One interesting thing in the report is that apparently the US embassy in Baghdad has only six fluent Arabic speakers. Another is that the Iraq war is costing eight billion US dollars a month, with an eventual total cost of some two trillion dollars. At the risk of sounding completely insensitive to the plight of Iraqis under Saddam Hussein (I am not) I think I would rather have Saddam untoppled and that money would have been better spent on virtually any global problem such as global warming, food security, human, drugs, and arms traffic control, economic development in the Third World, AIDS, etc. Of course that might not have been as good for the bottom line of big business.
Month: December 2006
Hosni’s wisdom
DUBLIN: An immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq would be dangerous but staying is also risky, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said in an interview published on Wednesday.
He said while talking to a daily newspaper that Iraq needs a strong leader but he did not name anyone.
“I don’t want to mention any names now,” he said in an interview before his first visit to Ireland, which starts on Wednesday and is part of a tour including France and Germany.
The names on Hosni’s mind: Hosni Mubarak, Gamal Mubarak, Safwat Sherif. OK, actually he probably means a nice former Baathist he can get along with. Just not one of those pesky Shias.
Stubborn stability
Debate on Hamas and terrorism
Correction: The debate was not hosted by the Conflicts Forum but rather by Intelligence Squared, which also chose the phrasing of the question.
Hairy relations
A French postman who tried to sell online what he claimed were strands of hair from the mummy of Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II was being held by police yesterday. Jean-Michel Diebolt, 50, was arrested at his home in Grenoble after he placed an advertisement on a website offering strands of hair and tiny fragments of the funeral cloth from the 3,200 year-old mummy for €2,000 (£1,300). He claimed to have obtained the pieces from his late father, a researcher who had been part of a French team which analysed the mummy in the 1970s.
Here’s the revenge? Nine French nationals were arrested during the past week-end in Egypt on charges of planning terrorist attacks in the region.
America’s Kingdom
Anti-Torture Protest
Fish ‘n chips-eating surrender monkeys
In the words of one Afghan lawmaker:
“The Musa Qala project has sent two messages: one, recognition for the enemy, and two, military defeat,” said Mustafa Qazemi, a member of Afghanistan’s Parliament and a former resistance fighter with the Northern Alliance, which fought the Taliban for seven years.
. . .
Some compare the deal to agreements that Pakistan has struck with leaders in its tribal areas along the Afghan border, which have given those territories more autonomy and, critics say, empowered the Taliban who have taken sanctuary there and allowed them to regroup.
What’s so interesting about this is that this is essentially what the British did in southern Iraq. They gave up. No one really likes to talk about it, and they are extremely difficult to embed with, but more and more people are starting to recognize that the one place coalition forces really suffered a defeat was in the south.
The Brits don’t patrol in Basra anymore, they largely just stay in their compound and get shelled every night. US bases get shelled too, but then they do something about it and the shelling stops.
Their most famous move was their abrupt withdrawal from Amara, capital of Maysan province, where they were rocketed every night by Mahdi militia. So with no warning to Iraqi authorities, they declared their mission in Amara complete, pulled out and “redeployed� to the Iranian border to conduct “World War II-style� desert patrol tactics. Somehow trying to turn a retreat into a evocation of the glories of the North Africa campaign.
The base in Amara, meanwhile was sacked by the Mahdi militia because Iraqi authorities hadn’t been given enough time to take control of it.
Since their departure, there have been pitched battles in Amara between Mahdi militia and police (who are controlled by the rival Badr Brigade Shiite militia).
Now don’t get me wrong, Iraq’s a tough place and each army has to make its decision about how to deal with it, but the British enjoy so much describing how they do everything better than the Americans.
In the beginning of their Basra occupation, they described how their years of experience occupying Northern Ireland made them expert at a light touch and winning the inhabitants’ trust.
Now, as they are talking about pulling out, the city is dangerous place awash in battles between rival militias and gangs making millions off the oil smuggling. The Brits just let them take over, and when it got too dangerous, they stopped leaving their base. And now they are leaving entirely.
In Afghanistan, when the fighting suddenly became hot. They appear to be doing the same thing.
So my question is, who are the real surrender monkeys?
Prisoners of Sex
Negar Azimi has an interesting article about gay rights (or lack thereof) in Egypt in the NYT Magazine. I remember at the time of the Queen Boat arrests being on the periphery of some of the debates in the human rights community whether to take on the case of not — I was advocating being as aggressive on this as any other issue that involves unlawful arrest and police brutality, and pushed for giving decent coverage of the case in the Cairo Times at the time, going against the judgement of its publisher, Hisham Kassem, who was (and still is) the president of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights. While I could understand some of the reluctance human rights activists, already tarnished as fifth columnists, had in giving their support to this case, I thought they should on a purely technical basis — i.e. as defenders of human rights, not defenders of gay rights.
Those Egyptian human rights activists who decided to avoid the case received a lot of flak from major Western donor organizations, while those who took it on found that certain embassies and rights groups were now keen to donate funds for projects. It is understandable that some people will see this as a form of Western pressure, thus reinforcing the fifth columnist image of the human rights community. But I wonder how people would see a similar case today — after 9/11, after MEPI, after the rise of the whole clash of civilization discourse on both sides of the Mediterranean. Would it make them more or less likely to take on a case like the Queen Boat? This is an excellent case to test the impact of the mostly Western funding of human rights groups in the Arab world and its relationship to “cultural politics.”
under the boardwalk
Maybe I just liked it because yellow press shill-artist Mustafa Bakry comes off badly in the lead, but Negar also deals in some refreshingly unjournalistic nuance. Whether she gets it right or not I don’t know, but her characterization of homosexuality and gay sex as an “unremarkable aspect of daily life, articulated in different ways in each country, city and village in the region,â€� sounds a little more plausible than that “we don’t have those guys here” line that I’ve now heard once too often.
In fact, that’s what much of the piece is about: the politically motivated rebranding of gay sex as a western perversion deserving of potentially lethal repression by security forces.
Makes one think that it’s a pity that there aren’t any gay politicians, no one at a senior level (say ministerial), who could speak out on behalf of a culture of personal rights and against the culture of crass politicking that surrounds the issue. Of course, that person would have to be well connected and virtually impossible to remove no matter what he said or did. Yep, pity there’s no one like that around.
Three nice photos with Negar’s article by one Ziyah Gafic.