Author: Mick Hartley

A nocturnal vomit, crudely, over the shopkeeper, was disproportionately indebted to Ernie, the sardonic thinker.

Eh?

According to Wordcount – “an artistic experiment in the way we use language” – these are ranked 17953 to 17960 in the most frequently used English words.

Some of the sequences that have been e-mailed in are quite amusing, but it’s best to find your own:

cretin speyhawk homburg unction

sterile flute clown racket pitches Angola

Hours of fun for lazy surrealists.

(Via Blog of a Bookslut)

I’m off for 10 days – back next Monday the 29th.

d to anything like the same degree.

In some villages, men have stopped women from having contact with Unicef officials, insisting that only they were entitled to speak for the community. There have also been repeated cases of men selling food given as aid, or passing it on to male members of extended families.

d stewards of art. You need to get out of this. You need to be apostles for art.” That’s what I’m doing in this book. I chose a range of poems. Some are religious, even though I am an atheist. I made decisions about quality, John Donne, George Herbert. He’s completely unknown in America. Of course, in England he is a huge figure. I am saying in order to respond to great art people on the left have to learn about the religious impulse. That’s my New Age-y side. I really respect mysticism and the spiritual dimension, even though I don’t believe in God. And I am saying that secular humanism right now by denigrating religion is merely reactionary, is corrupt or whatever, OK.

George Herbert a “huge figure” in England? Still, she’s always worth reading.

ng of the people,’ means, or has meant, spiritual backing…

“Only in recent days the base and negative stances of Israel and of the president of America have shown that the strength of our belief has, more than anything else, caused them to become gripped by fear. This has reached the point where the president of America officially responded to the establishment of the martyrdom forces [by saying]: ‘I am shocked at the establishment of the martyrdom forces.’

“The Americans and the Israelis are today in a position of total weakness. On the other hand, we must not, for even a moment, ignore the danger of Israel. We cannot remain indifferent with regard to the Palestinian cause. The honorable Leader [Khamenei] has said: ‘Everyone must act by all means and in all ways for the cause of Palestine, and this is a duty.’ He also said: ‘Martyrdom operations are the pinnacle of a people’s strength and the pinnacle of an epic.’ Also, the Imam [Khomeini] said: ‘Israel – that suppurating tumor – must be eradicated from the pages of history.’

“In order to cope with this danger, there is a need for a culture, and an epic. We planned and carried out [the founding] of a movement of seekers of martyrdom out of reliance on Allah, for Allah, and for the sake of implementing the wishes and goals of the Islamic Revolution. So far, this step has brought us great blessing. We will maintain contacts and cooperate with anyone who helps us create and strengthen this culture, and we will use all the potential of the Islamic world to implement this spirit.

Proclamations from Iran increasingly resemble the shrill output of the North Korean KCNA: just substitute Kim Jong-Il for Khamenei, Kim Il-Sung for Khomeini, juche philosophy for Islam, Japan for Israel…..the US as Great Satan is, of course, a common factor. They’re both equally….what’s the word?….well, insane just about covers it. But even the Dear Leader hasn’t got to the stage of expecting his subjects to blow themselves up on his behalf. Or of resorting to quite the level of invective employed by Iran against Israel “that suppurating tumor” which “must be eradicated from the pages of history“.

Mark Steyn on Kofi, and the Oil-for-Food scandal:

Despite the current investigations into his brother, his son, his son’s best friend, his former chief of staff, his procurement officer and the executive director of the UN’s biggest ever programme, the Secretary-General insists he remains committed to staying on and tackling the important work of “reforming” the UN.

Unfortunately, his Executive Co-Ordinator for United Nations Reform has also had to resign. Officially, Maurice Strong, Under-Secretary-General, godfather of the Kyoto treaty and chief UN negotiator on North Korea, resigned because he’d put his step-daughter on the payroll – she’s also quit – and because of his ties to Tongsun Park, a Korean businessman charged by the US Attorney’s office with taking millions of dollars from Saddam to act as an unregistered foreign agent for Iraq. Mr Park allegedly invested a million of those Saddamite greenbacks in a business of Under-Secretary-General Strong’s son – a now bankrupt Canadian petroleum company.

By happy coincidence, Under-Secretary-General Strong and Kojo Annan were both appointed, on the same day, to the board of a company called Air Harbour Technologies, a business registered in the Isle of Man and whose directors also included Michael Wilson, the guy under investigation for the UN office renovation contract in Geneva. It’s a small world, at least at the UN. AHT was wholly owned by the son of Sheikh Yamani, the former Saudi oil minister. Yamani Jnr was putting together a $60 million oil deal with Saddam, and seemed to think the presence of UN officials and offspring on his board might help him.

But not to worry. To demonstrate his ongoing commitment to “reform”, Kofi Annan has now put his Deputy- Secretary-General, Louise Frechette, another Canadian, in charge of the “reform agenda”. In a February report by Mr Volcker’s committee, Mme Frechette is said to have helped Mr Sevan block efforts to bring details of the Oil-for-Food boondoggle before the Security Council.

How do we know all the above? We only know because the US invaded Iraq and the Baathists skedaddled out of town leaving copious amounts of paperwork relating to the Baghdad end of Oil-for-Fraud, since when Claudia Rosett and a few other dogged journalists have been systematically unstitching the intricate web of family and business relationships around the UN’s operations. […]

[T]his is how the transnational jet set works, and those sensitive flowers who don’t have the stomach to look under the rock could at least do us the favour of ceasing to bleat about, in Clare Short’s marvellously loopy phrase, the UN’s “moral authority”. In The Times the other day, Matthew Parris demanded to know whether I could now admit the Iraq war had been a mistake. No. I’m still in favour of it 100 per cent – and these rare shafts of light on the sewers of transnationalism are merely one more benefit.

Amir Taheri in the Times:

The importance of what is happening in Iraq goes beyond its borders. If, as it now seems likely, Iraq does become a pluralist state committed to building a democracy, it would be hard for the despotic regimes in the region to defend a status quo that has kept much of the Middle East out of the post-Cold War trend towards reform and liberalisation.

The Iraqi constitutional debate has, thanks to the modern media, over-spilt into the whole of the Middle East and familiarised millions of people with terms and concepts regarded as taboo until the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. People are now talking about human rights, democracy, multiparty politics, federalism, gender equality, the place of faith in society, consensus, governmental accountability and, of course, parliaments and elections. New words have been invented to express concepts excluded from the Arab political lexicon by the despots. […]

The terrorist campaign has obscured the immense successes that the Iraqis have achieved. The most important of these is the destruction of the physical edifice of despotism and the slow but steady crumbling of its intellectual and moral infrastructure.

Iraq is the ideal choice as a model of democratisation in the Arab world. It faces virtually all the problems that Arab states face, including the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, the status of women and the role of the clergy. Success in Iraq could inflict a strategic defeat on all despotic ideo- logies in the region.

Soon after the liberation of Iraq in 2003, Yussuf al-Ayyeri, a chief theoretician of al-Qaeda, published a book entitled The Future of Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula after the Fall of Baghdad. In it, he designated Iraq as “the greatest battlefield of Islam against the infidel and its native allies”. Al-Ayyeri wrote: “It is not the American war machine that should be of the utmost concern to Muslims. What threatens the future of Islam, its very survival, is American democracy. To allow Iraq to build would represent Islam’s biggest defeat since the loss of Andalusia.”

This is why all reactionary forces, from pan-Arabists to Islamists, and their sympathisers in the West, have united to prevent Iraq from succeeding. Iraq has become the litmus test of the success of the democratic experience in the region. There is no guarantee that it will succeed. But it is vital for everyone concerned that it does.

No doubt it’s salutary to imagine just how bad things might get. Niall Ferguson thinks we’re fooling ourselves if we believe Iran’s theocratic revolution is on its last legs:

What we are witnessing is the old revolutionary story: The generation forged by revolutionary war turns out to be more belligerent than the generation that led the revolution itself. Significantly, Ahmadinejad’s main election backers were the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basiji, the paramilitary popular militias formed during the Iran-Iraq war. Ahmadinejad is himself a war veteran, one of hundreds of thousands of Iranians who came of age under fire.

So where do we go from here? Plan A — the European carrot — has failed. Plan B — the flaccid U.N. stick — will also fail. Is there then a Plan C — American (or Israeli) air strikes?

The answer is yes, but it is a plan fraught with peril.

According to Michael J. Mazarr of the U.S. National War College, Iran could retaliate with “an elaborate, ferocious, global provocation designed to draw the United States into a protracted conflict.” That translates into more terrorism in our cities and an escalation of the war in Iraq.

Now, ask yourself, what would be the likely effect of such a confrontation on Iranian politics?

To repeat: The Iranian revolution is still at an early stage. It has not yet produced its Bonaparte, its Stalin, its Mao. Or has it? A full-scale war with the “Great Satan” may be all Ahmadinejad needs to don that bloody mantle.

William Pfaff in the IHT adds his voice to the chorus of those who believe the US position on nuclear non-proliferation to be unsustainable.

America’s determination to stop nuclear proliferation produces perverse results. At a period of mounting instability in the Middle East and U.S. engagement in two wars in Islamic countries, it increases the allure of nuclear weapons to governments that do not have them, and reinforces their perceived value as political assets and as deterrents against foreign attack.
Nuclear proliferation does not itself promote aggression. Take the alarmist scenarios routinely cited by American and Israeli officials. There is no imaginable way by which nuclear aggression by Iran against Israel could have other than catastrophic results for the attacker. The same is true for any attack by North Korea on an American base in East Asia, or by India on Pakistan, or Pakistan on India.
The existing nuclear states, on the other hand, could attack a non-nuclear nation and escape military retaliation, although not huge political and moral opprobrium. Since everyone sees this, it adds to the perceived injustice of the American position defending the nuclear monopoly of these states.
John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, an eminent member of the “realist” school of policy analysis, notes that everyone understands that the implicit aim of U.S. nonproliferation policy is to prevent limits being placed on America’s freedom of action in dealing with other countries. He writes, “The country that acquires nuclear weapons becomes unattackable. It is precisely for that reason that it wants them.”

Michael Portillo was arguing a similar line yesterday in the Sunday Times:

Supposing Iran is intent on getting nuclear weapons; how frightening is that, given that it would not be the first scary state to do so? The chances are that it would never use them.

I can see the force of these arguments if you assume that Iran would only ever use nuclear weapons stamped with a “Made in Iran” sign, and fired from somewhere inside Iranian territory – though even that makes me a little nervous, given the president’s recent musings on the glory of martyrdom. But Iran has links to terrorist groups like Hezbollah. Does it really need spelling out?

Good to see Saudi blogger The Religious Policeman back – now UK-based, and posting on the war on terrorism, women’s rights….and cricket.