Iraq

Despite not being a dispassionate reviewer, I wrote this review of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. In case you didn't know, I'm not entirely without positive bias. And even with high expectations, the book really impressed. It seems to be doing quite well without my recommendation, but I would like to add my recommendation to the many that are out there. Hope you like the review.

Since I haven't really followed her work over the past few years, I was a bit annoyed when I heard she had "quit". Who is she to "quit", and to do so so publicly, I wondered? War, empire, are filthy, despicable, genocidal affairs. Opposing them is not like a job that one can "quit", is it? Opposing them, in my view, doesn't even mean one is deserving of special praise. But then I read her exit note, and found it some of the best and most refreshing reading I have seen in some time.

An important commentary by Ed Herman on ZNet, where he makes the comparison to Vietnam that actually matters: that the US pursued genocidal policies in Vietnam and is moving towards the same in Iraq. I've written before that I dislike talk of how the US was "defeated" in Vietnam and I dislike any talk of "quagmire" for imperialists - the US walked away from Vietnam after having killed several million people and no one in the US answered for it.

I have traveled to quite a few places where I've encountered volunteers with Christian Peacemaker Teams. I've never been to Iraq, so that's not one of the places. But I can say this, which is what others have been saying since some of the CPTers (as they are known to anglophones) were abducted in Iraq last week. The CPTers might have the word 'Christian' in their name, but they are no missionaries. They might have 'peacemaker' in their name, but that isn't a euphemism for imperialism the way 'peacekeeping' or 'peacebuilding' can be.

How not to cheapen the impact of the calamities by adding words? A horrible day in which a mortar attack on a religious procession led to hundreds of deaths, days in which hurricanes and floods led to hundreds of deaths.

Sometime Killing Train blogger Pandya has written a commentary for Counterpunch on the whole Pat Robertson/Venezuela business that I thought was good. Check it out if you haven't already.

I imagined what the reaction would be had something like that happened in the US, and was moved what I saw of the actual reaction of Londoners. The same was true of the Madrid bombings in 2004. And indeed the same was true of New Yorkers in 2001, even though the media and government very quickly defiled those human feelings.

Robert Fisk's piece in the Independent suggests how these bombings will be used to inflame racism:

So, the US killed some journalists in Iraq.

There was al-Jazeera's Tariq Ayoub. Some time after he was killed the US effectively banned al-Jazeera from Iraq. In the previous US war, al-Jazeera's offices in Afghanistan were bombed.

There were some European journalists who were killed early in the war; Fisk and others wrote about it.

Apologies for yet another absence.

It was technical difficulties again - a strange virus attack that had someone using my machine to send huge amounts of data (perhaps spam?). By the time I cleaned my machine my operating system was irretrievably damaged.

And so, those of you who have been advising me over the past weeks to switch to Linux - you have your wish. I am typing this from my old computer with a new operating system. There will be a time to talk about this more - I am getting more interested in both the technical side of these things and their larger implications.

A radio link from Dahr Jamail seems to point out the obvious. The elections aren't free. If you've been following the debate between Gilbert Achcar and Alex Callinicos, which has some interesting parts in it, you're familiar with some of the things that have been said. Schwartz's media guide was interesting and useful as well.