International Affairs: September 2006 Archives
In a bizarre move that's almost certain to reduce the security of British subjects, British police have agreed to get permission from "Muslim leaders" before conducting terror raids.
POLICE have agreed to consult a panel of Muslim leaders before mounting counter-terrorist raids or arrests. Members of the panel will offer their assessment of whether information police have on a suspect is too flimsy and will also consider the consequences on community relations of a raid.
"Hey Osama, can we pretty please raid the flat down the street with all the smoke billowing from the windows?"
Members will be security vetted and will have to promise not to reveal any intelligence they are shown. They will not have to sign the Official Secrets Act.
"We'll be raiding at 3am, but please don't tell them or they'll move their bomb factory before we get there. Promise? Crescent your heart and hope to die, strap a bomb-belt to your thigh?"
What's wrong with you, Britain? I was watching PBS last night and 200 years ago you Brits sentenced an 11-year-old girl to death for stealing her friend's clothes, and then considered it gracious to commute the sentence and merely ship the child off to Australia. That's pretty hard core, and that's why you ruled the world. And now this nonsense? Don't you have any pride?
The whole idea is idiotic, but I'm sure it'll move to America. Some other ideas:
- Notify the trailer park block president before raiding a meth house.
- Get permission from Marion Barry before conducting any crack whore sting operations.
- Ask Robert Byrd to oversee hate crime prosecution.
- Put Ted Kennedy in charge of the little guppies swim class.
- Oh whatever, this is too easy, use your imagination.
Orpah brags about how she's the boss of all these white people. You go, girl! White people clearly make better employees.
Condoleezza Rice demolishes Bill Clinton's lies and misrepresentations about the war on terror before 9/11. Orpah take note: maybe black people can make good employees after all!
Mark Steyn reviews Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road To 9/11 and relates some of the history behind the modern anti-West jihad. For instance, about Sayyid Qutb, the father of the jihad:
In an Islamist grievance culture, the tower doesn't have to be that tall to loom. The tragedy in Wright's book is that across little more than half a century a loser cult has metastasized, eventually to swallow almost all the moderate, syncretic forms of Islam. What was so awful about Sayyid Qutb's experience in America that led him to regard modernity as an abomination? Well, he went to a dance in Greeley, Colo.: "The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips . . ."In 1949, Greeley, Colo., was dry. The dance was a church social. The feverish music was Frank Loesser's charm song Baby, It's Cold Outside. But it was enough to start a chain that led from Qutb to Zawahiri in Egypt to bin Laden in Saudi Arabia to the mullahs in Iran to the man arrested in Afghanistan on Sept. 11. And it's a useful reminder of how much we could give up and still be found decadent and disgusting by the Islamists. A world without Baby, It's Cold Outside will be very cold indeed.
We should realize that peace on the Islamists' terms will not be very pleasant.
I'm not a fan of boycotts, so what follows is just a bit of trivia that might interest people who were insulted by Hugo Chavez's recent lunacy: CITGO is owned by the Venezuelan government.
The company is owned by PDV America, Inc., an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., the national oil company of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
That means that if you buy gas from a CITGO station, you're directly supporting the Chavez government.
(HT: DeoDuce and reagan80.)
Clayton Cramer has a great piece about Islamic death worship and the danger to Western Civilization (even to leftists!), and it led me to an interesting thought: all evil social structures are built on entrenched hypocrisy. E.g., it's great for young Muslims to blow themselves up, but apparently not for the imams, tyrants, mullahs, and so forth. If the heavenly reward is so great, why aren't the supposedly most spiritual Muslims also the most eager to attain it? Cf. the Communist Party and their subjects.
In contrast, good systems like democracy, capitalism, and Christianity at least attempt to apply the same rules to everyone. Sure, the end results aren't the same for everyone (some get rich, some get poor), but everyone supposedly plays by the same rules.
Then again, maybe I'm wrong and it's just a matter of degree. I guess everyone was supposedly equal under Communism, too... and anyway, the investments of US Senators tend to beat the stock market by 12%, so maybe I'm fooling myself. Still, it seems like there's some objective difference.
Drudge has a flash up at the moment saying:
FLASH: Iran's UN ambassador says that President Ahmadinejad will hold 'major newsconference' in NYC Thursday AM at UN headquarters...
If we let Ahmadinejad give a press conference in New York City under the protection of the Secret Service, we're going to look like fools in a few years when we're chasing him through the mountains of Pakistan. We should grab this guy as soon as he steps off the plane and throw him in a deep hole at Gitmo.
America's foreign policy is hurting tourism and we need to find a way to make some more money.
The US share of international travel has been falling since 1992, but the decline has accelerated since September 11, 2001. Since then America has lost an estimated $286 billion (£152 billion) in revenue from foreign tourists.While global travel has grown by a fifth, the the US travel industry’s share of the world tourism market has shrunk by a third, from 9% to 6%.
Wait wait, nevermind that the drop in tourism started during the Clinton administration, let's skip forward...
Tough security measures are only part of the problem, however. Surveys show that America is becoming unpopular with the rest of the world, partly because of the Bush administration’s foreign policy.Since 2000 the percentage of people holding favourable opinions of the country has fallen from 83% to 56% in Britain, from 78% to 37% in Germany and from 77% to 63% in Japan.
It's obvious that doing good by freeing gazillions of people from tyranny hasn't won us any points with the world, so I say it's time to stop making friends and start making money, Roman style. Rather than freeing all these people, protecting Europe from commies and Nazis, policing the oceans, and saving Tsunami victims, all gratis, it's time to start extracting tribute from every country that has benefitted from American foreign policy. Here's the tribute menu:
- Saved you from Nazis: 10% GDP
- Saved you from Communists: 10% GDP
- Special Commie and Nazi combo: 15% GDP
- Freed you from insane Muslim dictator: 20% oil discount in perpetuity, plus free airbases
- Every time one of your citizens bombs American property: $1 billion cash or 10 times the damage cost, whichever is higher
- Each one of your ships that transports goods without being attacked by pirates, Nazis, or Commies: 10% of the value of the goods
- Rescued your country from a major natural disaster: 10% GDP for the first disaster, 5% each additional disaster
I was disturbed yesterday to hear about Iraq's Prime Minister Maliki signing "security agreements" with Iran. There hasn't been much in the news about it, so I'm forced to link to a China Central Television article on the topic. Has this been much blogged about? Is there less to the story than it seems? On the surface these agreements seem to be grave insults to the thousands of Americans and Coalition soldiers who have shed their blood to free Iraq from Islamofascism.
Iran and Iraq have signed some historic security and economic agreements that point to a gradual warming in their relationship. On his first visit to Iran since taking office, Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, met with Iran's Supreme Leader - who promised to support al-Maliki's government. Nathan Mauger has more.As al-Maliki met with Iranian leaders for a second day, there was no public mention of the issue of Iranian interference in Iraq.
Instead, the Iraqi Prime Minister and his Iranian hosts expressed their growing friendship. ...
The Iranian officials also indicated that the way to end instability in Iraq was for American forces to withdraw.
Well sure, Iran can't wait for us to leave because they figure they can dominate the Shi'a Muslims in Iraq and create another client state for themselves, one with lots of oil. It seems obvious that such an arrangement would be terrible for American interests, and it's bitterly disturbing to me that the American government is allowing it. The Iranian regime is our enemy, and the enemy of all free people, and the Iraqis shouldn't be enabled by our passivity to move in that direction.
PARIS (Reuters) - France issued an implicit criticism of U.S. foreign policy on Thursday, rejecting talk of a "war on terror". ...Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, speaking in parliament, expressed these views on global terrorism ...
"Against terrorism, what's needed is not a war. It is, as France has done for many years, a determined fight based on vigilance at all times and effective cooperation with our partners.
"But we will only end this curse if we also fight against injustice, violence and these crises," he said.
A man who only has a knife might be content to let wolves stalk the land around his home, but a man with a rifle will eliminate the threat.
