Largely np - Nick Harkaway, fog of war, ponderous pondering

[peterthooper at juno.com]

_Gnomon_ by Nick Harkaway, heck of a read! Saw it on the "librarians recommend" table, devoured it like nothing recent except that weird baseball criminal justice doorstop somebody here recommended awhile back (for which, thanks!)
(_Lost Empress_)

If you like that sort of thing. Still not GR, obviously, but what is? But darn it's got some spin on the ball. Comparisons are odious, but if you liked Cryptonomicon you might like this. Similar in that it's a honking long potboiler but with even more storylines, a little more evolved simply because written after more developments, 
He's the offspring of John LeCarré, although both names are pseudonyms, which was news to me. 


Fog of War - 
Thomas Eckhardt quoted
Robert Fisk on Douma:
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/douma-syria-opcw-chemical-weapons-chlorine-gas-video-conspiracy-theory-russia-a8927116.html

Robert Fisk is the real deal, isn't he?
Not long on details in that article, but if he's looking into it then there's a chance that he'll find out if there's anything to it.

Iceland Spar -- two views of the CIA, admiration inculcated by the Bond oeuvre, and one of the men in our Presbyterian church was a Company retiree. Never talked about it. Gracious wife, beautiful daughter, so he must've had some good points.
OTOH overturning elected governments and installing autocrats is bad form and hard to admire.
In AtD, the school for spies didn't serve fish, because fish is brain food!

All of that isn't necessarily to suggest CIA covert ops in Syria. Didn't someone recently report that they don't have a lot of traction gaining in-country recruits anymore, so a lot of their activities now are intelligence gathering via various remote methods? Which would mean not as many covert ops? One can only hope - so...

If not they, then who? 

Douma is 10k from the center of Damascus. Less than Disney World is from Orlando.

People are trying to raise their families in the middle of this!

They have a civil war going on, so this Assad Junior character for whom there were high hopes has been hanging on since the year 2000, a year for which I remember also having high hopes.

30 countries sent observers to the 2014 elections. And said they were fair. And, unlike earlier Syrian elections, there was an opposition candidate. But that is just what they said.

Western powers are backing the rebels.

So is this Assad a really bad guy like Idi Amin or Saddam?

What do Western powers hope to gain by backing the rebels? Or, less cynically, on what basis do they justify intervention?

Do they really think the rebels will govern more effectively?

What of these rebels? Originally a non-violent outgrowth of the Arab Spring, somebody armed them, right?

What are their goals?

Do they have as many sub-headings, factions, and goals as there are Democratic Presidential candidates in this country? Yes, they appear to...including a group of "Assyrians in Syria" - Yossarian's people!

Kind of like the shadow governments in GR's London, although (some of) these aspirants and claimants control (some) territory in Syria.

Instead of states, provinces or communes, they have governorates. 
One of them is the Latakia Governorate, partially under rebel control - latakia tobacco mentioned in GR as one of the luxury items Pirate got doled out a whiff of every so often.
Now produced mainly in Cyprus, though (and wasn't there a huge flustercluck there awhile ago also?)(and a good cyberpunk novel about a dude who formed a 7 girl rock band there?)(what the heck was the name of that?!)

Emergence of a dominant rebel leader? Not that I find yet, although that may be the point, getting rid of the autocrat and governing by coalition?

Wikipedia said people were hoping for reforms, but all Assad implemented were some free market measures. Like that's going to make him popular - sheesh!

May heaven help us all!



- yeah yeah
Oi oi
Put your hand up for tea
For separation of church and state and me!
(Aldous Snow)




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