Blogito, Ergo Sum
by Gregg Calkins
Friday the 24th of November 2006
Carol
and I continue to fight the formatting problem, nothing posted yet although a
couple have been prepared. We cannot get
things to cooperate. I’m trying a new
approach this morning to see what happens.
I’m
going to try a new approach and move south if this weather doesn’t warm up a
bit…still a bare 72 at 9:30 in the morning and I’m wearing long pants while my
bare feet are letting me know they are bare.
Since I hate wearing shoes and socks this means I am vaguely but
detectably uncomfortable all the time.
About all I can figure is that George Bush has somehow fouled up the
climate of the entire northern hemisphere, he’s guilty of fouling up everything
else…hey, wait a sec, though, wouldn’t this mean he was also reversing global
warming?
From
our on-line Costa Rica
newspaper:
Costa Rica is
among the top 28 countries that are full democracies, according to a new index
by the Intelligence Unit of the magazine The Economist.
Of the 165 countries and two territories that were rated, just 28 were
determined to be “full democracies” and only two of those countries are located
in Latin America. Costa Rica was counted among the elite group as it tied
for 25th with Mauritius, the only African country to make the cut.
Uruguay, ranked 28th, is the only other Latin country to join Costa Rica as a
full democracy, the report said.
Concerning
civil participation, the report lists apathy and abstention as unfavorable
factors in a democracy. Canada and the United States, which in
parliamentary elections have been hovering around the 50 to 60 percent turnout
rate in some of the latest elections, ranked 9th and 17th.
As for the rest of the countries, 54 were rated as “flawed democracies” and 30
as “hybrid regimes.” The remaining 55 nations are “authoritarian regimes”
with North Korea receiving the worst overall ranking.
They
did not include a link to The Economist so maybe I’ll come across it
elsewhere. I mean, how can we endure not
knowing who the top 16 are, at least? As
well as who was 24th.
New
York Times headline today:
A powerful
legislative bloc loyal to firebrand Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr threatened to
withdraw from the government if Iraq’s prime minister attends a scheduled
meeting with President Bush in Jordan next week.
Time
to sing him the old song, I think. You
know, the one that goes “goodbye my phony imam baby, goodbye my phony imam
pal…” They like to talk about all of the
mistakes made in this war, not simply taking him out the very first time he
participated in military action against US troops.
I’ve
read the quote in several slightly different versions so I don’t know which one
is accurate, but Napoleon is reported to have said words to the effect that if
you ‘say’ or ‘set out to’ or ‘intend to’ take Vienna, then DO THAT! I suspect Sun-Tzu said it better, but the
point is the same: we said, intended and even set out to resolve the Iraqi
situation by regime change in Iraq, toppling Saddam to replace him with a
democratic regime. Clinton signed this
intent into public law in 1998.
Not
only didn’t he do anything about it but George Bush, as much as I like him,
decided we should try to do it in civilized sort of way. In retrospect, especially, it seems clearer
that we should have gone in with overwhelming force and simply smashed
everything related to Saddam completely flat and been done with it. Instead we tried to win hearts and minds,
limit collateral damage, not make any of the “Arab street” upset, listen to
“world” opinion, etc etc etc, and as a result we didn’t do any of those things
well.
The
“listen to world opinion” caution is about the stupidest thing I have ever
heard, deserving an even-more-scornful reply than Kissinger made when someone
suggested that he call Europe. As I cited
earlier, there are 167 countries and territories in the world, according to The
Economist. If they (surprise!) are
not all in agreement, to which ones do you listen?
Do
you rank them by size, population, relative military strength, or how
else? Or would you do something like I
would think best, assuming you were going to do such a dumb thing at all, and
that is begin with only the 28 ‘full’ democracies?
If
so, and if they aren’t all in agreement, would you then pare the list down to
just the 16 countries higher on “the list” (made by someone according to their
criteria) than you are?
Presumably,
since they are full democracies, the only way you could really determine what
“their” opinions were would be for all of them to sit down and put everything
you intended to do to a vote.
Otherwise,
what? I mean, let’s just try to define
what “American opinion” is, for instance.
Is it what George Bush says, or Nancy Pelosi, John McCain, Donald
Rumsfeld, James Baker, former presidents Clinton, Bush or Carter, the Hollywood
Oscar Committee, the New York Times editors, or somebody’s recent non-standard
poll? What’s that you say…Katie Couric?
This
criticism that the US has damaged its standing where “world opinion” is
concerned is about as unintelligent a charge as I can imagine even being
conceived. What the hell do they mean
and where do they get their information?
Aha…that should give you a clue, should it not?
I’d
save a lot of time, myself, by beginning with a list of countries whose opinion
did not matter to me in the slightest, no matter whether for or against. No, wait…that would take too long…
I
guess some of these guys are writing columns because that’s how they get paid. How else do you figure this conclusion by David
Ignatius?
The hard work
of building a new Middle East will be done by the Arabs, or it won't happen.
What would be unforgivable would be to assume that, in this part of the world,
the rule of law is inherently impossible.
If
true, why then did he say, slightly earlier:
But the
killers always seem to win in Lebanon. That's the cynics' rejoinder, and,
looking at the record of the past quarter-century, it's hard to argue
otherwise. The healthy parts of Arab life keep being overwhelmed by the
sickness.
So…is
it wrong to believe it is inherently impossible to believe the Arabs have to do
it or it can’t be done, yet they aren’t succeeding? Twenty-five years of watching the failure of
the Arabs to succeed alone makes on a cynic?
At one point Ignatius says:
The idea that
America is going to save the Arab world from itself is seductive, but it's
wrong.
Okay,
so we won’t do it ourselves, what then, just step aside? After all, a moment before he said:
The more the
United States and its allies try to support the forces of moderation, the more
they seem to undermine them.
So
what am I to understand here? Things
have been going to hell for a quarter of a century, we’re cynical to even
notice that, we not only cannot save their world for the Arabs, we cannot even
support the forces of moderation without undermining them.
Tell
me, sir, what are we to do?
We have
watched in Iraq an excruciating demonstration of our inability to stop the
killers. We aren't tough enough for it or smart enough -- and in the end it
isn't our problem.
Ah,
I got it! We not only aren’t tough
enough or smart enough, we actually weaken those who are by lending them
support, but those moderate forces are losing and have been losing for a
quarter-century…although only a cynic might note that.
But,
hey, what’s to worry? In the end it
isn’t our problem.
Listen,
things could be worse. He could be an
elected Democrat in congress.
Charles
Krauthammer remains at the extreme opposite end of the common-sense spectrum
when he touches on my earlier discussion about racism and intent, in this case
having to do with anti-Semitism:
…amid this
gathering darkness, an alarming number of liberal Jews are seized with the
notion that the real threat lurks deep in the hearts of American Protestants,
most specifically Southern evangelicals. Some fear that their children are
going to be converted; others, that below the surface lies a pogrom waiting to
happen; still others, that the evangelicals will take power in Washington and
enact their own sharia law.
This is all
quite crazy. America is the most welcoming, religiously tolerant, philo-Semitic
country in the world. No nation since Cyrus the Great's Persia has done more
for the Jews. And its reward is to be exposed as latently anti-Semitic by an
itinerant Jew looking for laughs and, he solemnly assures us, for the path to
the Holocaust?
Look. Harry
Truman used to tell derisive Jewish jokes. Richard Nixon said nasty things
about Jews in government and elsewhere. Who cares? Truman and Nixon were the
two greatest friends of the Jews in the entire postwar period: Truman secured
them a refuge in the state of Israel, and Nixon saved it from extinction during
the Yom Kippur War.
…it is a sign
of the disorientation of a distressed and confused people that we should find
it so difficult to distinguish our friends from our enemies.
Just
to judge by the amount of heated rhetoric and criticism the man has drawn from
the Arabs and their supporters for his defense of Israel, you would think that
the Jews would distinguish Bush as
perhaps the greatest friend and supporter they have ever had. Every bitter complaint you read—like those
from al-Sadr today—includes a reference somewhere within it to America’s
support of Israel.
Why
is it that wise men throughout history have sought to teach us to place more
worth on the things that people do rather than what they say…and
we still haven’t always learned?
Just this
month, Tehran hosted an international festival of Holocaust cartoons featuring
enough hooked noses and horns to give Goebbels a posthumous smile. Throughout
the Islamic world, newspapers and television, schoolbooks and sermons are
filled with the most vile anti-Semitism.
That’s
always puzzled me, too…how can those peoples “throughout the Islamic world” be
guilty of anti-Semitism, since they are also Semites?
The appearance
of the arctic bird nearly 100 miles east of San Diego would be the first
reported in California and would place it hundreds of miles farther south than
it had ever been seen.
The gull,
which normally breeds in Siberia or Greenland, rarely appears south of Alaska,
and is only spotted in even the northern part of the lower 48 states every few
years.
Wait
a minute! What the heck IS this, more
evidence of global cooling? I mean, you
can bet your bippy if they had spotted a southern bird out of place in Alaska
that it would have been ‘proof’ of global warming!
I’m
enjoying watching the Democrats govern, so far:
Even
before Democrats won control of the House, reports surfaced that Mrs. Pelosi
would skip over Rep. Jane Harman of California, the highest ranking Democrat on
the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and opt instead for Rep.
Alcee L. Hastings of Florida or Silvestre Reyes of Texas, the second- and third-ranking
on the panel.
Mrs. Harman is backed by many centrists and is seen as
hawkish on defense matters, while Mr. Hastings has the support of the powerful
Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) but is tainted by his impeachment and removal
as a federal judge in 1989.
Mr. Reyes has the backing of many Hispanic members and
of those who want a compromise candidate.
So you can have an impeached judge the Black
Caucus likes, a “toss them a taco” Hispanic as a compromise, or a qualified
person Pelosi doesn’t like. Now that’s
what I call building a consensus congress.
I
find all of this incredibly good comic theater!
Hastings is writing a letter, asking for support, saying, among other
things:
He said he has
been the victim of "misleading, poorly informed, misinformed and sometimes
venomous attacks ... by pundits, politicians, and editors screaming the word
'impeachment,' " while making no mention of his acquittal in a court of
law.
Are you ready for this? Pelosi was one of the people who voted for
his impeachment! In fact, if I remember
the vote total correctly, it was 402-2 for his impeachment.
Israeli forces
killed seven Palestinians, including a top militant commander, in raids in
northern Gaza yesterday while a 57-year-old grandmother blew herself up near
soldiers.
Spectators
marveled. Most women her age, someone
pointed out, are great-grandmothers.
Slipped
out for lunch today at one of the local joints, appropriately named “the stop”
since it’s right across from the bus stop.
As such it does a high-volume local business, together with the lower
economic class of young tourist. They
have remarkably good food and an excellent personal-sized pizza for about $3.50
and a bottle of beer is $1.50. The front
is open to the street and one side used to be, but expansion forced them to
wall it off and ruin the air-flow. Good
food, good price, but no ambiance…well, what there is is typical bus-stop
ambiance, let’s say.
Not
that we have a bus-stop, as such. The
center of town, as is the case of most Spanish towns, is organized around the
central park in front of the church, which in the case of La Fortuna is quite a
large park. The main drag going one-way
to the west (to Lake Arenal and the volcano) uses the entire south side of the
park as the place where busses stop.
This is where all of the taxi-drivers, would-be tour guides, and minor
thieves hang out to wait for new arrivals.
On the north side of the park, a two-way street at that point, some
other busses stop, mostly the east-bound plus some of the big busses used for a
couple of the major tourist attractions just outside town, notably Tabacón Hot
Springs, one place every CR visitor should include for at least one day. It has priced itself out of our market as
well as the locals, but for a tourist coming this far to spend his money on an
experience it is something I would highly recommend.
If
you like people-watching, and a relatively-inexpensive but good lunch, La
Parada is great. However, it’s a
picnic-table place, noisy and smelly because of the busses, presently a prime
hang-out for some bees who liked the food, too, and of course the local street
dogs. Carol and I like to take our
books, or her crossword puzzles, to enjoy while we eat, but it’s a noisy place
for that.
All
of the restaurants in Costa Rica tend to be noisy. All are open (VERY few are enclosed and
air-conditioned!) and all front on the main roads and streets in town. In the case of La Fortuna we have only three
east-west streets running most of (but not all of) the way through town,
so they get ALL of the truck traffic, bus traffic, noisy motorcycle (the people
I’d like to kill) traffic, etc, so it’s
really hard to find a quiet place to slip away.
I’m
not really surprised when Liberals deliberately misstate the Kissinger quote,
but I’m disappointed when someone like Daniel
Henninger falls for it:
As Norman
Podhoretz delineated in the September issue of Commentary, columns and articles
in journals of foreign policy are equating the tsunami of negativity rolling
over Iraq with repudiation of the Bush Doctrine in toto.
One might have
expected most of the disagreement to center on the doctrine's assertion of a
right to pre-emptive attack. Instead, Iraq's troubles have been conflated with
a general repudiation of the U.S.'s ability to abet democratic aspiration
elsewhere in the world.
It is
certainly possible that the Iraq effort will, in some obvious sense,
"fail." Henry Kissinger now says "victory," defined as an
Iraqi government gaining political control over the entire country, is not
possible. But we might want to think some before we toss out the infant Bush
Doctrine with the Iraqi bathwater.
I
agree with the conclusion, but let’s try to include ALL of what Kissinger
actually said, which I copied as:
"If you
mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi government that can be established and
whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control
and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political
processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is
possible," -- Henry Kissinger
I
bolded the extremely pertinent part. He
definitely does not say that military victory, even by that broad definition,
would fail or was not possible. He said,
and was sadly correct, that it was going to take longer than the fickle
democracies were going to give it! Huge
difference.
As stated, the
doctrine's strategy is "to help make the world not just safer but
better." Some conservatives have denounced the "better world"
part as utopian overstretch. Beyond that, the document lists as its goals the
aspirations of human dignity, strengthening alliances to "defeat"
terrorism, working with others to defuse regional conflicts, promoting global
growth through free markets and trade and "opening societies and building
the infrastructure of democracy."
… The sense grows daily among the
American public that helping "them" is hopeless and "we"
should pull back to our shores.
Oddly,
the former ideals were always associated with liberalism, with Democrats, the
concept of a better society and a better world, while the argument was that the
conservatives, the Republicans, didn’t really care about anyone else, isolationism
suited them just fine. What a change
now.
Like the
Europeans, we may talk ourselves into a weariness with the world and its
various, unremitting violences. … Does this overstate the buildup of anti-Bush,
anti-Iraq sentiment? … Maybe. But even the
realists and cynics might concede there has been some benefit, perhaps going
back as far as Plymouth Rock, in having one nation standing for the conceit, or
even the ideal, that men elsewhere with democratic aspirations could at least
count on us for active support. This is the core idea in the Bush Doctrine. If
its critics don't start making some distinctions, they may discover that
profligacy of opinion in our time carries a very steep price.
Bush’s
critics fail to deal with one issue so central to the argument that I cannot
understand how they fail to recognize they MUST resolve it.
This
is the simple fact that it may not be, this time, and perhaps it never really
was before, OUR choice. We can decide to
get out of Iraq, leave Iran alone, let North Korea’s neighbors resolve that
problem…like he says, let the rest of the world resolve their own various,
unremitting violences. We can stop
attempting to practice democratic principles anywhere but here at home.
Can’t
we?
People
are always arguing about those who will not learn from history, therefore
doomed to repeat its mistakes, but they always have some particular history in
mind when they say that. Right now the
negative camp’s view of history is clearly Vietnam. That war, they say confidently, is the
comparison.
I
suggest we need to go a little further back to find the correct parallel…all
the way back to the time when Islam came into being in the sandy wastes of
Arabia and then quickly conquered most of the known world, including Europe.
What
do you think? Did Europe have the luxury
back then of saying they preferred not to get involved in the various
unremitting violences of Persia et al?