Pat Buchanan is a paleoconservative and an isolationist, albeit a thoughtful and articulate one. Here, presented without further comment (I’m too preoccupied at the moment with packing up and getting on the road), is an essay in which he describes recent events in Georgia from a perspective that is far more sympathetic to Russia than anything you are likely to read around here.
It’s quite clear now that Russia is intent on reconquering Georgia, and that their decision to do so is a brazen and flamboyant test of Western power and resolve. What is less clear is how we can respond. We have many good reasons to support Georgia, a staunchly pro-Western nation and participant in NATO’s Partnership for Peace. But we are not likely to be inclined to go to war with Russia over Georgia, and Russia, which still considers the country part of its empire, knows it. Its action calls to mind Germany’s annexation of the Rhineland in 1936.
This is a major event.
In today’s New York Times, William Kristol considers our options. Have a look here.
Our reader Justin K., who, when he puts his ear to the ground, hears more than most, calls our attention to this item about the fighting in and about Ossetia, a conflict that is surely being savored with strategic appreciation by other interested parties in the caves and mountains to the east.
Things are getting hot in the former SSR. Our sources have suggested we follow along here, where readers will find further links as well.
An article in the New York Times a few weeks ago described the results of a Pew survey that inquired as to how the denizens of various nations felt about their governments and economies. Two authoritarian nations — China and Russia — did very well, while the Western democracies fared quite poorly.
On the opinion page of today’s New York Times is a worrisome assessment of the clouds gathering over Iran. Here.
Today’s Wall Street Journal carries an editorial item about the belated and largely symbolic response to the depredations of the Sudanese government. Here.
Our reader JK, a Navy man who is a steady source of all sorts of information, has provided us this link to an item about gathering tensions with Iran. The source is the blog Information Dissemination, whose focus is naval matters. We read:
Following an attack on Iran by Israel, Iran is not going to find much success trying to sink the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) in the Indian Ocean, but they might have a great deal of success killing you and me here in America. We don’t believe for one second that Iran is going to abide by the Geneva Conventions and not intentionally support the killing of American civilians in North America. If war happens, they are as likely if not more likely to attack here than in the Gulf. Whether you like it or not, there was absolutely no way the Democrats, including Barack Obama, were going to leave the possibility open that Israel attacks Iran, and the US gets hit by terrorist attacks inside the US while the FISA bill wasn’t passed.
This is a key point. The Democratic Party in mass shifted from a core position. This doesn’t happen without keen awareness to some strategic condition. Clearly some outside force has produced conditions which are far outside the scope of national politics, because nothing short of insight and real concern for political survival would Democrats find inspiration for such a massive policy shift with virtually no explanation to its core constituency. This is a major reason, and to Democrats scratching still their heads, an obvious sign we believe that Israel has demanded a time table.
Also from this item: “[T]he conditions for war are indeed being met.” Let’s hope not.
There’s a piece in today’s Times Magazine that is so breathtakingly misbegotten that I am reduced nearly to speechlessness. I had thought of giving it a thorough, line-by-line fisking, but as blogger Steve Sailer also realized upon reading it, it simply stands on it own, a fantastic self-caricature. It is, essentially, an argument that European culture is morally culpable for the crime of reluctance to abet its own destruction. One brief quote stood out above all, and will give you an idea of the tone of the essay:
[A] hallmark of liberal, secular societies is supposed to be respect for different cultures, including traditional, religious cultures — even intolerant ones.
Ah yes, of course: to be good secular liberals we must “respect”, and welcome into our midst, even cultures that implacably advocate the subjugation or destruction of our own. It’s our “hallmark”, after all.
Complete your education here.
Commenting on domestic politics has been such hard work lately — who’d have thought that people had such strong opinions? — that tonight we turn our attention to faraway Africa, where, they tell us, Zimbabwean pooh-bah Robert Mugabe has shown a rather mulish reluctance to abide by the results of recent elections. In a gracious gesture, however, he has now made it clear that he will gladly hand over the key to the executive washroom just as soon as a certain regional power, which has hitherto shown no interest whatsoever in the welfare of this bludgeoned nation, takes a more active role in the political process.
From reader JK comes a link to an article about a growing tension in the Persian Gulf. No, it isn’t between the Sunnis and the Shi’a, or between US diplomats and the Iraqi parliament, but between Islamic fundamentalists and those in the region who, having attracted enormous foreign investment, and having used it to build some of the most dynamic and opulent financial centers in the world, are also beginning to develop a taste for another Western export: freedom.
The nation of Indonesia is often cited as an exemplar of a “moderate” Islamic society (though of course it has had its share of Muslim extremism and terror). It is far from a being a tolerant, pluralistic society along Western lines, however; though one is “free” to worship, only five religions are on the list of government-approved options: Islam, Catholic and Protestant Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism. (It is no surprise, of course, that Judaism is not on the menu.)
It’s been a hectic weekend, and there’s been no time for writing. Fortunately, our West Coast correspondent Jess Kaplan has sent along two items of interest.
From Jess Kaplan comes this story about the disaster unfolding in Lebanon. Hezbollah, and by proxy Iran, now owns this tormented land.
Once again the despicable military junta that holds the nation of Burma hostage has forced the world to examine the presumptive “right” of inviolable national sovereignty. A horrifying natural cataclysm has just sheared away tens of thousands of its captive and wretched citizens, and laid its principal city to waste, while hundreds of thousands more — having already been reduced to ignominious poverty by their long years of thralldom to a brutal and criminally incompetent tyranny — now face the certain prospect of lethal famine and pestilence. The civilized peoples of the world stand at their gates, seeking nothing more than to help a ruined and prostrate country bind its wounds, feed its hungry, clear its rubble, and bury its dead. But, jackals that they are, Burma’s captors greet their visitors with a feral and desperate snarl, caring only to defend their kill.
That in the 21st century the world still permits entire nations to be kidnapped and enslaved in this way should shame us all.
We learn from today’s New York Times that the new Grand Poo-bah of Turkmenistan, the fabulously yclept Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, has begun dismantling in earnest the splendiferous personality cult of his predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, a.k.a Turkmenbashi. Mr. Niyazov’s image and idisosyncratic worldview had permeated every corner of Turkmen life during his reign, but no symbol of his absolute ascendancy loomed larger than his gold-plated effigy atop the Neutrality Arch, about which we scribbled a brief post (with photo) on the occasion of his death in December of 2006. The Arch in question, actually a three-legged tower, is the largest building in the capital city of Ashgabat, and the golden statue of Turkmenbashi at its apex was engineered so as to rotate one full circle each day, in order to keep our man facing always toward the Sun.
As long as I am to be pilloried as a racist and reactionary xenophobe anyway, I might as well carry on. Here’s the latest cave-in, this time from Britain.
No matter what your reaction — snarling in defiance, as are the conservative voices of the West, groveling in awe, as are the liberal governments of Europe, or exulting, with growing confidence, as in the mosques and madrassas — radical Islam is rising. Those who see it, rightly, as a potentially lethal threat to all that Western civilization stands for, argue for a variety of responses: restriction of immigration, economic boycotts, intolerance of non-assimilation, expulsion of seditious agitators, ethnic profiling, intellectual debate, military intervention, and the republishing of cartoons. One hears somewhat less, however, about another sort of response, one that might be the most effective of all: the education and empowerment of Muslim women.
I’m sorry to have been off the air yesterday; I spent a long day with the promising young band Bulletproof Soul at Avatar Studios, mixing some of the material we recorded a few weeks ago. I am also working at the office all day today, so can’t write at length now either — but it appears that our recent post about the distinction between democracy and government-by-consent has sparked a discussion that it would be interesting to continue.
I have often, in posts having to do with foreign policy, expressed the sentiment that it is in our interest to foster “democracy”. It has occurred to me, however, in the course of a recent conversation, that the essential point is to promote regimes that rule with the consent of the governed. I’m not sure that this is an important distinction, but it might be, so I thought I’d make it.
For the crime of expressing dissatisfaction with his government, Chinese freethinker Hu Jia has been sentenced to prison, despite an international chorus of protest. His wife remains under house arrest.
Meanwhile, when not distracted by its ongoing bludgeoning and suffocation of Tibet, China preens in the global spotlight as the host of the impending Olympics. It would behoove the rest of us not to show up, I think.
With a hat tip to Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna, we offer yet another frightening example of the withering of essential Western liberties under the steady pressure of Islamism. The latest gesture of craven appeasement comes from Austria, where a politician has been indicted for expressing an unfavorable opinion of Mohammed’s having married a six-year-old girl.
As long as we’re on the subject of spineless capitulation to religious extremism, here’s a relevant post over at Gates Of Vienna.
I have often expressed the opinion that the United Nations, though an appealing notion, is so feckless and corrupt, and so utterly devoid of any real power to inhibit the ambitions of scoundrels and tyrants, that the civilized nations of the world might simply be better off without it. Certainly the United States would; at the very least there’d be more parking available in Midtown.
Our commenter Peter K., a.k.a The One-Eyed Man (he actually has binocular vision), asks the following question about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the comment thread to a recent post:
If you are a Palestinian, what do you do?
The “peace process,” such as it is, has gotten them nowhere. In any event, there is a weak Israeli government which is unlikely to alienate the conservatives and make bold moves or conciliations. Violence is the only leverage they have, but this is something we all disapprove of.
What would you do if you were in Palestinian shoes?
It’s obviously a good question. While you can probably imagine what I might say here, I am in a recording studio all day today, and working tomorrow as well, so won’t be able to come back to this for a little while — but I encourage readers, including Peter himself, to comment.
From a friend of a friend in the mysterious East comes a pair of links to some videos featuring a Bahraini Shi’ite by the name of Dhiyaa al-Musawi. In the first clip he is being interviewed, in Arabic, and he is saying some extraordinary things.
As long as we are tilting at cultural relativism, here is a pithy account, by a former Muslim, of why we should not be shy about saying that post-Enlightenment Western culture is arguably humanity’s best effort yet.
The struggle of civilizations, or perhaps more aptly the struggle of modern civilization against medieval barbarism, has taken a depressing turn in the Netherlands. Unlike their neighbors the Danes, who have staunchly defended their liberties despite storms of outrage from thin-skinned Muslims mortally offended by a few cartoons, the Dutch are planning a somewhat different response to Islamic fury over a forthcoming film: supine, craven appeasement.
A BBC article informs us that the Turkish government, in an effort to ease the constant tension between medieval Islam and modern-day secularism, has commisioned a team of theologians to revise and update the Hadith, the body of lore and tradition based, allegedly, upon the sayings and deeds of Mohammed.
Continuing our recent focus on the decline of freedom in Russia, we see in today’s Wall Street Journal that Lev Ponomarev, an outspoken critic of the Russian penal system, has been charged with criminal libel:
On Friday, Mr. Ponomarev, a former aide to Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov and a colleague of opposition leader Garry Kasparov, was charged with criminally “slandering” General Yuri Kalinin, who runs Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service. Mr. Ponomarev has been calling attention to the often brutish treatment of prisoners in Russia’s roughly 700 penal colonies, some 50 of which have acquired reputations as “torture colonies.” He now is required to get government permission to leave Moscow. If convicted, he could face up to three years in a penal colony.
Story here.
In recent posts, inspired by a New York Times article and helped along by our well-informed friend Jess Kaplan, we’ve looked at Putin’s tightening grip on Russia. His power-grab has hardly confined itself to increasing restrictions on democracy, but has also, and arguably more dangerously for global stability and security, involved ruthless appropriation of major private industries, and use of this command of the energy sector as a bludgeon against his neighbors. This is mighty important stuff, but nobody seems to pay much attention. Why?
Yesterday we passed along a New York Times story about the deepening autocracy of the Putin regime, and our old friend Jess Kaplan commented insightfully. Today he has sent us a valuable article on the subject: The Myth of the Authoritarian Model: How Putin’s Crackdown Holds Russia Back, by the Stanford scholars Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss.
On the front page of today’s New York Times is a chilling account of just how bad things have got in Russia under the rapidly coalescing dictatorship of Vladimir Putin.
With a hat tip to James Taranto, here’s a story you didn’t see in the New York Times: Bob Geldof, the noted social activist, former Boomtown Rat, and star of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb video, praised George Bush for his commitment to fighting disease and poverty in Africa.
Much was made of a National Intelligence Assessment last year that suggested that Iran was not the nuclear threat it had been cracked up to be. In today’s Washington Sun, however, we read:
The director of national intelligence is backing away from his agency’s assessment late last year that Iran had halted its nuclear program, saying he wishes he had written the unclassified version of the document in a different manner.
Intelligence director Mike McConnell told a senate hearing yesterday that if he had had more time to write the document, he “probably would change a few things”.
“Declared uranium enrichment efforts, which will enable the production of fissile material, continue. This is the most difficult challenge in nuclear production. Iran’s efforts to perfect ballistic missiles that can reach North Africa and Europe also continue.”
He went on, “We remain concerned about Iran’s intentions and assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.”
In other words, let’s not be too complacent. Learn more here.
I’ve been nettled for years by the near-worship with which Bill Clinton has traditionally been regarded in these parts; if you ask most of my neighbors in Park Slope or Wellfleet, the man can simply do no wrong. This has always puzzled me, because although he is obviously highly intelligent and possessed of a certain raffish charm, he is also, as far as I can tell, a venal, ill-tempered, philandering rogue.
There are those who would have us believe that the root causes of Islamic terrorism are poverty and political oppression, and that if we Americans weren’t such swaggering imperialists, and could just get along a little more amicably with other cultures, we’d have less to worry about. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Our friend Jeffery Hodges (is he really out of bed and writing blog posts at 4:09 a.m.?) offers further evidence here.
There are two interesting editorial items in the Wall Street Journal this morning. Some of you won’t like them — particularly the first one, because it is by Fouad Ajami, whose viewpoint is far from neutral, and because it says some good things about George Bush, and about our recent adventures in the East. (There may be accusations of “twaddle”.) Nevertheless, I think it is worth reading, if only for the sake of balance. Feel free to fire away.
The second piece, by Bret Stephens, is about how our uncommonly good fortune here in America gives us a slightly skewed perspective about what real troubles are.
With a “hat tip” to the Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella, here is Garry Kasparov’s account of his recent arrest and imprisonment (as noted in these pages last week).
Neoconservatism takes a terrible pounding these days. The term “neoconservative” itself, and its common abbreviation, “necon”, are more often spat out in fury than with any understanding of what the word actually refers to, which is a coherent and morally informed school of thought that sees the traditional American ideals of liberty and democracy as fundamentally desirable anchors for our foreign policy.
Violence declined sharply in Iraq last month. This was such unwelcome news at the New York Times that the story, which opened with the sentence “The number of violent civilian deaths in Iraq dropped precipitously in September compared with the previous month”, was presented “below the fold” on page 10, having been knocked off the front page by a fast-breaking story about how girls in their early teens have become an attractive demographic target for Broadway producers.
One must imagine that gladder tidings, such as a massive flareup in sectarian violence, preferably with heavy coalition casualties, would have been featured more prominently.
Since 9/11, there has been a steady drone of voices from the Left asking “why do they hate us?”1, and supplying, lest we might be tempted to assign any blame whatsoever to our enemies, a litany of reasons why U.S. influence in the world is toxic and malevolent. They assume that jihadist assaults on the West are purely reactive; that if we had only somehow been nicer, our virulent Islamist foes would instead view us with benign indifference. The truth, however, is that fundamentalist Islam is not, and has never been, a passive agency in the world, but has always had a clear and proactive agenda: the creation of a worldwide Ummah, to be achieved by the elimination of infidels, through conversion or slaughter.
Horace Jeffery Hodges, the Gypsy Scholar, has just written an incisive post on this topic, with a number of illuminating links. Required reading.
Well, as we feared would happen, it appears that the peaceful uprising in Burma has been tamped down by ruthless violence. The UN has sent an envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, to speak with the ruling junta, and we can be sure that he will, at the very least, administer a stern finger-wagging — and if that proves ineffective, he may have to resort to more extreme measures, such as a baleful scowl, or perhaps even harrumphing. After all, these are pretty rough customers he’s dealing with, and this is no time for pussy-footing.
For those of you who are interested, here is a transcript of the events at Columbia University on Monday.
Looking back, I suppose little was gained, and perhaps something lost, by Mr. Bollinger’s caustic introduction, although for those of you who have only heard about it, it is worth reading, because it is much more than just taunting and name-calling; Bollinger makes it quite clear why a civilized world should have contempt for this regime.
But for Ahmadinejad’s admirers, it simply made him look brave to stand and take it. And for the rest of us, there was no need; we already know what the man is.
We note with considerable interest the goings-on in Burma these days, where the military junta that runs the country — one of the most repressive governments in the world today — is finding itself in a bit of a cleft stick as Buddhist monks are waging an ever-bolder campaign of civil disobedience.
Were any other group attempting such defiance of the ruling committee, they would be crushed by the armed forces, but such is the popular allegiance to these monks that the army, so far, has not dared, and so they are being pushed ever deeper into a very difficult corner.
Science-fiction readers, of which I was one myself in my youth, may note some similarity in this situation to one that the late Isaac Asimov described in his Foundation series. In that story, when a credulous agricultural populace was forced to choose sides between the technological priesthood of the Foundation and the mighty army of the Galactic Empire, they sided with the priests — the stewards of their immortal souls.
It certainly would be wonderful to see this awful regime driven from power in a bloodless revolution, but it is not in the nature of those who have gained absolute power by force to surrender it peacefully. Something has to give way soon. The world is watching.
There was a predictable ruction about whether or not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should have been allowed to speak at Columbia today, and I must say that at the very least it was gratifying to see that he was given a chilly greeting. It was nice to see the academic community turning out to express their disapproval of America’s enemies for a change.
Ask anyone these days, and they’ll tell you that health-care services in Cuba are second to none. Despite the island nation’s having been so thoroughly beggared by almost half a century of totalitarian Marxist rule that people drown themselves in rickety boats in desperate attempts to flee, even the humblest son of the soil, when troubled by the least infirmity, need go no farther than the nearest village to be seen to by world-class specialists working in gleaming state-of-the-art facilites. And it’s all free, free, free! Eat your heart out, imperialist running dog lackeys.
On September 6th, Israel did something in Syria, something about which they have been rather uncharacteristically mum. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens, ex-editor of the Jerusalem Post, considers what it might have been.
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