Bush Pulls Iraqi Puppet-strings

Is this the light at the end of the tunnel, or too little too late?

The New York Times reports that the Iraqi political parties are in talks to limit the power of militia leader Moktada al-Sadr.

According to Edward Wong, the US is “working hard to help build the coalition” to dislodge al-Sadr.

This is not good news. What we would like to hear is that the Iraqi politicians are fed up to the back teeth with al-Sadr and are determined to put him out of the magic circle of power in Iraq. Instead, reading between the lines, we are led to believe that the Iraqis would be doing nothing without the prodding of the US. The puppet does not move until the puppet-master pulls the strings. Writes Wong:

President Bush met last week in the White House with the leader of the Iranian-backed Shiite party, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, and is to meet this week with the head of the Sunni Arab party, Tariq al-Hashemi.

The problem is that a lasting political solution in Iraq must come from the Iraqis, not from American politicians who want a solution, any solution, so they can get the troops out.

And the nasty truth is that most successful political arrangements issue from the victory of a successful insurgency, not the manipulations of a foreign power. It is unfortunate but true that al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army sounds like the most likely candidate to win the right to rule Iraq.

Auguste Pinochet, Chile's Departed Embarrassment

Who was Auguste Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile who died last week? Was he a fascist dictator, as the left believes, or a man who rescued his nation from a Marxist maelstrom?

The facts are that Pinochet, after violently suppressing the socialist Allende government in a 1973 coup, slowly rebuilt Chile economically, and returned the nation to democratic rule, while carefully maintaining immunity for any improper acts committed while he was in power.

But, as the Economist reminds us, even his most fervent supporters are turning away from him, especially after revelations that he “had secretly stuffed $27m in a number of foreign bank accounts.”

Probably we would not care a whit about Pinochet were it not that the left had appointed him as their global fascist monster-in-chief. In 1973 Salvador Allende was the Great Red Hope, combining socialism and revolution in an intoxicating mixture that had lefties worked up into a fever of excitement worldwide. But in reality Allende was trampling on the political and economic rights of Chileans, wrecking the economy, and salting every institution in the country with political activists. So the army felt obliged to put a stop to it.

But now everyone wants to forget Pinochet and put him behind them.

[C]onservative opposition parties which largely supported his dictatorship realised soon after his arrest in London that he had become an electoral liability. Neither they nor the centre-left Concertacion coalition, which has governed Chile since 1990, have any intention of changing the free-market policies which have underpinned Chile’s economic growth for the past 16 years. But nor do they wish to remember that the policies had their origin in his regime’s structural reforms.

So was Pinochet an evil monster or the savior of his nation? Who knows. Today he is just an embarrassment.

Men Are Funnier Than Women. Discuss

Why are men funnier than women? Christopher Hitchens wants to know.

Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex.

He means, no doubt, im-pressing that into the opposite sex. And the most effective way of dissolving the natural reticence and modesty of women into passionate acceptance is by making them laugh, with

that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth

which is so rewarding to the eyes and ears of a man cherchant la femme.

Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift.

The fact is that women are more serious than men. A study of TV commercials has found that commercials aimed at women are much more serious than commercials aimed at men. And we know why women are more serious. Rudyard Kipling put it to rhyme in “The Female of the Species”:

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame

Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same,

And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,

The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

Stirring stuff, eh? It all leads to the central fact of the War between the Sexes:

Men have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants and supplicants. Women, cunning minxes that they are, have to affect not to be the potentates.

The trouble is that some gullible people actually believe all this pretence, women like Simone de Beauvoir who wrote in The Second Sex that the “female is the victim of the species.” She meant that females had to be birthing and suckling, an imperative that really cuts into the opportunity to create orginal works of intellect like The Second Sex.

But Beauvoir should have understood, as the student of Hegel she was, that there is always a question in the relationship between Master and Slave as to who really is the Master and who is the Slave.

Still, there is a nagging question about all this. Men may be funnier than women, but it is a fact that women laugh more than men. Is this because they are provoked to laugh by the funny men in their lives, or because, deadlier than the male, they are laughing at the men in their lives?

Jean Kirkpatrick, Great American

As you would expect, when the Associated Press announced the news of the death of Ambassador Jean Kirkpatrick at the age of 80 the one thing it did not mention was the greatest moment in her life.

It was the “Blame America First” speech at the 1984 Republican National Convention.

You remember. She famously connected the “San Francisco Democrats” with the instinct, so common among liberals then and now to “Blame America First,” as in:

When the Soviet Union walked out of arms control negotiations, and refused even to discuss the issues, the San Francisco Democrats didn't blame Soviet intransigence. They blamed the United States.



But then, they always blame America first.

How we roared with delight at her speech. It was almost as glorious as the moment at the 1992 Republican National Convention when President Reagan advised the delegates what to do about Candidate Clinton. “Don’t. Inhale.” It brought the house down.

Jean Kirkpatrick distinguished herself with a 1979 article in Commentary magazine “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” in which she differentiated between authoritarian dictators (who were often US allies) and totalitarian dictators (who were usually not).

It was a differentiation that Democrats did not enjoy, because they preferred to make an opposite inference, the moral equivalence argument. They preferred to rail at the US support for fascist dictators and remain silent about communist totalitarianism.

The Commentary article brought her to the notice of President Reagan and an appointment to the United Nations as US Ambassador.

Needless to say, Ambassador Kirkpatrick was forever after damaged goods to the mainstream media, and you can get the flavor of their distaste in the AP news item announcing her death. It describes her as “an unabashed apostle of Reagan era conservatism,” a woman with “a reputation as a blunt and acerbic advocate,” and “a controversial figure like [UN Ambassador John] Bolton.” Well, you would think that—if you were a Democrat.

In fact Jean Kirkpatrick was a great American who served with distinction in the pivotal first term of the Reagan administration. It was a time when the failed economic policies of the 1970s were reversed and the present prosperity was founded. And it was the period when the failed Carter administration foreign policy was replaced with a robust foreign policy that won the Cold War without a shot being fired.

And that, according to theorist of war Sun Tzu, is hands-down the best way to win a war.

What could be more unabashed, more un-blunt, un-acerbic, and more uncontroversial than that?

The Education Solution is Privatization

In case you haven’t noticed, the Brits are having a little firestorm about the governance at the University of Oxford.

A new Vice Chancellor, John Hood, has recommended “replacing the traditional system of governance with a more ‘top-down’ managerial approach,” according to Martin Jacomb in The Spectator. But the professors voted Hood’s proposals down 730 votes to 456. Shades of Larry Summers and Harvard faculty.

The problem at Oxford is money. It relies enormously on government money, and the government money isn’t enough to fund competitive salaries for academic superstars and for decent undergraduate education.

John Hood wants to beef up the central administration so that it can start doing some serious fundraising, after the example of US universities. And he wants to increase student fees and put the money into undergraduate teaching.

But to Jacomb, that is only dealing with half of the problem. It is not just shortage of money from the government that is hurting Oxford. It is the government control. And the record of government control of universities is not reassuring.

[R]eliance on government money inevitably brings with it a reluctance to reject the orthodox thinking of the day. We all learnt how Pope Urban VIII (who was the government) dealt with Galileo when he produced some thinking which the Pope did not like... Does anyone doubt that Milton Friedman could have achieved what he did anywhere other than in a truly independent university; in his case, Chicago?

...

And history also tells a frightening story. German universities, which included some of the best in the world a century ago, became totally dependent on government money after the inflation of the 1920s; and, sure enough, most appointed posts were already held by Nazi sympathisers before the First Supplemental Decree (Aryans only) came into force in 1935.

Even in the United States the universities are far too dependent on the government. For one thing, most of the research money comes from outfits like the National Science Foundation. Then there is a lot of research in the social sciences for which the only purpose is to assist the government in the expansion of its programs of social control.

What will it take for the professors to decide that they would rather be independent and free than dependent and subservient to the government?

It’s the great question of the age. Up to now, the professors have positively luxuriated in their lapdog relation to the corridors of political power. They accept the dictates of government and think up rationales to justify them, and happily assist the government in its attack on private institutions from corporations to churches and college fraternities.

That means that We the People are going to have to separate the universities from the government. That ain’t gonna be easy.

More Iraq Study Needed

What is it exactly that the Iraq Study Group is proposing? A drawdown in troop strength in 2008? An approach to Syria and Iran?

The Bush administration and the Congress must work together in forging a new course in Iraq despite partisan differences over how to end U.S. involvement in the long-running war, the co-chairmen of the Iraq Study Group said Thursday.

The basic recommendation is probably true.

The panel's 96-page report said flatly that the administration's approach was not working and recommended that the U.S. military accelerate a change in its main mission so that most combat troops can be withdrawn by spring 2008.

The question is how to continue the basic strategic interest of the United States, which is to maintain a divided Middle East. The idea is that no one power obtains control over all the oil. At the same time we want to hinder the use of the Middle East as a training ground for Islamist terror raids into Europe and North America.

For this strategy Iraq needs to be stabilized without becoming a client state of Iran.

We could well listen to the pungent views of Asia Times columnist Spengler, who perceives at the Middle East as an Arab civil war similar to the German civil war we call the Thirty Years War.

In those days France had an interest in a weak and divided Germany, and succeeded in exhausting Germany because Cardinal Richelieu throughout the war “sneakily shifted resources to whichever side seemed likely to fold.”

I have contended for years that the United States ultimately will adopt the perpetual-warfare doctrine that so well served Cardinal Richelieu and made France the master of Europe for a century.

Clearly, Iraq is not ready to be a mult-party democracy. The central error of the Bush policy was to hope that it could be ready, or made ready, for democracy. It was a noble error, but it was an error. Sorry. No can do.

The interest of the United States is now to promote a government in Iraq that reflects the power of the Shia but which is independent of Iran. Then it needs to back the Sunnis to counterbalance the power of Iran.

Here’s a prediction. We will see the United States in the next months muddling through to this policy. One warning. It won’t be pretty.

The Working Poor Are Different From You and Me

It’s pretty sobering, isn’t it, to read that the most charitable people in the United States are the working poor. I mean, they don’t exactly have a lot of spare cash lying around. Not like some people I know.

But then neither do your average middle-class homeowner sup to their ears in mortgage debt. They say: “I don't have enough money to spare,” according to John Stossel. And of course, they (make that we) don’t. We already spent it on our houses, our cars, our shopping, ourselves... You get the point.

Actually it is religious people who give most to charity. First of all they give to their church, and then they give to a lot of other places too. Here are the stats.

1. Religious people give more than non-religious people.
2. The working poor give more than the middle class.
3. The rich give more than the middle class.
4. The working poor give more than the non-working poor.
5. Conservatives give more than liberals.

John Stossel ran a test. He had the Salvation Army put a bucket outside a store in Sious Falls, South Dakota, and another one outside a store in San Francisco. What were the results?

Well, even though people in Sioux Falls make, on average, half as much money as people in San Francisco, and even though the San Francisco location was much busier -- three times as many people were within reach of the bucket -- by the end of the second day, the Sioux Falls bucket held twice as much money.

It’s good to know stuff like that.