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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I have no idea how events in Iraq will eventually play out. I fervently hope that this tortured country can move to a more peaceful direction but the current violence and mayhem makes such a prospect seem pretty distant. One thing that has always struck me is how Saddam has never gotten sufficient blame for bringing the current mayhem on to his own country. So it is interesting to read this smart passage by Russell Roberts over at the Cafe Hayek blog:
I don’t understand how the failure to find weapons of mass destruction makes the war unjustified. It’s not like Bush made up the idea of WMD. Saddam Hussein is the guy you ought to be mad at. Saddam Hussein acted as if he had or was working on nuclear capability. He’s the guy who employed nuclear scientists. He’s the guy who convinced the UN that he wanted nukes. He’s the guy who resisted weapons inspections. He’s the guy who said you can look over here but not over there. Why did he do all these things? Either because he actually had nuclear capability or was close to it, or because he wanted to fool people into thinking he was more important than he was. He managed to fool Bill Clinton, the United Nations, George Bush and Israel into thinking he had a desire for WMD. It appears now to have been something of a ruse. Probably. Should Bush have ignored the behavior of Saddam on the grounds that the whole thing was probably a hoax to enhance his self-image? I don’t think so. That certainly turned out to be a mistake with Osama. His talk wasn’t cheap.
Exactly. 20/20 hindsight is all very well, but it is not much use in making credible foreign policy.
So the Iranian government is assisting insurgent to attack British troops in Iraq. No real surprise there, methinks.
However Tony Blair ‘warning’ the Iranians with remarks like…
I want to be very, very clear about this – the British forces are in Iraq under a United Nations mandate. There is no justification for Iran or any other country to interfere in Iraq.
… exactly what sort of response from Iran, other than a blanket denial, does he expect? Sack your advisers Tony and try something along the lines of:
Dear Mr. Ahmadinezhad,
I assume it has not escaped your notice but there are quite a few people in your country who hate you and we don’t much care for you either. Lots of Iranians want a secular government and seeing as how you are peeing on our parade in Iraq, one good turn deserves another. We will be sending SAS teams to train, assist and supply pretty much anyone in Iran who wants to oppose you. If you want to reach an accomodation with us before one of your fellow countrymen puts a bomb, that we supplied, under your car, well, you know where to find us.
Tony
The trick here is not to do it covertly but to be quite open about it and why it is being done. I rather doubt he has the stones for such an approach, but hey, Blair has surprised me in the past.
Mark Steyn observes that an ethnic group in the UK is making its presence felt in the most detailed of ways:
Alas, the United Kingdom’s descent into dhimmitude is beyond parody. Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council (Tory-controlled) has now announced that, following a complaint by a Muslim employee, all work pictures and knick-knacks of novelty pigs and “pig-related items” will be banned. Among the verboten items is one employee’s box of tissues, because it features a representation of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.
As Steyn goes on to write, what will certain Muslim groups demand next: that Her Majesty the Queen be forced to abdicate on the grounds that it is intolerable that a Head of State be both a woman and be bare-headed? Is there no concession, however silly, that the cringeing political classes are not willing to make?
I think it is fair to say that yes, we should not go out of our way to put about images that are designed – key qualification – to be offensive to Muslims, or indeed Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, or for that matter atheists, agnostics or whatever. But it surely is a hallmark of a robustly tolerant and orderly society that people should not fly into a rage over something like a picture of Piglet on the side of a council worker’s coffee mug. If the Islamists cannot handle that, then what does it say about their own faith and moral fibre? I am an atheist and yet I don’t demand that people remove expressions such as “For God’s Sake” or “Heaven Help Us” from their vocabulary.
Some of Britain’s problems right now in Basra are a consequence of the absurdity of Muqtada al Sadr still walking around when killing him last year would have been clearly legitimate and just a damn good idea. At the very least he should be sitting in a prison cell. This is not an election campaign, it is an insurgency and the US missed a big opportunity to ‘retire’ Sadr when his militia previously fought against the allied armies.
When I called for ‘no pussyfooting around’, I was just suggesting that when an Iraqi faction shoots at British soldiers or throws petrol bombs at them, the respsonce should not be to just ‘contain’ it or to ‘negotiate’ with the faction responsible (at least not until much later after it has been suitably knocked down to size), no, it should be to use all the force at their disposal to try and cut that faction to pieces. Moreover, it should result in significent reinforcements being sent to give UK forces more options.
People like Sadr will use violence only if they think using violence will gain them a political advantage at a tolerable cost… so the trick is to make the cost intolerable. It is crazy to give such people a ‘second chance’ during an active insurgency as clearly all Sadr has done is use the time since he last took on the occupying powers to rebuild his power base. No, just treat the guy like the Islamo-fascist he is, put a bullet through his head and make it clear that hard line Islamists militias will not be tolerated in the Iraq.
So if local administration in Basra were truly considering handing British soldiers over to Sadr’s militia, then they need to be dragged into the nearest HQ and told if they plan on growing old, that sort of behaviour is a very bad idea. Far from giving them an apology that those undercover SAS man were free by force, they should be told to ‘get stuffed’ and expect more of the same if they prove by their actions that they are the enemy.
If the Iraqi local administration in Basra was, as claimed, about to hand over a pair of captured SAS under-cover soldiers that were in their custody to a hostile militia, then it seems that the escalation of tension and violence in Basra should be escalated further… by the British army.
Lesson One of occupying a country has to be to let any local administration know that it is the occupying army that is ultimately in control. The logic is clear: if we are there until Iraq (or whatever comes after the break-up of a unitary Iraq) has been sufficiently stabilised, then we must expect the army to use force to stabilise things, and that is a euphemism for being willing to kill people who oppose that process or interfere with military operations. If the local administration has indeed been infiltrated by enemies with antithetical aims who are cooperating with the enemy, then politics is probably not the answer at this juncture, force is. Unmake the local administration and replace it with another one at bayonet point. Show people in Iraq that some options are simply not on the menu. This is not a normal functioning civil society and should not be treated as one, any more than post-war West Germany was until acceptable institutions were in place to allow it to function as a viable post-totalitarian nation.
If Britain’s government ever wants to extract its forces at some point in the future without leaving behind something almost as bad as what was there before, it needs to be ruthless and none too squeamish. If this is a revelation to the UK government, I cannot imagine what it was thinking when this whole process started. When the decision to use force is made, use it effectively and resolutely, giving the Army the resources and support it needs to prevail… or if Tony Blair is not willing to do that, he had no business using force in the first place. What else was he expecting?
According to the SMCCDI, the Iranian government is strengthening gender apartheid in that country.
The Islamic republic regime is to apply more discriminatory measures against Iranian women in days ahead. Based on some official reports, the Gender Apartheid policy is to be strengthen and Sexual Segregation to increase in Iran.
The theocratic regime is basing the application of such policy on the strict interpretation of Islamic rules which are dating from 14 centuries ago in the tribal Saudi Arabia which became the cradle of Islam.
Already since three weeks ago, clerics have increased their anti-woman speeches and are using the Fridays’ collective prayers in order to mobilize their followers in what has been qualified as “making respect the values of Islam and morality”. Members of the brutal Bassij paramilitary force and the feared Islamist Moral Squad have been deployed beside the regular police force and reports of harassment of women, sometimes brutally, are increasing.
It is also apparent many Iranian women will put their lives on the line before accepting their Mullah designated social role as bare-foot and pregnant pleasure machines.
Many Iranian women have burned their mandatory veils in some demos in order to attract the world’s attention to their case. They’re believed to be the force that will bring down, a day, the Islamic regime and would impact the entire Middle-east.
When the excrement finally does impact the Iranian rotational air moving appliance, I expect the lasses will ensure these ‘religious’ authority figures wear their testicles about their windpipes rather than their original lower coordinates.
The fact that the leaders of the Sunni minority oppose a federal structure for Iraq, and have the ability to torpedo the new constitution, does not change the reality on the ground that Iraq is already in effect three nations.
The Kurds in particular have both an effective local administration and by far the best militias to call on if needed. The Kurdish situation is also helped by the fact that it was really the Peshmerga who moved into the vacuum and liberated the Kurdish region whilst US and British forces smashed Saddam’s armies in the south.
Eventually if the Kurds do not get the autonomy they desire, it is just a matter of time before they simply secede and I rather doubt the US had either the stomach or the inclination to use force to prevent what is a purely internal matter for the Iraqis and Kurds. Any in any case, so what if Iraq breaks up? The obsession with ‘stability’ and countering Iran is what lead the West to unwisely back Saddam Hussain for so many years and look where that got everyone in the end.
An independent Kurdish Northern Iraq may give the Turks cause to fret (unfortunate but them’s the breaks) and give Iran acute dyspepsia (which has to be a good thing) because Kurdish success in Iraq will no doubt give the Kurdish minorities elsewhere ideas above their station. However I fail to see how thwarting long standing Kurdish aspirations is in the interests of the US and UK, particularly as the Kurds have been quite amenable to US interests as of late and have shown themselves to be the sharpest operators.
Of course the prospect of a Shi’ite Islamic Republic of Southern Iraq is not very agreeable but it at least has the virtue of allowing more tailored pressures to be put on the three constituent parts of ‘Iraq’ rather than a probably futile one-size-fits-all constitution which in any case may fall apart as soon as western forces pull out.
An Iraq of highly autonomous cantons is probably the best that Iraq’s Sunni politicos have any right to expect because the alternative is never going to be a return to the ‘good old days’ of Sunni dominance and centralised rule from Baghdad, it is going to be splitting the county in three independent parts. And there is something to be said for that anyway. To hell with ‘nation building’… sometimes the cause of liberty (and probably long term stability too) may be served by a bit of ‘nation wrecking’.
I had never heard the word blogger until May 25 . But now I know them well because of all the amazing coverage they had of the protests. My friends overseas all followed what happened through the blogs, because they have more credibility than the mainstream media.
– Rabab al-Mahdi, a political science professor at the American University in Cairo, and an opposition activist.
I am sure many of you have heard the joke: An Arab meets one of the screenwriters from Star Trek and says “Hey, how come there are no Muslims on the Starship Enterprise?” The screenwriter replies “Because the story is set in the future.”
But many of the most puritanical and intolerant Muslims have their eyes very much on the future. Over on the Social Affairs Unit‘s blog, William Ridgeway has writen an interesting piece called “Those Drunken, Whoring Saudis: Desert Islam’s problem with women”:
Encroaching modernity has resulted in an increase in the place and power of Desert Islam in everyday society. Contrary to widespread Western beliefs about the trajectory of the Middle East as a hesitant but inevitable climb to liberal democracy, the region is actually going the other way – fast. Academics call this “Islamicisation”, the spread of radical Shi’a and Wahhabi beliefs and practices throughout the region. Because of this trend, the Middle East one sees nowadays is nothing like it was, say, fifty years ago. Around the 1950s, about the time oil was being discovered in the Gulf, many Muslim nations were relatively liberal by today’s standards. Alcohol flowed freely, women went uncovered and there was lively public debate about “Ataturk’s way”, the separation of Islam and state, modernisation, and dialogue with the West. The Middle East seemed to be going in the right direction.
Saudi oil changed all that.
I still think in the long run secular western civilisation will crush radical Islam under its sheer weight but it is an interesting article. Read the whole thing.
The Independent (or ‘Al-Independent’ as some of us like to call that bastion of Islamo-fascist apologists) has an article predicting nothing less than a full blown domestic Islamic insurgency in Britain.
Whilst clearly we have a problem, I really do not buy The Independent’s scenario as presented, implying that the 100,000 or so “totally militarised” Muslims in Britain from various hotspots are just raring and ready to make large parts of the country into no-go areas. However I guess we will know who is correct soon enough.
Peak Talk has the perfect summation of the tragic affair of the murder of Dutch film maker Theo Van Gogh by a Muslim fanatic.
Robert Alderson writes about what Islam really needs and has an interesting idea how to nudge things along
In some ways Islam is at the stage that Christianity was centuries ago. Religious texts and debates are in classical Arabic, a language which most Muslims can not understand – just like medieval European peasants could not understand Latin but were still expected to live by the Latin version of the bible.
I have not read the Koran or the Bible but from excerpts and quotations I have seen it would be perfectly possible to justify anything you wanted with selective quotations from either work; suicide bombings, slavery, non-tolerance of homosexuality, wearing a veil, whatever. The Christian Bible has at least been translated into most European languages and interested parties can refer to the source text and argue things out. The Koran has, by and large, not been translated into local Arabic languages and is therefore beyond the practical understanding of the ‘Arab Street’ The interpreters of the Koran are those scholars who have taken the time to learn classical Arabic and therefore may tend to have a different outlook on life than people who have to earn the money that pays for them.
The other point is that Koranic scholarship still regards the Koran as the literal word of God, no metaphors, no allusions – straight word of God no dispute allowed. This type of fundamental literalism was abandoned by mainstream Christian theologians a long time ago.
The West could do worse than translate the Koran into local dialects and publish it on the Internet or even drop it from airplanes! We need an Islamic Martin Luther to open up the religion.
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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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