I nearly collapsed today after work, with a fever and muscle aches, and there is no way I can blog. I’m pretty certain it’s the flu. There’s never a good time to get sick, but this is catastrophic — I am scheduled to go to Kuala Lumpur in a few days to give an all-day workshop on crisis management, and I had planned to write it all today and tomorrow. Talk about a crisis; and I have no idea how I’m going to handle it. Anyone want to fill in for me?

It’s fascinating how two bloggers look at the same article on how Iraq’s becoming the new playground for Al Qaeda and the likes, and draw two diametrically opposed conclusions.

Andrew Sullivan joyufully titles his piece, “Fly paper — it’s working,’ as though the current siege is a good thing because it’s putting us face to face with the terrorists in their own region. (Sullie’s link is screwed up so I can’t provide it.) It all underscores how brilliant Bush is:

If this pans out, then the Bush administration really will have pulled off something important: taken the war to the enemy, taken it out of the West, and given us a chance for military victory.

Then Josh Marshall reads the same piece and has a slightly less jubilant reaction:

When I read it, the story left me mute, expressionless, bereft — as though I’d just watched someone die.

The article is quite disturbing and if there’s anything about it that’s optimistic, I’m definitely missing it. At times it’s downright ominous:

“The monster is already near you,” said one Arab official who is familiar with the intelligence and who spoke on condition that he not be identified by name or nationality. “I don’t know if you can kill it.”

The official added: “Iraq is the new battleground. It is the perfect place. It will be the perfect place.”

Sounds like we’ve got them right where we want them, doesn’t it?

You have to read Tom Shales’ review of the upcoming propaganda travesty, DC 911, which, I am happy to see, is being universally laughed at. (Time magazine has referred to it as “militainment.”) This review is hilarious. And depressing.

Nothing in historical record suggests Bush acted particularly heroically Sept. 11, 2001, but Chetwynd’s script has him all but saddling up a horse and riding over to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban man-to-man. When Bush announces he will give a speech to the nation from the White House and aides try to talk him into seeking a safer location, Bush bellows, “If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come on over and get me. I’ll be home!”

Bush repeatedly demands he be taken to the White House as Air Force One flies aimlessly about on that horrible September day: “I’ve got to get back to Washington because I’m not going to let those people keep me from getting home,” he barks. And earlier: “Get me home! . . . The American people want to know where their damn president is.”

I also found another review of this fiasco that had me in awe. I hadn’t been to this site before, but I think it’s going to become one of my favorites very soon. The writer, Danny Schechter, looks at what’s actually behind the making of this North Korean-style propaganda cartoon, and in so doing manages to shed a harsh light on how our SCLM functions. DC 911 is nothing but a big free ad, a campaign contribution provided by Viacom to thank Bush for doing its bidding!

So move over Madonna and the Rug Rats and even Leni Riefenstahl, Viacom presents our latest TV superstar: President George W Bush as produced by Karl Rove the President’s in-house Machiavelli with the help of Lionel Chetwynd, a Republican toady, screenwriter and producer. The actual production draws on the cast of Star Trek, a comedian known for his role as “the ripper,” and financial subsidies from Canada where this pro-American patriotic epic was actually made to avoid paying union wages.

This is a long, detailed piece that really opened my eyes. For you Asiaphiles, scroll down to where Schechter talks about Viacom’s shameless efforts to coddle the CCP. Anything for money.

Right now we are struggling to win more multilateral support to help maintain order in Iraq. (This is so urgent that Paul Wolfowitzf is lying through his teeth, insisting we always wanted the UN to be there with us and always welcomed them with open arms. Check the story — it’s one of Marshall’s best posts ever.)

But if anyone needs a reminder of the contempt in which we held the United Nations only a few months back, maybe this passage from Bush advisor Richard Perle will be useful:

Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror is about to end. He will go quickly, but not alone: in a parting irony, he will take the UN down with him. Well, not the whole UN. The “good works” part will survive, the low-risk peacekeeping bureaucracies will remain, the chatterbox on the Hudson will continue to bleat. What will die is the fantasy of the UN as the foundation of a new world order. As we sift the debris, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions.

And you wonder why the world sees America as a go-it-alone, with-us-or-against-us cowboy that holds the UN in contempt? And you wonder why the UN member nations are so reluctant to join us?

As a serious opera lover, I found this little interview with the composer of the new opera Madam Mao quite fascinating.

Definitely the most intelligent, articulate analysis I have seen yet on the BBC, Dr. Kelly, Andrew Gilligan and the “sexing up” of the Blair dossier. And this paragraph wins a gold star:

It appears that Gilligan used information from a single source that he says he had reason to trust, he tweaked the wording to make it sound a bit more ominous than it was, and in the end it turned out that his specific charges were probably untrue. But regarding the infamous 45-minute claim, Tony Blair’s dossier also used information from a single source that British intelligence says they had reason to trust, they tweaked the wording to make it sound a bit more ominous than it was, and in the end it turned out that their specific charges were untrue. This leads to a pretty obvious question for both sides: why is it OK for your guy to do this but not the other guy?

Read the whole post, and don’t miss the excellent comments.

[Via BONOBO LAND]

I’d written earlier of how enchanted I was with Dai Sijie’s book, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.

I just watched the movie and have to admit I was disappointed. It was fairly faithful to the book, but it lacked gravitas and pathos. There was a poignancy to the book that stayed with me for many days (and does so even now); the movie, despite several memorable scenes and a fine start, just didn’t cut it.

It begins with a spectacularly beautiful shot of the young heroes climbing up a seemingly endless stone stairway leading up a steep hill surrounded by lush green vegetation that clings to limetone mountains that rise sheer up from the ground. They are going to their re-education camp. After a few seconds, we hear in the background children’s voices chanting an old Cultural Revolution song:

We are the Red Guard of Chairman Mao
Who march from the steppes to Tiananmen

Toward the end of my stay in Beijing, I bought the DVD for 8 yuan (about a dollar) and started to watch it with my friend Ben. (After about 20 minutes, the DVD stopped playing, an all too commonplace occurrence with fakes.) As soon as the singing started, Ben got quite excited and began to sing along. He said all the children in his school had memorized this song. Ben was born nearly five years after Deng ended the Cultural Revolution, so I was surprised he was taught songs glorifying the Red Guard.

(If you aren’t familiar with the details of the Red Guard, please buy the book Wild Swans, which manages to bring this phenomenon vividly to life, in all of its ugliness and irrationality.)

So I just watched the full movie, and as the childrens’ voices began their chant, I felt another of those wistful, all-consuming waves of — of what? It’s not easy to describe. The feeling goes beyond nostalgia and is right out of a Thomas Wolfe novel, that longing to recapture a moment that was magical but can never be experienced again. In other words, the movie gave me a flood of memories about China.

The sentimentality meter just shot up into the stratosphere, signalling that I should quit here and go to sleep. I had an unusually long and hard day today, but also a very intersting one that I hope to write more about soon.

No one will miss you:

Hong Kong’s leader said Friday he has withdrawn an anti-subversion bill that plunged his administration into crisis, sparked a massive public protest and fueled fears that China was trying to curb freedoms in the former British colony.

Talk about a communications disaster! Which was worse for the CCP, SARS or this odious legislation? Both are shining examples of China’s unique ability to dig its own grave and win the contempt not only of the world but of its own citizens as well.

Another shocking article on how the current administration lavishes favors on its adored Saudi friends, many of whom — Osama Bin Laden’s relatives among them — were rushed out of the US following the 911 attacks thanks to their friends in the White House.

“We did everything that needed to be done,” said John Iannarelli, a bureau spokesman. “There’s nothing to indicate that any of these people had any information that could have assisted us, and no one was accorded any additional courtesies that wouldn’t have been accorded anyone else.”

But the Vanity Fair investigation quotes Dale Watson, the former head of counterterrorism at the F.B.I., as saying that the departing Saudis “were not subject to serious interviews or interrogations.”

Mr. Watson could not be reached for comment today.

The official who architected the great escape “said in an interview that he was driven by concern that the Saudis ‘would be targeted for retribution’ by Americans after the hijackings.”

Can he really say this with a straight face? Of all the concerns the nation was undergoing at this historic moment, this was our highest priority — to coddle and mother a group of billionaire sheiks and Bin Laden relatives? Some of them were even chauffeured out on special flights at a time when all other flights had been grounded.

Can Americans really just shrug their shoulders and accept it?

It’s business as usual in China, where the government hisses that it does care about AIDS in China, it really, really does:

CHINA today slammed an international rights group for “falsely” blaming government policy for a massive AIDS outbreak, and said it was determined to care for victims of the epidemic.

‘If some international organizations, based on some inaccurate information make irresponsible accusations against China, I think this will not go with the facts,” foreign ministry spokesman Kong Quan said.

“It is true that in some parts of Henan province there were some problems with blood collecting stations and it led to the spread of AIDS in that area. The central government attaches great importance to this issue.”

“SOME problems”? Well, keep in mind that these are the same leaders who blandly refer to the Tiananmen Square massacre as “an incident.”

The report, by Human Rights Watch, is damning indeed.

“The number of persons with HIV is much higher than the one million cases that Beijing officially acknowledges,” the 94-page report, ‘Locked Doors: The human rights of people living with HIV/AIDS in China,’ said.

[….]

While documenting discrimination against HIV-AIDS carriers in China, the rights report also accused China of driving HIV-AIDS patients underground instead of helping them, fuelling the spread of the potentially explosive epidemic.

“Human Rights Watch found that at one hospital, the door to the AIDS clinic was actually padlocked,” said the report which is based on more than 30 interviews with HIV/AIDS sufferers, police officers, drug users, and AIDS outreach workers in Beijing, Hong Kong, and southwestern Yunnan province.

I’ve written extensively on this topic here and won’t go into another rant (even though it’s warranted). Suffice it to say that the government bears responsibility for almost all aspects of this tragedy and that its track record of taking responsibility for and speaking honestly about the topic has been abysmal, and still is.

Related post: The indescribable tragedy of AIDS in China