It is if you’re holding 100-billion Zimbabwean dollars which, incidentally, is less than the price of a loaf of bread in that country today.
What to do, what to do? Well Zimbabwe has decided to simply knock 10-zeroes off its currency. Now, $100-billion becomes a more manageable one dollar, for the next few days at least.
Big deal. Economists estimate that the country’s annual inflation rate is as much as six times higher than the officially acknowledged 2.2-million per cent rate. 2.2 million versus 12.5 million, who cares? It doesn’t matter who’s right, it really doesn’t.
There’s only one way out for Zimbabwe and that entails President Robert Mugabe either swinging from the end of a rope or locked away in some dungeon. He knows it and so does everyone else. Of course that would also mean pretty much the same fate for Mugabe’s cronies and minions which include his murderous military and security services. They’re propping him up because their only way out is decidedly unpleasant.
Mugabe is now in power sharing talks with the country’s political opposition but, out of necessity, Mugabe insists that any deal must leave him as leader of the new government. To Mugabe, leader means dictator and so he’s essentially asking the opposition to consign itself to irrelevancy and place themselves at the mercy of his security forces. Ouch, ouch and ouch.
For the sake of the people of Zimbabwe this dark farce must stop but there is too much force defending him within the country and a woeful lack of resolve to intervene by the leaders of Zimbabwe’s neighbours.
If only Zimbabwe had oil.
John McCain clings to “the surge” of US troops into Iraq as proof that 1) America is winning in Iraq and 2) that he’s the best man to serve as America’s next president.
The success line is built on two facts – the US sent an additional 30,000 soldiers to Iraq and violence in that country subsided. It’s highly convenient for McCain to claim that one led to the other, convenient but also highly misleading.
There are a number of reasons for the drop in violence in Iraq but there’s also an awful lot of wishful thinking thrown in for good measure by those with a personal stake in the surge.
We know that a major cause for the drop in violence in Baghdad has been the conclusion of ethnic cleansing. The Shiites have taken over the city and the Sunni and other minorities have been “cleansed” to their own, ethnic enclaves. The surge did nothing to stop much less reverse the ethnic cleansing of Iraq’s main city.
Another major cause for the drop in violence has to be credited to Muqtada al Sadr who has reined in his powerful Shiite militia, the Mahdi army. The good news is that al Sadr has told his forces to lay low. The bad news is that al Sadr has told his forces to lay low. The fuse on that little bomb may have been put out but the guy holding it still has a pocketful of matches.
Then there’s the Sunni resistance which has, at the moment, loaded up with American weapons and American cash to fight their fellow Sunnis, the al-Qaeda terrorists. Now that al-Qaeda has decided to refocus its efforts on Pakistan and Afghanistan, the resistance is pushing on something of an open door. The good news is that the Sunni resistance is winning. The bad news is that the Sunni resistance is winning. You see, the resistance has all along said, quite openly, that they’ve only called a temporary truce in their battle with the Americas and the Shiite militias. That was enough, however, for the US forces to re-arm, re-equip and heavily fund their once and future adversaries.
If the surge had really worked it would have meant somehow defanging the militias and the resistance. The whole political reconciliation business was intended to lay the groundwork for an end to ethnic violence but that hasn’t happened.
The spoiler is America itself. The United States wants Iraq to grant it a near-permanent and autonomous military presence in that country. The Pentagon envisions expanding its existing 32-bases to 60 in total. That, kids, is a clear statement that America has no intention of leaving or even limiting its military dominion over Iraq any time soon. There’s a reason why the US has built its largest embassy in the world in Baghdad, on a site bigger than the Vatican itself.
This is a demand that neither Sunni nor Shia can accept. America will need one hell of a lot more than a paltry surge if it incites Arab Iraq to unite and rise up against it.
In Iraq, all eyes are on America. With Obama leading McCain in the polls it probably suits the interests of the Sunni resistance and the Shiite militias to lay low for the time being. Why fight if not fighting is the best way to rid the country of foreign forces? There’ll be plenty of time for the Sunni and Shiite to hash out their differences once American forces are gone. Those people aren’t going anywhere, are they?
But this is an election year and we’re talking about an electorate not very good at digesting nuance. Surge works, mmmm goood! It may even be that John McCain truly believes it’s working. After all he believes that Iran is training al-Qaeda and that the terrorists are Shiite, not Sunni, and that Iraq shares a border with Pakistan. This guy doesn’t know which way is up but, then again, he’s only running to be president.
A particularly malevolent creature has attacked me claiming that I don’t “support the troops” in Afghanistan. This vermin equates my criticisms of the “War on Terror” with my regard for Canada’s forces, at home and abroad.
I do support Canada’s forces whether in the Middle East, at sea on the Atlantic or in the skies over Cold Lake. I come from a military family and am a former serviceman myself. That said, I know there is nothing contradictory in the warrior-pacifist. Real soldiers of the kind this country and our allies have counted on in their darkest moments utterly abhor war and only begrudgingly accept that it is sometimes, but only sometimes necessary.
There are those who pound their chests and bang their drums when our soldiers take the field. These types inevitably make loud noises but they’re always at a safe distance when they do it. Their bravery is hollow and vicarious and phony. It is they who find nobility in the squalor and morbidity of high-tech slaughter. I don’t. I see nothing lofty or noble in a 120 mm. tank round smashing into a mud hut or a thousand-pound high explosive aerial bomb detonating in a residential compound. Those things are merely gunnery and nothing more. That’s not fighting, just range shooting when there is no tank firing back, no fighter defending the target.
I support our troops but I loathe what we’ve done to them and what we’ve asked of them. In truth, we have betrayed them which is, of itself, a very time-honoured tradition.
I am not naive about the nature of warfare. Clausewitz described war as an extension of politics, a means to achieve political goals when diplomatic measures have failed. Almost all wars incorporate political dimensions. That said, there is a vital distinction between wars fought to achieve political objectives of the state and wars exploited to benefit the political fortunes of individuals. The War on Terror, in all its manifestations, falls squarely in the second category which undermines its legitimacy.
Let’s be honest. Canada went into Afghanistan in order not to go into Iraq. We went into Afghanistan to appease Washington and to stand with some of our NATO allies, most of whom also went to Afghanistan to mollify the Bush regime. That was the political dimension of Ottawa’s war plan.
The Commander in Chief of the Global War Without End on Terror, George w. BushCheney conducted America’s war to advance his political fortunes, not the political objectives of the United States. The war, after all, was an armed response to the attacks on America by extremists on 9/11. That framed America’s political objectives of the war: get bin Laden, crush al-Qaeda. BushCheney manipulated the tragic opportunity in order to serve their personal political interests at the expense of their nation’s. BushCheney all but abandoned America’s “just war” in order to pursue their own interests in a decidedly unjust war, an illegal war, a war of aggression against the oil rich nation of Iraq. It was because it was unjust and illegal that the regime had to doctor intelligence and contrive patently false justifications for their criminal acts.
The element of contrivance extends throughout the War on Terror. It is a powerful element in the “mission” in Afghanistan today. What is contrived about Afghanistan? Just about everything when you examine it closely.
Our effort at counterinsurgency warfare is pure contrivance. We stand in a country several times larger than Iraq facing a terrorist movement, a nationalist insurgency, a broad criminal subculture shackled firmly to a central government by a fundamentalist warlord-driven power structure and we dump the problem on a grotesquely understrength force. In that lies the nub of the betrayal of our armed forces. Sending a minuscule force of Canadian soldiers to Kandahar into the jaws of these circumstances is beyond anything we have any right to ask of them. Supporting this mission is not supporting the troops but the very opposite.
The best military minds on counterinsurgency warfare have a prescribed ratio of counterinsurgents to populace of about 1:25. That is one properly trained, properly equipped and properly led infantryman for every 25 civilians. In Kandahar province that would mean a minimum force of 25,000 and up to 50,000 combat troops contrasted with the 1,000-strong combat group we actually have deployed. That is a betrayal of our fine soldiers.
Canada ought not to have committed our forces to Kandahar at all without ensuring they would be adequate in numbers to meet the tasks given them. That would have necessitated an effort similar to the force we mustered during the Korean War.
Why the need for so many troops? They’re needed in order to wrest control of the countryside from the insurgents. The civilians must be protected from the terrorists and the insurgents (and the corrupt Afghan security services to boot) if we’re to have any hope of winning the “hearts and minds” of the people. If we’re not in their villages at night when the Taliban come calling, how do we expect them to resist the insurgents? Instead we play directly into their hands.
It’s a now all-too-common scenario. A friendly patrol is brought under fire from a village or compound. The insurgents have infiltrated the villagers’ homes because there was no force present to stop them. We identify the source of the hostile fire and then call in airstrikes or artillery or tank fire to destroy the enemy. If we’re lucky we kill some or most of the enemy but often cause civilian casualties at the same time. If we’re not so lucky we may just kill a lot of civilians and miss the bad guys all together.
The civilians see themselves as beset by both sides but they lay the blame for the dead on the side that actually killed them and that’s often us. They’re not interested in our justifications for the death of their family members. They’re not interested in how we rationalize that it’s all the insurgents’ fault. We did the killing and their tribal codes demand the deaths be avenged.
Our comedians masquerading as generals puff themselves up and berate the insurgents as cowards for exploiting the civilians but there’s plenty of cowardice lying at the feet of these generals themselves. These careerists are too cowardly to stand up and defend their troops by lambasting their equally cowardly political bosses for putting these soldiers in such an awful, understrength position in the first place.
These young men and women honour us and our country by their commitment and sacrifice and perseverence. We repay them by saddling them with a mission they cannot hope to achieve. So far our casualty rates have been low enough that morale hasn’t collapsed and yet I recently heard the early grumbling from one veteran, a tanker. Just because we’re not American, don’t get lulled into thinking our soldiers will take anything thrown at them.
Let’s get something straight. You don’t support the troops with magnetic plastic decals stuck to your trunk lid. You don’t support the troops by blindly backing the “mission.” You support the troops by doing what almost no one is doing today – by standing up for them and demanding that our political leaders and our military leaders either give them what they need to meet the challenges we’ve imposed on them or else get them out of there.
This is not a partisan issue. Conservative or Liberal, it makes no matter. We all owe it to these young people to support them and we owe that above and regardless of our political affiliations.
My father and mother, shortly before Dad shipped out to England. He suffered massive wounds in the war that nearly claimed him many times in the decades that followed. A man of great strength and enormous goodwill, who accomplished much and helped so many, now lost to us at age 90.
“Throughout the twentieth century, small groups of men seized control of great nations, built armies and arsenals, and set out to dominate the weak and intimidate the world.”
– President George w. Bush, 2003 State of the Union Address
Oh Johnny boy, this has got to sting.
Iraqi prime minister Nouri al Maliki has told Der Spiegel that Barack Obama’s 16-month timeframe for withdrawal of American forces from Iraq is spot on:
“Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki supports US presidential candidate Barack Obama’s plan to withdraw US troops from Iraq within 16 months. When asked in and interview with SPIEGEL when he thinks US troops should leave Iraq, Maliki responded “as soon as possible, as far as we are concerned.” He then continued: “US presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”
Oops, that isn’t going to sit well for John, 100-Years War, McCain.
“…apparently referring to Republican candidate John McCain’s more open-ended Iraq policy, Maliki said: “Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems.”
Iraq, Maliki went on to say, “would like to see the establishment of a long-term strategic treaty with the United States, which would govern the basic aspects of our economic and cultural relations.” He also emphasized though that the security agreement between the two countries should only “remain in effect in the short term.”
Maliki went on to say that he wasn’t expressly endorsing Obama, just his policy on Iraq.
“So far the Americans have had trouble agreeing to a concrete timetable for withdrawal, because they feel it would appear tantamount to an admission of defeat,” Maliki told SPIEGEL.
Has Washington’s troop surge in Iraq truly succeeded as so insistently claimed? Violence on the streets of Iraqi cities has abated and attacks on US forces there have diminished. That is undisputed. But has this become yet another example of “Mission Accomplished” triumphalism?
I suppose it depends what you read, who you listen to, what you’re willing to believe.
If you believe George w. Bush, the man whose greatest skill of the past seven years has been lying through his teeth, the surge has been an unqualified success, a “Hail Mary” pass to redeem his presidential legacy. If you believe what you read or hear in the North American media, the surge has at least the appearance of success. That tends to be as far as most of us go. However there are others who don’t buy it, among them a lot of Iraqis.
What are the key components of the surge success? One has been the schism between Iraq’s Sunni resistance and the mainly foreign al Qaeda terrorists. The two worked more or less cooperatively for a few years but Iraq’s Sunni fighters have now turned against their former comrades and are hunting them down.
Under the American military’s “Awakening” programme, the Sunni resistance groups are now receiving arms and cash from the Americans as compensation for crushing al Qaeda. These groups, however, have repeatedly made clear their intention to once again turn on their American benefactors in the future.
Then there’s the Shiite militias. They fall into two main groups, the Badrs and the Sadrs. The Badr brigades are closely aligned to the Iranians. They’re also Iraqi prime minister Nouri al Maliki’s team. That relationship has seen the Badr boys infiltrate Iraq’s security services with entirely predictable and frequently murderous results. Their chief competition is the Sadr militia who more or less follow bad boy cleric Muqtada al Sadr, al Maliki’s main rival and nemesis.
The second element of the success of the troop surge has been the retreat of the Sadr militias. A couple of months back, al Maliki sent the Iraqi army to destroy them in Mosul but he failed, even after American intervention.
There’s a growing sense of unease at the moment about the Sadr militia and what they’re really up to. Some suspect they’ve collaborated with the Sunni resistance in laying low, awaiting the outcome of the American election and preparing to pounce should Bush/Cheney attack Iran.
In effect, heralding success of the troop surge may be little more than whistling past the graveyard. There can be no success until Iraq’s armed camps are brought to heel, until they turn in their arms and their leadership dissolves. Until then, the game is still very much afoot.
The American media never seem to miss a chance to point out an Obama flip-flop, no matter how minor. John McCain, on the other hand, flops around like a fish hauled up on a dock and gets a pass on it.
Here’s another example, one of so very many. On Friday, McCain backtracked on a campaign pledge to set aggressive, national emissions standards for automobiles. Instead he said he endorsed the right of individual states to set their own. Why? Because the old bugger was in Michigan, land of the SUV and 350 pick-ups.
An
ABC News poll has found that
45% of Americans surveyed now
believe that the Afghanistan war just isn’t worth fighting any longer.
51% now believe the US military effort in that country has been unsuccessful. The numbers reflect a sharp slump from the massive support received from the American people when the war began in 2001.
“For Sholom Keller, a veteran who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq, it comes as no surprise that support for the war in Afghanistan is fading.
“I’m not shocked at all that American support is waning,” Keller told ABC News.com. “If we are in Afghanistan because the U.S. was attacked on Sept. 11, then I want to see the perpetrators captured and brought to justice.
“If we’re not finding them in Afghanistan, then I don’t know why we’re there,” he added. “And if they are there I want to know why we haven’t found them in the last seven years if they’ve been giving troops the right intelligence and missions.”
The poll is reflective of the Achilles’ Heel of counter-insurgency war waged by any democracy; the insurgents merely have to win the “hearts and minds” of their own people and they can take their time doing it while the foreign military force cannot afford to lose either in-country or at home and must win decisively and reasonably quickly. Time is on the side of the home team, not the visitors and, in counter-insurgency warfare, time is very much “of the essence.”
Despite all the historical precedents and even the clear warnings of people like General David Petraeus, American and NATO leaders never let the issue of “time” cross their lips.
The Americans don’t acknowledge the time factor because that would mean they might have to account for the losing effort they’ve made since 2001 which would, in turn, lead to why they lied themselves out of Afghanistan and into Iraq which would then lead to why they ignored sound military advice and pursued their sophomoric ideology in waging that war.
Canadian and other NATO nation leaders don’t acknowledge the time factor either because that would mean they too might have to account for the losing effort they’ve made since 2001 which would, in turn, lead to why they went to Afghanistan in the first place and why they continued to carry water for the White House well after it became clear that we’d all been lied to about Iraq and that Washington, the ally we were ostensibly in Kandahar to support, had all but completely turned its own back on Afghanistan.
Paul Martin was duped into expanding the Canadian mission from Kabul into Kandahar by a swaggering Newf who was “all hat and no cattle” and who has now slipped away into retirement having waged an enormously successful PR campaign and a disastrous military one. Monica Harper, well, I don’t need to go into that. Our own Stephane Dion? When it came time to stand up for principle he decided he wasn’t ready to fight an election. He put his personal political fortunes ahead of the lives of our soldiers and capitulated to an extension of “the mission” to 2011 and, in reality, well beyond.
So the irony is that we’re neatly locked in to the mission in Afghanistan while the American people steadily sour on it. We’ll continue to squander the lives of our soldiers while ensuring they’ll never win, like Hillier, leaving the failure for someone else to shoulder.
“Ensuring they’ll never win?” Sounds a trifle “over the top” doesn’t it? Yet that’s just what we’re doing. We don’t have a “winning army” of 500,000-800,000 soldiers and, no matter what happens in Iraq, it’s unlikely we’ll ever have a quarter of that force. We haven’t yet acknowledged much less excised the cancer spreading through that country, the “nexus” of a corrupt government; warlords, drug barons and other criminals; and the insurgents themselves. That’s right, they’re all connected. Sometimes they’re actually indistinguishable. We aren’t willing, at least not yet, to recognize that this has grown into a regional war, not just in the southern, Pashtun regions of Afghanistan but into the greater region extending from Pakistan through to Iran. We don’t have any game plan for dealing with a much wider war even as that draws closer to our lines.
NATO member support for the Afghan war is flagging. Those already in are looking for the exits and those who’ve stayed out look on this debacle and breathe a quiet sigh of relief.
We’re stuck in a time warp, continuing to fight a Cold War “military” war, insanely expecting the opposition to come out and stand up so we can bomb and shell them into oblivion while pretty much ignoring their war, the political war, the war that truly matters and that will decide the outcome of this conflict at the end of the day.
In these conditions it’s hardly likely that American support for the Afghan war can or will be rebuilt. What we need to worry about is when their loss of confidence in “the mission” will reach political critical mass.
Every now and then it’s nice to do a good turn for our tight-ass, right-wing friends – the sort that seem to pervade internet chat rooms. The Russians now have these types in their sights.
Enter the SlutBot, a Russian software robot properly known as CyberLover. From the Sydney Morning Herald:
“Romantic comedies. Reality television. Online dating websites. Speed dating. Documentaries about American women and their sexual obsessions with toasters. There is no limit to the amount of vocalised love being shared across every available medium, in particular the internet.
Cue CyberLover, a Russian software robot (known as a “bot”) that poses as a would-be paramour in sex chatrooms. While the use of love to hoodwink unsuspecting dorks is as old as the dirt, the use of so-called slutbots is a relatively new innovation.
According to a report from the tech site PC Tools, the slutbot can conduct automated “flirtatious” conversations with up to 10 people in 30 minutes. During conversations it is programmed to garner personal information and lure correspondents to other websites where they are infected with malware (malicious software).
“CyberLover demonstrates an unprecedented level of social engineering,” an expert in software designed to damage computer systems, Sergei Shevchenko, told the site.
“It employs highly intelligent and customised dialogue to target users of social networking systems.”
It can operate in a number of different personality modes, varying from “romantic lover” to the particularly appealing “sexual predator”. Not to mention that CyberLover could present an even greater risk if paired with emerging technology.
Updating your virus protection and limiting the amount of personal information you give out to strangers on the web are the best ways to protect yourself from CyberLover at the moment, PC Tools says.
However, it offers no advice on what to do if the minxbot is in your lounge room, dressed in a small black dress and patent leather pumps, smiling demurely as it surreptitiously uploads your credit card details to a server in Vladivostok.”
The Mound of Sound 