F M Ral

The Santa We Have

2004-12-18T01:37:00.000+01:00

The Santa We Have
By William Kristol
The elves on the ground have done a terrific job and have really performed a lot better this holiday season than Santa has. His arrogant buck-passing -- blaming a supplier in Ohio for shortages of sleigh bells, and the Division of Reindeer for the tragic lack of long-distance lift capacity -- has become inexcusable. Our heroic elves deserve a better Santa. (And ho, ho, ho: I really need someone else to take the blame for the failure of this whole Christmas operation, before people realise I've been knee-deep in holly here myself for years.)

(originally posted at Harry's Place for the seasonal fun)

Rationality is dead in the US

2004-12-07T01:10:00.000+01:00

According to a Newsweek poll of Americans:

-- 79 percent believe in the Virgin birth of Jesus

-- 55 percent believe every word of the Bible is literally accurate

-- 62 percent say they favor teaching creation science in addition to evolution in public schools

-- 43 percent favor teaching creation science instead of evolution in public schools

Apparently no data were collected to see how many Americans believe in UFOs, a flat earth, talking Jello, Martians, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, witches and other myths and legends no sane human being can possibly claim to have any evidence of. And they want to fill their children’s heads up with the same lies and bunk. Don’t tell me “it’s faith” or “I believe what I want to believe”. You have no proof, and yet you “believe”. Well, I don’t need to “believe” most Americans are irrational: we’ve got the proof right here.

Panda’s Thumb has recently observed, “Evolution Deniers and Holocaust Deniers in a locked step”: evidence doesn't matter to either group. I wonder if 43 percent of Americans would favor teaching Holocaust denial in public schools. Actually, I’m afraid of the answer.

Beinart’s argument

2004-12-03T23:03:00.000+01:00

Beinart’s argument in TNR for the Democratic Party to adopt a tough liberal line against Islamic totalitarianism is making a tour around the blogs. Seems to me it’s a strong argument but just a bit too strong.

There is no question that Islamic totalitarianism is the greatest threat liberal societies face today, and it is equally obvious that too many in the Democratic base prefer and idealistic pacifism and unrealistic isolationism as their foreign policy—very much counter to many interventionist Democratic foreign policy makers, as Beinart notes.

But to equate Islamic totalitarianism today with Communism in the late 1940s and 1950s is to grossly exaggerate its power, and thus, its threat. 50 or 60 years ago, Communism was in the ascendant. A dozen nation states—and then more—were in the camp. They had huge disciplined armies, navies, airplanes, paratroopers, nuclear weapons, and on and on and on… then space programmes and satellites…

The Islamofascists today don’t even come close to that kind of power: they have a few thousand nutters with small arms. Of course, they are very dangerous, and even lightly armed—with boxcutters for fucksake—they can do horrific damage. And, of course, they are trying to get their hands on WMD, and they have to be prevented from doing so. But these desperate, suicidal lunatics are not nearly the threat international Communist movement was five or six decades ago.

They are the greatest threat liberal societies face today, but they are not on the same level as other great totalitarian threats liberal societies have faced in the past.

Equating the past threat with the current one risks an over-reaction on our part. And over-reaction could lead to all sort of serious mistakes that then only deepen the problem and even strengthen the enemy. Invading a country without an aftercare plan, for example, and thus pushing millions of people who may loosely sympathise with the fanatics to consider actively joining them.

Still, even if his diagnosis goes over the top, Beinart’s prescription for better aftercare plans is good advice for the Democratic Party to outflank the Republicans:

For all the Bush administration’s talk about promoting freedom in the Muslim world, its efforts have been crippled by the Republican Party’s deep-seated opposition to foreign aid and nation-building, illustrated most disastrously in Iraq. The resources that the United States has committed to democratization and development in the Middle East are trivial...

And as Beinart points out, high-ranking Democrats known for their take on international affairs favour “a far more ambitious US effort” in this regard. More international engagement, then, not less. And that will indeed be a hard sell to the party base, despite that:

...the struggle against totalitarianism... provides a powerful rationale for a more just society at home...

Ukraine

2004-12-02T21:47:00.000+01:00

Was going to post something on events in Ukraine and how they are getting twisted by certain voices in the British media, but as luck would have it, Transition Trends, got there before me.

Misrepresenting revolutionary women

2004-09-28T23:48:00.000+02:00

An article in the ever-ideological FrontPage magazine abuses the laudable Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), and the reason is pretty clear.

Cinnamon Stillwell writes that RAWA activists, "were more opposed to U.S. military intervention than they were in favor of getting rid of the Taliban." Then Stillwell goes on to talk about the opinions of Duke University Professor Miriam Cooke, who is presented as an apologist for Muslim oppressors of women around the world.

Whatever the position of Cooke, however, she does not represent RAWA, which has been one of the most relentlessly democratic organisations combating the misogynistic mullah mentality in Afghanistan -- the only indigenous one, really.

RAWA's real thoughts on the US-supported overthrow of the Taliban and the three years since can be found on the RAWA website. What they say is actually along the following lines, as caught by a recent VOA piece:

...Zoya, a member of a group called the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) who does not use her last name for security reasons, says the recent improvements are limited, and that the situation for women is worsening in the rest of the country. "They cannot go without a male relative outside their houses, and they have no access to education and there are health problems for them. So we think that the bombs in Afghanistan - the bombing by the U.S. administration - has not changed the situation because they replaced one fundamentalist [group] with another one," she says.

For RAWA the point is really that the US-sponsored overthrow of the Taliban, which RAWA supported at the time, put in power a group of vicious, fundamentalist thugs little better than the Taliban themselves. Given the past record of serious human rights abuses and mass atrocities of a number of leading hard-line fundamentalist leaders in the post-Taliban government, what RAWA is saying is undeniably true. If you're going to root out "religious fascists" (RAWA's term), you should root them all out.

And the 9 October election will sadly not improve the situation much. As a RAWA statement asked a few months ago:

What value does an election have for the hopeless people who have no bread and no work and are being tormented by criminal fundamentalists?

Certainly the recent dismissal of Ismail Khan in Herat is only good news, but a number of other prominent jihadis with appalling CVs are backing President Hamid Karzai's (all but stitched-up) re-election. If your camp includes brutes like Burhanuddin Rabbani and Abdul Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf, it's hardly likely that real democracy and women's rights are going to result.

Stillwell's lumping of Cooke and RAWA was either done out of ignorance (ie, not knowing how to use Google), or it was a deliberate attempt to brush aside legitimate criticism of the Bush administration's half-hearted efforts in Afghanistan by a respected, indigenous, pro-democracy organisation. Given the ideological bent of FrontPage magazine, the latter seems pretty likely.

Dirty War

2004-09-27T21:59:00.000+02:00

BBC TV's "Dirty War" programme last night was brilliant. The dramatisation of a "dirty bomb" attack on the City of London not only showed how woefully unprepared the country is for such a possible scenario of horror, it also presented the mindset of radical Islamist militants very well without damning all Muslims. Essentially a disaster preparedness film and a warning wrapped up in an engaging package for mass-market consumption, "Dirty War" was researched by BBC Current Affairs, and the time (and money) invested in getting the detail right were evident.

The best thought line in the programme came from a captured bomber under interrogation, who, when confronted with the idea that his deadly crime would result in retaliation and Muslim deaths, says: "We expect your resistance. It unites us and divides you."

The post-film discussion was disappointing, however. The questions and comments from the audience were poor, and the phone-in questions were even worse -- just ill-informed silliness for the most part. Or perhaps the public questions showed just how ill-prepared the country is: if citizens cannot even formulate the right questions; how can politicians be expected to come up with the right answers?

Accusations of anti-Muslim bias were particularly off-the-mark. "Why did the terrorists have to be Muslims?" one audience participant asked. Well, it's hardly the Mormons who have been carrying out suicidal mass murder lately, eh?

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) representative on the discussion panel did not think the programme had shown anti-Muslim bias, and he pointed to the positive role of one of the key police investigators, a Muslim character. He might have also noted the very sympathetic grass in the film, another Muslim.

One good criticism the MCB rep made about the drama, however was the absence of Muslim victims in the crowded streets after the bomb had gone off. He's right: it's important to show that Islamofascists kill and injure Muslims with their indiscriminate public bombs, too. Look at JI's recent attack in Jakarta: in that one, they only killed locals (mostly Muslims), and not one Australian, their intended target.

How would Osama vote?

2004-09-26T20:34:00.000+02:00

Americans are back at the game of trying to guess what Osama Bin Laden wants so that they can deliberately do the opposite. The recent accusations flying in all directions about whether the terrorists want to see Kerry or Bush win in November are deeply disturbing, because they make it seem we've learned nothing after three years of super-saturation al Qaeda watching.

I thought we had managed to get past that, actually. Immediately after 9/11, Americans nervously boasted about "not doing what they want us to do" and overloaded the public debate trying to figure out what that was exactly. Eventually, the line "that's just what the terrorists want us to do" was repeated so many times that it became a joke. You might even say it helped ease the post-9/11 tension, revealing that Americans -- at least those without immediate family murdered on that day -- had come to a post-traumatic catharsis: a realisation that laughter in the face of the horror was possible, even therapeutic, and that the world indeed would go on.

And now we've regressed. The past week or two has seen a jumble of comments, statements and adverts from both sides of the fence suggesting al Qaeda has a presidential preference.

The fact is you don't need to guess what the likes of Osama Bin Laden and Co want; you just need to read what they say. They believe god is telling them to murder people, and they incite others to commit murder and suicide in that belief. Their hate speech covers Americans, Westerners, Jews, Christians, gays, women -- pretty much anyone apart from those who claim to hear the same voices in their head, too.

In terms of the upcoming presidential election, again, no guesswork is needed: militant Islamists are not going to stop trying to kill us infidels just because person A or person B is president. The Islamofascists are not going to slow down or reconsider their approach because of such trivialities. (Whether Kerry would be any less incompetent than Bush in preventing terrorist attacks, of course, is a different matter, and one that is perfectly valid to debate in this campaign.)

Yes, the Madrid bomb may have changed the course of Spain's general elections and resulted in the pull-out of Spanish troops from Iraq, but Zapatero replacing Aznar did not stop Spain from being on their target list. These religious lunatics continue to push for the roll back of the Reconquista, after all.

Extremist Islamist hatred is clearly much deeper than the hatred of a single individual, even a leader. They kill innocent Westerners deliberately in numbers as large as they can arrange. Presumably, if it were just about specific personalities, they'd opt for assassination rather than mass terror as their method. They have a totalitarian mindset targeting the West as a concept -- they are against the very ideas of freedom, of human rights, of equal rights, and of tolerance for diversity in society -- and all who are connected to the West as they define it are legitimate targets in their view..

Dear Mr Western Liberal, Dear Mr Western Conservative, get this through your head: they want to kill you both in equal measure.

Blog brags

2004-09-26T01:18:00.000+02:00

The blather about bloggers this week has been unprecedented. Getting credit for bringing down Rather has resulted in not just the normal waves of self-congratulation among bloggers but also praise outside in the wider media world. The typical chatter at the blogville café about the imminent death of big media has now become a discussion topic in the pages and on the screens of the condemned.

I don't want to cut off the medium I am sitting on here, but let's not get too up our own arse just yet: the elimination of mega-media would still seem some way off. It's great we've got people willing to do some fact-checking when a squijillion-dollar company is too lazy to bother. However, fact-checking is not blogging's strong point generally; rant, personal reflection and unsubstantiated allegation are.

I can't see that blogging at the moment does much more than feed opinions to the opinionated. Blogs are inhabited by people looking to deliver set-piece arguments rather than those with a truly open mind, ready to listen to those arguments. Bloggers bash those in disagreement with them, and the only reason people read blogs they disagree with seems to be to harvest material for bashing in their own blog.

Of course, big media consumers also stick close to outlets they tend to agree with, but because major newspapers and TV are produced by many more people than blogs, they are almost guaranteed to offer a wider variety of opinions in the long run. It's easier to hold to a strict ideological line when there's just one of you.

But even though most blogs simply deepen the dull yet dangerous political polarisation of US society, I still prefer blogging to bragging about blogging.

Rock-solid support and rocks for brains

2004-09-25T20:41:00.000+02:00

There's trust. There's faith. And then there's the simple absence of brain function. Any stroll through the Crossfire-style TV shows and the bully blogs these days will tell you that positions get entrenched, and nothing seems able to unseat them.

With a little over five weeks to go before the US election, the volume of rabid rhetoric on both sides has increased to Spinal Tap's "eleven". I wonder then, what it would take to get "strong Bush" supporters or "strong Kerry" supporters to change their minds.

On the Bush side, for example, it seems that no information from Afghanistan or Iraq could shake their decision to vote for W. On Afghanistan they overlook the increasingly powerful insurgent Taliban, the disturbing pull-out of MSF, and the undermining of the 9 October presidential election through backroom deals between Karzai and extremist warlords.

On Iraq it's even worse. The diehard Bushies belittle the significance of Abu Ghraib to America's standing in the world, considering it no worse than a frat initiation and with about as many consequences. The Iraqi body count never reaches the mainstream media much at all, so it's easy for them to ignore that, but even the US figure doesn't seem to matter -- if it's under 1000, if it's over 1000, what's the difference? The complete lack of post-war planning, the faulty intelligence, the daily car bombs and kidnappings, the enemy control of Fallujah and other towns, and the absence of any realistic exit strategy for what was supposed to be the first domino of democratisation in the Middle East… none of that makes a blind bit of difference to the 35 or 40 percent of voters who will vote for Bush no matter what.

Not even the fact that invading, occupying and destabilising Iraq have inspired the Islamofascists and given them a new recruitment advert and a new battleground to fight on will cause ears to open or voting hands to quiver. And can you get one of these people to even utter the words "record deficit", let alone have a conversation about it?

On the Kerry side it's much the same. Or really, we should call it the anti-Bush side, because Kerry could be a dog in a dress to the diehard anti-Bushies, again probably 35 to 40% of likely voters. Does it matter to them that Kerry has no more idea than Bush does about how to create a free, democratic Iraq? Does it matter to them that Kerry has no more idea than Bush does about how to clear up the mess of Guantanamo? Does it matter that Kerry is as unlikely as Bush to put real pressure on Pakistan and the Saudis? (Forget Kerry's anti-Saudi rhetoric: America's oil addiction severely restricts policy options when dealing with the land-o-loonies no matter who's in the White House.) The only thing that matters to them is that Kerry is not Bush.

So it would be interesting to ask people what would change their mind. On the Bush side, what if insurgents captured and held two or three more cities in Iraq? They'd continue to call it a difficult situation, but one we're increasingly "winning". What if documents emerged revealing Bush was aware of the abuse at Abu Ghraib for months? They'd call the papers forgeries. What if North Korea tested a nuclear bomb in October? They'd blame it on "Clinton's failed policies". What if Bush fell off the wagon and did something publicly embarrassing? They would forgive him just about anything, I imagine, short of torturing puppies on live TV.

Truth is, I cannot see anything that would change the mind of core Bush supporters. No fact, no truth, no revelation would change their mind.

Back to core Kerry supporters, and again, I suspect truth matters to them not one bit. Would they acknowledge a fair election in Afghanistan with a strong turn-out and no violence as a success for Bush? Not likely. If Fallujah was retaken, would that be accepted as a point for Bush? Hardly. Not even the capture of Osama Bin Laden at this point would shift their opinion of Bush; in fact, it would only intensify their suspicion of the President.

So, by a rough calculation, I figure that 70 to 80 percent of US voters are so dedicated to their chosen candidate that it has become as irrational as religious faith. Events don't matter; the outside world might as well disappear. Brain function has ceased.

Think that's going too far? Well, next time you meet a core supporter from either side, ask them if they can imagine anything that might happen that could possibly change their mind. Then see how much brain function is revealed.

Hari on Hitchens

2004-09-24T23:58:00.000+02:00

Johann Hari's interview with Christopher Hitchens in the Independent yesterday rubs salt into the still open wound of the post-9/11 split on the left. The interview does two things well. First, it gives Hitchens room to explain the various streams of foreign policy approach on the right and to dissect what is too often seen as a monolith by many of the old left.

Perhaps more expectedly, the conversation also examines how the left divided three years ago and how some parts have since realigned themselves again.

Given Hari's continued use of the word "Islamofascism" -- the self-identifier for lefties who recognised the real threat to liberal democracy after 9/11 -- I hadn't realised he had given up on Bush in Iraq back in May of this year. That's what you get for leaving the country and not keeping up with columnists' websites. Like Andrew Sullivan, Hari has stepped back from Bush on Iraq; however, Hitchens continues to flirt with him.

Sure, the interview is just a snapshot, but it does support my feeling that, in as much as "the left" means anything after 9/11, the lefty splits -- both semi-reformed, like Hari, and unreformed, like Hitchens -- have had stronger, clearer, and more consistent guiding principles than the neocons and others in the current administration driving foreign policy. The isolationist right is as madly ostrich-like after 9/11 as the isolationist left, so leave them both to one side. The vision of defending and advancing human rights has at least been a consistent thread throughout Hitchens's writing, and Hari's. I'm not so sure you can say that about Wolfowitz, and if you look at the record of Rumsfeld, Cheney or Perle, forget it: human rights and democracy abroad never rated very highly with them at all.

Yes, I'm comparing apples and oranges here. Those I admire are commentators with no responsibility, those I am criticising have actually had public positions that have forced them to make difficult, real-life policy choices with difficult, real-life consequences. Sadly, there are no split lefties in power to compare them to as far as I can tell.

Hostage taking pays

2004-09-23T23:39:00.000+02:00

As every leader in the UK and US is currently falling over himself to declare he will not negotiate with hostage-takers, everyone seems to do nothing but give these psychopaths exactly what they want: attention. The politicians continue to comment publicly (and try to cut deals privately), the family makes heart-breaking statements on TV, and the media are just gorging themselves on the pain and misery of these families. All of that plays into the terrorists' hands.

Once again, the media do not seem to be able to differentiate personal tragedy and news. These hostage takings are the former, and the story (and the terrorist themselves) only have significance to the extent that attention is given to them. Some will say one cannot ignore the individuals under the immediate threat of death. But countless people are facing death inside Iraq and out every day, and the decision to focus on these hostages in particular is simply an editorial decision. A bad one.

Someone said to me today, "oh, but if it were your family, you'd want media attention for the story and you'd go in front of the cameras too." First, even if that would be what I'd want, that doesn't change the fact that it is a personal tragedy, not nationally significant news, and an intelligent broadsheet editor or BBC TV news producer should understand the difference. Second, although it is impossible to fathom the anguish one would feel in such a situation, I can hope I'd have the presence of mind to hold myself back and not give my child's murderer the attention his sick mind craves.

People who cut heads off innocents and post the videos of it on the web are not people you can reason with or people who are likely to succumb to emotional appeals. To do what they do, these snuff-film makers cannot possibly see their victims and their families as human: they have turned them into objects to be manipulated for the cameras in the service of their own dark fame.

Everything the UK and the US have done in the past week with these three hostages has ended up being one big non-stop advert for these psychopathic narcissists, encouraging more attention-seekers to undertake the same.