Posts by Russell Brown
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Wouldn't it be more correct to say that the oppression was spread out more evenly under Saddam, rather than making him into some sort of gay and women's right champion?
No, he was a murderous bastard, but read James' statement again, then read this:
The United States' four-year-old occupation of
Iraq has considerably worsened the lives of the country's women, charges a new report from an international human rights group.The New York-based group MADRE says Iraqi women are enduring unprecedented levels of assault, abductions, public beatings, death threats, sexual assaults, honor killings, domestic abuse, torture in detention, beheadings, shootings, and public hangings.
MADRE's 40-page report, titled "Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the U.S. War on Iraq," also argues that the rise of theocratic militias in Iraq is the result of deliberate plans by U.S. officials, not an accidental byproduct of a bungled occupation.
"Rather than support progressive and democratically minded Iraqis, including members of the women's movement," the report reads, "the U.S. threw its weight behind Iraq's Shiite Islamists, calculating that these forces, long suppressed by Saddam Hussein, would cooperate with the occupation and deliver the stability needed for the U.S. to implement its policies in Iraq."
The 1970 Iraqi constitution gave women the most explicit rights of any in the region. As Human Rights Watch and other pointed out, these were largely removed in the post-invasion constitution that now applies.
I'd love Cohen to venture on this, but I'm not holding my breath.
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James:
People and groups that protested for woman's rights, gay rights social justice etc. find themselves working with or effectively supporting Islamists who have no concept of woman's rights that we would recognize, stone to death woman accused of adultery who are actually victims of rape and think gays should be killed. I have to say that it all looks all very strange, from the outside looking in, kind of like a bad Monty Python sketch.
Uh-huh ...
Hardline Islamic insurgent groups in Iraq are targeting a new type of victim with the full protection of Iraqi law, The Observer can reveal. The country is seeing a sudden escalation of brutal attacks on what are being called the 'immorals' - homosexual men and children as young as 11 who have been forced into same-sex prostitution.
There is growing evidence that Shia militias have been killing men suspected of being gay and children who have been sold to criminal gangs to be sexually abused. The threat has led to a rapid increase in the numbers of Iraqi homosexuals now seeking asylum in the UK because it has become impossible for them to live safely in their own country.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1838222,00.html
Campaign groups have warned of a surge in homophobic killings by state security services and religious militias following an anti-gay and anti-lesbian fatwa issued by Iraq's most prominent Shia leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0505-06.htm
They say that since the US-led invasion, gay people are being killed because of their sexual orientation.
They blame the increase in violence on the growing influence of religious figures and militia groups in Iraq since Saddam Hussein was ousted.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4915172.stm
Without defending Saddam's regime, it was secular. Women and gays were safer and had more rights than they do now. Fact.
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The oil for food money was going straight into Saddam's pockets, not to feeding the people as it was supposed.
Actually, the money was held in trust for the Iraqi people. And then it was handed out in large, unaccounted wads of cash, lost, embezzled and otherwise taken from the Iraqi people by the CPA. Billions of dollars of it.
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ANSWER et al get their knickers all in a bunch about a few meatheads on the night shift at Abu Graib doing some stupid stuff to some prisoners, during which no one was injured for which the soldiers were punished ...
Oh, sure. Apart from the prisoners who, according to the testimony of a serving officer, were beaten, then tortured to death by being hung by their arms. There was also testimony alleging sexual abuse of a 16 year-old girl, summary shootings of prisoners and "stupid stuff" like this:
* Urinating on detainees
* Jumping on detainee's leg (a limb already wounded by gunfire) with such force that it could not thereafter heal properly
* Continuing by pounding detainee's wounded leg with collapsible metal baton
* Pouring phosphoric acid on detainees
* Sodomization of detainees with a baton
* Tying ropes to the detainees' legs or penises and dragging them across the floor.And no, I do not think the hicks who took the rap thought it all up themselves.
The worst thing was that a great many of the Iraqis there (some of them no more than children) were imprisoned on the most flimsy evidence, and subsequently released after being tortured and found to be of no use.
No one here is defending the atrocities of the insurgents. You've achieved the dubious distinction of defending the above.
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I'm not at all mischaracterising the post. That's what they were on about. They took great offence that Aaronovitch should be asking those who fought apartheid to firmly condemn Mugabe. Their reasoning was that such pressure from the South African Govt would surely make things worse in Zimbabwe. Who do you think would actually benefit from such inaction and why do you think that site would be encouraging such inaction?
Aaronovitch's column concluded with the order "you must get rid of Mugabe."
I think the point of the blog post in response was that that was an easy declaration to make from London, not such an easy thing to do when you're a junior foreign minister in South Africa weighing up the possibilities of a civil war on your border. As it pointed out, taking the voice of Aaronvitch's former comrade Aziz Parhad:
I am apparently meant to pull out my magic wand and make everything all right, and the fact I haven't done so means that I am morally corrupt, and have betrayed all the values we used to share and which you, by getting a well paid job on the Times, have maintained and I, by taking a difficult political role in a developing country, have not. Fuck off, David.
It concludes:
Look, old comrade, maybe I'm right or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's past time for the diplomatic option and war is inevitable. Maybe a firmer line from us would not be such a huge risk and could achieve something. That's the thing about politics, you never can tell; a point you have often made yourself. But are you really so god damned sure that I'm wrong, that you're prepared to take the pulpit and damn me six ways to Sunday for disagreeing with you? It is not as if your judgement on these things has been all that great in the recent past, is it?
It might be wrong, but I think the point it makes is a reasonable one.
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Russell, have a look at that site with the creepy obsesion with Aaronovitch. Are you really keen on people who think that even putting pressure on the South African Govt to criticse Mugabe are is too much liberal intervention?
Which would be to mischaracterise the tenor of both the blog post and the Aaronovitch column it refers to.
I do find it odd that you think that blog's "creepy" though. It's just a watch site, and a far from creepy one at that.
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These guys are quite fun on our current topic:
http://aaronovitch.blogspot.com/
I've never really got into British blogs, with the exception of Harry Hutton, but I think this issue might be my entry point.
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It's easy to see how this is attractive to former Marxists. The ideas of driving for utopia and of the ends justifying the means were both popular aspects of Marxism.
Which is probably what I was trying to say.
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__To be honest, I think my secular modernism is under more direct threat from the religious fundamentalists of America than it is from Islamists. The Islamists' derangement might be considerably greater, but I don't think they have the power to change the society with which I identify. The other lot just might.__
Fully agree with that. But Cohen's point is that it's selfish of us to look at it that way. Our democratic rights are far less under attack than, for example, those of women in Saudi Arabia, and yet confronted by the dreadful George Bush, we've forgotten our internationalism.
Good point. But it does assume that any intervention we choose to make will be welcome and not counterproductive.
I may have missed something, but what little Cohen wrote about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon was effectively supportive of it. Yet by the standards he applied to Iraq - we should support the people - that's an impossible position to take.
__I don't believe that the majority of left-liberal opposition to the war in Iraq, or to American foreign policy, is predicated on an endorsement of Islamist bigotry.__
Yep. Very true. I think Cohen understands this too, but he treats it as irrelevant, and in that he does his argument a very great disservice.
Indeed. But there's precious little in his writing that suggests he's about to acknowledge such a nuance. And frankly, he seems to spend a lot of time, especially in his blog, slinging off at anyone with a criticism of him.
His usual line is that everyone's ignoring his argument, which just isn't true. There are a couple of good analyses here and here.
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the fact of the matter is the entire world was united behind the United States in the aftermath of 9/11 - NATO invoked for the first time Article of the Washington treaty - and the most spectacular achievemet of the Bush administration has been the squandering of that goodwill.
As I've pointed out here before, the Pew Global Attitudes Project tracked the squandering quite vividly:
http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=252
The proportion of Britons expressing a favourable opinion of the US slumped from 83% in 2000 to 56% in 2006. In Spain it went from 50% to 23%. These are both countries that have suffered serious terrorist attacks since 2001. You can't put this down to "the left" or "anti-Americanism". For one thing, opinions of Americans themselves still hover around 70% approval in those countries.
Pew's survey of Muslim opinion in Europe is also a good read:
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