alternative hippopotamus

“What’s lost … by embracing a tyrant who puts his people in prison because of their political beliefs?” he said. “What’s lost is, it’ll send the wrong message. It’ll send a discouraging message to those who wonder whether America will continue to work for the freedom of prisoners. It’ll give great status to those … who have suppressed human rights and human dignity.

Warming to the subject, Bush continued: “Sitting down at the table, having your picture taken with a tyrant such as Raul Castro, for example, lends the status of the office and the status of our country to him. He gains a lot from it by saying, ‘Look at me. I’m now recognized by the president of the United States.’”

Bush, as quoted in Politico

From RFI:

La participation européenne au sein de la Force internationale des Nations-Unies au Liban. Les 25 se réunissent aujourd’hui à Bruxelles pour trouver une réponse commune…

Originally I thought this was an interesting headline in that names that we take as universal, such as the United Nations, are not-so-universal. We see here that it’s rendered as Nations-Unies. The acronym “the UN”, however, is rendered as “l’ONU”.

Note also that while the foreign press uses the acronym FINUL (Force internationale des Nations-Unies au Liban) as a proper name, the english-speaking press just uses the more generic “UN peace-keeping force”.

Nouns: La participation (the participation), aujourd’hui (today), une réponse (an answer).

Verbs: réunissent (they meet), trouver (to find).

One thing that becomes apparent as you look at the nouns used in journalism, as opposed to what we’re taught in introductory French classes, is that the former are almost all abstract nouns, whereas the latter are mostly concrete nouns.

I noticed this bit from yesterday’s Democracy Now inteview with Seymour Hersh:

There was another element, and you mentioned that in your intro and also in your news report. One of the things that struck me right away, as soon as I saw how Israel was bombing, and my instinct told me there was something there, because in one of the Air Force plans that I knew about but didn’t write about, one of the Air Force options for taking out Iran was, of course, shock and awe, a massive, massive bombing well beyond any of the nuclear facilities. Go hit the country hard for 36 hours, drive people into underground bunkers. Don’t target civilians, necessarily, but hit their infrastructure, hit the roads, hit the power plants, hit the water facilities.

And so, when they come out of their bunkers after 36 hours, they look around. In the American neo-con view, they were going to say to each other, “Oh, my god, the mullahs did this to us, the religious mullahs who run the country. We’re going to overthrow them and install a secular government.” That was the thinking for the last year. That is the thinking for the last year inside some elements of the Pentagon, the civilian side, and also in Cheney’s shop.

The larger point Hersh is making is that recent events in Lebanon have been on the drawing board for some time, and had already been “blessed” by the Pentagon. But I’d like to focus on the smaller point, what Hersh understands is the Pentagon’s view of the Middle East mindset, or at least the neo-con portion of the Pentagon.

Particularly, how a typical citizen in Lebanon, or for that matter Iran, would respond to being bombed.

Of all the cause-and-effect analyses that a bombed-out civilian might have, that he should find the mullahs to be the source of his troubles would rank dead last. I know the more extreme bloggers on the right like to use the phrase “blame America first” to describe their nemeses on the left. But to have no understanding of US culpability, to completely ignore the likelihood that the US would be blamed first can only be sourced in willful ignorance of history.

One of the great privileges of living in our Nation’s capitol is being able to bike through the downtown area. Today I took a long loop, down Porter Street out to the McMillan reservoir. Then down 7th St to U, down 11th St to the Capitol City Brewery, where I perused today’s papers and blog posts over a Hefeweizen.

I’ll pause here for a second to note that it’s thanks to my Palm T/X that I can do this. The Washington Post, NYT, Le Monde, TPM, Factesque, The Sideshow, Brad Delong’s blog, and much more are all at my fingertips. It deserves its own post, but I’ll just say now that the Palm T/X is an iPod for people who like to read.

If I had to single out the most important thing I read today, it would probably be an interview from Frontline’s archives on Pakistan.

I mention this for two reasons: first, we tend to neglect any discussion of Pakistan until something big like the plot uncovered by MI5 comes to light. Second, you might not be aware, I wasn’t until very recently, that Frontline will post material from its archives based on the events of the day. It’s a very handy resource. Check it out.

Back to Pakistan. Before the invasion of Iraq, Mary Anne Weaver, foreign correspond for the New Yorker presciently noted this:

Our war against terrorism is largely perceived in the Muslim world as a war against Islam. Al Qaeda gains strength every day when we seem to be coming closer and closer to war with Iraq, and I think that the day the first American bomb falls on Baghdad you’re going to see hundreds, if not thousands, of potential Osama bin Ladens joining militant Islamist movements across the Muslim world.

I found this significant, as there were reporters well in the mainstream that understood what would be the likely consequences of an Iraq invasion. While Bush, Cheney, Lieberman, et al might try to make the case that Iraq is the front of our War on Terrorism, too often the alternative hypothesis is dismissed. The pre-emptive invasion and continued occupation of Iraq is a principle cause of recent events.

There are older events vis-a-vis our relationship with Pakistan that bear significantly on what we call the “War on Terror” (I’m not a fan of that expression). Again from the Frontline interview:

And this is one of the ironies of the militant Islamist movement today, the fact that the vast majority of its leaders were funded, armed, and trained on the battlefields of Afghanistan 20 years ago by the United States. And now, in a sense, they’ve begun returning home. They were driven out of Afghanistan by the United States bombing campaign after Sept. 11, and they’ve come home to Pakistan. Of course, many of them have gone back to Saudi Arabia and Yemen, or to the West Bank and Gaza, or to Egypt, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia generally, but huge numbers have returned to Pakistan. Because this is where it all began.

And at this point, you have at least 128 military training camps dotting the mountains and valleys of Pakistan. More than 1,000 young men pass through them each year, joining the ranks of some 60,000 to 100,000 Islamic militants who have fought or trained in Afghanistan and then, well-armed, have returned home to Pakistan.

Just kidding. No, really, she’s one of the hackiest I’ve seen. Her, and her army of flying monkeys.

Today, for instance, she goes after Kofi Annan, telling us that his “smear against Israel is threatening to ‘unravel.’” I’m not sure what “unravel” in quotes means in this context, unless her audience takes things so literally that they’d believe that Kofi Annan’s threads were coming undone. It’s Malkin, so who knows.

Anyway, I think it’s interesting she quotes the remarkably fictitious New York Sun, but misses what her home town paper has to say: (Washington Post)

Also Wednesday, U.N. officials repeated statements that an Israeli air attack that killed four of its border security monitors Tuesday appeared to be deliberate. U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland, concluding a six-day mission that took him to Lebanon, Israel and the Gaza Strip, said in Jerusalem that “precision munitions” had landed a direct hit on the U.N. post, despite repeated requests from the U.N. mission in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, to stop firing.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, U.N. officials in Jerusalem said UNIFIL commanders made 10 calls to Israeli military officers Tuesday over six hours, asking that repeated shelling near the compound be halted. In each case, an official said, Israeli officers gave assurances that it would be.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in a statement that he had expressed “deep regret” over the incident to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, but called it “inconceivable” that the attack was intentional.

The word “inconceivable” does indeed believe in quotes, not just because it was spoken aloud, but because it is believable, much less conceivable, that some degree of intentionality was involved, particularly given the rest of the quote.