Jacob Weisberg smells gas

Here is a very clear article in Slate about economics and common sense when it comes to gas prices. Here are some quotes:

[Slate: April 26th, 2006]

With gasoline prices now spiking around $3 a gallon—near their inflation-adjusted 1981 peak—we are witnessing stupidity on wheels. Republicans, who as incumbents fear that they will be blamed, are in a kind of frenzy to abandon free-market principles, basic economic reasoning, and increasingly, reason itself.
[...]
If you don't have some sort of monopoly power, gouging is another word for charging the highest price the market will bear, also known as capitalism. This is why the FTC investigation has turned up nothing. What constrains filling stations from marking up gas excessively is not the fear of prosecution but competition from other filling stations.
[...]
Of course, there is outrageous anti-competitive conduct in the petroleum industry—it's called OPEC.
[...]
[Democrats] also have their own distinctive form of gas-price stupidity, which is to ignore the conflict between the environmentalism they espouse and the cheap fuel they demand. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi even moaned about high gas prices in her Earth Day statement last week.
[...]
What none can acknowledge is that higher gas prices in the United States are a good thing. To be sure, oil at $70 a barrel causes hardships for working people and delights some of the world's worst dictators. But cheap gasoline imposes its own costs on society: greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution and its attendant health risks, traffic congestion, and accidents.

It is rather strange that a society committed to free market solutions, whenever possible, is willing to drop these principles so quickly when "the going gets tough". This increase in price of oil is actually a very generous subsidy for the development of more environmentally friendly sources of energy. As the author points out, those who support cleaner environment should actually welcome this increase in price.

The question is not whether one day we will run out of oil, or that we will find other sources of energy to replace it. The answer is a definite yes on both counts. The question should be whether we will irreversibly trash our planet in the process.

This hike in oil price may be the last chance for us to get our act together.

Can't touch this..

This is so awesome, apparently MC Hammer has a blog as well on Blogger. Check it out: Look Look Look

Lordi@Eurovision Song Contest

Eurovision is one of those things we make fun of, but can't quite manage to escape. Inevitably year after year, Finland ends up somewhere at the bottom of the list of European countries. With nothing to lose, this year they are sending Lordi.

[http://www.antenna.nu/lordi/interview1.php]

[Guardian: April 25th, 2006]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the choice of Lordi has been greeted with dismay by religious groups both in Finland and abroad. A group of Greek protesters known as the Hellenes have called on the Finnish government to intervene: "We ask the Finnish Commission of the Eurovision Song Contest to cancel the procedure and choose another song. This evil and satanic Finnish band is not welcome in Greece." (This year's contest will take place on May 20 in Athens).

I think I am going to watch Eurovision this year. Maybe that's why they are sending Lordi.

Sometimes a murder is just a murder

I came across this headline from Foxnews: Ethnic Gang Murder.

[Foxnews: 24th April, 2006]

Nearly 80,000 demonstrators flooded the streets in Belgium on Sunday in a silent march to commemorate a murdered teenager who was killed for refusing to give up his digital music player to two North African gang members.

The march was called by a Moroccan-born parliament member, who said the murder "stinks of racism" by increasingly violent North African street gangs — which he said, "go after victims who look like infidels."

But you wouldn't know the killing had any racial overtones from reading the AP's report on the march, which never once mentions the ethnicity of the killers. The BBC also left that detail out of its television report.

It did take me a while to dig up this story, it got buried in the news stories of bombings in Israel and Egypt.

But finally I came up with this:

[Flandersnews.be : 25th April, 2006]

The teenager in question is not the actual murderer but his accomplice; identified as the young man in the Nike top, seen on the CCTV footage.

Witnesses had described both offenders as being of North African origin. It now seems that Joe Van Holsbeeck's murderers are Polish.
[...]
The second suspect, the murder [sic] himself, has been identified but is currently in hiding. It is now suspected that he has fled to Poland. Detectives have come to this conclusion after analyzing signals from his mobile phone.

I guess BBC and AP had a point when they left out the ethnicity of the killers, the last thing anyone needs now is a war between these two EU members.

None of this should really be surprising, Fox News has a bit of a reputation when it comes to jumping to conclusions.

Malaya as a model for Iraq

[The New Republic: April 19th, 2006]

Today, as the Bush administration searches for a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, several military thinkers are pointing to the British operations in Malaya as a model. Episodes like the Batang Kali massacre seem to have been forgotten. Instead, contemporary analysts argue that Great Britain effectively suppressed communist insurgents and won civilian support through a large-scale, "hearts-and-minds campaign."
[...]
To seize civilian control, the British created a police state and invoked draconian powers ranging from movement-restriction and collective punishments to detention without trial.
[...]
Nearly the entire Chinese population of 400,000 to 500,000 were forced from their homes and were resettled into some 400 heavily guarded barbed-wire villages. They were deprived of all civil rights, and they endured great physical and emotional abuse.
[...]
In some ways, the U.S. military in Iraq is already following the British counterinsurgency model in Malaya. Although stateside leaders and strategists continue to pay lip service to the hearts-and-minds approach, the reality is that commanders on the ground, much like their counterparts in the former British empire, are skeptical. As Iraq ground commander General Thomas Metz stated bluntly, "[I] don't think we will put much energy into trying the old saying, 'Win the hearts and minds.' I don't look at it as one of the metrics of success."

This brings to mind the American "pacification" of Philippines and the British concentration camps in the Boer war at the beginning of the 20th century.

These three cases demonstrate that it is possible for armed forces to eliminate an insurgency. They also show that the occupying force has to resort to methods as savage as that of the insurgents. Although it's possible to do this in Iraq, it's very improbable that the current occupying powers have the political will to go through with this. With journalists and soldiers reporting on the situation in the country, the occupation is becoming more unpopular back home in US.

The only successful example of hearts and minds approach that I can think of, is the Marshall plan after the Second World War. Of course there was another reason for this approach then, USA did not want western Europe to fall to Soviet Union. US needed strong allies and took measures to create them.

It seems strange that US would not pursue a similar approach in Iraq, instead of investing money on expensive military gadgets, and writing blank checks to dodgy contractors. It seems that the current US administration is still confused in it's relationship with Iraq. Perhaps if US were to invest in Iraq, the way it invested in Western Germany after 1945, it would find itself with a powerful secular ally. However, all this talk of gradual troops withdrawal, is a further indicator that it's not interested in being an important player in the local politics.

I suppose things were much more simple in Malaya and Philippines.

that bloody woman

i just thought i'd inform you all that today i will be attempting to avoid watching any news at all.

This is due to the fact that it is the Queen's 80 Birthday and on this day England (and Australia too i'd guess) goes completely crazy, gushes with praise and celebrates the fact that background means everything. We (especially if we are the BBC) heap praise on some obscure white aristocratic family and cherish the days when Britain really was 'Great'...

Even news sources i usually respect tend to be complementary to that ruddy Windsor chick on days like these... and it makes me sick.

--- end of rant ---

Russian Media

Once every couple of months I try to find some sensible Russian newspapers on the web. I am sure they do exist, but after couple of hours I usually give up - too much nationalism and too little self-criticism tends to have that effect on me. Anyway, this is a list of newspapers I have come up with by checking what BBC monitors over there.

Gazeta
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
Novaya Gazeta
Moskovskaya Pravda
Moskovskiy Komsomolets
The Moscow Times
The Moscow News
Sovetskaya Rossiya
Kommersant
Vedomosti
Izvestia
Argumentiy i Faktiy

Will go through them in the next couple of days and try to find something sensible (i.e. having a liberal and democratic outlook - and I don't mean the ideas of the party run by Mr Zhirinovsky)

Meanwhile I will add Pravda (English version) to the news links, I was going to add it to the "right" section, but it is too messed up for that, although it does somewhat remind me of the Fox News. It's great entertainment of the fictional variety.

Political ads don't work

There is something very wrong with this article about political advertising.

[Guardian: 19th April, 2006]

"There is a myth about political advertising," warned Philip Gould, New Labour's polling and marketing guru, in his book The Unfinished Revolution. "Advertising has an effect but it is small and rarely decisive. It is certain that in four of the last five elections, advertising did not materially influence the result.

"The one possible exception is the 1992 election, where it can be argued that [Labour's] Tax Bombshell had some effect on the electorate. But even that is highly debatable. Labour lost that election because it was not yet electable."

That scepticism is echoed in the only recent study of political advertising in Britain, by David Sanders and Pippa Norris, which examined the effects of ads in the 2001 election. They found that the overall impact was small, that attack advertising was counter-productive and that ads were disproportionately effective for smaller parties who otherwise struggled for coverage.

I think there have been cases where political advertising worked. Otherwise, why are people convinced that Al Gore said that he "invented the internet", or that Kerry is a flip flopper whose record in Vietnam is worse than that of that "no-show" George AWOL Bush. Perhaps things in Britain are different, but character assassination, if done well, does bring about the desired results.

I also can't help wondering how they went about measuring the effectiveness of these adverts. Did they just go to people and ask them, "Do you feel that this advertisement made you like Tony more or less?". The point is that these adverts should work on subconscious as well as on a conscious level. But I am speculating here, since there is no account of their methodology at all.

God, i love fox! ;)

Terror Survival Handbook

jesus h christ! them nasty terrorists must be everywhere. think i better stop by a shop on the way home and buy myself a whistle and some energy bars...



sidenote: if you click on the contacts link (bottom right of the terrorism survival guide) you will see this handbook was written by terrorism ''expert'' Yuval Aviv

The Most Honourable Order of the Bath

I watched an episode of Dr. Who today. Then I checked up Christopher Eccleston in Wikipedia. There was a connection to Nigel Hawthorne, who I loved watching in "Yes, Minister". Apparently he had a KBE. After reviewing the meanings of different orders of knighthood, I clicked on the foreigners who received honourary knighhoods. As I was scrolling down the page, looking for familiar names, I came upon Nicolae Ceauşescu. I could not believe it. Why would this brute be rewarded by UK?

After some googling, I came up with this article:

[Telegraph: 8th November 2005]

In 1978, Nicolae Ceausescu was known to be a thoroughly nasty piece of work but Romania's insubordination within the Warsaw Pact ensured a warm welcome in London.

The same year saw Amnesty International begin a campaign against human rights violations in the totalitarian state.

Still, James Callaghan, the prime minister, considered Ceausescu worthy of an honorary Grand Cross of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath.

The old tyrant responded by awarding the Queen the Star of the Socialist Republic of Romania First Class. Sixteen years later the British asked for their medal back.

I wonder if the Queen sent back her award.

Another famous Knight Grand Cross of Bath (since removed) was Robert Mugabe. What was John Major thinking?

This is what Benjamin Zephaniah thought about his OBE.

[Guardian: November 27th, 2003]

Me? I thought, OBE me? Up yours, I thought. I get angry when I hear that word "empire"; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised. It is because of this concept of empire that my British education led me to believe that the history of black people started with slavery and that we were born slaves, and should therefore be grateful that we were given freedom by our caring white masters. It is because of this idea of empire that black people like myself don't even know our true names or our true historical culture. I am not one of those who are obsessed with their roots, and I'm certainly not suffering from a crisis of identity; my obsession is about the future and the political rights of all people. Benjamin Zephaniah OBE - no way Mr Blair, no way Mrs Queen. I am profoundly anti-empire.

..and I got all this information because of Dr. Who. That's exactly why I enjoy science fiction.

"What are they smoking?"

With only a couple of years left of his lame-duck presidency, President George Walker Bush has little time to introduce democracy to the people of the Middle East, while at the same time keeping America safe from the "evil doers". After watching freedom marching through the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the next obvious target is Iran.

[The New Yorker: 10th April 2006]

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

This article quotes many sources, who seem to be in the position to evaluate the policies of the current US administration. If what they say is true, than the situation is even worse than I thought.

Here are some of the quotes and my comments:

"Bush and others in the White House view him as a potential Adolf Hitler", a former senior intelligence official said.

Why must they compare every single dictator to Hitler? It's just ridiculous. WTF does potential Adolf Hitler mean? Is Ahmadinejad going to make a deal with Putin and take over Poland? Is he going to have concentration camps? Is he going to have a foreign or economic policy like that of the Third Reich? Why can't they just use a Bushism and call him an "evil doer"? This guy is not even a dictator, he does not even have the absolute power in his country.

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

Whatever they are smoking, they should be manufacturing and selling it in large quantities. Damn. This is just about the silliest plan ever, historically these types of plans are introduced by someone in the air force. It was going to work for Goering in England, and it was going to work for Harris in Germany. If you want regime change you need troops on the ground. When people get bombed, they don't tend to attack their leaders, they tend to stop thinking about politics and concentrate on survival.

Clawson [deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy] said that he would prefer to rely on sabotage and other clandestine activities, such as “industrial accidents.” But, he said, it would be prudent to prepare for a wider war, “given the way the Iranians are acting. This is not like planning to invade Quebec.”

Quebec? In a different situation I would think of this as a silly comparison, but keeping in mind the current administration, I am not so sure. They do speak French over there, perhaps they also think of them as cheese eating surrender monkeys. In any case last time when US attacked Canada (in 1812), it was no cakewalk.

“People think Bush has been focussed on Saddam Hussein since 9/11,” but, “in my view, if you had to name one nation that was his focus all the way along, it was Iran.”

That makes sense. During Clinton administration, I felt that there was at least an attempt to repair relations with Iran. Bush, on the other hand, already in 2002, in his State of the Union speech, pigeon holed Iran into the axis of evil.

The Pentagon adviser said that, in the event of an attack, the Air Force intended to strike many hundreds of targets in Iran but that “ninety-nine per cent of them have nothing to do with proliferation.

Well, that makes sense. If you are going to attack a country without any provocation, you might as well completely immobilise it, to make sure it can't defend itself.

As of early winter, I was told by the government consultant with close ties to civilians in the Pentagon, the units were also working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris, in the north, the Baluchis, in the southeast, and the Kurds, in the northeast.

This is the familiar setup which we have already seen in Afghanistan and Iraq. After all, generals do tend to fight the last war. It's nice to see that Kurds are involved, after all this effort they better get an independent state of their own. Otherwise perhaps Slate's Timothy Noah will start up his "Kurd Sellout Watch" column again.

The article illustrates well the problem of the present situation. US administration is convinced that those ruling Iran are irrational (those with "perverted sense of justice"), so the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine cannot be applied. From this it logically follows that under no circumstances must they get the nukes.

The problem with this assumption of insanity is that it does not matter whether Iranians would get the bomb in 3 years or 20 years, it does not even matter if they would never be able to complete this project or if they promise to abandon the use of nuclear power altogether, even for peaceful purposes. If they are insane, one cannot take a chance. From this it follows that the only way out of this situation is to have the regime change.

The Iranian government understands this problem and realises that the only way for them to stop the unavoidable US attack is to get the nukes ASAP. Only with the nukes would the be able to get the same kind of comparative safety enjoyed by North Korea.

So even though the official policy of the current US administration is to work this one out through diplomacy, their belligerent stance is actually encouraging Iranians to accelerate the production of the bomb.

But in any case, I think it's encouraging to know that

the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”'

Livingstone vs cheap embassies

One of the news stories on BBC this weekend is that the embassy of UAE in London has decided to pay the congestion charge.

Red Ken's response to this was:

[BBC:6 April 2006]

"All Londoners will welcome this settlement with the embassy of the UAE.

"Those embassies, such as that of the United States, which flout the laws of this country and misuse diplomatic immunity to evade the charge are enjoying the benefits of reduced congestion but contributing nothing.

"I hope they will now take a leaf from the United Arab Emirates and understand that as the richest and most powerful country in the world they can well afford to respect this country's laws."

Livingston is not a fan of the current US ambassador. Just a week or so back, he had this to say:

[BBC: 28 March 2006]

"It would actually be quite nice if the American ambassador in Britain could pay the charge that everybody else is paying and not actually try and skive out of it like some chiselling little crook."

The American ambassador he is referring to is Mr. Robert Turtle, who got appointed in June of last year.

[The Guardian: June 10, 2005]

The nomination of Mr Tuttle, who owns a car sales group called Tuttle-Click Automotive, comes after nearly a year without a US ambassador at the Court of St James.
[...]
Mr Tuttle and his predecessor, William Farish, are both wealthy private citizens with personal ties to the Bush family. Mr Farish spent three years in the job, but kept a low profile in London.

While I believe it is important that embassies stuff follow the same laws as everyone else, I think the bigger point is being missed here. Why have someone like Mr Tuttle, his only qualifications being a friend and supporter of the current US president, as an ambassador?

For that matter, what's the point of having such a large diplomatic corps? Using technological advances such as video conferencing, there is no reason that public servants from foreign ministries of two different countries can't sort things out directly.

Of course embassies perform a wide variety of functions, including screening visa applicants. But I think that with some planning even these jobs can be eliminated. So why isn't there a debate on this?

Putting the orange back together

After his party came in third after the parliamentary elections, President of Ukraine, Yushchenko had the unenviable choice of making a coalition with either the first place Yanukovych, or second place Tymoshenko.

Now it seems he has made his choice.

[BBC: 6 April 2006]

A spokeswoman for Mr Yushchenko's Our Ukraine bloc said its political council had agreed to team up with ex-PM Yulia Tymoshenko's party and the Socialists.

Mr Yushchenko sacked Ms Tymoshenko as prime minister last September.

Ms Tymoshenko's key demand was to return as prime minister. It is not yet clear if she will get the job again.

The problem with Tymoshenko of course is that she wants Yuschenko's job. Her party did get more than his in the elections, and she is not going to accept some inferior post, her supporters would not accept that. I am very curious as to what position he is going to offer her.

My prediction is that this second marriage is going to be even shorter than the first.

In any case, while Yanukovych is in opposition, admiring this mess from a distance, his support can only grow.

Blog Info

If you think that this may contain information about this blog, you are probably right.

Minutemen in action

I have always been interested in Minutemen Civil Defense Corps. Apart from an unfortunate name, their lives must be full of excitement and adventure. Who is that in the desert, is it another Mexican emigrant, or is it a drug mule, or perhaps it's Osama himself, trying to get into Disneyland?

[FoxNews: April 04, 2006]

ALAN COLMES, CO-HOST:Our top story tonight, it takes us to the U.S.-Mexican border in Arizona, where the Minutemen have begun patrolling once again. The video you're looking at was shot just hours ago and shows a snapshot of the waves of illegal immigrants that have been surging across the border in the Arizona desert.

The founder of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, Chris Simcox, joins us from the border.
[...]
SIMCOX: You know, we don't need negotiations, Alan. Come on. It's four and a half years past September 11. We keep negotiating. We keep having studies. We keep debating the issue while people are dying in the desert.

American citizens are victims of the crime wave coming into this country. And as another news agency reported today, 300,000 people from the Middle East were apprehended coming into this country last year.

This is a clear and present danger. It is the greatest threat to national security and public safety. The time for negotiating is over.

I think that just about sums it all up.

Do prayers make a difference

[Slate:April 6, 2006]

It was supposed to be good news, like the kind in the Bible. After three years, $2.4 million, and 1.7 million prayers, the biggest and best study ever was supposed to show that the prayers of faraway strangers help patients recover after heart surgery. But things didn't go as ordained. Patients who knowingly received prayers developed more post-surgery complications than did patients who unknowingly received prayers—and patients who were prayed for did no better than patients who weren't prayed for. In fact, patients who received prayers without their knowledge ended up with more major complications than did patients who received no prayers at all.

I think there should be more experiments of this type. Those who really do believe will simply ignore these types of findings. If anyone wants to burry their head in the sand, that's their right.

However, those whose faith is not too strong, may start to doubt, and who knows, maybe they will start to take things less literally, develop a sense of humour and perhaps even become more rational as a result. Now that has to be a good thing.

Silence in class

This was a rather boring article from Guardian on the pressure on people working inside the US educational system to be "objective". Nothing new was covered, although I wish someone would finally make a link between David Horowitz's efforts to turn American students into snitches and the hero worship of Pavel Morozov in Soviet Union. Despite all his efforts, I guess Mr Horowitz is still suffering from his communist upbringing.

Since the subject of upbringing came up, this article explains a lot about mine. More specifically it mentions the good old IB and reactions to it from a certain quarter of US society.

[The Guardian: April 4th, 2006]

Since February, the normally sleepy, wealthy district of Upper St Clair in Pennsylvania has been riven with arguments over its curriculum after the local school board banned the International Baccalaureate (IB), the global educational programme, for being an "un-American" marxist and anti-Christian. During their election campaign, the Republicans of Upper St Clair referred to the IB, which is offered in 122 countries and whose student intake has risen by 73% worldwide in the past five years, as though it was part of an international communist conspiracy, suspicious of a curriculum that had been "developed in a foreign country" (Switzerland). "Our country was founded on Judeo-Christian values and we have to be careful about what values our children are taught," said one Republican board member. Similar campaigns have also sprung up recently at school boards in Minnesota and Virginia.

I always wondered where my anti-Christian and un-American tendencies came from, now I know.

UK tortured prisoners during cold war

[The Guardian: April 3rd, 2006]

Photographs of victims of a secret torture programme operated by British authorities during the early days of the cold war are published for the first time today after being concealed for almost 60 years.

The pictures show men who had suffered months of starvation, sleep deprivation, beatings and extreme cold at one of a number of interrogation centres run by the War Office in postwar Germany.

I guess I should not be surprised by these types of revelations. But when I think of early cold war years in Germany, I tend to think of East Germans being made into socialists and West Germans denazified and democratised. Somehow the fact that the West Germans communists must have been persecuted to a certain extent, never entered my thoughts. One more point to the western propaganda.

During the last few days I also found out for the first time about the betrayal of Cossacks by the Western powers.

Justification for war

Here is a Marxist article illustrating how wars may benefit certain classes more than others. Irrespective of one's views on class warfare, it's hard to disagree with this basic premise - some people do make lots of money from other people's misery.

The article deals with the propaganda used to drum up public support for wars and it outlines the justifications for different wars by various US governments.

[The Progressive; America's Blunders by Howard Zinn: April 2006]

President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846.
[...]
President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba
[...]
He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines
[...]
President Woodrow Wilson[...]lied about the reasons for entering the First World
War
[...]
Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was “a military target.”

Everyone lied about Vietnam

Little ethnic trouble in Iraq

[London Review of Books; Diary by Patrick Cockburn: April 2006]

In the centre of Kirkuk there is a building that seems quite imposing compared to the ramshackle houses all around: this is the Republican Hospital. It is here that most of the casualties from gun battles, bombings and assassinations are taken. In 2005, some 1500 people were killed or injured in Kirkuk province. Large numbers of those taken to the hospital died, and there turned out to be an extraordinary reason for this. Some time earlier, the hospital had recruited an enthusiastic young doctor called Louay, who was always willing to help. What the other doctors didn’t know was that Louay, an Arab, was a member of an insurgent cell of the Ansar al-Sunna group. He used his position to make sure that soldiers, policemen and government officials died of their injuries. A police inquiry found Dr Louay guilty of killing 43 patients. He doesn’t seem to have found this very difficult. Many of the injured were bleeding when they reached the hospital and, according to Colonel Yadgar Shukir Abdullah Jaff, a senior policeman, ‘Louay would inject patients he wanted to kill with a high dose of a medicine that made them bleed more.’

This is an interesting article about relations between different communities in Iraq. It really does not matter whether one calls it a civil war or sectarian violence, the fact remains that people are getting killed because of their religion/ethnicity. Ethinic cleansing is gathering pace as old scores are being settled, while at the same time, sides prepare for the moment when Americans are not around any more. This is actually quite similar to what happened in Bosnia where Serbs and Croats were trying to get as much territory as possible before the peace treaty was signed. Possession, of course, being 9/10th of the law.

The tragic thing about all of this is that Sunnis, who have the most to lose if Americans bail out, are the heart of the insurgency. If Americans leave, the Shias and Kurds will get all the oil, and Iraqi Sunnis will end up in living in conditions not much better than Palestians Sunnis who live in Gaza.

If US works with Iran (a big if), then steps can be taken that will benefit all the parties in this conflict, except one, and will allow US to save face and claim victory. The one exception is the Iraqi Sunnis. I can't think of a scenario where they will come out of this on top.

Oh well, there goes another generation..