:: Bluestarblog ::

:: Sunday, October 27, 2002 ::

Adam Garfinkle sees a peaceful way to deal with North Korea:

The four powers around Korea--Russia, Japan, China, and the United States--should join to put a modulated end to the North Korean state by denying it all aid, except aid with tight strings attached that is aimed at gradually shifting its sovereign prerogatives into South Korean hands. For example, all food aid (which Pyongyang currently receives from Japan, South Korea, China, and the United States) and technical assistance to North Korean agriculture (currently supplied by the United Nations) could be tied to agricultural-sector reform overseen by an ad hoc four-power technical group, with nongovernmental South Korean participation. Energy-sector aid (the United States provides Pyongyang with 500,000 tons of fuel per year and under the Agreed Framework planned to build it two light-water nuclear reactors) could also be conditioned on a new four-power technical analysis of North Korea's overall energy requirements--an analysis whose logic would require the connection of North and South Korea's electricity grids, built up to South Korean specs. Korea's public health care inadequacies can be remedied in similar fashion. Any aid to infrastructure development could be predicated on elements of North Korea's army being devolved into a "corps of engineers" and other paramilitary functions that would be joined in the field by international consultants, with South Korean NGO participation.

The common denominator in all this would be to quietly and gradually divest Kim Jong Il's government of control over key areas of administration, even while the quality of services for North Koreans improved, and to integrate South Korean personnel and assets into the process as far as is practical. The external governmental profile in all this should be kept low, and the public diplomacy theme throughout should be along the lines of "building a unified Korea," something no Korean patriot could oppose. The North Korean leadership could take credit for progress so long as its actual control on the ground is being diffused, first to symbolically indistinct international custodians, and then, ultimately--as practical points of no return are reached in successive functional domains--to South Koreans.

What would South Korea get out of such an arrangement? The eventual, but not too painfully sudden, demise of its main security threat, as well as ample U.S. and Japanese aid in absorbing the North over an extended period. What would North Korea get? Its people would get a chance to live a normal life, which for many would mean not having to face the specter of starvation. Its government would get a decent burial, over a long enough time for its principals to save face (and escape criminal prosecution). Since such a great-power arrangement would deal with several regional issues (of which there are more below), and since symbols can be arranged to suggest Pyongyang's voluntary association in Korean reunification, it would not appear to be a diktat to North Korea. Obviously that alone would not produce voluntary North Korean acquiescence, but the point of this arrangement is to leave Pyongyang no choice--for it knows that without any external aid to its economy it is doomed sooner rather than later, either to complete economic and social collapse or to a forced reform process it cannot control. The carrots should be many and visible; the stick should be large but out of sight of polite company.

:: Scot 10:58 PM [+] :: ::
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Why Diana Abu-Jaber is a writing professor and not a president:

• Today, the book on attacking Iraq

Sure, President Bush is surrounded by all sorts of well-meaning consultants, analysts and spin-masters, but it seems that he's been getting some bad advice about story-telling — especially the story about Iraq. I'm no political pundit, but I have taught literature and creative writing for a while, and I had a few lesson-plan notes I thought President Bush might find useful.

No doubt. If there is one thing Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, et al. need to brush up on its their story-telling talents. I can't be the only one getting tired of clarity and concision from these politicians.

• Show, don't tell: This is the oldest creative-writing-class axiom of all.

I thought it might be avoiding cliches but what do I know?

Readers crave tangible details in a story instead of bland assertions. It's much more convincing to have physical proof that Saddam Hussein is capable of or planning to injure us than merely declaring he's part of an "axis of evil," which is actually a fairly weak abstraction.

Yes, I want proof. I want Saddam to confess in a court of law that he intends us harm. Barring that, perhaps we can subpoena his hangers-on, the ones privy to Lex Luthor's evil plans. What about his computer - the one with all his un-deleted emails to fellow members of the Internationl Death to America club (no, not the UN).

What kind of proof is she looking for? Is the rap sheet of atrocities from Saddam's last 15 years not enough? Is a terrorist collaborating maniac possessing nuclear weaponry not an obvious reason to intervene? I suppose nothing short of CIA uranium/anthrax/nerve gas inventory records made public will satisfy this kind of proof.

• Pacing is crucial: Stories have to unfold at a natural, organic tempo in order to seem genuine.

I wonder what the natural, organic tempo of suicide jihadis coming to kill us is.

Pressuring Congress to make a hurry-up decision on a question as big as whether to attack another country, about two minutes before a major election, feels forced and manipulative.

The government has been calling for the head of Saddam for about a half year. This debate hardly started yesterday.

• Don't drop your story lines: Readers like to follow a story from beginning to end. Don't trail off in the middle of hunting Osama bin Laden to attack a new villain — that just leaves us all dangling.

The mythical notion that one beast must be slain before you can confront another is something only a creative writing teacher would suggest. And what of Osama? Do we need to sift through every piece of Afghan rubble in our DNA goldpans before we conclude that if he's not dead, he no longer matters?

• Avoid cliché and hyperbole: A term like "war" implies there are two sides capable of fighting each other.

She's right. This should have been called the 'Shit kicking on __________" (terrorism, Islamism, Jihadism - take your pick).

But Iraq has already been devastated by the Persian Gulf War as well as our economic sanctions and foreign policy.

If by devastated you mean upkeep on dozens of presidential palaces, millions of dollars in weapons research, and $5000 booties to the families of Palestinian jihadis than I agree. These sanctions must be harsh.

Previous weapons inspectors tell us that Iraq barely has an army — much less any real "weapons of mass destruction" (see above: hyperbole, cliché and abstraction).

Previous weapons inspectors were last there four years ago. They would have been there longer but they were not permitted to actually do their job, which was to look for these weapons of mass destruction.
(see above: proof, obvious)

• Draw on personal experience: The most authentic stories come straight from our own life experience. Merely having your father state "I hate that man" (i.e., Saddam Hussein) is not satisfying to readers.

How about 70% of Americans hating that man?

I've visited the Middle East and taught lots of Middle Eastern students and I've found that they respect and admire America and that most of them would love to live here.

It sounds like the teacher could have really learned from her students.

The "bad guys" are a distinct minority — just like in this country.

You know, like our good ol boys who ram airplanes through skyscrapers in the name of the Lord. This is that wonderful 'cultural relativism' rearing its ugly head. 'They have bad guys, we have bad guys. They lob off the clitorises of their female population, our females without children earn 94% of what men earn.' You can see how similar our cultures really are.

• Familiarize yourself with your subject: If you haven't read any novels or seen any Hollywood movies told from an Arab perspective, you might ask yourself why that is. Ask yourself: What am I not hearing? Ask yourself: Is this really the story that I want to tell?

Why waste time with Arabian geopolitical strategy when you can watch Rudolph Valentino flicks and read about Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves? Looking for that mysterious Arab perspective? It's saying topple our governments. It's wondering why their filthy rich leaders havent provided the peasants with laptops and cellphones the same way the filthy rich leaders of the West have done for their peasants. Their culture is wondering why they have no culture. That's been the story they have been trying to tell for twenty years.

Consider this: There may be other, more powerful and immediate narratives we need to hear right now — tales of corporate greed and ruined life plans, right here at home; stories of pollution, disappearing forests and clean water, and global warming the world over. True, "war" is a grand story full of sound and fury, to paraphrase Faulkner, but maybe we want a different story right now. Maybe what we need to hear is the story of ourselves.

I won't even comment on this.

:: Scot 10:53 PM [+] :: ::
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Daniel Pipes on the other Islamist threat to America:

It came as no surprise to learn that the lead suspect as the Washington, D.C.,-area sniper is John Allen Muhammad, an African-American who converted to Islam about 17 years ago. Nor that seven years ago he provided security for Louis Farrakhan's "Million Man March." Even less does it amaze that he reportedly sympathized with the 9/11 attacks carried out by militant Islamic elements.

All this was near-predictable because it fits into a well-established tradition of American blacks who convert to Islam turning against their country.

This well-established pattern of alienation, radicalism and violence among black American converts to Islam suggests two points, should John Allen Muhammad in fact be implicated in the D.C. sniper attacks.

First: The troubling coincidence of conversion to Islam and hatred of the United States needs to be looked at very closely. To what extent does Islam attract the disaffected, to what extent does it actively turn them against their country? Probing the source of the disaffection that can inspire terrorism has important security implications.

Second: To what extent does the rhetoric and example set by prominent figures such as Louis Farrakhan and Siraj Wahhaj influence followers like the alleged sniper to engage in violence? If it does, given that this is wartime, do steps need to be taken to curtail their rhetoric?

That one should even have to raise these issues points, yet again, to the unpleasant realities that Americans must confront if they want to win the war on terror.

:: Scot 7:25 PM [+] :: ::
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MAD magazine turns 50!

:: Scot 7:17 PM [+] :: ::
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Rich Lowry with more on the milk under seige front.

:: Scot 1:24 PM [+] :: ::
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Hitchens, Rosenbaum, and now the Mirror? Tony Parsons' Shame on You American-Hating Liberals is a nice change to see from this Britrag.

:: Scot 12:59 PM [+] :: ::
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Arts and Letters Daily is back! The link to the left has been adjusted.

:: Scot 12:38 PM [+] :: ::
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Janet Albrechtsen on Australia and retaliation:

Australia's long holiday from the unfashionable issues of defence and national security is over.

If September 11, 2001, put Australia's lackadaisical attitude to defence on notice, the terrorist attacks in Bali on October 12, 2002, butchered that attitude just as surely as they butchered young, carefree Australians enjoying a holiday in the sun.

The Islamic terrorists left Australia a visiting card bearing simple messages: Crank up defence spending; the US – not the UN – is our best ally; and Western values rule.

The message to John Howard is that Australia's military needs money. Defence and intelligence forces must be capable of confronting a new enemy: a decentralised network of terrorists planning the West's destruction.

October 12 sinks that sentimental belief that the UN, pacifism and good intentions provide security. Stopping terrorism means destroying terrorists. That requires military force, intelligence services and strong allies.

The final message from October 12 is an echo from September 11: Not all cultures are equal. Political orthodoxy meant we looked the wrong way for too long, not questioning even the most abhorrent cultures. Calling a cultural spade a spade means there is no room for militant Islamic terrorists.

There is no more basic way to protect national sovereignty than with a capable military backed up by a realistic foreign policy and a recognition that Western values are worth fighting for. Anything short of that, and Australians might as well lay back and wait for the enemy to slaughter more of us.

:: Scot 10:31 PM [+] :: ::
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The Rev offers up another yuk - The Best Page in the Universe. Check out 'More crappy children's art work' and 'Love your kids? Prove it by beating them.'

:: Scot 9:55 PM [+] :: ::
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New interview from Edge - Steven Pinker's A Biological Understanding of Human Nature - posted in the Reading Room. I had to quote this:

EDGE: What questions are you asking yourself, and what do you hope to accomplish by going after the intellectual establishment in terms of their denial of human nature?

PINKER: The main question is: "Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage? Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications of the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?" This idea has been met with demonstrations, denunciations, picketings, and comparisons to Nazism, both from the right and from the left. And these reactions affect both the day-to-day conduct of science and the public appreciation of the science. By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.

EDGE: Why do we need to assuage people's fears? What's the matter with telling the truth?

PINKER: It's harder to find the truth if certain factual hypotheses are third rails—touch them and die. A clear example is research on parenting. Hundreds of studies have measured correlations between the practices of parents and the way their children turn out. For example, parents who talk a lot to their children have kids with better language skills, parents who spank have children who grow up to be violent, parents who are neither too authoritarian or too lenient have children who are well-adjusted, and so on. Most of the parenting expert industry and a lot of government policy turn these correlations into advice to parents, and blame the parents when children don't turn out as they would have liked. But correlation does not imply causation. Parents provide their children with genes as well as an environment, so the fact that talkative parents have kids with good language skills could simply mean that and that the same genes that make parents talkative make children articulate. Until those studies are replicated with adopted children, who don't get their genes from the people who bring them up, we don't know whether the correlations reflect the effects of parenting, the effects of shared genes, or some mixture. But in most cases even the possibility that the correlations reflect shared genes is taboo. In developmental psychology it's considered impolite even to mention it, let alone test it.

Denial is a river that flows through too many universities.

:: Scot 8:09 PM [+] :: ::
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Readers of this site know quite well what I think of Europe, but what do Europeans think of each other? This chart should help answer that.

:: Scot 1:03 PM [+] :: ::
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Andrew Sullivan on the merging of the anti-Semitism and anti-war movements:

America's anti-war movement, still puny and struggling, is showing signs of being hijacked by one of the oldest and darkest prejudices there is. Perhaps it was inevitable. The conflict against Islamo-fascism obviously circles back and back to the question of Israel. Fanatical anti-Semitism, as bad or even worse than Hitler's, is now a cultural norm across much of the Arab Middle East and beyond. It's the acrid glue that unites Saddam, Arafat, al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Iran and the Saudis. They all hate the Jews and want to see them destroyed. And if you're campaigning against a war against that axis, you're bound to attract some people who share these prejudices. That is not to say that the large majority of anti-war campaigners are anti-Semitic. Of course they're not. But it is to say that this strain of anti-Semitism, hovering around the edges of that movement, is a worrying and dangerous sign.

In American history, it's also not new. One of the major strains in anti-war sentiment in the 1930s in America was anti-Semitism. The America Firsters saw war as something that would only enrich the "international financiers" who controlled the banks and arms industry. European Jews - and their American counterparts - were trying to snare the U.S. into a European conflict it would do best to avoid. No surprise then that, alongside the far left, the far right in America is also now a part of the anti-war movement. Patrick Buchanan's new magazine, The American Conservative, is full of such anti-war bromides. Buchanan has long flirted with anti-Semitism, and it must surely somewhat embarrass the "progressives" fighting a war against Iraq that he is now, as his forefathers were in the 1930s, their ally.

The biggest faultline around this issue, however, is now on America's campuses. Earlier this year, a movement sprung up calling for universities to withdraw any investments in Israel, just as they once did in South Africa. A petition, begun at M.I.T. and Harvard, attracted hundreds of signatures from faculty, students and alumni. Similar initiatives were pursued at 40 other colleges. It was answered by another M.I.T./Harvard petition opposing divestment, which has garnered many more signatures. The controversy was further stoked by Harvard president Larry Summers' statement last month. He claimed that "serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent," in reference to the petition. "Where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists," he went on, "profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities."

Summers' argument was a simple one: why has Israel been singled out alone as worthy of divestment? Supporters cite its continued occupation of the West Bank. There's no question that Israel's policies in that regard are ripe for criticism, and to equate criticism of that with anti-Semitism is absurd and despicable. Similarly, it's perfectly possible to argue against Israel's domestic policies without any hint of anti-Semitism. But to argue that Israel is more deserving of sanction than any other regime on earth right now is surely bizarre. Israel is a democracy; it is multi-racial; Arab citizens of Israel proper can vote and freely enter civil society; there is freedom of religion and a free press. An openly gay man just won election to the Knesset. In any other Middle Eastern country and the Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank, he'd be in jail, executed or crushed under a pile of rocks. There is simply no comparison with apartheid South Africa, where a tiny ethnic minority denied the majority any vote at all. Compared to China, a ruthless dictatorship which is now brutally occupying Tibet, Israel is a model for democratic governance. And, unlike China's occupation of Tibet, Israel's annexation of the West Bank was undertaken as a defensive action against an Arab military attack. Or compare it to any other country in the Middle East, from Syria's satrapy in Lebanon, to Mubarak's police state, to Iraq's barbaric autocracy or Iran's theocracy, and it's a beacon of light. To single Israel out for condemnation and divestment, while ignoring all these others, is so self-evidently bizarre that it begs an obvious question. What are these anti-Israel fanatics really obsessed about? Where are the divestment campaigns for China or Zimbabwe?

:: Scot 12:51 PM [+] :: ::
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From the Annals of Improbable Research, Jeff Van Bueren writes of an experiment with the U.S. Postal Service:

Having long been genuine admirers of the United States Postal Service (USPS), which gives amazingly reliable service especially compared with many other countries, our team of investigators decided to test the delivery limits of this immense system. We knew that an item, say, a saucepan, normally would be in a package because of USPS concerns of entanglement in their automated machinery. But what if the item were not wrapped? How patient are postal employees? How honest? How sentimental? In short, how eccentric a behavior on the part of the sender would still result in successful mail delivery?

Some of the findings:

Pair of new, expensive tennis shoes. Strapped together with duct tape. Days to delivery, 7. When shoes were picked up at station, laces were tied tightly together with difficult-to-remove knot. Clerk noted that mail must be wrapped.

Sound-emitting toy. A monkey-in-box toy that, upon shaking, shouted, "Let me out of here! Help! Let me out of here!" Addressed in big letters to LITTLE JOHNNIE. Sound toy was equipped with a new battery. Delivery at doorstep, 6 days.

Hammer. Card was strapped to hammer handle; extra-large amount of postage was attached. Never received.

Can of soup. Never received.

Box of sand. Packaged in transparent plastic box to be visible to postal employees. Sent to give an impression of potentially hiding something. The plastic box had obviously been opened before delivery and then securely taped shut again. Delivery without comment at doorstep, 7 days.

Deer tibia. Our mailing specialist received many strange looks from both postal clerks and members of the public in line when he picked it up at the station, 9 days. The clerk put on rubber gloves before handling the bone, inquired if our researcher were a "cultist," and commented that mail must be wrapped.

Excellent work!

:: Scot 12:20 PM [+] :: ::
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Oxblog's Josh Chavetz explains The Immutable Laws of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

THE FIRST IMMUTABLE LAW OF DOWD: The first and most important rule is what might be termed the People magazine principle: All political phenomena can be reduced to caricatures of the personalities involved. Any reference to policy concerns or even to old-fashioned politicking is, like, so passé. And, of course, with every caricature goes a nickname.

THE SECOND IMMUTABLE LAW OF DOWD: It's easier to whine than to take a stand or offer solutions. Consider this: In her many columns to date lobbing stinkbombs at the "Whack-Iraq'ers," she has yet to come out and say that she opposes war in Iraq. The reason, presumably, is that she would then have to actually confront and argue against the administration's reasons for attacking Iraq. Instead, she offers this commentary on Bush's U.N. address (from her September 15 column): "But there was no compelling new evidence. Mr. Bush offered only an unusually comprehensive version of the usual laundry list. Saddam is violating the sanctions, he tried to assassinate Poppy, he's late on his mortgage payments, he tips 10 percent, he has an unjustifiable fondness for 'My Way,' he gassed his own people, he doesn't turn down the front brim of his hat."

THE THIRD IMMUTABLE LAW OF DOWD: It is better to be cute than coherent. Along these lines, Dowd's favorite rhetorical device is parallelism. For example, from her June 12 column: "The Islamic enemy strums on our nerves to hurt our economy and get power. The American president strums on our nerves to help his popularity and retain power." And from August 18: "[Bush Sr.]'s proudest legacy, after all, was painstakingly stitching together a global coalition to stand up for the principle that one country cannot simply invade another without provocation. Now the son may blow off the coalition so he can invade another country without provocation." Her phrasing is so cute that the outrageous moral equivalence she's drawing almost slips by unnoticed: She just compared the president of the United States to the September 11 terrorists and to Saddam Hussein.

THE FOURTH IMMUTABLE LAW OF DOWD: The particulars of my consumer-driven, self-involved life are of universal interest and reveal universal truths. Nowhere was this law more clearly illustrated than in Dowd's reaction to last fall's anthrax attacks. On October 17, 2001, for example, she opened her column with the line, "I am typing this wearing long black leather gloves." Dowd went on to explain that she had been wearing latex gloves, but she "felt the need for a more stylish sort of sterility" (a Dowd-like commentator might note ungenerously that this line describes her writing almost perfectly).

THE FIFTH IMMUTABLE LAW OF DOWD: Europeans are always right. Whenever Dowd quotes a Continental, she allows the quote to stand on its own, as if it were, by virtue of the very Europeanness of its speaker, self-evidently true. Thus, on May 26, 2002, in the midst of President Bush's tour through Europe, she reported that "some Europeans sneered that 'Bully Bush' had turned into something even more irritating: a missionary." Three days later, she reported that "Parisians were indifferent to the president's arrival, and a few gave his motorcade the intercontinental finger of disapproval, as had some Berliners." Of course, the only European she seems actually to have spoken with is a French journalist at the Bush-Chirac press conference, who told her "with a grimace" that "Bush is so . . . Texan."

If you don't believe me, hang on to this article. And the next time you read a Dowd column, read it by the numbers.

I tried it (Texas on the Tigris, The Soufflé Doctrine) - he's right!

:: Scot 10:39 PM [+] :: ::
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O.J. THINKS HE MIGHT HAVE DONE IT!

“For Years I've been pretty sure that I did not murder my wife,” Simpson said today at a golf course in Boca Raton, Fla., where he was taking a rare break from searching for the real killers of his wife. “But if Johnnie’s not 100 percent sure, I’m like, hey, maybe I better take another look at this.”

Simpson added that it would be “crazy” not to be swayed by Cochran’s new statements, which he called “thought provoking.”

“Look, you’re talking about a guy, Johnnie Cochran, who is a pretty smart guy,” Simpson said. “If he said maybe I did it, then maybe I did it.”

“If it turns out that I’m actually the one who did it, then looking for the real killers would be a big old waste of time,” Simpson said.

So how is he going to find out if he did it or not? Hypnosis? A seance? Videotape of his trial?

(from VodkaPundit)

:: Scot 10:31 PM [+] :: ::
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Rick Salutin's anti-Semitic apologia:

Take the Mideast. There are anti-Semitic rants recorded from Arabic news sources and sermons, as well as reprints of anti-Semitic tracts such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There is a comparable rain of hate from the Israeli side. The phrase "death to Arabs" is painted on walls, chanted and echoed at high levels. Israel's chief of staff recently called Palestinians a "cancerous manifestation" and said actions in the occupied territories are "chemotherapy," with more radical "treatment" possibly to come. Another chief of staff called Palestinians "cockroaches." Menachem Begin called them "two-legged beasts," and Ehud Barak called them "crocodiles."

There is a special role to the denial of fundamental grievances by each side against the other. There are reports of distribution of Holocaust denial literature during pro-Palestinian conferences at American universities. And embattled Israeli historian Ilan Pappe says Israel's government, through the ministry of education, has begun "the systematic removal of any textbook or school syllabus that refers to the Nakba [the 'catastrophe' that befell Palestinians in 1948] even marginally. Similar instructions have been given to the public broadcasting authorities."

The arrows crisscross not just in the form of hate, but as a sort of second-order hate, in which people accuse each other of hating. Harvard president Lawrence Summers has charged U.S. profs and students with being "anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent," for criticizing Israel and asking universities to withdraw investments there. For those whom he was referring to, many of them Jews, I imagine being called anti-Semitic is far more hurtful -- and intimidating -- than being called kikes.

The presence of anti-Semitism in the Mideast is itself a little disorienting, since in its past forms it always involved a one-sided persecution of Jews. In this case, anti-Semitism is involved, but the situation is far more mutual, like the symmetries of hate in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. We are dealing, in other words, with something less on the model of the rise of Nazi Germany, despite the element of anti-Semitism, than of the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia.

:: Scot 2:02 PM [+] :: ::
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The pitiful state of Western journalism in Iraq. Franklin Foer illustrates:

Like their Soviet-bloc predecessors, the Iraqis have become masters of the Orwellian pantomime--the state-orchestrated anti-American rally, the state-led tours of alleged chemical weapons sites that turn out to be baby milk factories--that promotes their distorted reality. And the Iraqi regime has found an audience for these displays in an unlikely place: the U.S. media. It's not because American reporters have an ideological sympathy for Saddam Hussein; broadcasting his propaganda is simply the only way they can continue to work in Iraq. "There's a quid pro quo for being there," says Peter Arnett, who worked the Iraq beat for CNN for a decade. "You go in and they control what you do. ... So you have no option other than to report the opinion of the government of Iraq." In other words, the Western media's presence in the Ministry of Information describes more than just a physical reality.

:: Scot 1:40 PM [+] :: ::
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More trouble in the Phillippines.

:: Scot 10:45 AM [+] :: ::
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Mark Steyn with more on the 'root cause' nonsense.

When Osama's boys hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the "root cause" crowd, after some pro forma regret about the loss of life, could barely conceal their admiration for the exquisite symbolism of the targets, the glittering monuments to American militarism and capitalism. The New Statesman dismissed the victims as Wall Street types who made the mistake of voting for Bush rather than Ralph Nader.

If you had to pick anywhere on the planet where Bush voters are thin on the ground, Bali's hard to beat. Lots of Aussie beach bums, Scandinavian backpackers, German stoners, braying English public-school types taking a year off to find themselves, but not many registered Republicans. This mass murder was clearly going to be harder to excuse, but the root-causers gamely rose to the occasion. The Sydney Morning Herald's Margo Kingston fretted over "whether we've respected and nurtured the place we love to visit or colonized it with our wants ... Maybe part of it is the lack of services for locals. A completely inadequate hospital, for instance, so graphically exposed in the aftermath of the horror. Some people -- foreigners like us, elite big-city Indonesians -- make their fortunes. Have residents lost their place, their power to define it? Did the big money fail to give enough back to the people who belong there, whose home it is?", etc., etc. Well, if the insensitivity of Western tourism is the root cause, Margo can relax: It's not gonna be a problem any more. Whether or not, as Margo would say, poverty breeds terrorism, in Indonesia last weekend's terrorism will certainly breed poverty.

While we're singing the old favourites, here's Bruce Haigh with a timeless classic. Mr. Haigh was an Australian diplomat in Indonesia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and he's in no doubt as to why hundreds of his compatriots were blown up in Bali. As he told Australia's Nine Network, "The root cause of this issue has been America's backing of Israel on Palestine." You don't say. It may well be true that, for certain Muslims "frustrated" by Washington's support for Israeli "intransigence," blowing up Australians in Bali makes perfect sense. But, if even this most elastic of root causes can be stretched half way around the globe to a place conspicuously lacking either Jews or Americans, then clearly it can apply to anyone or anything: Why, the FLQ would still be in business if only they'd thought to murder Pierre Laporte because of frustration at Washington's indulgence of the Zionist oppression of the Palestinian people. As has been noted here on previous occasions, the more you insist the Islamist psychosis is a rational phenomenon to be accommodated the more you risk sounding just as nutty as the terrorists.

:: Scot 8:31 AM [+] :: ::
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Michelle Goldberg and Mark Goldblatt each write about the intellectual and moral despair of the left.

:: Scot 8:14 AM [+] :: ::
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You don't usually know where various members of the entertainment industry stand on the war until they say something stupid (or in Barbra Streisand's case, do something stupid). I'm happy to see Hollywood bucks hasn't warped the mind of Henry Rollins:

"If he didn't have anything to hide, then why is he saying, 'Oh you can't go there.' I think a full 100-percent daylight, lights on, everything known, inspection needs to be had, if not, then it needs to be leveled. 'Let's just say, anywhere you don't allow us to check we just drop a bomb on it. How 'bout that?' I am so down with that. 'Well, I'll put women and children in it.' Well, then you can tell the world that you killed them because we told you what we're going to do. And now it's up to you to put the women and children in that mosque or take them out."

:: Scot 8:09 AM [+] :: ::
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Good ol' Brits. Slowly but surely...

:: Scot 7:09 PM [+] :: ::
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Ralph Peters argues the Bali terrorist strike indicates the weakness, not strength, of Islamic terrorists.

:: Scot 7:08 PM [+] :: ::
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Musharraf tells EU to mind its own business

Another brilliant move by the wily General.

:: Scot 5:44 PM [+] :: ::
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I never fail to admire children and their confrontations with moral quandaries. Better yet is when they incorporate teamwork and action into their plans. Leave it to the Scots to best demonstrate:

Police had to break up an animal rights protest yesterday when schoolchildren in Aberdeen pelted activists with cartons of milk. Sean Gifford of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and an unidentified man in a cow-suit had planned a peaceful protest at the gates of the Grammar School to let pupils know about the claimed hazards in milk.

But they had to be rescued by two female police officers when the teenage pupils launched a violent protest of their own. About 100 children, shouting "milk for the masses" and carrying banners, surrounded Mr Gifford and his "cow" partner and drenched them both in milk for about ten minutes. The police eventually intervened and escorted the PETA members back to their car.

:: Scot 5:21 PM [+] :: ::
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A letter from Iranian Farideh Tehrani.

To us, the Islamic revolution has failed. The system, in its entirely, is the problem; no Band-Aid reform will fix it. Iran's 23-year-old theocracy is as incapable of granting freedom and human rights as was the Soviet Union. No politician associated with the Islamic Republic is acceptable to us. There are no reformers in the clerical government. Our real reformers are among the 600,000 languishing in prison, or the hundreds of candidates who are disqualified in each election for believing in human rights or secularism. Do not sell out our freedom because of Khatami's meaningless double talk and irrelevant rhetoric. He is simply a smiling face of an ugly regime.

I hope blogging this doesn't get her killed.

:: Scot 5:10 PM [+] :: ::
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Excellent offering from StrategyPage on al Qaeda's fighting techniques.

October 10, 2002; Al Qaeda is a pretty effective intelligence organization, placing great emphasis on collecting and analyzing information. This is what they have done since they encountered American infantry and air power in Afghanistan. While al Qaeda disparaged American ground forces before September 11, 2001, they have since developed a more practical view of fighting U.S. troops. Al Qaeda quickly learned how to deal with smart bombs; and they did this by operating in small groups that keep moving. Al Qaeda who had fought the Russians also discovered that shooting officers first doesn't stop American troops. Russian units are very dependent on their officers for combat leadership, as Russia has not had decent NCOs for nearly a century. Al Qaeda now tend to regard all American combat troops as they did the Russian Spetsnaz commandos. But al Qaeda also noted the differences between regular army infantry and commandos. The regulars carry too much equipment and move more slowly. The Special Forces, SEALs and Delta Force travel light, and often look like Afghans. But the commandos are much better with their weapons and use superior small unit tactics. Al Qaeda will avoid commandos, and not play with regulars for too long. That's because al Qaeda has also learned to fear the AC-130 "Spitting Witches" (as they call the gunships), which tend to show up if the American infantry are having a hard time of it. Al Qaeda have also learned to clear out of the area if they encounter enemy snipers. The Canadian snipers, equipped with 12.7mm McMillan sniper rifles, gave them a real hard time. The overall lesson al Qaeda has learned is that you better stick with ambushes and hit and run attacks if you want to survive against American or other professional Western troops. The night vision equipment and control of the air make the Americans deadly if you don't have a well thought out escape plan. With the night vision stuff, al Qaeda has learned that if you lie down and cover yourself with a blanket you will usually be invisible, unless the enemy is very close. In that case, it's time for a suicide attack. The Taliban, who are not as keen on suicide attacks, have largely been staying at home or planting bombs and anti-US leaflets.

:: Scot 7:11 PM [+] :: ::
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John Leo explains campus anti-Semitism:

No room on the bus. An op-ed writer at the Detroit News asked, "When did antisemitism lose its seat on the bus of political correctness?" He meant, why doesn't the PC culture protect Jews? The answer is that seats on the PC bus are reserved for certified victim groups, but Jews don't count. They have been historic victims for centuries but are doing too well in America to qualify as officially aggrieved. And as Muslims have been welcomed into the grievance culture, the status of Jews on campus, the stronghold of PC, has become problematic.

Israel itself is often seen as an intolerable colonial outpost, planted in the historically victimized Third World by the West. The thing that most Americans admire about Israel, that it has many of the same features as the United States–free speech, an open society, democratic institutions–makes it a natural target of America-hating campus sentiment. Hostility to Israel was a strong feature of the New Left in the Sixties as it is of the campus left today. And as Boston Globe columnist Cathy Young pointed out last week, sympathy for the Palestinians, even when they are blowing up Israel's women and children, "stems largely from the knee- jerk instinct to romanticize the 'wretched of the Earth.' "

:: Scot 7:00 PM [+] :: ::
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A new gay icon? Nickelodeon's SpongeBob SquarePants could be up to the task.

:: Scot 6:52 PM [+] :: ::
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Ron Rosenbaum follows Christopher Hitchens' escape from leftism with a fitting good-bye:

Goodbye to the brilliant thinkers of the Left who believe it’s the very height of wit to make fun of George W. Bush’s intelligence—thereby establishing, of course, how very, very smart they are. Mr. Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer (I think he’s more ill-informed and lazy than dumb). But they are guilty of a historical stupidity on a far greater scale, in their blind spot about Marxist genocides. It’s a failure of self-knowledge and intellectual responsibility that far outweighs Bush’s, because they’re supposed to be so very smart.

Goodbye to paralysis by moral equivalence: Remind me again, was it John Ashcroft or Fidel Castro who put H.I.V. sufferers in concentration camps?

Goodbye to the deluded and pathetic sophistry of postmodernists of the Left, who believe their unreadable, jargon-clotted theory-sophistry somehow helps liberate the wretched of the earth. If they really believe in serving the cause of liberation, why don’t they quit their evil-capitalist-subsidized jobs and go teach literacy in a Third World starved for the insights of Foucault?

Goodbye to people who have demonstrated that what terror means to them is the terror of ever having to admit they were wrong, the terror of allowing the hideous facts of history to impinge upon their insulated ideology.

Goodbye to all those who have evidently adopted as their own, a version of the simpering motto of the movie Love Story. Remember "Love means never having to say you’re sorry"?

I guess today, Left means never having to say you’re sorry.

:: Scot 6:47 PM [+] :: ::
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It's Daniel Pipes vs Howard Zinn. A bit of a mismatch as Zinn occupies a different reality. To wit:

PROFESSOR HOWARD ZINN: Well, I certainly hope so. I hope that the administration's listening to those voices around the world which it seems not to care about, voices which are suggesting that the US would be the aggressor nation, that the US would be violating international law and that the US would be, well, killing a lot of people in Iraq for very, very dubious ends. And I'm hoping that the administration begins to turn around.

But this is an administration that seems hell-bent on war, in violation of international law and violation of some of the basic moral rule of just war, which is that you do not initiate a war if you're attacked. You defend yourself, but you don't initiate a war which is what the US and the Bush Administration are proposing to do.

You do not initiate a war if you're attacked? Does he know what he's saying?

:: Scot 6:33 PM [+] :: ::
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Robert Bartley on some of the U.N.'s less stellar moments:

• While Freedom House counts 192 nations, the U.N. counts 191. The pariah is a nation rated free, indeed a nation of 23 million souls and the world's 17th largest economy. Namely, of course, Taiwan, which has been blocked from U.N. membership every year for 10 years now. China, rated not free, has managed to impose its view; its foreign minister proclaimed "all acts aimed at the independence of Taiwan are doomed to fail."

• The United States has just been readmitted to the U.N.'s 53-member Commission on Human Rights. It was voted off last year by opposition from the tyrannies and perfidy by the Europeans. Other commission members include such paragons of human rights as Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. The agenda concerns much mischief over Israel, as well as efforts to revoke consultative status of Freedom House.

• In President Bush's U.N. speech in September, he said the U.S. is willing to return to the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It withdrew from UNESCO in 1985 after Congress sent its General Accounting Office to confirm that director Amadou Mahtar M'Bow had created a fiefdom without a trace of accountability, financial or otherwise.

• Secretary-General Kofi Anann thought it was a great victory when Saddam Hussein offered to talk about letting U.N. inspectors back into Iraq on the same terms that didn't work the last time. The important thing is not whether or not the inspections succeed in curbing weapons of mass destruction, that is, but whether they come under U.N. auspices.

And one he left out, my favorite -

• Syria is on the Security Council

:: Scot 2:16 PM [+] :: ::
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Steven Den Beste gives the Germans a pasting. In response to a reader who questions America's ability to handle German criticism:

As of last year, the NATO treaty was shown to not be worth the toilet paper it was written on. I'm friends with people who are friends with me. I help those that I think will help me if I need it. I support them because I know that they'll support me. And when they prove that they won't do any of those things, then for me to continue to support them and help them and try to be a friend to them is to show that I'm gullible and naive. If I did that I really would be simplisme.

If "friendship" is nothing more than lip service, then it isn't friendship. True friends prove it in a crisis. So we've got a crisis. What are you (Germany) doing to help? And why is your government trying to do everything in its power to fuck us over?

The answer is that the government of Germany is acting 100% on the basis of gain and loss for Germany. All of its foreign policy is completely self interested. I don't for a minute believe that Schröder opposes the invasion of Iraq because he has America's best interests in mind, or because he thinks that America will actually be safer if we rely on yet another round of diplomacy and castrated inspections. He's worried about convulsions in the price of oil which could totally ravage Germany's economy, and the possibility of Germany's unassimilated Muslim minority rising. Not having us invade would be better for Germany. So he opposes the war.

That's fine. That's his privilege. It's a completely reasonable thing for the Chancellor of Germany to do. But it's not the act of a friend.

:: Scot 1:59 PM [+] :: ::
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For those who wish that they would just kill each other off...

:: Scot 1:29 PM [+] :: ::
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Margaret Wente asks who's killing the children of Iraq?

The suffering of the Iraqi people has been immense. And the main cause is Saddam Hussein. He has tried to manipulate the oil-for-food program to punish regions that oppose him. He has used Iraq's smuggling and tax revenues for guns, not butter. He has sacrificed health and education programs to finance his weapons, then used hungry people and sick children as a cynical propaganda tool. (In 1998 and 1999, despite the urging of the UN, he refused to order baby formula for new mothers.)

When people call him the Butcher of Baghdad, the peace faction wails about demonizing the enemy. But it's the simple truth. He has waged war against his own people for 30 years. He has slaughtered Kurds and Shiites, Christians and Sunnis and Communists. In all his massacres, the children and the elderly, the weak and the sick, suffered most. He used as many as a million of his own young men as cannon fodder in his wars of aggression. He has tortured and killed thousands of real or imagined enemies of the regime in waves of Stalin-like purges, and driven millions more into exile.

I have no doubt that Saddam Hussein, like Stalin, will continue to attract his share of useful idiots -- of whom Canada has contributed more than its share. "The way to deal with Iraq is not by killing thousands of Iraqi civilians," say Margaret Atwood and Pierre Berton and David Suzuki piously. What do they imagine Mr. Hussein has been doing all these years? What do they imagine will ever make him quit? How much blood will be enough?

Stop it with the tough questions Ms Wente. The left has become exhausted preening the morality of innocent civilians - and now you want them to offer alternatives to war? Don't hold your breath - their replies won't surface until Saddam has long been overthrown.

:: Scot 9:21 AM [+] :: ::
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A fond farewell to Arts and Letters Daily. I'm replacing the link on the left with the the Arts and Letters Daily Archive. There's some of the best online reading I've done there.

:: Scot 6:44 PM [+] :: ::
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Is the UN siding with the enemy? David Warren writes of some curious overtures from political fifteen minute of famer Kofi Annan:

It has also emerged that Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, has been active behind the scenes, helping the Iraqis frame and phrase both of the diplomatic stunts that have subverted the U.S. and British diplomatic effort. He helped the Iraqis write the letter on Sept. 16, deceitfully offering "inspections without conditions", and has since kept them informed of diplomatic developments, helping them time their second intervention, in which they anticipated and rejected the proposed U.S. resolution draft. The U.S. State Department has the documentation on this; and it cannot have helped to relieve the feelings of distrust, even contempt, the Bush administration has for "the way they do business over there".

It almost looks like the UN is gently easing Iraq into accepting what will be soon be 'occupation' (a ritual followed by the inevitable military conflict). If not, this seems like a rather strange thing to do.

Warren gives a good explanation of Russia's hesitation to give the green light for war:

The Russians have proved the hardest nut to crack. The British prime minister, Tony Blair, trusting the French will end up on the side of the angels, has been working privately on the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, with every wile at his command. The Russians have huge direct investments in both Iraq and Iran, and Saddam alone owes them at least U.S. $10 billion. They are also conscious of having been stripped naked, strategically. They want the Americans to allow them to throw their weight around countries like Georgia, which has quietly slipped, like several other ex-Soviet states, from the Russian into the American sphere of influence. There is little they ask that the Americans can now give them; but there is a long Russian diplomatic tradition of trying it on anyway.

:: Scot 6:28 PM [+] :: ::
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Another gem from Mark Steyn.

If the object is to contain Saddam, deterrence will flop. If the object is to weaken America it just might work. We forget how fragile the concept is. It’s said the Soviets didn’t take it seriously until the Cuban missile crisis: suppose a McGovern or Dukakis or Carter had been in the Oval Office then. In the Daily Telegraph, Adam Nicolson professes to be in favour of ‘deterrence’. But deterrence depends on plausibility. When Saddam switches on CNN and sees Adam Nicolson standing in Downing Street pre-emptively chanting ‘Shame! Shame!’ over the mere possibility of a ludicrously antiquated vision of a prolonged siege of Baghdad, he might reasonably question how serious Nicolson would be about nuking the joint. The wily old monster might wonder, if he were to lob a small nuke at, say, Tel Aviv, whether the shame set would really have the stomach for full-blown retaliation with massive civilian casualties, or whether they’d be back in the streets chanting that ‘violence only breeds more violence’. He might conclude that a system of deterrence between a gangster and a ladies’ luncheon club will deter the latter and leave him free to do pretty much what he wants.

If you believe, like Nelson Mandela, that Bush is the problem not Saddam, then the above makes perfect sense. But I wonder if the rest of the anti-Yank set have thought it through. When they bitch about America’s warmongering but think the UN’s the perfect vehicle to restrain it, you know they’re just posing, and that, though they may routinely say that ‘Bush frightens me’, they’re not frightened at all. America could project itself anywhere and blow up anything, but it doesn’t. It could tell the UN to go fuck itself, but it’s not that impolite. Imagine any previous power of the last thousand years with America’s unrivalled hegemony and unparalleled military superiority in a unipolar world with nothing to stand in its way but UN resolutions. Pick whoever you like: the Soviet Union, Imperial Japan, the Third Reich, the Habsburgs, Tsarist Russia, Napoleon, Spain, the Vikings. That’s really ‘frightening’. I’ve now read a gazillion columns beginning, ‘He’s a dangerous madman with weapons of mass destruction. No, not Saddam. George W. Bush.’ It barely works as a joke never mind a real threat. The fact that, in all the torrent of anti-Americanism, there’s no serious thought given to how to reverse it nor any urgency about doing so tells you precisely how frightening and dangerous these folks really think the Great Satan is.

But the problem is this. Before 11 September, most Americans tolerated the anti-Yank diatribes from Europe as a quaint example of the local culture. Filtered through the smoke of the World Trade Center, it’s no longer quite so cute. The real phenomenon of the last year is not Europe’s anti-Americanism, which has always existed, but a deep, pervasive and wholly new American weariness with Europe. Saddam’s creditors in Moscow and under-the-table trading partners in Paris, his useful idiots in Europe and kindred spirits in the thug states may yet team up to stymie America at the UN and those 150,000 ‘peace’ marchers will cheer. But be careful what you wish for.

:: Scot 5:59 PM [+] :: ::
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Ken Layne sees journalism's ugly side.

A couple years ago, I thought the wires might be more careful now that the whole world has access. Maybe newspapers would make sure these stories from the future stopped appearing on their Web sites. Nah. Why start caring now? During the 2000 GOP convention, when everybody was making a big deal about Internet journalists (remember them?) covering the stupid non-story, Reuters reported on Laura Bush's speech and how the delegates reacted. This was an hour before she spoke. AP did the same thing with Colin Powell's speech, with detailed quotes from members of the audience. Filed at 9:10 p.m., almost 90 minutes before he took the stage.

Journalism is a total scam. Even in an era of 24-hour news channels and raw wires on the Internet, there's still no shame at daily newspapers. Whole sections are prepared days or even weeks before they arrive in your "news" paper, and you'd be surprised how much of the "A" section for today's paper was done while you were having breakfast yesterday. Or earlier.

:: Scot 5:51 PM [+] :: ::
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One Jew hater to another...

(from Little Green Footballs)

:: Scot 10:22 PM [+] :: ::
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Why I can't get enough of Ann Coulter. In 'Why We Hate Them' she writes:

Gore also complained that Bush has made the "rest of the world" angry at us. Boo hoo hoo. He said foreigners are not worried about "what the terrorist networks are going to do, but about what we're going to do."

Good. They should be worried. They hate us? We hate them. Americans don't want to make Islamic fanatics love us. We want to make them die. There's nothing like horrendous physical pain to quell angry fanatics. So sorry they're angry – wait until they see American anger. Japanese kamikaze pilots hated us once too. A couple of well-aimed nuclear weapons, and now they are gentle little lambs. That got their attention.

:: Scot 10:12 PM [+] :: ::
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This is chilling...

:: Scot 9:04 PM [+] :: ::
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Uri Dan gives a good explanation of Russia's reluctance to endorse U.S. policy on Iraq:

The Kremlin, which suffered not a few setbacks in the Middle East during the days of the USSR, is now trying slowly to restore its position in the Middle East as the new Russia. Iraq is too important from the geo-economic aspect for Russia to agree to give up a serious foothold in it. It seems that the Kremlin wants to make sure that if the US topples Saddam's regime by force, Russia will retain its economic position there. Russia is afraid that the renewal of the flow of Iraqi oil is liable to cause a drop in oil prices that will harm its economy. The Russians also want a part in the reconstruction of Iraq from its current ruins and those that will be produced in the coming war. Just recently Russia signed an enormous $40 billion economic-commercial agreement with the Iraqi government. A senior Russian personality told me: "This is a classic example of a step intended to establish Russia's status in post-Saddam Iraq. By means of this agreement Russia has said to America, in effect: We are also here, in Iraq." Russia is in fact telling the US something like this: We here in Moscow know that you will go to war without us, but you should realize that it would be better for you to go to Baghdad without our opposition. It is therefore preferable that the US already agree with Russia what it will receive for its support of the American step, even if this were to be an tacit agreement.

:: Scot 8:44 PM [+] :: ::
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Why their culture sucks part pi:

A cultural official has been arrested for allowing an Iranian actress and the young actor she publicly kissed on the cheek walk away free, in violation of strict Islamic laws, Iranian media reported Wednesday.

Socializing between unrelated men and women is banned by Iran's Islamic laws, and public kissing between men and women is considered taboo.

Mohammad Ali Pakdel, a cultural official in Yazd in central Iran, was jailed Tuesday, the daily Etemad reported. He was later released on $6,250 bail.

:: Scot 8:36 PM [+] :: ::
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Another day another Canadian jackass rears it's head from the morally bankrupt backbench of the Liberal crockus.

During a debate on Iraq late Monday, Bonnie Brown, the MP for Oakville, suggested a pre-emptive U.S. strike on Saddam Hussein would be akin to the actions of the Japanese empire's attack on Pearl Harbor.

In a lengthy speech denouncing the U.S. President, Ms. Brown said he had provided no evidence that Iraq posed a threat and said an attack on Iraq would be "insulting" to Second World War veterans.

Foreign Affairs jackass Bill Graham clears this up:

"Analogies that were made on this side of the House were made to say that if we choose unilateralism and if we choose to attack in circumstances which could be perceived as aggression, we defy the memory of those who resisted aggression in the past," Mr. Graham said. "That is a valid position. It is consistent with world international law."

Got that? Not to be outdone with all this is Colleen Beaumier, a nobody from nowheresville:

Also during the Commons debate on Iraq, Colleen Beaumier, the MP for Brampton West-Mississauga, praised Saddam's Iraq as a "progressive" secular nation that has suffered enormous hardship since the Gulf War.

So have the Kurds, the Iranians, and the Kuwaitis - not to mention the Israelis.

"Prior to the Star Wars of 1991,

The Star Wars of 1991? Is this the Gulf War of 1991 or the Star Wars Satellite Defence System that was an issue with the Russians - in the 80's?

Iraq was a country like all others in the Middle East under a dictatorship.

It's funny how often one can spot the bigotry of low expectations in this brand of leftism.

However, it was a progressive country with health care for all and education and human rights for women, which is far more advanced than other friendly Middle Eastern countries," Ms. Beaumier said. "It was a secular state offering a relative degree of equality for all its citizens."

For a Middle East dictatorship, this simply amounts to less blood being spilled on the streets. Saddam had his backwater slightly more organized, and lethal, than his neighbours but so what? The Jonestown kool-aid club lived much better than Koresh's Waco harem, who lived better than the Heaven's Gate Hale Boppers. All three however were equally malicious in their intent and posed dangers to society. The phrase 'relative degree of equality for all its citizens' can't be easy to say with a straight face.

Ms. Beaumier added, "that is not to say I support Saddam Hussein"

Of course not.

but the human rights abuses that occurred under UN sanctions in post-Gulf War Iraq were "far more vile and hideous than they were anywhere else."

What does this mean? Is this a slag at Saddam or the UN - or neither? It sounds more like emotional hyperbole than political analysis, not that I truly expected such.

:: Scot 12:02 AM [+] :: ::
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Oliver Willis sees the end of the road for Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.

Surprising many in Hollywood, Barbershop received strong support from minorities its first week of release, then by word of mouth spread to a larger audience. So far the film has racked up $38 million, impressive for a movie released in the waning days of the summer.

Jackson and Sharpton don’t like this. They don’t like the sacred cows of black America exposed for the entire nation to see, and they’ve done what is now familiar to anyone who’s watched them over the years. They’ve run to the media and complained. Jackson said, “There are some heroes who are sacred to a people, and these comments poisoned an otherwise funny movie”. Sharpton joined him in asking for the film to be edited, removing the content he and Jackson object to.

It left many scratching their heads. Here was a film, created and directed by blacks, starring a mostly black cast, and it was appealing to all of America. Isn’t this the exact sort of success that “Jesse and Al” fought for?

The answer is: yes. But it also shows that Sharpton and Jackson are increasingly becoming irrelevant to the fight for racial equity. The worldview of these two is almost always uniform: there is a white majority, and they are working in a concerted effort to keep blacks and other minorities down. Sure, there are incidents of institutionalized racism in America still and none but the most blinded believe that America has reached some sort of racial harmony. But these very same people realize that many of black America’s problems come from within. Teenage pregnancy, drugs, and other issues cannot easily be explained away in a protest march or in a media appearance.

:: Scot 10:05 PM [+] :: ::
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Two new essays posted in the my reading room - Our New Old Enemies by Ralph Peters and The Naked Face by Malcolm Gladwell.

:: Scot 10:00 PM [+] :: ::
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Bryan Preston describes the al Qaeda training tapes.

Most chilling of all, the tactics seen on the al Qaeda training tape match nothing seen on the battlefields of Afghanistan. It's therefore reasonable to conclude that the videotaped tactics are for some future attack. The entire tape points to such a conclusion. The ambush scenario featured six-lane highways with cloverleaf exit and entry patterns similar to those in the United States and Europe. Some of the hostage scenarios featured raids of buildings with large numbers of occupants, suggesting schools or businesses. The golf-course scenario certainly doesn't look like anything likely to be pulled off in most Middle Eastern countries.

Al Qaeda troops train via a set of combat scenes that vary in scale and intent. Scenarios seen on the tape include those described above, as well as several others that involve hostages. All hostage scenarios began with extreme violence — anyone offering resistance was shot and killed on the spot. During the siege, the terrorists play-acted dictating commands to the hostages in English, and the play-acting hostages responded in English. For these scenarios, the terrorists are trained to determine whether any law enforcement, military, security, or even armed citizens, are among the hostages. If they find such people among the prisoners, the terrorists will segregate them from the others, and will control them by threatening to harm the unarmed hostages. The end fate for such prisoners is ritual execution in front of TV cameras. In fact, all of these scenarios ended with the terrorists murdering all hostages and preparing to die in place. None of the hostage scenarios deviated from this pattern.

Dignitaries seem to be the target of the assassination on a golf course, as mentioned above. On the tape, the target was on the green when the terrorists fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a vehicle adjacent to the green. The Army assessment speculates that that vehicle probably belonged to the target's security detail, indicating that the target is a known VIP. Having destroyed the target's security, the terrorists then engage and kill the target with rifle fire. This scenario could constitute training to assassinate the current or a former U.S. president, or the head of state of a European ally. Other targets may include business and industry leaders, or high-ranking military officers.

The assessment also concludes that al Qaeda designs these raids to maximize media coverage. They would do this by combining mass casualty attacks such as 9/11 with other, smaller-scale attacks designed to get their operatives on camera to deliver messages and speeches. Al Qaeda would carry out the attacks simultaneously at multiple geographical locations to maximize their psychological effect.

:: Scot 9:44 PM [+] :: ::
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I'll never understand these lesbians -

A feminist bookstore has angered the Canadian Jewish Congress by refusing to distribute buttons calling for an end to suicide bombings in Israel, even as it sells buttons protesting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

''We're trying to digest the information that the Toronto Women's Bookstore is somehow averse to a button that says Stop the killings or Stop the bombings. I would think that no Canadians want to see suicide bombings killing innocent civilians,'' said Ed Morgan, chair of the CJC for the Ontario region.

The CJC was told this summer that the bookstore was selling $2 buttons bearing slogans such as Free Palestine -- Time for Peace Time for Women and End the Occupation Now.

No men and Jews allowed. Who's next - Asians?

:: Scot 9:38 PM [+] :: ::
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