Peter Nolan

Birthday books

Since it's my birthday soon, I've bought myself some books as a personal indulgence amidst all the filthy weather. 

Linda Grant, a British novelist and Guardian writer, several of whose books, including the Orange Prize-winning When I Lived in Modern Times, are set in Israel tells of her extended stay there in 2002/3 in The People on The Street: A Writer's View of Israel.  Grant writes that as a "category error, a British Jew, when everyone knows that the British are tactful, decorous, well0mannered, prudent, prone to meaningful silences and Jews are - well, the opposite. She's in Israel, "...not out of Zionism or interst in the Middle East conflict, but because the moment I put my foot down there, everything was half familiar.  I had half the story already inside my head and was avid and eager to learn the rest". 

Amazon also made a good choice as to what I would be interested in reading next.  Continuing on my quest to figure out what's been going on in Iraq, I also bought Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, the highly-praised account of the invasion and its aftermath by Washington Post military correspondent Thomas Ricks.

The Pope's Children

I've been putting off reaading The Pope's Children: Ireland's New Elite, the book by TV show host and SBP columnist David McWilliams, for quite a while, after I bought it at Christmas, fearing that it would be too twee to read about his archetypal characters "Low GI Jane", "Bouncy Castle Brendan" and friends without gagging. 

However, it's an entertaining and zippy read, which gathers a wealth of statistical and anecdotal data into a very readable narrative.  McWilliams, who was a central bank economist and an investment banker in London before becoming a journalist, makes a lot of interesting points.  He's hugely bearish on the Irish housing market, which is now looking a bit more prescient, describing it as being driven by a huge German savings surplus translating into low Eurozone interest rates.  This may now soon be coming to an end, as his editor, Cliff Taylor, writes in the current Sunday Business Post.  Brian Cowen must be hoping that he can get the general election out of the way before the situation deteriorates much further. 

McWilliams thinks, and I'd agree, that globalisation has had the unexpected effect of making the Irish cling more tightly to their traditions, even as they abandon much of the real committment to the Irish language,  the Catholic church, family values or a preference for rural life for a more moderate, somewhat vague, and non-judgemental set of attitudes.  Last weekend's rugby international, the first time that England has played at Croke Park, the scene of the original Bloody Sunday massacre during the War of Independence, epitomises this new ease with our place in the world, as the record margin of the Irish victory chimes with our self-confidence.

The book would need to be edited for a foreign audience, but if the sales figures are to be believed, the public has taken it to heart as the definitive chronicle of the Celtic Tiger period in Ireland;  I would have to agree.

On the move

I've just started accessing blogs while I'm away from my desktop using my PDA, using Bloglines Mobile.  This allows me to read a hell of a lot more than I otherwise would and avoids the impulse-buying of books, magazines and newspapers that I'm partial too. 

A lot of dirty book stores in London will keep their stock in their basements, keeping a ground-floor shopfront of unobjectionalbe material, usually dusty and neglected remaindered books, on the ground floor.  Often on my way home from the West End in London, I'll drop into one of these, which is usually open later than any other bookstore.  I hope that I don't get noticed doing this, as a reputation as a sad porn-addict is the last thing that I need. 

Now, if I could only get bloglines on the Tube....

As much Borat as Barot...

The 13 March issue of the New Yorker has a long feature on nuclear terrorism, which describes some of the amateurish efforts made by Al Qaeda operatives in the past, including Dhiram Barot, a Hindu Briton who had converted to Islam and was sentenced to forty years' imprisonment in London late last year for plotting terrorist attacks:

Charles Ferguson is a former nuclear submarine officer trained in physics; he left the Navy for a career in security studies and is currently a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2003, he co-wrote an unclassified report titled “Commercial Radioactive Sources: Surveying the Security Risks.” About two years later, F.B.I. agents working on an international terrorism case asked to meet with him. They brought a document showing that some of his report had been downloaded onto the computer of a British citizen named Dhiren Barot, a Hindu who had converted to Islam. Barot, it turned out, had been communicating with Al Qaeda about a plan to detonate a dirty bomb in Britain, and he had used a highlighting pen on a printout of Ferguson’s study while conducting his research.

The report described how large amounts of certain commercial radioactive materials might pose a danger to a terrorist who tried to handle them. “This seems to have worried him,” Ferguson told me, referring to Barot, “so he decided to look at smoke detectors.” Some detectors contain slivers of americium-241; the isotope’s constant emission of radiation creates a chemical process that screens for smoke. Barot informed his Al Qaeda handlers that he was thinking about buying ten thousand smoke detectors to make his bomb. In fact, to make a device that would be even remotely effective, Ferguson said, he would have had to buy more than a million

I doubt that we can rely on such incompetence keeping us safe in the future, which is why America and ports around the globe - even harbours in Sri Lanka - are now being rigged with radiation detectors - and nuclear weapons specialists being mobilised routinely to protect high-value targets and investigate suspicious people and objects, "a global nuclear-detection architecture"

New technology is already being adapted for defending the homeland against nuclear attack:

“Today, if you’re looking for a neutrino from a pulsar in the next galaxy,” he said, a scientist “can detect one event per year and reject the millions of background events.” The goal of new defense research, he continued, should be to bring “advanced technologies out of the academic community” and learn how to apply them at border posts and truck stops.        It should be possible, Wagner said, by way of example, to detect the dull signature of highly enriched uranium by spraying out other kinds of radiation, perhaps from an aircraft, and then search for an echo, roughly the way sonar works—an approach that’s likely to create health problems for civilian populations. Even if that difficulty could not be overcome, he continued, such technology could be useful in enemy territory if it was necessary to do a quick search for hidden nuclear bombs. Indeed, Fred Iklé told me that the Pentagon is now conducting this sort of research.

The World is Not Flat

According to the Guardian, UK retail bank Lloyds TSB is closing Indian call centre operations:

The bank will even allow its 13.5 million current account customers to ring their local branches instead of a call centre in India which unions claim is unpopular.

Why am I not surprised at this news?  Low-touch banking is fine for call-centres, but nothing more complicated.  Maybe HSBC might follow suit. 

At Foreign Policy this month, Harvard B School professor Pankaj Ghemawat writes, contra Tom Friedman,

Globalization has bound people, countries, and markets closer than ever, rendering national borders relics of a bygone era—or so we’re told. But a close look at the data reveals a world that’s just a fraction as integrated as the one we thought we knew. In fact, more than 90 percent of all phone calls, Web traffic, and investment is local. What’s more, even this small level of globalization could still slip away.

I read Friedman's The World is Flat while in Israel early this year.  Like Ireland, it's a small, globalised country, with its own diaspora of perhaps a million people, a vibrant high-tech economy and a huge amount of cultural interchange.  Still, the state is extremely important, both for facing the security challenges and in anchoring the identity of a country that is culturally very different from the UK or America, never mind its Arab neighbours. 

Book of the Day - The End of Iraq

I tend to read too many books to post whatever one I'm reading on the side of the blog.  Instead, I'll try to post my reactions to those that I'm reading, a microwave review.  Feel free to pose a question or make a point of your own in the comments. 

    

I'm starting off with Peter Galbraith's The End of Iraq, just out in paperback in Britain.  Galbraith, son of the liberal Harvard economist who died last year, was the first to uncover the scale of Saddam Hussein's genocide against the Kurds during the Anfal ("spoils") campaign in the nineteen-eighties, which culminated in the notorious gassing of the border town of Halabja.  While working on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, he travelled through Iraqi Kurdistan, noting the desolation of the landscape and the flattened buildings everywhere. 

After helping organise humanitarian relief for the Kurds after the 1991 Gulf War, when they fled to the mountains after a failed uprising Hussein's forces, Galbraith went on to serve in the Balkans, including a term as US ambassador to Croatia. 

In this book, Galbraith catalogues what he describes as the monumental incompetence with which the war was undertaken, starting at the White House and all the way down.  He describes the issues and process behind the Iraqi constitution, which leaves the Kurds with de facto - and probably soon, declared - independence. The Shia south, in the meantime, is more or less a milder Arab version of Iran's Islamic Republic, run by a patchwork of militias and parties.  The Sunni areas and Baghdad are, as he describes it, a black hole where the insurgency has no visible political leadership while a large and vigorous Al Qaeda presence is in danger of metastasising into a new base for worldwide terrorism. 

The solution now, Galbraith argues, is for the US to withdraw its military to a haven among the grateful people of Iraqi Kurdistan and build up successor states in the Sunni and Shia areas to keep AQ and Iranian influence to a minimum. 

Georgeous George Meets Eloquent Eamon

On Friday 29 September, on The Late Late Show, the main evening chat show on Irish TV, editor, novelist and former Irish diplomat Eamon Delaney took on George Galloway MP, the former Labour MP who now presides over the well-oiled electoral machinery of the red-black alliance known as the Respect party. 

The first question that occured to me when I appeared on this was why would a politician, particularly one as controversial as Galloway, appear on a light-entertainment show?  The answer seems to lie in the interrogation skills of the presenter, RTE's Pat Kenny, or rather the lack of them.  I've seen shower-curtain mold that's more aggressive and lively.  Throughout, his manner was gentle and unconfrontational, as if coaxing a small child whose cat has just been run over by a lorry. 

Throughout, Galloway shows why he's the man who put the common in the House of Commons.    Dressed in a black shirt and sports jacket, open to his chest hair, he's crude, uncontrollably aggressive and snarling throughout.  He described Brown and Blair as "two cheeks of the same arse”, repeating the same metaphor, telling of meeting Tony Blair in the Commons toilet, of John Prescott “fiddling with his secretary’s drawers”, as if he's the Bernard Manning of the British left. 

Galloway got enthusiastic applause from much of the audience at certain points, when describing Bush and Blair as war criminals. 

While Galloway sat in the leftmost of three or more empty armchairs next to Kenny, Delaney was set up as an invited heckler - parked several rows back in the audience, without a microphone, left hardly visible and easy for Galloway to drown out.  He's invited into the discussion at 7:30 on the timer.  Galloway doesn't deign to answer – “I’ll speak through the chair. I wasn’t expecting this harangue”. – “you’re welcome to have a stand-up brawl”

“You were expecting an easy ride, were you? ...This isn’t Bagdhad!” Delaney responds at one point. 

Galloway asks “Where did you get that eejit?” and that it''s “shocking that an editor is so ignorant and ill-informed about these issues?”, even though he repeated a number of obvious, documented and well-covered lies.  “The Iraqis will fight you with their teeth if necessary…” - so why all the foreign suicide -bombers or only Sunni insurgents? 

“...when we were arming Saddam Hussein..." - Hence all those Russian tanks, and missiles, MiGs, French missiles, Mirage jets and nuclear reactors and  Chilean  cluster bombs, South African artillery, along with tens of billions of dollars of funding from the Saudis, Kuwaitis and the UAE.  Oh, and rice  from the US.  SIPRI figures show the US and UK contributions were in the order of 1% of Iraq's total arms imports, which leaves out their substantial domestic arms industry. 

The US and UK have killed more Iraqis  than Saddam managed.  Again, even tagging the coalition with the deaths of the suicide bombers,  death squads and head-choppers,  the Lancet's total doesn't match the  300,000 odd Shia mown down in the 1991 uprising, the same number of Kurds killed in the Anfal genocide and  probably the same number again  just of Iraqi casualties during the Iran-Iraq war, and perhaps three quarters of a million Iranians, still dying today from the after-effects of gas attacks.

“Bin Laden was equally armed and supported by  America" - although it's unclear why the Saudi construction billionaire channeling the funds of the oil sheiks would need CIA money, which he always denies taking and the Americans, according to the 9/11 Commission report,  have no evidence of paying.

A stronger and better-briefed chair would have challenged Galloway on these, but Kenny was unwilling and unable.  Delaney got some applause for continuing to challenge him and asking him if he expected an obedient audinece like the ones in Bagdhad. 

Galloway went on to describe Castro, whose biography he recently published, as the greatest third-world leader of the twentieth century: I would have thought that Gandhi might have topped anybody else's list. 

Galloway was probably never more puffed up with pride than when talking about his Talksport radio program in the UK, which he claims has 3 million regular listeners. 

I've rarely seen Galloway in action before, but I can imagine that I'd not find it too hard to take him on in debate.  On the evidence of this showing, his supposed eloquence consists of him being nothing more than being crude, rude and evasive. 
 

Making Friends in Iraq

Courtesy of those nice people at Popbitch, who seem to have an eye for stories on the Middle East:

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US marine corps are introducing sensitivity training to their soldiers in Iraq. They're staring to wonder if such things as the troops' slogan t-shirts might not be such a good thing. Our favourite tees include:

• "Eat Pork Or Die" in English and Arabic)
• Shrine Busters" which show burning minarets, some with unit logos.
• Napalm. Sticks Like Crazy.
• The road to Paradise begins with me. (Usually in Arabic, often with sniper's crosshairs)
• Guns don't kill people. I kill people.

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Don't laugh at this.  It's not funny!

Chuck Chuck!

Update 1: Add link and correct grammar, add third para

I generally restrain from discussing Britain's constitutional affairs before the natives here in London, so I might as well comment here about Prince Charles, never a man for whom I've had much respect.
My opinion of the Prince of Wales is that his talents would probably get him a job in MacDonald's, but not on the tills or in management. 

He's now calling for the Big Mac and other unhealthy products to be banned.  However, as Scott points out, the products, such as pasty offered by his own firm, Duchy Originals, are even fattier than the Big Mac. 

It's a pity that he doesn't develop another interest to distract himself, like gambling, alcohol or women.  As an intellectual or environmentalist, he's about as authentic as Marie Antoinette was a shepherdess - flying to New York with a huge entourage to pick up an award from Al Gore.   I supsect that part of the reason that the monarchy has been kept alive so long is that stupid, lazy and debauched royals can be counted on to act as ballast on the ship of state, seperating the government of the country from the state's most powerful symbols, as Bagehot wrote.  Charles, having neither talents nor humility, is in grave danger of short-circuiting the two.   

Most British people seem to respect Elizabeth II as a hard-working, judicious and widely-ranging monarch.  Having an elected president of the UK on the Irish model, is, in my opinion, the only way to ensure that the country's next head of state has the experience, the independence and the strength of personality to stand up to an increasingly over-mighty central government.   

The royals are also the cornerstone of two of the worst parts of Britain's feudal legacy, which nobody in Britain, apart from some on the hard left, really seem to speak about.  One is the class system - without the honours system and the hereditery aristocracy, Britons may actually judge and be judged on character and achievements rather than their accents.  Another is the vast centralisation of land, even in the heart of London, into vast aristocratic estates; without this concentration of wealth and power, some of the land could be released for higher-use commercial development and for desperately-needed housing.  Charles is an environmentalist in this sense, preferring to preserve a rurual idyll, even though British farming has been completely bankrupt for decades and city-dwellers are packed into ever smaller living spaces, rather than see land move into productive use for housing, industry, roads or aiprports.  The Scottish land reforms were an example that could be followed south of the border also.   Come the revolution.....

Bumps in the road

My apologies if posting is a little light over the next week or so.  I'm going through something of a busy period at work, I have to do some travelling and I'm also writing a profile cum interview of the man who is, by many accounts, the world's most influential columnist.  So, sorry to dissappoint all of you in my audience, that means you John, if posting isn't what it should be.