The Black Line

Clash of Civilisations cotinues...

2006-02-12T00:26:00.000Z

EU Referendum reports on a new instance of offence being caused to Muslims, this time by Ann Summers (This link probably isn't safe for work). No doubt its all another one of those Jewish plots. My suggestion for renaming the doll? Given that he'sso full of warm air, how about "Tariq Ramadan"?

The End of the Line

2006-01-13T22:50:00.000Z

黑线不在了！

I will be posting here from time to time, when I want to go off on tangents that would interest me and me alone or when there are technical problems at the FI blog. Look out for very occasional updates.

~~This time, I'm afraid, there is no reprieve~~. After a year and a month of existence, I'm making my last ever post here. It's been fun and I think that I've had some good posts over the past while. Thanks very much to everyone who has been reading and commenting over the past year. In future, I'm aiming to get in at least one big post a week at the FI blog, which is taking on an interesting shape.

Here are some of my favourite posts:

The Myth of the Myth
The Bush White House Didn't Create the Fear or Terrorism

A critical treatment of an article with a left-wing slant on the war on terror

This award-winning blog

Giving Saddam the finger
Iraqis go to the polls

Welcome to the desert of the theoretical
Fisking a frog filosofer

A new movement is born

America, f**k yeah!

A conspiracy theory of my own!
Are they related?

The Great Chile Debate
This one ran and ran: Dick O'Brien doesn't do numbers, it seems

A Saudi Liberal Speaks

In Media Res
The global village idiots

The Error Strikes Back
Questioning the value of public intellectuals

So much for the Reform Movement and the Anglosphere

End of an Empire?
Review of Niall Ferguson's Colossus

Cow Demons
My notorious blogroll labels

The Irish Anti-War Movement on the March
Indymedia fails to stir the masses

Calling the EC President Race
A deft piece of political handicapping by your blogger

Film Review: The Day After Tomorrow
Hollywood gives global warming the Tellytubby treatment

A Union Man
I demand my rights!

Richard Lynn and the Salisbury Review
More IQ shenanigans from Ireland's leading "scientific racist", gaining exposure in a Tory journal

Knickers to Capitalism
What George Monbiot Misunderstands About Economics (followed up here and here and culminating in this)

Betting on Terror
Why the Pentagon's Abortive Terrorism Futures Market Was a Good Idea

Rory on the Radio

2006-01-06T00:50:00.000Z

Rory Miller discussed the impact on Israeli and Palestinian politics of Ariel Sharon's illness on RTE Radio on Thursday night. John Downing of the Daily Star and Trevor Sargeant of the Green Party also took part. The discussion begins at 5 minutes 20 seconds and ends at 21 seconds 40 seconds.

No gas

2006-01-02T17:01:00.000Z

Seems like I'm not the only person with an interest in Eastern Europe to forsee problems with Russian gas supply to Western Europe. The cut-off by Gazprom seems to have led to knock-on shortages throughout Europe and to have set the alarm bell ringing in London:

The British energy minister, Malcolm Wicks, today said the dispute could impact on supplies to the UK, but said the impact "should be less than elsewhere".
He said there was "no immediate threat" to UK supplies, despite the country now being a net importer of gas.
"We need to look at this one very carefully, but we are not a heavy importer of gas from Russia so the effects here should be less than elsewhere," he said.
EU energy ministers will discuss the growing crisis at an emergency meeting scheduled for Wednesday.

Thoughts for New Year's Eve...

2005-12-31T11:58:00.000Z

Procrastinate more! Tyler Cowen points to words in praise of absent-minded professors:

That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. [....] they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff.

What's "small stuff?" Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary. It's hard to say at the time what will turn out to be your best work (will it be your magnum opus on Sumerian temple architecture, or the detective thriller you wrote under a pseudonym?), but there's a whole class of tasks you can safely rule out: shaving, doing your laundry, cleaning the house, writing thank-you notes-- anything that might be called an errand.

...and offers what will, again, be my own motto for the coming year:

In his famous essay You and Your Research (which I recommend to anyone ambitious, no matter what they're working on), Richard Hamming suggests that you ask yourself three questions:
What are the most important problems in your field?

Are you working on one of them?

Why not?
Hamming was at Bell Labs when he started asking such questions. In principle anyone there ought to have been able to work on the most important problems in their field. Perhaps not everyone can make an equally dramatic mark on the world; I don't know; but whatever your capacities, there are projects that stretch them. So Hamming's exercise can be generalized to:
What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?
Most people will shy away from this question. I shy away from it myself; I see it there on the page and quickly move on to the next sentence. Hamming used to go around actually asking people this, and it didn't make him popular. But it's a question anyone ambitious should face.

New phone number

2005-12-29T17:07:00.000Z

If you're trying to contact me, please note that my mobile phone is out of order after sustaining water damage. Instead, please feel free to email me for my new mobile phone number.

Pipeline profits and politics

2005-12-28T10:56:00.000Z

"...the economically unclear mechanism for establishing the different prices suggest that while taking measures to increase the profitability of the gas it supplies, Russia wants to continue using gas prices as a tool of political pressure."

This is one interpretation offered by a Polish analyst in an International Herald Tribune story among many possible strategic reasons behind price hikes by the Kremlin-controlled giant gas company Gazprom. There are others: In particular, establishing a reputation for unreliability and political interferrence might seriously damage Russia's commercial reputation as a gas exporter.

If we see ExxonMobil with its own nuclear weapons and Microsoft sitting on the UN Security Council, then I might start believing Monbiot, Klein and the rest, but unlike many people with a preference for free markets, I tend to believe that commerce will be overriden by politics more often than the other way around.

Two things strengthen this conviction in the case of Russian energy: First, I inevitably get to see a mad paranoic glint in th eyes of any Pole or Balt I raise this with.

Second, we've just seen the Russian Duma enact a law that classifies NGOs ranging from the Open Society Institute of George Soros to the smallest donkey welfare society as potential enemies of the state.

Scrutinising Scruton Again

2005-12-26T00:03:00.000Z

Although I thought of him as a reactionary crank, some of his Financial Times articles and then reading his autobiography recently have persuaded me otherwise. He used to teach at Birkbeck, but found academia, supposedly the cradle of non-conformism and originality, a cold and unwelcoming home for a thinker who was individual enough to endorse a most typically English instinctive conservatism.

The West and the Rest is on my American Foreign Policy reading list and it's erudite and widely-sourced. His own earlier books, on the sectarian constitution of Lebanon, on his personal beliefs and on English nationalism and architecture are all cited.

On the other hand, perhaps he's overgeneralising his analysis of Islam and is less comprehensive in giving references to current events - describing widespread public rejoicing among Western Muslims at 9/11 - where and when is he thinking of? He refers to almost no group among them but the extremist al Muhajiroun groupuscule led by the media-whore Syrian Muslim Brother Omar Bakri Mohammed known to the tabloids as the "Tottenham Ayatollah".

I assumed that he'd oppose the Iraq war also, but he argues in this OpenDemocracy article that Kant's enthroning of reason and proposal for a world republic were not to be assumed feasible until the dawn of universal freedom.

The idea of a world republic is just such a regulative idea. For Kant, it does not indicate a condition that can actually be achieved, but an ÂIdeal of ReasonÂ Â an idea that we must bear in mind, by way of understanding the many ways in which mortal creatures inevitably fall short of it. The principal way in which we fall short is by failing to establish any kind of republic, even at the local level. And Kant is clear that a League of Nations can establish a genuine rule of law only if its members are also republics. Unless that condition is fulfilled, nations remain in the Hobbesian state of nature.

Although Scruton would certainly disapproveove, I've found reading him with this soundtrack is particularly stimulating.

The blackline, the hardline and the online

2005-12-23T18:32:00.000Z

Having recently suffered oppression myself at the hands of the Islamic Republic (have a look at my photos and story at flickr), the news that music has been banned in Iran caught my eye. On the positive side, they won't have to suffer Coldplay, it's surely good news for Iranian tribute bands...

Viral Marketing?

2005-12-23T00:04:00.000Z

I wrote in Magill recently about Ireland's preparations for dealing with an outbreak of the Asian bird 'flu. The FT reports Thursday that some patients suffering from bird 'flu appear to not respond to treatment with Tamiflu, the antiviral drug made by Swiss firm Roche that the Irish government is frantically stockpiling. The virus, doctors conclude, may have already developed resistance, so that new drugs are needed:

The reports increase suggested levels of resistance to nearly 10 per cent, or three out of the 31 known human cases of H5N1 treated with Tamiflu, which is marketed by Roche of Switzerland.
The study raises new questions about the drug, which more than 50 governments have ordered in significant quantities in recent months to stockpile as a potential prophylactic and treatment in the case of a flu pandemic.

An accompanying article in the journal reinforced calls for alternative approaches to treatment for a pandemic, including the stockpiling of the rival drug zanamivir, or Relenza.

The lesson here for policy seems to be not that breaking pharmaceutical patents can guarantee supplies of the necessary drugs - as the disease looks likely to need a broad spectrum of therapies, including cutting edge biotech products - but that a big diverse pipeline, which we can expect in an industry with secure intellectual property rights and funding allocated by deep, sophisticated financial markets is the key to fighting a pandemic. More here at TCS.

A spoonful of sugar

2005-12-22T23:21:00.000Z

Two stories stand out in the latest monthy Oil Market Report put out by the Paris-based Internatioanl Energy Agency, the OECD body charged with co-ordinating oil users' energy policies. The full report is here.

First, high oil prices, concern for the political risk to the global energy industry and the prospect of taxes on greenhouse gas emissions have revived interest in the use of biofuels, made partly or completely from agricultural crops. Cash-poor but sugar-cane rich Brazil pioneered this in the 'seventies and with the prospect of genetic modification to increase crop yields, this looks like a good prospect for other countries too. Talk in London is already of regulations that would require a minimum biofuel content for standard petrol. The economic switching costs should be easily handled by the car industry and fuel suppliers in the medium term. However, opposition from environmentalists worried about mutant ten foot tall stalks of sugar cane taking over the planet a la Day of the Triffids. The IEA comments (p.12)

Looking to the future, the growth of Brazilian ethanol demand will depend on oil prices and continued government support. Brazil is a relatively low-cost producer of ethanol, at some $30-35/bbl, so even if oil prices decline from current levels there is reason to believe that domestic demand for ethanol will remain strong. Estimates of future domestic demand growth are in the range of 20-35 kb/d per annum. Brazil is also pushing to satisfy growing demand in othercountries, such as the United States, which is the second largest producer/consumer of ethanol.

Brazil has been one of the strongest advocates of the liberalisation of agricultural trade under the Doha round and it could easily become an exporter of ethanol, given the opportunity:

Analysts have estimated that Brazilian ethanol could be delivered to the US market for a selling price of approximately US$1/gallon, well below the current gasoline price. Although Brazil has some success in increasing exports, currently approximately 45 kb/d, it faces substantial barriers to entry as most foreign ethanol markets are protected in an effort to support domestic agriculture.

The IEA is also sanguine on the prospects for the growth in oil supply next year, forecasting a growth of over a million and half barrels of production per day over 2006. Along with a more benign political situation in Iraq, to my mind, this points to crude prices below $50/b, possibly in the low forties, compared with today's level pushing $60.

Terror and Tranquility

2005-12-22T14:23:00.000Z

I was out having a jar with one of the new crop of Irish Times journalists last night. I wouldn't necessarily agree with him on many things, but he's nothing as lazy or complacent as some others on the opinion pages.

My own personal favourite is Tony Kinsella, whose qualifications or experience for gracing the pages of our national paper of record seem obscure, apart from being a old mucker of O'Foole.

Other than the juvenile piece of google vomit Post Washington published this year - which, to be fair to Fintan O'Toole, seems to have had little input from him, judging by the difference between it and his previous books - Kinsella has appeared from time to time to stoke complacency and spread cliche, as in this piece on the risks of terrorism.

Mark Steyn, who may or may not have lost his space in the Irish Times as well, highlights an interesting contrast that had not occured to me before:

...they like to mock Bush, Cheney, Rummy and co as the real terrorists – the ones determined to maintain America in a state of “terror”. Oddly enough, this was how the left chose to live during the Cold War, when the no-nukes crowd expected Armageddon any minute: fear of the phenomenon sold a gazillion posters, plays, books, films and LPs with big scary mushroom clouds on the cover. When nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world powers, progressive opinion was convinced the planet was about to go ka-boom and the handful of us who survived would be walking in a nuclear winter wonderland. Now anyone with a few thousand bucks and an unlisted Islamabad number in his Rolodex can get a nuke, and the left is positively blasé.

Going Critical

2005-12-22T14:19:00.000Z

Owing to space constraints, my recent TCS article on nuclear power in Britain didn't mention Chernobyl. In part, I wanted to keep this until the twentieth anniversary of the accident in April next year. Also, I had read in the press of a recent scientific consortium report(WHO press release is here, via Wikipedia) painting a less apocalpytic view of the consequences, but I hadn't followed the debate around this.

"As of mid-2005, however, fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004."

The other obvious issues left out are Sellafield and the performance of the British nuclear industry, both of which need a great deal more research before I'd feel comfortable in commenting on them in any detail. I suspect that nuclear weapons manufacturing rather than the civilian energy programs may have been a greater source of waste and accidents.

Also, the financial health of the British nuclear industry - including British Nuclear Fuels Limited and British Energy - which owns the power stations - has been fragile, to put it politely.

For my part, I suspect that most of the hostility in Ireland to Sellafield is a combination of the environmentalist scare-mongering together with "green" politics of a more traditional sort, namely that if our wicked colonial overlords across the water are doing it, it must be immoral. After the Good Friday Agreement, this gives a rare opportunity for Brit-bashing while remaining politically respectable.

If you're really interested in the whole subject, the Westminster Energy Forum is running a conference on the regulation of the nuclear power industry in London on January 19th.

Nevertheless, the question remains to be answered: Given this safety-obsessed, nappies-within-nappies society that they've done so much to foster, why aren't Greenpeace being held to account for their publicity stunts, given that they're more dangerous than the nuclear power industry? Feel free to discuss among yourselves....

Taking the uranium out

2005-12-22T14:11:00.000Z

Hotwired reports on new directions in research on using fuel sources other than uranium for nuclear power:

Scientists have long considered using thorium as a reactor fuel -- and for good reason: The naturally occurring element is more abundant, more efficient and safer to use than uranium. Plus, thorium reactors leave behind very little plutonium, meaning that governments have access to less material for making nuclear weapons.

But design challenges and a Cold War-era interest in using nuclear waste byproducts in atomic bombs pushed the industry to use uranium as its primary fuel.

Now, as governments look to prevent the proliferation of nuclear arms and as environmentalists want to reduce the volume of nuclear waste building up around the world, thorium is again drawing attention.

Over the past several years, studies in the United States and Russia have yielded solutions to some of the issues that troubled earlier researchers. And in January, India -- which has the world's second largest reserve of thorium behind Australia --announced it would begin testing the safety of a design of its own.

Man The Lifeboats

2005-12-22T14:09:00.000Z

Given that the FI blog is unable to publish, I'll be putting some posts here until our ... er... technical difficulties... are resolved at the main site.

Blogger's block

2005-04-05T07:22:00.000Z

I've had a very busy ten days, with the normal workload supplemented by the requirement to turn in an essay for my international security course. Normally, I feel that I can write as if turning on a tap and seeing the water flow, but I've had an intensely difficult and frustrating time in writing these. It's as if I've been trying to carve a shape out a very hard rock which took me ages to even visualise and longer to craft and polish.

My original plan was to do something on water issues in the Arab-Israeli conflict, but I fell in love with the idea of learning more about controlling WMD. When I was child, I used to have nightmares every so often about living through a nuclear war and its aftermath, which I imagined as death sentence on me and my family. This led to something of a fascination with the topic, so I read some books on it. Coming back to the topic as an adult to study deterrence, cold war history, the international non-proliferation regime and the state of US policy in this area was fascinating.

I argued that the NPT framework, managed by the IAEA had largely failed to prevent any state ruthless or determined enough to get the bomb, even in the face of outside pressure.

My perusal of the literature put out by the disarmers such as Dan Plesch and Joseph Rotblat convinced me that they were inhabiting the same dream-world as they were when pushing the democracies to disarm in the face of the Soviet threat in the eighties.

Last year, I read Thomas Schelling's brilliant book, The Strategy of Conflict. In an appendix, which alone is worth the price of the book, he proposes that nuclear weapons use remains taboo largely because of the uncertainty over how to create a different global consensus about the just use of nuclear weapons. This remains as true today as it was when he wrote it, not long before the Cuban missile crisis.

The veteran strategist Fred Ikle , speaking recently at the CSIS, urged analysts to try to think the unthinkable, and imagine the risks and security strategies necessary in a world following the first post-Nagasaki nuclear use.

I wrote, before discovering this paper, that proliferation brings with it the risk of chains of alliances spanning the globe (or "extended deterrence" in the jargon), poorly understood on all sides that could lead to runaway escalation of conflict among the world's nuclear powers similar to the mobilisation towards disaster in Europe during the summer of 1914 - the nukes of August, if you will.

Given the lack of consensus among the P5 security council members, the holes in the international law and the ponderous pace at which treaties are negotiated and enacted, I've come to think, having pored over their policy documents, that the approach championed by Ambassador-designate John Bolton is sound and sensible. He proposes on coalitions of willing states to police nuclear proliferation, rather than waiting for the UN and International Atomic Energy Agency (which until recently, even had Iran sitting on its governing council, judging its own non-compliance) provides the best solution.

The implicit American role, exercised in Iraq, of guarantor of the UN/IAEA international disarmament machinery also plays a very necessary role. Richard Butler in particular was scathing on Kofi Annan and his team, who tried to manage the relationship between the weapons inspectors and Iraq as a problem of communication and not law-breaking. I theorised that this was an inevitable outcome of bureaucratic politics models, which would predict that the UN can be expected to seek publicity and acclaim as an independent diplomatic actor for "peace" in its own right and champion the diplomatic process it controls over the independent inspectors or military action by the US and UK.

These are just a few thoughts from a quick survey of the field.

The Myth of the Myth

2005-03-29T02:08:00.000Z

Johnny Ryan, also gave Noam Chomsky a big tickling in the Irish Times last year.

Like many leftists, such as Michael Moore or those in the BBC, whose recent Power of Nightmares combined cretinous opinions with the soundtrack from the Magic Roundabout, he picks up the theme that the fear of terror is largely the outcome of the manipulation of public opinion after 9/11 by the Bush administration.

Some evidence on this quesiton, apart from videos of the President's speeches would not go amiss. Luckily, the most recent surveys in the series conducted regularly by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, coming after 9/11 and the Iraq war, shows spreading democracy internationally, perpetually unpopular, last among foreign policy goals, with only 14% of citizens considering it very important (See p.21); among foreign policy experts, support is barely higher (See p.21). Regardless of the merits of the President’s emphasis on spreading democracy, through force if necessary, it ill represents the views of the American people.

The CCFR survey data shows the American public believing (pp.6-12) even in polls taken years prior to both 9/11 and Bush’s election, that WMD and international terrorism were the greatest threats facing the US. While the reported levels of concern had increased, 1998 and 2002, they have consistently remained the gravest foreign policy problems in the eyes of ordinary Americans, with around three quarters feeling it is "very important". Again, the foreign policy elite echo this.

In his address at West Point in 2002, Bush stated, "Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies." Later in 2002, Vice President Cheney echoed this alarm about the links between terrorism, WMD and Iraq: Addressing a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he described Hussein as "a murderous dictator" who now had WMD, was, he stated unequivocally, "as great a threat as can be imagined."

From the attitude surveys, it's obvious that the American public came to this view well before President Bush did. So much for the sheepish masses being led astray by media manipulation.

Misusing Occam's Razor

2005-03-27T22:45:00.000Z

Johnny Ryan, an Irish polsci postgraduate at Oxford, has an article in the current issue of Magill with the stated aim of introducing to Dr Rory Miller of Kings College London, author of the recently published Ireland and the Palestine Question, the complexity of Islamist terrorism. In attempting to introduce his wrinkles, I suspect that Ryan is missing a number of essential points that the Miller has absorbed from his longer and more focused exposure to Arab and Israeli sources and proficiency in the original languages.

Ryan considers himself too sophisticated - he is a graduate of UCD, after all - to subscribe to the simple dichotomy of President Bush's challenge to the world after 9/11, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists" but his scholarship falls down on a number of points - al-Qaeda, the politics of the Islamic world and the Cold War - which leads him to draw inadequately supported and morally-flawed conclusions. As today's birthday boy said, "Why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own?" Here it is Ryan rather than Miller who is failing to grasp the nuances of his subject matter.

Occam’s Razor – as applied by al-Qaeda

To begin, who does al-Qaeda consider its enemies? Americans, for certain, especially those representing their government overseas, as in 1998's embassy bombings in Africa. Killing a dozen a US diplomats seems, to their mind, to justify the slaughter of a further 200 innocent bystanders. On its own, this far exceeds in scale and ruthlessness anything ever undertaken by any of Europe's terrorists. Alslo in the firing line have been the UN, which was condemned by bin Laden as "...nothing but a tool of crime.", which presumably justifies the mass murder of its humanitarian staff in Iraq. Neither are tthe aid agencies such as MSF, the ICRC spared from bomb attacks, nor innocents such as Margaret Hassan and Ken Bigley, slaughtered like cattle on video. The same pattern of targeting innocents has been repeated in Bali, Madrid and, but for chance, in Mobassa.

Violence of this sort bespeaks an extremism and indifference to human life that is completely new and untasted for us in the west, but is tragically familiar in the Islamic world. bin Laden's talk of the "tragedy of al Andalus", and his rage at the ending of the genocidal Indonesian occupation of East Timor reinforce the conviction that here we have a murderous fantasist. Gerry Adams and his crew had to concede their shining vision of a 32-county Irish Socialist Republic for some cross-border tourism bodies. The distance for al-Qaeda to travel is far greater.

Civil wars and terrorism in Egypt, Algeria, Afghanistan and now Iraq and Saudi Arabia, have bear out the analysis of Gilles Kepel and other scholars (which, strangely, Ryan cites in his other work) that Islamist terrorism is more a sign of weakness than strength. Islamists have failed to take power, either through the ballot box or through violence against their own societies, as al Zawahiri admits in his Knights Under the Prophet's Banner, quoted extensively in Kepel's War for Muslim Minds. Isolated from their home societies and exiled, they can only bid desperately for support through violent spectaculars, or "propaganda of the deed" as it was known to the anarchists of early 20th century Europe.

Rather than moving from violence to build a base of mass support, al-Qaeda is working in the opposite direction, as a splinter from the more broadly-based Islamists such as those in Algeria and Egypt. The better Irish analogy should be with Justin Barrett, not Gery Adams.

Islam is very far from being a monolith, as one would expect from a religious tradition with nearly fifteen centuries of history that straddles many cultures around the globe. The only government Bin Laden has held up as an example of his ideal society was that of Afghanistan under the Taliban and Mullah Omar, to whom he sweared alleigance as "commander of the faithful".

There are many other variants. Towards the other end of the spectrum, there are the Muslim politicians of South East Asia, such as former Indonesian president Abdurrahman Wahid ("Gus Dur"), who head the world's largest Muslim organisation and worked tirelessly in office for decentralisation and religious tolerance in that diverse nation. One of his more interesting recent roles, according to a recent New Yorker article, has been to act as a go-between for two of his friends, Iraqi Shia leader Grand Ayatollah Sistani and Paul Wolfowitz, a one-time US ambassador to Indonesia.

Then, in the murky middle, we have those movements and individuals, who may be abhorent, but are nonetheless represent useful allies, if not friends. One example is the Egyptian-born scholar Yusuf al Qaradawi, who may enjoy the widest reputation among in both popular and clerical opinion. His sanctioning wife-beating, the killing of gays and suicide-bombings against non-combatant Israelis, including women and children, disgust many in the West (although not, predictably, London mayor Ken Livingstone, who lavished praise on him during a recent visit to the city). The Sheik ridicules Osama Bin Laden's scholarship, and signed fatwas supporting the US attack on Afghanistan.

Hamas is in no sense an agent of reform. It's main electoral intervention to date has been in persuading the Israeli public first in 1996 and again in 2001, through a series of no-warning attacks on commuters, night-clubbers and shoppers, that negotiations would not deliver peace, bringing first Netanyahu and then Sharon to to power, followed by the re-occupation of the Palestinian areas after their attack on a Passover function in a hotel killed thirty. Palestinian terrorism may be accorded legitimacy in the wider Middle East, encouraged by the imprimatur of Qaradawi and others, but by now it's hard, after four years of being ground down to ascribe any success to it in furthering the struggle.

The cold war history he presents is bizarre. Bush's rhetoric of good and evil, strategy of democratisation and military intervention is being wielded, in many cases by the same people, as in the late cold war.

He's correct in drawing a contrast between the neo-conservative philosophy and that of Nixon and Kissinger, but this is only continuing Reagan's policies of reversing the growing Soviety military advantage and, just as importantly, abandoning the coldly amoral use of American power that brought such misery to Indonesia, Chile, Cambodia and other countries. In Korea, the Philippines and ultimately in Eastern Europe, this combination of moral clarity and military strength was the essential prerequisite for the overthrow of dictatorships that had seemed permanent. Oh, and thirty and forty-five thousand Americans died in Korea and Vietnam respectively, not "hundreds of thousands".

What will the world look like if non-state actors, ETA, the IRA, AQ, the drug cartels, religious cults like Aum in Japan - overcome the state cartel on holding biological and nuclear weapons. The motivations of its potential users are either so extreme, so obscure or simply so insane that they cannot be bargained with.

In summary, Bagdhad isn't Belfast, in spite of Ryan's impenetrable parochialism. al-Qaeda's terrorists have already killed tens of thousands without scruple in their own countries and 9/11 was just a taste of what may come. Let us hope we don't share the unfortunate fate of the battleground states in the Middle East or even the pale shadow of it that Israel has experienced.

Apocrypha...

2005-03-27T13:21:00.000Z

Beijing's Qian Men ("front gate"), at the southern edge of Tiananmen Square

My very first blog postings, written from an internet cafe right by Qianmen in Beijing, are here. At the time, the PRC government were blocking access from the mainland to blogger.com. Bizarrely, I was able to post, but not able to read what I had written. Therefore, showing my usual strength of character, I promptly gave up.

Intrinsically Disordered in Baghdad

2005-03-24T12:00:00.000Z

The Church of England isn't the only religious body having problems in recognising homosexual relationships, according to today's FT:

Say theword mujahid- or holy warrior - these days and many inhabitants of Baghdad are likely to snigger.

[...]

For Iraqis opposed to the predominantly Sunni Islamist insurgency, Terror in the Hands of Justice, which airs twice daily on Iraqi public television, has broken the mystique of a force that used to strike terror into the hearts of anyone working with the Americans or the new government.

[...]

In recent weeks, however, the insurgents' confessions have become increasingly at odds with the movement's reputation for stringent Islamic austerity.

One long-bearded preacher known as Abu Tabarek recently confessed that guerrillas had usually held orgies in his mosques, secure in the knowledge that their status as holy warriors would win them forgiveness of their sins.

Neigbourhood watch, Bagdhad style

2005-03-23T06:58:00.000Z

Saudi jihadis out of Iraq?

In spite of the solidarity on show in yet another six-person demonstration in Dublin, the Iraqi insurgency seems to be faltering.

This heart-warming story caught my eye:

As the gunmen emerged from their cars, Dhia and his young relatives shouldered their Kalashnikov rifles and opened fire, the police and witnesses said. In the fierce gun battle that followed, three of the insurgents were killed, and the rest fled just after the police arrived. Two of Dhia's nephews and a bystander were wounded, the police said.

"We attacked them before they attacked us," said Dhia, 35, his face still contorted with rage and excitement, as he stood barefoot outside his home a few hours after the battle, a 9-millimeter pistol in his hand. He would not give his last name.

"We killed three of those who call themselves the mujahedeen," he said. "I am waiting for the rest of them to come, and we will show them."

No doubt had this happened in London, Dhia would have either been left cooling his heels in jail while the terrorists were left off scot-free. Or perhaps he could have been left to meekly offer himself to the terrorists, while pointing out to them any slippy patches on the floor of his home where they might fall and injure themselves and then have to sue him.

...from my cold, dead hands Mr. Annan...

2005-03-22T01:49:00.000Z

I spent a big chunk of my Saturday this week at a workshop on the control of small arms at Birkbeck, as part of my International Security course. Dan Plesch led the lectures and workshop as another battle in his long struggle against peace and security as a CND activist, advocate of impeaching every UK prime minister from Thatcher to Blair, anti-war actvist and, according to a recent Sky News caption "Iran Expert". I stuggle to overcome my suspicion of academics who operate under the label of "peace studies", as if moral virtue is its own reward, independent of the harder facts and darker insights into human nature that other academic disciplines and the pragmatic experience of war and turmoil brings. While I soon became intensely riled by the unjustified atmosphere of sanctity that reminded me of my primary school religion classes, there were, however, some very interesting points made.

The activists seemed keen to replicate the Ottowa treaty process that led to an an incomplete ban on landmines. This treaty, with which Princess Di was much taken during the later stages of her life while not blowing Egyptian coke-heads, didn't take into account useful applications like sowing the Korean DMZ to stop the North Koreans sweeping south or the guarding of other frontiers such as those in Cyprus or Israel. Given how the UN disarmament process has been symtied by inertia and the veto-wielding powers, they thought that "civil society" i.e. the usual swarm of NGO pondlife and their journalist camp-followers who seem to be the main halo-polishers of the modern world, decided to act directly on governments, many of whom, responded. Those Atlases that carry the world's security burdens unaided on their shoulders, Canada and Belgium - remember Rwanda anyone? Mark Steyn does, and seems to be the only person condemning UN commander Romeo Dallaire. Needless to say, the US isn't a signatory. I thought, isn't exactly this same logic applicable to Operation Iraqi Freedom, where the democratically elected leaders, in conjunction with their legislatures, took up the baton of stopping genocide in Iraq from the deadlocked UNSC?

Newton's law of civil society - for each NGO, there exists an equal but opposite NGO, also reared its ugly head. The main opposition for these people was the US National Rifle Association. Indeed, the focus of the organisation's work seemed to be on accomplishing, by way of UN bureaucracy and international treaty what the Bill of Rights and public opinion prevents, what I've christened elsewhere as the Held fallacy, after the LSE political philosopher who addressed my class late last year.

Neither do these people ever recognise that control shows state control is worse than the outcomes of the market: all the licensed guns and most of those in the hands of the security forces were there available to defend and protect the Unionists and not nationalists in a crisis such as that of 1969 and are a key weapon in the arsenal of those threatening the "Protestant backlash" - remember Paisley's torchlight eighties rally of men waving gun permits?

Nobody seemed to have the facts as to where the weapons were coming from, as distinct from pushing the concept of another evil capitalist conspiracy, although verbally beating it out of them seemed to produce a tentative consensus that the FSU and Chinese arms are mainly to blame. Apparently, modern guns made for the US market, as almost legal production now is, are too expensive to interest the global black market, where weapons are sold well below manufacturing cost, not surprising given the deadly legacy of stockpiled weapons left over from the Cold War period. Remember how the IRA got its weapons shipped wholesale from Libya, while smuggling from America was sporadic and tiny in scale (according to Ed Moloney's book).

One researcher commented on how Kofi Annan had introduced and most of the NGO community perpetuated completely arbitrary and false statistics about the problem. The landmines campaign had said that there were 500 million in circulation, so the Secretary General said in a speech that there were 500 million small arms, but no sources were available to back this up.

Finally, a German academic, Peter Lock commented on the role of crime, not just in supporting, but increasingly, in driving the politics of civil conflict - a sadly appropriate theme!

Logic and the Left

2005-03-22T00:55:00.000Z

Tony asks speculates that the left and the right approach problems differently. I think he may be correct in this. One example is the Palestinian issue which he talks over. Those on the right - like Tony and I - seem to always be battling a huge wall of indignant emotion, especially in Ireland, if we sympathise with and argue for the continued existence of Israel, and this even without going into the "extremist" territory of tentatively venturing the hypothesese that the voiding of the Oslo accords, killings of active terrorists and election of Ariel Sharon were, perhaps, just maybe, for the sake of argument, perhaps politically logical and morally justified.

The differences between our mindsets and that of, for example, the standard Irish Times narrative seem to fall into a few broad fallacies.

First, I think most people make the assumption that because the Palestians appear weaker, they must have justice on their side, a dangerous conclusion. Regardless of their military inferiority when facing the Israelis without the backing of the Arab militaries, they seem to have a preference for massacre and terrorism, with only the first Intifada being a partial exception. Unlike either say the Poles under Soviet rule or even the IRA, they've never seemed to draw back from direct and targeted violence against women, children and non-combatants in attacking athletes, schools, family homes and so on.

Second, regardless of whether Israel is right or wrong, it's more useful to us than the Palestinians have ever been. A modern society, albeit one troubled by ethnic division and political polarisation, even one that's perhaps Enlightenment civilisation's country cousin, is more likely to be a friend than an enemy. As we observed, there was nobody dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv on 9/11. Whatever the shape of any future Palestine, it will be highly unlikely to serve as the stage for the preening leftists like Caoimhe Butterly.

Third, all outsiders, and the BBC and other British reporters in particular, always bring the assumption that the disagreements and conflict are the result of someone being unreasonable. But what if compromises are not reciprocated, inviting only more demands? If the hurt pride or the ambition is too great for compromise, but leads on only to sustained demands, what can be done? If Gaza is on the table, but Jaffa and Jerusalem are the prizes, who would offer compromise? To borrow from Jabotinsky's The Iron Wall, the philosophical cornerstone of the Revisionist Zionism of the Likud:

All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.

Word on the Streets

2005-03-20T01:50:00.000Z

"The peace process is for the media. It’s not real. The people are waiting for our decision, not Abu Mazen’s."

In "Appointment with Fear", Israeli journalist Yigal Sarna in today’s FT magazine, keeps it real as Ali G might say, if he lived long enough in this West Bank canton.

"Follow me", the boy says shyly. He leads us through alleys where the houses are so close together that the second storeys touch one another. In the doorways of small shops, idle men watch us without a word. At the edge of the camp, my guide phones our liaison, who says: “A child will come to take you.” Ten minutes later another boy pops up beside us. We follow him through the lanes of Balata, the most violent Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank. He stops at a green iron door. We climb four steps into a sooty apartment that doubles as a bakery. Next to the bread oven we are halted by two boys, like two miniature sentries.

The boys are 15 or 16 years old, in the twilight zone between a childhood of plastic pistols and the armed manhood of live weapons and explosives. They move us from room to room, to where their brother Jum’a is sleeping. He wakes, and greets us.

Jum’a, who is a few years older, is our contact: he is an al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades militant, a soldier in the war against Israel. And I am an Israeli journalist. This is a man who would, were I in a Jerusalem street, gladly see me dead. But we are meeting during a time of ceasefire, of truce, of hope - and hostilities are, for the moment, on hold.

In the camp, boys no older than our escort might be recruited by the Brigades to smuggle explosives into Israel. Or they might be recruited by Shin Bet, the Israeli security service, to track the Brigades for them. It depends on who gets their hands on them first. “Just yesterday we caught a boy, a jassus,” Jum’a says to me as he rises from his bed on the floor. Jassus is a harsh word. It means “spy”, an occupation that invites the death penalty.

”The boy was told to keep watch on our two commanders, Sanagra and Saltah,” says Jum’a. “But he was also reporting to Shin Bet; he was supposed to plant a bomb to kill them.” Snooker, the boy who was caught, was sleeping rough after running away from a father who beat him; Jum’a’s commander took pity on him and let him sleep in his own home. Shin Bet’s trap worked well at first - but then the boy was exposed. When the Brigades catch a collaborator, they interrogate him and then, usually, they kill him. In this case, they didn’t: they took pity. “He was working for the Israelis for only three weeks. He didn’t do any harm. We interrogated him and he broke. Just a kid, not well-trained.” The room is filling up with Jum’a’s comrades from the Brigades, and they laugh.

The Brigades make videos of the interrogation and execution of collaborators: two, who were caught in mid-January, were interrogated for several days with the help of burning cigarettes, the red-hot element of an electric heater and beatings. Once the collaborators had admitted everything, they were killed near the mosque, after evening prayers, in full view of the whole community. “We filmed everything,” the men tell me, as if to point out that they are sticklers for procedure.

Why have these men agreed to meet my photographer and me? Perhaps it is because of a burning desire that their fiery youth, doomed to end in violent death, will not be forgotten. Or perhaps it is because they feel that, during this time of talks between the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen) and the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon - a period in which they are not supposed to shoot at or kill anyone - they are losing their value. They are evaporating.

Before I met these young men, I spoke with a man I knew from the Balata camp. “This new truce,” he told me, “is the Brigades’ disaster. The street wants peace, but the peace is drying up the Brigades, whose power comes from weapons. The source of donations is also drying up. They are flickering out with the fire.”

Now there are about 10 young fighters in the room. Jum’a, whose home this is; Nasser, the oldest; tall Muhammad; some silent young men who don’t introduce themselves. “What is going to happen to you?” I ask them. “The Israelis will kill us.” They don’t have any other plans. Even when they go upstairs to the open rooftop to pose for the photographer, they seem to be imagining their faces on martyrs’ posters on an alley wall. The camera only completes the work of the rifle.

Now the Brigades’ current commander, Ala Sanagra, joins us. Ahmed Saltah - already nominated as his successor if and when Sanagra dies - is not with him. This is a vital rule: the two men are never in the same place at the same time. Both are on the most-wanted list, having been involved, according to an Israeli military spokesman, in three killings in 2004 and other “extensive terror activity”.

Sanagra is good-looking in a strange way, with sharp, handsome features that stand out from the crowd. He speaks little and wears stylish, tight black clothing. “This is Brigades style,” he says. Most of the young men in the room are dressed in black. Their short hair is spiky with gel, sometimes covered with the small woollen hat worn by pilgrims to Mecca. Most are wearing dark leather jackets.

Sanagra, who is 27 and single - “I’m married to the Brigades” - was born in Balata and into the Occupation: he was 10 when the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada, erupted. Like many other youngsters in the camp, he threw stones at soldiers and saw his father humiliated. There were nights when he awoke in terror as soldiers burst in to search the sleeping house. This seems to be a formative experience for many children in the camp. Their safest refuge is violated; in adulthood, the fear and impotence that this creates develops into a profound need for control, preferably using the power provided by weapons - the same weapons those childhood intruders carried.

Few of those who have gathered in the room to talk with me expect to die a natural death. Since the beginning of the second intifada, at the end of 2000, about 100 people have been killed in the Balata camp. According to the Brigades’ count, 79 of these “martyrs” were their people.

Most of the men here are heavy smokers, getting through a packet of Marlboros during the course of our conversation, crumpling the empty packet next to the ashtray. I count three rounds of coffee during the meeting. The room fills up with smoke. The atmosphere is a mixture of caffeine, nicotine and gunpowder.

The screened windows are slightly open and look out over a narrow passage between houses, but there is something suffocating and claustrophobic about sitting here. The room is a refuge, but also a potential trap. For a moment I imagine an Israeli force suddenly bursting in through the windows. My mind fills with an image of murderous chaos; the fighters, however, are having fun. They regale me with some of the folklore and humour of the Martyrs’ Brigades: how they forced a collaborator they had captured to phone his controller in Shin Bet, listened to the conversation, then interrupted it to yell at the Israeli intelligence captain, who quickly hung up. How six of them shot holes in the collaborator with their automatic weapons until he looked like a honeycomb. How people came to kick his corpse.

They like to tease their pursuers, even though they know that the Israelis are a hundred times stronger, that they will get them in the end. The game always ends in death, but at least playing wins you a temporary sense of power - a release from the Occupation, where from the moment you are born you have no control over anything, in which your every move is watched, your every move blocked. Control, even momentary control, is magical. For a brief while you instil fear in those who have made you afraid from the moment you were born. You rise from the dust of your trampled father.

”Ever since I was a child I’ve loved disturbances, demonstrations, stones,” says Jum’a. “I felt that this was my thing in life,” he says, holding a Kalashnikov he has brought out from its hiding place. The room is full of weapons. They have an animal presence, like the reek of a lion in a cave. These are guns that have fired and killed, and most of their owners are wanted men “with blood on their hands”, as Israel defines it: the killing of soldiers, the planning and implementation of terrorist attacks. Fear of these men casts a shadow in Israel that extends into the camp, where they have appointed themselves the guardians of morality. They will punish a wife-beater, a woman who strays, a thief who is caught. “They’ve acquired the reputation of very cruel fellows,” a camp-dweller told me. “Children who have no mercy.”

Ten years ago this group of young men were children, who sometimes threw stones at soldiers. But as they grew, they each became active in the Shabiba youth movement; they became a coherent group upon joining the Tanzim, the military wing of al-Fatah. Once the second intifada began, the group adopted the name “al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades” - thus commemorating the spark that caused the conflagration: Ariel Sharon’s September 2000 visit to Temple Mount in Jerusalem (the site of, among other holy places, al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock) and the killing of Palestinians in the riots that followed. Now the men of the Brigades are the least restrained of all the Tanzim’s fighters, sustaining a very high level of losses. The attrition rate is so high that it seems as though death itself is with us in the room.

”How many commanders were there before you?” I ask Sanagra. His hand caresses the ammunition clip of his weapon as he enumerates them in his mind.

”Eight.”

He is the ninth: all the previous commanders have been killed or captured by their Israeli pursuers; only three were taken alive.

”A cat has only nine lives,” I say.

”I’m on the ninth,” Sanagra smiles when my guide translates.

The men show me a poster depicting all the commanders. In the centre is Yasser al-Badawi, the Brigades’ founder; around him are the others: the dead, who are buried in the camp cemetery, and the living, who are buried alive in prison.

Al-Badawi established the Brigades in the camps in January 2001. He was a native of Balata, unmarried and in his early thirties. For seven months he recruited youngsters, collected donations, located weapons and ordered attacks - until he was killed in his car, when a grenade belonging to the co-fighter sitting next to him blew up. The men are certain that the weapon had been booby-trapped, and was triggered by an Israeli drone that passed overhead - that the “accident” was a targeted killing.

How do you select a new leader?

”The Brigades are a pyramid. The top of the pyramid decides who is next, according to seniority and the successes that person has had.” They count up “successes” as a businessman counts up commercial initiatives: 23 dead from an attack in Tel Aviv; a female suicide bomber killing two policemen in Jerusalem; a bomb in a shopping mall; a youth who blew himself up in an outdoor market.

The third commander was called Mahmood al-Titi, who is admired to this day. He shot down an Israeli drone, carried out terrorist attacks and even killed an Israeli soldier from an elite unit. He was blown up by an Israeli tank shell while visiting the camp cemetery. His replacement was Amir Zukan, who held sway for a few months until he was captured and given seven life sentences. In the chaos that ensued, 20-year-old Muhammad al-Hatib was chosen as the new commander. Two months later he was wounded and captured. After his arrest, Hashem Abu Hamdan and Nader Abu Leil commanded the Brigades, together with Khalil Marshoud. On June 2 2004, combat helicopters killed Abu Hamdan and Abu Leil by firing missiles at their vehicle; Marshoud remained alone as the eighth commander.

In mid-June 2004, Marshoud had talks with Fatah about the possibility of a ceasefire with Israel. That evening, he took a taxi to the camp with two other young men. Marshoud was next to the driver; Muhammad al-Assi, now sitting with us in the baker’s apartment, was in the back seat. Al-Assi remembers that it was dark when they entered the camp.

”Four days later I woke up in a hospital without remembering a thing.” He shows me a scar on his neck, and another on his abdomen. “The helicopters fired two missiles.” One missed, but the second was a direct hit on Marshoud. “We took him out of the vehicle: without a face, without a belly and without one arm,” says another young fighter, who helped carry Marshoud’s body from the smashed car. Around his neck there now hangs a small photograph of the martyr, a handsome young man.

And so Ala Sanagra was appointed the ninth commander, with Ahmed Saltah as his nominated successor. In order to demonstrate the danger that does not disappear for a moment, Sanagra shows me his mobile phone. “Captain Munir of Shin Bet knows my number,” he says. “He phoned me this week and said: ‘Soon I am going to slaughter you with a knife. You are a dead man.’” He laughs, briefly.

Such intimacy between pursuer and the pursued is not unusual: the Israelis possess photographs and details of every wanted man; the Palestinians know many of their hunters. Meanwhile, all about them, the territory is “planted” with collaborators.

”Don’t believe anyone here. The people in the camp love us,” Nasser, the group’s oldest member, tells me, “but it is a love without trust. That’s our law.”

What will happen next?

”This is just a temporary lull. Not a hudna,” says Sanagra, using the word for a truce. “For the moment, all sides have locked the safety catch on their weapons. We and the Israelis. But if they execute someone, we will take strong vengeance.” He is holding an M-16 engraved with a cedar tree - the symbol of Lebanon, where the rifle came from. As we talk, the fighters pass their weapons - a silvery pistol, an M-16 with a telescopic sight, a short Kalashnikov - hand to hand, like pets, as though it were hard for them to live without their metallic closeness, without the control and the security that they afford.

And the peace process?

”It’s good only for the media. It’s not real. We don’t want a complicated agreement like Oslo, but a simple agreement: for Israel to get out of the whole West Bank and to release all the prisoners. Then there will be peace. The people are waiting for our decision. Not Abu Mazen’s. We get messages from Abu Mazen all the time, but we aren’t a part of the new mood. He does not represent us, even though we are together with him in the Fatah. We haven’t given our agreement to the current process. But we want peace.” He says this like a man longing for a good sleep, after years of keeping his eyes wide open.

Will you fight Palestinian soldiers if they come here to force through an agreement?

”We will never shoot at our own soldiers,” says Sanagra.

”We need peace even more than you Israelis do,” says the baker and the owner of the house, Jum’a’s father. His greatest fear is that the Israeli army will, in pursuit of his son, blow up his home and that he, his wife and their other six children will be left without a roof over their heads. Jum’a’s mother remains outside the room, but I hear her angry mutterings against the men. “Why have they all come here?” She also scolds us, two Israelis who have come into her home. But it is the men who decide who enters. And when the father speaks, his son keeps quiet: filial respect is stronger than any politics. Jum’a’s father belongs to the generation that worked in Israel and misses the place. He remembers a boss who was “sweet as sugar”. To this the son says nothing; his generation is cut off from that Israel.

When we leave, some of the Brigades’ fighters accompany us the short distance to the military roadblock where our taxi waits for us. The people of the camp watch the armed men in silence. Only children gather around them. Forty-five minutes later, I am at home in Tel Aviv.

A week later, I return to the same room. Sanagra does not appear. He has vanished.

A few young men come in, surrounding a tall, thin figure. He is the tenth: Ahmed Saltah, Sanagra’s partner in the leadership. There is a heavy Hungarian pistol stuck in his belt, but the room is empty of sub-machine-guns.

Where have all the weapons gone?

”This week we lost the weapons that you saw,” says Saltah.

He himself was saved by a miracle. On the previous Tuesday evening, Saltah was sitting with three colleagues in an abandoned house in the village of Kalil. According to the Israeli Defence Force’s version of events, the four men were preparing to mount a terrorist attack. There were two others with them, not from the Brigades: the mayor of Nablus’s bodyguard and a Palestinian policeman. One looked out of the window and saw that the house was surrounded by the Israeli army.

The policeman and the bodyguard fired through the windows, creating cover for Saltah to slip out the back. He says the two men were killed in the house; the army says they were shot outside, close to the fence surrounding a nearby Jewish settlement, while carrying an explosive charge with a cellular detonator.

”They sacrificed their lives for me,” Saltah tells me, as one of Jum’a’s younger brothers looks on admiringly. It is the day after the dead men’s funeral, and Saltah’s right leg is jittery with tension. Had the Israelis killed him that night, his men would have taken revenge. Had he succeeded in any terrorist attack, Israel would have taken revenge. Possibly the fire would have reignited and the cards been reshuffled. Everything is so fragile in this peace.

A thick furrow is etched between his soft, boyish eyes. He does not smile much. Before October 2000, he had managed to spend two months studying economics at Najah University. Now his future is a helicopter missile or a bullet.

”I could be killed at any moment. But as long as there is a Palestinian woman who gives birth to a son, there will be a new leader to replace me. This is a chain.” He knows all the details of the deaths of his predecessors, and of the deaths of those they killed; he knows this better than anything. And a few years from now, if nothing changes, that admiring younger brother will be sitting under the commanders’ faded photographs, holding his automatic weapon, and talking to another journalist.

Turning to the Dark Side

2005-03-20T00:57:00.000Z

With Jon Ihle's relationship with notorious Irish neocon rag Magill magazine now out in the open, it looks like the dark side of the blogosphere has gained another convert, so the BSD link in my blogroll has been shifted accordingly.

What the FIUK are youse doing here?

2005-03-20T00:53:00.000Z

The latest Irish sojourners to wash up on England's shores are in London at present. With any luck, they will be able to squeeze me into their hectic schedule sometime this weekend. I've

I've recently come across some of the people that they mention. The wonderful blog of the Social Affairs Unit, publishes the original and erudite work of many heavy-hitting writers, including NHS psychiatrist Anthony Daniels (aka "Theodore Dalrymple"), Cambridge international relations don Brendan Simms, whose Unfinest Hour so mercilessly highlighted the need for what's now known as the neo-conservative approach during the scourging of Bosnia, Irish doctor and critic Seamus Sweeney and wunderkind Douglas Murray.

Alex Singleton is familiar to any reader of the Adam Smith Institute Blog. As well as posting frequently there and on Samizdata, Alex has just set up a new think-tank, the Globalisation Institute, as a platform for his pioneering policy research on globalisation from the perspective of a European free-markets advocate.

The granddaddy of all the free-market think-tanks, the Institute of Economic Affairs, which invented much of what is now absoluely undisputed in economic policy, such as the abolition of exchange controls and resale price maintenance in Britain, as well as building the intellectual foundation for Thatcherism. They do not, unfortunately, have a blog yet, but many of their books are available free for download at their site.

George Kennan: 1904-2005

2005-03-18T08:20:00.000Z

George Kennan, the intellectual dynamo who first articulated the doctrine of containment that guided American foreign policy all throughout the terror and tensions of the Cold War until its triumphant ending. His obituaries in the Washington Post and New York Times describe the somewhat dissappointing arc of his life and thought.

The force of Mr. Kennan's ideas brought him to power in Washington in the brief months after World War II ended and before the cold war began. In February 1946, as the second-ranking diplomat in the American Embassy in Moscow, he dispatched his famous "Long Telegram" to Washington, perhaps the best-known cable in American diplomatic history. It explained to policy makers baffled by Stalin that while Soviet power was "impervious to the logic of reason," it was "highly sensitive to the logic of force."Widely circulated in Washington, the Long Telegram made Mr. Kennan famous. It evolved into an even better-known work, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," which Mr. Kennan published under the anonymous byline "X" in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. "Soviet pressure against the free institutions of the Western world is something that can be contained by the adroit and vigorous application of counterforce," he wrote. That force, Kennan believed, should take the form of diplomacy and covert action, not war.

Mr. Kennan's best-known legacy was this postwar policy of containment, "a strategy that held up awfully well," said Mr. Gaddis.

And in echoes of today's debates, as a policy-maker, he was pessimistic of the potential for change in the Communist bloc and opposed on many occaisions the use soft power measures to roll back the occupation of Easter Europe.

A touchstone of his worldview was the conviction that the United States cannot reshape other countries in its own image and that, with a few exceptions, its efforts to police the world are neither in its interests nor within the scope of its resources.

"This whole tendency to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious and undesirable," he said in an interview with the New York Review of Books in 1999.

"I would like to see our government gradually withdraw from its public advocacy of democracy and human rights. I submit that governments should deal with other governments as such, and should avoid unnecessary involvement, particularly personal involvement, with their leaders.

Again, Gaddis is quoted in the Times:

"...he missed the ideological appeal of democratic culture in the rest of the world," Mr. Gaddis said, as the slow rot of Soviet Communism undermined the cold war's architectures.

He also publicly deplored his role in the setting up of the CIA's covert political operations capability, spoke against Vietnam and campaigned for nuclear disarmament. Eventually, he came to deplore and to some extent disown his legacy, disputing the resolute application of military power to corral the Soviets:

In February 1994, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations at a celebration of his 90th birthday, Mr. Kennan harked back to the "X" article. The time to have negotiated with Moscow, he said, was right after the evident success of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift, "when the lesson I wanted to see us convey to Moscow had been successfully conveyed."

But the United States and its allies insisted on "unconditional surrender" by the Soviets. The result, he said, was 40 years of Cold War at a cost of vast and unnecessary military expenditure, a useless and dangerous nuclear arsenal and 40 years of communist misgovernment in Eastern Europe.

Also, through no fault of his own, he inspired the worst opening line I've ever encountered in any book, from George Dempsey's From the Embassy, which I read and wrote about last year here and here, , "I joined the American diplomatic service because I was seduced by George F. Kennan." Whatever Kennan's faults, they didn't include a being the Bill Clinton of the diplomatic service.

Ireland's Cancer

2005-03-15T20:42:00.000Z

As Hedges relates, the outcomes unleashed by extreme nationalism and the violence it uses are hellish - it snuffs out human lives and coarsens our culture with crude propaganda, and everwhere cultivates an indifference to humanity. In this way, the IRA, even with a limited level of violence are the greatest threats to Ireland's cultural keys of learning, art, memory and compassion.

A friend sent me the article below this morning. I've never been a fan of the Provos, and neither have I had much time for the often hysterical denunciations of the Sindo.

My brothers were with me on Saturday. They think that the Irish Republic faces a threat of Weimar dimensions. I might not have agreed with them three months ago, but I've come around to believe just that.

From the Sunday Independent 13 March 2005

Laundering operation was a SF/IRA conspiracy to overthrow this State

GARDA COMMISSIONER Noel Conroy does not give press conferences. He eschews publicity. So his decision to go before the television cameras on Friday is an indication of the commissioner's view of the magnitude of the operation the Garda Siochana was undertaking in Cork and across the country starting last Wednesday evening.

Members of the Garda Special Branch, and the Fraud and Criminal Assets bureaux had just launched the biggest ever set of raids on the offices of accountants, solicitors and finance companies across the country looking for documents linked to offshore accounts, property deals, business ownerships and money transactions which are estimated to run into hundreds of millions of euro.

There is said to be a massive amount of financial activity ranging from pubs to trading corporations situated in countries outside the European Union in order to avoid the scrutiny of EU financial regulations. There are believed to be companies in Africa and Eurasia involved.

And they all have one thing in common. They are all linked to the IRA.

What's more, the money was clearly not for personal enrichment alone. The amounts involved were evidently for a purpose far beyond the purchase of holiday homes or new cars. The finance operation uncovered is on a scale to mount a massive campaign to subvert the sovereign state of the Republic of Ireland, to undermine its political parties and maybe even its political institutions and Constitution.

It is, gardai say, the IRA's banking system, to be usedto overthrow the government of Ireland.

A key part of the grandiose plan was the subverting of Sinn Fein's political opposition. The IRA is in the process of building a black propaganda campaign to attack TDs and other elected representatives. Across the country, the IRA have been spying on members of Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Labour and the Progressive Democrats. Units of IRA volunteers, under the guise of Sinn Fein "activists" have been building up dossiers on members of constitutional political parties with the intention of either destroying their reputations or blackmailing them.

This information is to be used to destroy the careers of politicians and public figures at key points, mainly in the run-up to the next general election in which Sinn Fein hopes to establish itself as a major presence in the Dail.

One instance, known to the Sunday Independent, involves a plot to reveal details of the extramarital activities of a TD in a constituency where Sinn Fein has hopes of gaining a seat.

This year the party is launching a series of major profile-building events across Ireland - in line with the so-called centenary of the foundation of Sinn Fein.

The party will be spending millions in promotional activities and recruitment drives through this year, followed next year by further rallies and commemorative events leading up to the 2007 general election, when it hopes to more than double its representation in Dail Eireann.

Although republicans and their supporters dismiss such claims as fantasy, gardai and members of Army Intelligence have become increasingly uneasy about the intentions of the IRA and Sinn Fein.

They believe the leadership of the Provisionals has decided that it has completed its strategic project in Northern Ireland, having overthrown the SDLP to become the biggest nationalist party, and has now turned its attention to its grand plan of taking power in the Republic.

Within republican circles this project is commonly referred to as the "re-conquest of the South".

This project is, as the Minister for Justice Mr McDowell commented last week, on a "colossal" scale.

It requires hundreds of millions of euro to pay for the small army of activists of all shades ranging from local "community" workers to high-flying financiers handling the organisation's money, and the spies who are involved in subverting the politicians and institutionsof the State.

The truth has finally dawned on Government that rather than be content with a political agreement that would have seen Sinn Fein in a Stormont Executive, the Provisionals were intent on an altogether bigger prize.

It is believed that this awareness underlies the Taoiseach's reference to the sense of "betrayal" in the duplicity of the Sinn Fein and IRA leadership throughout the years of painstaking negotiations to try and achieve a political settlement in the North.

The Taoiseach is now believed to accept that even if the Rev Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party had agreed to a deal with Sinn Fein last December, the IRA would still have carried out the Northern Bank raid.

Mr Ahern has been told that the planning for the raid had been under way for months and was agreed by the IRA Army Council - which includes Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness - at the very same time that he and the British prime minister were desperately trying to get the DUP to agree to share power with Sinn Fein in the North.

If the two prime ministers had succeeded and the raid had gone ahead, the DUP would have been shattered and the North could have been pitched into turmoil.

THE robbery of the stg£26.5m was, however, a completely disastrous miscalculation on the part of the Provisionals.

The IRA may have a highly sophisticated money-laundering operation which funds its huge political machine - with as many paid members as all the other political parties in Ireland put together - but the strain placed on this system by the injection of stg£26.5m was too much.

Over the past weeks the signs of the strain began to emerge as two separate garda intelligence-gathering operations came together, when members of the Special Branch following a dissident republican in Co Cork and anti money-laundering detectives found that they were watching the same people meeting together and exchanging packages of cash.

The Special Branch detectives were on the routine surveillance of a Cork member of the Real IRA, who appeared to have an unusually close relationship with a man who was both a senior IRA figure and a member of Sinn Fein.

The two had been friends since childhood and although they had apparently gone in different directions when the Real IRA split from the Provisionals in 1997, they were still in close contact and obviously working together.

This unusual and baffling relationship between the two Cork men had caused considerable interest and this interest doubled when the Branch men found that in the past month the two had held meetings with a financier at the centre of a completely separate investigation by CAB and the Garda Fraud Bureau into suspected money-laundering.

Some weeks ago it became clear that what the two sections of the Garda Siochana were witnessing was the movement of cash from the North to Cork and the laundering of that money on a very large scale.

High level conferences were held in Garda Headquarters overseen by Commissioner Conroy, Deputy Commissioner Fachtna Murphy and the Force's chief intelligence officer, Assistant Commissioner Joe Egan.

A joint operation was put into place, overseen by the director of Support Services, Assistant Commissioner Tony Hickey, the gardai's most experienced and successful crime investigator and the man who led the hunt for the killers of Veronica Guerin.

The operation swung into action last Wednesday with the first of a series of raids that went on over the following 48 hours, involving eight arrests and the seizure of thousands of files and computer hard drives relating to financial dealings here and abroad.

Of key interest are documents relating to the setting up of trading companies and property deals outside the European Union in places such as Bulgaria, Turkey and Libya.

Last week's operations are merely the start of an investigation which gardai say will run for years. As Commissioner Conroy confirmed at his press conference the operation is aimed at the "subversive" activities of the Provisional IRA.

Garda sources have confirmed that the €2.3m, and other money seized in Cork, is from the Northern Bank raid.

It is believed that this constituted only part of the IRA laundering operation and that most of the other dirty cash was being laundered by other people on both sides of the Border.

The Garda believe the operation uncovered in Cork is only a small part of the overall 'IRA volunteers have been building up dossiers on members of constitutional political parties with the intention of destroying their reputations or blackmailing them'

IRA laundering operation and that separate financial operations are in place in Dublin, the midlands and the Border area. The PSNI are also understood to be looking at financial operations just over the Border in the Newry area and in Derry.

The laundering of the Northern Bank cash has been a difficult and complex issue involving the transaction of the sterling notes for other "clean" sterling, its conversion into euro and its subsequent transfer out of the State.

The fact that this is proving difficult, even for a laundering operation on the scale of the Provisionals', was evidenced in the fact that following the raids in Cork one man gave himself up at Anglesea Garda Station in Cork city and handed over €175,000 in cash which he said he had been asked to keep by one of thefigures at the centre of theinvestigation.

Then, on Friday afternoon, another man was arrested while trying to burn tens of thousands of Northern Bank notes in his back garden in Passage West.

THE garda operation into the IRA's money-laundering is now the biggest and most complex ever undertaken by the force. More than 100 detectives, mainly from the Criminal Assets Bureau and Bureau of Fraud Investigation, are expected to be engaged almost permanently over the next few years in tracking down and revealing the extent of the IRA's illegal fund-raising operation.

The Special Branch will also play a key role and is already understood to have identified a very large number of businesses, licensed premises and hotels that have been acquired on behalf of the IRA. In particular, they have identified a substantial number of pubs which have been acquired by members of SF who previously had no obvious means. It is understood that once the gardai are assured they have exposed the core of the IRA money-laundering operations they will switch their attention to the businesses, pubs and houses, that have been acquired by members of the IRA and Sinn Fein through what is now corrupt or unjust enrichment.

Gardai have pointed out that in the 10 years since the first IRA ceasefire, the IRA has turned itself into the biggest organised crime organisation in the history of this State, comparable to the Mafia in the United States, and has become a threat to the institutions of democracy.

As the police and FBI in the United States embarked on a war against organised crime, so in this country the Garda Siochana is embarking on a dangerous and complex campaign against a highly dangerous and powerful terrorist-criminal organisation.

Jim Cusack

War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

2005-03-15T20:33:00.000Z

Perhaps the best book I read last year was War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by NY Times journalist Chris Hedges. A veteran war correspondent, he's plainly a very damaged man after witnessing wars in Yugoslavia, Central America and the Middle East and their effects. Not only does he relate the utter misery of death, injury and psychological damage on those in and around the fighting. Just as tragic is the ripping asunder of cultures as societies turn inwards into the narcissism of national-self love. Steeped in the classics and
educated as a theologian at Harvard, Hedges offers some of the most powerful prose on war since Thucydides. Commenting on Shakespeare's play, he writes:

Troilus, at the start of the play, states that he will not fight for Helen, a woman portrayed by Shakespeare as a mindless paramour. "It is", he says, "too starved a subject for my sword." Dying for this Helen, who has neither morals nor wit, is absurd. Yet I have seen men die for even more ridiculous reasons. There was no reason for the war in Bosnia. The warring sides invented national myths and histories designed to mask the fact that Croats, Muslims and Serbs are nearly indistinguishable. IT was absurd nuances that propelled the war, invested historical wrongs, which, as in the Middle East, stretched back to dubious accounts of ancient history. I have heard Israeli settlers on the West Bank, for example, argue that Palestinian towns, towns that have been Muslim since the seventh century, belong to them because it says so in the Bible, a reminder that this sophistry extends beyond the Balkans.
[...]
The cast of warlords in the former Yugoslavia was made up of the dregs of society. These thieves, embezzlers, petty thugs and even professional killers swiftly became war heroes.

Whatever war is, its amoung the greatest evils in human society, seducing us towards our own destruction. I certainly don't consider myself immune to this.

The Arab Street Erupts in Rage

2005-03-15T10:59:00.000Z

According to Reuters , "We call on the Iraqi government to close all Arab embassies," said a protestor in Baghdad's Shi'ite Sadr City district as others yelled "No to Syria." (Found in the Corner).

Stormont for Slow Learners?

2005-03-15T00:45:00.000Z

"The statement is rooted in the republican movement's insistence on its own autonomy, in its private and closed belief system, and in its axiomatic insistence that it cannot be answerable to any other law but its own... This is the IRA's world and in this world there is no law and no enforcement but their own. In particular, there is no place there for the police or the laws of states... whose existence they do not recognise."

Guardian editorial, 9 March

Nice of them to notice. How did they not figure this out with all those dead people on the streets of London and Belfast?

Ireland and the Palestine Question

2005-03-15T00:36:00.000Z

Speaking of the Middle East, Rory Miller's new book, which got a favourable if overly short review in the Sunday Business Post yesterday, is now available on Amazon.

Smogasbord from the Sunday NY Times

2005-03-15T00:35:00.000Z

The Sunday NY Times had a rich selection of articles by some of my favourite authors.

Niall Ferguson wrote on the international political economy of the dollar system, arguing that the US gets reduced borrowing costs in return for acting as the buyer of last resort for Asia. More importantly, he looks to see the situation continue for the forseeable future, as the Asians both look to maintain employment and avoid capital losses on their dollar assets.

The magazine has a long reportage on the state of Palestine, wearily taking a break from violence, absorbed in its own situation and soberly accepting the political culture that seems to drive the violence.

Francis Fukuyama celebrates the centenary of Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (which Ferguson has also spoken of). The target of his criticism of cultural explanations of politics and econoimcs seems to be his frequent adversary Samuel Huntington.

Has the IRA waged a just war?

2005-03-14T21:58:00.000Z

I thought that I should cross-post this piece of mine from Slugger's thread on the half-hearted apology by Garda McCabe's killers:

I'm not aware of any moral tradition (and I straddle several) which condones armed robbery of the mails or the killing of policemen. Even the Provos aren't cynical enough to condone it. If these maggots get out, I wouldn't expect to see them appearing on a gable wall anytime soon.

Think about the just war criteria (jus ad bellum)

"War can only be waged for a just cause"
I'm sure we all recall the vast majorities SF gained in free and fair voting for the Dail and Westminster? No? Me neither!
"War can only be waged under legitimate authority."
Who elected the Provo Army Council? Ah, but I thought you said Gerry and Martin weren't on it. And no, the Second Dail doesn't count either.
"War can only be waged with the right intention."
And getting your hands on the registered mail doesn't count.
"War can only be waged with a reasonable chance of success."
Sorry guys but Belfast remains, as Thatcher said so long ago, as British as Finchley.
"War must be waged with proportionality in mind."
Yeah, Jonathan Ball and Tim Parry had it coming: Probably wanted to be soldiers when they grew up.
"War can only be waged as a last resort."
i.e. only after losing elections and being suppressed by the Republic's police and army, with overwhelming public support.

Blogger Constipation

2005-03-14T21:48:00.000Z

For some reason, I've had problems logging in to Blogger today. In frustration, I've taken myself over to Slugger instead to do battle with the Provo-bots. They're not very good debaters - that's what comes of reading too many of big Gerry's shite books.

Family Values

2005-03-13T19:45:00.000Z

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

I thought I'd be Scarface instead, but I suppose it's not too far off!

Via Slugger

The Movement Gains Another Recruit

2005-03-13T16:18:00.000Z

If you look carefully, you might notice that Gavin has been promoted into the ranks of the "cow demons". According to Indymedia, which I take as Holy Writ, the Sheridan is now officially a "a Freedom Institute-linked blogger".

Welcome to the vast right-wing conspiracy, a chara!

Father Benedict McArnold

2005-03-13T15:39:00.000Z

US-based priest (Or perhaps former priest? I can't imagine how canvassing for the 'RA would be authorised by any Irish bishop) Sean McManus has been giving grief to Richard Develan for his excellent coverage of the McCartney affair and the laughable smear from McManus. In response to his statement I wrote him the letter below to his email address sean@irishnationalcaucus.org, as well as leaving several angry comments on his new blog.

I'm mystified by why Americans still haven't woken up to the fact that the IRA and Sinn Fein represent the most violent and extremist brand of anti-Americanism in Europe. Somehow, their aiding and abetting America's enemies, rogue states like Cuba and Libya and terrorists such as FARC or Hizbollah, and that's not to mention Sean Russell's little cruise on the Nazi u-boat. Quite how the third-world communist vision of Irish autarchy and anti-American "neutrality" accords with US interests and values is another mystery.

One of my acquaintances who knows a great deal about the topic referred to him as "very anti-British. Believer in purity of SF vision of an Irish Socialist republic. Sort of guy displaced by constitutional nationalism of peace process. "

Anyway, please feel free to share your opinions with the cleric yourselves.

Dear Father McManus,

I’ve recently read of your comments:

"If the purpose is to launch a campaign in America against not only the IRA but Sinn Fein, than that campaign is profoundly misguided because it's going to distract from the issue, and further it's not going to succeed."

It may have escaped your notice, but An Taoiseach and Deputy McDowell are the elected and lawful government of the Republic of Ireland. I would like to refer you to article 2266 of the Catechism: "The efforts of the state to curb the spread of behavior harmful to people's rights and to the basic rules of civil society correspond to the requirement of safeguarding the common good. Legitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offense. Punishment has the primary aim of redressing the disorder introduced by the offense. When it is willingly accepted by the guilty party, it assumes the value of expiation. Punishment then, in addition to defending public order and protecting people's safety, has a medicinal purpose: as far as possible, it must contribute to the correction of the guilty party."

Could I humbly suggest that the best service you can render to a country several thousand miles away of which you are not a citizen and remain entirely ignorant would be to stop trying to finance and propagandise for gangsters and terrorists?

Why has it escaped your notice that the IRA have been close collaborators for decades with America’s enemies Libya, the Soviet Union, the FARC, Cuba and Iran? That’s not to mention its utterly cynical violence as the dominant force in the Irish underworld and the greatest threat to Ireland’s democracy? How would you react if there was a campaign launched in Dublin having both John Gotti and David Duke as its beneficiaries?

Having argued long and hard here against the stereotype of Americans as violent fanatics and religious hypocrites utterly unfamiliar with the world outside their borders, it’s ironic that you should be the one to prove it.

You have no right to call yourself and Irishman or an American and certainly not a Christian.

Peter Nolan

W stands for War on Terror"

2005-03-13T15:37:00.000Z

As I had expected, irritating the hot-tempered and emotional President Bush when he has lent you his credibility isn't a smart thing to do, as Yasser Arafat learned to his cost and Gerry Adams now seems to be discovering, according to the Telegraph.

Mr Bush now views Mr Adams in the same unfavourable light as he did Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader, a senior presidential adviser said last night. "At the White House, Adams is now regarded with the same sort of disdain as Arafat," the adviser told The Telegraph. "The President no longer considers Mr Adams a reliable partner for peace. He doesn't want to meet him." [...] Mr Bush's displeasure has forced Mr Adams to abandon plans to raise money while in America. The United States government made it clear that it would not grant him a visa that permits fund-raising, this newspaper has learnt. Sinn Fein had claimed that Mr Adams had chosen not to raise money "to avoid it being made into a contentious issue''. In reality, he was told not even to bother applying for the appropriate paperwork for the week-long visit, which began in Ohio yesterday. American officials are also demanding major concessions from Sinn Fein, most significantly that the IRA be disbanded.

Adams is probably calculating that he can live with riling the White House, given that the Irish electorate isn't concerned about Bush's anger and that friends on Capitol Hill will cover him from the consequences. That might be a serious misjudgment.

As the World Turns

2005-03-02T10:52:00.000Z

This caught my eye - I particularly like the denunciation of sinister outside forces.

Whatever else that Iran and Syria can do, probably the biggest vulnerability for the US and its allies lies in the main arena of combat in the region, namely Iraq. Bad as the situation there is now, for the Americans and the locals, Hezbollah's weapons and experience - although their experienced fighters in Lebanon probably only number in the dozens - would allow them to cause terrific chaos.

Palestinian militants denounce Tel Aviv bombing
By Harvey Morris in Nablus,West Bank
Published: February 28 2005 18:21

Palestinian militants, including a leader of the Islamic Jihad group claimed to be behind Friday's Tel Aviv nightclub bombing, on Monday denounced the attack and said it was the work of outside forces.

As Israel announced a diplomatic offensive against Syria, which it alleges was behind the bombing that killed five Israelis, a wanted Fatah militia leader said: "It is clear that some resistance cells are infiltrated. We are not in a position to name Syria or Hizbollah but probably there is money coming from abroad."

Mohamed Dandan, leader of Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Nablus's Balata refugee camp, said individuals claiming to be linked to Lebanon's Hizbollah organisation had made intensive efforts to contact Palestinian militants to persuade them to break the present ceasefire.

He said a man identifying himself as Qais Obeid, a Lebanon-based Israeli Arab said to be behind the October 2000 Hizbollah kidnapping of an Israeli businessman, had been in touch with West Bank militants.

However, Mr Dandan would not confirm a report that the caller had offered them money to take responsibility for Friday's bombing.

He said Palestinian factions refused to be tools in the hands of any outside force. "We understand the difference between the local and the regional struggle against Israel," he said. "We can see an end to our struggle but perhaps Hizbollah and Syria and Iran cannot see an end to theirs."

Mr Dandan and a West Bank leader of Islamic Jihad said their organisations were committed to the ceasefire declared between Israel and the Palestinians three weeks ago.

The Israeli killings of militants seem to have encouraged a newfound reticence on the part of the terrorist groups. Viral marketing perhaps?

As Islamic Jihad leaders went to ground for fear of Israeli reprisals, its spokesman, a well-known figure in Nablus who has served time in Israeli jails, declined to be identified by name.

Regardless of the bloodshed, the political situation seems to have turned a corner, with the hard men realising that violence will ill-serve Palestinian interests.

"Frankly, it's the first time I've been distressed to hear about a suicide bombing in Israel," he said. "It came at a time when we had a consensus to preserve quiet to allow the Palestinian Authority to pursue a political breakthrough with Israel."

Although the Palestinian bomber said in a video he was acting for Islamic Jihad and a claim of responsibility was posted on an Islamic Jihad website, the Nablus leader rejected Israel's assertion that the bombing was ordered by the group's exiled Damascus leadership.

Both militant leaders said the situation in Lebanon supported a theory of Hizbollah involvement. They said Israeli retaliation against the organisation could give Syria a pretext to keep its troops in the country in the face of international and increasingly vocal Lebanese demands for their withdrawal.

The Israeli government on Monday gave foreign ambassadors an intelligence briefing on Syria's alleged involvement in the bombing. A foreign ministry spokesman said the aim was to try to ensure that today's London conference on Palestinian reform was not limited to economic issues but also stressed the necessity of a war against terrorist organisations.

Mahmoud Abbas, the PA president who will head the Palestinian delegation in London, said at the weekend that an unnamed third party was behind the Tel Aviv bombing.

More on Hariri

2005-02-21T01:19:00.000Z

The Syrian autocracy has been looking very shaky in the last few weeks, as Tom Friedman highlights again in his latest column today:

Throughout history, Beirut's streets have been reserved for the "defense of pan-Arab causes," wrote Mr. Kassir. But with the funeral for Rafik Hariri, Arab nationalism has taken on a new aim, he declared: "Today, the nationalist cause has shrunk into the single aim of getting rid of the regimes of terrorism and coups, and regaining the peoples' freedom as a prelude to a new Arab renaissance. Thus hundreds of thousands of free citizens walked in Rafik Hariri's funeral - while only a paltry cortege mobilized by the single party and its intelligence apparatuses walked in [former Syrian President] Hafez al-Assad's funeral a few years ago. [With the Hariri funeral] Beirut was the beating heart of a new Arab nationalism. ... This nationalism is based on the free will of citizens, male and female. And this is what the tyrannical [Syrian] regime should fear more than anything else if it tarries about ending its hegemony over Beirut and Lebanon."

I'm not so optimistic. Eeyore that I am, I'm not certain that any political change in Lebanon is likely to be an easy and bloodless one: The one people locked out of the coming together between the factions so far is Hezbollash and, from what I can make out, the Shia factions generally. Putting together their willingness to attack Israel and risk its becoming involved with the Syrian capacity to make mischief and you have a recipe for the same pre-Taif blood-letting that consumed the country up to 1990.

Furthermore, as bad as things are in Lebanon, I can't particularly see how political change in Syria, where the Sunni fundamentalists of the Muslim Brotherhood remain the only organised oppposition group with a mass following, would benefit either the US or any neighbouring state. More representative they may be, but they would almost certainly entusiastically and OVERTLY support terrorism in Lebanon, Iraq and against Israel.

Yours, pessimistically...

The Bush Tapes

2005-02-21T00:27:00.000Z

One of the more interesting questions to ponder for the second Bush term is what sort of candidate he will try to offer for the inevitable vacancies on the Supreme Court now that Rehnquist is seriously ill.

The New York Times reports on the release of audio tapes made of long conversations between the President, then campaigning for his second term as Governor of Texas and one of his political consultants. Among the interesting insights into his attitudes and plans is this nugget pointing to the likelihood of a nominee that will please the Christian conservatives, regardless of how noisy the confirmation process:

During the primary contest, Mr. Bush often sized up his dozen Republican rivals, assessing their appeal to conservative Christian voters, their treatment of him and their prospects of serving in a future Bush administration. He paid particular attention to Senator John Ashcroft. "I like Ashcroft a lot," he told Mr. Wead in November 1998. "He is a competent man. He would be a good Supreme Court pick. He would be a good attorney general. He would be a good vice president." When Mr. Wead predicted an uproar if Mr. Ashcroft were appointed to the court because of his conservative religious views, Mr. Bush replied, "Well, tough."

Why Bush and Sharon Agree

2005-02-17T13:27:00.000Z

In contrast to the tumult during the Oslo peace process, these days both American and Israeli right-wingers are mostly reacting to the Gaza withdrawal proposals with equanimity, Ruthie Blum writes in the Jerusalem Post.

Still Don't Believe in the Axis of Evil?

2005-02-16T14:13:00.000Z

"We are ready to help Syria on all grounds to confront threats," Iranian Vice-President Mohammad Reza Aref said after meeting Syrian PM Naji al-Otari, says the BBC. You read it here first.

America's Road to Damascus Might Pass Via Beirut

2005-02-16T00:47:00.000Z

More on the Hariri assassination from Lee Smith in Slate. Again, the expanded US presence in the region is a powerful catalyst for change. What was that you were saying about the Arab street?

"The Lebanese opposition has materialized now largely in response to American and European pressure. It's an index of how bad Syria really is that President Bashar Assad's regime got the United States and France to agree on policy, as they did with 2004's U.N. Security Resolution 1559, demanding that Syria withdraw its troops from Lebanon immediately. And yet, arguably, what has most emboldened Lebanese opposition figures is the presence of U.S. forces on the Syrian border in Iraq.

Opposition leaders grabbed at the main chance when they saw how furious Washington was with Assad's continued support of the insurgency in Iraq. The White House has been threatening Syria for some time now and upped the ante by making the regime's occupation of Lebanon a high and very public priority in its Middle East policy."

More on Blogs and the Media

2005-02-15T23:52:00.000Z

The left hates Bush, the right hates the media - says the ever-excellent Michael Barone.

Disgusted of Damascus

2005-02-15T00:17:00.000Z

Lee Smith, who wrote a whole series of utterly original and superlatively written articles (such as this) in his previous life as Slate's resident Arabist, profiles Syrian liberal dissident and one-time Sunni fundamentalist Ammar Abdulhamid in the New York Times magazine.

Again, the theme emerges that Iraq's revolution from outside has emboldened and strengthened the Arab world's reformists, although they face a harsh and unforgiving struggle rather than enjoying the leadership of civil society as the Eastern Bloc dissidents did:

For the last half-century, the Islamist movement and Arab regimes themselves have pushed Arab liberals to the sidelines. As a result, the Arab world's democracy activists and intellectuals do not enjoy the same advantages their Central and Eastern European counterparts did back in the 80's: whereas the generation of Havel and Walesa was backed by the Catholic Church and its Polish-born pope, Arab activists enjoy no such solidarity with any established Muslim institutions. Indeed, while militant Islamist leaders have called for elections in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, they typically see liberal, secular reformers like Abdulhamid as a threat to the traditional foundations of their authority.

Even so, the liberals seem to be gathering a little momentum. Recently, intellectuals from Iraq, Jordan and Tunisia petitioned the United Nations for a tribunal to prosecute both terrorists and the religious figures who incite violence. In Egypt, two new publications, Nahdet Misr and Al Masry Al Youm, fault the region's leaders and clerics alike for keeping Arabs from joining the modern world. The Iraqi election posed a stark challenge to regional autocrats. While Abdulhamid harbors mixed feelings about the United States' decision to invade Iraq, he says he believes that the American presence in the region is vital to the prospects for reform. "We are an important part of the world," he says, "and our inability to produce change on our own terms invites people in. The world is not going to wait for us."

Lebanon Hots Up

2005-02-14T00:38:00.000Z

Ex-PM Rafik Hariri, a vocal opponent of Syrian influence in Lebanon, has been killed in a large car-bombing in Beirut. Like his late father, Bashir Assad seems to be playing by what Tom Friedman called Hama rules: the utter ruthlessness of power-politics in the region. When the Sunni fundamentalists of the Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Hama revolted against the government in 1982 - Assad simply had the army destroy the city and cover it in cement - killing up to forty thousand inhabitants with tanks, artillery and poison gas. Survivors were screened by secret police who used a Soviet-made machine called the "black slave", which lessened their burden by automating the process of removing supsects' fingernails.

Friedman memorably describes driving in a taxi over a solid, even surface, with the outlines of the city's ruins visible in the concrete.

What's Wrong with the Irish Times?

2005-02-14T00:15:00.000Z

Robin Lynch's article on the Irish blogs generated quite a lot of comment, some here below and some on the other Irish blogs.

Robin came back to me on the comments below.

Fair points, Peter.

How much of your ire is directed against my article and how much against the paper that I work for?

I think an even mix of both, with another equal share being reserved for the profession of journalism as whole, which I've come to believe cannot deliver, largely because accurate news and opinion don't pay either for journalists or for publishers, outside of information on the financial markets.

The paper has a number of problems. Every time I read it, and I do so fairly rarely because paper copies are hard to get here, I think that it comes out very poorly in comparison with my other regular reads, the Financial Times and New York Times. Needless to say, both of these have financial resources that the IT can only dream of, but there's a diversity of opinion and concern for examining perceptions there that the IT hasn't captured.

Sam Smyth wrote about this last year in his piece on being an Irish foreign correspondent in Studies.

I can't believe that you think that I would purposefully exclude blogs that criticise the IT, as if by pretending they don't exist they might go away. I chose five or six of the best blogs that I read on a daily basis; I could just have easily mentioned several others, including yours.

I don't mind the selection of blogs, and in spite of appearances, I'm no egomaniac!

Not elaborating on the inherent differences between blogs and newspapers is one big fault with the article, IMHO. I write this blog because a lot of what I read is simply poorly sourced and hamstrung by weak analysis. I think that this is a particular problem for the Irish Times columnists, of whom O'Toole is the biggest waste of space ever, Myers an eejit and Waters nothing beyond a stylist with nothing left to say once he's exhausted his Roscommon POV.

As far as falling behind the times, I think as a prominent Irish blogger you might be lacking a little perspective. Far from "explaining the world to the great unwashed" I hope the piece will encourage more people to get involved, which can only be a good thing.

I wrote: "I would have been impressed if I'd read this eighteen months ago: As it is, we've another example of some IT journo with a pass degree in English trying to explain the world to the great unwashed. I think that he's missing the point."

OK, here I'm breaking my own rules on not dishing out personal abuse - I'm sure you're a smart guy, so my apologies. I would however be curious to hear about your route into the paper.

My point is, as I go into in more detail below, that any of the bloggers you mention could probably have written a much better version of this article, laying out case studies of the effects of blogs on politics and the media and making some forecasts.

This gets to the key points. First, I perceive in the article, and this can be subjective, that there's the attitude that everybody with any brain cells is entirely in agreement with the Times' "liberal" view of the world, summed up in the famous quote from New Yorker film critc, Pauline Kael: "I don't understand how Nixon could have won! I don't know anyone who voted for him."

Second, Where the really important stories in which blogs have played a starring role? All of these might be a bit obscure to anyone who doesn't follow the American political scene, but I'd expect an article such as this to catch them. How can you leave out Drudge's breaking the Lewinsky story that the Washington Post turned down? The role of blogs in shining the light on Trent Lott's birthday oration about "all these problems"? The keruffle over the fake memos exposed by the blogs when Dan Rather was insisting on their accuracy?

Third, the Dean campaign showcased blogs, but two other innovations, Meetup.com's ability to create an online community and convert it into a huge, self-sustaining grassroots campaign entirely seperate from the control of the churches, unions, businesses and various special interests - especially feminists, abortion rights campaigners, lawyers and the African-American and Jewish communities that have formed the backbone of the Democrats. You can find the sources I've come across on the Dean campaign in my archives, along with some other ruminations on the paper.

I did consider for a while becoming a journalist myself - but I think I would find it immensely frustrating not to be able to DO anything, rather than just report and feel impotent and unable to feel as if I really understand something by driving it.

I did offer to take a bet from all comers that the IT would be hit by a journalistic ethics scandal before May this year. This farce over the paper being sued by its own columnist seems to have proven me correct!

The Blackline Blog Awards

2005-02-13T22:16:00.000Z

The BAFTA's were on here in London town last night, with throngs of fat housewives from Essex completely filling Leicester Square. Since these film awards seem to be proliferating like weaponised anthrax among Middle East dictatorships, I thought that I myself should supplement the Freedom Institute Blog Awards with some nominated and judged, in a completely arbitrary and whimsical manner entirely by me.

Frank has a wider range than anyone, IMHO and comes up with a lot that you wouldn't expect, so I'd leave him as being best overall.

The problem with Mark's site is that I often don't know what I miss, but I'm hopeless at understanding complex non-verbal logical structures.

As an alternative, I'd definitely hand out to Mark an award for being Ireland's most unblinking Zionist blog, followed by Atlantic Blog.

I think that I mentioned Eagle's political comment, because I thought his posting, which might have been on BSD(?) after the November election was brilliant. He wrote that only liberals would want to leave America after the results because they want it to become like other countries, while conservatives don't even after electoral defeats because they prefer America to other countries. I'd tack on an award for best baseball prediction last year for the Sox v Yankees games - he got the right result but the wrong scores!

I'd probably tie Eagle and Tony on producing text that reads immediately as if it's newspaper-ready, but Frank is by far the best debater out there.

I would nominate Twenty Major as the funniest blog in Ireland, with his classic biting Dublin sense of humour. Scott Burgess, a friend and apparently a one-time classmate of Bill Sjostrom of AtlanticBlog

I'd nominate Back Seat Drivers as the best of the "incorrect" blogs. Dick O'Brien et al. deserve kudos for being a worthy opponent in debate, although Dick isn't the most skilled user of economic statistics in the Irish blogosphere.

The War on Terror - Up Close and Personal

2005-02-13T01:15:00.000Z

After 9/11, "Chris Mackey", a London-based American accountant found himself called-up to serve in Afghanistan. An Army reservist in Military Intelligence and Arabic linguist, he tells of his experiences gathering information from captives suspected of involvement with the Taliban and al-Qaida in his new book The Interrogator's War

As the Abu Ghraib scandal and the scrutiny given to new AG Alberto Gonzalez has highlighted, he and his fellow intelligence specialists found themselves rewriting the rules under immense pressure of discomfort and danger. He sums up his story in his epilogue and tries honestly to go beyond the common pieties for and against coercive interrogation.

I don't believe for a moment that our emb race of "monstering" [techniques of sleep-deprivation and other discomforts inflicted on prisoners] in any way presaged the behavior by those MPs [Military Police] at Abu Ghraib. Those soldiers truly were monsters. But the comments they claim to have heard from interrogators ring true to me and reflect a hardening of attitudes that is not difficult to trace. By the time we left Afghanistan, we had come to embrace methods we would not have countenanced at the beginning of the war. And while those who followed us at Bagram dismissed much of the so-called wisdom we sought to pass on, they took to monstering with alacrity. Indeed, as we left, it was clear they did not regard this as a method of last resort but as a primary option in the interrogation playbook. What was an ending point for us was a starting point for them. And during their stint in Afghanistan, they undoubtedly added their own plays, many of which were probably exported to Iraq. As the babble against al-Qaida shifted to a battle against Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi insurgency, pressure to adopt more aggressive methods must have only intensified, and the trend line we established was reinforced.
[...]
In all of the soul-searching over the scandal and the effort to understand what interrogators do, there has been a familiar refrain - the adage that harsh treatment of prisoners only produces bad intelligence, that a tortured prisoner will say anything to stop the pain. That line has been recited for years by schoolhouse instructors and has gained new currency among those rightly condemning the abuses at Abu Ghraib. I know many experienced and fine interrogators who believe that tenet of interrogation doctrine wholeheartedly. But I don't find it particularly persuasive. If a prisoner will say anything to stop the pain, my guess is he will start with the truth. Our experience in Afghanistan showed that the harsher the methods we used - though they never contravened the Conventions, let alone crossed over into torture - the better the information we got and the sooner we got it. Other agencies seem to have learned the same lesson. In its interrogation of high-ranking al-Qaida figures, the CIA has obtained secret legal rulings from the Justice Department to use certain coercive methods, including one called water-boarding in which a prisoner is strapped to a board and submerged in water until he is sure he will drown. If coercion doesn't work, why would the agency go to the trouble?

The Ground Shifts in Lebanon

2005-02-13T00:50:00.000Z

David Gardner writes in last week's FT on recent developments in Lebanon. Who would have thought that the sectarians divisions are increasingly being set aside by local leaders eager to remove Syria's heavy hand from the country? That the recent economic recovery doesn't herald the rebirth of the playground of the Levant? That Syrian economic and political reform has stalled under Bashir Assad while foreign policy drifts? That the French, of all people, would be encouraging American intervention?

I'd expect that Lebanon, Syria and Iran will all catch fire should any one burst into flames this year, as each is bound by Syria and Iran's opposition to America. We'll see....

Ian Buruma on attitudes to Israel worldwide

2005-02-13T00:35:00.000Z

Rootless cosmopolitan - and my second favourite journalist - Ian Buruma writes on perceptions of Israel, America and the relationship between the two in the NY Times magazine. As ever, Buruma's probably the only person who, as an ex-Far Eastern Economic Review culture editor, ex-foreign editor of the Spectator, prolific journalist and Anglo-Dutchman to be able to draw links across so many cultures and understand the ways in which very different cultures misunderstand each other.

Earlier this year, Representative James Moran, a Democrat, said that ''if it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be doing this.'' In Britain, Tam Dalyell, a longstanding Labor member of Parliament, expressed a similar view. Tony Blair, he opined, was listening too much to a ''cabal'' of Jews around President Bush that included Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; an under secretary of defense, Douglas Feith; Richard Perle, a member of the Defense Policy Board; Elliott Abrams, director of Middle East Affairs in the White House; and the former presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer. ''Those people drive this policy,'' Dalyell said.

Dalyell was ''worried about my country being led up the garden path on a Likudnik-Sharon agenda'' by British Jews close to Blair. He included among them Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, a Christian, whose rather distant Jewish family connections are very unlikely to make him a Likudnik.

The fact that James Moran had to apologize immediately, while the British M.P. was under no compulsion to do so, shows a profound difference between the United States and Europe, or indeed anywhere else in the world. Although Moran's opinion may be shared by other Americans, it is not something mainstream politicians can vocalize. Even legitimate criticism of Israel, or of Zionism, is often quickly denounced as anti-Semitism by various watchdogs. In European political discourse, not only is anti-Zionism quite acceptable, but so are vague allegations of too much Jewish influence in public life, especially across the Atlantic. And in the non-Western world, it's not even necessary to keep such allegations vague.

The Catham House Version

2005-02-12T23:48:00.000Z

Blogger and London Times Oliver Kamm writes on Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs, which I have linked to below), questioning the assumptions and approach taken by one of the associates at this most prestiguous and establishment-friendly of Britain's foreign policy think tanks. I've written previously on my encounter with another associate, the liberal Saudi academic Mai Yamani (also here). Perhaps I've taken the excellence and objectivity of the organisation's other staff too much on trust.

[RIAA associate] Mrs Allaf is energetic, however, in conveying that she has no sympathy for:

... the extremely belligerent and irresponsible statements Bush made about Syria and Iran, practically calling on their people to rise against their government, and promising threateningly (and without much proof) to “confront the regimes that continue to harbor terrorists and pursue weapons of mass murder.”

She takes her stand instead with those who assault Israel, literally as well as metaphorically, as she made clear in an ‘open letter’ to President Clinton five years ago:

We are determined to keep a united front. Remember, we the people have not yet begun to fight. But fight we will, literally and symbolically. Those who can’t throw rocks in frustration will at the very least throw words in determination. I hope you and your ally are ready.

I found Bush’s declaration of solidarity (which is what it was) with those suffering under totalitarianism inspiring and a prerequisite of a decent politics. I find Mrs Allaf’s solidarity with political violence despicable. But then I’m a biased blogger and columnist.

Today's New Word

2005-02-12T23:24:00.000Z

Neo-pad (noun) An Irish neo-conservative Origin: Devised by my classmates at Birkbeck College

Shifting Sands in Cairo

2005-02-12T23:22:00.000Z

Mark Leonard, London think-tank talking-head and self-publicist extraordinaire, has a piece in today's FT magazine on the difficult birth of the first legal reformist party in Egypt. This is another indicator of a degree of political turmoil in the Middle East that seems to have been midwifed by the US and to be unambiguously liberal.

One founder says:

"The Pandora’s box has been opened by George Bush. The internal pressures have been reinvigorated and people are speaking out, which they never did so openly or vigorously before. There is a sense of malaise. The question of the rotation of power is on the table. The question of term-limits is on the table. Change is now inevitable. The government can’t say we are foreign stooges because we have been saying these things for years. The Ghad party is a home-grown thing. It is not part of the Bush project.
[...]
We are modern. We talk about globalisation, access to the ideas of the west and justice. Young people who felt marginalised can have a platform and a voice. We want to instil a sense of hope, a sense that Egyptians are no less than the Indonesians and Malaysians who have made it. We want to draw people away from Islamism."

This being Egypt, the Mubarak government has been quick to realise the danger and has imprisoned the party's leader and begun trying to smash the organisation. A similar fate befell sociologist and human rights activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim last year, who was sentenced to several years in jail for taking money from that cat's paw of neo-con Zionism, the European Commission.

The Irish Times Can't Keep Up With the Changing Times

2005-02-11T10:21:00.000Z

Forwarded from Philip:

Peter, article on blogging in today's Irish Times. I note the
bias towards blogs who don't share our "world view", and the salivating
over Howard Dean.

Lots of blogs but few talking about Irish matters

Weblogs are taking off, but Irish bloggers talk about Iraq, the US and anything except Ireland, writes Robin O'Brien-Lynch.

The World Wide Web may have been invented by an Englishman (Tim Berners-Lee) working in Switzerland (at CERN, near Geneva) but it is the Americans who have stolen all the attention.

The rest of us invariably look Stateside for inspiration and innovation on the Web, and the US is home to several of the world's most popular websites, including Yahoo, Google, Slashdot, eBay, and, more recently, Blogger.

The idea of blogging - keeping a personal weblog to air one's views, as opposed to joining a multi-user discussion forum - may or may not have been dreamed up in the US but the term was coined there and the most widely read blogs on the Web are based there.

Expat North Americans are among the mostprominent bloggers in other countries, including the Republic.

Blogging in the State has seen significant growth over the past six months as the original ground-breaking sites are joined by increasing numbers of new blogs. However, there is a perception that the Irish blogging community is not quite the real thing.

It is a subjective distinction, but one important for the Irish political parties as
they look ahead to the next general election, even at this early stage. Important because of the Deaniacs, another innovation to come from the US.

The Deaniacs are the young, Web-savvy volunteers whose support turned Howard Dean from a little-known Vermont governor into the front-runner for the US Democratic presidential nomination in 2003.

Mr Dean came from a standing start to leave allhis rivals behind - and on the way smashed records for fund-raising. His success was driven by the Web community and, more specifically, bloggers who gave him vital feedback and encouraged others to get out on the streets, canvass, write letters and hold public meetings. And, of course, to hit on the "contribute" button on Mr Dean's homepage.

"A lot of the people on the Net have given upon traditional politics precisely because it was about television and the ballot box, and they had no way to shout back," Dean said at the time. "What we've given people is a way to shout back, and we listen - they don't even have to shout anymore."

No future presidential hopeful will run his campaign without taking at least something from Mr Dean's ideas (even though he lost). By studying the best-known blogs, his staff could glean more about the opinions of the US public from sea to shining sea than from weeks of doorstep canvassing.

Mr Dean also raised more than $30 million (€23.5 million), winning the "invisible primary" and propelling himself ahead of his rivals, and gaining the attention and respect of the media.

Are there any pointers here for the Irish parties? Fine Gael's (FG's) website is the one that most closely resembles that of the US parties. The Democrats' site, http://www.democrats.org, features the slogan "Kick Ass!", referring to their donkey logo, and proactive features condemning the Bush administration and offering ways that supporters can help.

Most of the political websites in the Republic act as mere virtual pamphlets, carrying only the anaemic trio of press releases, profiles and policy manifestos. As well as their well-publicised ripoff.ie site, Fine Gael features a "PDs – No Thanks!" parody piece and a list of "broken promises" from the coalition.

Despite this, FG director of communications, Mr Ciarán Conlon, believes the Dean model wouldn't work in the State. "The benefits for Howard Dean is that he could reach out across a vast country," he says. "There is nowhere in Ireland that can't be reached very quickly."

So glad-handing and baby-kissing will probably remain the methods of choice for Irish politicians. Even if a party did try to follow Mr Dean's example, it's doubtful that the message would go far.

The two biggest problems for the Irish blogosphere are out of its control; its infancy and audience. Blogging is a relatively new phenomenon and many of the Irish blogs researched for this article had only begun in the past six to nine months. A small national population means a small readership, and the blogging community in this State is a close-knit affair.

Bloggers worldwide have an obsession with referrals from other sites bordering on the neurotic, and most sites will have "blogroll" - a list of "blogs I like" - followed by "who's reading me".

In the Republic this practice leads to constant cross-referrals between a small group of people. Most of the comments left by readers come from other bloggers ("Love your site!" is a common one), and a couple of hours spent flitting from site to site will bring up the same names again and again. This insularity means that a lot of comment is back-slapping between internet buddies. Bloggers post links to other blogs rather than making comment themselves.

This is an unfortunate state of affairs, as there is some excellent Irish work waiting to be discovered.

Rainy Day (www.eamonn.com) by Eamonn Fitzgerald is a little heavy on homespun whimsy for some tastes but erudite and well-written. There is perhaps too much focus on foreign affairs at the expense of local comment.

On the other side of the coin, Dervala (http://www.dervala.net) is an Irishwoman living in the US whose observations resonate with Irish readers.

"Planet Potato - an Irish blog" lives up to its name, with recent comments on Sinn Féin, Eircom and ubiquitous Niquitin ads.

Caustic humour is a rarity among Irish sites, but Twenty Major (twentymajor.blogspot.com) is probably the best of the bunch and very local
in its focus.

These have in common originality, personal views and readability.

Too many Irish blogs feature "dear diary" warblings, excessive links to articles on the Web or just poor writing.

The dynamics of blogging in the Republic mean that the best sites refer readers to some of the worst, and there is no natural selection.

The better sites listed above are to be found on the blogroll of several of the most prominent Irish sites.

Unfortunately for the brainstormers in Leinster House's press offices, a lot of the best examples like these are cultural commentary, leaving even less room for the political parties to manoeuvre.

When Irish bloggers want to talk politics, they tend to discuss US and global affairs, particularly Iraq. This is a self-defeating process; US politics and the war in Iraq are well-documented, with thousands of bloggers based in Iraq.

Admittedly, Irish bloggers extend their potential audience by keeping their subject matter universal, but there also seems to be an unconscious snobbery towards Irish current affairs - all Iraq and no IRA. Perhaps unsurprisingly, when Irish political blogs do come up trumps, the focus is on the North.

Two of the best examples are www.sluggerotoole.com and backseatdrivers.blogspot.com, both of which are written by several authors.

Gavin's blog (www.gavinsblog.com) is one of the older kids on the block, has a lengthy blogroll and is a good place to start reading what's out there and help break into the clique. After all, influence is nothing without audience

I would have been impressed if I'd read this eighteen months ago: As it is, we've another example of some IT journo with a pass degree in English trying to explain the world to the great unwashed. I think that he's missing the point.

Increasingly his own paper is going to have its facts checked and narrow range of consensus opinions challenged by the blogs, our one included. Note that he doesn't cite any of the multitude of blogs that bitterly criticise the Irish Times itself, my own, or John Fay's Irish Eagle, or Mark Humphrys or Frank. Neither has he figured out that a large proportion of the bloggers, Eamonn and I among them, are expats.

Cross-posted to http://www.freedominst.org/forum

A Note On Comments

2005-02-10T22:27:00.000Z

If you're going to comment here, and in general everybody is very welcome to do so, take a moment to consider some suggestions that will allow us all to get along nicely. For my part, I find responding to comments on postings the most enjoyable thing about reading blogs, equaled only by the satisfaction of making a post of my own that combines both original thinking and skill in expression.

Abiola gets a lot more blogroaches than I have, so he posted a sensible set of guidelines for commenting, which I approve of and intend to follow here too.

1. Feel free to post
As Dick O'Brien will tell you, I don't mind having an argument; in fact, I find it very hard to tear myself away from one, so if you post I am more than likely to respond, whether or not I agree, and to continue.

2.I edit, I don't censor
This is my blog. If you feel you must comment and that you are being suppressed here, then you have every resource available to you, including the ability to set up and host your own blog for free. Just sign up on Blogger.

3.Why should we take your word for it?
An academic training is a great thing. If you propose an argument, an appeal to credible theory or to empirical evidence provide the best support for it, especially if these have gone through the process of peer-review to ensure high-standards.

4.You're writing a letter, not graffiti
Leave your name. If you don't know how to spell it, just ask and we'll all help you.

5.Be polite
I've only tried banning people twice, and in both cases that was for personal abuse. Here and now, I'll admit to being absolutely infuriated by Provos, by antisemitism and by racist yahoos in general; post any of these and you'll be cut out straight away.

How not to Launch a Career as a Public Intellectual

2005-02-10T22:25:00.000Z

One in an occassional series:

Michael Scheuer, author of Imperial Hubris, which I had read and thought gave an thought-provoking critique of US foreign policy, did himself no good at a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

He began by repeating some of the points in the book, which called for both less intervention in the Middle East and also great ruthlessness in dealing with America's enemies there, a very traditional form of foreign policy thinking that neatly fits Walter Russell Mead's label of Jacksonian, after the hot-tempered, ferocious and populist general and President.

But clearly--and the president fell back on the idea that bad economics and poor education, bad sanitation and the rest of that stuff, is the spawning of the attacks against us, which is entirely not the case in this particular instance. We're still grasping or groping around to try to find out why we're being attacked, and it has nothing to do with who we are or what we believe in.
[...]
To secure as much of our way of life as possible, we will have to use military force in the way Americans used it on the fields of Virginia and Georgia, in France and on Pacific islands, and from skies over Tokyo and Dresden. Progress will be measured by the pace of killing and, yes, by body counts. Not the fatuous body counts of Vietnam, but precise counts that will run to extremely large numbers. The piles of dead will include as many or more civilians as combatants because our enemies wear no uniforms.

Killing large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure. Roads and irrigation systems; bridges, power plants, and crops in the field; fertilizer plants and grain mills--all these and more will need to be destroyed to deny the enemy its support base. Land mines, moreover, will be massively reintroduced to seal borders and mountain passes too long, high, or numerous to close with U.S. soldiers. As noted, such actions will yield large civilian casualties, displaced populations, and refugee flows. Again, this sort of bloody mindedness is neither admirable nor desirable, but it will remain America's only option so long as she stands by her failed policies toward the Muslim world.

Like the chair, I'd pragmatically question whether such a slaughter woudl actually achieve anything, rather than following the precisely-targeted violence used by the Israeli military against senior terrorists, or the slow smothering and maintenance of the rule of law that the British counter-terrorism doctrine emphasises.

As many people do, he takes issue with the focus on rogue states rather than what are global terrorist organisations, which might well operate undetected anywhere from the New York suburbs to the Afghan mountains. Commenting on the invasion of Iraq and the possibility of action against Syria and Iran:

I think it means, in addition to Iraq, that they simply don't understand that the threats to the United States are transnational and not nation-state in dimension. And one of the reasons they went to Iraq is they don't understand that. The Clinton administration didn't understand it; this administration doesn't understand it. The idea that Syria is a threat to us is about as credible as me being the next queen of England, it's not. What threat is there?

Scheuer questions the nature and utility of the Israeli-American alliance, seeing America as having little benefit from it or influence over its junior partner.

I would certainly try to rearrange the relationship with Israel so it looked like we were the great power and they were the insignificant power, rather than the other way around.

Efraim Karsh, whose book Rethinking the Middle East I have just read, makes the same point that neither America nor the Russians were ever able to purchase influence over their allies in the region with their aid to any great degree. The EU seems to be destined to learn this the hard way.

The really suprising stuff comes later on.

I always have thought that there's nothing too dangerous to talk about in America, that there shouldn't be anything. And it happens that Israel is the one thing that seems to be too dangerous to talk about. And I wrote in my book that I congratulate them. It's probably the most successful covert action program in the history of man to control--the important political debate in a country of 270 million people is an extraordinary accomplishment. I wish our clandestine service could do as well
[...]
Well, the clandestine aspect is that, clearly, the ability to influence the Congress--that's a clandestine activity, a covert activity. You know to some extent, the idea that the Holocaust Museum here in our country is another great ability to somehow make people feel guilty about being the people who did the most to try to end the Holocaust. I find--I just find the whole debate in the United States unbearably restricted with the inability to factually discuss what goes on between our two countries.

However, to be fair, he does go on to backtrack somewhat:

QUESTIONER: [Inaudible] Teitelbaum [inaudible] Agency in Hamburg, Germany. Listening to you it sounds as if there is some kind--some sort of Jewish conspiracy about American policy. Can you just tell me in your mind how the Jews make it?

SCHEUER: Are what?

QUESTIONER: How the Jews do it? How do they do it?

SCHEUER: How do they do it?

QUESTIONER: Exactly.

SCHEUER: Well, mostly through abuse in the media. If someone says anything negative about Israel. We do it to ourselves in some way. [Inaudible]

Well, you know, the idea of the Jewish conspiracy is in your mouth, not mine. What I did was compliment Israel on its ability to control debate in the United States. I don't quite know how they do it, but clearly the reaction of most of our media, electronic and print, to anyone who says, "Geez, you know, maybe the Israelis shouldn't have the lead on all these things," is generally negative.

Via Andrew Sullivan, but its well worth reading the entire transcript - apart from just Sully's outrage quotes - to get a flavour of the book.

Outgoing Comments

2005-02-10T21:34:00.000Z

From now on as well, I will be adopting another of Abiola's policies and posting comments, either here or on any other blogs, using a PGP signature. No signature means it's not my comment.

Subtle Diplomatic Signals from Hamas

2005-02-10T15:21:00.000Z

At least twenty-five mortar shells and Kassam rockets have landed on Gaza Strip settlements since 2:00 a.m. Thursday, hitting settlements in Gush Katif, southern Gaza, and northern Gaza, according to the IDF.

OC Southern Command, Maj.-Gen. Dan Harel, is currently meeting with the commander of PA forces in Gaza, Mussa Arafat. The meeting was scheduled several days ago, but will naturally deal with Thursday's barrages. Harel is expected to demand of Arafat to crack down on the firing squads.

Jerusalem Post

Geography News

2005-02-10T14:28:00.000Z

"Due to her immense size the government is contemplating reclassifying Mary Harney as a county." Twenty Major

Upgrade to Comments

2005-02-10T11:17:00.000Z

I've upgraded to a premium account on Haloscan. This will allow more space for posts, searching for previous comments and, as some people have already found out, quick and easy mass deletion.

Hizbollah Takes Wing

2005-02-10T02:01:00.000Z

That old, unstoppable Lebanese ingenuity is on show again according to the Atlantic Monthly (sub only, email me if you want any article)

Allah Is My Co-Pilot

In an incident that passed largely unnoticed in the American press, the Lebanese terrorist organization Hizbollah launched an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) late last year, according to a recent report by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT), in Oklahoma. The unmanned aircraft flew from Lebanon into Israel late on the morning of November 7, passed over the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, and then turned west and returned to Lebanese territory, landing in the Mediterranean Sea not far from shore. The UAV spent roughly half an hour in Israel's airspace, undetected by Israeli air force radar but noticed by local residents (the UAV's engine is reportedly "quite noisy"). The next day Hizbollah triumphantly released a grainy twenty-second video of the flight, claiming that the aircraft could fly "deep, deep" into Israel. MIPT estimates that the aircraft can carry a payload of up to eighty-eight pounds, making it an "attractive option" for launching a covert attack with chemical or biological weapons. Israeli sources claim that Hizbollah's UAV is an Iranian-made aircraft, one of eight such planes given to the terrorist group by Iran; Hizbollah, on the other hand, claims it developed the UAV entirely on its own. It may be telling the truth: MIPT notes that "a small group of air model fans (or even someone alone) can build a capable UAV. All necessary equipment and parts are available in the open market at affordable prices."

Will the Ceasefire Hold?

2005-02-10T01:02:00.000Z

The tentative understanding between Israel and the Palestinian Authority has been greeted with optimistic rejoicing by the British press and scarcely any less by the American papers. It seems to be holding, for now, but the lion isn't quite ready yet to lie down with the lamb and eat straw like oxen.

Rory Miller and Efraim Karsh, both of Kings College London, and Ehud Ya'ari both point out the real danger of the Palestinian Islamist militants seeking to continue stirring the cauldron. Karsh and Miller don't put much weight on Abu Mazen's supposedly moderate position:

During his brief prime ministerial tenure in 2003, Mr Abbas made no effort to disarm the numerous armed gangs, attempting instead to win their consent for a temporary suspension of hostilities. Whether or not he will change tack now that he has reached the Palestinian Authority’s top spot remains to be seen, but the indications thus far are hardly encouraging.

My personal opinion is that after four years, that both sides are near exhausted and willing to substitute politics for violence, so that we get peace, as Ambrose Bierce so accurately captured it in the Devil's Dictionary:

In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.

It seems not too dissimilar from my own troubled homeland!

What exactly is it about democracy that you don't like?

2005-02-09T14:30:00.000Z

Update 1: Corrected description of RBB article
Update 2: Added link to IT article

Most people see the Iraqi insurgents' complete failure to either win representation, manipulate the ballots or indeed prevent the recent elections as a sign of their defeat and unpopularity. Another marginal figure, also familiar with repeated electoral defeat, Socialist Workers Party hard-nut Richard Boiled-Carrott (fine proletarian name there, Rick) wrote to an op-ed in the Irish Times decrying the Iraqi elections. Me ould mucker Joel wrote to the Times in response:

Madam, - The article by Richard Boyd Barrett in your edition of February 7th is a prime example of facts being distorted and conflated to fit a prior ideological position, in which the blackening of American intentions and actions is the overriding rule.

The anti-war left is understandably annoyed and discomfited at the apparent failure of the Iraqi people to follow the script set for them by the likes of Mr Boyd Barrett. Objective reports suggest that for the first time it looks possible that US attempts to put a representative government in place could succeed.
The election indicated that the insurgents are not supported by the Iraqi population at large. Indeed it made the insurgents appear the isolated and brutal terrorists they are.

Mr Boyd Barrett's assertion that the insurgency in Iraq is a response to the brutality of the occupation reveals a disturbing level of moral blindness in excusing the actions of these thugs merely because they share the anti-war left's extreme anti-Americanism. He would seem to prefer any regime, no matter how terrible, so long as America is seen to fail in its stated commitment to bring democracy to Iraq.
Following the success of the election, I suspect that Mr Boyd Barrett could well find himself on the wrong side of history, along with the insurgents.

His tone suggests he already knows this and is fearful of it. - Yours, etc.

Welcome to the Desert of the Theoretical

2005-02-09T00:47:00.000Z

Normally, I would leave architecture and po-mo philosophers to others like Frank or Jon who take an interest in such things.

However, I've recently decided, being shamed of my ignorance in the noble art of philosophy, to start reading some. First in line was a slim book of essays by Frenchman Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism.

Ideas like his clash with some powerful emotional and intellectual blockages on my part. First, as someone extensively educated in the "inhumanities", I tend to lack much training in the foundations, which is fatal for disciplines in which cross-references and allusion is so important.

Since most of my intellect, when not preoccupied with cooking, films, learning languages, is taken up with with business, economics and politics, I would have a bias against accepting any theories based mainly on the non-material and non-empirical, poetry, novels, drama, visual art or philosophy.

Then, by and large, experience has taught me not to put much trust in theory; if economists, with their vast and sophisticated modelling and testing toolbox produce few useful predictions (and indeed, tend to have problems getting jobs) then why would less empirically-grounded and rigorous disciplines like sociology or cultural studies have much to say.

Also, I carry the conviction, reinforced by long experience in trying to explain complex financial products, that people who cannot write plainly simply are not really thinking. This was enunciated brilliantly by Orwell in his essay Politics and the English Language; if you haven't read this, then you simply cannot consider yourself educated.

It's an unfortunate coincidence that most of this species are political toilet mold, advocating wierd forms of identity struggles or cliched leftism.

Baudrillard talks about the manipulation of images by the terrorists of 9/11 - something of Al-Qaeda's hallmark:

As soon as they combine all the modern resources available to them with this highly sumbolic weapon, everthing changes. The destructive potential is multiplied to infinity. It is this multiplication of factors (which seem irreconcilable to us) that gies them such superiority. The "zero -death strategy, by contrast, the strategy of the "clean" technological war, precisely fails to match up to this transfiguration of "real" power by symbolic power.

However, I think here again, he underemphasises the material effects - the disruption to transport, finance and politics, the grief of 3,000 deaths and the exceptional importance of the most precious symbols of American civic nationalism - its archetypes - are first and foremost its flag and its common understanding of history.

What he is offering is some mildly interesting ideas, but written in the indistinct fairground-mirror imagery of Baudelaire's symbolist poetry or Bob Dylan's lyrics, with no sign of a distinct skeleton of ideas within these words. This was apparent in this passage later on in the book:

The violence of globalisation also involves architecture, and hence the violent protest against it also involves the violent destruction of that architecture. In terms of collective drama, we can say that the horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseperable from the horror of living in them - the horror of living and working in sarcophogai of concrete and steel.

Except for the small matter that normal workdays in the WTC didn't involve choosing between waiting for death as burning jet fuel heats the structural steel of the buildings you stand on red-hot or jumping hundreds of meters to the ground.

I've gone on to Carl Schmitt's famous essay "The Concept of the Political", which comes with an long commentary by Leo Strauss.

I'm enjoying this a lot more, although its much denser, because the wheels and gears of thought are visible, and unlike Monsieur B, they reference other major works extensively, rather than relying on half-remembered television images for their foundations.

I would have finished this sooner, but in a terrible piece of absent-mindedness, I put the book in the dishwasher on Sunday night: Oh my God, I'm turning into Garrett Fitzgerald!

Problems with the comments

2005-02-09T00:10:00.000Z

Haloscan have received a scorching email from me about these repeated problems with the comments. I will try to edit out as many of the inadvertent repetitions as possible in the next few days. By popular demand, I will also upgrade haloscan to get the longer comments boxes. Apologies to anyone who has been sharing my frustration in the last few days.

Giving Saddam the Finger

2005-02-08T01:05:00.000Z

MH Finger 2
"The tree of Liberty must from time to time be refreshed by the ~~blood~~ inky fingers of patriots."

My friend and Birkbeck classmate Muhamad shows the traces of ink left on his finger after he voted in last week's Iraqi elections. He cast his ballot while visiting the pilgrim cities in Saudi Arabia, covering the Hajj for an Iraqi news magazine. The Bagdhad native, who came to Britain just over three years ago, is a vocal supporter of George W Bush and the war he waged.

All I risk by supporting Bush and the war is an occasional episode of social embarassment. The soldiers and marines risk life and limb, but get to leave after six months, all the while knowing their families and friends are safe at home. For him, the stakes are much higher.

Many's the time I've sat in seminars, lectures and classes while some supposed authority, like Paul Rogers tell him how it supposedly is in Iraq, and various idiots in the audience concur and invoke Islamophobia, the Project for the New American Century, oil and Richard Clarke.

After the election, I'm both a lot more optimistic and somewhat more at peace with my own views. I've been very uncertain as to whether the invasion was unambiguously right: Now, I've come to realise that although the realist analyses of the risks are prudent and credible, the moral case for intervention was very strong and Bush and Blair could and should have acted to bring an outcome like this about.

I'd like to thank....

2005-02-04T13:20:00.000Z

...Frank, Tony, John for the inspiration and Dick for publishing so much that leaves me typing in sputtering indignation.

Irish Blog Awards 2005 Winners Announced

DUBLIN – The Freedom Institute, a Dublin based think-tank which aims to formulate free-market policies designed to make Ireland a better place to live, today announced the winners of its inaugural Liberty Blog Awards for 2005. The Liberty Awards are a new initiative designed to promote high-quality online political commentary and discussion.
[...]
A panel comprising Paul MacDonnell (Director of the Open Republic Institute), Paul Daly (Journalist) and Philip O’Sullivan (Freedom Institute Spokesperson) judged the nominated blogs to determine the winners, which included:

Best Overall - Blog Mark Humphrys

Best Political Analysis Blackline

Best Economic Analysis Atlantic Blog

Best Appearance Richard Delevan

Best Humour Richard Delevan

Best International Blog Little Green Footballs

Freedom Institute Blog Awards

I'm flattered and surprised, given that I myself voted for the holy trinity, but thanks to everyone for the recognition. It might even motivate me to actually do some long overdue posting.

Investing in Virtual CO2

2005-01-31T11:32:00.000Z

Fiona Harvey writes on an interesting new fund launch by French bank CDC Ixis in last Monday's FT fund management section. Turning commodities into securities is always interesting. Personally, I wouldn't buy into this, as I think that the returns would be just as cyclical as holding other industrial commodities. Neither am I pessimistic about the prospects for the private sector to cut CO2 emissions given the imperative to cut costs by husbanding increasingly expensive energy.

One of the first carbon funds allowing investors to gain access to the European market in trading carbon dioxide has received regulatory approval.

The European Carbon Fund was approved by Luxembourg and will buy and manage carbon dioxide emission rights in the market that has grown out of the European Union's greenhouse gas emission trading scheme. This is designed to lower emissions from European industry in line with the UN-brokered Kyoto protocol on climate change.

Under the trading scheme, a mandatory limit is placed on the amount of carbon dioxide that companies in certain energy-intensive industries are allowed to emit. If they want to emit more than their allowance, they must buy emission rights in the market, or face heavy fines. Companies that produce less than their allowance can sell their excess rights.

The new eight-year fund comes from the French investment bank Ixis, part of the Groupe Caisse d'Epargne. Its target size is Euros 100m (Pounds 69.24m), of which Euros 40m has already come from Caisse des Depots and Fortis Bank, the two sponsors of the fund. Laurent Segalen, director of investment funds at Ixis, said a further Euros 20m had been pledged from other sources.

A variety of banks had been researching carbon trading, while hedge funds were beginning to show an interest. "But they still see carbon as exotic," he acknowledged.

The success of the EU's scheme, and the new fund, will depend on carbon scarcity in the market, which will encourage companies to reduce emissions. There have been concerns that some EU governments have been too generous in allocating allowances to their industries, in an attempt to gain a competitive advantage.

However, the European Commission is expected to demand tougher targets from 2008, when more industries will be brought under the scheme. Ixis calculates that in this second stage there will be a shortage of 60m to 100m tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, forcing many companies to buy extra emission rights.

Fund subscriptions will close on March 31. Ixis will hold a roadshow in London on February 9.

"I'm so ronery..."

2005-01-31T10:53:00.000Z

Michael Sheridan in the Times lays out a grim prognosis for the survival of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il:

According to exiles, North Korean agents in Beijing and Ulan Bator are frantically selling assets to raise cash — an important sign, says one activist, because "the secret police can always smell the crisis coming before anybody else".

It's time for Tony to award himself another point for his foresight.

What will happen now? Like Saddam Hussein, who suffered three revolts between the end of the Iran-Iraq war, this pressure on the regime could result in external aggression so as to unite the leadership and people in a war scare. Although a second war on the scale of the Korean War could cost a million lives and a trillion dollars by most estimates, I wouldn't expect a full conflict. Provocation is more likely to come from a small-scale act that's hard to ignore, but finely-tuned to avoid fostering a consensus for action between China, Japan, South Korea and the US.

Iraq Policy from the Inside

2005-01-29T20:25:00.000Z

Carne Ross, who worked on Iraq at the British mission to the UN, published a fascinating account of the process of persuasion and policy-making before the Gulf War in today's FT magazine.

There may be the biggest misperception of all, though not a lie, since it is hardly conscious. This is a misperception - a fiction, if you like - in which governments and governed collaborate alike, for to believe otherwise is too uncomfortable. And this is that governments, politicians and civil servants are able to observe the world without bias and disinterestedly interpret its myriad signs into facts and judgments (indeed, in the Foreign Office, telegrams are divided into these two very categories: “Detail” and “Comment”) with an objective, almost scientific rigour. The story of what these two governments observed, believed and then told their populations about Iraq suggests an altogether more imperfect reality.

One solution might be to institutionalise the process of the politicians and the intelligence apparatus failed miserably in interpreting Arab intentions, by including a special unit within military intelligence to act as Devil's Advocate and argue against the conclusions presented to the leadership.

Another, more idiosyncratic suggestion occurs to me - staff the relevant Foreign Office desks with either experts in ancient history, royal gossip correspondents or bond traders, who are equiped to make decisions based on conditional inferences supported by only limited evidence.

The article may not remain outside the subscription firewall for long, so please email me if you would like a copy.

Easterbrook Island

2005-01-29T20:15:00.000Z

Greg Easterbrook reviews Jared Diamond's Collapse in the Sunday NY Times. I've skimmed the book and I think it deserves a lot of respect, given that Diamond is the first environmentalist I've read to examine supposed Malthusian catastrophes in more detail. He's also articulate in defending the green critique of modern economic and political practise against its detractors such as Bjorn Lomborg and Julian Simon. On the other hand, as Easterbrook points out, he's conservative in overlooking the power of conscious evolution and adaptation by humanity, although he doesn't ignore culture and politics as extensively as he does in his last book, Guns, Germs and Steel.

To Easterbrook's dissent, I would add my own discontent with his somewhat shallow examination of many of the issues he writes on, as he ignores many of the most relevant works on the problems of energy and China's environment and often leaves out, both from the main text and the footnotes the most useful information from those works he does cite.

Needless to say, the dismal science doesn't get much of a role in his proposals to save the world, although his discussion of consumer pressure on natural resource extractors is very interesting and original in making a hard business case for careful environmental stewardship.

The Third Point of the Triangle

2005-01-28T13:22:00.000Z

Reading of the annual anti-capitalist jamboree at the World Social Forum, the question struck me: Why, when we have the guys in Davos trying to reform capitalism and the Porto Alegre compassion-fascists chainsaw it, is there not a World Capitalist Forum, dedicated to celebrating and proselytising the free-market economic system as it exists?

One of the think-tanks should try this. Perhaps, unlike dirty hippies and the superannuated German electric company chairmen taking their mistresses to Switzerland for a dirty weekend, maybe the creating Atlases are too busy holding up the world to take time out.

Why Films Don't Matter

2005-01-28T13:04:00.000Z

"Sticking feathers up your ass does not make you a chicken!"

Computer games and TV have the creative juice and make the money that movies seem to be lacking. The Sopranos and Grand Theft Auto (especially Vice City) have the humour, visual style and dialogue that the nineties' boy-wonder Tarantino never, ever, even got near. Finally, somebody else, a real live "critic" is willing to broadcast the same rant.

Thus Peter spoke...

A Conspiracy Across Borders

2005-01-28T02:06:00.000Z

Borders
Who is REALLY behind Borders, my favourite London bookshop? Have a look on the web - the similarity in the logos is truly striking!

Victor

2005-01-28T02:00:00.000Z

Victor
Coffee, beer, entertainment and conversation - just the thing for a cold winter's night before Christmas.

German Paper

2005-01-28T01:59:00.000Z

German Paper
Not everybody appreciates German humour. This example is visible in the Deutsche Borse (Germany's main stock exchange) in Frankfurt on a recent business trip.

Narrow Street

2005-01-28T01:58:00.000Z

Narrow Street
This photo, taken with my mobile, shows the Limehouse end of Narrow Street, looking east towards Westferry

Tower Bridge

2005-01-28T01:37:00.000Z

Tower Bridge
This is one of the rare portraits of me available, taken by Michael. Victor has my camera right now, so I haven't taken many new photos recently.

Five Are Brutally Kneecaped

2005-01-27T10:16:00.000Z

A long overdue punishment beating...

The Tipping-Over Point?

2005-01-16T02:34:00.000Z

Guns, Germs and Steel author Prof Jared Diamond is to speak at the Royal Society in London on Thursday. He's outlining his new book, Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive, which tries to build more detailed pictures of how civilisations in the past have sucumed to environmental crises. For all the talk nowadays of Malthus, few people seem to have ever tried to test the historical validity of his theories in the pre-modern age. Diamond, who writes original but dull books, can be expected to open up this debate up for the reading public.

Those Capitalist Bastards!

2005-01-15T01:34:00.000Z

Friday's FT reports on how the infrastructure for trading carbon dioxide emission rights both spot and forward, is now being put in place in Europe to coincide with the new EU regulations.

More than a dozen years since the trading of carbon emissions was first proposed, Europe's first exchanges are finally gearing up for business. At least six so far have stepped forward with emissions trading platforms, with possibly more to come, many of them potentially vying to lead a unified pan-European market.

Prices seem to be high enough to give an incentive to sell off a surplus, but not too extortionate:

A single allowance, permitting one tonne of CO emissions, was trading at €8.50 before Christmas on the over-the-counter market but this week has fallen to €6.85.

, compared to the $55 per tonne carbon tax in Norway, which seems to be driving the search for CO2 sequestration solutions.

A Dubious Honour

2005-01-13T22:44:00.000Z

I got this email last night from someone refering to himself as Political Junkie. I don't like getting spam at the best of times, so I wrote back to him telling him to go forth and multiply. Did anyone else get mail from this eejit?

Trust me, you don't want to bother going to his site; it's just about the only thing I've ever seen on the web that seemed better suited to another, cheaper, medium - like the back of a toilet door.

Fellow Bloggers:

Below is a list of 25 “Differences Between the Left and Right.” This list, culled from more than a 100 found in my bipartisan book “The Political Junkie Handbook” should entertain and provoke passionate response from your readers. I hope you can use it.

I am also interested in advertising on the many political blogs found on the internet. You may have seen my ads in such diverse range of publications as Mother Jones, The American Spectator , The Hill and many others. Please email me your monthly charge, specifications and any other information you believe pertinent to advertising on your site. Please note that I do not deal with PayPal.

Cordially,

Michael Crane
Editor
The Political Junkie Handbook
mrcrane@politicaljunkie.org
www.politicaljunkie.org

THE ISSUE: LEFT/RIGHT
Abortion: My Body, My Choice / It's a Child, Not a Choice
Animal Rights: "A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy" / Man is the Pinnacle of Creation
Child Raising: It Takes a Village / It Takes a Loving Mother and a Devoted Father
Crime: Crime is an Economic Problem / Crime is a Moral Problem
Education Policy: Outcome-Based Education / Back to the Basics
Favorite Celebrity Spokesman: Alec Baldwin / Charlton Heston
Favorite Motivating Factor: Power / Liberty
Favorite President: Franklin Delano Roosevelt / Ronald Reagan
Favorite Term for People Who Illegally Enter Our Country: Undocumented Workers / Illegal Aliens
Central Goal: Pursuit of Equality / Pursuit of Excellence
How They View Each Other: Believe Conservatives Reactionary / Think Liberals Utopian
Individual Modality: Self-Expression / Self-Control
Achieving Peace: Visualize Peace / Peace Through Strength
Politics: The Personal is Political / The Political is Personal
Popular Saying: Do Your Own Thing / Do Good and Avoid Evil
Public Policy: All Social Problems Have Solutions / All Policy Involves Trade-Offs
Rights: Group Rights / Individual Rights
Societal Motivator: Cooperation / Competition
Human Nature: Human Nature Can be Modified by Public Policy / Human Nature is Unchangeable
The Constitution is: A Living Document / An Inviolable Pact of and for the People
The Military: The Military is a Vehicle for Social Change / The Military Objective is Simply to Defend and Protect this Country
The Three R's: Racism, Reproduction and Recycling / Reading, Writing and 'rithmatic
Wages: Government Should Assure a Fair and Living Wage / Wages Must be Based on Productivity
Wealth: Wealth Must be Redistributed / Wealth Must be Created
Which Side on the Reading War?: Whole Language / Phonics

The New Empire of Energy

2005-01-13T18:15:00.000Z

FT Berlin correspondent Bertrand Benoit writes in yesterday's paper on the increasingly visible influence of Russian energy supplies on European foreign policy.

Schröder never speaks out on Putin's human rights abuses in Chechnya or his interference in Ukraine's affairs," says Friedbert Pflüger, member of parliament for the opposition Christian Democratic Union. "And there is a suspicion that this has to do with oil and gas."

Mr Putin's increased authoritarian style at home and with neighbours has raised concern and prompted a re-examination of Europe's links with Russia.

The French and British governments are particularly worried that Moscow's rising prominence as an energy supplier, not just to Germany but to Europe, is turning into an economic and political hazard for the entire continent.

This was exactly the worry highlighted by a report on Energy Security produced by Dutch academics for the European Commission last year (available here). Without the military means to influence or even in extremis to reshape producing areas, as the US continues to do in the Persian Gulf, Europe might find itself subject to the ruthless gas diplomacy of the Kremlin. Press reports noted that gas shipments to Ukraine through Russia were cut off after the recent change of government by Russia's oil and gas national champion OAO Gazprom.

I finished Michael Klare's book Blood and Oil recently, but I wasn't entirely convinced by his argument that war will be an inseperable part of the oil industry, as market logic would push towards substitues, even among other fossil fuels.

The Turning Tide

2005-01-13T17:37:00.000Z

I'm in bed today, suffocating under a bad 'flu. I had thought that I had escaped this season, but all the worst symptoms - sleeplessness, breathing problems, headaches, bodily weakness, seem to have hit me all at once.

Sullivan goes soggy, as we'd expect. I may be the most but thinking about the situation, I've long past the point where the I'm certain that the US is in control or even adequately responding to the situation.

Predictably enough, Sullivan has gone soggy, this time over the issue of torture.

Brutality and torture were unofficial policy, as they also have been at Guantanamo. "Everyone knows about it," an intelligence officer told Herrington. And Herrington was no hand-wringer. Herrington also noticed counter-productive sweeps of the general Iraqi population, over-crowding in detainee centers, the "disappearing" of prisoners and taking female relatives hostage to get suspects turned in. Do the Bush people really expect us to believe, after all we now know, that Abu Ghraib was a one-off event caused by a handful of underlings? The terrible truth is that it was anything but.

I've a suspicion that this issue may start dominating the headlines again soon, as the official investigations that have been published are digested.

The Economist often tries to encourage all in the Middle East to "have tea and discuss" rather than grapple with the combination of Alice in Wonderland and The Lord of the Flies that marks the region's politics. Their embedded correspondent with the US forces writes:

American marines and GIs frequently display contempt for Iraqis, civilian or official. Thus the 18-year-old Texan soldier in Mosul who, confronted by jeering schoolchildren, shot canisters of buckshot at them from his grenade-launcher. “It's not good, dude, it could be fatal, but you gotta do it,” he explained. Or the marines in Ramadi who, on a search for insurgents, kicked in the doors of houses at random, in order to scream, in English, at trembling middle-aged women within: “Where's your black mask?” and “Bitch, where's the guns?” In one of these houses was a small plastic Christmas tree, decorated with silver tinsel. “That tells us the people here are OK,” said Corporal Robert Joyce.

According to army literature, American soldiers should deliver the following message before searching a house: “We are sorry for the inconvenience, but we must search your house to make sure you are safe from anti-Iraqi forces [AIF].” In fact, many Iraqis are probably more scared of American troops than of insurgents.

Whether or not the insurgency is fuelled by American clumsiness, it has deepened and spread almost every month since the occupation began. In mid-2003, Donald Rumsfeld, America's defence secretary, felt able to dismiss the insurgents as “a few dead-enders”. Shortly after, official estimates put their number at 5,000 men, including many foreign Islamic extremists. That figure has been revised to 20,000, including perhaps 2,000 foreigners, not counting the thousands of hostile fighters American and British troops have killed; these are the crudest of estimates.

With insurgents reported to be dispensing criminal justice and levying taxes, some American officers say they run a “parallel administration”. Last month in Mosul, insurgents are reported to have beheaded three professional kidnappers and to have manned road checkpoints dressed in stolen police uniforms. In Tal Afar, farther west, insurgents imposed a 25% cut in the price of meat.

Former National Security Advisors Brzezinski and Scowcroft talked over the state of American foreign policy recently at the New America Foundation, with the transcript available here. Neither man, is any kind of Susan Sarandon, Brzezinski in particular, who once sent back a nuclear war plan to the Pentagon complaining that he wanted to see tens of millions more dead among the ethnic Russians, whom he thought held the USSR together.

The National Interest, living up to their mission of providing foreign policy analysis complete with heavy-metal umlauts, also wrote recently on the various critiques of the Bush administration.

America, f**k yeah!

2005-01-12T13:15:00.000Z

America, f**k yeah!

Michael S Fuchs makes an understated expression of patriotism at the NFT preview of Team America: World Police, probably the most obscene movie I've ever watched. They certainly go down where no puppets have ever gone before.

Finally, some reward for my blogging

2005-01-07T01:13:00.000Z

I've complained in the past about the lack of compensation to be found in blogging. With about 52,000 words written so far, I now calculate that I'm owed around twelve grand from all you tight bastards.

Anyway, I got an email recently, which seems to indicate that somebody out there loves me. My responses are linked below:

Hi folks,

Just to let you guys all know, you've been nominated for one or more of the categories in the Irish Free-Market Blog Awards, which the Freedom Institute is organising (as the only policy organisation with a blog in Ireland).

We will be announcing the winners in January.
The categories are:
Best Blog
Best Political Analysis
Best Economic Analysis
Best Looking Blog
Funniest Blog
The judging panel will be disclosed with the announcement of the
results.
There is a further category, Best International Blog.

Just so there's no misunderstanding, I'm fully open to any offers of cash or goods to influence any nomiations that I might make.

Late Christmas Presents

2005-01-07T01:05:00.000Z

I've been handing out more logins for gmail (the Google internet mail service that gives 1000mb of storage space, or forty times as much as hotmail) to family and friends. If anybody wants one, I have one or possibly two left over, so email me if you would like one.

Get in Line!

2005-01-04T02:19:00.000Z

The Los Angeles Times reports that the American government has created not just a single cloned sheep, but an entire new race of beings.

To be honest, I find this slightly absurd, as lumping together Spanish aristocrats from Cuba together with all the other "Latino" immigrants mainly the Mestizos and Indios from Mexico and Central America, many of whom don't speak any Spanish seems too broad a categorisation, whether it's by the supposedly representative minority activists or alarmists like Huntington.

I've just finished reading Eric Schlosser's book Reefer Madness, surveying the lunacies of the American government's war on cannabis, pornography and illegal immigration, which reinforced both my suspicion that regulation of these areas is disastrously misguided. Bad as life is for illegals, it seems by his account* that they at least don't have to worry about getting beaten and robbed by the US authorities as they can expect from their own government.

*I'm not sure if this link works for those who don't subsribe to the Atlantic Monthly. Email me if you would like to read the article but cannot get in.

North, South, East and West Brits

2005-01-04T01:50:00.000Z

I was amazed to discover that the latest incarnation of Magill magazine, which was founded and periodically revived by Vincent Browne, is an interesting departure from the norm of Irish media opinion. With Eamon Delaney, novelist and Accidental Diplomat in the editor's chair. It has some right-wingers I've heard of, such as economist Marc Coleman, who made a run for SU president when I was at Trinity, and Rory Miller, a middle east scholar at King's College London. I fear that it's likely to be short-lived, as in its previous lives, but it will be fun to see who appears.

Dr Miller writes on the Anglosphere, the theory, popularised by management consultant James Bennett, that the English-speaking nations should build institutions to underpin closer links, based on a common culture of economics, politics and international relations. I came across Bennett's Angosphere primer via Mark Humphrys' pages, which are always worth a browse.

I'd very much agree that America, Australia and Britain are taking the right approach in fighting against global terrorism and that they had strong interests and altruistic reasons for invading Iraq. However, I think that the Anglosphere concept isn't much use in understanding what makes this alliance work, as it ignores the important factors in its oversimple analysis.

Bennett gets history comprehensively wrong; even for the big events, he just doesn't know what every schoolboy knows. In the most important example, the similarities and cultural links between the three countries were much stronger in the past, but somehow this wasn't sufficient to prevent America systematically dismantled the British Empire, epitimised by Ike's humiliating coercion of Britain and France during the Suez crisis.

Second, he's guilty of what I'll call the big Bermuda fallacy. All these nations are isolated by water in different regions of the globe, meaning that the geopolitical factors that dictate their national security interests will be different, and not identical, as they might be if both Britain and Australia were located near Bermuda. I find the realist analysis of foreign policy put forward by Mearsheimer or Brzezinski than others and this would predict, as we observe, that the US will act to maintain its dominance and the others seek outside help to balance their weaker position vis a vis their neighbours. Since 1941, Australia has rejected Britain's meager capabilities for an alliance with the US, which has seen them fight together in Korea and Vietnam and now Iraq. Given the prospect of turmoil among Muslims in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Phillippines, Australia has little choice but to actively hunt down terrorists in the region. Rather than an Anglosphere, it's an Americasphere, with other medium-rank powers benefiting from the US military umbrella such as Japan, Poland and South Korea, joining the fight.

Third, Bennett's cultural assumptions are weak. If Anglophone culture explains domestic and international politics, law and economics, then the other strongly Anglophone countries - Canada, New Zealand and Ireland should share the same attitudes. All the later three - the Anglosphere theory's problem children, have a foreign policy that's distinct from, if not hostile too, America's, especially under the Bush administration.

The fourth, and crucial failure for Ireland, lies in failing to understand the exact nature of the Anglo heritage of each country making up the supposed Anglosphere. To put it simply, there ain't no green in the Union Jack.

As Huntington, and David Hackett Fisher before him have argued, the Anglophone cultures of America were either from England, Scotland or the settlements of Scottish Ulster, all defined by powerful animus towards Catholics and general and the Irish variety in particular.

In turn, the overseas Irish communities tend to reciprocate with a powerful Anglophobia; House Speaker Tip O'Neill spoke of playing at fighting the Redcoats when growing up in south Boston; Paul Keating, the working-class Irish bruiser, tried to redefine Australia as an Asian power and sever constitutional links to Britain.

So, overall, I don't rate the concept very highly, even ignoring Bennett's writing style, which makes comprehending his articles akin to making a close reading of a roll of toilet paper. What would you expect from a management consultant? If someone charges a thousand bucks an hour, one can hardly expect deep contemplation and brilliant expression. Perhaps it's a good thing that academic salaries are so uneconomic....

I've never before given the National Interest magazine much respect, but I've changed my mind after reading the Summer 2004 edition from cover to cover. Apart from the luminaries on the board - Brzezinski, Kissinger, Huntington, Eliot Cohen - it has a broad and detailed scope rivaling the best policy journals in the field, while mixing realist, neo-conservative and a pinch of nationalist themes. In an issue from four years ago, its founding editor, Australian diplomat and analyst Owen Harries casts a critical eye on Bennett.

If only I ever read any novels...

2005-01-01T13:09:00.000Z

The problem with bourgeois societies is a lack of imagination. A person raised in a middle or upper-middle class suburban environment, a place ruled by rationalism in the service of material progress, has difficulty imagining the psychological state of affairs in a society where there is little or no memory of hard work achieving its just reward, and where life inside a gang or a drafty army barracks constitutes an improvement in material and emotional security. Even to encounter first-hand such a society - whose instincts have yet to be refined by several generations of middle class existence - is not enough in the way of an education, since the visitor tends to see it as a laboratory for his or her middle class ideals, and thus immediately begins to find "evidence" for "pragmatic" solutions.

The problem is further compounded by the separation of literature from history and of both from political science in this age of academic specialization, creating policymakers ignorant of the very books that explain places like Haiti and Somalia far better than any social science "methodology." While the usefulness of history is accepted and needs no elaboration, the usefulness of literature is less so among the policy elite, even as Marco Diani, a senior researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, writes that, "The anguish of any society can be found in its literature, often earlier and more clearly revealed than in its social sciences."(1) That is because the future lies inside the silences, inside the very uncomfortably sensitive issues that people are afraid to discuss at dinner parties for fear of what others might think of them. And yet it is a principle function of social science to accumulate information precisely on what people are not afraid to talk about in front of a researcher's tape recorder (which is also why conventional journalism is often the most deceptive form of reporting on a society).

Who could stand back and analyse how we understand other societies like Robert Kaplan can? Where else would something like this appear than the National Interest, the intellectual home of foreign policy realism in America? The pronounced right-wing slant makes it different from Foreign Affairs or Foreign Policy and the quality of the articles can be uneven, but at its best, this quarterly journal produces some of the sharpest debate available in its field and a cockpit for the contending visions of nationalists, cosmopolitans, neoconservatives and realists.

Its archives, along with those of the New Statesman and other magazines, are available free through www.findarticles.com

Indymedia Surfs a Wave

2004-12-29T16:35:00.000Z

Indymedia describes itself as "a collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage. Indymedia is a democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth."

Two out of three isn't bad. They seem to have figured out the causes of the huge Asian tidal-wave. Perhaps they are providing an alternative to the mainstream for-profit media, or certain parts of it.

The Great Divide

2004-12-29T13:57:00.000Z

George Will writes on Iraq in the current City Journal.

My worry is the assault on the nation-state, which is an assault on self-government—the American project. It is the campaign to contract the sphere of politics by expanding the sway of supposedly disinterested experts, disconnected from democratic accountability and administering principles of universal applicability that they have discovered [....]

All this is pertinent to today’s headlines, for a reason that may, at first blush, seem paradoxical. The assault on the nation-state involves a breezy confidence that nations not only can be superseded by supranational laws and institutions, they can even be dispensed with. Furthermore, nations can be fabricated, and can be given this or that political attribute, by experts wielding universal principles.

When the Cold War ended, my friend Pat Moynihan asked me: "What are you conservatives going to hate, now that you can’t hate Moscow?" My instant response was: "We are going to hate Brussels" —Brussels, because it is the banal home of the metastasizing impulse to transfer political power from national parliaments to supranational agencies that are essentially unaccountable and unrepresentative."

I don't agree with him on Iraq, as it seems to me that the country has a Sunni problem and not one with "resistance". The more I read of David Held and his ilk, the more I come to expect that the whole debate over the European Union, "globalisation" and the proper world role for both the US and the UN are really all consequences of the same questioning of the nation-state as the foundation for political identity, action and legitimacy and how this might be affected, or seen to be, by transnational alternatives.

For those, like Professor Held's supposed "social democrats" who haven't won an election in Britain since 1945, the temptation to impose a vision rather than struggle futilely to persuade an unwilling electorate now seems overwhelming. Significantly this model now seems to have attracted the attention of others like the environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin, who've come to the conclusion that - to adapt Brecht's poem - the people have failed the movement, so let us dissolve the people and elect another.

Oil and Water

2004-12-29T13:36:00.000Z

I've just added more links to my sidebar, including to the funniest sites on the web - the Onion, rec.humor.funny and Indymedia Ireland.

One site that I've pecked at for a while now and that I'll be visiting more often in the future is Peakoil.net. It has some fascinating links to information from people all the usual eejits are fastening onto. I found the interesting European Commission report on energy security there. Now, they've reproduced a report from my ex-colleagues at Deutsche Bank. These aren't the experts covering the oil products market, like strategist Michael Lewis, or the oils team in equity research but the long-sidelined German economists, who seem to have spent the last ten years since the revival of the investment bank desperately searching for a role, casting about for an audience in macroeconomics, real estate and now oil.

Ian Buruma's Letter from Amsterdam

2004-12-29T12:34:00.000Z

Ian Buruma, probably the world's greatest cosmopolitan and one of my favourite writers, has a reportage piece on the current atmosphere in the Netherlands in the New Yorker. It's all worth reading, but puts his finger on how even apparently normal people can go seriously astray by weaving an internet coccoon around themselves.

"This is the problem. Although Theo van Gogh was Dutch and was killed by a Dutch citizen, in the end this is not just a Dutch story but a Middle Eastern one imported to the heart of Europe. Mohammed Bouyeri, and hundreds like him, have plugged into a wider world of violent Web-based rhetoric and terrorist cells. The integration of Muslims in the Netherlands has not been a greater failure than anywhere else. But the country may have been less prepared for the holy war."

This is probably what's happening, on a smaller scale, in Ireland right now.

What's Wrong with Academic Leftists?

2004-12-29T01:27:00.000Z

I've mentioned before that I'm grappling, although ineffectively given my lack of experience with philosophy, with the doctrines of Foucault and other modern thinkers and their implications for contemporary political problems.

I'm currently reading Law, Pragmatism and Democracy by Richard Posner, who I believe has brilliantly captured the essence, not just of how American democracy works, but why it works as it does. Its peculiar structures, facturing power into a babel of competing institutions and the simultaneous empowerment and limitation on both majority and minority opinions make it fairly unique among the world's democracies. Defenders of the system as it is are regrettably rare, among socialists, centrists, libertarians and conservatives.

I think this is one book that doesn't repay my usual hurried scanning, so I take it slowly and carefully. It's extraordinarily rich in insights, so I think I might just post a list of some of the best quotes from it, as Brian has recently done with A T Q Stewart's The Shape of Irish History.

Posner mentioned the German legal theorist (and unapologetic Nazi) Carl Schmitt, which sent me to his entry in Wikipedia and thence to this essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education which brought together some threads of my recent thinking and offered one suggestion for why the political thinking of many academic leftists is so contemptously anti-liberal.

Given Schmitt's strident anti-Semitism and unambiguous Nazi commitments, the left's continuing fascination with him is difficult to comprehend. Yet as Jan-Werner Müller, a fellow at All Soul's College, Oxford, points out in his recently published A Dangerous Mind, that attraction is undeniable. Müller argues that Schmitt's spirit pervades Empire (2000), the intellectual manifesto of the antiglobalization movement, written by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri...

Telos, a journal founded in 1968 dedicated to bringing European critical theory to American audiences, had started a campaign in the 1980s to resurrect Schmitt's legacy, impressed by his no-nonsense attacks on liberalism and his contempt for Wilsonian idealism. A comprehensive study of Schmitt's early writings, Gopal Balakrishnan's The Enemy, published by the New Leftist firm of Verso in 2000, finds Schmitt's conclusion that liberal democracy had reached a crisis oddly reassuring, for it gives the left hope that its present stalemate [i.e. the triumphant dominance of liberal democracy and fairly free markets as the only desirable model of political economy, as Fukuyama rightly advocated, but didn't prove in The End of History and the Last Man] will not last indefinitely. Such prominent European thinkers as Slavoj Zizek, Chantal Mouffe, and Jacques Derrida have also been preoccupied with Schmitt's ideas. It is not that they admire Schmitt's political views. But they recognize in Schmitt someone who, very much like themselves, opposed humanism in favor of an emphasis on the role of power in modern society, a perspective that has more in common with a poststructuralist like Michel Foucault than with liberal thinkers such as John Rawls.

My apologies for any lapses into incoherence, as I'm both paddling the shallows of a very deep sea of theory and feeling pretty exhausted tonight.

The Spirit of Christmas

2004-12-29T01:06:00.000Z

Massacre of the Innocents - Fra Angelico

Herod was probably the first person to have his Christmas plans go seriously awry, as mine did today. Having made an effort to organise a meeting of Irish bloggers, I turned up at the Market Bar at 1.30 pm to find it closed, an unexpected state for a Dublin pub, who would, in my experience, be happy to let anyone lick their mop after hours in return for a few coppers.

I ended up in Bar Mizu in the basement of the Powerscourt Centre. Any day that I manage to spend speaking with Tony Allwright, Michael MacGuinness, Darren O'Brien, Philip O'Sullivan, John McGuirk of the FI and John Fay is obviously a good day, but my profound apologies to anybody who came along to the Market Bar. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa...

Home Sweet Home

2004-12-29T01:02:00.000Z

The best thing about Christmas is reliving those long-lost home comforts