Badr Boys, Badr Boys, What You Gonna Do?
Guardian Baghdad correspondant Jonathan Steele claims the country's Interior Ministry "is refusing to deploy thousands of police recruits who have been trained by the US and the UK" and elevating sectarian cops instead. Interior Minister Bayan Jabr is a leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, and he's integrated some of the SCIR's armed wing—the Badr organization—into police efforts. How much can we trust the Interior Ministry?
It emerged late last year that the interior ministry has been running secret detention centres. US troops discovered two prisons in which more than 800 men and boys, mostly Sunnis, were held in shocking conditions. Under the Iraqi constitution only the ministry of justice is allowed to run prisons.
Many Sunnis now say they would rather be detained by the Americans than the Iraqi police.
Iraqi democracy—a little less Iowa, a little more Five Points.
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Psst! Pull my purple finger!
Yeah, this supposedly has been happening for a while 🙁
Thought there is the question if he will remain if Jafari’s nomination for Prime Minister gets tossed out in favor of Abdul Mahdi.
Of course Abdul Mahdi is also from SCIRI, but his nomination, if the political cards are right, will create a unity goverment with th Sunnis, Kurds, seculars, and the remnants of the UIA, and so the Interior Ministry has a chance of changing hands…don’t know if that will still purge millitia elements from the police and armed forces though 🙁
Formation of an Iraqi government has so far foundered on the question of who gets to personally control the shooty ministries (Interior and Defense) and the money ministry (Oil).
I’m just sayin’.
If we were better Imperialists, we’d “invite” him to resign.
Arab cronyism makes Bush’s cronyism look fair and reasonable. And yeah, I meant Arab, not Muslim. Corruption in the Middle East comes from more than just religious fanaticism. Arab culture has a lot of qualities that don’t click well with personal freedom and democracy. It’s a culture where personal loyalties of powerful men, to friends and family, take strong precedence over fairness, and the good of the country.
Yeah yeah yeah, I know it happens in America, too, but it happens way, way, WAY more in Arab countries. It’s systemic there, the rule and not the exception. Think of it like this: imagine if Bill Gates had a hundred kids and seven hundred grandkids, and he promoted them to high positions at Microsoft no matter how fucking stupid and lazy they were, in place of people who actually worked hard and knew what they were doing. You think Windows has glitches now? Please.
But that’s the norm in the Arab world, in business and in government, and news stories like this should come as no surprise at all. But you know what, we’re never going to address these cultural problems of theirs, because it sounds insensitive. No, we’ll just keep fighting dumbass wars like this, and losing a few thousand of our kids, and watching places like Iraq collapse right back into steaming piles of shit the minute we pull out.
It’s like trying to help a drug addict by confronting all of the problems you can see at a glance (not eating, house is a rotting mess, vanishes for weeks at a time), but without being able to talk about the drug problem itself, because that’s insensitive. Yeah, good luck really helping that person.
And how do we “fix” Arab culture? We don’t. We can’t. The western world’s best move is to give up on the Middle East. Our goal should be to render Arabs broke and powerless, as fast as humanly possible, before they nuke too many of our cities. Switch to hybrids for now, and immediately fund a Manhattan Project-sized effort to get past even hybrids, and past fossil fuels altogether. We want the Arabs starving, with flies crawling on their faces. When they can’t afford food, much less plutonium, the world will be a much, much safer place.
imagine if Bill Gates had a hundred kids and seven hundred grandkids, and he promoted them to high positions at Microsoft no matter how fucking stupid and lazy they were, in place of people who actually worked hard and knew what they were doing.
Your broader point about Arab culture may have some truth to it, but what you describe here sounds a lot like what’s happened at Ford and Motorola, among other major US-based companies.