Recently in International Affairs Category

The Democrats' panties are in a bunch over President Bush's criticism of Barack Obama's plan to consult with our enemies, but the ladies doth protest too much, methinks.

Speaking before the Knesset, Bush said that “some people” believe the United States “should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along."

"We have heard this foolish delusion before," Bush said. "As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history." ...

Sen. Joe Biden, piling on to Democratic complaints about President Bush’s speech in Israel today:

“This is bullshit, this is malarkey. This is outrageous, for the president of the United States to go to a foreign country, to sit in the Knesset ... and make this kind of ridiculous statement.” ...

"There is no escaping what the president is doing," said Durbin, who supports Obama. "It is an attack on Sen. Obama’s position that we should not be avoiding even those we disagree with when it comes to negotiations and diplomacy."

Durbin called Bush's remarks "unfair and really unfortunate."

Well, yeah, Bush is criticizing Obama's foreign policy ideas. The President is in charge of America's foreign policy, so this is a very different situation than when leftist politicians go to foreign countries to malign America. Still, I personally would have preferred if President Bush had made these accusations from the White House or the steps of the Capitol.

You'd think that by now most people would be quick to recognize that immigrants and illegal immigrants are very different, but you'd be wrong. Writes Ruben Navarrette Jr.:

Finally, I said, there is an unfortunate double standard in how Americans feel about foreign flags and those who wave them. A couple of years ago, Jewish Americans marched on Washington to declare support for Israel. Guess what flag many of them waved? And no one said a critical word. This wasn’t a cultural event like St. Patrick’s Day. This was a political gesture, like, say, a march for immigrants’ rights. Yet, some will insist, those who marched on Washington waving the Israeli flag were probably U.S. citizens and those who marched last week on May Day were, in all likelihood, immigrants. And that makes a difference. But wait. We know from media reports that many of the pro-immigrant marchers were U.S. citizens, including the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants.

As Bill Quick responds at the first link:

I don’t think most Americans have any real problem with other Americans who wave the banners of their former countries in celebrations here. Yet it is certainly understandable that Americans might resent the brazen sense of unearned entitlement demonstrated by those who live here in a state of illegality and who thrust the flags of their current nation (the only one in which they hold legal residency or citizenship) while demanding “rights” that are beyond their legal status in the first place.

I agree with everything Mr. Navarrette says about those immigrants who have followed the rules, waited their turn, and live in the United States in full compliance with our laws. But when he conflates legal immigrants with illegals under the general rubric of “immigrants,” he practices a pernicious form of dishonesty that poisons all his arguments and, indeed, the discussion itself. And, strangely enough, his position even shows great respect to those who legally emigrated into the country from Mexico, often waiting for years while patiently working their way through the endless convolutions of U.S. immigration procedures. To make the claim that such folks are no different — that they are all part of some vast, amorphous group of “immigrants” that includes all those who didn’t endure the same hardships — is to render their patience, their respect for the law, and the goals they have worked so hard to reach a sad joke. More fools them, for obeying the law.

The purposeful conflation of legal immigrants with illegal immigrants is intended to confuse and prevent the important debate on immigration. Any writer who refuses to recognize the difference between the two groups has nothing meaningful to contribute to the discussion.

I wrote about David Mamet's break with "liberalism" a couple of months ago, and here's another great story about a Hollywood leftist's conversion to the right-wing.

In my former life I was Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh’s agent and manager. I co-owned a prosperous talent management firm, Relativity Management, lived in a four-story mansion, and somehow success­fully stumbled (often drunk and stoned) through the whorehouse called Hollywood. I was an indoctrinated hardcore liberal. If you think I’m a spoiled dick and you hate me, then we’re on the right track. But having a child 10 years ago changed my thinking. It gave me a certain respect for capitalism and even corporate America.

When I bought a new Hummer H2 back in 2002, I ordered a custom license plate that read U.S. WINS. I got it because I believed in the message. I wanted people to have a reaction to the plate, usually negative, and then examine their thinking. Would it be so bad to win this war? Plus, I knew it would fucking piss everyone in the city off because it was Los Angeles.

I could give two fucks about WMDs. There were much more important reasons to topple Saddam—terrorism being one of them. The root causes of terrorism are the lack of capitalism, the lack of democracy, and the lack of modern education. What has stood in the way of those things has primarily been the regimes of Iraq, Iran, and Syria. We just got one of them out of the way.

It looks like visiting Iraq and watching the War on Terror first-hand can really affect one's perspective.

(HT: My wife.)

The National Security Agency says Japanese is hard... so hard that you shouldn't even try to learn it.

(HT: Nick and Bernardo.)

BBC North American editor Justin Webb reports from Missouri on the tranquility and safety of gun-toting America:

Wait till you get to London Texas, or Glasgow Montana, or Oxford Mississippi or Virgin Utah, for that matter, where every household is required by local ordinance to possess a gun.

Folks will have guns in all of these places and if you break into their homes they will probably kill you.

They will occasionally kill each other in anger or by mistake, but you never feel as unsafe as you can feel in south London.

It is a paradox. Along with the guns there is a tranquility and civility about American life of which most British people can only dream.

What surprises the British tourists is that, in areas of the US that look and feel like suburban Britain, there is simply less crime and much less violent crime.

Doors are left unlocked, public telephones unbroken.

One reason - perhaps the overriding reason - is that there is no public drunkenness in polite America, simply none.

I have never seen a group of drunk young people in the entire six years I have lived here. I travel a lot and not always to the better parts of town.

It is an odd fact that a nation we associate - quite properly - with violence is also so serene, so unscarred by petty crime, so innocent of brawling.

That's the difference between American citizens and British subjects. A free and armed population can police itself.

(HT: Instapundit.)

In what appears on the surface to be a clumsy attempt at espionage, a Mexican official stole several BlackBerries from Presidential aides during a high-level meeting.

Whether he was up to no good or simply desperate to play BrickBreaker, a Mexican press attache was caught on camera by Secret Service pocketing several White House BlackBerries during a recent meeting in New Orleans, FOX News has learned.

Sources with knowledge of the incident said the official, whose first name is Rafael, took six or seven of the handheld devices from a table outside a special room in the hotel where the Mexican delegation was meeting with President Bush.

Everyone entering the room was required to leave their cell phones, BlackBerries and other such devices on the table, a commonplace practice when high-level meetings are held. American officials discovered their missing belongings when they were leaving the session.

The Secret Service caught the fellow at the airport as he was preparing to leave the country with his "accidental" loot. Looks like an obvious attempt to steal American secrets, either for the Mexican government or personal gain. Our officials should be more careful with their equipment, and one can only hope that they're using encryption and properly locking their devices when not in use.

Congressmen arguing that Iraq should be spending its own money for reconstruction to ease the burden on America and the Coalition are correct, and I've been arguing similarly for years. It's primarily the Democrats making this point now, but I don't see why Republicans should object. (Am I missing something?)

Democrats plan to push legislation this spring that would force the Iraqi government to spend its own surplus in oil revenues to rebuild the country, sparing U.S. dollars. ...

"Rather, we need to put continuous and increasing pressure on the Iraqis to settle their political differences, to pay for their own reconstruction with their oil windfalls, and to take the lead in conducting military operations," said Levin, D-Mich.

Iraq has about $30 billion in surplus funds stored in U.S. banks, according to Levin.

Iraq is looking at a potential boon in oil revenue this year, possibly as much as $100 billion in 2007 and 2008. Meanwhile, the U.S. military is having to buy its fuel on the open market, paying on average $3.23 a gallon and spending some $153 million a month in Iraq on fuel alone.

This will be a complicated transition, and the Coalition needs to make certain that this oil money doesn't get stolen by a new breed of kleptocrats or wasted by incompetents. Corruption is rampant throughout the region, so this will be no easy task.

I also wouldn't object to direct payments into the American treasury to compensate us for our expenditures thus far. I've mentioned before that compensation for the families of Americans killed in Iraq would build a lot of good-will.

Military historian Frederick W. Kagan has a great piece on the importance of winning wars. Whatever one may think of our war in Iraq -- whether it should have been waged, whether it has been managed competently, whether we are presently winning -- Kagan explains why the costs of losing are far, far higher than the American left is willing to acknowledge.

The hyper-sophisticates of the American foreign-policy and intellectual establishment direct their invective at the whole notion of winning or losing. What’s the definition of winning? If we choose to withdraw from an ill-conceived and badly executed war, that’s not really losing, is it? We can and should find ways to use diplomacy rather than military power to handle the consequences of any so-called defeat. Less-sophisticated antiwar leaders on both sides will ask simply why the U.S. should continue to spend its blood and treasure to fight in “a far-off land of which we know little,” as Neville Chamberlain famously said in defense of his abandonment of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis. We have, after all, more pressing problems at home to which the Iraq war is only contributing. As is often the case, there is a level between over-thinking and under-thinking a problem that is actually thinking. Yes, in the world as it is, whatever line we sell ourselves, there really is victory and there really is defeat, the two are different, and their effects on the future diverge profoundly. And yes, the reason we must continue to spend money and the lives of the very best Americans in that far-off land is that the interests of every American are actually at stake.

We will consider below just how much of a diversion of resources away from more desirable domestic priorities the Iraq war actually is, but the more important point is simply this: Unless the advocates of defeat can show, as they have not yet done, that the consequences of losing are very likely to be small not simply the day after the last American leaves Iraq, but over the next five, ten, and 50 years, then what they are really selling is short-term relief in exchange for long-term pain. As drug addicts can attest, this kind of instant-gratification temptation is very seductive — it’s what keeps drug dealers in business despite the terrible damage their products do to their customers. “Just end the pain now and deal with the future when it gets here” is as bad a strategy for a great nation as it is for a teenager.

Maybe I'm cynical, but I think most of the anti-war elite know that a retreat-defeat will hurt America, and they're eager for America's diminishment in the world. It's not fair that America is so rich and powerful! We owe it to the rest of the world to sabotage ourselves for the sake of international equality. Obviously, most Americans would reject such a premise, so the left is forced to argue that they aren't really calling for defeat, and anyway, if they are, the consequences won't be that bad.

I've written quite a bit about Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe over the past few years, and it's heartening to see that he may be on his way out. Let's hope so, for the sake of the former "Jewel of Africa".

Andrew Walden claims that Muslims are leaving Islam in droves, mainly for Christianity or secularism.

Pope Benedict’s choice to publicly baptize the most prominent Muslim in Italy, Egyptian-born Magdi Allam, highlights a quiet worldwide exodus from Islam. In recent years, millions have moved on. With this high-profile action, Pope Benedict demonstratively blesses this massive conversion from the highest levels of the Church. ...

Although al-Qataani points to Africa, there is another phenomenon based on repulsion from Islamist dictatorship, corruption, and terrorist violence. In Iran as many as 1 million people have surreptitiously converted to Evangelical Christianity in the last five years. Pastor Hormoz Shariat claims to have converted 50,000 of them through his U.S.-based Farsi-language satellite ministry. He contrasts the upswing to the efforts of evangelical missionaries in Iran between 1830 and 1979, whose 149 years of work built a Christian community of only 3,000.

Lots more there, with a great many links. Not sure how accurate the premise is as a whole, but it sounds encouraging.

Woopty-doo, a new poll shows that "the world's" opinion of America is improving.

Attitudes to the United States are improving, an opinion poll carried out for the BBC World Service suggests.

The average percentage of people saying that the US has a positive influence has risen to 35% from 31% a year ago, according to the survey.

Those saying the US has a negative influence fell five percentage points to 47%.

The poll, part of a regular survey of world opinion, interviewed more than 17,000 people in 34 countries.

Wouldn't the interpretation of these results depend heavily on which countries were polled? That list isn't given in the article. I bet if you asked 34 Muslim countries America would fare pretty poorly. By mixing friends and enemies together, the aggregate results of this poll are nonsensical. I suppose it could be useful to measure what our friends and allies think of us, but shouldn't we be trying to piss off the tyrants and thugs of the world?

I'm certainly no fan of Nancy Pelosi, but I appreciate her stand against Chinese oppression of Tibet. I don't know all the ramifications of her advice, but I hope President Bush considers it carefully.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi does not want the U.S. to boycott the Beijing Olympics, but she says that President George W. Bush should consider skipping the opening ceremony.

"I think boycotting the opening ceremony, which really gives respect to the Chinese government, is something that should be kept on the table," Pelosi, D-Calif., told "Good Morning America" co-anchor Robin Roberts in an interview airing Tuesday. "I think the president might want to rethink this later, depending on what other heads of state do."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has announced she will not attend the Olympic Games, set to begin on August 8, 2008. Pelosi, meanwhile, has been outspoken in support of Tibet, the site of recent crackdowns on human rights demonstrators by the Chinese government.

In a recent trip to Dharmasala, India, home of the Dalai Lama's displaced Tibetan government, Pelosi said, "If freedom-loving people don't speak out against China's oppression of people in Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak out against any oppressed people."

China ruthlessly persecutes Christians, but that doesn't make the news as much as Tibet does because Christians are more diffuse. Keep all the victims of communist brutality in your prayers.

America's capital markets are losing ground to foreign competition due to excessive expense and regulation.

The United States received only 6.9 percent of the funds raised in global initial public offerings in 2007 and did not participate in any of the top 20 global IPOs, Harvard Law School Professor Hal Scott said at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's second annual capital markets conference.

"We found U.S. public markets had increasingly become uncompetitive," said Scott, director of the private-sector Committee on Capital Markets Regulation.

In comparison, in 2000, about half of the value of global IPOs was raised in the United States, according to Scott's committee.

Scott also noted that many foreign companies in 2007 took advantage of a U.S. regulatory change that let them delist from U.S. exchanges. About 15 percent of U.S.-listed foreign companies left the U.S. markets in 2007, about three times the historical rate, he said.

We need to ease regulations and cut taxes, or businesses will go elsewhere. That's capitalism. If we keep moving towards greater regulation and government meddling, we're going to end up on the losing end of economic history.

(HT: John Rutledge.)

Although Iraq's past collaborations with terrorist groups like al Qaeda are difficult to completely discern, it looks like Saddam Hussein's connections to leftist United States congressmen are easier to track.

Saddam Hussein's intelligence agency secretly financed a trip to Iraq for three U.S. lawmakers during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

The three anti-war Democrats made the trip in October 2002, while the Bush administration was trying to persuade Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. While traveling, they called for a diplomatic solution.

Prosecutors say that trip was arranged by Muthanna Al-Hanooti, a Michigan charity official, who was charged Wednesday with setting up the junket at the behest of Saddam's regime. Iraqi intelligence officials allegedly paid for the trip through an intermediary and rewarded Al-Hanooti with 2 million barrels of Iraqi oil.

The lawmakers are not named in the indictment but the dates correspond to a trip by Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington, David Bonior of Michigan and Mike Thompson of California. None was charged and Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said investigators "have no information whatsoever" any of them knew the trip was underwritten by Saddam.

"Obviously, we didn't know it at the time," McDermott spokesman Michael DeCesare said Wednesday. "The trip was to see the plight of the Iraqi children. That's the only reason we went."

Obviously! We're supposed to believe that these congresscritters were smart enough get elected to national office but were completely unaware of who paid for their trip to Iraq in the run-up to our invasion. What's more, we're supposed to believe that these vermin didn't knowingly use their public offices to lend legitimacy to the murderous tyrant Saddam Hussein. It's just a coincidence! It's all so obvious!

First off, let me say that I think it's silly for corporations to pay taxes at all. Why not just tax income when the shareholders of a corporation take out their profit as dividends? Taxing corporate profit and then taxing dividends again for individuals isn't fair, because you're taxing the same money twice on the same people. Anyway, it would be a lot simpler to just combine all the taxes together.

That said, the Tax Foundation has released a new report showing that corporate tax rates in America are among the highest in the world, and there's no doubt that our high rates are pushing jobs and businesses out of the country.

A new study from the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group in Washington, shows that most American states tax job providers at a higher rate than any other country in the developed world.

"This is startling news for America's businesses and workers," said Tax Foundation president Scott Hodge, the study's author. "Tax competition for jobs and investment is fierce, and the U.S. continues to fall further and further behind. Our states should be the world's leaders in many things, but high taxation should not be one of them. The high federal corporate tax rate is literally crushing states' competitive abilities. That means fewer jobs for American workers."

Counting the federal rate alone, the U.S. has the world's highest corporate tax rate, but including average sub-national rates (federal plus state in the U.S.), Japan edges out the U.S. for the highest-tax location (see table).

This new study breaks the tax down state-by-state, adding each state's corporate tax rate to the federal corporate tax rate. The results show that 24 states impose, when combined with the federal rate, a higher business tax rate than in any other nation. In fact:

* 24 states have a combined corporate tax rate higher than top-ranked Japan.
* 32 states have a combined corporate tax rate higher than third-ranked Germany.
* 46 states have a combined corporate tax rate higher than fourth-ranked Canada.
* All 50 states have a combined corporate tax rate higher than fifth-ranked France.

As I said though, to be properly considered you need to combine corporate tax rates with individual tax rates. My intuition tells me that if you add corporate tax rates to our individual tax rates, the sum would be lower than the similar sum for the various other countries mentioned. (I have no numbers on hand to back this up.)

Fellow St. Louisan Gateway Pundit has a fun chart comparing military deaths in the Iraq War to military deaths during the first five years of Bill Clinton's presidency.

As has been repeatedly noted, the Iraq War has had very light casualties by historical standards.

If you had to choose between easing our dependence on oil and feeding the poor, which would you pick?

The very idea that the modern world could run out of food seems ludicrous, but that is the flip side, or cause, of the tremendous recent increase in the cost of raw wheat, corn, rice, oats and soybeans. Food prices are not escalating because speculators have run them up for sport and profit, but because accelerating demand in developing nations, biofuel production and poor harvests in some areas have made basic foodstuffs truly scarce.

In energy circles, folks who warn about the beginning of the end of cheap fossil fuels talk about "peak oil" as a point we have dangerously and expensively crossed. Likewise, you can now add "peak wheat" to your political and investment lexicon. And it's a lot worse. ...

Joseph R. Dancy, who teaches law at Southern Methodist University and runs a small hedge fund, lays the immediacy of the crisis directly on ethanol-production mandates in an energy bill recently passed by Congress. The bill, intended to boost America's energy independence, is expected to push as much as 31% of the U.S. corn crop into biofuels production, up from 24% last year. In other words, at the exact moment we most need corn on our plates, it is being funneled into cars. A full tank of gas requires the equivalent of a quarter of a ton of raw foodstuffs, enough to feed one person bread for a year.

The flaws of biofuel have been obvious for a long time, but global warming alarmism has distracted us with phantoms from the real dangers our species has wrestled with for millennia.

Former CIA case officer Marc Gerecht explains that Sunni extremism is in retreat all around the world thanks to our ongoing success in Iraq. This is the best news I've heard since 2001; it must make the Democrats nervous about their electoral chances in November, despite their obvious pleasure at America's victory.

Throughout the Arab world, fundamentalism today is much stronger on the ground than it was in the 1980s. Yet the fundamentalist commitment to the Iraqi Sunni Arab insurgency pales in comparison with that made to Sunni Afghans.

A second striking fact about Islamism and the Iraq war is that the arrival of foreign holy warriors is deradicalizing the local population -- the exact opposite of what happened in Afghanistan. In the Soviet war, the "Arab Afghans" arrived white-hot -- their radicalization had occurred at home in the 1960s and 1970s, when Islamic fundamentalism replaced secular Arab nationalism as the driving intellectual force. On the subcontinent, Arab holy warriors accelerated extreme Islamism among both Afghans and Pakistanis. We are still living with the results.

In Iraq, as we have seen with the anti-al-Qaeda, Sunni Arab "Awakenings," Sunni extremism is now in retreat. More important, the gruesome anti-Shiite tactics of extremist groups, combined with the much-quoted statements made by former Sunni insurgents about the positive actions of the United States in Iraq, have caused a great deal of intellectual turbulence in the Arab world.

That final emphasized phrase is the key. "Intellectual turbulence" is what President Bush and other invasion-supporters intended back in 2003, and that sort of radical rethinking in the Muslim world is what will ultimately win the War on Terror. (A radical rethinking on our part is what will lose the war.) It's either that, or a fight to the death between Islam and the West -- for the sake of Muslims around the world I hope it doesn't come to that.

(HT: Iraq Pundit, who is an Iraqi in Iraq and endorses Gerecht's perspective; and Instapundit.)

Update:

Oooo, instalanche, keen! [insert obligatory "look around, you might find something you like" promo here]