Category: World

That Unpopular War

Belmont club describes the historical situation:

Imagine a time when America found itself in a war against a foreign foe whose strategy was to inflict a constant rate of loss on the army; invited US and British reporters to feed antiwar elements with atrocity stories; when US commanders who expected a quick war against a corrupt and oligarchic native elite found they had roused the countryside against them. Imagine a time when the issue of this war was central to an American Presidential election, caused a split in one of the major parties and planted the seeds for a world war. Not Iraq. The war was Philippine-American War and the election that of 1912.

Throughout the past century, the Philippines managed, though not without hiccups, to remain one of the most free and democratic countries in Asia.

As You Sow…

The absurd irony of Muslims around the world shouting “The Pope accused Islam of being violent — kill him!” has bemused me for some days now. Now the Archbishop of Canturbury has added his own voice to the call for Muslims to face up to the violence inherent in the system:

THE former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey of Clifton has issued his own challenge to “violent” Islam in a lecture in which he defends the Pope’s “extraordinarily effective and lucid” speech.
Lord Carey said that Muslims must address “with great urgency” their religion’s association with violence. He made it clear that he believed the “clash of civilisations” endangering the world was not between Islamist extremists and the West, but with Islam as a whole.

“We are living in dangerous and potentially cataclysmic times,” he said. “There will be no significant material and economic progress [in Muslim communities] until the Muslim mind is allowed to challenge the status quo of Muslim conventions and even their most cherished shibboleths.” …

Lord Carey, who as Archbishop of Canterbury became a pioneer in Christian-Muslim dialogue, himself quoted a contemporary political scientist, Samuel Huntington, who has said the world is witnessing a “clash of civilisations”.

Arguing that Huntington’s thesis has some “validity”, Lord Carey quoted him as saying: “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”

That last sentence reinforces the idea that many have put forward as the key idea of the present clash of cultures. Western culture is a culture of guilt, where one must be aware of one’s faults and strive to overcome them. Islamic culture is a culture of shame, where any slight against one’s perceived honor must be retaliated against with violence.

The fact that Western culture has been wildly successful at bringing freedom and prosperity to much of the world — often as a direct result of guilt over past crimes — and Islamic culture remains mired in poverty and despotism provides the cognitive dissonance that makes today’s Muslims so darn touchy about their culture.

(See also Ralph Peters’s Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States.)

Gobsmacked

I’ve recently discovered Steve Dutch’s pages on “Science, Pseudoscience and Irrationalism“. Full of wonderful stuff — clearly reasoned, scrupulously fair, and whitheringly contemptuous of those who would let fuzzy-headed feelings of goodwill determine their lives.

But . . . the absolute shocker for me was something that I have never heard of in years and years of interest in and study of the Middle East conflict. Allow me to quote from the Noble Qur`an, Surah 17 verse 104:

And We said to the Israelites after him: Dwell in the land: and when the promise of the next life shall come to pass, we will bring you both together in judgment.

Weasels for Common Sense

I wonder, is Orson Scott Card, a moderately famous science fiction author, a weasel for saying that the burden of proof that George W. Bush is a liar is on those who claim he knew in advance, all evidence to the contrary, that Saddam Hussein did not posess weapons of mass destruction:

It was not a lie for Bush to state the information available to him and to all the intelligence services of other countries: That Saddam had poison gas, was pursuing bioweapons, and had a nuclear program designed to give him nukes.

Saddam’s own behavior, refusing to allow untrammeled inspections, did not look like the actions of an innocent man.

It turned out that there was no serious nuclear threat from Saddam. But the fact that we did not find the poison gas did not mean he never had it — we know he did. What it proved was that he either destroyed it, concealed it, or moved it to another country — with Syria the most likely candidate.

The most suspicious fact is that we found no evidence of the destruction of the poison gas. There would have been no reason for Saddam to conceal such destruction — he could have invited international observation of such actions and the world would have applauded.

Poison gas is not destroyed without leaving behind evidence. The lack of evidence of poison gas when we invaded Iraq does not suggest its nonexistence.

Card goes on to cite numerous, well, lies about George W. Bush’s supposed malfeasances.