Iraq Now on Halliburton...

Damn good post on Iraq Now about everyone's favourite profiteers.

"Youngster: Wow. So no matter how boneheaded an incompetent manager I am, my department is 100% guaranteed to be profitable as long as I’m good at keeping my receipts?

Trainer: Absolutamente! But wait—there’s more: the more money you can profligately waste, the more money your department will earn. In fact, if you can spend enough, and increase our profits even more, we’ll even give you bonus, equal to 50 basis points on the amount you can spend over and above what you spent last week.

Youngster: Cool! So who pays my bonus? Does that come out of my own departmental budget? Or does it come out of the human services budget?

Trainer: It comes out of your department’s budget. Or rather, it goes into it. Because bonus expenses are a business expense, your department is reimbursed for your bonus expense, plus 2% of your bonus. At 50 basis points of 2%, you get 25 percent of the overage for your own bonus. Which itself is another business expense, of course. Which generates another reimbursement. Which generates another bonus. For you! This is the greatest business concept since multi-level marketing. Imagine the possibilities! Ain’t life grand? Imagine the possibilities!

Youngster: Is the bonus in the form of a paper check? Or an automatic deposit?

Trainer: Neither. Neither method is expensive enough. We send a courier to find you in the field, and we just hand you a sack full of cash. Arthur Anderson reports that 2% of every cash dollar in a business leaves in an employee’s pocket. So we just assume the courier’s a thief, and write off 2% in theft as an expense. The expense—along with the courier’s fee-- is reimbursed by the government, of course, plus an additional 2%-7% profit margin. "

Link

Marble Bar but no beer...

A terrible disaster has occurred in Marble Bar, WA, Australia's hottest town. This place is a tiny outback settlement that nestles, or rather hunkers down trying to find some shade in the Pilbara mountains of northwestern Aussie, the oldest part of the Earth's crust. The Bar was originally a gold-rush town (there's still a small mine not far away), but the bar of "marble" in the river turned out not even to be that. The hills are dark red with oxides and frankly look like Mars. There was - until this week - one pub. The reason I'm going on about this is because I've been there - I worked on Corunna Downs cattle station, about another 30 k's south into the bush, and I drank the most expensive beer of my life in the Ironclad Hotel's bar. The reason being that I had to bribe a mate to drive into town to get some ale - the bribe being a case of beer for his own throat, naturally. Not only that, but these buggers were charging 42 whole Aussie dollars for a slab of 24 stubbies (comparison - I later saw the same ale going for A$20 in Adelaide). So that was 84 bucks already. Mind you, it was a decent dirty boozer and the only pub within 200 miles.

Now - the pub has closed on the poor sods who have to live there! ABC News story
Apparently the temporary manager who was covering for the landlord's holiday quit and skipped town, leaving no-one legally qualified to open the pub. (Unfortunately the Bar's few amenities include the services of a policeman. Otherwise I doubt licensing laws would have held anyone back.) The owners, meanwhile, were held up on their way back by floods on the Great Northern Highway north of Meekatharra (there's a name I didn't I'd ever use again) and are still south of Newman, 300 km short.

Things like that used to happen all the time.

Another US helicopter down: and a new problem

The Americans have now had 2 helicopters shot down this year - this time it was a Blackhawk, with nine men killed. (The one before that was a highly manoeuvrable OH-58 Kiowa reconnaissance heli, a worrying development.) The Sydney Morning Herald has an interesting angle on the shooting-down here.

"General E. J. Sinclair, commander of the US Army Aviation Centre at Fort Rucker, Alabama, said last week that continuous foreign assignments were "going to cause some problems". He illustrated his concern by describing the plight of a senior US Army aviator who watched from afar while his newborn daughter grew into her toddler years. The army major has seen his daughter for 12 days in the past two years.

"I can't bring him back in my right mind and tell him after a month or two he has to go to Korea for a year-long assignment without his family. But that's what's happening," General Sinclair said.

Exacerbating the problem is a sharp increase in deployment times. The army announced last northern summer that US troops in Iraq would be there for one year, up from the typical six-month deployment. Retention concerns are especially acute in the service's aviation branch because of the extra investment in time and money required to train pilots to fly helicopters such as the Apache, Black Hawk and Chinook."

Homonymophobia

It's not been a good year for homonyms, as mentioned in the previous post. The great aviation security scare of 2004 has so far seen a succession of serious homo-bashing episodes - greatly helped by the Transportation Security Administration only including surnames on their warnings, as revealed by Nicolas Sarkozy. Now there's a man I never thought I'd agree with. (The true stupidity of this only stands out more when you think how often the same ones come up in Islamic names - there are likely more Mohammed Iqbals about than John Smiths) More broadly, the flap seems to have brought home to a lot of right-wing people what I've been fuming about for years - the degree to which the Americans cheerfully disregard British sovereignty whilst the Right moan about Europe. After all, we don't and never will have a single vote on Capitol Hill. Here we have a situation where the US presumes to dictate our policy (and a lot of other countries') - just like that! Not to mention the various international conventions about state jurisdiction aboard aircraft.

The full stupidity is impressive. On the one hand we have demands for a huge extension in the collection of data on people travelling to the US, without any apparent guarantees that this information will be respected or that it will be processed with greater competence than the passenger records seem to be now. On the other hand, we have a demand for armed guards on all passenger aircraft. The sky-marshal proposal has turned out rather strangely, though. Whilst the unsolved problems of it pile up, the Department for Transport seems to leave many of them untouched. After all, we are going to open a huge can of worms in terms of international law. but we hear nothing about who will have ultimate responsibility for their actions. There are 60 flights a day between the UK and the US, and many more overflights going elsewhere - but the total number being recruited could only watch about 13% of them, given leave, sickness, training and the like. No-one seems to know who is paying - the Metropolitan Police Authority is rightly having kittens at the possible budget consequences, as most of the police officers qualified for the job come from their force. (And who will replace them?) What will be the legal powers of a sky marshal? Will they be sworn-in as Queen's constables? How will we know who is a sky marshal and who is a terrorist? Imagine the scene when a man stands up from his seat and produces a gun. Apparently they will carry identification cards - but who knows what one looks like? And wouldn't that permit a decoy terrorist to identify the guard? What rules will apply at Heathrow, when there might be armed guards from dozens of countries passing through in a country where handguns are illegal? It is forbidden except for certain persons to bring a weapon onto an aircraft in Britain under the Air Navigation Orders. Will they be changed? Will the guard be under the captain's command?

Here's the weird, though - no-one seems to answer any of these questions, and their solution is apparently left to local collective bargaining between BALPA and the individual airlines. Hardly a sensible approach - since when have the management of Virgin Atlantic or the pilots' union had the right to determine national policy? But I suspect a deeper game. It must be obvious to the DOT that this is a bad policy imposed by the US. Perhaps some feline bureaucrat has concluded that the best answer is to let the proposal stagger on and collapse, hoping to kill it with kindness?

And finally - when, if ever, will Parliament ever be consulted about this?

Reading Michael Howard

Well, after a prolonged Christmas break blogging recommences today. Michael Howard, the exciting new Conservative leader or tiresome hasbeen depending on view, has greeted the New Year by spamming the entire party membership (and some poor unfortunate homonyms) with a "declaration of personal principles" patterned quite obviously on those on the Rockefeller Centre. link to the full text This curious document has been described variously as being obvious, motherhood+apple pie stuff, an impressive piece of spin and blatantly dishonest. But I believe - laugh! - that it is sincere. The question is not whether Howard means what he says but what the things he says mean. It is a question of reading Michael Howard.

Mr Howard kicks off with the ringing statement that he believes that "it is natural for men and women to want health, wealth and happiness for themselves and their families". Indeed, and who would quarrel with the idea that politicians should "serve the people by removing the obstacles in the way of these ambitions"? That Maoist injunction to "Serve the People!" is a little odd, but we may put that down to coincidence. What is happening in these first few lines is an exercise in speaking so as not to talk. Rather like John Kenneth Galbraith's idea of the importance of meetings at which no business is done, non-meaning remarks play a useful role. None of these sentences mean anything in the strict sense, but they do fulfil the role of lending an impressive, UN Charter sound to Mr Howard's manifesto. Further, they sound as if Mr Howard is pursuing his supposed new image as being socially conscious and not frightening at all without committing him to anything that might result from dangerous content.

The next three principles, though, take the plunge. All of these contain actual meaning, although it may not be obvious. I believe people are happiest when they are masters of their own lives, when they are not nannied or over-governed. Part of this is just another truism, but the second clause is more interesting. Nannied refers to the Tory cliche of the nanny state. This may be interpreted to mean anything that interferes with the right of the powerful to endanger the less powerful (workplace safety, speed limit enforcement, enforcement of taxation on the rich). Why the state is a nanny is beyond me - my own image of an oppressive state would be more like a large and menacing riot policeman - but perhaps it is because Conservatives traditionally had servants. I don't know. Over-governed is a recent coinage, normally referring in Britain to regional assemblies or Europe. This statement means I am a Tory and I do not like regional government or Europe. The next one is curious in the extreme: the state should be small - a routine statement of conservative faith, but what about the first clause? The people should be big.

I am foxed. Is this sincere belief in big people a coded offer of reconciliation with Kenneth Clarke? Or is it possibly just a weak effort at originality? Still, it will be amusing to watch the state shrinking towards the ever-expanding citizens. No wonder he admires Americans. The next principle deals with the same theme as no.3. This is the one about "armies of interferers", red tape and a truly impressive list of synonyms for administrators you don't like (the word for ones you do is "public servants"). This really covers the same ground as before - so why two of them? Very likely because the Tories' financial plans are founded on the great myth that there is an easily defined secret goldmine of waste in the public finances that can simply be magicked away. As there is no way to measure it, the Bureaucash can be assumed to be any sum you need to fill in the spreadsheet. This is a declaration of faith that it exists - we may translate this as Oliver Letwin has my confidence.

There now follows a mass of filler. Howard binds himself to the controversial propositions that "there is no freedom without responsibility", "injustice makes us angry" (really? I remember when he practically relished it!) and that "every parent wants their child to have a better education than they had". This last means simply that the Tories are trying to be cuddly whilst appealing to ambitious middle class parents. Next up? "Every child wants security for their parents in their old age". Well, I'm sure they wouldn't say no. I doubt if they have given the matter much thought. This means: Many Tory voters are old.

Then we get back to the controversial. There are three negative principles, which have attracted a great deal of comment. The first is the much-criticised one about one person's poverty not being caused by another's wealth. You can argue this out, but in the end it is a mere statement that I am a Tory and I will cut income tax.
More interesting are those dealing with education and health. Mr Howard apparently does not believe that one person's knowledge and education causes another's ignorance. Neither do I. What can he possibly mean? I suspect that this is a coded statement in favour of selective and private education -
it's good to be private (knowledge and education) because nobody else becomes more stupid because of it. After all, the conservative case in this rests on an opposition to supposed "levelling down".

Mr Howard also believes that one person's sickness is not made worse by another's health. Indeed. In a purely medical sense, maybe so. In a political sense, this means that Buying private healthcare is a good thing even if nobody else can afford it. Even if, of course, it uses NHS resources... Strangely, Mr Howard abandons here one of Karl Popper's principles of the Open Society. Popper remarked that as pain cannot be outweighed by pleasure and certainly not one man's pain by another's pleasure, society should minimise the avoidable suffering of all. Howard seems to say nearly the opposite - making yourself well at the possible cost of others at least does not increase their pain. In some degree, then, your own recovery outweighs others' pain. Lovely.

The only other principle that is not pure filler ("The British people are happiest when they are free." No shit, Sherlock!) is the penultimate one. "I believe that Britain should defend her freedom at any time, against all comers however mighty." So do I. What threatens our freedom, then? Terrorism? That's not enough, though - why didn't he say it specifically? What Conservatives mean when they talk about defending freedom is the European Union. This means I am against Europe and unquestioningly obedient to the United States. No mention of the US security authorities' current contempt for British sovereignty here. All in all, Howard's manifesto promises Thatcherism with a cherry on top.

Respect for the law

Britain's longest strike ended this week. The workers at a factory in Caernarvon, Friction Dynamics UK, that makes brakes, clutches and other vehicle parts, went on a one-week strike in April, 2001 over changes to their shifts introduced at a time when their wages had been static for 4 years and were going to be cut by 15%. Although the workers agreed to call in ACAS mediation, the management failed to turn up. After 8 weeks the management sacked all 86 strikers - this was legal under the Employment Act once a strike reaches 8 weeks. They were replaced by people recruited from Jobcentres (apparently the Employment Service saw nothing wrong in acting as a strikebreaker agency), and went to an industrial tribunal claiming unfair dismissal. For a start, it took a year for the case to come up, but that wasn't all. In the meantime one of the scabs was seriously hurt working with a machine missing a guard - he lost all the fingers on one hand, and was not compensated because Dynamics had somehow omitted to tell their public-liability insurers that 86 out of 103 workers had been sacked and replaced.

And that was it. The TGWU dug in for a long struggle and they kept picketing, lobbying, demoing and the rest of the armoury of protest. Finally, in August this year, the courts ruled that they had all been unfairly dismissed. But no compensation ever appeared - the American owner, Craig Smith (here's a link to some interesting information on this character) put the firm into administration, then got a new firm called Dynamex Friction which he owned to buy its assets, appointing the former manager of the plant as chief executive.

Why is it that conservatives are obsessed with "respect for the law" when the people they idolise most have all the respect for the law of goats? Smith may or may not have broken the law with his latest trick - the lawyers will decide that - but he has demonstrated utter contempt for it. The picket, by the way, is coming to an end now because the struggle will go on in the courts.

Blogroll update

We welcome two blogs to the blogroll - Guild of Ghostwriters, a British group blog, and Waldheim, a lefty blog from Yale.

First non-government supersonic flight!

Rutan does it again

The great Burt Rutan has come up with another of his astonishing aircraft. SpaceShipOne (great InterCapping!) flew above the speed of sound - the first time anyone has done without the aid of the state, better yet on the 17th of December, 100 years after the Wrights blah blah blah. This is his effort for the X-Prize, a prize of $10 million for the first spacecraft built without governmental aid, successfully flown into space, with space for 3 passengers, and repeated within 2 weeks with the same craft.

Details

Now that's the first good news in a while.

The Fate of Rumsfeld...

One day, in the future, they will find his body in the desert, blackened by the sun, his lips cracked, eyes swollen, collapsed at the foot of a great sand dune with a shovel still gripped in his blistered hands, crushed by the sand drifting back into the hole, like Ozymandias' architect.....still looking for weapons of mass destruction.

Brief thought about Saddam, trials etc

The possibility of an acquittal is a valid criterion of a fair trial.

Clark's Role in Kosovo Exemplifies His Traits (washingtonpost.com)

Link Excellent Washington Post story on Wesley Clark and the Kosovo war. Not the best advert for his presidential campaign, even though it doesn't mention "I'm not going to start World War Three for you, SIR!"

17th December - 100 years of aviation

100 years to this day - Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first ever controlled and sustained manned flight. Another good reason why, as soon as this post publishes, I'm off for a beeer.

Preparing for smallpox and the Asylum Cry

The Guardian reports today that plans for dealing with an outbreak of smallpox in Britain have been published. The arrangements include the establishment of emergency clinics, to be co-located with district general hospitals, within 24 hours of a smallpox case being confirmed anywhere in the world. These sites would require 140 staff each, who the regional health authorities are now to select. These persons would be the first group of people to be vaccinated immediately on a threat being identified. The clinics' task would be to isolate and observe all suspected cases, vaccinate contacts and any other groups, and treat any unfortunates who develop the disease. The first set of guidelines issued some time ago for this case suggested that the clinics would be set up away from any centre of population, but it would appear that practicality has won through.

All well and good, then - no wonder this article from the Canadian National Post suggests that Britain might be one of the few countries that could survive a flu pandemic. But what is wrong with us when - even in this desperate crisis - it is necessary to say that illegal immigrants who came forward to report suspected disease would be given immunity from prosecution (and, I hope, from smallpox as well)? Why has this psychosis seeped into absolutely everything? I'm sure that one day it will be remembered as one of the periodic panics that sweep through societies, like the Chinese Labour Cry or radon gas or Flesh Eating Bug. Rather like the one issue every nation has that seems absolutely vital to them but bewilderingly trivial to everyone else, people in the future will stand uncomprehending before the screaming headlines and hypocritical rantings yellowing in the archives. What was it all about - after all, it made up only 0.4% of public spending? Where did all the hate come from?

And in this weird country, 20 feet from me right now, two carpenters speaking what sounds like Russian are repairing a toilet cubicle..
Perhaps they wouldn't be so bemused if they were to read David Blunkett's insane remarks to the BBC today. "I need to ensure that people feel safe, that they are not egged on by those who would use insecurity and instability and difference as a method of whipping up racism and xenophobia", he said in an effort to defend his exciting new Asylum and Immigration Bill, which would permit him to withhold state benefits from rejected asylum seekers and take their children away if they refused to make a voluntary departure. So - we're going to be xenophobic in order to keep the xenophobes from getting in and being - well - xenophobic?

FRLs - Further Ramblings on the Law and Saddam?

Another issue which militates in favour of a legal conclusion is that it ought to be a much clearer case than that against Milosevic. Much of the geologically slow wrangling at The Hague has been about the application of the principle of command responsibility for war crimes. Given that Saddam Hussein held the posts of Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, Leader of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party of Iraq, President of the Republic of Iraq, and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces - that shouldn't be so hard to achieve...and it might go some way to achieving what Iraq Now, a US National Guard officer blogging from Iraq thinks is necessary:

"I wrote before, in War of Ideologies, it's not enough just to capture Saddam Hussein. It's not enough to militarily defeat the Saddamites and radical Muslim sects. This war will not be over until those movements are discredited on their home turf"
link

Foday Sankoh and the Iraqi Question

An interesting precedent to what I suppose will now be the Hussein Case seems to have occurred in the British intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000. It might well throw some light on the differing views of legality and its importance between the UK and US to consider what happened immediately after the capture of the RUF leader Foday Sankoh. Sankoh - whose movement famously engaged in mass amputations of prisoners' limbs as a form of revolutionary terror - was taken prisoner at a house in Freetown very soon after the British force landed. The initial problem was to prevent his followers from springing him, not to mention preventing a lynching. The obvious solution was to load him into a helicopter and ferry him without further ado to Illustrious, the task force flagship. But there was a serious difficulty in using her as a jail, which was that according to the law of the sea, she was under exclusive UK jurisdiction. That meant that he could legally claim refugee status immediately his feet touched the deck. In the end he was held in the Freetown prison awaiting trial by a UN-supervised court set up after the RUF's defeat later that year (he died in prison).

The Americans, though, occasionally give the impression that third-country prisoners are being held aboard ship. Whilst those ships are on the high seas or in US territorial waters, they are technically part of the US courts' jurisdiction for any event aboard. In foreign waters, the principle is the same - but with the condition that the port state has jurisdiction on any matter affecting its peace or security. Either way, they are either not holding prisoners at sea or they simply find the law inconvienient.

A perfect role for the ICC!

They got him in the end, of course - dragged out of a hole in the ground when the loyalty finally ran out. The now-whats gape, though. On the same weekend no less than 30 Iraqi policemen were killed. There was much talk about his trial. About crucial intelligence, weapons, terrorists. Does anyone really believe, though, that everything will change overnight? According to the public statements of the US commanders in Iraq, the vast majority of attacks come from the people they call the FRLs, former-regime loyalists, and not from the foreign terrorist element their political masters seem obsessed by. You could ask, for example, Major-General Chuck Swannick of the 82nd Airborne Division, who I quoted on this blog some time ago as saying exactly that at the same time that Paul Bremer was assuring the world that "90% of the threat comes from foreigners", although he confessed to having no information to support that. Why will they give up because their leader is jailed? Will this not just infuriate them more, or lift the spectre of a Ba'athist restoration from potential sympathisers?

Even if the foreign infiltrators did exist in the numbers we are asked to believe they do, surely the capture of Saddam Hussein would be a victory for their side? After all, the secular national socialism he espoused was equally offensive to the jihadis as Western liberal capitalism. Even in his later phase of swinging towards Islam post-1991, they still could not work together. Anyway, this all assumes a solution to the question of what to do next. Clearly, there must be some reckoning for the victims of his wars and persecutions. It ought to be obvious that we must make an example of civilised conduct in doing so. And the biggest problem in doing so is simply practical - where can a trial be conducted? How should it be conducted? Under which laws should it be conducted? It would be absurd to place him on trial in Iraq now - under the criminal code written by his government, it might be that he had committed no crime! Not even to think of the security problem. It would be very unlikely that a trial under the law of either Iran or Kuwait could be considered fair - and what about offences committed in Iraq against Iraqis?

The only code of law that unequivocally applies to all the possible charges against Saddam is international law. There are the crimes against humanity specified in the Geneva Conventions - genocide, murder of prisoners and the use of illegal arms against Iran. But Iraq is not a party to all the Conventions - can they apply retroactively? There are also the Genocide Convention and the Convention on the Prevention of Torture, and the UN Declarations on Civil and Political Rights could inform any judgement. On the question of retroactivity, it should be remembered that the provisions of the Geneva Conventions on crimes against humanity and war crimes are considered to be obligations "erga omnes" - they are crimes against all states based on the customary law of civilised nations. So that would be covered. There is, of course, one tribunal operating specifically for such purposes.

It's the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The one the Americans passed a law to attack if it prosecuted US soldiers. A pity, then, that its statute is limited to crimes committed after July, 2002 - otherwise, what could be better? One good piece of news is that the Iraqi "governing council"'s own tribunal has used much of the ICC statute in its preparations.

Hoon - and those apologies he was after

I notice that, back on the 14th of May, our much despised Secretary of State for Defence Geoff Hoon said in parliament that

"All the requisite numbers of boots and clothing and equipment were there..the truth is that when they went into operations all of our forces were given the right boots. There was sufficient clothing and protective equipment in theatre to deal with a force of this size. I am waiting for apologies from either individual journalists or their editors.."

Well, I'm waiting for apologies from this apology for a minister for his outstanding incompetence, dishonesty, and double dealing. Oh yes, throw in his charming crack about Iraqi mothers whose children had been wounded thanking the coalition. This was of course part of the immediate pre-Kelly period when Alastair Campbell was trying to get revenge on the media for being rude, and I suppose his remarks to the Defence Select Committee should be seen in this light, as an exercise in calculated bullying rather than a contribution to parliamentary debate. That doesn't change the rules though - lying to parliament is a resigning matter, and the National Audit Office report shows that he did just that. Literally. I thought I would have to wade through reams of text - but on the bottom of page 14, I found the evidence - in the huge glossy photo of a Royal Marine standing in front of a huge portrait of Saddam - WEARING A GREEN CAMO JACKET! (One-quarter of the 7th Armoured Brigade had woodland camouflage kit and black boots throughout the war.) From the horse's mouth (page 25 figure 6):

"The procurement was regarded as of limited success as few troops received their full complement and mismatches in sizing continued into the postconflict phase".

Better yet, the supply of body armour is described as follows:

"Despite these efforts, insufficient numbers were distributed in theatre largely as a result of difficulties with asset tracking and distribution"

Which means there wasn't any, of course. Other highlights of the document include the fact that only 8% of the highest priority stores requests were supplied on time, the missing nuclear/biological/chemical filters for the tanks, and the curiosu way the accommodation for headquarters was completed by the end of May but for everyone else much later. When will this man finally resign? In passing, wasn't it a remarkable coincidence that this crushing report was released on the same day as Hoon's White Paper?

Iraqi "Anti-Terror" demonstrations not all the reports seem?

Various media sources have been reporting supposedly "anti-terrorist" demonstrations in Iraq, including to its shame the BBC (what's going on there at the moment?). It seems, though, that portraying the demos as pro-CPA just because they are anti-Ba'ath might be unwise at best.

"One group that
mobilized its cadres for this demonstration was the Iraqi Communist
Party. Its supporters waved red flags emblazoned with the hammer and
sickle, according to ash-Sharq al-Awsat. It seems obvious that the
CPI was more likely demonstrating for human rights and against the
Baathists than in favor of the US per se."

Juan Cole, Michigan University

You could say that, couldn't you? Communists? Well, they're not going to be very pro-US are they? A demonstration by communists is perhaps the easiest to recognise there is - the iconography is the same around the world. (big red flags, stars, hammers/sickles, Marx, Lenin, Che, the AK47, and the local hero) But you'll find no mention of them in most reports. No - this was officially a demo in favour of George Bush!

That new Iraqi intelligence service - not a good start

So, apparently the boss of the Iraqi secret service we're creating (to replace the 300 out of 700 soldiers who have deserted from the Iraqi army we're creating? It's true that intelligence can make up for a shortage of manpower, but this is ridiculous!), one Iyad Allawi, is a former Ba'athist spook - what a surprise! - who used to pursue Saddam's enemies in Europe. (According to the Angry Arab News Service. Mind you, they do seem a little forward: "Regis Debray, the former leftist who surrendered Che to his death (allegedly)"...that's one hell of an allegedly.) Don't things just keep getting better? As Perry at Bush Wars puts it, "Every time you think they've committed the all-time biggest blunder imaginable, this crew tops itself."

Damn good blogs

We welcome three outstanding blogs - Living with Caucasians, a blog covering goings-on in Georgia, Slugger O'Toole and the Broom of Anger - two excellent Northern Irish newsbloggers. If you didn't read this - you wouldn't know that the "Police Fund IRA spies" story has been debunked. And you do now.