Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?
Update: seemingly not
Update: Oh yeah!
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Gaza Flotilla - now what the heck's that all about?
I have a theory, based on no evidence above and beyond my usual jaundiced, cynical and generally horrifying view of human nature[1].
I take as my starting point the following - given the presence of various dodgy Gallowayite Turkish organisations[2] on that ship, and the fact that guns are not difficult to get hold of in Turkey, it seems interesting to me that not a single firearm was apparently found on board that ship. My evidence for this claim is that if there had been, christ knows we'd have heard no end of it.
And from there, I argue that this isn't Cheonan - it's "SADDAM'S WMD!!!!" mark two.
After all, would we have been having anything like this conversation if the Israeli government had opened up its press conference with a photo of its commandoes posing next to a big fuck-off pile of AK47s and RPGs? Course not.
My canny theory about what happened is that the Israelis had convinced themselves that the flotilla were gun-running, didn't bother to check, and acted accordingly, planning roughly the clustereff that actually happened, presuming that the justificatory material would be found after the event. And then it wasn't and oooerr, oh shit. This would also explain why the post facto media strategy (via Henry) was so totally incoherent - it was built around a corpus delicti that didn't arrive.
I never know whether to be relieved or distressed at the seeming fact that the power of Empire is seemingly in the hands of people who aren't up to the job of organising a simple frame-up.[3]
[1]Francois Mitterrand will always be a hero of mine despite his manifold failings, for his answer to an interviewer who once asked him what quality was necessary for success in politics. He considered the question carefully before answering "Bleakness of the soul".
[2]By "Gallowayite" in this context, I mean that IHH basically supports Hamas because they're the existing government of Gazan Palestinians and is thereby prepared to give money to them with no strings attached, something which I personally regard as a stupid thing to do, but let's be specific here. I tend to regard the Israeli government's accusation of IHH having provided anything more to Hamas than the aforementioned NSA cash as poorly sourced and accusations of Al Qaeda links as being actually laughable.
[3]My guess is that coppers are more dangerous enemies than soldiers, because they work together in units for longer and so they instinctively don't grass on each other and they have more institutional knowledge about getting their story straight. Therefore, in most circumstances, a cop can do much worse things to you than a soldier can. Most of the really nasty people of the last century worked for secret[4] police forces, even in military dictatorships.
[4] "Secret" apparently has a particular sense of "unaccountable" which I don't think is in the OED (though I don't have the OED to hand). Very few secret police organisations are "secret" in any normal meaning of the word.
this item posted by the management 6/02/2010 01:47:00 PM
|