The Noble Cause

Like Harper here is another politician claiming that the war in Afghanistan is a noble cause but he too admits they underestimated the resistance. I think the word they are looking for is ignoble.

Browne: Taliban surprised us
UK: Defence secretary admits Britain underestimated Afghan resistance.
Full text of Des Browne's speech
Comment: John Williams

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Afghanistan

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Special report: Afghanistan

The Perils of Leaving Home

The perils of leaving home to speak at the UN. Especially if you are a crooked politician.

State of emergency in Thailand amid coup rumours

Commentary: Thailand's 'coup attempt'

On BBC the coup prempted their coverage of George Bush's speech to the UN. Ahhhh to bad so sad.

Thailand's turbulent politics

Thailand's latest political crisis traces its roots back to January when Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra sold his family's stake in the telecoms firm Shin Corp.

The move angered many, mainly urban Thais, who complained the family avoided paying tax and had passed control of an important national asset to Singaporean investors.

Profile: Thaksin Shinawatra

John Aglionby, south-east Asia correspondent
Tuesday September 19, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra being forced out in a coup d'etat would be an ironic twist in the career of a man who has preferred to write his own rule books rather than abide by prevailing conventions.

From his transformation as a little-known police colonel into the nation's most popular ever leader via a farcical attempt to buy Liverpool football club in 2004 and a bizarre alleged plot on his life last month, Mr Thaksin has always led an arrogant larger-than-life existence where wheeling and dealing behind the scenes has been as important as what is presented to the public.

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Negligence

Say it ain't so....
Pledges made last year to substantially increase the volume of official development assistance, including a doubling of aid to Africa by 2010, must be met. Responding to a question after the briefing, Mr Wolfowitz named US as a major defaulter to the commitment.

Of course when one spends all of ones International Aid and development funds on making war well.....what do you expect. The Cost of Iraq War calculator is set to reach $318.5 billion by September 30th, the end of fiscal year 2006.

Wolfowitz isn't he the guy who was in charge of the war in Iraq, the one that was supposed to be self funding thanks to all the oil.



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Africa

World Bank

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How To Win Friends and Influence People

Military prisons face swell of opposition

BAGHDAD, Iraq - In the years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.

Disclosures of torture and long-term arbitrary detentions have won rebuke from leading voices including the U.N. secretary-general and the U.S. Supreme Court. But the bitterest words come from inside the system, the size of several major U.S. penitentiaries.

"It was hard to believe I'd get out," Baghdad shopkeeper Amjad Qassim al-Aliyawi told the Associated Press after his release -- without charge -- last month. "I lived with the Americans for one year and eight months as if I was living in hell."

Captured on battlefields, pulled from beds at midnight, grabbed off streets as suspected insurgents, tens of thousands now have passed through U.S. detention, the vast majority in Iraq. Many say they were often interrogated around the clock, then released months or years later without apology, compensation or explanation for their incarceration.

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CIA



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Define Success

Harper will accept nothing less than success in Afghanistan

Cheney also cautioned there is a tough road ahead. "We are still in the fight in Afghanistan and we're likely to be for some considerable period of time," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Define success. Define considerable period of time. Define our mission in Afghanistan. Canadians want to know. As the Toronto Star found out Voices: Afghan mission

Define the clash of civilizations which lead to this...The start of a long war?

Success can't be defined as nation building when the government is really a City State with Karzai as Mayor. Canadians are being a sold a bill of goods that reconstruction has occurred, that the Taliban are the only warlords that are the problem and that the people like us. They really like us.

The only success in Afghanistan for the past five years has been this....

A Poor Yield For Afghans' War on Drugs

Poppy farming, banned in 2000 by the Taliban administration that U.S.-led forces overthrew the following year, quickly revived after the establishment of a U.N.-backed government and has been spreading rapidly ever since. It now accounts for more than half the country's gross national income and provides the raw material for about 75 percent of the world's heroin.

"It's become an industrial production," said Doris Buddenberg, director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime here, noting that Afghanistan's opium output this year was a staggering 6,700 tons. Rural poverty, dashed hopes for economic recovery, Taliban blandishments and anti-government sentiment "all added up to more families deciding to grow poppy," she said.

But anti-drug officials and experts here say the expansion of drug smuggling and refining is a far more pernicious problem than poppy farming and could easily turn Afghanistan into another Colombia.

"Our main problem is these former commanders and warlords who are still in power. Now they are district chiefs and local police," said Maj. Gen. Sayed Kamal Sadaat, head of the anti-narcotics police force. "The drug mafia is getting more powerful day by day, and the only support we have is from the international community. The senior authorities not only do not cooperate, they get in our way."

And I don't think that was what Harper meant by success.


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Afghanistan

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The Cost Of A Free Press

Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East is what the Americans say they are are fighting for in Iraq. For a free press of course...which reminds me again of A. J. Leibling who said a free press belongs to those that own one...and in this case much of the press in Iraq, at least the press that you and I get to read is owned by the U.S. military.

Which is why they jail independent freelance journalists like this guy US Holds AP Photographer in Iraq 5 Mos While paying off British interns to sell their story in the Iraqi press. This is thre real meaning of embedded journalism....journalists in bed with the Pentagon planting stories in the press. PR joins fight for hearts and minds

I Was A PR Intern in Iraq

By Willem Marx, Harper's. Posted September 18, 2006.

In this astonishing confessional by an Oxford graduate who worked in the green zone of Baghdad, we see the perversity of the American version of a 'free press' in Iraq.

With all I was doing on Western Mission, I had begun to pay far less attention to the military's daily storyboards. Although I was passing along more than ten articles to be published each week, thrilling the stats-obsessed military team, I had stopped reading all the items the military sent me, and I'm sure I forwarded on to Muhammad stories I would previously have held back. Every week I was required to confirm the details of the military's spreadsheet, which listed the stories written by the I.O. team, the stories published, and which newspapers had published them. But it wasn't until early August that I really looked closely at the figures for the previous three weeks. When I examined Muhammad's records, I saw that the amounts some newspapers had charged us for placing articles had shot up dramatically.

During July, pieces published in the newspaper Addustour had gone from $84, to $423, to $1,345, and finally to $2,156. For another newspaper, Al Adala, what we were charged had climbed from $82 at the start of July to $1,088 by month's end. I checked the word counts of the articles, since we paid more for additional column inches, but all the stories were roughly the same length. On closer inspection, I also noticed that articles had been published in newspapers I had not specified. One particular paper, Al Sabah Al Jadeed (The New Morning), had been paid around $12,000 over a ten-day period from late July to early August, although I had never told Muhammad to place stories there.

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Iraq


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Oriana Fallaci RIP

An excellent biographical web page dedicated to Oriana Fallaci the controversial Italian contrarian author and journalist, who passed away this month. A contrarian before little Christopher Hitchens was, and whom he modeled himself after as he swung right. Imagine that. She was the liberal darling of the right. Like Hitchens is today. Scratch a liberal and you find a conservative in a hurry.

THE AGITATOR

Oriana Fallaci directs her fury toward Islam.

by MARGARET TALBOT

Issue of 2006-06-05
Fallaci believes, the Western world is in danger of being engulfed by radical Islam. Since September 11, 2001, she has written three short, angry books advancing this argument. Two of them, “The Rage and the Pride” and “The Force of Reason,” have been translated into idiosyncratic English by Fallaci herself. (She has had difficult relationships with translators in the past.) A third, “The Apocalypse,” was recently published in Europe, in a volume that also includes a lengthy self-interview. She writes that Muslim immigration is turning Europe into “a colony of Islam,” an abject place that she calls “Eurabia,” which will soon “end up with minarets in place of the bell-towers, with the burka in place of the mini-skirt.” Fallaci argues that Islam has always had designs on Europe, invoking the siege of Constantinople in the seventh century, and the brutal incursions of the Ottoman Empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She contends that contemporary immigration from Muslim countries to Europe amounts to the same thing—invasion—only this time with “children and boats” instead of “troops and cannons.” And, as Fallaci sees it, the “art of invading and conquering and subjugating” is “the only art at which the sons of Allah have always excelled.” Italy, unlike America, has never been a melting pot, or a “mosaic of diversities glued together by a citizenship. Because our cultural identity has been well defined for thousands of years we cannot bear a migratory wave of people who have nothing to do with us . . . who, on the contrary, aim to absorb us.” Muslim immigrants—with their burkas, their chadors, their separate schools—have no desire to assimilate, she believes. And European leaders, in their muddleheaded multiculturalism, have made absurd accommodations to them: allowing Muslim women to be photographed for identity documents with their heads covered; looking the other way when Muslim men violate the law by taking multiple wives or defend the abuse of women on supposedly Islamic grounds. (European governments are, in fact, hardening on these matters: France recently deported a Muslim cleric in Lyons who advocated wife-beating and the stoning of adulterous women.)

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They Walk Among Us

As the red scare Sci-Fi movie healdlines of the fifties would say.

Imagine this 'Walking Shark' Among 50 New Marine Species Found Off Indonesia's Papua Province

Luckily it's the kind of shark they keep at Big Al's Marineland stores....





This is quite amazing.....Watch a video of the "walking" shark and other species.

Again we are discovering whole new worlds in the Indonesian region both on land and on sea.

Researchers described an underwater world of visual wonders, such as the small epaulette shark that "walks" on its fins and colorful schools of reef fish populating abundant and healthy corals of all shapes and sizes.

"These Papuan reefs are literally 'species factories' that require special attention to protect them from unsustainable fisheries and other threats so they can continue to benefit their local owners and the global community," said Mark Erdmann, senior adviser of CI's Indonesian Marine Program, who led the surveys. "Six of our survey sites, which are areas the size of two football fields, had over 250 species of reef-building coral each - that's more than four times the number of coral species of the entire Caribbean Sea."

Unfortunately this newly discovered shark and its underwater world is threatened by capitalist development in the region. Oh no you say not that old canard. Well explain this then its not the regional human population that threatens this area......

Though human population density in the region is low,

the coastal people of the Bird's Head peninsula are heavily dependent on the sea for their livelihoods -

which now are under threat from a plan to transfer fishing pressures from Indonesia's over-fished western seas to the east toward Papua province.

Threats from over-fishing with dynamite and cyanide, as well as deforestation and mining that degrade coastal waters, require immediate steps to protect the unique marine life that sustains local communities. The seascape's central location in the Coral Triangle of the Pacific, which exports and maintains biodiversity in the entire Indo-Pacific marine realm, makes it one of the planet's most urgent marine conservation priorities.

Some of those mining companies that are dumping cyanide are Canadian.

But of course if we treat this region like the Tories treated our Kyoto commitments it wil be; the region is screwed there is nothing we can do so lets do nothing.

But that is not true as CI found out in research on coral reefs off Madagascar, another under research marine area.....

Healthy Coral Reefs Of Madagascar Resisting Damage From Climate Change

They found healthy coral reefs that have avoided bleaching attributed to climate change found in other Indian Ocean reefs. The researchers believe cool water currents from adjacent deep ocean areas offset the warming effects of climate change.

"The resiliency and health of the coral reefs with their biodiversity and endemism makes the reefs of Madagascar a high conservation priority," said Gerald R. Allen, a leading ichthyologist who conducted underwater fish surveys on the expedition.

So we are discovering that our planet is alive and self repairing, some areas of the planet can adapt to climate chang. The fact is that when we speak of human development and its impact on global warming we are not just talking about human communities or human industry but a specific kind of industrialization. We are talking about capitalism. Those on the right understand this and so they engage in the psudeo science of global warming denial.

Capitalism is a non sustainable system of industrialization. Its resulting pollution,planned obsolescence and creation of a society of throw away goods (look at the masses of landfills world wide that provide habitat and living spaces for the poorest of the poor in our growing supercities) has distrubed the world more in 100 years than all of human existance over the last 20,000.

Capitalism exasperates and increases global warming , climate change and environmantal damage. By its internal logic of constant growth at any cost. It not human societies or huamn development in a region perse will destroy vulnerable areas that are adapting.

These regions may be able to adapt to climate change induced by low level human industrialization, but they cannot escape results of capitalist development on the shoreline, whether it is large scale trawling fishing, mining tailings dumped into the sea or garbage, sewage and offal dumped by tourist ships.

Yes you can help preserve this and the other unique ecological niches in this area. Check out Conservation International who is doing excellent work in this region of our world.

And remember YOU can save the world you live in.... you too can smash capitalism and its state.

See:

Ecology

Global Warming

New Species

Lost and Found

Capitalism Threatens Coelacanth

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Pope Embraces Orthodox Church

In his quoting of14th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Palaeologus the Pope is not quoting a Latin/Catholic Church father but rather a member of the old church, the Byzantine Orthodox Church. The Church of Russia rather than the Catholic Church of Rome or the church of Paris or the Holy Roman Empire. Who was the Emperor the Pope quoted. An Emperor and consequently the Head of the Orthodox Church, which the Pope convinently did not mention the latter role.

An Emperor and Church Father who ruled at the time of the begining of the Ottoman Empire and Turkish expansion. At the time of the historic Dracula and the Balkan wars against the Turks.

At a time when Europe once again would leave Byzantium to its fate under the Muslims because of Catholic sectarianism. Just as Catholic Europe had deserted it before during the Crusades, when it wasn't raping it on the way to Jerusalem.

Of course this is also a clever backhanded compliment a slap at the Omnipotence of the Orthodox Church as much as it's a slap at Islam.

This is very important the Pope was thus killing two birds with one stone in quoting Palaeologos. He condemns as outmoded the idea of the Orthodox Church being the New Rome. And he attacks Religion, read Islam, as political state military power, since the Vatican asa Spirtual City State perse has none. The Popes reading is that Islam remains too closely tied to State Power. Of course the role of the State in Catholic countries in the world can also be looked at, so people who live in glass houses....

Telling is the comment by Baum aboutManuels letters and writings....
Just as in the sixty-eight preserved letters between 1383 and 1417 few specific, day-to-day news items are to be found, so also in his theoretical writings the emperor distances himself from every-day reality.

Just as this current Pope has.Vatican experts say Pope 'unrepentant'

Orthodoxy and Islam

The Balkan Orthodox view on Islam in the context of the Ottoman conquest and rule during the 14th-15th century

Dialog with one "Persian"/ of the emperor Manuel II Palaeologos /1391-1423/. The writing is valuable because of its original character. It should be considered as one of the few polemic writings in the Byzantine tradition based on private observation and direct contact with Muslims. The author also shows deep knowledge of the Byzantine tradition and the previous polemic writings against Islam. The book of M. Palaeologos is written in the end of the 14th century and is a kind of record of his conversation with a Muslim scholar /muderis = professor/ in Ankara, in whose house the emperor spent the winter of 1391. There are many reasons to include this source in our survey. First, as we already mentioned the story is based on a real dialogue between the author and a learned Muslim . Second, the writing is providing us with Islamic teachings, unknown till then in the Byzantine tradition. For example, the teaching about the mortality of the angels; the existence of logic among the animals; That Mohammed has a higher place in the Heaven hierarchy than the angels, etc. Third, the thoughts of Manuel II Palaeologos about the Byzantine political doctrine. He dropped behind the traditional Byzantine view that the only true religion - Christianity is spread through the world by the only legitimate empire - Byzantine and by the only legitimate emperor, the emperor of Constantinople - the New Rome. For him the state and military success are not a part and do not come to confirm the truth of particular religious system. In his writing we see a refusal of the doctrine about the messianic role of Byzantine in the world's history as a unifier of the Oicumene.

Manuel II Palaeologus (1350 - July 21, 1425) was intellectual, soldier, statesman, and Byzantine emperor (1391-1425). He was son of John V Palaeologus, and when his father died, in February 1391, he escaped fron the turkish camp where he was kept as prisoner, and came to Constantinople to regain his throne (he had been crowned co-emperor in September 1373). The situation of the Greek Empire was desperate. Turks had conquered most of the byzantine provinces, had devastated and pillaged the big cities and had enslaved thousands women, young boys and girls. Manuel was forced to pay tribute to the Sultan Bayezid and was forced to follow him to his raids against the Greek cities. His chagrin was strong when he observed the Ottomans destroy and plunder the cities of Euxenus Pontus (Black Sea) and other cities of Minor Asia. When he asked Turks the names of christian cities that were pillaged and devastated, he received the answer: "the way we destroy them their name is also disappearing from earth...".

In 1396, Manuel made a journey to western Europe to appeal for help. He was graciously received in Rome, Milan, London, and Paris; he stayed in the french capital for two years. His visit did much to promote cultural ties between Byzantium and the West, but military aid was not forthcoming. As the historian Runciman describes "the french and english aristocracy received the king of Greeks with honor and respect and the intellectuals were happy to exchange views with such a sophisticated and educated person. They had already come in acquaintance with the classical greek studies thanks to Chrysoloras Manuel who was a pioneer in spreading Greek literature in the West."

Despite the agreement no military help came from the west. Europeans in reality prefered to support Muslims and not the Orthodox Christians. The same time, people and clergy back in Constantinople opposed to the union while emperor and army were in favor of it.

Manuel II PALAIOLOGOS (1391-1425 A.D.)

Wilhelm Baum
Univeristät Graz, Austria

After his father's death, Manuel fled from the sultan's camp and hastened to Constantinople, in order to forestall his nephew's plans. After his return, he married (on the tenth of February, 1392) Helena Dragash, the daughter of the Serbian prince Constantine of Serres. In the national museum in Sofia is preserved an icon which empress Helena had brought along for her father who fell in battle against the Turks in 1395. Both Manuel and Helena were crowned by the patriarch Antony IV. The archimandrite Ignatius of Smolensk has left us a description of the coronation. The pompous ceremony was supposed to strengthen the people's morale and demonstrate self-confidence.

Byzantium, however, held to the bitter end onto the dogma that its ruler was the only legitimate emperor and hence was the head of the civilized world. Nonetheless Antony stressed in 1393 in his missive to the Grand Prince that precisely because of the Turks' stranglehold the exceptional position of the emperor in the Christian world had to be emphasized. "The emperor occupies in the church that place which no other secular ruler can occupy. Many other emperors in the course of history have advanced religion, summoned ecumenical councils, confirmed the canons, fought against heresies, set up primacies (i.e., rankings of patriarchal seats) as well as provinces and dioceses. All this justifies their value and their place in the church.... patriarchs, metropolitans, and bishops therefore everywhere respect the name of the emperor... For Christians there is no church without emperor.

Also See:

Pope

Catholic Church

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