Category: Geopolitical Brouhaha

Regardless of whether you agree with the policy-makers who send them here and there, these are folks who have put their lives on the line for you.

Regardless of whether they served in a war zone or not, they had no guarantees of that when they joined up.

Regardless of whether your place of business actually observes Veterans Day on Monday, its observation is in your heart.

And if you aren’t flying a post-9-11 flag, fly one today, or tomorrow.

They deserve that much, at least.

An associate I correspond with was looking at, potentially, other places to move, being all scared by the encroachment on civil liberties during this de facto war time.

Another associate suggested looking at countries with economic freedom, as ranked by the Cato Institute. He noted that source pointed to Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Ireland, Switzerland, Luxemborg, and Netherlands in that order, though he was willing to concede that economic freedom might not translate to political freedom in the cases of Singapore (or in the transitioning Hong Kong).

My suggestion was the information at Freedom House. In their survey on freedom, the highest scores (1 out of 7 on political rights, 1 out of 7 on civil liberties) went to Australia, Austria, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Cypress (Greek area), Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Kiribati, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Marshall Is., Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Sweden, Switzerland, Tuvalu, United States, and Uruguay.

The stats should be looked at in detail to look for longer-term trends. Some of the nations (Uruguay, for example) have had significantly different ratings in the not-too-distant past.

Tuvalu is presently being evacuated because it is sinking, so it’s not a good choice.

Of the “economic freedom” states, Freedom House ranked Singapore as 5/7, 5/7 (Partly Free). Hong Kong was not separately rated. The UK rated 1/7, 2/7 (Free).

Looking at FH’s Press Freedom survey, the countries in 2001 with the most free press are: Australia, Austria, Bahamas, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Jamaica, Luxembourg, Malta, Marshall Is., Nauru, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, St. Lucia, Sweden, Switzerland, and the US.

Singapore is rated as Not Free. The UK ranks as Partly Free.

I hear airline tickets on international travel are quite reasonable right now …

The New York Times summarizes US strategy in Afghanistan, and how it is evolving. A long, level-headed article on Whassup.

(Via NextDraft)

Matt Welch has a whole column of the stuff, right here:

It is more than reasonable, then, to conclude, that the news and views expressed by the Saudi press (and, thankfully for us, transmitted via the Internet), are officially sanctioned by George Bush’s “friends.” Those friends, apparently, are not very appreciative of the tens of billions in mostly unconditional aid, weaponry and protection the U.S. has provided these past decades.
“If democracy means a governor who is a homosexual in a city in which dance clubs, prostitution, homosexuality, and stripping proliferate, the U.S. can keep its democracy,” wrote Al-Riyadh columnist Abd Al-Wahed Al-Hamid, apparently overlooking the lifestyle choices made by 5,000-plus notoriously decadent Saudi princes.
[…] The political spectrum here is still reeling from the post-Sept. 11 split between the “root cause” anti-war crowd, and their “reject equivalence” pro-war counterparts. But the Saudis should be quaking in their boots, because both sides agree on the insupportable venality of the House of Saud, and the need for the U.S. to overhaul its relationship with the kingdom. When the Village Voice and the Wall Street Journal unite against a common enemy in a time of war, someone’s in deep trouble.

Good stuff, as usual. Nothing really new here, but a well-stated summary of the old.

According to the Saudi press (the fifth least free in the world, according to Liberty House), it’s all the fault of the Jews.

There is no doubt that after World War II, the world Jewry has been trying to be as close as possible to the decision-making processes in the West in general and the US in particular — Congress, the Senate and the Pentagon. Zionism convinced the Western world that communism was their enemy No. 1 with Islam occupying the second position. As communism is no longer a threat, Islam is the No. 1 enemy and such a canard is unfortunately believed by many Westerners.
Moreover, as Zionism is surviving on lies, it exploits every opportunity to target Islam and this is evident following the September attacks on the US. Therefore, the US media that are controlled or dominated by Zionists continue attacking Islam, Muslims and Arabs taking advantage of the fact that the prime suspects in the attacks are Arab or Muslim.

I must confess, I’d never heard that Islam was Enemy No. 1 until, oh, let me think, some Muslim fanatics flew some frickin’ airplanes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

And, after all that, it seems to me that even folks as ostensibily dimwitted as Dubya have gone out of their way to avoid pointing the finger at Islam.

Articles like this, though, do make me wonder ….

(Via Matt Welch)

Michael Barone in US News on bombs gone astray.

What is remarkable about American precision bombing is that it works as well as it does. Since the Vietnam War, our military has developed laser-guided weapons that home in on targets with remarkable, though not total, accuracy. In the old days, something on the order of 90 percent of bombs missed their targets. Today, something on the order of 90 percent hit them. That means that we can inflict militarily significant damage nine times as great with the same quantity of explosives. And in the process, we reduce civilian casualties and collateral damage by a similar order of magnitude. This is a great triumph of American ingenuity.
What is newsworthy is not that there are still occasional civilian casualties. What is newsworthy is that so many bombs hit their targets. This is the story the news media should tell, while pointing out that accuracy is still less than 100 percent.

There’s a reason why huge flights of bombers were sent over German industrial targets in WWII. It’s because it took that many — and sometimes multiple visits by them — to knock out factories, rail yards, etc., because the accuracy was so poor. Or why the Brits, driven to night bombing because of casualties, preferred to use incendiaries, dropped when a city’s lights appeared.

Ironically, Pentagon “See how whiz-bang we are, so won’t you appropriate more money for us?” PR has made the American public appalled at anything less than perfection, so that when civilians are hit, it is at best a sign of American recklessness, at worst a sign of American genocide.

Virginia Postrel, commenting on this story on 11/2, notes:

In fact, the operation in Afghanistan is not primarily retaliatory. If retaliation were the goal, it could be accomplished far more quickly, with no concern for precision. Instead, we are embarked on a war to eliminate an ongoing threat before it can become much deadlier. That is a trickier undertaking.
Finally, it’s worth noting that the civilian casualties on September 11 were achieved with nearly 100 percent accuracy. They were intended. The civilians murdered were not “collateral damage.” They were the targets. The only exception to the terrorists’ 100 percent accuracy was Flight 93’s crash in Pennsylvania, which caused fewer casualties than intended.

She also notes in an 11/1 post:

I think the American people, and the world, need to see Ground Zero—the way it really looks, not the distant, sanitized version for TV and tourists. They tell us they don’t show us out of respect for the families of the thousands of people who were crushed, pulverized, or blown to bits. Maybe they’re right, but if it was me, or my loved ones, I would want the world to see the slaughter of the innocents. Now you turn on CNN and see people-in-the-street saying George Bush is wrong to call the perpetrators of this massacre “evil doers,” because that phrase is so black-and-white, so biblical and judgmental. So uncool, so unsophisticated, so earnest. So true.

(Via Dynamist)

George Jonas in the National Post on the role of respect in “the East.”

There’s a bewildered question Americans, and Westerners in general, keep asking after 9-11: “Why do they hate us so?” The question also has an unasked corollary: “Why don’t they respect us more?”
The answer may be that we haven’t yet learned when to whack the station master and when to offer him baksheesh.

Jonas might be relying upon a single anecdote a bit much, but it’s still an interesting set of observations.

(Via InstaPundit)

America the Terrorist State?

Matt Welch debates a “Chomskyite” on whether the US is “a flawed, arrogant, naive, idealistic, successful, occasionally brutal and constantly improving democracy, whose founding principles and imperfect track record have inspired billions worldwide, from Vaclav Havel to Fidel Castro,” or if it is “what the criminals have set up for the purpose of plundering and oppression.” And does so quite nicely, with blinders (of all stripes) firmly off.

It can be done, with strength of will, good PR, and international cooperation. It has been done, and this Monitor article gives some recent examples. Remember Abu Nidal?

In the 1980s, for instance, the Abu Nidal Organization was wreaking havoc in Europe and the Middle East. It was responsible for 900 deaths or injuries in 20 countries, including machine-gun killings at the Rome and Athens airports in 1985. The US State Department called it “the most dangerous terrorist organization in existence.”
Then, because of a coordinated international pressure campaign – as well as brass-knuckles tactics used by some intelligence services against the group’s members – Abu Nidal was kicked out of several countries, including Syria and Libya.
“We turned him into a vagabond,” says L. Paul Bremer, head of Marsh Crisis Consulting in New York and the former ambassador who chaired the National Commission on International Terrorism last year. The strain on the organization led to infighting, which thwarted its ability to carry out attacks. Abu Nidal himself is now inactive and reportedly living in Iraq.

In the blog that Matt Welch was lambasting yesterday, somebody noted that terrorism, per se, cannot be defeated, as it is a tactic, not an object. That may be true — but much of terrorism’s success has come from state sponsors, folks who are willing to pay money and/or give shelter to terror bands in exchange for being left alone, or, more often, those terror bands focusing on the state’s enemies. Syria, Iraq, Iran, all have played this game. The US and the USSR played it during the Cold War, too (the present state of Afghanistan being one outcome).

If we can create a climate where this is no longer a useful tactic to states — where to be a state sponsor of terrorism brings some real pain in return — then this sponsorship will dry up. It won’t stop individual nutcases from pursuing courses of terror, but it will limit their scope to what they can do on their own, without shelter, aid, or comfort from a government. And that’s a goal that’s both achievable and worthwhile.

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.