John Mortell’s blog

This is so accurate and evil:

It’s kind of creepy the way that ‘fake’ news like The Daily Show, the Onion and the Colbert Report are actually more realistic than most of the ‘real’ coverage of this election:

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

Interesting article here and while I’m not sure that it’s all completely accurate, it does strike me as being somewhat likely:

After the 2003 US invasion, amid the chaos and looting that followed the collapse of Saddam’s regime, SCIRI and Badr forces flooded across the Iranian border into Iraq. “Border control was nonexistent,” says Wayne White, who in 2003 headed the Iraq team at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. “The Iranians could just drive across…. They would come in convoys, ten trucks at a time.” Ali Allawi, a postwar Iraqi defense minister and author of The Occupation of Iraq, wrote, “About 10,000 trained and disciplined Badr fighters entered Iraq, either unarmed or armed only with light weapons, and reassembled in various towns and cities as the fighting arm of SCIRI.” (Other estimates involve significantly higher numbers.) Lavishly financed by Iran, SCIRI and Badr installed their leaders within days in ad hoc posts in Baquba, Kut and other key junctions in the south. Wary of Iran, but seeing little alternative to the turban-wearing clerics of SCIRI and Badr, US and British occupation authorities put the party’s officials into top positions. From the early, US-selected Iraqi Governing Council in 2003 onward, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim was named to a succession of key leadership posts, and top SCIRI officials were installed in various ministries, the police and the army. In the Shiite-dominated south SCIRI officials were named to run provincial authorities, cities and towns. They were viewed by the United States and Britain as natural allies in the struggle against remnants of the Baath Party and the burgeoning Sunni resistance — precisely the forces that Iran, too, saw as its deadliest foes.

Virtually en masse, Badr officers were recruited to the fledgling Iraqi police and army that were being assembled by the United States. According to Raed Jarrar, the Iraq consultant for the American Friends Service Committee, Badr officers maintained their same ranks when they were inducted into the Iraqi security forces. A particularly nasty part of Badr’s work in Iraq from 2003 to the present has been the operation of death squads. Often, such units were run directly by Iraq’s Interior Ministry, whose Badr-controlled police were blamed for assassinating hundreds of former government officials, ex-military and intelligence officers, and civilian professionals, according to widespread media reports. “I was told in the summer of 2003 in Tehran that the change in regime in Baghdad had allowed Iranian intelligence to identify every single individual who had worked in the Iran section of the Iraqi intelligence service,” says Mahan Abedin, director of research at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism in London. “They were able to get as much detail as possible about their person, their movement, their connections, their mobile number. All that information was collected.” They were eradicated, Abedin says, in a “hidden war.”

It’s a pretty good interview and you can see the whole thing here.
Just a few things that I found interesting -Bush has a very utilitarian ‘end’s justify the means’ view of a lot of his policies. It just comes across in a lot of the things he says and the language he uses, especially relating to Iraq but also to Africa. There’s also the oddest echoes of Jimmy Carter in terms of how he talks about the ‘higher realism of helping Africa’ in the sense that securing African well-being safeguards America’s national interest. What’s also interesting to see is how surprisingly affable Bush is. Nearly too much at times such as when he off-handedly refers to the ‘Dali Lama crowd’ & uses the word ‘suicider’ which is just .. awkward. Anyway, I still think he’s a horrible excuse for a President but it’s worth a look.

Original site here. Also,what do people think of the new theme? Also, Gavin has the bulk of the photos from the last time this was topical. Enjoy

While I’m somewhat dubious about the source (my own personal opinion of Alternet is that they let too much of their opinion creep into their articles rather than let the facts speak for themselves) these paragraphs in the middle of a piece attacking John McCain caught my attention

The “surge is working” narrative’s not reality-based, and when it comes to Iraq, we’ve seen the spin give way to the ugly facts time and time again.

That the troop escalation has been anything but a success is not an ideological claim, as supporters of the occupation charge, but numerical and chronological. The surge began last February, and there was something approaching a consensus at the time that the addition of about 20,000 combat troops — the rest were support personnel — would be a drop in the bucket in a country of 25 million people. Retired four-star General Barry McCaffrey said at the time: “I personally think the surge of five U.S. Army brigades and a few Marine battalions dribbled out over five months is a fool’s errand.” But the troop build-up continued in March, April and May.

The period that followed was a bloodbath — last June and July were the most violent summer months of any year of the occupation. August was one of the bloodiest months, period. Then, that month, the powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr ordered his Mehdi Army to stand down. The number of Iraqi civilian deaths fell by about 50 percent the next month and decreased again in October and November. The militia is estimated to be 100,000 strong and is arguably the most powerful ground force in Iraq after the U.S. military. While the change can’t be wholly ascribed to any single factor — the violence has also decreased as a result of communities that have been fully “cleansed” of one or another ethnic or sectarian group — it’s clear that al-Sadr’s order, not Bush’s “surge,” was responsible for most of whatever “success” there may have been.

Finally, there is the masterpiece of propaganda known as the “Sunni Awakening.” Spun as a sign of success, the reality is that the U.S. military turned over some of the areas where they’d encountered the most violent resistance to local Sunni authorities — many of whom they had condemned as “terrorists” previously — and started paying their fighters to stop shooting at U.S. troops. In other words, the U.S. was defeated and surrendered territory to the “enemy,” effectively paying reparations to local populations and suffering fewer casualties as a result. There are many ways to define success, but defeat and surrender are not among them. Yet, in perfectly Orwellian fashion, after four years of saying that Iraq was mostly stable aside from a few local areas and the Sunni “Triangle of Death,” the administration simply stopped using the phrase and replaced it with talk of a “Sunni Awakening.” We’ve always been at war with Eurasia.

In summary – is the ‘Surge’s’ success based on the U.S claiming success while it’s retreating? It’d be rather like ‘Tricky Dicky’s’ way of dealing with Vietnam where the aim was eventually not to win, but rather to stop the South Vietnamese falling immediately after the U.S pulled. Food for thought anyway…

I remember reading this article by Mark Steyn over Christmas, and it had a tremendous effect on me at the time. While, on reflection I have to wonder about a lot of the things said in it, there a number of ideas contained in the article that are great food for thought.

The median age in the Gaza Strip is 15.8 years. Once you know that, all the rest is details. If you were a “moderate Palestinian” leader, would you want to try to persuade a nation — or pseudo-nation — of unemployed poorly educated teenage boys raised in a UN-supervised European-funded death cult to see sense? Any analysis of the “Palestinian problem” that doesn’t take into account the most important determinant on the ground is a waste of time.

by 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. The big Italian family, with papa pouring the vino and mama spooning out the pasta down an endless table of grandparents and nieces and nephews, will be gone, no more, dead as the dinosaurs. As Noel Coward once remarked in another context, “Funiculi, funicula, funic yourself.” By mid-century, Italians will have no choice in the matter.

Certainly, the article makes a good case for certain areas having major problems in the future with regards to ‘the demographics of society’ and it’s well worth thinking about things like Palestine in that context, however, there are plenty of areas where his thought process becomes oversimplified like this example here:

Africa, to take another example, also has plenty of young people, but it’s riddled with AIDS and, for the most part, Africans don’t think of themselves as Africans: as we saw in Rwanda, their primary identity is tribal, and most tribes have no global ambitions. Islam, however, has serious global ambitions, and it forms the primal, core identity of most of its adherents — in the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere.

Granted, in some ways he has a point, but to suggest that ALL Africans are tribal in nature in somewhat simplistic, it is as much about the corruption of political institutions as it is about tribalism in many areas, Kenya at the moment being a good example. Also , the AIDS comment doesn’t take into account the continuing successes in treatment across Africa, and finally, Steyn ignores the recent growth in Chinese investment in Africa and what that means for the development of the continent.

There are plenty of interesting things within the ideas contained in the article, not least of which is the claim that given that there is not such a thing as ‘Frenchness’ or ‘Dutchness’. When this is compared to the sense of identity that comes with being ‘American’ it becomes possible to imagine that Europe will find it very hard to assimilate the incoming immigrants from the Muslim world.

Towards the end he makes a very good point which I have to agree with regarding the unwillingness that many ‘liberals’ have shown when dealing with Muslims and their claims:

In a few years, as millions of Muslim teenagers are entering their voting booths, some European countries will not be living formally under sharia, but — as much as parts of Nigeria, they will have reached an accommodation with their radicalized Islamic compatriots, who like many intolerant types are expert at exploiting the “tolerance” of pluralist societies. In other Continental countries, things are likely to play out in more traditional fashion, though without a significantly different ending. Wherever one’s sympathies lie on Islam’s multiple battle fronts the fact is the jihad has held out a long time against very tough enemies. If you’re not shy about taking on the Israelis and Russians, why wouldn’t you fancy your chances against the Belgians and Spaniards?

As a final comment on his article, I just have to wonder about his seeming lack of care regarding the fact that nearly a third of the worlds population live in China and India, neither of which are Muslim countries, and at least one of which is a (relatively) healthy democracy. As a gap in the argument it is pretty large. Still though, the article is well worth a look.

This is sooo inappropriate! Funny tho!
”Jingle Bombs”

I’ve talked about this book before, but it’s out to buy now and theirs a pretty sweet trailer out with it too: