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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Conspiracy Theories
If you liked The Da Vinci Code, you'll love the Downing Street Memo.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, June 21, 2005, at 9:42 AM PT
A few weeks ago, at an airport in Europe, I saw Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code staring at me across the bookstore bins. I had seen it many times before and averted my gaze, but I was facing a long delay, and I suddenly thought: May as well get it over with.
Well, of course I knew it would be bad. I just didn't know that it would be that bad. Never mind for now the breathless and witless style, or the mashed-paper characters, or the lazy, puerile reliance on incredible coincidence to flog the lame plot along. What if it was all true? What if the Nazarene had had issue, in fleshly form, with an androgynous disciple? The Catholic Church would look foolish but, then, it already looks foolish enough on the basis of the official story. "Opus Dei," according to Brown, is a sinister cult organization. Excuse me, but I already knew this, so to speak, independently.
Over the past month, I have hardly been able to open my e-mail without a flood of similarly portentous tripe concerning the "Downing Street Memo(s)." This time, it is not the interior of a Templar Church but the style of a clerk in the British Foreign Office that furnishes "the key to all mythologies." A former CIA hand named Ray McGovern has challenged me to debate about the "smoking gun" contained in the Downing Street palimpsests, and I have agreed, in principle. Other correspondents have helpfully added other "smoking guns" as e-mail attachments. A man named Morgan Reynolds, a former chief economist at the Bush Labor Department and now an instructor at Texas A&M, has proof that the World Trade Center was laid low by a "controlled demolition" and not by the hijacked planes. This is a refreshing change from the Gore Vidal view that the Bush administration knowingly grounded all military aircraft in order to give the al-Qaida teams a clear shot. But perhaps both those theories are congruent: One wouldn't want to exclude any options if one were a Republican seeking to incinerate the downtown business HQ of capitalist globalization.
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