Apparently I am…
abrev. Read The Whole Thing.
(Coined by C. D. Harris)
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April 14th, 2003 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
 April 14th, 2003 | Comments are closed
People in Baghdad have been protesting to US troops regarding the breakdown of law and order in that city and elsewhere in Iraq. The solution is simple… when the protesters turn up, lead them to one of the large piles of abandoned small arms dotting Iraq, issue each one of them with a Kalashnikov, 30 rounds of ammunition and a fluorescent yellow armband with the letters INW (Iraqi Neighbourhood Watch) in Latin and Arabic letters, and then tell them “Scram… this is your city so take care of the problem yourself and only call us if things get really out of hand”. At a stroke the Iraqis are given the means to stop the looters, they are empowered to take their post-Ba’athist future into their own hands and they are shown that the coalition is serious about Iraqis running Iraq. Will this mean some weapons get into the hands of the wacko bad guys? Sure, but those guys are already armed. However the upside is that for every one of them, there will be many dozens of normal armed Iraqi people who just want to live a normal life and who then will be able to say “never will be suffer this nightmare again”… and say it with a Kalashnikov in their hands. Ba’athist or Islamist thugs swaggering around your neighbourhood? Now that the Iraqis have had a taste of freedom, let them cap those bastards. All political power does indeed grow out of the barrel of a gun… so lets make sure everyone has one. April 14th, 2003 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
I was surfing our sidebar blog listing and came across an article on JoHo the Blog called Ambivalence.
My remarks are not really a criticism directed the author and to give credit where credit is due, he freely acknowledges that his feelings are petty and small-minded… and let he who has never been petty or small-minded cast the first stone. Yet it seems amazing to me that people can be so caught up in the banalities of American domestic politics (as if the Reps and Dems were actually that different) that the liberation of an entire people leaves them indifferent. It would be like a Republican in 1945 being indifferent to the liberation of France, Belgium and Netherlands from Nazi occupation by the advancing Allied armies because they worried that Roosevelt was a Democrat and fretting that he tended to say things like “God is with us”. It is entirely reasonable to lament the cost in blood and treasure of this war but that some can look on with ambivalence at the liberation itself is sad. Also on that blog was a commenter’s remarks to the effect that as the Bush propaganda machine was operating at ‘hallucinatory levels’ and thus they got their news from places like www.iraqwar.ru in Russia (note: they halted their English language analysis on April 8th but seem to be offering reports once again). As a small-L libertarian I am at best indifferent to Elephant Party statists like Bush and his counterparts in the Donkey Party, but the objective facts of what is happening in Iraq are not that hard to pick out from the noise and I do not see why party political affinities (or lack of them) should colour the ability to discern that essential and quite obvious facts of what has happened. People like that commenter must be heart broken to now discover that far from being a hallucination, the truth is that the overthrow of Ba’athist Socialism in Iraq is very real. The hilarious conspiracy ladened drivel to be found on iraqwar.ru treated the pronouncements of the deluded Iraqi Information Minister as having as much credibility as live video feeds from Iraq showing that the opposite of what he was saying. If that is where people are getting their news from, the hallucination is their understanding of reality itself. April 14th, 2003 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
That people who hate Anglosphere capitalist civilization should make common cause with a mass murdering tyrant is interesting but to anyone who has spent years observing the incoherence of ‘progressive socialism’ it is hardly a surprise. What is a surprise is that Vladimir Putin has shown that not only is the Russian state still the enemy, its leaders are not nearly as smart as I had given them credit for, given they have been caught having given active support to the Ba’athists even to the extent of acting as an employment agency for assassins on their behalf. To have squandered such a large pool of political capital and good will by continuously passing intelligence and weapons to the Iraqis right up to the start of the war is utter madness. Did the Russians think any outcome was possible in the long run other than an Allied victory over the Ba’athist regime? And surely once that fact is grasped, how could they think that news of their treachery would not eventually come to light? What possible benefit could the Russian state gain from this move? Is this going to make honouring Russian contracts with the fallen Ba’athist regime more likely or less likely in US dominated post-war Iraq? Were they hoping Putin’s good buddy Tony Blair would pressure the Americans into a softer line regarding Russian economic interests in Iraq? If so, I wonder how Blair feels about his private diplomatic conversations being relayed to the Iraqis by the Russian intelligence services. It is a terrible thing to live in a world filled with enemies, but if Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussain are the measure of our foes then at least we can comfort ourselves that we are facing opponents who are not just weak, they are self-deluded and quite frankly stupid. April 13th, 2003 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
So the French, German and Russian leaders have had a summit meeting in St Petersburg. After having had an object lesson in the severe limits of their diplomatic and political influence on the world stage, it strikes me that these three leaders have decided that the only way to be taken seriously is to get together and take each other seriously. When Jacques Chirac says:
He is, to put it bluntly, a liar. France and Russia were major supplier of arms to Iraq (far greater than the US or UK ever were) and were major beneficiaries of Ba’athist rule there. The meeting in Russia is nothing more noble that a tactical huddle of debtors prior to going to the receivers (The US and UK) of a bankrupt company (Ba’athist Iraq). Although I cannot resist mocking this triumvirate of gilded irrelevences, there is indeed a serious message emerging from this meeting. It should be clear once and for all that Blairite fantasies about being both Euro-Fedarist and Atlanticist are just that… fantasies. Of course this is going to be spun as something other than an ‘anti Anglosphere summit’ but who are they fooling? Europe is dividing again and that should be clear to anyone not willfully blind. Britain is on the side of history’s winners. However Tony Blair has the power to snatch strategic defeat from the jaws of victory if he does not get over his mindless attachment to ‘Old Europe’ and discredited bodies like the UN. After the last of the fighting dies down in Iraq, thing are not going to gradually return to the way they were antebellum. I really do not know if Blair is psychologically able to grasp the fact that the paradigm has shifted (I hate that word ‘paradigm’ but for once it the most appropriate term). Although I dislike him intensely, I am not sure he will make the wrong move… I really do not know: the jury is still out on how capable he is of actually making a major meta-contextual shift. The world has changed. Get used to it. April 12th, 2003 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Is Saddam Hussain dead? It is looking increasingly likely that he was killed in a coalition air strike. On one hand it would have been nice to see him on trial for his life, or better yet, end up like Mussolini, hanging in a public square… but dead is dead and that is good enough. Sic Semper Tyrannis. April 12th, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last night I saw pictures of the Iraqi Ministry of Economic Planning in Baghdad burning, set alight by ‘looters’. Memo to the Iraqi People: If you want liberty, prosperity and a rational economic future, you now have a golden opportunity that you must not squander… DO NOT REBUILD THAT BUILDING!. April 12th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
The news that Kirkuk, centre of the northern Iraqi oil industry, has fallen not to the coalition, but to US backed Kurdish Peshmerga has electrified the Kurds and horrified the Turks. I suspect that the Jash (pro-Saddam Kurds) are going to be cut to pieces unless they manage to find the few coalition troops in that part of Iraq to surrender to. The Turkish foreign ministry has said any attempt by Kurdish forces to take permanent control of Kirkuk would be unacceptable to them. They are claiming on domestic Turkish TV that the US has promised remove the Peshmerga from Kirkuk once order has been restored, and that Turkish military observers will be going there to make sure this happens. Firstly I do not for one minute believe a word the Turks are saying: I would be astonished if the USA was idiotic enough to make such a rash promise to the Turks, who frankly do not have all that much political capital to call on in Washington D.C. at the moment. The US would be insane to alienate the highly motivated Peshmerga, who it must be remembered have made great efforts to assist the lightly armed US forces in the north. What possible motivation does the US have to get in the middle of this? Secondly, what Turkey finds ‘unacceptable’ in the Iraqi part of Kurdistan is unlikely to impress or intimidate the Kurds any more. The usual internal Kurdish squabbles have been replaced by the PDK and PUK actually fighting along side each other in displays of uncharacteristic unity (yesterday on TV I saw a veteran BBC reporter marvel to see soldiers from the two groups coming out of the same bus!). The Peshmerga are not only better situated politically than any time in the last 25 years, they are also better armed, better organised and thanks to the US Special Forces, better trained. Once the Ba’athists are gone, the Kurds will be able to turn their undivided attention towards any Turkish incursions into Iraq and no prize for guessing who is scooping up all the heavy weapons and ammunition abandoned by the defeated Iraqi forces around Kirkuk. The facts on the ground are strongly in the Kurds’ favour. This problem was entirely predictable and is entirely of the Turkish state’s own making. As I have written before, I have no sympathy for them and it is hard to see how it would be in the interests of the US or UK to try and crush the legitimate desires of Kurds for self determination. April 10th, 2003 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
But the author, General Mirza Aslam Beg, the former Chief of Army Staff of Pakistan, did not realise it at the time. I particularly liked:
Read and laugh April 9th, 2003 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
It has been liberated. I have just watched live on TV via SkyNews as US soldiers used an armoured recovery vehicle to pull down the huge statue of Saddam Hussain in the very heart of Baghdad, surrounded by a crowd of Iraqis quite literally leaping about with joy Thousands of jubilant Iraqis danced in the square and when the statue fell, they rushed forward, ignoring desperate attempts by the US soldiers to keep them back for fear the still unstable structure would crush them… but this was a moment they would not be denied and they quite literally danced on the huge fallen monument to one man’s insane monomania. The cost in blood and misery must never been forgotten and there will be hardships, disappointments and trying times ahead but now is the time to celebrate what has been achieved. These moments do not come often in life, so savour them whilst they last. Enjoy. Update: The people at SkyNews’ website are fast! They already have an article up only minutes after I watched it live on television (the article took them 12 minutes to put up (almost as fast as me!)… Way to go, guys!). April 9th, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Patrick Ruffini is having server or hosting problems and thus has set up a temporary blog at patrickruffini.blogspot.com.  April 9th, 2003 | Comments are closed
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