For the first time ever I’m conducting an attitude survey here at normblog. Please write in and tell me what you think is the moral point of the saying:

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

I ask you just to think for a minute or two and then let me have your answer. Do not confer with others. Do not google it. You can do all that afterwards. I’m interested in your raw response. If you think the thing has multiple meanings, then give me the one you favour.

I saw Cold Mountain over the Christmas holiday and have been thinking of posting something about it. Philip Stott, out at EnviroSpin Watch, has now saved me the trouble with a warm and informative review. I wouldn’t go as far as he does – with ‘minor masterpiece’ – but I thoroughly enjoyed the film and for many of the same reasons as Philip’s. WotN also did, though she asks me to say that it doesn’t match up to the brilliance of Charles Frazier’s novel. I have to confess that I missed the ‘botanical blip of the first order’ that got to Philip; but I’ll put this down to ‘division of labour’.

From a post by Anne Cunningham a couple of days ago:

[T]here are two kinds of women, those who use their friends as filler between boyfriends and those who believe the main reason men exist is so that you can talk about them with your friends.

Well, don’t ask me; I don’t feel qualified to comment. But it seems very neat. Perhaps a bit too neat.

(Update at 2.55 PM.) Anne emails:

I’d say [the] distinction is more obvious when you are younger and unmarried. Even among the married, though, I would say there are some women who don’t particularly need friends outside it (being content with dyadic withdrawal), and women who need to maintain friendships and discuss their husbands at length.

For those so inclined, here are three appreciative pieces of three fine sportsmen: Ruud van Nistelrooy, Ricky Ponting and Steve Waugh. The last of these appreciations, by Mike Ticher, is sort of back-handed, taking pleasure in Waugh’s present discomfiture by the Indians. Still, in its own way it tells the story of what Waugh has been:

Waugh’s whole career can be read as an attempt to bend the game to his own powerful will. It was a stupendous effort but not even Bradman could entirely achieve that.

Rather than the expected rollover, it is a more fitting tribute to Steve Waugh that his last Test will be seen in the same light as Bradman’s – as proof that no cricketer is invulnerable.

Unless the old bastard scores a match-saving double hundred on the last two days, of course.

He joins the immortals of the game, whatever.

A couple of days ago I featured a piece by Laith Kubba about the political process in Iraq. This article by Zvi Bar’el covers similar ground and gives more detail. His conclusion:

These quarrels, the absence of an elections law, the dearth of data on the number of citizens in Iraq, the question of the status of Iraqi exiles who have not yet returned home, and especially the deteriorating security situation, led to an American decision to try to create a “partially elected” transitional government as the least bad option. Now several further radical changes appear likely before any sort of democratic process will be feasible in the country. Saddam’s capture looks more and more like drama and entertainment, compared with the stubborn political infighting that appears set to heat up in Iraq over the next few weeks.

One thing the article brought home to me – though I’m probably a bit slow off the mark here – is that some of the difficulties now arising in Iraq have nothing to do with the Americans or the war. They would have been part of any post-Baathist reconstruction.

Mark Palmer presents a strategy for dealing with dictators

The best kept secret in multilateral diplomacy, the Community of Democracies launched in Warsaw in 2000, should move towards the centre of British, American and other democracies’ foreign policies. Its budding democracy group at the UN could take back the UN human rights commission from the dictators.
…..
The dictators will not co-operate unless there are pressures. The prospect of a trial will help to focus their minds on the need for a negotiated way out. Saddam and the dictators of Yugoslavia, Liberia, Chad, Rwanda, Chile and Argentina have confronted this reality in a growing international practice. Dictatorship itself should be recognised as a crime against humanity and we should gather the evidence against each one of the last, least wanted.

(Emphasis added.)

I’m outa here for most of today, people, so I’m putting up some stuff and then… I’m outa here.

> Here’s a nice little piece about having to get up too early.

> You can have a certain amount of fun with The Amazing and Incredible, Only-Slightly-Laughable, Politically Unassailable, PoMo English Paper Title Generator (via Emily Jones, via Jackie). Some of the titles I obtained:

– The Womanhood of Processes and the Critical in Karl Marx’s Das Kapital
– Masculist Madwomen and the Boundaries of Polyvocal Breath in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre
– Negating, Objectifying, Shattering: Relic in Charlotte Bronte and the Anal Absence of Danger in Jane Eyre
– Building the Mandatory Fragments in Ian McEwan: Black Dogs and Politics
– Memory as Borderlines: Deconstructing Unitary Edges in Ian McEwan’s Black Dogs
– Perverted Concealment and the Response of White Multiculturalism in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain
– Feminizing, Desiring, Excavating: Multiculturalism in Philip Roth and the Primal Soul of Phallus in The Human Stain

> This goes back a bit but it was news to me:

A town in Nevada, which a major US newspaper said was the nation’s “armpit”, is to host an armpit festival sponsored by Old Spice. The company has agreed to back Battle Mountain’s “Festival of the Pit” in August.

See also here. (Hat tip: Matt Kramer.)

> From a review of Michael Moore (registration required):

In Stupid White Men he validated his own title when he wrote: “Who invented the punch card ballot? A white man. Whose idea was it to pollute the world with the internal combustion engine? Whitey, that’s who. The Holocaust? That guy really gave white people a bad name . . .”

In his latest book there is more, much more. A chapter entitled “The United States of Boo!” begins: “There is no terrorist threat. You need to calm down, relax, listen very carefully, and repeat after me: There is no terrorist threat. There is no terrorist threat! THERE . . . IS . . . NO . . . TERRORIST . . . THREAT!”

For this kind of stuff people pay to listen?

Anyone who may need a reminder of how awful the Guardian was during 2003 in what it was willing to carry about Iraq and related matters can find one in the article today by Alexander Chancellor. The whole thing needs to be read if you’re to get the special flavour of the Dragunianism, but here’s the guts of it:

It was obviously a huge relief for President Bush and Tony Blair that Saddam Hussein was found last month by US troops at the bottom of a hole. To fail to find him would have been a terrible embarrassment for the coalition. But let it not be forgotten that finding him was not the purpose of the war.

When we invaded Iraq, we knew exactly where he was. His capture was not the declared purpose of the invasion. This was to destroy his weapons of mass destruction, and, as a desirable side effect, to rid Iraq of a repressive dictatorship. When the WMD failed to materialise, we took to claiming that the welfare of the Iraqi people had always been our principle [sic] concern.

The liberation of Iraq may have been a good thing, but it was a side effect all the same, just as the overthrow of General Galtieri was a side effect of the Falklands war more than 20 years ago.

Some thoughts on this.

First, since Chancellor allows that ridding Iraq of a repressive dictatorship was part of the declared purpose of the invasion – as ‘a desirable side effect’ of destroying Iraq’s WMD – it’s altogether unclear why he thinks that Saddam’s capture was not part of that same declared purpose. His capture, or else his death, was obviously a component element of the aim of defeating and overthrowing his regime.

Second, the analogy with Galtieri is misplaced for the same reason. Britain went to war over the Falklands to repel the invasion by Argentina, no more and no less. Consequently, no more. There the side effect was unintended, not part of the declared purpose of Margaret Thatcher’s Government.

Third, the concern for the welfare of the Iraqi people was not claimed only post hoc. Both Tony Blair and George Bush made statements before the war in which this was spelled out as a consideration in favour of the war, albeit not their principal one. Furthermore, I’m not aware that either of them has since tried to represent it, rather than WMD, as having been their main concern at the time.

Fourth – and here we move from Blair and Bush’s concerns to Chancellor’s own, as of many of his co-thinkers on the anti-war liberal left – in deciding how to align oneself over this war no one was obliged by the exact order of priorities of the US President and the British Prime Minister. It was possible to support the war primarily for regime-change and humanitarian reasons, and only secondarily, or even not at all, because of the external threat the Iraqi regime was perceived as posing on account of WMD. Chancellor is big enough to concede that the liberation of Iraq ‘may have been’ a good thing; most supporters of the war thought it would be a good thing and continue now to think it was one.

Chancellor’s ‘may have been’, his wanting to press to the margins the liberation of Iraq and the welfare of the Iraqi people as not really being part of the case for war, as side effects and post hoc, is entirely revelatory of this anti-war mind-set since last April. Unable to look in the face the proposition that it would have been better had the war not happened and so better if Saddam were still in power – for this is the course they supported and the thought of it burns – many left and liberal opponents of the war have tried simply to write the liberatory and humanitarian aspects out of the argument, as though these never had anything to do with it. I repeat this yet once more: it’s ‘Where is the green parrot?’ (old normblog site – 21 August) and it’s ‘Where is the green parrot?’ WMD was, supposedly, the all of it – when in fact it wasn’t.

In the same piece Chancellor cranks himself up to feel some sympathy – with all the necessary covering clauses, naturally – for the now fallen dictator:

[I]f there are any circumstances in which a monster deserves a smidgeon of seasonal goodwill, these are surely they… I imagine he will have been granted no respite from interrogation by western intelligence agents…
…..
In the meantime, Saddam Hussein, for the first time in his life, has presented a pitiful and poignant spectacle…

With his long beard and unkempt hair he looked like an Indian guru, but a miserable one. He seemed doleful and resigned to his fate, which paradoxically gave him for the first time a semblance of dignity.

Lest anyone accuse me of quoting selectively, I say again – there are the necessary covering clauses. Go see for yourself. But here, at least, there is a balance. And there’s Chancellor’s being ashamed at the British Government’s ‘refusal to agitate against the death penalty’ for Saddam. But there’s no shame apparently at the lack of any balance over WMD considerations in relation to the considerations that were bound up with the freeing of the Iraqi people from the Baathist horror. Or maybe it is, precisely, shame that’s at work – but a secret shame, trying to minimize its own origins.

Please read this report by Andrew Meldrum on the awful plight of Zimbabwe’s refugees. Every day, a report of some further dimension of a country-wide horror. For how much longer?

Reader Richard Schwartz emails:

A few days before Christmas, you put up a comment by Edgar Neufeld about Mbeki’s gratitude to Mugabe. In fact, while Zimbabwe did harbour some ANC exiles after 1980, relations were historically rather cool between ZANU-PF and the ANC, partly as a result of the latter’s alliance in the mid-late 1960s with ZAPU. The former had a warmer relationship with the PAC. None of the senior cadres of the ANC were based in Zimbabwe. I therefore think some other explanation is in order for Mbeki’s baffling support for Mugabe.

Nevertheless, if one takes that explanation at face value, then a speech by Zwelinzima Vavi of COSATU from 2001 provides a useful antidote.

Zwelinzima Vavi is General Secretary of COSATU, the Congress of South African Trade Unions. The speech to which Richard refers does begin by talking of the ‘historical ties between ZANU-PF and the South African liberation movement’ and of ZANU’s support for that movement’s struggle against apartheid. But it also contains passages like these:

In the midst of the political violence meted against the opposition last year COSATU and SATUCC issued a statement condemning government action against the ZCTU [Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions]. Government threatened to invade the union’s office and examine its financial records. This action would have clearly undermined the organisational autonomy and integrity of the Trade Union…

We took a decision as a trade union movement in the region in principle to support land redistribution in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is still characterised by unequal distribution of land – still largely in the hands of whites. At the core of the liberation struggle in Zimbabwe was the land question and it is important that this be addressed in an orderly manner. However, we could not associate ourselves with the chaotic and anarchic fast track land resettlement programme unleashed by the Zimbabwean government in 2000. This programme was in flagrant disregard of the law and unleashed a wave of violence that threatened the very stability of the society. What is even more disgusting was that the violence by party hooligans was also directed at farm workers…

In order to mask its failures and faced by prospects of a credible opposition government opportunistically used the land question to deflect attention from its failures.