August 2004

The Onion “TechCentralStation”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/080904D.html on unleashing the power of the free market to capture Osama Bin Laden. Priceless!

The Allawi government’s decision to ban Al-Jazeera has received a lot of attention. Rather less has been paid to a subsequent announcement of a wide range of rules to be applied by the new Higher Media Commission. Prominent among them is a prohibition of “unwarranted criticism” of Allawi himself. This was reported in Australia’s Financial Review and also in the Financial Times (both subscription only) and also in a number of Arab and antiwar papers, but not in any of the general mainstream press.

For those inclined to a “slippery slope” view of censorship, this is certainly a case study.

Here’s a protest letter from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Another entry in my occasional role as co-ordinator of the Campaign For Real Body Counts; grateful for any comments that might help me make sense of these numbers:

As recently as the April uprising, the Sadrite Al-Mahdi militia was estimated by Iraqi experts to be between 3,000 and 10,000 strong, with the Pentagon suggesting that the hard core of fighters could be as small as 1,000.

In the May offensive against Sadr in Najaf and Karbala, it was once more credibly estimated that 1,500 of the Al-Mahdi Army were killed (note that this reference suggests that, as of the beginning of May, only 1,000-2,000 of the militia were located in or around the city of Najaf).

In the more recent episodes of fighting, official sources have told us that the Najaf branch of Sadr’s forces have taken a further 300 casualties, and lost a further 1200 men captured or surrendered.

So to recap … a force which was meant to have only 1,000 serious fighters, has had 1,800 of them killed and continues to fight on. Sadr had about 2,000 fighters in Najaf, has lost 3,000 of them and continues to fight[1]. Something doesn’t add up (or to put it another way, nothing does add up). Either:

• original estimates substantially underestimated the size of Sadr’s forces, or
• we have substantially overestimated the amount of Sadr’s force which has been neutralised, or
• Sadr has managed to recruit very substantial amounts of force indeed over the last three months.

To be honest, each of these three possibilities looks as bad to me as each of the others. Someone wake me up when it finally becomes acceptable to make comparisons to Vietnam.

Footnote:
[1] Even allowing for the likelihood that the Najaf militia would have been reinforced after May from Sadrite forces elsewhere in the country, I still can’t get this one to pass the laugh test. I’d also note that the 1,500 figure refers to Sadrite casualties in the whole of Iraq and probably shouldn’t be conflated with the Najaf figure of 300, but the qualitative conclusion is unlikely to be affected.

I’ve just finished Elizabeth Hand’s “Mortal Love”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061051705/henryfarrell-20, which I recommend very highly; it’s the best novel she’s ever written. Her earlier work is sometimes extraordinary (if you can find a copy of _Winterlong_, buy it without hesitating) but it’s never quite under control – one has the impression of an artist struggling with her materials and every once in a while being overwhelmed by them. She’s overcome this in her recent shorter work – in particular “Cleopatra Brimstone,” and “The Least Trumps”:http://www.conjunctions.com/njarchive.htm. Both these stories have a technical mastery that was only sporadically present in her early work. They’re acute and sharp.

_Mortal Love_ repeats this success at novel length. It has a wealth of materials – Richard Dadd (lightly disguised), Pre-Raphaelites, “Henry Darger”:http://www.elizabethhand.com/darger.htm style outsider art – but handles them with style, grace and economy.

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So I wander for no particular reason to Hugh Hewitt’s blog and he’s quoting an approving review of his new book from the print edition of the National Review.

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Seriously –

WASHINGTON (CNN) — President Bush said Friday he opposes the use of a family history at colleges or universities as a factor in determining admission.

Bush stated his position [sic] to what’s known as “legacy” in response to a question during a Washington forum for minority journalists called Unity 2004.

He was asked, “Colleges should get rid of legacy?”

Bush responded, “Well I think so, yes. I think it ought to be based upon merit.”

…

Prominent civil rights leaders have also called for an end to the legacy practice, as have some Democrats — including vice presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards.

From the same article:

While Bush clearly stated his opposition to quotas, he also suggested that he was not opposed to affirmative action.

But he didn’t explain what the distinction was.

“I support college affirmatively taking action to get more minorities in their school,” Bush said as the audience laughed.

No explanation given for why they were laughing.

Further to “my last post on idling”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002293.html , I see “via Limited, Inc.”:http://limitedinc.blogspot.com/2004_08_08_limitedinc_archive.html#109202801859090687 that the French electricity company EDF are disciplining an employee (an economist who also happens to be a Lacanian psychoanalyst … only in France!) who has written a book — “Bonjour Paresse”:http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/2841862313/qid%3D1092057870/171-4684613-8604262 — on how to skive at work. The Belfast Telegraph “offers some top tips”:http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/features/story.jsp?story=548650 :

bq. Skiving off is such an ugly expression. Much more preferable are terms such as ‘zero-tasking’ or ‘enabling real-time back-end utilisation’. For those interested in how to zero-task successfully, here are five hot tips:

bq. 1. Never walk down a corridor without a a document in your hands. People with documents in their hands look like hard-working employees heading for an important meeting.

bq. 2. Make sure you carry home lots of documents at night. This gives the impression you work much harder than you do.

bq. 3. Use your computer to look busy. Try “www.IShouldBeWorking.com”:http://www.ishouldbeworking.com/ or “www.BoredAtWork.com”:http://www.boredatwork.com/ for entertainment. The I Should Be Working site has a neat panic button that instantly transfers you to a more business-like page with one click.

bq. 4. Build huge piles of documents around your workspace as only top management can get away with a clean desk. Last year’s work looks just like this year’s – volume counts.

bq. 5. If you have voicemail on your phone, don’t answer it. Let the callers leave a message. Try to return the calls when you know the callers aren’t there. In the end they’ll try to find a solution that doesn’t involve you.

I assume that everyone reads “Juan Cole”:http://www.juancole.com/ , but if not, they should. Belle linked the other day to his coverage of the burned double agent story. But, of course, he is best know for his continuing coverage of Iraq. One popular narrative has the current Iraqi government as the harbingers of peace and democracy, impeded in their efforts by ex-Baathists, Al Qaida, the Mehdi Army, the Iranians, etc, and therefore fully justified in using all the force at their disposal to establish order. If I read Cole correctly there is another, competing story, the credibility of which is bolstered by the arrest warrants against the Chalabis (including the one in charge of Saddam’s trial). Namely that Allawi and his allies are using their position, and their access to US and allied firepower, to crush their competitors for political power. The distinction between these narratives is somewhat blurred, of course, by the fact that the current objects of repressive or judicial action are or include very many people who are indeed rogues, gangsters, fanatics, etc. Still, I wouldn’t bet my house on the first version, in which Allawi and co will turn out to have been the good guys, there will be genuinely competitive elections, the righteous will flourish and the unjust will be punished, and so on.

Timberite and internet expert Eszter Hargittai is quoted in this interesting Washington Post article about improving access to the internet in low-income, urban communities. People are setting up Wi-Fi accounts which can be shared by a number of families. Cool stuff.

The Irish athlete “Cathal Lombard”:http://www.flynnsports.com/athletes-detail.htm?id=155 has “tested positive”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/athletics/3544612.stm for “EPO”:http://www.drugs.com/cons/EPO.html, the now commonly-abused drug that radically boosts red blood cell production. Lombard’s path seems to have been a standard one. Nothing special for most of his career, his 5,000 and 10,000 meter times started improving radically when he changed coaches a couple of years ago. In “interviews”:http://www.irishrunner.com/cathal03.html he put it all down to training smarter and overhauling his approach to running.

Assuming the tests are confirmed, Lombard’s story shows just how phenomenally effective performance-enhancing drugs are these days. Lombard is basically a decent club runner: certainly faster than most of us, but he never won anything in competition and he certainly couldn’t touch the likes of, say, Mark Carroll, the leading Irish men’s middle distance runner of his generation. Just “compare”:http://www.flynnsports.com/athletes-detail.htm?id=24 and “contrast”:http://www.flynnsports.com/athletes-detail.htm?id=155 their respective accomplishments over the years. And yet at the age of 26, Lombard started knocking down his 5 and 10k PBs in 20 or 30 second chunks over a period of months, to the point where “earlier this year”:http://www.irishrunner.com/04stan.html he smashed Mark’s National 10k record by 13 seconds. Now imagine what happens if you give EPO to someone who is really, really talented to begin with.

This sort of thing makes it hard to get really enthusiastic about the upcoming Olympics, because it’s clear that for everyone who’s caught there are a bunch more who evade detection. But which ones? It’s hard to catch even textbook cases using known substances, let alone truly elite competitors who use stuff that testing agencies don’t even know exists. Some sports, like professional cycling, are so obviously soaked in chemicals that everyone has simply agreed to look the other way. On the track and field circuit, there are a lot of fairly clear-cut opinions about who’s clean and who isn’t, and a lot of justified resentment from honest athletes who see their own natural talent and hard work count for nothing courtesy of someone else’s course of injections. They face a harsh choice when they see the likes of Lombard accelerating away from them on the back straight towards Olympic glory, corporate sponsorship and popular adulation.

It seems that Prozac is “being prescribed so widely in the UK”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3545684.stm that there’s a buildup in our drinking water:

bq. Traces of the antidepressant Prozac can be found in the nation’s drinking water, it has been revealed.

bq. An Environment Agency report suggests so many people are taking the drug nowadays it is building up in rivers and groundwater.

See also “The Observer”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1278760,00.html.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” So said George Orwell, in a quote adopted by British blog “Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/ . It is a quote worth recalling in “the light of the decision of the Iraqi government”:http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/9C888134-9481-485A-A675-DD3C50DA224D.htm “to close”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3545514.stm down “Al Jazeera’s”:http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage Baghdad offices for a month. The new “Iraqi foreign minister justified the closure”:http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/A3BF4F15-97CC-4B0B-BAFE-55A1CB3D859F.htm in these terms:

bq. Hoshyar Zibari accused Aljazeera, along with other Arabic language satellite channels, of “incitement” and hiding behind media freedoms.

bq. Zibari said the channel’s coverage of Iraq was “one-sided” and “distorted”.

bq. He made the comments in an interview with an Aljazeera correspondent during an offcial visit to Moscow on Sunday.

bq. “They [Aljazeera and other Arabic channels] have all become incitement channels which are against the interests of security, the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people,” Zibari said.

bq. He added “the new Iraqi government will not tolerate these kinds of intentional breaches and violations”.

Looks like the new Iraqi government doesn’t think people should have the right to tell them what they don’t want to hear.

UPDATE: “This piece”:http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=549052 on Al-Jazeera by David Usborne in the Independent is worth reading.

It’s been argued at length whether the Iraq war as a whole was morally justified. Given that many thousands of people died in the process of removing Saddam’s regime, I don’t think so. On the other hand, if you suppose that Saddam would otherwise have stayed in power for decades, and make some optimistic assumptions about future prospects, it’s possible to come to the opposite conclusion. But what possible moral justification can there be for the two bloody campaigns against Moqtada al-Sadr?

If the figures reported by the US military are true, nearly 2000 of Sadr’s supporters have been killed by US forces (1500 in the first campaign launched by Bremer just before his departure and another 300 in the last couple of days). This is comparable with plausible estimates of the number of people killed by Saddam’s police state annually in its final years.

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The Guardian have “a long extract from Tom Hodgkinson’s How to be Idle”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1277111,00.html , an entertaining polemic against hard-work, time-keeping, self-improvement, and Protestant anxiety: a worthy riposte to those who think the quality of life is best measured in terms of per capita income. It also gives me an excuse to link to Paul Lafargue’s “The Right to be Lazy”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/ .