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CAVEAT LECTOR [Rick Brookhiser]
Debka.com, a site that Jonah has mentioned before, predicts sandstorms and snowstorms in Iraq; says the allies didn't bring enough troops; foresees a fierce fight for Baghdad. Maybe they are right — in my experience, they are right about half the time — but a word on them is in order.

Debka is the name of an Israeli folk dance. The site comes from Israel, and seems to run the leavings of Israeli intelligence. Some of their items are stuff that was new yesterday, and hence, though true, is no longer vital, and so gets passed on to Debka. Some of it is stuff that an intelligence officer said, "Why are you putting this crap on my desk? Give it to Debka!"

There is also a steady tone of marginally anti-American doomsaying. In the big picture, Debka supports the United States, thought 9/11 was terrorism, etc., etc. But in virtually every specific case, it takes the view that Americans are dumb cattle who don't know what they're doing. I assume this attitude is compounded from 1) the desire for sensationalist copy 2) Israeli arrogance — more common before the intafadas than now, but still sometimes surfacing: only we understand the region, only we know how to fight, and so forth and so on.

Posted at 09:47 PM

('The Corner' in National Review, March 23, 2003)
http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/corner.asp

The decision to kill Saddam Hussein’s two sons Uday and Qusay when they were surrounded in a villa in Mosul - instead of taking them alive - was made by high-ranking officials in Washington to meet the overarching goal of showing the Iraqi people that Saddam Hussein and his like were doomed to be eliminated root and branch from Iraq’s ruling system, never to return.

All they had to do was come out with their hands up, and they would have been taken into custody, and then hung. Which probably explains whey they didn't come out. :) Too bad though, they probably a good idea where Daddy Dearest was or might be in the future.

You Can Call Me Al

A man walks down the street
He says why am I soft in the middle now
Why am I soft in the middle
The rest of my life is so hard
I need a photo-opportunity
I want a shot at redemption
Don’t want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard
Bonedigger bonedigger
Dogs in the moonlight
Far away my well-lit door
Mr. beerbelly beerbelly
Get these mutts away from me
You know I don’t find this stuff amusing anymore

If you’ll be my bodyguard
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you betty
And betty when you call me
You can call me al

A man walks down the street
He says why am I short of attention
Got a short little span of attention
And wo my nights are so long
Where’s my wife and family
What if I die here
Who’ll be my role-model
Now that my role-model is
Gone gone
He ducked back down the alley
With some roly-poly little bat-faced girl
All along along
There were incidents and accidents
There were hints and allegations

If you’ll be my bodyguard
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you betty
And betty when you call me
You can call me al
Call me al

A man walks down the street
It’s a street in a strange world
Maybe it’s the third world
Maybe it’s his first time around
He doesn’t speak the language
He holds no currency
He is a foreign man
He is surrounded by the sound
The sound
Cattle in the marketplace
Scatterlings and orphanages
He looks around, around
He sees angels in the architecture
Spinning in infinity
He says amen! and hallelujah!

If you’ll be my bodyguard
I can be your long lost pal
I can call you betty
And betty when you call me
You can call me al
Call me al