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February 25, 2003

TIM BLAIR’S WEEKLY COLUMN IN THE BULLETIN opens with this wonderful pair of quotations:

“No one can doubt its cruelty and atrocities, but comparisons with the Third Reich are ridiculous.” – John Pilger on the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, November 15, 1999.

“The current American elite is the Third Reich of our times.” – John Pilger on the government of George W. Bush, January 29, 2003.

See, these international antiwar journalists have so much more perspective than we simplistic Americans. . . .

DEREK LOWE has a couple of posts on the VaxGen AIDS vaccine story, which seems a bit disappointing to me. He’s not quite as disappointed, though, and he knows a lot more about this stuff than I do.

CHARLES MURTAUGH WONDERS if the Klan is going Green. Or vice versa.

JOHN COUMARIANOS criticizes Paul Berman.

ANDREW SULLIVAN WRITES:

It is therefore a gamble Bush cannot completely lose (whatever diplomatic and popular damage it does would be more than undone by a successful war). But it’s a resolution the Security Council (and France and Germany) can easily lose. If the resolution is defeated, but war ensues, Bush will take a small hit at home, a huge hit abroad (still, how much worse could it get?) – but, precisely because of these things, an even bigger domestic gain if the war is successful. Bush will be seen as someone who did all he could to win over the U.N., but in the end, did what he believed was right. He will emerge principled and triumphant. Ditto Blair, especially if a liberated Iraq reveals untold horrors, human rights abuses and French arms contracts. Machiavelli’s dictum applies powerfully now: all that matters is that Bush win the war. If he does, this conflict will be deemed to have been just and justified. That’s why calling the French bluff is especially important – particularly if it isn’t a bluff.

This seems right to me. What’s interesting is that though Bush’s critics accuse the United States of “imperial overstretch,” it’s really the post-1945 international system that has obviously bitten off more than it can chew. It purports to be in the business of policing international relations according to some standard of civility, and of reining in rogue states before they become a threat to their neighbors, but in fact the current international system lacks the will and the wherewithal to do either.

As Jim Bennett noted last week, Bush and Blair are, in fact, engaged in a neck-or-nothing effort to save the international system. And those — like the feckless French and Germans — who oppose them are in fact the would-be midwives of something far less civilized:

In reality, a failure of the Bush-Blair coalition would sooner or later (probably sooner) give rise to a world in which a number of regional tyrannies who gradually, under the cover of their weapons of mass destruction, would annex first the states that are sovereign by convention, such as Kuwait, and eventually many that have been sovereign by circumstance.

The existence of such states would force other nations in the region to calculate that their own sovereignty depended on their acquisition of nuclear weapons. Given that most nuclear tyrannies would be happy to sell weapons to out-of-area states with ready cash, such proliferation could proceed more rapidly than many imagine. Alliances would be discounted; if America were to shy away from attacking a nation for fear of non-nuclear terrorism, it could hardly be expected to stand up to nuclear blackmail. This logic ends up favoring the nuclear over the non-nuclear, the ruthless over the constrained, and the closed over the open societies.

Some of them realize this, and think such a world would be fine. Others are just foolish and irresponsible.

February 24, 2003

JAY MANIFOLD reports from a real peace rally.

TED BARLOW’S GRAMMY ROUNDUP is a lot better than the real thing.

“HIGH STAKES FRAUD:” Joyce Malcolm has a Bellesiles postmortem.

UPDATE: Chris Mooney has a Bellesiles confession on his blog.

TALKLEFT says it best:

We are on the precipice of war. The American public is constantly reminded we are under high to very high terror alerts, and Ashcroft and Bush want to go after bong sellers?

Jeez. Oliver Willis has a photo of the particular menace to National Security in question.

TWO NEW PRO-WAR STUDENT GROUPS: Students Protecting America (organized by Harvard Law students) and Students For War. Check them out.

And here’s a page with links to other organizations at Brandeis, Columbia, Oxford and Princeton.

UPDATE: More links here.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING STORY:

A Muslim cleric, Sheikh Abdullah el-Faisal, was today convicted of soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred, in the first prosecution of its kind in Britain.

The Old Bailey jury found El-Faisal guilty of three charges relating to inciting racial hatred as well as three charges of soliciting murder. He was remanded in custody for sentencing on March 7.

El-Faisal had denied five charges of soliciting the murder of non-believers, Jews, Americans and Hindus, and four charges relating to inciting racial hatred.

The ground-breaking trial was the first prosecution of a Muslim cleric in Britain. It was also the first time potential jurors were banned from sitting on the jury because of their religion. The judge agreed to a defence plea not to allow Jewish and Hindu jurors – but in the end none came forward.

This last seems a bit much — it’s like the state engaging in the kind of discrimination the defendant is accused of. Isn’t it?