The captioned imamic quote closes Mark Steyn’s little essay on quirky vignettes gleaned from John Robson’s new Top Five Book “A year’s worth of strange stories”.
The broader point, one feels, is that in a certain sense the foot-of-page-37 item is the real story. What gives you a better grasp of the realities of Europe today? The front-page reports on the G8 and the U.S.-EU summit? The in-depth profile of Jacques Chirac or Dominique de Villepin? Or the small space-filler about a French police lieutenant promoted to captain despite spending 12 of the last 18 years on “paternity leave,” in the course of which he wrote three books about the Beatles.
As a summation of contemporary Europe that could hardly be improved, not least in the way the generosity of Continental “paternity” leave seems to be inversely proportional to their barren societies’ actual paternity rate.
Robson’s book is self-published and can be ordered direct from the author for $7.95 via Paypal.
[ht: Tim Blair]
I wonder if Britain may be more at risk than France. Val MacQueen reports on recent incidents:
In the last few days in Britain, three events have caused what was already a small crack in the paper-thin edifice of “multiculturalism” in Britain to widen to a noticeable fissure.
First, 14-year old British schoolgirl Codie Stott was arrested for trying to get a good grade in her group science project. She had been placed with a group of students only one of whom spoke any English. When they began talking what she deduced was Urdu among themselves, she realized she had no hope of completing the project. She went to her teacher, and prefacing her request with a diplomatic, “I’m not trying to be funny, but …” she asked to be moved to an English-speaking team. The teacher reacted violently, raising her voice in the classroom to shout, “It’s racist! You’re going to get done by the police!”
The 14-year old was reported to a police officer on the school premises and the next day she was arrested, taken to the police station and told to take the laces out of her shoes and take off her jewelry. She then had her fingerprints taken and she was formally questioned. “It was awful,” she said later, when she’d been released, the police having shown more sense than her teacher.
This news item created a storm of anger in Britain. But, the incident was quickly followed by another. Aishah Azmi, a teacher’s assistant in an Episcopalian school who was tasked with helping recently arrived Urdu-speaking children to learn English, was asked to remove her niqab (full facial veil) in the classroom. She refused. She was told that the children needed to see her lips and mouth as she pronounced the English words they were supposed to be learning. She refused on religious grounds. The school, conciliatory for fear of being accused of racism, told her she was free to wear the veil in corridors and the staff room, but she should remove it when teaching foreign children English. She refused again, saying that as there was a male colleague in the classroom, she could not remove her veil in his presence.
Ms Azmi was sent home and her salary suspended. There is a broad school of thought in Islam that wearing the veil is not a religious requirement. Indeed the full facial veil is banned in public by the governments of both Turkey and Tunisia. In Tunisia, a woman may not enter a public [government] building wearing even a headscarf.
Read on…
Tigerhawk participated in a conference call with Mark Steyn — available as a 1:10 podcast. I am half way through the audio discussion - recommended.
UPDATE: I finished the podcast. Please change that to “Highly Recommended”.
Next, today Tigerhawk reviews “America Alone”, concluding succinctly
Don’t be a fool. Read America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It. And hope that Mark Steyn is just wrong.
I have only one thing to add to that excellent essay. It’s not wise to assume that the current trajectory of Old Europe will simply straight-line into the future. E.g., demographics such as the Italian birth rate of 1.1. I believe that when the situation becomes sufficiently ugly that a society will change. Already both Sweden and France are offering modest new-birth incentives.
Secondly, the dominant multiculturalism that has allowed high Muslim immigration and non-assimilation may well change radically when there are police roadblocks and firebombings in middle class neighborhoods. France could be the first society to make a right turn.
In the analysis discussed in my last post, Richard Fernandez referenced the following email to James Taranto from a US Army intelligence sergeant [working human intelligence NW of Baghdad]. Now that I’ve read the entire email I wanted to provide a direct link. His observations are worthy of some debate. A fragment:
There have been distinct failures of policy in Iraq. The vast majority of them fall under the category “failure to adapt.” Basically U.S. policies have been several steps behind the changing conditions ever since we came into the country. I believe this is (in part) due to our plainly obvious desire to extricate ourselves from Iraq. I know President Bush is preaching “stay the course,” but we came over here with a goal of handing over our battlespace to the Iraqis by the end of our tour here.
This breakneck pace with which we’re trying to push the responsibility for governing and securing Iraq is irresponsible and suicidal. It’s like throwing a brick on a house of cards and hoping it holds up. The Iraqi Security Forces (ISF)–a joint term referring to Iraqi army and Iraqi police–are so rife with corruption, insurgent sympathies and Shia militia members that they have zero effectiveness. Two Iraqi police brigades in Baghdad have been disbanded recently, and the general sentiment in our field is “Why stop there?” I can’t tell you how many roadside bombs have been detonated against American forces within sight of ISF checkpoints. Faith in the Iraqi army is only slightly more justified than faith in the police–but even there, the problems of tribal loyalties, desertion, insufficient training, low morale and a failure to properly indoctrinate their soldiers results in a substandard, ineffective military. A lot of the problems are directly related to Arab culture, which traditionally doesn’t see nepotism and graft as serious sins. Changing that is going to require a lot more than “benchmarks.”
In Shia areas, the militias hold the real control of the city. They have infiltrated, co-opted or intimidated into submission the local police. They are expanding their territories, restricting freedom of movement for Sunnis, forcing mass migrations, spiking ethnic tensions, not to mention the murderous checkpoints, all while U.S. forces do . . . nothing.
…
James, there’s a lot more to this than I’ve written here. The short of it is, the situation is salvageable, but not with “stay the course” and certainly not with cut and run. However, the commitment required to save it is something I doubt the American public is willing to swallow. I just don’t see the current administration with the political capital remaining in order to properly motivate and convince the American public (or the West in general) of the necessity of these actions.
At the same time, failure in Iraq would be worse than a dozen Somalias, and would render us as impotent and emasculated as we were in the days after Vietnam. There is a global cultural-ideological struggle being waged, and abdication from Iraq is tantamount to concession.
Would you trust a Hurricane Katrina report datelined “direct from Detroit”? Or coverage of the World Trade Center attack from Chicago?
Michael Fumento has posted an extended version of his National Review article on the reality of media coverage. This is a remarkable piece — please don’t miss it:
…Why then should we believe a Time Magazine investigation of the Haditha killings that was reported not from Haditha but from Baghdad? Or a Los Angeles Times article on a purported Fallujah-like attack on Ramadi reported by four journalists in Baghdad and one in Washington? Yet we do, essentially because we have no choice. A war in a country the size of California is essentially covered from a single city. Plug the name of Iraqi cities other than Baghdad into Google News and you’ll find that time and again the reporters are in Iraq’s capital, nowhere near the scene. Capt. David Gramling, public affairs officer for the unit I’m currently embedded with, puts it nicely: “I think it would be pretty hard to report on Baghdad from out here.” Welcome to the not-so-brave new world of Iraq war correspondence.
Vietnam was the first war to give us reporting in virtually real time. Iraq is the first to give us virtual reporting. That doesn’t necessarily make it biased against the war; it does make it biased against the truth.
During my three embeds in Iraq’s vicious Anbar Province, I’ve been mortared and sniped at, and have dodged machine-gun fire — all of which has given me a serious contempt for the rear-echelon reporters. When I appeared on the Al Franken Show in May, after my second embed, it was with former CNN Baghdad bureau chief Jane Arraf — who complained about the dangers of being shot down by a missile while landing in Baghdad, and the dangers of the airport road to the International Zone (IZ) . . . and how awful the Baghdad hotels were.
What rubbish — read Fumento for the real story.
Michael Barone interviewed President Bush yesterday. US News released a podcast which I’ve downloaded but won’t listen to until bicycling later. Barone’s recap indicates it is an interview well worth listening to. In one segment Barone asks about the Iraqi oil trust — the good news is that Bush has “raised the issue” with al-Maliki:
…He said he has raised the issue with Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and said it could be one of two institutions that could unify the country, the other being the Army. But he added that the Iraqis have to come up with their own solutions.
Regular readers know that I’ve long backed the oil trust scheme. See, e.g., Can Iraq avoid the “Resource Curse”?:
Back on 8 May 2003 I wrote:
Oil wealth has been a curse for most countries who have it - particularly the Arab Gulf states. Where the revenues flow directly into the ruling government’s coffers, corruption and missapplication are the norm. Since meaningful general taxation isn’t required to fund the government, you loose one of the pilars of democracy: vigilant taxpayers.
Given the opportunity to design from scratch how the Iraqi oil assets are managed, we hope that the Iraqis can devise a scheme that avoids the “resource curse”. The core concept that appeals to me is to transfer ownership of all (or most) of the oil assets directly to the people - a variation of the State of Alaska structure. Then the new Iraqi government must tax the people for the funds to run the government, thereby inverting the usual wealth relationship in such states.
It is possible that today’s sectarian confict might have been avoided had the oil trust fund been implemented back in 2003 when Ahmed Chalabi first proposed it. Even now, I cannot think of another policy that has more power to move Iraq towards a stable society.
I don’t think anybody can predict where Iraq is going — and it is possible that the present government is part of the problem. Certainly we are seeing new negative developments, such as the Shia-Shia conflict between the Badr Brigades and the Madhi Army.
Richard Fernandez has a long, thoughtful, resource-rich analysis — recommended:
A few posts ago I remarked that the closest historical analogue to Iraq was the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, also a former ethnically mixed Ottoman state. That experience provides a benchmark against which to measure the length and duration of the challenge that Iraq represents as well as to understand the incentives of ethnic politics. The debate over how to handle the Yugoslav wars revolved around those who wanted to let the “ethnic cleansing” happen on the way to a more stable set of boundaries and those who wanted to keep the old Yugoslavia a multiethnic place. To some extent those are also the issues in Iraq now. The current Iraqi constitution, with its provision for federal states, reveals a preference for devolution among at least some Iraqis. But it is important to remember there were always a large percentage who believed in Iraq as a country; who thought of themselves as fundamentally Iraqi. Even surveys recently taken show a surprising support for a united Iraq. But the hope of achieving such a unitary, multicultural society is slipping away. And the terrible possibility emerges that the new Iraqi government is part of the problem and not part of the solution. While on the subject of comparisons with Yugoslavia it may be useful to remember that the architects of its civil war purposely stirred up trouble with the idea of grabbing pieces of the disintegrating state. It’s certainly plausible to imagine Iran and perhaps Syria licking their lips at the thought of picking up the pieces of Saddam’s old domain. For them unrest is not a bug; it’s a feature; disturbance not an aberration but an opportunity.
One solution to an Iraq divided by tribal and religious loyalties is to let it divide in a semi-orderly way yet manage the separation so that one doesn’t finish up with a dozen Somalias but a number of stable areas. The problem, as the fighting between the Badr Brigades and the Madhi Army shows, is that some way of dividing up the oil resource still must be found. Without some kind of central government to ensure that revenues are shared the seeds for future regional war will be planted. One simply remembers why Saddam went to war against Kuwait. It was for oil.
The task of managing peaceful devolution — if that goal is not changed by unforseen events — requires resources. It may require the half million men that the intel sergeant mentions or it may require less. One officer writing from Iraq to whose reference I’ve forgotten believes that only “unconventional solutions” will work. No massive armies of occupation, but more Lawrences. I hope he’s right. Lawrence’s greatest talent was his ability stir up ethnic unrest. He achieved no Arab state. But whatever the mission, it will require something. And that something will not be provided without a bipartisan commitment to midwifing the successor Iraqi state or states. More importantly, it will require an agile national leadership which can act opportunistically within the framework of a strategy rather than simply to implement a fixed vision. Perhaps the real flaw in Iraq was not a lack of force but a lack of imagination. From one perspective Iraq provides an opportunity perhaps of historic proportions; certainly Iran and neighboring countries with far fewer resources have treated it as such. The last three years have shown how ill equipped, politically and operationally, America has been to make use of that opportunity. That needs to change, a change should begin with the way Washington’s bureaucries do business under any administration. Washington is not the seat of empire. It’s the seat of local politics with the reach of empire.
Thomas P.M. Barnett’s proposed reconfiguration of US and Western “system administration” remains the best overall roadmap. Perhaps in 25 years or so the skills and capabilities will be there when next needed.
More SeekerBlog resources on the Iraqi Oil Trust Fund here.
Technorati Tags: Iraqi oil trust
A must-read essay on the reform of Islam by Richard Fernandez , which concludes:
After Sayyid Qutb was scandalized by Harry Truman’s America he was later brutalized by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s prisons. It may have been the low cut dresses of American women that first planted the seed which was to grow into al-Qaeda’s ideology but it was the blood shed by Marxist torturers that watered it. Qutb and later Osama bin Laden saw Marxism and secularism as agencies of the Devil; but to destroy them it was first necessary to destroy the world’s system administrator: the USA. One of the real ironies of the War on Terror is that the most hated targets of al-Qaeda, the culturally liberal — the gays, feminists, entertainers, civil libertarians, artists and novelists — are its most vocal critics. It is only slowly dawning on al-Qaeda’s pet hates that the Global Jihad is exactly about them and their whole belief system. Salman Rushdie knows it; Sayyid Qutb knew it. Some parts of Europe are beginning to know it; most will never admit it even to the second the blade is drawn across their throats. But the second greatest irony that the surviving non-Muslim believers in Europe — the Christians, Buddhists and Jews — have not only had to bear the intellectual brunt of defending liberalism up to now, but are now being asked to give up the public profession of their own faith in order to preserve it.
If you are an American admitted to a hospital in Amsterdam, Toronto, or Copenhagen these days, you’ll be considered a biohazard.
Hospital infections kill an estimated 90,000 patients each year in the US. About 13,000 of those deaths are due to methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus [MRSA]. Methicillin is the last line of defense the hospitals have today against staph infection.
So why are European hospitals reducing MRSA incidence, while the incidence of MRSA cases continues to grow in the US?
If you are an American admitted to a hospital in Amsterdam, Toronto, or Copenhagen these days, you’ll be considered a biohazard. Doctors and nurses will likely put you into quarantine while they determine whether you’re carrying methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a deadly organism that is increasingly common stateside, especially in our hospitals. And if you test positive for methicillin-resistant staph, or MRSA, these European and Canadian hospital workers will don protective gloves, masks, and gowns each time they approach you, and then strip off the gear and scrub down vigorously when they leave your room. The process is known as “search and destroy”—a combat mission that hospitals abroad are undertaking to prevent the spread of germs that resist antibiotics. Our own health authorities, meanwhile, have been strangely reluctant to join the assault.
Wendell Berry once wrote that when we took animals off farms and put them onto feedlots, we had, in effect, taken an old solution — the one where crops feed animals and animals’ waste feeds crops — and neatly divided it into two new problems: a fertility problem on the farm, and a pollution problem on the feedlot… Today 80 percent of America’s beef is slaughtered by four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk by just one company.
Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals”, offers up a very useful survey of our food chain. It is more pleasant to consume the output of industrial agriculture if we don’t look too closely at “how the sausage is made”.
This is not a typical environmental activist polemic — it is a very well-informed, objective review of the benefits [price, availability] and consequences [concentration, chemicals, bugs] of today’s efficient food chain. For example, the demand for more and more regulation favors the titans while driving out the small farmers.
But if industrial farming gave us this bug, it is industrial eating that has spread it far and wide. We don’t yet know exactly what happened in the case of the spinach washed and packed by Natural Selection Foods, whether it was contaminated in the field or in the processing plant or if perhaps the sealed bags made a trivial contamination worse. But we do know that a great deal of spinach from a great many fields gets mixed together in the water at that plant, giving microbes from a single field an opportunity to contaminate a vast amount of food. The plant in question washes 26 million servings of salad every week. In effect, we’re washing the whole nation’s salad in one big sink….
When Tommy Thompson retired from the Department of Health and Human Services in 2004, he said something chilling at his farewell news conference: “For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.” The reason it is so easy to do was laid out in a 2003 G.A.O. report to Congress on bioterrorism. “The high concentration of our livestock industry and the centralized nature of our food-processing industry” make them “vulnerable to terrorist attack.” Today 80 percent of America’s beef is slaughtered by four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk by just one company. Keeping local food economies healthy — and at the moment they are thriving — is a matter not of sentiment but of critical importance to the national security and the public health, as well as to reducing our dependence on foreign sources of energy.
Yet perhaps the gravest threat now to local food economies — to the farmer selling me my spinach, to the rancher who sells me my grass-fed beef — is, of all things, the government’s own well-intentioned efforts to clean up the industrial food supply. Already, hundreds of regional meat-processing plants — the ones that local meat producers depend on — are closing because they can’t afford to comply with the regulatory requirements the U.S.D.A. rightly imposes on giant slaughterhouses that process 400 head of cattle an hour. The industry insists that all regulations be “scale neutral,” so if the U.S.D.A. demands that huge plants have, say, a bathroom, a shower and an office for the exclusive use of its inspectors, then a small processing plant that slaughters local farmers’ livestock will have to install these facilities, too. This is one of the principal reasons that meat at the farmers’ market is more expensive than meat at the supermarket: farmers are seldom allowed to process their own meat, and small processing plants have become very expensive to operate, when the U.S.D.A. is willing to let them operate at all. From the U.S.D.A.’s perspective, it is much more efficient to put their inspectors in a plant where they can inspect 400 cows an hour rather than in a local plant where they can inspect maybe one.
Highly recommended
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