A Cease-Fire In Sadr City?

The NYT reports on an alleged truce between Maliki and Sadr, brokered by the Iranians, who now seem as influential with the Baghdad government as the US. But combat continues. As with several such deals, the details appear murky and subject to the usual constant revision:

Under the terms announced by Sadr’s lead negotiator, Salah Obeidi, the cleric’s Mahdi Army militia would put down their weapons and allow government forces to pursue individuals wanted in attacks, provided there is a warrant. In return, the government forces would stop what Obeidi called "random" raids and open blocked roads into the cleric’s Baghdad stronghold, Sadr City.

Obeidi said the document made no mention of the government’s demand that the militia disband and surrender its medium- and heavy-grade weapons — issues that the cleric’s representatives were not prepared to discuss.

But Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s spokesman, Ali Dabbagh, said all sides had agreed that only the government is authorized to maintain an army and enforce the law.

Meanwhile, a major attack has begun on the Jihadists in Mosul. Did Maliki blink in the battle with Sadr to free up troops in the North? Abu Muqawama airs possible interpretations here. Juan Cole is skeptical about the the Maliki-Sadr ceasefire and new Mosul front here. I wish I knew what was going on. It appears as if the Maliki government is very slowly gaining in strength and legitimacy. But all its gains are fragile and reversible.

Quit Complaining

Ticked off by the indignities of flying these days? The police state atmosphere, the delays, the status anxiety, the food, the rudeness, those people on their fucking cell phones? Jerry Weinberger reminds us that the bus used to be much worse:

In 1963, I took a Greyhound bus from San Francisco to New York. Though it was the cheapest way to get from coast to coast, the fare was about a hundred bucks; adjusted for inflation, that would be nearly $700 today, one-way. I’ll never forget that trip—my nose won’t let me. It took weeks for my clothes to give up the reek of intestinal flatus that suffused the atmosphere of the coach. The whores who plied their trade from stop to stop smelled like goats. And from the winos, sitting in the back with their brown bags of Ripple, came long, deep, rumbling burps that reminded you of rotting vegetables. The food—you had to buy your own in the dumps the bus stopped at—had all been fried in grease that came in hard blocks in boxes labeled HAZMAT. The trek took almost three days, and it was hard to get more than a couple of hours of sleep at night. So if you think flying is so tough, try taking a bus instead: though they’re much nicer nowadays, they still take a long time to get you where you want to go.

Genetic Discrimination

Isn’t that another word for life? Kinsley has a spot-on column, with one more reason to love Ron Paul. Money quote:

Is it unfair that Yo-Yo Ma can play cello better than I can? Or that people hire Frank Gehry instead of me when they want a beautiful building, or that Warren Buffett is a better stock picker? Sure, it’s unfair. And it’s unfair in precisely the same way the results of a genetic test are: my lack of talent at playing the cello is something I was born with and beyond my control. Could I have overcome my lack of talent through discipline and hard work? Maybe, but not enough to scare Yo-Yo.

“If God Made Us For Joy …”

Rowan Williams:

"Same-sex love annoyingly poses the question of what the meaning of desire is in itself, not considered as instrumental to some other process (the peopling of the world); and this immediately brings us up against the possibility not only of pain and humiliation without any clear payoff, but – just as worryingly – of non-functional joy: or, to put it less starkly, joy whose material ‘production’ is an embodied person aware of grace.  It puts the question which is also raised for some kinds of moralists by the existence of the clitoris in women; something whose function is joy. If the creator were quite so instrumentalist in "his" attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether he was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy…?"

Evil In Burma

Fallows’ take – with photos:

My wife and I have been to Burma several times over the last twenty years. The first time was in the summer of 1988, around the time of the August 8 uprising and subsequent bloody repression of monks and students. The most recent was a little more than a year ago, a few days before another bloody round of repression. Like almost everyone who has been in the country, we have viewed its regime as a peculiarly pre-modern and backward form of evil. It does not seems capable of thoroughly-organized evil and repression, as in the old Soviet system. Rather it displays a benighted, superstitious, and almost unthinking indifference to whether its people suffer and die.