QuoteLog

“It may be fun to be snotty, but fun is for children. If your goal is to win, then you build coalitions wherever you can find people who mostly agree with you, and you do your best to keep from driving them away.”

“Everyone tries to get along with Atrios, Kos and Drum on the left-side of the blogosphere. I certainly have. We e-mail them about stories we think they might be interested in and slip in some obeisance while we’re at it hoping for a link and increased exposure. It’s not much different, I’m sure, on the Right with Reynolds and Volokh. Offend Atrios and you’ll not only lose any chance of a link and readership coming from him, but maybe some other progressive bloggers in his sphere of influence.”

“I am not yet convinced that President Bush manufactured evidence for their existence as a pretext for war. But I do believe that he has fostered a White House culture that contributes to error with a stifled internal debate, a decision-making process that seems to short circuit research and analysis, and an obsession with loyalty and secrecy that makes the Nixon White House appear as a model of openness and transparency.”

“When the little kid who hung out at our C-MOC pointed out the two people who’d paid him to run up and down the street waving pictures of Saddam, those two people were identified as the local Al Jazeera Correspondants by our boss. Those same two people then later paid people to incite a riot - intended to cause American Soldiers to shoot up civilians - during a demonstration at our gate.”

“The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.”

“[Bin Laden] tried to make a peace deal. When terrorism happens, you will only have yourselves to blame.”

“I cannot say we’re not aware that you are going through your seasonal tribal warfare now, so it’s very dangerous to open one’s mouth here on any issue.”

“When the Saudi people finally rise up in revolt and throw out the House of Saud, it won’t be for democratic reform, and it won’t be for an islamic republic. It’ll be about mobile phones.”

“We tell Kim Jong-Il that if he so much as glances in the direction of anyone remotely associated with Osama bin Laden, including the Pakistani ISI or the ‘government’ of Saudi Arabia, we will make his country look like a jamboree of Osirak reenactors.”

“A tip on how to make your blog popular: position yourself in a place where a bomb might fall on you. Tickles everybody and makes your hits-counter happy. Possibility of death is a downside, but hey! You get linked by A-list bloggers.”

“We’re at a tipping point. The digital print is becoming the look of our time, and it makes the C-print start to look like a tintype.”

“We don’t make a distinction between civilians and non-civilians, innocents and non-innocents. Only between Muslims and unbelievers. And the life of an unbeliever has no value. It has no sanctity.”

“Someday someone will die and the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain problems.”

“They brought in the television cameras the other day to film the execution of an Italian hostage, Fabrizio Quattrocchi, but something went wrong. After forcing him to dig his own grave, they put a hood over his head and ordered him to kneel so he could be killed. He wouldn’t go for it. He tried to remove the hood, and defiantly yelled at them ‘I will show you how an Italian dies.’ The scene was a propaganda disaster for them, and good old al Jazeera, the modern mother of lies, announced that they had the tape but wouldn’t release it because it was too terrible to witness. It was terrible, but not in the way al Jazeera wanted us to think. It showed Western bravery, not Arab domination, so they couldn’t show it.”

“This pretty much confirms my perception of the Administration as having a fundamentally correct worldview, married to a chronic inability to thoroughly and properly execute.”

“It’s worth saying here what we now know the president got wrong - badly wrong. There were never enough troops to occupy Iraq. The war-plan might have been brilliant, but the post-war plan has obviously been a failure. We needed more force and we needed more money sooner. The president has no excuses for not adjusting more quickly to this fact: he was told beforehand; he was told afterward; but he and the Defense Secretary were too pig-headed to change course. I still favor the war; but I cannot excuse the lapses and failures of the administration in the post-war.”

“I just long for the day I wake up and find that the Saudi royal family are swinging from lampposts and they’ve got a proper government that represents the people of Saudi Arabia.”

“The Times’s image as a bastion of quality had become even more important as tabloid television, Britain’s declining newspaper values, and the unsourced ranting of Internet bloggers polluted the journalistic mainstream of the United States.”

“My heart never wanted us in Iraq, and wants us out as soon as possible. But my gut tells me otherwise, mostly because, American that I am, I feel a sense of obligation to a people we set out to rescue and cannot abandon.”

“The abrupt transition to anarchy was a disaster not only for Iraq but also for the United States. Pentagon planners in early May [2003] had predicted that U.S. troop levels would be down to 30,000 by late summer; instead, at Christmas the figure was 130,000 American soldiers in Iraq, with another 30,000 in Kuwait.”

“Al-Qa’ida does not wage wars similar to other wars ... Al-Qa’ida is completely willing to sustain the war for many years ... The war will be won by the side which will be able to bear the pain longer.”

“It’s amazing how the internet is bringing together people who might have not otherwise meet; and there are a hell of a lot of them. It seems the more active you are online, the more people want a moment of your time.”

“There’s certain songs I don’t play anymore, just like there’s certain words I don’t say anymore. It’s not me anymore. Don’t follow me way back there. There’s no more envelope to push. I pushed it off the table. It’s on the floor. Let’s move forward now.”

“I am the striking arm for Hizbullah and Hamas in Iraq because the fate of Iraq and Palestine is the same.”

“In our postwar paranoia about being too brutal in Iraq, we were too lenient - and thus ultimately will probably be more brutal than we would otherwise have had to be.”

“[Richard Clarke] is wrong because most if not all of the terrorism since 9/11 has occurred because al Qaeda and other radical Islamists have an even dimmer view of a free and independent Iraq than they do a free and independent United States. A democracy in Iraq that embraces modernism, pluralism, tolerance and the plebiscite is a greater sacrilege than anything we are doing here at home.”

“I am struck once again by the incomparable hold VIETNAM has over some people. They don’t seem to realize how the use of this inapt example demonstrates their inability to grasp the nature of new and different conflicts. When I was in college, El Salvador was Vietnam. When I was in Washington, Kuwait was Vietnam. Afghanistan was briefly Vietnam when we hadn’t won the war after a week. It’s Warholian: in the future, all conflicts will be Vietnam for 15 minutes.”

“The people that defiled the dead bodies were not technically terrorists, Ba’athists, or insurgents, they were common folk which makes it even more depressing. All respect for humanity has long been lost in a large section of Iraqis. I admit this concept is difficult, if not impossible, to explain to a western audience.”

“They have planned and paved the ways for a long time, but it is God who is the real planner -- and the proof of this is the fall of the American twin towers.”

“Instead of shouting and criticizing the American initiative, you have to bring democracy to your countries, and then there will be no need to fear America or your people. The Arabs should either change or change will be imposed on them from outside.”

“We denounce the mutilation of the American corpses. Islam prohibits that. This is childish behavior committed by ignorants who don’t know the meaning of life and death ... This is a grave mistake that destroys the reputation of Islam and Muslims.”

“In his bloggy rage after being taken to task by a mere non-lawyer, [Lawrence] Lessig demonstrates that he doesn’t really know or care what the public domain really is, apparently blinded by his grand wish that damn near everything be put there [...] Lessig doesn’t care much about protecting intellectual property, but he’s downright monomaniacal about the public domain.”

“The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents.”