Ah, how those YouTube vids can come back to haunt you. Here, courtesy of Gregory at Belgravia Dispatch via ForeignPolicy.com, is GW taking a question from a prescient young student about the legal framework governing private military companies.
His Telegraph obit:
A huge, lumbering bear of a man, 6ft 2in tall and nearly as broad, with a booming voice and bristling moustache, Muffett looked rather like a cross between Falstaff and Captain Mainwaring.
He spent 16 years in the colonial service in northern Nigeria, where he claimed to have been one of only two Britons whose name passed into the native Hausa language: “Aka yi masa mafed” (literally “One did to him Muffett”), meaning “Justice caught up with him”.
Muffett liked to regard himself as a hard-riding “bush DO” (district officer) of the old school and he allowed nothing to stand in the way of justice and good administration. Yet although he was ebullient and thick-skinned, he was always sensitive to local tradition.
In 1960 he apprehended the Tigwe of Vwuip, a northern Nigerian tribal chief who had eaten the local tax collector. The Tigwe had apparently been so impressed by the man’s ability to acquire money on demand that he had — understandably — decided to try to assimilate his powers.
It was not so much this particular misdemeanour that bothered Muffett; what really worried him was the fact that a UN delegation was due to visit the area, and “I wasn’t about to have one of them eaten. I considered that it would be a highly retrogressive step.”
The Tigwe, who was surprised to learn that the colonial authorities disapproved of his eating habits, was duly sent to jail — but only “until the delegation had departed beyond the reach of his culinary aspirations.”
Muffett often seemed to have magical powers of his own. He was once shot at with poisoned arrows, all of which miraculously missed his bulky frame, though one lodged in the pommel of his saddle.
On another occasion a witch doctor who had pronounced a curse upon him fell down dead the next day, an event which, Muffett recalled, greatly enhanced his standing among the local population.
Via Mark Steyn.
More than two dozen Iranian American and human rights groups have launched an appeal to Congress to reduce or eliminate new financial support of up to $75 million aimed at promoting democracy inside Iran.
The U.S. program, launched in 2006, backfired in its first year, undermining democracy efforts in Iran and leading to wider repression against activists as foreign agents or traitors, the groups said. Among those detained were four Iranian Americans, all charged with “crimes against national security” linked to the U.S. program. A second year of funding will further endanger democracy efforts, the groups added.
Steven Clemons at the Washington Note has an interesting observation about Al Gore this morning:
I think that Al Gore has just become the [McDonald’s founder] Ray Kroc of Climate Change initiatives.
Gore’s win seals the deal that he owns the global climate change franchise. Everyone big in this game — from firms, to NGOs, to governments — will need the Al Gore seal of approval on whether some initiatives are good or bad. That’s going to be interesting. Al Gore is going to be an NGO of his very own, and he’s probably going to have to get a sticker machine so that stuff he likes can bear his seal of approval.
But there is a bigger, more complicated and admittedly cynical dimension to the Gore win.
It keeps climate change policy from being something that anyone else can take a lot of credit for, particularly the Clintons — unless they can work out a deal.
Well, that’s doubtless true. But what complicates things even more is that Al Gore’s stance on climate change is about as content-rich as McDonald’s is nutritious. For we still have no idea what Al Gore actually thinks we should do about climate change. Sure, we’ve heard him sounding the alarm bell. But on the really big questions: what to do at the international level after Kyoto expires in 2012, how to bring developing countries into the fold, the small matter of agreeing a global stabilisation target: nothing, nada, rien.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I tried to ask Gore about this during one of his presentations, at the Royal Society of Arts last year. Did he accept that stabilising the climate safely would entail a quantified ceiling, and that this would mean developing country targets; and if so, what thoughts did he have on what would constitute fair shares to the atmosphere? Gore blustered and blew, but nevertheless definitively ducked the question.
David Kilcullen on how to run a successful counter-insurgency:
In counterinsurgency, the initiative is everything. If the enemy is reacting to you, you control the environment. Provided you mobilize the population, you will win. If you are reacting to the enemy – even if you are killing or capturing him in large numbers – then he is controlling the environment and you will eventually lose. In counterinsurgency, the enemy initiates most attacks, targets you unexpectedly and withdraws too fast for you to react. Do not be drawn into purely reactive operations: focus on the population, build your own solution, further your game plan and fight the enemy only when he gets in the way. This gains and keeps the initiative.