(1) (34)

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.

(1) (18)

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.

(3) (16)

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.

(0) (7)

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".

(0) (12)

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.

(1) (13)

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.

(1) (18)

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).

(0) (2)

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.

(0) (9)

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.

(0) (12)

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.

(0) (6)

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

(7) (43)

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.

(4) (16)

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.

(2) (91)

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.

(0) (22)

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.

(0) (27)

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.

(1) (34)

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.

(0) (28)

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.

(0) (21)

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.

(3) (4)

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.

(4) (17)

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.