Yada, Yada, Yada

I remember as a child spending Sunday afternoons at IKEA with my family, shopping for furniture. When I die, and my entire life flashes before my eyes, I will try to fast-foward through those memories, as they constitute some of the most stultifying days of my life. So dull is IKEA that I'd rather spend a Sunday at church listening to a minister prattle on about The Word than at IKEA shopping for cabinets.

But evidently the Swedes would beg to differ. A study shows that more Swedes trust their national furniture company than the church.


P.S. If Jesus shopped at IKEA:

It makes me feel distastefully needy.

Flatulence in the name of the Lord.

Yesterday I suggested that the violence in Iraq has taken on a primal dimension that might make it impossible to extinguish.

There's more evidence of that today. Across Baghdad, Shiites are punishing Sunnis for the car bombings that killed over 200 people in a Shia neighborhood yesterday. But in getting revenge, the Shiite militias aren't just rounding up and executing random Sunnis like they usually do. Nay, they're innovating: they're burning people alive.

Shiite militiamen grabbed six Sunnis as they left Friday worship services, doused them with kerosene and burned them alive near an Iraqi army post. The soldiers did not intervene, police Capt. Jamil Hussein said.

That paragraph sums up Iraq's ordeal: the Sunnis and the Shiites duke it out with stunning brutality, and as the shit flies and the fan whirls, the Iraqi government either idles on the sidelines or joins in the slaughter.

One thing has emerged clear-as-day from this inscrutable bloodbath: democracy is not only impossible in Iraq, it's a hindrance to stability. A country where people are roasted alive on the streets by death squads, as the government passively looks on, isn't ready for democracy. Elections and liberties won't temper a country's derrangement, they'll merely give it new outlets. Remember, it is democracy that empowered Nazism in Germany.

President Bush's folly was in believing that democracy is an end in itself. It's not. It's a means to an end - the end being a civilized country where power rests in the hands of a free people. But a country has to have the right social groundwork in place before it can start building a democracy. That groundwork can't be installed by a foreign army like it's prefab housing. It has to evolve into being.

We have failed in Iraq. That much is painfully obvious. We must now scale-down our goals and decide how best - or even whether - to go about achieving them. That "or even whether" bit is crucial. We ought to ask ourselves, "Has Iraq's implosion become unstoppable? Is there anything more worth doing? Should we just get out of there?"

However we proceed, let's keep in mind that the people we're dealing with are right now barbequing their fellow countrymen.

The death by radiation poisoning of a Russian dissident in London heralds the return of the belligerent Russian Bear of Cold-War yore. It's hard to believe that a little more than 6 years ago, Russia was ruled by a good-natured, overweight drunkard named Boris. Its leader today is frightening by comparison. President Putin is a former-KGB official who makes creepy jokes about rape and kisses little boys' stomachs.



Remember, Bush once claimed to have seen into this guy's soul and seen that it was good. Either Putin's soul has since frozen over or Bush is a bad judge of character. In any case, it seems the tectonic plates of Russia and the West are once again sliding together in what could become a dinky sequel to the Cold War.


UPDATE: This isn't the first time that Putin has allegedly poisoned one of his enemies. Two years ago the KGB was accused of turning handsome Ukrainian presidential candidate, Victor Yushkenko, into a creature of the swamp with the use of a toxin. Yushkenko was a powerful opponent of Moscow's bullying. He enraged Putin by promising to reorient the Ukraine towards Western Europe. And he paid for that with his complexion, and nearly his life.

Every day I read the New York Times, and practically everyday its front page greets me with another report of senseless violence in Iraq. A few days ago the Times ran an article about the revenge killings sweeping Baghdad. The theme was depressingly familiar: Sunni insurgents kill Shiites, Shia miltias kill Sunnis, the government does nothing, all hell ensues.

But one grisly detail in the article stood out: many of the bodies that crop up daily in Baghdad show signs of having been mutilated with acid and electric drills. This gruesomeness tells us something important: namely, that this isn't your garden-variety sectarian conflict anymore. This nihilistic violence is rarefied. Iraq is becoming a nation of Jeffrey Dahmers.

All over the world, people are being shot, blown up, terrorized. But in few places are acid and electric drills weapons of choice. The death squads' torture methods might gorey footnotes in this conflict, but they reveal more about it than any UN-calculated death toll or expert analysis can. The violence in Iraq springs from the Iraqis' most primal and vicious impulses - impulses that are not unique to Iraqis, but lurk in all people. And if history teaches us anything, it's that troop levels and tactics are trifling concerns when you're up against the absolute worst of human nature.

Restoring sanity to Iraq will require more than following this or that policy reccommendation or sprinkling troops here or there; it will require an all-out assault on the forces that are goring the country from the inside. Such an assault would be long and costly to the extreme. To be successful, it would need the backing of the American people - but they're exasperated. And where there's no will, there's no way.

Any further fighting in Iraq is bound to be half-hearted, and fighting half-heartedly in a war as intractable as this one is useless. Better, then, that we gather up our troops and leave the Iraqis to their own devices - to their car bombs and electric drills.

Police arrest wrong woman in Nebraska robbery.

France and Israel have come close to trading blows in the Mediterranean. Israeli warplanes have been buzzing French ships patrolling off the coast of Lebanon, bringing the French close to opening fire. Today the French foreign minister threatened to respond to further provocations with unconditional surrender.


P.S. Ah, the good old days:

Borat, the (fake) hard-hitting Kazakhstani journalist, helps out on the congressional campaign of a Republican in Alabama. Pants-dampening hilarity ensues.

Here's something that irritates me: womankind's crusade against Breast Cancer and all the extravagant attention it gets. Haven't we heard enough about brave celebrity women and their harrowing struggle against the lump in their breast? How many men do you see flaunting their cancerous prostate like it's a badge of honour?

I don't mean to sound insensitive, but we got the message a long time ago: breast cancer is very dangerous and women should regularly get their breasts examined. OK, understood. Now spare us the sob stories and the marches and the pink-ribbon paraphanelia.

Introducing my groundbreaking solution to the Iranian imbroglio: diplomacy!

And by that I dont't mean the dithering and endless discussion that's being passed off as diplomacy right now. Nay, I mean actual diplomacy. As in, sitting down with the Iranian government and demanding answers to the key questions, question like: 'Are you guys willing to give up your uranium enrichment programme under any circumstances?' And if not: 'Why not?' And if so: 'In exchange for what?'

I'm not a diplomat, so I can't presume to understand the intricate workings of diplomacy. But I'm willing to venture that negotiations with Iran wouldn't be dragging on listlessly like this if they were being well-executed.

The diplomatic process is obviously stuck. It can be unstuck if the U.S. comes down from the bleachers and engages Iran in a blunt one-on-one dialogue. Naturually, there'll be objections to sitting down with a regime that seized our embassy, disbelieves in the Holocaust and champions the eradication of Israel. And those objections are valid. But what of the alternatives? The alternatives are these: sanctions and war.

Sanctions are impractical because it'll be near impossible to get the Chinese, Russians and Europeans to agree to the kind of tough measures that'll be needed to put real pressure on Iran. And war - well, we've already waged one of those against a large and troubled radicalized Moslem country, and look where that got us. A war with Iran could reignite Lebanon, demolish whatever's left of Iraq, send oil prices through the roof, stretch our army to the breaking point and trigger a violent backlash across the Moslem world. Thanks to Operation Iraqi Freedom, we can't afford any of that.



Yes, negotiating with Jew-hating Islamofascist Holocaust-deniers is an unsavory proposition. But dare I say a little tete-a-tete is worth it if it's needed to avert a situation whereby said nation of wackos has an atomic bomb - and a yahoo president possibly crazy enough to use it.