1. You’re being coaxed or pushed into a fight.
2. You can’t help feeling like a fight because you’re sick to death of
3.
To otherwise be happy in the field recording statistics, events, and
the same tales of his exploits in different versions because the original stories were fundamentally untrue
The most concerted air campaign since World War II delivered by B-52s and Stealth Bombers. Cruise and Tomahawk hit targets hit with inevitable limited collateral. The centre of Baghdad erupts on Sky. You feel the air full of fire and electricity then wash your hands like Macbeth.
We’ve
been in it for a while. It ended up being the most difficult concept of all.
Ottoman. Saud. Damascus. Over and down to South Asia:
Two firearms hidden in a refrigerator were also seized.
AK-47 and M-16 rifles from southern Thailand to Aceh. Smuggled firearms were brought to the Idi Rayeuk village in a fishing boat. To outwit authorities, the firearms were concealed in gunnysacks. With $15,000 cash, they went back to Thailand, via Port Klang in Malaysia. From Malaysia they went overland to Hat Yai.
The army shot deserters and took a notebook containing the cell phone numbers of separatist guerrillas from a dead body.
The rebels move through the villages mingling with the local population. The military follows close behind, rounding up anybody deemed suspicious.
We’ve been in it for a while, in one way or another. A young man locked in a cell and left to decompose with insects. Pits full of bones opened up to punishing desert sun. Sudan under Egypt to Desert Fox F-16 swarm.
Clinton bombed a Sudanese factory that made medicine; at the same time, defined terrorism as a crime. Then, one word fatally obscured by the politics of non-intervention happened to be the most precious and important definition we could ever hope to uphold.
Here’s the smell of blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand..
Bashar, Bashar, set the world on fire!
Ibn Saud, the Bedouin. Rein in Ikhwan killers when necessary. Unleash, when necessary. Raids launched deep into the territory of Transjordan and Iraq.
The Shammar tribe suffered 410 deaths, the bani Khalid 640 and the Najran a staggering 7000. And the cities were not far behind.
Then, with the coal face chipped, slums clumped and stained, the stench of steam and rain:
there was, in the sun, dazzling Cairo. The ambition of the Suez or the way progress could undercut autonomy, and the occult rule of power. (Talking of which...)
Rommel driving onto Alexandria.
Sixty
miles from the Capital: a radio announcement details imminent occupation. Time
for Monty
abjure sea warfare
and Persian endgame.
Cities are older than states, borders and Empires, but can be destroyed by them. The requisite sacrifice, the humbled subject. Carthage. London.
The stock
of wealth. OPEC, St Tropez, Marbella, the Bush Dynasty, Yamani’s yachts.
The “house of the people” will be declared an illusion. The
Council of Guardians veto any legislation.
F-15s and F-16s over Iraqi airspace; M-1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles in the heart of Baghdad; soldiers and marines deployed to Japan and South Korea.
Nasser stocked with Soviet jets after the Zionist rout.
The American Civil War created a boom for Turkish cotton.
1865. The Young Ottomans are the first political party in the Empire. Stemming from literary roots (Namik Kemal and Ziya Pasha) and the influence of French theory and poetry, their eventual expulsion, due to political agitation, is inevitable. Exiled to the European capitals, they continue to publish reform journals and pamphlets and smuggle them into Turkey. Ideas survive. In the end, there is Ataturk.
Troops dispatched from Istanbul via the Suez canal.
The defeat of the Wahhabis at Mecca and Medina, 1811-19.
Henceforth, we are all brothers. There are no longer Bulgars, Greeks, Romanians, Jews, Muslims; under the same blue sky we are all equal, we glory in being Ottomans.
Enver Bey, 1908.
William Knox D’Arcy scoured the Persian Empire for oil, on a sixty year concession granted by Shah Muzatta al-Din. The British lobbied very hard for this. Then they sent the Navy.
Negligence is an extreme thing
Yamamoto Tsunetomo
The beautiful ruin of symmetry or the allure of the cosmopolitan centre: its irresistible orbit another crash state and test case.
The goal is to create a web of far-flung, lean forward operating bases, maintained in peacetime only by small permanent support units, with fighting forces deployed from the US when necessary.
Power projection hubs and forward operating sites: a new lexicon of force.
The
Pentagon owns and rents: 702 overseas bases in 130 countries, with an
additional 6000 bases on US territory; 44,870 barracks, hangers, hospitals etc.
plus 4,844 on lease. That doesn’t even begin to cover the actual number on the
global range
called the arc of instability.
After two to three years of exploration, the Blok A gas field is expected to start production in 2007. Rachmat said the country currently had some 160 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves, including critical regions such as deep seas and remote land areas. He also said the government should provide incentive for investors to develop gas reserves in the critical regions. He said the incentives could be in the form of more favourable production splits or cost recovery.
Indonesian fire is heavy. You can still smell that stench, can’t you?
The question is: can the clamour translate?
AND SUSTAIN
It turned into a question of survival, rather than, say, success.
That stench on a fresh breeze. Ignore it, and it may pass.
Exxonmobile and Conoco, years from the horizon, with all-new stainless steel and chrome equipment.
Ready to dig!
Revise the production split and
Never drink Diet Coke. Diet Coke is for fat people.
Paris Hilton
