Sadly, it’s been doing it for years.
Category Archives: War Commentary
“There’s Nothing Special About Britain”
I guess this is the kind of smarter diplomacy, and “reengaging with the world” that we were promised in the campaign. Of course, we were promised a lot of things in the campaign.
[Update Sunday night]
More smart diplomacy, with Russia.
[Monday morning update]
Gee, just what we want in an American Secretary of State:
Parliament President Hans-Gert Poettering was effusive in his praise, saying that with the new administration, the United States and Europe once again “share the same values.”
“What you said mostly could have been said by a European,” he told Clinton after she fielded questions ranging from climate change to energy security and aid to Africa and one on gay rights from a participant wearing an “I love Hillary” t-shirt.
I suspect that, even more than is usually the case, she’s going to represent the world to America, rather than the other way around.
[Bumped]
[Monday afternoon update]
Gift-giving advice from Barack Obama:
With my busy schedule of entertaining foreign dignitaries and celebrities at the White House, I know how important a well chosen gift can be. Two weeks ago, for example, we received a visit from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The Prime Minister brought a few housewarming gag gifts including a pen set made from a boat, a framed paper thing from another boat, and some old books by Churchill (not Ward, but that English guy). Obviously we wanted to return the nice gesture so I sent my interns out on a scavenger hunt for an appropriate present. They couldn’t find anything in the West Wing, but luckily Costco was open and was running a 25-for-the-price-of-10 clearance sale in the DVD department. You should have seen Mr. Brown light up when he opened that sack of classic titles like “Wizard of Oz” and “Baby Geniuses 2.” I like to think those DVDs helped cement our Anglo-American “special relationship” even if, as he mentioned to me, they probably wouldn’t work in his European player. Thinking quickly, I told the PM I would send him an American DVD player as soon as I earned enough cash-back points on my Costco card. Crisis averted, but that episode taught me a valuable lesson: always keep a stock of gifts handy in case some foreign poobah or supreme religious figure or failing industry pops by for coffee. As a result, I make sure the Oval Office closet is filled with pre-wrapped Sham-Wows and Snuggle blankets and trillion dollar bailout packages for whatever emergency might arise.
Why not? It makes as much sense as taking market advice from someone who doesn’t know what a P/E ratio is.
[Update late afternoon]
Here’s a completely plausible thesis on why the Obama administration dissed the UK:
The alliance that Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt crafted to win World War Two was more than just good strategy. They forged it in order to assert and defend an ideal which had fallen on hard times in the dark days of 1941, that of individual human liberty.
Originally born in Britain, this common ideal holds that human beings have a God-given natural right to arrange their lives as they see fit without interference from any authority, whether pope or king or government bureaucrat. The belief has always been America’s most precious historical legacy, and the rock on which our friendship with Great Britain is built.
It was that ideal which the Founding Fathers inherited from Britain, expressed as the rights of freeborn Englishmen. Our founders fought and nearly lost a war of independence against the British crown, and devised their own Constitution, to preserve the same ideal.
… Perhaps the president simply believes some other nation should replace Britain as our closest friend. (For a while, the Clinton administration meant to put Germany ahead of the UK.) Or perhaps Obama has a different view of the special relationship – one held by the likes of his onetime mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
These critics don’t see a legacy of freedom going back to Magna Carta. They see a historical procession of self-serving white males. And Churchill is not the man who singlehandedly stood up against Hitler and who warned us all about the Soviet Union’s iron curtain, but a white supremacist.
In this view (which also sees an America steeped in racism, colonialism and greed, rather than a nation dedicated to the proposition of liberty under law), there is no need to preserve any precious British-born legacy.
Including that fuddy-duddy English common law, and particularly contract law. After all, dead white guys came up with it. And that Churchill guy was on the wrong side in Kenya.
I wonder if Barack and Michelle Obama know who it was who freed the slaves? And who it was who originally sold them into slavery? I haven’t seen a lot of evidence of actual historical knowledge from either of them.
“The Malady Of Islam”
This seems to me a fundamental problem:
Modernity has multiple meanings: industrialization, urbanization, adoption of liberal values, women’s rights, elected governments, etc. I want to emphasize here the concept of citizenship as a core component of modernity. The idea of citizenship is linked to the idea of individuals in society possessing unalienable rights. The evolution of this idea has meant that even though society is a collection of individuals, individual rights override collective rights and distinguish modern society from mob rule. On this idea rests the modern democratic society, wherein political leaders are elected by citizens to whom they are accountable. They hold office with citizen approval; they make laws, but none might be passed that override the unalienable rights of citizens written into the constitution. They govern with support of the citizens and are replaced when they fail to meet the goals that saw them elected.
Let us now consider the malady of Islam given the above description of the problem as I see it. Modernity, and its concept of individual rights, is Western in origin. It evolved through centuries of philosophical and political debates, and then equally long periods of war to defeat those who opposed the principle of individual liberty. Eventually modernity and its off-shoot, citizenship, prevailed over the opposition and were more or less firmly established in the West and places beyond by the end of the last century.
Arabs were in close proximity to these ideas and the struggle that accompanied them. What, it might be asked of the Arabs, was their response to modernity? Even with all the apologia and obfuscation, the answer that cannot be evaded is that the collective Arab response has shown a preference for totalitarian ideology. In the period following the end of the World War II and European colonialism, there were three ideological responses that marked out the Arabs into three groups: secular Muslims, and orthodox Muslims divided into the majority Sunni and minority Shi’i sects.
Secular Muslims were mobilized by Arab nationalism embodied in the Ba’ath party. Sunni Muslims chose Wahhabism/Salafism embodied in the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Taliban. Shi’i Muslims followed Khomeinism embodied in the politics of the clerical regime in Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Sadrists in Iraq.
All three ideologies and movements they spawned are totalitarian. For all their professed belief in Islam’s sacred scripture, Arabs — given their blood-soaked history of suppressing dissent and despite their close proximity to the evolution of liberal movements in Europe — have been engaged in suppressing or eradicating any form of individual liberty while making no allowance for their opponents. Arabs have shown by their conduct that tyranny is their preferred response to modernity.
I wish that I had any sense whatsoever that the current administration understands this problem.
The Neocons At Human Rights Watch
Matt Welch, on Chas Freeman, and all of the reasons why he is such a disastrous nominee.
And any time someone uses the word “neocon” as an epithet these days, it results in an immediate plummeting of my assessment of their intelligence.
[Update late morning]
More thoughts on Freeman from Martin Kramer.
“Beaten Up For Her Own Good”
Sharia law is making appalling inroads in Italy.
At Last, An Honest Leftist
Lee Stranahan admits that he wanted the Iraq war to fail.
Actually, it went beyond a desire, into fantasy and wishful thinking, as when Harry Reid moronically declared it a failure, and a war that was already lost.
[Update a few minutes later]
John Hawkins, on what Rush Limbaugh got wrong.
Obama’s Worst Appointment?
Andy McCarthy thinks so. If what he says is true, it’s hard to disagree.
The British Civil War
Luring jihadist Brits overseas and killing them in Afghanistan is certainly a swifter response to the problem than having them sitting at “home” plotting to blow up Glasgow Airport while the government makes ever more desperate efforts to appease them. But no doubt some obliging judge will soon rule that it’s in breach of the European Human Rights Act for British troops in Afghanistan to shoot at British passport holders.
Move along, folks, nothing to see here.
The Alternate Reality
…in which the administration lives, that results in their selling out of Israel:
I would sum it up as a growing administration belief that solid U.S. support for Israel is probably the reason for radical Islamic anti-American terrorism; and, secondly, the Palestinian issue can be best resolved with the return of Israel to the 1967 borders. Apparently, this thought stems from the assumption that there has been a radical reappraisal about Israel on the part of the Arab nations, and Islamic world at large, who in toto have now accepted Israel’s right to exist. Therefore, with the casus belli removed, in the future we should expect no more wars — like 1948, 1956, and 1967, when Israel did not hold the Golan Heights or the West Bank. Accordingly, the withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza were positive first-steps and left stability in their wake.
I suspect that Netanyahu knows that he’s on his own now.
Foreign Policy Change!
But not much hope. The new administration is already selling out Israel at the UN. As Bayefsky notes, there should have been no US involvement in Durban in the first place. All we’ve done is legitimize a western-bashing process.