The Widening Middle Eastern War

Jordan’s King Abdullah recently warned of three developing civil wars in the Middle East. There’s the headline war in Iraq. But there is also a developing civil war in Lebanon. And now there is the growing likelihood of civil war in the Palestinian Occupied Territories between the forces of Fatah and Hamas, reports Claude Salhani.

According to Laurie King-Irani, "The Palestinians have let themselves fall right into the trap set for them by the Israeli extreme right."

Well maybe, whatever a remark like that is supposed to mean.

But for us the Middle East is probably more like the Germany of the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648. There is a religious conflict between Sunni and Shia. There are great powers around the periphery, each with their interests. And there is plenty of money to keep soldiers in the field.

The immediate consequence of the Thirty Years War was to promote France to the front rank of the great powers, and to delay for 200 years the emergence of Germany as the pivot of Europe.

None of that was obvious at the beginning of the Thirty Years War. So we may be surprised by the outcome of the eternal Middle East conflict.

But it is clear that the articifial borders created by the western powers in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after World War I are creaking and crumbling—as they were bound to do sooner or later. Nobody would care about that, were it not for Israel and oil.

Before the Great Middle Eastern War is over, the Middle East will probably end up as devastated as Germany in the middle of the seventeenth century.

And then there is Somalia.

Middle Class Muscle in South China

Everybody wonders what is going to happen in China. Will it reform out of its Communist Party monopoly? Or will it come to a smash-up as the irresistible force of a vibrant economy collides with the immovable object of an ossified political system?

Our friend at the New York Times, Howard W. French, reports that things are starting to move in Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong.

When citizens found out about a plan to build a highway through their middle-class neighborhood they decided to fight.

Over the next two years they managed to halt work on the most destructive segment of the highway and forced design changes to reduce pollution from the roadway.

There are numerous similar stories. Of course a lot of the stories are NIMBY-style activism. But the movement goes beyond that. Citizens formed an internet group Interhoo,

an independent association of civic-minded professionals who discuss municipal policy issues, publish position papers and quietly lobby the government over development strategy and other issues.

Even in Communist dominated China, Interhoo is making a difference.

“In the past five or six years there are signs that new politics, economics and culture are emerging in Shenzhen,” said Jing Chen, a scholar with the China Development Institute, a local research group, and a member of Interhoo. “There is an awakening of awareness on public issues. The 6,000 members of Interhoo discuss these issues and have published books that have had a great influence over the government.”

Of course, the New York Times being what it is, we get the story presented as a case of community activism.

But the larger question gets back to the basic Hayekian argument about spontaneous order. Society is just too big and complicated to be governed top down. Continued prosperity requires horizontal relationships, contractual give-and-take.

Can the authoritarian political class in China resist the competence and the energy of the burgeoning middle class? And, deep down, does it want to?

That will be the great question for China and the Chinese people.

It's The Anti-Semitic Violence That's The Problem

In Britain right now, one in 400 Jews is likely to be the victim of a “faith-related” attack in Britain every year.

One in 1,700 Muslims is likely to be a victim of a faith-related attack, according to Tom Harper and Ben Leapman.

In London and Manchester, where Muslims outnumber Jews by four to one, anti-Semitic offenses exceeded anti-Muslim offenses. The figures do not record the faith of the offenders.

Here is the record of merely one anti-Semitic incident.

Rabbi Alex Chapper, 33, was the victim of a faith-related hate crime in July 2005.
He was returning from a synagogue in Ilford, East London, with three Jewish friends after conducting a service. Seven Asian teenagers followed them down the road shouting "Yehudi," which means Jew in Arabic and Urdu. One of them shouted, "We are Pakistani, you are Jewish. We are going to kill you," before punching Mr. Chapper in the face and hitting one of his friends over the head with a bottle.
The youths ran off when someone threatened to call the police. Mr. Chapper and his friends identified the youths to the police, but they were never prosecuted.
"They just did not seem interested. I feel very let down," he said.

Oh well, they were probably asking for it. And anyway, they were infidels. What do you expect good young Muslim youths to do?

The fact is that young men have a predilection for violence. It is the duty of society, through families, churches, associations, and government to socialize them away from violence into more beneficial channels.

Somehow it doesn’t seem like the welfare-state societies of Europe are doing a very good job of this.

After The Great Seattle Windstorm

The Great Seattle Windstorm is now just a memory. But this morning it was kind of a mess after a night in which winds were reported to exceed 70 miles per hour, according to the Seattle Times.

I know. 70 miles per hour? One to two inches of rain? What kind of wimps are we in Western Washington? Nevertheless, downed powerlines are downed powerlines. And closed bridges are closed bridges.

But that sort of stuff doesn’t bother me! I decided to try to get to work, traveling across Lake Washington from Seattle to my office in Redmond near the Microsoft campus.

Not a good idea. First of all the Evergreen Point bridge was closed. The State Department of Transportation had closed it during the high winds of the previous night. Reported WSDOT:

When crews opened the drawspan of the SR 520 Bridge on Thursday, three of the hooks that connect the spans were sheared off by wave action. This is not unusual and is easily repaired. When winds decreased crews started repair work and scanning the bridge for damage. Crews found no significant damage and replaced the hooks.

No problem. I diverted and crossed Lake Washington using the I-90 bridge. But as I drove north on I-405 I observed very heavy southbound traffic. So when I gave up trying to get to my office, what with no power east of Lake Washington and downed trees everywhere, I had to drive north around Lake Washington to avoid the slow southbound traffic on I-405.

Lessons Learned: Always fill your car up with gasoline on the day before a reported storm. You’d think that half a tank would be plenty. But when you are out and about, subject to delays and traffic congestion, and you don’t know where there is a gas station that is open for business, you need to start out with a full tank. My car was only half full this morning and that is not enough.

Now the only question is: Will the office annual holiday party be on this evening?

So Bush Created a Catastrophe

We are at an inflection point in the War on Terror. Three years of effort to produce democracy in Iraq after the 2003 invasion has demonstrated that the forces of chaos in Iraq are stronger than the move to democracy. “Bush Has Created a Catastrophe,” complains Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian.

Yes, of course. The Middle East is a catastrophe, and Bush created it. That was always understood as a possibility from the beginning.

Back in 2003, some unnamed Bushie said that the administration was throwing all the balls up in the air in the Middle East. He was right, and they have come down in a right mess.

So what? Suppose that Iraq is a catastrophe? What does that mean for us?

The answer is: Not much.

The first best outcome in the Middle East is for democracy to flourish. The next best outcome is for the Middle East to be divided between Sunni and Shia, and for the Sunnis under the leadership of Saudi Arabia to take up arms against the expansionist Shia of Iran.

The one thing we do not want is for the Middle East, its oil, and its oil money to be united under the control of a single murderous dictator.

The reason that progressives like Timothy Garton Ash are upset is that the War on Terror upsets the business-as-usual of the worldwide bureaucratic welfare state.

In the minds of progressives the story, er, the narrative, is supposed to go like this. Progressives discover a festing sore of inequality and oppression and write brilliant manifestos demanding its immediate remediation through the means of a bureaucratic government program funded by tax monies. Then everyone goes back to a life of writing works of creative intellectual brilliance punctuated by the occasional sexual adventure.

But this fantasy becomes impossible when there are young Muslim men running around the world blowing themselves up and beheading people. When that is happening, you must call up young western men of a martial disposition, furnish them with abundant materiel and leadership, and tell them to go at it.

And the progressives of the world hate that more than death itself.

Because they thought that, after a century of work, they had completely extinguished the martial instinct in the young men of North America and Europe.

Yes. They were wrong about that, too.

The Lessons of Pinochet

Former President Auguste Pinochet of Chile, who died last week, was a dictator who toppled a would-be Marxist dictator. With all this dictator-ology going on, his life offers many lessons to us, writes Peruvian Alvaro Vargas Llosa.

• “The first lesson is that social utopias always end in tears.”
  
• “The second lesson is that there is no such thing as an ‘emergency’ dictatorship.”
  
• “The third lesson is that free markets and dictatorial governments are ultimately incompatible.” Dictatorship is about power, and the free market is about the regulation of power.
  
• “The fourth lesson is that human rights are not an invention of human rights groups[.]” The rule of law was developed for a good reason, that all power corrupts and usually results in a reduction of the welfare of the people.
  

The story of Chile and General Pinochet had a happy ending. Pinochet gave up power and returned democracy to Chile.

But as we tut-tut about the abuses of Pinochet let us not forget the unhappy people of Cuba, still under the rule of the ruthless dictator Fidel Castro and still getting poorer by the day.

The Great Sexual Taboo

It’s the great taboo of our time. It’s eating away at half the population. It’s a political issue waiting for some brave political entrepreneur to grasp. You know what it is.

"I want to spend more time with him, and do stuff like go shopping or see a movie. That would make it a friendship for me. But he says no, because if we do those things, then in his opinion we'd have a relationship--and that's more than he wants. And I'm confused, because it seems like I don't get the 'friend' part, but he still gets the 'benefits.'" It finally dawns on her: "I'm really unhappy about that. It's hard to be with him and then go home and be alone."

Those are the words of “Heather” in Unprotected by Anonymous, MD reviewed by Danielle Crittenden.

The patients of Anomymous, MD, are hurting, but what can she do? She can advise them on eating disorders and substance abuse. She can opine about the evils of tanning beds. But there is one subject that she cannot be judgmental about.

You see, young college women all over the nation are hurting themselves because of their “sexual choices.” Unfortunately, when it comes to sexual choices, “few modern doctors dare express a word of judgment.” Boys, of course, are instinctively avoiding the modern university, as the male/female ratio keep dipping towards 40/60. In the rebellious way of the male, they naturally rebel against the advice of their betters. But girls are different.

They are following the best advice that modern psychology can offer. They are enjoying their sexual freedom, experimenting, discovering themselves. They can't understand what might be wrong. And yet something is wrong.

The fact is that, whatever they may think they want, most girls do not do well with sexual freedom, sexual experimentation, sexual self-discovery. That is because the sexual life of a woman is not a journey of practice and creative experimentation. The sexual life of a woman is for real.

This is the great question of our age. We have decided that we need to transcend the simple world of rules and traditional roles. People cannot attain their full potential as human beings unless they transcend the rules in original, creative work. In The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir asserted that the same applies to women. But what about sex in the life of this “independent woman?”

A woman.. needs... not only to satisfy her sexual desires, but also to enjoy the relaxation and diversion provided by agreeable sexual adventures.

That’s easy to write, but the Beaver understands that this is more easily said than done. She writes for pages about the difficulties of the sexual life of the independent woman.

But we have proceeded in the past half-century on the assumption that there is no problem here, that women can indulge in “agreeable sexual adventures” like any man. And more than that, we have erected a taboo around the question. You are not allowed to discuss it.

This question of women’s sexuality and the agony of the young woman trying to experiment just like she is supposed to is, I suspect, the key political question of the age. If conservatives can understand the question and speak to women about it so that we show that we understand and they feel that we understand, then it’s Katy bar the door.