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"The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemoration. . .Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against the stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion. "
- Anna Comnena (1083-1153), The Alexiad
"I have taken all knowledge to be my province."
- Francis Bacon, 1592
Friday, April 25, 2003
VDH: Time is on Our Side
Victor Davis Hanson is pretty deadpan, but a paragraph in his latest had me rolling:
How, after all, do you fight such a strangely off-the-wall culture as our own, which turns the villainous Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf into "Baghdad Bob," with his own website and a cult following, replete with T-shirts and coffee mugs — or prints out thousands of decks of playing cards decorated with the names and pictures of Iraqi fascists?
Which makes his next half-sentence almost ironic.
What's that next sentence? You'll have to read the piece, I suppose.
Here's a pretty good analysis piece. I'll just revise and extend one thing:
Will France retaliate?
France will probably continue to oppose what its sees as the threat of US hegemony in the world.
In the short term, though, it has actually signalled a willingness to co-operate with the US over lifting sanctions on Iraq which remain in force under a previous Security Council resolution.
They'll continue to oppose the U.S. (something that, as we've gone over in previous posts, France was doing long before the current crisis and well before Bush took office) - that is, they do not see the U.S. as an ally. So they aren't really in a position to "retaliate" in a conflict they initiated. The "willingness to co-operate" is largely rhetorical, part of the verbal slight-of-hand they've engaged in all along - a passive-aggressive tactic. What it invariably boils down to is "yes, we want to cooperate with the U.S., and have compromise where they agree to do what we want and we forgive them for the times they didn't. But the U.S. refuses to cooperate", where "cooperate" means "adopt French policy, advance French interests even when opposed to U.S. interests," &tc.
Note also that allies of America do not focus their foreign policies on "the threat of U.S. hegemony". That's a revelation in and of itself that in their general policy, France sees America not as an ally but as a foe.
The piece goes on to say that this will all blow over. I doubt it. Something that involves such a fundamental divergence of interests will not "blow over". Indeed, even while re-assuring the readers that everything will blow over, it is qualified by the statement that "France and the US regularly have their spats". That implies the opposite of bygones being bygones - there will be regular conflict between America and France.
The BBC seems to be hitting this angle pretty heavily today for some reason. See also here, here, and even this warning from Jack Straw, British Foreign Minister, critiquing France's role in all of this
Signs that some reform might be in the offing for J-Schools:
The suspense started to build last year when Bollinger, president of Columbia University, put a hold on the search for a new dean of the prestigious New York institution's Graduate School of Journalism. Columbia is widely seen as the pacesetter in journalism education, and any changes it makes likely will have a ripple effect throughout higher education.
"To teach the craft of journalism is a worthy goal but clearly insufficient in this new world and within the setting of a great university," Bollinger said in announcing his decision. "The teaching of the craft is important. The question is balance." . .
This is a part of what concerns Bollinger because most of what people know about the world, they learn from the media. And it is this knowledge, more often than not, that people use to make decisions.
Which is certainly true, and it's not "anti-populist" to acknowledge that people presented with inaccurate or selective information, if other sources aren't available, aren't as well informed to be able to make decisions as they would be otherwise.
Bollinger worries that Columbia's journalism school doesn't fully prepare its students. He's concerned that the school focuses too much on skills training and not enough on the broad range of subjects that would-be journalists need to master.
My opinion is that things have changed considerably from the days when reporters were more likely to be nosy blue-collar types who were skeptical (and not just selectively skeptical), who wanted to find things out and had faith in the common sense of their readers, rather than thinking that they were already more knowledgeable than most people and their job was to find someone who would give them the quote they wanted to make the point they were looking for, having already made up their minds. Schools of Journalism as they're currently constituted have helped feed the latter attitude and drive the former outlook onto the margins.
"It is no longer enough to report the fact truthfully. It is now necessary to report the truth about the fact," the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press said 56 years ago. Too many journalists today lack the intellectual depth to do that, and their work reflects this shortcoming.
As we often see. It's amazing the number of reporters who will get assigned to a beat (say, the Pentagon, to name just one example), spend several years there, and very obviously not learn or research basic nomenclature, concepts, and the like associated with the institution they are reporting on. The frequent descriptive blunders (which cannot in all or even most cases be chalked up to mis-speaking) makes everything they report less credible - and these are the people who have made it up to the level of national news reporting, supposedly selected to be promoted to that status from the "farm teams" because of their exceptional merit. If nothing else, this lack of even basic knowledge of the institutions they're reporting on shows an almost insulting lack of curiosity - a flaw not nearly as much in evidence among their less highly educated (where "highly educated" means "has college diploma") but apparently more naturally inquisitive forebearers.
Last week, Bollinger issued his much awaited report.
"The educational goal ought to be to develop a base of knowledge across relevant fields that is crafted specifically for what leading journalists need to know: For example, a functional knowledge of statistics, the basic concepts of economics, and an appreciation for the importance of history and for the fundamental debates in modern political theory and philosophy."
Accomplishing this daunting task won't be easy.
But if it's not done, then there will just be even more useless journalists floating around in the future.
Yes, that's the headline of this FT story, which goes on to say:
The Brussels probe, which could last months. . .
Months of probing? Isn't that a violation of international human right's laws? I mean, I know they're broadcasters, but they're still human. I guess.
In other news, the FT proves that even journalists who work at a publication that focuses on economics (from what I gather, economics involves a lot of numbers and stuff) are bad at math:
Many smaller states are upset about Mr Giscard d'Estaing's proposals to cut the Commission to 15 members, which they fear would leave them without Commissioners of their own.
Perhaps the reporter, one Daniel Dombey, never played musical chairs. This is how it works: if you have fifteen chairs and twenty five players, then ten players are "out".
If the EU has 25 members and limits the seats on the Commissione - er, Commission - to 15, then ten members don't get a Commissioner. No "fear" about it (which implies they might be wrong). Now, which EU Members are likely to be the ones on the outside looking in? France, Germany, Italy, Britain, and Spain? No. How about the small states? Yah. More to the point, isn't it a coincidence that there are ten new members in Eastern Europe which annoyed the French quite recently, and there are ten fewer seats on the Commissione (darn, I keep doing that) that Valéry Giscard d'Estaing proposes than there are EU members. It's probably a coincidence that Giscard d'Estaing is a French politician, no? This too is interesting:
Members of the European parliament are also unhappy with proposals that would allow them to elect a president of the European Commission, but would limit their choice to a candidate nominated by the European council. If the parliament rejected the candidate, the council would have to nominate an alternative.
The Soviet origins of this idea are nearly transparent: yes, the Supreme Soviet can elect a leader from among the candidate (singular) they are presented with. (As for the later part of that statement, there will be extreme pressure to not be so "divisive" as to reject whoever one is presented with, and given the passive-aggressive nature of the EU's Mandarinate, the "alternative" the Commissione is likely to be presented with will be guaranteed to be unpalitable). The Soviet nature of this blueprint seems to be recognized by at least some:
We are trying to copy a President of the United States, a People's Congress of China and a Politburo of the Soviet Union," said Finnish representative Kimmo Kiljiunen.
In other European news, though, credit where credit is due - Gerhard Schröder, after, it must be said, four years of dithering fecklessness, seems finally resolved to bite the bullet and push for reforms of Germany's economic regulations and welfare system. That said, in order to woo members of his SDP, he's combining it with retrograde measures that will offset whatever economic benefit the reforms might produce. The introduction of a 25% capital gains tax is guaranteed to discourage, rather than attract, the infusion of investment that the German economy desperately needs.
Combine that with the months of probing that are to be inflicted on German Broadcasters, and things in Germany aren't looking rosy at all.
I expect that most of my readers (and most of the one writers of this weblog) aren't huge fans of PBS.
But if you haven't been whatching Frontline this year, you should be. The latest episode, on cyberwar got my attention.
Most shockingly the interviews with people minimizing the threat, after a segment on how easy a threat (speculated to be al Queda) has managed to penetrate highly sensitive DoD computers, and how very easy it is to get into other kritical node/junction computer hubs.
Diablogger links to my post on Whither France from yesterday, but the post is on Rick Santorum's recent comments. Essential conclusion: Santorum's remarks were incoherent. Which seems to be a observation of others who have read the transcript.
My cop-out is I'm kinda concentrating on other things now but will get back to commenting on domestic politics fairly shortly. Till then, others are doing a better job on this than I could, anyhow. Not that this normally stops me.
My gaze is still focused abroad at the moment, though.
There are some sites I don't link to. Steven Schwartz, author of "the Two Faces of Islam" has an article on a pair that represents this type - the "two faces of Fascism", that's well worth reading.
As for Buchananites, any movement that calls for high tariffs and government regulation of the economy and social life to such an extensive degree really cannot be called conservative in the American context, much less expropriate the mantle of Libertarianism.
Frontpage also has a good article on how Amnesty International glossed over the violations of human rights by the Ba'athist regime and spent most of their time haranguing America, and an article by Michael Reagan titled "Oil for Corruption" - it's on the UN's Blood for Oil program, natch.
They're on somewhat of a roll today, with a profile by
Ben Johnson and Michael Tremoglie of the movement for make the UN the enforcer of global socialism, something I posted on a few weeks ago. Jack Kemp has a piece on the worthlessness of having the UN involved in Iraq, as well as a reposted Newsmax article on how the scions of friviledge are profiting rather than suffering (as they loudly claim) from their dissent. Choice quotes from Garofalo, Robbins, and others. All worth reading.
A little while ago I blogged a extensive screed that included a discourse on the U.S. State Department's subculture. Now there are more people talking about the State Department and whether it, as constituted, is helping us achieve our policy goals or not.
Given the enflamed reaction to Gingrich's remarks by so many, it is interesting to ask why there can be a transformation of the Defense Department, and a transformation of how we handle domestic ("homeland") security, but the State Department is, for some, above question or need to adapt to new circumstances and change to better confront new challenges.
Al Superczynski sends a link to a Opinion Journal piece on how the UN profits from corrupting the supposed "Oil for Food" program (which became the "oil for palace", "oil for cash stashes", "oil for weapons", "oil for high-paid UN bureaucrats and their slush fund" and the "blood of Iraqis for oil for TotalFinaElf").
I'm not defending the UN here, but the UN does nothing that is not connected to its members. There's a reason why Annan awarded cozy deals to Saddam's biggest international supporters (the French and Russians), and a reason why they have behaved the way they have, both within the context of the UN and outside of it. Which gets at one of the numerous reasons why moves to transcend the nation and resort to institutions of "international community" are flawed. Usually the people pushing such schemes do it because they want you to "transcend" your interests so that they can impose theirs. While some get all misty-eyed at the thought of the UN, nations of the world working together in peaceful cooperation for the good of all humanity, venality is rife and the very countries at the front of mouthing such platitudes are using the institution to enrich themselves and screw others over. A body of kleptocrats sitting around the table putting deals for themselves together in this fashion reminds me of nothing else but the Mafia's Commissione (dittoes with the EU Commissione; indeed, it's only a matter of time before Chirac, de Villepin, Patten, Solana, and the rest of them start talking about "this thing of ours"; they're already talking about the consiquences of newly made-members and candidates "going against the family").
So, sure, the UN got their piece of the actoion out of the skim from the blood for oil - er, food for oil program, just as did the other members of the racket right down to Saddam and his family members.
I know that you're mighty tired of hearing these anti-war celebrities whine about being persecuted. The European press is full of such whining, even more than ours is, I believe. In the Corriere della Sera, there was a sob piece on the tribulations of Susan Sarandon. You would think she were Solzhenitsyn. It mentioned an interview that her husband (or whatever), Tim Robbins, had given to the Independent, in England: Hollywood — far from being a left-liberal oasis — "is the first to punish dissidents," he said.
Give me, and us, a break. Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins share the opinion of most of the establishment media in this country, and virtually all of academia. Not to mention their fellow pop-culture rulers. They rarely have to be around people who are actually pro-liberation and pro-Bush. As we've said before, they want the right to speak without challenge, without criticism, without consequences. And when other people exercise their own right to speak, Sarandon et al. cry that they're being persecuted. They think that the Constitution gives them the right to be universally approved and adored.
But you know all this, I realize.
Yes. But it's still always exasperating. Especially when so many of these people gush over the likes of Fidel Castro and say nothing about the people that are actually persecuted - rounded up and jailed, tortured, or executed (the anti-death penalty sort, like, well the above mentioned folks, have little to say about people being executed for their beliefs in Socialist paradises). That makes it all the more grotesque.
Oh, hang on, I'm still ranting: Do you love that use of the word "dissident"? Robbins claiming that he and his wife (or whatever) are "dissidents"? It reminds me of a previous rant of mine — concerning the title that Abbie Hoffman gave his radio show: "Radio Free America." Very funny. You appropriate the trials and suffering of others for your own bad self, without doing any real suffering at all.
And disparaging the true suffering of others, in effect (and sometimes directly).
"Right now, the Shiite and any Iranian-influenced Shiite actions are not an overt threat to coalition forces," said Lt. Gen. David McKiernan.
"But we're watching all these competing interests," he said, naming a number of groups seeking a voice in the new government. "And if truth be known, this is probably a little bit of democracy in progress right now in Iraq."
On the one hand this is good because we're not behaving like occupiers trying to impose our will on Iraq. On the other hand, we're letting others fill that void. Sure "right now" the Iranians actions are "not an overt threat" - so we're going to wait till they are?
It's one thing to let the Iraqis sort things out themselves. It's quite another to expand that to include Iranians infiltrating into the situation to influence things and work against us. Ralph Peters has more on some of this, and emphasizes that we won't know if we've won for at least ten years and that just as demonstrations didn't tell us much about what most people in America think, they might not in Iraq, either.
In other news, I'm surprised this hasn't received wider play.
Chirac currently being in a phase of "rhetorical adjustment."
That means trying to improve bilateral relations with the United States while refitting his approach to asserting a battered French leadership role in Europe.
From the rest of the story it's pretty clear that the means he will pursue to improve bilateral relations with the U.S. will consist primarily of cosmetic things and rhetoric, while he continues to pursue a foreign policy based on opposing the U.S. - in other words, trying to convince us that France is an American ally, while France behaves like an opponent.
The official gave as an example Chirac's "businesslike" telephone conversation with Bush last week, while pointing out that at the same time Chirac was reiterating at the EU's Athens summit meeting, albeit "with a lighter touch," his earlier warning to new members from Eastern Europe that in the future they must behave as Europeans.
This is EU code that must be understood in context in order to get the meaning. "Behaving as Europeans" means not behaving as members of a trans-Atlantic alliance. It means adopting this mindset.
From an American point of view, Chirac's subtext was that France held the right to define for the EU, as opposed to new members with strong Euro-Atlantic inclinations, its foreign policy and security attitudes. In this light, the official said he could not conceive of a change in a French foreign policy that is in essence anti-American.
The background is decades of French opposition to U.S. policy, but with a specific reference point in 1999.
That's of course prior to Bush becoming President. Noteworthy because there are those who try to blame everything on American policy and Bush's foreign policy in particular, and who claim that everything went swimmingly under Clinton (which requires slipping a whole lot of facts down the memory hole).
Early that year, Chirac called for the UN General Assembly's adoption of a set of principles for an international order "excluding unilateral temptations." The list was never presented for a vote, but Chirac's foreign minister at that time, Hubert Vedrine - French governance places supreme authority for foreign and defense policy in the hands of the president - defined the United States at that point as a primary international problem, tending to "inadmissible" hegemony and unilateralism.
If anything for the French, this description has since been amplified through the war in Iraq.
While Bill Clinton still occupied the White House, a French political figure like Bernard Kouchner, who served as UN administrator of postwar Kosovo, described anti-Americanism as the motor of French foreign policy. Kouchner, whose approval rating leaped to 66 percent last week after months of criticizing the French position on Iraq, said more recently that while French opposition to the Americans was often justified, "our manner of being opposed, making it a basis for everything, without any thought, is just stupid."
Guy Sorman, another Frenchman, one with good relations with Chirac, also calls anti-Americanism the single constant of French foreign policy, and now insists there has been an intensification of what he calls Chirac's anti-Americanism.
Sorman, an essayist, described Chirac in November 2001, after participating with him and a small group of French intellectuals in a discussion at the Elysee Palace, as "the most anti-American of all of us." Sorman spoke publicly then, after Chirac visited the United States in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, of a president who regarded the American leadership as devoid of historical sense, lacking in patience, nuance and profundity - attributes Chirac presumably considers as his own.
While he displays those attitudes in his dealings among fellow European leaders (obviously lacking patience with the European countries that dissented from the French position, asserted things without nuance, evidenced a lack of historical sense regarding the reasons why those countries might choose to side with America rather than France, and, well, was far from profound in all of this).
Andrew Ian Castel-Dodge has a post on the situation and the ramifications of their behavior that's worth reading. I couldn't have said it better myself (it even invokes the phrase "passive-aggressive" to describe the attitude of Germany, though I have applied that to France as well).
Some readers are reacting with a bit of glee. Certainly I believe actions have consequences - the French government made choices and the French people supported their government enthusiastic in those choices. Those choices have ramifications, and they don't just get to claim the positive (if there were any) ramifications while not having the negative ramifications visited upon them. Like any adolescent, they're whining and complaining about it, but those are the breaks. The American "bully" did not force them to adopt a different policy than the one they wished to pursue - unlike, I add again, their efforts to force others (including ourselves, but also the countries of the EU and Eastern Europe) to adopt French policy (and that's when they came to complain about "bullying" and "satellite status" and the like - being "bullied" means "refusing to do what the French want" and "satellite status" being "agreeing with America rather than France". But I digress).
They weren't forced to behave as America's ally - they behaved like they chose. But if they do not act like an ally of America, it's fair for America to not view them as one (this is a long digression, I'll be getting to a point fairly soon, though). Similarly, folks - including, I must say, myself to some degree - are expressing some shadenfrude over France's internal difficulties, especially with the growing number of radical, Jihadist Moslems in their midst. Again, the consequences of policies they adopted.
But I didn't - and don't - hope to see the French continue on the path of folly that will lead to catastrophe for France. If everyone had just done what would have worked out best for all around, then things would be better for everyone. The simple fact is that, given trends within France, the French have more at stake in us winning the war against Jihadist Islam than we do, but they fail to recognize that they need us to win. Or perhaps they do but the rather elderly French rulers prefer to pursue a easier but more short-term strategy (adopting an apres nous, le deluge attitude similar to that of the French nobility in the years leading up to the French Revolution, but in the meantime it's possible to live well - as long as they don't do anything to stir up the radicals against them. In the long term, they'll be dead and the deluge that will hit France will be a classic example of "somebody else's problem"). I hoped - and still hold some faint hope - that they will come to a different conclusion. But they make their choices. . .and take their chances.
But I'm more depressed by it than gleeful, really. Look, I do not argue we should let them off the hook. To do that would mean adopting their policies, in effect, which would be bad news really. To do that would also (further) promote the "moral hazard" problem - with no downside to pursuing risky policies that might, if we respond to them, alienate France's allies (us), and if someone's going to bail you out if it doesn't turn out for you, then that means their's no reason to not go down that path. I'm afraid that to some degree we helped encourage France (and to a lesser but not insignificant degree, Germany as well - I've been reading a book on aspects of the Cold War, and contrary to popular myth, it wasn't just the French, but at times West Germany as well, that, well, frankly behaved not very differently from how they have in this situation with regards to wanting to "have their cake" - commercial deals with the Soviet Bloc and going soft on criticism of despotic repression in those countries - "and eat it too" - that is, knowing that if push came to shove and things didn't work out, well "daddy" - America - would bail them out). But that's unsustainable, especially since it's transmogrifying from policies "independent" of, if contradicting, American policy, into outright opposition to America.
But as far as France's dark future, which some look forward to at least a bit, the full consequences of that are about ~15 years down the line (there is a lot of ruin in a country, and the policy of the French elites - unlike the policy of the American administration - is to push any accounting down the line, put it off into the future. That means, IMO, that when it comes it will be worse, but, again, in the meantime it's possible to live well). The simple fact is even if we are saying to ourselves "well, the French have been such sphincter orifices that next time they need help, they can go howl", when push comes to shove we'll have to help them. Why? Because of Britain's geographic proximity to France, any catastrophe that is visited on France will sooner or later (probably sooner rather than later) spill over and affect Britain. Dittoes Germany - any catastrophe that affects Germany will sooner rather than later spill over and affect the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. We might want to let the French suffer the consequences of their lack of vision, but we're not going to leave Britain and our other allies in Europe (which include not just the Eastern European countries but also Italy, Spain, Norway, and others as well) hanging. So fifteen to twenty years from now, we'll be cleaning up the mess. Again.
But in the meantime, France should be goaded (with sticks since carrots don't work) into waking up. They might yet. I'm pessimistic (given that they didn't, when they should have, this year. Again, this was what everyone should have done for things to work out well, and the fact that they didn't does not make me wrong - it puts everyone in a worse situation than otherwise would have been. They chose. . .poorly. France, Germany, and Russia most of all).
In the meantime, certainly support every (reasonable) measure that might get the French to realize that yes, actions have consiquences and they need to step up to the plate and do better next time, and see what people like Blair and Aznar did. Rewarding friends and punishing foes isn't about revenge.
Asside: It's interesting to contrast two elderly politicians - Chirac now and Reagan two decades ago. One did what he thought was best for the long run, at rather great personal cost in abuse. He ended up pursuing policies that led to freedom for over three hundred million people, and did not get to enjoy watching the fruits of that - Alzheimers beset him. The other has won the praise of all the "smart set" and basks in the glow of a public that gushes over his policies. But were already seeing that, like a sugar high, it was enjoyable in the short run but will not sustain life over the long run. One of these figures had people protesting in the streets of Europe and America against his risky policies, the other had people protesting in the streets effectively in favor of his policies. But, again, well it's obvious which model Bush - and Blair and others - are following.
Move along, nothing to see here, certainly not this:
The event was peaceful for the most part, although the U.S. military said Tuesday that police in Karbala arrested six men who had been planning to blow up two of the city's mosques.
Five of the detainees claimed to be members of Saddam's Baath Party, and one said he belonged to al-Qaida, said Capt. Jimmie Cummings, spokesman for the Army's 82nd Airborne Division. The men were arrested Monday and have been handed over to the 101st Airborne Division in Karbala, Cummings said.
al-Queda and Saddam's Ba'ath National Socialists cooperating? We were told that wasn't possible.
And to blow up mosques at that (I know, I know: Shia mosques don't count).
The UN Security Council met in a closed meeting. So we'll probably never know what happened, what was really said. But all the sudden the countries that right up to the meeting were saying they opposed the lifting of sanctions have changed their tune. We'll have to see what they mean by "suspending" (not the same as ending) the sanctions.
What was said? Were they presented with what we know about their activities? Things that by and large are kept sub-rosa? With the fact that they couldn't really stand in the way of terminating sanctions without paying a huge political price?
We'll probably never know the reasons for their sudden change. But I'm glad to see it happen. I'm further glad if we didn't cave and cut some sort of unreasonable deal (reasonable deals are - well, lets face it, how the wheels of diplomacy are greased. They're not greased by a shared respect for high-minded principles. Not with the rogue's gallery we're talking about here at least). I do hope it was accomplished by confronting them with their perfidy and insisting that it desist, or the political price in the form of further revelations about the corrupt practices of France, Russia, and the UN in Iraq would be revealed.
As EU constitutional ambitions enter their most "divisive" phase, Martin Feldstein explains why it would be unwise for Britain to join the Eurozone:
As Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, considers whether adopting the euro would be in Britain's interest, he should look carefully at the experience of Germany. Membership in the monetary union has weakened the German economy and is preventing it from escaping its current slump. Although Germany also suffers from a variety of structural problems, it is the euro that raised its unemployment rate over the past year to 10.6 per cent.
The German example shows that Britain's decision about adopting the euro is not a question of whether the time to do so is now right. Adopting the euro is a permanent commitment with permanent consequences. My judgment is that it would not be in Britain's long-term economic interest to accept the constraints of the single currency.
Here are the facts. Germany's gross domestic product rose only 0.5 per cent last year, the lowest of all the leading European countries, and ended the year in decline. Germany also has the lowest inflation rate, just 1.2 per cent. Because the single currency means that all eurozone countries have the same nominal interest rate, Germany's real interest rate is the highest in the eurozone. This is a very dangerous situation in which the high real interest rate weakens the economy and causes inflation to fall further. As the inflation rate falls, the real interest rate rises, creating the potential for a dangerous downward economic spiral.
If the German economy were not constrained by the single currency, natural market forces would cause interest rates to decline, thereby boosting all kinds of interest-sensitive spending.
It goes on, including an explaination of why a single currency works in America but doesn't in Europe.
France and Russia are to press in the UN today for keeping the sanctions they opposed during Saddam's bloody reign (when they figured they could profit more by having sanctions removed) on Iraq indefinitely. It's obvious now (if it wasn't before) that the "humanitarian" argument they employed before, when they were arguing for the removal of sanctions, was just a cover for their own greed and determination to profit while Iraqis were being killed by Chirac's friend, Saddam.
Now they're willing to impose any hardship it takes on the people of Iraq simply to keep their commercial contracts and economic interests intact. Likewise with the UN itself, which has used the "Oil-for-Palace" program as a slush fund for itself in ways that differ little from the corruption of the Ba'athist regime.
We're talking the real Blood-for-Oil actors here. But you won't find the usual suspects protesting it.
When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast.
Runs a thrill of joy prophetic, trembling on from east to west,
And the slave, where'er he cowers, feels the soul within him climb
To the awful verge of manhood, as the energy sublime
Of the century bursts full-blossomed on the thorny stem of Time.
Through the walls of hut and palace shoots the instantaneous throe,
When the travail of the Ages wrings earth's systems to and fro;
At the birth of each new Era, with a recognizing start,
Nation wildly looks at nation, standing with mute lips apart,
And glad Truth's yet mightier man-child leaps beneath the Future's heart.
This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
- Winston Churchill
Steven Den Beste has a optimistic post on the changes the recently concluded campaign hath wrought, linking to tworelated Weekly Standard articles.
I hope they're right. But I think they're making an error - uncharacteristic for Den Beste (at least) - in that the campaign to liberate Iraq from the Ba'ath National Socialist regime, like the one to liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban, is not the war in and of itself but only a phase in the larger conflict. As with the external conflict, what Joe Katzman has termed the Pan-Western Culture War will not be won in a month-long battle, even one that is brilliant and decisive. Joe himself also sees the recent campaign as important in achieving victory in that conflict, and so do I.
The negative trends that our civilization has experienced over the last three and a half decades were not precipitated by one event, however, nor will they be undone by one. They were the result of a decade of things that seemed to confirm the radical, New Left, Cultural Marxist critique - the movement that morphed into the Multicultural Left, Postmodern Left, anti-Globalization Left, etc (all with overlapping ideologies and agendas, usually attended by the same people).
Just as victory on the battlefield in Iraq is only part of the larger whole in the War on Terror, so to is it only part of the whole in the War on Bad Philosophy at home and abroad. Winning in Afghanistan in a way that proved false all the dire predictions and condemnations of the Left did not discredit them (as it might have if the institutions they control were healthy and thus could respond to empirical reality honestly), and neither will the campaign in Iraq do so by itself. Integral in achieving anything lasting on either front in this conflict (the ideological battle with radical Jihadist Islam and the ideological battle with radical post-Western Leftists) will be the success of reconstruction in Iraq. That will give us the opportunity (but only the opportunity) to win the debates (non-violent) and reverse the negative trends that Den Beste, Kotkin, Siegel, Brooks, and others (like David Horowitz) point to. It's going to be a long-term effort - likely taking at least a decade of rhetorical battle against the West's internal enemies (and I call them such advisedly with full understanding, and use it with deliberation). As I mentioned above, the disconnect of so many from empirical evidence is a problem we're facing that will be difficult to overcome. As Thomas Sowell put it:
Dangers to a society may be mortal without being immediate. One such danger is the prevailing social vision of our time - and the dogmatism with which the ideas, assumptions, and attitudes behind that vision are held.
It is not that these views are especially evil or especially erroneous. [I am not as charitable as Dr. Sowell here] Human beings have been making mistakes and committing sins as long as there have been human beings. The great catastrophes of history have usually involved much more than that. Typically, there has been an additional and crucial ingredient - some method by which feedback from reality has been prevented, so that a dangerous course of action could not be blindly continued to a fatal conclusion. Much of the continent of Europe was devastated in World War II because the totalitarian regime of the Nazia did not permit those who foresaw the self-destructive consequences of Hitler's policies to alter, or even influence, those policies. . .Today, despite free speech and the mass media, the prevailing social vision is dangerously close to sealing itself off from any discordant feedback from reality.
Even when issues of public policy are discussed in the outward form of an argument, often the conclusions reached are predetermined by the assumptions and definitions inherent in a particular vision of social processes. . .
. . .What is important about that vision are not only its particular assumptions and their corollaries, but also the fact that it is a prevailing vision - which means that its assumptions are so much taken for granted by so many people, including the so-called 'thinking people,' that neither those assumptions nor their corollaries are generally confronted with demands for empirical evidence. Indeed, empirical evidence itself may be viewed as suspect, insofar as it is inconsistent with that vision.
Discordant evidence may be dismissed as isolated anomalies, or as something tendentiously selected by opponents, or it may be explained away ad hoc by a theory having no empirical support whatsoever - except that this ad hoc theory is able to sustain itself and gain acceptance because it is consistent with the overall vision.
(From pp 2-3, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, by Thomas Sowell). The prevailing vision among the sorts of people Den Beste et al are referring to is, I argue, cut off from reality in exactly the manner Dr. Sowell describes. The key problem is they control the institutions that shape ideas and interpret events - education, media (both entertainment and news), and related spheres. This makes them more difficult to discredit, because they are in the position of assigning credit or discredit, and inconvenient facts about their past predictions are slipped down the memory hole. This is one reason why such figures as Noam Chomsky, to name just one, are reborn anew to interpret each crisis, without regard to the falsity of his previous assertions of U.S. intent and dire predictions of the deliberate (a favorite term of his) consequences of our policies. The fact that these people have a track record going back thirty or fourty years and being no more right in each case on things than they were this time around has yet to affect their standing. Michael Moore's craptacular book, "Stupid White Men", is still a best seller - uncorrected factual errors at al left unaknowledged and new ones added. Yes, when the attention of Americans at large are focused on a topic, most see through the bovine fecal matter. But the institutions we're talking about here got to the state they are in now because the people who marched into them are most dangerous when attention is not focused on them, or when they can turn an issue into something else (for example, transmogrify the discussion from one focused on the ideologies they teach to their students into a discourse on academic freedom, effectively changing the subject). Joey Tabula-Rasa has common sense, but in my opinion he - or my sister, or myself - loses something unrecoverable when their education is filled with Post-Modernist stuff rather than something worthwhile (class hours that will never come back), or when movies are filled with a drumbeat of propaganda falsifying reality, or when the news slants things to the exclusion of important facts (time is not infinite, it's finite, and something that could be informative but is instead junk or miseducation has an "opportunity cost". People miss, lose, whatever valuable materiel may have been there in the stead of what is taught). (Note also that this is not a anti-populist argument. If one believes that people, intelligent fellow citizens, can benefit from a good knowledge-base, then obviously they are also harmed by the lack theirof. Otherwise Steven's own desire to see what he calls "some of the most destructive political memes in circulation" is itself misplaced because a faith in populism would mean they wouldn't be "destructive" at all).
If things unravel in Iraq, then the debate at home will be imperiled also. That makes it imperative to insure that a just, limited, representative government that respects the rule of law is instituted in Iraq. Not just for the people of Iraq, not just as a model that will create a "spread-effect" in the Arab world, but for our own sakes. Though it might seem melodramatic to say this, it really is another all or nothing battle for the soul of civilization itself. Failure won't be graceful and failure on one front will result in failure on the other as well.
If we succeed, then, as I said, we have a chance - but only a chance - to undo the rot at home, discredit destructive (often deliberately so) ideologies, and restore our own institutions (reconstruction of ourselves is tied to reconstruction of Iraq in this respect). The "Long March Through the Institutions" took a long time, and it will take a long time to reverse it and the damage that it's caused.
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide;
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight,
Parts the goats upon the left hand and the sheep upon the right,
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.
Hast thou chosen, O my people, on whose party thou shalt stand,
Ere the Doom from its worn sandals shakes the dust against our land?
Though the cause of Evil prosper, yet 'tis Truth alone is strong,
And, albeit she wander outcast now, I see around her throng
Troops of beautiful, tall angels, to enshield her from all wrong.
1 Worth reading the whole thing if you're not familiar with it.
Update: Here's an article by David Horowitz on the type of people we're talking about here, and their persistence.
George Galloway, the Labour backbencher, received money from Saddam Hussein's regime, taking a slice of oil earnings worth at least £375,000 a year, according to Iraqi intelligence documents found by The Daily Telegraph in Baghdad.
Galloway denies having to be paid to be an apologist for Stalinist regimes.
Evil Whitey censors Susan Sarandon, blacklisting her by failing to watch her movie on CBS.
In the future, people will simply have to be forced to tune in to movies and music featuring prominent Leftists, so that dissent isn't stifled as a result of this type of non-viewing McCarthyite witchunting repression.
Similarly, so that these delicate flowers can feel secure in criticizing others, people must simply prevented from criticizing them, an action that results in a "chilling effect" on speech. So, for the elect to be able to exercise their freedom of speech and choice, you'll simply have to give up yours.
Anything less would be a violation of the principles they strongly believe in - that is, to be above criticism themselves.
Further details here on how the countries that were eager to drop UN sanctions on Iraq as long as Saddam was still in power are now the most opposed to removing them now that Iraq is free - and the reason.
Hint: it's all about oil, of course.
Also, here's a story by Adam Sparks on the moral corruption that is the UN, and what will happen if it's given a "central role" in Iraq:
Haiti is a small nation, yet the U.N. was there some 10 years, and all it did during that time was preside over Aristide's tyrannical reign, including the recent theft by Aristide of the elections in the Haitian Senate. The mission of restoring democracy in Haiti that had begun with putting American troops and lives in harm's way ended in January 2001 with a rout of the U.N. and its eventual surrender to a tinhorn dictator.
Because the U.N. has never had a mandate to create a free and democratic society and has no experience in democratic nation building -- U.N. member nations feel its role is merely that of a "peace enforcer" -- its presence in Haiti was no bar to the reestablishment of a corrupt Haitian government.
If the U.N. can't restore a basic democratic government to Haiti, after the United States had made the peace militarily, how can it begin to restore a democracy to a far more complex Iraq?
The Left has always been a major cheerleading squad for the globalists that support the U.N. These are the very same people that hate multinational corporations but love a multinational government -- like the U.N. -- that exercises control over individual nations. But a one-world government ought to be frightening to anyone who has ever read George Orwell's "1984." Why would anyone want to surrender national sovereignty to a body that gives nations run by tyrants, despots and power-mad dictators an equal vote with powerful democracies such as the United States in its general assembly?
Well, one would want that if one prefered the dictatorships to the U.S., as all to many on the Left - their demurals to the contrary - prove they do through their actions.
The organization has never removed a single tyrant or replaced one with a constitutional democracy, because doing so is simply not a part of its charter. The U.N. and the American Left both want one-world government brought to you by an organization that is by and large composed of representatives from tyrannical, nondemocratic nations.
Why should Americans want to emasculate their own sovereignty in order to be run by the likes of Syria, Libya and Sudan, each of which has a vote in the U.N.? Is the Left so tranquilized it doesn't know that despotic member nations of the U.N. outnumber the constitutional democracies? Or perhaps it is precisely because it does know and is intent on destroying our national sovereignty and replacing it with a socialist-style one-world government that redistributes power to everyone.
Fifty-four years ago, the U.N. stood by silently as the People's Republic of China invaded Tibet in 1949. Nearly a half million Tibetans died in the invasion aftermath, and China still occupies Tibet today. No U.N. resolutions, no boycotts, no divestment campaigns, no peace marchers. Nothing. Just an eerie Tibetan-Buddhist silence.
But the U.N. can be relied upon to fixate on Israel (which was attacked) and the U.S. (dittoes), while it ignores that (and also Syria's occupation of Lebanon never comes in for condemnation in the UN - or in the oh-so-morally-superior EU).
In 1994, Rwanda underwent the worst episodes of genocide since the Nazis. At the time, the U.N. had a sizable presence in that country, but when a debate over the issue bogged down in the U.N. Security Council, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan recalled the organization's peace-keeping forces and, in less than 100 days, more than a million Tutsis were brutally massacred. Subsequently, the Security Council approved a French-led military intervention, which ironically provided a safe haven for the Hutu killers.
Perhaps that's how the French became world-historical heroes in the eyes of so many on the Left.
So, although the U.N. and France objected to a war to liberate the people of Iraq, the organization didn't oppose unilateral action by the French in Africa. And where were the worldwide demonstrations by peace activists when millions -- not thousands, as in Iraq -- were being brutally killed in Rwanda under the U.N.'s and France's watch?
In July 1995, in Srebrenica, Bosnia, a U.N. peace-keeping battalion in a U.N.-declared "free zone" handed over 8,000 Muslim civilians to the Serbs, who promptly slaughtered them all. There was no U.N. inquiry to review that terrible human atrocity. Instead, soon after this massacre, Kofi Annan was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
That's because, for so many on the Left, actions and consequences don't matter - only sentiment, feeling, and intentions.
Neither the U.N. nor the European Union could solve the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, an event that resulted in the deaths of a quarter of a million people. It was finally resolved only after the U.S. ignored the Security Council and intervened directly without U.N. approval. In this instance, there were no mass demonstrations by grief-stricken protestors. Perhaps it was related to the fact that it was Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who sent in the troops. Don't forget, peace protests are often partisan, political rallies as much as they are Leftist confabs.
Of course.
The most damning U.N. hypocrisy has been the outrageous double standard employed against Israel. When Israel pulled out of Lebanon, which it had invaded following repeated terrorist attacks based in the southern part of that country, Syria filled the void, moving its forces into Lebanon and instigating a nine-year civil war between Muslims and Lebanese Christians. The U.N. criticized Israel for its defensive incursion into southern Lebanon, but no resolutions, boycotts or embargoes were issued against Syria for inflaming the civil war and later occupying Lebanon and setting up a puppet government there.
That not a single U.N. resolution was passed to condemn Syria was also consistent with the unwillingness of the U.N.'s peace-keeping force to offer security in southern Lebanon and to resist terrorist incursions into Israeli territory after the latter's withdrawal from Lebanon. Moreover, the U.N. has failed to resettle the dislocated Palestinians since Israel's creation 55 years ago.
Meanwhile, one doesn't find permanent refugee camps in Poland for the Poles who were resettled after Stalin re-drew Polish borders around that same time, or Germans still living in refugee camps after having likewise been moved out of East Prussia and Silecia. Nor permanent refugee camps in India and Pakistan after the division of the sub-Continent following the end of British rule there. Probably because the UN wasn't in charge in any of those places, people instead went on with their lives rather than being administered by a permanent (but corrupt and ineffectual) UN bureaucracy.
Perhaps the tough moral decisions couldn't be made because Libya, which may have a worse human rights record than even Iraq, now heads the U.N.'s Human Rights Commission. And, after all, U.N. diplomats would clearly rather enjoy another cocktail at a posh soiree on New York's swanky Park Avenue than be bothered with freeing an oppressed people in some distant land.
The best way to insure that Iraq is ruined and the Iraqi people suffer a return of corrupt and cruel government (if not internal disorder and strife) would be to give the UN a "central role" in Iraq.
Stanley Crouch understands why so many prefer to trust the UN rather than the U.S., all evidence of the UN's incompetence and corruption being ignored by them:
The reason those on the far left - or those who are merely unquestioning liberals - look beyond our shores is that they, like most academics or those influenced by academics, have no real faith in the judgment of Americans. Or they are not willing to accept that we have traveled the distance that we have from slavery and every other kind of injustice.
We have paid in blood, in trauma, in disillusionment, exhaustion and horror for every step beyond the muck of bigotry that we have walked on this road that distinguishes our nation.
We have not needed leadership from outside America because our tragic and optimistic destiny has been to show what can be done inside a democratic structure such as ours. We have had to do battle with the demons within us - some of those demons have been based on skin tone privilege, on sexual differences, on religion, on class.
We have had the blues, we have blown the blues away and we have blown others away as well. We need deny none of that to arrive at the fact that ours is still the most admirable nation in the world. This is not the result of any genetic or class or religious superiority, but because we have made it possible for more people to come from way down at the bottom and rise to enormous influence at the top than any other nation in history.
So while we should listen seriously to those Americans who talk of world opinion as the concluding war in Iraq is assessed, we also should understand that most of the world gets only the information its leaders allow and that world opinion is not defined by votes in the United Nations.
Update: John Coumarianos has more on what motivates some people to behave as they are.
Additional: Christopher Hitchens plays spot-the-phony and punctures the "ah-ha" reaction to the awarding of post-war contracts. Excerpt:
In front of me is a copy of the Arab Times, published in Kuwait City and picked up during my recent trip to the region. It gives a matter-of-fact account of the state of affairs in the Rumaila field, as of March 29. About 10 oil wells were ablaze, many fewer than had been feared. (A great number of bombs and charges had been laid, but either the local officers did not obey the order, or the order never came, or the fields were secured by British and American special forces too swiftly to allow the planned sabotage to occur.)
At any rate, a burning well is a tough proposition and an uncapped well—permitting a wholesale discharge—an even tougher one. The situation was being handled by Boots and Coots, a fire-control company with an almost parodically American name, which is based in Houston. Boots and Coots, which also worked in Kurdistan and Kuwait after the much worse conflagrations of 1991, is subcontracted for the task by Kellogg, Brown, and Root (another name Harold Pinter might have coined for an American oil company), which is in turn a subdivision of Halliburton. And "Halliburton," which admittedly sounds more British and toney than Boots and Coots, was once headed by—cue mood music of sinister corporate skyscraper as the camera pans up in the pretitle sequence—Vice President Dick Cheney.
Well, if that doesn't give away the true motive for the war, I don't know what does. But unless the anti-war forces believe Saddam's fires should be allowed to burn out of control indefinitely, they must presumably have an idea of which outfit should have got the contract instead of Boots and Coots. I think we can be sure that the contract would not have gone to some windmill-power concern run by Naomi Klein or the anti-Starbucks Seattle coalition, in the hope of just blowing out the flames or of extinguishing them with Buddhist mantras. The number of companies able to deliver such expertise is very limited. The chief one is American and was personified for years by "Red" Adair—the movie version of his exploits (played by John Wayne himself!) was titled Hellfighters. The other main potential bidder, according to a recent letter in the London Times, is French. But would it not also be "blood for oil" to award the contract in that direction? After all, didn't the French habitually put profits in Iraq ahead of human rights and human life? More to the point, don't they still?
But of course for the anti-war Left, trading the blood of Iraqis crushed under the Ba'athist boot for oil is fine, as long as it's done by the French, or the Russians for that matter.
I want to be the first to agree that transparency in the administration and allocation of oil revenues is of the highest importance. For example, there is a gigantic amount of money involved in the U.N.-administered oil-for-food program. Vast quantities of this surplus are still unspent and are backed up somewhere within a complex bureaucracy. The Kurdish people, for example, are still waiting to see how much of their hard-won cash will be released for the rebuilding of their desolated homeland. Escrow isn't enough. All we know is that many U.N. officials are sitting contentedly on the transfers and that the great undisclosed balance is held in a French bank. Here's a good cause for the humanitarians to take up, if they are willing to do some work and some digging instead of mouthing a few easy slogans.
America's response to September 11th has included the liberation of fifty million Moslems from two of the most tyrannical regimes in the world. Fifty million so far.
Campaigns that were, we must remember (now is not the time to be gracious and give ourselves a lobotomy), opposed by the people who were concerned about what kind of "backlash" we cruel, racist, jingoistic Americans would inflict on innocent Moslem people. Just as most of our recent military campaigns in the years before Sept. 11th - in Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, and Kuwait - were directed at helping Moslem populations that were threatened by others, rather than the other way around.
We reacted to September 11th by freeing Moslem populations from despotism and repression, not by imposing repression and despotism on them.
