The Skeptic الشكاك

1080 The Truck Driver and the Atom Bomb

I’m enjoying this, from the latest New Yorker:

The single, blinding release of pure energy over Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, marked a startling and permanent break with our prior understandings of the visible world. Yet for more than sixty years the technology behind the explosion has remained a state secret. The United States government has never divulged the engineering specifications of the first atomic bombs, not even after other countries have produced generations of ever more powerful nuclear weapons. In the decades since the Second World War, dozens of historians have attempted to divine the precise mechanics of the Hiroshima bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, and of the bomb that fell three days later on Nagasaki, known as Fat Man. The most prominent is Richard Rhodes, who won a Pulitzer Prize, in 1988, for his dazzling and meticulous book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” But the most accurate account of the bomb’s inner workings—an unnervingly detailed reconstruction, based on old photographs and documents—has been written by a sixty-one-year-old truck driver from Waukesha, Wisconsin, named John Coster-Mullen, who was once a commercial photographer, and has never received a college degree. [Read on…]

1011 ‘The Way You Mecca Me Feel’

London’s Sun and the slightly more reputable Telegraph report that Michael Jackson has converted to Islam. Both papers run photos of Jackson out and about in Bahrain, dressed in drag.

I think Run CMD said it best over email: “It’s obviously all part of a devious American plan to destroy Islam from within. Michael Jackson is working for Dick Cheney. It all makes sense now.”

994 The Future Is Bright

This is very well done. I particularly like the ad for American Apparel. And “The End of Experts,” by Thomas Friedman.

992 Kilcullen’s Afghanistan Brief

David Kilcullen gives the New Yorker‘s George Packer what must be one of the best, most concise briefs on Afghanistan available from a Western perspective:

Well, we need to be more effective in what we are doing, but we also need to do some different things, as well, with the focus on security and governance. The classical counterinsurgency theorist Bernard Fall wrote, in 1965, that a government which is losing to an insurgency isn’t being out-fought, it’s being out-governed. In our case, we are being both out-fought and out-governed for four basic reasons:

(1) We have failed to secure the Afghan people. That is, we have failed to deliver them a well-founded feeling of security. Our failing lies as much in providing human security—economic and social wellbeing, law and order, trust in institutions and hope for the future—as in protection from the Taliban, narco-traffickers, and terrorists. In particular, we have spent too much effort chasing and attacking an elusive enemy who has nothing he needs to defend—and so can always run away to fight another day—and too little effort in securing the people where they sleep. (And doing this would not take nearly as many extra troops as some people think, but rather a different focus of operations).

(2) We have failed to deal with the Pakistani sanctuary that forms the political base and operational support system for the Taliban, and which creates a protective cocoon (abetted by the fecklessness or complicity of some elements in Pakistan) around senior al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

(3) The Afghan government has not delivered legitimate, good governance to Afghans at the local level—with the emphasis on good governance. In some areas, we have left a vacuum that the Taliban has filled, in other areas some of the Afghan government’s own representatives have been seen as inefficient, corrupt, or exploitative.

(4) Neither we nor the Afghans are organized, staffed, or resourced to do these three things (secure the people, deal with the safe haven, and govern legitimately and well at the local level)—partly because of poor coalition management, partly because of the strategic distraction and resource scarcity caused by Iraq, and partly because, to date, we have given only episodic attention to the war.

So, bottom line—we need to do better, but we also need a rethink in some key areas starting with security and governance. [More…]

Via Abu Muqawama and SWJ.

956 Some Good News

• The Egyptian consul in Saudi Arabia is taking action on behalf of two doctors sentenced to jail terms and lashings for enabling a princess’ morphine addiction. News of the sentence caused a scandal in the Egyptian press. The consul says he hopes for a royal pardon. Too late for the Egyptian the Saudis executed for sorcery a year ago this time, but better late than never.
• Gamal Mubarak has proposed giving all Egyptians over the age of 21, whether they live at home or abroad, shares in Egypt’s public companies. Al-Masry al-Youm reports:
  

  The project aims to raise the financial efficiency of companies, preserve workers’ rights, distribute a package of free shares among citizens and create new entities, such as the Future Generations Fund and the apparatus for managing state-owned assets.

  Alternatively, shareholders could sell immediately. This truly is “new thought.” Perhaps America could learn from Egypt and distribute GM shares among the populace. I’ll leave the question of whether the analogy holds or whether this idea would work in Egypt to the economists. I have my doubts on both scores.

• As a side note, I’m glad to see more politic people have stepped in to express what I was too winded to say after that swift kick to the bidan. Scott MacLeod spells it out at his blog for Time. And the good Prof. Lynch says not to worry, Emanuel won’t influence policy, though the reaction to his appointment should have been anticipated and managed better.

921 Shabola on Obama

The Arab world could ask for no cuddlier a spokesman than its most esteemed political philosopher and McDonald’s jingle-writer, Shabola.

Shabola, remember, was an early Obama supporter. But his thoughts on Obama’s victory now rhyme:

Bush, curse him, made us vomit and wasted us for years, but people think Obama will be Salah ud-Din.

Talk about high expectations… Saladin now. The self-appointed Voice of the Arab Street is equating the next U.S. president with Saladin. [More of Shabola’s thoughts on Obama, Hariri, and Sheikh Yassin here]

The reactions I’ve heard from guys in grocery stores and in cafes have been more muted, but still celebratory. People are just glad Bush is gone, and that the American people didn’t vote for four more years.

The day Obama takes office will be a fragile moment of opportunity for the United States in the Middle East. I guess my message to the new U.S. president would be: Please don’t waste it. It won’t come back again soon.

898 Son of Irgun!

Obama may not “pal around with terrorists,” but his first act as president elect (after giving a rousing speech) was to ask the son of one to be his chief of staff.

Ha’aretz reports that Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois congressman, the inspiration for the character Josh on “The West Wing,” and a former advisor to President Clinton, is also the son of an Irgun member.

The paper also calls Emanuel an Israeli. I would be surprised to learn that dual-nationals can serve as congressmen, but I’ve been surprised before. Or perhaps Ha’aretz just got carried away, and meant “son of an Israeli.” Perhaps they will change the headline.

I have no doubt Emanuel is an intelligent and competent man, however many passports he holds. I assume he has the respect of at least the Clinton people Obama will choose to staff the White House. And Emanuel’s father’s mistakes may not reflect his own beliefs.

Regardless, the appointment of the son of an Irgun militant to such an important office will confirm many Arabs’ worst suspicions about the United States before the ink has dried on the headlines announcing Obama’s historic victory.

(Incidentally, if what the BBC’s correspondent says is true, Emanuel’s appointment would also confirm Republicans’ suspicions that Obama’s talk of bipartisanship is hollow.)

Obama never said he would change U.S. policy with regard to Israel and Palestine, and he did say he would appoint Clinton advisors. And presumably the U.S. policy of condemning the deliberate killing of civilians for any reason, including “national liberation” struggles, is not one of the things the Obama administration hopes to change.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be necessary, given that Emanuel was never a member of Irgun, nor could he have been at his age. Perhaps it’s unfair, perhaps Emanuel has no love for the Irgun, Hamas, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, or any other group that seeks an independent state by killing innocent people. In which case it should be easy for Emanuel to denounce Irgun’s tactics.

Alternatively, he could contribute to the future President Obama’s efforts to find a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by declining the job. I’m sure there are other qualified candidates.

[Update: Well, he took the job. Now he needs to tell his dad to shut up and stop talking to the press.]

891 November 4, 2008

(AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast)

A new day dawned in Cairo today. As it does every day.

And it started as it always does: with birds, schoolchildren, and car horns. No national holiday here.

I’m looking forward to going out in the streets to hear the reaction. The best reaction I’ve heard so far: “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.”

Bah humbug. I confess I’m moved.

860 Lost

I thought this blog post, from the New York Times‘ Stephen Farrell in Baghdad, was excellent:

BAGHDAD — So, a couple of weeks ago I met a guy on a highway near Abu Ghraib.

An American contractor, who somehow drove the wrong way through the Looking Glass and ended up lost in the real Iraq. A real land full of real Iraqis who would really have killed him had he gone much farther out of the I..Z. (International/Green Zone). Or B.I.A.P. (Baghdad International Airport). Or V.C.B. (Camp Victory).

Wherever he was coming from. Some acronym for some Comfort Zone, somewhere, anyway.

Military acronyms are everywhere in Iraq. Some of them don’t make much sense unless you jump all the way through the mirror and embrace the thinking as well as the language.

They are created in a world where 1,000-year-old Iraqi towns barely exist in reality, only as grid references or satellite coordinates, where real people are dismissed cursorily as ‘Hajjis,’ and where the two helpful guys at the back of the Green Zone’s Oakley sunglasses-Oreos-and-Slasher Videos emporium are known as “The Iraqi Shop.” Because there’s only one, in this world.

Anyway I called this lost Abu Ghraib contractor Lost. Because he was. Because I didn’t know his name. Because it was mildly funny. And because he was a living, breathing metaphor who was even wearing an I.Z. tee shirt.

I shouldn’t have.

I met the real ‘Lost’ a few days ago, another guy entirely. And there was nothing funny about him. His American military boots were walking across particles of dead human flesh, which wasn’t his fault. And his mouth was uttering banalities of callousness. Which was.

There had just been a bomb. There has always just been a bomb in Iraq, still. They are smaller now, so the deaths are in single or double figures, not triple. They are less frequent, so overall casualty charts have spiked down. For which we are all grateful.
More…

835 So Long, and Thanks for All the Brains

Many thanks to Ahmad Gharbeia for creating section-specific news feeds for Al-Masry al-Youm‘s Web site, which doesn’t offer the service. Ahmad notes that the feeds are created by scraping Al-Masry al-Youm‘s code and so could break at any time if the site’s design changes. So enjoy, and thank Ahmad, while you can!

As I’m going to be spending 36 of the next 48 hours in an airplane, here are a few items of interest in the meantime:

• “World Migrants Up To 200 Millions, 1.5 Million Arab Brains Overseas” World thanks Middle East for the brains, notes global increase in strange headlines…
• The good news is that the world financial crisis may put an end to the brain-drain. My barber, who has a great Arab brain, yesterday told me he used to want to move to the United States for work, but now considers himself better off in Cairo. As he snipped and trimmed, the crisis continued to batter Egypt’s stock market, lending emphasis to warnings that poor countries may suffer permanent damage from the current crisis. For the moment, though, shares on the Cairo and Alexandria Stock Exchange are rallying, following Asian markets’ response to European bail-out plans.
• Journalists Fined for Libeling Sheikh al-Azhar. Yesterday, a court fined Adil Hammuda and Mohammad al-Baz of Al-Fagr newspaper LE 80,000 each for comparing Sheikh Tantawi to the Pope. They were delighted they hadn’t been thrown in jail. A different court hearing Hammuda and three other editors’ appeal of another 2007 ruling against them yesterday said it would reconvene in December.
• Hundreds of thousands of U.S. voters from swing states may find themselves illegally disenfranchised in this election. In somewhat related news, absentee voters from a New York county were asked to choose between McCain and Osama for president.
• Dubai, “a failed video game in the desert”, from BLDGBLOG, one of my favorites:
  

  Atari had a stellar business plan and a first-rate marketing team—but, for all intents and purposes, it had nothing interesting to sell. Following the logic of this example, it is easy enough to see Dubai—or even Tucson, Arizona—as a failed videogame in the desert, ironically under-designed and over-promoted. […]

  One could even say that we have perfected the art of the anti-city—that we have made up anything but truly urban environments. Dubai, for instance, is famously difficult to navigate on foot, requiring a ten minute car ride down six-lane motorways, complete with frequently lethal U-turns, simply to get to the hotel across the street.

• Abu Dhabi may do it better. I think I dismissed the press release on this as, well, PR when I first saw it, but this sounds very cool and I really hope it works: “The Masdar Initiative is a new 6 million square meter sustainable development that uses the traditional planning principals of a walled city, together with existing technologies, to achieve a zero carbon and zero waste community.”
• A travel journalist from Connecticut recently visited Egypt and came home shocked at the sexual harassment she experienced. “Welcome in Egypt,” Lynn.

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