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Ed Webb

Forget 'developing' poor countries, it's time to 'de-develop' rich countries | Global D... - 0 views

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    Forget developing poorer countries - it's time to reverse the over-developed world.
Ed Webb

zenpundit.com » Blog Archive » ISIS: Paganism with an Islamic Face? - 0 views

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    Important and, to me, persuasive analysis.
Ed Webb

Turkish police 'seize Islamic State coin-makers' | Middle East Eye - 0 views

  • Turkish police have arrested six foreign nationals and seized material allegedly used by Islamic State (IS) militants to produce coins for the group
  • the coins produced are used as currency in IS-controlled areas
  • IS announced last year that it would start producing its own currency in an effort to "emancipate itself from the satanic global economic system".
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  • based on the original dinar coins used during the Caliphate of Uthman in 634 CE, was set to include seven minted coins: two gold, three silver and two copper. One gold dinar would be worth about $139
Ed Webb

Varieties of 'Islamophobia' and its targets | openDemocracy - 0 views

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    Very useful in placing in historical context identity politics that can appear to be eternal. Empires built both umma nationalism and Islamophobia, in different ways.
Ed Webb

Obama: Global arms dealer-in-chief | Middle East Eye - 0 views

  • A newly released report reveals Obama is the greatest arms exporter since the Second World War. The dollar value of all major arms deals overseen by the first five years of the Obama White House now exceeds the amount overseen by the Bush White House in its full eight years in office by nearly $30 billion
  • I knew there were record deals with the Saudis, but to outsell the eight years of Bush, to sell more than any president since World War II, was surprising even to me, who follows these things quite closely. The majority, 60 percent, have gone to the Persian Gulf and Middle East, and within that, the Saudis have been the largest recipient of things like US fighter planes, Apache attack helicopters, bombs, guns, almost an entire arsenal
  • The Congressional Research Service found that since October 2010 alone, President Obama has agreed to sell $90.4 billion in arms to the Gulf kingdom.“That President Obama would so enthusiastically endorse arming such a brutal authoritarian government is unsurprising, since the United States is by far the leading arms dealer (with 47 percent of the world total) to what an annual State Department report classifies as the world’s “least democratically governed states,” notes Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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  • In 2008, the United Nations banned the use of cluster munitions - an agreement the US is yet to ratify. Why? Cluster bombs are the number one seller for Textron Systems Corporation – a Wall Street-listed company located in Providence, Rhode Island
  • In February of this year, the Obama administration announced it would allow the sale of US manufactured armed drones to its allies in the Middle East
Ed Webb

Mongolia honours China conqueror Kublai Khan on 800th birthday - 0 views

  • "In Mongolia, Kublai is known as Kublai 'The Wise'," said museum researcher Egiimaa Tseveendorj.  "Genghis Khan is known as a military leader, but Kublai was a king who organised an enormous kingdom, not only by conquering it, but with administration, politics, trade, diplomacy, science, religion and production," she added.  "In the period of Kublai Khan the Silk Road, which facilitated trade with the West, experienced a new era of prosperity."
Ed Webb

Lessons from the destruction of Iraq's marshes - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • officials were constantly disappointed by the ingratitude of the ma’dan for the gift of state-initiated modernization
  • The marsh ecology itself was identified as an enemy to be overcome
  • the actual conduct of counterinsurgency remained anchored in developmental discourse. Iraqi officials justified the construction of new diversionary canals as necessary for agricultural expansion
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  • Similar stories could be told about British and German uses of concentrations camps and “hunger wars” in southern Africa, Soviet eradication of the herds of Kazakh nomads, American defoliation of Vietnamese rice paddies and Portuguese attempts to defeat insurgency by building a dam in Mozambique. Third World states have since adopted similar tactics, as in Guatemala’s genocidal 1982 “beans and bullets” campaign in the central highlands. The logic of ecological intervention continues to influence counterinsurgency today.
  • The destruction of the marshes did not begin in 1991, or even in 1980, but a century earlier. For millennia, the marshes had stood out as a stateless zone, comparable to what James Scott describes of upland southeast Asia. Hydrologically incorrigible and physically impenetrable, the area was a natural haven for escaped slaves, dissenters and brigands. At the turn of the 20th century though, the Ottomans and British began using advanced cartographic technologies and steamship navigation to assert mastery over the marshes and encourage the transition from peripatetic tribalism into modern citizenship based on settled agriculture. “Reclaiming” the marshes for agriculture was a cornerstone of development policies in Iraq.
  • Development and counterinsurgency are thus often linked, both tactically and doctrinally.
Ed Webb

Root Canal | Foreign Policy - 0 views

  • Of all the great canals that have ever been dug, which was the most important? Which canal, that is, has had the most outsized role in world history, by fueling trade, war, or empire?
  • I would give the Suez Canal the nod. Digging it did much the same for British sea power as Panama later did for the United States. It granted the Royal Navy ready access to the Indian Ocean, making possible a liberal empire presided over by an unrivaled fleet. How crucial Suez was to Atlantic powers’ endeavors in Asia became clear in 1904 and 1905. That’s when Japan’s ally, Great Britain, closed the canal to the Russian Navy — and in turn compelled the Russian Baltic Fleet to undertake an epic 20,000-mile voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, through the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, and up through the East China and Yellow seas just to meet Japanese Adm. Togo’s tanned, rested, and ready Combined Fleet at Tsushima Strait. The result was predictable: a debacle of the first order.
  • Suez supplies a second gateway to the larger maritime world, enhancing Mediterranean and North Atlantic countries’ prospects on the high seas immensely
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