Christopher Hitchens on Bernard Henri-Levy

From today's NY Times Book Review:

One or two of his chapters can be described as almost an interior monologue or stream of consciousness, where the son of a man who fought for the Spanish Republic is having trouble with a redefinition of what the verses of the “Internationale” call “the wretched of the earth.” Not everyone will share in the historic misery of this experience, of having seen Cambodia or Zimbabwe, say, turn into something rather worse than a negation of the liberating dream.

But for those who have, as well as for those who haven’t, Lévy provides a good register of what it felt like. And then there is this:

“I’m convinced that the collapse of the Communist house almost everywhere has even, in certain cases, had the unexpected side effect of wiping out the traces of its crimes, the visible signs of its failure, allowing certain people to start dreaming once again of an unsullied Communism, uncompromised and happy.”

If this is not precisely true, even of those nostalgic for “Fidel,” apologetic about Hugo Chávez, credulous about how “secular” the Baath Party was, or prone to sympathize with Vladimir Putin concerning the “encircling” of his country by aggressive titans like Estonia and Kosovo and Georgia, still it does contain a truth. One could actually have gone further and argued that the totalitarian temptation now extends to an endorsement of Islam ism as the last, best hope of humanity against the American empire. I could without difficulty name some prominent leftists, from George Galloway to Michael Moore, who have used the same glowing terms to describe “resistance” in, say, Iraq as they would once have employed for the Red Army or the Vietcong. Trawling the intellectual history of Europe, as he is able to do with some skill, Lévy comes across an ancestor of this sinister convergence in a yearning remark confided to his journal by the fascist writer Paul Claudel on May 21, 1935: “Hitler’s speech; a kind of Islamism is being created at the center of Europe.”

Christopher Hitchens on Pakistan

From Slate:

The very name Pakistan inscribes the nature of the problem. It is not a real country or nation but an acronym devised in the 1930s by a Muslim propagandist for partition named Chaudhary Rahmat Ali. It stands for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Indus-Sind. The stan suffix merely means "land." In the Urdu language, the resulting acronym means "land of the pure." It can be easily seen that this very name expresses expansionist tendencies and also conceals discriminatory ones. Kashmir, for example, is part of India. The Afghans are Muslim but not part of Pakistan. Most of Punjab is also in India. Interestingly, too, there is no B in this cobbled-together name, despite the fact that the country originally included the eastern part of Bengal (now Bangladesh, after fighting a war of independence against genocidal Pakistani repression) and still includes Baluchistan, a restive and neglected province that has been fighting a low-level secessionist struggle for decades. The P comes first only because Pakistan is essentially the property of the Punjabi military caste (which hated Benazir Bhutto, for example, because she came from Sind). As I once wrote, the country's name "might as easily be rendered as 'Akpistan' or 'Kapistan,' depending on whether the battle to take over Afghanistan or Kashmir is to the fore."

I could have phrased that a bit more tightly, since the original Pakistani motive for annexing and controlling Afghanistan is precisely the acquisition of "strategic depth" for its never-ending confrontation with India over Kashmir. And that dispute became latently thermonuclear while we simply looked on. One of the most creditable (and neglected) foreign-policy shifts of the Bush administration after 9/11 was away from our dangerous regional dependence on the untrustworthy and ramshackle Pakistan and toward a much more generous rapprochement with India, the world's other great federal, democratic, and multiethnic state.

Recent accounts of murderous violence in the capital cities of two of our allies, India and Afghanistan, make it appear overwhelmingly probable that the bombs were not the work of local or homegrown "insurgents" but were orchestrated by agents of the Pakistani ISI. This is a fantastically unacceptable state of affairs, which needs to be given its right name of state-sponsored terrorism. Meanwhile, and on Pakistani soil and under the very noses of its army and the ISI, the city of Quetta and the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas are becoming the incubating ground of a reorganized and protected al-Qaida. Sen. Barack Obama has, if anything, been the more militant of the two presidential candidates in stressing the danger here and the need to act without too much sentiment about our so-called Islamabad ally. He began using this rhetoric when it was much simpler to counterpose the "good" war in Afghanistan with the "bad" one in Iraq. Never mind that now; he is committed in advance to a serious projection of American power into the heartland of our deadliest enemy. And that, I think, is another reason why so many people are reluctant to employ truthful descriptions for the emerging Afghan-Pakistan confrontation: American liberals can't quite face the fact that if their man does win in November, and if he has meant a single serious word he's ever said, it means more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less.

Bernard Henri-Levy on Afghanistan

Discussing a controversy over photographs of dead French troops published in Paris Match, in a column from Gulf News:

First, the Taliban's state of mind: the fact that they hate the French only a little less than they hate the Americans, and that the clever minds who thought they might get into the Taliban's good graces by keeping a low profile and being discreet and ingratiating - even collaborating with them - were sadly mistaken.

Then there is the fact that they are not "resistance fighters", "religious students" or anything of the sort. Instead they are motivated by cynicism, choosing to celebrate a recent military success by displaying trophies and parading around as in ancient times.

We also learn - and this is hardly without importance - that they are what we call these days good communicators, able to stage their own photographs, posing for the camera (especially since the photographer says that is exactly what happened, and there is no reason to doubt her word).

Finally, those of us who wanted it neither heard nor said, or who considered it a state secret, are reminded that for years and years, the French have had elite commandos fighting shoulder to shoulder with the American Special Forces in the Afghan mountains.

The report reminds these people - and this is key - that France is fighting a war over there, a real war that also happens to be as undeclared as the war it fought in Algeria 50 years ago.

BHL will speak again in Washington at the French Embassy's La Maison Francaise on September 20th at 8 pm. The event is sold out, more information here.

Inside Eastern State Penitentiary

Last weekend, someone I know and this blogger visited Eastern State Penitentiary in Philaldelphia, Pennsylvania--not for the "Terror Behind the Walls" haunted house experience, but for the daytime tour of America's oldest penal institution. It was here that among the most progressive of America's founding fathers conducted the first experiment to improve human behavior by eliminating torture and beatings of prisoners.

Instead, Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Benjamin Rush, and a group of Pennsylvania Quakers decided to use isolation in solitary confinement to induce reflection, repentenance, and a new way of life for inmates. The experiment began in 1790 in the Philadelphia's Walnut Street Jail. In 1821, the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons succeeding in persuading the Legislature to fund the Eastern State Penitentary for 250 prisoners. Architect William Strickland, a namesake of someone I went to college with, was fired from the job in 1822, replaced by John Haviland. In 1826, the Marquis de La Fayette, one of my favorite historical characters, visited the construction site. In 1829, the prison finally opened.

Many leaders believe that crime is the result of environment, and that solitude will make the criminal regretful and penitent (hence the new word, Penitentiary). This correctional theory, as practiced in Philadelphia, will become known as the Pennsylvania System.

Plans are finalized to prohibit all contact between prisoners at Eastern State, the world's most ambitious Penitentiary, now nearly ready for its first inmates.

Masks are fabricated to keep the inmates from communicating during rare trips outside their cells. Cells are equipped with feed doors and individual exercise yards to prevent contact between inmates, and minimize contact between inmates and guards.

Prisoners were permitted to read only one book--the Bible--by the light from a single round skylight designed to resemble the eye of God looking down on the person in the cell below, a porthole through which one could observe heaven--and repent.

In 1832, the prison was visited by a French delegation that included Alexis de Tocqueville. The so-called "Pennyslvania System" became a model for European penology, leading to the construction of similar buildings across the world. But one foreign visitor was appalled by what he saw in the supposedly humane and progressive institution--Charles Dickens. He wrote in his American Notes:"The System is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement, and I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong...."

In 1913, Eastern State officially ended the "Pennsylvania System." Later prisoners included Al Capone, who spent eight months in a luxurious "single" furnished with rugs, lamps, and a radio (ordinary prisoners shared cells after 1913). Riots caused by overcrowding and poor conditions gave the model prison a bad name in the 1930s, it was closed in 1970.

Now, with funding from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the William Penn Foundation, among other sponsors, the prison is run as a museum and night-time Disney-style attraction. It is well worth a visit...a living example of how the road to hell is sometimes indeed paved with the very best of intentions.

Happy Ramadan!

It's a month of prayer and fasting. Wikipedia has the full story of the holiday, here.

Parag Khanna's Second World

A little bird told me that Wired magazine will run an article on Parag Khanna, author of .

Like Fareed Zakaria, Khanna is a former insider at the Council on Foreign Relations, so his views tend to reflect those of the Eastern Establishment, which makes them significant. The bird told me about Khanna because Khanna thinks we are entering a new Middle Ages, rather than Fukuyama's End of History. And if this is the Middle Ages, that makes Central Asia very important again--no doubt because it was named as such by Sir Halford Mackinder, author of the "Pivot Point" theory of world history, where control over center of the Eurasian landmass would lead to control of the world. And Khanna seems to think that control is headed towards--China, as he explained in an excerpt from his book published in The Guardian (UK):

It is difficult to find a westerner who does not intuitively support the idea of a free Tibet. But would Americans ever let go of Texas or California? For China, the Anglo-Russian great game for control of central Asia was neither inconclusive nor fruitless, something that cannot be said for Russia or Britain. Indeed, China was the big winner.

Boundary agreements in 1895 and 1907 gave Russia the Pamir mountains and established the Wakhan Corridor - the slender eastern tongue of Afghanistan that borders China - as a buffer to Britain. But rather than cede East Turkestan (Uighurstan) to the Russians, the British financed China's recapture of the territory, which it organised into Xinjiang (which means "New Dominions"). While West Turkestan was splintered into the hermetic Soviet Stans, China reasserted its traditional dominance over Xinjiang and Tibet, today its largest - and least stable - provinces. (Beijing has now accused the Dalai Lama of colluding with Muslim Uighur separatists in Xinjiang.) But without them, the country would be like America without all territory west of the Rockies: denied its continental majesty and status.

Every backpacker who has visited Tibet and Xinjiang in the past decade knows that the Chinese empire is painfully real: the western region's going concern is undoubtedly Chinese Manifest Destiny. With the end of the civil war in 1949, China endeavoured immediately to overcome the "tyranny of terrain" and tame the interminable mountain and desert landscapes with the aim of exploiting vast natural assets, establishing penal colonies and military bases, and expand the Lebensraum for its exploding population.

Both Tibet and Xinjiang have the misfortune of possessing resources China wants and of being situated on the path to resources China needs: Tibet has vast amounts of timber, uranium and gold, and the two territories constitute China's geographic gateway for trade flow outward - and energy flow inward - with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Decades of labour by the army and swarms of workers have paved the way for unchallenged Chinese dominance. The high-altitude train linking Shanghai and Lhasa that began service in 2006 represents not the beginning of Chinese hegemony, but its culmination.

Tibet and Xinjiang today set the stage for the birth of a multi-ethnic empire in ways that resemble nothing so much as America's frontier expansion nearly two centuries ago. Chinese think about their mission civilatrice much as American settlers did: they are bringing development and modernity. Asiatic, Buddhist Tibetans and Turkic, Muslim Uighurs are being lifted out of the third world - whether they like it or not.

They are getting roads, telephone lines, hospitals and jobs. School fees are being reduced or abolished to promote basic education and Chineseness. Unlike those Europeans who seek to define the EU as a Christian club, there are no Chinese inhibitions about incorporating Muslim territories. The new mythology of Chinese nationalism is based not on expunging minorities but granting them a common status in the paternalistic state: Uighurs and Tibetans, though not Han, are told they are Chinese.

"The Soviet Union collapsed because they experimented with glasnost prematurely, before the achieved unity among the peoples," explains a Chinese intellectual in Shanghai who studies central Asia. Large empires are maintained through a combination of force and law; and as recent weeks illustrate, China is determined not to waver.

Haunted Screens

Wired Magazine's New York Editor (and my college roommate at UC Berkeley--go Bears!) has a blog called Haunted Screens. No, it's not about which Horror pix to download from Netflix, at least not yet...(full disclosure, it links to this blog)

governmentbailout.com

Attention all Wall Street Moguls. The site is real! It exists! Here's the link:

http://governmentbailout.com

If only Lehman Brothers had known about this, they might have ended up like AIG...

British-Russian Diplomatic F-Word Controversy Continues...

Speaking of international crises, using clips from a BBC radio interview with Foreign Secretary David Milliband, Russia Today puts its own spin on whether Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov used the F-word in diplomatic communication... (I think he may have done):

Putin Speaks on Russian-Georgian War

On Russia Today, Russia's version of the Voice of America, Putin told a French journalist from Le Figaro that he blames the US for the Georgian war:

Bernard Henri-Levy Goes to Washington

His new book, Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism is in American bookstores, and BHL is on a book tour of the USA. Last night, I saw him at the Johns Hopkins Nitze School of International Affairs, on a panel entitled "Existential Threat or Historical Footnote? What Our Obession with Islam is Costing Us." Perhaps to dull Levy's message (why not give him a solo gig?), BHL had been plonked onto a panel of experts who pooh-poohed his theme of an existential threat to freedom from Islamist fundamentalist extremism allied with anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and Red-Brown neo-fascism. The panelists were: Ohio State University's Woody Hayes Professor John Mueller (BHL declined to sit next to him), who sounded like a spokesman for the Council on Islamic American Relations, who made fun of both existentialism and transcendentalism, while arguing that 9/11 was Overblown; Hopkins' Bernard L. Schwartz Professor Francis Fukuyama, a friend of BHL, who extended the invitation, yet apparently couldn't take Islamism seriously himself; and Adam Garfinkle, Colin Powell's former speechwriter--now editor of The American Interest magazine--whose explanation of the origins of Arab anti-semitism were immediately contradicted, and whose expertise was thus expertly undermined, by BHL. With so many contradictory voices on the program, no wonder that BHL didn't talk about Islamism, except by indirection, concentrating on the bankruptcy of the Left in the face of Islamism, the newest totalitarian threat, and the dangers of anti-Semitism. So uninterested was the audience in BHL's philosophy, with the exception of one self-identified Pashtun from Pakistan and one self-identifed American grandson of a Holocaust survivor, they primarily directed their questions to John Mueller and Francis Fukuyama--an audience beyond denial, into a "I don't want to know" willfull blindness towards what is going on in the world...

BHL made the point, in reference to a scenario sketched out by Fukuyama, that in any conflict between a Muslim woman confronting her family over a love match with a man of whom her family may disapprove, it is the obligation of progressives and the West to side with the individual over the community. This romantic notion, of love conquering all, is anathema to traditional Islamist thought--and takes a strong stand for individual freedom. When BHL made the statement, it was greeted by silence--punctuated by the sound of one person clapping. I turned around and saw a middle-aged Asian woman applauding--surrounded by dumb, silent, and disapproving students and Washingtonians.

I thought to myself: BHL may have a hard sell with this one...

So, I'm going to request an interview with BHL from his Random House publicist (his editor was there, and I did shake BHL's hand, since practically no one else was around him after the talk). I hope I'll have a chance to ask him some questions about his book while he's in the nation's capital. In the meantime, I did at least get a few photos with my cell phone of the French nouvelle philosophe. You can buy a copy of the book from Amazon.com here: NY Sun review here. You can read an excerpt here. On Kojo Nnamdi's WAMU-FM radio show, here.

Tina Fey as Sarah Palin

Russia's New National History Standards

Leon Aron's New Republic article reminded this reader of Lynne Cheney's failed attempt to standardize a pro-American History curriculum during the her chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Luckily, it didn't work here--although Cheney-ism under Putin, like Ford-ism under Stalin, seems to have found its truest adherents in the highest levels of the Kremlin:

In fact, the clearest expression of the Kremlin's goodwill toward the textbook came two months earlier, with an invitation to the conference participants to visit President Putin at his residence in Novo-Ogaryovo, outside Moscow. In a long introduction to the discussion that ensued, Putin complained that there was "mishmash" (kasha) in the heads of teachers of history and social sciences, and that this dire situation in the teaching of Russian history needed to be corrected by the introduction of "common standards. " (Four days later, a new law, introduced in the Duma and passed with record speed in eleven days, authorized the ministry of education and science to determine which textbooks be "recommended" for school use and to determine which publishers would print them.) There followed some instructive exchanges:

"A conference participant: In 1990-1991 we disarmed ideologically. [We adopted] a very uncertain, abstract ideology of all-human values. . . . It is as if we were back in school, or even kindergarten. We were told [by the West]: you have rejected communism and are building democracy, and we will judge when and how you have done. . . . In exchange for our disarming ideologically we have received this abstract recipe: you become democrats and capitalists and we will control you.

Putin: Your remark about someone who assumes the posture of teacher and begins to lecture us is of course absolutely correct. But I would like to add that this, undoubtedly, is also an instrument of influencing our country. This is a tried and true trick. If someone from the outside is getting ready to grade us, this means that he arrogates the right to manage [us] and is keen to continue to do so.

Participant: In the past two decades, our youth have been subjected to a torrent of the most diverse information about our historical past. This information [contains] different conceptual approaches, interpretations, or value judgments, and even chronologies. In such circumstances, the teacher is likely to . . .

Putin (interrupting): Oh, they will write, all right. You see, many textbooks are written by those who are paid in foreign grants. And naturally they are dancing the polka ordered by those who pay them. Do you understand? And unfortunately [such textbooks] find their way to schools and colleges."

And later, concluding the session, Putin declared:

"As to some problematic pages in our history--yes, we've had them. But what state hasn't? And we've had fewer of such pages than some other [states]. And ours were not as horrible as those of some others. Yes, we have had some terrible pages: let us remember the events beginning in 1937, let us not forget about them. But other countries have had no less, and even more. In any case, we did not pour chemicals over thousands of kilometers or drop on a small country seven times more bombs than during the entire World War II, as it was in Vietnam, for instance. Nor did we have other black pages, such as Nazism, for instance. All sorts of things happen in the history of every state. And we cannot allow ourselves to be saddled with guilt--they'd better think of themselves."

Crisis Communications for Diplomats

The Daily Mail (UK) today has an account of a telephone conversation between British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that may explain why diplomatic communication is often kept secret:

At one point Sergei Lavrov, the colourful Russian foreign minister, became so incensed that he reportedly barked: 'Who the f*** are you to lecture me?'

Mr Lavrov, who is seen as the fearsome face of Russia's new aggressive foreign policy, objected to what he believed was Mr Miliband's condescending tone.

He used full-strength industrial language to suggest to the Foreign Secretary that he knew little, if anything, of Russia's history - perhaps unaware that Mr Miliband's grandfather Samuel served in the Red Army and his father Ralph was a leading Marxist theoretician.

Such was the repeated use of the F-word that it was difficult to draft a readable note of the exchange, according to one insider who has seen the transcript.

A Whitehall source said: 'It was effing this and effing that.

'It was not what you would call diplomatic language. It was rather shocking.'

Mr Miliband was 'surprised' by the ferocity of the verbal attack and the nature of the language, an insider close to the Foreign Secretary added...

The Art Museum of Tunis

Thanks to a notice from a Facebook friend, I learned about this new museum--The Art Museum of Tunis:

Chers Amis des arts,

L’idée de créer un Musée d’art à Tunis est un projet ambitieux auquel je m’attaque et je reste conscient que je ne peux le réaliser sans la participation d’autres personnes. Il est évident que des énergies différentes doivent s’associer pour mettre au monde une telle institution.

Le but est de permettre aux visiteurs de la Tunisie d’admirer les créations des artistes de ce pays, de donner l’occasion aux étudiants de mettre des couleurs sur les noms dont ils entendent parler, de savoir à quoi ressemble un « Aly Ben Salem » en vrai. Car en l’absence de musée dédié à la peinture dans notre pays, comment les gens peuvent-ils avoir une éducation artistique ? Je ressens ce manque comme beaucoup d’autres et j’essaye d’y remédier.

C’est pourquoi j’ai besoin de votre contribution, n’hésitez pas à écrire vos idées et propositions, elles seront étudiées avec toute l’attention du monde.
Je suis curieux de savoir ce que le spectateur voudrait voir comme œuvre dans ce musée, alors envoyez moi les noms de vos artistes Tunisiens préférés et montrez ce group à vos connaissances pour que ce cercle s’agrandisse et que les amis des arts nous rejoignent.

L’objectif étant que Le Musée d’art de Tunis appartienne au public, il est naturel donc de faire participer tout le monde.

Je compte sur vous.

Amar Ben Belgacem
Président fondateur du musée d’art de Tunis

Dear friends,

Setting up an Art Museum in Tunis is an ambitious project that I am starting up, though I’m aware of the fact that I can’t do it without other people’s contribution. And to give birth to such an institution, it is obvious that we need to gather various forces/talents.

The aim is to allow visitors of Tunisia to admire creations of artists from this country, to give students the opportunity to associate colours with the artists they’ve heard about, to see what Aly Ben Salem’s artwork looks like in real life. How could people increase their knowledge of art without any museum featuring paintings of our country? As many, I feel this lack and want to make up for it.

That’s why I need your contribution: do not hesitate to submit your ideas and proposals, they will be examined with the best care you can imagine.
As I look forward to knowing what kind of work a visitor would like to see in this museum, please send me a list of your favourite Tunisian Artists and show this group to your acquaintances to make this circle grow and encourage many friends of art join the project.

As this Art Museum of Tunisia being is intended to belong to the public, it’s obvious that everybody should be encouraged to participate.

I rely on you.

Amar Ben Belgacem
President and Fondator of The Art Museum of Tunis.

Ann Coulter on George Bush

In today's column, Ann says the President is like Gary Cooper in High Noon:

George Bush is Gary Cooper in the classic western "High Noon." The sheriff is about to leave office when a marauding gang is coming to town. He could leave, but he waits to face the killers as all his friends and all the townspeople, who supported him during his years of keeping them safe, slowly abandon him. In the end, he walks alone to meet the killers, because someone has to.

That's Bush. Name one other person in Washington who would be willing to stand alone if he had to, because someone had to.

OK, there is one, but she's not in Washington yet. Appropriately, at the end of "High Noon," Cooper is surrounded by the last two highwaymen when, suddenly, his wife (Grace Kelly) appears out of nowhere and blows away one of the killers! The aging sheriff is saved by a beautiful, gun-toting woman.

Washington Post: Cindy McCain Broke Federal Law

Today's Washington Post runs a story alleging that Cindy McCain broke federal drug laws, reportedly committing fraud to feed her addiction:

Her charity, AVMT, kept a ready supply of antibiotics and over-the-counter pain medications needed to fulfill its medical mission. It also secured prescriptions for the narcotic painkillers Vicodin, Percocet and Tylenol 3 in quantities of 100 to 400 pills, the county report shows.

McCain started taking narcotics for herself, the report shows. To get them, she asked the charity's medical director, John Max Johnson, to make out prescriptions for the charity in the names of three AVMT employees.

The employees did not know their names were being used. And under DEA regulations, Johnson was supposed to use a form to notify federal officials that he was ordering the narcotics for the charity. It is illegal for an organization to use personal prescriptions to fill its drug needs.

How come the potentially future First Lady didn't do jail time? The Post explains:

The DEA questioned the charity's doctors, and McCain hired John Dowd, a powerhouse Washington lawyer, to represent AVMT. Dowd had defended John McCain in the Keating Five scandal, helping the senator win the mildest sanction of the five senators involved. Dowd declined to comment for this article.

Soon, the DEA began looking at Cindy McCain. Dowd informed Johnson, the physician, that "there's been further investigation and Cindy's got a drug problem," Johnson told county investigators.

The DEA pursued the matter for 11 months. Dowd kept tabs on the investigation from Washington, writing letters and making frequent phone calls to the agency, according to sources close to the investigation.

McCain's conduct left her facing federal charges of obtaining "a controlled substance by misrepresenting, fraud, forgery, deception or subterfuge." Experts say she could have faced a 20-year prison sentence.

Dowd negotiated a deal with the U.S. attorney's office allowing McCain, as a first-time offender, to avoid charges and enter a diversion program that required community service, drug treatment and reimbursement to the DEA for investigative costs.

Ali Alyami: What the Saudis Want in Lebanon

Ali Alyami, of the Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia, has emailed this analysis:

...the Saudis feel threatened by Iran and that’s why they would like to see Hezbollah take over Lebanon. They know if Hezbollah control all of Lebanon, the Israelis will destroy them, hit Syria if it interferes and takes out Iran’s nuclear installations. All of this works to the benefit of the absolute and theocratic Saudi princes and their religious extremist allies. After all this is cleared up, the Saudis will go back and build Lebanon’s infrastructure and implement the Shariah law. The biggest losers in all of this are the defenseless Lebanese Christians most, if not all, of whom will leave the country instead of being enslaved by the Wahhabis. This is a tragedy in the making. The West will either give lip service or look the other way. In the long run, Israel will not benefit from this scenario either.

In the mean time, the Saudis are working closely with the Iranians now to unite all Muslims against the West.

Memo to Dick Cheney: Maybe "Spheres of Influence" Aren't Such a Bad Idea?

More fallout from the Russian-Georgian war--and Dick Cheney's anti-Russian saber-rattling. Drudge tipped this Breitbart.com item:

Two Tu-160 Russian strategic bombers landed Wednesday at an airbase in Venezuela to take part in military exercises, Russian news agencies reported, citing the Russian defence ministry.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the planes:

The Tupolev Tu-160 (NATO reporting name Blackjack) is a supersonic, variable-geometry heavy bomber designed by the Soviet Union. Similar to the B-1 Lancer but with far greater speed, range and payload, it is one of the heaviest combat aircraft ever built.

Introduced in 1987, it was the last Soviet strategic bomber designed, but production of the aircraft still continues, with at least 16 currently in service with the Russian Air Force.

Its pilots call the Tu-160 the “White Swan”, due to the surprising maneuverability and antiflash white finish of the aircraft.

It looks like the Bush administration is being hoisted upon the petard of its own rhetoric. If "spheres of influence" are a bad idea, then has Bush cancelled the Monroe Doctrine? That seems to be what the Russians are testing here. And if the Monroe Doctrine is still valid--it defines an American sphere of influence--what principle is there behind the statement that Russia is not permitted a sphere around its borders? And if not a matter of principle, rather of power, then it looks like Russia means to test American power.

So, it looks like either Dick Cheney backs down--or there is a new power struggle with Russia, maybe even a new Cuban missile crisis, this time in Venezuela. Which, ironically, may help John McCain--unless the Kremlin is in close touch with David Axelrod about what is going on in Latin America...

Fouad Ajami: Obama Really Means Change

Ajami calls Obama a "cosmopolitan" in today's Wall Street Journal:

So the Obama candidacy must be judged on its own merits, and it can be reckoned as the sharpest break yet with the national consensus over American foreign policy after World War II. This is not only a matter of Sen. Obama's own sensibility; the break with the consensus over American exceptionalism and America's claims and burdens abroad is the choice of the activists and elites of the Democratic Party who propelled Mr. Obama's rise.

Though the staging in Denver was the obligatory attempt to present the Obama Democrats as men and women of the political center, the Illinois senator and his devotees are disaffected with American power. In their view, we can make our way in the world without the encumbrance of "hard" power. We would offer other nations apologies for the way we carried ourselves in the aftermath of 9/11, and the foreign world would be glad for a reprieve from the time of American certitude.

The starkness of the choice now before the country is fully understood when compared to that other allegedly seminal election of 1960. But the legend of Camelot and of the New Frontier exaggerates the differences between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy. A bare difference of four years separated the two men (Nixon had been born in 1913, Kennedy in 1917). Both men had seen service in the Navy in World War II. Both were avowed Cold Warriors. After all, Kennedy had campaigned on the missile gap -- in other words the challenger had promised a tougher stance against the Soviet Union. (Never mind the irony: There was a missile gap; the U.S. had 2,000 missiles, the Soviet Union a mere 67.)

The national consensus on America's role abroad, and on the great threats facing it, was firmly implanted. No great cultural gaps had opened in it, arugula was not on the menu, and the elites partook of the dominant culture of the land; the universities were then at one with the dominant national ethos. The "disuniting of America" was years away. American liberalism was still unabashedly tethered to American nationalism.

We are at a great remove from that time and place. Globalization worked its way through the land, postmodernism took hold of the country's intellectual life. The belief in America's "differentness" began to give way, and American liberalism set itself free from the call of nationalism. American identity itself began to mutate.

The celebrated political scientist Samuel Huntington, in "Who Are We?," a controversial book that took up this delicate question of American identity, put forth three big conceptions of America: national, imperial and cosmopolitan. In the first, America remains America. In the second, America remakes the world. In the third, the world remakes America. Back and forth, America oscillated between the nationalist and imperial callings. The standoff between these two ideas now yields to the strength and the claims of cosmopolitanism. It is out of this new conception of America that the Obama phenomenon emerges.

Here's a definition of cosmopolitanism from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

The word ‘cosmopolitan’, which derives from the Greek word kosmopolitês (‘citizen of the world’), has been used to describe a wide variety of important views in moral and socio-political philosophy. The nebulous core shared by all cosmopolitan views is the idea that all human beings, regardless of their political affiliation, do (or at least can) belong to a single community, and that this community should be cultivated. Different versions of cosmopolitanism envision this community in different ways, some focusing on political institutions, others on moral norms or relationships, and still others focusing on shared markets or forms of cultural expression. The philosophical interest in cosmopolitanism lies in its challenge to commonly recognized attachments to fellow-citizens, the local state, parochially shared cultures, and the like.

For more on this concept's relevance to contemporary politics, see Kwame Anthony Appiah's book Cosmopolitanism: