Since
Ask me three questions, no more no less. Ask me anything you want about my life, interests, hobbies, anything really. Then I want you to go to your journal, copy and paste this allowing your friends (including myself) to ask you anything they want.
5) How Bosnia Armed by Marko Attila Hoare
I’ve read lots of “big picture” books and essays on Bosnia-Herzegovina (heck, I’ve helped write one or two of them myself) but there are surprisingly few micro-studies of particular aspects of the conflict other than the horrors of particular atrocities. So this book is a real breath of fresh air in some ways; the author has looked only at the army of one faction in the conflict, the Muslims aka Bosniaks, and concentrates on the army’s organisational and political history rather than its performance in battle.
Indeed, one of the points that comes out is just how few battles there actually were in the three and a half years of war. The consequent stalemate left plenty of time for politicking between state and officers and for disputes within the system; parts of the Sarajevo corps were controlled by local gangesters; the viciousness of the Srebrenica group towards its local Serb antagonists was ultimately, and horribly, more than repaid; the Bihac command was the only consistent area of success, facing down an internal rebellion and making gains off the Serbs.
This is really only a book for the Bosnia-Herzegovina enthusiast, as demonstrated by the fact that there are no maps – OK for those of us who know the country but no good for the neophyte. It did explain one or two things for me that I had been wondering about – the micro-history of the patchwork of Croat and Muslim areas of control in central Bosnia, and the previous history of the sinister Munir Alibabic. Although the writer takes a pro-Bosnian perspective it doesn’t much cloud his judgement, really because he is telling the inside story of the people with whom he sympathises rather than their opponents.
There are three points where I think his account is lacking. One is his repeated dismissal of rebel Muslim Fikret Abdic as a mere “traitor” or “agent of Belgrade”. Abdic’s story, from fraudulent agri-businessman to local warlord, is much more interesting than that – indeed, in terms of democratic legitimacy he outpolled all others in the 1990 elections, so a clearer explanation is needed of who was betraying whom. It would be interesting for someone some day to explore Abdic’s story in more detail. He won’t come out of it well, but it will be a more rounded picture than is found here.
The second is the man to whom (for reasons never properly explained) Abdic handed the leadership of Bosnia in 1990, Alija Izetbegovic. It is apparent at frequent points in the text that Izetbegovic was very nearly worse than useless as a leader, and that he repeatedly made disastrous decisions about military and political strategy. It would have been good to see an overall assessment to this effect, as well as some explanation of why despite his manifest deficiencies he held onto leadership of his party and his part of the country until 2000.
The third is actually the question raised by the title of the book. How did Bosnia arm? The supply of arms from Iran in 1994-95, sanctioned by the Clinton administration, is mentioned only briefly in passing. How many arms were supplied? What difference did it make to the outcome of the war? Likewise the rumour I have heard about the unusually success of the Bosnians in Bihac being helped by UN peacekeepers “donating” them significant amounts of military materiel. It may well not be true, but it would have been interesting to investigate.
There’s a brief afterthought about the influence of Bin Laden and the Mujahedin on the Bosnians, which shades into the author’s more recent and highly entertaining and effective demolition of the leftish conspiracy theories about the Yugoslav wars (I’m glad someone is doing it as well as Hoare does). A good book for the expert, not one for the beginner.
When I first went to Bosnia in 1997 I moved into an apartment in Banja Luka that I was told had recently been vacated by the previous tenant, an Englishman generally known as “Mr Attila”. I guess the odds are high that he and the author of this book are one and the same. It’s a small world, especially in the Balkans.
4) Essays and Lays of Ancient Rome by Thomas Babington Macaulay
This book was given to my great aunt as a second prize for general good behaviour at her Somerset boarding school in 1886. It includes several of the Lays of Ancient Rome published first in 1841, two other historical essays (on Robert Clive and Warren Hastings) published at the same time, and Macaulay’s first ever historical essay on Milton, published originally in 1825.
I don’t remember my father’s aunt, who died aged 98 when I was very small; she was one of the oldest of my great-grandfather’s 15 children, and her husband was the chieftain of one of the Irish clans, whose brother founded a medium-sized poliical party in the early years of the Irish Free State and then merged it into what became Fine Gael. Meanwhile my great-aunt’s son grew up to become a British ambassador in south-east Asia, and added a knighthood to the clan chieftainship which he eventually inherited.
However the book is not especially enlightening about her – presumably she had no qualms about leaving it behind in her parents’ house when she got married in 1894. Once or twice in my historian days I found relics from early on in someone’s life, and it does leave you realising how little you can tell of what lies in store for you at that stage. The connection between this book and the elderly lady who, visiting Dublin in the 1940s, would stay in Phoenix Park with her former neighbour, President Douglas Hyde, is fairly slim. But not completely fictitious.
Oh yes, the book itself. Well, the Lays of Ancient Rome are supposedly translated from a Latin original by Macaulay into the style and rhythm of ballads, the most famous being “Horatius at the Bridge”. I felt bothered by the fact that actually much of the plot and all the incidental details were as far as I can tell made up by Macaulay, so it’s really a work of historical fiction by him. Good stirring stuff, but to this cynical reader obviously invented to inspire good manly values in the reader – build the alliance of aristocracy with the common people in order to prevent democracy and mob rule. Indeed, that’s what I felt about all the poems.
The two historical essays on Englishmen who got involved with India, Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, brought home to me how little I know about India. Macaulay of course lived there for several years himself, but earlier readers – both in the 1840s when the essays were written and in the 1880s when my great aunt was given the book (one of her brothers later died in Fyzabad, now Faizabad, enforcing the values of the Raj) – would have had a much better knowledge of the localities mentioned than I do. His opinion of Bengalis is so negative that it is comical (one of my mother’s sisters is married to a Bengali). John Keay’s History of India is sitting on my shelf looking accusingly at me; I don’t think I got beyond 700 AD when I last tried reading it a few years ago.
Finally, the essay on Milton – as I said, Macaulay’s first published work, and one that is much more directly political. For any Irish reader it’s difficult to deal with the approval rating that Cromwell gets from otherwise sane and sensible English people. Macaulay of course isn’t sane and sensible by any measure, and I felt I learnt a lot more about Milton and his age from Claire Tomalin’s biography of Pepys – although Milton isn’t actually mentioned in Pepys’ diary, his secretary was the brother of Pepys’ long term lady friend.
In summary, a book that made me realise how distant we are (or at least, how distant I am) from the cultural heritage of the nineteenth century, and also how much more mature history (at least the history I read) is as a discipline than the rhetorical Whiggery which made Macaulay famous.
From
…from the U.S.-based thinktank Stratfor, who have called a number of things right so far. (Locked post more because this is copyright material than because it’s political, so feel free to quote extracts attributing to Stratfor.)
Bush’s Crisis: Articulating a Strategy in Iraq and the Wider War
Summary
President George W. Bush’s press conference on Tuesday evening was fascinating in its generation of a new core justification for the Iraq campaign: building a democratic Iraq. It is unclear why Bush would find this a compelling justification for the invasion, but it is more unclear why the administration continues to generate unconvincing arguments for its Iraq policy, rather than putting forward a crisp, strategic and — above all — real justification.
Analysis
It is clear that the current crisis in Iraq was not expected by the Bush administration. That in itself ought not to be a problem. Even the most successful war is filled with unexpected and unpleasant surprises. D-Day in Normandy was completely fouled up; the German Ardennes offensive caught the Allies by surprise.
No war goes as expected. However, in order to recover from the unexpected, it is necessary to have a clear strategic framework from which you are operating. This means a clearly understood concept of how the pieces of the war fit together — a concept that can be clearly articulated to both the military and the public. Without a framework that defines where you are going, you can never figure out where you are. It becomes impossible to place the unexpected in an understandable context, and it becomes impossible to build trust among the political leadership, the military and the nation. This is why the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam was unmanageable — yet the Ardennes offensive of 1944-1945 was readily managed.
In a piece entitled “Smoke and Mirrors: The United States, Iraq and Deception” which Stratfor published Jan. 21, 2003, we commented on the core of the coming Iraq campaign, which was that the public justification for the war (weapons of mass destruction) and the strategic purpose of the war (a step in redefining regional geopolitics) were at odds. We argued that: “In a war that will last for years, maintaining one’s conceptual footing is critical. If that footing cannot be maintained — if the requirements of the war and the requirements of strategic clarity are incompatible — there are more serious issues involved than the future of Iraq.”
During President George W. Bush’s press conference this week, that passage came to mind again. The press conference focused on what has become the new justification for the war — bringing Western-style democracy to Iraq. A subsidiary theme was that Iraq had been a potential threat to the United States because it “coddled” terrorists. Mounting a multidivisional assault on a fairly large nation for these reasons might be superficially convincing, but they could not be the main reasons for invasion – – and they weren’t. We will not repeat what we regard as the main line of reasoning (War Plan: Consequences http://www.stratfor.com/story.neo) behind the invasion, because our readers are fully familiar with our read of the situation. We will merely reassert that the real reason — the capture of the most strategic country in the region in order to exert pressure on regimes that were in some way enablers of al Qaeda — was more plausible, persuasive and defensible than the various public explanations, from links to al Qaeda to WMD to bringing democracy to the Iraqi masses. Such logic might work when it comes to sending a few Marines on a temporary mission to Haiti, but not for sending more than 130,000 troops to Iraq for an open-ended commitment.
Answers and Platitudes
Bush’s inability and/or unwillingness to articulate a coherent strategic justification for the Iraq campaign — one that integrates the campaign with the general war on Islamists that began Sept. 11 — is at the root of his political crisis right now. If the primary purpose of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was to bring democracy to Iraq, then enduring the pain of the current crisis will make little sense to the American public. Taken in isolation, bringing democracy to Iraq may be a worthy goal, but not one taking moral precedence over bringing democracy to several dozen other countries — and certainly not a project worth the sacrifices now being made necessary.
If, on the other hand, the invasion was an integral part of the war that began Sept. 11, then Bush will generate public support for it. The problem that Bush has — and it showed itself vividly in his press conference — is that he and the rest of his administration are simply unable to embed Iraq in the general strategy of the broader war. Bush asserts that it is part of that war, but then uses the specific justification of bringing democracy to Iraq as his rationale. Unless you want to argue that democratizing Iraq — assuming that is possible — has strategic implications more significant than democratizing other countries, the explanation doesn’t work. The explanation that does work — that the invasion of Iraq was a stepping-stone toward changes in behavior in other countries of the region — is never given.
We therefore wind up with an explanation that is only superficially plausible, and a price that appears to be excessive, given the stated goal. The president and his administration do not seem willing to provide a coherent explanation of the strategy behind the Iraq campaign. What was the United States hoping to achieve when it invaded Iraq, and what is it defending now? There are good answers to these questions, but Bush stays with platitudes.
This is not only odd, but also it has substantial political implications for Bush and the United States. First, by providing no coherent answer, he leaves himself open to critics who are ascribing motives to his policy — everything from controlling the world’s oil supply, to the familial passion to destroy Saddam Hussein, to a Jewish world conspiracy. The Bush administration, having created an intellectual vacuum, can’t complain when others, trying to understand what the administration is doing, gin up these theories. The administration has asked for it.
There is an even more important dimension to this. The single most important thing that happened during the recent offensive in Iraq was that the United States entered into negotiations for the first time with the Sunni guerrillas in Al Fallujah. The United States has now traveled a path that began with Donald Rumsfeld’s dismissing the guerrillas as a disorganized band of dead-enders and led to the belief (shared by us) that they had been fairly defeated in December 2003 — and now to negotiations that were initiated by the United States. The negotiations began with a simple, limited cease-fire and have extended to a longer, more open-ended truce.
The United States is facing the fact that the Sunni guerrillas have not only not been defeated, but that they are sufficiently well organized and supported by the broader Sunni population that negotiations are possible with them. There is an organized Sunni command authority that planned and executed this operation and is now weighing U.S. offers on a truce. That is a huge change in the U.S. perception of the Sunni guerrillas. Negotiations are also something that the administration would never have contemplated two weeks ago, regardless of how limited the topic might be. The idea that the United States needed to negotiate anything was unthinkable.
This is not the only negotiation going on at the moment. There are negotiations with the Muqtada al-Sadr group. Negotiations with the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani group. Discussions with the Iranians. Iraq is swirling with negotiations, offers, bluffs, double crosses and lies. It is quite a circus at the moment, with at least three major players (the Sunnis, the Shia, the United States) who are in turn fragmented in all sorts of fascinating ways — and this doesn’t even begin to include the Kurds and other minorities.
Making Alliances
The United States is going to have to make alliances. Its core alliance with the majority Shia has to be redefined in the wake of al-Sadr’s uprising. Even if al-Sadr is destroyed with his militia, the United States and the Shia will have much to talk about. Far more important, the United States is now talking to the Sunni guerrillas. That might or might not lead anywhere, but it is vitally important to all sides, no matter what comes of it. The United States has recognized that the Sunni enemy is a competent authority in some sense — and that changes everything.
The United States will combine military action with political maneuvering. That is logical and inevitable in this sort of war. But as deals are cut with a variety of players, how will Bush’s argument that the United States is building democracy in Iraq fly? The United States will be building coalitions. Whether it is a democracy is another matter. Indeed, it was al-Sistani demanding elections (which he knew the Shia would win) and the president putting off elections — declaring at the press conference that he would not bend to Shiite demands on a timetable.
The problem that Bush has created is that there is no conceptual framework in which to understand these maneuvers. Building democracy in Iraq is not really compatible with the deals that are going to have to be cut. It is not that cutting deals is a bad idea. It is not that the current crisis cannot be overcome with a combination of political and military action. The problem is that no one will know how the United States is doing, because it has not defined a conceptual framework for what it is trying to accomplish in Iraq — or how Iraq fits into the war on the jihadists.
Bush Political Crisis
This is creating a massive political crisis for Bush domestically. The public knows there is a crisis in Iraq, but there is little understanding of how to judge whether the crisis is being managed. If the only criterion is the creation of democracy, that is not only a distant goal, but also one that will be undermined by necessary U.S. deal-making. Democracy — by any definition that the American public can recognize — is not coming to Iraq anytime soon. If that is the mark of success, Bush’s only hope is that he won’t be kept to a tight timetable. What is worse for Bush is that, in his news conference, he framed the coming presidential election as basically a referendum on his policy in Iraq. The less that policy is understood, and the more Iraq appears uncontrollable, the more vulnerable Bush will be to charges that the Iraq war was unjustified, and that it is a distraction from the wider war — which the American electorate better understands and widely supports.
He is facing John Kerry, who has shrewdly chosen to call neither for a withdrawal from Iraq nor for an end to the war on the Islamist world. Kerry’s enormous advantage is that he can articulate a strategy without having to take responsibility for anything in the past. He can therefore argue that Bush’s impulses were correct, but that he lacked a systematic strategy. Stratfor said in its annual forecast that the election was Bush’s to lose. We now have to say that he is making an outstanding attempt to lose it.
Obviously, the administration has a strategy in Iraq and the Islamic world. It is a strategy that is discussed inside the administration and is clearly visible outside. Obviously, there will be military and political reversals. The strategy and the reversals are far more understandable than the decisions the Bush administration has made in presenting them. It has adopted a two-tier policy: a complex and nearly hidden strategic plan and a superficial public presentation.
It could be argued that in a democratic society like the United States, it is impossible to lay bare the cold-blooded reasoning behind a war, and that the war needs to be presented in a palatable fashion. This might be true — and there are examples of both approaches in American history — but we tend to think that in the face of Sept. 11, only a cold-blooded plan, whose outlines are publicly presented and accepted, can work. We could be wrong, but on this we have no doubt. Even if the administration is correct in its assumption that there must be a two-tier approach to the public presentation of the war, it has done a terrible job in articulating its public justification.
The administration has held only three press conferences. Some explain this by saying that the president is too inarticulate to withstand public grilling. We don’t buy that. He is not the greatest orator by any means, but he doesn’t do that badly. His problem is that he will not engage on the core strategic question. Franklin Roosevelt, our best wartime president bar none — who should be the model for any wartime president — spoke on and off the record with reporters, continually and with shocking frankness when we look back on it. He did not hesitate to discuss strategy — from Germany First to relations with Joseph Stalin. He filled the public space with detail and managed public expectations brilliantly, even during the terrible first six months of the war.
We are convinced that the Bush administration has a defensible strategy. It is not a simple one and not one that can be made completely public, but it is a defensible strategy. If President Bush decides not to articulate it, it will be interesting to see whether President Kerry does, because we are convinced that if Bush keeps going in the direction he is going, he will lose the election. The president’s public presentation of the war is designed to exploit success, not to withstand reversals and hardships. What is fascinating is that political operatives like Karl Rove, the president’s political adviser, can’t seem to get their arms around this simple fact: The current communications strategy is not working. They seem frozen in place, seemingly hoping that something will turn up. We doubt strongly that building democracy in Iraq is the cry that will rally the American nation.
I see that the Prime Minister is ahead in the first round of the Macedonian presidential election, but that there is a second round still to come – with the ethnic Albanian votes holding the balance.
I’ve met PM Crvenkovski a couple of times; I don’t know the other candidate at all. The good thing is that the more moderate Albanian candidate kicked the ass of the more extreme one, which suggests that Macedonia is not doing too badly.
You are a GRAMMAR GOD!
If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!
How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
Though of course the same could be said for several other countries…
Perturbing conversation with a friend in NATO who is going for both the jobs that I am going for. And he has a significant advantage over me for both; he’s a NATO insider, so will have a good track on the NATO job, and his mother is from the same small country as the commissioner most likely to get the relevant EU post, so he speaks the right language (literally). But I got the impression he hadn’t done any background work with the Brits, even though he too is a British citizen, so I might just be able to have the edge on him there in that I have been doing a little hacking. To be honest I’d thought of him as an obvious successor for me in this post as well. But since he’s currently working for NATO he won’t want the pay cut.
Bah, just checked his CV which I found on-line, and he’s eight months older than me. Not sure why this bothers me. Probably just means it’s time for dinner.
Our office in country X (not one of mine) has had to close due to government oppression, and I’ve been able to steal one of the analysts to do some work for me in country Y. It’s an ill wind…
B’s at the respite care place for a few days, and I had the day off work, so took F to see Mini Europe at the foot of the Atomium north of Brussels. Quite fun, and filled with tourists. Highlights for me: the motorway bridge representing Luxembourg with model traffic jam on top of it; the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate, you can knock a bit of it down and then it pops back up again for the next customer; the Ariane rocket; the Irish national anthem which swells to a climax and then omits to play the last line; trying to get F to remember the name of Big Ben. Highlights for F: the model TGV, the model Eurostar, the model trucks and boats; the real ducks and fish in the ponds; the ice cream in the restaurant afterwards. Highlight for us both: the model of Vesuvius which erupts with smoke and earthquake. Most of the cultural stuff is lost on a four-year-old but I think we’ll go back.
West Belfast is done. Now all I have to do is redesign the front page…
So I’ve got Strangford done. And then discovered that the interns managed to scramble the data for the last constituency, which is of course the one which interests more people than any other… Will have to reconstruct from scratch.
An excellent profession of faith from Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
North Belfast, where I myself got a glorious 4.1% of the votes back in 1996.
I was browsing in a bookshop during the week and came across the autobiography of a well-known writer, who has been dead now for over a decade. I was struck by his description of his son, who had “normal” intelligence, but “could not keep a job because he could not get along with his fellow employees” and was now a “gentleman of leisure”, living off his father’s support and happy being alone with his TV and VCR.
The story has a rather grim twist, in that the son was busted a few years ago (long after his father’s death) for possession of child porn among his many videotapes. Interestingly, he was given a non-custodial sentence after psychiatric reports. Conspiracy theorists mutter that this was obviously due to a political fix thanks to the connections of his (by then long dead) father. I think it’s much more likely that the court psychiatrists made the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, or perhaps even autism, that should have been made decades before.
South Down (having problems uploading though)
Just back from church and hunting of Easter eggs in the garden. Here in Belgium, the church bells all go off to visit the Holy Land on Good Friday and return for Easter, bringing the Easter eggs with them. However bunnification has hit most of the chocolate eggs on sale here, I’m sorry to say.
I doubt very much that she found anything of the kind, let alone that three carefully chosen pot-holes in the cliff face happened to be the very same three holes used for a routine execution. But having read up on the evidence, it does seem to me likely that this is the site that was traditionally associated with the tomb from quite an early stage. The extraordinary thing is that a shrine which ought by rights to be the pulsing vibrant centre of Christianity is no such thing; it’s not that it’s too big – St Peter’s is bigger, and has the right sort of aura – but that the space is not harmonised; the six squabbling sects who are perpetually renegotiating the territory within the church have been unable to create a space for reflection. Symptomatic is the ladder visible outside one of the windows which has been there since the Crimean War, as nobody can agree who has the right to move it.
Personally I felt much closer to the roots of my faith this morning, standing with my hands linked to the rest of the congregation, chanting the Lord’s Prayer in Flemish, musing on the symbolism of canles, light, water, darkness. And eggs of course. Must go and cook lunch.
3) Green Shadows, White Whale by Ray Bradbury
I’ve had this on my list of sf/fantasy books with an Irish dimension for a while; I had a discussion of it with
It’s the story of young sf writer Ray Bradbury, brought to Ireland by film director John Huston, to write a screenplay for Moby Dick. Huston comes across as a real monster, incessantly bullying his wife, Bradbury and other colleagues, with almost no redeeming features. I found Bradbury’s portrayal of Ireland and the Irish irritating at first and then I realised that he was doing nothing more than writing in his usual style; it might as well have been Mars.
The short stories dropped into the narrative – including two with fantasy elements, which I list on my web page – are the best bits of a very uneven book. The only other “novel” I’ve read by Bradbury, To the Dust Returned, was equally uneven. Perhaps he is someone who needs the discipline of the short story form to write quality stuff. For €7.50 I can’t complain too much.
North Down. Unusual in that no decimal places are involved.
Novella nominees (four out of five):
Empress of Mars, by Kage Baker – also a Nebula nominee; oddly enough I printed it off a few days ago, but hadn’t yet read it.
The Green Leopard Plague, by Walter Jon Williams
Just Like the Ones We Used to KNow, by Connie Willis
The Cookie Monster, by Vernor Vinge
Novelette nominees (two out of six):
The Empire of Ice Cream by Jeffrey Ford – as with the Kage Baker story, I’ve printed it off but not yet read it.
Bernardo’s House, James Patrick Kelly
Short Story nominees (just one out of five):
Robots Don’t Cry by Mike Resnick.
No doubt more will be added now that the nominations are public.
South Belfast. 127.43 votes separated the runner-up from the last candidate elected.
The Hugo nominations have been announced.
OK, time to get reading. (And ordering.)
West Tyrone. Several interesting features for connoisseurs of the Single Transferable vote (probably none are reading this).
Over the long weekend I will try and complete putting up the Assembly election results.
Tonight: Upper Bann
Nach dem Aufstand des 17. Juni
Ließ der Sekretär des Schriftstellerverbands
In der Stalinallee Flugblätter verteilen
Auf denen zu lesen war, daß das Volk
Das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt habe
Und es nur durch verdoppelte Arbeit
Zurückerobern könne. Wäre es da
Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung
Löste das Volk auf und
Wählte ein anderes?
The Solution
After the uprising on June 17th
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had flyers distributed in Stalin Way that said
That the People had frivolously
Thrown away the Government’s Confidence
And that they could only regain it
Through Redoubled Work. But wouldn’t it be
Simpler if the Government
Simply dissolved the People
And elected another?
From a House of Commons committee meeting of 1 March 2001:
Simon Hughes: Probably every single person in the Room—including members of the Committee, Officers of the House, civil servants and visitors—has played the game of trying to get an illegal drink or two before reaching the age of 18. [HON. MEMBERS: “Oh.”] Methinks my colleagues protest too much. I was not even referring to the leader of the Conservative party—who did it all the time according to his own reminiscences—but speaking for myself.
Jackie Ballard (Taunton): Only you can do that.
Simon Hughes: Indeed.
It was part of school life to go to places that were out of bounds and where one could buy cigarettes and drink. I shall not mention the third thing, but that was available too, if one looked in the right place. It probably had more attraction than the other two for some people.
Charles Clarke: What?
Jackie Ballard: Sex.
Simon Hughes: My hon. Friend is helpful to the Minister, who is clearly innocent of such matters and must have had a delayed upbringing.
How it will work in Ireland:
http://www.1mho.com/evoting/