* WMD?

"Powell asserted Sunday on BBC1's Breakfast with Frost. "We will find weapons of mass destruction." Gen. Tommy Franks, head of U.S. Central Command, told Fox News that same day that he has "absolute confidence that there are weapons of mass destruction inside this country." White House Spokesman Ari Fleischer noted last week that "we know Saddam Hussein is there, but we haven't found him yet, either."

Weapons of mass destruction are "what this war was about -- and it is about," Fleischer said.

But none have been found yet.

"When we have something to report, it will duly get reported, of course," Fleischer added Tuesday."



* Robert Fisk seems to be reporting from Iraq daily these days. Today's piece illustrating how plainly obvious the whole thing actually is.

"It casts an interesting reflection on America's supposed war aims. Anxious to "liberate" Iraq, it allows its people to destroy the infrastructure of government as well as the private property of Saddam's henchmen. Americans insist that the oil ministry is a vital part of Iraq's inheritance, that the oilfields are to be held in trust "for the Iraqi people". But is the Ministry of Trade relit yesterday by an enterprising arsonist not vital to the future of Iraq? Are the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Irrigation still burning fiercely not of critical importance to the next government?"



* Whilst Kagan, assuming him to be a propagandist, can be excused for alterior motives, Paul Berman's 'Terror and Liberalism' tops it all. This quite amusing review of 'the latest pile of wank' demonstrates reactionary irrationality of the 'definitive and final world order' sort. Best bit obviously:

"After the Indochina war, Berman writes, Chomsky had no way to explain the atrocities in Cambodia. He therefore set out, basing himself on his "customary blizzard of... obscure sources" (an ungracious remark, this, coming from the author of so lightly documented and empirically thin a book as Terror and Liberalism), to demonstrate that "in Indochina, despite everything published in the newspapers...that genocide never occurred," or if it did, was all America's fault.

What Chomsky and Edward Herman actually set out to do in The Political Economy of Human Rights was to show how differently the crimes of official enemies are treated in mainstream American media and scholarship than are those of official allies or of America itself. Accepting without argument the existence of "substantial and often gruesome atrocities" in postwar Cambodia, Chomsky and Herman reviewed the sources uncritically relied on in the mainstream, showed how inferior they were to sources that told a less convenient story and pointed out that equally credible sources that told of roughly equivalent atrocities within the American sphere of influence (for example, Indonesia's in East Timor) were generally ignored. Not the one-dimensional soundbite Berman alleges. But he is hardly alone in misrepresenting The Political Economy of Human Rights. Dealing fairly with the book's argument requires a modicum of discrimination, attention to detail and polemical scruple, courtesies rarely accorded Chomsky by his critics.

After 9/11, Berman continues, Chomsky was similarly doctrinaire and deluded. He found the "entirely predictable" attacks by Al Qaeda "the reply of oppressed people from the Third World to centuries of American depredations." Chomsky, Berman scoffs, "had no basis at all," in his ridiculous bestseller 9/11, "to attribute these centuries of Third World motivation to bin Laden."

No; but then, he didn't. The "terrorist atrocities," Chomsky noted in 9/11, were "a gift to the harshest and most repressive elements on all sides." The likely perpetrators were "extreme Islamic fundamentalists," "murderous...religious elements" who "for 20 years have caused great harm to the poor and oppressed people of [the Middle East]"; not surprisingly, since the latter are "not [their] concern." Al Qaeda has "little concern for globalization and cultural hegemony," and bin Laden himself "knows virtually nothing of the world and doesn't care to." There is not a word in 9/11 ascribing Third Worldist political motivations to bin Laden or Al Qaeda. Berman had no basis at all to attribute this absurd misreading of their motives to Chomsky.

In ten pages, Berman manages to make more, and more serious, errors of fact and logic than Chomsky has made in 10,000. An impressive performance."