PhotoDude.com

Thu. May 09, 2002

QuoteLog, 5/10

QuoteLog, 5/10 – "Fresh food is flown in for him twice a weeklobster, shrimp, and fish, lots of lean meat, plenty of dairy products. The shipments are sent first to his nuclear scientists, who x-ray them and test them for radiation and poison. The food is then prepared for him by European-trained chefs, who work under the supervision of al Himaya, Saddam’s personal bodyguards. Each of his more than twenty palaces is fully staffed, and three meals a day are cooked for him at every one; security demands that palaces from which he is absent perform an elaborate pantomime each day, as if he were in residence. Saddam tries to regulate his diet, allotting servings and portions the way he counts out the laps in his pools. For a big man he usually eats little, picking at his meals, often leaving half the food on his plate."

Mark Bowden, The Atlantic

"Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said Tuesday that the world’s Muslims had only themselves to blame for the poverty, misery and violence afflicting much of the Islamic world [...] Muslims spent too much time fighting themselves, neglecting the pursuit of knowledge and creation of wealth, said the Malaysian leader, known for his straight-talking ways. ”If I may be permitted to say, we Muslims and our countries are not very Islamic. We cannot even regard each other as brothers,” he said. ’To be very crude the fate of the Muslims of today is of their own making.’ Mahathir said Muslim education had concentrated too much on religious dogma, neglecting worldly subjects such as science, mathematics and philosophy. The world’s 1.3 billion Muslims needed to arm themselves with knowledge and skills to enrich their countries and defend themselves, he said. ’They missed the Industrial Revolution completely. And now they are going to miss the Information Age,’ said Mahathir, whose country’s economic success is admired in much of the Muslim world."

Reuters

"She never asked to get shot. She was only doing her job, this young photographer from New York, on assignment for The AP, covering what looked like a routine skirmish on the troubled West Bank. She doesn’t even know his name, the Israeli soldier who shot her, although she aims to find out. She has some questions for him. Like, how could he have failed to notice her cameras, her massive lenses and her large backpack? And how could he mistake a 26-year-old, fair-skinned American woman for a rock-throwing Palestinian man? And what exactly was he thinking that Saturday afternoon on the outskirts of Bethlehem when he lifted his M-16, pointed the gun in her direction, placed his finger on the trigger and squeezed? Yola Monakhov would like to know. So 18 months after she was shot and nearly killed, she’s doing what people in her business are trained to do. At midweek, she’s flying back to the scene of the incident [...] Monakhov isn’t the only foreign journalist who has been shot on the West Bank or the Gaza Strip since fighting broke out there 20 months ago. But hers is the only case where the Israeli Army actually felt the need to apologize [...] But she said she would like her shooter to know she’s actually doing pretty well. She’s working again. She’s already had assignments in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. ’I still wear a brace,’ she said. ’I still have a sense of myself as an injured person. I have a dropped foot, but I just started to get a lift to it.’ Her progress, she said, might relieve some of the soldier’s guilt. ’It’s nice to see he hasn’t ruined a life,’ she said. ’He only took a chunk out of it. He might like to know that.’ "

Ellis Henican, Newsday

"Once, speaking with my father about his experiences as an infantry battalion commander in World War II, I asked him how he handled the problem of clearing towns and villages during the Allies’ sweep across Germany in 1945. ’Well,’ he replied, ’in my division we had a standard procedure. We’d send in a patrol and demand the town’s surrender. If the patrol took fire, we’d pull back and let the artillery blow the town to smithereens.’ [...] As our ability to detect and strike targets from remote distances grows, so also does an enemy’s incentive to respond by locating his military forces in cities, where concealment and protection are easier and where Western scruples about avoiding civilian casualties and damage can most easily and ruthlessly be exploited. Just such a pattern already has been visible from Chechnya to the West Bank. In each case, fighting has centered on urban areas, not because the attacker preferred it—few military commanders do—but rather because that’s where the enemy chose to defend [...] But before aiming our moral outrage at the attacker, currently the Israelis, it is worth asking what moral responsibility attaches to a defender who chooses deliberately to fight in densely populated urban areas shielded by his own noncombatants [...] As Jerome Marcus, a former State Department attorney, pointed out in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, the Geneva Convention specifically requires combatants to avoid locating military objectives in or near population centers. An armed force choosing deliberately to violate that injunction forfeits any claim to moral outrage about the consequences [...] Despite antiseptic videos of smart bombs flying into bunkers—indeed, partly because of them—war in the future is much more likely to look like the West Bank than Afghanistan. The greater America’s military supremacy, the more likely that future enemies will seek to win, through deliberate and cynical manipulation of civilian casualties and damage, political victories they are incapable of winning by force of arms."

Richard Hart Sinnreich, Washington Post