Showing posts with label iraq. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iraq. Show all posts

18 October 2008

Why Stella is a Star

That's Stella Rimington, former head of MI5. Her Guardian interview is so packed with good sense that I'll have to quote it at length:

A former head of MI5 today describes the response to the September 11 2001 attacks on the US as a "huge overreaction" and says the invasion of Iraq influenced young men in Britain who turned to terrorism.

In an interview with the Guardian, Stella Rimington calls al-Qaida's attack on the US "another terrorist incident" but not qualitatively different from any others.

"That's not how it struck me. I suppose I'd lived with terrorist events for a good part of my working life and this was as far as I was concerned another one," she says.

In common with Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, who retired as MI5's director general last year, Rimington, who left 12 years ago, has already made it clear she abhorred "war on terror" rhetoric and the government's abandoned plans to hold terrorism suspects for 42 days without charge.

Today, she goes further by criticising politicians including Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, for trying to outbid each other in their opposition to terrorism and making national security a partisan issue.

It all began, she suggests, with September 11. "National security has become much more of a political issue than it ever was in my day," she says. "Parties are tending to use it as a way of trying to get at the other side. You know, 'We're more tough on terrorism than you are.' I think that's a bad move, quite frankly."

Rimington mentions Guantánamo Bay, the practice of extraordinary rendition, and the invasion of Iraq - three issues which the majority in Britain's security and intelligence establishment opposed privately at the time.

She challenges claims, notably made by Tony Blair, that the war in Iraq was not related to the radicalisation of Muslim youth in Britain.

Read it and weep.

22 January 2008

Magna Carta and the Commons

Here's an old but wonderful essay drawing out the many connections between the Magna Carta and the commons. Its sweep is broad:

While the Magna Carta is singular, an English peculiarity, its story is one of oppression, rebellion, and betrayal. It has become a story with global significance. We are commoners looking in at it from the outside. We have seen its history from the robber barons who became chivalric knights who became law lords who became “founding fathers.” Having studied their doings in the forest, in Palestine, in the law court, on the frontier, and now in Iraq, we have learned to be suspicious.

27 September 2007

In Praise of Clotheslines

Nice:

Today, however, such clotheslines are considered blight. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal (September 18, 2007, p.1) reports on how neighborhood associations are cracking down on residents who dare to use the sun to dry their clothes. A typical quote came from a neighbor of one of the offenders. “This bombards the senses,” said one Joan Grundeman, an interior designer in Bend, Oregon. “It can’t possibly increase property values and make people think this is a nice neighborhood.”

At least some people have their priorities straight. Better to bombard Iran and Iraq and keep the laundry out of sight where it belongs.

14 January 2007

Open Source War and Google Earth

How's this for a confluence:

Terrorists attacking British bases in Basra are using aerial footage displayed by the Google Earth internet tool to pinpoint their attacks, say Army intelligence sources.

Documents seized during raids on the homes of insurgents last week uncovered print-outs from photographs taken from Google.

The satellite photographs show in detail the buildings inside the bases and vulnerable areas such as tented accommodation, lavatory blocks and where lightly armoured Land Rovers are parked.

Written on the back of one set of photographs taken of the Shatt al Arab Hotel, headquarters for the 1,000 men of the Staffordshire Regiment battle group, officers found the camp's precise longitude and latitude.

So what do they do? They try to censor the images. But guess what? That's not going to work, and it's going to get worse. The two main solutions are (a) change the way you fight wars or - rather better - (b) don't fight wars in the first place.

01 January 2007

Open Source War

The article may be old, but the issue of open source war - the kind currently being waged in Iraq, for example - is sadly bang up to date (so to speak):

It's possible, as Microsoft has found, that there is no good monopolistic solution to a mature open-source effort. In that case, the United States might be better off adopting I.B.M.'s embrace of open source. This solution would require renouncing the state's monopoly on violence by using Shiite and Kurdish militias as a counterinsurgency. This is similar to the strategy used to halt the insurgencies in El Salvador in the 1980's and Colombia in the 1990's. In those cases, these militias used local knowledge, unconstrained tactics and high levels of motivation to defeat insurgents (this is in contrast to the ineffectiveness of Iraq's paycheck military). This option will probably work in Iraq too.

In fact, it appears the American military is embracing it. In recent campaigns in Sunni areas, hastily uniformed peshmerga and Badr militia supplemented American troops; and in Basra, Shiite militias are the de facto military power.

The link came from a post on the blog of the author of this fascinating analysis, John Robb. Recommended.

01 October 2006

Paying the Price

Nice piece in The Independent about a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers on the cost of capping greenhouse emissions:

The cost of curbing the soaring emissions of harmful gases that are blamed for causing global warming has been estimated at $1 trillion by a major study of the cost of climate change.

The volume of emissions of the gases that cause global warming will double by 2050 unless rich countries agree to take significant policy steps to cut energy use, it shows.

The report, byPricewaterhouseCoopers, lays bare the potential damage to the environment of the industrial revolution in China and India. It puts a price of $1 trillion (£526bn) on the cost of sorting out the problem spread over the next generation. The bill is equivalent to a year's output of the economy of Canada, and less than half of the total stock of debt that has been built up by Britain's households. But it is less than the cost in terms of environmental catastrophe and loss of life that scientists fear will happen as temperatures and sea levels rise. "It is implicit from our findings that a trillion dollars certainly is a cost worth incurring," said John Hawksworth, the chief economist at PwC and author of the report.

As the surprisingly intelligent thread on Digg points out, these figures are amazingly doable. For example, one trillion dollars is only three times the current spending on the war in Iraq. Similarly, it is only 40 times the cost of one small global-warming induced weather disaster, that caused by Katrina. There are going to be rather more than 40 Katrinas if things carry on as they are.

What's most heartening about this report is that a terribly respectable outfit like PricewaterhouseCoopers is taking the exercise seriously. This is what we in the trade call a Good Sign: it means those in power are starting to realise that it will actually be cheaper to prevent rather than cure. And once the rich get behind moves to preserve this particular commons, we are almost there.

30 March 2006

Googling the Genome

I came across this story about Google winning an award as part of the "Captain Hook Awards for Biopiracy" taking part in the suitably piratical-sounding Curitiba, Brazil. The story links to the awards Web site - rather fetching in black, white and red - where there is a full list of the lucky 2006 winners.

I was particularly struck by one category: Most Shameful Act of Biopiracy. This must have been hard to award, given the large field to choose from, but the judges found a worthy winner in the shape of the US Government for the following reason:

For imposing plant intellectual property laws on war-torn Iraq in June 2004. When US occupying forces “transferred sovereignty” to Iraq, they imposed Order no. 84, which makes it illegal for Iraqi farmers to re-use seeds harvested from new varieties registered under the law. Iraq’s new patent law opens the door to the multinational seed trade, and threatens food sovereignty.

Google's citation for Biggest Threat to Genetic Privacy read as follows:

For teaming up with J. Craig Venter to create a searchable online database of all the genes on the planet so that individuals and pharmaceutical companies alike can ‘google’ our genes – one day bringing the tools of biopiracy online.

I think it unlikely that Google and Venter are up to anything dastardly here: from studying the background information - and from my earlier reading on Venter when I was writing Digital Code of Life - I think it is much more likely that they want to create the ultimate gene reference, but on a purely general, not personal basis.

Certainly, there will be privacy issues - you won't really want to be uploading your genome to Google's servers - but that can easily be addressed with technology. For example, Google's data could be downloaded to your PC in encrypted form, decrypted by Google's client application running on your computer, and compared with your genome; the results could then be output locally, but not passed back to Google.

It is particularly painful for me to disagree with the Coalition Against Biopiracy, the organisation behind the awards, since their hearts are clearly in the right place - they even kindly cite my own 2004 Googling the Genome article in their background information to the Google award.