The man who told us Al Qaeda would rejoice if Obama was ever successfully nominated…

Who? Yes, as most Aussies remember too well, that was John GWB Howard, our Prime Minister for eleven long years. But this week who can resist this?

Yes, it starts tonight and just about everyone is recommending it, even if it has been constrained by the condition that no commentators are allowed. Their own mouths, and reflection on what happened, will condemn much I suspect. Of course it wasn’t all bad after all… But so much was so truly dreadful, and some of the utterly shameful bits will no doubt surface, perhaps even, down the track, the famous comment linked above:

…LAURIE OAKES: On that subject, Senator Barack Obama’s announced overnight he’s running for the Democrat Presidential nomination, and he says if he gets it he has a plan to bring troops home by March, 2008 and his direct quote is “Letting the Iraqis know we’ll not be there forever is our last, best hope to pressure the Sunies and Shiah to come to the table and find peace”. So, basically he’s agreeing with the Labor Party.

JOHN HOWARD: Yes, I think he’s wrong, I mean, he’s a long way from being President of the United States. I think he’s wrong. I think that would just encourage those who wanted completely to destabilise and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for Obama victory. If I was running Al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats.

LAURIE OAKES: If he wins, and you’re still there, bad news for the alliance.

Which rather makes a mockery of the now Opposition’s righteousness over the “What’s the G20?” story and the endless analysis of the Bush handshake. But I suppose that’s politics. I have never believed that George Bush said that, by the way, but I can believe Kevin Rudd may have cracked an ill-timed funny. That, I think, may be what happened, though of course I don’t know.

Meanwhile as you watch The Howard Years spare a thought for the people I had much time for, the embattled moderates in the Liberal Party who had very lean times under JWH. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Phillip Coorey explores this today.

The travails of being a moderate Liberal during the Howard years are being well demonstrated in a series of new revelations, especially on that most controversial of topics, border protection.

John Howard was used to moderates Petro Georgiou, Judy Moylan and Bruce Baird agitating for change from the time border protection became an issue in the months before the election in 2001.

In The Howard Years, the four-part ABC TV series that begins tonight, both Georgiou and Baird bristle when recounting Howard’s now memorable line at the 2001 campaign launch about deciding who comes to this country and the circumstance in which they come.

Baird called it "smart politically" but "on a human basis, I was concerned".

Georgiou said: "When I first saw the slogan I just went ‘gulp’."…

An SBS documentary which JWH will not like takes the issue further on Wednesday night.

You may also read more about it here.

Everyone should watch this documentary. It explains how harshly people seeking asylum have been treated and how Australian Governments have too often returned, what they regard as failed asylum seekers, to situations of very real danger. When will we again find our humanity?

Malcolm Fraser, former Australian Prime Minister

Sometimes I feel ashamed to be an Australian. Watching A Well Founded Fear is surely one of those times. How could we have allowed this to happen? We all bear an immense personal responsibility, moral and legal, but no one so much as those who lead our nation in these inhuman policies. This documentary should lead us to two commitments. First, in spite of the policy changes under the Rudd government, we have not yet begun to make up for the profound harm we have caused. We must do that. Second, we must never allow this to happen again. Never, never, never.

Chris Sidoti, Former Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commissioner

I will watch both, if the communal TV antenna gives me access to ABC as we still have a problem with that, but I am sure of access to SBS! 🙂

Update

ABC has been restored here in Surry Hills… 🙂

 

Foreign Policy: Think Again: Al Qaeda

This is well worth visiting.

 

Al-Qaeda a virtual network

Zawahiri is not saying much that is new. The only real difference with what has gone before is the explicit focus on Britain. This does not indicate any direct link with the London bombs.

Whenever there has been an attack there has been a knee-jerk search for overseas links or for some kind of overall mastermind. No investigations into the London bombs have revealed any such connections.

Instead, we need to face up to the simple truth that bin Laden, Zawahiri et al do not need to organise attacks directly. They merely wait for the message they have spread around the world to inspire others. Al-Qaeda is now an idea, not an organisation. We now have a situation where autonomous cells carry out attacks on targets and at times of their own choosing, which are then applauded by al-Qaeda leaders of global infamy but limited practical ability to execute or organise strikes. This is exactly as Zawahiri and bin Laden had hoped. This is a virtual terrorist network, not a real one.

There may have been no mass uprising in the Islamic world, perhaps due to the sense and humanity of most of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims rather than any counter-terrorist strategy pursued by the West, but an increasing number of angry people have answered the call.

Zawahiri portrayed himself as a warrior and a statesman in the video broadcast on Thursday. He did not need any props to demonstrate his extraordinary gift for media manipulation.

This seems to me a very sensible article.

 

Real Authors of Iraq Dossier Blast Blair (2003)

Yesterday I wrote: “From a very different viewpoint, that thriller I have been reading — which is not bad but woefully proofread if at all — has one marvellous but of course unlikely trope, that the (unnamed) British Prime Minister depended on his teenage son’s web surfing to garner evidence on Saddam and WMD for his dossier on Iraq pre-invasion.”

I had forgotten the true story.

 

Iraq really does have something to do with it…

Link.

The five men suspected of trying to explode bombs in London on July 21 were motivated by anger over the Iraq war, not by religion, one of the men has reportedly told Italian judges following his arrest in Rome on Friday.

Osman Hussain, 27, is also reported to have denied the group was linked to the July 7 bombers but said it saw those atrocities as a “signal” to stage its own attacks. Italian reports said Hussain was an Ethiopian-born Briton who had changed his name from Hamdi Isaac. They said the group devised the plan in a basement gym in Notting Hill, near where two of the men were arrested on Friday.

“Rather than praying, we had discussions about work, politics, the war in Iraq,” he said in comments leaked to La Repubblica and an Italian news agency.

The men, all immigrants to Britain from East African states, watched films – “especially those in which you saw women and children killed and exterminated by the English and American soldiers, or widows, mothers and daughters who were crying”.

Hussain, who appeared before Italian magistrates on Saturday for an initial extradition hearing, denied the failed bombers wanted to kill anyone but themselves “as a show” and “to spread terror”. He also denied any connection to al-Qaeda, although “we knew that they existed. We had access to their platforms through the internet but nothing direct.”…

Hardly surprising that post-Iraq War attacks just may involve at least some degree of response to the Iraq War, is it? Despite assertions to the contrary emanating from Canberra, London or Washington.

And from Indonesia:

 

…another school term, and much else, going down the tube…

New Series: Entry 12

16 September 2004: It turns out the Salt Mine’s Deputy went to the same school in Armidale where Mister Marsden (see previous entry) was a junior seminarian…

Oh yes, the computer – a Pentium 4 – in my Salt Mine staff room was stolen yesterday afternoon: all its inner workings neatly removed. There’s been a bit of this happening lately.

Back in 1962 Dr Marsh, the best lecturer on Shakespeare I ever had – he had completed a book on Cymbeline while in prison in South Africa, told our tutorial group who, at the time, were discussing Yeats’s "The best lack all convictions, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity" that the problem with the then South African regime, which he opposed, was not that they were evil but they were so absolutely sure they were right. This came back to me while watching With God on our Side last night.

You will get the general picture very effectively by perusing The Jesus Factor, a PBS production. On that site Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourner Magazine – well worth visiting, says:

… When Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney talk about the necessity of American power and supremacy, military supremacy in the world as the only way to peace, I understand that as a foreign policy. I think it’s not a wise foreign policy, but I understand it.
When President Bush adds God to their formulation and says God’s purpose or intention is somehow linked with American military preeminence, that’s a very dangerous thing. President Bush [and] the White House basically choreographed a liturgy at the National Cathedral. President Bush was a chief homilist. In the pulpit of the National Cathedral, he made a war speech. He called the nation to arms in the pulpit of the National Cathedral, and he claimed a divine mission for our nation to rid the world of evil.
That is not only bad foreign policy or presumptuous foreign policy — I would say it’s idolatrous foreign policy to claim God’s purpose for that mission. And in the language that Mr. Bush has used, he does this again and again and again. Our role, and his role as president, this is acclaiming a righteous [decree] that Pax Americana is God’s foreign policy. This is a very unsettling thing.

Unsettling all right. "It is sobering to recall that … Athens, as the leader of the Delian League, was destroyed when it arrogantly began to impose its will on other states," writes Denis Kenny in the latestDissent. "President Bush especially, has been congratulated by his supporters for his ‘moral clarity’ in waging the ‘war on terror’, when by any recognised thical standards his pronouncements read like those of a moral cretin." In the same magazine, Dirk Baltzly says: "Whatever its moral value, deception has sometimes been used successfully as an instrument of foreign policy. Self-deception never has." Looking at the escalating insurgency in Iraq, and the manifest continuance of terror elsewhere, not to mention the fact that recruitment to terror is actually rising, it is hard not to see the black-and-white nostrums so beloved by George Bush and his offsiders – Condy Rice is another born-again for example – as setting them all up, and us, for self-deception. Not evil: just too damned sure they are right.

"Two-valued orientation, the mindset that perceives a clear separation between good and bad, black and white, right and wrong, is a stage of consciousness that everyone experiences as part of the maturation process. Some people remain there instead of growing into the more nuanced stage of formal operations and beyond, and these people can be described as fundamentalists. They exist in Islam, and also in our society. Not all, or most, fundamentalists are terrorists or capable of terrorism, but all, or nearly all, terrorists are operating at the fundamentalist level of human consciousness." So writes Courtney Nelson in "THE NATURE OF THE CONFLICT: AFTER 9/11/01." Good stuff too.
We have not been well led…

"Let’s look at the facts for a second. The Bush/Cheney administration’s record on terrorism is not exactly the best. They delayed military operations in Afghanistan long enough for Osama bin Laden to escape our grasp. They failed to crack down on Saudi Arabia, the country that produced fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. And, in the coup de gras, they attacked Iraq, a war that terror experts feel was a diversion from the real war against Al Qaeda. In the words of the author of Imperial Hubris, who wrote anonymously but is known to be a senior CIA official fearful of losing his job, the Iraqi war was a ‘Christmas present’ to bin Laden. We gave him a delay from our operations against him while at the same time leading many new recruits to terrorist groups." — "The Politics of Terror" by Dave Rosenberg (The Bentley Vanguard | Bentley College Thursday, September 16, 2004.)

Far graver than Vietnam – The Guardian (UK) Thursday September 16, 2004: "’Bring them on!’ President Bush challenged the early Iraqi insurgency in July of last year. Since then, 812 American soldiers have been killed and 6,290 wounded, according to the Pentagon. Almost every day, in campaign speeches, Bush speaks with bravado about how he is ‘winning’ in Iraq. ‘Our strategy is succeeding,’ he boasted to the National Guard convention on Tuesday. But, according to the US military’s leading strategists and prominent retired generals, Bush’s war is already lost. Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, told me: ‘Bush hasn’t found the WMD. Al-Qaida, it’s worse, he’s lost on that front. That he’s going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It’s lost.’ He adds: ‘Right now, the course we’re on, we’re achieving Bin Laden’s ends’…"

Last night we had a reprise of Jerry Falwell’s disgusting comments on the subject of September 11 2001:

I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way–all of them who have tried to secularize America–I point the finger in their face and say "you helped this happen."

A soul-mate of Abu Bakar Bashir?

# Just in case you have been wondering and hadn’t noticed the date, this is from my long dead Diary-X blog, second series 2004. I have found a CD-ROM with quite a few archives on it.

 

Some non-fiction read recently 2c – tentative conclusions

And I really mean tentative. Further, there is no way a shortish post like this can do more than indicate rather than expound. After all, the books with which this series of posts began comprise around a thousand pages, while this post will most likely be just one to three! And I am about to add to that by recommending another thousand pages or more, which I have either skimmed or, in the case of Jason Burke, read attentively since commencing these posts.

Supplementary texts

 Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda: the true story of radical Islam, Penguin 2004. This is the most thorough and most convincing book I have read on the subject. The writer has gone to first-hand sources and has relevant language skills, unlike very many who write on this. He speaks Urdu, the principal language of Pakistan and a second language understood by many of the players in Afghanistan. He has been to many of the relevant places and spoken to many of the people involved and thoroughly documents everything he says. His understanding of Islam and of the bewildering array of groups and their connections, or lack of direct connections, with Bin Laden or Al-Qaeda is superior to that of most western commentators. Anyone at all interested has to read this book. It outclasses the derivative work of Burleigh in this area by a factor of what – 1000%? The small sample of his work I attach below barely indicates the strengths of the book, but does indicate the direction Burke takes.

 Malise Ruthven, A Fury for God: the Islamist attack on America, Granta 2002. There has been an edition since then, which I don’t have. This was the first book of its kind that I read and remains among the best, but some of his conclusions about his subject need to be reconsidered in the light of Burke’s book. He is sceptical about the direction much US and UK policy was taking at that time, particularly about reliance on military solutions. That remains true, but does not rule out all military involvement. Excellent on the ideological background of “Islamist” groups.

 Karen Armstrong, Islam: a short history, Verso 2001. Short it is indeed, but also scholarly and fair-minded.

 John Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to be Modern, Faber 2003. Even shorter! The thesis is very interesting, however, and has a lot going for it.

 Melanie Phillips, Londonistan: how Britain is creating a terror state within, Gibson Square 2006. Burleigh endorses this book, but I still find it tendentious. Phillips does, however, highlight some of the ironies of following our own values of free speech. She overdraws, as does Burleigh, the “multiculturalism is to blame” argument. In The Mighty and the Almighty Madeleine Albright comes almost to the opposite conclusion: that a deep understanding of cultural pluralism and a willingness to respect the Other may be part of the solution. There’s a big difference, I would argue, between that position, which I share, and craven surrender to the bizarre and positively dangerous in our midst. Getting the balance wrong in either direction won’t help us, and may indeed do worse than that. The temptation to divide the world into goodies and baddies, alluded to below under “complexity”, must be resisted.

 Abdullah Saeed, Interpreting the Qu’ran: Towards a contemporary approach, Cambridge UP 2006. Saeed is Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne. I am sure this book would not please either of the speakers at that 2005 Mine Seminar, but it will please very many Muslims and seems to me, by analogy with my understanding of some parallel dilemmas in Jewish and Christian circles and with my understanding of the nature of text and reading generally, to be a very fruitful approach for all concerned. Accepting, as all observant Muslims do, that the Qu’ran is indeed of divine origin, Saeed argues that interpreters of the Qu’ran are not so blessed.  He distinguishes three approaches, and in that respect adds nuance to the rather too broad idea of “fundamentalism”. The three approaches are: i) textualists, who argue for a strict following of the text and adopt a literalistic approach to the text; ii) semi-textualists, who “essentially follow the Textualists as far as linguistic emphasis and ignoring of the socio-historical context are concerned, but … package the ethico-legal content in a somewhat ‘modern’ idiom, often within an apologetic discourse.” Apologetic there is in the theological sense of presenting scripture in a way meant to refute sceptics. Having broken that sentence structure, I now present: iii) contextualists, who emphasise “the socio-historical content of the Qu’ran and of its subsequent interpretations.” Or, as a Presbyterian minister I knew many years ago was fond of saying, “a text without a context is a pretext.”  Thus, while I agree with the very well expressed statement by Sheik Yasin on context towards the end of that video referred to in the previous post, it is clear nonetheless that he is not a contextualist in Saeed’s sense, and may even be in camp i), though possibly in camp ii).  I still find it unfortunate that contextualism does not, in general, go as far in Qu’ranic studies as perhaps it should, as it has (much to the distress of many) in Biblical Studies.

Complexity

So much could be said here! People often resist complexity. They like their boundaries neat. Thus the vision of Al-Qaeda that emerges in Burke’s book may be resisted because the appeal of something resembling a Western or a James Bond movie is far easier to imagine. This can be a fatal trap when the true situation is simply not so neat, as Burke convincingly demonstrates. See too a 2005 post here: Lernaean Hydra – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. I posted that at the time of the London bombings.

Let’s just take one example: Did the CIA fund the Taliban?

This is a widely held view. I even shared it myself. However, is it true? It may well be that it is not. There are issues of chronology involved – the Taliban emerged rather late in the day compared to other mujahadeen groups, and Burke is excellent at unpicking all that. (Some thought of by many as Al-Qaeda in many books turn out to have been very loosely connected, or not connected, or even rivals of Al-Qaeda.)  Certainly the CIA, mostly via Pakistan intelligence and along with Saudi and other financiers, did fund some of those fighting the USSR and the Afghan Marxist regime, but it appears the US backed off from that policy during the Clinton years, and that further in the stage when such funding was occurring the Taliban hardly existed. Nonetheless, much of the materiel did fall eventually into Taliban hands.

This video is a typical example of the case for the CIA having funded the Taliban, but looking at it carefully one does see much chronological sliding going on. Rather, when the Taliban did emerge it appears the question really was “Who the hell are they?” See for example The Taliban Files from National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 97. Various Pakistani groups, on the other hand, were heavily involved, but Pakistan too is another instance of complexity, but there isn’t space here to go down that track. See also Beyond the Burqa: The Taliban, Women and the C.I.A. (September 12, 2001).

Idealism

I am really trying not to sound patronising, because I respect idealism and even cling to some to this day, modified as it might be by experience and knowledge, especially of history.

The young, confronted with a world that all will admit is not the best of all possible worlds, may react with cynicism, apathy, or a deep desire to make a difference. Those who desire to make a difference will soon seek out how to make a difference, and therein is some danger, as well, of course, as much of the hope of the world. Those boys at The Mine, just like their confreres in the rather fundamentalist Christian and Jewish or political activist groups in the school, look for people who offer convincing solutions. Now you have to admit that both those speakers in the 2005 seminar (the video linked from the previous post in this series) are quite excellent public speakers. As a former debating coach I wouldn’t mind having them on my team, and it is no accident that one of the two sixteen year old presenters was indeed a valuable member of his age-group’s debating team, as was the brave young lad in cadet uniform who got up to rebut what he had heard. (The body language going on behind him, if you have seen the video, is interesting; it’s almost as if the presenters wish there was a hook in the wings or a trapdoor under the stage.) That lad, by the way, is now one of my Facebook friends.

You will also note on the right that the seminar the previous year directly dealt with the issue of terror. The tactic was definitely not recommended.

We need to remind ourselves that terrorism is a tactic and not an ideology, nor is it inevitable in a Muslim context. The nearest that terrorism came to being a rather empty ideology was in the case of the Russian nihilists and the weird Germans in the 60s and 70s. Burleigh is actually very good on both, especially on the Germans.

On the other hand, when an ideology goes in for group judgements, whether these be based on class, race or religion, there is a likelihood that terror may become an attractive tactic. In my view we need to strenuously resist group judgements. It also must be said that the ideology recommended by the two speakers in the 2005 seminar is ultimately total – they said as much – and you can’t get a higher authority than God as its author. Indeed, if the premises of the speakers were in fact correct it would follow that we should listen, but unfortunately I think the premises are highly questionable.

But as the speakers also said, we do have to all live together. Their solution, however, is not mine. In the world, let alone Australia, we all have to find ways to harmony in difference. It is a challenge, one we have not done too badly on here in Oz, comparatively, much better in fact than much of Europe.

Language

One small but important example. In Blood & Rage (p. 468) Burleigh defines takfir as “the art of deluding infidels”. Burke notes (p. 331) “Takfir: excommunication, a practice in Shia Islam but until recently almost unknown among Sunnis.”  See also this from a conservative Muslim source. The authority referred to there is a key figure in the development of political Islam in the 20th century.

Jason Burke article.

 

Uncomfortable but possibly correct thoughts on Afghanistan

It isn’t very often that I recommend something in Quadrant, but I do recommend Justin Kelly’s How to Win in Afghanistan – even if the title is perhaps rather ambitious. What he says is certainly worth placing beside whatever other sources you may be following. “Kelly is a recently retired Australian army officer. He commanded the Peace Monitoring Group on Bougainville, was deputy commander of the peace keeping force in East Timor and was director of strategic operations in the US headquarters in Iraq from November 2006 until September 2007.” So it is frankly written from a military perspective, but he does get at least some vital facts correct.

Originally law belonged to a people. It was a common possession which defined the group to which individuals “belonged” and which was marked by their subscription to the weight of custom, ritual and obligation entailed. In return, membership of the group regulated the interactions between individuals and families within the group and offered advantages in dealings with other groups…

From this germ evolved the idea of the modern state as a geographically bounded area within which “a law” prevailed…

These two conceptions of law—as belonging either to a people or to a state—are irreconcilable and the conflict between them is being played out in domestic and international politics across the world. Insurgency and counter-insurgency is a competition to establish whose law will prevail in an area. The counter-insurgent force is attempting to establish its coercive authority in areas in which that authority is contested by insurgents. In Afghanistan, NATO forces are acting as proxies for the government of Afghanistan in the extension of its authority. The Taliban is resisting that attempt while also endeavouring to extend its authority over the remainder of the country.

Modern-day Afghanistan is largely a figment of the Western imagination. Its present boundaries emerged only during the nineteenth century as a result of imperial competition between Persia, Russia and Britain. It is the rump of a larger Pashtun empire (the term Afghan having its roots in the Persian for Pashtun) that had previously extended well into modern-day Pakistan and Iran. The northern boundary, only stabilised in the 1870s, was originally a zone through which Pashtun influence was in balance with that of the steppe-dwelling Uzbek, Tajiks and Turkmen, who remain ethnic minorities in northern Afghanistan today. Peshawar, in Pakistan, was until the early nineteenth century the winter capital and “pearl of the [Pashtun] Durani Empire”…

I still think a good case can be made that the whole Iraq thing – whatever you now think of it – was a terrible distraction from attending properly to the place where Al Qaeda really was, under the friendly shelter of the Taliban.

 

2008 in review 10: what did I post about in November 2008?

As I noted here, I am now going in reverse order, finishing in April 2008, and adding December in the new year. That way the months are published in a more logical order. Shame about January-March, but not a tragedy… Of course I now have three blogs to epitomise.

Floating Life

Saturday 1 November brings you The Howard Years on ABC; on 2 November Sirdan and his mum at Chinese Whisper includes one of my best photos, and in the afternoon I wrote Place and voice spot on: Peter Corris, “The Big Score” (2007).

Last episode of SBS’s “First Australians” and a must see anthology on 3 November reminds me what a good year this was for documentaries on TV; The Chemist’s Tale is a story from Redfern. New to read – local and national on 4 November is about the South Sydney Herald; The real education revolution… is among my better posts; Promoting Ninglun’s Specials… explains itself. 5 November was a memorable day: I believe something is happening right now in the USA…; Tribute; Meanwhile in Indonesia…. Next day began with A reminder we could all do with and then US election via George Negus, and the language of religion; the day after I posted On assignment! about a photo job I was given, and Trounced by Thomas! That brings us to the weekend. On Saturday I wrote The good oil on Barak Obama; Sunday was And that’s another thing that really gets on my goat… followed by With Sirdan and his mum at the Chinese Whisper again…

 

2008 in review 9: what did I post about in March 2008?

The month finished with Milestone! Visit #200,000. That refers to all the Floating Life blogs covered by Sitemeter. As I start this post the figure is 295,505.

Floating Life

Mardi Gras week-end kicked off this month: For Mardi Gras: a recycle and Seen heading for Mardi Gras. On Saturday I also posted The Council for a Parliament of the World’s Religions, while Sunday brought The only gay in the village….

“I guess it is a good thing when one’s prejudices get worked over and one is left feeling a bit of a fraud. That is one effect watching Compass last night had on me…” So I wrote on 3 March: Humbled, followed by Spiritual predator and Too awful even to name about Israel/Palestine. John Howard has just been elected… on 4 March refers to my reaching 1996 in my reading of Frank Welsh’s Great Southern Land, and How good is your English? that day has become a very popular post. Young film-maker is about SBHS ex-student Rory Pearson, while on 5 March I also wrote English/ESL honoured. “Go to Creating a Community of Writers Using Technology and you will find details of a March 7, 2008 Conference in Grand Rapids, MI.” My English/ESL site was an “exhibit” there. Islam is the theme of the first 6 March entry Some interesting thoughts from people I tend to ignore…; On keeping an open mind on Indigenous Australia policy followed. On 7 March DVDs on a stormy night is a review post, while This just intrigued me on 8 March is about US politics. Chinese Whisper now does Yum Cha was a Sunday lunch post.

 

ABC brilliant last night: "Mortgage Meltdown" and Imran Khan

Last night Auntie indulged herself in a repeat, as well she might. Mortgage Meltdown was first broadcast on Four Corners in September 2007.

PAUL BARRY: Mark Seiffert is a housing activist in Cleveland Ohio, the foreclosure capital of the United States. The hundreds of people who file into his offices every week are not rich and are not speculators, but they’ve been persuaded to take out expensive subprime loans they can’t pay back and should never have got into.

WOMAN (speaking to counsellor): … Mortgage started in September at an adjustable rate, which is almost $300 more than I was paying. When my husband lost his job …

PAUL BARRY: Now their city is now seeing a tidal wave of evictions and foreclosures.

MARK SEIFFERT, HOUSING ACTIVIST, CLEVELAND OHIO: It’s devastating. I mean, you know we’ve had, in Cleveland there’s supposedly about 80,000 property units, buildings. Ten thousand of those are vacant as of today. And we’re seeing foreclosures increasing by more than 300 per cent over the last couple of years.

And it’s no longer an inner city, minority, poor person type issue, it’s, you know, we see men, women, black white, it’s married, single, wealthy, middle income, lower income, fixed income. There is no, you know, status quo. I mean fire fighters, architects, TV reporters. It’s everybody. And it’s, you know, the crisis is just beginning.

And:

PAUL BARRY: But bad as the problems clearly are for California and for Cleveland, how on earth have they spread so far as to shake the world?

The answer lies here on Wall St, because it was the big banks and brokers here who put up the massive amounts of money that fuelled the huge lending surge and the dodgy loans then came back here to be parcelled up into mortgage backed securities and collateralised debt obligations and sold to investors all around the world, with everyone picking up fat fees along the way.

SATYAJIT DAS, AUTHOR, ‘TRADERS, GUNS AND MONEY’:A German banker recently said to me with a very Germanic accent, “Why is somebody not paying their mortgage in Luneville, West Virginia,” and this is a real town by the way, “going to affect me?”

And the reason is very simple. Because of the web of transactions in global finance now and capital flows, people from all round the world have invested in the US.

PAUL BARRY: Satyajit Das is a world expert on hedge funds and credit markets and an adviser to banks around the world.

Based here in Australia he has long been warning how easily a crisis like this could develop.

SATYAJIT DAS, AUTHOR, ‘TRADERS, GUNS AND MONEY’:To give you an idea of global capital flows, 85 per cent of capital flows from Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East is in to the US. And a good chunk of that has gone into the subprime mortgage area, or the mortgage area in general.

PAUL BARRY (to Satyajit Das): So the money comes from overseas and it then gets lent out to people in Cleveland, Ohio?

SATYAJIT DAS, AUTHOR, ‘TRADERS, GUNS AND MONEY’:That’s absolutely correct.

PAUL BARRY (to Satyajit Das): Right.

SATYAJIT DAS, AUTHOR, ‘TRADERS, GUNS AND MONEY’:That’s absolutely correct.

PAUL BARRY (to Satyajit Das): So when the people in Cleveland, Ohio, stop paying, the wave comes back again outwards?

SATYAJIT DAS, AUTHOR, ‘TRADERS, GUNS AND MONEY’:It’s like the old saying about chaos theory: the flapping of the wings of a butterfly in the Amazon causes a Caribbean hurricane. And that’s what we’re seeing now.

Do read/watch. Yes, well worth repeating!

Then on Enough Rope we had an interview with the rather wonderful Pakistani cricketer turned politician Imran Khan.

 

Revisiting The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Why did that Milan Kundera novel come to mind as I thought about yesterday’s Vice-Presidential Candidates Debate? You will recall I was not much impressed by it. Janet Albrechtsen in today’s Oz finds Sarah Palin “charismatic”! My own view is that anyone who finds either Palin or Biden charismatic needs a new dictionary. And again, what debate? You may read the transcript and judge for yourselves. Sure, we had a number of exchanges of views, but we also had one participant who refused to engage time and again.

I thought of Kundera because of the erasure of what has really happened in Iraq since 2003, when John Howard put forth The Line so well that the current Canadian PM, then Opposition Leader there, used it verbatim, as we now now; and John stuck to that line as reality dissolved around him year after year. See for example some posts I put up along the way: John Howard on Iraq (October 22, 2007) and Want a cheap and nasty debate? Visit the Senate…  (December 5, 2006) lead you in turn to others back to 2003.

Palin wanted to forget everything older than six months in the Iraq story. She didn’t want to concede that the current problems in Afghanistan and on the Pakistan border areas might conceivably be as they are because Bush chose Baghdad as prime target and did not commit enough to Afghanistan. I am sure the idea that Al Qaeda had minimal interest or participation in Iraq before the US-led invasion may not pass muster with her, or her supporters. And yet it is true. To go even further back, of course, the idea that Al Qaeda itself, and the Taliban, are not unrelated to US policy towards Afghanistan in the later years of the Cold War would also be inscribed in the Book of Forgetting.

Renegade Eye has a good post on Al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda is talked about in a metaphysical manner. Stratfor presents an assessment that can be used, no matter what your viewpoint, to at least talk on the subject, with reality.

I am glad that there are promising signs in Iraq, after so many have died and so much has been ruined. I hope it works; having made a bum choice, Bush and the rest of us are stuck with the consequences and really do have to make the best of it. But it is hardly cause for patriotic chest-puffing…

As for the bail-out and what led to it, that may not be the world’s best idea, but a lot of wise heads say it has to happen, that money from The United Arab Emirates or China really is needed to save the US financial system from complete meltdown. We can but hope and pray, I guess.

But there has been an air of unreality about talk about this too. That was brought home to me by something Tony Delroy said on ABC’s Night Life last night: the figures mean that 70,000 US households per day — that is families, men, women — have been losing their homes! The numbers are simply staggering, and the human cost is also hard to conceive. This story helps.

As the vice-presidential candidates talked about the financial crisis gripping this country and the House and Senate sparred over the $700 rescue bill, the crisis got a little darker for at least one family as CNN reported that a 90-year-old woman shot herself in the wake of an eviction attempt. The woman, from Akron, OH, survived, and has become a flash point for the debate — she was mentioned on the floor of the House on Friday.

Foreclosures have all sorts of victims and we’ve been reporting on them since the beginning of the crisis, but the stories of real people may have gotten a little lost over the past few weeks as the banking crisis has spiraled out of control. How do you process the plight of one woman losing her home against the backdrop of a $700 billion rescue plan? Both are impossible to fathom. And this woman has not been the only one to come to national attention for attempting suicide — there was a case back in July of a Massachusetts woman who committed suicide as she faced eviction.

Perhaps as Congress considers the big picture of the financial crisis, it’s important that they are reminded of the very real human costs of our economic condition.

George Soros saw it coming, I should add. See The Age of Fallibility (2006) pp. 144-5 and 159-161.

 

Boston Review — Days of Lies and Roses: Selling out Afghanistan — Sarah Chayes

This is an Arts & Letters Daily offering.  Sarah Chayes’s Boston Review article is one of those invaluable contributions that take us away from the political and ideological into the actual world of human experience.

The other day I drove out to visit Nurallah, a member of my cooperative who had just lost his mother. His house lies a few miles outside Kandahar on the ancient road to India—the very place where Afghanistan was founded. From the sturdy beaten-earth walls of the compound, the lines of tawny Kandahar shrink to insignificance against the backdrop of the rocky hills beyond, etched in purple against the sky.

Enough children to fill a schoolroom crowded around me, clutching my hand to kiss, as I settled cross-legged on a cushion on the floor. The four strapping sons of that beloved matriarch seemed like lost children too, faces crumpled by the blow of her passing.

Nurallah’s mother died of a stroke. In a way, that was a happiness, a sign of improving times. For a woman who lost her husband and two sons during the Soviet occupation, a woman who spent 12 years as a refugee in Pakistan, a woman whose youngest son was drafted by the Taliban to fight in northern Afghanistan and almost perished when U.S. proxies there sealed him and other prisoners in a cargo container in November 2001—for such a woman to die in her bed was not a foregone conclusion…

Sarah Chayes is the founder of the Arghand, a cooperative agribusiness in Afghanistan. From 1997 to 2002 she worked as an overseas correspondent for National Public Radio. She is the author of The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan after the Taliban.

In a context of increasing danger and violence—which reached a pitch last fall when open battles between Taliban fighters and Afghan and international troops were fought at the gates of Kandahar—the situation in this very symbolic southern capital of Afghanistan has indeed stabilized a bit. Village families that fled the fighting to camp out in the cramped homes of relatives in town have returned to their vineyards and orchards. Kandahar streets are crowded again—if somewhat tentatively—with the jolly chaos of late-model SUVs, caparisoned horse-drawn taxis, dark-green pickup trucks loaded with police officers, battered white station wagons, brightly painted rickshaws, vegetable wagons, donkey carts, dust, and smog.

And yet, after five years here I have learned to mistrust the weekly or monthly fluctuations in atmospheric pressure, seeking instead to discern the underlying pattern. And that pattern is not encouraging.

Permit me first to dispel a common misconception. This city where I live and work is Kandahar, Afghanistan, which since September 2001 has come to symbolize (at least for Americans) the forces of evil and obscurantism—enemies of our “enlightened civilization.” Kandahar, after all, was the lair of Mullah Muhammad Omar, where he cosseted his infamous “guest,” Osama bin Laden. Kandahar has arguably replaced Moscow as the ideological antipode to everything we Americans think we believe in. And yet the issues at stake here are not in the least ideological. They are practical—and opportunistic.

Ask a Kandahari what he wants from his government and you’ll get a familiar answer: not vast ideas but practical solutions to everyday problems. Most Kandaharis would put basic law and order at the top of their list, then public utilities and infrastructure, education, timely performance of administrative functions (such as delivery of driver’s licenses and title deeds), freedom from arbitrary shakedowns by public officials, and some mechanism to afford them a voice in their collective destiny.

But in more than five years in Afghanistan, the American government, which considers its presence here a part of its broad effort to “bring democracy to the Middle East,” has achieved none of these things.

Please read the whole article.

…Some urge me to swallow my outrage: bribery and corruption are the Afghan way. I refuse to accept such stereotypes. Every society is composed of diverse tendencies, and it is specific historical events that bring one or another to the fore. In this case, the historical event was America’s post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan—our effort to transform an entire society without bothering to understand it in the first place.

Our first error was to subordinate every other concern to a cowboys-and-Indians-style hunt for al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership—a hunt that has thus far proved singularly fruitless…

I was reminded too of one of my “blogmarks” — who has been silent lately, now studying in the USA: Ahmad Shuja. Reading his back entries is still an education for anyone seeking to understand life in Afghanistan.

 

Ninglun and the mullahs

Not really, but spurred on by an excellent review article in the US magazine Nation I have thought about them. The Long Life of the Frontier Mullah by Basharat Peer [June 11, 2008] reviews Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan Borderland by Sana Haroon.

…The “war on terror” has made the borderlands a newsworthy topic, yet accounts of the daily struggles, aspirations and challenges of the region’s population are rare. American coverage of the recent elections there spotlighted the ANP’s victory as a rejection of Islamist parties and marginalized the issues that dominated the campaign: reducing the presence of the Pakistani military, lowering civilian casualties in the counterinsurgency operations and pushing a development agenda in the tribal belt. What’s not in short supply are stories about the mullahs and warring tribes; their prominence is a testament to how the frontier region remains an unruly captive of the narrative that first defined it for the world beyond the Hindu Kush and the Khyber Pass: the imperial “Great Game” played by Britain and Russia in the region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Great Game had its second inning in the early 1980s, when the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan supported the Afghan resistance against Soviet forces in neighboring Afghanistan.

One of the first printed works to establish the reputation of the North-West Frontier tribes as bloodthirsty and acrimonious was written in 1897 by a second lieutenant of a British cavalry regiment. The young officer was Winston Churchill, who had ended up commanding a brigade tasked with subduing tribes in Malakand–in the frontier territory’s northern reaches–after refining his polo game during a posting with his regiment in British India. In The Story of the Malakand Field Force, which is peppered with racist and Islamophobic remarks, Churchill says of the frontier tribes, “Except at the times of sowing and of harvest, a continual state of feud and strife prevails throughout the land…. Every man’s hand is against the other, and all against the stranger…. To the ferocity of the Zulu are added the craft of the Redskin and the marksmanship of the Boer.” He goes on to write that the frontier people were exposed to the “rapacity and tyranny of a numerous priesthood…and a host of wandering Talib-ul-ilms, who correspond with the theological students in Turkey, and live free at the expense of the people. More than this, they enjoy a sort of ‘droit du seigneur,’ and no man’s wife or daughter is safe from them.”