Northman's Fury

Sir Edmund Hillary, who, along with Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, became the first person to climb the summit of Mount Everest, has died at the age of 88.

Part I

July 2007

First, a bungle. I thought McCain was toast; even that he may drop out of the race. Now, he may wind up being the establishment candidate Republicans rally around to defeat Huckabee. Oh well.

Beyond that, most of my major posts involved Pakistan, stemming from the battle around the Red Mosque at the time, including a warning from British generals that a loss in Afghanistan would cause Pakistan to fail, and possible US military action in the tribal areas. The situation certainly hasn’t improved much, though fortunately it hasn’t yet exploded.

All part of the problems the Bush administration will be passing on to whoever winds up being the successor, along with much damaged credibility.

As are the situations in Gaza and Somalia, which show some interesting similarities in their development.

August 2007

The Padilla verdict, and an account of his captivity that should terrify anyone who actually thinks about it.

One of the first indications that 2007 was going to be a record year in the Arctic.

Stu Bykofsky wrote an stupefying article titled “We need another 9/11”, which basically argued that another major terror attack killing thousands of innocents was needed to shut up all the opposition to Bush and the Iraq War.

August also brought some of the clearest indications of the shockwaves that the financial markets were going to feel from the sub-prime fiasco.

And I made another of several posts examining counterinsurgency and why we weren’t doing too well at it.

Welcome to the paradoxical world of counterinsurgency warfare -- the kind of war you win by not shooting.

The objective in fighting insurgents isn't to kill every enemy fighter -- you simply can't -- but to persuade the population to abandon the insurgents' cause. The laws of these campaigns seem topsy-turvy by conventional military standards: Money is more decisive than bullets; protecting our own forces undermines the U.S. mission; heavy firepower is counterproductive; and winning battles guarantees nothing.

September 2007

The Canadian Dollar reaches parity! And some people are nervous at the prospects.

Then there was the whole veiled voting “controversy” trotted out by our generous Conservative government, which got the desired results, even if they’re unlikely to admit it.

There was also much talk about the “serious people” in Washington, who are a big part of the war culture that drives such fiascos like Iraq, (and nearly could have done the same for Iran).

Then there were a few issues with some of America’s allies; both the Saudis, and of more current significance, the leader of Pakistan.

And finally, some words on the fact that the “surge” has morphed into an attempt to bring the “awakening” throughout Iraq.

This is a really bad idea for the long term. By throwing their support behind the local leaders and not the central government, the US is encouraging warlords and fiefdoms and a multitude of forces whose primary loyalties will be to something other than the state of Iraq. This is an extension of the policy that put Shiite and Kurdish militias into uniforms to create the illusion of progress in the creation of an Iraqi army, so that now we hear all sorts of stories about how these very same militias have “infiltrated” these units and are using them for their own purposes.

October, 2007

I lost a bet.

Another in what appears to be an endless series of former Bush lackeys coming out to say what everybody already knows as they launch their book tours.

There was also the case of little Graeme Frost, a 12-year old who, along with his family, was attacked and smeared by the right for daring to point out that SCHIP helped him, continuing a pattern of attacking anyone who disagrees with the party line, including those in uniform.

Several posts regarding rights and liberties, from former Nazi interrogators slamming current practices in the “War on Terror”, (and being lambasted as naive and foolish for it), to a true Big Brother scenario in Canada. The movie “Rendition” also came out, which led to a ham-handed attempt at de-bunking, and a line that to me, encapsulates the whole conservative argument on all of the above these days.

Also, in what is probably related to the above attitudes towards state police tactics, the tasering death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport, a story that wouldn’t really take off until a cell-phone video is finally released a month later.

And of course, the big news of the month is that Al Gore and the IPCC won the Nobel Peace Price. I’m still uncertain if it was deserved, but it was fun watching the outrage and taking on the skeptics.

Another Peace Price winner, Desmond Tutu, is banned from speaking at an American University because of his criticism of Israel, this a month after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a guest at Columbia.

November, 2007

Tasers! Tasers! Tasers!

The video showing the RCMP killing Robert Dziekanski with tasers is finally released and prompts reactions from Polish officials, ordinary Canadians, and dumb-asses. It also prompts some “safety” demonstrations, which probably look a little different than the way they get used in the real world. All of which leads to a post on how our police forces are evolving to face future challenges.

Some early indications of the fear the Republican establishment has of the Huckabee campaign, the Bush administration trying to bypass the yet-to-be-released NIE on its push for war with Iran, and too much support for torture.

Also notable was the Saudi ruling to punish a rape victim with 200 lashes, the Canadian Conservative Party’s dictatorial policies, and the debate over intelligence and DNA.

Then there was the crackdown in Pakistan and Bush’s delusional reading of it; our language becoming increasingly twisted, and I ask a question that I’m now sorry to say I will find out the answer to.

The situation in Pakistan is clearly tense, passions are on the rise, and a quite popular figure is about to take to the streets with, if the crowds greeting her return are any indication, possibly hundreds of thousands of supporters. Any crackdown is likely to be quite nasty and bloody.

Musharraf is desperate, and its very hard to predict what a desperate man will do. But as ugly as a heavy-handed crackdown would be, what if the "strong threat" is real? And what if it succeeds?

With all the pent-up rage and frustration there right now, what happens if Bhutto becomes a martyr?

December, 2007

The Iran NIE is finally released, and man, are the war shills upset! Suddenly the CIA and other intelligence agencies can’t be trusted and may in fact, be working for the Iranians. Abolish the bastards!

It manages to scuttle some of the fear-mongering. It would be so much easier were everybody as clueless as the White House staff apparently is.

On the Climate Change front, 2007 was a year to remember, though our government’s actions are shamefully puny.

And Climate Change isn’t the only place we’re losing ground; we’re also fast becoming a surveillance state. And such acts have very little to do with the “War on Terror” or any real concern for our military or defence.

There was also a sneak peek at history’s greatest book, Malawians showing the good judgment to ignore the “experts”, and some casualties in the “War on Christmas”.

In campaign news, a quixotic effort to make science an important issue in the race for president, and some more wisdom from Scott Adams:

The December 17th issue of Time had some interesting statistics on voters. When asked the “most important quality” for a candidate, Democrats picked “good judgment” 33% of the time, and Republicans picked it 21%. The other choices were caring about people, leadership, character, and experience.

Does it bother you that good judgment wasn’t the top choice for three-quarters of all voters?

Obviously experience doesn’t help if you have bad judgment. But a person with good judgment would consult with people who have experience. Clearly, judgment is more important than experience.

. . .

Clearly, good judgment should be the most important quality in a president. But how often do you hear someone say that a candidate “has good judgment”?[emp. mine]

Normally, once I post something, I don't pay too much attention to it unless subsequent events remind of it, but with the new year and all the myriad lists it produced, I thought I'd go back and take another look at everything I posted over the last 13 months and compile a sort of post round-up of what I've been up to here. It has been somewhat fascinating to reread many of the posts and a good reminder of why I keep doing this.

December, 2006

Yeah, a bit early for a 2007 review, but it’s the first month I have blog posts up for. Looking through them, two are significant to me.

The first is this post regarding the wingnuts premature celebrating of Ethiopia’s victory of the Somali Islamists. To myself, and anyone else who had bothered to do a teeny bit of research on the situation and had paid attention to how the war in Iraq had progressed, it was obvious that the situation in the Horn was far from settled. I ended with this:

This wasn't the end of the regional war people have been warning the world about, it's the opening phase.

From this came a series of posts as I kept an eye on the situation, (here, here, here, and here), and the situation deteriorated as I had suspected. A few days ago, the BBC had this to say on the one-year anniversary:

The Ethiopian decision to invade Somalia in December 2006 altered the balance of power in the Horn of Africa.

On 28 December 2006, they helped government forces capture Islamists from the capital, Mogadishu, which they had controlled for six months.

Ethiopian forces, which had been facing Eritrea along their 1,000km border, but were otherwise confronting few security threats, are now engaged on three fronts.

The forces in Somalia are now bogged down and cannot withdraw, as Prime Minister Meles Zenawi recently acknowledged.

In addition to the conflict in Somalia they now also confront a growing rebellion in the Somali region of Ethiopia from the Ogaden National Liberation Front.

Knox Chitiyo, head of the Africa programme at the Royal United Services Institute in London, believes the Ethiopian military position is increasingly difficult.

"The government now has daggers pointing at it from all directions," he says.

"It is facing a multi-front war with no prospect of a military victory."

As with many other things, I take little satisfaction over the fact that I got this right, given the ugly consequences.

The second is a bit of a surprise; a post about the planned surge. I sometimes forget that the plans were already being bandied about that far back.

This worked out differently than I had expected. During the summer, it did appear that the dire predictions I had linked to of terrible casualties were more than accurate and the surge was doomed to a bloody failure. Instead, General Petreuas shifted strategies mid-stream and tamped down violence by co-opting the forces who they were fighting; the “awakening” inspired by the al Qaeda overreach in Anbar.

That strategy has its own problems, and it still doesn’t change the fact that the surge itself remains a failure, as Matthew Yglesias points out:

The weird thing about the surge is that it's failure has been much more unambiguous. The theory behind the surge was clear. Some people said more troops would bring more security to Iraq. Critics of that idea noted that sending more troops would be logistically unsustainable. Surge theorists posited that a temporary increase in force levels would create a temporary increase in security that would open window of opportunity for political reconciliation that would allow for a permanent increase in security. So the surge was implemented. As of September, the surge had failed to generate the political reconciliation that would allow for a permanent increase in security. Surge supporters told skeptics we had to give it more time. Three months later, the surge has still failed to generate the political reconciliation that would allow for a permanent increase in security. Now we're near the point of de-surging -- the window is closing rapidly and nobody thinks the opportunity will be seized. And yet surge fans are declaring victory. It's doesn't make sense. The surge's architects laid out admirably clear goals for it. Laid them out and unambiguously failed to meet them.

January, 2007

A few good stories as I peruse the archive.

My first post regarding legalizing Afghanistan’s opium crop, something I still think is a good idea.

Some Global Warming “hype" regarding the first disappearance of a previously inhabited island due to rising seas.

One less than prophetic post regarding the imminent possibility of war with Iran, which appears far less likely than it once did.

And, in honour of the primary season finally starting, a post regarding the bogus story of Obama’s Muslim roots, and this snippet from Dilbert creator Scott Adams:

As more U.S. presidential wannabes slither into the race, I realize that flip-flopping season has officially opened.

For those of you who do not follow politics, flip-flopping is what happens when an intelligent person revises his opinion because the situation changes or new information becomes available. Flip-flopping goes by many other names including: rational behavior, thinking, and not being a frickin’ idiot. No one wants that sort of loser to have the nuclear codes.

The typical voter says to himself, “If a candidate goes off and starts using information and reason to make decisions, there’s no chance he’s going to agree with me.” No one wants that.

February 2007

A couple more posts about Climate Change, which appears to be one of my pet topics, the most amusing of which is this one where it was disclosed that ExxonMobil and other big oil companies were offering $10,000 for stories that played up shortcomings of the IPCC report.

Not exactly the most subtle ploy, and frankly, only $10,000? Exxon/Esso made $40 billion last year. You think they could put up a bit more money than that.

Of course, you'll note they're not funding research to try and dispute the findings. They know the science is against them. They just want to pay for hacks to criticize the scientific findings. So long as they can keep people thinking there is actually some controversy over the topic, they figure they can keep on business as usual.

Of the Iran stories, this one looks considerably prophetic now that a portion of the NIE has been released, and goes to show just how unsurprising its conclusions should have been, were it not for the blatant politicization of the previous ones.

Although international concern is growing about Iran's nuclear program and its regional ambitions, diplomats here say most U.S. intelligence shared with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency has proved inaccurate and none has led to significant discoveries inside Iran.

March, 2007

This month is mostly significant because it is on the 31st that this blog took its current format. The previous months were originally posted on a different, far uglier little blog that I’ve since removed. I also added a statcounter to see if anyone was reading things; they weren’t, and continued not doing so through April and May. Oh well, this is mainly for my own venting anyways.

As for posts, I rather misread the signs for an imminent Canadian election, though the Conservatives continue to govern like an election campaign, and there were a couple hints at the dismal state of the US’s image abroad here and here.

April, 2007

The big story, at least early in the month, was the release of 15 British sailors that had been captured by the Iranians, in what I thought was quite the propaganda coup for the Iranians and slammed the idiots who thought Blair should have acted more like Thatcher during the Falklands War.

There was also McCain’s stroll through Baghdad, which wasn’t, shall we say, one of his finest moments.

Best post looking back is probably this one exploring how the British fought in Northern Ireland compared to the counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a nutshell, the reason the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are doomed can be summed up in two words, “Force Protection”. How often have you heard stories of troops firing on vehicles at checkpoints because they failed to stop on time and the troops felt threatened? The idea is to protect the troops from suicide bombers, and it’s hard to argue that this is a bad thing. Sometimes they’re right and stop suicide bombers. Other times they are tragically wrong and slaughter innocent civilians.

The message is that our troops’ lives are far more important than the civilians that they are supposedly there to protect. Look at the casualty figures in N. Ireland again. The reason the British suffered greater losses than the terrorists, is because they ignored “force protection” and put civilian life above their own. Part of the fifth point above, they were there as protectors, not tormentors. Shooting up innocent civilians turns their families against the occupiers and to the terrorists. Not shooting them up means some real terrorists get through and you suffer greater casualties.

May, 2007

A post on the Afghan campaign following the death of Mullah Dadullah that confirms the bit I quoted above:

After burying the dead, the tribe’s elders met with their chief, Hajji Arbab Daulat Khan, and resolved to fight American forces if they returned. “If they come again, we will stand against them, and we will raise the whole area against them,” he warned. Or in the words of one foreign official in Afghanistan, the Americans went after one guerrilla commander and created a hundred more.

And another with an eerily familiar incident; an Afghan soldier turning his weapon on his “allies” and killing two US soldiers.

May is also unique in that I found one of those rare instances when I agreed with the Bush administrations actions. In this case, regarding the situation in Darfur.

Also worth remembering is the story of how Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card tried to strong-arm a sick and drugged-up Ashcroft into re-authorizing the warrentless eavesdropping program.

And there was the scare over tainted food coming from China, which seems to have been replaced by tainted toys without ever being solved, and an example of how the Chinese ignoring food safety is just a matter of following America’s example.

June, 2007

A significant month due to the fact that people actually started reading the site on a regular basis. Not very many people, mind you, but the fact that there appeared to be someone interested in what I was writing encouraged me to write a bit more often. It ended with a huge boost, when Cernig from The Newshoggers, who was doing the guest blog round-up at Crooks and Liars, linked to this post and for a while had me convinced the statcounter code was broken. From my regular 15-20 hits a day, I got over 1,500 in 24 hours. Left me somewhat giddy.

Otherwise, it was a quite busy month, with an appalling story regarding the Romney family’s dog, Canada’s no-fly list showing just how useful such things truly are, Vladimir Putin boning up on his “Person of the Year” credentials, and a post regarding how the “surge” was working after one of its bloodiest months.

And on the Climate Change posts, one particularly eloquent rant copied from David Brin on how the deniers are battling against measures that would make sense even if all the science backing them up was wrong.

Perennial Bush-defender Peter Worthington got all hot and bothered that the US didn’t place better in the Global Peace Index rankings, trying to argue that the strategy of “Wars for Freedom” should trump their actual record. Related to that was this post where I went on my true rants regarding the protection of “terrorists’ rights”

How blind to facts can people be? Protect the rights of terrorists? I don’t give a flying fuck about the terrorists. It's my rights I'm looking to protect.

Do you really want to live in a country where somebody can claim you’re a threat, and based solely on that claim, you can be dragged off the street and thrown into legal oblivion for the rest of your natural life?

Want to know why you were arrested? Sorry, you’re a terrorist now, we don’t have to tell you.

Want to challenge the evidence against you? Sorry, you’re a terrorist now, we don’t have to show you or anyone else what evidence we have.

Want a trial? Sorry, you’re a terrorist now, you don’t deserve a trial.

Say you’ve been abused? Tortured? Forced into confession? Too bad, you’re a terrorist, we don’t care about you.

. . .

Call me crazy, but if I get dragged off the street and thrown into a cell, I want to know why. I want to know what the charges against me are. I want the Government to be forced to produce some evidence of their claims. I want a trial and the chance to defend myself.

Part II should be up late today or tomorrow morning.

One last, posthumous post from G'Kar at Obsidian Wings. Well worth the read.

He will be missed.

It's 2008. Here's hoping it's a good one for everyone.

I had planned to do a retrospective of my blogging year before the year end, but travel and the intermittent connection to the net that came with it rather ruined that plan. I still hope to do so once I have reliable internet again in a couple of days. In the meantime, you can go here for some 2008 predictions.

And drink lots of water to help stave off the worst of the hangover in the morning. ;)