May I gently suggest that your reaction to Steyn is really a reaction to Steyn not saying the things he was supposed to have said.
Thus the Jordan refugee camp - a flood of light in the darkness illuminating acres of UN stuff surrounding a few tents of refugees - I thought hilarious. Particularly as the "refugees" wanted to get back to "dangerous" Iraq if the Jordanian border guards would let them.
Also, appealing to me were the UN white SUV's, whose no doubt well-fed occupants were discussing the food plight of the Iraqis in a street lined with stores positively bulging with food.
I'm sure a well-heeled western journalist has no trouble buying things, but the stores would not be offering plenty of goods if there was no-one to buy them. The merchants aren't stupid.
Perhaps, some of the other "journalists" should get off their duffs and see for themselves what it's like outside the information mills in comfy Baghdad.
Then we could confirm, or deny, Steyn's stuff.
I haven't noticed anyone travelling much outside the official venues. Have you read any reports (funny or not) that detailed the everyday life of Iraqis outside the cities?
Yet, you must have to be able to say "His account is totally at variance with everybody's else's accounts."
What other accounts? Other journalists who decided to see for themselves. Others who would be a bit nervous wandering through Saddam's home town? Others who would liken the nervousness as similar to that experienced wandering through some parts of London?
Of course, there is Robert Fisk. Not much fun from him. he's busy with Uday's exploits - then a deadly ambush - "American boots smashing down doors" - anything that is likely to confirm that nothing is any good any more.
If Steyn read Fisk, he wouldn't have gone near Iraq, but fortunately he didn't so he did. Sorry it wasn't what you expected.
Harry
--------------------------------------------------
Keith wrote:
Harry,
At 13:45 05/06/2003 -0700, you wrote:Keith,
I posted it because it was both fun and interesting.
I thought Steyn's sense of humour was fairly sick. In any case, must have driven around Iraq with blinkers. His account is totally at variance with everybody's else's accounts. His account can only be interpreted as mischievous.
I couldn't imagine any of those things you say. I just read about a reporter who entered Iraq in an old jalopy - went East to the outskirts of Baghdad, then north to a couple of cities much in the news.
So, he reported what he saw - which is a little different from many other reports we hear.
So, you prefer to read the opinions of someone sitting a thousand or more miles away, who no doubt gets much of his information from the newspapers.
Well, Max Hastings was not really writing about what was happening in Iraq. He was mainly concerned with the way that Blair committed this country to war, so far without any evidence that we have seen, and the further breakdown in trust that this has engendered. (Incidentally, Max Hastings was a war correspondent for many years before he became the editor of the Daily Telegraph, so he can probably interpret the chaos and cruelties in Iraq that we see on TV more accurately than we can.)
Keith Hudson
Also, not only is he not particularly informative, he also isn't very funny.
Steyn was informative, wasn't he? And he was also funny - at times cuttingly so.
Harry ---------------------------------------------------------------------
Keith wrote:
Harry,
Well, I'm not quite sure what your motive was in quoting Steyn, nor what his was in writing his silly piece, come to think of it. From what we read of his piece one would imagine that no lives were lost at all, neither coalition troops nor Iraqi civilians (most of which died from cluster bombs which both the Americans and the British said beforehand that they would never use).
But anyway, let me quote someone else of far more stature. He is Max Hastings who used to edit the Daily Telegraph for 10-15 years or so and pulled it from old-fashioned right-wingism to somewhere near modern reality. Max Hastings is without doubt one of the respected voices in England today. He's not establishment but the establishment (of the left or the right) take a great deal of notice what he says. What he write below is another nail in Blair's coffin. (Incidentally, one MP today likened the political controversy in England now as similar to Watergate. It just won't go away and it's gradually gaining momentum.)
Here are his opening paragraphs from a piece in yesterday's Sunday Telegraph:
<<<< I WAS SILLY TO TRUST AMERICA
Even by the standards of the Bush Administration, last week was a remarkable one for diplomatic folly. Paul Wolfovitz, the Assistant Defence Secretary, disclosed that the US wilfully exaggerated the threat of weapons of mass destruction, to rally support for an Iraq war. Likewise, Wolfowitz's boss, Donald Rumsfeld, declared that he has little expectation of finding any WMDs. He then launched a new round of sabre-rattling against Iran. So much for the gleeful banner under which President Bush greeted a home-bound American aircraft-carrier crew: "Mission accomplished".
The leading lights of the US Defence Department always made it plain that disarming Saddam was a pretext for regime change in Iraq. Yet that pretext was the basis of a massive American diplomatic offensive. Tony Blair explicitly told the British people that disarming Saddam justified taking Britain to war. That argument was fraudulent.
Some of us, who accepted public and private Whitehall assurances about WMDs, today feel rather silly; Robin Cook [ex British Foreign Secxretary] is crowing, and well he may. He said that WMDs did not exist. He appears to have been right. It is irrelevant that the Allies won the war. The Prime Minister committed British troops and sacrificed British lives on the basis of a deceit, and it stinks.
Meanwhile inside Iraq, it has become irrelevant to criticise the Americans for past failure to anticipate the problems of making the country work. The question is whether they intend to commit resources commensurate with the task, now that the requirement is plain. . . . .
>>>>
At 11:19 02/06/2003 -0700, you wrote:Keith, et al,
Mark Steyn is a humorous commentator on the contemporary scene. He writes for publications in the US, the UK, and Canada. Although, I suppose he is center-right, but he writes for leftist publications as well as others.
This is from the Telegraph, whose lead-in said:
"There's no dysentery or cholera, no sign of a human catastrophe, the roads and medical centres are empty and the countryside charming. Yes, writes Mark Steyn, there's no place like Iraq for a holiday."
He hired a jalopy in Jordan, went across the border as far as the outskirts of Baghdad, then north to places like Kirkuk.
He mentioned
His remarks about the NGO's in their new shining white SUVs trying to find trouble is delightful and funny.
He said:
"I drove as far east as the outskirts of Baghdad and as far north as Kirkuk. I spent a pleasant evening prowling round Saddam's home town of Tikrit, where I detected a frisson of menace in the air, but marginally less than in, say, Stockwell, south London."
After the continuous doom and gloom, it's refreshing to read someone who got in a car and went across the desert to see for himself.
As Steyn said:
"But, when the naysayers started moving on to claim that the whole post-war scene was going disastrously for the Yanks, I honestly didn't know what to make of it. As a general rule of thumb, when two non-government organisations, the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, the BBC and the New York Times agree that the whole powder keg's about to go up, it's a safe bet that things are going swimmingly."
I haven't read Steyn for months, but Junior insisted I should drop everything and read this piece.
It's good. Go to the Telegraph at:
http://tinyurl.com/d6ty
It was a long one, so I changed it to a "Tiny Url".
Harry
**************************************************** Harry Pollard Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 Tel: (818) 352-4141 -- Fax: (818) 353-2242 http://home.attbi.com/~haledward ****************************************************
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