Where Have You Heard This Before?

Today the exultation of Sri Lankan authorities, drunk and glib on their success in gunning down the last sliver of resistance from the LTTE, better known as the Tamil Tigers, reached fever pitch with the presumed deaths of most of the group's leaders (notably the LTTE's infamous chief, Vellupillai Prabakharan, pictured left).

Leading the pack in the race to make the most bombastic and infuriatingly misguided statements is General Sarath Fonseka, head of the Sri Lankan Army, who said:

"All military operations have come to a stop. Now the entire country is declared rid of terrorism."

It would be naive to think that Mr. Fonseka is actually so heady with Bushist "Mission Accomplished" vigour that he actually thinks that the problem of Tamil nationalism has been resolved by "over 250 bodies scattered over the last ditch" (another of his boasts). The Sri Lankan Army is intimately familiar with terrorism and its complications, and they must know that it's only a matter of time until the problem kills more civilians. 

Of course by then, the Sri Lankan authorities will hope to have milked all the political brownie points possible out of their increasingly Pyrrhic victory.

It's Proselytime!

Just a quick post on a breaking scandal, courtesy of Al Jazeera English: apparently US soldiers posted in Afghanistan have been conspiring to proselytize while on duty, a gross violation of the US Army Code of Conduct. Al Jazeera reporter Brian Hughes caught footage of Lieutenant-colonel Gary Hensley,  a military chaplain urging soldiers to spread the Good News. In his words:

"The special forces guys - they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down. Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That's what we do, that's our business."

This isn't the first time the US Army's policy of "getting people into heaven, one way or another" has been seen. In February, the US Army approved the embedding of two self-proclaimed "gonzo missionaries", presenters of a tv program called Travel The Road. The program follows Tim Scott and Will Decker as they plumb the furthest reaches of the poor-world, where they tape themselves trying to convert increasingly confused natives. 

This caused a mini-scandal, as again, the US Army Code of Conduct mandates that only journalists be embedded. Given that the only pretensions Mr. Scott and Mr. Decker had to journalism were that they carried cameras around and called themselves "producers of dynamic media", this was seen to be somewhat in contravention to the strictures of the US Army.

Right, back to work.

A Disclaimer

I haven't been posting recently. That's because I'm currently in the middle of a rough patch of exams, so I won't be posting for the next couple of days, until the 13th of May. 

If you want informative jokes and interesting news, go to my friend's blog, Osu! Tatakae! Nippon!, who's posting faster than South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee can brutally put down a labour movement.

Which is pretty fast.