Brown undoes the special relationship.
by Nile Gardiner
Posted by: Fred ||
03/27/2008 00:00 ||
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There is a real danger that the special relationship could eventually die a slow death through a combination of political indifference, a decline in British defense spending, and the erosion of British sovereignty within the European Union. The special relationship has been the most enduring and successful alliance of modern times, and provides the best hope for defeating the threat of militant Islam and protecting the West against rogue regimes.
As Margaret Thatcher so eloquently put it in a speech at the end of the Cold War, "whatever people say, the special relationship does exist, it does count and it must continue, because the United States needs friends in the lonely task of world leadership. More than any other country, Britain shares America's passionate commitment to democracy and willingness to stand and fight for it. You can cut through all the verbiage and obfuscation. It's really as simple as that."
Unfortunatley, Maggie's day is past and so is the special relationship. With the unhousing of the hereditary peers, the disappearance of the RN, the retention of Celtic members in the Parliament after devolution and the submission of the rights of Englishmen to EUropean dictat from Brussels, there is no more United Kingdom with which to have a special relationship. I rue its passing, but, unlike some, I am willing to face the reality. We'll always have Churchill.
The proportion of men and women getting married is below any level found since figures were first kept nearly 150 years ago.
And the number of weddings held in 2006 was the smallest since 1895, when the population was little more than half its present level.
The evidence that marriage is withering away at an increasing pace was met with a furious response from critics of Labour's benefits system, which disregards the status of husbands and wives and pays parents extra to stay single.
#3
There is a real danger that the special relationship could eventually die a slow death through a combination of political indifference, a decline in British defense spending, and the erosion of British sovereignty within the European Union.
To say nothing of the erosion of British sovereignty within London, Birmingham, Bradford and anywhere else the Umma has staked a claim.
The Democratic primary is starting to look like World War I. The origins of the dispute are forgotten. Pennsylvania is the Somme. No chance, though, that the Clintons, who lead the imperial armies, will consent to paying reparations at the Treaty of Denver.
The most striking resemblance to the Great War has been the campaign-worker body-count. They're strewn all over the battlefield. Geraldine Ferraro (killed for bringing up if Obama weren't black), Samantha Power (Hillary's a "monster"), the intrepid if foolhardy Rev. Wright (multiple offenses), James Hagee (Catholics as the "anti-Christ"), Bill Cunningham ("Barack Hussein Obama"), Bill Sheehan (for bringing up Obama's drug use). All gone. Anyone working for or in support of a political campaign these days is entering a free-fire zone.
Some say the high casualty rate in the campaigns is the result of indiscriminate political correctness. Campus speech codes were put in place to monitor people who said the "wrong thing" about favored groups, often categorized as holding "minority status" by dint of race, gender or sexual preference. Now the Democratic campaigns are using the toxic PC gas on each other.
But something more powerful seems to be in the air. The Samantha Power incident was a case study in the campaigns' current habit of leaving the wounded for dead. Quoted in a newspaper published in Scotland, Ms. Power, an admired writer on genocide, said of Hillary Clinton: "She is a monster, too -- that is off the record -- she is stooping to anything."
Time was a remark like that would earn its imprudent utterer a trip to the woodshed. Now it's the firing squad. What changed? . . .
Posted by: Mike ||
03/27/2008 12:32 ||
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"Bill Cunningham ("Barack Hussein Obama")"
Was he a campaign worker? I thought he is a talk show guy, conservative type.
#2
Any chance we can get the ACME Suprise Meter graphic for this story? I know it's a regular favorite (for reasons I won't go into right now) but I just thought it seemed appropriate.
Had Sen. Barack Obama (D., Ill.) said the following words in his speech last week on race in America, his problems with his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, would probably now be over:
You have all heard the racist and anti-American outbursts of my pastor Rev. Wright. They are all inexcusable. His speeches have forced me to reexamine my long association with Trinity United Church of Christ. And so it is with regret that I must now leave that church.
I had heard similar extremist language of Rev. Wright in the past, and now apologize that I did not earlier end my attendance and contributions. Had I long ago expressed my strong objections to Rev. Wrights views, such opposition might have suggested to him a more moderate path.
But any good that now might come by remaining steadfast to Rev. Wright in consideration of our long past friendship is outweighed by the damage that would accrue from the sanction of his extremism that my continued attendance at his church might convey.
I have loyalty aplenty, but it is to the truth, my country, and universal tolerance, not to any one friend however long and close our association. . . ."
Go read it all. If McCain's speechwriters have any sense, they'll be cribbing off this article for the benefit of McCain or his running mate.
Posted by: Mike ||
03/27/2008 11:12 ||
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"God Damn America....just words. America KKK...just words. The government invented AIDS to kill the black man....just words. White people are still the opressors of the black race....just words. Don't tell me words don't matter." There, fixed it for ya VDH.
Or, BHO should really say the below and McCain (if his advisors had any cojones) should use the above.
"I'm a joke and a liar, of course that kind of goes without saying as anyone with any lick of commonsense would know full well I sat in on all those sermons and heard Wright's schtick for the past 20 years. Any person with a half a brain might even conclude that I tacitly endorsed Reverend Wright's views. Luckily those kinds of people are not my supporters. I also don't have any true experience to make me realistically viable as the Commander in Chief. Heck, I was in the Illinois state senate not too long ago. One term senator Clinton has more experience then I do. Sen McCain was voting on bills in congress when I was doing coke back in the day. Again, thank Allah, oops, I mean God, that my average supporter is to lazy to research any of this. Also, my wife might make me sit down to go pee but at least she isn't screwing interns behind my back. I do know one thing; I can count on at least 40% of the American people - you know, the elitist white guilt ridden liberal democrats and the ignorant swing voters to vote my way, so screw it, I'm staying in the race. It's all about change, that's all these lemmings, uh, I mean the people want to hear, not that the change is going to be for the better, cuz' believe me it's not. Unless your a socialist that is. You think a 35% corporate tax is steep wait to you see what me and the democratic congress do to the man. Also, I know the surge is working but since my base is so stupid, er, I mean myopic without any sense of history or posterity we're gonna pull the troops as soon as I can sign the paper work. Thank you, I'm glad you liked the show. For my next trick I'm going to pull Teddy Kennedy out of my ass."
Here's some news for Hillary Clinton: The Bosnian war was over in 1996.
Those of us, like myself, who first went to Bosnia at the start of the war in 1992 and then, in 1994 and 1995, endured Bill Clinton's circumlocutions as we sat in an encircled Sarajevo watching pregnant women getting blown away by shelling from Serbian gunners, know that.
We know that as President Clinton mumbled about "enmities that go back 500 years, some would say almost a thousand years," Bosnia burned. We know what that talk of intractable grievances dating back to 995 was meant to communicate: No Western intervention could achieve anything in the Balkan pit.
Only after the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, three years after the initial Serbian genocide of 1992 against that population (and one year after a genocide on his watch in Rwanda), did the gelatinous Clinton develop some backbone. NATO bombed, Richard Holbrooke did his brilliant work at Dayton in November 1995, and the guns fell silent in Bosnia.
So, yes, the war was well and truly over when Hillary Clinton arrived in the northeastern Bosnian town of Tuzla on March 25, 1996. It was over, although she recently recalled "landing under sniper fire." It was over when "we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."
Oh, please. Researching a book, I also visited that base in 1996 to talk to Major General William Nash, then the commander of U.S. troops in Bosnia. If you'd lived the war, the base was a small miracle of American order and security.
Hillary Clinton's transference is intriguing: Suffering Sarajevans ran from snipers during the war her husband let fester. Invented danger, supposed to showcase bravery, may instead betray guilt.
But I'm not going to psychoanalyze the Clintons. I don't have the space to plumb such unquenchable ambition. Few do. Anyway, she now says she "misspoke" about Tuzla. End of story, you might say. But I'd say it's the beginning of another, more important one.
Clinton made up Bosnian sniper fire in an attempt to show that she's tougher than Barack Obama; that she's a hardened, seasoned, putative commander-in-chief ready to respond to crisis when the "red phone" of her fear-mongering ad rings.
John McCain's own recent "misspeaking" about Iran, placing (Sunni) Al Qaeda in (Shiite) Iran, also smacked of muscle-flexing: He wanted to signal toughness to the mullahs in Tehran, where Obama has suggested he'd seek dialogue.
But what the United States, and those that look to it, need now is not more braggadocio from the White House. We've had a seven-year dose. That's enough.
What's needed, rather, is some new, creative thinking about a changed world in which authoritarianism is enjoying a renaissance and America and its allies need to work together to spread peace, prosperity, freedom, equity, security and, yes, democracy.
U.S. hard power has not worked.
In what way hasn't it worked?
1) We used hard power on Afghanistan. The Taliban is out of power, the al-Qaeda bases were destroyed, and al-Q no longer uses the country as a sanctuary.
2) We used hard power on Iraq. Saddam is dead. His evil spawn sons are dead. The Ba'athist regime is destroyed. The Ba'athists are out of power and on the run. A democratic parliament is in power. The military is being rebuilt. A big chunk of the country is at peace.
Neither situation is perfect (of course). But hard power clearly changed both for the better.
The Iraq invasion was bungled. European soft power is insufficient.
Euopean soft power is flaccid. It's ridiculed because the world knows there is nothing behind it.
As Constanze Stelzenmüller of the German Marshall Fund notes in an important recent essay called "Trans-Atlantic Power Failures," a "European Union with 27 member states and a total of 1.8 million men and women under arms" is incapable of pacifying little Kosovo ("one quarter the size of Switzerland") on its own.
The Euros might as well name their new state 'Ruritania'. Their armies are flaccid because the Euros have refused to invest the money and moral fiber to make them effective.
The trans-Atlantic bond of Cold War years is gone forever. The alliance is going to be looser, more pragmatic. But it has to find "the right mix of idealism and realism," and a new cohesion, if one-pipeline Russia and one-party, Tibet-tormenting China are not to prosper with authoritarianism-for-export.
Foreign policy debate in this election campaign has been paltry. I'd like to hear something about GWOT - the "Global War on Terror" - the heart of U.S. national security strategy. It amounts to war without end because "terror" is a tactic and tactics don't surrender. GWOT should be abandoned: It's externally divisive and internally treacherous. Al Qaeda can be beaten sans GWOT.
I'd like some discussion of what NATO might do to help spread the Iraqi burden and ease a gradual extrication of most U.S. troops from Iraq.
The US doesn't need to be 'extricated' from Iraq. We'll leave Iraq when we're good and ready, and we'll march out on our own. We certainly don't need a balky, stubborn NATO tying our hands there. Did Mr. Cohen actually observe how well this has worked in Afghanistan?
On issues that cross borders - terrorism, financial market volatility, global warming - and on Iran, Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq - three things are essential: a new moral authority in the White House, the capacity for original strategic thought, and a 21st-century understanding of the border-jumping networks that have knit humanity into new relationships.
Obama, in his speech on race, did important things. He confronted reality, thought big, probed division, sketched convergence. He took Americans and many people beyond U.S. shores to a different mental place. Imagine that capacity applied to GWOT, Iran, Russia, China and Israel-Palestine.
Imagine all the people, you can do it if you try .....
Posted by: Fred ||
03/27/2008 00:00 ||
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HILLARY > either somebody in the Secret Service, etal. wilfully wants to lose their job, including pension, or is a turncoat; or Hillary's delegation came under sudden surprise? attack, ala CHENEY'S BOMB INCIDENT.
#3
Help me here. Did Billious Bill get the requisite UN and international approval for this war? Didn't he predict that all the troops would be home by Xmas?
I love the blind spots here. Wasn't Srebrenicia under Dutch protection at that time?
#4
Roger Cohen..never heard of him. He must be another one of those self-ingratiating asses who take a few facts, interject unaccountable 'personal experience' for emotive content, and weaves his own agenda and/or prejudices into the narrative, give it a snappy title and -boom- feel important enough to change the world.
"If you'd lived the war, the base was a small miracle of American order and security." ... "U.S. hard power has not worked."
Uhh huh.
#5
The fool that wrote this article needs to go read Kipling's "The Gods of the Copybook Headings." As a matter of fact, it would be a good thing if everyone in the whole U.K. read that again daily, for the rest of their lives.
Most particularly they should contemplate the stanza that reads as follows:
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us, and delivered us bound to our foe.
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said, "Stick to the Devil you know."
That's the righteous, irrefutable answer to the next thrice-damned Labour cretin who comes up with yet another White Paper proposing to shrink the MoD and spend the savings on Muslim immigrants.
Margaret Bourke-White was a correspondent and photographer for LIFE magazine during the WW II years. In September 1947, White went to Pakistan. She met Jinnah and wrote about what she found and heard in her book Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India,Simon and Schuster, New York, 1949. The following are the excerpts:
Pakistan was one month old. Karachi was its mushrooming capital. On the sandy fringes of the city an enormous tent colony had grown up to house the influx of minor government officials. There was only one major government official, Mahomed Ali Jinnah, and there was no need for Jinnah to take to a tent. The huge marble and sandstone Government House, vacated by British officialdom, was waiting. The Quaid-i-Azam moved in, with his sister, Fatima, as hostess. Mr. Jinnah had put on what his critics called his "triple crown": he had made himself Governor-General; he was retaining the presidency of the Muslim League — now Pakistan's only political party; and he was president of the country's lawmaking body, the Constituent Assembly.
"We never expected to get it so soon," Miss Fatima said when I called. "We never expected to get it in our lifetimes."
If Fatima's reaction was a glow of family pride, her brother's was a fever of ecstasy. Jinnah's deep-sunk eyes were pinpoints of excitement. His whole manner indicated that an almost overwhelming exaltation was racing through his veins. I had murmured some words of congratulation on his achievement in creating the world's largest Islamic nation.
"Oh, it's not just the largest Islamic nation. Pakistan is the fifth-largest nation in the world!"
The note of personal triumph was so unmistakable that I wondered how much thought he gave to the human cost: more Muslim lives had been sacrificed to create the new Muslim homeland than America, for example, had lost during the entire second World War. I hoped he had a constructive plan for the seventy million citizens of Pakistan. What kind of constitution did he intend to draw up?
"Of course it will be a democratic constitution; Islam is a democratic religion."
I ventured to suggest that the term "democracy" was often loosely used these days. Could he define what he had in mind?
"Democracy is not just a new thing we are learning," said Jinnah. "It is in our blood. We have always had our system of zakat — our obligation to the poor."
This confusion of democracy with charity troubled me. I begged him to be more specific.
"Our Islamic ideas have been based on democracy and social justice since the thirteenth century."
This mention of the thirteenth century troubled me still more. Pakistan has other relics of the Middle Ages besides "social justice" — the remnants of a feudal land system, for one. What would the new constitution do about that? .. "The land belongs to the God," says the Koran. This would need clarification in the constitution. Presumably Jinnah, the lawyer, would be just the person to correlate the "true Islamic principles" one heard so much about in Pakistan with the new nation's laws. But all he would tell me was that the constitution would be democratic because "the soil is perfectly fertile for democracy."
What plans did he have for the industrial development of the country? Did he hope to enlist technical or financial assistance from America?
"America needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America," was Jinnah's reply. "Pakistan is the pivot of the world, as we are placed" — he revolved his long forefinger in bony circles — "the frontier on which the future position of the world revolves." He leaned toward me, dropping his voice to a confidential note. "Russia," confided Mr. Jinnah, "is not so very far away."
This had a familiar ring. In Jinnah's mind this brave new nation had no other claim on American friendship than this - that across a wild tumble of roadless mountain ranges lay the land of the BoIsheviks. I wondered whether the Quaid-i-Azam considered his new state only as an armored buffer between opposing major powers. He was stressing America's military interest in other parts of the world. "America is now awakened," he said with a satisfied smile. Since the United States was now bolstering up Greece and Turkey, she should be much more interested in pouring money and arms into Pakistan. "If Russia walks in here," he concluded, "the whole world is menaced."
In the weeks to come I was to hear the Quaid-i-Azam's thesis echoed by government officials throughout Pakistan. "Surely America will build up our army," they would say to me. "Surely America will give us loans to keep Russia from walking in." But when I asked whether there were any signs of Russian infiltration, they would reply almost sadly, as though sorry not to be able to make more of the argument. "No, Russia has shown no signs of being interested in Pakistan."
This hope of tapping the U. S. Treasury was voiced so persistently that one wondered whether the purpose was to bolster the world against Bolshevism or to bolster Pakistan's own uncertain position as a new political entity. Actually, I think, it was more nearly related to the even more significant bankruptcy of ideas in the new Muslim state — a nation drawing its spurious warmth from the embers of an antique religious fanaticism, fanned into a new blaze.
Jinnah's most frequently used technique in the struggle for his new nation had been the playing of opponent against opponent. Evidently this technique was now to be extended into foreign policy. ....
No one would have been more astonished than Jinnah if he could have foreseen thirty or forty years earlier that anyone would ever speak of him as a "savior of Islam." In those days any talk of religion brought a cynical smile. He condemned those who talked in terms of religious rivalries, and in the stirring period when the crusade for freedom began sweeping the country he was hailed as "the embodied symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity." The gifted Congresswoman, Mrs. Naidu, one of Jinnah's closest friends, wrote poems extolling his role as the great unifier in the fight for independence. "Perchance it is written in the book of the future," ran one of her tributes, "that he, in some terrible crisis of our national struggle, will pass into immortality" as the hero of "the Indian liberation."
In the "terrible crisis," Mahomed Ali Jinnah was to pass into immortality, not as the ambassador of unity, but as the deliberate apostle of discord. What caused this spectacular renunciation of the concept of a united India, to which he had dedicated the greater part of his life? No one knows exactly. The immediate occasion for the break, in the mid-thirties, was his opposition to Gandhi's civil disobedience program. Nehru says that Jinnah "disliked the crowds of ill-dressed people who filled the Congress" and was not at home with the new spirit rising among the common people under Gandhi's magnetic leadership. Others say it was against his legal conscience to accept Gandhi's program. One thing is certain: the break with Gandhi, Nehru, and the other Congress leaders was not caused by any Hindu-Muslim issue.
In any case, Jinnah revived the moribund Muslim League in 1936 after it had dragged through an anemic thirty years' existence, and took to the religious soapbox. He began dinning into the ears of millions of Muslims the claim that they were downtrodden solely because of Hindu domination. During the years directly preceding this move on his part, an unprecedented degree of unity had developed between Muslims and Hindus in their struggle for independence from the British Raj. The British feared this unity, and used their divide-and-rule tactics to disrupt it. Certain highly placed Indians also feared unity, dreading a popular movement which would threaten their special position. Then another decisive factor arose. Although Hindus had always been ahead of Muslims in the industrial sphere, the great Muslim feudal landlords now had aspirations toward industry. From these wealthy Muslims, who resented the well-established Hindu competition, Jinnah drew his powerful supporters. One wonders whether Jinnah was fighting to free downtrodden Muslims from domination or merely to gain an earmarked area, free from competition, for this small and wealthy clan.
The trend of events in Pakistan would support the theory that Jinnah carried the banner of the Muslim landed aristocracy, rather than that of the Muslim masses he claimed to champion. There was no hint of personal material gain in this. Jinnah was known to be personally incorruptible, a virtue which gave him a great strength with both poor and rich. The drive for personal wealth played no part in his politics. It was a drive for power. ......
Less than three months after Pakistan became a nation, Jinnah's Olympian assurance had strangely withered. His altered condition was not made public. "The Quaid-i-Azam has a bad cold" was the answer given to inquiries.
Only those closest to him knew that the "cold" was accompanied by paralyzing inability to make even the smallest decisions, by sullen silences striped with outbursts of irritation, by a spiritual numbness concealing something close to panic underneath. I knew it only because I spent most of this trying period at Government House, attempting to take a new portrait of Jinnah for a Life cover.
The Quaid-i-Azam was still revered as a messiah and deliverer by most of his people. But the "Great Leader" himself could not fail to know that all was not well in his new creation, the nation; the nation that his critics referred to as the "House that Jinnah built." The separation from the main body of India had been in many ways an unrealistic one. Pakistan raised 75 per cent of the world's jute supply; the processing mills were all in India. Pakistan raised one third of the cotton of India, but it had only one thirtieth of the cotton mills. Although it produced the bulk of Indian skins and hides, all the leather tanneries were in South India. The new state had no paper mills, few iron foundries. Rail and road facilities, insufficient at best, were still choked with refugees. Pakistan has a superbly fertile soil, and its outstanding advantage is self-sufficiency in food, but this was threatened by the never-ending flood of refugees who continued pouring in long after the peak of the religious wars had passed.
With his burning devotion to his separate Islamic nation, Jinnah had taken all these formidable obstacles in his stride. But the blow that finally broke his spirit struck at the very name of Pakistan. While the literal meaning of the name is "Land of the Pure," the word is a compound of initial letters of the Muslim majority provinces which Jinnah had expected to incorporate: P for the Punjab, A for the Afghans' area on the Northwest Frontier, S for Sind, -tan for Baluchistan. But the K was missing.
Kashmir, India's largest princely state, despite its 77 per cent Muslim population, had not fallen into the arms of Pakistan by the sheer weight of religious majority. Kashmir had acceded to India, and although it was now the scene of an undeclared war between the two nations, the fitting of the K into Pakistan was left in doubt. With the beginning of this torturing anxiety over Kashmir, the Quaid-i-Azam's siege of bad colds began, and then his dismaying withdrawal into himself. ....
Later, reflecting on what I had seen, I decided that this desperation was due to causes far deeper than anxiety over Pakistan's territorial and economic difficulties. I think that the tortured appearance of Mr. Jinnah was an indication that, in these final months of his life, he was adding up his own balance sheet. Analytical, brilliant, and no bigot, he knew what he had done. Like Doctor Faustus, he had made a bargain from which he could never be free. During the heat of the struggle he had been willing to call on all the devilish forces of superstition, and now that his new nation had been achieved the bigots were in the position of authority. The leaders of orthodoxy and a few "old families" had the final word and, to perpetuate their power, were seeing to it that the people were held in the deadening grip of religious superstition.
Posted by: john frum ||
03/27/2008 12:46 ||
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"...embers of an antique religious fanaticism, fanned into a new blaze...."
She seems to have seen with a clear eye well into the future.
ITS creator and governor general, M. A. Jinnah, has described Pakistan as "the biggest Moslem state... and the fifth biggest sovereign state in the world." Though the second point might be disputed, Pakistan is unquestionably worthy of attention, for it is situated just where the Anglo-American and Soviet orbits touch in the strategic Central Asian theater.
Seldom has a new state been created under such contradictory pressures or with such a load of full-grown problems. Control of the government is vested in a few top officials, supported by a powerful bureaucracy, but Britain has a say in matters of defense, finance, and foreign policy. Already the government is shot through with corruption and nepotism. Social life is dominated by Mohammedan concepts, including the subjection of women. The structure of the state, however, has not yet had time to harden, and internal strains may reshape it in another image.
The policy of isolating Hamas and applying sanctions to Gaza has been a predictable failure. Violence to both Gazans and Israelis is rising. Economic conditions are ruinous, generating anger and despair. The credibility of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and other pragmatic forces has been grievously damaged. The peace process is in tatters.
Meanwhile, Hamas's hold on the Gaza Strip, purportedly the principal target of the policy, has been strengthened. Since Hamas assumed full control in June 2007 the already-tight sanctions, imposed following the Islamists' January 2006 electoral victory, have been tightened further. Israel upon which Gazans depend almost entirely for relations with the outside world even curtailed cross-border passenger and goods traffic.
Israel has hardly been alone. The West Bank-based Palestinian Authority, seeking to undermine Hamas's standing, has done its part to cut off Gaza and prevent the normal functioning of government. Feeble protests aside, the international community has at best been a model of passivity.
The logic behind the policy was that by putting pressure on Hamas, they could prevent rocket launches into Israel. This would demonstrate to the Palestinian people that Hamas could not deliver and ought not be trusted. The hope was that the West Bank, buoyed by economic growth, a loosening of Israeli security measures, not to mention a revived peace process, would serve as an attractive countermodel. But the theory has not delivered on any of these counts.
Within Gaza the debate about whether the sanctions have helped or hurt Hamas's efforts to consolidate power is, for all intents and purposes, over. The Islamist movement has come close to establishing an effective monopoly on the use of force and a near-monopoly on open political activity. It has refashioned the legal and legislative systems. And it enjoys freer rein to shape society through management of the health, education, and religious sectors.
By boycotting the security, judicial, and other government sectors, the Palestinian Authority turned an intended punitive measure into an unintentional gift, creating a vacuum that Hamas has filled. The absence of any international involvement has meant the absence of leverage. The closure of the crossings has caused the private sector to collapse, eroding ordinary citizens' traditional coping mechanisms, increasing their dependence on those who govern, and weakening a constituency traditionally loyal to the Palestinian Authority.
Some will argue that the isolation policy is working because Hamas has lost popularity, which even its leaders acknowledge. But intense public frustration in the Gaza Strip cannot be the measure of success. Gazans may not be satisfied with Hamas, but their anger continues to be directed at Israel and the West, as well as at Fatah, which many see as complicit in the siege.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/27/2008 00:00 ||
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#1
Mr. Evans must be a BHO Democrat; he would talk to anyone. What was the name of the guy acting as a middleman between the Democrat Rep. and FARC?
#3
Punishing the Japanese in early 1941 also backfired, despite ongoing face-to-face negotiations.
Talks with Hitler, however, achieved "peace in our time". The time just didn't last very long.
Posted by: Bobby ||
03/27/2008 6:03 Comments ||
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#4
Just making them suffer unspeakable torment must be worth something. After all they want death as much as the Israelis want life, by their own words.
#5
Send Evans in on foot with some flowers and a copy of the Koran. He will save us all. Or be tortured, paraded on television and beheaded. Hard to say which is more likely.
#6
Feeble protests aside, the international community has at best been a model of passivity The absence of any international involvement has meant the absence of leverage.
Its truly ironic that Evans would suggest that passivity has helped cause this failure when that is precisely what he and his group has lobbied for. How wonderful it must be to live in 'Captain Biggles' world. To live in a world where the closest his manicured nails ever get to dirt is a non-chilled salad fork. His is a world where rolling up your sleeves requires one to first have his man-servant remove his Faberge cufflinks. And Heavy lifting simply means occasionally having to shift his mistress Gucci handbags for more leg room on his private jet. Yes it must be wonderful indeed. After all, a career based solely on maintaining the status-quo in world affairs must be the envy of every global elite.
Conservatives such as Noonan hoped that 9/11 would bring back the best of the 1940s and 50s, playing Pearl Harbor to a new era of patriotism and solidarity. Many on the left feared that it would restore the worst of the same era, returning us to the shackles of censorship and conformism, jingoism and Joe McCarthy. But as far as Hollywood is concerned, another decade entirely seems to have slouched round again: the paranoid, cynical, end-of-empire 1970s.
We expected John Wayne; we got Jason Bourne instead.
The Bourne movies are the first major action franchise of the new millennium; theyre also the highest-grossing example of the revival of the paranoid style in American cinema. Matt Damons Bourne marries the efficiency of James Bond to the politics of Noam Chomsky. Hes imperial overreach and blowback personifiedthe carefully brainwashed product of a covert CIA program who goes off the reservation and starts taking down his superiors, a succession of jowly, corrupt agents of the American empire. The Bourne sagas anti-government paranoia reached its peak in last years $227 million-grossing Bourne Ultimatum, which exposes the CIA as an all-powerful bureaucracy that can track anybody, anywhere, and is comfortable wiping out journalists, innocent bystanders, and even its own agents in the service of dubious war-on-terrorism aims. Where does it end? the lone free-thinking spook, Joan Allen, demands of her superior. It ends when weve won, he snaps, before ordering up another execution.
Such fear thy government anxieties are always laced throughout American pop culture. But they belong most of all to the 1970s, when the one-two punch of Vietnam and Watergate sparked recurring visions of isolated Americans trapped in the gears of an irreducibly complex conspiracy: Gene Hackmans surveillance expert in The Conversation (1974), tearing up his apartment in search of proof that his every move is being watched; Robert Redfords CIA agent in Three Days of the Condor (1975), forced to go on the run from shadowy forces within his own government; Warren Beattys reporter in The Parallax View (1974), manipulated by a sinister corporation to become the lone gunman patsy in its latest bought-and-paid-for assassination.
Now they belong to us as well. Hollywoods highest-profile conspiracy theorist is, of course, Michael Moore. But the more telling figure is Stephen Gaghan, the screenwriter for Steven Soderberghs Oscar winner, Traffic (2000), who moved on to script and direct Syriana (2005), the first major Middle East movie released after the invasion of Iraq. Traffic and Syriana are superficially similar, offering kaleidoscopic visions of American policy that rove across borders and multiple points of view. But whereas the former takes care to present the architects of our failed drug policy as decent (if misguided) people struggling with the moral compromises required in a fallen world, Syriana eschews nuance entirely, tracing all the ills of Mesopotamia to a malign nexus of Texas oilmen, neocons, and a trigger-happy CIA, and culminating with the agency ordering a missile strike on an inconveniently liberal Arab leader to preserve an American oil companys bargaining position.
#1
Oh, dear - this is why I turned to writing historical novels. "To Truckee's Trail" began as a lament about how there were no movies I wanted to see, in the spring of 2004. Nothing that told our stories, that harked back to where we came from, that painted our ancestors (literal or metaphorical) as brave, decent, competant, honorable people.
We need our stories, not some politically correct wankfest that will make some Hollywierd denizen (and their European fans) just go all over goose-bumpy with chills 'n thrills over their bravery in pissing on our institutions and our ancestors.
Indie movie making, indie writing may be where it's at, because we need our stories. We need to remember where we came from and who we are. We need to take back our stories and remember who we are. Hollywierd won't do it for us. It's up to us, that Army of Davids.
Oh, and my follow-up book(s) is about how the German colonies in Texas came to be, and how they worked out their place as Americans.
You didn't know about how a bunch of German noblemen and so-gooders tried to plant a colony of good German farmers and craftsmen in 1840s Texas?
Well, thats another damn good story that Hollywierd has tried to keep from you!
#2
What America needs is a combination of American International, Hammer and Golan-Globus studios, cranking out all manner of entertaining movies.
All they really need are three things: small budgets, plots and acting. 10 movies that cost $2M each and make $30M each in the box office makes a lot more profit than a $200M movie that makes $210M at the box office.
#4
"exposes the CIA as an all-powerful bureaucracy that can track anybody, anywhere, and is comfortable wiping out journalists, innocent bystanders, and even its own agents in the service of dubious war-on-terrorism aims."
-only hollywood could create such a fantasy. If only the above were true.
#5
the next film will be "stop-loss". Supposedly about a SNCO whose called back to iraq on the "stop-loss" plan, something we did away with over 2 yrs ago. The bigger issue is that any military guy tells you he had no idea stop-loss was a possibility is either full of shit or plain stupid. Especially as the character is supposed to be a combat hardened Staff Sergeant. Of course, the average dork will think it's real and that's another myth I'll have to dispell to potential officer wannabes.
#6
"Whats old is new again"
It shows how obsolete hollywood is that they rely on re-makes and big-name stars to sell films. Manchurian/Mesopotamia Candidate is a fine example. Saw the original and - though may be unpopular - will never see another denzel movie again. Looking back, his whole career (yes a talented actor) choice about the message the movie sends is absolute crap. And I have been noted that "don't judge and actor/esses own beliefs based on what they film" Well that bullcrap. They read the script and, especially somebody high billing, choose what they want to do.
I was upset for a little bit about the HD vs bluray thing for a while then, "Hey, there ain't s*t coming out anyways and I already have my copy of 300 (which, by the way, Gates of Fire was a great read before watching the movie). We Were Soldiers, Troy (to an extent only bc I was familiar with Illiad), then I have to go back to Aliens for a good war movie. OK, Gettysburg was pretty good but again I had read the book/knew history.
Is 'stop-loss' even a term? You real military people will have to clue me in on this, because the best movie MTV has ever made was Joe's Apartment. The ads just show a lot of actors in cowboy hats with sticky phrases.
Why not a movie about The Gallic Wars - a trilogy using the same tech as the opening scene of Gladiator, Shakespearean actors and stuntmen? Hannibal by Harold Lamb is already written. but it is all about the vampire killing 'take the shot' cloony, crappy rhetoric (can't handle the truth cruise), and uninspiring stories (bored identity group, maybe the books were better I don't know because now I know I will never read them).
Gotta agree with Bright Pebbles:
The market is out there else Halo 3 would not have out-earned major films, CoD, all those games. Me, Ace Combat was fine but no candle to Wings Over Vietnam - would love an update to Steel Panthers III/MBT.
In my humble opinion, hollywood knows it is doomed so they are attempting to make themselves better than the independant movie maker, much like how the established news sources are downplaying the internet. Ironically (again) IMHO by establshing themselves they fail to bring up new actors or take chances on plots. If people get used to star wars I vs. star wars IV graphics - and in fact the next star wars movies will be all CG as I understan, and they will on account of video games, then all somebody needs is a studio to film (plus equipment et al) and insert own background. Of course there is much more to making a movie, but there always seems to be recreationists out there ready for a battle or go CG as Medieval II has layed the foundation for.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
The Bourne movies are the first major action franchise of the new millennium; theyre also the highest-grossing example of the revival of the paranoid style in American cinema. Matt Damons Bourne marries the efficiency of James Bond to the politics of Noam Chomsky. Hes imperial overreach and blowback personifiedthe carefully brainwashed product of a covert CIA program who goes off the reservation and starts taking down his superiors, a succession of jowly, corrupt agents of the American empire. The Bourne sagas anti-government paranoia reached its peak in last years $227 million-grossing Bourne Ultimatum, which exposes the CIA as an all-powerful bureaucracy that can track anybody, anywhere, and is comfortable wiping out journalists, innocent bystanders, and even its own agents in the service of dubious war-on-terrorism aims. Where does it end? the lone free-thinking spook, Joan Allen, demands of her superior. It ends when weve won, he snaps, before ordering up another execution. 
