BY DAN
KENNEDY
Serving the reality-based community since 2002.
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Wednesday, April 07, 2004
MONITORING IRAQ. CNN's Aaron
Brown told us all last night to read the Christian Science
Monitor's coverage of the uprisings in Iraq. So I did. Very
sharp, very calm analysis, quite different from the frightening
reports on television and in most newspapers. Not that those are
wrong, but the violence overwhelms the context.
Dan Murphy reports
from Baghdad that support for the upstart Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr
is wide but shallow. This is a point I've seen made elsewhere, but
Murphy does an exceptionally good job of explaining it. Murphy
writes:
Iraq's major Shiite
political parties, like the Supreme Council for the Islamic
Revolution in Iraq, are reluctant to stand up to Sadr's militants,
afraid they could lose standing for siding too closely with the
US.
They're hoping that the US will
deal with Sadr's people for them, leaving them free to criticize
the operation if public anger grows at the civilian, predominantly
Shiite casualties in Baghdad's Sadr City, the holy city of Najaf,
and the southern town of Nasariyah.
Murphy also offers a key
observation that any influential Shiite leader who succeeded in
surviving Saddam Hussein's depredations is almost by definition weak
and compromised, writing:
The moderate Shiite Grand
Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, who stayed alive by avoiding controversy
while many ayatollahs were killed by the Hussein regime, also has
avoided any major statements.
No wonder Sistani has proved so
frustrating for US and UN negotiators.
In addition to Murphy's piece, the
Monitor's Ann Scott Tyson analyzes
the difficulty of the mission now facing US troops.
Thank you, Aaron.
WHEN METAPHOR BECOMES
REALITY
There must be a
temptation, when confronted with the Dantesque scenes from
Fallujah, to surrender to something like existential despair. The
mob could have cooked and eaten its victims without making things
very much worse.
- Christopher
Hitchens, writing
in the Wall Street Journal, April 2
We are united. Saddam Hussein
committed injustices against us for 35 years. It is impossible
that we let America do the same. We will kill them with knives. We
will eat them.
- Mohammed Ali
Hussein, quoted
in today's Boston Globe
HORSING AROUND. Back in
1994, when Mitt Romney was running against Senator Ted Kennedy,
then-governor Bill Weld called Romney something like a very
impressive piece of political horse flesh (sorry, can't find the
exact quote).
Boston Herald business
columnist Cosmo Macero Jr. today demonstrates
(sub. req.) that Romney is more of a show horse than a work horse. He
reports that Romney has been blowing off "Jobs for Massachusetts," an
economic roundtable of high-powered business executives and community
leaders, which was the incubator for such job-growth initiatives as
the mid-'90s tax breaks for Raytheon and Fidelity. (Note: Media Log
is not endorsing those gifts, especially the one for
Raytheon.)
Macero writes:
Five fiscal quarters into
Republican Romney's jobless administration, the only people more
frustrated than his political rivals are the business-community
supporters who hailed his 2002 victory over Democrat Shannon
O'Brien.
"The idea of running around the
country chasing jobs ... I'm not sure that's the right strategy,"
says John Regan, a Republican, who is vice president of
legislative policy for the Associated Industries of
Massachusetts.
The Bay State has shed 60,000
jobs on Romney's watch.
Nor does Macero let Romney off the
hook for posturing on such issues as gay marriage and auto-insurance
rates rather than rolling up his sleeves and doing the hard work of
economic development.
Romney's not just losing people.
He's losing those who should be his strongest supporters.
BUSH FIGHTS OFF THE LYING
LIARS. Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman, in his
Lowell Sun column, offers
a long and impressive list of Bush critics who've been denounced by
the White House as liars.
They range from former Treasury
secretary Paul O'Neill and former counter-terrorism adviser Richard
Clarke to Gwen Rigell, the principal of the Florida school where Bush
was reading to children when the 9/11 planes hit, who says the
president couldn't have seen the attacks, as he has claimed, because
there was no television set in the classroom.
Goldman writes:
Is there a point at which
President Bush has to look in a mirror and admit to himself that a
list of people this diverse, whose previous accomplishments were
so exceptional that each and every one had individually earned the
right and the honor of serving a United States president, may, in
fact, not all be liars or malcontents, or disloyal?
I think the answer is
yes.
Ooh! Goldman must be
French.
posted at 9:15 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
