With the Sudanese, I stand

An overturned coup

There are some things you observe from afar without much engagement. At times, the issue gets a passing glance until something significant happens. I was on a BBC news site earlier and I read that the military coup in Sudan last month has now been overturned. [BBC News: Sudan's military reinstates ousted civilian PM Hamdok]

The previous ousted Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok who was missing at one time and then under some sort of house arrest at the whim of the military junta has now been reinstated as part of a power-sharing arrangement.

I stand with the Sudanese

This is quite an unusual development, that a military coup returns to civilian leadership with the same personnel outside of a bloody counter-coup. We have to watch the developments as to the viability of this new agreement and whether it would be accepted.

What we cannot ignore is the public protests and demonstrations of the Sudanese public who have been against the coup from the onset against the brutal onslaught and repression of the military. This coupled with mounting international pressure must have led the military to capitulate. After 30 years of Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese had lost no inhibitions in seeking self-determination and civilian leadership, I commend them.

Nigeria: And when they were down

Oh, The grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.

And when they were up, they were up,
And when they were down, they were down,
And when they were only half-way up,
They were neither up nor down.

The Grand Old Duke of York

Of trust and less

The Nigerian military has put itself in a rather difficult position of needing support whilst not being quite trustworthy. Too many times they have put a spin on stories that have turned out to be outright lies.

Their engagement with the Boko Haram militancy in north-eastern Nigeria has exposed fundamental rank and file deficiencies in the forces from low morale to not being adequately equipped to handle the insurgency.

The nursery rhyme at the start of this blog almost fully illustrates the almost futile exercise of winning anything until a radical reform of our whole military apparatus is put in place. Sadly, I do not think many well-meaning Nigerians are convinced that this regime has the will, mien or wherewithal to get this done as determined purposeful exercise, a stunt or a fluke.

An aimless march

When they were up, what we have read of is a scorched earth policy of pillage and massacre, extra-judicial killings and lawlessness, many of these highlighted by civil rights groups that there is very little to differentiate what they have done with war crimes.

When they were down, it has been barracks sacked, mutiny against generals, being under-equipped against the absurd but worryingly sophisticated tactics and weaponry of Boko Haram, soldiers let down by their generals, unnecessarily martyred as if sent into battle with their guns stopped or hands tied behind their back. The soldiers are brave because of who they are, not because of example and character exemplified by the military brass. It is a shame.

Recently, it was the wives of the soldiers who were protesting sending their husbands to war unfit for the task to which they were deployed. The real down that the military has passed off as a military manoeuvre depending on who you believe is that 480 soldiers have either fled into Cameroon in flight from Boko Haram or crossed into Cameroon in a military strategy to fight back, who knows? [BBC]

At the same time, Boko Haram declared an Islamic caliphate in Gwoza, the region where they have held sway, and even though the area is under a state of emergency, they act with impunity and writ large, the Nigerian authorities literally unable to project power and unchallenged sovereignty.

The Nigerian military have rejected the claim, but actions would matter much more than words. Ruefully, until we see something different, we have an alternative and illegal power in control in the north-eastern Nigeria.

We are not winning

Back to the nursery rhyme, it appears they’ve gone up the hill and down again, and now that they are only halfway up, they are neither up nor down. There does not seem to be plan, purpose, aim, strategy or any conceivable idea as to how the Boko Haram menace would be arrested and dealt with.

The Commander-in-Chief was ensconced in Germany on some personal retreat away from the chaos of Nigeria does not seem to be a general at war, rather he fiddles like Nero as Nigeria burns, proffering empty platitudes to the realities that Nigerians under the cosh of terror face, literally oblivious of things when buried in the cosy cocoon of Aso Rock – it is both a travesty and an atrocity.

The truth is we are shamefully and inadequately NOT winning this war against Boko Haram, no fanciful pronouncement would take away from the fact that the Nigerian forces are down and fearfully, maybe out too.

Nigeria: Is the Senate bribing the military?

Golden parachutes all round

Sometimes, it is just not clear whether the Nigerian legislature has any clue about their purpose and the function they are to serve in Nigerian democracy.

Recently, they approved a bumper state pension [1] for former military Heads of State and their families having previously resisted [2] the granting of that emolument to them some time ago.

Now, there might be probable cause for offering a stipend to those who have ruled the country either by the will of the people or by the sheer force of guns.

Reservations on rewards

However, it is important that having ruled Nigeria there should be standards of review that allow for a scrutiny in posterity of those tenures with some basis for considering if those regimes have served Nigeria well or not. For instance, whilst General Sani Abacha did run the country down as a despot, it would atrocious to reward his descendants with largesse for his maladministration.

At a time when it has been proven [3] that he and his family plundered the country to multiples of billions of dollars stashed away in foreign banks and most notable of which is the case that his son brought to retain stolen billions in Switzerland having pain the Nigerian treasury almost in a billion dollars in restitution, this is certainly the wrong message to send to every Nigerian with or without the means to seize power.

Whilst I am not aiming to create a report card of past military regimes, it goes without saying that the politicisation of the military has not served Nigeria well and such governments have not engendered development, peace or prosperity for the country.

A contradiction in terms

It smacks of incredulity that the chairman of the Senate Committee on Information and Media can aver that this is no invitation for a military takeover of government and it is laughable that he offers that the Senate would resist any would-be coup plotter.

I am left flummoxed by this statement, “We are not sending any wrong message, the message we are sending actually is rather a strong message that assumption of political power by force of arms is anachronistic, undemocratic, out-modelled. It is out of fashion and I think that it is something that will even make anybody attempting it to look stupid and out of place.”

There are truths to the part about the assumption of power but contextually, the looking stupid and out of place calls for a clean mirror in front of that speaker.

Accountability confers legitimacy

There are democracies where the clout of the Senate might carry more than a warning to those who might be inclined to overthrow a representative democracy.

The sovereignty of Nigeria should and must belong to the people, but this only derives from the people not being disenfranchised when they exercise universal suffrage through free and fair elections and from their representatives being truly accountable to the people throughout their terms rather than just at times of electioneering.

It is debatable that Nigeria’s democracy is representative and accountable which infers the Senate may not have the underpinning and force of legitimacy to prevent a military takeover or become the engine for revolution or insurrection that leads to the people to deny prospective military rulers the usurpation of power.

Pensions already exist for legitimate service

Obviously, military personnel who have ended up leading the country have also risen to the top ranks of the military forces in which they have been commissioned and a pension is already accruing to them for that military role, it would be belabouring the point that many also had their hands in the till when they were in charge; there is absolutely no need for the extra pay for adding an unlawful political dimension to their military service.

If anything, this sends the wrong message to our democracy, to our people and to those who might think the military route to power could be a shortcut to ensuring a good retirement package when past ones professionally useful years.

The offer to the families simply fosters that class of louts and miscreants who as spouses and brood have shown little exemplary conduct in their hubris and hedonistic tendencies, projecting megalomania well beyond that which the principals in power ever dared to exercise.

Looks like bribery to me

In what can be seen as an abject waste of parliamentary time and priorities, if as the chairman says, “that the new law did not provide any new special benefits to all the intended beneficiaries, as they were already enjoying pension.”

If the intended beneficiaries already have a pension and there are no new special benefits, why is a law being promulgated to give the same people the same thing?

Maybe the act of the Senate is to deepen the nation’s democracy but that cannot be achieved by paying off the military and bribing a rival politicised structure of the military into ineffectiveness – what deepens democracy is accountability, responsibility, leadership and a modicum of common-sense.

I dare say, with this announcement, all those four qualities appear to be lacking in the Nigerian Senate and that is quite unfortunate.

Source

[1] » Ex-Heads of State Pension: Senate warns coup plotters::Vanguard (Nigeria)

[2] allAfrica.com: Nigeria: Senators Kick Against Remuneration for Ex-Military Rulers

[3] BBC News | AFRICA | Banks freeze more Abacha millions

Nigeria: General T. Y. Danjuma - a very influential Nigerian

Dished out willy-nilly

Some three weeks ago a very influential Nigerian revealed an interesting power dynamic in how the resources of Nigeria were profligately handed out without accountability or scrutiny.

This man was endowing $100 million to a foundation and revealed how he made $500 million in profit [1] from the allocation of an oil block tossed to him by the then Head of State, General Sani Abacha [2].

An oil block in the general sense is a prospect that requires surveys and analysis that might yield the possibility of oil and gas which can be exploited to its full potential for great profit.

Oil for money, gas for nought

Where there is the discovery of oil, the owner of the oil block might well have hit the jackpot, unfortunately, the dearth of imagination and professional ability has also left oil blocks abandoned if gas was discovered because the infrastructure in Nigeria has not been developed sufficiently to profit from gas exploration through to the market.

General Theophilus Danjuma (rtd.) [3] was Chief of Army Staff in the 70s and the Minister of Defence between 1999 and 2003, but some 12 years ago he was influential enough to profit from the generosity of being tossed an oil block.

If he not being in government were able to get a piece of Nigeria’s resources without recourse to some due procedure by the big chief under whom power and authority is exerted for the Nigerian entire beyond any accountability, one can only wonder what those in power did and what everyone who could peddle influence could get in oil blocks and more.

A really lucky chap

The oil block that General Danjuma got was sold off on its potential for $1 billion and after paying off his dues, taxes and other matters he was left with $500 million profit that he could not find much to do with.

Many questions arise from this revelation of truth as to how Nigeria’s great fortunes and potential has been squandered off for patronage and the maintenance of power along with the quest for power by others who might want to have access to the means of doling out these resources for unspeakable amounts of wealth and amazing influence. [4]

Retired at 41

General Danjuma is 72, he had risen to the highest ranks in the army allowing him to retire at 41 – I would not suggest that he did not attain this position by merit and dint of hard work but it is rather exceptional that anyone anywhere in the world in whatever profession can retire at 41.

After retirement, he apparently did not sink into the background per se, he engaged in business activities that probably bought him some grief that he was readily able to have the sop of an oil block tossed to him by a Nigerian leader though not in our name.

It would be nice that some oil block were awarded for meritorious services to Nigeria as a whole, but no, this was all for personal enrichment at the expense of Nigerians, banditry attempting to gain respectability and even succeeding in Nigeria.

Half a billion with no sense

This oil block was award according to the time frame in 1998 and it was held on to for 10 years and sold in 2008 having not yet been exploited but having the potential persuading some other company to shell out $1 billion for it.

General Danjuma, a not so notable businessman in Africa somehow acquires liabilities totalling half a billion dollars – you wonder how he could have been under the radar for so long with no one realising he was a man of such considerable means.

Then with $500 billion in hand, this is cash in the bank, not assets as other businessmen are usually valued, he finds himself in a Midas dilemma; all this money and no sense of what to do with it – this again exemplifies the Nigerian story, so many resources, so much money, maybe so much talent but no wherewithal to do something wonderful and beneficial to the nation that supplied the means to be raped and plundered with impunity.

What oil does to Nigerian politics

Now, General Danjuma, revealed this as a microcosm of how Nigerian resources have been expended as well as the underlying psyche of why there is a quest for power by many interests that might make a grab for that power if they are not kept comfortable by sharing that largesse in a circle of the corrupt palliation of rivals and power bases.

There is no telling that this plunder continues under the stewardship of whoever is leader of the country even if it seems to be more transparent than during the military era, but a good deal of the people who claim to be leaders were once in the military, at least 3 of them have run for presidential office with one having ruled for 2 terms.

With this in the public domain, it is no wonder that there is unrest in the Niger Delta when people see the rich pickings that people with influence can take at the expense of the indigenes who suffer in squalor and penury.

It goes without saying that, if a non-player like General Danjuma could have access to an oil block and make so much money, many others would have made much more along with the usurpation that might have occurred exploiting the more viable oil blocks – the mind-boggling figures of over hundreds of billions made from oil but lost in the system cannot be far from the truth.

Prescription for good health to Nigeria too

Lest I forget, though I can no more find the source, it was General Danjuma who having fallen ill a few years ago got a prescription from his doctor to spend two weeks of recuperation in the French Riviera – now, that is a prescription I would want to swallow till I am overdosed; on the Nigerian people’s money to boot.

General Danjuma, is back in a position of great influence [5] advising the Acting President just because every Nigerian leader still has to have some influential retired general in the background to ward off other pretenders – despite this blot on General Danjuma’s seemingly questionable record, in all honesty, he is perhaps the most acceptable of all the other generals the Acting President had to choose from.

General Danjuma, was launching an endowment of $100 million to his foundation established to tackle health issues that might hopefully allow him and our comatose President to seek treatment in the country, one wonders if this is his purgatory presaging absolution.

He is left with $400 million that he could disburse to other worthy Nigerian causes and maybe persuade other looters of our resources to put something back into Nigeria or allow his children to squabble and destroy themselves fighting to be sole inheritors of the loot – such is the tragedy of power and money in Nigeria.

Sources

[1] I made $500 million from oil block -TY Danjuma

[2] Sani Abacha - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[3] African Success : Biography of Yakubu Theophilus DANJUMA

[4] The Punch:: How Nigeria lost billions of naira to discretionary – Google advisory – harmful website

BBC News - Explosions hit Nigeria oil amnesty talks

FT.com / Comment - Observer: Hu and cry over Chinese oil deals – Comment in 2006 talking about the prospect of General Danjuma making $1 billion from the oil block he was gifted by General Sani Abacha.

The Nigerian tale of two oil blocks – Some additional background to how oil blocks were retained or usurped depending on who was wielding power and influence.

[5] Danjuma to Jonathan: Act now, time is short – After his appointment as chairman of the Presidential Advisory Council.

Pambazuka - Nigeria: Executive Director - T. Y. Danjuma Foundation (TYDF) – The foundation swings into action.

Thought Picnic: AFRICOM another swamp for lethal mosquitoes

AFRICOM is inevitable

I once surmised in a comment on some blog when people raised the issue about AFRICOM [1] not being properly addressed in Obama’s Ghanaian speech that the more American investments and assets flow into Africa the more the need to protect those assets with some presence which could be military.

We all know that China is getting its fingers into Africa, not only in trying to get resources but these invaders under the guise of doing business and offering growth are ring-fencing resources by buying stakes, buying land and cavorting with the powers that be.

The Chinese managers are already on the ground directing projects and probably reporting back in debriefs to the mothership as to how to get more entrenched in Africa, you can imagine other hegemonies competing for African resources will not sit back and watch the new Scramble for the Partition of Africa on their television screens.

Basically, AFRICOM is here to stay but not necessarily as we expect, it would not be tanks and bombs like in the annihilation of substance of Afghanistan or Iraq, but there are lessons to be learnt from those battles that would prove useful to the contagion that AFRICOM will represent to Africa.

Weaponising anthropology

The information required is all in the open domain but it requires someone to pull the bits together to see the coherent scheme that would follow the age-old exchange system that had Africans giving up their land for the Bible or giving up their lives for the Quran.

In 2007 we learnt, the US military engaged anthropologists and sociologists [2] in a programme called the Human Terrain System [3] (HTS) for Iraq and Afghanistan in the two preceding years; this studies the complexities of human beings and their societies trying to appreciate how these communities work, how they make decisions, how they thrive and from a cynical if not sinister perspective how to infiltrate those communities in what is neatly called the battle of hearts and minds.

The battle of hearts and minds sits comfortably with everyone and for the military the dividends can be great to reducing conflict and engaging these communities in ways that help them work against the insurgents in their midst. Invariably, knowledge is power and powerful if you understand how societies work and need to engage in those societies for partnership or profit.

Defence contractor running academic research

What makes this HTS curiously interesting is the Pentagon partly outsourced this activity to BAe Systems [4], the defence contractor and it really makes one wonder why engaging anthropologists and sociologists for a field study is not handled by some renowned academic faculty from the many world standard universities in the United States.

One would think the core expertise of BAe Systems as one would find on their homepage is defence, security and aerospace technologies, the study of social groups and cultures can hardly make weapons work except where we are being opened up into a new area of overwhelming the defences of the enemy by understand what makes the enemy tick – I see no profit centres in this venture for BAe Systems – maybe I am being myopic.

Mapping out Africa

So, back at AFRICOM, they are building a social science research centre to recruit academics “help map the complicated human terrain on the African continent.”

The head of this facility is Colonel Dean Bland who says “We have no combat mission in Africa.” So we have nothing to fear only that people who have studied and understood what makes Africans tick and are privy to the secrets of our culture, our traditions, our languages and our communities can lay bare all this information to AFRICOM who can use the surge and embed lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan to infiltrate and assimilate without firing a gun shot.

Maybe I am being hysterical here, but I doubt this endeavour would be managed directly by AFRICOM but it would outsourced to experts with experience in the field and I suppose that would be BAe Systems.

It would be too obvious if a search for BAe Systems on the AFRICOM homepage would yield a result but the logical connection is almost indisputable.

A new swamp for lethal mosquitoes

The whole thought of a defence contractor running an anthropological study in Africa should make anyone feel a chill down their spines. However, this recruiting exercise would and can be the opportunity of a lifetime to many and just like our fellow Africans of old who brought the slaves to the coast from the bushes, I would suppose there are descendants ready to sell principle for the exposition for deep Africa to foreign emasculation.

We have enough swamps breeding mosquitoes in Africa, but this is one engineered swamp that looks like any other swamp and would attract no interest albeit you can expect the mosquitoes breeding here to be 2-headed, 10-legged and carriers of lethal malaria.

With AFRICOM, it is possible Africans have already lost the battle long before it started, we are not playing the same game of partnership and cooperation.

Sources

[1] U.S. Africa Command Home

[2] The Toronto Times - US learning and adjusting to realty on the ground and makes good progress

[3] Human Terrain System - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[4] BAe Systems

Epilogue

This write-up is hardly exhaustive, but a gathering of thoughts about how Africa is being shaped for engagement from outside Africa.

Benazir Bhutto, 1953 - 2007

Killed in the safest place

If I thought the year 2007 would run out on the note of events that have already taken place with the effects of the credit crunch, the prospects of recessions and economic show-downs coupled with low consumer confidence and Madeleine McCann, I was wrong.

I had hardly had breakfast and returned to my room when I heard of a suicide bomb attack in Rawalpindi, Pakistan on the convoy of Benazir Bhutto, we were first told she was safe, that was not the case, she was mortally wounded.

Rawalpindi if you may know is the military headquarters of the Pakistan; it has the intelligence services and obviously should have the best security measures you can hope to have in such a volatile country.

The question remains how a suicide bomber first took a shot at Benazir Bhutto´s neck and possibly her chest before compounding the commotion with a self conflagration that wasted over 20 lives – in Rawalpindi.

That would be point of discussion as one hopes that all the people behind this heinous, cruel, shameful, cowardly act of gross terrorism are caught and punished.

The Pakistan of today has all the hallmarks of Pervez Musharraf´s misgovernment and pseudo-democracy that has proved more ruinous for Pakistan over the last 8 years.

But we have to pause for thought as our prayers, heartfelt sympathy and condolences are conveyed to the family of Benazir Bhutto who was assassinated this afternoon in Rawalpindi.

Pakistan looking forward

The future of Pakistan is in the balance as our overriding policy of the war on terror is condemning to the scrapheap essential matters of true democratic reform in favour of comfortable but corrupt alliances with the West.

Ms. Bhutto was a flawed personality amidst allegations of corruption and other accusations of impropriety, but in all that Pakistan has to offer of leadership, it appears she still embodied the aspirations of the masses as they flocked to her rallies in the hope that she had a message and a solution to their ills and situations.

This chapter closes with 3-days of mourning for a lady who served her country twice as Prime Minister, the ramifications however would be more far-reaching than we can begin to fathom, eventually, one would hope Pervez Musharraf would be swept away then allowing the governing institutions of Pakistan to thrive as bastions of real democracy.

Pakistanis deserve that much and like President Bush said in his statement about this killing – they should honour Benazir Bhutto memory with a return to democracy. My hope is that it would be a properly representative democracy rather than the charade that now exists.

Benazir Bhutto – leader, voice, hope and martyr – Rest in peace.

The US does not torture

New rules to misrule

I would not know, but I would leave this to the great legal minds and dons that visit my blog, suppose that is a branch of legal jurisprudence that is called military law.

This is because outlawed outpost of Guantanamo Bay has presented a Military Commissions manual to be used for trying detainees in Camp Delta, the contents of which appear to satisfy elements of civil law and in others indicate a departure from standard and accepted legal practices where the threshold of evidence is as low as hear-say.

The evidence is awash with classified monikers that the patchwork of evidence the defence would have to work with would leave enough holds to make every trial unacceptably loaded against the accused bringing to close to just better than a kangaroo court.

Now, I am no legal expert, the views might differ, no so much by the letter of the law but by political persuasion where the right would contend that these provisions are the best that can be offered with regards to the sensitivity of the issues at hand and the left would contend that premise of innocence until tried and proven guilty is lost.

Some military lawyers already have misgivings about this manual which in the circumstances might have its progeny with the military junta of Myanmar, OK! That was a bit given to histrionics, my point is, and justice should not only be done, it should verifiably be seen to be done properly.

US does not torture

The other part of the evidence that would be most interesting to every civil and human rights activist is the implication that.

+ Some evidence might have been obtained under torture

+ Some evidence was obtained by coercion and is admissible as long as it was obtained before December 2005

The question then is, have these prisoners been tortured? They most certainly have, the spectacle of Abu Ghraib was an excerpt of the “Practical Guide to Obtaining Information” introduced by the commandant of Guantanamo Bay.

As for coercion, we can presume dunking which is the deliberate deprivation of air by pushing the full face into a liquid was not torture till at least December 2005 – avoiding gruesome detail – an activity that gets a full thumbs-up from vice-President Cheney, sorry, the less aggressive word is “water-boarding”, you would be forgiven for thinking it was as hip as skate-boarding.

Yes, “water-boarding” is a variant of dunking where rather than push the face into a liquid, facing upward and the body inclined with the head at the lower point, the gardener simulates a torrent of rain over the face that the gag-reflex creates a drowning sensation as the person almost enters the delirium of death.

However, we must hear the President out, “We do not torture”, he protests, they only use vital tools of elevated persuasion – I will not be good for politics, not with my mastery of semantics.

It would appear my concept of torture is hardly coercion in the eyes of those at the forefront of the war on terror in America. Judge for yourself, as we have been told, the US does not torture.

Peace eludes our time with appeasement

Peace eludes our time

Almost 78 years ago, Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich, a perfect English gentleman with a paper signed by Adolf Hilter which was a non-aggression pact securing peace in Europe [1]. We now view that supposed pact of peace as appeasement.

Today, amidst the propaganda and rhetoric that fuels the problems in Lebanon and Gaza as viewed from Israeli eyes, the blanket war on terror is appeased by everyone who can exert influence to halt these hostilities.

Looking like a military state

Each time I view my television an army spokesperson from democratic Israel comes on air, not speaking of their deployments and military activities but dabbling with the politics and wherefores of the conflict.

This is the type of speech one should hear from their political masters, but it appears the politics is becoming militarised and the military is becoming politicise, not of which bode well any democracy.

All weapons break the peace

Besides, we hear time and time again about the thousands of rockets the Hezbollah has, well, are we being naïve here? Israel has helicopter gun-ships, laser guided weaponry and nuclear weapons still undeclared.

Israel is seriously militarised that region in that quest for its defence, that has also lead to the regional militants arming themselves such that when Israel moves with aggression they and not just left with slings and stones to roll over and die.

The main part here is Israel really believes the Middle-East conflict can be resolved with their military might as world leaders pay lip service to the call for restraint and the lack of a determined purpose to see an end to that conflict.

The flytrap of implications

More and more we hear about Syria and Iran being called upon to rein in Hezbollah and Hamas, why they should escapes me.

In fact, I believe there is a more sinister ploy at hand; the need to find a way to implicate both Syria and Iran so that it can become a free-for-all battle royale, this would allow for nuclear sites in Iran to be targeted and destroyed and a possible assassination of the heads of government in those two countries.

The picture looks nasty and I fear for the ultimate effect of this situation.

It can now been argued that the Palestinians and Lebanese have already paid too high a price to return the soldiers unharmed and that is if the Israeli bombardments do not already crush the soldiers in some levelling escapade.

An eruption to wipe out hopes of peace

The world has looked on as the festering Middle-East conflict has ebbed and flowed like an indecisive volcano; it is about to rain lava and pyroclastic flows [2] that would engulf more than we have dared to imagine possible.

Back to the appeasement talk, rather than call to order the parties involved and get this situation to stop forthwith every influential nation has sent boats and evacuation teams to Lebanon to evacuate their citizens.

That, in my view is the license for this conflict to escalate, it says Israel can now maraud with impunity and as long as Hezbollah can still fire its rockets they would continue to descend like mega-hailstones on Haifa and beyond if they find the range.

If anyone should stop doing shit [3], it should start with the world leaders and their flimsy idea of sending in a Lebanon Peace Keeping Force [4] – how does that resolve issues on the ground today?

You need peace to keep it, and for now there is no peace but appeasement that is leading to the untenable, maybe when oil hits $100/barrel somebody might just feel the pinch enough to nip this Middle-East crisis in the bud.

References

[1] BBC ON THIS DAY | 30 | 1938: 'Peace for our time' - Chamberlain

[2] Pyroclastic flow

[3] BBC NEWS | Business | Bush lunch chat is caught on tape

[4] BBC NEWS | Middle East | UN calls for Lebanon peace force

Appeasement

Appeasement is a policy of accepting the imposed conditions of an aggressor in lieu of armed resistance. Since World War II, the term has gained a negative connotation, in politics and in general, of weakness, cowardice and self-deception. - Wikipedia