Behind the green door

science fiction
Published on

On a somewhat lighter note, after the serious entries of the past week, this is the start of a thread on soc.history.what-if in which James Nicoll starts speculation about what would happen if the US in 1958 found a doorway in time to the Earth of 250,000,000 A.D.. This evidently fired the imagination of the posters there, as there is quite a lot of good, interesting speculation throughout the thread. Even though I like blogs quite a lot, Usenet still beats them when it comes to sustained discussion like this.

Related links:
The Epona Project, an attempt to create a believable extrasolar in detail.
One view of Earth 250,000,000 A.D.
The Future is Wild, the website of the tv series of
that name, which explored a similar issue. Heavy use of Flash.

How to quote out of context

Manufacturing Consent, War on Iraq
Published on

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If you follow news and political blogs, you have likely seen the following quote, from a John Pilger
authored article in The New Statesman:

Four years ago, I travelled the length of Iraq, from the hills where St Matthew is buried in the Kurdish north to the heartland of Mesopotamia, and Baghdad, and the Shia south. I have seldom felt as safe in any country.

No matter where you read it, it would’ve likely been followed by a rant about how silly John Pilger is to
think the Iraq of Saddam was safe and how morally repugnant he was to say this while people were being tortured and killed and so on.

How many blogs however, put this quote in context:

Four years ago, I travelled the length of Iraq, from the hills where St Matthew is buried in the Kurdish north to the heartland of Mesopotamia, and Baghdad, and the Shia south. I have seldom felt as safe in any country.Once, in the Edwardian colonnade of Baghdad’s book market, a young man shouted something at me about the hardship his family had been forced to endure under the embargo imposed by America and Britain. What happened next was typical of Iraqis; a passer-by calmed the man, putting his arm around his shoulder, while another was quickly at my side. “Forgive him,” he said reassuringly. “We do not connect the people of the west with the actions of their governments. You are welcome.”

At one of the melancholy evening auctions where Iraqis come to sell their most intimate possessions out of urgent need, a woman with two infants watched as their pushchairs went for pennies, and a man who had collected doves since he was 15 came with his last bird and its cage; and yet people said to me: “You are welcome.” Such grace and dignity were often expressed by those Iraqi exiles who loathed Saddam Hussein and opposed both the economic siege and the Anglo-American assault on their homeland; thousands of these anti-Saddamites marched against the war in London last year, to the chagrin of the warmongers, who never understood the dichotomy of their principled stand.

You don’t have to agree with Pilger, but wat I’m saying is, you know, read the entire article before
getting indignant. If you need to quote people out of context, your case does not get stronger.

The new, improved Iraqi flag

War on Iraq
Published on

Delusion:

“This flag represents the democracy and freedom of the new Iraq, where the old one represented killing and oppression and dictatorship,” he said. “We are not imposing this flag on the people; it was chosen by the legitimate representatives of Iraq. When a new national assembly is elected, it can decide whether to keep it or change it.”

Reality:

I also heard today that the Puppets are changing the flag. It looks nothing like the old one and at first I was angry and upset, but then I realized that it wouldn’t make a difference. The Puppets are illegitimate, hence their constitution is null and void and their flag is theirs alone. It is as representative of Iraq as they are- it might as well have “Made in America” stitched along the inside seam. It can be their flag and every time we see it, we’ll see Chalabi et al. against its pale white background.

My email buddy and fellow Iraqi S.A. in America said it best in her email, “I am sure we are all terribly excited about the extreme significance of the adoption by the completely illegitimate Iraq Puppet Council of a new national piece of garishly colored cloth. Of course the design of the new national rag was approved by the always tastefully dressed self-declared counter terrorism expert viceroy of Iraq, Paul Bremer, who is well known for wearing expensive hand-stitched combat boots with thousand dollar custom tailored suits and silk designer ties. The next big piece of news will be the new pledge of allegiance to said national rag, and the empire for which it stands. The American author of said pledge has yet to be announced.”

The US Army in Iraq

War on Iraq
Published on

One of the reasons I’m still convinced that the US and its allies should withdraw from Iraq as quickly
as possible, despite the very serious consequences this would have, is the fact that the US army is wholly unsuited to fight a guerilla movement. Let me explain.

In guerilla warfare, you have a small group of hostiles subsumed in a much larger civilian population, with the differences between the two often difficult to spot. To defeat these hostile groups, you not only most defeat them military, you must also be able to win the support of the larger population, as well as erode the support the guerillas recieve from it. The guerilla movement has to do the opposite: it probably cannot win the war directly, but can make it too costly for its opponent to continue by gaining the support of the majority of the population. Without this support guerilla movements wither away or become just another group of bandits.

To get this support, a guerilla movement has to offer people a genuine alternative to the current regime and it has to make sure people do not want to collaborate with their enemies. The latter they can achieve either by targeting those collaborators, (as already seems to happen in Iraq, with the new Iraqi police force being a regular target), or by making sure their enemies alienates people through their own action. For every innocent victim, another guerillas may be created. Up to a point, the more repressive the current regime is, the more alluring the guerillas’ alternative becomes.

I don’t know if there is a broadbased resistance movement to the US-led occupation in Iraq right now, but there certainly is a nascent one. And the US Army is hard on its way to recruit people for it, by the way it operates in Iraq. As one senior British army officer said:

Speaking from his base in southern Iraq, the officer said: “My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans’ use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don’t see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are. Their attitude towards the Iraqis is tragic, it’s awful.

“The US troops view things in very simplistic terms. It seems hard for them to reconcile subtleties between who supports what and who doesn’t in Iraq. It’s easier for their soldiers to group all Iraqis as the bad guys. As far as they are concerned Iraq is bandit country and everybody is out to kill them.”

[…]

The American approach was markedly different: “When US troops are attacked with mortars in Baghdad, they use mortar-locating radar to find the firing point and then attack the general area with artillery, even though the area they are attacking may be in the middle of a densely populated residential area.

This attitude is deeply ingrained in the US Army, which at least from World War II onwards has always elevated the safety of its troops above nearly all other considerations. If you are fired upon, you strike back with all the firepower at your disposal; if this causes civilian casualties (“colletoral damage”) than so be it. Which is an attitude that serves it well in a conventional war, where the enemies are known and civilians mostly absent. It works not so well in a guerilla war, where the fighting often takes place in densily populated urban areas…

Making this situation worse, is the fact that the US Army has little to no institutional experience with trying to keep the peace in a largely hostile territory. Whereas the British Army has its decades of hardgained experience in Northern Ireland, since Vietnam the US Army has until now mainly been involved in quick campaigns, avoiding the kind of situation they’re in now in Iraq. In fact, the last situation in which the US Army was involved comparable to Iraq, Somalia, was an unmitigated disaster. As now, it began operations with the best of intentions only to quickly alienate the population there, with the end result being an ignoble retreat after an operation to snatch some Somali warlords which had been causing trouble ended with three helicopters shot down and 18 US soldiers dead, not to mention some 500 hundred Somalis, combattants and non-combattants both.

The same mistakes that were made then, I fear are being made in Iraq now: an overreliance on firepower and technology, little clue as to how to win over the civilian population and an attitude at the top which thinks its troubles are due to some mastermind or other working against them and if only he can be eliminated all its troubles will end. What I fear is another Somalia, or worse, another Vietnam. What I fear is that the US is being sucked into a long running guerilla war, devastating Iraq even more than a civil war would.

On Iraq

Antiwar, War on Iraq
Published on

Why I was opposed to the war on Iraq:

  1. Didn’t trust Bush or Blair.
  2. The long history of US and UK meddling in Iraq, beginning with the UK using poison gas in the 1920ties
    to defeat popular uprisings, through the US’s support of the Ba’ath party’s 1963 coup to the wheelings
    and dealings in the 1980ties, when saddam was our best friend as long as he kept killing Iranians, and
    let’s not forget how the Shi’ite population was encourage to rise up only to betrayed, or the decade long
    sanctions that hurt only the Iraqi people, not Saddam.
  3. The reasons given for the war were phony. It was clear from the start that “Saddam has weapons of mass destruction” and “Saddam has ties with Al Quaida” were so much lies.
  4. Afghanistan. Here we were supposed to believe Iraq would be led into a glorious future, when the
    country that we had been promised this about the year before was largely forgotten.
  5. A healthy skepticism of the idea that democracy can be imposed from above.
  6. A fear of the consequences of what would happen during the war, as well as after. Fortunately, the
    war was less bloody than I had expected, but the same cannot be said of the occupation.
  7. Not much faith in Bush and co not to fuck things up even if they were sincere.

We’re now more then a year further, the war is “over” and the occupation of Iraq an established fact. Yes, yes, you opposed this war, good for you, but you have to deal with reality as it is, not as you should wish it to be. Does this mean you should resign yourself to the occupation and support it, for some values of support? I don’t think so, as my presence at the March 20th anti-occupation demonstration in Amsterdam showed, but I’ve found it hard to articulate why.

It is tempting to give in to the calls to be grownup, mature and sensible and acquiescence in what Bush and Blair have done. Let them get away with their crime. But would you let a burglar live in your neighbour’s house just your neighbour was abusive to his family and the burglar says he has the best interests of the family at heart? I think not. Which is one reason I cannot accept the continuing occupation of Iraq.

The other reason is more complicated, more of a gut feeling than something I can reason out. I don’t think having US troops in Iraq is doing either Iraq or the US much good. Even if they would be under UN control tomorrow, with Bush having given up the presidency in favour of Kerry, I think I’d still oppose the occupation. Because there’s still reason #5 I was opposed to the war, something that nagged at me when bright-eyed and bushy-tailed warliberals tried to sell the war to me.

The idea is either (if you believed in this war from the start) that we in the West have a duty to liberate Iraq from Saddam and make it into a democracy or (if you didn’t) that, since “we broke it, we bought it” and we still have a duty to the Iraqi people to make their country into a democracy. It is an attractive idea, a great cause to be part of, the chance to do some good in the world in a very concrete way.

But…

Do the people who are in power in Iraq share your ideals, your goals? Will the Iraqi people themselves think the same about freedom, democracy and apple pie? Will the occupation not tend to exacerbate already existing problems or even become the focal point for anti-democratic forces? Will the temptation to take “shortcuts”, to e.g. install an “enlightened dictator’ be resisted? Is it actually possible to impose democracy from the outside? The history of US foreign policy in the 20th century, whether led by a Democratic or a Republican president, certainly doesn’t make me optimistic.

And yes, I’m aware that if the coalition troops withdraw from Iraq, there will likely be a civil war, with at best some strongman getting into power and rule Iraq much in thew same way Saddam did. The trouble is, the civil war is already there, with the coalition troops just being another target…It seems to me that at least sometimes, the presence of coalition troops just worsens the situation. Just look at Fallujah.

So what is the answer? I honestly don’t know. What I would try is to start withdrawing the coalition troops, but not to abandon Iraq. Democratic and civic forces need to be supported while those who would want to exploit Iraqi suffering for their own goals, like Al Quida, need to be defeated.

After that…?