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What qualifies you to write a book like this?

As I say in the foreword, positively nothing. I’m just some guy. (Then again, so are nearly all of the talking heads setting the terms of public debate in the United States, sad to say.) It just seemed like a book like this should exist, and as far as I could tell, it didn’t. As to whether the content is credible, that’s your call, of course. But, my occasional fallibility aside (see the errata page for that), you should be able to verify pretty much everything in the book in a couple of Googles.

When were the essays completed?

Generally speaking, about six months before publication, give or take. Which, given the nature of war, is a bit like doing an oil painting of a fireworks display. For high-flux situations like Iraq and Afghanistan, I tried to squeeze in updates as late as possible in the process. (My editor can tell you how much extra work I kept making for him.) But even those had a lead time of months. Still, as I write this on the eve of publication, as far as I can tell, most of the thing holds up pretty darn well. Much better than I expected, to be honest.

Why isn’t [insert your favorite civil war / insurrection / international stand-off here] included?

Believe it or not, my publisher originally wanted the book to be only 30,000 words long. Which was, of course, impossible. As it is, most of the essays are short enough to read on the can, which seems a bit unjust, given that we’re often describing situations in which countless nice human beings have lost their lives. The risk of trivializing anything haunted me every waking minute while writing this thing. Ultimately, we convinced the kind publisher to extend my word and page limit up by about fifty percent (which costs money out of their pocket, mind you), and then I spent most of the month of March 2007 cutting and slashing every spare word, and in a few cases, entire chapters.

This is where the main page for the Who Hates Whom subsite will go. Obviously, still under construction.

I’ve been busy this week finally working on that comic book series for Dark Horse that I’ve been promising for years. But I’m working on it.

Check back in a few days and I’ll have stuff here. Honest.

The extra chapter on Peru, not included in the book, will appear here.

Fujimori actually just said that getting extradited was always part of his plan. Yeah. Right.

This space will remain under construction for a while; notes, updates, errata, and stuff I wished I’d been able to include in the book should all eventually wind up here.

Introduction/Foreword Thingy

• The Treaty of Kadesh is located in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.  Go if you get the chance.

• CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC, and CBS all paying more attention to Anna Nicole Smith’s death than significant global events of the very same day.

• The UN definitions of "terrorism" are a thornier issue than I had room to get into in the text (after all, one man’s "terrorist" is often another man’s "freedom fighter"), but neither the consensus definition nor the one used in Resolution 49/60 distinguish between acts committed by state and non-state actors.

• The Reagan administration calls the entire African National Congress a "terrorist" organization. (The point in the book is simply to show that the word "terrorist" gets tossed around a lot.)

In fairness, factions within the ANC did engage in sabotage and armed resistance, and Nelson Mandela himself had been key to forming the ANC’s main armed wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe — albeit only as a last resort, after almost fifty years of the ANC’s non-violent resistance.

Then again, let’s also consider that Reagan’s policy of "constructive engagement" with South Africa made the United States into apartheid’s strongest ally, eased an international arms embargo, and strengthened the explicitly racist regime. Reagan also vetoed a 1986 law implementing sanctions and calling for the release of all political prisoners (including Mandela), despite the measure’s overwhelming popularity in both houses of Congress, which quickly overrode Reagan’s veto by nearly 4-to-1 margins. Four months later, in February 1987, the UN Security Council considered a resolution to mandate a similar set of sanctions worldwide. The Reagan administration vetoed that, too. In 1988, another set of UN sanctions, another Reagan veto.

Bizarrely, in 1985, Reagan sincerely claimed that South Africa had "eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country — the type of thing where hotels and places of entertainment and so forth were segregated." The president’s competence on this issue, much less what constitutes a "terrorist," could not have been more questionable.

• Anti-Castro activist Luis Posada Carriles, implicated in the 1976 blowing up of 73 civilians, goes to work for Oliver North. Note that Posada also claims responsibility for a series of hotel bombings.

Incidentally, Posada’s past employment by the U.S. provides a handy bogey man to Cuba’s state-controlled media, used to generate feelings of anger, fear, and solidarity among the populace. The effect is disturbingly not unlike the way U.S. media, economically compelled to repeat stories pushed by the White House, winds up rotatating its own set of scary evildoers (Castro, Noriega, Chavez, Ortega, Saddam, Ahmadinejad, etc.), with similar results.

Few Americans have ever even heard of Luis Posada; many adult Cubans may recognize his name as easily as you’d know Osama bin Laden.

• Amnesty International uses the word "terrorist" in reference to Al-Qaeda while discussing a country in which people’s arms were being hacked off as a means of projecting power.

This oddly narrow usage of the word "terror" is employed elsewhere by Amnesty, but since the book’s completion, I’ve found other Amnesty articles concerning Sierra Leone in which the word "terror" is applied to both cases. If I could, I’d soften the language here. Also, this specific quibble should not be confused with criticism of Amnesty’s goals and methods, which I support.

And I’m sure you’re hearing all about it in the US press.  Probably can’t even turn on the TV or the radio without seeing something about it.  Ahem.

Sigh.

PS, added as a somewhat crass but fully sincere afterthought: Come to think of it, picking up a copy of Who Hates Whom might not be a bad thing for the day. Can’t solve a problem without taking the time to try to understand it.

Whole reason I wrote the book, actually.

(Well, that, and the paycheck. But the other reason was bigger. You’d believe that if you saw the check.)

My new book is available next week, although you can order right this second if you want to:

Who Hates Whom: Well Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts, And Various Things Blowing Up — A Woefully Incomplete Guide™.

It’s exactly what it sounds like — a brief, pocket-sized paperback guide to about 35 of the world’s major conflict zones, complete with original maps, illustrations, and photographs.

Frankly, if you’ve ever wished for a book that allows you to look up who’s who in Sudan in one trip to the can, here it is.

Is it any good? I have no idea, honestly. There were a kajillion compromises in getting this thing down to pocket size.* But I worked hard on it, and so far, WHW has picked up some kind praise from John Hodgman of The Daily Show, Ken Jennings from Jeopardy!, comedian Emo Philips, and — of all things — Men’s Health magazine, which chose it as a “Must Have” in their September issue. (Will reading Who Hates Whom therefore give you tighter abs? Possibly.)

If you enjoy the occasional political stuff on this blog, or if you liked the general vibe of last year’s Prisoner of Trebekistan, you might dig it.  I hope you will.

*It’s not up yet, but I’ll have WhoHatesWhom.com at least partially up sometime next week with extras, deleted stuff, source notes, errata, etc.

The L.A. Times story is here. Not surprisingly, the Pentagon dismisses the estimate out of hand, but as Jon points out, it’s right in line with this extrapolation of last year’s Lancet study, which was also dismissed out of hand, despite using widely-accepted methodology.

Meanwhile, when random Americans were polled a few months ago by the Associated Press, the median guess for the death toll was under ten thousand.

Obviously, we really have no idea how many innocent people have died in Iraq.  But there’s at least a fair chance that however bad you may think Iraq is, you might need to multiply it by one hundred.

Rep. John Boehner’s communications director has now provided an excuse for his boss’s already-notorious comment to Wolf Blitzer that the blood of Americans is a "small price:"

"Wolf asked about the money spent in Iraq, and that’s what Mr. Boehner was referring to when he said our troops’ efforts are critical for the safety and security of our country."

This is, of course, precisely the excuse rather easily predicted — and, as described in advance, a rather horrifying admission that when confronted with both dollars and American blood in the same question, the GOP’s leader in the House only hears the dollar amounts.

The predictability of the current leadership’s inhumanity would be almost funny if it weren’t so goddam awful.

TPM grabbed this from CNN, and C&L reposted the video. This isn’t some minor guy speaking. This is the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives, John Boehner, telling us how he really feels about the very soldiers his ilk are constantly instructing us to "support:"*

Here’s the transcript — Boehner is quite pointedly asked not just about the financial cost, but about "the loss in blood, the Americans who are killed every month."

I suppose maybe Boehner may claim that he wasn’t paying attention to the second part of the question, that all he heard were the dollar figures. That would be simply restating the problem. Rather precisely.

There are so many other falsehoods packed into that one brief response that it’s almost like one of those Highlights for Children puzzles where you have to find two dozen things hidden in a cartoon tree. No, we’re not "making success." No, General Petraeus didn’t really outline anything "pretty clearly;" the Pentagon itself reportedly disagrees with a great deal of the what was ultimately just a rehash of longstanding Bush administration talking points. No, the war isn’t going to "stop Al-Qaeda" (which isn’t centered in Iraq, of course, had no connection to Saddam before the war, but which now uses the war itself as a major recruiting tool). No, we’re not going to unilaterally "stabilize the Middle East," no matter what happens in Iraq. And so on. How many ways can the GOP House Minority Leader disconnect from reality in one paragraph? Find ‘em all!

And the blood of American soldiers, not to mention countless Iraqi civilians, continuing to be spilled so allow this nonsense can continue? It’s "a small price."

* "Support," remember, means "allow to die and be maimed in large number for no clearly attainable objective other than preventing a massive loss of face for the war’s supporters."