The Cult of the Simpletons

"Like the rest of biological evolution, the human mind is a collage of adaptations (the propensity to do the right thing) to different situations. Our thought is a pack of fixed routines — simpletons. We need them. It is vital to find the right food at the right time, to mate well, to generate children, to avoid marauders, to respond to emergency quickly....

The mind evolved great breadth, but it is shallow, for it performs quick and dirty sketches of the world. This rough-and-ready perception of reality enabled our ancestors to survive better. The mind did not evolve to know the world or to know ourselves. Simply speaking, there has never been, nor will there ever be, enough time to be truly rational."

Taking this description -- simpletons -- as a metaphor, it may be possible to apply it to another human tendency, the construction of religious or philosophical ideas by purely metaphysical means. In other words, the development of ideological points of view in a void, separate from empirical input, sans scientific method. The idea that one can divine truth by logical thinking, without going through the rigorous exercise of starting with empirical observations and inductive thinking, before reaching a conclusion about the nature of reality. The absence of such an approach in attempts to develop knowledge about the real world -- particularly when it comes to political philosophy -- is the essence of ideology.

To many, the post-Soviet period is known as a non-ideological era, in which ideas based on fantasies of the past (Nazism and Fascism) or those based on fantasies of the future (Communism) no longer apply. As the world succombs increasingly to scientific knowledge and the scientific method, ideology -- especially political ideology -- becomes a thing of the past.

But does it?

David Brin's article, Neoconservatism, Islam and Ideology:The Real Culture War (from which the above citations are taken), casts doubts on this premise,using the American conservative movement as an example.

Traditional American conservatives must come to grips with what has happened to their movement. While old-style libertarians like William F. Buckley and Gingrich-era combatants such as Pat Buchanan and John McCain blink in astonishment, even dismay, the very definition of "conservative" has been shattered and the word taken over by a new brand of neoconservatism that has proved fundamentally different, though fantastically effective (so far) at seizing power in the world's greatest democracy.

What commonalities could I possibly see between Islamic fundamentalism and today's American neoconservative movement?

The author starts by pointing out how Straussian neocons have neatly sidestepped the values of The Englightenment, opting for Plato's "noble lies" instead of the Enlightenment value of accountability. More to the point, however, Mr. Brin argues that the character of neoconservative ideas bears an uncanny resemblance to those of religious fanatics.

What appears stunning to me is how few have pointed out the deep commonalities between American neoconservatism, Islamic fundamentalism, and every other prescriptive dogma that wracked and afflicted the Twentieth Century. The one common theme uniting all of these ideology-based systems is a burning contempt for the secular, pragmatic, accountable and tolerant legacy of the Enlightenment. Especially its promotion of skepticism toward the subjective, self important mind games that allow each of us to play tricks upon ourselves.

Anyone not on the fringes of neoconservative politics has been pointing this out from the first day that Bush took office. Brin, however, does not stop there.

There is a cultural war going on, all right. Not between East and West. Or between North and South. Or Islam vs. Christianity. Nor is it based on that ridiculous political metaphor and curse bequeathed to us by the French -- left versus right. Not even faith vs. humanism. All are distractions.

What Dr. Brin has in mind goes right to the political core of America -- and perhaps most of the free world. His thesis is both surprising and predictable.

The struggle is between panic and confidence. Between those -- both left and right --who preach that we must enslave our minds to simple doctrines, and those who know that free people can argue, learning from each other, using all of the tools at hand to raise a generation of human beings who are smarter and better than we are.

The full text of Dr. Brin's article can be found here.



Tags: neoconservatism; ideology; straussian; politics; Bush

Send in the Clowns

The Dutch political circus has breathed new life into a nearly forgotten Mark Twain cliché: get your facts straight before you distort them.

When immigration minister Rita Verdonk announced last May that Aryan Hirshi Ali, the fiery, Sommalian-born anti-Islam member of Dutch Parliament, had lied to immigration authorities in order to obtain Dutch citizenship, it was not quite the shot heard ‘round the world. But, as it turned out, it was the latest in a series of circus acts performed by the current Dutch government.

Back in 2002 the first Balkenende cabinet had allied themselves with the rightwing LPF party (the party originally founded by Pim Fortuyn before his assassination). That government only lasted three months, basically due to in-fighting among LPF ministers. A coalition party, the VVD, pulled the plug on this cabinet and new elections were called. The result of these elections was the second Balkenende cabinet, this time with three coalition partners, Balkenende’s Christian Democrats, the center-right VVD and the center-left D66.

The legacy of the first Balkenende cabinet was the adoption of LPF’s immigration, anti-Islamic policies. This legacy and these policies formed the basis for the second Balkenende cabinet and Minister Verdonk’s role in the Hirshi Ali affair.

Controversy is nothing new for Rita Verdonk. A shoot-from-the-hip, supposedly “true-blue” politician, Verdonk’s hard-line immigration policies have led her to clash time and again with opposition parties in Parliament.

The timeline:

In March 2005, in response to claims by asylum seekers in a Dutch television program, the minister releases information about some of these persons to the public, something unheard of under Dutch privacy laws. The Dutch Labor Party and the Socialist Party submit a motion of no-confidence in Verdonk, but a government majority backs the immigration minister.

December 2005: Verdonk apologizes to Dutch Parliament about her handling of a group of Congolese refugees. Although they claimed that, if returned to the Congo, their lives would be in danger, the minister assured everyone concerned that no one in the Congo would know that they had applied for asylum in the Netherlands. As it turned out, however, their status was clearly shown on the traveling papers they needed to return to their country. Verdonk claims that this had been done without her knowledge. Under fire from her own coalition, she finally accepts responsibility for the blunder and formally apologizes. The motion to send her back to private life is defeated.

In April 2006, opposition parties in Dutch Parliament demand that Rita Verdonk resign because of another immigration blunder that came to light. Having decided to return a group of Syrian refugees to their country of origin (Syria), she failed to inform the Parliament of the fact that Syrian intelligence agents were present at the discussions. No one knows what happened to the refugees, but Verdonk fires two of her top civil servants in the immigration service and stays in her post.

Also in April 2006, Verdonk announces that she plans to deport Iranian asylum seekers and send them back to Iran. Since these refugees are both homosexuals and Christians, their chances of leading a normal life, or even surviving this one, in Iran are exceedingly slim. Not long before, the Iranian authorities had hung two homosexuals in a public square. This time a majority in Parliament draws the line. Unconvinced that these refugees could be returned to Iran without fearing for their lives, Parliament prevails and Rita Verdonk reverses her decision.

Still in April 2006, a busy month for Rita Verdonk, a fire in a cell complex at Schiphol Airport causes the death of 11 detainees. The investigating committee claims that Verdonk had released or promised to release six witnesses to the incident, presumably because she does not want them to testify. The person in charge of the investigating committee is Peter Van Vollenhoven, a member of the Dutch royal family. Behind closed doors, Mr. Van Vollenhoven changes his mind and refuses to file a complaint. Verdonk, a political Houdini of sorts, escapes once again.

Then there is the case of an 18-year-old schoolgirl who was in her last year of school at a Dutch high school and wanted to stay in the Netherlands long enough to graduate. Can’t do, Minister Verdonk concluds, because the girl had already been sent packing months before and had re-entered the country under false pretenses. Off with head! Not literally, of course, but Verdonk takes her side of the story to a Dutch newspaper. In doing so, she again releases private information from the schoolgirl’s dossier. A Dutch court rules that the girl should be returned to her country of origin. After surviving countless questions in Parliament, Verdonk -- sometimes called Iron Rita after Lady Thatcher -- is free to continue her series of blunders in Dutch politics.

The biggest blunder so far comes in May 2006 when, after hearing Aryan Hirshi Ali claim that she had lied to obtain her Dutch nationality, the minister announces that Ms. Ali is not a Dutch citizen and ergo has no right to be a Member of Parliament, following which Hirshi Ali resigns from her elected post. Needless to say, the Dutch Parliament once again entertains a motion of no-confidence in Rita Verdonk for her handling of the matter, particularly in a case that involves a Member of Parliament. The motion fails, a compromised is reached and Ms. Verdonk agrees to study the situation to see whether it would be legally possible for Hirshi Ali to keep her Dutch citizenship after all.

Six weeks after Verdonk says that Hirshi Ali lied about her name and date of birth and therefore was no longer a Dutch citizen, she informs the Parliament that Ali did not lie about her name and that she could keep her Dutch passport. According to Verdonk, Sommalian Law [sic] allowed their citizens to use other names handed down in family lines. In this case, “Ali” was such a name. So, problem solved. Somalian Law is substituted for Dutch Law and the name "Ali" is legal after all. Not sure what happened to the date of birth (Ali claimed that she was two years older than she was). But never mind. All she has to do now is to sign a simple statement of fact, along with a confession of guilt and a pledge of alliegance to Rita Verdonk, absolving the minister from any responsibility whatsoever, including -- presumably -- any mistakes or blunders she might make in future cabinets, her career in general or her private life in particular. Well, not quite.

Typically, during the long Parliamentary debate that follows, Ms. Verdonk repeatedly says words to the effect that she did not do anything wrong in this matter and she did not make any mistakes. Later that same evening, however, she begrudgingly admits that she “may” have made some mistakes, particularly by not doing the research in the first place when she announced that Ali was not entitled to Dutch citizenship.

When the Green Party introduces yet another motion of no-confidence in Verdonk, the government musters yet another majority to defeat it. At this point, Verdonk’s coalition partner, D66, announces that it has no confidence in the minister and that she would have to go if the coalition is to continue. Balkenende’s cabinet decides it would rather protect Verdonk than continue to work with D66 in the coalition.

Accordingly, the cabinet falls.

Update:

The clowns are back. The Balkenende Cabinet will continue for several months as a minority government, with limited decision-making powers. New elections will be held in November.








File under: Dutch, immigration, Verdonk, Balkenende, Hirshi Ali

Goodbye, Hirshi Ali

So, Hirshi Ali is leaving the Netherlands to join a right-wing think tank in America. She has been ushered out of the Netherlands by a series of events that do little credit to that country (the one in which I currently live). First, she received death threats from radical Muslim groups, which took on a measure of seriousness following the murder of Theo van Gogh. Secondly, she recently lost a court battle to stay in her secure flat in The Hague, because her neighbors were afraid the building was not safe with Hirshi Ali living there. And finally -- the icing on the cake --, her fellow Liberal Democrat, Minister of Immigration Rita Verdonk, decided that Ms Ali no longer had a right to Dutch citizenship.

Hirshi Ali, it seems, lied on her citizenship application about her real surname and her date of birth. This was enough, according to Ms Verdonk, to strip Ms Hirshi Ali of her Dutch citizenship. One wonders whether it would have made any difference to her citizenship application if Hirshi Ali had stated her real surname and her real date of birth. After all, she did not conceal a criminal past or try to persuade Dutch immigration authorities that she was something she wasn't. She simply concealed her family name (apparently) for fear of reprisals and her age (to enhance her attractiveness to the opposite sex, presumably). What she did not do was commit any offence, one might assume, to warrant loss of her Dutch passport.

Be that as it may, Hirshi Ali has resigned her seat in Parliament and will emmigrate to the USA to work for the American Enterprise Institute. This, in itself, may be sufficient punishment. Presumably, given her undeniably right-wing views in many areas, particularly with regard to immigration and Islam, she will not have to suffer the fate of those whose views do not coincide with the current right-wing government of the USA: Uncle Sam Does Not Want You!

Her political activities in Holland have ranged from co-authoring the scenario of a film with Theo van Gogh about Islamic oppression of women to a constant barrage of epithets targeted not at individual fanatics but at Islamic culture in general. That this is borderline racism, even U.S. bloggers do not admit. Many see Hirshi Ali as a heroine, not as a rabble-rouser. The Belgium Flemish Block (or Flemish Interest, as they're currently known)has adopted her cause to promote their own quasi-racist politics.

Even moderate Andrew Sullivan has been quoting sources that lead back to the Flemish Block via the Brussels Journal. It is unfortunate that Hirshi Ali's cause has been tainted by such openly racist groups. Unfortunately, her own approach to this issue has been muddled by inferences that Islam -- not individual believers -- is to blame for the horrors that many women endure in some Islamic cultures, particularly in the Middle East.

By targeting Islam and not individuals within Islam, Hirshi Ali moves close to the racist line. Like many, she seems to believe that anyone who accepts Islam as a religious belief must also accept the darker side of that religion -- much like accusing Christians in America of approving of the pronouncements of Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. After all, one might argue, aren't Chistian fanatics who attack and kill abortion doctors first and foremost "Christians" and only secondly "fanatical individuals"?

Suffice it so say that I disagree with Hirshi Ali's politics, her approach to the problem of certain medieval Islamic practices and her confrontational approach to an entire civilization -- one that does not generally practice the cruder aspects of Islam (just as most Christians no longer believe in slavery or the obligation to kill homosexuals).

I think she is wrong in many respects. But, in one respect at least, she is right. She should not be stripped of her citizenship and sent packing from the Netherlands on a technical detail. She has earned a reputation as a strident and passionate warrior for a cause in which she believes passionately.

To deny her right to live peaceably in the Netherlands and to promote her view of Islamic practices is to deny the very essence of civil rights. Ironically, the fault lies not with the Dutch, but with a right-wing minister who cannot see the forest for the trees.

File+UnderHirshi+Ali The+Netherlands; Freedom+of+Speech

Bolton: "I shrunk the coalition!"

Thanks to one poster’s concerns about the UN’s new Human Rights Council, it seemed appropriate to address them here rather than in the comments section. This National Review article sums up the conservative case against the new Council as follows.

The successor [i.e. new UN Human Rights Council] is worthy of the original — just as bad, and utterly undeserving of respect from anyone concerned about human rights. It's time for those who feel such concern, led by the U.S., to work together outside the U.N. system.

One has to wonder where such support would come from. Except for the United States, Israel and two tiny island states, virtually every nation on earth voted to approve the new UN Human Rights Council. According to this report, “The creation of the new Council was also hailed by virtually all human rights organizations.”

The National Review article also objects to the fact that the Council “puts liberal democracies side by side with genocidal despotisms as though they were equally legitimate.”

While this certainly has been true in the past, the whole idea of restructuring and creating a totally new Council was to tackle this very problem. The new Council has certain procedures to discourage the election of nations with serious human rights abuse records. These include pre-election vetting of candidate Council members, limited terms and removal from the Council by a two-thirds vote of the General Assembly for member countries that commit abuses.

Since the idea behind the new Council is to bring such abuses to light and focus attention on the countries in which they occur, the likelihood of abuses being committed by Council members should be less than would be the case if there were no formal umbrella organization dedicated to monitoring human rights. In cases where Council members do commit abuses, it will be easier to put pressure on them from within the Council and to get them to live up to their human rights commitments or face sanctions or pressures from global opinion. Arguably, although it is a slow, step-by-step process, it is better than no process and its chances of success are undeniably greater than simply ignoring the problem.

In my view, the new Council offers a proactive, constructive approach to dealing with human rights abuses. The benefits of having a good human rights record should outweigh the cost of continuing such abuses. If the Council imposes sanctions and exposes offending nations to world opinion without resorting to force, it will be a positive step in the right direction. The approach is rational, designed to discourage offending nations to stop such practices, to impose sanctions where necessary and to encourage economic benefits for countries that comply with Council policy.

The NR article, however, only sees the stick, not the carrot. “Even a laughably weak eligibility criterion — that any country under U.N. sanction for human-rights violations be barred from membership — self-destructed during the negotiations.”

The article goes on to propose setting up a non-UN human rights body comprised solely of liberal democracies. One has to wonder why, when every liberal democracy in the world (except the USA) approved and voted for the new UN Human Rights Council. As many on the left argue today, there is something very unrealistic in conservative foreign policy – and this seems to be the perfect example.

Surprisingly, the article then rejects its own advice to abandon the international ship. “While it would be foolish to expect the council to do much good, we still have a stake in blocking it from taking actions and codifying new rights fundamentally opposed to our interests.”

Hmmmm.

The problem with this particular conservative analysis, it seems to me, is that it is premised on America taking unilateral action, as in the case of Iraq. Apart from the obvious lack of success of the current administration's unilateral approach to geo-politics, it seems that Mr. Bolton’s presence at the UN has also helped to shrink the U.S.’s coalition of the willing from 30-some nations in Iraq to three in the General Assembly -- Israel and two islands in the Pacific.

Three cheers for Mr. Bolton!

Considering its lack of international legitimacy for the invasion of Iraq, its own not inconsiderable list of human rights abuses, including Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Bagram, imprisonment without trial, ghost prisoners, kidnappings, renditions, not to mention the latest allegations of civilian massacres in Iraq and virtual lack of support even among liberal democracies – the Bush administration and its apologists appear to have little credibility or political capital left beyond America's border.

There's a message for America in all this. One wonders if and when it will finally sink in.



File_Under: Human_Rights_Council; Human Rights Abuses; Bolton; Neo-Conservatism; Bush

Don't Tell the Kids!

There are many obscenities in the world you might not want your kids to know about just yet. War, genocide, starvation, human rights abuse, torture, forced prostitution and child pornography, not to mention terrorism and suicide bombers.

But here is something that everybody should know about. Stop the world, we want to get off!

United Nations - A running gag at the United Nations is that whenever the United States takes a defiant stand against an overwhelming majority of the 191 member states, there are only three countries that predictably vote with Washington most of the time - whether it is right or dead wrong.

As expected, this incongruous voting pattern was repeated Wednesday when the three loyal US allies - Israel and the two tiny Pacific Island nations of Palau and the Marshall Islands - were the only member states to stand in unison with the United States when it rejected a resolution calling for the creation of a new Human Rights Council.

The vote in the General Assembly was 170 in favor and four against (United States, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau), with three abstentions (Venezuela, Iran and Belarus).

And here is something that everybody already seems to know about. How to Lose Friends and Encourage Extremists

One of my proudest moments as an American working in Egypt always came at about this time of year, when the US State Department issued its annual report on the state of human rights around the world. I remember sitting in front of a computer in a Cairo living room a year before 9/11 while a group of young journalists, human rights activists, and academics downloaded the report from the Internet, eager to see what the world's most trusted authority on the rule of law had to say about their country and their region.

Their reaction was what made me grateful for having been born in the USA. Because they were bright, well-informed, and fiercely pro-democracy, they quibbled about how the report phrased a particular human rights abuse or why this or that infraction hadn't been given more or less emphasis.

But there was not the slightest doubt among them that this report spoke truth or that, of all the world's countries, only the United States of America had the performance record to speak with authority and credibility on this subject.

When this year's Human Rights report appeared last week, I e-mailed it to six of these old friends and asked them for their reactions "off the record."

They had a lot to say, but it all came down to this consensus: The United States had forfeited its right to report on abuses committed by others by committing its own, failing to correct them, and then holding no one in authority accountable. They said they would have expected this behavior in their own countries, but not in mine.
The keywords in their e-mails to me included Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Bagram, imprisonment without trial, ghost prisoners, kidnappings, renditions, unilateralism, bribing journalists, and Bush & Company and their whole Iraq adventure.

One of them wrote, "What kind of democracy is George Bush trying to spread anyway?"

This is something that Bush skeptics should know about. 500,000 reasons why the U.S. won’t invade Iran

And yes, there are signs of evolution.

The report puts greater stress on an approach administration officials call "effective diplomacy" - with the aim of encouraging "transformational democracy" - than it did in 2002.

"The administration we have today is not the administration that came into office," says Jon Wolfsthal, a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "It's no longer a [neoconservative] government, it's a realistic government."

The report's emphasis on Iran's nuclear ambitions reflects the administration's view of the new reality: that Iran sponsors terrorism, threatens Israel, is meddling in Iraq's nascent democracy, and represents a generally destabilizing force in the region. "We may face no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran," the report says, adding that diplomacy must succeed in order to avoid confrontation.

Bush appears to be extending an olive branch to countries that rejected the unilateralist approach of his first term. In addition, more than in the 2002 document, Bush speaks of global challenges beyond the military and security threats.

"Many of the problems we face - from the threat of pandemic disease, to proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, to terrorism, to human trafficking, to natural disasters - reach across borders," the introduction states. "Effective multinational efforts are essential to solve these problems."

By the way, where did all the Democrats go?

We have a President who likes to break things. He has broken the federal budget, running up $3 trillion in new debt. He has broken the Geneva Conventions, giving the green light to torture. He has repeatedly broken promises - and broken faith - with the American people. And now, worst of all, he has broken the law.

In brazen violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), he ordered the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless wiretaps of American citizens. And, despite getting caught red-handed, he refuses to stop.

Let's be clear: No American - and that must include the President - is above the law. And if we fail to hold Bush to account, then he will be confirmed in his conviction that he can pick and choose among the laws he wants to obey. This is profoundly dangerous to our democracy.

So it is time for Congress to stand up and say enough! That's why, this week, Senator Russ Feingold proposed a resolution to censure George W. Bush for breaking the FISA law. And that's why I fully support this resolution of censure.

And here's something you ought to explain to your kids. Brain dead or brain alive?

The law should be struck down because it imposes an unacceptable burden on women. But it should also serve as a warning that the threat to abortion rights has reached a new level.

South Dakota's abortion law is the most restrictive one adopted by any state since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. It does not contain exceptions for pregnancies that result from rape or from incest. Nor does it allow abortions that are necessary to preserve the health of the mother. The law is unlikely to go into force anytime soon. If it did, it would simply drive women - as in the pre-Roe days - to risk their lives to end their pregnancies with illegal back-alley abortions.

Gov. Mike Rounds, who signed the bill into law, said that the "true test of a civilization" was how it treated "the most vulnerable and helpless," including "unborn children." But his state has hardly been a leader in protecting vulnerable children who have left the womb. The nation's three worst counties for child poverty at the time of the last census were all in South Dakota, according to the Children's Defense Fund. Buffalo County, home to the Crow Creek Indian Reservation, was dead last.

The legal definition of human death is “brain dead” – i.e. when the encephalogram registers a flat signal. Until at least four months into the pregnancy, zygotes and fetuses do not have central nervous systems or brains. The Chiavo case shows just how far anti-scientific notions have pervaded some conservative lawmakers. The South Dakota abortion law confirms this anti-science stance.

Pixelated, No Less

US BROADCASTERS have been hit by record-breaking fines of almost $4 million (£2.5 million) by a federal TV standards watchdog which decrees that even casual use of the “s-word” or pixelated shots of a woman’s breasts “disturb the peace and quiet of the home”.

There are many obscenities in the world you might not want your kids to know about, but natural sex and profanity on TV or in movies is not one of them.

The Island of Blood Is.

You can tell your kids about man’s inhumanity to man. You can teach them the mechanics of reproduction and safe sex. You might even be able to persuade them that swearing is a sign of an impoverished vocabulary.

But, whatever you do, don’t tell them what humans do to baby seals.



"Tags: Kids, Human_Rights, Iran, Censure, Abortion, Sex, Baby_Seals

Poor Mr. Bush

Just when most of the world was lambasting our poor president with disdain and contempt, accusing him of everything from bumbling incompetence to sublime ignorance, the poor guy suffers yet another defeat in his democratization program for the Middle East. Iraq. The threat of civil war looms in a failed country, one that our beloved leaders not so long ago told us was full of people who would welcome American troops with open arms and bouquets of flowers, the way Europeans welcomed their liberators. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen. The Pandora’s Box that many predicted would result from America’s invasion of that country based on false intelligence – if one is to give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt, which in itself is a stretch for many – seems to be opening.

In any case, it is happening and because it's happening it simply adds to the mess the world is in – from Al Qaeda terrorists operating at will in Iraq to abuses of prisoners at Guantanimo to torture at Abu Graib and seemingly dozens of other detention centers in Afghanistan and, apparently, in “new” Europe. Not to mention the poor people of Iraq.

Meanwhile, the jobless recovery of the American economy continues sluggishly and the dollar still hovers below the euro. The poverty gap widens in America and around the world and poor Mr. Bush has to admit that the government even got things wrong in the aftermath of Katrina. It’s not a very pleasant picture, this state of the union – and not one that Mr. Bush cared to talk about in “his” state of the union message.

Tilting at those Middle East windmills is not helping the situation very much, Sir. The enemy is still on the loose, wanted dead or alive. The clash of civilizations is drawing closer by the day. American credibility is sinking faster than the dollar.

Let's face it, Mr. President, the state of the union sucks!

No wonder many returning vets are looking to the Democrats to save them.

Now running for office: an army of Iraq war vets. All but one of these 50 or so House hopefuls are in the Democratic Party.

So here we are three years later and what has the Bush adventure in the Middle East contributed to the world – peace, stability, increased admiration for American intervention in the affairs of others, generosity in the face of disaster, words of wisdom to those who have lost the way or serious progress against those who wish America harm?

The true believer screams, “Just wait. Things are bound to improve.” The realist answers, “The world is a much more dangerous place than it was after 9/11.”

But the question remains, why? Can we simply put it down to ignorance of the world or incompetence? Most people recognize that Bush is probably the most unsuitable leader the Free World has ever had. He has failed at everything he has tried so far, including the presidency. Apart from his own fantasies about having a direct line to God, everything he touches turns to stone. The man is the archetypical loser and everyone knows it.

If anyone doubts it, just look at his latest proposal – to let entrepreneurs from the Middle East run American ports! He has to be kidding! Free trade, he calls it! How about freeing the people of the UAE, especially the women, while we’re at it? What does Bush have to say about that – and why, by the way, is he willing to defy even his own supporters to push this issue to its conclusion in spite of heavy opposition on both sides of the aisle?

Here’s some information that might shed some light on this issue. Could it be that there is something more important to Mr. Bush than the security of the United States, consistency of principle and a belief in freedom, democracy and justice (something that the UAE cannot lay claim to under any circumstances)?

How much does "free" trade have to do with this? How about a lot. The Bush administration is in the middle of a two-year push to ink a corporate-backed "free" trade accord with the UAE. At the end of 2004, in fact, it was Bush Trade Representative Robert Zoellick who proudly boasted of his trip to the UAE to begin negotiating the trade accord. Rejecting this port security deal might have set back that trade pact. Accepting the port security deal - regardless of the security consequences - likely greases the wheels for the pact. That's probably why instead of backing off the deal, President Bush - supposedly Mr. Tough on National Secuirty - took the extraordinary step of threatening to use the first veto of his entire presidency to protect the UAE's interests. Because he knows protecting those interetsts - regardless of the security implications for America - is integral to the "free" trade agenda all of his corporate supporters are demanding.

What a mess! It’s enough to make one feel sorry for him, to shed a tear of support for this much-maligned master of political intrigue. Clearly, he’s starting to feel the pain. Poor Mr. Bush.



Tags:
Bush, terrorism, UAE, U.S._Ports, Katrina, Middle_East

A Muslim President of Europe?

As a follow up to my previous post on the Danish cartoons, it now seems clear that extremists on both sides of the cultural fence are mainly responsible for the furor caused by the unfortunate choice to publish these deliberately insulting images of the Prophet Mohammed.

Here is a more definitive treatment of this issue by one of my favorite armchair analysts at Strategytalk.

Enjoy.



Tags:
Free_Speech, Danish Cartoons, Muslims, Prophet Mohammed, Jyllands_Posten, Mohammed_Cartoon