UNILATERALISM, MY ASS!

Here’s a BBC story pointing out that France is, essentially, using the threat of its Security Council veto to frustrate the many European nations that support the U.S. on Iraq.

AOL TIME WARNER LOST NEARLY $100 BILLION IN 2002.

Advantage: InstaPundit, which was nearly $100 billion more profitable than AOL last year! Quick, get out the press release!

[Kaus already did this schtick last year — Ed. He already did the Ed. schtick, too. . . .]

HESIOD DOESN’T GET IT, so I’ll try to speak very slowly:

Antiwar protesters aren’t Communists by definition.

But A.N.S.W.E.R. and the WWP basically are. (And of the extra-nasty Stalinist variety.)

Communists are, in my opinion, as bad as Nazis: mass murder, totalitarianism, etc. (And calling them “Marxists” instead doesn’t fool anyone.)

Going to a march organized by Communists doesn’t make you a Communist, any more than going to a march organized by Nazis makes you a Nazi.

But knowingly going to either one makes you icky. And calling it McCarthyism when people point that out, or point out that the Communists really are Communists, makes you either dishonest, or stupid.

Clear enough?

(I should also note that I’ve tried to call attention to non-icky voices opposing the war. I think they’re wrong about the war, but it’s okay to be wrong. It’s not okay to be in bed with Stalinists or Hitlerites.)

LILEKS:

The line that clarified everything: I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq: Your enemy is not surrounding your country – your enemy is ruling your country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation.

It brought to mind Susan Sarandon’s ad, in which she argues against a military effort to depose Saddam. “What,” she asks, “has Iraq done to us?”

Aside from shoot at our pilots, and attempt to kill an ex-President, I’ll grant that they’ve done no more to us than Hitler did to the US in the 30s. But that’s not the point. Sarandon has turned into the very thing her ilk decries: an insular self-satisfied wealthy Westerner who couldn’t care less what happens in other countries, as long as no Americans get a nick.

Her, and a lot of her colleagues.

FRANCE IS BLOWING IT IN ITS NEOCOLONIALIST UNILATERAL ACTION IN AFRICA:

Just when it was reveling, downstage-center, as a marquee player in international discussions on Iraq, France has collided with an African crisis that may more cruelly mark out the limited character of its diplomatic and practical powers.

This reality bites: A French-engineered peace agreement meant to bring to calm to the Ivory Coast after a months-long rebellion – signed here with the trappings of inviolability over the weekend in the presence of President Jacques Chirac and a handy phalanx of plumed Gardes Republicaines – has imploded.

This article is damning. The French military force is called “invisible,” the word “neocolonialist” is used, and, most humiliating of all, it says that France was “outfoxed” in the diplomatic negotiations. The Ivory Coast, it suggests, indicates the limits of French power.

Check out the photo accompaning this article with signs calling Chirac a criminal and boosting the USA. And doesn’t it figure that the French have their own Republican Guard. . . .?

THE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION has a dialup connection that’s now getting 24kbps. Ugh. More later.

DAVID BOAZ is condemning the anti-choice movement in strong terms.

THE GRUMPY LEFT: This writer in the Star Tribune is getting tired of the Judean People’s Front aspects of, well, lots of lefty causes:

I also began to wonder where the left gets its harshness — a know-it-all style of dark grievance-dom that has increasingly come to define the peace movement. It was on my mind because I had seen this belief system in full bloom two nights earlier, as I watched a replay of the day’s big Washington, D.C., antiwar demonstration. . . .

I just wish that every gathering of my lefties didn’t have to become such a tedious exercise in cause-linking, chant-bullhorning and supposed truth-telling. I have the fantasy of a progressive cause with no Youth and Student Coordinator, no West Coast Representative, no brother from the movement in the country to the south and no presumption that words like Solidarity, Network, Action and Uprising are always to be treated as gospel, the code words that say we are all the same.

(Via Fraters Libertas).

“CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES” — a roundup of the week’s best (self-nominated) blog entries — is over at Dodd Harris’s this week. Check it out!

ALPHECCA’S WEEKLY survey of media bias on gun control is up, with a surprising finding.

TED BARLOW has unmasked my secret identity.

A LOT MORE NEWSPAPER WEBSITES are reportedly going to start asking for registration. Do you like that idea? I offer my observations in today’s TechCentralStation column.

LIFE IS GOOD, here at the secure undisclosed location. I didn’t follow the State of the Union speech — I’m at a hotel with the InstaWife and no kids, an opportunity too good to be wasted on political speeches. But Stephen Green and Tacitus provided blow-by-blow coverage, so the Blogosphere was on the job.

From what I’ve seen, Bush did pretty well on Iraq, and got a passing grade (with perhaps an extra point or two for audacity) on the domestic side. However, if you grade on the curve with Gary Locke plugged in, he gets an A. (Andrew Sullivan would give Bush an A outright.) What I saw of Locke in the playback looked weak, and others seem to agree. He came across like a city councilman. Not a bad city councilman, but not somebody ready for primetime at the national level, at least not yet.

UPDATE: Just noticed that they were dissing me for my absence over at The Corner, where they were blogging in realtime, too. Heh. Well, they get paid the big bucks for that sort of thing.

Meanwhile, here is a piece noting the Tolkien resonances in the speech. And Matt Welch assembled a focus group on the State of the Union. Plus there’s a link on his page that’ll let you subscribe to the Los Angeles Examiner! Go for it.

OFF TO A SECURE, UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: Blogging will resume later.

AXIS OF NOT-SO-FEEBLE: The Norwegian Air Force dropped its first bomb in almost 60 years in Afghanistan today. (Via Rantburg). And don’t miss this photo of anti-French, pro-American protests in Cote d’Ivoire, with a sign reading “USA is better” and a — non-defaced! — American flag. Bwahahaha!

GARY FARBER on the unlikelihood of “terror bombing” against Iraq.

WILLIAM SJOSTROM POINTS TO THIS ARTICLE BY JOHN KEEGAN on “The New Appeasers.” Excerpt:

Here the new appeasement takes on its second form. It does not seek, as in the 1930s, to appease dictators. The object now is to appease other objectors to war – half-hearted allies such as Germany, the “Arab street”, liberal opinion at home and, above all, the legalists in the UN and other international organisations.

The new appeasers’ cry today is for a “second” (but implicitly a third and fourth) Security Council resolution authorising military action against Saddam and, without that, no intervention. The appeasers believe that they have found, in the UN Charter, means to prevent the democracies resorting to force in almost all circumstances. . . .

The history of appeasement does not change. Hitler was once a weak little man – and it was the concessions of the appeasers of his day that allowed him to grow strong. Once Saddam has his nuclear weapons, he will beat the drum of war. It will be a war that the new appeasers, like the old appeasers who rallied to Churchill after Hitler’s first blitzkrieg, will bitterly regret that they did not fight when they had the chance to win.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

THE EDDIE MURPHY / JOHN MCCAIN CONNECTION. It’s all so obvious, now. . . .

BILL HOBBS has done some research on claims about the cost of war — and on who’s doing the claiming. He also notes:

One of WAND’s five stated policy goals is

Eliminate the testing, production, sale and use of weapons of mass destruction.

Isn’t that what we’re trying to do in Iraq?

Yes, Bill, but I suspect they’re talking about our weapons of mass destruction. Not Saddam’s.

PORPHYROGENITUS says it’s all about ooiiilll at the BBC.

LEE HARRIS writes:

If the international community supported the First Gulf War overwhelmingly, which clearly it did, it is morally committed to supporting the current policy of the United States and the failure to realize this connection can be most charitably ascribed to intellectual dishonesty.

Since the United States is the only nation in the world that is willing to play this role, let alone capable of playing it, there are only three ways that it can relate to the international community: either as its lackey, or as its leader, or as its tyrant.

The world cannot really expect the United States to be its lackey, and certainly doesn’t want it to be its tyrant. And this leaves them only one choice.

Those who are now currently refusing to accept America’s moral right to lead at this point are betraying the very ideals they pretend to champion—you cannot have world peace until someone enforces it; but no one who is powerful enough to enforce it can be persuaded to enforce it like a flunkey—it is utopianism to think otherwise.

I’m not sure “utopianism” is the precise word, but yes.

THERE MAY BE NO LOGICAL CONNECTION between “Free Mumia!” and “Not in Our Name!” — but there is a financial connection. Tom Wolfe must be smiling.

UPDATE: Michele has some thoughts, over at A Small Victory. In another postshe notes that waiting for a “smoking gun” is probably a mistake:

a smoking gun would imply that it is too late; a gun does not smoke until it has been fired.

Indeed.

DOES SADDAM HAVE NUKES? ARE THE FRENCH SPYING FOR SADDAM? Trent Telenko has info on both. I’ve gotten some email from military folks suggesting the latter based on the behavior of French ships and aircraft in the Persial Gulf region.

If it’s true, paybacks should be severe.

GOVERNMENT DATABASES AND MISSION CREEP: Brian Doherty is absolutely right about this.

PESSIMISM ABOUT THE FUTURE: I have to say, this posting by Michael Rogers seems to hit the nail on the head. Most people I know are pessimistic about the future of their professions, too, almost across the board. I wonder if it’s caused by the phenomenon Brad DeLong identifies: better communications technology is creating more competition for people in a wide variety of fields.

DeLong’s prediction for 2023 reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, in which we’re told that globalization had smeared things out into a worldwide layer of “what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider prosperity.”

Is that really our future? I’m inclined to doubt it. But I could be wrong.

UPDATE: John Nye emails:

I think the trends you speak of would be at work even if there were no globalization. And Stephenson had it wrong. The greatest wage pressure will be on status and goods. Prosperity should easily increase material welfare (no. of cars, clothes, dinners, etc. you can buy) but will adversely affect prestige goods (like the probability of being accepted to the top ten universities or the chance of buying that prime lot in Menlo Park or even getting tickets to Broadway). So the issue is not that standard of living will be at the Pakistani middle class level.

Rather it will feel like that for some because they will be objectively richer but some of the things they cherish which provide status will be unobtainable. This has already been happening in the US. See my article on Irreducible Inequality.

I think this may be right. Reader George Zachar emails:

BY DEFINITION most professions will vanish/evolve into something unrecognizable as time, technology and expertise advance.

Focus on individual capabilities/skill sets/flexibility, and things look brighter/more realistic.

I’ve lost count of the personal career metamorphisms I’ve gone through.

I think this is right, too.