licentious radio

Wednesday, April 2, 2003
[2:30:34 PM]

About this supposed translated Russian-intelligence website....

The claim is that a Russian website publishes government intelligence information on the Iraq war, and the translations are made available at aeronautics.ru. Here's the article for March 30.

The war they write about is very different than the war we read about in western newspapers. Are they just making it up? Are our newspapers missing what's happening? How can I tell?

They consistently claim more US casualties than ever get reported. With the internet, you can't hide deaths that are reported to families, because that generates newspaper articles, which Google indexes. The only way to hide casualties would be to keep them quiet until some future date, then all of a sudden announce you found dozens more dead Americans. That doesn't seem like a good plan. Or you could know that you can't find some soldiers, but not list them as 'missing'. These guys claim hundreds of soldiers are not accounted for, but not listed as missing. Certainly we've heard a lot about supply trucks making wrong turns, and there were two guys who were left alone for a week with a broken vehicle.

The only information that is easy to assess is that they keep talking about Marines at Najaf, when the newspapers are pretty clear it was the 3rd Infantry before, and now it is airborne.

I find the reports interesting in their detail, but mostly I discount them as implausible in some instances, and in others, not much more detailed than you could get from public sources.

[1:51:10 PM]
Iraq and guerilla warfare....

It's not the same. Sure, Saddam is as cruel as anybody, but it's not like you can turn a regular army into guerillas overnight. China and Vietnam had years of daily practice to learn. Saddam doesn't have much time.

Villagees aren't a jungle. It's true that urban fighting is a little harder for the US (than desert), but the biggest difference is re-supply. Guerillas in the jungle could slink away and come back with more supplies. Once the US finds the arms caches in a village or city, there's no way for the Iraqis to get more.

So Najaf, Nasiriya, and Karbala probably can buy days and weeks for Saddam, but not years.

[10:49:39 AM]
"He [Arnett] was, in the most straightforward sense, offering aid and comfort to the enemy."

That's a dangerous thing to say. "Aid and comfort" may seem to cover a lot of territory. Selling high-tech missiles and sheltering would-be terrorists -- that sounds like treasonous "aid and comfort" to me. A captured doctor who gives medical care to critically wounded enemy soldiers is surely giving "aid and comfort", but I hope no one would call that treasonous. Doctors are *supposed* to save lives.

But public information? If you say Arnett gave treasonous "aid and comfort" by stating an opinion to the Iraqi television, why isn't it treasonous to say the same thing on English television, which could be quoted in Iraq?

Ah ha! Some of us would say it *is* treasonous to question authority 'in time of war'. And there you get to the fundamental divide. People who think questioning authority is wrong *probably* are ignoring lessons we learned in the Vietnam War. Americans have a great history of ignoring history.

Face it, some of us are basically fascist nationalists, and some of us think the beauty of the United States is precisely in the freedom and *responsibility* to question. Blind obedience is a *losing* proposition. To win, you need to see all sides, and take advantage of the ideas you would have missed if you didn't. I say loyalty without giving due negative feedback is not loyalty, but abdication of duty.

Maybe it's unprofessional for a journalist on *our* side to give an interview to a journalist on *their* side. But that seems implausible -- no one here would complain if one of *our* journalists interviewed one of *their* journalists. And it you give an interview to an 'enemy' journalist/propagandist, are you supposed to lie? Surely if you have secret military information, you should not tell the 'enemy'. But that's the same if you are on western TV.

[10:19:14 AM]
Hooray for getting Jessica Lynch back!

[7:27:34 AM]
I *hope* Iraq's recent bluster means they know they're beaten. Wouldn't it be a relief if they really did just collapse at the end of this week?

I *hope* Tommy Franks knows what he's doing in bypassing Kerbala. On the face of it, it seems like it repeats the problem of Najaf and Nasiriya -- a city full of Iraqi fighters sitting on top of our supply lines. Kerbala is worse, because the "gap" is only two miles wide at one point. Maybe they won't need that route for supplies.

It seems like the only scenario in which Iraq could actually inflict a lot of damage on US forces is if they just run out of fuel, food, and ammunition, and a huge sandstorm blows up.