Posts by Rich Lock
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A friend of mine decided to experiment with the spice rack once.
He ground up some coriander and cumin, and mixed them with some almonds he had lying around, to add some flavour.
Once he'd prepared all of this, he filled his pipe and took a couple of puffs with me and a couple of mates watching. His eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped onto the ground.
Of course, we were all quite worried, expecially when we couldn't get him to wake up. So we called an ambulance and got him to the hospital.
The doctor examined him and told us there was nothing he could do - the poor guy was in a Korma.
I'll get me coat.
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James - thank you for actually engaging with the issues raised and for providing facts and argument.
Sagenz - ducking and diving and more or less changing the subject (while pulling out the children again), does very little to convince me you are correct.
This is going to be my last post on this particular subject, cos this 'arguing on the internet' thing takes up far too much of my limited free time.
Before I continue, I would like to point out that I'm have not actually made any moral arguments, or 'war is bad, m'kay'-type points. While I do have opinions along those lines, I haven't expressed them here, and don't intend to. Please bear that in mind.
My point is this: the two main govenments involved in this debacle (Britain, US) have shown a lack of planning and preparation that in my opinion amounts to criminal negligence. Because of this lack of planning, lack of foresight, and unwillingness to learn from past mistakes, they have actively damaged their stated cause (reduction of global terrorism), and made the world a far more dangerous place.
This alone is, in my opinion, sufficient cause that rather a lot of heads should be rolling. In some cases I would not be unhappy to see heads literally rolling.
So.
Sagenz: you are vilifying Clinton for not intevening in Rwanda. What is your view on the Clinton administration intervention in Somalia?
It seems to me you could quite easily damn Clinton for acting, and just as easily damn him for not acting, cherrypicking your arguments to suit.
Rwanda blew up as a crisis relatively quickly, if memory serves (a couple of months? Am happy to educated otherwise).
Somalia was a more slow-burning crisis. 'The West' had much more time to get organised, to plan how to act, to gather forces, etc, etc. For those who want a decent backgorund to the Somalia crisis without having to wade through too much scholarly detail, I recommend the book 'Black Hawk Down' (avoid the film at all costs). Most of the book deals with the shot-down-helicopters-and-desperate-fight-in-the-city part of the interventions, but it also gives a pretty decent background to the local politics and reasons for the crisis, plus the subsequent repercussions post-fight. It also, not incidentally, gives a pretty decent insight into the mentality of the average US squaddie in these sort of situations - very relevant to the current situation in Iraq.
In summary:
1) The US mission in Somalia acted outside UN authority.
2) The US strategy was to attempt to take down the top echelon or leadership of what they percieved as the 'bad guys', working on the (utterly naive) assumption that there would be a widespread outbreak of democracy once 'the bad guys' were gone.
3) The US relied almost totally on an 'overwhelming firepower' approach to the problem.
4) The US leaders had little to no idea of the local language, customs or politics. So 'collateral damage' from 3) was inveitable. When it occurred, a lot of locals who were neutral or favourably inclined towards the US forces turned actively hostile.Does any of this sound familiar?
Fact: Saddam was not a threat at the time of the invasion build-up. He didn't have any WMD's, and everyone knew it (if you believe otherwise, please let me introduce myself: I am the ex-nigerian foreign secretary, and find myself in need of funds to transfer millions from my bank acount. I will give you half of this if you send me a couple of hundred dollars now).
Fact: Saddam was bottled up in Iraq and a plan for dealing with him could be thrashed out more or less at leisure.
Fact: Western forces were at the time heavily engaged (and under-resourced) in Afghanistan, and still are.
Fact: The invasion of Iraq has bled resources from the far more important and at the time far more pressing conflict in Afghanistan. Arguably, it is now impossible for the the Afghanistan mission to succeed.
So Saddam's wish to restart his weapons programmes is neither here nor there. There was no immediate reason or urgency to deal with him. He didn't actually have anything, and he wasn't likely to be able get anything in the immediate future, either. He could have been contained and dealt with at leisure.
The suffering of his people at the time is also neither here nor there. They'd been suffering for 20 years. Another few months or even a year or two would have made a negligable amount of difference to the humanitarian crisis and a HUGE amount of difference to any intervention.
Troops and Equipment could be built up slowly, a decent post-invasion plan could be thrashed out, the possible consequences could be thoroughly thrashed out, Afghanistan could have been stabilised first, a plan to contain Iran could have been put in place, a plan to avoid a humanitarian crisis could have been thought up etc, etc, etc.
None of this is 20/20 hindsight. It was flagged up at the time, and as I have outlined above, a strategy of shoot-first-shoot-lots-kill-the-bad-guys-and-hope-democracy-breaks-out has been shown to be fatally flawed in more places than just Iraq and Somalia.
Your point about the Clinton administration invasion plan is interesting, but I don't think it carries much weight. In 1998, the Clinton administation only had 2 years max left to run. They knew they weren't going to be invading Iraq in that time frame. In the context of the time, I doubt the plan was anything more than half-baked, and was intended as nothing more than the dust-collecting shelf-filler that government departments come up with all the time to cover their own arses in case anything goes wrong.
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So sagenz, what you're saying is this: in the set of circumstances I have outlined, plus your addition, I should do the following:
Immediately run out of my house, even though I have neither equipment or a plan and I'm not actally trained in either police enforcement or search and rescue, and run into the woods like a headless chicken hoping that it all turns out all right?
Would that be an accurate assesment?
Please don't try the 'won't-somebody-think-of-the-children' response. It doesn't. Fucking.Wash.
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Re: gangs in the military - Michael Herr's 'Dispatches' (Vietnam era) has a passage that describes how a group of Detroit Black Panthers (arguably not a gang per se) were smuggling home an 81mm mortar piece by piece, so that they could 'take out a police station'.
If anyone has slightly more than a passing interest in gangs in the military, I recommend the George Gittoes documentary 'Rampage'. Not the best film ever, but worth a look. He follows a Miami boy from a bad neighbourhood (real bad....) who signs up and goes to Iraq. The film gives a snapshot of what happens to him and his family and friends back at home both while he is over there and when he returns.
James - you need to get it into your head that the reason people are really, really, REALLY pissed off has NOTHING AT ALL to do with Saddam.
Let me run a hypothetical scenario past you (bear with me for a couple of minutes). I am at home, minding my business. You call around and insist we go out for a walk in the local woods, leaving immediately. Now, these woods aren't some overgrown local park. They are dense, trackless wilderness that is full of hidden dangers - ravines, fast-flowing rivers, thick bush etc etc. They need to be approached with caution. People can get lost and die in there if they aren't careful. Everyone locally knows this.
You are dressed in jeans, T-shirt and sandals. I ask you where your walking shoes are. I ask you where your map and compass are. I ask you where your foul-weather gear is. I ask you where your radio is. I ask you if you have any survival rations. I ask you why we have to leave right this minute. I ask you why we are going for a walk in the first place.
You dismiss my questions with a laugh. I persist. You continue to dismiss my questions out of hand. I persist. You get a bit angry, continue to dismiss my answers, and imply I'm crazy. I persist. You become very angry, and tell me that if I am not with you, I am against you, and that I should trust you - you know what you're doing.
For some reason (maybe I have some sort of weird brainfart), I eventually go along with you.
Five hours later we are in the middle of the woods. It is raining, the temperature is dropping, and night is falling.
It is at precisely this moment that you turn to me with a big ol' shit-eating grin on your dial, and say: 'well, looks like we're lost. But don't worry - it doesn't matter how we came to be in this situation. The important thing now is that we get out alive, right?'
Personally, I would have the greatest difficulty not becoming murderously enraged at that point.
Now, getting to the point: around 2001/2002/2003, when all of this military build-up was occurring, you may recall that large numbers of people were asking certain questions. For starters: Where is the equipment for the troops? What happens once Saddam is gone? Who is going to be in charge of Iraq? How is Iraq going to be governed? How are we going to rebuild the infrastructure? How are we going to deal with the tribal divisions? How long are we going to be there? Saddam has been bottled up for 10 years - why the hurry? Why now? And so on. And on. And on.
Most of these questions were dismissed out of hand, and the people that asked them were marginalised. If they persisted, the implication was put about that they were not a team player. Possibly (whisper it) a bit inclined towards treason and treachery.
And now here we are, five years later. And at precisely this moment, you are turning to me with a big ol' shit-eating grin on your dial, and saying 'hey, it doesn't matter how we got here. The important thing is that we all muck in together to clean up this mess, right?'
Now, do you see that there is a small chance that I just might possibly be the teensy, tiniest, weeny bit grumpy? Possibly not all that inclined to get with the programme? That I might be reaching for a dictionary and looking up words like 'responsibility', 'negligence' and 'impeachment'?
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If we're talking about overthrowing a brutal dictator, then smashing the countries infrastructure without actually having a rebuilding plan in place, leaving millions of people to suffer in misery for years and years and years to 'give them some time' to become a 'decent nation', as you put it, is not exactly my idea of how it should be done.
A bit like rescuing someone who is being brutally assaulted, by driving off their attacker, but then leaving them at the side of the road to crawl a couple of miles to the hospital by themselves, don't you think?
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@Andrew Smith - " I still think the outcomes of this war will need judged 10 years on. It's still too soon."
What's your view on the French Revolution? Too early to tell?
If we're talking long game, I doubt we'll know how things are shaking down for a lot longer than 10 years. By the time a whole bunch of hopefully only regional conflicts have played out and the borders on various maps have been re-drawn - Iran/Iraq/Kurdistan/Turkey and possibly Israel - and there is some form of regional stability where enough time has passed for all involved to have recovered to the point of cordial relations with their neighbours, we ain't talking 10 years.
How long did it take Vietnam/Cambodia/Laos to even start picking themselves up?
And if we're not talking long game, then I think quite enough time has passed for us to make a FUBAR assessment.
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Well, speaking of seats....
Seeing as how I have 10 minutes or so until my ferry, here's something I read once to keep you entertained.
Back in teh olden days, before all this new-fangled stuff like 'carbon fibre', 'air shock suspension' and 'lycra', it was all a bit more hardcore.
As any cyclist knows, if you're riding for any length of time, things 'down there' can get a wee bit uncomfortable. Which is why modern cycle pants have a thick layer of padding.
But in the early days of the Tour de France, they didn't have such modern conveniences, so first thing in the morning before the race, they used to make a trip to the nearest butcher, and get him to cut off a piece of sirloin to slip into place to pad things out nicely.
The steak would then marinade in the riders juices all day. At that nights rest stop, the riders would whip out the nicely tenderised beef, and ask m'sieu le chef to give it just a couple of minutes each side.
Bon appetit!
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There has indeed been a furious battle over the lake road cycle lane carried out via the letters page of the flagstaff.
The sheer volume of illogical, wing-nut NIMBYism has left me rather gobsmacked, to be honest.
Typical letter (somewhat paraphrased): 'they've built a cycle lane! And because they've changed a single lane road to...uh...a single lane road, it's really delayed the traffic!'.
Getting in and out of Devonport via car just seems to be getting more and more difficult full stop (probably because of increased traffic volumes, especially during the summer when it seems that every car driver in Aucland wants to divert there for a picturesque flat white pit stop brunch).
Because the cycle lane is the most visible 'thing thats changed', its getting the blame.
On a more general note, i've always found peoples anti-bike attitude incomprehensible. A non-polluting, non-congesting, low-harm lightweight vehicle. Why, it must be Satan's transport choice. How silly of me.
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"Somebody point me towards a paradigm for thinking about it that doesn't take into account each candidate's "first"ness but rather their fitness for office"
Either support the 'new broom' (Obama), or the 'smart political operator by virtue of having had a lifetimes involvment in it' (Clinton).
No mention of ethnicity or sex in that.
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Emma, it was more the "factual inaccuracy that a resonably clued-up 11-year old would have spotted slap bang in the middle of the front frickin' page" that was the final nail in the coffin for my relationship with the Herald. Which came on top of continuous and large helpings of:
1) indifferent to downright embarrasing subbing (semi-colons consistently used in place of apostrophes, for example),
2) basic factual inaccuracies (the specific one I refer to being a whopper), and
3) a complete lack of coherent, well-argued, in-depth analysis of the type I can get for free on Public Address, but an overdose of rambling, shallow, verging-on-the-wingnut witterings.
Oh, and the main story on pg 3 of the last herald on sunday. The economy? No. Trouble in Kenya? No. Ed Hilary? No.
But Nicky Watson's missing dog on the other hand.....
The "woman-with-not-many-clothes-on-used-to-illustrate-an-only tangentially-related-story" is not at all an uncommon one, and isn't isolated to NZ. Russell linked to a 'daily show' a year or so ago that showed a Florida news station running a story on a sex attacker preying on prostitues in Florida. The footage used to illustrate the story was stock footage of women in bikinis walking on the beach....