It is only necessary for a feeling to arise that it is impious and disgraceful to serve the British, for the whole of our fabric to tumble like a house of cards without a shot being fired or a sword unsheathed.

Lieutenant General Sir George Fletcher MacMunn, British general and scholar (Wikipedia)

I want to make it clear, we will be in for the long haul when it comes to RAMSI. The ordinary people in the Solomon Islands want Australia there. They appreciate the help and they’ll be there irrespective of who is in power in that country.

John Howard in response to requests from the Solomon Island prime minister to withdraw Australian troops

Recently, [UN peacekeepers] initiated what they call “night flashes,” in which three truckloads of peacekeepers drive into the bush and keep their headlights on all night as a signal to both civilians and armed groups that the peacekeepers are there. Sometimes, when morning comes, 3,000 villagers are curled up on the ground around them.

Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War

Balad Airbase, Iraq (Google Maps)

[If the Americans] want to make war for twenty years then we shall make war for twenty years. If they want to make peace, we shall make peace and invite them to afternoon tea.

America has spent a fair bit on the Iraq war. The purpose of the war seems to be to kill so many people who aren't friends with America, that everyone who's still alive will decide that want to be America's friend. But this war is a pretty expensive (and violent) way of making friends. So far they've spent US$16,364 per potential Iraqi friend. The war has cost $451 billion¹ and there are 27,499,638 people in Iraq². That's already pretty expensive, even before you consider that there are still some stubborn holdouts in Iraq who don't want to be friends with them. So each actual new Iraqi friend America has made would have cost quite a bit more than $16,364.

I wonder if making friends with Iraqis would have been cheaper (and possibly quicker) if instead of using all that money to kill their neighbours, they'd used it to buy everyone a never-ending supply of cheese. Or American SUVs. Or holidays in Paris.

1. http://www.nationalpriorities.org/Cost-of-War/Cost-of-War-3.html
2. http://www.google.com/search?q=population+of+iraq

It seems the evidence that Iran is training terrorists and pedophiles is now undeniable. For the good of the world, the Iranian people and children everywhere, they must be bombed. Or we could just bomb Iran.

So. To keep score. The United States is supporting: the Shia government, which funnels money and arms to Shia militias, death squads, and insurgent/terrorist groups; the Sunni opposition, which funnels money and arms to the Sunni insurgency; the Sunni insurgency directly, so that they will combat the Shia militias as well as al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group of Sunni terrorists supposedly supported by Shia Iran; the Saudis, who fund Sunni insurgents as well--almost surely--as Sunni terrorist groups; the Iraqi Kurds, who have their sights set on an independent nation that includes a de-Arabized Kirkuk; and the Turks, who have their sights set on never, ever seeing an independent Kurdish entity anywhere, anyhow, anyway, ever, amen.

Who is IOZ?

The Bush administration is thorough, at least, if not much else.

I'm reading about holocaust denial after a fellow at Rough Edges gave me one of their pamphlets. Holocaust deniers, who are mostly just neo-Nazis, basically seem to be saying that "we didn't kill six million Jews but we would if we could." They feign horror at the suggestion that Hitler would ever harm a hair on a Jewish head, but then talk about how awful Jewish people are and if they were slightly harmed they totally had it coming.

But it's interesting to read about all the myths (accepted as myths by both sides) that I remember as being historical facts when I went to Germany as a kid. I thought most of the killings happened in Germany for instance. But it seems that nearly all of them happened in Poland, because German people got upset at Hitler when he tried to mass kill people in Germany. And Nazis didn't make soap out of concentration camp victims either.

I know it's difficult to care about fact-checking when you're dealing with folk like the Nazis, but I suspect if the Allies had been a bit more careful about the rumours that were spread, there probably wouldn't be such a successful Holocaust denial industry today.

Tears of the Sun was an "ethical" action movie about how sometimes killing a lot of people is the only principled choice you can make. Fortunately, the world only has good people and bad people so it's mostly pretty easy to work out which ones need killing and which ones need saving. It was also about being an American, and looks at the constructive steps America might take in reducing violence in Africa.

I have to say, I'm a little surprised at Monica Belucci who I nearly always love. Not only was her character incredibly annoying, but if it's possible for a French actor to betray their French roots then she definitely did. Apart from the similarity to the hundreds of years of French occupation of Africa, this film was as American and as not French as they come.

But it was entertaining violence. There were a lot of explosions and a lot of shooting, and I like that stuff. Quite a few stabbings as well. The baddies really were very bad, and certainly deserved any gratuitous knife guttings they may have received.

I'm reading a book called State Terrorism and the United States. The US Government really is a despicable creature. The ugliness of US realpolitik makes me more ambivalent about terrorists who use the same logic. When it comes to political realism, does the oppressor define the nature of the politics? The US is perfectly happy to kill civilians if it furthers its own goals. The US will use whatever power it has, as effectively as it can, irrespective of ethics. However, in general, setting out to kill civilians doesn't achieve what it wants. For oppressed groups, perhaps this is not the case, and targeting civilians does further its goals. There have been enough instances of the US aiding and participating in foreign state terrorism and genocide, that I feel comfortable assuming the US would use these methods more directly if it thought it would be effective.

I think I shouldn't be ambivalent about terrorism. It is probably better just to say amoral politics and war are crap, whoever does them.

If might is right, then love has no place in the world. It may be so, it may be so. But I don't have the strength to live in a world like that, Rodrigo.

Gabriel in 'The Mission'

The Mission is a brilliant film. If anything is going to make me a dinkum pacifist then it's probably this. I'm 100% convinced by Gabriel's first sentence, but I'm fairly convinced. Jesus seemed pretty sure they we are supposed to love our enemies. All our enemies. Not just the ones who aren't a threat to us.

I get annoyed at the way the left always puts inverted commas around the word "peacekeeper" when they're talking about UN peacekeepers. Sure, going off to keep the peace with a Steyr has as element of contradiction, but it's not so different to lots of other things we do. In theory, police officers carry guns to enable them to keep society safe. A lot of violent offenders are arrested violently. People generally accept the idea that it's possible to use violence to prevent violence. Or more constructively, that the threat of violence can prevent violence. I suspect that UN peacekeepers actually haven't killed that many people in the past few decades. But I reckon they've still discouraged a lot of other people from doing so.

Perhaps you don't believe that it's possible for someone with a gun to foster peace. It is possible that peacekeepers are only making things worse. But I don't think the evidence is so strong (if there is any at all) that the idea of an armed peacekeeper deserves the sneers and ridicule that it often gets.

There is a whole lot of crowing going on in the right-wing media about how the left-wing media seems to think that David Hicks is more innocent than Hicks himself does. A lot of people certainly complained about the validity of his guilty plea, but you can complain about that without believing he is innocent. If you think that torture is bad and say so but then someone confesses to something serious under torture, nothing has occurred to validate torture. Nor to invalidate an opposition to torture. Torture is a kind of self-validating technique, because it can extract everything it desires. You can torture someone into signing a document claiming it was only right and reasonable that they be tortured.

Mock trials are rather similar because they can dictate terms to the extent that outcomes are predetermined. America's legal system was carefully crafted to deny the powerful the outcomes they might desire. If you're going to bias a legal system you're probably better to err on the side of powerless rather than the powerful. In one sense, that is very dissatisfying - which I think is why the neocons have changed it for Guantanamo Bay - but the old way seems to have proven pretty effective and stable.

I've still never heard anyone claim Hicks is completely innocent or is a nice person. People were just confused about how the US expected to get an unbiased outcome given the system that had been constructed. They're not even content to weight the system against the defendent. They're so scared of a single bad guy being set free, that any path by which an accused might be found innocent has been removed. That, to me, is what is most silly about the whole thing. In principle, I doubt many people are opposed to the idea of David Hicks going to prison for a while. But I think you do probably have to work a bit at persuading people it's the right thing to do.

In 2006, Halliburton made profits of $2.3bn on revenues of $22.6bn. Last month it announced a 40% decline in fourth-quarter profit.

Halliburton plans move to Dubai

Poor old Halliburton. The good times can't last forever - all wars eventually come to an end.

In 1791 there was a successful slave rebellion in Haiti (then called St Domingue). Before the rebellion the colony had produced 30% of the world's sugar and was the most profitable of all European colonies.

Despite having just experienced its own revolution in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity, France sent an army to put down the revolt - one ship even prepared to sail under the banner 'live free or die' before it was realised that this might be seen as encouraging to the rebels.

New Internationalist (NI 398, which is actually quite good)

Happily the French soldiers got their arses whooped by mosquitoes and black fellas.

I quite like Barack Obama. Even when he talks about war.

I finished reading a proper book on Pol Pot yesterday. It was a very interesting and unpleasant read. I was so eager to believe that Pol Pot was a bad person demonised by the West until everyone thought he was completely evil. We like to do that with communist leaders, while glossing over all the things right-wing leaders do wrong. But this time, I don't think that it is true. It's hard to explain why Pol Pot is so much worse than the regimes that came before and after him. They all abused their power and used obscene violence. But the Khmer Rouges promised such a great improvement in Cambodian's lives and ended up making them so much worse.

Pol Pot was a narcisstic fool. Yet thousands of people supported him without question. By the end of his regime he had tortured and executed nearly every friend he had ever had. People he had known and trusted since he was in his early 20s he suddenly concluded were insufficiently communist and had them killed.

I don't really think the Khmer Rouges knew what they believed, except that anyone who disagreed with whatever it was had to be killed. They didn't even annouce they were a communist organisation until a couple of years after they were in power. None of them seemed to have even seriously read and understood Marx. Pol Pot admitted that he had tried but didn't really understand any of it. They seemed to have ended up being mostly inspired by Mao, but I think that even Mao was pretty disgusted by them.

Perhaps it feels like that in 30 years of existence their organisation didn't really make a single good decision. They seemed to have survived purely on Pol Pot's charisma. They had no greater goal in mind. The organisation existed purely to preserve its own existence. Pol Pot "converted" to liberal capitalism in the 1990s claiming that he was a pragmatist and would pursue the most productive route to national reconstruction. But he was never a pragmatist. No one could ever tell him anything. People who told him the truth were killed. People who suggested they pursue anything other that the most severe communism were killed, no matter how logical their compromises might have been. Pol Pot formally abolished families during his reign (seriously), but 15 years later he retired (temporarily) so that he could raise his own families. He appointed one of his most trusted commanders, Son Sen, to be in charge of the Khmers Rouges. A while later he took control again and had Son Sen and his extended family shot.

More recently Pol Pot seems to have realised that his regime messed things up. He blamed it on his followers claiming they had failed him.

I think Pol Pot is so uniquely repulsive because he had so much goodwill. He had enormous support from the Chinese and the Vietnamese which he used purely to make war (and eventually kill a lot of Vietnamese). When he took power the Cambodian people loved him. But in those three years he did more harm to the Cambodian people and more harm to the socialist ideology than I would have thought possible. His regime caused all the effects of an enormous genocide while believing it was helping the same people it killed.

An Iraqi child offers a toy to some British soldiers in Basra (Sydney Morning Herald)

I just finished reading All Quiet on the Western Front this morning. It was a great book. It has forced me to think all over again about pacificism, which I've never been persuaded by. For anyone who's marginally pacifist, it's definitely worth reading.

The papers are all talking about whether or not Paul Kagame assassinated the Rwandan president just before the genocide in 1994. It's generally believed that the assassination triggered the genocide, which strikes me as a little strange. The genocide literally started hours after the assassination. The president of Rwanda, who should have taken power after the prime minister was killed, was assassinated by government soldiers. The ten Belgian soldiers who were protecting the president were tortured and killed. The same UN Belgian peacekeeping force was the one attempting to protect Tutsis from Hutus during the first few weeks of the genocide (with only very limited success).

People have accepted that the genocide involved many months of preparation, and the UN saw evidence of these preparations three months in advance. In this context is it reasonable to say that the assassination "triggered" the genocide of 800,000 people? It seems to me that the genocide was going to happen regardless unless someone from outside had tried to stop it.

I don't know what Paul Kagame is like, although he has killed a lot of Hutus since he came to power. I'm not sure what circumstances that was done in, but it's hard to imagine an orderly blood-free transition after a genocide on that sort of scale. It's possible that there are all sorts of conspiracies involved and Paul Kagame is a cynical despot. But overseeing the relative calm of the last 10 years, after events like those has to count for a lot.

The French are the ones who have reignited the issue, and they obviously don't like him. They helped block the UN from becoming more involved before and during the genocide. A Belgian UN officer claimed that the French were supplying the Rwandan government with ammunition days before the genocide started, although the French deny it. I don't think the Tutsis have a particularly friendly history either, but it's difficult to argue they've done a bad job recently.

Maybe Paul Kagame orchestrated the entire genocide just so he could come to power as the glorious leader who ended the bloodshed. But you build a feasible character assassination of anyone who gains power because they deal effectively with the circumstances around them. People have argued that Xanana Gusmão is only interested in helping himself at the expense of East Timor. Presumably the 20 years of resistance and fighting, and the virtual withdrawal from politics after the election were masterfully orchestrated by him to boost his own popularity and power. Sure, it's possible. But given how unbelievably unlikely it is, I think the burden of proof is on the folk who believe it.

Everyone is upset about the The Human Cost of War, research published in the Lancent on the number of deaths in post-invasion Iraq. People figure the number is way too high and assume there must be a problem with the statistics. In the sample they covered, 289 people died violently, which was 2.26% of their sample. They extrapolated that number to get their figure of something around 601,027 for the whole of Iraq. The 95% confidence interval was between 426,368 and 793,663. Some people initially complained that the range was so high that the whole study was meaningless. I think enough statisticians have written about why that isn't the case. But a few people still think the representativeness of the sample must be bad. Iraq Body Count is one group who have said this although I think they're unconvincing and verging on misleading.

People have said that for the researchers to get a number so high, they must have sampled from an area of the country where violence was higher than normal. While it is possible that the sample isn't representative, this criticism is kind of missing the point of the confidence interval. The confidence interval tells you about the likelihood of getting a sample so unusual that the true number is outside that interval. If you knew the sample was representative, you could just measure the deaths in that sample, and work out the total number by multiplying. You wouldn't have a range of values at all. Unless there is systematic bias in the sample, you can have a lot of confidence in the confidence interval.

I've read the paper, and I don't really have doubts about the randomness of the sample. I don't think there was systematic bias in the sample selection, and probably not in the surveying process either. Their methods were very rigorous, and self-selection bias does not appear to be an issue. Virtually everyone they approached was willing to participate. The vast majority (92%) of reported deaths were backed up by death certificates so people aren't just making deaths up. The researchers chose to omit one of the areas they surveyed from the final results because the death rate there was so high. So obviously haven't got a totally crazy sample. There are places where the death rate is much higher.

When you start to think about it, the number doesn't seem so extreme. The paper pointed at that if three violent deaths per day occurred in each of Iraq's major urban centres outside Baghdad that would equal about 270,000 deaths plus however many died in Baghdad.

The majority of deaths counted by Iraq Body Count occurred in Baghdad. 43 of the 50 most violent events occurred in Baghdad. Those 43 Baghdad reports account for 50% of the total for the whole war for the whole of Iraq. Virtually all (maybe 95%) of the very violent events recently reported occurred in Baghdad. Baghdad represents a fifth of the Iraqi population, but far more than half the total number of deaths reported by Iraq Body Count. Maybe people are only dying in Baghdad, but that definitely isn't what the Lancent survey found. Also Iraq Body Count doesn't count military casualties, while the Lancet study counted all deaths, and that could cause huge distortion.

The same research team did a similar survey in 2004. The results of the first survey were confirmed by the second survey, despite a completely different sample. The results of the first survey were also confirmed by a separate UN survey done at the same time. Both surveys found a similar number of war-related deaths.

I think the article is very credible. The problem with the number of of 601,027 isn't that it's unreasonable. The problem is that it's too awful to accept without flinching and looking for reasons why it is wrong. If you don't believe that people can die this fast, read about Sudan.

Update: One issue I haven't heard anyone else talk about is the problem of population migration. If the survey uses population densities from 10 years earlier then the house selection is not biased against violent areas. However, it should be biased against violent areas because there is bound to be some migration out of violent areas and into peaceful areas. So you are more likely to pick a house in a violent area, than you should be based on current population distributions. The sample will be systematically biased towards violent areas, but it's probably hard to know how significant the bias is without knowing the extent of the displacement.

We appreciate the company, we really do.

Christopher Hill grateful that Australian soldiers are fighting in Iraq.

Tom and I were chatting about Job last night. So I decided I wanted to read it. I borrowed Tom's bible and opened it up. I landed on Joshua and decided to read that instead. I'd only ever had Sunday school Joshua before - the story with mostly trumpets and laughing and celebrating the winning of Jericho. But it's not quite the same in the bible. I read through 45 minutes of very bloody war. Joshua goes about killing everything that moves for decades. The only tribe where even the poor kiddies were spared by Joshua was the Gibeonites and that was only because the sneaky devils tricked him into making a peace treaty with them. Lousy, lying heathens.

I think one of my favourite bits was where Joshua sends off some troops to go and kill and raze everyone in the city of Ai. He didn't send many troops and they were all slaughtered. It turned out that the reason they lost the battle was because Achan had stolen some silver and gold from Jericho that was precious to God (I suppose God is storing up his riches in heaven just like the rest of us). So all of Israel through stones at Achan and his children until they were dead, and God was appeased. So Joshua went back to Ai with 30,000 men and convincingly killed and burnt everything. I'm sure God worked some of his military magic (like recommending that cheeky ambush), but you have to wonder if the extra 27,000 soldiers also made a difference.

The funny thing about that is that these days we say that the problem with violence is that it just brings more violence. In Joshua's case he needed to do violence, and Achan was standing in his way. So violence does bring more violence, but sometimes that's exactly what we want.

I suppose I can understand how killing a whole sub-continent might be part of God's plan. But it strikes me as a little arbitrary. To be fair, God and I have always had disagreements with this. Life also seemed a lot cheaper in the Old Testament than the New Testament, and feels like it might have more to do with the space humans were in at the time than the space God was in.

It brings up the age old question. Is God mainly on about maximising his glory, or about loving humanity?

Over 20 years of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, and a decade of sanctions, have left Iraq with feeble public services and impaired institutions, such as courts to schools. The Economist

Iraq’s educational system used to be among the best in the region; one of the country’s most important assets remains its well-educated people. The results of education reform in the 1970s and 1980s are evident in the high literacy rates in the adult population. However, over the past two decades, wars, sanctions, and harsh economic conditions have taken a toll on the educational system. UN

So who do you trust? When the Economist claims that the schools have been enfeebled by 20 years of dictatorship and a decade of sanctions, is it really just a polite way of saying it's been enfeebled by a decade of sanctions and three years of war? You can say a lot of bad things about Saddam Hussein, but it's difficult to claim he wasn't also the most progressive leader in the Middle East.

Did Hizbullah not kill 159 Israelis, including 116 Zionist soldiers? Nasrallah wins the war

Hezbollah, a terrorist organisation, killed 159 Israelis in one month, 72% of whom were soldiers. In Iraq America has killed 5212 soldiers/policeman and 40133 civilians, making military casualties 11% of the totals. I'm inclined to think that sometimes it is an artificial distinction, but even so that is appalling. And if the distinguishing characteristic of terrorism is that it targets civilians, then it appears that neither Hezbollah nor the American military are very good at the things they are supposed to be good at.

In October 1994, anxious to intimidate the allies and the UN into lifting sanctions on Iraq. Saddam Hussein mobilized his forces on Kuwait’s border. Within 72 hours thousands of U.S. troops, ships, planes, missiles, etc. were either in the theater or on the way, leading Iraq to retreat. This episode shows the importance of flexible organization. Although U.S. forces are undoubtedly technologically superior and forward deployed against just this possibility, their ability to deploy as a combined force on land, sea, and air within 72–96 hours sufficed to deter Iraq. Stephen J. Bank

I don't think this little anecdote says anything about the value of "flexibility". I think it says a lot about spending more money than your enemy on guns (by a factor of thousands I'd guess). I don't think Saddam moved his troops there because he didn't think the US would be able to stop him. I reckon he did it because he hoped they wouldn't bother. It was a bluff, that cost America a lot of money, but gave them a chance to "project their power" or whatever it is those crazy kids like to do.