On German arrogance...

This is arrogance beyond the pale, and is highly indicative of the mind-set of the German left. For the German speakers, this is the original. I must point out that the poor translator has NOTHING to do with the article's content, my critique is strictly to the original author. The translation is very nice, as a matter of fact. :-)

Let's start with the fisking...

The president of the USA expects gratitude from the Iraqi people, because the USA liberated them from a tyrant. Any mistakes he has made are excused; he sees no reason for apologies. All the mistakes were made by others, up to and including recent executions in Baghdad, which apparently cannot be carried out correctly. In Texas, where George W. Bush was once the governor, humans are killed in an obviously friendlier fashion than in Baghdad. In Baghdad, people are lynched as they once where in the Wild West, where insults were hurled at the condemned and the unfortunate tearing off of heads at the end of a rope took place.

First of all, the first three statements are not facts, but postulates. The President of the US didn't expect gratitude: he greeted the liberation of Iraq not with demands for them to acknowledge this, but rather welcomed them into the 20th century. Bush has never been one to push the blame elsewhere: unlike Clinton, he acknowledges when something has gone wrong, and has never placed the blame elsewhere. Or did I miss the White House press release blaming the generals in charge for screwing things up? Must've been put in the stack of stuff and hasn't surfaced yet. He sees no reasons for apologies, as none have been asked for (except for his political opponents, who want Bush to go away: are there not the anti-Bush sentiments that his mother should've aborted him before birth (see Daily Kos, almost any page).

I don't remember any lynch mobs in Iraq: that was something that the Iraqis did under SH. What bothers our correspondant is the fact that there wasn't adequate decorum at the execution: hey, it's an execution, not a funeral. I think it should've been public, myself.

The Iraqi people have no reason for gratitude. In the end, Saddam Hussein was a product of Washington politics, to the point that he felt so secure, he thought Washington would permit him to become a conqueror - the conqueror of Kuwait. The older Bush allowed the Baghdad dictator a victory in the Iran War, let slide the gassing of tens of thousands of Kurds, the massacre of Shiites, Sunnis and democratically inclined Iraqis of all persuasions who didn't belong to Saddam's own clan. In regard to these crimes there will be no trial; this is where the promise of a constitutional state ends. Saddam was just a caricature of a system whose thugs - if you will pardon the expression - handed down to the nation of the two-rivers gang war, civil war, death squads and the enslavement of returning Iraqis from     a cushy exile.

No reason for gratitude? I think the author here is projecting: what he means is that the left has no reason for gratitude, no reason to thank the US that it's actions have saved the UN from irrelevance in the face of severe corruption and malfeasance. If the left were in ANY way intellectually honest, they'd acknowledge that there was no alternative to dealing with a despot who had almost bribed his way out of the sanctions that the UN had placed on SH for failing to do what the UN told him to do.

And SH a product of Washington politics? Get real: SH was the result of Washington politics like the strongly expansive German economy is the result of the great economic policies of the last decades. In other words, the only connection is a negative one (in case you don't know, the German economy is weak and hardly robust; German macroeconomic policies have sucked). And to say that SH was given the go-ahead to invade Iraq is about as revisionist as you are gonna get.

And the time line doesn't work: it is generally accepted that the Iran/Iraq war was at best a draw, with both sides showing their incompetence and inability to fight a modern war. The US condemned the gassing of the Kurds: what does this guy think, that the US should've invaded back then?

In fact, the only thing in that paragraph which makes sense is the idea that SH was a thug.

And consider Iraqi's who returned from exile in Iran. These are people who had the courage to come out and vote and who gave the Shiite's a governing majority. Here again, we have a miscalculation; Iran allegedly has too much influence in Iraq because of the shared Shiite faith. Yet no one claims that the through a Catholic John F. Kennedy, the Vatican was secretly in control of the USA. Only ideologues and conspiracy theorists could believe such nonsense. Bush is just such an ideologue.

Oh give me a frellng break. The only people who voted in the Iraqi election were returned exilees? What the hell is that man smoking, I want to warn my kids against using that stuff. And the problem with Iran isn't a shared Shi'ite faith, but much rather that Iran sees such great opportunities for meddling in Iraq to tweak the nose of the Great Satan. And here the ignorance of history is also appalling: the fact that John F. Kennedy was a practicing member of the Roman Catholic Church was very, very much an issue during his presidential campaign! Bush isn't an ideologue in the sense that this man is trying to conflate (ideologues being on the same level, here, as conspiracy theorists: if anything, the Democrat Party is full of conspiracy theorists, not the White House).

While the "common vision" - the existence of which the U.S. President confirmed after communicating it to Iraqi head of state Nouri al-Maliki - has changed once and for all into a Fata Morgana, Bush has an even a bigger target in his sights. His last speech sounded     like a declaration of preemptive war against Iraq's neighbor Syria - and above all Iran. His reasoning for taking action is still being     fine-tuned. We can assume he will use the same sound reasoning as he did four years ago, which led to a war against Saddam Hussein that violated international law.

First and foremost: there is no such thing as international law concerning the decision to go to war with Iraq. Let me rephrase that: there is no such thing as international law that governs when nations go to war with each other. There are international treaties that the US is a signatory to, such as the Geneva Convention, and there are international organizations that the US has joined and whose rules apply: but there is no international law governing the decision to go to war.

Second, the US did not violate any international law in going to war with Iraq. The war was conducted under UN's own rules and regulations, which do not require anyone going to the UN security council. It's really very simply to understand: the UN security council sanctioned the war against Iraq to free the Kuwaitis. Iraq was able to reach a cease-fire that led to very specific requirements in terms of Iraqi disarming and completely documenting this disarmament. Iraq repeatedly and deliberately violated the terms of the cease-fire, and the US was fully justified in attacking Iraq on that basis alone. This is a constant meme of the left, that the war was illegal: it was not.

And the standard meme of the left as well is to say that for such a momentous thing as going to war, the UN security council must give its approval: this is, bluntly, an attempt to break the chain of events that led to the war.

Iranian agents are supposed to have been involved with killing American soldiers.Iranian diplomats - who are presumed to have been busy establishing consulates - were kidnapped by American troops (an act that shows how much the U.S. respects Iraqi sovereignty). Iranian "networks" allegedly destabilize Iraq, (as if the destabilization isn't a consequence of the invasion by the "coalition of the willing").

Now this is rich as well. Iran has NEVER recognized that it was illegal for them to have occupied the US embassy in Teheran, and now they are whining about having what they were calling their consulate offices violated by coalition troops in Iraq. It has also been established - no longer supposition - that Iran has delivered military goods, fresh from Iranian factories, to people who enjoy blowing up innocent civilians. From what I have understood of the arrests of Iranians in Iraq is that they were neither accredited diplomats, nor were the offices a duly declared and recognized consulate, nor were their activities compatible with diplomatic activities.

As I've posted elsewhere, Iraq is a failed country, destabilized not by the invasion, but by the removal of the despot, SH. As such, would it have been better to keep SH around?

The war planners in Washington obviously exclude the use of ground troops against Iran. Aircraft carriers, cruise missiles and Patriot missiles, which have now been deployed in the waters off the Iranian coast, are considered unfit for a land war, and will be of no use fighting the various factions of the Iraqi insurgency. The deployment rather points to the possibility of surgical strikes against the     Teheran regime's nuclear facilities, airfields and military bases.   

Well, well, well. Someone slept through their Military Threat Analysis 101 class. First: all of the above weapon systems are there at the request of the various Persian Gulf states, all of whom feel threatened by Iran. Not so much threatened by military action, but rather feel threatned politically (and if you don't think this is a problem, then you don't understand the Persian Gulf at all. Maybe someone should simply poin out, as well, that not all US soldiers are in Iraq: the military strategy of the US doesn't revolve around what is going on in Iraq. And the whole damn point of putting those systems in place IS to raise the possibility of using them: the utility of a strategic asset is in direct proportion to the perception of the potential opponent in regards to that system. This is basic. But something that this author simply doesn't understand.

It is only the danger that Iran could activate the Lebanese Hezbullah that now prevents the "hawks" from attacking Iran. But it is certainly questionable whether Hezbullah would listen to the Teheran Ayatollahs. The U.S. administration promotes the scenario that Hezbullah is under the direct control of Teheran. But the reverse argument is just as conceivable: Hezbullah could provoke Israel to execute the "decapitation blow" before the United States does so itself.

This is what drove me to Fisk this. The "only" danger that prevents the US from attacking Iran is Hezbullah? Gee, the fact that there is a long border with Iraq and that US troops could well be directly involved if Iran were to invade Iraq in response isn't a danger at all? And the idea that Hezbollah is in some concieveable way seperate from Teheran's whims is patently absurd: Teheran funds Hezbollah and controls Hezbollah. End of story. This isn't some bizarre sort of "scenario", but rather established fact. Not convinced? How about this from the 1985 Hezbollah Manifesto:

We are the sons of the ummah (Muslim community) - the party of God (Hizb Allah) the vanguard of which was made victorius by God in Iran. There the vanguard succeeded to lay down the bases of a Muslim state which plays a central role in the world. We obey the orders of one leader, wise and just, that of our tutor and faqih (jurist) who fulfills all the necessary conditions: Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini.

I mean, just how naive can you be? Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini is the Ayatollah Khomeini. This isn't a "scenario": this is fact.

The despots on the southern coast of Persian Gulf [the Sunni oil states] may favor such a scenario [getting Hezbullah to incite Israel to attack Iran]. In Berlin, Paris and other capitals, one was aware of other ways to discourage Iran's nuclear ambitions. It is time to reflect on this, especially in Berlin. In its present role, the German government has the strength, the opportunity and therefore an obligation, to tame the "hawks."

Now this is really rich: passive voice, "one was aware". No statement of fact, but rather weasel words: "one was aware". And hello, no one wants to discourage Iranian ambitions: we want them to abandon their ambitions.

The German government hasn't the strength or the opportunity to punch its way out of a paper bag. A wet paper bag at that.

Germany, under Schroeder and Fischer, blew their opportunity to shape US foreign policy in the Middle East by choosing the cheap and easy way out, the way of radical pacifism, of denying that there are times to use military force, and were more than happy to allow their French colleagues to basically set German foreign policy be defaulting to their position. The Germans abdicated their foreign policy position to the French, and honestly, I haven't seen any change since then.

And who died and made the Germans the world's superpower tamers?

I'll repeat this once again: Germany abdicated its responsibilities by failing to engage the US in any sort of meaningful dialogue when confronted with the evidence of the failure of the UN sanctions to tame Iraq. Instead they chose the route of public rejection of US policy in order for Schroeder to win an election. Perfidious at best.

Civil War vs. Failed State...

There is a letter to the editor in today's FT (link is here) that raises an excellent point that I'd like to expand on.

First of all, Iraq, despite being called one, is not in a civil war. Rather, it is a failed state: the events of the last decade have destroyed Iraq.

First you have the despotic rule of SH, resulting in a cult of personality: loyalty was not to Iraq, but rather to him (which makes those who decry the disbanding of the Iraqi Army ignorant of the true nature of that Army: it was there as an instrument to do what SH wanted, and not there to serve the state).

Second you have the sanctions after the GWI, which destroyed civil society by impoverishing Iraq in general, except - and this is a critical point - those who directly supported and served SH.

Third you have the invasion, which led to the collapse of what was left of the state.

Fourth you have the continuing low-level fighting, which has moved from attacks on US soldiers to terror killings of civilians.

Add those up and you can see what we have in Iraq: a failed state which cannot get a new start because of continuing sectarian violence, aided and abetted by its neigbors for their own purposes.

For me, that makes the situation clearer in understanding why Iraq hasn't yet started on a road to peace.


Fundamentally, there is no Iraq left.

Oh, it's there, in the hearts and minds of the population. But it's not there any more.

The rulership of SH ruined it.

The sanctions destroyed it.

The invasion liberated Iraq, but the problem was that the old Iraq, the Iraq of the last 40 years, wasn't there any more. That is the failure of post-war planning: everyone "knew" that Iraq was a secular society (after all, the denial of the Left that there were ANY ties between the Iraq of SH and religiously motivated terror groups is part of the litany condemning the war) that *should* have been able to quickly pick up the pieces and reboot, so to speak.

As did Germany and Japan, both devestated by their wars and utterly defeated on the battleground.

But unlike Germany and Japan, both of whom retained their national identity - that is why Hirohito was not deposed and put up for war crimes: it would have destroyed the heart of Japanese culture - and were able to use their positive national charachteristics to rebuild their societies, Iraq was, at the point of the invasion, already a failed state, unable to provide for its citizens, existing not for the sake of Iraqis, but rather only for the sake of SH.

That puts some of the comments during SH's execution also in perspective: at least one of his captors bluntly stated "you have destroyed us".

That is the legacy of SH.

So now what?


The critical thing is that nation-building here has nothing to do with rebuilding roads, infrastucture and the like: it has everything to do with rebuilding the concept of a functioning Iraqi state. One that serves the people of Iraq, not the other way around.

But as long as there are those who do not want this, and they themselves are not sanctioned for meddling in the internal affairs of another country, then it will be a long and stony road.

But one worth taking.

This is what is so appalling about the current pessimism and defeatism in the Congress: these people will be more than happy to inflict major ruin on the Iraqi people in order to further their own little pathetic careers, instead of pushing the rest of the world to help.

Not help the US in Iraq.

But to help the Iraqis in Iraq.

And pointing all the blame to the US is farcical: Iraq was destroyed when the sanctions were put into place. Iraq must be the example in the future that sanctions, as well-minded they may have been, are nothing more than an admittance that other policies have failed. They punish no one but the average person on the street: to imagine for a moment that a despot like SH might have been influenced by such sanctions is to show an appalling lack of knowledge about despots.

Rather, the Iraqis are paying the price now for the perfidy of France and the rest of Europe when Iraq was confronted in the UN: Iraqis are paying the price for the incompetence and ultimately banal corruptability of the UN in enforcing the sanctions, which allowed SH to escape any meaningful effect. Iraqis are paying the price now for the failures of the UN.

The US saved the UN from irrelevance by deposing SH. If the US had backed down, as the French had been paid to try to do, then the UN, today, would be ignored even more than it is.

It Ain't Necessarily So...

Ah, so many seem to be so convinced that Iraq is lost, that the US must go down in defeat.

So many that it almost seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Well, to parahprase Gershwin, It Ain't Necessarily So.

Here is the first link: put bluntly, the main-stream media and the pundits from the left that have been driving the meme of "the US is incompetent, the Military is clueless, we've made all these mistakes" are in turn clueless themselves. The fact that the US doesn't trumpet its strategy from the towers and keeps its strategy close at hand is confusing for such weak-minded; the military is far, far from clueless (indeed, letting the cities fester while consolidating the countryside is a strategy eminently suited for Iraq; and the mistakes we've made are not the ones the Left think we are making.

Secondly, here is another link listing the real failures: Inadequate plan for the post-war period; leaving Iran alone; pullbacks and soft failures; Iraqi elections held too early; misunderstanding some fundamentals; unreasonable expectations; media misconduct and malpractice. Some of these failures were the result of things that we should've known, but didn't; others are beyond our control, and yet others can only be answered with the words "no excuse". But these are not the failures that the MSM and the Left imagine our failures to be.

Third is that the conflict needs to be put in perspective: it just isn't Iraq.This post by Steve den Beste sums it up better than I ever could (and this by Tigerhawk updates Steve's original points). This post by Belmont Club reminds us what is at stake.


In other words: it ain't over till the fat lady sings.

The Difference Between Then And Now...

I was reading last week's Spiegal magazine, a retrospective of the last 60 years (that's how long they've been publishing). One thing that struck me was the difference between the post-war politicians - Adenauer, Schmidt - and today's German politicians.

Today's politicians are technocrats: they have mastered the political framework that they live in, but in doing so have retained no charachter. I don't use the term in a nice sense: I do not espouse technocracy, as it is simply elitism wrapped in academic paper. Still stinks.

I realized that something that happened in the past would run completely different today.

What?

The hijacking of the Landshut.

On 13 October 1977, Lufthansa flight LH181 from La Palma to Frankfurt was hijacked by the "Martyr Halimeh" terror commando, led by Zohair Youssif Akache and with Souhaila Andrawes, Riza Abbasi and Nadia Duaibes. Further details aren't really necessary: it is the reaction that counts.

After the pilot, Jürgen Schumann, was murdered - he was executed in the aisle of the plane with a shot to the back of his head - the GSG 9, up to that point a relatively unknown anti-terror commando created after the Munich massacre, stormed the aircraft on 18 Oct and killed three of the hijackers. A stewardess and a GSG 9 member were wounded.

If this were to happen today, I doubt that any German politician would dare to order the same action. The German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, had prepared a letter of resignation if the attack had failed.

German politicians today are too interested in their careers to risk anything like that.

The Cold Equations

Today's FAZ has an editorial that ends beautifully.Here's my quick translation (link is behind the gotta pay wall):

The Finns will be warm and cozy when the lights go out in Germany. They use continuous electricity production from biomass and extremely efficient power-heat coupling. The basis demand is met by nuclear energy. That is a sensible energy mix. But the Finns also have the better education system.

Ouch. That's about as nasty a nastygram as the German press is capable of.

What's the story?

Very simple: Germn energy policy, as it currently exists, will lead to the collapse of the German energy system.

Why?

There are two reasons.

First, there's a lot of nonsense about global warming, the need to reduce CO2, etc. This is for the indoctrinated and the accompanying useful idiots.

Second, German energy policy is chained to ideological precepts that have nothing to do with reality.

Yes, my friends, stupidity and irresponsibility are alive and flourishing in Germany!

Here's the rest of the story:

In the 60s and 70s there was a very broad and general acceptance of nuclear energy in Germany, seen as a necessary part of the energy mix. In the 1980s, in yet another desperate attempt to save the party from irrelevance, the SPD, the German socialists, decided that this was something that they had never agreed with, oh no, not us. The Red-Green administration under Schroeder, behoven to an increasingly anti-science votership, forced German companies running nuclear power plants to enter an accelerated depreciation schedule on those plants, and switched all research into wind and solar energy generation. The goal is to generate 20% of all German energy use in 2020 by using wind and solar.

Think of that: 20%. Does anyone know what that means?

It means that the lunatics will have taken over the asylum.

The FAZ editorial puts it in proper perspective: no one knows who will be the administration in Germany in 2020. But whoever they are, they will curse the policy decisions made at the turn of the millenium. They will curse when the first ship in the North Sea rams a wind generating pylon and brings the whole net to collapse; when the nets across Europe start to overload and the fail because of swings in German electricity supplies that will ripple through the electrical infrastructure; and when the critics point out that while Germany may have the highest level of renewable energy, it has a bad record of controlling emissions and that the money has been wasted; consumers will gripe about the very high electricity costs, and the environmentalists will bemoan the millions of dead birds and the herds of whales in the North Sea that will beach themselves because they've lost the ability to navigate inside a matric of 40 meter concrete sockets set into the ocean floor.

The problem is one of a simple technical nature, one that the irresponsible idiots - sorry, the duly elected officials - have deliberately ignored and rejected as being important. The problem is that the vector of growth of renewable energy supplies is slower than the vector of the basis demand.

Huh?

That means nothing less than the growth of renewable energy is not going to be able to replace the energy sources that today make up the basis supply that ensures that the electrical infrastructure works the way it is supposed to.

Now, the only way that energy demand increases can be met when nuclear power is phased out is to build new plants. Since these can't be nuclear, they will have to be either oil, gas or coal. Hence: in their idiotic pursuit of the demonization of nuclear energy, the policies of the so-called environmentalists will actually increase those emissions that they will have literally spent billions on reducing.

In other words, the equations of the irresponsible, political idiots pushing these policies don't work: to repeat, there is no way that renewable energy production can replace German nuclear power generation in the German energy mix in the year 2020 (or even beyond that). There is no way: the equations do not work.

But the German environmental minister Gabriel has now promised, in Nairobi, that the Germans will generate 40% less CO2 by 2020, as long as the Europeans promise to generate 30% less. Completely and fully absurd, it's a promise not worth the paper it's written on.

What are Germans actually planning to do in order to replace nuclear energy in the German energy mix?

No less than 38 gas and coal generating plants with a total production of 24 000 MW and an annual CO2 production of ... 120 mn tons. This represents not an expansion of German energy production, but ONLY the replacement of nuclear energy. This means that the Germans willl reach the originally set goals that they were to have reached in 2005 in the year 2020.

But Gabriel has eaten the mushrooms. He claims that Germany's nuclear plants can be replaced with renewable electrical energy generation.

And the useful idiots - those who call themselves "critical thinkers" - don't even bother to check the numbers. They've all drinken the Kool-Aide, after all: we don't need to check numbers.

Too bad that the German taxpayers also don't do the numbers: on-shore wind power connection to the net is something that the owners pay for. Off-shore? The consumers of electrical energy generation will have to pay for it. We're literally talking about billions being put into the ground that consumers will have to pay for. You see, if the owners of the off-shore windmills had to pay for it, then they would literally never turn a profit, since the sunk costs - pun intended - would deter any rational investor.

This is what happens when anti-science people - the Greens in Germany are notoriously anti-science unless, of course, it's a pet environmental project - can successfully demonize energy production: you get a situation where the energy mix of the country is going to be so screwed up that it's almost going to make sense to start anew.

And the stupidity is reflected in the ironic final sentence: no wonder that the Germans are so screwed up. They've been indoctrinated for decades now that nuclear energy and a sensible energy mix is the work of the devil.

The current crop of German politicians is appalling at best and downright dangerous at worst.

Understanding the Rwandan Massacre...

Why my interest in Rwanda and the Rwandan massacre?


Not because of personal friends involved or the like, but because it is something that unfolded under the eyes of the world and is not unlike the Darfur tragedy currently unfolding.

It also underscores the banality of evil. Evil is a hard concept in our relativistic world. After all, so the sophists, one man's evil is another man's virtue, and while people shouldn't hurt other people, anything goes otherwise. We saw it in Germany with the cannibal: his claim that he didn't commit a crime was based on his fantasy that it wasn't a crime when he had the victim's permission. And the mere fact that there *are* internet forums where such things are discussed is an indication that evil is very much alive and well today.

Here you can read more: Dalrymple makes a good point. But first of all: philosophers usually don't concern themselves with evil, unless they are moral philosophers, and moral philosophy is about as popular in modern philosophy as theologians are ( i.e. not very), unless, of course, they are left-wing moral philosophers ranting about the imminent establishment of a theocratical fascist state in the US.

What is, then, evil?

Evil is a slippery concept. I'll go as far as to take the Heideggarian analogy with being itself: we don't know what it is, we can't describe it simply, as it is something that is in and of itself indescribable. To paraphrase US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart on pornography: I can't define it, but I know what it is.

First of all, evil is contextual. Evil has to be viewed in context with what the alternative is in terms of behavior at that point in time. If a child sees a dog who has been run over, breaking its legs, that childs' actions may be good, indifferent or evil. Good might be rescuing the dog and having it operated on; indifferent might be to simply go on walking by, and evil might be to poke at the dog's broken leg with a stick in order to make it howl. But would be pulling a gun and shooting the dog, putting it out of its misery, be evil? These are all contextual questions that need to be understood within the world in which the actions took place.

But there are absolute standards upon which one may act. We know them as imperatives: a Doctor's primary moral responsibility is "To Do No Harm", and he swears a hippocratic oath to indeed do no harm. The child in my constructed example behaves wrongly when that child pokes at the dog with the broken leg, but we can give a child the benefit of a doubt because that child may not know any better: while this is an explanation, it is not an excuse, and obviously the child has not had a moral upbringing that enables it to choose between right and wrong.

Evil is the sheer joy of doing wrong. The willful knowledge that your actions are morally wrong, but with the willful knowledge that you either don't care or you actually enjoy doing that which is wrong.

Rwanda was, in Dalrymple's words, the most efficient slaughter in human history. Rarely have so many been killed by so few with such little effort, is what he saying: I'd venture that the death camps of fascism and communism were more efficient, but that is a different category entirely.

Dalrymple writes:

In that slaughter, in the space of three months, neighbours killed without compunction those with whom they had been friendly all their lives, only because they were of the different, and reputedly opposing, ethnic designation. They used no high-tech means, only clubs and machetes. Women and children were not spared; husbands of mixed marriages killed wives, and vice versa. The participation of the general population in the slaughter was its most remarkable feature: usually in mass murder, it is the state that does the killing, or rather the state's agents, since the state is an abstraction without an existence independent of those who work for it. Hatzfeld, the African correspondent of the French left-wing newspaper, Liberation, went to interview some of the perpetrators a few years after the genocide. They were friends who took part in the murder (if that is not too slight a word for it) of 50,000 of the 59,000 Tutsis who lived in their commune.

Here we have a clear view of what happened: the collapse of the state; the lack of a common moral compass that would have prevented the people taking part from doing what they did. Dalrymple sees the book from which it is taken as one of the better ones dealing with the moral problem of evil, but one that mystifies the author, as evil mystifies any decent and moral person.

For three months, the men would get up, have a hearty breakfast, gather together, and then go on hunting expeditions of their former neighbours, who had fled to the nearby marshes. They would hack anyone they found to death; and then, when the whistle blew in the evening for them to stop their 'work' (they regarded it as such), they returned home, had a quick wash, had dinner and socialised in a jolly way over a few beers. Their wives would be - for the most part, though not universally - content, because Tutsi property was thoroughly looted, and distributed according to the individual efficiency and ruthlessness of the killers. One of the most haunting things in this book, if it is possible to pick anything out in particular, is that many of the victims did not so much as cry out when caught by the murderous genocidaires: they died in complete silence, as if speech and the human voice were now completely worthless, redundant, beside the point. I have often wondered why the people went into the gas chambers silently, without fighting back, but I suppose that when you witness absolute human evil committed by the people with whom you once lived, and who, at least metaphysically, are just like you, you see no point in the struggle for existence. Non-existence, perhaps, seems preferable to existence.

 

The murderers were pleased with their work, they thought of all the corrugated iron roofing, cattle and so forth that they were 'earning' by it. They had never been so prosperous as during this period of slaughter and looting. Unaccustomed to eating meat very often (the Tutsi were pastoralists, the Hutu cultivators), they gorged themselves upon it, like hyenas finding an abandoned kill in the bush. Very few were their pauses for thought.

The next question that must now be addressed is this: what were the French doing here?

It's one thing to realize that your policies were wrong, that your actions were mistaken, that what you did was, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, wrong and that you would've decided differently if you knew what you now know.

It's another one entirely of actively aiding and abetting evil. Which is what the French did in Rwanda, and my question remains: these are the people that the US is supposed to look to for guidance?

Further French Perfidy...

I think the best thing one can do to understand how the French have deeply, terribly screwed things up in Africa is to read this.

The French were more interested in saving the Embassy's dog than they were in saving the Tutsis that had worked with its own diplomats for years.

And this is, for me, the key quote:

As the French left, years of anger among Rwanda's Tutsis spilled out over the price they believe they have paid for Paris's unique view of its place in post-colonial Africa - a role critics say is shaped by an obsession with the influence of its language and culture that led Paris to support a murderous regime because its opponents spoke English. France went on backing the killers even as the bodies piled up in the streets, churches and football stadiums. "France wants to blame us, the ones whose families were murdered, the ones who put a stop to the murderers; they want to blame us for the genocide because they cannot face their own guilt," says Rwanda's foreign minister, Charles Murigande. "The French armed the killers and they trained them even when they were saying they were going to kill the Tutsis, and France supported the genocide regime right up until the end, even helping the killers to escape." Why? "Because they have this obsession with Anglo-Saxons."

Because of this obsession with Anglo-Saxons. Sort of explains French opposition to US foreign policy as well: a severe case of NIH, Not Invented Here. And what was France doing, inviting and meeting with the architects of the massacres, who were later convicted of genocide in the Haague?

And there is this, indicative of the imperial nature of French foreign policy:

Africa has traditionally been considered such a special case in Paris that France's policy is run out of the presidency. At the time, the "Africa cell" was headed by Mitterrand's son, Jean-Christophe, a close friend of the Habyarimanas. He later said that there could not have been a genocide because "Africans are not that organised". France's president did not deny what had happened, but took a view no less racist: "In such countries, genocide is not too important."

There's that old saying of Eldridge Cleaver: If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. I think you have to extend that even further: if you've caused the problem, then you better be part of the solution.

But to support genocide in order to preserve the sanctity of a language?

The RPF's invasion of Rwanda in 1990 rang all the alarm bells about encroaching Anglo-Saxon influence. The rebel front was dominated by Tutsis whose families had been driven into exile by wholesale massacres around the time of Rwanda's independence from Belgium in 1962. Many families settled in neighbouring Uganda where their children grew up speaking English, joined Yoweri Museveni's rebel movement that seized power in Uganda in 1986 and then began to plan an assault on their homeland. Kagame was among them.

France immediately sent troops and weapons to defend Habyarimana's regime. Politicians and the military top brass cast the conflict as between Francophone Hutus and invading Anglo-Saxon Tutsis - though 15% of Rwanda's population were Tutsis who had not left the country. Some in the French military talked of the RPF as wanting to destroy the Hutus, calling the rebels the "Black Khmers". Despite the growing evidence of a genocide in the making during the early 1990s, and the excesses of Habyarimana's regime in assassinating opponents and organising periodic massacres of Tutsi civilians, France's support did not waver.

This cries of fatal conceits and sheer incompetence of corruption. But it gets worse: the French bear a grudge. Against the Tutsis and the Rwanda government, it bears a grudge against those who survived:

Rwanda's foreign minister, Murigande, accuses France of spending more than a decade punishing the RPF for its victory: "In all international forums - the World Bank, the IMF - France not only voted against any development programme that these institutions would want to undertake in Rwanda but it even went out of its way to mobilise other countries to vote against them." Before the genocide, France was the largest donor of any country to Rwanda. Today, it is the smallest.

And this is the country that is supposed to serve as an example of enlightened use of power?

The Propaganda War...

There is a propaganda war being waged, and it is largely one-sided.


This is, as always, a good read.

Thomas Barnett has it right:

Americans swallow enemy propaganda at face value, subjecting us to knee-jerking manipulation by fiery orators. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with a few choice phrases, successfully elevates himself to the status of a Muslim "Hitler." But this populist windbag is already losing his grip in Tehran, giving Washington a strategic opportunity we don't yet appreciate.

It's not merely Americans who do this, but the West in general. We are so used to the fiction of objectivity in the news - a fiction, not reality - that we believe that everyone behaves in this manner. After all, the last great propaganda war was that of the SovUnion: the ChiComms have abandoned theirs largely.

But it gets better:

Suffering the world's worst brain drain and a birth rate that's dropped through the floor, Iranian society is imploding before the world's eyes, triggering a resurgent domestic reform movement that's now aligned with pragmatic conservatives determined to arrest the nation's downward spiral.

Externally, however, Iran is peddling influence across the region, quietly executing regime-building investment strategies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and southern Lebanon. Iran's oil revenue is creating development all right, just not back home where increasingly angry Iranians want it.

Slap these dichotomous images together, and you can't help but wonder at the similarities between today's Iran and the Soviet Union in the late Brezhnevian period: the blustery facade of regional domination covering a system rotten to its spiritual core.

This really is the key to current and future developments: the increasingly obvious case that can be made for the inherent severe weakness of Iran. The analogy between the two (Theists in Iran and the CPSU in Russia) is not perfect, but it servves the point: Iran, as I've stated here before, is not going to have an easy time of sustaining its development, let alone making the jump to nuclear power.

If I were to fault Barnett's analysis, it is that he postulates that Iran will be have rationally and in its own enlightened self-interest.

Of that I am not too sure: to paraphrase Joshka Fischer, "Mr. Secretary, I am not convinced".

There is, after all, the risk that a status quo will develop for the next several years, one where the internal politics of Iran get sidetracked and while the government in power (whatever form it might be) is embroiled into solving the problems that theocracy has created for Iranian society (poor economic opportunities, squandered billions, lack of adequate infrastructure), that the mainstreams of Iranian theocracy will be content to work in the background, supporting whatever role they play in the establishment of the New Caliphate. Not that the Iranians are Arabs, but they see in many ways the world with the same set of blinders. They would rather be in bed with a Shi'ite than to have secularism become the dominant philosophy.

Let's remember the basic plan that the theocrats have: seven steps to establish the Caliphate.

1) Awaken Muslims to their heritage and plight.

2) Open Their Eyes: Force the West to make it their problem, i.e. force the West to become involved. The greatest threat here is that the West yawns and basically says "so what?", choosing not be engaged at all. Terror attacks will make this highly unlikely.

3) Arise and Stand Up: make terrorists and their organizations part of the body of Middle East politics, i.e. the legitimization of terror, or more exactly, the establishment of the terror groups as legitimate players. This is what Hamas and Hisbollah are trying to do in Lebanon: become part of the political scene.

4) Collapse of Arab Tyrants: the destruction of not merely the politicians of the various countries, but literally the destruction of a functioning political system. This means that Democracy in Egypt (such that it is) is as doomed to destruction as the Hashemite King in Jordan, as well as the Royal Family in Saudia Arabia and elsewhere.

5) Declaration of the Caliphate: with the state withering away, the Mullahs and their tools will ascend into control.

6) Confrontation: As complete and total a war as the Islamists can pull off. The West will be too weak to be bothered to fight it properly, i.e. the Will of the West is to have been broken at this point, weakened by the years of conflict.

7) Victory and the subjugation of the World. By defeating the West and re-establishing the Caliphate, the Caliphate will have re-established the ancient glory of Muslim society whose collapse and destruction has haunted them ever since. The West will abdicate its role in the world and retreat, becoming dhimmi.

Now the question: what is to be done?


The strategy against the establishment of the Caliphate has to do with 3 and 4: deny terrorists their role in politics and strengthen states in the region, preventing the political and social chaos that would develop in the wake, for instance, of destroying the Jordanian royal family, either literally or figuratively. That is the kingpin to the success of the theocratic plot: deny them this, and they cannot succeed.

But now we are still in 1 and 2 (and feel free to think, if you want to be a fool,  that these steps can only be taken one after another: up to 5, they are supposed to run parallel and with varying speeds), with some 3, while 4 is being worked on.

After 5 we have truly serious problems. That is the war that the theocrats want, and indeed must have to reach their goals.

Carter's Legacy

What do you say about former Presidents?


Most have been happy to simply, more or less, fade into the background and follow their hobbies, having served their country.

There have been, fundamentally, two exceptions. Clinton sees himself as too young to simply fade away - and after all, his legacy still needs to be created - and his wife is still involved in active politics. This can be seen as his due. He doesn't comment (much) on active presidential issues, but rather does defer to the sitting President, avoiding direct criticism, as has been the inofficial policy of virtually all Presidents after leaving office.

To repeat: it has been the inofficial policy that any President's politics will not be criticized by any former Presidents. None.

There is an exception. Carter.

Carter, despite the heartfelt and serious desires of the left to paint Bush 43 as the worst President, is arguably the worst President in living memory. I'm sure that Presidential scholars might argue with that (Taft was pretty bad, and the less said about Millard Fillmore is probably better...), but I think we have now the phenomenon of the grouchy old President.

Carter.

This links to something that is virtually unheard of: he, and the policies he now espouses, are driving his buddies away.

The key word is "malicious advocacy".

The facts in dealing with the conflict are these: There are two national narratives contesting one piece of land. The Israelis, through deed and public comment, have consistently spoken of a desire to live in peace and make territorial compromise to achieve this status. The Palestinian side has consistently resorted to acts of terror as a national expression and elected parties endorsing the use of terror, the rejection of territorial compromise and of Israel's right to exist. Palestinian leaders have had chances since 1947 to have their own state, including during your own presidency when they snubbed your efforts.

Your book has confused opinion with fact, subjectivity with objectivity and force for change with partisan advocacy. Furthermore the comments you have made the past few weeks insinuating that there is a monolith of Jewish power in America are most disturbing and must be addressed by us. In our great country where freedom of expression is basic bedrock you have suddenly proclaimed that Americans cannot express their opinion on matters in the Middle East for fear of retribution from the "Jewish Lobby" In condemning the Jews of America you also condemn Christians and others for their support of Israel. Is any interest group to be penalized for participating in the free and open political process that is America? Your book and recent comments suggest you seem to think so.

The occasional reader here knows that I have an interest in sophistry, or more exactly of showing that it not only still exists, but is active and plays a major role in politics today.

Carter has become a sophist, confusing opinion with fact (indeed deliberately representing opinion as fact, and fact as opinion), and that those who dain to disagree and object are to be made objects of ridicule and disdain in turn.

What is sad is that there were only 14 of 200 that resigned.


Carter will get what is coming to him: he will end up disdained and mocked, remembered for rabbit attacks, micromanagment, the Moral Equivalent of War (MEOW), abandonment of US diplomats to their fate, abandoning allies and abject failure as a President. That will be his legacy.

That must be the most bitter thing concievable: it will be the fate of Clinton as well, especially if La Clinton fails to go for the presidency, knowing that her husband has permanently tainted her.

What They Are Doing To Themselves...

Now this is interesting (HT: Blue Crab Boulevard...)

The last line is the telling one: to paraphrase, what the Iranians are doing to themselves is
much worse than anything we could do to them.

First: Iranian oil and the accompanying revenues will start to run out over the next several years, with a 10%-12% decline per annum, meaning, according to the link, that Iran will cease to be a significant oil producer by 2015.

Second: Iran is not investing in its oil industry, and as a matter of fact has a very lopsided economy. Oil revenues are 65% of the Iranian governement's revenues, which means that the non-oil economy can only support 35% of Iranian government spending. Heavy subsidies for many basics means that the Iranians are, fundamentally, eating their oil, or at least consuming it.

Third: this explains why the Iranians are so adamant about developing nuclear power. They are faced with the devil or the deep blue sea: either they drastically reduce their exports NOW in order to supply their own domestic demand in the future - which would be actually the economically sensible path - and then face massive popular protests when Iranians realize how fundamentally poor they are - subsidies prevent that from happening right now - or they have to have an alternative source of energy.

Doesn't mean that they aren't developing nuclear weapons, it's just that they are trying to finesse acquiring them as a neccessary part of their own development.


Iran is in many ways exemplary for the Arab world and its abject failure to modernize and to make their own futures: they have squandered their oil billions, either on populistic measures that buy temporary stability or on ambitious political and military projects that serve to stabilize the government control of the population.

There are some exceptions: some of the Gulf Emirates have built up significant infrastructure and world-wide holdings that can provide them with a more than comfortable income stream for the foreseeable future. These are small countries, though, with limited demographic problems. Countries like Iran don't have that option anymore. Their demography is working heavily against them, the same demographic development that they embarked on decades ago, aimed basically at increasing their populations such that they would have more than adequate number of soldiers to throw at Israel (this followed from some analysis I saw after Yom Kippur, that basically Egypt lost because they failed to field enough soldiers that would have kept the Israelis permanently on the defensive, unable to risk an attack because of the need to maintain the necessary reserves to counter all the forces fielded).

But fundamentally the Arabs and Iran have squandered what should have been able to upgrade the economies of the area so as to provide an industrialized future.


It's intriguing to think that ultimately the Arabs and Iran invariably screw things up without the West having to do anything about them. I remember reading in the early 1980s about the Iraqi plans to establish their own aircraft industry, developing their own ground-attack aircraft and munitions, of using their oil monies to establish modern industries and develop their country. I remember reading, again in the 1980s, of the massive Iranian investments into engineering schools and technical academies in order to gain the critical mass that they needed to develop indigenous industries.

I don't think at all that their is something "wrong" with Iranians, with the Arabs. There isn't: you can see how many flourish and thrive in the West. But there is a fundamental charachter flaw in Arab, in Iranian culture: the apparent inability to maintain long-term commitments to change for the length of time needed to actually implement the changes. I put it down to the fatal flaw of these cultures. There is an inability of transformation, an inability to combine traditional ways with the demands of modern society.

It is the tragedy of the Iranian and Arab world that they have failed to understand - or have wilfully ignored, or willfully denied - that you cannot have long-term scientific development and the resulting improvement of living standards without coming to some sort of reconciliation with the past. For them, Islam is the core of life, the Koran is not merely their "bible", but rather the literal word of God and as such not subject to interpretation and "modern" rational analysis.

That is the tragedy of what they are doing to themselves. That is the greatest tragedy.


Unless, of course, they do build their own nuclear weapons and destroy Israel, with the resulting destruction of Arab and Iranian culture for generations to come in Israel's retaliation and vengeance strikes.


The question now? How to manage the coming collapse of the old-tier oil economies - not economies using oil, but rather the economies that depend on selling oil - while avoiding the human costs of general collapse in the Arab world and Iran. And while at the same time managing the transition from oil-based economies to ... something else.

Democratic Stupidity ... or the pride of ignorance

Sigh.

Over here at the Schizoid Mansion (apologies to Jerry Pournelle) we're packing the goodies. We've got all sorts of goodies - it's been not a bad year, albeit not the best year. There've been worse, there've been better.

But we find this particular piece of stupidity here, hat tip Greg Mankiw.

So let's fisk this.

Fewer and fewer Americans support our government's trade policy. They see a shrinking middle class, lost jobs and exploding trade deficits.

First of all, where's the basis for this? Fewer and fewer? Because the Democrats were elected in this election cycle? Second, the middle class isn't shrinking: it's growing. Third, jobs haven't been lost in net, but rather have increased. The only thing that is "accurate" is that the trade deficit has increased: but the proper metric isn't an increasing trade deficit, but much rather what is the proportion of net exports as a % of GDP? Further, you have to take a look at why a trade deficit is happening.

Yet supporters of free trade continue to push for more of the same -- more job-killing trade agreements, greater tax breaks for large corporations that export jobs and larger government incentives for outsourcing.

Sigh. Supporters of free trade become the bogeyman: trade agreements that "kill jobs" (That's right, Mr. Lin, I'll get a discount if I fire 10,000 people? Sign me up!), tax breaks (which part of the tax code covers that one? I can just see the schedule: for every 1000 jobs exported, you get 12.4275% reduction in taxes on profits in excess of 1.2342 times your average profits over the last 10 years, exclusive of tax deductions, up to 12000 jobs exported, thereafter a 6.4456% reduction up to 100000 jobs exported; over 100000 jobs there is a uniform rate of 3.8379%...), and I guess I missed that issue of the Federal Register that covered the legislation that provided for subsidies for outsourcing.

Last month voters around the country said they want something very different. They voted for candidates who stood up for the middle class and who spoke out for fair trade. They did so because they understand what's at stake.

I'll grant the first point: they sure did. But given the first, that means that the vote was a vote of "vote the bums out". But that means that people didn't vote for, they simply voted against: that means that the Democrats are trying to read the granting of a mandate into a protest vote. And since when did the Democrats ever assume that the voters really understand what they did? We've been hearing for decades from Democrats about how stupid voters have been for voting in people like Reagan, Bush I, Bush II...

Over the past 100 years, Americans have built a thriving middle class. It's the envy of the world, and it didn't come easily.

No, it didn't come easy. The Democrats have been trying to stop it for decades, increasing the taxes of the middle class whenever they can get it through: getting your tenterhooks into the middle class is the best way of raising revenues for whatever boondogle or pork you're going to foist onto the nation.

At the turn of the 20th century, child labor was common; working conditions were often abysmal; there were no enforced workplace health, safety or environmental requirements; no unemployment insurance; and no workers' compensation. Workers were attacked and killed for the sole reason that they wanted to form a union; there was no 40-hour week, minimum wage, job security, overtime pay or virtually any other limit on the exploitation of employees.

List of nasty stuff that hasn't been around for a really long time: so what? No Republican has ever, ever called for anything like a turning around of any law pertaining to any and all of these developments. None.

America was split dramatically between the haves and have-nots. It was a harsh work world for many: nasty, brutish and, too often, short.

Ohhh, Hobbes! They can quote Hobbes! What does Calvin say? Seriously, America was split dramatically between those who owned land and slaves: the Georgists were the closest thing that the US came to in developing a theory of the proletariat that would have led to socialism. But there are a myriad of reasons why this didn't happen: guess what, Georgism doesn't work.

Worker activism, new laws and court decisions changed all that during the past century. As they did, a middle class grew and thrived. By mid-century, it became the engine that drove an ever-expanding economy in which benefits were shared by tens of millions of Americans. The American Dream of a secure, well-paid job with benefits, a nice house and a high-quality public education seemed within reach of everyone who worked hard and played by the rules.

The first is wrong: new laws and court decisions changed all of that. Worker activism didn't change any laws, didn't force any court decisions. Worker activism can affect legislature via lobbyism; court decisions can be influenced by elected judges. But worker activism isn't a key part of the legislative and judicial parts of the government.

And what is the middle class anyway? Something that these idiots never define or try to properly describe. The middle class is first and foremost a statistical contruct, defined as a set proportion of the population with certain charachteristica: in reality, the middle class refers to those whose income exceeds their cost of living, allowing the acquisition of capital via savings. That is how a middle class develops. Now, how does this happen? How can anyone start saving?

Simple. It's the difference between skilled and unskilled labor. In a primitive economy - i.e. non-industrialized - unskilled labor is never paid more than the marginal cost of labor, since the individual can be replaced by someone who will be willing to work for that cost. Adding skills to the equation results in wage differentiation, since that particular worker can no longer be replaced by anyone, just by someone with a similiar skill set. That only happens in an industralizing society: in a fully industrialized society, job skills become the key motive to acquiring free time in order to further improve job skills via education.

This is beneficial to anyone who can become skilled: further, it creates capital, and is fundamental to the development of capitalism as we know it today.

And people, fill me in here: when did the American Dream become a secure job with well-paid benefits, a nice house and high-quality public education? Talk about defining the field! The American Dream is nothing more than giving people the freedom to achieve what they set out to do, whatever that may be, and not to keep them under control, as is still the case today in many countries.

That is what's at stake when we talk about trade policy: America's middle class and the American Dream.

Uh, no: what is at stake in trade policy is whether people as stupid as these two are going to try and recreate the same situation we had in the 1920s and resurrect Smoot-Hawley. Which would be mind-bogglingly stupid, but seems to be exactly what is being argued here. Just in a different name and in a different form.

The new mobility of capital and technology, coupled with the revolution in information technology, makes production of goods possible throughout much of the world. But much of the world at the beginning of the 21st century looks a lot like the United States did 100 years ago: Workers are grossly underpaid, exploited and abused, and they have virtually no rights. Many, including children, work 10, 12, 14 hours a day, six or seven days a week, for only a few dollars a day.

Blah blah blah. Now, if industrialization can move anywhere - which it can't, or we'd see advanced industries in Africa, given cheap labor and proximity to raw materials - then you'd see the development of the middle class in those countries as well.

And sure, most of the Third World has really shitty working conditions. But you know what? The alternative is for those people, working their tushes off, to not be employed and to be condemned to further abject poverty, of having only their muscle power to sell.

And what these two are really complaining about is that the rest of the world isn't like us: duh.

The result has been a global race to the bottom as corporations troll the world for the cheapest labor, the fewest health, safety and environmental regulations, and the governments most unfriendly to labor rights. U.S. trade agreements paved the way for this race: While rejecting protections for workers or the environment, they protected investors and corporate interests.

Right. By not being just like us here Americans, them people overseas are being downright...

Unamerican. By gum!

The results of such trade agreements are skyrocketing trade deficits -- more than $800 billion this year alone -- and downward pressure on income and benefits for American workers. Why? Because these agreements enable countries to ship what their low-wage workers produce to the United States while blocking many U.S. products from entering their countries.

Duh. The reason that the US is running a trade deficit is that the US imports more than it exports. Any sort of trade is going to put downward pressure on income and benefits for US workers: after all, given comparative advantages, those other countries produce more efficiently that US workers. And the argument that US exports are being blocked is an old one of the protectionists: the GATT works very well in addressing these problems.

Equally important, by enabling this kind of trade, the agreements force U.S. workers to accept cuts in their pay and benefits so their employers can compete with low-wage foreign producers. And those workers are the lucky ones. Millions of others have lost their jobs as corporations moved overseas to build the same products with cheap foreign labor. It is no coincidence that salaries and wages today are the lowest percentage of gross domestic product since the government began keeping track of this in 1947.

Uh, competition of any kind does this. This is pure protectionism: those damn foreigners are the fault of everything. And the idea that salaries and wages are my income is laughable: what about my benefits? This is stupid: these two lash out about the dismantling of the benefits of the middle class, but ignore them when benefits would destroy their argument.

Laughable.

It took a century to build a thriving middle class and economic security here in America. We need to protect that for which we have sacrificed.

Ah, they actually say it! We want to protect... but not the interests of the American consumer, but rather the interests of our own sacred cows.

We must insist that all trade agreements have labor, environmental and other protections so that American workers can compete on a level playing field. Trade agreements must also be reciprocal. The American market is the most desirable in the world. Every country wants access to it. That gives us a great deal of leverage, if only we'd use it. Barriers to U.S. products overseas should not be tolerated.

Insist all you want. Then the Europeans will demand that American workers should not be allowed to work more than 35 hours/week and take 30 days of vacation, and that no one can be fired except for extreme cause. Welcome 10% permanent unemployment as a fact of life that no one is willing to change, and let's make sure that we don't let in too many foreigners either. The reason that everyone wants to sell here is that we are the largest single country market in the world: but put up barriers, and prices will rise, meaning that domestic makers will no longer be exposed to competition, allowing them to raise their profits. Who loses? The consumer: your choices will become limited, you won't have recourse to alternatives, innovation will slow significantly and you, the average consumer, w i l l b e p o o r e r.

What shouldn't be tolerated are these idiots.

Free-trade agreements have protected drug companies, international investors and Hollywood films, yet failed to protect our communities, our workers and our environment.

Free trade agreements have lowered prices, increased diversity of product choice available, and have led to domestic innovation in the face of foreign competition. And how the hell is the environment helped by making less productive use of limited resources???? What they are saying here is that protected industries, industries that due to union restrictions in deciding how to put their workers to use are having difficulty competing, that those have not been protected. Oddly enough, that's the user base of the Democrats...business as usual, pandering to their masters.

We believe there is a better way. Fair trade is not the enemy of more trade. It's how we expand international trade without reversing U.S. economic progress.

Fair trade is just another way of saying: we control it and decide if it is fair or not. Given that, it's not free any more. And their effects, just as Smoot-Hawley's effects, would be just as stupid.

If Dorgan-Brown were to get their way, the effects would be of the same dimension as Smoot-Hawly: Dorgan-Brown, the new Smoot-Hawley!

Sigh. Both Smoot and Hawley were Republicans, and it took decades to drive that nonsense out of the party. Guess it's now the Democrats' turn to learn those lessons: but it will be, just like it was back then, the consumers and workers, who will pay the bill for the pride of ignorance.

Merry Christmas...

So, we've got another 3000 years, is that what he is saying?

Ah, the ignorance of history.

Here we have that oh-so-charming nice Mr. Ahmadinejad, who was just handed a significant electoral defeat, goes off on one of his tangents. As far as he is concerned, the West will disappear just like the Pharoahs did.

Well, besides the snide hit at the Arabs (gee, do you think he meant it like that?), that indicates we've got quite a while to go yet.


Let's look at the facts: according to your friendly local Wikipedia, the Pharoahs started ruling around 5200 years ago, and the last of the pharoahs (pharoahettes?) died around 2036 years ago. Now, let's just round things up and go for a time span of 3200 years.

If we take the establishment of the United States some 230 years ago - gee, it just seems like yesterday - then we've got, even rounding upwads, another 2950 years to go.

Way to go, Ahmadinejad: go and wait your turn. We'll give you a call in the year 4956 and give you the keys to the city hall.

But let's be nice and put the beginning date with the reformation and the birth of the West as a concept in, say, the mid 1600s: that means Ahmadinejad can come on over and collect the key to the city any old time in, say, rounding once again, the year 4800.


Gee, I hope he's being patient about that. Must be a really major bummer to have to wait that long.

Ah, the ignorance of history...


Oh, and yes, I am dating the reign of the pharoahs from the protodynastic period through the final occupation by the Romans. Why use the protodynastic period? Because that's the period where the concept of Egypt, with pharoahs, was established. One *could* start with the first dynasty, but that shaves only 200 years off the dating. Same difference.

Now *this* is brilliant...

This links to the first clever use of Second Life.

The possibilities are getting to be mind-boggling: virtual conferences, virtual meetings, virtual almost any damn thing.


And people are using this to escape their first lives? Bizarre.


Think about it: no more need to get your clients together into a stuffy room to have their brain cells killed off by PowerPoint and get fed rubber chicken. Simply set up a Second Life to replace travel.

Of course, there's no face to face, press the flesh kind of contact: with some clients, that's probably a plus rather than a minus.

This could revolutionize the meeting business. Or, more exactly, put it *out* of business...

Air America and the Twilight Zone...

So, Air America is going tits up. You can read what the NYT says here...

Like this is surprising?

Back when I was living in DC, one of the jobs I had was working on the fair market value of radio and TV stations. The basic methodology was to estimate the market, then the market share trend of the radio or TV station according to the demographics, and then do a discounted cash flow, based on current balance sheets and estimated cash flow from their continuation, to determine what the fair price should be, i.e. the price where the purchase is financed out of the cash flow, plus an up-front payment for the actual plant and equipment. The difference between the fair value and the actual purchasing price reflected immaterial value, such as station reputation, the DJs involved, etc. That was always fun writing up.

Air America was doomed to failure from the start, since as you can read above, they had no business plan. The professionals involved were constantly stymied by the political nature of the program, but more critically by the absolute incompetence of the left-wing supporters of the station.

But that's typical of the left: no business plan, but let's burn through lots of other people's money. They burned through $45mn, top heavy with management that wasn't worth a tenth of what they were being paid, and no attention paid to market share.

All in the name of challenging Rush Limbaugh.


What the left doesn't realize, isn't capable of realizing, is that in the radio and TV business, it isn't enough to get on the radio or TV and gab. Rush tried that with TV and failed: he is much, much better on the radio, purely on the radio.

But first and foremost you need to have a business model. But that is anathema to the left: that takes work, putting one together, and it takes real work to implement it, going out and making sure that your program is listened to in order to sell advertising.

I have the very first show that the Twilight Zone produced, made to sell the series. We all know and love Rod Serling, the man with that profound cadence and pacing of his melodious voice, the announcer of that show. He didn't pitch the show - probably the best TV material ever done, although Farscape comes close - as the best of writing and the best of acting, but rather sold it first and foremost as entertainment that would lead to people buying the advertiser's product. And he finished off his spiel with the prediction that Sanka Instant would be the best selling instant coffee on the market in the new season (I'm assuming that Sanka financed some of that first show).

That's what makes TV and radio work: not the decision to make a new series with good acting and great stories, or in the case with Air America, bad acting and political dogma, but rather meeting the needs of those who finance you.

And apparently, according to the Grey Lady, that was the last thing on the minds, if I might use that term with great liberty, of Air America.

And I disagree with the NYT on one count: I rather doubt that Air America really ever had 2.4mn listeners.

If they had, and if they had been able to get advertisers, then they wouldn't have had to go into bankruptcy. But that's typical for the at least a significant majority of the left in the US: no business experience, no ability to put a business plan together that doesn't require the destruction of capital, and above all no hesitancy in wasting other people's money.


The sad thing is that they now control Congress...

Insight into the leftist problem...

Just ran across this website for the first time: ShrinkWrapped. This is the link for the following...

The key quote is this:

Some on the left are overtly anti-American; there have always been non-democratic Americans who believe that their particular brand of Utopian ideology is necessary to save our nation.  From the neo-nazis on the right to the Trotskyites on the left, these people do not believe in consensual politics.  Their threat has been obvious and is not my concern at this point.  Today the bigger threat comes from a vocal and integral part of the Western Political Elite, the MSM and the Professoriate.  While many liberals believe Ward Churchill is a dangerous fool, too many think that his ideas, while perhaps too strongly expressed, have some relative validity.  After all, the white man did take the Native American's land; shouldn't we be tolerant and understanding of their anger and the need to redress their grievances.  When he argues that the 9/11 attackers are simply retaliating for our numerous misdeeds, it may be noxious to many, but isn't there some truth to his charges?  After all, the United States did support tyrants in the Middle East and elsewhere.  In another instance of similar logic, the ACLU is suing Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of several people who were abused by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.  There is a superficial plausibility to the case.  After all, the chain of command does go through Rumsfeld, and prisoners were abused; shouldn't something be done to set things to right?  In these cases, as in many others, the left and liberal aggrandizement of their own ideological ideas presents a serious danger to our prosecution of the war.  The ACLU, people like Ward Churchill, groups like Moveon.org and Human Rights First insist that their motives are pure (while everyone who disagrees with them have motives that are typically corrupt.)  They are upholding human rights; the right to be treated with respect; the right to counsel; the right to free speech.  As abstractions, these rights are inviolate; as explanations for their behavior (which could appear to be harmful to our nation's interests) they are superficially plausible; yet, reality always supervenes.  To be more attached to abstractions than to the welfare of others in one's community is a classic signifier of the Narcissist.  It is one step removed from the narcissistic disavowal of the other: my beliefs are more important than your life.

Repeat that last thought:

my beliefs are more important than your life

and rephrase it this way:

my political career is more important than foreign lives

and I think you can understand the depravity that passes for political wisdom in Washington, DC.

Shrinkwrapped rounds the above post up by saying:

The only way we can lose this war is to undermine our efforts from the inside.  When our elites in the media, academia, the judiciary, ignore or refuse to look at the words of our enemies, and support abstractions over reality, it endangers our welfare, and our rights.  If a judge, who can not or will not see that this is merely one more theater in a global war, is successful in engineering the release of Jose Padilla and he then causes an atrocity (he was working on a dirty bomb, and failing that, had planned to blow up an apartment building) does anyone doubt some basic rights will be curtailed at the demands of a frightened and aroused populace?  Does anyone doubt that if we are attacked with mass casualties, our restraint with Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia will be over?  Our system depends on the consent of the governed; when people are told they have no right to reasonably defend themselves and that abstract rights for our "victims" (ie, those who want to kill us and destroy our country) are more important than our rights to (in Dennis Miller's immortal words) "not walk down the street and get blown up", we will see a rapid erosion of the very rights we hold dear.

And we see today the results of this stance: there are times I think that the Left actually wants the kind of repression and witch-hunting that might come after a WMD incident in the US to prove how their beliefs in the fundamental nature of the US were right. It would make no difference to them that they manufactured the circumstances: the only thing that counts is being right.

The French Explain It All...

Leave it to the French to make sense of the Middle East.

Or rather, view it in such a way that explains their policies.

Basically we don't need to worry about the establishment of a Shi'ite led New Caliphate, because the Shi'ites will do nothing but squabble. It's all just hot air and posturing. The tribal conflicts and petty power-mongering is such that the establishment of any New Caliphate will fail, since the parties have too many issues and problems with each other.

So the French view - more than a tad colonialistic and paternalistic - is that we don't need to do anything: the inhabitants of the Middle East will fuck up any and everything that they will try to do.

Might be true - I dare say that there really aren't too many obvious success stories in the Middle East besides "that shitty little country" - but doesn't mean that you can simply press on and ignore what is going on.

It's bad enought that you have a region of chaos, anarchy, tribal warfare and barbarism. It'd be much, much worse if you have that coupled with what I call container bombs (i.e. nukes that you fit in a container with international shipping as the delivery vehicle), so that the Crazies can export their violence.

France, you're part of the problem: this is not a solution.


You can find an English translation here.

Asymmetrical Warfare...

I've got a copy of the ISG report but haven't had a chance to read it yet. That will come.


But here's another take on asymmetric warfare. Rather surprising from the LA Times, one of the papers out there with a more than alarming tendency to report propaganda rather than the news. Must be an attempt to get back a few readers.

It's a legitimate point: we've all heard the joke where the wife filing for divorce says "what's mine is mine, what's your's in negotiable".

That's the view of Islam: what once was Islamic remains so, regardless of what has happened. It must be so, after all, everything is Allah's will.


On Sunday I watched Lawrence of Arabia for the first time in many years, the two-disk DVD. What struck me in that movie wasn't the representation of the Arabs as childish and squabbling, as many have criticized the film. I've read the Seven Pillars book by Lawrence, did so while in Jordan in 1977.

What struck me is the inability of Arab culture to adapt and change.

That has been the a significant part of the problem, is a significant part of the problem, and will continue to be a part of the problem.

But getting back to the article:


Put another way, when Muslims beat infidels, it's just too bad for the latter; they must submit to their new overlords' rules with all the attendant discrimination and humiliation mandated for non-Muslims. Yet when Islam is beaten, demands for apologies and concessions are expected from the infidel world at large.

This is the asymmetry I am talking about. The Islamicists cannot accept change and defeat: they cannot, as this would contradict the idea that everything is Allah's will. A temporary setback is something that can be expected, but there is no acceptance of the rights of others to believe what they chose. In other words, an asymmetry of allowable behavior, a double standard to which the West is held but the Islamists are not.

Makes their lives infinitely simpler: they do not believe that they *can* lose: they believe, after all, that it is the will of God. And no man may abrogate the will of God.


Makes it hard to argue with such folks.


Makes it hard to even talk to those folks.


And yet that is apparently what the ISG wants the US to do exactly that.


A sad day, a day that will live in infamy. Not that infamy: the infamy of displaying your ignorance in the face of your enemy. Abject stupidity.

Iraq And Disaster...

Sigh.

The rhetoric of the chatterers is such that Iraq is "now" classified as a "disaster."  One of the old media channels even calls the violence there a "civil war." And it's all Bush's fault.


Why is this wrong?

Simple.

"They" believe that Iraq wasn't a disaster before the Ba'ath party was deposed and Saddam Hussein was pulled out of his hiding place. They believe that the entire region just needs some stability and then everything will get back to normal, that Bush's greatest failure was to believe that the people in the Middle East actually wanted democracy, how naive could he have been? And how stupid he has been not to have followed "their" ways of reconstructing Iraq, of having disbanded the army, of having destroyed the society. Bush's policies, they maintain, have led to the disaster, indeed have *been* the disaster.

I had a brief exchange of mails yesterday with one of FT's editors, where he raised the question of whether our choice was now between clever people without character or stupid people with it. It's a legitimate question, but underscores the popular, popular amongst the so-called intelligentsia, that Bush is stupid. And with that stupidity came an arrogance - how often that has been repeated - that America can change things in the Middle East.

Sigh.

The reality is that the whole region is a disaster, a catastrophe of an imposed and unsustainable attempt at stabilizing that which isn't stable. But it's not Bush who caused this disaster: it is the entire post-colonial era that is a catastrophe: this is the root cause. The problem is with autocratic rulers, creating new political dynasties in countries like Syria and Egypt; the problem lies in generations held in ignorance, manipulated by theocrats whose very existence, their lives of luxury, is deeply and permanently threatened by the secular and oh-so-successful West. The entire Middle East - and I am deliberately not naming countries, since the borders in the Middle East are arbitrary and meaningless, since they do not follow the reality of demography and society - is an abject failure in terms of economic development, scientific and technical development, social development - my god, they systematicaly mutilate their daughters - and virtually all indicators of civil society.

What has happened in Iraq is the pulling off of the blindfold. But it's the blindfold the entire western world wears: it's the blindfold that masks the critical factor.

The situation in Iraq isn't limited to Iraq: we just cannot avoid seeing it there. You can now scarcely avoid seeing it in Lebanon, where it really has been visible for many years; it is well hidden in Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iran.

You don't see it in Israel at all.

Remember, if you can, the policies of past administrations: stability in the region. Keep things stable, keep things under control, keep things manageable. Don't get the people upset (don't upset the "Arab Street"!) in those countries, everything could get completely out of control.

But what has happened is that you've had a pressure cooker that you've been keeping "under control," one that is now well past its maximum pressure. If you've ever dealt with industrial processes and controlling complex reactions, you know that the greatest nightmare is that the process gets out of control, that backpressure builds and fittings fail, that chemicals mix that must be kept apart and that the whole thing blows up.

Do you see where I am heading here?

The greatest disappointment in the Middle East since Iraq's attempted takeover of Kuweit and the lack of closure to that event has been the abdication of responsibility of the West, more specifically of those who created the problem in the first place (and yep, you old Colonial powers, I *am* speaking of you), the craven abdication of these countries, of their abandonment of their fundamental responsibilities.

Europe just doesn't have the will to go in and work to establish civil society: they prefer to finance instead the terrorists, followig their - the European's - odd sense of "justice."  This isn't justice in the broad sense: this is justice in the narrow, narrow-minded, political sense, of redressing political grievances against, as a French diplomat put it, "that shitty little country."

But I'm getting off topic.

The disaster in Iraq isn't that the US went in and screwed everything up - 20/20 hindsight is at best useless and and at worst sanctimonious posturing (and yes, you progressives and leftists, I *do* mean you) - but rather that the world can now see what the real problems in the Middle East are: tribalism, crushing poverty and overpopulation, ignorance and the accompanying demagogery that passes for religion, the perversion of the modern that sees the pinnacle of western technological development - the Internet - being used to push an agenda that would have meant that the Internet would have never been developed.

And the disaster in the West is the preference of the left to pillory the right for having pulled off the blindfold, instead of working to push a progressive agenda as policy for the US in the Middle East. Help those countries in need? Sure, but tied to education of girls and health care for women; where are the feminists who decry female mutiliation and the repression of literally hundreds of millions of women across the world?

That is the disaster: that there is, amongst the left, no vision of what they want the world to be, based on their principles, but rather only a nagging gaggle of nattering negativism, dead in the water and unable to see beyond their own feet of clay. The left still hasn't understood that Marxism and all of its nuances are dead, dead, dead in the water, and not pining for the Norwegian fjords. Progressivism might have a chance yet, pushing a humanist, secularist agenda and goals, but instead has latched on to that obscure and opaque beast, transnationalism, pushing not human liberty and dignity, but rather control and repression.

Sad. The Iraqi disaster could be an object lesson in what to do and what not to do: instead the collective lie of the failure of intervention will be trumpeted from the rooftops until the Big Lie is established as memes in the collective consciousness.

Once upon a time the Left was also a critical left. Marx's critique of western capitalism wasn't poorly done (it was mistaken in more than one aspect, but that's another story entirely), but the capability for critical thought on the left was destroyed by the totalitarian parties that took the mantle of Marxism to the extreme and brutally repressed critical thought.

That reverberates today. Critical thought is as rare as hen's teeth: what passes for critical thought is rote recessitation of dogma from the left, learned and learned (pronounce those two words differently to get what I mean) uncritically and as a new catechism.

A Simple Sentence...

Normally I enjoy reading Martin Wolf in the FT. This is his most recent column, unfortunately behind the usual subscription barrier.

But there is one sentence that underscores how wrong he is here.

"Gerhard Schröder could not have won an election in 2002 on an anti-American platform if the German people's confidence in the US had not been undermined."

Sorry, this is absurd.

Gerhard Schröder won the election based on his anti-American platform, a platform that was able to take advantage of literally decades of anti-American propaganda that Schröder most cycnically used, playing a receptive population. Not because of something that Bush did - here the usual demonization of Bush sets in, yawn - but the result of taking an existing resentment and deliberately, cynically destroying what had been a decades-long partnership in security affairs by offering it as a sacrifice to the gods of democracy, by appealing to the resentment of the German voter, especially in the East, to the US as an economic, political and military power.

I live in Germany and have done so pretty much solidly since 1980. That's 26 years, and back then already German anti-Americanism was rampant on universities, driven largely by East German financed "student" groups, who were being paid to mount black propaganda according to their SED and KGB masters. It was also wide-spread in the SPD, Schröder's party, and of course amongst the Greens.

Schröder's blatant and deliberate populism served one purpose only: to get him elected. For that reason he was more than willing to declare Germany to be a radically pacifistic state, one that would fail to shoulder its responsibilities in the world arena, sacrificing principle for short-term political gain.

The damage that Schröder has caused to the US-German relationship will take more than a decade to repair. It wasn't Bush's doing. The blame here lies squarly on Schröder.

Reality intrudes...

Been quiet here. As I've said before, reality intrudes...

First the election in the US: for me it was a disappointment, but the US voting population made its decision and that's all that matters. Interesting to note that many, many races were very close indeed, and that the Democrats have in many cases not the mandate that they hoped for, but rather have taken the Congress with very thin majorities. Hey, they're still majorities, that's all that counts at the end of the day. But if the morons of MoveOn and the other left-wing loonies think that this election means the nation is moving massively to the left, they're hoping for a fantasy world that doesn't exist. The nation rejected Republican representation and have sent Democrats to represent them in the US system of government: the President has two years to work with them and we all have two years to judge them by their deeds. The Democrats now have the chance to walk the walk after the years of talking, and I venture to guess that history will judge them harshly if they start doing what their supporters desperately want them to do.

Makes the upcoming next two years even more interesting than they would have been otherwise. The Democrats will also be held to account now: given the appalling shape of their leadership, this will hurt them significantly more than they think in 2008. The Democrat dream team is probably Clinton/Obama: the Republican dream team might be Guiliani/McCain.

Second, the Stern report came out.

I haven't had the time to read it, so I won't comment on the content as such.

But I will comment on a) timing and b) political motivation.

The timing was well done, with the US election coming up and the current political infighting in the UK.

Which brings the political motivation, which Stern doesn't hide. His goal is to justify action. His motives may be pure - I'm willing to give him that benefit of a doubt - but I'm with Lombard here: given the limited resources, what do we do to have the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people? Stern et al argue that we **must** spend vast amounts NOW NOW NOW and that failing to do so will condemn humanity and destroy the world.

Sorry. Been there, done that, use the T-Shirt to polish the car nowadays.


In the words of Joshka Fischer: "Sorry, but I am not convinced."

Why?

Because of the same reasons that Fischer wasn't convinced. The step is too large to take without more evidence.

I forecast for a living and having been doing it for more than 20 years now. That's right, 20 years. I know what a forecast can bring and what it can't: what the activist and the kool-aide drinkers claim cannot be supported on the basis of forecasts. The margins of error are too large in and of themselves: add to that the large-scale specification problems that all published models have to deal with (cloud coverage, solar variance, etc), and it all adds up to something that is so vague and non-quantifiable that then to publish forecasts with a variance range that includes decimal points is nothing more than a huge display of hubris amongst the modelers.

If anyone - anyone - tells you a forecast that shows three-digit accuracy after the decimal, ignore it. A good forecaster will tell you that GDP, for instance, will grow between 2-3%; a bad forecaster will tell you it will grow 3.21%.

Sure, the numbers all forecasters store in their forecast database are detailed out to 15 digits after the decimal, but that is meaningless: the numbers are stored in that accuracy because the software demands it, not because the forecasts are that accurate.

That is why Kyoto is a farce: the proposed reduction in modelled temperatures is a small fraction of a degree of temperature. Sorry, that answer lies within the statistical error if the forecasters are being honest (which they are not: research into global warming is now a major source of money, and only a fool thinks that climate scientists are honest, independent, objective observers with no exterior motives: peer-reviewing becomes a joke when you stack the deck of peers...).

Stern's take is a tad more honest: from what I've seen of the summaries, it does show huge ranges of variance. This is in and of itself problematic: his deliberate use of only the most negative scenarios is, however, the key to understanding the significance of this report.

Which is to increase the number of kool-aid drinkers and defend the true believers from the apostasy of blasphemers.

More on anti-americanism in the wake of the elections coming up next...

Here We Go Again...

Well, it looks like the Germans are going to do the best possible thing with other people's monies: the German government is buying into Airbus.

This is, of course, to force a comittment to a continuing German stake in the manufacturing of Airbus planes. Closing down Hamburg is no longer in the works.


But this is a terrible move otherwise.

Why?


Because it just means that good money is being thrown after bad. Not satisfied with state guarantees - no, let me rephrase that: unable to operate profitably without state guarantees - Airbus will now have a major shareholder whose pockets are extremely deep.

Those of their taxpayers.


The German government has no business, as far as I am concerned, being involved in Airbus. If Airbus can't make it on its own - and don't tell me it can't in the face of competition: it did until the idiots in charge put the company at risk for their oh-so-proud plans to completely dominate the market, instead of merely being competitive - then it deserves to fail, as hard as that is on those involved.


Has anyone even thought about what this means in terms of the ongoing dispute between Airbus and Boeing, or rather between the EU and the US in terms of governments trying to manipulate market competitiveness?

We don't know all the details: all I know is from this that they are going to be buying a significant stock package.

But not because it's a good investment and will help widows and single moms with kids.


Instead, it's out of desperation.