Month: March 2005

Answer: not. The big snag in forming an Iraqi government is, as expected, whether or not Kirkuk winds up in Kurdish hands or not. Add to this the Kurdish insistence on maintaining their own separate militia, and what you’ve basically got is a demand for functional independence plus a big chunk of the Iraq oil reserves.

It is, to say the least, difficult for the Shiite majority to agree. Turkey is still very edgy about Kurdish independence. I don’t know how this gets resolved, short of the Kurds compromising.

It is perhaps relevant that the current leader of Iraq, Allawi, has absolutely no incentive at all to resolve this crisis. The moment a new government is formed, he’s out in the cold. Well, he’s leader of the minority bloc — but if he was in any position to be part of a coalition government, he’d already have done so, and the Kurds wouldn’t be a problem.

Iraq has a government. Or not.

My friend Jere pointed out, quite accurately, that the question isn’t really “what did the kid in Kentucky write about?” The question is “when did we start arresting people for writing stories, no matter how disturbed?” Or, perhaps, “when did we stop trusting parents to raise kids and deal with problem situations?”

It’s probably relevant that the biggest policy victory (pending) for the Democrats over the last few years has been Social Security, on which issue they’re coming down on the side of the government protecting people. We really like being protected these days.

Remember the kid in Kentucky who got in trouble for writing a story about zombies taking over his high school? It’s more complicated than he claimed. According to local police, there weren’t any zombies in the stories, and there’s more to the case against him than just some fiction.

I did a little poking around to see if I could find anything out about this “No Limited Soldiers” gang. The only sign of it on Google is, um, a Command and Conquer clan. Their page seems to be down. I found their home page on archive.org, and whois data shows that the domain is registered to someone in the Netherlands, so probably no connection there.

In defense of something or other, the kid’s teachers still look like they’re overly nervous. They’re on record saying that “they had not assigned such a story or talked to him about it — and had they seen it, they would have been obligated to report him to authorities.” Zombies are scary. Overreaction to zombies makes me wonder if the police didn’t overreact to something else.

Or, hey, the kid could be a junior whacko who was thinking seriously about armed revolt. Hard to tell at this point.

Christopher Hitchens, of all people, has a good roundup of the Ohio voting machine irregularities. He’s such a contrarian.

The United Iraqi Alliance/Kurd talks are not going well. I’m saddened, if not surprised. While it’s certainly not unprecedented to have no clear winner a month after polls close, there’s no sign of the deadlock lifting. I suppose we’ll see what happens in three days.

For all the talk about how the Iraqi election was the first domino, and about how recent events in Syria and Egypt are more dominos falling, I can’t help but wonder if the dominos represent democracy. Populism? Almost definitely. The ability of the people to force regime change? Sure. Newly found bravado for Shiites throughout the Middle East? Hm.

There are pro-democracy protests in Lebanon, but right now, the Shiite protests are larger. It’s good that the Saudi government is loosening up, but it would be foolish to ignore the fact that protests in Saudi Arabia are likewise Shiite-driven.

We’ll find out, one way or another.