The so-called
International
Cricket World Cup



is finally over – a strange combination of drawn-out yawn, rip-off, farce, and sinister mystery.

The sinister mystery of course was the murder of Bob Woolmer, an event probably not directly caused by his team’s (Pakistan) premature exit from the tournament, or the impulsive fury of a disappointed fan, but the well-planned execution of a stringer who either was not playing along with agreed match-fixing arrangements or was about to blow the gaffe on the billion dollar industry. Everyone knows the one-day game is riddled with corruption, and every unexpected result, and even every unexpected episode – like two wickets in an over - is automatically suspect.

Bob Woolmer may have been a big man, but he was a midget in comparison to the godfathers of illegal cricket betting.

The on-going plodding efforts of the local police were derisory – the murderers would have been out of the country within an hour of the deed being done – creating a new simile in the English language – as useless as a Jamaican pathologist.

The drawn-out yawn was the two month long tournament itself – from 16 original teams, some of which could hardly hold a bat the right way up, we reduced to a mystifyingly named “Super 8” phase, the participants of which played every combination of each other and which therefore seemed to go on for ever. There was and is one cricketing superpower – Australia – just as there is a global political superpower – with all the other teams being also-rans, so there would never be any doubt of the result.

The rip-off was the huge expense of the proceedings for any fan wanting to attend – hanging around in the West Indies for two months is not the cheapest part of the world, not to mention the costs of flying around from island to island to follow your team, plus the ticket prices in the vast, newly built stadiums, which therefore remained largely empty and will stand as terrifying white elephants for the future of these small nations, whose arms were twisted to build them.

The farce was the siting of the tournament on tropical islands where it rains all the time, and came fittingly to a head in the final on Saturday, which limped along on an on-off basis due to the weather, was shortened, and ended twice – in the almost total darkness! Don’t we have weather forecasts these days? If on/off rain was predicted for the whole day, why not postpone the whole event until Sunday? Do teams spend several years in properation for the final, only to be fobbed off with a truncated parody of a match, because of rainy weather? Since everyone had been waiting two months, another day would not have made much difference.

All of this is based on One Day International cricket, a pantomime version of the ancient game, where the players wear neck to toe coloured pyjamas (some of which must be excruciating in the heat) and play a game which has the most Byzantine arcane rules of any sport, including the so-called Duckworth-Lewis rules, where one needs a laptop and statistics degree to decide who won! And not even then, because officialdom in the final match could apparently not fix on the winning figure, leaving the losing team (Sri Lanka, the winning one being of course Australia) to battle on literally in the dark. Imagine a football cup final whose length could be reduced to a 15-minute play each way at the whim of the referee, or a match decided by 1.35 goals!

Oh yes, and as another part of the farce, we have the 'umpires', relics of an earlier gentlemanly era, mostly elderly portly figures with acute visual and hearing impairment, who made decisions, chiefly on leg-before-wicket and catches at the wicket, seemingly at random. Where do they get them? We could only hope that the number of batsmen given out when they were obviously not, were approximately equal to the converse case, and so cancelled out. If not due to incompetence, the inevitable suspicion, for every incomprehensible verdict, is of course match fixing again.

We have the (awesome) computer graphics technology to make decisions of hair-fine accuracy now, so for heavens sake use it, and relegate the human ‘umpires’ to field supervisors, holding bowlers’ glasses and setting up the stumps etc.

So next time please, shorter and simpler.

Boris Yeltsin





is dead and buried; the tributes have been made, the pundits have opined, and the journos have moved on.

I was very sad to hear the news last week; not that I am a believer in coincidences, but I had been wondering what had become of him when the flash came through.

He was a man who fundamentally changed his (vast) country - not many can say that; and a person who emerged from his conventional communist political background to show enormoous personal courage, to climb on that tank, face down the still very dangerous forces of the past and avert an unimaginable civil war.
Of course he has his detractors, from the minnows who moaned that he drank too much, to the ordinary Russians for whom idealism mattered less than the disappearance of their life savings.

The truth is that, although he was quintessentially Russian, Russians distrusted him - as in the communist era and now, they preferred a resulote leader who told them what to do and kept Russia strong, than an experimenter with newfangled and disorganised theories of 'democracy'.

His name will be remembered for centuries to come; though I hope not as the figure in the narrow window of the sole democratic Presidency of Russia - a slim episode between the country's last communist leader and the first fascist one.

The latest numbing catastrophe from the schoolyard

comes again from the US, where, as the world knows, 32 were shot to death in, not a schoolyard, but the 2000 acre Virginia Tech campus.

However, not out of the blue, as the usual cliché has it – in fact, the Tech seems rather a flaky place, with a shooting incident on the first day of the academic year, and death threats to unspecified persons just this week. The CNN commentator, with unaccustomed frankness, posed the questions: why always schools or colleges, and why (usually but not always) America? Good questions. Why schools? I suppose because unstable and often affluent teenagers, sated by violent TV and websites (and NOT desperate deprived individuals, as some social apologists would have it) enact their bloody fantasies on the environment they know best – their schools And why America? Forgive us if we mention America’s gun culture. In a country where the absolute right of a wild-eyed adolescent to buy the automatic weapon of his choice, no questions of ID asked, is enshrined in the Constitution, it is somehow more likely that these incidents will take place in the US than elsewhere. Of course, the gun lobby are already rushing in. If only the kids in the college had had their own automatic weapons, this would never have happened – the assailant would not have dared to shoot etc. Funny that hours after heavily armed (as well as heavily overweight) police arrived at the campus, the gunman was still merrily shooting away.

This raises another strange point. There was at first apparently a shooting incident involving a mere two deaths, at around 7am. The authorities naturally assumed that this was a normal American college morning (“I don’t like Mondays” etc) and did not react seriously. Meanwhile, the gunman walked unchallenged to the other end of the mile long campus, and started shooting up an engineering building, two hours later! He got as far as another 30 deaths before turning his gun on himself – the authorities were still running around sending emails, updating their website and taking videos. Could not the police have taken him out hours earlier?

President Bush called on a 'loving God' to provide consolation for those bereaved. I have one question: "why did the loving God not prevent the attack in the first place. Strike the perpetrator with a heart failure, or jam his gun? Shouldn't have been too difficult.

As I said, the ‘conservatives’ are already rushing in, blaming liberal college culture etc. Actually, I think one of the solutions would be to round up conservatives and the NRA, arm them to the teeth, if they are not already, take them to an appropriate locale, say Death Valley, and let them wipe themselves out – it would leave the world a better and cleaner place (and a few fewer gun lobbyists).

The iconic author and great humanist Kurt Vonnegut has died. His attitude to life, and the inspiration for his greatest work, came from his experience as a POW in world war 2, imprisoned at Dresden, when the Allies, preferring a classical city with little military signifance as a target, to the by then well-known locations of the Nazi death camps, flattened it in a one night fire storm than killed 100 000 civilians. Vonnegut survived because the prisoners had been temporarily held in an underground meat storage facility - hence "Slaughterhouse 5".

One of his lesser known jobs was that of a car dealer specialising in SAAB's. This enterprise failed, and he blamed this on the crap product. SAAB's have improved in the meanwhile, and I dedicate my trusty chariot (above) to his memory. I hope GM will belatedly recognise him as one of their more illustrious salesman. He also joked that because of this, he never received the (Swedish managed) Nobel prize for literature..

He seemed to have had writer's block in later life, not producing much. However, when the president incumbent of the White House incumbed, probably the worst President since Franklin D. Pierce, the ensuing outrages forced him to come out of retirement for his last work - "A man without a country" which says it all. It applies (or should apply) to many. Read it.

Battle of Britain

stuff it ain't

This is Faye Turney (Turkey?)

the intrepid if rather overweight British gender equality sailor who in company with 14 of her fellow 'coast patrollers' was captured and then released by Mahmood the Munificent last week. Mr. Blair of course raised an emetic high moral storm about perfidious Iran and how the sailors were well within Iraqi territorial waters. How you define territorial waters in an enormous ill-defined muddy estuary is a bit puzzling, and begs the ur-question: who gave the Brits the right to be in Iraq or its waters in the first place? Why were the Brits so upset - I mean, it's not as if the Iranian navy is patrolling the coast of the Isle of Wight. No, these sailors were simply pawns in the sad little charade of the last act of Empire, and not very well equipped ones, in a little unarmed and unprotected rubber dinghy; so they rightly thought: why should they sail Mr. Blair's ducks for him?

So, in a very un-stiff upper lip manner, they sang whatever tune the Iranians wanted: apologised for straying into Iranian territory, thanked their captors for the good treatment etc etc.

When released, the predictable happened - Ms. Turney headed straight for the media, as fast as her pudgy legs would carry her, offering her 'story' for a 6 figure sum, meaning presumably more than £ 100 000. According to British military relulations, serving members are not allowed to give their accounts to the media - this time the rules were relaxed - why? was the MOD promised a percentage? And of course this time Ms. Turvey was singing a different tune, to up the ante - how she was threatened with death and rape, and stripped almost naked (could not have been a pretty sight). At least she must have felt under some honest impulse to earn her £100 000 plus. Only when howls of rage from the public intervened (for instance from a mother of one service person killed in Iraq, who unfortunately never had the opportunity to sell his story) did the British Ministry of Defence pull the plug and forbid any more of the gallant mariners blabbing to the telly. Wouldn't have been much to their stories anyway.

Moral of the story: if you start a shabby little war under false pretences, don't expect the hapless soldiers sent there to be heroes. As Slate magazine said, they are not defending their country; they are just pulling down their salaries. And who ever died for a salary (especially not good ones)?

This is Carlos Alberto Parreira,
the famous Brazilian (football) coach,

headhunted (or foothunted?) to coach the South Africa side in the run-up to the 2010 World Cup, to be held of course in South Africa. Not to be confused by the way with that other iconic Brazilian coach, Luiz Filip Scoleri – they look vaguely similar, except one with a moustache and one without.

Anyway, Mr. Parreira signed the contract, and arrived in South Africa at the end of last month. There were awed articles showing him emerging from his Sandton multi-star hotel to go house hunting for some suitable des res which start thereabouts at R20 000 per month. Mr Parreira would be able to afford this, since his contract stipulated a fee of US$ 250 000 per month, or R 1 800 000: about US$ 8000 per day (you can play around with a calculator for a few other parameters).

All started off well: he attended a couple of matches, and set up a training camp. Then a tiny problem – the South Africa Football Association had neglected to apply for a work permit for him (they probably reasoned they are God, with the destiny of the universe in their hands, so why should they consider such minutiae?). But the SA immigration authorities took a different view – Mr Parreira, on pain of arrest is not allowed to attend any games, takes notes off a televised game, or do anything which could be construed as ‘work’. So he is sitting around, at a cost of US$8000 per day. If South Africa, is anything like Namibia, where a work permit even for a celebrity can take 6 months to a year, we may be talked about a lot of dosh down the tubes.

This seems all to symptomatic of the hallucination and obsession, which is gripping the South Africa football authorities and the Government around 2010. Billions are being spent, for instance, on vast stadia holding five times what normal (post-cup?) crowds will be able to sustain. When any soul has the temerity to timidly suggest that one could manage by spending say a billion or two Rand less, he/she is accused of having an apartheid mentality. Government assume that the World Cup will be an event of cosmological significance, changing the destiny of a country and a continent, but it won’t be. It will be great, it will be amazing, but it will be a 4-week football tournament. And that’s it. Six months after Deutschland 2006, can anyone remember anything about it apart from the head butt? The only part of South African society which will, one can predict, make a huge killing (unfortunately probably literally) is the criminal industry.

That’s the long term. In the short term, I hope that work permit comes through soon.

I know it’s

a few days ago, so apologies for old news, but I’m still puzzled.

What led John Howard, the Australian PM, to lash out at Barak Obama, the latest candidate for the Dem nomination? (Or “08-ama”, as the cartoonists have obviously dubbed him). Is he (Howard) feeling increasingly isolated now that his buddies B&B are in the twilight of their careers? Is it because everyone else is ‘distancing’ himself or herself from his greatest love, the Iraq war? Why did he say that bin Laden must be circling the election date in 2008 and praying for an Obama/Democratic victory? Why is he still calling the Democrats the friends of the terrorists, when even Bush has given up on that one? Or maybe the news hasn’t reached the remote shores of Australia yet?

It need hardly be commented that Osama (not Obama) would most likely be praying for a Republican victory in 2008, since under Bush, al Qaeda has done brilliantly, and recruited staggeringly more supporters (the latest, a violent faction in Algeria) than Osama could ever have hoped for. As the other classic cartoon had it: “Is it not wondrous, O Vile One, that the more Bush talks, the less we have to do?”

Beyond this, why the sudden (and status-enhancing) attack in particular on Barak Obama, who is not by a very long shot the Dem’s confirmed candidate yet. After all, Howard has not launched a public attack on Senator Murtha or Speaker Pelosi, both vociferous anti-war Democrats. Could there be a niggly little racialist aspect, that Howard is infuriated by a cheeky Abo upstart daring to criticise his policies? especially towards a country whose policy has been, for a century, in all but name, the extermination of the Aborigine population?

Obama, as would be expected, gave a dignified reply. If Australia was concerned about troop commitments in Iraq, he said, she was most welcome to send more troops of her own. Since Australia maintains a derisory contingent of 1400 troops, about 100th of the US’s level, the suggestion is very apt.

It’s not often

that one agrees with everything that President Putin says. But in yesterday’s address at a high level security conference in Munich, he said, among other things, that the US was acting as the world’s sole superpower in a unipolar world, that it was exercising an almost uncontrolled use of military force to get its way, that it was flouting international law, that it was making the world a more dangerous place, that it was inspiring terrorism and forcing smaller countires to seek weapons of mass destruction for their protection.

In other words, that US policy is having the precisely oposite effect from what was ostensibly intended.

I would say the speech should get a 100% accuracy grade. Using the US’s (then) military supremacy to achieve dominance in world affairs, correct me if in error, was precisely the neocon’s agenda, as made specific in the writings emanating from the wood-panelled right-wing think tanks, in the early years of the Bush administration.

‘Surprising and disappointing’, was the State Department’s reaction. I’ll bet. ‘An unnecessary confrontation’ said someone. “If Russia wants meaningful relations with the West…” pompously began the overweight, superannuated Republican John McCain. It might actually be a case of things being the other way around.

‘Back to the cold war?’ posed the Babbling Broadcasting Corporation.

No, none of these things. Just a (re)emerging power flexing its muscles, and laying out a few, long overdue home truths. The US would be well advised to listen.

Over $ 7 billion

has been promised in aid by various countries at a recent conference for the reconstruction of the Lebanon.

I wonder how much of this was contributed by Israel.

Also to be wondered is, in the event of a Hizbollah governemtn coming to power, even legally, how much of this will be handed over??

“Where’s the outrage?”

as a former (and better) US president once said. I’m referring to Somalia, where a few months ago, after a decade of anarchy, a de facto but functional administration grew up, seemingly spontaneously, in the glaring absence of the so-called provisional government, which felt so popular and secure in its own country that it chose to base itself in Nairobi; its leader never having been to Mogadishu. Anyway, this de facto administration, unlike the products of innumerable hot-air conferences, actually started to get things done. The seaport and airport of Mogadishu were opened. Government offices started to function. You could walk around the city without being instantly mowed down by militias. It seemed to be a government by consent, whereas the ‘official’ government, a cobbling together of warlords, was nowhere to be seen, or at least languished in a far southern town. The administration was called the Union of Islamic Courts – the very name indicating that it was primarily a clerical and administrative organisation, rather than a political one. Religious extremists? No more so than the Christian Democrat party in Germany is an extremist religious organisation.

But the UIC, though not fundamentalist, made two fundamental mistakes. One was simply by virtue of being successful. Somalia’s neighbours, Ethiopia, which fought several border wars with Somalia in the 70’s, and the comically corrupt regime of Kenya, must have concluded that a stable and functioning Somalia represented a competitor and a threat to them. They decided to take action, using the installation of the recognised but moribund ‘provisional government’ as a pretext.

The other mistake was the inclusion of ‘Islamic’ in their name, which would guarantee that sooner or later they would get bombed by the US. No matter that the organisation was overwhelmingly a moderate one, the paranoid delusionals in Washington could very easily be convinced (by some “reliable intelligence” again) that they harboured dangerous wanted-list al Qaeda suspects. So Ethiopia, Kenya and the US ganged up on the UIC, and of course defeated them by sheer weight of firepower. The UIC retreated, saying that they did not want to cause civilian casualties, an attitude somewhat different, we may note, from that of the US.

The US navy blockaded the Somali coast to prevent UIC members from escaping (why should they wish to ‘escape’ from their own country?) : and is not the blockading of a neutral country’s coast an act of war in international law? And of course, the US duly bombed the UIC’s last remaining stronghold in the far south, with evidence of civilian casualties but very little evidence of slain al Qaeda militants.

So now the provisional government holds sway in Mogadishu, propped up by 8000 troops of the Ethiopian army. As far as the US is concerned, the Ethiops made an ideal low cost proxy force. They will leave ‘in a few days’ stated the Ethiopian prime minister. Fat chance, seeing that in their absence the half-life of the Somalia PG would be about 10 minutes.

There is an attempt to legitimise this exercise by claiming that it is only temporary, pending the arrival of an AU peacekeeping force. The only show-willing contributor to such a force so far is Uganda, which seems rather suspiciously eager to get in on the act. Few regional countries wish to get involved in Somalia; and anyway the AU is fully stretched doing an essential job in Dafur. So I would bet the Ethiopians will stay put for the time being. Why not? They have effectively a client state, if not a colony, and a new coastline, the former one lost to Eritrea.

In the last couple of days there has been another disturbing incident. One of the leaders of the UIC, conceded by even the EKUS ‘coalition’ to be a moderate, 'turned himself in' in northern Kenya, flown to Nairobi, and then ‘handed over’ to US officials. By what right or law is this done? He is presently being ‘held’, as a citizen of a sovereign country (which Somalia is now touted to be) on no other ground than that he is an official of an organisation unpopular with the US. Next stop, Guantanamo!

What are we to make of the statement/admission by the US ambassador to Kenya that ‘some’ members of the UIC were moderates and should play a part in the new Somalia order? It seems like an exercise in PR and window dressing. If you had just been driven out of your office by a foreign army, covertly backed by the US, would you be inclined to slink back and ‘play a part’? It is highly unlikely that the provisional government would trust anyone in the UIC, and rightly so.

So there we have it. A Christian army invading and forcibly occupying a Muslim state. Sound familiar? The army is bound to be popular, Not too many signs of a full insurgency yet (the attacks on Ethiopian troops are starting) but watch this space. Certainly, there are no flowers in the street. What do you expect from a new war, from the folks who brought you Iraq? (As the commentator Gwynne Dyer said).

A justifiable cause for outrage? I think so.

So Saddam has been executed.
However, despite 'conservative' commentators rushing to comment that his death 'is an important milestone', 'allows Iraq to turn the corner', 'marks the end of a dark chapter', and all the other clichés, his death now does not mark anything much, since the fate of Saddam and the fate of Iraq parted company a long time ago, and the daily life of Iraqis in the present hell is far darker than it was under his regime.

Nor will his passing affect the insurgency much one way or the other, since his faction is but a small faction in the insurgency.

His trial was a shambles, and did not provide in the slightest degree the hoped for platform to reconciliation as the Truth Commission provided in South Africa. He was hanged on a (relatively) minor incident early in his career, to avoid awkward questions of his support from the West cropping up in the proceedings, and most of his victims, the thousands of Sunnis, will not receive and moral or legal justice.

If anything, he was the only person who symbolised (and achieved) a strong unitary Iraqi state, and his passing thus symbolises the inevitable fragmentation and chaos into which the country is now descending.

Bill Torbitt

Can anyone fail to be reminded,

even if they only know about it from history books, when they hear the Lebanese prime minister’s desperate pleas for help and an immediate cease fire: of Haile Selassie’s appeals for help to the League of Nations when the Italian fascists where laying waste to his country Ethiopia, or the pleas of Imre Nagy, the Hungarian premier of the 1956 uprising, over the free radio’s last transmitter, as the Soviet tanks were closing in on Budapest?

To defeat a handful of ragged terrorists, and their fireworks-night rockets, is it necessary to destroy a sovereign country, to send hundreds of thousands fleeing for their lives, to cause hundreds of deaths, and billions worth of damage, to undo a generation’s work in painful reconstruction, in a couple of days? Are these precision strikes, to destroy a small country’s infrastructure: power supply and only dairy processing plant? Or is it Israel’s favourite tactic of collective punishment?

It is now obvious that the reason for the clamour to remove Syrian forces from the Lebanon was simply to leave in defenceless in preparation for an Israeli attack.

As expected, the US congress and senate pass knee-jerk resolutions endorsing Israel’s attacks on Hezbollah and the Lebanon without calling it to exercise any restraint. Every state, given enough power and contempt for its neighbours, starts to behave like the Nazis.

The Israelis, like the Nazis before them, not being used to those they are attacking to defend themselves, react with fury to Hizbollah’s resistance. As with the Nazis, do they have a policy of 100 Arabs killed for every Israeli?

The neo-cons, like in their cowboy movies, need an identifiable bad guy, to simply the issues for their audience. This bad guy then is demonised in all the available media, and blamed for all the evil and problems the US is encountering. Of course, the current evil is terrorism (and anything which may threaten the supremacy of Israel). The bad guy can either be an individual or a country. And of course, it should be someone/some place reasonably easy for Americans to pronounce. Up till recently, it was al-Zaqarwi. After he was killed, the message was that all the problems of Iraq would be solved….. sorry, that does not seem to have happened, so a new villain is needed. Re-enter Iran/Syria (the supply of bad guys does seem to be dwindling)

Does not any intelligent person realise (and even in the neocon administration there must be a couple) that clumsy military attacks on Muslim create far more terrorists than they kill?

So we have a ‘precision’ targeting of Lebanon. It certainly is a precision attack, designed to maximise the impact of collective punishment. The usual targets are power stations, roads and other communications, and in the case of Lebanon, the diary processing plant which produces baby food for the whole region.

In the neo-con world, there must be a simple explanation (and conspiracy theory) for every setback and problem. Hizbollah would of course not have acted on its own – there must have been a puppet master in the background.

One conspiracy theory is that Iran deliberately orchestrated the raid on Israel to draw attention away from its nuclear programme at the G8 meeting. Here’s another conspiracy theory – that the whole scenario is the neo-con’s ploy to revive their flagging agenda and to bring the US electorate, literally, a brand-new casus belli.

Is it not Israel’s strategy to surround itself with a buffer zone of compliant, subject or if not compliant, shattered vassal states ?

Onward to Teheran (and just imagine what the Iranian ‘insurgency’ will be like when we get there)