Good news and bad news from Iraq.
Taking a brief break from the non-stop festival of martyrdom in the War on C.S. Lewis underway at National Review, Jonah Goldberg blogs about something that matters. He's right: this is good news:
FALLUJA/RAMADI Iraq (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein loyalists who violently opposed January elections have made an about-face as Thursday's polls near, urging fellow Sunni Arabs to vote and warning al Qaeda militants not to attack.
..."We want to see a nationalist government that will have a balance of interests. So our Sunni brothers will be safe when they vote," said Falluja resident Ali Mahmoud, a former army officer and rocket specialist under Saddam's Baath party.
"Sunnis should vote to make political gains. We have sent leaflets telling al Qaeda that they will face us if they attack voters."
Any news that suggests al Qaeda is continuing to make itself unpopular in the Middle East -- be it by disrupting the economy and killing civilians as in Jordan or by screwing up nationalist movements like in Iraq -- is good news.
This, on the other hand, is pretty sickening:
AMMAN (AFP) - An Iraqi general formerly in charge of special forces said he witnessed horrific scenes of torture in Iraqi prisons and accused a Shiite militia of being responsible.
"It was horrific. Thousands of detainees, often teenagers, beaten, burned, receiving electric shocks, then the majority killed," Muntazar al-Samarrai, who fled
Iraq for Jordan five months ago, told AFP.
In video footage Samarrai said he filmed at one detention center, men show whip marks and acid burns. One of them has lost an eye. Another's legs are broken. Still another has nails driven into his body.
The video also shows the mutilated corpses of three men who Samarrai said died as a result of torture.
...Last month, the US military said it dismantled one of Iraq's secret detention facilities in Baghdad, but Samarrai said nine other such facilities are lurking throughout the country.
Thousands of people. And the Washington Post reports that the US has just turned up another one of those (nine?) torture prisons, finding detainees with broken legs. As Neil points out in this terrific post*, this is the real problem in Iraq: the unleashing of ethnic tensions and the sudden political subordination of a long-dominant minority group, whose leadership was abusive of the majority groups, to these long-aggrieved groups. Conservatives and war-hawks can comfort themselves that forcing Sunni nationalist vs. al Qaeda showdowns might be speeding up the rate at which al Qaeda is discrediting itself in the Muslem World. But is that worth bringing on what may well turn into an ethnic cleansing and the deaths of more Iraqis in the first two years of occupation than Saddam and sanctions would have done away with in a decade? This is the question I think the whole thing -- the question of whether the war is at all justified -- comes down to. (Actually, that's not entirely true since I'm basically ignoring the serious antiwar argument that the US has actually created more terrorists than would have existed had it not invaded Iraq -- a subject on which I can't really comment.) It depends on your relative beliefs about the danger a strong al Qaeda poses to the Western world order and whether dismantling al Qeada's support base in the Islamic developing world will seriously diminish its ability to carry out another attack on the West, particularly if, like in London, it doesn't have to import the perpetrators. But nobody can honestly avoid acknowledging that the consquences of "fighting al Qaeda abroad rather than at home" aren't pretty -- and are bound to get worse.
*With regards to the rest of Neil's posting, I take no position on Protein Wisdom which I've only visited once; but I do second his choice for Best Conservative Blog. Although this praise is a year out of date, Belgravia Dispatch did the impossible in 2004: it proved that a rational, intellectually honest, non-solipsistic case for Bush and against Kerry was possible (something of which, for instance,National Review never manged to convince me). Granted, probably the last thing Gregory Djerejian wants is a bunch of libruls cheering for him. But still.
FALLUJA/RAMADI Iraq (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein loyalists who violently opposed January elections have made an about-face as Thursday's polls near, urging fellow Sunni Arabs to vote and warning al Qaeda militants not to attack.
..."We want to see a nationalist government that will have a balance of interests. So our Sunni brothers will be safe when they vote," said Falluja resident Ali Mahmoud, a former army officer and rocket specialist under Saddam's Baath party.
"Sunnis should vote to make political gains. We have sent leaflets telling al Qaeda that they will face us if they attack voters."
Any news that suggests al Qaeda is continuing to make itself unpopular in the Middle East -- be it by disrupting the economy and killing civilians as in Jordan or by screwing up nationalist movements like in Iraq -- is good news.
This, on the other hand, is pretty sickening:
AMMAN (AFP) - An Iraqi general formerly in charge of special forces said he witnessed horrific scenes of torture in Iraqi prisons and accused a Shiite militia of being responsible.
"It was horrific. Thousands of detainees, often teenagers, beaten, burned, receiving electric shocks, then the majority killed," Muntazar al-Samarrai, who fled
Iraq for Jordan five months ago, told AFP.
In video footage Samarrai said he filmed at one detention center, men show whip marks and acid burns. One of them has lost an eye. Another's legs are broken. Still another has nails driven into his body.
The video also shows the mutilated corpses of three men who Samarrai said died as a result of torture.
...Last month, the US military said it dismantled one of Iraq's secret detention facilities in Baghdad, but Samarrai said nine other such facilities are lurking throughout the country.
Thousands of people. And the Washington Post reports that the US has just turned up another one of those (nine?) torture prisons, finding detainees with broken legs. As Neil points out in this terrific post*, this is the real problem in Iraq: the unleashing of ethnic tensions and the sudden political subordination of a long-dominant minority group, whose leadership was abusive of the majority groups, to these long-aggrieved groups. Conservatives and war-hawks can comfort themselves that forcing Sunni nationalist vs. al Qaeda showdowns might be speeding up the rate at which al Qaeda is discrediting itself in the Muslem World. But is that worth bringing on what may well turn into an ethnic cleansing and the deaths of more Iraqis in the first two years of occupation than Saddam and sanctions would have done away with in a decade? This is the question I think the whole thing -- the question of whether the war is at all justified -- comes down to. (Actually, that's not entirely true since I'm basically ignoring the serious antiwar argument that the US has actually created more terrorists than would have existed had it not invaded Iraq -- a subject on which I can't really comment.) It depends on your relative beliefs about the danger a strong al Qaeda poses to the Western world order and whether dismantling al Qeada's support base in the Islamic developing world will seriously diminish its ability to carry out another attack on the West, particularly if, like in London, it doesn't have to import the perpetrators. But nobody can honestly avoid acknowledging that the consquences of "fighting al Qaeda abroad rather than at home" aren't pretty -- and are bound to get worse.
*With regards to the rest of Neil's posting, I take no position on Protein Wisdom which I've only visited once; but I do second his choice for Best Conservative Blog. Although this praise is a year out of date, Belgravia Dispatch did the impossible in 2004: it proved that a rational, intellectually honest, non-solipsistic case for Bush and against Kerry was possible (something of which, for instance,National Review never manged to convince me). Granted, probably the last thing Gregory Djerejian wants is a bunch of libruls cheering for him. But still.
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