20 Years On: "The case for removing the worst of the Arab prison states looks more justifiable than ever, even as the blunders involved in its execution look even more unpardonable...."

"The case for removing the worst of the Arab prison states looks more justifiable than ever, even as the blunders involved in its execution look even more unpardonable....
    "[The] account [must begin] with the singular figure of Saddam Hussein. The decision to employ force cannot be understood without taking stock of the dictator’s perverse 'role and agency,' and no amount of revisionism can efface his incessant malice, aggression, and volatility.
    "The regime of absolute control and capricious terror in Baghdad established what the Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya called a 'republic of fear, or what the country’s first post-war president, Jalal Talabani, once described as 'a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave beneath it.' 

    "Before the arrival of coalition forces, Iraq was an abattoir of repression at home, and a font of menace and violence abroad. Although the rule of the Ba’ath Party has seldom been omitted from retrospective evaluations of the causes of the war, it has generally been given short shrift. It’s therefore not especially surprising that Saddam Hussein is now widely regarded as a phantom threat, and that the war has come to be perceived as the outcome of a conspiracy.
    "[We should not overlook] the moral and strategic challenges posed to American power by Iraq’s ancien régime. Perhaps one anecdote will illuminate the character of the modern totalitarian state the Ba’athists modeled on those of Hitler and Stalin. On July 22nd, 1979, just days after he assumed the presidency of Iraq, Saddam Hussein convened an urgent assembly of the Ba’ath Party leadership. One of his lieutenants opened the meeting by announcing a treasonous plot in which the conspirators were said to be present, and an old party rival bearing the signs of torture was produced to identify the 68 supposed collaborators. As the names were haltingly recited and the accused were detained, panic swept the room. Desperate to assure the new leader of their loyalty, some of the remaining delegates broke into hysterical chants of 'Long live Saddam!' 

 

    "A few days later, 22 of the 68 accused were brought to the courtyard of the same building for execution. The penalty would be meted out by the delegates themselves, to whom Hussein personally handed pistols, thereby ensuring their complicity with the new order.
    "The bloody origins of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship were indicative of the means of his rule. For decades, he would pursue forcible domination of the Middle East, and vast quantities of Iraq’s petroleum revenue were devoted to purchasing the instruments of war and genocide. The ambition to lay his hands on weapons of mass destruction persisted even in the face of daunting obstacles. In 1975, four years before he became president, the Iraqi Ba’athists inked a deal with French prime minister Jacques Chirac to acquire a nuclear reactor. The facility was later destroyed by an Israeli airstrike, but not even this brush with foreign power on Iraqi soil caused a rethink of the country’s nuclear aspirations. As Saddam later confessed to his American interrogators, these aspirations never ceased and were judged a necessary insurance policy for a regime dedicated to expansionism. As Saddam himself later put it, 'the boundaries of our aims and ambitions … extend through the whole Arab homeland.'...
    "The unintended consequence [however] of destroying Iraq’s Ba’athist tyranny without securing the institutions of free government was to release forces of barbarism straight out of [Conrad's] Heart of Darkness. But whatever may be said of this Rousseauian failure of imagination on the part of the American government, it scarcely undermined the casus belli. In fact, the vicious forces empowered by Saddam Hussein that swarmed into the power vacuum after his fall were part of the case for war to begin with. The evisceration of Iraqi civil society and the increasingly Islamist character of Ba’athist rule prefigured the descent into mayhem after he was swept from power. Had his reign been permitted to continue, the most plausible scenario would have been the eventual implosion of the regime under its own weight, turning a rogue state into a failed state.
    ... Advocates of a more humble foreign policy are always ready to explain the risks of using power, and seldom address the risks of not doing so. In the case of Saddam Hussein, this is a colossal mistake. It is perfectly possible to argue that the manifold blunders involved in the policy of ushering Iraq into a new era pale in comparison to the failure of refusing to confront its insane regime for so long.
    "To put the matter another way: Whatever the costs of the US military engagement in Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s nightmarish tyranny was never going to be anything approaching a compliant partner in the international order. In all likelihood, it was going to enlarge its own power at the expense of every decent movement and state in its orbit until it was removed by force or collapsed into mayhem. By 2003, invading forces encountered a country already in an advanced state of disarray. Even more than other autocracies that abound in the Arab world, Ba’athist Iraq had kept society under a lid of oppression, stultifying the social, political, and economic development of the country. In due course, its implosion—whether by internal revolt or fratricide between the despot’s sons—would have unleashed a hideous orgy of violence. Absent the helping hand of international security forces, post-Saddam Iraq would have made the bloodletting of the Lebanese civil war look tame by comparison.
    "The experiment in participatory politics in postwar Iraq has been a messy and sometimes nasty arena of sectarian rivalry and confessional jostling.... The Ba’athist-Bin Ladenist forces arrayed against the new Iraq were eventually routed, but not before inflicting grievous wounds, both in Iraq and on the American psyche. The costs and failures of the war stimulated a remarkable coincidence of view between cynical conservatives and soft-headed progressives across the West that remains largely intact to this day. The public lost faith in the traditional mission of US foreign policy to shore up the international system. Despite America’s robust material support for Ukraine, it’s clear that the cause of American activism has not quite recovered from the war in Iraq.
    "Some two decades after the Iraq War was launched, its hold on America’s imagination has not slipped. But if it’s to be a determining influence over Americans’ view of the world and their role in it, a more sober consideration of its lessons is needed. Greater accuracy in our hindsight will sharpen our foresight. It therefore remains a relevant question whether the world would be better off were Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic sons still in power in Baghdad. Years after the demise of the Arab awakening, the case for removing the worst of the Arab prison states looks more justifiable than ever, even as the blunders involved in its execution look even more unpardonable."

~ Brian Stewart, from his post 'Chronicle of a WAR, 20 Years On'

* * * *

"... most worryingly of all, the West has forgotten how to set up a successful civil government in an occupied area. In the long run this last concern is the most serious, and it might mean that the brutality becomes more visible, and [the conquered country] more bloodstained.
    "And it is serious for another reason. What about the other terrorist-supporting governments that should be in George W. Bush's sights? If terrorism is to be toppled then the governments of Libya, Sudan, Jordan, Syria, Iran and Iraq must be toppled and replaced - and NOT with the fascist-leaning puppets that the US has supported in the past...
    "If Bush can't set up successful civil governments in these countries, then he may have to call off the War Against Terrorism early, just as his father called off the Gulf War early for the self-same reason.
    "As you may recall, the Gulf War ended in 1991 with the US reluctant to finish the war as they should have - with the toppling of Saddam Hussein. When Bush senior stopped the turkey shoot on the road to Baghdad, it wasn't just a loss of courage - it was also the realisation that they had no end-game, that they wouldn't know what to do when they got there."

~ me, from my 2001 post 'The Roots of Peace'

* * * * 

"[T]he notion that the Bush administration deceived the American people has become the accepted narrative of how we went to war.
    "Yet in spite of all the accusations of White House 'manipulation' -- that it pressured intelligence analysts into connecting Hussein and Al Qaeda and concocted evidence about weapons of mass destruction -- administration critics continually demonstrate an inability to distinguish making claims based on flawed intelligence from knowingly propagating falsehoods.
    "In 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously approved a report acknowledging that it “did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments.” The following year, the bipartisan Robb-Silberman report similarly found 'no indication that the intelligence community distorted the evidence regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction'....
    "Iraq-Al Qaeda links were 'substantiated by intelligence information.' The same goes for claims about Hussein’s possession of biological and chemical weapons, as well as his alleged operation of a nuclear weapons programme.
    "Four years on from the first Senate Intelligence Committee report, war critics, old and newfangled, still don’t get that a lie is an act of deliberate, not unwitting, deception. If Democrats [and others who] wish to contend they were 'misled' into war, they should vent their spleen at the CIA....
    "This may sound like ancient history, but it matters. After Sept. 11, President Bush did not want to risk allowing Hussein, who had twice invaded neighbouring nations, murdered more than 1 million Iraqis and stood in violation of 16 U.N. Security Council resolutions, to remain in possession of what he believed were stocks of chemical and biological warheads and a nuclear weapons program. By glossing over this history, the ... lies-led-to-war narrative provides false comfort in a world of significant dangers."

~ Los Angeles Times, from their 2008 op-ed 'The White House Didn't Lie About Iraq'

* * * * 

"While mistakes were made by both the Bush administration and the Obama administration, those mistakes were of different kinds and of different magnitudes in their consequences, though both sets of mistakes are worth thinking about, so that so much tragic waste of blood and treasure does not happen again.

    "Whether it was a mistake to invade Iraq in the first place is something that will no doubt be debated by historians and others for years to come. But, despite things that could have been done differently in Iraq during the Bush administration, in the end President Bush listened to his generals and launched the military 'surge' that crushed the terrorist insurgents and made Iraq a viable country.
    "The most solid confirmations of the military success in Iraq were the intercepted messages from Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq to their leaders in Pakistan that there was no point sending more insurgents, because they now had no chance of prevailing against American forces. This was the situation that Barack Obama inherited — and lost.
    "Going back to square one, what lessons might we learn from the whole experience of the Iraq war? If nothing else, we should never again imagine that we can engage in 'nation-building' in the sweeping sense that term acquired in Iraq — least of all building a democratic Arab nation in a region of the world that has never had such a thing in a history that goes back thousands of years.
    "Human beings are not inert building blocks, and democracy has prerequisites that Western nations took centuries to develop. Perhaps the reshaping of German society and Japanese society under American occupation after World War II made such a project seem doable in Iraq.
    "Had the Bush administration pulled it off, such an achievement in the Middle East could have been a magnificent gift to the entire world, bringing peace to a region that has been the spearhead of war and international terrorism....
    "Despite the mistakes that were made in Iraq, it was still a viable country until Barack Obama made the headstrong decision to pull out all the troops, ignoring his own military advisers, just so he could claim to have restored 'peace,' when in fact he invited chaos and defeat.."

~ Thomas Sowell, from his 2015 post 'Who Lost Iraq?'

"As always there are lessons both to avoid and to emulate from history, and a lesson too from this capitulation: 

• Subduing and modifying Japan and putting it on a path to peace and prosperity after WWII: Six years and the destruction of Shintoism as an ethical code.
• Reconstructing Germany and setting it on a path to peace and prosperity after WWII: Seven years, and the destruction of Nazism as an ideology.
• Reconstructing Iraq (including hunting down and killing the killers and those who supply them) and setting Iraq on a path to peace and prosperity: Too difficult. 

"Setting both Germany and Japan on the path to peace and prosperity -- making havens of peace and prosperity at the heart of Europe and at the door to Asia, and putting down the twin bacilli of Shinto nationalism and German national socialism -- this was selfishly important to anyone who valued a peaceful world ravaged by decades of strife and war, and was done by people who knew what they were doing. Just as selfishly important now would [have been] a haven of secular peace in the ravaged Middle East.
    "Now I grant you that the knowledge of how to set up a country from the rubble has clearly been lost (just another symptom of the modern-day philosophical collapse), and German and Japanese reconstruction did not have sworn enemies in the country next door supplying arms, money and training to brainwashed killers (that this continues so brazenly is another symptom of the timidity brought to the war against Islamic totalitarianism), but surely there should be recognition that setting up a post-war country ravaged by tribal and religious conflict takes years, not months, and that making a haven in the Middle East for peace and prosperity is of selfish importance to everyone in the west."

~ me, from my 2007 post 'Democrats Vote for Cut and Run'

"In 1945, the knowledge existed to successfully rebuild countries after they'd been liberated from savagery. But by 1991's Gulf War, even the victors had realised that knowledge had gone. Disappeared. Gone with the wind. So they didn't drive to Baghdad, because they knew enough to know they wouldn't know what to do when they got there.

    "They still don't."

~ me from my 2021 post, 'Kabul'

Chilcot, Blair and the rights of invasion

 

“Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the non-existent “rights” of gang rulers. It is not a free nation’s duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses."
~ Ayn Rand on ‘Self-Determination of Nations’

Any decision to take men and women into war must be made with the utmost seriousness and sincerity.  Trying to peer beneath all the invective over the last decade about the decision taken to invade Iraq makes it almost impossible to see whether that was so in this case. “This rage over the Iraq war and inchoate desire for revenge has driven the collective political psyche in Britain and the West off the rails,” says Melanie Phillips in The Times.

I supported the war against Saddam and still do. I also think, though, that in many crucial respects it was misconceived from the start and subsequently managed with astounding incompetence, ignorance and cowardice.
    The Bush and Blair administrations failed to understand they were entering a tribal minefield. They failed to acknowledge the need to stop Iran fomenting sectarian strife in Iraq. They also failed to commit themselves to the long haul in order to defeat Islamist terror.

It was a job half-done, its reasons poorly explained; the plan for the end-game, tragically, was dismal – barely conceived, if it ever was.

So … “Blair lied, people died.” “No blood for oil.” “Bush’s lapdog.” “Where was the WMD?” Too much commentary has been little more than bumper-sticker lite, not the thoughtful analysis the subject demands. Seven years in the making, the 12-volumes-worth of Chilcot report, issued overnight, should be that document.

Its executive summary certainly makes former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who led the British push for war, look terrible. According to the report, Blair made statements about Iraq’s nonexistent chemical, biological, and nuclear programs based on “what Mr. Blair believed” rather than the intelligence he had been given. The U.K. went to war despite the fact that “diplomatic options had not been exhausted.” Blair was warned by British intelligence that terrorism would “increase in the event of war, reflecting intensified anti-US/anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world, including among Muslim communities in the West.”
    On the other hand, the inquiry explicitly says that it is not “questioning Mr. Blair’s belief” in the case for war — i.e., it is not accusing him of conscious misrepresentations.

And after all those years being written, Julie Lenarz among others can still identify crucial omissions:

1) It's quite remarkable that Sir John failed to mention the attempt by the US and UK to resolve the conflict with Saddam peacefully by pushing new sanctions through the UNSCR, as the old sanctions regime was violated on a daily basis. That attempt was vetoed by Russia.
2) It's even more remarkable that Sir John made such bold statements about bad judgement on behalf of TB without acknowledging once the evidence he received from Hans Blix, the UN's chief weapons inspector and by no means a supporter of the war.
    a) “It seemed plausible to me at the time, and I also felt — I, like most people at the time, felt that Iraq retains weapons of mass destruction. I did not say so publicly. I said it perhaps to Mr Blair in September 2002 privately… I talked to Prime Minister Blair on 20 February 2002 and then I said I still thought that there were prohibited items in Iraq.”
    b) “I have never questioned the good faith of Mr Blair or Bush or anyone else. On some occasions when I talked to Blair on the telephone, 20 February, I certainly felt that he was absolutely sincere in his belief.”

It’s too easy now to forget that there was a case for war – a “legitimate case to be made for the removal of a genocidal regime.” Phillips reminds us of some of the selfish reasons for ending the regime, arguing that without the Iraq War Saddam would now be riding the tiger of .Islamist terror.

Saddam was a highly significant threat to the West. He was a godfather of international terrorism.
   He was behind the plot to murder George HW Bush. Audiotapes of his conversations with key officials revealed that al-Qa’ida had been in contact with Iraqi intelligence for sanctuary, training and planning acts of terrorism against the US.
    Saddam’s refusal to show that he had stopped developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, as he was required to do by the UN, reinforced the belief among western intelligence services that he was still engaged in these programs.
   In 1998, the threat Saddam posed to the West had caused Bill Clinton to sign the Iraq Liberation Act, which called for Saddam’s removal and a forced end to his WMD programs. Clinton didn’t follow through.
    The events of 9/11, however, changed the calibration of risk, overnight. It wasn’t that Saddam was generally thought to be responsible for those attacks. It was rather that, with the new realisation Islamic terrorism breached all previously understood constraints of warfare, Saddam’s regional ambitions, sponsorship of terrorism and pursuit of WMD made the threat he posed no longer tolerable.

These reasons were made at the time, poorly heard, and now only dimly remembered, but they were made and understood. “The case for overthrowing Saddam,” argued Christopher Hitchens in 2005, “was unimpeachable”—and Blair “the only statesman from the nineties to emerge from the decade with any credit on this front.”

The man he helped depose, unquestionably, was a monster:

 

All known and understood at the time. But then suddenly, once the Coalition went to war, as Phillips recognises: “Saddam was said never to have been a threat at all, and logic, reason and proportion went out of the window.”

The apparent over-egging of questionable intelligence about Saddam’s WMD programs was held to prove that they had long been junked altogether. The failure to find any stocks of WMD was held to prove that Saddam was no longer trying to produce the stuff. Absence of evidence was held to be evidence of absence.
    The Iraq Survey Group’s interim report saying Saddam was pursuing biological weapons programs up to the start of the war was brushed aside. The Israelis who said WMD stocks may have been moved to Syria were brusquely dismissed. Former US general James Clapper, the present director of national intelligence, and ex-general Thomas McInerney, who said the same thing in 2003 and 2006, were ignored.
    In 2004, an American defence official, John Shaw, claimed that Saddam’s WMD stockpiles had been moved to Syria by the Russians. In 2006, I interviewed Georges Sada, Saddam’s former air vice-marshal. He told me Saddam had transported chemical and biological stockpiles by air and road to Syria in late 2002.
    The legacy of the Iraq war has been toxic. The British people now seem reluctant to believe warnings by politicians or intelligence officials about threats from the Islamic world and even less willing to countenance any military action to counter any such threat.
    If Saddam were still around today, he would be riding the tiger of Islamist terror, as he always did, and the threat to us all would be even greater.

Chilcot is supposed to suggest lessons we must learn from the Iraq war. This is the main one: the core reason the war was botched was the West’s failure to acknowledge the nature, scale and complexity of the threat from the Arab and Islamic world.
    The persecution of Tony Blair shows that this failure remains just as true today.

Perhaps that makes Chilcot’s Report the worst kind of whitewash.

The important, humane task of understanding the history and politics of that calamity in 2003 has been sacrificed at the altar of allowing a needy elite the space in which to say: ‘Blair is evil, and I am good.’

.

Stability over insanity in Iraq...yeah, right

With New Zealand wanting a seat on the UN Security Council, it can't just stay quiet about ISIS, says Olivia Pierson in this Guest Post.

Before 2003, when Saddam Hussein tyrannised Iraq with his secret police, torture chambers and death squads, many, if not most in the west, claimed that he was still the best man for the job "because he kept stability in the region."

In fact, he was the brutal dictator of a psychopathic regime left to dehumanise Iraqi citizens, systematically breaking their hearts and minds over a thirty year time-line. That is until the coalition forces led by America and Britain finally deposed him, resulting in his long-overdue execution. Iraq never was, and will not be in the near future, anything close to stable, unless your idea of stable is tormented and tyrannised.

In the wake of the burgeoning cruelty dished out by the new Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS, NZ Prime Minister John Key said that he wouldn’t want to put NZ troops into Iraq, "because this is a civil war between two groups, Sunni and Shi’ite." He echoes the same sentiments as do his idols, Barack Obama and David Cameron.

The thing that John Key and the boys don’t get is that ISIS is a Sunni-led terrorist corporation, with 2 billion dollars at its disposal thanks to its backers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and its looting of Iraqi banks. They are Sunni Muslims hell-bent on becoming a full-blown medieval Islamic Caliphate, who are butchering members of all other sects, including other Sunni Muslims. This is not just a civil war between two Muslim enclaves; this is an attempt by jihadists to wipe out any form of Islam that doesn’t impose Sharia Law, along with all Jews, Christians and infidels worldwide.

ISIS seeks to remake the world in its own pathological image. Through clever branding, technological savvy, a single-minded purpose, overwhelming violence and the primal call for all true Muslims around the world to join their crusade of death, their numbers are swelling. They have already taken the North-East of Syria and a third of Iraq, including the Mosul dam, which itself can be used as a terror-tool to drown hundreds-of-thousands of Iraqis, if they so choose. They have set up terror-training camps where they are teaching young Muslims who have responded to their call, from all parts of the world including Europe, America and Australia, how to kill, rape, maim, crucify and behead civilians, including children. These radicals will return to their home countries to inflict their "holy cause" on western civilian life, otherwise known as infidels.

Welcome to the harsh reality that Islam is a political ideology, not merely a religion – and there's no reformation in sight!

John Key has brought New Zealand back into NATO and is seeking a seat on the UN Security Council. Former Prime Minister Helen Clark is in the running to hold the top UN position currently occupied by Ban Ki-Moon. That places NZ in an important position regarding its voice on geopolitical issues. John Key has stated that he supports the US air-strikes over Northern Iraq in order to aid the brutalized Yazidis and Kurdish forces on the frontline against ISIS. But this is not enough. As the Islamic State swells its ranks, they will be able to overwhelm resistance.

This is the moment jihadists have been anticipating for many years, if not decades. It is estimated that there are 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide, seven percent of whom are conservatively deemed "radical"; that’s 112 million. If only one percent of said radicals respond to the call of the new Caliphate, that is a fighting force of 1.12 million deadly terrorists.

With full knowledge of the idea being utterly unappealing, I submit that troops on the ground are inevitable – the alternative is the spreading of pure hell. Considering that all modern countries will be affected by the despicable tactics of the new Islamic State, it would be prudent, though not attractive, to step forward firmly on the offensive, in concert, to send a clear message to Islam around the world that their jihadist’s agenda will be vanquished.

John Key and Helen Clark ought to stay open to all options, no matter how unedifying, instead of making statements about not supporting intervention in the form of ground troops. The well-signposted withdrawal of American troops from Iraq helped bring about this alarmingly swift catastrophe. After an eleven-year campaign and a very wobbly government, such an act was a betrayal of the Iraqi people, barely able to stand after the spirit-crushing abuses of Saddam. And now this.

* * * *

Olivia Pierson is an Auckland screenwriter.

 

UPDATE: Kurdish soldiers launch ground offensive to free Mosul dam …

Tony Blair on Terrorism

A good conversation, here, over the weekend, on fighting an ideology.

Meet the Press Sunday, host David Gregory suggested to former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair that the US, Britain and others made a mistake when they went after Saddam Hussein, which Gregory said only led to more terrorism.

Watch Blair’s response.

It makes you wonder whether his incredible unpopularity might just be because he still has the ability to concisely state uncomfortable truths.

Democracy is not freedom: An Egyptian case study [updated]

I keep being told by people “in the know” that the coming of “real democracy” to Egypt will bring real freedom.

Rubbish.

The whole idea is premised on the idea that what “pro-democracy” protestors want is what you and I want. That democracy is a synonym for freedom.

It’s not.

Democracy is simply a synonym for mob rule.

It’s a counting of heads regardless of content.

It is the worship of jackals by jackasses.

It’s three wolves and a sheep voting for dinner.

It was what George Bush and his neo-cons wanted to export to the Middle East. Their “Forward Strategy for Freedom” called for the exportation by force of democracy to the Middle East.

They succeeded.

And the people of the Middle East turned out in droves to vote for the wolves.

Democracy, said the neo-cons, would bring freedom and security to the Middle East. Instead, it unleashed a whirlwind.

Democracy in Iraq gave the people an Islamic constitution and a regime that favours Tehran.

Democracy in Palestine delivered a landslide victory to the Iranian-backed Hamas—who began establishing a totalitarian Islamist regime and unleashing a wave of suicide bombings, before collapsing into a civil war with Fatah.

Democracy in Lebanon handed control of Lebanon to the Iranian-backed Hezbollah--who almost immediately started launching rockets into Israel, beginning a month-long war.

And what will democracy in Egypt bring    Well, guess . . .

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei has already called for Egyptians to rise up and install an Islamic state.

Would a regime mandating shariah law and genital mutilation represent “freedom” for Egyptian men and women?  Would its installation bring “security” to the Middle East?

Egypt is a country where the “all-encompassing and explicit system” of totalitarian Islam is widely supported across the spectrum—where stone-age barbarism is still the prevailing attitude, and more than 50% support the militant Muslim Brotherhood, the progenitors of Al Qaeda, and the only organised political opposition in the country.

Would their installation—or the installation of a “beard” for the Brotherhood like ElBaradei—would that represent freedom?

Egypt is a country with (thanks to the US who supplied them) the world’s tenth-largest military, and a population in which even the so-called “moderates” are violently anti-Semitic. Would a government giving expression to that violence increase security in the Middle East?

Democracy is not a synonym for freedom.

And the “Forward Strategy for Freedom” was a Forward Strategy for Failure.

Mob rule in Egypt will be one more sign of evidence of that failure.

What are the options for Egypt?

“The plight of Egypt — like that of much of the region — is intellectual. The protestors who genuinely do want a better future face no good options.”

UPDATE:  The Green Party is A-Okay with Egyptian mob rule that delivers theocracy, or an Egyptian democracy that wishes to wage war against its neighbours. 

“If the people of Egypt … want to wage war,” says the Green Party’s official blogger, “that is their democratic right.”

So much for the so called peace-loving secular credentials of the Green Party.

They're eating KFC here

                   
Where do you think this KFC outlet is located? 

Mangere? Cairo?  Fallujah?

Take a bow all those who picked the latter, formerly Iraq's most dangerous city.  Says the 'North Shore Journal' [hat tip Tim Blair]:

    Only a short time ago the city of Fallujah served as stronghold for insurgents. Daily skirmishes, improvised explosive device detonations and public unease made operating a business in the city very difficult...
    The KFC is the first to open for business in the city. Before improved conditions in the city, insurgents threatened business owners, demanding money to support acts of terrorism...  
    “I remember when I was here last in July 2004 and things were much different than they are now,” said Sgt. Steve J. Arnoux, a 25-year-old vehicle commander from Browning, Mont. “When we would go out on convoys in the city, the attitude was a lot different. It seemed like we were just waiting to get ambushed. Now we stop at KFC.”
    Citizens of the area can now work steady jobs, where as prior conditions kept many from even coming to work on a daily basis.
    “I love the work here, because we have the opportunity to go to work every day,” said a KFC employee.

UPDATE 1: And AP reports:

BAGHDAD (AP) — An oil refinery in Iraq's western desert has resumed production, the government said Sunday, as part of an outreach to an area once controlled by Sunni insurgents.
    And in the country's south, a new airport opened in Najaf in what the prime minister said was a key step in the reconstruction of a country devastated by war.

UPDATE 2: Michael Yon has a link to a Power Point presentation on some stats from Iraq. The success of the surge is deeply impressive [hat tip Half Done]

No lies

I love the pithiness of Aussie blogger Tim Blair:

Just for the record
George W. Bush didn’t lie.

Don't underestimate Saddam - Gore

Sanctimony comes easy to Al Gore, even when he's right -- as he is here in 1992 berating the Administration of Bush the Elder for ignoring the threat from Saddam Hussein: his cooperation with terrorists, his genocide, and his stock pile of WMD.

So, who lied?

NZ troops are propping up a theocracy

Every free country has the right to liberate a slave pen (allow me to remind careful readers of the difference between a right and a duty).  It has the right to hunt down those who have committed or intend to commit violence against its citizens.  These two principles -- the recognition of individual rights and of the right to self-defence -- were the twin justifications for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, an invasion and occupation supported by New Zealand troops, and it's clear enough from the fairly widespread support for the Afghanistan campaign that these two principles are at least dimly understood by everyone who possesses a greater grasp of world affairs than Keith Locke.

So why then are New Zealand troops in Afghanistan propping up a regime that is about to execute a young man for the crime of ... wait for it ... blasphemy?  That's right, blasphemy.  For the 'crime' of questioning the treatment of women in the Koran (something everyone who possesses a moral standing greater than Eliot Spitzer should undertake occasionally) Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh has been condemned to death by an Afghani court.

It wasn't supposed to be like this, was it?  As Idiot Savant says [hat tip Liberty Scott] "We wouldn't support Iran's rabid theocracy with troops; why are we supporting Afghanistan's?" An excellent question asked even by Peter Dunne.  I'm not sure either of them will like the answer spelled out, however.

The answer, as Yaron Brook and Elan Journo have argued in some detail, is that the twin campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq were not genuinely based on the principles of self-defence and individual rights.  While they began with the righteous indignation symbolised in the name chosen for the military campaign against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan: Operation Infinite Justice, Brook points out that "this reaction was evanescent," and as the name of the operation changed the campaign for self-defence eventually became something else quite different: a promise of "self-determination" for those liberated in the invasions and a promise to spread "democracy" to those with little or no understanding of the concept of freedom.  Since democracy is a counting of heads regardless of content, the result of spreading democracy to those whose heads are full of theocratic mush should have been obvious.

Whatever they chose, whomever they elected, Washington and its allies -- us included -- promised to endorse. The decision was entirely theirs.

If self-defense were part of the goal ... then one would logically expect that, for the sake of protecting American [and New Zealand] lives, Washington [on behalf of its allies] would at least insist on ensuring that the new regimes be non-threatening, so that we do not have to face a resurgent threat [or support a theocracy]. But Bush proclaimed all along that America would never determine the precise character of Iraq’s (or Afghanistan’s) new regime. The Iraqis [and Afghanis] were left to contrive their own constitution...

When asked [for example] whether the United States would acquiesce to an Iranian-style militant regime ..., Bush said yes. Why ...? Because, Bush explained, “democracy is democracy. . . . If that’s what the people choose, that’s what the people choose.”

What the majority of Afghanis chose for their country, as history now shows and Brook makes clear, was a theocracy that allows "legions of undefeated Taliban and Al Qaeda warriors to regroup and renew their jihad," and that murders its citizens for questioning a holy book that rates women below goats.

This is not what New Zealand troops should have been fighting for, and if that's all they're now there for then it's time that they weren't.

Watch out for the green bubble bath (updated)

In the seventeenth century it was the tulip bulb mania.  In the eighteenth it was the South Seas Bubble.  In the nineteen-twenties it was a stock market boom and a bubble in Florida swamp land; in the eighties a boom in sales of white shoes, gold chains and shoulder pads; and in the late nineties a "dot-com boom" in which even the most be-pimpled jandal-wearing geek was able to float an IPO to buyers eager to 'invest' their piles of borrowed government-created credit in schemes ranging from bizarre to unlikely.   All of these various bubbles imploded leaving investors taking a bath and creditors awash in un-backed IOUs -- which largely describes the government-created credit most 'investors' were using to seek their fortunes. 

The lesson is obvious enough: Boom leads to bust.  Today's rocket-fuelled "irrational exuberance" is tomorrow's rational reflection that every time the currency is inflated in the way central bankers periodically like to do, prices tend to inflate like the Hindenburg did just before the airship fell to earth in a shower of sparks.

Any time borrowers are flush with excess credit you see a boom in whatever borrowers like to decide is fashionable, and rampant inflation in prices in markets conveniently not measured in the central bankers' inflation-measuring baskets.  The most recent boom in property prices is just one bubble in which some investors are already taking a sub-prime bath.  Here's another to keep an eye on: Alternative energy. 

Notes Harper's magazine in support of this thesis, the alternative energy bubble has the legs to go all the way, just like the Hindenburg did: it's fashionable; it's driven by legislation and subsidy; and already companies like First Solar (who on the back of an 800% rise in share price were declared Wall Street Journal's "best 1-year performer" ) have become the darlings of Wall Street, despite a grand total of 12 clients, factories producing to capacity and what one analyst calls "an enormous multiplier." (Says Zachary Scheidt of Stearman Capital, "The deck seems stacked against shareholders at this time, not due to the inadequacy of management or the strength of the company, but simply due to the unbridled enthusiasm of investors.")  How bad will this bubble be?  Harper's estimates

the gross market value of all enterprises needed to develop hydroelectric power, geothermal energy, nuclear energy, wind farms, solar power, and hydrogen-powered fuel-cell technology—and the infrastructure to support it—is somewhere between $2 trillion and $4 trillion; assuming the bubble can get started, the hyperinflated fictitious value could add another $12 trillion. In a hyperinflation, infrastructure upgrades will accelerate, with plenty of opportunity for big government contractors fleeing the declining market in Iraq. Thus, we can expect to see the creation of another $8 trillion in fictitious value, which gives us an estimate of $20 trillion in speculative wealth, money that inevitably will be employed to increase share prices rather than to deliver “energy security.” When the bubble finally bursts, we will be left to mop up after yet another devastated industry.

Let us remind ourselves that this and every other bubble was created by debasing the currency -- a "seeming golden age — in reality, a thinly gilded one — during which the first, most favored issuers of cheap credit and artificially boosted equity prices enjoyed almost effortless success, but whose successes must eventually be paid in the destruction of real capital.   As Sean Corrigan notes, real, physical capital was never called into being quite so readily as the artificial credit created out of thin air by central banks, since the creation of real, physical capital "requires not the staccato keystroke of a fiat banker, but entrepreneurial vision, hard work, and genuine saving."

By that last we mean a voluntary abstention from current consumption, undertaken in order to improve the chance of greater plenty in the future, and not the corrupt preemption of a man's spending power — effected with monetary trickery — which inflationists laud as "forced saving." Being a species of initially unrecognized compulsion, this is a deceit doomed to fatal self-contradiction once its dupes wake up to the nature of the con being practiced upon them.

PS: Here's Czech president talking to Glen Beck about how freedom is more important than warmism and subsidised climate nonsense.

UPDATE: A reader has drawn my attention to the fact that while the Harper's article makes good sense on the possible energy boom-and-bust, it peddles pure Keynesian bullshit in earlier parts of the piece.  See here for example.  Readers are warned to skip the earlier paragraphs head straight to the sections on alternative energy, and discard the rest as arrant nonsense.

I love it when he talks Austrian

Ron Paul.  "I love it when he talks Austrian," says Dale Amon.

Hayek? .... Check!
Hazlitt? .... Check!
Von Mises? .... Check!
Ron Paul gave an extremely cogent economics talk to Seattle Business leaders which you can watch here.  He even wants to dump Sarbanes-Oxley. What more could you ask?

Well, as a commenter suggests, how about a candidate who doesn't wear a tinfoil hat and who will finish the job in Iraq.  That said, when he takes off the tinfoil and talks Austrian he is damn good.  Given Alan Bollard's regular departures from reality and Don Brash's own venture into tinfoil-hat territory in the middle of last week, it's a speech they urgently need to listen to themselves.
UPDATE: By the way, if you're in or near Auckland and you too want to talk Austrian economics, then my colleague Julian is about to start delivering a comprehensive year-long course based on George Reisman's textbook Capitalism, which will involve one lecture a week and deliver the goods like nothing else will [course details here].  There are still a couple of places left, so email me if you're interested: organon@ihug.co.nz.

The "long march through the culture," and the need to attack Trevor

Several blogs including The Hive, Quest for Security and Poneke have been all a-giggle about old Trevor Loudon and his predilection, they say, for seeing "communist fronts" everywhere, even in places as unlikely as the NZ-China Friendship Society.

Taking on established bloggers is par for the course for newer blogs like these bidding for attention, but the Hive and Poneke have enough integrity not to get their facts wrong  when they start a blog war, and they're good enough not to have to resort to blog wars to attract readers.  It's sad that they think they have to.

Gigglers like the 'Quest' bloggers are just useful idiots who know no better, but Hive and Poneke are intelligent enough, I would have thought, to know that the use of front organisations has been a pre-eminent strategy by communists for at least the last ninety years in injecting the foul bacillus of communism into the culture, and to know that if that wasn't the case it wouldn't be necessary to have people like Trevor eager to lift up the rocks of these front organisations to see what's crawling around behind the shiny public faces.

The "long march through the culture" that communism has enjoyed over the last ninety years, despite its bloody history over all of those years, was largely the result of 1)the 'moral disarmament' caused by the suffusion of religious morality and its extolling of sacrifice as a moral virtue -- a political blank cheque the communists have been ready, willing and better placed than the religionists to pick up -- and 2)the strategic thinking of (first) Leon Trotsky, and thence of one Antonio Gramsci, the co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, a talented theoretician who, as Lindsay Perigo explains,

put a distinctively modern, relativist stamp on traditional, dogmatist Marxism. He is Marx laced with Machiavelli (a Gramsci pin-up). Marx had implied the existence of truths independent of human perception; Gramsci cleansed Marx of any taint of objectivity and proclaimed that truth was entirely "pragmatic," "praxis"-driven, determined by the interests of the revolution. Marx had preached the historical inevitability of the triumph of socialism, independent of man's will; Gramsci taught that only the wilful, conscious but clandestine subversion of capitalist culture at every level—a "long march through the culture" as he put it—could effect revolution. He was frustrated that the proletariat had not only failed to rise up against capitalism but had seemingly grown enamoured of it! This infernal reactionary ourage he attributed to the bourgeoisie's "cultural hegemony," their domination of churches, schools, the media, the unions, the arts, etc. The bourgeoisie therefore had to be beaten at their own game, their institutions infiltrated by intellectual moles ... and, by a long, silent, subtle process, brought down.

The moles' agenda was not to be "revolution" explicitly, but something unexceptionable on its face, couched in weasel words with which we're all too familiar: "consensus," "mandate," "justice," "pluralism," "community," "democracy," "global [insert marshmallow noun here]," and so on. (Note the names of two of the groups associated with New Zealand's recent "terrorist camp" raids: “Global Peace and Justice Auckland,” spearheaded by communist John Minto, and “Peace Action Wellington”!)

Ever wondered why the church is riddled with atheist priests?
Think Gramsci!
Where "Liberation Theology" (Marxism set to Catholicism) came from?
Think Gramsci!
Why our schools and universities place social consensus above genuine learning and deal in the currency of Marxism disguised as mush?
Think Gramsci!
Why our newspapers and TV networks, now full of graduates from the schools and universities, do the same?
Think Gramsci!
Why "corporates" are universally despised as evil, even by the corporates themselves?
Think Gramsci!
Why the United States, the last semi-repository of bourgeois values, is "The Great Satan" to Muslim and non-Muslim alike all over the globe?
Think Gramsci!
Where the editor of Salient gets this sort of stuff from, "rebutting" my column on Global Warming:
"Go about your business now, keep consuming. The mindless corporations are protecting your interests— believe it—only lefty politicians subvert real science. Rest assured, greed is a good thing."

[For all of these manifestations of nonsense], Think Gramsci! Via Chomsky in this last instance—but remember where Chomsky got it from!

Other contemporary luminaries influenced by Gramsci include the pomowanker Foucault; and unsurprisingly, and, chillingly, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who just couldn't wait to bring his troops home from Iraq. Brown the weasel-worder, who has forbidden public servants to use the words "Muslim" and "terrorist" next to each other!

There's no question that the Left has taken its "long march through the culture" with devastating success. We are assailed by their bromides at every turn, and the Right has been mortally corrupted by them (as well as its own contradictions). Their "long march," with Gramsci at the helm, has dragged the world to the abyss of totalitarian Hell.

Thank goodness then for the likes of Trevor Loudon, who are happy to keep track of the "long march," however surreptitious the marchers, and for the likes of Lindsay Perigo, who unlike so many others knows that it's going to be a long haul back from the pomowankers and the nihilists, and via a very different path.

"We lovers of reason and freedom have to do a Gramsci of our own," says Perigo, but in favour of reason and freedom and capitalism.  This is a long march on which our culture is in desperate need. 

Who's with us?

Iraq death count "wildly exaggerated"

                      

The Wall Street Journal has now opened up its website to non-subscribers (or "lost its wall" in Tim Blair's words) just in time for me to link to their story on how the Iraqi death toll of 655,000 so gleefully reported around the globe in 2006 was 'sexed up.'

We know that number was wildly exaggerated. The news is that now we know why.

It turns out the Lancet study was funded by anti-Bush partisans and conducted by antiwar activists posing as objective researchers. It also turns out the timing was no accident. You can find the fascinating details in the current issue of National Journal magazine, thanks to reporters Neil Munro and Carl Cannon. And sadly, that may be the only place you'll find them. While the media were quick to hype the original Lancet report -- within a week of its release it had been featured on 25 news shows and in 188 newspaper and magazine articles -- something tells us this debunking won't get the same play.

The Lancet death toll was more than 10 times what had been estimated by the U.S. and Iraqi governments, and even by human rights groups...

The Lancet study could hardly be more unreliable. Yet it was trumpeted by the political left because it fit a narrative that they wanted to believe. And it wasn't challenged by much of the press because it told them what they wanted to hear. The truth was irrelevant.

As Investor's Business Daily reported at the time:

The study used a methodology known as "cluster sampling," which can be valid if using real data and not anecdotal reporting. Most of the original Lancet clusters reported no deaths at all, with the journal admitting, "two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Fallujah." Fallujah? Hello?

Fallujah at the time just happened to be a major concentration of pro-Saddam and anti-American sentiment, the home base for the homicide bombers and terrorist "resistance" before the U.S. Army and Marines cleared out that nest of thugs.

And the number of clusters used?  Just forty-seven.  Tim Blair points to a new count - suggesting a much lower toll - which draws from more than 1,000 clusters.  Don't expect that one to get wide coverage either.

It's not just that much of the press and the blogosphere won't want to admit the 'sexed up' death toll they so gleefully reported a year ago was wrong, it's not just that they hate to retract, it's also that they don't want to have to admit -- even to themselves -- that the counterinsurgency strategy implemented by General David Petraeus is working, that by any decent standard Petraeus is the Man of 2007, and that the Iraqis are generally better off now than they were under a bloody, murdering dictator.   To most of the world's press, the truth remains irrelevant to their 'narrative.'

In a world awash with non-objective journalism, thank goodness for the Wall Street Journal.

Eight for '08

Uncle Trev tagged me to post my eight wishes for 2008. I've confined myself to politics.

1. For the disquiet about Nanny State and the EFB that is now all but bubbling under to reach a tipping point, erupting into nationwide outrage against the onslaught of Nanny's soft fascism -- and widespread and insistent demands to beat the bitch back.
2. For New Zealand's Labour-Lite party to find a pair and come out with genuine policies promoting capitalist acts between consenting adults -- or that are even just a tiny bit more radical than those now advanced by Australia's new Labour Prime Minister.
3. For ACT (the "liberal" party) to promote policies actually based upon its founding principles; for the Maori and Green Parties to discover property rights; for Jim Neanderton, Winstone Peters and Peter Dung to be rejected by Wigram, Tauranga and Ohariu voters respectively, so that we never hear their ego-driven whining again.
4. For would-be Libz supporters to realise that it's about ideas, stupid; and for several Libz candidates to put together significant war chests for well-focussed, widely publicised constituency campaigns, by which New Zealanders discover the twin values of liberty and reason, and principled policies promoting same head to parliament.
5. For Alan Bollard to realise that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon -- and that it's his hand on the handle of the printing presses.
6. For Ron Paul supporters to realise that Gen Petraeus is winning in Iraq and that George Bush did not fly those planes into the World Trade Center; to rediscover Thomas Jefferson's policy on the Barbary Coast pirates and to take to heart the words of President Madison once the Barbary war was finally won (America's first victory over Islamic terrorists), to whit: “It is a settled policy of America, that as peace is better than war, war is better than tribute. The United States, while they wish for war with no nation, will buy peace with none.”
7. For warmists and the pro-warmist media to finally realise that the planet stopped warming in 1998, that climate models are as accurate as crystal balls, and that Al Bore and the IPCC emperors really don't have any clothes.
8. For American Objectivists to realise that the anti-human environmentalists and death-worshipping Islamic totalitarians in our faces are a more direct and imminent danger than are the right wing religionists they insist are under the bed.

And finally, a hope almost beyond hope for the demise of lies, spin and spin doctors, and the rise and rise of open and honest straight talking instead.

. . . I'm tagging, um, Callum, Scott, Woolfie, Graham, PhilAndLuke and MikeE and to post their own hopes for 2008 -- if they aren't out there somewhere well beyond civilisation and internet coverage as they should be at this time of year.

Presidential debates enmired in middle ground

You could take some time and watch the YouTube Republican presidential debates, or you could let bloggers like Myrhaf and Gus van Horn do the heavy lifting for you. Myrhaf for one was "appalled" by the debaters:

The Republican Party is in trouble. The candidates are all mixed economy mediocrities, with the possible exception of Ron Paul, who is out in left field. None had specific, courageous answers about what Thompson called the "entitlement tsunami" headed our way. By all indications, the presidency of any Republican except Paul will be an extension of Bush's policies. [A Paul presidency would be both different and worse. --GvH] Some made general statements about cutting spending, but only Paul gave specifics. The rest are too terrified of offending the legions of Americans who now suck off the federal teat...

The only two candidates who sounded like they had integrity were the libertarian antiwar candidate and the Christian big government candidate. The rest are the kind of middle-of-the-road hacks you would expect among Republican politicians. The candidates are in a welfare state bind: the only way to look principled is to risk angering some pressure groups full of voters; but being controversial is the quickest way to marginalization. It is impossible in today's America to be honest and principled about getting the government out of our lives and remain a serious candidate. I don't think I've ever been so depressed after a debate.

Notes van Horn, Given Myrhaf's previous analysis of what makes Hillary Clinton a weak candidate, the idea of a "Huckabee vibe" -- or other similar superficialities that supposedly inspire voters -- is frightening.

And a note to myself on that same depressing state: It is equally impossible in today's New Zealand to be honest and principled about getting the government out of our lives and remain a serious candidate. As the politically compromised Deborah Coddington observed recently, and just a trifle hyperbolically:

On one side, the state-worshipping collectivists, with thought processes which go something like: state-owned equals good - privately owned equals bad. They apply this same argument to education, health, security, transport, television, radio, and even water for heaven's sake.

On the other side, those vehemently opposed to anything run by the state except for the protection of life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness, call themselves the Libertarianz Party and look for cupboards in which to hold their annual conferences.

Just for the record it was a cupboard the size of a brewery in which the last conference was held. The point however remains depressingly the same: the middle-of-the-road hacks and the state-worshipping collectivists continue to flourish even as nanny's spending binge continues, her list of useless ministries, departments, agencies and quangoes and her bossiness both increase exponentially, and her infrastructure collapses around us.

Yes, it is depressing sometimes.

UPDATE: The Independent explains the last-man-standing reason the folksy Huckabee even has a "vibe."

How did it come to this? Mainly because all his better-known rivals have defects. Mix Romney's money and managerial acumen, John McCain's honesty and military record, Fred Thompson's southern charm and Rudolph Giuliani's toughness – and you'd have an Identikit candidate to bowl over every Republican in the land. On the other hand, if you blend Romney's Mormonism, McCain's age and support of the Iraq war, Thompson's plodding indolence, and the liberal social views and messy private life of Giuliani, you'd come up with a candidate who might not win a single vote from Christian conservatives, so important a part of the Republican primary electorate.

Enter Minister Mike.

Galt help us.

Iraq: What's going right

The positive indicators in Iraq are now so strong, says Ralph Peters in the New York Post, "that the left's defeatist lies are losing traction." Here are Peters' Big Five reasons about Iraq, and What Went Right -- reasons the defeatist liars do their very best to evade.

Seven 'wonders' of the totalitarian world

You all know about the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and maybe the Seven Wonders of the Industrial World. You've probably heard too about the recent competition to find the New Seven Wonders of the World, which featured some stunning buildings including Sydney's Opera House and New York's Statue of Liberty.

Now, courtesy of Esquire magazine, we proudly present the seven wonders of the totalitarian world, "celebrating those modern monuments from the totalitarian world that may or may not make it through the next coup. Check them out while you still can."

• Fist Crushing U.S. Fighter Plane, Libya
• Monument to President Laurent Kabila, Democratic Republic of Congo
• Lenin’s Mausoleum, Russia
• Monument to President Saparmurat Niyazov, Turkmenistan
• Mao Leading the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, China
• The Hands of Victory, Iraq
• Monument to the Founding of the North Korean Worker's Party, North Korea

That monstrosity to the left, by the way, is the North Korean monument Winston Peters would have admired last week in Pyongyang, and down there on the right is the monument to Mao -- the prick who made the founding and "success" of the North Korean Worker's Party possible. These monuments - all of them -- are quite literally monuments to totalitarianism, and they're exactly as ugly as the ideology that produced them. Lumpen products of a grey, deadening spirit.

And they aren't just ugly, they aren't just tributes to the megalomania that produced them, on closer analysis they're also an explanation of the type of human being who would have them produced. You can laugh at them, as you must, but when you've finished it's also possible to learn from them, and to answer the all-important question: What the fuck kind of person builds this stuff!?

To begin with, it's instructive to compare these seven totalitarian pseudo-wonders with those all-too genuine wonders of the industrial world celebrated above. The seven wonders of the industrial world were produced by honest effort, and mostly by the energy, initiative and non-sacrificial wealth of private individuals -- instead of enforcing sacrifice and impoverishment upon those forced to pay for and build these great achievements such as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Transcontinental Railroad, their building helped raise and kept raising people's standard of living.

It's the difference between the voluntary and the involuntary -- the earned and the unearned. Ayn Rand reckons it's this last that sets the totalitarian monuments apart: it's not just that they're literally as ugly as sin, but they come from something ugly in the humans who wished them produced, and who wished to bring for that same ugliness into the world. In that task, they succeeded. In her article 'The Monument Builders' Rand writes that the primary motivation of those who commissioned such aesthetic atrocities was the ugliness of power lust -- a desire for a particular kind of "spiritual" atrocity.

Power lust -- as a manifestation of helplessness, of self-loathing and of the desire for the unearned.

The desire for the unearned has two aspects: the unearned in matter and the unearned in spirit... These two aspects are necessarily interrelated, but a man's desire may be focussed predominantly on one or the other. The desire for the unearned in spirit is the more destructive of the two and the more corrupt. It is a desire for unearned greatness; it is expressed (but not defined) by the foggy murk of the term prestige.

The seekers of unearned material benefits are merely financial parasites, moochers, looters or criminals, who are too limited in number and in mind to be a threat to civilization until and unless they are released and legalized by the seekers of unearned greatness...

Of the two, the material parasite is psychologically healthier and closer to reality: at least he eats or wears his loot. But the only source of satisfaction open to the spiritual parasite, his only means to gain "prestige" (apart from giving orders and spreading terror), is the most wasteful useless and meaningless activity of all: the building of public monuments ... presented as a munificent gift to the victims whose forced labor or extorted money had paid for it ...

Such is the motivation of those who clamour for such monuments. Don't even mention today's fetish for public transport. I began writing my own conclusion, but how could I improve on this summation of totalitarianism's pyramid builders:

When you consider the global devastation perpetrated by socialism, the sea of blood and the millions of victims, remember that they were sacrificed not for "the good of mankind" nor for any "noble ideal," but for the festering vanity of some scared brute or some pretentious mediocrity who craved a mantle of unearned "greatness" -- and that the monument to socialism is a pyramid of public factories, public theaters, [public museums, public transport centres] and public parks, erected on a foundation of human corpses, with the figure of the ruler posturing on top, beating his chest and screaming his plea for "prestige" to the starless void above.

Such is the nature of the monument builders of totalitarianism.

The Right Hon PM Tweedledum

So Australia are now the first country in the world to have a Prime Minister who rejoices in the name of Kevin. A mummy's boy with a taste for his own earwax. Must be why Australia's called the lucky country.

The difference in personal quality between the new PM and the old one could be clearly seen in their two speeches on Saturday night. Howard's concession speech -- perhaps the last political speech in his career -- was proud, generous and statesmanlike. Rudd's victory speech by contrast was so wet that even his ebullient supporters were silenced.

Those personal differences however are more substantial than any policy differences. As yesterday's 'Sunday Star Times' editorial suggests, on policy issues this was in every way a me-too election -- Tweedledum trying to outbid Tweedledummer -- and in that respect at least, it's likely to foreshadow NZ's own election this time next year.

UPDATE 1: Rudd's already announced he's taking up the only three substantive areas of policy difference: he's going to sign up to sacrifice Australian prosperity to Gaia, to empower the unions, and to cut and run from Iraq. At least these are differences on the face of it, since Kyoto's now all but irrelevant and while withdrawing Australia's 550 combat troops from Iraq, that will still leave more than 300 Australian support troops.

UPDATE 2: "Ideology is dead in Australia," says Paul Sheehan. "The electorate made sure of that at the weekend." SOLO's Australian coordinator Hilton Holder agrees, but he argues that's a bad thing. Rudd's victory, he says, "is a symbol of a lobotomized and amoralized nation. "

UPDATE 3: Russell Brown also has a go at His Wetness:

Australia's last two Labor Prime Ministers, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, were raging personalities: brash, passionate, prone to controversy and somehow embodying national character. I don't think there's much chance of that with the new guy...

Good news from odd places

BBC News: "George Bush's troop surge in Iraq appears to be working... An estimated 1,000 people a day are returning across Iraq's borders having previously moving abroad to escape the violence, Iraqi authorities say... One factor in their return is likely to be a sharp and sustained drop in all kinds of violence, particularly in parts of the capital Baghdad, following a US-Iraqi military 'surge'."

London's Times:

Road from Damascus: Iraqis are voting with their feet by returning home after exile The figures are hard to estimate precisely but the process could involve hundreds of thousands of people. The numbers are certainly large enough, as we report today, for a mass convoy to be planned next week as Iraqis who had opted for exile in Syria return to their homeland. It is one of the most striking signs that not only has violence in Baghdad and adjacent provinces decreased dramatically in recent months, but confidence in the economic and political future of Iraq has risen sharply. Nor is this movement the action of men and women who could easily reverse course and turn back again. Tighter visa restrictions imposed by Damascus mean that those who are returning to Iraq cannot assume that they could quickly retreat again to Syria if that suited them. This is, for many, a one-way decision. It represents a vote of confidence in Iraq.

NY TIMES: Around Baghdad, Signs of Normal Life Creep Back: "With security in Baghdad improving, residents across the city are taking steps to return to normalcy. More Iraqis are traveling between Shiite and Sunni areas to shop, work and go to school. While there are still neighborhoods too dangerous to enter, interviews across the city reveal the personal ways Baghdad residents are fighting to reclaim the lives they lost."

NY POST: "THE situation in Iraq has improved so rapidly that Democrats now shun the topic as thoroughly as they shun our troops when the cameras aren't around..."

It must hurt the poor pessimistic dears terribly to have to admit that General Petraeus' "surge" is working, but the good news is now breaking out of from blog commentators like Michael Yon and Michael J. Totten, and on out into the mainstream. That in itself is good news.