Bollettino

There's been some Iraqis restlessness about the switches in their democratic, freely chosen rulers. Imagine! The ingratitude! Massoud Barzani, the Kurd leader, is quoted by the NYT as expressing a wee bit of concern about the apparent US goal of maintaining Iraq as a vaccum into which we inject our intentions. And:


"He also expressed concern about Mr. Bremer's longtime association with former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, whom the Kurds blame for their betrayal in the intelligence wars between Iran and Iraq three decades ago."

A point that goes right over the massed heads of the American media, who are performing the Mobius maneuver in the wake of the Blair revelations at NYT, trying to see what they ate for breakfast a week ago.

LI says: who cares?

On other fronts: LA Times, which has consistently been more on the mark about Iraq than any other major newspaper, ran a large article about Ahmad Chalabi's wonderful adventure in the Jordanian banking system Sunday. It is definitely worth reading.

The New Yorker ran a profile of Zizek last week. We asked our friend T. about it, who is a big citer of Zizek. He reports:

"...its a rather campy version of the persona that doesn't really bring-out, exactly, the guy's sense of humor and what humor DOES, psycho-socially and rhetorically. Also missed the best example of an aspect of Zizek's "style" - the essay in "Enjoy Your Symptom!" on the films of Roberto Rossilini - Zizek had never seen a film by RR (along the lines of his comment that there are many movies that he hates, but provide a good theory about any one of them and he will assert that he loved it all along). Additionally, I think that there might be a factual error in the article: "...the number of people who are equipped to discuss the works of Jacques Lacan rivals the number of those who are fluent in Slovenian..."
Anyway, read it."


And finally, we are going to comment later this week on the British Imperialism fiesta hosted by Boston U., which is a round-table about Niall Ferguson in which the Great Ferguson himself participated.