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Ideas matter, and especially to intellectuals like President Obama. He is not a rigid ideologue and is capable of flexible maneuvering. But his interpretation of history, his attitude toward sovereignty, and his confidence in multilateral institutions have shaped his views of American power and of American leadership in ways that distinguish him from previous presidents. On Libya, his deference to the UN Security Council and refusal to serve as coalition leader show that he cares more about restraining America than about accomplishing any particular result in Libya. He views Libya and the whole Arab Spring as relatively small distractions from his broader strategy for breaking with the history of U.S. foreign policy as it developed in the last century. The critics who accuse Obama of being adrift in foreign policy are mistaken. He has clear ideas of where he wants to go. The problem for him is that, if his strategy is set forth plainly, most Americans will not want to follow him.

- The Obama Doctrine Defined by Douglas J. Feith and Seth Cropsey

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Because he’s a Democrat.

- Overheard by Damian Thompson at the unveiling of the Ronald Reagan statue in London this morning. Someone was explaining why David Cameron gave the event a miss.

(41)

I see that my fourth (approximately, I think) cousin John Micklethwait, Editor of the Economist, whom our own Paul Marks disapproves of so severely, is this weekend attending a meeting of the Bilderberg Group.

I learned about this list of potentates thanks to a link to it from Guido Fawkes, and I consider it rather significant that such an august media personage as Guido should be positively drawing our attention to this gathering.

When the internet got seriously into its stride, and particularly blogging, at or around the year 2000, you would have thought that observation and analysis of the global elite would have exploded. After all, detailed analysis of these persons and their thinkings and their doings was the quintessential Story They Don't Want Us To Know, in other words, a story that was ready-made for the internet.

Yet, actually, very little was said about these persons and their meetings and their secret thinkings aloud, by regular people as opposed to the people who were already fascinated by such things. Oh, I'm sure that the people who had been banging on about the evil Bilderbergers for the previous quarter of a century immediately started publishing vast screeds about these persons on the internet. But, or so it seems to me, very few other people paid such talk very much attention. And so, pretty much, it has continued.

Why? Was it because bloggers who dipped their toes into these hitherto forbidden waters were visited by sinister people in sinister raincoats at sinister times of the night? Did those who mentioned the Bilderberg Group on the internet suffer mysteriously fatal road accidents?

I can't speak for others, but the thing that kept me away from talking about Bilderberg meetings and similar things was not the fear of Them, but the desire not to be thought completely mad, by people generally.

The thing is, if you ranted on about the Bilderberg Group in about 1980 or thenabouts, what you said might just be true. Ish. A bit. But if you said such things at any length you would be kissing any sort of life as a respectable political communicator goodnight, and those were the only political communicating lives then available. If you wrote letters about Bilderbergers to the mainstream media, or to the media as we used to call them, or if you tried to get on the radio to talk about such things, then you really were bonkers. After all, the whole point of the Bilderberg conspiracy was that it was a conspiracy of, among other things, absolute media silence. (And before anyone tries to say anything different, getting libertarianism into newspapers and onto the radio during the 1980s and 1990s was an absolute doddle compared to getting any sort of newspaper space or air time for Bilderberg speculations.)

So it was that, for the half century or so before the internet came amongst us, talking about such things as Bilderberg meetings with anything but brevity and levity meant that you might as well have put a big sign around your neck saying: I AM A MAD LOSER. Sane people didn't waste their lives trying to spread such ideas, which meant that, actually, sane people didn't even waste their time thinking about such things. What the hell was the point? If you spent any significant portion of your life even thinking about the Bilderberg Group, then you really were mad.

So then, enter the internet. Chocks away. All restrictions on freedom of expression gone. Say whatever you like. Right? Right indeed, pretty much. But if you were sane, you actually knew very little about the Bilderberg Group, unless you were a participant. If you wrote too effusively and too knowledgeably about Bilderberglery around, say, 2002, people were bound to suspect that this was not the first time you had ever pondered these matters. You would look like: one of those people, one of the paranoid losers who ranted on pointlessly about global conspiracies instead of getting on with life, during all those decades when ranting pointlessly about such things was the only way to talk about them.

If you did later do some Bilderberg blogging, around 2005 say, and even if you yourself were totally sane, you immediately risked the loonies crawling out from their personal loonybins and commenting at tedious, paranoid, screw loose length. Which wasn't the solution to anything. That was the problem.

This is why I think it is so significant that Guido (who is the total opposite of such loony tunes communicational incompetence) now regularly alludes to the activities of these globally elite people. (This is not the first time he has done this, and I bet that isn't either.) Guido may be a bit of a chancer, a bit of a tilter at windmills, a man who risks and therefore is, but he is absolutely not mad. He is a fully functioning member of society. He is not, in a word, a loser. In fact, I would say, he has been one of the winners of the last decade of British life. And where he has for some years now been pointing, others may eventually follow.

Especially when you consider what a mess these would-be global guardians are now making of the world.

Another star of the new media, James Delingpole, also deserves more than a passing mention in this regard, although a passing mention is all he will get here. He, like Guido, has been willing to mention the Bilderberg Group by name, in connection with the right royal mess that the global elite are making of the whole climate change thing. Unless of course you think it was all a deliberate fraud from the start, as I am at present inclined not to. To all the other fully paid up, fully functioning human beings who definitely think about lots of other things as well, but who have started to feel their way into such Bilderbergish thinking and who have ventured forth with such thoughts onto the internet, but whom I have not mentioned here, and in many cases do not even know about: my apologies! As our own Paul Marks would say.

The point is, time. A decade has now passed during which it has not been an early indicator of insanity to have given at least some thought to the global elite and their habits and meetings and watering holes and blunders and subterfuges and dilemmas. New methods of communication are often spoken of as having their impact just the once and straight away, but it's almost always more complicated than that. Often, their impact takes years, sometimes even decades or even centuries, to materialise. Now that several years have already passed with something very like total freedom of expression about anything, it has become slowly but surely more possible for you (a) to write and publish some quite well thought through opinions about Bilderbergers and their ilk, while (b) not being regarded by everyone who reads these thoughts as an obsessive freak loser who needs to get out more, so that you can be killed by a passing delivery van.

By the way, my attitude towards gatherings like the one referred to at the beginning of this posting is by no means one of total hostility. My objection to these people is not so much that they exist, as that they are doing what they are doing so damned incompetently. Unless that is, their objective was always private plunder for themselves and nothing else, in which case they're doing a very capable (albeit morally repugnant) job. My libertarianism doesn't mean abolishing such meetings, still less massacring all those who participate in them, even if some analysis of their financial arrangements and of how these arrangements relate to their Big Decisions (in the manner of this classic piece of Guidology) would absolutely not come amiss. It means getting libertarians and libertarianism (approximately speaking) well and truly in among them, and totally changing what gets said and what gets decided at these global gatherings. And I actually think there is a far better chance of accomplishing that than in trying to spread libertarianism only through local political methods, like doing libertarian party politics, or trying to foist libertarianism on existing political parties. (Don't let me stop you if you are attempting these things. But good luck. You'll need it.)

A few years back, I recall suggesting to Guido that when he had got bored with tormenting our merely local rulers, he might like to take a crack at the global elite. Alas, it appeared that he had other plans. I wonder if he might now be changing his mind.

That may just be wishful thinking on my part, but whatever Guido himself does next, the time might now be just about right for someone like Guido, if not the man himself, to have a serious, world changing go at these people.

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This item about Mexico, via the ChicagoBoyz group weblog, is shocking. The scale of violence in Mexico - largely centred on the drugs trade - is rising rapidly. It ought, really, to be the top security issue for the United States. It is hard to justify actions in the MidEast with this sort of crap happening just across the border.

The war on drugs is proving an even bigger disaster than libertarians typically state.

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Others have been complaining about how long it has taken, but I have been surprised at the speed with which the West has responded to events in Libya, and have been unable to shake the feeling, until today actually, that the reports I was reading were send-ups for comic purposes of some kind.

I am an agnostic about Western intervention in foreign parts rather than an outright atheist, but I respect the atheist position and deeply fear the true believer, "nation building" idea. Governments are good at destroying stuff, but tend to be shambolic at any kind of creativity. The more creative they try to be, the more destructive they typically end up being. People do creative, not governments.

This operation seems to be mostly destructive, which is all to the good. I think it reasonable to hope that it accomplishes some good, rather than only fearful that it will all go horribly wrong.

The West's leaders are telling Gadaffi that maybe he can rule his country, but not the way he has been for the last fortnight or so. Bombing it and shelling it into submission is not allowed. Do that and we'll do the same to you. Govern your country with riot police. Maybe arrange some elections, and then fix them. Bribe people into supporting you, rather than just killing them like they are armed soldiers. Above all, and now I'm going by what David Cameron said this afternoon, don't announce ceasefires and promise them to your fellow members of the Head of Government Club, but then not deliver them.

This was one of the big things that Saddam Hussein did wrong, as I understand that earlier story. He didn't just invade Kuwait. He told other members of the Head of Government Club that he wouldn't. Lying to your people is okay. They all do that. That's business as usual. But lying to fellow members of the Head of Government Club is not the done thing. Do it and you get blackballed, by which is meant that your armed underlings, the basis of your power, get slaughtered. Provided, that is, you are not bossing a serious power, and Westerners slaughtering your underlings would start a serious war, as opposed to an "asymmetric" war (i.e. a slaughter of your slaughterers).

LOL!!!: Just watched a British military talking-head-in-a-suit on the BBC, when asked to say what success for this operation would mean, say: "removing Saddam", and then hurriedly correct himself.

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WikiLeaks: Cuba banned Sicko for depicting 'mythical' healthcare system.

According to the Guardian (!):

Cuba banned Michael Moore's 2007 documentary, Sicko, because it painted such a "mythically" favourable picture of Cuba's healthcare system that the authorities feared it could lead to a "popular backlash", according to US diplomats in Havana.

The revelation, contained in a confidential US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks , is surprising, given that the film attempted to discredit the US healthcare system by highlighting what it claimed was the excellence of the Cuban system.

But the memo reveals that when the film was shown to a group of Cuban doctors, some became so "disturbed at the blatant misrepresentation of healthcare in Cuba that they left the room".

Castro's government apparently went on to ban the film because, the leaked cable claims, it "knows the film is a myth and does not want to risk a popular backlash by showing to Cubans facilities that are clearly not available to the vast majority of them."

UPDATE: Hat tips to commenters Jock and Alisa. The Guardian story has now been corrected to say that Sicko was shown in Cuba, confirmed on Michael Moore's own website. Pity. That was a fun meme while it lasted, but truth must prevail. Moore says that the cable was purely a lie. Not necessarily: indecision as to the "line to take" is not exactly unknown in totalitarian regimes. Both showing the film and forbidding it have their dangers from the point of view of the Cuban rulers.

This round to Michael Moore, but I shall defiantly repeat something I said in 2008:

When the history of Fidel Castro's rule in Cuba comes to be written all that stuff about the excellence of the healthcare system will turn out to be lies but the claim of high literacy rates will be more or less true.

Communist education gets results because force is near to the surface. I acknowledge but do not approve ... A further advantage of communist education is that the wishes of the teachers are given almost as short a shrift as those of the pupils.

Force works well in education because the forcers can look at the forcees all the time they are doing the forcing. It works less well in healthcare and very badly indeed in agriculture.

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It's official. The North Koreans torpedoed the South Korean navy ship. I have this excerpt from a Jane's newsletter:

Torpedo 'only possible explanation' for Chon An sinking, says report. A torpedo attack led by North Korea is the only possible explanation behind the sinking of the South Korean corvette Chon An, argues the final joint investigation report released by Seoul on 13 September. The 305 page-long report, seen by Jane's , rules out any other possibility - such as a sea mine - to explain the disaster that killed 46 sailors in the Yellow Sea (West Sea) on 26 March

There was a time when this form of international behavior had a name: "Act of War".

(10)

John Hillary, Executive Director of War on Want, has written an article for - amaze me some more - the Guardian. Here it is: A myopic Tory approach to fighting global poverty

Mr Hillary, I am sure, sincerely wants to fight global poverty. The trouble is that he and his colleagues in the development "community" have become a mini-class in their own right, complete with a class interest. I am forever saying that people often have an incredibly sensitive "nose" for their own class interest that operates a little below the conscious level. In this, Marx had a point. Classes always convince themselves that whatever benefits them as a class is also to the benefit of the world.

What benefits the aid community is that aid is seen to be very complex and difficult, so you need a special class of people to mediate giving aid.

Hence:

"Ultimately, a country's development path is determined by historical forces and political choices at a far higher level than aid, and it is these more complex factors that risk being overlooked in a narrow focus on measurable, short-term outputs. "

I do in fact agree with this statement - although my view of which political choices have which results might differ from that of Mr Hilary. I also agree that it really is complex and difficult to work out how best to use the government's aid budget, assuming that one has decided that there is benefit in doing this at all. But the intense practical complexity of (making up an example) arranging for perishable medicines to reach a flood-stricken area before they go off, a process that might involve both technical and human factors, is not the sort of complexity that John Hillary means here.

That sort of complexity in a problem can be solved by clever people making clever plans or by average people making individually minor but cumulatively clever adjustments and innovations. The success of the plans or adjustments then shows up in measurable outputs - if not in the very short term, at least in the medium term. That does not serve the class interest of the aid community. It needs aid to be philosophically complex, basically so that their class will always be needed.

Hence one could predict that the aid community will favour un-measurable and long term ("long" tending to "infinite") solutions. It is also likely to favour indirect solutions. Every stage of indirectness is an evolutionary niche for someone in his sub-class to find sustenance. Sure enough, in the Guardian article Mr Hillary is indignant about the government scrapping the DfID's global development engagement fund, "a scheme designed to increase public understanding of the causes of global poverty and to mobilise action in support of international development." He imprudently included a further link that said that the cancelled projects included:

£146,000 for a Brazilian-style dance troupe in Hackney, London; £55,000 to run stalls at summer music festivals; £120,000 to train nursery school teachers about 'global issues'; £130,000 for a 'global gardens schools network' and £140,000 to train outdoor education tutors in Britain on development.

(4)

“The regard for the laws of nations, or for those rules which independent states profess or pretend to think themselves bound to observe in their dealings with one another, is often very little more than mere pretence and profession. From the smallest interest, upon the slightest provocation, we see those rules every day either evaded or directly violated without shame or remorse. Each nation foresees, or imagines it foresees, its own subjugation in the increasing power and aggrandisement of any of its neighbours; and the mean principle of national prejudice is often founded upon the noble one of the love of our own country.”

Adam Smith, taken from “The Wisdom of Adam Smith, A Collection of His Most Incisive And Eloquent Observations, Edited by Benjamin A Rogge, page 173.

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"The Obama administration came into office promising to press the "reset" button with the rest of the world after eight years of the so-called arrogant, swaggering Texan cowboy blundering his way around the planet, offending peoples from many lands. Instead, Obama pressed the ejector-seat button: Brits, Czechs, Israelis, Indians found themselves given the brush. I gather the Queen was "amused" by the president's thoughtful gift of an iPod preloaded with Obama speeches – and, fortunately for Her Majesty, the 160GB model only has storage capacity for two of them, or three if you include one of his shorter perorations."

Mark Steyn.

It is amazing how a foreign leader can get away with being brusque to allies so long as he or she does not speak with a Texan accent. After all, Mr Obama got the Nobel Prize for Peace!

(25)

Just read an article by Afua Hirsch in the Guardian called "How can lawyers help Haiti?"

"By going away" was the general opinion expressed in the comments. A little harsh, I thought, given that establishing a more solid rule of law might indeed help reconstruction there. But I am not really interested in that coz my gob just got smacked. In passing, Ms Hirsch mentioned this little fact:

...what is happening to millions of extra dollars pouring into a country that already had a staggering 10,000 NGOs before the earthquake. For an island with a population of fewer than 10 million, there is at least one NGO per 1,000 people.

Blimey. Ten thousand. Not ten thousand people, ten thousand organisations. Of the sort called "non-governmental" although that is a lie. And that was before the earthquake. Ah well, 'tis an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Just think, had not the earthquake come along all these helpers might have solved all Haiti's problems and left themselves with nothing to do.

(8)

My blogging activities have been a bit patchy of late - possibly my enthusiasm or ability to come up with topics to write about has run a bit dry after doing this gig for almost nine years. But one reason for my lack of output has been my business travels, since after a busy day heading around from place to place, it takes a bit of effort to crank up another posting. Anyhow, in one nation I visited in the past few days on business - Switzerland - I could not fail to be struck at how folk in that nation feel a sense of being under seige. Under siege, that is, from various financially ruined nations such as the US and UK who are becoming increasingly aggressive in chasing after taxpayers. And although Switzerland is far from perfect - they have their own bureaucratic foibles and petty rules - I generally like the cantonal system, which means that if the canton of say, Zurich, decides to impose some dipshit rule, another one might take a more liberal view. And on the issue mentioned by Perry de Havilland of the totalitarian tendencies of certain medical lobbyists, I'd argue that Switzerland falls pretty well near the liberal, if not libertarian, end of the spectrum. Take the issue of smoking in privately-owned places. Yes, there are bans in some places, but I noted, for instance, that at Zurich airport, there was a rather smart-looking cigar bar. (Smokers are treated fairly well on the whole). In the hotel I stayed in, folk were smoking in one part of it without provoking any kind of anguish from anyone else.

I occasionally write about this nation because it is useful to have an example out there of a nation that has managed to resist the siren songs of being a "good European" and joining the EU behemoth, and because its people seem to still have a sort of cussed independence of mind that is a pleasing contrast to what I come across elsewhere. No doubt the Eyeores in the comment thread will tell me otherwise.

As an aside, I find the Swiss accent of German as hard to understand as ever, and I thought my German was quite good.

(21)

The news out of Haiti today has been uniformly grim. As I watched the TV footage of people trying to find survivors from underneath the rubble, it was natural to wonder whether we haven't been rather pathetic here in Britain to carp about the harsh winter, since, although the winter snows have not been a ton of laughs, it has not meant the kind of devastating loss of life and wreckage of homes that happens in an earthquake event.

Rand Simberg makes the point that while there is never complete protection for any kind of country against natural disasters, it tends to be a pretty useful rule of thumb that richer countries, with superior building standards and better means of rescuing those in danger, tend to fare better when nature strikes. Maybe he is right - I think the Japanese, for instance, with their almost constant experience of earthquakes, are in a better position, due to the wealth and technical prowess of that country, to deal with such events than a miserably poor, conflict-riven nation such as Haiti.

But frankly, even the richest, most technically savvy nation on earth is going to be clobbered hard by a high-category quake. Let's hope help can get to those who need it most. Here is a site that seems to be offering shrewd advice and links to those involved in the relief efforts.

(38)

In an earlier posting today, I expressed the fear that this Copenhagen nonsense would lead to quite a few more stupid laws. But the news right now seems to be rather better than that:

The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN's role in all future climate change negotiations.

If this shindig can be a total fiasco I really do not care why (for his own idiot reasons this guy agrees). Sadly, I fear that this leak may just be negotiation as usual. The bodge that results will still probably be pretty terrible.

On the other hand, maybe the rich countries do not actually want a deal. Reading that Guardian report, you can almost hear the rich country negotiators muttering amongst themselves that they would prefer to stay rich. But maybe that is a step too far towards being sensible, and too much to hope for.

Fingers crossed.

(23)

Often I read, in various Climate Alarmist articles, words to the effect that "time is running out on a global climate deal"... which is great news if it is actually true. It suggests to me that perhaps they realise that the "universally accepted" One True Apostolic Eco-Faith is really the very epitome of a paper tiger as there is far from a genuine consensus on the subject.

So if time is running out, it would seem hard to overstate the importance of running interference and generally throwing spanners into the works for as long as possible. To prevent the latest transnational 'tranzi' red-wrapped-in-green statist power ploys, friends of liberty need to do whatever they can to 'run out the clock' and then encourage as much international political recrimination post-failure as possible, in order to keep the ball out of play for as long as possible. I think it is time to suggest creative but practicle ways to help sow discord and disunity amongst the predatory political elites (and their supporters) of the various countries seeking to extend ever more control over their national subjects under the cloak of green politics.

Certainly if overtly totalitarian measures like carbon rationing are ever brought in, truly the time for unambiguous direct resistance to the state will have arrived, so preventing things getting to that stage is more than a little important.

(17)

I would be willing to wager that the Nobel represented the time when, in retrospect, it started to go really wrong for Mr Obama. He could have come across all modest and statesmanlike and told the Nobel prize givers that their award was very touching, very nice, etc, etc, but he just did not feel he had done enough to receive it, and there were more deserving recipients. To have done that, of course, would have been to demonstrate a capacity for embarrassment, for shame. Now Mr Obama has shown us that he has no such shame, that his vanity is as bad as it appears to be from this end. And that will be his downfall.

Even some folk over at that haven of idiocy, the Huffington Post, are not greatly impressed by what happened last week. Michael Moore, of course, is. With friends like these...

(5)

Short of arranging a letter of congratulations from Roman Polanski, this could scarcely be bettered.

UPDATE: ah, sheesh - sorry Johnathan. Great minds collapse into hysterical laughter alike.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: And Perry. And, uh, everyone on the planet. Getting this post out has been a wonderful journey for me and I thank the Committee from the bottom of my heart.

(41)

Beyond parody.

Maybe they awarded him the gong for his attempts to shut up Islamic terrorists, etc, by the power of endlessly talking about himself. You never know, there may be something in it.

(13)

Norman Borlaug has died. He may well have saved more lives than anyone else who has ever lived.

(16)

Of course, it’s been half a century since Cuba has had a real new leader. This is one of the down sides to life extension.

- Rand Simberg

(39)

Matt Welch of Reason debates Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell over issues including the recent bouts of piracy in the Indian Ocean. One issue that comes up is whether the Somalia is a "libertarian nirvana". Duh. Lefties love to sneer that such lawless parts of the world are some sort of anarcho-capitalist paradise. Have they not figured out that free societies are saturated with notions of law and property boundaries, which need to be upheld and defended? Laws and liberty are intertwined - the problem is when laws violate the right of humans to live their lives unmolesed, rather than protect such rights. Since when did robbing merchant ships have anything to do with freedom, exactly?

Anyway, Mr Welch more than holds his own in this encounter. Worth a view.

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Okay, let's remember that there is a world outside the Westminster Village. The president of Iran is not a man whom anyone would want with his hands on the nuclear button, certainly not Israel, which has reason to worry that the man is an anti-semitic fruitcake. It appears that there has been a possible change in the tack of US policy towards Iran now that Mr Obama is at the helm. Now it may be that Mr Obama is playing a devilishly cunning game and, by trying to make nice to Iran, is either buying time or trying to engineer real, positive change. Of course, it also may be that Mr Obama is out of his depth and has made the fatal mistake that one can do business with a regime like Iran.

The danger, it seems to me, is that failing to stop Iran from proceeding with an enrichment programme for nuclear material is going to worry the hell out of Israel. And remember, that while Iran may not be the West's immediate problem, it is a massive, existential one for Israel. The US may be wise not to want to pick a fight on this issue, given that such a course could go horribly wrong. Israel may not have the luxury of having to make even that choice.

Given that the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction tends to work when both sides are basically rational, even if they are bad, it is folly to suppose that nuclear deterrence will work with a regime led by a man who sincerely dreams of taking his place in heaven, and putting lots of those he loathes somewhere else, very violently. At the very least, a defence policy must now involve greater development of anti-ballistic missiles to shoot down incoming weapons, since there will be the risk that the launch sites and development sites may be out of reach of an airforce or ground assault team.

Consider this: why does Iran, with all its oil reserves, want to spend billions of its currency reserves on developing enriched fissile material? What does the Iranian government propose to do with it - use it for garden compost?

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Are you optimistic about the future? Several months ago I was not, but I am now. From what I can see, governments are walking down the path of their complete moral and financial bankruptcy far more quickly than I ever imagined they would. I thought that it would take our overmighty governments several slow, demoralising decades of decline and eventual collapse to completely discredit their authority and control in the eyes of the people. However, our governments appear to be going supernova right now and I suspect they will burn themselves out over a few painful and tumultuous years - destroying a great deal of wealth in the process, no doubt. However, as worrying as that prospect is, it was always going to be that way. And in spite of that, I feel particularly upbeat about the longer term future. Those who know nothing more (and expect nothing less) than widespread government authority and control over all aspects of our lives will have their imbecile - sorry, umbilical - cords to the State cut sooner than expected, thanks to the overwhelmingly reckless (but entirely predictable) government response to the current financial crisis. I really do believe that future historians will pinpoint this crisis as marking the beginning of the end of the big-government era.

Do you agree?

(9)

A good friend of mine, the Norwegian journalist Kristine Lowe, reflects on a recent trip to Iceland, which has seen its government collapse amid the credit crunch. Iceland has, of course, benefited from sensible low-tax policies as well as being buoyed by what now appears to be some foolish banking lending policies.

I am not sure I would want to live there, mind. The long nights and expensive beer would drive me nuts.

(72)

Earlier this afternoon Perry and I had a lengthy editorial telephone discussion on the subject of Georgia. While we agreed broadly there was one area in which we had intense debate until I finally figured out how we were talking past each other.

The question is, how the hell did US intelligence assets miss the Russian Black Sea fleet movements? How did they miss the massive transport job of the troops and their logistical tail? They did not just materialize in position. It takes time and planning to make such moves. I will leave the detail of that to Perry as he seems to have been thinking about it in great detail.

My take is there is a limited amount of time available on the black satellites. The manpower and resources have been re-targeted on the Middle East. Orbits have been shifted to give maximal coverage in those areas of interest and experienced personnel have moved to 'where the action is'.

This is not to say Russia is being ignored. It is however a very big place and I am going to guess that the time between scanning particular areas has greatly lengthened. Russian troop movements are mainly rail based and with enough eyeballs and Cold War era periodic coverage one might hope to pick up changes in traffic patterns and notice "something is going on". But... this requires a certain periodicity in coverage. Changes in static positions like silos and strategic air bases are much easier to pick up even with occasional coverage. Dynamic changes, such as train and road movements are a different story. You have to have a satellite taking pictures at just the right time or often enough to pick up a signal just by chance.

This is what took Perry and I awhile to meet minds on: I have been thinking of this issue as a communications/information theory problem. How often do you have to sample an area to notice a change in the density of train traffic? I would posit it would have to be several times a week at the very least if the spike in traffic was huge and extended; if the spike were smaller and flatter you would need to sample daily or multiple times daily. You would have to do it at night and through clouds as well if you were to get a statistical value high enough to ring alarm bells. It is an issue of sampling rate versus the highest detectable signal frequency, pure and simple.

I doubt they have even been scanning large areas of Russia more than a few times a week (I suspect much less often) except in areas of nuclear strategic interest. They could easily miss large troop movements in a part of Russia which is not of great national interest to the United States.

Let the discussion begin. There is a lot of meat on this bone!

(12)

The Times (of London) has a sobering editorial today about the level of crime in the Caribbean, following the recent murder involving a married couple on their honeymoon in Antigua. Jamaica has already developed a fearesome reputation for violence - Kingston is a particularly unpleasant place - and the problem is spreading. In its history, the area has been touched by violence, stretching back before the dark stain of Western-imposed slavery, of course. The pirate gangs who raped and pillaged their way across the area were not lovable rogues with parrots on their shoulders but brutes.

Of course, when it comes to recent times, experiences vary. I went to Barbados with friends several years ago and had a wonderful time and was struck by how friendly people were. Barbados is a great place, although I am rather saddened that the youngsters are not as keen on cricket as they used to be, but perhaps that is inevitable as sporting fashions change.

The Times argues that some folk have blamed the problems on tourism as something that has widened the gap between rich and poor. This seems a bit of a strange argument. Surely, without tourism, the region - assuming there was no other source of wealth - would be even poorer, making for an ever more desperate situation that there is now. More pertinently, the editorial argues that a major cause of violence are drug gangs. The Caribbean is a crossing point for the drugs that are exported by gangs out of South America, such as Columbia, and then on to the US and elsewhere. At no point does the Times address the issue of whether the illegality of drugs might be fuelling the criminal gangster culture that is allied to it.

And there is something else to consider. Since Britain joined the-then EEC, now European Union, the old British connections to the trading interests of the UK's former colonies have been weakened. Imports of sugar and other produce were placed at a competitive disadvantage because of Britain's membership of the absurd Common Agricultural Policy.

Finally, one of the latest issues to rear its head is the ongoing attempt by Western governments, such as the US, to crack down on tax havens such as The Cayman Islands. If a left-leaning, high-taxing Democrat administration gets into power with Mr Obama in the White House, life for such havens could get much tougher, with attendant impact on their business activities.

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Even though I do not know if it should be done, given that it would be done by the people who would do it rather than by people who would do it well, I'm glad someone has at least said this:

Invade the country, shoot the generals and feed the people.

Those are apparently the words of David Davis, opposition spokesman for something or other. His colleagues were "stunned", says Iain Dale.

Incidentally, Biased BBC, who I do not always like (basically because I do not always dislike the BBC), made a good point recently about those Burmese generals. After quoting a Wikipedia entry to the effect that the Burmese generals are quite a bit more socialist than not, Niall Kilmartin says:

This socialist origin and orientation of military rule in Burma seems to have been airbrushed out of routine BBC coverage. The mention of 'generals' and 'military' with no hint of their ideology has an obvious tendency to suggest a right-wing regime rather than the left-wing regime it more appears to be.

Well, whatever. What is definitely true is that if, during a natural disaster, a government treats its own people as hostages rather than anyone they are supposed to help, then helping those people means shoving the government aside, at least for the duration of the disaster. Trouble is, smashing up a government does not, to put it mildly, necessarily mean helping its people. It's one of those necessary-but-insufficient situations. I actually think that if these generals did fear an old-fashioned invasion, a bit more than they do now, they might tolerate an NGO invasion instead. Surely, a threatened invasion, a real one, might accomplish something here. Trouble is, if you threaten something, it is better to mean it.

Latest from the BBC on Burma here. Things are said, by some, to be "improving". Hmm.

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The distinction between the legal order in Western democracies and the tyrannies of Stalinist Russia or modern China or the Arab gulf states, is often thought to be stark. In Britain in particular, we are complacent that 800 years of the common law will protect us against the overreaching power of state functionaries.

Today comes a case that shows this conceit to be ill-founded. It was already widely known that the Home Secretary would like the power to lock anyone up for seven weeks on her say-so. But it is not in effect yet, and is likely to be opposed in parliament. Who knew that the British state is already punishing 70 people with effective suspension of all their economic rights on mere accusation, by freezing their assets by Treasury order without any legal warrant or process?

The Terrorism (UN Measures) Order 2006 and the 2006 al-Qaeda and Taleban (UN Measures) Order were made under section 1 of the 1946 UN Act in order to implement resolutions of the UN Security Council. These orders are not parliamentary instruments but "orders in council" - the council in question being the Queen's Privy Council, so that the rules under which (according to solicitors for the victims)...

We have the madness of civil servants checking Tesco receipts, a child having to ask for a receipt every time it does a chore by running to the shops for a pint of milk and a neighbour possibly committing a criminal offence by lending a lawnmower.

Which remains, though the learned judge found it entirely illegal, indefinite:

Jonathan Crow QC, for HM Treasury, had told him the UK government would be left in violation of a UN Security Council order were the orders to be quashed immediately.

The Treasury said the asset-freezing regime and individual asset freezes would remain in place pending the appeal.

A spokesman said the asset-freezing regime made an "important contribution" to national security by helping prevent funds being used for terrorism and was "central to our obligations under successive UN Security Council resolutions".

To which I say, and not for the first time, damn the UN. Neither the UN nor Treasury officials are supposed to make our law. And if this proscription stands, then we might as well have no law.

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I never get tired of looking at this photograph. It never fails to fill me with wonder and awe at the ingenuity of my species who, against all the odds, have carved these glorious man-made islands of light out of the primordial blackness. Whenever I am heavy of heart, I open up this photograph and stare at it to remind me that, somewhere, there is light and life.

And there is. For now.

Towns and cities around the world are turning out the lights for an hour to highlight the threat of climate change.

Sydney was the first major city to begin "Earth Hour", when at 2000 (0900 GMT), lights went out on landmarks like the Opera House and Harbour Bridge.

Bangkok, Toronto, Chicago and Dublin are among 27 other cities officially due to follow suit at 2000 local time.

With each passing day I become more convinced that the 'green' movement is actually a millenarian psychosis; a mental and spiritual sickness borne, perhaps, from some degree of civilisational exhaustion. Not just a belief that the end of the world is nigh, but an active desire to bring it about. And soon. Ours is not the first age to witness such pandemics of madness but, in the Middle Ages at least, there was the excuse of a near-universal poverty. In such a state of interminable plight, despair may not be the wisest response but it is at least an understandable one.

But now we live in an age of near-universal prosperity and progress. Never before has our species enjoyed such security and such freedom from want. Yet this is clearly no defence against a recurrance of this psychological plague.

Some pubs are spending the evening without the lights on while many Australians are marking the occasion quietly in the darkness at home.

Life, laughter, love, food, drink, warmth, travel, communication, progress, a world full of unprecedented wonders and it's all too much for them. Better to sit in the darkness and curse the lighting of even a single candle.

'Stop the world, I want to get off' was the plaintive refrain of some Broadway comedy show I think. It could also be the motto for the greens, except that they want everybody off. Is that what they aspire to as they sit at home quietly in that seductive, undemanding cloak of blackness? To switch off civilisation and shuffle away into the perpetual tenebrosity dragging everyone else behind them?

The conditions are ripe for the spread of this insanity. Indeed, it is spreading now. How long will it be, I wonder, before some official body somewhere floats the idea of mandatory blackouts and curfews? "The voluntary approach" they will proclaim, "has not worked".

And what do we do in response? Laugh at them? Ignore them? Rage against them? What would work to inoculate the rest of our species? What combination or words or phrases could we use to dissipate and lay low a viral madness? I am, of course, familiar with the customary rebuttals. "We will win because we have MTV and Coca-Cola". But without the light there is no MTV, there is no Coca-Cola. What do we have then?

The lights are not yet going out all over the world. But I fear that I will see them do so in our lifetime.

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A lot of elections at the moment. Besides the US elections, we have just had the Spanish elections and in my wife's small country, Malta, the ruling Nationalist Party, a vaguely right-of-centre party that supported Malta's entry into the EU and the euro, won by an incredibly slender margin (just over a thousand votes). As I have a vested interest in Malta remaining a broadly open country, I am glad that the party won, or at least relieved that Labour, the main opposition party with a vindictively regulatory streak, did not. But my views on Malta's election are tinged with a bitter-sweet taste as the Nationalists, for all their generally pro-enterprise views, have made serious errors. The party took Malta into the EU. By staying out of the EU, Malta could have retained and expanded its status as an offshore tax haven, providing Monaco, the Swiss, Liechtenstein and Gibraltar with some useful competition as a friendly venue. Malta has quite a thriving IT and financial sector and English is widely spoken there, a priceless advantage. By keeping out of the EU, it could also have avoided becoming a conduit for tens of thousands of illegal immigrants who use the small island as an entry point for the EU. Malta, an island the size of the Isle of Wight with half a million people, is not a country that can easily absorb a large influx. But as my better half points out, Malta, a Catholic country, has long feared the shadow of its Muslim neighbour, Libya, just a hundred miles or so to the south, and sees EU membership as somehow tying it ever more closely to a non-Muslim population. The Maltese are quite a tolerant bunch but they are fiercely pro-western. The Archbishop of Canterbury would be thrown into Valetta's Grand Harbour.

One reason for the closeness of the elections is that there is a lot of anger at the governing party, even among most moderate voters, at some of the crasser building developments in the densely populated island. Even the most ardent defender of free enterprise will sometimes struggle to defend the ugly high-rise developments in part of the island that have gone up next to the attractive, honey-coloured buildings along parts of the country (in the smaller neighbouring island of Gozo, such developments have been far fewer, thankfully). Tourism is a crucial source of income for Malta; its historic buildings are part of its appeal, so long-term tourist entrepreneurs should hopefully follow their self-interest and avoid damaging the very thing that makes Malta a nice place to visit. This is an interesting subject for economists: ugly developments make money for investors in the short run and arguably, are better than no development at all, but the long run costs can be in the form of less tourism overall as would-be visitors go elsewhere for somewhere prettier.

Anyway, back on topic: this has to have been one of the closest election results I have ever read about.

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Richard Dawkins is someone whom I generally admire in the field of science. He is on the right side of the argument, in my view, in excoriating attempts to portray 'intelligent design' (creationism) as science; much of what he says about religion is true and he is a sharp, lucid commenter about scientific issues. But alas, that does not mean his grip on reality is particularly strong when it comes to other matters. Take his recent comments about the supposedly enormous influence of Jews on US foreign policy, which have already provoked a lot of comment.

My own take on all this is as follows: Dawkins is not anti-semitic and it would be pretty outrageous to suggest as such; I don't think he is trying to say that Jews totally control the foreign policy of the world's most powerful nation, only that they have a lot of influence in proportion to their numbers. But what Dawkins plainly does not consider - assuming his remarks have been reported accurately - is how the 'Jewish lobby' is not some sort of undifferentiated mass. Also, consider some of the main policymakers in Washington: Dick Cheney and Condi Rice. They are not Jews; neither, as far as I know, is Don Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, etc. Nor do I think that the policy of the US/other major nations has necessarily favoured Israel vs other Middle East countries. Arguably, if the Jewish lobby was as powerful as some say, then the US would have sanctioned the ability of Israel - which certainly has the means - to reduce its foes to radioactive dust. Anyway, a desire to protect the state of Israel from annihilation - a threat that is all too real if one takes the ravings of Iran's leadership seriously - is a noble one. Israel is, with all its faults, one of the few functioning liberal democracies in the Middle East (that is partly what drives its Islamic foes nuts, of course). Even if one subtracts the beneficent impact of foreign aid, Israel's domestic economic success is a standing rebuke to the theocracies that surround it.

If Dawkins wants to press the claims of atheists, fine (as an atheist myself, I count myself an admirer of what Dawkins has done to challenge religious superstition). But he does himself no favours by repeating the tired mantras about the vast influence of the Jewish lobby.

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Classical liberal scholar, Randy Barnett has a long and excellent post (which I came across via Instapundit) spelling out some of the contradictions that occur when libertarians, be they minarchists, anarchists or more 'pragmatic' types, get into arguments about events like the war in Iraq (I have been called a lot of names, but hey, I can deal with branded a warmonger and a sappy peacenic, as has happened).

In particular, he notes something that some of us at Samizdata have observed many times, which is that for a certain kind of isolationist libertarian, they almost endow foreign, sovereign governments with the sort of respect that they never have for their own states. Barnett calls this the "Westphalian" attitude (derived from the Treaty of Westphalia in the 17th Century which recognised sovereign state's boundaries in Europe at the end of the 30 Years' War). Barnett ends up by making a point that I would make, which is that judging the rightness or wrongness of certain wars cannot be done by simple recourse to a sort of Rothbardian non-initiation-of-force principle, even though that principle is mighty useful as a sort of discussion point (Rothbard is a hero of mine, notwithstanding certain problems I have with his specific views). Judging, for example, whether regime or thug X poses country Y an existential threat, and what to do about it, cannot be done simply by parroting a few principles. One has to judge the facts of the situation and ask questions such as, "is this war prudent"? or "Will it make threats to us worse rather than better?", or "What are the balance of risks?". Prudence, as the Greeks knew, is a virtue, although it seems at times a little unfashionable to point that out. With the benefit of hindsight, prudence might have led us to take a rather different view of what to do about Saddam, assuming we had to do anything other than deter him by threatening to nuke him out of existence (but then, that shows that acting in strict self defence can come at the cost of killing millions of innocent people, which is not exactly libertarian. Does this mean "strict" libertarians must be pacifists?).

Anyway, Barnett's essay is first class. For the more straightforward anti-war line out of the libertarian tradition, Gene Healy of the CATO Institute still has what I think is the best essay on the subject. It reads pretty well in the light of events. Both articles are pretty long so brew up plenty of coffee first.

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Tyler Cowen notes an unsavoury fact about the Chinese economic miracle:

...of the 3,220 Chinese citizens with a personal wealth of 100 million yuan ($13 million) or more, 2,932 are children of high-level cadres. Of the key positions in the five industrial sectors - finance, foreign trade, land development, large-scale engineering and securities - 85% to 90% are held by children of high-level cadres.

Cowen lifted the above quote from an interesting article that details how the regime in Beijing controls economic data coming out of the Middle Kingdom, which helps to prompt foreign investors to keep funding the great confidence trick that is the modern Chinese economy.

The family connections of China's super-rich and captains of industry must be considered alongside rosy economic statistics provided that expound China's development. These filial links between the commanding heights of China's supposedly private sector and its government betray the fact that China Inc. is the unholy alliance of a dictatorial regime and the application of corrupted 'free' market ideals. Such an arrangement will fail in due course, and will probably fail spectacularly since it has come this far.

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I would like to draw your attention to what's happened to The Times's Law section in the noughties. Once upon a time this was a lively mini-newspaper on a Tuesday, aimed at lawyers, with two or three substantial comment pieces, news, Law Reports and lots of job ads. Now it is a single sheet of newsprint, and found buried inside a growing section entitled Public Agenda.

From an advertisement in last week's Economist:

Devolution Trust for Community Empowerment (DTCE), a Pakistan based non-governmental organisation funded by a consortium of donors through UNDP, is plannning to undertake a social audit in 110 districts across the country compatible with baseline social audit established in 2001/02 and first annual follow-up application undertaken in 2004/05. The objective of the exercise is to obtain policy feedback on citizens' views and experience in relation to key public services sectors like health, education, water and sanitation, police, access to justice and engagement in local governance arrangements. The study design should consider the comparison overtime [sic] with the baseline and follow-up applicaions in citizens' views, use and experience of public services under the devolved local government system in Pakistan with a strong element of institutionalization of the social audit process.

Meanwhile, working the other way round, a flyer reaches me from De Havilland information services [no relation] for a conference on "Embedding the Third Sector in Public Services":

Third Sector public service delivery is a new, effective and exciting avenue to further revolutionise and modernise service provision as we know it. However, this is no longer an innovation, it is a reality and public money already funds multiple public services through third sector organisations. It is acknowledged that the opportunities, expertise and fresh, grass-roots approach the third sector brings will bring improvement and better value to public services.

Major efforts to reinforce this through building an infrastructure and action planning to rationalize and embed this are underway in te Third Sector Review, recently conducted by the Office of the Third Sector. The final report is due in March [and?] will culminate in summarising the sector's contribution and propose how this will work in a better, stronger, more resilient infrastructure.

The Office of the Third Sector is very pleased with what has happened to the role of charities, and will be colonising more of British civil society presently..

"Metaphors furnish clues to transformation, but they are not the powers that resist or engender such new realities," a literary theorist once wrote.

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For some reason, my home turf of East Anglia will not stay off the news

For sale: the world's smallest country with its own flag, stamps, currency and passports.

Apply to Prince Michael of Sealand if you want to run your own storm-tossed nation - even if it is just a wartime fort perched on two concrete towers in the North Sea.

Built in World War Two as an anti-aircraft base against German bombers, the derelict platform was taken over 40 years ago by retired army major Paddy Roy Bates who went to live there with his family.

Sealand, which is based off Felixstowe, one of Europe's largest container ports, has in its time been raided by the authorities, who have been at their wits' end to know what to do about the feisty Bates family. The place has even featured as an inspiration for people trying to harness encryption to make new forms of offshore banking possible, although I suspect that after 9/11, it will become impossible for a place like this to carry out totally private banking operations without countries such as Britain taking fairly robust action.

Even so, in his way, Bates has been a bit of a hero. He has established one of the longest-running 'private nations' on the planet in recent history. I wish him and his family the best.

This website is worth a read for material about offshore communities. And of course do not forget the Free State Project.

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Every day or two I visit The Croydonian, and today The Croydonian links to an amazing report. Papua New Guinea is having a row with Australia, about an Australian evildoer who escape in a Papua New Guinea airplane, and Papua New Guinea is now threatening a range of nasty things against Australia, of which this, apparently, is the most nasty:

The most serious step being contemplated is the suspension of significant elements of Australian aid deemed not essential to PNG, the Herald understands.

Yes, you did read that right. Papua New Guinea is threatening to cut off aid, from Australia to Papua New Guinea! Imagine the consternation that must now be sweeping through the Australian aiding classes. They do not want us to help them any more! Worse: Perhaps they do not think we were helping.

Is this an idea whose time has come?

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Having given up trying to stay PM and handed over the kulturcampf to Mr Brown, St Anthony now wishes to save the world:

In his strongest warning yet on the environment, the prime minister will tell fellow EU leaders that the world faces "conflict and insecurity" unless it acts now. "We have a window of only 10-15 years to take the steps we need to avoid crossing catastrophic tipping points," Mr Blair says, in a joint letter with his Dutch counterpart, Jan Peter Balkenende.

I am not interested for this purpose in whether he is right about 'catastrophic tipping points'. It is entirely possible he is. It is interesting that this is certainly not from his own knowledge. And since actually no one knows enough about climate to say under what conditions, never mind when, a catastrophe, bifurcation, flip, transition... whatever you would like to call it... might occur, then the fact the firm limit of years is reported as as little as 7 in some places, and up to 25 elsewhere, should not worry us.

What should, is the contradiction between the millenarian rhetoric and the irrelevance in its own terms of the hair-shirt policy that we are being exhorted to adopt. If the quantity of CO₂ in the atmosphere will cause catastrophe at some threshold level, then capping emissions from human activity merely postpones reaching the threshold. By not very much.

If things are that bad either: (1) We should find ways yet unknown to make global human greenhouse-gas emissions close to zero or net negative. (Sorry, no cooked food - except sun-baked and geyser-boiled - until we do.) Or (2) we should enjoy the party at the end of the world. But it seems those in charge do not know the difference between quantity and rate.

Now that is really scary. Reality I can cope with. I am aware I'm going to die, and probably suffer disease and loss first. That the course of my life will be determined not by biology, physics and economics, but by messianic imbeciles with no grasp of any of them, is harder to bear.

For me; the non-exclusive or: technofix plus fun.

For the Head Boy; "Repent, o ye sinners or burn in hell on earth! Go, and sin no more. (Than you did in 1990)."

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Work sent me to the Conservative Party conference in last week. It was dull. But I saw the Globalisation Institute had a fringe event so I went along and they gave us all some wine. They had Mark Malloch Brown, the UN's Deputy Secretary-General, give a speech in which he said this:

After all our efforts at reform, Kofi and I felt let down, if not betrayed, by the UN Human Rights Council's biased and unbalanced approach to the Lebanon conflict. They focussed solely on Israeli actions, while ignoring the atrocities committed by Hizbollah.

That certainly woke me up. It is comforting to hear someone from the UN be so honest. Perhaps next we will find that he is an avid reader of the website UNisEvil.com. Somehow I think it unlikely.

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The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's national current affairs flagship, the 7.30 Report, ran an interesting piece on Peak Oil theory, which was surprisingly contrarian considering the ABC's traditional biases (think BBC protégé). The most common manifestation of Peak Oil theory - a belief that at some point soon oil production will peak and then decline, causing spiralling oil prices and a world of chaos - has long been a favourite of environmentalists, leftists and the perpetually gloomy. However, of late Peak Oil's slip is showing to such an extent that even an organisation like the ABC cannot deny it is distinctly iffy. I would go further; it's demonstrably false. Mark Nolan, ExxonMobil Australia's Chief Executive controversially stated earlier this week that

According to the US Geological Survey, the earth currently has more than three trillion barrels of conventional recoverable oil resources. So far, we have produced one trillion of that.

And he's referring to known oil reserves. Thanks to woeful underinvestment in exploration by - and equally woeful management of - many of the world's true oil majors, the state owned National Oil Companies (subscriber-only article, sorry), we may have knowledge of just the tip of the iceberg.

Considering the pace of development of alternative energy sources, the famous quote from former Saudi oil minister Sheikh Zaki Yamani that "the Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil." is looking more prophetic than ever. Peak Oil chaos? Stuff and nonsense.

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Decidedly. This is one of those sentences, from one of those articles, that you read again and again in the hope that it might bear some reasonable meaning on closer inspection. No-one could really think that, could they? Today's prize for greatest misplaced faith in the state goes to The Guardian's Hywel Williams:

Middle Eastern tribalism, just like the African variety, is the direct result of colonial interference which frustrated the indigenous development of state-building.

Nasty states that express tribalism are not in the 'Western tradition', but they are caused by colonialism in the Middle East and Africa, while Putin's Russia on the other hand looks "to its Slavic roots", and while Bush's America is (apparently) a tribalism of politicised evangelicalism.

It is perplexing how 'tribalism' will stretch to cover everything Mr Willams does not like, but still he purports to think that local states for local people are a good thing (if permitting the English self-government is going too far, tantamount to endorsing apartheid). "Modern democratic states" are what he wants. But to be acceptable they should all be alike in this, in that, and in the other respect. His way of government is best. How is that different from imperial interference?

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I am still unconvinced of the isolationist argument vis Iraq that would have had Western militaries - and probably as a result civilians - quit the entire Middle East, and leave Saddam to wreak havoc as he has before, but my goodness, the case for non-interventionist foreign policy has never looked so good at the moment as the insurgency in Iraq gets worse. Jim Henley sums up the "do as little as possible" school of libertarian foreign policy as well as anyone:

If a war is worth years of struggle, billions squandered and thousands or tens of thousands of dead on both sides, why isn’t peaceful change worth as much? Why is it a “bold initiative” to announce a “generational struggle” to transform a region of the world through a war that might or might not achieve its ends, but preemptively absurd to launch a generational struggle to transform the same region through nonintervention, to instill liberalism and justice by exemplifying it? Because people might get killed? People get killed the other way. Because it might not work? Look around you. The other way isn’t working now.

My main problem with Jim's argument is that setting an example to the dictatorships, thugocracies etc of that region would strike me as a fairly drawn-out, if not rank impossible, endeavour (that's putting it politely, ed). We are talking about a process that might last thousands of years. And I am afraid that in the meantime, the various despots in that region might not quite get with the Enlightenment programme and develop a continued fondness for blowing infidels up. At best, I would say that such folk might, even at their craziest, be deterrable, which is why I think the libertarian world-view - if I can presume to call it that - should focus on deterrence, and forswear the temptations of what folk called pre-emptive action. But again - and Jim and others have to answer this question - does observing the niceties of national sovereignty always trump other considerations? For me, one of the clearest-cut examples of justified and smart pre-emption was the Israeli airforce's bombing of the Iraqi nuclear facilties in the early 1980s. No doubt some libertarian "leave-well-alone" foreign policy commenters fulminated about that event at the time, in a way that may have echoes now in what is being written about Israel's actions in Lebanon (see the posts below).

What to do?

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Terrorism is an extreme form of political communication. You want to be sure that, in your response, you don't end up amplifying the messages that terrorists are trying to convey.

and,

We just have to live with risk. We can’t be completely secure, and we will never be completely secure.

Not some supercilious liberal flâneur and dilletante security-skeptic - such as yours truly - but Sir Richard Dearlove, formerly C, speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

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Reflecting on my recent, rather intemperate post about whaling, I have decided that I may have been a little too hard-line on the issue. Despite the current miniscule numbers of non-Minke whales culled by Japan (only Japan hunts species other than Minkes), it would not hurt to further encourage population growth in less populous whale species.

Thus, in an imperfect world where the chances of internationally roaming whales ever being made the property of individuals is about zero, I suggest a compromise with the pro-whaling nations as a best case scenario. Make an offer to Norway, Iceland and Japan to lift the IWC moratorium, in return for all IWC members (with the obvious but unspecified target being Japan) agreeing to the following stipulations:

i) all subsidies to whaling industries must be incrementally phased out

ii) whale hunting must be limited to the two Minke whale species with abundant populations, until the population numbers of other whale species have recovered sufficiently to remove them from the upper reaches of the 'endangered' list

Naturally, these conditions need refining; how to decide population numbers, how quickly the subsidies will be dropped etc. Regardless, if these two stipulations are broadly accepted by all parties, Japan can take such an agreement back to its belligerent and powerful pro-whaling lobby and present it as an ostensible overwhelming victory. Truth is, by letting market forces set demand - and hence supply - stipulation one would eventually harpoon (sorry, couldn't resist) the whaling industry in that country, and stipulation two would protect the less numerous species of whale in the process. I would not expect the perpetually emotionally overwhelmed anti-whaling lobby to accede to such a proposal, but I think it stands as the most effective way of durably cutting back the industry - if that is what consumers demand. Let the market decide the future of whaling.

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Oh, how quickly smug, self-righteous smiles can turn into outraged gasping. I was quite pleased to see Japan, Norway, Iceland and others eventually get one over the woolly-thinking Western mouth-foamers at the recent International Whaling Commission meeting in St Kitts & Nevis. Of course, this is a mostly symbolic victory for those in favour of harvesting resources. In a practical sense, it may improve the pro-whaling camp's ability to set the agenda at future IWC get-togethers. This achievement was dwarfed, however, by the far more notable victory enjoyed by the anti-whalers earlier in the conference. The Japanese attempted to enact secret ballot voting at IWC conferences, and failed. This is a considerable strategic defeat, because secret ballots would have significantly enhanced the appeal of Japan's chequebook diplomacy in the eyes of swinging IWC members, who might otherwise be concerned about domestic political consequences should they choose to vote with the Japanese. Regardless of the relative unimportance of the Japanese camp's win - and the relative importance of the anti-whaling bloc's success at the meeting - the usual suspects are up in arms, like they always are. More on that later.

I believe Japan would require a two-thirds majority of members to overturn the moratorium on whaling that is currently in place, and they have no hope of mustering those kinds of numbers any time soon. Personally, I think Japan should simply follow Norway's lead and unilaterally discard the moratorium. Stop using this 'scientific research' nonsense as a pretext for a perfectly legitimate operation. The Japanese - and any other nation - have an absolute right to harvest the whale resource in international waters. They do not need to make excuses to anyone. It is time they looked the anti-whaling hysterics like Australia, Great Britain, New Zealand and their shrieking NGO allies in the eye and told the lot of them to get stuffed.

Take Greenpeace genius Danny Kennedy, walking the usual carping course:

It would be a stupidity really for civilisation to go back to this old barbaric business - which there is no demand for, I'll note, in this day and age - and actually deplete the asset that the whale-watched business is based on.

If anyone is interested, I have previously made the case for dropping the moratorium on whaling here.

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John Mearsheimer is a Professor at the University of Chicago who has attracted a great deal of attention in the blogosphere recently for a paper he co-authored about the role of the Israeli lobby and its influence on the policy of the United States towards the middle-east region. I think it fair to say that, at the very least, the paper was not his finest hour.

But it attracted me towards some of his other work, and the estimable Winterspeak, posting at Jane Galt’s blog, recently went to a speech where he outlined some of his views on his theory of international relations. Winterspeak was not entirely convinced.

Of course, political science is even more of a ‘black art’ then economic science. A scientific theory in the natural world can be demonstrated or refuted by scientific verification. In the social ‘sciences’ such verification is much harder. Therefore, making predictions about the future is hard. But one I still a worthwhile exercise. Readers can judge for themselves.

One of the aspects of Professor Mearsheimer’s work that has drawn particular attention is his view that the internal composition of states does not matter, democracy or dictatorship, theocracy or monarchy, they will have the same foreign policy goals. Given that in the United States, democracy is seen as a sacred cow, this is bound to be a provocative stance.

In considering this point of view, it may be helpful to make a distinction between ‘strategic’ foreign policy thinking, and ‘tactical’ foreign policy thinking, just as a chess-player does. Strategic is ‘this is what we want’ and tactical is ‘this is how we are going to get it’. If you view Professor Mearsheimer’s work in that light, I understand why he thinks that way. Take, for example, his recent debate with Zbigniew Brzezinski on the future of China’s policy. It seems to me that the internal composition of China’s government will not make a great deal of difference towards China’s desire to regain Taiwan.

It does of course make a great deal of difference about how they go about getting it, though. I am not very knowledgeable about China or its people, so I am not at all sure about how a future Chinese democracy would go about trying to reclaim Taiwan from the mainland. It may be thought that a democratic Chinese government would be sensible enough to eschew war, but given what the Chinese people seem to think about their neighbours, and watching other Asian democracies in action, gives me reason to doubt the good sense of a Chinese democracy.

It does seem to me that the tactics a state employs though are extremely important, and have massive and wide-ranging implications. Therefore, if one may be critical of Professor Mearsheimer’s theory, it is that he under-rates the importance of tactical moves in foreign policy goal setting. The classic example of this would be the transformation of Prussia into Imperial Germany in the late 19th century, and its effects on France and Russia. A more contemporary one, and more pointed given his latest academic effort, is that vital one of United States support for Israel. This policy is effected precisely because the United States is a democracy and, like it or not, the American public opinion is far more favourable towards Israel. This expression of American opinion thus translates into a massively different policy position towards the Middle East then would be the case if United States foreign policy was principally conducted with the interest of the government only in mind, as would be the case if the United States was a dictatorship.

And that support has a huge bearing on the foreign policy strategies of Arab states. So in the long run, democracy matters.

That does not mean that a democracy is likely to pursue more sensible or rational foreign policies. Democracy is no guarantee of good government. It simply means that governments in democracies have different political considerations to bear in mind when they make diplomatic decisions. I would welcome readers views on this matter.

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I remember, on either September 11 or 12, 2001, in a conversation about the war, I predicted that we would not get out of the current unpleasantness without nuclear weapons being used.

While the strength of my belief in this prediction has wavered a bit over the years, it has now hardened into near certainty.

Read it and weep.

Additional thoughts:

There is no chance whatsoever that the Americans will end the Iranian nuclear threat by preemptive military action. The threshold for certainty and "imminence" has been set too high, the political consequences for waging "preventive" or "preemptive" war have been made too dire, for American politiicans by the last five years of relentless dishonesty and fecklessness in the American media and political scenes.

The Iranian mullahs will get their nukes, (and sooner than the ten years generally bandied about in the media). Once they have them, they will be immune from diplomatic and military pressure. The odds that they won't use one, either directly or by proxy? Nil.

There remain two interesting questions: Who will they nuke, and what will we do about it?

I doubt they'll hit Israel, for all their bluster, because Israel is the one country that is certain to launch a massive counterstrike. There are lots of easier targets for them. There probably won't be any need to nuke Europe - the descent of that continent into dhimmitude will most likely be satisfactorily accelerated by the mere presence of nukes in Iran. I wouldn't be surprised if the mullahs chose Baghdad or possibly the Iraqi oil port as their first target, to get the Americans out of their face and off their borders.

No one but the Americans will be in a position to respond to the Iranian nuclear attack. Whether we respond in a meaningful way depends on whether whoever happens to be the leader of the US on that day will have the fortitude to nuke them back. The odds of that are rather small, I fear, and once the mullahs have used a nuke with impunity, they will do it again and again. Why not? Is there any reason whatsoever to believe that their behavior of the last 30 years will change for the better once they obtain the combination of more leverage and immunity from real consequence provided by nuclear weapons?

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Brian has a new podcast available in which he talks with Antoine Clarke about elections around the world, the libertarian case for democracy and some juicy tidbits. Apparently. Meanwhile, I talk with Neil O’Brien of Open Europe on whether the European social model really is social and whether science should be funded by the EU.

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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).

(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.

(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.

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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.

(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.

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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.

(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.

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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.

(4)

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)

(27)

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.

(49)

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.

(13)

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?

(62)

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?

(29)

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.

(39)

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.

(7)

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.

(15)

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!

(93)

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)

(25)

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.

(12)

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.

(63)

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.

(4)

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.

(18)

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?

(21)

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...

(25)

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!

(10)

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

(9)

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.

(17)

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.

(12)

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.

(3)

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.

(10)

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)

(16)

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.

(26)

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

(15)

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.

(23)

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.

(6)

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.

(10)

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.

(20)

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.

(1)

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.

(7)

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?

(22)

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.]

(15)

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.

(25)

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.

(15)

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.

(14)

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 t