Posted on 03/09/2005 9:26:41 AM PST by quidnunc
Now the torrents of Arabia cascade on, from Baghdad to Beirut, Cairo, Riyadh and beyond. Those of us who argued three years ago that Iraq was the place to start the dominoes falling and that the Middle East was ripe for liberty, for democracy, for one man, one gloat – whoops, sorry, vote… Anyway, those of us who told you so way back when long ago gave up trying to figure out why the media, the Dems, the Europeans and Canadians were so wedded to “stability” uber alles. But we had a feeling that their enthusiasm was unlikely to be shared by the actual subjects of Assad and co. And we were right: it turns out America’s Zionists know the Arab people better than Europe’s Arabists do – better than all those ex-ambassadors to the Middle East now shilling for Saudi-funded think-tanks who pop up on TV discussions to recycle Arab League talking points.
That’s not to say we’re in the final reel with happy endings all round. The nations of Eastern Europe weren’t all liberated on the same template. Syria could be the Middle East’s Romania – where the opportunist second rank decides to whack a dictator who’s outlived his usefulness and pass themselves off as the forces of freedom. Or Syria could be the Czech Republic – where the head thug’s heart is no longer in it and he negotiates a graceful retreat. But, either way, I doubt if Boy Assad’s presidency will be with us for much longer.
What’s happened in the last couple of weeks is that Bush has persuaded the French and the Saudis that Assad is a loser, and there’s no downside to putting the skids under him. And the way things are going most Middle East regimes would rather pile on Damascus lest Bush turn his attention elsewhere. Last week’s Arabic News reported that Colonel Gaddafy has “underscored the need to launch full freedom in Libya”. And to show he’s serious he’s introduced yet another spelling of his name: as the headline put it, “Qathafi Wants Freedom To Prosper In Libya”. Qathafi: that’s a new one on me. I’ve seen him spelled Khadafi, Qaddafi, Gadhafi, Qudhafi, Kadafi, Gheddafi, Kaddafi, Qadhdhafi and a couple dozen others, but clearly this latest one is an indication that, like Mubarak in Egypt, he’s under pressure to move to a multi-candidate electoral system and is planning to run as all of them: Gadafi (Sclerotic Dictatorship Party), Qadafi (Sword Of The Infidel Slayer-Liberal Democratic Alliance), Gaddhafi (New Sclerotic Dictatorship Party), Khaddaffy (Khonservative Phartty)…
Whether Qathafi really “wants freedom to prosper in Libya” is doubtful. But the fact that in the month since the Iraqi election he and President Mubarak and Prince Saud, the Saudi Foreign Minister, and King Abdullah of Jordan all feel obliged to sign on rhetorically is a big step. It may even ensure the survival of at least a few of them. For three decades, radical Islamism prospered because there was no other big idea to counter it. And the more the EU and UN and Arab League fetishized “stability” – the stability of the Assads and Arafats - the less chance there was that any alternative concept would ever arise. Bush and the Iraqi people changed all that.
In January I wrote that 2005 would be “the most important year in the region since Churchill drew the map of the modern Middle East in 1922”. The melancholy fact is that many of the changes underway today could have been with us a lot earlier if the Great War’s peacemakers hadn’t botched the job 80 years ago. The stagnant Middle East of Assad, Arafat and the House of Saud is the malign legacy of the prototype progressive transnationalism – the League of Nations mandates that helped deliver the peoples of the region into the hands of a uniquely disastrous bunch of unreliable western client rulers.
The new political settlements that emerge in the Middle East will be messy and flawed and problematic, but they will still be an improvement. Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze leader who says that in Iraq the Arabs’ Berlin Wall has fallen, is also the guy who not so long ago was saying “We are all happy when an American soldier is killed.” He will never be an ideological soulmate of Dick Cheney.
But so what? The Swedes and Irish aren’t soulmates of Cheney either, but a free society with a representative government is in America’s long-term interest, just as a nominally pro-American dictator holding his people back is not in America’s long-term interest. To firm up Daniel Schorr’s tentative endorsement, Bush got that right, and one day, if he’s not already, Walid Jumblatt will be grateful he did.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
Thanks..ever since he appeared on C-SPAM a few week ago...I really like his style.
BTTT
ROFL...Man, this guy's brilliant.
>> Anyway, those of us who told you so way back when long ago gave up trying to figure out why the media, the Dems, the Europeans and Canadians were so wedded to “stability” uber alles. <<
I think it's a combination of laziness and fear of change. If they (e.g., the State Dept and other govt bureaucracies) can keep the same people in power, they don't have to learn anything new or deal with unfamiliar situations. Classic government bureaucratic mindset.
I actually hoped he was going to tell the IRA that terrorism is history and they need to get on the bandwagon.
Maybe they already are on it and I missed the memo.
Shalom.
SteynOnCulture
THE BUSH BANDWAGON
Come on, lads. You don’t want to be the last to leap aboard the bandwagon. The New York Times are running front page stories with headlines like “Unexpected Whiff Of Freedom Proves Bracing For The Middle East”. Daniel Schorr, the dean of conventional wisdom at National Public Radio, was for once almost ahead of the game, concluding his most recent editorial with a strange combination of words that had never before passed his lips in that particular order: “Bush may have had it right.”
Did he simply muff the reading? Did he mean to say: “Bush may have had it - right?” But apparently not. Ever since, the same form of words has mysteriously flowered from Toronto to London to Sydney. It’s the catchphrase du jour - like “Show me the money” or “You are the weakest link. Goodbye.” Now it’s “Could Bush be right?” Even America’s media naysayers have suddenly noticed that they can hardly hear their own generic boilerplate about what a Vietnam quagmire the new Iraq is over the sound of raven-tressed Beirut hotties noisily demanding Lebanon’s freedom in the streets of Beirut.
Over at Britain’s Guardian, meanwhile, the poor chaps are desperately trying to give credit to anyone but the reviled Bushitler. Here’s how Timothy Garton Ash opened his disquisition: “Has Osama bin Laden started a revolution in the Middle East?” Well, that’s one way to look at it. Maybe he could share the Nobel Peace Prize with Michael Moore and MoveOn.org.
Now the torrents of Arabia cascade on, from Baghdad to Beirut, Cairo, Riyadh and beyond. Those of us who argued three years ago that Iraq was the place to start the dominoes falling and that the Middle East was ripe for liberty, for democracy, for one man, one gloat – whoops, sorry, vote… Anyway, those of us who told you so way back when long ago gave up trying to figure out why the media, the Dems, the Europeans and Canadians were so wedded to “stability” uber alles. But we had a feeling that their enthusiasm was unlikely to be shared by the actual subjects of Assad and co. And we were right: it turns out America’s Zionists know the Arab people better than Europe’s Arabists do – better than all those ex-ambassadors to the Middle East now shilling for Saudi-funded think-tanks who pop up on TV discussions to recycle Arab League talking points.
That’s not to say we’re in the final reel with happy endings all round. The nations of Eastern Europe weren’t all liberated on the same template. Syria could be the Middle East’s Romania – where the opportunist second rank decides to whack a dictator who’s outlived his usefulness and pass themselves off as the forces of freedom. Or Syria could be the Czech Republic – where the head thug’s heart is no longer in it and he negotiates a graceful retreat. But, either way, I doubt if Boy Assad’s presidency will be with us for much longer.
What’s happened in the last couple of weeks is that Bush has persuaded the French and the Saudis that Assad is a loser, and there’s no downside to putting the skids under him. And the way things are going most Middle East regimes would rather pile on Damascus lest Bush turn his attention elsewhere. Last week’s Arabic News reported that Colonel Gaddafy has “underscored the need to launch full freedom in Libya”. And to show he’s serious he’s introduced yet another spelling of his name: as the headline put it, “Qathafi Wants Freedom To Prosper In Libya”. Qathafi: that’s a new one on me. I’ve seen him spelled Khadafi, Qaddafi, Gadhafi, Qudhafi, Kadafi, Gheddafi, Kaddafi, Qadhdhafi and a couple dozen others, but clearly this latest one is an indication that, like Mubarak in Egypt, he’s under pressure to move to a multi-candidate electoral system and is planning to run as all of them: Gadafi (Sclerotic Dictatorship Party), Qadafi (Sword Of The Infidel Slayer-Liberal Democratic Alliance), Gaddhafi (New Sclerotic Dictatorship Party), Khaddaffy (Khonservative Phartty)…
Whether Qathafi really “wants freedom to prosper in Libya” is doubtful. But the fact that in the month since the Iraqi election he and President Mubarak and Prince Saud, the Saudi Foreign Minister, and King Abdullah of Jordan all feel obliged to sign on rhetorically is a big step. It may even ensure the survival of at least a few of them. For three decades, radical Islamism prospered because there was no other big idea to counter it. And the more the EU and UN and Arab League fetishized “stability” – the stability of the Assads and Arafats - the less chance there was that any alternative concept would ever arise. Bush and the Iraqi people changed all that.
In January I wrote that 2005 would be “the most important year in the region since Churchill drew the map of the modern Middle East in 1922”. The melancholy fact is that many of the changes underway today could have been with us a lot earlier if the Great War’s peacemakers hadn’t botched the job 80 years ago. The stagnant Middle East of Assad, Arafat and the House of Saud is the malign legacy of the prototype progressive transnationalism – the League of Nations mandates that helped deliver the peoples of the region into the hands of a uniquely disastrous bunch of unreliable western client rulers.
The new political settlements that emerge in the Middle East will be messy and flawed and problematic, but they will still be an improvement. Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze leader who says that in Iraq the Arabs’ Berlin Wall has fallen, is also the guy who not so long ago was saying “We are all happy when an American soldier is killed.” He will never be an ideological soulmate of Dick Cheney.
But so what? The Swedes and Irish aren’t soulmates of Cheney either, but a free society with a representative government is in America’s long-term interest, just as a nominally pro-American dictator holding his people back is not in America’s long-term interest. To firm up Daniel Schorr’s tentative endorsement, Bush got that right, and one day, if he’s not already, Walid Jumblatt will be grateful he did.
The Irish Times, Monday March 7th 2005
MAN AND NATURE
This column appeared a couple of weeks back in National Review, but in the cabin-fever stretch of winter - and with the UN predictions of post-tsunami disease epidemics failing (as usual) to materialize - it still seems pertinent:
I find myself thinking of Kenya’s tsunami victim. That’s right: victim, singular, no “s” on the end. He was Samuel Njoroge, a car mechanic from Nairobi, who was making his first ever visit to the East African coast. “He was very excited about the prospects of going to the beach and learning how to swim,” said his father. He picked the wrong day.
When tens of thousands are dead, it’s easy to mock the networks flying in Diane Sawyer and the other sob sisters to nod sympathetically and maintain that anguished angle of the eyebrows as someone retails the details of one specific tale of woe. But “human interest” at its crassest has a lot more going for it than its opposite: inhuman lack of interest. Consider 43-year old Greg Ferrando of Maui, on vacation in Thailand and enjoying the charms of newly deserted Patong Beach. As the Associated Press reported, “he went for a barefoot jog up the immaculate white sand beach, where the tsunami has wiped away almost all signs of humanity.”
“This whole area was littered with commercialism,” said Mr Ferrando. “There were hundreds of beach chairs out here. I prefer the sand… It looks much better now.” If you don’t mind stumbling over the occasional washed-up corpse on your barefoot jog.
There are a lot of takers for Mr Ferrando’s view: Man is the problem. He should be humbled by the awesome power of Mother Nature and learn the error of his ways. Eschew the beach chairs and parasols and margaritas and all the other litter of commercialism.
But, if I had to name the single distinguishing feature of North American life, it’s the refusal to be cowed by the elements. In the northern two-thirds of the continent, Mother Nature spends six months of the year trying to kill you, and do we care? Hell, no! Bring it on! In the weeks leading up to the fall of the Taliban, you may recall, the media were prostrate before the awesome powers of the “brutal Afghan winter”: “Realistically, US forces have a window of two or three weeks before the brutal Afghan winter begins to foreclose options,” reported New York’s Daily News. Actually, to be really realistic, US forces had a window of two or three years: a third of a decade later, the “brutal Afghan winter” still hasn’t shown up to foreclose options. As I write, it’s 62 and partly cloudy in Kandahar, 61 in Bost and Laskar, and in my corner of the Atlantic seaboard I won’t be seeing temperatures like that for another four months.
But the whole point of all the earth-is-your-mother environmentalism is to inculcate an enfeebling passivity in the face of nature. There wouldn’t be an America at all if the first settlers had heeded the warnings of Ye Olde Weather Channel about the brutal New England winter. In that sense, for all his other failings, I’ll miss Hurricane Dan Rather’s dispatches from turbulent coastal municipalities – not the parts of the show where he’s reporting on the actual hurricane, but the bits where he does the other headlines of the day as if it’s the most normal thing in the world to be reading “The Dow closed 13 points down today” while wrapped in his sou’wester round a lamppost as the wind’s howling and a rusting doublewide flies over your shoulder.
At such moments, Dan captures something important about the essence of America. Insofar as the “brutal Afghan winter” has any objective reality at all, all it means is that the key highway to Pakistan runs through some pretty high elevations, and has a tendency to get snowbound and impassable. Whether it needs to get quite so impassable is another matter. I like the Afghans, God bless ‘em, but honestly it doesn’t speak well for a culture to have lived in the same place for thousands of years and never got around to inventing the snowplow.
During the Afghan campaign, an Internet wag, Glenn Crawford, deftly summed up the different cultural approaches to unpromising climate - in this instance between the bleak Afghan plain and Nevada. Third World solution: eke a living out of the desert. American solution: “Viva Las Vegas!” One wouldn’t commend a den of gambling and fornication to every spot on earth, but, driving through the Sunni Triangle, I couldn’t help feeling the history of the Middle East would have been a little different if smack in the middle of the Arabian desert you could have seen Wayne Newton with full supporting orchestra. It would be to Afghanistan’s benefit if someone opened a ski resort, and made the brutal Afghan winter pay its way.
That’s what the Thais did: they made Phuket and Phi Phi Island the preferred vacation resorts for millions of westerners. Economic reality dictates that poor people wind up providing services for richer people: in Mississippi, they work in Wal-Mart; in China, they manufacture stuff for Wal-Mart; in Sri Lanka, they make the brassieres for virtually every breast in the United Kingdom; in Thailand, they pour your banana daquiris; in Afghanistan, they grow poppies. There are worse things than luxury tourism. To demand, as Mr Ferrando does, that Thai beaches remain free of “commercialism” is to demand that the Thai people stay poor and dependent.
“The Earth Is Your Mother” is eco-babble. The Eighth Psalm gets a lot closer to the truth: “What is man that thou art mindful of him…? Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands…”
Just so. We’re not here to be cowed by the environment. Rebuild the resorts in Phuket. And open one in the Hindu Kush.
National Review, January 21st 2005
~ Mark's "Happy Warrior" column can be read every two weeks in National Review . In the current issue, don't miss Steyn on the Democrats' wilderness of mirrors, only in the print edition of National Review, on sale now - or save over 40% and subscribe.
A KINDER GENTLER JIHAD?
Was it a mere seven days ago that I wrote in this space: “As for this Bush-failed-to-get-bin-Laden business, two and a half years ago I declared that Osama was dead and he’s never written to complain.”
I should have left well alone. He’s back, and complaining, rather petulantly. “I am surprised by you,” he admonishes the American people on his new video, evidently feeling he’s still not being taken seriously. So the has-bin is alive and wellish, and I’ve received a fair amount of mail mocking my contention that he’s kicked the burqa and is pushing up daisycutters. And much of that mail then extrapolates from my Osama blunder to assert that, given my confident prediction of a Bush win tomorrow, Kerry’s a shoo-in.
Well, we’ll see about that one soon enough. On the matter of bin Laden, however, I remain skeptical. He’s waited three years to appear before the world, and this is all he’s got to say? The video was delivered to al-Jazeera in Pakistan, and the Jazzers claim they broadcast everything they were given except a few minutes of camera set-ups. This turned out to be complete baloney: they left out a ton of unseen footage, including threats against members of the Bush family and a lot of whining about how the war on terror has cramped al-Qa’eda’s style. As to what we did get to see, most of the “transcriptions” are of the English sub-titles provided by al-Jaz. I’d be interested to see some forensic analysis of the Arabic.
Somewhere between “Osama”, al-Jazeera and the Reuter’s/AP/CNN translations, for example, a crucial point got lost in translation. Osama pledged that certain “states” would be left unharmed – not states as in “nation states”, but states as in “wilaya”, a word in Arabic that means province – ie, a sub-national division. Thus, under the Turks, what’s now Iraq was divided by the Ottomans into the vilayet of Basra, the vilayet of Baghdad and the vilayet of Mosul. So the word “wilaya” referred not to Belgium and Canada but to Idaho and New Hampshire. As the wannabin put it in his statement, “Any US state that does not toy with our security automatically guarantees its own security.”
Wow. He’s been boning up on the electoral college, and decided to attempt last-minute Spain-like swings of Florida and Ohio. Had the initial translations been more accurate, the Osama tape would have been seen as much more explicitly pro-Kerry.
As it is, like much of the Democratic base, he’s less pro-Kerry than pro-Michael Moore. Osama has been quite the busy researcher while holed up in Waziristan. Many reporters commented on his reference to My Pet Goat, made famous by Fahrenheit 9/11 as the book President Bush and that Florida grade-school were deeply immersed in on the morning of September 11th. But only Tim Blair, the great Australian wag, noticed the most salient fact. This is what the bin man said:
“It appeared to him [Bush] that a little girl’s talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers.”
Ha-ha. It’s the way he tells ‘em. But Blair pointed out that, unlike Michael Moore, who just used the book’s title as a cheap gag at the President’s expense, Osama went to the trouble of mastering the plot. In My Pet Goat, the eponymous hero prevents his little friend’s dad’s car being stolen by butting the thieves. If you go down to a polling station tomorrow and talk to the anti-Bush crowd, you’ll notice that, despite having been doing the “Shrub sat there reading My Pet Goat for seven whole minutes!” cracks to like-minded chums for six months, your average leftie windbag hasn’t been motivated to find out anything about the book beyond the title. Maybe Osama or his doppelladen just took a lucky shot: If it’s a book about a goat, it’s bound to involve plenty of butting. Don’t forget, this is a guy who lives in a cave in Waziristan, so he’s no stranger to goat-butting.
But, if I were a Democrat, I would be deeply ashamed at the way my favourite talking-points have been taken up so enthusiastically by my country’s enemies. Not just My Pet Goat, but the whole Bush-stole-Florida thing. In the heat of partisan politics, the left has failed to understand that these are arguments that diminish not just their target but an entire political culture. Whoever’s writing Osama’s scripts doesn’t give a goat’s butt over Jeb Bush and Florida recounts – or, as the bin man calls it, “the rigging experience” in Florida - but he’s seen a Michael Moore bootleg and he’s watched CNN and he’s read month-old copies of The Guardian and he believes that this is the way you have to talk to Americans. He’s condescending to them.
At the same time, in relaunching himself as Omichael bin Mooren, he’s diminished his own jihad. If you compare this statement with his 2001 video at the start of the Afghan campaign or his 2002 “Letter to the American people”, he sounds like a bigger flip-flopper than John Kerry. In 2001, he was bitching about the fall of Andalucia in 1492; in 2002, his grievances ran on and on, starting with “the British handed over Palestine to the Jews” and moving on to Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir, yada yada, before calling on the west to convert to Islam, scrap democracy, adopt Sharia, ratify Kyoto (really) and “reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gamblings, and trading with interest”, which should make the Irish Times Christmas party a quieter affair.
Where’d that Osama go? This new one sounds more like Rodney King wondering “Why can’t we all just get along?” Don't mess with us, we won't mess with you, he offers, adding affably. “We did not attack Sweden, for example.”
As odd as the content is the style. There’s none of the “In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful” stuff. If this really is Osama, he seems to be repositioning himself from holy warrior to torpid 1950s pan-Arab secular nationalist. Is that why he’s dumped the camo-and-rifle look for the demure shaheed of a Gulf foreign minister? I suggested a couple of weeks ago that these next few years would see the mainstreaming of jihad: from the difference in content, tone and design between Osama’s 2001 video and whoever made this production, the marketing boys at al-Qa’eda are already on that route.
“We don’t believe anyone can argue about the newsworthiness of this latest Osama bin Laden recording,” al-Jazeera spokesperson Jihad Ballout said.
Jihad Ballout? This statement sounds more like a Jihad Bailout. “W. was clinging to his inane mantra that if we fight the terrorists over there, we don’t have to fight them here,” twittered The New York Times’ elderly schoolgirl, Maureen Dowd, “even as bin Laden was back on TV threatening to come here.”
Er, no. Not really. For three years al-Qa’eda have issued blood-curdling video threats to “come here”. In this latest one, they can barely talk the talk.
As to whether it makes any difference to tomorrow’s election, I think not. Americans are not Swedes and they don’t want to be. They will vote for the least Swede-like candidate. Moderate Democrats made a huge mistake in allowing themselves to be annexed by Michael Moore’s fever swamps. And so it seems have al-Qa’eda.
The Irish Times, November 1st 2004
NO EFFECT.ORG
A few years ago, I had an agent who was hard to get hold of. I’d call him up and his secretary would say, “Oh, he’s with Vanity Fair right now.” I’d enquire hopefully as to which of his clients the perfumed glossy had chosen to feature, and she’d say, “Oh, no. It’s not for any clients. Vanity Fair’s doing a profile of him – ‘the king of a new breed of super-agents that's changing the way the industry does business’.”
“Oh, really?” I’d say. “Well, if you could have him call me next wee…”
“I’ll try. But he’s doing a photoshoot for Paris Match on Monday, and then on Tuesday he’s go…”
Week in, week out, I’d pick up a magazine or newspaper and see my agent staring out from the full-page spread. “Gee,” I thought, “whoever’s my agent’s agent is doing a great job.”
That’s how I feel about moveon.org. Hardly a day goes by without some featurette or other on “how the Internet is changing the way we do politics” or some such, with seemingly obligatory reference to the spectacular success of moveon.org. But, in all the stories about the spectacular success, nobody ever seems to point to any examples of what they’re spectacularly successful at. They’ve certainly raised and spent a lot of money, but what do they have to show for it other than their own hype?
“Moveon.org Becomes Anti-Bush Powerhouse,” says CNN. But have they knocked the Bush campaign off course? Have they peeled away voters in key states? The only critical wobbly “red” state has been Florida, and that’s due more to demographic trends than anything else: those incoming oldsters aren’t voting Democrat because moveon.org is the talk of their gated community.
By comparison, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth raised very little money and spent even less. According to the IRS records up to September 5th, moveon.org had total “527” receipts of $9,086,102 and total expenditures of $17,435,782; the Swiftvets had total “527” receipts of $158,750 and total expenditures of $60,403. Who would you say got a bigger bang for their buck?
The Swiftees rarely get cited as an example of a new energizing force, only as the umpteenth coachload of “Republican-funded smear merchants”. But they changed the dynamic of the Presidential race. They paralysed the Kerry campaign, deprived it of its only theme and left it floundering in search of another. They forced John Kerry himself into hiding from interviewers for over a month. They led to mockery of his Vietnam campaign strategy by mainstream Republicans like Bob Dole and criticism of it by mainstream Democrats like Bill Clinton. They prompted Kerry to hire hundreds of new advisors to add to the thousands of old ones, and thereby obliged the snooty old media, who’d barely given the Swiftee “Republican liars” the time of day, to start running stories on the crisis in the Senator’s campaign. As the icing on the cake, one of Kerry’s medals is now the subject of an official US Navy investigation.
Not bad for one month’s work. Moveon.org, on the other hand, have generated a thousand articles on the buzz, the cool, the chic of moveon.org. Rather than a transformative force, they’re remarkably like those two other props of the Democratic Party, the music business and Hollywood, in both of which blowing millions to little effect is a way of life. Look at it this way: if anybody from moveon.org turned up to be interviewed by Judy Woodruff or Tim Russert, what on earth would you ask them other than “How much more dough did you raise and spend this week?”
I’d argue that the moveon crowd have done more damage to the Democrats than to the Republicans. Rather than making new converts for the party, they seem mainly to have radicalized the existing ones. Not sufficiently to force one of their own – an explicitly anti-war candidate – on the Dems, but enough to require a vacuous establishment nominee to genuflect in their direction. Whether or not America is still a 50/50 country, the Democrats have wound up with a 50/50 candidate. Sometimes Kerry says he’d have done what Bush did only “smarter” and with more French input; a week later, he says it was “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time”. After Bush artfully bounced Kerry into saying, if he had to do it all over again, he’d still have voted for the Iraq war, it was the moveon Democrats who bounced him back, furious at what they saw as a repudiation of the official line.
In other words, moveon.org is beginning to look a lot like NARAL and the NEA and the Jackson/Sharpton ethnic grievance mongers: an unrepresentative group that prevents Democratic candidates from any serious thinking on the relevant issue. When it’s abortion or education or race, the party can still just about get away with fudging it and sliding past with weaselly evasions. But the war and national security are the central questions in American politics for the foreseeable future. The Swiftvets will go away when John Kerry does. But I doubt moveon.org will. Rich but barren, they’re not a new force but as perfect a manifestation of the modern Democratic Party’s ideological nullity as could be devised.
National Review, September 27th 2004
~ Mark's "Happy Warrior" column can be read every two weeks in National Review . In the current issue, don't miss Steyn on conservative nation-building, only in the print edition of National Review, on sale now - or save over 40% and subscribe.
THE JIHAD GOES MAINSTREAM
What would happen if “al-Qa’eda” (for want of an easier shorthand) produced a Yasser Arafat figure?
That’s to say, imagine America’s enemies with a figurehead who gets treated as Arafat does – emissaries from the Vatican and the EU routinely make pilgrimages to his compound and get photographed beaming alongside him at that desk of his with the big unchanging pile of paperwork and the curiously omnipresent box of baby wipes. He’s received at the UN, EU, Arab League and (depending on the occupant) even the White House as a head of state whose lack of a state to head is a mere technical detail. I see a country called “Palestine” got to march in the 2004 Olympics parade as if it were no different from New Zealand or Denmark.
If you persist, as many do, in arguing the comparative threats of rogue states and stateless actors, Arafat offers a unique perspective: a stateless actor for whom the world created a rogue statelet. For all that paperwork on his desk (requisition slips for suicide-bomber belts?) Arafat seems to have little interest in government. Unlike other politicians of one’s acquaintance, he has as far as I’m aware no affordable prescription drugs plan for seniors nor any views on outsourcing. Thirty years ago, he was head of a movement of killers – killers, indeed, of several prominent Americans. Today, he heads a more diffused movement of killers – the intifada – and all that’s changed is the innovativeness of their depravity. One thinks, for example, of the suicide bomber with vials of HIV Positive blood in his belt, with which he hoped to infect fatally those who survived the initial blast. And yet no matter what he does his European cheerleaders refuse to fall out of love with a vain, unreformable terrorist whose incompetence and thuggery can apparently never dent the Palestinians’ inviolable status as “victims” of Israeli “occupation”.
What if that happened to the broader jihad? Already, there’s a palpable longing to make the Islamists just a regular common-or-garden terrorist movement, like the IRA or the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Mo Mowlam, formerly Britain’s Northern Ireland Secretary, oversaw the process by which the IRA’s Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness became Ministers of a Crown they decline to recognize. And she figures, if you can pull that off, what’s the big deal with al-Qaeda? Earlier this year, she called for Osama bin Laden to be invited to “the negotiating table” – a difficult trick: what’s left of the late Osama would fit in the salt cellar. But, putting such technicalities aside, Ms Mowlam’s main point was that the whole “war on terror” approach was all wrong. “If you go in with guns and bombs, you act as a recruitment officer for the terrorists,” she said.
Well, she’s a Labour leftie, what do you expect? But Michael Ancram, Deputy Leader of the British Conservative Party, isn’t sounding so very different. He’s proposed a Grand Congress of Reconciliation which would sit in Istanbul with representatives of the world’s Muslim nations plus America, Britain, Russia, Europe and Australia (what? no Canadians?) to thrash out areas of difference and produce a Declaration of Reconciliation detailing the appropriate compromises. For example, many mainstream imams want to stone adulteresses to death, behead all sodomites and kill all the Jews. Maybe the Grand Congress of Reconciliation would thrash out a compromise whereby we lightly pebble-dash adulteresses, merely castrate sodomites and kill only some of the Jews, just the troublemakers, maybe ten per cent.
Alas, the other side isn’t interested. Hussein Massawi, the Hezbollah leader behind the Beirut barracks bombings 20 years ago, put it at its pithiest: “We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you.”
But suppose that changed. Suppose a kind of political wing evolved parallel to the suicide bombing, like Sinn Fein and the IRA, with some Saeb Erekat-type spokesperson who plays well on CNN. The Arab League would anoint them as the sole legitimate representatives, and the EU would almost certainly agree to meet with them, and even in America the likes of Senator Patty Murray, who famously hymned Osama for “building day care facilities, building health care facilities”, would probably be eager to tour their nurseries and seniors centers. A large chunk of the west is almost begging for some fellows on the other side to sit down and talk with, because sitting down and talking is what they do best, even with folks who want to blow them up.
Given the growing Muslim populations in Europe and the remarkable success hitherto obscure Muslim lobby groups have had in constraining certain aspects of the war on terror, it seems almost certain that Islamist political parties will arise on the Continent within the next decade. And, given the very few degrees of separation between very prominent western Muslims – ambassadors, princes, professors – and the terrorists, it seems likely that many prominent figures in these parties will be broadly supportive of the terrorists’ ends if not necessarily their means. And, given the governing principle of multicultural society – that western man demonstrates his cultural sensitivity by pre-emptively surrendering – it seems to me that any savvy Islamist, surveying the Madrid bombing and the aftermath, might be contemplating the benefits of a twin-track strategy. In the years ahead, the urge by weak-willed allies to “politicize” the war on terror will be one of the biggest challenges for Washington.
National Review , September 13th 2004
~ Mark's "Happy Warrior" column can be read every two weeks in National Review. In the current issue, don't miss Steyn on MoveOn.org's inability to move anyone, only in the print edition of National Review, on sale now - or save over 40% and subscribe.
THREE LITTLE WORDS
At dinner in Paris a couple of years ago, I was asked about “this American sickness with guns”.
“Americans have guns,” I said, “because a lot of Americans like having guns.”
My host scoffed. “A lot of people here would like to have guns, too. But they don’t.”
“Exactly,” I said.
The difference between America and most of the rest of the world can be summed up in three words: “We, the people.” The Warsaw Pact had “People’s Republics”, of course, but, when you call yourself a “People’s Republic”, you aren’t. Lots of political systems invoke “the people”, but very few trust them enough to live by it. For four decades in the Middle East, the likes of the House of Saud and President Mubarak explicitly sold themselves to Washington as anti-democratic brakes on the uglier inclinations of their subjects. Their argument was: okay, we’re undemocratic, but believe me with a crowd like ours you wouldn’t want democracy. If it was ever a persuasive argument, it isn’t now.
But that line isn’t confined to Araby. It’s standard in the new Europe, too – and not just at my elegant French dinner party. On June 13th, the Europe Union held elections, and, though between the Baltic and the Irish Sea there were significant regional variations, the key trends were this: low turn-out in some places, high turn-out for “Euroskeptic” parties in others, and big anti-government votes partout. The division in Europe is between the twin forces of Apathy and Hostility. Nonetheless, five days later, the leaders of 25 nations huddled in a Gauloise-filled room and emerged with a “European Constitution” – a blueprint for a Federal European state for which the election results of less than a week earlier had made plain they had no popular mandate.
To which my hosts in Paris would have shrugged: “So what?”
The principle underpinning the new Europe is exactly the same as that advanced by King Fahd and his thousands of princes – not “We, the people”, but “We know better than the people”. We know better than them on guns and the death penalty and the Euro and constitutional arrangements, and pretty much everything else, including election results. When 29% of Austrian voters were impertinent enough to plump for Joerg Haider’s Freedom Party, thereby earning the unlovely nationalists a place in the governing coalition, the EU punished them by imposing sanctions on the country. As the Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson put it, “The program that is developing in Austria is not in line with EU values.” In the new Europe, the will of the people is subordinate to the will of the Perssons.
One sympathizes with the Continental elites. Last time, they let the will of the people loose, it gave them Nazism and Fascism, and militarism and genocide, all of which were hugely popular. So after the war the priority of Europe’s governing class was to constrain the masses. In the current Wilson Quarterly (as in Woodrow), Professor Jed Rubenfeld of Yale makes the case that it was America which essentially invented the means to contain European nationalism – by concocting “a new system of international law and multilateral governance”. As Rubenfeld argues, “The internationalism and multilateralism we promoted were for the rest of the world, not for us.”
There’s a measure of truth in this. The paternalistic arrangements Washington promoted for post-war Europe would have been unacceptable at home in a republic founded on popular sovereignty. But therein lies the irony. Ever since Karl Marx sat in the Reading Room of the British Library in London writing Das Kapital, all the most destructive anti-western ideologies have been invented in the west. In the dining rooms of agreeable Ivy League colleges, they fret about imposing western values on the developing world but not a whit about imposing anti-western values, all of which were developed in the west – from Communism and Fascism to subtler grievances like “neo-colonialism”. Even Islamofascism is at core a traditional European-style political totalitarianism that’s cannily exploited a structural weakness in Islam and taken it for a ride. I’m not saying Islam itself isn’t hugely problematic. I tend to agree with Churchill on the curses of Mohammedanism – “fatalistic apathy… improvident habits… degraded sensualism…”, etc – but it took a Fascist politicization to make it a global threat.
What’s happening in Europe today is a refinement of western anti-westernism. A system of remote, unaccountable, post-nationalist, pan-continental institutions urged upon the Continent by America has become the principal vehicle for anti-Americanism. “A politically united Europe will be a stronger partner to advance our goals,” insists Strobe Talbott. Tell it to Mr Persson, the aforementioned Swede, who says the purpose of the European Union is that “it’s one of the few institutions we can develop as a balance to US world domination”. Sweden was famously relaxed about Nazi world domination and Soviet world domination, but even in the chancelleries of Stockholm there comes a time when the threat is so unspeakable you have to get off the fence.
The EU is not a “balance to US world domination”. Indeed, it will have difficulty dominating its own backyard. The multilateral panaceas and US security blanket imposed on Europe have led it to its present paradoxical state of militantly pacifistic anti-American moral equivalism. There are lessons here - alas, too late for Europe to learn, but not for America.
National Review , July 12th 2004
~ Mark's "Happy Warrior" column can be read every two weeks in National Review. In the current issue, don't miss Steyn on knowing the enemy, only in the print edition of National Review, on sale now - or save over 40% and subscribe.
THE JOKE'S ON THEM
I can pinpoint the exact moment I knew the jig was up. It wasn’t Reykjavik or the fall of the Wall. It was when Gennadi Gerasimov, spokesman for President Gorbachev, appeared on TV and, seeking to explain the Soviet Union’s loosened grip on its Eastern European satellites, inaugurated an all-new Warsaw Pact: “The Brezhnev Doctrine is dead,” he declared. “We now have the Sinatra Doctrine: you do it your way.”
Mr Gerasimov was on TV a lot in those days. Plausible, genial, bespoke, tanned, he looked like a White House press spokesman doing a tour of duty in the Kremlin, which was the whole idea. For the “reformers” in Moscow, reform was mostly a matter of style. If they aped the manners of the west, maybe the Politburo could retrench, hold on to what mattered, survive.
So they sent their first and last western-style spin-doctor out before the cameras to do a one-liner about Ronald Reagan’s old buddy Frank that could have come straight from the Gipper himself. Dan Quayle responded by noting the continued presence of Soviet troops in Warsaw Pact countries and urged Moscow to remember the Nancy Sinatra Doctrine: “These Boots Are Made For Walking”. The Reds couldn’t win on this turf. To modify Mrs Thatcher, Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without a single shot. Just rimshots.
Say what you like about Marxism-Leninism but it was deadly earnest. In the Forties, the Kremlin issued a directive to the Communist Party of Great Britain that “the lower organs of the party must make even greater efforts to penetrate the backward parts of the proletariat” – which, to British ears, sounds like a ribald music-hall joke, as Claud Cockburn (father of Alexander, for any readers of The Nation who happen to be reading this) endeavored in vain to point out to Moscow. By the time the Commies got around to professing – like the ladies in lonely-hearts ads – the importance of a sense of humor, they still failed to understand why they needed one.
There’s a Broadway musical on at the moment called Assassins, a weak little revue by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman about the men and women who’ve tried to kill American presidents, from Lincoln to Reagan. When it comes to the latter, we see John Hinckley at a carnival sideshow pumping bullet after bullet into a cardboard cutout of the President, only to have him bounce back again and again with a brand new quip, like some kind of vampiric lounge act you can’t drive a stake through – “Whoops, honey, I forgot to duck”, “I hope you fellers are Republicans”, etc. Eventually Hinckley’s all out of ammo and hurls the gun away in frustration.
I think the authors mean us to see Ronald Reagan as a cardboard quipster: there’s no there there – nothing for Hinckley to kill. In fact, you’re left with the opposite impression – that the inexhaustible supply of jokes is merely the outer projection of a tremendous underlying strength and resilience. In his big speeches, he talked about the “evil empire”. In his gags, he joked about hapless Russians waiting ten years for a plumber’s appointment. The Soviet Union was wrong because it was evil. But it would fail because it was inept and sclerotic.
In the hours after Reagan’s death, CNN was wall-to-wall with media bigfeet, none of whom voted for him and all of whom spoke of his smile and his twinkle and his “wonderful sense of humor” as if these were things apart from his political philosophy, rather than the external evidence of it. The jokes reflect a cultural confidence that seems obvious – but only with the benefit of hindsight. Younger readers may have difficulty recalling quite how gloomy the pre-Reagan era was. If you think April in Iraq was bad, the entire 1970s were one long quagmire. From far away Cambodia to just-offshore Grenada, Communism was winning and the west was in retreat. Somehow the lower organs of our nomenklatura had been penetrated by a terrible pessimism: in their guts they didn’t expect us to win.
As for Reagan, all the things the defensive chattering classes now tout as evidence of Reagan’s irresistible personal charm were assumed back then to be proof that he was a moron who’d blunder us into Armageddon. The bestselling poster of the day showed Ron and Maggie like Rhett and Scarlett in Gone With The Wind, locked in each other’s arms with a huge mushroom cloud billowing behind them: “She promised to follow him to the end of the earth. He promised to arrange it.”
Funny. But wrong. And, in the end, the best jokes have a piercing truth to them. In their death-throes, the Soviets thought they could mimic the style – the rhythm, the vernacular, the set-up, the punch – without the substance. Not for the first time, they missed the point of the joke.
Ronald Reagan was the apotheosis of happy warriors. In that spirit, of all the elegant tributes, summations of his life and reports of his passing, let me cite my very favorite – a headline from an Associated Press story two days after he died:
Government To Close In Honor Of Reagan.
Wow. That’s a much better memorial than putting him on the quarter or Mt Rushmore.
Alas, the Federal Government was merely taking a day off. But somewhere up there Ronald Reagan is enjoying the joke.
National Review , June 21st 2004
~ Mark's "Happy Warrior" column can be read every two weeks in National Review. In the current issue, don't miss Steyn on "we, the people", only in the print edition of National Review, on sale now - or save over 40% and subscribe.
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LOL. Many thanks for the Steyn trove. I'm making reservations to Ski Hindu Kush.
Another good one from Steyn!
..... different cultural approaches to unpromising climate ... [EG] beween the bleak Afghan plain and Nevada.
Third World solution: eke a living out of the desert.
American solution: “Viva Las Vegas!”
It's hard to pick out Steyn's best lines without copying the whole thing. LOL. The guy deserves some international prize for being a World Treasure.
<< Steyn ..... deserves some international prize for being a World Treasure. >>
Absolutely!
Wow, thanks for that!
BTTT
STEYN PING!!!!
There is the worrisome suggestion that those at State move on to jobs with those very same foreign countries who they often seemed to represent to the detriment of US interests.
There is that George Schultz story that new Ambassadors before assuming their new job would be asked to pick out "their country" on a globe. They invariably picked their new assignment. Mr Schultz would correct them and say --No, it's the US.
Thanks, Goldwater.
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