| Monday
April 5, 2003 Dr. Pournelle,
I am a protective agent in Iraq on contract to a US
firm to provide security to its workers. I can tell you without a doubt that
the men killed in Fallujah were not CIA. They were private security agents
like me who were hired to protect Americans in Iraq. There are quite a few
of us running around here doing this job, but it is a fairly tight community
and most of us know each other, if only by name. The guys who were killed
work for a small private security company composed of ex-military personnel.
They were not conducting covert operations or spying or anything like that.
Now, I am not saying that the CIA does not have anyone here under such a
cover. I honestly have no idea what the CIA is doing here. Those particular
people, however, were not CIA. They were simply a target of opportunity.
As a long time reader of your books (I first read The
Mercenary when I was 14) I thought that you might be interested to hear a
little bit about what we are doing over here. Some have gone as far as
accusing us of being Mercenaries. I suppose that could be argued, but I
don't think that we quite fit the definition. In actuality we are closer to
security guards than anything. Some provide static security at work sites.
Others, like myself, provide personal security to executives and engineers
as they travel about the country doing their business. We are well paid, but
there isn't enough money in the world to get any of us to fight for the
other side. We are most definitely heavily armed, but we would be little
good if we weren't. All of us are ex-military, from either a special
operations or infantry background. We would, if so organized, be very
capable of conducting military action, but we do not, at least not in my
group (and I am pretty sure it is the same in the others). The only time we
would commit any type of violent act is if our principals (protectees) were
attacked, and then all we would do is what was necessary to evacuate them.
Even so, you may be interested in some of the things
that we do here. For myself, I lead a team of Iraqi Security Agents. Most of
them are either Kurds from the North or former Iraqi Army. The former we
know are dependable for obvious reasons. The ex-army types were never really
loyal Saddam Backers and hate the "Wahabis", as they refer to them, who are
causing the trouble. Surprisingly they work very well together. We have
formed quite an effective team and developed what I am sure will be life
long friendships. We are probably doing more toward healing this country's
wounds than most of the do-gooders over in the CPA ever will simply by
demonstrating that we can work together and have a common cause.
Not sure wear this disjointed rambling is headed or if
you are even interested, but if you like I can keep you up to date on our
adventures. Please let me know. All the best and please keep up the good
work.
(will there ever be any more tales of Falkenberg's
Legion?)
Matt Kirchner
I neither knew nor cared whether the
men killed were CIA or not; the fact that it was shouted that they were, and
this was one of the justifications for attacking them, is enough in my
judgment to force the CIA to pay attention. In order to take care of its
own, the Company has to take care of many thought to be its own.
Iraq was ruled by a civilized Sunni
majority, which was then taken over by Saddam and his crooks; real
neo-Jacobin democracy in Iraq will lead to Shiite terror. Anyone who paid
attention to what was going on over there would have known this before we
invaded, and would have known we needed the Iraqi Regular Army to keep peace
and order; so of course the neocons disbanded the Iraqi army first chance it
got, and sent home with weapons a number of young men with no prospects for
a job; and then Bremer wondered about what happened.
There are words for that kind of
naiveté.
As a side note: I am a former editor
of Survive Magazine and one time associate of Lt. Col. Robert Brown, and the
author of a fiction series about John Christian Falkenberg. I have many
friends and associates among the soldiers of fortune. I do not use
"mercenary" in the pejorative sense of someone who would change sides for
more money.
I think there's a distinction between long-term oil
supplies and short term ones. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is short-term.
George W. Bush's efforts at filling it as fast as possible do not indicate a
disposition toward energy independence. Rather, they indicate an expectation
of, or even a disposition toward, fireworks in the Middle East.
When Bush took office, he had several thousand troops
in eastern Saudi Arabia, sitting on top of the oil fields, backed up by
about twenty thousand more in-region, mostly afloat on the Persian Gulf.
Eastern Saudi Arabia is approximately as unpopulated as northern Alaska. Not
only did eastern Saudi Arabia have oil, but it was as defensible as any
place in the Middle East. Bush chose to withdraw the American troops from
the Saudi oilfields, after the Saudi government refused his request for
bases and ordered him out instead. There was no sensible reason for Bush to
accept deportation, unless he trusted the Saudis entirely, or unless he
wanted to conciliate Al Quada. Most of the September 11 attackers carried
Saudi passports. Saudi Arabia is not exactly a free country, and its
officials can ask any question they want to ask. The Saudi officialdom
simply must have known that the attackers were not peaceful students. What
was the reason to absolutely trust the Saudi government?
Very well, Bush invaded Iraq. Having done so, he did
not concentrate his forces on oilfields, but went after places like Fallujah
instead. The Saudis have shrewdly observed that the troops which could
enforce low oil prices are becoming bogged down in Fallujah, and acted
accordingly. The situation in Iraq is worsening steadily. Sooner or later,
conflicts in northern Iraq will result in the invasion of Syria. Bush will
have to drain the Persian gulf of troops to fill the gaps further north
(presumably the logistic pipeline will run from the Mediterranean).
Saudi Arabia may very well decide to solve its
internal problems by absorbing Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab
Emirates. These countries are even more socially, militarily, and
politically impotent than Saudi Arabia. They play at being western developed
countries, buying the trappings from abroad with oil money, but they have
very little of nationhood about them. Saudi Arabia at least has its Wahabbis,
if it can point them in the right direction. From a certain standpoint, the
consolidation is long overdue. The increase in oil revenue would enable
Saudi Arabia to temporarily solve many of its internal problems, and perhaps
half of the population of the conquered territory, being guest workers,
could simply be expelled back to South Asia. The gulf states have used visas
in such a way as to prevent their guest workers from putting down permanent
roots, so they are birds of passage. The Saudis could easily subvert them by
offering a donative, payable back home in Karachi, or Mumbai, or Manila.
Say, about ten years wages for a few days fighting ought to be about right,
because the guest workers have no long-term stake in the gulf states. The
United States Navy will still be in the gulf, but ships by themselves do not
project power on shore very well. The navy will have the unattractive choice
of letting the Saudis consolidate the oil fields, or letting the Iranians
cross the gulf instead. Prince Bandar will probably convince George W. Bush
to turn a blind eye, with airy promises of abundant oil.
Bush has staked literally everything on a grand
political victory in Iraq. In the attempt, he is systematically squandering
the limited objective of control of the oil fields. If his grand design
should ultimately fail, the Iranians will inevitably pick up the detritus,
including control of the entire Persian Gulf, and Iraq as far north as
Baghdad.
Andrew D. Todd
An interesting analysis.
Subject: Fallujah Heros
Like all of you, I was dismayed to hear of the
atrocities at Fallujah. Check out pictures and a couple of words about the
heroes that died there from this web site:
http://www.jayreding.com/archives/004440.php#004440
Text on the site referring to inappropriate commentary
on the Fallujah tragedy from a liberal blog that has achieved some currency
was answered as follows:
"The rage of the left is as sad as it is sickening"
So true.
Bill
But, but, but, liberals CARE so much, don't you
see.
I find "sad" an inappropriate word for much of what
I hear from Al Franken and KOS and those people....
=====================
When this old world starts getting you down...
I laughed. Then gulped, feeling guilty. Then laughed
again.
<
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3558493&thesection=news&thesubsection=general
>
-- Terry Cole BA/BSc/BE/BA(hons) (tcole@maths.otago.ac.nz)
System Administrator, Dept. of Maths. & Stats., Otago Uni. PO Box 56,
Dunedin, NZ.
========================
They are overestimating how large a bomb needs to be.
"Project Orion", George Dyson, 2003 (paperback) pgs
54-55: ""Pursuing these limits became my obsession," Ted admitted in 1986.
"What is the absolute lower limit to the weight of a complete fisson
explosive? What is the smallest amount of plutonium or uranium 235 that can
be made to explode? What is the smallest possible diameter of a nuclear
explosive that could be fired out of a gun?" The answers were surprising. "I
was narrowing my focus, getting the quantities of plutonium that one could
use to make nuclear explosions, down into less than a kilogram. Quite a bit
less." This is golf ball, not baseball, size."
==================================
http://www.techcentralstation.com/033104C.html
However, it's possible to overstate
the achievement, and both the program personnel and the media are doing
that. For instance, one would have the impression from the coverage that a
scramjet had never been previously tested in flight, when in fact the
Australians did this almost two years ago, with a tiny fraction of the
Hyper-X budget. The significance of this flight was not that it was an
in-flight test of a scramjet, but that it generated sufficient thrust to
actually accelerate the vehicle.
Rich
=======================
Subject: "25 Years in a Cell"
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1738&e=5&u=/zd/20040323/tc_zd/121973
---- Roland Dobbins
===================
Subject: Buckyballs, Nanotech and toxicity
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31403-2004Mar28.html
Looks like a few side effects will occur from
nanotech. I guess fullerene (C60) is missing enough electrons to be a
serious oxidant.
John
=============================
Dear Dr Pournelle,
"I like Linux generally. It's easy to work with and a
lot faster and less resource intensive than Windows. But until this issue is
addressed, I'm not likely to give up my Windows installation."
Just so, though I have other reasons for not giving up
Windows. The two OSs have complementary strengths.
In the case of Windows there are equivalent issues to
Randy Powell's installation problems - things like absence of vbrun300.dll,
wrong quicktime version, absence of flash or director, wrong DirectX, etc. -
but they are well canvassed on the web. Linux (and Mac) users often feel
smug that their machines are relatively immune to virii: this is the flip
side of that coin.
There are several automated "package management"
meta-tools out there which are intended to address this problem, but like
other Linux desktop conveniences they are still evolving and it's not clear
which will dominate. The most interesting synthesis going on at the moment
is in the RPM world, and RH/Fedora is at the forefront. Mr Powell's Mandrake
uses a tool called urpmi to keep track of .rpm package dependencies. There
is also "apt", which is capable of tracking dependencies on CD or on the
web. Debian uses "apt" for .deb dependencies. RH uses "yum" for .rpm
dependencies, but it can also use "apt", and thereby hangs a tale.
Of the two main installation tools, "apt" and "yum"
(don't you just love these names), yum is the default for now, but a lot of
people use the apt system. Not only has it some momentum (a little while ago
it was the only reliable service) but since "apt" can handle .deb as well as
.rpm dependencies it makes sense to use apt if you have to support both
Debian and RH.
Red Hat is of course one of the most important Linux
vendors. It recently stopped free support for its variants of Linux - Red
Hat 9 was the last such distribution. It now ships commercial support
packages (with steep academic and personal discounts) for its new commercial
products, but the old "up2date" links to Red Hat support are obsolete. As of
the end of 2003 there is no more patches/support for Pre-RH9 systems; from
30th. April next year RH9 support likewise disappears.
To mollify critics from the Open Source movement RH
merged with the Fedora Project, which builds cutting-edge versions of the RH
products but without formal contract support from RH (although several RH
engineers are deputized to assist the Fedora developers). In return it gets
back the basics of future RH commercial distributions.
The "up2date" in Fedora now links to repositories of
updated packages which are maintained not by RH, but by the open source
community. Trouble is that since Fedora is so state-of-the-art, the yum
repositories in particular sometimes can't keep up!
These issues are often discussed on the Fedora mailing
lists. See for example < http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2004-January/msg01649.html
>
The upshot is this: as the geeks who develop Linux
begin to use its desktop features themselves, they will come to appreciate
the need for straightforward installation procedures and will develop them.
It has already started. Tools like synaptic, which offer a glorious GUI for
apt package updates, show the way. But it will take time. Meanwhile, Windows
will remain the home user system of choice.
Regards, TC
-- Terry Cole admingt@maths.otago.ac.nz System
Administrator Dept. of Maths and Stats, Otago University PO. Box 56, Dunedin
tel:64-3-4797739 NEW ZEALAND fax:64-3-4798427
===========================
Your link to Eric Raymond's rant led me to this link:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/uibook/fog0000000249.html
which is about user interface design. I recommend it
for all programmers.
Charles Milner -- Harts Systems Ltd http://www.harts.com
===============================
And THIS will put
the cat among the pigeons:
Dr. Pournelle,
If this doesn't make things worse, I don't know what
will:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/04/05/iraq.main/index.html
I'm not sure we have any choice but to try to take him
out of circulation, but I think calling a press conference to say that we
were going to try indicates a greater concern with voter response in the US
than practicality in pacifying Iraq.
On the other hand, I suppose the strategy here could
be to keep the Shia sufficiently angry at the US that they won't be
interested in fighting the Sunni. I doubt it'll hold off civil war very
long, though.
Sincerely,
Joe Beaver
=========
Subj: Iraq: Who's rising? *The* Shia or *some* Shia?
http://www.strategypage.com/fyeo/qndguide/default.asp?target=IRAQ.HTM
IRAQ: Radical Shia Minority Rebels
[begin quote] April 5, 2004: Sadr militia had taken
control of government buildings in Shia towns or neighborhoods from Baghdad,
south to Basra. Sadr's armed militia is not large, a few thousand men, but
they are dedicated to the establishment of an Islamic Republic (like the one
that has ruled Iran since 1979, and is generally hated by Iranians.) ...
Sadr has sort of talked himself into a corner, telling outrageous lies (the
suicide bomb attacks in Iraq are the work of Americans), and appears to feel
that he can seize people with a good old revolutionary coup (as was used
during the Russian revolution in 1917, and many before and since.) Sadr
can't win a battle like this, and it was always hoped he would realize this.
But apparently not. Now a lot of people (Iraqis and coalition troops) are
going to get killed because of the foolishness of one man. ... Sadr is
considered a troublesome minority by most Iraqis, and most Shia. [end quote]
Which is a little different from what some other
sources have been reporting.
Time will tell how many Sadr militia there are, and
how effective. We'll all be just blundering around in the Fog of War for a
while yet. I'm a bit disappointed at the sky-is-falling spin that NY Times
reporter John F. Burns and his crew are putting on the Sadr militia
uprising, but maybe I shouldn't be -- they are, after all, the NY Times.
Or maybe the sky really is falling, and I'm just an
idiot, or a neo-Jacobin. Or insane.
Am I making too much of the line, near the end of the
Burns report, about "Sadr militiamen ... fought a protracted battle along
Sadoun Street, one of Baghdad's main commercial boulevards, with the Iraqi
police"? If the battle was "protracted", I don't guess the Iraqi police just
ran away, did they?
And it'd be interesting to learn, in a month or two,
exactly what happened at the police stations and civil defense centers that
were abandoned. Treachery? Cowardice? Or prudent evacuation of small
outposts that might otherwise have been wiped out to no good purpose?
Rod Montgomery==monty@sprintmail.com
The sky is not falling, and the
Marines are pretty sharp: they have been fighting small wars for a long
time.
The real question will be the effect
on our troops (and not just casualties).
Make no mistake, if we decide to stay
the course we will learn the empire business. But Empire has a logic, and it
leads to places not usually seen by a republic.
We do not have long to make some
choices: what, precisely, do we think we can accomplish in Iraq?
=======================
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
I was rereading Heinlein, "The Moon Is A Harsh
Mistress" and noticed that his description of the Peace Dragoons control of
the tube stations was similar to the TSA's control of airports. There are
authors who just get to the essential truths. Shakespear, Kipling, and yes,
Heinlein.
Being currently unemployed, I responded to an ad from
the TSA for screeners (hey, it's a job). You have to sign a nondisclosure
statement to go through the screening. You cannot tell what it entails on
threat of not being considered and possible crimminal charges. Not only
that, you cannot tell that you cannot talk about it if I read the thing
properly.
I am waiting with baited breath for your new books.
Love your site. Keep up the good work.
Patrick
==============================
Hello, I'm a big fan of your collaborations with Larry
Niven.
Me and my friends have been discussing this for quite
some time: the real motive for invading Iraq. I think it's clear that it had
nothing to do with WMDs and little to do with liberation.
And while I may be sympathetic to some of its causes,
I don't believe the left's assertion that it's a simple matter of "blood for
oil" or any other mindless slogan, except of course in the broadest sense,
that the primary reason the US has any particular interest in the region is
because of its oil. But they did not invade Iraq for its oil, or at least
that was not the primary reason.
We thought that it was important to take a step back
an analyze the entire region.
First of all, we look at Saudi Arabia.
For the past 13 years the United States has had troops
stationed in Saudi Arabia. They were there to protect Saudi Arabia from a
possible invasion by Iraq (since Saddam being in control of over half the
world's oil would be a BAD thing). The troops were there so long that they
constructed a virtual city for them, including, among other things, bars.
In the eyes of many Saudis it must have been a big
insult to have what appeared to be an occupational force in the holiest of
Muslim sites drinking alcohol and getting drunk.
Add to that the fact that thousands of Muslims make
pilgrimage to Mecca every year, and they see the occupation with their own
eyes.
And out of the 19 Sept 11th hijackers 15 were Saudi.
Fancy that.
Fast forward a dozen years. Without Saddam to pose a
threat Saudi Arabia is safe and one of the first things the US did after
major combat operations in Iraq ceased they pulled out thousands of troops
from Saudi Arabia (moving them to Qatar I believe). It wasn't heavily
advertised.
From this point on it becomes a lot more speculative.
Saudi Arabia may be on the verge of revolution. There
have been massive protests of the Saudi Royal Family happening with
increasing frequency. Of course such things are hard to predict, but there
seems to be a significant chance that they might continue to gain support,
and possibly overthrow the government.
And of course what would replace the Saudi Royal
Family would almost certainly be a fundamentalist regime. But whereas the
Taliban had a whole lot of dirt, this new regime would sit on top of one of
the world's largest deposits of oil. And such regimes generally aren't too
fond of Israel.
Whether or not things escalate to that level, it
appears that one of the major motivations for the invasion of Iraq was to
establish a safe place in the Middle East from which to operate and to allow
them to get their troops out of Saudi Arabia, so they might ease tensions in
Saudi Arabia by limiting their visible presence in the country.
Of course the neo-Jacobins completely underestimated
what it would take to win Iraq. And even though I was against the war, I
honestly thought they'd have an easier time with it than they have.
My opinion has changed and I think Iraq will remain a
deadly quagmire for years to come. Handing over control of the country to
the Iraqis would be disastrous, as it would likely result in another
fundamentalist dictatorship. And the UN isn't likely to be interested until
the US reliquishes some control. And the US' list of allies grows thinner as
elections replace the governments that were supportive of the US-led war.
I don't really have an answer, but I think it's best
if you can escape the inevitable oversimplification and polarization that
develops with things like this if you are to have any hope of understanding
what is happening.
Thank you for your time.
-Christopher William McEwen
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
_
===============================
The year is 1904,
only 100 years ago. Here are some of the statistics for the U.S. that
year...
·
Total
U.S. population in 1900 was 76 million people, less than a third the
population we have now. Alabama, Mississippi, Iowa, and Tennessee were each
more heavily populated than California; with a mere 1.4 million residents,
California was only the 21st most populous state in the Union. (The
population of Las Vegas, Nevada was 30.) The American flag had 45 stars;
Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Hawaii and Alaska hadn't been admitted to the
Union yet.
·
Life
expectancy at birth was 47 years, and the infant mortality rate is high: 140
of every 1000 babies born will die in their first year (these days, fewer
than 10 in 1000 die) Yet more than 95% of all live births in the US took
place at home.
·
Flu,
pneumonia, typhoid, gastritis, and whooping cough were common causes of
death. The five leading causes of death in the US were: 1.) Pneumonia &
Influenza 2.) Tuberculosis 3.) Diarrhea 4.) Heart disease and 5.) Stroke
·
90% of
all US physicians had NO college education. Instead, they attended medical
schools, many of which were condemned in the press and by the government as
"substandard."
·
The
dollar was a defined (not floating) unit of currency; there was NO income
tax; there was NO central bank (i.e., Federal Reserve). But the United
States was a rising economic powerhouse and was the wealthiest economy in
the world: per capita income was on the same level as Britain and Australia,
was twice that of France and Germany, and was quadruple the standard of
living in Japan and Mexico.
·
Still,
most Americans in 1904 were living in what we today would consider poverty.
Per capita American income in 1904 averaged around $5000 [in present-day
dollars], less than one-fifth the current level. In other words, the typical
American in 1904 had about the same income as a typical Mexican today. The
average wage in the US was $0.22/hour; the average US worker made between
$200-$400/year; A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000/year, a
dentist $2,500/year, a veterinarian between $1,500-$4,000/year, and a
mechanical engineer about $5,000/year. Sugar cost $0.04/pound. Eggs were
$0.14/dozen. Coffee cost $0.15/pound.
·
A
man's typical on-the-job work week consisted of 60 hours of work, spread
over six days. Pensions were rare; men generally worked until they were too
feeble to go on doing so. Two-thirds of men over 65 still worked full-time
jobs. Women made up only 18% of the paid work force. They mainly worked
in textiles, apparel, shoes, canning - fields where you were paid according
to how much you produced.
·
At
home, women spent an average of 40 hours a week on meal preparation and meal
cleanup, seven hours on laundry, and another seven hours on housecleaning.
The average housewife baked a half a ton of bread-about 1400 loaves-per
year. 18% of households in the US had at least one full-time servant or
domestic.
·
Only
about a third of American homes had running water, only 15% had flush
toilets, only 14% of the homes in the US had a bathtub, and half of farm
households didn't even have an outhouse. Most women washed their hair only
once a month and used borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
·
Only
3% of American homes were lit by electricity; only 8% of the homes had a
telephone (a three-minute call from Denver to New York City cost $11.00) 50%
of all people’s living spaces averaged more than one person per room; taking
in lodgers was common.
·
Most
people lived within a mile of where they worked, and depended on their feet
to get them around; only 20% of urban households owned a horse. There were
only 8,000 automobiles in the US, and only 144 miles of paved roads; the
maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.
·
Coca
Cola contained cocaine; marijuana, heroin and morphine were all available
over the counter at corner drugstores. According to one pharmacist, "Heroin
clears the complexion, gives buoyancy to the mind, regulates the stomach and
the bowels, and is, in fact, a perfect guardian of health."
·
Half
the population drank alcohol; half didn’t. The half that did drink averaged
two hard drinks and two beers per day; wine consumption was minimal. By
contrast, in Europe, people drank twice as much beer, and averaged more than
four glasses of wine a day.
·
[Only]
10% of the American
population was completely illiterate, and the average adult had an 8th grade
education; only 7% of students would ever complete high school.
[compiled from
http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=41362 and
http://www.teach12.com/ttc/assets/coursedescriptions/529.asp]
===============================
If I understand you correctly, you wrote that the
British deliberately set up the Sunni to rule Iraq. Well, not quite. What
the British actually did was to adapt the "dyarchy" approach Sir Lionel
Curtis had invented for India to Iraqi conditions (Sir Reginald Coupland did
the adaptation, if I remember his name correctly). This was a transitional
approach to a full hands off independence that both respected local wishes
and also avoided failed states by leaving them going concerns with
pro-British working institutions. It was well on the way to working when
interrupted by outside events (not just the world wars - also the deliberate
anti-imperialism of the USA before 1939-45 as well as after). Whether it was
inherently vulnerable to disruption, and whether disruption was inevitable,
are important questions too, of course.
The thing is, during the slow transition Iraqi dyarchy
- purely coincidentally - had local involvement that used the material at
hand: the Sunnis. But the British were not setting the Sunnis up, they were
growing in a constitutional monarchy that respected all minorities as well
as the majority. I was myself a child in Iraq in the 1950s, and I distinctly
recall that when the monarchy was overthrown our Armenian nanny was a
monarchist. So the nation building was working, until Suez's failure worked
through to undercut the Baghdad Pact that implemented British hegemony; an
unintended consequence of US middle eastern policy, though one that European
arabists had explicitly warned about.
If anyone wants to know more about the way empires
work, it's worth reading up the work of the Beit Professors of Imperial
History like Sir Lionel Curtis and Sir Reginald Coupland. It would certainly
clear away any misconceptions like "the USA isn't after territory like the
British, so it isn't an empire"; the British weren't after territory either,
just following the logical consequences of getting stuck with commitments
and facing up to making them pay for themselves as much as possible. Things
like the "Perpetual Maritime Peace" were hegemonic and imperial but not
territorial.
Yours,
P.M.Lawrence. GST+NPT=JOBS
I.e., a Goods and Services Tax (or almost any other
broad based production tax), with a Negative Payroll Tax, promotes
employment.
See http://users.netlink.com.au/~peterl/publicns.html#AFRLET2
and the other items on that page for some reasons why.
I am not sure what your disagreement
is. The Brits brought in an outside King -- the Hashemites had no previous
rule in Mesopotamia and Faysal did not last long in Syria due to French
opposition -- and the Turks had long used the Sunni to keep the
Shiites down.
I make no doubt that the monarchy, and
for that matter the Sunni in general, were more for tolerance than the
Shiites. Most everyone is.
Hi Jerry
What can you say about this?
http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,8696545%5E1702,00.html
That's just simply shocking. Who would have thought
that kite flying is so dangerous?
- Paul
Actually, I can think of nothing to say
about this. Astounding!
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