February 2006 Archives

Bush seems to recognize profiling -- when the alleged victim has $1 billion in their pocket. "Security hawks" find flaws with "government secrecy." "Free traders" go domestic. God willing, all the hypocrites will be reduced to the dust bin of history; but preserved there in intricate detail.

I wrote the bracketed text just after Cheney shot . Part

[Coverage of the Cheney shooting brought to mind this piece about perverse disparities of scrutiny leveled at personal, rather than policy, scandals.

[I recall the idea for the piece came to me as I was sitting in a Fox studio, listening to hyper-coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in my earpiece and looking out at a large room of producers, as I was readying to address Clinton's policy of sanctions and bombing against Iraq. I don't recall if it happened that day, but I, and many others I'm sure, would be repeatedly bumped for the Lewinsky story. All this set me thinking about "wagging the dog" being a multi-dimensional enterprise.

[The piece was published by Newsday on Feb. 12, 1998. I haven't followed the Cheney shooting story close enough to know if hunting dogs were involved there. As I recall, Christopher Hitchens, with whom I used to correspond in those days, would later ripoff the "dogs of war" motif in a Vanity Fair article around the time of Clinton's impeachment, late the same year.

[Perhaps the eeriest part of the piece is a pair of sentences I remember very deliberately deciding to keep in: "A journalistic pack howls for war as cruise missile bombings are dubbed 'pinpricks.' One wonders how that would sound if one of our cities were struck by one." Or two...]

The Dogs of War
By Sam Husseini

Is the White House moving towards bombing Iraq to distract from the Lewinsky matter, following the script of the film Wag the Dog? Or does the media's fervent pursuit over Lewinsky illustrate how servile the media are on Iraq?

As journalists parse every utterance by administration officials regarding President Clinton's alleged promiscuity -- and then flog themselves for their own compulsiveness -- rationales for the US's Iraq policy go unchallenged. The administration's claim that it is working tirelessly for "Mideast peace" even as it revs up the missiles elicits few queries.

by Sam Husseini

Three years ago, on February 15, 2003, shortly before the invasion of Iraq, there were quasi-global peace protests.

The streets of New York City, London, Rome, Madrid, Johannesburg, Hong Kong and many other places were filled with people protesting against the then-impending invasion of Iraq.

It's a shame that those protests didn't happen earlier -- imagine if they happened before Congress gave its dubious "authorization" for war in October 2002, for example. It's conceivable at least that Bush would have had a harder time launching the invasion.

But it is more regretful that these protests have not grown; have not continued to include more of the globe and have not become deeper in nature. Quite the contrary, they have atrophied. Over a month ago I was on a program on Pacifica station WBAI's appropriately-named program "Wake Up Call" in New York with leaders from various groups: United for Peace and Justice, International Answer and International Action Center. I challenged them on their non-follow-up on global protests. They all ignored the point. [Listen at the Wake Up Call archive blog.]

As I understand it, one is not supposed to edit their own Wikipedia entry. Today I violated that rule by editing -- starting, really -- the entry on me, which was just a stub. The rub is I crited me:

Criticisms of Husseini

Husseini wrote the article "Follow the Policy: Why So Long for Iraq to Comply?" shortly before the invasion of Iraq. The piece purported to explain why Iraq hadn't complied with the United Nations disarmament demands. It ignored the possibility that Iraq had actually complied. This was the case even though Husseini in other instances had questioned the U.S. government claim that Iraq had not complied.

It felt good, but I of course reserve the right to respond to these allegations.

People being bombed, occupied and oppressed. Would the Prophet Muhammad -- if peace is to be upon him -- do what some of his alleged followers are doing? Would he be upset at how he is depicted -- or how the poor and oppressed are treated? Is peace to come to him with some people, in his name, acting as they do?

And so, people in "the West" can pretend that it's cartoons that Muslims are upset about; not bombings and occupations and oppression.

This global non-dialogue must end. True civilization must begin.

My work at "double you double you double you dot a sea see you are a see why dot oh are gee" has led to this one-page PDF crit of the State of the Union Address. If people can get photocopies made, and have the guts and love to share information with other people they see in the course of a day, we have the tools to build an information infrastructure to foster democracy at the local level. Let the blogosphere hit the grassroots. Samizdat away!