(no subject)
The UN will be teaching Gazan school children about the Holocaust.
The wars on women in Afghanistan and Congo:
Democratizing Afghanistan would require something else, something far deeper and, frankly, more dangerous and more threatening: a revolution in intimate relations. …
The Congo has, obviously, a whole different set of social relations and political realities with which to contend. But the widespread, calculated use of mass rape and mass vaginal mutilation in the Congolese wars of the past decade can, again, only be called astonishing. I have heard no native Congolese political analysts, doctors, or human rights workers “explain” the peculiar, terrifying sadism of this phenomenon; outsiders, too, have been baffled by it. That is probably all to the good; there are some things that can’t, and maybe shouldn’t, be explained.
What’s undeniable is that tens of thousands-more likely hundreds of thousands-of women and girls, ranging from very young children to elderly grandmothers, have been raped or gang raped; in the course of these assaults, their sexual organs are often shot at, stabbed, speared, or ripped apart. The pain is unimaginable; the damage, both emotional and physical, is forever; as one Congolese woman told Human Rights Watch, “My body has become sad.”
Who can explain this barbarism? Who can explain this utter hatred of the female, of female sexuality, of the future, of life? More important, who or what can stop it?
And also.
How an Iranian bomb would change the Middle East:
an Iranian nuclear program would rearrange the region's political, economic, and cultural furniture. Therefore, what's most dangerous is not an Iranian bomb but the new Middle East that would issue from it.
Photogallery of Iran. Iranian women have higher levels of education than men, less legal rights and are active in the pro-democracy struggle. Perhaps the West could do more:
For the observation that Iran is one country also suggests that the West has some foreign-policy tools in Iran that it has not yet seriously tried to use. … What do Iran's rulers truly fear? I'll wager that the answer is not sanctions and that it might not be a bombing raid, either. … By contrast, a sustained and well-funded human rights campaign must be a terrifying prospect. So what if we told the Iranian regime that its insistence on pursuing nuclear weapons leaves us with no choice but to increase funding for dissident exile groups, smuggle money into the country, bombard Iranian airwaves with anti-regime television and, above all, to publicize widely the myriad crimes of the Islamic Republic? What if President Obama held up a photograph of Neda, the young girl murdered by Iranian police last summer, at his next news conference? What if he did that at every news conference? I bet that would unnerve President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and even the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, far more than the loss of some German machine tool imports or Dutch tomatoes.
… an aggressive focus on Iran's massive human rights violations would allow the regime to cry "foreign meddling" and attack its opponents as spies. But so what? They do that already. Given the potential for disaster lurking behind almost every other policy option, we have nothing to lose by trying.
The Obama Administration has cut off funding for an Iran human rights watchdog organization. The Obama Administration seems to have mostly very wrong instincts: it looks more and more like Carter redux--except Carter made a serious fuss about human rights.
About Afghanistan’s deeply flawed election. The tragedy of the Middle East is that so often the choice is between the corrupt and the fanatic. Michael Yon on taking a 92-year old veteran who has been visiting Afghanistan to the Market Garden (“A Bridge To Far”) celebrations in Holland.
None of the paved roads in Afghanistan were built by Afghan vision with Afghan resources. If not for the many foreign invaders, this land would be road-and runway-free. …
I asked General Petraeus about his dad, and he said his dad was a Dutch ship captain and was at sea when the Germans invaded Holland. And so he sailed to New York and there eventually met his American mom. (Touchdown for the United States.) His dad joined the Merchant Marines, who suffered more casualties per capita than any other service during the war. I asked General Petraeus what he thought about all these incredible remembrance ceremonies, and he talked about the Margraten Cemetery, saying a Dutch family had adopted every single grave. General Petraeus was struck by the Dutch gratitude and talked about it for some minutes, saying in part, “This is a country that makes an enormous effort to remember and honor those who liberated them.” “Symbolically,” he said, “in saving a bridge, we strengthened enormously a bridge between two countries. That relationship is exceptional.” “I am struck by the sheer sacrifice that was made,” he said, “Just the river crossing, there are 47 names on that plaque.” General Petraeus had long-commanded the 101st, including in combat in Iraq, and had briefly been acting commander of the 82nd, the two principal divisions being honored today.
General Petreaus recounted working with the Dutch in the Cold War, Haiti, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, and now on counter-piracy efforts off of Africa, saying of Holland, “This is a country that punches above its weight class.”
… Examining the graph closely, violence was at an all-time high in about June 2007, right when I reported on the Hugh Hewitt radio show that the Surge was working. Needless to say, a lot of people said that was crazy. (Just look at that graph!) During a more recent interview with Hugh, we remembered that interview in 2007. But look what started to happen in July. When I was reporting the growing civil war in 2005, the civil war was not yet showing itself in the statistics but I could feel it growing. By 2006, Iraq was starting to burn down, but by June 2007 the Surge obviously was working even though Iraq was mad with violence at that time.
In this type of war, as with Afghanistan, the statistics lag behind the realities. This month’s statistics are ancient news even though the events that underpin the graphs just occurred. A witness must be on the ground and know what to look and listen for, and be willing to disregard what the crowd is saying (unless they are right). The witness must be politically tone-deaf.
If General Petraeus did not take the Iraq reins in early 2007, I would say there would have been maybe a 90% chance that genocide would have occurred. Of course Petraeus never said anything like that during today’s talk, nor did he tell the audience that he had taken command in late January 2007 and that by July 2007 violence began to subside. Those are the facts.
General Petraeus mentioned during the talk that the Washington Post had just released the classified message from McChrystal to the White House. The memo has since set Washington ablaze, yet the McChrystal document delivered news so old and parched that Indiana Jones might find it more useful for finding hidden treasures. That Washington finds the ideas new or shocking only shows that Washington is shot full of painkillers and can’t feel a thing. The report should have been submitted by the Commanding General in Afghanistan in 2006.
This is a very moving seven part dispatch going from Kandahar to the remembrance celebrations in the Netherlands to Gen. Petraeus’s lecture on Iran and Afghanistan. But Michael Yon is always worth reading.
The wars on women in Afghanistan and Congo:
Democratizing Afghanistan would require something else, something far deeper and, frankly, more dangerous and more threatening: a revolution in intimate relations. …
The Congo has, obviously, a whole different set of social relations and political realities with which to contend. But the widespread, calculated use of mass rape and mass vaginal mutilation in the Congolese wars of the past decade can, again, only be called astonishing. I have heard no native Congolese political analysts, doctors, or human rights workers “explain” the peculiar, terrifying sadism of this phenomenon; outsiders, too, have been baffled by it. That is probably all to the good; there are some things that can’t, and maybe shouldn’t, be explained.
What’s undeniable is that tens of thousands-more likely hundreds of thousands-of women and girls, ranging from very young children to elderly grandmothers, have been raped or gang raped; in the course of these assaults, their sexual organs are often shot at, stabbed, speared, or ripped apart. The pain is unimaginable; the damage, both emotional and physical, is forever; as one Congolese woman told Human Rights Watch, “My body has become sad.”
Who can explain this barbarism? Who can explain this utter hatred of the female, of female sexuality, of the future, of life? More important, who or what can stop it?
And also.
How an Iranian bomb would change the Middle East:
an Iranian nuclear program would rearrange the region's political, economic, and cultural furniture. Therefore, what's most dangerous is not an Iranian bomb but the new Middle East that would issue from it.
Photogallery of Iran. Iranian women have higher levels of education than men, less legal rights and are active in the pro-democracy struggle. Perhaps the West could do more:
For the observation that Iran is one country also suggests that the West has some foreign-policy tools in Iran that it has not yet seriously tried to use. … What do Iran's rulers truly fear? I'll wager that the answer is not sanctions and that it might not be a bombing raid, either. … By contrast, a sustained and well-funded human rights campaign must be a terrifying prospect. So what if we told the Iranian regime that its insistence on pursuing nuclear weapons leaves us with no choice but to increase funding for dissident exile groups, smuggle money into the country, bombard Iranian airwaves with anti-regime television and, above all, to publicize widely the myriad crimes of the Islamic Republic? What if President Obama held up a photograph of Neda, the young girl murdered by Iranian police last summer, at his next news conference? What if he did that at every news conference? I bet that would unnerve President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and even the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, far more than the loss of some German machine tool imports or Dutch tomatoes.
… an aggressive focus on Iran's massive human rights violations would allow the regime to cry "foreign meddling" and attack its opponents as spies. But so what? They do that already. Given the potential for disaster lurking behind almost every other policy option, we have nothing to lose by trying.
The Obama Administration has cut off funding for an Iran human rights watchdog organization. The Obama Administration seems to have mostly very wrong instincts: it looks more and more like Carter redux--except Carter made a serious fuss about human rights.
About Afghanistan’s deeply flawed election. The tragedy of the Middle East is that so often the choice is between the corrupt and the fanatic. Michael Yon on taking a 92-year old veteran who has been visiting Afghanistan to the Market Garden (“A Bridge To Far”) celebrations in Holland.
None of the paved roads in Afghanistan were built by Afghan vision with Afghan resources. If not for the many foreign invaders, this land would be road-and runway-free. …
I asked General Petraeus about his dad, and he said his dad was a Dutch ship captain and was at sea when the Germans invaded Holland. And so he sailed to New York and there eventually met his American mom. (Touchdown for the United States.) His dad joined the Merchant Marines, who suffered more casualties per capita than any other service during the war. I asked General Petraeus what he thought about all these incredible remembrance ceremonies, and he talked about the Margraten Cemetery, saying a Dutch family had adopted every single grave. General Petraeus was struck by the Dutch gratitude and talked about it for some minutes, saying in part, “This is a country that makes an enormous effort to remember and honor those who liberated them.” “Symbolically,” he said, “in saving a bridge, we strengthened enormously a bridge between two countries. That relationship is exceptional.” “I am struck by the sheer sacrifice that was made,” he said, “Just the river crossing, there are 47 names on that plaque.” General Petraeus had long-commanded the 101st, including in combat in Iraq, and had briefly been acting commander of the 82nd, the two principal divisions being honored today.
General Petreaus recounted working with the Dutch in the Cold War, Haiti, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan, and now on counter-piracy efforts off of Africa, saying of Holland, “This is a country that punches above its weight class.”
… Examining the graph closely, violence was at an all-time high in about June 2007, right when I reported on the Hugh Hewitt radio show that the Surge was working. Needless to say, a lot of people said that was crazy. (Just look at that graph!) During a more recent interview with Hugh, we remembered that interview in 2007. But look what started to happen in July. When I was reporting the growing civil war in 2005, the civil war was not yet showing itself in the statistics but I could feel it growing. By 2006, Iraq was starting to burn down, but by June 2007 the Surge obviously was working even though Iraq was mad with violence at that time.
In this type of war, as with Afghanistan, the statistics lag behind the realities. This month’s statistics are ancient news even though the events that underpin the graphs just occurred. A witness must be on the ground and know what to look and listen for, and be willing to disregard what the crowd is saying (unless they are right). The witness must be politically tone-deaf.
If General Petraeus did not take the Iraq reins in early 2007, I would say there would have been maybe a 90% chance that genocide would have occurred. Of course Petraeus never said anything like that during today’s talk, nor did he tell the audience that he had taken command in late January 2007 and that by July 2007 violence began to subside. Those are the facts.
General Petraeus mentioned during the talk that the Washington Post had just released the classified message from McChrystal to the White House. The memo has since set Washington ablaze, yet the McChrystal document delivered news so old and parched that Indiana Jones might find it more useful for finding hidden treasures. That Washington finds the ideas new or shocking only shows that Washington is shot full of painkillers and can’t feel a thing. The report should have been submitted by the Commanding General in Afghanistan in 2006.
This is a very moving seven part dispatch going from Kandahar to the remembrance celebrations in the Netherlands to Gen. Petraeus’s lecture on Iran and Afghanistan. But Michael Yon is always worth reading.