A timeline to think upon

If Iran Were America (And We Were Iran): A Timeline

This is a very well done example of reversing protagonists and putting shoes on other feet. It’s also a useful pointer for people who have been previously unaware of just how much throttling of autonomous political movements in ex-colonial resource-rich states has been done by the industrial powers of the West over generations.

Via Pandagon.

Filed under: economics, history, islamophobia, middle east

Sometimes, sarcasm is the only possible response

This news headline – Iraq now ranked second among world’s failed states – seems to have left many in the blogosphere lost for words. But as Amanda Marcotte points out, if we don’t talk it up, it can be spun as people not really caring that the whole venture in Iraq is a clusterfuck.

The Shrub can’t do anything right, can he? As of today, we’ve spent $436,458,000,000 on this adventure war, and still Bush failed to make Iraq the #1 most fucked-up country on the planet. Sudan skidded into first, and I guarantee you, they did it at a fraction of the cost.

Harsh but fair.

Filed under: authoritarianism, middle east, war

What happened to women’s rights in Iraq?

There were some long involved threads on ozblogs last week about Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Kim at LP, and those of us who agreed with her, got piled upon (twice) for disagreeing with some of Hirsi Ali’s suggestions about how to best end the oppression of women in Islamic cultures. The offended were a whole bunch of WOT-hawks who seem to think that Hirsi Ali’s many undeniable strengths and talents mean that somehow her opinions, agenda and tactics are above criticism. Their argument seemed to be that because Hirsi Ali has suffered sexist oppression justified by reference to Islam and she speaks of how such oppression needs to end through curtailing the power of Islam, that therefore her calls to eradicate Islam are the only plans for ending sexist oppression that should be listened to.

I’m not going to flinch away from mentioning female genital mutilation (FGM) here, because that seemed to be a core of the outrage: how could we criticise a women who wanted to end the genital cutting and mutilation of little girls? Of course, we never criticised Hirsi Ali wanting to end FGM: who doesn’t want to see the end of harmful physical mutilations?

We merely argued that her particular emphases and tactics seemed counterproductive rather than genuinely helpful to the goal of eradicating such harmful practices as infibulation (and never even got a chance to mention that by far the bulk of genital cutting is simple ritual labial marking which leaves minimal scarring on a par with piercing an ear, or that excision of the top part of the clitoral hood actually enhances sexual pleasure rather than diminishing it).

So, not waving away FGM, but now it’s back to the larger picture of women’s oppression by traditionalist male hierarchies. We can all agree that sexist oppression justified by religious teachings needs to end. Where many people have a problem with Hirsi Ali’s speeches on this is that she singles Islam out as somehow uniquely prone to being distorted by male hierarchies seeking to rationalise and justify the systemic oppression of women.

Filed under: authoritarianism, blogging, interblog, islamophobia, middle east, religion, war

Iraq too dangerous for Harry (and his tank unit)

Shorter desperate Whitehall spin: but the rest of you will be just fine, honest, even if you’re not in a tank unit, and of course the COW is totally winning in Iraq. [news story]
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Chris Heyman, an ex-military editor of a book about the UK Armed Forces channels Sir Humphrey for Townhall.com

“Soldiers will say: ‘If it’s too dangerous for Prince Harry, then it’s too dangerous for me. Is his life worth more than mine?’ Well, from a political point of view, yes. But from a morale point of view the answer is no,” Heyman said.

Heyman goes on to point out that without combat experience in Iraq or Afghanistan, Harry will be one of the only soldiers of his generation who will not have served in this conflict, which will squelch his military credibility and hopes for future merit-based promotion and a genuine Army career. He’ll have to be prepared for seeing this picture from 1993 of him playing tank commander suddenly appear wherever he goes on (protected) duty.

Image Credit: CNN

Filed under: Sociology, middle east, war

Are we allowed to disagree with Uncle Sam?

Tim Dunlop over at Road to Surfdom analyses the Australia-US alliance and the growing rift between the PM and the electorate about how we handle ourselves in that alliance.

This is basically handing our foreign policy decisions to the United States. It is saying that there are no circumstances under which it is acceptable for us to act independently of them. That’s not an alliance: it’s an arranged marriage between Imam and a thirteen-year old child bride.

For a blog that often has huge ideological spats occurring there, there’s almost no dissent to Tim’s analysis from the commentors. A few choice one-liners:

Filed under: middle east, war

How to squander goodwill amongst the liberated

Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, summarising part of his book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, argues that one large contributor to the current distrust and militancy amongst Iraqis is the way that the Bush Administration chose people to oversee the transition from dictatorship to democracy under the aegis of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Jim O’Beirne of the Pentagon vetted who went, and the people he passed as suitable were mostly not qualified experts in the Middle-East or post-conflict reconstruction, but they were known Bush loyalists:

A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance — but had applied for a White House job — was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget, even though they didn’t have a background in accounting.

The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest is now regarded by many people involved in the 3 1/2 -year effort to stabilize and rebuild Iraq as one of the Bush administration’s gravest errors. Many of those selected because of their political fidelity spent their time trying to impose a conservative agenda on the postwar occupation, which sidetracked more important reconstruction efforts and squandered goodwill among the Iraqi people, according to many people who participated in the reconstruction effort.

Filed under: Politics, middle east