Posts by Russell Brown
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These are fascinating Hadyn -- Dropkicks drop-kick the MSM again! -- but irrelevant on a single count: they were not forged in the cauldron of real pressure test rugby -- certainly not in the case of the All Blacks.
That starts now. And I'm still picking us to beat the French by a substantial margin.
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Oh, and well done guys, another PA thread makes the MSM
Dropkicks definitely deserve more whisky.
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Just the bit where in the Dan Rather interview Saddam refuses exile. From the horses mouth. No intermediaries.
But we know Saddam was a a boastful liar. Was he really going to surrender on camera in an interview with an American TV network?
I think the El Pais transcript is more compelling.
well, according to a senior European official. They must have a better understanding of Brown than British officials. I never thought that Brown as PM was going to ring Robert Fisk for advice on foreign policy but I'm really skeptical about what Hersh is claiming here, yet again from anonymous officials.
I'll grant you that. He did offer the embarrassment of the captured sailors as a rationale, but that seems one of the thinner parts of the story. OTOH, given recent statements from the French leadership ...
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And , finally, before I go and make dinner (is that the time already?), we would do well to recall that the advertised outcome of the Iraq adventure was that it would fatally destabilise Iran's hardliners and and usher in a new spirit of democracy.
The actual result was basically the opposite. I think that should play a part in everyone's thinking as the ad campaign for the next adventure rolls out.
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But I wasn't meaning this as an attack on Hersh but rather an attempt to broaden the deabte slightly to consider how this fits in with the position of the Dems (i.e. they all, even hero of the doves Obama, consider Iran trouble) and what might be a better strategy if Bush's is the wrong one. What I see mostly is, and excuse the generalistion, "Bush is a war monger so there's not really a problem with Iran".
It's compulsory at the moment to declare Iran trouble, and Ahmadinejad "the new Hitler". Did you notice in the Hersh story the quote from a recent column by John Podhoretz that claimed that Ahmadinejad was “like Hitler . . . whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it . . . with a new order dominated by Iran."
WTF? A new world order? Dominated by a country with a buggered economy that might in 10 years' time have one nuclear weapon? Isn't that a particularly idiotic statement from someone with pretensions as an intellectual leader?
Ahmadinejad is a populist loon his own people are tiring of. For goodness sake, he isn't even the commander of the Iranian army.
Just because people say these things doesn't make it true. The worrying thing is that Cheney listens to Podhoretz.
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But he was wrong. Exile was offered to Saddam and he refused. I'm surprised this is news. In the Dan Rather interview just prior to the war Saddam makes it very clear that he refused that option. He may at some point have conisered it and/or the Egyptians may have thought he had, but that's not what he decided eventually.
Oh, sorry. It's just that according to El Pais, whose story last week -- based on an official transcript -- was widely covered by other media, Bush told the Spanish leader Saddam had made the offer. The White House did not dispute the accuracy of of the transcript.
Supposedly he wanted take $1 billion with him, and "information about WMDs" (whatever that means), but it does seem to back up Hersh's story quite well. This was three weeks before the White House announced its ultimatum for Saddam to vacate or be invaded.
So Bush lied in public, and Hersh got it right.
Anything else I can clear up for you?
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Sorry, but if we're going to sink into a national funk if (shock horror!) the ABs come home without the Webb Ellis Cup it's a very sad day indeed.
No, I'll just be pissed of for a week. People who get bitter and angry and demand retribution about the results of sports games piss me off more though ...
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I think Stratfor are Boston-based. This is from the executive summary of their predictions in advance of the Iraq invasion:
- The purpose of the war is to position the US in the heart of the region, so as to be able to bring to bear overwhelming pressure on surrounding States, so that they ruthlessly 'deal with' the Al Quaeda network in their countries ... or else face the US.
- Ultimately, Pakistan is on the US agenda.
- India, as a consequence, is going to become a major US ally.
- China will acquiesce, as will Russia, in return for US recognition of their respective rights to 'deal with' 'insurgency' as they see fit.
- Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia are the biggest losers .... and Iraq.
- The current international landscape is about to fundamentally change ... war will become a permanent feature of the next 5-10 years.
Well, they got the last bit right.
On the other hand, they claimed that Syria was getting a nuclear weapon from North Korea. This seems a fairy reasoned asssessment:
Their flaw is their need (as a business) to be relevant. They have positioned themselves as an unofficial CIA, the guys with the best intelligence who can find the truth. They can see the real story, the real strategies of all the players where others see only chaos. This works fine as long as there is strategy, but often chaos in the world is simply reflective of chaos. No matter what the situation, Stratfor must see the workings of a grand strategic design behind events, even if no such thing exists. This comes up worst in their analyses of Al Qaeda. They need to see current world affairs as an epic chess game between Bin Laden and Bush, each marshalling massive resources to defeat the other. But Bin Laden does not have massive resources, he personally has been nearly reduced to a figurehead who can only inspire, not act. And the Bush Administration has plenty of other goals. Nonetheless, for the last 3 years, Stratfor has tried to see every US move as laying the groundwork for the final move in the game: a massive military assault on what must be Bin Laden's headquarters of northern Pakistan. Despite nothing like this happening, they still continue to predict it.
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but now even the major Dem Presidential candidates wont pledge to have all US troops out of Iraq by the end of their (theoretical) first term in 2013, five years away, as long again as the US has already been there. I wouldn’t have thought that scenario was possible at the beginning of the year. That must piss off a lot of anti war protestors / activists etc.
And soldiers and their families too, I guess. But they're only po' black folks anyway. But hey, US casualties in September were down to, oh, about what they were in September last year, so it must be going well, right?
How many more hundreds of billions of dollars will the US government have to borrow for those five years, James?
How do you expect the Sadrists (who are currently on ceasefire) to respond in Iraq if Iran is attacked?
Did you catch the reaction from virtually all sides in Iraq to the ludicrous US Senate vote for the decentralisation of Iraq? (I'm struggling to think of a more emphatic expression of hubris and stupidity than voting for the break-up of another country.)
When do you expect the cholera epidemic currently claiming 100 lives a day to tail off?
How many of the two million Iraqis who have fled the country do you expect to come back in the next five years? And the similar number who've been displaced internally by ethnic cleansing?
The only really "good" news appears to be that the Iraqis have firmly decided they don't want the "help" of al Qaeda.
And like Neil, you seem to have missed the part about how the attack's not going to be directed at Iran's nuclear facilities anyway.
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Okay ... a blog review of Austin City Limits Day 1.
Bjork seems to have stolen the show.
Also playing: LCD Soundsystem and Arcade Fire.
I'll go out on a limb and guess that the BDO lineup might look a bit similar. In which case, come on down M.I.A., Peter, Bjorn and John, and Wilco.
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