Author: Mick Hartley

ood, apparently emboldened by his party’s victory in last month’s senate elections when it won all but seven of the 66 seats. The 3,000 delegates attending the ZANU-PF conference are being wined and dined in style in Esigodini, an impoverished corner of Zimbabwe.

Amir Taheri questions the accepted wisdom that the US has failed in Afghanistan and Iraq:

The US intervened in both Afghanistan and Iraq with the aim of changing the regimes in Kabul and Baghdad, which was achieved with remarkable speed. The machinery of terror and war built and maintained by the Taliban and the Ba’ath has been shattered. And whatever happens in Afghanistan and Iraq one thing is certain: Mullah Muhammad Omar and Saddam Hussein will not return to power.

In both Afghanistan and Iraq the remnants of the terrorist regimes, now joined by their ideological kindred from elsewhere, are still waging a vicious war, mostly against civilians. But neither country is a safe haven for terrorists plotting attacks against other nations, including the US.

To be sure, critics might say that the aim of the intervention was to transform Afghanistan and Iraq into modern democracies. While this is true any judgment as to the success or failure of the democratisation project must take into account the element of time. No, Afghanistan and Iraq are not Swiss-like democracies at this precise moment in time. Both may suffer years, if not decades, of violence and terror. The terrorists in Egypt fought for a quarter of a century. Turkey took almost 20 years to defeat its terrorists. In Algeria the terrorists fought for 12 years before they were crushed. Colombia has been fighting terrorists for 40 years and the Philippines for 30. Right now 22 nations across the globe suffer from the plague of terrorism as an almost daily fact of life.

The real question is not whether or not Afghanistan and Iraq have already become model democracies. The real question is whether or not they would have had any chance of even forming such a dream under Mullah Omar and Saddam. Anyone familiar with Afghanistan and Iraq would know the answers.

From the Times, an Iraqi journalist, Ali Hamdani, who’s employed as a translator at Saddam’s trial:

I was told I would be only 30ft from Saddam Hussein, the closest I have ever been to the dictator who owned my life for three decades. But in the event, all I can see across the courtroom is a skinny old man sitting in a cage.

Next to me two other Iraqi translators are sweating and looking very nervous. It’s five minutes before the trial begins, and the three of us are about to start a simultaneous translation on day three of Saddam Hussein’s trial, but not one of us has yet stepped up to the microphone.

Looking into their eyes I realise my colleagues aren’t going to do it, so I go and sit at the microphone, thinking that they may have been among Saddam’s victims, and that’s why they are so nervous.

But who wasn’t one of his victims? Isn’t this the man who caused all that suffering to me and my people? Isn’t it the man who banned me three years ago from travelling to see my father in his last days, when he was dying abroad? Wasn’t he the man behind the Iraq-Iran War, during which my uncle was killed?

Wasn’t he the source of all the fear we lived in for decades, forcing many of my relatives, including my brother, to leave the country?

So why am I not feeling like my colleagues?

After five minutes I realised that this old man sitting in the defendants’ cage in front of me was not the person I used to hate. He is another person. The man I see looks completely different from that man who used to appear on TV in his army uniform, holding a pistol and shooting in the air as if he were aiming at creatures on another planet because he had got bored of killing Iraqis.

This man in the courtroom has to wait for his turn to talk, otherwise his mike will be turned off. Saddam never had to wait for his turn because it was his turn for decades, and there was no time for anyone else to say anything.

It may look to outsiders as if he has taken control, shouting at the judge. But up close you can see desperation in his eyes.

At one stage the judge called for witnesses. I couldn’t understand which witnesses they were talking about. Any of us could be a key witness against Saddam.

From Pajamas Media:

China has become the top supplier of fighter-bombers to Sudan’s Muslim regime, whose attacks on Christian rebels in the south have made Khartoum notorious.

Sudan’s air force recently bought $100 million worth of Shenyang fighter planes, including a dozen supersonic F-7 jets, and also purchased 34 other fighter-bombers from Beijing, Middle East Newsline reported Thursday.

In exchange, Chinese oil companies have become big stakeholders in Sudan’s oil and natural gas fields.
The state-owned China National Petroleum Corp., for example, owns 40 percent of Sudan’s largest oil field.

“China rarely attaches any political strings to its assistance to Africa,” said a report from the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation. “This has opened up space for China to deal quite profitably with some of the more heinous regimes on the continent. It is no coincidence, for example, that Sudan and Zimbabwe now play host to a very large Chinese economic presence.”

China, of course, is a permanent member of the UN Security Council, with power of veto, should an awkward resolution raise its head.

On the Culture Show tonight, there was an interview with director Sam Mendes about his latest film Jarhead, based on the novel by Anthony Swofford, which deals with the experiences of a GI in the first Gulf War. Asked – inevitably – if the film was intended to be a comment on the current situation in Iraq, he said, no, he regarded it as an apolitical film, but, well, much of the film is about the idea that the fighting somehow never arrives; the soldiers are psyched up for battle, and the catharsis never comes, so to that extent it does kind of resonate with the current war, which is a war against a phantom enemy. There were no WMDs….

No surprise at all, of course. Such a view is so commonplace in these circles that it’d be extraordinary to hear anything different, and the interviewer, Andrew Graham-Dixon, merely nodded – well, of course, absolutely.

A phantom enemy. Saddam – one of the most horrific tyrants in modern memory, started two wars on neighbouring countries, genocidal attacks on the Kurds, unspeakable tortures against his terrorised population, defied UN Security Council resolutions, was clearly intent at the earliest opportunity to acquire WMDs, but – sigh – no, no actual ready-to-use WMDs were found by an invading force that Saddam could be pretty sure was coming months in advance. Just a phantom enemy, a scare cooked up by the neo-cons….

Nothing against Sam Mendes, really….excellent director, I liked American Beauty, and from the reviews of Jarhead I’m sure he’s right in saying that it’s no anti-war polemic. Married Kate Winslet. Talented guy. It’s what you’d expect someone like him to say – which is the depressing part. How did it get to the point where it’s so unexceptional when a leading cultural figure comes out with this stuff that no one would even think of suggesting there might be an alternative view?

s people. Therefore, we purged the key leaders above the rank of deacons in Protestant or Catholic churches and the wicked among the rest were put on trial. The general religious people were…put into prison camps [and given a chance to reform]…. We learned later that those of religion can do away with their old habits only after they have been killed.

d your concerns and would like to emphasize that I regret any statement or act that could express a lack of respect for the religion of others”. Two UN experts, on religous freedom and on racism and xenophobia, are said to be working on the case.

Is it really the job of the UN to involve itself in cases where religious sensibilities are offended? Should they not rather be advising the Muslim world to join the rest of us in the 21st century?

As referenced here before, Francis Heaney’s “Holy Tango Anthology of Literature” (if poets and playwrights wrote works whose titles were anagrams of their names) is now published on line under a Creative Commons license. Brilliant parodies include Harold Pinter’s “Horrid Planet”, Tom Stoppard’s “Moptop Darts”, and “A Wee Bladder” by Edward Albee, plus many, many more. Here’s “Kin Rip Phalli” by Philip Larkin:

They trim your dick, your mum and dad.
They may not need to, but they do.
They take the foreskin that you had
And leave you smoother than bamboo.

But Dad was severed in his turn
By docs in old-style masks and gowns,
Who wore a look of unconcern
While snipping little penile crowns.

Man hands on suffering to man.
It stains indelibly as ink.
They cut you early as they can,
Then wonder why you need a shrink.

(via)

The US ambassador to South Korea isn’t mincing his words:

A senior US diplomat has branded North Korea a “criminal regime” involved in arms sales, drug trafficking and currency forgery.

Alexander Vershbow, the new US ambassador to South Korea, was explaining why the US had imposed economic sanctions against the North.

The BBC isn’t happy:

Pyongyang is notoriously sensitive to such labels. US-North Korean relations were seriously damaged by President Bush’s branding of the North as part of an “axis of evil” in 2002.

Some analysts suspect hardliners have seized the initiative once again inside the Bush administration and that could prove a significant obstacle to further progress in the nuclear talks.

Curse those hardliners! Just when the talks were going so well.

A strange line on the evolution controversy, from a self-confessed agnostic:

In principle, this appears to be a harmless intellectual debate, where science and theology weave and blur. But, in fact, the controversy affects the very roots of Western civilization and, in the long run, can have tremendous consequences on a political level.

The whole philosophical and juridical structure that supports liberal democracy hinges on the existence of a superior being from whom emanate the ”natural rights” that protect individuals from the actions of the state or from the will of other people. If the premise of God’s existence disappears, the theory of the existence of natural rights is automatically eliminated and the door is flung open to all kinds of abuses.

I believe it was Immanuel Kant who first formulated the decisive refutation of this position, with his famous quip, nein, das ist scheisse.