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August 24, 2005

Comments

dsquared

It's yer man George O again, innit?

"When you admonish a revolutionary for the bloodshed he is causing, he says you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. When you ask where's the omelette, he tells you Rome wasn't built in a day".

Alex

This is quite simply amazingly fucking stupid - a category of rhetoric I'm forced to invoke more and more often. It's entirely clear that the Shia-Kurdish alliance (Motto: I'll Scratch Your Back, So That Way You're Facing Away From Me And Hence Can't Stab Me In Mine) has given the Sunnis three days to surrender, or they'll whip the constitution through with their majority. It's a declaration of civil war timed to go off in three days.

jamie

...with a state divided along "national" (Kurd/Arab) and confesional (Shia/Sunni) faultines, proliferating militias, private armies and all sorts of interested foreign parties contending for different sides. The more I think about it, the more Iraq looks like Germany circa 1618.

chris

It'd be nice if everybody got over this "Muslim reformation" stuff soonish, because it's completely fatuous.

There are no useful analogies between present day western Asia and 16th century Europe, not least because present day western Asia exists in the context of a world where all the knock-ons from events in 16th century Europe have actually happened, and any views prevalent there that anybody doesn't particularly like have emerged in that context. (God, this is primary school stuff.)

The only useful point Gerecht makes (accidentally as far as I can see), is that a lot of people who ought to know better don't understand the difference between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Sadly true, but it belongs in a discussion about educational standards rather than international policy.

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