World Events
« Previous EntriesRepublicans on the nose
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008While most attention has been focused on the never-ending story of the Democratic presidential primaries, the Republicans have just lost a seemingly safe seat in a Mississippi special election, following two earlier losses including that of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert. As this CNN story says, this raises the prospect of a wipeout in November. [...]
Holiday from Sanity
Saturday, May 3rd, 2008I was pretty much stunned into silence by the proposal for a gasoline tax holiday put forward by John McCain and Hillary Clinton (not that it matters but I’m not clear which of them came up with it first - can anyone set me straight on this). I won’t bother repeating all the reasons [...]
War crimes trials?
Monday, April 28th, 2008It’s not that surprising to read that former Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad has called for an international tribunal to try Western leaders with war crimes over the war in Iraq, nominating Bush, Blair and Howard in particular. Mahathir is well-known as a provocateur, with a fondness for extreme statements, which have included anti-Semitic attacks on [...]
Peace is for losers part, 2
Friday, April 4th, 2008In my last post on Iraq, I concluded with a somewhat snarky reference to pro-war bloggers who reasoned that, since Sadr offered a ceasefire, he must have lost the fight in Basra, and therefore the government must have won. As it turned out, the ceasefire was the product of some days of negotation, brokered by [...]
Peace offers are for losers
Monday, March 31st, 2008The pro-war blogosphere is full of the news of Sadr’s defeat in the battle for Basra, manifested in his call for a truce, an end to government raids and the release of all prisoners. Here’s a roundup of the links from Glenn Reynolds. Reynolds, who has chronicled Sadr’s decline into irrelevance from 2004 to the [...]
Forced to fight renegades
Thursday, March 27th, 2008The Maliki government’s offensive in Basra, directed against (some) Shiite militias seems to have taken most observers by surprise. Possibly as a result, reporting of the event has been unusually revealing about the implicit presumptions that guide the news we get to read. The New York Times, for example, leads with a photo of “Fighters [...]
Gitmo and Gulag
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008My namesake, Canadian terrorism expert Tom Quiggin, takes a look at the Guantanamo Bay trials, and notes their adherence to the principles laid down by Stalin’s chief prosecutor, Andrey Vyshinsky.
Quiggin notes that
According to Col. Morris Davis, who is a former chief prosecutor of the military commissions, it appears that the plan was made ahead of [...]
Progress in Iraq
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008Looking for information about the implications of the ’surge’ in Iraq, I found this NY Times report, which seems to sum up a lot of relevant points, and ought to prompt some rethinking of firmly held views. The key points
The American-led military campaign in Iraq is making enough progress in fighting insurgents and training Iraqi [...]
Suharto dead
Monday, January 28th, 2008I don’t imagine many readers will be shedding tears at the death of former Indonesian dictator Suharto, and certainly I won’t be. The bloody massacres in which he rode to power amid the collapse of the Sukarno regime, and the brutal invasion and occupation of East Timor, not to mention his spectacular corruption, mark him [...]
Less bad news from Iraq
Thursday, December 13th, 2007Over the last few months, the volume of bad news from Iraq has diminished. For example, the number of US troops killed in November (about one per day) was the lowest in a couple of years. While it’s much harder to measure Iraqi casualties the number seems to be declining, at least in Baghdad. What [...]
Retrieved from the memory hole
Sunday, December 2nd, 2007The NY Times says that Iraq is the third most corrupt country in the word after the failed states of Somalia and Myanmar (Burma). The article gives plenty of examples at all levels, but is striking in the way it represents US forces as dismayed, but largely helpless, onlookers.
It’s time, obviously, to dive into [...]
Worse than you can possibly imagine
Wednesday, November 21st, 2007As Brad DeLong says, the Bush Administration is worse than you can possibly imagine, even after taking account of the fact that the Bush Administration is worse than you can possibly imagine.
Apparently, soldiers wounded in Iraq, and therefore unable to serve out their enlistments, are getting letters demanding partial repayment of their enlistment bonuses.
A million tragedies
Friday, October 12th, 2007Stalin is supposed (possible apocryphally) to have said “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”. Like much said by that master of lies, it is a half-truth.
Burmese junta shuts off the Internet (or tries to)
Friday, October 5th, 2007One of the big questions about the Internet is whether governments can control it, and potentially use it to suppress dissent. Quite a few have tried, most notably that of China, and of course we have no idea how much tapping and monitoring the US government has been doing.
Still, recent events in Burma suggest that [...]
More on mercenaries
Thursday, October 4th, 2007This Washington Post article, describing the killing of Iraqi civilians by Blackwater mercenaries who are, under laws imposed by the US, free to murder whoever they want in Iraq without any fear of adverse consequences, and who have regularly exercised that freedom makes it clear enough that Blackwater alone has been sufficient to doom the war effort in Iraq.
Mercenaries
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007Mercenary soldiers have a deservedly bad name in history, both for their conduct and for the fact that they have not generally lived up to the expectations of those who hired them. But, under the more appealing name “private military contractors”, they have enjoyed a resurgence in recent years.
This piece in Salon by [...]
The party of Jefferson Davis
Friday, September 28th, 2007Having decided more or less unanimously that war, torture, and indefinite imprisonment without trial are good (provided, of course, we talking about actions the US), the Right has finally opened up a topic where they can find some disagreement.
Why Tuesday ?
Friday, September 28th, 2007Among many questions that you could ask about the British and US electoral systems, one of the more minor but harder to answer is …
Shedding blood for liberty
Sunday, September 23rd, 2007But in that case, Thompson ought to have made some claim like “the US, and only the US, fights for the freedom of others” which at least sounds like standard meaningless stump-speech rhetoric rather than a false factual claim.Leaving motivations aside, the striking fact is that Thompson’s claim is close to the direct opposite of the truth. The US is notable among major nations in how little it has suffered from foreign warsUntil Vietnam, by the official count, the US had never lost a foreign war, and until Korea, US forces had hardly ever even been in retreat (in both the World Wars, the entry of substantial US forces marked the turning point for the Allied side).
War credits
Thursday, September 13th, 2007Now that everyone has finally agreed that Iraq is another Vietnam, we can move on to the next point which is that, having lost the war, the war party is going to blame their domestic opponents, just like they did after Vietnam.
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