Hard News: Ten Times Warmer
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OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG Squee!
Sorry, I just wet myself a lot about the Arcade Fire.
Likewise. Thank god they're playing Sydney too! I've been hanging out to see them for ages.
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This is interesting, just got this in an e-mail from Stratfor:
Stratfor has seen indications that Iran is planning to up the ante in Iraq by supplying its militant proxies with shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). These man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS) are short range and are only able to shoot down helicopters and other low-flying aircraft. The U.S. military also announced Sept. 30 that it had seized Iranian-made surface-to-air missiles called Misagh-1s being used by insurgents in Iraq.
Iranian military and logistical support to Iraqi Shiite militant s is nothing new. But adding SAMs to the weapons mix opens up a whole new can of worms.
The Iranians probably are well aware that they would be heading for trouble if the SAM threat materializes. For now, the prospect of Iranian-supplied SAMs to Iraqi insurgents is enough to get Washington's attention. As long as this threat is used as a pressure tactic, negotiations between Washington and Tehran have a chance of going somewhere. But if U.S. choppers start going down, a shift in Iranian thinking will immediately be made apparent -- and it will be Washington's turn to make a decision on grand strategy in Iraq. -
I would never rely on anything Hersh reported
So let's pretend Mai Lai never happened, and Cheney just wants to make friends with Iran. While we're at it, can I sell you the latest radiohead album?
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Stratfor has seen indications that Iran is planning to up the ante in Iraq by supplying its militant proxies with shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles (SAMs).
I hear they're also planning to burn down the German Parliament.
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I'm listening to Prince as I type, but even I accept that he is past his peak as a power in music
naaaaah..... 3120 was very, very strong.
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Once upon a time, the tour promoted the album which paid the cheque that built the house the rock star lived in. In the download age, its become the other way round.
That happened a long time before downloads. As long ago as the 80s and 90s bands would find themselves so far in debt due to insanely expensive recording sessions and video shoots that they would find themselves compelled to tour for 2 years in order to sell enough tshirts to try to pay back the record company; who meanwhile is making all the money from the album sales that the touring and promotion is generating.
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Stratfor has seen indications that Iran is planning to up the ante in Iraq by supplying its militant proxies with shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). ...
As long as this threat is used as a pressure tactic, negotiations between Washington and Tehran have a chance of going somewhere.
What negotiations would these be? The one's Washington continuously refuses to countenance? Whosoever Stratfor are, he/they/it sound ignorant. -
but now even the major Dem Presidential candidates wont pledge to have all US troops out of Iraq by the end of their (theoretical) first term in 2013, five years away, as long again as the US has already been there. I wouldn’t have thought that scenario was possible at the beginning of the year. That must piss off a lot of anti war protestors / activists etc.
And soldiers and their families too, I guess. But they're only po' black folks anyway. But hey, US casualties in September were down to, oh, about what they were in September last year, so it must be going well, right?
How many more hundreds of billions of dollars will the US government have to borrow for those five years, James?
How do you expect the Sadrists (who are currently on ceasefire) to respond in Iraq if Iran is attacked?
Did you catch the reaction from virtually all sides in Iraq to the ludicrous US Senate vote for the decentralisation of Iraq? (I'm struggling to think of a more emphatic expression of hubris and stupidity than voting for the break-up of another country.)
When do you expect the cholera epidemic currently claiming 100 lives a day to tail off?
How many of the two million Iraqis who have fled the country do you expect to come back in the next five years? And the similar number who've been displaced internally by ethnic cleansing?
The only really "good" news appears to be that the Iraqis have firmly decided they don't want the "help" of al Qaeda.
And like Neil, you seem to have missed the part about how the attack's not going to be directed at Iran's nuclear facilities anyway.
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I'll go out on a limb and guess that the BDO lineup might look a bit similar. In which case, come on down M.I.A., Peter, Bjorn and John, and Wilco.
If this turns out to be true, I will have a nervous breakdown trying to negotiate all of my band clashes and run between stages. There are worse problems to have, of course...
(That M.I.A. song which uses the lyrics from 'Where is My Mind?' might be the closest I ever get to seeing the Pixies, anyway. Sigh.)
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Whosoever Stratfor are, he/they/it sound ignorant.
A right wing analyst in, I think Texas, who has quite a reputation for, uhhh, getting it wrong. They make all sorts of predictions which rarely come to pass, and make all sorts of claims to inside information which they clearly do not have access to.
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Not only did the Petreaus report reset the clock so Bush can have a large troop presence in Iraq until the end of his term
One assumes you are taking the proverbial...outside the hard right, who needed something, nobody bit. Being generous James, it was twaddle, made up, manipulated tosh..and pretty much universally derided both by those in the know (including a bunch of other US agencies) and the massed public. It simply made Bush look sillier and more desperate than he already appeared, if such was possible.
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I think Stratfor are Boston-based. This is from the executive summary of their predictions in advance of the Iraq invasion:
- The purpose of the war is to position the US in the heart of the region, so as to be able to bring to bear overwhelming pressure on surrounding States, so that they ruthlessly 'deal with' the Al Quaeda network in their countries ... or else face the US.
- Ultimately, Pakistan is on the US agenda.
- India, as a consequence, is going to become a major US ally.
- China will acquiesce, as will Russia, in return for US recognition of their respective rights to 'deal with' 'insurgency' as they see fit.
- Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia are the biggest losers .... and Iraq.
- The current international landscape is about to fundamentally change ... war will become a permanent feature of the next 5-10 years.
Well, they got the last bit right.
On the other hand, they claimed that Syria was getting a nuclear weapon from North Korea. This seems a fairy reasoned asssessment:
Their flaw is their need (as a business) to be relevant. They have positioned themselves as an unofficial CIA, the guys with the best intelligence who can find the truth. They can see the real story, the real strategies of all the players where others see only chaos. This works fine as long as there is strategy, but often chaos in the world is simply reflective of chaos. No matter what the situation, Stratfor must see the workings of a grand strategic design behind events, even if no such thing exists. This comes up worst in their analyses of Al Qaeda. They need to see current world affairs as an epic chess game between Bin Laden and Bush, each marshalling massive resources to defeat the other. But Bin Laden does not have massive resources, he personally has been nearly reduced to a figurehead who can only inspire, not act. And the Bush Administration has plenty of other goals. Nonetheless, for the last 3 years, Stratfor has tried to see every US move as laying the groundwork for the final move in the game: a massive military assault on what must be Bin Laden's headquarters of northern Pakistan. Despite nothing like this happening, they still continue to predict it.
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It does occur to me that if the Iranians are pursuing an enriched uranium route - as has been reported - they could readily disperse their enrichment facilities in hundreds of locations. Equally, it's not unbelievable that if Iran was attacked, sympathisers in Pakistan could make up their losses with fully or partly enriched uranium.
Once they have the 90% U235, making a bomb, especially a non-airdroppable one, is relatively straightforward (unlike Pu bomb manufacture, which has lots of niggles in implosion and initiator design).
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He's generally been on the money. He reported years ago that Saddam had offered, via the Egytptians, to vacate Iraq before the invasion -- which was confirmed this month.
But he was wrong. Exile was offered to Saddam and he refused. I'm surprised this is news. In the Dan Rather interview just prior to the war Saddam makes it very clear that he refused that option. He may at some point have conisered it and/or the Egyptians may have thought he had, but that's not what he decided eventually.
Are you seriously suggesting that Hersh fabricates sources?
He's got it wrong in the past, being a bit on the conspiratorial side (not to deny he hasn't been spectacularly right when he does get it right). But it's more that I'm a little puzzled that the Cheney team should be telling the whole world their plans. I assume they actually do want to broadcast this and anonymous former intelligence people appears to be the Washington DC way.
And the only reason I can think of for doing that is to prove to Iran the US means business. The Iraqi govt is reporting that Iran is prepared to stop their unhelpful activities so maybe this is working. (And yes I did conflate the nuclear and Iraq issues but the same reasoning applies).
But I wasn't meaning this as an attack on Hersh but rather an attempt to broaden the deabte slightly to consider how this fits in with the position of the Dems (i.e. they all, even hero of the doves Obama, consider Iran trouble) and what might be a better strategy if Bush's is the wrong one. What I see mostly is, and excuse the generalistion, "Bush is a war monger so there's not really a problem with Iran".
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But he was wrong. Exile was offered to Saddam and he refused. I'm surprised this is news. In the Dan Rather interview just prior to the war Saddam makes it very clear that he refused that option. He may at some point have conisered it and/or the Egyptians may have thought he had, but that's not what he decided eventually.
Oh, sorry. It's just that according to El Pais, whose story last week -- based on an official transcript -- was widely covered by other media, Bush told the Spanish leader Saddam had made the offer. The White House did not dispute the accuracy of of the transcript.
Supposedly he wanted take $1 billion with him, and "information about WMDs" (whatever that means), but it does seem to back up Hersh's story quite well. This was three weeks before the White House announced its ultimatum for Saddam to vacate or be invaded.
So Bush lied in public, and Hersh got it right.
Anything else I can clear up for you?
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But I wasn't meaning this as an attack on Hersh but rather an attempt to broaden the deabte slightly to consider how this fits in with the position of the Dems (i.e. they all, even hero of the doves Obama, consider Iran trouble) and what might be a better strategy if Bush's is the wrong one. What I see mostly is, and excuse the generalistion, "Bush is a war monger so there's not really a problem with Iran".
It's compulsory at the moment to declare Iran trouble, and Ahmadinejad "the new Hitler". Did you notice in the Hersh story the quote from a recent column by John Podhoretz that claimed that Ahmadinejad was “like Hitler . . . whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it . . . with a new order dominated by Iran."
WTF? A new world order? Dominated by a country with a buggered economy that might in 10 years' time have one nuclear weapon? Isn't that a particularly idiotic statement from someone with pretensions as an intellectual leader?
Ahmadinejad is a populist loon his own people are tiring of. For goodness sake, he isn't even the commander of the Iranian army.
Just because people say these things doesn't make it true. The worrying thing is that Cheney listens to Podhoretz.
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Anything else I can clear up for you?
Just the bit where in the Dan Rather interview Saddam refuses exile. From the horses mouth. No intermediaries.
He was given that option, it was given a lot of attention at the time -
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/17/sprj.irq.main/
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/622/eg1.htm
http://www.iht.com/articles/2003/01/31/policy_ed3__4.php
http://www.iht.com/articles/2003/03/18/a1_21.php
it's just that he chose otherwise. I am really surprised this is news - it was talked about quite a lot at the time. he may very well have led the Egyptians on. But what he says to Rather is very clear.
The bombing plan has had its most positive reception from the newly elected government of Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. A senior European official told me,
Podhoretz is crazy, but that does not mean that Iran is not trouble. I mean, why not address the far saner views of the leading Dems?
I don't want to go on about Hersh, but I can't help but think this from his article is a bit odd -
The bombing plan has had its most positive reception from the newly elected government of Britain’s Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.
well, according to a senior European official. They must have a better understanding of Brown than British officials. I never thought that Brown as PM was going to ring Robert Fisk for advice on foreign policy but I'm really skeptical about what Hersh is claiming here, yet again from anonymous officials.
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And , finally, before I go and make dinner (is that the time already?), we would do well to recall that the advertised outcome of the Iraq adventure was that it would fatally destabilise Iran's hardliners and and usher in a new spirit of democracy.
The actual result was basically the opposite. I think that should play a part in everyone's thinking as the ad campaign for the next adventure rolls out.
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Just the bit where in the Dan Rather interview Saddam refuses exile. From the horses mouth. No intermediaries.
But we know Saddam was a a boastful liar. Was he really going to surrender on camera in an interview with an American TV network?
I think the El Pais transcript is more compelling.
well, according to a senior European official. They must have a better understanding of Brown than British officials. I never thought that Brown as PM was going to ring Robert Fisk for advice on foreign policy but I'm really skeptical about what Hersh is claiming here, yet again from anonymous officials.
I'll grant you that. He did offer the embarrassment of the captured sailors as a rationale, but that seems one of the thinner parts of the story. OTOH, given recent statements from the French leadership ...
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OTOH, given recent statements from the French leadership ...
They've nobbled Brown and Sarkozy, clever bastards. Watch out RB.
I think that should play a part in everyone's thinking as the ad campaign for the next adventure rolls out.
yeah it does, be assured.
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dangerous fruit loop # 1, John Bolton
Isn't he just?
I saw the end of a TV interview between Bolton and John Pilger a few years ago, just after Dubya went into Iraq.
Pilger asked some question that Bolton didn't like. Bolton's reply was - and I quote word for word - "Are you a member of the communist party - the Labour party?". Pilger replied that he wasn't.
So, by Bolton's logic, Tony Blair, Dubya's best mate in the whole sorry Iraq debacle is a communist. Dear oh bl--dy dear.
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At the moment I'm just hanging out till Kristen Hersh plays down here (Wellytron).
You'll love it, she's really good live. I saw her (and interviewed her!!) at the Paramount Theatre in Wellington in '94, promoting her first solo album Hips And Makers and pretty impressed.
Then in '95 she came back through fronting Throwing Muses as Orientation headliners and was just as good again.
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At the very first BDO, my friend who I went with was wearing a Rage Against The Machine T-shirt. People kept asking her if RATM were playing, and eventually we started telling people they were, and as the day went on, we then said they'd just played (and they were AWESOME).
So I like to think there are people who will have a false memory of having seen Rage Against The Machine at the Big Day Out in 1994.
That's the only BDO I've ever been to and thakfully, no memories of RATM. I went mainly to see The Breeders as I was a big fan of the Pixies and thought seeing Kim Deal's side-project would be the closest I'd ever get to seeing them.
They were really good, but the real revelation of the day was...Smashing Pumpkins. Their albums never did anything for me, but they were a formidable live act and even better when I saw 'em again in Wellington in mid-'96.Of the other headliners, Urge Overkill were bland and Soundgarden tedious. Straitjacket Fits went on before them, it was their final ever gig (barring the 2005 reunion tour) and they wiped the floor with them. After Soundgarden finally went off stage, their guitarist stayed on, playing a mind-numbingly dull guitar solo for six goddamn minutes.
Then, closing the evening, the 3Ds came on and wiped the floor with them as well.
Two weeks or so later, I saw one of the best gigs I've ever seen: Johnny Cash at the Christchurch Town Hall, easily the most truly charasmatic performer I've ever seen. His wife, June Carter-Cash came on for a few numbers as well. I'm eternally grateful to have seen both of them.
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The Clean AND Billy Bragg!, the eighties and nineties are certainly back then. Frankly reckon it might be worth it just to BB (and hopefully Wiggy as well).
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The worrying thing is that Cheney listens to Podhoretz.
So does Giuliani.
Maybe Hersh's sources are people that disagree with Cheney and are pushing back against his plans. The SecDef is no fan, by some accounts at least, and many in the military (particularly the army) are rather strongly opposed to action against Iran at this point.
As for what should be done about Iran perhaps negotiations based around their 2003 offers could be considered. But of course it will mean actually talking to the Mullahs. Kind of like when St. Ronny the Gipper sat down with the heads of an evil empire that actually was a threat at the time.
Of course many of the same people that now consider negotiations with Iran to be "emboldening the enemy" or "appeasement" or "futile and dangerous" thought exactly the same thing about talking to the USSR. They were wrong then as well.
The most troubling aspects of the bombing option are not the issues about oil prices (which will skyrocket as Iran attempts to close the Gulf), or the possibility that Iran will retaliate with missile strikes on Israels nuclear facilities, or the fact that they will take the leash off Hizzbollah.
These are all very bad to be sure, and by themselves make the possible gains of "pushing Irans nuke programme back a few years" not worth having.
The real problem for the US in doing this is the fact that their military in Iraq is supplied along a 500 mile land route through southern Iraq. Which is not only shiite, but the stronghold of the Iranian founded and supported SCIRI party and the BADR militia. The Brits have abandoned this area to "Iraqi" control. Add to this the fact that sadr is likely to feel the need to stir up trouble in Bahgdad and that Maliki will be unreliable to say the least and the US in Iraq could very quickly find themselves in a world of pain.
Iran will be playing a role in Iraq for a long time, there is nothing the Americans can do about that. The best hope is to isolate the real crazies in Iran in favour of the less crazies, negotiations and dialogue are how you do this, not dropping bombs. Their current president is not popular at the moment and would likely be gone next year if the US doesn't help him out by turning him into a hero/martyr. Shiites are quite big on martydom. as the last guy that decided to start a war with Iran found out at the cost of an estimated million odd lives.
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