Category: World

Monday Politics

In Monday’s dose of international politics, we have Chrenkoff’s latest — the 24th — Good News from Iraq.

And to provide some much-needed negativity, LGF links to an article by Roger Simon outlining new testimony that indicates that Kofi Annan was up to his cute little grey hairs in the Oil-for-Fraud deal:

A trip in September 1998 by Mouselli [Kojo Annan’s sometime business partner] and Kojo to the Non-Aligned Nations Movement Conference in Durban, South Africa during which they traveled with the Secretary General’s entourage and later had a private lunch with Kofi Annan. In Mouselli’s view, the purpose of the lunch was to make the Secretary General aware of the various business dealings in which he and Kojo were engaged, in order to get the Secretary General’s blessing. It was Mouselli’s understanding at the time that Kojo had previously discussed the Iraqi Embassy visits with his father, though he does not recall specific statements regarding the UN inspection contracts.

UN DELENDA EST!

Virtual Tourist

My brother and sister sent me Dallas Kachan’s Starship Diaries for my birthday last month. It’s a book about a guy who got lucky in the dot-com boom, bought an airplane (a Beech Starship, one of the most interesting aircraft of the late 20th century) and flew around the world in it.

It’s quite an engaging story, although my early impression was that Kachan was in need of an editor. He was always pulling back on the control “yolk,” and the passive voice was used extensively.

Then more things began to niggle. His description of air traffic control terminology seem just a tiny bit off. But what do I know, I’ve only put-putted around the Lower Mainland in a few lessons in a Cherokee. His exposition of linguistics was, well, eyebrow-raising, and his politics seemed naive.

And he wasn’t a terribly good pilot. He’d leave the cockpit to use the lavatory in mid-flight, he fell asleep at the wheel numerous times, and he’d forget to double-check essential calculations and almost run out of fuel over trackless wastes or open ocean.

Then he began to conflate entire countries in his narrative, visiting tourist attractions in one day that were thousands of miles apart in different countries. I found myself thinking “He couldn’t have just made it all up, could he?”

Heh. Turns out he did. He flew around the world on his computer, using Microsoft Flight Simulator, and then made up the grand tales of his adventures at each stop. It’s supremely gratifying that I started wondering about his story before I found this out :-)

Preconceptions

I suspect I may be seeing some visitors to this site from a certain group of friends who’ve not seen this blog before, or been exposed to the full intensity of my political ranting. Consider that we’ve recently been talking about reconsidering certain preconceptions that we hold dear.

Consider also that I grew up in a totalitarian dictatorship.

Now try to keep an open mind about the following statements:

  • George W. Bush is neither:
    • a fundamentalist
    • a liar
    • an idiot
    • a puppet controlled by (pick one)
      • big business
      • the religious right
      • shadow neo-con conspiracies.
  • Bush’s foreign policy deserves praise precisely because it does away with 50 years of Cold War realpolitik and amoral pragmatism.
  • Bush’s foreign policy has been directly responsible for amazing events in the world lately, including:
    • Libya giving up its nuclear program
    • Pakistan revealing the existence of the Libya-Iran-North Korea nuclear axis
    • municipal elections in Saudi Arabia
    • municipal elections in Palestine
    • the Israeli pullout from Gaza, along with the recent thaw in Israeli/Palestinian relations
    • massive popular revolt in Ukraine leading to real democratic elections
    • mass pro-democracy and anti-Syrian protests in Lebanon, leading Syria to end its 20-year illegal occupation of Arab territory.
  • The American invasion of Iraq saved at least 10,000 more lives than it took.
  • Life in Afghanistan and Iraq is objectively better now than in 2000.
  • Of the conflicts of the last 20 years that have been successfully ended by international action, the UN has been responsible for none and the US at least 4.
  • The United Nations was complicit in allowing Saddam Hussein and the governments of France and Canada to siphon off hundreds of millions of dollars of aid money that was supposed to be buying milk for starving Iraqi children.
  • The Kyoto Accord is a pointless and hypocritical face-saving exercise. Oh, and it wasn’t George W. Bush who refused to sign it.

If you disagree with any of the statements above, what is your evidence for doing so? “Everybody knows” doesn’t cut it.