Web 2.0 (in under 5 minutes)
Definitely worth watching.
I’m shocked, shocked to find corruption
Audit results of Iraq’s 2007 oil sales and revenue flow conducted by Ernst & Young questioned 13.8 million barrels of oil produced but unaccounted for last year; a continued lack of metering throughout the oil value chain; $849 million deposited the wrong place etc. etc.
As Cassablanca’s Captain Renault would have said: I’m shocked, shocked to find that corruption is going on.
The secret of great acting? It’s all about the timing
The tragic deaths of three paratroopers on patrol in Helmand on Sunday brings the number of British military casualties in Afghanistan to 100. A steady stream of Ministers and MPs have gone on air to praise the soldier’s courage and reiterate the reasons for why we are in Afghanistan. Rupert Everett, the actor, chose an altogether different approach. Publicising his documentary he risked the wrath of British servicemen and women by labelling them “wimps” in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph:
“The whole point of being in the Army is going to war and getting yourself blown up. They are always whining about the dangers of being killed. They are such wimps now. It’s pathetic, all this whining.”
Everett has since apologised for his remark.
Taking down Turkey
Turkey’s government – its most successful in decades – is on its way out. Last week, the Constitutional Court overturned the recent lifting of the ban on headscarves in universities. Female students are once again being told what to wear by the secular establishment.
More importantly, this means the Court is almost certain to kick the AK Party out of government and ban its leaders from politics for five years. The country’s chief prosecutor, backed by the army, opposition parties and the liberal intelligentsia (all of whom are miffed about losing their long grip on power), filed a petition to ban the party in March, on the flimsy grounds that relaxing the headscarf ban showed that Tayyip Erdo?an and his colleagues wanted to turn Turkey into an Islamic theocracy. This despite Turkey looking more like a modern, thriving democracy now than it ever has; the AK Party’s time in power has coincided with rapid economic growth, growing proximity to the European Union and significant progress in improving human rights. AK’s predecessors achieved none of this.
The secular fundamentalists accuse the government of attempting to take Turkey back to the past. Such an accusation could at least as justifiably be levelled at them. The EU has warned that banning the government, which was re-elected with an overwhelming majority this spring, will jeopardise the country’s membership prospects. The economy is going backwards as the government diverts all its attention to fighting the court action. And if AK is closed, Turks will again be saddled with the ineffective, corrupt secular parties they were so keen to get rid of. A return to the dark ages indeed.
Intervention Blues
Simon Jenkins has a good piece in the Sunday Times about the decreasing willingness to contemplate humanitarian intervention. The humanitarian creed, he says:
can no longer override considerations of state sovereignty and the natural caution of diplomats and generals.
While opposing every intervention known to man, Jenkins goes on to lament:
This noble cause has vanished in the wind. Almost before it is put to the test it is gone. The failure to intervene in Darfur and the deference shown to the dictators of Burma and Zimbabwe indicate a pendulum swinging fast in the other direction.
It is not hard to see why the negativity. The West has failed to intervene in Burma and ships are now being forced to return after waiting in vain. The EU military mission in Chad was originally conceived by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner as a repeat of the U.S safe zone created in the Kurdish areas in Iraq. But instead of a mandate to go into Sudan, it has had to sit on the Chadian side of the border. Problems, of course, plague missions in Iraq and Afghanistan while Kosovo refuses to solve itself.
But Ivo Daalder and Robert Kagan argued against this pessimism in the Washington Post last year.
America has frequently used force on behalf of principles and tangible interests, and that is not likely to change.
The duo behind the League of Democracies, remind readers that the U.S has intervened between 1989 and 2001 with significant military force on eight occasions — once every 18 months. This interventionism, they go on, has been bipartisan — four interventions were launched by Republican administrations, four by Democratic administrations. The implication: interventionism is here to stay. It is as much a part of international politics as state sovereignty.
I have to say I agree with Daalder and Kagan. The West is only temporarily numbed by recent failures, as well as being logistically constrained because of troop overstretch. True, in Europe few governments seem willing to spend the necessary funds on the required military and civilian capability. True, the U.S electorate is in a particularly sour mood, to the extent that more Europeans now support democracy-promotion than Americans.
But this will pass. And once a new U.S president begins a draw-down in Iraq – a policy I expect from both Senators McCain and Obama – and surge in Afghanistan – again something to expect form both – the balance of sentiment will be re-calibrated in favour of intervention.
However, we need a re-definition of interventionism, a Chicago speech for the new post-Iraq millennium. And David Milliband is the man to give it, in my view.