X-Mas Indian Style

This is hilarious!

I Think He Really Really Means It This Time!!

Please see my previous post in the West's brinkmanship with Khartoum here Tony Blair was said to have, "told Sudanese Vice President Kiir there must be "clear progress" by November 24 when African Union leaders meet to discuss Darfur."

Wed Nov 22, 2006 6:54 PM GMT
LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Tony Blair told Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on Wednesday to implement a U.N.-brokered agreement aimed at ending the Darfur crisis or face a response from the international community.
...
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced...last week that Sudan had agreed in principle to a joint U.N.-African Union force in Darfur, where three years of conflict have killed 200,000 people and driven 2.5 million from their homes.

But Khartoum has objected both to the size of a peacekeeping force and any U.N. sharing of command with African troops.

Before the phone call, Blair told parliament that there was international diplomatic support for "tougher measures" if Khartoum fails to implement the agreement. But he did not specify what such measures might be.
...
"I think it is very clear from the work that we've done and from the statements from the United States of America that if the government of Sudan do not seize this opportunity, we will have to look at tougher measures to take against them," he said.

Washington's special envoy to Sudan, Andrew Natsios, said this week the United States and others could resort to an unspecified "plan B" if Khartoum did not make progress on Darfur by January 1.

Racist! Who Me?

First Mel Gibson, now Kramer - or whatever his real name is.
Let's admit it, we're all racists. We can't help ourselves. Skin colour is an easy way to tag a person or, for a time, a whole group of people. It feels good dammit!
I just saw an old episode of ER that had the medicos chuckling at a WASP-ish couple, (Episcopalian to be precise) who have difficulty communicating or showing much emotion. Stereotype? Yep. Funny? Oh, yeah!
I am a racist, like all the rest of you, (YES YOU!) with a great capacity for bending my own rules; turning any race related dictum on it's head as the situation warrants. Sometimes its all those Chinese, until I actually meet a Chinese person and than all those racist thoughts melt away in the face of the humanity of the one real person I am in contact with. Sometimes, every damn thing is lucky with those people and at other times, the beauty of a film about some red lantern or some damn dragon makes me want to travel to China and see if, as Paul Theroux put it, the bra is the most superfluous garment in China.
Do these fleeting dichotomous thoughts make me a racist? I think so.
Do you think I'm a racist?
Are you a racist?

The Stomach Flu

The family has been covered in germs for the past week-and-a-half. The virus or virii (if there is such a word) masquerades as a simple cold for two days. It then proceeds to give you a slight fever, achy muscles and bones for another day. By this time, you may be forgiven for thinking the cold bug is actual a simple case of the flu. Next, this slow moving, pugilistic little bug, punches you in the stomach resulting in nausea and some purging through your oral and nasal cavities. And, as if this wasn't enough, the bug then begins to kick your ass! All the way to the toilet...where you once again purge yourself through your kicked-in part.
The bug moves slowly and case histories in our home, and from anecdotal evidence, show this case of the stomach flu is mild but long lasting -- about a week to a week and a half.

What Am I Reading Now?

By melding love, science, and religion into a primer on personal growth, M. Scott Peck launched his highly successful writing and lecturing career with this book. Even to this day, Peck remains at the forefront of spiritual psychology as a result of The Road Less Traveled. In the era of I'm OK, You're OK, Peck was courageous enough to suggest that "life is difficult" and personal growth is a "complex, arduous and lifelong task." His willingness to expose his own life stories as well as to share the intimate stories of his anonymous therapy clients creates a compelling and heartfelt narrative.

I'm guessing that I am going through a mid-life thingy. So...instead of getting a motorcycle and a tattoo-ed girlfriend, I went out and bought this book and am writing my eulogy. You know, for fun and introspection. What? What!?

Source: Amazon.com
Also see the Wikipedia article on Peck.

Rest Your Eyes

Exit Iraq?

Its official: Withdrawal or disengagement as the bureacrats and spin-doctors are sure to call it is just around the corner! Withdrawal is the right thing to do for innumerable reasons. Here are just two:
1) American citizens are getting killed over a conflict for Iraq....there is no Iraq, there are, in fact, at least three states (Sunni, Shia and Kurdish) and further fractures along these bigger fault lines. For a great debate on the partitioning of Iraq, see Peter W. Galbraith's debate on the The New Republic's site. Galbraith is the first U.S. Ambassador to Croatia and the author of the book, The End of Iraq: How American Competence Created a War Without End. Galbraith debates Reuel Marc Gerecht, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an advisor to the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Survey Group.
2) It's costing American taxpayers and eventually the current debts will come home to roost in an awful way, which inturn will be sure to effect the world economy. But don't take my word for it. Everyone who's anyone is suggesting a withdrawal of some sort:

Fareed Zakaria writing for Newsweek: November 6, 2006

But today, more than three years into the American-led invasion of Iraq, there is little question that we stand at, well, a critical moment. The policy we are pursuing—maintaining 144,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and hoping that things improve—is not sustainable either in Iraq or in America. President Bush has three tools at his disposal that he can (theoretically) apply to the mission at hand—more troops, money and time. At this point, none of these will make much difference.

Robert Kaplan writing on The Atlantics website: October 22, 2006

What we will not be able to manage is a genocide, mainly of the Sunnis, that we alone will be seen as responsible for. Any withdrawal—with all of its military, diplomatic, economic aid, and emergency relief aid aspects—has to be as meticulously planned-out as our occupation wasn't. Staying the course may be a dead end. But don't think for a moment that "redeploying" is any less risky than invading.

The Economist should be called The Optimist. They are still holding out for a (no, not a victory or even a positive outcome, but) "a more stable trajectory." Nevertheless, implicit in this argument is the idea of the end game.

For the politicians (and newspapers, like ours) who argued strongly for the invasion of Iraq, it is no longer enough to accuse those who want to head for the exit of “cutting and running”, as if using a pejorative phrase settled the argument either way. Cutting your losses is sometimes the sensible thing to do, even for a superpower, and even after paying a heavy price in lost lives and wasted money. If you genuinely believe, as many people now do, that the likeliest long-term outcome in Iraq is that America will end up cutting and running anyway, with no improvement to be expected even three or four years hence, why simply postpone the inevitable?
Because failure may not be inevitable.

Even Henry Kissinger's recent article at The Washinton Post's site entitled, "Lessons for an Exit Strategy," is trying to see its way to the exit sign:

American strategy, including a withdrawal process, will stand or fall not on whether it maintains the existing security situation but on whether the capacity to improve it is enhanced. Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy.

I Double Dare You!

Blair warns Sudan close to "crunch point"
Tue Oct 31, 2006 1:36 PM GMT

LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Tony Blair warned Sudan on Tuesday it was nearing the "crunch point" for Khartoum to enforce the peace in Darfur or risk isolation and unspecified action by the international community.

Blair met Sudanese Vice President Salva Kiir in London and told him "everyone must stop fighting and resume dialogue with the people who did not sign up to the peace agreement," Blair's spokesman told reporters.

"We are reaching the crunch point. It's important that the Sudanese government be in no doubt at all of our seriousness," he said at a briefing about the two leaders' talks.

Blair told Kiir there must be "clear progress" by November 24 when African Union leaders meet to discuss Darfur.

More than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million driven from their homes to live in camps in Sudan and across the border in Chad since the start of fighting in Darfur in 2003.

A Different Take on Jan Pronk's Dismissal

Eric Reeves has recently written on his website regarding Jan Pronk's outspoken nature on the genocide underway in Darfur. Jan Pronk who was, in my eyes, doing the right thing by speaking out is, according to Reeves, a bit of a loose cannon. Reeves writes,

"At the same time, it must be said that Pronk’s tenure has been marked by egregious errors in judgment, perverse miscalculations, expedient disingenuousness, and a series of decisions that have had disastrous consequences for the international response to massive, ongoing genocidal destruction. He is sharply faulted by many, including many within the UN and the humanitarian community, and his imminent departure (he would not have survived the impending changes within the Secretariat) ensures that he can do no further damage (search “pronk” at www.sudanreeves.org for a series of critiques of Pronk’s performance over the past two and a half years). His expulsion also ensures, however, that there is very likely to be no senior UN diplomatic presence in Sudan"

To add an extra wrinkle to this, Media Monitors Networks has cast aspersions on Eric Reeves' credibility:

Dr Reeves' credibility as a commentator and researcher has already been extensively questioned in 'The Return of the 'Ugly American': Eric Reeves and Sudan'. (2) The credibility of his claims about Sudan have been undermined further by recent comments made by the United Nations World Food Programme which is active in those very areas of Sudan about which Mr Reeves makes his bold assertions.

I looked through Media Monitors website and I would rather trust Reeves and Jeff Weintraub when it comes to Darfur. Weintraub has written about Jan Pronk's expulsion from Darfur thusly:

Meanwhile, the Khartoum government has underlined its increasingly blatant contempt for the alleged "international community" by ordering the expulsion of the main UN envoy in Sudan, Jan Pronk. As it happens, Pronk has been one of the high UN officials most accommodating to the Khartoum government's positions, but it seems that even some mildly realistic comments about what Khartoum calls "sensitive issues" are too much.