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.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Iran made another step forwards towards its long held goal of obtaining nuclear weapons yesterday by restarting its uranium enrichment program.
While Iran’s long term strategic goal is quite possibly insane, it must be conceded from a Realpolitik perspective that Iran is playing a very strong hand, and their tactical moves are precise and well executed.
For Iran has played the Europeans charged with negotiating them out of their nuclear ambitions with finesse and skill. While some European figures, such as the British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, have talked a good game about bringing Iran before the United Nations, others are taking measures to ensure talking is as far as it goes.
Thus, even as Iran announced plans to break the IAEA seals on the centrifuges of its Natanz uranium enrichment facility, Austrian Chancellor (and temporary president of the European Union) Wolfgang Schüssel warned that it would be premature to discuss sanctions. Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, added that “every effort must be made to convince the Iranians to return to the previous situation, to negotiations.” Mr. Solana’s idea of getting tough with the Iranians is apparently to beg them to show up for lunch.
Of course, the real negotiating tool is the United States Army, Navy, and Air Force. With American troops still in Iraq, Iran knows that it has to tread warily, but the cunning men in Tehran may well be counting that the US will not feel able to take decisive action before the 2008 Presidential elections change the political landscape in a possibly decisive way.
I personally am very pessimistic about these developments.
I have written a couple of times before about the very useful cultural confrontation with intolerant Muslims that occurred when Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten published some less than flattering cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed.
Well in case you are curious what those cartoons actually looked like, here they are (sorry, but I do not have a larger version and the original link no longer works):
If Salman Rushdie wrote the ‘Satanic Verses’ and incurred the ire of the moonbat faction of Islam, I guess the Jyllands Posten publication must be the ‘Satanic Cartoons’.
Here is a link that shows the cartoons more clearly so you can see what all the fuss is about.
There is a good article about the Iranian blogosphere in the Times by Ben Macintyre. I think Iran’s bloggers deserve as much credit and support as possible as they are very much on the front line of resisting Islamo-facism and blogs there are truly the heirs to the Soviet era dissident Samizdats.
Update: Alan Moore has a few things to say on the subject as well.
The best possible antidote to ignorant and irrational Indonesian Muslim clerics forcibly imposing Sharia and claiming the tsunami was punishment for women not wearing veils would be for people to respond to their violence in kind and simply run the bastards out of town.
The religious police have not always had it their own way. In one incident on the island of Sabang, attempts to humiliate a bareheaded girl backfired when angry villagers turned on them. By the time the civil police arrived to rescue the enforcers they were surrounded by an angry mob flicking lighted cigarettes at them.
This is an encouraging start but they need to get rather more serious than flicking a few cigarettes at them.
Michael Totten, who has clearly been having some interesting times in Lebanon, has a fascinating article in LA Weekly about his first hand experiences attending a Hezbollah event as the ‘Party of God’ is trying to improve its image in the West.
He does a good job of giving a sense of what these people are like and what their ideal vision of the future would be.
Officials from the Israeli security services, not usually thought of as the Europhiles’ favourite, are apparently in France at the moment advising that country’s security services on riot control, following the mass mayhem in France a month ago. It strikes me as rather ironic, given the anti-Israel tilt of French foreign policy in recent years, that the country’s leaders are calling for help from Israel. Strange days indeed.
Spending a few days in Turkey and reading their newspapers makes it very clear that the Kemal Ataturk’s vision of a modernising, secular Turkish republic is still very much an ongoing battle. It should also be noted that very few secular Turks seem to be anti-Muslim, they are just pro-secular and as the overwhelming majority of people in Turkey are indeed Muslim (at least nominally), that the whole structure of politics are avowedly secular makes Turkey the front-line on the struggle against Islamist governance.
The news is abuzz with political skirmishes on that subject. Articles in the New Anatolian and Turkish Daily News (no individual article links unfortunately) discuss opposition to some municipalities trying to introduce alcohol serving ‘red light districts’ and banning its sale elsewhere. As many Turks drink raki (Ataturk’s favourite drink in fact), this is not just a matter for tourists.
Other articles tell of five teachers in Mersin being driven from their jobs and moved to different schools after pressure from local imams who were angry they were teaching evolutionary theory, on the grounds they were “destroying the religious beliefs” of children. The teachers’ union in Mersin responded furiously that their members have been punished for engaging in “secular, democratic and fact-based teaching”.
In another article, retired General Hursit Tolon has said that Turkey is “edging away from secularism, which is the first pre-condition of modernism”. He is in the process of forming a new political party to try and combat that drift. He also seems to be saying that “the intervention of the West, the European Union and the USA” are behind many of these problems. Exactly what he means by that I do not know but at least in once sense I suspect he is quite correct, though I do not see a conspiracy at work here (and as I cannot read Turkish, I cannot easily find out precisely what General Tolon means unless some Turkish blogger wants to clue me in) but rather the bull-in-a-china-shop threat springs from the parochial and often simplistic underpinnings of so much of the received wisdom that spews forth from the West.
Obviously the struggle between those who want to see laws enforcing Islamic principles and those who demand Turkey remain a secular state out in the open now. I do not know enough about Turkey to venture an opinion on how strong and coherent the political and social forces are defending secular values but historically the final bulwark against Islamic governance has been the Turkish military, who simply take over via a coup d’etat if it looks like the core principles which Ataturk set out are in danger. The US has a constitution to limit the scope of democratically sanctioned change, but for better or worse the Turks have their military fulfilling that function.
There is nothing wrong with the wishes of the plurality being thwarted if what they want amounts to tyranny, so whilst I deplore the past excesses of the Turkish military, I really have no problem the basic idea of them simply refusing to countenance the end of the secular Turkish republic. Democracy is a tool, nothing more and if a measure of it leads to an increase in liberty (and it usually does), then that is good. But it an excess of it leads to tyranny, no matter how popular that tyranny might be, then some sort of effective check is needed to unalloyed democratic politics. Are the social and political forces of secularism strong enough to survive without that final drastic check on Islamist aspirations? I am certainly not qualified to know but I have not heard that question even being asked by all to many people in the West when the subject of Turkey joining the EU comes up.
Yet should Turkey join the EU, without doubt the democracy fetishists will require the military to entirely step back from any political role and I cannot help wondering if the net result of that will be the inevitable progress towards an impeccably democratic but Islamic Turkish Republic that no longer seperates ‘church’ and state.
Some said much the same about secular Iraqi Ba’athism being a ‘good thing’ because it kept the Islamo-fascists at bay in that country, but although previous Turkish military regimes may have been no respecters of humans rights (to say the least), it does not seem to me that secular Turkey circa 2005 is comparable to secular Iraq under the Ba’athists. Yet do you think there is any chance the EU could see a positive role for the institutions in Turkey which simply will not countenance the development of an Islamic state? Not a chance. The great and good that make up Europe’s political elite are simply not smart or sophisticated enough to see past the simplistic notion “more democracy always good”. And of course given the crazed over-emphasis on the importance of democracy (rather than liberty) in Iraq, much the same can be said of the intelligentsia in the USA.
My brief stay in Turkey and exposure to its English language press gave me a tantalising glimpse of what is going on. However I just do not have enough of a feel for the country to know how things will shake out and it might be interesting to see what the Turkish blogosphere has to say.
Back in November I commented on how some Islamists in Denmark were getting worked up into a lather over some cartoons run by the newspaper Jyllands-Posten in which the prophet Mohammed was portrayed in a less than endearing light.
Well it seems that this story is destined to run and run. People in Srinagar, the largest city in Indian controlled Kashmir, have gone on strike in protest over the Danish cartoons. Now am I the only one who finds this truly bizarre? It is hard to imagine a provincial Danish town, say, Esbjerg, suddenly downing tools to protest a comic saying rude things about Lutheranism in a newspaper in the Indian sub-continent.
Still, it does go to show that there truly is a globalized culture war going on and that is it has nothing to do with the “evil plots of the Bush-Hitler Illuminati”. The fact people in Srinagar even know about the Danish cartoons is remarkable. That the Islamists should have taken the bait Jyllands-Posten dangled in front of them is rather splendid because you cannot win a war, cultural or otherwise, by just defending yourself.
And this is a war we can and must win and, best of all, we get to fight it on ground of our own choosing because what the people of Srinagar have shown is that the enemies of open society can be easily goaded. It is not about ‘social justice’ or ‘economic deprivation’ or any of those smoke screens generally deployed by the Fisks and Galloways of this world when they make their apologias for Islamo-fascism, it is about confronting a culture of intolerance and refusing to tolerate that.
The biblical notion of ‘an eye for an eye’ is still taken seriously in Saudi Arabia. Literally.
Both of which are generally lacking in the public discourse, on the war in Iraq.
First, Mr. Scott accurately captures the view of Iraq held by the quagmiristas:
I can only imagine the perception that many Americans have of Iraq; some nation in the Middle East where jihadists multiply, the Iraqi security forces resemble the keystone cops, U.S. forces are helpless against roadside bombs, and the situation is so dire that only disengagement can solve the problem.
Sound familiar? It contrasts rather markedly with the data, which Mr. Scott summarizes to paint a picture of an Iraqi insurgency that peaked in the months before last year’s Presidential election (and Kerry still couldn’t beat Bush!), and is now transitioning from decline to defeat. Interesting stuff, and food for thought.
Its a damned shame you never see anything approaching this level of factual detail and context in the media, and even in most specialty press, accounts of the Iraqi war.
Somebody with a political axe to grind, or someone who has literally bet their life:
When it comes to the future of Iraq, there is a deep disconnect between those who have firsthand knowledge of the situation — Iraqis and U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq — and those whose impressions are shaped by doomsday press coverage and the imperatives of domestic politics.
The ones with a political axe to grind (and the uninformed who follow their lead) think Iraq is a lost cause or a mistake:
A large majority of the American public is convinced that the liberation of Iraq was a mistake, while a smaller but growing number thinks that we are losing and that we need to pull out soon. Those sentiments are echoed by finger-in-the-wind politicians, including many — such as John Kerry, Harry Reid, John Edwards, John Murtha and Bill Clinton — who supported the invasion.
Those with firsthand knowledge and a stake in the matter believe the contrary:
American soldiers are also much more optimistic than American civilians. The Pew Research Center and the Council on Foreign Relations just released a survey of American elites that found that 64% of military officers are confident that we will succeed in establishing a stable democracy in Iraq. The comparable figures for journalists and academics are 33% and 27%, respectively. Even more impressive than the Pew poll is the evidence of how our service members are voting with their feet. Although both the Army and the Marine Corps are having trouble attracting fresh recruits — no surprise, given the state of public opinion regarding Iraq — reenlistment rates continue to exceed expectations. Veterans are expressing their confidence in the war effort by signing up to continue fighting.
I have long believed that, whatever its flaws, the Iraqi campaign is on the road to strategic success. Figuring out who is winning requires that you ask a deceptively simple question: which side is making better progress toward their strategic objectives?
I think the answer is very clear – the US and its allies are making progress toward their strategic objectives, and their Islamist/Baathist enemies are not.
We have removed three potential WMD players (Iraq, Pakistan, Libya) from the scene as a direct or second-order consequence of the Iraqi campaign. We have removed one of the major terror-supporting states (the Saddamite regime) from the picture. We are introducing by far the most democratically accountable government into the Mideast (other than Israel), and are destabilizing the long-term prospects for neighboring dictators who, coincidentally, sponsor terror to one degree or another. We have forced the Islamists to fight in the Mideast, and as a consequence are eroding their support as they do what they do, which is attack civilians. We have badly disrupted international terrorist networks.
As for the Islamists, well, what ground have they gained toward their stated goals of a pan-Arab caliphate, the eradication of Israel, the acquisition of WMDs, or the destabilization of the West?
I don’t see any real gains on their side, and I see real progress on ours. Sure, progress has come at a cost, but only the most naive (or those with ulterior motives) would believe that we could neuter the Islamist threat without any missteps or losses.
Those on the front lines think we are winning a fight worth fighting. It is those in the perfumed salons who don’t think we are winning, and who don’t think the game is worth the candle. I know who I believe.
Yes, make jokes about it, so says Afshin Ellian, an Iranian dissident.
There are a couple very interesting articles over on the Social Affairs Unit blog about Afshin Ellian. As I have been saying, the voices of intolerance cannot be appeased, they need to be uncompromisingly confronted and ideally they should be confronted not just by secular westerners but by other Muslims.
Okay, so did you hear the one about the Imam, his two wives and a goat…
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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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