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Mick Hartley quoted at some length the other day from this TimesOnline piece by Sarah Baxter, but I have only just read the thing itself. The first few paragraphs, which Mick Hartley did not recycle, are particularly choice, and I do quote them here, now:
A glorious culture clash took place in Iran recently that made me laugh out loud. The children of Che Guevara, the revolutionary pin-up, had been invited to Tehran University to commemorate the 40th anniversary of their father’s death and celebrate the growing solidarity between “the left and revolutionary Islam” at a conference partly paid for by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.
There were fraternal greetings and smiles all round as America’s “earth-devouring ambitions” were denounced. But then one of the speakers, Hajj Saeed Qassemi, the co-ordinator of the Association of Volunteers for Suicide-Martyrdom (who presumably remains selflessly alive for the cause), revealed that Che was a “truly religious man who believed in God and hated communism and the Soviet Union”.
Che’s daughter Aleida wondered if something might have been lost in translation. “My father never mentioned God,” she said, to the consternation of the audience. “He never met God.” During the commotion, Aleida and her brother were led swiftly out of the hall and escorted back to their hotel. “By the end of the day, the two Guevaras had become non-persons. The state-controlled media suddenly forgot their existence,” the Iranian writer Amir Taheri noted.
After their departure, Qassemi went on to claim that Fidel Castro, the “supreme guide” of Guevara, was also a man of God. “The Soviet Union is gone,” he affirmed. “The leadership of the downtrodden has passed to our Islamic republic. Those who wish to destroy America must understand the reality and not be clever with words.”
Don’t say you haven’t been warned, comrade, when you flirt with “revolutionary Islam” as if it were a mild form of liberation theology. …
LOL indeed.
I am actually quite optimistic that at least some (more) lefties will wake up, as time goes by, to the absurdity of them being in alliance with radical Islamists. The only rationale for this otherwise ridiculous arrangement is (see above) that the enemy of your enemy (the USA) is your friend, no matter what. If you really do think that the USA is the biggest baddest thing in the world and that curbing its power is the only thing that matters (think Hitler Churchill Stalin), then this alliance makes a kind of primitive sense. Although even if you do think that, encouraging the development of rampant capitalism everywhere except in the USA would make a lot more sense. That really would reduce the USA to the margins of history. But, if you think that lefty-ism is anything at all to do with positive support for civilisation, decency, freedom, female (in particular) emancipation, life being nice even if you do not submit to Islam etc., then you should surely turn your back on all such alliances.
Meanwhile, I cannot help noticing and rejoicing that those Islamists have such a genius for pissing off their potential allies. From what I have been reading, they have achieved this same feat in the last year or two with the people of Iraq, no less. Compared to that momentous own goal, if own goal it turns out to be, pissing off the Guevaras is small potatoes indeed.
Unless of course millions of lefties around the world read of this outrage and exclaim with one voice: “That does it. Not the Guevaras. How dare they silence these hereditary paragons of revolutionary virtue. We will now support the USA against the Islamists until the Islamists are utterly crushed. Then we will sort out the USA.” That would change things a bit.
I make no secret of my boundless admiration for Ayaan Hirsi Ali and so let me strongly commend an article in the International Herald Tribune called A refugee from Western Europe by Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie (the later of whom I confess I may have judged too harshly in the past).
It is important to realize that Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society, and to the boundless energy of its antagonists. She knows the challenges we face in our struggle to contain the misogyny and religious fanaticism of the Muslim world, and she lives with the consequences of our failure each day. There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.
Having recapitulated the Enlightenment for herself in a few short years, Hirsi Ali has surveyed every inch of the path leading out of the moral and intellectual wasteland that is traditional Islam. She has written two luminous books describing her journey, the most recent of which, “Infidel,” has been an international bestseller for months. It is difficult to exaggerate her courage. As Christopher Caldwell wrote in The New York Times, “Voltaire did not risk, with his every utterance, making a billion enemies who recognized his face and could, via the Internet, share information instantaneously with people who aspired to assassinate him.”
“There is no one in a better position to remind us that tolerance of intolerance is cowardice”… truly words worth burning into one’s soul.
Given the craven dishonour of the Dutch government, whose promises to protect her wherever she went have proven to be worthless (as indeed the people of Srebenica discovered in 1995), if anyone knows if someone has organised a place for donations to pay for her security from the fanatical vermin who wish to silence her, I for one am certainly willing to put my money where my mouth is.
The Israeli raid on a Syrian target earlier this month has mostly faded from the news, but to my knowledge there has been no definitive report on exactly what was bombed. My own best guesses are either a big Hezbollah staging area or a Syrian nuclear weapons related facility, but my gut guesses and ten cents will buy you a cup of coffee if you have access to a TARDIS.
This item, by a former Jerusalem Post editor is about the best discussion I have run across.
What’s beyond question is that something big went down on Sept. 6. Israeli sources had been telling me for months that their air force was intensively war-gaming attack scenarios against Syria; I assumed this was in anticipation of a second round of fighting with Hezbollah. On the morning of the raid, Israeli combat brigades in the northern Golan Heights went on high alert, reinforced by elite Maglan commando units. Most telling has been Israel’s blanket censorship of the story – unprecedented in the experience of even the most veteran Israeli reporters – which has also been extended to its ordinarily hypertalkative politicians. In a country of open secrets, this is, for once, a closed one.
Read the article and make up your own mind.
In both the USA and UK, much of the debate about how to react to the military situation in Iraq really strikes me as really odd. If a person thinks the available facts indicate we are not doing well against the insurgents, surely the choices should be either:
- Conclude the enemy will inevitably win and no military and political victory is feasible, therefore accept being defeated and get out completely as soon as possible
- Conclude the enemy can be beaten, but not at an acceptable cost, so accept being defeated and get out completely as soon as possible
- Conclude the enemy can be beaten and therefore reinforce to improve the military force levels (i.e. the ‘Surge’) in order to actually win
What does not make any sense to me is any talk of reducing force levels by a person who does not think we have either already won or already been irretrievably defeated… and the stated position of most politicos on both sides of the Atlantic is neither of those things.
Yet surely to argue for any reduction in military force levels in Iraq by anything less that 100% and to argue that things are not going well, is tantamount to saying you support a policy to make the allied military situation even worse.
There is an interesting article in The Times about Ehsan Jami, a former Muslim who rejected his religion in the aftermath of 9/11. He is organising a movement to fight for the rights of people who leave the Muslim faith and as a consequence face the threat of death, as mandated by the Koran.
This is not an issue on which there can be any compromise whatsoever. However it is also an issue which needs to be highlighted not just for the sake of former Muslims but as a means to rubbish the advocates of multicultural relativism. This is an issue that must be forced down the throat of anyone who wishes to practice Islam in any civilised country.
He could have taken his article to this conclusion but perhaps he thought the baggage that would come with it would distract from his intended points. In order for my ‘friendly amendment’ to make sense, it is important to understand what “multiculturalism” really means. Multiculturalism is not a recent ideology. Only the name is new. Most of you are far more familiar with it as “separate but equal”. Wikipedia says:
Multiculturalism is an ideology advocating that society should consist of, or at least allow and include, distinct cultural and religious groups, with equal status.
Separate but equal … segregationism. Multiculturalism as an ideology is diametrically opposed to integration and assimilation. Some have noted a difference in the formation of terrorists in America as compared with Europe but without necessarily attributing it to America’s still comparatively high cultural emphasis and expectation of newcomers to assimilate.
The absence of significant terrorist attacks or even advanced terrorist plots in the United States since Sept. 11 is good news that cannot entirely be explained by increased intelligence or heightened security. It suggests America’s Muslim population may be less susceptible than Europe’s Muslim population, if not entirely immune, to jihadist ideology. In fact, countervailing voices may exist within the American Muslim community.
So what does this have to do with Richard Miniter? → Continue reading: Richard Miniter stops short
Correlli Barnett, a long-standing critic of the Coalition overthrow of Saddam’s Ba’ath dictatorship, gives us this in this week’s Spectator:
“In Saddam’s strictly secular Iraq, al-Qa’eda and other forms of Islamist extremism were ruthlessly put down. Is it not plainer every month that we would all (including Iraqis) now be much better off if Saddam Hussein had been left in power,but under continued allied air surveillance?”
The regular trope that Saddam was a “strictly” secular leader won’t wash. The “strictness” was in fact pretty variable. What is Barnett trying to say, that Hussein kept copies of the complete works of Voltaire and Richard Dawkins under his bed? Surely, to be serious, Saddam was capable and willing to use and invoke religion when it suited his purposes; I have no idea whether he thought there was a supreme being or not, but frankly, what consolation would it be to the tens, hundreds of thousands of people who were brutalised by his rule to be told that he was “strictly” secular? The Marsh Arabs, the Shiites, the Kurds and other groups may want to ask Mr Barnett what benefit they had from being oppressed by a “secular” ruler. Stalin was “strictly secular”, as was Mao, at least as far as I know.
In fact, this argument is so silly that it got me wondering about what exactly is so marvellous about “strictly” secular regimes that cause havoc on a mass scale; Stalin’s Russia, for example, with its attendant mass famines, the Gulag, and the rest, surely drives a stake through the notion that the absence of revealed religion automatically brings a better state of affairs. I am a lapsed Christian, and no admirer of much that goes under the name of religion (that’s puttting it mildly, ed), but there are so many examples of evil, secular regimes, that it is hard to summon breath to point this rather obvious fact to someone like Barnett.
Then there is this claim that Iraqis and others would have been “much better off” with the old brute in power. That is frankly impossible to judge, and sitting here in the comfort of my apartment, is not one I feel fit to make, but then neither does Mr Barnett. I guess the henchmen who ran Saddam’s torture chambers and his security services feel that their circumstances have taken a big turn for the worse; George Galloway and the various other lowlifes clearly may mourn his passing; arms dealers in the West, East and elsewhere may rue the missed orders and deals no longer struck (that includes Britain, I am ashamed to say), but if Barnett wants to make this claim with seriousness, he needs to weigh the costs of what is now happening in Iraq with the toll of the Iran-Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait, the gassing of villagers in northern Iraq, etc. And he needs to consider whether, and for how long, Saddam’s regime could have lasted, even without sanctions, and what would have happened thereafter.
The other problem I have is Barnett’s casually thrown-in comment about the Allied air surveillance – he means the “no-fly zones” in the north and south of Iraq. They cost money to enforce, there was exchange of fire between the airforces and the Iraqi forces on the ground (breaches of the 1991 Ceasfire, for those who bleat about the “illegal” invasion of 2003). It is naive to imagine those flights could have remained indefinitely, or have been enforceable beyond a certain point. Sooner or later, the air cover would have been reduced, leaving those in the north and the south to the tender mercies of Saddam’s/his son’s forces on the ground. Not a happy prospect.
There are good arguments to be made against the war: Saddam posed us no immediate threat; his armed forces were degraded after 1991 and there were more serious threats around which required more of our attention. There are also prudential grounds to avoid war if possible, starting with the old adage, which ought to be familiar to libertarians: the law of unintended consequences. I have found myself, more than once, rueing the entire enterprise as an object lesson in the folly of interventionism and chided myself from falling off the wagon in this respect. But the only problem is that I start getting those neo-con urges as soon as apologists for dictatorship like Barnett put pen to paper. The anti-war folk may have many arguments in their favour, but so many of them give me the creeps.
(Update: topic heading changed: this article has nothing to do with Korea!)
What I find so infuriating about the situation in Southern Iraq is that it was all so avoidable, and by that I do not mean by not getting involved in the first place. Clearly I was wrong to assume that just because the British government did the right thing helping with the ouster of Saddam Hussein, they would do what was needed to actually secure victory in the aftermath and focus Britain’s resources on achieving military success against the Iranian based insurgents in their area of responsibility. Silly me.
What US generals see, however, is a close ally preparing to “cut and run”, leaving behind a city in the grip of a power struggle between Shia militias that could determine the fate of the Iraqi government and the country as a whole. With signs of the surge yielding tentative progress in Baghdad, but at the cost of many American lives, there could scarcely be a worse time for a parting of the ways. Yet the US military has no doubt, despite what Gordon Brown claims, that the pullout is being driven by “the political situation at home in the UK”.
A senior US officer familiar with Gen Petraeus’s thinking said: “The short version is that the Brits have lost Basra, if indeed they ever had it. Britain is in a difficult spot because of the lack of political support at home, but for a long time – more than a year – they have not been engaged in Basra and have tried to avoid casualties.
“They did not have enough troops there even before they started cutting back. The situation is beyond their control.
It is not like Britain lacks the troops to send in order to apply the needed force to Basra and its environs. What exactly are the 23,000 British soldiers defending Rheindahlen, Saxony and Westphalia from at the moment? It is extraordinary that the standard response to things getting rough militarily these days is not to reinforce but rather to cut back in-theatre thereby increasing the pressure of those troops left behind… hardly an approach calculated to bring success.
I thought the one thing the damn state was capable of was waging wars, particularly ones of its own choosing. If it cannot even do that, what the hell use is it? Even less than I thought, and that is saying something.
Paul Staines takes a very gloomy view of the situation in Britain’s two wars
I take no pleasure in reporting this, but it seems to be going unsaid in the British press. British forces are painted, particularly by broadcasters, as having achieved a measure of success in Basra due to superior British peace-keeping techniques honed in Northern Ireland.
The truth is very different. To quote from a report;
Three major Shiite political groups are locked in a bloody conflict that has left the city in the hands of militias and criminal gangs, whose control extends to municipal offices and neighborhood streets. The city is plagued by “the systematic misuse of official institutions, political assassinations, tribal vendettas, neighborhood vigilantism and enforcement of social mores, together with the rise of criminal mafias that increasingly intermingle with political actors,” a recent report by the International Crisis Group said.
The Washington Post reported a senior U.S. intelligence official yesterday saying that “The British have basically been defeated in the south”.
The article went on to say that British forces
… are abandoning their former headquarters at Basra Palace, where a recent official visitor from London described them as “surrounded like cowboys and Indians” by militia fighters. An airport base outside the city, where a regional U.S. Embassy office and Britain’s remaining 5,500 troops are barricaded behind building-high sandbags, has been attacked with mortars or rockets nearly 600 times over the past four months.
In May Blair visited the Basra HQ and came under mortar attack – not a sign of pacification.
The head of the armed forces, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, told the BBC that success depends “upon what your interpretation of the mission was in the first place… I’m afraid people had, in many instances, unrealistic aspirations for Iraq, and for the south of Iraq.” The reality is that once British forces exit Basra the fighting will escalate into a full-scale civil war: Mission failure.
This begs the question – what now is the plan in Afghanistan? They are a people who fought the Red Army and won. The Soviets were brutal and were still defeated. Is NATO going to match and exceed that brutality in pursuit of “victory”? Afghanistan should be monitored closely and elements that present a clear and present external danger should be eliminated. It is not the job of NATO to impose Western values by force as Rome’s Imperial Armies once imposed Roman law.
9/11 was blowback. It was blowback for the USA making movies featuring nudity. It was blowback for rock and roll and Jack Daniels and hog-roasts and pornography and Marilyn Monroe and Baywatch. It was blowback for not being part of a caliphate. Mohammed Atta was an architect(!) and what really wound him up was that in his native Cairo the Hilton Hotel and the Bank of America towered over the medieval mosques. Oh Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine always gets dragged up as a “legitimate” grievance but that’s pure window dressing. Why has no Arab state done a bloody thing to aid the Palestinians? And by the way, my definition of “aid” does not include bunging $25000 to the family of a “martyr” who has blown up in a Pizza Hut. The PA has basically been bank-rolled by the EU and oddly enough not in fact by their fellow Arabs and brothers in Islam of the Arab League. Why do you think the oil sheiks didn’t pony up the dough?
– Regular commenter Nick M in this thread.
But that wasn’t quite his intention. He was attempting to declare a failure but accidentally got his facts right. On Sunday’s Meet the Press with Tim Russert, a debate waged between Senators Jim Webb and Lindsay Graham resulted in the following statement by Senator Webb.
And with respect to al-Qaeda, quite frankly, al-Qaeda didn’t come to Iraq to try to destroy a democracy. That’s a very, very flimsy democracy there. We all recognize that. Al-Qaeda came to Iraq because the United States was in Iraq, and the people in al-Anbar are not aligning themselves with the United States. It’s “The enemy of the enemy is my friend.” This hasn’t been the Iraqi military, the national military that’s been taking out al-Qaeda. It’s been a redneck justice. It’s been these sectarian groups out there who don’t like al-Qaeda. And if we leave, they still will not like al-Qaeda.
His statement is right on so many points, it’s more than a little heartening.
First, democracy or no, Al-Qaeda is in Iraq to attack the United States. Where would the Senator rather rather have them attack us? Second, he is correct that this is a case of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But in terms of Al-Qaeda, that is called aligning themselves with the United States. We share a common enemy and are fighting it together. That is all “ally” means. What is he expecting? Conversions? Third, al-Anbar is a Sunni province. al-Qaeda is a Sunni organization. Sunnis have been their support base. And now a major part of that support base is turning against al-Qaeda. The biggest sign of success is when we no longer need to count on the military solutions but rather, the support base itself turns against the terrorists. Yet he is bemoaning the absence of a military component to this accomplishment. Senator Webb has done us the favor of highlighting some outstanding signs of imminent success although it was rather ambitious of him to spin them the way he did. It is also difficult to reconcile his belief that this revolt by the support base is “redneck justice” with the following statement taken from his own website.
Looking at these [Viet Nam] examples, you come to a conclusion about the use of force in this situation. In my opinion, we need to articulate clearly that we do not have a quarrel with the Muslim world. But the part of the Muslim world that considers itself at war with us must be on notice. Who are these people? They are the ones conducting terrorist activities and those training and providing logistical support to them. All those people, in my opinion, should be fair game. Over time, we should see the people who are conducting this international campaign of terrorism being cut away from their support base. Many good people were cut away from the support base of the South Vietnamese government. I think there’s a direct parallel.
Senator Webb is delivering good news suggesting that resistance to terrorism may soon be strong enough for us to reduce support levels. But he sounds greatly disappointed that this resistance is at the grass roots, and not a military accomplishment. Why do I suspect that if it was a military accomplishment, he would be lamenting the absence of grass roots support?
I have come up with yet another in a long line of ‘Modest Proposals’ for solving world problems, this time for successful suicide bombers.
When someone is prepared to kill themselves because their religious belief assures them of an eternal party or an eternal peace or large numbers of subservient soon to be non-virgins, there is not a great deal that can be done to sway them from their evil course… or so one would think.
I propose hitting below the belt.
What is important to these folk? What do they want? Why do they do what they do?
They want everyone to be believers of their one true faith.
What else is important to them?
Family.
My modest proposal is a very biblical one. When a terrorist succeeds in not only blowing themselves up but in also killing innocent civilians we should round up their family, nuclear or extended as is appropriate to the culture; men, woman, children and elderly;and give them a very simple choice:
Convert to the religion represented by the majority of the innocents killed… or die.
This strikes at the heart of the belief system of these murdering swine. The message would be that success is a failure worse than their worst nightmare. How many Hamas would want their daughter converting to Judaism and then marrying a doctor? Or even worse… a lawyer!
Thus Sunni wouldst become Shia; Shia wouldst become Sunni; Palestinians would become Jews… and for that matter if any Christian committed a similar heinous act, the same would apply to them.
Fair is fair.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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