■"Walking a Beat With Officer Muhammed: Without adequate training, Iraqi police can't calm the cities," op-ed by Sean Flynn, New York Times, 11 October 2004, p. A29.
■"Get Me Rewrite. Now. Bullets Are Flying: For reporters, much of Iraq is now a no-go zone. They are an endangered species," by Dexter Filkins, New York Times, 10 October 2004, p. WK1.
■"President of Syria Defends His Nation's Role in Lebanon: A rebuff of pressure from France and the United States," by Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times, 10 October 2004, p. A10.
■"Conservatives in Iran Battle the Spread of Foreign Investment," by Nazila Fathi, New York Times, 10 October 2004, p. A16.
■"Israel Trades One Nightmare for Another," by Steven Erlanger, New York Times, 10 October 2004, p. WK3.
■"Saudi Arabia: Women Won't Vote in Elections," by Joel Brinkley, New York Times, 12 October 2004, p. A14.
A collection of articles that update our sense of how the Big Bang strategy continues to unfold across the Middle East.
The first one, an op-ed by Sean Flynn, who knows Sys Admin types like cops and firefighters, gives yet another searing indictment of our military's efforts to train up the Iraqi police forces.
Here's the key excerpt, referring to our tendency to teach Iraqi cops the bare basics of arresting and handcuffing bad guys but almost nothing about human rights:
"That's a standard of training Americans would never accept," said Gerald F. Burke, a retired Massachusetts State Police major who spent more than a year as an adviser to Baghdad police commanders. "It's a standard the Iraqis wouldn't accept if they didn't have to. Really, it's just an excuse for us to be able to say, 'Hey, we tried.'"
When you see a four-star military policy general in the U.S. Army, you'll know things have really changed. But so long as that community is treated as an afterthought, don't expect our skill sets to somehow magically transform itself overnight in Iraq.
We continue to learn through failure, but the learning has to pick up pace.
A good measure of how little we control in Iraq is how afraid the Western journalists are to do much of anything beyond reporting from inside the Green Zone. I don't blame them. I consider them the canaries in the coal mine. Most of the time, they'll put themselves at great risk, but frankly it's close to suicidal for a Western journalist to travel in many parts of Iraq right now.
It's one thing to be the last soldier to die in a losing effort, it's another to be the next journalist who gets beheaded on the Internet. That's how ugly our effort is becoming and it should alarm us plenty.
Taking a tour around the dial, we see Bashar Assad complaining plenty about U.S. and French pressure to reduce Syria's military and political domination of Lebanon, a recovering state that the West believes could stand on its own. How do I know our pressure is getting to Syria? Assad is actually going to the effort of making his case to the international press, and you know how much Syrian autocrats like to do that.
Actually, as I've noted before, we have to secretly root for Bashar, hoping he's a closet Gorby who's biding his time and doing the Briar Rabbit shtick like this more to satisfy internal Old Guard audiences he's trying to placate as he works reform agendas slowly first by simply replacing those aging types with members of his own, rather impatient generation.
In Iran, the desperate conservative mullahs are engaging in an crackdown of such offensive proportions that they are sure to alienate the masses even more than they've been in recent years, which will be quite an accomplishment. This is what will really ratchet up the social stress there: it's one thing to start targeting the weak, like women, but another when the Parliament starts curtailing the government's own ability to conclude deals with foreign companies for investment, which is what's been happening lately.
As one government spokesman said:
"From now on the government will not be able to negotiate with any foreign investor because they will tell the government that it does not have the necessary authority," said Abdullah Remezanzadeh, the government spokesman.
He said the moves by the hard-liners were aimed at paralyzing the government and shutting it out of international affairs.
How did this hard-line Parliament come about? The mullahs threw a slate of progressive candidates off the ballots last February, and so a lot of people in Iran simply refused to vote, leaving the door for a raft of super-conservatives to step in and effect this reversal of the reforms of the past several years.
I mean, you gotta like it when Iranian government spokesmen start bitching about the hard core mullahs! So yeah, the tipping point there seems closer by the day. But guess what? That tipping point will be full of danger, as it always is, because the hard right in Iran will push for nukes like there's no tomorrow because . . . they actually feel like there's no tomorrow. I mean, the U.S. took down the Taliban on their right and Saddam on the left, the knee-jerk reaction we've seen since.
Pretty? No. Progress? Yes.
Here's the slippage. Seems the House of Saud does not intend to let the apparent loophole regarding who can vote in local elections next year slide by unopposed, thus opening the door for women to vote (the actual law only disallowed men serving in the military from voting, thus women's rights activists in the kingdom were beginning to argue that women should be able to vote in the historic elections next year, the first in over seven decades). Seems the government is signaling that women will probably not be allowed to participate.
We'll see what happens on that one, but here's hoping the pressure builds . . ..
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