Free Republic

Salama Nimat, an Arab journalist writing from Washington for the London-based Al-Hayat, is shocked and awed to realize that the first two free and general elections in the whole history of the Arab nation will happen in January, "in Iraq, under the auspices of the American occupation, and in Palestine, under the auspices of the Israeli occupation". Makes him feel almost warm and fuzzy towards Western imperialism. He is the latest of several prominent Arab journalists bold enough to point at the obvious. He is so indiscreet as to mention that the only places in the Arab world where the...

We now know not only that there will be an election in Iraq on Jan. 30th, but who is going to win it. This is because a single party slate has been assembled out of the various Shia factions to contest it; and the Shia are three-fifths of Iraq's population. In defiance of any advice I might have given, the electoral system cuts several Gordian knots by making the whole of Iraq into a single constituency. It is thus a radical system of proportional representation, in which each party will be assigned seats according to its share of the overall...

Vladimir Putin continues to make a fool of himself over the election in Ukraine, though he is beginning to be a dangerous fool. Perhaps because his own views on life, politics, and diplomacy were formed through the many years he worked in the KGB, the Russian President seems unable to grasp that meddling in Ukrainian politics, to press Russian interests over Ukrainian, is not in the Russian interest. A free, democratic, and sane Ukraine will always seek good relations with its much larger neighbour, in the same way Finland under the late Urho Kekkonen did with the Soviet Union, through...

Tom Brokaw has retired after 23 years of reading the NBC Nightly News. Dan Rather will soon end 24 years of delivering the CBS Evening News. Peter Jennings, who has been doing ABC World News Tonight for 21 years, isn't leaving, so far as I've heard, though he has passed the mandatory retirement age for most professions. I'm now so old myself, I can remember when they were all fresh faces. They came from outer nowhere in America — from small-town South Dakota, and Texas, in the case of the first two; and Mr. Jennings from a little town "north...

"I am a sick man. … I am a wicked man." This is how Dostoevsky's nameless anti-hero begins his Notes from Underground, the prelude to a series of five extraordinary novels on the fate of modern man. -snip- There you have our post-modernity in a nutshell: an unthinking elision of the moral into the psychological, creating a "nuance" where no nuance exists. And by so doing, the previous translators externalized the evil that Dostoevsky's character had discovered in himself. The old Christian thing was to do good, in the knowledge that we are capable of terrible evil. But the "new...

At stake in Iraq just now, is whether Jihadi terrorism and guerrilla action can be defeated. Iranian nuclear weapons are the bigger immediate issue, but Iraq offers the definitive test of wills. Do the U.S. and allies have the stomach to see the Jihadis off, even if this requires killing every one of them in a postmodern Iwo Jima? The whole Muslim world is waiting to see who wins this battle of wills, and I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the future course of Islam may be decided in light of it. The news from...

The political crisis in the Ukraine is actually quite encouraging. A presidential election has obviously been stolen by an old-line ex-Communist thug, and the people won't stand for it. The demonstrations began soon after election results were posted last Sunday. By yesterday, huge crowds of people and vehicles decorated with the orange of the leading opposition candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, had surrounded the Cabinet office and most of the major administrative centres, demanding a proper recount of the polls; and Mr. Yushchenko had informally established an alternative government behind their lines. His supporters were also burning tires and setting up roadblocks...

We will see if the deal between Iran and the "European Three" (Britain, France, Germany, playing at being an alternative superpower) goes into effect on Monday. Under it, Revolutionary Iran is supposed to suspend all activities that look suspiciously like making nuclear weapons, while it negotiates a comprehensive package of European financial and technical aid. But at the time of writing, the deal is coming apart. As I understand, the Iranians have already started re-interpreting the provisions, tergiversating upon everything to which the Europeans thought they had agreed. This is not a crisis the United States can "bomb its way...

Yasser Arafat is still too freshly dead for anyone to be rendering the judgement of history. Ignore all obituaries. Look instead at that procession of the self-appointed great and wise, to Cairo and Ramallah! (Excluding minor officials, sent as part of their diplomatic duties.) A self-selected rogues' gallery of the planet's most deceitful and self-serving politicians, gone to see and be seen at a carnival of hypocrisy. But the late PLO chief was more than "a bit of a rogue". He was a monster: a man with the blood of thousands on his hands, who never cared to wash them....

Fallujah has been effectively pacified, for the moment, but as the U.S. military is well aware, it is dealing with "insurgents" (old Saddamites plus international Jihadis leeching into Iraq chiefly from Syria and Iran), who have established a presence in Samarra, Baiji, Qaem, Bakuba, Hawijah, Tallafar, Heet, Saqlawyia, Tikrit, Anah, Rawa, Haditha, Ramadi, Balad, Beiji, Bahraz, Baladruz, and Sunni Arab neighbourhoods in Baghdad and Mosul. The Jihadis staged uprisings in several of these towns, in a desperate attempt to distract the U.S. Marines from Fallujah. The largest was in the major city of Mosul, where a dozen Iraqi police stations...

That you may live in "interesting" times is of course an old Chinese curse, and in this sense of the word, it will be interesting to see how the social, legal, and political situation develops in the Netherlands after the murder of Theo van Gogh. His cremation was this last week; his "execution" by a Muslim fanatic was performed on Nov. 2nd. -snip- Whether in the Middle East, or embedded within Western society, the Jihadis claim not only the right to decide which among us should live or die, but also the right to perform theatrical executions, in some parody...

Is it my imagination, or has the very tone of the media — that "MSM", or Main Stream Media, to which they have been reduced in weblog shorthand — changed in the last week? I am trying to account for a little heading in the New York Times that reads, "With Our Troops". It is small, but it is a miracle all the same, for the grey lady's position before the re-election of President Bush was ambiguous. The Pentagon's brilliant plan for embedding journalists with the military, in this latest case with U.S. Marines in the front of action to...

I am not deliriously happy with the re-election of President Bush, nor in a mood to gloat over it. There are too many wounds to heal. Instead I am profoundly relieved, not only that George W. Bush survived the election, but that it was reasonably decisive, and that it's over. The greatest and most public-spirited thing John F. Kerry ever did was deliver that concession speech at Faneuil Hall on Wednesday afternoon. It was genuinely noble, and he spoke the truth: America cannot afford to be so divided. The election hamstrung the administration's efforts to respond to world developments. There...

The dreaded day has come, and not yet passed. At the time of writing, to a deadline of 1 a.m. last night, it appears the pollsters were nearly right. President Bush will be re-elected, but by a close margin, with the possibility of serious litigation much delaying a final result in the swing state of Ohio. It appears to me that Ohio is solid beyond challenging, however, with 87% of its precincts reporting, and Bush more than 100,000 ahead. There have been no major upsets, with the minor and mostly predicted Congressional upsets tilting slightly to the Republicans in Senate,...

No matter who wins Stateside on Tuesday (or next May, if the race is close enough for the lawyers to throw into the courts), I shall be disappointed. My regular readers will by now have guessed that I am hoping, nay praying, for a Bush victory. More than that: I am hoping for one that is so shockingly decisive, that it will bring the Democrat Party to its senses, and leave major figures in the mainstream media in the United States and elsewhere asking themselves serious questions about life. But this is really too much to hope. I shall be...

One week from today, we may or may not know the result of the U.S. presidential election. Tens of thousands of lawyers, employed by both parties, stand waiting to contest results, Florida-style, in each swing state. The polls indicate it is exceedingly close, both in popular vote and in the electoral college, and different polls show different trendlines. The number of swing states appears to be increasing. Voter turnout is itself less predictable for this election than for any recent one in the U.S. — the people are far from indifferent about the result. Advance polls show an extraordinary climb...

Part IIThe reader is under no obligation to take me seriously; my credentials are currently archived on my website, half-a-million words since 9/11 that will or won't stand the test of re-reading. I am a "pundit" -- never meant to be, but there you have it. Woke up the morning of Sept. 11th, 2001, as usual wondering what I would write about that day, but by mid-morning was galvanized to a purpose. Not something from within, but something from outside had done the galvanizing. I realized, in the moment I learned the aircraft had hit the towers, that there are...

The Americans go to the polls this year on All Souls, which is Nov. 2nd — two weeks from yesterday. I can't think of a more appropriate day in the ancient Christian calendar. On All Souls we traditionally lit our candles, and carried them into our ancient cemeteries, and set them down by the graves of our forefathers. A reminder that democracy is the tyranny of the living, who vote not only on their own behalf, but also for the dead, and the unborn. The Americans also vote on behalf of the whole world — living, dead, unborn, — for...

In the conclusion of his web commentaries on the U.S. presidential debates, the National Review's Jay Nordlinger wrote something that truly resonated with me: "Some of our critics are taunting us with, 'Bush is going to lose, ha, ha, ha. Face up to reality, NRO boys, Kool-Aid drinkers.' All that. Frankly, I don't talk much about who will win. I talk about who should win. What the people do is their business. I'm not all that worshipful of the people, frankly. This is part of the joy of not being a politician. This is the people that voted for Clinton...

As I write, the U.S. Marine Corps is taking Fallujah all over again. There is a rumour they have captured "Zarqawi" — the semi-legendary terror mastermind believed to be holed-up in Fallujah — which I don't think is true. But in the unlikely event it does prove true, I want you to know you read it here first. The new Iraqi army led the assault into Ramadi, and I gather there were about equal credits in the taking of Samarra the week before: these were two of the three largest among about 30 pockets of enemy control in the "Sunni...