Commenter Bill Kelsey writes about the unintended consequences of interventionism on Catallarchy.
Lounsbury on the uselessness of airstrikes as a counter insurgency method.
The Bush Administration is having problems controlling the press.
From idleworm: Ever notice how you never see Iyad Allawi and Saddam Hussein in the same place at the same time? The Butcher of Baghdad cleans up real nice…
U.S. Election Held Yesterday “Just to Be Safe” If you intend to vote, you should have.
Terror in the Skies!!! I really detest drama queens like the one who wrote the article dissected in this World ‘O Crap post and all the morons who sympathised with her.
No, it’s not a story about somebody remaking Airplane!, it’s about how a woman and her husband were terrorized on a flight from Detroit to Los Angeles by a group of Middle Eastern men who went to the bathroom a lot. Fraught glances are also exchanged, and somebody carries a McDonald’s sack on board. It’s pretty intense stuff.
Check out the customer reviews on Amazon of My Pet Goat. Link from The Poorman via Sadly, No!
Amazingly, Michael Bérubé has an actual letter sent by GW Bush to General Pervez Musharraf posted on his blog.
Mark at Rafah Kid Rambles has a post up about a woman living in the West Bank who wrote about trying to get to the village of Abu Dis:
“We went to a meeting last week in a village on the outskirts of Jerusalem . A 10 minute journey from Damascus gate in the old city to the village, took 2 hours. First we had to go all the way around east Jerusalem to the village of Abu Dis. The taxi driver let us off at a ‘hole in the wall’ (literally) but unfortunately there was a checkpoint there and the soldiers wouldn’t let us through.
Luckily we were rescued by the women from Machsom watch who had been there monitoring the checkpoint since 6am that morning. They drove us to another hole in the wall where we were able to climb through and get a taxi on to our destination.”
Go to the post to see the picture. Then, look at the picture of the village of Abu Dis Lawrence of Cyberia has posted here, kicking off an excellent post about the ICJ and The Wall. On the subject of the ICJ, I thought Stephan Kinsella had an interesting insight:
With the danger of the UN turning into a one-world government looking remoter all the time (if anything, the US is more likely to do this), the UN is looking more attractive, if only as a brake on US bellicosity and imperialism.
Summarizing the ICJ’s decision, Kinsella writes:
The latest praiseworthy action by the UN is the ruling by its top court, the International Court of Justice (sometimes called the World Court) that the West Bank barrier is illegal.
In this case, the ICJ was asked “to urgently render an advisory opinion on the following question”:
“What are the legal consequences arising from the construction of the wall being built by Israel, the occupying Power, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, as described in the report of the Secretary-General, considering the rules and principles of international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, and relevant Security Council and General Assembly resolutions?”
The court ruled today “that the barrier Israel is building in the West Bank breaches international law and cannot be justified by Israel’s security concerns. ‘The wall … cannot be justified by military exigencies or by the requirements of national security or public order,’ said Judge Shi Jiuyong of China. ‘The construction of such a wall accordingly constitutes breaches by Israel of its obligations under the applicable international humanitarian law.'”
See Kinsella’s LRC post for included links.