We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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Only Blair could repackage scuttle as a political victory. The situation in the south of Iraq has worsened over the last few years as British troops have withdrawn from the main towns, leaving the local areas in the control of the Mahdi Army and the Shi’a militias, often under the influence of Iran. The Times reports that the main tasks assigned to the British Army: pacification and reconstruction, have not been achieved.
Anthony Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washing-ton, said the British move would simply hand more power to the Islamist groups backed by neighbouring Iran. “The British cuts will in many ways simply reflect the political reality that the British ‘lost’ the south more than a year ago,” he said.
Although there is no Sunni-Shia carnage to compare with Baghdad, the Shia-dominated south has been torn by a cutthroat internal competition for power that has turned bloody. Since August, both Diwaniyah and Amara have been convulsed by clashes between the mainly Shia Iraqi Army, and Sadr’s militia.
Unwilling to increase defence expenditure and recruitment, the government tried to hide behind a victory message whilst hoping to prevent the possible creation of a Shi’astan with a reduced force. Soldiers have done a sterling job under impossible political conditions, whilst stabbed in the back by the hypocrites in the Liberal Democrats. If the government cannot fulfil the security commitments that Blair undertook on our behalf, it should say so honourably and withdraw leaving the United States to hold the ring. If a hot war results from the Shi’a-Sunni tensions ensuing, Blair’s legacy will stand out: defeat abroad, failure at home.
Via the Norman Geras blog (and in turn via Glenn Reynolds), is a long letter that challenges head-on the disgraceful spectacle of Iran’s conference of December 2006 to “debate” whether the Holocaust existed. Good. It is a letter that reminds us that thousands, maybe millions, of Iranians do not subscribe to the same claptrap as its leaders. It is welcome and important that such views get an airing. I hope it happens a great deal more often.
Up until today, I knew very little about Barack Obama except that he is Democrat Senator who has very recently announced that he is going to run for President in 2008.
Today, I still know very little about Mr. Obama but I now know a little more than I did yesterday. Specifically, I now know that, although he is now a Christian, he was raised as a Muslim. If that is the case then does that not mean that he has (at some point in his past) left Islam and converted to Christianity? And does that not mean that he is, according to the Islamic faith, an apostate? And is not the penalty for apostacy (again, according to Islam) death? And, if all that is correct, is it not reasonable to speculate that there are, at least, some rather excitable Islamists who regard themselves as being under a religious obligation to separate Mr. Obama’s head from his shoulders?
I have no idea as to what his chances are but in the event that Mr. Obama achieves his goal, then I humbly recommend that his very first executive action should be to order a generous salary increase for the staff of the secret service because, oh boy, are they going to be earning it.
Why has Iraq turned out to be so difficult? Where did it all go wrong? Libertarians and neo-conservatives do not share many values but both agree that there are cultural characteristics which can render governance easier than this current war has shown. Iraq has proved that state-building can go horrifically wrong and that a chaotic situation involving a nation divided by tribe and religion can viciously spiral into civil strife.
After Iraq was conquered or liberated depending upon your viewpoint, the upsurge in terrorism sponsored by surrounding pariah states was very likely. Yet, if the correct steps had been taken to rebuild the Iraqi economy, then the insurgency would not have worsened. We would not now have a civil war, sectarian massacres, the dripfeed of corpses and kleptocratic authorities. All of these developments feed off each other in a failed state.
Iraqis were browned off with their impoverishment from sanctions and their ruined middle class aspired to the prosperity that they had enjoyed prior to Saddam’s wars. Now that middle class has departed. What did these Iraqis want? They wished for security and the expectation that thieves, from militias or the secret police would not steal their goods or injure and kill them. They wanted title or the local equivalent, whether individual or communally based perhaps for the March Arabs so that their chattels and homes could not be expropriated. After 2003, we should have appropriated and extended Saddam Hussein’s social revolution through free-market reforms, breaking down tribal loyalties with education and the modernising cash-nexus. Hernando De Soto expresses this advantage very clearly.
In early March, I [Ramesh Ponnoru] called de Soto to talk about the relevance of his ideas to Iraq’s future. As you will see, he was a model interviewee; I didn’t have to do much talking.
NRO: How important is the establishment of property rights in a post-totalitarian country such as [we’re hoping postwar Iraq will be]?
HDS: It’s obviously crucial. If you want to create a market society, that’s what it’s based on. . . . [T]he starting point, the genesis of a market society is property rights because it relates to the issue of what belongs to whom. Once you determine that, you know who starts with what poker chips. And once people see that the law protects rights that they already have, then people begin to believe in the rule of law.
They wanted a medium of exchange that the government could not devalue and that would enable them to travel to the surrounding countries and buy more goods. They wanted employment so that they could aspire to such travel, and create opportunities for themselves. The building blocks existed to satisfy the middle classes and avoid the degeneration of political conflict into the defence of religious and ethnic identity. → Continue reading: Back to basics in Iraq
Rageh Omaar, writing in the New Statesman, makes an interesting observation:
Each time I return [to Somaliland] I am struck by the increasing influence of puritanical interpretations of Islam. […] Generations of young Somali men have attended seminaries and Koranic schools, but they never used to wear turbans or red and white keffiyehs, increasingly a symbol of Sunni sectarian identity.
Somalis have been guest workers in the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, for decades, giving Saudi Arabia considerable economic and cultural influence over the people and institutions of the as yet unrecognised Republic of Somaliland. One influence has been the financing of schools based on the puritanical Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. Western governments seem unperturbed. They are more worried, in the case of Somalia, by the emergence of a loose alliance of home-grown Islamists who came to power because they got rid of hated warlords, than with the large sums of money being spent by Saudi institutions to spread an austere version of Islam.
It was ever thus. I know some in the commentariat will dismiss anything Omaar says because he’s an ex-BBC journalist writing in a lefty publication. But his point, supported by these facts, boils down to a simple one, with which I concur: Islamism won’t weaken in the rest of the world while it continues to be spread from Riyadh.
You would not want to start from here, but the West must find ways to stop sucking up to the Saudis and, more, to begin to counter their theological export industry. 30 years late is better than never. Killing people is beside the point. Offering cultural alternatives is not.
So I am reading the declassified summary of the National Intelligence Estimate(PDF) that everybody is talking about. While there are dissenting opinions in the classified version, the 3+ pages in the declassified summary are the conclusions that every contributing intelligence source agree on. The core problem is captured in the very first bulleted point; the point that is getting quoted in the news reports.
- Nevertheless, even if violence is diminished, given the current winner-take-all attitude and sectarian animosities infecting the political scene, Iraqi leaders will be hard pressed to achieve sustained political reconciliation in the time frame of this Estimate
How can so many learned people look at this and not understand the root of the problem immediately?
Democracy is the problem. Democracy = winner-take-all. Whether on the left or the right, politicians and pundits have been unanimous in couching our presence in Iraq in terms of “bringing democracy” like we have here in the United States. How can so many people be under the mistaken notion that we are a democratic republic? We are not. We are a constitutional republic. What MacArther and his staff understood while enforcing the Potsdam Declaration (perhaps even better than the Allied leaders did) was that we, the United States, are a republic governed by a constitution with some carefully limited democratic features. With that in mind, when the process foundered for building in Japan a new government adherent to the declaration’s terms, he oversaw the construction of a constitution with strict limits on the power and reach of both the government and the majority of the population. We, the US, handed Japan a constitution on a platter.
The only hope for peace in Iraq is to stop calling for democracy, and instead call for, or dictate, a constitution that guarantees the rights of life, liberty and property. Only if that effort fails, should we pull out and resort to preventing the development of military capabilities by intermittent military hit and withdraw interventions.
“I think we should take Iraq and Iran and combine them into one country and call it Irate. All the pissed off people live in one place and get it over with.”
– Denis Leary.
There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan. … Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. … They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs – well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people.
– Martin Amis, quoted by Christopher Hitchens in his City Journal review of America Alone
Longish article in the Telegraph today about the increasing domestic economic woes in Iran, which puts pressure on current leadership of that country. If such a country is this state when the price of crude oil has been so high, albeit off its peaks – Iran is a major oil exporter – then imagine how things may pan out if the price of the black stuff goes down even more.
Michael Totten has some more great stuff from Lebanon that you just will not read in the mainstream media.
And remember he does not have a news organisation behind him, so he trips and reportage are all funded from his own pocket and from donations from readers.
The current war in Iraq is the long death rattle of a savage era that started in 1968 with the start of Saddam Hussain’s rise to power and begun in earnest in 1979 with his assumption the presidency of Iraq. To outsiders, what happened in Iraq then and more recently is somewhat abstract unless you are a member of the US or UK military or family member of such, but to a great many Iraqis it was all too real and all too personal.
And you did not have top be a political opponent to experience the true evil of the Man from Tikrit. Over on Camera Anguish, Julian Taylor reports on an attempt by expatriate Iraqis to use the death of the tyrant to close the book on Saddam Hussain’s era of very personal horror for them.
Why is a bloody tyrant getting his just deserts generating so many official grimaces and shocked swooning amongst the professional political classes? That Saddam Hussain’s executioners visited upon him a tiny measure of the degradation and horror Saddam’s own busy hangmen inflicted on so many others when he was in power is a trivial matter. Tyrants should have neither consideration nor dignity, deserving only to reap the harvest of hatred from the fields of skulls they have themselves planted, ideally at the hands of their victims or suitable representatives.
Tyrants are killed as punishment for unspeakable evil acts and as a warning to other would-be tyrants. Puncturing their vanity and disrespecting them is not ‘inappropriate’, it is justice and a small measure of revenge for against a person towards whom the most appropriated emotion is hatred. That such a person controlled a state makes their debasement all the more important, though quite possibly that very fact lies at the heart of why so object to what happened to him.
Sic semper tyrannis.
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