20. april 2003

The H word One word has the progressive left going off its rockers: Haliburton. Christopher Hitchens has an article in Slate about people who prefer Saddam Hussein to Haliburton, and he makes a lot of good points. Well, if that doesn't give away the true motive for the war, I don't know what does. But unless the anti-war forces believe Saddam's fires should be allowed to burn out of control indefinitely, they must presumably have an idea of which outfit should have got the contract instead of Boots and Coots. I think we can be sure that the contract would not have gone to some windmill-power concern run by Naomi Klein or the anti-Starbucks Seattle coalition, in the hope of just blowing out the flames or of extinguishing them with Buddhist mantras. The number of companies able to deliver such expertise is very limited. The chief one is American and was personified for years by "Red" Adair—the movie version of his exploits (played by John Wayne himself!) was titled Hellfighters. I still don't expect it's the last we hear about this topic. 9:49:19 PM    comment []

Chinese SARS cases jump dramatically with disclosure On Saturday, the Chinese president Hu Jintao, implicitly admitting that China had been less than honest in its claims about SARS, demanded that officials immediate and accurately disclosure the real figures, on pain of severe punishment. The total number of confirmed SARS cases in the capital Beijing alone immediately soared from 37 to 339. This happened as Hong Kong reported 12 deaths from SARS in a single day. 11:48:32 AM    comment []

Palestinian PM threatens to quit The newly appointed Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas (also called Abu Mazan) has reportedly threatened to quit over a standoff with President Yasser Arafat over the new cabinet. The key problem seems to be Abbas' appointment of Mohammed Dahlan as interior minister, a key post controlling the security services. Arafat opposes him, and keeps insisting on his old ally Hani al-Hassan continuing in the post. The appointment of a real, independent Prime Minister has been a key demand from the United States for publishing the "road map" peace plan. If Mr Abbas quits, we will be back to where we were, and Arafat will be left with the blame. The US has insisted on sidelining Arafat as a precondition for putting pressure on Israel in the negotiations. 8:50:06 AM    comment []

Freedom of speech and the war on terror Tim Robbins, who with his wife Susan Sarandon have been high-profile critics of Bush and the war in Iraq, recently made a highly publicised speech lamenting that the National Baseball Hall of Fame had cancelled one of his appearances to avoid controversy. As it happened, Dale Petroskey, president of the Hall of Fame, got a hell of a lot of the political attention he didn't want, and had to apologise for the whole mess. One obvious problem with Robbins' complaint, and that of many other war critics who feel under siege in their own country, is that they are not really persecuted by the state. Their appeals to the First Amandment is thus misplaced. In fact, it is their opponents' applications of the same rights that causes them all these problems. Surely, the prevailing mob culture and the frequent personal attacks on "unpatriotic" citizens is not a good thing. But it is in fact what should be expected in a democracy in times of trouble. Pro-war politicians haven't exactly gotten off easily, either. I think Eric Burns in FoxNews (yeah, I know: boo hiss!) has some balance in criticising both Robbins and Petroskey in a recent column. I think the critics of the Bush administration are being overly alarmist sometimes. Surely, there have been enough incidents and developments after 9/11 that warrants criticism. But as an outsider, I cannot help smirking at the idea that the US is developing into some sort of police state. The excesses against civil liberties were far worse during WWI and WWII. If you look to how western European countries handled leftist terrorist threats from the 1970s onwards (and Britain's war against the IRA in Northern Ireland), even the Patriot Act is a joke. Germany, Britain and France at times operated what could be described as state death squads to strike back at terrorists. Yet, no western European nation has developed into a police state, even though most have far less constitutional checks against executive excesses than the US. On the contrary, as the threats subsided, public debate and the democratic process ensured that past wrongs were addressed and, hopefully, corrected (case in point: Sir John Stevens' investigation into misconduct by the British security forces in Northern Ireland). There is a fine balance between being alert and being alarmist, and I fear many civil rights groups in the US have crossed that line. From that, their credibility suffers. 3:44:26 AM    comment []

From 9/11 to Baghdad The Telegraph has a very good multipart article on the background for the second Gulf war. Much has been said about the neocons' plans for American domination, much of it overly simplistic, and this is a good overview. It also discusses Tony Blair's role, dismissing the claim that he was "Bush' poodle" who just went along with the US drive to war. On the contrary, Blair had for a long time had similar concerns as the neocons about the combination of ruthless terrorists and rogue states with weapons of mass destruction. 2:18:50 AM    comment []

Failed alcoholic experiment If you go out for a few pints once in a while, you find out early that some people just can't handle alcohol. And, obviously, some areas are worse than others. Alaska, according to statistics, is one of the worse. Pilot Station, an Alaskan village of just 550 people, had been totally dry since 1985, but last summer the population overwhelmingly demanded lifting some of the restrictions. The results were not pretty. Some parents drank up all the family's food money, teenagers came drunk to community functions, two police officers were fired for being drunk at work and the village safety officer quit, overwhelmed by calls for help. The number of sexual assault cases rose from "maybe one or less a month to sometimes three in a week," said Alaska State Trooper Brian Miller. Fights and beatings increased as well. On March 4, a special election decided that Pilot Station should go dry again. 12:22:05 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 Jan Haugland. Last update: 01.05.2003; 02:59:24.