Thanks to everyone who's sent contributions to Operation Homefront via this site's Amazon link. The group helps military families in the San Diego area; for more, scoll down. As of 2:00 p.m. Central time, we're up to $401.85, net of Amazon's cut. (Amazon's reports have about a one-hour lag, so if you've just given your contribution isn't included in that total.) You can also give directly via PayPal with the button to the left. Unfortunately, the OpH people seem to have their PayPal account set up to add "shipping" to your donation, so you may need to adjust to amount to hit the right level. [Posted 3/21.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 21, 2003 • Comments
Today's Dallas Morning News features this story on a local Kurdish expat who's joined hundreds of other Iraqi expats helping the U.S. effort to oust Saddam. Todd Bensman writes:
RICHARDSON—A 20-year-old photo that hangs on a wall of the Haji family's comfortable suburban home offers a telltale glimpse of a long and tragic drama. The picture shows a young, lean Karim Haji as an anti-Saddam Hussein guerilla fighter, clasping an AK-47 in the hills of the Kurdish enclave of northern Iraq.
At the time, dozens of Mr. Haji's clansmen and relatives, including a beloved brother, had been murdered, gassed and repeatedly driven from their homes in the Iraqi dictator's zeal to suppress all perceived threats to his hold on the country.
Mr. Haji is 46 now, a bit thicker in the middle after a decade of comfortable North Texas living, the father of seven children and husband of a wife grateful for his opportunity to make a decent living as a gas station manager. But Mr. Haji practically bolted from the comforts of his adopted home when presented recently with a chance to don a military uniform once more for a final confrontation with his old nemesis.
The Richardson resident is, until very recently, was stationed in Kuwait with American soldiers preparing for invasion. Mr. Haji is one of dozens of Dallas-area Kurdish and Iraqi expatriate civilians—hundreds nationwide—who have volunteered to help American soldiers wage war and peace as translators, POW guards, guides and in post-conflict humanitarian aid operations....
The effort includes thousands of Kurds and Iraqi Shiite Muslims who accepted preferential immigration terms extended to them in 1991 after the disastrous defeats of their American-encouraged rebellions against Mr. Hussein. Those expatriate communities, including an estimated 7,000 in North Texas, comprise rare enclaves of Americanized, multilingual Muslims who support war against Iraq's regime.
Kurdish exiles are everywhere in the U.S., even in Dalton, Georgia, where my pal Charles Oliver profiles 26-year-old Dara Rasheed.
"One hundred percent of the Kurdish people hate Saddam. They call him Hitler 2," Rasheed said.
In 1988, Saddam attacked the Kurdish village of Halabjah with poison gas, killing 5,000 people.
"That village was an hour from where I lived," Rasheed said.
Some Americans don't realize just how brutal Saddam is, Rasheed said. He said that Saddam will force the families of his enemies to watch as they are executed.
After the first Gulf War, Rasheed's father worked for an international agency helping to rebuild the Kurdish villages Saddam had destroyed.
The family heard that Saddam's forces had threatened to kill all those who had worked for Western agencies if he came back into control of northern Iraq.
So the family fled to the United States. They first chose to go to Chattanooga because family friends already lived there. They eventually settled in Dalton, after hearing about it from other friends.
[Posted 3/21.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 21, 2003 • Comments
Shoutin' Across the Pacific picked up Iraq's torching of southern oil wells three hours before CNN. He did it from Georgia with commercially available satellite images. Come to think of it, CNN's in Georgia and uses commercial satellites... Check out his "near real-time" page of satellite images, and let's hope his server doesn't melt. [Posted 3/20.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 20, 2003 • Comments
I like my iBook and love my iPod. They're pretty. They give me pleasure. They work well. Two out of three ain't bad. But I'm getting a little uncomfortable with the cultural meanings Apple is determined to attach to its products. It's bad enough to have a portrait of John and Yoko starring out from behind the Apple Store's Genius Bar, as if these flakes belonged in the company of Richard Feynman, Jane Goodall, and Martin Luther King.
Now Al Gore has joined the Apple board. Some people look at Gore and see a nerdy Democrat. I see the guy who blurbed Algeny, so "pro-technology" he's anti-technology. Either way, he's no business genius (certainly not a Yoko-caliber profit monger). The appointment represents some combination of political favoritism and image making.
Maybe I'm nuts, but trying to grow your market share by excluding everyone who doesn't share hippie-dippy Bay Area politics strikes me as a dumb strategy. Of course, there is a way to make amends: diversify those black-and-white portraits. Nominees? [Posted 3/20.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 20, 2003 • Comments
Along with security precautions modeled on presidential visits, the Oscar organizers have made a more-publicized change: no red carpet arrivals. The official line is that the usual festive atmosphere would be tacky for a nation at war: "The academy is mindful that its celebrity guests would feel uncomfortable arriving at this year's awards at the beginning of a major war to face a business-as-usual phalanx of interviewers and photographers," Gil Cates, who is producing the broadcast, told the Los Angeles Times.
The red carpet survived World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, not to mention September 11, but it can't survive Iraq? I suspect a different motive: the commercial powers that be have wisely concluded that interview after interview with antiwar stars would turn off the American viewing public.
Either that, or it's a vast Conde Nast conspiracy. As a Harry Winston executive told the LAT, "I think the people who will benefit the most will be the Vanity Fair party-givers. If Vanity Fair has its party, that will be the red carpet." [Posted 3/20.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 20, 2003 • Comments
I'm with Tacitus: "'Operation Iraqi Freedom' is as lame and ham-handed as they come." Military operations should have meaningless names like "Overlord." Check out the comments. [Posted 3/20.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 20, 2003 • Comments
In case you missed InstaPundit's link, check out Ed Driscoll's TechCentralStaion piece applying the TFAIE model to Hollywood and Silicon Valley. [Posted 3/20.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 20, 2003 • Comments
Operation Homefront has expanded to El Paso. And you can donate directly to the San Diego branch via the button to the left.
All contributions made to this site in March, minus Amazon and PayPal fees, will go to Operation Homefront. And if you're in San Diego or El Paso, check out the needs for in-kind donations and volunteers. [Posted 3/20.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 20, 2003 • Comments
Reader Andy in San Diego answers my request for info on how to help service members' families with this link:
[Talk show host] Roger Hedgecock (here in San Diego), is helping to promote Operation Homefront, which is getting needed stuff to the families of our military.
Granted, it's limited to the San Diego area (and Camp Pendleton), but since we have some extremely large bases here (Miramar Marine Air Station, Naval Base San Diego (also called "32nd Street"), Naval Air Station North Island, Naval Amphibious Base Coronado (home of the SEALs on the west coast), Camp Pendleton...and probably a couple minor ones I'm forgetting), Op Homefront is covering a lot of people.
San Diegans can help by volunteering services, from car repair to tax accounting, while others can contribute money. Having just been in San Diego, I can say you really feel the presence of the war there.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 19, 2003 • Comments
Sixty percent of U.S. Marines are privates or corporals, making an absolute maximum of $21,888 a year (for a mythical corporal with more than 26 years of experience). A newly minted private makes $12,780 a year. No, that figure doesn't include housing allowances, but it's still a pittance, especially if you and your family are stationed in a pricey place like San Diego County. An article in today's LAT profiles the hardships, and some of the groups that help:
"A lot of sacrifice goes on within an entire family when one member of that family is in the military," said Sandy Bowen, the interim director of Military Outreach Ministries, which provides food, furniture, clothing, and other services to hundreds of Navy and Marine families in San Diego Country each month. "These people are our neighbors, and they are sacrificing a great deal in order for their spouse to protect our country."
Bowen sees the people her group helps, most of whom are 18 to 24 years old, as no different from any other young, high school-educated workers trying to better themselves.
"They are moving upward. They are proud to be in the military, and they are taking charge of their lives," she said.
It's often not an easy journey. There are the women who call a week before payday, out of money and needing baby formula. The family that lived in a tent on the beach as they waited to get housing on base. The woman, 8 months pregnant, who was sleeping on an air mattress and called wondering whether she could get a bed.
"You learn to buy cheap and never off-base. You take hand-me-down clothes, clip coupons," said Mollie Stuckey, 25, who brought her 6-month-old daughter to the recent food and clothing giveaway at Camp Pendleton sponsored by Bowen's group.
"Half the Marines I know work part-time jobs in town," she said. "Pizza delivery, bartenders, jobs at night that have flexible hours."
Bravo for the post-Tribune-merger LAT for publishing this regional story, which is hard to imagine under the previous regime. But the story leaves out obvious information: How can readers help? The groups mentioned aren't much better. Via Google, I found out that Military Outreach Ministries is a program of the local presbytery (the Presbyterian church's equivalent of county-level government) and that it's looking for someone to fill that director's job. I didn't, however, find out how someone who isn't a San Diego Presbyterian might contribute. And the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society, a national nonprofit group, seems to limit its fundraising to service members. If anyone has further information, please let me know. [Posted 3/18.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on March 18, 2003 • Comments