Peter Krupa

I’m usually not one to dump on Europeans for kowtowing to extremism, etcetera, but this latest move by the Italians seems like a particularly bad one: They’ve swapped five Taliban prisoners in Afghanistan for a journalist hostage.

“We think that the life of a person is very precious,” said Mr. Prodi’s spokesman, Silvio Sircana, who is also a friend of Mr. Mastrogiacomo’s. “So if there is a chance to save a life, we must do all we can do. And this was our very simple line, and not anything more.”

Meanwhile, Ustad Yasir, one of the Taliban prisoners released, has stated that “he would return immediately to war, and was ‘grabbing two rifles to begin jihad again to hunt down invaders and fight nonbelievers.’”

Morally, this feels like some sort of a puzzle from a freshman-level ethics seminar: Is it worth it to save one life now if by doing so you endanger a dozen more later? It’s a fascinating question. For an ethics seminar.

Meanwhile, I certainly wouldn’t want to be an Italian civilian working in Afghanistan right now.

And while we’re on the New Yorker, this week George Packer has an enormous article about the bureaucratic fuck-up that is the U.S. occupation of of Iraq. It defies glib summary, so you should probably just read the whole thing. That guy on the right is an Iraqi interpreter in the employ of the U.S. As you can see, he’s taken pains to conceal his identity. That’s because interpreters are being murdered now, willy-nilly, a fact to which the State Department has been slow to catch on. Visas for Iraqis? Why? Everything is going great!

(I’m actually starting to become ashamed of my country.)

OK! So now, not only does the U.S. hold people indefinitely against their will, use sketchy interrogation techniques, deny them the right to appeal their detention, and subject them to closed hearings, but then those people suddenly and miraculously confess to just about everything!

And the Pentagon waves around a transcript - “See! Look! He confessed!” - which is supposed to… what? Give us a warm, fuzzy faith in American justice?

Whatever the truth of Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s guilt, procedure in getting to it is crucial, and appearance is everything. Right now, we appear more or less like the Soviet Union.

Some poor immigrants take big risks when they come to this country. They cut corners, live on the margins. It’s a deliberate gamble, really. They’re betting that the risk of something really bad happening as a result is worth the higher standard of living and greater opportunities that will be available to their children.

Sometimes, they lose that gamble:

Eight children and an adult were killed, and several other people were injured, in a raging fire that erupted late Wednesday night and engulfed a four-story Bronx home that two immigrant families shared, the Fire Department said.

…

In a news conference in Manhattan this morning, New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the fire appeared to have been caused by a space heater or an overloaded power strip. He said it started in the basement and traveled up the wooden stairs, trapping people on the upper floors. There had been 22 people living in the house, the mayor said.

…

Mamadou Soumare, a taxi driver whose wife and three children died in the fire, stood across the street from the home, staring up at the house.

A father of four, only his daughter, Hassimi, 7, had survived and had been taken to Lincoln Hospital. Of his dead children, two were twins and the other was 4 years old.

“I loved my wife,” he said, opening his cell phone and going through photographs of his family that were stored on the phone.

“There was no fire escape,” he said.

That’s because he didn’t go to Australia just to see the sights like some snott-nosed prole. No siree. He “resolved to spend the next week looking for a meaningful experience of Australian aboriginal culture.” Obviously, Rolf is in touch with the human experience, or Gaia, and he’s not afraid to tell you about it:

I’ve always prided myself on traveling independently in unfamiliar cultures, but joining a guided tour of aboriginal Uluru is something of a necessity: Indigenous people in this part of Australia are famously averse to the notion of random backpackers wandering onto tribal land without a formal welcome, and anthropologists have noted that Aborigines generally prefer busloads of superficial tourists (who buy a lot of souvenirs and are quickly gone) to more earnest seekers, who unwittingly traipse through ceremonial lands, make themselves at home, and ask a lot of intrusive questions.

Because you see, Rolf Potts is not only better than you and your “superficial” family from Phoenix, with your straw hats and fanny packs, he’s better than those “earnest” hippies from Seattle who are taking six months off from studying Foucault to stumble around Australia with a Lonely Planet guide book and some fancy-schmancy tent.

That’s why you should all refrain from traveling - you’ll probably do it wrong. Better to let Rolf Potts do the traveling. He’s better than you.

Two Iraqi soccer players killed in front of their teammates. Eighteen Shittes executed in retaliation for the rape of a Sunni woman. Car bombs, car bombs, car bombs. The thing is, violence like this doesn’t just happen, like a hail storm or something. Someone has to do it. Think about that. For every car bomb or excecution you read about, someone had to say to himself, “Yeah, murdering unarmed people is a good idea.” And so at this point, I think the best plan of action is to get to work on some workable alternative energy plans.

It’s pretty clear by now that the Bush administration is trying to pick a fight with Iran. It’s been building up to it for at least the last six months, and the sabre-rattling has reached an all-time high with the President of the United States standing up before the world and accusing Iran of killing American soldiers with sophisticated and deadly new weapons.

Except that the weapons (EFPs, or Explosively Formed Projectiles) are not particularly new. Neither are the ones being waved around at super-double-secret-probationary press conferences particularly sophisticated: You can make a rough one with a ball-peen hammer, a copper disc, a section of pipe, and a lump of explosives. (Nice picture of the result here.) Also, it’s odd that a majority of the U.S. troops killed with EFPs were most likely killed in Sunni attacks.

Considering all that, it’s a good thing our leader is fearless and confident. “I can say with certainty that the Quds Force, a part of the Iranian government, has provided these sophisticated I.E.D.’s that have harmed our troops,” Bush told the press conference.

Now wait, that’s funny, because if a military was providing sophisticated “I.E.D.’s,” first of all, they wouldn’t be “I,” and second of all, wouldn’t they look something like the devices that have been developed by professional armies?

Because really, if the White House is saying that someone in Iran is shipping pipe segments and copper disks of a certain size into Iraq, that doesn’t seem to warrant a special press conference and unsourced accusations of the Iranian government’s involvement.

Unless, you know, someone wants to pick a fight with Iran.

(My humblest gratitude and props to DefenseTech.org)

I hate it - hate it - when the craziest of left-wing crazies turn out to be right. They would hold up signs at anti-war rallies with a list:

Afghanistan
Iraq
Iran
Syria

And I would think to myself, “No. That would be crazy!” Right?

Right?!?

In the latest lynching… er… hanging carried out by our democratically elected allies in the Iraqi government, one of the criminals had his head yanked clean off. Reuters reports that some “Arabs” are crying foul, while the spokesman for our democratically elected allies in the Iraqi government claims it was “the will of God.”

Actually, as Slate.com’s Explainer explained back in November, they probably just botched their weight-of-prisoner : length-of-rope ratio:

The trick to a successful hanging is to have the victim drop an appropriate distance through a trapdoor before the rope goes taut against his neck. If he drops too far, he’ll have picked up so much speed that the noose might decapitate him. If he doesn’t drop far enough, he could remain conscious as he slowly strangles to death. But if you get the “drop” just right, the knot of the noose will snap against his neck—and either kill him or knock him unconscious.

The last major innovation in hanging occurred toward the end of the 19^th century, when executioners first developed a systematic way to calculate the drop. Once these “drop tables” were published, a hangman knew that he’d need 7 feet for a slight, 120-pound criminal, but only about 4 feet for a 200-pounder.

See? The West is an advanced culture. We figured out a mathematical way to kill a man without popping his head off. Those savages in Iraq could learn something.

We. Cannot. Send. More. Troops. To. Iraq. We don’t have them. We don’t have the money. We don’t have the bodies. We don’t have a mission. There is no defined enemy to fight. There is no defined friend to defend. It would not be a heroic last-ditch effort. It would be heroic last-ditch stupidity. There was no glory in the Charge of the Light Brigade. There was no glory in Pickett’s Charge. There was no glory in any of the battles of the Somme. There were, however, a lot of dead soldiers, and a lot of live politicians and generals who told us how gloriously the soldiers died.

This is not a game of Risk. You cannot throw your last units into battle, roll the dice for the hell of it, lose, and then go eat ChexMix. Willfully destroying the US military - its equipment, its morale, its soldiers - and accomplishing nothing is not good foreign policy. Neither is going in double-or-nothing when you’re $350 billion in the hole.

Will someone. Please. Stop the insanity.