If anybody has doubts about the Blogosphere constituting a serious form of media expression these days, I would point to the Sunday New York Times turning to Iraqi blogs for response on the recent election.

I found the Times’ choice of blogs interesting.

The first blog quoted was: A Star from Mosul, written by “Aunt Najma,” a 17 year old school girl, who has been posting from war-torn Mosul, deep in Sunni Iraq. It is impossible not to like this charming young girl (proud of recently becoming an aunt), who posts fairly regularly concerning the dangers and inconveniences the war has brought to her life. When I began reading her, she was apolitical, but in recent months as the fighting neared her home, her postings became anti-American. Najma reports that a Mufti informed residents of Mosul this time that voting was a religious duty, and Najma’s family responded enthusiastically. Her election post ended on a patriotic note.

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The Times’ second blog was predictable. It was, of course, Riverbend’s Baghdad Burning. Its author describes Baghdad Burning as a “girl blog,” and uses as an epigraph: I’ll meet you ’round the bend my friend, where hearts can heal and souls can mend. But Baghdad Burning consistently features a lot more strident and inflammatory anti-Americanism than it does healing and mending. This one was a dead certain cinch for NYT selection.

Riverbend tells us in the Times:

Many Iraqis went to vote because the current situation is intolerable. It’s not so much with high hopes for drastic change that people went to the polls as it is in the national aspiration of putting an end to the occupation, and to the tyranny of the last year in particular….
In my opinion, elections in Iraq cannot be democratic under a foreign occupation – especially when the election lists were composed largely of the same people who supported the invasion and occupation of Iraq. We are recycling the same names, faces and ideologies of sectarian and ethnic divide.

Even so positive a concession as the admission of a large electoral turnout was reserved by Riverbend for the Times. Baghdad Burning has not been updated with the material appearing in today’s Times, and sits sullenly without new postings since Thursday, December 15, just before the election. Riverbend is refusing to acknowledge the news she doesn’t like, news of the size of the turnout and the election’s success. I used to consider this blog worth a regular look. Its author was obviously a passionate America hater, but I thought the blog worth reading as an effective voice for a particular point of view. This little exercise in self censorship shows just how honest a voice Baghdad Burning really is. Chances are “Riverbend” has a great big, bushy mustache, and is really the nephew of “Baghdad Bob,” aka Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the former Iraqi Minister of Information.

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No. 3 was an Iraqi blog I didn’t know, titled: Eject: Iraqi Konfused Kollege Kid. “The kid himself” brought an apolitical youthful rocker’s perspective to the election:

IRAQ’S first Election Day last January was another Anyday for me. As a so-called Sunni who would rather be identified as “Iraqi,” I wasn’t really into politics… Now, I’m not the kind of person who simply gets up and does whatever his ayatollah tells him to do, but I was rather fed up with all the bad blood that resulted from American-installed sectarian policy, and I felt that voting would restore much-needed balance….I chose List 618 (the so-called Sunni list), not because I want an Islamic government, but to restore the balance between Sunnis and Shiites. I considered the secularist Allawi list (731) for some time, but something told me that guy’s going to win anyway. Besides, Ahmad Radhi, Iraq’s most famous soccer player, is strangely supporting 618.

“The kid himself” is not a high volume blogger. He hasn’t posted since Monday, December 12, and his posts have nothing to say about politics. Way to go, Times, there’s a great job of journalism, really getting the real inside dope on the Iraqi point of view on the election.

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No. 4 was Hassan Karuffa, a civil engineering student, and the author of A Star from Mosul‘s cousin, who writes An Average Iraqi. Hassan, like his cousin, was much more enthusiastic about this election. He does describe some of the electoral slates who were running in a recent posting. Alas! for the Times, Hassan too strikes a positive note:

Looking back at the things we achieved since the war, I feel very proud. Although we hear shootings and bombings every day. We reached this far, and we are going on, on and on to the finish. Yes, I am optimistic about the future. Life in Iraq has been so bad so far, but I see a bright future. I see an Iraq with full-time electricity, full-time water and full-time security.

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Studiously overlooked by the Times were Iraq the Model and Hammorabi, both pro-American, and both far more more widely read, and much more politically substantive than the Times’ choices: three nice kids plus Baghdad Bob’s hairy nephew.

Liberals are not happy. Hat tip to Preaching Politics.

CNN reports that Zarqawi was in the hands of Iraqi Security Forces last year, who let him go:

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — Iraqi security forces caught the most wanted man in the country last year, but released him because they didn’t know who he was, the Iraqi deputy minister of interior said Thursday.

Hussain Kamal confirmed that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — the al Qaeda in Iraq leader who has a $25 million bounty on his head — was in custody at some point last year, but he wouldn’t provide further details.

Israeli Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, former chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Force

asserted that Saddam spirited his chemical weapons out of the country on the eve of the war. “He transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria,” General Yaalon told The New York Sun over dinner in New York on Tuesday night. “No one went to Syria to find it.”

Exactly what we’ve been saying all along.

And some people say there’s nothing good on PJM!

Iowahawk is offering special coverage of the election in Iraq by Special Correspondent Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi:

Yozup, haters? Yeahhh, the Zarkman’s comin’ at ya from B-town, and me and the Q Crew be all up in this bish. Infidel who runs this blog says all y’alls over in Satanland got some big hard-on about this Iraqi election shit, and asked me if I would jack his hit counter with a little local Q Crew flava. Normally Zarkman would tell the tell the punkass bitch to go suck it. But the choads at Pajamas Media are passin’ out the Haterade, so somebody’s gotta give you the Team Z POV.

All who subscribe to the position taken in this “story” are, in this blog’s opinion, too stupid to live.

PJM is going to have a blogfest on trying Saddam tomorrow. We’re utterly and completely opposed to this sort of nonsense. Trials of defeated war opponents are only hypocritical exercises in victor’s justice, and embody the worst kind of wet, liberal impulses in the direction of internationalism and empty formalism. We ought to behave like rational adults.

When we capture an adversary like Saddam, we ought either to decide to be genteel and humane about the whole thing, and exile el supremo to some remote form of permanent imprisonment on a little St. Helena of his own. Or, we should avoid fooling around, and instruct the US commander on the scene to whistle up a drumhead court martial, followed directly by a firing party, as soon as the malefactor falls into US hands. In cases where we have good reason to eliminate a tyrant with extreme prejudice, we should hang him. C’est tout.

What we do these days is all empty ceremony and folderol designed to humbug ourselves into believing that we have become superior superhuman entities, that we are above mere vengeance. Of course, we still desire vengeance, and fully intend to have it, and enjoy it. But we insist on lying to ourselves and the world, and pretending that, so omnipotent is our materialist and bourgeois way of life, that, by us, even vengeance and killing can be rationalized and domesticated.

Popular Mechanics has an interesting article on how US troops are improvising in order to win in Iraq. Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Norman Podhoretz views recent liberal panic over the War in Iraq in Washington and in the MSM, analyses the situation, and concludes:

In Iraq today, however, and in the Middle East as a whole, a successful outcome is staring us in the face. Clearly, then, the panic over Iraq—which expresses itself in increasingly frenzied calls for the withdrawal of our forces—cannot have been caused by the prospect of defeat. On the contrary, my twofold guess is that the real fear behind it is not that we are losing but that we are winning, and that what has catalyzed this fear into a genuine panic is the realization that the chances of pulling off the proverbial feat of snatching an American defeat from the jaws of victory are rapidly running out.

Left-wing author & journalist Robert Dreyfuss published an attack on Porter Goss a few weeks ago (10/Nov/2005) in the liberal American Prospect , which, nonetheless, supplies excellent backgound (and plenty of insider gossip) on the war inside the CIA:

Exactly as intended, Porter Goss has hit the Central Intelligence Agency like a wrecking ball… Since Goss took over, between 30 and 90 senior CIA officials have made their exit, according to various sources, some fleeing into retirement, others taking refuge as consultants. Others, unable to retire, have stayed, but only to mark time at the agency. Morale, already low after several years during which the CIA was accused of a series of intelligence failures related to September 11 and Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, is now at rock-bottom. The agency’s vaunted Near East Division, in particular, which served as the “pointy end of the spear,” as one CIA veteran put it, in simultaneous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the “global war on terror,” has been decimated (sic).

CIA doves were accustomed to looking upon themselves as an enlightened guild of mandarins, the permanent professionals who advised unsophisticated and temporarily-elected executive administrations on the realities of international affairs, of how it really was, and on what was done and not done, old boy. The Bush administration was determined to govern, and the willingness of some of its conservatives to challenge the hegemony of entrenched liberal bureaucracies in the State Department and the CIA was revolutionary. Establishment members of the notoriously liberal CIA mandarinate found themselves being ignored by a bunch of arriviste Republicans, and they were absolutely furious. Like many liberal academics, they had resided for so long in a self-reinforcing community of the like-minded, in which their own viewpoint and prejudices flourished unchallenged, that they firmly believed in their own intellectual superiority and privileged access to objective truth. Unwelcome conservative dissent, particularly dissent arriving from positions of superior authority accompanied by demands for re-evaluations of cherished liberal articles of policy faith were perceived as outside pressure tampering with Agency process :

The partisan, pro-Bush nature of the current regime at the CIA was underlined when Goss issued a widely leaked memorandum telling agency employees to “support the administration and its policies in our work,” adding, “As agency employees we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.”

The import of Goss’ memo to staff was not lost on agency veterans. “The meaning was that from now on, there is only one acceptable view, and that’s the neocon view,” said one. For many it was the final straw, convincing them that there was no hope of salvaging independent analysis.

Goss may have put the final nail in the coffin of an agency whose expertise and analytical skills were cavalierly overridden by a White House obsessed with Saddam Hussein. From 2001 on, its covert operatives and analysts were ignored, pressured, and forced to toe the administration’s line; neoconservative ideologues considered those operatives to be virtually part of the enemy camp. Many of those who remain inside the CIA are distraught, convinced that their work is wasted on an administration that doesn’t want to hear the truth. “How do you think they feel?” asked one recently retired CIA officer with three decades of experience. “They’re watching a ****ing idiotic policy, run by idiots, unfold right before their eyes!”

This outrage at the perceived slighting of professional expertise and interference with analytic process is what has led some very angry CIA officers and analysts to apply their skills and connections as participants in an organized operation aimed at destroying and removing specific adversaries including the Vice President, and at crippling an elected administration.

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Not everyone with a CIA background shares Dreyfuss’ view of the Goss revolution as unmitigated disaster. Melissa Boyle Mahle, a former CIA operations officer and Intelligence author, who has a recently created blog writes:

Goss is doing what George Tenet could not and would not do, shedding the organization of the “old think” that led the Agency into playing it safe in the 1990s. After the Iran-Contra and Ames spying scandals, the Agency lost so much political standing that it began to implode organizationally and philosophically. Afraid to take risks that might offend Washington politicos and European allies after overstepping its legal bounds in the Iran-Contra era, gutted of the clandestine operators who knew how to run secret wars, exhausted from reform whiplash, and demoralized by criticism and poor performance, the CIA simply became unable and unwilling to get down and dirty to do the hard part to fight a real war on terrorism.

The CIA senior leaders today are those who came of age as managers during the 1990s and many unfortunately bring with them the mind-set of caution and political correctness. The culture of the Agency, particularly that of the Directorate of Operations, places a premium on organizational loyalty. The “old boy” network sticks together and resists changes that might alter its collective power and influence. The upheaval at Langley is a direct result of DCI Goss challenging the status quo, breaking some china and hitting the cultural brick wall.

Hat tip to Tom Maguire.

The London Times is reporting that a Belgian woman, who had married a Morrocan and converted to “the religion of Peace,” travelled to Iraq and last month blew herself up in a suicidal act of terrorism.

MIREILLE, who was born in Belgium to a white, middle-class Christian family, blew herself to pieces last month in a suicide attack against American troops near Baghdad.

In one of the most extraordinary tales of Islamic radicalisation, she is thought to be the first white Western woman to carry out a suicide bombing.

Belgian investigators, who arrested 14 people associated with her, are keeping the 38-year-old woman’s true identity secret, but details have started to emerge. She was from the southern Belgian town of Charleroi, married to a Moroccan and converted to an extreme form of Islam.

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Expatica

LeeBert at ApognosiS provides a useful reference collection on Iraqi WMD evidence.