Category Archives: Not Europe

Good Lord!

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Good lord, this looks serious:

A dawn bomb attack devastated a major Shi’ite shrine in Iraq on Wednesday, sparking nationwide protests and sectarian reprisals against Sunni mosques despite appeals for calm from government and religious leaders. The attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra, one of Shi’ite Islam’s holiest sites, provoked more violence than attacks that have killed thousands but the Shi’ite-led government insisted it would not provoke civil war…..

No one was killed in the attack on the mosque in Samarra. However a Sunni cleric was killed, police said, at one of 17 Sunni mosques in Baghdad fired on by militants. One mosque was damaged by fire, though most damage appeared relatively minor.

Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shi’ite, declared three days of mourning and called for Muslim unity. He said the interim government had sent officials to Samarra. Residents said police sealed off the mainly Sunni city, 100 km (60 miles) north of Baghdad; police fired over demonstrators’ heads as they chanted religious and anti-American slogans.

Armed Mehdi Army militiamen loyal to radical Shi’ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr took up positions on streets in Baghdad and Shi’ite cities in the south, clashing in Basra and elsewhere with Sunnis; a Sadr aide said: “If the Iraqi government does not do its job to defend the Iraqi people we are ready to do so.”

Witnesses said rocket-propelled grenades damaged a Sunni mosque in Basra and there were heavy exchanges of fire after Sadr’s Mehdi Army militia attacked an Islamic Party office in the city. Thousands of people marched in Shi’ite towns across the country and through the capital, condemning the Samarra attack.

A different kind of clash.

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While I’m still struggling to put my reaction to the cartoon row into appropriate writing, today’s Spiegel Online’s English edition features an interesting and important article about a different kind of culture clash. It’s a timely story about the fact that Islam the religion and Islam the cultural practice are often quite distinct. It’s a story about the slow and violent death of traditional hiearchies during modernisation, particularly if modernisation is perceived as imperialist. But above all, it’s a story about allegedly legalised crime against a young woman and her incredible courage to resist what would have been her traditional duty: suicide. Her faith, she states, gave her the strength to keep telling her story. As Uwe Buse writes on Spiegel Online -

“Mukhtar Mai, the daughter of a Pakistani farmer, thought she was apologizing for the misdeeds of her brother. Instead, she was gang raped by men in her village. After the rape, Mai contemplated suicide. Today she is likened to Martin Luther King, Jr.”

Nadolig Llawen

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Nadolig Llawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda o Barcelona

Which is Welsh (the language of my childhood) for Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year from sunny Barcelona. Well, I just added the sunny part, since the sun is, right now, also rising.

Since I am not religious, and I am not really a dedicated fan of e-commerce, xmas – as I live it – is maybe a time for thinking about roots and origins.

The New Year, however, is a time for looking towards the future. May 2006 be just as interesting as 2005 has been. For all of you. We couldn’t ask for more.

Enjoy yourselves everyone!

The Loophole

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The FT has just put this up:

The Kurdish regional government’s surprise announcement that it had begun drilling for oil in the north of Iraq sparked alarm yesterday, two weeks ahead of national elections.

As the FT indicates, the decision of the Kurdish government hinges on the controversial article 109 of Iraq’s constitution, which gives the federal government the right to manage oil and gas from “current” fields in co-operation with the regions and distribute it to the governorates according to population, but the article does not spell out the division of responsibilities for exploration and production in new fields. The following is also not without significance:

In August 2004, then-oil minister Thamer Ghadhban said Iraq had “unconfirmed or potential” reserves of 214bn barrels. Of this, the KDC estimates the Kurdistan region contains some 45bn barrels.

Then and now

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Billmon, in a very eloquent post, says nothing. All he does is put up a series of quotations. Yet his message couldn’t be clearer; or more correct.

Lest visiting American wingnuts misunderstand me: I do not assert that Billmon is correct in inviting us to infer that Donald Rumsfeld is guilty of war crimes. That question would be decided by a court, in the extraordinarily unlikely event that Rumsfeld ends up before one.

No, what Billmon gets undeniably right is the far bigger and broader and more fundamental idea that (to use the words of Telford Taylor with which Billmon’s post comes to a close) ‘law is not a one-way street’. Whether a government is good or bad is decided by what it does and refrains from doing; not by who its members are or by the justifications they offer for their acts and omissions. That goes for the current government of the USA, and it goes equally for every other government entrusted with the running of a state.
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For Our Washington DC Readers

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Both of you.

John Barry, author of Rising Tide a rather timely book about flooding and New Orleans and of The Great Influenza a rather timely book about the 1918 pandemic, will be half of a panel about hurrican Katrina at Politics & Prose bookstore this Friday at 7pm. The store is at 5015 Connecticut Ave NW, and if you don’t know it already, you’re in for a treat.

Grand Larceny?

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Crickey, this really does seem to fall under the definition of what you could call a scandal. According to the Independent’s Patrick Cockburn one billion dollars was plundered from Iraq’s defence Ministry between June 2004 and February 2005 (during the government of interim prime minister Iyad Allawi):

“It is possibly one of the largest thefts in history,” Ali Allawi, Iraq’s Finance Minister, told The Independent. “Huge amounts of money have disappeared. In return we got nothing but scraps of metal.”

So – What Did Happen to Iraq?

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A few weeks ago, if you can cast your mind back that far, the big story was apparently something to do with a country called Iraq that was trying to agree among itself on its future constitution. After multiple deadlines were breached, two of the factions in the country decided to impose the constitution on the other by their majority. But then, they hesitated. The text was amended, but not by the drafting committee..

And then there was a hurricane. Not that it was one anywhere near Iraq, where they don’t have hurricanes, but it still knocked the whole thing off the agenda. And the Iraqis had a particularly horrible disaster of their own. So – what did happen to that constitution?

Well, it seems nothing happened to it. They have done absolutely nothing about it since then – it still hasn’t gone before Parliament, and even its opponents haven’t held the meeting to draft a counter-constitution they promised. What has been going on is that the killing has kept up at a rate of about thirty a day. August saw the deaths of 85 US servicemen. And, worryingly, there are signs that after a period of quiet, what I call the New-Old Iraqi Army has entered the lists again.
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Katrina and the Waves

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As Edward suggests below, the macroeconomic effects of Katrina are just now becoming known, much less felt or sorted out.

One item that will be much more widely reported is that in addition to all of the petrochemical industry located there, New Orleans was the linchpin of the Port of South Louisiana. The port is the largest in the United States by tonnage, and the fifth largest in the world. Only Rotterdam, Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong are larger.

Stratfor reports, “Fifteen percent of all US exports by value go through the port. Nearly half of the exports go to Europe.” Anything from Montana to Ohio that’s sent to the world in bulk passes down the Mississippi River and past New Orleans. Virtually all of it is loaded onto oceangoing vessels at the PoSL. The port is expected to be closed for at least three months. This is a significant disruption in world trade.

The refinery outage is a serious issue. Even if they were not damaged by the storm, their staffs are probably scattered throughout the region, and not all will have survived. The refineries are also built to be run continuously and brought offline rather slowly. The rapid shutdown and long-term power outage may have done more damage than the storm itself. And they were all running flat-out before the storm to meet high demand.

The big question is consumer spending and demand. If gas prices take enough household income to cause cutbacks in other areas, what will that mean for the American economy? How sharp a drop in growth should we expect? And can the global economy run without the great engine of American consumer demand?

We may be about to find out.

This Is Not A Happy Day

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Hot on the heels of Dougs update on the tragedy which is taking place while we watch in Louisiana, comes this distressing news from Iraq:

More than 600 Iraqi Shi’ites died in a stampede over a Tigris River bridge in Baghdad on Wednesday, panicked by rumors a suicide bomber was about to blow himself up, an Interior Ministry source told Reuters….

A police source said large crowds had been heading to the Kadhimiya mosque in the old district of north Baghdad for a religious ceremony when someone yelled that there was a suicide bomber among them.

“Hundreds of people started running and some threw themselves off the bridge into the river,” the source said.

“Many elderly died immediately as a result of the stampede but dozens drowned, many bodies are still in the river and boats are working on picking them up.”