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?
The Miles Davis of anti-capitalism
Riffing off one glib observation after another, Michael Moore?s Capitalism: A Love Story is his weakest film yet.
The real scandal is this obsession with scandal
As Republicans and Democrats squabble over who is most corrupt, the American people become more cynical about the entire political class.
Britons, why can?t you be more like Iraqis?
Political observers are cynically celebrating the Iraqi elections as a welcome contrast to dumb apathy here at home.
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Tyranny of but - March 7, 2010
Does freedom matter?
The short answer to that question, when I have asked various acquaintances of what I would call a "mildly liberal," or middle-of-the-road disposition, is: "Yes, but ..."
This "but" may correspond to any of many suggested qua...
Baby steps - March 6, 2010
The Dominion budget tabled this week (or "federal" as we now say, in emulation of the Americans) was full of restraint. We have been assured of this by every media source I've seen, and the notion gains additional plausibility from the mild endors...
Olympic torch - March 3, 2010
Fourteen gold medals! Granted, the medal inflation to which William Watson the economist drew attention in these pages yesterday, but -- 14 gold medals!
I shall remember the Vancouver Winter Olympics not for anything that happened there, except a...
Chile survived its huge earthquake relatively well. Iran would be a different...
In his days on the staid old London Times of the 1930s, Claud Cockburn won an in-house competition for the most boring headline by coming up with "Small Earthquake in Chile: Not Many Dead." The shelf-life of this joke?which, I hasten to add, was at the expense of the Times, not the people of Chile?was so durable that when the anti-Allende and pro-Kissinger historian Alistair Horne came to write his book on the Unidad Popular government of the 1970s, he called it Small Earthquake in Chile. At approximately the same time, composing his memorable epitaph for Salvador Allende, Gabriel García Márquez spoke of the likable peculiarities of the Chileans and exaggerated his non-magical realism by only a few degrees when he said:
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Al Haig was a neurotic narcissist with an unquenchable craving for power.
"Nobody has a higher opinion of General Alexander Haig than I do," I once wrote. "And I think he is a homicidal buffoon." I did not then realize that this view of mine was at least partly shared by so many senior figures on the American right.
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Amnesty International loses sight of its original purpose.
It's an old story, but it bears retelling. One day at the dawn of the 1960s, a lawyer named Peter Benenson was reading the newspaper on the London subway. He came across a small item reporting that two students from Portugal?then still a fascist dictatorship running a filthy empire in Africa?had been sentenced to seven years imprisonment for raising a toast to liberty in a public place in Lisbon. After a short cogitation, he decided to take action, and his open letter concerning "prisoners of conscience" was published on the front page of the London Observer. You may never have heard or read about this micro-event or its macro consequences, but I am willing to wager that you have heard of Amnesty International, which was the great tree that sprouted from this acorn. Its "branches"?the innumerable local groups that sprang into existence?have been responsible for the release of many political prisoners and the public shaming of many of the regimes that hold them.
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Stop the Masochistic InsanityThe violent response to the report of "Quranic abuse" isn't about faith, it's about intolerance.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, May 23, 2005, at 9:16 AM PT
Toward the end of Taliban rule in Afghanistan, when music had already been banned and women excluded from Islamic rituals by being immured in their homes, and when new non-Quranic punishments—such as being buried alive—had been promulgated for homosexuals, an arcane point arose among the fierce Islamists who ran the place: Should paper bags also be haram, or forbidden? The point was an exquisitely delicate one. It was known that such bags were made from recycled paper. It had been alleged that old and torn copies of the Quran had been thrown, or must have been thrown, somewhere and sometime, into the vats of pulp. Was there, therefore, not a real risk that each paper bag might contain a profaned fragment of the divine word? The thought of toilet paper being made in this manner may have been too obscene even to consider, but in the event, paper bags were banned, just as most reading material had already been.
It's essential that we understand the deep irrationality that underlies all faith and that can take these fetishistic forms. That great religion expert Kenneth Woodward, who used to write with extreme lenience on such subjects as miracles (for Newsweek, as it happens), has now written a solemn article for the Wall Street Journal saying that Muslims revere the Quran, or "recitation," much, much more than Christians revere the Bible. The Bible is only a first draft of God's will, set down by mere mortals, whereas the Quran is the unmediated word of God himself. No wonder, then, that pious Muslims will hear of a Newsweek capsule story, assume it to be infallible, and immediately begin to kill and burn. What could be more understandable?
Well, first, most Muslims did not do any such thing, and those who did should not be indulged in the Wall Street Journal. Second, why are we to assume that God speaks only Arabic? Third, are these not the same crowds who believed that all the Jews were ordered to leave the World Trade Center just in time? The truth or otherwise of the story has precious little to do with it. If it had not been this "provocation," it would have been another (such as the claim that the United States sets off the car bombs in Baghdad to give itself an excuse to stick around).
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