U.S. military says man held is not Iraq al Qaeda leader

It’s so hard to tell these bloody Islamofascists apart. Still I bet he’s a leader of something. A bit of enhanced interrogation will soon get the truth.

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The five major nuclear-armed powers said on Friday the Non-Proliferation Treaty was under threat and cited Iran’s uranium enrichment campaign in a rare joint call for action to shore up the NPT.

North Korea’s nuclear test blast in 2006, Iran’s pursuit of potentially bomb-capable enrichment and new allegations Syria covertly tried to build an atomic reactor with North Korean help spotlight mounting challenges to the treaty, analysts say.

“The proliferation of nuclear weapons constitutes a threat to international peace and security,” the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France said in a joint address on the final day of a two-week meeting of 106 NPT member nations.

“This … imperils prospects for progress on other NPT goals such as nuclear disarmament and hurts prospects for expanding international (civil) nuclear cooperation,” said British chief delegate John Duncan, speaking on behalf of the five.

“The proliferation risks presented by the Iranian nuclear program continue to be a matter of ongoing serious concern to us.” Tehran is under U.N. sanctions for refusing to suspend the work and curbing U.N. inspections meant to verify its nature.

I wonder where the world’s ‘minor’ nuclear-armed powers were. Perhaps they had their own little meeting in a separate room.

I guess it’s understandable that these guys should have meetings and fulminate about nuclear proliferation but in all honesty, the yanks and the French and probably the Brits should have thought about all this back in the 1960s or whenever it was they helped Israel get The Bomb. And doing nothing more than making a few unhappy noises when India and Pakistan started testing their little toys wasn’t really a credibility-enhancing move either, for any country that wants to tut tut now about the evil Persians.

I’d have a lot more respect for them if they’d only drop this sickening pretence that they’re concerned about peace and freedom and all that bullshit. Why not just come out guys and admit you like being the ones with da power? We all know that’s what you mean.

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But you won’t hear any of it here I’m afraid. Instead you get a re-mix of some other boring old farts who once were rockers.

Download audio file (thewho_racedit.mp3)

Seriously, why do re-mix djs bother? The original was 10 times better.

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Rudd has had a saloon passage so far on foreign affairs, dazzling the media with a round the world trip in which his ability to speak Mandarin caused universal acclamation. As usual from our media, celebrity and symbolism were privileged over anything of substance. Rudd was therefore allowed to get away with a highly confusing stance over Afghanistan, in which affirmations of indefinite Australian involvement were mingled with vague warnings that the Europeans would have to lift their game, or else … well he never said what would happen if they didn’t, and the media didn’t ask because they were too busy writing about the important stuff like whether or not he had saluted George Bush.

However, at least there have been some government pronouncements on Afghanistan, even if they’ve left us little the wiser. About Iraq there’s been a deafening silence. The impression was given that Rudd had sternly advised Bush that he would honour the election commitment to bring home the troops (but not just yet, in fact not for many months after he was elected) and that Bush accepted that meeting election promises was the honourable thing to do.

Yet at the same time, Angus Houston was announcing that the combat troops’ mission had ended and that was why they were coming home, which was consistent with some opposition claims that they would also have brought them home mid-2008. And now, from Stars and Stripes of all places. there’s this:

Australia will keep a headquarters unit based at Camp Victory near Baghdad and a security force that protects Australian assets in the capital’s International Zone, each with about 100 members. Roughly 600 navy and air force troops assigned to a “dual-force” mission encompassing Iraq and Afghanistan will also remain, a spokesman for the Australian Defence Force said.

“There has been some speculation that Australia is abandoning the coalition, but that is not the case,” said Brigadier Damian Roche, the commander of Australian forces in Iraq. “We’re reducing our ground force, but Australia remains just as committed to the coalition and just as committed to the future of Iraq.”

What does ‘just as committed to the coalition’ mean? That we remain fully supportive of the occupation? If that is the case, the withdrawal of the troops is pure tokenism and Rudd is trying to have the best of both worlds: maintaining the uncritical support of US actions in the Middle East which was a hallmark of the Howard/Downer years while allowing anti-war Labor supporters to believe that there has been a significant change in government policy. Does ‘just as committed’ mean that if things in Iraq get really sticky again we’ll send some combat troops back?

Whatever the truth it’s unsatisfactory to try to piece it together on the basis of statements by a brigadier reported in Stars and Stripes. The Australian media has virtually ceased to show any interest in Iraq so it’s possible I’ve missed it, but I don’t recall any clear statement by either Rudd or Stephen Smith about the situation in Iraq which this country was complicit in creating.

Many people, of whom I am one, regard the invasion/occupation of Iraq as an appallingly immoral act, comparable to the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, Japan’s invasion of China in 1931 or the USSR’s intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. If Rudd is not prepared to distance himself and his government from it clearly and publicly, he will give the lie once and for all to the meme that the actions of the Howard/Bush mobs were somehow unrepresentative of their nations. Australia will be identified for all time as a nation that is prepared to wage aggressive war in order to curry favour with the USA.

Rudd should make a major speech - preferably in parliament where it can be debated - setting out his government’s attitude to American actions in Iraq and its future intentions with regard to our involvement. People may agree or disagree with what he has to say but we deserve an explanation in depth of what he believes and intends to do; something substantially more than a few carefully crafted lines at a press conference or a radio interview.

He should make such a speech, but I won’t be holding my breath.

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“You’re a digger who is simple, direct and tough. And you have never let this cobber down,” he said.

Is there anybody anywhere in either of our two nations who would not cringe with embarrassment at reading such juvenile crap? Apart from those at the Liberal Party function I mean, who I expect were giddy with excitement that Mr Bush would condescend to learn a bit of the local lingo.

And I suspect a lot of actual diggers are less than impressed.

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The writer, one David Kupelian (whose work is unfamiliar to me* but which I will certainly look for in the future) apparently wants to see the White House turned into a latter day Versailles, with a [Republican] president in the role of the Sun King:

What I’m saying is, the president is like the father of a big family, and who he is and what he is – his spirit – affects everyone, like the sun. It’s a radiant energy that directly shines on people. Presidents invisibly shape the character and worldview of the country, with a particularly profound effect upon the young, since they are the most impressionable.

Wipe that smirk off your face and consider this evidence:

Whereas Ronald Reagan had such respect for the Oval Office that he reportedly never entered it without wearing a coat and tie, Bill Clinton turned it into his private sex club. And the radiant effect of his monumental selfishness was that he infected an entire generation of young people, in high school and even middle school, influencing them to sexually mimic the national trauma of a president exploiting an intern barely older than his daughter.

Just imagine what a new Clinton presidency would mean for the USA:

You could expect a radical increase in shocking, self-destructive and criminal acting-out by lost souls lashing out blindly in a desperate expression of revenge toward the contemptible society that could dare elect such a person as president.

Oh look I’ll stop now before I copy and paste the whole thing. It’s a pure unadulterated scream.

BTW Steve of Brisbane was good enough to link to RTS the other day and I should return the favour. You know Steve, he’s the surly wingnut who drops by occasionally and leaves a withering comment along the lines of ‘youse lefties are such wankers why don’t you go read this [insert link to Piers Akerman or similar intellectual heavyweight]’. No not that one, that’s Pete, I mean the other one, Steve from Brisbane.

Anyway Steve is whining that nobody here will ‘debate’ him, by which he means nobody takes him seriously enough to respond to his insightful observations. Well that’s what he says he’s upset about but you know what? (Damn Rudd, now he’s got everyone asking rhetorical questions.) I think deep down his post is a cry for help. Here he’s been writing posts on his blog for months demonstrating conclusively how stupid teh lefties are and from the quick look I had, his comments are averaging *cough* 0. None. Zero.

So please take a moment to help Steve lose his cyber virginity. Go break his comments duck. It’s all part of the brotherhood of the blogosphere .

*Kupelian is apparently ‘managing editor of the world’s leading independent Internet news source, WorldNetDaily.com.’ WOWSERS! His book ‘has been enthusiastically endorsed by Dr. Laura Schlessinger, David Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, D. James Kennedy and many others’ … hehe, you can’t get much more independent than that.

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“My friends, I will have an energy policy that we will be talking about, which will eliminate our dependence on oil from the Middle East that will — that will then prevent us — that will prevent us from having ever to send our young men and women into conflict again in the Middle East,” McCain said.

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I don’t require musicians I like to be rational, sane, compassionate, intelligent, thought provoking and in general good people. But it’s awfully nice when one of them turns out to be so. The superb singer/songwriter Richard Shindell has some thoughts here and more here on being an artist in the age of illegal downloading. He speaks sense.

This is how things will be done from now on: just between us humans. No lawsuits, no cartels, no coercion - just respect, good faith, and solidarity.

While I think a lot of anti-piracy measures and attitudes have been hamfisted, insulting and obnoxious (and I don’t use P2P myself), I don’t make my living from music so I can’t begrudge those who do their strong feelings on the matter. Still, when he talks about the “better angels” attitude, and respect between consumer and artist, that makes sense to me. I think there are lots of things that can be done to turn pirates into people who support artists — not least of which is “the passage of time” and “embiggening of musical tastes” since (IIRC) it’s teens/uni-aged kids who do it on the grandest and most unthinking scale, and it’s mostly directed towards the more top 100 end of things. DRM-free eMusic’s corporate line has long been that it pitches the long tail and independent acts to “mature” music fans who are vastly less likely to fileshare. This was actually borne out when Random House tracked piracy of it’s eMusic DRM-free audiobook files and found … none. “Value adding” strategies — turning “pirates” into payers, at least on some scale — are surely the best way forward for the industry. If the labels won’t do it at that level, it is gratifying to see artists take the initiative.

Richard still thinks it’s important the artist gets paid (in this case, him) but he’s actually doing some constructive, realistic things about it. Go, Richard!

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Here’s a nice happy song about people being killed. Sorry if it breaks up - go here for the original.

Download audio file (teargas-and-plateglass-valley.mp3)

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U.S. air strike kills al Qaeda boss in Somalia

Bring ‘em on! BRING THEM ON!!!

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