I am sitting here in the Calgary Airport on the brink of ending my vacation. In fact, my vacation is over, unless you consider a plane ride home to be en vacance, which the sane man or woman does not. My time away wasn’t long but I think I connected (briefly) with the capacity to enjoy myself. But the world intervenes, as it does for the neurosurgeon protagonist Dr. Perowne of Ian McEwan’s Saturday, a novel I am half way through and will undoutedly finish on the plane.
McEwan certainly gets right the inability of modern man to disconnect. Events keep intruding. I am sitting in this dull terminal staring at a television screen with the words ISRAEL INVESTIGATED blasting across a muted CBC announcer who seems to be devoting an overly-long period to this subject, which would, at first glance, not appear to be of considerable interest of the citizens of Alberta. What’s going on here? Clicking over to the NYT coverage I find (to no surprise whatsoever) that it is our State Department behind this investigation. Why not the Defense Department, under whose purview the subject, the use or misuse of cluster bombs, would normally fall? Well, we all know the answer to that, don’t we? The US State Deparment has legendarily felt a “certain way about a certain group” ever since I have been alive – and as we also all know I wasn’t born last week. I have to smile, through my heartburn, to find State oddly lining up with Senor Chavez on the Israeli use of American weaponry. Of course, the folks at State would wince and cry I am being unfair or even irrational. But am I? In the depths of many of their hearts something simultaneously sinister and self-deceiving beats away. As I have said before, their policies are often doubly racist, toward Jews and Arabs both. But I won’t go over that again. The argument is plain for anyone who wants to think about it. That Israel was fighting a foe that was doing nothing but attack civilians (the object of this supposed use of cluster bombs) means nothing to them. And the reason this argument means nothing (and that their objections are being raised now) is politics of an extremely vicious sort, a kind of subtle ethnic cleansing at long range. Only the people being cleansed are people like me. Welcome home, Simon.
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13 Comments
1. Frank Martin:Oddly enough, not a word has been said about the illegality of using shot pellets in katushya missiles, which are designed and used specifically to kill civilians. They have no military use on the modern battlefield.
Oddly enough, no one has gone after Hezbollah for coating their weapons in rat poison for the purpose of killing a person who sufferes even a minor wound( rat poison is an anti-coagulant).
Oddly enough, no one at the UN has admonished either Russia or China for supplying these weapons to Terrorist groups, which unless someone can point me to the hezbollah factory where the missiles are created, they most certainly came from. Well, that and the fact that the missles all have Russian and Chinese language printed on the side of them. Pretty good clue there I guess.
Of course, that would be wrong to hold the poor,poor russians and chinese accountable for their acts in feeding and arming the monsters. Oh I forgot, “We must learn to understand the cause of the rage of the rebel”…
Come talk to me about “cluster bombs” when someone shows me how Katushyas are launched only at military targets and not at civilians.
Come talk to me about “cluster bombs” when you can show me the leaflet dropped by Hezbollah to clear civilians from military targets.
Aug 25, 2006 - 5:02 pm 2. MarkD:The Bush administration’s major failing is not going after the traitors in State and the CIA.
Too strong? I think not. These folks were not elected to make policy, but to execute it on behalf of the administration that we elected.
Or is that “just consent of the governed” business just another lie? Because I don’t remember voting for any “elites” to tell me how to run my life.
Quite honestly, I’m not too impressed with my self annointed superiors. Mrs Clinton can’t keep her husband from straying – she’s not my choice for anything. Ted Kennedy? I was in the Marines during Vietnam, and he’s killed more women than I have. Kerry? I’m still married to my only wife, never accused anyone of war crimes, and never attempted to negotiate with a foreign government. My honorable discharge is dated the day I left active duty – Jimmy Carter didn’t need to pardon me.
Those fools at State need to take another look at their paychecks. They don’t work for the UN.
Aug 25, 2006 - 6:47 pm 3. Luther McLeod:Just for old time’s sake, Type Key’s two week sign in is still just a tease.
Roger
Cogent words for someone sitting in an airport terminal. I suppose State is an easy target, but if so, it is their own fault. It is depressing to have to add them to the fifth column, but they have been there for quite a few decades.
The current situation just illustrates how an entrenched and self serving bureaucracy can subvert and obfuscate the course laid down by the executive, who is, ostensibly in control.
The question for me is, who does not have control? Condi is making some ‘odd’ decisions, at least to me. The issue becomes, who’s directive’s are being ignored, GW’s or Condi’s? Who’s in the wheelhouse?
Aug 25, 2006 - 7:19 pm 4. Terrye:MarkD:
The Bush administration tried going after the CIA and so far it has had mixed results. In fact I would say they made a point of going after him.
My exbrother-in-law went to work for the Justice Dept, DEA, right out of grad school 1972. He is still there. Think of all the administrations he has seen come and go. But he is also very serious about his job and does not play politics. We forget these people are called the permanent government for a reason.
I have heard practically nothing about this socalled investigation in the news so I doubt if it will come to much of anything. Sometimes I wonder if promises of an investigation is just a way to pacify people. BTW, I might be wrong about this but it seems to me that I read somewhere that if the US sells a state military hardware, there are legal strings attached. We are not China or Russia..we don’t just sell the stuff, take the money and forget about it.
Aug 26, 2006 - 3:34 am 5. ForNow:Here’s a pertinent oldie-but-goodie on the State Dept.
Aug 26, 2006 - 8:16 am 6. Ron:“A Deep Mystery For Deep People” by Larry Miller, The Weekly Standard, July 15, 2002.
Something has been wrong with the State Department for a long time and it just didnít start with Alger Hiss. It now seems to be in collision with the CIA in trying to take down the executive branch. Bush made a mistake in not cleaning the stables and the leaks like the Plame deal is just one of the results.
The Department of Justice seem incapable of bringing charges against any of the leakers of National Security information, what has occurred on the front pages of the New York Times should bring jail time instead of Pulitzerís but nothing yet, same old Walter Duranty smoke and mirrors from that purveyor of disinformation and misinformation.
We have traitors and traitorous actions but nothing is done. We have millions coming across the border illegally and nothing is done. We have a ìDeath Cultî masquerading as a religion and are still letting their ìPeace Lovingî Imamís into the country still so they can teach little kiddies how to carry Semtex to school in their lunch boxes. All of this happens under the auspices of Political Correctness and the wonders of Diversity; this will get us killed.
Poor Israel will find that itís not wise to elect some one akin to Jimmy Carter. By losing the skirmish with Hezbollah they have emboldened their enemy who now tastes blood for the first time and they will be back. Israel has fallen for the same Political Correctness and Diversity plans that the Elitist left has shoveled to us through our Universityís and Media. Israel and 6 million citizens have to get their heads screwed back on or they will get them chopped off by the Islamic Head Choppers.
It feels like 1938 again and Neville Chamberlain is once more feeding pabulum to the babes in the woods. Reading a little history will go a long way; there is really no use in having to do this once more. Got to take the gloves off before they get a bomb and then a city.
Aug 26, 2006 - 8:35 am 7. heather:I am sorry you have to live with these anti Semitic insults to your being, Roger. And I am sorry I can only offer sympathy.
However, there are a couple of great articles about the war that cheered me up: Amir Taheri has published one called, “Hezbollah didn’t win,” in the Wall Street Journal, and also in his Benador Associates website. He knows a LOT about Lebanese politics…
And the second article is by Edward Luttwak, entitled, “It’s so easy to misread war,” with the subtitle, “The 1973 Yom Kippur War left the Arab world gloating – till it realized what it had lost…” This gem, well worth reading, is in the Thursday, August 24 Globe and Mail, page A15 – unfortunately behind one of those ‘walls’. One of the highlights is: “Hezbollah certainly held its ground, but its mediocrity is revealed by the casualties it inflicted, which were very few.” Luttwak works at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, so this article MAY reappear there…
Aug 26, 2006 - 10:40 am 8. heather:More on Luttwak’s article: the misuse of the Katyushka rockets. These are only effective if fired in CONCENTRATED barrages (ie, the Russians in WWII, where they were called “Stalin’s Organ”). However, Hezbollah has the sort of command and control organization that mitigates against that tactic. Rather, the Katushkas were sprinkled around to village militias who concentrated on hiding said Katushkas. Thus, Israeli civilian casualties were extremely light, and did not justify a large-scale offensive by more than 45,000 Israeli soldiers with accompanying 100s of deaths.
To quote Luttwak”, “Instead of hundreds of dead civilians, the Israelis were losing one or two a day and, even after three weeks, the total was less than in some one-man suicide bombings.”
Aug 26, 2006 - 10:48 am 9. heather:More on Luttwak’s article: the misuse of the Katyushka rockets. These are only effective if fired in CONCENTRATED barrages (ie, the Russians in WWII, where they were called “Stalin’s Organ”). However, Hezbollah has the sort of command and control organization that mitigates against that tactic. Rather, the Katushkas were sprinkled around to village militias who concentrated on hiding said Katushkas. Thus, Israeli civilian casualties were extremely light, and did not justify a large-scale offensive by more than 45,000 Israeli soldiers with accompanying 100s of deaths.
To quote Luttwak”, “Instead of hundreds of dead civilians, the Israelis were losing one or two a day and, even after three weeks, the total was less than in some one-man suicide bombings.”
And then, there are Hez boasts of its own heroism and effectiveness: ” When an Israeli recce companyu attacked the mountain of Bint Ibail, losing 8 men in one night, that number was perceived in Israel and broadcase around the world as a disastrous loss. Many a surviving verteran of the 1943-1945 Italian campaign must have been amazed by this reaction. There too, it was one stone-built village and hilltop town after another, and though the Germans were outnmbered, outgunned and poorly supplied, a company that went against them would consider the loss of only 8 men as very fortunate, because attacking forces could suffer a 150 percent or even 300 per cent casualty rate… the need for a second, third or fourth assault….”
Indeed, Hez did not fight as fiercely as the Egyptians in 1973 or the Jordanians in 1967 – as Israeli casualty figures demonstrate.
Aug 26, 2006 - 10:54 am 10. Soldier's Dad:State has been running a mine clearing program in Lebanon since 1998. There is nohting particularly newsworthy about State sending it’s existing mine clearing expert in Lebanon to investigate yet another report of an unexploded mine.
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2006/71047.htm
Aug 26, 2006 - 11:42 am 11. miapulp:“But the world intervenes, as it does for the neurosurgeon protagonist Dr. Perowne of Ian McEwan’s Saturday, a novel I am half way through and will undoutedly finish on the plane.”
Excellent choice of reading material, Roger! Loved that book; loved Dr. Perowne.
Susan
Aug 26, 2006 - 1:22 pm 12. BarCodeKing:The problem with State and CIA is that they are career bureaucrats. They know that unless they really mess up, they can’t be fired. They have their own agendas, and when a presidential administration comes along which doesn’t want to further their agendas, they do their best to sabotage it. They know that in any case, they only have to put up with a given president for four or at most eight years. Bush will be back in Crawford in 2009, while the Arabists at the State Department will still be there.
It must be nice to work at State or CIA and not have to worry about terrorists flying a plane into your building, since that would be counterproductive for them.
Aug 26, 2006 - 3:19 pm 13. srlucado:“Clicking over to the NYT coverage I find (to no surprise whatsoever) that it is our State Department behind this investigation.”
I believe that this is because Foreign Military Sales, which would cover Israel’s purchase of cluster bombs, receive approval from State, not Defense. Therefore, the misuse of such items would be a State Department issue.
Aug 28, 2006 - 2:13 pm