A friend on Twitter–aptly screen named Newsjunkie365–asked me for my thoughts on the weeklong blog frenzy sparked by two writers from The New Yorker who aren’t enthralled by Twitter. One is Steve Coll, the other George Packer(who I discussed, in a brief yet negative fashion, a couple of months back.)

Already, I’m coming unconscionably late to the smack down–very un-Twitter like of me. It started a whole seven days ago. However, The Atlantic blogged about it yesterday, which gives me an excuse.

The discussion follows the typical parameters we’ve come to expect from this kind of “debate:” New Media technology X enters marketplace, Old Media types whine about the kids these days. continue »

Okay, so I have spent the last two days traveling from one part of the world to another, leaving me in a state of jet lagged mush. That being said, regular blogging will resume this week, as my self-imposed vacation has been lifted.

And what do I find in the newsprint?

After I had rather rashly declared democracy in Iraq “dead” (at least in the headline–if you read closely you’ll see there’s a caveat taking into consideration just such a development) the government, according to the NYT, has “staggered toward a resolution of its election crisis on Sunday as the country’s leaders gave an appeals court time to reconsider a ban on hundreds of candidates barred from next month’s election because of alleged links to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.”

It appears they’ve done the time honored Iraqi tradition with tough political issues, and kicked the can down the road. The ban of the 500 candidates, it seems, will be reviewed after the election. How this “sweep it under the rug” move will work in practice is anybody’s guess.

In other words, the crisis might be resolved, or it might be about to get worse. Per the NYT:

But the fate of some of the most prominent candidates accused of having Baathist ties remains unresolved, and the crisis could still worsen.

More importantly, this highlights the rather unusual relationship that the U.S. will have with Iraq in the year ahead. While at the same time  claiming that Iraq is a sovereign country, Americans are still mucking about in its government process in a pretty signifcant way. In this case, Prime Minister Maliki’s people haven’t been too appreciative of it, accusing the U.S. of  ”interfering in Iraq’s internal affairs by trying to put pressure on the judiciary to reinstate the candidates.”

Blogging live from New Delhi, India. Ergo, reading The Times of India, which published an interesting piece from Brahama Chellaney on Obama’s Afghan strategy called “Surge, Bribe, and Run.”

The writer, with candor we don’t often see in the U.S. press, states pretty clearly aim of the Afghan surge strategy–that it’s “designed…not to militarily rout the Afghan Taliban but to strike a political deal with the enemy from a position of strength. Without a deal with Taliban commanders, the US cannot execute the ‘run’ part.”

Ie, we’re fighting and dying not for victory, not even to kill terrorists, but to help Hamid Karzai consoldiate his power so he can cut a deal with our temporary enemies. These enemies, so the wishful thinking goes, will then reject extremism and start to help us in our fight against Al Qaeda.

Chellaney also weighs in on what the long term prospects of success for this strategy. I’m quoting at length.

Obama’s Afghan strategy should be viewed as a short-sighted strategy intent on repeating the very mistakes of American policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past three decades that have come to haunt US security and that of the rest of the free world. Washington is showing it has learnt no lesson from its past policies that gave rise to Frankenstein’s monsters like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar and to “the state within the Pakistani state”, the ISI, made powerful during Ronald Reagan’s presidency as a conduit of covert US aid for anti-Soviet Afghan guerrillas.

To justify the planned Faustian bargain with the Taliban, the Obama team is drawing a specious distinction between al-Qaeda and the Taliban and illusorily seeking to differentiate between “moderate” Taliban (the ‘good’ terrorists) and those that rebuff deal-making (the ‘bad’ terrorists). The scourge of transnational terrorism cannot be stemmed if such specious distinctions are drawn and the security interests of the world’s most populous democracy, which confronts a tyranny of geography, are ignored. India, on the frontline of the global fight against transnational terrorism, will bear the brunt of the blowback of Obama’s Af-Pak strategy, just as it came under terrorist siege as a consequence of the Reagan-era US policies in that belt.

The Taliban, al-Qaeda and groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba are a difficult-to-separate mix of soulmates who together constitute the global jihad syndicate. To cut a deal with any constituent of this syndicate will only bring more international terrorism. A stable Afghanistan cannot emerge without dismantling the Pakistani military’s sanctuaries and sustenance infrastructure for the Afghan Taliban. Instead of seeking to achieve that, the US is actually partnering the Pakistani military to win over the Taliban.

This one is a downer, but wanted to highlight a post from Stephen Farrell, a moving account of an Iraqi man who worked with him in Iraq, a driver named Yasser. Yasser, who worked for the Times of London, was killed outside the Hamra Hotel. The post gets at the numbness of death tolls that appear everyday in the headlines, which become emotionally disassociated with the human beings who make up the tallies. It’s also about the Iraqi men and women who work for Westerners in Iraq, particularly journalists-they’ve really born the brunt of the violence targeting the media.

As Americans, we have viewed the “sacrifices” the war primarily through the loss of American troops. This is normal, and there are a number of culutural reasons for it. We sort of worshipfully fetishize the military in some ways, infantalize them in others, and our pat discourse of bravery and heroism often misses a much larger point: it’s Iraqi civilians who have taken on the majority of suffering in this war, and though the costs to Americans has been horrific as well, Iraqi deaths are often spoken of as an afterthought.  

So, here’s Stephen Farrell on the under reported courage of the innocent, describing how Yasser once saved his life.

Another time I was heading home from the Green Zone at the end of the day when a car filled with gunmen pulled in behind us near the Palestine Hotel. Yasser inserted his own car between ours and theirs and slammed on the brakes.

No one expected him to do that; no one would have asked him to do that. As our car hurtled off the gunmen turned on him, chasing his car along Abu Nuwas Street for the best part of half an hour while he desperately shouted a commentary to us into a cellphone that was flying about on the floor of the car, because he needed both his hands on the wheel.

It was an act of unbelievable bravery. It was not done for a salary, or to keep a job or because he somehow feared death less or welcomed it more than any of us. It was done because he was Yasser, because those were his values. And that day he eventually made it back to the safety — safety — of the Hamra Hotel. 

A few readers mentioned that my last post sounded a bit “bitter” and “angry.” That’s certainly possible–it’s perhaps why I’m about to embark on a mini-vacation. I’ve been traveling for the past 48 hours, and will be traveling for the next 72, so I won’t have another post until Monday or Tuesday. But, going forward, I promise to find the silver lining in every atrocity, the upside to each reported injustice. 

Thanks also to the readers(especially Mark, Jaime, Vickie, and Kim) for sharing their (satirical!) waterboard top three. Joe Lieberman was the hands down winner–btw, I saw him at a press conference the other day in Baghdad, and I can sympathize with that pick–with my buddy Don Rumsfeld a close second. 

 So say we all.