"The law is a ass—a idiot"

So said Mr. Bumble in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist.

That is what I could think of when I read a LA Times news story about this man and a Supreme Court case:

He went to the South as a "freedom rider" in 1961, joining other civil rights activists on behalf of African Americans seeking the right to travel freely on interstate buses. He was arrested, then badly beaten by white cellmates. "When I went to jail in Alabama for violating the Jim Crow laws, they charged me with disturbing the peace," he said.

Guess what? According to the government, this man is a terrorist!

Who is he and why is he a terrorist?

He is Ralph Fertig, a retired judge and USC professor.  The guy turns 80 next week (Happy birthday, Mr. Fertig.)

What did he do?  Hide explosives in his underwear while on a plane?  Nope.

Fertig says he wants no part of terrorism or violence, but rather the freedom to advocate for the rights of the Kurdish minority in Turkey. He is troubled that Kurds can be punished for speaking their own language or displaying their national colors. And he believes the 1st Amendment protects his right to counsel Kurdish leaders to steer away from violence and to take their cause to the United Nations.

"I am opposed to violence. It seems crazy to me that I could go to jail for trying to persuade people to engage in nonviolence," said Fertig, a retired judge and a USC professor of social work.

The State Department has named the Kurdistan Workers Party, or the PKK, as a terrorist organization. The PKK, which seeks an independent state for the Kurds, has been accused of violent attacks on Turkish targets, including civilians.

See, the law is a ass.

BTW, apparently even writing columns in newspapers can warrant a terrorist label:

Government lawyers say [the anti-terrorism law] even forbids filing a legal brief or writing an op-ed essay on behalf of a designated terrorist group.

Great! Now my colleagues will be happy to report to the feds my opinions as terrorist activity in their attempts to oust me:)

Chemical Ali hanged: Remembering the gas attack on the Kurds

"Chemical Ali" is dead, hanged for his atrocious crimes against the Kurds, among his many, many crimes.
The Economist has this piece from its archives; excerpt:

EIGHT years of carnage have not robbed the Gulf war of its capacity to shock. In the middle of March (the exact date is unclear) Iranian soldiers pushed the Iraqi army out of the Kurdish town of Halabja, in the Kurdish part of north-east Iraq. One or two days later (this date, too, is unclear), the Iraqi air force appears to have responded by bombing Halabja with some sort of poisonous gas.
The Iraqis say it was the Iranians who bombed the town, a claim that contradicts the testimony of most survivors. The Kurds say that more than 4,000 people died, a claim difficult to verify. But western reporters and television crews, helicoptered into Halabja by the Iranians, found hundreds of corpses strewn around the town. Most were eerily unwounded, suggesting that they had been the victims of a quick-acting poison agent, possibly one of the nerve gases. Hundreds more victims, in hospitals in Tehran, had ferocious skin burns of the kind caused by mustard gas.

The first of the video clips of this PBS Frontline piece recalls the horrors of the horrendous gas attack that Saddam and Chemical Ali launched on civilian Kurds.  A couple of years ago I showed this in one of my classes, and students could not believe this happened.  Which was when one student asked: "why don't all these suicide bombers go kill all these tyrants instead of killing innocent people?"
Compared to what the Kurds went through, Chemical Ali died pretty painlessly.  I wonder whether he expressed any regrets at all before he died.

Violence in Iraq and Afghanistan

With more than 75 dead in Baghdad bomb blasts, and with violence picking up in Afghanistan, at least Pakistan seems to be a calm place!

Meanwhile, Charles Cooper at CBS writes:

For some reason, this story has not received as much attention as it ought to. Turns out that United States General Ray Odierno and Iraq's leadership are at odds over the timetable for the departure of American forces. How this issue gets resolved is likely to have major implications for both countries and, perhaps, the wider region.

What is the "issue? It all comes down to the Kurdish angle. The Iraqi government is not too keen on any active cooperation between the US forces and the Kurds. The Kurdish situation is an unresolved one through the six years of our presence in Iraq.
Writing in the Independent, Patrick Cockburn observed that the only thing preventing the Kurds and the Arabs from fighting is the presence of US forces.

It is called the "trigger line", a 300-mile long swathe of disputed territory in northern Iraq where Arab and Kurdish soldiers confront each other, and which risks turning into a battlefield. As the world has focused on the US troop withdrawal from Iraq, and the intensifying war in Afghanistan, Arabs and Kurds in Iraq have been getting closer to an all out war over control of the oil-rich lands stretching from the borders of Syria in the west to Iran in the east.
....
President Barack Obama's administration is alarmed by the prospect of Iraq splitting apart just as the US pulls its troops out. But Washington can also see the danger of becoming more deeply enmeshed in the Arab-Kurdish conflict, which kept northern Iraq ablaze for much of the last century. US withdrawal also frightens the Kurds, the one Iraqi community that supported the US-led invasion. They can see the political and military balance is swinging against them just as they are faced by Mr Maliki's rejuvenated Iraqi government commanding the increasingly confident 600,000-strong Iraqi security forces. A report by the International Crisis Group concluded recently that "without the glue that US troops have provided, Iraq's political actors are otherwise likely to fight all along the trigger line following a withdrawal, emboldened by a sense that they can prevail, if necessary, with outside help."

So, other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

It’s Time for the US to Declare Victory and Go Home

That is the bottom line from Col. Timothy Reese:

The general lack of progress in essential services and good governance is now so broad that it ought to be clear that we no longer are moving the Iraqis “forward.” Below is an outline of the information on which I base this assessment:

1. The ineffectiveness and corruption of GOI Ministries is the stuff of legend.
2. The anti-corruption drive is little more than a campaign tool for Maliki
3. The GOI is failing to take rational steps to improve its electrical infrastructure and to improve their oil exploration, production and exports.
4. There is no progress towards resolving the Kirkuk situation.
5. Sunni Reconciliation is at best at a standstill and probably going backwards.
6. Sons of Iraq (SOI) or Sahwa transition to ISF and GOI civil service is not happening, and SOI monthly paydays continue to fall further behind.
7. The Kurdish situation continues to fester.
8. Political violence and intimidation is rampant in the civilian community as well as military and legal institutions.
9. The Vice President received a rather cool reception this past weekend and was publicly told that the internal affairs of Iraq are none of the US’s business.

Yes, please bring them home.
And, more importantly, please do not keep sending more to Afghanistan.

How fast will Iraq unravel?

The first bombing has happened after the US forces pulled out of the cities. How much ever I want to be optimistic about Iraq, I find it terribly troubling to think about that mess. Thomas Ricks has clearly articulated the reasons why I have been, and continue to be, troubled:

My worry is that I don't see the political situation as being much different than it has in the past. Nothing much has changed from the previous rush to failures. As readers of this blog have seen me say before: the surge succeeded tactically but failed strategically. That is, as planned, it created a breathing space in which a political breakthrough might occur. But Iraqi leaders, for whatever reason, didn't take advantage of that space, and no breakthrough occurred. All the basic issues that faced Iraq before the surge are still hanging out there: How to share oil revenue? What is the power relationship between Shia, Sunni and Kurd? Who holds power inside the Shiite community? What is the role of Iran, the biggest winner in this war so far? And will Iraq have a strong central government or be a loose confederation? And what happens when all the refugees outside the country and those displaced inside it, who I think are majority Sunni, try to go back to their old houses, now largely occupied by Shiites and protected by Shiite militias?

A secondary issue is how Iraqi forces will behave once they are operating without American forces watching them. There are a lot of "Little Saddams" in Iraq. That didn't used to be our problem-but now these guys have been trained, equipped and empowered by us.

I hope I am wrong, and that Iraq really is embarking on a new course this week. But I don't think so. So I think the real question now is: How fast will the unraveling occur?

I really wish George Carlin were alive and well enough to do his blunt comedy routines that are the most truthful ones on any situation. I remember how he satirized war as sex and rape--that even the terms we use are that way. I blogged about this earlier too ....