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Contrarian Christopher Hitchens takes stock of the Anglo-American intervention into Iraq, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the war, in "How did I get the Iraq war so wrong? I didn't" (The Australian, March 20, 2008).

Hitchens reminds us of some notable successes achieved:

A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial.

The Kurdish and Shi'ite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide.

A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled.

The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated.

Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil-free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qa'ida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society.

Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would the Gaddafi gang have turned over Libya's (much larger than anticipated) stock of WMD, if not for the ripple effect of the removal of the region's keystone dictatorship.

Hitchens provides no conclusive reason to claim these positive developments outweigh the negative results: the costs of the war in lives and treasure and its undesirable unintended consequences.

Yet, he does rebut the easy answer of those war critics who think that had we simply not intervened, any bad result would not be our fault. He dubs this position the "Bishop Berkeley theory," to wit, "if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it's not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn't count, and we are not involved."

Hitchens points to the potentially shameful and dire consequences of the Bishop Berkeley attitude toward a "war of choice" in Burma, Rwanda and Darfur.

Alas, in a morally ambiguous world, there is no safe refuge from responsibility.

Labels: al Qaeda, Al-Qa'idah, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, Burma, Christopher Hitchens, Darfur, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Rwanda, Syria

What would a Lebanese company in the Bekaa Valley that sells frozen fruits and vegetables want with a Ukrainian factory producing the special steel pipes needed for nuclear reactors and rocket production?

The Ukrayinska Pravda website in Kiev published the following report on February 20 entitled "Arabs want to buy a plant working for rocket production. For Al-Qa'idah?" (BBC English translation by subscription).

The state-owned Nikopol pipe plant, a producer of unique stainless thin-walled seamless pipes and titanium-and-nickel alloys, which currently undergoes bankruptcy procedures, can change hands to Junet, a Lebanese company willing to invest 35m dollars in the plant.

The director-general of the National Space Agency of Ukraine, Yuriy Alyekseyev, said this in a letter to the plant's financial readjustment manager.

The output of the plant, which entered a state of financial readjustment in June 2007, is used in rocket production, aviation and in the nuclear sector. It is worth noting that Junet was never before involved in this business. It sells frozen vegetables, fruit, juice and grain.

Labels: al Qaeda, Al-Qa'idah, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, Hezbollah, Lebanon, Ukraine

Arafat died of AIDS-related failures,

"When the subject of Arafat's AIDS condition was raised with a number of Palestinian, French and other sources, the response invariably was that it was an 'open secret', but one now increasingly spoken of in loud whispers..."

and, in the immediate aftermath of his death, the PLO will be dominated by the jihad-oriented faction of Fatah, strongly supported by the Iranian and Syrian governments. These are the reports of sources for Global Information System Stations, in Paris, Cairo, Beirut and Gaza, and related in Friday's Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily.
Here are the details of that report:
• The new Fatah Chairman is Faruq Qaddumi, who has the support of mobilized elements of Palestinean society.
• Qaddumi was in Beirut on November 11, for talks with Syrian and Iranian officials and leaders of HizbAllah and other terrorist and radical groups. He is strongly supported by Legislative Council Speaker and Interim Chairman Rawhi Fatouh.
• Fatah's strongly-active terrorist unit, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, changed its name on Thursday to Arafat Martyrs' Brigade.
• Extensive planning has been underway for some time before Arafat's death was announced to ensure that his funeral would occur on al-Quds (Jerusalem) day, November 12, 2004. This was a holiday created as a "gift" by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran after Arafat became the first Arab official to visit him after the 1979 revolution. Al-Quds Day is the last Friday in the month of Ramadan.
• Several Arab diplomats were told -- while officially Arafat was claimed to be alive -- to be ready and available on al-Quds Day, raising the suspicion that Arafat had been dead for some time before the announcement so that his body could be held for the symbolic day.
• Four separate diplomatic sources, three of them Arab, told GIS/Defense&Foreign Affairs that Arafat died of AIDS-related failures.

Labels: Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, Al-Fatah, Defense and Foreign Affairs Daily, Global Information System, Hezbollah, HIV/AIDS, Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Yassir Arafat