Stromata Blog

De Abortione Nil Nisi Bonum (II)

The elevation of unrestricted abortion from a progressive policy preference to a primary dogma is one of the most astonishing developments in intellectual history. From Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal and rare”, “rare” has been dropped entirely, and “safe” is hardly a consideration. Abortions performed by non-medical personnel or by the unsupervised ingestion of abortifacient drugs are regarded as quite acceptable. The child’s death has a higher value than the mother’s health.

Even more strikingly, pro-abortion progressives denounce any public criticism of abortion as fiercely as any religious fanatic has ever excoriated blasphemy. Several posts back, I cited a couple of examples. A couple more showed up today.

Sentinel Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House (a subsidiary of publishing octopus Bertelsmann), reached an agreement last year to publish a book by Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Barrett has received a substantial advance; she reported $425,000 from Sentinel on her most recent financial disclosure form and is reportedly entitled to further installments in the future. All that is known about the subject of the book is that it will be “about how judges should avoid letting their decisions be shaped by personal feelings”.

Yesterday there appeared online an open letter signed by 263 soi-disant “members of the writing, publishing, and broader literary community of the United States” asserting “that moving forward with Coney Barrett’s book places Bertelsmann and Penguin Random House both in direct conflict with their own Code of Conduct and in violation of international human rights”.

The signers of the letter profess to “care deeply about freedom of speech”, but publishing a book by a jurist who voted to allow democratic processes to decide what laws will govern abortion violates the “imperative that publishers uphold their dedication to freedom of speech with a duty of care”. They have read not a single sentence of the manuscript, which may or may not yet exist. Their rationale for demanding that Penguin Random House drop it is based entirely on their opposition to Justice Barrett’s opinions about the morality of abortion:

The ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health that overturned Roe hinged on exactly what Coney Barrett’s book is reportedly about – the judiciary’s role and “how judges are not supposed to bring their personal feelings into how they rule.” Yet, it seems this is exactly what Coney Barrett has done, inflicting her own religious and moral agenda upon all Americans while appropriating the rhetoric of even-handedness – and Penguin Random House has agreed to pay her a sum of $2 million to do it.

Dobbs did not, it should be noted, reflect what are most likely Justice Barrett’s private views. The Court didn’t prohibit abortion anywhere or overturn state laws that legalize the killing of unborn infants at any stage of pregnancy. To pro-abortion zealots, however, unrestricted abortion is an overriding good that no one has the right to disparage. Moreover, those who, like Justice Barrett, do anything to impede abortion’s advance are to be punished, even if the letter’s signatories do not – yet – demand total censorship.

A second “sign of the times” came to my attention via an essay by Rod Dreher. It concerned a recent ruling by the European Court of Human Rights reversing the conviction, for “unlawful sexual display”, of a bare-breasted woman who interrupted Christmas caroling at a Roman Catholic church and acted out an “abortion” on the Virgin Mary. She was sentenced to one month in jail and fined €2,000. The ECHR, whose view of free speech rights is, to put it mildly, far from libertarian, found that this exhibition was an exercise of the perpetrator’s protected human rights. Indeed, it ordered the French government to pay her €9,800 “for moral damages, legal costs and expenses”.

It isn’t hard to figure out why the court ruled as it did. It has no difficulty with governments that clamp down on criticism of Moslems or homosexuality or the new “transgender” craze. Abortion, however, is sacred, and protests in its favor are not to be constrained even by neutral laws for maintaining public order, applied without preference for any ideology.

It is a small and bitter consolation that the sacralization of “abortion rights” will in time enhance what James Taranto labeled “the Roe Effect”: “It seems self-evident that pro-choice women are more likely to have abortions than pro-life ones, and common sense suggests that children tend to gravitate toward their parents’ values.”

Roe itself may have had less of an effect than Mr. Taranto anticipated, so long as abortion was regarded by many supporters of “a woman’s right to choose” as a choice of last resort. Now, however, it is widely celebrated, and dissent will, if present trends continue, be slowly but relentlessly shut down. The day may come when it will rare for anyone but a strongly and sincerely religious woman to have more than one child and when childlessness will be considered praiseworthy. A generation after that happens, the United States will be a very different nation, and progressives may regret their neglect of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Can Lilliput TKO Brobdingnag?

Right now two Lilliput-Brobdingnag conflicts are in progress. The one that dominates the headlines pits Ukraine (population 41 million, GDP $181 billion) against Russia (population 146 million, GDP $1.65 trillion). (All Gross National Product figures in this post are the estimates of the International Monetary Fund, which Wikipedia has compiled into a useful table.) Through the all-enveloping fog of war, the state of the battle front is obscure. As I write, much of the news is hopeful for the outnumbered Ukrainians, though it would be incautious to make predictions on the basis of current reports. Very few military operations move as swiftly and smoothly as, say, the First Gulf War. Over any but a short time frame, Russia is highly likely to prevail. It has been striving for the past decade to undo the decay that its military suffered during the late Soviet and early post-Soviet eras, while Ukraine didn’t begin taking its own defense seriously until not long before yesterday. Russian setbacks suggest that modernization hasn’t progressed as far as Tsar Putin hoped, but they don’t mean that Ukraine has more than a slender chance of survival as a genuinely independent nation.

And the reason why one can’t be optimistic very far into the future is the state of the other Lilliput-Brobdingnag imbroglio, between Russia and NATO. Judging by economic strength, the sine qua non of military might, Russia is barely noticeable. Its Gross Domestic Product (below California, Texas or New York) is one-fourteenth that of the United States. Five other NATO members (Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Canada) outproduce Russia. Their aggregate GDP ($10.68 trillion) is six and a half times Russia’s. That doesn’t count the other 24 NATO members, which are substantially larger than Russia in the aggregate. Even the combined GDP of NATO’s relatively poor, formerly Soviet-ruled Eastern border states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria; $1.45 trillion) is competitive.

The point of the last paragraph’s tedious array of numbers is that, next to NATO’s Brobdingnag, Russia isn’t even a very big Lilliput. The notion that it could successfully attack a country that, while not belonging to NATO, is a NATO ally and prospective member, is on its face absurd, like a Chihuahua taking on a pack of Pit Bulls. Moreover, it’s an isolated Chihuahua. Its only firm, reliable ally is Belarus. Even Kazakhstan, whose dictator Tsar Putin recently rescued from a popular uprising, has turned down a request for assistance. Russia does enjoy the benevolent neutrality of the communist-controlled region of China, which will be of some assistance, but Xi Jinping will risk very little to help Tsar Putin’s paper tiger. Meanwhile, any prospect of an open rupture within NATO died when the alliance’s least Putin-skeptical members, Hungary and the Czech Republic, denounced the attack on Ukraine.

How can Putin possibly think that it’s other than insane to go up against those odds? The idea that he is, in fact, mad has gained traction lately, but his “madness” is entirely rational. NATO did almost nothing to buttress Ukraine’s defenses while there was time to prepare. The possibility of war with Russia has been less than remote since 2014, when a pro-Russian insurrection began in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. How did Brobdingnag address that danger? It offered minimal aid the Ukraine, its European members (prodded by Moscow-funded pseudo-environmentalists) increased their dependence on Russian oil and natural gas, NATO defense spending and readiness declined, and, starting immediately after his inauguration, the current President of the United States began stifling American energy production.

The one absolutely confident prediction that we can make about the future of Ukraine is that no NATO soldier will fire a bullet in its defense. Nor is it at clear that, in their present condition, the NATO armies could successfully intervene if their political leaders wanted them to. Germany’s highest ranking officer says that the German army, once NATO’s second strongest, “is more or less standing bare”.

Far more than when Richard Nixon coined the phrase, Brobdingnag is “a pitiful, helpless giant”. Should Ukraine emerge unscathed from its present ordeal, it will owe its salvation more to St. Michael the Archangel, patron saint of Kiev, than to any secular power.

Update (February 27, 2022): One of the links above goes to Institute for the Study of War’s February 26th update on the war. The February 27th update is here. Tje opening paragraph summarizes the current situation:

The Russian military has likely recognized that its initial expectations that limited Russian attacks would cause the collapse of Ukrainian resistance have failed and is recalibrating accordingly. The Russian military is moving additional combat resources toward Ukraine and establishing more reliable and effective logistics arrangements to support what is likely a larger, harder, and more protracted conflict than it had originally prepared for. The tide of the war could change rapidly in Russia’s favor if the Russian military has correctly identified its failings and addresses them promptly, given the overwhelming advantage in net combat power Moscow enjoys. Ukrainian morale and combat effectiveness remain extremely high, however, and Russian forces confront the challenge of likely intense urban warfare in the coming days.

“Smart Power” Made Stupid

The slogan “work smarter, not harder” was popular for a time, then was laughed out of cubicles across the land when Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss adopted it. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have never seen a cubicle, of course, so they’re no doubt far enough out of touch to imagine that “being smart” really is a strategy instead of just an aspiration.

The concept behind “smart power” is reliance on cleverness rather than force to overcome or win over one’s adversaries. Similar ideas have often been mooted in the military realm: “We don’t need as many men, tanks and guns, because we can outthink the enemy.” Sometimes that works on the battlefield. The problem is, the enemy is able to think, too, and there’s no guarantee that an otherwise weaker army will be able to negate superior firepower with brilliant tactics.

In diplomacy, counting on unassisted brains is iffier yet. When President Obama or Secretary Clinton lauds “smart power” as a self-sufficient counter to Islamofascism, Red Chinese hegemonism or Russian truculence, he (or she) implicitly claims the ability to consistently outwit Osama bin-Laden, Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin. Well, maybe Barry and Hill are the new Metternich and Bismarck, but how much national security should we bet on that prospect?

In less than two weeks, the new Administration hasn’t had much time to chalk up foreign policy successes or failures. What it has done, however, has suggested its “little gray cells” may need a more robust supplement.

The sheerest and most incredible absence of “smartness” is the President’s failure to keep his party from inserting “Buy American” mandates into the Stagflation Stimulus Bill now pending in Congress. If he didn’t know about those provisions, he was negligent. If he doesn’t care, he is dumb. A trade war with our allies – worse, one that we are bound to lose at considerable cost to both our and our friends’ economies – is about the greatest boon our enemies could ask for.

Another boon is for the President of the United States to echo and reinforce Islamofascist propaganda themes, as Mr. Obama did in his first interview with an Arab language television network. Bad enough was his ignorance of the history of American relations with the Moslem world; there’s no way to be usefully “smart” without a foundation of knowledge. Worse was his casual assertion that America has in the past engaged in a generalized war against, and has tried to “dictate” to, the Islamic world. That is the line that Osama and his ilk have pushed for years. A President who was exerting, rather than just talking about, “smart power” would have used this forum to emphasize the truth: that most of America’s recent wars have supported oppressed Moslems, often against Christian adversaries. He might even, as Jenn Rubin suggests, have announced America’s $20 million donation humanitarian aid in Gaza (not necessarily a great idea, but wouldn’t “smart power” get the maximum mileage out of it?) While truth telling might not penetrate the shield of Moslem paranoia, an American leader’s endorsement of outright lies can only make paranoia stronger.

And how brightly are we dealing with our major international rivals? I would have thought that one element of “smart power” was being smart enough not to speak loudly while carrying only joss sticks. Yet that is what the new Secretary of the Treasury did when he denounced Red China’s monetary policies. We have no carrots or sticks (at least, none that it would be “smart” to use) to encourage Peking to revalue its currency for our benefit. Of course we should pay no attention to the answering yawps from Chinese spokesmen, but the problem with this exchange is that it makes us look impotent and Peking strong at a moment when we ought to be doing all that we subtly can to undermine its prestige.

Doesn’t “smart power” also involve maintaining and expanding alliances? How is that consistent with reports that the Administration is already abandoning the planned European missile defense program? The friendly Polish and Romanian governments, having invested political capital in the project, are hung out to dry, while Tsar Vladimir gains a victory without any expenditure of effort. How “smart” is that?

Still, let’s be fair. If press reports are correct, “smart power” is about to go on the offensive – in Zimbabwe, where the Administration will attempt to oust the deranged tyrant Robert Mugabe without violence (violence by anti-Mugabe forces, that is; violence on the dictator’s side has been endemic for years). I hope that the effort succeeds but note that this is like trying out one’s new basketball strategy against the Dallas Academy girls’ team.

Every sentient being on the planet knows that Mugabe has ruined Zimbabwe. He is widely unpopular within the country, where he has yielded a portion (though what portion is unclear) to the opposition. His survival is not of particular strategic interest to any other country. Getting rid of him is about the easiest task that “smart power” could undertake. I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t succeed. If only all the rest of our challenges were that simple.

The Obama Nation Abroad

Colin Powell predicts that Barack Obama will be a “transformational President”, and who am I to doubt it? The question is, transformation into what? The future is always dark, and I have no spectacles of prophetic night vision. Nonetheless, the picture of what the Obama Nation will look like is becoming steadily less murky.

Senator Obama’s own running mate says, “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. . . . Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

As Senator Biden doesn’t mention, President Kennedy’s test was the construction of the Berlin Wall, and he flunked. From that performance (reinforced by flounding at the Vienna summit), the Soviets took away the conviction that the new Administration was easy to push around. The next stop was the Cuban missile crisis. The world survived that, but those of us who can remember living through it would rather have skipped the experience.

Barack Obama has already shown how he will respond to a foreign crisis. He has “pre-reacted”, as it were. The terrorist campaign in Iraq after the deposition of the Ba’athist dictatorship, was, among other things, a test of American steadiness and will power. Senator Obama declared that we should do just what the Kennedy Administration did in Berlin: Back down. Is there any reason to think that he will have a different answer for a Russian invasion of Ukraine or a pro-Islamofascist coup in Pakistan or a nuclear-armed Iran’s ultimatum to Israel or an al-Qa’eda uprising in Saudi-controlled Arabia or Red Chinese threats against India or Taiwan?

Even if it wanted to, could the Obama Nation counter a serious challenge outside its borders? As President Bush’s political difficulties illustrate, vigor in our foreign policy requires the backing of domestic opinion. Mr. Obama’s base of support lies with people who never want to intervene anywhere at any time for any reason. They put up with President Clinton’s actions in the Balkans and Haiti only because those were inconsequential and casualty-free. Would they reverse their firmest principles after being exhorted by The One? Judging by what he says later in the speech quoted above, Senator Biden isn’t confident:

I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where [the crisis] might originate. . . . And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you – not financially to help him – we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.

Rallying behind America in a crisis is not, as that rather pathetic plea implicitly concedes, the natural course of action for the Obama Left. Whence, then, would a President Obama draw supporters for, say, a showdown with Tsar Vladimir over the future of Ukraine? Will he abandon his base to court the conservatives he’s been denouncing for the past two years? Has he ever taken the risk of parting ways with left-wing velleities?

Whatever the exact course of events, the Obama Nation will almost certainly withdraw step-by-step not just from Iraq but, as the test results come in, from all the rest of the world, leaving the field to regional powers: Red China in Asia, Russia in Eastern Europe, Iran (or a Saudi-Egyptian alliance) in the Middle East, Venezuela in Latin America. All of those minor hegemons are anti-Western, internally unstable and politically reckless. Their lurches and spasms will make for interesting times.

The Obama Nation’s foreign policy may not be intellectually isolationist, but that will be its practical effect. Reinforcing the tendency will be its skeptical attitude toward foreign trade (pace Professor Goulsbee, who will, I’m sure, be less influential than Mr. Obama’s personal inclinations and those of the protectionist-dominated Democratic Congressional caucus).

Those parts of the world that don’t like the idea of being overseen by such fine folk as Vladimir Putin, Hu Jin-tao and Hugo Chavez are already looking for alternatives. The prospective free trade agreement between Canada and the European Union may be the first of many similar efforts. Why shouldn’t Mexico and Colombia follow suit? It would make a great deal of sense for those Latin American countries that reject neo-communism to link more closely with Europe, once the U.S. ceases to be a reliable trading partner and ally. For Europe, there is a benefit besides liberalized exchanges of goods and services: Latin American guest workers could start to displace some of the volatile Moslem immigrants who now provide a large part of the continent’s labor force. Spain is already encouraging immigration from the Western Hemisphere. For other EU countries, too, Mexicans might be an attractive alternative to Pakistanis.

So, looking ahead four years or so, we may well see a United States that has essentially opted out of world affairs and international commerce. (We’ll probably be busy fighting recession the way Herbert Hoover did, with trade barriers and tax increases on “the rich”.) If the remaining democracies are going to survive in the face of a multiplicity of aggressive tyrannies, they will have to alter their behavior dramatically: not just form a super-Common Market but expand their armed forces and risk dangerous confrontations outside their own neighborhoods. Their chattering classes enjoy ranting at America now. No doubt they’ll extol the Obama Nation in public – but secretly they’ll wish that the despised “W” were President again.

Taking Sides in Berlin

A column in today’s Wall Street Journal (Matthew Kaminski, “Obama and the German Question” invites another perspective on Barack Obama’s Siegessäule rhetoric.

Much has been made of the need to improve America’s image in Europe. This narrative is some two years past its sell-by date. President Bush may not be popular at home or on the Continent, but America is again the ally of choice. On Iran, Russia, China and the Mideast, the big players of the European Union eagerly and pragmatically seek out U.S. leadership; in the surprise twist of this century so far, France leads the way.

Berlin is the exception. Its foreign policy can be charitably described as inconsistent and confused – and infused with a strain of anti-Americanism hard to find among other European ruling elites these days.

Germany’s government is a “grand coalition” between conservatives and socialists. The leading figure among the latter is Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who used to be former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s chief of staff.

Like his previous boss (Mr. Schröder is now on the Kremlin’s payroll at gas giant Gazprom), Mr. Steinmeier nurtures friendly ties with Moscow and is cool toward Washington. Chancellor Merkel’s instincts lead her in an opposite direction, yet she has shown little leadership on foreign policy of late, possibly to avoid a costly fight before elections.

Russia is a major concern to European leaders today, as Tsar Prime Minister Putin grows steadily more authoritarian, anti-American and irrational. It wasn’t a major topic of the Siegessäulesprache, but the few words devoted to it took an unambiguous stand. Quoth Senator Obama:

In this century — in this city of all cities — we must reject the Cold War mindset of the past, and resolve to work with Russia when we can, to stand up for our values when we must, and to seek a partnership that extends across this entire continent.

That is the Schröder/Steinmeier line: See only good in the Kremlin. David Frum rejoins:

Russia has reverted to authoritarian rule. It uses its oil and gas to muscle its neighbors. The rulers of Russia are almost certainly responsible for the assassination of one of their most effective critics on British soil — and for the murder of dozens of journalists at home. These are facts, not delusions born of some “Cold War mindset.”

[And here and here are more to read about the current state of Russian liberty.]

Did Slick Barry realize that he was taking sides in an important European debate? Perhaps not. Did he mean to pass lightly over Russian misconduct? Not necessarily; the passage may have been “just words”. Nevertheless, it means more than a little when an immensely popular American politician stands on German soil and endorses a key tenet of Germany’s anti-American Left. At the very least, the political climate will now be colder for our friends in that country. The next President, whoever he is, will have to live with the consequences.

Europe’s Humane Economy

Vacationing in France, David Frum has penned a pair of interesting and amusing columns. The first is about being a tourist in Paris, where history is abundant but not always well tended. The second makes an important point about political attempts to eliminate “inhumane” liberty from labor markets. Some background:

The minimum wage in France is €8.50. Another €4.25 in payroll tax is applied on top of that wage, for a total minimum cost of hiring of €12.75, or more than [$17.50 an hour].

The law forbids employees to work more than 35 hours per week. Period. No overtime; it’s just flatly forbidden. French law guarantees generous mandatory holidays of up to six weeks. Firing employees is extraordinarily difficult, so you have to assume that anyone you hire will stay hired until he or she tires of the job.

An anecdotal example of the effect of this dirigiste paternalism:

It’s 2:15 on a French afternoon, and I am as usual at this time of day sitting in a café waiting to pay the bill for lunch. And waiting. And waiting. When you hear talk of the slowness of French meals, you may imagine haughty waiters languidly presenting an elegant repast. I am sure that happens too. But as it happens, I am not anywhere elegant. I am sitting in a very unremarkable seafood restaurant by the harbour in Dieppe.

There is nothing languid about the scene here. The patronne is racing about like a demon, taking orders, slapping down plates of fish, planting bottles of wine on the table with a thump.

She has to move fast. There are almost 30 tables in this place, and she has only one assistant. The two of them do everything that must be done in the front room. They clear tables, they bus dishes and, if you look at the mirror at the right angle, you can see them scraping plates and placing them in a dishwashing machine. At the moment when I decide I want a cheque, the assistant is at the back polishing newly washed glasses.

At $17.50 an hour, would you hire a second servitor? Actually, the “assistant” may well be a daughter or sister or daughter-in-law, helping out under a half-illegal arrangement so that the owner can afford to stay in business.

For the larger picture, some facts and figures:

Per hour worked, the French rank among the most productive people on Earth: 7% more productive than Americans, for example. But the devil lies in the phrase “per hour worked.”

Almost 10% of France's work force lacks jobs. France’s economy is not in recession; in fact, it is thriving. High unemployment has become normal here; not since the 1980s has France seen an unemployment rate south of 8%.

And remember, the unemployment concept counts only those persons who seek work. Those who retire early, or who qualify as disabled, or remain in school until age 30 do not count as “unemployed” in the job statistics. Only in life. The truest picture of French society comes from counting those in [the work force]: Altogether, 51% of French adults work, as opposed to 62% of American adults.

And those French who do work do not work very much: While working Americans work an average of more than 1,800 hours per year, working French people put in slightly more than 1,500. . . .

Can France afford to keep missing economic opportunities? The gross domestic product of the 60 million people of France now roughly equals that earned by the 35 million people of California (using purchasing power parity valuations for the dollar and the euro). Over time, little differences compound into big ones. The Democratic economist Robert Shapiro calculates that, if present trends persist, the average European will see his standard of living decline to about half that of the average American by 2025.

But perhaps other Democrats will save Europe’s face. Congress has already raised the minimum wage. Once it has secured American defeat in Iraq, it can turn its full attention to promoting economic stagnation.

Cautious Optimism for France

Oui,, France is every civilized man’s second home, mais sometimes one would rather not go home again. The dishonesty and betrayals of Jacques “le Ver” Chirac have turned Francophilia into a left-wing monopoly and “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” in to a cliché.

Disappointment with M. Chirac was, it’s only fair to point out, predictable. The last French Rightist who had America’s best interests at heart was Louis XVI. From de Maistre through de Gaulle, the conventional view on le Droit has been that America is a progenitor of revolution. The French Left used to be pro-American for the same reason, though that impulse has vanished as it has fallen under the domination of hard and soft versions of Marxism.

Nonetheless, every French election in which the Right does well brings a surge of hope to right-wing hearts on this side of the Atlantic. Yesterday’s election results appear, based on a quick glance around the blogosphere, to be no exception. It was definitely a good day for the Right. The four Presidential candidates on that side of the spectrum (Sarkozy, Le Pen, de Villiers, Nihous) took, at the latest count I’ve seen, 45 percent of the vote, and François Bayrou, whose party has historically been right of center (though M. Bayrou himself is swathed in ambiguity and opportunism), had 18½ percent. That left a satisfying and astonishingly low 36½ percent for the seven contenders on la Gauche. Once upon a time, the French Communist Party could come close to that total all by itself. Now its splintered successor parties can’t in toto break out of single digits.

M. Sarkozy still must face Socialist airhead Ségolène Royal in a runoff on May 6th, and his victory isn’t an absolutely sure thing, at least not the way that M. Chirac was a sure winner over M. Le Pen six years ago. One would be foolish to bet against it, though, particularly in light of the fact that Mlle. Royal devoted much of the first round campaign to putting forward nostrums, such as a hike in the minimum wage to combat a 20 percent youth employment rate, that lured votes from the harder Left but may not impress less extreme voters as wholly rational. (To read the account in today’s Wall Street Journal [link probably for subscribers only], from the pen of one of the newsroom’s cookie cutter leftists, one would think that Mlle. Royal goes into the runoff in a commanding position, thanks to M. Sarkozy’s alleged “rightward shift”. There’s no mention of the polls, which put her 8 to 10 points behind, nor of her only leftward lurch. Amusing.)

By French standards, Nicolas Sarkozy is pro-Western Alliance, pro-economic freedom and anti-lawlessness. The objections to a hopeful view of his likely ascent are, unhappily, obvious: First, “French standards” in these matters are pretty low, as (the often over-excitable) Andrew Stuttaford points out. Second, enacting liberal (in the European sense), pro-Western policies in dying, leisure-loving France may be beyond any politician’s power. Stanley Kurtz offers plenty of cautionary notes:

The question is whether even a Sarkozy win will be enough to spark real reform. Sarkozy’s hopes for paring back France’s bloated welfare state likely outrun the expectations of even his own supporters. And disaffected immigrants in France’s suburbs are already claiming that “if Sarko wins, there’ll be riots.” So a Sarkozy victory is less likely to signal quick reform than it is to initiate a difficult and conflicted period of testing, which may or may not ultimately result in significant change. The huge turnout for the first round of voting portends a sharp left/right debate to come. Both sides understand that the fate of Europe’s social model could hang in the balance.

Given the likely electoral polarization, a Sarkozy victory followed by moves at reform may set up a confrontation with the left, which could pour onto the streets early in Sarkozy’s term in an effort to block serious change. Will Sarkozy hold back and avoid confrontation by pushing reform only gradually? Will he boldly take on his opponents? Or will even baby-steps toward change spark massive protests, as did mild attempts at labor market reform did only recently?

All in all, one’s optimism must be cautious at best. That is, however, better than things have been lately in la belle France.

Wall Street’s Two Newspapers in One

The split personality of the Wall Street Journal has rarely been so startlingly on display as in Monday morning’s edition. The editorial page reviews documents released by the World Bank over the weekend and concludes that Bank president Paul Wolfowitz has been the victim of “a political hit based on highly selective leaks to a willfully gullible press corps”. On the editors’ reading of the record, which looks quite convincing, Mr. Wolfowitz signed off on what amounted to a severance package for his paramour only after being instructed to do so by the Bank’s ethics committee. His preference was to play no role whatsoever in personnel decisions concerning her.

Needless to say, none of this context has appeared in the media smears suggesting that Mr. Wolfowitz pulled a fast one to pad the pay of Ms. Riza. Yet the record clearly shows he acted only after he had tried to recuse himself but then wasn’t allowed to do so by the ethics committee. And he acted only after that same committee advised him to compensate Ms. Riza for the damage to her career from a “conflict of interest” that was no fault of her own.

Based on this paper trail, Mr. Wolfowitz’s only real mistake was in assuming that everyone else was acting in good faith. Yet when some of these details leaked to the media, nearly everyone else at the bank dodged responsibility and let Mr. Wolfowitz twist in the wind. . . .

All of this is so unfair that Mr. Wolfowitz could be forgiven for concluding that bank officials insisted he play a role in raising Ms. Riza’s pay precisely so they could use it against him later. Even if that isn’t true, it’s clear that his enemies – especially Europeans who want the bank presidency to go to one of their own – are now using this to force him out of the bank.

Equally cynical has been the press corps, which slurred Mr. Wolfowitz with selective reporting and now says, in straight-faced solemnity, that the president must leave the bank because his “credibility” has been damaged. Paul Wolfowitz, meet the Duke lacrosse team.

And where does one find an example of this press corps cynicism? Turn to page A3 of the Journal, where reporter Greg Hitt [what an appropriate surname!] writes, “Wolfowitz Digs In as Criticism Intensifies Within World Bank” [link probably for subscribers only]. Mr. Hitt makes no reference to the facts described in the editorial until his very last paragraph, where they become no more than Mr. Wolfowitz’s desperation ploy:

Late last week, Mr. Wolfowitz apologized for his role in Ms. Riza’s transfer, and he said he would accept any remedy offered by the World Bank’s board of directors. Late Saturday night, though, he displayed a more combative tone, complaining in an all-staff email that “misleading information” was circulating during the board’s review of the case. He urged World Bank staffers to read public documents about the transfer for themselves, and he directed them to portions that showed his actions in a more favorable light, including his early offers to recuse himself from dealing with Ms. Riza.

The preceding 15 paragraphs tell the story of a beleaguered executive resisting overwhelming sentiment for his departure, with nary a hint that the charges against him look, in light of the information currently available, very much like a crude smear. “Selective reporting” seems like an apt term.

Needless to say, the various EU and NGO bigwigs quoted by Mr. Hitt as outraged at Mr. Wolfowitz’s purported ethical lapse have never expressed smidgeon of interest in Saddam Hussein’s widespread bribery or, for that matter, in waste and corruption among World Bank borrowers.

La Fainéantise Européenne

A major theme of Mark Steyn’s superb new book America Alone is that Europe is doomed by demography. With all of its countries reproducing at far less than replacement rate (several are close to halving every generation), the continent is on track to become a vast, underpopulated theme park, into which, inevitably, our age’s counterpart to the Huns and the Vandals will migrate. This time they won’t need an Adrianople to open the way, and there will be no prospect of a second Catalaunian Fields.

A new study presented to the European Defense Agency shows how bleak the prospects are for military robustness in a society that every year gives birth to fewer and fewer young men. As summarized by The Daily Telegraph:

The vision of Europe in 20 years’ time was drawn up at the invitation of defence ministers by the EU body, which exists to push for more common spending and research by EU defence ministries and industries.

The paper, An Initial Long-Term Vision for European Defence Capability and Capacity Needs, paints a Europe in which plunging fertility rates leave the military struggling to recruit young men and women of fighting age, at a time when national budgets will be under unprecedented strain to pay for greying populations.

At the same time, increasingly cautious voters and politicians may be unwilling to contemplate casualties, or “potentially controversial interventions abroad – in particular interventions in regions from where large numbers of immigrants have come.”

Voters will also be insistent on having backing from the United Nations for operations, and on crafting large coalitions of EU member states with a heavy involvement of civilian agencies, and not just fighting units, the paper states. They will also want military operations to be environmentally friendly, where possible.

The “regions from where large numbers of immigrants have come” means, of course, those dominated by Islam. In hopes of avoiding giving offense to what will by then be a powerful voting bloc, the paper urges the EU to alter its concept of the purpose of military operations. As the German Press Association puts it,

Future military operations by the European Union will focus on bringing security and stability to conflict zones rather than achieving victory against conventional enemies, a report submitted to the bloc's defence chiefs said Monday. . . .

Given the changing nature of global threats, EU military interventions in the future will “not necessarily involve fighting battles,” it said.

Instead the focus will be on “diplomacy in preventing wars from occurring, containing those conflicts that do occur and discouraging the emergence of parties whose objective it is to contribution to the generation of a crisis.”

As such, the objective will not be victory, but moderation, balance of interests and peaceful resolution of conflicts, the report underlined, adding that in fact, armed forces will be only one component of EU security operations.

Well, everybody would rather jaw-jaw than war-war. Unhappily, those who lack the capacity to fight will be ignored when they try to talk.

Is it any wonder that European governments are reluctant to let the soldiers whom they have “committed” to fighting in Afghanistan do much more than parade? It looks like the “Long-Term Vision” of “environmentally friendly” wars that “not necessarily involve fighting battles” is already here.

The Freedom Gap

Europeans regularly denounce America for infringing civil liberties – by imposing the death penalty for murder, confining terrorists in “secret prisons”, refusing to give Geneva Convention protections to illegal combatants, etc. To many on the Left, those outpourings stem from the critics’ exquisite sensitivity toward human rights. We should listen to our transatlantic betters, we are told, and heed their wisdom.

So what do those wise guides have to say about the human right that is least controversial in the United States? Americans (outside a few enclaves of the Fascist Left) agree that the government shouldn’t punish people for expressing their opinions, even if those opinions aren’t liked by the majority. Though Voltaire didn’t really say, “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”, that is the American position, limited only in the most extreme circumstances. Thus communists, racists, atheists, Bible thumpers, Islamofascists et al. can contend in the public square against conservatives and liberals.

In Denmark matters are different. Article 266 b) of the Danish Criminal Code “prohibits the dissemination of racist statements and racist propaganda”.

The Danish authorities have informed ECRI that between January 2001 and the end of September 2003, 23 cases were brought to court against 32 people and that 24 convictions were passed, including a 20 days’ imprisonment sentence. [Footnote: “Amongst these cases, 4 concerned words yelled at someone, 7 were about statements made on the Internet, 2 concerned advertisements, 2 concerned statements made at political rallies, 3 were about interviews given in the media and 3 concerned mail sent to politicians.] . . .] In 2003, 16 court decisions were rendered against politicians under Article 266 b) of the Criminal Code and NGOs have noted an increase in 2005 in the number of complaints against politicians, especially for statements made regarding Muslims and Islam.

In this country, there would, I trust, be cries of outrage if anyone were punished for what he said in a letter to a politician, at a political rally or on a Web site. The report from which I just quoted also expresses outrage, to wit:

18. ECRI [the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance] deeply regrets the fact that the police are still very reluctant to register complaints of racist statements and to investigate and press charges under Article 266 b) of the Criminal Code, partly due to the fact that freedom of speech is given priority consideration in Denmark. It has been indicated to ECRI that the few cases that are brought to court only result in a fine. . . .

20. ECRI urges Denmark to take a more proactive approach in prosecuting anyone who makes racist statements, since Article 266 b) of the Criminal Code as interpreted by the Supreme Court does not appear to be adequate.

The ECRI also thinks little of freedom of association:

22. ECRI notes that racist organisations are still not prohibited in Denmark. Furthermore, although the Danish authorities have indicated to ECRI that the policy in Denmark is to prosecute individual members of neo-Nazi or skinhead organisations, very few cases, if any, have actually been brought against them. . . .

25. ECRI strongly recommends that the Danish Government penalise the creation or leadership of a group which promotes racism, as well as support for such a group and participation in its activities. . . . It also recommends that Denmark take a more proactive approach in punishing members of such organisations.

One can only imagine what these Eurocrats think of our Constitution and its pernicious First Amendment.

Needless to say, the primary meaning of “racism” in this context is the expression of negative opinions about Islam. Only two “vulnerable groups” are mentioned: Moslems and Denmark’s minuscule population of Gypsies. The latter, one to two thousand in number, seem to have been brought in so that “groups” could be plural. Regarding the oppressed Moslems, the report decries once again those dreadful Jyllands-Posten cartoons and the inexplicable way in which the public associates Moslems with terrorism, extremism and oppression:

88. In its second report, noting with concern the climate surrounding Muslims and Islam in Denmark, ECRI recommended that the Danish Government undertake awareness-raising measures in the public sphere as well as in the education system to promote a more objective and informed perception of Muslims. ECRI also recommended that public opinion leaders promote a more informed and diverse image of Muslims and Islam.

89. ECRI notes with deep concern that the situation concerning Muslims in Denmark has worsened since its second report. ECRI has been informed that, apart from the above-mentioned discrimination that Muslims face together with other minority groups in areas such as employment, education and housing, politicians from some political parties such as the Danish People’s Party and some media continue to make incendiary remarks about Muslims. Although, in 2003, a number of cases of incitement to racial hatred in general, and against Muslims in particular were successfully prosecuted, ECRI notes that the police are generally reluctant to investigate complaints made by Muslims concerning hate speech directed against them. ECRI regrets in this regard that the lack of a strong message that would be sent by consistently prosecuting those who breach Article 266 b) of the Criminal Code has given some politicians free reign to create an atmosphere of suspicion and hatred towards Muslims. This problem is compounded by the fact that the media mostly interview those imams who express the most extreme views, thus confirming the image that is being given of Muslims as a threat to Danish society. In September 2005, with the stated intention of verifying whether freedom of speech is respected in Denmark, a widely-read Danish newspaper called on cartoonists to send in caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad; such drawings are considered to be offensive by many Muslims. This newspaper thus published 12 such cartoons, one of which portrayed the Prophet as a terrorist. The issue has caused widespread condemnation and a protest march was organised in Copenhagen as a result. The fact that, according to a survey carried out regarding the publication of these drawings, 56% of the respondents felt that it was acceptable is a testimony of the current climate in Denmark. ECRI considers that the goal of opening a democratic debate on freedom of speech should be met without resorting to provocative acts that can only predictably elicit an emotional reaction. ECRI wishes to bring to the Danish Government’s attention in this regard, that in its General Policy Recommendation No. 5 on combating intolerance and discrimination against Muslims, it calls on Member States to encourage debate within the media on the image which they convey of Islam and Muslim communities and on their responsibility in this respect in avoiding the perpetuation of prejudice and biased information. [Footnotes omitted]

The reader who carefully peruses that bafflegab will observe that the only debate that the ECRI desires to encourage is one among journalists over how much self-censorship they should practice.

So these are the lovers of liberty who lecture us on our deficiencies in human rights! I would just as soon hear strictures on law and order from the mouth of Michael Corleone.

In Europe, freedom to oppose Islamofascism is disappearing, because the rulers are afraid of Moslem mobs. One suspects that Europe’s concern for conditions at Guantanamo arises largely from the same source. The biggest chasm in the world is that between those governments that cherish freedom and those that regard it as a concession by the governing class, to be revoked or restricted whenever it becomes inconvenient. Closing that gap would be an excellent thing – but not if it means moving one step toward the dhimmis across the sea.

Addendum: Meanwhile in Belgium, bien-pensants are demanding that the editor of the Brussels Journal be prosecuted for “promoting racism”. His offense is writing articles like “Muslims Create Islamophobes, Then Want Islamophobes Punished”. They are, alas, being handed what they want.

The CIA’s Vanishing Prison Act

In an earlier post, I wondered whether the “CIA secret prisons” story, for which leak receptacle Dana Priest won a Pulitzer Prize, might not be bogus, an untrumor fashioned to cause trouble for “New European” governments that have supported the cause of civilization in Iraq. The evidence for my hypothesis continues to mount (or, to be more precise, the absence of evidence for the tale’s truth gapes ever wider). Yesterday Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy whatchamacallit, told a parliamentary committee that he had “no information whatsoever” to confirm that the prisons existed or that terrorists were interrogated within them. Since Dr. Solana’s anti-American credentials are brightly burnished, it seems doubtful that he would have made that admission if he had not given up hope that proof would ever turn up.

Many of his fellow leftists will keep the accusation alive, we may be sure, but the focus of attention has now shifted to the CIA’s purported failure to file the proper paperwork concerning its “clandestine” (an odd term, since the pilots submitted flight plans and operated openly) flights through European air space. What’s next? CIA operatives welshing on traffic tickets?

While it remains possible that there is a grain (0.002285714 ounce) of truth to Miss Priest’s prize winner, the evidence now weighs heavily in the other direction. We might want to consider what that means.

First, the only plausible motive for the invention was to disrupt American alliances and thus hinder the War on Terror. That a highly placed source within the CIA, whether Mary O. McCarthy or another, wanted to do that should cause deep concern, if not alarm.

Second, this incident is yet another example of the unreliability of “news” based on unidentified sources. For reasons that elude me, anonymous leakers have, in the media’s estimation, the highest level of credibility. In a sensible world, they would be recognized as barely more entitled to a presumption of honesty and accuracy than graffiti on a men’s room wall.

Third, the elite media have again displayed their gullibility to any fiction that fits their preferred view of the world. It’s apparent the Miss Priest and her editors at the Washington Post didn’t exercise “professional skepticism” when told about CIA “misconduct”. Nor did they consider whether the alleged activities would in fact be blameworthy. As usual, terrorist suspects were given the benefit of every doubt, the American authorities the benefit of nothing whatsoever.

I wonder whether the Post will now assign a reporter or two to look into the origins and progress of the apparent hoax that it played such a major role in propagating. That would be a useful exercise. We all know how likely it is to be undertaken.

Leaks and Lies

Eric Rasmusen and James Taranto have picked up a possibility that I alluded in an earlier post: that Mary O. McCarthy’s “secret prison” disclosure wasn’t a leak but a lie.

There are multiple reasons for suspicion. European Union investigators – hardly likely to be prejudiced in favor of the United States – have uncovered nothing. Less, in fact, for the principal “evidence” of the prisons’ existence comes from dubious characters who say they were incarcerated there. That is the same sort of corroboration that appeared for the “October Surprise” fabrication, and both sets of witnesses seem equally credible; at least, the EU authorities haven’t given them any credence.

Then, too, Mrs. McCarthy worked in the CIA Inspector-General’s office, not in an operational role. Her knowledge of the “secret” derived from second hand information at best, from her own imagination at worst.

There are also internal loose ends. The existence of the prisons was supposedly known to only a handful of top officials, but how could any substantial facilities for imprisonment and interrogation be run without rank-and-file operatives who would necessarily know the details? Do Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld personally jet to Poland to quiz al-Qa’eda capi? And the suppositious captives were ferried by CIA-run airlines, whose existence was publicized nearly a year ago by the New York Times. Even before then, they don’t seem to have been a very closely guarded secret. The anti-American propaganda group Human Rights Watch was apparently monitoring them well before then; after the Post published its story, HRW cited details of a November 2003 flight by a “CIA plane” from Afghanistan to Poland to Romania to Morocco to Guantanamo as “proof” of Polish and Romanian involvement. Using such a compromised transport system for a super-secret project would be extraordinarily careless.

It is still possible that the story is true, or not entirely false. There may be rational explanations for the discrepancies, and reality doesn’t have to be probable. But let’s toy with the idea of its falsity (which would make consistent Mrs. McCarthy’s confession that she gave it to the Washington Post and her denial that she ever disclosed classified information) and see how it plays out.

What was the motive for the invention? As a domestic embarrassment to the Bush Administration, it was patently minor league. True, some Angry Leftists believe that al-Qa’eda members ought to receive the full panoply of Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendment protections, but that’s hardly a widespread opinion. The story in fact had little impact in the U.S. when it appeared.

It was in Europe that it was Big News, for plenty of EU bien-pensants believe fervently in due process for Islamofascists (a contrast to their view of the rights to be accorded to, say, accused businessmen). A very plausible motive for concocting a tale of Polish-Romanian cooperation with the CIA would be to punish those governments for their past aid to the American cause and to discourage them from helping in the future. If that was the originator’s intent, it implies an active desire to aid the enemy by weakening the anti-Islamofascist coalition. We all know what we would call someone who tried to break up the Allies in the middle of World War II. The same term seems apt here.

While the scenario that I’ve just sketched has its speculative elements, another instance of a false leak aimed at helping our enemies is hard to doubt. Bill Hawkins takes note of one of the less-discussed “revelations” in James Risen’s treasonfest:

In State of War, Risen reveals that Clinton also had an overly ambitious plot, which eventually backfired, involving assisting an enemy with WMDs. Operation Merlin had the CIA using a Russian atomic scientist, who had defected to the United States, to sell or give nuclear bomb blueprints to Iranian diplomats at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. The catch was that the plans for the TBA 480 “firing set” contained design errors that would send Iran’s scientists down the wrong path and delay their development of weapons. The TBA 480 is a Russian device for creating the implosion that sets off the nuclear chain-reaction in a bomb. The Russian scientist, whose defection does not now seem as genuine as was supposed, spotted the flaws and offered to help Iran fix the problems. But even if he had not tipped off the Iranians, other Russian and Chinese experts are known to be helping Tehran, so the design flaws would likely have been spotted at some point.

Risen writes (page 195) that the Clinton-approved plan ended up handing Tehran “one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world, providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers such as the United States and Russia from rogue countries such as Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short.”

Little as I wish to deny Mr. Clinton the blame for anything, this “Operation Merlin” is clearly a fiction. One needn’t be an intelligence expert to discern the folly of giving key information about nuclear weapons to an enemy state and the futility of trying to render the data harmless by throwing in a few mistakes. Bill Clinton is not stupid, and he wouldn’t in any case have devised such a scheme on his own. It would have had to pass muster with a lot of men who, whatever their faults, are too skilled for such a sophomore blunder.

No, somebody fed Risen this silly lie, and he swallowed it. Here the liar’s motive is transparent: to obscure the role of non-Iranian scientists in the mullarchy’s nuclear program by insinuating that America unwittingly supplied the crucial technological know-how.

A corollary is that Risen’s source sympathizes with the rogue scientists who have been assisting nuclear proliferation. It would be fascinating to know who he is. A chilling hypothesis is that an American official at a high enough level to be able to claim acquaintance with top secret operations is actively running interference for the men who are arming our most dangerous enemies.

The Friends of Osama bin-Laden

Does Mary O’Neil McCarthy, former CIA employee, consider herself a FOO (by which I don’t mean the ghod beloved by science fiction fans)? Surely not! Her explanation of her motives for leaking classified information to a Washington Post reporter probably parallels the newspaper’s own:

Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. said people who provide citizens the information they need to hold their government accountable should not “come to harm for that.”

“The reporting that Dana [Priest, the leakee] did was very important accountability reporting about how the CIA and the rest of the U.S. government have been conducting the war on terror,” Downie said. “Whether or not the actions of the CIA or other agencies have interfered with anyone's civil liberties is important information for Americans to know and is an important part of our jobs.”

Government accountability is not to be scoffed at, and a reader who relied solely on the Post would learn of no balancing considerations, other than a general statement by a Republican Senator that Miss Priest’s disclosures –

“hindered our efforts in the war against al Qaeda,” although he did not say how.

One is surprised that the writer wasn’t enterprising enough to ferret out the hindrances to which the Senator might be referring, such as those mentioned by Byron York in a January 30th article in National Review (not on-line):

On November 2, the Post reported that the CIA “has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al-Qaeda captives” at secret sites in “several democracies in Eastern Europe.” The program, which was so highly classified that few in the federal government knew about it, was, the Post reported, “a central element in the CIA’s unconventional war on terrorism.” The paper did not name the countries involved [though describing them as “democracies in Eastern Europe” rather narrows the field – TV], acceding to the requests of U.S. officials who “argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.”

Almost immediately, however, the European press—along with National Public Radio in the United States— reported that Poland and Romania were the European countries involved. . . .

In Europe, the reaction was immediate and intense. . . . [T]he EU said it would launch a probe of both Poland, which is an EU member, and Romania, which hopes to become one. Both countries might be punished if the story were true, EU officials said. . . .

[I]n Poland, the story caused enormous anger and unhappiness behind the scenes. In an interview with National Review, one source with knowledge of the Polish government’s dilemma would not address the facts of the story, but called the damage “horrific.” The source cited two reasons. First, the Polish government believes that it is now, as a result of the Post story, on al-Qaeda’s hit list, setting off fears that Warsaw or Krakow could follow Madrid and London as European terrorist targets. And second, the leak shook the pro-American Polish government’s faith in the United States. Poland has been a loyal ally of the U.S., sending troops to Iraq and keeping them there when others withdrew. That decision has been costly not only in lives—17 Poles have died in Iraq—but also in terms of Poland’s relations with largely anti-U.S. European governments. And now Poland worries about whether it can trust its most powerful ally. “The next time we are asked to do an operation in common, we will always think twice about your intelligence community’s ability to keep a secret,” the source said.

That is real, serious, and possibly lasting damage to America’s national security. The secret-prison leak, as Bush administration officials argued when they tried to [persuade] the Post not to publish the story, had real consequences.

If guys at WaPo don’t read National Review, they might have dug up the possibility – it was reported in the New York Times – that all or part of what Mrs. McCarthy peddled was false, which might shed a different light on the “accountability” rationale. Investigations by the European Union have yet to turn up any sign of the “secret prisons”.

Still, it’s possible to imagine situations in which the good of exposing governmental wrongdoing would so outweigh the harm to national security that a whistle blower would not deserve to be punished. To suppose, though, that this was one of those instances requires making assumptions that, viewed soberly, seem quite strange.

It’s easy to figure out why the CIA might want to keep the whereabouts of al-Qa’eda bigwigs, and the fact that they were in custody, secret: to forestall rescue attempts, to create uncertainty in the enemy’s mind about the status of missing leaders, to shield cooperative prisoners from retaliation and to minimize hostile propaganda opportunities, among others.

One can also imagine, if one has a sufficiently robust belief in American malevolence, that the prisoners are in reality innocent victims subjected to torture. CIA agent McCarthy and Post reporter Priest evidently concluded that this scenario was likely enough that readily foreseeable harm to our country’s ability to fight al-Qa’eda had to take second place to warning against the evil. What’s more, their decision to make the matter public implies their conviction that resort to the established procedures for informing the Congressional intelligence committees of misconduct would be futile. Not only, in their opinion, were CIA and other Executive Branch officials acting abominably, but their overseers in the Legislature wouldn’t care.

What an astonishingly paranoid perception of one’s own countrymen! It presumes away the good faith of a sizable number of elected and appointed officials and the efficacy of institutional safeguards, giving the benefit of every doubt to those whom the U.S. regards as hostile. Presuming that way is reasonable for governments with long records of secrecy, suppression and tyranny. But anyone who applies them to the United States is, to be blunt, either a conscious friend of our enemies or a useful idiot.

About now Leftoid readers, if this blog has any such, are sneering at my naïve faith in George W. Bush and his cronies. So you think the government is always right, do you? What about. . . . followed by an invocation of My Lai or Watergate or Waco or Ruby Ridge or Abu Ghraib.

My reply is that governments do act badly, and the pressures of war lead to follies and blunders, many of them dreadful. On the other hand, if we let only perfectly wise and trustworthy governments have the tools needed to wage war, we will be defeated.

Ultimately, I think, those who worry more about hypothetical violations of the civil liberties of al-Qa’eda members than about real setbacks to our capacity to fight terrorism understand that complete openness and an expansive view of the rights of enemy combatants are not winning strategies. But that doesn’t bother them. They believe either that there isn’t really a war going on or that the “Bush regime” is so horrendous that deposing it from power takes precedence over victory.

It would be a great clarifying moment if people like Mary O. McCarthy, Dana Priest and Leonard Downie Jr. would make their world view explicit and tell us why they see no harm in their amateur declassification program. Let them proclaim frankly that, in their eyes, Islamofascism is no big deal or George W. Bush is a tyrant. Then the nation can have an open, honest debate about how bureaucrats and journalists should conduct themselves. If the conclusion is that we should stop fighting Osama bin-Laden and his ilk, it will at least be a conscious decision arrived at through Constitutional deliberations, not one imposed by the unilateral actions of a handful of unelected leakers and their accomplices in the news media.

Briefly Noted

Smallpox and measles: Nature’s cure for American Indians’ ecocide (via Cronaca).

AIntellect translation at a Chinese restaurant (via NeverYetMelted).

EUrocrats worry more about the dangers of lit candles than dictatorship in Belarus (via Andrew Stuttaford).

Carrying sports grudges too far, even if the grudge is against a Democrat (via Power Line).

The First Day of Great Lent

Last year, I created a Lenten Weblog, to which I conscientiously contributed every day from Clean Monday (that’s today) through Lazarus Saturday. This year I doubt that I will have the persistence for such an enterprise, but I’ll try to post occasional thoughts on topics of a suitably Lenten character.

This morning, I took up St. John Climacus’ The Ladder of Divine Ascent, traditional seasonal reading for Orthodox Christians. A passage in translator Colm Luibheid’s preface strikes me as worthy of attention:

[T]here is one feature of the unrelaxed severity and discipline of early monastic life that certainly ought to be adverted to . . . ; namely, the undeniable correlation between hardship and an intense marshaling of inner, and frequently unsuspected, resources. Words cannot really encompass what happens here. But the fact seems well established. In the evidence of the Gulag Archipelago, in the testimony of men like Solzhenitsyn, Tertz, Panin, and Shifrin, in the records of the tidal wave of misery let loose by German Nazism, there is a persistent and humbling proof of the capacity of individuals, trapped amid the worst conditions of deprivation, to unlock an inner dynamism, which often is manifested as a commanding faith in God and which must never be confused with the understandable motive of escapism. It has happened too often in twentieth-century experience to be trivialized or explained away; and somewhere within it lies a common bond with the ordeals, voluntarily undertaken, and the achievements of the first monks of the Church. Sharp differences of time and circumstance do not alter the shared character of the early saint and that prisoner of our day who has climbed beyond gross suffering and oppression to arrive at a level of richness beyond all common imagining.

Don’t we see the opposite phenomenon, too? Men who live soft, comfortable lives, as most of us in the Western world do, flinch from mild hardship. It may not be necessary to look any further for an explanation of the cowardice of our elites in the face of terrorism. Instead of an “intense marshaling of inner, and frequently unsuspected, resources”, we see the dissipation of resources that lie readily at hand. Thus the European Union’s Justice and Security Commissioner avers, “The press will give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression. We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right.”

In other words, this civilized European statesman does not have to be shut up in the Gulag or tortured by Islamofascists; his morale breaks under the threat of rowdy gangs of Moslem youths.

Perhaps civilization is inherently temporary and self-limiting. Men toil to construct the edifice. Tantae molis erat romanam condere gentem imperiumque. Then, the labor done, they grow unwilling to undergo the strain of defending their achievements; so they stand listlessly aside as barbarians burn them down. Facilis est descensus.

What the Cartoon Jihadists Want

It has become clear that the assault on Jylland-Posten’s famous cartoons was whipped up by Islamofascists to whom the quaint term “outside agitators” can legitimately be applied. They traveled through the Middle East spreading their message of hatred and also, since the real drawings were not offensive by any reasonable standard, fabricated others. To put it bluntly, they blasphemed the prophet whom they profess to honor, in order to deceive their fellow Moslems. Their machinations led to dozens of killings (almost all of Moslems) and millions of dollars of property damage. In the eyes of God, they are no better than murderers and vandals. What do they hope to accomplish by their crimes?

Jim Geraghty, who has the perspective that comes from residing in a predominantly Moslem country, paints part of the picture:

And now back to our bad news, and signs that the Danish cartoons have ignited a chain reaction that will result in all-out conflict between the West and the Muslim world over their insistence that Muhammad cannot be mocked, ever, and our insistence that freedom of speech includes the insulting, the insensitive, the controversial and the blasphemous. . . .

After 9/11, “if X happens, then the terrorists have won” became a cliche. In this case it might be extraordinarily accurate to say, “If you conclude that Islam cannot coexist with Western values, then the terrorists have won.” . . .

A little less speculative is the question of how Westerners’ souring views on Islam affect our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Bush administration’s goal of bringing democracy and liberty to the Middle East. It’s hard to sell that idealistic mission to the American people when a surprisingly large chunk of your base sees the Muslim world as an irredeemable mass of hatred and violence.

As Geraghty notes, the elite news media are playing into the cartoon jihadists’ hands:

[T]he media (with notable exceptions) has proven itself to be worse than useless in covering the news; they have made an effort to make these cartoons seem unimaginably, unprintably taboo (instead of letting readers decide this for themselves) and they have covered up the degree to which threats and intimidation are repressing free discussion of ideas in non-Muslim countries. That is the story.

Deliberately arousing Western hostility might seem like a suicidal strategy. In a War Between Civilizations, the West, with gigantic advantages in men, money, technology and military skill, could crush even a united House of Islam – probably without going onto full war footing. Some of the jihadists may be insane enough to ignore the disparity of forces, but others are wholly rational. As Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies spells out, they plan to conquer without fighting a real war:

Muslim demonstrators have been torching embassies, stoning churches and threatening mass murder – to protest cartoons characterizing Muslims as violent extremists.

They have been burning flags and stomping on crosses and Stars of David – to express their outrage at those who say they are intolerant.

The damage these demonstrators are doing to the image of Islam is incalculable, far beyond what any poison-penned cartoonist could accomplish. So why are they doing it?

Machiavelli provided the answer more than 500 years ago. For those who would rule, he said, it is better “to be feared than loved.”

By now, all but the most self-deluded among us recognize that Militant Islamists are waging a War Against the West, a deadly jihad against Christians, Jews, Hindus and moderate Muslims. These religiously inspired fascists have no interest in being loved by “infidels.” They do, however, want to inspire fear – and they do want to rule.

The international intifada that has erupted – ostensibly in response to 12 cartoons first published in a Danish newspaper in September – is merely the Militant Islamists’ latest tactic. The charge most frequently leveled against the protestors is hypocrisy. How can they be up in arms over a few cartoons lampooning Muslims when, in many Muslim societies, Jews and Christians are routinely characterized in the most vicious terms and images? But that misses the point.

The Militant Islamists are not demanding equality. They are demanding superiority. They are Muslim supremacists – deological heirs to those who, in the 20th century, fought for Aryan supremacy and white supremacy.

Yousef Al-Qaradhawi – leader of the European Council for Fatwa and Research and president of the International Association of Muslim Scholars – is seen by some as the “hidden hand” behind the protests. He has candidly declared: “Islam will return to Europe as the conqueror.”

And because so many in the Western political elite loathe their own civilization while indulging in a sentimental romance with “oppressed peoples of the Third World”, this tactic succeeds. Bruce Bawer (no permalink), a homosexual cultural critic self-exiled from the United States, who has come to appreciate our country from an unusual vantage point, records the craven conduct of the governments of Norway and Sweden:

[O]n February 10, in Oslo, came a dramatic capitulation that seemed a classic case of sharia in action. For days, Velbjørn Selbekk, editor of the tiny Christian periodical Magazinet – the first publication to reprint the now-famous Muhammed cartoons from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten – had firmly resisted pressure by Muslim extremists (who made death threats) and by the Norwegian establishment (which urged him to give in). But then, on that morning – the day before a planned mass demonstration against the cartoons – Norway’s Minister of Labor and Social Inclusion, Bjarne Håkon Hanssen, hastily called a press conference at a major government office building in Oslo.

There, to the astonishment of his supporters, Selbekk issued an abject apology for reprinting the cartoons. At his side, accepting his act of contrition on behalf of 46 Muslim organizations and asking that all threats now be withdrawn, was Mohammed Hamdan, head of Norway’s Islamic Council. In attendance were members of the Norwegian cabinet and the largest assemblage of imams in Norway's history. It was a picture right out of a sharia courtroom: the dhimmi prostrating himself before the Muslim leader, and the leader pardoning him – and, for good measure, declaring Selbekk to be henceforth under his protection, as if it were he, Hamdan, and not the Norwegian police, that held in his hands the security of citizens in Norway. . . .

On Tuesday, as if Norway hadn’t already been disgraced enough, an official Norwegian delegation met in Qatar with Muslim leader Yusuf al Qaradawi (who has defended suicide bombers and the murder of Jewish women and children) and implored him to accept Selbekk’s apology for the cartoons. Lucky them: he did. “To meet Yusuf al-Qaradawi under the present circumstances,” the Norwegian-Iraqi writer Walid al-Kubaisi told Aftenposten yesterday, “is tantamount to granting extreme Islamists and defenders of terror a right of joint consultation regarding how Norway should be governed.” Yep.

Then again, at least Norway had its brief, shining moment of resistance. Not Sweden. Among the European leaders who have insisted firmly in recent days that their nations enjoyed free speech – only to insist even more firmly that that right must be exercised “responsibly” – was Swedish foreign minister Laila Freivalds, who, responding on February 9 to a Muhammed cartoon in the newspaper of the right-wing Swedish Democratic Party, didn’t just call for “responsibility” but enforced it, sending the Security Police to close down the party website. “It is frightful,” she sniffed, “that a small group of Swedish extremists can expose Swedes to a clear danger” – as if it were the Swedish Democrats, and not Islamic extremists, who were threatening violence. Lately, many Europeans have sought to explain to enraged Muslims that democratic states cannot silence the free expression of ideas; Freivalds appeared determined to show that in Sweden, at least, this is no longer the case.

To find further examples, public and private, is depressingly easy. Here in Illinois, the Daily Illini, the student newspaper of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, had its own “brief, shining moment of resistance”. It reprinted the Danish cartoons. Then came the retreat into dhimmitude. The editor responsible for the action was suspended, and the paper ran an apologetic editorial.

In my law school days, I was the Daily Illini’s token conservative columnist (in fact, just about its only columnist to the right of Che Guevara). When I saw that it had defied the Islamofascists, I was rather proud of it and thought of writing a congratulatory post. Just as well that I didn’t get around to it.

The consequence of these surrenders is not merely the damage done to freedom of speech and the press by concessions to Islamofascist demands. In yielding to our enemies, we make them look like Osama bin-Laden’s “strong horses” and thus help them attract new followers. To a great many on the Western Left, the first priority is demonizing George W. Bush. Hence, they are reluctant to resist even the most repulsive of those who oppose him. Enlisting those allies – “the enemies of my enemy” – and leveraging their displays of dhimmitude into an upsurge of Islamofascist power are what the Cartoon Jihad is ultimately all about.

Further reading: David Warren, “The Test”
James Lewis, “The Discreet Charm of the Danish Cartoons”
Dennis Prager, “American News Media: Little Courage and Little Honesty”
Joseph Tartakovsky, “Islamic Chauvinism and the Mohammed Cartoons”
Paul Belien & Filip van Laenen, “Muslims Create Islamophobes, Then Want Islamophobes Punished” (signs that resistance is not utterly dead)
Abraham H. Miller, “From Cartoons to Chaos”
Diana West, “Cartoon Network”
Vasko Kohlmayer, “Appeasement Unto Death”

Åland Fights Back!

Through a quirk of history, the autonomous region of the Åland Islands (“Ahvenanmaa” in Finnish) enjoys the right, enshrined in the constitution of Finland, to veto treaties entered into by the government in Helsinki. For reasons explained by the Daily Telegraph, that oddity may help preserve the European Union from the misbegotten Giscard Constitution.

Voters in France and the Netherlands rejected the Constitution last year, but you know how much democracy counts with EU bureaucrats. Plans are afoot to revive the document and enact it without the consent of the governed. It is the Eurocrats’ misfortune that the Ålands have been victims of Brussels’ drive for socialist uniformity.

The islanders’ revolt has been brewing for some time. First, this community of Swedish-speaking Finns lost the right to fish at sea with traditional nets.

Then Ålanders saw their beloved spring duck hunting virtually abolished. To the Alanders’ final outrage, local laws on consuming “snus” or Swedish chewing tobacco, are about to be quashed by the European Court of Justice. . . .

Snus, a form of chewing tobacco, has been outlawed by EU fiat in every nation except Sweden, which secured a special opt-out as a condition of its joining the EU, and in every region – except Åland.

The Commission recently took Finland to court to quash Åland’s snus law. But Finland has no power to change that law. Finland does not control laws covering health in Åland; Åland does.

Åland is not allowed to defend its law before the justices in Luxembourg because the court recognises only nations. So the court is set to convict and fine Åland, without allowing the island’s government to plead its case.

For some reason, unfathomable to the Brussels way of thinking, the Ålanders are upset by this form of due process of law, so they are now threatening to prevent Finland from ratifying the proposed Constitution, which would kill it again.

It would be optimistic to think that the Lords of Europa will bow to a few thousand duck hunting, tobacco chewing fishermen. If necessary, I’m sure, the EU will override the Finnish Constitution for the sake of its own. Still, it is heartening to see resistance. Maybe America should offer aid to these European dissidents. I had never before heard of snus but will defend to the death the right of the people of Åland to chew it!

Further reading: Chresten Anderson, “Finnish Island Wants to Leave EU” (the article that attracted the Telegraph to this genuine David vs. Goliath story)

A Fresh Wind in Germany?

I’ll be surprised if this breeze retains its force between Davos and Berlin, but it is encouraging to read OpinionJournal Political Dairy’s account of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s speech to the World Economic Forum:

[D]espite a Teutonic speaking style, Mrs. Merkel delivered the most American of speeches. I lost count of the number of times she used the word “freedom” sometime after the 10th reference. And that’s to say nothing of her statement that “Christian values” were the foundation stone of her politics. No wonder George W. Bush likes this lady.

“Increasing freedom has always led to improvements in Germany,” she said, citing the great free-market guru (and architect of West Germany’s postwar economic boom) Ludwig Erhard. She railed against the heavy hand of German bureaucracy on German innovation and entreprenuership. Computers were a German invention [Karl von Babbage, eh? – ed.] yet where, she asked, was the German equivalent to a Microsoft or a Google? She described German unemployment, which has hovered around 10% for more than a decade, as “terrifying.” She was equally scathing of the political environment she’s inherited. “We are paralysed by events and situations and don’t seem to be able to overcome this,” said Mrs. Merkel. “Each rule and regulation has a political lobby associated with it,” she said, calling Germany’s problems “self-inflicted.”

On the solution side, Mrs. Merkel was clear in direction, if not in details. “We have to open the windows, breathe deeply the fresh air and see the opportunities rather than the risks and hazards,” she said. Germany “must become more flexible, develop better benchmarking, become less rigid in its laws and above all tackle bureaucracy.” She called for a “viable” tax system and reduced labor costs. She also urged free trade, lamenting the failure of the WTO talks in Hong Kong (thanks to French obstruction). The chancellor referred to Britain as a role model for economic reform, reminding her audience why she’s known as “Maggie” Merkel.

Some Europeans, it seems, are starting to notice that entrepreneurs are deserting their continent. The Daily Telegraph carried a pertinent report last week:

Europe’s most successful companies are turning their backs on EU markets because of red tape, a high-level report said yesterday.

The companies that Europe needed to survive were instead investing more money than ever in the United States and Asia, concluded the report, presented to the European Commission in Brussels.

The lack of investment was so dire that it threatened Europe’s “comfortable” way of life. “Europe has to act before it’s too late,” said the report’s author, Esko Aho, the former prime minister of Finland. . . .

Not only were US, Chinese and Japanese firms outspending Europe on research and development, the gap with Europe was growing.

Perhaps most damagingly, Europe’s most important countries were pouring more and more of their technology investment overseas, as they despaired of the European Union becoming “innovation friendly”.

Unless EU governments took bold action to increase spending on research, freed labour markets so skilled workers could move more easily, and stopped pouring taxpayers’ money into dying industries, Europe’s post-war way of life was doomed.

The report said: “Europe must break out of structures and expectations established in the post-Second World War era that leave it today living a moderately comfortable life on slowly declining capital.

“This society, averse to risk and reluctant to change, is in itself alarming but it is also unsustainable in the face of rising competition from other parts of the world. For many citizens without work, or in less-favoured regions, even the claim to comfort is untrue.”

Meanwhile, the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party worries about excessive consumption of chocolate. Talk about missing the moment!

Will Paris Burn?

America has suffered race riots, too. Nobody who remembers Watts and Detroit (where I happened to have a summer job during the 1967 turmoil) will be smug about what is already being called the “Paris Intifada”. On the other hand, our urban black ghettos in the 1960’s were havens of law, order and prosperity next to the Moslem slums surrounding contemporary Paris, where violence has was already routine before last week. In those areas, according to the Associated Press,

Since the start of the year, 9,000 police cars have been stoned and, each night, 20 to 40 cars are torched, [Interior Minister Nicolas] Sarkozy said in an interview last week with the newspaper Le Monde.

As was the case during the U.S. race riots, there are two schools of thought about how the government should react:

Sarkozy on Monday ordered a permanent increase in police and undercover agents to identify troublemakers in difficult neighborhoods. However, the law-and-order minister’s tough talk drew growing criticism Tuesday — even from within his own government.

Sarkozy recently referred to troublemakers in the suburbs as “scum” or “riffraff” and in the past vowed to “clean out” the suburbs.

Such “warlike” words won’t bring calm, Equal Opportunities Minister Azouz Begag said in an interview published in the daily Liberation newspaper.

He told the paper that he “contests this method of becoming submerged by imprecise, warlike semantics.”

While re-establishing order demands firmness, “it is in fighting the discrimination that victimizes youths that order is re-established, the order of equality,” said Begag, who was raised in a low-income suburb of Lyon.

U.S. experience, in the unlikely event that the French were willing to pay any attention to it, is not very pertinent here. Except among a communist fringe, alienation of blacks from American ideals was negligible; to the extent that the 1967 and 1968 riots had an ideological element, it was a demand to be treated like other Americans. French Moslems, including many who have no intention of stoning police cars, appear to regard themselves as a separate nation that must be treated differently from other Frenchmen, a delusion to which the authorities have over the years reacted with a stumbling combination of accommodation and repression. Dire as the thought is, Islamofascist terrorists, losing ground in Iraq, could decide that France is an attractive new battlefield. No doubt their bien pensant chatterers will blame George W. Bush.

Addendum: I’m not sure whether Rod Dreher is optimistic or frightened:

I got an e-mail today from a friend in Paris subject-lined, “It’s started.” He was referring to the Muslim riots in the Parisian suburbs. This is something that the French have anticipated for a long time, and planned for. I don’t think the French authorities are going to put up with this for much longer, and I would guess that if things don’t settle down in a couple of days, we will see the authorities move in with serious force. The rest of Europe has got to be watching all this amid shudders. We all should be. . . . [E]lites in this country – especially those of us who work in the MSM – refuse to ask the hard questions about Islam and the West because we are afraid that the answers will shatter the icon of multiculturalism. As the Dutch learned one year ago today, when Theo van Gogh was ritually slaughtered by a Muslim extremist on an Amsterdam street, reality eventually has a way of grabbing one by the scruff of one’s neck and rubbing one’s nose in it.

Irritating Europe

The fact that someone feels depressed and helpless doesn’t mean that his political ideas are necessarily wrong, but one expects a high concentration of bizarre notions among the people who fall into those categories. Hence, poll data quoted by David Frum (from a not-online article in the new issue of American Enterprise) may help explain why creatures like Ken Livingstone, George Galloway, Dominique de Villepin, Romano Prodi and Gerhard Schröder flourish in Old Europe:

57% of Americans say they are “very satisfied” with their lives – as opposed to 14% of French, 17% of Germans, and 16% of Italians. Only 8% of Americans describe themselves as “not very satisfied” or “not at all satisfied,” as opposed to 18% of French, 16% of Germans, and 20% of Italians.

Only 32% of Americans agree that success is determined by forces outside our control. But 54% of French agree with that statement, as do 68% of Germans, and 66% of Italians.

To be fair and balanced, one must consider the possibility that Americans suffer from delusions or that sophisticated Europeans have much higher standards of “satisfaction”. The straightforward reading, though, is that those trapped inside the EU (vide another piece in the same issue, “America Still Beckons”) see accurately that their destinies are largely controlled by bureaucratic mandarins and aren’t content with the outcome. Their unhappiness gives hope to European liberals. Unfortunately, as the election returns in West Germany showed, many of those who chafe under the mandarinate are afraid to venture into the world without its guidance.

Europe’s psychological misery can also be seen as the foundation of much of its anti-Americanism. To ordinary Europeans, anxious and fearful about their own lives, Americans’ chipper optimism, our belief that anybody can, through his own efforts, achieve personal success must be intensely irritating. It’s natural for them take pleasure in seeing cocky Americanos suffer mishaps, like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, to glow with inward sympathy for our country’s avowed enemies, and to construct paranoid fantasies about what those grating people across the Atlantic really plan to do to the world. As another American Enterprise article observes,

Nearly one third of Germans under 30 say that the U.S. government ordered the 9/11 attacks. In France, a book insisting that Americans carried out the assault themselves to increase defense budgets becomes a huge bestseller. In Britain, major newspapers carry headlines like “The USA is Now the World's Leading Rogue State.”

Asked which countries are the biggest threat to world peace, Europeans name the U.S as often as North Korea and Iran (each are picked by 53 percent). Countries characterized by Euros as less menacing than the U.S. include Syria, Iraq, Russia, China, Afghanistan, Libya. As one American living in Britain, Anglican minister Dwight Longenecker, summarizes: “Our cultural ancestors have become unrecognizable, even hostile, to us.”

What can we do about attitudes like those? Our diplomats and journalists normally assume that foreign hostility stems from clashes of interests or culturally induced misunderstandings. Those can be ameliorated or corrected. To the extent, however, that the real cause is irrational ressentiment, rational approaches can do nothing. It may be that Old Europe won’t get over its problem with America until it resolves its problem with itself.

Addendum: A Davids Medienkritik correspondent calls attention to a manifestation of German anti-Americanism that seems consistent with the idea that American self-confidence grates on the Old European mentalité, leading in this instance to denial of acquaintance with the disliked volk:

Surprised to see tourists still climbing the stairs inside the glass dome of the Bundestag at 9 PM, I decided to join them for a panoramic view of the city’s skyline.

At the base of the walkway that leads to the top there is a photographic exhibit on the history of the building, beginning with its construction as the Reichstag and ending with its reconstruction as the Bundestag. Naturally much of the exhibit is devoted to the post-war period, the division of Berlin, and reunification.

To my amazement, there was not one mention in either the photographs or the accompanying narrative of the United States and the role it played in bringing down the wall and reunifying the city. Without the United States the Bundestag would still be meeting in Bonn, but here were busloads of German and international school children reading a history that would have made the East German Communist Party proud. The experience reminded me of those photos of the Politburo where the faces of party members who had fallen out of favor had been cropped out.

On a related note, I watched a television documentary on Berlin earlier this summer that included a segment on the Berlin airlift. It showed clips of the Berlin Airlift but not once did it mention who flew the planes. There is no doubt that history is being re-written in Germany today. One can only wonder where it will end.

Clobbering Schröder on Your Computer

Illness having opportunely forced Jacques “Le Ver” Chirac to the sidelines, Gerhard Schröder has the EU division of the Race to the Bottom all to himself. The strident anti-Americanism that he displayed in his debate with CDU leader Angel Merkel last Sunday was, of course, the product of desperation. Barring an anti-miracle, his party will suffer a massive defeat “after seven years of economic bumbling and unfulfilled promises”. Schadenfreude is uncharitable, but it will be hard to resist on September 18th.

For those who would like to indulge the feeling in advance, Eighty Dimensional Software has just added Chancellor Forever to its burgeoning line of computer simulations of parliamentary elections. Previous games have been set in Canada, Australia, Britain and British Columbia. (There is also one based on U.S. Presidential elections, though I find it less entrancing than its siblings.) The German edition uses the same basic engine with several interesting additions. One is unique to Germany: the preposterous voting system that tries to meld proportional representation with first-past-the-post constituencies and succeeds in aggravating the weaknesses of both. Others are new features that can be retrofitted to the rest of the series, including multiple types of advertising and free television time.

The Deutsches Institut für Public Affairs is credited with assisting in the game’s development. It is presumably responsible for the large quantity of local information built into the scenarios. Disappointing, however, is the absence of real life media endorsements like those included in the British version. Trying to lure Axel Springer or Der Stern to one’s side would make for more flavor and better gameplay than is provided by random, and potentially unbalancing, generic “endorsers”.

In line with conventional wisdom, there seems to be little chance that a coalition of the CDU/CSU and the Free Democrats can avoid winning a majority in the Bundestag, though reaching the voting percentages needed for a high victory point total isn’t easy at all. For more competitive play (and for those who think that it’s bad luck to set one’s hopes too high), there is also a 2002 scenario, in which Herr Schröder can repeat his anti-U.S., pro-Saddam campaign. (This year he’s moved on to defending the Iranian mullarchy’s nuclear ambitions, which doesn’t seem to be playing as well.)

Eighty Dimensional Software’s prices are startlingly low for products of this quality. Chancellor Forever costs only $12.00 (in English) or €10.00 (in German), with discounts for owners of other games in the series.

France Imports America’s Idiocies

The French establishment may be impervious to good ideas from the U.S., like freeing the economy and deposing sadistic tyrants, but a story in today’s Wall Street Journal [link probably for on-line subscribers only] shows that it doesn’t reject everything from America out of hand: Some of the leading French universities are setting up affirmative action programs, justified with made-in-America bologna.

In France, where the minority population is mainly of North and West African descent, the state officially doesn’t recognize minorities, insisting that immigrants shed their cultures of origin when they come to France and join what the French Constitution calls “the Indivisible Republic.” “La discrimination positive,” the French expression for affirmative action, has long been taboo here.

But with some minority groups becoming increasingly marginalized, a chorus of influential Frenchmen has questioned the country’s color-blind philosophy. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who is tipped as France’s next president, has spoken in favor of affirmative action. Claude Bébéar, founder and chairman of insurer AXA SA, has partnered with a human-rights association, SOS Racisme, to facilitate the recruitment of minorities at France’s big companies. . . .

The “marginalization” of “some minority groups” is, as polite European opinion refuses to say openly, fostered by leftist hatred of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and enforced by Islamic extremists who isolate Moslem children from Western culture and values. Now the rejection of individual freedom, religious tolerance, social mobility, economic liberalism and scientific progress is to be rewarded by preferential access to higher education.

The French educational system prides itself on being a meritocracy based on grueling concours, or exams, that are blind to race or ethnicity. However, the reality is that white students from privileged upbringings often fare the best on these exams. As a result, the increasingly diverse makeup of France’s population isn’t reflected in its elite universities.

Until recently, Sciences Po [an elite university] was a bastion of white, affluent France. Even today, 17% of its students come from the top 2% of French households in terms of income.

Given the high correlation between intelligence and income, and between the intellectual attainments of parents and children, why should that statistic shock anybody? And how will punishing successful parents, by raising barriers to their children’s pursuit of education, help France emerge from its economic and social doldrums?

“Our sense of Republican equality has terrible results, which is that, year after year, inequality in France is progressing,” says Sciences Po Chancellor Richard Descoings. . . .

The newest batch of 57 ZEP students admitted to Sciences Po this year is the largest group yet. Despite worries voiced by some non-ZEP students that the influx of affirmative-action applicants will devalue the school’s diploma, proponents like Mr. Descoings have no plans to slow down recruitment. . . .

The first group of Sciences Po ZEP students will graduate and enter the job market in May. “You can’t judge the [program’s] success on” the first class, Mr. Descoings warns. “It will take years to evaluate the quality of recruits and the kinds of careers they’ll have.”

Based on worldwide experience (vide Thomas Sowell’s Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study), it’s easy to foresee “the kinds of careers they’ll have”: Either les bébés de la discrimination positive will be shepherded into remunerative positions above their level of competence, or they will fail in the job market. Either outcome will encourage further alienation of unassimilated Moslems.

A discouraging footnote is M. Sarkozy’s role in this folly. Cis-Atlantic conservatives tend to view him as a preferable alternative to the odious duo of Chirac and de Villepin. It would be more realistic to recognize that the current generation of French political leaders is intellectually corrupt tout court and that we can expect little good to come out of Paris until these withered branches fall from the tree or are lopped away.

Vive le “Non”!

Unless the exit polls are severely wrong – not by a couple-of-point Ohio-sized margin but as they (perhaps) were in Venezuela – French voters have rejected the draft European Union Constitution. As Mark Steyn observed in advance, that setback will merely prove to the EU elites that the masses are desperately in need of enlightened instruction in what their own interests consist of, so I anticipate that some version of the same bureaucratic blueprint will in the end be forced upon a reluctant continent. For the moment, though, one can hope that the trend toward a European super-state has been halted.

What I have against a Europe-wide polity is not the potential “threat” to American supremacy. The adoption of the d’Estaing charter would in fact give solid assurance that the EU will never be a world class power, for it would entrench a dirigiste welfare state that will never be able to afford guns and will lag further and further behind in producing butter. (I mean the latter metaphorically; agricultural subsidies will ensure an unending surplus of literal butter.)

An unarmed, sclerotic Europe is not, however, in anybody’s best interests. As it ossifies, it will become more hostile to the United States (because failing states always look for successful ones to blame), less able to keep order within its own sphere of interest and more inclined to appease the militant elements in its Moslem population. Moreover, as a democracy-in-name-only, it will lack the instruments for peaceful revival. Give the eurocrats 50 years and the only road to a strong, pro-Western Europe will be one carved by a man on a white horse. I much fear, though, that he will be a man on a white camel.

Assuming that the French electorate’s “non” isn’t overridden by its political masters, there may be some short-term negative consequences. The Left will probably take power in France after the next elections and will plunge ahead with M. Chirac’s project of squeezing the last vestiges of liberty out of the nation’s economy. On the other hand, the rest of the EU nations will remain relatively free to experiment with liberal (in the Old World sense) solutions to their problems. They may even – I know that I’m being optimistic – come to realize that hitlerizing George W. Bush is not a coherent foreign policy. In the long run, those countries that choose the path of freedom will have a chance of matching American prosperity individually and American power collectively. From a purely American nationalist point of view, that might not be so wonderful an outcome, but the world will be better off for it.

In any case, let us celebrate for a moment. For my part, I shall read an issue of Vae Victis (the world’s best wargaming magazine, regardless of its origin) and revert to calling “chips” “French fries”.

Britannia in Stasis

Looked at on its own, Labour’s election victory is one that would please any Prime Minister. As I write, 625 of the 628 seats outside of Northern Ireland (where the major parties have a negligible presence) have been called, and the Labourites have won 354, versus 197 Conservative, 62 Liberal Democrat, 6 Scottish Nationalist, 3 Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalist) and 3 independents (including, alas, the loathsome George Galloway, who, based on the Casement precedent, ought to be hanged for treason). Overall, Labour will enjoy more than a 60-seat overall margin in the next Parliament, which is very solid by historical standards.

All of the commentary will focus not on what Labour got but on what it didn’t get: the same landslide majority as in 2001. It has lost about 47 seats, leading to an instant consensus that Tony Blair suffered a defeat. The big questions for rumination are the defeat’s dimensions and cause. On the answers depends the length of Mr. Blair’s third term in office. Everybody “knows” that he will step down at some point, to be succeeded by the unspeakable Gordon Brown. If the pundits decide that Labour did well, that transition will take place three or four years hence; that it failed, within one or two. Since the majority of the pundits dislike Mr. Blair and dote on his anointed successor, their conclusion is preordained; it’s just a matter of judicious selection of supporting facts.

Hence, large effects will hang on guesses about the reasons for a minute movement of voters. Omitting Northern Ireland, Labour won 41.7 percent of the vote in 2001, 36.2 percent (according to the latest Sky News tally this time. The Conservatives rose from 32.4 to 33.2 percent, the LibDems from 18.7 to 22.5. Those numbers suggest that electoral opinion hasn’t shifted much in the past four years. The simplest way to look at it is that about 13 percent of the 2001 Labour vote switched this time, with 70 percent of those moving left (to the Liberal Democrats) and 30 percent right (to the Conservatives, who then gave up some of their own right flank to the UKIP and the British National Party). Some of that loss can be attributed to the war in Iraq, some to the Blair government’s abridgement of traditional civil liberties, much to regression to the mean: Labour’s 2001 vote share was an historical peak; one would expect some of those who voted Labour for the first time not to repeat.

My own, inexpert view is that voters’ opinions changed little because they were offered a choice of three status quo parties. The policy differences separating Tony Blair, Michael Howard and Charles Kennedy were, let us say, nuanced. A Prime Minister Howard wouldn’t have cut taxes and public spending 30 percent, nor a Prime Minister Kennedy have renounced Britain’s alliance with America. If the Tories had four years ago started getting ready to run on neo-Thatcherite principles, it would have been a very different election – perhaps a disaster for the Right, but victory would have been possible. Instead, with a timid platform and opportunistic lunging after the anti-war vote, the Conservatives were essentially fighting to keep what they had and make marginal gains by picking up handfuls of votes in marginal constituencies. That goal they attained, but it wasn’t much of a goal.

The stasis of the outgoing Parliament’s term seems to me unlikely to persist. The forthcoming change in Conservative Party leadership won’t make a difference, of course; Michael Howard was probably bolder than any foreseeable successor. What will unsettle the voters is the drive for adoption of the European Union’s constitution, coupled with the predictable impacts of the gradual but steady increases in taxes, spending, crime, officially sponsored libertinism and police intrusiveness. Five years from now, Britain will either be a province of New Europe, with a post-democratic administration, hedonistic citizenry and entrenched criminal underclass, or it will be in the midst of a revolt against those tendencies. I suppose that smart money would bet on the former. Still, hope is not yet extinguished.

Addendum: Daniel Johnson summarizes all that was wrong with Michael Howard as a party leader:

It is a myth that Howard relaunched the Tories with new policies that were attractive to the electorate. What he did was to strip out any policies that might have appealed to the kind of liberal middle class voters who defected to Tony Blair in 1997. As a result, by the time those voters were ready to look again at the alternatives to Blairite “New Labour” in 2005, Howard had ensured that the Tories had nothing to offer them. . . .

[H]e promised to match Labour’s spending plans and was reluctant to commit himself to lower taxes. He refused to talk about Europe at all, and sacked any of his colleagues who dared to hint at a smaller state. His big themes were supposed to be crime and immigration. But few voters believed that the Tories would do better at crime than Labour, and the anti-immigration policies alienated as many voters as they attracted.

But Howard’s biggest mistake was to suppose that he could destroy Tony Blair’s position by questioning his integrity. Even worse, Howard retreated from the staunchly pro-American and pro-war foreign policy to which Duncan Smith had adhered . . . .

If he cannot now be king (by the next election he will be nearly 70), he has set his heart on being the kingmaker. And because he knows that the “Notting Hill Tories” (a liberal, privileged coterie whom he has sedulously promoted) are unlikely to be chosen by the party members, he wants to restore the exclusive right to elect the leader to the parliamentary party. This was the system that overthrew Margaret Thatcher in 1990, an act of matricide from which the party has never quite recovered.

In another post, Mr. Johnson depressingly observes that the Conservatives still have a smaller presence in Parliament than Labour did when it was at its Thatcher Era low in 1983.