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editor
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 Posted: Thu Dec 21, 2006 9:49 am Post subject: Gambling Warriors |
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WELCOME!
Gambling Warriors:
From - alas! - Losing Streak:
The Atlantic
Magazine Subscription
Why Iraq has no army
An orderly exit from Iraq depends on the development of a viable Iraqi security force, but the Iraqis aren't even close. The Bush administration doesn't take the problem seriously - and it never has.
By James Fallows
December, 2005, p. 60
| Quote: | "On the current course we will have two options," I was told by a Marine lieutenant colonel who had recently served in Iraq and who prefers to remain anonymous. "We can lose in Iraq and destroy our army, or we can just lose."
The officer went on to say that of course neither option was acceptable, which is why he thought it so urgent to change course. By "destroy our army" he meant that it would take years for the U.S. military to recover from the strain on manpower, equipment, and -- most of all -- morale that staying in Iraq would put on it. (Retired Army General Barray McCaffrey had this danger in mind when he told Time magazine last winter that "the Army's wheels are going to come off in the next twenty-four months" if it remained in Iraq.) "Losing" in Iraq would mean failing to overcome the violent insurgency. A continuing insurgency would, in the view of the officer I spoke with, sooner or later mean the country's fracture in a bloody civil war. That, in turn, would mean the emergence of a central "Sunni-stan" more actively hostile to the United States than Saddam Hussein's Iraq ever was, which could in the next decade be what the Taliban of Afghanistan was in the 1990s: a haven for al-Qaeda and related terrorists. "In Vietnam we just lost," the officer said. "This would be losing with consequences." (-- p. 63) |
Link to this entry
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editor
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| Posted: Thu Dec 21, 2006 9:51 am Post subject: |
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From Losing Streak:
Harper's
Magazine Subscription
Notebook
The Simple Life
By Lewis H. Lapham
December, 2005
beginning at p. 9
| Quote: | | On further acquaintance with the modus operendi of the Bush Administration, I've come to think that the attributions of a competent criminal intelligence miss the point. They give credit where no credit is due, and they fail to account for both the increasingly evident childishness of American culture and the corollary attitudes of entitlement that over the last thirty years have infected ever larger sectors of the country's equestrian class. President Bush and his friends bear comparison not to Jesse James or Commodore Vanderbilt but to a clique of spoiled trust-fund kids...It is with acts of vandalism that juvenile delinquints proclaim their manhood, and what else is the Bush Administration's record over the last five years if not a testimony to its talent for breaking things -- the deconstruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, the loss of respect for America nearly everwhere in the world, a $236 billion budget surplus in 2000 scrapped for a $412 billion deficit in 2004, the country's economic future consigned to foreign creditors, the ever accelerating dissolution of the American political union into separatist factions of race, religion, gender and social caste. (-- p. 10) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Thu Dec 21, 2006 9:59 am Post subject: |
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The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
The Talk of the Town
Hearts and Brains
By Hendrik Herzberg
Nov. 6/06
| Quote: | There's a lively debate among historians over the question of whether the record of the forty-third President, compiled with the indispensable help of a complaisant Congress, is the worst in American history or merely the worst of the sixteen who managed to make it into (if not out of) a second full term. That the record is appalling is by now beyond serious dispute. It includes an unending deficit - this year, it's $260 billion - that has already added $1.5 trillion to the national debt; the subcontracting of environmental, energy, labor, and health care policymaking to corporate interests; repeated efforts to suppress scientific truth; a set of economic and fiscal policies that have slowed growth, spurred inequality, replenished the ranks of the poor and uninsured, and exacerbated the insecurities of the the middle class; and, on Capital Hill, a festival of bribery, some prosecutable (such as felonies that have put one prominent Republican member of Congress in prison, while another awaits sentencing), some not (such as the reported two-million-dollar salary conferred upon a Republican congressman who became the pharmaceutical industry's top lobbyist immediately after shepherding into law a bill forbidding the government to negotiate prices for prescription drugs).
In 2002 and 2004, the ruling party avoided retribution for offenses like these by exploiting the fear of terrorism. What is different this time is that the overwhelming failure of the Administration's Iraq gamble is now apparent to all. This war of choice has pointlessly drained American military strength, undermined what had originally appeared to be success in Afghanistan, handed the Iranian mullahs a strategic victory, immunized the North Korean regime from a forceful response to its nuclear defiance, and compromised American leadership of the democratic world. You can read all about it, not only in the government's own recently leaked National Intelligence Estimate, which reports that the Iraq war has intensified the danger of Islamist terrorism, but also in a shelf of books - a score or more of them, beginning two and a half years ago with Richard A. Clarke's "Against All Enemies" and continuing through Bob Woodward's "State of Denial" - that document the mendacity, incompetence, lawlessness, and ideological arrogance surrounding the origins and conduct of that war. (-- p. 45) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Thu Dec 21, 2006 10:03 am Post subject: |
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The Walrus
Magazine Subscription
Canada's Afghan gamble
By Veronica Cusack
April, 2006
| Quote: | The most obvious scars of the West's disregard are the ubiquitous rag-wrapped cripples. Throughout the 1980s, the Russians ringed each of Afghanistan's main cities and most major towns with land mines. They placed them along the main supply line from Kabul to the Soviet border and around military "hard points" throughout the country. Power plants, irrigation channels, grazing areas, farmlands, and footpaths - nothing was exempt. Rival militia factions buried anti-tank mines, booby traps, and yet more land mines during the civil war, and later, the US contributed unexploded ordnance in the form of cluster bombs scattered in air raids. Anti-personnel mines, manufactured all over the world and no bigger than hockey pucks, litter the countryside and come in more than fifty different varieties. The "bounding frag," for example, jumps almost a metre before it explodes, spraying hot, jagged shrapnel into the stomach of an adult or the face of a child.
When Dan Kelly, program manager of the United Nations Mine Action Programme for Afghanistan (MAPA), began his work in 1999, 300 people a month were being killed by land mines, and countless others were being maimed. Kelly, originally from Newcastle, New Brunswick, trained as an engineer and served in the Canadian military for 32 years. He was chief of operations for the Cambodian Mine Action Centre and worked on demining in Sarajevo and northern Iraq. His program trained thousands of Afghans to scan the land inch by inch and destroy the devices they found. It provided technical support, mine-awareness education, surveying, and clearance. But because the Taliban held sway, the rest of the world paid scant attention.
..."I kept it going in a very difficult period," says Kelly, "moving it from a $19-million to a $90-million operation, $10 million a year of it from CIDA. Deaths went from more than 300 a month to less than 100. It's still too many, but our work is showing significant results." (-- p. 64-65) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2641#2641
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| Posted: Thu Dec 21, 2006 10:29 am Post subject: |
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War Made New
Technology, Warfare, and
the Course of History
1500 to Today
Hardcover
By Max Boot
| Quote: | Although the General Staff was future-oriented, a good deal of its time was spent in the study of the past. Its dedication to learning the lessons of battles past has endeared it to historians ever since. Twice a year, officers undertook "staff rides" in which they studied old battles on the very ground where they had been fought. Their findings were published in a series of books and a monthly journal whose focus was not just on what had happened but why it had happened and whether the various participants had made the correct decisions.
This was only one of the many practices started by the General Staff that has become routine in virtually all professional armies. Another was war gaming. Staff officers played out elaborate scenarios at a map or sand table. Metal symbols were used to denote the opposing armies -- red for the enemy, blue for friendly forces, a color code that has persisted to the present day in the armed forces of the United States and other nations. A roll of the dice indicated the element of chance and an umpire scored the results. In the summer and fall, the General Staff took their was games outdoors, supervising largescale maneuvers by the army. War gaming became a fashionable pursuit among Prussian officers, with various regiments pitted against each other. (From the chapter entitled, The First Industrial Revolution, Rifles and Railroads, at pg. 122) |
More on the book, Japan's high-stakes gamble on the attack of Pearl Harbour and how poker may have saved the lives of hundreds of service men that fateful morning.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2643#2643
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editor
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Jan 24, 2007 10:12 am Post subject: |
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The Punishment of Virtue
Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban
Hardcover
By former NPR reporter Sarah Chayes
| Quote: | Most important, for nearly all the Afghans I interviewed at the time, was (Hamid) Karzai's emphasis on negotiation. "He was telling the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, to hand over power peacefully and not to destroy the country," the (small-time opium) dealer told me. "From that we came to know he was a good person. By negotiations and by the help of the tribal elders and their councils, he came to Kandahar. With the people's consent, that's how he came. He did not enter Kandahar by force."
During the days of pandemonium that immediately followed the Taliban flight, with the shoot-out over the cars by the almond merchants' warehouses, and the tug-of-war for the injured at the hospital, and looting all over town - humanitarian offices turned inside out, cars stolen, papers strewn, furniture carried off - Karzai's soldiers were praised for their comportment. They acted like public servants, people said, assisting the frightened population, refraining from pillage and theft. They seemed to represent the new Afghanistan the population so fervently desired.
America's other group of proxies, by contrast, Gul Agha Shirzai and his gun-slinging acolytes, embodied precisely the kind of violent chaos Afghans dreaded.
Shirzai was also from a Kandahar family. His father had a reputation across the province as a champion dogfighter. He poured much of his energy into this passion, breeding the barrel-chested fighting dogs local nomads keep, organizing matches, tallying bets. In a country where a man is known by his lineage, by the deeds of his forebears, these were not auspicious roots for Gul Agha Shirzai.
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Shirzai's dog-fighting father also joined the resistance, calling up tribal followers and marshaling them into a rebel force. But according to the word spread by many in Kandahar, the Soviets lured him secretly to their side, and he served as a spy for the occupiers while pretending to fight against them.
Such betrayals and counterbetrayals were a feature of that bitter war... (From Chapter 8, A Choice of Allies 1980-2001, at pgs. 66-67) |
A compelling enough tale, maybe, but it's based almost entirely on hearsay:
Arab News
US to Allow Hearsay, Coerced Testimony in Guantanamo Trials
By Barbara Ferguson
Jan. 20/07
| Quote: | The Pentagon unveiled new guidelines for trials of “war on terror” detainees that will allow hearsay and coerced information to be introduced as evidence if a judge considers it credible. The rule handbook, presented to Congress on Thursday, will apply to the special tribunals at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba set up to try the “enemy combatants” being held at the site. Defense attorneys will be able to see summaries of classified evidence against their clients, but the rules forbid the lawyers from revealing potentially favorable classified evidence until US government officials have a chance to review it. If a suspect is found guilty he could be executed by orders of the US president, though it would be up to the secretary of defense to determine how to carry that out. The goal “has been to design a system that meets our responsibility under (the Geneva Conventions) and that provides a fair trial,” said Brig. Gen. Thomas Hemmingway, the Pentagon’s legal adviser to the process.
The Pentagon’s completion of the hefty 238-page manual outlining procedures for terror trials has revived debate in Congress on the treatment of military detainees. Democrats said they were concerned that the manual — based on a law passed last year in the then Republican-run Congress — tramples on basic legal rights that should be afforded to military prisoners. This, they say, puts US troops at risk of mistreatment if captured.
Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said he is working alongside Democratic Sens. Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin on a bill addressing flaws in the manual “that are impediments to the effective and credible prosecution of suspected terrorists.” But the Bush administration and GOP members say the tough standards are needed to ensure dangerous terrorists are convicted. “While ensuring the fair and full prosecution of terrorists, the military commissions manual preserves the ability of our war fighters to operate effectively on the battlefield,” said Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee.
Under the law, the president can convene military commissions to prosecute terror suspects so long as he follows certain guidelines, such as granting defendants legal counsel and access to evidence used against them. The law also for the first time provided specific definitions of abusive treatment of prisoners, prohibiting some of the worst abuses like mutilation and rape but granting the president leeway to decide which specific interrogation techniques are permissible. The new regulations lack some protections used in civilian and military courtrooms, such as the prohibition on using coerced or hearsay evidence. At a Pentagon briefing, Dan Dell’Orto, deputy to the Defense Department’s top counsel, said the new rules will “afford all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized people.” On hearing this, Rep. Ike Skelton, a Democrat and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he planned to scrutinize the manual to ensure that it does not “run afoul” of the US Constitution. “I have not yet seen evidence that the process by which these rules were built or their substance addresses all the questions left open by the legislation,” Skelton said.
Officials think that with the evidence they have now, they could eventually charge 60 to 80 detainees, said Brig. Gen. Hemmingway. The Defense Department is currently planning trials for at least 10 detainees. There are almost 400 people suspected of ties to Al-Qaeda and the Taleban being held at the military’s prison in Guantanamo Bay. About 380 others have been released since the facility was opened five years ago. — With input from agencies |
More on the 238-page U.S. Manual for Military Commissions.
More Guantanamo Gamblers.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2698#2698
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| Posted: Wed Feb 14, 2007 8:52 am Post subject: |
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Aljazeera.net
Al-Queda deputy posts new statement
Feb. 13/07
| Quote: | Al-Queda's deputy leader has described the US troop build-up in Iraq as a gamble that is bound to fail, while critising US Democrats for not bringing any change to US policy.
In an audio tape posted on the Internet on Tuesday, Ayman al-Zawahiri said the decision of George Bush, the US president, to send 21, 500 more troops to Iraq would fail.
"[Bush's] addiction to gambling...motivates him to continue to place bets until he goes completely bankrupts," al-Zawahiri said.
"Were the Americans to leave [Bush] alone, he would continue to send their forces to Iraq until the majahideen kill the last one of their soldiers."
Al-Zawahiri's statement was transcribed on the Web site of the Site Institute, a US private organisation that tracks Islamists' use of the Internet. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2708#2708
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| Posted: Fri Feb 23, 2007 1:47 pm Post subject: |
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Gertrude and Claudius
Paperback
By John Updike
| Quote: | Her heart felt deflected. Something held back her love for this fragile, high-strung, quick-tongued child. She had become a mother too soon, perhaps; a stage in life's journey had been skipped, without which she could not move from loving a parent to loving a child. Or perhaps the fault was in the child: as water will stand up in globules on a fresh-waxed table or on newly oiled leather, so her love, as she felt it, spilled down upon Amleth and remained on his surface, gleaming like beads of mercury, unabsorbed. He was of his father's blood -- temperate, abstracted, a Jutish gloom coated over with the affected manners and luxurious skills of a nobleman. Not merely noble: he was a prince, as Gerutha had been a princess.
She wondered if her own motherlessness was discovered by gaps of motherly feeling within her. She allowed nursemaids, tutors, riding masters, fencing instructors to intervene between herself and the growing boy. His games seemed designed to repel and exclude her -- inscrutable, clattering games, with sticks and paddles, bows and arrows, dice and courters, noisy imitations of war in which he commanded, with his high-pitched voice and tense white face, the buffoon Yorik and some unwashed sons of the castle garrison's doxies. The quiet hoops and tops and dolls of Gerutha's girlhood had no place in this male world of projectile fantasy, of hits and thrusts and "getting even" -- for a strict tally was kept in the midst of the shouts and wrestling, she observed, as in the bloodier accountings of adult warfare, much as Horwendil boasted of how King Fortinbras, in being slain, had forfeited not only the invaded terrain in Jutland but certain coastal lands north of Halland on the coast of Sweathland, between the sea and the great lake of Vanern, lands held not for their worth, which was little, but as a gall to the opposing power, a canker of dishonor. (PART ONE, pgs. 34-35) |
Uncharacteristically gripping stuff for dull Updike, who has at long last succumbed to the wisdom of P.G. Wodehouse's fictional lady novelist, Rosie M. Banks (aka Mrs. Bingo Little), authoress of such romantic classics as Only A Factory Girl and T'was Once in the Month of May.
Other riffs on Shakespeare's Hamlet we admire:
Good Bones and Simple Murders
Hardcover
By Margaret Atwood
See Gertrude Talks Back, p. 16.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2715#2715
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editor
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| Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 10:32 am Post subject: |
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Canadian Geographic
Magazine Subscription
Undoing the Dew Line
Once the first line of defence against
a Soviet missile attack, 42 radar sites
across Arctic Canada were left
contaminated with oil, fuel and PCBs.
Why cleaning up those sites is costing
a fortune.
By Arthur Johnson
Photographs by Colin Rowe
March/April, 2007
| Quote: | When Lieutenant Colonel David Eagles, an environmental engineer with the Department of National Defence (DND), first went to the Arctic to inspect some of the sites in the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line — a network of military radar stations stretching along the Arctic coast from Alaska to Greenland — he was dismayed and outraged to see the evidence of disregard for the environment by the men who had worked there.
"They used to have barrel-rolling contests," he says. "They'd get these empty, or partly empty, fuel barrels and roll them down a hill to see how far they could go."
When they tired of the sport, they left the barrels to rust where they lay. What's more, personnel at many sites buried garbage all over the place. Sometimes the disposal of waste seemed planned to inflict the maximum damage on the environment.
"Why did they place garbage in several different dump sites?" asks Eagles, project manager of what has become one of the most extensive and expensive environmental cleanups ever undertaken in Canada. "And why did they put a garbage dump right beside the river?"
...The development of submarine-launched intercontintal ballistic muclear missiles rendered the DEW Line obsolete almost as soon as it was completed, and by the early 1960s, 21 intermediate sites had been decommissioned and transferred to Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC). Since INAC is responsible for lands in the North, it ended up with responsibility for the cleanup of the decomissioned sites. DND operated the remaining 21 Canadian sites until the DEW Line was officially shut down in 1993 and some of its stations merged with the new North Warning System. INAC is seven or eight years behind DND in the cleanup work, choosing to focus its resources on higher priority sites such as mines, which cause more environmental damage than DEW sites.
By 2012, when the last dime of DND's estimated $583 million has been spent, almost every trace of its 21 sites will have been wiped clean -- dismantled, buried or, in the case of the thousands of tonnes of contaminated soil, shipped outh to remediation plants in Ontario or Alberta.
Eagles has come to terms with the careless behavior of the DEW Line workers. "The world was a different place then," he says. "Environmental standards were different. Rolling barrels down a hill may be disgraceful to us, but for men who were thousands of miles away from their homes and families, it was entertainment." (-- pgs. 62-64) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2794#2794
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editor
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| Posted: Wed May 02, 2007 12:06 pm Post subject: |
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Poker Nation
Hardcover
By * Paris Review editor Andy Bellin
| Quote: | The only genuinely intelligent method is to learn the way Richard Nixon did. Born a devoted Quaker, Nixon managed to remain unfamiliar with any form of gambling until his mid-twenties, when he joined the Untied States Navy during the early years of World War II. That's where he got his first exposure to poker. It intrigued him from the start. After watching the game for a while, he approached a fellow officer who played regularly with a question. He wanted toknow if there was any sure way to win at poker. Eventually the officer told him and went on to explain the most fundamental notions of the game.
Nixon took great interest and played heads-up with his friend for months for no money. Before he was willing to risk a penny, Nixon got tons of experience under his belt. He went on to be such an efficient player that he partially funded his first senate run with proceeds from his poker winnings. (-- p. 189) |
Not even a dyslexic gerbil editor can spoil the fun of this poker classic.
| Quote: | | * Note: Funny...No Andy Bellin listed among editors on the Paris Review masthead when we checked May 2/07 - the four-flushing rogue! |
Link to this entry
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editor
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| Posted: Sun May 20, 2007 9:46 am Post subject: |
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Harper's
Magazine Subscription
Undoing Bush
How to repair eight years of sabotage,
bungling, and neglect
June, 2007
| Quote: | ...For a short parlor game, challenge your friends to name a constitutional right that Bush has not sought to undermine. After the right to bear arms and the guarantee against the quartering of soldiers, the game will be over. Those who prefer a longer game can reverse the exercise, but be prepared for an extended and dispiriting evening.
...The Fifth Amendment right to due process, meanwhile, has fallen victim to assertions that "enemy combatants" can be held indefinitely without trial, that suspicious organizations can have their assets frozen without notice or hearings, and that military tribunals can sentence defendants to death on the basis of hearsay and coerced testimony. For the administration, secrecy trumps all legal process; it has claimed that lawsuits challenging unconstitutional renditions to torture and warrantless wiretapping cannot even be adjudicated because the government's allegedly unconstitutional conduct is itself a secret, even when the facts in question have already been emblazoned across the pages of the country's newspapers.
The single constitutional principle most under attack, however, is the separation of powers. Time and again, administration officials have sought to elevate the president above the law, arguing that, as commander in chief, he may choose to "engage the enemy" however he pleases, without regard to what the other branches of government have said. This notion first surfaced in an August 2002 Justice Dpartment memo written by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo for then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. Yoo argued that the president could not be precluded from ordering the torture of enemy combatants merely because the United States had ratified an international treaty prohibiting torture under all circumstances, or because Congress had made torture a federal crime. "The president enjoys complete discretion in the exercise of his Commander-in-Chief authority and in conducting operations against hostile forces," Yoo wrote. "Congress can no more interfere with the president's conduct of the interrogation of enemy combatants than it can ditate stregic or tactical decisions on the battlefireld." If the president decided to "engage the enemy" by ordering that the enemy be tortured, that was prerogative, and literally nobody could stop him.
...The first and most important step toward restoration of constitutional principle, then, will be the next election. If the public does not demand fidelity to our founding principles, our representatives will not do so on their own.
The remaining steps are straightforward. The next administration could start by proclaiming - loudly - that in wartime, as in peacetime, the American system of government includes tree branches, and the president's first job is to take care that the law is faithfully executed. Second, Guantanamo must be shut down and the prisoners there brought within our borders. When Defense Secretary Robert Graves suggested just that, the administration's lawyers objected that they would lose their argument that because the detainees are held offshore, they are unprotected by the Constitution. But the argument that Guantanamo is a "law-free zone" is precisely why that island has become a world symbol for U.S. arrogance and lawlessness - a "reverse Statue of Liberty," as some have called it. ((From 1. The Constitution by David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, at pgs. 44-45) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2658#2658
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Jun 01, 2007 12:35 pm Post subject: |
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12 Books That Changed The World
Hardcover
By Melvyn Bragg
| Quote: | Magna Carta, which shines so brightly still, which has guided men and women in their pursuit of the highest ideals and inspired their loyalty to ideals sometimes unto death, was born of what could be called a desperate gamble by warlords to chain down a leader who had ceased to meet their needs. It was a case of document or death. Out of the bloody battlefields of the Middle Ages came this lasting constitutional principle - that the power of a king could be and henceforth would be limited by a written grant.
It was an attempt to codify the releationships between three forces - the king, the Church and the barons. It was a deal to solve the deepening crisis of confidence in the state. One of the many ironic riches in Magna Carta is that what could be called a stitch-up by the ruling classes of the day has become an authority for democracy, a cornerstone of liberty, and the chief defence against arbitrary and unjust rule. As the authors Danziger and Gillingham point out, Magna Carta's promise of the people's liberty under the law depended on popular participation in law-making, and this in turn led to the formation of our democratic government subject to law. The law of unexpected consequences is here apparent in its fullest glory: had any one of the particpants at Runnymede in 1215 even dreamt that would happen...? (From the chapter entitled, MAGNA CARTA June 1215 by Members of the English Ruling Classes, pgs. 70-71) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2883#2883
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Jun 04, 2007 1:02 pm Post subject: |
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The Fog of War
Eleven lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara
DVD
Featuring music by Philip Glass that
actually added something of value
to this powerful testimonial
| Quote: | Lesson #2: Rationality will not save us.
McNamara: In my seven years as (Defense) secretary, we came within a hair's breadth of war with the Soviet Union on three different occasions... Twenty-four hours a days, 365 days a year for seven years I lived through Cold War...Cold war... It was a hot war!
...I want to say - and this is very important - that in the end, we lucked out - it was LUCK! - that prevented nuclear war (during the Bay of Pigs conflict). We came THAT close to nuclear war. Rational individuals - Kennedy was rational, Castro was rational - rational individuals came that close to total destruction of their societies. |
See also McNamara on unilateralism at our U.S. forum.
More about McNamara at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum.
More about the Bay of Pigs gamble at Cuba Libre.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2890#2890
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editor
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| Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 8:49 am Post subject: |
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The Economist
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The warlord and the spook
Russia's wars in Chechnya, which the
Kremlin says are over, have shaped
the country that Russians and the world
are now living with
June 2/07
| Quote: | Like a high-end barmitzvah, only with more weapons, the inauguration of Ramzan Kadyrov was held in a giant white marquee, in the grounds of one of his palaces, near the Chechen city of Gudermes. The guests - Russian officers who were once his enemies, rival warlords squirming in dress uniforms, muftis in lamskin hats - brought sycophantic portraits, cars and other gifts fit for a Caucasian potentate. As his pet lions gnawed on their bones outside, Chechnya's new president made a speech, as short and nervous as a schoolboy's, in which he vowed to continue the reconstruction of his wretched semi-autonomous Russian republic.
...As with all wars, the starkest toll of Chechnya's are the dead, who as well as the slaughtered Chechens officially include around 10,000 federal troops, and unofficially many more. Then there are the tens of thousands of injured, such as Dima, who lives with his parents in a grotty apartment on the outskirts of Moscow. In December 1999, Dima was shot in the chest in the village of Alkhan-Yurt. He heard the air rushing out of his lungs; then he was wounded again. He lay bleeding, eating snow, and preparing to die, but lived after a doctor bet his colleagues two bottles of vodka that he could be saved. Two pieces of shrapnel stayed in his back. "I lost my health forever when I was 20," says Dima, who was incapacitated for two years; terrible years, says his mother. Alkhan-Yurt, meanwhile, became infamous for the butchery and rape commnitted there by the Russians soon afterwards.
Still Dima, now at college, is relatively lucky. Many of the 1m-plus Chechnya veterans came back alcoholic, unemployable and anti-social, suffering what soon became known as "the Chechen syndrome." This widespread experience of army mistreatment and no-limits warfare has contributed to Russia's extraordinary level of violent crime: the murder rate is 20 times western Europe's. But the cruelty is also reproducing itself in a less well-known and more organised way.
As well as the army, thousands of policemen across Russia have served in Chechnya. Many return with disciplinary and psychological problems, says Tanya Lokshina of Demos, a human-rights group. They also bring back extreme tactics that they proceed to apply at home, such as the sorts of cordons and mass detentions deployed against peaceful protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg in April. Torture, concluded a recent report by Amnesty Internati.onal, is endemic among Russian police. It is often used to extract confessions, but not always: a survey by Russian researchers found that most victims of police violence thought it had been perpetrated for fun. (-- pgs. 55-57) |
More on 'no-frills' Chechnya at the guardian unlimited.com.
* More of our favorite Russian gambles and gamblers.
| Quote: | | * and our most fervent hope for two or three millennia of Russian peace and prosperity to give the rest of the arts community time to catch up. |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2891#2891
Last edited by editor on Fri Dec 28, 2007 1:45 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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