Archive for May, 2005

Busting the Moral Equivalence Racket

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Steve Darden
on 5/30/2005
in Foreign Policy, Islam and Politics
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Another great essay by Keith Thompson - a short, sharp critique of postmodern relativism.

When the notorious vehicles of death assaulted the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, American leftists found themselves standing on strange and uncertain ground — but in a way that differed substantially from the experience of most Americans that day.

Most of us didn’t blame America for the pilots’ murderous acts.

In the aftermath of Vietnam, self-styled progressives got used to automatically assuming the worst about U.S. foreign policy, defining themselves as permanent dissenters from a cultural center they loved to hate. Charmed for decades by Third World revolutionaries mouthing pious clichés against the accumulated evils of the West, the left faced in Osama bin Laden an enemy who shared their chronic contempt for the U.S. but made “no pretense at any universal, secular ideology that could appeal to Western liberals,” as Andrew Sullivan wrote at the time.

This was new terrain for America’s self-willed exiles in residence — but not exactly a deal breaker. Just because bin Laden didn’t inspire feelings of solidarity among reflexive critics of America’s global presence was hardly a reason to lose sight of the true culprit — America herself.

It didn’t take long for the “Not in My Name” left to settle on a two-pronged strategy: Exercise discipline by muzzling those hard to resist “America had it coming” sentiments, while staying on the outlook for opportunities to equate America’s use of force in the world with the nihilistic mayhem of Islamist terror.

The movement’s first full-dress drill in moral equivalence came just after the White House and Congress resolved to strike at the heart of bin Laden’s Afghanistan operations. Leading left intellectuals responded that when the number of civilian who died as a result of the war in Afghanistan exceeded the number of casualities caused by of Qaeda’s September 11 mayhem, the Afghanistan war would wrong, irrespective of all other factors.

This masterwork of moral blindness neglected to ask two rather basic questions. What did the Al Qaeda pilots intend to accomplish when they commandeered airplanes and crashed them into the Twin Towers? What did American soldiers intend to achieve when their actions resulted in the deaths of Afghani civilians?

…

When the president of the United States asked Americans to volunteer blood to the Red Cross after September 11, it’s worth remembering that he didn’t also ask us to volunteer for suicide missions or to enter American mosques and start taking hostages. Here’s the money question: Even if asked to do such things, how many of us would say yes? The fact that America’s apostles of equivalence can’t answer this question without stammering pretty much says it all.

This is not to say the radical cultural left doesn’t deserve the title "loyal opposition." Their opposition to America is increasingly clear. To whom or what they are loyal is rather more murky.

For more analysis of the transformation of the postmodern left see "Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left" by David Horowitz, reviewed by Jay Nordlinger:

Politically speaking, it’s probably the most explosive suggestion you can make today: that the Left has joined hands with radical Islam. That it is fellow-traveling with it. Such a suggestion will get you branded a McCarthyite, immediately. But is it true (the suggestion, that is)? Afraid so. And this case is powerfully, sickeningly made in David Horowitz’s new book.

And for the “taxi driver’s perspective”, see my post on the Haim Harari Speech: A View from the Eye of the Storm.

ABC’s Moran on anti-military bias

Published
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Steve Darden
on 5/30/2005
in Media and Military
. 0 Comments

I’ve not yet found a transcript of the Hugh Hewitt interview with ABC’s Terry Moran in which Moran admits that the media does have a deep anti-military bias (scroll down or search for "Terry Moran"). :

It comes from, I think, a huge gulf of misunderstanding, for which I lay plenty of blame on the media itself. There is, Hugh, I agree with you, a deep anti-military bias in the media. One that begins from the premise that the military must be lying, and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong. I think that that is a hangover from Vietnam, and I think it’s very dangerous.

but you will find a link to an MP3 audio snippet of Moran’s comments.

(ht: Instapundit)

The Dog That Didn’t Bark - The Press and Linda Foley

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 5/30/2005
in Media
. 0 Comments

Thomas Lipscomb wrote this 26 May critique for Editor and Publisher. If the shareholders of the legacy media still don’t understand why their readership is falling every month, they will surely benefit from reading this account:

Newspaper Guild President Linda Foley made a public statement on May 13 that journalists are “being targeted for real in places like Iraq.” She has been trying to slide out of it ever since. Pressed by E&P’s Joe Strupp, Foley offered a clarification on who specifically was doing the targeting: “I was careful of not saying troops, I said U.S. military.”

…

Sherlock Holmes’s key clue to who stole the racehorse in “Silver Blaze” was a dog in the stall that didn’t bark. And something equally odd happened on the way to the Foley firestorm: To date, not a single pundit, editorial writer, or newspaper ran anything, with the exception of the Chicago Sun-Times story I wrote, a St. Paul Pioneer Press column by Mark Yost, and a Washington Times column item.

…

The average circulation decline among 684 US daily papers is averaging 1.9% in the past year. In some places it is catastrophic. This is the biggest drop in the last five years. And no one is forecasting a turnaround yet. In case it hasn’t occurred to anyone, that means fewer slots for Newspaper Guild workers. Media credibility is in the toilet, even if the Koran isn’t.

The Manchester Guardian’s Peter Preston explains where the circulation is going—-“the defectors are packing up and moving out of newsprint: to broadcasting in tiny measure (though radio and TV news are losing customers, too) but overwhelmingly to the Net.” And it isn’t the Right or the blogosphere that are doing this to us, although that is what the MSM would prefer to believe. We are doing it ourselves.

If the most basic tenets of Journalism 101 are now no longer important enough for the media itself to honor and defend against their own members who violate them, where is the professionalism and the authority that is our main claim to writing the indispensable “first draft of history” – much less its value for sale? And if we lose sight of that irretrievably, who needs us? There are bloggers out there today with more credibility than Dan Rather, Mary Mapes, Eason Jordan, and Linda Foley combined, and their audiences are growing.

If Foley is allowed to walk unchallenged from what Mencken might have called “a clear, simple, and” unproven statement, it will only accelerate the speed at which her members lose what is left of their credibility–and then their jobs. (Look at The New York Times newsroom downsizing this week.) If the press isn’t going to take its own standards seriously, it is hard to think of why anyone should take the press seriously enough to pay for it. In the meantime, Rupert Murdoch’s and Roger Ailes’s success offers a constant unpleasant reminder: the media market prefers dogs that bark.

Leaving the left

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 5/30/2005
in Foreign Policy, Iraq and Politics
. 0 Comments

Writer Keith Thompson in the 22 May San Franciso Chronicle explains his separation from "the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness…". I think this is an honest and very well-written piece by a man I can identify with. A man who finally faced the awful contradictions between the progressive viewpoint of the 1960’s - with which he identified, and the reactionary posture of the left today:

I’m leaving the left — more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives — people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere — reciting all the ways Iraq’s democratic experiment might yet implode.

My estrangement hasn’t happened overnight. Out of the corner of my eye I watched what was coming for more than three decades, yet refused to truly see. Now it’s all too obvious. Leading voices in America’s "peace" movement are actually cheering against self-determination for a long-suffering Third World country because they hate George W. Bush more than they love freedom.

Like many others who came of age politically in the 1960s, I became adept at not taking the measure of the left’s mounting incoherence. To face it directly posed the danger that I would have to describe it accurately, first to myself and then to others. That could only give aid and comfort to Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and all the other Usual Suspects the left so regularly employs to keep from seeing its own reflection in the mirror.

…

A turning point came at a dinner party on the day Ronald Reagan famously described the Soviet Union as the pre-eminent source of evil in the modern world. The general tenor of the evening was that Reagan’s use of the word "evil" had moved the world closer to annihilation. There was a palpable sense that we might not make it to dessert.

When I casually offered that the surviving relatives of the more than 20 million people murdered on orders of Joseph Stalin might not find "evil’" too strong a word, the room took on a collective bemused smile of the sort you might expect if someone had casually mentioned taking up child molestation for sport.

My progressive companions had a point. It was rude to bring a word like "gulag" to the dinner table.

I look back on that experience as the beginning of my departure from a left already well on its way to losing its bearings. Two decades later, I watched with astonishment as leading left intellectuals launched a telethon- like body count of civilian deaths caused by American soldiers in Afghanistan. Their premise was straightforward, almost giddily so: When the number of civilian Afghani deaths surpassed the carnage of Sept. 11, the war would be unjust, irrespective of other considerations.

Stated simply: The force wielded by democracies in self-defense was declared morally equivalent to the nihilistic aggression perpetuated by Muslim fanatics.

Susan Sontag cleared her throat for the "courage" of the al Qaeda pilots. Norman Mailer pronounced the dead of Sept. 11 comparable to "automobile statistics." The events of that day were likely premeditated by the White House, Gore Vidal insinuated. Noam Chomsky insisted that al Qaeda at its most atrocious generated no terror greater than American foreign policy on a mediocre day.

All of this came back to me as I watched the left’s anemic, smirking response to Iraq’s election in January. Didn’t many of these same people stand up in the sixties for self-rule for oppressed people and against fascism in any guise? Yes, and to their lasting credit. But many had since made clear that they had also changed their minds about the virtues of King’s call for equal of opportunity.

These days the postmodern left demands that government and private institutions guarantee equality of outcomes. Any racial or gender "disparities" are to be considered evidence of culpable bias, regardless of factors such as personal motivation, training, and skill. This goal is neither liberal nor progressive; but it is what the left has chosen. In a very real sense it may be the last card held by a movement increasingly ensnared in resentful questing for group-specific rights and the subordination of citizenship to group identity. There’s a word for this: pathetic.

I smile when friends tell me I’ve "moved right." I laugh out loud at what now passes for progressive on the main lines of the cultural left.

In the name of "diversity," the University of Arizona has forbidden discrimination based on "individual style." The University of Connecticut has banned "inappropriately directed laughter." Brown University, sensing unacceptable gray areas, warns that harassment "may be intentional or unintentional and still constitute harassment." (Yes, we’re talking "subconscious harassment" here. We’re watching your thoughts …).

…

I’ll admit my politics have shifted in recent years, as have America’s political landscape and cultural horizon. Who would have guessed that the U.S. senator with today’s best voting record on human rights would be not Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer but Kansas Republican Sam Brownback?

He is also by most measures one of the most conservative senators. Brownback speaks openly about how his horror at the genocide in the Sudan is shaped by his Christian faith, as King did when he insisted on justice for "all of God’s children."

My larger point is rather simple. Just as a body needs different medicines at different times for different reasons, this also holds for the body politic.

In the sixties, America correctly focused on bringing down walls that prevented equal access and due process. It was time to walk the Founders’ talk — and we did. With barriers to opportunity no longer written into law, today the body politic is crying for different remedies.

…

One aspect of my politics hasn’t changed a bit. I became a liberal in the first place to break from the repressive group orthodoxies of my reactionary hometown.

This past January, my liberalism was in full throttle when I bid the cultural left goodbye to escape a new version of that oppressiveness. I departed with new clarity about the brilliance of liberal democracy and the value system it entails; the quest for freedom as an intrinsically human affair; and the dangers of demands for conformity and adherence to any point of view through silence, fear, or coercion.

True, it took a while to see what was right before my eyes. A certain misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as morally capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that shape their lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left’s entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces, hence political wards who require the continuous shepherding of caretaker elites.

Leftists who no longer speak of the duties of citizens, but only of the rights of clients, cannot be expected to grasp the importance (not least to our survival) of fostering in the Middle East the crucial developmental advances that gave rise to our own capacity for pluralism, self-reflection, and equality. A left averse to making common cause with competent, self- determining individuals — people who guide their lives on the basis of received values, everyday moral understandings, traditional wisdom, and plain common sense — is a faction that deserves the marginalization it has pursued with such tenacity for so many years.

All of which is why I have come to believe, and gladly join with others who have discovered for themselves, that the single most important thing a genuinely liberal person can do now is walk away from the house the left has built. The renewal of any tradition that deserves the name "progressive" becomes more likely with each step in a better direction.

(ht: Chicago Boyz: Demimasque)

UPDATE: I’ve been reading Thomson’s website. It is quite interesting. The front page is a lengthy interview by C. J. Winter.

The State of Stem Cell Research

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 5/30/2005
in Science Policy
. 0 Comments

The State of Stem Cell Research

Chicago Boyz has just posted a useful overview of the current-history of embryonic stem cell research

When President Bush announced his very federalist compromise to the stem cell research debate in 2001, I thought it was a pretty good move. Although I support stem cell research, I can accept that some people see it (or at least the branch dealing with embryonic stem cells) as a grave sin. I can even understand their position, although I don’t share it. The compromise simply made clear that the federal government would not fund research into embryonic stem cell research. It did not, however, limit adult stem cell research, nor state or private investment in embryonic stem cell research. Here is the meat of the policy recommendation in Bush’s remarks to the nation:

The writer, Demimasque, includes a half-dozen links to relevant Federal and State bills.

The Middle East embraces democracy

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 5/30/2005
in Foreign Policy, Iraq and Middle East
. 0 Comments

Fouad Ajami, Professor Emeritus of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University, wrote this definitely-must-read May 22 essay for WSJ based upon a recent lecture at the Hoover Institution.

"George W. Bush has unleashed a tsunami on this region," a shrewd Kuwaiti merchant who knows the way of his world said to me. The man had no patience with the standard refrain that Arab reform had to come from within, that a foreign power cannot alter the age-old ways of the Arabs. "Everything here–the borders of these states, the oil explorations that remade the life of this world, the political outcomes that favored the elites now in the saddle–came from the outside. This moment of possibility for the Arabs is no exception." A Jordanian of deep political experience at the highest reaches of Arab political life had no doubt as to why history suddenly broke in Lebanon, and could conceivably change in Syria itself before long. "The people in the streets of Beirut knew that no second Hama is possible; they knew that the rulers were under the gaze of American power, and knew that Bush would not permit a massive crackdown by the men in Damascus."…

To venture into the Arab world, as I did recently over four weeks in Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, is to travel into Bush Country. I was to encounter people from practically all Arab lands, to listen in on a great debate about the possibility of freedom and liberty. I met Lebanese giddy with the Cedar Revolution that liberated their country from the Syrian prison that had seemed an unalterable curse. They were under no illusions about the change that had come their way. They knew that this new history was the gift of an American president who had put the Syrian rulers on notice. The speed with which Syria quit Lebanon was astonishing, a race to the border to forestall an American strike that the regime could not discount. I met Syrians in the know who admitted that the fear of American power, and the example of American forces flushing Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole, now drive Syrian policy. They hang on George Bush’s words in Damascus, I was told: the rulers wondering if Iraq was a crystal ball in which they could glimpse their future.

The weight of American power, historically on the side of the dominant order, now drives this new quest among the Arabs. For decades, the intellectual classes in the Arab world bemoaned the indifference of American power to the cause of their liberty. Now a conservative American president had come bearing the gift of Wilsonian redemption. For a quarter century the Pax Americana had sustained the autocracy of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak: He had posed as America’s man on the Nile, a bulwark against the Islamists. He was sly and cunning, running afoul of our purposes in Iraq and over Israeli-Palestinian matters. He had nurtured a culture of antimodernism and anti-Americanism, and had gotten away with it. Now the wind from Washington brought tidings: America had wearied of Mr. Mubarak, and was willing to bet on an open political process, with all its attendant risks and possibilities. The brave oppositional movement in Cairo that stepped forth under the banner of Kifaya ("Enough!") wanted the end of his reign: It had had enough of his mediocrity, enough of the despotism of an aging officer who had risen out of the military bureaucracy to entertain dynastic dreams of succession for his son. Egyptians challenging the quiescence of an old land may have had no kind words to say about America in the past. But they were sure that the play between them and the regime was unfolding under Mr. Bush’s eyes.

Unmistakably, there is in the air of the Arab world a new contest about the possibility and the meaning of freedom. This world had been given over to a dark nationalism, and to the atavisms of a terrible history. For decades, it was divided between rulers who monopolized political power and intellectual classes shut out of genuine power, forever prey to the temptations of radicalism. Americans may not have cared for those rulers, but we judged them as better than the alternative. We feared the "Shia bogeyman" in Iraq and the Islamists in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia; we bought the legend that Syria’s dominion in Lebanon kept the lid on anarchy. We feared tinkering with the Saudi realm; it was terra incognita to us, and the House of Saud seemed a surer bet than the "wrath and virtue" of the zealots. Even Yasser Arafat, a retailer of terror, made it into our good graces as a man who would tame the furies of the masked men of Hamas. That bargain with authoritarianism did not work, and begot us the terrors of 9/11.

The children of Islam, and of the Arabs in particular, had taken to the road, and to terror. There were many liberal, secular Arabs now clamoring for American intervention. The claims of sovereignty were no longer adequate; a malignant political culture had to be "rehabilitated and placed in receivership," a wise Jordanian observer conceded. Mr. Bush may not be given to excessive philosophical sophistication, but his break with "the soft bigotry of low expectations" in the Arab-Islamic world has found eager converts among Muslims and Arabs keen to repair their world, to wean it from a culture of scapegoating and self-pity. Pick up the Arabic papers today: They are curiously, and suddenly, readable. They describe the objective world; they give voice to recognition that the world has bypassed the Arabs. The doors have been thrown wide open, and the truth of that world laid bare. Grant Mr. Bush his due: The revolutionary message he brought forth was the simple belief that there was no Arab and Muslim "exceptionalism" to the appeal of liberty. For a people mired in historical pessimism, the message of this outsider was a powerful antidote to the culture of tyranny. Hitherto, no one had bothered to tell the Palestinians that they can’t have terror and statehood at the same time, that the patronage of the world is contingent on a renunciation of old ways. This was the condition Mr. Bush attached to his support for the Palestinians. It is too early to tell whether the new restraint in the Palestinian world will hold. But it was proper that Mr. Bush put Arafat beyond the pale.

It was Iraq of course that gave impetus to this new Arab history. And it is in Iraq that the nobility of this American quest comes into focus. This was my fourth trip to Iraq since the fall of the despotism, and my most hopeful yet. I traveled to Baghdad, Kirkuk, Erbil and Suleimaniyah. A close colleague–Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations–and I were there to lecture and to "show the flag." We met with parliamentarians and journalists, provincial legislators, clerics and secularists alike, Sunni and Shia Arabs and Kurds. One memory I shall treasure: a visit to the National Assembly. From afar, there are reports of the "acrimony" of Iraq, of the long interlude between Iraq’s elections, on Jan. 30, and the formation of a cabinet. But that day, in the assembly, these concerns seemed like a quibble with history. There was the spectacle of democracy: men and women doing democracy’s work, women cloaked in Islamic attire right alongside more emancipated women, the technocrats and the tribal sheikhs, and the infectious awareness among these people of the precious tradition bequeathed them after a terrible history. One of the principal leaders of the Supreme Islamic Council for Revolution in Iraq, Sheikh Hamam Hammoudi, an elegant, thoughtful cleric in his early 50s, brushed aside the talk of a Shia theocracy. This Shia man, who knew a smattering of English, offered his own assurance that the example and the power of Iran shall be kept at bay: "My English is better than my Farsi, even though I spent 20 years in Iran." He was proud of his Iraqi identity, proud of being "an Arab." He was sure that the Najaf school of Shia jurisprudence would offer its own alternative to the world view of Qom, across the border. He wanted no theocratic state in Iraq: Islam, he said, would be "a source" of legislation, but the content of politics would be largely secular. The model, he added, with a touch of irony, would be closer to the American mix of religion and politics than to the uncompromising secularism of France…

A lively press has sprouted in Iraq: There is an astonishing number of newspapers and weeklies, more than 250 in all. There are dozens of private TV channels and radio stations. Journalists and editors speak of a press free of censorship. Admittedly, the work is hard and dangerous, the logistics a veritable nightmare. But no single truth claimed this country, no "big man" sucked the air out of its public life. The insurgents will do what they are good at. But no one really believes that those dispensers of death can turn back the clock. Among the Sunni Arabs, there is growing recognition that the past cannot be retrieved, that it had been a big error to choose truculence and political maximalism. By a twist of fate, the one Arab country that had seemed ever marked for brutality and sorrow now stands poised on the frontier of a new political world. No Iraqis I met look to neighboring Arab lands for political inspiration: They are scorched by the terror and the insurgency, but a better political culture is tantalizingly close…

As I made my way on this Arab journey, I picked up a meditation that Massimo d’Azeglio, a Piedmontese aristocrat who embraced that "springtime" in Europe, offered about his time, which speaks so directly to this Arab time: "The gift of liberty is like that of a horse, handsome, strong, and high-spirited. In some it arouses a wish to ride; in many others, on the contrary, it increases the desire to walk." It would be fair to say that there are many Arabs today keen to walk–frightened as they are by the prospect of the Islamists coming to power and curtailing personal liberties, snuffing out freedoms gained at such great effort and pain. But more Arabs, I hazard to guess, now have the wish to ride. It is a powerful temptation that George W. Bush has brought to their doorstep.

Enjoy!

Princess Louisa Inlet

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 5/30/2005
in Cruising
. 1 Comment

Apologies for the intermittent posting. We have been cruising the Princess Louisa Inlet with five guests aboard, and have just picked up wireless net access via the Seattle Yacht Club station at Cortes Bay in Desolation Sound.


The Marine Provincial Park site offers lots of information on the park, quoting Earl Stanley Gardner:

"There is a calm tranquility which stretches from the smooth surface of the reflecting water straight up into infinity. The deep calm of eternal silences is only disturbed by the muffled roar of throbbing waterfalls as they plunge down from sheer cliffs. There is no scenery in the world that can beat it. Not that I’ve seen the rest of the world. I don’t need to, I’ve seen Princess Louisa Inlet."

The photo gallery link shows some representative views, though the scale is so huge that still photos are completely inadequate.

AP puts the negative spin on Bush-Karzai meeting

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 5/30/2005
in Afghanistan, Foreign Policy and Media
. 0 Comments

Neo-Neocon is on a roll this week, one great post follows another. This media-critique commentary demonstrates how a productive Karzai - Bush meeting gets spun into a quarrel by AP. She quotes from the actual transcript of the press conference (for which the headlines read "Karzai blasts US for Afghan prison abuse":

On the question of the prisoner abuse, we are, of course, sad about that. But let me make sure that you all know that that does not reflect on the American people.

Right now in Afghanistan there is an Italian lady that has been kidnapped by an Afghan man, while there are hundreds of Afghan women demonstrating outside in the streets of Kabul demanding the release of that woman, the Italian lady.

So the prisoner abuse thing is not at all a thing that we attribute to anybody else but those individuals. The Afghan people are grateful very, very much to the American people, and recognize that individual acts do not reflect either on governments or on societies. These things happen everywhere.

Neo-Neocon writes: Karzai–a devout Moslem–shows the same sort of common sense on the subject of Newsweek and the Koran-flushing story:

[The riots] were more against the elections in Afghanistan. They were more against the progress in Afghanistan. They were more against the strategic partnership with the United States.

We know who did it. We know the guys. We know the people behind those demonstrations. And unfortunately you don’t, here, follow the Afghan press. But if you listen to the Voice of America, the Radio Liberty and the BBC, the Afghan population condemned those acts of arson in Afghanistan.

Of course, we are, as Muslims, very much unhappy with Newsweek bringing a matter so serious in the gossip column. It’s really something that one shouldn’t do, that responsible journalism shouldn’t do at all.

But Newsweek story is not America’s story. That’s what we understand in Afghanistan.

Read the whole thing…

France will vote no

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 5/29/2005
in EU and Foreign Policy
. 0 Comments

Gregory Djerejian predicts that France will vote no to the EU constitution today. Greg has assembled a useful briefing on the set of issues he believes add up to a defeat, combining his own analysis with that of the Financial Times and of Anatole Kaletsky, writing for The Times (London). Kaletsky’s summary of the economic factors follows:

The people of France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands may be angry about globalisation or ultra-liberalism or immigration, but this reflects a deeper malaise. Their living standards are falling, their pensions are in danger, their children are jobless and their national pride is turning into embarrassment and even shame. In sum, they feel that their countries, which numbered among the world’s richest and most powerful nations as recently as the middle of the last decade, have gone to the dogs under the leadership of the present generation of politicians. And, at least in the economic sense, they are absolutely right…

The relative economic decline of “old” Europe since the early 1990s — especially of Germany and Italy, but also of the Netherlands and France — has been a disaster almost unparalleled in modern history. While Britain and Japan certainly suffered some massive economic dislocations, in the early 1980s and the mid-1990s respectively, they never experienced the same sort of permanent transformation from thriving full-employment economies to stagnant societies where mass unemployment and falling living standards are accepted as permanent facts of life. In Britain, unemployment more than doubled from 1980 to 1984, but conditions then quickly improved. By the late 1980s it was enjoying a boom, the economy was growing by 4 per cent and unemployment had halved. In continental Europe, by contrast, unemployment has been stuck between 8 and 11 per cent since 1991 and growth has reached 3 per cent only once in those 14 years.

This dreadful economic performance is more than enough to explain the political angst among Europeans. But what does it mean for the future of Europe? If Europe’s economy remains paralysed, then the federalist project is clearly dead, as are all hopes of further significant EU enlargement. But if the economy recovered, the disillusionment with EU politics might quickly vanish.

Who’s Afraid of the Islamists?

Published
by
Steve Darden
on 5/29/2005
in Foreign Policy, Iraq and Islam
. 0 Comments

Don’t miss this Belgravia Dispatch commentary on the outlook for real reform in the Middle East (kicked off by a NYT op-ed by Sadd Eddin Ibrahim):

It is the jubilance of being unshackled. Of being made free. In the shouts of "Kifiya" we hear this hope again, only in a new manifestation. Skeptics ask: Is History not simply repeating itself, another blundering power colonizing locals who stifle and brew resentment under the boot of foreign occupation? Optimists retort: did not the glorious sight of eight million flocking to polling places reassure many (not least, the Iraqis themselves) that the American intervention was something other than yet another blundering, brutish neo-colonialist adventure; but rather a complex exercise in democratizing an Arab state subdued by decades of Baathist excess and thuggery?

My money is on the latter, and I still think we will slog through and make Iraq a success in the coming years. I believe the Middle East may have passed a tipping point with peoples increasingly demanding political breathing space. We are seeing it in Kuwait, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Egypt, in Iraq, in Iran, in Bahrain. Just about everywhere, really. It is the dominant narrative at this juncture. What responsible actors in the U.S. must do is figure out how best to maximize the chances of these trends taking root over the long-term and in a manner beneficial to the U.S. national interest. We should not recoil in fear, for instance, whenever we hear the word Islamists. If moderate Islamists were to take control in certain countries (though I think their popularity is often overstated) and guide stable polities, this will prove better than secular butchers like Saddam. We must be careful, however, to ensure that foreign influence is wielded in a manner calibrated to not lead to nationalist backlashes or radical Islamist reaction.

This is why B.D. is so sensitive to tales of torture, of denigration of Islamic tenets in detainee treatment, and so on. This is not born of squeamishness; but of realism. An important element in securing a long term victory in this struggle against extremist terror is denying the enemy propaganda tools. Where are our fluent Arabic speakers on al-Arabiya explaining what legal reasons compelled us after 9/11 to have a detention center in Guantanamo for fanatical al-Qaeda detainees? Where are our spokesmen apologizing for the death of detainees in Bagram and Abu Ghraib who perished under U.S. custody? Loudly, repeatedly, in Arabic? Where are our spokesmen in spelling out the disciplinary measures that have been taken, the corrective measures that are being instituted, the red-lines that have been communicated to grunts in the field as to what is and isn’t acceptable when it comes to treatment of POWs? Where are our spokesmen in explaining that it was the United States that led efforts in tsunami relief (inclusive of in kind contributions) that struck and killed so many thousands of Muslims (whilst showcasing the embarassingly paltry Saudi contributions)? That it was the United States that pressed intervention (if belatedly) to save ravaged Muslim Sarajevans and, later, Muslim Kosovars? Where are our spokesmen in explaining that we understand the hopes of those who aspire to Palestinian freedom as much as we understand the hopes of those who hope for a secure Israel? Is it just me, or are we behind in getting these messages out? If so, why?

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