Month: October 2001

Matt Welch is a left-of-center fellow who writes well. I like him. He’s currently incensed over an award-nominated blog in Australia that’s making some … less-than-convincing commentary about the war.

And Tony O’Brien closes out the festival of reason with a triumphant use of scare-quotes and imaginative spelling:
But if we ‘civilised’ countries, full of ‘freedom-loving’ people wish to preserve our systems, particularly our time-honoured system of justice and of the principle of presumed innocence, isn’t the proper course of action to attempt to capture bin Laden et al, a la Milosevitch, and hand them over to an independent tribunal such as the European court of justice?
Milosevic slaughtered the peoples of Yugoslavia for a decade. For the first half of that decade, the world did just what the O’Briens of the world would have us do now – it sent in UN “peacekeepers” to deliver food, fretted a great deal, took pictures of the “tribal” carnage, and applied sanctions (oh wait, sanctions are bad, too). Anyway, Milosevic didn’t budge until he and his military were bombed, first in Bosnia, later in Kosovo and Belgrade. By then, the graves were full, the countries were ruined and the seeds for future war were planted. How many hundreds of thousands of American deaths is O’Brien willing to accept while we “attempt to capture bin Laden” without resorting to war?

Again, Matt is not some slavering conservative hawk. He’s a careful, well-spoken (ah, well-written) fellow who neither minces words nor suffers fools gladly. Consider what he has to say, carefully.

I’ll add another note. The blog in question goes on to ask:

And yet a couple of days ago didn’t I read that George – resorting to the b-grade cowboy movie dialogue that he loves so well – had given his special forces the nod to kill him if they find him? And why might that be? Might it be that they didn’t want him, at some date in the near future, blabbing off his mouth in front of a tribunal, and exposing the US role in all sorts of nasty business over the last couple of decades?

Might it be that bin Laden is a mad dog who needs to be put down as quickly as possible, lest (since “finding” is not “capturing”) he escape again? No, of course not. That would be too obvious. It must be a conspiracy by those damned Yankees.

Feh.

When even the Wall Street Journal starts talking, seriously, about a US take-over of the Saudi oil fields, you know the relationship is in trouble. [Requires an e-mail registration.]

Today the dominant fact of the U.S.-Saudi relationship is that this “friend” is a principal source of funding for al Qaeda. The U.S. Treasury has identified several Saudi charities and a prominent Saudi businessman as bankrollers of terrorism. The Saudi response has been to decline to participate in an international consortium of more than 80 nations that have agreed to block the assets of terrorist groups.
This affront comes on top of the Saudi refusal to cooperate with the U.S. investigation of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, in which 19 American servicemen died. Since last month’s terrorist attacks in the U.S., numerous connections have also emerged between Saudi Arabia and the hijackers, some of whom carried Saudi passports. Many of those currently under arrest are Saudis, but the official Riyadh reaction has been to overlook these facts. All of this despite the fact that 5,000 U.S. troops are based in the Kingdom–less to protect American interests than to protect the Saudis from Saddam and other neighborhood bullies.
[…] The U.S. is so fearful of “instability” that it’s afraid to criticize the current regime, much less encourage it to move in a more democratic direction. But the status quo is hardly stable. The U.S. has looked the other way while the Saudi ruling family has stifled even moderate challenges to its power. This in turn has bred radical Islam as the only outlet for dissent, which the Saudis have attempted to buy off with cash for fundamentalist mosques and schools that promote the most venomous anti-American sentiments.

Trouble indeed.

(Via InstaPundit)

“Five Things You Can Do For America”

An American Muslim organization’s web page attempts to help Muslims around the world understand about America. Interesting reading.

(Via InstaPundit)

NATO crews are flying AWACS planes over the US. There’s a switch. I can’t wait for the conspiracy theorists to start in on this one.

(Via NextDraft)

Sniping at the appeasers

A Geoffrey Wheatcraft opinion piece from the Observer about the folks who Just Don’t Get It.

Almost the worst thing about the bleating critics is their imperviousness to reason and complete lack of the intellectual humility needed to recognise that one may have been wrong. In the spring of 1999, I was one of those who deplored the bombing of Serbia. Elementary observation now suggests that Serb forces are no longer terrorising Kosovo, that Serbia is returning to something like democracy and that Milosevic is on trial. Would that have happened if we had dropped John Pilger, Julie Burchill and Simon Jenkins on Belgrade (tempting as that thought is)?
[…]At a time like that – and this – the only honest prescription is ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’. ‘KBO’ was Churchill’s even pithier version of Gramsci’s slogan: keep buggering on, recognising that it will be a long struggle, but that it has to be won.

Good reading, if not cheerful.

(Via Matt Welch)

One of InstaPundit’s readers has an interesting metaphor for civilian casualties in Afghanistan. It’s worth reading.