A slight return to 2004. Wasn't that fun.

Tom Watson runs for the gap, specifically yet another ugly little employment law story at the Sun. Readers will know that they're like that among themselves and there's something of a press tradition of not mentioning the names. On this occasion it's Our Boys Go In Editor "Tom" "Newton" "Dunn" vs. their Whitehall editor Clodagh Hartley.

The other story is that Watson is suggesting that Trevor Kavanagh took the credit for publishing the Hutton whitewash ahead of time when Hartley was in fact responsible.

Sadly this just recalls Labour's relationship with the Sun. A close reading of this explains all:

Kavanagh, who claimed he had been read the contents of the report over the telephone by an “impartial” source went on to tell the BBC “the source had nothing to gain financially or politically, no axe to grind, no vested interest"

Access to the document, no financial or political interest, someone who had Kavanagh (or Hartley)'s direct phone number = i.e. they were a civil servant operating with permission from their boss who was in contact with them, or to put it another way, a government press officer.

As is fairly well known, Alistair Campbell got powers to give the career COI officials orders in May 1997. His departure didn't end that. The source was probably Godric Smith or Tom "Walter Mitty figure" Kelly. Kavanagh was lionised by the media establishment for having what was, in fact, the government's line-to-take read out into his ear by a government press officer. It wasn't as if the Blair governments were averse to racking up brownie points with Murdoch where possible, was it?

On the other hand, perhaps the most repellent of the Murdoch/Met cases was the Forest Gate raid of 2006, when the police launched a miniature Operation OVERLORD (or rather, MOTORMAN - I don't think they used a boat) in Walthamstow in pursuit of a "chemical dirty bomb suicide vest" which was capable of attacking aircraft up to 5,000 feet overhead in their opinion, accidentally shot someone because their hand slipped, tore the building apart, found nothing, and satisfied themselves by having the News of the World smear the suspects as paedophiles, before spending ages trying to seize their savings. It wasn't so much a police operation as a sort of wildly overdone high-camp mashup of 2000s tropes. News International columnist Andy Hayman was in charge, but perhaps we were spared worse:

The police always argue that (many things they do) are a matter of operations and politicians should not be involved. Well, I'm afraid I have a big argument with that."

Citing the 2006 raid on a street in Forest Gate, he added: "At one stage the police were going to turn out all the residents of the street at 2am in the morning. John Reid was the home secretary and I was working with him.

"Andy Hayman, who was in charge, wanted to turn them out and I said to John Reid - no, you can't do that. He said 'John, it's operational'. I said 'S** operational, there are political considerations here' - turning out a street of Asians at 2am with the allegations of a gas plot and we don't know what the evidence is for that."

So when did they start tapping Prescott's phone?

It remains the case that Labour's half of the twisted relationship with Murdoch was very different to the Tories'. It was transactional and contingent and that's one of the reasons why it was so horrible at the time, but that also made it possible to leave. When you are one entity you cannot cooperate, said Montgomery. It's also very hard to stop.

Production note: part of this post was originally a comment on Tom Watson's blog and was never released from moderation. I might have been nice about this, but you know.

fighting the real enemy

Con "WMD" Coughlin's piece in the Torygraph is worthy of close reading. You'll note that this:

Whitehall was caught off guard by the seriousness of the situation in Helmand province, where British troops were deployed in Nato’s reconstruction programme. Most Labour ministers supported the view of John Reid, the defence secretary at the time, that “we would be perfectly happy to leave in three years’ time without firing one shot because our mission is to protect the reconstruction”.

Intelligence assessments conducted in southern Afghanistan concluded that they would receive a hostile reception.

isn't actually sourced to either General Richards, who is the ostensible subject of the piece, or to Sandy Gall's book mentioned later in it. Also, the piece contains extensive quotes from Richards that turn out to have been dug out of Gall's book, when a over-rapid look at the piece might give you the impression Coughlin spoke to Richards.

Reid's remark has gone down in the annals of stupidity, but the notion that "most Labour ministers" agreed with him isn't sourced to anyone at all. In fact, the policy was repeatedly re-debated and altered, as I blogged here over the winter of 2005-2006, which doesn't suggest everyone agreed on it. Further, it's news that "intelligence assessments" accurately forecast what would happen - especially as any assessment carried out before the deployment would have been an assessment of the original plan, not the plan as it was radically altered in the field.

I suspect Coughlin is talking the secret services' book here, and they are fighting the real enemy - the uniformed services' Defence Intelligence Staff, which would have been responsible for such an assessment. Further, DIS was notoriously right about Iraq (if you believe Brian Jones' telling) and this is inexcusable to the spooks (who weren't) or Coughlin (who wasn't, and who culpably published their nonsense).

Further, does this quote sound convincing to you? For an American general, he sounds a lot like a British journalist trying to sound tough.

Sir David also recounts a heated argument between Brigadier Ed Butler, the first British commander in Helmand, and an US general who took exception to him. “I nearly punched that damn Limey’s [Butler’s] lights out, he was so arrogant,” the US general said.

Liam Fox: Not Fit For Purpose

OK, so "Not All That" Foxy Liam Fox is in trouble.

"He is an odd bloke," said one fellow minister. "He has fingers in so many pies that you kind of think one of them will land him in trouble somewhere along the line."

Another Tory MP said Fox's tendency to name-drop and brag about his close friendships with Republicans in the US, media magnates such as David and Frederick Barclay (owners of the Daily Telegraph), and his endless globe-trotting, even before he entered the cabinet, has made many bristle and help explain why he has plenty of enemies in the Tory party and in Whitehall. "I think you either roll with the bluster or find it repellent," said a Tory MP.

Ah, one of them. Anyway. Part of the problem is this famous meeting where his bestie Adam Werritty just happened to turn up. What was on offer? Well, a product called Cellcrypt, whose makers were trying to sell it to the MoD to stop evilly-disposed persons from eavesdropping on British soldiers' phone calls back to the UK. (Note: this is going to be long. Technical summary: voice encryption apps for GSM-style mobile networks can guarantee that your call will not be overheard, but not that your presence cannot be monitored, and not necessarily that the parties to your calls cannot be identified.)

Back in the early days of Iraq, the CPA permitted one mobile phone operator in each of its three zones to set up. The British zone, CPA-South/Multinational Division South-East, let the Kuwaiti national telco, MTC (now Zain and busy running Mo Ibrahim's old Celtel business into the ground) set up there with a partner some of us may have heard of. It's from Newbury and it's not a pub or an estate agency and its logo is a big red comma...funny how Vodafone never talked that particular investment up, innit? Anyway. Later the Iraqi government did a major tender for permanent licences and Orascom got most of it, but that's another story.

One thing that did happen was that soldiers took their mobiles with them to Iraq, and some of them pretty soon realised that buying a local SIM card in the bazaar was much cheaper than making roaming calls back to the UK. Either way, lots of +44 numbers started showing up in their VLR, the big database that keeps track of where phones are in a GSM network so it can route incoming calls.

Pretty soon someone who - presumably - worked for the MTC-Voda affiliate and whose purposes were not entirely aligned with Iraq The Model realised that you could use the VLR to follow the Brits (and the Yanks and the Danes and the Dutchmen and Kiwis and all sorts of contractors) around. Not only that, you could ring up their families in the UK and make threats with the benefit of apparently supernatural knowledge.

This obviously wasn't ideal. Efforts were made to mitigate the problem; soldiers were discouraged from using local GSM networks, more computers and public phones were made available. The eventual solution, though, was to get some nice new ruggedised small-cell systems from companies like Private Mobile Networks Ltd., which basically pack a small base station and a base station controller and a satellite backhaul terminal into a tough plastic box of a suitably military colour. You open it up, unfold the antenna, turn on the power, and complete some configuration options. It logs into the mobile operator who's providing service to you via the satellite link.

Now, because radio signals like all radiation lose intensity with the inverse square of the distance, you'll be vastly louder than everyone else. So any mobile phone nearby will roam onto your private mobile network and will be in the UK for mobile phone purposes, a bit like the shipping container that's technically in Egypt at the end of Four Lions. And none of this will touch any other mobile network that might be operating in your area. Obviously you can also use these powers for evil, by snarfing up everyone else's traffic, and don't for a moment think this isn't also done by so-called IMSI catchers.

You're not meant to do this, normally, because you probably don't have a licence to use the GSM, GSM/PCS, or UMTS frequencies. But, as the founder of PMN Ltd. told a colleague of mine, the answer to that is "we've got bigger tanks".

So, where were we? Well, the problem with trying to do...something...with Cellcrypt is that it doesn't actually solve this problem, because the problem wasn't originally that the other side could listen to the content of voice calls. Like all telecoms interception stories, it was about the traffic analysis, not the content. Actually, they probably could listen in as well because some of the Iraqi and Afghan operators may not have been using up-to-date or even *any* air interface encryption.

But if you're going to fix this with an encryption app like Cellcrypt, you've got to make sure that every soldier (and sailor and diplomat and journo and MoD civilian) installs it, it works on all the phones, and you absolutely can't make calls without it. Also, you've got to make sure all the people they talk to install it.

And the enemy can still follow you because the phones are still registering in the VLRs!

So, there's not much point relying on OTA voice encryption to solve a problem that's got nothing to do with the voice bearer channel. However, bringing your own small cell network certainly does solve the problem, elegantly, and without needing to worry about what kind of phones people bring along or buy locally.

And the military surely understand this, as by the time of the famous meeting, they'd already started deploying them. Also, back when this was a big problem, 19 year-old riflemen usually didn't have the sort of phones that would run a big hefty application like Cellcrypt, which also uses the mobile data link and therefore would give them four figure phone bills.

To sum up, Werritty was helping someone market gear that the MoD didn't need, that was hopelessly unfit for purpose, wouldn't actually do what the MoD wanted, and would cost individual soldiers a fortune, by providing privileged access to the Secretary of State for Defence.

Callaghan-era surge

I have recently been reading David McKittrick (et al)'s Making Sense of the Troubles. An interesting point, which I wasn't aware of before, is their contention that the late 70s and Roy Mason's tenure as Northern Ireland secretary was an important turning point. In fact, you could make an interesting comparison with Iraq in 2007-2008.

Mason's policy was to forget about further top-level negotiations, after the collapse of the Sunningdale agreement, and focus on security and economic issues in the hope that progress from the bottom up would bring the conflict parties back to the negotiating table on better terms. In fact, during his tenure, there was a dramatic drop in the rate of killings that was never reversed. This is the hub of McKittrick's argument - having surged in 1971 and peaked in 1972-3, levels of violence stayed very high until 1977 and then dropped to a new, much lower average level.

The British government in this period tried various expedients. The military used more special forces, and integrated their intelligence systems and those of the police and security services. Overall, there was a deliberate effort to project the whole war as a law-enforcement problem (very much a theme of US and Iraqi government propaganda during the "surge"), and to launch as many criminal prosecutions as possible. They tried hard to recruit informers and to make use of supergrasses.

McKittrick and his co-authors argue that there was a sort of cycle-of-recruitment effect at work - terrorism caused recruitment into the loyalist terrorist organisations, whose violence caused further IRA recruitment, which led to more military intervention and more loyalist violence. They further argue that this cycle was broken or at least slowed down in the late 1970s - whether the government was succeeding in providing security or not, it at least reduced the demand for unofficial, privatised violence. The government also tried hard to recruit potential paramilitaries into its own forces, and demonstrated that it was willing to use force against loyalists as well as republicans (they argue that the failure of the 1977 loyalist strike was important). This is all quite familiar.

However, the drop in violence was an over-determined event. There was a major change in the IRA leadership and strategy, which emphasised holding out for the long term and eventually led to an increased emphasis on the ballot box. (The parallel with the Sadr movement stands out.) There was a major protest movement demanding peace, which is another way of saying that the people were unwilling to tolerate so much violence any more.

Although this turning point meant much less violence, it didn't solve anything in and of itself. And it involved quite a lot of state violence in itself - especially during interrogations. This Musings on Iraq roundup is telling - rather than gunbattles and mass bombings, the war continues with a low-level assassination campaign. In Northern Ireland, the best any security solution could ever do in the absence of a political solution was to hold the levels of violence down around the post-77 average, with a very significant cost to society as a whole.

status: it's complicated

This post brings several things to mind. Apparently, eastern Libya was a hugely overrepresented area among the international jihadis who went to Iraq and there exploded. Clearly, this means that you can't assume that they're fighting for democracy, whiskey, sexy.

However, it's also very likely that this represented a deliberate policy on the part of the Libyan government to channel its dissidents into particular ideologies that its new friends also perceived as the enemy, and then to ship them out of the country and hope they would explode somewhere else. Making jihadis - repressing all other forms of dissidence, while not trying too hard to stop them recruiting or leaving the country - had the side benefit that it validated their claim to be a bastion of stability assailed by Islamic extremism. They could produce the extremists, after all. And it further allowed them to avoid burning all their bridges with the other side. If it became expedient to make friends with the terrorists again, they could produce the bloody shirts - the martyrdom videos - and demonstrate that they had been useful.

Of course, Gadhafi didn't have to be an evil genius to come up with this plan - he was essentially copying Saudi Arabia's homework, and depending on how you look at the relationship between the Egyptian regime and the Brothers, perhaps sneaking a look at the neighbours' as well. Giddens may have thought they were going to be a new Norway, but the real plan was more like Saudi 2.0, probably right down to the hereditary government.

Another lesson from this is that they're probably not going to give up easily.

earth-shattering kaboom

Really excellent piece on the Al-Qa'Qaa munitions complex, its looting during the US invasion of Iraq, and the role of the estimated 40,000 tonnes of assorted explosives that went missing in the Iraqi insurgency and the civil war. Also, strategic geography - that area was on the demographic frontier between Sunni and Shia, on the suburban fringe of Baghdad, and near the end of the road from the western borders. Combine that with the explosives, and you can see why it was the crucible of the war and also part of the reason why things quietened down so quickly after mid-2007 - get a grip there and the Americans and the Iraqi government had gone quite a long way already.

Also, October, 2004:

Sanger, still waiting for the editors of the Times to publish his exclusive, discovered that the story was leaking on Sunday. The article went out the next morning: "Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished from Site in Iraq." Shortly after the newspaper hit the streets, Bush's chief political strategist Karl Rove swept into the media area of Air Force One and started shouting at Sanger. "Rove came and screamed at me in front of all the other reporters," he says. "Declared that this had been invented by the Kerry campaign." Apparently, the report had hit a nerve.

Ah.

I didn't think I'd still be blogging this six years later

Well, this looks pretty ugly. I have a question. We know that unofficial, non-doctrinal training material was being circulated around the joint services intelligence centre in Chicksands in 2003-2005 - there's an interesting quote about it in the Guardian piece here:

Any public inquiry into the activities of the JFIT would be expected to examine the extent to which it was supervised by military lawyers. It is now known that at least some of the training material used by F Branch at Chicksands between 2003 and 2005 escaped the scrutiny of the training centre's in-house lawyer, Brigadier David Yates, who told the Mousa inquiry that he did not "have the capacity" to check it.

This is important because, as the piece also points out, most of the interrogators were reservists. They would have gone first of all to the Chilwell mobilisation centre to do fitness tests, draw additional kit, get their vaccinations, complete their admin, and to do refresher courses on things like first aid, marksmanship, and anti-terrorist precautions. Then, later, they would have gone for a period of pre-deployment training, which would concentrate on preparing for their specific role in Iraq, before finally shipping out via South Cerney and RAF Brize Norton. It would make sense if the reservist intelligence people were sent to their trade's headquarters, which for most of them would also be their unit's peacetime depot, for their specialised pre-deployment course. (I think I have the process right, but several readers can correct me.)

Now, we also know that the Americans began with the torture in 2002, and that Major-General Geoffrey Miller was transferred from Guantanamo to Iraq with his infamous directive to "Gitmo-ize" the detention camps in the summer of 2003. So, where did this documentation come from?

Sometimes, FaxYourMP Just Isn't Enough

I don't quite know what to make of this:

Q What other sites, remember any particular internet sites you looked at?

A When I was doing research about MPs, I looked at one called theyworkforyou.com and I think another one was called publicwhips [publicwhip.org.uk].

Q So, have you carried out any research to ... about Stephen Timms.

A Yeah, on ... I looked up, I found, I Googled him, I found out he had a website, I found a page about him on theyworkforyou.com ... if you follow that link it shows information about how he voted on different things related to the Iraq war and the build up towards it. I found out that ... he very strongly agreed with the invasion of Iraq and they said very strongly because they worked out all his votes for everything related to that and it came up to something like 99.9% support or something like that.

Q How does that make you feel?

A That made me feel angry because the whole Iraq war is just based on lies and he just voted strongly for everything as though he had no mercy. As though he felt no doubts that what he was doing was right, even though it was such an arrogant thing to do and I just felt like if he could treat the Iraqi people so mercilessly, then why should I show him any mercy?

Q What, what makes you think that it's your place to go and stab him?..

brief Iraq post

Weird news from Iraq - apparently one of Sadr's conditions for returning to Iraqi politics is that Allawi and the SIIC are included. There's a turn-up for you. It does sound like the Iranians are the main actors here, and the point of including Allawi is to get minimal consent from the Sunni. Some day there's going to be a good book written on the politics between the US and Iran during the Iraq War.

a slight return from 2004...

Two things: brief piece about the Toyota Hilux, preferred transport to the world guerrilla, and a fatwa against mobile money transfer. You know you've made it when you've been fatwa'd.

More seriously, this huge Guardian piece on Iranian policy in Iraq is well worth reading. It's interesting, to say the least, that the people Sadr wanted to see as guarantors of Iranian good faith were Hezbollah - it would seem they've got a foreign policy these days. Also, there's a sort of disguised alliance between the Iranians and the US. The Americans fought hard to stabilise al-Maliki's government and to build it up as a credible force. It's hard to imagine they really want rid of him now.

And there's this:

It is understood that the full withdrawal of all US troops after a security agreement signed between Baghdad and Washington at the end of 2011 was also sought by Sheikh Nasrallah.

"Maliki told them he will never extend, or renew [any bases] or give any facilities to the Americans or British after the end of next year," a source said....US officials have strongly suggested they would scale back their involvement in Iraq if the Sadrists, who have been a key foe throughout the years of war, were to emerge as a significant player in any government.

But it's their policy to leave:

On the 2011 December withdrawal date, the official said: "Any follow-up engagement with Iraq in relation to troops would be at the request of the government of Iraq. There are no plans to keep troops after December 2011. We are drawing down and all will be out of Iraq."

The piece seems to be heavily influenced by sources in Al Baathi Allawi's entourage. You do wonder if Allawi was only fetched out of the deep freeze in order to press Maliki into making a deal with the Sadrists.

Why are these scumbags so scummy?

John "War Nerd" Dolan got a job, as a lecturer at the American University of Iraq. Hilarity ensued. You bet. It's a tale of un-fantastic right-wing academics, a kind of glaring dullness, a total lack of character, and an endless supply of raw cash. It so happens that John needed that more than anything else, so good luck to him. Read the whole thing - what stands out is the vast gap between the neo-con obsession with The Western Canon! Classicism! Principle! Courage! and the petty, provincial, small-mindedness that people like Joshua "Not The Blogger" Marshall practice in their lives. It's not even the incompetence. It's the style that gives them away.

The other interesting thing in the piece is John Agresto's role. Again and again, he turns up wondering why a string of horrible political thugs treated him with disrespect. Lynne Cheney, his old boss, seems to have been a really awful human being close up. Who knew? But somehow, it never crosses his mind to wonder why this keeps happening every time he associates with the Cheneys or Bill Bennett or some other horrific political gargoyle. It's....full of bastards, just this particular astronaut isn't going to get out of the ship.

I also loved the notion of a neo-conservative as someone who got mugged by reality and now never goes into town for fear of running into reality again. A lesser writer would say that he started carrying a gun in order to shoot reality. However, that would imply some kind of grand, tragic struggle against brute fate. You can't have tragedy without dignity, and that's one thing the administration of the American University of Iraq doesn't have.

This reminded me of two things, or rather the other way around. If you want Mitt Romney to speak, you've got to take a bulk order for his booky wook. Hence the book is a bestseller (for whatever that means in today's book trade). Similarly, 'bagger Sharron Angle's campaign raised $14m and paid $12m right back to the political consultants who organised the donation drive.

The other thing was this documentary series on YouTube about Americans and steroids. Two points come to mind - the enduring role of the quack, and a sort of grinding optimism. And this quote: "Everyone wants to be a monster."

A critical point, though - I'm fairly sure the sheaf of documents one of the doctors waves while reading out a list of horrible side effects that turn out to relate to vitamin C is from an open-access "adverse event reporting system", which basically gathers anything anyone anywhere feels inclined to report. They aren't verified in any way. Anti-vaccine people often abuse this.

Fortunately, someone's done the actual journalism and documented that the ties between multilevel marketing, quackery, and extreme-right politics aren't just style, they're organisational and financial. It goes back a while, too.

cutting down on your mercenary miles

Here's something interesting.

We must also consider the alternative that many of the most prominent and powerful Afghans are in fact motivated by greed and opportunism. [harrowell: ya think?] It is therefore in their interest to maintain the status quo of massive US and international spending that fuels the Afghan "rentier state" economy.

This isn't just recreational cynicism; they argue that the latest announcement of a clampdown on private security companies in Afghanistan is to be taken more seriously than the last six, and that this actually represents an effort to integrate them into the Afghan government's forces or at least its allies. Importantly, and very differently from Iraq, the main players are local rather than foreign - like the 24,000-strong Watan Group. (Check out their Corporate Social Responsibility page.) Rather than just being part of the ISAF baggage train, they're a significant nonstate actor in Afghan politics.

If you were feeling optimistic, you might consider this as being similar to the various political fixes the Soviets arranged in 1988 to keep the roads open for the Afghan government post-withdrawal. If you've been reading this since at least 2007, you'll know that I think the absolute best that could happen in Afghanistan would be to get back to something like the 1989-1992 period, just without the continuing US/Pakistan/Saudi destabilisation and the cut-off of Russian aid that kicked off the civil war (and the destruction of Kabul, the invention of the Taliban, and so on). I agree this is pessimistic, but then, well, I wouldn't start from here.

In Iraq, understanding the business/organised crime environment may have played a bigger role than is publicly acknowledged in getting the US Army out of town. For example, here's a Joel Wing piece on the history of oil-smuggling (you'll note that the Baiji refinery comes up. party like it's 2005!). Interestingly, the initial Awakening Council leader Sheikh Abu Risha was an important oil smuggler, and you can bet those networks were of use.

Leaving aside the obvious Afghan export, the analogous business is probably selling stuff to ISAF. Bagram now has its own cement plant, inside the perimeter, but that's a Turkish construction firm.

probably a robbery

Here's an interesting follow-up on the recent raid on the Iraqi central bank, from Joel Wing. You may recall that the attack, a classic NOIA multi-layered assault using suicide bombers, snipers, and infantry, successfully took over the building and held off the Iraqi army for some time before disengaging, and that although a large quantity of documents and computers were destroyed, no money was taken.

I read that as being an insurgent effort to project incorruptibility, in the style both Tomas Masaryk and Mao advised their followers to adopt, in the context of an operation designed to wreck the bank as an institution. Wing's follow-up suggests that there may have been other motives at work - the fire began in the office of the Inspector-General, and the files destroyed include the records of an inquiry into a huge fake-cheque fraud ($711 million - a reminder that frauds in Iraq grow to enormous size). Further, there was a previous unexplained fire in the bank's archives in 2008 which destroyed evidence in a corruption case.

Wing's sources speculate that employees at the bank might have taken the opportunity of the raid to start the fire, that the attackers were involved in the original fraud, or that those behind the fraud hired the attackers to destroy the evidence.

Fascinatingly, almost a year ago, The Guardian reported that similar motives might have played a role in the kidnapping of British IT consultant Peter Moore and the murder of his bodyguards. Moore was working on a new accounting system for the Finance Ministry, that would track all the Iraqi government's income and expenditure in detail, when he was kidnapped from the Ministry's data centre by a platoon-sized force of gunmen posing as Ministry of the Interior forces. It is rarely obvious in Iraq whether the fake policemen are fake policemen, or real policemen posing as fakes, but several different kinds of insurgents had the capability to manoeuvre forces that size in central Baghdad at the time.

Among other things, this is a reminder that the recent history of Iraq cannot be written without paying serious attention to its aspect as the biggest robbery in human history, a fat city for every crook in the Middle East and far beyond.

remember this?

Here's something interesting. I'm getting people googling for details of resettlement for Iraqis who were employed by the British during the occupation, again. This is the first such incident since February. The request came in from a netblock registered to an Iraqi ISP and VSAT provider based in Baghdad. I will not provide any more details, as their WHOIS record is quite personally-identifying.

Last night, the links in this post were 404ing; today, two of them (the Arabic PDF and the Miliband statement) are now resolving again, but the one to the application form is still returning a page which (disingenuously?) claims that

We are currently experiencing exceptionally high traffic volumes on the website. Please try again later.

re-re-wind....

Shia rage in Basra, over electricity that goes north to Baghdad. Joel Wing has more, including that the trouble spread to Nasiriyah. He also provides a short history of the Iraqi grid since 1991, including the fact that the first Gulf War reduced capacity to the level of 1920. A few years ago, even suggesting that 1991 damaged anything marked you out as an extremist.

From the same source, details of the raid on the Iraqi Central Bank. Central banking is not a trade that usually demands physical courage; Ahmed Rashid documents a rare example of the contrary with the Taliban governor of the Afghan central bank who was summoned to the front and eventually killed.

On this occasion, the interesting thing is that it's a complex, integrated attack. Suicide bombers exploded at the entry checkpoints. Infantry charged the breaches and stormed the building. Snipers established themselves on the roof, and other infantry may have created stop-groups in the streets, all in order to block the response.

The attackers destroyed files and computers and killed people. But they didn't take any money. As Masaryk said and Mao quoted, don't lie, don't steal.

the fake policemen rob a bank

We've not had any fake policemen for a while. This used to be a blog trope back in 2004-2006 - a major feature of the various wars that represented facets of the War On Trrr was the presence of forces made up of armed men either posing as policemen, or sometimes, policemen posing as nonpolicemen, or perhaps even insurgents posing as policemen posing as insurgents or vice versa (fake fake policemen, if you will). We even had a case from the United States, with a detailed HOWTO guide.

Here's a notable instance of fake police, or rather, real police robbing banks in Iraq, from Joel Wing's blog.

First was the jewelry heist in Bayaa , a southwestern neighborhood in Baghdad. Before noon five SUVs drove up to a street filled with jewelry stores and set off bombs killing four, and wounding three. The gunmen then got out of their cars and opened fire on twelve stores, their owners, and guards, leading to eleven more deaths. They were armed with RPGs, AK-47s, machine guns, and silencers. To cover their escape the robbers threw grenades. On their way out they got into a gunfight with the security forces, wounding four policemen, before they got away. The Baghdad Operations Command claimed that they had killed one of the robbers, and arrested two others. The New York Times however, talked to a local witness who said that the dead man was not one of the robbers. Iraqi commanders quickly blamed the robbery on Al Qaeda in Iraq, saying that it was meant to replenish their coffers after their two leaders were killed, and many others arrested. The intelligence chief of the Interior Ministry however said that they didn’t know who the culprits were. The neighborhood was surrounded by blast walls and only had two entrances in and out that were blocked by checkpoints. Later, several senior police officers were arrested. It’s not clear whether they were directly involved in the attack, or whether they were just detained for negligence for letting it happen.

Three days later in the town of Mishkahb, 20 miles south of the city of Najaf, a branch of the state-run Rafidain Bank was robbed. A police officer served drugged tea to the guards at the bank. Then five other men entered, and made off with $5.5 million. A day later, $1.3 million of the stolen money was found, buried near a house of one of the thieves. The bank was holding such as large sum because it was going to pay government officials at the end of the month. The branch was just yards away from a police station as well.

Drugged tea? Joel also has reports on infiltration of the police in dear old Diyala.

If there is any conclusion to be drawn here, it's that this probably isn't good news.

spiritual healer

Patrick "unseasonably mild" Wintour's predictably friendly piece on Blair going before the Iraq inquiry is unintentionally disturbing:

No prime minister is indifferent to his or her legacy, and however much he feels stale controversies are being aired with little new public evidence, he knows tomorrow will be important for him, and his future public life as world statesman, Middle East envoy, spiritual healer and businessman.

Spiritual healer? As if the "world statesman" bit wasn't hilarious enough, or the "businessman", bit as opposed to "boardroom table ornament". The whole piece is sourced to "friends", British newspaper and especially Blairite code for "his PR people wanted to get this out", so presumably he actually believes this or at least tolerates his media advisers saying it.

Meanwhile, in his defence, he argues that Iraq was already a regime that had used WMD, and therefore we can't permit a regime like Iran from having them (around 10:11). The rest is here; if you care for a trip down memory lane. Alternatively, you could just vote Conservative.

left behind

I was hoping we wouldn't be seeing any more of these. 86.62.12.74, on a high latency satellite link, searching UAE Google for IraqLEStaffScheme. My original post on the official instructions for UK employees in Iraq is here. This is why I was keen to re-raise the issue before the final withdrawal, which is now looking more and more final.

Meanwhile, I still haven't heard from my new MP, marquee name Campaign Grouper Jeremy Corbyn....even Greasy Phil Hammond was better.

out

The remaining British training team in southern Iraq has been moved to Kuwait to await negotiations on their future status. A suggestion: couldn't they perhaps wait in...Britain?

tectonic plates

Over at CT, a link to two polls - here and here. The killer finding is that the same sort of percentage of the US population, and the same sort of people, deny that Barack Obama is a US citizen *and* that the American and African continents were once part of the same landmass.

Specifically, an actual majority - well, a plurality - of Republicans disagree with plate tectonics. The crossbreaks are hilarious; the only groups of which this was true were Republicans and Southerners, but the most likely groups to get it right were blacks, Latinos, and Democrats, in that order, so those were almost certainly the same individuals.

So far, another stupid Americans story. But the differences between the groups can be summarised as follows:

1. Less Republican groups had a small but real advantage in the percentage who voted yes.


2. More Republican groups had a considerable lead in the percentage who voted no.


3. More Republican groups had many fewer Don't Knows.

I think the most important statement is number three. The Democratic- and fact-leaning groups, although they had significant numbers of people who got it wrong, were much more likely to say they weren't sure than to choose No. Being unsure of the answer, they expressed doubt.

Republican-leaning groups weren't just more likely not to know, but more likely to plump for an answer anyway. Fools, you could say, rushed in.

Now, I really don't believe quite that many of them are ignorant of basic geology - I rather suspect that the question tripped a number of trigger words (Africa!) before getting to that point. Everyone thinks like that a lot of the time.

This is, of course, how operationalised post-modernism works - what matters is the theatre of action, jumping and yelling and trying to dominate the mental space, and all that determines which way you're pointing is a small set of identity-defining talking points. Did you know Senator X is weak on fufferum? Did you know that?? But why aren't you talking about his position on elefurt? That's what I want to know! The base have probably internalised this to a considerable degree.

That does raise the possibility of getting things done by tailoring your message to fire their immune receptors. The classic example is adding the word "security" to whatever proposal you have. Similarly, the Decent Left project was based on giving a whole lot of ugly right-wing ideas the right biological markers to stimulate a certain kind of leftie.