. . . are going great so far, depite the one explosion in Baghdad. Turnout is good, with the possible exception of Sunnis, who can go fly a kite for all I care perhaps can be included in the new government through appointed positions. Of course, I'm sure you've all heard the quotes about how "sure we're scared, but what else is new? We lived under Saddam for decades. We've been scared all our lives."

People are doing extraordinary things to vote.

Dean has a a roundup of roundups.

UPDATE: Jeff Percifield has his own roundup, of quotes from the Iraqis themselves.

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Same blog, two links in a row. But it's going to happen every now and again, especially with James Joyner, Dean Esmay, and both of my favorite Jeffs.

This time it's Dean, who has a nice synopsis of the work being done by Free Muslims Against Terrorism. They just issued a statement about the upcoming Iraqi elections, which is worth a read (and excerpted in Dean's entry).

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. . . is publishing the over/under on when the New York Times will proclaim the Iraqi elections worthless.

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I really want to believe.

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"But you can't blow out a fire."

The governor of Baghdad was just assassinated. In that light, Smash's observation about Bin Laden's increasing desperation is particularly important to bear in mind.

Democracy is coming to the Middle East, and neither the Baathists nor the Islamists can stop it.

Both Bin Laden and Zarqawi are living on borrowed time.

That said, I'm sick to death by what we've seen and what we will see this month. But there's no way around—only through.

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Blackfive shows us why what we do matters when we give toys and shoes to the kids in Iraq. Read this, if you read nothing else I ever link.

And send a few bucks to the programs that are helping Iraqis (Blackfive has a nice roundup).

Via Kate.

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Via Protein Wisdom comes an article in the Weekly Standard by Mackubin Thomas Owens, professor of national security at the Naval War College:

Critics are asking what the operation in Falluja really accomplished. They note that the insurgents’ leaders appear to have escaped and that violence has erupted elsewhere in northern Iraq. Media accounts also routinely describe the fighting outside Falluja as a “rebel counteroffensive” that surprised the U.S. military, implying that the reduction of Falluja merely created more insurgents.

But the view conveyed by these headlines is myopic. An equivalent headline in June 1944 would have read: “Massive U.S. Casualties on Omaha Beach; HitlerÂ’s Reich Remains Intact, Defiant.” Such stories fail to place Falluja, Mosul, Tal Afar, and other cities in northern Iraq in context. The fact is that Falluja is part of a campaign, a series of coordinated events—movements, battles, and supporting operations—designed to achieve strategic or operational objectives within a military theater. Falluja is just one battle, albeit an extremely important one, in a comprehensive campaign to stabilize the Sunni Triangle.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

When they controlled Falluja, the rebels were able to sustain a high rate of attack against the Iraqi government and coalition forces. Falluja gave them infrastructure--human and physical--and provided the security needed to maintain a large terrorist network. As one military analyst, writing for the Belmont Club blog, has remarked, in the absence of sanctuary, large terrorist organizations cannot survive. Without sanctuary, terrorist networks are reduced to “small, clandestine hunted bands.”

You'll recall that one of the many failures of the Vietnam war was the unwillingness of the Johnson Administration to cut the supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh trail. Clearly, we aren't making that mistake this time: this war, whatever you may think of it, is being fought with commitment and a desire to win. And success is likely to give many Americans a sense that the whole enterprise was worth the loss of life and the financial expenditure.

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Apparently, it's all over the news today that bad things happen in wars.

Jeff at Protein Wisdom runs a righteous linkfest, and points out that:

First, the filth US Marines have been killing in Fallujah are terrorists, not insurgents; and second, these terrorists routinely hide behind children, fire from inside mosques, feign injury and/or surrender with ambush in mind, and booby-trap dead bodies in hopes of slaughtering American soldiers. They’re not interested in the “rules of war.”

Unless it helps them kill more of us, of course. Americans have died because we've been so assiduous in avoiding any unnecessary civilian casualties; my eyes are dry today. Has everyone forgotten the use of Red Crescent vehicles to carry armed Iraqis in the first phase of the war?

Jeff again:

Kidnapped international aid worker Margaret Hassan has been murdered. On video. No word yet on whether or not she was armed at the time.

Lest anyone misunderstand, I'm glad that we've taken such care to fight a clean war. I'm glad that we go to great efforts to keep civilian casualties to an absolute minimum. But I do not want to see this war drag on and on because our boys and girls have to fight in handcuffs, while the opposition finds ever-more-outrageous ways to flout international law.

The mainstream media is, once again, guilty of an egregious double standard.

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does it again, with some Good News from America (cf. Good News from Iraq):

• Grace Leung, 73, woke with a clear conscience, knowing that she'd survived 52 years of open warfare without killing her husband. She looked forward to another day of battle.

• Tamara Huerta, 22, a waitress pulling a double shift, suddenly realized she could do just about anything with her life. Dazed, she sat down.

So go read 'em all—in context.

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A new group, The Truth About Iraq, is trying to counter the media distortions and omissions about the liberation; they even ran an editorial in the L.A. Times to try to get it across to skeptical Americans that Iraqis really do want democracy:

Nearly 55% of Iraqis say that toppling Hussein was worth the price of the current difficulties. These figures are easy to understand when you look at another set of numbers. In an Op-Ed article circulated this year among the more than 200 independent newspapers now published in Iraq, an Iraqi democratic activist observed that Hussein tortured and killed as many as 750,000 of his own people. Iraqis don't understand the debate about whether Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. To them, Hussein was a weapon of mass destruction.

UNICEF, hardly an apologist for the Bush administration, estimates that 5,000 Iraqi children a month died of starvation and malnutrition while Hussein siphoned funds from the U.N.'s oil-for-food program to build his palaces and enrich French politicians.

Via Dean Esmay.

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Photon Courier reads a cartoon by Garry Trudeau:

In the Sunday Doonesbury, Mike has a summer daydream in which: "George Bush never became President..." and "we never invaded Iraq..." and "we didn't torture and kill prisoners..." and "we're not hated around the world..." and "the American people are far more secure."

Shortly after reading this comic strip, I read a post by Omar, who blogs from Iraq. On Al Iraqyia TV, he saw a program about an event that happened in the early 1980s. A member of an opposition group was arrested by Saddam's agents. He was tortured to get him to reveal the name of the leader of the group...at first he resisted but finally broke and said "Sabah, a student in the college"...then lapsed into a coma and soon died. Saddam's goons arrested and killed everyone they could find named "Sabah" in the colleges in Baghdad (except for known regime supporters). There were 40 of them.

Courier concludes by remarking, "what a great summer daydream."

Yup.

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Cobb gives us a succinct hindsight-is-20/20 defense of the war in Iraq.

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This is an amazing essay, by a writer for Esquire who despises George W. Bush but nonetheless forces himself to examine the war in Iraq as objectively as possible. It's one of the ballsiest things I've read in a long time ("most ovarian," perhaps, for those of us on the distaff side of the gender line—but this essay has nothing to do with sex).

I've seen it excerpted on other blogs, but I'm not going to do that because it just has to be read in its entirety. Everyone should read it, not just as an example of how a person might find Bush offputting and yet think the war has merit, but as one realization of what we all aspire to: a continual re-examining our beliefs. A determination to find our intellectual blinders—whatever they might be—and to take them off.

Via I Love Jet Noise.

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Plenty of people were deceived—headline writers and headline readers alike. And now Jeff Goldstein explains patiently why "no connection between Saddam and 9/11" does not mean "no connection between Saddam and al Qaeda."

Featuring the words of some people who would know. Like Bill Clinton.

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1 Hey girl. You linked to an "Allah" post here. Is that Allah Goldstein? Frightening. ;-)

Posted by: Juliette at July 17, 2004 01:03 PM (1+d4t)

2 That was just a test to find out who my True Friends are. Now I know you'd really tell me if my bra straps were showing. Thanks!

Posted by: Attila Girl at July 18, 2004 04:07 AM (LcVoH)

3 HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Posted by: Juliette at July 18, 2004 01:50 PM (1+d4t)

4 What . . . you wouldn't tell me?

Posted by: Attila Girl at July 19, 2004 01:49 AM (SuJa4)

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Just when you thought this story couldn't smell any more than it does . . .

BAGHDAD A U.S. marine held by an Iraqi militant group is alive and has been released, the marine's brother said Tuesday.
.
The group, Islamic Response, issued a statement on Monday saying that it had taken Corporal Wassef Ali Hassoun, the marine it had earlier threatened with beheading, to a "place of safety" after he promised to abandon the American military.

On Tuesday, Corporal Hassoun's older brother, Sami Hassoun, said, "We received a sign that he is alive and he is released and everything is O.K."

"The sign is something that came directly from him, there is something that nobody else could possibly know," Sami Hassoun said in a telephone interview from Tripoli, Lebanon. "It's a certain clue. He is alive, and he is released."

What makes the brother so certain?—surely any information the terrorists have could have been extracted by subterfuge or torture. The longer this situation goes on, the more I begin to think Spoons may be right about it: the whole thing could be an elaborate deception to cover up an act of desertion. I don't want to think that, but there's something very weird going on.

Perhaps Hassoun was spared because he was a Muslim. If so, the terrorists did the smart thing. Which doesn't happen often, but on occasion they do act in their own best interest. (I want to say, in my best Charleton Heston voice, "darn the luck!" I hate it when my enemies wise up.)

Even Rusty Shackleford, who had been insisting that the Hassoun had to be dead—and made a convincing case—is wavering. It's actually possible, though, that Rusty's original idea was right, and only the timing was different than he supposed. Rusty's thought was that Islamic Response had captured Hassoun, killed him, and then realized what a public relations disaster that would be in the Muslim world. They buried the body, and announced that Hassoun had been moved "to a safe place." I wonder whether the scumbags kidnapped him and then figured out that it wouldn't be bright to decapitate a Muslim.

Of course, now one Muslim family knows what it feels like to go through the uncertainty of having their child kidnapped by extremists. I wonder if this will create more sympathy for Western values among the often too-silent "moderates." It's definitely a Western-values family to begin with, of course: otherwise Hassoun wouldn't have joined the Corps in the first place.

One supposes that more will be revealed.

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John of Arrggh! passes along this news about where our hard-earned private contributions went. I love the idea of a sewing center wherein women make goods that then get sold to pay for women's education in Iraq.

And, of course, our dollars also refurbished the television station that publicized the sewing center.

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Photon Courier discusses the parallels between the isolationists during WWII and present-day anti-war activists. It starts with anti-Semitism, and expands out from there.

Scroll down to "Into the Abyss" (he's a BlogSpotter).

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Michele has a roundup of Iraqi reactions to the transfer of power.

(Yeah. It isn't a real handover until we leave, blah blah blah.

See Japan, Germany. South Korea. Do your homework, then come back and blather at me.)

Via Jeff G.

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Four people were arrested as suspects in the murder of Nick Berg. We don't know whether they were the four guys shown in the video alongside Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, though I'll bet they are. Al-Zarqawi himself remains at large.

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Yeah, I know: a few of you are sick of the Nick Berg issue. But murder is one of the things I've studied, so this case is going to hold an enduring fascination for me.

Dorkafork points me to this article, which discusses (briefly) the analysis the video is being subjected to. I get the impression from the story that the FBI is simply using the version off the web, and does not have access to the original, though in the digital age that probably makes a lot less difference. Dorkafork has been complaining about the quality all along, but I suspect the original is just as bad as what we've been viewing. Still, it might make a difference in terms of things like blowing up the images of the perps' hands to check for distinguishing characteristics.

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