Sumerian cuneiform in North Carolina

The story as to how this Sumerian cuneiform tablet wound up in the hands of a drywall hanger in Fayetteville, North Carolina still sounds fishy to me. The story that Veenker is connecting the tablet to, about 14 missing tablets sold in 1962 in Philadelphia to the Oriental Institute in Chicago might fit some facts, like the inscriptions matching the ones transcribed from an inventory made years ago, but again, this is Fayetteville, North Carolina.

I'm sticking with my wild guess that the tablet is a piece from the Iraqi National Museum.

Israeli attack on Syria is more proof of failure of U.S. foreign policy

This can't be good. What the fuck is going on in Syria?

Admittedly, i'm out of the loop. Between the vacation in austin and the work i've had to make up, as well as these recurring headaches, i'm not so up on the news.

My speculation is that this proves once again, Syria did not have WMDs smuggled in from Iraq, or at least any nuclear ones. Why on earth would they import them from North Korea? The reason why the Bush administration is not crowing about the Israeli strike is because they don't know how to spin this. Syria had to import nuclear weapons and North Korea was not contained. Sure, Syria has possibly suffered a setback to what might be a nuclear program, but how is that an argument bolstering U.S. foreign policy?

Bush can cry all he wants about how he warned us that North Korea would be engaging in nuclear proliferation, but where is the United States? Bogged down in Iraq. Idiot.

cuneiform tablet in Fayetteville, North Carolina

I don't mean to be a complete bastard, but this story about a myseterious tablet of cuneiform is mighty fishy. An incredibly well-preserved tablet of cuneiform surfaces in Fayetteville, North Carolina. This is the story one of the people came up with to explain its presence:

According to Buie, Eddie has had the tablet for at least a couple of years. “He had it long before his wife died. I think it came out of Pennsylvania,” he said.

As the story goes, a girl brought the tablet along when she visited Eddie’s wife. Somehow, Eddie’s wife wound up with it.

Buie said he doesn’t know much else about the artifact’s recent history.

Riiiiggghhht... I'm sorry, but i doubt this. Just looking at the condition of the tablet in that photos, i'd wager that it is a piece looted from National Museum of Iraq.

Pennsylvania? Come on... this is Fayetteville, North Carolina. This is Fort Bragg and Pope Air Force Base. Something is not right here, and this is probably why the FBI is involved.

The question is more likely whether this is just an illicit souvenir from a thoughtless soldier who didn't understand what he was doing or a hint of evidence of a larger, organized operation.

"Fantasies generate realities"

So Vargas Llosa says anyway.... Looking at what happened in Iraq, i'd say the paranoid fantasy of a world torn apart by terrorism was a stronger fantasy than the neo-con fantasy of "spreading democracy."

This article in Prospect, "The Democracy of Don Quixote" amused me as the writer does not once ascribe the American adventurism in Iraq as quixotic, but instead addresses the nature of ideology and the unreliable narrator. I'll admit that i'm a little suspicious of his motives, but it was interesting.

six Iranians taken in raid in Irbil

At first i read the AP story, and thought, "There! They're doing their damnedest to provoke Iran!"

Then i calmed down a little, and thought, "Oh, well.... maybe those Iranians were indeed masquerading as a diplomatic mission, and needed to be neutralized..." until i read the story again, and realized that the "foreign force" took down the Iranian flag that was flying over the building the Iranians were operating out of.

Whether the Pentagon says the building was a consulate or not, they simply cannot do that. That's a huge diplomatic breach, flirting with an act of war.

This is going to be very messy.

and now Iran?

This whole "surge" in Iraq story seems like a crock of shit. Yeah, i know there is no real "surge," that it's just another shuffling of deployment rotations, keeping some troops due to come home there longer, and speeding up the departure of ones in the States. However, there is something odd going on. When i get up in the morning, the sky is filled with contrails of military planes. There is something amiss. Between the increase in contrails and the attack in Somalia, it feels like something else is up... just what is up, i don't have the depth to understand.

However, i have this ugly feeling that this whole "surge" ploy is not about Iraq at all, but Iran.

After reading Glenn Greenwald this morning, i feel less self-conscious in confessing my suspicions online. The old rumor was that it was supposed to happen in October, before the American elections, but when that didn't happen, the doomsayers amended their predictions to the strike on Iran being at the end of January. I fear that it's really coming this time.

Yep. I read the Juan Cole post too, which breaks down where the troops are being deployed:

Bush could not help taking swipes at Iran and Syria. But the geography of his deployments gives the lie to his singling them out as mischief makers. Why send 4,000 extra troops to al-Anbar province? Why ignore Diyala Province near Iran, which is in flames, or Babel Province southwest of Baghdad? Diyala borders Iran, so isn't that the threat? But wait. Where is al-Anbar? Between Jordan and Baghdad. In other words, al-Anbar opens out into the vast Sunni Arab hinterland that supports the guerrilla movement with money and volunteers, coming in from Jordan. If Syria was the big problem, you would put the extra 4,000 troops up north along the border. If Iran was the big problem, you'd occupy Diyala. But little Jordan is an ally of the US, and Bush would not want to insult it by admitting that it is a major infiltration root for jihadis heading to Iraq.

The clear and hold strategy is not going to work in al-Anbar. Almost everyone there hates the Americans and wants them out. To clear and hold you need a sympathetic or potentially sympathetic civilian population that is being held hostage by militants, and which you can turn by offering them protection from the militants. I don't believe there are very many Iraqi Sunnis who can any longer be turned in that way. The opinion polling suggests that they overwhelmingly support violence against the US.

Juan Cole is the Middle East expert, but I don't think deciphering the logic of actual deployment of troops has anything to do with what is happening. It would seem perfectly in character for this administration to try "shock and awe" all over again in Iran, all flashy airstrikes. Despite Somalia actually having an Al-Qaeda presence, the strike there just seemed like more saber rattling towards Iran to me, with no real substance.

Ugh.

first impression of Imperial Life in the Emerald City

The Bastard of Istanbul was not there, so i checked out Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City instead. I'm far from finished with the book, but every page has made me cringe with just how many mistakes were made in planning and executing rebuilding Iraq after the removal of Saddam. There are a few heroes, but only tragic heroes, Cassandras who warned of the consequences of the lack of foresight and gross mismanagement, or selfless martyrs who undertake Sisyphean tasks to be undermined by their superiors.

It's a bitterly funny book though. I've burst out laughing several times, even though i feel kinda dirty afterwards. It would be the darkest of satires if it was not actually documenting real events.

One of the less monstrous fuck-ups (meaning that living people were not directly hurt by the mistakes) that amused me was this one regarding the oversight in securing several high priority sites during the fall of Baghdad:

Even as the impact of the looting was becoming clear, ORHA could not prod the military into action. When Barbara Bodine, a veteran diplomat and Arabic speaker who was to become the interim mayor of Baghdad, got word from an Iraqi contact that looters were perilously close to breaking into a vault under the Central Bank that housed a priceless collection of Assyrian gold, she fired off an e-mail to the U.S. Central Command. The exchange, as she and a State Department official in Washington who was copied on the messages remember it, went something like this:

BODINE: The Assyrian vault under the Central Bank is in immediate danger of being looted. We need to get on this.
CENTCOM: What's in the Assyrian vault?
BODINE (thinking of the "Who's buried in Grant's Tomb?" line) : Assyrian treasure.
CENTCOM: What's an Assyrian treasure?
BODINE: Go read the early chapters of your Bible. It's old stuff. It's really really valuable. We need to save it.
CENTCOM: Okay. We'll see what we can do.

Well, it amused me anyway. To ORHA's credit, the Central Bank was at the top of its list of sites to be secured and protected. Unfortunately, ORHA was neutered by Rumsfeld excising any personnel that he regarded as a threat from the State Department, replacing them with less qualified political hacks, and then not providing them with the material support that they needed to do the job.

The further i get in, the more cringes i get rather than laughs. I knew of many of the mistakes from articles that i've read the past few years, but to have them woven together into a larger tapestry, it is still jaw-dropping.

More later, i hope....

martyring Saddam

It is practically old news now, but a few nights ago, when i was watching cable news, with shouting pundits, it doesn't seem to have sunk through into the mainstream. Aside from the fact that Shia militia infiltrated the execution, Juan Cole pointed out that the timing of Saddam's hanging could not have been worse:

The tribunal also had a unique sense of timing when choosing the day for Saddam's hanging. It was a slap in the face to Sunni Arabs. This weekend marks Eid al-Adha, the Holy Day of Sacrifice, on which Muslims commemorate the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son for God. Shiites celebrate it Sunday. Sunnis celebrate it Saturday –- and Iraqi law forbids executing the condemned on a major holiday. Hanging Saddam on Saturday was perceived by Sunni Arabs as the act of a Shiite government that had accepted the Shiite ritual calendar.

The timing also allowed Saddam, in his farewell address to Iraq, to pose as a “sacrifice” for his nation, an explicit reference to Eid al-Adha. The tribunal had given the old secular nationalist the chance to use religious language to play on the sympathies of the whole Iraqi public.

Bush's nonsense about Saddam's death, "I wish, obviously, that the proceedings had ... gone in a more dignified way. But nevertheless, he was given justice," and the photos of the execution being "revolting and barbaric" is disgusting. Someone already compared the theater we saw as making the U.S. worse than Pontius Pilate, in pretending to absolve itself of the poor judgement. Kneejerk rightwingers will feign indignation that there is a comparison being drawn between Jesus and Saddam, which is absurd. This is about a leader trying to wash blame from his own hands by using a lynch mob as his proxy.

the mystery cult of Gladwellian relativism

Since i've begun using Google Reader, i've been reading an awful lot of RSS feeds. When i was test driving the thing, i subscribed the Thinker bundle. After a couple of weeks of reading Malcolm Gladwell, i began to feel unclean. I was aware of his books The Tipping Point and Blink, but I never picked them up. My district manager had urged all of his managers to read the damned things long ago, but i steadfastly refuse to consider the babble of any of these pop psychology cults. The last straw with Gladwell was when i read his praise of Milton Friedman.

Maud Newton's dismantling of Malcolm Gladwell's defense of Enron's Jeff Skilling makes me very happy indeed. However, this paragraph of Gladwell i find especially offensive:

The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. The C.I.A. had a position on what a post-invasion Iraq would look like, and so did the Pentagon and the State Department and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and any number of political scientists and journalists and think-tank fellows. For that matter, so did every cabdriver in Baghdad.

Gladwell is an idiot. It's one thing to be a blinkered acolyte of the free market, but quite another not to be able to admit that there was never a mystery about what would happen in Iraq. It was obvious from the very beginning that the American public was being lied to. Having a "position" and having database of facts that have been objectively assessed are two entirely different things.