Counterstrike
Reflections on 'Blowback' - Lee Harris
It is simply a myth to believe that only interventionism yields unintended consequence, since doing nothing at all may produce the same unexpected results. If American foreign policy had followed a course of strict non-interventionism, the world would certainly be different from what it is today; but there is no obvious reason to think that it would have been better.
Iran: The wrong options on the table
- Spengler
The neo-conservatives "idealists" in the US had an easy, neat and plausible solution to the Middle East in the form of exporting democracy to the region. They were wrong. Similarly, the "realists", who, judging by the recent intelligence estimate on Iran, are in the ascendancy in the Bush administration, have a neat and easy solution - balance of power and deterrence. They are also wrong. There will not be a happy ending.
The abandonment of the Jews - Caroline Glick
The US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear intentions is the political version of a tactical nuclear strike on efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs.
In Praise of Carbon - John BrignellSuch delicious irony. How is that today's twisted eco-fascists have turned the source of all life into the destroyer of worlds?
Road to Bali - Peter FosterThe issue is not whether humanity will succumb to a "climate crisis," ... it's whether the authoritarian enemies of freedom (who rarely if ever recognize themselves as such) will succeed in using environmental hysteria to undermine capitalism and increase their Majesterium.
Television Networks Fade To Black As The U.S. Surge Succeeds In Iraq - Rich NoyesWinning the war? Who cares about that?
How to be a ?dudelike? mum
Zoe Williams? witty and insightful Bring It On, Baby joins a tiny handful of new books calling for solidarity between parents and a war of resistance against patronising parenting propaganda.
Why more and more people feel ?mentally ill?
Yes, the American Psychiatric Association?s DSM is mad, labelling even shyness a disorder. But it didn?t create today?s therapy culture.
Hans Blix?s Stalinist rewriting of history
Far from being anti-war heroes, UN weapons inspectors paved the way for the bombing of the ?bastards? and ?moral lepers? of Iraq.
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The trust thing - July 28, 2010
Conrad Black is out of prison in Florida; the former CanWest papers are acquiring new owners; the JournoList scandal continues in the U.S.; and we sweat through insupportably humid heat, thanks to jetstreams a long way north of where they should b...
Good news - July 25, 2010
Let me record in passing how happy I am that the Harper government is getting rid of the "long form" of the census. Or rather, I wish it were doing so entirely: instead it is replacing one of innumerable arbitrary invasions of the citizen's privac...
JournoLism - July 24, 2010
The word "detachment" has several meanings. It may refer, for instance, to the state of being free of prejudice or bias, to being "disinterested" -- a word that in turn means almost the opposite of "uninterested." But it can also refer to a milita...
The United States and Europe stood up to Serbia. Can they stand up to North K...
The impressive decision last week by the International Court of Justice in The Hague?to reject the claim submitted by Serbia that Kosovo's 2008 declaration of independence was unlawful?was mostly either ignored or reported in articles festooned with false alarmism about hypothetical future secessions. Allow this precedent, moaned many, and what is to stop, say, Catalonia from breaking away?
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Mel Gibson's tirades are the distilled violence, cruelty, and bigotry of righ...
Every time Mel Gibson unburdens himself of a tirade against Jews or "n______s" or uncooperative females, there are commentators on hand to create a mystery where none exists. When he produced The Passion of the Christ, which lovingly and in detail recycled the bloody myth that all Jews are historically and collectively responsible for the murder of Jesus, it was argued by many mainstream Christians that his zeal for the faith might be a touch lurid but that the film itself was mainly devotional. When he was arrested on the Malibu freeway and screamed abuse at a police officer to the effect that Jews were responsible for all the wars in the world, pundits convened on page and screen to speculate whether our Mel had too much to drink that evening. Not long ago, I watched him go completely bug-eyed on television at a Jewish interviewer who asked him about the latter incident. "You've got a dog in this fight, haven't you?" he hissed. And now, in the wake of a Niagara of cloacal abuse directed at the mother of his youngest child, in which we were spared nothing by way of obscenity and menace and nothing by way of paranoid and sexualized racism, there have been those who diagnose Gibson's problem as a lack of anger management skills, combined perhaps with a touch of narcissistic personality disorder.
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Why is the U.S. Treasury Department subsidizing zealots who oppose our foreig...
Has President Barack Obama ever looked more ineffectual than he did last week, sitting almost wordlessly next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while the latter, on what seems like his 10th trip to Washington this year, lectured us all yet again on the importance of leaving Israel unmolested and even uncriticized? Even as the press conference dragged on, with the words "peace process" coming to sound more hollow and mocking by the moment, bulldozers and settlers were continuing their apparently uninterruptable creation of facts on the ground, all designed to forestall or pre-empt the availability of a geographic space in which even a vestigial Palestinian state could be created. Barely reported was the blatantly expressed view of Netanyahu's thuggish foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman?a man so hostile to diplomacy that he barely travels?that no such state could be expected from the current negotiations in any case. Apparently forgotten is the humiliation of Vice President Joe Biden, whose visit to Jerusalem last March was made laughable when the Israeli housing ministry?currently under the control of the religious Orthodox Shas Party?insisted on pressing ahead with new construction in a hotly disputed neighborhood.
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The Arab Street: A Vanquished Cliche
by Christopher Hitchens
The return of politics to Iraq has had many blissful secondary consequences, one of them apparently minor but nonetheless, I think, important. When was the last time you heard some glib pundit employing the phrase "The Arab Street"? I haven't actually done a Nexis search on this, but my strong impression is that the term has been, without any formal interment, laid to rest. And not a minute too soon, either.
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In retrospect, it's difficult to decide precisely when this annoying expression began to expire, if only from diminishing returns. There was, first, the complete failure of the said "street" to detonate with rage when coalition forces first crossed the border of Iraq, as had been predicted (and one suspects privately hoped) by so many "experts." But one still continued to hear from commentators who conferred street-level potency on passing "insurgents." (I remember being aggressively assured by an interviewer on Al Franken's quasi-comedic Air America that Muqtada Sadr's "Mahdi Army" in Najaf was just the beginning of a new "Tet Offensive.") Mr. Sadr duly got a couple of seats in the recent Iraqi elections. And it was most obviously those elections that discredited the idea of ventriloquizing the Arab or Muslim populace or of conferring axiomatic authenticity on the loudest or hoarsest voice.
The London-based newspaper Al Quds al-Arabi, which has for some time been a surrogate voice for "insurgent" talk in the Arab diaspora, polled its readers after the Iraqi elections and had the grace to print the result. About 90 percent had been favorably impressed by the sight of Iraqi and Kurdish voters waiting their turn to have a say in their own future. This is a somewhat more accurate use of the demotic thermometer than the promiscuous one to which we have let ourselves become accustomed. Meanwhile, the streets of, say, Beirut have been filled with demonstrators who are entirely fed up with having their lives and opinions taken for granted by parasitic oligarchies.
Of course, every now and then one still reads polls, conducted by who knows what measurement, that appear to state the contrary. For some reason, the Pew Center seems especially keen on publicizing these sorts of mass-opinion finding. You've seen them: Nine out of 10 Moroccan teenagers have a poster of Osama Bin Laden on their bedroom walls and so forth. Yet these findings don't seem to translate into anything much: The Muslim population with the closest experience of Bin Laden was the Afghan one, and the Afghan street, to judge by all available evidence, rejected him and ignored his threats in crushing and overwhelming numbers.
In the Palestinian elections, boycotted by the Islamists, a fairly solid turnout split the votes between Mahmoud Abbas and Mustapha Barghouti, the latter of whom scored an impressive 20 percent or so for a secular program. Where Hamas has done well in local elections in Gaza, it has been due to grass-roots welfare and social policy as much as to intransigent anti-Zionism, and it's possible to imagine the organization evolving, as has Hezbollah in Lebanon, into a quasi-political party with seats in the assembly. The logic of this, all rhetoric to one side, points largely in one direction.
Other Muslim streets are even more problematic for those who lazily assume that the jihadists are the voice of the unheard. The populations of Bosnia and Kosovo—populations that actually did have to confront anti-Muslim violence on a large scale—are generally hostile to Bin-Ladenism. Nobody has ever used the term "Iranian street," at least in print or on broadcast news, if only because everyone knows that Iranian opinion, as registered during the mock elections or voiced to visiting hacks, is strongly against the reigning theocracy.
This doesn't entitle those of us in the regime-change camp to claim the "street" either. It simply means that those who once annexed the term have been forced to drop it, and for a good reason. The struggle for public opinion in the region is a continuing one and cannot be determined in advance, least of all by pseudo-populists who grant the violent Islamists their first premise.
The same will hold true, one hopes, for the cheap propagandists who have lately been flourishing the term "Islamophobia." This word, or slogan, has been gaining ground among soft defenders of Islamism in Europe. It is used to put a stop to discussion about the political aims of Islamists in non-Islamic societies, and it has most recently generated great nervousness in Britain—sufficient nervousness to decide the Blair government to introduce legislation to make criticism of Islam into a prohibited hate crime.
Here again, the most persuasive evidence is the evidence that looks us in the face. In Iraq, Muslim militants place bombs in the mosques of those Muslims they regard as heretics. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, too, the Salafi and Wahhabi extremists commit murder against Muslims they deem unclean or unorthodox. And in the West, there are non-Muslims who excuse such atrocities as "resistance." These are often the same as those who hailed what they thought of as the "street." I don't think they should be indicted for hate crimes, but they should be made to understand that what they say is hateful and criminal, as well as sectarian. The battle for clarity of language is a part of this larger contest, and it is time for the opponents of terror and bigotry to become very much less apologetic and defensive on this score.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His latest collection of essays, Love, Poverty, and War, has just been published.
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