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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
I do quibble with one of Dunnegan's, though. Yes, it takes years to build up additional military units. That's why we should have started years ago. We were able to increase both the size and quality of the U.S. Army in the '80s, I see no reason why we couldn't in the '00s. Maybe there is no use crying over spilt milk now, but in my opinion the rationale that it takes a long time to do something that should be done means that we should start ASAP. It's not a reason to not do it at all. Note also this does not mean we need more troops in Iraq right now, though perhaps a different mix would be better - if we had them. It's for rotation reasons and ability to counter other potential threats, as I argued yesterday.
But overall, both pieces are great. Read 'em both.
An excellent lecture by John Kekes on the professoriate and the state of modern higher education. This was particularly good:
This coercive stifling of opinion permeates daily life, not just our campuses. It is very hard to think of an area of life that is free of the exhortation of intrusive moralizing.
Good, because those engaging in the intrusive moralizing do not think of themselves in that light, and need to be confronted with it.
Here, shades of last fall's "Humanities" dialogues on this site:
The professional obligation of professors is to teach their subjects and expand their fund of truths to the best of their knowledge. That is their job and their justification for receiving the benefits they enjoy. But many of them - especially in the social sciences and the humanities - have come to subordinate teaching and research to a political ideal. Their supposed justification is that the ideal is now more important than teaching and research, and this entitles them to violate their professional obligation if it conflicts with their political ideal. The ideal in question happens to be that of the liberal left. It calls for an egalitarian society without hierarchies and authorities that perpetuate significant differences in wealth, status, power, and life prospects. My concern, however, is not with the nature of the ideal, but with the serious consequences of subordinating teaching and research to any political ideal. Higher education is now deeply compromised because the chief preoccupation of many professors is with making universities and colleges, and through them society as a whole, conform more and more closely to their political ideal. This damages higher education regardless of the nature of the political ideal to which the pursuit of the truth is subordinated.
The professors who become self-appointed political activists know that their society funds higher education in the expectation that they will teach the truth and expand its scope. In order to assure that the money supporting their activities will continue to flow, they present a false picture of what they are doing. But they manipulate the truth in good conscience because they feel justified by the ideal they in fact pursue and have no compunction about falsification when it serves their political purpose. I shall argue in what follows that this is an accurate description of the prevailing state of affairs and a major cause of the deplorable state of North American higher education.
Which is to say, there is value in what those who study the humanities can contribute, when they adhere to their purpose. The problem is not the subjects themselves or the results of good political science or historical or literary research, the problem is the corruption of the practice to serve a different purpose altogether, an ideological rather than scholarly cause. Then there is this bit:
It would be one thing to declare forthrightly that universities and colleges no longer regard the upholding of truth through teaching and research as their basic obligation. It may, then, be said that henceforth institutions of higher education are to be in the vanguard of the transformation of society to reflect a political ideal. But not only is this not said, it is denied with hypocritical indignation. For defenders of preferential treatment realize that if they told the truth about the political ideal they are aiming at, they would have to justify it to politicians who allocate resources for teaching and research, not for political activism; to parents who pay for students' expenses on the assumption that they will get an education rather than be conscripted as foot soldiers into the army of political activists; to those professors who continue to uphold the truth and refuse to subordinate it to political considerations; and to citizens who do not wish to pay taxes to finance self-appointed activists bent on changing their society. Their justification would have to reveal what qualification entitles professors of literature, sociology, or anthropology, for instance, to take advantage of their students' willingness to learn and harangue them with a political view about how society should be transformed. It is because no convincing justification could be given that instead of telling the truth, these professors spread falsehoods.
Which is why arguments over entrance policies, the ones presented for public and judicial consumption, are such a sham, as is the claim of diversity and exposing their students to a rich variety to challenge them, because:
they want diversity only if it conforms to their political ideal. . .
. . .It goes without saying that any institution should be open to challenge, research and teaching should be receptive to promising new possibilities, and it is wrong to exclude people from university and college positions on the basis of characteristics irrelevant to teaching and research. What preferential treatment aims at, however, is not these desirable goals, but the inclusion of people on the basis of characteristics irrelevant to teaching and research, the undermining of truth for political purposes, and damaging the one institution in North American life whose traditional and indispensable contribution to the well-being of society used to be upholding the truth. This destructive policy moreover is presented and supported by falsehoods intended to obscure the fact that it aims to transform universities and colleges into political tools by replacing better with worse qualified teachers and researchers.
At the foundation of it all is the mindset that O'Brien confronted Winston Smith with, the belief that:
the truth cannot be subverted because it does not exist. What exists are beliefs people hold, express, and act on, but, since all beliefs are cultural artifacts, ultimately one is as good as any other. If there are no objective grounds on which beliefs could be criticized or justified, then all beliefs have an equal claim to recognition and respect. Any attempt to show that some cultures, individuals, values, practices, or institutions are better than others is a coercive and arbitrary authoritarianism that fails to respect the integrity of other systems and ways of life. This is why "Western civ" must go, why there should be no canon, why teaching the classics is a form of oppression, why science is a plot by men to impose patriarchy on women, and why professors have as much to learn from students as students from professors. This is politics with a vengeance because it attacks the very possibility of legitimately regarding any authority or belief as better than anything else.
Of course, all this involves a great degree of doublethink: on the one hand, real truth does not exist and no belief is better than anything else so the hierarchy of the canon should be destroyed and Western Civ displaced because, on the other hand, their ideological vision - that of the Cultural Left - deserves to replace it all in order to transform society to match their progressive vision. As Kekes puts it:
Most relativists, however, are not consistent. Their actions are at odds with what they claim to believe because no sane person could seriously hold the pernicious and absurd beliefs to which relativists are committed.
So the relativistic argument is just a sham, a rationalization for their substituting that which is ideologically pleasing to them and disparaging that which is not.
Then there is this, which gets at the root of the politicization of universities and the tactics that are used to intimidate anyone who objects to it:
Academic freedom is routinely used to protect the advocacy of communism, terrorism, homosexuality, the overthrow of the government, the denigration of Western civilization, the celebration of America's enemies, the castration of rapists, and so forth. But academic freedom is not extended to the advocacy of Protestant fundamentalism, male dominance, innate racial differences, anti-semitism, condemnation of homosexuality, or the superiority of Western civilization. The limits of academic freedom are thus set to favor causes political activists regard as being within the limits of toleration and to prohibit the advocacy of causes they find objectionable. This, of course, is nothing but censorship designed to forbid the public questioning of beliefs political activists find congenial. It is also an insult to the truth because the censorship is exercised by those who rely on academic freedom to protect their own advocacy of political causes they favor.
Regular reader Alene sends in this link on the banning of a political party in Belgium.
You don't have to share that Party's views to see this as a triumph of authoritarianism over democracy, and note that the real "stifling of dissent" is more common in continental Europe than it ever has been in the U.S. There are a lot of political parties and voices in America, most of them quite small but none of them banned. Fringe views either remain marginal because they lack wide appeal or they are absorbed by the Democratic Party, but they are not outlawed. All sorts of views are allowed to be expressed in the political arena and countered not with prohibitions but with counter-argument. Sure, the radical fringe claims that counter-argument is a "chilling effect" on speech, but such silly assertions are shown to be hollow by the Belgian example. That is what real suppression looks like.
It’s a sign of Belgium’s lack of confidence in Democracy and civic discourse that they feel they must ban parties the elites do not approve of. If such Parties are so outlandish, they can be beaten at the ballot box. But it's also a sign of how those in power in many European countries have insulated themselves from the governed and made themselves unaccountable to the electorate. Parties with "fringe" views would lack appeal if the political process was more responsive to issues people cared about, rather than simply a dialogue among elites.
Former NFL player and current U.S. Army soldier Pat Tillman has been killed in action in Afghanistan. The letter Major John Tammes sent to Glenn Reynolds is a better tribute than I could write. May the Lord keep his soul, comfort his family and friends, and may Tillman's service inspire others.
Every dead soldier deserves a tribute. I'm torn between mentioning this death when I do not mention all the others who sacrifice their lives for us here at home. I sit here and type, and I wring my hands over the period when I won't be here blogging, writing, thinking. The time when I'll be in training myself, cut off. While I look forward to what I am going to do I worry about what will be a period when I'm unable to do this. But oeople like Tillman but not as famous go about the much harder task of fighting this war for us and bleeding for us. How can you not respect a man who did not draw attention to himself? Is drawing attention to his death and singling it out from among hundreds a fitting tribute to a man who did not want to be singled out?
Probably not. We do what we can and live within our limits, though. He embodied what was best in so many others whose names are less familiar to us. I feel selfish and the best way I can make up for it is to not forget what they do for me that makes it possible for me to do this at all.
The answer, of course, is no. Just all the world's "Good People" are. You know, the ones who we're endlessly told we should listen to more and give authority over our policies. The ones that, when we don't defer to them, it's seen as a sign of our moral failings and lack of international spirit.
Richard Meixner alerts me to this post at Belgravia Dispatch on the still delicate issue of how to handle the nuclear ambitions of Iran's Mullahcracy.
I'm afraid Gregory is right. This is a reason why we should have built up our Armed Forces when we could, after Sept. 11th. We clearly have more needs than resources in that area. No, I'm not necessarily suggesting an invasion of Iran, though toppling the Mullahs is necessary in winning the war on terror. There are several good reasons for doing that, from their overt nuclear ambitions, to their support of terror including providing safe harbor for members of al-Qaeda, to their interference in Iraq which in more civilized times would be seen for what it is: an act of war. Oh, and I'm not forgetting what tops the list of reasons to remove the Mullahcracy, their oppression of the Iranian people. If Iran were a democracy, the issue of nukes would not be a problem and neither would support of terror.
This gets to the core of the war strategy, where helping the people of nations achieve liberty goes hand in glove with advancing our own interests. One either believes that or one does not. But even if you don't, being able to deter nuclear programs is important. Right now, we can't. If we had sufficient military forces to convince the Iranian Mullahs that we had more than enough to take them out and handle Iraq, they might be more cooperative. The problem is similar to that of Syria, where they do not believe they need to worry about us in the near term because we "have our hands full in Iraq", as Gregory puts it. They know that won't last forever so they're taking advantage of the moment, each in their own ways. So is North Korea and so is China. The tragic train disaster has, naturally, overshadowed the fact that Kim Jong Il had just returned from China discussing an aid agreement. China is playing things both ways, at best. Of course, why should we expect otherwise from a government that still does things like this to its own people?
So in a roundabout way we get to this article by Steven Schwartz. Read the whole thing, but ask the tough question of whether the awkwardly eloquent Bush has built us up to trample out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are grown. I know for sure that the Democratic alternative won't, and that's a shame. But we need to expand the force structure to win the war, not because we will everywhere and always use force, but because having greater ability to do so will work wonders in motivating the reluctant, in the way that Khadaffi has been. If he and his family can be motivated to give up their weapons and terror ambitions and sing the song of democracy, how many others can?
Yesterday I wrote a post on the state and future of the Democratic Party and thus of American politics. Peter Thorp sends in a link to a post with a different view.
Read 'em both and make up your own mind. I will clarify one thing from mine that came up. I'm not hoping to perpetuate lies, Democratic or otherwise. I'm hoping for revitalization that will eliminate or at least diminish the "lie factor" in their politics (obviously, it will never be possible to entirely eliminate lying in politics).
I think that in the Happy Carpenter post, accidentally and inadvertently the same error is made as the Left often makes (deliberately) with Bush: confusing being mistaken with lying. Sincere disagreement is, or at least should be, what politics is all about. We believe our ideas are right, and theirs are wrong. They hold the opposite opinion - that theirs are right and ours are wrong. In a battle of ideas, both should believe they will prevail on the merits. In my opinion, it's a further sign of the current miserable state of the Democratic Party that they feel they must resort to rather blatant misrepresentations and deceptions aimed at their own electorate (see here for one example).
The my premise is based on the hope, vain though it may seem to some, that they will go through some reflection and generate new ideas. But like I said, read both posts and decide for yourself.
Mike Parker, via e-mail, reminds me of this article by Michael Ledeen from last October, on what China has evolved into as well as what we're fighting in the larger war. Check it out.
Kevin Cherek, whose letter prompted this post, wrote back with another very good question:
Another thought - I read the piece by Kay S. Hymowitz. If true, the millennials seem to hold values that currently are much closer to the republican party. If this holds during the "turning", one has to wonder what will become of the democratic party. If it collapses entirely, what
will take its place? Perhaps the republican party will fracture and differentiate, or maybe some movement has yet to emerge.
People would dispute that the Democratic Party is on the verge of collapse. After all, elections, polls, and party ID are all very close now, and some point to demographic trends that they believe favor the Democratic Party as a sign that the future is theirs.
But my observation is that the Democratic Party is intellectually exhausted. Ignore the fog for a moment and look at how the platform they are putting together is taking shape. The "newest of new ideas" Kerry is going to run on are the same old things that the Democrats have run on for four, five, or is it six Presidential campaign cycles? Clinton had some ideas, when he first ran in '92, that were actually different. Ideas that bubbled up through the Democratic Leadership Council. But as an intellectual enterprise, that is tapped out as well and you hardly hear about them anymore, and when you do, it's nothing new.
One of the reasons to emphasize scare tactics is when the other side is on the programmatic and intellectual offensive. If you don't have ideas of your own to counter with, you tell people how bad things will be if the other side implements their crazy, untested schemes. It's a reactionary tactic, and the "change" Kerry and the Democrats are offering is a "lets keep them from changing things, or better yet, lets go back to the way things were in the good ol' days" kind of change, where the "good old days" are the Clinton era at best or, for Krugmanites, the halcyon days of the '70s, when men were men in the Alan Alda & Phil Donahue sense, and men were Liberal. Gas lines and stagflation would be a small price to pay if only. . . Those were the days. Mr, we could use a man like Jimmy Carter again. . .
Intellectual exhaustion and fear mongering are not the wave of the future. They might win an election here or there - I think there is a decent chance Kerry will win - but that will further entrench, for them, the attitude that they don't need to change or rethink, that is think at all - and everything will be fine, the country is with them. But the sour disposition and the longing for a past that may never have been and certainly wasn't all it was cracked up to be compared to a better future never did the Republicans any good. They only became successful when they became more forward looking: respecting what was good in the past but building forward. When they, to paraphrase Tammy Baldwin, became more creative than simply longing for the past.
For all that one of their most prominent groups is named "Move On", Liberals and Democrats cannot or will not. This is not likely to have lasting majority appeal, and certainly not likely to have wide appeal among young people who are part of a positive, forward-looking generation, the Millennials.
One of the reasons I want to see the Democrats not just defeated but soundly defeated is that it will be clear that they were rejected, not just jobbed again, screwed but they "really won" or would have if those dirty Republicans hadn't cheated them. They might then resort to that last, desperate option: thinking and re-evaluating to reform their Party to make it more attractive again.
Which brings us back to Kevin Cherek's question. What will happen? Either they will refound their Party along more sensible lines, in a way that doesn't let the radical tail wag the liberal dog, or they will have to be replaced by a new Liberal movement, or the country will effectively become a one-party nation like Canada is. This will not be because of wicked things the majority Party does to suppress opposition and stifle dissent, but because the opposition can't get its act together. But the cause, their failure, will matter less than the effect, which will be stultified political debate and sterile politics and policies. I believe that competition is good not just in the economic sphere but also in the political sphere. Certainly having no fear of losing their majority in Congress didn't do wonders for accountability, fiscal and otherwise, when it came to the Democrats of yore, and it's not doing us any favors now that the Republican majority has no fear to keep them on their toes. In my opinion, that's an overlooked aspect behind the spending and deficit problems.
That's why I remain for sincere Liberalism, despite the fact that I can't foresee myself going back myself. It's utterly selfish: it's not just for their sake that I want a robust, creative, smart Liberal party. It's for ours as conservatives and ours as Americans who benefit from having real options in two Parties competing strongly - in positive ways - for our votes. Right now we have the bitter Left full of spite and bile and the Liberal political machine of politics and interest groups hoping to ride a wave of spite and bile back into power for its own sake. That's not healthy for our politics, and it'll have to end. The longer it takes, the worse it gets. The fact that this election is going to be close is not good news for anyone. It needs to be a blowout. Only then will the internal problems with the Democratic Party be addressed, or a new movement form to replace it with something better.
No matter how many children they blow up, be they Jewish children or Moslem children as in Basra, some people will continue to describe the terror masters as "spiritual leaders" and terrorists as resistance fighters, pushed into violence. But the "devil made them do it" theory, along with romanticization of third-world killers of whatever stripe they may be, does not alter the facts of the act itself.
Indiscriminate killing such as they engage in must be confronted, fought, and defeated. The kind of people willing to do things like this must be put down. This is not a reaction to injustice or poverty or oppression - many who participate, as has long been chronicled - are well educated and well off. There is nothing that can rationalize this, though there are many people who rationalize it and shift the blame from the perpetrators to some other source, the West or the U.S., which they despise for their own reasons. “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” is in reality someone who murders children.
Of course, the comparison isn't exact, but there are parallels. David Keene explores them, and what it means. It starts with a point about China that I've discussed before here too:
The quasi-communists who run things on the Chinese mainland these days have been proceeding for more than a decade on the historically naive assumption that they can, in effect, have their cake and eat it too. In their desire to build a China that can compete in a world in which economic and military power are more interdependent than ever, they are trying to free up their country’s economic system without giving up an iota of political power. The very idea of a free-market totalitarian state may be difficult to grasp intellectually, but that seems to be what the folks in Beijing are trying to build and hold together.
I agree with those who say it won't work and that eventually there will be a shakeup resulting in, we hope, a democratic China. But the question is what happens along the way between now and then and how much damage it does to not only China, but China's neighbors in the meantime. That includes Taiwan:
And its very existence is making Beijing more nervous by the day. China’s rulers want Taiwan “back” not just because they consider the island a “renegade” province but also because the freedom its people enjoy presages a future that the rulers aren’t eager to embrace.
One of the things happening here is the Chinese oligarchy using nationalist passions to cling to power. Directing the attentions of the population towards some external goal - recovering China's glory and territory - is one way of doing that. It can hold on that way for some time, and create havoc and even war. Sure, eventually the Chinese oligarchy will fall, but it may not be a "soft landing" kind of fall. . .
Till then, we should no more abandon Taiwan for the convenience of getting along with China than we should abandon Israel for convenience:
Taiwan is not a client state or a nation that we support for the sake of convenience or realpolitik. It is a nation that has embraced the ideals for which we stand and turned them into a reality. For that, it deserves, and has earned, our support.
Austin Bay has more, arguing that we need to get to the bottom of this to revitalize the UN. Again, I think we need to get to the bottom of this so we can replace the UN with something better. You be the judge.
Elsewhere, Claudia Rosett on how the UN can pay its debt to the Iraqi people. Few people put it that way. Most people think that the world owes the UN, rather than the UN oweing the world - especially the UN's victims - anything.
Outside of the haze of Democrat and Liberal doom-and-gloom, things are getting better, as two City Journal pieces show. Kay S. Hymowitz looks at a variety of indicators, cultural and social, and finds them trending up:
Wave away the colored smoke of the Jackson family circus, Paris Hilton, and the antics of San Francisco, and you can see how Americans have been self-correcting from a decades-long experiment with “alternative values.” Slowly, almost imperceptibly during the 1990s, the culture began a lumbering, Titanic turn away from the iceberg, a movement reinforced by the 1990s economic boom and the shock of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. During the last ten years, most of the miserable trends in crime, divorce, illegitimacy, drug use, and the like that we saw in the decades after 1965 either turned around or stalled. Today Americans are consciously, deliberately embracing ideas about sex, marriage, children, and the American dream that are coalescing into a viable—though admittedly much altered—sort of bourgeois normality. What is emerging is a vital, optimistic, family-centered, entrepreneurial, and yes, morally thoughtful, citizenry.
There's something to that. When the shockingly revolutionary issue of our time is Gays wanting a right to form families, rather than people trying to "Smash Monogamy", things have changed. In many ways, "revolutionary" goals have become conservative ones.
I harp on the things that are still going the wrong way here, and frequently get mail from regular readers saying things aren't that bad. In my opinion, we have a swiss-cheese situation. Some things are getting better, others - some important institutional structures - aren't. Indeed some of those are getting more hostile to the larger society, or at least further alienated from it, precisely because it's not going "their way". The analogy is two trains heading in opposite directions. A lot of the article highlights the generational aspect of things. Longtime readers will remember posts referencing the work of Strauss & Howe, who predicted much of this. But we still have more work to do. But a lot of positive things are going on out there:
With their genius for problem solving and compromise, pragmatic Americans have seen the damage that their decades-long fling with the sexual revolution and the transvaluation of traditional values wrought. And now, without giving up the real gains, they are earnestly knitting up their unraveled culture. It is a moment of tremendous promise.
We have a duty to be more creative than longing for the past. I believe the best accomplishments of the gay, feminist, and black civil-rights movements in the second half of the 20th century can live alongside the moral clarity that has made America the Shining City on a Hill. These are not mutually exclusive concepts. We do not have to choose one or the other.
Our responsibility to ourselves and to future generations is to take the best of what we've become and bring it together.
The second City Journal piece highlighting good trends is by Harry Stein, who finds some even in daytime TV. It's still at best a mix bag, but "less bad" constitutes improvement. Check out both pieces.
Check out this Boston Glob column By Derrick Z. Jackson on a Kerry fundraising letter:
What was striking about the letter was that the entire first page was about how Bush misleads, but not a single sentence about how Kerry would lead. . .
Further evidence of how the Kerry folks are relying heavily on the ABB game was the campaign's recent ''release'' of something called the ''Middle-Class Misery Index.'' By the time you get done reading it, you'd think we're in the second Great Depression.
. . .as if any were really needed if one pays attention to the facts, that the problem isn't "Bush lied!" or "Blair lied!", but that Western intelligence agencies, as a whole, may have been mistaken.
Fixation on the wrong problem ("they lied to us!") is an obstacle to solving the real problem, and that is intelligence gathering. Western intelligence may have over-estimated Saddam's weapons stockpiles - though not his programs and intentions of maintaining a WMD capability (see here), but they underestimated Libya's, and before that North Korea's, and before that Pakistan's, and before that. . .
The point is the problem isn't primarily political manipulation. Leaders make decisions based on the information available. We need to insure that information is the best it can be, and also understand the limits of information-gathering abilities. That is, we need to work to reduce errors and we need to understand that life is never error free.
Well, people keep talking about how much better things would be in Iraq if only - if only the UN were in charge, if only we listened to our good allies France, Russia, and China, &tc. Christopher Hitchens does some if only of his own. Given where he was on Iraq in '91, it's a bit of the same, but he's changed where others haven't, and recognized that there is a progressive rationale for war. When he writes this, though, it has special resonance because he ran in those circles and remembers the arguments that were made:
The antiwar Left used to demand the lifting of sanctions without conditions, which would only have gratified Saddam Hussein and his sons and allowed them to rearm.
Then there is of course this:
The supposed neutrals, such as Russia and France and the United Nations, were acting as knowing profiteers in a disgusting oil-for-bribes program that has now been widely exposed. The regime-change forces said, in effect: Lift the sanctions and remove the regime. But in the wasted decade of sanctions-plus-Saddam, a whole paranoid and wretched fundamentalist underclass was created and exploited by the increasingly Islamist propaganda of the Baath Party. This also helps explain the many overlooked convergences between the supposedly "secular" Baathists and the forces of jihad.
I haven't blogged directly on the the UN's Oil-for-Terror program. I allude to it frequently but haven't, that I remember, done a post directly on the subject. What more can be said about what Glenn Reynolds calls UNSCAM? And who's really surprised?
Of course, there is a good reason to give this story as high a profile as possible. The idea that the UN is a paragon of virtue that should be exalted and seen as a pillar of legitimacy and internationalism at its best needs to be punctured. Not, in my opinion, so everyone can go back to 19th century realpolitik, but so that we can learn and move forward with something that makes democracy and accountability its basis and also does not seek to usurp authority while insulating itself. We'll never get there as long as people pretend that the UN is the be-all-and-end-all. The Iraqis know full well why the UN cannot be trusted - the UN works with and on behalf of the oppressors of the world, against the decent countries of the world and the people who are oppressed. The UN is also not nearly as good as people claim it is when it comes to security, in either Kosovo or Afghanistan now, or in Rwanda when the French (again) worked hand in glove not with the people being slaughtered but with those doing the slaughtering.
The pretense that the UN is a noble institution that should be given the benefit of the doubt needs to be peeled back. Hopefully it will be in the Presidential campaign here, but somehow I doubt it because, for his own reasons and because it is easier, Bush will try to appear to be working with and cooperating with the UN as much as possible. Kerry on the other side will do nothing but exalt the UN and lay all the problems of the world on the fact that we don't defer to it - and thus to France, Russia, and China - more. But people need to be reminded that when someone says "work with the UN" they mean its Security Council members, and that means with the interests of those members. Those interests are not the same as ours and while there is not necessarily any reason for them to give up their interests for our sake, neither is their necessarily any reason for us to put their interests ahead of ours. Especially when theirs involve shady, corrupt deals with blood-soaked dictators and ours involve eliminating said dictators and trying to help foster democracy in their place.
The truth is, the real "blood-for-oil" program was run not by Haliburton on behalf of Cheney & pals, but by the UN on behalf of Saddam, France, and Russia. The UN's internal investigation is being stonewalled, so pressure will have to come from outside. It won't come from the EU, or Russia, or China. It'll have to come from us.
Overall in Iraq I have no fear. Concerned optimism would be the way to put it. I agree with Andrew. But I do believe that problems like Fallujah need to be adressed, confronted, and solved and don't believe that one-sided cease-fires are the solution.
If it had been the other side saying "no mas" and offering to throw down their arms, that would be one thing. But that isn't apparently what's happening. Thus there is concern to my optimism, because we can screw things up for Iraqis and for ourselves.
Iraqi security forces moved back into Fallujah Tuesday on a mission to restore control and collect weapons from insurgents as dozens of families began returning to the embattled city, a crucial test of an agreement between U.S. officials and local leaders aimed at ending hostilities.
A U.S. military run radio station urged residents to hand over heavy weapons - including machine guns, grenade launchers and missiles - to Iraqi security forces or at the mayor's office.
But it was not yet known whether the city's guerrillas would abide by the call to surrender their arsenals. U.S. commanders have warned that if the disarmament does not take place, Marines may launch an all-out assault to take the city, a move that would likely mean a resumption of bloody fighting.
As I wrote here, I don't understand our response. We're told that these guys are "dead-enders". Are they or aren't they? If so, can we trust that we're not just letting them melt away to fight another day? I thought we were looking for an opportunity to get at them so they won't continue to attack coalition troops and normal Iraqis? We've been told that we've finally learned what the enemy sees as a sign of weakness - unilateral cease-fires and concessions give them the feeling they won and we lost. Have we?
I can understand treading carefully with al-Sadr in Najaf, but in Fallujah, which has been a center of "dead-ender" and foreign infiltrator opposition since, well, forever, I can't. I'm hoping there's something I don't know, but from what information I do have I feel that kid gloves here will simply result in more dead in the future.
No, I'm not merciless. But I understand the old saying that there are times when mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent. I believe these people will have learned from this not to take on American soldiers head on, but will go back to blowing up Iraqi neighborhoods, killing people from the shadows and pulling a fade. Right now I'm hoping they don't (pretend) to give up their arms and disappear quietly - because I believe it will only be so they can kill another day, on terms more favorable to themselves. Along with everyone else, both pro and con, on the war, I’ve been wrong my fair share of times. The “con” people want you to forget they’ve ever been wrong. But so far, when I’ve had fears like these, I’ve been right. I was right in early posts back on blogger when I said the post-war would be more dangerous than the war itself, I was right that not finding WMDs would be a problem, and I've been right in the past when I feared failure to push matters hard when we've had the opportunity would simply lead to the same problems showing up again later, and worse. I know you're not supposed to take council of your fears, but it can and should motivate you to not make the same errors twice, and to finish off an intransigent enemy when you have the chance rather than letting him return to bedevil you later. What happened to "a time and manner of our chosing?"
Ruhland pins the tail on the donkey as to how Air America and the Democrat Party fail to ignite voters' imaginations in an expansive way. That they resort to scare-mongering, racial divides, class warfare and ad hominem invective to win votes is as counter-productive and wrong-headed as the social and governance policies they seem to prefer and present so lamely. Worse, they are not even successful at being scary- most of us roll our eyes, while some special interests groups motivated by favors, not fear, queu up only for the hand-outs promised.
Air America isn't funny, fun, fair, or informative- rather like 90% of the network news America is already stuck with. Why oh why is Gore trying to add yet another partisan news outlet to the party faithful airwaves? Maybe his financiers will see just how 'scary' Franken's situation is...
One can hope!
Maybe, though I don't mind them losing their shirts in this case and in some cases higher exposure of these people, by themselves ("these people exposing themselves" didn't read right") is a good thing. As Charlotte said, most Americans aren't exactly persuaded by these antics.
He seemed very opposed to the idea in the past, but he's come around:
Cabinet ministers said yesterday that Mr Blair had shifted his position partly because of fears that in the run-up to the European elections on June 10 the Tories would make political capital out of his reluctance to hold a referendum.
The Prime Minister, they said, had gradually been persuaded that the pressure was unstoppable.
The Telegraph has learnt that Mr Blair began to shift his position after the Brussels EU summit on March 25, at which he called for negotiations on the constitution to be concluded by the end of June, when the Irish are due to pass the presidency to Holland.
Whatever the reason for his change of position on the idea of a referendum, it's a good thing. Having examined the draft EU Constitution at length, I can only hope the British people reject it (enter "A Constitution for Bureaucratopia into my search engine and relevant links will come up).
The first of these is to terrorize the regime's coercive forces, notably the police and the National Guard, that are in the front line of the war against terror. The murders in Jeddah of several policemen in February and March have set a pattern that has since been repeated in Riyadh as well as the cities of Buraidah and Unizah in the Najdi heartland.
The second aim is to create no-go areas for the security forces, thus enabling the terrorists to establish safe havens and, later, a number of "liberated zones." The militants seem to have focused on the Qassim region, where the Hanbali brand of Sunni Islam is strong. At least two remote spots in al-Shamsiyah and Um-Sadrah, some 45 kilometers east of Buraidah, have been identified as logistics points for terrorists.
The terror campaign's third aim is to disrupt the modest program of political reform announced by Crown Prince Abdullah last year. The program includes the holding of the kingdom's first-ever elections: Though modest - limited to municipal councils - these could strengthen the regime by broadening its support base.
But things don't look like they're going their way:
dozens of alleged militants have been killed in more than 80 engagements with the security forces. Among them were four of al Qaeda's most notorious military commanders, including Khalid al-Haj, a Yemeni regarded as the overall commander of the terror movement in the Persian Gulf region. Almost 1,000 other militants have been captured in a nationwide sweep against "the deviant movement" in the past six months.
The Liberal radio network, "Air America", is a microcosm of modern Liberalism. Check out my article on Liberalism's emphasis on scare tactics and pessimism on Enter Stage Right.
There's a bunch of other good articles over there, too, including one on the UN's internet ambitions by Cheryl K. Chumley.
