RIDE ON, KING JESUS

The Times-Picayune continues with great coverage from their city. Lolis Eric Elie wrote this vivid column tonight:

JoNell Kennedy’s grandmother is one of those old women who is still proudly and defiantly in command of her faculties. You aren’t going to tell her what to do or what to think.

There’s something endearing about seeing such a spirit in someone whose body nonetheless has lost much of its strength and whose gait has lost much of its pep.

Until Monday, I had hoped one day to be one of those people. I wanted to be like Clothilde Martha Crowley Nicholas. But so much has changed since then.

Nichols lives in the flood-prone area near Dillard University. She refused to evacuate for Katrina, even after hearing of all the devastation that the hurricane was expected to bring about.

I can hear her words in my imagination, though I wasn’t there on the front porch to hear her actually say them.

“I have seen more hurricanes than you will ever see. I’m not leaving my house. That’s that. If you want to go, go!”

“That is what I treasure about her and what angers me most,” Kennedy wrote me in an e-mail. “By being the matriarch of our family, things have always gone her way, and this Sunday past it was no different. After being urged by my aunts, mother and neighbors, who were all packed and ready to move to higher ground, she refused.”

“JoNell, I’m not running from God. I’m going to sit right here and let King Jesus ride on,” Nichols told her granddaughter.

What do you do in a circumstance like that? Do you leave a person behind and save your own life? Do you walk to your car and drive off as much out of spite as out of an instinct for self-preservation?

Do you pray for forgiveness, club them over the head, knock them out cold and kidnap them to safety?

JoNell, you let grown-ass people be grown-ass people, fully responsible for their considered decisions.

“I’m not running from God.”

“I’m going to sit right here and let King Jesus ride on.”

Oh man, I can see this lady and I can hear this lady. She is very familiar to me. And I celebrate her independence, even if she has died as a result of her decision. Life is meant to be lived. In order to do so, ultimately you simply can’t be protected from life.

Something tells me that Ms. Nichols lived, and lived fully. I’m going to be thinking of her often in the next few days.

“I’m not running from God.”

“I’m going to sit right here and let King Jesus ride on.”

Amen.

 

MORE DRAMATIC PAGES FROM THE TIMES-PICAYUNE

Full coverage may be found , but this is page 3:

 

And this is page 4:

 

This is historic, no doubt about it. Now they have to hope and pray there are no more breaks in the various levees.

 

NEW ORLEANS IS EFFECTIVELY UNDERWATER

And the coverage from today’s Times-Picayune documents it. Here’s page 1:

 

And here’s page 2:

 

The pictures are just incredible.

 

PRIME MINISTER PUSHES TRANSFORMATION IN JAPAN

Thomas P.M. Barnett highlights a huge change that’s on the horizon in Japan but in doing so makes a point about the diversity and flexibility of democracies to shape themselves around local preferences:

I remember first being told about [J]apan’s amazing post office financial system back when I did the economic security exercise on foreign direction investment in Asia (part of my Naval War College NewRuleSets Project collaboration with the legendary broker-dealer firm Cantor Fitzgerald. Many of the execs I spoke with on Wall Street called it the equivalent of a “Ma Bell,” not in terms of hindering postal service but in monopolizing the financial market for the bulk of Japan’s personal savings. They described it’s death-like grip on all that cash (roughly $3 trillion dollars-and I said “trillion”) as being one of the main reasons why Japan’s cozy financial system was having a hard time getting the economy to snap out of the lengthy recession that has dominated and defined the country’s post-Cold War pathway-in effect, rendering Japan far less the global leader than it could be (and certainly was expected to become at the Cold War’s end).

But it’s not just the postal system’s ability to fence off all that cash in relatively poorly performing investments that truly hampers Japan, the far worse aspect is political: Japan’s effective single-party state of the last half century, the Liberal Democratic Party, has used it as it’s main power base. Imagine if the U.S. Postal Service was also America’s biggest insurance company and bank. Then imagine if one of our political parties had a lock on how it was run and used that immense power as a slush fund to basically stay in power virtually non-stop, decade after decade. That would be pretty bad, wouldn’t it.

It’s something worth remembering when politicians paint China as “communist” and argue that such high state ownership in the economy gives it an unfair advantage. Point being, that single-party domination of the economic landscape is exactly how every other Asian economic power has risen in the past half century. Japan is often described as the only socialist state that ever worked, and the postal system was a big reason why (allowing massive, state-directed investments in the private sector to be planned like clockwork),

But that system has long been broken in Japan, and so PM Koziumi (Esquire’s best-dressed politician, I am duty-bound to remind you), in a truly bold and brave move, is seeking to privatize this “Ma Bell” and break it up into constituent companies. Do you think we’d all have cellphones today if Ma Bell still existed? Well, that’s how important and positive a change Koziumi’s quest could end up providing for Japan.

Combined with his push to get Japan more open to playing a bigger role in global security affairs, Koziumi is easily the best thing that has happened to Japan since the Cold War ended.

Japan may, in fact, point the way forward for us in Iraq if the Iraqis can fashion a unique governance and economic model via something similar to the Japanese experience.

 

DISASTER IN NEW ORLEANS!

The news is potentially overwhelming. Will the flooding problem recede fairly quickly or will things only get worse? Whatever the case, there may have been much loss of life already. Here’s page one from the local paper, The Times-Picayune, today:

 

And here is page two:

 

You can review for yourself their only publication today, their electronic edition, HERE.

 

QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS RE: IRAQ AND 9/11

Stephen Hayes has a hard-hitting column up in The Weekly Standard concerning Iraq, 9/11, and a gentleman of interest:

Two weeks before the 9/11 Commission's final report was released to the public, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee released its own evaluation of the intelligence on Iraq. The Senate report added to the Shakir story.

The first connection to the [9/11] attack involved Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi national, who facilitated the travel of one of the September 11 hijackers to Malaysia in January 2000. [Redacted.] A foreign government service reported that Shakir worked for four months as an airport facilitator in Kuala Lumpur at the end of 1999 and beginning of 2000. Shakir claimed he got this job through Ra'ad al-Mudaris, an Iraqi Embassy employee. [Redacted.] Another source claimed that al-Mudaris was a former IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] officer. The CIA judged in "Iraqi Support for Terrorism," however, that al-Mudaris' [redacted] that the circumstances surrounding the hiring of Shakir for this position did not suggest it was done on behalf of the IIS.

A note about that last sentence: The Senate committee report is a devastating indictment of the CIA's woefully inadequate collection of intelligence on Iraq, and its equally flawed analysis. It is of course possible that the CIA's judgment about al Mudaris is correct, but the bulk of the report inspires no confidence that it is.

Consider the three new facts in this brief summary. One, Shakir himself told interrogators that an Iraqi embassy employee got him the job that allowed him to help the hijacker(s). Two, that Iraqi embassy employee was Ra'ad al Mudaris. Three, another source identified al Mudaris as former Iraqi Intelligence.

All of this information was known to the U.S. intelligence community months before the 9/11 Commission completed its investigation. And yet none of it appeared in the final report.

Hayes concludes his column with some very direct questions that go to the heart of the question while begging still others:

* Ahmed Hikmat Shakir was arrested in Doha, Qatar, just six days after the 9/11 attacks. How was he apprehended so quickly? Was the CIA monitoring his activities? What did the 9/11 Commission know about this arrest? And why wasn't it included in the 9/11 Commission's final report?

* Who identified Shakir's Iraqi embassy contact, Ra'ad al Mudaris, as former Iraqi Intelligence? Is the source credible? If not, why not?

* Have other detainees been asked about Ahmed Hikmat Shakir? If so, what have they said?

* What do the former employees of the Iraqi embassy in Malaysia tell us about Ahmed Hikmat Shakir and Ra'ad al Mudaris?

* Has anyone from the U.S. government interviewed Ra'ad al Mudaris? If so, how does he explain his activities?

* Have the names Ahmed Hikmat Shakir and Ra'ad al Mudaris surfaced in any of the documents captured in postwar Iraq from the Iraqi Intelligence headquarters in Baghdad?

* How long was the phone call between Ahmed Hikmat Shakir and the safehouse shortly before the 1993 World Trade Center attack?

* Does the U.S. government have other indications that Ahmed Hikmat Shakir and the 1993 World Trade Center bombers were in contact, either before or after that attack?

* Vice President Dick Cheney has spoken publicly about documents that indicate Abdul Rahman Yasin was provided safe haven and financing upon his return to Iraq in 1993. The FBI is blocking declassification of those documents, despite the fact that Yasin is on the FBI Most Wanted Terrorist list. Why?

* Before Operation Iraqi Freedom, Abdul Rahman Yasin, Musab Yasin, and Ahmed Hikmat Shakir were all believed to be in Iraq. Where are they today?

Inquiring minds do want to know.

 

A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE CENTER-RIGHT AND THE CENTER-LEFT

Thomas P.M. Barnett: intellectual bridge. I guess that explains why I like the guy so much; he’s seriously engaging the issues of the day, often from a center-left point of view. Here, Barnett revels in the fact that a major center-right figure (Michael Barone) has reviewed his new work and approves:

Barone certainly has delighted my man Neil Nyren of G.P. Putnam’s Sons (editor-in-chief and publisher), but my PR man Michael Barson’s probably pulling his hair out over the last line in Barone’s citation. Read it and see what I mean:

* Thomas Barnett’s Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating. This is the PowerPoint guru’s follow-up to The Pentagon’s New Map, in which Barnett presents his recommendations for “A Department for What Lies Between War and Peace.” Barnett argues that the military wasn’t ready for peacekeeping in Iraq and that it has made mistakes. But, he goes on, “no public institution responds to failure better and more quickly than the U.S. military. And it has.” This book will be widely read in the Pentagon, and should be widely read beyond. It’s pre-order right now, but see if you can get (as I did) a reviewer copy.

See what I mean! Hey, you gotta like the enthusiasm, but let’s get real Mr. Barone!

Seriously, having someone of his stature in your corner is a huge deal. People like him, Ignatius, Congressman Mac Thornberry--you get the picture. We’re talking slightly right of center, serious thinkers. If I can’t capture that, I have nothing.

PNM won that crowd over by its lack of squeamishness on defense. BFA needs to win over the slighty left of center with its idealism.

Then we’ve got the movement moving ...

For the full text of Barone’s piece, including his three other picks, go to here

I do like that juxtaposition: defense – and – idealism. There doesn’t have to be a gulf between the two concepts. In fact, that is the only way forward.

 

ARMY TRANSFORMATION UPDATE

Given the occasional hysteria over Army recruiting goals for this fiscal year, I suggest reading this July 2004 transcript from General Peter Schoomaker, U.S. Army Chief of Staff, on the evolving role of Army transformation, on temporarily growing the Army by 30,000 [putting a different light, I think, on the specific recruiting goals for this fiscal year], and on repositioning our forces. Note this graphic representation of the concept:

 

And here is a synopsis of the new posting of Army units. Its no longer all about the divisions; it’s all about the combat teams – similar to the old Armored Cavalry Regiments that guarded the German – Czechoslovakian border in Europe:

U.S. Army Forces Global Posture:

 

And here is a graphic representation of that global posture:

 

The biggest, baddest, finest fighting force on the planet is transforming on the fly and doing it well. Finally, here is a graphic on the three different types of Brigade Combat Teams:

As Jake Gaither, legendary coaching icon of the Florida A&M Rattlers, might have said -- agile, mobile, and hostile.

 

TEN WAR FOR FREEDOM ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Here is yet another point of reference from page 2 of that substantive essay by Christopher Hitchens in the Weekly Standard. These are ten accomplishments arising from the Bush Administrations War For Freedom:

1) The overthrow of Talibanism and Baathism, and the exposure of many highly suggestive links between the two elements of this Hitler-Stalin pact. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who moved from Afghanistan to Iraq before the coalition intervention, has even gone to the trouble of naming his organization al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

(2) The subsequent capitulation of Qaddafi's Libya