Blood & Treasure

birth pangs

I Hate Lebanon and the People of Lebanon at the fuck-lebanon blogspot address. By a Lebanese:

Today I renounce my Lebanese nationality. There's nothing to be proud of any more. There's nothing to hide behind any more. There's no reason to keep my head up any more…

…Fuck you Lebanon. You are the mark of shame on my forehead. Fuck Lebanon and every Lebanese person who is on the street with a gun. Fuck Hezbollah, Fuck Amal, Fuck Future Movement, Fuck the PSP dick-suckers who are the lowest form of human beings I've ever known.

via. So what are the protest babes doing now?

strange cartographic event

It’s the Friday edition of the Crazy Ralphie Peters memorial map melt. This week: Pashtunistan.

Pashtunistan? Some people are very serious about Pashtunistan, including some people very close to Karzai. Notice how Afghanistan has consistently refused to recognize the Durand Line? The dream lives on….

…realistically, they’ll settle for Pashtunistan plus the non-Pashtun areas of Afghanistan all rolled up into one state. Of course, this would require just a wee bit of extra effort. Might the government of Pakistan resist? Of course. Would the Baluchis and Dardic-speaking people up north be happy about being included in a Greater Afghanistan? Probably not. And how about Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, Turkmen, etc…? The new state would completely marginalize them demographically.

This is all speculation of course. But are some people in Afghanistan and Pakistan waiting, watching and hoping? Absolutely. And some of them are in Karzai’s inner circle. Stranger cartographic events have occurred.

More here. You can see the appeal for outsiders as well. It doesn’t exactly solve the region’s problems, but it does roll them up into one, big convenient problem ball.

Anyway, here’s the flag of Pashtunistan. I don’t know what the motto translates as. “Stand well back” perhaps.

consumers here and there

These ads are all over the place, but apparently not any more. The reason for the logo in the bottom right corner is that the picture is a screen grab taken from Chinese bulletin boards, where the ad is the scandal du jour among the fenqing. According to Roland Soong, the ads are being withdrawn – in Britain - in the face of a threatened boycott of Procter and Gamble’s Chinese operations.

I’ve seen them here and there in Manchester. It’ll be interesting to see if they do in fact disappear.

Elsewhere, Sun Bin carries an interview between Der Spiegel and the head of Adidas, the company that provided chav camouflage for the Chinese paramilitaries escorting the torch. Short version: the man don’t give a fuck.

SPIEGEL: Don't you have to weigh the damage you inflict on your image in the West for not taking a position on China, against the losses you would incur in the Chinese market if you did speak out?

Hainer: No. The criticism is especially loud in Germany and France, but it's significantly quieter in many other countries. And in Asia, not just in China, people are looking forward to the games with great anticipation. I also believe that Western consumers -- unlike some in politics and the media -- understand our role correctly. We are involved in the Olympics because we make equipment for athletes. In any event, we have received more emailed complaints in the past about issues like the use of kangaroo leather in our shoe production than we have recently had about China. We have not noticed any damage to our image so far.

SPIEGEL: Would you have any objection to the Dalai Lama wearing Adidas?

Hainer: Not at all. Actually it's always been my goal to one day see the pope wearing our three stripes. With a German pope, the chances of that happening have never been as good.

SPIEGEL: After his operations, former Cuban President Fidel Castro appeared in an Adidas tracksuit several times.

Hainer: We don't have a problem with that, either.

your task for today is to do leisure

Yes, Singapore is cool:

We are not dull, we are quite cool. We're going to have reverse bungee, all-night dining by the river and by the marina, two integrated resorts, Formula One. How do you explain that? Whether they like it or not, they have to shift the nuances.

That’s Lee Kuan Yew, giving advice, as he likes to do. He’s got a lot of it for the Chinese government over its media handling.

The Chinese should learn to do what we have done, just take the western media on the western media's terms. I don't tell the western media you can't sell here. All I say is you allow me the right of reply. You are selling because you want to sell advertisements, not because you want freedom of information or because you want to enlighten my people.

On the money with that one, literally and figuratively.

that 2006 feeling

Abu M wants to know if this is the day the next Lebanese war started.

It’s interesting that the current round of violence started with Sinoara’s government trying to take down the Hezbollah military/intelligence communications system.

I don’t think the Lebanese state has the capacity to take on Hezbollah. What it may be able to do is tie Hezbollah down while Israel attacks again, presumably through Syria to avoid UNIFIL. According to reports I’ve seen, most of the fighting on the opposition side seems to be coming from Amal, acting as a screen for the Hezbies. It follows from this that engagement of Hezbollah main force units within Lebanon would be the signal for an Israeli attack.

UPDATE: Game over.

A security source said Hezbollah and its allies were in control all of the mainly Muslim half of Beirut after pro-government gunmen laid down their weapons in their last bastion.

The gunmen in Tarek al-Jadeedi, a Sunni area whose residents are loyal to Hariri, had been in contact with Hezbollah to surrender, handing their posts to the Lebanese army.

"It certainly leaves the government weaker and the Future movement weaker," said Paul Salem, director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut.

"Hezbollah is dominating most of west Beirut."

The Christian militias seem to have kept out of it, and Hezbollah/Amal seem to be handing the territory they've taken over to the Lebanese army. Like I say, I assumed that the March 14 side's weakness meant that they wouldn't have poked Nasrallah with the shitty stick without some kind of promise of foreign support. Maybe they were trying to provoke the Hezbies into staging an overt coup d'etat, in which case you really would have a civil war.

den' pobedy

More pictures here. People tend to get a bit embarrassed about the Soviet contribution to World War Two: it kind of messes up the “good war” narrative, especially when you factor in that they did most of the fighting, killing and dying in the European theatre: disembowelled the Nazis, as Churchill put it after the destruction of Army Group Central.

Well the Soviets were what they were. I’m just glad they did what they did. Things get tricky when you consider whether there was any relationship between what they were and what they managed to accomplish. Whatever: it’s probably why only one of my family died in the conflict. On which subject:

The enemy plan of attack called for a simultaneous assault on the night of 7-8 February by the 65th Infantry Division from the west, and by Combat Group Graeser from the east, converging on Carroceto and the Factory…The brunt of the blow, however, was borne by the adjoining 2 North Staff s. Infiltrating rapidly and in small groups, the 145th Infantry Regiment (65th Infantry Division) crossed the Moletta River and fought its way east toward the Albano road. Before midnight the attack had spread along the whole front of the 24 Guards Brigade. With the advantage of a dark night and the numerous deep gullies which cut up the rough country west of the Albano road, the 65th Infantry Division pushed deep into the positions of the British troops. The fighting along Buonriposo Ridge resolved itself into a series of confused hand-to-hand encounters as the strong points of the 2 North Staff s were isolated and overrun. In the early morning hours the 3d Battalion, 157th Infantry, discovered enemy tanks and infantry operating to its rear. At 0400 seventy men, all that was left of the company of the 2 North Staffs to its right, requested permission to attach themselves to the 3d Battalion.

That was in the fighting around the Campoleone salient, near Anzio, in February 1944. Pte Douglas O’ Connor, my maternal great uncle, didn’t make it out.

the Huns: a chronology

Attila's Rise to Power

Called the Scourge of God by the Romans, Attila the Hun was King and General of the Hun empire from A.D. 433 to 453. Succeeding his Uncle, King Roas, in 433, Attila shared his throne with his brother Bleda. He inherited the Scythian hordes who were disorganized and weakened by internal strife. Attila's first order of affairs was to unite his subjects for the purpose of creating one of the most formidable and feared armies Asia had ever seen.

Peace Treaty Between Rome and Attila the Hun

In 434 East Roman Emperor Theodosius II offered Attila and Bleda 660 pounds of gold annually with hopes of securing an everlasting peace with the Huns. This peace, however, was not long lived. In 441 Attila's Huns attacked the Eastern Roman Empire. The success of this invasion emboldened Attila to continue his westward expansion. Passing unhindered through Austria and Germany, Attila plundered and devastated all in his path.

Attila Attacks Italy

In 451, having suffered a setback on the Plains of Chalons, by the allied Romans and Visigoths, Attila turned his attention to Italy. After having laid waste to Aquileia and many Lombard cities in 452, the Scourge of God met Pope Leo I who dissuaded him from sacking Rome.

Manchester U-turn over travelling Rangers fans

GREATER Manchester Police and City Council officials insist Rangers supporters will be afforded a warm welcome for next week's Uefa Cup final, despite voicing concerns previously.

…"We are really looking forward to giving a warm Manchester welcome to all the fans making the journey down. Manchester is one of the biggest footballing cities in the world and we are proud that one of the biggest clubs in the world will be coming to our city for the final.

I understand that the burghers of Didsbury are going to be providing them with meat, wine and their own virgin daughters.

appeared to be common labourers

Odd: Just when the Chinese authorities get the Olympic flame back onto home ground:

In a stunning blow to China’s prestige, two local protesters shocked hundreds of cheering bystanders when they unexpectedly extinguished the Olympic Torch today near the Window of the World, a theme park in the Shenzhen industrial zone near Hong Kong.

…It is unknown what happened to the two protesters, who appeared to be common laborers. Some of the bystanders ended up with blood on their faces, the eyewitness said. It took about an hour of confusion, with the torchbearer being escorted to a military van, before it could be relit and start the procession again.

I wonder if this has got anything to do with the wave of strikes, lockouts and labour disputes in the region: not to mention riots and child labour markets.

UPDATE: According to Danwei, Chinese media are reporting that the flame was extinguished in a crush of enthisuastic supporters. All other accounts "harmonized", which is very quick work.

a foreign cultural problem

Guesting at Crooked Timber, Kathy G opines:

… America, the Mideast, and the world would have been better off if “the single most popular and widely read book on the Arabs in the US military,” Raphael Patai’s racist tract The Arab Mind, had been taken off Pentagon reading lists, and been replaced with Edward Said’s Orientalism instead.

I don’t know if they’ve been reading Said, but they’ve surely been reading something. In my sad civilian way I recently bought FM3-24, the latest version of the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Here’s subsection 1-77:

American ideas of what is “normal” or “natural” are not universal. To the contrary, members of other societies often have different notions of rationality, appropriate behaviour, level of religious devotion, and norms concerning gender. Thus what may appear to be abnormal or strange to an external observer may appear to be perfectly normal to a group member. For this reason, counterinsurgents – especially commanders, planners and small unit leaders – should strive to avoid imposing their ideals of normalcy on a foreign cultural problem.

That’s just an example. It’s pretty much all in that vein, and comes under the endorsement of Petraeus, Nagl and kindred COIN mavens. Did you see those scare quotes round normal? Obviously, mired in relativism the lot of them. Relatedly, perhaps, see Ghosts of Alexander on the Afghan Individual as a Unit of Analysis.

I'm beginning to think that the focus on democracy in the universal values framework contributed to the violence in the first stages of the occupation. It was a way of framing the issue that automatically made huge sections of the Iraqi population into terrorists or terrorist suspects or at the very least civically subhuman - people whose understanding of the world we don't have to consider: Our side is right. They must be on our side. We don't know they're on our side. They're insurgent potentialities.

appeal to the prematurely aged

Smug Man’s Bible commemorated:

The Economist's bid to appeal to more youthful readers seems to be paying off after two 17-year-olds created a rap about the business title, while a Facebook fan group created by a teenage schoolgirl has enjoyed a surge in popularity.

The rap, created by US students Ike Edgerton and Chris Misa under the name Psikotic, is a tribute that includes samples of Economist journalists such as Edward Lucas and Anthony Gottlieb from the title's audio podcasts.

The chorus of the rap runs: "He reads the Economist so he can get the gist, its solid competence gives him confidence that his intelligence is correct."

Other lines praise editorial standards such as "The style in which they write is simple and concise, how do they get their sentences so precise?"

The rap finishes with the defiant statement: "I guess reading it makes me kind of boring. Well if that's the price I pay for being well informed - too fucking bad."

The author gives a precise and accurate account of the magazine’s appeal:

"I don't think of it as a business magazine, but I guess it is, I find it an easy way of keeping up with world events without reading too much."

I still fondly remember the old Far Eastern Economic Review. It was part of Dow Jones, so the op ed was hardcore hard right: but the actual journalists ran around all over the place uncovering all sorts of things. I may be reaching a bit here, but I’m sure the same edition which carried Nate Thayer’s interview with Pol Pot also carried a think piece by some desiccated calculating machine to the effect that Hong Kongers were eating too much and it was making them lazy. Anyway, it was a compelling package. A real business magazine. A business magazine on drugs.

by massage alone

From Pro state in flames: If you happen to be traveling on a coach in Southern China you may see this on the headrest of the seat in front.

Translation:

Retired female military veteran in Nanchang has exceptional skills.
Her hands carry 220V electricity that can turn on lights.
She can cure many diseases.
By massage alone, she can cure erectile dysfunction, sexual frigidity and premature ejaculation.

Well that’s a damn good start. And a happy ending too.

bedtime with zhuangzhi: music from an empty tube

This is insanely great. Don’t analyze it, just catch the wave:

Great knowledge is wide and comprehensive; small knowledge is partial and restricted. Great speech is exact and complete; small speech is merely so much talk. When we sleep, the soul communicates with what is external to us; when we awake, the body is set free. Our intercourse with others then leads to various activity, and daily there is the striving of mind with mind. There are hesitancies; deep difficulties; reservations; small apprehensions causing restless distress, and great apprehensions producing endless fears. Where their utterances are like arrows from a bow, we have those who feel it their charge to pronounce what is right and what is wrong; where they are given out like the conditions of a covenant, we have those who maintain their views, determined to overcome. The weakness of their arguments, like the decay of things in autumn and winter, shows the failing of the minds of some from day to day; or it is like their water which, once voided, cannot be gathered up again. Then their ideas seem as if fast bound with cords, showing that the mind is become like an old and dry moat, and that it is nigh to death, and cannot be restored to vigour and brightness. Joy and anger, sadness and pleasure, anticipation and regret, fickleness and fixedness, vehemence and indolence, eagerness and tardiness;-- all these moods, like music from an empty tube, or mushrooms from the warm moisture, day and night succeed to one another and come before us, and we do not know whence they sprout. Let us stop! Let us stop!

Woo fucking hoo.

button three

…on the speed dial of terror.

The General Staff building was and is right next to the Ministry of Defence building in central Moscow. Zhukov occupied a two story suite there, still preserved exactly as it was during the war…Upstairs, his office contains the usual huge desk with a dark leather top. Stalin’s picture is not behind the desk but behind the door. The telephone is black with three quick dial buttons. Button one is for Beria. Button two is for Stalin. Button three is for Mrs Zhukov.

From another disappointing book, Chris Bellamy’s Absolute War. It’s magisterial up to Stalingrad, plateaus at Kursk and then begins to skimp mercilessly. Operation Bagration gets especially short shrift, which is a shame because it’s the one I wanted to read about most. I see it’s listed on Amazon with Ian Kershaw’s Fateful Choices, which is kind of blah too. Not having much luck these days with Knowledge. Perhaps it’s time to try Floozies or something.

I can recommend the Sjowall and Wahloo mysteries though. Didactic Swedish Marxists: can’t miss with those guys.

foreign policy: the basics

I’m loving this:

Taiwan is seeking one of its citizens for his alleged role in an apparent multimillion-dollar fraud case involving a failed attempt to lure Papua New Guinea to transfer diplomatic recognition from China to Taiwan, two senior officials said Friday.

Foreign Minister James Huang and Deputy Prime Minister Chiou I-jen made dramatic television appearances to discuss their roles in the affair after the Lianhe Zaobao newspaper in Singapore reported that Taiwan was suing Ching Chi-ju and another Taiwanese man to recover $29.8 million from a Singapore bank account under their control.

It’s like this bloke walks up to you in a pub and says, “I can get you some diplomatic recognition” as though it was a snide DVD player or a Thai bride or an eigth of blow or something, demands the cash upfront and then says he’ll meet you round the corner.

Actually, it’s a bit more complex than that. The latest is that the actual bribe, presumably to the PNG government and including the middleman’s cut, was $US 20 million. The rest was to be distributed around senior Taiwanese politicians. But Mr Ching walked off with the lot, it seems.

Maybe I could get Crumpsall to recognize Taiwan…

unanswered questions

I was going to write a post beginning with a series of rhetorical questions.

For instance: is it too late for the government to realize that they’re almost certainly out of office come 2010? Is it too late for them to grasp this as an opportunity to forget about triangulation, pandering, initiatives and relaunches - and instead give us honest, intelligent and courageous government? Can they be really unaware that this is their last chance to give us something we want to remember rather than prefer to forget?

Then I realised that the answer to all these questions was ‘yes’, so I didn’t bother writing the post.

a disease of intelligence

Just got John Gray’s Black Mass. I know that it’s an astonishing intellectual tour de force that you imperil your very soul by not reading straight after publication, but I still thought I’d wait till the paperback came out. Got it on a three for the price of two offer as well. Beat that, Faust.

I enjoyed Straw Dogs – the tone, the prose, the sentiment – without signing up to everything in it. Very Taoist book as well: not just the title or the fact that it was structured in the Chinese analect style, but the general theme. People vaguely think of Taoism as something to do with twee books about Winnie the Pooh, but it’s an extremely hard doctrine. The basic premise is that human life doesn’t matter: life itself, as a totality, is what matters, and that attempts to impose system, order and justice on the world by humans are of themselves existentially life threatening. Therefore, morality is a disease of intelligence.

That particular version of Taoism seemed to be the intellectual framework of Straw Dogs – all those references to Gaia - perhaps filtered due to the fact that Professors of comparative political thought don’t want to get into a position where they have to explain exactly what they mean by “way” or have interviewers asking when his consideration of the Tao of the Teletubbies is coming out. Or indeed, what he’s doing dicking around with that horrible Fu Manchu stuff when everybody knows that respectable public intellectuals should be dancing around a pole with Voltaire’s skull nailed to the top.

Well, Gray flits from one thing to another so it’ll be interesting to see if he develops a similar line of argument in Black Mass. More on this later.

on and off message

A top Iraqi official said Sunday there was no conclusive evidence that Shiite extremists have been directly supplied with some Iranian arms as alleged by the United States.

Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said Iraq does not want trouble with any country, "especially Iran."
Al-Dabbagh was commenting on talks this week in Tehran between an Iraqi delegation and Iranian authorities aimed at halting suspected Iranian aid to some Shiite militias.

Asked about reports that some rockets made in 2007 or 2008 and seized in raids against militias were directly supplied by Iran, al-Dabbagh replied: "There is no conclusive evidence."

Come on Ali, get with the programme:

Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh called reporters late Sunday night to clarify remarks he made at a news conference earlier in the day, when he appeared to say that there was no hard evidence that Iran was allowing weapons to come into Iraq. Dabbagh said his comments had been misinterpreted.

"There is an interference and evidence that they have interfered in Iraqi affairs," Dabbagh said in an interview arranged by a U.S. official. When asked how he would characterize the proof that Iranian weapons are flowing into Iraq, he said: "It is a concrete evidence."

Via. I think the interesting thing here is the way in which the Iraqi government has become a kind of operational liaison between the US and Iran, since the Iranians brokered the last ceasefire between the Sadrists and the Green Zone Iraqis. So I tend to think that the current bout of message re-inforcement isn’t a precursor to war, but a bout of chest beating before negotiations, either direct or through the ISCI/Dawa axis. It’s also an acknowledgment that the information product known as the surge has become obsolete.

Of course, the mistake here would be to think of war as a discrete act meant to impose a defined end state, instead of escalation from mutual opposition into open ended violence and economic blockade – which itself may be part of a negotiating strategy.

The Iranian countermove here seems to be to shift back towards support of the Sadrists

promoted

We’re up. It’s going to be pure football S&M next year: paid around £60 million to be imaginatively tortured and pummeled by just about everyone in frojnt of a live television audience.

It’s not that we don’t know how to play football. I’m sure the lads read a book about it once, though probably one with pictures.

I thought this piece from yesterday about the Championship was good, and the Stoke manager in particular puts his finger on it:

Pulis believes the Championship's competitive edge owes much to the clubs' financial parity. Apart from the £11.2m a year the three sides relegated from the Premier League receive in parachute payments for two years, income does not vary greatly from club to club. "There's a better spread in this division, with the money shared out more, so anyone's capable of beating anybody," said Pulis. "It's a great division. Perhaps the Premiership could learn from the Championship."

It could do, if the Premiership top six were hived off into a European league. After all, for most of the clubs at the top use the domestic league as practice for European competition anyway. Right now, promotion means being sucked into a gaggle of punchbags for the top four. But you still stand to make money provided you’re not relegated, so it’s a lucrative dead end. I wonder how many of my fellow stokies are actually looking forward to what they’re going to see next season.

a certain irritating ditty

Fun fact: When people in China gather to have a right good gripe about something, they do it to the tune of a certain irritating ditty. Jeffrey Wasserstrom on the twee style in Chinese protest:

The “Frere Jacques” question has deeper historical roots, as I’ve been tracking for some time the way that the song, which is very easy to put protest lyrics in any language due to the role of repetition in it, has been adapted by generations of Chinese students. It was sung with “Down with Imperialism” lyrics back in the 1920s and “Down with Deng Xiaoping” ones in 1989 (though some version then focused on the government having lied to the people), and it was also sung in-between those periods by Red Guards and 1940s activists … I’ve also heard that students put new words to the tune in 1999, so why not in 2008?

At least it’s not We Shall Overcome. Anyway, here’s the 1989 version.

Dadao guandao!
Fandui fubai!
Women yaoqiu minzhu!
Women yaoqiu ziyou!
Xiang qian jin!
Xiang qian jin!

Down with corruption!
Down with nepotism!
We seek democracy!
We seek freedom!
March forward!
March forward!

explode together

Away from the parish pump, Roland Soong translates a 9000 word essay on China, Tibet and the Olympics by Huangfu Ping, a former chief editor of the People’s Daily who enjoys a kind of unofficial role as representative of Beijing on earth. This is basically as close to a detailed explanation of the Chinese government’s current stance as anyone is going to get, or at least that of its generally reformist wing – and the fact that Huangfu Ping is the message bearer on this issue means that the reformist wing has been given general control on the issue. Here he takes a swipe at some of his more aggressive comrades:

We also need more flexible social administrative systems and ethnic autonomous-rule systems to ensure that social problems do not get politicized. Wise leaders are always good at separating political and ideological problems and reduce things to specific individual social problems to be solved one at a time. They do not label the various demands from various interest groups as "political plots" "with ulterior motives" and let these demands coalesce into politicized problems that explode together. Therefore, the relevant leaders in charge of the Tibet issue must break away from the traditional political thinking and deal with the unique social, ethnic and religious problems in Tibet in a pragmatic way.

There have been concerns expressed that the latest Tibetan uprising would tilt power towards hawks in the Chinese administration. They were already in charge in Tibet and across the Chinese far West generally, and for all their bluster after the event they are the ones who allowed the uprising to happen. As for the “pragmatic way”, that seems to consist of holding talks with the DL in an attempt to split him from militants in the Tibet independence movement, one of whom recently speculated that the Tibetan cause may be better advanced if it resorted to suicide bombings.