drwex | More depressive stuff

Fuck you, President Bush. On behalf of the hundreds more newly dead I would like to hereby inform you that we didn't win. We've lost. The insurgency in Iraq is not weak or desperate or on its last legs or any of the other lies you and your vile band of soulless monsters put out and the mainstream media laps up. Both the continued gusher of outrageous falsehoods and the lapdog obedience of MSM depress me.

How do we know this? By simple observation. But let's walk it through because it makes sense to me to try this. What, generally speaking, is the objective of terrorism? Not any specific terrorism - Chechens want Russian troops out, but that could be accomplished any number of ways. Why terrorism as a specific set of methods? Tautologically, to terrorize. To instill sufficient fear in the target (usually civilian, but see the Vietcong for how this can be made to work against enemy troops) that they respond out of fear.

This week, the shouted warning of a nonexistent suicide bomber was enough to send a crowd of Iraqi Shia into a panic. Hundreds died, maybe a thousand. People responded out of panic. Not unreasonable, given that mortar shelling of the shrine had killed 16 people. The people have, effectively, been terrorized. We lose. The specific aims of these terrorists (US troops out? foment sectarian war? provide cover for their criminal enterprises?) don't really matter. They may fail at each and every one of those aims but in the analysis, they've won.

For contrast, look at other examples: New York after 9/11, Madrid after the train bombings. Remember that a few days after the WTC attacks, a plane crashed? Had the population been terrorized, we might have seen a large-scale withdrawal from air travel - a national switch to road or rail or teleconference or whatever. Didn't happen. Turns out the second event was an accident (bad maintenance, as I recall). People got back to their lives as best they could. In Madrid a few days after the train bombings people voted in a government that pulled Spanish troops out of Iraq. I don't think this was panic, nor a knee-jerk reaction to terror. It was, I think, a release of long-seething popular upset. Remember the huge anti-war protests in Europe prior to the invasion of Iraq? People responding out of anger is not the same as people responding out of fear.

In NYC and in Madrid we won (and London, too - have some tea). We've lost in Iraq and I feel like our regime's blindness to that fact, and unwillingness to plan on that basis renders us at best ineffectual and at worst doing real harm to the people we ought to be protecting. (Our worldwide image is shot alread; not even going to try on that one.)

Speaking of dealing realistically, some of the comments I got made me think people missed what I wanted to say about the Superbowl coverage of hurricane Katrina on its approach. My objection was not to coverage - it was clearly a major storm with potential to do great damage. My objection was to the mindless hype, pointless speculation, and misery competitions that I felt dominated. For example, today I learned two things that I think are important:

1) the levees around New Orleans were designed to stand up to a Cat 3 according to the Army Corps of Engineers specialist interviewed on NPR. So all the discussion about whether Katrina was a Cat 4 or Cat 5 were meaningless. At either strength, it was likely the storm surge would breach the levees. I don't think this was well-publicized and judging from the comments of people who had to be rescued after they stayed behind it seems like they didn't realize it either. Hype obscures useful information.

2) the most helpful thing you can do if the Red Cross is your chosen channel of helping right now is write a check. People who think doing things like collecting teddy bears is cute don't realize that the Red Cross simply can't deal with stuff like that. The cost to collect, store, pack, move and distribute the bears far exceeds the cost of buying new at the disaster relief sites. Teddy bears are not going to take priority space on trucks that are carrying bottled water, emergency roofing material, etc. What the Red Cross needs (according to their spokesperson on NPR) is cash, which will primarily be used to pay the costs of moving volunteers and equipment into the affected areas. Again, important information that would have been good to know beforehand. It doesn't really matter where Katrina was going to come ashore, which was the focus of so much hype. The Red Cross was going to need hundreds of thousands of dollars in simple cash to move their people.

So I've got a check to write, but I did want to thank golux_org for the pointer to the story on the (non)connection between climate change and increased hurricane activity. I had clearly misinterpreted the results of the MIT study.