Saturday, June 05, 2004
RIP
Dust off the black armbands
Friday, June 04, 2004
Global Sunday
This Sunday I will be a guest on the TV program Global Sunday to discuss the state of Canada's military and the election. The show airs at 6:30 PM ET, but the panel I am on probably won't begin until around 6:45 pm. Tune in!
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Thursday, June 03, 2004
Foot-in-Mouth Watch, #2 (literally)
So the Harper campaign hit a little snag. Watch for this to be front page above the fold in the major dailies tomorrow:
Some idiot decided to punch a gay activist in the face at a Harper rally. This, combined with Harper's supposedly "controversial" remarks that he'd allow a free vote in parliament on abortion, made for a bad day for the Conservatives.
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Some idiot decided to punch a gay activist in the face at a Harper rally. This, combined with Harper's supposedly "controversial" remarks that he'd allow a free vote in parliament on abortion, made for a bad day for the Conservatives.
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Say goodbye to the DCI
The resignation of George Tenet, the U.S. director of central intelligence, came not a moment too soon. Indeed, I am amazed he was allowed to resign and not fired. If anyone should have paid a price for the continual intelligence goof-ups over the past number of years -- especially 9/11 -- it should have been Tenet. No one has faced any consequences for 9/11, the Iraq WMD intel exaggeration or anything else. (Nor has anyone at the FBI, for that matter. Even after their botched handling of the investiation into the post-9/11 anthrax letters, Robert Mueller remains in place, and, as far as I know, they are still trying to devise a way to charge ex-Army bioweapons expert Stephen Hatfill.)
Whoever Bush decides to name to the post will have a tremendous burden to carry, and much confidence-building to do after the dismal performance of recent years. George Tenet will not be missed.
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Whoever Bush decides to name to the post will have a tremendous burden to carry, and much confidence-building to do after the dismal performance of recent years. George Tenet will not be missed.
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Wednesday, June 02, 2004
Tory defence plan a step in right direction
Check out the text of what I said on Global National's The Last Word. Nothing exciting, but the point should be made. These proposals aren't anything drastic, just common sense.
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Martin veers hard left
When Paul Martin was still finance minister, a political friend told me Martin would someday become one of the most leftwing prime ministers in history. The reason? Martin is remembered as a fiscal hawk as finance minister, and would want to shed that image as PM.
I didn't believe my friend. I thought he was crazy.
He wasn't.
Tomorrow Martin is going to unveil the most ultra-left, big government Liberal party platform since Trudeau the era.
Some highlights from leaks to the CP wire:
--8,000 new soldiers for "peace initiatives." Note the language: "peace initiatives." This is likely code for "we'll hire the bodies, but they won't be getting any new equipment."
--A quadrupling of funding for wind energy. I guess they want to suck in the Green Party vote? (said to be at around 5%)
--A national daycare program, which has been prmised by the Liberal in every election since 1993.
In total, $27-billion in new spending over the next five years. $27-billion!
There is an upside to this: there is going to be some real daylight between the parties on important issues. It is common to hear complaints about how all the parties are the same. Not so in this election.
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I didn't believe my friend. I thought he was crazy.
He wasn't.
Tomorrow Martin is going to unveil the most ultra-left, big government Liberal party platform since Trudeau the era.
Some highlights from leaks to the CP wire:
--8,000 new soldiers for "peace initiatives." Note the language: "peace initiatives." This is likely code for "we'll hire the bodies, but they won't be getting any new equipment."
--A quadrupling of funding for wind energy. I guess they want to suck in the Green Party vote? (said to be at around 5%)
--A national daycare program, which has been prmised by the Liberal in every election since 1993.
In total, $27-billion in new spending over the next five years. $27-billion!
There is an upside to this: there is going to be some real daylight between the parties on important issues. It is common to hear complaints about how all the parties are the same. Not so in this election.
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Tuesday, June 01, 2004
Defending Judith Miller
In response to the mea culpa Sunday by New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent relating to the Gray Lady's reportage leading up to the Iraq war,The New York Sun, a rival paper, has taken the unusual step of defending Times reporter Judith Miller in an editorial. As usual, the Sun asks questions others won't.
The Times management and other critics of the reporting by Ms. Miller and her colleagues seem to give Saddam the benefit of the doubt. Certain things just don’t add up. If Salman Pak was really a counterterrorism training camp, what were Egyptians doing there? Couldn’t Egypt get counterterrorism training from America? And with Saddam claiming that U.N. sanctions were starving his people, did he really need to spend money on mobile weather balloon trucks? Was Zarqawi’s block of cyanide salt for electroplating jewelry? Was the sarin shell accidentally waylaid? Did the biological weapons scientist just decide to take some work home with him at night?
The kind of information Ms. Miller and her colleagues were bringing in strikes us as highly newsworthy. It’s hard to imagine that after September 11 many Americans would be willing to stake their safety on the notion that Saddam’s forces and foreign fighters running around a passenger plane fuselage were engaged in “counter-terrorism” training. Or on the idea that Saddam’s trucks with chemical tanks were used to inflate “weather balloons.”Imagine how a newspaper would look if it buried that information — the sarin, the cyanide salt, the mobile labs, the plane fuselage, the botulinum — and an attack took place. It would be a journalistic and a national security error far worse than anything of which Ms. Miller or the Times have been accused.
It is unfortunate that the Times chose to specifically single out Judith Miller for her pre-war news stories. She is an excellent reporter of the highest quality and integrity and was only doing her job.
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The Times management and other critics of the reporting by Ms. Miller and her colleagues seem to give Saddam the benefit of the doubt. Certain things just don’t add up. If Salman Pak was really a counterterrorism training camp, what were Egyptians doing there? Couldn’t Egypt get counterterrorism training from America? And with Saddam claiming that U.N. sanctions were starving his people, did he really need to spend money on mobile weather balloon trucks? Was Zarqawi’s block of cyanide salt for electroplating jewelry? Was the sarin shell accidentally waylaid? Did the biological weapons scientist just decide to take some work home with him at night?
The kind of information Ms. Miller and her colleagues were bringing in strikes us as highly newsworthy. It’s hard to imagine that after September 11 many Americans would be willing to stake their safety on the notion that Saddam’s forces and foreign fighters running around a passenger plane fuselage were engaged in “counter-terrorism” training. Or on the idea that Saddam’s trucks with chemical tanks were used to inflate “weather balloons.”Imagine how a newspaper would look if it buried that information — the sarin, the cyanide salt, the mobile labs, the plane fuselage, the botulinum — and an attack took place. It would be a journalistic and a national security error far worse than anything of which Ms. Miller or the Times have been accused.
It is unfortunate that the Times chose to specifically single out Judith Miller for her pre-war news stories. She is an excellent reporter of the highest quality and integrity and was only doing her job.
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Monday, May 31, 2004
Chalabi hit job article #353,023
Jane Mayer has produced a mammoth work of journalism about Ahmad Chalabi for the New Yorker. It's likely to get a lot of play this week. The piece, titled "The Manipulator," is a classic hit job. But it's a good hit-job piece.
I haven't heard much about Mayer since her attempt (with Jill Abramson, currently the #2 at The New York Times) to vindicate Anita Hill. Mayer has done a lot of homework about Chalabi and the history of the Iraqi opposition. Unfortunately, the piece is tremendously biased against Chalabi and is a touch boring to read because of its repetitive style. The format:
X said Ahmad Chalabi did a lot of bad stuff. The bad stuff he did is A, B, C. (Y denies this.)
An example of what I'm talking about:
Chalabi has consistently denied having any personal political ambitions, or any desire to lead Iraq. As early as 1994, he told the Los Angeles Times, “Anyone who wants to take power in Baghdad is crazy. I’m just in this to get rid of Saddam.” In our conversation, however, Chalabi said that he could no longer uphold his promise that he would never seek office in Iraq. “Never is a very long time,” he said. Scott Ritter, a former weapons inspector for the United Nations, who has known Chalabi for seven years, said that Chalabi had confided to him his plans to run Iraq once America had liberated it. Ritter, who strongly opposed the war and produced a controversial documentary in 2001 asserting that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, also said that Chalabi spoke of benefitting financially from Iraq’s oil reserves, which are the second largest in the world. (Chalabi’s office denies this.)
There's nothing wrong with this stylistically, as far as I know. But she could have done a bit more research to present more from the denying side, other than just doing a four word denial sentence in parentheses at the end of the paragraph.
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I haven't heard much about Mayer since her attempt (with Jill Abramson, currently the #2 at The New York Times) to vindicate Anita Hill. Mayer has done a lot of homework about Chalabi and the history of the Iraqi opposition. Unfortunately, the piece is tremendously biased against Chalabi and is a touch boring to read because of its repetitive style. The format:
X said Ahmad Chalabi did a lot of bad stuff. The bad stuff he did is A, B, C. (Y denies this.)
An example of what I'm talking about:
Chalabi has consistently denied having any personal political ambitions, or any desire to lead Iraq. As early as 1994, he told the Los Angeles Times, “Anyone who wants to take power in Baghdad is crazy. I’m just in this to get rid of Saddam.” In our conversation, however, Chalabi said that he could no longer uphold his promise that he would never seek office in Iraq. “Never is a very long time,” he said. Scott Ritter, a former weapons inspector for the United Nations, who has known Chalabi for seven years, said that Chalabi had confided to him his plans to run Iraq once America had liberated it. Ritter, who strongly opposed the war and produced a controversial documentary in 2001 asserting that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, also said that Chalabi spoke of benefitting financially from Iraq’s oil reserves, which are the second largest in the world. (Chalabi’s office denies this.)
There's nothing wrong with this stylistically, as far as I know. But she could have done a bit more research to present more from the denying side, other than just doing a four word denial sentence in parentheses at the end of the paragraph.
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Mike Harris unplugged
Check out this very worthwhile but little-noticed interview with Mike Harris from a golf magazine. He shares some interesting perspective about his life and his politics, as well as his history with golf. Turns out he isn't that good a player (best he ever got was a 6 or 7 handicap.) I like what he said about cheaters:
Golf has been a big asset in your professional life.
...you've probably heard the saying so many times that you get to know a lot about a person on the golf course - if they cheat in golf, then they usually cheat in business and cheat in life.
It's an old saying, but you've found it to be very true?
Very true. And I don't consider them golfers if they don't respect golf for what it is, and the rules of golf. It shows how you handle adversity too. Are you a club thrower? Do you get frustrated very easily if you're having a bad day?
Good for Mike Harris. This kind of comment says a lot about him as a person. Of course, the most significant part of the interview is the very last question:
How badly did you want to be prime minister?
I actually didn't want to be prime minister. I had no desire to live at 24 Sussex and to host foreign dignitaries four nights a week, and deal with all that stuff. That's all the negative stuff to me. What turned me on was the opportunity to go and change things. So if I could be prime minister with a majority government, and cut taxes, and cut the civil service in half... There were things that I would like to see this country do: make Canadians proud again, proud of the military, proud that we can compete. That's what I wanted to do, and the only way you can do that is to be prime minister and have the majority government to do it. The drawback to doing that was being prime minister, and that's why I didn't want to do it. I'll encourage others to do it.
And there you have it. He didn't and does not want to Prime Minister of Canada.
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Golf has been a big asset in your professional life.
...you've probably heard the saying so many times that you get to know a lot about a person on the golf course - if they cheat in golf, then they usually cheat in business and cheat in life.
It's an old saying, but you've found it to be very true?
Very true. And I don't consider them golfers if they don't respect golf for what it is, and the rules of golf. It shows how you handle adversity too. Are you a club thrower? Do you get frustrated very easily if you're having a bad day?
Good for Mike Harris. This kind of comment says a lot about him as a person. Of course, the most significant part of the interview is the very last question:
How badly did you want to be prime minister?
I actually didn't want to be prime minister. I had no desire to live at 24 Sussex and to host foreign dignitaries four nights a week, and deal with all that stuff. That's all the negative stuff to me. What turned me on was the opportunity to go and change things. So if I could be prime minister with a majority government, and cut taxes, and cut the civil service in half... There were things that I would like to see this country do: make Canadians proud again, proud of the military, proud that we can compete. That's what I wanted to do, and the only way you can do that is to be prime minister and have the majority government to do it. The drawback to doing that was being prime minister, and that's why I didn't want to do it. I'll encourage others to do it.
And there you have it. He didn't and does not want to Prime Minister of Canada.
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Sunday, May 30, 2004
Who is Ayad Allawi?
Definitely not the right person to be leading Iraq if you want democracy, freedom and human rights to take root there.
Allawi's opposition group, the Iraqi National Accord ("Wifaq" in Arabic) was on the CIA's dole for many years, and may still be. (It certainly was up until the time of the war.) Allawi used to visit Washington DC for meetings with his masters at Langley. They would put him up at the Ritz-Carleton Hotel in Tyson's Corner, out in the Virginia suburbs. He is not a democrat, and although a Shiite Arab, is as close to a Sunni strongman type that you could get. He always favoured the CIA's "coup option": that Saddam Husein could be assissinated and that a new leader (presumably him) could be installed rather seamlessly. That idea was always unworkable. Allawi is an ex-Baathist, and his group tried to kill a rival opposition leader in 1996 (see above link).
The Iraqi Governing Council apparently approved the nomation of Allawi by a unanimous vote. I'm sure there was some serious strong-arming going on behind the scenes. We'll have to see how this all unfolds, but it's getting harder to see any kind of silver lining in this dark cloud over Iraq.
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Allawi's opposition group, the Iraqi National Accord ("Wifaq" in Arabic) was on the CIA's dole for many years, and may still be. (It certainly was up until the time of the war.) Allawi used to visit Washington DC for meetings with his masters at Langley. They would put him up at the Ritz-Carleton Hotel in Tyson's Corner, out in the Virginia suburbs. He is not a democrat, and although a Shiite Arab, is as close to a Sunni strongman type that you could get. He always favoured the CIA's "coup option": that Saddam Husein could be assissinated and that a new leader (presumably him) could be installed rather seamlessly. That idea was always unworkable. Allawi is an ex-Baathist, and his group tried to kill a rival opposition leader in 1996 (see above link).
The Iraqi Governing Council apparently approved the nomation of Allawi by a unanimous vote. I'm sure there was some serious strong-arming going on behind the scenes. We'll have to see how this all unfolds, but it's getting harder to see any kind of silver lining in this dark cloud over Iraq.
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