by Chris Bertram on November 27, 2004
Not only is “child malnutrion”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002900.html soaring in Iraq, but so are deaths from crime. “The Times reports”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1376189,00.html that in Baghdad alone more that 700 people are killed every month:
bq. Shot, stabbed, blown up,burnt: the bodies of Iraqis killed in Baghdad lie piled in overcrowded refrigerators at the city’s central mortuary, their ever-increasing number overwhelming both staff and storage space in a wave that marks the city’s descent into a Hobbesian world of crime and brutality.
bq. “Our morgue was designed to cope with between five and ten bodies a day,” explained Kais Hassan, the harrassed statistician whose job it is to record the capital’s suspicious deaths. He gestured into the open door of a refrigeration unit at the stomach-turning sight of tangled corpses inside, male and female, shaded with the brown and green hues of death. “Now we’re getting 20 to 30 in here a day. It’s a disaster.”
To be fair, the article also reports that the hospital staff cannot agree on whether on not the situation is worse than under Saddam, since they remember the Baathists dumping large numbers of unclaimed bodies at the morgue. No doubt there’ll be blog commentary to the effect that (a) the crime-related death figures are invented by anti-war ideologues and (b) the Coalition can in no way be held responsible for deaths from crime. (via “Juan Cole”:http://www.juancole.com/ )
by John Q on November 26, 2004
One of the nice things about blogging is the occasional contributions from people who have more sense than to start a blog of their own, but are well-informed and passionate about particular subjects of current interest. Over at my blog, I’ve had not one but two such contributions on events in Ukraine.
Following up the post from Tom Oates last week, reader Dan Hardie sent me another (long) piece, by Tarik Amar, who is doing a PhD on Soviet history speaks Ukranian, German and Russian, among other languages, and knows the place very well. Lacking all these qualifications, I pass it on to you with a recommendation to read it.
From what I’ve read, including Tarik’s piece, this all seems very similar to Marcos in the Phillipines and Milosevic in Serbia, and hopefully will be resolved in a similar fashion.
by Chris Bertram on November 24, 2004
There’s some commenter unrest in a thread below about our lack of coverage of recent events in Ukraine. Lacking the resources of the BBC or the NY Times, I’m afraid that we assorted academics and oddballs at CT can’t aspire to comprehensive news coverage and usually (well sometimes!) restrict ourselves to writing about stuff we know something about. Fortunately, when we are ourselves in a shocking state of ignorance, we can sometimes point to people who are not. And such is Nick Barlow, over at “Fistful of Euros”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/ , who has multiple posts on the topic.
by John Q on November 18, 2004
Scandals surrounding the Oil-for-Food program and postwar reconstruction in supply contracts, particularly with respect to Halliburton just keep on going. So I thought I’d repost this piece from six months ago, pointing out that it’s silly to try and score political points out of either of these.
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by Chris Bertram on November 16, 2004
The LA Times reports on “an Iraqi doctor’s experiences”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq15nov15.story inside Fallujah. (via “Brian Leiter”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/ )
by John Q on November 14, 2004
Supporters of both sides in the war in Iraq, and particularly those who are or were associated with the left, have described it as a “war of liberation”. Here, for example, is John Pilger and here is Norman Geras. Presumably Geras and Pilger each think the other is wrong.
The obvious position for an opponent of the war is that both are wrong. On reflection though, I think that Geras and Pilger are both right.
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by Chris Bertram on November 11, 2004
With so many of the usual suspects showering opprobrium on the still-warm Arafat, it is perhaps worth raising the issue of consistency. If Arafat’s past included some of the items on Iyad Allawi’s _curriculum vitae_ then those acts would certainly have been added to the bills of indictment that feature on so many blogs. [1] Andrew Gilligan (formerly of the Today Programme, Hutton Report etc.) has “an article on Allawi”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=5239&issue=2004-11-13 in the latest Spectator. A snippet
bq. With a friend, Adel Abdul Mahdi, he arranged to kidnap the dean of the university to publicise the Baath cause. ‘We took Iraq’s first hostages,’ recalls Mr Abdul Mahdi, now Iraq’s finance minister, nostalgically. The two men did time for the offence, until a Baathist coup got them back out again.
And later ….
bq. The INA’s most controversial operation during this period was a campaign of what can only be termed terrorism against civilians. In 1994 and 1995 a series of bombings at cinemas, mosques and other public places in Baghdad claimed up to 100 civilian lives. The leading British Iraq expert, Patrick Cockburn, obtained a videotape of one of the bombers, Abu Amneh al-Khadami, speaking from his place of refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan, claiming that the attacks had been ordered and orchestrated by Adnan Nuri, the INA’s Kurdistan director of operations — an account that has not been seriously disputed.
He may be a bastard, but at least he’s our bastard?
fn1. Of course Arafat’s biography does include many disreputable actions.
by John Q on November 11, 2004
November 11 marks the armistice that was supposed to bring an end to the Great War in 1918. In fact, it was little more than a temporary and partial truce in a war that has continued, in one form or another, until the present. Hitler’s War and the various Cold War conflicts were direct continuations of the first Great War, and we are even now dealing with the consequences of the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot agreement.
The Great War was at the root of most of the catastrophes that befell the human race in the 20th century. Communism, Nazism and various forms of virulent nationalism all derived their justification from the ten million dead of 1914-18. Even the apparently hopeful projects that emerged from the war, from the League of Nations to the creation of new states like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia ended in failure or worse. And along with war, conquest and famine came the pestilence of the Spanish Flu, which killed many more millions[1].
And yet this catastrophe was brought about under the leadership of politicians remarkable for their ordinariness. Nothing about Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Bethmann Holllweg or the other leaders on both sides marks them out for the company of Attila or Tamerlane or Stalin. How could men like these continue grinding their populations through years of pointless slaughter, and what led people to follow them? In retrospect, it is surely clear that both sides would have been better if peace had been made on the basis of any of the proposals put up in 1917 on the general basis of of “no annexations or indemnities”. The same was true, in reality, at any time from the outbreak of war in 1914 until the final collapse of the Central Powers, and even then the terms of 1917 would have been better for all than those of Versailles. We should think about this every time we are called to war with sweet-sounding slogans.
War is among the greatest of crimes. It may be the lesser evil on rare occasions, but it is always a crime. On Remembrance Day and always, this is what we should remember.
fn1. It’s not clear whether the War exacerbated the pandemic, for example through massive movements of people and widespread privation. But it seems right to consider them together when we remember the War.
by John Q on November 9, 2004
by John Q on November 8, 2004
With Fallujah being pounded to bits, jihadi and insurgent attacks everywhere and a state of emergency, this may seem like a bad time to discuss the Iraqi elections, but there’s no reason to suppose that there’s going to be a better one.
In the Washington Post, Marina Ottaway develops concerns I’ve expressed previously about the possibility that the Iraqi election will degenerate into a Yes-No vote on a unified slate of candidates with a predetermined sharing of the spoils (thanks to Jack Strocchi for the link). Apparently the US Embassy/shadow government is backing this idea. It seems unbelievable that anyone on the US side could see this as a good idea (of course, it makes great sense for Allawi who would be wiped out in a competitive election), but this kind of thing has been the pattern at every previous stage of the occupation.
by Maria on October 20, 2004
Pop quiz: name a wily old political operator who relies on the French Right to keep him out of jail and in power indefinitely while he out-manoeuvres the opposition and bamboozles the tax-payer.
No, not Jacques Chirac. His buddy Gaston Flosse, aka Papa Flosse, the president-in-waiting of French Polynesia. Chirac’s unbending desire to keep Flosse in power has thrown French Polynesia into a political and institutional crisis, sparking the biggest protests ever seen in Tahiti, and accusations by the French Left of a legal coup d’etat.
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by Eszter Hargittai on October 7, 2004
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been announced for 2004. I started compiling a post about it, but found myself sending emails to my father for clarification. He is an expert on the topic of Nobel Prizes (having written a book about it based on interviews with over 70 Nobel Laureates) so I decided to invite him to write a little blurb here for us. Given his expertise in the topic and the Hungarian connection of one of this year’s laureates, he has spent the last day and a half giving interviews to various media outlets in Hungary. I have edited his post  with his permission  by shifting some of the science information into a footnote to focus the attention on another component of his note. My father is Professor of Chemistry at the Budapest University of Technology.
Some experiences beyond chemistry of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry by István Hargittai
On October 6 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2004 was announced. The citation was, “for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.” The recipients were Aaron Ciechanover (b. 1947 in Israel), a professor of medical sciences at the Technion – the Israel Institute of Technology, Avram Hershko (b. Herskó Ferenc 1937 in Hungary), also a professor of medical sciences at the Technion, and Irwin Rose (b. 1926), an American professor, formerly at the Fox Chase Cancer Research Center in Philadelphia.[1]
There is an interesting side issue with Avram Hershko in that he was born in Karcag, Hungary, and then emigrated with his family in 1950 to Israel. He is one of several scientists of Hungarian origin who became famous and much recognized abroad. There are various counts of Hungarian Nobel laureates, but here is what the Prime Minister of Hungary allegedly said on the day of the chemistry prize announcement: He welcomed the news by referring to Hershko as the fourteenth Hungarian Nobel laureate and stressed that Hershko has kept his Hungarian name and language.
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by John Q on September 26, 2004
I finally went to see Fahrenheit 9/11. I won’t give a review as I don’t have much to add to what lots of others have already said. What struck me about the film is how much worse things have become, and how much more has come out, in the time since the film was made (I haven’t checked but the film seemed to end around the time of the Fallujah atrocities and the subsequent abortive assault).
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by John Q on September 22, 2004
Daniel Akst contributes yet another in a seemingly endless series of articles reminding American workers that they should “stop whining”, since they are far better off than were their forebears during the Great Depression.
What is striking about this genre is that the choice of the Depression is not an accident. You have to go back that far to get a comparison that gives a clear-cut, unqualified and substantial improvement in the pay and conditions of US workers across the board. Real hourly wages for men with high school education are now around the levels prevailing in the 1950s[1]. Since it’s difficult to make comparisons with the war decade of the 1940s, it’s necessary to go back to the 1930s to get a clear-cut improvement.
Correction and apology I got so annoyed by the appearance of the Depression comparison, that I failed to read the entire article properly. Akst ends by pointing out
It is noteworthy that in news media coverage of job stress, the emphasis is usually on educated middle-class professionals who, in fact, have many choices – including a lower-pressure job or simply working less. All this hand-wringing over the suffering of the relatively fortunate only distracts us from the plight of Americans whose work lives are really stressful: those who are paid $7 or $8 an hour, don’t have health insurance and lack the skills or education to better their lot.
Life for these workers is a tightrope act without a net, so the least that we lucky ones can do is stop whining. Better yet, we can honor their labor by adopting social policies, like national health insurance, a higher minimum wage and tougher limits on unskilled immigration, that will ease their struggle. It will cost us something, of course. But for the working poor, yoga won’t cut it.
which makes a lot of the points I would have wanted. I withdraw my criticism of Akst and apologise for misreading him. Thanks to commenter Steve Carr for pointing this out. (As there has been plenty of discussion, I’ll leave the rest of the post unchanged for the record) end correction
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by John Q on September 21, 2004
The idea that the forthcoming US election would be a good one to lose keeps on spreading. Here’s Andrew Sullivan
if Bush wins and heads into a real, live second Vietnam in Iraq, his party will split, the country will become even more bitterly polarized than now (especially if he’s re-elected because he’s not Kerry) and he’ll become another end-of-career Lyndon Johnson.
In my view, any rational supporter of the Republican party should hope for Bush’s defeat, since a victory will be disastrous for all concerned. A Kerry victory would be better for the United States and the world, but not necessarily for the long-term interests of the Democratic party.
Some updates over the fold
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