Blood & Treasure

not a bomb

Just a suspicious looking device. Heath Robinson for our times. via

The same people also do a wall mounted terror-ometer.

By parsing Internet news feeds for specific keywords, the amount of terror-related content reported by the media is used to predict the upcoming impact of terrorism on our lives. This quantity is displayed on an easy-to-read needle meter packaged in an attractive, wall-hung device.

anyone but

A quick delve into the background of the Home Secretary:

He remains a relatively isolated figure even within New Labour. Without Blair's blessing, he'd be in the wilderness. He is more of a functionary than a potential leader; an apparatchik. If we had a Politburo instead of a cabinet, Reid would probably be running the State Security Division.

Written in 2002. Prescient I think you'd call it.

A few months before his Ulster posting, he was the first senior cabinet member ever to be severely censured by the parliamentary commissioner for standards, Elizabeth Filkin. It was a tangled affair, but in essence he was accused of using parliamentary allowances, taxpayer's cash, to pay the salaries of staff, again including his son, in his constituency office, knowing that they were really working for Labour's electoral campaign. In the course of the inquiry, it emerged that Reid had held "discussions" with other witnesses, which in plain unparliamentary language sounded a lot like threats. Conveniently for Reid, Filkin's censure was overturned by a Labour-dominated House of Commons committee. It was a political fix that undermined her office, and diminished the notion of independent parliamentary scrutiny of MPs' conduct. Filkin was eventually forced out of the House of Commons.

Ah yes. The scandals come and go so quickly, one forgets. I wonder how many MPs he’ll be “discussing” things with if he runs as Blair’s successor.

In the international arena, Reid, during his drinking days, fell into bad company in the Balkans with the Bosnian Serb mass-murderer Radovan Karadzic, who tops The Hague's International War Crimes Tribunal list of wanted men. Reid has admitted spending three days in 1993 at a luxury Geneva lakeside hotel as a guest of Karadzic. "He used to talk to Karadzic, he admired Karadzic. He mistook the Bosnian Serb project as the inheritor of the united Communist ideal," says Brendan Simms, a Cambridge academic and author of Unfinest Hour: Britain And The Destruction of Bosnia.

via.It looks like the “anyone but Brown” crowd really do mean anyone. Reading this put me in mind of Nixon, oddly enough. Both seem to have the same propellant, rising through a high-octane mixture of resentment and cunning. Paradoxically, this secures Reid an air of competence because it follows that a man clearly capable of anything (Watergate) is also capable of doing something sensible (visiting China) from time to time. The whole tenor of Toolis’ article is that he’s a thug who gets things done. I suggest the following campaign slogan: John Reid – at least he’s our sonofabitch.

broadening the definition

Mick Smith has a question:

One of this blog’s US readers, Don Walker, asks the question, posed previously here, as to how long we can operate alongside US troops without finding ourselves guilty of war crimes simply for helping them carry out practices deemed perfectly legal by President Bush but which under UK and international law remain illegal.

“If Bush amends the definition of torture under Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, as is expected, can British troops continue to interact on the battlefield with the US?,” Don asks. “Would British troops condone torture by turning prisoners over to the US? If the US removes the right to habeas corpus , a right found in the Magna Carta for prisoners, should British troops turn prisoners over to the Americans? Persons captured by the British and turned over to the Americans could disappear into the black hole of prisons.”

And as if on cue:

… The legislation broadens the definition of enemy combatants beyond the traditional definition used in wartime, to include noncitizens living legally in this country as well as those in foreign countries, and also anyone determined to be an enemy combatant under criteria defined by the president or secretary of defense.

I’m not sure what the exact legal position on this is, but it strikes me at least as a possibility that we might be breaking the Geneva convention simply by operating joint military and intelligence actions with the United States, since these are bound to lead to the capture of whatever category of persons that the President decides are “unlawful combatants” subject to secret detention and torture. At the very least, we’ve got to the point where support for the United States and opposition to torture are alternatives you have to choose between. In practice they always were, to a certain extent, but now it’s official.

If you’re not already, you really should be reading Jim Henley on this.

it's about the water

From Power and Interest: Egypt and Ethiopia at odds over the distribution of Nile water

Ethiopia has been the major protagonist in challenging the Egyptian position. Eight-five percent of the Nile water passing through Egypt comes from the famine-ridden country of Ethiopia. Egypt has so far maintained that any unilateral action to make use of Nile River water would be regarded as a breach of international law and has even threatened to go to war should Ethiopia take further steps without first consulting Cairo.

Ethiopia, the most populous country in the Horn of Africa, needs to develop its irrigation system to end the decades-long dependency on foreign food relief; at the same time, however, Egypt's population is growing rapidly, increasing water demand. Moreover, roughly 95 percent of Egypt's territory is inhospitable desert. Cairo has even built new cities for its growing population, projects that require even more water. Both countries are striving to develop their economies and to feed their populations, while climactic changes are making droughts more widespread.

Now Egypt obviously can’t fight Ethiopia directly. There’s a big lump of Sudan in the way. But…

With an unresolved border conflict with Eritrea in the east and a Somali uprising in the Ogaden region in the south, the Egyptian government assumed that Addis Ababa would not want to provoke Cairo over the water issue. However, Ethiopia's large population and its impressive G.D.P. growth rate have made Addis Ababa recognize that economic development is increasingly tied to its ability to use its natural resources, and the Nile water system is in that sense perhaps its most important asset.

…it can support as proxies those in a position to weaken Ethiopia. Given that the Sudanese also want a bigger share of the Nile, I suspect that water conflict also affects regional diplomacy over Darfur.

no concept of liberty, etc

The anarchist's cookbook for capitalists known as the Far Eastern Economic Review has been banned in Singapore, for publishing a profile of opposition politician Chee Soon Juan. In the general interest of spreading the love, go and read the article concerned here. via.

bourbon comforter

Oh, lordy: it’s Nick again.

From de Pauw’s defence of the natural superiority of aristocratic Europe, via Nietzsche, Heidegger and the other Nazi philosophers, to Baudrillard and the postmodernists who decry America as “the desert of the real”, there has been a barely disguised fear that European peoples would abandon their hierarchies if they got the chance to follow the American way.

Yes, indeed: France feared the rise of the United States so much that it bankrupted itself in order to make it happen. If you were to find a modern-day analogy for the relationship between France and the revolutionaries of the thirteen colonies, probably the most appropriate would be the relationship between Iran and Hezbollah, except that Hezbollah appears to have more operational autonomy. The Continental Army fought with French muskets and French artillery, and were paid directly from the French treasury. The Hezbs run their own businesses and buy their military kit from all over, if the effective use of Kornets, Milans and RPG 29s in the late war is anything to go by.

The pretext for this is a review of George Walden’s God Won’t Save America, and that in turn is a pretext for promoting the faintly paranoid decentist worldview that the debacle in Iraq exposes a conspiracy of cynical Europeans and Muslimonazis to thwart the spread of freedom from its one true home to the rest of the world. Take this dig at Chris Patten:

Walden reinforces the point with a marvellous portrait of the over-promoted Chris Patten, a Widmerpool for our times. While governor of Hong Kong, Patten was loud in his demands for democracy. When he became European commissioner for external affairs, however, his passion deserted him. Supporting democracy in the Middle East would upset the dictatorships Europe did business with and compromise the EU’s strategic ambition to be a counterweight to the US in the region.

Actually, Patten didn’t just shout about democracy in Hong Kong. He introduced limited but genuine institutional reforms which enabled more Hong Kongers to vote for the Legislative Council. These measures were overturned when China took over, China of course being a dictatorship that no-one at all wants to do business with, unlike the economic powerhouse that was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

I’m not sure what you’d call this kind of thinking, but the phrase bourbon comforter springs to mind.

no go areas

A lecture from the bedwetter in chief:

Repeating his pledge that there could be no "no go areas" in Britain after his recent showdown in east London, he said he would not be "brow-beaten" by extremist "bullies".

Well there’s been a fucking huge no-go area in the centre of Manchester over the last week. And now we’re being browbeaten by an extremist bully.

I know, I know. I’ll stop banging on about it now.

hands across the ocean

The War Nerd apologises to us for Afghanistan on behalf of his fellow countrymen:

You know, we should get down on our knees and apologize to the Brits for making them trust us, making them believe we Americans actually had a clue and were leading them somewhere. You can see they've finally figured it out, that Bush and Cheney never did know what they were doing, but now the poor trusting Limeys are as deep in the shit as we are. I guess it's some kind of poetic justice, because we've done to them what they did to hundreds of other tribes: luring them into doing our dirty work for us. But it's no way to treat an ally.

red zone alert: huge baby spotted on Deansgate

Mrs Treasure’s latest report from the red zone brings news of an actually popular politician. Standing in a huddle on cigarette break outside her office with a few other pariahs, she noticed a disturbance in the Starbucks over the road. A scrum of burly men in shades burst out on to the street, and in the middle of them was none other than His Monicaness, former President Bill Clinton.

Well, there’s a thing. Everybody stared at him for a bit till he noticed them in return. Immediately, the eyes bulged out of the big moon face, the smile went up to about 1000 amps and he gave them a big, expansive wave.

The thing about Clinton is that he responds to people like a huge baby, and people instinctively respond to him in the same way. Mrs T and all the other women went aaaaah and waved their cigarettes back at him. A couple of the lads gave him a double thumbs up and shouted geezer and wah-hay and suchlike. Then he got into a limo and was driven off, leaving an impression of a big cheeky grin in mid air. Now that’s a proper president.

Then the janitor of the building where they all work came out and told them that there was a police sniper on the roof, which lowered the mood somewhat. Later, Jack Straw was spotted gladhanding away in the mini Sainsbury’s on Deansgate, but he couldn’t draw flies to a shit fight.

about who is in charge

Victor Shih gives us more on the demise of Chen Liangyu, the Shanghai Communist Party boss:

So, here I was, going about my boring life, and BAM, we find out that Shanghai Party Secretary Chen Liangyu has been dismissed. This time, there would be no face-saving "illness" or "promotion" to the CPPCC. Like Chen Xitong before him, the Hu-Wen leadership is using Chen as a way to send a credible signal to all of the local officials about who is in charge. Chen will face criminal prosecution and go to jail. At this point, the official annoucement still does not accuse him of embezzlement personally, only that he facilitated and protected those around him who misused public funds. But the announcement suggests that the CDIC is just starting to investigate the case of Chen, so they might "find" more incriminating evidence, depending on the outcome of elite political bargain.

He also reports a rumour to the effect that the former Party boss of Guangxi province has killed himself over similar corruption charges. And over at Jamestown we learn that there's also a major purge going on in the central military Commission, which controls the armed forces. I can't believe that big media aren't covering this in more detail, since it's going to be the basis for every major shift in Chinese domestic and foreign policy for the next few years.

As for me, I love the smell of purging in the morning. It smells like victory...