Shafts of Light
From the blog of Hayder Al-Khoei — grandson of Grand Ayatollah Abdul-Qasim Al-Khoei — I found this post on hearing the music of Lebanese singer Nancy Ajram in what was the heartland of Sadrist Iraq really affecting:
Things just arn’t the same as they were in Kufa. When the US and Iraqi armies battled Moqtada’s army in 2004 most of the people that wandered the streets of Kufa were militiamen. Even in times of peace this town was a bastion for the Mehdi Army. Historically, Kufa has always been the heart of the Sadrists in southern Iraq.
The local police were either sympathetic to the Sadrists, indifferent when it came to their crimes or Sadrists themselves. In many instances the police would man checkpoints together with the militia. If the Sadrists needed police cars or equipment they would either steal them from the police or be given them by the police. Anyone wearing jeans, having the wrong haircut or playing music loud from their cars would be humiliated, taken out of their cars and beaten with sticks in the middle of the street.Those days are long gone. Now commandos and Rapid Intervention Forces patrol the streets alongside the police, there is no room for the Sadrists to breathe. Yesterday we had to drive over a mile to find a space to park alongside the river bank. The river was lined with families and teenagers laughing, enjoying dinner, drinking tea, playing backgammon or smoking sheesha. Every few minutes a car would drive past with Arabic music on full volume blaring out of the windows and there was not a single Sadrist there to shut them up. Some of the older men even encourage the teenagers, with beads swinging in their hands they shout “hele, hele” as they hear the sweet voice of Nancy Ajram.
Al-Khoei’s pleasure at the relaxed atmosphere in Kufa reflects the broader improvements in security that led Stephen Biddle, Michael E. O’Hanlon, and Kenneth M. Pollackto proppose, in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, a strategy for troop withdrawal from Iraq that doesn’t come at the cost of stability.
Stormcrow Economics
With so much to blog about at the moment, I don’t know where to begin. However, I couldn’t let this one slip past without a link. The New York Times has just profiled (the indispensible) RGE Monitor’s Nouriel Roubini. Roubini, a notorious pessimist, is now, much like The Black Swan author and career contrarian Nassim Nicholas Taleb, lauded where he was once obscure for predicting to a large degree the current financial crisis. The NYT calls him “Dr Doom”, but Roubini is more like Hyman Minsky or Keynes, an economist trying to understand what happens when the past doesn’t resemble the future. His diagnosis of the current crisis draws on his work with emerging market financial crises in the ’90s. The common denominator Roubini identified was large current account deficits, financed by “borrowing from abroad in ways that exposed them to the national equivalent of bank runs”. Roubini has watched with trepidation the same dynamic at work in the US for the last few years — a position that he ironically describes as more realist than pessimist, because “things are turning out even worse than I initially predicted.”
For the US though, the future Roubini sees is undeniably bleak,
“Reckless people have deluded themselves that this was a subprime crisis,” he told me. “But we have problems with credit-card debt, student-loan debt, auto loans, commercial real estate loans, home-equity loans, corporate debt and loans that financed leveraged buyouts.” All of these forms of debt, he argues, suffer from some or all of the same traits that first surfaced in the housing market: shoddy underwriting, securitization, negligence on the part of the credit-rating agencies and lax government oversight. “We have a subprime financial system,” he said, “not a subprime mortgage market.”
Roubini argues that most of the losses from this bad debt have yet to be written off, and the toll from bad commercial real estate loans alone may help send hundreds of local banks into the arms of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. “A good third of the regional banks won’t make it,” he predicted. In turn, these bailouts will add hundreds of billions of dollars to an already gargantuan federal debt, and someone, somewhere, is going to have to finance that debt, along with all the other debt accumulated by consumers and corporations. “Our biggest financiers are China, Russia and the gulf states,” Roubini noted. “These are rivals, not allies.”
The United States, Roubini went on, will likely muddle through the crisis but will emerge from it a different nation, with a different place in the world. “Once you run current-account deficits, you depend on the kindness of strangers,” he said, pausing to let out a resigned sigh. “This might be the beginning of the end of the American empire.”
Solzhenitsyn
“Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.”
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, December 11, 1918 – August 3, 2008
