Just to make sure we understood that we were no longer in Charentes-Maritime, Cambridge laid on a splendid display of vertically-delivered water today.
Monthly Archives: July 2005
Quagmire News
A special Memex service. From today’s New York Times…
“We are capturing or killing a lot of insurgents,” said a senior Army intelligence officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to make his assessments public. “But they’re being replaced quicker than we can interdict their operations. There is always another insurgent ready to step up and take charge.”
At the same time, the Americans acknowledge that they are no closer to understanding the inner workings of the insurgency or stemming the flow of foreign fighters, who are believed to be conducting a vast majority of suicide attacks. The insurgency, believed to be an unlikely mix of Baath Party die-hards and Islamic militants, has largely eluded the understanding of American intelligence officers since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government 27 months ago.
The danger is that the violence could overwhelm the intensive American-backed efforts now under way to draw Iraq’s Sunni Arabs into the political mainstream, leaving the community more embittered than ever and setting the stage for even more violence and possibly civil war.
If the hats fits…
My summer hat, on a French window-sill, yesterday. Photographed with my friend Hap (a genial hat fanatic) in mind. (Although generally sound on the matter of hats, he wears a mere baseball cap in Summer. This is to encourage him to mend his errant ways.)
Whatever next?
New York Times discovers Podcasting. Time to move on to the Next Big Thing, I fear. Sigh.
Tourist traps
Photographed in La Rochelle today.
Hyperbole?
No — I’m not making it up. This is the name of the next village.
So when will they be ready, exactly?
From today’s New York Times…
WASHINGTON, July 20 – About half of Iraq’s new police battalions are still being established and cannot conduct operations, while the other half of the police units and two-thirds of the new army battalions are only “partially capable” of carrying out counterinsurgency missions, and only with American help, according to a newly declassified Pentagon assessment.
Only “a small number” of Iraqi security forces are capable of fighting the insurgency without American assistance, while about one-third of the army is capable of “planning, executing and sustaining counterinsurgency operations” with allied support, the analysis said.
The assessment, which has not been publicly released, is the most precise analysis of the Iraqis’ readiness levels that the military has provided. Bush administration officials have repeatedly said the 160,000 American-led allied troops cannot begin to withdraw until Iraqi troops are ready to take over security.
Holiday reading
In the garden, Tuesday afternoon.
Contemporary French politics
Governance of the Net
The UN Working Group on Internet Governance has produced its report. The BBC summarises it thus:
WGIG has issued its report about net governance and has tabled four possible futures for what should be done about policy issues, such as spam and hi-tech crime, that fall outside Icann’s narrow technical remit.
Option One – create a UN body known as the Global Internet Council that draws its members from governments and “other stakeholders” and takes over the US oversight role of Icann.
Option Two – no changes apart from strengthening Icann’s Governmental Advisory Committee to become a forum for official debate on net issues.
Option Three – relegate Icann to a narrow technical role and set up an International Internet Council that sits outside the UN. US loses oversight of Icann.
Option Four – create three new bodies. One to take over from Icann and look after the net’s addressing system. One to be a debating chamber for governments, businesses and the public; and one to co-ordinate work on “internet-related public policy issues”.
The one common aspect of all four proposals is the creation of some sort of talking shop that will give governments and others a say in how the net develops.
En passant one’s confidence in the UN’s approach to all this is not exactly reinforced by the fact that they choose to release the report in Microsoft Word format as well as PDF.