Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada "Of Interest To Me" Mar.02 -- Mar.08, 2003
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Saturday, March 08, 2003
James Gandolfini is playing hardball with HBO over his contract for the 5th season of The Sopranos. His lawyers are arguing that he wasn't properly notified of a salary increase for the show's creator David Chase, so this makes it a breach of contract.
Who does James Gandolfini think he is, Tony Soprano?
Yo, HBO -- just give him more money. Much, much more. Call it "The James Gandolfini Show". Give him "Created by James Gandolfini and not David Chase" credit. Do anything. Just settle it. That's all I'm sayin'. Settle it, or I will be forced to post the following:
NNNNNOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
8:28pm AST
Yesterday, I had the distinct pleasure of watching a bald eagle outside my office window. It was just soaring on the strong winds, more or less hovering over a small area. Saw one last week, too; it was paying more attention to another bird and followed it around, harrying it.
Bald eagles are fairly common in Nova Scotia. There's a pretty healthy population, particularly on Cape Breton Island, and along the system of lakes and rivers connecting Halifax Harbour with the Bay of Fundy.
This U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service map of bald eagle pairs shows that, since the bald eagle went on the endangered species list in 1978, it has really come back strong. The banning of DDT has contributed to the bald eagle's resurgence, as well, but a part of the population health is complements of eaglets that were taken from NS and reintroduced into various states.
8:11pm AST
Another very compelling Victor Davis Hanson piece, this time on the postmodern anguish over a war to rid the world and the Iraqi people of a murderous maniac and the grisly gang who work his wicked will.
There is a Potemkin phoniness to this war to come. We live in a world of images broadcast immediately into our living rooms without commentary — or, indeed, any intellectual context at all. Thus, because a Tariq Aziz — a really murderous, awful man — can get on a plane to the Vatican without his holster, he looks to the ignorant as if he were a jet-setting, press-conference-convening statesman like Tony Blair. Dan Rather sits across from a mass murderer in a Western tie and suit and questions the tyrant as if he is interviewing the head of the local school board.
Text, image, and rhetoric — not the deeds themselves — become reality. Had Mr. Bush, Clinton-like, only bit his lip, apologized to various peoples, talked of "multilateralism," and spun his southern drawl to sound more like the Joads than Sam Houston, then he too might have bombed a thug (in Europe, no less) for two months without congressional, U.N., or Cameroon's approval. Even ANSWER and "Not in Our Name" would have felt his pain and thus stayed home.
The point is unanswerable. There were no protests over Kosovo, no protests when Clinton fired the cruise missiles into Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan. Where were the French and German foreign ministers, then? Where was Martin Sheen and Babs and Mike Farrell? If they were vocally protesting against Bill Clinton, I'd love to hear about it.
So war now belongs to the realm of postmodern thinking, a world where a grim Pericles must convince not the Athenian assembly, but the slouching guests at Trimalchio's banquet. There is no absolute good or bad, only the suspiciously powerful and the nobly impotent. Intention and exegesis are everything, action nothing. Meeting and defeating evil is considered judgmental and arbitrary — and thus hopelessly simplistic; soldiers must be social workers who feed and nurture victims, rather than those caricatured, retrograde avengers from our more primitive past. The beneficence of peace means twelve years and 300,000 air sorties over two-thirds of the airspace of a country enslaved in tyranny; the evil of war means the liberation of millions from a psychopath hoarding frightful weapons.
And where the animals who did this will probably get medals.
6:40pm AST
Thursday, March 06, 2003
March 5th marked the 57th anniversary of Winston Churchill's famous speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, which he titled, The Sinews of Peace. It’s more commonly referred to as, of course, Churchill’s ‘Iron Curtain’ speech. Soviet historians mark the beginning of the Cold War from this speech. Perhaps this was the first salvo; it laid out the challenges ahead, and also laid out a plan the West could follow to achieve peace and ultimate victory.
One must think that Truman had a good idea of the kind of message Churchill would deliver. The original plan was for Churchill to deliver a short series of lectures, but this was not his style. He began by joking that ‘Westminster’ was somehow familiar to him.
The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn moment for the American Democracy. For with primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future. If you look around you, you must feel not only the sense of duty done but also you must feel anxiety lest you fall below the level of achievement. Opportunity is here now, clear and shining… To reject it or ignore it or fritter it away will bring upon us all the long reproaches of the after-time. It is necessary that constancy of mind, persistency of purpose, and the grand simplicity of decision shall guide and rule the conduct of the English-speaking peoples in peace as they in war. We must, and I believe we shall, prove ourselves equal to this severe requirement.
He spoke of the ‘overall strategic concept’ that should guide Western civilization.
It is nothing less than the safety and welfare, the freedom and progress, of all the homes and families of all the men and women in all the lands. … To give security to these countless homes, they must be shielded from the two giant marauders, war and tyranny.
He spoke, too, of “poverty and privation”, but said that removing the threat of war and tyranny would allow science and co-operation to bring forth “an expansion of material well-being beyond anything that has yet occurred in human experience.” He called upon the “fraternal association” of the English-speaking peoples as the means to protect the peace and achieve the victory over war, tyranny, poverty and privation for all.
Churchill spoke before of the notion of ‘the Temple of Man’s Freedom’. At Fulton, he spoke of the ‘Temple of Peace’. “Workmen from all countries must build that temple.” But it may not be built, or it could fall.
The Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of science, and what might not shower immeasurable material blessings upon mankind, may even bring about its total destruction. Beware, I say; the time may be short. Do not let us take the course of allowing events to drift along until it is too late. If there is to be a fraternal association of the kind I have described, with all the extra strength and security which both our countries can derive from it, let us make sure that that great fact is known to the world, and that it plays its part in steadying and stabilising the foundations of peace. There is the path of wisdom. Prevention is better than cure.
He recognized the Russian sacrifices and accomplishments in the war, and he recognized Russia’s need for her own security, but then Churchill advised that he must speak frankly. Then Churchill spoke the famous lines:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lies all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.
Churchill addressed the concerns regarding Communist activities in front of the Iron Curtain, the Communist fifth columns that work in absolute obedience to orders from the Communist centre.
… However, I repulse the idea that a new war is inevitable; still more that it is imminent. … I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines. … Our difficulties and dangers will not be removed by closing our eyes to them. They will not be removed by mere waiting to see what happens; nor will they be removed by a policy of appeasement. What is needed is a settlement, and the longer this is delayed, the more difficult it will be and the greater our dangers will become.
From what I have seen from our Russian friends and Allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness. For that reason the old doctrine of a balance of power is unsound. We cannot afford, if we can help it, to work on narrow margins, offering temptations to a trial of strength. If the Western Democracies stand together in strict adherence to the principles of the United Nations Charter, their influence for furthering those principles will be immense and no one is likely to molest them. If however they become divided or falter in their duty and if these all-important years are allowed to slip away then indeed catastrophe may overwhelm us all.
Churchill concluded his speech saying that, if the West did stick together and stay ahead of the Soviets, “the high roads of the future will be clear, not only for us but for all, not only for our time, but for a century to come.”
Of course, there was much acrimony. The late Roy Jenkins (Churchill: A Biography) comments,
The Wall Street Journal … stated bluntly that “The United States wants no alliance, or anything that resembles an alliance, with any other nation.” The New York Times was highly critical. And the Chicago Sun … wrote so hostilely about what it described as the ‘poisonous doctrines’ of Fulton that Churchill withdrew from an arrangement, entered into only a week before, that the paper would serialize his Secret Sessions Speeches. Deep offence was necessary to make Churchill resile from a favourable publishing arrangement.
Stalin was obviously taken aback. He criticized Churchill’s alliance proposals as racist, and, with an admirable spin, complained of Western democracy; that, when one party was in power, the others were locked out of power ~ the Soviet system was so much better as all interested parties could participate at the same time under the umbrella of the Communist Party.
So, Churchill, who was such a great visionary, laid it all out for us. At times, the West did work on the narrow margins, but détente gave way to a more robust engagement and the Cold War was won. In the early 1950s, Churchill told his private secretary that, if the secretary should live to see old age, he would live to see the end of the Soviet Union. That would have put the timing just about right for the eventual collapse.
“Remember him, for he saved all of you."
-- C.L. Sulzberger
7:25pm AST
Wednesday, March 05, 2003
Iain Murray links to a Telegraph piece by Janet Daley, America Threatens an Epidemic of Freedom.
Now, as everybody keeps saying (even Martin Amis [who's conceded the 'war for oil' argument]), we are on the verge of a new world, in which the communist bloc no longer provides a check on American power. For some bizarre reason, this seems to be regarded as a matter of regret, even by people who are not actually old Stalinist reprobates.
America untrammeled by the Soviet threat is about to unleash - what? An epidemic of freedom? A destabilising onslaught against dictatorship and terrorism? Oddly enough, the critics are almost right in their self-contradictions: America is both interventionist and isolationist. What its people want is to be left alone to enjoy their freedoms and their prosperity in peace.
Since September 11, they have realised that the only way they can achieve this is by bringing the chance of those freedoms to those who would threaten them.
10:24pm AST
Stalin Long Dead, Stalinism Not Yet
Andrew Sullivan on the 50th anniversary of Stalin's death. The monster died on March 5, 1953. Andrew links to this Independent article on Stalin's apologists.
Some readers will find the comparison with Hitler offensive. In fact, Stalin was worse. Alexander Yakovlev, an expert on Stalin's crimes, estimates that his victims totalled more than 30 million. To give some idea of the scale of this: Stalin's body count is the equivalent to an army of 1.5 million Fred Wests, or 10,000 11 Septembers. Yes, Stalin helped to defeat Nazism, but so would any Russian leader who had been attacked by the Reich.
One anecdote will have to suffice to give some sense of Stalin's contempt for human life. His wife Nadezhda began in the early 1930s to teach courses in textile production in an attempt to escape the misery of life in the Kremlin. She and her students carried out assignments in the Russian countryside, where she witnessed the degeneration of the peasantry because of Stalin's policy of forced seizures. According to the historian Robert Conquest, 3.5 million people starved to death, and cannibalism became rife. Nadezhda's students were so shocked that they insisted on reporting back to the great leader Stalin. They did, and Stalin had them all arrested for "sedition". Nadezhda killed herself not long afterwards.
Victims of Communism Memorial website.
10:12pm AST
Discount Blogger is giving me grief for my 'light reading' from this past weekend, James D. Watson's "The Double Helix". Now, now, in my own defence, I should say that it is a rather short book, and I was thoroughly stumped by the organic chemistry. I assure you that I waste as much time as any other blogger, and then some ~ just try to get between me and my PlayStation2!
I saw "The Double Helix" on a few of the 'best of' lists for the 20th century in non-fiction. Watson's book was #33 on The 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the 20th century, a list compiled by a panel organized by the National Review, and also appeared on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's The 50 Best Books of the Century (they also feature a 50 worst list).
As a bit of a self-challenge, I've tried to read some from those lists over the past couple of years. From the NRO list, I've read much of Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago", C.S. Lewis' "The Abolition of Man", Orwell's "Collected Essays" and "Homage to Catalonia", Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom", Milton Friedman's "Capitalism and Freedom", Anne Frank's "Diary of a Young Girl", Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", Fukuyama's "The End of History and The Last Man", and James M. McPherson's "Battle Cry of Freedom". On deck, waiting to be read, are more Lewis, Hayek and Jacobs, Huzinga, Manchester, Bloom, Arendt, Schumpeter, Popper and Gasset. I had already read #1, Churchill's war memoirs.
From the ISI list, I've read "The Education of Henry Adams" and have Booker T. Washington's "Up From Slavery" on deck.
Another great list comes compliments of CBC Radio. Around the turn of the century, CBC Radio host Michael Enright had a series of very interesting interviews with Dr. Bruce Meyer, of the University of Toronto. They discussed the great books that have influenced Western culture and thought from the dawn of recorded history. I've read about half; the tapes of this extremely interesting discussion are worth picking up (great for the car).
I really appreciate these lists. No matter what I've thought about buying beforehand, the simple act of walking into a book or music store seems to make me totally forget what I had thought about beforehand. I never know what to buy once I'm in there; these lists really help to focus the reading list.
So, lots of light reading ahead, but not before some serious Grand Theft Auto action.
9:40pm AST
Tuesday, March 04, 2003
Don't read these before bed. Stanley Kurtz has a disturbing piece on North Korea in NRO. He also links to articles (below) by Caspar Weinberger in Forbes and Joshua Muravchik in Commentary (a must read, especially for all you 'Blame Bush' types).
Our nightmare, sadly, is the result of the lethal combination of terror and proliferating weapons of mass destruction, not the actions of the Bush administration. For all our might and technology, the confluence of terror and WMDs has the power to destroy us — if we do not destroy it first.
We are at the beginning, not the end, of a terrible new age. Our army is too small. So is our defense budget. They will get bigger. Even that, unfortunately, will not return us to our accustomed security. We stand today on the brink of a war — with North Korea.
Weingberger in Forbes: Diplomatic Maneuvering With Liars
There is literally no end to this cycle once we start rewarding broken promises. So what do we do?
• We must recognize and accept the fact that diplomatic solutions are easy to secure but are totally worthless if the other side cannot be trusted.
• We must accept that Kim Jong Il and Saddam Hussein are two of a kind--with one significant difference: North Korea's brutal dictator admits to lying and to having had an active nuclear weapons procurement program for all these years; Iraq's brutal dictator is still trying to hide the evidence that he has such a program, as Colin Powell demonstrated so conclusively.
Joshua Muravchik in Commentary: Facing Up to North Korea
The North Koreans are master diggers. The DMZ is said to be honeycombed with tunnels through which vast quantities of military personnel and equipment can invade the South in any new Korean war. (Some of these tunnels have been discovered and closed; no one doubts that many undiscovered ones remain.) As best we can make out, the North Koreans have also built underground nuclear reactors, plutonium-reprocessing plants, and uranium-enrichment facilities—and who knows what else? Iraq, as we discovered after the 1991 war, had built an entire nuclear program right under the nose of the IAEA, all the while complying with every inspection request. The hilly terrain of North Korea is more conducive to concealment than the flat sands of Iraq, and North Korea’s is a much more closed society. As helpless as inspectors have been in finding Iraq’s weapons, they would be more helpless still in North Korea.
Horrible, war would be. But to say that it is unthinkable is once again to hide our head in the sand. Pyongyang itself suffers under no such illusions and no such inhibitions. For its part, it insists that economic sanctions will be taken as an act of war, implying that it would respond with military strikes. Indeed, far from having viewed war with us as unthinkable, the North has calculated its demands on us over the years—that we remove our tactical nuclear weapons, that we persuade the South Koreans to forswear nuclear weapons of their own, that we cancel joint military exercises with Seoul—precisely in order to weaken our ability to resist its own military power. These demands we have systematically granted.
Not only does the North’s belligerence leave us no choice but to “think” about war, we cannot exclude the possibility of initiating military action ourselves. Part of the cause of our present predicament is that we ruled out the use of force at earlier points in this saga—when, however painful, it would have been less costly than today. And today it may be less costly than a few years from now, when North Korea will have dozens of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles (it has tested one that could reach Alaska) or when it will have shared them with al Qaeda and others.
I notice from my webstats that I get a few hits from North Korea. Kinda creepy (or is Great Leader's secret police just reeeeally bored).
U.S. sends 24 bombers to Guam as an added check on Kim as Iraq unfolds.
10:43pm AST
Michael Demmons links to this very interesting story on the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
Just perusing it now .... hmmm, let's see ... U.N.? ... U.N.? ... U.N.? ... Nope - nothing about the U.N.
Wow, waddaya know, the U.S. got him all on its own. 10:32pm AST
Tired of Getting Gouged in the Blogosphere?
Michael Demmons has redesigned his site and has reemerged as Discount Blogger.
10:25pm AST
Find out your Middle Earth names ... hey, you never know when you're gonna need them.
My Orcish name? Ghâshhûr the Nasty
10:19pm AST
Vince Vaughan: "Since when was it cooler to be Canadian?" (via Damian and Tim)
When Geddy Lee first belted out "Begin the day with a friendly voice, a companion unobtrusive, who plays that song that's so elusive, and the magic music makes your morning mood." That's when.
21:12 AST
The National Citizens Coalition ran ads in Toronto and Ottawa papers today denouncing Carolyn Parrish's recent anti-American slurs.
 “A
few days ago, Ms. Parrish slandered Canada’s best friend and ally” said
NCC vice president Gerry Nicholls. “She declared: `Damn Americans, I
hate those bastards.’ Our ad makes it clear she was not speaking for
Canadians when she made that rude and insensitive comment.”The NCC ad features the American and Canadian flag flying side by side under the heading, “Together for Freedom.” “Most Canadians reject the kind of anti-American bigotry that Ms. Parrish displayed,” says Nicholls. “They recognize that the United States is our best friend, closest ally, and largest trading partner.” |
Right On! I know I sure frickin' do.
Ms. Parrish was on the Mike Bullard show last night (Canada's Jay Leno ... he ain't no Letterman, that's for sure) and was totally coddled by Bullard (a rabid Trudeau-ite, from what I've seen). 9:56pm AST
Monday, March 03, 2003
Iain Murray links to a Marian L. Tupy article in TechCentralStation, In With The 'New' (Europe). Could the days of the Franco-German EU be numbered?
The 'new' Europeans, as Donald Rumsfeld called them, clearly do not think that European foreign policy should be shaped by French anti-Americanism. The new members are rather fond of the Americans - not least because they see the United States as having done much more to defeat communism than all the other European countries put together.
But the divisions between 'old' and 'new' Europe go much deeper than that. The accession of the new EU members threatens the post-war consensus regarding the social-democratic nature of the European economy. The type of economic arrangements that the Central and East European countries wish to follow seems unambiguous. [...]
To be sure, Russia will never become a part of the EU, but reforms in this former communist behemoth are symptomatic of a liberalizing wind sweeping through post-communist Europe. As her economy grows, so will Russian prosperity and influence.
In the short- to medium-term, however, it will be the British who will play a pivotal role in the whole European saga. The accession of the Central and East European Countries will strengthen the British role in the EU and turn the United Kingdom into the undisputed leader of its reformist faction. Hopefully, this new bloc will check the power of the Franco-German alliance and succeed in reforming the fossilized edifice of the European economy - a necessary venture, which will in time release the creative potential of all European peoples.
11:02pm AST
The New York Times's op-ed piece today is on The Rush to War. Yeah, it's been just an absolute blur. I hate the way Bush whooshed by us unnoticed when he went to the United Nations last fall. He's so tricky!
But a cautionary note is in order. Pakistan's pivotal role in the seizure of Mr. Mohammed is one more demonstration of the importance of working in concert with other nations in the fight against terrorism.
What's the point here? The U.S. is working in concert with many nations on the war on terror, and on the disarming of Iraq. The UN didn't hand over Khalid Shaikh Mohammed or aid in his arrest.
We are not under any illusion that Mr. Hussein is disabling his missiles simply because he likes the idea. Iraq would never be making even these grudging concessions if American troops were not massed near Iraq's border. The U.N. must realize that whatever success it has achieved of late in getting Iraq to abide by its directives has come only because of American military might.
Saddam will never disarm; these 'grudging concessions' are meaningless. And this 'success' will disappear as soon as American military might leaves the region.
The threat of force, however, should not give way to the use of force until peaceful paths to Iraqi disarmament have been exhausted and the Security Council gives its assent to war.
There is no peaceful path to Iraqi disarmament. Good will is not in this man's arsenal. Saddam will continue to play games until it is politically impossible for the U.S. to maintain a significant military presence in the region. Then, he will play more games with the inspectors until they are forced to leave. We've seen it before, we'll see it again.
Even if there is a quick military triumph, many things could go wrong over the long haul. The Turks could intervene militarily in northern Iraq to assert control over the Kurds there, who have established an autonomous — and democratic — government.
Yeah, yeah, Turkey is the region's only democratic Muslim country and an important potential ally, but the United States cannot permit Turkish troops to cross the Iraq border and occupy the Kurdish area. The Turks fear nationalist rumblings from their own Kurdish populations, and won't want to see an independent Kurdish state forming in what was northern Iraq. Tough. Turkey is an uncertain ally. Churchill wasted a lot of time during the Second World War trying to coax Turkey to join the war against Hitler. The West can't give Turkey a pass annexing another 'nation' (the Kurdish autonomous region of northern Iraq) just because they're a secular Muslim state. Turkish movement across the border should be viewed as a hostile act against the U.S. and Britain who have protected northern Iraq, via the no-fly zones, for a decade.
8:27pm AST
Following my lead, Jonah Goldberg muses on actor/comedian Janeane Garofolo's on-air anti-war strategy. 8-)
On a recent edition of Fox News Sunday, Tony Snow asked her about Saddam Hussein: "Has he been a mass murderer? She responded, "Yes, there's been a lot of people who have been mass murderers. And I think Turkey also, who we've been negotiating with, has one of the worst human-rights records in the world. Also, the sanctions, you could say, have been responsible for mass murder."
He asked, "Do you think he is eager to obtain weapons of mass destruction?" She responded, "Yes, I think lots of people are eager to obtain weapons of mass destruction."
Sigh. This is the "Everybody does it" argument. According to this logic, we shouldn't stop any one serial killer if we aren't willing to stop all of them. The fact that Saddam has orchestrated the deaths of hundreds of thousands and tortured countless of his own subjects cannot be used to justify removing him from power, because we don't use it to justify removing, say, the democratically elected government of Turkey. In short, Garofalo would rather America be consistently wrong than inconsistently right.
7:54pm AST
Over the weekend, I read James D. Watson's The Double Helix ~ his account of the race to find the structure of DNA. Watson and his colleague, Francis Crick, discovered the double helix structure in 1953 and earned themselves the Nobel Prize.
Despite struggling with some (all?) of the organic chemistry, I found it a very interesting read. The point of the book is to describe the pursuit of the goal, all the wrong ideas, dead-end alleyways, bungled calculations, and the interpersonal relationships that go into a scientific discovery of this magnitude. For Watson, a young American at Cambridge, the goal was the Nobel. It was interesting to read of work like that going on at such a research institution; Watson relied heavily on consulting with other researchers, both in the actual DNA investigation and in other fields related to his work. The ready availability of such individuals greatly aided and speeded Watson and Crick's work.
But, it was also the personal life issues surrounding the pursuit of the discovery. Taking breaks to go for drinks, trying to meet girls, going to the theatre, sharing the work with friends. Watson does a great job explaining what his life was like during those few years leading up to the double helix discovery. His book is a classic; I'd recommend it, non-scientist that I am.
TIME has a few pages devoted to Crick and Watson. 8:13am AST
Update: Fifty years from the day (Feb28'53) that Crick and Watson discovered the structure of DNA, James D. Watson suggested that stupidity is a genetic disease that should be cured (via James Taranto):
... low intelligence is an inherited disorder and that molecular biologists have a duty to devise gene therapies or screening tests to tackle stupidity.
"If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease," says Watson, now president of the Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory, New York. "The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what's the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, 'Well, poverty, things like that.' It probably isn't. So I'd like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent."
6:31pm AST
Sunday, March 02, 2003
While not available online, P.J. O'Rourke's essay in the latest issue of The Atlantic on the antics of former President Bill Clinton is worth the price of the magazine. Clinton sure has an interesting perspective on recent history; I have a feeling the history books won't share his view. You should check out P.J.'s essay.
5:24pm AST
Victor Davis Hanson observes that it's the 1930s all over again -- The Present Farce -- and asks, should we laugh or cry as we watch history come full circle?
In place of the old League of Nations equivocating over the October 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, we now witness the recent pathetic speeches of the Non-Alignment Movement at the U.N. General Assembly — an amoral body once hosted in 1982 by none other than Saddam Hussein. Here was a Cuba that has never held an election lecturing about democracy. Iran, the world's leading terrorist nation, warned shrilly about extremism. Algeria acted as if talking about the need for stability would make us forget that it is a police state engaged in a dirty war with Islamic killers.
A few African countries — none of them democratic; most of them corrupt, and all responsible for millions of their own dead and diseased — pontificated about past American culpability for this and that. I almost expected to see Franco call for democracy or a young ascendant Peron to praise tolerance.
All the U.N.'s Security Council's resolutions and inspections will have about as much effect as the old League's threats in 1931 to dislodge the Japanese from Manchuria. Indeed, reasoning with a China that devoured Tibet or a Syria that stole Lebanon would in 1939 be like asking Italy that seized Abyssinia or a Soviet Union planning to annex eastern Poland for help in restraining Germany. In the 1930s a weak League blamed its woes on an isolationist America that refused to join; now an even weaker U.N. Assembly rails at a United States that it is too involved and trying to "bully" a debating society into giving teeth to its rhetoric. The way to wreck the U.N. is not to use force unilaterally, but — as in the case of the League — to haggle over a series of meaningless resolutions against dictators that cannot or will not be enforced. [...]
Western Europe has almost gone the way of Weimar. Amoral, disarmed, and socialist, it seeks ephemeral peace at all costs, never long-term security, much less justice. Furious that history has not ended in perpetual peace and leisure, it has woken up angry that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair disturbed its fanciful slumber with chatter about germs and genocide.
12:03pm AST
Iraq has begun dismantling four al-Samoud missiles, and plans to dismantle six more. Wow. Ten out of one-hundred twenty. That's some effort. Those inspections are really working. At this rate, given the time passed since 1441, Iraq will destroy all its missiles by 2006.
On Fox News Sunday this morning, Paul Gigot made the point Dick Cheney was right last summer ~ the inspections are serving no one but Saddam Hussein.
Democrat Senator Joseph Biden said that this dismantling of missiles is not significant in and of itself (only if it were a part of a massive disarmament on the part of Iraq ... well, duh!).
10:54am AST