RIGHT AND TRUE (via Mike Daley):

October 26, 2005

President Addresses Joint Armed Forces Officers’ Wives’ Luncheon (George W. Bush, Bolling Air Force Base, Washington, D.C.)

In four years since September the 11th, the evil that reached our shores has reappeared on other days, in other places — in Mombasa and Casablanca and Riyadh and Jakarta and Istanbul and Madrid and Beslan and Taba, Netanya, Baghdad, and elsewhere. In the past few months, we’ve seen a new terror offensive with attacks in London, Sharm el-Sheikh, and a deadly bombing in Bali once again. All these separate images of destruction and suffering that we see on the news can seem like random and isolated acts of madness. Innocent men and women and children have died simply because they were in the wrong train, or worked in the wrong building, or checked into the wrong hotel. Yet, while the killers choose their victims indiscriminately, their attacks serve a clear and focused ideology — a set of beliefs and goals that are evil, but not insane.

Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism. Whatever it is called, this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam. This form of radicalism exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision: the establishment, by terrorism, subversion and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom. These extremists distort the idea of jihad into a call for terrorist murder against Christians and Hindus and Jews — and also against Muslims who do not share their radical vision, whom they regard as heretics.

Many militants are part of a — global, borderless terrorist organizations like al Qaeda, which spreads propaganda and provides financing and technical assistance to local extremists, and conducts dramatic and brutal operations like the attacks of September the 11th. Other militants are found in regional groups, often associated with al Qaeda — paramilitary insurgencies and separatist movements in places like Somalia and the Philippines and Pakistan and Chechnya and Kashmir and Algeria. Still others spring up in local cells, inspired by Islamic radicalism, but not centrally directed. Islamic radicalism is more like a loose network with many branches than an army under a single command. Yet these operatives, fighting on scattered battlefields, share a similar ideology and vision for our world. And we know the vision of the radicals because they’ve stated it openly — in videos and audiotapes and letters and declarations and on websites.

First, these extremists want to end American and Western influence in the broader Middle East, because we stand for democracy and peace, and we stand in the way of their ambitions. Al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, has called on Muslims to dedicate — and I quote — their “resources, sons and money to driving the infidels out of our lands.” The tactics of al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists have been consistent for a quarter-century: They hit us, and expect us to run.

Earlier this month, the world learned of a letter written by al Qaeda’s number two leader, a man named Zawahiri, a letter he wrote to his chief deputy in Iraq, the terrorist Zarqawi. In it, Zawahiri points to Vietnam as a model for al Qaeda. He writes: “The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam, and how they ran and left their agents, is noteworthy.” The terrorists witnessed a similar response after the attacks of American troops in Beirut in 1983, Mogadishu in 1993. They believe that America can be made to run again — only this time, on a larger scale, with greater consequences.

Secondly, the militant network wants to use the vacuum created by an American retreat to gain control of a country, a base from which to launch attacks and conduct their war against non-radical Muslim governments. Over the past few decades, radicals have specifically targeted Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Jordan for potential takeover. They’ve achieved their goal, for a time, in Afghanistan. And now they’ve set their sights on Iraq. In his recent letter, Zawahiri writes that al Qaeda views Iraq as, “the place for the greatest battle.” The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. And we must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war on terror.

Third, the militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region, and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia. Zawahiri writes that the terrorists, “must not have their mission end with the expulsion of Americans from Iraq.” He goes on to say, “The jihad requires several incremental goals — expel the Americans from Iraq; establish the Islamic authority over as much territory as you can to spread its power in Iraq; extend the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq.”

With the greater economic and military and political power they seek, the terrorists would be able to advance their stated agenda: to develop weapons of mass destruction; to destroy Israel; to intimidate Europe; to assault the American people; and to blackmail our government into isolation.

Some might be tempted to dismiss these goals as fanatical or extreme. Well, they are fanatical and extreme — and they should not be dismissed. Our enemy is utterly committed. As Zarqawi has vowed, “We will either achieve victory over the human race, or we will pass to the eternal life.” And the civilized world knows very well that other fanatics in history — from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot — consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history. Evil men, obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience, must be taken very seriously — and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply. (Applause.)

Defeating the militant network is difficult because it thrives, like a parasite, on the suffering and frustrations of others. The radicals exploit local conflicts to build a culture of victimization, in which someone else is always to blame and violence is always the solution. They exploit resentful and disillusioned young men and women, recruiting them through radical mosques, as the pawns of terror. And they exploit modern technology to multiply their destructive power. Instead of attending faraway training camps, recruits can now access online training libraries to learn how to build a roadside bomb, or fire a rocket-propelled grenade — and this further spreads the threat of violence, even within peaceful democratic societies.

The influence of Islamic radicalism is also magnified by helpers and enablers. They’ve been sheltered by authoritarian regimes — allies of convenience like Syria and Iran — that share the goal of hurting America and modern Muslim governments, and use terrorist propaganda to blame their own failures on the West, on America, and on the Jews.

The radicals depend on front operations, such as corrupted charities, which direct money to terrorist activity. They’re strengthened by those who aggressively fund the spread of radical, intolerant versions of Islam in unstable parts of the world. The militants are aided, as well, by elements of the Arab news media that incite hatred and anti-Semitism, that feed conspiracy theories, and speak of a so-called American “war on Islam” — with seldom a word about American action to protect Muslims in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Somalia, and Kosovo and Kuwait and Iraq; with seldom a world about — word about the generous assistance to Muslims recovering from natural disasters in places like Indonesia and Pakistan.

Some have argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals. I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September 11th, 2001, and al Qaeda attacked us anyway. The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse. (Applause.)

The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and yet the militants killed more than 150 Russian schoolchildren in Beslan. Over the years these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence — the Israeli presence on the West Bank, or the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, or the defeat of the Taliban, or the Crusades of a thousand years ago. In fact, we’re not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We’re facing a radical ideology with inalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world.

No acts of ours involves the rage of killers. And no concessions, bribe, or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans of murder. On the contrary; they target nations whose behavior they believe they can change through violence. Against such an enemy, there is only one effective response: We will never back down, never give in, and never accept anything less than complete victory. (Applause.)

The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century. Yet, in many ways, this fight resembles the struggle against communism in the last century. Like the ideology of communism, Islamic radicalism is elitist, led by a self-appointed vanguard that presumes to speak for the Muslim masses. Bin Laden says his own role is to tell Muslims — and I quote — “what is good for them and what is not.” And what this man who grew up in wealth and privilege considers good for poor Muslims is that they become killers and suicide bombers. He assures them that this is the road to paradise — though he never offers to go along for the ride. (Laughter.)

Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy teaches that innocent individuals can be sacrificed to serve a political vision. And this explains their cold-blooded contempt for human life. We’ve seen it in the murders of Daniel Pearl, Nicholas Berg, and Margaret Hassan, and many, many others. In a courtroom in the Netherlands, the killer of Theo Van Gogh turned to the victim’s grieving mother and said, “I do not feel your pain because I believe you’re an infidel.” And in spite of this veneer of religious rhetoric, most of the victims claimed by the militants are fellow Muslims.

When 25 Iraqi children are killed in a bombing, or Iraqi teachers are executed at their school, or hospital workers are killed caring for the wounded, this is murder, pure and simple — the total rejection of justice and honor and morality and religion. These militants are not just enemies of America or enemies of Iraq, they are the enemies of Islam and enemies of humanity. (Applause.)

We have seen this kind of shameless cruelty before — in the heartless zealotry that led to the gulags, the Cultural Revolution, and the killing fields. Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy pursues totalitarian aims. Its leaders pretend to be an aggrieved party, representing the powerless against imperial enemies. In truth, they have endless ambitions of imperial domination; they wish to make everyone powerless, except themselves. Under their rule, they have banned books and desecrated historical monuments and brutalized women. They seek to end dissent in every form, to control every aspect of life, and to rule the soul, itself. While promising a future of justice and holiness, the terrorists are preparing a future of oppression and misery.

Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy is dismissive of free peoples, claiming that men and women who live in liberty are weak and decadent. Zarqawi has said that Americans are, “the most cowardly of God’s creatures.” But let us be clear: It is cowardice that seeks to kill children and the elderly with car bombs. It’s cowardice that cuts the throat of a bound captive. It is cowardice that targets worshipers leaving a mosque. It is courage that liberated more than 50 million people; it is courage that keeps an untiring vigil against the enemies of a rising democracy. It is courage in the cause of freedom that will once again destroy the enemies of freedom. (Applause.)

And Islamic radicalism, like the ideology of communism, contains inherent contradictions that doom it to failure. By fearing freedom — by distrusting human creativity and punishing change, and limiting the contributions of half the population — this ideology undermines the very qualities that make human progress possible, and human societies successful. The only thing modern about the militants’ vision is the weapons they want to use against us. The rest of their grim vision is defined by a warped image of the past — a declaration of war on the idea of progress, itself. And whatever lies ahead in the war against this ideology, the outcome is not in doubt: Those who despise freedom and progress have condemned themselves to isolation, decline and collapse. Because free peoples believe in the future, free peoples will own the future. [...]

The fifth element of our strategy in the war on terror is to deny the militants of future recruits by replacing hatred and resentment with democracy and hope across the broader Middle East. This is difficult, and it’s a long-term project; yet there’s no alternative to it. Our future and the future of that region are linked. If the broader Middle East is left to grow in bitterness, if countries remain in misery, while radicals stir the resentments of millions, then that part of the world will be a source of endless conflict and mounting danger — in our own generation and in the next. If the peoples of that region are permitted to choose their own destiny, and advance by their own energy and participation as free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized, and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow, and eventually end. By standing for the hope and freedom of others, we make our own freedom more secure.

America is making this stand in practical ways. We are encouraging our friends in the Middle East, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to take the path of reform, to strengthen their own societies in the fight against terror by respecting the rights and choices of their own people. We’re standing with dissidents and exiles against oppressive regimes, because we know that the dissidents of today will be the democratic leaders of tomorrow. We’re making our case through public diplomacy, stating clearly and confidently our belief in self-determination, and the rule of law, and religious freedom, and equal rights for women — beliefs that are right and true in every land, and in every culture. (Applause.)

And as we do our part to confront radicalism, we know that the most vital work will be done within the Islamic world, itself. And this work has begun. Many Muslim scholars have publicly condemned terrorism, often citing Chapter 5, Verse 32 of the Koran, which states that killing an innocent human being is the killing of all humanity — is like killing all humanity, and saving the life of one person is like saving all of humanity.

After the attacks in London on July the 7th, an imam in the UAE declared, “Whoever does such a thing is not a Muslim, nor a religious person.” The time has come for all responsible Islamic leaders to join in denouncing an ideology that exploits Islam for political ends, and defiles a noble faith.

Many people of the Muslim faith are proving their commitment at great personal risk. Everywhere we have engaged the fight against extremism, Muslim allies have stood up and joined the fight, becoming partners in a vital cause. Afghan troops are in combat against Taliban remnants. Iraqi soldiers are sacrificing to defeat the al Qaeda in their own country. These brave citizens know the stakes: the survival of their own liberty, the future of their own region, the justice and humanity of their own tradition — and we are proud to stand beside them. (Applause.)

With the rise of a deadly enemy and the unfolding of a global ideological struggle, our time in history will be remembered for new challenges and unprecedented dangers. And yet the fight we’ve joined is also the current expression of an ancient struggle — between those who put their faith in dictators, and those who put their faith in the people. Throughout history, tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that murder is justified to serve their grand vision — and they end up alienating decent people across the globe. Tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that regimented societies are strong and pure — until those societies collapse in corruption and decay. Tyrants and would-be tyrants have always claimed that free men and women are weak and decadent — until the day that free men and women defeat them.

We don’t know the course of — our own struggle will take, or the sacrifices that might lie ahead. We do know, however, that the defense of freedom is worth our sacrifice. We do know that the love of freedom is the mightiest force of history. We do know the strength and character that our troops and military families bring to the fight. And we do know that the cause of freedom will once again prevail. (Applause.)

These are historic times. It’s a vital time for our nation and the world. And I want to thank you for your courage and thank you for your sacrifice. May God bless your loved ones. May God bless you, and may God continue to bless our country.

1 Comment | DEMOCRATIC LEGITIMACY, GEORGE W. BUSH, ISLAMIC REFORMATION | Permalink
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YOU CAN'T BE SAWING OFF YOUR OWN LIMBS:

October 25, 2005

Lost in the Woods (LAWRENCE HERMAN and GARY HUFBAUER, 10/25/05, NY Times)

AS Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continues her talks in Ottawa today, she may find that the most acrimonious disagreement between Canada and the United States is not a question of hard power – issues like Afghanistan, Iraq and nuclear nonproliferation – but of softwood. A quarter-century-old dispute over Canadian lumber exports, which Washington claims are unfairly subsidized, has escalated to the point where it now threatens broader relations between the two countries.

If it remains unresolved, the softwood war might also spill over into the December ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization, where Washington and Ottawa have long worked together to expand free trade. What kind of example does it set for the rest of the world if the United States and Canada – close neighbors, each other’s largest trading partner and crucial allies – cannot resolve their own trade disputes?

American and Canadian lawyers, lobbyists and negotiators have been fighting on and off over Canadian lumber exports to the United States since the 1980′s. In 1982, a coalition of 250 American lumber mills claimed that Canadian provinces were subsidizing lumber exports by charging set “stumpage fees” – the price forest companies paid when harvesting standing timber – while American mills were paying open market prices. While the fight over things like stumpage fees is complex enough, it got a sharp twist in 2000 when Congress passed an amendment giving American companies injured by foreign trade the punitive duties imposed by the United States, which in the case of Canadian lumber exports now amount to about $5 billion.

Never mind that the right of the United States to impose such duties is in dispute…

Even if the trade dispute is moronic and the duties foolish, we can’t cede our right to act in our own perceived national self-interest.

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IT ALL COMES DOWN TO WHETHER YOU FIND THE 60s AND 70s AN ACCEPTABLE PRICE TO PAY (via Kevin Whited):

October 24, 2005

The Neocon Who Isn’t: Francis Fukuyama has all the “right” credentials. So when he opposed the Iraq War and voted for John Kerry, eyebrows were raised. They’re still rising. (Robert S. Boynton, 10.05.05, American Prospect)

On a Saturday in January 2003, as the Iraq War approached, the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment convened a meeting in a nondescript building in Arlington, Virginia, with three dozen of Washington’s top conservative policy intellectuals. Using an information-gathering technique dating back to the Eisenhower administration, the office asked four groups to study the long-term threat the United States faced from international terrorism and to report back to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.

One of the groups was led by Francis Fukuyama, a professor at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), best known as the author of The End of History and the Last Man, the international bestseller that led British political philosopher John Gray to dub Fukuyama “[the] court philosopher of global capitalism.” The relationship between Fukuyama and Wolfowitz went back 35 years, to when Fukuyama was a Cornell undergraduate and Wolfowitz, then a Yale political-science professor, was a board member of the Telluride Association, the elite group house where Fukuyama lived. Fukuyama interned for Wolfowitz while a graduate student in the mid-1970s at the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and later followed his mentor to the State Department during the first Reagan administration. When Wolfowitz became dean of the SAIS, he recruited Fukuyama from George Mason.

When Fukuyama received the Pentagon’s call, he immersed himself in subjects — the politics of the Middle East, Islam, terrorism — he hadn’t thought about since he’d worked with Dennis Ross on the Palestinian autonomy talks that followed the Camp David accords.

Fukuyama had spent much of the previous summer in Europe promoting Our Posthuman Future, his most recent book at the time, and his encounters with editorial boards throughout the continent left an impression on him. “That was the point at which I started to think about the whole issue of American hegemony,” he says. “Until then I had accepted the neoconservative line, which is, ‘OK, we’re hegemons, but we’re benevolent hegemons.’ But when I was in Europe, the reality of what non-Americans thought hit me more forcefully than it had before. Even the editor of the Financial Times, which is a pretty conservative paper, was absolutely livid about the way the Bush administration was dealing with the U.K. and Europe.”

Fukuyama’s team prepared furiously for three months, and, of the presentations made that January day by the four groups, Fukuyama’s was the only one Wolfowitz attended. This was precisely the time when preparations to invade Iraq were in full swing. The news Fukuyama delivered was most likely not what Wolfowitz wanted to hear.

The group’s recommendations — which have never been mentioned publicly, much less released — were a photographic negative of the path the Bush administration followed. The United States, the group advised, should avoid overreacting to the events of September 11, and particularly resist military incursions that would “lead to a world in which the U.S. and its policies remain the chief focus of global concern,” as Fukuyama put it in The Washington Post on the first anniversary of the attacks. The group reasoned that although military action was a necessary component of the American response, it should be of secondary concern to a “hearts and minds” campaign directed at the vast majority of the Islamic world that generally admires America.

It was an analysis that departed from the “clash of civilizations” scenarios that Fukuyama’s friend and former teacher Samuel Huntington predicted some years earlier. In contrast, Fukuyama’s group portrayed the conflict between democratic capitalism and Islamic fundamentalism as so lopsided that Huntington’s formulation overstated the strength of America’s foe. “Neither Arab nationalists nor Islamic fundamentalists, or any other alternatives in that part of the world, present a really serious route to modernization,” he told the London Independent in April 2003.

Given this radical inequality, Fukuyama has argued in subsequent writings (which reflect the ideas that appeared in his group’s report) that the United States should avoid inflammatory rhetoric such as the “war on terror.” In contrast, Fukuyama argued that while Islamic terrorists are dangerous, they don’t resemble anything close to the threat once posed by communism or fascism. [...]

The most divisive aspect of Fukuyama’s argument has been his claim that Islamic terrorism is not an existential threat to the United States. It is a theme that he says has been influenced by the French scholars Gilles Kepel (The War for Muslim Minds) and Olivier Roy (The Failure of Political Islam), who argue that political Islam has demonstrated itself to be a failure everywhere it has taken power, and that the Islamic terrorist movement had been largely a failure prior to 9-11. Those attacks, as well as the Iraq War, gave it a new lease on life.

The seeds of these ideas, however, are buried deep in Fukuyama’s own work. In his original 1989 National Interest article, “The End of History?”, he singled out Islam as the only viable theocratic alternative to liberalism and communism, although one he doubted would have “any universal significance.” In the preface to Our Posthuman Future, he dismissed the threat of Islamic radicalism as “a desperate rearguard action that will in time be overwhelmed by the broader tide of modernization.”

Critics have faulted Fukuyama for clinging to his end-of-history thesis, accusing him of systematically underestimating events that challenged it, whether it was Yugoslav nationalism in the ’90s or Islamic radicalism today. “Fukuyama’s an optimist, which blinds him to a lot,” says Paul Berman, the author of Liberalism and Terror. (Reviewing “The End of History” in The New York Review of Books, Alan Ryan dubbed Fukuyama “the conservative’s Dr. Pangloss.” “If what we’ve got is what History with a capital H intends for us,” he wrote, “then we, too, live in the best of all possible worlds.”.

Krauthammer argues that it’s Fukuyama’s secular sensibility that blinds him to the appeal of radical Islam. “It has 1 billion potential adherents, which means that [Osama] bin Laden’s ideology has the potential to appeal to infinitely more people than the Aryan ideas of Nazism ever did,” he told me. “Frank has a stake in denying the obvious nature of the threat, but the fact is that history returned after 9-11 … . There are people running around trying to acquire anthrax with which to wipe out an entire city. If that doesn’t qualify as an existential threat, I don’t know what does.”

Fukuyama replies that these are the kinds of sentiments America should resist. “For the U.S. to treat every Muslim as a potential suicide bomber is precisely what fanatics like bin Laden want,” he says. “Iraq before the U.S. invasion was certainly not an existential threat. It posed an existential threat to Kuwait, Iran, and Israel, but it had no means of threatening the continuity of our regime. Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups aspire to be existential threats to American civilization but do not currently have anything like the capacity to actualize their vision. They are extremely dangerous totalitarians, but post threats primarily to regimes in the Middle East.”

Korb agrees. “The bombing in London was terrible, but it wasn’t like the Blitz,” he says. “Terrorists can make life unpleasant, but bin Laden isn’t going to end up running Great Britain, while Hitler very well might have.”

The difference between Fukuyama and his critics is as much philosophical as empirical. Whereas Krauthammer and Berman emphasize Islamic terrorism’s potential for imminent violence, Fukuyama takes the long view, reasoning that political Islam won’t win the larger ideological war regardless of how much damage it inflicts.

It is, of course, precisely the secular sensibbility of neoconservatism generally that has sent Mr. Krauthammer spinning out of control on the Miers nomination and that makes it rather unlikely that neocons will remain in the Republican Party for any considerable period of time. However, it is Mr. Fukuyama who is right about the appeal of and the threat presented by Islamicism, neither of which is terribly great. The most amusing aspect of the whoile dustup though is that while the intellectual class argues amonst itself about such minutiae, the President has gone about happily using the pretext of Islamicism to break apart the ossified dictatorships of the Islamic world and get them all–almost without exception–moving down the path of democratic reform.

It’s interesting that Mr. Fukuyama quite consciously modeled himself after George Kennan, even down to signing his original End of History piece with the pseudonym, X. Over time, Kennan became disenchanted with the results of folk embracing his theory of containment because they opted for an overactive type of containment–fighting wars and propping up rotten regimes and so forth every time a communist bulge appeared in the encirclement. He understood that communism couldn’t possibly succeed in the long term and wanted to just passively wait it out. By the time we’d made a hash of Vietnam and were being governed by craven souls like Nixon, Kissinger, Ford and Carter it looked like we might just settle down to exactly that original plan. But along came Ronald Reagan, who found the Cold War intolerable, and by the time he was finished knocking over the china even the Soviet apparatchiks knew it was over.

Mr. Fukuyama partakes of Kennan’s wisdom–we could indeed just wait out Islamicism and authoritarianism in the Islamic world–but he got stuck with his own personal Reagan right at jump street. George W. Bush seized 9-11 as a way of avoiding another 50 year war and an excuse for hastening the inevitable End. He’s bulling his way through the Middle East: toppling regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq by force and in Palestine and Lebanon by rhetorical force; undermining regimes like Syria’s; and radically altering behavior and the pace of reform in places like Libya, Pakistan, etc.. In effect, given the opportunity to replay the Cold War, Mr. Fukuyama would, but George Bush decided not to.

Comments Off | END OF HISTORY, FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, ISLAMIC REFORMATION | Permalink
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DON'T THEY DESERVE THEIR CEAUSESCU MOMENT?:

October 24, 2005

From Saddam’s Trial to Syrian Suicide: Accountability comes to the Arab World (Mona Eltahawy, 20/10/2005, Asharq Alawsat)

Are we seeing the start of an Arab Autumn?

On Oct. 18 former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein takes the stand on charges of premeditated murder, torture and forced expulsion and disappearances when he goes on trial for a 1982 massacre of Shiites. A week later, the U.N. investigator’s report into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri is due before the Security Council.

The sight of Iraqis and Palestinians voting earlier this year and of the Lebanese who turned out in their thousands to protest Hariri’s assassination was called an Arab Spring for spurring talk of change in the Arab world.

With Saddam Hussein standing before prosecutors and the names of the rich and the powerful of Syria and Lebanon on the pages of the Mehlis report, October could be the start of an Arab Autumn, in which we shed the old and prepare for the new.

Accountability is a rare commodity in the Arab world. We are so unused to seeing officials held accountable that the sight of Saddam answering charges may prove cathartic for people across the entire Arab world, not just in Iraq.

I can almost guarantee there will be calls for a fair trial from countries where such a thing is a luxury. And for those who insist on complaining about the “humiliation” enacted upon Saddam, that is exactly the point.

“This is the least which can be done to settle all the pain he and his regime have caused an entire nation,” lamented an Iraqi friend whose family fled Saddam’s Iraq when he was a child. “Imagine – all the resources both human and natural – all were used for him and his family’s own pleasure.

“I’m against the death penalty but I’m willing to make an exception in this case,” he said. “I hope his trial, conviction and hanging will be in public. Just to remind other dictators and blood thirsty tyrants of the awful end they might face. [...]

Autumn is the season when gardeners plant the seeds for spring. Accountability is the seed we’re planting this autumn in the Arab world. Let’s hope it bears fresh and vibrant blossoms.

And Saddam and Assad can fertilize the soil.

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ALBERT'S WEB:

October 23, 2005

Web of the Free (MARK A. SHIFFRIN and AVI SILBERSCHATZ, 10/23/05, NY Times)

American values caused the Internet to emerge and evolve as a medium of freedom. While there is a standard of transcendent decency that can and should regulate Internet communication in such matters as child pornography, there are standards of national self-interest that vary from country to country. China sees the Internet as part of its internal infrastructure and seeks to govern it as such, monitoring and censoring communications that include words like “liberty,” “Tiananmen Square” or “Falun Gong,” and going after dissidents who use the Internet.

Internationalizing control of a medium now regulated with a loose hand by a nation committed to maximizing freedom would inevitably create more of an opening for countries like China – a strong proponent of imposing some international supervision of Icann – to exert more pressure on internet service providers. More broadly, international regulation could enable like-minded governments to work in concert to deem certain thoughts impermissible online. It is all too possible that minority political or religious expressions would be widely repressed under a doctrine of the greater good imposed by a collective of governments claiming to know what’s best, limiting what may be expressed online to whatever, say, the United Nations General Assembly, the European Union, or the Arab League, might deem reasonable.

Any society may, of course, choose to create its own balkanized domestic version of the Internet, an Intranet within its borders that it regulates as it pleases. It could then still do within its borders many of the things done by the Internet, like Brazil’s online tax collection system, but would not enjoy the online privilege of worldwide interaction.

The Internet is an attractive commercial infrastructure for all societies, even oppressive ones. But the string attached to its creation by America is that it must be used within a context of freedom, both economic and political. That is a democratic value that we should not be shy about exporting. Accepting that commitment to online freedom should be the price that foreign governments must pay for the blessing of the Internet in their national economic lives.

America must be the spider, not just one of the flies.

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YEAH, THAT'LL WORK:

October 23, 2005

The New Puritans (EURSOC Two, 21 October, 2005)

France scored a minor cultural victory against the United States yesterday when the UN’s cultural arm UNESCO voted overwhelmingly to support a Paris-backed convention protecting national cultural practices.

The convention, which was backed by 148 of the 154 governments present yesterday, allows nations to exclude cultural goods and services from competition. It adds that access to culture from a variety of nations is a “fundamental right” and that only the implementation of “true national cultural policies” can allow cultural production to take place in every country, thus making cultural diversity possible.

In short, UNESCO agreed to the nationalisation of culture. Only the US and Israel voted against the convention, though four others abstained. Britain supported the French position, with the UK’s ambassador Timothy Craddock claiming that the convention was “clear, carefully balanced, and consistent with the principles of international law and fundamental human rights.”

Fair enough: Few would disagree that the people of say, Iran, North Korea – or even China – should be allowed to enjoy the diversity of cultures outside their national boundaries. However, to argue that enthusiasm for the convention was based solely on the wish to extend the cultural horizons of the citizens of these benighted countries is disingenous.

In fact, many treaty supporters will use the convention as an excuse to exclude foreign influence in the name of protecting national culture. The so-called fundamental right to diversity could be satisfied by inviting approved theatre tours from friendly states. Or – just imagine – the Havana Festival of Chinese, North Korean and Venezuelan Cinema.

France’s obvious delight at the convention’s success – it sees it as a “manifesto for alternative globalisation” – sits uneasily with its usual tolerance of closed regimes.

There may be indeed be nobler aims in the treaty, but Britain (and every other country on the board) knew exactly what they were signing up to: Yet another transnational slap in the face for Washington.

Because, let’s face it, which culture do most of these elites imagine that their citizens are most under threat from?

Unless they ban books, movies, TV and the Internet how do they avoid contiunuing Americanization?

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STABILITY SUCKS TOO:

October 22, 2005

Bringing democracy to Syria and Iran (Daily Telegraph, 22/10/2005)

Not all the arguments against invading Iraq were couched in idealistic terms. Many hard-bitten Foreign Office types argued that the intervention would “destabilise” the region. They now look vindicated. Precisely as the cynical Arabists predicted, neighbouring states have been “sucked in”. America blames Syria for allowing insurgents to cross its border, while Iran stands accused of arming the Shia militia who have been harrying British forces in Basra.

Then again, stability isn’t everything. The point about “sucking in” is that it works both ways. Some 300,000 Iraqis live in Syria, and perhaps 150,000 in Iran. For the second time in less than a year, the peoples of those two unhappy autocracies have had to watch the Iraqis who live among them queueing up to vote – a sight no doubt destabilising for the dictators, but stimulating for everybody else.

We have just been reminded of quite how beastly the Damascus and Teheran regimes are. Syria has been indicted for its murder of the popular Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, while Iran, as The Sunday Telegraph has revealed, is receiving clandestine shipments of missile technology from North Korea.

That is the problem with dictatorships: their domestic stability, so valued by FCO mandarins, is bought at the expense of international aggression. To borrow a metaphor from chaos theory, they drink order from their surroundings. They may be immobilist at home, but they are revolutionary abroad.

Stability will only be appropriate after the Kingdom of Heaven is established–we needn’t hold our breath.

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Posted by orrinj

TEXTBOOK ILLUSTRATION:

October 21, 2005

Pollster talks of priority shift among Palestinians (Daily Star, October 21, 2005)

Khalil Shikaki, director of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, says there has been a profound shift in the attitudes of Palestinians since the Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in August. Shikaki, whose organization is the leading public opinion group in the Palestinian Authority, says that prior to the Gaza withdrawal, Palestinians overwhelmingly gave the “end to the occupation” as their top priority.

Now, he says, the priority is for an improvement in the economic life in the Palestinian areas, with an end to political corruption and an end to the occupation falling far behind. “For the first time, after the Gaza disengagement, we have economics coming on top … And the second one is in fact a virtual tie between fighting corruption and fighting occupation. The gap between the first, which is improving economic conditions and the second which is corruption and ending occupation is wide. It’s 15 percent.” Ironically, he says, the Palestinians now are strongly in support of a permanent cease-fire, even though most of them believe the Gaza pullout was due to the Palestinian use of force.

Which is exactly what Natan Sharansky, George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon said would happen.

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NOW HE TELLS THEM?:

October 21, 2005

Schroder warns against too much EU interference (Honor Mahony, 10/21/05, EUOBSERVER)

Outgoing German chancellor Gerhard Schroder has taken a parting shot at the EU warning that it should not interfere too much in member states’ business.

Writing in the weekly newspaper, Die Zeit, the chancellor said that citizens were annoyed that the EU was not effective where they wanted it to be, such as in foreign policy, and overbearing in some areas where it was not wanted.

Mr Schroder accused the European Commission and the bloc’s highest court of contributing to the “creeping impression” that they are “using common market principles to justify European regulations for which there is no need”.

“Nothing infuriates citizens more than the suspicion of a creeping loss of sovereignty,” he wrote.

He also warned that the over extension of EU powers put the member states’ “intact statehood” into question.

So what’s wrong with the EU is the idea of union.

Comments Off | EUROPEAN UNION | Permalink
Posted by orrinj

CZECH, PLEASE:

October 21, 2005

EU criticism has become fashionable, Czech leader says (Lisbeth Kirk, 10/21/05, EUOBSERVER)

The 64-year old [Czech conservative president, Vaclav Klaus, ] has had a busy schedule combining over the last few days with a speech at the Global Forum conference in Gothenburg, followed later by reception with the Swedish Royals before he headed to London to congratulate former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher on her 80th birthday.

Lady Thatcher and Vaclav Klaus are politically very close allies. He, more than anyone else in continental Europe, has been keeping alight her conservative ideals of freedom, liberalism, democracy and euroscepticism.

Five months have passed since one of their mutual bugbear, the EU integration ship ran aground following the rejection of constitution by French and Dutch voters.

Since then the EU has deemed itself to be having a ‘period of reflection’ which Mr Klaus believes is not enough.

“The pause for reflection is a pause for inertia. We should do something”, he demands adding “Time will not wait and the opportunity we have now will not repeat itself any time soon”.

“The EU needs a change. To be satisfied with recognition of the status quo and with an eventual slowing down in further unification, is not sufficient”, he says.

The Czech politician calls for a revision of the whole EU project even if it goes against some powerful vested interests.

Arguing that “the State of Europe” should be forgotten he says that a “higher European-wide democracy is an illusion”.

Mr Klaus also rejects the notion of variable geometry – the idea that different countries can integrate at different speeds and to a different extent.

“We should try to create something like an Organization of European States (OES), whose members will be individual European states rather than the citizens of these states directly, as suggested by the European constitution”, Mr Klaus suggests.

He argues that such a construction would be different to the Council of Europe – the group of states keeping an eye on democracy in Europe.

“[This] is a different institution, created to help fighting non-democracy”, says Mr Klaus.

“We should not Europeanise issues but fight for the preservation of basic civil, political and economic liberties …. The alternative is a non-state, post-democracy and administered society.”

The young Czech Republic has already produced more great leaders just named Vaclav than the French Republic has produced even mediocre leaders ever.

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Posted by orrinj

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