Blumenthal summarizes the Iraqi situation: 600 years of Sunni rule

Salon.com | Empty words

Bush's strategy rests on more than sheer avoidance of facts, however; it depends on willful ignorance of the history of Mesopotamia.

From the creation of the Iraqi state in 1921 to the army's coup of 1958, Iraq had 58 governments. In 1968, the Baathist Party led by Saddam staged another coup. Some periods of this prolonged instability were less unstable than others, but the instability was chronic and profound. The overthrow of Saddam appears to have returned Iraq to its 'natural' unstable state. But in fact the instability runs even deeper.

The Baathists, of course, were Sunnis. Saddam was a Sunni. Before him, the monarchs, beginning with Faisal I, were Sunnis. Before Faisal, the Ottomans, who ruled beginning in the 15th century, were Sunnis. Shiites have never ruled the country until now. Why should the Sunnis, after 600 years of control, accede to the dominance of Shiites? In Vietnam, the root motivation against the United States was nationalism, as it was against the French. It even trumped communism in the national liberation struggle. In Iraq, religion and ethnicity are often ascribed as the root motivations of conflict. But to the extent that nationalism may exist as a factor, its ownership does not and cannot reside in the current Iraqi state.

The present Iraqi government is a ramshackle affair of Shiites and Kurds. The Kurds have no interest in a central authority, and play the game only to solidify their autonomy. The Shiites are maintained as dominant only by the presence of the U.S. occupation army and their sectarian militias. They will never disband those militias in favor of a national army unless they can run the army like an expanded version of the Shiite militias. Prime Minister al-Jaafari and the other Shiite leaders, including Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi, have all been Iranian agents or allies, recipients of Iranian largess in one form or another. Shiite Iraqis are natural friends and allies of Shiite Iran. Iraq under the Shiites does not have to be remade in Iran's image to serve Iranian interests. Whether or not sharia (Islamic) law is imposed, Iraqi Sunnis will never see Shiites as Iraqi patriots or nationalists but, instead, as being in league with Iraq's traditional and worst enemy.

These suspicions are hardly abstract. The militia of the largest Shiite faction, the Badr Brigade of SCIRI (Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq), was trained and armed by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, and is heavily infiltrated and directed by Iranian agents today. Yet Bush has invested American blood and treasure in the proposition that a Shiite-dominated government, which now inevitably means an Iranian-influenced regime, can serve a second master in the United States and present itself to the Sunnis as national saviors.

At the time of the invasion I thought Rumsfeld's strategy made sense only if the goal was to partition Iraq.

Given the current state, is the least worst goal mitigation of the civil war?

Salon takes on Scientology

Salon.com News | The press vs. Scientology

This is the third of what will be four articles on Scientology. Great job by Salon. This article describes how the Church has cowed mainstream journalists; it says something very important about the state of journalism today. They also seem to have become less aggressive than they were in the Hubbard days.

Salon and Slate do some of the most interesting journalism anywhere.

Google to annihilate PayPal - thank heavens

Verizon | Reuters.com

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) this year plans to offer an electronic-payment service that could help the Internet-search company diversify its revenue and may heighten competition with eBay Inc.'s (EBAY.O: Quote, Profile, Research) PayPal unit, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

Exact details of the search company's planned service are not known, the report said, but quoted people familiar with the matter as saying it could have similarities with PayPal, which allows consumers to pay for purchases on Web sites by funding electronic-payment accounts from their credit cards or checking accounts.

It's been known for at least a decade that the fundamental security model of credit cards was a very poor match for online transactions. Fraud cases have waxed and waned over the years, but based on recent news reports I suspect the toll on small vendors is getting pretty heavy.

So what are the alternatives to standard credit cards? PayPal is the big one today, but I've never liked them. I've been monumentally unimpressed with their approach to security, or the feeble and unimaginative ways they've struggled with phishing scams and PayPalm spam.

Now, apparently, there will be Google.

Good.

(BTW, does anyone remember Microsoft Wallet -- a major component of the very first release of Internet Explorer? Don't think Microsoft has forgotten. Palladium has a role here too.)

Brin on hierarchical societies and the Bush agenda

Contrary Brin: A Little More Hormatsian Wisdom

A good summary. In a world where brilliance and excellence is commonplace, what becomes valuable? Remember, diamonds, if they were common, would be cheap -- despite their interesting properties.

That which is valuable is that which cannot be readily substituted. Connections. Family ties. Owned wealth. Power.

See also this and this and this and (most recently) this. From neo-feudalism to the new guilded age.

Teddy Roosevelt, where are you?

Does Scientology really want all this publicity?

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Psychiatrists hit back at Cruise

I like this. The more Cruise talks, the more publicity scientology gets. The American Psychiatric Association's press release, however, was pretty pusilanimous. They called Cruise "irresponsible" for claiming psychiatry was evil and patients should all stop their meds. This is not Cruise being irresponsible, it is him expressing a key tenet of a very whacky, and often quite nasty, religion.

Keep talking Cruise.

Thinking about Fab

So what's the "plastic" (see 'The Graduate') of the 2010s? Is it nanotech? Proteonomics? AI?

Or is it Fab? I've been thinking again of a post from a few weeks back: Gordon's Notes: Self-replicating device -- another step on the road. The more I think about it, the more it seems that this will be the next enormous disruption. Fab.

I don't know the detailed history. I remember reading about applying ink jet printer technology to create 3 dimensional objects, and to create small circuits -- maybe 5-10 years ago. Around the same time came the 21st century equivalent of the lathe; rapid prototyping machines that could create resin/plastic shapes on demand.

The field has moved on. Fab is now one of these areas, like the personal computer, when one can imagine the capability/cost ratio growing exponentially.

In the world to come one can imagine a home fab unit, loaded with basic modules (resin, copper, gold, platinum) and fed with directions downloaded off the net. Want a variant on a phone? Download the hacked version and use your own software to tweak it. Push "start" and, tomorrow morning, your new phone awaits. The phone has no bolts, nuts or modular components, it's a seamless whole. Slice through it and you will find plastic and circuit intermingled. Somewhere inside is the power supply. When it stops taking a charge, throw the thing out.

Want a bit more cleverness in the phone? Add in the neural network module created from cultured human neuronal tissue (ok, so I'm getting ahead of myself ....)

Need more raw materials? Toss an old PC into the "digester" ... ok, so that takes Nano, so it's still science fiction. Until the nanopalypse the raw materials still must be bought and "mined".

Fab is weird and disruptive. It also seems inevitable -- unlike, say, nuclear fusion or Nano.

Does anyone really think they can predict social security finances in 2040? What a joke.

The Philippine Insurrection

When we take car trips, and when the kids are watching DVDs, my wife and I listen to tapes from 'The Teaching Company'. On this trip we're listening to James Senton lecturing in 1996 on American history from the 1870s (Florida throws the presidential election to a crook, de facto slavery is reinstated, the genocide of the Plains Indians is implemented) to the 1920s.

Post-civil war America, by the way, is brutal. It's as though whatever meager nobility we had died with Lincoln.

During our imperial heyday, America conquers Cuba, Mexico and the Pillipines. Cuba was invaded, we are told, because God told President McKinley He wanted Cuba. McKinley seems to stumble into the Phillipines. War there kills 5,000 Americans (generally forgotten on Memorial day) and 500,000 Phillipinos (presumably not forgotten over there). You do remember being taught about this war in your history classes, don't you?

It was in the Phillipines that the US adopted the Spanish "Reconcentration" anti-guerilla methods, which were later rediscovered in Vietnam.

Any similarities to our era, and our adventures in Iraq, are purely coincidental (573,000 hits).

McKinley, by the way, was the creation of a 19th century version of Karl Rove.

Bush will rule for 3.5 more years. At least. We need Teddy Roosevelt the IInd.

Wicked deflation of the Friedman balloon

The Light Of Reason � Blog Archive � MY TERRIBLE (WHITE) BURDEN

via DeLong. This is truly wicked -- a "translation" of Friedman's most recent column that purports to reveal Friedman's true thoughts. It works quite well.

I won't miss Friedman when the NYT puts the editorials behind a paywall. He's nowhere near as interesting as he was four years ago.

Bribe inflation: 700K for a house member?!

Brad DeLong's Website: Republican House Member Randy Cunningham Takes Bribe, Pockets $700,000

The alleged bribe was passed through using an inflated home price. The price seems high though. 700K will buy presidential access or a part of a senator. Why would Randy Cunningham be worth so much?

Shock - Corrupt Bush official resigns

Editor of Climate Reports Resigns - New York Times

Bush brings in an industry flunky opposed to climate change science. This gentleman edits documents to support his boss's agenda. He's following standard Bush procedures that happen to also be legal. He's discovered.

So far, so good. Then he resigns?! Those who've committed far worse offences usually make a move to a lateral position. This guy shouldn't have gone anywere. Is this a sign that Bush's power is fading fast? Cooney may have figured there wasn't much of a future left in the Bush administration.

Philip A. Cooney, the chief of staff to President Bush's Council on Environmental Quality, resigned yesterday, White House officials said.

Mr. Cooney's resignation came two days after documents revealed that he had repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that cast doubt on the link between building greenhouse-gas emissions and rising temperatures.

Mr. Cooney has no scientific training. Dana Perino, a deputy White House press secretary, said Mr. Cooney had long been considering his options following four years of service in the administration. Ms. Perino said the decision was unrelated to revelations about the documents...

Ms. Perino snorted her soda out her nose as she tried but failed to keep a straight face ...

Has Bush done anything lately? If he's decided to retire early that's great with me ...

Update: My wife corrected me on this; it really is hard to believe that someone as ruthless and vengeful as George the IInd would retire like this. So either Mr. Cooney had other reasons to quit and took advantage of this one, or someone felt he was an inadequate lackey and this was a handy way to get rid of him.

Toxoplasma infection alters personality?!

Dangerrrr: cats could alter your personality - Health - Times Online

The claim is that toxoplasma infection alters human personality. I don't believe it, but it's fascinating. We do know that parasites change personality and behavior in many species. (via Metafilter)

via Metafilter - the worst tv series ever?

Movie Poop Shoot - COMICS 101

A wonderful description of a kids? 1979 NBC tv action/series that lasted two episodes. It was based on DC comic book characters, and it's so bad it may move into the twilight zone of interestingly awful. One has to assume drugs were involved somewhere.

NameVoyager: explore US infant names over the century

The Baby Name Wizard: NameVoyager

I'd come across this a while back, but it deserves mention again. This time via Marginal Revolution.

Track the fall and rise of Emily.

We are primates: faces and judgment

FuturePundit: Babyfaced Politicians Lose Elections

Another bit of evidence that we are machines programmed by natural selection; weak chinned folk may be smarter and braver, but they are judged inferior and lose elctions (Science).

The most successful politicians viscerally understand we are primates and behave accordingly -- even when they themselves don't believe in either natural selection or in our programmatic nature.

It's easy to understand why the Kurds and Shiites won't disband their milias ...

Building Iraq's Army: Mission Improbable

BAIJI, Iraq -- An hour before dawn, the sky still clouded by a dust storm, the soldiers of the Iraqi army's Charlie Company began their mission with a ballad to ousted president Saddam Hussein. "We have lived in humiliation since you left," one sang in Arabic, out of earshot of his U.S. counterparts. "We had hoped to spend our life with you."...

...The reconstruction of Iraq's security forces is the prerequisite for an American withdrawal from Iraq. But as the Bush administration extols the continuing progress of the new Iraqi army, the project in Baiji, a desolate oil town at a strategic crossroads in northern Iraq, demonstrates the immense challenges of building an army from scratch in the middle of a bloody insurgency.

Charlie Company disintegrated once after its commander was killed by a car bomb in December. And members of the unit were threatening to quit en masse this week over complaints that ranged from dismal living conditions to insurgent threats. Across a vast cultural divide, language is just one impediment. Young Iraqi soldiers, ill-equipped and drawn from a disenchanted Sunni Arab minority, say they are not even sure what they are fighting for. They complain bitterly that their American mentors don't respect them.

In fact, the Americans don't: Frustrated U.S. soldiers question the Iraqis' courage, discipline and dedication and wonder whether they will ever be able to fight on their own, much less reach the U.S. military's goal of operating independently by the fall.

... Last week, U.S soldiers from 1st Platoon, Alpha Company, and Iraqis from 2nd Platoon, Charlie Company, clambered into their vehicles to patrol the streets of Baiji. The Americans drove fully enclosed armored Humvees, the Iraqis open-backed Humvees with benches, the sides of which were protected by plating the equivalent of a flak jacket. The Americans were part of 1st Battalion, 103rd Armor Regiment of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard.

As an American reporter climbed in with the Iraqis, the U.S. soldiers watched in bemused horror.

"You might be riding home alone," one soldier said to the other reporter.

"Is he riding in the back of that?" asked another. "I'll be over here praying."

One hopes this is a worst case scenario. I wish we had a different president.

Is the least terrible option to configure the situation for the quickest possible civil war with the lowest number of casualties and the least objectionable tyrant victor for each partitioned nation, then abandon ship? Impeaching Bush would be nice, but unlikely.

Oh, and offer refugee status to any Iraqi that had anything to do with the US.