Bodily Diplomacy
In my perception, Iraq war for folks living here in Whitman Land, has become another kind of background noise[1] even though it has now been going on for longer than three years. Ok, let me be more generous and say that, at the very most, it has become a bumper sticker with two tropes that I see here: "support our troops" or "war is not the answer". And only as this background noise has grown louder in the recent months - I guess loud enough to disturb the dreaming (for example, about those gaint flat screen TVs to be had for under $1000 at Wal-Mart) of citizens - did we see some political fallout and feedback.
So counter this, GWB is running around like a headless chicken. For example, he will be meeting the Iraqi PM Maliki in Jordan (cos' that Baghdad-ian Green Zone is too damn hot for a sitting president to visit) to discuss something, as well as to practise the art of soul gazing (GWB should patent this, and sell license rights to other world leaders):
"These critics say, in effect, that the 56-year-old Iraqi leader has failed, so far, to meet the test set by Mr. Bush when the two men met for the first time in Baghdad in June. At that meeting, the American leader told Mr. Maliki he had come to “look you in the eye” and determine if America had a reliable partner here."
- from a NYT article today: "Deeper Crisis, Less U.S. Sway in Iraq"
I wonder what would GWB find this time around when he looks Maliki "in the eye"? What will he do if Maliki insists on wearing Ray Bans to the meeting? Guesses anyone?
[1] Do I sound cynical? Do I? Some of my Republican friends argue that I am blind to fact that the United States went into Iraq to save those ungreatful Iraqis just as it did with those French traitors. Yes sir, we always go to save dem savages from themselves. But they also say that since Iraqis have shown themselves to be ungreatful, United States should leave, and let them all rot in hell. I tell them to take responsility of breaking and bungling in Iraq, and now send it half a million troops with a trillion dollars or two to fix it, if they can.
Scannings
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Amar vs. Akbar
This Indian memo in today's NYT takes a look at the (supposedly?) growing disparity between Muslims and the rest of the junta in India. As to be expected of such memos, it clobbers together and quotes a bunch of statistics from an yet to be released Indian Goverment report on this issue, while providing little or no background knowledge or explanation as to why these statistics are what they are.
This is fatal, IMHO, not only because statistics without such background information or knowledge can be manipulated to fit private or social engineering agendas but also because the root causes that drive such disparities are obscured. Let's consider three pieces of statistics from the article as examples to illustrate this:
"In the western state of Maharashtra, for instance, Muslims make up 10.6 percent of the population but 32.4 percent of those convicted or facing trial.""In the famed national bureaucracy, the Indian Administrative Service, Muslims made up only 2 percent of officers in 2006."
"Less than 2 percent of the students at the elite Indian Institutes of Technology are Muslim."
A reader looking at these statistics, without any background knowledge, might reach for conclusions along the lines of Maharashtra Police hates Muslims, and locks them up in larger number than their fellow citizens of a different faith or that IAS and IITs discriminate against Muslims in their selection procedures. But in my understanding, if only based on informal reading, the first statistical number might be attributed to the fact that organized crime in Maharashtra is divided along religious lines. As for the second and third numbers, for a fact, I know that IAS and IIT (even more than IAS, having attended one) selection procedures are religion blind; all they require of an individual is the ability to pass through some very rigrous screens.
That said, the conclusions that are drawn in (and can be drawn from) this article make for disturbing reading. These coupled with de-contextualized statistics, I am sure, will be used by sections of Indian polity to engineer some hopelessly bad social policies in the days ahead - religion based quotas at IITs anyone?
Scannings
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