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Sunday, September 23, 2007 |
MrEugenides: "Disturbing developments over at Bloggerheads, where Tim Ireland's blog is 'off-air' - forced out of business thanks to the bullying of an Uzbek billionaire and his lawyers.
Alisher Usmanov recently bought shares in Arsenal. It's been alleged in several quarters that if they choose to dine with this guy, the Gunners should be supping with a very long spoon. The Guardian takes up the story:
"Schillings, the lawyers acting for Usmanov, have been in touch with several independent Arsenal supporters' websites and blogs warning them to remove postings referring to allegations made against him by Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan.
Usmanov was jailed under the old Soviet regime but says that he was a political prisoner who was then freed and granted a full pardon once Mikhail Gorbachev came to power as president. Schillings have warned the websites that repetition of Murray's allegations were regarded as 'false, indefensible and grossly defamatory'.
It appears that m'learned friends' intervention has had the desired effect. Tim's webhost has caved in the face of a flurry of threatening letters from Schillings, and his blog has had the plug pulled, as has Craig Murray. Both of them had published comments about Usmanov which prompted him to reach for the phone to his lackeys at Schillings. Worse, and particularly stupidly, a whole network of sites hosted on the same server have also been taken down, among them Bob Piper and Boris Johnson, who were not involved in any way. Nut, sledgehammer, rearrange."
This is what it is all about.
Thanks to The Cartoonist for the cartoon.
1:43:17 PM 
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Macleans: "Arriving in Baghdad has always been a little weird. Under Saddam Hussein it was like going into an orderly morgue; when he ran off after the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003 put an end to his Baathist party regime, the city became a chaotic mess.
Since 2003, more than 3,775 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq, while nearly 7,500 Iraqi policemen and soldiers have died. For Iraq's civilian population, the carnage has been almost incalculable. Last year alone, the UN estimated that 34,500 civilians were killed and more than 36,000 wounded; other estimates are much higher. As the country's ethnic divisions widen, especially between Iraq's Arab Shia and Arab Sunni Muslims (the Kurds are the third major group), some two million people have been internally displaced, with another two million fleeing their homeland altogether.
In his testimony to Congress, Gen. Petraeus pointed out the lethal threat of al-Qaeda. But this should come as no surprise to an American general - because the U.S. Army helped create al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The American role in the promotion of the terrorist organization is not some mad conspiracy theory, but a well-documented attempt by the U.S. government to demonize the insurgency and make it appear to be the central front in the war on terror. This was as great a mistake as disbanding the Iraqi army, which the U.S. did in May 2003, or perhaps even greater, since it led to the sectarian downward spiral that has destroyed the country.
One of the worst things to happen to Iraq was the war in Bosnia, a misleading precedent of civil strife and international intervention that taught all the wrong lessons. The conflict in the former Yugoslavia gave the West the false impression that we could successfully interfere in complex disagreements because we were on the side of justice [sic] and immensely powerful.
Ironically, the recent American support for Sunni militias is itself a classic Balkan solution to an Iraqi problem. In 1994, the U.S. quietly helped to build up the Croatian army, allowing the Croats to sweep through Serb-held Krajina the following year, viciously cleansing it of the Serbs. The newly pumped-up Croats then acted as a counterbalance to Serbian power; this, in turn, brought Slobodan Milosevic to the table and led to the signing of the Dayton peace accord. Today, the Sunni tribes are the Croats, backed by the U.S. and presenting an increasing military threat to the Shia government, which at some point may have to rely on Iran to defend itself.
One of the terrifying aspects of the war is the monumental failure of analysis and action on the part of America's political, military, journalistic and even business elites."
11:06:39 AM
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