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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Michael Harold
Published Letters: 498 Editor's Choice: 3
From our friends at Informed Comment who seem to know more about this stuff than everyone else in the country combined:
But to the British this isolated Afghanistan state with a subsidized army fulfilled the function of a buffer state: keeping Russia far from their Empire. The British and Russian governments demarcated the rest of the country's borders and formalized their agreement in the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention on Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet.
This Treaty was an part of the same process that Usama Bin Laden evoked in his warning to the United States on October 7, 2001. Seated not far from the Durand Line before an outcropping of the mountains of Afghanistan, whose name and history he did not mention, the Amir of al-Qa'ida informed his global audience:What the United States tastes today is a very small thing compared to what we have tasted for tens of years. Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and contempt for more than 80 years.
What was he talking about? He was talking about the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), in which "THE BRITISH EMPIRE, FRANCE, ITALY, JAPAN, GREECE, ROUMANIA and the SERB-CROAT-SLOVENE STATE, of the one part,and TURKEY,of the other part" agreed to the demarcation of today's Republic of Turkey.
Lausanne followed on the Treaty of Versailles (1919), which separated most of the Ottoman Empire from Anatolia. Together these treaties abolished the Islamic caliphate, which had been claimed for centuries by the Ottoman Sultan and recognized by most Sunni Muslims. The Treaty of Lausanne stipulated:No power or jurisdiction in political, legislative or administrative matters shall be exercised outside Turkish territory by the Turkish Government or authorities, for any reason whatsoever, over the nationals of a territory placed under the sovereignty or protectorate of the other Powers signatory of the present Treaty, or over the nationals of a territory detached from Turkey.It is understood that the spiritual attributions of the Moslem religious authorities are in no way infringed.
The division of the Islamic umma, the Muslim community, into nation states by the European colonial powers the better to dominate them and nullify the temporal power of the Islamic caliphate is at the heart of Bin Laden's grievances against the contemporary world order. Destruction of the caliphate based in Istanbul prepared the ground, in his view, for the catastrophe of the Palestinians, sanctions and war against Iraq, and the "occupation of the Land of Muhammad" by "infidel troops."
Though Bin Laden mentioned neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan, al-Qaida respects the border dividing these two states no more than it does the State of Israel or the secular Republic of Turkey. All are equally products of aggression against the Muslims.
It is no coincidence that al-Qaida, though led and conceived by Arabs, was founded in these borderlands. To Westerners it may appear that Bin Laden is now trapped in an isolated region. But this region, never fully integrated into the modern system of states, provides an appropriate seat for this transnational insurgency against that very system.
http://icga.blogspot.com/2007/07/pessoptimist-in-istanbul-will-bin-laden.html
The Sunni in Iraq, secular or not, will never give up their claims to dominance. The Shia will never again accept minority status. Al Qaeda wants its caliphate back. Saudi Arabia is Sunni. Iran is Shia. Iraq is predominantly Shia. With the destruction of the caliphate, Turkey became (and remains) the only Islamic country that prescribes secularism in its Constitution and practices secularism in its politics.
Yeah. And we're going to establish "democracy."
We are so screwed. And so is Iraq.
I agree that whistleblower is a better term than tattletale. But it is still pejorative to say the least.
Your example of those who bravely go to certain death leaving behind them a last letter to a loved one or a poem speaks of a courage than most will never know. Given the amount of courage necessary to speak truth to power in an age in which power has made truth its enemy, knowing that your life may be ruined as a result of speaking the truth, there has to be a better word than whistleblower. I don't know what that word would be, but I know what it would mean. It would mean selflessly putting the truth before all else for the good of others.
"Our traffic has doubled since Huffington Post came on the scene," Walsh said. "We're on track for 4.5 million uniques [unique visitors] this month, and we've been averaging about 4.2 million this year." According to the company's filings, the average number of Salon's unique visitors for the three months ended last Dec. 31 was 3.6 million, an increase of 56% from the three months ended Dec. 31, 2005.
http://www.nasdaq.com//aspxcontent/newsstory.aspx?textpath=20070730%5CACQDJON200707300015DOWJONESDJONLINE000003.htm&cdtime=07%2F30%2F2007
I'm guessing that 4.5 million uniques a month isn't too bad for an online magazine. And given Glenn's rapid rise in the blogosphere and his NYT bestseller status, he's probably responsible for a significant portion of those visits.
At times, this is one of the most intelligent and resourceful comment sections in the political blogosphere. That's why I come here: to read the usually insightful posts by various commenters. At other times the comment section morphs into something I don't think Linnaeus could classify.
I would like to respectfully suggest that a significant number of people actually do come to Glenn's comment section for purposes related to information and opinion. That's because there are some fairly serious political and social analyst types that frequent these comments.
If I were a libertarian I would probably be a lot more sympathetic to the ongoing arguments that occasionally take up several hundred comments in a single blog entry.
But I'm not a libertarian.
No kidding. I really like talking to intelligent, sensitive and open-minded types.
Again, that's why I come here.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
