Month: April 2003

Philip Greenspun asks:  Should we break up Iraq if so many inside the country hate each other?  What are the pros and cons of breaking up Iraq into three regions?  A big reason to do this is that smaller nations would be more likely to become dependent on the US and easier to control.   It would also reward the Kurds for their loyalty.  A con is that many of the nations in the region would get mad at us for doing it (however, they are already mad at us so the downside is limited).  What do you think? [John Robb’s Radio Weblog]

We should let the Iraqis decide. Also, it’s a bad idea to refer to the Kurds’ “loyalty.” They aren’t our employees or slaves, they are independent people and as such are loyal to themselves. If people start thinking someone is loyal to them, they’ll just be disappointed and angry when that someone starts to act independently. This phenomenon can be seen in the attitude of Crusaders towards the French for having the nerve to act like a sovereign nation.

Journalist Celebrates Freedom…. …by looting Iraq. Boston Herald reporter Jules Crittenden busted with five-foot painting taken from one of Saddam’s palaces. No word on whether it was that velvet sword-and-sorcery babe spotted in Uday’s apartment. [Hit & Run]

From the article in the Boston Globe (presumably a competitor:

bq. US Customs officials confiscated a large painting that a Boston Herald reporter, Jules Crittenden, brought back as a souvenir from the war in Iraq, but the artwork is not valuable enough to merit prosecution, a law enforcement official said yesterday

Maybe someone should ask the Iraqis what they think of that? After all, he committed a crime in Iraq, not the United States.

Africa ‘needs better malaria drugs’. Health campaigners are calling for more effective, but more expensive, antimalarial drugs to be made available across Africa. [BBC News | Front Page | UK Edition]

Naturally the “health campaigners” are interested only in drugs to treat malaria (which would be paid for by people in other countries) and not at all in eradicating malaria so that treatment isn’t required. That’s not surprising because the way to get rid of malaria is to use DDT to kill the mosquitos that carry it. Unfortunately the “health campaigners” are almost always socialists, and being an ecofreak has become an integral part of the socialist dogma. Despite their pretense of concern, groups like the World Health Organization would rather bankrupt nations and see millions of children die rather than promote the use of an evil chemical.

“Echelon: The Secret Power” documentary reviewed in Variety [Politech]

I doubt this film will be seen in the US any time soon.

Iraqi Regime May Have Tried to Surrender, But US Bombed Instead. According to ABC news, Hussein sent his head of intelligence, Gen. Taher Haboush, to meet and to try to work out a surrender deal with a tribal chieftain who had previously worked with the CIA. After Gen. Haboush, left the house of the intermediary, the chieftain apparently tried to get in touch with his CIA contact on a satellite telephone and mentioned the name of Gen Haboush. U.S. military intelligence apparently intercepted the call and sent in an air-strike to bomb the house. ABC reports that the chieftain and 17 of his family members died during the attack, but Gen. Haboush escaped uninjured. The incident reportedly occurred on April 11. [LewRockwell.com]

It remains to be seen whether this is true or not, but if it is I wouldn’t be surprised. After all, the US government admitted before the war began that the invasion would proceed as planned even if the Iraqis did try to surrender.

Revealed: Russia’s secret deal to re-arm Saddam (from February 1999). I must have missed this one — not that it’s a surprise that Russia has been complicit for some time. Furthermore, it isn’t just a policy under Putin:

bq.
The Foreign Office said yesterday that it had received reports of the arms deals, which were being investigated. Officials privately confirmed that the deals had been approved by Moscow. A senior Foreign Office official said: “It is almost beyond belief that a permanent member of the security council could authorise such a flagrant breach of the UN arms embargo. It indicates that Russian relations with Iraq have become a great deal closer since Mr Primakov became prime minister.”
[Counterpoint]

There’s considerable irony in Russia standing for international free trade in defiance of a socialist organization.

Anything into Oil. The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing.

Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. “There is no reason why we can’t turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil,” says engineer Terry Adams, a project consultant. So the city of Philadelphia is in discussion with Changing World Technologies to begin doing exactly that. [Discover Magazine]

Argentina Seeks Boss for Economic Crisis [AP World News]

The headline both sums up the article and also explains why Argentina’s economic problems will continue.

Liberate America First. Freedom is a very simple concept. It means doing what you wish with what is yours. It takes years of post-graduate study under PhD’s to unlearn what freedom means. Freedom means that when you wake up in the morning, your life, liberty and property are yours to do with them what you will. Of course, that means that no one else’s life, liberty, or property is yours. That’s freedom. It’s real simple. It’s also a state of being I have never experienced. And I have no reason to believe that any Iraqi under American rule will ever experience it either.

Let me give the post-graduately brain-washed an example. I recently sent New York State $1,000 to satisfy one of the fifty or so taxes I have to pay every year to avoid being dragged out of my home and thrown into a dungeon. At the same time, I was asked to contribute to a very local charitable cause which I will not identify lest anyone’s privacy be violated. I contributed $50. I wanted to give more, but alas, I had just been the victim of a robbery by the state (technically, an extortion, for you lawyers). Freedom is being able to do what you will with your own. I am not free and none of my fellow-citizens is free either. For one thing, we are compelled to pay for America’s global and growing military empire even though it makes us sick. [LewRockwell.com]

Adventures in Security. Latest threat to go nuts, grab some tweezers, and hijack a plane to Cuba? Why none other than White House spin-czar Ari Fleischer, one of the best known faces on the planet. Flying commercial landed Fleischer in the aptly named “random” search cue. [Hit & Run]

As a high-ranking employee of the Federal government, Fleischer is probably the only terrorist given one of those searches. The article doesn’t say anything about him being kept off the plane, though, so the search apparently didn’t do any good.