Mark Steyn on John Kerry

In The Spectator:

"The reality of this race was summed up by the bumper sticker I saw on some smug Vermont granolamobile the other day: 'Someone Else For President'. That's what matters to Democrats -- that Bush ceases to be President and Someone Else takes over the job. And, as long as they think of John Kerry as Someone Else, Dems are buoyant and confident. Unfortunately, every so often, they'll linger by the TV a little too long, Senator Someone Else will start to talk, and his party will remember that he is, indeed, John Kerry, and it's too late to get another Someone Else. "

Another Problem For Joseph Wilson

Tim Graham writes that Joseph Wilson's credibility is in trouble:

"But on Saturday morning, Washington Post reporter Susan Schmidt actually showed signs of having read the committee report (do TV news people read reports, or just reports on reports?). She found that Joseph C. Wilson IV, the former ambassador to Gabon who declared there was no Iraqi attempt to acquire uranium in Niger, 'was specifically recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to what he has said publicly.'"

Good News From Uzbekistan

A native of Uzbekistan, Rustam Kasimdzhanov is the new World Chess Champion.

America Cuts Off Aid to Uzbekistan

The Argus has a news roundup.

Happy Bastille Day!

The Guardian has a list of Bastille Day links:

"It should be a great day to celebrate: the moment when the people of Paris stormed the Bastille prison, symbolically putting an end to the absolutism of Louis XVI's monarchy."

By the way, one of the keys to the Bastille is located at Mount Vernon, George Washington's estate. It was presented to Washington by the Marquis de Lafayette, who led the asssault on the French prison after returning from service in the American Revolution.

Democracy

The scene of German Chancellor Willy Brandt on his knees apologizing at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial, found in The Apologist (see below), also occurs in Michael Frayn's play Democracy . We saw the show not long ago at the Wyndham Theatre in London, where it moved from the National. It was impressive that a drama featuring a half dozen middle-aged German politicians, with grey hair and grey suits, could still pack in a crowd. It was a very serious, thought-provoking evening, a meditation on the nature of democracy and its discontents. The plot centers on the spy scandal that brought down Willy Brandt's government. His most trusted personal assistant, a man by the name of Guillaume, was revealed to be working for the Stasi. So ended Brandt's attempts at better relations with East Germany and the Soviet bloc.

The play was a German version of "Yes, Minister," without all the jokes. Brandt's best political "friends," in the end, are happy to see him go, and take plum political jobs for themselves. Especially interesting is the portrayal of Helmut Schmidt, as the Chancellor-to-be.

Perhaps the play will come to America sometime. It might be good to see somewhere like the Kennedy Center, for example.

Also, discussion of Frayn's "Democracy" might provoke some discussion about whether those who claimed there were "Reds under the bed" might not have been paranoid after all, in certain cases at least, just realistic...

Daniel Pipes vs. CAIR

This article by Daniel Pipes draws a line in the sand contra recent public relations efforts by one of America's best-known Islamic organizations:

"In conclusion, 'Not in the Name of Islam' seeks to clean up Islam's image without doing anything of substance. It manages to do two things at once: impress naive Westerners without upsetting anyone in Hamas, Al-Qaeda, the Iraqi Islamist organizations, or other violent groups. In this, the petition initiative fits CAIR's well-established pattern of obfuscation and insincerity."

The Apologist

Really enjoyed readingThe Apologist by Jay Rayner. It's got almost everything a middle-aged, middle-class, career-changing curmudgeon facing a mid-life crisis could want. Plus it is about a restaurant reviewer turned international diplomat, which in a more dramatic and much bigger way, paralleled some of the smaller changes in my own life.

And the theme is at once comical and serious, which I ususally enjoy (sort of like David Lodge novels). Not going to spoil the plot, but here's an excerpt, reflecting a high a level of insight about some of the pitfalls international diplomacy:

----------------------------------


Max Olson, after describing Willy Brandt apologizing in December 1970 at the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial, on his knees,

"This is our man, Marc, poster boy for the penitential Engagement crew. There"s not been a gesture like it since."

"Not even Clinton in Kigali in 1996?"

He turned and fixed me with an amused, fatherly grin. "You’ve been doing some reading?"

A little, I said. My office had prepared a few briefing papers for me and I had tried to read as much of them as I could. There had been one on Bill Clinton’s trip to Rwanda, while still president, to apologize for the world’s failure to intervene in the Rwandan genocide.

Max sniffed the air, irritably. "Shall I tell you something about Clinton at Kigali, Marc? Shall I?" He wasn’t lookin for an answer, but I nodded all the same. "You know he was only there for two hours?" I nodded again. "And that he never left the airfield?"

"There were security concerns and…"

"The engines on Air Force One were never turned off," he said, enunciating every syllable, so I didn’t miss the point. "All the time Billy Boy is on the tarmac, wearing his bleeding heart on his sleeve and saying his wise words about the one million dead who aren’ t there to hear him, there are four Rolls-Royce engines back there, all powered up and ready to go." He took a final drag on his cigarette, then dropped it and ground it under the toe of his shoe. "If you go round in the car to say sorry to a neighbour, it is always good to turn off the engine. Just for a minute, at least. Don’t you think?"

I nodded wisely again. "No, Marc," he said, pointing up to the image in front of us, "this is your man." He walked over to me, placed a hand on my shoulder and together we studied the gargantuan picture. "I just wanted Willy Brandt and the heir to his legacy to spend a little time together."

Saddam Hussein's New Novel

According to this CBC News report, the plot of Saddam Hussein's new novel is pretty clear evidence of his link to the 9/11 attacks:

"Abdel Amir told the Associated Press that Get Out, You Damned describes a Zionist-Christian conspiracy against Arabs and Muslims, with an Arab leading an army that invades the land of the enemy and topples one of their monumental towers, an apparent reference to the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. "

His apologists say Hussein was deluded when he wrote it. But what if it is intended as a manifesto, which seems likely?

Globalization in the Caribbean

Last night we attended the opening of "Keys to Memory-Step Back in Time" at The Historical Society of the Museum of Antigua and Barbuda. The evening, celebrating a new permanent history exhibit, featured a "moving cultural exhibition." This was a pageant dedicated to the history of the island from the time of the Amerindians. The theme was how over the years people from all over the world have come to Antigua. There was no shrinking from the slave period, which ended in the 1830s, and leaves its legacy today. Yet the overall message was positive, one of progress and a brighter future.

It was a wonderful show, part Christmas pantomime, part carnival (Antigua Carnival is in late July, a legacy of celebrations for the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953). People of all ages, from all sorts of different communities appeared in the parade. The evening brought elements from the whole island together; from the tony Mill Reef Club, where Jackie Onassis used to stay while visiting the Mellons to the smallest villages; to the expatriate communities from other CARICOM nations; to immigrants from Arabia, Portugal, and France.

Most striking to an American, was the American section of the pageant. Narrator Keva Margetson recalled the gratitude on the island when the American military bases opened in 1942, offering jobs with good salaries as an alternative to work on the plantations. Antiguans were grateful for the first competitive opportunities for their labor. This seemed to mesh with my recollection of Uzbekistan, how happy the Uzbeks were that there was an American base paying good wages in US dollars. Antiguans likewise appreciated the cash. An American Air Force officer, carrying a US flag, marched in the pageant, along with everyone else.

That element of American life--paying people a living wage--is an important one. American military aid is not only for the projection of force, it also helps lift up the population of countries by providing jobs to local inhabitants, and an alternative to existing social structures that gives individuals just one more choice than they had before.

In Antigua, the establishment of American sub-hunting bases during WWII, followed by satellite tracking stations during the Cold War, helped the island's transformation from an agrarian, underdeveloped economy to something more modern. Jet travel brought tourism. And over some 60 years turned this small island into a hub of high-tech--though not always legal--commerce.

Today, Antigua is a world center for internet gambling as well as money-laundering (there is a government money-laundering agency) and cruise ships dock regularly unloading thousands of visitors, who spend gobs of money on things like swimming with stingrays. There are more banks registered in Antigua than in my hometown of Washington, DC. Antigua just recently won a case before the WTO involving American attempts to shut down its offshore gaming industry.

Clearly modernity has its pluses and minuses, but for Antigua and the Antiguans, as demonstrated in "Key to Memory-Step Back in Time," the benefits have outweighed the costs.

Lileks on Michael Moore

You can read it here.

American Taboo : A Murder in the Peace Corps

After finishing "This Is Not Civilization" (see entry following), I immediately snatched American Taboo : A Murder in the Peace Corps from the pile. Now this is a "true crime" story that rings frighteningly true. I simply could not put it down. It is about the murder of Deb Gardner, a confused 23-year old from Washington state, by a fellow Peace Corps volunteer in 1976. The book was favorably reviewed in the Washington Post Book Review, and that postive account, linked below, was if anything, an understatement. The story is incredible, so incredible, it must be really true.

Not only are the characters realistic, but Weiss ties together people who were trying to run away from their past. Then and now. In the island paradise of Tonga, in the woods of Idaho, in the streets of Brooklyn. The descriptions of Peace Corps life are unlike any that I've read before, but seem pretty accurate to someone who lived through the Ford and Carter years.

Imagine the characters in Rosenberg's novel tracked down by a nosy reporter, in real life. Then imagine the stakes are much, much higher. Life and death. Throw in government conspiracy and cover-up, family melodramas, and scenery from Alaska to Washington, DC to the South Seas. And a fantastic trial in Tonga. An OJ Simpson-style event that has never been forgotten on the island.

It is absolutely gripping, chilling, shocking, funny, sad, tragic, ironic, and you name it. And underneath it all is a subtext, unspoken except for one reference to "rachmones." Weiss is telling the story of a Jewish science whiz from Brooklyn who murdered a pretty girl because she rejected him and got away with it--because he did it in the Peace Corps, an organization more concerned with "the cause" than with justice. So concerned that not only is his record cleared, but he is rewarded with a good government job.

How could Stalin, Hitler, Mao and others murder millions and get away with it? Just the way Dennis could get away with murder Tonga. He was a brilliant psychopath who gamed the system. However, in the end, Weiss seems to argue, Dennis was his own victim as well, for he brought shame upon his family--his mother died an early death, according to Weiss out of heartbreak at her son's crime. His brother tells the reporter, "I have no brother." Etc.

Weiss, himself Jewish, implies in his passionate telling of this awful crime that Dennis shamed not only the Peace Corps, America, his family, and himself, but that he also shamed the Jewish people.

Although no one had directly confronted Dennis about the murder for over twenty years. Weiss decided to do so after he learned that the Tongan tradition is for a criminal to ask forgiveness of his victim's family.

Weiss tracked down and confronted the murderer for himself, documented in the memorable climax of this book.

Set in the 70s, this story in some respects is like a real-life episode of CBS's "Cold Case." But scarier. And the characters are unfortunately very believable.

Wouldn't be surprised if "American Taboo" were to become a film, someday in the not too distant future. It rings true.

This is Not Civilization

Nathan Hamm's comments about Robert Rosenberg's Kyrgyzstan novel piqued my interest. It came from Amazon in 3 days, and I just finished reading it, taking it from my summer reading pile. What can one say? If you have ever worked in, visited, or lived in Central Asia, Istanbul, or an Arizona Indian Reservation, it will strike many chords. The plot was very "realistic," a little hard-hearted, a little too sad for me. No happy ending. No lives intertwined at the end--all the characters go their separate ways.

One of them is paid off. Cash money to go away. Such things happen, but it is not very admirable, let's put it that way. Of course, perhaps that is the message of "This Is Not Civilization." Americans can be jerks.

I missed having a sympathetic American character.

I found the Kyrgyz more sympathetically drawn, which is nice in a way, but again sort of frustrating. I wished, in the end, for a little more complexity, and a little more development in the end. But the story of a doomed romance between a Kyrgyz woman and an American man is compelling, and the plot moves along.

Most of the action really takes place in Istanbul, and since we visited most of the sites in the novel, it brought back a lot of memories.

So, if you are interested in Central Asia, Turkey, or Arizona, add "This Is Not Civilization" to your own summer reading list. If you are only interested on the level of the story of a romance, be prepared to be frustrated at the end.

A good first novel, with the promise of better ones to come.

Hamid Karzai in Philadelphia

Nathan Hamm was present when Hamid Karzai received the Liberty Medal in Philadelphia. He has an excellent account of the event in The Argus:

"As many of you know, I went to see Hamid Karzai receive the Philadelphia Liberty Medal at Independence Hall yesterday.
It was absolutely beautiful in Philadelphia yesterday and far from crowded in the city in the morning. The area around Independence Hall was entirely blocked to traffic and crawling with uniformed and plainclothes police and a healthy dose of Secret Service agents."

Summer Vacation

Dear Readers,

I'm on summer vacation for the month of July, so posts may be somewhat less frequent. Thank you for your understanding...

War, Evil, and the End of History

Recently finished Bernard-Henri Levy's latest book, War, Evil, and the End of History. There's so much in it, on a variety of different levels, it is difficult to capture in a paragraph. Bottom line: The book is a response to a number of philosophical arguments, ranging from Foucault to Fukuyama. Levy takes his personal transformation, comparing himself to, and distinguishing himself from, Benny Levy in the Bangladesh civil war and May 68 events in Paris, as well as personal confessions from BHL travelling to hot spots today, such as Sri Lanka, to make a number of points:

*No single philosophical or political system can cope with the problems of war and evil, they are permanent features of human existence which must be confronted constantly.

*History does not "end." And the smaller and more remote regions are even more affected by it than the central powers.

*Islam is not the only movement that spawns terrorists and suicide bombers. There are fanatics and mass murderers wherever one looks for them, from Burundi, to Sri Lanka, to Rwanda, to Sudan--and his chapter on Sudan, written years ago, is particularly relevant today.

The style is intensely personal and stream of consciousness. But combining journalism with philosophy is pretty interesting reading--BHL's references to Malraux seem appropriate.

War, Evil, and the End of History combines theoretical reflection with striking descriptions of some forgotten messy realities. It is a good reminder that there are lots of loose ends out there, that politics is not the answer to everything, that academic writing removed from the facts of life has some shortcomings. It is also an antidote to the triumphalism of the "End of History" school, that briefly mutated into "Unipolar world" advocacy. This book shows us that facts and actual lived human experience are every bit as important as theoretical paradigms.

Fascinating, and challenging. Put War, Evil, and the End of History on your summer reading list.

Mark Steyn Celebrates American Independence

"But America is also an historical anomaly: the first non-imperial superpower. It has no colonies and no desire for any. For almost 60 years, it's paid for the defence of the west virtually single-handed while creating and supporting structures--the UN, Nato, G8--that exist only to allow its "allies" to pretend they're on an equal footing. For "allies", read dependencies: it's because the US provides generous charity defence guarantees that the European governments have been free to fritter away their revenues on socialised health care and lavish welfare and all the other entitlements the Euro-progressives berate America for not providing for its own citizens. The non-arrogance of Washington is unparalleled in human history: it's American muscle that tames Bosnia but it's the risibly pompous Paddy Ashdown who gets to swank about the joint playing EU viceroy."

From Steyn Online.

More on Melvin Lasky and the CIA

"Mel had ample opportunity to display that courage in 1967 when it was revealed that a large part of the funding for the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and hence for Encounter, came from the CIA. The revelation could not have come at a worse moment. Anti-establishment and anti-American sentiment were boiling over across Europe and America (plus ca change ...). The fact that Encounter, far from being conservative, was an audaciously liberal, albeit anti-totalitarian, organ mattered not a whit. Overnight, readers and authors fled from the magazine. Mel's efforts to salvage and reconstitute Encounter over the next decade or so were indeed courageous. Although the magazine never quite regained its cachet, it did retain its wide-ranging intellectual verve. Encounter had struggled financially for many years. Finally, in 1991, it closed. It was the end of an era. Nothing even remotely approaching Encounter's intellectual seriousness and range has appeared in England to take its place. "

From The New Criterion.

Dinesh D'Souza Confronts Wahabism

In National Review Onlinehe says:

"The arguments on behalf of freedom, and of America, are not only for the benefit of Muslims in the Arab world; they are also for the benefit of people in America and the West. To help counter the anti-Americanism that we see from Europeans and sometimes even from Americans, we can confidently show our allies, our citizens, and our idealistic young people that America is not simply richer, more varied, and more tolerant, it is also morally superior to the fundamentalists' version of Islamic society. It was Edmund Burke a long time ago who wrote, 'To love our country, our country ought to be lovely.' Burke's point is that the highest form of patriotism is not based on the dogmatic assertion, 'My country, right or wrong.' Nor is the highest form of patriotism based on loving your country simply because it is yours. Rather, the highest form of patriotism is based on loving your country because it is good. "

Iyad Allawi v. Saddam Hussen

DEBKAfile (not always reliable, but often interesting) says the new Iraqi leader plays a deadly cat and mouse game with former Ba'athists.

"Intensely aware of the security concerns weighing down on his administration, the Iraqi prime minister understands full well that both his political future and physical survival depend on his skill in managing the twilight zone in which Iraqi Baath insurgents and their allies collide with the 130,000 American soldiers shoring up his regime. From the moment he assumed office, he became a prime target for assassins. His murder would provide a short cut for the Iraqi Baath and al Qaeda seeking to topple the Iraqi administration provisionally installed to assume sovereignty and shepherd Iraq to a democratic election. Allawi realized he needed some urgent life insurance, an ace in the hole for his survival. What he has done therefore is to gain control of Saddam and his top 11 regime officials as hostages to guarantee his life. The insurgents will be given to understand that violence against the prime minister will be met with the fast trial and execution of a member of Saddam's 'dirty dozen.' It will therefore be in Saddam's vital interest to keep his successor in good health."