Random Notes

Sy Hersh's highly anticipated story on the battle between Rumsfeld and Pentagon is now online in today's New Yorker. The fact that Pentagon is leaking this stuff speaks volumes. (Update NYT has a good follow up story).

I am reasonably sure that US military will correct course and sort out this mess over the next few weeks. If all the stories about the non-pause in the media are any indication, the course correction is already under way.

Rumsfeld is a political survivor. Unless things start turning really bad in the battlefield, he too will survive this. Though the fact that the knives are already out can not bode well for him. He doesn't seem to have made very many friends!

Josh Marshall posted some scary speculations from a former diplomat about where this war may be headed. I don't think it is going to be as bad as he outlined. I think US will win militarily without great cost. But the political costs are already enormous. We are going to see a huge polarization between the modern West and what might be increasingly Islamized middle east. And this polarization will work more to the detriment of the people in middle east. They will take shelter in religious fundamentalism. Unless a joyous mob greets the coalition in Baghdad, this is going to set the people in middle east back by at least 20 more years.

I did not think that it is possible to mess up the overthrow of an obviously unpopular thug from power. But we are obviously watching that in slow motion.

The war enjoys enormous support at home. It took two different presidencies, thousands of dead American soldiers and the fear of draft to wake up the people in USA about Vietnam. With half the Americans believing that Iraqis were responsible for 9/11, I don't see support for war flagging.

I hope this war gets over soon. The question is what will follow. I would like to believe that democracy in Iraq is on the agenda. Marshall outlined another scary scenario. I wish I could say with conviction that it is paranoia on his part.

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Check out this hilarious flash animation on US aid to Afghanistan.

USA today has a cool map charting the progress of US troops over the last 7 days.

Talking of maps, this is the mother of all maps resources for Iraq.

As I speculated yesterday, Al Jazeera did get DOSed. There is also a lot of anti war hacking going on.

One of the more surprising ironies of this war is that Wall Street Journal (print edition) has one of the most objective war coverages, while Washington Post seems to be kinda selective about what it prints and how it is presented.

Hindu has an interesting news item that claims that US is trying to instigate a Shia uprising by pushing Majid Al Khoei militia into Basra. (For those who don't know, Hindu is a staid, solid paper, not given to hyperbole). I love a popular uprising as much as the next person. But I am not hot on the idea of Shia militias or any religious fanatics for that matter. I should have thought that US learnt at least that from Afghanistan.

Talking Points Memo has been consistently providing terrific analysis of disastrous US diplomatic efforts and its potential impact.

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This image of Elizabeth Heathman, 4 years old, clutching a photo of her father St. Kelly Heathman of third infantry is heart wrenching. (via comments at the Agonist.org).

Incidentally, Agonist got mentioned by by both NYT and CNN today. I think Sean Paul is doing a much better job than most of mainstream US media.

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I don't quite know how they are doing it, but this site is hooked on to all the war TV channels that you can think of, including Al Jazeera. (via Russian Beauty). Incidentally, Al Jazeera now has a news site in English. From what I can see so far, it does seem biased, but it also provides information earlier than the US media. (Update: I hear that the site is in the middle of a Denial of Service attack. Alternately, it has gone down under the traffice. Not that it was providing objective news! But at least it was an alternate source.)

Ha'aretz has a good, objective analysis of the war over the last 3 days (via TalkingPointsMemo).

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I think Reuters has the best ongoing news coverage. Slate has an interesting guide deconstructing pundits & another guide to news sources on the web. The TV coverage makes me want to throw up.

Among the weblogs, Agonist is doing a damn good job. Kevin Sites, a CNN photographer, started an interesting photoblog from inside Iraq. But it looks like CNN made him stop. The only Iraqi blogging from Baghdad (that I know of) has been silent since last friday. I hope he and his family are alright.

Christopher Albritton is stumbling around somewhere in Norther Iraq and is updating his blog from there. Nick Denton is posting the e-mails that he is getting from his journalist friend inside Iraq.

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This is depressing.

There is something vulger about the broadcast media's anticipation of 'Shock and Awe'. They seem to be treating it like a giant reality show.

I am very glad that Saddam will to be gone. I think whoever or whatever replaces him will be at least better than him and I hope that Iraqi people will have a better life than they do now. Salam Pax's post expresses that hope too.

I am under no illusion that the US administration is engaging in this war primarily to take out nuclear weapons. The recycled cold warriors that manage defence policy in this administration lost their souls a very long time back.

Be that as it may, Iraqi people will still have a much better shot at life after this. They may not be greatly better off. It is possible that the majority of their oil wealth will be sucked off by large US corporations rather than by Saddam's cronies. But I hope that they don't have to live constantly under fear after this.

The wreck of the international order, organizations, and protocols that follows this, will take years to heal. In that, the US government is not behaving very differently from the way the Romans or the Brits did before them or the Chinese may do 50 years down the line. I am not shocked into disbelief. But this cynic's heart still despairs.

What makes me feel really nauseous are remarks, comments like this quoted in Atrios:

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It was apparently a scripted news conference.

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Power and weakness by Robert Kagan in Policy Review articulated the viewpoints of many in the current Bush administration. It was a highly influential article that gets quoted a lot. It is also very long (over 27 pages).

In 'Europe and America: Some know more about war', William Pfaff in IHT considers people who are looking at the same issues from a different looking glass.

Nex stop Baghdad? by Kenneth Pollack in Foreign Affairs magazine is the precursor to Pollack's highly influential book 'The threatening storm: the case for invading Iraq'. Pollack was the former director for gulf affairs at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. The link is to the abstract of the article. To read the complete article, you gotta pay. Josh Marshall has an interview with Pollack in his weblog. Also, you may want to read Marshall's current thoughts on the subject. A lot of people are going through similar hand wringing.

An unnecessary war by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt does a fairly decent job of countering the argument of Kenneth Pollack that Saddam is “unintentionally suicidal.” It goes on to say that

Dreaming of democracy by George Packer is an article on Iraqi dissidence built around the story of Kanan Makiya. Packer has a heart and writes with sympathy and knowledge.

This is transcript of a conversation with General Anthony Zinni. Retired Marine General Anthony Zinni commanded the US Central Command from 1997 to 2000. He was also President Bush's special emissary for Palestine-Israel dispute. In this conversation, he speaks against a war with Iraq now.

Guardian website has a collection of 30 interviews that present a spectrum of viewpoints.

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You have to go down the page a little to find the link to 'IRAQ.SADDAM.JUNEO3' on the main page of TradeSports. It seems that a good number of people are betting that Saddam will be out by June.

A first draft of a study (pdf file) on what the financial sector seems to think of war on Iraq is now available on the Stanford University site.

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My new article A Cheer for South Asian Writers is now up in SatyaCircle.

In case you want to read more about the writers that I mentioned in that article, the following websites may help. They have a lot of stuff on some of the writers that I mentioned in that article.

Arundhati Roy
Amitav Ghosh
Bapsi Sidhwa
Salman Rushdie

I'll try to add some more links later in the day.

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The first time I looked at an Avedon portrait, I was uneasy. Those were the photographs that Avedon shot of his father who was dying of cancer. It was only recently, that I went back to Avedon. To me, they are still not easy portraits to look at. But his vision and his humanity is more understandable now.

The most eloquent introduction to his work is his essay included in Richard Avedon Portraits. I strongly recommend that you read it if you get a chance.

There is a Thomas Struth exhibition going on in the Met that is worth checking out. I could only spend a little time there and would like to go back again later.

For some reason, I always heard Struth's name uttered alongwith that of Andres Gursky.I saw the Gursky exhibition in MOMA in 2001, but was not really moved by it. So, I did not really go out of my way to check out Struth photographs. But Struth is different. He is not hard like Gursky. May be I am reading it wrong. But I thought there is something cold about Gursky. Struth is more poignant, poetic at times.

Let me also add that EVERYONE seems to think very highly of Gursky, so I guess could be just that I did not get it. (Incidentally, there is another Gursky exhibition going on in SFMOMA).

Once by Wim Wenders is a wonderful photo journal of his wanderings around the world. Incidentally, Donata Wenders is also a cool photographer. She shot Buena Vista Social Club. Her website is here.

Update: Tyler Green blogged about the Struth exhibition earlier. He did not much like the streetscapes. But I completely agree with his opinion about Met's crowd control.

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