EclectEcon

This analogy has been made explictly by my colleague, Salim Mansur in his most recent weekly column for the Sun papers:

The good news from Iraq, as the Economist reports, is the guns have begun to fall silent. American and Iraqi casualties are down sharply,the sectarian-ethnic conflict is mostly over, al-Qaida insurgents are on the run as Sunni Iraqis have turned against them, and the government
of Iraqi PrimeMinister Nuri al-Maliki has increased confidence as Iraqi soldiers drove the Shia militia of Muqtada al-Sadr out of the port city of Basra and slums of Sadr City in the capital area of Baghdad.

An Iraq led by an elected government capable of securing its own interests invariably will alter the balance in favour of moderation in the hugely important Persian Gulf region. The effects of a strong and stable Iraq will be enormously positive globally. This will be the Bush legacy, as democratic Korea remains that of Truman, should the good news from Iraq become irreversible with the support of American troops.

The Iraq story, moreover, reveals that all the liberal left talk of solidarity with the poor and the oppressed of Third World countries is merely the empty noise of do-nothing hypocrites when confronted with blood thirsty thugs.

They will decry a Bush rather than advance the freedom of those beaten down by despots. 

Iraqis bear witness to this ugly truth and that is why good news from Iraq goes mostly unreported.

I do not share the optimism, infectious though it be. Democracy is a tough fit with Arab societies and with Islam. The principal reason is the inherent non separation of mosque and state in Islam. Turkey has managed it best, with Malaysia and Indonesia managing a modicum of accommodation. The risk of all these states sliding back into Shariaville, is high. The bulk of the remaining Islamic states are either hired goons - Egypt - collaborators of convenience - Saudi Arabia - or flat out hostiles, and none of these are even sniffing around a democratic structure.If they were, most like Egypt and 'Palestine', would likely vote for the other guys, as we have seen. A vote to end the vote.

1. Global Warming is occurring,
2. Global warming is the direct of human behaviour, and
3. it is most efficient for us to do something about it, likely via carbon taxes.

Environmental extremists routinely assert a “scientific consensus” that global warming is occurring, and that human activity somehow causes it. This week, however, over 31,000 scientists spoke up and reduced that myth to a smoldering rubble.

The environmentalists’ alleged “scientific consensus” is much like the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, behind which the supposedly infallible wizard dictated to his minions. Beyond that curtain, however, the wizard was nothing more than an ordinary little man perpetrating a fraud upon those who worshipped his doctrine. And once Toto removed that curtain, the fraud was exposed for all to see.

Similarly, environmentalists’ mythical “scientific consensus” has served as a shroud behind which they have sought to maintain an air of infallibility. By falsely claiming a closed consensus and excoriating anyone who speaks out against their flawed orthodoxy, environmental extremists seek to prevent any objective, scientific debate that might inhibit their political agenda.

That shroud, however, was further torn this week by a 31,000-strong petition organized by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM). According to the OISM’s board of scientists, “a review of the research literature concerning the environmental consequences of increased levels of carbon dioxide leads to the conclusion that increases during the 20th Century have produced no deleterious effects upon global weather, climate, or temperature.”

To the contrary, the OISM notes that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide have actually increased plant growth rates, among other positive effects. On this basis, the OISM concludes that “predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in minor greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are in error and do not conform to current experimental knowledge.”

• Even if the EU, Canada, and the US impose carbon taxes, these taxes would have a minimal impact on carbon emissions, given the rates of economic growth in the rest of the world, and
• it might be more efficient to build levees and dikes, if necessary, than to try to curtail carbon consumption.
  
  Just call me a major skeptic.
  
  Addendum: For more, see this at SCSU Scholars.
  
  And check out the Global Warming DoomsDay Called Off video from, surprisingly, the CBC.

  Addendum #2: For more, see this about the decline in sunspot activity and possible global cooling. [h/t Newmark's Door].

The execution of two Afghanis by Islamists in Pakistan stands out in sharp contrast to western treatment of prisoners of war. As Powerline says,

In Pakistan today, just across the border from Afghanistan, Taliban goons got their hands on two Afghans who they claimed had collaborated in a Predator strike on a Taliban house across the border in Pakistan. It isn't clear from this news account whether the Taliban kidnapped the victims from Afghanistan. 

In any event, loudspeakers in mosques called the faithful to witness
the brutality that was to follow. A crowd estimated at 5,000 or more
assembled. The Afghans were dragged out of a car. ...

The crowd cheered "Allahu akbar," or "God is great." You can see how
this would be a religious experience. The assassins then debated
whether the second man should be decapitated, since he may not have
been of age. One of the gunmen settled the issue by shooting him in the
head.

I'm not sure whether these gentlemen are among those with whom
Barack Obama wants to sit down and chat when he becomes President. I
hope not. Wittgenstein once wrote something to the effect that if a
lion could talk, we wouldn't be able to understand him. But I think
Obama would have a better chance with the lion than the Taliban.

Reports from Canada say Hezbollah operatives have been detected conducting surveillance on Jewish targets in Toronto, including schools and synagogues. U.S. sources have confirmed increased Hezbollah activity as well. Intriguingly, the reports specifically said the men conducting the surveillance were Hezbollah members, not just men of Middle Eastern appearance. That either indicates a deep penetration of Hezbollah in Canada — the Canadians knew the political affiliation of the men — or psychological warfare against Hezbollah, an attempt to let the group know the Canadians are on to them. If this is a Hezbollah operation, the Canadians just told them they were busted.

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said on Wednesday that U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's expressed support for Israel stems from his fear that the Mossad would assassinate him, just as it did President John F. Kennedy.

"We suspect he may fear being killed by Israeli agents and meet the same fate as Kennedy when he promised to look into Israel's nuclear program," Gaddafi said.

1. Why on earth is Hillary Clinton waiting until Friday to drop out of the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination? (ancillary questions: Does she have a chance, even remotely? Is she so hung up on power that she cannot bear to concede defeat?)


2. Has Barack Obama hired a food taster?

"Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along," Bush said.

Without mentioning Obama by name, Bush compared "this foolish delusion" to the prelude to World War Two.

"As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: 'Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of 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," he said.

Still, it seems to me that the little picture of a gloomy sky is a lot more accurate, in the long run, than the Associated Press, ABC News, and other sources, on the topic of the "unrest" in Lebanon. Sure, they mention "possible civil war." Sure, they mention the numbers of dead, the "militants", the people of Beirut, Tripoli, etc., still living in fear... but they gloss right over its true root cause:

Heavy fighting broke out Sunday between supporters of Lebanon's Western-backed government and opposition followers in the central mountains overlooking the capital, security officials said.

Um. "Western-backed government". Would those "opposition" members be Hezbollah? Who's backing the "opposition followers"? No mention, although it has been very well-established that Iran and Syria have been pulling the strings for that "opposition" group for quite some time, now. Hezbollah, the invading force, gets labeled as "opposition"!

This sits right up there with blaming the Israelis for shooting back at the sphincters in Gaza who target Israeli civilians for death. Nice "journalism", guys!

"We had an agreement," Curt Schilling, one of a handful of Red Sox players who talked with Major League Baseball on ground rules for the trip, told ESPN's Claire Smith.

"Some of the promises have already been taken away, now this," Schilling said. "As far as the players are concerned, [withholding the coaches' bonuses] can't happen."

''When we voted to go to Japan, that was not a unanimous vote,'' Lowell told the Globe, "but we did what our team wanted us to do for Major League Baseball. They promised us the moon and the stars, and then when we committed, they started pulling back. It's not just the coaches, it's the staff, the trainers, a lot of people are affected by this.

I have no doubt that these guys completely understand the profound global ramifications of this trip. Nobody needs to explain to them that this isn't just another road series on their pocket schedules. This is an event of major significance for the sport, for the franchise and for the nation they're about to visit.

Five years have now passed since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Vice President Dick Cheney, in Iraq with Sen. John McCain — the presumptive Republican nominee for president — summarized the five years by saying, “If you reflect back on those five years, it’s been a difficult, challenging, but nonetheless successful endeavor. We’ve come a long way in five years, and it’s been well worth the effort.” Democratic presidential aspirant Sen. Hillary Clinton called the war a failure.

It is the role of political leaders to make such declarations, not ours. Nevertheless, after five years, it is a moment to reflect less on where we are and more on where we are going. As we have argued in the past, the actual distinctions between McCain’s position at one end (reduce forces in Iraq only as conditions permit) and Barack Obama’s position (reduce them over 16 months unless al Qaeda is shown to be in Iraq) are in practice much less distinct than either believes. Rhetoric aside — and this is a political season — there is in fact a general, but hardly universal, belief that goes as follows: The invasion of Iraq probably was a mistake, and certainly its execution was disastrous. But a unilateral and precipitous withdrawal by the United States at this point would not be in anyone’s interest. The debate is over whether the invasion was a mistake in the first place, while the divisions over ongoing policy are much less real than apparent.

Stratfor tries not to get involved in this sort of debate. Our role is to try to predict what nations and leaders will do, and to explain their reasoning and the forces that impel them to behave as they do. Many times, this analysis gets confused with advocacy. But our goal actually is to try to understand what is happening, why it is happening and what will happen next. We note the consensus. We neither approve nor disapprove of it as a company. As individuals, we all have opinions. Opinions are cheap and everyone gets to have one for free. But we ask that our staff check them — along with their personal ideologies — at the door. Our opinions focus not on what ought to happen, but rather on what we think will happen — and here we are passionate.

Public Justifications and Private Motivations
We have lived with the Iraq war for more than five years. It was our view in early 2002 that a U.S. invasion of Iraq was inevitable. We did not believe the invasion had anything to do with weapons of mass destruction (WMD) — which with others we believed were under development in Iraq. The motivation for the war, as we wrote, had to do with forcing Saudi Arabia to become more cooperative in the fight against al Qaeda by demonstrating that the United States actually was prepared to go to extreme measures. The United States invaded to change the psychology of the region, which had a low regard for American power. It also invaded to occupy the most strategic country in the Middle East, one that bordered seven other key countries.
Our view was that the Bush administration would go to war in Iraq not because it saw it as a great idea, but because its options were to go on the defensive against al Qaeda and wait for the next attack or take the best of a bad lot of offensive actions. The second option consisted of trying to create what we called the “coalition of the coerced,” Islamic countries prepared to cooperate in the covert war against al Qaeda. Fighting in Afghanistan was merely a holding action that alone would solve nothing. So lacking good options, the administration chose the best of a bad lot.
The administration certainly lied about its reasons for going into Iraq. But then FDR certainly lied about planning for involvement in World War II, John Kennedy lied about whether he had traded missiles in Turkey for missiles in Cuba and so on. Leaders cannot conduct foreign policy without deception, and frequently the people they deceive are their own publics. This is simply the way things are.

We believed at the time of the invasion that it might prove to be much more difficult and dangerous than proponents expected. Our concern was not about a guerrilla war. Instead, it was about how Saddam Hussein would make a stand in Baghdad, a city of 5 million, forcing the United States into a Stalingrad-style urban meat grinder. That didn’t happen. We underestimated Iraqi thinking. Knowing they could not fight a conventional war against the Americans, they opted instead to decline conventional combat and move to guerrilla warfare instead. We did not expect that.

A Bigger Challenge Than Expected
That this was planned is obvious to us. On April 13, 2003, we noted what appeared to be an organized resistance group carrying out bombings. Organizing such attacks so quickly indicated to us that the operations were planned. Explosives and weapons had been hidden, command and control established, attacks and publicity coordinated. These things don’t just happen. Soon after the war, we recognized that the Sunnis in fact had planned a protracted war — just not a conventional one.

Our focus then turned to Washington. Washington had come into the war with a clear expectation that the destruction of the Iraqi army would give the United States a clean slate on which to redraw Iraqi society. Before the war was fought, comparisons were being drawn with the occupation of Japan. The beginnings of the guerrilla operation did not fit into these expectations, so U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the guerrillas as merely the remnants of the Iraqi army — criminals and “dead-enders” — in their last throes. We noted the gap between Washington’s perception of Iraq and what we thought was actually going on.

A perfect storm arose in this gulf. First, no WMD were found. We were as surprised by this as anybody. But for us, this was an intellectual exercise; for the administration, it meant the justification for the war — albeit not the real motive — was very publicly negated. Then, resistance in Iraq to the United States increased after the U.S. president declared final victory. And finally, attempts at redrawing Iraqi society as a symbol of American power in the Islamic world came apart, a combination of the guerrilla war and lack of preparation plus purging the Baathists. In sum, reshaping a society proved more daunting than expected just as the administration’s credibility cracked over the WMD issue.

A More Complex Game
By 2004, the United States had entered a new phase. Rather than simply allowing the Shia to create a national government, the United States began playing a complex and not always clear game of trying to bring the Sunnis into the political process while simultaneously waging war against them. The Iranians used their influence among the Shia to further destabilize the U.S. position. Having encouraged the United States to depose its enemy, Saddam Hussein, Tehran now wanted Washington to leave and allow Iran to dominate Iraq.

The United States couldn’t leave Iraq but had no strategy for staying. Stratfor’s view from 2004 was that the military option in Iraq had failed. The United States did not have the force to impose its will on the various parties in Iraq. The only solution was a political accommodation with Iran. We noted a range of conversations with Iran, but also noted that the Iranians were not convinced that they had to deal with the Americans. Given the military circumstance, the Americans would leave anyway and Iran would inherit Iraq.

Stratfor became more and more pessimistic about the American position in 2006, believing that no military solution was possible, and that a political solution — particularly following the Democratic victory in 2006 congressional elections — would further convince the Iranians to be intransigent. The deal that we had seen emerging over the summer of 2006 after the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq, was collapsing.

The Surge
We were taken by surprise by U.S. President George W. Bush’s response to the elections. Rather than beginning a withdrawal, he initiated the surge. While the number of troops committed to Iraq was relatively small, and its military impact minimal, the psychological shock was enormous. The Iranian assumption about the withdrawal of U.S. forces collapsed, forcing Tehran to reconsider its position. An essential part of the surge — not fully visible at the beginning — was that it was more a political plan than a military one. While increased operations took place, the Americans reached out to the Sunni leadership, splitting them off from foreign jihadists and strengthening them against the Shia.

Coupled with increasingly bellicose threats against Iran, this created a sense of increasing concern in Tehran. The Iranians responded by taking Muqtada al-Sadr to Iran and fragmenting his army. This led to a dramatic decline in the civil war between Shia and Sunni and in turn led to the current decline in violence.

The war — or at least Stratfor’s view of it — thus went through four phases:
• Winter 2002-March 2003: The period that began with the run-up to invasion, in which the administration chose the best of a bad set of choices and then became overly optimistic about the war’s outcome.
• April 2003-Summer 2003: The period in which the insurgency developed and the administration failed to respond.
• Fall 2003-late 2006: The period in which the United States fought a multisided war with insufficient forces and a parallel political process that didn’t match the reality on the ground.
• Late 2006 to the present: The period known as the surge, in which military operations and political processes were aligned, leading to a working alliance with the Sunnis and the fragmentation of the Shia. This period included the Iranians restraining their Shiite supporters and the United States removing the threat of war against Iran through the National Intelligence Estimate.

The key moment in the war occurred between May 2003 and July 2003. This consisted of the U.S. failure to recognize that an insurgency in the Sunni community had begun and its delay in developing a rapid and effective response, creating the third phase — namely, the long, grueling period in which combat operations were launched, casualties were incurred and imposed, but the ability to move toward a resolution was completely absent. It is unclear whether a more prompt response by the Bush administration during the second period could have avoided the third period, but the second period certainly was the only point during which the war could have been brought under control.

The operation carried out under Gen. David Petraeus, combining military and political processes, has been a surprise, at least to us. Meanwhile, the U.S. rapprochement with the Sunnis that began quietly in Anbar province spiraled into something far more effective than we had imagined. It has been much more successful than we had imagined in part because we did not believe Washington was prepared for such a systematic and complex operation that was primarily political in nature. It is also unclear if the operation will succeed. Its future still depends on the actions of the Iraqi Shia, and these actions in turn depend on Iran.

The Endgame
We have been focused on the U.S.-Iranian talks for quite awhile. We continue to believe this is a critical piece in any endgame. The United States is now providing an alternative scenario designed to be utterly frightening to the Iranians. They are arming and training the Iranians’ mortal enemies: the Sunnis who led the war against Iran from 1980 to 1988. That rearming is getting very serious indeed. Sunni units outside the aegis of the Iraqi military are now some of the most heavily armed Iraqis in Anbar, thanks to the Sunni relationship with U.S. forces there. It should be remembered that the Sunnis ruled Iraq because the Iraqi Shia were fragmented, fighting among themselves and therefore weak. That underlying reality remains true. A cohesive Sunni community armed and backed by the American s will be a formidable force. That threat is the best way to bring the Iranians to the table.

The irony is that the war is now focused on empowering the very people the war was fought against: the Iraqi Sunnis. In a sense, it is at least a partial return to the status quo ante bellum. In that sense, one could argue the war was a massive mistake. At the same time, we constantly return to this question: We know what everyone would not have done in 2003; we are curious about what everyone would have done then. Afghanistan was an illusory option. The real choices were to try to block al Qaeda defensively or to coerce Islamic intelligence services to provide the United States with needed intelligence. By appearing to be a dangerous and uncontrolled power rampaging in the most strategic country in the region, the United States reshaped the political decisions countries like Saudi Arabia were making.

This all came at a price that few of us would have imagined five years ago. Cheney is saying it was worth it. Clinton is saying it was not. Stratfor’s view is that what happened had to happen given the lack of choices. But Rumsfeld’s unwillingness to recognize that a guerrilla war had broken out and provide more and appropriate forces to wage that war did not have to happen. There alone we think history might have changed. Perhaps.

Please feel free to distribute this Intelligence Report to friends or repost to your Web site linking to www.stratfor.com

The Stephen Harper government has withdrawn its support for a UN anti-racism conference scheduled to take place next year in South Africa, according to a media release today from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

Jason Kenney, secretary of state for multiculturalism and Canadian identity, said today that the conference, like its predecessor in 2001, "has gone completely off the rails... Canada is interested in combating racism, not promoting it. We'll attend any conference that is opposed to racism and intolerance, not those that actually promote racism and intolerance".

... The last UN anti-racism conference held in Durban in 2001 degenerated into a hate-fest of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel vitriol, while the most egregious human rights violators escaped criticism. The Toronto Star today reported that "all of the non-governmental organizations invited to the first conference have been invited back to the second, including those that were at the 'forefront of the hatred', some of which posted pro-Hitler posters at the 2001 gathering."

The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is in charge of planning for the conference, an entity that has directed 93% of its resolutions on human rights violations at just one nation - Israel. Iran is a member of the organizing committee, despite its government's open call to wipe the Jewish homeland off the face of the earth.

"The Stephen Harper government has again demonstrated that Canada can project power as a moral leader in international affairs," added [Alistair] Gordon [Director of the Canadian Coalition for Democracies]. "A nation does not need a massive military to provide the moral leadership and clarity that denies legitimacy to Orwellian UN agencies that hijack the language of human rights to promote Jew-hatred.

"Stephen Harper has signaled that Canada will act on principle, regardless of UN consensus. This is the stuff of global leadership."

Senator Barack Obama says he would “engage in aggressive personal diplomacy” with Iran if elected president and would offer economic inducements and a possible promise not to seek “regime change” if Iran stopped meddling in Iraq and cooperated on terrorism and nuclear issues....

Making clear that he planned to talk to Iran without preconditions, Mr. Obama emphasized further that “changes in behavior” by Iran could possibly be rewarded with membership in the World Trade Organization, other economic benefits and security guarantees.

The suggestion, which emerged as a flash point in the campaign, has prompted Mrs. Clinton to question whether such an approach would amount to little more than a propaganda victory for the United States’ adversaries and to question the experience of Mr. Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois. Other Democrats, in turn, have criticized Mrs. Clinton for an approach to Iran they call too hawkish, including a vote for a nonbinding resolution describing the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran as a terrorist organization.

Responding to overwhelming pressure from every civilized person on earth with any semblance of intelligence, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee today announced that it had voted to terminate its charter. Just prior to the unanimous vote, the Committee voted to rescind numerous past prizes - including the 2007 prize to itinerant comedian and performance artist Albert Gore of the United States - and award those prizes and all future prizes to the United States military.

"This about face by the Nobel Peace Committee," stated former Committee Chairman and former leader of the Norwegian Labor Party, Trygve Andreesen, "came after hundreds of millions of civilized people sent e-mails, letters, telegrams, text messages, voicemails and carrier pigeon messages demanding that we stop giving awards to Islamic martyrdom supporters like Jimmy Carter, frauds like Rigoberto Menchu and corrupt mass-murderers like Yassir Arafat."

"We got the message," said Ola Oppigardem, Committee Secretary and former leader of the Norwegian Labor Party. "The Gore prize was what did it. We acknowledge that the warming of the Earth's surface is an important issue that deserves careful scientific study, but we didn't realize that Gore was an egocentric Luddite who specializes in creating hysteria and false science. ..."

Two representatives accepted the Prizes on behalf of the U.S. military - former Senator Robert Dole (R-KS) and Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI).

"Well, we never really expected any sincere gratitude from these Europeans," said Senator Dole, who was wounded in Europe during World War II fighting Nazis. "It's kinda nice and Elizabeth and I, we're really, almost sort of honored to be here to accept the award for people who actually do real work for peace."

Added Senator Inouye who was also wounded defending Europe in World War II, "I always thought the peace prize was a bunch of crap given to whiney, self-aggrandizing, busybodies by a bunch of self-important, narcissistic gullible, retired, left-wing, Norwegian, gasbag politicos. These awards may cause me to consider thinking about possibly reassessing my opinion."

This is what happened on the streets of London yesterday. A demonstration organised by Iranian Islamists promoting the destruction of Israel, in which people called for the killing of Jews and waved Hezbollah flags. The police provide protection for such a demonstration on the basis that people are entitled to march provided they are not breaking the law. They ignore the fact that such incitement to murder is indeed against the law; they fail to grasp that a parade of Hezbollah flags is a recruiting device for Islamists; they refuse to acknowledge that such a demonstration is an flagrant act of intimidation by proxies for a terrorist regime which is currently blowing up our troops in Iraq, threatening genocide against Israel and intent on defeating the west in war. Welcome once again to Londonistan.

To return from the United States to Europe is to travel from a country that thinks it is on the front line of the struggle against jihadist terrorism but is not, to a continent that is on the front line but still has not fully awoken to the fact.

Only a fool would rule out the possibility of another terrorist assault on what is now styled the American homeland, but the fact is that in the six years since 9/11, there have been several major attacks (Madrid, London) and foiled plots in Europe. In the United States, there have been no major attacks and, as far as we know, just a few averted conspiracies. All the evidence suggests that American Muslims are better integrated than those in Western Europe. Last week's arrest of a group apparently planning a 9/11 anniversary attack in Germany suggests that the threat to the heimat is greater than that to the U.S. homeland.

An invisible front line runs through the quiet streets of many a European city or town where there is a significant Muslim population. Whether you live in London or Oxford, Berlin or Neu-Ulm, Madrid or Rotterdam, you are on that front line -- much more than you ever were during the Cold War. This struggle is partly about intelligence and police work to prevent those who have already become fanatical, violent jihadists from blowing us up at St. Pancras or the Gare du Nord. ...

Iraq is a sideshow in this larger struggle. President Bush may claim that Iraq is the front line in the war on terror, but even some of his senior commanders don't believe that. To be sure, the Iraq war has become an added grievance for disaffected Muslims everywhere, although note that Germany's nonparticipation in the Iraq war did not keep it safe. Nor should we avert our eyes from the further uncomfortable truth that a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq will be celebrated by violent jihadists as a victory.

But the larger truth is that a British soldier returning from Basra to Bradford (a city with a large Muslim population) will be coming from one front line to another. This invisible front line is not a military but a cultural/political one. ...

If we are calm, clear-sighted and resolute, we will eventually win this struggle and remain free. A continent that has rid itself of the horrors of imperialism, fascism and communism will see off this lesser menace too. But it will take many years, and we had better shape up to it.

Since their peak on September 20, the difference between nominal and inflation-indexed Treasury yields from five to 10 years in the future has come down to 2.57 percent from more than 2.6 percent. This is probably still higher than Fed officials would like, but not in truly worrisome territory.

I think the real message of gold today, as it has been since 2001, might just be that we live in a world of heightened risk, and gold has always been the ultimate safe-haven investment.

The most recent surge in gold prices comes at the same as time there's been more talk—particularly by the French—of taking military action again Iran if it doesn't abandon its efforts to build a nuke. (Interestingly, the last great gold surge happened during the Iranian revolution in 1979.) ...

After falling throughout the 1980s and 1990s, gold bottomed in 1999 and then began a steady march higher in early 2001. You could interpret that 20-year drop as a sign not only of diminishing inflation but also that the world was becoming a safer place, with less threat of a nuclear war. Likewise, the rise since 2001 and 9/11 is a sign that the world is becoming a dangerous place again.

The fear factor is also at play with stocks. The market's current price-to-earnings ratio is right at its historical average, a strangely subdued state given fat corporate profits and a lengthy economic expansion. Higher gold prices? Blame Ahmadinejad, not Bernanke.

“Last week The New York Times carried a story about the current state of the 9/11 lawsuits. Relatives of 42 of the dead are suing various parties for compensation, on the grounds that what happened that Tuesday morning should have been anticipated. The law firm Motley Rice, diversifying from its traditional lucrative class-action hunting grounds of tobacco, asbestos and lead paint, is promising to put on the witness stand everybody who ‘allowed the events of 9/11 to happen.’ And they mean everybody—American Airlines, United, Boeing, the airport authorities, the security firms—everybody, that is, except the guys who did it. According to the Times, many of the bereaved are angry and determined that their loved one’s death should have meaning. Yet the meaning they’re after surely strikes our enemies not just as extremely odd but as one more reason why they’ll win. You launch an act of war, and the victims respond with a lawsuit against their own countrymen. But that’s the American way: Almost every news story boils down to somebody standing in front of a microphone and announcing that he’s retained counsel...

Those 9/11 families should know that, if you want your child’s death that morning to have meaning, what matters is not whether you hound Boeing into admitting liability but whether you insist that the movement that murdered your daughter is hunted down and the sustaining ideological virus that led thousands of others to dance up and down in the streets cheering her death is expunged from the earth...

On this sixth anniversary, as 9/11 retreats into history, many Americans see no war at all.” —Mark Steyn

Bernard Goldberg's latest book, "Crazies to the Left of me, Wimps to the Right," ultimately lacks the courage to say what needs to be said: Liberals are traitors.

Goldberg's basic thesis is that liberals have abandoned the core principles of men such as FDR and JFK, while the Republicans have lost their courage.

His assessment of Republicans is spot on.

Republicans are wimps. At least some of them are.

But on the other salient point he is wrong - fundamentally wrong. Liberals aren't just "loony" or "stupid." These are all adjectives he uses to describe the principal players in mainstream liberalism. And neither is liberalism just "becoming increasingly irrelevant," as he asserts. I wish Goldberg were right about that. I wish liberalism were irrelevant - if that were true, we wouldn't have to worry so much about what 2008 might have in store.

But liberalism's problem is much more systemic then Goldberg lets on, and his book lacks the courage to state what his evidence uncovers.

Liberals are traitors - at least the self-conscious ones are. And it is not because they hate Bush or disagree with the Iraq war. Their treason stems from their behavior - from the way they go around telling everyone that they hate Bush and disagree with the war - even to the extent that they sympathize with and give material aid to the enemy. ...

Liberal perfidy is deliberate, and it is dangerous.

It is one thing to disagree with the policies of one's government. After all, no democracy can be a democracy without the balance of a loyal opposition. However, when the rhetoric and behavior of that opposition is no longer in keeping with the principles of loyalty - when it turns to sympathy and material aid for the enemy and strident and arrogant criticism of your own government - then that opposition has turned to treason.

This is what self-conscious liberals are doing in the name of their civil rights. They have become traitors to the cause of freedom and democracy, and unless something is done about it, it won't be the enemy abroad that will be our undoing. It will be the traitors from within.

Jack Layton is always good for a platitude or two (or three). And the one that appears on his party's website concerning Canadian troops in Afghanistan is exceptionally plebeian. "Support our troops. Bring 'em home," it pleads. How perfectly banal. I love the "'em" – lest we forget that Layton is a man of the people (and not just of the people who would take Afghanistan back to the eighth century), he reminds us by dropping that snooty "th."

In a statement on the website, Layton refers to the war in Afghanistan as a "George Bush style counter-insurgency war." (In case we've forgotten who we should be blaming!) But Canada's soldiers are volunteers. They have signed up for a profession that is not, by definition, safe (unlike Layton and Miller). And they do their job well (unlike Layton and Miller) – so why "bring 'em home" as though they were hapless children or disillusioned draftees?

The need to offer surface "support" for troops stems, of course, from the Vietnam era. So I would suggest that rather than declaring, "I support the troops," people with misgivings about Afghanistan wear stickers that say, "I promise not to spit on troops or call them baby killers."

I support our troops because I support the war in Afghanistan. That includes supporting the deliberate killing of bad people. It also includes accepting that civilian deaths and military casualties will occur and that both are grim inevitabilities of war.

Still, I would prefer that, rather than spout clichés, all Canadians understand why our troops should be encouraged to do their job with the best possible weaponry on this most important battlefield.

There is an article on the Guardian site called Throw a pebble at Goliath: don't buy Israeli produce, by Yvonne Roberts, in which she urges people to boycott Israel because of its human rights record.

Now I know nothing about Yvonne Robert and have never even heard of her before, but I assume she also an avid campaigner for people to boycott products from Cuba, Burma, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, China (good luck doing that), Iran, Syria, Belorus, Zimbabwe, North Korea (assuming they actually produce any products) etc. etc. etc... after all, if she is such a tireless campaigner for human rights, surely she could not possibly feel it was alright for people to trade with all those places, given the state of human rights in those places. Right?

Anyone want to take any bets on this? [links are in the original]

The day when those regimes become predominantly Jewish is the day that these people will start criticizing them, regardless of whether their human-rights records get better or worse.

This is not against Israel, it's for Palestine,... I think the Palestinians are living in a prison.

Today there is far too much sensitivity within societies, and too little hard-nosed recognition of threats from without. We are inclined to be intolerant of speech by our friends and neighbors, and tolerant of beheadings, rape, and homophobia in distant lands.

This makes no sense.

All 15 members of the Security Council adopted the sanctions, Resolution 1747, which focus on constraining Iranian arms exports, the state-owned Bank Sepah — already under Treasury Department sanctions — and the Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite military organization separate from the nation’s conventional armed forces.

No surprises were in the resolution, which modestly strengthens largely financial sanctions adopted in December in a first, limited resolution.

Rodney Hide: Has the Minister seen any reports of a political party that has always advocated extensive tax cuts, whatever the macroeconomic conditions, its own electoral fortunes, and the fads and fashions of politics--and, indeed, irrespective of floods and volcanoes?
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN: Yes, I have. I have noted that both the size of the caucus and the size of its leader are shrinking at approximately the same rate.

But we never deviate on our policy!!

• If property rights are well-defined and well-enforced, and
• If transaction costs are low (less than the expected gains from the transaction), then
• resources will move to their most highly valued use.

Jiang Ping, former president of the China University of Political Science and Law and a scholar who advised officials drawing up the law, told the official New China News Agency that it is significant because it helps codify a property law system that has been evolving through regulation in recent years as the country moves away from socialism.

"Only when people's lawful property is well protected will they have the enthusiasm to create more wealth and will China maintain its economic development," Jiang said.

"In the property law, state assets and private assets are put on the same level, which I think is totally wrong and even irrational," said Gong Hantian, a Beijing University law professor who has advised the government on legal matters.

"The reason China has such a fast-growing economy is that we have a very strong public sector. . . . Privatization for a socialist country like China is not a gospel, but a disaster," he said.

Libby, the former aide to the US Vice President Dick Cheney. The details of this affair are as tortuous as they are arcane. The essence of the story was an apparent hunt by the special prosecutor to find the identity of a ‘mole’ who leaked the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA agent, allegedly to discredit her husband Joseph C Wilson IV who had been dispatched to Niger to check whether Saddam had tried to buy uranium from that country, and who returned to say he had not done so and that the Bush administration had ‘twisted’ the facts in making the case for war against Iraq. ...

But Libby was not source of the ‘leak’. Strangely, the special prosecutor appears to have known from an early stage that the person who disclosed Ms Plame’s name was Richard Armitage, a former State Department official and who, far from doing the bidding of the White House, was no friend of the administration’s policy in Iraq. No action was ever taken against Armitage. Instead, Libby was hung out to dry for perjury. But the lies he appears to have told on oath concerned merely the identity of the person who had told him about Ms Plame. And the person who told the real whopper was none other than Joseph C Wilson IV himself.

[I]n questions 66 and 67, only 8% (6% in Canada) support an attack against North Korea if it continues developing nuclear weapons, but that jumps to 53% (50% in Canada) if the Security Council approves. Questions 68 and 69 show the same result for Iran. Support for invading Iran if it continues to develop nuclear weapons jumps from 9% without Security Council approval (7% in Canada) to 48% with it (41% in Canada). The poll offers for no explanation for the fetish for the largely irrelevant Security Council. Is there something about IR scholars wanting to keep Putin happy?

The Americans are taking the wrong approach to countries run by gentlemen like President Chavez. There's no need for confrontation: just wait until they start to cause trouble, then ship 'em a whole bunch of policy wonks trained in the Sociology and Development departments of US universities, and encourage them to help the government in question to free its people from the grip of nasty corporations. To take command of the economy and run it for the benefit of the people. No need even to use CIA plants - there are plenty of the real thing being churned out by dozens of universities (and not just in the US, if you want to add a bit of multinational flavour to the effort). Ship 'em out and wait for the whole place to collapse under the weight of regulation. By the time they're done such a large part of the population will be employed policing the market activities of the rest of the people that there won't be enough left to man a decent army. End of threat. A bit hard on the local populous, I admit, but no plan's perfect.

• According to the new rules from the American Media Practitioners Association, we're obliged to make at least one flattering reference to Barack Obama per column, preferably accompanied by that picture USA Today used with his head framed by a kind of luminous halo thing.
• He's young, gifted and black, and white, and Hawaiian, and Kansan, and charismatic, and Congregationalist, and Muslim. He rejects the way "politics has become so bitter and partisan,'' he represents "a different kind of politics."
• Some commentators say he's a blank slate. And how long is it since we've seen one of those? They used to have 'em in the schoolhouses back when the kids still learnt stuff instead of just discussing their sexuality with the guidance counselor all week long. I'll bet in those radical madrassahs they're still using blank slates.
• To be sure, the imams always knew young Barack was not your typical novitiate. No doubt when he was late for Friday prayers they stood around singing "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Obama?" How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand? Who knows?
• The madrassah stuff was supposedly leaked to Insight Magazine by some oppo-research heavies on Hillary Rodham Clinton's team. Which if true suggests that Hillary's losing her touch.

The letter, written and signed by Carter, asked that Sher show “special consideration” for a man proven to have murdered Jews in the Mauthausen death camp in Austria.

Update: A copy of the letter has been posted on the web by the New York Sun. Click here to view it.

Bartesch, who had immigrated to the U.S. and lived in Chicago, admitted to Sher’s office and the court that he had voluntarily joined the Waffen SS and had served in the notorious SS Death’s Head Division at the Mauthausen concentration camp where, at the hands of Bartesch and his cohorts, many thousands of prisoners were gassed, shot, starved and worked to death. He also confessed to having concealed his service at the infamous camp from U.S. immigration officials.

“We had an extraordinary piece of evidence against him – a book that was kept by the SS and captured by the American armed forces when they liberated Mauthausen,” Sher said. “We called it the death book. It was a roster that the Germans required them to keep that identified SS guards as they extended weapons to murder the inmates and prisoners.”

... The family approached several members of Congress. “The congressmen would, very understandably, forward their claims over to our office and when they learned the facts they would invariably drop the case,” Sher recalled.

But there was one politician who accepted the claims without asking for any further information.

“One day, in the fall of ’87, my secretary walks in and gives me a letter with a Georgia return address reading ‘Jimmy Carter.’ I assumed it was a prank from some old college buddies, but it wasn’t. It was the original copy of the letter Bartesch’s daughter sent to Carter, after Bartesch had already been deported.

“In the letter, she claimed we were un-American, only after vengeance, and persecuting a man for what he did when he was only 17 and 18 years old.

“I couldn’t help thinking of my own father who returned home with shrapnel wounds after he joined the U.S. Army as a teenager to fight the Nazis and hit the beaches at Normandy at that same age on D-day.

“On the upper corner of the letter was a note signed by Jimmy Carter saying that in cases such as this, he wanted ‘special consideration for the family for humanitarian reasons.’

OPEC had announced a cut of 1.2 million b/d in October, and another 500,000 b/d production cut is scheduled to take place in February. Our analysis suggests that only about 65% of the agreed October cuts have been implemented.

Iran's oil usage is growing at the fastest pace in the world. Its capacity to produce oil is declinging rapidly, and its reserves could be depleted in a decade.

I guess those in charge are focused on short term contentment of the domestic population. Nuclear power will not be able to replace all the domestically consumed oil. But nuclear weapons might.

It’s a shocking figure: more than £100m was spent in the past year on translating and interpreting for British residents who don’t speak English. In the name of multiculturalism, one Home Office-funded community centre alone provides these services in 76 languages.

According to BBC’s Newsnight last week, local councils spend at least £25m on these services, the police £21m, the courts system more than £10m and the National Health Service accounts for £55m at a conservative estimate.

The financial cost is bad enough, but there is a wider problem about the confused signals we are sending to immigrant communities. We are telling them they don’t have to learn English, let alone integrate. Worse, by insulating them linguistically we have created communities that are now incubators for Islamo-fascism.

... “Awareness-raising programmes” are all the rage — we have to celebrate our diversity and raise awareness among those oppressed of their rights. But self-reliance doesn’t come from handouts. You don’t learn to stand on your own two feet if someone is holding you up. Indulging differences can be harmful if it prevents communities from integrating.

Certain RCMP officers made a serious mistake. The government has recognized the fallibility of its security forces by undertaking an independent investigation into how such a mistake was made. We cannot expect a democracy to be perfect, but we can expect it to recognize its mistakes, to compensate the injured parties, and to take concrete steps to prevent a recurrence.

The most important lesson to be learned from Mr. Arar’s case is not the shortcomings of our own security services, but the barbarism of our radical Islamist enemies who brutalized an innocent Canadian. The real lesson is the treatment of Bill Sampson, a Canadian tortured and sentenced to death by beheading in Saudi Arabia. The real lesson is the torture and murder of Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi under Iran's chief prosecutor, Said Mortazavi, who was subsequently welcomed at the inaugural session of the UN Human Rights Council.

Those (on the right I am ashamed to say) who whitewash Pinochet and his crimes are saying one or more of the following:
* No, he wasn't a murderer, torturer and thief. It's all been made up by Christopher Hitchens.
* His murdering and torturing were acceptable because the victims were primarily communists or socialists
* Yes, he was a murderer, torturer and thief but at least he was our murderer, torturer and thief.
* What's a little murdering when he introduced a funded pension scheme?
* What's a little torture when he was on our side in the Falklands War?

What pathetic, morally bankrupt arguments.

The following paper: Sanholtz, Wayne, and Rein Taageprera. 2005. Corruption, Culture and Communism. International Review of Sociology (Jan), has two major findings. First, the effect of culture on "elite integrity" is such that the rank, from highest to lowest, is European Protestant, European Catholic, East Asian, Orthodox, and Muslim. Second, if a country is Communist, or has a Communist past, the effect is to cause a downward shift in elite integrity for all five cultural backgrounds. The absolute downward shift is strongest for European Protestant countries because they start out at high levels, and least for Muslim countries, because they start at relatively low levels.

S&T go on to link Elite Integrity to values on two dimensions, Survival/Self-Expression and Traditional/Secular-Rational. Though they don't explore the issue further, one can assume that poor countries are likely to cluster towards the survival and traditional ends of the two value continua.

A strong correlation between corruption and poverty is evident in the results of the CPI 2006. Almost three-quarters of the countries in the CPI score below five (including all low-income countries and all but two African states) indicating that most countries in the world face serious perceived levels of domestic corruption. Seventy-one countries - nearly half - score below three, indicating that corruption is perceived as rampant. Haiti has the lowest score at 1.8; Guinea, Iraq and Myanmar share the penultimate slot, each with a score of 1.9. Finland, Iceland and New Zealand share the top score of 9.6.

The 2006 Corruption Perceptions Index is a composite index that draws on multiple expert opinion surveys that poll perceptions of public sector corruption in 163 countries around the world, the greatest scope of any CPI to date. It scores countries on a scale from zero to ten, with zero indicating high levels of perceived corruption and ten indicating low levels of perceived corruption.

The talking heads were smiling a whole lot more last night than they were two years ago.

Doesn’t the present violence ... have its roots in the Crusades’ brutal and unprovoked attacks against a sophisticated and tolerant Muslim world? In other words, aren’t the Crusades really to blame?...

Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression — an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades.

A minimum level of fitness is no longer required of those who wish to join the Canadian Forces.

A notice posted in the recruiting section of Canada's military website says that, as of Oct. 1, the regular test to determine physical capabilities that has traditionally been demanded of all new applicants has been eliminated.

It's a change that comes as the Forces, stretched to the limit with deployment of more than 2,200 soldiers in Afghanistan, tries to increase its ranks by 8,000 members over the next five years even as attrition is depleting them.

After joining the Forces, however, recruits will still be subject to a medical examination — and those who can't meet the grade physically will be turned over to trainers who will try to get them into the kind of condition required to begin their life in the military, the notice on the website says.

Why pay to join a gym or fitness club, when the Forces will pay you to get in shape?
And you will be serving your country at the same time!

The trial lawyers have now enlisted themselves in the war against terror. One can imagine a parody — a team of wing-tipped attorneys parachuting into the wilds of Afghanistan, armed with subpoenas forcing Osama bin Laden to produce all relevant documents and secure his attendance at a 20-day videotaped deposition (damn the Geneva Conventions against torture). The legal and photocopying bills alone crush al Qaeda.

The reality is more prosaic, and less amusing. For just as Willie Sutton legendarily said he robbed banks "because that's where the money is," plaintiffs' attorneys are weaving creative legal theories to hold legitimate third parties liable for the intentional acts of terrorists. This friendly fire could end up doing almost as much financial damage as the terrorists themselves, with the lawyers getting rich in the process. [emphasis added]

... Federal laws permit parties injured by an act of terrorism to recover treble damages and attorneys' fees in civil suits against terrorists. Fair enough. But an act of terrorism may also include "knowingly providing material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization." The vagueness and breadth of this language is the source of the mischief: Following the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. started cracking down on front organizations for Islamic terror groups that posed as charities; and some of these faux-charities had accounts at international banks. Bingo. Lawsuits are pending now that claim, in effect, that the banks should have known then what the U.S. government did not decide until years later.

... If courts are not going to apply the antiterrorism laws sensibly, Congress should amend them to make clear that civil liability is limited to those who commit criminal acts of international terrorism, and those who aid and abet with specific intent to commit terror. Otherwise, terrorists can damage the global economy simply by inducing fratricidal litigation.

Howard is the only western leader who has grasped that the greatest danger to the west lies in the way it has been attacked and undermined from within, a process that is continuing and which threatens to hand liberal democracy over to its Islamic enemies who are laying siege to it from without. He is the only one who puts these two things together, and is using his office as a bully pulpit from which to fight for the values of western civilisation in the culture war. Can you imagine President Bush, or Tony Blair or David Cameron, denouncing the universities as breeding grounds for left-wing enemies of civilisation? Of course not. Howard is Australia’s Churchill, and is the true leader of the west at this perilous time. What a pity he can’t run for President of the United States.

Who killed 80,000 Muslims recently, imprisoned thousands more and brutally occupied and de-facto annexed their country? Israel? no. USA? Try again. Remarkably, no UN debate ensued. If Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International made a fuss about it, nobody noticed.

Something to think about, for those who insist on the fiction of international law.

Bill Clinton Nose Watch

The former President told Fox News' Chris Wallace that:

OK, now let’s look at all the criticisms: Black Hawk down, Somalia. There is not a living soul in the world who thought that Osama bin Laden had anything to do with Black Hawk down or was paying any attention to it or even knew Al Qaida was a growing concern in October of ‘93.

Well, the Clinton Justice Department thought otherwise, as this 1998 indictment of bin Laden and friends makes clear:

* ...At various times from at least as early as 1989, the defendant USAMA BIN LADEN, and others known and unknown, provided training camps and guesthouses in various areas, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Sudan, Somalia and Kenya for the use of al Qaeda and its affiliated groups.