See also this overview of the “Arab spring” from STRATFOR.

Even though Egypt’s newly elected political leaders have now consolidated their parliamentary power in the wake of last year’s exhilarating “Facebook revolution”, their chief ideologist Yusuf al-Qaradawi (last mentioned in these pages here and here) realizes nevertheless that the long-overdue reforms his homeland yearns for will take time to implement, and must be phased in gradually.

Patience! It may be several years, for example, before there can be any chopping off of hands.

Learn more here.

Israel Upholds Citizenship Bar for Palestinian Spouses

Israel’s Supreme Court has upheld a law banning Palestinians who marry Israelis from gaining Israeli citizenship.

Civil rights groups had petitioned the court to overturn the law, saying it was unconstitutional.

“Human rights do not prescribe national suicide,” Judge Asher Grunis wrote in the judgement.

How about that! “National suicide”. Amazing that somebody can get away with calling a spade a spade like that in this day and age. As Dennis remarked (my emphasis):

Judge Grunis appears to be sound on what exactly constitutes a nation, that is, it consists of a people, not anyone who can manage to get to a physical location.

Very unfashionable notion these days, that.

What say you, readers? Should Israel be allowed to define itself as home to “a people”?

If you say ‘no’, then why not? If you say ‘yes’, then you probably know what I’m going to ask next.

Meanwhile, DEBKA reports that in Egypt, General Tantawi and the SCAF grow weary of their burden, and are negotiating an early handover of the reins of power to the Muslim Brotherhood (who reiterate that they are not bound by Egypt’s agreements with Israel). DEBKA also reports on a growing deployment of U.S. military resources to Israel:

Thousands of US troops began descending on Israel this week. Senior US military sources told DEBKAfile Friday, Jan. 6 that many would be staying up to the end of the year as part of the US-IDF deployment in readiness for a military engagement with Iran and its possible escalation into a regional conflict. They will be joined by a US aircraft carrier. The warplanes on its decks will fly missions with Israeli Air Force jets.

As a result of the political upheavals in the region, Israel’s security situation has deteriorated sharply in the past year, and the buildup of U.S. forces there is unlikely, in my opinion, to be reversed any time soon. This tightening encirclement of Israel by its mortal enemies, who are in political ascendancy on all sides, will lead to an increased Israeli dependency on the United States to guarantee its survival. This in turn will give the United States — whose current administration shows no particular fondness for Israel to begin with — increasing leverage with which to pressure Israel as regards its accommodation of Palestinian demands, which are themselves merely a proxy for the eliminationist sentiments of the regional Islamic community.

A commenter recently remarked, in response to my unvarying pessimism about how the ‘Arab Spring’ was likely to affect Western interests in the region:

In the end the “Arab Spring” might turn out to be an unmitigated disaster but at the very least it allows for possibilities not imagined in many decades.

That’s certainly true. Likewise, if I were to put on a blindfold while driving, it would allow for possibilities not imagined by nearby motorists.

The Muslim Brotherhood (or “Ikhwan”) differs from militant Islamist factions like al-Qaeda not in its goals, which are more or less the same, but only in its strategy: it has no moral or philosophical aversion to violent jihad, but considers it unnecessarily provocative, and therefore counterproductive. As such, it can make an ostentatious public display of distancing itself from terrorism, and so it is embraced by gullible Westerners — for whom the only imaginable threat from Islam is terrorist violence — as a “moderate” Muslim organization to be supported and embraced. This suits the Ikwhan, whose avowed strategy is to sabotage secular democratic societies from within, just fine.

The Obama administration, however, which has made “outreach” to the Muslim world a priority (even going so far as to make NASA’s “foremost” mission helping Muslims “feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering”) clearly feels the the Muslim Brotherhood is an outfit it can do business with. We should not be surprised to see — in fact we should be astonished not to see — the Ikwhan seizing the opportunity now taking shape in Cairo, for which it has worked and waited so long. We should also not be surprised to learn that they will do so with the overt or covert support of the United States: so broad is the Brotherhood’s influence in Egypt that it is almost unimaginable that they will not take the reins, and you can be sure that Foggy Bottom and the Oval Office have already made the appropriate calculations.

For my trouble, I was berated in the comment thread for having made, under the bewitchment of “confirmation bias”, an assertion that was “unsupported by fact” and unable to “withstand even the slightest amount of scrutiny”.

A lively eleven months have passed since then, and we have yet to see any flowering of secular Jeffersonian democracy in the region, despite the lavish and effervescent optimism with which the initial disturbances were greeted by most observers here in the West. As was suggested at the time by those of us who have rather less faith in the universal appeal of Western ways, and a more sober understanding of the history of the area and its people, the likeliest outcome of these populist upheavals would be a transition to Islamic governance, with a concomitant erosion of Western interests in the region, and deepening existential peril for Israel.

Now, as Andrew McCarthy notes here, The Hindu reports that the Obama administration has turned to none other than Yusuf al-Qaradawi — the Muslim Brotherhood’s principal ideological theorist and dawa-jihad strategist — to negotiate the terms of our accommodation with the Taliban.

More confirmation bias, no doubt (after all, it’s just the Hindu, not the New York Times). We’ll just have to see.

Her crime, if you haven’t followed the case, was to comment disapprovingly on Mohammed’s deflowering of his nine-year-old wife Aisha.

Well, tolerance is paramount in a decent society, I guess.

Meanwhile, Christmas masses have been canceled in Iraq due to fears of anti-Christian violence.

North Korea: North Korea is demanding that foreigners either remain in their homes or leave the country. Pyongyang authorities ordered some foreigners to leave, according to Chinese nationals who frequently visit North Korea.

A Chinese student in Pyongyang said North Korean professors ordered their Chinese and Russian students to avoid leaving their residences. According to a Chinese man who flew out of Pyongyang on 20 December, foreigners were not allowed to leave their accommodations after the announcement of Kim Jong Il’s death on the 19th.

North Korea also is deporting some foreigners from Pyongyang, Sinuiju and the Rajin-Sonbong special economic zone, Chosun reported on 21 December. Missionaries and US businessmen engaged in charity work in Rajin-Sonbong and Sinuiju have been forced to leave. North Korea is preventing foreigners from entering the country and will not issue any new visas until after 29 December.

Comment: Control of foreigners, including expulsion, is one of the national civil readiness measures prescribed in a semi-war state of alert, which is a preparatory stage of war preparations for an attack as well as for defense against an attack. Such measures are out of sync with a global and increasingly integrated economic system, but for North Korea they are normal during conditions of stress, such as leadership change.

Kim Jong un’s first military order, according to Korean news services, was to order all military units to return to garrison. His military mentors, most likely Vice Marshal Ri, the chief of the General Staff, had him sign this order on 18 December. This also is prescribed in a semi-war state of alert for rear and mobile military units. For forward forces just north of the Demilitarized Zone, they are supposed to report to wartime defenses and commence tunnel living.

Comment: The context for this order is that the annual Winter Training Cycle for the Korean People’s Army began on 1 December. Winter is the period of the most intense and extensive training for the entire Army.

In December, which is the first month of the cycle, soldiers are in classrooms or at shooting ranges and other basic field training sites for the early phases of the cycle. The cycle culminates in large unit – corps- and multiple corps- echelon — field exercises in early spring.

Confining units to garrison means the early phases of the training cycle have been interrupted and the entire cycle must be truncated by at least a month. Army readiness peaks in April, after the cycle ends and remedial training is completed for units that failed to meet standards. The Army cannot now meet that schedule without sacrificing readiness.

The North Korean Marshals and Generals will appreciate that the coming year will be a period of extraordinary military vulnerability until the summer training cycle is completed. They may be expected to be prickly and prone to violence over perceived provocations by the Allies.

The order to confine troops to barracks during a time of internal stress always means the leadership does not trust its lower echelons of leadership. It does not want troops to have access to live ammunition and will not risk normal training because of the danger of a military revolt.

Special comment: The succession of Kim Chong il in 1994 was not peaceful or smooth, despite western punditry and North Korean propaganda. There were multiple assassination attempts against Kim Chong il during his first year as leader, although he was his father’s understudy for more than a dozen years. An entire North Korean Army Corps revolted against him in early 1995 and requested American and South Korean assistance, which it did not receive. Its leaders fled to China. The corps was disbanded.

Despite the North Korean propaganda and the shallow Western news coverage, the succession of Kim Jong un is likely to be much more unstable than was Kim Chong il’s, once the mourning period ends in January 2012.

All the video reports and written news items on the home pages of the Korean Central News Agency stress that the Army and the people support Kim Jong un. Every video of Kim Chong-il during his life shows Kim Jong un in the background. But all the images are quite recent and they are few. Kim Chong-il did not take his designated heir everywhere with him, as his father did with him.

Moreover, the videos and other reports do not mention that the communist party or the government support Kim Jong un. The Army always is listed or mentioned first. The North Korean people will understand that for now they are under army rule.

Finally, North Korea is an oriental despotism as described by Professor Karl August Wittfogel in his seminal book “Oriental Despotism.” It is not inscrutable or unpredictable or mysterious. It is Asian.

That means that an extended royal family governs and risks being destroyed if the government changes. It will exhibit no interest in reform that jeopardizes its status and life style.

That family pampers and depends on the loyalty of the armed forces leaders. That means that every army corps commander has a villa, Mercedes Benz personal vehicles, Rolex watches, flat screen HD TVs and all the luxuries that North Korean can afford. Kim Chong il never neglected his senior commanders and they are now in charge of national security.

All of that means that peace with South Korea is highly unlikely because the generals and vice marshals will lose their life style and the Army will lose its reason for existence.

Internal economic reform will be measured by whether it helps the Kim extended family. The young Kim is a victim of the decisions of his grandfather and father.

Anecdote: South Korea’s director of the National Intelligence Service told the press today that US satellite photos show that all of the leadership trains used by Kim Chong-il were in their normal parking areas in Pyongyang rail yards on 17 December, the day Kim died.

This means that Kim could not have died on a train during a field tour, as the Pyongyang government announced on the 19th, and as the official media broadcast. He died with no heroics.

On the 18th, however, the North Koreans did move a leadership train from Pyongyang, apparently and belatedly recognizing their gaff.

The South Korean intelligence chief reported that Kim most likely died in bed, or at least in Pyongyang. The story about dying on the train was part of the mythology the North Koreans love to indulge, but which no North Koreans believe.

Final comment: The New York Times published an absurd article about a massive intelligence failure because the US did not know that Kim was dying in his villa in Pyongyang, and learned of his death from official North Korean press statements … as it did when Kim Il-sung died in 1994.

The intelligence failure thesis reveals an ingénue’s complete misunderstanding of US intelligence. No one knows or can know when a national leader is dying suddenly, including the Chinese, even in a Web 2.0 world. There is no App for dying national leaders.

One of the consistent lessons of history, from Aristagoras to Gorbachev, is that authoritarian systems place themselves at great risk when they attempt to liberalize. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is learning this lesson today; they have unleashed forces that they have no idea how to control.

First: you may have heard about the kerfuffle that arose recently when the home-improvement chain Lowe’s decided to yank its sponsorship of the “anti-Islamophobic” television series All-American-Muslim. (Dozens of other sponsors soon joined them; all are now predictably being tarred as “racists” by the ummah‘s useful idiots on the Left, although opposition to the spread of Islam in the West has nothing whatsoever to do with race, and everything to do with a perfectly sensible wariness toward a totalitarian, intolerant, and virulent ideology.) Robert Spencer comments here.

Also: what with the recent persecutions of Geert Wilders, Elisabeth Sabaditch-Wolff, and Lars Hedegaard, the witch-hunt for “instigators” following the Anders Breivik rampage (which has made the Norwegian writer Fjordman’s life a living hell), the imprisonment of (the admittedly loutish) Emma West, and the stifling effect of Europe’s incremental dhimmitude on free speech in general, it should be no surprise that the OIC, the global organizing body for dawa jihad, is feeling its oats these days — and has its eye on that last bastion of free expression, the United States.

With that in mind, Clare Lopez at American Thinker has had her eye on a meeting, now presumably concluded, between OIC and our Secretary of State. Read her substantial article here.

Since Cameron’s “No,” there’s been much chatter about the return of Britain’s “bulldog spirit.” Self-delusion is a lingering attribute of former imperial nations adjusting to a lesser reality.

Let’s unpack that a little:

Yes, you were once a great nation and people, but no longer, and good riddance. You are now a sagging, broken, deracinated little country, just as we planned — with nothing left to sustain you but empty traditions and fading memories, and no hope for the future but to submit to the will of your new masters.

Kneel!

In response (and with a hat tip to David Duff), here’s Ed West of the Daily Telegraph:

Of course the EU has brought wonderful benefits. In the old days one had to go through the palaver of changing currencies before going on holiday; now, thanks to the EU, that is no longer a problem, as no one can afford holidays. And, of course, after 45 years of European peace, a peace maintained by the US military (protection which, alas, has created a sort of infantile anti-Americanism among Europeans, the same sense of resentment a grown-up child living with their parents feels), the EU has done an amazing job of bringing Europeans together. The German chancellor is rarely off the front page of the Greek press, and Irishmen love the fact that their budget must first be discussed in Berlin before anyone in Dublin has a say.

But of course the EU is not about economics, and never has been – it’s a moral idea with the millennial goal of destroying nationalism, which is why for four decades British Eurosceptics have been cast as moral deviants or caricatures (incidentally the latest YouGov polls show less support for the EU among women than men). That is why Guardian readers – and I imagine it is quite similar with New York Times readers – are always surprised to find normal, affable people who hold conservative views.

That last bit — about educated liberals who have been so deeply marinated in the warm crock-pot of smug multi-culti PC groupthink for so long that they’re genuinely surprised, upon finally making the acquaintance of an actual conservative, to find that he lacks horns and a tail — I can vouch for personally. Where I live, it happens all the time.

You can read the rest of Mr. West’s piece here.

Well, good for him, I say, for refusing to surrender England’s ancient sovereignty to a lot of unelected Eurocrats as their doomed continent falls under the all-too familiar shadow of coalescing German dominance.

To quote Winston Churchill:

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

At the root of this ideological confusion, says Friedman, is a tension between two central tenets of Western political philosophy:

Western countries, following the principles of the French Revolution, have two core beliefs. The first is the concept of national self-determination, the idea that all nations (and what the term “nation” means is complex in itself) have the right to determine for themselves the type of government they wish. The second is the idea of human rights, which are defined in several documents but are all built around the basic values of individual rights, particularly the right not only to participate in politics but also to be free in your private life from government intrusion.

The first principle leads to the idea of the democratic foundations of the state. The second leads to the idea that the state must be limited in its power in certain ways and the individual must be free to pursue his own life in his own way within a framework of law limited by the principles of liberal democracy. The core assumption within this is that a democratic polity will yield a liberal constitution. This assumes that the majority of the citizens, left to their own devices, will favor the Enlightenment’s definition of human rights. This assumption is simple, but its application is tremendously complex. In the end, the premise of the Western project is that national self-determination, expressed through free elections, will create and sustain constitutional democracies.

I’m a recovered neoconservative, and as such I used to share this opinion myself. Many still do:

It is interesting to note that human rights activists and neoconservatives, who on the surface are ideologically opposed, actually share this core belief. Both believe that democracy and human rights flow from the same source and that creating democratic regimes will create human rights. The neoconservatives believe outside military intervention might be an efficient agent for this. Human rights groups oppose this, preferring to organize and underwrite democratic movements and use measures such as sanctions and courts to compel oppressive regimes to cede power. But they share common ground on this point as well. Both groups believe that outside intervention is needed to facilitate the emergence of an oppressed public naturally inclined toward democracy and human rights.

The problem with all of this is a curious modern blindness to vital historical and cultural realities, brought on by Western vanity about the universal appeal of its values:

The idea that the destruction of repressive regimes opens the door for democratic elections that will not result in another repressive regime, at least by Western standards, assumes that all societies find Western values admirable and want to emulate them. This is sometimes the case, but the general assertion is a form of narcissism in the West that assumes that all reasonable people, freed from oppression, would wish to emulate us.

Our choices, then, are not so simple as we would like to think they are:

Assume there is a choice between a repressive, undemocratic regime that is in the interests of a Western country and a regime that is democratic but repressive by Western standards and hostile to those interests. Which is preferable, and what steps should be taken?

These are blindingly complex questions that some observers — the realists as opposed to the idealists — say not only are unanswerable but also undermine the ability to pursue national interests without in any way improving the moral character of the world. In other words, you are choosing between two types of repression from a Western point of view and there is no preference. Therefore, a country like the United States should ignore the moral question altogether and focus on a simpler question, and one that’s answerable: the national interest.

The question then is: if the simplistic moral calculus applied earlier this year by giddy “Arab Spring” cheerleaders who saw little more in Tahrir Square than Westernizing hipsters with iPhones was based on a narcissistic delusion, then what is our real national interest in the region? If the creation of secular pro-Western Jeffersonian democracies in the Muslim lands of the Middle East and Maghreb is just a pipe dream — and it is — then we should evaluate our aims more coolly and clearly. I can think of a few (your mileage may vary):

1) Tamping down Islamism where we can, or at least ensuring that Islamist regimes understand that we will entertain no more costly fantasies about “nation-building” in response to the next hostile act on the part of their jihadis against us; that the next time around there will instead be a good deal of nation-demolition on offer, and very little indeed in the way of building.

2) Maintaining the economically vital flow of oil and shipping through Mideast waters.

3) Standing in solidarity with Israel: our only genuine ally, the only West-friendly democracy, and indeed the only non-barbarous nation in the region.

You can read all of Mr. Friedman’s excellent essay here.

Iran: Comment: Several reputable analysts have suggested that the attacks against the British Embassy are symptoms of a fundamental political struggle in the Iranian leadership elite. The argument is not new, but suggests that the underlying disagreements are not resolved.

The strong fundamentalists, embodied by the Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Basij militia, are hostile to outsiders and react violently to sanctions on Iran. They advocate that Iran can survive and be strong without concessions to the UN or the West.

A more pragmatic and worldly-wise group of leaders advocates dialogue with the West and others to discuss differences. This group has influence but lacks power at this time.

UK-Iran: Foreign Secretary William Hague said Britain ordered Iran to vacate its embassy in London by Friday, stressing it did not mean diplomatic ties between the two countries had been entirely cut off. It does mean they have been downgraded.

Norway-Iran: Norway has temporarily closed its embassy in Tehran due to security concerns after the British mission was attacked by an angry mob, the government said on Wednesday.

France-Iran: The French Foreign Ministry said it is recalling the French ambassador to Iran for consultation after the attack on British Embassy in Tehran. According to a Ministry statement, the attack was a violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and that France must respond.

US-Iran: The United States unveiled sanctions against the energy and petrochemical sectors, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of a “significant ratcheting-up of pressure” on Iran.

She said Iran’s oil and gas industry and its financial sector would also be targeted by the sanctions.

Comment: Sanctions on oil and gas and on banks dominate public conversations about restraining Iranian nuclear programs. The logical or practical connection between oil and banking sanctions and Iran’s nuclear program, however, has not been well explained. To paraphrase Kissinger, means must match ends in order to achieve successful policy outcomes. Thus far that match has not been established, demonstrably.

Both oil and banking sanctions contain significant threats of unintended consequences. China relies on Iran for 10% of its petroleum imports. That means that it will never cooperate in imposing sanctions on oil exports because it cannot without disastrous effects on its economy and Europe’s economy as well, because of global economic linkages.

Germany and Italy import Iranian oil, as well as India, China, Japan and South Korea. The economic stability of those countries could be affected by French President Sarkozy’s proposal to sanction Iranian oil.

Higher oil prices would ripple across the world. Oil producers would reap a windfall and consumers would go into recession. That is why hedge fund managers are buying options that oil will reach $140 or $150 the barrel.

Banking sanctions have extensive backlash potential as well. India favors non-proliferation of nuclear weapons programs and related capabilities. Earlier this year an Indian bank agreed to cooperate in limited banking sanctions against Iran.

When Indian oil refiners found they could not use Indian banking facilities to pay for Iranian oil imports, Iran stopped shipping oil to India, 12% of whose oil imports come from Iran. The refiners found a work-around to keep the oil flowing.

The lesson is that sanctions on Iranian banks would have consequences for China, India, Russia, Italy, Germany, Japan, South Korea, the UAE and Turkey, before the sanctions hurt Iran. Iran is one of the few countries that continued to grow during the 2008 global economic crisis; has a favorable balance of payments, and has significant cash reserves owing to the high price of crude in the past three years.

It might be time for world leaders to devise more imaginative policy responses than punishment through sanctions to achieve compliant behavior by Iran. One of the downsides of an increasingly integrated global economy is the unintended consequences of sanctions.

He also had this to say about the recent “friendly”-fire incident on the Af-Pak border:

NightWatch research of operations reports from the northern border region of Afghanistan, where the Haqqanis operate, suggests that Pakistani tribal paramilitary forces or regular army forces stationed near the border routinely provide artillery and mortar fire across the border into Afghanistan in support of Taliban infiltration or Haqqani attack operations inside Afghanistan. This has been occurring for a decade, but this time it backfired.

Meanwhile, John Hood comments at the Corner on the rash of explosions in Iran:

I guess U.S. and Western politicians has been treading carefully around the reality of the situation, perhaps for good reason, but does the political class really think the rest of us don’t know what’s happening in Iran right now? The Israelis or agents acting in their behalf or interests are subjecting the Iranian nuclear program to attack. First they hit a base outside of Tehran two weeks ago, taking out the head of Iran’s missile defense force along with a couple dozen other military personnel and some key real estate. Then on Monday they hit a facility near Isfahan that houses one of the country’s uranium-enrichment sites.

Presumably, American leaders and other Western officials know what is going on, even if they haven’t been actively supporting the strikes on Iran. In response, the Iranian government orchestrated an assault on the British embassy — there being no comparable Israeli or American target handy — and will attempt terrorist or military reprisals as soon as they can.

In other words, the question of whether the military option should be used against Iran’s nuclear program is now moot. It is being used. Now what?

With regard to Pakistan, today STRATFOR published a substantial essay, by Nate Hughes, on the context and consequences of the latest mishap. Read it here.

Early Results in Egypt Show a Mandate for Islamists

Seems to me there was somebody who saw this coming almost a year ago, even before the Times started writing things like “We can think of no better rebuttal to Osama bin Laden and other extremists.” Back around January 28th, I think it was. Wish I could remember.

The older I get, the more it amazes me how persistently people expect things to go well, even when there are other people involved.

As Mr. Yglesias points out, creating a unified, pan-European democratic republic would be a very “tall order”. As for German domination, my memory’s not as good as it once was, but it does seem to me that there was already some problem or other with that, a while back.

Meanwhile, over at Gates Of Vienna, Baron Bodissey writes:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says that Eurozone member states that do not stay within budgetary rules will face a partial loss of national sovereignty. Yet any country that submits to the EU’s budgetary restrictions has already lost part of its national sovereignty. That’s some catch, that Catch-22!

It sure is!

Finally, (with a hat tip to our friend David Duff) here’s UKIP’s Nigel Farage, speaking plain truth to smirking power. It won’t accomplish anything, but I have to admit it does give one rather a Chris-Matthews-style thrill up the leg.

Grenades Hit Syria’s Baath Party Building in Damascus

Syrian activists say several rocket-propelled grenades hit a ruling Baath Party building in Damascus Sunday, as President Bashar al-Assad vowed he will not “bow down” to international pressure to ease his brutal crackdown on dissent.

The Local Coordination Committees activist network and several residents Sunday reported numerous explosions in the center of the Syrian capital. They said fire trucks were headed to the area amid a heavy police presence. There was no immediate verification of the reports, and other eyewitnesses saw no signs of damage.

If confirmed, the attack would be the first such incident in the Syrian capital since the anti-government uprising began in March. The reported assault occurred hours after an Arab League deadline passed for Damascus to end the bloodshed.

As security analysts remind us, uprisings against government authority are “centripetal”: they seek the center of power. As long as violence is limited to outlying districts, the ruling clique is in no immediate danger. That attacks are now beginning in Damascus shows that this conflict is entering a dangerous new phase.

Meanwhile, as the social framework breaks down in hotspots like the city of Homs, diversity has, predictably, begun to confer its usual blessings — with savagery on the rise between the majority Sunni population and the Alawites (the offshoot Shia sect to which Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, belongs). Christians are just trying to keep their heads down, but if they have any sense will soon be fleeing in droves.

In this morning’s KGS NightWatch, analyst John McCreary made the same points:

China: The Ministry of Commerce said on 16 November that China’s exports are feeling pressure from global economic uncertainties. A spokesman said the ministry cannot be optimistic about the export situation during the coming period, citing a downshift in global economic recovery, a downgrade of the US credit rating and the expansion of the European debt crisis. He said that frequent protectionist measures and trade disputes have had a “relatively large influence” on China’s exports and that these issues, along with rising costs at home, have complicated China’s foreign trade outlook.

Comment: The Xinhua report is significant for several reasons. First it disclosed that the Chinese government expects that the credit rating of the United States will be downgraded. Second, the Chinese economists predict a contraction of the global economy. Finally, the Chinese anticipate a contraction of globalization as the result of protectionist policies, in other words, a reassertion of economic nationalism. The Chinese seem to expect that the export markets for cheap Chinese manufactures will shrink and the prices for raw materials will rise.

The apparent Chinese linkage of the US credit rating to the European debt crisis implies that the Chinese know or believe that US banks have much greater exposure to European sovereign debt than they have admitted. The Chinese assessment evidently is that Europe will drag down the US.

One Chinese economist, a professor of finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, recently wrote that the Chinese banking system is nearly bankrupt already and China’s Gross Domestic Product is declining, but the Chinese are hiding the data. He wrote that “every province in China is Greece.”

This note is a warning to hedge bets in China in 2012.

[A] throng of seething Islamists stripped, beat, paraded, and finally shot Qaddafi execution-style, all the while screaming the signature “Allahu Akbar!” battle cry with a fervor that would have made Mohamed Atta blush. They then shoved the despot’s corpse into a refrigerator — to maintain it for further triumphant display before thousands of gawking spectators. Too bad there was no official from the Obama administration’s Islamic Thought Police on hand to remind the mob of the Koran’s oft-quoted (but oftener ignored) teaching that to slay a single person is to slay all of mankind.

The murder was facilitated by NATO forces operating under false pretenses: Claiming they were merely protecting civilians, they set about hunting down Qaddafi, only to help usher in a new era of Islamist governance. The bill for NATO’s services was willfully footed by the Obama administration — which had previously funded the Libyan regime on the oft-repeated grounds that Qaddafi was a valuable counterterrorism ally, but which then initiated a war against Qaddafi in the absence of any provocation or American national-security interests. NATO’s war of aggression is already inuring to the benefit of America’s Islamist enemies. What’s not to celebrate?

More here.

It would be interesting to get Mr. McCarthy in a room with James Taranto, who a couple of days ago wrote this:

Writing on Commentary’s website, Max Boot has a useful corrective to some of the distraught commentary you’ve probably been hearing of late about the rise of Shariah in North Africa in the wake of the Arab Spring:

“Saying a country’s legal system will be based on sharia law is about as descriptive as saying it will be based on the Ten Commandants [sic] or the teachings of Christ. Like Christianity, Judaism or any other religion, Islam is subject to countless interpretations. Sharia law has meant many different things in many different countries across the ages. Even Islamic fundamentalists are not all alike. Wahhabis rule in both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, yet liquor is readily available in the latter but not the former.
Islamist parties do not necessarily take their inspiration from the Taliban, Hamas, or the Iranian mullahs. In fact, the failure of all three of those Islamist regimes–in Afghanistan, Gaza and Iran–to deliver economic or social progress has done much to discredit them in the Muslim world. That doesn’t mean most Muslims are ready to embrace a strictly secular regime; but then even in Europe, Christian Democratic parties are common, and in the United States many political candidates claim to take their marching orders from the Almighty.”

It’s also worth noting that a regime can be “strictly secular” and also horrifically oppressive, as Justice Antonin Scalia noted earlier this month in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

” “I ask [law students], “Why do you think America is such a free country? What is it in our Constitution that makes us what we are?” And I guarantee you that the response I will get–and you will get this from almost any American . . . the answer would be: freedom of speech; freedom of the press; no unreasonable searches and seizures; no quartering of troops in homes . . . those marvelous provisions of the Bill of Rights.
But then I tell them, “If you think a bill of rights is what sets us apart, you’re crazy.” Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights. Every president for life has a bill of rights. The bill of rights of the former evil empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours. I mean it. Literally, it was much better. We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press. Big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests, and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff!
Of course, it’s just words on paper, what our Framers would have called a “parchment guarantee.” “

We are far from confident that the democratic experiment in the Arab world is going to work out well. But if you start telling us that Libya is sure to be worse off than it was under Moammar Gadhafi, merely because he was “secular,” we will take you about as seriously as we took people who said the same about Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

While I certainly share Mr. Taranto’s lack of confidence that the democratic experiment in the Arab world is going to work out well, he misses the point here, I think. First, nobody is suggesting that secular regimes can’t be authoritarian. This is a non sequitur; of course they can. (I wonder also exactly what argument he seeks to advance by citing Justice Scalia’s remarks, which seem clearly to say that a nation’s freedom depends on the nature and temperament of its people — certainly true, but the precedent in the Maghreb, then, is not encouraging.) The point is that there is every reason to worry that a new Islamist regime in Libya will be a far worse problem for Western interests in the region (and, in particular, for Israel) than the continuation of a Qaddafi regime would have been. Mr. Qaddafi was despicable, and in his day fought actively against us, but in recent years he had been brought to heel, and had been given our assurances that as long as he behaved, he needn’t worry about U.S. interference.

As for Mr. Boot, the same applies: that he can buy a drink in Bahrain is no cause for optimism about the emerging Islamist powers in the area. They have replaced durable autocracies with whom we had stable working relationships, are tied to al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, and will almost certainly become hothouses for all manner of anti-Western, anti-Israeli perfidy. Already Libyan weapons are flooding toward Israel through Egypt (where their safe passage is possible once again thanks to the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, also with U.S. support). It isn’t necessary for Islamist regimes to “take their inspiration from the Taliban, Hamas, or the Iranian mullahs” to be antipathetic to our interests in the region and the world, though some of the new ones likely will. For them to take their inspiration from the core traditions and historical example of Islam itself, and from the prevailing sentiments of the regional ummah, will be amply sufficient.

People tell me I’m too pessimistic about all of this. I hope they’re right. We’ll soon see.