It seems Iraqis are not tuning in to the generous media diet that the US is providing them. For some reason, they are eschewing Peter Jennings’s reporting on the Laci Peterson case and Tom Brokaw’s “Fleecing of America” segments and turning instead to al-Alam, an all-news channel being broadcast in Arabic from Iran. Who could have predicted that Iraqis wouldn’t groove on Fox News?

“I am a media man,” says Haidar Ali al-Assadi, one of al-Alam’s Baghdad correspondents, “and I can make people either for or against America.” I wonder which it will be.

Now we have a use for all those cheap guns. With the AK-MP3, we finally have an MP3 player that resembles Hillary Rosen’s rhetorical image of the devices. Built into an empty AK-47 magazine, you can either listen to it by itself or locked and loaded into the world’s favorite assault weapon. Imagine how cool you’ll look at the gym when you mount the stairmaster with your assault rifle. If you can’t picture it, then you’ve never been to Israel.

No doubt this is why the NRA is lobbying to let the assault weapon ban expire.

The war is essentially over, and the reconstruction effort is beginning in fits and starts. It is early days yet, but there were some early indications this week that this grand project could go rather badly.

Umm Qasr, right on the Kuwaiti border, was the first town to be “liberated” and declared safe for humanitarian and development workers, and so is seen as a test case for the rest of the country. That test case is not going so well, with the population refusing to accept the leaders blessed by the US and the military government having trouble with basic things like paying government employees, which they thought would be a simple matter, because they never consulted anybody who had ever had to do such things before.

Further, it seems the Mr. Powell had been right after all about the lack of little Jeffersonian democrats in Iraq. According to the Washington Post:

As Iraqi Shiite demands for a dominant role in Iraq's future mount, Bush administration officials say they underestimated the Shiites' organizational strength and are unprepared to prevent the rise of an anti-American, Islamic fundamentalist government in the country.
…
As the administration plotted to overthrow Hussein's government, U.S. officials said this week, it failed to fully appreciate the force of Shiite aspirations and is now concerned that those sentiments could coalesce into a fundamentalist government. Some administration officials were dazzled by Ahmed Chalabi, the prominent Iraqi exile who is a Shiite and an advocate of a secular democracy. Others were more focused on the overriding goal of defeating Hussein and paid little attention to the dynamics of religion and politics in the region.

“It is a complex equation, and the U.S. government is ill-equipped to figure out how this is going to shake out,” a State Department official said. “I don't think anyone took a step backward and asked, ‘What are we looking for?’ The focus was on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.”

Shia clerics in Iran are urging Shia in Iraq to seize power in Iraqi cities in the wake of the fall of the Baath Party, prompting The Donald to clarify that the Iraqis can have any kind of government they want, so long as it is not a kind that the United States does not like.

One of the post-war period’s few pleasant surprises has been the apparent commitment from Turkey not to invade northern Iraq to counter Kurdish gains in the region. The bad news is that it now seems they have been smuggling guns, grenades, and night-vision goggles to ethnic Turkmens in Kirkuk, and probably elsewhere. It seems nobody can be cool without night-vision goggles anymore.

In another Lebanonesque turn of events, guns are now available in Iraq at rock-bottom prices, so you can equip your very own ethnic, sectarian, or political militia for a very reasonable price. But I suggest you get them now; demand may be rising soon.

I have not had time this week to write much, but you can amuse yourselves instead with Brunching Shuttlecock's Apathetic Online Journal Entry Generator.

Newt Gingrich, the conservative poster boy of the 90s, is jumping up and down at the American Enterprise Institute so that you will notice that he’s a neoconservative too. He says that the State Department is responsible for the global unpopularity of the war in Iraq:

The State Department communications program failed during these five months [running up to the war] to such a degree that 95 percent of the Turkish people opposed the American position. This fit in with a pattern of State Department communications failures as a result of which the South Korean people regarded the United States as more dangerous than North Korea and a vast majority of French and German citizens favored policies that opposed the United States.

Clearly the policy could not have anything to do with it; it must be the inadequacy of the television commercials.

Gingrich blames the State Department’s Bureau of Near East Affairs, which he says opposed the war because of its “propensity for appeasing dictators and propping up corrupt regimes.” I would have guessed it was because they actually understood something about the region, but I am not a senior fellow at AEI. I just look like one.

The Military (Ret.) Governor of Iraq, Lt. Gen. Jay Garner (Ret.), arrived in Baghdad today to begin his overlordship of the Tigris and Euphrates. As seen in this photo from The Guardian, General Garner (you can call him Jay) immediately went about setting a new tone for the country. First, now that Saddam is gone, every day is casual day, and Members Only jackets are cool again. Second, the new regime is benign and culturally sensitive, as demonstrated by the General’s gentle hand laid on the muhajiba’s shoulder. This may be the first time she has ever been touched by a male non-relative, and you can see her exhilaration at the possibilities of life in the new Iraq.

In honor of Easter Sunday, we're going to play a fun game with a religious theme here at the Far-Flung Ryan-Silva Media Empire. Read the following quotes and see if you can tell which were said by President Bush, and which were said by a televangelist. Answers are in the comments section. Good luck!

1. “America mourns those who have been called home, and we pray that their families will find God's comfort and God's grace. His purposes are not always clear to us, yet this season [Easter] brings a promise: that good can come out of evil, that hope can arise from despair, and that all our grief will someday turn to joy, a joy that can never be taken away.”

2. “Many of the POWs who were rescued on Sunday know the power of prayer in their lives - and they know that they were battling a cruel and unrelenting enemy.”

3. “The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity. We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history.”

4. “As a nation, we continue to pray for all who serve in our military and those who remain in harm's way. We also pray for those who have lost people they love in this war.”

5. “[I urge you to] pray especially at this time for a quick and victorious conclusion to the war against Saddam Hussein. Pray that God would protect and comfort American POWs, that they would not be abused and would be rescued soon. Pray that God would shield and protect all members of the U.S. armed forces, as well as innocent Iraqi civilians.”

6. “Corporal Henry Brown, a 22-year-old soldier from Natchez, Mississippi, was lost in battle earlier this month. After the news arrived, his best friend, Frank Woods, Jr., said this about Henry: ‘He believed God was working through him and he was part of the plan. I guess part of the plan now is God calling his soldier home.’”

Don’t feel bad if you find it difficult. Many people all over the world have trouble telling the difference between George Bush and a televangelist. Click on “comments” below for the answers.

There is an article in this month’s Wired about Google searches, and what they say about the culture. The author watched 24 hours of searches whiz by at Google company headquarters.

Back in the day, Lycos used to make this information publicly available on demand. You could go to their site and see a random sampling of what people were searching for at any given time. Back then some people actually used Lycos. When the company I worked for first got Internet access piped through their network, we had a lot of fun with the feature. Prior to that you had to go to a dedicated dial-up machine and get online at 24kbps. This is one of those things I will crankily tell my grandchildren about. But I digress.

Anyway, being able to watch people’s search queries was a little sobering. For one thing, it made it horribly clear that the art of spelling even simple words had been entirely lost. For another, about 75% of the queries had to do with sex, which at the time meant plaintive, misspelled pleas for photos of Pamela Anderson Lee and, as astonishing as it is today, Anna Nicole Smith. And there were a whole lot of even less wholesome queries, unsuitable for reprinting in a nice family blog like this one.

Lycos still has a feature showing the most popular searches, but it is doesn’t have the raw, voyeuristic quality of the old site. I blame lawyers.

But if you have a website with decent logging capability, you can tell what people who found your site through search engines were looking for. And this can be fairly revealing. Or disgusting. Or both.

Many a fetishist has come to the Empire because they went searching for “braless” or “braless wives.” More than one oddball has found us by searching for “women and tiparillos,” a fetish I had never even conceived of. All I can say about these people is that they ought to spend more time in the British Club in Mohandiseen.

But not every sick bastard on the Internet is sick in a sexual way. Or at least not just in a sexual way. One of the most consistently popular searches that ends in the Empire is “gory photos.” But sickest of all are the many people that go out of their way to find “muzak.”

20,000 Iraqis demonstrated in Nasariyya against the American military presence yesterday, as did 3,000 in Mosul today -- 7 of whom were killed when Marines fired into the crowd, saying demonstrators were shooting at them.

Someone should have told the Iraqis the Administration doesn't make policy based on focus groups.

The new Military (Ret.) Governor of Iraq, Lt. Gen. Jay Garner (Ret.), convened a leadership meeting in Nasariyya today with whatever Iraqi opposition groups he could get to come. He pooh-poohed the idea that democracy was unlikely to flower in postwar Iraq.

“I don't think they had a love-in when they had [the 1787 Constitutional Convention in] Philadelphia,” he told the New York Times. I had forgotten the time when Alexander Hamilton’s followers hacked Richard Dobbs Spaight to death, or when partisans of James McHenry mobbed Thomas Jefferson’s house, threatening to kill him unless he left the country within 24 hours.

“Anytime you start the process it's fraught with dialogue, tensions, coercion, and should be,” says the Military (Ret.) Governor. Dialogue and tensions, sure. But did he really just say the birth of the democratic tradition in Iraq should be fraught with coercion?

In Kuwait yesterday, Colin Powell said, “we were concerned about some of the looting that took place in the museum in Baghdad… the United States understands its obligations [under the Hague Convention] and will be taking a leading role with respect to antiquities in general, but this museum in particular.” He also promised that Coalition™ forces would work to “secure the facility,” which would be terrific news, if there were anything left in the facility.

Powell also gave assurances that the United States will also “participate in restoring that which has been broken.” Several tubes of Krazy Glue are on their way now.

“I think that we believe there are chemical weapons in Syria,” said President Bush this weekend, showing the leadership, insight, and foreign policy savvy that got us where we are today.

The Donald is at it again. When he was asked by NBC’s Meet the Press this weekend why the US military allowed the Iraqi Museum in Baghdad to be looted, he put on his irritated face and said:

Rumsfeld: But we didn't allow it. It happened. And that's what happens when you go from a dictatorship with repressed order, police state to something that is going to be different. There's a transition period, and no one is control. There are periods where -- we're still fighting in Baghdad. We don't allow bad things to happen. Bad things do happen in life, and people do loot. We've seen that in the United States. It's happened in every country. It's a shame when it happens. I'll bet you anything that if they -- when order is restored and we have a more permissive environment that there will be opportunities to ask people to return some of those things that were taken. We have already found people returning supplies to hospitals.

Q: What the heads of the museums will say is that they actually askes for the U.S. to help protect it, and that the U.S. declined. Is that accurate?

Rumsfeld: Oh, my goodness. Look, I have no idea. We've got troops on the ground, who do you know who we asked and whether his assignment at that moment was to guard a hospital instead -- those kinds of things are so anecdotal, and it always breaks your heart to see destruction of things.

Even if you accept this explanation, it is more than a little disturbing that the Secretary of Defense does not even seem inclined to ask whether someone dropped the ball here. “Oh, my goodness. Look, I have no idea,” he says, as though it were a ridiculous question. Thousands of priceless international treasures have been stolen or destroyed from a known location, and you expect Mr. Rumsfeld to want to know why? Why, so he can diagnose the problem and prevent it from happening again? Oh, my goodness.

But I don’t accept the explanation in any case, since The Donald's boys seem to have been able to secure the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Oil buildings without much trouble.

Donald Rumsfeld is mad again. Yesterday he was pounding the podium on the subject of the insistence of the press on reporting what is going on in Iraq, rather than what the Administration hoped would happen:

I picked up a newspaper today and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest. And it just was Henny Penny -- "The sky is falling." I've never seen anything like it! And here is a country that's being liberated, here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator, and they're free. And all this newspaper could do, with eight or 10 headlines, they showed a man bleeding, a civilian, who they claimed we had shot -- one thing after another. It's just unbelievable how people can take that away from what is happening in that country!

I, too, am amazed by the things that are being taken away in Iraq.

And, you say, “Well, what was it in the plan?” The plan is a complex set of conclusions or ideas that then have a whole series of alternative excursions that one can do, depending on what happens. And, they have been doing that as they've been going along. And, they've been doing a darn good job.

So the plan is to make it up as you go along? That explains a lot.

Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.

And that is what this is all about: freeing Iraq, so that Iraqis may rob, kill and intimidate each other.

The Arabic word for quagmire is warta. It's in the Mughni al-Kabir. It figures the Mughni al-Kabir would have it; it's printed in Lebanon.

While many Iraqis are very concerned about the future, they do have some things to be cheerful about. One is that Saddam Hussein is gone, which really is cause for celebration. The other is that with the Americans in charge, they should get some really outstanding TV. They say that countries with a British colonial past have excellent administrative systems but bad food, and former French colonies have excellent food but lousy administration. I think that the people of Iraq can look forward to excellent televised entertainment but extremely short attention spans.

So far, though, the new age of Iraqi television is not looking so exciting. The US occupation authorities are broadcasting a diet of public access style TV. First, viewers were treated to a televised address from President Bush and Prime Minister Blair. President Bush assured the Iraqis that in fact everything is going great, despite what they may conclude from having looked out their windows. He assured the country that Coalition™ forces “will help maintain law and order, so that Iraqis can live in security.” This would be an embarrassing statement, but likely nobody was watching because the power plants have been so thoroughly looted that nobody has any electricity to run their televisions with.

“You are a good and gifted people… an inventive, creative people,” intoned the President slowly, raising his voice slightly in hopes that this would help Iraq’s non-English-speaking people understand.

According to the Washington Post:

After the addresses by Bush and Blair, viewers mostly saw slides of what [an] official called “Iraqis being liberated,” interspersed with screen-size versions of the U.S. military's psychological warfare tracts. Programming also includes military public service announcements including warnings to Iraqis not to evade checkpoints, with the advice to slow down and let the soldier come to them.

This was followed by subtitled editions of newscasts from various US news networks, including Fox News's hour-long politics show, “Special Report With Brit Hume.” An official from the US government authority in charge of the broadcasts said they were intended as “an example of what a free press in the American tradition actually is.” Which would explain the inclusion of Fox News.

But the Baywatch reruns will start soon, and only then will the Iraqi people know they are truly free.

Time Magazine has good articles explaining the trouble brewing in the south between pro-US and pro-Iranian ayatollahs, and the trouble brewing in the north that could force the Coalition™ to defend Iraqi territory against the Turkish military. Of course, they might well have trouble doing so, since the war plan left Coalition™ forces so thin in the north. “But with every day... the wisdom of that plan becomes more apparent.”

My Oxford English-Arabic Dictionary doesn't have the Arabic word for “quagmire” in it; I suspect it will make its way into the next edition.

Dick Cheney emerged from his undisclosed location yesterday to deliver this pronouncement:

“In the early days of the war, the plan was criticized by some retired military officers embedded in TV studios,” Cheney said, drawing laughter. “But with every day and every advance by our coalition forces, the wisdom of that plan becomes more apparent.”

The major criticism, you will recall, was that the plan did not include enough military personnel to secure areas once they had been “liberated.” Clearly this is no longer a problem, apart from the riots, looting, and assassinations that we are seeing in the wake of Coalition™ forces, who say they have neither the troops nor the inclination to stop the mayhem.

I cannot imagine what we critics were thinking. Boy, do we have egg on our faces.

The Iraqi regime has been toppled. With the security apparatus gone, widespread looting is taking place, with people stealing anything they can find which might be put to use or later sold. It may be some time before Coalition™ forces are able to restore order.

The massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction that the Administration told us the Iraqis possess are now presumably unguarded. It may well be that no living person knows where all of them are. Those government and military officials highly placed enough to have access to weapons stockpiles must be very concerned about their personal futures, and are no doubt looking for ways to make new friends outside Iraq.

I feel safer, don’t you?

I was in the supermarket this afternoon and saw this headline on a tabloid: "How Cher stopped hating herself." Good for Cher. Now if she could get me to stop hating her, she'd really have something.

US troops are in Baghdad and the Defense Department is telling us, again, that Saddam may be dead. While I would guess the war will continue for a while, it seems likely to be winding down.

So now what? Well, according to a report released by the US Army War College in February, here comes the tricky part:

To be successful, an occupation such as that contemplated after any hostilities in Iraq requires much detailed interagency planning, many forces, multi-year military commitment, and a national commitment to nation-building.

Recent American experiences with post-conflict operations have generally featured poor planning, problems with relevant military force structure, and difficulties with a handover from military to civilian responsibility.

To conduct their share of the essential tasks that must be accomplished to reconstruct an Iraqi state, military forces will be severely taxed in military police, civil affairs, engineer, and transportation units, in addition to possible severe security difficulties.

The administration of an Iraqi occupation will be complicated by deep religious, ethnic, and tribal differences which dominate Iraqi society.

U.S. forces may have to manage and adjudicate conflicts among Iraqis that they can barely comprehend.

An exit strategy will require the establishment of political stability, which will be difficult to achieve given Iraq's fragmented population, weak political institutions, and propensity for rule by violence.

Very comforting.

Unfortunately, to say that the Administration’s plan for the post-war period is underdeveloped is a massive understatement. There is clearly a great deal of confusion within the Administration, even down to such basic issues as whether the Defense Department or the State Department will be in charge of the reconstruction effort.

Many will consider “reconstruction” to be a euphemistic term. While not much is known about the Administration’s post-war plan, it has been reported that a number of Americans are waiting in Kuwait for the all-clear to come in and take over the 23 Iraqi government ministries. Some reports even have dueling teams of State and Defense Department nominees hanging out in Kuwaiti hotels, waiting to take over the same positions.

James Woolsey, former director of the CIA, is said to be set to take over the Ministry of Information. This is sure not to raise any suspicions or ire in the region.

If you have ever been an ambassador to a Middle Eastern country, you are likely sitting by the Kuwait Hilton’s pool right now. Timothy Carney, a former ambassador to Sudan, will head the Ministry of Industry. Robin Raphael, a former ambassador to Tunisia, will head the Ministry of Trade. Kenton Keith, a former ambassador to Qatar, will head the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Robert Reilly, a former director of the Voice of America, is hanging around Kuwait City, but I have not been able to work out what he is supposed to be doing.

Barbara Bodine, the former U.S. ambassador to Yemen, will be Governor of Baghdad. Buck Walters, a former ambassador to Namibia, will be Governor of the southern region, which is very similar to Namibia in that it is dry and sandy; he should have no problems.

All of them will be working under General Jay Garner. But the Pentagon does not want you to call Garner a military governor, because he is a retired general. Why, even the sergeants who answer his phones call him Jay.

According to the Washington Post, the Iraqi dinar will be replaced, at least temporarily, with the US dollar, a move that will have no imperial overtones at all.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, widely seen as the architect of the Iraq war, has said the transition from US rule to an Iraqi “transitional authority” would take more than six months; I would guess it will be a lot more than six months.

In other transition news, paramilitaries from the Iraqi National Congress, a group of Iraqi exiles opposed to the regime of Saddam Hussein, have been airlifted into the south of the country to undertake tasks which are not yet clear.

The leader of the INC, Ahmed Chalabi, is a darling of American neo-conservatives like Wolfowitz and Cheney, and is widely seen as their choice for president of Iraq. He left Iraq in 1958 and so his power base inside the country is open to question. He ran a bank in Jordan until he was indicted there for fraud; he allegedly fled the country in the trunk of a car to avoid prosecution. He is still wanted there, which could make state visits problematic.

But hey, who said presidents have to be supported by a majority of their people or have clean legal records, right?

The World Health Organization (WHO) has issued a statement that says, in part: “WHO is deeply concerned that injuries suffered as a direct result of this conflict are the number-one public health problem in Iraq today.” Oh, the peril of unintended consequences.

While this certainly is worrying, I would be even more concerned if there were a more serious public health problem in Iraq today.

The Bush Administration believes it is important to establish a national health system that guarantees a high quality of health care of all citizens. In Iraq.

From this New York Times photo, it appears that Drew Carey is serving in Iraq.

General Richard B. Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, explained to everyone today why they should stop pointing out that the war plan sucks: it's bad for the troops. “It is not helpful to have those kind of comments come out when we've got troops in combat, because first of all, they're false, they're absolutely wrong, they bear no resemblance to the truth, and it's just -- it's just -- harmful to our troops that are out there fighting very bravely, very courageously.”

It doesn't really seem to me that the troops need the media to point out to them that the war plan sucks; I think they know. I've seen a foot soldier quoted in the paper every day since the war started saying, “this sure isn't what we expected.”

Myers also tried out a new excuse for why 100,000 more troops are only now being shifted into the theater: tactical surprise. With only 250,000 troops massed on the border, the Iraqis were completely taken by surprise by the American attack. 350,000 would be a dead giveaway. An ultimatum by President Bush saying, “get out within 48 hours or we attack” is apparently not a dead giveaway; I guess you have to be a general to understand why. General Myers engaged in a little question-and-answer with himself, perhaps worried that someone else would answer first: “Do you think there was tactical surprise? I think there was.” I am a little concerned about what takes General Myers by surprise. Which is probably why he doesn't think the war plan sucks.

In another brilliant stroke of tactical surprise, the Pentagon suddenly redirected the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit to the front, even though they were scheduled to go home after six months overseas. The war planners, of course, had anticipated this all along, but did not issue the orders until five days ago. The element of surprise, you see.

When I was in college, I intended to take the Foreign Service exam and enter the diplomatic corps. As with many things when I was in college, I kept putting it off and never got around to it. But I have often wondered if I could have passed the exam, which is famously difficult. So last year, I signed up to take it.

Yesterday, I got an electronic postcard reminding me of the exam date. It features a photo of Colin Powell blathering on about something or other, with the caption, “This man wants you to remember a really important date. April 12, 2003. This is the date you are scheduled to take the Foreign Service Examination.” Colin and his henchmen go on to say:

There has never been a better time to pursue a career in the Foreign Service. We need your help to create a stronger, more diverse diplomatic corps and are eager for your project and people management talents, and your team-building and relationship skills. That's why we want to see you on April 12.

As a Foreign Service Officer, you will represent America around the world...

As tempting as it is to represent America around the world at a time when the cornerstone of its foreign policy is reviled everywhere (except the Solomon Islands, apparently), I am going to have to pass on this particular career opportunity. If I were to join the Foreign Service right now, it would only be to resign immediately in disgust, and that seems like a waste of time.

So my April 12 is free; who wants to play frisbee?