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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History and Mystery
Why does the New York Times insist on calling jihadists "insurgents"?
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, May 16, 2005, at 10:09 AM PT
When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your hair. A doozy classic led the "Week in Review" section on Sunday. Portentously headed "The Mystery of the Insurgency," the article rubbed its eyes at the sheer lunacy and sadism of the Iraqi car bombers and random murderers. At a time when new mass graves are being filled, and old ones are still being dug up, writer James Bennet practically pleaded with the authors of both to come up with an intelligible (or defensible?) reason for his paper to go on calling them "insurgents."
I don't think the New York Times ever referred to those who devastated its hometown's downtown as "insurgents." But it does employ this title every day for the gang headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. With pedantic exactitude, and unless anyone should miss the point, this man has named his organization "al-Qaida in Mesopotamia" and sought (and apparently received) Osama Bin Laden's permission for the franchise. Did al-Qaida show "interest in winning hearts and minds … in building international legitimacy … in articulating a governing program or even a unified ideology," or any of the other things plaintively mentioned as lacking by Mr. Bennet?
The answer, if we remember our ABC, is yes and no, with yes at least to the third part of the question. The Bin Ladenists did have a sort of "governing program," expressed in part by their Taliban allies and patrons. This in turn reflected a "unified ideology." It can be quite easily summarized: the return of the Ottoman Empire under a caliphate and a return to the desert religious purity of the seventh century (not quite the same things, but that's not our fault). In the meantime, anyway, war to the end against Jews, Hindus, Christians, unbelievers, and Shiites. None of the "experts" quoted in the article appeared to have remembered these essentials of the al-Qaida program, but had they done so, they might not be so astounded at the promiscuous way in which the Iraqi gangsters pump out toxic anti-Semitism, slaughter Nepalese and other Asian guest-workers on video and gloat over the death of Hindus, burn out and blow up the Iraqi Christian minority, kidnap any Westerner who catches their eye, and regularly inflict massacres and bombings on Shiite mosques, funerals, and assemblies.
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