Oh, just kill me now

The Camel Method, it seems, is a method of converting Muslims to Christianity by using the Qur'an.

“Camel” is not (readers might be gladdened to learn) a reference to a beast of burden in Arab lands. Rather, it is Mr. Greeson’s acronym — Chosen Angels Miracles Eternal Life — to help missionaries remember aspects of Isa’s story.

Sure it is. And the rifle sights supplied to the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan with Christian scriptures engraved on them are just a celebration of the manufacturing company's faith.

"We believe that America is great when its people are good," says the [manufacturer's] Web site. "This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals." [...]

Weinstein, an attorney and former Air Force officer, said many members of his group [the Military Religious Freedom Foundation] who currently serve in the military have complained about the markings on the sights. He also claims they've told him that commanders have referred to weapons with the sights as "spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ."

Well, hey, we'll get 'em from the inside and out. Use the Gospels to shoot 'em down on the battlefield and to convert them in the streets until soon there won't be any pesky Muslims to deal with anymore. At least, not any upper-case ones:

“At the extreme,” Dr. Reynolds said, “these Christian missionaries will grow beards like Muslims, give up pork, even say that they are ‘muslims’ — lower-case ‘m’ — in the Arab-adjective sense of ‘submissive to God.’ ”

So what if there are a million ways of saying you're a believer in god that wouldn't elicit this kind of confusion? So maybe you have to engage in a little shell game to get your foot in the door. It's for their own good. Come to Jesus, hajji.

Don't do it, Kirkuk!

Firstly, I want to note the launch of ForeignPolicy.com's Middle East Channel, which is already shaping up to be fantastic (how could it not be, being edited by the likes of Marc Lynch and Daniel Levy?).

From that very channel comes this piece, Kurds No Closer to Taking Kirkuk After Iraqi Elections.

The piece is of course interesting on a topical level, as the fate of Kirkuk (whether it, and its oil, should become part of Iraqi Kurdistan or not) has been a major sticking point in Iraqi politics. However, being all caught up in my thesis as I currently am, I found this bit particularly interesting:

In the public eye, every election in Kirkuk turns into a census and quasi-referendum rolled into one. This is because the ethnic communities here assume that Arabs, Kurds and Turkomans vote for their own candidates; that this shows the respective communities' sizes; that the vast majority of Kurds want Kirkuk to be attached to the Kurdistan region; and that these factors combined suggest the probable outcome of a future referendum on Kirkuk's status.

[...]

Moreover, matters are complicated by intra-Kurdish divisions. Some of the heaviest campaigning in Kirkuk was not between Arabs and Kurds but intra-Kurdish: between the Kurdistani Coalition which combines the two Kurdish principal parties - the Kurdistan Democratic Party and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan - and the upstart Goran, or Change, movement. Goran's strong showing in the Kurdistan regional elections last July was a dire warning to the ruling parties, especially the PUK, the party from which Goran's frustrated would-be reformers sprang last year. Today, when no open campaigning was allowed, the PUK and KDP went all-out in their bid to outpace their rival. Cars bearing KDP and PUK flags and blaring their horns crisscrossed Kurdish neighborhoods as if the campaign was still in full swing. Men beat drums; in some areas, women - decked out in their most colourful finery - danced to the beat.

Some Goran candidates may not be following the main parties', and possibly their own leadership's, line on Kirkuk. For five futile years, the KDP and PUK have insisted that the only way to resolve Kirkuk's status is by a referendum based on an ethnic vote. They have loaded the outcome through their control of local government, which allowed them to change the governorate's demography in their favor. That outcome, therefore, is unlikely to be accepted by the losers, who have threatened violence if they are inducted into the Kurdistan region against their will.

Some Goran officials in Kirkuk, by contrast, seem to be saying something new - that the only sensible way to proceed is to restore trust between the ethnic communities and let Kirkukis decide for themselves, over time, what the best solution is for Kirkuk, by referendum or otherwise. This is music to the ears of Arabs and Turkomans, who have made no secret of their hope that Goran will gain a couple of seats at the PUK's expense, even if they themselves wouldn't vote for Goran, lest they increase the overall Kurdish vote.

It sounds like the PUK and KDP have been trying to take the province in a Lebanese direction--that is to say, legislating and statebuilding based on demographics. What is at stake in this case is different from what was at stake in Lebanon when the various agreements on which Lebanon's confessional system is based were made, but the consequences might not be dissimilar--widespread violence and general anarchy. I'm not sure what "letting Kirkukis decide for themselves, over time, what the best solution is for Kirkuk, by referendum or otherwise" would entail other than paralysis and punting--some kind of decision needs to be made one way or another--nor do I know how Goran would propose to go about "restoring trust between the ethnic communities", but all of that said, I can't see the PUK's and KDP's approach ending anywhere very good.

Withdrawal and the SOFA

Eric Martin makes some important points about the current U.S. debate over the timeline for withdrawing forces from Iraq: everybody who's saying we can't pull out in 16 months, or two years, is ignoring the SOFA--Status of Forces Agreement--that the Bush administration negotiated with the al-Maliki government, which just had quite a strong showing in the recent elections.

Rather than delaying the commencement of withdrawal under the theory that we can, or should, ignore the SOFA, the US should put a downpayment on withdrawal by beginning the pullout now as suggested by Marc Lynch for the following reasons: (1) it would reassure the Iraqi people of our intention to leave Iraq, which would make the SOFA more palatable; (2) it would strengthen Maliki's hand, and the hand of those advocating nationalism/centralism without, in the alternative, empowering the extremism of some of the Sadrist elements; and (3) even if such overtures do not convince the Iraqi people to endorse the SOFA, withdrawal over 12 months will be easier to accomplish if we've already begun to pull out some of our forces.

Martin is fast becoming one of my favorites for his detailed and insightful analyses of Iraqi politics.

Jaw-dropper

Here's the BBC with today's reason to curl up and cry (emphasis added):

In an apparent video confession, the middle-aged woman [Samira Jasseem, "Mother of Believers"] described how she identified potential bombers, helped supply them with explosives and led them to their targets.

She also explained, in a separate interview with the Associated Press, how insurgents used rape as a tool, with the "shamed" women persuaded to redeem themselves through suicide attacks.

Her apparent confession could help throw light on the recent increase in attacks in Iraq involving female bombers.

[...]

Insurgents use female bombers because they can hide explosives under their robes and are less likely to be searched by male guards at security checkpoints.

That last bit is fairly common knowledge, but I think it's important to include anyway in terms of understanding how central gender oppression is to this whole tactic.

I have a lot to say about this, but I can't right now. I'm too overwhelmed just now. I'm angry at the men who did these things, but even more so I can't think of anything but how profoundly sad I am for the women who have been used in this way. I can't find a word to describe it other than grief.

As for Samira Jasseem...I will have to think about her.

Heavens to Murgatroyd, I've found it

..."it" being perhaps the only case in which it is possible and appropriate to describe the Bush administration as "fascist" without sounding like a fourteen-year-old who's trying to come off as knowledgeable and self-righteous when he or she is really just whining. I am not the only person to have thought of this, it turns out--this looks like very interesting reading--but I'm pleased that it occurred to me independently as a result of my fine education in the history of political liberalism.


I was reading The Economist's thoughts on the exit of President George W. Bush, and was struck by these bits:

Yet Mr Bush’s presidency was also poisoned by his own ambition. Mr Bruni’s “timeless fraternity boy” wanted to be a great president. He not only wanted to win the second term that Bill Clinton had denied to his father—though that mattered to him enormously. He also wanted to usher in a period of prolonged Republican hegemony, much as William McKinley had done for his party in the late 19th century. After the September 11th attacks he not only itched to destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He also wanted to tackle the root causes of terrorism in the Middle East. Mr Bush frequently spoke about how much he hated anything that was “small ball”. His close advisers repeatedly described him as a “transformative president”.

...Other facets of Mr Bush’s personality mixed with his vaulting ambition to undermine his presidency. Mr Bush is what the British call an inverted snob. A scion of one of America’s most powerful families, he is a devotee of sunbelt populism; a product of Yale and Harvard Business School, he is a scourge of eggheads. Mr Bush is a convert to an evangelical Christianity that emphasises emotion--particularly the intensely emotional experience of being born again—over ratiocination. He also styled himself, much like Reagan, as a decider rather than a details man; many people who met him were astonished by what they described as his “lack of inquisitiveness” and his general “passivity”.

...Ron Suskind, a journalist, has argued that Mr Bush created a “faith-based presidency” in which decisions, precisely because they were based on faith, could not be revised subsequently.

I think we can all recognize this characterization. We've seen it before. This in particular--"emphasises emotion...over ratiocination" and the notion of a "faith-based presidency"--combined with the Economist's view of GWB as desperate to prove himself in a big way, put me in mind of some of Carl Schmitt's thoughts from The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. I direct your attention to Chapter 4, "Irrationalist Theories of the Direct Use of Force". (Emphasis added.)

Bakunin gave this struggle...the character of a struggle against intellectualism and against traditional forms of education altogether. ...Even science does not have the right to rule. It is not life, it creates nothing, it constructs and receives, but it understands only the general and the abstract and sacrifices the individual fullness of life on the altar of its abstraction. Art is more important for the life of humankind than science.

and,

The ability to act and the capacity for heroism, all world-historical activities reside, according to Sorel, in the power of myth. ...Only in myth can the criterion be found for deciding whether one nation or a social group has a historical mission and has reached its historical moment. Out of the depths of a genuine life instinct, not out of reason or pragmatism, springs the great enthusiasm, the great moral decision and the great myth. In direct intuition the enthusiastic mass creates a mythical image that pushes its energy forward and gives it...the courage to use force.

[...]

From the perspective of this philosophy, the...ideal of peaceful agreement, an ongoing and prosperous business that has advantages for everyone, becomes the monstrosity of cowardly intellectualism. Discussing, bargaining, parliamentary proceedings, appear a betrayal of myth and the enormous enthusiasm on which everything depends. Against the mercantilist image of balance there appears another vision, the warlike image of a bloody, definitive, destructive, decisive battle.

I could go on--the book is full of things I think are applicable to the Bush Administration. I have several pages that I dogeared because I ran across them in looking for this part and I felt they were relevant in a way I hadn't yet thought of, but I'll spare the length and let it lie.

Anyway, it must be noted that I have excised all the analysis of Marxist thought because while it is important and interesting, I'm interested in Schmitt's conclusions about politics as a whole rather than in particularly how Marxism contributed to those conclusions, since we are not dealing with a Marxist president (although there are some respects in which one could argue that his administration thinks in terms of dialectics and heightening the contradictions).

I do think it's interesting, as in it somewhat upsets the ideal case, how the heroic myth became located in Bush himself and, to an extent, the Iraqi people (in Bush's thinking, that is) rather than in the people Bush ostensibly actually rules. It's as though the American polity were consuming popular will that's been manufactured overseas. Think about all the rhetoric about the "Iraqi people" and their freedom, or the freedom they need to have. The American occupation has been a sort of attempt at educational dictatorship--we will take them by the hand and teach them not only to vote but to vote for people who will do things we like, because then they will have learned to be free; we know better than they what they want and need--in a classical Marxist sense. Ironic, eh?

Schmitt, to be completely clear, was a big fan of dictatorship as a political ideal and is widely considered to have contributed intellectually to Nazism, whether intentionally or not. He is also a big hit among neocons--the very people who brought you George W. Bush and, more recently and more directly, Sarah Palin.

Theory of the unitary executive, anyone?

Buh?

Goddamn it, you idiots.

Iraq's recent stability has been in large part due to the support of Sunni militias, previously insurgent, who decided to support the government and the effort for peace. Our precious surge would most likely have amounted to nothing without them. Now that the Shi'ite dominated government is feeling confident that their military is capable, and now that the Sunnis are starting to look for some political rewards, the state is arresting members of the Sunni "Awakening" movement.

This is seriously beyond stupid. Doing this just as it looks like American forces are starting to pull back aggravates instability. What's more, many of these guys were formerly allied with Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia--the last thing anyone should want is driving them back to AQM. Breaking promises to the Sunnis is not only in bad faith, it's inflammatory. It's like they're trying to compromise their security and start up civil war again.

"Some people from the government encouraged us to fight against Al Qaeda, but it seems that now that Al Qaeda is finished they don’t want us anymore," said Abu Marouf, who, according to American officials, was a powerful guerrilla leader in the 1920s Revolutionary Brigade west of Baghdad. "So how can you say I am not betrayed?"

Is it possible that they're this stupid, or is there something else going on here?

"Iraq and the U.S. have reached preliminary agreement to withdraw American forces from Iraqi cities by next June, six years into the increasingly unpopular war, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said Thursday after meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice."

That's not breaking or anything, but I figured it's the kind of thing people would want to know if they missed it.

Gaydar may actually exist, which makes me feel like less of a fraud.

Fascinating article on how stained glass windows also purify air. Medieval goldsmiths were also into nanotech, apparently. [H/t Shakesville]


In closing, I finally read Watchmen and it was incredible.

Okay, so.

A while ago, Nouri al-Maliki, the president of Iraq, said that he likes Obama's plan for a 16-month withdrawal of US troops. By name. He said "Obama."

So this leaves John McCain pretty well fucked. He's been arguing for a continued troop presence in Iraq, and the president of that nation just came out and said he was wrong. The campaign has argued that al-Maliki doesn't actually believe this, that he's just playing domestic politics, but that's a dumb-ass argument--all it says is that the Iraqi people, more than one man, want us out. Oh, well, then, guess we should settle on in.

On top of it all, Obama is expected to have a million people at his rally in Germany, making it the largest political rally in German history. Just think about that for a minute.

This is an ouchy weekend for McCain.

Hilarious

Okay, so I was reading this, nodding along thinking "Yup, typical. Association of Physicists posts one article by a few members arguing against client change + sloppy editing + same day as Gore speech = Right wingers start jizzing all over the place about how the rats are abandoning ship and the planet is doing just peachy."
And then I got to the end:

So, what happened here? Climate Progress explains the story very well, but it appears that one sloppy editor relied on one frequently-debunked British Lord — and conservatives reflexively pounced on a development that was far from what it appeared to be.

Kevin summarized this nicely: “Lord Monckton, who triggered the original article in DailyTech, may be a lord, but he’s also a longtime global warming skeptic. There’s nothing new here, and, as you might expect, scientists continue to believe that climate change is largely driven by human activity. Nice try, though.”

LORD MONCKTON?! BRILLIANT! THANK YOU, UNIVERSE.


Also, have you ever heard of KBR? It's a subsidiary of Halliburton, and it's been doing the bulk of the contracting work over in Iraq.

Well, on top of the numerous suspicious incidents, rapes and killings of female employees which go unprosecuted, and the mounting evidence that they've been effectively stealing money from the government for years now, it turns out that they're shitty electricians.

The NYT has a piece about the electrical conditions in troop facilities in Iraq, and it's apalling. The conditions are unacceptable--getting electric shocks in the shower?!--people have DIED, more have been injured (this is troops, you understand), and on top of it KBR and the Pentagon seem to have been quite happy to do absolutely nothing about it even when they knew damn well what was up. The only reason this is coming out now at all is the family of a soldier who died in the shower pushed for answers.

Electrical issues are the number one non-combat risk to troops.

Further in the "horrific" department, part of how this happened seems to be that because the government contracted out so much work so fast to KBR, oversight officials couldn't keep up, and KBR couldn't do all that work fast enough and so subcontracted to other entities that often employed poorly educated Iraqis who made only a few dollars a day.

In other words, if the government hadn't been in such a tearing hurry to pour money into Halliburton, our troops would be better equipped, better housed, and in better health. And some of them might be alive today.

These are the ones who berate us for not supporting the troops.

HOL LEE KER RAPP

Holy crap.

Blackwater--Blackwater, the main mercenary military contracting firm employed by the U.S. Military in Iraq? That Blackwater?--asked the court handling a suit against them to do so using Shari'a law.

You have got to be motherfucking well kidding me. Three Blackwater employees died in a plane crash in Afghanistan. Their widows sued.

Last year, Blackwater argued that since they were working as agents of the government and soldiers can't sue the government (they can't? Who knew?), the suit should be dismissed. That argument was disallowed by a court.

So now, because it took place in Afghanistan and because Shari'a law doesn't hold companies responsible for the actions of employees, that's their angle.

Besides the obvious sliminess of trying to wiggle out of damages, the sheer vortex of irony, shamelessness, deadpan balls-to-the-wall opportunism, and general BULLSHIT is just too much to handle. It boggles the mind.

GAH. It's doubly frustrating because under other circumstances questions of the overlaps or encounters between different forms of law, together with church/state issues, would be very interesting. But this really should not go forward. It's disgusting.