The Zong

The Wall Street Journal has posted a PDF of the Iraq Study Group Report’s introduction, as the entire report was presented this morning to the President, and while there don’t seem to be many surprises, (most of the report’s main tenets have been out there for awhile) reading it leads me to a host of emotions. Some tidbits from said introduction:

Given the ability of Iran and Syria to influence events within Iraq and their interest in avoiding chaos in Iraq, the United States should try to engage them constructively. In seeking to influence the behavior of both countries, the United States has disincentives and incentives available.

That’s gotta hurt to hear. I mean, a few years ago we were supposed to be greeted as liberators, the war was supposed to last “weeks, not months,” etcetera, and now it’s time to sit at the table with the Axis of Evil. What do you say at a meeting like that? “Sorry about that whole Axis of Evil thing. It was just good television.”

The United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict and regional instability. There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria, and President Bush’s June 2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.

I guess this statement is pretty obvious on the face of it, but it calls to mind the efforts that this administration has actually undertaken to deal with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the last four years. You might have thought that 9/11 would have served as a signal that maybe we haven’t really been doing a good job in this area of foreign policy, but this President decided that invading a country that never attacked us would be a better strategy than improving relations with the Arab world through diplomacy and strong changes in policy.

The primary mission of U.S. forces in Iraq should evolve to one of supporting the Iraqi army, which would take over primary responsibility for combat operations. By the first quarter of 2008, subject to unexpected developments in the security situation on the ground, all combat brigade not necessary for force protection could be out of Iraq.

I suppose we saw all this coming. My roommate just commented that perhaps all the research that went into this report could have been had by reading the newspapers for the last few months.

There certainly is little or no chance that the report’s findings will be heeded by this administration in their entirety, but one might hope that, as he peruses through this report and tries to find the good spin on it, President Bush might think for a second about how the hell we got here in the first place. The recommendations in the report are based on a set of circumstances that many, many high-level analysts and officials saw coming a long time ago. Nevertheless, this is where we’re at: faced with the enormously Orwellian task of sitting down at the table with states who sponsor terrorism to ask for help in the War on Terror.

The pundits and talking heads are all aquiver as baseball’s winter meetings heat up into a rolling boil, and for many fans like me, the waiting is the hardest part.

There’s an element of fun about it. I remember one year thinking that the Giants were real close to signing Vladimir Guerrero. Good thing they didn’t get screwed by signing that guy to a long-term contract. At the time, it was an obvious recipe for adventure: get a stew going by hiring Felipe Alou, spice things up by telling Vlad that Felipe’s back in the dugout, sign Vlad for fifty years, then add a little Bonds-Juice for some kick. Finally, serve that stew to whatever team of $200 million mercenaries the AL decides to send to the Fall Classic, go pick up your World Series trophy. Tasty.

Man, was I ever ready for that shit to go down. However, someone called Brian Sabean just as he was leaving to buy all his friends Guerrero Giants jerseys for Christmas and reminded him that he really had to keep the Giants payroll under control. If I recall correctly, MacGowan even came out in the papers and reminded us that baseball is a business, and that business requires a modicum of sanity, and that spending more than $80 million on a baseball team’s payroll was just loony.

This year? Well, it seems that the generous owners of the San Francisco Baseball Giants have adjusted for inflation a bit, and have a total of $85 million to spend on this year’s nimble band of gamers. We’re seeing just what kind of lineup that kind of scratch can buy right now.

I love players with a lot of heart, but they seem to play a lot better when they’re backing up players with talent. I mean, even the A’s had a couple guys with more than 30 homers last season. The Giants had two less than that, and the “changes” in the squad thus far include a leadoff hitter with a career on-base percentage of .344 (Dave Roberts), a utility man who’ll play first if they can’t find anyone else to do it (Richie Aurilia) and a catcher on the wrong side of 30 who used to be pretty good defensively (Bengie Molina). Sounds great, but there’s more. King of the big strikeout Pedro Feliz will be back in the hot corner, and rumor has it that David Wells might belly up to the mound for a couple of games before he gets to go make beer farts in the dugout at Triple-A Fresno.

Is this really the team that this beautiful new stadium was supposed to bring us? What of all the promises that a new stadium will make a small-market team into a large-market one? Listen, guys: I promise to stop bitching if you’ll just go out and get Barry Zito or trade for someone with an OPS higher than Dontrelle Willis, but if you just sign Bonds again and expect the team to rally around the leadership of Armando Benitez, I’m gonna call a meeting, and it won’t be pretty. I’ll be easy to spot, just look for the drunk guy crying by the statue of Willie Mays during the All-Star Game.

(You know, that big nationally-televised baseball game that they’ll be playing in San Francisco without any Giants on the field.)

Are you sick and tired of listening to horrible sportscasters like Joe Theismann detract from your enjoyment of televised professional sporting events? Me too! Since everything you really need to know about a football game is on the screen and wholly independent of the rantings of Theismann and his ilk, I encourage you to visit The Zong for weekly recommendations on what to listen to during the game instead of the dipshits the networks pay to think about sports for you. The feature will be called “The Theismann Music Awards” and you should throw in your own recommendations in the comments section, if that pleases you.

Tonight: Monday Night Football featuring the Carolina Panthers versus the Philadelphia Eagles.

If you’re actually going to watch this game, I suggest that you consider something electronic to compliment the robotic movements of allegedly-gay android quarterback Jeff Garcia. While his particular model is obsolete, it sure is enjoyable watching him scamper and dodge around the field hoping that Terrell Owens isn’t still out there somewhere. I’ll go ahead and suggest Röyksopp’s “Melody A.M.,” because it’s a little robotic and a little sad. Just like Jeff Garcia. Around the end of the second quarter, when Steve Smith scores his third touchdown, switch to something funkier and more upbeat, like Herbie Hancock’s “Man-Child.” Hit play and groove your ass into Tuesday while Jake Delhomme screams at his defense like a little Frenchman.

In case you missed it, a “secret” memorandum was obtained by the New York Times and, as reported over the weekend, it is being read as a “laundry list” penned by Donald Rumsfeld.

On the “laundry,” of course, is the blood-stained set of undies that is the Iraq war. After literally years of insistence that troop levels should be dictated by the commanders on the ground, we have here an historic treatise that should give every American the opportunity to read just why we’ve stayed the course in this war of choice, and why the realities perceived by those in power and what they say about it are two very different things.

Mr. Rumsfeld has frequently emphasized the difficulty of stabilizing Iraq and the need to turn over responsibility to Iraqi authorities as quickly as possible. But he has also been a forceful, even cantankerous, defender of American policy, often insisting his critics were unduly pessimistic. On Oct. 31, just a week before finishing the memo, Mr. Rumsfeld told a radio interviewer, “I feel that we are making good progress with the piece of it the Defense Department has.”

One option Mr. Rumsfeld offered calls for modest troop withdrawals “so Iraqis know they have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country.”

Another option calls for redeploying American troops from “vulnerable positions” in Baghdad and other cities to safer areas in Iraq or Kuwait, where they would act as a “quick reaction force.” That idea is similar to a plan suggested by Representative John P. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat, a plan that the White House has soundly rebuffed.

Well, that’s just great. Glad to hear that Rumsfeld finally came around just in time to get his walking papers. It’s much more likely that, over the course of two pivotal elections, the Bushies weren’t about to admit that they actually kind of agreed with some of their critics, that maybe we should be doing something different.

Once again, the odd ones out are our troops and their families. While they continue to risk their lives, our government keeps them in Iraq for political purposes, and they are wounded and killed while Rumsfeld writes a memo that basically says the same thing that his critics have been saying for over a year.

The last couple of items in the memo, in the “Above the Line” category, are almost sickening in their adherence to a public-relations tone, in a way that belies the true concerns of an administration that consistently denies paying attention to polls or public opinion.

Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis. This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not “lose.”

Recast the U.S. military mission and the U.S. goals (how we talk about them) — go minimalist.

I’d love to know what this last line about going “minimalist” means. Does it mean that we should speak in more modest terms about victory? (Not that anyone has any idea what would constitute victory in Iraq anyhow) Should we “recast” our mission in more realistic terms, withdrawing from the nebulous goals of peace and freedom in the Middle East? Shouldn’t someone have thought to outline things a bit more clearly before we sent our military into harm’s way?

It’s very likely that this memo was leaked to the press with a purpose, and that it gives the Bush Administration a good starting point from which to drastically change the course of the war by favoring troop reductions and redeployment without admitting that it was ever wrong. Still, there is no question that, all rhetoric aside, Iraq is now in the throes of a civil war, and that makes it clear that the Rumsfeld firing and his didactic memo come far, far too late.

Quick, someone reanimate Ronald Reagan’s corpse! The Reds are back, and they’re pissed that North Korea gets to have so many marches.

In September of 2004, as I’m sure you’ll remember, Russia was completely blindsided when a bunch of cowardly Chechen assholes took a school hostage in Beslan and killed hundreds of innocent people. At the time, an understandably shaken President Putin began a push to institute certain antiterrorism measures that many described as “drastic,” “authoritarian,” and even “dangerous.” I’m sure all this sounds vaguely familiar.

At any rate, Putin signed a controversial slate of legislation in March that, among other things, allows Mother Russia’s “secret services” (shudder) to freely monitor domestic phone conversations. The signing was met with international consternation, and was a reminder that the Russian government had been gradually moving back in time towards the good old police-state days of yore. I’m sure all this sounds vaguely familiar.

Now, more than 2 years after the Beslan tragedy, things are really starting to get juicy from a cloak-and-dagger standpoint. In case the only thing you’ve been reading is Teen People for the last few months, Anna Politkovskaya, one of Russia’s ballsiest investigative journalists, was murdered in an elevator while wrapping up an article about human rights abuses against civilians by the Russian military back in October. This got the attention of the international community, which suddenly took notice that being a curious Russian journalist while Putin is in power is about as safe as being Kim Jong Il’s barber.

“One thing that immediately comes to mind … is that Anna had many enemies, said Joel Simon, executive director of the New-York based Committee to Protect Journalists.

She was at least the thirteenth journalist to have been the victim of a contract-style killing since President Vladimir Putin came to power, according to CPJ.

“She single-handedly incarnated the resistance to the order that Mr. Putin wants to impose on the media,” said Robert Menard, president of Paris-based Reporters Without Borders. “Nobody can imagine this was just a crime committed by common criminals.”

In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States was shocked and profoundly saddened by the murder of a journalist who devoted much of her career to “shining a light on human rights abuses and other atrocities of the war in Chechnya” and the plight of Chechen refugees.

Thirteen journalists? Contract-style killings? It’s getting fucking cold in here.

So last week, a “former” KGB agent named Alexander Litvinenko was murdered by being poisoned with something called polonium-210 while investigating her death. Salon.com is out today with a mind-numbing conversation with some guy named Mike Large who evidently knows a lot more about radioactive stuff than my dumb ass:

Litvinenko’s murderer has not been found, but the poison that killed him has: polonium-210, an isotope of uranium discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie and named for Poland, Marie’s native country. Used as part of the trigger in the earliest atomic bombs, including those dropped on Japan, polonium-210 is a highly radioactive substance. The alpha particles it emits can be lethal when absorbed into the human body.

“Polonium, although it does occur naturally, is at the very end of the uranium decay train.

“You need a nuclear reactor, you need a radiochemical laboratory that can handle radioactive material, and then you need a clinical laboratory that can cut it into a designer drug. Now, those facilities are simply not available in other than state enterprises. So countries like the United States, the Russian Federation, Britain, France and Israel are the sort of countries that can do this.”

Large goes on to detail why this substance is really only available to nuclear-capable governments, in a way that makes me feel pretty stupid.

We’ll probably never know what the hell is going on, and while it’s sexy to think that Putin is just trying to get the Berlin Wall rebuilt without any press coverage, it’s probably just as likely that all this is being done to make it look like he’s responsible. Whatever the explanation, I think it’s pretty amazing that here in 2006 we’re reading about KGB agents being poisoned with radioactive isotopes—in newspapers. It’s like Russia hired Tom Clancy to run their frigging tourism board.