Hard News: Only in a relative sense
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He's still two days late, though. I invoked him on pg 2, and here we are on pg 8 and he's only just turned up. Of course we're not talking about Iraq, James - it's rude to start the party without the star attraction.
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A positive write up in of all places the Guardian. Progress must be truly undeniable!
The solid-gold good news out of these provincial elections took a few days to emerge: the swing towards secular parties that favour a strong central government. That is promising.
But before you go off declaring victory, the 51% turnout (of registered voters) is the lowest of any of the elections run under US control, and it was achieved under a comprehensive security lockdown. The turnout in Baghdad was only 40%. Like I said, normal only in a relative sense.
A positive take on Iraq from an Iraqi (pre election)
Gee. A "positive take in Iraq" from a blog that has been providing "a positive take on Iraq" since 2003, and whose authors have taken huge donations from the US conservative movement. Who'd have thought?
I don't doubt the Fadhil brothers' sincerity, but really ...
Many of the still displaced Iraqis are former Baathists and their families, who gives a shit about them and why on earth would anyone anyway? They had it good at the expense of the rest of their countrymen for a long time, and now they are paying the price. If I was one of them I would stay out of the country also out of fear of the deserved revenge of fellow Iraqis. Plenty of them deserve a stretched neck, not sympathy.
James, you reach for rationalisations like a drunk reaches for the next beer, but that's just disgusting.
The flight of 4.7 million Iraqis from their homes has been a humanitarian calamity -- the worst in the region since the Palestinians fled in 1948. With any luck, this huge cohort of refugees won't be quite such a multi-generational problem as that one, but it's massive.
About 50,000 Iraqis are thought to have returned to their homes last year, but there has been consistent evidence that many of the remaining millions simply will not have homes to return to, as a consequence of the ethnic cleansing that they fled in the first place.
The claim that "they were all Baathist bad guys anyway" is a self-serving lie. Apart from being remarkably callous on your part , it simply isn't true. You just made it up.
Given the above I presume you're outraged that the US taxpayer is paying a weekly wage to Sunni militias. Or is that a little too much irony for you?
By now we would be almost certainly be watching a nuclear arms race between an idiot in Iraq and some nutters in Iran, located in the most strategic region in the world .... Hussein would hand off something nasty to one of the many terrorist organizations with whom he had working associations with ... Try oil at $500 a barrel, if you could get it. The great depression would look like a cake walk.
James, I can't help but think that the fact that your rationalisation relies on quite this level of dystopian crystal-ball gazing suggests you're papering over its cracks.
But as I recall, cordial relations between Iraq and Iran -- and they will become more cordial yet -- wasn't part of the original bill of goods. Quite the reverse.
The thing is that this was supposed to be a repeatable form of armed diplomacy that, as Cheney put it beforehand, would take "weeks, rather than months".
It's now at six years and running, and will eventually cost the American taxpayer $1,000,000,000,000. (I invite you to consider the opportunity cost of spending that much money in the region in any other way.)
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, and the coalition death toll is heading for 5000. The American public fell out of love with it a long time ago. It is not repeatable.
Meanwhile, in places like Basra, the clock has been turned back a thousand years for women. Maybe it will settle out -- but whatever emerges will not look like what the White House promised.
Oh, and I expect you heard that the weapons that provided the public rationale for war didn't actually exist.
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the clock has been turned back a thousand years for women
Oh Russell, don't be so silly. James knows that 'human cost' and 'human rights' are not umbrella terms which actually include *women*. That would be ridiculous.
Bumpkin Abroad
I am immensely tickled by this.
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In regard to the hoons...
I'm reminded of a quote by Micheale Mead's:
"If the fires that innately burn inside youths are not intentionally and lovingly added to the hearth of community, they will burn down the structures of culture, just to feel the warmth.
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Giovanni, you stopped one letter too soon - "noes means noes", surely. :)
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It is not repeatable.
If only that were true. People said stuff like that after WW1. The US still has the power to smash the living crap out of anywhere and anyone they feel like. It's just a little too tempting, I think.
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Is it better then it was under Hussein? Just a little bit.
At which point under Hussein? The point when Iraqis had one of the highest literacy and higher-education rates in the world? Where workforce participation by women was normal and ordinary, rather than unusual and discouraged? Yeah, they're definitely better off.
Oh, and don't forget that their infant mortality rate has continued to climb post-invasion, despite having more than doubled (from 50/1000 to 108/1000) as a result of the sanctions after the Kuwait invasion. That's a really impressive sign, that is. "We'll kill you, and we'll kill your kids before they reach the age of five!"
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"If the fires that innately burn inside youths are not intentionally and lovingly added to the hearth of community, they will burn down the structures of culture, just to feel the warmth."
Very nice.
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Latest numbers:
**Iraq: Key figures since the war began**
By The Associated Press – 22 hours ago
U.S. TROOP LEVELS:
_October 2007: 170,000 at peak of troop buildup.
_January 2009: 144,000
_Confirmed U.S. military deaths as of Jan. 31, 2009: At least 4,236.
_Confirmed U.S. military wounded (hostile) as of Jan. 31, 2009: 31,004.
_Confirmed U.S. military wounded (non-hostile, using medical air transport) as of Jan. 3, 2009: 35,470.
_U.S. military deaths for January 2009: 16
_Deaths of civilian employees of U.S. government contractors as of Sept. 30, 2008: 1,264.
_Iraqi deaths in January 2009 from war-related violence: 242, the lowest number of casualties reported in one full month since the AP began tracking this figure in April of 2005.
_Assassinated Iraqi academics as of Jan. 19, 2009: 413.
_Journalists killed on assignment as of Feb. 2, 2009: 136.COST:
_Over $593 billion so far, according to the National Priorities Project.OIL PRODUCTION:
_Prewar: 2.58 million barrels per day.
_January 2009: 2.11 million barrels per day.ELECTRICITY:
_Prewar nationwide: 3,958 megawatts. Hours per day (estimated): 4-8.
_Jan. 19, 2009 nationwide: 5,970 megawatts. Hours per day: 13.3.
_Prewar Baghdad: 2,500 megawatts. Hours per day (estimated): 16-24.
_Jan. 19, 2009 Baghdad: Megawatts not available. Hours per day: 13.1.
Note: Current Baghdad megawatt figures are no longer reported by the U.S. State Department's Iraq Weekly Status Report.TELEPHONES:
_Prewar land lines: 833,000.
_Jan. 5, 2009: 1,300,000.
_Prewar cell phones: 80,000.
_Jan. 5, 2009: An estimated 14.7 million.WATER:
_Prewar: 12.9 million people had potable water.
_Jan. 15, 2009: 21.2 million people have potable water.SEWERAGE:
_Prewar: 6.2 million people served.
_Dec. 31, 2008: 11.3 million people served.INTERNAL REFUGEES:
_Nov. 27, 2008: At least 2.4 million people are currently displaced inside Iraq.EMIGRANTS:
_Prewar: 500,000 Iraqis living abroad.
_Nov. 25, 2008: Close to 2 million, mainly in Syria and Jordan.All figures are the most recent available.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced in late November that it had reached a milestone: exactly 50,000 Iraqi refugees had submitted for resettlement from host countries in the Middle East. Some refugees will not be able to return to Iraq and cannot, or will not, remain in host countries, according to UNHCR. -
It is not repeatable.
If only that were true. People said stuff like that after WW1. The US still has the power to smash the living crap out of anywhere and anyone they feel like
At this point, it really isn't. We've seen clearly that unless you can completely pacify a country in short order, you're there for the long haul. That severely diminishes the ability to project power into other areas. All the guided missiles and modern ground-attack aircraft in the world can't hold ground, or engage the enemy in cities without excessive civilian deaths (I know, I know, they're only rag-head camel jockeys, but some people do get upset if they die).
The US is already struggling to maintain its current deployments, and that's when they're not fighting a hot war. Trying to do another Iraq, without completely withdrawing from Iraq and giving troops time to recuperate, would be a total disaster.
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Matthew, Iraq is a total disaster. WW1 and 2 were also both total disasters. But that did not stop the mass lunacy that led to all of them.
Yes, the US will be unable to maintain either it's own low death toll, or the 'low' civilian death toll, but you presume that is some kind of prerequisite to military action. They can bomb the crap out of anywhere without risking a single soldier, and in the final case they can raze entire nations to the ground without even leaving home.
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On the Iraq issue, I'd say there'll be an increased role for multi-lateralism, aux Afghanistan, Timor or Bosnia.
And the ChCh boy racer plot thickens. Does it reinforce what we know already, or is it a media-beatup, or both?
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LOL so they're both Christians and Odinists? That certainly reinforces that they're a confused bunch.
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I'm not sure what this reinforces.
"Stear" from the rear?
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Vigilants combat boy racers with... foam.
But who watches the Foammen.
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But who watches the Foammen.
You do -- and as a bonus, the kind of phallic symbolism that psychoanalysts pray for!
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But who watches the Foammen.
It's surely the most overt sexual fetish a vigilante has ever come up with. And if he gets caught it might turn from fantasy to reality.
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Craig, it never occurred to me to think of the sandworms as phallic symbols until now. But I guess the idea of giant worms guarding (triangular?) patches of the 'spice of life' should have rung alarm bells. So is the lack of water symbolic of galactic impotence? And are the Fremen genital crabs?
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Vigilants combat boy racers with... foam.
Who can forget this little gem?
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I hope that isn't where crazy foam guy is getting his info on what happens when you stick stuff in exhaust pipes. Anyone care to lay bets on the first bad outcome (other than the cars needing a new exhaust)?
1. Someone gets hit by foam firing out
2. Exhaust pipe explodes
3. Foam guy caught in act by angry gang of boy racers
4. Copycat foamers start foaming everyone's cars
5. Foam taken off shelves pending the apprehension of foamer -
<tenuous relevance>Fine, references to BSG, Watchmen (well, Juvenal, but I'll award a point) and Dune in the same thread so far. It's building towards a nerdgasm here.
What are the odds that the Solace in the Wind sculpture on Wellington's waterfront is going to be painted blue come (sorry) March?</tenuous relevance>
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Craig, it never occurred to me to think of the sandworms as phallic symbols until now.
My DVD of the movie has one of the 'making of' documentaries, and it includes the enchanting sight of the production manager -- a woman called Golda Oppenheim, who looks and sounds like she should be taking tea with Jane Marple somewhere in the Home Counties -- saying that the sandworms always looked like gargantuan penises, "and you couldn't really work around it. We just pretended not to notice, in the end." Words to live by. She also said David Lynch was a very strange man, but with lovely manners -- despite being American. :)
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Didn't think my previous poston Iraq would be a popular, but I obviously don’t care about that do I?
Matthew Poole, so Saddam's Iraq was just a swell place was it? I mean for fuck's sake, do you know anything, anything at all about the Hussein regime? Does the thought of 2 million dead bodies move you at all? Hussein’s regime was one of the most brutal Police states in history, on a par with Stalin's Soviet Union. Does Halabja ring a bell for you? When you add up the Anfal campaign, Iraqis killed for whatever reason, the Iran Iraq war, invasion of Kuwait etc, you get to about 2 million dead people thanks to Saddam's tender mercies or actions. And Iraq was a lovely place was it? Fuck off.
What is it about you lefties? There doesn’t seem to be a murdering tyrant or Marxist you don’t love, admire and whose ass you don’t want to kiss. Saddam, Castro, Che, Mao, Stalin, never heard a leftie say a bad word about the Marxist nut in Pyongyang who has starved millions to death. And you think of yourselves as the nice guys. Bizarre.
As for Iraq under a continued Hussein regime and Iran developing WMDs or nukes to threaten/defend against the other, repeat after me: one plus one equals two. It is about at that level of strategic analysis. A long history of enmity, Persian/ Arab Shia/Sunni fault line, wars, millions of dead bodies in the recent past, nutters running both countries and you are telling me there was no likelihood of future confrontation? Please.
If you were an Iranian would you want to protect yourself from the nutter who killed over at least a million of your people from 1980 to 1988? If you were Saddam would you want to protect against Iranians who have every reason to want vaporize you? Was a future confrontation certain to happen? No one can say. But was it a potential scenario with potentially very bad consequences? Absolutely. Risk equals probability multiplied by consequence. If you can't figure any of that out, your little bumpkin head is stuck in a rather dark smelly place.
I didn't say every displaced Iraqi was former Baathist. But a significant portion is. Did Saddam run his little sadistic state with just himself and his two sons? No he didn't. Every thugocracy needs people in every region and every city and town to keep the screws on the population. Do the math, that adds to quite a few people. And a lot of them fled Iraq to avoid their deserved fate. Made up? BS. Why would anyone give a shit about those people now?
I supported Hussein’s overthrow, so I own a portion of the blame for the difficulties and mayhem that existed and still exist to a much lesser extent. I also own a small piece of the progress of Iraq going forward. If you advocate for a policy, you own a piece of it, absolutely fair enough. But I’d much rather own that than having effectively supported the continuation of one of the worst regime’s in human history, or handing the country over to a bunch of head hacking psychopaths. Every one of you who have opposed the undertaking own a piece of that. You might not like it, or be intellectually honest enough to admit it, but that is the truth.
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