June 25, 2006

Understanding the al-Qaida hierarchy

How did Abu Musab al Zar-qawi go, in a matter of weeks, from a fool fumbling with a machine gun he didn’t know how to use, to the supreme leader of everything that is un-holy in Iraq and beyond?

Simple.

We put a $25 million bounty on Musab’s head, he had a cool name, and we caught him nap-ping and blew up his house with two 500-pound bombs right in the middle of the run-up to our mid-term elections. Most of all, he went from dufus to Ghengis because it was good timing and good politics.

The best thing that has come from his killing is that at least now we have the whole al Qaida in Iraq hierarchy thing straightened out.

It goes like this I think. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a fat guy with a beard, who, if not in per-son at least through pen pal status, knew Osama bin Laden, was signified by Colin Powell, in his dog-and-pony show for the benefit of Congress and the American people during the lead up to the Iraq war, as being a key al-Qaida operative.

It didn’t matter then that he was not actually part of al-Qaida and wouldn’t be for years to come. It didn’t matter later that he was in charge of only a very small fraction of the in-surgents in Iraq.

He was signified, and we put a bounty on his head, which made him a big deal.

So Al — I like to call him Al. Actually I like to call them all Al — So Al then went on TV, since our bounty also made him important to Al-Jazeera, and took credit for killings he may or may not have had anything to do with, and we started hear-ing his name more and more often.

Pretty soon, CNN’s talking heads even started outwardly showing a modicum of weird pride in the fact that they could pronounce his name, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It had a rhythm, a meter, it rolled off the tongue — “On the shores of Gitchee-Goomie; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,” yes, by all that’s holy, it is iambic penameter. No wonder it caught on.

Then, less than a month ago, we started seeing video clips of Big Al firing a machine gun to prove how in touch he was with the daily operation of the in-surgency.

Then, a few days later, we got the out-takes and he looked less like a fierce foreign fighter and more like Mike Dukakis in a tank, or George Bush in a jet, or even a new addition to Mad Magazine, Abu Musab al-Newman.

As he fumbled and swore at his machine gun until a lesser person, probably Private Al, stepped in and fixed it for him and let the taping go on, we were systematically told through voice-overs how inef-fectual and insignificant the man was.

We all marveled at his stu-pidity and incompetence, and realized it was al-Qaida itself that was our problem, the leader was just a PR front man.

A handful of days later it was announced that we had killed him — “the top man in al-Qaida Iraq.”

We were immediately told that his death would not com-pletely stop the insurgency, but that it was a big deal, a very big deal.

In effect we were told, like in a line from the Three Stooges, “Bottom man has become top man and then has become bot-tom man again.”

We heard about it first on all the early morning talk shows and news digests. Only later did we find out that the White House knew about his death at 3:45 p.m. the day before. So, I guess they just wanted to hold it for the morning news so it would get better play.

So anyway, the al-Qaida hi-erarchy thing: Here is how it stands.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is re-placed by Abu Ayyub al-Masri who is also called Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, but some sources say he might actually by Abdul-lah bin Rashid al-Baghdadi.

Al replaces Al, but might ac-tually be Al.

Who cares?

The real problem is we can’t tell who is more dangerous to the country of Iraq, the insur-gency or the new Iraqi govern-ment.

And I can’t help thinking, Why don’t we have cool names like this for our own dolts?

We could call George Bush Abu Dubyu al-Finito, and Dick Cheney could be Dodo Shoot Shoot Cause a Boo Boo.

Then, anytime we got tired of them we could just replace them with some guy named Al without missing a step.

That is, of course, as long as it’s not al-Gore.

John Hourihan is wire editor of the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6207 or via e-mail at jhourihan@ctpost.com.

Posted by todd on 6:20 PM | Comments (5)

May 29, 2006

A look back through rose-colored sun glasses

An “oldies station” graced my ride to work last week with “Jamie’s Got a Gun” by Aeros-mith, and I had to laugh.

It wasn’t because Joe Perry’s mother, Mary, was my gym teacher in high school and Joe was a little kid who hung out at times with my kid brother. It was more because the ageless guitarist is younger than I am, and I have a hard time accept-ing him as someone whose mu-sic is considered oldies.

The past for me is the ’60s and ’70s, and oldies are from the ’50s and have the words “Shing- a-ling” and “Doo-wop-doo-wadda-wadda” in the lyrics.

The past was so much better I thought as I passed through Shelton on Route 8.

Don’t we all notice that when we look back?

It was a simpler time, more easy going. Not as hard.

Remember when a mile-a-minute was fast? Boy, back then we were cooking with gas and everything was just hun-key dorey. Not like today at all.

We could hear the news at 6 and see the “film at 11.” And TV went off the air sometimes, on purpose, like every day.

There were only two kinds of coffee — hot and cold. Immi-grants meant us, and aliens were on Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon and in Terry and the Pirates.

Milk came from contented cows, not mad ones, and Won-der Bread built strong bodies eight ways instead of the puffed up 12 we have now.

The only person we knew from Iraq was Ali Babba and his 40 thieves, and The Sheik was an old silent movie. We liked Ike, not Mike, but we didn’t like his sniveling VP. The big war was over and eve-ryone had a job.

Then my reminiscing burped.

We also had “Machine-Gunner Joe” McCarthy and his communist hunt in the name of national defense, and we all learned how to duck and cover while our parents built fallout shelters that wouldn’t have worked if we needed them.

Black people and women had few rights and fewer job oppor-tunities. And worker strikes were stopped with military force.

There were fewer divorces because even an abusive hus-band with a paycheck was bet-ter for a woman than being os-tracized by her town and having little or no government assistance to turn to.

And, of course, there was Korea, in case you forgot, and tensions in the Middle East.

But how about those ’60s and ’70s I thought.

Now there was a time.

There was free love and Ne-hru jackets, bell-bottoms and mini-skirts. (They invented mini-skirts when I was in Viet-nam, and I thought it was just part of my welcome home. Man, I loved mini-skirts).

We had Phil Ochs and “I Ain’t Marchin’ Any More” and Bob Dylan and “The Times They Are A Changin' ” and Janis and Jimi and the Moody Blues.

There was color TV that you could adjust from across the room, and TV dinners to eat while you watched “Bonanza.”

There were plenty of flower-power rallies to go to and meet women, and psychedelics, and 35-cent-a-gallon gas, and bra-burning, and free love. Did I mention free love. Did I men-tion mini-skirts?

Burp.

Of course there was the war in Vietnam and on TV, and we never had to wait until 11 to see the film, and there were meth monsters and speed freaks, and “OD” and “draft number” be-came household words.

There were missiles in Cuba and Nikita’s shoe tirade at the United Nations.

There were assassinations of a president and his brother and the most important man in our civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr.

And there was Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew making a charade out of the Bill of Rights and government ethics in the name of national defense.

And there was the National Guard at Kent State, and the Chicago Democratic Conven-tion and trouble in the Middle East.

Then I was at work in front of my computer screen check-ing the day’s stories on the wire.

There were drugs, ethics breaches by politicians, aliens and immigrants, missiles in Iran, civil rights abuses in the name of national defense, vio-lence in the Middle East, and. of course, war.

I guess things haven’t changed that much. The “good old days,” always look better in retrospect.

But the sad thing that occurs to me as I pore over the wire is that we continue to make the same mistakes, and continue not to learn a damn thing from them.

John Hourihan is wire edi-tor of the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6207 or via e-mail at jhouri-han@ctpost.com

Posted by todd on 6:24 PM | Comments (4)

May 14, 2006

Helping Darfur must be for the right reasons

I guess it’s been a chilly day for the devil.

I figured he’d be ice skating before I would agree with President Bush, but what the president announced May 8, in the name of the American people for the people of Darfur, I agree with whole-heartedly.

With this, we can become the America we are supposed to be, instead of the America we have seemingly become.

Without the “all-the-options-are-on-the-table” threats, we can again be the ideal that was for so long the essence of the United States and help these people without asking anything in return.

The aid the president says we will send, $224 million, is not enough. I hope we send more.

Because, as I think of all the oppressions in history — the Jews, the Tutsis, the Indians, the slaves brought to America, all the oppressed people throughout all times — the people of Darfur have it worse.

It is worse because their oppression comes not from one source but from every source possible under the unrelenting Sudan sun — including part of it being their own fault.

These black farmers are oppressed because of the color of their skin, their non-Muslim religion, and their own lack of knowledge.

They are oppressed because of geography and nature, and because of timing in the world situation.

Ten years ago in Sudan, of which Darfur is a part, seven out of ten had a job, and six out of the seven worked in agriculture. They raised crops and sheep. Unfortunately they planted the same crops year after year in an effort to survive and make a living, which is detrimental to the land. And because of our own cattle/sheep range wars of a few hundred years ago, we know that when sheep graze they leave nothing.

Overcultivation and overgrazing helped the surrounding desert creep across the land squeezing the farmers into a smaller space every year.

And when the annual rainy season arrived, from April to October, it didn’t come as nourishing rain but as a tsunami from the sky, eroding more of the land and allowing the desert to take a bigger bite.

Then the rainfall began to decline and the 110-degree temperatures baked the rest of the life out of the earth.

To add to their bad luck, their natural resources are iron ore, copper, chromium, zinc, tungsten, mica, silver, gold and (you guessed it) petroleum.

In 1999, the government of Sudan made its top priority the development of its oil fields, some of which were populated by farm villages.

With the desert coming from one direction and the government projects from the other, the people of Darfur crowded into their villages, tended their animals, and planted their meager crops.

They hunted for food, and now, overhunting killed off the wildlife.

They were weak and out of hope, but because they still had water, they became a target.

They were also targeted for their color, their religion, and everyone wanted their land for one reason or another.

In attempts to drive them out, rebels calling themselves the Janjaweed, attacked.

Villages were burned and the people were raped, mutilated, branded, murdered, their water was poisoned and crops wasted.

And all their oppressors wanted was for them to be gone or dead.

The government assisted the rebels, possibly in the hopes that the land would be freed up for oil projects.

About 200,000 of the people of Darfur have been killed, slaughtered for trying to defend their villages. Wasted for trying to stay alive. And 2 million to 4 million have been forced from their homes into camps.

And they aren’t even safe in the camps where nightly raids kill handfuls and the roads outside are gauntlets of death.

They are hungry, thirsty, scared, beaten and trapped.

And the one superpower who usually helps in such situations is tied up in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and fighting terrorism across the world.

What the president did on May 8, I am happy he did in my name.

Now, wouldn’t it be perfect if we could go in, not as just another marauding army, but out of love for fellow human beings?

I know pragmatic people say we should send troops to make sure the aid gets to those who need it, but wouldn’t it cost about the same to just send so much food and water that there is too much for everyone?

Wouldn’t we have less of a problem recruiting other countries to share the cost of sending carrots rather than sticks; butter rather than guns?

And wouldn’t it be perfect if we did it without coveting their undeveloped oil fields?

John Hourihan is wire editor of the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6207 or via e-mail at jhourihan@ctpost.com.

Posted by todd on 6:16 PM | Comments (3)

April 29, 2006

Bin Laden nothing but a 'waste of water'

I remember Friday-night parking lot fights after dances or school games.

And I remember the guys who would stand on the edge of the brawl, hiding in their anonymity, and when no one was looking they would step in, throw a sucker punch, and back off into the crowd to hide again among the girls.

Osama bin Laden reminds me of those little weasels.

The main difference is we didn’t pay much attention to them later when, over a few Pabst Blue Ribbons on the dirt road behind Duffy’s hamburg joint in the dark, they would re-tell their tales of bravado — how they broke some guy’s nose because he didn’t see them coming and couldn’t find them later because they ran and hid.

When they spoke, we didn’t listen. They were the spineless dregs who were usually only kept around for gas money.

Now bin Laden, for reasons beyond my understanding, is a different story.

Every time he crawls out of his cave and burps on tape we highlight it on news radio and news TV, his skinny, bearded face, in pictures taken years ago when he could actually show his face outside the sand storms of Pakistan, is emblazoned on the TV screen and on the front page of newspapers.

As if he matters.

We make him bigger than he is, more important. The only thing important about bin Laden is his eventual capture and punishment. God willing.

It will happen, because some day the guy in the middle of the circle, who has the courage to stand up in plain sight, will see him coming to throw his sucker punch, and that will be the end.

If anyone, especially anyone who is a Muslim, really looks behind what he says, to what he does, they would feel the same about him as we did about our own lightweight sucker-punching vermin who stood outside the circle and only got involved when no one was looking.

He would be an embarrassment.

If you think about it, this 7-foot little man has killed as many good Muslims as he has good Christians or Jews.

His al-Qaida gang has taken responsibility for nearly all the insurgent attacks in Iraq as well as many around the world, including here in the United States. His criminals have killed Muslims in police stations, check points, recruiting offices; at funerals of Iraqi people; at Iraqi restaurants, at Iraqi schools and mosques and playgrounds; and then he calls for a holy war pitting Islam against its enemies.

My question for him is, “Which side would you be on?”

We sure don’t want you on our side, and you are killing off so many of your side that Muslims all over the world, including in the Middle East, have turned on you.

Is this why he is saying let’s go to Sudan?

Is it because the people there haven’t seen him lately for whom he is?

This newest move is tell-tale.

In Sudan, 180,000 people have been killed in a government-backed ethnic cleansing (read that, genocide). These people have been starved to death, made to live in disease and hunger, and when that wasn’t enough to kill them, they were slaughtered by marauding bands of machete-wielding criminals backed by government air power. And all because they are a different religion.

Which side do you think the United Nations is on; which side do you think Butch bin Laden is on?

That’s right, he has stepped into the fight by sending in a few taunts from Pakistan or Afghanistan or wherever he is hiding in his cave eating microwave Pop Tarts and slurping it down with warm yogurt. And then he sits back.

He tells others to go to Iraq, Afghanistan or Sudan, but then stays safely outside the circle, hidden in a hole in the ground, surrounded by his select group of home-boys because he can’t trust anyone else anymore. They have all seen him for what he is, a waste of water.

I think it is time for the American media to see him as he is, too.

For me, I don’t want to hear about this gutless miscreant any more until he is captured, imprisoned or dead.

Until then, do we really have to publicize every self-deluding regurgitation he manages to get onto a videocam like some tourist in the mountains surrounded by his boys who tell him later over a nice goat-meat sandwich on month-old bread, “Boy, you told ‘em, Boss.”

The only thing keeping him alive is the media. He wants us to accommodate him by making his ranting seem important.

If he were worth talking about in public, he would have the guts to come out in public.

But he doesn’t. What’s the matter doesn’t anyone like him anymore?

John Hourihan is wire editor of the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6207 or via
e-mail at jhourihan@ctpost.com.

Posted by todd on 6:10 PM | Comments (3)