"History occurs twice, once as tragedy, the second time as farce." (Karl Marx)
"As best as I can tell, [antiwar spin] is a parody of Stalin: one person killed by America is a tragedy. A hundred thousand killed by Saddam, or a million by Pol Pot, are a statistic." (Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds)
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Reflections of a former Belgian and "liberal mugged by reality" on politics, the US-European cultural divide, the conflict with Iraq, and the Israeli-Arab conflict.
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LGF wonders "tell me about the roadmap" as Palestinians rename the main square in Jenin in memory of the islamikaze who just blew up four American soldiers.
Speak of LGF, it and a number of the other "usual suspects" are written up in a TIME magazine article on warblogs.
The next few days are going to be light on blogging as it's deadline season at work. Check my blogroll, and the click the Command Post button, if you're looking for stuff to read :-) posted by Former Belgian at 9:12 PM
Peter "O Tool" Arnett is apparently out of a job following this bizarre interview. I was not entirely surprised that NBC sacked him --- even a liberal network has limits --- but to get fired from National Geographic takes some doing. Perhaps al-Ghardiyan may hire him now. Update: the Daily Mirror (al-G's tabloid brother) hired him.
Speaking of which: the once-proud Manchester Guardian has in recent years degenerated into a loony-"left", virulently anti-American, and Israel-bashing screed (with a few token exceptions like Julie Burchill). But even in a publication widely known in the blogosphere as The Daily Wanker (a play-of-words on the name of the Communist Party of Britain newspaper of old), Charles Johnson notes an article that sets a new benchmark for yellow "journalism". C. P. Scott (the founder of the newspaper) must be spinning in his grave. Update:Bill Herbert did some digging and finds out one of the "sources" was a neo-Nazi mag. posted by Former Belgian at 8:14 PM
I found the following revolting image (snapped by ProtestWarrior at a "peace" demo) at Clubbeaux.
I do not believe public figures should be immune against being derided. Nor that a public personality belonging to an ethnic minority should ipso facto acquire such an immunity. But just ask yoursef this question: if a conservative or libertarian group would have made a similar poster about Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton (or Kofi Annan, for that matter), how many people would (rightly) have called for their scalp?
Just in case you still harbored the illusion that so-called "left"-ists cannot be racist. posted by Former Belgian at 7:30 PM
Surprise, surprise.Former TotalFinaElf exceutive reveals payments of US$5M to various French political parties, including that of Jacques Iraq. For the uninitiated: TotalFinaElf is a Franco-Belgian oil concern that got sweetheart deals from the Iraqi regime worth as much as US$75 billion. Need I draw a picture? posted by Former Belgian at 6:42 PM
Here in the United States, we tend to think of images only in terms of cameras and television: Photography is separate from narrative. In the Arab world, language is full of images, which cannot be separated from narrative. Arabic is a metaphorical language, rich in shades of meaning.
The image-based style of the Arabic language acts as an excellent interface with pictures. Thus television is terribly important. Consider the effect achieved, for example, when Majid Abdul Hadi, an al-Jazeera reporter in Baghdad, shows a picture of a coalition bombing while referring to Baghdad as the pulsing heart of the Muslim caliphate, a pulsing heart engulfed in flame.
[...]
Beneath the Arab modes of visual representation, the Western style is also present. Indeed, Arab coverage often copies the CNN and Fox News formats. Today, just like CNN, every one of the 10 Arab channels I watch, or appear on as a commentator, has a "war room" staffed with retired generals discussing the progress of the war and freely advising the Iraqis how to conduct it. In this way, these veterans of Arab wars are compensating for past defeat with on-air political speeches.
The tone of many reporters in Baghdad is much the same. For example, an al-Jazeera reporter in the Iraqi capital falsely told his viewers on the first day of the air campaign, "Here in Baghdad, a city accused of hiding weapons of mass destruction is being hit by weapons of mass destruction." This kind of repetition is the stuff that has made Arabic poetry so justly admired. Here, the rhythm and sonority of the language act to encourage audience disregard for the true definitions of the words being used.
I remember a rabbi who had grown up in a French colony in Northern Africa bitterly remarking that where it came to getting intoxicated with their own florid language, "les francais, ce sont les arabes de l'occident" (the French are the Arabs of the West). It is hard not to see certain parallels.
One for the road: The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler feels "discriminated against" because he has not yet been indicted for war crimes by a Belgian court, and sent a missive to the Belgian minister of Justice requesting to be indicted.
A reader on LGF drew attention to a PBS debate on the Scottish heritage (transcript here) which contained some interesting observations on the contrast between the Scottish and the French enlightenments:
What [Scottish skeptical philosopher] David Hume does is he shows that far from being this great sort of dangerous weapon, although it can be, that self interest is, in fact, the driving engine of change and progress. The free market is more than just a place where goods are exchanged, that the free market is really the clearing house of civilization because civilization is about exchanged, self interested exchange between customer and business person, between consumer and producers but also the exchange of ideas among scientists, among intellectuals within the larger culture as a whole. That’s the focus that the Scottish Enlightenment gives us, the role of self interest as this driving creative productive force in society.
[...T]he French Enlightenment tends to put its faith not in individuals or entrepreneurs but at those who hold power at the top -- whether they were a monarchical government, as someone like Voltaire did -- or a revolutionary as happens later as the French Enlightenment morphs into the French Revolution. And it’s two fundamental[ly] different points of view, two different views of the future that emerge out of the French Enlightenment, which is one in which a large centralized state is able to bring about and transform society by dictating by enlightened and legislation and guidance versus a Scottish Enlightenment view which says this is ultimately about advocates of individuals pursuing their own self interest and that those two distinct visions have shaped our future in the history of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century ways in a really extraordinary degree. And you could argue that the Cold War was in many ways a confrontation of the principles of the Scottish Enlightenment embedded in American values and in institutions of America and its allies versus the French Enlightenment with its inheritance uh, that it passed on to Karl Marx and to the utopian socialists in the Nineteenth Century and then on to the vision of the Soviet Union and that Communism brought as to what human improvement was about.
There is another characteristic that sets the "Latin" (by extension also German) and "Scottish" (by extension Anglo-American) enlightenment thinkers apart: the fundamentally rationalist, deductive, and idealistic tradition of the former (Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel,... ) and the fundamentally empiricist, inductive, and utilitarian tradition of the latter (Bacon, Hume, Bentham, John Stuart Mill,...). In fact, this distinction is arguably reflected in the distinct characters of Anglo-American and French scholarship in the humanities almost to this day. There are plenty of exceptions on either side, but an American historian or sociologist of the old school will generally be fact-driven, while his French counterpart will be concept-driven. Both approaches may lead to first-rate scholarship in the right hands, but the latter is much more prone to "the theoretician falling in love with his/her own model" and looking only for facts that corroborate the theory. It is no mere accident that postmodernism (which takes this trend to its logical extreme) and Marxism both developed in the Franco-German intellectual ambit. posted by Former Belgian at 8:51 PM
Pundit roundup: Mark Steyn has a hilarious parody in which various historical generals comment on the "quagmire" the media reporting campaign has hit; Steven Den Beste takes Amnesty International to task for what I shall summarize as practicing "the soft bigotry of low expectations", and hosts a guest entry has by an anonymous retired military officer, who gives a sober commentary on where the campaign stands at this stage; Tom Paine has an absolutely hilarious story about the young Robert Fisk, which he claims is true; but Bill Whittle's essay on History (the latest installment in a book in progress) takes the cake. posted by Former Belgian at 8:32 PM
Pop pundit and lifelong leftist Julie Burchill gives a tongue-lashing to the NIONists ("Not in my name"-ists) worthy of Whacking Day. It is especially noteworthy for appearing in the al-Ghardiyan (a.k.a. The Daily Wanker):
I've always thought that the last place you'd see the vanity of depression in action would be on a protest march, especially one against war in a foreign country, but I do believe that many of the anti-war antics currently taking place are totally egotistical. Those who demonstrated against US aggression in Vietnam and Cuba did so because they believed that those people should have more freedom, not less. But does the most hardened peacenik really believe that Iraqis currently enjoy more liberty and delight than they would if Saddam were brought down? If so, fair enough; if not, then they are marching about one thing - themselves. That's why so many luvvies are involved; this is simply showing off on a grand scale.
I've just heard a snippet of the most disgustingly me-me-me anti-war advert by Susan Sarandon, in which she intones, "Before our kids start coming home from Iraq in body bags, and women and children start dying in Baghdad, I need to know - what did Iraq do to us?" Well, if you mean what did Saddam do to [America's entertainment elite], not an awful lot - but to millions of his own people, torture and murder for a start. Don't they count?
[...]
Surely this is the most self-obsessed anti-war protest ever. NOT IN MY NAME! That's the giveaway. Who gives a stuff about their wet, white, western names? [...] We don't know the precious names of the countless numbers Saddam has killed. We're talking about a people - lots of them parents - subjected to an endless vista of death and torture, a country in which freedom can never be won without help from outside.
Contrasting British servicemen and women with the appeasers, it is hard not to laugh. Are these two sides even the same species, let alone the same nationality? On one hand the selflessness and internationalism of the soldiers; on the other the Whites-First isolationism of the protesters. Excuse me, who are the idealists here? And is it a total coincidence that those stars most prominent in the anti-war movement are the most notoriously "difficult"and vain - [Barbara] Streisand, Albarn, [George] Michael, Madonna, Sean Penn? And Robin Cook! Why might anyone believe world peace can be secured by this motley bunch?
Anti-war nuts suffer from the usual mixture of egotism and self-loathing that often characterises recreational depression - an unholy alliance of Oprahism and Meldrewism in which you think you're scum, but also that you're terribly important, too. [... T]here are [also] the human shields - now limping homewards after being shocked to discover, bless 'em, that Saddam wanted to stick them in front of military installations as opposed to the hospitals and petting zoos that they'd fondly imagined they were going to defend.
What these supreme egotists achieve by putting themselves at the centre of every crisis is to make the Iraqi people effectively disappear. NOT IN MY NAME! is western imperialism of the sneakiest sort, putting our clean hands before the freedom of an enslaved people. But even those whose anti-war protests started in good faith now know that when Saddam's regime comes tumbling down, thousands of Iraqis will dance and sing with joy before the TV cameras, and thank our armed forces for giving them back their lives.
(Hat tip: Instapundit, although Julie Burchill's "dissent" from the al-Ghardiyan editorial line was first spotted by Tom Paine.) posted by Former Belgian at 8:12 PM
Richard Dawkins, the brilliant geneticist and author of the seminal books "The selfish gene" and "The blind watchmaker", occasionally startles friend and foe with screeds like this anti-American rant in al-Ghardiyan. Jonathan Davis fisks him to within an inch of his life (long but very much worth reading).
Karl Zinsmeister, chairman of the American Enterprise Institute, spent two weeks with the 82nd Airborne Division in Kuwait. He has some observations on the cultural gap between journalists and soldiers which go a long way to explain the mutual distrust.
In The new anti-Semitism, Melanie Phillips examples the phenomenon of "antisemitism on the left". Of course the phenomenon itself is not exactly new: think of Karl Marx himself, as well as the early social democrat leader August Bebel's memorable definition of antisemitism as "the socialism of fools". But the present inverted situation, where antisemitism is primarily associated with the "anti-racist" "left" and some of the staunchest opposition to it is to be found on the conservative side of the political spectrum (or plane), has no real precedent.
Anti-Semitism is protean, mutating over the centuries into new forms. Now it has changed again, into a shape which requires a new way of thinking and a new vocabulary. The new anti-Semitism does not discriminate against Jews as individuals on account of their race. Instead, it is centred on Israel, and the denial to the Jewish people alone of the right of self-determination.
This is nothing to do with the settlements or the West Bank. Indeed, the language being used exposes as a cruel delusion the common belief that the Middle East crisis would be solved by the creation of a Palestinian state.
The key motif is a kind of Holocaust inversion, with the Israelis being demonised as Nazis and the Palestinians being regarded as the new Jews. Israel and the Jews are being systematically delegitimised and dehumanised — a necessary prelude to their destruction — with both Islamists and the Western media using anti-Zionism as a fig-leaf for prejudices rooted in both mediaeval Christian and Nazi demonology.
This has produced an Orwellian situation in which hatred of the Jews now marches behind the Left’s banner of anti-racism and human rights, giving rise not merely to distortions, fabrications and slander about Israel in the media but also to mainstream articles discussing the malign power of the Jews over American and world policy.
She describes her attendance at a conference over the subject, and discusses at length the virulent nature of Arab antisemitism. She is at pains to distinguish between legitimate criticism of specific Israeli government policies from the delegitimization and vilification of Israel and of the Jewish people qua people.
She then moves on to the role played by the British media:
[...] Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 [...] marked the beginning of the media’s systematic inversion of Israeli self-defence as aggression, along with double-standards and malicious fabrications, which have nothing to do with legitimate (and necessary) criticism of Israel and everything to do with delegitimising the Jewish state altogether in readiness for its dismantling.
[...The conference]
heard that in France Jews were vilified and excluded from public debate if they challenged the lies being told about Israel. It was shown a devastating French film Décryptage (Decoding) — which has been playing to packed houses in Paris — about the obsessive malevolence towards Israel displayed by the French media. It was told about the way the British media described Israel’s ‘death squads’, ‘killing fields’ and ‘executioners’ while sanitising Palestinian human bombs as ‘gentle’, ‘religious’ and ‘kind’. It heard about the cartoon in the Italian newspaper La Stampa during the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, depicting an Israeli tank pointing a gun at the baby Jesus who is saying, ‘Surely they are not going to kill me again.’
And of course there was Jenin, the so-called ‘massacre’ or ‘genocide’ reported as such by virtually the entire media, where in fact 52 Palestinians died, of whom more than half were terrorists, while Israel sustained (for it) the huge loss of 45 of its soldiers. This astonishing media distortion was conceded at the conference by the (extraordinarily brave) Palestinian politics professor Mohammad Dajani, who also observed that a distraught Palestinian public was — on this and other occasions — whipped up by biased and emotional Palestinian reporting which showed little concern for the truth. But the big lie of the Jenin massacre is now believed as fact, contributing to the belief that Israel is a criminal state.
Europeans have thus made themselves accomplices to an explicitly genocidal programme. But an even more striking feature is that, while the old anti-Semitism still festers away among neo-Nazis, the new anti-Semitism is a phenomenon of their sworn enemies on the political Left. So, as the Canadian law professor Irwin Cotler observed, we now have the mind-twisting situation where anti-Jewish hatred is harnessed to the cause of anti-racism and human rights, with Israel being compared to both Nazism and apartheid by those who define themselves against these ideologies. Such a travesty of the facts involves, of course, the implicit denial of the truth of those terrible regimes, quite apart from the prelude to annihilation created by such a lethal defamation of Israel. And even more counterintuitively, many Jews and Israelis on the Left also subscribe to this analysis — and even to the demonology of Israeli Nazism and apartheid — handing an effective weapon to those who dismiss the claim of a new anti-Semitism as Jewish paranoia or Islamophobia.
So what is the explanation for the Left’s position? Partly, it’s the old anti-imperialist and anti-West prejudice. Partly, it’s the view that only the powerless can be victims; so Third World people can never be murderers, and any self-defence by Western societies such as Israel must instead be aggression. Partly, it’s the post-modern destruction of objectivity and truth, which has ushered in the hegemony of lies. And partly, as the Left takes an axe to morality and self-restraint, it’s a golden opportunity to pulverise the very people who invented the damn rules in the first place.
A left-wing Polish journalist at the conference, Konstanty Gebert, got the real point. The Left, he said, could not face the fact that they had totally misconstrued the Middle East because this would undermine their whole philosophy. This was founded on the premise that reason could reconcile all differences; all that was needed in Israel was an enlightened government for reason to prevail. The evidence that we are facing a phenomenon which is not susceptible to reason would destroy that world view. It would also give credibility to the hated Sharon, whose demonisation is absolutely vital to the Left as a protection against the implosion of its whole ideological position.
Arafat's Fatah faction dispatched hundreds of suicide bombers to Iraq. This presumably in response to Bush Jr. holding out the prospect of a Palestinian state ;-) I am sure that this gesture will be "appreciated" in the White House ;-) posted by Former Belgian at 11:44 PM
In the "you can't make this stuff up" category: BBC Chief denies bias while speaking to Media Workers Against The War (what's next, David Duke denies racism while speaking to the KKK?), and Eugene Volokh, Professor of Constitutional Law at UCLA, summarizing an "anti-war" "teach-in" at Columbia University that is so over the top that I briefly wondered whether it was a hoax. After having read very similar reports elsewhere, I figured it must be for real. Go read it, but take Prozac first if you still believe the Humanities should be about scholarship rather than agitprop.
Beyond left and right? My main annoyance with the "left-right" classification of political opinions (or its US counterpart, the "liberal-conservative" spectrum) is twofold. First of all, there is its one-dimensional character which in my opinion is no longer descriptive of the political playing field nowadays (if it ever was in the first place). Secondly, the overuse of "left extremist" and "right extremist" as rethorical bludgeons for political opponents has largely robbed these terms of their stable meaning.
So did anybody ever come up with alternatives? The Wikipedia gives a (not totally accurate) summary with links.
The terms "left-wing" and "right-wing" originally derive from the pre-revolutionary French National Assembly, where the representatives of the nobility and clergy (the First and Second Estates) would be seated on the right and the representatives of "the rest of us" (the Third Estate) on the left. Thus, the division reflected both a socio-economic distinction, as well as, generally, a tendency to conserve the established order on the part of those sitting on the Right and a desire to change or overthrow it on the part of those sitting on the Left.
Over time, the meaning of these terms transfigured: for instance, laissez-faire economics is now supposedly a "rightist" policy while it originally was associated with the "left" (with what some call "classical liberalism").
An early alternative to the left-right scale gained currency in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War (for reasons which will be obvious): it placed political opinions on a circle rather than a line. Thus, Communism (nominally "extreme left") and Fascism (nominally "extreme right") both found themselves at 12 o'clock as "totalitarian" ideologies. The opposite of totalitarianism on this scale would be political democratic centrism at 6 o'clock, with social democracy at the 3 o'clock and conservatism at the 9 o'clock positions, respectively.
An elaboration of this concept led to a two-dimensional scale, where political opinions are rated on two axes. One variant, the World's Shortest Political Quiz, was popularized by a Libertarian group. Its two axes are degree of state regulation/control in (1) economic matters (left-right, or liberal-conservative) and (2) personal matters (up-down, or libertarian-autoritarian). The quiz divides people in five categories, four of which represent extreme positions on one of the two axes, and the fifth of which, "Centrist", represents those taking middle-of-the-road positions on both axes.
Rightly or wrongly, the WSPQ came under considerable criticism as being designed to recruit voters for the Libertarian Party. Its general principle was considerably refined by The Political Compass, which uses a similar two-axis classification but employs more questions and more qualified answers. It also maps present and past politicians on the basis of their policy positions. Contrary to the WSPQ, the Political Compass authors distinguish between Left Libertarianism (which they identify with anarcho-syndicalism) and Right Libertarianism.
I am aware of only one attempt at a three-dimensional scale. It was proposed by
The Friesian School: following Isaiah Berlin, it distinguishes between the two "negative freedoms" (freedom from control) of the Political Compass (which determine their x and y coordinates), and the "positive freedom" of input in the governing process, which is their z coordinate and spans a scale going from tyranny over oligarchy, representative democracy, and direct democracy to anarchism (i.e. equal distribution of decision power).
Finally, let me mention the Quizilla Which Political Stereotype Are You quiz that has gained some popularity in the blogosphere. It classifies people among eight political stereotypes (each with a paradigmatic politician): (1) fascist (Hitler); (2) communist (Stalin); (3) Democrat (FDRoosevelt); (4) Republican (Reagan); (5) Socialist (Eugene Debs); (6) Libertarian (Thomas Jefferson); (7) Green (Ralph Nader); (8) Anarcho-syndicalist (Noam Chomsky). One thing that annoyed me about this quiz is the stereotypical character of the answers: I tended to agree with part of one answer and part of another. Depending on which combination I picked, I ended up as either Roosevelt or Reagan :-) (On both the WSPQ and the Political Compass, I came out as a Centrist.)
Da Instaman draws my attention to a very interesting essay by Lee Harris on the cosmopolitan ideal and its limitations. I shall return to this at length later. posted by Former Belgian at 7:03 PM
Speaking of which, I am always somewhat amused by the utter disdain in which self-anointed "intellectuals" hold people who actually make things --- whether it's an idiotarian dissing Steven Den Beste as "somebody who thinks the whole world is a cellular phone"> (15 minutes of reading Den Beste will convince you that the guy, well, just knows how to use his brain), or culinary writer and restaurant critic Daniel Rogov poking fun at TIME magazine's "Person of the Century" contest for having awarded 13th place to Linus Torvalds, "a guy who knows something about computers". Conversely, I personally know one engineer for whom the most deadly insult was (and is) not accusing somebody of nonhuman ancestry or incestuous relations, but to call him/her a "French intellectual"... posted by Former Belgian at 3:59 PM
Friday, March 28, 2003
French author Pascal Bruckner (PB) gave an interview in Le Figaro (LF) that, well, is very "un-French" :-) Cinderella Bloggerfeller has a translation. A few choice excerpts:
LF:Is Europe currently in the process of leaving history, as Robert Kagan, a man close to the American administration, claims?
PB: Europe is characterized by the desire to leave history for good, including its own history. One of the most obvious signs was its passivity in the face of the Yugoslavian crisis, which it only emerged from in 1995, in Sarajevo, then in 1999, in Kosovo, thanks to American intervention. In 1999, in the Kosovo affair, Europe was so insistent that NATO strikes on Serbia and Montenegro should be kept to a minimum that the American general responsible for operations exclaimed: “No more interventions with partners like this!”
LF: What is France’s position in this Europe of renunciation?
PB: France is a concentrate of all the European contradictions – the wish to appear a great power on the one hand and not to get its hands dirty on the other. I’m really astonished that Jacques Chirac, so lucid when it comes to internal security problems – when faced with gangs and hooligans only force pays- shows himself so Rousseauist in the domain of international relations which, as Raymond Aron saw in 1948, remain marked by the law of the jungle. It would be a pity if the French executive succumbs to a belief in angelism. Only recourse to military action can bring a tyranny to heel. There comes a moment when a population is so permeated and crushed by a dictatorship that it is no longer able to revolt. It must wait for outside help.
LF:In your opinion, why is it that it is America that has shown itself to be “Aronian?”
PB: America, the home of capitalism, paradoxically knows how to spend colossal sums (as in the case of the Iraqi expedition) on taking care of the world. Europe, which now has no more than a market definition of itself, believes with Adam Smith that commerce and exchange will guarantee the peace of nations forever.
LF: Where does this paradox come from?
PB: Europe behaves towards the rest of the world just as the Fifteen [members of the EU] do amongst themselves, without raising its voice and valuing negotiation and courtesy above all. Europe can only afford itself this luxury – living in the middle of a storm zone as if it were in a sanatorium – because it is protected by the American nuclear umbrella. We are endlessly protesting against this state of dependence. Europe is speeding towards “Helvetization” [i.e. turning into Switzerland, a multi-lingual, neutral state], it lives first and foremost in a perpetual remorse for its own history and tends to consider its own past as nothing but a series of crimes and abominations. The ideology of “the tears of a white man” dominates not only the recent pacifist demonstrations, but it thoroughly permeates our surrounding culture. It is blended with the twilight philosophy of disillusion, the certainty that we will never recover our power again and that in future we will always be the wise and good ones in the great arena of history, in other words, inactive.
The New York Review of Books has a very long essay by prominent author Doris Lessing about Zimbabwe and what Chiraq's pal Robert Mugabe turned it into. A must-read. Here are the opening paragraphs
"You have the jewel of Africa in your hands," said President Samora Machel of Mozambique and President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania to Robert Mugabe, at the moment of independence, in 1980. "Now look after it."
Twenty-three years later, the "jewel" is ruined, dishonored, disgraced.
One man is associated with the calamity, Robert Mugabe. For a while I wondered if the word "tragedy" could be applied here, greatness brought low, but Mugabe, despite his early reputation, was never great; he was always a frightened little man. There is a tragedy, all right, but it is Zimbabwe's.
Mugabe is now widely execrated, and rightly, but blame for him began late. Nothing is more astonishing than the silence about him for so many years among liberals and well-wishers—the politically correct. What crimes have been committed in the name of political correctness. A man may get away with murder, if he is black. Mugabe did, for many years.
Go read it all. And see how "the soft bigotry of low expectations" is quite literally a 'kindness' that can kill.
In Gaulish Gall, Steven Den Beste comments on Dominique de Villepin "conciliatory" speech in London (coverage of NYT and Daily Telegraph):
A few days ago I quipped that there was no French word for chutzpah because a fish has no word for water. Another reason we can't use that word is that it is inadequate; it's like describing an ocean as a "really big puddle". The latest diplomatic moves by the French demonstrate truly unmitigated and unprecedented gall.
[...]
France is not only willing to forgive the US, France is also willing to forgive the UK, as long as it, too, apologizes and stops misbehaving. All that the UK has to do is to stop striking out on its own, toe the "European" line, and let the French speak on behalf of Europe, and everything will be hunky-dory. His speech made clear that European unity was vital, and also made clear that the French were right in all of this, which implies that the only way for European unity to be regained is for everyone to acknowledge the superior wisdom and morality of France's point of view.
I can't decide if this means that de Villepin is deluded, desperate, or utterly contemptuous of our mental processes. Likely it's a bit of all three, actually, but there's a strong strain of desperation here. France is in deep trouble.
[...]
The new theory is that the US and UK will fight the war, and will spend the money to pay for it (upwards of $70 billion), and that once the war is over we'll happily turn post-war administration of Iraq over to the UN [while footing the bill].
[...]
So in an address delivered in London, Monsieur de Villepin has offered the US an olive branch, after a fashion. All we have to do is apologize and repent, and France won't hold our misbehavior against us. They'll let bygones be bygones. After all, given that France considers the US such a deep and valuable friend of long standing, it certainly can't hold our recent misbehavior against us, as long as we acknowledge the error of our ways and promise not to do it again.
[...]
France is not only willing to forgive the US, France is also willing to forgive the UK, as long as it, too, apologizes and stops misbehaving. All that the UK has to do is to stop striking out on its own, toe the "European" line, and let the French speak on behalf of Europe, and everything will be hunky-dory. His speech made clear that European unity was vital, and also made clear that the French were right in all of this, which implies that the only way for European unity to be regained is for everyone to acknowledge the superior wisdom and morality of France's point of view.
[...]
For example, de Villepin emphasized how critically important it was for the "oil-for-food" deal to restart immediately. His claim was that this was needed for humanitarian reasons, but it is important to note that the majority of that program has been administered by French companies. TotalFinaElf has primarily been responsible for selling the oil, and other French companies have been primary sources of the food and other supplies which have been shipped in.
[...pages and pages of great stuff, which "fair use" copyright doctrine prohibits me from quoting. Just go read the whole thing...]
de Villepin's speech in London sets an all-time high for chutzpah. It breaks the Olympic medal for gall. The arrogance and contempt required to even be willing to deliver that speech goes beyond anything I think I've ever encountered. de Villepin, and his boss Chirac, are deeply in need of a rude awakening. Fortunately, there's every reason to believe that they're going to get one, very soon.
When young, I used to be a Marxist, and surely in the depth of my soul I still take seriously some of the bearded grandpa's insights. Thus, I believe that the objective, material, conditions of life have some kind of influence on the way people think. Nowadays, the European youth is as removed from any productive or creative activity as the youth in Saudi Arabia, for instance. Instead of reading the Koran, they read Le Monde and Jean Baudrillard, and instead of the Islamic green, they fight for the ecological green. But we have in both parts of the world the same explosive combination of an unproductive way of life with highly elaborate but sterile ways of thinking converging in a kind of disdain and, in the end, hatred for those people who keep material production going. Alisa will probably remember the Russian writers of the mid-19th century, like Gontcharov, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, who wrote about the superfluous men, the unproductive petty aristocrats and state bureaucrats who, because they knew they were useless, became nihilistic and turned the hatred they felt for themselves against the wider society. I think that in the long term the only existing cure for both the Arab and the European youths is hard productive work. When you spend your day building something you won't feel by night the urge of destroying it.
Fox News is openly making fun of Hans "Clouseau" Blix as we speak, particularly his insistence that Iraq does not have the missiles beyond the allowed range that the US came under fire from.
Right now US ambassador to the United Nobheads, John Negroponte, is being interviewed. He explains why he actually walked out during the speech (demented freakazoid rant is a more accurate description) of the Iraqi ambassador (as the latter started accusing the US of planning the genocide of the Iraqi people). Perhaps Negroponte and Tex at Whacking Day could have traded places for the day? posted by Former Belgian at 7:17 PM
Turkey's refusal to let US troops cross through its territory has cost them a lot of US aid money and desperately needed loan guarantees, and definjitely necessitated rethinking the whole battle plan, and in all probability cost the Coalition forces a number of lives. But something has been under the radar: it was the islamist-led coalition that was in favor of the package deal, and the secularist opposition that was against. The latter is rather "counterintuitive" to say the least: now Michael Ledeen in the New York Sun offers the following observations
The Turkish government, which for the first time since the fall of the Ottoman Empire is based on an Islamic party, fully expected that Parliament would approve its proposal that America be given the use of Turkish air bases in the Iraqi war.The government was so confident that the party failed to demand internal discipline, and thus several deputies voted against the resolution.
But that does not account for the failure to approve the government’s proposal.
Primary blame for the defeat of the measure lies with the opposition — the secular, Kemalist parties that have governed the country since Ataturk.
Contrary to expectations, the opposition, responding to orders from party leaders, voted unanimously against the government’s position.
The leaders insisted on a disciplined "no" vote because of pressure — some would call it blackmail — from France and Germany.
The French and German governments informed the Turkish opposition parties that if they voted to help the Coalition war effort, Turkey would be locked out of Europe for a generation. As one Turkish leader put it, "there were no promises, only threats."
Need I say more? For obvious economic reasons as well as a deeply rooted desire to be regarded as "European" on the part of the Turkish elite, Turkey would do literally anything to be admitted to the EU. But if the price is becoming EUnuchs in the harem of the Western world's most contemptible politician, perhaps they ought to reconsider. "The one thing you cannot trade for your heart's desire is your heart." (Lois McMaster Bujold, "Memory".) posted by Former Belgian at 7:04 PM
Quote for the day:
"War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."
Thousands of Palestinians have marched to protest about the war in Iraq and urged Saddam Hussein to strike Israel with chemical weapons. In the West Bank towns of Tulkarem and Tubas, nearly 4,000 Palestinians marched through the streets, holding posters of Saddam and waving Iraqi flags.
The best allies that opponents of a Palestinian state have continue to be the Palestinians themselves.
B.L.O.G.G.E.R. .S.U.C.K.S. .E.S.K.I.M.O. N.E.L.L. posted by Former Belgian at 11:28 PM
Walid Phares, Arab-American professor comments on al-Jazeera. He warns people not to get fooled by their occasional exposure of corrupt Arab rulers (which is "shooting fish in a barrel" anyhow). Go read it all. posted by Former Belgian at 11:22 PM
Still no way to keep up with the rapidly evolving battlefield situation. But my curiosity about the lack of news from the Northern Front just got answered: Fox news reports that a 1,000 strong paratroop contingent has safely parachuted in the North. I would not be surprised if much of what is going on now has the intention of drawing as many Saddamite troops as possible to the South so a movement from the North can happen. (The hi-tech Fourth Infantry Division, which was originally supposed to go through Turkey, is now scheduled to arrive this weekend.) <br> <br>Of course, from Sod-Damn Insane's perspective, what he needs is not to <i>win</i> the war (he can't, anyhow), but to drag it out long enough that his "useful idiots" can apply enough domestic and international pressure on the US to accept some arrangement which guarantees the survival of his regime. His "Ministry of Truth" will then spin this into a 'victory' just like the whacking he received in 1991. And remember: no war crime or other Amalekite stratagem will be too vile to be used for keeping Saddam in the saddle. posted by Former Belgian at 11:22 PM
No comments necessary: (courtesy of ProtestWarrior.com. See there for details.)
Walid Phares, Arab-American professor comments on al-Jazeera. He warns people not to get fooled by their occasional exposure of corrupt Arab rulers (which is "shooting fish in a barrel" anyhow). Go read it all. posted by Former Belgian at 10:52 PM
According to an AFP dispatch, the Belgian lower house of parliament voted an amendment to the controversial law that grants universal jurisdiction to the Belgian courts in war crimes cases, whether or not there is any Belgian involvement. The English is rather bizarre "reverse Franglais": by translating into French and back into standard English, I obtain:
Under the amendments passed, the lawsuit will proceed automatically if any of the following apply: (a) the alleged crime was perpetrated in Belgium; (b) the alleged perpetrator is either a Belgian subject or is physically present in Belgium; (c) any of the victims are either Belgian subjects or have resided in Belgium for at least three years.
In none of the above applies, the "public prosecutor" [Belgium's equivalent of a District Attorney] will decide on the competence of the Belgian courts. The Belgian minister of justice has the authority to pass on the case to the judiciary of the country of the accused.
The amendments will affect only cases filed after July 1, 2002 -- like the one against Bush Sr. -- and only those in which the country of the accused has war crimes legislation. [To my knowledge, the US does.]
The dispatch goes on to say:
Fears that a war crimes lawsuit over the Iraqi conflict could be brought against the current US president have further strained relations between the United States and Belgium, which has been a fierce critic of the war on Iraq and was at the center of an unprecedented crisis at NATO over the conflict last month.
The changes to the law came only a week before Belgium's parliament was due to be dissolved ahead of a general election scheduled for May 18.
According to parliamentary sources, the parties in the ruling coalition were divided over how to amend the law.
Verhofstadt's Liberals, backed by Flemish-speaking Socialists, had proposed a "diplomatic filter" allowing the government to pass on any cases to the country where the alleged crimes took place, providing it is democratic.
Francophone Socialists and Greens feared that the law would be rendered toothless if the amendments were too radical.
Read: they are afraid it would deprive them of a vehicle for judicial auto-eroticism over their favorite whipping boy (hint: born in 1928 as Ariel Schneiderman).
I continue to be amazed how a country with one of the most incompetent judiciaries in the Western world would have the chutzpah to in effect declare its courts to be the world's supreme court. (That's Lawrence Peter's "percussive sublimation" management strategy taken to absurd extremes.) But then again, the principle that "a badly crafted or unenforceable law is worse than no law at all" is as counterintuitive to the Belgian statist as it is self-evident to any American not on the political lunatic fringes.
But let's look at the half-full part of the glass: a classic piece of "Barney legislation" has just been semi-sanitized [assuming the Senate approves the amendment]. I have much less of an issue with Belgium seeking jurisdiction in cases involving Belgian citizens or territory (several other countries have such laws on the books).
Update: the vote was only in the Chamber Commission, not in the plenum. A still more restrictive version that also eliminated the "grandfather clause" was voted through the Plenum. posted by Former Belgian at 9:26 PM
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe has compared himself to Adolf Hitler.
At the state funeral of one of his cabinet ministers, Mr Mugabe said: "I am still the Hitler of the time. This Hitler has only one objective, justice for his own people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people, and their right to their resources.
"If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold. Ten times, that is what we stand for."
Mugabe has wet dreams about being Hitler, Saddam of being Stalin and Salah-e-Din (Saladin) in one, Arafat will settle for Saladin alone, and their friend Chiraq harbors similar delusions of grandeur of being either the new De Gaulle or the new Louis XIV. One truly knows a man by the company he keeps. posted by Former Belgian at 4:30 PM
[Napoleon] had one prodigious advantage - he had no responsibility - he could do whatever he pleased; and no man has ever lost more armies than he did. Now with me the loss of every man told. I could not risk so much; I knew that if I ever lost five hundred men without the clearest necessity, I should be brought upon my knees to the bar of the House of the Commons.
It seems that everybody is dissing the BBC these days. Andrew Sullivan has been calling it the "Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation" for months. Now others are joining in.
[...]
Rand Simberg blames BBC snobbery on upper-middle-class sensibilities, and I think he's almost right. It's really a case of New Class sensibilities.
I can't help but notice that anti-Americanism, and the various manifestations of what some have called Transnational Progressivism, are most common among people who, well, have state-supported managerial or intellectual jobs, the people who made up what Milovan Djilas and others called the "New Class" of bureaucrats and managers in the old Communist world. Not surprisingly, the New Class was deeply concerned with matters of status and position, and deeply opposed to things that might have led to competition on merit. There's nothing new about such a view, which predated communism: As David Levy and Sandra Peart note, it's an attitude that even in the nineteenth century was characteristic of anti-capitalists and anti-semites - and, nowadays, there's a lot of overlap between anti-capitalists, anti-semites, and anti-Americans.
A common thread among anti-semitism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Americanism is the fear of being outdone by people willing to work harder. It's not surprising that such a fear exists among a disproportionate number of those who take state-supported jobs. It's thus not surprising, then, that New Class sensibilities are so often anti-American and anti-capitalist, and increasingly (or perhaps I should say, once again) anti-Semitic, too. The New Class, in this regard, as in many others, is like the old haut-bourgeoisie.
WHACK! (Sound of cluebat hitting my head.) I have been a "progressist" all my life, and (in consequence) a social democrat of the old school for most of it. But much of what calls itself the "new Left" these days is objectively a deeply reactionary movement posturing as "progressive". And many "progressive" ideas I have always embraced (equality of opportunity, the marketplace of ideas, scientific and technical progress as vehicles of individual and collective empowerment) have become part and parcel of "neoconservative" doctrine. Could this be the "Umwertung aller Werte" (revaluation of all values) Nietzsche was predicting?
As much as I understand the feelings and frustration behind "freedom fries", "freedom toast", French wine flushing parties, and proposals to boycott French goods, they are both a bit childish and --- the one cardinal sin of the engineerist --- ineffective. John Fund proposes hitting France where it really hurts --- with a special issue of Green Cards to fuel the "brain drain" of talented Frenchmen. I propose an amendment: extend the proposal to Belgium.
The other day at the pub, I overheard an expat Belgian being asked by an American what the prevalent political philosophy is in Belgium. He quipped "national-castrism". He hurried to explain that this was not a reference to Fidel Castro... posted by Former Belgian at 9:22 AM
Tuesday, March 25, 2003
Law student and former US Military Police captain Phil Carter predicts what will happen to the "fragger":
Prediction: SGT Akbar will likely be charged with capital murder and a number of other military offenses in such a trial. He will have a right of defense counsel, a right to cross-examination, and a right to put on his defense -- all the rights that a criminal defendant would have in L.A. County. Akbar will have the right to a military jury, which at his option can include enlisted members and officers. That jury must find him guilty by unanimous verdict. If convicted, Akbar can appeal to the Army Court of Criminal Appeals, and then to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces -- both of which will be mandatory appeals if he receives the death penalty. After the CAAF, he can appeal his case to the Supreme Court. In total, he has one more court of appeal than civilian defendants do. Ultimately, I predict that Akbar will be sentenced to death and executed for his heinous crime which took the life of CPT Christopher Seifert.
He also points to an article on findlaw.com refuting some common myths about the military justice system. posted by Former Belgian at 11:20 PM
WW II historian John Keegan apparently works for the Daily Telegraph as a defense (or defence, for Tony Blair :-)) editor. See his comments yesterday and today, for instance.
TV is off the air in Iraq now, and part of Baghdad is shrouded in darkness. Something is about to happen... posted by Former Belgian at 10:16 PM
And in The New Republic, expatriate Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya has some choice things to say:
The bombs have begun to fall on Baghdad. Iraqi soldiers have shot their officers and are giving themselves up to the Americans and the British in droves. Others, as in Nasiriyah and Umm Qasr, are fighting back, and civilians have already come under fire. Yet I find myself dismissing contemptuously all the e-mails and phone calls I get from antiwar friends who think they are commiserating with me because "their" country is bombing "mine." To be sure, I am worried. Like every other Iraqi I know, I have friends and relatives in Baghdad. I am nauseous with anxiety for their safety. But still those bombs are music to my ears. They are like bells tolling for liberation in a country that has been turned into a gigantic concentration camp. One is not supposed to say such things in the kind of liberal, pacifist, and deeply anti-American circles of academia, in which I normally live and work. The truth is jarring even to my own ears.
If you want to understand the perceptual chasm that separates how Iraqis view this second Gulf war from how the rest of the Arab-Muslim world views it--or from how these antiwar elites here in Cambridge or, dare I say, in Turtle Bay or Paris or Berlin view it--then you must begin with the war that has already been waged on the people of Iraq by their own regime. Then you will know, horribly, how the explosion of a JDAM can sound beautiful. For Iraqis, the absence of this new American-led war is not the presence of peace. Years before the first American cruise missile exploded in a "safe house" of the Iraqi leadership, the people of Iraq were living through a war. They have been living through that war since 1980, the year Saddam Hussein launched his futile war against Iran. Since then, one and a half million Iraqis have met a violent death. Between 5 and 10 percent of Iraq's population has been killed, either directly or indirectly, because of decisions made by its own leadership. The scale of such devastation on a people is impossible to imagine. Think of Germany or France after World War I. Think of the Soviet Union after World War II. The peoples that are thrust into such a meat-grinder are never the same when they emerge. Is it any wonder that we Iraqis do not look at this war the way so much of the rest of the world does?
UPDATE: Kanan Makiya is the author of "Republic of Fear", originally published under the pseudonym Samir al-Khalil.
We're only 5 days into the war, Coalition forces are near Baghdad, ... but war doesn't happen in "Internet time", so some people are already blabbing about quagmires and the like. Steven Den Beste, David Warren, and Ralph Peters offer reality checks. SdB refers to the "fallacy of misleading vividness" from the Guide to Fallacies (errors of reasoning).
Not to mention Mark Steyn's bitingly humorous take on the situation. posted by Former Belgian at 9:44 PM
Neil Cavuto: The Shi'ite has hit the fan. It's now official: the Iraqi population rose up against the remaining Saddamites in Basra, Iraq's second-largest city.
Fox also reports that Special Republican Guard units are dressing up in US (or other Coalition) uniforms, "accept" Iraqis willing to surrender, and shoot them. Iraq continues to pile one perfidy upon the next.
"Perfidy", in fact, has a very specific meaning in the context of international law. There is a common misunderstanding among Belgian journalists (see e.g. the example cited today by Live in Brussels) that disguising combatants in civilian clothes, feigning surrender,... are mere ruses of war. In fact, under international law, there is a very sharp distinction between permissible ruses of war (feints, camouflage, disinformation, decoys, interception and/or jamming of communications), and perfidy, which constitutes a gross breach of the laws of war. According to, e.g., Article III.37 of the 1977 Protocol Additional of the Geneva convention:
1. It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy. Acts inviting the confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or is obliged to accord, protection under the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, with intent to betray that confidence, shall constitute perfidy. The following acts are examples of perfidy:
(a) the feigning of an intent to negotiate under a flag of truce or of a surrender;
(b) the feigning of an incapacitation by wounds or sickness;
(c) the feigning of civilian, non-combatant status; and
(d) the feigning of protected status by the use of signs, emblems or uniforms of the United Nations or of neutral or other States not Parties to the conflict.
[...]
Other examples are the use of human shields, disguise in the uniform of the opposing party,... Perfidious conduct on the part of one warring party is generally considered to forfeit the abused protection (see e.g. the following analysis by international law scholar Prof. Louis Rene Beres).
Newsweek has the inside story about how the "decapitation strike" that opened the war came about. Apparently the Coalition had a top-level informer who told them where Saddam would be sleeping that night. (Hat tip: the Command Post gang.)
Incidentally, like Andrew Sullivan, I am of the opinion that the Iraqi behavior of the last day (shooting POWs, "surrendered" troops opening fire,...) may be a conscious attempt at provoking the Coalition forces into less discriminate tactics (like carpet bombing), so the Iraqis have some civilian casualties that they can trot out for emotional blackmail.
Seven in 10 said the anti-war rallies have not changed their opinion on the conflict. One in five-20 percent-said the protests have made them more likely to back the war, while 7 percent said it has increased their opposition to the conflict.
As best as I can tell, [antiwar spin] is a parody of Stalin: one person killed by America is a tragedy. A hundred thousand killed by Saddam, or a million by Pol Pot, are a statistic.
There's no way I can keep up with all the war news here by myself ;-): even Instapundit gave up. THE COMMAND POST is a new warblogger collective that has literally up-to-the-minute info around the clock. See also the button over on the left. posted by Former Belgian at 6:34 AM
Sunday, March 23, 2003
The other day I heard that old Rush favorite, "Something for Nothing" (from the album 2112). It occurred to me that the chorus is a very concise statement of my personal philosophy of life:
You don't get something for nothing
You can't have freedom for free
You won't get wise, with the sleep still in your eyes
No matter what your dreams may be
The first line is the most basic law of economics, also known as the TANSTAAFL ("There ain't no such thing as a free lunch", Robert A. Heinlein) principle.
The second line is Thomas Paine's famous opening to "The Crisis" (see below), reduced to one line.
The third line can be read to mean: wisdom can only be acquired by checking theory against objective reality.
And this applies to all ideologies, no matter where on the political map they come from (the fourth line).
For non-American readers, here is the Paine quote:
These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.
One of the longest LGF threads ever concerns the report that a sergeant of the legendary 101st Airborne Division (of D-Day fame, entre autres) threw three hand grenades at his commanding officers, killing one and wounding a dozen. The perpetrator is said to be a Black American convert to Islam, although his motivation is not clear at this stage (a psychopath nursing a grudge, or one of the political variety).
As anybody remotely familiar with people in the combat military (especially those in elite units like the 101st) can imagine, soldiers who "frag" their mates (as this type of act is known in army slang) and would be handed over to the survivors would probably beg to be put to death by firing squad instead. My prediction however is that the US Army (for image reasons) will classify this as a psychiatric case and that the perp will be bundled off to a "looney bin".
Update: several referred me to the Rudyard Kipling poem/song Danny Deever
"What are the bugles blowin' for?" said Files-on-Parade.
"To turn you out, to turn you out", the Colour-Sergeant said.
"What makes you look so white, so white?" said Files-on-Parade.
"I'm dreadin' what I've got to watch", the Colour-Sergeant said.
[...]
They are hangin' Danny Deever, you must mark 'im to 'is place,
For 'e shot a comrade sleepin' -- you must look 'im in the face;
Nine 'undred of 'is county an' the regiment's disgrace,
While they're hangin' Danny Deever in the mornin'.
WATCHING THE SHOW: I was watching CNN last, and they did a phone interview with John Burns, an obviously British-born reporter for the New York Times, currently reporting from Baghdad. Burns has been watching, from a half a mile away, the "coalition of the willing" destroying government buildings. Burns said that not only did he feel perfectly safe, he said that many Iraqis were going outdoors to watch. He perceived it as Iraqis having great confidence both that our bombs and missles would land only on military targets, and that we would do our best to avoid hitting civilians.
Maybe Burns is wrong. Maybe, in spite of who Burns works for [a reference to NYT's blatant liberal bias, FB], he's a closet pro-American journalist. But it is somewhat gratifying to think that in spite of Iraqi media efforts to portray the U.S. as a bunch of bloodthirsty killers, there are Iraqi civilians who know better.
Paul Johnson accuses Jacques Iraq of having dealt fatal blows to three international institutions for no other reason than "amour propre".
We have to face the ugly fact: Internationalism--the principle of collective security and the attempt to regulate the world through representative bodies--has been dealt a vicious blow by Mr. Chirac's bid to present himself as a world statesman, whatever the cost to the world. France is a second-rate power militarily. But because of its geographic position at the center of Western Europe and its nominal possession of nuclear weapons, which ensures its permanent place on the U.N. Security Council, it wields considerable negative and destructive power. On this occasion, it has exercised such power to the full, and the consequences are likely to be permanent.
The first body Mr. Chirac has damaged, perhaps fatally, is the U.N. The old Security Council system will have to go: It is half a century old and no longer represents reality because three of the world's most important entities--Japan, Germany and India--have no permanent place on it. More important, however, the United States, whose support for the U.N. is essential to its continuance, has lost confidence in its usefulness in moments of real crisis, as the Azores summit showed. The Security Council will now be marginalized and important business will be transacted elsewhere. Indeed, it may prove difficult to keep the U.S. within the organization at all.
Mr. Chirac's heavy hand has also fallen on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. By trying to manipulate NATO against the U.S., its co-founder, principal member and chief supplier of firepower, France made a fundamental mistake. Both the U.N. and NATO were originally created precisely to keep the U.S. committed to collective security and the defense of Europe, and to avoid a U.S. return to isolationism. America's victory in the Cold War meant that there was no longer a case for keeping a large proportion of its armed forces in Western Europe.
It now makes much more sense, militarily and geographically, to base America's rapid-reaction force for the European theater in reliable Britain, and on this basis construct practical bilateral deals with all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, whose freedom and democracy depend on U.S. goodwill. In this new system, France will become irrelevant. We will see then what Germany will do. My guess is that it will come to its senses and scuttle quickly under the U.S. umbrella.
The third organization Mr. Chirac has damaged is the European Union. Although under French pressure the EU has been scrambling toward monetary and constitutional union, the Iraq crisis--which has split the EU into a dozen fragments--shows that it has made no progress at all toward a common foreign policy. The only country that joined the Franco-German axis is Belgium. Two of the five major members, Italy and Spain, sided with the U.K., as have most of the newcomers and aspirant members--thereby earning the East Europeans personal abuse from Mr. Chirac. This is the man who likes to be called "the first gentleman of Europe."
The crisis demonstrated plainly enough that the EU's armed forces do not exist and, on present showing, never will. Mr. Chirac could not hold off the Anglo-American option of force because he could not make a significant contribution. Anglo-American commanders have learned, from their experience in the Balkans, not to trust the French forces. So, having no "war card" to play, Mr. Chirac played the "peace card," the only one he possessed. As a result, a dozen or more EU members, or would-be members, are now rethinking their commitment to the EU. The U.K. is wondering, for instance, whether its future is with Continental Europe. Once again, for the British, the Channel has proved wider than the Atlantic.
Mr. Bush has a busy time ahead. Not only must he and Mr. Blair devise a workable post-war settlement for Iraq (and plan the next move against terrorist states like North Korea and Iran), but America has to construct a vision of a safe world which can get by without NATO and with a marginalized U.N. It is high time that America began the "agonizing reappraisal" that the former U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles once threatened.
In it, America must think hard whether it can offer a viable alternative to European states that no longer wish to commit themselves to a European Union dominated by a selfish and irresponsible France. Today, in 2003, I see no reason why this reappraisal should be agonizing. On the contrary, it is welcome and overdue, and can be constructive and exhilarating.
A priceless op-ed in the subscriber-only section of the Wall Street Journal by chess world champion and contributing editor Gary Kasparov:
Past war-time leaders have similarly faced critics, nonbelievers and those who would appease evil. Much has been said about the dismissals that similarly greeted Winston Churchill's warnings of the destruction Hitler would unleash. As a long-time student of American history, I am struck also by the parallels with another Republican Party leader who was pilloried for launching a war that his critics claimed was reckless: Abraham Lincoln.
At the time of the Civil War, his critics were numerous and viscious, the ultimate price of war was terrifying and peaceful alternatives were on the table. Indeed, despite the overwhelming battlefield success of union armies his democratic opponent Gen. George McClellan mounted a strong presidential challenge in 1864 on a platform of immediate peace and reconciliation, abjuring intervention into the affairs of the southern states. Democrats then, not so unlike those of today, were more concerned with slavery in economic terms than the underlying principles that animated Lincoln.
But there are crucial differences between the challenges that confront today's war-time leaders. Their detractors are highly organized and have access to a broadly sympathetic media. I wonder if Lincoln would have preserved his 10% lead in the popular vote had the public then had CNN reporting live from Atlanta. When the media take at face value mass demonstrations in Iraqi cities to support our "beloved Saddam" one tries to imagine whether anyone would have given similar credence in Lincoln's time to a parade of black slaves on the streets of Richmond demonstrating in support of the Confederacy.
[...]
What makes today's demonstrators and anti-Bush media so implacable is that their actions are underpinned by a grossly inaccurate reading of history that emerged from the left-wing movements of the last century. The belief system and indeed vocabulary of this movement have become woven into the fabric of modern political discourse. Thus news readers speak of Cuban "President" Fidel Castro and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but Chilean "dictator" Gen. Agusto Pinochet.
In the mental history book of many of those opposing American action in Iraq, there is no page on the sacrifice of 38,000 American soldiers who perished in the Korean Peninsula. There is no chapter on American protection of Taiwan, saved from Mao's blodbath by U.S. warships. Though there are plenty of lessons offered on the dirty "imperialistic" war in Vietnam, there is no mention of the fact that the U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia opened the gates to the unspeakable horrors of Pol Pot's genocide in Cambodia and the massacres and mass exodus in South Vietnam. (One might even argue that the tragedy that befell the people of Southeast Asia was a direct result of the success of the anti-war movement.)
In these circles, it's unfashionable to talk about the true origin of the Arab-Israeli conflict, of the naked aggression of Arab states in 1947 aimed at the elimination of all the Jews in the region. Or that the policy of Arab spiritual leaders targeted moderate Arabs as well as Zionists. That policy was successfully inherited by the so-called liberation fighters in Algeria, another cruel and dirty war. No injustice by French troops there could be compared to the mass liquidation of innocent civilians, both Muslim and Christian, executed by anti-colonialist fighters after their departure 1962. Similarly, it is taboo to speak of the wrongdoings of Salvador Allende or the Republican terror sponsored by Stalin's secret service in the Spanish Civil War.
Stanley Kurtz writes about something I know all too well from close up: leftism as a religion.
And in the absolute required reading category, David Brooks' essay Saddam's Brain. I will just quote the opening paragraph:
WHEN FACULTY MEMBERS at the Sorbonne gather to discuss who should get the prize for most evil alumnus, they probably rehash all the familiar names--Pol Pot, mastermind of the Cambodian genocide; Abimael Guzman, leader of Peru's Shining Path guerrilla movement; and Ali Shariat, the intellectual godfather of the Iranian revolution. But they really should give serious consideration to Michel Aflaq.
It was Aflaq, a Syrian intellectual and political organizer, who founded the Syrian and Iraqi Baath parties. It was Aflaq, too, who in 1963 elevated Saddam Hussein to the Regional Command in Iraq's Baath party, and so set him on his course to dictatorship. And it was Aflaq who laid down the ideology that continues to dominate Saddam's thinking today. Saddam Hussein, after all, isn't a general who took over a government by means of a military coup. He's not only a thug, a ruthless tribal leader, a Don Corleone-style Godfather, a power-mad dictator. He is first and foremost a political activist, a party man.
Go read the whole thing. posted by Former Belgian at 6:08 PM
Are the Iraqi's headless now? Mark Steyn argues they certainly act like they are, as does Steven Den Beste. posted by Former Belgian at 5:40 PM
Friday, March 21, 2003
I just see a telling split-screen on Fox. On the left the Iraqi ambassador to the Useless Nabobs is reading off some incoherent rant about "the communist-capitalist American Zionist oil mafia". On the right you can see (carefully selected targets in) Baghdad being bombed. Well, the poor sod[damite] ambassador may only be trying to save his relatives from being immersed in vats of acid. posted by Former Belgian at 10:38 PM
Mansour Ijaz gives a different American Muslim perspective. He claims that, unlike the pro-islamofascists, he speaks for "the silent majority" of American Muslims.
A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."
Chirac souspasse [sic] soi-meme de nouveau ("underpasses" himself again). Then again, I agree with Glenn Reynolds that the further the United Neocolonialists/Useless Nincompoops are kept from Iraq, the better for the country and the world. posted by Former Belgian at 7:33 PM
"Shock and awe" finally started, at least the first part of it. The images are unlike anything I've ever seen. There seems to have been a lull (at least in Baghdad) while Rumsfeld and Meyers were holding their briefings, possibly to give Iraqi commanders "sitting on the fence" a chance to change sides.
Fox News reports that Turkey finally allowed US military overflights. Apparently they were waiting for the decision to be published in the Turkish equivalent of the Federal Register/Het Belgisch Staatsblad/Le Moniteur Belge.
An article in "The Atlantic Monthly" turns the tables on the "internationalist" jetset and exposes their neo-colonial lifestyle. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
The next wave is now starting to hit.
Live from Brussels reports that the Belgian media (of all sides) have been saturation-bombing their audiences with anti-war coverage, but are not proposing any serious alternatives, except more of the same failed approaches. He also notes that people he talked to privately express a certain satisfaction that the world will shortly be rid of the Saddamite regime. Well, garbage cleanup may be a low-prestige position, but somebody has to do it. Although what seems to be going on in Iraq looks more like a tumor being removed with painstaking care not to damage the healthy tissue.
The peace of the slaves for the West, peace of the grave for Israel "anti-war" movement has been immune to parody since masturbateforpeace.com was first brought online. Yet even they have just outdone themselves with a vomit-in at a federal building. (Hat tip: lgf.) posted by Former Belgian at 3:35 PM
The Libertarian Samizdata has a much less positive appreciation of Tony Blair than I do. For them, his "doing the right thing" in the War on Terror is overshadowed by his Euro-enthusiasm. Their admittedly somewhat alarmist post links to an analysis from the Cato Institute (a Libertarian think thank) that raises many concerns that the present non-Libertarian happens to agree with. Not to mention the very fact of a Constitution being drafted by Giscard d'Estaing (how about the "unalieanable right" of Central Africans not to end up in Bokassa's cooking pots?). What's next, Bill Clinton drafting a Vatican encyclical on chastity?
According to the Gazet van Antwerpen (in Dutch, does not require registration or an online subscription), the EU-summit on the war was apparently quite stormy, and ended in a split. The UK and five other countries (The Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Denmark) came out in favor, while vehemently against were, you guessed it... France, Germany, and Belgium. In the same newspaper, a report on Belgian PM Verhofstadt's favoring an integrated Belgian-French-German military in the light of this crisis. I am sure the Belgian military will make a fearsome addition.
Sarcasm aside, it is a mystery to me why, of all people, Verhofstadt (who largely built his political career on being Belgium's answer to Margaret Thatcher) seems to think Belgium's meal ticket consists of acting like France's chocolate poodle. True, Belgium's national elections are at the gates, but I always considered Verhofstadt to be one of the few principled Belgian politicians, as much as I (a social-democrat for most of my conscious political life) used to disagree with him on socio-economic matters.
I am not mystified in the same manner by the behavior of his foreign minister, Louis "le nain jardin" Michel --- a living example of the Churchillian epithet "the only bull who brings his own china shop".
Washington Post: US officials convinced Saddam was in bunker hit. A former mistress of Saddam is said to have declared the 'Saddam with glasses' reading the speech was a double. (hat tip: Belgravia Dispatch blog.)
Two choice bits from The Australian: (1) an open letter by an Iraqi refugee; and (2) a piece of commentary by journalist and former MP Winston S. Churchill Jr. posted by Former Belgian at 11:54 AM
There is something surreal about the campaign. Resistance is almost unbelievably light, which could mean one of fouir things: (1) the US psychological warfare campaign aimed at encouraging Iraqi forces to give up without a fight has succeeded beyond expectations; (2) an `in-depth trap' is being prepared for the Coalition forces; (3) the Iraqi leadership has indeed been knocked out by the `decapitation strike'; (4) Saddam is suffering from a psychological `knockout' similar to that of his role model, Josef Stalin, in the first weeks after Operation Barbarossa.
Meanwhile, B-52 bombers are reported to take off from bases in England. This could either mean they are being brought forward to bases closer to the theatre of operations, or that the much-hyped `shock and awe' massive smart bombing strike may start as early as tonight. (The very hype may have been disinformation to put the enemy on the wrong foot.) posted by Former Belgian at 11:43 AM
I am currently listening to military SciFi-author and former paratrooper John Ringo, who is explaining on Fox News why the military --- which traditionally has held mainstream media reporters at arm's length --- has made a 180-degree turn for this campaign and is actually allowing reporters to ride with the front-line troops and reporting in real time. The bottom line: the journalists --- who live like common `grunts' for the duration --- now feel first-hand what it is is really like to be a soldier, and this type of reporting leaves nearly zero room for 'spin' on the part of the journalist.
Speaking of a "preventive strike" on hostile public opinion. Incidentally, it appears that the "phone-cam" images are being watched as intently in the Pentagon as by armchair strategists around the globe :-), as it allows fact-checking rumors from other media.
The first direct combat fatality (a US Marines officer) has been reported.
One unique aspect form the present war is the presence of 'embedded' civilian correspondents who report in real time for their employer media. Fox News in fact has live video via satellite phone from some of their people.
Meanwhile, Caroline Glick, embedded correspondent for both the Chicago Sun-Times and the Jerusalem Post (both newspapers of the Hollinger Group) has some choice remarks about the tenacious attempts of the Kuwaitis to block her press accreditation (as well as those of other people with Israel connections).
A few hours before I was set to depart for Kuwait on a flight from Washington, DC, I began to realize that I would be in for a rough ride. I read on the Internet that the Kuwaitis issued a statement telling the international press corps in Kuwait that anyone transmitting reports to the Israeli media would face criminal prosecution.
[...]
On the face of it, the Kuwaitis could have easily passed over my name and not bothered with me. I am an American citizen. I applied for my Kuwaiti visa with a letter of accreditation from the Chicago Sun-Times. For the Kuwaitis to go after me they would have to really want to.
[...]
The US army's public affairs officers were told by the Kuwaitis ahead of my arrival that they would not accredit me to work in the country. The State Department's agreement with Kuwait stipulates that the US army will not accredit journalists not already accredited by the Kuwaitis. For the rest of the international press corps, Kuwaiti accreditation was a formality.
The information office had a table right across from the army's public affairs counter. But for me, it was an insurmountable hurdle. And non-accreditation meant that I was stuck, prevented from doing my job.
[...]
For their part, the Kuwaitis were moving as well, but so was I. In the late afternoon hours I sat down at a table in the Hilton lobby waiting to phone a helpful foreign service officer at the US Embassy named Jim Moran. A stranger sat down at my table and said, "You're Caroline Glick from the Chicago Jerusalem Post Sun-Times."
"Who are you?" I asked.
"I'm Yigal, Hungarian from Peruvian television."
So I met Yigal Zur, another hounded Israeli. Yigal introduced me to an army officer who had been helping him. The officer told me to pack my bags and move out of my hotel room immediately. "If you stay there on your own the Kuwaitis can escort you to the airport, no problem," he said. "And I know that is what they want to do."
What followed was like a movie scene. Yigal and I got into a cab and drove to my hotel. He waited in the cab while I ran up and packed my gear and checked out. We then returned to the Hilton, paid in cash for a room under his name so no one would know where to find me.
In the meantime, I received a call from Jim Moran at the US embassy. The State Department had worked out a compromise. The Kuwaitis would accredit me if I signed a paper promising not to report for any Israeli media outlet while in Kuwait.
[...]
The next morning, before they gave me the statement, a Kuwaiti official (born and raised in Virginia) began interrogating me. He wanted me to agree not to write for the Israeli media not only in Kuwait, but in Iraq as well. I couldn't believe his nerve. I replied politely that I could only discuss with the Kuwaiti government my plans for while in Kuwait and that a decision where to place my articles was made by my company, not by me.
After signing the statement, I was immediately loaded on a bus with other journalists. Yigal from Peruvian television spent the next two nights in a room registered under my name waiting to go himself. I was sent to the Army's 3rd infantry division's first combat brigade.
I looked at the other journalists on my bus and wondered about them. Would they be angry if they knew what I had to go through in order to join them on this bus? Did they care when they saw that the Kuwaitis had put a notice on the bulletin board of the Hilton's media center prohibiting all news organizations from publishing their reports in the Israeli media? Would it bother them if they knew that I had just spent the last night in hiding?
Not knowing the answers to any of these questions, I kept my own counsel on the bus, introducing myself as a Sun-Times reporter only.
Eventually she resumed reporting as she crossed into Iraq. She continues:
For me, the main lesson from this odyssey is that to refer to the Middle East conflict as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is to ignore the truth.
The truth is that at its root the conflict is about the Arab world's obsession with rejecting Israel. Kuwait hates the Palestinians. The Kuwaitis kicked the Palestinians out of their country :[a few bparagraphs up she clarified:] You can't find any Palestinians in Kuwait anymore. All 250,000 of them were deported in 1991 after the coalition forces liberated Kuwait.
[...]
The way I was treated had nothing to do with Beit El or Netzarim. It has to do with Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem and the Bible.
She also comments:
The drive from hotel to hotel lasted 25 minutes during which the taxi traversed Kuwait City. The most remarkable aspect of Kuwait City is the absence of Kuwaitis. They leave the work of running their kingdom to foreigners Filipinos, Indians, Pakistanis, Egyptians and Bangladeshis mainly. [...]
Kuwait City looks like a run-down version of [the Israeli towns of] Afula or Beersheba with one primary difference. There is nothing going on. No one is going anywhere or doing anything in Kuwait City. Whereas Israeli cities teem with life and energy, Kuwait City is lethargic, bereft of human vitality.
The opulence of the beach front suburb was an indication that Kuwaitis actually live there. But its wealth made it no more appealing than the dead cityscape. At first glance, the villas recalled Herzliya Pituah, but upon closer examination, they lack character. The palaces stand like algae in a motionless pool.
My cab ride to the Hilton showed me that the Kuwaitis care little about cultivating their own country. My experience after arriving at the Hilton showed me that the Kuwaitis care very much about hating Israel.
Alea iacta est. I wish G-dspeed to the US-UK-Australian forces.
Meanwhile, the Flemish conservative daily Gazet van Antwerpen (Antwerp Gazette) reports that US Secretary of State (=foreign minister, for non-Americans) Colin Powell told the Belgian government that "Belgium's international reputation is being endangered" by its so-called "genocide law".
This law --- which grants Belgian courts worldwide jurisdiction in alleged 'crimes against humanity' whether or not Belgian citizens are in any manner involved and allows any private citizen to file a suit under the law --- is a classic example of how a badly thought-out law can be worse than no law at all. The law was originally passed in the laudable desire to create a legal framework to bring some of the perpetrators of the Rwanda massacres to justice. Rather than create an 'ad-hoc' court a la Nuremberg or the Hague court dealing with former Yugoslavia --- which some consider "victor's justice" --- or grant the courts jurisdiction in matters concerning Belgium's former colonies --- which would have involked cries of "colonialism" --- the Belgian lawmakers went for the "transnational progressivist" solution and in effect appointed the politicized and notoriously incompetent Belgian court system as the world's Supreme Court. (The many international organizations with headquarters in Brussels appear to have gone to the Belgian lawmaker's heads.)
Two convictions concerning Rwanda indeed resulted. Aside from that, some two dozen lawsuits have been filed against incumbent and former world leaders as diverse as Pinochet, Castro, Arafat, (Israeli PM Ariel) Sharon, and now against the American leadership at the time of Gulf War I (President Bush Sr., Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf,...) Of late, the remarkable tenacity with which the (problematic, to say the least --- I will return to this in a future post) case against Israeli PM Ariel Sharon has been pursued --- including the passing of an amendment allowing him to be tried in absentia --- has led to the Israeli ambassador to Belgium being recalled for "consultations". It does not look like he will be returning any time soon.
Belgian senator Hugo Coveliers (of the center-right VLD) rightly remarked that since Belgian courts are manifestly incompetent when it comes to their domestic caseload (supermarket killings of the "Nivelles gang", pedophilia scandals,...) , they would be well advised not to start looking for cases outside Belgium's borders.
HOW THE LEFT IS CHANGING: Here's an email that cheered me:
As a gay man [both Andrew and the guy he is quoting are, but FB emphatically is not], it took no effort for me to detest the collectivist ideology of the theocratic thugs of the far Right. But it was quite a while before I began to see something that I had long been feeling: that the victimist egalitopians of the Left are just as much in the thug category. You only need to cross them to find out that Noam Chomsky and Pat Robertson are twins. I live in San Francisco. My mildest dissents from the party line have most often been met with a two-pronged response: "You are far too intelligent to consider such a thing" and "Is something going wrong in your emotional life?". I am in fact far too intelligent not to notice the combined condescension and abdication of thought therein expressed. And my emotional life is indeed in difficulty: Muslim terrorists want to destroy the civilization that makes my very existence possible and they blew a hole in my home town.
I come from a strong Catholic background, was a lifelong Democrat and I am a 60's boomer. So appeals to "Justice and Peace" seemed to me only the Natural Form of Righteousness. Now I see that what is lacking there, and in almost all the Left, is "Freedom". I have watched with increasing dismay as most of the idiots and the savants of the Left have lined up against President Bush's response to 9/11. Not that his strategy is unassailable and without risk (what, in this world, could be?). But the smug and self-satisfied contempt with which they respond, especially to him as a person, has pulled the mask off. (Apparently cultural sensitivity does not extend to Texans and the maligned standard of IQ suddenly is back in vogue). None of them show anything near such a feeling for the Islamist thugs who slaughtered 3000 of their countrymen and women in a single morning.
I am afraid that my generation learned too well to love their enemies without ever learning how to stop hating their fathers. So that now, hatred of the father takes the form of love of the enemy. And inside all that is a toxic self-hatred that appalls me.
Maybe out of this horror, some new kind of Western self-understanding will emerge.
Nice thought for the night. Am going offline now for a brief nap.
Arafat formally asked the 67-year-old Abbas on Wednesday to serve as prime minister and form a new Cabinet. The two have known each other for four decades. In the 1960s, they co-founded Fatah, the Palestinian faction that has led the struggle for statehood.
[...]
Abbas could easily fail: he's up against a wily Arafat reluctant to share power, has little grassroots support and will depend to some extent on the goodwill of hawkish [Israeli] Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Under a new law passed on Tuesday in the Palestinian Legislative Council, Abbas has three weeks to form a cabinet and present it to the council. If he fails, he has the right to ask for an additional two before Arafat is obliged to nominate another premier.
The law also stipulates that Abbas have the authority to appoint the cabinet and call it into session, and he is responsible for overseeing its functions.
"It's the beginning of a transition - it is certainly a turning point and a qualitative shift in the political culture," said legislator Hanan Ashrawi. "Now we have power-sharing that is clearly spelled out."
Arafat remains the overall commander of Palestinian security forces and the broader "Palestinian leadership," a body that includes the cabinet, PLO leaders and security commanders. Arafat also retains the final say in peace talks with Israel.
Arafat tried until the last minute to limit the powers of the prime minister but was rebuffed by a rebellious PLC in what is seen as a sign of his dwindling influence.
Both Israeli and Western sources see this as a great improvement over Arafat --- but that statement must qualify as the "damning with faint praise" of the year. LGF has some eye-opening stuff on this guy.
Meanwhile, in Israel, the Home Front Command is working on the 'better safe than sorry' principle. Having previously been told to get their communal NBC shelters and/or protected rooms in order (see Tal G. and An Unsealed Room --- over in blogroll --- for personal perspectives), all citizens are being told to carry their gas masks and atropine injectors with them at all times, even though the probability of a nonconventional 'incoming' is (officially) rated quite low by the military leadership. Aside from the Patriot launchers that many of you will remember from Gulf War I, the new Arrow anti-missile system (a joint US-Israeli development) has also been deployed. (Much more here on Gil Shterzer's blog.)
On the various news media I am monitoring, various reports of Iraqi units surrendering. posted by Former Belgian at 10:49 PM
Has anyone noticed an indifference in the precincts of the far Left to the fatalities of 9/11 and the horrors of Saddam Hussein?
Right after the 9/11 attack, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen called it "the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos."
[...]
More recently, it appears that none of the millions of antiwar demonstrators have a bad word to say about Saddam Hussein nor an iota of sympathy for those oppressed, tortured and murdered by his regime. Instead, they vent fury against the American president and British prime minister.
Why is the Left nonchalant about the outrages committed by al Qaeda and Baghdad?
Lee Harris, an Atlanta writer, offers an explanation in a recent issue of the Hoover Institution's journal, Policy Review. He does so by stepping way back and recalling Karl Marx's central thesis about the demise of capitalism resulting from an inevitable sequence of events:
* Business profits decline in the industrial countries;
* Bosses squeeze their workers;
* Workers become impoverished;
* Workers rebel against their bosses, and
* Workers establish a socialist order.
Everything here hangs on workers growing poorer over time - which, of course, did not happen. In fact, Western workers became richer (and increasingly un-revolutionary). By the roaring 1950s, most of the [Marxist] Left realized that Marx got it wrong.
But rather than give up on cherished expectations of socialist revolution, Harris notes, Marxists tweaked their theory. Abandoning the workers of advanced industrial countries, they looked instead to the entire populations of poor countries to carry out the revolution. Class analysis went out the window, replaced by geography.
This new approach, known as "dependencia theory," holds that the First World (and the United States above all) profits by forcefully exploiting the Third Word. The [Marxist] Left theorizes that the United States oppresses poor countries; thus Noam Chomsky's formulation that America is a "leading terrorist state."
For vindication of this claim, Marxists impatiently await the Third World's rising up against the West. Sadly for them, the only true revolution since the 1950s was Iran's in 1978-79. It ended with militant Islam in power and the Left in hiding.
Then came 9/11, which Marxists interpreted as the Third World (finally!) striking back at its American oppressor. In the [Marxist] Left's imagination, Harris explains, this attack was nothing less than "world-historical in its significance: the dawn of a new revolutionary era."
Only a pedant would point out that the suicide hijackers hardly represented the wretched of the earth; and that their objectives had nothing at all to do with socialism and everything to do with - no, not again! - militant Islam.
So desperate is the [Marxist] Left for some sign of true socialism, it overlooks such pesky details. Instead, it warily admires al Qaeda, the Taliban and militant Islam in general for doing battle with the United States. The Left tries to overlook militant Islam's slightly un-socialist practices - such as its imposing religious law, excluding women from the workplace, banning the payment of interest, encouraging private property and persecuting atheists.
This admiring spirit explains the [Marxist] Left's nonchalant response to 9/11. Sure, it rued the loss of life, but not too much. Dario Fo, the Italian Marxist who won the 1997 Nobel Prize for literature, explains: "The great [Wall Street] speculators wallow in an economy that every year kills tens of millions of people with poverty, so what is 20,000 dead in New York?"
The same goes for Saddam Hussein, whose gruesome qualities matter less to the [Marxist] Left than the fact of his confronting and defying the United States. In its view, anyone who does that can't be too bad - never mind that he brutalizes his subjects and invades his neighbors. The [Marxist] Left takes to the streets to assure his survival, indifferent both to the fate of Iraqis and even to their own safety, clutching instead at the hope that this monster will somehow bring socialism closer.
In sum: 9/11 and the prospect of war against Saddam Hussein have exposed the [Marxist] Left's political self-delusion, intellectual bankruptcy and moral turpitude.
In political usage, the USA and Europe are often "separated by a common language" even when they both speak English. I have consistently added "[Marxist]" to Pipes' usage of "Left", since many of the mainstream "Left" parties in Europe (notably Belgium, West Germany, and the Scandinavian countries) have roots in the Bernstein-Lassalle-Bebel tradition of social democracy rather than Marxism-Leninism.
Another major confusion is about the word "liberal". The "liberal-democratic" parties in most European countries are in fact pro-market (and in many cases socially conservative), and considered center-right in their respective countries.
Steven Den Beste offers his (engaging as always) analysis on the expected "opening moves" of the war. posted by Former Belgian at 10:06 PM
Foxnews is now interviewing Winston S. Churchill, journalist, former MP, and grandson of "the" Winston Spencer Churchill. In the same understated British way, just as feisty as his grandfather. posted by Former Belgian at 9:50 PM
In the end, however, the real problem with the EU is that it has no identifiable purpose. When it came into being, the EU was intended to both reconcile Germany and France while providing a common front against Soviet aggression directed at Western Europe. With these prospects no longer in play, the EU is little more than yesterday’s answer to the day before’s problems. The only goal it has to propose is the utopian fantasy of opposing the presumed hyper-power which is the United States. Unfortunately, no one can really say why this bureaucratic behemoth should oppose the US, nor can anyone give a reasonable account of how the EU would go about its quixotic mission. All we have are a sad combination of old-style leftist internationalists seeking to reinvigorate failed doctrines with a dash of anti-Americanism.
Europe is in the thralls of a major identity crisis. No longer able or willing to justify the continued existence of its nation states, it seeks to overcome them through the simplistic and intellectually slipshod construction of the EU. But as it stands, not a single European, be he intellectual, politician, journalist or archbishop can provide a shred of a rational reason as to why the EU deserves to see the light of day. Unfortunately, the EU benefits from this malaise as the European public is distracted with hopes of economic security and the enjoyment of perpetual though banal peace. There is a combination of numbed indifference and anxious frustration in Europe. To a large degree this accounts for the current rift between the US and Europe.
The European public has no idea as to what its future may be, and it doesn’t fully believe those in Brussels who tell them it will be a fairyland where nothing bad will ever happen again. But Europeans have no other solutions. They’ve had it drilled into their heads by coffee shop philosophers and pontificating politicians that the nation must be excoriated, that humanitarianism and the rights of man must now rule. In this state, Europeans are totally incapable of understanding the fact that the West actually won the Cold War – they don’t know what to do with their victory and they certainly don’t know what to do with the great power that was at the head of that victory. While it may be true that recent American diplomacy has not helped the situation, much of the cause for the growing incomprehension between Europe’s public and the US revolves around this European listlessness, a listlessness which long preceded the presidency of George W. Bush. Sadly, politicians like Gerhard Schroeder and Jacques Chirac have decided to use this situation to their advantage.
David Frum comments on the strange bedfellowship between looney left and paleoconservatives on the issue of Gulf War II, and moves on to the origins of the present-day paleoconservative movement, and to some not-so-well-hidden skeletons in their closet. Read the whole thing.
The comedy series "Keeping Up Appearances" has a new season, this time starring Hans Blix. posted by Former Belgian at 7:17 AM
Tuesday, March 18, 2003
Tony Blair handsomely survived both "divisions of the house" (=votes) in the House of Commons. (For non-British readers: British MPs literally vote with their feet, by walking out through one of the two exits from the House of Commons.) posted by Former Belgian at 10:17 PM
At the White House this morning, press secretary Ari Fleischer lashed back harshly at Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), who alleged Monday that Bush had "failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're now forced into war."
Fleischer said that "every member of Congress is entitled to their opinion of course." Then he read from comments Daschle had made in September, when the senator said leaders "ought not to politicize this war" and "ought not to politicize the rhetoric about war and life and death."
"It's hard to assess what Senator Daschle means when his remarks are so inconsistent," Fleischer said. "He's essentially blaming President Bush for the fact that we may be on the verge of war."
An often-heard argument of Belgian appeaseniks is that "but first the USA armed Iraq, and now they want to depose him". A letter to the editor of The Times of London contains some useful numbers:
Sir, I have often heard the claim that “we armed Saddam”. Thankfully A. H. Cordesman, in his 1998 report on the Iraqi military for the Center for Strategic & International Studies, has enlightened me.
In the key period between 1973-91 the US exported a mere $5 million of weapons to Iraq; more reprehensibly the UK sold $330 million-worth of arms. Of much greater interest are the arms export totals to Iraq of the four countries most against military action: Germany with $995 million, China $5,500 million, France $9,240 million, and the Russians a massive $31,800 million. So the claim that we armed Saddam has to be treated with a degree of care, particularly by those who would award the moral high ground in this debate to the leaders of nations such as Germany, France and Russia.
Kevin Sites, independent journalist for CNN, posts an unedited blog straight from the scene. This could be quite interesting. (Hat tip: Silent Running.) posted by Former Belgian at 7:01 PM
Fox News's Patti Ann Browne, truly "a face to move a thousand ships".
Steven Den Beste is on the MOAR (Mother of All Rolls): among all the great stuff isthis item, which a Jewish reader Emailed me was the best Purim joke he had read for many years. (SdB, who is a devout atheist of Dutch-American origin, happened to post it on the Jewish holiday of Purim --- an ancestor of both Carnival and April Fools' Day.)
This just in: the government of France announced today that not only does the Security Council, everyone in Europe and everyone everywhere else on Earth oppose Bush's "rush to war", but that the Deity disapproved as well.
The office of French President Jacques Chirac said, "We have direct word from Heaven that He opposes this war, and that He thinks that the inspections should continue. He fully agrees with the government of France in this issue and urges President Bush to reconsider."
France also warned that "Ignoring the will of the Almighty, that would be taking a heavy responsibility."
Word was expected shortly from the Pit, with the full expectation of agreement with France's position from there, as well.
France also revealed a new project aimed at locating and communicating with intelligences inhabiting planets around nearby stars, and demanded that the United States suspend its plans to attack until their opinions on the matter could be gathered, a process expected to take no more than 150 years.
The French promised that 20 years could be cut off that schedule if the United States consented to pay the entire cost of the project, and urged the United States to keep its military forces in place while waiting, so as to maintain pressure on Saddam's great grandchildren to continue cooperating with the inspections process.
Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds weigh in on the French strategy and its cost to France, and StrategyPage on why even in Old Europe not everybody would be happy with France being the concert master of the EU-orchestra. posted by Former Belgian at 12:59 AM
Two articles, one in StrategyPage.com and another by Prof. Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, on the French strategy and why even in Old Europe not everybody is comfortable with it.
Heard on Europe 1, top rated radio station, this afternoon: 'Does Bush belong to a cult [French: "secte"]?' (because his church is not 'recognized' by the Catholic Church). Someone should explain to the French that no Protestant Church is 'recognized' by the Catholic Church and that other religions exist outside of the Catholicism. Talk about bigotry.
Belgians have the same problem --- that they think of religion as a binary state device. You're either 'catholique' (Roman Catholic) or 'laic' (secular humanist) --- most Belgians I discussed religion with knew that there were such things as Judaism and Islam, but were stupendously ignorant about Protestantism.
The "cult" Dubya supposedly belongs to is none other than the United Methodist Church. Methodism is a mainstream Protestant denomination going back to 18th century England (a brief history). I am emphatically not a member of the church, but it is no more of a cult than the Church of England (église anglicaine), the Nederlands-Hervormde Kerk (église réformé, roughly equivalent to Presbyterian) in Holland, or the Evangelische Kirche (=Lutheran Church) in Germany. Speak of "provincialism". posted by Former Belgian at 6:04 PM
A new addition to the blogroll: An Unsealed Room by Jerusalem Post journalist Allison Kaplan Sommer, focusing on motherhood, the situation in Israel, and the USA/Israeli cultural fault line. posted by Former Belgian at 5:45 PM
Thus spake Da Instaman, a.k.a. Professor Glenn Reynolds:
I think it was a mistake to go the Security Council route. But I think that France's backstabbing surprised almost everyone, not just the Bush Administration. In retrospect, we probably should have recognized that self-aggrandizing yet self-defeating diplomacy is a French hallmark, and that we shouldn't have believed French promises.
But you have to give Bush credit -- though few will -- in that he's bent over backward to try to let the international system demonstrate relevance and competence. And by doing so he has made abundantly plain that the United Nations is a joke, and that France and Germany are not our friends, but (France, especially) our would-be rivals. And there's value in that.
That said, I wouldn't have gone to the Security Council at all. And you can bet that neither the United States, nor any other power, is likely to do so ever again.
BREAKING NEWS: US, UK, Spain withdraw UNSC resolution; Bush expected to issue ultimatum in speech to the nation at 8 PM Eastern time (1 AM GMT).
Fox news reports that UN inspectors have been checking out of their hotels and leaving. Also that Robin Cook has resigned "in protest" from the British cabinet; the controversial British politician is good riddance for Blair anyhow. posted by Former Belgian at 4:55 PM
Brusselsblog notes that according to the Belgian radio news "American forces will no longer be allowed by Foreign Minister Louis Michel to use the port of Antwerp. Shortly after that Andre Flahaut, the Defense Minster, also announced Belgian airspace to be closed to U.S. forces at that moment."
He sarcastically suggest General Tommy Franks must be really worried, and that of course there is no connection with the upcoming elections in Belgium.
Expat Belgians, in the past, had to go through an enormous collection of administrative hoops (and pay a small fortune in stamp taxes and document authentication fees) to be able to vote at all. Now, for the first time, they are legally obligated to vote, and I have gotten snowed under with missives from the local Belgian embassy begging me to register to vote.
If only Belgian electoral law allowed for "minus" votes, I'd go register right this minute. posted by Former Belgian at 3:55 PM
Morals --- all correct morals --- derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level." (Robert A. Heinlein, "Starship Troopers")
Anybody who expects states to ever act in anything other than their self-interest is, in my opinion, hopelessly naive about human nature. What distinguishes visionary realpolitik is the willingness of a country to act in its long-range interest, even if this means foregoing a short-term advantage or taking a calculated risk.
Many European states are uncomfortable with roles as bit players in a "unipolar" world: from a Macchiavellistic point of view, they may have been better off in the cold war where they could "play both ends against the middle". France's leadership has the additional motivations of fear of a large irredentist Muslim minority, plus narcissistic fantasies about restoring the "grandeur" of their has-been nation by jockeying themselves into the driver's seat of the gleaming new Eurotrain. Not to mention the ability of Chirac — voted into power "while voters held their noses" because his opponent was Jean-Marie Le Pen — to buttress support for his reign by riding the crest of the anti-American wave at home. Short-term rationales for a desire to appease islamic despotisms as a "counterweight" to the US are certainly not lacking, from their perspective.
The long-term price of continuing to do so, however, could at best be the very opposite (an entirely unfettered "hyperpower", and a France doomed to international irrelevance) of what they seek, and at worst could be far more sinister than anything they bargained for: the death, at the hands of islamofascism, of Western civilization as we know it.
Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed ; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves." (Winston Churchill, "The Second World War, vol. 1: The Gathering Storm.")
As the Dutch expression goes: "choose eggs for your money" (pick the best of a bad bunch).
Adam Garfinkle at the Foreign Policy Research Institute opines that the antiwar movement is not at all about Iraq but about a new emerging "secular religion":
There has never been a human culture that did not have a religion, by which I mean a set of ideas to organize our questions and thoughts about existential matters to which empirical answers elude us — questions about consciousness, mortality, creation and moral logic. In societies like many in western Europe that have become overwhelmingly secular in character, there is a conceit that "secular" means, in effect, "no religion need apply." We have been conditioned to think of secular and religious as opposites, when the term "secular" merely means a set of views in contradistinction to the explicitly religious views of traditional deistic belief systems. A society’s being "secular" does not obviate the social impulse toward or need for religion; that impulse merely migrates to other places, the most popular one of the twentieth century having been politics — which, as Digby Baltzell used to say, citing the secular religions of fascism and communism, hasn't done much good for either politics or religion.
Particularly in post-Christian Europe in the Internet Age, the infusion of religious energies into politics — even, in some cases, the subsumption of political energies by an unrecognized and still unnamed "secular" religion-goes hand in hand with the building of a new polity: a federated European Union. The popular, folk religion of that new political civilization was manifest on the streets of major European cities this month, complete with elements of spectacle and ritual common to all religions. The protestors were, in essence, praying for peace in the idiom of the new faith, which is normatively multiculturalist, anti-nationalist, anti-globalizationist, anti-Zionist and sometimes anti-Semitic, and, above all, anti-American. Almost entirely unattached to traditional faith, moreover, it is an amalgam of emotion and new superstition with eerie overtones. As G.K. Chesterton said, "When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing; he'll believe in anything."
Michael Radu gives an expat Rumanian view on "old vs. new Europe":
It has been said that during the 1930s the London Times proclaimed “Dense fog over English Channel. Continent isolated.” A similar and equally amusing claim is now being made with a strong French accent in Paris, Berlin, and Luxembourg. French President Chirac recently asked the Central Europeans to “shut up” and to cease being “infantile,” while at the same time threatening their accession to EU membership. Such petulant outbursts only prove France’s isolation. In fact it takes a huge amount of Gallic sophistication and arrogance to obscure the simple fact that those isolated are the “old Europe” minority, in the words of Donald Rumsfeld.
[...]
Seen from Paris (and Berlin), the future does not seem bright. With the addition of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO and the forthcoming admission next year of seven new East European members, old Europe’s isolation is bound to increase. And with Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic plus Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovenia and Slovakia entering the EU soon, the fog over Europe will increasingly isolate France and, unless it changes course and government, Germany as well.
Germany is a special case, since until recently it has been a steadfast U.S. ally in every matter that counted. It was largely the absorption of the former East Germany and its resentful and indoctrinated citizens that has influenced Berlin’s attitude regarding Iraq. (Of course, Gerhard Schroeder’s desperation during the electoral campaign of last year and his need to retain the support of the Greens, many of whom remain “like melons— green on the outside, red on the inside.”) Add to this the economic stagnation of the past decade, the burden imposed by Berlin’s huge contributions to the EU (mostly the price of French amour [propre], given the enormous cost to the EU, especially to Germany, of subsidizing a noncompetitive Gallic agriculture), and the catastrophic loss of credibility of Schroeder’s administration with German voters since its narrow reelection this past November, and the German crisis is structural. Berlin’s growing international isolation only makes matters worse.
As to France, its attitudes toward the United States are so regularly peculiar as to be predictable. But this is a power in such a state of decay that it is incapable at this point even of controlling events in its former showcase ex-colony, Ivory Coast. Even its language is losing so much international prestige that the Francophonie— the loose association of countries where French is supposedly spoken— has felt the need to include Bulgaria and Vietnam, and held its last summit in Lebanon— a country whose French-speaking nationals are far more likely to live in Paris or Detroit than in Beirut.
All in all, while only the dreamers of a French-German alliance in control of the EU could still take seriously the notion of a mythical “Europe” as a counterpart to America’s “hyper-puissance,” the reality checks of Madrid and Vilnius suggest that the political and indeed ideological map of Europe is indeed changing for the best: away from isolationist games with an anti-American subtext and toward geopolitical realism.
Go read the whole thing. posted by Former Belgian at 2:36 PM
The generally liberal Prof. Mark Heller of the political science department at Tel Aviv University, tells it straight-up in an essay entitledAmerica, the Rome of the 21st Century:
At the risk of rhetorical overkill, it seems that what started out as a [conceptually, not technically] relatively simple mission to get rid of a vicious thug in Baghdad has turned into a transforming event in international relations.
[...]
In the past few decades, a whole host of slimeballs have been thrown out of office as a result of outside military intervention without UN sanction. The list of ex-tough guys includes Idi Amin, chief clown of Uganda, deposed by the Tanzanian army; Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge band of merry men, sent packing after a Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, and Mobutu Sese Seko, chief kleptocrat of Zaire, ousted by a coalition of the African willing.
None of these interventions provoked massive protest marches in London, Paris, Rome or Surabaya, and one is tempted to conclude that the non-reaction is explained by the belief that it's ok to kick out the bad guys, as long as the kicker-outers are not Americans.
But even that doesn't capture the whole picture, because Uncle Sam, without provoking much outrage, has also ousted a few such characters in his backyard, including Panamanian chief [drug] pusher Manuel Noriega and the voodoo king of Haiti, Doc Duvalier, Jr.
[...]
BUT THE protest against regime change by war is strong and growing everywhere else, particularly in the "enlightened" West. This resistance is not being waged for the sake of Iraqi sovereignty, that is, for Saddam's right to continue ruling Iraq as he has done for the past 24 years at least, that is not the intention of the resisters, though it may well be the practical outcome of what they do.
Nor is it being waged in order to deny Iraqis basic human liberties and rights, including the right to choose their own leaders, or just live decent lives; at least, that is not the intention of the resisters, though it may well be the practical outcome of what they do.
Instead, it is waged to constrain and hobble the exercise of American power, or, as intellectuals, politicians and other aspiring moralists like to put it, to uphold a world order based on the principles of international legality and multilateral consensus.
And the truth is that protesters have already succeeded in ensuring that the basis of world order will be profoundly affected by the outcome of the crisis, whatever it is.
For if the administration ultimately ignores the mass and institutional expressions of opposition and wages war on Saddam, the result, assuming the war ends with Saddam gone, will be even greater American preeminence, along with greater contempt for multilateral institutional constraints on American power and even less willingness to consider the views of anyone else except the few allies who stood with the US before and during the campaign.
In other words, the result will be precisely that least desired by [...] critics [of America]: The UN will go the way of the League of Nations (perhaps even to the point of American withdrawal), and the US, instead of being a mere global cop, will become a global supercop.
Alternatively, if the administration backs down because of fear of the possible consequences of acting unilaterally (hostile editorial comment, critical resolutions in the UN, sanctions, even indictments in the International Criminal Court) and leaves Saddam alone, the result will be either a variety of small cops acting independently to take care of their own neighborhoods (Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast) or else multilateral paralysis, that is, no cops and no global order at all.
That would not be a step forward to world government or world law; it would be a step backward to the anarchy of the state of nature, where life, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
qsi has an interesting article on how Tony Blair sought one legacy when entering office (a shake-up of the British political spectrum, and Britain's monetary integration with the EU), and may end up being remembered for quite another. Or: how the Anglosphere (=the bond between English-speaking peoples) turned out to be stronger than the Eurosphere.
Of course, Atlanticism has always been a force in British politics: think of Churchill (himself partly of American ancestry) or Thatcher. This is the first time, however, that we see such a forceful expression of it in a Labour, rather than a Tory, politician.
The Proceedings of the US Naval Institute have a fascinating article by Captain Peter Layton, Royal Australian Air Force, on the nature of modern Arab warfare.
The new Arab approach to conflict is an adaptation of the revolutionary warfare of the second half of the 20th century. Assassins using this new way of war now swim among the populations of the world. With cheap, unrestricted global air travel provided by Western technology, they can deploy wherever they wish; there are no front lines or safe rear areas. The assassins make effective use of liberal immigration policies that have permitted large numbers of Middle Eastern migrants to settle in the West. Small numbers of fellow travelers and sympathizers are distributed throughout Western nations, able to be activated to provide local support, protection, and knowledge for deploying assassins. Their command-and-control system relies on commercial communications systems and business application cryptography. This makes their control system strong, redundant, secure, and global and the assassins hard to detect, track, and target. They do not rely on their own technology even for weapons, instead using in situ civilian, commercial equipment for attack.
The new Arab way of war is parasitic. Local supporters acquire weapons and explosives, provide safe houses, arrange transportation, and steal or hire vehicles. Assassins fly in, carry out attacks, and fly out quickly, avoiding arrest. Relying completely on local sources, they can strike deep into the Western heartlands, mimicking the strategic air attacks characteristic of the West.
Foot soldiers employed in this way of war usually are male and middle class and often well-educated, with strong religious fervor. A good education is necessary to operate independently and covertly in Western societies. The most dedicated assassins come from countries with a well-established, openly anti-Western education system antagonistic to secular societies, modernism, and human rights. A consuming spiritual passion, with a commitment bordering on fanaticism, is a valuable attribute for members of a small group when deployed into hostile countries. Given these warfare techniques, Muslims seem likely to remain the prime source of recruits.3
Intentionally, there is no obvious state involvement. In his attack, the assassin dies or melts into the crowd, providing no proof of who is responsible. This tactic is meant to confuse and frustrate a legally justifiable response, as the Western paradigm based on the 1648 Peace of Westphalia assumes a state-versus-state conflict. Avoiding giving the West a defined, obvious state opponent is a rational strategy peculiar to the Arab way of war.
(Hat tip: LGF.) posted by Former Belgian at 10:44 PM
Dr. Khadhir Hamza, former director of the Iraqi nuclear program, is being interviewed on Fox right now. He was quite emphatic that Saddam had not dismantled his WMD program and could not be believed to be doing so.
In the "the enemy of my enemy..." category, a prominent Shi'ite muslim cleric was interviewed five minutes before, and declared (in Arabic) an American invasion on Iraq to be a "just war". For those unaware, the majority of non-Kurdish Iraqis are Shi'ites, while Saddam and his entourage mostly belong to the rival Sunni muslim denomination --- and indeed mostly hails from his birth town of Tikrit. (The Chaldean Catholic Tareq Aziz is the most notable exception.)
Contrary to popular belief since the Khomeinist takeover in Iran, Sunni is not the "moderate" and Shi'i not the "radical" islam: both denominations have moderate and radical strands. (The Wahhabi form of Sunni islam --- with Saudi Arabia as its stronghold --- makes Khomeini look almost liberal.) The rift between them goes back to the early days of Islam, when a succession war developed between followers of Muhhammad's fourth khalifa (caliph, i.e., successor), his son-in-law Ali, and followers of Mu‘awiyah (not related by blood or marriage to Muhammad), who after his victory would become the first caliph of the Ummayad dynasty. At that stage the Shi'a (faction) of Ali seceded and founded a rival caliphate, and is henceforth known as Shi'ite Islam.
The following Associated Press dispatch hardly requires comment:
Posted on Sun, Mar. 16, 2003
Report: Germany Aimed to Block U.S. on War
MELISSA EDDY
Associated Press
FRANKFURT, Germany - Germany set out to isolate the United States in the U.N. Security Council so Washington would be forced to "remorsefully return" to the body for help rebuilding Iraq after war, a report said Sunday.
Germany, a nonpermanent member of the Security Council, has been a staunch opponent along with veto-wielding France and Russia to a resolution that would allow the use of force to disarm Saddam Hussein.
In a report to the Foreign Ministry on Feb. 21, Germany's U.N. Ambassador Gunter Pleuger said that Washington, forced to move against Saddam Hussein alone, would later "remorsefully return to the Council" to seek help on enormous task of rebuilding Iraq, the Frankfurt Allgemeine newspaper said Sunday.
The newspaper said Pleuger's report backed unidentified countries' efforts to block the resolution. Pleuger said "it is better if the Security Council does not let itself be used by the USA," the newspaper reported.
[...]
Sharkblog is likewise on a roll. posted by Former Belgian at 7:46 PM
Two elemnts of symbolism not lost on the speakers:
(1) the summit is held literally midway between the USA and Europe
(2) it occurs on the anniversary of the Saddamite poison gas attack on the Kurds at Halabiya posted by Former Belgian at 7:35 PM
Azores summit press conference: Tony Blair is speaking as I type. Translating Tony Blair's elegant Oxford English into blunt bloggerese: "The UNSC unanymously agreed that Saddam has to disarm or face serious consequences. Nobody believes he has disarmed. Yet the UNSC is looking for excuses to stack debate upon debate upon debate in order to avoid doing something, and thus threatens to become the very laughingstock that its detractors already say it is. Therefore we have no choice but to do the UNSC's dirty work for them."
In answer to a question about a vote at the UNSC, Bush said bluntly: "one country has voted already, has shown its cards. That country is France".
Bottom line of all four speakers: "Tomorrow is the day we determine if diplomacy will work." Code speak for "we will give the French one final call, and if they are continuing to play passive-agressive, then f-expletive them".
I expect either an ultimatum being served (more likely if the UNSC votes), or the war to break out in the next few days without ultimatum (more likely if France continues to stonewall).
The die is not yet cast, but is being rolled as we speak. posted by Former Belgian at 7:13 PM
Saturday, March 15, 2003
Steven Den Beste is clearly on a roll (three long and interesting posts in a very short space of time). He seems to think the attack is imminent, possibly with an ultimatum being published after the upcoming US-UK-Spain-Portugal meeting on the Azores. (Portugal is invited as the host.)
Some months after US Senate Majority Leader (=chief whip, for British readers) Trent Lott had to resign over comments that were either incredibly stupid or a thinly veiled endorsement of the [white-black] segregationist policies in the South of old, one of the Democratic whips in the House was forced to resign over a speech alleging that "the Jewish lobby" was strong-arming the Bush administration into a war in Iraq. (Both men will stay on as common "backbenchers" in their respective houses of parliament.)
Jonah Goldberg in The National Review makes mincemeat of that allegation, correctly pointing out that many leading figures in the "anti-war" (read: appeasenik) movement are Jewish, and that the anecdotal criterion that many Jewish (neo)conservatives are in favor of the war could also be used to "prove" that a "left-handed" or "red-headed" or "Catholic" conspiracy is at work because the vast majority of left-handed, red-headed, Catholic,... (neo)conservative commentators and policy makers favor a forced regime change in Baghdad.
I part company with Goldberg (an outspoken neoconservative) on one issue: [his claim] that only (neo)conservatives support the war. (This will definitely be news to the guys at OxBlog, for instance.) One particularly notable exception [among the many] is the atheist and far-left Christopher Hitchens (see, e.g. here and here), who originally coined the term "islamofascism" and correctly identifies radical islamism and Baathism as forces of extreme reaction, not as the "progressive" causes that the idiotarian "left" in Belgium and elsewhere seems to think they are. As befits the man who wrote a book entitled "Why Orwell matters".
Update: Josh Chafetz of OxBlog (just added to the blogroll, see on left) commented. He included a bunch of URLs which the current commenting system cannot handle. I am repeating them here: we've posted a number of times on the liberal case for war, including links to Chait's seminal article on the topic and several Hitchens' pieces. Go read 'em all.
Some more highlights in that issue of National Review: William F. Buckley on why neither the "USA invades Iraq for oil" claim nor proposals for an American economic boycott of France make much economic sense; Iranian author and journalist Amir Taheri on what's wrong with the UN; Tom Gross on how the New York Times bends over backwards to be critical of Israel in a misguided attempt "not to appear too Jewish". (The founder and its owners are historically Jewish, as are many of its journalists --- not surprisingly in the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel.) The website of former NYT journalist Andrew Sullivan is of course filled with stories on how NYT coverage on all sorts of issues was slanted by the newpaper's "liberal" perspective.
I must say, however, that by continental European and particularly Belgian standards, the NYT is still a paragon of fairness and balance, even if its claim of "objectivity" is patently untenable. One thing I appreciate about the Wall Street Journal (which is just as ideologically slanted as the NYT, but in the opposite direction) is that it is up front about its conservative orientation.
Which is also one of the reasons why I will take Fox News over CNN any time of the day.
Some days ago, a rather amusing incident at work. I had prepared one section of a long technical document and handed over the draft to a German subordinate so she could add her sections. The document was returned to me, with her additions in typical Deutschlish, and my section marked up. She had flagged several English idioms she did not know, and... "corrected" all my American spellings to the Oxford equivalents.
Upon being queried why she did this in a document intended for an American client, I got the umpteenth variation on the comments "because American English is not really English", "because British spelling is more correct",...
Rather than bother to rattle off my well-worn standard speechlet on the subject, I left her office with an ironic smile. I could not have found a better metaphor for "Euro-conceit" than the willingness to dismiss one of the two standard English spellings as "wrong" (the one with the largest native speaker base, at that) without having properly mastered the language oneself.
New site feature: commenting system has been added courtesy of enetation.com posted by Former Belgian at 8:02 PM
Friday, March 14, 2003
Even Charles Johnson (himself a jazz guitarist turned warblogger) cannot resist
commenting on the latest "antiwar" celebrity.
En revanche, Silent Running points to an article by leftist pop pundit Julie Burchill in al-Ghardiyan The Guardian (of all places) where she makes pretty short work of the "Celebrities" "against" war:
But I'm not prepared to wear the pro-war straitjacket I've been handed without having a good old hissy fit. And a bit of name-calling never goes amiss, either. So may I just single out for salutations, on the "anti-war" side: Pop Stars For Appeasement, Dancers Against Democracy, Actors For Apathy, Fashionistas For Fascism and Jugglers For Genocide. All of them united under that flaccid flag of convenience, Show-Offs For Saddam.
Personally I am somewhat bemused by the whole "celebrities" controversy. The one really interesting thing for me was "bespectacled Bush basher" Jeanene Garafalo's brutal honesty in admitting she did not take a similar stand on Clinton's "unilateral" intervention in Kosovo because "that wasn't hip then". (See e.g. here.) Involuntarily I started hearing Steely Dan's "Chain lightning" in my head, with its lyrics about how good it feels to unthinkingly "get with" a cause that's "hip" right now.
But back to the main point. If there is anything I've learned in my forty-odd years on this planet, it's that a person's being a genius in one field of human endeavor does not rule out the same person being a complete idiot in another, or a sorry excuse for a human being. Relatedly, a person can be the nicest fellow on Earth personally (and thus arguably display great "micro-moral" intelligence) and suffer from chronic cephalopostsphincter on "macro-moral" issues.
Some examples. Noam Chomsky is rightly regarded by most linguists as somebody who revolutionized that field of science. His political punditry however reflects all teh self-referentiality and disconnectedness from reality of the theoretician who fell in love with his own constructs and begs not to be confused with contradictory experiments or facts.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was a virulent antisemite, a Nazi collaborator, and had a "love" live that even by French standards was a bit shocking. This in no way precludes his being one of the few genuinely original voices in French 20th-century literature, and "Journey to the end of night" one of the greatest novels ever to be written in that language.
Isaac Newton spent most of his time engaged in occult pseudo-scientific theological writings which he considered his really important activity. The mathematics and physics that made him immortal were little more than a pastime for him. (There is room for an "alternate history" novel plot here: what if he had spent all his time on science?)
Ludwig van Beethoven, like Newton, was by all accounts a cantankerous personality at best. Richard Wagner was outright contemptible as a human being and wrote essays (e.g. "on the pernicious influence of Jews in music") that would made an intellectual harlot blush. Both achieved immortality as composers, although in my eyes Wagner could never hold a candle to Beethoven. (But that's another story.)
So why is anybody at all getting excited about this movie actor, that rock singer, or the other has-been former star opposing the war on Iraq? Or, for that matter, about hard-rocker Ted Nugent or actor Tom Cruise being in favor of it? Or about British heavy metal band Judas Priest proudly granting permission to a B1 bomber crew to paint the cover art of their classic "Screaming for Vengeance" album onto their plane? (Admittedly, one of the best metal albums ever.)
What evidence does anybody have that singer/kinky sexpot Madonna, U2 singer/tunesmith Bono, actors Charlie Sheen (anti-war) and John Travolta (pro-war), or for that matter classical pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim have any useful knowledge to impart outside their fields of expertise? In the absence of such evidence or credentials, their statements carry no more intrinsic weight than those of John Q. Public who's sitting next to you on the bus, and should be judged by the same standards.
Bloviating egotripping posers have existed in all cultures, in all ages. The difference is that when one of them has an attack of logorrhea these days, it gets piped through in real time to millions of entertainment (or irritainment) junkies, and gets endlessly recycled in a self-referential medium that often truly is its only message.
LGF has a entry on a few particularly nauseating examples of French "intellectual" self-congratulation. ("Se féliciter" is a reflexive French verb, after all.) The comment section has some really good stuff before trolls cut in and the thing degenerates into a name-calling fest.
Andrew Sullivan, in The Extra Mile (or should it be called "The Last Mile"? ;-)) argues why the few days extra delay at the United Nincompoops may just be worth it. He also quotes a friend writing thus from Norway:
You don't have to be pro-war to be appalled by the way in which European opinion on this issue has been formed. When I first moved to Europe I would've echoed the familiar refrain about American naivete and European sophistication. (Friggin' Henry James.) I realize now it's closer to being the other way around. We're at least trying to figure out how to deal with the real world. They've decided to buy into the comfortable pretense that the real menaces out there aren't real and that the only real danger is American arrogance. Reading the propaganda sheets here in Norway from day to day, the sense of flight from reality, the empty self-righteousness, the need to regurgitate anti-US cliches that everybody knows deep down are nonsense, the mindless reiteration of the word "peace," the refusal to take responsibility for ANYTHING, is staggering. So is the readiness with which the people soak up it all. It's scary how in a social-democratic country the very idea of taking responsibility is bred out of the race. And the concept of freedom isn't even on their radar.
Many Europeans think of Americans as overgrown children. Another insult that stings because there is some truth in it. But one of my own criteria for adulthood is the willingness to take responsibility for one's own actions. And in that regard, most Americans I've met and worked with were much more "adult" than the average European. posted by Former Belgian at 10:03 PM
The Washington Post carries a piece on blogging and the upcoming war. Featured are some of the usual suspects: Instapundit, LGF, Andrew Sullivan, Dissident Frogman,... See the blogroll on the left for links. posted by Former Belgian at 9:42 PM
While Googling around for something I bumped onto a review of a book on the origins of the American "neoconservative" movement. (From a European point of view, the term is a misnomer, for reasons which will become obvious.) Allow me to quote:
The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology. By Gary Dorrien. Temple University Press. 500 pp. $34.95.
[reviewed by] Mark Gerson
In a sense, modern American political thought is a battle for the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy. With the exception of the most committed paleoconservatives and the most ideological libertarians, a consensus has developed in American thought that accepts civil rights, the New Deal, and the goal of equality of opportunity. These cornerstones of the liberalism of old-"when Democrats were Democrats"-are supported by most conservatives and even exalted by some: Ronald Reagan, for instance, who consistently quoted Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy and who never sought to repeal Social Security or to reinstitute a traditional understanding of states rights. By and large, American conservatives seek to conserve both the policies and the society wrought by men who were considered liberals just three decades ago.
Interestingly, when the word "change" is applied to modern American intellectual life, it is generally associated with the neoconservatives. The traditional conservatives, as represented by National Review, now support civil rights-after once having considered them a violation of Burkean notions of traditional order-and now advocate basic government social welfare programs-having once vilified them as a negation of freedom and a harbinger of collectivism. Liberals, on the other hand, who once championed civil rights, pluralism, and equality of opportunity, now all too often support quotas, multicultural Balkanization, and equality of outcome rather than opportunity. In contrast to both liberals and old conservatives, neoconservatives have consistently supported a limited welfare state buttressed by an understanding of human nature based on religious values, a strong military, and a desire to allow communities to decide for themselves how best to balance their needs with the demands of individual freedom. Thus, while contemporary liberals abandoned the neoconservatives, National Review conservatives joined them. It is the neoconservatives who have, for the most part, remained in place.
This vividly reminds me of Churchill being asked why he first left the Tories for the Liberals, and decades later returned to the Tories. His answer was that his personal views had remained unchanged, but that the other parties had changed around him. posted by Former Belgian at 9:37 PM
Stefan Sharkansky translates a long "eyewitness from Baghdad" report from Der Spiegel. posted by Former Belgian at 9:23 PM
Guess what: French Freedom Toast
was never French to begin with First made at a roadside tavern not far from the city of Albany in 1724, there are few dishes more truly American than the breakfast favorite known as "French toast". So American is the dish that very few can understand why it is not called "American toast", "Albany Toast" or even "New York State toast".
The confusion comes about because the owner of the tavern at which the dish was invented had a very poor knowledge of grammar. When Joseph French decided to name the dish after himself he should have written his invention as "French's toast" (that is to say, the toast of French).
There's the selfsame naming confusion about "French hill" in Jerusalem, by the way.
(Hat tip: Instapundit) posted by Former Belgian at 4:37 PM
Merde in France wonders aloud whether the alleged "uncultured cowboy Dubya" does not know the French national anthem better than the French prime minister Jacques Iraq Chirac:
Tremblez, tyrans et vous perfides
L'opprobre de tous les partis,
Tremblez ! vos projets parricides
Vont enfin recevoir leurs prix!
Tout est soldat pour vous combattre,
[...]
Amour sacré de la Patrie
Conduis, soutiens nos bras vengeurs
Liberté, Liberté chérie
Combats avec tes défenseurs!
Or, in translation:
Tremble, tyrants and traitors
The shame of all good men
Tremble! Your kin-killing schemes
Will receive their just reward
Against you we are all soldiers
[...]
Sacred love of the fatherland
Guide and support our vengeful arms.
Liberty, beloved liberty,
Fight with your defenders
Some noteworthy reads:
(a) The French Connection by William Safire in the New York Times. A teaser:
France, China and Syria all have a common reason for keeping American and British troops out of Iraq: the three nations may not want the world to discover that their nationals have been illicitly supplying Saddam Hussein with materials used in building long-range surface-to-surface missiles And speaking of a French connection: if you can find a copy somewhere, go and read The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq by Kenneth R. Timmerman (it's been out of print for a while --- I bought my copy after Gulf War I.)
(b) An Associated Press story detailing that the Saddamite regime has so far subsidized Palestinian suicide terrorism to the tune of US$35 million. (Hat tip: lgf)
(c) The rage, the pride, and the doubt, Oriana Fallaci's "eve of the war" thoughts.
(d) Some politicians, when you think they have reached their nec plus infra manage to surprise you with a plus infra. See here and here.
(e) From the Chicago Boyz: excerpts from a subscriber-only WSJ article on the French strategy.
Colin MacLeod forwarded me a post of his concerning how the European media view Bush. Some excerpts:
And here's one example of the approach adopted by [what another contributor calls] "Europe's #1 weekly political magazine." [Former Belgian comments: Der Spiegel is without doubt Germany's most respected political weekly.]
Article link I'm not sure where the editors found the title phrase, which translates, or perhaps re-translates, approximately as "On a divine mission." The sub-head is "The Crusade of G.W. Bush." Certainly the Spiegel editors are fully aware of how problematic the term "crusade" is in the current political context - indeed, they clearly hope to exploit it in the interests of attracting, and further inflaming their readership. Ditto for the image of Bush speaking from beneath a severe-looking cross, as though preaching or testifying. What I find even more interesting though are the black-and-white photographs that frame the image: The combination of militarist images, along with the hand gesture Bush is making in the photo on the upper right, make it hard to overlook a flagrant attempt to evoke archival images of Hitler. Though Der Spiegel certainly includes articles meant to offer "balance," it's well-known to embody a leftwing perspective, which, in the German context, means democratic socialist. The intro to the cover story runs as follows:
[Original German omitted. Translation is accurate as best as I can tell, FB]
"By storming Baghdad, US President George W. Bush seeks to fulfill a holy mission [mission from God]. Rarely in deeply religious America have fundamentalist bigotry [sanctimony] and national political forces been so intimately linked. Christian zealots call for a crusade against Islam."
When mainstream European magazines give US policy a treatment like this one, depicting Bush as a Christian-fascist storm trooper emerging from some repressed historical nightmare, is it any wonder that the European public thinks we've gone off the deep end?
There are four main issues here:
(1) Very few Europeans have even a half-baked understanding of what the USA and Americans are all about. The often-heard accusation of American "provincialism" stings precisely because it contains a core of truth: it is also a prime example of "pot calls kettle black. Film at five."
(2) Many of the younger generation of European journalists are "post-soixantehuitards" (freely: "post-1968 student revolt new leftists") who still more or less subscribe to some or all these ideas. (Robert Scheer, often reviled and/or fisked by one of my favorite bloggers, Stefan Sharkansky, has plenty of colleagues in the Euro press.) Others sincerely believe that the European model of statist social democracy is a fairer and more just system than laissez-faire capitalism, and fear or loathe America as the most successful exporter of the latter. And even conservative journalists are generally statist paleo-conservatives (sometimes with an authoritarian streak), not the American variety with its libertarian streak. Conspiracy? There is a much simpler explanation: the sort of Europeans who think like Americans in these matters are simply attracted to professions other than journalism. (And even the ones who are tend to work for the financial newspapers, not for the mainstream press.)
(3) The continental European tradition of journalism is very different from the American one. For example, most Belgian newspapers are originally house organs of political parties (Catholic, Socialist, Liberal [which means pro-market there, not "liberal" in the US sense]). Editorializing in news reporting is the norm, not the exception, and the separation between facts and opinions all but nonexistent. (There are some individual journalists who represent fortunate exceptions, on both sides of the political spectrum.) Advocacy journalism is common, and especially publications aimed at younger people routinely engage in what Americans call "gonzo journalism". If the subject is the amorous habits of this or that mediocre rock musician, that's one thing: if it's, say, the situation in Israel that's quite another.
(4) Most relevant to this specific statement: those continental Europeans (Britons are another kettle of fish) who are themselves not religious paleoconservatives are viscerally uncomfortable with politicians publicly professing religious faith. This has to do with a fundamentally different perception of "separation between religion and state". This point bears some elaboration.
I remember a discussion in the workplace where a French person claimed the USA does not have true separation of religion and state, and pointed to the open and sometimes ostentatious religiosity of US politicians, the role of "the Religious Right" in the GOP (=Republican Party, for non-American readers), and the phrase "in G-d we trust" on US banknotes.
The American reposted that, on the other hand, most European countries know no true separation between religion and state, and pointed to such things as state-subsidized Catholic and Lutheran schools, the "Church Tax" in Germany, the fact that priests, ministers, and other religious functionaries are paid as state employees, the fact that certain political parties in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany explicitly bill themselves as "Christian-Democratic",...
Guess what: they are both right. It's just that the American and European definitions of "separation" are fundamentally different.
The American definition is anti-interventionist: the "Establishment Clause" of the First Amendment proscribes the state's favoring (or disfavoring) any one religious denomination over the others. Subsequent Supreme Court jurisprudence has interpreted this as prohibiting any form of state subsidies to any religious denomination, and in practice I can state the precise amount of federal subsidy to churches, synagogues, mosques,... granted by the United States of America. Nothing. Niks. Rien. Nada. Nichts. Zippo. Efes. Niente. This definition grew in the context of a society that was religiously multi-denominational (mostly a plethora of Protestant denominations --- some of them homegrown --- plus some states with Catholic populations, and the odd Jew or freethinker) from day one, and many of whose founding families had fled from countries where they were discriminated against or persecuted for dissenting from "the established Church". This does not mean that religious conflict or bigotry were absent from US society: such phenomena are human, all too human, especially in the 19th Century. It did mean that a state religion was both a constitutional and a practical impossibility. And one of the results is that Americans are, by and large, fairly comfortable with politicians and other personalities publicly expressing religious beliefs, even when they belong to different denominations.
The European definition in practice is the French one: it is fundamentally interventionist and regulatory, and seeks to relegate and restrict religion to the private domain. This definition grew against the background of a power struggle between a single religious denomination (Roman Catholicism) which wielded large temporal powers and sought to retain or expand them, and "anticlerical" politicians which sought to restrict them. Several European countries (notably France and Belgium, but also Spain and Italy, not to mention the German "Kulturkampf" under Bismarck) have histories of bitter conflict between the Catholic clergy and non-Catholic parties over such issues as the creation of secular state schools. (Both France and Belgium, at various times, broke off diplomatic relations with the Holy See.) The accommodation eventually reached in most European countries eventually involved, on the one hand, state subsidy for "recognized" religious denominations or even state financing of their school systems, and, on the other hand, laws that sought to legally enforce the belief that "religion is a private matter". (For instance, school children and teachers in French public schools are not allowed to wear distinctive religious clothing or even jewelry with religious symbols, although one may look the other way when it comes to small pendants and the like.) The Belgian Ministry of Justice, Division of Religious Services, annually spends the equivalent of about US$200M in taxpayer money on the salaries of clergymen (mostly Catholic priests, but also some Anglican and Calvinist ministers, Orthodox rabbis, and imams) and fully funds the Catholic school system. (The Orthodox Jewish schools in Antwerp and Brussels are funded proportionally to their general studies curriculum.) In a peculiarly Belgian twist, the (old and established) Secular Humanist movement is treated as a religion for funding purposes.
Germany actually has a "Church tax", where on your tax form you indicate the denomination for which you want to earmark it --- you do have the option of declaring yourself a nonbeliever and being exempt. (I can just imagine how such a tax would fly in the USA --- although many families may voluntarily be paying larger contributions than that to their particular church, synagogue, or whatever. But that's the whole point --- they're doing it of their own free will.)
In short: Europeans can deal with a politician going to church on Sunday (like they themselves may, if it's not raining too hard). But a politician who dares open his/her mouth about a "revival of Christian values" or something of the sort will set off alarm bells all over the place. And to be fair to Der Spiegel, German politicians belonging to the Christian Democratic Union, and particularly its Bavarian sister party CSU, are not given much quarter either when they start using this rethoric. A French politician doing the same would be ripped to pieces by Le Monde and Libération, and would become the object of public derision on top of it.
Bush Jr. is a tough sell in Europe for the very same reasons that guarantee the affection of much of the American public. In fact, the more I see of him, the more he reminds me of a Democratic president that was both reviled by Europe's fellow-traveling left and the butt of many jokes and urban legends. (I grew up hearing stories that Truman had to be taught to spell his own name.) History, however, has given Truman the last laugh. posted by Former Belgian at 10:30 PM
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
Stephen Pollard at the Brussels think tank "Center for the New Europe" claims to have inside information on the future White House strategy. One paragraph in particular caught my attention:
...Mr Bush's most fundamental belief is that actions have consequences. If the UN behaves irresponsibly, it will pay the price. A phrase is doing the rounds: the US out of the UN, and the UN out of the US.
Well-connected advisers tell me that if, as now seems likely, the UN refuses to back action against terror, Mr Bush will announce a "temporary" suspension of America's membership, to be accompanied by an offer: if the UN gets its act together and carries out long-overdue reforms, America (and its money) will return. But if there is no reform, the temporary withdrawal will, de facto, become permanent.
Whew. Speak of not dealing in small change.
The irony of history here, of course, is that the USA created the UN in the first place --- in other words, it would be committing a form of "institutional infanticide". Surprising? To a European, perhaps. To an American (or one
familiar with the American mindset), not at all.
BitterSanity persuasively argues that the different USA and European perceptions of the UN reflect not so much some anti-American conspiracy on the part of the Europeans, but rather a fundamentally different perception
of government and administrative bodies in general, and supranational organizations in particular. Nothing illustrates this better than Thomas Jefferson's famous words:
"That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..."
In other words, Americans fundamentally take a utilitarian view of any form of administration or government (local, federal, supranational): as a means to an end. Most Europeans take an idealistic, almost Platonian, view of such institutions, which raises them to the status of ends in themselves rather than means to an end.
It requires little imagination why a continent traumatized and exhausted by two world wars and change would project all its dreams of peace and universal brotherhood onto "the only game in town" for dreamers of a universal government. It sadly reminds me of radical socialists and communists --- people who generally had their heart in the right place, but their head in another --- simultaneously acknowledging the failures of the (then still existing) Soviet Union and all the while claiming its system meant the only hope for true equality and social justice.
There's certainly an argument to be made that the U.N., as presently constituted, is worse than useless. For one thing, despite the U.N.'s professed aversion to war, what it really seems to object to is victory. In the U.N.'s 58-year history, two wars have been waged under Security Council auspices: Korea and the Gulf War. Both ended with less than total victories, leaving in power two of the worst tyrannies on earth, which are now two of the world's most dangerous rogue states. (If the U.N. instead of the Allies had fought World War II, Germany might still be ruled by Nazis instead of weasels.) U.N. peacekeeping operations, too, are at best a mixed bag, with a record of failing to prevent such horrors as the Srebrenica massacre and the Rwanda genocide.
Incidentally, the only reason the UN Security Council approved the Korea intervention in the first place
was that the Soviet representative had walked out in a tiff (on another issue), allowing the remainder of the council to vote through a resolution without being shot down by a Soviet veto. (China was not yet a permanent member of the UNSC at the time.) Where was the UN on Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge mass murder regime? During Rwanda? During Kosovo? Too busy drafting anti-Israel resolutions, perhaps?
The UN may be a great idea and was founded with the best intentions, but it has one problem: it just ain't working. And the problems are not in the details: an organization that gives equivalent representation to corrupt
potentates and sponsors of murderous terrorism and to liberal democracies is intrinsically doomed to fail, although this is obviously much clearer with 20/20 hindsight than in the post-WW II euphoria. Whatever the UN could be in theory, in practice it comes down to this. If, more by accident than by design, the UN Security Council votes to do the right thing, nothing much happens in practice unless Uncle Sam and John Bull are willing to do the dirty work. Otherwise, the UN turns into the world's most expensive debating society at best, and (as in the prelude to the Six-Day War) an active obstacle to peace at worst.
Perhaps the time has come for somebody to repeat to the UN the words spoken by Oliver Cromwell to the Rump Parliament (and repeated in 1940 by British politician Leo Amery to Neville Chamberlain):
You have been here too long for any good you have been doing. Go, let us say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer started out life as a psychiatrist. He quips that the first job prepared him well for the second. His column today:
If, for Blair's sake, you must have a second resolution, why include an ultimatum that Blix will obfuscate and the French will veto? If you must have a second resolution, it should consist of a single sentence: "The Security Council finds Iraq in violation of Resolution 1441, which demanded 'full and immediate compliance by Iraq without conditions or restrictions.' "
The new resolution should be a statement not of policy but of fact. The fact is undeniable. You invite the French to cast what will be seen around the world as the most cynical veto in the history of the council, which is saying a lot. They may cast it nonetheless. They are, after all, French. But then they -- not you -- will have to do the explaining.
That's all you need. No need for elaborate compromises, stretching the timetable, or a tortuous checklist for Hussein to dance around. One sentence. One line. Cards on the table.
No more dithering. Every day you wait is an advertisement of hesitation and apprehension. It will not strengthen Tony Blair. It will not strengthen the resolve of our allies in the region. It will only boost the confidence and resolve of the people you are determined to defeat.
If the one-line resolution passes, the violation triggers 1441, which triggers the original resolutions ending the Gulf War. If it fails, you've exposed the United Nations for what it is: the League of Nations, empty, cynical and mendacious. Mr. President: Call the vote and walk away.
Tony Blair has been an extremely good friend, and has done the kinds of things that I expect an ally to do. He also has problems of his own, and because of that the US has been willing to go to considerable lengths to help him with those. In particular, he's under a lot of internal pressure to have some sort of UN approval before sending British troops into combat, and there's reason to believe that this is most of the reason why the Bush administration has continued to attempt to deal with the UN.
It is right that we should do that. Blair has earned that degree of consideration. But there are definite limits, and when it reaches the point where the mission itself is imperiled, then we have to consider whether we have to stop doing so. I think we've reached that point in the UN.
...Primarily because of internal British politics, what Blair needs is for a UNSC resolution to effectively authorize war, and for it to get 9 votes. Then, if it still fails, it will be because of what he can refer to as an "unreasonable veto". But if the resolution doesn't get 9 votes, or if there is no vote at all on the resolution, then he's in a bind and could conceivably face a serious revolt from within his party.
...And it may well be that much of the French machinations are actually motivated by the hope of destroying Blair politically, to cause him to lose his position as Prime Minister, in hopes that Labor would then choose a replacement more aligned with the kinds of positions France advocates both within and outside the EU. Bush personally is not in any kind of significant political peril, but Blair is sitting on a bubble.
...The danger of the UN process all along was that we might be nickel-and-dimed to death, or week-and monthed to death. If each action by the UNSC does nothing more than to set the stage for another UNSC action, which sets the stage for yet another after that, then the process will never end because our opponents will never let it end. There's a reason why Res 1441 tried to make clear that it was a "last chance"; it was precisely to prevent what we're now facing.
Which is why we may have to be the bad guys here. I made the suggestion a couple of days ago that the US could take the heat by making a unilateral decision for war, leaving Blair in the position of going to his MPs and saying, "I did everything I could, but the Americans decided they couldn't wait any longer. It ain't my fault." I think we've reached that point.
The conditions to which [British PM Blair] has succumbed were created and abetted by a profoundly cynical power-play, from France, Germany, and Russia -- one which, in the French and Russian promise to use their vetoes to kill any U.N. decision to enforce its resolutions, is now exposed as a frontal attack on the interests of the United States -- an attempt to create a new balance of power, by cutting America down to size.
The French et al. smell blood, they are not going to back off now when they see the prospect of doing real damage. Their strategy was from the beginning to split the British from the Americans by humbling Mr. Blair, to delay the inevitable full-scale attack into the Iraqi hot season, when the fighting would be more difficult and thus the casualties higher; to isolate the U.S. diplomatically; to galvanize the international peace movement against the Bush administration; and to improve Saddam's prospects for creating a catastrophe when war comes.
This is truly "passive-aggressive" behavior à l'outrance. For reference, here is the textbook definition of "passive-aggressive personality" (from The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy):
Passive-aggressive (negativistic) personality: Persons with this personality disorder typically appear inept or passive, but these behaviors are covertly designed to avoid responsibility or to control or punish others. Passive-aggressive behavior is often evident in procrastination, inefficiency, or unrealistic protests of disability. Frequently, such persons agree to perform tasks they do not want to perform and then subtly undermine completion of the tasks. [...]
And elsewhere in the same article David Warren writes:
Indeed, the only reason the U.S. introduced a new, and 18th resolution to the Security Council, and has been delaying the vote, is to provide the political cover to keep Tony Blair in office as British prime minister, and thus keep extremely useful British forces in the field in Iraq. The only remaining advantage of delay is for the new Turkish prime minister to give the U.S. forces that have actually been unloading in, and transiting, Turkey, the legal cover of a fresh Turkish Parliamentary vote. For as I am convinced by witnesses on the scene, the U.S. and Turkish armies are now in fact fully co-operating towards joint action on Iraq's northern front, whatever you read in the papers.
Somewhere else in Bloggerspace I read the following quote (sources anyone?) that adequately describes my feelings as an embittered European:
Europe will always be ready to weep for the dead. America is what it takes to fight for the living.
Update: the correct quote is from Ralph Peters in The New York Post: "Europeans will always be willing to weep over the dead. The United States must take a stand for the living. In Iraq. And beyond." Go read the whole thing. Peters pulls no punches.
E. Nough, perhaps the most thoughtful poster in the otherwise noisy comments section of Little Green Footballs, now has his/her own blog, Thinking Meat. Very much worth a visit --- it's going on my daily reads roll. posted by Former Belgian at 9:51 PM
According to British-born former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan, the main difference between Bush and Clinton on Iraq is one of style, not substance.
Here's a simple pop-quiz. Who said the following: "What if [Saddam] fails to comply and we fail to act, or we take some ambiguous third route, which gives him yet more opportunities to develop this program of weapons of mass destruction? ... Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you he'll use the arsenal."
Full marks if you guessed Bill Clinton. It was 1998.
...Are there deeper differences between Bush and Clinton on this? There is, of course, the matter of style. Clinton was a master of the European dialogue. He meant very few things he said but he said them very well. He was a great schmoozer. When he compared the Serbian genocide to the Jewish Holocaust, it sounded earnest but no-one, least of all the massacred Bosnians, actually believed he meant it. And he didn't. If he had meant it, he wouldn't have allowed a quarter of a million to be murdered in Europe, while he delegated American foreign policy to the morally feckless and militarily useless European Union. Ditto with Iraq and al Qaeda. A few missiles here and there; some sanctions that starved millions of Iraqis but kept Saddam in power; and a big rhetorical game kept the pretense of seriousness up. But there was no actual attempt to match words with actions. In this, the French were completely - preternaturally - comfortable. No wonder Clinton was popular.
Bush's style couldn't be more different. He's blunt, straightforward, folksy, direct. Although his formal speeches have been as eloquent as any president's in modern times, his informal discourse is of the kind to make a European wince. And his early distancing from many of Clinton's policies, his assertion of American sovereignty in critical matters, undoubtedly ruffled some Euro-lapels. In retrospect, he could have been more politic.
... What the world, after all, is afraid of is not the deposing of the monster, Saddam. What the world is afraid of is American hyper-power wielded by a man of very American faith and conviction and honesty. Bush's manner grates. His style - like Reagan's - offends. But, like Reagan, he is not an anomaly in American foreign policy - merely a vivid and determined representative of a deep and idealistic strain within it. And history shows that the world has far more to gain from the deployment of that power than by its withdrawal. If the poor people of Iraq know that lesson, what's stopping the Europeans?
On March 5, 2003 (the 50th anniversary of the death of Stalin), The Independent carried a must-read article on how his infamous legacy lives on.
In the 1930s, self-described progressive intellectuals of all stripes made pilgrimages to "the Workers Paradise", were of course told and shown only what The Red Czar wanted them to hear, and let themselves be taken in. The infamous H. G. Wells quote: "I have seen the future, and it works" is only one of the more damning statements from that era.
Now you see "progressive" "intellectuals" making pilgrimages to Stalin's intellectual heir in Baghdad, and being taken in without the excuse that "there was no way we could have known". This is history happening for the second time, as farce. posted by Former Belgian at 7:44 PM
Congressman Walter Jones (Republican-North Carolina) replaces a sign for "French fries" with a signing promoting "freedom fries" during a news conference in the Longworth House Office Building cafeteria on Capitol Hill Tuesday, March 11, 2003. Jones, along with Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Administration Committee, not shown, announced that House cafeterias would no longer serve "French" fries, replacing the "French" cuisine with "freedom fries." (AP Photo/Lisa Nipp) posted by Former Belgian at 7:31 PM
posted by Former Belgian at 11:11 PM
Congressman Walter Jones (Republican-North Carolina) replaces a sign for "French fries" with a signing promoting "freedom fries" during a news conference in the Longworth House Office Building cafeteria on Capitol Hill Tuesday, March 11, 2003. Jones, along with Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Administration Committee, not shown, announced that House cafeterias would no longer serve "French" fries, replacing the "French" cuisine with "freedom fries." (AP Photo/Lisa Nipp)
