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Tuesday, March 08, 2005 |
 Lind on loyalist parmalitaries (militias). Both Lind and I have cracked the lid on Iraq and haven't found a state. Elections won't change that simple fact.
The proliferation of militias, growing dependence of the Iraqi government and the U.S. on those militias to fight Sunni insurgents and our obvious inability to control the militias all point to the bottom line of the war in Iraq: Iraq is not moving closer to becoming a state again, and it may be moving further away from doing so.
Like the American destruction of Fallujah and the recent Iraqi elections, the rise and spread of Shiite militias devoted to fighting Sunni insurgents puts ever-greater pressure on Iraq’s Sunnis to cast their lot with the insurgency. Shiite militias in particular leave them little choice; who else but the insurgents will protect them from Shiite militiamen? The situation in Germany during the Thirty Years’ War may be an analogy: though many tried, few German princes could avoid casting their lots either with the Protestants or with the Catholics. Neutrality meant you became the victim of both.
6:18:11 PM 
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CNN. Chechnya. Maskhadov was killed by Russian special forces today. What is clear is that this will fragment the movement and make it more likely to innovate with new methods. Maskhadov advocated a classic guerrilla insurgency.
12:35:52 PM
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ABC. Democracy at work. Beirut. Nearly 500,000 pro-Syrian protesters waved flags and chanted anti-American slogans in a central Beirut square Tuesday, answering a nationwide call by the militant Shiite Muslim Hezbollah group for a demonstration to counter weeks of massive rallies demanding Syrian forces leave Lebanon. NOTE: this dwarfs the earlier opposition rallies.
10:56:51 AM
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LOL. In response to my post on the topic, CNet posts an article about blogging on the job. Still influencing the debate, although indirectly.
10:19:29 AM
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I am not sure US "conservatives" (for the lack of a better term) understand the implications of making Iraq a model for the rest of the Middle East. Al Qaeda would love to achieve the same thing.
9:57:57 AM
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Economist. Rebuilding failed states. These states are below the level of economic sophistication necessary for global guerrilla warfare.
7:44:31 AM
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It is pretty interesting to watch the Republicans Victorianize American society. We have already seen the push towards its moral system. There is now a parallel push towards its economic system through the decimation of social security, the diminishment of the minimum wage, and harshening of bankruptcy laws. Perhaps black globalization has a future in the US...
7:36:25 AM
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Bruce Sterling in Belgrade. The citizens of this city are the vanguard of a new phase of capitalism. They're busily subverting conventional multi-national commerce and creating a dark parallel process - call it black globalization.
It would be fantastic to travel the world with Bruce to map the development of black globalization and global guerrilla warfare. It would make an amazing book.
7:09:36 AM
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© Copyright 2005 John Robb.
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