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The two acronyms that we hear concerning the twenty-first century are GRIN (Genetics Robotics Information Nanotech) to describe the wave of new technologies and BRIC (Brazil Russia India and China) to identify the new heavyweights. In foreign policy, media commentary has focused upon China, the earliest power to emerge an cast its influence across the globe.

Not far behind is India. With its longer demographic growth, this country is considered as the most powerful power in the longer term, since it will not have to deal with a rapidly aging population. Yet, because some of the people speak English, play cricket and vote, they are not considered to be a potential enemy, with whom we may come to blows. We forget at our peril that democracies can marshall the power of the majority and there is no guarantee that India will be on the side of the Enlightenment. Hindu chauvinism is a powerful counterweight to the Anglosphere. According to Immanuel Wallerstein, India has played on these assumptions to its advantage:

Was then the new Indo-U.S. joint statement a victory for U.S. diplomacy? In it, the U.S. for the very first time legitimated India's role as a nuclear power, by promising India that it "will work to achieve full civil nuclear energy cooperation with India as it realizes its goals of promoting nuclear power and achieving energy security." This of course undermined enormously the already weak position of the U.S. in opposing Iranian nuclear ambitions, since what India has received from the U.S. is precisely what Iran has been claiming is its right, "full civil nuclear energy."

And in return, what did the U.S. get? - a promise "to combat terrorism relentlessly." Since India was already doing this, it wasn't very much. Meanwhile, India is maintaining its close relations with Iran and Russia, and even (on paper) a strategic alliance with China. More importantly, India is proceeding with Project Seabird, aimed at turning it into the major military power in the Indian Ocean. This does not make the Chinese too happy, to be sure, but it shouldn't make the U.S. too happy either, since at the moment, it is the U.S. that is the major military power in the Indian Ocean.

Let us remember that India will, rightly, consider her own interests paramount. They may not coincide with ours.

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Recently, a Greenpeace boat was rammed by a Japanese whaling ship. Or vice versa, depending on which side of the fence you sit on. Somewhere in my blogospheric wanderings, I stumbled over a Greenpeace blog purportedly authored by the crew on that particular mission. Since sparring with members of the crew and those peopling their fawning commentariat, I am reminded yet again how soft-headed, shallow and emotionally driven the anti-whaling argument is.

It continues to amaze me how, over the years, Greenpeace has pulled off such a remarkable public relations campaign in regards to whaling. They have successfully ensured the utter ignorance of many hundreds of millions of otherwise intelligent individuals on the matter of whaling. For most opposed to whaling, there is one species, "the whale", and it is being fished into extinction by those nasty Japanese. Forget the fact that some species of whale are not even close to endangered. The minke, for example, has an international population ranging somewhere between 500 000 - 1.1 million individuals. The minke is the most commonly harvested whale. Icelandic and Norwegian whalers only hunt minkes and the vast majority of the Japanese catch consists of minkes. Forget the fact that, when the Japanese hunt other species, each year they have never taken more than 51 Bryde's whales, 10 sperm whales or 100 sei whales. If you want to check the population levels on each of those whale species, please take a look at the earlier IWC chart I linked to. To suggest this tiny rate of harvesting will have a negative impact on whale populations is preposterous. Even if the Japanese follow through on their threat to double their cull of minkes to about 1000, and - let's be generous - add another 1000 taken by the Icelandic, the Norwegians and indigenous groups, this cumulative figure of 2000 is clearly sustainable given a conservative population growth rate of 1% and a highly conservative total population of 500 000.

Another point that the anti-whaling wailers do not like to concede and invert in their rhetoric; whaling in international waters is not illegal. Membership of the International Whaling Commission is entirely voluntary, and no member is bound to accept its rulings. For example, IWC member Norway has been catching minke whales under an objection to the moratorium on whaling since it was put in place in 1986. Japan, whilst almost certainly running a misleading campaign that asserts its catch is predominantly for scientific purposes, could withdraw from the moratorium on commercial whaling and start openly whaling commercially any time it wanted to.

A further blow to the relevance of the anti-whalers' cause can be seen in the dwindling market for whale meat. Even arch enviro-moonbat David Suzuki concedes that the market for whale meat is falling in Japan. The same thing is happening in Norway, according to other environmental hysterics. Simply, the young don't much care for the stuff in Japan or Norway. The market for whale meat is literally dying. As for any potential non-culinary demand in the West, we no longer need whale oil, and there are far cheaper sources of pet food. When viewed rationally, whaling is a non-event, and its importance is further deflating.

Considering the above, the anti-whaling campaign seems like a ridiculous waste of energy if "saving the environment" is key. One of the eco-pirates on the Greenpeace boat claimed, in a response to my initial post on their blog, that "Greenpeace's position is based purely on the need to leave healthy intact ocean ecosystems for future generations." If they were truly a group concerned with preserving ocean ecosystems, they would be concentrating their efforts in South East Asia, where numerous fisheries are in various stages of collapse due to rampant overfishing. The whaling debate shows Greenpeace for what they are - a bunch of filthy hypocrites who ignore true environmental catastrophes to chase after high profile red herrings. Please pardon the pelagic pun.

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Louise who? Louise Arbour is High Commissioner for Human Rights at the UN, that is who. Now like it or not (and I certainly do not), most people reading this blog pay for the United Nations and so have an interest in what their tax money buys in that cesspool of corruption. One of those things is Louise Arbour's salary so that she can defend 'Human Rights'.

Now rather prominently amongst those things commonly felt to be a human right is the right to express yourself, just so long as you are not crying 'Fire' in a crowded theatre or actively inciting people to violence. Yet when a Danish newspaper prints some cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, sparking protests from Muslims, does she support the right of Danish people to express themselves? Hell no.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour was investigating the matter. "I understand your attitude to the images that appeared in the newspaper," Arbour wrote the Organization of the Islamic Conference. "I find alarming any behaviors that disregard the beliefs of others. This kind of thing is unacceptable."

Investigating? If it is 'unacceptable', it sounds like she is well past the 'investigating' stage as it looks pretty damn clear who she thinks is in the wrong here. Let me tell you what is unacceptable. Pandering to people who want to see force used to 'punish' people for saying things they do not like, that is unacceptable. Claiming to defend human rights on our dime while giving aid and comfort to intolerant bigots, that is unacceptable.

Muslims should feel free to express themselves too. Let them match through the streets and scream until they are blue in the face, calling the entire editorial staff of Jyllands-Posten "kufur bastards" if they like, just so long as they do not call on the state to 'punish' them. The state can only punish people for breaking the law and there is nothing illegal about expressing critical views about Islam.

Either Louise Arbour immediately recants her views and accepts the non-negotiability of freedom of the press or she must be sacked. Your tax money pays for her antics, so you can demand her removal.

Tell you Member of Parliament/Congressman/Senator/whoever. Got a blog? Pass it on. Sack Louise Arbour.

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Samizdata's informal motto is "guns 'n' girls", but in this post you get neither. Instead you get a picture taken in Brussels of a fine, hand-rolled cigar and an American flag:

The man is Richard Miniter and the photo comes from this interview in The Brussels Journal under the title "America Is Winning the War on Terror, Says Expert".

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Here is a good article in the National Interest demonstrating how private sector peacekeeping is much better than its UN equivalent. To quote,

Peacekeeping success does not come from a splendid rebirth of Western interest in these missions, but rather from the unheralded role played by the private sector doing jobs once provided by Western militaries, and from a more realistic and pragmatic approach by the funding states. Sent by donor states, private companies are increasingly providing the missing skills, capabilities and, most importantly, the actual will to carry out international mandates in conflict and post-conflict (CPC) situations. The peacekeeping success stories that get the most play by advocates rarely include the central and growing role the private sector is playing to ensure that success. Private firms filling a myriad of non-traditional roles are creating fundamental changes in the way international peace and stability operations are undertaken. From a humanitarian perspective, this is long overdue.

The article argues that the United Nations, only as good as the resources that its members bring to the table, is a useful framework for co-ordinating security co-operation, but argues that its peacekeeping capabilities should be privatised. As they say, from a humanitarian perspective, this is long overdue.

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I am watching the BBC Ten o'clock News, and the lead story is Condoleezza Rice, spelling out the Bush doctrine:

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has delivered a forceful call for democratic reform in the Arab World in a major policy speech in Cairo.

The US pursuit of stability in the Middle East at the expense of democracy had "achieved neither", she admitted.

"Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people," she said.

The BBC's Frank Gardiner said her comments marked a complete departure for the US, and were "immensely risky".

Indeed. In order to have seen this one coming, you would have had to have read some of President George W. Bush's speeches, in particular his Second Inaugural Address, and to have then made the even greater mental leap of realising that President George W. Bush had actually thought about what he was saying, and had meant it.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. (Applause.)

As the BBC immediately explained, the worry is that democracy in the Middle East may result in Islamomaniacal governments which "hate America". As opposed to regimes like the ones in Egypt and Saudi Arabia now, which permit no anti-American sentiments whatsoever.

Now the BBC is explaining that Egypt, like the USSR before it, is immovably non-democratic. Mubarak will be followed in the fullness of time only by further Mubaraks. We shall see.

President George W. Bush is a physically quite little guy, or so he seems in the photos that I have seen. He has an eccentric way with the English language, his pauses extending to the point where they flirt dangerously with embarrassment. He believes – really believes – in God. So, he is an easy man to underestimate, and all of Europe now does this. Yet if US Presidential greatness is defined as determining a new course for the USA and then making that new course the actual course that is then steered by (which it is, although there is also the matter of whether the new course is good and wise to consider), then President George W. Bush is getting greater by the month.

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I confess that I didn't give any money to the tsunami relief effort, mostly because it became apparent to me within a few days that there was far more aid on its way to the area than could possibly be put to good use. I prefer that my donations go where they can make a difference.

Mark Steyn confirms that I was right not to waste my money (or rather, to give my money to the tranzis to waste).

Five hundred containers, representing one-quarter of all aid sent to Sri Lanka since the tsunami hit on Dec. 26, are still sitting on the dock in Colombo, unclaimed or unprocessed.

At the Indonesian port of Medan, 1,500 containers of aid are still sitting on the dock.

Four months ago, did you chip in to the tsunami relief effort? Did your company? A Scottish subsidiary of the Body Shop donated a 40-foot container of "Lemon Squidgit" and other premium soap, which arrived at Medan in January and has languished there ever since because of "incomplete paperwork,'' according to Indonesian customs officials.

It was apparent to me that the US and Aussie military were doing everything possible to ensure that casualties would be minimized during the immediate crisis. Since long-term relief was being farmed out to the UN, and no fundamental reforms of either the UN or the countries receiving it were contemplated, well, the outcome and effectiveness of the long-term relief program was pretty predictable. The UN was being put in charge, so I sent my charity dollars elsewhere.

When rent-a-quote senators claim to be pro-U.N. or multilateralist, the tsunami operation is what they have in mind -- that when something bad happens the United States should commit to working through the approved transnational bureaucracies and throw even more "resources" at them, even though nothing will happen (Sri Lanka), millions will be stolen (Oil for Food), children will get raped (U.N. peacekeeping operations) and hundreds of thousands will die (Sudan).

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Kofi Annan fears that this:

The United States and other countries have protested about the re-election of Zimbabwe to the UN's main human rights body, the Human Rights Commission.

Zimbabwe was one of 15 countries chosen by members of the UN's Economic and Social Council in New York. All but one were chosen by consensus.

Critics say too many countries with appalling human rights records have been on the commission.

. . . may "caste a shadow on the UN's reputation as a whole".

Which until now was, of course, completely unblemished.

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The UN continues to confirm that it is everything its detractors says it is and so much more. Kofi Anan is now blaming the UK and USA, the two countries which produced people in official positions who were willing to point out that the UN 'sanctions' in Iraq were a complete scandal, for the way things played out. The sooner this bizarre organisation is destroyed the better.

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Surprise surprise:

President Robert Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party today emerged victorious in the official results of a Zimbabwean parliamentary election criticised by the opposition and western powers as fraudulent.

With 84 of the contested 120 parliamentary seats declared, Zanu-PF took 51. Morgan Tsvangirai's opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) won 33, according to results on the official counting screen at the Harare election centre.

The ruling party entered the race needing only 46 seats to obtain a simple majority in the 150-seat parliament, where 30 members are Mugabe appointees.

Still, at least this election has given everyone something to grab hold of, and it surely counts for something that Mugabe feels that he needs to fake the result he wants.

It is interesting how much more interest the pro-Iraq-war blogosphere is paying to Zimbabwe now. It is all because of the Iraq election. Until that happened, the pro-Iraq-war blogosphere was understandably pre-occcupied with Iraq, and other misery-spots tended to be neglected. But since the election, the pro-Iraq-war blogosphere is interested in any circumstance which seems in any way to be being influenced by that election. Suddenly, all political badness everywhere is part of the story, provided only that some locals are making democratic noises, demonstrating, etc.

I am not complaining. This just goes to show how right they were when they said, those that did, that the election would make a huge difference. It has.

However, this is interesting. It is a piece by S. J. Masty at the Social Affairs Unit blog, trashing the whole idea of spreading democracy hither and thither, in countries to which it is not suited and who have not evolved it at their own speed and in their own way. Instead of having one relatively staid kleptocracy in permanent charge, says Masty, democracy is liable to replace that one kleptocracy with two or three competing kleptocracies. "Predator democracies", he calls these unfortunate countries. This is well worth a read, and a think. (Thanks to Patrick Crozier for the link.)

What I think is that Masty may be confusing the messenger (democracy) with the message (lots of people are now rowing about who gets to rule the country). An old fashioned monarchy, by definition, would put an end to the rowing, but can an old-fashioned monarchy survive in a country where so many more people want a slice of the action than in the old days?

UPDATE: This is the kind of thing Masty has in mind.

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I always thought that NGO meant Non Governmental Organisation. How come any of them get money from the state?

- thanks to Natalie Solent for spotting a good point made at The Road to Euro Serfdom

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I've been trying to take out The Motorcycle Diaries from my local video hire shop, but with no success. It seems that the film is particularly popular. It is based on part of the life of Che Guevara, a hero for many young people.

When I was at university, there were students who wore Che Guevara t-shirts or who put up posters of the man on their bedroom walls. People never said a bad word against this man. To some, he was their personal Jesus figure.

Problem was, no one really knew who the hell Che Guevara was. He was a revolutionary figure, something to do with Cuba. That was about all most people knew about the man. It always seemed odd to me that people wanted to associate themselves with someone they knew so little about. In reality, supporting Che was just about making a statement - of sticking it to companies, America and the West.

Making Che Guevara into someone worthy of admiration is the most successful thing the 'Left' has managed to do in the past fifty years. This is the man who had no shame in murdering innocent civilians, was a major human rights violator, and put gays (who were 'deviants'), religious minorities and other undesirables into concentration camps. Some hero.

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Tony Blair is only one of many who has expressed amazement at the scale of the response by individuals to the Tsumani disaster.

Just why this particular disaster has, as they say, caught the imagination of the public is a complicated matter. It was photogenic, for one thing. More to the point, it was and is still being actually photographed. Lots of flattened towns and recycled amateur videos of the waves themselves crashing in on everything. That helped and still helps a lot. Like Dale Amon, I think that the media have made a huge difference. Indeed, I would say that this is the kind of situation when we see these people at their considerable best. And I like also to think that the Blogosphere in particular and the 'new media' in general were also helpful in communicating the story, as I have already written here. It must have further helped that many of those blogging or new-media-ing were able to do so in English, the lingua franca of the Aid-giving world.

The presence of tourists who are (or were) Just Like Us surely added to the sense of involvement many of us felt, and although people understandably derided headlines like this, the fact that celebrities had their holidays all disrupted brought it all that bit nearer home to us, surely. Call me shallow and Dianaficated – and knowing our commentariat I am sure several will – but this catastrophe only really impinged upon my feelings, as opposed to my numbed and astonished brain, when I learned that Lord Attenborough had lost his fourteen year old grand-daughter. Lord Attenborough is famous for his stellar film career, and also for his habit of crying on British TV for the most trifling of reasons. There will be fewer jokes about his crying now. His loss surely affected other feelings besides mine.

So, explaining this tidal wave, if you will pardon the metaphor, of freely donated money, as well as political money in response to the public mood, involves many different variables. But I would like to add a few more thoughts to the mix.

This catastrophe is, it seems to me, an exception to a rule which is now widely accepted among the donation-giving (as opposed to donation soliciting) classes. This rule is: that most of what passes for Foreign Aid these days is pointless, or worse. Personally I believe this, and I now believe that a lot of other people believe it too, and have believed it for some time.

Take the Sudan. Suppose you throw money into that mess. Who gets their hands on it? Starving people? Maybe. But a lot of it surely goes instead to the people who are inflicting rather than suffering from the starvation. The starvation-inflicters control the country like prison guards, and they demand tribute from Aid Agencies as a price for the Aid Agencies bringing their Aid to a few of the starvation-sufferers.

This Tsunami disaster, however, seems to me, and (I surmise) to many others, to be different.

First, many of the countries afflicted by this disaster are semi-reasonably governed. The local politicians may be torn between on the one hand swanning around posing for bogus photo-ops and on the other hand doing absolutely nothing in a state of blind funk, but at least they are not sufficiently well organised to actually prevent other more helpful people (locals or foreign) from actually helping, such as religious organisations, or such as the United States Navy. South India may, compared to Milton Keynes or Minneapolis or Munich, be a somewhat haphazard sort of place. But for all its defects and disappointments, India is an open society, with journalists prowling around complaining about things and yet staying out of jail, and with people who are allowed to shout at foreign film crews about what a shower of shits their government is without being taken off to the basement of the local police station and never heard from again. India has trash television of the capitalistic sort – i.e. the fun and actually quite informative sort – not just government bullshit television. India has portable phones.

If the US Marines showed up in what remained of an Indian coastal town and the Indian army was (a) there, and (b) it opened fire on the Marines, some fat bastard in a palace two hundred miles away who is doing bugger all else to help would nevertheless have to worry about how such a circumstance might affect the next lot of elections he plans to win. So, the Marines get to do their thing. And they get to be snooped on by TV reporters, and we all (aid donors and aid receivers) get to argue afterwards about whether the Marines etc. did as well as they might have.

Right now, for instance, I am watching a hastily put together BBC documentary about how the friends and relatives of missing people are wandering around, in Phuket I think it is, waving photos (and let's hear it for cheap cameras) of their missing loved ones, and other photos of kids they have rescued but not identified yet. Okay, they are not getting much official help, although unofficially they are helping one another all they can. But my point is, neither are they being officially impeded. Self help and mutual aid are at least being allowed.

All of which is guesswork on my part, albeit guesswork heavily seasoned by reading this blog a lot, during the days after disaster struck.

And I should guess that similar things can be said, with approximate truth, about many of the other places hit by this catastrophe. These are, in many if not all cases, places where if you really can help and you really want to help, you have at least been allowed to do so.

And second, disaster relief is actually quite easy, compared to the average mess which is the usual basis for attempted Aid frenzies.

I know, I know. Aid workers, even as I blog, are tearing their hair out at the complexity and scale of the mess they are struggling to clean up, and who the hell am I to say that what they are doing is easy? Yet, they do, it seems to me, have one huge advantage compared to the circumstances that pertain in other disasters. They have a definition of cleaning up. They have an objective. Basically, very approximately, very roughly, as best they can, as imperfectly as they must, they are trying to restore the state of affairs that existed before the Tsunami struck. And, they can be confident that if they do manage an approximation of this Herculean labour, the local people whom they are seeking to help will then know just what to do. They will get back to getting on with their lives. Their lives worked okay before. They can work okay again. Meanwhile, they need a helping hand. A big one. But only for a while.

Other 'disasters', of the sort that are said to have 'root causes' (i.e. complicated and controversial and intractable causes), but upon which we are nevertheless nagged to shower Aid, have no such simple and shared objective to get everyone who is trying to help to actually help.

Notice how his disaster has not been deranged by debate about its 'root causes', i.e. by contending politicians and political stirrers. Okay, a bit deranged. But nothing that serious. We all know what caused the disaster. An earthquake. That was the root cause of the thing, and that cannot be altered, only cleaned up after. Washington, London, Paris, the UN etc., can argue the politics of it all they like, but meanwhile, here is a road, covered in mud, and the thing is to get the mud off it so that lorries can get through with food and fresh water. Are these people injured? Look after them. Is this hospital short of bandages? Give it bandages, and whatever else it can use. Thirsty are you? Have a drink of water. This was your house was it? Here, let me help you rebuild it.

'Natural disasters' have another colossal advantage over man made ones, aside from the fact that they are relatively mild in their impact (Do the maths. Stalin? Mao? Tsumani? No contest.) Natural disasters happen, and then they stop. An earthquake quakes, and then it stops.

The misgovernment of a country, due to tyranny or civil war or some evil combination thereof, can last for decades.

To summarise, this disaster is (a) exceptional in being one that good people have been allowed, by circumstances and by local politicians, to deal with; and (b) it is exceptional in that it is actually reasonably correctable. Money will, in short, not do that much harm, and could do a hell of a lot of good.

Note that I am not just saying that this is how I think it is. Maybe I am totally wrong. Maybe the politicians are screwing up everything, and maybe the idea that there is a status quo ante which can in any imaginable way be returned to is utter nonsense. For instance, and to enter just one caveat, Sri Lanka, one of the worst hit places, is divided by civil war, and there, the BBC has been reporting a classic Too Difficult scenario unfolding, at any rate in those parts of Sri Lanka that are being fought over between the government and the Tamil Tigers. But on the other hand, at least the BBC was able to crawl around such places with their cameras and film people arguing, in this case about a large box of biscuits. That is definitely something.

For what I am also saying is that even if I am totally wrong, I surmise that I am absolutely not the only one who is thinking along these lines. Millions of people throughout the world, I suggest, are having similar thoughts to the ones I have been having. Thus, in this disaster, they have given generously, while in previous disasters they fixed blankly implacable looks on their faces and walked right past those plastic tins with slots in them as if they didn't exist. Too complicated. Too difficult. My coins will buy too little good and maybe do serious harm. Sorry, but no. (As Kim du Toit, extreme Aid To Africa sceptic commenter here would put it: fuck it.) But, this time it is, maybe, different.

Both the scale of the generosity, and the extreme amazement felt by the Usual Aid Collectors, make sense to me.

The Usual Aid Collectors, who have spent their entire adult lives rattling their tins under indifferent noses and stalling governments, have got it fixed in their minds that most people are cruel and selfish bastards. Understandably, they do not like to think of themselves as presiding over a mostly doomed and pointless and often downright harmful way of life, which those cruel and selfish bastards are actually too sensible to waste their money on. So, when this disaster struck, the Usual Aid Collectors expected the same flint-faced indifference, and help only from the usual 'caring' (i.e. deluded) people. Yet suddenly, the very same people who only days earlier were busy buying stupid Christmas presents for themselves instead of baling out some hapless clutch of Africans, yet again, suddenly surged into their banks and buildings societies, waving twenty pound notes. Buckets were handed around businesses on the day of the New Year resumption, and millions were pledged in hours. Today, the figure for British donations passed £100,000,000.

As if to prove my point about how completely out of sinc with normal and sensible people the Aid Collecting classes are, right on cue, here is a Dimbleby (I still have the BBC clucking away in front of me as I blog) saying that we all feel "impotent" in the face of this disaster. Now a woman whom I do not recognise is saying that we are "proving that we care". She, you see, thought that we did not care, not most of us. But I say: we always did care. It was just that before, usually, there was, there is, nothing we could do. This time, on the other hand, we do not feel so impotent. This time, we can see on our televisions that help is not only wanted by thousands upon thousands of very unlucky people; there is a very decent chance that if such help is given in abundance, it will actually get through and do quite a lot of good. And not that much harm.

It will do some harm. The very scale of the giving means that in a few months time, as David Carr has gloomily prophesied (to me in conversation even though I cannot find him doing this here in blog form), numerous scandals and crimes will emerge from this particular and particularly huge Aid frenzy. True. But to a remarkable degree, I think that this Aid frenzy might actually achieve something.

And hello, what is this? Gordon Brown and Tony Blair are both saying (in a manner suggesting rivalry rather than cooperation) that we need a similar Aid frenzy to rescue … Africa. "We must then make sure that we also respond to the man-made, equally terrible disaster that is happening daily, in Africa." That is Blair as best I could catch it. Now he is talking about a "new Marshall Plan".

But he is failing to get the difference between rebuilding, which is hard but possible, and building, which is diabolically difficult, and frankly not something you can do by just chucking bank notes over strangers.

"Will this new Marshall Plan work?" the BBC man is asking. Europe, the BBC man is pointing out (thus proving that sometimes the BBC gets things exactly right), was merely being rebuilt. No it will not, and everyone except people like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (and I admit that that is a lot of people) are failing to realise this.

Here is an Independent article which opens with the same deluded message:

The unprecedented and worldwide public response to the tsunami disaster may help make 2005 a breakthrough year in tackling world poverty, senior figures in aid agencies believe.

Wrong. Flat wrong. (I got a mass of such drivel simply by googling for news about tsunami public response.) These people – these "senior figures in aid agencies" – are precisely the wrong ones to understand what is going on here. They think that helping strangers is always quite easy, that is to say, always possible. The reason people are not always more helpful, they said a month ago and will shortly be saying again, is that people are mostly selfish swine. I say: helping strangers is very hard. Often it is totally impossible. But, sometimes, as now, it makes sense.

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There are two big China stories doing the rounds today. In no particular order, there is the one about IBM selling its personal computer operation to a Chinese corporation, and there is the one about how the EU is planning to end its arms embargo on China.

Concerning the ending of the EU arms embargo, the EU Referendum blog (linking to this Times Online story today) has this to say:

As we have pointed out many times on this Blog (see for instance, here),the embargo has become one of the most sensitive geo-political issues, with the United States worried that its European allies will be arming a country that it sees as a potential military rival.

And, as we have also reported, China is spending billions of dollars upgrading its military capability and is rapidly becoming an economic superpower. Now The Times notes that Washington is concerned that East Asia remains militarily unstable, with China threatening Taiwan and North Korea threatening South Korea.

The US is worried that Europe will sell China advanced technology, such as over-the-horizon-targeting systems (guided by Galileo GPS signals) that would enable the Chinese military to strike American ships hundreds of miles out in the Pacific.

The Times also notes that Congress already is planning legislation that would ban the Pentagon from trading with any country that makes military sales to China and, as we have observed (here) is already making technology transfers difficult.

At the moment, the War on Terror is going well in this sense, that no mega-horror stories of the sort feared immediately after 9/11 have actually materialised. (Whether that is because the War on Terror has been conducted from our side with dazzling brilliance, or because it was superfluous, I leave the reader to decide. A bit of both would be my guess.) There have been some horrible killings, but no mega-death bomb explosions or plagues of the kind that we all have feared. Which means, unless the Islamofascists prove to have more life (by which I mean death) in them than now seems likely, that the world, and the people of the USA in particular, now have some attention to spare for what is surely going to be the big confrontation of the next few years, namely the rivalry for the global number one spot between the USA and China. China now has semi-sane economic policies, and a billion odd people semi-thriving under them. And America is … America. Quite a confrontation, I am sure we would all agree.

No doubt the EUrocrats will argue, if they have not started arguing already, that this IBM deal proves what hypocrites those silly Americans are for fussing about them doing business with the Chinese too. But cheap computers that China already perfectly well knows how to make are one thing; such things as hi-tech guidance systems for Chinese rockets are quite another.

Maybe this will be the moment when Americans finally decide in large numbers what an anti-American operation the EU is – as opposed to just a bunch of loser countries that count for nothing, whether they get together or whether they stay separate. Time was when the USA saw the EU as a bastion against the USSR. But imagine what Americans will make of people whom they regard as helping their enemies. What a change it would make (is making?) if everyday Americans were to take against (are taking against) the EU, and decide that they would like it, shall we say, crumbled.

Unless, of course, the EU is just dangling the ending of the arms embargo in front of everybody, prior to doing a deal with the USA that will leave everyone smiling and shaking hands, and the EU (having agreed to perpetuate the arms embargo indefinitely) suddenly being the USA's good buddy again.

As a libertarian, I expect to be told (again) by other libertarians that I am not a libertarian, this time for not condeming all embargoes absolutely, regardless of who against and of what. Which I can live with. I might even be persuaded that the world would be improved if the Chinese government could now buy all the weapons it wanted from anyone it wanted. I doubt it, but give it a try if you want to. But one thing I do know. I absolutely do not want to find myself a citizen of a nation state (EUrope) which the USA decides is its enemy. Whatever ends up happening with this embargo, today I felt that possibility move a little closer.

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The Democratic Leadership Council, a faction of the US Democratic Party, is calling for the resignation of Kofi Annan as the only way to restore the UN's credibility. The litany of condemnation includes:

Annan's handling of the fallout over the past week has done nothing to improve his perceived credibility: He has refused requests from congressional committees for access to the United Nation's 55 internal audits and other reports, or for the chance to interview U.N. officials who oversaw the program, saying that it would interfere with the Volcker inquiry. That inquiry is expected to release an interim report in January. The full report could take another year and cost as much as $30 million -- to be funded with leftover cash in the oil-forfood program.

The British diplomatic response as reported by the BBC is to condemn Americans as a "lynch mob". Someone supposedly called "Lord David Hannay", a former British diplomat is defending Kofi Annan from those redneck peasants (including the DLC).

Apart from the fact that calling someone "Lord David Hannay" is a most improper form of address, it turns out that this creep was "first secretary of the negotiating team for entry into the EC" according to the UN's global security website. So if anyone got kickbacks for betraying the British fishing industry or agriculture, or the excessive payments by British taxpayers to the European Economic Community (as it was called then), Lord Hannay should know who got the brown paper envelopes. He may even know a thing or two about the massive fraud going on at the European Commision, as he worked there, but I prefer to believe that he is simply blind to the wrong-doing of others.

It seems that a bi-partisan alliance of critics of the UN may be forming in the US Congress. Obviously some Rebublican sceptics want the UN reformed others want it abolished. What the DLC report suggests is that the less blinkered supporters of transnational government can see that getting rid of Annan is their best hope for restoring credibility.

Shame that the BBC and "Lord David Hannay" are such provincial ignoramuses that they don't get the message.

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I am attending a wedding tomorrow, of the daughter of a school friend (the other daughter is my god daughter), and this got me thinking about Muslims and Muslim weddings, which are, or so I have been persuasively told, not like our weddings.

When we marry, we marry outside our family, and our weddings are thus gatherings involving and uniting two families, and what is more two families who probably had nothing to do with one another until the bride from one and the groom from the other brought them together. Our marriage customs are, in the patois of the anthropologists, "exogamous". We marry outside the clan.

Muslims, on the other hand, by custom, marry within their own clans, and a Muslim wedding is thus a gathering of and a celebration of just the one family, together with its various friends and hangers-on. Arab marriage customs are "endogamous".

As one of my favourite intellectuals – a French anthropologist called Emmanuel Todd, known to the Anglo-Internet mostly for his bizarre opinion that the Euro-economy is racing ahead of the US economy, but better than that at anthropology, trust me – puts it, in his brilliant book (which fully lives up to its amazingly confident title) The Explanation of Ideology:

From Morocco to Pakistan, from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, a single family form dominates, its unique trait being preferential marriage between paternal parallel-cousins. Typical of the Muslim world and not simply of the Arab one, this characteristic can be observed in Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and among Berbers of Algerian or of Morocco. …

This does not apply to all Muslim societies, because Islam conquered some non-endogamous societies on its perimeter in its early time of military supremacy. But it does apply to the Muslim heartland.

Here in the West, alliances and cooperative ventures that go beyond mere clan membership are commonplace. You may not like, for example, the Labour Party, but at least its upper echelons are not confined to people who are all related to one another. Yet Saddam Hussein's Iraq, to take one particularly famous example, was ruled by a clan all of whom lived in one town, and old habits die hard.

One result (among many) of this peculiar fact is a society in which them and us remain permanently divided. Islam, in Islamic minds, is irreconcilably divided from the rest of us, and similar them/us divisions afflict Muslim society itself. We in the West indulge in plenty of themming and ussing, so to speak. I am, after all, doing it in this posting. But the Islamic version of this habit is now, I think it is fair to say, far more absolute.

This could have been a very, very long posting, but I will keep it short and just say that I think this explains a lot.

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From Mark Steyn, a crystalline summation of the reasons to fight Islamist terrorism here and now, rather than later:

So we're living through a period of extraordinarily rapid demographic and cultural change that broadly favors the Islamists' stated objectives, a period of rapid technological advance that greatly facilitates the Islamists' objectives, and a period of rapid nuclear dissemination that will add serious heft to the realization of their objectives. If the West – and I use the term in the widest sense to mean not just swaggering Texas cowboys but sensitive left-wing feminists in favor of gay marriage – is to survive, it will only be after a long struggle lasting many decades.

The Islamist ideology is profoundly inconsistent with life as we now live it in the West (which includes all that libertarians hold dear, as well as much that we like to decry). Indeed, it is hard to find any aspect of their ideology that is consistent with the West. Because Islamism is inherently exclusionary and expansive (unlike, say, Buddhism), it cannot coexist in the long run with the West, so conflict at some level is inevitable. In a purely cultural and economic contest, the Islamists were doomed, which undoubtedly explains their decision to escalate their struggle with the West to the level of terminal violence.

Steyn notes that demographics indicate that the Islamists are not going to just fade away. Further, unlike crackpot groups in times past, modern transport and communications technology means that Islamists cannot be held at a safe distance from Western societies. So much is historical fact.

Based on what we have seen to date, and setting aside the question of WMDs altogether, I am quite comfortable with the conclusion that the Islamists pose a threat to liberty that cannot be ignored or tolerated. The demonstrated ability and willingness of Islamist terrorists to inflict catastrophic damage on Western societies will eventually lead to either the subjugation of those societies or to their transformation into defensively closed and unfree societies.

I think the question of whether to deal with Islamism on less than a war footing was settled on 9/11/01. The only remaining question is how best to win this war.

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Our own Natalie Solent posted a really good piece at her personal blog last night, about the fact that many, many bad things continue to be done to the world, but that the difference is that they are soon liable to be done with equal relentlessness everywhere, spread around the world evenly, in a way that will make it much harder to notice and complain. Time was when evil was done with maximum ferocity in country A, but hardly done at all in countries B and C, and the evil done by the evil was eventually obvious to all, even to those at first most inclined to support it. Sometimes it was even easier than that:

… To help you along to this conclusion the goddess History primly laid out several countries split into communist and non-communist sections so that you could watch one half sink and one half rise and draw appropriate morals. …

But not any more. Will the day come when that same goddess ordains that we are all to be governed by the same benign, suffocating, righteous, repressive elite, and no comparisons between them ruling and them not ruling will possible, because everywhere will be theirs?

What I fear is that a time will come when there will be no significant examples of difference left in the world. That possibility is still far off but for the first time in history the technology is in place for it to happen. Think about that. …

She mentions that extraordinary moment in history, notable for the fact that hugely important and portentous things were made to not happen:

I am haunted by the tale of the fleets of Zheng He, recounted in Guns, Germs and Steel. China's vast program of exploration, greater than anything Europe ever had, was turned off click! because of some otherwise obscure quarrel between two factions at court. The reason that there was only one switch was that China was unified.

And the worry is that, unlike the blood-sodden grindings and thrashings of evil in the twentieth century, the clicks we are about to be subjected to will be inaudible.

It is a beautiful and melancholy piece. David Carr rewritten by Jane Austen. It contains at least another half dozen sentences I wanted to copy and paste here, but since it is all there, go there, and read it all.

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The United Nations is seen by many, idiotarians and some otherwise quite reasonable people, as the nearest thing we have, in these modern times, to some sort of institution with 'divine' authority. I am sick of hearing about how the United States or UK or any other country is evil because it is acting without authorisation from the UN. It is therefore with glee that I relay any news showing that behind the edifice of self-righteousness and vast amounts of funds is all too human and corrupt an institution.

The Inter Press Service News Agency reports that the United Nations has been hit by a rash of new complaints about sexual abuse of women and children by peacekeepers, civilian staff and humanitarian organisations operating either with the blessings of the world body or under the U.N. flag. In May the news wrote about a UN probe into reports of sexual abuse by Congo staff, but things have 'progressed' since then.

A system-wide investigation was triggered by a report from Annan, who says that six out of 48 U.N. agencies operating in the field have received reports of new cases of sexual exploitation or abuse, mostly by blue-helmeted U.N. peacekeepers, during 2003.

The agencies that received the complaints include the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the U.N. Children's Fund, the World Food Programme and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. Margaret Stanley of Ireland said:

Sexual exploitation, including all forms of trafficking and related offences, particularly in the case of vulnerable persons dependent on international aid, is completely unacceptable.

Rosemary McCreery, Assistant Secretary-General for Human Resources Management, specifically singled out the sexual abuse perpetrated by civilian, police and military contingents in Kosovo and in the Bunia region in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). McCreery said preliminary internal investigations this year had revealed ''widespread abuses'' in DRC.

The 'Washington Times' also reported that a soon-to-be-released book by current and former U.N. employees contends that Bulgarian peacekeepers in Cambodia in the mid-1990s were actually former convicts who agreed to serve six months in the Southeast country in exchange for their freedom at the end of their term. The Bulgarians were "drunk as sailors" and "rape vulnerable Cambodian women", according to the book, Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story From Hell on Earth. Bulgaria's ambassador to the United States has denied the allegations.

The investigation into such allegations are not examplary either and several delegates are complaining that the world body is not doing enough. Karen Lock of South Africa said:

The secretary-general's report had not elaborated extensively on measures taken to improve the conditions of refugees and vulnerable communities. It was hoped that those measures would be reported in greater detail to the appropriate inter-governmental bodies.

So we have oil for food or rather oil-for-terror and money for UN officials and assorted politicians, humanitarian aid that dare not speak its name and a sanctimonious veneer that gives tranzis and Guardianistas of all shades opportunity to draw on moral 'authority' for their deranged vision for the world.

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Ben Hammersley has put a bounty on Kofi Annan's head.

Annan is an object of undeserved worship, and the way to treat objects of undeserved worship is to blow raspberries at them. This Bounty Bar makes a fine raspberry. I make that three incompatible metaphors. Salutations to Photoshop, and to Normblog for the link.

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Kofi Annan has perfected the Holy Man style of public performance. He speaks very quietly, in that exquisitely enunciated African accent, and people just take if for granted that he is a Good Man and a Good Thing. But Per Ahlmark (linked to by Instapundit) shows him to be a less than perfect human being. He describes the inaction and treachery of the UN, as lead by Annan, in first promising, and then failing, to protect the Bosnian Muslims from the Serbs. But, he continues:

No one should be surprised by the UN's inaction, because only the year before it had demonstrated utter incompetence in facing the fastest genocide in history – the slaughter of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in just 100 days. UN forces in Rwanda in 1994 were Annan's responsibility before and during the crisis.

Annan was alerted four months before Hutu activists began their mass killings by a fax message from Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general commanding UN forces in Rwanda. Dallaire described in detail how the Hutus were planning "anti-Tutsi extermination". He identified his source "a Hutu" and reported that arms were ready for the impending ethnic cleansing.

Dallaire requested permission to evacuate his informant and to seize the arms cache. Annan rejected both demands, proposing that Dallaire make the informant's identity known to Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, even though the informant had expressly named the president's closest entourage as the authors of the genocide blueprint.

This is the man who is being seriously proposed as the next ruler of Iraq, because he would be an improvement.

Annan, Ahlmark makes clear, is an object of religious worship, a human repository of millenarian hopes, rather than a man who has earned the adoration he basks in.

A similar error of false adoration was made by the more elderly admirers of Kofi Annan, when younger, with that other African Holy Man of severe actual unholiness, Julius Nyerere. As with Nyerere, it is hard to tell what proportion of Annan's catastrophic blunders to attribute to sheer stupidity, and how much to actual wickedness. I suspect a combination of the two in the form of a murderously stubborn stupidity, which combines intellectual mediocrity with an immoral unwillingness to admit to error, possibly all floating in the same delusions as those that engulf the minds of his worshippers, but perhaps caused by mere vanity.

Robert Mugabe is another such. Although, having a slightly more severe and steely public persona, he is more readily identified as the mass murderer that he is. He should have gone to RADA. At the very least he should lose the Hitler moustache.

The vision Kofi Annan personifies with such theatrical precision is that of a single, infinitely benign World State, which will cure all ills, correct all injustices, right all wrongs, and put down the mighty from their seats. Allelujah. Especially those horrid Americans. That this same man might be an ill, a perpetrator of injustice, a wrongdoer and far too mighty one, and that the vision he personifies might be a road to ruin of our entire species, starting with its poorest and most unfortunate, and that those ghastly Americans may in fact be energetically rescuing the human race from a great and self-sacrificial folly with no good purpose to it whatever, is a thought that is simply not bearable to the World Statists. So they caste it aside. Mere evidence has nothing to do with it. To cease from the worship of Kofi would mean changing their entire way of thinking and believing and feeling, and that they will not do, no matter how much blood soaks their altar.

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David Renwick is scornful of the 52 diplomats who signed a letter denouncing Tony Blair's Iraq policies, and is equally scornful of those who described this letter as a revolt by The Establishment:

The fact that the letter was not signed by a couple of hundred other former ambassadors, including this one, was thought scarcely worthy of mention.

So who were these signatories?

Many of the signatories were former Arabists in the Foreign Office, affectionately known as the Camel Corps. Some members of the Corps have shown a tendency over the years to develop a quite passionate attachment to the Arab world that, unfortunately, has not always been reciprocated by the Arabs. They have tended to concentrate on the crimes of the Israelis, rather than those of the Palestinians. Most of us would prefer to be more even-handed.

Stephen Pollard is even more scornful. He links to a piece by Andrew Roberts in the Times which says that whenever the Foreign Offices protests like this it tends to be wrong:

TONY BLAIR should be delighted that no fewer than 52 former diplomats have written to him to say that his Middle Eastern policy is "doomed to failure". Whenever a collective view has developed in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office it has been only a matter of time – and usually not long, either – before it has been proved spectacularly wrong.

So the 52 are either wrong because they aren't the majority view at the Foreign Office, or because they are. But either way, they are definitely wrong.

Pollard also links to Melanie Phillips, who is even more scornful. To her the Camel Corps is also "The Establishment".

The main personal consequence for the 52 diplomats of having put their heads above the parapet like this has been to draw attention to all the financial interests they have which predispose them towards saying what they have said.

Personally, I am not surprised that people have financial interests in alignment with their opinions. Most of us prefer to make money doing things we believe in. And if these guys believe in making friends with Arabs … For me, the question is, not: Who paid them to say this? It is: Are they right?

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Clearly a great deal of the anti-Americanism that now afflicts this world is stupid, malevolent, small-minded, cowardly, a mask behind which lurks Marxist or sub-Marxist cretinism, and generally ridiculous. But I want to suggest now that some of it may be rational, and even wise.

Consider the phenomenon of a classroom full of semi-unruly school children, who, when confronted with a new teacher, proceed to 'test' that teacher.

A common interpretation of such behaviour is that children "want" or "need" boundaries. That was not my experience. The fewer damn boundaries I faced when I was a child, the happier I was, and this was never more true than when I was stuck in a damn classroom, being made to attend to some stupid intellectual rigmarole that did not interest me or did confuse me or annoy me.

But what all children do want to know is simply, what kind of teacher is this? Like babies who find out how things are put together by trying to take them apart, children try to break a teacher, simply to find out what he is made of. If it turns out that he is indeed the sort of teacher who is going to put in place lots of those boundaries, well, this may be very bad news. But, whether they need such boundaries or not, most children want to know about them, so that they can then proceed with true assumptions in place in their minds about how things are going to be from now on, until this guys goes, and someone else shows up and there is another testing session.

Testing is even more necessary if a new teacher declares his desire to be nice, to allow freedom, to let children choose how they behave, what they will learn etc.. He will find himself being tested to destruction. Teachers get set upon like wounded deer being savaged by wolves.

Here the common explanation is that children behave like wolves because, basically, they are wolves.

Again, I dissent. A classroom full of children confronted by a new, liberal, nice, permissive teacher will, again, need to know where they truly stand with such a person. It is not that children do not like freedom, deciding what they will learn, how they will behave, etc. It is simply that children want very much to know, if such declarations are presented to them, whether they are in fact true, or just pious utopian drivel which will collapse in the face of the first serious challenge, or in the face of the first real decision made by a child which the permissive teacher actually does not approve of.

But there is another even more basic problem with permissive, nice teachers. The problem with a nice teacher is that there are other forces in play which threaten to destroy niceness besides nasty teachers who are only pretending to be nice. There are also the other nasties in the classroom, and a nice teacher is all too likely to be especiallyl bad at restraining these nasties. So why get your hopes up when Mr Nice Teacher makes his first nice speech? On the contrary, join the nasties and try to destroy him, again, to see what he is made of. If he then shows himself both willing and able to quell such a rebellion, good, then it looks like he might be trustworthy, a teacher whose protestations of niceness from now on might be worth betting on. If not, then best to find out now.

Here is a case where the children who are tempted to bet on the new regime do indeed need boundaries – boundaries to protect them.

There is nothing crueller for a child than having his hopes aroused, only to have them dashed by the feebleness of the very person who promised him all these wonders. Nothing is more cruel for a bottom-of-the-pecking-order child in a school to be presented with a utopian manifesto of niceness, to believe it, and then to find that actually it is not true.

Well, you can see where I am going with this, I am sure. To the point where I hardly need to spell it out. But I will anyway.

Much anti-Americanism nowadays is, I surmise, simply the question: What are you guys made of? We hear your fine words. But what, in practice, do they actually mean? If a few insults about cowboys and Macdonalds and stupid Schwarzenegger movies and Oil Company Corruption are enough to get you so angry that you already want to bugger off back home, then clearly your new Pax Americana, or whatever the hell it is, is a total waste of space, and the sooner we all destroy it the better.

A policy of American isolation may not be perfect, but it makes sense. (This is the equivalent of simply not being a "teacher" at all, or trying to become one and then giving up in despair.) A policy of turning the world, or at least certain clearly defined parts of it, into something like an American empire, with clear rules, backed by overwhelming force and the willingness to use it in certainly quite clearly defined circumstances, also makes sense. (This is like being a firm but fair teacher, who sets boundaries, and sticks to them.) What does not make sense is a cloudy, (President Woodrow) Wilsonian dream of universal niceness, unsupported by serious power as soon as such vapidities are seriously challenged.

It is said that just before Thatcher launched the British Naval Task Force that sailed off to the Malvinas Islands in order to turn them back into the Falklands Islands, she confronted her Cabinet with the question: Are we serious about this? Because if we are not, now is the time to say, not when the serious fighting gets under way and young men start to get killed in serious numbers. Nobody spoke up, and the Malvinas were duly Falklandised. America now faces a decision like that, but on a global scale.

Since 9/11, America has strode back onto the world stage, chucking all kinds of Big Words around. America is going to hunt down terrorism not just in America itself and at the borders of America, but everywhere. America is not just going to sit tight and wait for the explosions; it is going to get out there and hunt the bastards down, and topple any or all despotisms that now back terrorism and will not back down and turn them into something far nicer and far less likely to churn out terrorists. Personally, I can entirely see the rationality of this new foreign policy, and I think I support it, provided it is pursued consistently and until it has worked. But, do they mean it? What are the Americans really made of?

Now that the President Bush version of the USA is facing (I would say) its most serious test since 9/11, in the form of an insurgent challenge in Iraq clearly timed to coincide with the forthcoming Presidential election, we are about to find out. Will Bush himself blink? Will the Democrats offer a cut-and-run alternative to the American voters, and if they do, will the American voters grab it or spurn it?

We are, I think, about to find out. And if it turns out that America does not have the stomach for the fight it now faces to impose its new foreign policy on the world, the sooner the rest of us find out, the better.

I do not expect Americans of the sort who read this blog to like this analysis very much. (I expect some corresondingly equal and opposite and rational attacks on Europe's various foreign policies.) But I do expect some Americans at least to understand the rationality of it. The world is already too full of people who trusted America to support them, and then got let down, not a few of them being Iraqis who were sold a pup by President Bush's dad.

But the good news is that if I am right, then although this may now be bad news for Bushism, the longer term outlook for the new American policy, of hunting terrorists everywhere rather than just waiting for them to show up, may be much better than it now looks. If Bush, backed by America as a whole, does tough out this latest little flurry of fighting – if, in other words the Tet analogy does not hold (military victory but political defeat) – then this particular strand of anti-Americanism will weaken rather than grow.

For we will then know where we stand. Even those who do not like where they stand will at least know where they stand. And those us who do like where we stand will like it very much.

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International news agency Reuters reports that a van, containing Arabic language tapes and detonators, has been searched close to the scene of today's mass murders in Spain. So far, the authorities have maintained that the atrocities were the handiwork of terror group ETA, but there could be a possibility that Islamo-fascists had a hand in this affair, possibly even to the point of directing the operations.

The truth is that no-one can be certain for sure, and we must be mindful about jumping to conclusions. But given Spain's support for the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, and Spain's proximity to north Africa, there is a serious possibility that Islamists may have played a part in this.

There is also the worrying thought that terror groups, who have come under growing pressure from law enforcement agencies and the military since 9/11, are becoming more desperate and hence willing to co-operate with those they would have previously ignored.

If true, it makes the sneering article by Simon Jenkins in today's Spectator, in which he mocks Blair's concerns over global terror networks and their access to WMDs, not only wrongheaded, but frivolous in the extreme. London, Paris, Berlin or Rome could be next. Nothing to worry about eh, Simple Simon?

A black day for Spain. My heart goes out to the people of that wonderful country.

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Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism
Peter Schweizer
Doubleday, 2002

"It's surprising what you can accomplish when no one is concerned about who gets the credit." This lettered sign stood on Reagan's desk during his presidency and since it reflected his attitude, he cannot have worried much that his own part in the downfall of Communism has been seriously underestimated, a judgement which Peter Schweizer labours to correct in this book. For its theme, Reagan's War, was the war against communism. By leaving out other aspects and events which did not touch on it – Israel, the Palestinians, the Lebanon, the Falklands, or the home economy – an exaggerated impression may have been given of Reagan's singlemindedness. Even the inclusion of the assassination attempt, so nearly successful, is with an emphasis on Reagan's belief that he had been preserved by God to conduct this war.

Reagan began political life as a Roosevelt-admiring Democrat. He had been aware of the attempt by communists to dominate and subvert the American film industry as early as 1946 and become involved in countering it, almost certainly sidetracking his career as a film star. The Korean War (1950-3) reinforced his attitude and, while still a Democrat he campaigned for Eisenhower, though disappointed later by his lukewarm anti-communism, and even less impressed by Nixon. This was also the time when anti-anti-communism became intellectually fashionable, Reagan encountering it when he was hired by General Electric to host and act in GE Theatre on television. Travelling round the country as the company's roving ambassador to its plants and business contacts he was able to give speeches entirely based on his own views, unhampered by any kind of censorship. Schweizer distances Reagan from Senator McCarthy, who, he mentions, was initially supported by John F. Kennedy and never censured by him (p. 37). Reagan met Nancy Davis, who became his second wife (after his first wife Jane Wyman left and divorced him) through being asked to exonerate her of communist connections, apparently a case of mistaken identity.

Reagan parted from General Electric in 1962; his attacks on the Kennedy Administration were inconvenient when GE was being investigated for price-fixing by the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy. Also GE Theatre was, perhaps inevitably, losing its popularity. But he was still in television theatre, and this was the year of his last movie, The Killers. It was also the year in which he met Senator Barry Goldwater, and found they had much in common, politically and in their love of the outdoor Western way of life, typified by horse-riding. Reagan's fluent speech-making particularly impressed Goldwater, as well as the Republicans who were running him for President. His uncompromisingly anti-communist speech on the eve of the 1964 election made a tremendous impression nationally, but Goldwater still lost in a landslide to Johnson.

Johnson, and Nixon who replaced him in 1968, never fought to win in Vietnam, as Reagan urged, nor does Schweizer suggest that the US public would have been willing to try. The policy of both Republican and Democrat administrations was to accommodate to the Communist powers, in the belief that both the USSR and China would wish to reciprocate, and also help them to some sort of compromise in Vietnam. In fact, the USSR planned and carried out expansion on all fronts, military and nuclear, naval and territorial in Africa and Latin America and finally, Afghanistan.

Reagan was on the sidelines nationally, but had to face local subversion during his terms as governor of California from 1966 to 1974, during riots, takeovers and sit-ins by students on the Berkeley campus. He put himself forward as a Republican candidate for the presidency in 1968, but the party preference for Nixon was overwhelming and Reagan supported him loyally from then on, and even undertook missions for him to Taiwan, South Vietnam and South Korea. He did, however, challenge Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976, but lost again. The Carter presidency that followed probably saw US international status at its nadir, culminating in the fall of the Shah of Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Reagan, who this time had won the Republican nomination fairly easily, now beat Carter soundly to enter the White House in 1981.

To put it simply, Reagan now reversed the US foreign policy of detente of more than a decade. "Going against the advice of the majority of his cabinet, Reagan commenced the largest peacetime military buildup in history." (p. 140) Schweizer does not record how he got the enormous appropriations through Congress. His strategy was not so much one of direct confrontation, as of competition: to keep up, the USSR would end up bankrupt. The bill that Reagan ran up for the USSR to pay is estimated as $36-$44bn per annum. (p. 284) "They cannot vastly increase their military productivity because they've already got their people on a starvation diet," he explained. (p. 141) This strategy, it would be fair to say, did not have popular support, and as the year 1984 for re-election came, he lost support for it from past presidents Ford and Nixon, from Republican business men and State Governors and even key members within his cabinet, but, as his National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane commented, "The president would have willingly lost the second election if it came down to changing his Soviet policy." (p. 229) Reagan so often persisted in driving through his own policies that it is difficult to see where the idea came from that he was some sort of manipulated puppet, or even went with the flow of some inevitable train of events.

If the home opposition was considerable, to the extent that the Kremlin hoped to rely on it, that of the left in Europe was nearly hysterical. From released KGB and other archives Schweizer documents how much the USSR and East European governments funded the peace movements both in Europe and the USA, as well as terrorists such as the Red Army Faction in West Germany. As a quid pro quo, as it were, Reagan saw to it that arms in large quantities were sent to the anti-communist resistence in Afghanistan. His suggestions for a Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), while mocked by the opposition at home as "Star Wars", is now known to have really frightened the Russians. That all this might have risks and that Dr Strangelove was actually living in Moscow is illustrated by an anecdote of the applause at a vodka-lubricated party there for a general's suggestion that the nuclear button should be
pressed now before it was too late. (p. 243)

Gorbachev owed his selection [as Soviet leader by the Politburo] to the pressures Reagan was exerting on the Soviet system," Schweizer claims. (p. 245) In fact, Gorbachev, recommended by the veteran Soviet politician Gromyko as a new man "with a nice smile but ... teeth of iron", failed, with his glasnost and perestroika, to reform communism and provide both guns and butter. Although the two leaders seemed to have hit it off in personal terms – "Gorbachev immediately started to like Reagan," recalled a Soviet diplomat (p. 254) – Reagan refused all Soviet disarmament offers, particularly in exchange for abandoning SDI, an irony in that the US has never followed it up.

Communism collapsed after Reagan left office at the end of 1988. In 1989 the system fell like a pack of cards; the USSR could no longer support the East European regimes and first Poland, then Hungary and Czechoslovakia and, in November, East Germany replaced their communist governments, and the Berlin Wall came down. "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Reagan had demanded, speaking at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987. In due course the Soviet Union itself disintegrated and Gorbachev was swept away in the debris of what he had tried to prop up. Doubtless in his comfortable academic position, TIME's "Man of the Decade" is explaining away the unfortunate accident that brought about this catastrophe.

Reagan is now a tragic victim of Alzheimer's dementia, a fate bravely announced by himself and given in the last document printed in Reagan In His Own Hand. It is now up to his critics and detractors (and there are plenty of these, vide the Introduction, pp. 1 - 4) to assess his record and agree with, or refute what the Chairman of Solidarity declared in Warsaw in 1989: "Reagan was the main author of the victory of the free world over the ‘evil empire'." (p. 278)

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Now that it seems Saddam Hussain may not in fact have any weapons of mass destruction, Dubya and Blair are being pilloried for having gone to war to oust that particular mass murderous fascist regime.

Sometime in the not too distant future, when it looks like war with North Korea's mass murderous regime is inevitable, Dubya and Blair (or their successors) will be pilloried for threatening war because the North Koreans have weapons of mass destruction.

And it will be the same people doing the pillorying in both cases.

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Perhaps the 'idiotarian' opposition to the US is over the top, a bit like suggesting that Pol Pot was better than Richard Nixon because Nixon taxed more people. But I offer three honest reasons (well, one is cowardly) for opposing British military intervention and occupation of Iraq:

1. The British armed forces are not properly equipped. I did say so beforehand. Let me be clear: if the cause is just, but the equipment is not ready, kit up first, then go to war.

   N.B. This is not an argument against US intervention in Iraq. I note approvingly that in the Second World War, the US federal government starting arming before launching assaults on Axis-occupied territories.

2. This one will really not be popular on Samizdata.net... Suppose that it is not possible to defeat Islamic fundamentalism by force of arms - at least as far as the UK is concerned. A final 'victory' worldwide that follows half a dozen nuclear terrorist outrages in the UK and a racial war in most of the UK's towns is not worth it. As far as the UK is concerned, it might be safer to appease and let others do the fighting. I think of Switzerland not declaring war with Germany over the treament of the Jews in 1941.
3. To be a libertarian must include at least some reservations about using other people as ends for one's own purpose. I do not have the right to force one person (A) to do something to another (B) that I think is moral, but that (A) did not wish to do, even though (B) may deserve it. This means among other things that I do not have the right to levy money by compulsory taxes in Yorkshire, to pay for my pet social-engineering experiments in Basra. I should add that the argument against compulsory aid for the disabled is the same.

In effect a libertarian who says it is fine to use tax-funded resources to liberate Bagdad from tyranny and economic ruin, and argue that it is not alright to use a fraction of the money to liberate a paraplegic from economic disadvantage, could be said to be inconsistent.

Failing to recognise the points I list above could lead to the following sorts of problems:

1. A British soldier killed because he lent his body armour to a colleague. This sort of thing happened in the Crimean War with coats, right boots, blankets etc. In Kuwait the British troops got the nickname 'the Borrowers' from the US troops. I imagine that the French troops in the Crimean saw their British colleagues in much the same way.
2. Consider this scenario: by the end of the 'war on terrorism' in 2015, France has not had a single nuclear terrorist strike, the US has had 20, the UK has had six and Spain, Italy and Poland one apiece. Who's the idiot?
3. In 2010 President of the EU Blair announces a "libertarian" programme of the Peace Corps: all 18 year olds will serve in a peace-keeping unit to promote the values of freedom around the world. The move is popular as it cuts youth unemployment in the EU from 45% to 40% and crime.

I repeat: removing Saddam Hussein is great. So why worry about all the lies or mistaken intelligence? It matters because we may be asked to believe another set of pretexts. It would be nice if the next lot were a bit more coherent and plausible. Of course it will be harder to persuade many people who swallowed the "45 minute" threat line of Tony Blair's. Refusing to support a war just because Tony Blair says it is right does not make someone an idiot.

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Instapundit links to this:

The capture by the United States of thousands of centrifuges on board a German-owned vessel, the BBC China, en route to Libya has raised suspicions in Washington and London that Col Gaddafi offered to abandon his weapons programme after threats from America, rather than the lengthy British and American diplomacy vaunted by Tony Blair.

Instapundit is pleased because this report says what he and lots of others have also said, that it was American military muscle and the threat of more of it, not merely polite requests to Col Gadaffi to be nicer from Blair or his fellow Europeans. Quite so. The idea that recent American military activity had nothing to do with Gaddafi's change of heart is very far fetched.

But what irritates me is that Blair, the Telegraph, Instapundit, the lot of them, are all talking about "threats" and "diplomacy" as if these were two entirely different and opposite things, when in truth threats and diplomacy go hand in hand, and neither can work properly without the other.

Take this particular set of circumstances. How were those American threats communicated, if not through diplomatic channels, and how did Col Gaddafi signal his desire to comply with American wishes if not through that same diplomatic process? And did not the Americans then respond very diplomatically to the Colonel's climbdown?

As for that non-American diplomacy which is imagined by some to have persuaded Gol Gaddafi to change his ways, well, this report illustrates that this too would have consisted of threats, diplomatically communicated and responded to, in this case the threat of not allowing such things as centrifuges to journey from China to Libya on ships controlled by those doing the threatening. An unwillingness to make any such threats would have rendered European diplomacy toothless, and hence ineffective. And that seems to be what happened.

But that is not my central point. All I here insist on is the true as opposed to sentimental and ignorant meaning of the word "diplomacy". Diplomacy doesn't mean being nice only. It also means being nasty, while explaining nicely – or perhaps not so nicely – what you want in exchange for being less nasty.

What does anyone think that diplomats actually say?

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The cover article of the latest New Statesman is by William Dalrymple, and is called simply Islamophobia. The value of the piece for me is that it puts the case against the current trend of US (and UK) policy as strongly as I have ever read it. War is the health of the state, and it will bring ID cards and tougher searches at airports, blah blah. Maybe so, but that hardly amounts to the collapse of civilisation as we know it. This (this being the concluding paragraphs of Dalrymple's piece), on the other hand, just might:

Meanwhile, Tony Blair's neoconservative chums in Washington, immune to the justifiable fears of the Muslim world, talk blithely of moving on from Iraq next year to attack Iran and Syria. They have also invited Franklin Graham, the Christian evangelist who has branded Islam a "very wicked and evil" religion, to be the official speaker at the Pentagon's annual service - and this immediately prior to his departure for Iraq to attempt to convert the people of Baghdad to Christianity.

All the while, the paranoia and bottled-up rage in the Muslim world grows more uncontrollable, and the attacks by Islamic militants gather pace, gaining ever wider global reach and sophistication. As long as British Muslims remain at the receiving end of our rampant Islamophobia, and remain excluded from the mainstream of British life, we can expect only still greater numbers of disenfranchised Muslims in the UK to turn their back on Britain and rally to the extremists.

As Jason Burke points out at the end of his excellent book Al-Qaeda, "The greatest weapon in the war on terrorism is the courage, decency, humour and integrity of the vast proportion of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims. It is this that is restricting the spread of al-Qaeda, not the activities of counter-terrorism experts. Without it, we are lost. There is indeed a battle between the west and men like Bin Laden. But it is not a battle for global supremacy. It is a battle for hearts and minds. And it is a battle that we, and our allies in the Muslim world, are currently losing."

This month's upsurge of rampant Islamophobia in Britain, widely reported in Muslim countries, is the last thing we need in such a desperately volatile climate.

That "upsurge" is the Kilroy-Silk affair, and the surge of support that K-S received, in particular, from the readers of the Daily Express, together with the increasing number of attacks of British mosques there have been lately.

The point is this. More airport searches for us, or for that matter even that military 'quagmire' that the opponents of military action in Iraq have been earnestly predicting and for which some may even have been hoping, is as nothing – nothing – when set beside the danger that Dalrymple is describing. What he fears is a massive influx of intelligent, educated (much of it scientifically educated) talent into the ranks of the terrorists, as a result of the thrust of Western policy towards Islam in general, and in particular as a result of the inability of anti-Islamists to make any distinction between mere Muslims, and outright terrorists. Give a dog a bad name, in other words.

I don't like Islam one little bit, because I consider its central tenets to be untrue, and I dislike untruth. (God does not exist. Muhammed is not his prophet. Etc.) I feel similarly about Christianity. (God does not exist. God did not send his son anywhere.) I further dislike Islam because so many Muslims these days, unlike most of the Christians I have much to do with, seem to take their religion really seriously and really to believe it to be true, which I find frightening. Who knows what the hell these people will deduce from their false axioms? It only takes a tiny few. (In the past it only took a tiny few Christians to set the tone of entire centuries.) So, yes, despite the fact that I am well aware of the fact – which of course it is – that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are entirely peaceable and decent and morally blameless people, and in millions upon millions of cases I dare say a lot better people than I am, I am "Islamophobic". So, am I helping to push the world into a pit of barbarity, just by saying such things as I do earlier in this paragraph?

Setting aside entirely the moral rights and wrongs of the matter (i.e. am I entitled to put what I put in the previous paragraph?) is current US policy (and the attitudes of people like me that accompany it), as a matter of fact, having the effect on the overwhelming majority of hitherto non-terroristic Muslims that Dalrymple describes? Is George W. Bush making Al-Qaeda recruitment harder or easier than it would otherwise have been? Is GWB frightening the Muslim world into abjuring terrorism, or enraging it into taking it up big time? In short, are we winning the War on Terrorism, or losing it?

If people want to comment on that by veering off into the realms of the related but utterly distinct matter of whether we are morally or intellectually or politically entitled to be rude to Muslims, or whether they started it, or which is worse, our Islamophobia or their anti-Semitism and anti-Great-Satanism – they should obviously feel free. I can't stop such comments. But the great strategic question is surely: whether, as a matter of fact, people like William Dalrymple are right or wrong.

My tentative opinion has always been – i.e. since 9/11 – that whereas some Muslims are no doubt being enraged into terrorism by US policy, many more are being scared away from it. But am I right?

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Yesterday's Guardian contained an article that is an interesting sign of the times.

Says the subheading:

The 'war on terror' is being used as cover for a sustained assault on the independence and progressive agenda of NGOs, says Abigail Fielding-Smith

It may seem like a cheap joke to go on about what a perfect name that is for the piece: Abigail Fielding-Smith. Abigail. The hyphen. But I think this name is more than just a joke, because what is happening here is that an entire Ruling Class that was, which was quietly but firmly taking over the world, with no muss and no fuss, is being rudely challenged by a new Ruling Class that is: America!!!

The horror.

The so-called "war on terror" is radically reformulating many aspects of world politics, not least the international nongovernmental organisation (NGO) sector.

"War on terror". So uncouth, unnuanced and confrontational.

Broadly defined as not-for-profit, autonomous organisations working in the global public interest, NGOs play a pivotal role in international society. They have a strong advocacy voice in intergovernmental politics and are viewed by some as the "third sector" (after intergovernmental bodies and corporations) of international society. Kofi Annan calls them "the conscience of the world".

Northern governments respected the NGOs' flexibility, commitment and capacity to respond to (and prevent) international crises in a way that the interstate system could not. Consequently, the proportion of aid budgets given to intergovernmental organisations such as the UN decreased during this period, while funding for NGOs rose steadily. International NGOs now receive one-quarter of the average northern government's total aid budget; the French government gives them nearly half.

Abigail Hyphen Stroke Money was quietly taking over the world, in other words.

But now those infuriatingly heroic Arabs with their hijacked airplanes have really upset the apple cart, haven't they? They've only gone and got the Americans seriously interested in the big wide world out there. And instead of just paying for them in the old style, the Americans have started trampling all over the shins of the NGOs. With the result that those ghastly Arab resistance heroes, never inclined to make very many fine distinctions, now make no distinction at all between the Great Satan and the Lesser Satans of Oxfam, the Red Cross, and the rest of them.

In Iraq, many NGOs have tried to distance themselves from coalition governments by refusing to accept their money. The attack on the neutral ICRC in Baghdad on October 27 demonstrated the futility of this attempt. As Alistair Dutton, emergencies officer for Cafod, explained: "If our government is the occupying power and we are distributing food, where is the distinction between those who wage war and those who distribute humanitarian goods? Politicians have chosen to coin the phrase 'humanitarian war' and they have therefore co-opted us, arguably."

Distinctions are further blurred in Iraq by the unprecedented use of for-profit organisations in the reconstruction operation.

Those vulgar Americans. Not content with having a "war", they also want to do trade everywhere.

It gets worse:

Another source of pressure on NGOs' independence is the political environment of the "war on terror". While the threat of terrorism is real and important, there is no international agreement on what it is. The concern in the NGO community, particularly in the US, is that the taint of terrorism may be used to discredit the work of politically dissenting international NGOs, or even to stop their funding.

The piece concludes:

Many of these trends existed before September 11. But the "war on terror" has created an acute need for NGOs' international expertise while at the same time providing justification for glossing over or rooting out their progressive political agenda. At a time when it is needed most, "the conscience of the world" looks vulnerable.

The NGOs are still in business, but they've been demoted. They used to be in charge, but now they are only taking orders. It must be very galling.

This posting is about what is happening and about what Abigail Fielding-Smith thinks about it, and it may well be that the lady doth protest too much, and that actually the NGOs are not really being permanently stopped from becoming a new global Civil Service, and that they are merely having to duck and weave a little. But I must tell you that, insofar as what Fielding-Smith says is actually happening, Brian Hyphen Micklethwait (and I do have some hyphenage in my ancestry and quite a few people of the Fielding-Smith persuasion among my cousins) is cautiously optimistic about this trend.

Which is just one more irony. When it comes to her final intentions for the world, Fielding-Smith is a rabid statist, with her as the state. Yet meanwhile, she regrets the decline of "Non-Governmental" organisations. I'm leary of the state, usually, but when the US State barges in on the NGOs, I am, for the time being, delighted. My only worry is: is it really happening? Here's hoping.

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Following up the somewhat irrelevant but entirely excellent and useful comment number one on the previous post, here's Ananova:

Reports are coming in that Saddam Hussein has been captured in Iraq.

The reports, from the Iran News Agency and an Iraqi Kurdish leader, claim he's been arrested in Tikrit.

There has been no confirmation from the US Defence Department or the Ministry of Defence.

"Saddam Hussein was arrested in his hometown of Tikrit," the agency IRNA quoted top Iraqi leader Jalal Talabani as saying. It gave no further details.

The reports have sparked celebrations by hundreds of people in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk.

In Baghdad, a US spokeswoman told reporters that a "very important" announcement would be made at a news conference scheduled for 3pm local time (1200 GMT) but did not say who would be the speaker.

Here's hoping it's true.

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There is an excellent round up of the current nuclear threat in today's Opinion Journal.

According to another government study, Pyongyang has also been at work on two very large "electrical generating" stations that, upon completion, will produce sufficient spent nuclear fuel to yield 200 kilograms of plutonium, enough to manufacture approximately 30 nuclear weapons a year.

It is a long article but well worth the time it takes to read it.

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At last, the people of the world unite to take a stand against tyranny:

Casting aside petty differences and forging new allegiances, UN ambassadors said they would ignore New York's smoking ban, imposed five months ago and extended to the UN this week.

Now that's what I call multilateralism!

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Just for those who haven't heard yet, and timed to coincide with the world-wide release of Terminator III, Arnold Schwarzenegger has decided to run for the Governorship of California. His politics are described as being socially liberal and economically conservative. Does this mean he's a thinly-disguised libertarian?

I don't know, but what I do like is what he said about the current Democrat Governor of California, Gray Davis, who's just run up a record state budget deficit of $24 billion dollars:

The politicians are fiddling, fumbling and failing. The man that is failing the people more than anyone is Gray Davis. He is failing them terribly, and this is why he needs to be recalled, and this is why I'm going to run for governor.

Whichever way you want to put it, $24 billion dollars is a whole heap of schmoola, and the taxpayers of California, who're expected to put their hands in their pocket to repay it, have just acquired themselves a rather interesting candidate to help them do it. May the best tax and spending terminator win!

There is, of course, one other thing which must be said about this news story. It will be back! (sorry)

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How cool is this, says Alan Forrester without any question mark.

The United States is planning to build an unmanned hypersonic aircraft capable of striking any target in the world within two hours.

I know what he means, but I would prefer a question mark in there somewhere. Talk about power projection.

It appears that the philosophy is a development of the "shock and awe" tactics developed for the Iraq war.

According to Darpa: "The intent is to hold adversary vital interests at risk at all times, counter anti-access threats, serve as a halt-phase shock force and conduct suppression of enemy air-defence and lethal strike missions as part of integrated strategic campaigns in the 21st Century."

In other words the United States will be able, using aircraft based on its own territory, to strike at individual targets without warning and without the need for foreign bases.

The whole project goes under the acronym Falcon - Force Application and Launch from the Continental United States.

The military journal Jane's Defence Weekly, which broke the story in its latest edition, says that as well as this futuristic plan, the research agency also proposes a shorter term (by 2010) weapons system.

What I have in mind is the Antoine Clarke question. Imagine the button for this gadget on the desk of your least favourite President of the United States of, say, the last twenty years. Think Bill Clinton, wanting to divert attention from his latest sordid and very public grilling about his sex life, with the power to make big (but cheap) bangs anywhere on earth with a guarantee of no American body bags and timed to the second.

I'm starting to feel about Bush the way I now feel about Thatcher. She massively strengthened the British state, and its general habit of doing what it likes despite all criticism, for purposes (getting the state a bit more out of the British economy than it had been) that I approved of, and was then ousted and replaced by a very different political tendency. Now Bush is doing the same with the US state, to do other things I approve of.

And Bush too will eventually be toppled, if only by the inexorable force of the US Constitution that will only allow him eight years at the wheel. In a decade from now, when the Democrats have got their act together and when they get to own the White House for another decade, the world will be ruled by armed social workers for whom global gun control will be only the start. (Show us your banking records or bangs in two hours.) Bush will never get to play with this new toy. His successors will.

That's "how cool" this is.

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A gaggle of envoys from the European Union were in Washington today where President Bush presented them with a list of his demands. They are as follows:

1. Stop trying to get in my way
2. Stop being so French
3. Stop trying to pretend that you matter
4. Kiss my Texan arse
5. Do the world a favour and die.

The envoys said that they had never been so insulted. Mr.Bush told them that they should come to Washington more often.

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People involved in political arguments often argue as if arguments are the entire point. Yet the current disputes within the USA, within Britain, and between the USA and "Europe" are as much about who we are, as they are about who is right.

Take France. Ruled by a bunch of sleazebags, right? Their "arguments" for not going to war against Iraq were, if that's the way you are inclined to think, feeble in the extreme. X ergo Y and therefore it follows Z, blah blah blah.

But what if the real arguments now are not about who is right, but about who we are?

One of the oddities of British life is the extraordinary expensiveness and dramatic complexity of British TV car adverts. Something to do with a car cartel, I believe, which means there's money to burn getting each buyer to step forward. And one TV car advert in particular goes straight to the heart of the France question, and the "who we are" question. I refer to the one that advertises the Renault Clio, by claiming that this car possesses "va-va-woom". Various other things do also, like posh French-type birds posing in Mies van der Rohe style modern houses, while various other things don't, like an over-coiffured small dog, and a strange looking character wearing nothing but a pair of stars-and-stripes bathing trunks and a cowboy hat, and waving guns.

This last one is so ghastly an apparition that Thierry Henry – the ultra-skilled black French footballer who plays for Arsenal (and France) with great distinction and who is in amongst all this, narrating with good humoured subtlety – just stares blankly into the camera. That's all the comment we need. Those ghastly cowboys are just, you know, ghastly, while those (us) continentals are so suave and sophisticated and cultured.

It's also a clever ploy to use a black man for all this, because smuggled in there (but totally deniable) is the suggestion that the cowboy is probably the type of hick who'd be bothered by Thierry Henry's blackness, whereas you, oh viewer, are not, are you? Maybe I'm reading too much into things there, but I don't think so.

What the advertisers are betting on is that there are a lot of Brits who think of themselves most definitely as on the French side of the France/Anglosphere confrontation, and who are willing to put large wads of money where their preferred identify is. And there surely are. This advert has been running for quite some time, and they'd have pulled it by now if it didn't do the business. If Renault's sold better by being smothered in Union Jacks and sat in by British bulldogs, then that's what they'd have. Lots of Japanese companies sell stuff by waving the Union Jack and sponsoring ultra-British things like show-jumping.

Samuel Huntington (in Clash of Civilisations) saw all this kind of thing coming. He saw that whereas the communism/capitalism thing was about who and what was right (X ergo Y), now it's all about who and what we are. This, for example, is what the Euro argument is really about. "Economic interests" have nothing to do with it. Who we are is what that is about.

And this is why, in this new world, "we" (whoever, exactly "we" are) need to go beyond the narrow logicality of political debate – beyond X ergo Y, into the territory of cultural affinities and coolnesses, the territory of who has va-va-voom and who does not.

This is why blogging is such a crucial addition to our persuasive arsenal. We can argue on our blogs. And, as part of and in among and in between the arguing, we can tease out the va-va-voom of things.

I never know with Samizdata postings whether there'll be lots of comments, or some, or hardly any, or none. If there are comments on this, no doubt some will be easily summarisable: "I'm not French!!" But I'm hoping that others may be more nuanced.

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Those who look for symbolism as a guide to events might like to note that 'Evian' spelled backwards is 'Naive'. Whilst I would never suggest that that is anything except concidental I do reckon that even a casual observer of the latest G8 conference in that Southern French town would have noticed that idealism (to the extent that it ever existed at all) has given way to thorny realpolitik.

No amount of mutual backslapping and bonhomie can disguise the fact that this latest conference was little more than a cosmetic exercise in alleged unity of purpose where none, in fact, exists. Quite aside from the fact that US-EU tensions are hardly going to be settled by a couple of days of diplomatic chinwagging in the Alps, the early exit of George Bush illustrates pretty effectively where he feels his priorities lie:

President George W Bush was not present for the summit's final session on Tuesday, having left the previous day on the Middle Eastern leg of his foreign tour.

Nothing could illustrate more clearly that the Americans regard the Middle-East as a more pressing concern than the latest round of plaintiff appeals for 'international somethingorother' from the likes of Chirac and Shroeder. The former demands attention, the latter can be safely stacked in the pending tray.

But even aside from that, there are cracks which just cannot be papered over with reams of polite communiques. Even a left-of-centre and devoutly internationalist British PM is pressing for a different worldview than the one assiduously promoted from Paris. The result will be no single worldview at all.

I suspect that this G8 malarkey has had its day and not because of the travelling circus of the 'Great Unwashed' wreaking havoc and gutting town-centres in its wake, but rather because the reasons for its inception just no longer hold true. This annual round of global group-hugging was only important when it was felt (perhaps not unreasonably) that the interests of the world's great industrial powers were converging. They are not converging any longer and, if anything, they are diverging. This is not so much globalisation as polarisation.

This will likely not be the last G8 summit. There will probably be more in the future. But I suspect we have seen the last meaningful one and that the summits of tomorrow will be prove to be nothing more than an exercise in formality and politeness where the delegates exchange chit-chat whilst waiting for something bigger and more exciting to come along.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's this or nothing. Seriously, there's been nothing here for nearly twenty four hours, so I'm going to write about Tesco moisturised and elasticated No Fuss 2 in 1 anti-dandruff shampoo and conditioner, because it's a subject I feel strongly about. (Sorry, I can find a link to the Tesco enterprise as a whole, but no direct link to any information about this particular product.)

For the last few decades I've always assumed that shampoo, by its nature, is something that can't be entirely convenient. Does the lid hold the shampoo in tightly? If so, it will be a bother opening it, by unscrewing it or by otherwise gouging it open, and that means you'll tend to keep it open, and that means that it loses its moisture and gets stuck at the bottom of the container, and you have to hold it upside down for about a minute, waiting for it to appear, or perhaps dilute it, which risks diluting it too much and turning it into an uncontrollable liquid rather than a semi-controllable sludge (no disrespect intended). Then, once it has appeared, I assumed it to be a law of nature that not all of it would end up in my hair, but that some of it would assemble itself just outside the hole in the container from which it had emerged, where it would dry out and perhaps block the hole. Which is why I probably should keep the container shut, by screwing it shut again, or by forcing the lid back on. (Remember, a lid that is easy to force short is a lid that can easily fall open again, and that defeats the purpose of the thing.) But that's so much bother that I can seldom be bothered.

Actually, the procedure I eventually got around to using was to put the lid back on, but to keep the container upside down so that I didn't have to wait for it to journey laboriously to the exit every time.

I hope this is making sense.

So, let's take those two adjectives that I apply (for they do not appear on the container) to the latest Tesco shampoo (and conditioner) one at a time. Moisturised, and elasticated.

Moisturised. This means that the shampoo (and conditioner) remains soggy, and does not dry out. How did they do this? I don't know. I merely note that they have done it. I no longer, with Tesco 2 in 1 shampoo (and conditioner), have to hold the shampoo (and conditioner) upside down for a minute in order to get shampoo (and conditioner) out of the container, or remember to keep it shut but upside down. This is a definite advance.

Elasticated. This means that the shampoo (and conditioner) no longer hangs about outside the container or in the exit of the container. It gets sucked back in again automatically, as a consequence of its own inner structural strength, like a semi-liquid three dimensional rubber band. How did they do this? I don't know. I merely note that they have done it. The container stays open and upright for weeks at a time, yet remains looking as if it has only just been opened.

"No fuss" indeed. Remarkable. Truly remarkable.

Note that this is not only a technical achievement. Equally impressive is that the soapologists set themselves, or had set for them, the right task to perform in the first place. The right answers were preceded by the right questions being identified as the ones to answer. Left to their own merely technical devices the soapologists might not have arrived at moisturisation and elastication as the targets to aim at for shampoo (or for conditioner).

What with gulf wars and peace processes and Robert Mugabe and the European Union, it is easy to forget that underneath and beyond all that, civilisation keeps quietly advancing. There are those who say that increases in mere comfort and convenience mean nothing, but I disagree. For me an item like Tesco No Fuss 2 in 1 shampoo (and conditioner) signifies something both good and honest and splendid in and of itself, but it also points the way to larger potential triumphs by the forces of civilisation in the future.

Suppose "peace processes" were conducted as logically and diligently as was the search for moisturisation and elastication with regard to Tesco No Fuss 2 in 1 shampoo (and conditioner). Might we not now have rather more peace to go round? If the governing of Zimbabwe was done as well as the managing of Tesco, wouldn't that be a fine thing?

Yes it would. But the secret is not merely to put Tesco executives, fresh from their shampoo (and conditioner) triumph, in charge of peace processes or of Zimbabwe. That wouldn't work. We know this from experience. What needs somehow to be contrived is a world in which the rules followed in the search for shampoo (and conditioner) moisturisation and elastication are somehow made to apply also to the search for peace, and for good Zimbabwean government. We somehow need a free market in peace, and in Zimbabwean government.

Easier said than done. But as the story of Tesco No Fuss 2 in 1 shampoo (and conditioner) tells us, if you can frame the question right, that's a huge step towards getting the right answer.

I have another question which is probably more easily answered. What is conditioner? It sounds good, but what is? And why the need to combine it with shampoo?

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It has been a while since I tripped over one of these. Let me state up front that I have no reason to think Richard Poe is a member of the tinfoil hat and black helicopter brigade, so I read his stuff with rather more respect that I do on some other sites I could mention. Thus I will try to examine his thesis without the usual clothespeg-on-the-nose I use when looking at conspiracy theories. He has written an article called The 9-11 Conspiracy: We Need a Truth Commission, in which he suggest that that:

Though cautiously worded, Judge Baer's decision has implications beyond the 9-11 case. Dissident experts ranging from former CIA director James Woolsey to Yossef Bodansky, director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, have long alleged that America may be under "low-intensity" or "asymmetric" attack by foreign powers hiding behind "false flag" operatives such as bin Laden.

[...]

Through the Clinton years, Big Media and Big Government systematically suppressed evidence of foreign involvement in such operations as the 1995 attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the downing of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 (probably by a missile). But the evidence continues to grow.

[...]

Moreover, the number of America's enemies abroad may be larger than we have been led to believe. The alliance which George Bush named the "Axis of Evil" -- minimally defined as Iran, Iraq, North Korea and their "terrorist allies" -- may itself be a false flag operation under whose cover such envious powers as Russia, China -- and perhaps even the European Union, under French and German domination -- may have secretly cooperated to oppose what they see as the threat of U.S. global hegemony.

I will not even attempt to address Richard's domestic issues as I cannot get to grips in my mind with his theory on why both the previous and current US governments would cover up what he is suggesting they are covering up, so I will just look at the other main thrust: the asymmetric attack by foreign powers.

It is very unclear what the objective of these shadowy people behind the 'false flag' gig would be, given the nature of the actual and putative attacks. Blowing up a US government building in Oklahoma City, of all places, would gain what for whom? For a born-in-the-USA individual such as Tim McVeigh, who may feel Oklahoma City actually features in the grand scheme of things, perhaps the attack made perfect sense as a strike against tyranny and day-care centres. But who outside the USA could find Oklahoma State on a map without considerable squinting, let alone Oklahoma City, or see attacking it as a stepping stone to overthrowing the hated hegemonic power? Did mission planners in Moscow, Paris or Peking know something about the importance of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building to the global geo-strategic balance of power that is hidden from the untutored eye? I cannot see how blowing up a bunch of run-of-the-mill bureaucrats was going to bring Oklahoma to its knees, let alone the United States.

Likewise, shooting down the TWA flight does what for whom? It seems to me that the whole point of terrorism is to terrorize, and thus the worst possible result for the perpetrators would be for people to think "darn, another accident", which clearly is the majority view of what happened. Where the hell is the terror? No, sorry, the authors of that shoot-down (or whatever) would surely want everyone to know it was a terrorist act, even if they hid who did it. What is the point otherwise? Target practice?

To say I am not a fan of the EU would be a masterly understatement, but the idea that the...

European Union, under French and German domination -- may have secretly cooperated to oppose what they see as the threat of U.S. global hegemony

...suggests some sort of cost/benefit analysis must have gone on in Berlin and Paris that resulted in "it makes sense for us to fuck with the USA by helping folks to blow various things up". Not even I reckon they are that stupid (and I think they are pretty stupid), but okay, let's try and do some thinking along those lines ourselves.

If the people behind the 'false flag' ops have decided that attacking the USA physically like this is the way to achieve their objectives, and if their objectives are, presumably, the significant dis-aggrandising of the USA, then the result of the attacks are presumably seen by the attacker as the upside: that which brings the objective closer to realisation.

Yet we are really talking about a series of pinpricks over several years. Face it, in brutal numerical terms, even 9/11 was less destructive than many natural disasters around the world... and the other 'terrorist' incidents Richard is suggesting were even smaller in terms of psychological impact, loss of life and economic disruption. For some historical context, there were huge numbers of allied area bombing attacks against German cities during the Nazi Götterdämmerung, hundreds of which caused many times more casualties than 9/11, all which in retrospect did little to really slow down the Nazi war effort psychologically or militarily.

Even in economic terms 9/11, which was clearly mother of all terrorist acts, was a loud, unpleasant but transient hiccup from that vast hippopotamus called the US economy, from which it recovered. Don't get me wrong, I think 9/11 was truly a monstrous day of infamy that still fills me with homicidal rage (I used to work in the WTC), but viewed from the perspective of some great false flag 'shadow war' to dis-aggrandise the USA, this all amounts to little more than throwing turds at the castle wall. Anyone who thinks these attacks have seriously reduced the overall power of the USA is mistaken on a truly epic scale (even assuming all the incidents Richard mentions were attacks, such as the crash of TWA 800).

The downside? Obviously that is the risk of finding yourself at war with the USA. That is what happened to Al Qaeda and Ba'athist Iraq and look what happened to them. Fairly predictable really.

So if 'someone' is running a complex series of covert operation over many years, and that 'someone' is not ultimately a bunch of deluded Islamic moonbats called Al Qaeda, then whoever they are, they must be damn close to 100% convinced that their true identity [add suspect here]* will never be discovered. To think otherwise suggest the true authors of these attacks are actually prepared to face the prospect of an all out war with the USA if someone on their payroll goofs. Can you name me anyone who would think that if the 'real' return address to 9/11 was known, that they could fight and win a full blown war with an outraged USA right now? Any takers? EU? Russia? China? Israel? OPEC?

Now bear in mind that unlike the guys we think in fact did perpetrate 9/11 (i.e. Al Qaeda), these 'shadow warriors' being suggested are not an amorphous dispersed trans-national bunch of Islamic barking moonbats, but rather are the employees of a nation-state or group of nation-states, with cities, airfields, ships etc., you know, kind of like Iraq, with all sorts of things that can be bombed, invaded, shot at, set fire to, irradiated, etc.... and unlike Iraq, most have democratic voting populations who would really rather not get bombed, invaded, shot at, set fire to, irradiated...

So to make the 'false flag' theory viable, there need to be some underpinning truths:

1. The true party responsible is either 100% sure they can never be discovered and/or...
   
2. They feel that the cost of discovery, i.e. war with the USA, is bearable

Truth 1 is preposterous, so if the 'shadow warriors' think that, they are in the same 'deluded' category that any reasonable observer would ascribe to the quality of the Taliban and Al Qaeda's geo-political/military analysis. Why do I think this? Because if anyone is efficient enough to keep a series of attacks over many years from getting a correct return address on them, 100% of the time, we must be facing a group of such skill, dedication, flawless organisation and sheer luck hitherto unknown in the history of mankind... and all this in an increasingly information-rich omni-wired global environment. If such people exist anywhere, they sure as hell do not work in the public sector and certainly not the French public sector.

Truth 2 makes perfect sense if you are an Al Qaeda barking moonbat on September 10, 2001, who probably felt they were secure in Afghanistan and sufficiently dispersed globally to ride out any Clinton-style 'fire a few ALCMs' type response. However if you are the suggested 'shadow warriors' from France or China or Israel or Moscow or the Grand Cayman Islands, exactly what sort of response would you make to the USA saying "YOU have just attacked us! It's clobbering time!" as they summon their allies and start paving the oceans over with aircraft carriers moving in your general direction. Exactly what sort of military response do you make to that? Diplomacy perhaps? Well if the 'false flag' has failed then that means the US is waving either a forensic 'smoking gun' due to some covert operational cock-up or worse yet, they have one of your operatives strapped to a chair somewhere in Langley, so now what? Dook it out in the UN security council? Riiiiiight. Clearly the end result if the Yanks are convinced you did the deed, is 'game over, man'. In reality, the game is probably over from spectacular domestic political implosion ("you did WHAT?") long before the USMC marches out of their barracks, let alone turn up at the presidential palace in a hail of bullets and smart bombs.

If you are a nation-state with a burning desire to pee in America's gas tank, the 'upside' of doing these things is trivial unless you can somehow contrive to nuke Americans cites or find some other way to cause damage and disruption on a scale several orders of magnitude greater than killing a handful of people working for the Bureau of Motor Vehicles in Oklahoma or randomly downing an airliner every few years. And yet the downside is suicidal on a national level if the slightest thing goes wrong and the truth is revealed.

I try to keep an open mind but this 'conspiracy' just makes no sense.

*= The Jews, the Masons, Mossad, the Illuminati, The Jews, Vatican, MI-5, Deuxieme Bureau, The Jews, SPECTRE, The Jews, KGB redux, Justin Raymondo, George Soros, The Jews, The Templars, Chinese GRI...

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Somehow I missed this item yesterday... Now we have never been all that timid about slamming George Dubya when he makes a dumb move, but to be honest, if he delivers what may prove to be the coup de grace to the UN as a source of so-called 'moral authority', then I will start collecting memberships for the George W. Bush Fan Club!

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Michael Totten has written an interesting article about the difference between 'liberal' (in the US sense of the word) and 'conservative' views of the world, called Builders and Defenders.

If you want to find a person who knows the history of pre-war Nazi Germany, the Middle East during the Cold War, or the partition of India and Pakistan, you’re better off looking to the right than to the left.

I am astonished and dismayed to discover this. I’m a life-long liberal and I devour history like food. Not until after September 11 did I learn I’m a minority on the left.

But clearly as someone very well read in genuinely foreign history and affairs, Michael is a member of a pretty tiny minority everywhere, not just on the left. Perhaps he would be less of a minority amongst a certain species of neo-conservatives in the USA, but he would still be one. In my experience, Michael would also find the situation amongst American capital-L Libertarians more akin the one he finds on the left.

Which brings me to another point... Michael is certainly a thoughtful commentator but he suffers from that exasperating bipolar disorder common to those on both the statist left and statist right: there is a great deal more to the world than just 'liberal' (in the US meaning of democratic regulatory quasi-socialist) and 'conservative' (in the US meaning of democratic regulatory quasi-capitalist). That someone with a blog should fall into this meta-contextual trap is all the more grating for a libertarian such as myself, given the sheer number of neither 'liberal' nor conservative blogs there are within the ever expanding blogosphere. Even the mightily Sir Glenn of Instant Punditry describes himself as a 'Whig' rather than a 'liberal' or conservative.

The truth is that what Michael is describing is more of an American phenomenon than a left or right one, and even then it is only slightly less applicable to us 'more cosmopolitan' British and Europeans.

There is an old joke, which like so many is all the more amusing because it is essentially true…

The French think the world revolves around Eiffel Tower, the British think they own the world and the Americans think they are the world

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On Channel Four News tonight it was reported that the UK government is to ban childminders from smacking children from the autumn. What I found odd in the report was that apparently the UN thinks the government should go further and prevent parents, not just childminders, from smacking.

I don't have strong feelings either way on whether smacking should be allowed. What gets me is that the UN thinks it is its job to decide whether or not it should be legal. Surely the UN's role - if it has one at all - is to provide a forum to discuss disagreements between countries, helping to prevent wars. It should not be for deciding the domestic policies of individual countries.

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Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses,
And all the king's men,
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
- Traditional English rhyme

Vladimir Putin, the hero of Chechnya, has in essence told Tony Blair to take his attempt to paper over the disagreements regarding Iraq, now that the allied takeover is a fait accomplis , and stick it where the sun does not shine.

Moreover, the French, Germans and Belgians are going to continue to work towards a new 'European' alternative to NATO aimed at reducing US influence, whilst all the time keeping a straight face and claiming they have no hostility to the USA, of course.

This is all truly excellent news.

Now whilst it was clear that Tony Blair was willing to go a long way in the interests of a return to the ante-bellum political status of seeming harmony with 'Europe', the USA is highly unlikely to have much desire to take such a conciliatory position. Blair however was obviously willing to let slide the fact the French and Russians hurt him quite badly politically by scuppering his attempts to get a UN imprimatur for the liberation of Iraq.

My big worry post-Iraq was that the Axis of Weasels and their Russian cohort, having failed in their diplomatic objectives of safeguarding their economic sweetheart deals with the Ba'athists in Iraq and pandering to domestic anti-Americanism, would avoid paying a price for these positions. I thought the key to their 'damage limitation' would be to play on Tony Blair's manifest desire to "be at the centre of Europe" whilst at the same time remaining best buddies with the United States in his 'warrior prince' role.

They would use this huge psychological weak spot to get Blair back on-side and eager to be a 'Good European', leveraging the fact the US manifestly 'owes Tony a big one' to mitigate any political and economic cost to them of their placing the wealth of the Elf Aquitaine Oil company and its Russian counterparts over the lives of Iraqis living under Ba'athism, not to mention US geo-political interests.

Well I am delighted to see that are not nearly such devious political operators as it is so often claimed. Putin in particular continues to confirm my views far from being the wily fox that pundits describe; he is in fact a true dunce with delusions of his own importance as he presides over a basket case economy with an imploding society that is drinking itself to death on homemade vodka.

That Tony Blair's world view has received such a public kick in the bollocks from the people who should logically need his good will and support at this point in time is…simply splendid news. It may even start to break through the cloying desire in the Prime Minister's head for logic-free €uro-harmony, that the world changed forever on September 11^th 2001. He can stay with the dynamic Americans and spend his political capital wisely or he can piss it away with sclerotic Old Europe. He cannot do both and maybe even he will start to see that now as he heads back from Russia with his tail between his legs.

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Events appear to be developing rather faster than I thought they would. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that they are snowballing.

I doubt very much whether either Monsieur Chirac or Herr Schroeder have spent any time in the blogosphere but, judging from the news in the UK Times their reaction to the 'Axis of Weasels' slur was to take it deadly seriously:

At a meeting in Brussels with the Prime Ministers of Belgium and Luxembourg, President Chirac and Gerhard Schroder, the German Chancellor, want to clear the way for a common European defence system that would start with a core of volunteer states.

To be honest, I am trying very hard to suppress my natural inclination to double over in hoots of derisive laughter. Perhaps they will rent a seedy, run-down office, kit themselves out with a set of overalls and call themselves 'Yankbusters'. It is hard to imagine what else they could do with armies that consist of time-serving pensioners and conscripted students.

There is nothing new about the idea of a common EU defence pact, of course, only now the French (and it is primarily the French) appear to be driving the issue with an unseemly haste. It bears all the hallmarks of panic and, given the growlings emanating from Washington of late, that panic may be more than a little justified:

Although the Germans have qualms about a confrontation with Nato, the French are not hiding their aim to achieve their long-standing goal of unhitching the United States from European defence. This has become more pressing with the reported plans of the US to punish France for its stand on the war in Iraq by excluding it from Nato decision-making.

I don't suppose that the French are under any real illusion as to the capacity of Belgium to ride to their rescue. No, this is just the French doing what the French have always done; desperately seeking alliances in order to advance their own national interests. Not having the sufficient wherewithal to rule the world (as they believe they rightly should) they seek instead to project their influence by building blocs which must be configured in such as a way as to enable the French to dominate them. Mock we may, but for the French political classes this is as serious as a heart-attack and, possibly, a last throw of the dice.

Panic, however, is not merely confined to Paris. Tony Blair can see exactly where this is heading and it's giving him the the big-time jitters:

“I don’t want Europe setting itself up in opposition to America. I think it will be dangerous and destabilising.”

Mark those words. Blair has a very clear idea of the stability he wants and knows every bit as surely that this isn't it. Blair, being neither pro- nor anti- anything, is the consumate internationalist. Harmony is what he seeks. At home he has adroitly neutralised all opposition by gathering everybody into a big tent of consensus. Abroad he hoped to be the golden bridge that brought the USA and the EU together to sing melodiously from the same hymn-sheet in a global choir of co-operation.

It's all off-key now and the discord is grating harshly on the ears. The American Star Tenor that Blair adores simply cannot work with the pushy European falsettos he hopes to please and now everyone is about to flounce off in a huge huff, leaving only the Fat Lady. She isn't singing yet, but she's clearing her throat.

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If you haven't come across it yet, I recommend (as does Michael Blowhard to whom my thanks) William Shawcross' 2003 Harkness Lecture, delivered on March 27th, in other words just as the public bit of the war was getting seriously under way, but before it had been successfully concluded. It is a very good brief summary of the state of the world now, as seen through the eyes of the USA's neo-conservatives, and it is particular good as a brief introduction to neo-con ideas and attitudes:

I don't want to say that they all believe the same things. They don't, but there are some common threads in their views.

They tend to believe that we live in a special moment of history, one which is characterised above all by America's unparalleled military power and the opportunity to expand the boundaries of democracy around the world. This is the time for a grand strategy to assert Pax Americana. This is the decisive decade in human liberty.

They value strategic thinking and the setting of priorities. They are wary of permanent alliances and are attracted to bold geopolitical moves for the expansion of American values. They are not wedded to stability. Conversely, they are not afraid of challenging the status quo. As we are seeing in Iraq.

They see American values as universal values and believe passionately in the special mission of the United States to bring American style democracy to the rest of the world. That is particularly true since 9/11. They, like President Bush, tend to see the world in very straightforward terms – even in terms of good and evil. They do not believe that evil governments can be reformed. Sovereignty is relative – the more evil the state the less sovereignty to which it is entitled.

They are particularly close to the state of Israel, in some cases to the Likud party, and they see the defence of Israel as a test of America's willingness to defend American values. They believe that Israel will achieve peace not through compromising with her enemies, but through a grand re-ordering of her environment, through overwhelming force, and through daring strategic moves.

Even before the agonising rows over Resolution 1441 and Iraq's lack of disarmament, they had no great regard for the United Nations. They see it as filled with undemocratic or anti American nations which seek to use it to constrain the United States.

In other words, it won't end with Iraq.

We live in interesting times.

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The United Methodist Church are calling on Methodist George W. Bush to repent for overthrowing Saddam Hussain's regime in Iraq. He is enjoined to:

...repent from domestic and foreign policies that are incompatible with the teaching and example of Christ.

Ah yes... the eleventh commandment... "Thou shalt not overthrow tyranny but shall instead give aid and succour to murderers and rapists". Oops. Sorry. I guess silly ol' Dubya was reading the abridged version of the Bible.

(Link via Joshua Claybourn)

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A few days ago, I spent a pleasant evening at chez de Havilland enjoying a sumptuous dinner consisting of a selection of char-grilled endangered species washed down with a delightful bottle of Ultra-Extreme-Right-Wing cordial.

After dinner, we retired to the drawing room to smoke cigars (hand rolled by grossly exploited third-world children) whereupon the discussion turned to matters of international affairs. It was during the course of our deliberations that I struck upon what I considered to be a quite promising strategy for dealing with the 'Axis of Weasels' (France, Germany, Russia)

Since the basis of their informal 'alliance' appears to be the shared concern about the vast amounts of money each is owed, then would it not constitute a masterful stroke in the machiavellian art of 'divide and conquer' to ensure that one or more gets reimbursed while the other is told to take a hike? Then sit back and watch while the gang breaks apart and they start turning on each other.

To me, this was a screamingly obvious manoeuvre. And not just to me because I note that Brian Micklethwait has made a similar suggestion in one of his comments below:

What if an "illegitimate" world just cries all the way to the bank? - leaving France as the only one in step, and broke?

For all the reasons discussed here (and there) I think the Americans could break such a strike, indeed are already starting to.

Indeed they are, Brian. No sooner had I finished reading Brian's comments, and marvelling upon how they echoed my own thoughts on the subject, than I notice this article in the Financial Times:

The difference in approach was evident on Friday in a newspaper interview in which Tony Blair, prime minister, said the failure to secure a second UN resolution had put British soldiers' lives at risk.

Downing Street believes that Mr Chirac's threat to veto such a resolution made difficult negotiations with countries such as Russia and Germany "impossible".

Meanwhile Condoleezza Rice, the US president's national security adviser, was reported this week to have said that France should be punished, Germany ignored and Russia forgiven as the US readjusts its relations with European allies.

The world, and it would appear the French in particular, is about to be reminded of an old axiom: to the victors go the spoils.

By the way, if any influential members of the US Government happen to be reading this, let me just say that the Samizdata Team are available to provide free-lance consultancy on International Relations. Please e-mail us for a resume.

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Phil Bradley shows us what a wonderful institution that carnival of thieves called the United Nations is

I can hardly turn on the TV without some talking head from the UN, one of its many agencies and adjuncts, or a European diplomat talking about the UN's legitimacy or credibility. This is a recent phenomena and I am curious as to where the UN has acquired its supplies of legitimacy and credibility. Certainly not from its member states - many of whom can hardly keep the road to the airport open without help from French paratroopers. Nor does it get it from the work of its agencies, which while on paper are well intentioned, in practice are dens of corruption, incompetence and cronyism, relegated to 'coordinating' roles because they are incapable of doing any thing useful.

Perhaps it is from the UN's work in intervening in crises and helping states achieve legitimate democratic government. OK, the UN did pull its troops out of Rwanda prior to perhaps a million people being massacred, failed to anything about Kosovo and left NATO to intervene, and appears to be making a complete mess of 'helping' East Timor transition to democracy. A state of affairs which even the UN's senior person in East Timor admits to. Sorry, no signs of legitimacy and credibility here!

I must therefore conclude that United Nations has discovered a means of manufacturing these precious commodities. This is a major scientific breakthrough, a philosophers stone for the twenty-first century. The UN is keeping tight-lipped on the details of this breakthrough. So it's not clear as to how much legitimacy and credibility they can manufacture. But think of implications if they can produce a large supply (doubtless it is expensive to produce, but then everything at the UN is vastly more expense than it should be). Clearly the UN and its member states constitute a major market for both products, but the potential is huge, especially for credibility which the recent war in Iraq has shown there is a world-wide shortage, notably in the news-rooms of CNN and the BBC, as well as in some European and Arab capitals.

And to think, I always thought the United Nations was a complete waste of time and money, filled with corrupt bureaucrats only interested in first-class air travel and their expense accounts. Shows how wrong you can be!

Phil Bradley

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You've just got to laugh really. Certainly that was my reaction when I happened upon this development, courtesy of Bill Herbert:

A coalition of lawyers and human rights groups yesterday unveiled a bid to use the UN's new International Criminal Court as a tool to restrain American military power.

In a move Washington said vindicated U.S. claims that the court would be used for political purposes, the rights activists are working to compile war crimes cases against the United States and its chief ally in Iraq, Britain.

What, no mention of any intended actions against Saddam Hussein? Some mistake surely? I mean, if Great Satan and Little Satan are in the dock then surely it cannot be so hard to cobble together a half-way decent case against the Ba'athist regime as well?

Of course, we all know the reasons why that is never going to happen; the same reason that truly does vindicate the American determination to have nothing whatsoever to do with the International Criminal Court. But, for once, it is worth examining this in just a little more depth.

So, I followed the link in Bill Herbert's post to this article in the National Post which provides a bit more background:

They said five eminent international lawyers will outline a case against the United States and Britain next month for submission first to an international "alternative" court called the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal in Rome, then the prosecutor's office of the ICC in The Hague.

The 'Permanent People's Tribunal'? What's that all about? I'm 'people' and yet I have never heard of them nor do I recall appointing them to sit in judgement on my behalf.

I find myself falling back on my long-established axiom that any organisation which includes the word 'people' in its name is invariably dedicated to anything but people. For confirmation, I did a bit of 'googling' and, sure enough, I found a website for this 'tribunal' who, it seems, style themselves under the even more nauseatingly self-righteous title of 'The Lelio Basso International Foundation for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples'.

I have no idea who 'Lelio Basso' is but this, erm...august body appears to be a squadron of tranzi busybodies who have claimed jurisdiction over the entire planet. According to them, however:

The Permanent Peoples' Tribunal is permanent and is characterized by the ideological pluralism of the members of the jury, selected on the basis of their moral, academic and literary qualities.

The claim of 'pluralism' is a tad encouraging but, a cursory examination of their 'Vice-Presidents' does not appear to bear this claim out.

Ruth First (now deceased) is described in her biography as a 'lifelong communist'. There is also somebody called Susy Castor who was Haiti's delegate to the Socialist International Committee for Latin America and the Caribbean but, best of all, is a chap called Amar Bentoumi who has quite a few disgruntled bones to pick with America:

"What gives the right to the US troops stationed in South Korea to use the UN flag?" he said, denouncing the illegality of this 55 year long military occupation, defying the sovereignty of the Korean nation.

Yes, but I don't really believe that the sovereignty or integrity of South Korea is at the forefront of Mr.Bentoumi's mind. I do suspect he has other overriding concerns:

M. Bentoumi also questioned the accuracy of information denigrating systematically the D.P.R.K. and its policies, and cited examples proving that often it was a question of "unwarranted allegations" and unsubstantiated accusations.

Oh the humanity!! We must profoundly repent for the evil capitalist opprobrium that has been unjustly heaped on that lunatic Stalinist prison-state.

Anyway, I think we get the picture. 'Pluralist'? Well, yes, only if 'pluralist' means a mixture of Marxist, Leninist and Trotskyite and I strongly suspect that 'the Bench' will waste no time whatsoever on their deliberations before finding both the USA and Britain guilty as charged.

Not that that matters, mind. They maye have 'literary qualities' but we have the the 3rd Infantry Division and the Royal Irish Rangers so I reckon that means that the Defendants win by default. (Though I imagine those boys would just love an opportunity to settle matters out of Court).

I'll wager that this whole pantheon of 'international tribunals' is another example of commies doing what commies love doing best i.e. inventing organisations with preposterously sanctimonious names, attaching themselves to a widely-recognised principle such as 'war crimes' and paddling hell for leather to get somewhere on the global stage.

The real issue is the sullying of the 'war crimes' principle because, make no mistake, it will be damaged and compromised goods from now on in.

Modern lefties are like car thieves. They roam the streets looking for vehicles they can break into and, when they find one, they jump in, rev up the engine and drive around town making lots of noise. Assuming the vehicle is recovered at all it will most likely be burned-out, wrecked and fit only for the scrapyard.

Well, we must have left the 'war crimes' vehicle unlocked and now the damage is done. Military action aside, a legal or political principle for dealing with democidal and genocidal regimes would be very useful but we're going to have to look for a new one and, when we find it, we better make sure it is fitted with an immobiliser and a very loud alarm.

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The UN, meaning significant portions of its membership such as France, Germany, Russia etc. are refusing to simply lift sanctions against Iraq automatically until they get their way politically... which is to say to dilute US and British control over post-war Iraq.

So even after Ba'athism is gone, the sanctions could be maintained. In short, the people backing this are saying "do what we want or we will make the Iraqi people suffer even though the regime the sanctions were designed to contain is now gone".

And the thing that really sticks in my craw is that these sanctimonious bastards think they have the moral high ground.

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It has been a regular refrain from the anti-interventionists that there was no real connection between 9/11 and Saddam and that by overthrowing the Iraqi regime, we were diverting valuable resources from the war on terror.

Well, that theory has taken a lot of hits, judging by this story.

In fact, by deposing thuggish regimes such as the unlamented one in Iraq, it makes it easier, by far, for intelligence services of the West to unearth valuable information about terrorists and their whereabouts. Or course in their hearts the peaceniks knew this all along, but no doubt they are now vexed about Iraqis nabbing air-conditioning units from Ba'ath Party headquarters.

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Bloody media. Always complaining. Thus Rumsfeld at the end of last week, himself complaining about all the newspapers featuring looting instead of liberation.

Last night, I caught John Simpson of the BBC opining that the fall of Saddam is of no significance to any country outside of Iraq, and I don't know where to start, so hopelessly mistaken does that strike me as being. The argument was that because Saddam's regime was a "dead end", it couldn't therefore be of any greater consequence when this inconsequential regime was toppled. And then various other Talking Heads took it in turns to agree. They didn't seem to understand that there could possibly be anything between America invading a country and smashing all its statues and bombing all its bunkers and decapitating all its leaderships, and having no effect on a country whatsoever, despite having lots of bases in a newly liberated country right next door. Twats.

Nevertheless ...

Nevertheless, as this guy for one (and kudos to Instapundit for linking to this guy given the kind of thing this guy says about him) points out:

# of important news stories Glenn Reynolds broke during war: 0
# of important news stories journalists broke during war: All of them

It's from these same media people that I get the evidence in the light of which I choose to regard their editorial biases as biased, their conclusions and prophecies and prognostications as mistaken, or not as I please. The media are still the people supplying the news, even as they try to spin it in ways that the samizdata related blogosphere mostly disapproves of.

The media are, I think, rather like Windows. There are all sorts of things wrong with them, but, with occasional cock-ups and catastrophes, they get the job done, approximately speaking. If you are prepared to put a bit of effort into learning how they work, you can usually dig below the surface and get what you want, if you really do want it.

When that CNN guy revealed that they'd been concealing the truth in order to keep the flow of nice TV footage, I can't say that I was especially surprised. Only the candid way he admitted to it struck me as in any way out of the ordinary.

As to the present coverage of the Iraq war that Rumsfeld was so irritated by, I would far rather have the media biased against what the powers-that-be are doing than biased in their favour, even when I agree, approximately speaking, with the powers-that-be.

Suppose our newspapers and TV screens had indeed swamped all mention of looting and pillage with falling statues and cheering crowds and nothing else. Would the world in general, and Iraq in particular, really be better places? I say not.

Perhaps the problem is that the media do several different jobs. Two in particular have been seen colliding with one another in recent weeks, namely reporting, and complaining.

The complaining, as is natural just before a military campaign is being embarked upon, has taken the form of prophecying a succession of disasters. And the reporting has consisted mostly of admitting, sometimes through gritted teeth, that most of these disasters have not occurred. Iraq has not proved to be Vietnam. Baghdad has not been Stalingrad. When Baghdad fell with hardly a skirmish, we were told. When that statue fell, we saw it. When the Iraqis finally felt sure enough to smile and cheer, we saw their smiles and heard their cheers. And we drew our own conclusions, to the effect that our original conclusions about all this had been right, and that the media's had been mostly wrong. Are we really going to begrudge the media one genuine disaster, one which neither the blogosphere nor they foresaw, in the form of the looting that is now still going on?

They may be exaggerating this story, but it is definitely a story and they are quite right to be telling it.

Non-looter Iraqis have been shouting at camera crews that the bloody looters are making their lives a misery, and doctors have complained that their hospitals have no drugs or security guards. Well, good. Good for the camera crews and good for the Iraqis. Who suffers from these complaints? Coalition leaders impatient for their triumphs and their rounds of applause? Tough. Who benefits? The good citizens of Iraq and the wounded of Iraq and their carers, who get their law and order and their drugs about two days quicker than they would have done if the media had merely been blowing fanfares of praise to the soldiers and their commanders. There'll be plenty of time for handing out testimonials and retractions and apologetic analyses concerning what went right, albeit mostly from different people to the original Cassandras. Meanwhile, things are not completely perfect and the Cassandras are still complaining. Quite right. That's one of their jobs. And another part of their job will be to say: oh it's stopped, and oh, it wan't that bad, as and when it stops, and if it turns out that it wasn't that bad.

Meanwhile, you can interpret the complaints about looting very differently to the way that the complainers are mostly interpreting them now. One way of discussing Iraqis cursing the Coalition for screwing up the first few days of the peace is to say: the Coalition is screwing up the first few days of the peace. Which they did. But another is to say: well, thank God the Iraqis feel safe enough to call the Coalition a bunch of arseholes for screwing up, and to do it on camera. Maybe law and order is a couple of days away yet, but civilised politics, the sort where you can call Bush and Blair a couple of wankers without having your tongue cut out and bleeding to death in a basement, has started as of now.

The media are rather bad at dealing with important problems where the problem is knowing exactly what the right thing to do is. Most of what most of them know about such things ain't so. But when the problems are urgent, and the answers are pretty obvious – subdue looters, anaesthetise the wounded when they are being operated on, feed the starving, switch on the damn lights, comfort the bereaved – the media are at their best. Instead of the murderously sedate solving of the problems (or not as the case may be) away from the glare of the TV lights that those in authority would prefer, unaccompanied by any embarrassing questions about why they hadn't thought this through a month ago, there must instead be an undignified scramble to sort things out, accompanied by the lies and contradictions of press officers. It must be galling to get onto world-wide TV to complain about not knowing where in hell your next thirty meals are going to come from, but still not to get a meal. But such arrangements save lives, nevertheless.

Rejoice, rejoice, says the blogosphere about this war, now winding down. I say, with the media and against the blogosphere: hold the rejoicing, there's still work to be done. Now, Rumsfeld, about those anaesthetics …

Stepping back and looking at the larger picture, would all that military planning – the stuff that mostly went very right indeed – would have been done so well had the soldiers not known that failure would involve not just the hell of battlefield reverses but the further hell of being sneered at by those media arseholes? And were they not further encouraged in their work by the thought that success would means far fewer friends dying, and wiping the smug sneers off the faces of the arseholes? That's a big stick, and a big carrot. The media tried to destroy the military attack on Iraq. But they didn't destroy it. And because they didn't destroy it they made it stronger.

Looking at the even bigger picture, for "military attack on Iraq" read: everything. The media, the complaints department of capitalism. They demand the impossible, and sneer when they don't get it. When they do, they move immediately on to the next impossibility. Hurrah for capitalism. It finds creative uses even for socialists, which is more than you could ever say for socialism.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and the price of vigilance is the arseholes who do it mouthing off about what they think about what they see on their various vigils. It's a price well worth paying, I say.

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So the French, German and Russian leaders have had a summit meeting in St Petersburg. After having had an object lesson in the severe limits of their diplomatic and political influence on the world stage, it strikes me that these three leaders have decided that the only way to be taken seriously is to get together and take each other seriously.

When Jacques Chirac says:

It is good that the Saddam Hussein regime has fallen. The fall of a tyrannical regime is a positive thing. We said for a long time that he had to be brought down. We did not defend him, but said it should not be done by force.

He is, to put it bluntly, a liar.

France and Russia were major supplier of arms to Iraq (far greater than the US or UK ever were) and were major beneficiaries of Ba'athist rule there. The meeting in Russia is nothing more noble that a tactical huddle of debtors prior to going to the receivers (The US and UK) of a bankrupt company (Ba'athist Iraq).

Although I cannot resist mocking this triumvirate of gilded irrelevences, there is indeed a serious message emerging from this meeting.

It should be clear once and for all that Blairite fantasies about being both Euro-Fedarist and Atlanticist are just that... fantasies. Of course this is going to be spun as something other than an 'anti Anglosphere summit' but who are they fooling? Europe is dividing again and that should be clear to anyone not willfully blind.

Britain is on the side of history's winners. However Tony Blair has the power to snatch strategic defeat from the jaws of victory if he does not get over his mindless attachment to 'Old Europe' and discredited bodies like the UN. After the last of the fighting dies down in Iraq, thing are not going to gradually return to the way they were antebellum.

I really do not know if Blair is psychologically able to grasp the fact that the paradigm has shifted (I hate that word 'paradigm' but for once it the most appropriate term). Although I dislike him intensely, I am not sure he will make the wrong move... I really do not know: the jury is still out on how capable he is of actually making a major meta-contextual shift.

The world has changed. Get used to it.

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Another one you didn't see in the media.

"The demonstration comprised about a hundred protestors demonstrating against the arrest of Vietnamese pro-democracy campaigners. This action was organised by the 'Alliance Vietnam Liberté' (Vietnam Freedom Alliance) and various Ngos were invited. A representative of Amnesty International was present as well as Françoise Hostalier, former Human Rights Minister [yes we have one of those in occupied France!] and president of 'Action Droits de l'Homme' (Action Human Rights), as well as myself Laurent Muller, president of the 'Association Européene Cuba Libre' (European Association for a Free Cuba). The demonstration ended at 17 hours outside the Republic of Vietnam embassy [in Paris]."

It continues with the following:

"I take this opportunity to remind you that tomorrow, 8 April 2003, the AECL is holding a press conference about the latest wave of repression in Cuba. Some 80 non-violent dissidents are currently being tried for 'treason' and 'supplying information to an enemy state' (the USA). Prison sentences from 10 years to life have been requested [by prosecutors]. It appears that one death sentence has been requested against one dissident."

The press conference will be held at 15 hours at the aid centre for the Foreign Press, maison de la Radio, 116 avenue du Président Kennedy, 75016 Paris. The best contact I have is Prégentil (Americans will really like the graphics on his front page). Sad note: repression is operating worldwide whilst the eyes of the world are focused on the liberation of Iraq.

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There are lots of reasons to hope that this war is nearly over, not the least being that if it does end soon, the civilised world will be able to switch its attention to other bad things now being done by other bad people.

You get the feeling that Fidel Castro, for example, was hoping that this thing would last a lot longer than now seems likely. He's been rounding up dissidents, and he surely guessed that he'd have two or three months free of major western media interference. But what if Gulf War II fizzles out quickly, and what if the Media then takes a closer look at what he is now doing, say in about a fortnight's time? Well, we can hope.

The news I'm watching on the TV right now (Sunday breakfast time) is that the British are moving fast into the centre of Basra, days sooner than the media people I'm listening to had been expecting. If they, and the Americans in Baghdad, can make these incursions stick and if there are no big and nasty surprises yet to come, and if they can reduce the whole thing to a few dozen boring little sieges of nutters, the media may soon be toning down its fascination with Gulf War II and be looking for other morsels to feed on. If so, look out Fidel.

How delightful it would be if this opportunistic calculation were to turn Castro into one of the bigger casualties of Gulf War II.

And what's Mugabe been up to during the last fortnight?

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In accordance with its already stated policy, Samizdata.net offers the comment section under this item for discouraging messages to our BBC TV reporters serving to attack our freedoms and to encourage tyranny over the people of Iraq and the world. The many TV media personnel who read Samizdata.net regularly are sure to forward this to their colleagues.

[Note: If you are supportive of BBC TV coverage in Iraq or elsewhere, you are welcome to post a comment under a relevant story, but please leave this comment section to those who want to heap discouragement, abuse, hatred and curses upon our BBC media personnel.]

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Does this look like playing both sides?

So under a "defence pact" with Qatar, French troops will be in the Gulf after all. Just in time for the reconstruction contracts I trust. (Incidentally, "MAM" as the French Defence Minister is known, is regarded by French troops with similar contempt to that shown by British troops for Geoff "Buff" Hoon).

I'm getting about as much flak from reaction to my last posting as a B1 over Bagdad. I will reserve comment on the diplomatic bungling until the organised fighting stops.

Whether or not Salam Pax is genuine or not, the Samuel Huntingdon quote carried on his blog about sums up how a big chunk of the world's population regards the Anglosphere.

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."

The bombing of Bagdad is doing little to dispel this notion. I don't approve or agree, but that doesn't make it less of a problem.

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So it appears that we are now a few days, or possibly even a few hours, away from being engaged in an honest-to-goodness, actual, balls-out, fighting war. Despite the misgivings of Antoine Clarke, I believe HM forces will acquit themselves admirably although there is no doubt that the bulk of the war effort will fall upon the much larger US contingent.

We are here now because Tony Blair has prevailed over the anti-war sentiments of much of his own party. Without wishing to sing his praises per se, he has confounded the sizeable number of British commentators who believed that he did not possess the spine to see through his pro-war commitment. He clearly does and he clearly has. Last night's vote in the House of Commons, on a motion to delay hostilities with Iraq, was defeated despite a record number of Labour rebels voting for it and, ironically, with most of the opposition Conservatives voting against.

Of the Conservatives who voted for the motion, some are undoubtedly what Mark Steyn has called 'defeatist patricians'. In all but name they are Social Democrats and are driven by sentiments that are not so much anti-American as they are pro-EU. For them, the top-down, corporatist paternalism of Europe is much more resonant of the natural order of things than the racey vulgarity they see as intrinsic to the American way of doing thigs.

But there are others on the British right who are vigourously opposed to Britain taking any part in the attack on Iraq not because they harbour anti-American sentiments (indeed, they heartily reject such nonsense) but because they believe that it is not in British national interests to do so. They are far from confident that any US administration would go to bat for Britain in the way that Britain has gone to bat for America and whilst this may or may not prove to be the case, they (and I) do have genuine cause for complaint about the kid gloves that successive US administrations have put on when dealing with the IRA.

However, it would appear that at least some of isolationist argument in this regard is based on the erroneous (and largely left-inspired) view that Tony Blair is merely acting as George Bush's 'poodle'; that he will get his 'orders' direct from Washington and that he will send British troops off to yomp around the planet in whatever direction the Whitehouse commands.

It is this kind of thing that makes for good copy, but it is not actually true. For good or for bad, Blair has very much acted as his own man throughout this whole affair. Had it not been for Tony Blair, the Americans would almost certainly have not agreed to take (the ultimately fruitless) UN route to disarming Saddam. Had George Bush had his way, the war in Iraq would, by now, have been over and done with. Try telling anyone in Washington that Tony Blair is their 'poodle'. I think you will be sharply disabused of any such view.

But, aside from our relationship with the Americans, there is one issue on which the isolationists and I see eye-to-eye and that is the matter of the European Union; when it comes to the EU, I am the Mother-of-all-Isolationists. I want to see Britain out of it. Not a renegotation, or a realingment or a partial detachment but out. For good.

Up until very recently, views such as this were considered to be both extreme and marginal in this country. Nearly everybody who was anybody considered our membership of the EU to be of vital importance and beyond question. Certainly the overwhelming majority of our political and media classes were united in their belief that Britain simply had no future outside of the EU.

Well, times they-are-changin' and in some surprising quarters:

When will the British wake up from their pathetic little dreams of being Europeans and realise that we have been looking for our future in all the wrong places?

Who wants to be European today? Who wants to be an ungrateful, unprincipled, two-faced, pacifist, Euro-grasping, oil-hungry Lilliputian?

Some right-wing American? No, that is the view of the notably left-of-centre British journalist Tony Parsons.

And it is not just in Britain that our future membership of the Euro-club is being called into question either. Some Europeans no longer believe that we belong:

He was able to understand the real consequences of Britain’s decision: the country’s possible isolation from Europe. The comment by the Greek Presidency on Britain and Spain’s attitude in the matter was eloquent: "with their actions they have placed themselves outside the framework of the European Union."

Nor, does it appear, that this is all just rhetoric. British officials appear to be dragging their feet in this project all of a sudden:

The British government has rejected the Convention’s plan to create a European public prosecutor. This new legal body would be based in Brussels, dealing with serious crimes affecting more than one European Union member state, reports the Ananova.

Would we have been treated to headlines like that, even a year ago? I rather doubt it.

Of course none of this means that British independence from the EU is either inevitable or imminent. Who knows, perhaps, when the dust has settled over Baghdad, Mr.Blair will move to repair our damaged ties with the Franco-German axis with the same kind of missionary zeal that he has displayed in his support for the US. After all, prior to this war, Mr.Blair was widely seen as by far the most Federastic Prime Minister that Britain has had since Edward Heath. Has he changed his mind? I have no idea.

I do know that, as is so often the case, it is events not arguments which change the world. I am pretty sure that, had it not been for Blair's determination to commit British forces to the removal of Saddam Hussein, had we stood aside and let the Americans go their own sweet way, then the anti-EU movement in this country would have remained as marginal as it always been and the British fly would go on being gradually and quietly sucked dry by the EU spider.

As it is, harmony has become discord, cooperation has given way to mutual distrust and the settled view both here and in Europe is now shot through with angry debate and denunciations. How can any conservative or libertarian in this country plausibly maintain that this is not in our national interests? I humbly submit that it is our priority national interest.

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Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
- John Donne (1573-1631)

When one embarks upon a war, nothing is ever certain. However if I was a betting man, I would anticipate the mother-of-all-surrenders, at least initially, followed by some nasty but sporadic and isolated fighting in a few key centres... in the end there is only so much that can be done from 20,000 feet and it is the squaddies with bayonets who will end this matter once and for all.

But just as the article Silver Linings earlier today suggests, I have an inkling that it is not just Saddam Hussain and Ba'athist Socialism which will rue the day Al Qaeda changed the world on September 11th. The aftermath of the Cold War ended today in the United Nations and I suspect when we look back in ten years we will realise that a great many things were never quite the same again. I think that NATO, the UN and (to a lesser extent) the EU have all been fatally weakened and thanks to Jacques Chirac, a great many people who matter have finally noticed that the zeitgeist has shifted and we are entering terra incognita: uncharted territory.

We have been hearing about the end of the bi-polar world and the 'New World Order' but in reality I do not think people really believed that the old institutions, assumptions and mindsets were really as obsolete as they actually are. It remains to be seen how long the UN and NATO continue to twitch but when the British and American tanks stash across the border of Iraq, they will be cutting the veins of more than just Ba'athism.

Britain too has just had an object lesson in the fact you cannot have your cake and eat it too. We are either an Atlantic nation trading with the world as we always have, or we are within Festung Europe. I do not think he realizes the enormity of what he is doing but Tony Blair is never going to be a 'Good EUropean' again... and if he tries to be, the contradictions are going to be impossible to reconcile.

Stay tuned. We live in interesting times.

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British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was shown on TV yesterday afternoon saying something particularly interesting, to my ear. I don't mean to suggest by this that Straw is normally dull, but this particular thing really got my attention. He used the phrase "Prime Minister Blair". I've never heard a British Cabinet Minister refer to the Prime Minister of Britain in this particular way.

Straw presumably assumes that if he just said "Mr Blair" or "The Prime Minister", which would be the usual way for a British Home Secretary to talk about a British Prime Minister, a significant slice of his audience might be confused as to exactly who he was talking about. Only by him identifying and placing together in the one phrase both the name and the office can he be confident of avoiding any such muddles among those he is seeking to communicate with. Either that, or he's been talking so much with Americans in the last few days that their verbal habits are rubbing off on him.

Either way, what I think this shows is how very global politics is becoming. Yes it's partly that Mr Straw is just now up to his neck in a particular global crisis, but as all we political pundits have been telling each other for as long as any of us can remember, more and more political issues now have a global angle to them, to the point where it makes more sense to speak of them as having local variations.

This is happening because of the continually plummeting cost of international communication. A system of global wires and waves that was once the privileged preserve of millionaires and statesmen, such as Jack Straw, is now available for us all to use at will.

Hence, for example, this weekend's world wide anti-war demonstrations mentioned just before the report of Mr Straw's odd little soundbite. Anti-capitalism and (savour the irony of this) anti-globalisation demos have been global ever since e-mail got into its stride.

During the decade before that, international electronic communication was cheap enough for capitalist salarymen to make hourly use of to do their work, but was not quite within the range of most civilians. Which, I suggest, goes a long way to explaining both the dominant tone of the 1980s, and why this tone then changed to something very different. What's happened now is that the average voter in an average rich country (such as mine) is now globally connected. He has a round-the-clock internet connection, and round the clock global news channels. He is, increasingly, a member of an international audience rather than a merely national one. Hence the media-savvy Brit who says "Prime Minister Blair". Straw knows, probably without even thinking about it, that his audience has now changed.

You wouldn't think it would be necessary to explain all this on a blog. If blog readers aren't tuned into all this stuff, then who is? Yet blogs in the ideological vicinity of Samizdata have, in recent weeks and months, been all abuzz with the notion that "the United States" or "the Anglosphere" on the one hand, have been "moving apart" from "Europe" and in particular "France" on the other hand – the inverted commas being because the point I'm making is that these collectivities make less and less sense as descriptions of what is really being said and done and by whom.

I don't think that "moving apart" is at all what is happening. I think that the world is – as usual and ever since Samuel Morse worked out how to send messages on electric wire in, I think, 1842 or thenabouts – moving closer together. But, as the experience of the twentieth century proved with particular ferocity, communication isn't the same thing as brotherly love. On the contrary, communication enabled insults to be exchanged and armies mustered with unprecedented speed and intensity. E-mail is used not to enable us all to agree, but to enable disagreeing teams to assemble and battle it out, on the internet, in the TV studios, and in the streets.

And what is becoming clear is that the opinion of "France" is widely held by many people in America (the geographical entity, so no need for inverted commas there), and that actually, quite a lot of people in Europe support what "America" is about to do in Iraq.

Last night I watched the re-run of Skinner and Baddiel, which is an improvised TV comedy chat-show. S&B specialise in joshing around with members of the audience, and last night they got a big German guy embroiled in their talking. In among jokes about how fat the guy was, and how he presumably liked sausages and how the Jewish Baddiel wanted to know how old he was and thus what he did during the war (he was born in the seventies by the look of him), they talked about the fact that "Germany" opposes the forthcoming war. They asked the German guy: do you oppose the war? It turned out that he supported it.

Such variations of opinion within nations and similarities of opinion across nations have always been there of course. The difference now is that modern communications technology has reached the stage where these differences are now starting seriously to matter in regular politics. It's reached the point now that the two of the contending teams re the war are not "America" and "Europe"; they are the pro-war international coalition of individuals and the anti-war international coalition of individuals.

The idea that "Europe" is one big slab of Eurostatist opinion is utterly false. Several of us Samizdatistas attended a talk given by Tim Evans last Friday, and one of the many interesting things he talked about was how amazingly strong and intelligent and numerous is the libertarian movement in Europe, in many ways far stronger than here in Britain.

European libertarians are by no means necessarily pro-Bush. On the whole, in the manner of the Cato Institute, they seem to be fiercely anti-Bush. But according to all the talk about what "Europe" thinks about such things as welfare policy and tax policy, these people shouldn't even exist.

To repeat the point, what has now changed is not that there are suddenly European libertarians. There always have been. The difference is that the technology now exists to attach them to the worldwide libertarian movement. Whereas previously they were politically impotent, now these people will both add strength to and gain strength from this worldwide movement, just like those anti-war demonstrators. Or to put it another way, a personal way, and as I did when I first started writing here, I used to be a British libertarian. Now, because of blogging, I'm just a libertarian. I haven't stopped being British, but I'm now part of a globally dispersed rather than nationally concentrated community.

At the level of big-time electoral politics, the cooperation that goes on between British Labourites and US Democrats, and between British Conservatives and US Republicans, is coming more and more out into the open. (Think Clinton at the Labour Party Conference.) There's no doubt that the thing that the average British Labourite most hates about Blair cooperating with "America" is not that it's America. It's the particular Americans he's cooperating with. If Gore was squaring up to Iraq in an identical manner to what Bush is doing, the Labourites would have had no problems, any more than when they backed Clinton contentedly over Bosnia, because Clinton was Clinton. Their guy, in other words. (Note my use here of the American word "Labourites", in the manner of "Prime Minister Blair" – maybe I should make it "Laborites".)

Let us not forget the context of this latest crisis involving "Prime Minister Blair" and the rest of them. It was triggered by an event that proved that the United States Government could not afford to ignore the details of what happens abroad. From being the undisputed master of the USA, the US government switched back to being the very much disputed but approximate master of large stretches of the entire world. The very reason that the UN is now in such turmoil is that the US government is now taking the way that the entire world is governed totally seriously, and thus finds the UN's defects seriously annoying.

In 1990 "the USA" thought it could go home and stay home, and for ten years it relaxed in blissful national isolation, or what passes for it these days, in this "highly interdependent world", etc. etc. But a small decade later, "the USA" is back embroiled in the world and its arguments, and I don't see that ever really changing, do you?

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We are always being told by those who oppose war against Ba'athist Socialism in Iraq of the downside... and although on balance I still support the armed overthrow of Saddam Hussain's regime, on some of those issues I am all too aware that there is some truth to the fact this open ended 'war on terrorism' is also being used as an open ended 'war on domestic civil liberties'.

However, let us also ponder the potential upside:

1. Enough Americans will finally realizes that not only is the UN a body which allows blood soaked tyrants to stand up with impunity and take money from taxpayers in the USA, and this will push the US political establishment into seeing that the UN no longer serves any positive role... leading to US withdrawal and the UN's financial collapse. Excellent!
   
2. War results in the overthrow of a mass murdering tyrant who has waged wars against three nations in the region, and the Iraqi people end up almost immeasurably better off. Excellent!
   
3. Tony Blair stands steadfast with the USA and the Anglosphere is once again shown to be the true repository of resisting tyranny across the world... Excellent!
   
4. ...and at the same time is fatally weakened politically by virtue of the fact the gulf between him and the grass roots of the socialist Labour Party have now been so starkly illuminated that it can no longer be finessed by spin doctors. Excellent!
   
5. NATO is shown to be the anachronism it is and is restructured... and a new looser alliance of willing partners in Europe and North American emerges to take its place, without France and Germany... Excellent!
   
6. ... which also derails the terrifying prospect of a pan-European military alliance centred on the EU. Excellent!
   
7. And speaking of the EU, now that France has broken cover with its remarks to Eastern Europe to 'shut up', I think the future seeds of the EU's disintegration have been well and truly planted. Very excellent!

Always curious to know what US politicos are thinking about these turbulent times, I had dinner with Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) last night and made many of these points to him. Whilst I would not say he was happily endorsing my views, I did not see any grimaces or rolling of eyes from the urbane Chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary. Although he did not make me a convert to the joys of the 'Patriot Act', I was surprised to see the number of issues we did indeed agree on.

Of course I am well aware things can always shake out very differently as war and politics have a ways of springing surprises on even the canniest of customers, but sometimes things also have a way of turning out better than expected. Face it, nobody really knows what will happen.

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Tony Millard writes about Nigeria, Cameroon and Russia from the middle of Tuscany.

Two days ago I got a typical Nigerian fraud scam email and, in a spirit of light-hearted humour, forwarded it to a few people with a preamble to the effect that USD$ 5,000,000 fee for giving my bank account details to someone in Africa was a good deal and should be pursued with enthusiasm as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I got the usual responses from the usual people (i.e. more or less polite trying to 'appreciate' the joke) but one stood out. It was from the wife of a friend of mine, who worked for the UN for many years in Africa.

I think it makes great reading and confirms what we already know, that the UN is a pointless bloated gravy train that has nothing to do with Africans, who seem to be written off by them as some sort of cattle, and everything to do with driving around in large 4x4s and going to self-serving meetings at my and your expense.

I reproduce is the email below in full, witholding the name of the person as the couple are good friends, despite their employment history…

Dear Tony,

I just read your mail "Blessing In Disguise". I suppose it is a joke, not being very good at sensing British humor. But in case it is not, I just want to share a few things from my own experience. You know that I have worked in Africa with different missions for the UN in the 90s, the longest one being in Cameroon, a country neighboring Nigeria. Camerooneese are very violent people and my life was several times in danger. However, compared to Nigerians, they are angels. I have been told by UN and World Bank officials never to set foot in Nigeria. It is a country where pistols and knives are used daily especially in Lagos. I have heard of people having rented a car who had to go to their hotels naked, stripped from their clothes, their money and car stolen. Even the Cameroonese avoid Nigeria.

When I came back from Cameroon to Paris, the only Cameroonese woman I trusted there, a young lady employed by the government, called me to let me know that she was arriving in Paris for a visit. I was gearing up to do everything to help her but immediately upon her arrival, I received an official call from the UN people inquiring if she was staying with me and telling me to get rid of her immediately. Apparently, after my departure from Cameroon, she together with a group of other women, had visited the police to lodge a complaint against me, accusing me of spreading propaganda against their government.

Imagine that! I worked for their government. My contacts at the World Bank later told me that once I were back in Cameroon, I'd be chucked in the underground of the airport where they would probably let me rot for days in the horrendous heat (for comparison, Tuscany temperatures in the middle of the summer are positively winter-like there).

The problem with the people in these countries is that corruption, violence and deception are ubiquitous and not addressed by the police, as such behavior appears to be the norm in their mind. You cannot trust anybody. Frankly, I'd rather go today to Iraq than any time to Cameroon or Nigeria.

Btw, similar precautions apply to any deal in which the Russians are involved...Our good Lithuanian friend, when he was doing business in Russia, never travelled without a pistol in his pocket and always accompanied with two 'gardes du corps'…

Tony, let me know very quickly that this is a joke so that I stop worrying.

XXX

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So the 'heroic' human shields found Iraq not worth laying down their lives for? I previously asked why they weren't in Kuwait City when Iraq invaded. David Carr suggested jokingly next year North Korea, but I doubt if they would be welcome. The place that needs defending right now from the threat of massive chemical and possibly nuclear destruction is South Korea.

If the human shields were anything more than stooges for Communist evil, they would be in Seoul, Pusan, or forming a chain across the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ). If it is of any help to the peacenik who may be reading, try this link for info on places to visit along the border.

I'm not holding my breath.

This has been my 100th posting on Samizdata. Thanks to Brian, Adriana and especially Perry for their patient explanations of this medium, and to all the readers and commentators, who make it all worthwhile. Well sort of

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I have just received this briefing, courtesy of Stratfor. Since a hefty subscription fee is required in order to link to the article, here is an excerpt:

"Former Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, reputed to be a personal friend of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, made a lightning visit to Baghdad on Feb. 23. The purpose and results of the meeting are shrouded in secrecy, apart from a statement by Moscow that Hussein was asked -- and agreed -- to cooperate fully with U.N. weapons inspectors.

Reliable Stratfor sources within the Russian government say Hussein indeed has promised to cooperate with the inspectors' demands -- including that Baghdad scrap its al Samoud 2 missile program by March 1, an announcement that sources expect to be forthcoming within days."

It seems that this '11th hour offer' also includes an invitation for Western oil companies to recommence business in Iraq and a blanket promise from Hussein to 'play nicely'. The offer is being heavily sponsored by the French, the Germans and the Russians and is expected to be received warmly by HMG.

But the real test is whether or not it is accepted in Washington. It could be acceptable if it could then be presented as having only be achieved by the credible threat of force. However, the policy goal in Washington is regime change in Iraq and not status-quo.

Rejection of the offer by Washington could see Mr.Primakov flying back to Baghdad to broker yet another offer, although what more Hussein could possibly put on the table is hard to imagine.

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This Iraq business. Every few weeks I sit down and try to write something short and sweet on the subject and it soon grows long and ugly. Yesterday I did it again. Today I'll try it yet again. (And hurrah! Here it finally is. But long and ugly, I'm afraid.)

So. Iraq. Blah blah blah, cut cut cut. And then this:

The USA is not just squaring up to Saddam Hussein because he is a big bad threat, although I'm sure that's part of it. It is also going to take out Saddam's Iraq because it is a good place to set about influencing other important places from, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, and because it is takeable. Iraq is nasty, but it is also weak. Saddam Hussein is a monster and is known to be a monster, which makes him weak. Arabs aren't nearly as opposed to the USA taking out Saddam as they would be if it attacked another of their countries, which makes him weak. Even the UN has resolved various things against Saddam over the years. So he's vulnerable as well as threatening. The benefit of taking him out is big, while the cost of taking him out, by the standards of your average piece of conquest is quite low. I mean, imagine if the USA was instead trying to conquer Iran, or Egypt, or Saudi Arabia. Nightmare. Couldn't happen.

The point is: USA thinking isn't only about the rights and wrongs of invading Iraq, liberating the Iraqis, and stopping Saddam-bossed or Saddam-assisted future terrorist attacks. They have many other dishes on their menu besides him. The purpose of taking out Saddam is not just to take out Saddam, but to wrench the whole balance of power in the Muslim world into a different state, a state far less helpful to Islamofascist (and other) terrorists.

The key questions are: Will the USA setting up shop right next to the very heart of the Muslim world like this enable it to take out terrorists and terrorist infrastructure more efficaciously than before? Will it persuade potential terrorists that, what with the USA getting so exercised, maybe they'd be better off forgetting about terrorism and becoming accountants and computer consultants? Or will it provoke now reasonably "good" Muslims into becoming terrorists the way they wouldn't have done if the USA had just carried on Clintonising about it all? Presumably President Bush reckons that the answers to those questions add up to a big gain to the USA if they go into Iraq, and although I am definitely open to persuasion about all that, at the moment, for whatever difference it might make, I strongly agree with him.

Asking "Why Iraq?" and "Why not somewhere else?" is like asking "Why France?" and "Why not somewhere else?" in 1944. Lots of reasons, and meanwhile: be patient. They'll get there. Basically, Iraq is the next big step that makes the most sense. But don't confuse taking out Saddam with the endgame of this thing. Oddly enough, in Europe at any rate, it's the opponents of Bush who are now being rather more public about this than Bush's supporters. "It won't end with Iraq", said the protesters last Saturday. They're right.

Tony Blair's problem is that his public support for Bush is based on a diminished idea of what Bush is up to, which comes over as dishonest because it is. But, if Blair were publicly to support what Bush is really up to, that would be honest, but very probably even more unpopular, especially with his own Party, than what he is saying now. A lot – and I mean a lot – of British people think that the USA is quite assertive enough in the world now, thank you very much, without it getting an order of magnitude more assertive. I hope Americans realise what a public pickle Blair is getting himself into over this.

Meanwhile, whatever Blair or the Brits or the French or the Timbuktooans might say or think, the USA plan is to take Iraq, and following that, over the next few years, to make itself a lot safer than now from terrorist attacks by (a) chasing terrorists, absolutely everywhere on the planet, and by (b) putting whatever pressure is necessary on any government anywhere which is now not chasing terrorists to switch to chasing terrorists with comparable zeal to the USA, thereby making the USA, and the West and the World in general, massively safer from terrorist attack than we all are now. And if that also makes the USA a whole lot more of a force in the world even than it is now, well, the Americans can live with that.

Ah, the irony of it. The idea of 9/11 was that it would bring the Great Satan to its knees. Now it looks as if this attack, breaking the Machiavelli rule that if you attack your enemy you had better be in a position then to finish him off, is actually going to result in the Great Satan becoming a lot stronger. By launching that astonishing assault, the Islamofascists have turned the world into a place that the USA now feels it has to control far more completely than it ever has before, in sheer self defence, and in particular it has turned the Muslim world into something that the USA is now determined to plunged into the middle of and severely re-arrange.

I know, I know. Is what the USA is doing right? Well maybe it is and maybe it isn't. But me? - I sympathise with the USA. If I'm right about what it's doing and why, well, I think it all makes perfect sense. Plus, frankly, in situations like this, I'm far more interested simply in trying to work out what is happening than I am to inform the world of what ought, in my opinion, to be happening instead if I do not approve.

One final point, which strongly tilts me towards the USA in all this.

The USA is now powerful enough to influence large tracts of the world in a big way, provided it does mostly nice things (like squash terrorism, spread capitalism and spread democracy) and that will be mostly very good news for the world, in my opinion, even for most of the people who will never admit this. And the USA may also be stupid enough to do serious damage to itself in the process. War is the health of the state, etc. But what the USA is not capable of doing, now or for the foreseeable future, is to tyrannise over the world. The USA can't, in other words, do to the world what Saddan Hussein and his cronies have been doing to Iraq for the last two decades, whatever the USA's enemies now say. The USA is simply not constituted to do such a thing. It's not in its nature, flawed though that may be. It doesn't have either the will or the power to do this. Had the old USSR ever had the power of the current USA, who knows what it might have done, and how many more millions it might have slaughtered in the process? But the USA, no.

If the USA had two billion people in it and an economy twice its present size and growing really fast, and if all its internal checks and balances had either been castrated out of it by a succession of Julius Caesars (and there are some who say that exactly this last bit has already happened or will shortly happen) or else if the USA had never had any checks and balances in the first place – instead of a mere three hundred million (??) people and an economy chugging along okay, and a Constitution and a democratic political tradition that still counts (in my opinion) for a hell of a lot – then I wonder what I would think about the USA hegemonising in all directions the way it is now doing? Power corrupts, and absolute power, … etc. With a USA like that, I might regard even the occasional serious terrorist stunt in places like my own London SW1, even with WMDs, as a price worth paying to avoid such a world.

But as it is: go Uncle Sam. And then keep on going. Just don't fuck up.

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Nicolas Chatfort write the obituary of the UN, an organization whose statist premise makes its impending passing something few at Samizdata.net will shed a tear over

We are witnessing a major historical turning point in history. The world order envisioned by the UN is on its deathbed and unlikely to be revived. The world order I am referring to, however, is not the one enshrined in the lofty words of the UN charter. No, that vision died long ago, in fact as soon as the signatures were given in San Francisco. The idealistic vision of an international community working harmoniously toward common ends died stillborn when despotic regimes, whose very existences were alien to the goals set out in the charter, were allowed to join. The idea that the legitimacy to US actions is dependent on the views of countries such as Angola, China, Guinea, or Syria is absurd.

Realpolitiks, on the other hand, have underpinned the UN for over half a century. The myth behind the UN is that it an organization designed to maintain international peace through collective security. Nothing could be further from the truth. The strength of the UN has always rested on a grand bargain between the US and the other democracies of world. On the one side, the US would agree not to return to isolationism after WWII and promised to use its military force to provide a protective umbrella to its weaker partners. On the other side, the democracies would provide political support to US actions around the globe, thus enhancing the legitimacy of these actions. The Security Council has been effective only when it has been aligned with the interests of the United States, on whom it has been dependent for military strength with which to impose its will. No other country or collection of countries can adequately substitute for the US military.

This bargain has now been broken. France and Germany no longer feel that they have an obligation to support the US. In fact, it now appears that France views the weakening of American power as one of its major diplomatic goals. Although in the past French posturing has been a nuisance for the US, it had always returned to the side of the US when it mattered. The recent French actions in the UN, however, are unprecedented in that Paris is now working actively to undermine the US position. The obstinacy of the French position suggests that Paris is more interested in bringing the US to heal than Iraq. Chirac is mistaken if he believes that the US will acknowledge UN paramountcy over US security interests. The UN cannot function without the US military power to back it up and the US will not long remain a member if it comes to view UN more as an impediment to US security rather than as an aid.

Nicolas Chatfort

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Arguments are getting quite heated among libertarians about the claim that the US is a potential threat to freedom versus the view that the US is the best guarantor of freedom in the world today. I happen to agree with both statements.

It would be absurd to claim that the US is a worse place to live than peacetime Iraq, unless one happened to enjoy being part of a quasi-fascist police state. It is reasonable to worry about the potential threat to freedom posed by the world's only superpower: there is no one to overthrow that state if it should go rotten.

I am disappointed in the complacency of some US libertarians and conservatives who ought to remember that wartime is the time when most encroachments on freedom can be justified. I have been accused of hype for using Hillary Clinton as an example of what a horrible US could be. Surely there can't be anyone who thinks that none of Presidents Lincoln, Wilson, Hoover, F.D.Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Bush senior and Clinton were ever a threat to freedom? Or that no one will ever be elected to the US presidency who is a bad person?

I certainly wish the US forces in the Middle East a speedy and successful trip. I equally hope that the plan is to remove the tyrant with no or low civilian casualties, both for humanitarian reasons, but also because a post-Saddam Iraq will be less resentful of US troops if there hasn't been carpet-bombing, or bad target intelligence.

I remain convinced that the British forces will either be as symbolic or ineffective as the Piedmont-Sardinian contingent during the Crimean War, or worse that they are headed for a repeat of Isandlwana, Majuba Hill, or Dunkirk. Bluntly the best troops in the world are cannon fodder when they run out of ammunition, the comms equipment doesn't work and their boots have melted in the sun.

As for ID cards for use against terrorism. Yes they can help. Yes they are also a violation of personal liberty. But I would be rather more convinced if the British government weren't providing safe havens for terrorists whether leftist, Islamist or Irish.

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Apologies are due for my short sabbatical away from the Samizdata but I'm afraid the prosaic concerns of keeping a roof over my head required attendance.

Having returned this evening, I have had an opportunity to scroll through the items posted since my last visit and, also, the comments appended thereto. It is among the latter efforts that I discovered this outpouring of hysterical claptrap:

"You are evading the fact that the United States Government is the foremost terrorist organisation in the world at the current time and its war plans are not designed to protect yours and my liberties but rather to extend its own power at the expense of me and you in terms of our money, liberty and increased risk of attack and at the expense of the lives of the innocents in Iraq who are about to be bombed.

For a moment, I thought we had been honoured with a visit from Noam Chomsky, but the actual author turned out to be Paul Coulam who I had, until now, credited with a bit more common sense. I won't go as far as to say that I am shocked but I am disappointed; not because Paul is clearly against any attack on Iraq but because he has elected to employ the ludicrous rhetoric of the far-left in order to express that opposition.

If Paul honestly believes the things he has written then there is probably nothing I can do or say that will serve to change his mind but I am inspired enough to conduct a little Q&A session in which Paul and everybody else is invited to participate.

1. America is indeed on the warpath. Is this because:
   1. They just decided that they want to dominate everybody in the whole world and enslave them for ever and steal all their resources?

      OR

   2. They might just be trying to prevent another 9/11 type terrorist attack on their country?

2. Paul is quite right to be outraged at the erosion of his civil liberties and the plundering of his wealth but are these processes occuring because of:
   1. American warmongering and 'bloodlust' for power?:

      OR

   2. Because the majority of his (and my) fellow Brits keep electing socialist kleptocrats into Westminster and they, in turn, are only answerable to even bigger kleptocrats in the EU?

3. Thousands of Saddam's 'Republican Guards' will be deliberately targetted by allied forces in any attack on Iraq. These are the men who have tortured, murdered and terrorised a nation at the behest of their tyrant boss. Should they be regarded as:
   1. 'Innocent' Iraqi victims of the American terror machine?

      OR

   2. About as deserving of our sympathy as the Waffen SS?

Of course, I have my own answers to these questions (can't you tell?).

On a slightly different tack, I also note that Paul chose to play the 'Switzerland' card in his arguments with US foreign policy>

"If the US had followed a similar foreign policy to that of say Switzerland we would be much safer, freer and richer than is currently the case."

Excuse me, Paul, but did you put even a jot of thought into that statement before you posted it? Had the US followed the foreign policy of, say, Switzerland then we would now be living under the shadow of either a Nazi or a Soviet Europe. 'Safer' 'freer' and 'richer' are not exactly the three words I would use to describe that state of affairs.

Besides which I assume it's the internationally-recognised Swiss neutrality that is actually at the heart of the matter and I do wonder why Rothbardians are always insisting on such neutrality for the USA? Swiss neutrality has been respected largely because of its geography and unique position as a small country in the heart of a continent. Neutrality is no defence against war (both Holland and Belgium declared neutrality at the outbreak of WWII) and is not a realistic model for a huge trading country like the USA (or even Britain for that matter). Swiss neutrality is, I'm afraid, uniquely Swiss.

And let me turn to another ridiculous, but widely echoed, assertion:

"Would Saddam or Osama or any of the rest of them be remotely interested in us if our governmnets hadn't sought to continually intervene in their affairs."

Spoken as if the Middle East was some tranquil oasis of civil society and free trade before all these meddling 'Gringos' showed up, and not an imperial playground or a tapestry of super-power client states. Still, let us not get bogged down by the sorry history of that sorry corner of the world because when Paul appeals for an end to 'intervention' in the affairs of the region he undoubtedly means a withdrawal of all the soldiers, spooks and subsidies.

That may be a good idea but it would not be an end to 'intervention' because commerce is also a form of intervention, especially when it is commerce between developed and undeveloped countries. Whenever Coca-Cola open a canning plant in Damascus, that is 'intervention' in the region; if BMW open a dealership in Amman that is 'intervention' in the region, especially when the 'white men in suits' start showing up with suitcases full of cash ready to power-broke with local potentates. Rothbardians may not see MTV Satellite broadcasts as a provokation but people like Osama Bin Laden most certainly do.

So, when people like Paul call for the West to stop intervening in the region let's be clear what is actually being called for: not only does the military hardware have to be pulled out but Exxon, Shell, BP, IBM, Hewlett Packard and Britney Spiers etc all have to be pulled as well. Who knows, perhaps Western governments would have to sanction their own corporations from doing any business in the region at all.

Is this what the Rothbardians want? Somehow, when push comes to shove, I rather doubt it.

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Last night I attended a political fundraising dinner where the speaker was a Conservative MP. Because he deals with defence issues, he was quizzed (often heckled) by members of his party about the Iraq war. Last November I heard an American 'informed source' give an explanation as to why war with Iraq was just and necessary.

The problem I have is that there was no common ground at all between the case presented by both speakers. According to one, the hunt for Al-Qaeda is the background goal. According to the other, Al-Qaeda will be cheering when that secularist Saddam falls. One said that nuclear, biological and chemical weapons were the single jusification. The other said it was a smokescreen to get UN backing. One said that there was eidence that Saddam had financed Al-Qaeda. The other said there was no such evidence, but he was financing Hezbollah instead (which is bizarre given the long-standing Iranian connection).

So we are left with this conclusion, the politicians haven't a clue what they are talking about, and the intelligence services are playing their pet theories off against each other.

If the war against Iraq is about the right of one country to disarm another I am against it. Today Bush thinks Iraq should be disarmed, who will President Hillary or President Gore pick on? Switzerland? Israel? The United Kingdom? If it is to overthrow tyrants then why not start with North Korea? If the war is supposed to install a pro-American government in Iraq then how will bombing Iraqi cities help?

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Reading a number of anti-war libertarian blogs such as that of the estimable Jim Henley, it occurred to me that among the various errors in their positions over what to do about Saddam, etc, is a tendency to dismiss or downplay any threat that such countries may pose to us.

Now, I am not going to engage in some long ramble about why I think the case for war is correct (though I think it is). However, what I do want to do is briefly reflect on what I think is an aspect of the anti-war libertarian position which could prove damaging to libertarianism more generally. It is the problem of evasion.

In recent years, libertarians have been aware of a growing threat to our free society, namely, the Green movement. And much time is spent, rightly, dismissing or pulling apart the scare stories (such as the Greenhouse Effect, population explosion, etc) that are offered to justify wholesale government controls over our lives. But a nagging question is - what would libertarians do if the Green case is partly, or even wholly, correct? What if global warming is as bad as they claim? What would we fans of free-wheeling capitalism do about that? It is simply not good enough for us to trash the Green case without at least working out how we would cope with such issues.

It seems to me that the isolationist libertarians who rubbish most government attempts to crack down on terrorists and their state sponsors need to answer a similar sort of question. How can free, minimal state societies deal with serious threats to liberty and life? What sort of measures should such societies take?

I think we owe it to ourselves to pose such questions and come up with a few ideas. Attacking governments for trashing civil liberties and ramping up defence spending is of course a good thing for libertarians to do, and we must continue to do so. But not offering any positive suggestions on how we defend ourselves is not just unwise. It threatens also to make the libertarian movement irrelevant.

And frankly, I don't give a toss whether such worries make me a 'neo-libertarian' or whatever. I am not interested in going to my grave knowing that I died like a good disciple of Murray Rothbard. I want to stay alive with as much freedom as possible. It is about time that we worked on a few ways to achieve that.

Consider the gauntlet thrown on the floor.

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According to the New Zealand Herald, North Korea says nuclear war is possible at 'any moment'. I'll still guess it's just blackmail and grandstanding. Invasion didn't work for them in 1950 and it certainly won't work now, even with a couple nukes. A couple nukes is just enough to get the whole planet really ticked off at them. They'd be done for. Everyone (except the French of course) would want a piece of them.

Unless their leaders are some unbelievable combination of stupid and desperate...

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The mighty N.Z. Bear has a splendid article about what he would do if he was UN Secretary General for a day, fisking UN Resolution 1441 and Iraqi non-compliance. Good stuff!

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I have liked many of Mark Steyn's articles in recent months but in The Falklands War is a model of fierce good sense, he has outdone himself. he draws many useful parallels between the Falklands War and the impending war with Iraq's Ba'athist regime.

Why would anybody think, faced with economic catastrophe, that invading a string of distant islands is the answer? Dictators don't behave rationally. Indeed, one reason they become dictators is precisely to escape the tiresome constraints of rationality. There may be valid arguments for not going to war with Iraq, but not the ones that begin, oh, even if Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, he'd never use them against the West. Never bet on a dictator's rationality.

This is Steyn at his best... read the whole article!

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After watching the news tonight, I am coming around ever more to David Carr's way of thinking. Perhaps sheer irritation by the Bush Administration about the obscurantist stance of the French and German governments regarding the use of force to depose Saddam Hussain may achieve something I have long wanted to see... the end of the fiction in American minds that either France or Germany are in fact US allies in any meaningful sense.

This is the first step needed to de-couple the Anglosphere Atlantic Alliance from the legacy of World War Two and the Cold War. The first clear step that this process is under way will be the permanent withdrawal of most US forces currently stationed in Germany, a situation which is a costly anachronism in the post Cold War world. Maybe the opportunity will be immediatly post-Gulf War II, with the US troops currently based in Germany which are going to be involved in Iraq going back to bases in the USA instead.

I just hope the pompous Chirac and the buffoonish Schroeder keep plucking on the eagle's feathers... sooner of later Blair, or his successor, is going to have to decide if they want to be on the side of history's winners or history's losers.

Hell, changing the name of N.A.F.T.A. to North Atlantic Free Trade Area would not even require reprinting all that stationary with the acronym on it!

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This year we are likely to see a regime change in Bagdad and if we're very lucky in Pyongyang. Brussels would be taking optimisim perhaps a bit far!

It occurs to me that this is an area in which libertarians who are sceptical of the public relations exercise known as the "Saddam's the worst thing since Hitler" can agree with the libertarian interventionists. It also shows up the fundamental dishonesty of the leftist "peace" campaigners.

Talking to a "peace" protestor a couple of weeks ago I was informed of the following alleged facts:

1. that Iraq was a client of the US and armed by the Reagan and Bush senior presidencies.
   
2. that the people of Iraq would bear the brunt of any US led military intervention.
   
3. that the sanctions against Iraq were killing hundreds of children every day;
   
4. that the US was only interested in manipulating the oil price, though I'm clear whether it is supposed to go up or down.
   
5. that the "peace" protestors are against any war and in no way endorsing the Iraqi regime (which remains nameless).

Contrast the claims with the attitudes of the same people about the regimes of general Pinochet in Chile and the apartheid regime in South Africa.

1. The left claimed that both were US client states, so why didn't the peace protestors defend those regimes from proposed US sanctions? Obviously the "client state" claim is irrelevant or untrue.
   
2. If the people are going to suffer most from military action, how come they don't defend the German people who suffered from a terrible invasion in 1945: Soviet troops were ordered to rape every German woman they could find in Berlin. The "peace" protestors are not normally known for minimising the trauma of multiple rapes on women and children.
   
3. How come the South African children who presumably suffered from the leftist inspired sanctions against South Africa weren't worth defending? Perhaps they were meant to suffer and become useful puppets in a Soviet war of liberation.
   
4. So where were these "peace" protestors when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, or when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, or Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1980 (admittedly they must have been confused by this one)?

Funny how it's only the regimes that support socialism (preferably of a racialist tendency) or anti-modern theocracy that are deemed worthy of "peace" protestor support.

A Commie is a Commie is a Commie. There are grounds for opposing war, but the Communist Dictator Defence League isn't one of them.

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Perhaps not the best feel-good title for my first posting and certainly not the usual New Year's Eve admonition but it concerns the aspect of reality that urged me to blog in the first place. It is also just too horrible to pass on in the interest of New Year's festivities.

There are many living hells in the world today but North Korea deserves a special mention. According to Anthony Daniels, one of the few journalists to have visited North Korea, no other regime comes remotely as close to annihilating the human personality as North Korea's does.

Never in history have human beings been so dragooned into uniformity and blind obedience as in North Korea. The regime is one of bread and circuses: but attendance at the circuses is compulsory and the bread has been replaced by rockets.

The North Korean ideal is an eternal marchpast of the Leader by millions of people, expressionless until they let out a howl of rehearsed joy when the leader raises his hand to them. I have seen it myself, and am glad to have done so: for it was absolute political evil, the ne plus ultra of inhumanity.

I know most people realise that North Korea is a 'bad guy' although Bush mentioning it as part of the Axis of Evil will certainly prompt some anti-American idiotarians into defending it. In some vague way, we know North Korean are oppressed by a Stalinist-type regime, have been starving for some time and now the North Korean leadership have hit the headlines with their nuclear weapons antics. But just as during the Cold War we didn't know what communism really meant for the individual citizen in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, now we don't know how exactly the North Korean variety of communism continues to crush human creativity, spirit and dignity.

It doesn't help that an alarmingly high number of other useful idiotarians who have encountered the evil there either cannot or refuse to see it. The former US President Jimmy Carter managed to see in Pyongyang a second Manhattan. Anthony Daniels calls it not blindness, but hallucination. He concludes:

The only question, then, is how to destroy it once and for all: whether to let time take its toll (for all things pass); to offer little fat Kim a gilded retirement in Monaco watching the pornographic films that he is said to like; or to threaten war.

I know which option I'd take.

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Garry North at LewRockwell.com tells us:

Once the United States military has established control over the oil fields, which I assume it will do at the beginning of the invasion, Iraq will not be able to feed itself.  Control the flow of oil, and you control the only thing worth controlling in Iraq.  The government will topple.  Even if it doesn’t, who cares if the U.S. government controls the oil?

At that point, the oil-drilling concessions will be handed out by the United States government’s puppet regime.  "Y'all come!"  This will buy off Europe’s foot-dragging politicians, who will be able to go to their voters and say, "fait accompli."  They will have offered token resistance to the United States, which is all that European voters expect.  Now they will reap the rewards, either directly by the participation of their national oil companies or indirectly by enjoying a lower price of oil.

The USA wants to invade Iraq to 'control' the flow of oil. Bush wants to do this in order to increase the supply of oil and therefore lower the price... and clearly saying "Y'all" is prima facie evidence of conspiratorial evilness. Gotcha.

However...

"Iraq’s oil fields are capable of providing far more than an extra million barrels of oil a day.  This is why the United States has in effect capped Iraqi wells by its oil-for-food embargo.

Right, so Bush has been doing beastly things to Iraq to keep oil prices up then?

Richard Perle is the chairman of President Bush's Defense Policy Board, a civilian advisory group.  He co-authored a paper in 1996, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," which was published by the previously mentioned Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies.  The report is still on-line.  It calls for the establishment of a new balance-of-power foreign policy in Israel – the same system, it might be added, that twice led England into world war, and which twice required the United States to bail out England.  The report made suggestions to the Likud Party, which is Ariel Sharon’s party.

Ah, its not about oil, its about Israel. Right. And if 'balance-of-power' is such a terrible idea, when why are LewRockwell.com always so bent out of shape by the current pre-eminence of the USA?

And what is this about bailing out England? I guess Scotland, Ulster and Wales were not 'bailed out' then? It is usually a good indication of someone engaging in a cranio-rectal insertion when they refer to the UK as 'England', which is rather like describing the USA as 'New York State'. And this is someone who has such knowledge of International Affairs that he can see through the machinations of the sinister Oil Illuminati.

The United States must defend the interests of the alliance by bringing new supplies into production.  This was what the invasion of Afghanistan was all about: establishing protection over a new pipeline from the Caspian Sea oil fields, either through Afghanistan and Pakistan and into the tankers, or through Turkey.  This pipeline is important if Russia is not to control this flow of oil.  The Great Game of the 19th century – Russia, Turkey, England, Afghanistan, and India – is still being fought.  For a good analysis of the pipeline issues, see the September, 2001 article on Turkey and the pipeline, which is posted on the Web site of the joint Israeli-American organization, the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies.

Ah. Its all about Russia! Or more accuratly, depriving Russia, the world's second largest oil exporter, of oil. Gotcha. And that is what Afghanistan was 'about' too... in case an oil pipeline might, some time in the future, go through there. Or through Pakistan. Or through Turkey. Or maybe Gloucestershire?

The oil lever is the lowest-cost foreign policy tool at the government's disposal.  This will require American troops in Iraq on a permanent basis. This is a deliberate no-exit strategy.  The Administration plans to send in troops that will become as permanent as its 5,000 troops in Saudi Arabia.  How many troops will this be?  As many as it takes to control the marginal price of oil. The United States government is about to replace OPEC as the pricing agent of world oil.  The name of the game is still cartel pricing, but there will be different hands on the spigots.

Oh, so it is all about oil then! If someone can explain what this gibberish actually means, I would be very grateful. And to think there was a time when I actually admired the Lew Rockwell group.

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I don't think anyone is naive enough to believe that the highly state-controlled business of arms sales isn't a tool of foreign policy. With that is mind, news of this deal might be interesting:

"Lockheed Martin has won a contract to supply 48 new F-16 fighter jets to Poland, in Eastern Europe's biggest military deal.

The US firm beat off competition from the French manufacturer Dassault and a joint British-Swedish venture by BAE Systems and Saab to secure the deal."

I have not the first clue about the relative technical merits, or otherwise, of the various fighter jets concerned but I do know that high-grade weapons deals such as this are loaded (scuse pun) with political and diplomatic significance. The arms business is seldom just about business as one of the parties to the negotiations is only too quick to point out:

"Dassault chief executive Charles Edelstenne accused the Polish government of making a political decision by choosing an American plane rather than a European one.

"The political element was the dominating element, much more than the quality of the material and the price," he told Radio France Info.

"I felt for a very long time that they very much favoured rapprochement with the Americans. So it's not a surprise," he said."

Sour grapes? Well, possibly. But, then again, he might just be right:

"Lockheed was backed by a $3.8bn US government financing package and some heavy lobbying by President George W Bush's administration."

Alright, every government lobbies on behalf of its domestic arms industry. But Poland is one of the ten or so former Eastern Bloc countries pencilled in to join the European Union in 2004 and, arguably, the most important of them. How odd that the Poles should so publicly rebuff their prospective Euro-partners in favour of the Great Satan.

Could it be that the above-mentioned 'lobbying' was about more than jet-fighters and that the Bush administration has decided it would be good strategy to gently lure the Poles away from the twitching tentacles of Brussels? Watch that space.

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Picture this: A CIA official in handcuffs, standing in the dock of the European Court at Strasbourg while a calcified, gravelly German judge hands down a life sentence.

Far-fetched? Yes, but theoretically possible by dint of the orders issued by the Whitehouse,

"US President George W Bush has authorised the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to kill about a dozen terrorist leaders named on a secret list prepared by the White House..."

which has made waves in Europe:

"EU legal and constitutional experts in Brussels said Monday that the killing in the European Union of suspected terrorist leaders on a list drawn up by the White House would be considered murder, even if the person had been authorised for such a liquidation by the law of his home country."

So, let's imagine that a CIA trigger-man clips Mahmoud Al-Nutjob on the steps of his student hostel in Berlin. Is said CIA man going to be arrested by the German police? If so, is he going to be prosecuted by the German state? Would the US government intervene? If so, what form would that intervention take?

I think that there could be a just a little friction here.

*Tip to any CIA agent who may find himself in the above situation: don't try the old 'I was only obeying orders' defence. It won't cut much ice with Germans.

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It's a done deal!

"Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia are all set to join the EU in May 2004."

Following an intense round of Gallic shrugging, Belgian glad-handing, German tax raising, Italian bribing and Swedish introspection, Brussels has munificently agreed to don the mantle of the late Soviet Union and squat like a toad on the peoples of Eastern Europe.

My message to the ten lucky winners of 'Economic Jeopardy': you guys need your collective heads tested! Don't you know that there is no destination printed on that ticket you've just bought to ride the Great Rattling Train of Regulation?

Still, there is hope for the Turks, left yapping like angry terriers outside as the stone gates of the Belgian Empire slammed shut in their faces:

"European leaders meeting at a landmark EU Summit in Copenhagen this week thwarted Turkish and Anglo-American hopes for early negotiations for the country’s entry into the European Union, opting instead for a review of its progress on its economy, human rights and democracy by the end of 2004."

A review!! Oh come on, we all know what that means. Sometime towards the end of 2004 a roomful of enarques in Brussels will take some time out from their daily task of grinding out reams of pointless legislation to call up Jacques Chirac and ask him if he has changed his mind about the Saracens. 'Non'. Review complete.

No, the real mystery is why the US appears to be so keen to stuff Turkey into the Euro-oven. Do they think it will strengthen the EU? Why would they want to do that? Have they not been keeping up with current events in the State Department?

Or, alternatively, perhaps they realise only too well that the French and Germans are never going to accede to Turkish membership and are therefore sponsoring the proposition in order to lever open a few nascent cracks?

Of course, if Washington wants to be really smart they could always drop a line to Ankara offering them membership of NAFTA. The Turkish terriers would snap at it, I'd wager. They clearly want to join the West. They want to be in the rich boys' club. Oo-oo-oo I wanna be like you-oo-oo. So let them. In fact, Washington could really set the cat amongst the Princely pigeons by going further and offering NAFTA status to the ten soon-to-be-strangled-in-red-tape candidates above as well.

Of course the EUnuchs would be furious. Wouldn't want that now, would we (snigger!).

My message to the Turks; we Brits are in and want out, you're out and want in. Fancy a swap?

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Back in March of this year I did a posting here saying that Japan will be back, and ever since then I have been keeping a particular eye out for Japan news in whatever media stuff came my way. The most startling thing I has spotted so far was an article in the November issue of Prospect, by Eamonn Fingleton, called "Japan's fake funk", which says that Japan never went away, and the only surprise will be when the West realises it. This article was subsequently made available here at Financial Review. (My thanks to John Ray for supplying the link to this.) Whatever you think of this piece, it certainly makes fascinating reading. Here's how it starts:

FOR A DECADE now, the western consensus has been that Japan is an economic basket case. But this is a dramatic misreading of a perennially secretive society. Indeed, it may come to be seen as one of the most significant misreadings in economic history.

Fingleton goes on to argue that Japan's alleged economic woes are just that - alleged - and that actually Japan is doing very well thank you. It is racing ahead in numerous vital technologies, its standard of living is not at all in decline, and its financial woes are greatly exaggerated. Economically, says Fingleton, Japan has now overtaken the USA.

Why then do the Japanese still send out SOS messages? Because, says Fingleton, it suits them to. Being regarded as a basket case means that they get an easy ride diplomatically from the USA, while they cosy up to the Chinese, who are in Fingleton's opinion about to emerge any decade now as the world's dominant economy.

Fingleton is the author of In Praise of Hard Industries, published in 1999, which denounced the internet stock fad for being a fad, so he has something of a pedigree. But is he right?

Or is he just the latest in a long line of dirigiste-inclined self-deluders who regard only certain parts of the economy (in his case big and complicated machines) as being "real" (as opposed to "information" which he reckons is not so real), in the same way that people used to say that only agriculture was real and that manufacturing, and then "finance", was economic frippery by comparison.

This emailer to Brunton et al. ("Trader") dismisses Fingleton's piece as "nonsense", for all the usual financial reasons that we've become familiar with. Fingleton regards people like "Trader" as self-deluders.

Other commentators have made much of Japan's alleged demographic woes, in the form of a rapidly aging population.

Well, who is right?

If the technological facts assembled by Fingleton are right – Japan racing ahead in "key technologies", like supercomputers, machine tools, and so forth – then if Japan is in decline, it is in a very odd sort of decline, caused, it would seem, by them financing high technology for the rest of us at a loss, and thus becoming the world's best informed paupers. Sort of technological monks, you might say.

I don't know what the truth is about all this, but I would like to very much. Comments?

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This is rather startling. Martin Walker is a lefty, but he's no mug. I've read his book about the Cold War, and although lefty, it's not bad. This is Walker reporting from Washington for UPI, November 13th:

"You want to know what I really think of the Europeans?" asked the senior State Department official. "I think they have been wrong on just about every major international issue for the past 20 years."

They were wrong, the diplomat continues, about Bosnia, and about Russia accepting NATO enlargement and Missile Defense. They were wrong about the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972 and the Kyoto Protocol. They were wrong about the European Union's new common security and defense policy. They were wrong about Reagan and the Evil Empire, and they helped vote the US off the UN Human Rights Commission. They whine about the US Farm Bill when they are the world's prime protectionists.

The official, a career diplomat who speaks fluent French and likes to vacation in Italy, sat back and took an appreciative sip from his glass of good red wine from Bordeaux.

"One more thing," he added. "Whenever I use the word Europeans, I don't mean the Brits."

It was perhaps the most interesting and informative off-the-record lunch this reporter had attended in some three decades in the news business. The speaker was not a political appointee with a cursory knowledge of international affairs, but a professional and highly experienced Foreign Service officer with a wide range of friends and contacts across Europe.

He is a cultivated and courteous man, but he was angry, in that dangerous way quiet men can be. And the unveiled contempt in his voice and the curl of his lip when he drawled out the word "Europeans" said as much for the depth of his feelings as his bitter rhetoric.

Europeans do not yet get this, the great sea change that has taken place in the American foreign policy establishment. …

Thinking about it, what I find startling is not what it says, but the fact that it says it, in a boring old wire service. I have only one thing to add. Read the whole thing before it disappears from easy view.

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Dale is right, in their simplistic minds, the news anchors miss the real battle.

Finally, France appears favourably disposed to new U.S. proposals for a draft resolution that now drops any immediate authorisation for a military strike against Iraq unless Baghdad balks at U.N. weapons inspections.

Facing major opposition from everybody, except the trusty Brits who supported all the U.S. drafts, the United States radically changed key parts of its earlier draft resolution which authorised any U.N. member to "use all necessary means" if it decided Iraq violated a whole series of infractions. The new text also deletes earlier proposals explicitly threatening "serious consequences."

It does sound pretty watered down, if you ask me, but after meeting chief U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix, the U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said that a new resolution would not prevent Washington from undertaking a military strike against Iraq:

"The United States does not need any additional authority even now, if we thought it was necessary to take action to defend ourselves."

The new U.S. compromise has been labelled as a "one-and-a-half step." Instead of two resolutions - one that would give Iraq an opportunity to comply and a second that would authorise force - if the Security council does not do so after reports by Blix of any failure by Iraq to comply with its disarmament obligations, the United States could decide to strike Iraq anyway, and would probably get considerable support to do so.

What seems to be happening is that the French are backtracking whilst trying to preserve some diplomatic dignity. French Ambassador Jean-David Levitte said France insisted on a "two-staged" approach but did not say if this meant a second resolution. Well, given that the U.S. envoys are going around making statements about the U.S. determination to use military force anyway, and in the light of recent terrorist attacks, the opposing Europeans are starting to look like complete twits. The only reason they can get away with it, is that they look quite reasonable next to the rest of the U.N. twits.

The Russian U.N. ambassador, Sergei Lavrov, sharply criticised any unilateral action and warned the United States not to use the Security Council as an excuse for a military strike or one that would lead to a "regime change." I am surprised that the holier-than-thou Russian even understands the meaning of "regime change"!

Bangladesh Ambassador Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury opined:

"Every possible effort should be made to avert war. These views are evidently shared by a preponderant majority of the membership of the United Nations. They must be heard, listened to and heeded."

Yes, and your delusions of relevance must be exposed, dispelled and shown for what they are. An empty rhetoric with potentially dire consequences, endangering lives and safety of millions of innocent citizens whose governments, for once, are trying to have a go at protecting them. It is not often you will hear me support Tony Blair or George Bush as representatives of the state that, in case you missed it, is not your friend...

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Patrick Crozier is back from his far eastern expedition. His experiences are now showing up on UK Transport - which deals with transport everywhere, and which will one day, I hope, have its name changed to something more everywhere-sounding - and on CrozierVision - which sounds perfect and which now deals with everything else Crozier-related. Apart from UK Transport's title my only other quibble is that most of the photos are displayed too small to appreciate properly. I enlarged one of them by mistake while putting this together, and there's nothing wrong with them that displaying them bigger wouldn't correct at once.

Such trivia aside, it's fascinating stuff. For instance, from the latest CrozierVision piece:

We are told that Japan has been in recession or thereabouts for a decade. So, while I was there I thought I'd try to spot the evidence. It wasn't easy. Cars are new, people are well-dressed, there doesn't seem to be much abandoned property, restaurants seem busy enough, there don't seem to be any sales.

I did however spot a shantytown. This one was in Tokyo and there was a similar if smaller one in Nagoya. Even in destitution the Japanese beat us. Quite simply they have a better class of dosser. Take a careful look at the photos and you will spot that in addition to the regulation cardboard box these people also have blue tarpaulins. Pretty sensible really. I also saw plenty of coat hangers presumably so that could hang out their shirts ready for that all important interview. Japanese cardboard cities also don't smell of stale urine. How they do it I don't know because public toilets in Japan seem pretty thin on the ground.

Patrick will be doing both of the last Friday of the month talks in November, on the 8th at the Evans household in Putney on Congestion Charging (that's road pricing before the spin fraternity got hold of it), and on the 29th at my place on - what else? - Japan.

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Until today, I missed this piece last Friday (Oct 11th) by Tunku Varadarajan for the Wall Street Journal, on the need for a Nobel Non-Science Anti-Prize that could really make sense and do some good. I believe you need to register to make the link work, so here are two of the key paragraphs:

This will not be a joke prize, as the peace prize is; it will be something that Saddam Hussein would get right now, a species of anathema, or international pillory. Apart from being cathartic, a negative award would have a genuine effect on the international order, a real bite in the form of a profound disincentive. Such an award would carry some of the odium of a war-crimes tribunal. No country - or, at least, no civilized country - would allow the winner to visit; and those that do would be tainted. The winner would become a pariah.

Now, that is a deterrent. That kind of award has reason to exist. And it would require some real agonizing over. Imagine the debate: Will it be Robert Mugabe or Kim Jong Il?

Indeed. Several blog-years ago I did a piece on how stupid the Nobel Peace Prize is, on the grounds mostly that peace takes decades to identify, yet they persistently grant it to people who signed alleged peace treaties last Wednesday. Evil, in contrast, can often be identified right now, just as some forms of scientific progress can be. (The cracking of DNA by Watson and Crick springs to mind. As I understand that triumph, they were getting joyously drunk the evening of the day they cracked it.) Likewise, if almost an enitire nation is being systematically starved (as in North Korea right now) you don't need thirty years to realise how evil that was. So yes, I'm for it.

Seriously, if the blogosphere got behind this notion we could really make it happen. Let nominations commence.

Boring I know, and boringly topical, but I think I'd go with whoever is most in charge of North Korea these days. But if you can suggest someone nastier and make your mud stick, go ahead and good luck to you. That's the whole point.

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That's it, then. Prime Minister Tony Blair has been warned that military action against Iraq to force a regime change would breach international law. According to the Financial Times, he received confidential advice from Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith and Solicitor General Harriet Harman that international law would allow military action in "limited circumstances" to support U.N. resolutions, but it rules out war to achieve regime change.

Apparently, the legal advice explains why Blair has shied away from openly calling for a "regime change" like U.S. President George W. Bush who wants to see Saddam Hussein gone regardless of whether United Nations inspectors return to check Iraq's weapons capability.

This is Tranzis at work using 'international law' to restrict national sovereignty, this time from within a national legal system. Let's not forget their true agenda:

A good part of the energy for transnational progressivism is provided by human rights activists, who consistently evoke "evolving norms of international law" in pursuing their goals. The main legal conflict between traditional American liberal democrats and transnational progressives is ultimately the question of whether the U.S. Constitution trumps international law or vice versa. Before the mid-twentieth century, traditional international law usually referred to relations among nation-states: it was "international" in the real sense of the term. Since that time the "new international law" has increasingly penetrated the sovereignty of democratic nationstates.

It is, therefore, in reality, "transnational law". Human rights activists work to establish norms for this "new international (i.e. transnational) law", and then attempt to bring the United States into conformity with a legal regime whose reach often extends beyond democratic politics and the guarantees of the U.S. Constitution.

Or the United Kingdom or anywhere else...

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I'm off on holiday soon, and I nearly forgot to mention it. We got an email from Shams Ali:

Hi there!

With reference to your passage in the BLOG:

"And that is when it starts to become confused. Who exactly is going to do the applying? Evidently not 'politicians', but somebody will have to. What is a "non-political government" when it's at home? What 'fundamental principles' are these? Perchance, the Law of Sharia?"

The confusion arises from the human habit of jumping at conclusions without having done the spade work to dig out the facts.

The "fundamental principles" are enumerated and defined at
www.worldjustice.org/principles.html and the rules of their application at www.worldjustice.org/rules.html also the reasonings for the need for such institution are described at www.worldjustice.org/wcj.html and some history of it all at www.worldjustice.org/history.html for the difference between government and politics see www.truth-and-justice.info/govpol.html as for Judaism, Christianity and Islam see www.truth-and-justice.info/religions.html and for the various "isms" see www.truth-and-justice.info/isms.html. You will also find some stuff on government, politics, unions, pensions, etc., by browsing the www.truth-and-justice.info/issues.html - and all that stuff is the tip of an iceberg.

Once you've gone through the stuff, I would like to hear from you what exactly YOUR "libetarianism" is, or, in other words, whom do YOU propose to favour and at whose expense?

regards,

shams ali

I'm more of a Popperian than Shams and I think that jumping at conclusions is very different from jumping to conclusions. If it isn't Sharia, and if Shams tells us it isn't Sharia, then fine, it isn't Sharia. But he doesn't answer that with a yes or a no. Instead he tells me I have to do an iceberg of homework.

It's an old trick. You write long tracts, and refuse to supply short summaries and short answers to short questions. The idea is that people will immerse themselves in your oh-so-elaborate thought processes, but the reality is they mostly ignore you on account of you being a pompous git. I shall do neither. I have glanced at some of my homework, and now I'm just going to carry on communicating – guessing, asking and answering. If Shams Ali doesn't like it, tough. We'll talk about him amongst ourselves.

Being a libertarian (that's libertarian with another "r" in there, mate) I favour people who are trying to live their lives freely, with their justly acquired property, and I believe in defending them against all who attack them. Pretty much what you say, in other words, Shams, although that "at whose expense?" of yours suggests to me a world of fixed-sum falsehood. I'd like a world dominated by libertarian ideas, and by the libertarian people who most effectively believe in them, at the expense (was this is the sort of thing you were getting at?) of all those who adhere to other more aggressively predatory sorts of ideas, who, in my alternative world, would be kept out of serious power and out of the limelite.

Unlike Shams Ali I do want to answer the who-whom question concerning my preferred utopia because, along with Julian Morrison (who commented on my earlier posting), I believe that governing, dominating, setting the agenda or the tone or the pace, reigning, achieving intellectual hegemony, calling the shots, stopping the bucks - call it what you will - has do be done by people, and that's just as true for libertarianism as it is for any other ism. The rules matter. They matter a lot. But mere rules alone won't do it. Verdicts can't impose themselves. People have to impose them. As Julian says, "even absolute rules have fuzzy edges that require human judgement", although I don't think that libertarians will be able to break their own rules "with impunity", to quote the phrase that Julian goes on to use. I think that libertarianism brings good things out of even quite bad people, and it certainly will bring many good things out of the judges who preside in libertarian courts.

Shams Ali gives no direct answer of his own to my who-whom challenge, nor do I see any in the homework he set me. My suspicion is therefore confirmed. He wants to be the Supreme Panjandrum, but like almost all would-be Supreme Panjandra, under cross-examination he dodges the question and talks of other things.

For strangely, he does answer questions I didn't ask, about Judaism and Christianity. So, another question: where does devout in-your-face damn-all-agnostics-for-a-bunch-of-fence-sitting-wimps atheism (my preferred creed) fit in with all this?

A more serious question will come from my fellow libertarians: why am I bothering with this character?

Well, he's a Muslim. He certainly has ferociously orthodox Muslim things to say about the state of Israel. But he's writing in English, and apparently seeking to communicate with us Anglos and not just with other Muslims (hence the stuff about Judaism and Christianity). I favour engaging with Muslims in debate. I've learned quite a lot simply from doing a little of my Shams-homework.

Oh sure, I believe in threatening Islam with nuclear holocaust, as do others, such as Dale Amon. I think that's genuinely a good thing to do. I believe nuclear deterrence can work. But I also believe in trying to talk to Muslims about other much nicer things. The idea that we can't talk logically and politely with people whose fundamental axioms we disagree with and with whom we have other even bigger quarrels is just plain wrong. It seems hard to believe now, but I really do believe, with some of the commentators on David's pieces about Israel, that gruesome confrontations can sometimes calm down.

Also, Shams seems to come from the respectable bourgeois end of the Muslim spectrum, the Thatcherite end you might say, which is also interesting. Follow those homework links and you'll find many things to agree with, as well as to be angry about or confused by. If he were simply a zero-civility zero-creativity barbarian, then he'd be best ignored. But he's not that.

Finally, there's the nature of blogging itself. Blogging enables me to correspond, one little person to another little person, without wasting my replies only on my single little person correspondent. It used to be only big celebrity writers who could afford the bother of writing elegant and clever letters to one another, secure in the knowledge that eventually posterity would gather it all up and admire it. The rest of us, forget it. But blogging democratises the institution of the open letter.

Blogging makes it worth my while to correspond with Shams Ali.

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I'm sure most of you have read or heard by now about the "15 kilos" of Uranium seized by Turkish authorities. It's turned out to be only 100 grams. I delayed writing about this due to my skepticism about the quantity. A quantity of enriched Uranium (ie high in U235) that "close" to critical mass in that small a container would be, shall we say, a bit on the warm side? ...in both senses! There are ways around this if it is all pelletized (as from power plant fuel rods) and packed in neutron absorbing materials. Those, along with the lead shielding, would drive the weight up. The taxi would have been down on it's axles!

So there were only 100g of possibly enriched Uranium and it was caught. That's the good news. But there is a dark lining to this "silver cloud". According to Ha'aratz:

Smugglers use Turkey's porous eastern border to import drugs, and hundreds of thousands of migrants each year illegally cross the rugged frontier on their way to more affluent European Union nations.

Police in Istanbul seized more than one kg of weapons-grade uranium last November that had been smuggled into Turkey from an east European state. The smugglers were detained after attempting to sell the material to undercover police officers.

Note what Ha'aretz leaves you to infer for yourself. We all know how successful attempts to stop drug smuggling have been. About all you can do with drug seizure data is infer an order of magnitude more was not caught. Given the value of fissionable material and the actual quantities seized in Turkey alone in the last year...

Folks, we have a problem.

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I don't know who "Shams Ali" is exactly, but he has established something called the The World Court of Justice, and so far as I can judge, his ambition is simple. He wishes to be the Supreme Ruler of Mankind. I know the feeling. I once wanted that job myself, and I reckon I'd probably still take it if someone offered it to me.

Mr Ali has got be a Muslim of some kind, because of being "Ali" and because he writes of "the prophet Jesus", which (David Carr tells me) strongly suggests a Muslim.

But, from a libertarian point of view Mr Ali is by no means completely to be dismissed. Have a read of this, from his World Court of Justice Comments on The National Security Strategy of the United States of America Report (17 September 2002).

The only difference between politics and ordinary crime is that an ordinary criminal uses his own force to interfere with freedom, person or property of other people against their will, while a politician uses the powers of government for the same purpose.

That at least is a classic libertarian meme.

Politics is incompatible with economic freedom, peaceful relations with other states, and respect for human dignity.

A bit vaguer, but still in our territory.

Political freedom is nothing else than a socially acceptable form of organized crime. Only 100% impartial non-political government, that favors neither majority nor minority, but governs by application of strict rules to fundamental principles can guarantee economic freedom, peaceful relations with other states, and respect for human dignity.

And that is when it starts to become confused. Who exactly is going to do the applying? Evidently not "politicians", but somebody will have to. What is a "non-political government" when it's at home? What "fundamental principles" are these? Perchance, the Law of Sharia?

Meanwhile, the global triumph of liberty (which is what Shams Ali says he wants) means that liberty puts a stop to – conquers, you might say – the existing political arrangements of the planet, that is to say, national governments and their various collaborations and aggregations, such as the UN. And that is a lot like establishing an alternative world empire. This man could simply be an utterly deluded and utterly orthodox Muslim fanatic with a vivid imagination. But maybe his fantasies are more interesting than that.

If you wish to communicate your views on these matters to Mr Ali, you can email him, or you can write to him, at the following address:

The World Court of Justice
PO Box 10121
Birmingham B27 7YS
UK

Who says the British imperial spirit is dead?

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Time for another spook outing. Former US Marine and former UN arms inspector, still playing flat out for the home team, laying down his reputation for his country: Scott Ritter.

You're the US government. You decided, soon after 9/11, to redo Gulf War 1 and this time finish it. You need inside intelligence. You dig through your mountains of electro-data with your electro-diggers. You exhaustively debrief everyone who ever has any remotely significant dealings with the Iraqi regime, and you put it all together as best you can. You're looking for any sign of Saddam trying to get his retaliation in first, one way or another, and you're looking for information about just how he is setting about defending himself, so that you can come at him from different directions to the ones he's ready for.

One way in is to get your spooks onto that "UN" WMD inspection team. And … another is to set up your very own peacenik pro-Saddamite appeaser, who can tramp all over various Iraqi red carpets, shake lots of hands, talk to lots of assemblies, conspire with or be deluded by lots of Iraqi dirty tricksters and generally shine a different light on all the things and the people and the places you want to know about. Whatever happens, however Ritter's treated and by whom – trusted, distrusted, used, abused, whatever – you learn things, and possibly (when you combine it with all the other things you've learned) important things. Ritter himself may never know how well he's now doing.

But what about the harm Ritter may also be doing? What harm? Will Ritter cause important third parties to oppose Bush's decision to take out Saddam? It's not their decision and it never was.

You also ham up the "opposition" to the war from other sources. You get old Bush family retainers to dissent publicly from Junior's plans. You encourage massive press coverage of all those European "statesmen" (some of whom are also on your team) with their "vulgar cowboy" talk.

This oppositional play-acting serves two purposes. First you (with your Republican political hat on) want Gulf War 2 talked about a lot just now for electoral purposes, while the Democrats, who'd rather be talking about corporate cock-ups (remember those?) and economic downturns and domestic policy stuff, don't, hence their silence on GW2. Second, and more seriously (with your US of A hat back on), you want Saddam H imagining that he has a lot more "support" in the West than he really does. That way he behaves himself, so that he doesn't alienate all that support.

You're not just threatening would-be bombers and reservoir-poisoners with ghastly failure and ghastly punishment. You also want their bosses, for their own larger strategic reasons, to choose to refrain.

This was the trick you also worked on the USSR during the mid to late eighties, to get that to collapse quietly. You gave the West's "peace movement" huge publicity. You arranged for Gorbachev to be idolised in the West, especially in the USA. Faced with their enormous "peace movement", and a leader who apparently had the West's masses eating out his hand, the Moscow bastards held off from anything too nasty, so as not to alienate their Western "support". By the time they got that this support was mostly smoke and mirrors, their game was up.

Even as you were cranking up the peace movement, you poured as many bodies as you could into the USSR to learn whatever they could. Some of these bodies were posing as pro-Soviet peace-activists, and the like. Lefty Professors, student radicals, "youth" representatives, communists, anti-anti-communists. Were we all supposed to think that none of these guys were working for you, and that the only spooks you had in the USSR were military attaches and local dissidents? Come on.

Note this. You got double benefit from your pseudo-peaceniks. They both pressed flesh with the enemy and enabled you to control the peace movement, insofar as it was genuine, mostly by contributing to it when that's what you wanted, but if necessary by standing ready to tone it down, should it have ever got out of control and started to do real harm.

And now you're doing it again. This sort of thing has only got to influence things a bit, for a while, to pay for itself many times over. Scott Ritter is just one of your projects out there and running.

Okay, so why does a good little pro-Western anti-Saddamite like me indulge in the apparent treachery of revealing what I have deduced? Why am I telling them, merely for the unpaid pleasure of telling my fellow blogospherists?

Well, first of all, the Saddamites are not all stupid. The beauty of something like the Ritter operation is not that the opposition are totally taken in, but that they are confused and wrong-footed and sucked into elaborate silly-bugger games, and all this at the very time when they need to be thinking about more serious stuff. I'm not telling Saddam's dirty tricksters anything they haven't thought about. Besides which, they may surmise that I also may be one of your spooks, and that this posting (should any of them chance upon it) may be evidence that Ritter is, after all, a genuine peacenik who is doing genuine harm to your (our) arrangements, instead of what they had been assuming.

The truth is I'm just a bloggist having some fun and all blog-readers out there will surely know this. But if the bad guys get wind of this speculation, from me or from someone else out here being semi-public about it, they won't know what to believe. I'm rocking no boats and spilling no beans. All you good guys out there know that this posting almost certainly means exactly and only what it says. But the bad guys won't know what the hell to think.

Which I like. For the deeper message of this posting is that, just as the West is capable of a ferocious mega-slaughter if it were ever to come to that (see the collected works of Dale Amon, including for example the later paragraphs of this), so too, in the meantime is it more subtle, more cunning, more intellectually profound, than its intellectually and spiritually more one-dimensional enemies.

We are now turning our minds in our millions to this Islam thing. Is it a threat? What sort of threat? Where do all the good Muslims fit in? What must we do and not do with this thing and to this thing, to coexist contentedly with it?

Somewhere in among the Islam thing, we now all know, there's a nasty wildcat. If we mishandle things and end up having to drown the entire Islam thing in horrors - wildcat, kittens and all - then we'll do it. But plan A is to carry a big stick, but then with the other hand to stroke and hypnotise the wildcat into immobility and to anaesthetise it.

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Tonight I'm speaking at the Putney Debates in London on the topic September 11^th 2001, one year on.

A few thoughts I shall be raising are:

1) The terrorists failed the Machiavelli test of initiating a surprise attack: either kill your enemy or win him over. Al-Qaeda, it can be safely assumed, failed badly with regards to the global capitalist system, and hasn't won over anyone who didn't support them or hate capitalism already.

2) The 'war on terrorism' fails the test on the same grounds: it frightens people who aren't enemies, is likely to miss the most dangerous targets, and creates the vehicle for new resentments, desire for revenge etc.

3) I think Bush's speech was terrible: it would make a great recruitment spiel for any anti-Western gang of killers. Was I the only person who spotted Condoleeza Rice grimacing at a couple of passages? As for UNESCO, the less said...

4) The 'war on terrorism' is basically a just cause. That is precisely why it is so dangerous. It contains in its name all the inanity of the 'war on drugs' or 'war against poverty'. It is also perfect for exploitation by government. 'Ingsoc' could justify anything in Orwell's 1984 under the banner 'the war against terror'. Do we suddenly trust Mr Blair and the man who sprung steel tariffs on the world earlier this year? I notice that on "fairness" grounds we're all being sized up for a national DNA database in the UK. (It's unfair on criminals that they get fingerprinted and not the rest of us!!!)

5) President Bush has to leave office by 2008 at the latest. Imagine that Al Gore succeeds him and the 'war on terrorism' is still going strong: does the Vietnam war sound familiar?

6) I should make it clear that I would happily fire a missile at Saddam Hussein, regardless of his involvement in last year's attack, or whether he is building weapons of mass destruction.

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"Good evening, this is the news from the BBC. Peace Activists are still besieging the Saudi Arabian embassy in London to protest at Saudi Arabian funding of violent terrorist organisations and aggressively exporting Wahhabist Islam. Although there are no reports of any violence, the activists have been handing out sample bottles of Vodka and girlie magazines to passers-by as a symbol of their disapproval of the Saudi regime.

A spokesperson for the activists said that the American military campaign will not stop until the root causes of American anger had been addressed.

Root causes of American anger

Meanwhile at a meeting of European Heads of State in Strasbourg, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder issued a joint statement again condemning Al-Qaeda as a gang of ruthless savages and a threat to the entire civilised world. They also issued a warning to Saddam Hussein not to indulge in any aggressive, unilateralist behaviour that would lead to more conflict and cause even more anger in the West. Monsieur Chirac was particularly forthcoming, describing the Iraqi regime as 'simplistic bedouin warriors'. His words were warmly welcomed by Church leaders and trade union representatives. Now over to Caroline for the weather..."

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If I had suggested that the next head of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights would be someone like Colonel Gadaffi everyone would assume that I was making a lame attempt at satire.

Well, Colonel Gadaffi has just been appointed as the next head of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

Of course, the possibility that this is the work of one or more Western intelligence agencies (MI6?) cannot be entirely discounted but regardless of whether it is or not, it is actually robustly good news. It means that the Tranzis are casting off any pretences about the true nature of their project.

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Although it has been linked to elsewhere in the blogosphere, I feel that this essay by John Fonte is simply too important to pass without mention here.

It's a long essay but far more than worth it. For me, it was more like a gripping novel; once I started reading it I couldn't put it down. It isn't just good, it's exciting because a lot of us have known for some time that there was something wrong in the world but it was difficult to pin down and put our fingers on. It was something that has no face and no name. Like fog it swirled all around us but not being corporeal we lashed out fiercely in all directions, landing blows on nothing. It was like an itch we could never scratch.

John Fonte has done us all a service by running his nails deliciously down that spot and we will hear more of him and, more importantly, much more of the 'Transnational Progressives' ("Tranzis") he so graphically disects.

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Just how much influence Washington had in the establishment and growth of the EU is moot but what is certain is that successive US administrations looked favourably upon the EU, and British membership of it, seeing it (not unreasonably at the time) as a bulwark against the spread of communism.

No such bulwark is required now and, as Bruce Anderson points out, facts on the ground have dramatically altered the lofty ideals in the air:

"This mutual incomprehension and disdain will have far-reaching consequences, including a reassessment of American interests. Initially hurt by the Europeans’ attitudes, the Americans have rapidly ceased to care. They have now reached a stage at which they are no longer interested in what European countries think, with two exceptions: Britain — and Russia."

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The arguments are intensifying at the highest levels about whether the U.S. and its closest allies could or indeed should, oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Let me get straight to the point - I am not 100 percent convinced, if it were ever possible, that moving against Saddam is top priority in the war against terror as opposed to say, moving against Saudi Arabia (where most of the September 11^th hijackers came from), Iran (a major sponsor of terror), or for that matter some other nation/body which is potentially posing a lethal threat to our civilisation. However, as I will argue below, I think crushing Saddam is a vital necessity, though one fraught with risks.

Of course, as has occasionally been noted on this blog, some of those who would oppose military action against Iraq are idiots who dislike any such action, usually out of a desire to see America's face ground into the dust. Their arguments can be dismissed as self-evidently malevolent in intent. The Robert Fisks, John Pilgers and most of the Left fall into this camp, albeit with honorable exceptions.

There is another camp of war sceptic, represented by such intelligent and good souls like Jim Henley of Unqualified Offerings who doubt the efficacy of military action and who also fear it may trigger off even worse crises, as well as swell the bureaucratic monster of the State and further erode remaining civil liberties. I have a good deal of sympathy with that view, given that war has almost always been attended by serious loss of liberty, often never to be reversed.

And there are those who argue that all we need to do is to contain Saddam and his ilk rather than pre-emptively crush his regime. Into this category falls former top British defence civil servant Sir Michael Quinlan, writing a critique of such action in today's Financial Times.

His is one of the most closely argued cases against invading Iraq I have read so far. But reading the article through finally convinced me that we do need to take out Saddam's regime. And he does this, ironically enough, with the opening paragraph of his article:

"Saddam Hussein is a malign tyrant with a history of aggression against his neighbours. He almost certainly has chemical and biological weapons and would like to get nuclear ones, in breach of United Nations Security Council edict. We can place no trust in his denials or his current manoeuvering."

Well, Sir Michael, if that is the case, then clearly the U.S. and its allies have a clear duty to their citizens by taking this man out of circulation, seizing/destroying his stocks of weapons of mass destruction, and attempting to place a form of government less likely/able/willing to menace its neighbours! Of course the problem is that Saddam is not uniquely evil and there are other potentially lethal regimes (China springs to mind) which we could act against, but for the much greater risk. But just because we cannot take out all the world's monsters in one go does not mean we should not move against some of them. At least doing so can deter others.

The bulk of Sir Michael's argument becomes one, long eloquent case for doing, well, nothing. Apparently, poor old Saddam has no hostile intent, it is just that he is frightened of what other terrible folk next door will do to him. You know, like Joe Stalin invading half of Europe because he was worried someone would want to invade his socialist paradise:

"Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction, unconscionable thought it is, is entirely capable (entirely?) of explanation as an act of defiance, a bid for prestige (gotta kill those Kurds, impresses the ladies) and an insurance against mortal attack."

The clincher argument for me is this - if Saddam has or is trying to get horror weapons, he is going to use them sooner rather than later. The evidence exists. He has used them before. He has invaded his neighbours, brutalised his people and sponsored terrorism abroad. We haven't got time to wait for the monster to die of old age. I wish we could. I wish we could worry about school vouchers, restoring the right to trial by jury in full and ending the Nanny State. But priority Numero Uno right now is getting rid of regimes that could make our humble ruminations so much blather and radioactive dust.

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The next Archbishop of Canterbury tells us that without a new UN resolution authorizing the United States and its allies (meaning Britain) to attack the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussain:

...any US-led invasion of Iraq [would be] "immoral and illegal." Yesterday he softened his stance to say that he would support only a UN-sanctioned invasion of Iraq.

Firstly, Rowan Williams is not a lawyer and his legal opinions are about as meaningful as those of David Beckham or Mariah Carey or Joe Blogs who works flipping burgers in a fast food joint near you. The Nazi race laws were passed by the duly constituted judiciary and therefore 'legal', Pol Pot murdered a third of Cambodia under the duly constituted law of the land, slaves were 'legally' owned in the USA and Jesus Christ was not lynched but rather was crucified perfectly 'legally' by the Imperial Roman and Jewish authorities. Since when has the utterances of churchmen been relevant to an act's legality as opposed to its morality? Legality and morality are only passing acquaintances.

Secondly, as for moralitry, the majority of member states of the UN are, by 'western' standards, abusers of human rights. A substantial minority of those states are out and out tyrannies, such as Zimbabwe, Cuba, China, Belarus and Burma to name but five. How does this body somehow become a font of moral authority? By what logic does this parliament of thieves and murderers become transformed into a source of moral authority whose imprimatur transforms a act from illegal and immoral to one he can support? Are there no objective moral reasons involved in making a choice here, merely the machinations of a corrupt transnational bureaucracy?

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In his usual, sweetly controversial way Brendan O'Neill spells out his opposition to the planned US bombing of Baghdad rejecting the West's right and its responsibility to intervene in Iraq or anywhere abroad.

He sees the world in realpolitik terms where the only 'right' of the West to do as they please comes from competing rights - i.e. the West's right against the sovereign right of smaller nations. Apparently, given that is not the case now as almost everybody accepts that

Western powers should 'do something, anything!' about corrupt, victimised and poor states, instead all we hear is the word 'responsibility'.

Brendan finds curious the implicit notion that 'we', the West, have some kind of responsibility to do something about Iraq. And by extension anywhere else, even if the regimes are repressive. At least he is consistent in his position which is a rare virtue in today's muddled-up musings on individual and collective morality, rights and responsibilities.

Let's have it out then, Brendan.

Round 1: The West is not a uniform block. It is a collection of nation states, governments, or as we, Samizdatistas, like to think of them, a bunch of bureaucratic and oppressive collectivist entities, and as such it cannot be assigned rights or responsibilities. There may be unifying or common features characteristic to the Western world and there may be some moral force vested in those.

Round 2: Freedom is what makes us, the 'West', better. I find curious Brendan's implicit notion that Western values are on a moral par with those of the non-Western regimes whether it be ex-communists or the Third World. Therefore there can be no 'moral' right or responsibility to intervene. Given Brendan's scepticism of the state and governments, perhaps his notion is based on something like: Those who live in glass houses, shouldn't throw stones...

However, there is such as thing as relative comparison. I may not like the Western states and governments but they are a damn sight better than the communist regimes of old and the oppressive regimes of the present. However flawed the Western moral, political and social fabric may be, it got there by way of choice and freedom! I say it was thanks to progress based on freedom, rights of an individual and other visions and aspirations of the kind I recall Brendan calling for:

It seems perfectly clear to me that we need more development, more production, and bigger and loftier ambitions. (10th July 2002)

Round 3: Monopoly on power. The problem is not assignment of rights or responsibilities to the international players but the fact that only governments currently have monopoly on power and force of the kind needed to bring freedom to those living under totalitarian regimes. This has not always been the case and so people did not need to look for moral guidance in international affairs in the press releases of their politicians and defense officials. Individuals with convictions could fight for their vision regardless of the official position. Take Lord Byron in Greece, Tom Paine in the French Revolution and George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway in the Spanish civil war.

Round 4: If it's evil, fight it. Brendan says:

They [the left and liberal opponents to war] seem to have forgotten two important points: democratic governments, by their nature, cannot be imposed from without – and to those on the receiving end, choosing between diplomacy and war is a bit like choosing between a rock and a hard place or between having a gun pointed at your head and having somebody pull the trigger. It’s no choice at all.

Speaking as someone with experience of being on the receiving end, the Soviet empire was evil and repressive and there has never been a chance of achieving democracy from within. The only hope for those trapped inside was pressure from without combined with the inevitable but oh so slow decay of the system. My parents' generation is a 'lost' generation - the best years of their lives wasted by communism. Why? Because the West didn't have enough balls in 1948, 1956 and 1968 to kick the communist arse. Iraq is a variation on the same theme. Therefore, I say, if force is needed to defend freedom, use it.

So do we have any right or responsibility towards those who do not enjoy the same degree of freedom as us? Perhaps not collectively, in the form of state intervention but as individuals we do. Otherwise how can we passionately call for freedom and progress for ourselves and then calmly insist that others will just have to put up with whatever kind of oppression they find themselves subjected to?!

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Victor Davis Hanson has written a truly bizarre and confused article in National Review in which he attempts to define the widening gulf between the 'Europeans' and the United States (he does not really explain which Europeans he has in mind... Greeks? Germans? Portuguese? Finns?).

He suggests that one reason for 'European' disdain for the United States, not just amongst some poisoned social elite ruling class but the man in the street, comes from dislike of the middle and lower class orientation of American culture.

[America is] the only one in history in which the hard-working and perennially exhausted lower and middle classes are empowered economically and have fully taken control of the popular culture to create strange institutions from Sunday cookouts and do-it-yourself home improvement to tasteless appurtenances such as Winnebagos, jet skis, and Play Station IIs.

Ah yes, I frequently hear 'European' taxi cab drivers, nurses, office workers and house painters bemoan those tasteless Americans whilst listening to Beethoven on the radio and discoursing on Sartre with each other... oh pleeeease. I don't know who Victor Davis Hanson hung out with on his trip to 'Europe' (I guess 'Europe' is all just a homogenous mass to a Mexican Canadian Yank like Hanson) but mass culture in western Europe is pretty much overrun with Winnebagos, jet skis, and Play Station IIs... and ghastly low brow Euro pop music, tabloid newspapers, celebrations of half-wittedness like 'Big Brother' on television and other such manifestations of lower and middle class 'cultural empowerment'. The reality of what common people in 'Europe' think about the United States is that for the most part they don't really think about it much at all. The USA does not loom as large in the popular psyche as Hanson thinks.

As for me, describing the United States as 'the only one in history in which the hard-working and perennially exhausted lower and middle classes are empowered economically' causes a wry smile. I wish it was more generally true. Unfortunately the USA is just as much in the grip of statist corporatism as Europe, only unlike Europe, the opposition to it is better organised. I wish Hanson's rose tinted view of the USA was correct because I see much in American enterprise culture to admire but there are two Americas... one of which twice elected President Clinton on a platform not of economic empowerment but of welfare dependency and statism. Unfortunately it is not too hard to find the views Hanson thinks particularly 'European' being aired in Los Angeles and Boston.

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On this day in 1704, British Admiral George Rooke took Gibraltar from Spain by force of arms. British control of the Rock was later permanently granted to Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht on 13^th July, 1713.

Britain has controlled Gibraltar for almost 300 years, i.e. longer that the United States has even existed, and what is more, unlike the goats and scorpions of Perejil Island off Morocco, the people of Gibraltar refuse to submit to Spanish sovereignty or be bartered away against their will like livestock.

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Paul Staines has pointed me at a great article in The Spectator by Bruce Anderson:

The Americans will not be deflected by the absence of support from continental Europe. A few months ago, William Hague asked George Bush how he would deal with European objections to ballistic missile defence. "I’ve got a secret plan," Mr Bush replied. "What is it?" "I’ll go ahead anyway." So he will on Iraq.

Anderson explains that Continental European hostility to Bush's approach to, well, pretty much everything, is rooted in moral relativism and the taint of a Marxist meta-context

They also insist that we live in a world of moral relativities. European governments had a double quarrel with Mr Bush's 'axis of evil' speech. They do not believe in the axis. Nor do they believe in the evil. They prefer to live in a world as depicted by Whistler, in which everything is a subtle symphony of endless grey. From this perspective, Saddam may be a bad man, but he is merely a darker shade of grey than Ariel Sharon.

The leaders of Europe preside over powerful modern economies and complex societies, all of which are rendered impotent by fundamental philosophical flaws in the very epistemology of their ruling classes.

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Three cheers and bloody hurrah for Iain Duncan Smith for having some backbone and standing up to both our government and Spain's over the latters petulant and childish demands on Gibraltar

It's been an awful long time since any mainstream politician of any stripe stood up to the demands of Europeans over anything but such feathers has he ruffled that:

"Iain Duncan Smith suffered a diplomatic rebuff prior to his three-day European tour, starting today, when Spain's prime minister cancelled plans to meet him.

And it looks like IDS is not going to back down. Good. Now if he can stand the carpetting he is assuredly going to get in the press ("xenophobe, anti-Europe, intransigent, extreme right-winger...yadda...yadda...yadda") then we'll know that whether he's actually got a brass set or not.

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I am not entirely sure what to make of this admission from Donald Rumsfeld to the effect that it is 'inevitable' that terrorists are going to get their grubby paws on WMD sooner or later and bloody well use them.

I don't think anybody is blogland is surprised by this admission. After all, isn't this something we have all speculated about? A nuclear weapon is not exactly available at any retail outlet (yet!) but it seems that constructing just a rudimentary one is not as mind-bogglingly difficult as it used to be. Given that, all that is required is the will to use it and we all witnessed an unambiguous demonstration of that will last September.

No, what is arousing my curiosity is the Official Stamp that these suspicions have now been given by Mr.Rumsfeld. Even the most gauche among us have been alerted in no uncertain terms. So is Mr.Rumsfeld trying to soften us all up? Does he know something we don't? Or is it a case of expecting the worse but hoping for the best?

I couple this with the appearance yesterday of a dire warning on the front page of a popular British tabloid (sorry, can't find link) that suicide bombers were on their way to Britain. It may or may not be true, of course. British tabloids are somewhat notorious for issuing dire warnings that turn out to be nothing more than, well, dire warnings.

Things are a tad less dramatic over on the actual battlefront in Afghanistan where British Royal Marine Commandos trudge around disconsolately seeking engagement with an enemy that either cannot be found or no longer exists. Meanwhile, back in the West, we are fighting a war of catastrophic expectations and that ratchet has just been cranked up another notch or two.

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As a citizen-journalist who lives five time zones west of GMT, I am often the last Samizdatan to get a crack at the day's news. I read Fukuyama's lame remarks in the WSJ this morning, but by the time I got home to write about it, everyone from Virginia Postrel to the sage of Knoxville to our own Perry de Havilland had already taken the time to thoroughly refute Prof. Fukuyama's anti-libertarian screed.

But I am going to join the scrum anyway. Fukuyama criticizes the Cato Institute, accusing them of "propound[ing] isolationism in the '90s, on the ground that global leadership was too expensive." He points to a Cato analysis from 1991 that rejected the Gulf War on a cost-benefit basis and extrapolates from this one (1) data point that Cato is anti-war. Check out this excerpt from the Cato Handbook for the 105th Congress, which was written well in advance of 9/11. The authors criticize the lackluster response to previous state-sponsored terrorist attacks against the US (Khobar Towers, the USS Cole, etc.) and argue that state sponsored terrorism against the US should be treated as a matter of war and not as a criminal justice / extradition matter.

While Harry Browne and some other libertarians have elevated their antiwar rhetoric since 9/11, the Cato Institute has done no such thing. Consider these words from longtime Cato analyst (now their VP) Ted Galen Carpenter, posted to the site on 9/11:

The first order of business must be to determine who is responsible for these terrible acts and to order appropriate retaliation. Terrorist assaults of this magnitude should be treated as an act of war against the United States, not merely as a criminal justice matter. The President should immediately seek the full authorization of Congress to use whatever military force is necessary against the guilty parties. If the perpetrator is a government, the objective of the United States should be nothing less than the removal of that government. If the perpetrator is a terrorist organization without government sponsorship, the objective of the United States should be to track down and eliminate the members of that organization.

Fukuyama would have us believe that Cato thinks we ought to hold hands in a big circle and sing "Come on people now, smile on your brother" by Jessie Collin Young and the Youngbloods. Pacifism and isolationism are not the mainstream libertarian opinion by any stretch of the imagination, but it makes a convenient straw-man for Fukuyama to direct his puffery.

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And unfortunately probably not the end of the unerringly off-target Frances Fukuyama. He is one of the more dependably incorrect pundits currently putting quill to parchment, and his 'The End of History', coming as it did in the middle of history's violent resumption in the Balkans in 1992, may go down as the most ludicrous analysis of the world since 1848.

In his latest prognostication he argues that September 11^th has undermined the entire thesis of libertarianism.

Sept. 11 ended this line of argument. It was a reminder to Americans of why government exists, and why it has to tax citizens and spend money to promote collective interests. It was only the government, and not the market or individuals, that could be depended on to send firemen into buildings, or to fight terrorists, or to screen passengers at airports. The terrorists were not attacking Americans as individuals, but symbols of American power like the World Trade Center and Pentagon. So it is not surprising that Americans met this challenge collectively with flags and patriotism, rather than the yellow ribbons of individual victimization.

There is something almost endearing about Fukuyama's unerring ability to get it wrong. Fire departments in many places are not 'government' at all, but rather local volunteers who need no cohesion or coercion from the state to put their lives on the line for their jobs. In most of the western world, it is not 'government' who provides the airport security but private business, and does anyone really think that nationalisation of this function in the USA has actually made airports safer? If you have an incompetent screener, who do you think finds it easier to fire him, a private company or the US government? If emergency services can only exist when set up by the state, then how does 'historian' Frances Fukuyama explain the fact that for the last 175 years, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution has provided that service for Britain not just privately manned but privately funded?

Likewise, Fukuyama might like to hold up the Cato Institute's dafter remarks about Saddam Hussain as the totality of libertarian foreign policy ideas but it just ain't so and there is indeed libertarian thought which does not take the strict 'anti-war' line, seeing that as being in fact anti-survival. I have huge respect for the Cato Institute and regard it as a superb organisation, but when it comes to matters of defence and co-existing in the real world with psychopathic tyrants who are trying to arm themselves with nuclear weapons, well sorry, the dollar amounts expended in the Gulf War is really not the sensible starting point for analysis. Yet the fact is not all libertarians are full blown anarcho-libertarians, even if we are indeed much informed by anarcho-libertarian ideas... there is in fact libertarian life beyond Murray Rothbard. Many of us support the concept of a nightwatchman 'state' in some form or other. Minarchists like me see dropping bombs on the Saddam Hussain's of this world as being one of the very few legitimate functions of the state and the reality is that my views on that sort of thing are actually those of the majority of 'small L' libertarians (and more than a few American Libertarian Party activists as well if the truth be known. I can think of one who contributes to this blog).

Yes, I like the idea of getting the state out of 90% of what it does but the only time I turn the other cheek when my community is threatened is when I need to shoot my rifle off my left shoulder because I am taking cover in a doorway. As I mentioned in several earlier articles, the de facto pacifist libertarian 'ostrich' faction is by no means a distinguishing feature of libertarianism, just a faction of it.

Of course as a general rule, if Frances Fukuyama says something, you can safely assume the contrary is in fact the case.

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According to the founders of the International Criminal Court in Rome have delcared that 'it marks the turning of a new page in human history'. Setting aside, for a moment, the rather pompous tone, they might well be right. But the question is, exactly what 'page' is being turned?

The intention of the Court is to bring perpetrators of genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and other 'crimes against humanity' to justice regardless of where they are in the world. Their jusrisdiction will apply where the domestic courts in question fail to act and they can only act in countries which are signatories to the Rome Treaty establishing the Court.

Certainly these are noble ideals. Who wants to see a world where homicidal regimes can get away with it? Certainly not me but my disquiet is borne from the feeling that it is not quite as simple as that.

Bureaucracies, once established, tend not only to grow but also actively seek reasons for their continued existance and expansion. Just now, it is only the above-mentioned type of activities which are under the ICC's remit but how long will it be thus circumscribed? A brief to tackle 'crimes against humanity' can be interpreted in all manner of ways to cover all manner of policy decisions. A tough anti-immigration policy? A lack of welfare benefits? No nationalised 'free' health care? No state education programme? There are no end of people who earnestly believe that such things constitute 'crimes'.. The ICC may be benign but how long will it stay that way?

This is not just theoretical. Within the last few years the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (a welfare-state cartel) launched a war against 'money-laundering' and 'drug-running' that morphed almost seamlessly into a campaign (led particularly by France and Sweden) against what they laughably referred to as 'unfair tax competition'. The justification for this neo-imperialism was that small countries providing tax havens were 'undermining the democracy' of countries such as France and Sweden. The result of this was that little countries like Malta, Leichtenstein, the Cayman Islands and Monaco were threatened with everything short of war in order to comply with the demands of the OECD for banking transparency and other domestic changes of law. They had no choice but to toe the line.

Thus the 'quest for global justice' becomes the imposition of agendas.

There are even greater dangers than this, though. No criminal code is enforceable without armed agents to act in its name. This leaves the ICC reliant on the military muscle of big powers to act as its appointed 'police force'. But, as we have seen, in a world of complex alliances and interests, that is rarely going to be available. In time the ICC will demand it's own 'police force' to act independently of nation-state interests. And that is a recipe for war without end.

I say this because, does anybody imagine that Slobodan Milosevic would be facing a War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague today had he had a nuclear arsenal at his disposal? At the risk of upsetting some people, the answer has to be no. It is for that same reason that Vladimir Putin will never have to answer for the Russian Army's activities in Chechnya and Ariel Sharon remains impervious to the plaintiff cries of the 'international community'.

This is a lesson which will not have been lost on other nations. The message is, if you want to retain your independence, sovereignty and autonomy of action then you better get yourself heavily armed and, preferably, nuclear armed. When you possess both the ability and the will to vaporise a big chunk of the planet, the 'international community' is left grumbling and impotent.

I have no doubt that the formation of the ICC was driven by good intentions, by the best of intentions. Unfortunately, they are exactly the kind of intentions that so often pave the road to hell.

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The '38th Annual Munich Conference on Security Policy' (will there be a 39th?) seems to be...shall we say, in a little difficulty. When the German press accuses the US of being on an 'ego-trip' one can safely infer that things are not exactly getting off on the right foot.

All the more so when you read accusations like this:

"The Americans call on the Europeans to spend more money on defence, while the Europeans accuse the Americans of being too self-willed and not interested in a real partnership"

For the benefit of non-British readers, allow me to translate the above phrase into English:

"The Americans are wicked for not sharing our crippling moral relativism and post-colonial guilt and selfish because they refuse to subsidise our defence costs while we pour all our resources into our bloated welfare sectors"

There is a wealth of analysis in the linked article but, for me, the most telling lines are in the conclusion:

"But the disquiet in Europe is not only about differences on security issues, or the war on terror, or the shift in the Middle East peace process. There’s another, deeper, perhaps existential (to use a favourite European word) element: all this is happening as the Europeans are trying to redefine exactly who they themselves are, concludes Newsweek"

'Defining' oneself is more usually about defining what your are against rather than what you are for. It's a lot easier. It looks like the European elite is already well down the road to defning itself as against the US.