BAALBEK, Lebanon — Shivering in the snow, Syrian Aisha Mohammad looked at the last-minute charity that saved her children from freezing during the smack of a particularly tough Lebanese winter: a wood-burning stove complete with twigs and garbage to ignite in hopes of warming her drafty tent in an icy eastern plain.
How to help Syrian refugees – CNN.com — The article lists more than a dozen major organizations involved in assistance and relief activities serving Syria’s refugee.
* * *
Refuge | The Washington Post – features 18 refugee stories ranging from “a birth and a wedding” to a family mourning their own in a cemetery on what was to them “foreign soil”.
* * *
Many refugees in Lebanon are living in unofficial makeshift camps, with shelters built from scavenged materials. The Lebanese government has refused to establish refugee camps for fear that they will become permanent homes for Syrians who have fled the civil war.
Images from the area showed refugees scraping snow off the roofs of tents, icicles hanging from ropes and wooden posts, and laundry frozen on washing lines.
. . . hopes for a negotiated end (always a long shot due to Moscow’s strategic interests in Syria) are now even less likely due to the growing bad blood between the U.S. and Russia.
To those who have fled the fighting, what the conflict in Syria is about may not matter or mean very much, if anything: they have found themselves out in the cold in numbers almost too vast to contemplate and with a distribution impossible to administer centrally through other than interstate cooperation in the matter, and that appears about as non-existent as peace or, perhaps, blankets may to those who have none.
One wonders what memories Syria’s refugees will carry with them, those who survive, for the rest of their lives?
How will they come to feel about the world that helped them? That failed them?
______
In a briefing published today, An international failure: The Syrian refugee crisis, the organization details how European Union (EU) member states have only offered to open their doors to around 12,000 of the most vulnerable refugees from Syria: just 0.5 per cent of the 2.3 million people who have fled the country.
When she emerged from underneath her blanket, Ghusun, who is “more than 100 years old”, turned her deeply lined face from the wind and moaned in pain from the cold.
Her small group of seven included an 87-year-old woman, four other women and one man. Each clutching old blankets to shield themselves from the bitter wind, they explained they had left their homes in the Syrian city of Homs two months ago, making their slow way to Aleppo, then finally crossing the border into Turkey just before the snow fell.
Catholics may wish to differ as regards the ownership of Rome.
Saudi Arabia rakes in $30 billion annually from the Haj — and all, of course, are welcome to return.
However, there are many Muslim-majority states worldwide, and so the issue is somewhat disingenuous as regards where a Muslim may feel at home or where a longer-lived tribesman whose cultural legacy far predates Islam and to whom conversion (even if sold as “reversion”) surviving some elements in Islam would seem to be a local issue this day.
As an ethno-religious presence, the Jews have a broad community and many arguments about being Jewish come up as much as they do in Islam.
My direction as regards ethnography, governance, and religion are involve just two or three themes: 1) let’s meet somewhere around monotheist humanism and agree to peace; 2) global cultural diversity may be as important to humanity as global biological diversity — let’s preserve one another by recognizing that others are “First People” and “Original People” and “Chosen People” too — the condition is not exclusive!; and 3) if we adopt as overarching values the pursuits of compassion, humility, inclusion, and integrity, our own humanity and the “humanity of humanity” will do just fine, and it may do just as much despite ourselves.
As-salamu alaykum!
Every child born is born with ready made ethnicity, family, language, and religion.
Not every child born, however, gets to enjoy them or keep them, and there are many reasons for that, but in that we lose a few of our approximately 7,000 living languages each month, the matter of cultural diversity and preservation should be taken as seriously as that of biological diversity. We do not know what or whom may hold some secrets beneficial to the world’s overall survival, experience of life, and qualities of living.
We need us.
There is an old world obsessed with resource competition and deficit, but here one may argue, this given that food distribution, for example, presents economic, logistical, and political issues and proves as much or more of a challenge than producing raw food supply to cover hunger in the world, that the same are “problems in the head” and partly related to emotional deficit and social self-concept.
Heighten cooperation, integration, and trade across space, and one might find economic and resource development benefits concomitant.
Can we change the way we do business?
Well, we’re finding out.
Our despots gather and tie up wealth primarily to expend the same in the worst ways imaginable; our NGOs and assorted nonprofit service organizations stretch dollars practically into infinity, or so they may try on behalf of the welfare of their fellow humans.
That contemptuous phrase “the whims of man” applies well to autocratic societies in which, indeed, the whims of one man control a great swath of humanity, but with those, one knows the methods: to those who humiliate themselves before their regimes: bribery, nepotism, and patronage: i.e., those get fed like dogs; to those who threaten such regimes: blackmail, intimidation, murder.
In contemporary realpolitik, the path ends with the suffocation of the constituent humanity or the overthrow of the regime.
Syria’s a good case in point today: I cannot figure out on whose side God has appeared. From the survey of that unfolding tragedy, He would seem altogether absent.
One more thing: the struggle for truly just systems of law beneficial, invested in, and trusted by all has not come about through whim.
The struggle for decency in human relationships by way of ethical and moral argument that finds expression through the law has a millennial existence, one that would seem to have its roots in the depths of tragedies, small and large, attending the human experience across oceanic time.
I’m all set up and am having real issues navigating next steps in one of the most modern societies in the world: I may only imagine what it’s like to be anonymous on the streets of a passive and teaming nation like Pakistan or a somewhat bureaucratized and Orwellian culture that erupts at the interface of person and government in the west. Without family or stable and helpful community-based networks, we have and sometimes number among a legion of nearly unaccounted and uncomfortably roaming persons. Some part of that may contribute to freedom and “rugged individualism” and some part, plainly, to horror.
With a soul like Jafarai, the person may be less lost than the state of origin and so many unwittingly receiving and subsequent and temporarily hosting nations as compelled migration — especially migration compelled by famine or war — and illegal immigration are a matched pair.
There’s plenty of trending news for cyberchat and cybergossip, but as I do here and others do in the various communities and forums that comprise the still emerging “Facebook civilization”, people reach back to make or suggest points or draw parallels between discrete or separated but analogous circumstances.
Community detention centers, tent camps, semi-permanent refugee camps correspond to reactions to disasters. We see so many of them each year — earthquakes and tsnunami, hurricanes and typhoons, sometimes volcanoes, sometimes, these days, damaged nuclear reactors, and then ever present conflict as well as community- or state-wide financial stress and disaster — that one wonders how far ahead of a bad circumstance the world less affected by a given emergency may make itself.
With the World Wide Web well established and robust, the suffering of distant people are no longer that distant in either common perception or space.
Ahmad Ali Jafari needed a place to land, or even if returned to Afghanistan, some program in which he was accounted and helpfully reoriented, integrated, and included.
Perhaps that’s because, and this for all the blood and treasure spent since then, it is still yesterday and yesterday remains captive to yesterday’s drives, experiences, and transmitted inter-generational cultural programming.
One of the most complicated and intrigue-filled scandals in recent decades, the Iran-contra affair dominated the news for many months. It consisted of three interconnected parts: The Reagan administration sold arms to Iran, a country desperate for materiel during its lengthy war with Iraq; in exchange for the arms, Iran was to use its influence to help gain the release of Americans held hostage in Lebanon; and the arms were purchased at high prices, with the excess profits diverted to fund the Reagan-favored “contras” fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
Strangely, the page on my Chrome browser looks like garbage until copied down (fair use – one paragraph) to ASCII text.
* * *
The event in the year 1358 was a counterattack. Our courageous and religious youth attacked the U.S. embassy and discovered the truth and identity of this embassy, which was the Den of Espionage, and presented this fact to people throughout the world.
In those days, our youth called the U.S. embassy the “Den of Espionage”. Today, after the passage of 30-plus years since that day, the name of U.S. embassies in countries which have the closest relationship with America – that is to say, European countries – has become the den of espionage. This means that our youth are 30 years ahead of the rest of the world. This event was related to America as well. These three events were related, in different ways, to the government of the United States of America and its relations with Iran. Therefore, the 13th of Aban – which is tomorrow – was named “Day of Fighting Against Arrogance”.
He believed that virtue was better revealed in action than in theory. He used hissimple lifestyle and behaviour to criticise the social values and institutions of what he saw as a corrupt society. He declared himself a cosmopolitan. There are many tales about him doggingAntisthenes‘ footsteps and becoming his faithful hound.[3] Diogenes made a virtue of poverty. He begged for a living and slept in a large ceramic jar[4] in the marketplace. He became notorious for his philosophical stunts such as carrying a lamp in the daytime, claiming to be looking for an honest man. He embarrassed Plato, disputed his interpretation of Socrates and sabotaged his lectures. Diogenes was also responsible for publicly mocking Alexander the Great.
The investigations were effectively halted when President George H. W. Bush (Reagan’s vice president) pardoned Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger before his trial began.[2]
The scandal began as an operation to free the seven American hostages being held in Lebanon by a group with Iranian ties connected to the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution. It was planned that Israel would ship weapons to Iran, and then the United States would resupply Israel and receive the Israeli payment. The Iranian recipients promised to do everything in their power to achieve the release of the U.S. hostages. The plan deteriorated into an arms-for-hostages scheme, in which members of the executive branch sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of the American hostages.[2][3] Large modifications to the plan were devised by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council in late 1985, in which a portion of the proceeds from the weapon sales was diverted to fund anti-Sandinista and anti-communist rebels, or Contras, in Nicaragua.[4][5]
While President Ronald Reagan was a supporter of the Contra cause,[6] the evidence is disputed as to whether he authorized the diversion of the money raised by the Iranian arms sales to the Contras.
Certainly from journalism’s second row seat to history, I ask what can be known or with confidence inferred by sifting and revisiting news — and what may be imagined in the widening gaps between surface coverage of many elements and their untapped depths.
In Pakistan, which information environment practically guarantees no one can know much of anything with confidence, one expects the floating of wild conspiracy theories, the kind that turn events upside-down and deliver them on a plate labeled “CIA-Mossad”.
In the open societies, Great Britain and the United States foremost, one expects such behavior to be minimized rather than encouraged, and yet we’re scratching our heads over growing “black budgets” and many things happening seemingly off the page as well as “off the hook”.
Of course, I’m reading spy novels, so perhaps that enthusiasm has begun to contaminate my appreciation of RT, CNN, Al Jazeera, Time . . . .
I ask questions about many things that can’t be seen.
One cannot “see” psychology and political psychology — no sign ever hangs over a politician announcing that he may be “DICTATORIAL”, “DISINGENUOUS”, or “DISSIMULATING”, and yet memory serves for recalling milestones and other moments, puzzling moments, sometimes, and fitting them back together.
Then such signs start to emerge from out of the fog, we start to test them again.
How could Ronald Reagan, for example, a show business alumnus, fumble so badly on the Lebanese hostage crisis as to not be aware of Oliver North’s behind-the-scenes machinations to cut a deal somewhere inside the Iran-Soviet-South American political line?
The fair good Republican story begs credibility.
The Lebanese hostage drama was not third-page lead and flip to the back of the “A section” stuff: it was front page all the way, and the President, the Republicans’ most beloved, seems nonetheless to have dropped the reins.
* * *
At ABC News, where I worked at the time, one of our camera crews had been granted access to the Oval Office the previous night. We had video of Carter, looking grim and exhausted in a cardigan, consulting with his aides until, quite literally, it was time to dress for the inauguration of his successor. Those images and live shots of desperate diplomacy, followed by the stately run-up to the transfer of power in Washington, played on one side of the screen. The preparations for departure from Mehrabad played on the other.
The Iranians stage-managed the drama down to the last second. Precisely at noon, just as Reagan began to recite the oath of office, the planeload of Americans was permitted to take off. The Iranians’ message was blunt and unambiguous: Carter and his administration had been punished for America’s sins against Iran, and Reagan was being offered a conciliatory gesture in anticipation of improved behavior by Washington.
“The Iranians” are still stage-managing “down to the last minute” the dramas in which they star themselves. That is part of the “malignant narcissism”, a part of control, a part of the guaranty of continuing “narcissistic supply” from one’s ever awed (and battered and intimidated) subjugated others.
* * *
The original reason for the hostage-taking seems to have been “as insurance against retaliation by the U.S., Syria, or any other force” against Hezbollah, which is thought responsible for the killing of 241 Americans and 58 Frenchmen[7] in the Marine barracks and embassy bombings in Beirut.[8] Other reasons for the kidnappings or the prolonged holding of hostages are thought to be “primarily based on Iranian foreign policy calculations and interests” particularly the extraction of “political, military and financial concessions from the Western world”,[9] the hostage takers being strong allies of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The Reagan’s [STET] made Americans feel good about themselves and about what we could accomplish. Obama’s arrogance by appointing 32 leftist czars and constantly bypassing congress is impeachable. Eric Holder is probably the MOST incompetent and arrogant DOJ head to ever hold the job. Could you envision President Reagan instructing his Justice Department to act like jack-booted thugs?
Presidents are politicians and all politicians are known and pretty much expected to manipulate the truth, if not outright lie, but even using that low standard, the Obama’s have taken lies, dishonesty, deceit, mendacity, subterfuge and obfuscation to new depths. They are verbally abusive to the citizenry, and they display an animus for civility.
The divide between what an American President may know and what the American public may be allowed to know in the way of day-to-day foreign relations and states of affairs seems to widen with the growth and the heightened presence of the “Islamic Small Wars” and the concomitant development of an immense intelligence bureaucracy laden with missions the public doesn’t need to know about – or shouldn’t — until afterward, perhaps, and denoted affirming as regards American patriotism.
The acknowledged and most galling of the world’s dictatorships and still feudal societies don’t have this issue: they know what they’re about, and their subjects do as well, and that’s a sad state wherever it’s found; the states navigating between open democracy and paternalist nationalism or resurgent absolutism do have this issue, for certainly Moscow’s internal opposition has been tracking what has been and continues to be taken from them since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Long opposite in stance, the United States may no longer be immune itself to cultivating suspicion throughout its constituency.
I neither condemn, demonize, nor patronize President Obama and have long noted, not alone, the need in even informal open source research to separate surface from what may be gathered and sifted as regards separate items of interest and their management.
Lo and behold, for example, where Obama has been roundly accused of abandoning Israel, throwing it “under the bus” (so I read too often), Israel holds sway over the critical cockpit avionics of the F-35 program, has developed with U.S. support long-distance refueling capability, and has access to “bunker busting” (tunneling-exploding) bombs. Even though it appears contentious and stressed, I believe the American-Israeli relationship close, rather than not, and laudable given the general stakes involved for democracy, the fruits of The Enlightenment, and the general well being — measurable by indicators of improved qualities in living — of others worldwide.
Nonetheless, the American body politic may be slipping collectively into the land of innuendo, far right and left, and have less and less insight — or energy for developing insight — into the White House’s essential American rationality (or rejection of it).
Cock-a-doodle-do about Reagan or Obama, align with the Tea Party or the New Old Now Old, Lost, and Far Out Left, the policy axis may not align with either filter.
On the surface, for example, the Obama Administration has decried the “military coup” in Egypt (that would be Obama, the secret member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the ever clever “Manchurian Candidate” out to get “America, the Prise”) but the Egyptian military, Israel, and the United States would seem on some same kind of page as regards Iran, Hamas, Syria, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
While the political cant went that-a-way –> . . . the politicians, their armed forces, their wealthy benefactors and partners — do add “large swaths of their constituencies” — hold some central constructs together out of the light.
One might say of highest-level privileged conversations, whether taking place in “open societies” or decidedly closed or closing ones, that they are all taking place somewhere “in the shadows”.
* * *
WASHINGTON — When Shiite Muslim terrorists hijacked a TWA jet and took 39 Americans hostage in Beirut four years ago, then-President Ronald Reagan’s public stance was clear: There would be no negotiations with terrorists.
But in private, the U.S. position was quite different. Reagan quietly encouraged Israel to make a deal with the terrorists, to exchange Israeli-held detainees for American hostages–and that is how the TWA captives were released, as the first step in a massive swap of prisoners across Israel’s northern border.
Arms trafficking, money laundering, personal enrichment, protection for gangsters, extortion and kickbacks, suitcases full of money and secret offshore bank accounts in Cyprus and Switzerland: the cables unpick a dysfunctional political system in which bribery alone totals an estimated $300 billion a year, and in which it is often hard to distinguish between the activities of government and organized crime.
Among the most striking allegations contained in the cables, which were leaked to the whistleblowers’ website WikiLeaks, are:
• Russian spies use senior mafia bosses to carry out criminal operations such as arms trafficking.
• Law enforcement agencies such as the police, spy agencies and the prosecutor’s office operate a de facto protection racket for criminal networks.
• Rampant bribery acts like a parallel tax system for the personal enrichment of police, officials and the KGB’s successor, the federal security service (FSB).
Snowden’s father, Lon, also expressed his gratitude to Russian President Vladimir Putin for protecting his son from the legal consequences of having violated his NSA confidentiality obligations.
*
Human Rights Watch analysts also took note of the irony of the Kremlin coming to the defense of a self-styled champion of privacy and free speech rights.
“He cannot but be aware of the unprecedented crackdown on human rights that the government has unleashed in the past 15 months,” Rachel Denber, the rights group’s expert on Russia and other former Soviet states told the Associated Press by email.
Throw away God; give up on one humanist ideology or another: what’s left?
Money.
Are governments businesses?
Who do they serve?
Among those served, what are they serving?
* * *
In the capitalist democracies, most expect private businesses to keep proprietary the business processes, relationships, and technologies that enable their sales, investment strategies, and accumulations of wealth distributed back to stakeholders or to the public in the form of consumer spending. As regards governments, they may be expected to keep secret fundamental military and security edges involving security intelligence and operations. These days, whether with billions networked through criminal pacts or blacked out for “black ops” budgets, governments, known criminal or not, would seem to be transitioning into deeply feudal empires — not of, for, or by The People but of, for, and by Some (Very Enriched) People.
______
Spanish police arrested four people Friday suspected of laundering large sums of money from Russian criminal gangs as part of a network they said may be linked to Semion Mogilevich, one of the FBI’s ten most wanted fugitives.
The arrests took place in the Mediterranean coastal town of Lloret de Mar near Barcelona, which has a large Russian community and is popular with tourists from the country, police said in a statement.
The four are suspected of tax fraud, document falsification and money laundering.
MOTHERBOARD: Let’s start with public perception. People believe the Taliban is fueling the drug trade in Afghanistan. To what extent is this true, and why is it so widely believed?
The Taliban are players in the Afghan drug trade, but minor ones in relative terms. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate this is to look at the value of the annual drug trade within Afghanistan, which is about $3 billion. The Taliban capture only about 5 to 10 percent of those profits. The bulk of the profits is appropriated by other groups, such as traffickers, government and police officers, as well as warlords.
Web searched first-page reference to data on the Taliban’s narcotics trafficking seems to trail off for 2013, but relayed at the bottom of this post, there’s combat footage from early 2013 posted just six days ago.
No pun intended here either: the impression as regards the latest admixtures of crime and politics is getting rich.
According to American national intelligence watcher Tim Shorrock (reference: Spies for Hire), the annual bill for U.S. security-oriented intelligence efforts approximates $52 billion, not that the distribution is known. The social integration of the state’s population with its defense and security sectors may suffice for trust — are we going to trust our neighbors or not? — but the informational dark space created by the development of a large population of government-employed or contracted secrets keepers may not bode well for democracy.
Who is getting that intelligence budget?
On what basis?
To what end?
Shorrock’s sturdy journalism illuminates many paths in the national security intelligence complex, but as seems true today in Russia, the public may be told that it’s being served, but given the enormity of the spooky business and its continuing growth in its institutional aspect, public also has room – more cause – to suspect otherwise.
This is not to impugn the American intelligence community: by and large, we still trust our neighbors.
With help from books like Spies for Hire, the privileges known to the free press and more affirmed than not (so far as I know — and infringements by government gets play in the press pretty damned quick), and the web, it’s not that hard getting a glimpse of the cobbling developed to counter the narcotics trade, the terrorism business, and other contributors to international crime.
Still, the more a government privileges a class with secrets-keeping powers, the more paranoia it may inspire in those who are not of it.
* * *
But, without naming names, Medvedev said Russia should be careful about freeing people convicted of crimes like hooliganism – the charge in the Pussy Riot case – and theft, which was the indictment against Khodorkovsky.
“Our people really are not much inclined, for example, to conduct acts of amnesty for individuals involved in violent crimes, for individuals who committed crimes against society, including hooliganism,” Medvedev said in a TV interview.
In political Russia, it appears deflection has become a high art.
The Khodorkovsky case has become legend and no realist expects more from the Kremlin then in its realpolitik the continued expression of absolute power that has dogged the matter from before the arrest stage and forward.
I’ve chided Pussy Riot (no, children, we do not take bawdy shows into churches without a big, friendly invitation) but most watchers feel the Kremlin’s punishment back-to-the-gulag! vulgarity bespeaks itself of criminal callousness.
In Medvedev’s above cited statement, the infantilizing of the Russian people by way of a paternalist stance should be as clear to neutral onlookers as the heightened projections of criminality. “Pussy Riot” may indeed be a vulgar noun, but the girls are not the evil ones; as for Khodorkovsky, he appears to have leaned westward with Yukos and in the direction of integrity (gasp!).
Since the late 1990s, Khodorkovsky had taken steps to transform Yukos along the lines of western business models. These steps included the introduction of corporate transparency, the adoption of western accounting standards, the hiring of western management, the creation of an independent board of directors with a corporate governance subcommittee, corporate growth through mergers and acquisitions, and increased western investments. These actions had marked Khodorkovsky as an outspoken leader who was pro-western and challenged the non-transparent means by which government and business operated in the Russian energy sector. These practices, along with the possibility of Yukos selling a major stake to Exxon Mobil or Chevron, deeply unsettled the Kremlin.
With Russia as with Syria as with, not so oddly, Islamic Jihad in large part, one may expect the patina of legitimate cause to wear away before the eyes of a widening and more profoundly comprehending global public. Even so obvious, so visible, however, one wonders about the better options available to that same public.
One may note that Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe has survived decades in power without a shred of statewide legitimacy left intact, but the crowds of those patronized, the money involved (for himself and those to whom he distributes spoils) has proven sufficient to lead him into his 90s with probably a fairly good night’s sleep.
A wave of violence Friday killed 52 people in Iraq, most of whom were kidnapped and shot dead with their corpses abandoned, in scenes harking back to Iraq’s sectarian war . . . More than 6,000 people have been killed this year, forcing Baghdad to appeal for international help in battling militancy just months before a general election, as official concern focuses on a resurgent Al-Qaeda emboldened by the war in neighbouring Syria.
Raise the volume all you like, talk is talk and that’s all it is: in coming days, so one may suspect with reason, it will become near impossible for the morally pissed off and remote to be heard over or through the bodies piling up as they do when the cause has become nothing short of madness itself.
* * *
STERLING HEIGHTS, MICH. — The Iraqi government is negotiating with the US government and BAE Systems to purchase 200 Bradley Fighting Vehicles sometime during the next 15 months, according to BAE officials.
The potential deal is expected sometime in 2014 and could come just before another expected agreement is reached with Saudi Arabia to buy Bradleys in 2015. The Iraq contract would provide recently upgraded M2A2 ODS (Operation Desert Storm) variants to the Baghdad government, the same vehicles that the US Army National Guard uses.
The search string “Iraq Sectarian Violence 2013” doesn’t produce news anymore: it produces a story line that starts with taking off the lid covering this simmering pot of scorpions, the seemingly unintended consequence of the 2003 invasion — ten years and eight months ago — and opens a long scene two or three (I don’t think three acts will do it for this part of the world) that is playing now and keeps cycling back to unconventional, sub-state, guerrilla style barbarism and sadism within the context of (yawn) Sunni-Shiite predispositions that have absolutely nothing to do — and they will have nothing to do — with tomorrow.
I’m sure my life in media’s fringe would be more exciting (and solvent) if I worked for RT!
However, it takes no genius to understand the astoundingly absurd structure of this portion of the Islamic Small Wars: Putin : cash / Assad : survival / Khamenei : ambition / Shiite : expansion and survival vs. Obama : Obama / Sunni Quasi-Democratic Kerfuffle (Syria) / Iraq : Sunni Reassertion with “gorious” Al Qaeda-type Edging.
Iraqis are suffering murder associated with or motivated by cultural and religious precepts that have absolutely nothing to do with the nature of God, humanity, or the universe — and for that, or just perhaps ignoring that, Iraq as a state is laying in large arms contracts.
Beware the next Gulf War.
All this other bloodletting: calisthenics.
Iraqis need an army of detectives, psychologists (cultural, ethnographic, linguistic, social), and wondrous poetic minds (preferably Jewish or, perhaps, Presbyterian — for the kindness thing), for every surprised and tortured corpse in this year’s Iraq body count, so far, of 6,000 (update that: 6010 or so as I type) was murdered by somebody else’s programming in the head, which programming always exists and persists as language foremost albeit molded by emotion best interpreted through the portal opened by the terms “civilizational narcissism” and “malignant narcissism”.
______
Gun battles between Iraqi security forces and armed attackers have left at least ten dead and more than 40 injured in Kirkuk.
Suicide bombers and gunmen initially launched an assault on police intelligence headquarters in the northern Iraqi city.
At the state level, state forces consistently engage Al Qaeda when apparent, much to their credit, but the sub-state, transnational character of that insult to humanity knows its way around tanks and patrols. What’s needed would seem an extraordinary upgrade in intelligence concepts and methodology, including HUMINT.
* * *
It was the second month in a row that the overall death toll declined, but the U.N. envoy to Iraq, Nickolay Mladenov, said he was “profoundly disturbed” by an uptick in “execution-style” killings. In three places around Baghdad last week, Iraqi police found bodies of 31 men, women and children who had been shot in the head.
By April 2013, simmering sectarian tensions boiled over and the country experienced its deadliest month in half a decade. If a day goes by in Iraq without scores being maimed or killed in car bombings outside schools, mosques or crowded markets, that day is the exception rather than the rule. Hundreds continue to die each month in such grisly attacks. What follows is an account of the violence that has gripped the country over the past year. There are no coffins draped in Stars and Stripes, but the cameras are rolling and the world is watching.
Syria has emerged as the new “Jihadist cause célèbre” across the Arab world, energizing that movement and providing a melting pot for foreign fighters from across the region to create personal ties that will underpin future terrorist networks.
By the measures of manpower, weaponry and territory, it can now be argued that the broader al Qaeda network is stronger than at any time since the peak of the Iraq insurgency half a decade ago, and perhaps even than at any time since 9/11.
BackChannels 