The Big Bust

So Brown, the 'man of the people' is backing the $700 billion payout to Wall St, i.e. Wall Street took the risk and got to keep the losses and the taxpayer (here or in the US) covers the losses. Before anyone thinks this plan is a complex one drawn up my the greatest economic minds, here is how they arrived on the figure;

“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

Reassuring?
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Afghanistan: Stalemate

News reports since the fall of the Taliban in 2001 often seem to have an upbeat quality where victory is 'just around the corner' as the coalition/NATO win victory after victory. Let me give you a few examples;

Dec 06: British jubilant as Taliban leader in south Afghanistan killed in air strike
May 07: Death of Taliban commander boosts Coalition forces in Afghanistan
Dec 07: Taliban Suffers "Huge Defeat"
Aug 08: Canadian military claims major victory in offensive

Wow! Sounds like they are winning! Then this;

Officials and military commanders in Afghanistan say the Taliban and other insurgent groups are in control of more and more territory and that at best the battle against them has reached stalemate.

So lets get this straight - NATO, the combined forces of the most advanced military forces in the World vs a guerilla army and the best that can be achieved is a stalemate.

Or to put it in numbers;

There are now some 62,000 foreign soldiers in Afghanistan , including 34,000 U.S. troops, and some 150,000 Afghan security forces. They face an estimated 7,000 to 11,000 insurgents.

212,000 vs 9,000 = stalemate. And the cost of this stalemate? Don't worry, it has onyl cost around $126 Billion. Bargain really.

Oh, and we are also seeing signs that far from stopping terrorism, the Iraq war (the other one) is spreading it;

The use of two vehicle bombs — one to breach the perimeter of a compound, a second to drive inside and explode — is a tactic used by the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq. […]

He said a new, less-compromising generation of al-Qaeda leaders emerged, many of them moving into action after escaping from a Yemeni prison that year, he said.[…]

The new leaders have found followers among al-Qaeda fighters returning from Iraq. “The quieter it is in Iraq, the more inflamed it is here,” as Yemeni fighters travel back and forth, said Nabil al-Sofee, a former spokesman for a Yemeni Islamist political party who is now an analyst.

Those who have been following the Iraq debate might remember “flypaper theory,” which was one of the earliest exponents of the “incoherent post hoc justifications for the Iraq war” genre. The idea was that there was some limited number of terrorists in the Middle East, and the presence of an occupying U.S. army would lure them to Iraq, whereupon they could all be conveniently killed, presumably as soon as they stepped off the bus.

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New PostWatch Blog

Bristol Evening Post Watch - really good read!

http://eveningpostwatch.wordpress.com
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War of Terror: 7 Years On

Well here we are again, another anniversary of the co-called War of Terror's start on September 11th. Also known as Bush's Crusade, The Long War and the Endless War. I had calculated that the War of Terror - just the Iraq bit - had cost the South West £1.2 billion. Yes folks - £1.2 billion. Add Afghanistan and all the other war related costs (such as the hike in the oil price) and it must be up to £2 billion. Yes folks, the War of Terror has cost us in the South West around £2 billion. We keep getting told about great victories in Afghanistan - important strategic victories that have broken the resistance, the killing of hundreds of militants, capture of key towns - and yet victory itself is elusive and always just around the corner. How many more wedding parties will we need to bomb before we have won?

So on another anniversary of September 11th here is a few suggested bits of reading and stuff;

Ending Occupations to End War

While counter-terrorism activities can be usefully pursued in these three areas, it is clear that the local perception of foreign occupation is part of the problem, and a long-term occupation is likely to exacerbate the violence rather than reduce it.

Afghanistan: The Value of None

We have no idea just how many civilians have been blown away by the U.S. military (and allies) in these years, only that the "collateral damage" has been widespread and far more central to the President's War on Terror than anyone here generally cares to acknowledge. Collateral damage has come in myriad ways -- from artillery fire in the initial invasion of Iraq; from repeated shootings of civilians in vehicles at checkpoints, and from troops (or even private mercenaries) blasting away from convoys; during raids on private homes; in village operations; and, significantly, from the air.

The Failure of the Iraq War

A few weeks [after Bush got into power in 2000, his] speechwriter David Frum offered an even more exuberant version of the same vision to the New York Times Magazine: "An American-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the replacement of the radical Baathist dictatorship with a new government more closely aligned with the United States, would put America more wholly in charge of the region than any power since the Ottomans, or maybe even the Romans."....[Yet - here we are in 2008] The respected Iraqi newspaper Azzaman pointed to one of these forces in a recent editorial: "Iran has emerged as the country's top trading partner. Its firms are present in the Kurdish north and southern Iraq carrying out projects worth billions of dollars. Iranian goods are the most conspicuous merchandise in Iraqi shops. Iraq, though occupied and administered by America, has grown to be so dependent on Iran that some analysts see it as a satellite state of Tehran."

And a couple of vids;
McCain the Warmonger - http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/09/warmonger_mccain.php
Resisting the Republicans - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwYHupGVj9o

Victory in Iraq! (for Iran)

With Iraq a major issue in the U$ election, McCain is trumpeting the success of the surge and looking forward to victory. But has the U$ won? It is hard to see how; this great article argues that Iran are the real winners and has the revelation that the Bu$h regime have been spying on the Iraqi government.

On the subject - an interesting point in the letter to the Guardian;

Your list of the reasons why only Britain is facing recession (The question, G2, September 4) makes no reference to the huge cost of the attack on Iraq and subsequent involvement in Afghanistan. In February the economist Joseph Stiglitz estimated the cost of the Iraq adventure as $3tn to the US and a similar cost to the rest of the world; Britain was a leading player in the use of human and financial resources. I find it interesting that virtually no one refers to the massive opportunity cost of our involvement in Iraq and its inevitable impact on the state of our economy.

Good point.
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