We certainly have seen the results of appeasement. It is much easier to tolerate a dictator when he is dictating over somebody else’s life and not your own.
– Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga in response to Jaques Chirac’s outburst.
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February 19th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, has arrived in Paris to take part in a Franco-African summit despite European Union sanctions against him. France obtained a waiver to allow Mugabe to enter Europe as sanctions were formally extended for a further year on Tuesday. Mugabe will be joinig around 45 other African heads of state, Jacques Chirac and Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, as part of French attempts to forge closer ties with Africa. His arrival has prompted protests from Britain and other EU countries and human rights groups are planning a series of protests during Mr Mugabe’s visit. Given the company Jacques Chirac likes to keep, I would be deeply concerned to see him getting along with Tony Blair and George Bush. Or perhaps it’s not personal. It is worse. Philip Delves Broughton’s excellent analysis of France’s hang-ups and downs shows a burning desire to emulate de Gaulle and restore France’s glory. Chirac’s years of political hackery and alleged expense fiddling and kickbacks as Paris mayor will be forgotten as the echoes of General de Gaulle are ringing louder and louder:
I hope the United States does not forget French crude attempts at the realpolitik game. I hope that the important players in the international arena will not let France usurp more influence that it deserves and make it face the consequences of its actions. Or is it too much to hope for? February 19th, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Guardian is a true equal opportunity newspaper. It has generously extended its ability to be proven wrong on many issues to Salam, who welcomes the opportunity.
To be fair, the main point of the article was reporting on the signs of dissent in Baghdad in the past few days. And that must be a good thing. February 19th, 2003 | Comments are closed
I still cannot say the word ‘blog’ in any non-blogger company without being confronted by blank faces and puzzled expressions. The medium isn’t really ‘out there’ yet. But gradual recognition in the circles of orthodox journalism gathers apace although I am not, perhaps, as wildly enthusiastic as I ought to be about this BBC editorial:
The hook of the editorial is the acquisition of Pyra by Google but I suppose that it’s a good sign that they’ve been interested enough by blogging to write about the medium in fairly glowing terms. They do mention one or two blogs specifically and, naturally, both are left-wing but then the BBC can hardly be expected to even acknowledge the existance of anyone or anything that isn’t. Do you think they’ve noticed this one yet? February 19th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
So, the human shields arrived in Baghdad already! Well, most of them. One of the three red London buses broke down in Italy, and several activists dropped out after being dug out of snow drifts near Istanbul, but, heroically,
Well, you need mental toughness and nerves of steel to become a Human Shieldster, of course! Just ask Ken O’Keefe, Shield Leader: he used to be in the American Marines. Although you might have trouble finding him, as sadly, he has now gone nuts and is no longer part of this brave Western anti-war protest:
Mr Joffe-Walt mentioned various other hardships and tribulations which the Shield had suffered in its crusade to save human history from itself:
Shield-members will apparently be camping
Erm, I wonder if they’ve negotiated that with the Iraqi humans planning to be living inside them already? If bombing starts, numbers of safe buildings available for human living could possibly be reduced. I can tell the Shield has considered the possibility of bombing, because one of them said,
Of course. And equally predictably,
It takes a nutter to know a nutter, I suppose. (Thanks to the Telegraph) February 18th, 2003 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Stephen Zunes, Chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco, writes:
I have two observations to make about this:
February 18th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
This Iraq business. Every few weeks I sit down and try to write something short and sweet on the subject and it soon grows long and ugly. Yesterday I did it again. Today I’ll try it yet again. (And hurrah! Here it finally is. But long and ugly, I’m afraid.) So. Iraq. Blah blah blah, cut cut cut. And then this: The USA is not just squaring up to Saddam Hussein because he is a big bad threat, although I’m sure that’s part of it. It is also going to take out Saddam’s Iraq because it is a good place to set about influencing other important places from, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, and because it is takeable. Iraq is nasty, but it is also weak. Saddam Hussein is a monster and is known to be a monster, which makes him weak. Arabs aren’t nearly as opposed to the USA taking out Saddam as they would be if it attacked another of their countries, which makes him weak. Even the UN has resolved various things against Saddam over the years. So he’s vulnerable as well as threatening. The benefit of taking him out is big, while the cost of taking him out, by the standards of your average piece of conquest is quite low. I mean, imagine if the USA was instead trying to conquer Iran, or Egypt, or Saudi Arabia. Nightmare. Couldn’t happen. The point is: USA thinking isn’t only about the rights and wrongs of invading Iraq, liberating the Iraqis, and stopping Saddam-bossed or Saddam-assisted future terrorist attacks. They have many other dishes on their menu besides him. The purpose of taking out Saddam is not just to take out Saddam, but to wrench the whole balance of power in the Muslim world into a different state, a state far less helpful to Islamofascist (and other) terrorists. → Continue reading: It won’t end with Iraq February 18th, 2003 | 187 comments - (Comments are closed)
When people fear the government, there is tyranny. When government fears the people, there is liberty February 18th, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yesterday evening I was present at a very interesting gathering that took place in the City of London. It was, or at least appeared to be, a joint venture between the American NRA and the NRA of Great Britain (yes, we do have one). I have not attended anything like this before. The format was that of a TV chat show which was hosted by a representative of the American NRA who fielded questions to, and took replies from, an almost entirely British audience. The event was filmed by an American production company and will, in due course, be edited into an info-mercial for distribution in the USA designed to press home to an American audience the folly and dangers of apparently ‘reasonable’ gun control measures. It was a remarkably well-informed audience. Many of them were former shooters and gun-owners and, without exception, they were able to recount, by reference to both historical data and relevent legislation, the way victim-disarmament had started in the 1920’s as merely sensible measures to remove the ‘most dangerous’ weapons from society and, over the years, chip by chip, step by step, measure by measure, the disarmament programme advanced up to 1997 when all handguns were prohibited along with every other potentially life-saving tool (e.g. pepper sprays). Emphasised too, was the political and legal slippery slope which has resulted in a situation in Britain today where acting in genuine self-defence is classified as serious crime. On the face of it, this is an exercise which will benefit Americans not Britons but, on a deeper level, it will benefit Brits as well because events like this bring together those too-few Britons who still believe in a right of self-defence and spurs them on to greater levels of mutual education and political activism. That is how things change. I detected not the merest hint of a defeatist atmosphere last night. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that the self-defence movement in Britain, albeit still small, has been galvanised to an unprecedented degree. February 17th, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
The following stands out among the many comments to my previous post on Iraq.
There are two issues in this comment. One is the old boring question “Why Iraqis and not North Koreans, or Chinese, or any other suffering people?” We have repeated countless times here on Samizdata.net that we do not consider lives of Iraqis above other individuals suffering elsewhere. Yes, I do want the world to be rid of North Korean, Chinese, Iranian and any other statist murderers. By yesterday, if you please. It’s long overdue and given that my taxes also pay for the army (or what’s left of it), I have no hesitation in supporting its use in cases when this becomes part of a government strategy. The fact that the US and UK government policies are temporarily aligned with my view of the world does not redeem them in my eyes or make them somehow better entities. My objections to the state and my hatred of anything statist is not negated by my support of Bush and Blair in their determination to give Saddam his due. Samizdata’s eye will watch over the American attempts to establish democracy in Iraq with the same vigilance as ever and hurry to point out any misdemeanour by the inherently collectivist and kleptocratic state. More importantly, the comment touches on an issue far greater than Iraq and the international pandemonium associated with it. Why do most of us hate to see people suffer? Why should we be moved by a sight of a child corpse, a woman tortured or a man shot? Why does the world remain shocked, moved and outraged by the suffering endured by those in Nazi concentration camps and Stalinist gulags (although unfortunately too few pictures serve to fuel the horror over those)? I do not count myself among the emotionally incontinent (public expressions of grief) and the emotionally unsatiated (reality TV). My outrage comes from the belief that an individual is more important than a lofty idealistic concept, more so since every ‘utopia’ has built its edifice on a large pile of human bodies. The more idealistic and utopian the vision, the longer it takes to defeat it and the larger the ‘mountain of skulls’ left behind.   Savonarola’s Florence, Robespierre’s France, Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Kim Jong-il’s North Korea, Saddam’s Iraq, note that there is an individual’s name attached to every totalitarian nightmare. We are forced to ‘care’ about them, whether we like it or not. If we are lucky, we have not been affected directly, but they certainly had an impact on the way we live today, simply as a result of the international politics shaped by their existence. → Continue reading: Old style morality… February 17th, 2003 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
We are witnessing a major historical turning point in history. The world order envisioned by the UN is on its deathbed and unlikely to be revived. The world order I am referring to, however, is not the one enshrined in the lofty words of the UN charter. No, that vision died long ago, in fact as soon as the signatures were given in San Francisco. The idealistic vision of an international community working harmoniously toward common ends died stillborn when despotic regimes, whose very existences were alien to the goals set out in the charter, were allowed to join. The idea that the legitimacy to US actions is dependent on the views of countries such as Angola, China, Guinea, or Syria is absurd. Realpolitiks, on the other hand, have underpinned the UN for over half a century. The myth behind the UN is that it an organization designed to maintain international peace through collective security. Nothing could be further from the truth. The strength of the UN has always rested on a grand bargain between the US and the other democracies of world. On the one side, the US would agree not to return to isolationism after WWII and promised to use its military force to provide a protective umbrella to its weaker partners. On the other side, the democracies would provide political support to US actions around the globe, thus enhancing the legitimacy of these actions. The Security Council has been effective only when it has been aligned with the interests of the United States, on whom it has been dependent for military strength with which to impose its will. No other country or collection of countries can adequately substitute for the US military. This bargain has now been broken. France and Germany no longer feel that they have an obligation to support the US. In fact, it now appears that France views the weakening of American power as one of its major diplomatic goals. Although in the past French posturing has been a nuisance for the US, it had always returned to the side of the US when it mattered. The recent French actions in the UN, however, are unprecedented in that Paris is now working actively to undermine the US position. The obstinacy of the French position suggests that Paris is more interested in bringing the US to heal than Iraq. Chirac is mistaken if he believes that the US will acknowledge UN paramountcy over US security interests. The UN cannot function without the US military power to back it up and the US will not long remain a member if it comes to view UN more as an impediment to US security rather than as an aid. Nicolas Chatfort February 17th, 2003 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Many of the anti-war protesters has been carrying placards with the slogan ‘Not In My Name’. Well if you voted in the UK, regardless of whether it was for Labour or Conservative or LibDem, then you gave your consent to the system which taxes me without my consent, so I suppose I am robbed in ‘your’ name. I was disarmed (by a Tory government) and forbidden to effectively defend myself in ‘your’ name. My rights to own property and control my own labour and capital are abridged into meaninglessness in ‘your’ name. So when you say say about a war against the Ba’athist socialists of Iraq “Not In My Name”, please forgive me if I really do not give a damn if something gets done by the state that you do not like. I do not think George Bush and Tony Blair want to topple Saddam Hussain due to an abiding concern for the Iraqi people, but frankly I really do not care why the statists who tax me are going to do it, just that they do it. Provided there is a net gain in liberty in Iraq, and it is hard to see how that could not be the case post-Saddam, then I am in favour of the violent and hopefully fatal removal of the Ba’athist thugs. Do it for ‘Freedom for Iraq’, do it ‘because Saddam is a threat’, do it ‘because of links to Al-Qaeda’, do it ‘because the voices in my head told me to’… I do not care. Just do it! You can even do it in my name if you like. February 17th, 2003 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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