Link Banana

You don’t have to agree with Ross Douthat’s politics to agree with his assessment of War, Inc..

The complexities of the Israel-Fatah-Hamas are often lost on me. But this I was heartened by:

However, Hamas is now attempting to sell the virtues of a ceasefire to a battered people accustomed to talk of “steadfastness” and “resistance”. A group of leading thinkers is to visit universities and hold symposia to convince Gazans that a period of calm will help lift the siege and rebuild their disappearing economy.

Though that hardly means that a resolution is suddenly within sight, I can’t see this as a bad thing.

Carol Williams assembled — through the shards of information made public — what a day is like for prisoners at Guantanamo. There are several interesting bits, but this really caught my eye.

More than 2,000 books and magazines in 18 languages are stocked for the prisoners, each vetted for its potential to incite. The “Harry Potter” series had been the most popular selection before a recent influx of nature and music books.

At the new Camp 7 facility for high-value detainees — which jailers have dubbed “the platinum camp” — the book most in demand now is “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” a nearly 20-year-old treatise by Stephen R. Covey.

(via brijit)

Also of note: Raymond Bonner’s “Forever Guantanamo” rife with outrage about torture and having surprisingly little to say about the place itself.

Proving myself right, I’ve again been ignoring Iraq news. Slate’s Fred Kaplan has some valuable details about the mess that’s engulfed Basra.

The fighting in Basra, which has spread to parts of Baghdad, is not a clash between good and evil or between a legitimate government and an outlaw insurgency. Rather, as Anthony Cordesman, military analyst for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, writes, it is “a power struggle” between rival “Shiite party mafias” for control of the oil-rich south and other Shiite sections of the country.

Both sides in this struggle are essentially militias. Both sides have ties to Iran. And as for protecting “the Iraqi people,” the side backed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (and by U.S. air power) has, ironically, less support—at least in many Shiite areas, including Basra—than the side that he (and we) are attacking.

Also of note, Kaplan’s piece about what victory will really mean in Iraq.

While the Dalai Lama has gotten a lot of flack for urging moderation and nonviolence, another Buddhist monk embraces violence as necessary to defend the people against Sri Lanka’s rebels.

“Am I an extremist? Sometimes I am. Sometimes I am not,” Rathana said over green tea, when asked about reports from foreign human rights groups that accuse his party of hindering peace talks. “The point is that we need to end this war. And we are forced into a military solution.”

(via Passport)

It’s an interesting name, and an obvious reason. I’d like my name to stand for such a great idea.

Mark Helprin says that that’s the solution to the crisis in Darfur.

Which would the regime in Sudan prefer? To be annihilated, or to discontinue its campaign of mass murder in Darfur? Given Sudan’s record, very few nations would be willing to come to its aid with other than a pro forma whimper, and given the geography and the air and naval balance, no nation could. Though many a repressive dictatorship would protest, and Sudan’s patron, China, might determine to speed up the formation of the blue-water navy it is already building, little else would change except for the better.

Also of note, a damning rebuttal from Mark Goldberg.

I’d heard and forgot about the news that 4000 Americans have died in Iraq until I saw this. It made me sit up and pay attention.

Speaking of America’s military… (I’m also getting tired of that opening, but I like the idea of having segues.) Matthew Yglesias has posted an interesting graph of the number of American troops in Iraq from invasion to date.  It’s interesting to see, though I have to agree with the commenters that it would be nice if the y-axis had started at 0 and not 100,000.

Maybe it’s just me, but this statistic seems surprising:

Since the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, more than 16,000 troops — mostly Army — have deserted. Antiwar groups contend the number is much higher, with many of the runaways quietly discharged.

For context, it’s from a rather interesting story about Iraq-era deserters in Canada and the support they’re getting from Vietnam-era deserters.

(via Passport)

An odd way to find a way to end human wars, but not without value: study other primates. The answer for bonobos:

“No deadly warfare,” de Waal says, “little hunting, no male dominance, and enormous amounts of sex.” Their promiscuity, he speculates, reduces violence both within and between bonobo troops, just as intermarriage does between human tribes. What may start out as a confrontation between two bonobo communities can turn into socializing, with sex between members, grooming, and play.

And humans:

De Waal has also reduced conflict among monkeys by increasing their interdependence and ensuring equal access to food. Applying these lessons to humans, de Waal sees promise in alliances, such as the European Union, that promote trade and travel and hence interdependence. “Foster economic ties,” he says, “and the reason for warfare, which is usually resources, will probably dissipate.”

(via clusterflock)

Speaking of war… Just to haunt your dreams, The Economist paints a vivid picture of quickly and easy the Hamas-Israel conflict could start a war to engulf the Middle East. Here’s hoping they’re wrong about this.

Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister, finds he can no longer resist pressure to end the rocket fire, a job that military men say can be achieved, if at all, only by a ground invasion. But ground warfare against Hamas’s guerrilla fighters in the teeming confines of Gaza will certainly kill many Palestinian civilians. That will tempt Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah in Lebanon, to help his fellow Islamists by opening a second front from Lebanon.

Of course, to weaken Hizbullah, Israel sees a need to attack Syria as well. Remember that, for now at least, this is all fiction. It’s best for all of us if it stays that way.

March 16th is the the fourtieth anniversary of one of most notorious massacres in America’s history. Ed Ruggerio wants to make sure that we’ve learned the right lessons from it.

This March 16 we should remember that we can still “lose” wars by forgetting that we aren’t always the good guys. We lose them when we can’t muster the courage to confront our own worst selves. We lose them when we stick our veterans into simple categories: well-adjusted or crazy. We lose wars when we sanitize them; when we create myths that lack the obscenity and evil of the real thing.

And when we “lose” a war this way, it makes it easier to start the next one.

Viktor Bout, subject of Merchant of Death and inspiration for Lord of War, was caught by the U.S.’s DEA in Bangkok. Perhaps the most interesting part is that they’re seeking to prosecute him, even though many American defense contractors have used his services in the past.

(via UN Dispatch)

In case you’d forgotten the mess of Darfur, this photo’s likely to snap you to attention.

(via UN Dispatch)

The Ho Chi Minh trail, one of the most prominent features of what the Vietnamese know as “the American war,” is being turned into a highway. David Lamb’s trip down the road delves into history and modern Vietnam, but I found this anecdote both odd and charming:

“It may sound strange, but although it was a terrible time, my four years on Truong Son was a very beautiful period in my life,” said Le Minh Khue, who defied her parents and at age 15 joined a youth volunteer brigade on the trail, filling bomb craters, digging bunkers, burying corpses and ending each day covered head to toe with so much mud and dirt that the girls called each other “black demons.”

Khue, a writer whose short stories about the war have been translated into four languages, went on: “There was great love between us. It was a fast, passionate love, carefree and selfless, but without that kind of love, people could not survive. They [the soldiers] all looked so handsome and brave. We lived together in fire and smoke, slept in bunkers and caves. Yet we shared so much and believed so deeply in our cause that in my heart I felt completely happy.

(via brijit)

In light of the Colombia situation, Slate’s Explainer offered a good bit of relevant history that I was somewhat surprised by:

With the exception of two militia movements that successfully seized and retained power—Fidel Castro’s 26^th of July movement in Cuba and, 20 years later, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua—most of Latin America’s armed groups were defeated by their nations’ governments years ago. The FARC has endured because the cocaine trade in Colombia has become a huge source of revenue for the group—by some estimates, $250 million to $500 million a year, or at least half of its income. The other major leftist insurgent group that remains active in Latin America today is also Colombian: the National Liberation Army, or the ELN. Drug money helped this smaller group endure as well, though it may make up only one-tenth of ELN’s income; kidnapping and extortion provide the bulk.

More bad news:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday suspended peace talks with Israel following a spasm of violence in the Gaza Strip that has left more than 100 Palestinians dead since Wednesday as Hamas has continued its campaign of rocket strikes.

The conventional wisdom will tell you that Latin America’s a rather calm and quiet place. Such CW make news like this harder to wrap your head around.

Venezuela and Ecuador mobilized troops to their borders with Colombia on Sunday, intensifying a diplomatic crisis after Colombian forces killed a senior guerrilla leader at a jungle camp in Ecuador.

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, whose government has warm ties with the rebel group, threatened Colombia with war and mobilized tank units and fighter jets near the border between the two countries. […]

Speaking on television Sunday night, President Rafael Correa of Ecuador called Colombia’s action a violation of Ecuador’s sovereignty. He expelled Colombia’s ambassador and withdrew his ambassador from Bogotá.

How much of this is a show for internal political gains — both Correa and Chavez are leftists who are sure to gain some greater support by painting Columbia’s action as American provocation — and how much is genuine is still open to debate.

Perhaps mistakenly, I shrugged off Nicholas Kritstof’s first attempt to convince the world that the Sudanese government is ready to restart hostilities in the south of their country. (For those who are wondering, Darfur is in the west, and their had been a long war in the south that ended a few years ago.) After a second column on the same idea, I figured it at least beared mentioning.

Since late November, there have been repeated clashes in the Abyei area between South Sudan’s armed forces and a large tribe of Arab nomads, the Misseriya, which is armed and backed by the Sudanese government in Khartoum. Mr. Paguot said that several hundred people had been killed in these clashes, and that some of the gunmen were government soldiers who had taken off their uniforms to masquerade as tribal fighters.

On Feb. 7, gunmen from the Misseriya shot up and looted a bus arriving in Abyei and began blockading the road that leads into the town from the north. That has cut off supplies, so shops in the town market are running out of fuel and food, and prices are rising.