Iraq
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Sunday rapid fire
- RFID Digital Door Lock – this looks very cool, a totally key less lock system.
- The RFID Superstore
- MyPhotoPipe.com – a very large format printing service, run by a blast from the past
- What would Genghis Khan do in Iraq – an interesting article The Mongols also immediately executed the caliph and his sons on charges that they spent too much money on their palaces and not enough defending their nation.
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More Iraq
One oft-repeated trope about Iraq is that Iran and Syria don’t have any interest in an unstable Iraq. Why? While I’m sure that is not their ideal situation, I’m sure that a vibrant pro-Western democracy would be worse in their opinion.
Also the possible strategy of doubling down (a “troop surge”) is doomed to failure. The Iranians and Syrians can trade off lives and money at a very favorable ratio to them for the foreseeable future.
However this is a moot point. Enough highly motivated factions are in Iraq to make the eventual breakup a certainty. What we should be doing is facilitating the breakup instead of denying it.
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Semantic annoyances
It’s annoying that Colin Powell calling Iraq a civil war is news. When there are two wars going on the media decides to make media pronouncements news stories. Pathetic.
More annoying is that the current conflict doesn’t bear that many resemblances to a civil war as they are usually defined, and a lot resemblances to a traditional gang war. Come to think of it, that’s probably the most useful way to think about it.
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Sic Semper Tyrannis
Saddam Hussein sentenced to death by hanging
For more on the latin, try this.
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More Iraq
Coming Anarchy has an excellent post on the future of an independent Kurdistan. It fits in nicely with my thoughts about the coming partition of Iraq. I think that will be upon us before we realize it’s even on it’s way. To wit, who will want to be the last Shia in a Sunni area, or the last Sunni in a Shia town?
My brain is fried, what I mean to say is the the rate of segregation will increase over the coming year.
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Semantics
I’ve always rejected the notion of Iraq being in a civil war due to the notion that a civil war requires two clearly defined sides and usually territories, be it Davis and Lincoln or Lenin and Kerensky.
While the two defining concepts in Iraq, Sunni and Shia, are clear, the fighting seems to be split up into 14-20 (from what I’ve read) different parties. Also, the fighting does not seem to be for control over the country, but rather ethnic cleansing of the classic variety, that is removing one group from a particular chunk of land.
What do you call that? It’s not quite anarchy, malignant diversity? Failure of integration? What?
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Two things that have surprised me
- The Israel-Hezbollah war hasn’t restarted yet.
- For all the conflict in Iraq, the government hasn’t fallen, nor are there several competing governments.
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Interesting article about service in Iraq
From the Washington Post
Between March 21, 2003, when the first military death was recorded in Iraq, and March 31, 2006, there were 2,321 deaths among American troops in Iraq. Seventy-nine percent were a result of action by hostile forces. Troops spent a total of 592,002 “person-years” in Iraq during this period. The ratio of deaths to person-years, .00392, or 3.92 deaths per 1,000 person-years, is the death rate of military personnel in Iraq.
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The death rate for U.S. men ages 18 to 39 in 2003 was 1.53 per 1,000 — 39 percent of that of troops in Iraq. But one can also find something equivalent to combat conditions on home soil. The death rate for African American men ages 20 to 34 in Philadelphia was 4.37 per 1,000 in 2002, 11 percent higher than among troops in Iraq. Slightly more than half the Philadelphia deaths were homicides.The death rate of American troops in Vietnam was 5.6 times that observed in Iraq. Part of the reduction in the death rate is attributable to improvements in military medicine and such things as the use of body armor. These have reduced the ratio of deaths to wounds from 24 percent in Vietnam to 13 percent in Iraq.
The usual caveats apply of course, but it’s an interesting read.
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War quote of the moment
…Thomas Ricks’ says the war on Iraq and subsequent occupation was ill-conceived, incompetently planned and poorly executed. I have no quarrel with that. What dismays me is that anyone expected any different. All wars are full of incompetence, mendacity, fear, and lies. War is big government, authoritarianism, central planning, command and control, and bureaucracy in its most naked form and on the largest scale. The Pentagon is the Post Office with nuclear weapons.
I’ve always thought that the odds of the government getting some large conspiracy right were much smaller than the odds of them getting some basic assumptions wrong. The complaints of “Bush didn’t get the war planning right” crowd is baffling too. How else was it going to look. In many ways Iraq is much better managed than any of our other wars, only better lit. How else is it going to look?
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An undercovered story
Deaths fall for U.S., rise for Iraqis
U.S. military deaths during the past month have dropped to an average of about one a day, approaching the lowest level since the insurgency began two years ago, according to a USA TODAY analysis of U.S. military data.The decline in U.S. deaths comes as Iraqi casualties are the highest since the U.S. military began tracking them in 2004.
I’ve noticed this from ABC’s This Week coverage as well, though they don’t give the numbers over time. It would be interesting to see a chart of democide in Iraq (I’m counting the insurgency as a prospective government for the purpose of this post); I would wager it’s roughly stable year to year. After so many decades of being a police state, Iraq contains a sizable number of people for whom killing is their only skill.
And while we’re on the topic, check out the WikiPedia entry on Democide. It’s an informative read on mass murders by governments over time, going back to the Mongols.