Truth? We don't need no stinking truth!

If you haven't been following the Jamil Hussein story over the past few weeks there's a great roundup of the pertinent facts here:

BAGHDAD AP, Jan. 4 — The Interior Ministry acknowledged Thursday that an Iraqi police officer whose existence had been denied by the Iraqis and the U.S. military is in fact an active member of the force, and said he now faces arrest for speaking to the media.

Ministry spokesman Brig. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, who had previously denied there was any such police employee as Capt. Jamil Hussein, said in an interview that Hussein is an officer assigned to the Khadra police station, as had been reported by The Associated Press.

The captain, whose full name is Jamil Gholaiem Hussein, was one of the sources for an AP story in late November about the burning and shooting of six people during a sectarian attack at a Sunni mosque.

The U.S. military and the Iraqi Interior Ministry raised the doubts about Hussein in questioning the veracity of the APs initial reporting on the incident, and the Iraqi ministry suggested that many news organization were giving a distorted, exaggerated picture of the conflict in Iraq. Some Internet bloggers spread and amplified these doubts, accusing the AP of having made up Husseins identity in order to disseminate false news about the war…

And the best part was that the bloggers, for reasons completely unknown to a member of the reality based community, actually were listened to when they started flinging their poo at the AP. But the best part, the absolute crown jewel of the entire affair is that the poor bastard who made the mistake of actually telling the AP reporters the truth about the immolation of six Sunnis, is now being threatened with imprisonment for committing no crime whatsoever. I would like to find some comfort in the fact that the old axiom "the truth will out" actually does still apply, even in today's world, but the mental image of this guy turning up as a body on the street with drill holes in his head is making it very hard.

The muddled hunt for ponies

The Editors respond to this odious Jacob Weisberg piece with what can only be described as genius:

Ah, the soft bigotry of low expectations. You could invade the greater Tigris/Euphrates region at any point in human history, and the end result could be a peaceful, functioning Iraqi state at a tolerable cost. I know of no physical law which would prevent it. You get lucky, you work smart, and anything is possible, right? You could invade Sweden tomorrow, re-name it “Iraq”, and have yourself a marvelous, if slightly Nordic, Iraqi state. Heck, you could have left the whole mess alone four years ago, and you would have had a relatively peaceful, functioning, pain-in-the-ass Iraqi state (and by the standards of Iraq today, it was practically Sweden) at the extremely tolerable cost of nuthin. This was a very do-able, pretty well un-fuck-up-able plan. Funny story about that.
[...]
So, again, if we decide to ignore the fact that Kosovo had a coherent justification, and Iraq didn’t, then yeah, the primary remaining difference is that the Kosovo war was not run by total morons, a staffing decision which everyone outside the Bush administration agrees was wise. And so, abracadabra, all serious persons approve of Kosovo and distain Iraq. But notably absent from Weisberg’s list of recent wars is Afghanistan, because it really shows the pointlessness of this entire exercise. If we ignore the reasons for things, the primary difference between Iraq and Afghanistan is, well, not a whole lot. Afghanistan is not on its way to peace or functionality any more than Iraq is. But while the conditions in both countries are similarly awful, it is generally agreed that Afghanistan - while totally fucked up in execution - is not a strategic failure, because the justification for the war was clear, and, by these clear standards, an (incomplete) victory was achieved. Meanwhile Iraq has morphed from a mission with a surplus of grand goals into this desperately muddled hunt for ponies. Now, wars often end up having evolving goals, but when the justification for the war ends up becoming completely exinct, Darwin would say this says something about the fitness of these ideas. This seems like a topic for discussion.