AbuMusabAlZarqawi – ILANA MERCER

Coughing Up Some Coulter Fur Balls

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000

COULTER AND COMMUNAL GRIEF

Ann Coulter, I imagine, considers herself an individualist, not a collectivist. Which is why her views on grief perplex. About certain Sept.-11 widows, Coulter has written the following: “These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them.” (Emphasis added.)

Nations don’t grieve; individuals who incur loss do. The nation, following Sept. 11, can legitimately lay claim to the confusion that comes with a loss of a previous sense of security and to the sorrow that accompanies the deaths of compatriots. However, only the immediate relatives of the victims were in fact bereaved. The nation might be shocked, reeling, but only the families of the dead were utterly devastated. With every day that dawns, they alone face the kind of pain the rest of us cannot fathom.

The line, “letting the community grieve and get on with the healing process,” is standard in liberal locution (adopted, sadly, by many Crunchy Cons); it’s straight out of Oprah’s vernacular.

The idea that people not directly affected by a tragedy ought to perform the rites reserved for the bereaved conjures the image of a tribe in the paroxysmal throws of a grief ritual. It’s inspired by the equally primitive specter of Oprah’s televised group therapy sessions, in which every individual’s pain is equally weighted.

In the abstract, Sept. 11 was an attack on “our nation.” In reality, some felt it more than others.

ANNIE, GET ABU BERG, INSTEAD

A much worthier object for Coulter’s contempt is Michael Berg, the late Nicholas Berg’s father. Berg recently lost a friend: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He offered the following pious homilies for the man who personally sawed off his son’s head:

“I’m sorry whenever any human being dies. Zarqawi is a human being. He has a family who are reacting just as my family reacted when Nick was killed, and I feel bad for that… I have never indicated anything but forgiveness and peace [toward Zarqawi].” (Emphasis added.)

Berg, a pacifist who thinks Nick was “killed” by some cosmic force—not beheaded by a barbarian—went on to disgorge that pacifist’s plumb line about violence breeding only more violence.While it can include violent methods, reasonable punishment is not the same as violence. Following an unprovoked act of aggression with a proportional act of retribution, and punishing only the guilty—that’s justice, not violence.

Justice must be done not only for the purpose of vindicating the dead, but because justice, like liberty, is the foundation of a peaceful and orderly society. By rejecting proportional retribution—in Zarqawi’s case, two 500-pound bombs sounds about right to me—Berg has rejected justice.

About the carnage we’ve created in Iraq, H. L Mencken, always impeccably savoir-faire, would have agreed: there is no justice to be had in that orgy of blood and destruction. Nevertheless, as a reader deliciously described Zarqawi’s demise, “That so and so needed killing.”

And that enabler of evil, Abu Berg—he is a worthy object for Coulter’s contempt, not the Sept.-11 widows.

COULTER VS. MENCKEN

Speaking of Mencken, on Lou Dobbs’ “Today” show, Coulter anointed herself as the Right’s H. L. Mencken. Coulter is certainly sui generis, but she’s no Mencken.

First, while not-quite “Godless,” Mencken held “that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind—that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.” “In America,” he contended, “[religion] is used as a club and a cloak by both politicians and moralists, all of them lusting for power and most of them palpable frauds.”

More material, Mencken was a libertarian. He hated government with all his bolshy being, and was deeply suspicious of power—all power, not only liberal power. To Mencken, all government was evil, and “all government must necessarily make war upon liberty.” Therefore, the only good politician was “one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it’s goodbye to the Bill of Rights.”

Mencken certainly would have had few kind words for dirigiste Dubya, the ultimate statist. Coulter, conversely, has shown Bush (who isn’t even conservative) almost unquestioning loyalty, other than to protest his Harriet Miers indiscretion and, of late, his infarct over illegal immigration. Such singular devotion would have been alien to Mencken. Nor would the very brilliant elitist have found this president’s manifest, all-round ignorance forgivable or endearing—Bush’s penchant for logical and linguistic infelicities would have repulsed Mencken.

About foreign forays, Mencken stated acerbically that “the United States should mind its own business. If it is actually commissioned by God to put down totalitarianism, let it start in Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Santo Domingo and Mississippi.” Mencken believed that “waging a war for a purely moral reason [was] as absurd as ravishing a woman for a purely moral reason.” Not in a million years would he have endorsed Bush’s Iraq misadventure.

Since he was not a party animal, but a man of principle, conformity to the clan would not have seen Mencken fall into contradiction as Coulter has: she rightly condemned Madeleine Albright’s “preemptive attack” on Slobodan Milosevic, as having been “solely for purposes of regime change based on false information presented to the American people.” But has adopted a different—decidedly double—standard regarding Bush’s Iraq excursion.

To repeat: Coulter is sui generis, but a Mencken she is not.

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Dear Al (Zarqawi) …

Ilana Mercer — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0000

Rational suspicion of power is predicated on distrusting all power, not only American power, and distrusting some potentates a wee bit more than others, as reason, facts, and context dictate ~ilana

After reading Ayman al-Zawahiri’s creepy letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, discovered in Iraq, I guessed immediately how the apologists would explain it away: a forgery! Right I was. From the Daily Kos to (Juan) Cole’s Curse—al-Qaida’s exculpators were out in full force on the blogosphere, prowling for the telltale signs of a sham.

The letter has an authentic ring. It’s low-key, eerily gentle, even demure. It has a certain quality and cadence—a mood that PSYOP could not have recreated easily. But then I’m not particularly invested in the forgery theory, as the dilettantes on the hard left are. They’re as attached to febrile foreign-policy fantasies as the administration—their view of the enemy is every bit as lacking in nuance.

According to the administration, al-Qaida is in business because “they hate our freedoms”; the radical left claims al-Qaida was created, ex nihilo, by America’s foreign misadventures. Neither faction is right. Each becomes apoplectic when its intransigent theories are challenged.

Thus, one fair and balanced bloviator for Bush dismissed as a liberal idea the no-brainer that America’s presence in Iraq is exacerbating that Category-5 hurricane. Similarly, when faced with evidence that the two Al-Zs and their foot soldiers aim to consolidate “a caliphate in the manner of the Prophet,” left-liberals let rip with their brand of bloggerel. “Counterfeit,” they crow.

It’s not that I trust our government’s veracity. Far from it. But rational suspicion of power is predicated on 1) distrusting all power, not only American power, as the Left does. 2) Distrusting some potentates a wee bit more than others, as reason, facts, and context dictate. The U.S. says the thing’s authentic; al-Qaida says it isn’t. The U.S. makes a stronger case, not least because a forgery seems so futile. What purpose would it serve? To make Bin Laden’s Capo Bastone (Zawahiri) appear worse than he is? To make Americans like the lieutenant (Zarqawi) less? To make Muslims admire Zarqawi less? Not possible.

Most Americans detest these thugs; most Muslims think they’re innocent, framed by the “Zionists” and the Americans. That is if the say-so of Egyptian professor Abd Al-Sabour Shahin reflects the Muslim majority. Shahin, one of Islam’s leading lights, is not alone. Ask countless Islamic clerics, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, Palestinian Authority leaders and “intellectuals,” Hamasniks, Grand Muftis, plus powerful elements in the press and governments of Egypt, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia—they all agree: 9/11, 7/7—you name it; Israel and the U.S. planned it.

Against the advice of “a lot of [his] Muslim and Arabist readers,” one blognoscente opted to rely on the following sources in pronouncing the letter a forgery: al-Qaida via Aljazeera and… his gut. Leftists seldom do gut-override. Think of the unbearable cognitive dissonance that would generate. For in the missive, Zawahiri actually criticizes aspects of the insurgency. By contrast, some on the far left (joined by a few far-gone libertarians) hold up the insurgents as inspiring role models of resistance to government tyranny. That these cold-blooded murderers are soaking Iraqi soil with the blood of innocents is a pesky detail ignored for the most by this lot. Now Zawahiri has put them to shame.

He asks Zarqawi to reconsider the wisdom of culling so many Shia. He broaches the topic by telling his murderous mate that it is necessary to bring “the Muslim masses to the mujahed movement.” To that end, killing so many of them is probably not helpful. Yes, the Shia are a handful, he concedes. They aren’t kosher theologically, have cooperated with the Americans against Saddam and the Taliban, and, all together, have a history of “connivance with the Crusaders.” But while Zawahiri is no fan of theirs, he thinks they ought to be forgiven—not slaughtered for—their “ignorance.” Besides, he adds as an afterthought (or as a rhetorical flourish), it’s impossible for the mujahedeen to kill all Iraq’s Shia.

Zawahiri is no charmer. And yes, his critique is based on logistics, not ethics. But it’s more of a critique than the token “tsk tsk” offered by the assorted Lawrenthians who claim this missive was forged. What a bruiser for the American fans of the Iraqi “resistance”!

“The shaykh [sic] of the slaughterers” also gets told by Zawahiri to quit hacking off heads. A bullet to the back of the head is more likely to win the hearts and minds of the Islamic “Umma,” says Bin Laden’s second-in-command.

There is a special spot for Israel in Zawahiri’s pan-Islamic plot. As it turns out, it’s not “the occupation” that is the thorn in his side but Israel’s existence. Israel is at the heart of the Islamic world—it was planted there by “the enemies of Islam” and needs, very plainly, to be excised. Again, you can see why those who’ve fetishized the Palestinian cause would prefer to dismiss this note.

The Left and their (very few) libertarian and paleoconservative friends think they can tweak the Islamic edict on Israel out of existence like some unsightly nose-hair. This old chestnut, however, has been corroborated by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Jihad Central. Galvanizing a ruling by the late, cankered Khomeini, Iran’s President has reaffirmed the urgency of wiping Israel off the map.

Clearly, even if the Zawahiri epistle is inauthentic it is not necessarily untrue.

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Ink Stains And Blood Stains

Ilana Mercer — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 00:00:00 +0000

The U.S. attacked a prostrate, Third World nation, with no navy or air force, whose military prowess was a fifth of what was smashed in the Gulf War. The election of Jan. 30, 2005, and any number of photographs of happy, ink-stained voters cannot change this truth one iota ~ilana

People with no principles look to consequences to justify their actions – the Republican Party and its media megaphones now contend that Iraq’s first democratic election has provided a final and irrefutable justification for America’s invasion and conquest.

That Iraqi Shi’ites turned out en masse for Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and sharia law doesn’t alter the truth – we waged an illegal, unjust, and unnecessary war.

However, with Fox and Friends continuing to claim that WMD were probably moved to Syria, and al-Qaeda and the Ba’athists were an item, it falls to the “reality-based community” to periodically remind them of the facts. To paraphrase Corneille, a good memory is needed once lies become the norm.

As a comprehensive report published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in January 2004 stated, “There was and is no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Saddam’s government and al-Qaeda.” Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was viewed unfavorably by the Islamists, for precisely the reason we ought to have viewed it more favorably: under Saddam, Iraq was a secular country.

There is some evidence terrorist coordinator Abu Musab al-Zarqawi traveled to Iraq in May 2002, well after 9/11. He briefly ensconced himself in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq (among Bush’s allies and beyond the reach of Saddam’s power), near the Iranian border, before resuming his murderous peregrinations in the region.

On Jan. 27, 2003, Hans Blix, Chief United Nations weapons inspector, reported to the UN Security Council regarding the inspections process he resumed in November 2002.

He briefly recounted the procedures outlined by Resolution 687 and implemented in 1991 after the Gulf War, when the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) set about to disarm Iraq. The process continued for eight years, until 1998, at which point Saddam Hussein’s prohibited weapons programs had been dismantled.

At the time of Blix’s report, the Americans and British insisted that after 1998 Saddam Hussein had reconstituted the programs that had been dismantled during eight solid years of inspections. Blix’s task was to investigate this claim.

Blix was decidedly cautious and suspicious in his 2003 report. When the Iraqis claimed (truthfully) that all proscribed items had been destroyed between1991 and 1998, Blix refused to take their word for it. He launched comprehensive inspections – interviews, seminars, inquiries with suppliers and intelligence organizations. These were impeded by some Iraqi jitters (they suspected inspections were a … covert operation. What on earth would have given them that impression?). These fears were invariably soothed over after discussions and negotiations (barbaric, I know).

Contra the lies and the liars that tell them, Blix noted that “Iraq has, on the whole, cooperated rather well so far with UNMOVIC in this field. The most important point to make is that access has been provided to all sites we have wanted to inspect, and with one exception, it has been prompt.”

A stipulation of Resolution 1441 was that Iraq submit a comprehensive WMD declaration. A terrified Iraq promptly complied. Submitted in December 2002, the declaration contained some 12,000 pages and was promptly ridiculed by both the White House and Whitehall. Yet it has never been refuted.

Blix, too, remained skeptical, although he firmly believed his process would expeditiously ferret out the truth about Iraq’s putative WMD. Aided by military and technological assistance from Switzerland, New Zealand, Germany, and other members of the coalition of the unwilling, numerous experts under Blix’s command crisscrossed the country (something they can only dream of doing today after “liberation”), ready to disable any dangers that might be discovered.

From November 2002 to January 2003, Blix conducted approximately 300 inspections of more than 230 different sites in Iraq. Of these, more than 20had hitherto not been inspected. (He set up field offices in Mosul and Basra, places he could never hope to access today.)

Despite this empirical exercise, the fantasy-based community asserted that “All the Western intelligence services – the UN itself – stated with certainty that this thug had and was hiding WMD.”

Really?

The UN itself, in the person of Hans Blix, never stated that Iraq had WMD in 2002. He suspected the lion’s share of the weapons had been destroyed between 1991 and 1998, but sought to verify claims to the contrary. He wrote: “Intelligence authorities have claimed weapons of mass destruction are moved around Iraq by trucks; in particular, that there are mobile production units for biological weapons.”

Dutifully, Blix proceeded to investigate.

On March 7, 2003, the UN’s chief weapons inspector reported good cooperation from the Iraqis. “At this juncture, we are able to perform professional no-notice inspections all over Iraq and to increase aerial surveillance,” he observed approvingly.

Using Cyprus as a base, and assisted by American U-2s, French Mirage surveillance, and other capabilities offered by the Russian Federation (Old Europe, you know), Blix had the run of Iraq. The meticulous Blix scuffled with the Iraqis over the legality of their al-Samoud 2 missiles, but here too, he secured the destruction of 34 of them. In an attempt to check for discrepancies regarding the numbers of biological and chemical weapons produced and destroyed in 1991, Blix had also begun to excavate disposal sites.

The fear-mongering claims made by “intelligence authorities” were scrutinized by Blix (and later by David Kay, and after that by Charles Duelfer), as he conducted surprise searches both underground and above. Like David Kay and Charles Duelfer after him, Blix found “no evidence of proscribed activities.”

Nevertheless, Blix wanted to be absolutely sure: “Even with a proactive Iraqi attitude induced by continued outside pressure, it will still take some time to verify sites and items, analyze documents, interview relevant persons, and draw conclusions,” he cautioned.

How much time? “It will not take years, nor weeks, but months,” months he did not get because of George W. Bush’s rush to judgment.

On Feb. 14, 2003, Mohammed ElBaradei, chief inspector of the International Nuclear Energy Agency, filled in the mushroom-cloud-sized blanks in the emerging WMD picture.

“We have to date found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear related activities in Iraq,” he stated categorically.

ElBaradei’s extensive and aggressive inspections throughout Iraq included sampling air, water, sediment, and vegetation, and interviewing key Iraqi personnel and officials (who had yet to be dispersed). From high explosive HMX, to the manufacture of magnets, to the purpose of the notorious high strength aluminum tubes (the ones Condoleezza Rice falsely declared were suited only to nuclear weapons programs), to probing the possible use of laser technology to enrich uranium, to investigating dual-use equipment – ElBaradei had a firm grip on what he described as Iraq’s crumbling military infrastructure.

He even checked out the story of the nukes from Niger, which Bush had continued to parrot well after this legend had been exposed as a crude forge
ry. Iraq’s claim that “it has made no attempt to import uranium since the 1980s” was corroborated. ElBaradei unceremoniously, but politely, pronounced that the Niger procurement was “inauthentic.”

ElBaradei, who conducted a total of 177 inspections at 125 locations, had reached almost every nook and cranny in pre-invasion Iraq. He too confirmed that, contrary to the line Bush and his claque adopted about Hussein’s recalcitrance, “Iraq has continued to provide immediate access to all locations.”

Exhaustive searches had concluded that Iraq was no threat to America. So the search for a casus belli mutated from “national security” to “humanitarianism.” Desperate to reverse John Quincy Adams’ wisdom (in 1821, the secretary of state emphasized that “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher of the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own”), one typical warmongering commentator argued that Saddam’s regime remained intolerable. The Bush administration had no choice but to consider Saddam “in the context of [his] past history of murderous aggression against his neighbors and against his own people, showing his total contempt for the rights and sovereignty of others.”

There you have it. We invaded Iraq in 2003 because Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 (I thought we settled that score). Or because he launched a chemical attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja (killing 5,000) … in 1988. Or because he invaded Iran in 1980 (with the U.S., led by Donald Rumsfeld, weighing in to help Saddam settle that score).

To sum up, the U.S. attacked a prostrate, Third World nation, with no navy or air force, whose military prowess was a fifth of what was smashed in the Gulf War. The election of Jan. 30, 2005, and any number of photographs of happy, ink-stained voters cannot change this truth one iota.

*Screen pic image credit

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