, March 16, 2003. No, Molly, I haven’t. The liberal media have had a terrible, terrible war.

Someone with more time than me should really spend a couple of days going through Sullivan’s archives and compiling these classics. He was generous enough to share his wisdom with us, it would be a shame to let it all fall into the memory hole.

According to Newsweek, the Pentagon is considering using what it calls “the Salvador option” in Iraq:

What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called “the Salvador option” — and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. “What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are,” one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. “We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing.” Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking “the back” of the insurgency — as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time — than in spreading it out.

Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported “nationalist” forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success — despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras.)

. . .

Shahwani also said that the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, he said, “are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them.” He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.”

And there’s the key: the Sunni population is paying no price, and we have to change that equation. In el Salvador, changing that equation meant throwing our support behind death squads guilty of torture, massacres and “disappearances” — arming them, training them, politely overlooking the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians. (Not to mention four American nuns and six Jesuit priests. There’s a good rundown of those years here for anyone who needs a refresher course.)

“Salvador option.” Jesus Christ, what’s a satirist to do when reality itself plays out like a ham-fisted satire?

Update: a response to the predictable right-wing wankery.