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In British military vernacular they are called ‘bumpy jumpers’, but they are a sight more chilling to the very hearts of Islamic fundamentalist extremists than an approaching squadron of B-52s wheeling in for an attack run. Women without veils… Good looking blonde women without veils… Good looking blonde women without veils with guns!  April 18th, 2003 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
 A commenter called Johan from Sweden got me thinking about memes and their uses. Next time you hear of a new tax or a new abridgement of civil liberties such as surveillance or free speech or conscriptive ‘education’ or an increase in regulation of what you do even on private property or any of the host of democratically sanctified violence backed imposition on civil society, the meme to start trumpeting should be clear:
The socialist left and statist right are both big on majoritarianism whilst paying lip service to the right of minorities… well I have news for you, we are all a minority of one in the final analysis. Just because someone votes for the state to help itself to your money, remember to protest loud and long and give lie to the myth that democracy empowers anyone except the political factions able to manipulate the system.
It may not stop them but every little bit that de-legitimizes the politicization of civil society under the blanket of democracy is a step in the right direction. April 18th, 2003 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
The UN, meaning significant portions of its membership such as France, Germany, Russia etc. are refusing to simply lift sanctions against Iraq automatically until they get their way politically… which is to say to dilute US and British control over post-war Iraq. So even after Ba’athism is gone, the sanctions could be maintained. In short, the people backing this are saying “do what we want or we will make the Iraqi people suffer even though the regime the sanctions were designed to contain is now gone”. And the thing that really sticks in my craw is that these sanctimonious bastards think they have the moral high ground.  April 17th, 2003 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
When it comes to the British International Development Secretary, Clare Short, any attempt to analyze her views are bedeviled by the fact she is such a mass of contradictions and illogic. Yesterday at a briefing in London she was asked by a journalist if she thought the death toll of Iraqi civilians was a price worth paying for the overthrow of Ba’athist Socialism, to which she replied:
Let us ponder that remark… that the Ba’athist regime was mass murderous is beyond doubt and clearly something of which Clare Short would be cognisant. So what is she saying? She is not saying that what even the hilarious Iraqi Minister for Information admitted was a small number of Iraqi civilians killed was too high a price to end two and a half decades of tyranny. No, she is saying that the loss of even a single life is not a price worth paying… paying for what? To prevent the murder of thousands of Iraqi people every year, that is what. The term ‘absurdity’ seems inadequate somehow. Face it… Clare Short does not give a damn about the Iraqi people. She is more concerned about preserving the sanctity of her surreal world view. Why else would she say such an idiotic thing if not because trapped within her dogmatic meta-context, she is simply incapable of saying anything else regardless of florescent evidence suggesting better moral theories. As I have written before, to oppose the war on the grounds that the domestic cost in Britain or the USA in blood, treasure and encroachment of the state is too high a price for the sake of the Iraqi people, is at least a coherent viable argument… but to oppose the war on ostensibly altruistic grounds that the price to the Iraqi people of overturning the Ba’athist Socialist status quo is too high is simply ridiculous, given that the scale of that Saddamite tyranny was hardly a secret. To have taken such a position at before the war or in the early stages of the campaign was at least somewhat tenable, at least for a person with a poor understanding of the military and technological realities, on the grounds the cost in blood would indeed be mind bogglingly high. But to still use that argument after we know that the ‘massive casualties’ scenario has not proved to be the case is bizzare. Pictures of tragic little Ali Ismail Abbas are truly heartrending for sure, but how does that change the cold hard facts about the butcher’s bill if Ba’athism had not been overthrown? To argue on a ‘what is best for the Iraqi people cost/benefit analysis’ means the likes of Clare Short cannot have it both ways… unless all that matters is not that a ‘single life’ is lost to violence but only who did the deed. Although Clare Short’s logic is hard for me to fathom, perhaps she is saying that preventing thousands of Iraqi civilians dying every year in Saddam Hussain’s jails and torture chambers is not worth a single Iraqi death if a British taxpayer funded soldier was the one who ended the ‘single life’ in question. Or maybe she means nothing of the sort. So who exactly does Clare Short care about? What does she mean when she opens her mouth and makes noises that sound like English? I cannot figure it out. April 16th, 2003 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
April 14th, 2003 | 11 comments - (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)
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