The end

Life has become increasingly hectic as this year has gone on, for reasons including a bigger workload at my day job, the odd bit of freelancing, some light playwriting, and the unexpected urge to move in with my girlfriend.

The upshot of this is, as any regular readers will have noticed, my blogging has slowed to a standstill. Whether this will change in the New Year, I can't say; but I wouldn't put money on it, unless you want to a) lose it, and b) get a really weird look from a rather bemused bookie.

However, I thought I should at least make one last post before 2006 winds down. And with his speech on how the execution of Saddam Hussein marks the end of 'a dark chapter in Iraq's history', Iraqi prime minister Nouri Maliki made the choice of subject rather obvious.

I was on the fence about the invasion of Iraq. On the one hand: wicked tyrant created by Britain and America, a threat to regional stability, and those terrifying weapons of mass destruction. On the other, pre-emptive war is a bloody scary precedent, Iraq had bugger all to do with 9-11, and we were all told lies by our governments to persuade us it was a good idea.

As it has turned out, the case against was the stronger. This is partly because it's clearly made us less safe (remember July 7th?). But perhaps more worryingly, it turned out that the detailed battle plan put together by the finest military minds the US had to offer consisted entirely of the words, "Invade Baghdad! Freedom is on the march!", followed by 400 blank pages where a plan for reconstruction was supposed to be.

Through all this mess, though, the one thing that everyone seemed to agree on was the Saddam Was Bad. He killed hundreds of thousands; he created an apartheid in which a Sunni minority ruled over the Shiites and the Kurds; he invaded neighbouring states; and, in one bizarre televised incident, he felt up a ten year old boy. Let's face it, this guy was nuts.

And now he's dead. That should be a good thing, right? So why was it that reading the headlines this morning, I felt my skin crawling?

Partly I suspect it's because Saddam is the first 'celebrity' to be executed in my lifetime. (Well, there was Ceausescu, but I was nine at the time and more interested in what Father Christmas had brought me.)

But partly also it's because of the horribly excited way in which the incident has been greeted by parts of the media. The Star, the British tabloid for those who find the Sun too intellectually taxing, ran the headline "Happy Noose Year" over a mocked up picture of... well, you can guess the rest. As I write, the frontpage over at Fox News is offering us video footage of Saddam actually having the noose tied around him.

...does this strike anyone else as just a little barbaric? A man had been executed as a direct result of Anglosphere foreign policy - and people are cheering. Aren't the values that we're supposed to be trying to export to the Middle East precisely the ones which would tell us to rise above this kind of thing?

And isn't 'an eye for an eye' such a monumentally fucking stupid ethical code, that Aeschylus was writing plays about how it screws people up twenty five fucking centuries ago?

One suspects there are going to be a lot of angry Sunnis out there right now - and they weren't exactly feeling serene to start with. And then there are Saddam's mates over in Palestine's Hamas-led government, who now have yet another excuse for refusing to sit down and talk peace with the Israelis.

Still, as Bush and Blair will keep reminding us, Saddam was evil. That of course makes everything that flows from his death entirely justified, doesn't it.

Anyway. Happy new year to one and all. In Lovell-related news, check this out.

The headline laughs

Surely this headline from the International Herald Tribune this weekend was written with a thick dose of black humor? It reads:

White House commends Chile for surviving 'difficult period' of Pinochet reign

Hitchens has a good write-up on the man and his sins.

Spaced out

I heard this story on the radio this morning: NASA is planning to start building a colony on the moon in 2020. What was once science fiction could become science fact in 15 years or so.

Dropped amid the latest body count from Baghdad and the odd bit of good news—Pakistan offering an olive branch to India over Kashmir—the new space plans seemed almost a quaint.

But immediately I wondered, surely the Chinese can somehow do this faster and more efficiently?

The lengths they'll go to to publicize a Bond film

Don't know if this one's getting much coverage in the States: London has turned into the set of Smiley's People.

Former Russian spy Alexander Livtenenko, who later defected and became a British citizen, fell mysteriously ill and died after meeting with some former associates. This became a whole lot less mysterious once it became clear that someone had stuck a chunk of polonium-210 into his food, thus irradiating him from the inside out.

Anyway, the Russians aren't too happy at how seriously the British police are looking into this one. From a daily email sent out by the BBC's Newsnight:

Tensions are rising between Britain and Russia over the poisoning of the former Russian secret agent, Alexander Litvenenko. Moscow is accusing British officials of helping to whip up an "unacceptable" campaign against Russia. The Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that relations between the two countries were being harmed.

...Is anyone else resisting the urge to splutter, "Well, you shouldn't have bloody well killed him then!"?

Keepin’ it real

George Packer had a leader in last week’s issue of the New Yorker, which is no longer online, lamenting how US foreign policy is now firmly headed down the realist foreign policy path. Discussing the influence of decidedly non-Neo Cons Robert Gates and James Baker III on White House foreign policy decisions going forward, Packer writes:

These are the same men who, fifteen years ago, abandoned Afghanistan to civil war and Al Qaeda, allowed Saddam to massacre his own people and concluded that genocide in the Balkans was none of America’s business. They are not the guardians of all wisdom. At some point, events will remind Americans that currently discredited concepts such as humanitarian intervention and nation-building have a lot to do with national security—that they originated as necessary evils to prevent greater evils. But, for now, Kissinger is king.

In other words, to quote Dr. Phil, the entire US political establishment has decided its “time to get real,” with the possible exception of John McCain who is suggesting we send more troops in. (Though, as Frank Rich pointed out, he probably knows this isn’t going to happen.)

The rest of the GOP, despite their lip service, have long since abandoned their short-lived flirtation with neo-conservatism and are going back to the position President Bush espoused in the 2000 primaries. One prominent right-winger pundit proclaimed, essentially, Iraq is the Democrats problem now. And the Dems, who won the election based on some vague notion of leaving ASAP, have found a newfound respect for the Scowcroft set.

This is the other casualty of the Bush Administration’s Iraq plan: The ability for the US to confidently work with other nations to solve increasingly global problems the world over: the natural resource issues Jonn has written about, strife in Africa and Palestine. The politicized push into Iraq discredited it, while the ongoing fallout from the war made sure people won’t support it again anytime in the immediate future.

It’s a shame. These “discredited concepts” could help in a place like Darfur, where 500,000 lives have been lost so far in the Second Sudanese Civil War. This week I stumbled onto the website of two filmmakers, Jason Mojica and Jim Malik, who are currently raising money to travel to Darfur next month and make a movie called Christmas in Darfur.

It’s the sort of gutsy reporting project we here at AR like, but the filmmakers admit they have an uphill battle. For one, intervention in Darfur isn’t the sort of thing that captures the imagination of the well-heeled, “war-weary” youth of the West. And forget sullen young people when the filmmakers note you can't even get through to the politicians. The filmmakers write in their web site:

[G]overnments have realized that there is absolutely zero percentage for them in stepping in to try to stop the bloodshed. They catch hell domestically ("No Blood for Oil!”, “Wag the Dog!”) or get pictures of the corpses of 19-year-old kids getting dragged through the street . . . . What this means is that the marginal value of each life has effectively dropped to zero. Kill 5 people, kill 500, kill 500,000 - it makes no difference - each added fatality has absolutely no policy impact and won’t change the situation one iota

With Kissinger Associates in charge of our current foreign policy and the Democrats racking up all manner of political points going along for the ride, Darfur isn’t going to be on the US foreign policy agenda anytime soon. But should that stop anything?

No, Mister Nasser, I expect you to die

Former British Prime Minister Anthony Eden




Good heavens:

Britain drew up plans to cut the flow of the River Nile to Egypt to force President Gamal Abdel Nasser to give up the Suez Canal in 1956, files reveal.

Military officials believed they could harm agriculture and cut communications by reducing the flow of water, newly-released documents show.

The plan was outlined to Prime Minister Anthony Eden six weeks before British and French forces invaded Egypt.

But it was abandoned because of fears it would trigger a violent backlash.

See, this is what happens when you get too used to being top dog in world affairs. You start thinking you're a James Bond villain.

Now I'm half-expecting the Pentagon to demand protection money from developing countries, in exchange for not turning their giant space lasers on Lagos or Mumba.

London's Bridge is falling down

When we started this blog, one of our flimsier aims was to write about the ins and outs of the relationship between our two countries: Aaron's an anglophile, I have an unhealthy fascination with American politics, we were wasting valuable time emailing each other about these things anyway, so we thought we might as well publish some of our ramblings. In this aim, we have spectacularly failed, even in weeks where we do manage more than one post.

At last, though, a story too good not to comment on. So, of course, I've commented somewhere that isn't here. (Whoopsie.) Over at the Sharpener:

I'm about as pro-American as anyone you'll find on the British left, and I agree that the Bush-Blair relationship is a sick joke. But... I think Myers has misunderstood the Prime Minister's motives on this one (...) Asking what Blair wanted in exchange for invading Iraq is a meaningless question. It's like asking what Tom Cruise would want in exchange for accepting an Oscar.

Downwardly Mobile

Interesting economic history factoid I came across the other week: until the industrial revolution, your grandchildren were on average likely to end up doing significantly shittier work than you did.

Two reasons behind this. Firstly, economic growth was all but nonexistent. More people meant less food, which meant - rather upsettingly - starvation. So on the whole, populations didn't grow very much. And the number of 'good' jobs stayed pretty stable.

Secondly, reproduction rates were higher at the top of the economic ladder - that is, the rich were likely to have more children that made it past puberty than the poor did. Multiply that by a couple of generations, and a lord was likely to have a lot more descendants than his serfs.

But, of course, with the number of good jobs frustratingly static, all those kids couldn't grow up to be lords like great granddaddy was. Luckily, there were convenient labour gaps at the more poverty stricken end of the economy because those damned peasants kept snuffing it. So everyone could move down a level.

There were exceptions, of course. But the result was that the overriding economic tendency was towards downward mobility: on average, each generation could expect lives slightly worse than their parents had. This is the exact opposite of the scenario the western middle classes have got used to the last couple of centuries.

Resources, and lack thereof

I am, as has been noted, incredibly busy again. So, two quickies:

1) At a health conference on Tuesday I was informed that costs in Britain's National Health Service - led by wages and high tech drugs - are rising at a rate of 6% a year. After next year's Comprehensive Spending Review, NHS funding will be rising at an expected 3% a year. You think we're seeing cuts now? Just you wait.

2) On the Sharpener I'm asking - what do we do when the planet runs out?

Too rich for words

Far-right blog Red State is always good for some funny comments. They had an interesting take on Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi's choice of Rep. John Murtha as House Majority Leader:

With the next Speaker's support, odds are that 25-years after
the Democrat-controlled House Ethics Committee cleared Murtha of all charges in
the ABSCAM scandal, Okinawa Jack finally will get the leadership position to
which he had been working before getting caught.

Just to recap some more recent history than ABSCAM: Before John Boehner replaced him after he was indicted, your Majority Leader was, how do we say this, Tom DeLay.

Then, last week, corruption was cited as a major factor in the Democrats retaking the House.

So, you know, maybe wait a few days before you start tossing around 20-year old corruption allegations.

Altman in Iraq

This NY Times piece from this morning read more like a scene from a Robert Altman movie than a newspaper article, complete with unlikely bedfellows and witty, off-the-cuff banter.

Hashim al-Menti smiled wanly at the marine sergeant beside him
on his couch. The sergeant had appeared in the darkness on Wednesday night,
knocking on the door of Mr. Menti’s home.

When Mr.
Menti answered, a squad of infantrymen swiftly moved in, making him an
involuntary host.

Since then marines had been on his roof with rifles,
watching roads where insurgents often planted bombs.

Mr. Menti had
passed the time watching television. Now he had news. He spoke in broken
English. “Rumsfeld is gone,” he told the sergeant, Michael A. McKinnon.
“Democracy,” he added, and made a thumbs-up sign. “Good.”

The marines had
been on a continuous foot patrol for several days, hunting for insurgents. They
were lost in the hard and isolating rhythms of infantry life. They knew nothing
of the week’s news.

Now they were being told by an Iraqi whose house
they occupied that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, one of the principal
architects of the policies that had them here, had resigned. “Rumsfeld is gone?”
the sergeant asked. “Really?”

Mr. Menti nodded. “This is better for
Iraq,” he said. “Iraqi people say thank you.”

The sergeant went upstairs
to tell his marines, just as he had informed them the day before that the
Republican Party had lost control of the House of Representatives and that
Congress was in the midst of sweeping change. Mr. Menti had told them that,
too.

“Rumsfeld’s out,” he said to five marines sprawled with rifles on
the cold floor.

Lance Cpl. James L. Davis Jr. looked up from his
cigarette. “Who’s Rumsfeld?” he asked.

Random notes on the recent rapture

In the blizzard of words and articles following Tuesday’s election in the US (and today’s confirmation that both houses were, indeed, sacked by the Dems) and the cheery-on-top resignation of Donald Rumsfeld on Wednesday, there probably isn’t much to add at this point. Like Jonn, I didn't think they could do it.

A few quick, random notes:

• The news that Dick Cheney was against shoving Rummy out of the lifeboat served only to endear the VP to the conservatives, at the expense of his boss who they had already disliked for a good 12 hours or so. It didn’t help Bush with the right flank that he had the incoming Majority Speaker Nancy Pelosi over to the White House for lunch the same day.
  
• As one AR commenter asked the other day, what are the Dems really going to do now that they have both houses of Congress? Will they, as the GOP faithful have been screaming for months, use their subpoena to drag people up to Capital Hill? Will they try to impeach President Bush? Are they going to create a solid base for 2008?
  
• God knows what they’ll do, but there’ll certainly be more investigations than we’ve seen as of late. The whole sordid tale of the outgoing Congress can be read here, every insult nicely cataloged by Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi. It’s blood-boiling stuff.
  
• Perhaps the more interesting story from Tuesday is this: The Dems did pretty well at the state-level, picking up six governorships and nine legislatures. It’s the sort of help that could turn an Ohio—which jumped into the arms of the Democratic Party this week—in a tight election. As the pundits have pointed out all week, it might have made a difference in the 2004 presidential race.
  
• Why is Bush dusting off the Spring-2001, uniter-not-a-divider shtick? Because all those Dems forgot about the last six years, right?
  
• Right-wing blog Red State came out with a piece today declaring that it’s going to “fight on.” Not sure who asked, but, like a lot of the response from the right-wing blogs and pundits—which, for the most part, just congratulated one another on not complaining about voter fraud like those pesky, uppity Democrats—it seemed like a pretty defensive pose. Particularly coming from a site that, for months leading up to the election, was mind-numbingly smug.