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Friday, May 4, 2007
Hear no evil, see no evil... 
Say where?
| | I love the English countryside, so it was fun to enjoy some of the Chiltern Hills with Euan and his family last Sunday. What I had hoped, on departure from Heathrow on Wednesday, was to shoot some of the same country from the sky. I did, and kept shooting all the way across Greenland. |
| | The first series, running from Heathrow to Scotland across the Midlands and the Lake District, is up. I'll add more later. |
| | Meanwhile, it would be fun if some locals could help me identify some of the places in these pictures. (You can do that in the comments.) I'll be doing the same with The Kid and Google Earth later today. (He took many of these shots, since he was the one with the window seat.) But being rookie UK travelers, we're at something of a disadvantage. Hope to remedy that in the coming months and years. |
| | [Later...] I am getting some awesome help from Euan and others. I'm IMing with him right now. He writes, |
| | I just love the way that Doc is in Santa Barbera loading his arial photos of Britain taken from their plane back to the US with his son tagging the images and me and a friend here in the UK trying to ID the locations and add Flickr notes. This is indeed an ever smaller world. |
| | Right now I'm uploading a pile of pix from crossing Scotland, which is Euan's home country. Fun stuff. |
Now on Then
| | Tonight at 8pm Eastern (5pm Pacific), the PBS program Now will broadcast the story of Steven Vincent, the journalist whose blog, In the Red Zone, outlives him. Steven was murdered on August 2, 2005, three days after the New York Times published an op-ed piece by him. His wife Lisa later wrote, Steven ... has the dubious distinction of being one of the few foreign journalists in this Iraq conflict specifically targeted for execution. Here's what I wrote three days after he was killed. Many links there, mostly still active. |
| | Steven was a hawk. Like many others who witnessed and survived the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, he supported the war in Iraq. So did George Packer of the New Yorker. |
| | George's latest, about Iraqi refugees being refused entry into U.S., is required reading. |
| | Both Steven's and George's writings tell a tale of failed intelligence and gross incompetence by the Bush administration. This, for example... |
| | By failing immediately to occupy and pacify the Sunni Triangle during the war, the U.S. allowed the affiliation between tribal groups and the Baath Party to reform and reassert itself. Gradually, a combination of embarrassment, humiliation, disgrace, and dishonor, fueled by a genuine diminution in the Sunnis' quality of life, compelled these Iraqis to seek revenge rather than political negotiation. Attacks on U.S. soldiers produced American counter-responses, killing Iraqi civilians and initiating further cycles of honor and revenge slayings. Gradually, the Sunni's tribal mentality drew the U.S. into a new kind of war: an unreasonable war fought not for familiar goals like territory, riches, or ideology, but for the irrational, intangible prizes of honor and self-respect. |
| | ... is from a National Review report by Steven, published in December 2004. |
| | I said it before and I say it again; this war must be won. If it is not the world as you in the United States know it today (and as we here in Iraq dream for it to become) will exist only in books of history. The forces of extremism that we confront today are more determined, more resourceful, and more barbaric than the Nazi or the communists of the past. Add to that the weapons they can improvise or acquire through their unholy alliance with rogue regimes, combined with their fluid structure and mobilityŠ well, they can be more deadly than any forces we have faced in the past. Much more. |
| | I don't doubt they're deadly. I also don't doubt that we've increased their number and strength by invading Iraq and turning it into the mess it is now. |
| | Six months after Steven was murdered, William F. Buckley, founder of the National Review, wrote, |
| | One of these postulates, from the beginning, was that the Iraqi people, whatever their tribal differences, would suspend internal divisions in order to get on with life in a political structure that guaranteed them religious freedom. |
| | The accompanying postulate was that the invading American army would succeed in training Iraqi soldiers and policymkers to cope with insurgents bent on violence. |
| | This last did not happen. And the administration has, now, to cope with failure. It can defend itself historically, standing by the inherent reasonableness of the postulates. |
| | Is he wrong? I hope so, but I doubt it. |
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