blood & treasure

new site

2004-07-16T15:54:00.000+01:00

Well, I've just about had it. For some reason Blogger won't let me link to anything. As a result, I've moved the transfer to my new site forward. Britain's top public intellectual and most prominent Moloch worshipper can now be found at:

http://bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/

do that thing with your bookmarks.

i'm off

2004-07-15T15:12:00.000+01:00

Sometime over the next few days, I'm going to shift off Blogger and set up elsewhere. I'll keep you posted.

zen governance

2004-07-15T14:52:00.000+01:00

Prior to his report, there was much speculation that Lord Butler didn’t like the way the senior civil service had been put under the whip of various Blairoid arrivistes and cronies and was determined to administer a good kicking in response. Instead, he’s given our callow PM a smooth demonstration of what the Mandarin classes are actually good for.

Step aside Hutton, and look how a real pro goes about soothing troubled waters. “Doubtful” claims, “unsubstantiated” allegations, “vague and ambiguous intelligence”, “strain” between the government and the intelligence services. And yet no one was to blame. Failure was collective. In fact, it was a kind of platonic essence floating about the place until exorcised by Lord Butler ‘s report, at which point it evaporated with a faint hiss. Both sides of the argument can find satisfaction in the report, but neither are vindicated. Perfect equilibrium has been reached. Are chemical warheads a fantasy in the mind of Tony Blair? Or is Blair a simply a figment of the imagination of a warhead? Who can say? Shall we move on?

Well, maybe. The problem is that both Hutton and Butler have revealed a lot about how this government actually goes about its business, and specifically the business of taking the country to war. And it’s this, I think, rather than the war itself which has put people off the government. People have turned against Blair in the same sense that people who see sausages being made turn towards vegetarianism.

14/7+1

2004-07-15T10:16:00.000+01:00

It's late, but...

"Danielle laughed: I know some Maoists. They had a conference on the French Revolution and their main spoeaker was a reclusive philosopher who'd spent years studying the period. He went to the podium, said nothing for the longest time and then announced - 'there was only one revolution - the French revolution'. There was thunderous applause."

From The Golden Age is in us.

Ballard and Blunkett

2004-07-14T12:26:00.000+01:00

Just finished Millennium People, which offers all that you might expect of the pleasures of Ballard: the benign tolerance of extremes; the humming of intense affectlessness; the peculiar way he has at communicating reassurance at the prospect of chaos. Wherever you go, you’re safe with Jim. And you go to some pretty strange places.

Many assessments of Ballard treat him as a prophet. This is sort of true, in an out of kilter way. Crash can be seen to anticipate road rage. Cocaine nights pre-figured the flagrant hedonism of Club 18-30. The thuggish overclass of Super-Cannes can be taken as a metaphor for the overall effects of the Washington consensus and global neoliberal economics. And the success of UKIP seems to echo the middle class revolt that is the subject of Millenium People.

And yet there’s a lot that’s out of alignment. Car culture doesn’t generate psychosexual adventures, but punch ups on the hard shoulder. The island hedonists in Cocaine Nights are retirees, rather than the gormless teens and twenty somethings infesting Zante and Faliraki. And UKIP represent the forces of militant nostalgia rather than the more nuanced and comprehensive revolt against the very idea of civic responsibility that drives Millenium People.

Ballard’s too good a writer to be a really accurate prophet. You get the feeling he wouldn’t have created a party like UKIP – too loud and puerile. On the other hand, Robert Kilroy Silk is a real Ballard character, a mass of cliches struggling to emerge out of a sort of primal blankness.

What would Ballard have done with the Home Secretary as a character? Here we have a blind man obsessed with surveillance, identification and order, a man with a guide dog who needs to know where everyone and everything is at all times. On the face of it, Blunkett is a highly Ballardian character. But then again… he’s a bit too crude and a bit too obvious.

Perhaps this is really what makes Ballard so appealing. In real life, Ballardian types are spiteful, career obsessed and status hungry wised up rabble. You have to go to the books to get the real thing. Britain’s just too mediocre to make a satisfying dystopia.

ochre is the new black

2004-07-13T15:38:00.000+01:00

Or something. Added Backword Dave, Stalinism, Chase Me Ladies and Explananda to the links, because that's the kind of public intellectual I am. I've deleted Chun the unavoidable, because he deleted himself.I've not put up comments yet and may leave blogger in the next couple of days. Or maybe not. Meanwhile, the site feed is working finally. You can see it on the right. I have a mild ache in my shoulder. My Jack Russell is sleeping on my lap as I type. Outside, it's bright with a strong breeze. I need to change the contents of the washing machine. I'm not sure whether to have another cup of coffee. I'm just going to buy some stamps.

blues

2004-07-13T13:31:00.000+01:00

got those must-find-a decent-comments-system, something-weird's-happened-to-the-RSS-feed, the-format-makes-the-print-size-look-tiny-on-a-mac, might-as-well-update-the blogroll-while-I'm-at-it blues.

Abnormal service resumed later.

a bit on the cute side

2004-07-12T16:16:00.000+01:00

...but quite amusing nonetheless.

moloch speaks!

2004-07-11T18:17:00.000+01:00

In today’s Observer, Nick Cohen warns against the long term consequences of giving legal protection to superstition.

The evangelicals were mad and wanted to get even. But there was something more than that. Butler got to the heart of the difficulty of imposing censorship when he wrote in the Melbourne Age : 'If we believe our religion is the only way to heaven, then we must also affirm that all other paths lead to hell. If we believe our religion is true, then it requires us to believe others are false.'

Well, quite. To a devout Jew, what could be more hateful than Christianity's claims that Jesus was the son of God? To a devout Christian, what could be more hateful than Islam's claims that Jesus was only another prophet? To devout Jews, Christians, Muslims, and for that matter, Hindus, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Jains, Bahais, Mormons and Moonies, what could be more hateful than athiests' claims that there are no gods and they should grow up? To the fundamentalist, anyone who recommends another path is sending people to hell.

But Nick, they are going to hell. All of them. Now, as well as being Britain’s top public intellectual I am also a worshipper of Moloch, with all that this entails. It’s been a while since I’ve actually burned a child alive within the hollow statue of a brazen bull, but that’s cool. I realize that this is not permitted in these benighted times, and in the best New Labour fashion, I do not wish to be judgemental of those who do not understand that the screams of a burning child sound sweet to the ears of God and have a positive affect on labour productivity.

I would like to make this argument more forcefully. Look at Africa, once a great and powerful continent, fertile and forested. Then the Romans destroy Carthage, the Mecca of Molochianism. Since then it’s been nothing but war, famine, colonialism, desertification and starvation. How many children have died since the worship of Moloch was extirpated. How many would have been saved if even one was sacrificed?

Thanks to Mr Blunkett, soon I will be able to campaign openly and publicly for the burning of children, and take to court any who would profess to find this abhorrent. And I am not the only one. Mrs Granger from next door but one is a sturdy local businesswoman and devotee of Humwawa, who rides the South Wind, whose breath smells of entrails and who feasts on the heart’s blood of captured warriors. She, too, is looking forward to the new dispensation. This is truly an ecumenical matter.

We intend jointly to raise our case with Prince Charles, defender of faiths. We also have some advice on organic agriculture that may be of interest to him.

premature

2004-07-09T12:11:00.000+01:00

I'd like to take this opportunity to declare how disillusioned I am with the Kerry presidency.

unknown knowns

2004-07-09T12:04:00.000+01:00

Various apologists have compared the events at Abu Ghraib to fraternity high jinks. Taking the higher road, others warn us not to drift into thoughtcrime. This is not the real America.

Slavoj Zizek says yes and no.

To anyone acquainted with the reality of the American way of life, the photos brought to mind the obscene underside of U.S. popular culture—say, the initiatory rituals of torture and humiliation one has to undergo to be accepted into a closed community. Similar photos appear at regular intervals in the U.S. press after some scandal explodes at an Army base or high school campus, when such rituals went overboard. Far too often we are treated to images of soldiers and students forced to assume humiliating poses, perform debasing gestures and suffer sadistic punishments.

The torture at Abu Ghraib was thus not simply a case of American arrogance toward a Third World people. In being submitted to the humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture: They got a taste of the culture’s obscene underside that forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy and freedom.

Article via Lenin’s Tomb, where Len also reviews Zizek’s latest at exhaustive length. Anyone would think he was a public intellectual or something.

green shoots

2004-07-08T15:52:00.000+01:00

well, it seems to be assassination day here at Blood & Treasure. From the LRB, Perry Anderson assesses what's probably going to be the next major international crisis. As an aside, he takes a look at a possible unintended consequence of liberalization of the gambling laws. Concerning the attempted assassination of Taiwan Presdient Chen Shui-ban:

For those in search of a more plausible explanation, the most popular scenario - widely bruited in Taiwan - points at the island's powerful gambling syndicates, which stood to lose huge sums of money if the Blue camp, on which all bets had been placed, won. They could well have calculated that winging Chen was the best way of unleashing a sympathy vote for the Green cause that would yield them an avalanche of cash in lost wagers. But how could they be sure that a bullet would not - counter-productively - actually kill him? A clue may lie in the embarrassed admission of Chen's security detail that, supposedly because it was a hot day, he was not wearing a bullet-proof vest, standard issue for a presidential incumbent on the campaign trail. An odd feature of the shooting was that aim was taken through the windscreen of an open vehicle, where a bullet was most likely to be deflected, and not at the candidate's head or upper body, which were clear of obstruction, unprotected above it. If a gang had assumed that Chen would be wearing an armoured vest, then a bullet slung low through the windscreen should have struck where it could cause a sensation without inflicting any real injury.

ghoul pool

2004-07-08T15:01:00.000+01:00

With Ayad Allawi’s offices mortared by insurgents yesterday, this seems timely:

Each entrant picks five members of Iraq's 37-person Interim Government that s/he believes will be the first to be assassinated, blown up or otherwise martyred. Unfortunately, this means that no more than seven people can join a single pool. The pool is won by whoever is the first to rack up five points or, alternately, whoever has the highest score by January 31, 2005, when a popularly- elected government is scheduled to take the reigns of sovereignty (the same day that monkeys are set to be released from butts all across Iraq). We assume this will allow ample time to establish a clear winner, but there's no need to panic if the deadline rolls around and two or more contestants are locked in a dead heat. After all, by the time the deadline comes, the American elections will be long since over, and pretending that Iraqi elections are imminent won't be necessary to whoever's in the White House. The Interim Government will be around for quite a while yet -- although not in its current lineup. As long as a single member is still clinging to life support in a US Army field hospital, the Ghoul Pool is in effect!

or I'll kick your head in

2004-07-07T12:42:00.000+01:00

My campaign to be voted Britain’s top public intellectual is gaining momentum. But to what model can I aspire when I succeed to my rights? Ah, but of course!

A fixation with the plight of the Palestinians, Levy asserts, diverts attention from suffering in forsaken corners of the world such as Sudan, where he wrote three years ago about combat in the Darfur region that has now become a focus of international concern about slaughter and famine.

"The Palestinian 'victimocracy' has a tendency to hide wars that are infinitely longer and more murderous," Levy said. "Because we all have our eyes locked on one war alone — well, two, the war in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian war. And this emphasis has the terrible effect of hiding, of silencing, of erasing from our memories and our mental map the other wars that are thousands of times more lethal."

This is pure genius! I too would like to state with casual authority which lives are worth public attention and which not. Who do I write to to get permission? Is there a training course of some kind? Implying that Palestinians and the people who support them are somehow responsible for the escalation of violence in Sudan is a masterpiece of legerdemain, a cheap and nasty trick done in the high style. I shudder in tribute, and aspire to think harder.

And let’s not forget that in addition to his amazing way with a pensee, Bernard Henri Levy is also a man of action.

Godin showed me a video of this last operation, which shows Levy - as famous for his chest hair, silk blousons and Christian Dior shirts as for his philosophy - arriving at Nice airport with his third wife, the actress Arielle Dombasle. As they check in, shadowy figures can be seen in the background, ladling cream.

"They pick up their boarding cards, as you can see," said Godin, who has clearly watched this shaky footage hundreds of times but, like a footballer reviewing the goal of his career, seems unlikely to tire of it - "then three entarteurs fall on them, with me leading the charge. They shout: "Oh no. Oh not again." I deliver my cake, and he responds with punches. One of my young female comrades flans him again, point blank, while a second woman crushes a layered chocolate gateau topped with creme chantilly over the head of Arielle Dombasle. It was at that point", he added, "that things got out of hand."

....

Few have been more outstanding flanees that Bernard-Henri Levy, a man so sensitive that he was once credibly reported as observing that "when I find a new shade of grey, I feel ecstatic". He has also famously remarked that he dislikes seeing a woman pay in a restaurant. "I think," Levy explained, "that money does not suit a woman; or rather that I would not fall in love with such a woman." His own varied talents constitute, by his own account, "a landscape which does not have a fixed place in the classic topography of culture."

These are the kind of observations that guarantee the philosopher express deliveries of creme chantilly for years to come. "He is the worst," says Godin, who, on the subject of Bernard-Henri Levy, tends to sound like Herbert Lom on Inspector Clouseau. "He is the worst this decade." He is especially critical of Levy's consistent urging of armed intervention against the Bosnian Serbs, given that the philosopher, unlike other intellectual militants such as Andre Malraux or George Orwell, has shown no inclination to enlist himself.

But if a taste for personal involvement has not been a feature of Levy's contribution to the Bosnia debate, he cannot be accused of having shrunk from unarmed combat once the pies have started flying. At Levy's baptismal flanning, in Liege 10 years ago, the author of "Testament of God" delivered an unambiguous response. "I didn't even feel the uppercut," Godin told me, "because I was so happy to gaze up from the floor and see the peak of French intellectual thought so thoroughly snowbound." Levy, who emerges from his books as a reflective man unshakably committed to qualities such as reasonableness and tolerance, was dismayed to find that footage of the incident, which shows him shouting to his prone assailant: "Get up, or I'll kick your head in," was repeatedly broadcast on French television.

On their second encounter, at a Brussels bookshop where a gathering of what Godin describes as "100 painted old trout" had come to hear the thinker, and pugilist read from his work "The Last Days of Baudelaire", Godin was laid out on a table and subjected to further blows. The film of ther latest incident, which shows Arielle Dombasle scratching and lashing out at the entarteur's woman companions, ends with an abrupt thump. "Levy broke the camera," says Godin, "then punched the cameraman on the nose. A few minutes later he had his hands round my neck while Arielle Dombasle thrashed at me with her handbag. The police got me out of there."

Such episodes have done little to enhance Levy's profile. His puppet on the French equivalent of Spitting Image struggles to advocate a military solution in the former Yugoslavia through a hail of dairy products. In Japan, Godin claims, footage of the French philosopher's viscous misfortune has proved so popular with game-show viewers that Godin is known as "a kind of Belgian Jerry Lewis". "Levy was flanned in Reims by a mysterious splinter group," said Godin, "and recently I heard that he also ran into difficulties in a bakery at Montpellier. If those reports are true, he is under fire from all sides."

....

On a recent operation involving Levy, Godin claims, the cream pies were carried through a security barrier strapped to Alfred, a performing dog. "Alfred is a pedigree," said Godin, "but I refuse to reveal the breed. I like the thought of Levy experiencing a feeling of slight unease every time he sees a dog at a public function."

Yes, it’s a tough life being a top public intellectual. But I can take it.

oh, go on then

2004-07-06T19:24:00.000+01:00

...I'll play. See also here and here.

1. Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly? Don’t care
2. The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises? Gatsby
3. Count Basie or Duke Ellington? pass
4. Cats or dogs? Dogs. Cats are insects with fur
5. Matisse or Picasso? whatever
6. Yeats or Eliot? Eliot
7. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin? Keaton
8. Flannery O’Connor or John Updike? pass
9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca? Casablanca
10. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning? pass
11. The Who or the Stones? The Who
12. Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath? larkin
13. Trollope or Dickens? Mutual snoozathon
14. Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald? pass
15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? Dostoevsky
16. The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair? You what?
17. George Balanchine or Martha Graham? Don’t like dance
18. Hot dogs or hamburgers? burgers
19. Letterman or Leno? Oh, behave
20. Wilco or Cat Power? Come again?
21. Verdi or Wagner? pass
22. Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe? Grace
23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash? cash
24. Kingsley or Martin Amis? Martin, for Money
25. Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando? Mitchum
26. Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp? See 17
27. Vermeer or Rembrandt? No opinion
28. Tchaikovsky or Chopin? See above
29. Red wine or white? red
30. Noël Coward or Oscar Wilde? Oscar
31. Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity? Not seen either
32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev? pass
33. Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev? See 17
34. Constable or Turner? Turner
35. The Searchers or Rio Bravo? Rio Bravo
36. Comedy or tragedy? Comedy
37. Fall or spring? Autumn
38. Manet or Monet? No opinion
39. The Sopranos or The Simpsons? The Simpsons, emphatically
40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin? pass
41. Joseph Conrad or Henry James? Conrad
42. Sunset or sunrise? What’s a sunrise?
43. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter? Porter
44. Mac or PC? Don’t care
45. New York or Los Angeles? Don’t know either. I’ll be contrary and say LA
46. Partisan Review or Horizon? No thanks
47. Stax or Motown? pass
48. Van Gogh or Gauguin? pass
49. Steely Dan or Elvis Costello? Steely dan by a mile
50. Reading a blog or reading a magazine? blog
51. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier? Gielgud
52. Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin’ Lovers? Not heard either
53. Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde? Chinatown
54. Ghost World or Election? pass
55. Minimalism or conceptual art? Don’t like either
56. Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny? Daffy
57. Modernism or postmodernism? Dunno. I’ll ask the postman
58. Batman or Spider-Man? I was a Marvel kiddie, so Spiderman
59. Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams? pass
60. Johnson or Boswell? Johnson
61. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf? Spare me
62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show? You what?
63. An Eames chair or a Noguchi table? Having any opinions about design is the sign of an unsound person
64. Out of the Past or Double Indemnity? Double Indemnity
65. The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni? pass
66. Blue or green? green
67. A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It? Don’t like Shakespeare
68. Ballet or opera? neither
69. Film or live theater? film
70. Acoustic or electric? bass
71. North by Northwest or Vertigo? Psycho
72. Sargent or Whistler? Don’t care
73. V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera? Not read Kundera
74. The Music Man or Oklahoma? OOOOOOOOOklahoma
75. Sushi, yes or no? bollocks
76. The New Yorker under Ross or Shawn? Not a fan
77. Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee? Williams
78. The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove? Not read either
79. Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham? Who?
80. Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe? See 63, substitute architecture for design
81. Diana Krall or Norah Jones? pass
82. Watercolor or pastel? pass
83. Bus or subway? underground
84. Stravinsky or Schoenberg? pass
85. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter? neither
86. Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser? Cather
87. Schubert or Mozart? pass
88. The Fifties or the Twenties? The age of Mencken, please
89. Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick? Read neither
90. Thomas Mann or James Joyce? Mann
91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins? Don’t care
92. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman? pass
93. Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill? Lincoln
94. Liz Phair or Aimee Mann? Who?
95. Italian or French cooking? French
96. Bach on piano or harpsichord? Not heard either
97. Anchovies, yes or no? yes
98. Short novels or long ones? Don’t mind
99. Swing or bebop? swing
100. "The Last Judgment" or "The Last Supper"? pass

that it should come to this

2004-07-06T17:36:00.000+01:00

The Guardian’s flashback feature today reminds me that I must be one of the few British people under 45 to have known a man who was later hanged.

Two Australian heroin traffickers, Brian Chambers and Kevin Barlow, were hanged shortly before dawn today after a flurry of last-minute appeals to the Malaysian authorities for mercy or a stay of execution failed, prison officials said. The officials spoke to reporters through a peep-hole in the massive steel gates of Pudu gaol, Kuala Lumpur. Later an unmarked prison truck left the prison for the mortuary, witnesses in a crowd of some 200 reporters and onlookers said.

The two were the first Westerners to hang under Malaysia 's tough anti-drugs laws, which prescribe death for anyone convicted of having over 15 grammes of heroin.

Asked how he felt, Barlow's lawyer, Mr Karpal Singh, said: 'Pathetic, that it should have come to this stage. '

Chambers' mother said in a written statement: 'No one has the right to take someone else's life. It's inhumane. There is no more to be said, but he will be free forever. '

Chambers and Barlow, who was born in Stoke and who also held British nationality, were arrested on the resort island of Penang in November, 1983, with 180 grammes of heroin and given mandatory death sentences last July. An appeal failed last December.

I still remember Kevin Barlow, vaguely. His mother worked with mine at the North Staffs Royal Infirmary. When I was about five I was stuck on top of a slide at the old playground on London Road in Trent Vale. He was a couple of years older, and helped me down the chute. I don’t remember if his eyebrows met in the middle.

The Barlow family left Stoke after a minor bit of squalor. I believe his mother was caught stealing from patients. By that time, young Kevin was already marked down as a wrong un, though weak rather than malicious. At the time of his death, mum and I theorized that he’d been used and dumped as a mule – given a small amount of heroin and steered towards the cops, while people carrying much larger amounts escaped attention.

A few years later I happened to work with a woman who was formerly a reporter on the Star newspaper in Malaysia. She said that the mule theory was current at the time in Malaysia, but the government had decided to make an example of whoever they got, and that person was Kevin Barlow. At the time, the News of the World was making hay with the case, featuring pleas for mercy from Mrs Barlow and assorted family members, with strong undertones that a blameless Brit was being unjustly killed by sinister foreigners. The Star was operating the other side of the street: How dare these foreigners bring heroin to our country and then try and push us around. The Star’s circulation went up quite nicely, my friend said. I doubt the whole affair hurt the NoW’s print run either. The Malaysian government got to posture in an electorally satisfying manner and no doubt several kilos of white powder passed unmolested through the country while the furore was in full swing. Kevin Barlow swang, I think, because his death was more useful and profitable to interested parties than his life.

vote for me

2004-07-05T18:24:00.000+01:00

Even though many of my fellow bloggers are apparently unable to resist a beauty contest, I’ve been resolutely ignoring a certain list, designed to facilitate networking and a generally pleasant life for a group of people whose existence is predicated on ideological respectability.

Prospect. Fucking Prospect. How do you feel when a magazine called Prospect flops on your doormat? Do you feel overcome by a tingle of moderate progressivism? What’s that like, exactly? Is it like mice gently nibbling your scrotum? Or is it like the gentle squeak of bats being popped in a microwave? Later, does one need the aid of a single glass of excellent Mer-lot to recover? Or does one go outside to Appreciate the Design Community, wherever it may lurk?

Anyway, I hereby enter myself as a write in competitor. You can see by the above that I am no stranger to letters, belles and otherwise. And look at the competition. There are plenty of actual thinking types here, but none of them are British. As to the Brits…

Richard Dawkins is a nice guy and fully on the side of the apes, but I’m not sure that jihad is the best way of promoting atheism. Linda Colley is less capable of expressing herself plainly than George Bush. Melanie Phillips is not fit to bite the scabs off my elbow, whatever her controllers in Tehran might think. Geoff Mulgan isn’t fit to bite the scabs off my other elbow. Yours neither.

And the rest? A pack of prehensile status monkeys, scribbling valets of power, thoughtless think tankers and vile ranting dogs.

So vote for me. Go on, do it. I’m an intellectual. I’m personally slovenly. I’ll nick any idea that’s not tied down and guarded with flamethrowers. I’m the kind of damn fool who prefers to be bribed with status than hard cash. I bear senseless grudges indefinitely. I have an overweening sense of intellectual entitlement. I have nothing useful to say and a frantic urge to make people listen. I'm not a woman, but winning this could get me enough op-ed commissions to pay for the operation.

I am the boss thinker. I was born for this job. You know what to do.

i nearly forgot

2004-07-04T20:40:00.000+01:00

It's July 4. As everybody kows, this is the anniversary of the publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, , the opening of the Grand Junction Railway between Birmingham and Manchester and the Birth of Ottoman Emperor Murat III.

I believe something else happened too, but I can't for the life of me recall what right now.

Only joking. But no, you can't come back. Try Mexico.

old news

2004-07-03T21:55:00.000+01:00

But, for the record...

As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a Marine colonel — not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the TV images — who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said. And it was a quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking.

After the colonel — who was not named in the report — selected the statue as a "target of opportunity," the psychological team used loudspeakers to encourage Iraqi civilians to assist, according to an account by a unit member.

But Marines had draped an American flag over the statue's face.

"God bless them, but we were thinking … that this was just bad news," the member of the psychological unit said. "We didn't want to look like an occupation force, and some of the Iraqis were saying, 'No, we want an Iraqi flag!' "

via Atrios

i get responses

2004-07-03T18:28:00.000+01:00

A while back, I linked to an Explananda dissection of a Paul Berman article on post-invasion Iraq, adding my own nasty little hoots and jeers to Chris' reasoned refutation. In particular, I balked at the following statement by Berman:

To understand Saddam Hussein and the history of modern Iraq, you have to feel anger--or else you have understood nothing.

Chris noticed, and responded:

Now, I think this is precisely wrong, and I found it interesting that although I disliked the Berman piece, I actually nodded along with the offending quotation. Two points: First, I don't think there's anything objectionable in the notion that some circumstances call out for certain kinds of emotional response. That does not mean that we have to script out every reaction to everything we come across. It means that we should recognize that a certain range of emotional responses will be more or less appropriate in certain circumstances, often because they will be associated with (part of?) moral judgments. There is typically a fairly close connection between moral judgment and emotional response. In general, where certain moral judgments are called for, so will the emotional responses that go along with them (shame, disgust, outrage, etc.). Indeed, it seems to me that the reductio might just as easily be run in the other direction. Is it really odd to say this: "To understand the holocaust, you must feel sorrow, or you have understood nothing"? I don't think that's odd at all.

Second, even if we think that my first point is usually mistaken, I think the reductio only appears to succeed because it fails to take the vileness of the Ba'ath regime sufficiently seriously. That is, even if in most cases, understanding and emotion are easily separable, we ought to recognize limit cases in which they will - for almost all of us - go together. Iraq was surely one of those cases. I opposed the war, but the reading I did on Saddam Hussein's Iraq made me helpless with anger. It also gave me nightmares. And I confess that it is difficult to imagine reading and understanding and not feeling this anger.

Damn. I'm going to actually have to think about this. OK, here goes with the counter-response:

What really irritated me about the original statement was the word nothing. Certain circumstances may call for certain kinds of emotion; it may be that lacking that emotion makes your understanding deficient in a moral sense. It doesn’t follow that this moral deficiency means that one fails to understand whether the invasion of Iraq is likely to succeed in its aims, whether the people undertaking it are sincere in these aims, or whether these aims are likely to be welcomed by the people on whose behalf one is feeling anger. That requires kinds of knowledge that are irrelevant to whether anger is felt or not.

Conversely, there are circumstances in which don’t require anger which might justify war. Significantly, these were the arguments put forward by the government, namely that Saddam was a serious security risk to the region and the world as a whole. Justification for war was presented as a concrete threat rather than a moral cause, because this was seen as a stronger argument. Therefore anger at Saddam is neither sufficient nor necessary cause for war. Without feeling anger, one’s understanding of Iraq and what is to be done about it are not harmed in any significant way.

Berman’s article as a whole struck me as fairly typical of the pro-war left’s response to their project gping off the rails: we were wrong, but in a wider sense we were right, therefore whatever the actual results we should do it again. This is a dangerous way to go about making foreign policy.

It’s all about moral one-upmanship. Unless you realize this then you have understood nothing about the pro-war left.

i print rumours

2004-07-02T17:27:00.000+01:00

I print them from today's Popbitch

chemical_ali writes from Iraq:
"In a romantic postscript to a disastrous
occupation, newspapers here are saying that Paul
Bremer enjoyed "an emotional relationship" with a
35-year-old Iraqi woman who used to work for
Saddam's protocol department. His paramour and
her family are now in Jordan awaiting passage
to the US in Bremer's hasty wake, with talk of
marriage on the cards.

"Many of Bremer's colleagues also fell into bed
with their Iraqi translators and assistants,
while others could pick up prostitutes at the
private bars the occupation authority set up at
the Rashid hotel. Army grunts, however, had to
make do with banging their hookers in the
toilets of the Palestine hotel, right under
the noses of the press corps."

What's Arabic for "me love you long time"?

now it's about the oil

2004-07-01T18:03:00.000+01:00

Sovereignty this, puppetry that. The fundamental point was made in the piece by Bruce Ralston I linked to a few days back. the US has swapped military bases in Saudi Arabia for military bases in Iraq. Those troops are there indefinitely on the same mission that originally took them to the Kingdom, namely to secure oil supplies.

Yes, finally, at last and unambiguously – it’s about the oil. About time, too. If I have to have a war, I want it to be about the stuff that powers ambulances, rather than one undertaken for reasons of imperial vanity, or in Blair’s case, as an example of psychopathic altruism. He’ll kill anyone to show how good he is. And since we’re dealing with a tradeable commodity, there’s also more of a chance of making a rational settlement instead of getting lost in the fog of culture war.

Back on topic, it follows that the basic task of any Iraqi government is to guarantee the security of US army bases by ensuring the consent of the Iraqi people to their continued existence, by any means from state terror to elections. My bet is that we’ll get a combination of the two. If the elections go ahead as planned in January, I look forward to taunting the pro-death squad left sometime round December as “unacceptable” candidates and movements are weeded out.

More generally, the ability of the Iraqi government to deliver will depend on whether the US is prepared to settle for bases in the country or wants the country as a base. This latter was plan A, but that foundered on the insurgency and the sheer incompetence of Bremer and Co. Since Chalabi got defenestrated, the US seems to have gone for a more minimalist approach, rehabilitating the old Baathist power structure on the one hand and making overtures to people like Sadr on the other. Both the main currents of the Iraqi insurgency now have the opportunity to get involved in formal politics.

Whether the insurgent movements come in from the cold fully depends on the amount of actual control any future Iraqi government has over social and economic policymaking. We already know some details.Foreign troops in Iraq will be ubermensch as far as locallaw is concerned; the UN retains control of the oil revenues, such as they are right now. Every minister will have a friendly team of advisers breathing down his neck.

If Allawi is going to succeed in his fundamental task, he needs as much freedom in other areas as possible. He's going to have to ditch the small stuff. Here’s the recently exited exarch on his economic achievements.

Open economy. Bremer said the economy in Iraq is more open than ever before, particularly during the past 35 years. Specific improvements include free trade, a liberal foreign direct-investment law, and low tax rates.

Sounds great. I’ll be filling my boots as soon as the profits from my Ostrich Farm investments clear. I think stuff like this will go as soon as possible. A combination of foreign military occupation and foreign ownership of the economy is a recipe for general insurrection, just as Russian style economic shock therapy would plunge large sections of the population into permanent immiseration. This is why I think the idea that Iraq is a puppet state is inadequate. Allawi needs more freedom of action than that.

Specifically, he has to satisfy a number of constituencies, most of which are heavily armed, many of which oppose each other’s policies and none of which trust him. He’s also got to deal with intervention from neighbouring states, especially Iran. He’s got to be a democrat, while preventing any outcomes of democracy unacceptable to his foreign sponsors. He has to be tough, without activating the sqeamishness of those same sponsors. If he acknowledges popular sentiment, he needs to let Iraq become a more Islamic place without manufacturing jihadis. He's got to stop Sunni/Shia conflict breaking out seriously. He’s got to stop the country splitting up without generating the kind of nationalism which would lead to hostility to the US military presence. He’s got to make the presence of US troops a non issue by giving the public some form of business to mind, and satisfy Iraqi political movements with the rents from that business in the form of control over public spending. If he succeeds, he’s clearly a genius and I want him as Prime Minister right now.

More likely is a kind of resurgent mediocrity, a place that’s a cross between Egypt and Guatemala in a rough year. And this is a best case scenario.

missed anniversary

2004-06-30T12:03:00.000+01:00

of the shot heard round the world (via antiwar blog).

Lenin said of World War One that it was a conflict between slaveholders for a fairer distribution of the slaves. But the remote origins of that are in the desire of one of the slaveholders – Britain – to drag in the United States to help secure its property. The US, of course, had ideas of its own about the way the world should be ordered. Lenin’s quip is not a bad description of the war between the jihadis and the forces of Anglostan in Iraq and other places.

From AJP Taylor:

The First World War had none of the traditional outcomes. The Balance of Power was not restored. A single great power did not dominate the continent. There was not even universal revolution. The intervention of the United States overthrew all rational calculations. Henceforward, what had been the centre of the world became merely “the European Question”.

Proud anti-pro-American that I am, I wonder if, should Americans ever come to their senses on the matter of empire, they will ever forgive us? Of course they will, in return for the mineral rights.

pleasantly of musk

2004-06-29T17:20:00.000+01:00

via informed comment, a report from Fallujah by Nir Rosen.

My hosts showed me a leaflet that was circulating throughout the region. A blurry photocollage depicted a giant, spiderlike creature next to a pair of legs that belonged to a man in an American military uniform. The leaflet explained that the creature circles around Falluja, attacking Americans. It could run up to forty kilometres, screaming and biting. I had heard numerous fantastic stories like that. One told of a Kalashnikov that worked for four hours straight without reloading. An armory used by the mujahideen turned into a weapons cornucopia. Dead mujahideen were said to smell pleasantly of musk. “Unnatural things happened,” I was told over and over.

And a happy handover to you too.

lacuna

2004-06-28T16:09:00.000+01:00

Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11 inspire no opinions in me whatsoever. This is probably a sin against blogging. I'm sorry, but there you go. He's just so...so...no, nothing's coming.

I've a sort of meta-idea about that though. There's a great big Michael Moore shaped hole in the culture, which he fits exactly, for better or worse. There's no room to winkle him out with words and examine him in detail. He was always there in a way, a big pie shaped ghostly presence that suddenly manifested itself, a representative of the angst and agitprop subset finally called into the mainstream.

Well, that's your lot. it's not much but it was still more of an effort than I wanted to make. So be grateful.

customer service

2004-06-27T18:27:00.000+01:00

Harry Hutton wishes to purify himself with a view to ridding the world of infidels. It is a process which requires research and certain pieces of specialised equipment. Follow his progress here and scroll upward.

when I'm 86

2004-06-26T19:44:00.000+01:00

Flit takes the long view on sovereignty, and puts a marker down in the great Iraq metaphor stakes.

Reality is as much an unknown quantity among many of those in the opposition ranks too, of course. In order for them to plan domestic opposition effectively, however, they really have to get one thing straight. You're. Not. Leaving. You can't. Energy needs demand American basing in the Middle East. The Saudi bases were forfeited for Iraqi ones. So the Iraqi ones are the ones you're getting. I'll say it again: You're. Not. Getting. Out. Even if Kerry wins. Hell, even if Nader wins. Two or three presidential elections from now, you will still have tens of thousands of American troops in Iraq. …

At the moment, the Iraq adventure is more or less where the Philippine adventure was in March, 1900; the open rebellion has calmed down a bit, there is a parallel civilian power struggle in the offing, and the Americans are changing leadership. (McKinley didn't have Kofi Annan back then, so he had to invent the Taft Commission to fill its place, but other than that we're pretty close.) That puts us about one year from the popular Aguinaldo figure's (Sadr's?) end, a year-and-a-half from a bloody American defeat that outrages the home front and leads to American reprisal atrocities (Balangiga), two years from the "zones" policy (what they called the Philippine concentration camps) and a decade away from the end of the still-to-come Moro (Kurdish?) rebellion. If everything goes according to precedent, Iraq will be a fully sovereign nation again no later than 2050.

By which time, I'll be 86. I wonder if we'll still be blogging away then? Meanwhile, in another part of the empire...

and the winner is

2004-06-26T18:17:00.000+01:00

Backword Dave. It was pretty obvious really. Even if you don’t know, you can sort of guess it wasn’t Nixon. It’s not given to one man to have all the vices, I guess - though Kennedy certainly had most of them.

Also Dave tips me off that Blogger comments only links to blogger sites. That’s them for the bin then, as soon as I get round to it.

worst president ever

2004-06-25T18:35:00.000+01:00

No it’s not about George. It’s sort of about Bill, but it’s mainly about someone else.

OK, right. From Oliver Kamms blog, the following statement:

Clinton himself - the worst human being ever to be President - debased his office.

The worst, eh? I never liked old backdoor Bill but he never did anything as bad as what’s alleged below. This is an extract from Gore Vidal’s The Last Empire.

“Well” said Hersh “I’m glad I got to you.” Hersh is brisk and bumptious. “I got some questions for you. That detail in your book about how he was having sex in a tub wuth this girl on top and then, as he’s about to come, he pushes her head underwater. Why?
…
I explained to Sy that the shock of the head being shoved underwater would cause vaginal contractions, thus increasing the pleasure of a man’s own orgasm. “Crazy” he said. How do you know all this?” I said I’d been told the story years ago…Sy was exuberant. “Well, I got four retired secret service men – serious guys – and one told me how he would bring the President a hooker when he was lying on his back in the tub and then she’d get on top of him and when he was ready the Secret Service guy would shove her head underwater…”

Any guesses?

was it the uniforms after all?

2004-06-25T13:57:00.000+01:00

Once described by an Independent correspondent as the very young columnist of the year, Johann Hari has some interesting thoughts on the appeal of fascism to certain gay men.

But there’s another important question: will fascist movements inevitably turn on gay people? In the case of the Nazis, it seems to have been fairly arbitrary; Hitler’s main reason for killing Rohm was unrelated to his sexuality. From my perspective as a progressive-minded leftie, all fascism is evil; but should all gay people see it as inimical to their interests? Is it possible to have a gay fascist who wasn’t acting against his own interests? Fascism is often defined as “a political ideology advocating hierarchical government that systematically denies equality to certain groups.” It’s true that this hierarchy could benefit gay people at the expense of, say, black people. But given the prevalence of homophobia, isn’t that – even for people who don’t see fascism as inherently evil – a terrible risk to take? Won’t a culture that turns viciously on one minority get around to gay people in the end? This seems, ultimately, to be the lesson of Ernst Rohm’s pitiful, squalid little life.

Yukio Mishima once argued that gay men should be fascists because they would inevitably face the hostility of the majority and so should support an ideology which promoted the suppression and disciplining of that majority. If the fascist party itself turned on gay people, then you would at least know in which direction oppression was coming from and so stand a chance of being able to get out of the way. This is at least arguably better than walking home through a rough area of town constantly looking over your shoulder.

More generally, I think there is an environmental pre-disposition to be economically right wing amongst gay people, if only for the fact that this is the ground where the rhetoric of of individual choice and freedom has traditionally been located. And it’s easy for someone designated an outsider to feel hostility to the idea of the working classes and to policies which might benefit them collectively. What, put my tax money in the pockets of queer bashers? That line of thinking applies to other minority groups too.

It’s noticeable that the Labour Party has used minority-speak to camouflage its own journey rightwards. Amongst a certain class of activists, it resonates to say that traditional left wing policies are “too white”, “too male” or even heterosexist (whatever happened to heterosexism? Ah, the rhetoric of yesteryear). I certainly recall a meme floating round during the firefighters strike to the effect that they didn’t deserve a pay rise precisely because they were white, male and working class. If the boy columnist really fancies chucking a bomb, gay people and the rightward shift of the Labour Party might be an interesting subject to tackle.

via Harry's Place

a victory

2004-06-24T22:34:00.000+01:00

Truth and beauty won in the end. Justice too. Come on, admit it. They played like donkeys. It would have been a colossal embarrassment to have that team in a semi final in a major tournament.

recognition

2004-06-24T18:49:00.000+01:00

I blogged about Israeli interests in Iraq back in March, and now Seymour Hersh's latest in the New Yorker concerns Mossad intelligence activity in Iraqi Kurdistan. A short extract:

...Clawson said, “The Israelis disagreed quite vigorously with us last summer. Their concern was very straightforward—that the Iranians would create social and charity organizations in Iraq and use them to recruit people who would engage in armed attacks against Americans."

This doesn't quite fit. As I recall, at that time all the violence was coming from Sunni insurgents. The Shia were largely quiescent, or at least quiet.

I wonder if there's something else going on. Wasn’t one of the original objectives of the invasion to get a pro-Israeli government in an Arab state? Remember all that stuff about a pipeline to Haifa?

Well that didn't work out. Instead, the US seems to be committed to whatever form of government can be made to work and get everyone in Iraq to calm the hell down - irrespective of that government’s attitude towards Israel. I don’t think US policy has changed as such. It’s more of a change of gravity. Iraq now has weight as a subject rather than an object of US policy.

Looking at it from a Likud point of view, there’s now a possibility that the US will be lending a friendly ear to a new, pro- Palestinian government in Iraq. Perhaps it is better to weaken such a government before it takes root. Back in the spring, the timing of the Assassinations of the Hamas leaders Rantisi and Sheik Yassin seemed calculated to stir the pot just as the insurgencies in Fallujah and around Najaf were taking hold. The Kurds have already stated that they don’t like the interim constitution because it’s removed their veto on the final arrangements for the nature of the Iraqi state. Israeli military support for Kurdish autonomy would go a long way to weakening Iraq as well as providing the means to destabilize Iran and Syria.

Obviously there’s no guarantee that the new Iraqi government will set down roots. But maybe now’s the time to intervene to ensure it doesn’t, while the political and military situations are still fluid.

What I’d like to know at this point is Allawi’s intentions towards Israel, and specifically whether or not he intends to offer diplomatic recognition.

requiem

2004-06-23T16:08:00.000+01:00

the end of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq - a business view

I note this is rich: U.S. reconstruction specialists commonly complain of ungrateful Iraqis. What the fuck these idiots think the Iraqis should be grateful for I don't know, but certainly merely toppling a dictator is not enough, the motherfuckers in Iraq know bloody well that toppling dictators does not make the fucking pie in the end, so no reason to congratulate the Chef for simply having bought the motherfucking ingrediants, he's gotta fucking make the pie in order to fucking congratulate him. Mindless idiots, these stupid fucking American "reconstruction" idiots in the CPA, full of their bloated farts of empty pompous "liberation" posturing.

a poem for England

2004-06-23T13:45:00.000+01:00

As the question moves on from the undoubted ugliness of England players to the probability that they reflect the ugliness of the English as a whole, I now think that this whole thing has gone too far. I may snigger and snipe, but I am for all that an Englishman. So in advance of tomorrow’s game, an extract from a poem by our most famous bard.

That Rudyard Kipling – he’s fuckin’ mint!

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master,
If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

Come on England!

photos via those estimable anthropologists at Chavscum

rhetorical wall

2004-06-22T17:14:00.000+01:00

Via Explananda one of those articles: the invasion I supported has gone all pear-shaped, but nonetheless, in supporting it I still demonstrate my moral superiority. Well alright, if you must. But then it’s slap bang into a rhetorical wall of outstanding silliness.

To understand Saddam Hussein and the history of modern Iraq, you have to feel anger--or else you have understood nothing.

OK, let’s say that you can read Arabic, are fully versed in the history of the place and maybe even live there. But unless you’re emotionally correct, then you don’t know a thing. I would have thought the fundamental problem with people like Paul Berman is that they were so angry with Saddam Hussein that they understood nothing about Iraq. Nor did nearly all of the rest of us, but this is what tends to make sensible people wary, rather than enthusiastic.

Let’s apply the same principle to other countries. Say you have a fairly unsavoury regime – dictatorial, corrupt, brutal – but not in Saddam’s category and therefore not meriting anger.

To understand Aleksandr Lukashenko and the history of modern Belarus, you have to feel mild but constant irritation--or else you have understood nothing.

Now let’s say we’re talking about a certainly venal, probably fairly corrupt president, but one who has a firm mandate from the people of a country who, by and large, like the state they live in pretty well.

To understand Jacques Chirac and the history of modern France, you have to feel occasionally exasperated--or else you have understood nothing.

I wonder what emotions it is necessary to feel for me to understand, I don’t know, Norway for instance. Or Tonga. Or…

To understand Tony Blair and the history of modern Britain, you have to feel like sitting with your head in your hands and moaning gently but continuously --or else you have understood nothing.

Well, maybe not so wrong after all.

the ugly Englishman

2004-06-22T11:33:00.000+01:00

As the flying cheeseburgers waddle triumphantly into the quarter finals, more people are shocked and awed by their resemblance to swamp donkeys. Worse, our official global poster boy bears an uncanny facial resemblance to the toxic avenger. Is there any doubt that, come Thursday, truth and beauty will be on the side of Portugal?

stasiland

2004-06-20T18:12:00.000+01:00

Anna Funder’s Stasiland was my Book of 2003 by a fairly long way. What distinguishes the regime it describes from other tales of totalitarianism is a kind of repulsive intimacy.

"Laid out upright and end to end," reports Stasiland, a first book which this week won the Australian writer Anna Funder the £30,000 BBC4 Samuel Johnson prize, "the files the Stasi kept on their countrymen would form a line 180km long." In its abandoned Leipzig offices, Funder even came across the "smell samples" of underpants that the Stasi used - or at least pretended to use - in order to trail and identify dissidents with the aid of sniffer dogs"

Other dictators get in your face. The Stasi got in your knickers. They were one of East Germany’s largest employers. Additionally, around one in six of the population was working for them part time. Clearly, this isn’t your classic secret police set up. There just wasn’t enough political dissidence to keep all these spooks and snitches employed. About halfway through the book it occurred to me that East Germany had come to exist precisely so that its population could be spied on. Hostility to caopitalsim was the official position of the State. Hostility to privacy was it's actual raison d'etre. Minding other people’s business depended on them having business to mind, so it helped that East Germany was just about successful enough economically to create a ramshackle facsimile of consumerism.

Funder interviews a number of ex-Stasi operatives. They don’t seem too bothered by what they did, and most don’t defend it in a way that indicates they might have a bad conscience. As far as they were concerned they were staunch communitarians. I’m inclined to believe they were right.

these days

2004-06-20T17:06:00.000+01:00

Jacek Kuron was a socialist, a prominent and longstanding dissident against Commumist rule in Poland, a member of Solidarity’s national committee and Minister of Labour in the first post-Communist government.

His Guardian obituary is a tale of civic heroism. And it ends with what you might call an intergenerational moment.

He continued writing intermittent tracts on social and political themes, and produced a two-part autobiography. In 1995, he failed, probably because of poor organisation, to secure nomination in the Polish presidential elections.

He is survived by his second wife Danuta, and his son Maciej, a celebrity chef.

found via Crooked Timber

more brutal laws

2004-06-19T18:01:00.000+01:00

Billmon finds evidence that the hard line may be imminent.

Iraq's interim government yesterday said it was considering reviving emergency martial law powers from the Saddam Hussein era to combat a wave of violence that has killed nearly 200 people and paralyzed oil exports.

Malik Dohan al-Hassan, justice minister in the caretaker Iraqi government, said authorities may resort to "exceptional" laws imposed by the former dictator after it takes power on June 30.

…..

Such a move would be welcome by Col. Haydar Abdul Rasool, an officer in the fledgling Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.

Given the country's mounting security woes, Col. Rasool said he would recommend closing the nation's borders and giving police and soldiers a much freer hand to deal with wrongdoers on the street.

If Iraqi leaders follow through with the martial law idea, he just might get his way.

"Right now we can only open fire on people if they threaten us," the burly commander of 1,300 soldiers said in an interview. "We should have more freedom to act. We must have more brutal laws. The American laws are weak laws."

….

Col. Rasool, a no-nonsense military leader who was an officer during Saddam's rule, said he was looking forward to the day when he can set up checkpoints and dispatch patrols without coordinating with American troops or abiding by the Americans' rules of engagement.

It's not that there ever was a soft line. But note the word “no-nonsense”. Back during the cold war, our bad guys stood for no nonsense. They were also “impatient” Their bad guys were “brutal”. They were also “intolerant”. As Billmon notes, the new government is looking increasingly like a fairly standard issue CIA authoritarian lash up. The neocons fell at the first hurdle. They couldn’t even get a functioning government going, which cleared the way for the cynical realist tendency.

Political science question of the day: Is it necessary to end violence in Iraq in order to stage elections, or maintain a certain level of violence in order to “postpone” them, or at least drastically limit those allowed to run for office in them? Discuss.

Still, Iraqis can always vote with their feet.

Beyond the unsure political situation, I have spent the last few days helping a relative sort things out to leave abroad. It is a depressing situation. My mother's cousin is renting out his house, selling his car and heading out to Amman with his three kids where, he hopes, he will be able to find work. He is a university professor who has had enough of the current situation. He claims that he's tired of worrying about his family and the varying political and security crises every minute of the day. It's a common story these days. It feels like anyone who can, is trying to find a way out before June 30. Last summer, people who hadn't been inside of Iraq for years were clamoring to visit the dear homeland that had been 'liberated' (after which they would clamor to leave the dear homeland). This summer, it is the other way around.

The Syrian and Jordanian borders are packed. A friend who was returned at the Jordanian border said that they were only allowing 20 cars to pass per day... people were being made to wait on the borders for days at a time and risked being rejected at the border guard's whim. People are simply tired of waiting for normality and security. It was difficult enough during the year... this summer promises to be a particularly long one.

le mot juste

2004-06-18T17:23:00.000+01:00

Apparently, America is undergoing a linguistic invasion from these shores:

At this point, the trend is moving beyond journalism, and to terms that (unlike "go missing" and "run-up") have perfectly good American counterparts. In his campaign for governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger talked about having "a" (not "some" or "a cup of") coffee. A visiting friend of mine talked of "booking" (not reserving) a hotel room. David Letterman recently made fun of Oprah Winfrey's saying that she couldn't appear on his show because she was "on holiday" -- what was wrong, he wondered, with "vacation"? A friend has taken to saying, "I'll ring you" instead of "phone you" or "call you up." From various sources, I have heard repeated uses of "sack" (fire), "row" (argument), and "chat up" (talk to, usually in a flirtatious way). Briticisms all: Together they constitute a cultural equivalent of De Vries's poseur.

I'm afraid I can't resist the inevitable conclusion, so here goes: Briticisms have passed their sell-by date, and the odor (or should I say odour) is getting a bit rank.

I notice from reading US blogs that the word "wanker" seems to have made the crossing too. Not suprising, in view of the above.

via Arts and Letters Daily

that's it, they're gone

2004-06-17T18:43:00.000+01:00

Rod Liddle expounds on the iniquities of the 2003 extradition act with the aid of a learned friend:

Britain’s foremost expert on extradition (and the author of what I assume is a deeply eminent tome, ‘Jones on Extradition’) is the QC Alun Jones. He is plainly aghast at the ramifications of the new Act. ‘Previously,’ he told me, ‘everybody knew where they stood. The courts knew what to do and there was a home secretary to take final responsibility if a foreign state wished to extradite a British subject. Not any longer. The Americans want somebody, and that’s it, they’re gone. There is no legal mechanism to stop it happening. There is a small checklist for the magistrates to consider and after that nothing at all. It is ludicrous.’

And goes on to offer a kind word for everyone’s favourite hook handed fundamentalist, currently in durance vile:

… it is alleged that Hamza spoke to the ringleaders of the kidnap gang four times on the telephone. There is no suggestion that he was behind, or directly involved in, the kidnap itself, but nonetheless the Yemenis wish to talk to him and I suppose that one can understand their desire to do so. Extraditing old Abu to Yemen would at least have an element of logic about it, much though we Western liberals may worry ourselves about the equity and impartiality of the Yemeni justice system. But the Yemeni government has been repeatedly rebuffed.

Similarly, as British people were killed during the Yemeni government’s raid upon the hostage takers, and Hamza’s phone calls, whatever their relevance, were made from Britain, one could make a perfectly respectable argument for trying the man here. And indeed we’ve been attempting to cobble together a case against Abu Hamza for at least five years, but the thing has foundered because there is no evidence whatsoever against him. We are assured, by Mr Blunkett and others, that the Americans have found new evidence — in which case, why can they not share it with our own prosecuting authorities and as a result have the man tried here? Also on the charge sheet is the suggestion that Hamza attempted to set up a jihad training camp in Oregon, despite, again, never having set foot in the US. Why on earth would he set up a jihad training camp in a country where he has never been? And how would he do so?

I’m not sure that evidence is the point here. We’ve got someone who the authorities think is a bad guy, but whom they have no evidence against. Before they took the fingernail pulling end of the interrogation business in house, the US used to deport people in this category to Syria. Now that torture in the US comes with presidential approval, we can send people there for the same reason.

surrey comes to Kabul

2004-06-17T13:24:00.000+01:00

In Afghanistan, corruption is rampant, voter intimidation may result in the September elections being postponed and most of the country’s heritage is on sale at an auction room near you. But never mind: It was all worthwhile.

The original course was built by the Afghans during the reign of Mohammad Zahir Shah, but moved to its present site after the kings cousin overthrew him in 1973.

It may provide new challenges to any modern player, but it used to be a lot worse. The entire area has had to be cleared of mines in recent months and three Soviet tanks and a multiple rocket launcher have been removed.

"What we need is for people to come and play and help us fund restoring the grass and getting access to water," said Abdul, before driving from the high perch of the first tee into a former Taliban barracks reduced to rubble by U.S. bombers in 2001.

The first hole, a 371-yard (340-meter) par 4, drops sharply then flattens out across a barren, rocky stretch crossed by a gravel road.

Caddies are sent ahead to spot balls that otherwise easily disappear in the glaring sun on parched, near-white earth.

yes, but will they let women join?

brainstorming

2004-06-17T12:32:00.000+01:00

After the Big Brother ruck, a suggestion for improving the ratings of home makeover shows.

how we got here, part one

2004-06-16T16:59:00.000+01:00

His answer was Ukip. I had wondered whose answer it was, since the polls were showing heavy Ukip support, and yet no one I knew or met thought that the party of Kilroy, Collins and disgraced former Tory MPs was anything but a vaudeville turn. How could you appeal to the ordinary voter's sense of the authentic by presenting them with a gaggle of chemically-bronzed, face-lifted, tooth-whitened prison-penitents?

Comrade Aaronovitch wants to know. It’s a bit of a puzzle to him how we got here. And it’s dangerous apparently. Deviation from the path of the blessed Tony is a one way street to perdition, or at least Poujade. It would be less of a puzzle if he looked for the origins of UKIP in the politics of the past few years.

Take Kilroy, for instance. It’s taken for granted that the ability to perform for media is part of a modern politician’s skill set. And the daytime TV is our Prime Minister’s own favoured arena for communing with his people. So who says a daytime telly fuhrer can’t front a political party? Eventually the professionals always take over.

And then there’s the vision-of-Britain-thing. I seem to recall that “reclaiming patriotism” was an essential part of what I believe used to be called the New Labour Project. I also seem to recall something called New Britain, a soundbite of long ago. I even seem to recall Peter Mandelson walking round the place accompanied by a bulldog with unfeasibly large testicles. Behold the balls of my bulldog, he seemed to say. Look at them swing! Do they not refute forever the notion that we in New Labour are inveterate handwringers and peaceniks?

Yes, indeed. But having whetted everybody’s appetites, what did they come up with? A lot of buzzwords. Britain was new. It was young. It was dynamic. But what it actually was and who the kind of people who represented it were was always a bit of a mystery. Gay dotcom entrepreneurs? One joke conceptual artists? Funky property developers? Permatanned makeover show hostesses? Don’t forget the ringing slogan: Hey everybody – we’ve got restaurants!

But we have reclaimed the St George’s flag. Grown men can now walk the streets, their faces painted white with a big red cross in the middle, safe in the knowledge that they’re not going to be pecked to death by lesbians. As a grown man, I say: thanks a fucking bunch.

Ukip’s own vision of Britain stuff is a big, steaming pile of John Bullshit taken straight out of the Boys Book of British Battles. But so what? The nation is an imagined community. New Labour‘s imagined community seemed to be produced by people with no imagination at all. They’re not in a position to complain when other people come along and make a better job of it. Like I say, it’s bullshit. But it’s bullshit with heritage, my friends. It’s bullshit with traction.

a race of Gazzas

2004-06-15T15:44:00.000+01:00

Thinking about yesterday's post on the ugliness of England footballers, it occurs to me that this tends to prove the point made by Matt Ridley in Nature via Nurture that humanity's genetic component is malleable while it's environment is often fixed.

Consider English football and the skills it values: speed in short power surges, strength and tenacity, both in the tackle and in holding on to the ball. It's a combination that tends to favour homo gazzientus - short legs, so that the centre of gravity is low, and a thick, powerful body, to hold off the tackles of others and get some weight behind the player's own. Additionally, this configuration gives players speed over short distances and power in the shot. Moon pie faces and slab foreheads tend to go along with this physical type. The environment of English football selects and rewards ugliness.

Continental football, by contrast, places the emphasis on ball skills, vision and endurance. This puts a premium on height and a tall, spare build - a slightly beefier version of the East African long distance runner. That's why it was gazelles versus warthogs out there on Sunday.

It gets worse. Stumpy they may be, but English footballers are also rich and successful (bearing in mind that "success" and "English football" are highly relative terms). If it's true that women are programmed to find these qualities attractive, then Wayne Rooney is going to become even more of a characteristic English type than he is already.

turning crusty

2004-06-15T14:39:00.000+01:00

Activist and embryonic national treasure Peter Tatchell’s gone crusty. All decent lefties should join him, he says. Well, maybe. I’m not averse to the idea. The Greens are coming out with some interesting stuff. What I’d like to see from them is a formal repudiation of the animal rights nutters. I’m a proud speciesist. I like pigs and I like pork. You can have my vote or the gone-mad-in-menopause vote. The two are mutually exclusive.

Crusty Pete goes on to diss Respect and their prospects, rather politely given the run ins he’s had with their supporters in the past.

I’m not about to play the guilt by association game, except with people who play it themselves. One outcome of Iraq is that all of us, pro- or anti-, are keeping some pretty strange political company. But where Respect did do fairly well last week was in some of areas with a large Muslim vote to mobilize. That part of the coalition came through. It didn’t do so well in traditionally left wing areas without a large Muslim vote. A serious socialist party should get more than a handful of votes in South Wales, even one just out of the gate.

This is what I meant about Respect being crap. It was the same old table-in-the-street, benefit-in-the-pub agitprop, at least in my part of Manchester. And it just doesn’t work. My suggestions? None whatsoever. I’m a consumer of politics, not an activist. It was pretty clear during the campaign what I was supposed to do for Respect, but not at all clear what Respect could do for me. And the danger for Respect’s socialist contingent now is that they could end up as the appendage of a sectarian muslim party, which is no-one’s idea of good news. Anyway, ongoing, as they say in newsrooms.

insult to injury

2004-06-14T16:23:00.000+01:00

Watching la debacle last night, Mrs treasure said something which seems so glaringly true that you wonder why nobody noticed it before. England players are, taken one with another, appreciably uglier than those representing abroad.

You haven’t seen Germany, I said. No, that’s the haircuts, she replied. And besides, it’s not just the faces. England look sort of wrong, physically speaking.

She was right. It was the second half. As we watched, England put together a rare attack. It looked like a squadron of flying cheeseburgers out there, galloping up the pitch. What you might call the Gazza archetype – homo Gazza – was well represented - long, thick torsos with short stumpy legs. Either that, or long and bony, with what looks like half a dozen elbows. Up north, it was all pie heads, moon faces and Easter Island foreheads.

This probably explains the adulation given to Beckham. He’s the only normally proportioned one out there wearing the three lions.

And this isn’t even a vintage crop of England players. Remember Peter Beardsley?

he has returned

2004-06-13T17:41:00.000+01:00

and come unto his kingdom. Some have questions:

Should Americans be concerned that on March 23rd a bipartisan group of Congressmen attended a coronation at which a billionaire, pro-theocracy newspaper owner was declared to be the Messiah – with royal robes, a crown, the works? Or that this imperial ceremony took place not in a makeshift basement church or a backwoods campsite, but in a Senate office building?

Worry not child. For is it not so that a religion is merely a superstition which owns property? Yea, and intellectual respectability hath always been a rental commodity. Looketh to the extropians for further confirmation of this point.

And there was much envy and weeping amidst the counsels of the prophet Icke...

Links via Crooked Timber

digging graves at blood and treasure

2004-06-12T18:38:00.000+01:00

I spent a bit of Thursday on the phone, batting the options round with a mate. The Lib Dems? Yeah. In the end. What do you think? Went with the Greens. Yeah, but they’re not going to make it in North Manchester. Good for Whalley Range, but you’ve got to get Labour out and round here that means the Lib Dems.

You’ve got to get Labour out. We paused as the enormity of that sunk in. And for people of our time and place, that is an enormity. But it’s also a banality, a plain and obvious fact. Tony Blair didn’t steal the soul of the Labour Party. His presence at its head is evidence that it lost its soul sometime during the desperate days after the 1992 election.

It’s not that I don’t sympathise with this campaign on a personal level:

Yes, indeed, it would be a pleasure to see him go. As his memorial, let the words “Take eyecatching initiatives and associate me with them” be projected on to the night sky above Baghdad. Let them be painted on the forecourts of every petrol station in the land as the queues stretch back for miles and the black stuff reaches £10 a gallon.

But I’m not going to chain myself back to a corpse because somebody changed its head. Would this lead to – gasp – right wing government? Yes, and we’ve had an unbroken stretch of that since 1979. Would – say – a Tory/Liberal coalition be any more right wing?

Get rid of Blair by all means, but send the Labour party with him. It’s over. It is no more. It has ceased to be, or at least ceased to be meaningful. Let’s create a vacancy on the left and amuse ourselves while candidates to fill it cavort and posture before our eyes.

And on that point, a brief memo to Respect. You were crap. Try doing us the honour of thinking up a proper name for the enterprise. Act like you’ve got jobs, or could conceivably get them. Give people some confidence that you could help them out in an everyday, material sense. We’re trying to dig a grave here. If you want to help out, bring a bloody shovel.

in the red corner

2004-06-11T16:38:00.000+01:00

The estimable Mike Davis balances the historical record.

The decisive battle for the liberation of Europe began 60 years ago this month when a Soviet guerrilla army emerged from the forests and bogs of Belorussia to launch a bold surprise attack on the mighty Wehrmacht's rear.

The partisan brigades, including many Jewish fighters and concentration-camp escapees, planted 40,000 demolition charges. They devastated the vital rail lines linking German Army Group Centre to its bases in Poland and Eastern Prussia.

Three days later, on June 22 1944, the third anniversary of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, Marshal Zhukov gave the order for the main assault on German front lines. Twenty-six thousand heavy guns pulverised German forward positions. The screams of the Katyusha rockets were followed by the roar of 4,000 tanks and the battle cries (in more than 40 languages) of 1.6 million Soviet soldiers. Thus began Operation Bagration, an assault over a 500-mile-long front.

This "great military earthquake", as the historian John Erickson called it, finally stopped in the suburbs of Warsaw as Hitler rushed elite reserves from Western Europe to stem the Red tide in the east. As a result, American and British troops fighting in Normandy would not have to face the best-equipped Panzer divisions.

What makes the Soviet contribution to allied victory in World War Two more relevant than ever this year is the fat that the “liberation” of Iraq bears more resemblance to the “liberation” of Eastern Europe by the Red army than it does to events further West. It may be described as sovereign, but the new Iraq government is host to 138,000 troops it has no control over, hundreds of advisers and their private guards for its ministries and more than 1000 staff in the “embassy” of it’s senior occupying power. Was Poland under the Warsaw Pact any less free than this?

More generally, the Soviet contribution to the war raises all sorts of questions about “the good war”. The Russians lost over 27 million people and killed over two thirds of all the German soldiers who died in the conflict in Europe. That contribution made the Western invasion a good deal easier and might have been the thing that made it possible for it to succeed at all. We’ve heard that our freedoms, such as they are, flow from the commitment to democracy of the Western allies and their willingness to back it up with force. It’s less comfortable to consider how much of it depended on the outcome of a brutal, pitiless race war launched by the Nazis and fought between the troops of two appalling dictators. This can’t be marginalized, no matter how much the historical revisionist anglosphere types would like to do it.

But it leads on to a more disturbing thought. Would the outcome have changed if the Soviet government had been different, and better. (or in fact not Soviet at all)? Did it take someone like Stalin to beat someone like Hitler? In 1931, Stalin said that the point of his forced collectivization and crash industrialization was to insure Russia against invasion. The Soviet Union had ten years to do it, he said. It sounds like paranoid dictator speak, but ten years later the invasion rolled around on schedule. And when it took place, would it have been possible to remove huge swathes of Russian industry physically and carry it hundreds of miles beyond the Urals in a less centralized, dictatorial state?

I don’t know. But if you accept the necessity of dictatorship in this case, then you also have to accept the dictator. In this case, the dictator was Stalin. And it follows from that that you have to accept the dictator as a whole, and the whole of what that dictator does. So the immense suffering - millions starved to death, tortured, issued with “nine grammes of lead”, exiled and incarcerated in gulags – in turn become a component part of whatever contribution the second world war made to the existence of freedom in Europe. So thanks, Ivan Frontovik. And thanks to all who starved in the Ukraine, died in the cellars of the Lubyanka, hauled rock and chopped wood in the gulags. Thanks to the zeks. And thanks to the Urkas, Russia's historical criminal caste who shared gulag duty with the politicals and…

“tattooed themselves with pictures of masturbating monkeys and played cards for each other's eyeballs”

…according to Koba the Dread. Yes, masturbating monkeys. Since today seems to be disturbing thoughts day, then why not?

the president is dead

2004-06-11T14:02:00.000+01:00

long live the king!

There's a couple of puzzling things about the idea of, according to the above learned folks, asserting the divine right of presidents precisely in order to torture people. For one thing, it's not a great start to a monarchy. Come on George, the accession of a new monarch is supposed to be the occasion to release prisoners, not have them anally raped or attach them to electrodes. Get it right! (rolls eyes)

Also, this doesn't make sense in terms of the raw politics of responsibility avoidance. Back when he was Caudillo of Paraguay, Stroessner used to take a quick break from the cares of office by phoning up his head interrogator and having the man select a political prisoner and go at him with a chainsaw, extremities first, while he listened down the open line. Couldn't get away from his desk, you see.

The US government's early response to the Abu Ghraib revelations was to employ a bad apple strategy - just a few trailer park losers, nothing to do with the chain of command in any way. Further revelations made that untenable. But it wopuld still havge been possible and necessary by conventional political criteria to keep the affair contained at the lowest level possible, and above all well away from the President.

But the Torture Memo specifically nails the President, through an aggressive interprtetation of his constitutional powers, to the whole affair. What kind of political strategy puts Bush, so to speak, down an open line to Abu Ghraib and other outposts of America's gulag for Muslims?

It could be a sign of terminal decadence in the administration. Or it could be a sign that the President and his advisers aren't worried about how either the constitutional issue or the torture issue will go down with the electorate.

Enquiring British minds want to know: could they be right?

pass the face paint

2004-06-10T17:39:00.000+01:00

Am I an anti-corporate warrior? Do Birkenstocks make uour feet look like Cornish pasties? Damn right. I cross my fingers every time I go to Tesco and refuse to laugh openly at people playing didgeridoos in public, except at the people who play them through their noses. But it’s not something I can bring myself to get excited about. If I had a gripe with McDonald’s, for instance, it would be over such dull matters as conditions of employment and union rights rather than their existence as a large corporation as such.

After all, if McDonald’s is a problem, then what’s the solution? Nationalization? Forbidding businessmen to gather in groups of more than twenty people? This latter’s not a bad idea. Adam Smith warned us about what happens when business people get together and “conspiracy against the public” sounds like a piece of classic Blunkettismo.

But, employment conditions aside, what’s the actual problem? They’re a bunch of people who like sell meat, bread and potatoes while wearing polyester. Not my idea of a great way to spend the time, but since meat, bread and potatoes is the staple diet of northern Europe and North America, you can see how the idea took off.

Of course, it’s not such a great idea to confine your diet to the above substances, and the way McDonald’s target kids is pretty cynical. Then again, there are stunted little kids running around Salford Precinct who live entirely on pie and chips, or as it’s called locally, pie anfuckin chips. Is warping children’s nutrition any better when it’s done by nice, homely, traditional fish and chip shops? Surely not.

So when I first heard about Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me documentary, I wasn’t impressed. File under: angry young man turns up at HQ of faceless corporation and embarrasses receptionist with ponderous satire. File and forget, in other words. But when I read a bit more about it, I ran across this:

He was tested beforehand by three doctors and deemed to be an above average human specimen. In the first week he put on 10lbs. After the month he'd added a total of 25lbs. His cholesterol level rose by 65 points (one-third higher than when he started). Most shocking of all, his doctor, who begged the film-maker to abandon the experiment after three weeks, concluded that the constant intake of fast food was causing serious liver damage, akin to that of Nicolas Cage's character in Leaving Las Vegas.

Like I say, meat bread and potatoes isn’t anyone’s idea of balanced nutrition. But it’s been the basic working class menu in Anglostan for just about forever. Whatever the consequences, they shouldn’t include liver failure after three weeks. What the hell are those people doing to basic foodstuffs? Of course, McDonald’s recommends that we don’t eat there absolutely all the time. But that’s like promising not to poison someone all at once.

So maybe the anticorporates have more of a point than I thought. Pass the facepaint Ethel, I feel a didgeridoo coming on. But I won’t take it too far. Looking back, and thanks to Mr S, I certainly wouldn’t take our kid to McDonalds like I used to if he were young now. He could have pie anfuckin chips instead.

remember the pro-working class point of view?

2004-06-09T15:16:00.000+01:00

John Reid does

"I just do not think the worst problem on our sink estates by any means is smoking, but it is an obsession of the learned middle class," he said. "What enjoyment does a 21-year-old single mother of three living in a council sink estate get? The only enjoyment sometimes they have is to have a cigarette."

It’s characteristic of a certain kind of reformer to respond to the difficulties of working class lives by trying to deprive the people who lead them of their pleasures, solaces and consolations. Given the fondness of New Labour for the technocratic delusion, it’s a tendency that’s had a good deal of encouragement in recent years. We can't end poverty. But we can make poverty perform.

So it’s nice to see the Health Secretary sticking up for the harassed smoker. In times past, the pro-working class point of view – the idea that the government has no right to interfere with the pleasures and the choices of working people - was very strong in the Labour Party and provided a necessary corrective to the zeal of the middle class pokeynose element. “A little of what you fancy does you good” doesn’t sound much like a developed political philosophy. But really it’s about including the whole population in Mill’s calculus of individual rights, rather than quarantining the poorest as objects of experimentation and reform.

However, he’s not quite there yet.

Faced by calls for a ban at the meeting attended by health professionals and the local community, Mr Reid said: "Be very careful, that you do not patronise people because sometimes, as my mother used to say, people from those lower socio-economic backgrounds have very few pleasures and one of them is smoking. I worry slightly about the unanimity of the middle class professional activists on this."

Lower socio-economic backgrounds, indeed. I don’t think I’ve heard a senior Labour politician use the phrase “working class” for about ten years. It’s one of the most striking taboos in the whole Blairite cargo cult. Simply uttering it would cause the whole magic kingdom to vanish in a puff of smoke. The terrible power of the words would sweep the Blairistas from the hallowed precincts of the Tate Modern and leave them swigging Diamond White outside an off license in Swinton.

We can dream. Come on John, you know you want to…

democracy in Egypt!

2004-06-08T20:46:00.000+01:00

Oh well. Never mind.

via Abu Aardvark

cynical realists triumphant

2004-06-08T17:29:00.000+01:00

Stratfor responds to the Iraqi transitional government as follows:

The United States has clearly entered a new phase of the Iraq campaign in which its relationship with the Iraqi Shia has been de-emphasized while relationships with Sunnis have been elevated. This has an international effect as well. It obviously affects Iranian ambitions. It also helps strengthen the weakening hand of the Saudi government by reducing the threat of a Shiite rising in strategic parts of the kingdom that could threaten the flow of oil. The United States is creating a much more dynamic and fluid situation, but it is also enormously more complicated and difficult to manage.

It’s a good enough place to end up. But let’s start with Iyad Allwai, transitional Prime Minister and head of the Iraqi National Accord, the main rival amongst exile groups to the now discredited Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress.

According to Andrew and Patrick Cockburn’s Saddam Hussein, an American Obsession, as of the early 1990’s Allawi “was a charming and articulate individual who had the gift of impressing intelligence officials.” In the early seventies, Allawi was head of the Iraqi Student’s Union in Europe, which sounds very much like an intelligence posting. He broke with the Ba’ath party in 1975 and was the survivor of an assassination attempt three years later, which left him short of a leg.

According to Middle East Reference, the INA itself was...

...created in December 1990, on the initiative of Saudi Prince Turki ibn Faysal, with the support of the CIA, and Jordanian and British agencies. Largely made up of Ba‘thists and former military officers who oppose Saddam Hussein's leadership; main constituency is Sunni Arabs in central Iraq…. Originally under Saudi sponsorship, who promoted the INA to participate in the first congress of the JAC (see INM below); and helped the INA to establish radio station, Voice of Free Iraq. Arranged bomb blasts in Iraq from 1994 to demonstrate its credibility: included the bombing of a Baghdad cinema, which killed civilians; and outside Ba‘th newspaper offices. Abu Amneh al-Khadami, who claims to have organised the bombings, stated in January 1996 that these bombings were carried out to impress the CIA. Also reportedly bombed INC headquarters in Salahuddin in October 1995; the CIA investigated, but did not release results. Counselled the US against supporting the INC / Samarra‘i coup attempt of Mar95, in favour of its own military scheme, which was scheduled to take place on 26Jun96. This had emerged out of a plan from Retd Gen. Muhammad Abdullah al-Shahwani, an ethnic Turkoman with 3 sons in the Revolutionary Guard, who had contacted the INA in Aug94. The INA in turn contacted MI6, and details were passed onto the CIA, whose operatives within UNSCOM helped coordinate the coup attempt: the Iraqi government became aware of the plot in advance, and 120 coup plotters were arrested (& mostly executed) by the Iraqi regime.

The Cockburns take up the story:

“When they sped out of Jordan, the CIA took with them General Shawani and lodged him in a safe house in London, the location of which was kept a closely guarded secret. A few weeks later, the safe-house phone rang. It was Anmar, his eldest son, calling from Baghdad.
“If you are not in Baghdad in a week, father, “ he said, “I and [brothers] Ayead and Atheer will be killed.”
The old man broke down in tears. “What have I done, what have I done?” he reportedly cried. “I have killed my sons.”

Chalabi apparently warned the CIA three months in advance that the plot had been penetrated by Iraqi intelligence. According to some, it was Chalabi himself who tipped off Saddam’s people, not wanting the INA to take credit for the overthrow of Saddam, or presumably take power afterwards. Also, the INA were supposed to be responsible for the bombing of the INC headquarters in northern Iraq a couple of years earlier in which 28 people were killed.

Exile politics was ever fraught. Maybe what makes the ‘96 coup attempt significant is the fact that it was both a CIA failure and a failure for the traditional foreign policy realist point of view, in which inconvenient dictators need to be removed with as little trauma to their countries power structure as possible. Enter the era of “Blair’s wars” and humanitarian liberalism. Leave the field free for the grandiloquent Ahmed Chalabi and his eager backers in the Republican Pentagon and, latterly, the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Despite these reverses, Allawi stayed on the CIA payroll, making himself unobtrusively useful both during

The efforts to court Iraqi commanders, and the subsequent dissolution of the Iraqi Army, offers a partial explanation - along with the sheer brutality of the bombardment that the Iraqi Army suffered - for the light resistance that the advancing Americans often faced.

"Many officers in the Iraqi Army sold out," said Iyad Alawi, an important participant in the advance operation and now a member of the Iraqi Governing Council. "There were hundreds of them. Our effort was quite widespread. We sent in hundreds of messages."

and after the invasion.

The Bush administration has authorized creation of an Iraqi intelligence service to spy on groups and individuals inside Iraq that are targeting U.S. troops and civilians working to form a new government, according to U.S. government officials.

The new service will be trained, financed and equipped largely by the CIA with help from Jordan. Initially the agency will be headed by Iraqi Interior Minister Nouri Badran, a secular Shiite and activist in the Jordan-based Iraqi National Accord, a former exile group that includes former Baath Party military and intelligence officials.

Badran and Ayad Alawi, leader of the INA, are spending much of this week at CIA headquarters in Langley to work out the details of the new program. Both men have worked closely with the CIA over the past decade in unsuccessful efforts to incite coups against Saddam Hussein. The agency and the two men believe they can effectively screen former government officials to find agents for the service and weed out those who are unreliable or unsavory, officials said.

All this gives us a useful insight into the power struggle that matters – the one in Washington. Both Alawi and interim President Ghazi al-Yawer resigned over the attempted storming of Fallujah. I suspect that this is the point at which the State Department/CIA axis of cynical realists launched their successful counter-coup against the Pentagon and the Department of defense, which even now sees the eager proponents of middle eastern transformation wired to polygraphs and sweating, though for their sakes hopefully not too much.

So where are we now? Both Allawi and al-Yawer (profile here) are aligned with the traditional Iraqi power structure, based around the Sunni heartland and are aligned with Saudi Arabia. Opposing them we have an axis consisting of religious Shi’ite parties, Iranian affiliations and support from the Pentagon/Department of Defense faction in Washington, assuming that this isn’t completely purged.

Ideally, this puts the US in the role of a swing player, able to switch to either axis in Iraqi politics as local or regional priorities dictate, essentially a divide and rule strategy. The problem with this is that it tends to organize politics around Iraq’s confessional divide. And it’s going to be hard to maintain stability in this context without resorting to repression. Maybe it’s time to declare the insurgency over and prepare for the civil war.

Or maybe more than just a civil war. Stratfor again:

The future at this moment is in the hands of Tehran and An Najaf. This is the point at which the degree of control the Iranians have over the Iraqi Shiite leadership will become clear. The Iranians obviously are not happy with the trends that have emerged over the past month. Their best lever is in Iraq. The Iraqi Shia are aware that the United States is increasingly limber and unpredictable -- and that it has more options than it had two months ago. The Iraqi Shia are in danger of being trapped between Washington and Tehran. It is extremely important to note that al-Sistani today tentatively endorsed the new government, clearly uneasy at the path events were taking. Therefore there are two questions: First, will the Iranians become more aggressive, abandoning their traditional caution? Second, can they get the Iraqi Shiite leaders to play their game, or will the old rift between Qom and An Najaf (the Iranian and Iraqi Shiite holy cities) emerge once again as the Shia scramble to get back into the American game.

a cruel and stupid lizard

2004-06-08T14:35:00.000+01:00

Even more on Ron.

He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wife—the one that you remember—because she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon.

I think Martin Amis was wrong when he said that ceasing to be a socialist enabled Christopher Hitchens to unburden himself into a better prose style. This kicking of the sainted Ron shows all the signs of a man playing at home – skillful, happy and relaxed enough to exhibit some pretty good ball skills. But in the last paragraph he remembers that he’s playing for the other team now, and cramps up badly.

Link via Mark Kleiman

oi!

2004-06-07T17:53:00.000+01:00

You! Yes, you from the Lockheed Martin Corporation of Fort Worth, Texas! Shouldn’t you be giving your employers a little more of your attention and be spending less time googling for “prostitutes in a park in Madrid with lines of cars.”

Or is it just that lobbying for defence contracts is getting weird these days? I knew someone who helped organize a Saudi trade delegation to Paris. There were twenty people on his roster – Sheikh this, Sheikh that. And there was also: “Madam Fifi, consultant.”

more on Ron

2004-06-06T18:54:00.000+01:00

A commentor wants to know more about my crack about Reagan fighting for freedom down to the last European. It’s a combination of things really. The resurgence of the doctrine of winnable nuclear war. The advent of a new generation of tactical nukes. And most importantly the deployment of those nukes in Europe, amid much chestbanging rhetoric.

I can’t look back kindly on a man who would have cheerfully provoked my death, had his tactics been matched by the Russians. Ronnie’s gone, and to hell with him.

And yet, it was wrong to say that I felt in imminent danger at that time. Solemn types expended much hot air over hs supposed unfitness for office at the time of his election: “At this vital juncture of the cold war – the Americans have elected a stone cretin.”

It certainly looked that way. And it was a masterstroke. It said to the Eastern Bloc: “the game’s up, sunshine. It doesn’t matter who we elect. You’ll never catch up.” It was like Muhammad Ali tap dancing round his stricken opponent before delivering the coup de grace. It said to the Chinese: who cares who lost China – make a bunch of cheap stuff for us.

I think most of us had a sense of this back in the 80s, whatever our politics. I bet Ron was aware of it too. He wasn’t a second rate actor impersonating the president. He was a good actor in a second rate role he could pretty much phone in. The joke would be funnier if it wasn’t for the nukes.

gone

2004-06-05T22:58:00.000+01:00

The man who presided over the early phase of the career of Osama Bin Laden has moved on to a new role in the Bush re-election campaign.

Like many of us over here, I recall his strength. His virtue. His willingness to fight a nuclear war with the Soviet Union down to the life of the last European. Fortunately, we had Gorby around to save us.

I can only suspend my habitual atheism to wish him joy in his new home.

be glad you weren't there

2004-06-05T16:28:00.000+01:00

Richard Norton-Taylor was born on D-day. But he still had a narrow escape.

As I recalled 10 years ago - in the naive belief that 50 years would be the end of public celebrations - my mother (my father was helping to liberate Rome at the time) described later how, just before going into labour, she heard about the Normandy landings on the radio news. "I was worried, though, as the matron kept coming in to inquire what I was going to call my son. I thought that something must be wrong with the baby - but the press had been calling to see if any boys had been born that day, and was I going to christen him Bernard (after Montgomery) or Dwight (after Eisenhower)?"

What burden such ties would have become. Not so heavy, perhaps, as those borne by one of my D-day contemporaries. He was named Dee-Day Rodney White - HMS Rodney was the battleship which pounded German positions on the Normandy coast - by his father, a Hastings fisherman.

"He must have been pissed or something," Dee-Day told me when I interviewed him on our 50th birthday. He has had to endure such predictable quips as "See you, Dee-Day, after tomorrow".

getting metaphorical, once more

2004-06-04T15:32:00.000+01:00

Let's talk about the war says British Spin and continues thusly:

You have a known murderer, out from prison on license, who is holding hostages in a house. The police have surrounded the house, there are reports that the murderer has a gun. The police ask repeatedly for him to surrender either the gun or himself. He refuses. The police storm the house and take him prisoner. It turns out that he's was holding a crude replica. Are the police to be condemned as reckless?

If the cops knew through third parties - ie the UN - that the murderer had no gun and went ahead anyway, killing or causing the deaths of a number of the hostages, then they certainly were.

The fun of arguing through metaphors is that it lets you control the terms of debate. Here's how I'd do it.

The Corleones and the Five Families are discussing the fate of Lucca Brazzi, a one-time prized employee who has fallen into disfavour through showing signs of developing a mind of his own. The Corleones want him whacked as a lesson to others. The Five Families say he's no threat to anyone and whacking him will cause more trouble than it's worth. The Corleones go ahead anyway, but struggle to retain control of Brazzi's old fiefdom - so much so that the limits of their power become embarrassingly clear. The five families shrug, sigh and cross their fingers, hoping a Corleone they can do business with will emerge as head of the family

as mad as they look?

2004-06-03T18:06:00.000+01:00

The speccie orders its army of loyal readers to stick with the Tories. A quick glance at the UKIP website gives reason for their concern. It looks like the manifesto of an emerging party of the radical right rather than just a home for mainly conservative protest votes.

Europe aside, the UKIP manifesto mostly reflects the middle class axis of complaint along the line encompassing fuel protests – Tony Martin – immigration (euphemized as “overcrowding”). Perhaps the ideal UKIP policy would be to legalize the drive-by shooting of asylum seekers, neatly wrapping up all these issues in a vote-winning combination. Naturally, the police would take an interest in these matters. But liberty for the upstanding Briton could be secured on production of an England Rugby shirt, or perhaps a recent receipt from B&Q.

I admit this is unfair. What’s more, I intend to remain unfair to a party of whiners led by a permatanned telly demagogue. And yet there’s quite an interesting flavour to some of UKIP’s output. Take this:

Governments no longer seek to serve the people. They now view the voters as production units in a company called Great Britain PLC and as such they expect us to do what they as directors want. They never now talk of freedom, and they have forgotten what democracy means:

They take a steadily increasing proportion of our money in taxes.

They are now attacking our basic legal rights such as Habeas Corpus, the Double Jeopardy rule, and Trial by Jury.

With identify cards, CCTV, and DNA testing government agencies will soon able to keep tabs on everybody.

and later

Establish the general principle that new technology must never be used for the routine observation of members of the public who are not under suspicion of having committed some crime.

Leftist? Liberal? Whatever. The important stuff about policies like this is that they potentially give UKIP amplitude, enabling it to escape from the anti-European ghetto and maybe set up shop in a more general way of political business if they succeed in hollowing out the Tories from within. They need a new name though. And “National’s” been taken.

life attack

2004-06-02T17:06:00.000+01:00

Stuff's happening. Blogging light to nonexistant over the next few days...

innovation in financial services

2004-06-01T14:59:00.000+01:00

I learn from my inbox this morning that Mr David Roberts wishes to make me rich.

My name is David Roberts, the Chief Executive of
Personal Financial Services of the Barclays Group with
head office at 54 Lombard street, London EC3P 3AH.

I am writing this letter to solicit for your support
and assistance to carry out a project concerning a
late customer of the bank by name Dr. Victor Morgan,
an oil magnet and philanthropist who died on the 14th
of June 2002 in the London Hospital after being
involved in fatal car crash which also claimed the
life of his wife and two sons.

Lying in his inactive account in one of our branches
is the sum of Thirty Million United States Dollars ($30,000,000.00). Ever since he died the bank has placed a stop on all transactions on this account pending when his next of kin would come forward for necessary actions, identification and collection.

Yes, it's a British e-mail scam. None of your Nigerian rubbish around here. Makes the heart swell, and brings a tear to the eye. How do you get to become an "oil magnet" anyway?

trousers to the world

2004-05-31T16:10:00.000+01:00

You're "Unhappy Birthday"! You're a
bastard when someone wrongs you, but you're
funny as hell.

Which Smiths Song Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

via Backword

managerial wisdom

2004-05-30T17:30:00.000+01:00

From Draxblog:

Anecdote, repeated in Soderbergh's Traffic, tells of the day Khruschev had to leave power to the new Soviet leader. He met the new man in his office, left him two letters and said: "Whenever you find yourself in trouble, follow the instructions in the letters". Few years later, new man in charge found himself in trouble. He went to his office and opened first letter. The letter said: "Blame me". The man did just that and remained in power. Few more years passed and new trouble came. The new man went back to his office and opened another letter. The letter said: "Start writing two letters".

my adoptive home town

2004-05-29T17:47:00.000+01:00

Never ceases to amaze.

Less than 24 hours later, a 14-year-old boy was critically ill in hospital with stab wounds in the chest and stomach. At first it seemed as though a brutal, but straightforward, robbery had gone wrong. But yesterday the young "victim" became the first person in this country to be convicted of inciting their own murder.

An intricate web of deceit had been spun by the boy on the chatroom to recruit another teenager as his would-be killer.

"This case serves as a stark warning of the dangers of the dark side of the internet," Nicholas Clarke, prosecuting, told the court yesterday.

The boy - who is now 15 and can be referred to only as John for legal reasons - persuaded his friend, known as Mark, now 17, to stab him to death in order to pass a fictitious initiation test for the British secret services in a meticulously planned attack one Sunday evening last summer.

there.I've said it.

2004-05-29T17:36:00.000+01:00

Welcome, one and all, to the grand opening of the Official Nick Berg Conspiracy Theory. After cutting the ribbon, the mayor will pin a rosette on an odd shaped vegetable and dip his finger in a number of home made jams produced by elderly virgins.

Possum believes "the available evidence surrounding the case suggests that it was a 'black operation' by US psychological warfare specialists ... to provide the media with a moral relativity argument to counter the adverse publicity over torture at Abu Ghraib". The use of FBI footage in the opening sequence, if confirmed, suggests the involvement of high-level US Government operatives.

Since this is congruent with my own political outlook, I'm obliged to think of reasons why it can't be true. Probably something to do with the complete lack of evidence for the proposition as put forward. Still, pretty coherent for two and a bit weeks after the event.

lizard brains

2004-05-28T12:02:00.000+01:00

Last year, shortly before it was published, Martin Amis' Yellow Dog was the recipient of a berserk, pre-emptive attack by Tibor Fisher:

Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder (not only because of the embargo, but because someone might think I was enjoying what was on the page). It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating.

Well, I'm two thirds of the way through the paperback and I'm here to tell you that it's Tibor out there astonishing the kiddies, his dick swinging in the wind. True enough, Yellow Dog isn't "slightly disappointing". It's pretty damn good. I was going to say his best since...but it doesn't really work like that.There seem to be some changes at work that make comparisons pointless.

For one thing, it's simple. There's none of the cosmic stuff, where Amis attempts to nail the feelings of his squalid creations to the stuff of the universe itself as they snuffle and hoot their way towards Cosmic Doom. Freed from portentousness, what we have is a day out swimming in the postmodern swamp with a random sample of ethical cripples, some more sympathetic than others, all assailed by a kind of creeping, corrosive worthlessness attendent on an overmediated culture.

Fuck me, I've gone all purple. Mart, boy, what have you done to me? Anyway there's lots of laughs too, deriving as is usual in Amis' stuff, from shame and humiliation.

Reading Koba the Dread, it occured to me that Martin's politics were starting to resemble his dad's, in a less bufferish and commonsensical way. It may also be that his books are turning in the same direction. No-one's a more nifty tap dancer round a thesaurus than Amis junior, but in Yellow Dog he seems content to just show us what he's on about rather than work quantum physics - or whatever - into things to develop a meaning for us all.

So what's he on about, then? One theme seems to be the ability of technology and commerce to both satisfy desire and to push it further than we ever thought possible or desirable. It's also a vision of an Americanised culture in a British context, publicity without style, celebrity without self worth, diffident recklessness, resentful hedonism. People either wallow joylessly in their impulses or squat on their jobs like fat, prehensile toads. Yes, it's the first really successful age of Blair novel. State of England, eh Mart? 'Kinell. State of that!

I've sometimes wondered why we have to use a dumbed-down phrase like dumbing down to describe a dumbed-down culture. Mart's here to tell us why words have failed us. Thing is, it's not that we've got dumber. Naah, geezer. it's just that our impulses have got smarter. Our lizard brains have learned to txt and e-mail and publish newspapers...

"Clint had recently read a piece in a magazine that posited the emergence of a new human type: the high IQ moron. Wised-up, affectless and non-empathetic, high IQ morons...were also supercontemporary in their acceptance of all technological and cultural change - an acceptance both unflinching and unsmiling."

handling bollocks roughly

2004-05-27T19:36:00.000+01:00

I interviewed Francis Wheen once for the China Daily about his biography of Marx, and met him later on at the old Briton’s Protection pub next to G-Mex. Nice bloke, and still fighting the good fight. Even if it is in Spiked and he has to fight his way through the inevitable smugness.

As a good God-fearin' atheist and some time contributor to the New Humanist magazine, Wheen is especially aghast at the apparent rise of the creationist movement. 'Those people', he says, as a full sentence, to indicate that he doesn't much care for the likes of the Christian fundamentalists who in 2002 took control of a state-funded school in north-east England intending to 'show the superiority' of creationist beliefs in their classes. 'Why don't we have schools that teach children there is a tooth fairy or put Santa Claus Studies on the national curriculum, and be done with it?'

Wheen was most struck by prime minister Tony Blair's response to revelations of a creationist takeover of a state-run school. When Lib Dem Jenny Tonge asked Blair if he was 'happy to allow the teaching of creationism alongside Darwin's theory of evolution in state schools', the prime minister said: 'In the end, a more diverse school system will deliver better results for our children.' 'A simple "no" to Tonge's query would have sufficed', says Wheen, 'and perhaps shown that the prime minister of the United Kingdom believes in reason.

i'll go long

2004-05-26T13:38:00.000+01:00

The market for martyrs. (pdf file).

Injury-oriented sacrifice can be modeled as a market phenomenon grounded in exchanges between a relatively small supply of people willing to sacrifice themselves and arelatively large number of “demanders” who benefit from the sacrificers’ acts. Contrary to popular perception, it is on account of limited demand rather than limited supply that markets for “martyrs” so rarely flourish.

A little too much effort to squeeze the whole phenomena into the rational choice economics formula, but a useful line of enquiry I think.

via Libertarian Jackass

way too much information

2004-05-25T19:42:00.000+01:00

Someone has done a close, frame-by-frame analysis of the Nick Berg beheading video, with particular attention to blood spatter. Finish your tea and read the conclusions.

unintended ironies

2004-05-25T15:15:00.000+01:00

Matthew Turner'snoticed something.

Blair's announcement today that the provisional Iraqi government can, if it wants, tell the coalition troops to go home is a remarkable achievement for the prospective provisional government.

For that weak, divided and under-strain authority has achieved a level of control it is believed no British government has ever managed with respect to US forces in Britain.

up and down the Cheetham Hill Road

2004-05-25T15:07:00.000+01:00

A shoddy article in today’s Guardian on the subject of the Muslim vote - apparently, sub-editing is haram or something – did bring to mind a stroll down the Cheetham Hill Road last Saturday.

With an election pending, you normally find that most of the businesses have posters up. Round here, that means either Labour or Lib Dem, or quite often both. They let people put posters for lost pitbulls in their windows, so why not political candidates? The locals are a courteous bunch, by and large.

This time there were more posters than usual, and they were all for the Lib Dems. The beaming, bald bonce of Qasim Afzal followed me all the way down the road. Due to some problem with the offset process, however, the forces of Liberal Democracy in the Cheetham Hill ward were visually represented by an ugly shade of burnt orange.

Gorgeous George’s acolytes were also out soliciting, but not getting many customers. The lads at Spices of Kashmir put one of their posters up – in emetic shades of yellow and green – but they’re only young.

As ever at times like this, I wonder where the hell the Tories are. In times past, they had good representation in Manchester and a fairly strong local organization. And these are small businesspeople we’re talking about. They don’t like taxes any the better because their parents came from somewhere around the Pakistan/China/Kashmir border area. I suspect the Tories’ ongoing trouble – their continued feebleness - isn’t down to their ideas, but to their lack of organization. If they were stronger in this regard they’d have held on to the swivel-eyed loons too. Build the party, comrades!

For the record, the all-important B&T endorsement goes to the least unappealing of our three centre right parties, in a newly established popular front with proprietors of the Midway Halal grocers and the Sizzling Balti. I might give the crusties a punt in the generals, assuming they venture out of Hulme.

liberal Chekist

2004-05-24T17:55:00.000+01:00

Vladimir Putin, considered at length by Neal Ascherson.

Sakwa writes about Putin's choice between 'pluralistic statism' (imposing the authority of the law without diminishing the structures of civil society or regional autonomy) and 'compacted statism' in which civil society is regimented in the name of enforcing the rule of law, while power and patronage are concentrated on an undemocratic elite at the centre. At present, Putin's Russia looks increasingly compacted rather than pluralistic. Jack shows that Putin's Kremlin is increasingly composed of 'enforcers' - officials who have served either in the KGB/ FSB, or in the military. The proportion of such people among federal officials was under 5 per cent in Gorbachev's time. Now it is 58 per cent. Democratic self-confidence does not grow well in their shadow.

Jack defines Putin as a 'liberal Chekist'. He sees parallels with Andropov, the head of the KGB who came to lead the Soviet Union in 1982, when it was too late (and he was too sick) to carry through his ideas. He wanted to liberalise the Soviet economy without corresponding political reform. 'First we'll make enough sausages, and then we won't have any dissidents.'

One theory about the demise of the Soviet Union, apparently popular in US intelligence circles, is that the whole reform process in the 80’s was initiated by the KGB. According to this, Russia’s technical development was fuelled mainly by industrial espionage (remember Concordski). Examples of high technology would be stolen and the Soviets would fill the gaps in their knowledge by figuring out how it worked. By the early eighties, the West was so far ahead that Soviet scientists couldn’t work out how to reverse engineer the stuff, so the game was up.

Andropov wanted to launch Chinese style economic reform, but died before he got properly going. Gorbachev eventually took over and tried the same thing, but didn’t have the authority to carry it through while preserving the integrity of the state. Hence Putin’s fondness for enforcers.

laughter for monday

2004-05-24T16:20:00.000+01:00

Extensive ruminations about the Chalabi/Iran connection, courtesy of Kevin Drum and Jim Henley. The latter in particular has some questions:

Isn't blowhard Michael Ledeen, for instance, just the sort of arrogant fool a foreign intelligence service would regard as the perfect mark? Aren't Ledeen's endless screeds demanding that the US topple the Iranian government the perfect cover for a witting or unwitting agent of influence? Where do the allegiances of (continuing!) Ledeen pal Manuchir Ghorbanifar really lie, and what damage has Douglas Feith done to the country by getting himself mixed up with the man? Are the Iranians crazy, for bringing US troops to their very borders, or crazy smart, having figured out just what a ten-division army bogged down in a sour occupation can and can't do to them?

Schadenfreud has been forbidden by those whose position on the war has revealed them to be fools. Well I don’t care. Give me Schadenfreud! Give me Emma Freud! Give me all the scions of the great psychoanalytic dynasty, including that creepy publicist and cultural operator!

I just can’t help it. I’m minding my own business when I’m overcome with giggles by the thought that Melanie Phillips is an Iranian intelligence asset. I think my lungs will burst at the next po-faced discussion of the “influence” of Tony Blair, dupe of dupes. Those endless legions of tough-minded, unfooled, stout-hearted, clear-sighted think tank monkeys, calling for courage and sacrifice from their corner offices. All with their strings pulled by a couple of guys with beards in an office in Tehran.

On the other hand, a lot of the neocon crowd were close to the Iran-Contra nonsense. Dupes or…what did they know and when did they know it?

led to the appointed place

2004-05-23T15:45:00.000+01:00

Or something like that.It’s always tricky to judge the boundaries between reasonable conjecture and outright conspiratorialising. I use what I call Rosenbaum’s Rules, evolved after reading Ron Rosenbaum’s sympathetic but skeptical accounts of various conspiracy buffs (go here to buy his book on these and other matters).

These are:

does the theory maximise itself in terms of those supposedly responsible for it? (and George W Bush personally ordered…

does it merge with other conspiracies to form one grand Secret History of Everything?

does it conform to and expand on the political beliefs of the person making the theory?

Say yes to any of these and its time to go away and lie down for a bit, contemplating fluffy bunnies and sunlight. Having said that, further reports of the Nick Berg case are beginning to convince me that there is officially Something Funny Going On.

The authenticity of the Nick Berg beheading video is critiqued here and here. Main points:

If al-Zarqawi was responsible, he seems to have grown a leg. Either that, or the story of his medical treatment - including the amputation of his leg - in Baghdad is not true. This story indicates that the line on al-Zarqawi may be changing, however.

The video is in fact two videos spliced together and overdubbed.

Nick Berg was probably dead before his beheading.

Asia Times also publishes the following:

According to e-mails sent from a US consular officer in Baghdad, Beth Payne, to the Berg family, Nick Berg was being held in Iraq "by the US military in Mosul". A May 13 AP report notes that a US State Department spokesperson subsequently said this was untrue, an error, and that Berg was being held by Iraqi authorities. But another May 13 AP report quoted "police chief Major-General Mohammed Khair al-Barhawi" as claiming that reports of Iraqi police having held Berg were "baseless".

And Berg is seen on the beheading videotape in what appears to be US military prison-issue clothing, sitting in what appears to be a US military-type white chair, virtually identical to those photographed as used at Abu Ghraib prison.

According to the Philadelphia Daily News, meanwhile:

Berg teamed up in Baghdad with an ex-Philadelphia man who led a controversial group of Iraqi expatriates encouraged by the U.S. government - even as he faced deportation for his role in Russian-emigre crime ring selling millions of vials used for crack.

Aziz Kadoory Aziz, also known as Aziz al-Taee, hooked up earlier this year with the 26-year-old West Chester man to start a small company called Shirikat Abraj Babil, or Babylon Towers Co., that would install, inspect and repair telecommunications and utility towers.

In interviews with several news organizations in Baghdad, Aziz claimed he may have been the last friend to speak with Berg before his kidnapping and beheading by terrorists possibly linked to the al Qaeda network. The radio-tower contractor had come back to Baghdad after a 13-day detainment in Mosul, only to disappear again on April 10.

Aziz said that on April 10 Berg "surprised me by calling me at 9 or 10, to say that he found some friend to travel with to Jordan." Berg said he was en route, but Aziz doesn't know who he was with or what kind of vehicle they were driving. "He said they were nice people. I told him to have a nice trip."

I don’t know what to make of all this, but it paints a very odd picture of a willfully naïve Candide figure stumbling around Iraq intersecting with all sorts of interested parties. And there’s the odd encounter back home as well.

Before traveling to Iraq twice this year, Berg had been investigated by the FBI because in 1999 - while at the University of Oklahoma - an associate of jailed Sept. 11 suspect Zacarias Moussaoui had obtained Berg's e-mail password.

on the eve of war

2004-05-23T15:03:00.000+01:00

a president prepares. In this clip from German channel zdf, Bush the younger consumes the unforgiving minutes before going on TV to declare the war officially started with a bit of larking about. From last year. File under ‘how we got into this mess’.

via the Daily Kos

timely

2004-05-23T14:04:00.000+01:00

Things to be cynical about. 714 of them.

all ahmed

2004-05-22T21:01:00.000+01:00

All the time. The bust followed Chalabi's attack on the UN's oil for food programme, says Christopher Allbritton. He's an Iranian agent, says TPM. He's a construct of geo-political fantasists, says the FT. Juan Cole discounts Andrew Cockburn's allegations that he was planning a coup, and Riverbend has her first good laugh in ages.
Me, I'm reminded of the line in Goodfellas (from memory)...

"There were supposed to be rules but guys just got whacked all the time, whether they got out of line or not."

Thieves fall out, so there you go. But what does all this tell us about the power struggle in Washington?

update: possibly, this.

loved not wisely but too well

2004-05-21T18:49:00.000+01:00

I don't have much experience in Toryology, but there's something odd going on over on the right hand side of the aisle.

There is abundant evidence of this, most eloquent of all Michael Howard’s in-tray. The Conservative leader has been deluged with letters from senior Republicans attacking him, sometimes in strong terms, for his alleged failure to support Tony Blair to the hilt. The Republican party believes that the betrayal is all the greater because of his role in setting up the Atlantic Partnership, a think tank dedicated to ‘purposeful strengthening’ of links between Europe and the United States. The Atlantic Partnership, whose meetings are addressed by senior members of the US administration as well as top-rank European politicians, has been extremely effective in getting the US message across to an elite British audience. But some of the Partnership’s Republican backers have told Michael Howard that his recent criticisms of Tony Blair amount to a betrayal. According to an aide, Howard recently remarked on receiving a letter from an angry Republican, ‘I am not going to be told by Americans what I will and will not do.’

Never mind the public - when do any of them mind the public - this is some kind of pitch to the Tory faithful in their house journal. Max Hastings hs also been using the Speccy and the Guardian to make foreign and defense policy proposals for the Tories, from the left of the party. But why do the Tories want to chain Blair to Bush? What's actually in it for them? And I wonder how much of this stuff Kerry's aware of?

One senior official privately describes telling Blair, ahead of a pre-war meeting with George Bush, that Britain’s standing in Washington was now so high that he could make practically any demands he liked, and that they would probably be granted. A list was provided. The official was aghast when the British Prime Minister did not raise a single one of them at the meeting which followed. Later he described the meeting, and his feeling of utter amazement, to Jack Straw. The Foreign Secretary shrugged his shoulders. ‘That’s the nature of the beast,’ he said.

I can juts see himn sitting there with puppydog eyes, trembling in some sort of personal apotheosis. Blair's approach to politics has always struck me as somewhat theological. Where previous labour leaders stressed atlanticism for its utility - as a signal that they were fit to govern - for Blair it seems to be a matter of faith. There can be no higher calling than to sit by the right hand of an American President.

On the other hand, what if Kerry got in and it was generally understood that Blair's closeness to Bush, his role in not making him seem like an absolute dolt, had damaged his standing with the Democrat in the white house? The thought that he had actually undermined the "special relationship" would finish him off for good.

you too can be...

2004-05-21T13:53:00.000+01:00

Thomas Friedman!

Remember: Thomas Friedman is the Carrie Bradshaw of current events. Think Sex and the City, write "Sects and Tikriti":

a. How can Islam get to its future, if its past is its present?

b. Later that day I got to thinking about global civilizational warfare. There are wars that open you up to something new and exotic, those that are old and familiar, those that bring up lots of questions, those that bring you somewhere unexpected, those that take you far from where you started, and those that bring you back. But the most exciting, challenging and significant clash of all is the one you have with your own civilization. And if you can find a civilization to love the you that you love, well, that’s just fabulous.

via Arts and Letters Daily

"too clever by half..."

2004-05-20T19:45:00.000+01:00

In an absolutely stunning article, Andrew Cockburn goes behind the Chalabi bust.

Another benefit was his money. One former covert operator happily recalled the inaugural meeting of the Iraqi National Congress in Vienna, Austria in June 1992, which was wholly, if secretly, funded by the CIA: "There wasn't a single person there who didn't believe he was paying for it all out of money he had embezzled from the Petra Bank!" (I asked one investigator who had spent years probing the Petra wreckage if anyone from the US government had ever queried him on the true facts of the fraud. "No", not once," he answered, adding that journalists had also steered clear of the ugly truths about Chalabi's banking career.)

"He doesn't want colleagues, only employees," says one former INC associate sadly. "And he prefers to bring in outsiders who can't work independently of him." As example, this Iraqi opposition veteran cites INC official Zaab Sethna, an American of Pakistani origin, and Francis Brooke, Chalabi's Washington lobbyist. During last year's war, Brooke, a fundamentalist Christian, told Harper's Magazine that he would support the elimination of Saddam, "the human Satan," even if every single Iraqi were killed in the process.

Other key aides who have stuck by him over the years include Nabil Mousawi, a former Leeds pizzeria manager who first attracted Chalabi's notice when he volunteered to work the copy machine at the INC's inaugural meeting. Entifadh Qamber, now the INC spokesman in Baghdad, has been similarly loyal. Known for his verbal and physical aggressiveness, Qamber once punched out an elderly Iraqi critic live on television.

we march towards death in onomastic cohorts

2004-05-20T12:33:00.000+01:00

40 today. A quick glance at the obituaries in the Manchester Evening News seems in order. I’ve been doing this for a number of years now out of curiosity, trying to scope out the circumstances behind the trade jargon of death. “Died in the arms of holy mother church” – one of ours, a fellow left footer. “After a long illness, bravely born” – swigging the Brompton’s mixture.“Taken from us suddenly” – Manchester style, head kicked in outside a nightclub.

And so on, and so forth. But it’s the names that make the most impression. When I started reading obits for pleasure, it was Freds, Berts and other names redolent of allotments, pipes and British war movies that were busy departing.

They seem to have gone now, though their wives – the Ivys , the Annies and the Bettys were making appearances for a good few years afterwards, confirming what we’re told about comparative lifespans.

Then came the R-generation – Reg, Ray, Ron, products of the thirties and the early meritocratic period. Orwell once described children in the new towns who knew nothing of the bible, but had an intimate knowledge of magnetos. There they are, dying before my eyes. And following on, their lady wives: farewell, Pam and Shirley. Your taste in wallpaper will not be missed.

There’s also a sense of history books closing. There go Tadeusz and Iwan, fetched up in Manchester after evading the Nazis or the Communists in Poland or the Ukraine. And here, names strongly suggestive of the Windrush generation. All integrated now in Southern Cemetery.

Onwards to the world of the welfare state, the firstborn of the family with its first mortgage and first family car. Derek, Colin, Chris – there were such hopes for you, and you did become an industrial chemist. But now you’re gone, or going.

This is where it starts to get disturbing. There was a Derek in my class at school. When you’re good and distant , there’s something almost reassuring about the way naming fashions identify cohorts which march together through life towards their endings. But I’m a bit too far up the conveyor belt to be smug right now. Martin Amis said after the late thirties, people stop saying hi and start saying bye. Well there’s a Martin right here in the paper – suddenly, at home (at home=not murdered) – so what do you think of that Mr smartarse?

Hopefully I’ll be able to step out of line for a few years. At least, for long enough to read the paper and say to myself: there goes Darren and I’m still dodging my coffin. Meanwhile, there is something to be said for a cheerful outlook and a sturdy sense of humour. So here’s a re-enactment of "the Shining" by cartoon rabbits.

business news

2004-05-20T11:53:00.000+01:00

This fellow is going to make money

vanishing Sonia

2004-05-19T14:29:00.000+01:00

Early speculation over Sonia Gandhi’s fit of modesty concentrated on a supposed backlash to her Italian ancestry – not likely given the fact that the Indian electorate know all about it and a plurality of them voted for her anyway. Rahul Mahajan has what sounds like a more credible explanation.

Normally, Congress governs in coalition with the Indian Communists and kindred left parties. This time they refused to play ball, preferring to support Congress from the outside over specific issues while not committing themselves to the full neoliberal package. The Indian Sensex market drops precipitately, and Sonia gives way to Manmohan Singh, the name most closely associated with neoliberalism. The people have their say, the investors have their government. Full story here.

hope for us yet

2004-05-19T12:44:00.000+01:00

According to this BBC report, while most of the public remain in favour of ID cards, a larger minority than previously thought oppose them. More significantly, a large number of people are prepared to be militant in their opposition.

Up to 5 million people (28%) would demonstrate against ID cards the survey conducted by online research firm YouGov found.

One million would be prepared to go to prison rather than register for a card.

The survey paints a different picture to the recent MORI poll which found that 80% of UK citizens were in favour of cards.

By contrast the YouGov online poll found that a smaller majority - 60% - of citizens were in favour.

With this issue it's a case of never mind the quantity, feel the depth. ID cards would require almost universal compliance to be practically workable. And those opposed would also have to play a gigantic game of chicken with the government over the proposed punishments for those who refuse to comply. If enough people said they'd be prepared to go to prison even after the government made an example of one or two, strict enforcement of the law would swampt the criminal justice system. It's really a matter of preventing refuseniks feeling isolated in the face of state coercion, which is why this is one of the few issues where demonstrations might have some practical effect.

We also need a more everyday means of recognising each other. An ID card, perhaps...

...that made his ears burn

2004-05-19T11:42:00.000+01:00

It's a fine spring morning, and the Los Angeles Times brings us a brief history of the lobotomy.

The late Walter Freeman, who wrote Howard's case history, had retired from the neurology department at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. By then, he was famous for championing the lobotomy. Freeman was so convinced of the value of the operation that he traveled the country to "treat" just about any stubborn mental problem, charging as little as $25.

He would damage the prefrontal region by driving steel ice picks through each eye socket, just above the eye. This "transorbital" lobotomy required no drilling into the skull, as other techniques did.

Freeman had settled in Los Altos, a few minutes' drive from where Howard's family lived. He was nearing the end of his career and would later lose his surgical privileges after one of his patients died on the operating table.

What with one thing and another, I'm still tempted now and again...

via Hit and Run

2004-05-18T17:43:00.000+01:00

i think a new look is in order
Abnormal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

2004-05-18T14:50:00.000+01:00

from the pre-history of neo-conservatism
Actually, from the Georgetown Bookshop's fascinating collection of antique propaganda material. It seems that some things don't change. Other things don't change either. Nor do still other things.

But this is how all the trouble started.

2004-05-16T17:12:00.000+01:00

somebody phone UKIP
I’ve been boggling at the KCNA site published in Japan for a few years now, but via Nick Barlow I see that North Korea has it’s own official web presence. Amid the treasure trove of Stalinist cult lunacy therein, a number of souvenirs are on offer…all priced in Euros.

I think that tells us everything we need to know.

2004-05-15T20:54:00.000+01:00

a conspiracy is born
Curious. The Nick Berg referrals are still rolling in. But now a large number of the requests say "Nick Berg execution staged". I wonder if this is the point when a specific conspiracy theory hardens out of a state of generalised radical distrust.

2004-05-14T20:26:00.000+01:00

crumbly lipped cassandra in reductio ad absurdam shock
Melanie Phillips, making sense.

2004-05-14T13:54:00.000+01:00

message to gorehounds
I appreciate all the traffic, but there is no video of the Nick Berg murder on this site. If it’s work displacement activities you’re after, there’s plenty of commentary about various things here and at the sites linked to on the right. Or you could actually do some work . If you insist, there are stills here, along with a comments facility.

2004-05-14T13:51:00.000+01:00

hordes of imperialists slaughtered, one heroic resister slightly scratched
Dispatches from the insurgency. About as trustworthy as Adam Ingram, but worth bookmarking anyway.

2004-05-14T13:48:00.000+01:00

America's dreaming
Not his best, but it's JG Ballard, so read it anyway.

Note that characteristic Ballard touch...

We might think that the US had enough problems coping with Iraq, where the abuse of prisoners has given a spin of sexual perversion to its drive towards world domination, something the British Empire, with its croquet and memsahibs, never achieved, alas.

2004-05-13T19:12:00.000+01:00

under old management
One of the things about the great outsourcing debate that puzzled me was the idea that India was booming because cold calling the UK and lying about supporting Man United to likely sales prospects was considered a great job for its graduates. Apparently not.

Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has resigned after a shock election defeat that paves the way for Italian-born Sonia Gandhi's Congress party to take power in the world's largest democracy.

The result was a resounding rejection by the rural poor of Vajpayee's "India shining" campaign motto, although Gandhi's Congress was not expected to turn its back on a policy of gradually liberalising Asia's third-largest economy.

....

The coalition led by Vajpayee's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) lost one-third of its MPs, including its foreign minister, punished by disaffected rural poor who feel excluded from India's economic boom.

Of course, India's peasantry really support globalization. All the so-called peasants who voted against the BJP must be middle class westerners in disguise.

Not that it'll do them any good.

2004-05-13T15:13:00.000+01:00

not depressed enough yet?
Try some contemplation of global immiseration. Your host: Mike Davis

Something in this essay struck me as relevant to Iraq and the ongoing confrontation between the Occupation forces and their (current) Shi’ite allies and the Sadrist movement.

Today, on the other hand, populist Islam and Pentecostal Christianity (and in Bombay, the cult of Shivaji) occupy a social space analogous to that of early twentieth-century socialism and anarchism. In Morocco, for instance, where half a million rural emigrants are absorbed into the teeming cities every year, and where half the population is under 25, Islamicist movements like ‘Justice and Welfare’, founded by Sheik Abdessalam Yassin, have become the real governments of the slums: organizing night schools, providing legal aid to victims of state abuse, buying medicine for the sick, subsidizing pilgrimages and paying for funerals. As Prime Minister Abderrahmane Youssoufi, the Socialist leader who was once exiled by the monarchy, recently admitted to Ignacio Ramonet, ‘We [the Left] have become embourgeoisified. We have cut ourselves off from the people. We need to reconquer the popular quarters. The Islamicists have seduced our natural electorate. They promise them heaven on earth.’ An Islamicist leader, on the other hand, told Ramonet: ‘confronted with the neglect of the state, and faced with the brutality of daily life, people discover, thanks to us, solidarity, self-help, fraternity. They understand that Islam is humanism.’

The Sadrists started out as a ‘government of the slums’ especially the al-Thawra district of Baghdad, now known as Sadr City, under the leadership of Moqtada al-Sadr’s father Mohammed Sadiq – providing a social and welfare infrastructure and an alternative system of justice to Saddam’s courts. Juan Cole’s essay on Sh’ite political factions in Middle East International provides fascinating background on both the younger and elder Sadr, who wasn’t averse to secular or leftist influences.

Muhammad Sadiq had a wide-ranging intellect. He notonly excelled in the Islamic branches of knowledge, but also learned fluent English,and studied psychology and history. Al-Asadi says that his history tutor, Dr. FadilHusayn, considered him his best student and presented him with a rare copy of TheParis Commune (presumably the one authored by Karl Marx).22 This anecdote suggests the way in which leftist and Marxist influences circulated even in clerical circlesin the shrine cities, a phenomenon that went back at least to the 1950s. Muhammad Sadiq wrote a Shi‘ite commentary on the 1789 “Rights of Man” issued by the French revolutionaries.

Prof Cole also explains how the Sadrist government of the slums mobilized after the invasion deposed Saddam.

Sadr Movement adherents differentiate themselves from middle class and
wealthier, more secular Iraqis of the sort who controlled Iraq politically for most of
the twentieth century. They decry the wearing of Western-made clothes, patronizing
movie theaters that show Western films, drinking alcohol, and the appearance in public
of unveiled women. They insist on the necessity of holding and attending Friday
prayers at mosques. They also represent themselves as more socially conscious and
caring than is the Westernized and individualistic Iraqi middle class. Their militias
provided security to millions of Shi‘ites in the spring and summer of 2003, at a time
when the Iraqi police force had collapsed and the Anglo-American forces were too
small to provide security. Sadrist clergymen fought looting and insisted on the return
of looted merchandise. Adherents also specialize in providing food and medical aid to
poor neighborhoods, seeking thereby to build a political base when elections come.
They appear to have gained some Iranian patronage for these efforts.

Sadr the elder was assassinated in 1999, along with two of Muqtada’s elder brothers. His uncle had been murdered by Ba’athists back in 1979.

Like other Arab dictators, Saddam was an assiduous killer of socialists and communists. And in Iraq as elsewhere, it is religious leaders and parties who have moved in to fill the gap. It’s one of those post-liberation ironies that a party led by a determined enemy of Saddam and supported by significant sections of the Iraqi working class now apparently has to be disposed of in the name of freedom and pluralism. Maybe it does. Muqtada himself appears to be more than a little deranged, possibly as a consequence of the brutal repression his family suffered under the Ba’ath. But this is part of Iraq’s unfolding tragedy rather than a reason for whooping it up.

Whatever happens to Sadr’s movement in particular, it’ll be interesting to see if Sadrism in the wider sense – a kind of declaration of independence by the global surplus population complete with autonomous civic and military structures – takes off in the future.

2004-05-12T16:48:00.000+01:00

willing the ends
From Normblog, an interview with Adam Michnik.

Bush has a utopian ideology . . . maybe not Bush, but maybe his circle. Perhaps I'm being naïve, but I don't think it is utopian to want to install democratic rule in Iraq. If it won't be an ideal democracy, let it be a crippled democracy, but let it not be a totalitarian dictatorship. I don't like many things in today's Russia, but we have to say that there is a difference between Putin and Stalin. In my opinion, the religious visions of Bush's circle are anachronistic. I can't believe that John Ashcroft has personal conversations with God every day, who tells him what to do. But if God told him that he should destroy Saddam, then this was the right advice, because a world without Saddam Hussein is better than a world with Saddam Hussein.

I don’t agree with the conclusion, but the analysis seems to be exactly right when you look at what has been achieved by humanitarian militarism over the past decade. Bosnia slumbers on under the rule of King Paddy the Benign. In Kosovo, Serbian ethnic cleansers have been replaced by Albanian ethnic cleansers. For the most part, Afghanistan has reverted to its pre-Taliban political configuration. Hamid Karzai happens to be the warlord with international support who controls Kabul and its environs. Having said that, Kabul does seem to be a free city. Sierra Leone won’t be setting the world on fire any time soon, but the violence has largely ceased.

So with the possible exceptions of Kosovo and Iraq itself, the military humanists have left the sites of their interventions in a slightly better state than they found them. That is if we take a loose interpretation of the word ‘left’. All the happy beneficiaries apparently need ongoing political control of their country by the political delegates of the military humanists. Given the level of actual support for military intervention that exists internationally, it’s probably the best that can be achieved.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story. In order to create “crippled democracies” in Afghanistan and Iraq, dictatorships in the surrounding countries have had to be supported, notably Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The hardline mullahs in Iran look more secure than they did a year back, and Ghaddafi has been given life tenure as Libyan dictator.

Additionally, the timing and conduct of the Iraq occupation has allowed militant jihadists to regroup, won them more supporters and made the people of the countries involved in the occupation at greater risk of attack. Of course, we were all targets before. But that in itself is no reason to paint a big red target sign on everybody’s head.

Add these factors to the equation. Now let’s make an honest pitch for liberation based on the “crippled democracy” approach.

Ladies and gentlemen. People of this great nation. We aim to topple a totalitarian dictatorship and replace it with a crippled democracy. Our plan is to create a corrupt, brutal and dictatorial regime, but not as corrupt, brutal and dictatorial as the one that went before it. We would like to do better, and who knows, we might pull it off. However, we cannot guarantee that we will succeed even in this.

Yet the attempt will involve us in an open ended military, political and economic commitment, using money that would otherwise have been spent elsewhere. An unknown number of our troops will die. So will an unknown number of the civilians in the country we intend to liberate. It’s not that we want to kill them, but public opinion demands that we put our own military’s security ahead of civilian lives in crippleddemocracystan, even though we care so deeply about these civilians that we intend to liberate them.

Those of you who know which way up a map goes will be aware that the country we intend to liberate abuts totalitarian dictators. We need secure bases of operations so we intend to provide these dictators with economic and political support. In this way we can pursue our policy of opposition to dictatorship more effectively.

Our liberation of crippleddemocracystan will indirectly further the aims of the more general war on terror by replacing a corrupt, brutal and dictatorial regime with a less corrupt, brutal and dictatorial regime. It is not however, a direct attack on the terrorists themselves, who may well increase their attacks on us in response now that the direct pressure is off them. Our response to this will be to curtail exactly the same kind of freedoms that we wish to see established in crippleddemocracystan, not that there will be too many of those. Never mind. You lot have had plenty of liberties for a long time, so now it’s time to share.

I don’t think a pitch made on these grounds would go over well with the public. But if you think that it needs to go ahead regardless, you are under pressure to come up with better reasons, even if they have no factual basis, or ignore the public altogether.

And the problem with that is that it tends to cripple democracy in your own country.

2004-05-12T12:10:00.000+01:00

invitation to a beheading
Over at Maxspeak, the Sandwichman provides a preamble to the kidnapping and murder of Nick Berg.

On March 7, 2004 an "enemies list" composed of signatories to an anti-war petition was posted on the Free Republic website. The introductory and subsequent comments on that list suggest that the purpose of the posting was to encourage people to harrass the individuals on the list and to circulate their names to agencies and individuals that might take action against them.

Nick Berg's father, Michael Berg was on that list and he named Prometheus Methods Tower Service, Inc. as an affiliation. According to his family on March 24, 2004 -- approximately two weeks after publication of the enemies list on the Free Republic website -- Nick Berg was detained by Iraqi police who handed him over to US forces, he was then held until April 6 when he was released, the day after his family had filed a lawsuit in Philadelphia federal court. Nick Berg was not heard from again after April 9.

The original enemies list is here.

Today's Independent gives more background.

Mr Berg was unlucky in Iraq, even before the people who killed him got their hands on him. He went missing not once but twice. He arrived in Iraq for the first time in December 2003. On 1 February this year, he returned home on holiday, but he came back to Iraq on 14 March. That was when things started to go wrong.

His parents suddenly stopped hearing from him after 24 March. He had said he was coming home on 30 March, but he wasn't on the flight. That was his first disappearance. That time, the Americans found him. He had been arrested at a checkpoint in Mosul. He was released on 6 April, after his parents filed a lawsuit in the US.

He told them he had not been mistreated, but that at one stage he had been held in a room full of Iraqis, some of whom had begun shouting abuse at him. After that he was moved to a single cell.

Whether that first, strange episode had anything to do with his subsequent disappearance is not clear. Certainly, it is bizarre that Iraqi police would arrest an American and hold him for several days. If they had suspected him of wrongdoing, it would be more likely that they would hand him over to US forces directly. It is possible he met someone during that stint in an Iraqi prison who later took a more sinister interest in him.

After he was released, Mr Berg told his parents he was coming home. The US State Department offered to arrange him a ticket on a charter flight from Baghdad, but Mr Berg told his father Michael that he doubted they would be able to do so. Why is unclear - there were plenty of flights. Perhaps he was nervous that the plane would be attacked with a missile. The last time he spoke to his parents, on 9 April, he told them he planned to find a route out overland, either via Kuwait, Turkey or Jordan.

The Berg family found out about his detention following a visit from the FBI. (link via Atrios)

When FBI agents arrived at the Berg's West Chester home on March 31, they were relieved to know their son was alive, but in jail. The agents questioned them about various details that only they and their son would know about.

Jerri Williams, spokeswoman for the Philadelphia FBI office, said the agency was "asked to interview the parents regarding Mr. Berg's purpose in Iraq."
On April 5, the Bergs filed suit in federal court in Philadelphia, contending that their son was being held illegally by the U.S. military in Iraq.

The next day, April 6, Nick Berg was released. He told his parents he had been riding in a taxi on March 24 when he was arrested by Iraqi officials at a checkpoint in Mosul. He told his parents he had not been mistreated.

There's no proof of anything here, but there are a number of data points that stack up in a suggestive way. A list of "enemies" is circulated, in which Nick Berg's father and the company he works for is named. The son is arrested and detained for no clear reason, and jailed with people hostile to him. FBI agents question his parents about his son's reasons for being in Iraq. After release, he refuses offers of help from his own government. His final disappearance follows shortly afterwards. It will be interesting to see what the Berg family do next.

As to Al-zarqawi, he appears to have something of a charmed life. Atrios again:

The presence of al Zarqawi was used as one of the justifications for invading Iraq, despite the fact that he was being harbored in Kurdish controlled territory in the North. The Bush administration ignored 3 opportunities to get him, feeling that it would undercut their non-existent case for war in Iraq.

update: The Berg family wiegh in.