Teleologic Blog: World History Archives

January 20, 2009

Iraq - 2009 - Bush was right

For years (really since mid-2002) I've been defending the Bush presidency and its foreign policy goals regarding Iraq. Six long years of argument and criticism from just about everyone I know. I remain defiant and unshaken in my analysis. (Here let me extend a grateful hand to Steven Den Beste for providing so much clear-headed analysis during the early months of this debate).

Bush was right.

Bush will be vindicated in history.

We had to respond to the 9/11 terror attacks. We had to strike at the very core of the Islamic world and convince them that attacks against the U.S. were the worst mistake they could ever make. For a myriad of reasons, Iraq was the best available target for a U.S. attack.

We won that war with just 2 and 1/2 divisions against an army that was five time larger. We destroyed Saddam's government and captured him and then set about the arduous task of rebuilding Iraq on totally new ground. We set about proving to the Islamic world that democracy was not incompatible for people just because they were Arabs, or because they were Moslem. We challenged Al Qaeda, not in some minor country like Afghanistan, but in the very heart of the Islamic world. They had to come and fight us there, Afghanistan they could flee from, Somalia they could leave any time but Iraq, no Iraq was a country that had to be fought for.

And they lost.

The effort of rebuilding Iraq is far from over but I believe we have won. Iraq may very well become what the Bush administration dreamed of: a stable, peaceful, prosperous and democratic country sitting right in the middle of the Islamic world. A constant, daily affront to the dictators in the Islamic world who always tell their people "you aren't ready to choose your government" or "Democracy is Unislamic". Bush tried to change the world and I think he has wrenched machinery of history from a terrible direction to a new and better pathway, better for them, better for all of us.

Things can still go badly. The future is unwritten and not always for the best. But as former President Bush flies home to Texas, I salute him for daring to do the hard, difficult, dangerous thing. And for standing up to the whole weight of opinion from the rest of the country and the rest of world who just wanted to let things stew in the Islamic world.

He was right. The Bush administration did the right thing. Iraq is a better country, and the world is better place thanks to the U.S. invasion and occupation in 2003.

To all the brave men and women who served in the U.S. Army and Marines and Air Force, I salute you. You fought under nearly impossible conditions and you won. Counter-insurgency is hard but our enemies were fools and our goals - peace and freedom for the Iraqi people - were noble.

Let me close with the immortal words of President Kennedy, spoken 48 years ago, and still true

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

To President George W. Bush, champion of liberty!

Posted by rakhier at 12:44 PM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2008

Tibet - Ruled by China

While I realize this is an unpopular opinion, I think a careful look at Tibet's historical record shows that, on balance, the people of Tibet have benefited from being forced to be part of China. Tibet prior to the Chinese take-over in 1949 was a remarkably backward country with upwards on 30% of the adult male population living in monasteries (and contributing nothing economically to the country) and upwards of 10% of the population living as heriditory slaves of the various monasteries (because the monks did no work). Tibet had no education system (other than Buddhist teachings), they had no doctors (other than shaman), they had no industry, no roads, no telephones and this was the situation of the country in 1949!

Does their terrible backwardness justify the invasion by Mao's Communist Army? From a utilitarian perspective, I believe it does. Over the last 58 years, the Tibetan people have gained on every standard of economic and personal well-being. They are living longer, they are richer, they are (by virtue of being part of China) much more a part of the world instead of living in the isolated mountain island kingdom that Tibet once was.

Now, clearly, the Tibetan people did not ask China to conquer them and they did not ask to have their way of life radically transformed. During the "cultural revolution" a great deal of priceless ancient objects and buildings were destroyed, both in Tibet and in the rest of China. Many Tibetans fled their country (and there is a small community here in Palo Alto). Their lives were transformed but was it for the worse? I submit that a significant percentage of the population of Tibet that is alive today outside of Tibet would be dead if the Chinese had never invaded, due to the poor quality of health care and high incidence of childhood diseases and the complete unlikelihood of meaningful change occurring "naturally" in Tibet (i.e. without the Chinese invasion).

What are the odds that the Dali Lama, a man with no education other than a complete immersion in Tibetan Buddhism, would have proposed any of the changes that in fact occurred? Now days he talks about what Tibet would be like if the Chinese gave up control and let him back in the country. He talks about democracy, and good government, human rights, the need for Tibet to be transformed. All these things he learned about after he fled Tibet in 1957.

Could the Chinese treat Tibet differently? Of course. Could they be nicer? Surely. We all know the Chinese government is ham-fisted, rather closed ideologically, and somewhat paranoid. However, China is a great power in the world today (meaning that no other power really has any influence over their government's decisions). It is not going to give up control of Tibet due to street protests in Lhasa nor will it be swayed by disruptions to the (remarkably egotistical) Olympic Torch runs China is holding around the world.

The Chinese government will be (in my opinion) increasingly amenable to carefully thought out moral arguments about letting the people choose (in every part of China) how they want to live their private lives. Religion is making a slow comeback in China and over the next 50 years I strongly suspect that China will allow the people in Tibet the freedom to follow more of Tibetan Buddhism than they allowed over the previous 50 years. I also strongly suspect that street protests will not accomplish anything. I don't think Tibet will be free of Chinese control in my lifetime and as a consequence, I think the Tibetan people, both in Tibet and outside it, would be well advised to follow a policy of careful, reasoned discourse with the Chinese government. The Chinese believe in reason and in virtue, but the Tibetans will have to think long and hard about exactly what arguments they are going to make for greater autonomy because history (in the sense of who has done the most good for the most Tibetans) is not on their side

Posted by rakhier at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)

December 23, 2006

Back in September 2006, Sistani said "to hell with it..."

According to this interesting essay by Spengler (from the Asia Times), back at the start of September 2006, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani said "I will not be a political leader anymore. I am only happy to receive questions about religious matters." So, the most influential Shia leader basically threw up his hands, and gave up on trying to solve the problems of Iraq.

This explains why Muqtada al-Sadr has become a more significant figure in the last four months.

BTW: When Spengler says "Jihad is not an evil doctrine, an unfortunate afterthought, or an expression of Mohammed's aggressiveness. It is a sacrament, the Islamic cognate of the Lord's Supper."

Just because it is a sacrament to the Moslem faithful, doesn't mean it isn't evil. A sacrament in a given religion is not, ipso facto, non-evil. In this case, jihad, the conquest of the non-Moslem world, is evil.

Posted by rakhier at 12:14 AM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2006

Demographic Troubles for Iran...

The writer Spengler (Asia Times) has another interesting article on the demographic problems of Iran. Worth the read. In the interests of keeping the information available I'm putting it in the extended entry.

Jihadis and whores
By Spengler

Wars are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women.

The French sold their women to the German occupiers in 1940, and the Germans and Japanese sold their women to the Americans after World War II. The women of the former Soviet Union are still selling themselves in huge numbers. Hundreds of thousands of female Ukrainian "tourists" entered Germany after the then-foreign minister Joschka Fischer loosened visa standards in 1999. That helps explain why Ukraine has the world's fastest rate of population decline. On a smaller scale, trafficking in Iranian women explains Iran's predicament.

To understand Iranian politics, cherchez les femmes: the fate of Iranian women sheds light on the eccentricity of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. By Spengler's Universal Law of Gender Parity, the men and women of every place and every time deserve each other. A corollary to this universal law states that the battered Iranian whore is the alter ego of the swaggering Iranian jihadi.

In the interest of balanced reporting, I cite the history of Jewish prostitution before delving into the Persian example. The Jews have lived long enough to be defeated more often than any other people. After Spain expelled them in 1492, the Jews sold their women so widely that the character of the Jewish prostitute figured prominently in 16th-century literature, notably in one of the earliest novels, La Lozana Andaluza (1528), a story of refugee Spanish-Jewish whores in Rome. After Russian pogroms drove Jews out of the Pale of Settlement in the late 19th century, Jewish women became the raw material of the white-slave traffic, supplying Argentina as well as Western Europe. [1] Jewish prostitutes are almost unknown today, a measure of the revival of the Jewish nation.

These distasteful facts bear directly upon Iran's national decline, and the impulses that push the Iranian leadership toward strategic flight forward. Iran's plunging birth rate, I observed in essays past, will burden the country with an elderly population proportionately as large as Western Europe's within a generation, just at the point at which this impoverished country will have ceased to export oil. By 2030, Iranian society will collapse.

One does not have to destroy an opponent's military forces to defeat him. Russia collapsed without a single shot fired when Mikhail Gorbachev and his generals understood that they could not compete with Ronald Reagan's United States. The Islamic world also has been defeated, by a globalized economy in which the US dominates the top, and China blocks entry at the bottom. As the most urbane people of Western Asia, the Persians grasped the hopelessness of circumstances quicker than their Arab neighbors. That is why they have ceased to bear children. Iran's population today is concentrated at military age; by mid-century, today's soldiers will be pensioners, and there will be no one to replace them.

That is why it is folly to approach Iran as a prospective negotiating partner, and meaningless to offer the clerical government security guarantees, for the threat to its security arises from within. Once a people has determined to extinguish itself, nothing will prevent it from doing so. There is no doubt as to the demographic data, which come from the demographers of the United Nations. But it is one thing to read the statistics, and quite another to consider the millions of intimate decisions that together sum up to national suicide.

What is it that persuades women to employ their bodies as an instrument of commerce, rather than as a way of achieving motherhood? It is not just poverty, for poor women bear children everywhere. In the case of Iran, deracination and cultural despair impel millions of individual women to eschew motherhood. Prostitution is a form of psychic suicide; writ large, it is a manifestation of the national death-wish, the hideous recognition that the world no longer requires Ukrainians or Moldovans.

Iranians already behave like a defeated people. That is why they are so unstable, and so dangerous. The new Persian Empire masquerading as an Islamic Republic is a wounded beast. The rural misery and urban squalor that drive Iranian women into the brothels of Dubai and Brussels contrasts sharply with neighboring Azerbaijan, whose economy will double in size by 2010 as new oilfields come online, according to the CIA World Factbook.

Half of Iranians do not speak Persian, and half of those speak Azeri. Azerbaijan's oil wealth is a giant magnet; it must attract either the largest national minority in Iran, or the military attentions of Iran itself. If a Kurdish state asserts itself out of the ruins of Iraq - a long-delayed justice for that ancient and resilient people - Iran's Kurds will be tempted to throw off the Persian yoke.

The proliferation of Iranian prostitutes in Western Europe as well as the Arab world helps explain the country's population trends. The European Commission's most comprehensive surveys of human trafficking found that Iranian women made up 10-15% of the prostitutes working in Belgium, the Netherlands and Italy. [2] "Fatima" from Persia has become as familiar as "Natasha" from Belarus. Iranian whores long have been a scandal in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, which periodically round up and expel them.

It is hard to obtain reliable data on prostitution inside Iran itself, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it has increased since Ahmadinejad became president last year. Anti-regime sociologists claim that at least 300,000 women are whoring in Tehran alone. The ADNKronos website reported on April 25:

The clerical regime vacillates between repressing prostitution and sanctioning it through "temporary marriages", an arrangement permitted under Shi'ite jurisprudence. In the latter case the Muslim clergy in effect become pimps, taking a fee for sanctioning several "temporary marriages" per women per day.

These numbers cannot be verified, to be sure, but the spillover of Iranian prostitutes into Western Europe and the Gulf states suggests that the actual numbers must be very large indeed, so large, in fact, as to help explain the frightful rate of Iran's demographic decline. Along with Albanian, Chechen and Bosnian women, Iranian prostitutes are living evidence of the dissolution of the traditional Muslim society that purports to shield women from degradation.

Islamism (or what George W Bush has called "Islamo-fascism") responds to the crisis of faith. As I wrote on November 8, 2005:

The crisis of modernization first of all is a crisis of faith, and the attenuation of religious faith is the root cause of the birth-rate bust in the modern world. Traditional society is everywhere fragile, not only in the Islamic world; by definition it is bounded by values and expectations handed down from the past, to which individuals must submit. Once the bands of tradition are broken and each individual may choose for herself what sort of family to raise, religious faith becomes the decisive motivation for bringing children into the world ...

The collapse of traditional society has brought about a collapse of birth rates across cultures. Cultures that fail to reproduce themselves by definition are failed cultures, for the simple reason that they will cease to exist before many generations have passed.

That is why the Islamists - Muslims who seek a new theocracy - display a sense of extreme urgency. They are not conservative Muslims, for they reject Muslim society as it exists as corrupt and decadent. They are revolutionaries who want to create a new kind of totalitarian theocracy that orders every detail of human life. [3]

Nothing is more threadbare than the claim of Islamists to defend Muslim womanhood. Islamist radicals (like the penny-a-marriage mullahs of Iran) are the world's most prolific pimps. The same networks that move female flesh across borders also provide illegal passage for jihadis, and the proceeds of human trafficking often support Islamist terrorists. From Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur to Sarajevo to Tirana, the criminals who trade in women overlap with jihadist networks. Prostitutes serve the terror network in a number of capacities, including suicide bombing. The going rate for a Muslim woman who can pass for a European to carry a suicide bomb currently is more than US$100,000. The Persian prostitute is the camp follower of the jihadi, joined to him in a pact of national suicide.

Notes
[1] See Edward J Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery 1870-1939 (New York: Schocken Books, 1983).
[2] Research Based on Case Studies of Victims of Trafficking in Human Beings in 3 EU Member States, ie Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands (pdf file), European Commission.
[3] Crisis of Faith in the Muslim World, Part 2: The Islamist response. Asia Times Online.

Posted by rakhier at 08:45 AM | Comments (0)

August 22, 2006

The Fall of Liberal States into Fascism...

Shanon Love from Chicago Boyz has this insightful essay on how liberal socieities fall apart

History, however, suggest they are looking in the wrong direction.

The history of the 20th Century paints a very clear picture of how liberal orders collapse into authoritarian ones. Contrary to popular belief, liberal orders do not gradually evolve into authoritarian ones by the accumulation of state power. Instead, liberal orders fail suddenly when they cease to provide basic physical and economic security. The functional power of the state decays until conditions reach a degree of disorder that triggers a sudden collapse into an authoritarian order. Ineffectiveness kills the liberal state, not excessive powers.

The major cases of Russia, Italy, Germany and Japan all follow this pattern. In each case, the liberal order lost the ability to provide the basic order and stability required for the economy to function, and simultaneously lost the ability to suppress the violent action of political extremists. A feedback loop arose in which the erosion of state effectiveness created disorder which empowered extremists who further sabotaged the state's ability to function. The feedback loop rather rapidly increased the power of extremists and destroyed the liberal order.

Terrorism as we know it today did not exist prior to the 1960s. Virtually everyone considered the targeting of random civilians by shadowy unaccountable organizations utterly taboo. No one had any trouble recognizing such tactics as war crimes. Any group who adopted such tactics faced political suicide if not outright extermination. Even in the '60s and '70s most major terrorist actions sought to create maximum media exposure with a minimum of civilian casualties. As the liberal West seemed unable to respond effectively to terrorism, more and more groups adopted it as a tactic and their attacks grew more violent and less precisely targeted. Now we face the very real possibility of attacks using nuclear and biological weapons which could kill millions at a stroke.

If we cannot successfully curtail the escalation of terrorism we face the collapse of our liberal order. Today we face Islamist terrorists, but if others view terrorism as successful we will face attacks from other groups as well. Terrorist attacks will undermine social and economic functions and people will increasingly view the liberal order as a failed one. 9/11 illustrates this risk in miniature. During the '90s the West proved unable to restrain Al-Qaeda and its attacks grew increasingly destructive. People worried more about increasing state power than they did about the external threat. Finally, 9/11 caused a counter-reaction and we saw a sudden expansion of state power. Had we treated terrorism more seriously and had we authorized relatively minor expansions of state power in the '90s we would not have the Patriot Act and NSA surveillance today.

Political correctness threatens to cripple the effectiveness of the liberal order. For example, we refuse to use proven techniques such as profiling airline passengers and instead use invasive and ineffective searches for any object that might contain a bomb or weapon. We consider profiling, even accurate profiling, unjust. Neither will we use data mining, keyword searching or other modern tools, preferring instead to rely on invasive techniques such as planting informants. In the end we create the illusion of programs that are both powerful and ineffective. If a future attacks succeeds on a grand scale, many may conclude, just as they did after 9/11, that the state (or worse, a successor state) needs vastly more power.

We may be sliding down a slippery slope towards authoritarianism, but I fear we do so facing up-slope and unawares. We fix our eyes uphill on the minor threat while we slide insensibly down into the maw of the beast.

As I've said before, the ultimate purpose of the state, the Prime Directive of any society is the preservation of the lives (and, by a simple extention, the property) of its citizens. All else falls before this, in the final analysis. Governments that can not (or will not) protect the lives of its citizens are in deep trouble. As Solzhenitsyn said in 1978 "No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. In a state of psychological weakness, weapons become a burden for the capitulating side. To defend oneself, one must also be ready to die..."

As the previous post suggested, a refusal to face war seriously leads to more horror, not less. If your enemy is ruthless and knows you hesitate to harm the innocent, your enemy will use the innocent when fighting you.

Posted by rakhier at 09:57 PM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2006

The War against the self-named Party of God

I fully support Israel's attempt to destroy the self-named Party of God AKA Hezbollah. Hezbollah has a stated objective to destroy the state of Israel. Hezbollah is a part of Lebanon's government and has ruled much of southern Lebanon for a decade. They have also hidden their war materials quite carefully amoung civilian infrastructurs as much as possible. To the Western idea of rules of war and keeping military supplies and soldiers seperate from civilian, Hezbollah says "We do this for good reason. We want civilian casualties."

The good news (rather, the news that could be worse) is that Hezbollah hasn't used chemical, biological or nuclear weapons against Israel. Almost certainly becuase they don't have them.

The bad news is that it is not clear how Israel's creation of a new 15-mile buffer in Lebanon will improve the situation. The limited war aims of the Israeli government seem unlikely to do much long term damage to Hezbollah. It is true a 15 mile buffer will spare Israel from bombardment by simple rockets, but what about large missiles which Hezbollah will continue to get from Iran (or Syria)?

Certainly the attacks on Israel by Hezbollah give the lie to the idea that Israel can exchange some land for peace with the Arabs. So far Gaza has been the stage for many rocket attacks and so (recently) as southern Lebanon.

This is how Melanie Phillips sees the current British media attitude towards the conflict:

So the fact that Israel is at war solely to prevent the deaths of innocents is dismissed. All that matters is that the consequences of its actions are that Lebanese civilians are dying. The fact that the Israelis do not intend them to die is irrelevant. Those deaths are deemed to be the equivalent of the deaths caused by Hezbollah. The fact that Hezbollah deliberately sets out to murder innocent Israelis is irrelevant. Thus the only thing that matters is which side has more dead people. The fact that there are more dead Lebanese than dead Israelis settles the matter. The Israelis are in the wrong, are behaving disproportionately, are committing war crimes, are the villains of the piece. The fact that they are actually the victims of unprovoked genocidal aggression is deemed irrelevant. Thus the moral bankruptcy of Britain’s post-modern cultural desert.

I see the reason to view the current war in this moral-free-way is because there seem to be no good solutions. The Hezbollah hate Israel and are not willing to compromise. Hamas (in power in the south) also hate Israel and seem unwilling to compromise. The logical response to people who have an unwaving hatred and no willingness to negotiate is clearly violence until one side or the other is defeated and surrenders. As this level of violence will produce many civilian casualities, the average person throws up their hands and says "why can't they just live together in peace?"

Well quite clearly Israel can live peacefully with its neighbors, but Hezbollah is not interested in peace, nor is Hamas. It is possible to have no peace but no war but only if both sides refrain from using violence and that hasn't happened on the Arab side.

Posted by rakhier at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2006

Sweden is in deep, deep trouble...

This lengthy essay shows what happens when democracy gets perverted into the tyranny of moral convictions.

Read it and weep.

On the surface, Sweden is a tolerant nation and peaceful democracy. In reality, there is massive media censorship by a closed elite that is scared of having a debate about immigration. Opinion polls have revealed that two out of three Swedes doubt whether Islam can be combined with Swedish society, and a very significant proportion of the population have for years wanted more limitations on immigration. Yet not one party represented in the Swedish Parliament is genuinely critical of the Multicultural society or the current immigration policies. The Swedish elite congratulate themselves that they have managed to keep “xenophobic” parties from gaining a foothold while the country is sinking underneath their feet.

It gets worse.

85 per cent of the convicted rapists were born on foreign soil or by foreign parents.
Rape cases involving children under the age of 15 are six times as common today as they were a generation ago.
The Jewish congregations in major cities Stockholm , Göteborg and Malmö are forced to spend up to 25 percent of their membership fees on security and hired guards.
The Swedish government is looking at a proposal to reduce the size of Sweden's army to jut 5,000 men.

"It is an international embarrassment to Sweden as a nation that Swedes travel around the world to lecture about women’s rights, and at the same time their own young women are finding that their most basic rights, such as being able to go outside wearing normal clothes without being harassed."

Why are the people letting this happen? Has the welfare state turned the Swedes into a population of dump, helpless sheep?

Posted by rakhier at 05:17 PM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2006

Mark Steyn explains that Europe is Dying...

You can't get a more grimly reasonable prediction about Europe than this rather long piece by Mark Steyn. In it he lays out the problems which Europe (and the West in General) faces. You can sum it up in one word: demographics.

[There is] one point of similarity between the jihad and conventional terrorist movements like the IRA or ETA. Terror groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets: The IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: They want it, and they've calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off...

As fertility shrivels, societies get older--and Japan and much of Europe are set to get older than any functioning societies have ever been. And we know what comes after old age. These countries are going out of business--unless they can find the will to change their ways. Is that likely? I don't think so. If you look at European election results--most recently in Germany--it's hard not to conclude that, while voters are unhappy with their political establishments, they're unhappy mainly because they resent being asked to reconsider their government benefits and, no matter how unaffordable they may be a generation down the road, they have no intention of seriously reconsidering them...

The latter half of the decline and fall of great civilizations follows a familiar pattern: affluence, softness, decadence, extinction. You don't notice yourself slipping through those stages because usually there's a seductive pol on hand to provide the age with a sly, self-deluding slogan...

What will London--or Paris, or Amsterdam--be like in the mid-'30s? If European politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean the populace off their unsustainable 35-hour weeks, retirement at 60, etc., then to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?...

Personally, I didn't expect to see cultural decadence in my lifetime but that is exactly what we are seeing. A culture that will no longer defend itself is a decadent culture. Clearly in an important sense, Europe is no longer willing to defend itself. Based on demographics it is not willing to perpetuate itself. The only thing that is going to stop the sustained decline of Europe's population is increasing numbers of people who are willing to have and raise children. It turns out that the "Post-Christian hyperrationalists" aren't willing to do this at even a replacement rate. Instead we see most Western countries with fertility rates around 1.5 and lower. (Canada's fertility rate is down to 1.5, Germany & Austria are at 1.3, Russia and Italy are at 1.2; Spain 1.1). This means these countries are shrinking and they are going to keep on shrinking until something changes.

Having children is expensive. Its a burden. It means you care about the future and you want to be a part of it. When the average woman is having just one child in her life time, there is clearly a problem with the idea that you care about the future. In the long run, the world belongs to people who want to have children. Problem is: educated post-Christian-rationalist Europeans aren't in that group. Don't expect people like that to be in power in 50 years time.

Posted by rakhier at 12:27 PM | Comments (0)

April 06, 2006

Mexico has its own rather serious rules about Immigrants...

Mexico has rather serious and far-reaching rules about legal and illegal immigrants to its country. Its outragous that their government should be demanding that the U.S. treat illegal immigrants from Mexico better than they treat legal immigrants to their own country.

In brief, the Mexican Constitution states that:

Immigrants and foreign visitors are banned from public political discourse.
Immigrants and foreigners are denied certain basic property rights.
Immigrants are denied equal employment rights.
Immigrants and naturalized citizens will never be treated as real Mexican citizens.
Immigrants and naturalized citizens are not to be trusted in public service.
Immigrants and naturalized citizens may never become members of the clergy.
Private citizens may make citizens arrests of lawbreakers (i.e., illegal immigrants)
and hand them to the authorities.
Immigrants may be expelled from Mexico for any reason and without due process.

Mexico certainly has every right to control who enters its borders, and to expel foreigners who break its laws. The Mexican constitution is designed to give the strongest protections possible to the country’s national security. Mexico’s internal immigration policy is Mexico’s business.

However, since Mexican political leaders from the ruling party and the opposition have been demanding that the United States ignore, alter or abolish its own immigration laws, they have opened their own internal affairs to American scrutiny. The time has come to examine Mexico’s own glass house.

For the details see this PDF from the Center for Security Policy. (Hat tip to Michelle Malkin)

Posted by rakhier at 09:49 AM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2006

Why the ICC is Happy Milosevic is Dead

A very interesting entry in the ChicagoBoyz blog on why the International Criminal Court is happy Milosevic died three days ago.

5. Legality of the Court: This is a finer point of law, but was Milosevic's main argument, which the court had no answer for. Milosevic claimed that the ICC had no legal basis to hear his (or any) international case. The judge interpreted that as a question of jurisdiction, but they are not the same thing. Jurisdiction concerns the power of the court over the defendant. I could set up the court of "plezercruz" in my back yard with Jon holding a gun as my bailiff, and, if you stumbled into my back yard, I could declare jurisdiction over you because I CAN force you to comply. But it certainly wouldn't be "legal." Jurisdiction is about power, not right.

Legality concerns whether the court actually is an agent of law in the first place. Milosevic's argument was, basically, that since the UN Security Council itself had no right or ability in law to sanction him personally, it was impossible for that same council to create a court to do that for them. Courts are agents of the sovereign, and the UN has no sovereignity by defintion. By his argument, the ICC had no more right to try him than I have of trying you in my backyard. This argument crippled the ICC. It had no answer for it.

Milosevic asked the ICC to seek a ruling from the International Court of Justice (a non-criminal UN court which settles inter-sovereign disputes and is nonbinding) as to it's own legality, but the ICC basically ignored his request, despite amicus briefs from all over the world urging them to do so, probably because the ICC likely has no legitimacy in law.

Good arguement. I personally think he died from natural causes but maybe he contributed to his own health problems?

Posted by rakhier at 09:25 PM | Comments (0)

Mexico is moving into 2nd World Status

According to some recent data:

40% of Mexican households are in the middle class.

Mexico is in the middle of a housing boom. 560,000 new homes were built last year -- a record -- and 750,000 are expected for 2006.

Posted by rakhier at 09:23 PM | Comments (0)

February 06, 2006

Belmont Club on the Cartoon Crisis...

You can't get a better handle on the Cartoon Crisis (round-up of the info on the Cartoo war here at the Mudville Gazette)

Read Wretchard's entries here : Re-reading William Manchester's 'Alone' and here: Interesting Times.

The argument for regarding the Danish cartoons as a boon is premised on the belief that President Bush's attempt to separate the War on Terror from Islam was doomed to fail anyway; that it was better to face that question now than later. According to this point of view, a view reinforced by the election of Hamas in the Palestinian territories, cultural and religious issues were at the root of international conflict. That mere voting -- in Palestine for example -- would never be sufficient to establish a liberal democracy for as long as the underlying culture remained hostile and aggressive to democracy's roots.

One wonders. One wonders how long the forces of the multi-cultural left are going to continue to protect and excuse the forces of intolerance, hatred, and bigotry which everyone can see in the Moslem world.

Freedom of speech? Hah. No freedom if you want to say something which someone else takes offence at. No freedom if your speech might make some other group angry. The Moslems want the freedom to tell everyone else to shut up. "Don't make us mad or we will kill you." "Don't insult Mohammed or we will kill you." "Don't practice your infidel religion openly or we will kill you."

Islamic fascism is incompatable with western ideals. Period. One of them is going to loose this war.

BTW: If anyone wants to know, there have been many depictions of Mohammed in Islamic art in history. Here are some examples. No doubt the Moslem fanatics will be out burning their own libraries to purge them of these unclean images of the prophet.

Posted by rakhier at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2006

The Coming War with Iran...

I should say more about the current flurry of comment about Iran and its nuclear weapon's program. But I find it very depressing. Charles Krauthammer says

Ah, success. Having delayed two years, we now have to deal with a set of fanatical Islamists that we know in advance will not be deterred from pursuing nuclear weapons by any sanctions.

Even if we could get real sanctions. Which we will not. The last remaining months before Iran goes nuclear are about to be frittered away in pursuit of this newest placebo.

First, because Russia and China will threaten to veto any serious sanctions. The Chinese in particular have secured in Iran a source of oil and gas outside the American sphere to feed their growing economy and are quite happy geopolitically to support a rogue power that -- like North Korea -- threatens, distracts and diminishes the power of China's chief global rival, the United States.

Second, because the Europeans have no appetite for real sanctions either. A travel ban on Iranian leaders would be a joke; they don't travel anyway. A cutoff of investment and high-tech trade from Europe would be a minor irritant to a country of 70 million people with the second largest oil reserves in the world and with oil at $60 a barrel. North Korea tolerated 2 million dead from starvation to get its nuclear weapons. Iran will tolerate a shortage of flat-screen TVs.

The only sanctions that might conceivably have any effect would be a boycott of Iranian oil. No one is even talking about that because no one can bear the thought of the oil shock that will instantly follow taking 4.2 million barrels a day off the market.

Indeed, the threat here works in reverse. It is the Iranians who have the world over a barrel. On Jan. 15, Iran's economy minister warned that Iran would retaliate for any sanctions by cutting its exports to ``raise oil prices beyond levels the West expects.'' A full cutoff could bring $100 oil and plunge the world into economic crisis.

Which is one of the reasons the Europeans are so mortified by the very thought of a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. The problem is not just that they are spread out and hardened, making them difficult to find and to damage sufficiently to seriously set back Iran's program.

The problem that mortifies the Europeans is what Iran might do after such an attack -- not just cut off its own oil exports but shut down the Strait of Hormuz (through which nearly half of the world's export oil passes) by firing missiles at tankers or scuttling its own vessels to make the strait impassable. It would require an international armada led by the United States to break such a blockade.

Such consequences -- serious economic disruption and possible naval action -- are something a cocooned, aging, post-historic Europe cannot even contemplate. Which is why the Europeans have had their heads in the sand for two years. And why they will spend the little time remaining -- before a group of apocalyptic madmen go nuclear -- putting their heads back in the sand. And congratulating themselves on allied solidarity as they do so in unison.

The Glittering Eye says

Over the Christmas holidays I had a conversation on the subject of Iran with my very bright brother-in-law in which I was reminded that lots of people make little distinction among things that are physically impossible (things we can’t do), things that are politically impossible (things that are hard to do), things we shouldn’t do, and things we don’t want to do. They are different and there are quite a few things we can do about Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, it’s not completely clear (at least to me) that we should do any of them, and not one of them is particularly palatable.

Joe Katzman at Winds of Change.net says

I personally believe that we're very likely to see at least 10 million dead in the Middle East within the next two decades, with an upper limit near 100 million. I do not believe pre-emptive action will be taken against Iran. I do, however, believe the extremist mullahs in Iran mean exactly what they say. They are steeped in an ideology that believes suicide/murder to be the holiest and most moral act possible. They have been diligent in laying strategic plans for an offensive Islamic War against Israel, America and the West. Plans backed by 25 years of action, and stated no less clearly than Mein Kampf. I believe that Ahmedinajad's talk of 12th Imam end-times and halos around his head at the UN aren't the ravings of an isolated nut, simply an unusually public (and unusually noticed) expression of beliefs that are close to mainstream within their ruling class. That class of "true believer" imams and revolutionary guard types have been quietly consolidating their control over all sectors of Iranian society over the last few months, and I do not believe anyone in the world today has both the will and the capability to stop them.

As I say, pretty depressing.

Posted by rakhier at 07:04 PM | Comments (0)

January 03, 2006

Spawl - Its a Constant Feature of Cities

The idea that spawl (the expansion of cities out into the surrounding countryside) is a feature only of modern American cities, is false. Sorry. All cities sprawl when they aren't under threat from invasion or geographically constrained. Read the short comment by Michael Barone on Sprawl here.

It appears that all cities–at least all cities in the industrialized western world–have experienced a dispersal of population from the center to a lower-density periphery. In other words, sprawl is universal... Most American anti-sprawl reformers today believe that sprawl is a recent and peculiarly American phenomenon caused by specific technological innovations like the automobile and by government policies like single-use zoning or the mortgage-interest deduction on the federal income tax,' Bruegmann writes. 'It is important for them to believe this because if sprawl turned out to be a long-standing feature of urban development worldwide, it would suggest that stopping it involves something much more fundamental than correcting some poor American land-use policy.

Posted by rakhier at 11:09 AM | Comments (0)

December 15, 2005

Joe Katzman on Diplomatic Troubles with Britian...

Joe Katzman at Winds of Change.net has a long essay in which he slams the U.S. Congress. Congress is putting up such road blocks to cooperation with Britian that the British are seriously talking about pulling out of our F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program. This would be bad. We need to work with Britain, not put up annoying laws which make them inferior partners.

His conclusion is worth reading:

The continental European EU model of top-down transnational socialism insulated from democracy is one. It is doomed by demographics, by the corrosive effects of its inherent unaccountability and inflexibility, and by the emptiness that lies at its heart. What is in question is what will come after, and whether its roots in the Enlightenment, Western Civilization and the dignity of man will prove strong and deep enough to overcome its failures.
The authoritarian quasi-capitalism of China (which could morph into something either better, or far worse) and Asia is another option, one that will present a rising challenge both geopolitically and ideologically. Can material prosperity be insulated from political freedom? For how long? If so, there are many places where such a model will be attractive - and a resource-hungry colonialism that depends on its export is hardly out of the question.
There is, of course, the Islamist alternative, which may acquire an ability to destroy that far surapsses their fallen civilization's utter inability to create. It has blended with the detrius of the 20th centry's failed totalitarian experiments, and that truth is now being observed in affiliation and action as well as in theory. In the end, what remains of Islamic civilization will either learn to love the kuffar [unbeliever] as its brother, or its own internal logic will lead to its death - at another's hands, or at its own. The Fascist death-impulse is strong, and intrinsic, but they rarely die alone. It is time for the decent people to choose, and make a stand.
And don't forget the Anarchy alternative of warring tribes, artificial failed states, and the shadowy criminal organizations that both feed on and depend on them. for the foreseeable future they, too, will be with us. There are a number of plausible scenarios in which al-Qaeda is just the first challenge of its type, the early wave of a trend rather than the last wave of a long civilizational death-spiral.

Against all of these, there is another tradition. One of civic society organized of individuals, and characterized by accountability, flexibility, and the rule of law. It is not a tradition bound by ethnicity, geography, or past historical status - though it has many of its origins in the historical experiences of the British people and blends deeper Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian origins. James C. Bennett and The Anglosphere Institute call it The Anglosphere, and to the extent that Western civilization and its ideals retain a fighting chance in this world, this is where they reside most firmly.

It's a model that has proven its sustainability, and now it is learning the balance between respect for others, duty to others, and its own self-preservation. It is imperfect. It is also, I believe, the best hope for a world that represents a better future for ALL humankind.

Say it with me, Congressmen: I am a member of a civilization.

Britain is the leader that was, America, the leader that is. And if the USA plays its cards as well as Britain did, another will arise in time and become the leader that will be. Of a culture that values the creativity, exploration, freedom, and dignity of all. Perhaps one day, those values will be held by most of humankind. Perhaps one day, they will even extend beyond. I hope so with all my heart.

Hear hear! Read the whole thing...

Posted by rakhier at 09:13 AM | Comments (0)

December 09, 2005

Searchlight Crusade explains (again) why we are fighting this war...

Its hard to get a better summary of why we are fighting this war than that which is provided by Searchlight Crusade.

Furthermore, they have told us repeatedly exactly what their strategic goals are: nothing short of the annihilition of our society and way of life as it exists. This is understandable, as our civilization's great memes are in direct conflict with theirs. Evolving wisdom as opposed to revealed historical wisdom. Individual freedom of religion as opposed to enforced submission to the rule of one particular religion. However recently and imperfectly we may have come to it, respect for women and minorities of all sorts, and participation in our ruling bodies, versus subjugation of women to men, subjugation of others to the dominant religion, heavy ongoing penalties for those outside the favored class of the ruling religion...

I do not fool myself that I can live with allowing the islamic civilization to win this war. They would demand our society make changes that I could not live with. I have two daughters and a wife I love; what the requirements of the society the islamicists would impose upon them I will die before I allow them to take place.

I agree with this. The Islamic-Fascists must be defeated. Its either them, or us. Our civilization stands for everything that they hate. Their ideology is close to a complete list of the things I hate.

Posted by rakhier at 05:23 PM | Comments (0)

December 07, 2005

Iran - Is War Inevitable?

This essay at the Officer's Club is strongly pesimistic on the topic of a peaceful resolution to Iran's nuclear program.

Today marked a suprising announcement from the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Muhammad El Baradei, as he confirmed Israel's assessment that Iran was only "months away" from developing a nuclear bomb. The announcement is surprising because the IAEA has long tried to "keep the peace" between Israel, the U.S. and Iran. El Baradei's announcement will escalate the crisis.

Also today, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (widely expected to replace Ariel Sharon as head of the Likud Party in elections next month) asserted that he would "not hesitate" to strike Iran as Prime Minister.

The point has not been lost on the Iranians, who just announced that they are purchasing sophisticated surface-to-air missiles from Russia.

Logic dictates that Israel would strike before the Iranians had a functional bomb, to assure that any Iranian retaliation would be non-nuclear. Military resolution of the crisis is looming...

His analysis is good and really if the Isralies honestly said to us "to preserve the survival of Israel we have to attack Iran's nuclear installations" we would likely go with them.

On the other side is this comment:

Macho talk of a military strike on Iran's infrastructure usually fades away once genuine logistical considerations are put on the table. And short-sighted attack proponents spend little time discussing actual consequences of such a move. Have people forgotten that the Islamic Republic's army would make Iraq their live-fire range following a Western attack?

I respect the Israelis' military competence and survival insticts. They can be squirrelly when they need to be. But even this is too much for them - and they know it. This is no Osirak and operations in Iran are not the same as operations in Lebanon. Respect Israeli wisdom along with their martial prowess.

The Iranian AND Israeli saber-rattling is purely for domestic consumption and cooler heads in DC know that. Nuclear weapons would give the mullahs the sense of security they have always lacked. The United States will not attack a nuclear state unless its own existence is at risk and the mullahs know that. Don't look now, but the strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction is back in vogue!

I personally don't trust the current leadership of Iran. Theocracies are a deeply flawed system of government and Iran's is just as bad as previous theocracies. Corrupt, incompotent, paranoid, and each leader "holier than thou".

That said, Iran is geographically stronger than Iraq ever was. The Iranian population is large and capable of being unified (i.e. the majority are Persian with their own language, culture, and religion). Potentially Iran is a mid-level state, however the mis-management of the mullahs over the last 20 years has hurt them.

Iran would not be a country I'd like to attack (Syria is far weaker and more inviting). Given that a military strike against Iran is a matter of choice for us at this time, I don't think we will make that choice. Until the Iranians force us (or the Israelis) to attack them, I don't see us doing it within the next year.

Posted by rakhier at 09:37 AM | Comments (0)

November 29, 2005

The Spanish Civil War - Dos Pasos and Hemmingway...

Neo-NeoCon has (as usual) a very engaging post on her Blog which centers on a New Yorker review of a book. The book in question: The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles by Stephen Koch; takes up the question of what really happened in Spain during the war.

As you can tell from the Wikipedia article, it was very confusing.

Here is where the New Yorker review comes down:

Intellectuals can hardly keep away from politics any more than other citizens, and probably less, especially in decades like the nineteen-thirties (or this one, for that matter). But, because they typically bring to it an unstable mix of abstraction and narcissism, their judgments tend to be absolute, when nothing in politics ever is. This is why a writer as devoted to the visible, concrete world as Hemingway could nonetheless stumble so badly during his time in Spain: he lacked a sense of politics. The writer forever in search of one true sentence ended up accepting a whole raft of lies. Dos Passos, for his part, lacked the inner toughness to recover from the blow his idealism was dealt by José Robles’s murder and Hemingway’s betrayal.

Yes, you heard that right. The "good" side in the Spanish Civil war was just as "bad" as the "bad" side in the war. There was really little reason to choose between one side or the other. Both sides murdered their political enemies, both side lied about what they were doing and why. Both side made friends with the most evil governments on the planet.

What should have been done? The British and French reaction, to stay out of the fight and support neither side, actually seems like the right thing to do, given the reality of the two sides... And yet, if they had intervened, the war almost certainly would have ended sooner, the suffering might have been much reduced. It would hardly have mattered which side the British or French choose to support.

Sometimes it seems as if civil wars are necessary to resolve contradictions in society which cannot be settled through dialog. I would argue the U.S. Civil war falls into that category. Was the Spanish Civil war necessary? Was the Lebanese civil war necessary? I have no good answers to these questions.

Sometimes, there are no good choices, only bad ones. Was the choice not to interfer with the Spanish civil war the least bad choice? Or just the easiest?

Posted by rakhier at 09:47 PM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2005

Sharia Law in Australia: Its not going to happen...

Here is a strong put statement by the Treasurer of Australia, Peter Costello:

We are a secular state under our constitution, our law is made by parliament elected in democratic elections.

We do not derive our laws from religious instruction.

There are Islamic states around the world that practise sharia law and if that’s your object you may well be much more at home in such a country than trying to turn Australia into one of those countries, because it’s not going to happen.

Hear hear!

Posted by rakhier at 09:34 AM | Comments (0)

TigerHawk updates Steven Den Beste on the Reason for the Iraq War

TigerHawk has gone and updated Steven Den Beste's monumental analysis of the War In Iraq (which is now 2 years old). Den Beste's analysis was brilliant two years ago and re-reading it (with the additions) is still like a blast of cold air from the Sierra Nevada. Wow.

BTW: Maybe Den Beste is back!

Posted by rakhier at 09:20 AM | Comments (0)

November 07, 2005

Riots by the Lower Class in France...

I think there are two essential texts to read to understand what is going on in France right now. First is Theodore Dalrymple's essay for City Journal Barbarians at the Gates of Paris (from the fall of 2002). (You can find it in book form here.)

An exerpt here:

A kind of anti-society has grown up in them—a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other, “official,” society in France. This alienation, this gulf of mistrust—greater than any I have encountered anywhere else in the world, including in the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid years—is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and potholed open spaces between their logements. When you approach to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity; they make no gesture to smooth social intercourse. If you are not one of them, you are against them.

Their hatred of official France manifests itself in many ways that scar everything around them. Young men risk life and limb to adorn the most inaccessible surfaces of concrete with graffiti—BAISE LA POLICE, fuck the police, being the favorite theme. The iconography of the cités is that of uncompromising hatred and aggression: a burned-out and destroyed community-meeting place in the Les Tarterets project, for example, has a picture of a science-fiction humanoid, his fist clenched as if to spring at the person who looks at him, while to his right is an admiring portrait of a huge slavering pit bull, a dog by temperament and training capable of tearing out a man’s throat—the only breed of dog I saw in the cités, paraded with menacing swagger by their owners.

There are burned-out and eviscerated carcasses of cars everywhere. Fire is now fashionable in the cités: in Les Tarterets, residents had torched and looted every store—with the exceptions of one government-subsidized supermarket and a pharmacy. The underground parking lot, charred and blackened by smoke like a vault in an urban hell, is permanently closed.

The other essay is by Paul Belien in Brussels Journal. Here is an exerpt

The Western authorities quietly accepted this when they abandoned the suburbs to the immigrants a decade ago. The attempt by the French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, a second-generation immigrant himself (though not from a Muslim country), to assert the authority of the French Republic over its lost territory has triggered the current civil warfare in France. For the “youths” this is a declaration of war. They are not in Sarkozy’s country but in their own country, where the West promised they could retain their own cultural values and spread them.

Those media that tell us that the rioting “youths” want to be a part of our society and feel left out of it, are misrepresenting the facts. As the insurgents see it, they are not a part of our society and they want us to keep out of theirs. The violence in France is in no way comparable with that of the blacks in the U.S. in the 1960s. The Paris correspondent of The New York Times who writes that this a “variant of the same problem” is either lying or does not know what he is talking about. The violence in France is of the type one finds when one group wants to assert its authority and drive the others out of its territory.

France, and much of Western Europe is facing a number of real problems. The people don't work very hard. They aren't having very many children. They are retiring at very early ages and they want to state (i.e. everyone else) to take care of them. The attempt to import cheap laborers from the Moslem world while still insisting that countries derived their nationality from a shared history and culture has failed.

I don't see much in the way of good solutions for France (or the Netherlands). Their economic system is going to fail but hasn't failed yet. The people who have the political power are still quite comfortable in their cozy jobs with their six weeks of paid vacation a year. Historically it is very rare to see reform before disaster. Only high quality poltical systems tackle problems before they become disasters, and high quality political systems are rare.

As a reading of Dalrymple's essay shows, the situation in France now is not very different from the situation 3 years ago. Back then cars were burned, stores were destroyed and the police didn't enforce laws in the Cites. The only difference now is the frequency of the violence, not the degree.

As Greg Djerejian points out

During a time when national unity might be demanded, with parts of the country literally in flames, the public is left to ponder the sad reality that de Villepin and Sarkozy are still going about their inter-elite squabbles and maneuverings in advance of the next presidentials. Crisis? What crisis?

Posted by rakhier at 09:03 AM | Comments (0)

October 19, 2005

Turkey - becoming more Islamic?

A disturbing essay about some recent events in Turkey suggest that the current party in power (AKP) is not as committed to the rule of law as one would hope.

Istanbul — Back in June, Turks did a double-take when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan began his monthly television address. Rather than speak before the traditional backdrop of the Turkish flag and a portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the republic, Erdogan spoke before photos of Ataturk’s mausoleum and a mosque. The message, Turks said, was clear. Ataturk was dead, but Islam lives on.

In November 2002, Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party [AKP] swept to power with just over a third of votes cast but took two thirds of the seats in parliament because only one other party surpassed the mandatory ten-percent threshold to enter the national assembly.

While Erdogan describes the AKP as a mainstream, inclusive party, a bridge between East and West, his actions suggest otherwise. While Alevis — a Sufi-influenced Islamic sect — number about 15 million in Turkey, the mainstream daily Milliyet surveyed more than 300 AKP parliamentarians and found not a single Alevi deputy. Traditionally, acceptance of diverse interpretations of Islamic jurisprudence is a prime reflection of tolerance. Despite the AKP’s rhetoric, the Alevi barometer suggests a gathering storm.

Worrying signs abound in Istanbul, where East and West have long blended in harmony. While the Saudi-style (as opposed to Turkish-style) veil was once limited to outlining districts like Sultanbeyli, it is becoming increasingly common in the center of Istanbul. While secular society accepts the veil in the name of diversity, such tolerance is one-way. Turkish women say residents of more conservative districts make them feel unwelcome if they do not likewise adopt conservative Arab styles of dress.

In the past year, the AKP has begun to translate its near monopoly over most major municipalities and national government into action. Rule-of-law has been a casualty. On January 7, 2005, bulldozers and dozens of policemen showed up outside Chocolate, a trendy café adjacent to the Besiktas soccer stadium. After a Besiktas match, men and women, sons and daughters, would cross the street and relax, have a coffee or beer, and watch the boats go by on the Bosphorous. On that rainy day, the police arrived with bulldozers and told the shocked staff the municipality — run by AKP — had ordered the restaurant destroyed. Television cameras and the property owners videotaped the subsequent confrontation. The landlord’s lawyer demanded to know on what grounds the municipality would demolish the restaurant. He produced the requisite permits and demanded to see a court order. “I don’t know anything about a court order. And I don’t want to see your permits,” the AKP official said. “I have a job to do.” Minutes later, bulldozers drove through the glass atriums of the restaurant in front of shocked onlookers. The AKP did not even switch off the restaurant’s gas before the demolition. Vendetta trumped safety. Three other restaurants fell victim to the AKP’s bulldozers on the same day. The video shows waiters and cooks weeping. No restaurants meant no jobs in Turkey’s already tight job market. Had they worked at a more Islamic establishment, they need not have worried.

The January demolitions were not alone. On October 14, 2005, AKP officials demolished part of Reina, a restaurant and nightclub complex on the Bosphorous popular among affluent and Western-oriented elites. Again, the government operated without court order. The AKP-led municipality has especially targeted Istanbul districts led by other political parties. Demolitions have occurred in SiSli, Bak?rkoy, and Kadikoy.

Large firms deemed un-Islamic or pro-Western by the ruling party’s advisors have also been subject to arbitrary taxation and penalty unsupported by any financial regulation or audit. The government has targeted beer manufacturer Efes and the local Coca-Cola bottler, while promoting products manufactured by companies deemed Islamist. Turkish Airlines once served Coca-Cola on its flights. According to flight attendants, at the request of the government, it increasingly substitutes Cola Turka, a brand owned by Ulker, a confectionary company long associated with Islamist causes.

While businessmen and U.S.-Turkish trade associations describe Turkey as a prime investment opportunity, behind the scenes, long-time friends of Turkey question where Erdogan is leading Turkey. Ideology has trumped rule of law. Political arrogance is extreme. The party uses its office to shut down dissent. When Show TV broadcast this month a political advertisement for an opposition party, government officials demanded the firing of the advertising manager. The AKP’s mouthpiece, the daily Yeni Safak repeatedly brands as “enemies of Islam” or “coup-advocates” anyone who questions abuse of power. While both U.S. and Turkish diplomats say relations are back on track after disputes over Operation Iraqi Freedom, in truth there has seldom been so little confidence in Washington about a Turkish government.

Turkey has always been not only an important U.S. ally, but also a regional model of tolerance. The combination of rule of law and diversity of belief have been the bedrock of the Turkish state. Anyone enjoys full rights as a Turkish citizen so long as they uphold the law. Discrimination has been rare. The Jewish and Alevi communities have thrived. The second president of the Turkish republic was Kurdish. Istanbul is home to peoples who trace their roots across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. It is ironic, then, that even as Turkey rests on the threshold of European Union membership, the AKP government is undercutting the tolerance and commitment to the rule of law that has so long made Turkey a regional model.

Posted by rakhier at 08:11 PM | Comments (0)

Shanghai - The New New York...

Shanghai is well on its way to becoming the most important city in the world. Certainly it ranks in the top 10 alongside London, Tokyo, Paris, Moscow, New Delhi, etc.

This article from the New York Times describes the amazing transformation occuring in China's main city.

SHANGHAI, Oct. 16 - Move over, New York. This year alone, Shanghai will complete towers with more space for living and working than there is in all the office buildings in New York City.

That is in a city that already has 4,000 skyscrapers, almost double the number in New York. And there are designs to build 1,000 more by the end of this decade.

An apartment complex going up in Shanghai. With mortgage rates around 5 percent, energetic foreign investment, rising income and official approval, the nation is making up for years of inattention to construction.

China's real estate market is so hot that miniature cities are being created with artificial lakes, and the country's nouveau riche suddenly seem eager to put down as much as $5.3 million for a luxury apartment in skyscrapers with names like the Skyline Mansion.

For decades after the Communists took over in 1949, there was relatively little housing construction or office building under central planning. But since the early 1990's, Shanghai and other cities have been making up for lost time. And this year the building boom is at a frenzy, with the nation expected to lay down the finishing blocks on 4.7 billion square feet or more of construction, a record, up from 2 billion in 1998.

"There's no doubt what is happening in parts of China is on a scale we've never seen before," said Richard Burdett, professor of architecture and urbanism at the London School of Economics. "But more importantly, it's the fastest pace of development in the past 50 or 100 years."

In Beijing, the remains of an old Taoist temple now stand in the middle of the parking lot of a new mall more than twice the size of the Mall of America. Big developers are acquiring huge swaths of prime land in the largest cities to build huge residential campuses with kitschy names like Cloudland Water Manor, Eastern Venice, Palais de Fortune and Skyway Oasis Garden.

Such developments dwarf anything being built today in the West. "I'm working on a master plan for a 46-kilometer riverfront area," said Robert Egan, who runs a landscape architecture firm in Beijing called PlaceMakers. "Scale like that doesn't happen in the U.S."

It is not uncommon to see a residential development with 10, 20 or even 30 identical high-rise apartment buildings clustered around sculpted green spaces and artificial waterways.

For increasingly wealthy Chinese, the American dream of a home and a yard has become more like a French villa with a community lake, a town square, a post office, a hospital, a cinema, a church, a hotel, a shopping mall and, of course, a power plant.

A top-of-the-line unit at one development project has a 25-acre palm-shaped artificial lake, which brochures say will feature docks with berths for private yachts.

Prices are soaring. Luxury apartments in Shanghai and Beijing with names like Home of the Tycoons now sell for prices comparable to some high-end properties in New York.

Rising prices have created a circus-like atmosphere in parts of China. Real estate fairs are mobbed, land speculation is rampant and some poor farmers dream about converting their wheat fields into the next Beverly Hills.

Indeed, prices have risen so fast over the last few years and the pace of building has been so furious here and in other large cities that the government and some leading economists have been warning about a huge property bubble in China.

The building boom is a principal reason that China is searching around the world for energy and natural resources: it needs the raw material to build new cities, and the energy to power them. That is helping drive up world commodity prices and threatening global environmental damage .

China's heavy reliance on coal to power its overcharged economy has already made it the world's second-largest producer of greenhouse gases, after the United States. And the World Health Organization says China has 7 of the world's 10 most-polluted cities.

The construction boom is also beginning to wipe out what little is left of the old China, alarming historic preservationists. Indeed, as the world's most-populous country, at 1.3 billion, rapidly modernizes and urbanizes, producing millions of new homeowners, its social and economic fabric is being fundamentally altered.

China's housing rush is being fueled by mortgage rates around 5 percent and huge inflows of foreign capital. But the boom is also driven by landmark government housing reforms from the 1990's that for the first time since the Communist revolution of the late 1940's allowed Chinese to acquire their own homes rather than live in government housing.

As a result of this privatization, thousands of new residential projects are rising in the bustling coastal provinces. And sprawling satellite towns and luxury villa developments are sprouting in what was once farmland.

This may just a suggestion of what is ahead. China expects 75 million more farmers to move to cities over the next five years, amounting to one of the biggest mass migrations in history, according to CLSA, a brokerage house specializing in the Asia-Pacific region.

"China's demand for housing is just getting going," says Andy Rothman, a CLSA analyst in Shanghai.

The boom is most evident in the largest cities like Beijing, which will be host for the 2008 Olympics and is now draped in construction projects that are straining water and power supplies. Every big city seems to have plans for a central business district. And every big housing project seems to have a Phase 1, 2 and 3.

"Everyone wants to build a Manhattan," said Jun Xia, a principal in the Shanghai office of Gensler, a global architecture and design firm. "In China, I say 'smaller, smaller' and the clients say 'wider, wider.' "

Some of the greatest financial rewards have been going to the country's new real estate tycoons - people like Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin in Beijing, and Wang Shi in Shenzhen. A property tycoon in Tianjin, Sun Hongbin, once served a two-year prison term for embezzlement but now graces the cover of magazines like China Entrepreneur.

It is not surprising that in a country where 170 metropolitan areas have more than a million people, according to government figures, everyone seems to want to be a developer. State-owned oil and steel giants, automobile companies, shipbuilders and even Communist Party newspapers are creating real estate subsidiaries.

The developer of the Fortune Residence in Shanghai, a high-end property, is a subsidiary of People's Daily, the leading newspaper of the Communist Party. And China Central Place in Beijing is being developed by Guohua Electric, a power company that for 50 years has occupied land in an area the city recently designated as its new central business district.

Guohua's real estate arm is now building a $1.2 billion complex that consists of three high-rise office buildings, a 1.8-million-square-foot shopping mall, 1,300 luxury apartments, two five-star hotels and a man-made lake and river walk.

Foreigners are also scrambling to enter the Chinese real estate market. Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch have invested in property. And Morgan Stanley has acquired about $700 million worth of commercial real estate this year in Shanghai. The city says it now has more than 4,000 skyscrapers - buildings 18 stories or higher - far more than New York, according to Emporis, a global real estate research group based in Germany.

Also considering investments here are Simon Property, one of the world's biggest retail developers; Triple Five Group, developer of the Mall of America; and a Japanese real estate tycoon, Minoru Mori, who is spending nearly $1 billion to build one of the world's tallest buildings - the 1,614-foot Shanghai World Financial Center in the Pudong district.

There is, of course, a dark side to this real estate boom. In the scramble to reallocate land and create boomtowns, China has spent much of the last decade demolishing millions of old homes and buildings and relocating tens of millions of people, many against their will.

And there are broader risks. The Chinese government is concerned that soaring prices might overheat the nation's economy and even threaten social stability. It moved this year to impose new taxes and other tough administrative measures aimed at cooling off the property sector.

Housing sales have slowed since June. But in recent months, real estate construction has picked up steam again, according to UBS. And that growth is bolstering new demand for energy and raw material. China is already the world's largest producer and consumer of steel, cement and coal.

In his report, "China Eats the World," Mr. Rothman of CLSA predicted that in coming years, "the Chinese dragon will stay very, very hungry."

Many Chinese are acting as if the housing boom will not fizzle any time soon. The economy is soaring, income is rising, Ikeas and Wal-Marts are popping up in second-tier cities and tens of millions of people are giddy about the prospects of owning their own homes, driving their own cars and adopting a more modern lifestyle.

"You know for a half-century, nothing was built in China," Mr. Jun of Gensler said. "Now there's a lot of excitement and demand for new houses, and excitement about a new way to live."

Posted by rakhier at 08:05 PM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2005

How American High Tech Companies Support China's Government...

This essay by David Kopel (for the Rocky Mountain News) describes how Yahoo, Microsoft, Cisco, and Google are all doing what the Chinese government tells them to do. Fingering people who send e-mail. Filtering out sites that talk about democracy. Sticking to the Chinese government's offical position on Taiwan. Its sickening the way these companies are complicit in the tyranny of Chinese Communist Party and how they don't care one bit that what they are doing is part and parcel to the political repression in China.

Read it in the Extended entry section...

Kopel: U.S. Web firms aid in repression by Dave Kopel
September 24, 2005

Today, many Americans get the news by reading the headlines on the Yahoo!, Google or Microsoft Web portals. Many more Americans learn about current events by using a search engine from one of these companies. In China, however, such behavior can get you thrown in prison - sometimes with the cooperation of the U.S. companies that tout their supposed commitment to goodness and freedom.

Last year, assistant editors of Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary Business News) held a staff meeting about a memo sent from national Communist Party headquarters ordering journalists how to cover the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square murders, in which peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing were slaughtered by the Red Army.

Reporter Shi Tao wrote a summary of the meeting, and used his Yahoo! e-mail account to send it to the Asia Democracy Foundation, a group in New York State that supports Chinese democracy. The group published the report, anonymously, on the Web site Democracy Forum and their newsletter Democracy News.

The Chinese dictatorship asked Yahoo! to help them find the person who had sent the message. Yahoo!'s subsidiary in Hong Kong complied, and Shi Tao was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

After Reporters Without Borders (www.rsf.org)broke the story on Sept. 6, 2005, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang blandly replied that "To be doing business in China, or anywhere else in the world, we have to comply with local law."

Indeed, Yahoo! is so enthusiastic to comply with "local law" - however tyrannical and unjust - that in 2002 Yahoo! signed the "Public Pledge on Self-Discipline for the China Internet Industry" (www.isc.org.cn/20020417/ca102762.htm). Thus, explains Reporters Without Borders, a Chinese Web user who runs a Yahoo! search query for a controversial topic such as "Taiwan independence" will "retrieve only a limited and approved set of results." If "you try to post a message on the subject in a discussion forum, it never appears online."

Google and Microsoft have also signed the so-called "Responsibility" code. After the Chinese government blocked Google in 2002, Google modified its Chinese search engine. Google maintains on its own servers a cache of various Web content, so a Chinese surfer previously might have been able to find forbidden content by using the Google cache, rather than reading the content directly from a banned Web site.

In June 2005, Microsoft admitted that it had imposed filters on its Chinese weblogs to block "forbidden words" such as "freedom," "democracy" and "demonstration."

Reporters Without Borders also reports that much of the Chinese Internet runs through routers sold by Cisco Systems, which Cisco modified to allow searches for "subversive" key words, for visits to prohibited Web sites, and for the transmission of "dangerous" e-mail. Ethan Guttman's book Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire and Betrayal, supplies details. Cisco admits to having modified the routers for the Chinese government, but accepts no responsibility for how the modifications are employed.

The Rocky Mountain News mentioned the Shi Tao case in a three-paragraph item in the Sept. 7 Business Briefs, and reported more broadly on American complicity in Chinese Internet censorship in an Aug. 15 business story from Bloomberg. The Denver Post has not given the issue serious attention in 2005.

"Don't be evil" is Google's corporate motto. Microsoft defends its corporate interests on a "Freedom to Innovate Network."

But the noble phrases are contradicted by the misuse of freedom, by cooperation with evil, by assisting the technological advancement of what the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society calls "the most extensive, technologically sophisticated, and broad-reaching system of Internet filtering in the world."

The evil behavior of American companies in China directly endangers Americans. First of all, the dictatorship censors news about health problems, such as the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory System (SARS); suppression of the news about an epidemic significantly increases the chance that an epidemic could spread internationally.

More broadly, the censorship impedes democratic reform in China, and deprives the Chinese people of truth about their government's violations of human rights, about ethnic suppression in Tibet, and about Taiwan's right to remain independent. Thus, China suppresses popular opposition to dictatorship and to an invasion of Taiwan, which some observers believe could occur soon, and which would likely lead to war with the United States.

The architecture of repression which the American companies and their Chinese paymasters are creating could easily be exported to regimes in other nations.

A Washington Post editorial (Sept. 18) suggested that the American companies may be violating the 1989 federal law forbidding the sale of "crime control and detection" equipment to China. Unfortunately, the Commerce Department under the Bush, Clinton, and Bush presidencies has often been lax regarding Chinese exports. Perhaps only consumer and shareholder pressure can persuade the American companies to change their evil ways.

Posted by rakhier at 11:18 PM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2005

Why the Islamic Fascists Think They Can Win...

This small essay by Lexington Green of the Chicago Boyz blog sums up why I'm trying to teach. Its a reaction to this essay on how the U.S assimilated immigrants to the U.S. in the past.

This lack of cultural confidence become apparent when the UK, and to a lesser extent the USA, were faced by the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism. The Islamic radical looks around him in a country like England and sees people who do not respect their own way of life and are apologetic about it. The Islamic radical correctly senses weakness and has contempt for people who do not respect their own country, civilization or way of life. He sees the firmness of his own will and faith, and he discounts his material disadvantages, which he is not necessarily wrong to do. A small number of people with absolute conviction and willing to risk all for a cause can work seeming miracles. Mohammad's followers came out of nowhere and overran the world, and their descendants never forget it. Closer to our own time, they recall that a superpower invaded Afghanistan, but that mujahideen from around the Muslim Umma rallied to its defense, and the Soviet Union is no more. The soft, comfort-seeking West seems like a much easier target. And like the Soviet Union, it no longer believes in the principles that supposedly animate it. To the outside observer looking at our depraved entertainment products and listening to the self-loathing on the mainstream news, the West must seem to be an animated corpse that will crumble into a putrescent heap if it is struck hard enough.

Weakness in any sphere invites attack, and the realm of cultural confidence and identity is no exception. Morale is more important than arms, and a country that starts out believing it does not really deserve to survive is already beaten. That may be overstating the case for the UK in 2005. However, a country that tries to wage a struggle where many of its most powerful and influential people believe that the moral right resides with their enemies is far weaker than it will appear if you try to add up the tangible assets each side brings to the fray.

Fortunately, the academic and educational and media communities, while still very powerful, are weakening. They are being stripped of their quasi-monopoly positions by advancing technology. A more complete, more affirmative and truer version of Anglo-American freedom can be formulated and disseminated via the new media, the home-schooling movement, and other means. The United States and the rest of the Anglosphere are magnets for immigrants. These people have experienced alternative arrangements up-close. They are likely to see and understand what is good about these communities. All we need to do is regain this understanding ourselves, and make it available for those who want to learn. This will be a difficult challenge in the years ahead. I anticipate that it will be successful, but nothing is inevitable.

I think this is a very good analysis of the problem. We are suffering from a crisis of moral to a real degree. Academia is filled with people who think the U.S. is the source of all the evil in the world today. Most serious writers spend their books talking about how bad current Western life is. In Hollywood is it a mark of honor to be anti-U.S.

The Islamic fascists look at this in the same way that Hitler and his brown-shirt fascists looked at Wiemar Germany. From their perspective they saw the Weimar republic as corrupt, ineffective, and uncertain in their own minds about whether they deserved to rule the country.

Posted by rakhier at 01:12 PM | Comments (0)

August 29, 2005

The non-war with the Nazis in 1936

The essayist Callimachus describes a fictional war against Nazi Germany in 1936 which would have stopped Hitler in his tracks and saved the lives of tens of millions of people. He then describes how the anti-war movement of today would have completely rejected such a war (which in fact did not occur). Makes for a great read.

It began when Hitler, the German dictator now little remembered in history, marched 20,000 troops into the Rhineland demilitarized zone, in violation of articles 42 and 43 of the Treaty of Versailles. France pulled itself out of a political crisis and united behind this threat from its old enemy. It used the treaty violation as a pretext to declare war. France's stauch allies in Czechoslovakia joined them, secure in the fastness of the Sudeten mountains, thus tying down Nazi troops in central Germany.

Britain, too, stood with its French ally, though not without some debate over France's unilateralism. The British in the end provided key air support and blockaded German North Sea ports, though relatively few British troops crossed the Channel until the fighting was almost over.

When war began, French divisions streamed into the Rhineland at several points, and the overwhelmed Germans, after brief resistance, retired across the bridges. They set up a defense on the east bank, but when the French penetrated this at several points, the German army rose up under von Blomberg and von Fristsch and overthrew Hitler and his gang. The top Nazis were executed after trial in German courts in which horrible crimes -- and even more horrible plans -- came to light, along with evidence of their vast corruption.

The German military leaders negotiated a new settlement with the Allies, revising several provisions of Versailles that no longer reflected realities on the ground. Nazi functionaries were purged from local offices, extremist parties were banned from German politics, and, with the aid of the occupying powers, after much difficulty and insurgency, Germany gradually returned to a democratic system of self-government, more robust than the failed Weimar Republic.

Why is this war "necessary?" Because it prevents World War II in Europe, the Holocaust, and the deaths of tens of millions of people, from the North Sea to the Russian steepe.

But would it stand up to the modern anti-Iraq-War activist's definitions of justified? Put him in the Wayback Machine and set the dial to 1936. Remember, he doesn't know there's going to be a World War II in Europe. Like the pacifists Orwell scorned, he probably thinks Hitler is not such a bad guy as he's made out to be in the capitalist press, and anyway the leaders of Britain and America are the real threat to world peace.
What will he say, in protesting this "unjust and unnecessary" war?

Hitler was provoked. Just a month before the remilitarization of the Rhineland, France and Russia had signed a mutual assistance pact that was a direct threat against Germany. France had engaged in a massive build-up of fortifications right on the border of Germany, and it was denying Hitler's right to defend himself. It was the old hegemony double standard.
What Hitler did was merely an internal matter. The French violated German sovereignty without just cause. Why, Hitler had never attacked France. Hitler was just moving troops in his own backyard. As G.B. Shaw said, "It was as if the British had reoccupied Portsmouth."
Hiding behind the Versailles Treaty was a red herring. It had already been violated. Germany had effectively renounced it a year before by bringing back the draft, and France and Britain had done nothing but make diplomatic protests.
Even worse, Britain herself had signed the Anglo-German Naval Treaty with Hitler that allowed Germany to build a battle fleet that included submarines, something forbidden by Versailles. Britain itself already had participated in a violation of the treaty!
There was no public support for the war in France and Britain. The people were solidly against war. They remembered the betrayed ideals of 1914, and they had indicated again and again their revulsion with the very idea of warfare.
By contrast, the remilitarization was wildly popular with the German people. In the Rhineland, women tossed flowers and priests showered blessings on German troops marching under the Swastika flag.
The door was still open for negotiation. Hitler, in announcing the resumption of German authority in the Rhineland, had said unequivocally, before the whole world, "we pledge that now, more than ever, we shall strive for an understanding between European peoples, especially for one with our Western neighbor nations .... We have no territorial demands to make in Europe! ... Germany will never break the peace."
France did not go first to the League of Nations and attempt to use its authority to condemn the German action. Thus, its invasion lacked legitimacy. Instead of evicting the Nazis at once, France should have gone the League route and then put its military forces entirely under control of the League, to be bound by whatever the League decided to do.
False pretenses! A scare that never materialized. The British were told over and over that they would be at the mercy of German bombers. Churchill asserted that the first week of the war would kill up to 40,000 Londoners [Nov. 28, 1934]. Baldwin warned the "man in the street" that, "Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through." Yet in the lightning defeat of Germany's small military, the Nazi air force never got off the ground. The mighty swarm from the skies that struck fear in so many in Britain and France existed only on paper.

The non-war in response to the Nazi occupation of the Rhineland is one of the great historical "what ifs". We now know that Germany's army was very skeptical about this move and was serious about staging a coup against Hitler if the French and British had gone to war over the move. Sadly, nothing was done and 4 years later, World War II broke out.

Posted by rakhier at 04:58 PM | Comments (0)

Chris Hitchens Lays out 10 Positives for the Bush Administration

This essay by Hitchens describes the reason why he supports the neo-con view on the world. Here he lists 10 postive things that have happened since 9/11 which the Bush administration can take credit

(1) The overthrow of Talibanism and Baathism, and the exposure of many highly suggestive links between the two elements of this Hitler-Stalin pact. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who moved from Afghanistan to Iraq before the coalition intervention, has even gone to the trouble of naming his organization al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

(2) The subsequent capitulation of Qaddafi's Libya in point of weapons of mass destruction--a capitulation that was offered not to Kofi Annan or the E.U. but to Blair and Bush.

(3) The consequent unmasking of the A.Q. Khan network for the illicit transfer of nuclear technology to Libya, Iran, and North Korea.

(4) The agreement by the United Nations that its own reform is necessary and overdue, and the unmasking of a quasi-criminal network within its elite.

(5) The craven admission by President Chirac and Chancellor Schröder, when confronted with irrefutable evidence of cheating and concealment, respecting solemn treaties, on the part of Iran, that not even this will alter their commitment to neutralism. (One had already suspected as much in the Iraqi case.)

(6) The ability to certify Iraq as actually disarmed, rather than accept the word of a psychopathic autocrat.

(7) The immense gains made by the largest stateless minority in the region--the Kurds--and the spread of this example to other states.

(8) The related encouragement of democratic and civil society movements in Egypt, Syria, and most notably Lebanon, which has regained a version of its autonomy.

(9) The violent and ignominious death of thousands of bin Ladenist infiltrators into Iraq and Afghanistan, and the real prospect of greatly enlarging this number.

(10) The training and hardening of many thousands of American servicemen and women in a battle against the forces of nihilism and absolutism, which training and hardening will surely be of great use in future combat.

It would be admirable if the president could manage to make such a presentation. It would also be welcome if he and his deputies adopted a clear attitude toward the war within the war: in other words, stated plainly, that the secular and pluralist forces within Afghan and Iraqi society, while they are not our clients, can in no circumstance be allowed to wonder which outcome we favor.

The great point about Blair's 1999 speech was that it asserted the obvious. Coexistence with aggressive regimes or expansionist, theocratic, and totalitarian ideologies is not in fact possible. One should welcome this conclusion for the additional reason that such coexistence is not desirable, either. If the great effort to remake Iraq as a demilitarized federal and secular democracy should fail or be defeated, I shall lose sleep for the rest of my life in reproaching myself for doing too little. But at least I shall have the comfort of not having offered, so far as I can recall, any word or deed that contributed to a defeat.

I'm optimistic about Iraq. We have made lots of mistakes (as always happens) but I think we are learning and doing better. The real advantage we have is our enemies are not supported by powerful nations that we cannot attack (unlike the North Vietnamese who were supported by both China and the U.S.S.R.).

Posted by rakhier at 09:21 AM | Comments (0)

August 23, 2005

China's Economy is screwed up so badly... (oil prices)

This comment talks about how badly China's oil companies are being treated by the Central government of China. Essay here at Peking Duck.

There are strong reasons to believe [Sinopec and PetroChina] have deliberately halted supplies to create seeming chaos...they want to pressure the NDRC ["National Development and Reform Commission" – the government body responsible for setting retail prices for refined oil products] for an immediate increase in oil product prices, thus cutting their considerable losses on refinery production stemming from the rising price of imported crude...the energy companies want to eventually force the NDRC to completely free oil product pricing so that they can completely dominate the market...[and] to take the opportunity to acquire the few petrol stations that they don't already run.

Still, how is it possible for two majority state-owned companies to go to war with their own government? Had any reporters bothered to visit Guangzhou and simply asked the first taxi driver they saw, they too, would have been told the following story in excruciating detail:

China's bureaucratic system makes it possible for the two giants to dare to challenge the NDRC's authority because, administratively, Sinopec and PetroChina are under the supervision of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, not the NDRC. And, in the bureaucratic hierarchy, the duo are vice ministry or ministry-level units whose top executives are appointed by the State Council or cabinet. Given the rampant turf protection and regionalism on the mainland today, it is not uncommon for government units with competing interests to run into conflicts.

That’s the ‘how’ of it, as to the ‘why’, we need only to glance at the balance sheets of the mainland’s oil refiners. Together they lost 4.19 billion yuan in the first half of this year. Compare that to a profit of 16.38 billion yuan for the same period last year (figures from the China Petroleum and Chemical Industry Association). No wonder there are few happy bunnies among the executives at Sinopec and PetroChina. Their crude oil refining companies have been sacrificed for the greater good of society, i.e. to bear the losses incurred in providing cheap subsidized oil. Technically, China’s domestic crude and refined oil prices are linked to the international benchmarks but, in reality, domestic price increases have only been applied to crude, domestic refined oil prices have not closely followed those of the international market and have therefore fallen way behind in the last couple of years as international prices have sky-rocketed. Indeed, US$70 per barrel is fully expected within the next week or two.

(the unlinkable) South China Morning Post columnist Eric Ng further explains:

Refiners' profitability remains at the mercy of macroeconomic policies of central government planners. With inflation control and closing the income gap between rural and urban China high on the state leaders' agenda, the soaring diesel bill of the increasingly mechanised farming community has more political value than the red ink of oil refiners' income statements.

It is hard to blame the government planners for dragging their feet on rising fuel prices, as complaints from 60 per cent of the population living in rural areas are louder than the outcry of the two domestic oil giants.

Now that the small independent refiners have shut their plants or cut production to avoid further losses, the two oil giants are asked to pick up the slack by despatching more fuel to supply-short areas. And they have to serve rising overseas demand too, as refined oil exports surged 45.5 per cent in the first seven months of this year, in contrast to a 20.9 per cent fall in imports.

It will be a tough balancing act for the government to weigh the ills of fuel smuggling, shortages and hoarding against popular discontent spawned by high fuel prices.

A couple of months ago several taxi drivers warned me about "trouble brewing" between the oil refiners and the government. "How come you're so clued-up about the machinations of the big oil refiners?" I asked.

"Because any rise in the petrol prices might mean that I can't pay the rent for my family's apartment," he replied.

Good answer, I thought.

One particularly colourful taxi driver raged at the hypocrisy of the "powers that be" in China: "The so-called principles of the big oil companies change as often as the weather," he complained. "If international crude prices crashed down to US$10 a barrel they'd slip on their red hats and become hard-nosed socialists all praising the planned socialist economy and how domestic oil prices must be maintained artificially high 'for national stability'. Now however, after making a killing for years, they complain about that same planned economy that feathered their nests for years isn't to their taste. If the government suddenly let the oil refiners raise prices how many people would suffer? The government must get its economic house in order before allowing the oil companies a free reign."

Always on the ball, Simonworld noted this
excellent point earlier:

Maybe market economics can triumph over Communism
after all? The writer is implying that Sinopec and
PetroChina are using shareholder interests as a fig
leaf to ignore orders. What if, perhaps, they actually
believe in creating shareholder value and subverting
Government orders is a means to that end?

China's economy is in a mess because the Central Government can't let go. It's on its way to free market, but not there...

Posted by rakhier at 02:24 PM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2005

Cicero on the Sitzkrieg's End...

Cicero, writing at Donklephant talks about how we used to live in a world where MAD made the future very simple.

It turns out the Cold War amounted to an entire half century of having it all, creating nominal safety. The nothing part of M.A.D. — Armageddon — never came to pass. And so we did indeed create a playground of prosperity: Shopping malls, freeways, cheap global travel, and the Internet; the plethora of things, rock-n-roll, the rise of socialism and multiculturalism; baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet. We got very used to that. Three generations grew up in the soil of transparent global war...

Since 9/11 we have enjoyed the seemingly endless dawn of Sitzkrieg — a period of declared emergency, but undeclared war. Our malls remain open, and gasoline flows freely. The housing market is hot. Mobilization for war is something we read about. But now there are multiple indications that terrorist nukes are either here, or coming, or in the making. Perhaps this is a long way off; perhaps it’s hearsay; perhaps it is close at hand. But if we want a meaningful definition of centrism, it should be something that can withstand the shocks of catastrophic terror. Discussing mega-terror should be on the centrist’s table, since 9/11 changed the rules. What are 9/11’s rules? That catastrophe can happen anytime, anyplace, to anyone, with no warning or apparent reason. On an unthinkable scale.

I found this first comment to the essay very thought-provoking...

One or more of our cities WILL get nuked, if you believe Sam Nunn and www.nti.org. The question is, what will be the response? I believe the Dems must act NOW to articulate a framework for nuclear response, otherwise the reaction will be escalation on the part of the US beyond what people can conceive. “Solving” the problem by simply destroying the Muslim World, largely.

We do NOT face destruction of the entire World. Muslim extremists/terrorists can destroy three or four of our cities (likely with an Iranian, Pakistani, or North Korean set of nukes), but not the entire country. WE certainly can kill everyone in Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt if we wished. No one could or would stop us if we lost, say, San Diego and Dallas. Three to nine million dead Americans through nuclear terror would certainly provoke a demand for 300-400 million dead “enemies” on the part of the American people...

We really need to talk about this now, before it happens, instead of letting the terror and anger of the moment be the time we first talk about what to do...

Posted by rakhier at 08:27 PM | Comments (0)

August 01, 2005

Some good essays in the Carnival of History...

Here are some good essays found in the Carnival of History.

Islam, Christianity and Reform

Whereas christian doctrine requires a good christian to treat with all persons in good faith so long as they act in good faith, Islam does not. It has only the concept of a grudging truce between believers and non-believers, and this must only be done when there is something to be gained thereby (for instance, the Israelis do not conquer Damascus, Cairo or Baghdad within the next few weeks). In such instances, Islam permits its practitioners to make truce, and even to pretend it is permanent, but not for it actually to be permanent. As spoken by Islamic leaders from the very beginning to the religion and continuing today with every notable modern leader, the only permanent "peace" countenanced by Islam is when all the non-believers have been converted. Check out the translations provided by MEMRI for all of the evidence as to this which you should need. But the truce is exactly that - a breathing space meant to allow the Islamic soldiers time to force a more favorable situation, which they will then use to resolve the conflict in their favor. They are not giving up. Their religion does not permit them to give up.

Bad use of Nazi examples in recent arguements.

In the current (lamentable)state of popular discourse, the only identifiable evil which people are prepared to universally acknowledge as objectively true is Hitler, National Socialism, the Holocaust, etc. All other evil is subjective; i.e. a difference in "values," in the literal Weberian sense. Simply look at one cretinous facet of the debate about terrorism, summed up in the inane, but oddly credible, statement, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," as if the morality of the tactic, terrorism, is related to the aspiration of the goal, "freedom fighting."

Posted by rakhier at 02:23 PM | Comments (0)

July 24, 2005

Mao - the great murderer...

The new book Mao - the Unknown Story by Jung Chang is reviewed in the London Times. Lots of history books will need to be re-writen based on this book. So much for the glorious leader...

Myth: The Long March was done against constant opposition. Fact: most of the way the Communists were allowed to proceed without fighting.

Myth: Mao ordered the Communist forces to fight the Japanese while the Nationalist did nothing. Fact: the Communists forces did almost nothing to fight the Japanese.

Myth: The Communists ended the use of opium in China. Fact: The Communists grew and exported vast amounts of opium to the rest of China.

Full review in the extended section.

Jung Chang not only demolishes Mao with her new book, she sets Beijing a new problem, says Jonathan Fenby

Three decades after his death the face of Mao Tse-tung still stares out over the huge expanse of Tiananmen Square in central Beijing. Though the authorities now admit that the founder of Communist China was “70% right, 30% wrong”, the man who led the greatest revolution since the second world war remains a sacrosanct figure in the world’s most heavily populated nation.

This summer, though, his reputation has been comprehensively demolished in the West by the bestselling biography, Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang, author of the perennial bestseller Wild Swans, and her historian husband, Jon Halliday. It blames Mao for 70m deaths — far more than Hitler or Stalin.

Though travellers have brought in copies in their luggage, and it has been reviewed in newspapers in Hong Kong, the book is not on sale in mainland China. English-language newspapers in the Far East that carried articles about it were banned. On internet chat sites the censors have moved in to delete any postings critical to the man hailed as the Great Helmsman of China.

Chang’s book, published by Jonathan Cape, has attracted most attention for its portrayal of Mao as an utterly ruthless, evil figure who eliminated enemies by purges, poison and murderous traps, abandoned three wives and was driven by ambition, not ideology. But the shock might not be so great in China as in the West, given the killings and disasters the country suffered in the 20th century, the general absence of humanity among its leaders, and the personal experience so many people had of the disasters of the past half-century.

In its 70-30 valuation of Mao, Beijing is willing to admit to one major fault — the Cultural Revolution he launched in 1966 to assert his authority by unleashing the Red Guards on the political establishment, which he feared was escaping his control. But this disavowal is used for a political purpose, to argue how important it is to maintain stability and how dangerous political reform would be.

Otherwise, Mao remains untouchable in China, though it has become increasingly clear he is a figure surrounded by self-created myths that no longer hold water. There is a very good reason for this, which explains why the new biography and other recent research represent a real and present danger for the rulers of the last leading state run by a Communist party. Remove the props of Maoist history and you bring into question the foundations of the party’s legitimacy to govern 1.3 billion people and head an emerging global economic superpower.

Four elements lie at the heart of the Mao story. All are totally or largely false.

A key assertion is that he was a pure nationalist who put his country first and led the only true resistance to the Japanese invasion of China from 1931 to 1945. This is particularly important today, when the wilting appeal of communism has led the authorities to promote nationalism to win public support, particularly against Japan. Mao as patriotic hero is a potent recruiting sergeant.

But this new biography shows how a foreign leader, Joseph Stalin, aided and directed Mao’s rise. Halliday is a Russian expert, and has extracted a wealth of documentation from the Moscow archives. The Soviet role in establishing the Chinese Communist party around 1920 was already known, but what is new is how, despite some divergences, Mao followed Stalin’s dictates to win power.

Only the Kremlin could provide the political backing, money and arms he needed. Since Stalin played a double game in China, maintaining relations with the Nationalists and supplying Mao’s great opponent, Chiang Kai-shek, with arms, Mao’s greatest fear must have been that Moscow would desert him in the name of realpolitik. To avoid that, he kowtowed to Moscow — even after he achieved power he rose to his feet during a visit by a Soviet envoy to cry out three times “ May Stalin live ten thousand years”.

Another big hole in the Mao-as-patriot story comes during the full-scale war that broke out with Japan in 1937. Apart from one offensive, of which the Chairman disapproved, the Red Army avoided conflict, saving its resources for civil war with the Nationalists after Tokyo’s defeat. Petr Parfenovich Vladimirov, the main Soviet adviser at Mao’s headquarters, makes this evident in his diary, which was published in 1974 in India but escaped attention until recently.

Communist forces, Vladimirov noted in 1942-43, “have long been abstaining from both active and passive action against the aggressors”. Instead, they were ordered to retreat and seek truces. Visiting battle areas a little later, a US unit found that Communist units had struck non-aggression agreements with the invaders. Trade flourished across the lines.

Nor was this all. The Communists maintained contacts with the collaborationist regime set up by Japan. Mao even floated the idea of a ceasefire with Japan in northern China.

Similarly, the base from which the Chairman operated during the war years at Yenan in north China turns out to have been very different from the model society of selfless idealists portrayed in official writing, and reproduced by many western accounts. The truth was that the base writhed with political intrigue as Mao used terror and mass indoctrination to get unquestioning allegiance.

On top of this, the politburo decided to go into the opium trade. Vladimirov records a cadre telling him narcotics would “play a revolutionary vanguard role”. Trading as the Local Product Company and describing its output as “soap” in its records, the Communist drug enterprise exported millions of boxes of opium a year, supplying it to itinerant merchants or using the Red Army for transport through enemy lines. A Taiwanese researcher estimates this provided 40% of the base’s revenue.

The war against Japan over, the orthodox story is that, led by the all-wise Chairman, China’s peasants overthrew the reactionary Nationalists in a template of rural revolution. In fact, Mao had a low opinion of the peasantry, amounting to contempt. While the masses in the Communist rural areas were needed to provide manpower and act as bearers, the Chairman preferred attacking cities to waging war in the fields as the Chinese civil war unfolded after Japan’s defeat in 1945.

Initially, he was not very successful. Though it was exhausted by the long war with Japan, Chiang’s regime pushed the Communists to the far north of the country, and was poised to finish them off. At that moment, a powerful American emissary, the future secretary of state George Marshall, forced Chiang to call a truce, which allowed the Red Army to escape.

Stalin then came through as Moscow provided large quantities of supplies to the Chinese Communists. Using Russian arms and tactics, Communist forces swept south, crossed the Great Wall, took Beijing and defeated the Nationalists in an epic battle involving millions of men in east China. Despite the peasant legend, this was the victory of a modern army using American equipment captured from the Nationalists, as well as Soviet supplies — the first troops to enter Beijing rode in US trucks.

A hidden element in that victory, as Chang and Halliday lay out, was that key Nationalist generals were secret Communist agents or switched sides. These defections hammered the final nail in the Nationalist coffin and, at the end of 1949, Chiang flew to Taiwan to dream fruitlessly of reconquering the nation he had lost.

It is also clear that the most important plank in the Maoist platform is deeply worm-eaten. The year-long Long March out of southeast China to a safe haven in the north of the country in 1934-35 is extolled as one of the great heroic feats of the 20th century, in which the Red Army, under Mao’s leadership, scaled mountains, forded torrents and crossed murderous swamps as it fought off Chiang’s troops. Fanned by uncritical reports from western writers, the trek became proof of the Chairman’s genius and his natural-born aptitude to lead the cause.

The reality was that regional warlords allowed the Red Army to escape for fear that Chiang’s central government troops would set up permanent camp in their domains. The Communists killed huge numbers of peasants along the way.

Far from trekking with his men, Mao was carried on a litter. When his wife was severely wounded by shrapnel, he paid her no attention. Chang and Halliday even report that the most celebrated incident of the journey, in which intrepid soldiers were said to have climbed across the chain links of a demolished bridge above a foaming river, simply never happened. They also say that Chiang let the Communists escape because he hoped that, in return, Stalin would release his son, who was being held in Moscow.

Confronted with such a charge sheet, what would Beijing be left with if it allowed the myths to be stripped away? An inhuman dictator who cared nothing for the ideology on which the post-1949 state is supposed to be based. A revolution achieved by armed force, not popular support. A wartime leader who dealt with the enemy, and presided over a drug empire. A serial murderer who dreamt up torture methods and exulted in the suffering of victims. A man for whom relationships had no meaning, who despised the masses and who fabricated his own image for posterity.

Given that, it is no wonder the government and party hold back from allowing the founding myths of the regime to be brought into serious question. The party is intent on controlling any move towards openness for fear of being engulfed by a tide of change. But if China is to become a modern state, its leadership will have to recognise that, so long as it does not come to terms with history, it will be moored to the past and to a deeply distorted account of events.

Still, behind the censorship, there are some openings in the curtain. Mao’s misdeeds are becoming better known among the Chinese people. Jung Chang is working on a Chinese version of her book, which she hopes will be smuggled into the mainland. Last month a Chinese publisher said it wanted to bring out a translated edition of my book Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost.

Given its warts-and-all picture of the generalissimo, this may not seem surprising: he is still officially regarded on the mainland as an enemy of the people. But I wait with interest to see what the publisher does with the passages on the Red Army’s hands-off approach to the Japanese, the Communist opium business, the Long March, and the nature of the Communist victory.

Posted by rakhier at 10:37 PM | Comments (0)

An Australian wonders about Islam...

An Australian writer wonders in his newspaper column if all the talk he has heard from Moslem leaders is just lies. It is pretty worrying that so few Moslem leaders will condem terrorism. Full essay in the extended section.

ANDREW BOLT (20 July 2005) Herald Sun

It's time we accepted the difficult truth: many of the Muslims we invite to live in Australia want to destroy us.

FOR four years, since the September 11 attacks, I've begged our Islamic leaders to drive extremists from their mosques.

For four years I've also reassured you that most Muslims here are moderate.

I've even insisted they have some moderate Muslim leaders, and last week again endorsed Sheik Fehmi Naji El-Imam of Preston mosque as a man of peace.

How eager I was to praise. Heavens, I described as "moderate" the Melbourne-based Islamic Information Services Network of Australia (IISNA), which purged from its website articles I'd noted claiming democracy was a sin, Jews were behind September 11 and Western society was a pollution.

But was I just kidding myself? Isn't it becoming terribly clear that Islam -- at least the Islam of Australia's Arab sheiks and imams -- is hostile to our society?

Isn't it now obvious we should never have let into our country those imams who now preach hate?

Isn't the evidence that some cultures -- Muslim Arab ones -- pose more problems than their importation at this rate is worth? Isn't multiculturalism making these problems worse?

I know these are dangerous, hurtful questions. I also know many Muslims will feel deeply offended, loving this country and obeying its laws, and I wish only I heard from them far more often.

But the London bombings, perpetrated by home-grown Muslims, makes our silence on such issues not a sign of civility, but suicide.

So let me admit that the past few days have been terrible for those of us who thought we could count on Muslim leaders for real help against the Muslim extremists who threaten us.

Such setbacks we've had.

Only last week I'd praised Sheik Fehmi as a good man, who'd condemned the London bombings. But a day later he was asked about fellow Melbourne sheik Mohammed Omran, a friend of a suspected al-Qaida boss, who'd claimed September 11 was really the work of a US-based conspiracy.

"He is entitled to his own thinking," Fehmi replied meekly. Then, asked if Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terrorists had committed those attacks, he added: "We cannot say. We do not know these things."

How can Muslim leaders fight terrorism, when the most moderate of them won't condemn even bin Laden, or admit that monster's self-confessed guilt?

Fehmi was not my only disappointment. I checked the IISNA site this week, and among the announcements of classes and prayers found this advice to a reader who'd asked if it was a sin to kill non-Muslims:

"In regard to non-Muslims who are at war with the Muslims and do not have a peace treaty with the Muslims or are not living under Muslim rule, then Muslims are commanded to kill them, because Allah says . . . 'Fight those of the disbelievers who are close to you, and let them find harshness in you.' "

If that's advice passed on by a "moderate" Islamic group, what must the radical ones here say?

Well, we know that, too. In a Melbourne bookshop run by Omran a Herald Sun reporter this month found books being sold that command Muslims to ready for war and to hate Jews.

In Sydney last week, the Islamic Bookshop, Australia's largest of the kind, was found (again) selling similar poison near the Lakemba mosque, including a book with tips on how to blow yourself up and kill plenty.

"The form this usually takes nowadays is to wire up one's body, or a vehicle or a suitcase with explosives and then to enter among a conglomeration of the enemy and to detonate," it says.

"There is no other technique which strikes as much terror into their hearts."

Again and again we're told such things aren't typical. Apologists, too often Muslim converts with little clout among ethnic groups, claim Islam means peace. But again and again we are left feeling like dupes.

The genuinely charming Waleed Aly, of the Islamic Council of Victoria, goes on 3AW to tell us the radical Mufti of Australia, Sheik Taj el-Din el-Hilaly, who has praised suicide bombers as "heroes" and called the September 11 attacks "God's work against oppressors", is not a big worry because he represents no one. Aly says he doesn't even know who made the man a mufti, our highest ranking Islamic cleric.

But the truth, Waleed, is that your own council voted to make Hilaly the Mufti in a decision of the Federation of Islamic Councils of Australia. Why won't you sack him?

Everywhere disappointment. Hilaly's spokesman, Keysar Trad, soothes us with false claims that the Mufti is misquoted and is a proud Australian, but he turns out himself to have been a translator for the Islamic Youth Movement, a pro-bin Laden group whose leader, Bilal Khazal, now faces terrorism-related charges in Sydney.

We also find Trad has written articles with lines such as: "The criminal dregs of white society colonised this country (Australia) and . . . the descendants of these criminal dregs tell us that they are better than us."

Faced with such evidence whichever way I turn, what else can I think about Islam -- or Arab Islam, at least -- but that it is an enemy of our culture, our society? And I ask: How did we come to let in the extremist preachers of such a hostile creed?

Why did we let in sheiks such as the Jordanian-born Omran, who declares Islam rejects democracy and instructs Muslims to go to Iraq to fight coalition troops? Why did we let in the Egyptian-born Hilaly?

But so much that we did in the name of multiculturalism was dangerously naive. Just think: only a few years ago the jihad-preaching Islamic Youth Movement, which met in Hilaly's mosque, was given three grants -- two state multicultural grants to run language classes and one work-for-the-dole grant to smarten up its offices.

Then there was all that other multicultural pampering to help Muslim ethnic groups here keep their distance, their "identity".

In March, the Victorian Multicultural Commission, whose grants budget the Bracks Government has tripled, even ran a football carnival for teenagers who were split into ethnic teams -- the Turks playing the Greeks, the Lebanese the Jews and so on.

Does this make any sense in a society where the urgent need now is not to reinforce old tribal loyalties, but dissolve them in a warm pool called "Australia"?

As you figure the answer, remember that Lebanese Australian children at the Muslim-dominated Moreland Secondary College, now closed after non-Muslim students fled, danced for joy at the September 11 attacks. Remember Lebanese ethnic gangs are strong in Sydney.

How hapless we've been, refusing to admit we were importing a problem that multiculturalism could only make worse.

For example, we have allowed into Australia Lebanese -- many of them Muslim -- who are often uneducated, unskilled and poor

in English. Their Islam was yet another barrier to their assimilation.

The results were as predictable as they were politely ignored -- a jobless rate and imprisonment rate double that of other Australians. Gangs. Poverty. A near ghetto in Lakemba.

What an unholy recipe: First we build a vulnerable underclass of unassimilated people with a religion of rejection. Then we let loose on them imported radicals preaching a hatred of our society; teachers who instruct them in the shame of our history; and multiculturalists who pay them to keep their distance and retain their much nicer ways.

A LL this always was foolish. Now we see it was dangerous as well, since British-born Muslims bred in a similar stew of multiculturalism, ethnic enclaves and Islamist extremism, have gone to war.

We need now to change ideas once thought sacred by our cultural elite.

First, we must be more wary about the dangers of importing cultures that clash with the one that has built this free, rich and democratic society.

As a former Chief Justice, the late Sir Harry Gibbs, said in 2002: "A state is entitled to prevent the immigration of persons whose culture is such that they are unlikely readily to integrate into society, or at least to ensure that persons of that kind do not enter the country in such numbers that they will be likely to form a distinct and alien section of society, with the resulting problems that we have seen in the UK."

Second, we must ban mosques from hiring imams from overseas, or at least those who preach race hate or damn democracy. If Islam does mean peace, let only peace be preached.

And, third, we must show more pride in this country, and switch our multicultural cash from funding division to building unity.

After all, the duty of government is to make one nation out of many tribes -- and not the deadly reverse.

Posted by rakhier at 10:22 PM | Comments (0)

July 14, 2005

Well, there is at least one Moderate Moslem...

An Arab intellectual named Sadik al-Azm published an essay called Islam and Secular Humanism. Worth the read

Let me restate my answer in a somewhat different and perhaps clearer form: Islam as a coherent, static ideal of eternal and permanently valid principles is, of course, compatible with nothing other than itself. As such it is the business of Islam to reject, resist and combat secularism and humanism to the very end, like any other major types of polities and varied forms of social and economic organisation that human history produced and threw up in the lives of peoples and societies. From kingship to republic, from slavery to freedom, from tribe to empire, from ancient city state to modern nation-state. Similarly, Islam as a world-historical religion stretching over 14 centuries has unquestionably succeeded in implanting itself in a whole variety of societies, a whole multiplicity of cultures, a whole diversity of life forms ranging from the tribal-nomadic to the centralized-bureaucratic, to the feudal-agrarian, to the mercantile-financial, to the capitalist-industrial.

In light of these palpable historical facts, adaptations and precedents it should be clear that Islam has had to be very plastic, adaptable, malleable and infinitely reinterpretable and reversible to survive and flourish under such contradictory conditions and widely varying circumstances as referred to above. This is why I would conclude that there is nothing to prevent historical Islam in principle from coming to terms and making itself compatible with such things as secular humanism, democracy and modernity. Whether it actually does and/or evolves in that direction is a historical contingency and a socio-cultural probability, depending on what actually living and kicking Muslims do as historical agents.

His comments on Turkey are facinating:

This novel development generates the following most intersting paradox: as is well known, the currently ruling Islamic party in Turkey is the most eager proponent and promoter of Turkey’s membership in the European Union – a “Christian Club“ as Valéry Giscard d’Estaing once called it. At the same time, the Turkish military establishment, traditionally the staunchest guardian of Turkish secularism and the bastion of its Kemalist experiment, is now the most important opposer of Turkey’s membership in the secular European Union.

What are we to make of this paradox? It is clear to me that this Turkish Muslim democratic party hopes that EU-membership will help put an end to the military’s traditional meddling in the affairs of the Turkish state. The army generals know this very well and react accordingly by doing their best to delay and abstruct the process for as long as possible. This is why I think the EU would do all parties concerned a great favor and an enduring service by taking Turkey by the hand and helping it through this difficult and risky transition period – pretty much the way it had aided Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal to overcome their troubled fascist, militaristic and authoritiaran pasts respectively. Certainly, Turkish membership in the EU would make it almost impossible for the military there to revert to type and distort their country’s fragile democracy. It would also make it just as difficult for any Islamic party or coalition of such parties, to revert to type in the future and ruin Turkey’s promising experiment by one form or another of Muslim fundamentalism, scripturalism and literalism.

Both the Arab world and Islam in general are in dire need right now of a reasonably free, democratic and secular model that works in a Muslim society. Turkey is at the moment the most likely place for such a model to develop and mature, given the assistance of the EU-membership and the safeguards it provides. In other words, what we need here is a credible functioning counter-example to the failed Muslim Taliban instance that the Americans left us with in Afghanistan not so long go, with all its horrors and deformities.

Read the whole thing. Hat tip to Martin Kramer.

Posted by rakhier at 04:12 PM | Comments (0)

Editorial in the Telegraph about the lack of a Moderate Islam...

Yet another writer bemoans the fact that there are few "moderate" Moslems.

This was not a funny coincidence. It was because the IRA preached a doctrine about Ireland and called on the loyalty of a perverted version of Irishness. Therefore, the words "Irish" and "terrorist" went together, hard though this was on the majority of Irish people. The Brian Paddicks of the day would have been appallingly negligent if they had not concentrated their investigations among the Irish. And the vigilance of the public, which the police then and now rightly call for, inevitably directed itself towards Irish neighbours, Irish accents, Irish pubs.

So it must be with Muslims in Britain. In fact, the situation is more serious because we are dealing with a religion, not merely a national aspiration, and the demands of a religion are more absolute than anything else. If fanatics can persuade people that their religion insists that they kill others (and often themselves) in its service, then they will obey. And whereas the IRA, though utterly sadistic and fanatical, kept in mind a political aim which, once achieved, would mean that they need kill no longer, the religious fanatic lacks even this check on his behaviour.

From time to time, perhaps, he will kill for a specific reason - to take power in one country, to drive foreign troops out of another - but, in principle, there is no end to his killing until everyone who does not share his particular version of truth is exterminated...

The faith Mohammed taught does not just hope that the world will become Muslim. It wants all human society and politics to be governed by religious law: it draws no distinction between the secular and religious sphere (except to condemn the secular). Therefore, Muslim leaders find it very difficult to resist the hotheads who say that Sharia - the divine law - should be imposed wherever possible.

In addition, the religion is absolute in its attitude to particular bits of territory. It is forbidden, for example, that any other religion be practised in the Arabian peninsula, because that land is considered sacred to Islam. Therefore, it is hard for a "moderate" to oppose the second-class citizenship of Christians or Jews in Muslim lands, or to say that "infidels" fighting in Muslim countries should not be murdered - even when they are his fellow citizens in a Western country...

It is only when you start thinking about what we are not getting from leaders of British Muslims, and indeed Muslim religious leadership throughout the world, that you start to see how much needs doing. The moderates are not pressed hard for anything more than a general condemnation of the extremists.

When did you last hear criticisms of named extremist groups and organisations by Muslim leaders, or support for their expulsion, imprisonment or extradition? How often do you see fatwas issued against suicide bombers and other terrorists, or statements by learned men declaring that people who commit such deeds will go to hell?

When do Muslim leaders and congregations insist that a particular imam leave his mosque because of the poison that he disseminates every Friday? When did a British Muslim last go after a Muslim who advocates or practises violence with anything like the zeal with which so many went after Salman Rushdie?

Why is not more stigma attached to the Muslims who are murdering other Muslims every day in Iraq and the Middle East?

What communal protection is offered to those Muslims who really are brave and confront Islamist violence, or the poor treatment of women, or call for democracy in the Middle East? How much do mainstream political parties with Muslim councillors and candidates really insist on their religious moderation and co-opt them to extrude the bad people lurking within their communities?

Yes. Where is the Moslem stand against violence?

Posted by rakhier at 06:31 AM | Comments (0)

July 09, 2005

So much for that mystery...

For a shot time there was some question about whether the new president-elect of Iran (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) was one of the U.S Embassy hostage takers.

According to his own official website (all in Farsi), the appointed Mayor of Tehran and now president-elect boasts of his involvment in the U.S Embassy take-over. The Wikipedia article on Ahmadinejad list various pieces of evidence for and against the claim. Given his history and the fact that major power blocks in Iran support him, I believe that he was part of the hostage takers.

It really is hard to imagine how the Iranians could do more alienate the U.S. But I'm sure they will find a way...

Posted by rakhier at 02:19 PM | Comments (0)

Some quotes from the Koran on violence against infidels...

Sura 4-89: “They but wish that ye should reject Faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing (as they): but take not friends from their ranks until they flee in the way of Allah (from what is forbidden). But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them; and (in any case) take no friends or helpers from their ranks…”

Sura 9-29: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”

Sura 22-9: “As for the unbelievers for them garments of fire shall be cut and there shall be poured over their heads boiling water whereby whatever is in their bowels and skins shall be dissolved and they will be punished with hooked iron rods.”

Sura 47-4: “When you meet the unbelievers, strike off their heads; then when you have made wide slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives”

A vast majority of Muslims regard the Koran (the source of these quotes) as the Word of God. The word is fixed, immutable, and cannot be changed by man. The Koran is what it is. No discussion of the text as a human work which shows cultural influences and evolves over time is allowed. Show me comparable passages in the teachings of the Buddha, or of Jesus, or Confucius. You can not.

BTW: Moslems argue not over the words but the meaning. Translations are done and since none are "offical" (all translation of the Koran are officially considered inaccurate) the meaning in English has some variations. I've read one Moslem scholar argue that all these passages are not to be interperted literally. Yes, they will say the Koran does contain these passages but either (a) these commands are not to be taken litterally or (b) the words don't mean what they used to mean. Personally, I don't buy that theory.

Islam is the most violent major religion.

Posted by rakhier at 01:41 PM | Comments (0)

July 08, 2005

No More Despots!

Blogger Dean points out that the key idea behind the U.N. was the proposition that

the aim [of the UN] is to stop nations from from warring on each other except as a last resort. Inherent in that is the notion war is the worst of all possible outcomes. This needs to be challenged wherever and whenever possible, because it is a lie. Despotic regimes murdered more than four times as many people in the last 100 years as all the wars on the planet combined. Furthermore, wars are often fought for good reason, whereas despotic regimes never exist for any good reason; they exist only because of the willingness of good people to stand by and do nothing.

The evidence is clear on this and Dean is right. Internal deaths caused by evil governments killing their own people vastly exceed the deaths caused by all the wars of the last 100 years put together. In fact, internall killings are about four times the number of the deaths caused by international war.

Certainly international wars tend to be far more destructive than internal executions but that must be balanced against the sheer destructiveness of mudering hundreds of millions of people.

just don't bother your neigbors

We need to stop this. It is simply unacceptable. If we are concerned with world security, then it is a fact that the only thing which has ever been shown to increase the security of everyday people is freedom and democracy.

Hear hear!

Posted by rakhier at 01:46 PM | Comments (0)

July 07, 2005

London is Bombed...

So, the first big Al Qaeda terror attack in Europe or America since the Madrid bombing is this. My reaction: Is this the best they can do?

Londoners and the British public in general are not going to be frightened by this terror attack. There is no political point to trying to change British opinion by terror bombing three or four underground trains. Its been tried in the past and it doesn't work.

My sympathies to the families and friends who were killed or injured. As fellow warriors for Western Civilization, the road is rough, our enemies are evil. I salute you.

Posted by rakhier at 12:56 PM | Comments (0)

June 15, 2005

How is the war in Iraq going now?

According to this analysis by Professor Owens at the Navel War College, pretty well. As he says

One ratline follows the Euphrates River corridor — running from Syria to Husayba on the Syrian border and then through Qaim, Rawa, Haditha, Asad, Hit and Fallujah to Baghdad. The other follows the course of the Tigris — from the north through Mosul-Tel Afar to Tikrit and on to Baghdad. These two "river corridors" constitute the main spatial elements of a campaign to implement U.S. strategy.

The U.S. operations over the last 9 months have been aimed at denying the terrorists large "safe havens" (such as Fallujah) and shutting down the supply lines (at this point from Syria).

The good news is that most of the Syrian and Saudi border with Iraq is desert. In the old days the desert borders could not be controled or watched. Nowdays the U.S. has the capability of watching the desert and the capability of intercepting any movement into Iraq. Whether we are actually spending the money and effort to do this is a different question but we can in theory.

The two places we can not easily control are the populated lands surrounding the two major rivers that flow into Iraq: the Euphrates and the Tigris. This landscape is much harder to monitor than the desert thanks to the vegitation, the population, and the topography. Still, these are narrow corridors and we ought to be able to control or interdict movement through them, if we deploy enough forces.

The hardest border of all to control is the Iran-Iraq border. This border is rough, with a real population, significant vegitation and large mountains. If Iran wanted to destabilize Iraq by sending men and supplies across this long border, they could and it would be very hard to stop (think North Vietnam sending supplies and military forces to South Vietnam, yes, that hard to stop). The fact that Iraq is going to be dominated for decades to come by the majority Shia population may help us because Iran is also dominated by Shia clerics. The Iranian goverment may be reluctant to destabilize the new Iraqi government because it might be that the Iraqi government, if left alone, might turn into a friend to Iran.

Clearly we would like Iraq to destabilize Iran - peacefully - instead of Iraq turning into an ally of the evil Iranian government. But the Iranians seem to be following at "wait and see" attitude towards the Iraqi government.

Posted by rakhier at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)

June 08, 2005

Austin Bay talks about the Syrian Smugglers

This entry in the Austin Bay blog is well worth the read. It goes through and explains a Washington Post article about a Syrian smuggler family on the border with Iraq. Bottom line: the Syrian smugglers are happy to support the Iraqi terrorists by transporting men and material into Iraq. The majority of the men they take into Iraq are not Syrians but Arabs, many of them are Saudi (what a surprise!).

We need to control this border. There is no question about this. The fact that we can't (or won't) control our own border with Mexico doesn't detract from the necessity of this mission. I think it can be done. The border is mostly desert. Clearly the best case would be to get Syria to control its side of the border. A better government in Syria would be a big help. But we can't rely on that happening any time soon.

Posted by rakhier at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)

The Future Merger of Terrorists and Criminal Organizations

Joe Katzman has a facinating essay in which he talks about the possible future merger of terrorist groups (like Al Qaeda and the IRA) with criminal organizations. As he says

The ground is shifting under the feet of the nation state as a political entity. Real structural changes are in the offing, of a kind that can create a very different world. Are we up to the challenge? I don't know. What I do know, is that there is no scriptwriter behind the scenes to ensure a happy ending.

WE are the scriptwriters. Happy endings are NOT guaranteed. And the drama is just beginning."

Every system contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. The only way to stay in the game is to keep changing. Stasis is a certain road to failure.

Posted by rakhier at 09:56 AM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2005

Zimbabwe - the next Cambodia under Pol Pot?

So, while the U.S. is the world violator of human rights (according to the now bogus organization Amnesty International), Mr. Mugabe is busy turning his country into this year's version of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.

You can't do better than reading this entry by Wretchard and the comments from his readers.

This comment is accurate but heartless:

It's no longer appropriate to blame colonialism or exploitation for sub-Saharan Africa's woes -- other ex-colonies like Singapore have emerged and even thrived. Japan was almost totally destroyed after World War II, but (with significant American aid, to be sure) became a world economic power in just a few decades.

But Africa suffers from the same ills, year after year. The NGOs pour in money, and all that comes back is misery, broken dreams, and failed hopes. It is the NGOs, in my view, that have enabled the African states to continue playing the victim -- with aid and foodstuff pouring in, they are under no real pressure to reform.

We are seeing the wages of tribalism, cronyism, and backwardness. And you cannot blame America or the UN or even the NGOs (who have done much harm in the name of doing good). You can only look to the Africans themselves. We in the West have a lot of evils to atone for in Africa, but we are not responsible for much of the chaos that reigns there now, and it is useless self-flagellation to suggest that we are.

We could take over large chunks of Africa. We could impose good government on them. Should we? We are doing this sort of thing in the middle east right now. Its a lot of work, more than one thousand six hundred Americans have died in Iraq and we aren't done. We have spent more than 100 billion dollars in Iraq and we aren't done. There are limits to our power. We didn't screw up Africa. We didn't put Mugabe in power. We didn't run Zimbabwe for the last 25 years. How is this our responsibility?

Posted by rakhier at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)

The Problem with the EU Constitution: There is no European Community

This essay by a group clearly opposed to the (now dead) EU Constitution has a very cogent analysis of why the new Constitution could not be created democratically.

It is possible to turn the EU into a State, but it is not possible for that State to have a democratic basis. The reason is that democracy means rule by the demos, the people, through the representatives they elect and on whom they confer legitimacy and authority.

A European people does not exist except in the statistical sense, and one cannot be artificially created from above in the way the EU is attempting. The 450 million inhabitants of the EU are divided into many peoples, real national communities speaking their own languages, who desire to make their own laws, decide their own government and self-determine themselves as they have done for generations through representatives they elect and who are responsible to them.

The EU cannot be democratised by giving the European Parliament power to make laws instead of the 25-person Council of Ministers, as some suggest. The democracy that is needed to underpin a stable State is not just majorityrule, but majority rule on the basis of a community, a demos, normally a national community, where there is sufficient mutual identification and solidarity among its members as to induce minorities willingly to obey the majority, so giving majority rule its legitimacy and authority.

The existence of such a real, self-aware community is crucial for underpinningthe legitimacy and stability of a State with its own tax and public service system, from which some citizens are net gainers and others are net losers - if that State is to be stable and endure. It is the absence of such a community at European level, and the impossibility of artificially creating it, that is the root cause of the EU's crisis of authority and acceptability.

The EU's "democratic deficit" problem is inherently insoluble without repatriating major powers back from the supranational to the national level. The Constitution does the opposite of this. If it is ratified it can only worsen the crisis of democracy at both EU and Member State level. Just as people often only appreciate the value of health when they become ill, they appreciate the value of their democracy only when they have lost it, and they must begin the struggle to win it back again.

This is as good a definition of democracy as I've ever seen. Here is how I would rephrase it:

"A democracy which underpins a stable State is not just majority rule, but majority rule on the basis of a community where there is sufficient mutual identification and solidarity among its members as to induce minorities willingly to obey the majority, so giving majority rule its legitimacy and authority."

The key problem in a democracy is "what happens when I know I'm right but my side is in the minority?" Potentially you get civil war when this happens. Personally, when I look back on American of the late 1850s, I'm nearly convinced that John Brown was right.

Slavery in the U.S.

After the Supreme Court ruled (in the Dred Scott case)that slaves were property and no state could free a slave brought onto their land just becuase they didn't like slavery, the distinction between free states and slave states was logically at an end.

The free states were faced with the fact that people could now bring slaves with them anywhere in the U.S. and nothing could be done to stop it. Slavery was thus made legal throughout the entire U.S. At this point, a moral person who is opposed to slavery had some clear choices. Such a person could either (a) live with the supreme court decision, repressing their personal moral convictions for the sake of the country or (b) take up arms to put an end to this gross injustice.

John Brown actually believed in the essential notion that African-Americans were human beings, equal in all important ways with European-Americans. Given this belief, slavery was a monsterous and on-going multitude of crimes. Men, women, and children were being murdered, tortured, starved, raped, and forced to work for no pay every day throughout the southern states. How could a moral person sit by and do nothing in the face of such wide-spread, state-sanctioned evil?

The Dred Scott case caused the Civil War and in my opinion, the Civil War was justified. Slavery had to be ended everywhere in the U.S. or it could be ended nowhere.

Posted by rakhier at 10:13 AM | Comments (0)

June 02, 2005

The End of the E.U. 2004 Constitution...

I'm pleased and relieved that the E.U. proposed constitution is dead. I'm so glad to see the people in France and Netherlands have rejected this stupid monsterous document. Here is a great little editorial by David Brooks. And here is the even better editorial by A. Kaletsky in the London Times. Kaletsky says:

The idea that closer political integration could somehow turn these self-indulgent dreams into a new European “economic model” has been the dirty little secret of the EU project. Of course the citizens of Europe would like ever-rising incomes and ever more job security, in exchange for doing less and less work and retiring earlier and earlier — and they might be tempted to vote for a constitution which guaranteed these fantasies as fundamental human rights. On closer inspection, however, the citizens have begun to realise that their politicians have been selling Europe on a false prospectus.

The single market and the merging of foreign trade policies did genuinely create prosperity, but every subsequent project of European integration not only failed to deliver the results politicians promised but also made conditions worse. The single currency has been the most egregious. In exchange for giving up the basic tenet of sovereignty — the right to mint a currency and thereby manage the national economy — the EU promised economic prosperity and full employment. Instead the single currency has condemned the eurozone to stagnation and mass unemployment.

For years politicians have made Europe a pretext for imposing unpopular policies — cuts in pensions or higher taxes — which they were too cowardly to justify in their own right. But they always promised that giving up sovereignty to Europe would somehow stave off economic reality and make their citizens better off.

The bottom line is: the European Welfare state of the last 50 years is falling apart. It simply can not be sustained. As Brooks says

Over the last few decades, American liberals have lauded the German model or the Swedish model or the European model. But these models are not flexible enough for the modern world. They encourage people to cling fiercely to entitlements their nation cannot afford. And far from breeding a confident, progressive outlook, they breed a reactionary fear of the future that comes in left- and right-wing varieties - a defensiveness, a tendency to lash out ferociously at anybody who proposes fundamental reform or at any group, like immigrants, that alters the fabric of life.

This is the chief problem with the welfare state, which has nothing to do with the success or efficiency of any individual program. The liberal project of the postwar era has bred a stultifying conservatism, a fear of dynamic flexibility, a greater concern for guarding what exists than for creating what doesn't.

Posted by rakhier at 11:02 AM | Comments (0)

June 01, 2005

Austin Bay cogently blasts Amnesty International

Austin Bay on his blog (which is well worth reading these days) attacks Amnesty International's idiotic labeling of Guantanamo Bay as a modern day Gulag. Columnist Byrne of the Chicago Tribune is the guy who wrote the first essay which puts paid to the idea that our prison at Gitmo is comparable to the Soviet Gulags.

Frankly speaking I support the imprisonment of members of Al Qaeda at Gimo for as long as we want. Remember that is it standard practice for states to kill enemy spies during wartime. No trial. No public hearings. Britian did exactly this when World War II started. The British intelligence service went to every known or suspected German agent and gave them a choice: work for us a "double agent" or we will kill you. Some loyal Nazi spies refused and were immediately executed. The rest were "turned" and did exactly what the British intelligence agency told them to do for the duration of the war. I assert that the British were morally and legally in the right when they did this.

Al Qaeda declared war on the United States. They have no nation, no army, no treaties with us. They acknowledge no rules of justice or convention. When they capture Americans they execute them and post the videos on their sympathetic web sites (remember Daniel Pearl?). We owe them nothing. We can do anything we want to members of Al Qaeda. So far we have treated the majority of the captured members of Al Qaeda better than they deserve. Some of the people we released from Gitmo have gone back to fighting us again. Why should we release them?

The bottom line is: the rules of war apply to people who (1) fight for a country which signs the rules of war and abide by its provisions (2) who wear uniforms which clearly distinguish them from civilians. Neither condition applies to Al Qaeda members. The rules of war simply do not apply to these people. The best analog is that of spies. No law, no treaty protects spies. No rule says we have to release spies after some time elapses. No rule says you can not kill spies during war time. Historically we have executed spies in the past, as has every other country in war.

The day that Al Qaeda surrenders, declares peace with the United States, and lays down its weapons, is the day that we will have to think about how much longer we will hold Al Qaeda members at Gitmo. That day hasn't come.

Posted by rakhier at 09:53 AM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2005

Dean on Vietnam War Protesters...

Dean of Dean's World has this cogent critique of some Vietnam War protesters.

1) Isolationists of the "this is none of our business" variety.

2) People who just didn't want themselves or their brothers, husbands, and sons drafted.

3) Liberals who thought it was a lost, doomed cause.

4) Pacifists of the "all war is bad" variety.

5) Communists, communist apologists, and generally anti-American dips***s.

The only people I really hold in contempt are groups 4 and 5. Pacifism is immoral, selfish, and destructive. Communism is as evil as Nazism. But the others are people I can understand and respect.

What disturbs me is that, in retrospect, a lot of people just sort of accept as axiomatic an historical view which reads, "this was an evil racist immoral war fought becuase America was a bunch of bullies and/or wanted to fuel the military-industrial complex." Honestly, that's the only position I take strong exception to. That and the revisionist history that goes along with it, most of which seems to have been concocted by groups 4 and 5.

Ho Chi Minh was never, ever a "freedom fighter," nor even a home-grown hero. Nor was he ever a sincere revolutionary who wanted help from the Western powers and only turned communist because "we gave him no choice." All of that is pure commie propaganda bulls**t. He was a KGB stooge and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist radical from day one. And when he got into power, exactly what the anti-communists said would happen did happen: the bloodletting was horrendous, and the oppression incalculable. The much-maligned "domino theory" was also vindicated, as neighboring regimes quickly fell (or in some cases very nearly fell) to totalitarianism.

Now it may be that we never should have gone there in the first place. It may also be that we made the right choice in going but conducted ourselves poorly. All of that is debateable. Either way, it is fair to say that America cannot stop all oppression and genocide worldwide.

In retrospect, the only thing I find genuinely contemptible in our exit was that, after the U.S. troop withdrawl, we broke our promise to the government of South Vietnam. We suddenly, and with little warning, cut off all the funding we had promised to give them so that they could defend themselves--and then sat on our hands while hundreds of thousands were butchered in the camps and millions more fled for their lives, with quite possibly as many drowning or dying of exposure as died in Uncle Ho's "re-education" camps.

What he says is true. Ho was a Communist from the begining. It is also the case that the domino theory was vindicated by events following our withdrawal from Vietnam in 1973. It is also the case that the Congress (and the American people) left South Vietnam in the lurch, despite our sworn agreements to the contrary - with the result being that about 1 million South Vietnamese lost their homes and at least 150,000 were killed.

Posted by rakhier at 04:18 PM | Comments (0)

Neo-NeoCon on Vietnam...

Interesting series of posts by Neo-NeoCon on the Vietnam war. The best is this one Vietnam - After the Fall

Vietpundit links not only to the series by Neo-NeoCon but also to an essay by Thi Hoai called Vietnam in my Heart

After liberation, however, southern society was subjected to intense repression: prison, concentration camp, the seizure of property, discrimination against bi-racial children, the purge of intellectuals, the destruction and prohibition of southern culture, the complete erasure of numerous careers and many lives. These are not the actions of righteous winners. Nor are they evidence of the superiority of the new regime in relation to its recently vanquished enemy.

Thirty years after the war, the country has never once acknowledged the painful exodus of almost 1 million southern Vietnamese, the “boat people”. It is as if they are no longer Vietnamese and have been excommunicated from the unified nation. It is as if the country belongs to only a single group of Vietnamese but not to another. It is as if they believed that national feeling can grow naturally from out of a deep hole of division and hatred, like a rice plant growing out from a trench.

Posted by rakhier at 04:09 PM | Comments (0)

April 28, 2005

Three Experts Comment on Islamic Extremism

Three experts Irshad Manji, Steven Emerson, and Gilles Kepel respond to some important questions about Islam and the west. Ms. Manji is quite interesting to listen to ---

Manji: It mostly depends on how you define extremism. If you mean "literalism," then it is more than widespread - it is mainstream. If you mean the overt preaching of violence, then it percolates on the margins. The key here is to recognize that because literalism is mainstream in Islam today, the thin minority of Muslims who have any intention of engaging in terror are nonetheless protected by the vast majority of moderate Muslims who don′t know how to debate and dissent with that proclivity.

Let me explain why. We Muslims, even in the West, are routinely raised to believe that because the Koran comes after the Torah and the Bible (historically and chronologically), it is the final and therefore perfect manifesto of God′s will. The Koran, we are taught, does not lend itself to the inconsistencies and ambiguities and outright contradictions and, God forbid, human editing like those earlier scriptures. Mainstream Muslims believe, as an article of faith, that the Koran is not like any other scripture. It is the summit of the holy books. This is a supremacy complex, which even moderate Muslims share. And this supremacy complex is dangerous because when abuse happens under the banner of Islam, most Muslims do not yet know how to debate, dissent, revise or reform. That′s because we have not yet been introduced to the possibility, let alone the virtue, of asking questions about our holy book. The same cannot be said today for “moderate” Christians and Jews.

Clearly, this is a problem. Hat Tip to Winds of Change.net

Posted by rakhier at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)

April 25, 2005

The Coming Anarchy in Nepal

This is a good post on what the author, Curzon, calls The Coming Anarchy in Nepal.

I personally find it hard to support in any way a king like the current king of Nepal. A man who is unfit to lead the country and seems to have no feel for government. Many people would make better leaders, such as the Nepalese themselves.

It is true that Communist revolutionaries have a bad track record but it is not as bleak as the author suggests. Counter examples to Cambodia and Afghanistan are Nicaragua, and Cuba. I think Castro is one of the worst leaders in the world today and I think the Sandinistas were very average political leaders but you can not honestly say that when they took over millions died in Cuba or Nicaragua.

Frankly, the insergents in Nepal have valid points. 90% of the land in Nepal is owned by a small class of hereditary land owners. They have owned the land for hundreds of years and have done little to promote the well being of the people who work on the land. The average Nepalese is dirt poor and has no hope for improvement in their life time.

The current government in Nepal is a king who rules, not because he has any skill in ruling but because his brother was killed by his own son. This is no way to run a country in the modern world. The current king seems to think it is still the year 1750 C.E.

Ideally the Nepalese would throw out the useless King Gyanendra and create a new democratic republic. The new government could then address the really serious needs of land reform and poverty in Nepal. I certainly don't want to see another Pol Pot or Stalin or Mao in control of Nepal but I also don't want to see King Gyanendra rule as a despot keeping the Nepalese in poverty while his sons cruise around Kathmandu in expensive autos for the next 20 years.

Bottom line: Monarchy is a terrible form of government. Most modern governments are much better than Monarchies. Change can be good.

Posted by rakhier at 04:28 PM | Comments (0)

April 14, 2005

On the former Pope - Karol Wojtyla

I have an opinion on the late Pope. On balance I think he was a net negative for the World as a whole, though a very small negative. Not as bad as Pope Pius 12, not as good as Pope John 23. He had many positive attributes - energy, spirit, dedication, conviction that he knew the right direction for the Catholic Church. But, in my judgement, he was wrong about the right direction for the Catholic Church, wrong about the Church's moral stand on a large number of critical moral issues, and wrong about the Church's relation to true evil in the world.

People like to give the Pope credit for the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, or for the rise of the Solidarity Movement. I don't think either claim is a good one. Communism in the U.S.S.R. didn't work. Everyone in the system knew it. But it did produce some true believers, like Gorbachev, who thought that if Communism was done morally, it would be a good system. He was wrong about that but he didn't try to "fix" his mistake by killing millions of people (as Lenin and Stalin had done before him). The Pope had nothing to do with Gorbachev or his moral decisions - Gorbachev and his fellow reformers were atheists.

As to Solidarity, yes the Poles were (and are) Catholic. Yes the Pope was Polish, but I fail to find any linkage between the origin of the dockworker's strike in Gdansk and the Pope. The shipyard strike in August of 1980 seems to have had no connection to the Pope but does fit a long pattern in the life of Lech Walesa - a man who wanted to work in a good shipyard where workers weren't abused and forced to work under idiots.

I would like to point out - for those people who want to claim the Pope is a great hero - that a true test of the Pope's moral character can be found in his relation to one of the greatest moral struggles in Polish history: World War II. Poland was attacked in 1939. Mr. Wojtyla, then 19, was in a university. He stayed in the University until it was closed by Nazis. He responded to the Nazi occupation by hidding in an underground seminary run by the very powerful Archbishop of Krakow. So far as we know, his activities during this time of war and horrendous evil was to study to be a priest. There are many things Mr. Wojtyla could have choosen to do. Many dangerous things which might have saved lives or helped defeat the Nazis. But instead, his life during this time is a blank. Empty. This is not the behavior of a great hero (like say Mordechaj Anielewicz or Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski). One can say that his behavior as a priest and later bishop in Communist Poland was heroic. Perhaps so.

Finally, on a lesser note, I think the Pope should have stepped down from the Papacy in 2000. His health was clearly failing and the church basically stood still for the last 5 years, waiting for him to die. Important things happened in the last 5 years while the Catholic Church has essentially been in a state of suspended animation.

Interesting article critical of the Pope here by John Derbyshire.

Article about Mr. Wojtyla here (Wikipedia)

Posted by rakhier at 11:21 AM | Comments (0)

March 02, 2005

The Iraqi Insergents have Lost...

As this article in the Winds of Change.net says - the Insergency is dying. Really. When the Insergents can only blow up bombs in front of bakeries or in front of mosques or in front of hospitals, they are flailing around like a snake with its head chopped off. No rational insergency would attack targets which have ZERO military value. No rational insergency would target ordinary Iraqi people. This insergency is dying and we have won. Hundreds if not thousands more people will die over the coming years but the hard part is over and it is a huge victory for Democracy, for the United States, and for the Neo-Cons who argued for this.

Posted by rakhier at 12:17 PM | Comments (0)

February 22, 2005

Dr. Johnson on Expanding Democracy...

Dr. Paul Johnson, writing in Forbes.com has this to say about America bringing democracy to the Middle East:

As for European intellectuals, who command so much power in the media, universities and opinion-forming circles, they have done everything they possibly could to abuse America's initiative in Iraq and to prevent the installation of freedom. Some make it clear that they would much prefer Iraq to be run by men like Saddam than by American-backed democrats. Of course, intellectuals pay lip service to free elections but in practice have a profound (if secret) hatred of democracy. They cannot believe that their votes should count for no more than the votes of "uneducated" people who run small businesses, work on farms and in factories and have never read Proust.

The intellectuals wanted the Iraqi elections to be defeated by terror. But now that the elections have actually taken place, they want the new government to fail. They want democracy to fail in Afghanistan as well so that they can smile smugly and say, "We told you so." For if democracy were to triumph everywhere, what role would there be for the intellectual critic?...

Just as the appalling 20th century was the age of the totalitarian state, the Gulag and Auschwitz, so the 21st may come to be seen as the age of government "of the people, by the people, for the people." If so, the U.S., by its courage and persistence, will be able to take primary credit. It has certainly led from the front, and it has shown that it knows how to use its position as the world's sole superpower with judgment, honor and unselfishness.

I think Abraham Lincoln would be proud of what George W. Bush and the U.S. forces have done. After the freeing of the slaves, what more logical and benevolent step could there be than to free millions of Arabs from the slavery of terror?

Hear hear!

Posted by rakhier at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)

February 15, 2005

The Double Standard

This essay by Roger Kimball in the New Criterion blog is a brilliant analysis of the current situation.
The U.N. is an institution that is "good" and can basically do no wrong. Even when it is involved in the biggest corruption scandel in world history - who cares? Even when it is revealed that in 5 of the 10 U.N. peace-keeping missions the staff and military there are engaged in pedophilia, rape, and organized prostitution - big whoop.

The U.N. gets a free pass no matter what it does or how badly it performs it's "job". By contrast, some institutions are "evil" and they get attacked no matter what they do - good or bad, right or wrong. The U.S. and Israel are always wrong, always evil, always doing the world harm.

This is an idiotic view and yet, that is the conventional wisdom from a large number of supposedly intelligent people.

Posted by rakhier at 09:47 AM | Comments (0)