Dan O'Huiginn

I’m entirely in love with the Russian section of my friendslist right now (*).

Russia is currently having a tiff with Georgia. The Georgian government arrested four alleged Russian spies (possibly as a way to look good before today’s local elections); Russia responded by cutting off air, rail, postal links with Georgia. Now Russia has moved into the overtly racist stage: Moscow police have been turning up at Georgian-owned businesses, looking for minor legal infringements that would justify closing them down. A Georgian arm-wrestling champion, of all people, has been murdered in Moscow. Georgian refugees are being ordered to report to the police, etc, etc, etc… In short, the anti-Georgian prejudice that has long existed in Russia is being fanned by the Russian government into something potentially far more dangerous.

With all this going on in the mainstream, I look at livejournal. What I see is Russians making a point of going to Georgian restaurants, making “I am Georgian” badges and “I love Georgia banners”, arranging an anti-racism protest on Sunday, and so on, and so on, and so on.

Makes me feel good.

Now, I’m going to head out and see what I can make of a Hungarian industrial/synthpop mix. But I’m going to do it a lot more happily having looked at Livejournal

Edit: Neeka at Global Voices has a summary and translation of some of what’s going on. Bed now, since it’s 5am.

(*) This being essentially a few of the nicer (and some less nice) A-list Russian political bloggers, all of whom use Livejournal. In other words, I read them, they don’t read me, and it’s all a lot less like my English LJ and more like reading blogs.

Russian livejournal-users are talking non-stop about the spat with Georgia mentioned below. [Plushev](http://plushev.livejournal.com) has a heartwarming [roundup](http://plushev.livejournal.com/1209051.html#cutid1) of what people are saying.
[Cook](http://cook.livejournal.com) wants to make badges with the slogan “I am Georgian”, and [Antoshkin](http://antoshkin.livejournal.com/) has a template for a banner saying “I love you, Georgia!”.
A protest is being planned this Sunday in Pushkin square in central Moscow, “_against the kindling of hostility againstGeorgia, and against discrimination against Georgian citizens and citizens of Georgian origin_”
I’ll try to translate more of this, because it is inspiring stuff. Unfortunately it’ll have to wait until tomorrow :(.
Until then, thanks to Livejournal, and to the Russian LJ-users!

From the comments of an Abu Aardvark post: “_Subjectively speaking, I think we (the US) had a lot more respect for the Soviet Union than we do for Islamists and their allies_”
This rings true. I can’t work out what it proves, but I’d love to be able to. I would have expected al-Qaeda to get a lot of respect, through being caricatured as an comic-book evil genius. Instead, it seems the stereotype has stuck to evil, without any of the genius.
Why? Do the powers that be have less respect for non-state actors? Is it because nobody reads Arabic, so we can’t understand their cunning plans? Have we got so hung up on the ‘they hate us because we’re free’ angle that we’re blind to the Cunning Plans they do have? Is it objectively true that the leaders of al-Qaeda are less cunning than the old men in the Kremlin?
And what are the consequences of this different stereotype on how the USA (and Britain, by extension) behave?
Also: yes, I know I’m posting a ridiculous amount today. I had one of those moments where I did a word count on my ‘notes too shoddy to put anywhere’, and decided that 400,000 words of notes kept to myself is utterly useless. I apologise to my lone reader for inflicting all this on you – I still have a vague hope that one day I’ll find the right balance between hoarding information and inflicting all my crap on people.

Two scary things about the Saudi plan to building a 550-mile fence to shut out Iraq:

1. It’ll take 5-6 years for them to complete. They reckon things will be bad for a long time
2. The cost is some £13bn. I know this is a country rolling in money, but still: that’s an awful lot to pay just to keep Iraq’s rebels from getting out.

Now, maybe I’m overreacting. Building protection along a border is normal, and normally expensive. It’s only the Telegraph spin linking this so directly to Iraq. But still, it does suggest that the Saudis are working on an assumption that Iraq is going to end up in civil war within the next few years.

Looking through Brookings Iraq Index for something else entirely, I came across this baffling table. The amount of post sent each year in Iraq:

Year	Tons of mail
2001	148 tons sent (231 received)
2003	37 tons sent
2004	43 tons sent
2005	54 tons sent

Huh? Use of the postal system is a third of what it was under Saddam? Why on earth would that be the case?
Granted, dodgy statistics are the most likely culprit – the figures are sourced to an article in the New York Times, and its quite likely that the Baath figure is dodgy for some reason or other. Odder still: somehow the Times writer interprets the figures as “evidence of recovery“.
Still, it’d be nice to think there’s some mystery in those numbers, waiting to be uncovered.

Quick news from Hungary: the Prime Minister is keeping his job. There are protests going on outside Parliament at the moment: I’ll waddle over in an hour or two, but judging by Sunday it’s unlikely to amount to much.
The next date for things to happen is Revolution Day in a fortnight’s time.

Parties, and not the government, rule Iraq now

One line that tells you more than most articles, out of an excellent piece of journalism by Lara Logan. It’s also a perfect example of how compelling human interest journalism can be, when it’s done on the basis of a lot of facts, not just telling the story of the first native you meet.
Lara has framed what seem like two of the most important issues in Iraq. The first is the role of parties, mentioned above. The other is this picture of befuddled GIs surrounded by two conflicts they don’t understand:

…American soldiers are bearing the burden of a failed strategy and being forced to fight with one hand tied behind their backs, suddenly caught in the midst of two distinct wars: a counter-insurgency and a rapidly escalating sectarian conflict.
And their partners in the counter-insurgency war are participating in the sectarian conflict they’re being asked to stop.

I’d not heard of Lara Logan before, but from here on in I’m reading everything she writes.

Just as al-Qaeda (*) love prolonging the war in Iraq, so they must be overjoyed every time Blair or (usually) Bush go on some belligerent, over the top rant about Iraq. Then, it becomes so much easier for them to paint as evil megalomaniacs.
So, whenever Bush ramps up the rhetoric about Iraq, what he’s doing is putting domestic party politics above the fight against al-Qaeda(*). In other words, helping his country’s enemies to score a few political points.
Yes, this point has doubtless been made better elsewhere. But obviously it still hasn’t got through.
* no, I’m not happy boiling ‘The Enemy’ down to one sinister cartoon organization. Nor do I much like world politics being a ‘fight’ against anybody – but it’ll do.

It is hard to resist the temptation to scream at the Iraqi government to get on with doing something. But Condeleezza Rice is going a bit far telling them: “They don’t have time for endless debate of these issues, They have really got to move forward.”. In other words, stop worrying about all this democracy business.

Even the Guardian has devoted several articles to the spat between Russia and Georgia. Georgia arrests four ‘Russian spies’, Russia cuts off all links with Georgia. Georgian businesses in Moscow start getting raided (there’s nothing Russian police enjoy more than going after anybody from the Caucasus). No word on what is happening to ethnic Russians in Georgia, who make up some 6% of the population.
All this sabre-rattling seems very good for helping Saakashvili and Putin get their parties re-elected, but not much use for anybody else. Grr!

flat good.

lack of shower curtain or curtain over the bathroom window, not so good. especially when there’s a supermarket opposite.

I’m not usually all that shy about my body. But this is ridiculous.

[crossposted to IAG]
A while back the New York Times and the [BBC](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5357340.stm) cheerfully reported that 25 Sunni tribes in Anbar had decided to support the Iraqi government in attacking insurgents.
Am I too cynical in thinking that the crucial sentence is this one:

In addition to the government’s blessing, Mr. Rishawi said, the tribes also wanted weapons and equipment to confront the Qaeda-backed insurgents.

Asking for weapons from the government isn’t a sign of loyalty – it’s about getting yourself the equipment to defend yourself against anybody – government, American, jihadi, whatever – who attacks you.
Every Iraqi grouping with an ounce of sense wants to keep itself heavily armed at the moment – and if the kit comes with a vague government permission to use it, so much the better.This isn’t any different from the militias that were incorporated into the various security forces, or the employment of tribes to guard oil pipelines.
Or am I being too cynical?

This post deserves propagation. Abu Aardvark points out the key sentence in the letter to Zarqawi from al-Qaeda’s central command: “prolonging the war is in our interest“. As he explains, this makes perfect sense: the jihadis are unpopular in Iraq, and they would have no chance at all were the country not under foreign occupation. But while we are in the country, they can use their fight against us to build international support. Yes, that’s been obvious for a long time, but it’s something else to have it confirmed from the horse’s mouth. Full letter [http://www.ctc.usma.edu/harmony/CTC-AtiyahLetter.pdf](here), others captured in the same batch [here](http://www.ctc.usma.edu/harmony.asp)

• I really, really need to get my head down and do some work. I had figured that getting out of Cambridge would clear my head, and in most ways it has, but not to the point where I can sit down and do what I’m supposed to do.
• I find myself almost wishing that Hungarian was spoken by more people. There are some truly beautiful nuances to the language, but there’s no way I’m going to learn it just for 2 months and 13 million speakers. There are some very nice things you can do with affixes to slightly alter the meaning of words. But I’ve consciously decided not to aim higher than the ‘point and gesture’ level.
• That riot thing. Since I’m living stupidly close to the parliament, I’ve beenoccasionally dropping in on the ongoing anti-government protest that’s been happening there since the Prime Minister. It’s impressive how old and calm everybody there is. I mean, an anti-government protest without an angry young man in sight? that’s quite something.

I’m temporarily turning off comments on this blog, because of the ridiculous amount of comment spam I’m getting right now. No promises about when they’ll come back; probably when I’m sorted out enough to put a bit more content around here.

How can you develop a service without sharing a language with your users?
Holed up in Budapest, my head too messed up to do any proper work (eep! the doom she is a-coming!), I’ve been listening to danah Boyd‘s keynote at the blogtalk conference that’s just winding up in Vienna.
She touches on the fact that the creators of Orkut don’t have the faintest idea what their Portugese or Hindi-speaking users are doing. I’d always vaguely assumed that there would be a fair few Portugese-speakers within the Orkut development team, for instance. But obviously not.
It’d be a nice little project for a journalist or an anthropologist, to work out how much the developers of these sites know about their users.

The US Congress has done something remarkably sensible, by tacking onto a defense spending bill a guarantee that they will not establish permanent bases in Iraq. As Reuters says,

“Democrats and many Republicans say the Iraqi insurgency has been fueled by perceptions the United States has ambitions for a permanent presence in the country.“

Yep. A [poll](http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/sep06/Iraq_Sep06_rpt.pdf) released a few days ago found that 77% of Iraqis believe that the US plans permanent bases in Iraq, down just 3% since January.
The problem is, not even most Americans are going to notice this little message in a corner of a bill, let alone Iraqis. US-funded propaganda outlets might publicise it if they’re smart, but they don’t have any credibility. And anyway, why should they believe what Congress demands, if Bush isn’t willing to state it openly, and if there is always a way to work around it?