Quick, everybody, look depressed! Our betters are watching from Toronto and have decreed it thus. When you have your sad face on, then dive into this third-rate rehashed hack hash. Ponder the hash... deeply. Be the hash. Be ashamed if you can't wipe the smile off your face. Be ashamed that no one knew, in advance, precisely how things would go, how imperfect our sight, how immensely superior the voyeur's hindsight. 'Tis so. Barkeep, one sarsaparilla - use crocodile tears instead of branch water, plz. I'm sure that'll help.
Only I'd laugh longer if the sophomoric, historically illiterate, unserious, unrealistic dreck offered up by clueless editorialists didn't so closely reflect the disability of so many of our countrymen, including the political class. We'll muddle through, but in this case running up the score and talking smack is more what I had in mind .....
Hat tip to Think of England. One of the most fundamental 'human rights' is property rights, and Ms. Whyte explains why.
by Jamie Whyte
Jeremy Bentham described the Declaration of the Rights of Man by French revolutionaries as nonsense on stilts. Nice rhetoric, but ultimately unsuccessful. Since 1789 the idea of human rights has thrived. It now even has its own day. This years Human Rights Day, was dedicated to the war on poverty.
Bentham was right. The idea that we all enjoy certain rights, not because any legal system gives them to us, but simply because we are humans, is silly. But, in the 18th century at least, it was beneficial silliness.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are born equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that amongst these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. These statements are not self-evident. They are not even true. They are gobbledygook. Yet they inspired the Constitution of the United States, one of mankinds great achievements.
#2
Quoting from Robert Heinlein, Starship troopers,
Mr. Dubois had paused. Somebody took the bait. "Sir? How about `life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'?"
"Ah, yes, the `unalienable rights.' Each year someone quotes that
magnificent poetry. Life? What `right' to life has a man who is drowning in
the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What `right' to life
has a man who must die if he is to save his children? If he chooses to save
his own life, does he do so as a matter of `right'? If two men are starving
and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man's right is
`unalienable'? And is it `right'? As to liberty, the heroes who signed that
great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty
is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of
patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called `natural human rights'
that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is
never free of cost.
"The third `right'? -- the `pursuit of happiness'? It is indeed
unalienable but it is not a right; it is simply a universal condition which
tyrants cannot take away nor patriots restore. Cast me into a dungeon, burn
me at the stake, crown me king of kings, I can `pursue happiness' as long as
my brain lives -- but neither gods nor saints, wise men nor subtle drugs,
can insure that I will catch it."
Fight for them as legal rights? Sure. But don't expect nature or your enemies to respect them.
#3
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are born equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that amongst these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. These statements are not self-evident. They are not even true. They are gobbledygook. Yet they inspired the Constitution of the United States, one of mankinds great achievements.
Excuse me, but . . . not even true? Gobbledygook? With all due respect, Ms. Whyte, the only gobbledygook in the above is your commentary. For one thing, you forgot to quote the whole Declaration:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.* That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
(Emphasis and footnote added.) The sentence you didn't bother quoting is critical. It's a key point--maybe even the key point--and it's one that goes back to at least St. Augustine's The City of God. It's this: governments have as their purpose, and their moral duty, to protect and secure the fundamental rights of their citizens. The government itself is not the source of those rights, and the government is answerable to God (as we all are) and to its citizens for how well it carries out this duty.
If all rights come from the state, and the state is answerable to no higher power, then you are the property of the state. The state is your master, not your servant. The state can take away your private property, your life, anything it wants, and you have no complaint. The "utilitarian" philosophy of your hero, Jeremy Bentham, is practiced today by Peter Singer, who will cheerfull tell you that if you become disabled, the state should be able to snuff you out to advance the greater good.
Look, I agree that private property is fundamental to liberty, and you've actually done a pretty good job of explaining why, in practical terms, this is true. Where you go wrong is in your expectation that godless utilitarianism is going to protect private property, or anything else that has anything to do with liberty. Just look at history. Why do you think that the first objective of every totalitarian and every social engineer is to discredit religion? The state (or maybe even the head of state**) is a jealous god, and there can be no other gods before it. Once the state is god, and the source of all rights, and accountable to no one, private property will be the least of your worries.
[/rant]
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
*In the original draft, "pursuit of Happiness" was phrased as "pursuit of Property;" the Declaration is then best understood as saying that the right to own private property is among those rights which come from God.
**E.g., Kim Jong Il.
Posted by: Mike ||
12/31/2006 9:11 Comments ||
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#4
It's been 'em a long time between J Bentham posts, I get weepy.
#5
Life? What `right' to life has a man who is drowning in
the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries. What `right' to life
has a man who must die if he is to save his children? If he chooses to save
his own life, does he do so as a matter of `right'? If two men are starving
and cannibalism is the only alternative to death, which man's right is
`unalienable'? And is it `right'?
Ayn Rand rightly debunked this sort of reasoning as being based on "emergency ethics": while rights are of no use to a drowning man, he wasn't drowning for his entire life. I daresay 99.999% of the time there ARE NO EMERGENCIES, so basing your laws, morality, and ethics on something that happens only 0.001 % of the time is patently unrealistic.
The most common threat nowadays to human life in the West does not come from natural disasters but from other humans. And don't talk to me about Katrina: that was a natural disaster made worse by foolish humans.
I have heard philosophers, who should know better, state that political systems do not matter because they cannot affect the ability of a man to think as he chooses. That's true, but only if a man confines himself to just thinking. If his thinking makes him believe that he must act, then the political system will make a great difference in whether he will be permitted to act or not.
The American idea of human rights as being inalienable because they are granted by God is based on the fact that the document was intended to justify the actions of the American people with specific regard to the Crown of England, who asserted that ITS right to rule over other men was granted to it by God. It was a specific document, written within a specific context, and directed at a specific audience: ripping it out of context, like Heinlein's devious instructor did, does it a misservice.
One of marx's greatest faux-pas was his statement that "religion is the opiate of the masses". Wrong: Religion is the amphetamine of the masses. It's one thing for a tyrant to try and talk a man out of his rights if that man believes that the tyran granted those rights to him in the first place. It's a different kettle of fish to talk a religious fanatic out of his rights if that fanatic believes those rights came from God: "Who the F*ck do you think you ARE, mortal infidel, taking rights away that GOD gave me?"
I'm a religious man, and so know what the potential is within religion to motivate people, which is why I believe the true threat to Western civilization is imperialistic Islam.
The writer is an intellectual. As Orwell notes, no ordinary person would be this stupid.
by Anatol Lieven
Every political, social and economic system ever created has sooner or later encountered a challenge that its very nature has made it incapable of meeting. The Confucian ruling system of imperial China, which lasted for more than 2,000 years, has some claim still to be the most successful in history, but because it was founded on values of stability and continuity, rather than dynamism and inventiveness, it eventually proved unable to survive in the face of Western imperial capitalism.
Which should suggest that western capitalism has certain advantages, but read on, our intellectual proceeds to knock it down.
For market economies, and the Western model of democracy with which they have been associated, the existential challenge for the foreseeable future will be global warming. Other threats like terrorism may well be damaging, but no other conceivable threat or combination of threats can possibly destroy our entire system. As the recent British official commission chaired by Sir Nicholas Stern correctly stated, climate change "is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen."
Climate change hasn't even happened yet and it's the greatest challenge? I suggest that in the here and now the greatest challenge to the western model of democracy is handling the threat of Islamism. If we don't handle that properly, it will be the Islamists who will deal with whatever climate change occurs, and they'll handle it in their usual insh'allan way.
The question now facing us is whether global capitalism and Western democracy can follow the Stern report's recommendations, and make the limited economic adjustments necessary to keep global warming within bounds that will allow us to preserve our system in a recognizable form; or whether our system is so dependent on unlimited consumption that it is by its nature incapable of demanding even small sacrifices from its present elites and populations.
We don't have a system of unlimited consumption: each of us as individuals, and each state as a state, has definite limits. Anyone who's taken an economics course recognizes that; economics is the way we define limits in society and decide the relative worth of each part our daily lives.
Further, the proposals of the elite (the Left, the Euros, and the apparatchiks of the international organizations) aren't 'limited': the goal is to force a new statism on the West. Gone is democracy, replaced with institutions that will do our thinking for us. Gone are free markets, replaced with 'managed' economic models that will decide the relative value of items, and one that becomes increasingly Soviet over time: health care will be 'free', housing will be 'cheap', and we'll get exactly what we deserve. Gone is personal liberty, replaced with a collective order that defines us as groups. It is 'Metropolis' brought to the 21st century.
If the latter proves the case, and the world suffers radically destructive climate change, then we must recognize that everything that the West now stands for will be rejected by future generations. The entire democratic capitalist system will be seen to have failed utterly as a model for humanity and as a custodian of essential human interests.
And if the latter doesn't prove the case, the intellectual elites will simply move on to another global threat. The goal here isn't to deal with 'climate change': the goal is find a lever, a wedge, a tool that allows the elites, who after all are smarter than the rest of us, to exert their naturally-derived superiority over the rest of us. We the cattle need to listen to our betters. When global cooling, population explosions, nuclear anniliation and starvation didn't move us to listen, they came up with 'climate change'. They'll keep trying.
Even the relatively conservative predictions offered by the Stern report, of a drop in annual global gross domestic product of up to 20 percent by the end of this century, imply a crisis on the scale of the Great Depression of the 1930s; and as we know, the effects of that depression were not restricted to economics. In much of Europe, as well as Latin America and Japan, democracies collapsed and were replaced by authoritarian regimes.
The writer doesn't have his facts right: in the 1930s, Japan was not a democracy. Few countries in Latin America were. And the fascist and socialist movements in post-war Europe grew in the prosperous 1920s.
The writer also focuses upon the direst warnings of the Stern review to trump common sense. Yes, God might stick the Earth in His oven and bake us to a crisp. It's not likely, and climate warming models that are more plausible, with a global increase in temperature of about 1 degree Celsius, have far more moderate outcomes on the planet over the next hundred years. Those outcomes aren't scary, however, and the goal of both the Stern review and the author are to scare us into accepting their solution to the claimed problem.
Note the increasing desparation to the Left on climate change: first it was 1 degree. Then it morphed to about 3 degrees. Now you find predictions on the order of 5 to 8 degree increases over the next hundred years. Over the next fifty years. Could happen any day now, yup. Why the alarmism? As the elites see that their previous prediction fails to move us, they up the ante, hoping at some point to scare (or buffalo) us into intellectual and moral surrender.
As the report makes clear, however, if we continue with "business as usual" when it comes to the emission of greenhouse gases, then we will not have to wait till the end of the century to see disastrous consequences. Long before then, a combination of floods, droughts and famine will have destroyed states in many poorer parts of the earth as has already occurred in recent decades in Somalia.
There's the scare tactic right there. Let's be serious: anyone see the rest of the world going the way of Somalia because of climate change? More likely it will go the way of Somalia if we allow Islamism to flourish, if we allow tribalism to persist, if we allow thugs and dictators to have their way. What's the solution to that: more western civilization, not less. Sort of blows away the whole thesis of this article.
If the conservative estimates of the Stern report are correct, then already by 2050 the effects of climate change may be such as to wreck the societies of Pakistan and Bangladesh; and if these states collapse, how can India and other countries possibly insulate themselves?
Perhaps because India is something that Pakistan and Bangaldesh aren't: India is a capitalist, democratic state that within fairly broad margins is attempting to address its many social and economic problems. The other two countries are backwards states that to a large degree are held hostage by a death-cult that prevents them from recognizing reality, much less dealing with it.
At that point, not only will today's obsessive concern with terrorism appear insignificant, but all the democratizing efforts of Western states, and of private individuals and bodies like George Soros and his Open Society Institute, will be rendered completely meaningless. So, of course, will every effort directed today toward the reduction of poverty and disease.
Mr. Soros is already meaningless: he advocates a statist, European approach to problem-solving that almost by definition can't adjust to new information, new technology and new ideas. The statist model wants to fit the 21st century into the comfortable confines of the 19th century philosophies of Hegel and Marx. This is why their approach to 'climate change' is more statism: carbon taxes, emission rules, more government agencies, more international rules, none of which really solve the problem. As Jaques Chirac once astutely noted, what matters to the statists isn't that they solve the problem but that they feel good about trying to solve it.
And this is only to examine the likely medium-term consequences of climate change. For the further future, the report predicts that if we continue with business as usual, then the rise in average global temperature could well top 5 degrees Celsius. To judge by what we know of the history of the world's climate, this would almost certainly lead to the melting of the polar ice caps, and a rise in sea levels of up to 25 meters.
It's unfortunate that the author has no sense of history: he'd recognize that 30 years ago the climate change issue of the day was global cooling. There were proposals, apparently serious, of lifting large mirrors into space so as to focus more of the sun's radiant energy on the planet. We've had Malthusian predictions of population explosions, war, famine, pestilence and starvation predicted over the years, all of which would affect the western world and all of which were just around the corner. We're still waiting.
As pointed out by Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth," this would mean the end of many of the world's greatest cities. The resulting human migration could be on such a scale as to bring modern civilization to an end.
Suppose for a moment that something like this began to happen: it's not like a movie; cities won't flood overnight. If New York or Dhaka or the Maldives become uninhabitable over fifty years, the population will indeed shift, but it will happen in ways that are almost inperceptible. Western countries will spend billions of dollars -- which they will have -- to mitigate the effects of flooding, or warming, or drought. The third world will do what it always does when confronted by a situation that causes a region to be unlivable: pick up and move.
And that happens frequently even today. We've seen mass migrations in Africa and Asia in our lifetimes because of climate disasters. We've seen more because of war and political unrest. It's tragic for them; I haven't seen the leftist elites do much about it other than wring their hands.
But the biggest error Lieven makes is his inability to recognize the greatest resource of western civilization: progress combined with adaptability. In trying to peer into the climate crystal ball, he completely discounts how western technology will advance to help solve the problem (to the extent that the problem is real). Need to cut carbon emissions? Need to find ways to generate energy without burning coal? Need to manage a rising ocean? Need to grow more food in changing climates? It's those blasted capitalists who will figure out how to do this. Lieven can't even see the technological changes of the past twenty years, let alone the last hundred. Those changes combined with the ability of markets to marshal resources provide us the ability to adapt, and societies that best permit technology and markets to advance are the ones that survive best in any changing environment.
If this comes to pass, what will our descendants make of a political and media culture that devotes little attention to this threat when compared with sports, consumer goods, leisure and a threat from terrorism that is puny by comparison? Will they remember us as great paragons of human progress and freedom? They are more likely to spit on our graves.
They might spit on yours. Once again the western world, using the prosperity generated by capitalism, free markets and democracy, will be the best equipped to manage any large scale, substantial climate change. We'll eat Delaware oranges. We'll grow sugar cane in South Dakota. We'll continue to live our lives because, in the end, we have three hundred million people in the U.S. who are empowered to solve problems, not just at a national level but at a personal level.
Read Dickens' Tale of Two Cities and ponder how Paris was fed. That's how we'll manage.
Underlying Western free-market democracy, and its American form in particular, is the belief that this system is of permanent value to mankind: a "New Order of the Ages," as the motto on the U.S. Great Seal has it. It is not supposed to serve only the short-term and selfish interests of existing Western populations. If our system is indeed no more than that, then it will pass from history even more utterly than Confucian China and will deserve to do so.
A major conceit here is that it's our fault that we haven't solved the problems of peoples who refuse to live like us. It's our fault that Zimbabwe tolerates the tribalism and backwardness that allows a Robert Mugabe that robs them blind and imprisons them in a police state. It's our fault that the Venezuelans have a clown running their country who is pushing his foot down on their necks. And so on.
And of course, if the U.S. tries to solve a particular problem, from Afghanistan to Iraq, we're wrong. Of course. The convenient hubris of the Left is to damn America for both action and inaction. The 'New Order of the Ages' should yield to the wiser statism across the Atlantic, the continent that started two world wars in the last century and is hell-bent on binding everyone to their rules for survival.
Non-western societies aren't stupid: they can, if they wish, recognize the same reality we do. If climate change turns out to be real (and I have my doubts, aka the global cooling scare of the 1970s), non-western societies have the opportunity to adapt. They will likely have to become more western to manage: more democracy, not less, more capitalism, not less, more freedom, not less. Free western societies will manage. The rest of you? Sure hope you figure it out.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/31/2006 00:58 ||
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#1
Absolutely outstanding fisk, Steve. Bravo.
You hit every nail squarely on the head.
I attended - almost out of morbid curiousity - a panel discussion about "America's Evil New Badness" or something (OK, it had a neutral title and a "mixed" panel) at a Washington think tank a few years back. This Lieven character was one of the presenters. His detachment from reality was one of the primary contributing factors to my reaction to the whole event: I felt like an undercover FBI agent, cloaked and hooded, at a KKK rally. WTF were these people talking about? It was all US-unilateralism this, world-alienation and disapproval that, and generally a scary and bizarre discussion untethered from Earth.
Finally one or two audience members - one was a fairly high ranking Polish diplomat from their embassy - stood up and bitch-slapped Lieven and one or two of his co-panelists, saying they could not speak "for Europe", etc., and generally dressed them down in specific, concrete terms for which they had no rebuttal. To my dismay, I saw several audience members look shocked and appalled that the delusional, preposterous themes being propounded were being debunked with prejudice.
One of the panelists was some guy named Lind - a smart guy who generally tries to style himself a high-end, sophisticated isolationist of sorts. He was so astounded by the bizarre presentations that he commented with a smile that he'd have to take a comparatively interventionist, administration-friendly line just to return the discussion to reality.
My snarky one-liner on "global warming": no thanks, I'm not religious. It's clear that environmentalism in general serves as a secular religion for many, many adherents who are otherwise quite above religion, thank you very much. Global warming (well, the anthropogenic part) is merely the central tenet of the more extreme versions of the faith.
But as you point out, the climate change ideology is more than just a religious stand-in. It is the latest - and perhaps most audacious - attempt to dress up anti-freedom, anti-capitalist, statist social engineering in some other garb. Note the shopworn and preposterous swipes against western consumer economies and lifestyles.
When statist, fascist models that cynically claimed to be aimed at eliminating "social injustice" didn't just fail (or commit genocide and mass impoverishment) but actually came crashing down in dramatic fashion, these sorts needed a new weapon to use in their ultimately doomed effort to constrain economic freedom and demonize productive human undertakings.
I hate pop psychology (heck, I hate all psychology), but the fit between global climate change ideology and the emotional and political needs of the self-hating elites is hard to miss.
The allusion to Soros is especially revealing and ironic - as if his largely misbegottten and arrogant little operations are the most notable engines of democratic change on the planet, as opposed to America's mere example and America's uniformed military.
BTW, those who don't already visit should go by Tim Blair's site regularly, for the most hilarious skeptical takes on climate change religion and its usually clownish clergy.
#2
Environmentalism and global-warmism are the new Marxism-Leninism, with the same kind of staffers as before 1989. George Soros is just a modern-day pirate.
#3
When I saw the title, I thought the article would be along the lines of Steyn's "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It ." Instead it's the typical anti-capitlalist rant from the Left. Where Steyn's argument is based on demographics and migration (both of them real and measurable), the Left's is based on the bugaboo of Global Warming/Climate Change.
While environmentalism can be viewed as a secular religion, don't forget that there is a Religious Left (think Jimmy Carter) that is just as strong an adherent to environmentalism as the secularists. It is a means to an end.
The GW/CC is a convinient weapon that the Left uses to attack Capitalism. When the Left talks about "unlimited consumption", what it wants is to limit the individual's right to choose. You can see this in their opposition to free trade, school choice and healthcare. The Left's drive for Socialism always leads to an authoritarian regime, as Hayek argued in "The Road to Serfdom."
#5
Verlaine said: "But as you point out, the climate
change ideology is more than just a religious
stand-in. It is the latest - and perhaps most
audacious - attempt to dress up anti-freedom,
anti-capitalist, statist social engineering in
some other garb."
The "garb" looks like "Agenda 21" to me - "sustainable development", "global governance", punitive water, transport and energy pricing etc.
#7
Best fisk of the year, and you made us wait till the last day of the year to enjoy it, you visigoth!
Thank you, Mr. White.
The obstinacy of the left is evident in this guy's article. The worst thing in the world that can befall a leftist (short of death, which in their mind removes the reason for the universe's existence) is to admit error, and worse, error in basic precepts. The meme thread that came out of the French revolution has repeatedly and universally been shown to be inferior to the one that came out of the American one. Yet the left is so terrifed of admitting this fact to themselves that they will simply, in a way defying any logic, keep inventing excuses and justifications for the continued championing of their cause.
Hence global cooling morphs into global warming morphs into climate change, so that no matter what happens in the world of meteorology, it's anthropogenic, evil, and can be solved by more statism, less capitalism, less liberty, and more distrust and regulation of the entrepreneurial spirit.
Guys like this are the meteorological equivalents of Paul Ehrlich.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
12/31/2006 10:08 Comments ||
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#8
So long as the good doctor isn't an Ostrogoth, I s'pose he can be forgiven. ;-)
#10
Great commentary Mr White. One correction, if I may. Oranges will not be growing in Delaware, instead, we will be fishing over the Delmarva Shallows. And great fishing it will be.
#11
The sky is falling, the sky is falling! Oh, wait - different fairy tale.
And out of respect for chicken little he was not a democrat! LOL
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
12/31/2006 19:08 Comments ||
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#12
In the last 100 years (approx) Western Civilization have acquired a belief that people have rights but not obligations. Win or lose the war with Islam (draw isn't possible), this will be gone.
Most of the great butchers of the 20th century died of old age, in their own beds, some of them honored by millions. Not a single one met justice in the sense accepted in free states across the world. The handful who died otherwise are aberrations, victims of strange events that act as models for nothing.
There is one single exception - the hanging of Saddam Hussein on December 30, 2006 after a careful, lengthy trial carried out under extremely difficult circumstances according to internationally recognized judicial norms. The state of Iraq has succeeded where the rest of the civilized world has failed. It is a singular achievement, and it will stand.
"There is no more acceptable sacrifice than the blood of a tyrant."
- Giovanni Boccaccio
Posted by: Mike ||
12/31/2006 09:12 ||
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#1
Hear, hear. Quoting my sister-in-law, who can be as liberal as any, on the execution: "Justice is served, finally. Now they should deal with OJ". LOL
Posted by: john ||
12/31/2006 11:06 Comments ||
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Saddam Hussein is dead. The mighty dictator met a criminal's end on the gallows. The murderer responsible for 1 1/2 million corpses is just a bag of bones. For decades, the world pandered to his fantasies, overlooking his brutality in return for strategic advantages or naked profit. Diplomats, including our own, courted him, while the world's democracies and their competitors vied to sell him arms.
Saddam always bluffed - even, fatally, about weapons of mass destruction - but the world declined to call him on his excesses. Massacres went unpunished. His invasions of neighboring states failed to draw serious punishment. He never faced personal consequences until our troops reached Baghdad (a dozen years late). As long as Saddam paid sufficient bribes and granted the right concessions to the well-connected, the world shut its eyes to his cavalcade of atrocities. Even when his soldiers raped Kuwait, the United Nations barely summoned the will to expel his military - and the alliance led by the United States declined to liberate Iraq itself from a tyrant with a sea of blood on his hands.
Everything changed in 2003. For all of its later errors in Iraq, the Bush administration altered the course of history for the better. It may be hard to discern the deeper meaning of our march to Baghdad amid the chaos afflicting Iraq today, but President Bush got a great thing right: He recognized that the age of dictators was ending, that the era of the popular will had arrived. He and his advisers may have underestimated the difficulties involved and misread the nature of that popular will, but they put us back on the moral side of history.
Bush revealed the bankruptcy of the European-designed system of international relations. An unspoken code agreed between kings and czars, emperors and kaisers, had protected rulers - however monstrous - for centuries, while ignoring the suffering of the masses. The result was that any Third World thug who seized a presidential palace could ravage his country as long as his crimes remained within his "sovereign" borders.
Supported by other English-speaking democracies, Bush acted. Breaking Europe's cynical rules, our forces invaded a dictatorship to liberate its population. And suddenly, the world was no longer safe for tyrants.
No matter the policy failures in the wake of Baghdad's fall, the destruction of Saddam's regime remains a historical turning point. When our troops later dragged the dictator out of a fetid hole, every other president-for-life shivered at the image. Tonight, none of those other oppressors will sleep well. They may try to console themselves that America is failing in Iraq, that we've learned our lessons. But no matter what they tell themselves, they'll never feel safe again.
We set a noble precedent, and the critics who insist that deposing Saddam was a mistake are rushing to a very premature judgment. We did a great thing by overthrowing Saddam. We may have done it poorly, but we did it.
We also revealed the hypocrisy of those governments who sold out their professed values for oil money (and pathetically cheaply, too). From Paris and Berlin through Moscow and Beijing, many will never forgive us. We should be honored.
Was justice done when the trapdoor opened under Saddam's feet? In a clinical sense, yes. But such an easy death was far too kind. He should have been turned loose, naked and handcuffed, in the central square of Halabja, where the survivors of his most notorious poison gas attack could have ripped his flesh with their bare hands. But we live in a civilized community of nations. Bloodthirsty dictators must be executed humanely - and over the protests of human-rights advocates who insist they shouldn't be executed at all.
Still, Saddam's death was a last humiliation for him. He lived long enough to see his sons die, destroying his dynastic dreams. And long enough to discover that all those Iraqis jumping up and down and crying "We will die for you, Saddam!" didn't really mean it.
Given all of the recent violence in Iraq, it's remarkable how little has been committed in support of Saddam - occasional demonstrations on his home ground, and little else. There'll be a hiccup of violence now, but even his fellow Baathists have been seeking to regain power for themselves, not for their erstwhile master. (And it's easy to picture their relief at the death of the man they, too, once had to fear.) The various factions of Iraq are fighting for many things - but Saddam hasn't been one of them. Sycophantic lawyers - Western and Iraqi - doubtless whispered that the people still supported him, that they and his Western friends would never let him hang. (He must have thought ruefully of Ramsey Clark as the noose tightened around his neck.)
Saddam's pathetic grandeur lies in ruins. Millions will celebrate his death; few will mourn. In the end, the all-powerful dictator was just a delusional old man in a cage insisting, "I am the president of Iraq!"
Of course, the Middle East has an ongoing problem with reality. Conspiracy theorists who insisted that the United States was keeping Saddam alive to restore him to power as part of a complex plot will now suggest that one of Saddam's doubles went to the gallows, that the dictator still lives, held in reserve by mysterious forces. But Saddam Hussein is dead, condemned to death by an Iraqi court. Even the die-hards will figure it out in time.
Again, we can be proud that the United States of America brought him down. And that no dictator can ever feel entirely safe again. President Bush changed the world. For all of today's carnage and confusion, and despite the appalling policy errors after Baghdad fell, the future will show that the change was for the better.
#1
For all his merits, Peters exhibits one of the worst flaws of current punditry (and analysis in general) - his inability to acknowledge certain key facts or truths without qualifying the acknowledgement with assertions of very dubious or at least premature criticisms. "For all of its later errors in Iraq ..... blah blah blah".
He also stupidly adopts the "chaos" meme. Ralph oughta visit, oh, about 75% of the country and see how chaotic it seems.
Peters has long been clear-eyed about some of the key APPARENT mistakes in Iraq - though he seems to have averted his eyes from the scary and unpleasant fact that these errors were not just embraced by the uniformed military but mostly the fervently held views of CENTCOM and MNF-I, shared by their civilian overlords - but he couldn't write even just one little column in which he focused on his main point.
His main point is important, and correct - and unlikely to be widely echoed. Whatever the flaws of his surrounding verbiage .....
Interesting take on the difference between America and the Mongols on the conquest of Iraq.
By Jack Weatherford
IN HIS FINAL televised speech to the Iraqi people in 2003, Saddam Hussein denounced the invading Americans as "the Mongols of this age," a reference to the last time infidels had conquered his country, in 1258. But the comparison isn't very apt unlike the Mongols, the Americans don't have the organizational genius of Genghis Khan.
In the 13th century, Temujin better known by his title, Genghis Khan ("world leader") headed a tribal nation smaller than the workforce of Wal-Mart, yet he conquered and ruled more people than anyone in history. After Genghis Khan's death, his grandson, Hulegu, further expanded the empire, easily conquering most of the Middle East and achieving the Mongols' aim: the establishment of a trade corridor from Korea on the Pacific to Syria on the Mediterranean, one part of their goal of controlling the world.
So that every warrior knew his place within the struggle, Genghis Khan began each campaign with meetings to communicate to his approximately 100,000 soldiers where and why they would fight. The legal justification for the Mongol invasion of Iraq derived from the reluctance of the caliph of Baghdad to control the Shiite Cult of the Assassins, whom the Mongols accused of attempting to kill their khan.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/31/2006 00:51 ||
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#1
A bit of political spin on this article, histories I have read give a very different perspective on Baghdad after the Mongols, from Wikipedia, for lack of a better source:
The Mongols swept into [Baghdad] on February 13 [1257] and began a week of massacre, looting, rape, and destruction.
As far as damage done, the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols made the sack of Rome by Alaric look kindly. The Grand Library of Baghdad, containing countless precious historical documents and books on subjects ranging from medicine to astronomy, was destroyed. Survivors said that the waters of the Tigris ran black with ink from the enormous quantities of books flung into the river. Citizens attempted to flee, but were intercepted by Mongol soldiers who raped and killed with abandon.
Although death counts vary widely and cannot be easily substantiated, a number of estimates do exist. Martin Sicker writes that close to 90,000 people may have died (Sicker 2000, p. 111). Other estimates go much higher. Muslim historian Abdullah Wassaf claims the loss of life was several hundred thousand or more. Ian Frazier of The New Yorker says estimates of the death toll have ranged from 200,000 to a million.
The Mongols looted and then destroyed. Mosques, palaces, libraries, hospitals grand buildings that had been the work of generations were burned to the ground. ... Prior to this, the Mongols destroyed a city only if it had resisted them. Cities that capitulated at the first demand for surrender could usually expect to be spared. Cities that surrendered after a short fight, such as this, normally could expect a sack, but not complete devastation. The utter ferocity of the rape of Baghdad is the worst example of Mongol excess known. ...[From the article "once the takeover ended, the bloodshed ended." -- probably because there was no one left to kill! The Mongols "exercised a genius for speaking to people in terms that they understood." Everybody understands "Submit or die!"]
Baghdad was a depopulated, ruined city for several centuries... Of all the Mongol Khans, [Hulagu] is, for obvious reasons, the most feared and despised.
Aftermath
Thus was the caliphate destroyed, and Mesopotamia ravaged it has never again been such a major center of culture and influence. ...[due to a succession crisis] after 1258 there was no unified Mongol Empire, but four separate kingdoms, including the Il-Khanate of Persia established by Hulagu. [The world conquered by the Mongols was a good deal smaller than the real one, and their unified rule extremely brief in historical terms.]
In the meantime, the Mongols led by Kitbuqa had fallen out with the crusaders holding the coast of Palestine, and the Mamluks were able to ally with them [the crusaders, that is], pass through their territory, and destroy the Mongol army at the Battle of Ain Jalut. {This was the first significant defeat of Mongol armies and ensured the security of Egypt from the Mongols.} Palestine and Syria were permanently lost, the border remaining the Tigris for the duration of Hulagu's dynasty.
[After the succession crisis was resolved in Mongolia] Hulagu returned to his [newly conquered] lands [near Iraq] by 1262, but instead of being able to avenge his defeats, was drawn into civil war with Batu Khan's brother Berke.
Berke, a Muslim, sternly protested Hulagu's destruction of Baghdad. Berke allied himself with the Mamluks and started raiding Hulagu's forces in the area of the Caucasus, inflicting a severe defeat on him in 1263. Hulagu died in 1265. The centuries-old irrigation system of Mesopotamia fell into ruins and has not been replaced. In the mid 1300's several outbreaks of the Black Death kicked the remnants of Iraq while they were down. In 1401 Baghdad resisted its Mongol/Turkic rule and the infamous Tamerlane ravaged it yet again. One account recalls he commanded his veterans to bring back two severed human heads from the populace and stack them in one of 120 skull pyramids around the city, The stink of rotting human flesh carried for miles. Now that's shock and awe. Modern propagandists attempt to minimize the godawful destruction which fell on Baghdad between 1257 and 1401 by equating it with the two wars in Iraq between 1990 and now. Modern day deniers state that Muslims have exaggerated the terrific destruction brought on Iraq by the Mongols and the Black Death in their politically-motivated campaign to denigrate the current US war effort there. To state
Iraq enjoyed a century of peace and a renaissance that brought the region to a level of prosperity and cultural sophistication higher than it enjoyed before or after.
#2
I read a Sufi text years back which stated the original "Assassins" were actually a Sufi sect that spread the false rumor that they would send out suicide killers against those who threatened the order. Opportunists jumped on the bandwagon & soon every assassination in the middle East was blamed on the "Assassins", who of course were always killed immediately after completing their mission. The middle East has always had an abundance of suicide killers, anyway. The original sect was so successful in scaring their opponents they were mostly left alone until the Mongols showed up. No real "Assassins" were ever dispatched, the rumor alone protected the sect. Makes a great story, anyway.
#3
Excerpt from the book "Storm from the East" by Robert Marshall:
The Mongols' prime objective was the Caliph of Baghdad, but before confronting him they meant to eliminate the other major power in the region, The Ismailis or Assassins. They had emerged because of a schism in the Shia Muslim sect and established themselves in northern and eastern Persia by taking and controlling a series of mountain fortifications. Behind their walls they lived a contemplative life, producing beautifully wrought paintings and metalworks, but beyond their retreats they terrorized those civilizations they deemed heretical and so earned the enmity not just of the rest of the Islamic world but eventually of Europe. Rather than confronting his enemies in open combat he preferred to sponsor a campaign of political murder, usually executed with a dagger in the back, as the means to his ends.
The Mongols has their own reasons for launching a campaign against the Assassins. First, they had received a plea of help from an Islamic judge in Qaswin, a town near the Assassins' stronghold at Alamut, who had complained that his fellow citizens were forced to wear armour all the time as protection from the Assassins' daggers. According to Rubruck, another reason that determined Mongol attitudes was the discovery of a plot to send no fewer than 400 dagger-wielding Assassins in disguise to Qaraqorum with the instructions to murder the Great Khan. The Assassins had encountered the Mongols once before, during Chormaghun's terror raid through northern Persia 1237-8, which led them to send an envoy to Europe to beg help.
...
On 1 January 1256 Hulegu's army crossed the Oxus River and brought into Persia the most formidable war machine ever seen. It possessed the very latest in siege engineering, gunpowder from China, catapults that would send balls of flaming naphtha into their enemy's cities, and divisions of rigorously trained mounted archers led by generals who had learnt their skills at the feet of Genghis Khan and Subedei. As news of Hulegu's army spread he was soon presented with a succession of sultans, emirs, and atabaks from as far apart as Asia Minor and Herat, all come to pay homage. Its sheer presence brought to an end nearly forty years of rebellion and unrest in the old lands of Khwarazmia, but to the inhabitants of Persia and Syria it was the dawn of a new world order.
The Mongols made first for the Elburz Mountains where the Assassins lay in wait behind what they believed to be their impregnable fortresses. With extraordinary ingenuity the Mongol generals and their Chinese engineers manoeuvred their artillery up the mountain slopes and set them up around the walls of the fortress of Alamut. But before the order was given to commence firing the Assassins' Grand Master, Rukn ad_Din signaled that he wanted to negotiate. Hulegu countered that he must immediately order the destruction of his own fortifications; when Rukn ad_Din prevaricated; the bombardment commenced. Under the most devastatingly accurate fire, the walls quickly tumbled and Rukn ad_Din surrendered. Hulegu took him prisoner, transported him to every Assassin castle they confronted, and paraded him before each garrison with the demand for an immediate surrender. Some obliged, as at Alamut; while others, like Gerdkuh, had to be taken by force. Today the spherical stone missiles fired by the artillery teams at the walls still litter the perimeter of the ruins. Whether each 'eagle's nest' surrendered or taken, the Mongols put all the inhabitants to the swords - even the women in their homes and the babies in their cradles.
As the slaughter continued, Rukn ad_Din begged Hulegu to allow him to go to Qaraqorum where he would pay homage to the great Khan and plead for clemency. Hulegu agreed, but when he got to Qaraqorum Mongke Khan refused to see him. It was effectively a sentence of death. On the journey back his Mongol escorts turned on the Grand Master and his attendants, who were 'kicked to a pulp'. The Persian historian Juvaini commented that 'the world had been cleansed'. Five hundred years later Edward Gibbon echoed those sentiments, claiming that the Mongols' campaign 'may be considered as a service to mankind'. It took two years for the Mongols to dislodge over 200 'eagle's nests', but in the process they virtually expunged the Assassins from Persia.
#4
IN HIS FINAL televised speech to the Iraqi people in 2003, Saddam Hussein denounced the invading Americans as "the Mongols of this age," a reference to the last time infidels had conquered his country, in 1258.
The British conquered the place in the Great War; I expect they count as infidels. Of course, it cost them 92,000 men to drive out the Turks. I do not have an estimate for the Mongol version but I expect it made the "slow motion massacre" of the last few years look like a church picnic.
#7
Genghis Khan (not Conan) said: "The greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them before him. To ride their horses and take away their possessions. To see the faces of those who were dear to them bedewed with tears, and to clasp their wives and daughters in his arms"
I.e. kill, pillage and rape. That the Mongols did in Baghdad. Not a lot of administering.
Posted by: ed ||
12/31/2006 23:10 Comments ||
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Three young brothers, Salam, 4, Ahmed, 7, and Osama, 9, were gunned down outside their school on the morning of December 11. They had just arrived by car when they and the driver died in a wild spray of gunfire. Four other schoolboys who happened to be nearby were wounded.
It was an assassination attempt, and it failed. The target was the boys' father, Bala Ba'lousheh, but he wasn't in the car. He was a senior Fatah official with the Palestinian Authority's intelligence service in Gaza City, and his would-be assassins were almost certainly from Hamas, the rival Palestinian political party which won power in last year's election. After the shootings, demonstrations erupted in the West Bank and Gaza. Within 48 hours, a prominent Hamas leader was shot to death in the Gaza Strip.
The level of conflict between the Palestinian parties simmers just below the level of civil war, even as the spoils keep shrinking. The open wound inspires strong reactions among millions of people around the world with no direct stake in the problem.
For the sake of reality, let's put aside whatever views and prejudices you may hold on the Palestinian question. Put aside any animosity about grasping Jews or murderous Arabs. Put aside the Holocaust, and Muslim anti-Semitism. Put aside hopes and judgements. Simply look at what has happened on the ground. Stripped of all emotion and prejudice, right and wrong, one reality becomes clear: there is no chance of a sovereign, autonomous Palestinian state. Not within our lifetimes. No chance. None.
Not only won't there be a sovereign Palestinian state, there can't be.
It's no longer viable. At every historic juncture since Israel was created in 1948, rhetoric has taken precedence over pragmatism in the Arab world. As a result, every one of these historic junctions has resulted, without exception, in material defeat for the Palestinians.
In 1948, roughly 700,000 Palestinian Arabs - the number remains contested and inexact - heeded calls from the Arab world and fled their homes in the newly proclaimed Israel. The result? The Palestinian position of 1948 now looks infinitely superior to the Palestinian position of today.
In 1967, Israel was invaded by its Arab neighbours in the Six Day War. The result? The Arabs lost control of the holy city of Jerusalem and the Palestinians went from Arab rule to Israeli control.
In 1982, after the Palestinians sparked a civil war in Lebanon, Israel invaded Lebanon and Jordan's army attacked the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The result? The Palestinians were crushed in Lebanon and Jordan and Israel fortified its position in the West Bank.
In 1987, the first Palestinian intifada began at the instigation of PLO leader Yasser Arafat, and suicide bombings came to Israeli life. It lasted almost five years. The result? Israel again fortified and expanded its positions and the West Bank was divided into military-controlled subdivisions.
In 2000, Arafat launched the second intifada, his response to Israel's final offer in the Oslo peace accords. It lasted six years. The result? What the Palestinians were offered in 2000 is now impossible today, because Israel has since encircled Jerusalem with settlements housing 100,000 Jewish settlers. And Israel began building the Wall.
In 2006, Hezbollah attacked Israel, in the cause of Palestine, and Hamas and other militant elements fired rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip, as political opposition was Islamicised. The result? Some 175 Israelis were killed by Hezbollah, for which Lebanon paid with more than 1500 dead, and Hezbollah lost its military control of southern Lebanon. It thus lost its strategic forward position for no strategic gain.
In the West Bank, the dividing fence and wall became a reality, effectively halting suicide bombings but also annexing more sections of the West Bank. Israeli military control became more intense. According to B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, 1065 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces in 2006, while 23 Israelis were killed by Palestinians.
Everyone I spoke to while visiting Israel recently hates the wall. One prominent Palestinian moderate, Khaled Abu Toameh, who once worked for the PLO and now writes for The Jerusalem Post, told me in Jerusalem: "The wall is a tragedy. The wall is bad. It is the direct result of Yasser Arafat's intifada. It will become the wailing wall for both sides. I'm not optimistic. Not at all."
A conspicuous critic of the wall is the former US president Jimmy Carter, who, in his new book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, writes: "An enormous imprisonment wall is now under construction, snaking through what is left of Palestine to encompass more and more land for Israeli settlers. In many ways, it is more oppressive than what blacks lived under in South Africa during apartheid."
Compare this fenced-off community of today with 20 years ago, before the intifadas. The Palestinian workforce was integrated into the Israeli economy, with relatively free movement into Israel. Education and health systems were built, universities opened, local governments were functioning, corruption was minimal, and life expectancy had soared from 47 under Arab rule to 68. Then came Yasser Arafat and Fatah.
"Fatah is the mafia," Abu Toameh told me. "It is responsible for most of the anarchy on the West Bank. Fatah is a monster." Nor does he think much of Hamas, though he thinks it is much less corrupt, much more competent, and more pragmatic. He believes the West erred shockingly in trusting and subsiding Fatah and has now mishandled the transition to Hamas.
"But on the Muslim side, the message has always been 'No', and 'No', and 'No'. They quote the Koran: God is on the side of the patient . . . And what is the West Bank now? It is six Arab cities, two refugee camps, 150 villages. A series of cantons, with no economic base. And Gaza? An awful place."
And Israel? Through all the wars, terrorist bombings and threats of annihilation, and despite intense internal divisions, Israel has grown into a muscular economy of almost 7 million, with a per capita gross domestic product far higher than any Arab neighbours, including Saudi Arabia. The Jewish population has grown from 600,000 to 5.3 million, with a birthrate higher than those in Western Europe. Per capita, Israel has the most engineers and the most high-tech economy in the world.
Untold damage would be done to this economy if one anti-aircraft missile, fired from the West Bank, brought down an airliner flying out of the futuristic new Ben Gurion International Airport. Israel can't afford to let this happen.
Sixty years of years of "No" has put an end to a sovereign Palestinian state, indefinitely. This pawn has been sacrificed in a much larger game.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/31/2006 17:27 ||
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#1
Good catch, Fred. I have noticed Taomeh's dispatches at the JPost before, but this is the first time I have read this thoughts. Amazingly insightful. A Paleo arab who freakin get's it.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
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