Tuesday, June 15, 2004

 
posted by William Leon 6/15/2004 10:59:01 AM

Ready or not, Israel, here come the spare ribs! Israel’s supreme court yesterday ruled on a petition from secular politicians and a pork distribution company, unanimously striking down bylaws in Israeli cities that were used to prevent the sale of pig products and ordered local authorities to make a "re-evaluation" regarding selling pork in keeping with the wishes of their residents.

The decision was praised by civil libertarians, but Eli Yishai, head of the ultra-orthodox Shas party, reacted angrily, saying it "puts a central nail in the coffin of the Jewish identity of the state".

William Leon was heard to shout, "All hail the joys of bacon and sausage!"

Monday, June 14, 2004

 
posted by William Leon 6/14/2004 01:39:40 PM

Oil in Israel? Yeah, right: Biblically-inspired, Tovia Lushkin says his company, Givat Olam, needs £18 million to develop wells and extract oil from a £3 billion oilfield in the centre of Israel.

 
posted by Judith Weiss 6/14/2004 12:37:25 PM

Blog roundup. Wretchard fisks an Orwellian politically-correct critique of one of my favorite books. I really like his analogies to persistant data structures.

Gary has a photo you have to see.

Terry Teachout buys a Max Beerbohm.

A long first-person account of NGO-ing in Afganistan discusses restrictions against women, ending with this anecdote:

. . . my co-worker Mumtaz has a great story from his days in the late 90s as a translator with the UN. He accompanied a UN delegation to the new Taliban government to negotiate the conditions for UNICEF, UNHCR, and other groups to continue work in Afghanistan.

The Taliban Minister of Planning began their first meeting by leaning over the table and pointing straight at Mumtaz. "We are willing to talk about these aid programs. But tell them that if they so much as mention gender, I will f--- their mothers," he said with ferocious emphasis. "Translate!"

Mumtaz nodded gravely, turned to the UN staff, and said, "He says you are under no circumstances to mention gender. He will not hear of it." The UN staff nodded gravely, and Mumtaz turned back to their host. "Did you tell them?" insisted the Minister. "Did you tell them that I would f--- their mothers?"

"Of course," said Mumtaz, unflappable. "They do not look shocked," said the Taleb dubiously. Mumtaz shrugged, raised his palms in a helpless gesture. "They are Westerners. They do not mind such things."

Saturday, June 12, 2004

 
posted by Judith Weiss 6/12/2004 09:44:10 PM

Chutzpah Dept. Did you know that the only reason the UN agreed to the Iraq transition government plan was because Spain pulled its troops out?

Get this one. They've made a compromise at the United Nations, right? Got the Yanks, Brits, Frogs and Toads, the Russians, and the Iraqis on board, all agreed about what's going to happen, a "multinational" force under US command more or less like what's going on now. Meanwhile, Spain just pulled out all its troops, so they can't exactly get back on board.

Well, Foreign Minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos says that the Spanish withdrawal from Iraq was the "detonator" that caused the UN agreement. "We placed on the table the necessity of going toward a new model of political transition that will return the Iraqis' sovereignty to them, and this is thanks to the diplomacy of the Spanish Administration." Moratinos believes that the Americans' tipping point, which led them to try for another UN resolution, "has its origins in Zapatero's decision." Rajoy is shooting back, calling Zap a liar since he had said that there would be no UN resolution before June 30, his deadline for pulling out the Spanish troops. Says Rajoy, how the hell did Zap get Spain in such a position that it now has no influence over what France and Germany get together and decide with the States and the UK.

Nelson says this type of bombast is typically Spanish. He ends with an elephant & ant joke you will enjoy.

File this one under "killing your parents and then throwing yourself on the mercy of the court because you're an orphan":

The United Nations decided over the weekend to suspend its construction project in the Jenin refugee camp after Palestinian gunmen threatened crews rebuilding houses destroyed during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002. [ all two square blocks - ed. ] Five men armed with M-16 rifles raided the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) offices in the camp on Friday to protest that the new houses were two small. The gunmen threatened to harm the UN staff if their demands for larger houses were not met.

. . . One of the attackers complained that the 180 square meter apartment he had been given was too small for him and his wife. "Soon we will have children and this apartment would be too small," he told the UN staff.

180 sq.meters is 1936 sq.feet. This is a 1936 sq. ft. house.

It's possible that the reporter got the figures wrong and the proposed house was really 180 sq. ft., which would indeed be very small. Definitely worth threatening the aid workers with guns.

This is a perfect example of dysfunctional family members passing along abuse. Arafat abuses the Palestinian people, who say "We can't leave him, he's our leader even though he treats us like shit." Then the Palestinian people abuse the UN, which says "We have to keep trying to satisfy their demands, even though they treat us (and everyone else) like shit." Or perhaps the UN is like naive inexperienced social workers with boundary problems. One wonders just what it would take to get them to set limits.

UPDATE: Some context from Imshin.

Friday, June 11, 2004

 
posted by Judith Weiss 6/11/2004 04:22:21 PM

Anyone but Kerry Dept. This is a sober, point-by-point examination of Kerry's probably performance in the White House based on his decades of (under) performance in the Senate. The headings are provocative:

1. Does he work well with others?
2. No visible political courage.
3. Yep. No vision.
4. No fallback salesmanship.

Of course he might grow into the office, as Bush did.

Speaking of Kerry's performance in the Senate, one of the many times he didn't show up to his job was when it was voting on Bush's Project BioShield Act of 2003. But now that Kerry has decided he is only going to win if he is tough on terror, he thinks bio-terrorism is a big deal.

Just a reminder that this isn't just about Kerry's record, character, and cluelessness (or past performance). It's also about the same attributes in his friends and supporters.

Speaking of which, Kerry visits Reagan's coffin.

Can you imagine Kerry doing this?

(Previous ABK posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

UPDATE: For those of you handicapping the Kerry VP sweepstakes, you can cross McCain off your list.

 
posted by Judith Weiss 6/11/2004 02:36:40 PM

Nation-building. Via Winds of Change, I found this blog by journalist Laura Rozen. I always appreciate smart sophisticated analysis that challenges my biases, and she seems to know a lot of Beltway insiders as well.

Like Laura, I am not cynical about the benefits of promoting democracy around the world, and I don't disagree with her preferred methods (scroll down to the next-to-the-last paragraph), I just don't think they would work in Iraq without an initial military intervention. Unlike the examples Laura gives here, Saddam's regime was not going to collapse of its own accord, for several reasons:

1) Primarily, the oil wealth of Iraq. Too many people (and governments) were willing to continue to pay Saddam for his oil, take advantage of kickbacks, and sell him weapons, in spite of sanctions. And his neighborhood has managed to exert outsized influence on the UN, distorting its purpose, because of the world's dependence on its combined oil wealth.

2) Few other regimes in Saddam's "bad neighborhood" were making the transition to democracy; in fact, rather than being influenced by the only country in the region that is a democracy, they had a longstanding commitment to scapegoat it for their own failures and eliminate it. And because of their wealth they could get away with this attitude for decades. One of the purposes of the Iraq war was to establish a beachhead of democracy in the neighborhood which would start the dominos falling. Whether or not this is realistic (I think it is), the neighbors are sufficiently frightened to fund insurgents and denounce the occupation.

3) Saddam's ambitions were more global than those of the two-bit South American and African dictators she describes. His aggressiveness, financial support of the most fanatical terrorists, and continuing wealth were a lethal combination that would not yield to the kind of shaming from without and challenge from within that have been successful in other places.

Most of the following reasons for invading Iraq could not be addressed by shaming, isolating, and supplying internal resistance movements:

Saddam was in the cross-hairs for a bunch of reasons -- he was a tyrant of worst sort who richly deserved to be removed, he was a nutcase who seemed to be becoming increasingly detached from reality who was sitting right next to the whole world's oil source and could raise holy Hell with the world economy by attacking the Saudis or other countries in the area, he was not immortal and we were afraid of the country falling into civil war disrupting the oil supply when he died, he supported terrorism ( in Palestine, for example) which is currently a big no-no, he seemed to be working on very worrisome weapons, he was dissing us by shooting at our planes in the no fly zone and thumbing his nose at us in a part of the world where it is dangerous to appear weak, we had already passed a law calling for his ouster (in 1998 under Clinton), he was in violation of the peace treaty that ended the first Gulf war, he was in violation of many UN resolutions, his country seemed relatively weak and easy to conquer (compared to Iran or NK -- God help us if we ever have to invade NK), our military was ready to finish him off and had been preparing and planning to do so for a long time, his country seemed like a good lodgment in the region for a military base as a way to put pressure on Iran and Syria, taking his country was a way to end our military basing in Saudi which was provoking problems there and which was unwanted there and which was insecure there, taking his country would put the fear of God into the Arabs who considered us weak and perhaps make them more cooperative, taking his country might allow us to gather intelligence regarding terrorism and the clandestine trade in WMD components, taking his country might draw in terrorists whom we could kill or capture there rather than on our own turf, and finally taking his country would allow us to try to go after the "deep causes" of Arab hatred of us by giving them the chance to have some kind of democracy or at least civilized order to live under -- the most ambitious part of the whole thing. I'm sure there are other reasons not listed above.

As they say, a war against Saddam was "over-determined".

Finally, 4) Has the West been as willing to shame (and cut off funding to) the Arab tyrants as it has been to shame those of Eastern Europe, Africa, and South America? Western opinion-makers certainly haven't romanticized Arab despotism more egregiously than their earlier counterparts did the huge Communist enterprises of the 20th century (it would be difficult to), but a lot of the admiration for Communist dictators died down as those regimes crumbled or mutated. Has the Western leftist's love affair with the Arab world run its course? For example, the EU is still funding and excusing Arafat, in spite of internal efforts to expose his misuse of their money.

(While we're on the subject of nation-building, a UN official suggests that the poor Iraqis should suffer under the same fractious, paralyzing, identity-driven parliamentary system as Israel. Oy.)

 
posted by Judith Weiss 6/11/2004 09:48:21 AM

Way cool stuff. This guy lived with American soldiers in Baghdad for weeks, going out on patrol with them, and he's making a film about it. Check out the trailers.

Speaking of Baghdad, in the midst of swirling chaos some people can still find time to reply to personal ads.

Speaking of Craig's List personals, here's a collection of choice posts.

Speaking of weird personal fetishes: pencil carving!

Speaking of obsessively detailed things one can do to pass time during extended periods of sensory deprivation, here's a story about one man's attempt to make good use of his prison sentence.

 
posted by William Leon 6/11/2004 08:09:03 AM

Reagan understood the U.S. relationship with Israel:

He understood viscerally that Israel was a friend of freedom and a strategic asset in countering Soviet influence in the Middle East. His support was never based on domestic considerations, but rather on his moral and strategic understandings. Here, too, he understood the big truths and acted on them. The little truths sometimes had to fend for themselves. It has been said that some people walk into our lives and make small steps and leave; others make big steps, and we are never the same. Ronald Wilson Reagan was one of those big steppers. ("Reagan: Big Steps Altered Jewish Politics," by Marshall Breger, The Forward)

Wednesday, June 09, 2004

 
posted by William Leon 6/9/2004 08:34:30 PM

Farewell to Ronnie: Two of the most touching statements in tribute to former President Ronald Reagan were given on the floor of the House of Representatives today, by Henry Hyde and Chris Cox.

No stranger to great oratory and having learned it at the feet of Reagan, Cox gave a stirring statement on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre last week as well.

UPDATE: A roundup of encomiums on Reagan from people whose lives were changed by his policies: those who used to live behind what used to be the Iron Curtain. More here. And another reminiscense by the inimitable Rottweiler.

UPDATE: The most comprehensive link roundup and personal reflection on Reagan, emphasizing his role in ending the Cold War.

UPDATE: Iowahawk captures the bemused condescension of the punditry.

Sunday, June 06, 2004

 
posted by Judith Weiss 6/6/2004 02:23:58 PM

The pivot of history. Today is the 60th anniversary of D-Day. Blackfive is curating a blogburst on the topic.

Meanwhile, visit Silent Running for a foray into an alternate universe where "Beebvision" comments on the events of WWII with the same attitude the BBC has today.
(You can also start here and click backwards through the previous posts to get the whole thing.)

[ UPDATE: An editorial cartoon with the same idea. ]

Alan takes us on a tour of antiwar and anti-Roosevelt opinion before the US entered WWII. Eye-opening. Believe it or not, Roosevelt had it worse than Bush.

UPDATE: More about public opinion on how to deal with Hitler.

. . . there were people arguing throughout the 1930s that actually the way to deal with Hitler was to make a gesture of disarmament. Now we look back and say, 'How on earth could anyone have thought that was sensible?' But that was for a time in fact the predominant view.

The second thing is how big a gamble politically President Roosevelt was taking in committing America, first of all to helping, and then to committing forces. It is sometimes forgotten that in the prewar presidential elections each of the candidates had to line up and say, 'on no account will we get drawn into any European conflict'. And that's why this transatlantic alliance is felt so keenly on their side as well as ours.

. . . Chamberlain when he came back from Munich was an absolute hero. People forget that. In the early hours of the morning Chamberlain had to go up on the balcony of Downing Street in order to greet the crowd or otherwise they wouldn't disperse. Now we look back on Munich, and what that piece of paper has become a symbol of, and it reminds you that history tends to judge things rather differently.

Saturday, June 05, 2004

 
posted by Judith Weiss 6/5/2004 11:17:54 PM

Ronald Reagan, 1911-2004. I was determinedly apolitical during the Reagan decade. Or rather, my politics were the closest they ever came to crunchy anarchic anti-globalism (although - always a straddler of subcultures - I still hung out with my yuppie Libertarian Party buds). So in my world, Reagan was the anti-Christ, much as Bush is today to many of the people I hung out with then. Although I vaguely appreciated that he said the right things about the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, I was still an embattled liberal and Reagan was still the evil villain of the AIDS epidemic. But mostly I avoided political discussion and taking positions, maybe because I knew if I did I would become consumed. As I am now.

So whatever I would say about Ronald Reagan would be very distanced and vague, so I will point you to these folks:
Michele Catelano.
"Tacitus" here and here.
Arthur Chrenkoff.
Michael Totten.
Terry Teachout.
Tim Blair has more here and here.
Maroonblog - start here and scroll.

UPDATE: Meryl's views on Reagan are closest to mine.
Hitchens goes for the jugular.

UPDATE: Various Reagan conversions.