17 December 2006, a Sunday...Christmas shopping begins tomorrow!
Luis must be planning on doing some, too, because he showed up for work at 0730 this morning, it's sunny and mildly warm with just a trace of a breeze. I'll get out a bit later with the pressure-washer. For those of you contemplating moving to the tropics, by all means bring a good pressure-washer or else plan on buying one the instant you arrive. You will be using it constantly. Also a weed-whacker, although there are plenty of neighborhood guys, at least here in rural La Fortuna, who do that for a living.
Well, just a moment for coffee and the New York Times, at least, to get my blood up to speed before I put it to work...
SOMEONE in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office has gotten everybody on this city’s holiday party circuit talking, simply by floating an unlikely Iraq proposal that is worthy of a certain mid-19th century British naturalist with a fascination for natural selection.
We shall call it the Darwin Principle.
The Darwin Principle, Beltway version, basically says that Washington should stop trying to get Sunnis and Shiites to get along and instead just back the Shiites, since there are more of them anyway and they’re likely to win in a fight to the death. After all, the proposal goes, Iraq is 65 percent Shiite and only 20 percent Sunni.
Sorry, Sunnis.
The Darwin Principle is radical, decisive and most likely not going anywhere. But the fact that it has even been under discussion, no matter how briefly, says a lot about the dearth of good options facing the Bush administration and the yearning in this city for some masterstroke to restore optimism about the war.
Actually, it's an excellent idea, one the Sunnis would understand. By now surely everyone knows the Sunnis used to rule the country absolutely, meaning that their control was total, not proportional, and what they are really mad about is losing that power. What they are fighting for now is to get as much of it back as they can, before they are forced to settle.
This is called human nature, and it's about time some people started recognizing it. It's the same in business negotiations, peace treaties, home sales, husband/wife arguments, Congress...everywhere. People strike the deal and sign on the bottom line only after they conclude they have gotten all that they are able to get for their side.
The Sunnis figure they haven't reached that point yet--and the evidence so far seems to be on their side, because every time they fight they are given a bit more, people keep arguing they need to be better represented (hah!)--so they will continue until such time as we draw the line and say, okay, we're going with the Shiites now since you Sunnis don't seem to want to accept the situation.
At that point the Sunnis will strike their deal. And if they don't...well, hey, Darwin had his point, after all.
However, I admit to being prejudiced: I'm not on the Sunni side of this street-fight.
And why is it that the press is suddenly having such trouble with majority-rule democracy? Why shouldn't we support the wishes of the 65% majority?
Harry Reid cracked me up several times on the Sunday tv program, but the one I really liked, given the recent past history, was his firm statement to Stephanopoulos that "it's a slim majority...but it IS a majority, and we intend to..."
I laughed, remembering how many times he complained in the past that Republicans had no right to do this or that because of their slim majority!
He had me going, though. Talking about one of his friends, he referred to the man's son, a Vietnam vet...oops, he meant Afghanistan. Vietnam simply popped out of his mouth like a cork from a champagne bottle, he couldn't help himself. George let him get away without comment, of course.
But the best of all, especially after all of the complaints about Senator/Doctor Frist's medical analyses in the past, was when Step asked Reid, after Reid described in glowing terms his friendship with the stricken Senator Johnson and his recent bedside visit, "was he conscious?"
"George," Senator Reid said, "I'm no doctor."
Republican Senators can diagnose vegetative states via television. Democrat Senators cannot even diagnose consciousness sitting by a bedside.
Reid is simply oblivious to some of the things he finally does say...he was complaining, for instance, that in the Iraqi war so far 30 troops from Nevada had been lost. Since about 100 times that many were lost in New York City on one morning, I thought that a rather silly comment. Of course, Reid no doubt things the two events are completely unrelated.
Which I think is particularly humorous since he then went on to lecture how the entire Middle East interacted and all of the players needed to be included, Iran and Syria especially, and the Israelis were part of the problem...they all interact as one regional problem, all of them are involved, except when Reid doesn't want to believe that they do.
Other great lines: "I have no military experience but I have political experience..." And this classic: "Halliburton has made enough money in Iraq."
Then, after all of Reid's previous criticism of Bush for his inability to make a decision about what to do now in Iraq ("all options are on the table"), George asked Reid if he would support Obama's position that Congress needed an independent oversight commission on ethics: "We're going to take a look at everything."
I'll give George credit for trying to ask him that question in a couple of different ways, but Reid bobbed and weaved like Ali in his prime, only acknowledging that "of course" Obama would be free to submit his bill for debate. Obama was no doubt glad to be freed once more by another white man.
Reid, happy in his Ol' Massah role, doesn't want any outside independent commission, that much was plain.
The debate between retired general Keene and retired vice-admiral Sestak, now an incoming Representative, was interesting, from my point of view, because of Sestak's unwillingness to admit the obvious. Keene kept saying that security for the Iraqi population was fundamental to the issue. We should all know this, of course, anyhow, because the goal of any insurgency employing terrorism as a tactic is to make the population feel insecure, not whip the government's military. A car-bomb which kills 50 Iraqi ditch-diggers is not intended to win a war, it is intended to instill fear and insecurity. I mean, doesn't everybody know that?
Not Sestak, who kept saying we needed to get out by a date certain because Iraq needed a political solution, not a military one, even though he seemed quite aware that the Iraqi political solution, absent security, was likely to be the warring militias seeking a military victory over one another. Perhaps he thinks Iran is peachy because their government rules its people due to a political solution?
He made one line that will come back, I think, calling Afghanistan "a just war" in an unforced error.
Why? Well, because if one admits to the fact that there IS such a thing as a "just" war then one also has to recognize that the definition must of necessity be derived from the speaker's sense of the meaning of the word "just".
The reason we have 9 Supreme Court Justices and do not require unanimous agreement for their decisions is because defining "just" isn't quite as easy as Sestak perhaps thinks it is.
In the minds of many, it would seem that the Afghanistan war is "just" because they attacked us first on 9/11. People who buy into this silly notion often counter with the argument that we still fought WWII with Germany even though only Japan attacked us, thus getting sucked into the sill notion themselves.
I say it's silly, because, of course, we were never attacked by the government of Afghanistan on 9/11.
They weren't even Afghan citizens. But the war against Afghanistan, he said, is a "just" one.
Okay, time for a little humor. Do you remember the Australian Aborigine tennis star, Evonne Goolagong Cawley? It seems that in an alternate universe one of the Mellon family heirs, some Joe or another, was so taken with her after watching a tennis match that they ran away and got married. Everyone was eagerly awaiting their first sight of the heir to the immense family fortune, but immediately after the baby was born the couple sneaked off to Bangor, Maine, to one of the family hideaways.
As the local paper, the Bangor Banger, headlined breathlessly: Mellon-Cawley Baby Comes To ME.
No, I don't know why these things come to me, either. (My funniest one is unprintable because it uses the very offensive C-word. Carol insisted on hearing the story, though, so I told her...I thought she'd never stop laughing.)
Back to serious, again, as Amir Taheri says that Ahmadinejad may have something big planned very soon...only not directly against the United States.
With so many men with military and security backgrounds in Mecca, the mullahs leading the Iranian pilgrims would be in a position to seize control of the space around the black stone of the Ka'aba (The Cube) and use it as a venue for political demonstrations.
IF that is, indeed, the Iranian intention, it would not be the first time that the Khomeinist mullahs have used the Hajj to promote their ideology. Through much of the 1980s, the late Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini managed to disrupt the pilgrimage by sending his shock troops to the "holy" city with a mission to indoctrinate pilgrims from all over the world.
Khomeini claimed that the main reason for the pilgrimage was to demonstrate the Muslim nations' "exoneration from the Infidels" (bara'a lil-mushrekin). In 1986, he claimed that the slogan "Death to America!" was as important to Muslims today as the more traditional one of Allah Akbar
Nonsense, we all know that Muslim hatred is all because of George Bush invading Iraq, if he hadn't done that we'd all still be friends over there. Plus, those unemployed young men over there can't find jobs. Plus it has been OUR foreign policy at fault. And, we are stealing their oil.
In my other alternate universe we would make the scientific discovery of cheap power without using oil and wouldn't need any more from them. Why is it I don't think that would really make them happy, being able to keep all of their oil?
On Friday, a leading cleric with close ties with Ahmadinejad fired what sounded like the first shots in the coming clash with Saudi Arabia over the Hajj. Addressing the Friday prayer congregation in Tehran, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami warned the Saudi authorities against any attempt at preventing the Iranian pilgrims from "venting their anger at the Crusaders and the Zionists."
Khatami dismissed suggestions that the Middle East is entering a period of sectarian wars between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims. He claimed that the real issue was the choice between revolutionary Islam, represented by Iran, and "an Islam of defeat and compromise" represented by all other governments in the Muslim world.
What do you know...I think that's pretty close to what Bush has been arguing all along. My, my, wouldn't it be hell if he turned out to be correct?
Well, we didn't believe Osama when he declared war on the United States, why should we believe Khatami? After all, what does he know...
ALTHOUGH presented in religious terms, Ahmadinejad's ambition to restore Iran's position as the dominant regional power has deep roots in Persian nationalism.
Ever since it emerged as a state over 25 centuries ago, Iran has always tried to extend its western frontiers and reach the Mediterranean. Iran's westward expansion, however, stopped in 610 AD when the Byzantine Empire succeeded in driving the last Persian forces out of their footholds along the eastern Mediterranean. In the 15 centuries that followed, successive empires - Roman, Arab, Mameluke, Mongol, Ottoman and British - frustrated Iran's attempts at regaining what historian Sepehr Zabih has called "Persia's western lung."
They have to be secretly laughing at the critics who describe America as "imperialistic"...the Persians actually know what empire is and it doesn't look anything like what the Americans do. In Panama we gave them our canal, in Kuwait we gave them back their oil, the list is endless.
ENCOURAGED by the defeat of President Bush's Republicans in America's mid-term elections, Ahmadinejad has clearly moved onto the offensive.
Speaking to voters at a polling station in Tehran on Friday, Ahmadinejad claimed that the United States was already defeated in the Middle East. "They are like rubble, and we are like the flood," he said.
"That kind of talk can only lead to war," says Sami Faraj, an expert in regional security. "Ahmadinejad feels that, with the United States wavering in Iraq, nothing can stop him. The region may have to pay a high price to prove him wrong."
If they can.
If the fools in the US get us to engage in a talk about an Iraqi solution which includes Iran as a participant, they've already said that one of their conditions is going to be the departure of US troops from the region.
Once we do that, who else has any military power in the Mideast capable of stopping Iran form doing anything it wishes?
Israel? Nonsense, liberals have already gleefully pointed out how Israel couldn't even defeat the small group of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
And, as Ahmadinejad has said, Israel is only a one-bomb problem, anyhow.