Ah ha! So that’s what it was really about. Well why didn’t you say so at the start rog?

Show me any example of you from any time in the year 2003 saying that’s what it was really all about and I promise never to yank your chain again.

The constitution creates an incredibly loose federation, allowing the Shia South and a Kurdish North to amalgamate into super provinces which will essentially function as separate nations with their own police forces, laws and armies. Moreover, it directs revenue from oil rights and government assistance to those same parties at the expense of the Sunnis in the centre. In driving for this they are effectively sowing the seeds of civil war.

Large densely populated areas of the country are claimed by rival enthnic groups; the Kurds in particular are laying claim to the cities of Kirkuk and Mosul and their outlying provinces both of which are in no sense Kurdish majority and contain substantial Turkmen and Sunni populations who are now at the other side of a slow-mo ethnic cleansing program. While the Western World was watching New Orleans dissolve into toxic sludge, the largely Turkoman city of Tal Afar went over to the insurgency and was retaken by US troops and Kurdish peshmerga.

Likewise, Baghdad and cities like Hilla and Balad (scene of three simultaneous carbombings in a Shia district just a few days ago) in the Sunni ‘zone’ have large Shia and Kurdish populations - Sadr city in Baghdad, stronghold of Muqtada (it’s named after his father Muhammad Sadiq) has a million Shias at last count. Unsurprisingly, al-Sadr and his slum army are opposed to any agreement that would leave them stranded in the Sunni territories.

Democracy huh? It’s a wierd sort of democracy that refuses to recognise any laws that contradict Islamic law. I find it strange that right wingers claiming we need to stick by the SCIRI government and claim it is a democracy declaim the laws it has put forward in the constitution, laws which make it little different from shariah states like Iran (and Saudi Arabia). It’s a wierd sort of democracy that allows states to field their own entirely differant law courts, seperate paramilitary groups, and revenues beyond the control of the ferderal government.

If this is democracy I don’t understand what Bush’s problem with Syrian Lebanon was.

Back to the point-scoring

Rob - Everyone gets moderated. I did last night, but you’re the only one who complains. I think Mark hit the roof last night but I can see why he would. All irony and sarcasm aside, spam filter moderation is a compromise between occaisional post quarantine and crapflooding by mindless bots, a choice far less decent moderators than Mark wouldn’t agonise over for a second. The fact that you make a habit of bitching about it strikes me as flat out freaking whiny: It happens to all of us. Deal with it and quit moaning. As a not yet twenty year old its embarrasing to watch an elder carp and whinge like a two year old.

Can I say I think Leinad made some very good rejoinder points that I’d like to get back to when I’m less tired.

If you feel I overreacted I apologise and I ought not to use language like that, so I’m sorry.

1. Irony is sometimes hard to read in text. Given constant annoyance from the spam thing and various other problems, not to mention the Tim Lambert vs anti-Tim Lambert stuff last weekend it was hard to read your comment as any other way than literally, particularly when it came on top of claims you made previously (and as recently as Friday) that your comments were being moderated and that you were being singled out.

I don’t take kindly to being accused of manipulating discourse or being partial in allowing comments. You might recall that J F Beck made similar statements over the course of the week. All this has a cumulative effect, and irony or humour or otherwise, you should be aware of how you’re contributing to it.

2. I don’t quite know how to take your various somewhat qualified apologies except to accept them.

However, I’ll take the fuck-off option.

Not the point. The question is: Is it helping?

But those who stand in ‘relative safety’ and don’t enlist to go over there and fight in support of their blustering convictions are not ‘gutless’ but paragons of RWDB warmongering virtue?

I’d be interested to know what “winning” means to RWDBs and pinko commie lefties.

Moreover, IMO its the mindless backing up military bullying of civilians (eg Israel’s illegal occupation beyond their 1967 borders) thats is the ‘gutless’ position. Its weak and craven. Bowing down to the powerful, no matter whether their cause is just, or otherwise.

Of course, I suppose to follow your logic, the US had no part to play in any illegal wars, mass killings of civilians, torture, breakdown in law and order, infrastructure shambles, record Iraqi unemployment, US corporate corruption in Iraq, reduced oil exports; nor did it therefore have any part to play in creating your ‘medieval islamic state of terror’.

Iraq to you must sound like a great western triumph, so it must be ‘gutless’ to keep asking people to continue dying for a triumph. Or, if it’s not a triumph could it be they are dying for a mistake? Oh, sorry, the ‘cut and run’ delusion.

By the way, does RWDB ’scuffling for honour’ in Iraq include glossing over incompetence, humiliation and defeat or is that just the lying organs of a wicked, wilfully woeful traitorous capitalistic press spewing their hatred when you don’t like what they report?

(It’s difficult not to conclude that ‘wishfully hoping, begging, ducking for cover, blustering but often pleading to save face’ is now the real RWDB Iraqi doctrine.)

Hubris, as they say, is almost always inevitably followed by nemesis.
(After the Greeks, someone said there are none so blind as those who cannot see-that’s why one cartoonist does Ratty with one eye, one presumes.)

“- Withdraw Western military forces from the Middle East.
- Pressure Israel to allow the creation of viable, contiguous Palestinian state.”

That must be the greatest gutless capitulation to the medieval islamic state of terror I ever heard.

But how much time, and how many more lives is acceptable? Is a timetable like the French/US in Vietnam (1945-1975) 10,000 days and 5 or so million dead OK? Following your logic would you like to see Australian conscription of our youth to go and help ‘finish’ the job?

The penny hasn’t dropped that occupations are counterproductive, that nationalist insurgencies have a habit of winning?

What’s your definition of ‘better’, is women’s rights included in that?

FFS

Oh rilly? I thought I was being moderated ‘cos you can’t handle the truth!
Or maybey ‘cos perhaps the software can smell the booze on my breath.

“This is a brand new 21st century truck-up.”

Damn tootin’ And yet so many persist in framing their responses in such 20th century ways to any who dare point out it is becoming a colossal clusterfuck. I’m probably more right wing, or at least more high Tory or low Whig, than some that would call me leftist for being anti this war. I’m anti it cos’ it was fought for the wrong reasons by the wrong people in the wrong way. If I have any ideological leanings at all, it’s towards the “Ban Stupidity Now Party”.

Or as Newk once said to a much younger me, “Never change a winning game, but always change a losing one”.

Well I’ll go to bed while I’m moderated. I still think Mark is feeding my name into the Spaminator.

Rob, you are majorly giving me the shits. Nabs, or Lefty E, don’t assume because they have comments moderated that they’re being deliberately silenced.

You can take your conspiracy theories and make them come true. If you don’t apologise to me within 24 hours for your repeated false and solipsistic and vexatious allegations that you’re being censored, I will fucking well feed your name into the Spaminator. I’m sick of hearing it from you, buddy, you know how bloody frustrated I am by the whole spam problem.

So you can now make up your mind whether you never want to comment here again because of your sly insinuations or just fuck off.

Not because of your politics but because of your bloody rudeness to your host.

I’ll here from you by Sunday or never again.

’sides, most righties are complaining that there’s too much coverage of the insurgencies’ atrocities. In fact didn’t you say a few comments ago that the media don’t report the good news?

Fisk is nuts if (per Brian’s post) he thinks the civil war is an American concoction. It’s going on, its just that only one side has declared it.

Most of the insurgent attacks are now directed on the Shia-Kurd government and just plain Shia’s in general. This in part because they’re ’softer’ targets than the Yanks but also the Yanks themselves are becoming sidelined in this whole process, which is less and less about ending the Occupation per se than who has the best position when the Occupation ends.

Shia religious and political (spot the difference authorities are holding back despite strings of atrocities because they’re trying to get the Americans to leave as quickly as possible and a full blown civil war might have the opposite effect.

*Cue Anti-Boomer Rant*

Yeesh! Alla you! This isn’t 1939. This isn’t 1969. This is a brand new 21st century truck-up and easy answers and slogans from ageing (ex/post/anti)hippy memories -

’stay the course this is their finest our we shall fight on their beaches, we shall fight in their burning oilfields’

and

‘Troops out now! Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam!!! Give peace a chance!’

are more than useless when it comes to examining and understanding what the hell is going on in Iraq.

These chicks and dudes (mainly the dudes, esp if the constitution gets passed) have their own politics, their own feuds, factions, faiths, grudges and dress sense and the eyeglasses of Jane Fonda or Henry Kissinger are not going to help in understanding them.

Honestly!