Loud Whispers

Finally, an acknowledgment of Sunni genocide as the BananaRepublic's sub rosa policy in Iraq: "The Whispers and the Why Nots." Reported by Helene Cooper, "Whispers" is the lead story of the Week in Review section in today's New York Times.

"We shall call it the Darwin Principle," Cooper writes of the policy, also referring to it as "the Shiite option." One unnamed senior regime official is quoted as calling it the "stare into the abyss" strategy.

Although the policy is couched as a "proposal" in an ongoing debate within the Bullshitter-in-Chief's regime, as though it hasn't already been implemented, Cooper's report is explicit about the fact that Sunni genocide has been promoted at the highest Banana Republican level, namely by Darth Cheney's office.

Which confirms the worst suspicions we've had of a U.S. regime secretly bent on mass murder by way of proxies -- suspicions I must admit I had recently begun to doubt after reading so many news stories about the U.S. military's desire to root out the Shiite death squads.

The "Whispers" headline in the NYT print edition has been toned down on the Web site to "The Capital Awaits a Masterstroke on Iraq," a craven minorstroke of what I presume to be second thinking. Maybe the public editor will look into the change and explain it.

Postscript: A reader writes:

The Times article is likely not a report about whispers, but about "staged whispers" that attempt to post-date the decision to allow for genocide through civil war. I suspect this strategy was well-considered from the very beginning. See Robert Parry's article on Truthout. It illustrates that what is happening in Iraq is nothing new and that in fact we are very experienced at this sort of thing.

The Parry article, posted two years ago, discusses the "Salvador option" and notes that the Pentagon was "intensively debating" it as "a new policy" to pacify Iraq, according to a Newsweek report in January of 2005.

We've talked before about the "Salvador option" in Iraq. Here, for example. In any case, use of the so-called "the Shiite option" explains why the Saudis read Darth Cheney the riot act on his visit to Riyadh earlier this month. Given all the "surge" talk we've been hearing, you don't really believe the meeting was about a troop withdrawal, do you?

December 17, 2006 9:24 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
HERMAN WOUK'S LATEST 
It's hard to say which comes off worse in Herman Wouk's latest novel, his first in a decade: the U.S. Congress or the American press. "A Hole in Texas" offers the choice between two emblematic stereotypes: a red-faced opportunist who heads the House Armed Services Committee and a mustachioed investigative reporter for the Washington Post.
more picks

Sites to See

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Straight Up | published on December 17, 2006 9:24 AM.

Deep Woodstein was the previous entry in this blog.

Techmeister is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

AJ Blogs

AJBlogCentral | rss

culture
About Last Night
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Artful Manager
Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture
blog riley
rock culture approximately
CultureGulf
Rebuilding Gulf Culture after Katrina
diacritical
Douglas McLennan's blog
Flyover
Art from the American Outback
Rockwell Matters
John Rockwell on the arts
Straight Up |
Jan Herman - arts, media & culture with 'tude

dance
Foot in Mouth
Apollinaire Scherr talks about dance
Seeing Things
Tobi Tobias on dance et al...

media
Out There
Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
Serious Popcorn
Martha Bayles on Film...

music
The Future of Classical Music?
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
Jazz Beyond Jazz
Howard Mandel's freelance Urban Improvisation
ListenGood
Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds
On the Record
Exploring Orchestras w/ Henry Fogel
PostClassic
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Rifftides
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...
Sandow
Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Slipped Disc
Norman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds

publishing
book/daddy
Jerome Weeks on Books
Quick Study
Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera

theatre
Stage Write
Elizabeth Zimmer on time-based art forms

visual
Aesthetic Grounds
Public Art, Public Space
Artopia
John Perreault's art diary
CultureGrrl
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary
Modern Art Notes
Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog
Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.