These are some numbers from Afghanistan.
US military expenditure for the war against (estimated): US $66 billion
GDP (Purchasing Power Parity): US $22.27 billion
So about three quarters of all money spent in that country is used for smashing and killing stuff. One quarter is used for everything else.
In one of the many wars the US has declared on various stuff, they are apparently winning. In Mexico, thousands of people "involved in the drug trade" have been killed in recent months - many of them at the hands of the Mexican army and others at the hand of other people involved in the drug trade. With all this socially constructive death being dealt some congratulations must be in order. The United States has decided it can no longer stand by and watch those "involved with the drug trade" idly wander the streets of Mexico without being killed. So it has helped fund a fairly hearty war against them.
Many had previously thought the matter of drugs, corruption and governance in Latin America was a complex matter, but thanks to a recent editorial at the WSJ this complexity has all but vanished. All the situation really required was for the United States to step in and support a leader willing to apply the necessary military force. The US has found that leader in Felipe Calderón. Surely this is the beginning of the end of all those "basket case" countries in Latin America who have allowed the drug trade to flourish. The end of all those corrupt Latin American leaders forcing their nasty hard drugs down the gagging throats of a vulnerable American populace.
But seriously, this story sounds very much like busy as usual for the US happily throwing about vats of drug war money to help out their latest tough guy chum. A fresh approach it is not.
It is only necessary for a feeling to arise that it is impious and disgraceful to serve the British, for the whole of our fabric to tumble like a house of cards without a shot being fired or a sword unsheathed.
Lieutenant General Sir George Fletcher MacMunn, British general and scholar (Wikipedia)
I want to make it clear, we will be in for the long haul when it comes to RAMSI. The ordinary people in the Solomon Islands want Australia there. They appreciate the help and they’ll be there irrespective of who is in power in that country.
John Howard in response to requests from the Solomon Island prime minister to withdraw Australian troops
Recently, [UN peacekeepers] initiated what they call “night flashes,†in which three truckloads of peacekeepers drive into the bush and keep their headlights on all night as a signal to both civilians and armed groups that the peacekeepers are there. Sometimes, when morning comes, 3,000 villagers are curled up on the ground around them.
Balad Airbase, Iraq (Google Maps)
[If the Americans] want to make war for twenty years then we shall make war for twenty years. If they want to make peace, we shall make peace and invite them to afternoon tea.
America has spent a fair bit on the Iraq war. The purpose of the war seems to be to kill so many people who aren't friends with America, that everyone who's still alive will decide that want to be America's friend. But this war is a pretty expensive (and violent) way of making friends. So far they've spent US$16,364 per potential Iraqi friend. The war has cost $451 billion1 and there are 27,499,638 people in Iraq2. That's already pretty expensive, even before you consider that there are still some stubborn holdouts in Iraq who don't want to be friends with them. So each actual new Iraqi friend America has made would have cost quite a bit more than $16,364.
I wonder if making friends with Iraqis would have been cheaper (and possibly quicker) if instead of using all that money to kill their neighbours, they'd used it to buy everyone a never-ending supply of cheese. Or American SUVs. Or holidays in Paris.
It seems the evidence that Iran is training terrorists and pedophiles is now undeniable. For the good of the world, the Iranian people and children everywhere, they must be bombed. Or we could just bomb Iran.
So. To keep score. The United States is supporting: the Shia government, which funnels money and arms to Shia militias, death squads, and insurgent/terrorist groups; the Sunni opposition, which funnels money and arms to the Sunni insurgency; the Sunni insurgency directly, so that they will combat the Shia militias as well as al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group of Sunni terrorists supposedly supported by Shia Iran; the Saudis, who fund Sunni insurgents as well--almost surely--as Sunni terrorist groups; the Iraqi Kurds, who have their sights set on an independent nation that includes a de-Arabized Kirkuk; and the Turks, who have their sights set on never, ever seeing an independent Kurdish entity anywhere, anyhow, anyway, ever, amen.
The Bush administration is thorough, at least, if not much else.
I'm reading about holocaust denial after a fellow at Rough Edges gave me one of their pamphlets. Holocaust deniers, who are mostly just neo-Nazis, basically seem to be saying that "we didn't kill six million Jews but we would if we could." They feign horror at the suggestion that Hitler would ever harm a hair on a Jewish head, but then talk about how awful Jewish people are and if they were slightly harmed they totally had it coming.
But it's interesting to read about all the myths (accepted as myths by both sides) that I remember as being historical facts when I went to Germany as a kid. I thought most of the killings happened in Germany for instance. But it seems that nearly all of them happened in Poland, because German people got upset at Hitler when he tried to mass kill people in Germany. And Nazis didn't make soap out of concentration camp victims either.
I know it's difficult to care about fact-checking when you're dealing with folk like the Nazis, but I suspect if the Allies had been a bit more careful about the rumours that were spread, there probably wouldn't be such a successful Holocaust denial industry today.
Tears of the Sun was an "ethical" action movie about how sometimes killing a lot of people is the only principled choice you can make. Fortunately, the world only has good people and bad people so it's mostly pretty easy to work out which ones need killing and which ones need saving. It was also about being an American, and looks at the constructive steps America might take in reducing violence in Africa.
I have to say, I'm a little surprised at Monica Belucci who I nearly always love. Not only was her character incredibly annoying, but if it's possible for a French actor to betray their French roots then she definitely did. Apart from the similarity to the hundreds of years of French occupation of Africa, this film was as American and as not French as they come.
But it was entertaining violence. There were a lot of explosions and a lot of shooting, and I like that stuff. Quite a few stabbings as well. The baddies really were very bad, and certainly deserved any gratuitous knife guttings they may have received.
I'm reading a book called State Terrorism and the United States. The US Government really is a despicable creature. The ugliness of US realpolitik makes me more ambivalent about terrorists who use the same logic. When it comes to political realism, does the oppressor define the nature of the politics? The US is perfectly happy to kill civilians if it furthers its own goals. The US will use whatever power it has, as effectively as it can, irrespective of ethics. However, in general, setting out to kill civilians doesn't achieve what it wants. For oppressed groups, perhaps this is not the case, and targeting civilians does further its goals. There have been enough instances of the US aiding and participating in foreign state terrorism and genocide, that I feel comfortable assuming the US would use these methods more directly if it thought it would be effective.
I think I shouldn't be ambivalent about terrorism. It is probably better just to say amoral politics and war are crap, whoever does them.
If might is right, then love has no place in the world. It may be so, it may be so. But I don't have the strength to live in a world like that, Rodrigo.
Gabriel in 'The Mission'
The Mission is a brilliant film. If anything is going to make me a dinkum pacifist then it's probably this. I'm 100% convinced by Gabriel's first sentence, but I'm fairly convinced. Jesus seemed pretty sure they we are supposed to love our enemies. All our enemies. Not just the ones who aren't a threat to us.
I get annoyed at the way the left always puts inverted commas around the word "peacekeeper" when they're talking about UN peacekeepers. Sure, going off to keep the peace with a Steyr has as element of contradiction, but it's not so different to lots of other things we do. In theory, police officers carry guns to enable them to keep society safe. A lot of violent offenders are arrested violently. People generally accept the idea that it's possible to use violence to prevent violence. Or more constructively, that the threat of violence can prevent violence. I suspect that UN peacekeepers actually haven't killed that many people in the past few decades. But I reckon they've still discouraged a lot of other people from doing so.
Perhaps you don't believe that it's possible for someone with a gun to foster peace. It is possible that peacekeepers are only making things worse. But I don't think the evidence is so strong (if there is any at all) that the idea of an armed peacekeeper deserves the sneers and ridicule that it often gets.
There is a whole lot of crowing going on in the right-wing media about how the left-wing media seems to think that David Hicks is more innocent than Hicks himself does. A lot of people certainly complained about the validity of his guilty plea, but you can complain about that without believing he is innocent. If you think that torture is bad and say so but then someone confesses to something serious under torture, nothing has occurred to validate torture. Nor to invalidate an opposition to torture. Torture is a kind of self-validating technique, because it can extract everything it desires. You can torture someone into signing a document claiming it was only right and reasonable that they be tortured.
Mock trials are rather similar because they can dictate terms to the extent that outcomes are predetermined. America's legal system was carefully crafted to deny the powerful the outcomes they might desire. If you're going to bias a legal system you're probably better to err on the side of powerless rather than the powerful. In one sense, that is very dissatisfying - which I think is why the neocons have changed it for Guantanamo Bay - but the old way seems to have proven pretty effective and stable.
I've still never heard anyone claim Hicks is completely innocent or is a nice person. People were just confused about how the US expected to get an unbiased outcome given the system that had been constructed. They're not even content to weight the system against the defendent. They're so scared of a single bad guy being set free, that any path by which an accused might be found innocent has been removed. That, to me, is what is most silly about the whole thing. In principle, I doubt many people are opposed to the idea of David Hicks going to prison for a while. But I think you do probably have to work a bit at persuading people it's the right thing to do.
In 2006, Halliburton made profits of $2.3bn on revenues of $22.6bn. Last month it announced a 40% decline in fourth-quarter profit.
Halliburton plans move to Dubai
Poor old Halliburton. The good times can't last forever - all wars eventually come to an end.
In 1791 there was a successful slave rebellion in Haiti (then called St Domingue). Before the rebellion the colony had produced 30% of the world's sugar and was the most profitable of all European colonies.
Despite having just experienced its own revolution in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity, France sent an army to put down the revolt - one ship even prepared to sail under the banner 'live free or die' before it was realised that this might be seen as encouraging to the rebels.
New Internationalist (NI 398, which is actually quite good)
Happily the French soldiers got their arses whooped by mosquitoes and black fellas.
I quite like Barack Obama. Even when he talks about war.
I finished reading a proper book on Pol Pot yesterday. It was a very interesting and unpleasant read. I was so eager to believe that Pol Pot was a bad person demonised by the West until everyone thought he was completely evil. We like to do that with communist leaders, while glossing over all the things right-wing leaders do wrong. But this time, I don't think that it is true. It's hard to explain why Pol Pot is so much worse than the regimes that came before and after him. They all abused their power and used obscene violence. But the Khmer Rouges promised such a great improvement in Cambodian's lives and ended up making them so much worse.
Pol Pot was a narcisstic fool. Yet thousands of people supported him without question. By the end of his regime he had tortured and executed nearly every friend he had ever had. People he had known and trusted since he was in his early 20s he suddenly concluded were insufficiently communist and had them killed.
I don't really think the Khmer Rouges knew what they believed, except that anyone who disagreed with whatever it was had to be killed. They didn't even annouce they were a communist organisation until a couple of years after they were in power. None of them seemed to have even seriously read and understood Marx. Pol Pot admitted that he had tried but didn't really understand any of it. They seemed to have ended up being mostly inspired by Mao, but I think that even Mao was pretty disgusted by them.
Perhaps it feels like that in 30 years of existence their organisation didn't really make a single good decision. They seemed to have survived purely on Pol Pot's charisma. They had no greater goal in mind. The organisation existed purely to preserve its own existence. Pol Pot "converted" to liberal capitalism in the 1990s claiming that he was a pragmatist and would pursue the most productive route to national reconstruction. But he was never a pragmatist. No one could ever tell him anything. People who told him the truth were killed. People who suggested they pursue anything other that the most severe communism were killed, no matter how logical their compromises might have been. Pol Pot formally abolished families during his reign (seriously), but 15 years later he retired (temporarily) so that he could raise his own families. He appointed one of his most trusted commanders, Son Sen, to be in charge of the Khmers Rouges. A while later he took control again and had Son Sen and his extended family shot.
More recently Pol Pot seems to have realised that his regime messed things up. He blamed it on his followers claiming they had failed him.
I think Pol Pot is so uniquely repulsive because he had so much goodwill. He had enormous support from the Chinese and the Vietnamese which he used purely to make war (and eventually kill a lot of Vietnamese). When he took power the Cambodian people loved him. But in those three years he did more harm to the Cambodian people and more harm to the socialist ideology than I would have thought possible. His regime caused all the effects of an enormous genocide while believing it was helping the same people it killed.
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