Again with anniversaries. Tomorrow will mark one year since the fall of Baghdad to U.S. forces. Today, those forces lost control of two Iraqi cities. Reuters reports:
U.S.-led coalition forces do not have control of the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Kut, where Shi'ite militiamen have seized control of key buildings in the center of town, the top U.S. general in Iraq said on Thursday.
It's that bad.
Now this, the Associated Press: "In an ominous new tactic, kidnappers seized foreign hostages, threatening to burn three Japanese captives alive if Tokyo did not withdraw troops." Elsewhere, in seemingly unrelated incidents, several South Koreans and Israeli Arabs have been taken, though the South Koreans have since been released. If this ignites a wave of kidnapping and murder of foreign civilians, the situation -- already very bad -- could become far less stable very quickly. I do not expect what military allies we have to pull out of the country over incidents like this, but it makes the prospect of expanded international cooperation in Iraq increasingly unlikely. And we need expanded international cooperation, not for some nebulous idea of legitimacy, but because it is the surest route to victory.
From the run-up to the war through the present the entrenched right has viewed efforts to internationalize the effort in Iraq with unabashed hostility. To a slight degree, I sympathize with this view. The atmosphere at the United Nations before the war, already poisoned by the administration's misplaced certitude, was not helped by the obstinate diplomatic bungling of certain nations, and there was no evidence that any move to oust Saddam Hussein, a worthy goal in my opinion, would have made it through the Security Council without extortion by the French and Chinese. But to continue to praise President Bush's leadership on this issue is nothing short of asinine. His supporters cite his ability to act decisively in the face of opposition as a powerful reason to re-elect him. The is an admirable trait, under two heavy conditions: the action must be right and executed well. In this case, reasonable people can debate whether the former condition was met, but I find it increasingly difficult to see any amiguity on the second. We came to Iraq with the best trained, best equipped, and most admirable military in the world and have met entirely inadequate success. A year after Baghdad fell, we have not even pacified the country, much less taken the steps necessary to restore sovereignty to the people we came to liberate.
Had the free world, united in its historically unrivaled might, come down as one upon the regime of Saddam Hussein, I do not doubt things would be better now. Good people were going to have to die to remove Saddam. But a truly strong leader with the political facility and moral authority to bring our allies in line might have minimized the loss and certainly could have lessened American casualties. It's not too late, but it's getting later. We have not lost in Iraq, and I do not think we will. But while it is noble to be willing to bear any burden, it is wise to make that burden less onerous when possible.
In times of crisis, small men act for the sake of action and oppose for the sake of opposition. Great men act on infectious vision and turn the tide of history. This is your cue, Senator Kerry.
The hidden punchline to my last post on the Araujo trial is that no one appears to be claiming that the defendants aren't the guys who did it. I mean, all the potential jurors got the civics lesson from the judge on the first day: things you read in the newspaper or saw on the television are not evidence, things the lawyers say in the courtroom are not evidence, things your friends said about the case are not evidence. The only things you may consider as evidence are things that come from sworn testimony on the witness stand. What the lawyers say during voir dire, even, that's not evidence.
But still. What the lawyers said during voir dire was basically this: there are a number of facts not in dispute. The victim was a teenager who was one gender biologically but presented a different gender socially. The victim engaged in sexual acts with at least one of the defendants. The defendants, on finding out that a girl they'd fucked at a party had a penis, were enraged. The victim was brutally and horribly murdered. All of those things are being taken for granted by both sides. Other things are only being implied. One of the defense lawyers keeps pressing jurors on the difference between murder and manslaughter, asking whether they understand the difference between premeditated crimes and "heat of passion" crimes. Another defense lawyer keeps talking about "sexual deceit" or "sexual deception" and whether or not jurors think it's reasonable to have a violent or emotional reaction to such deceit or deception.
At the end of all of it, I'm not surprised that jury selection is moving slowly. My guess is that a lot of the prospective jurors are saying something similar to what I said, that I came in to this prepared to assume innocence, but the strong suggestion of guilt in the lawyers' lines of questioning has made me feel hostile towards the defendants. The article says that one of the lawyers asked a juror "If someone near and dear to you, a close family member or friend, were on trial for these same charges, would you want 12 people with your ... present state of mind to judge that case?" The woman in the article said no.
I was asked that same question, and I said no. The "present state of mind" is different--the woman in the article had a brother who'd been murdered, but in my case it was that I have friends who live every day in the fear of this kind of thing happening to them. If I were a family member of one of the defendants, I wouldn't want twelve people like me on that jury. I wouldn't want one person like me on that jury.
Ten years ago the most disgraceful season in the history of Major League Baseball was beginning under a haze of uncertainty. The end of the season and the World Series were eventually canceled due to the players' strike. Days after the Fall Classic would have ended, the Republican Party took control of both houses of Congress for the first time since the Truman administration. Darkness followed, impeachment and maudlin sentiment for Cal Ripken ruled the day.
Another baseball season began yesterday, and the day before, and during the previous week in Japan. Hell, the Mets don't play until today. Again there is uncertainty, this time over steroids or something. President Bush is concerned. But there is also possibility. Barry Bonds, still innocent until proof -- or at least evidence -- of wrongdoing is provided, stands with one home run fewer than his godfather, the greatest ballplayer ever to play the game, Willie Mays. Before the year is out he may catch Babe Ruth, and Aaron is not too distant a target. Alex Rodriguez finally has a chance to play some meaningful games, as does Vladimir Guerrero. Albert Pujols may be the new best ballplayer ever to play the game. And the universe-altering prospect of a Red Sox-Cubs World Series is, well, a possibility.
And a few days after that Fall Classic ends, we'll have an election. Happy Tuesday.
Kurt Cobain has been dead ten years, and even though I wasn't the kid at your high school with the big poster of Kurt's scruffy face that said OUR KING IS DEAD, I was good friends with that kid. And I, geeky and straight-edge (which was still the better part of a decade from being even close to hip), having decided about a month previously that this Nirvana stuff was actually pretty good, sat around and watched MTV News like everyone else, and tried to figure out what to make of it.
As a teenager, suicide always seemed a bizarre and remote, nearly comical type of drama. A number of years later, having known three suicides among the people I went to middle or high school with, I don't feel like I'm any closer to figuring it out. Suicide is nearly unique in its ability to exist in my head only as an abstraction, despite all evidence to the contrary. To some extent, all death is abstract -- but dying in a car crash has a certain concreteness to it, a process that could be understood. But while a car accident is an impersonal event (even, as I've just called it, a "process"), suicide is the opposite: so completely personal that a general understanding of it is like an infinitely receding point in my mind. Which probably says a lot more about me than I had intended to say, so anyways.
Also ten years ago this week, the beginning of the genocide campaign in Rwanda that killed 800,000 people, or possibly more.
Happy Monday.
I spent most of my weekend up by Lake Tahoe, being what is generously termed a "guest editor" at a writing workshop. Vagueness of phrasing because, well, it wasn't a particularly strenuous guest-editor gig. I talked about markets and story structure during dinner prep, and had a lot of conversations about books and short stories. I'm not saying that I wasn't possibly useful or interesting for the writers, I'm just saying that the work/fun ratio skewed decidedly in my favor.
These writing workshops, they're a great thing. I'm not even talking about the big ones, the Clarions (East and West and South) and Odyssey and Viable Paradise. I mean these little ones, the thrown-together collaborative ones organized by writers for writers. The ones that are as much vacation retreat as writing workshop.
It's not just that they're fun, although they're a lot of fun. And it's not just the writing critiques, although I gather that everyone at the workshop found the critique sessions really useful (and at least a couple of them have already sent off their workshop stories to various markets). It's the whole community thing. I think it's a lot easier to feel good about your work if you can talk to other people who understand what you're doing.
Of course, it never hurts if that talking is in a context that also involves hot tubs, s'mores, and demon marshmallow armies.