Agenda Journalism

Just as the Sandy Hook tragedy gave a heretofore unexcelled opportunity for gun confiscators to capitalize on hysteria in order to potentially reach ends otherwise unobtainable, it has also shone a light on the intellectual and moral failures of collectivists — the tribe to which all confiscators belong.

These failings are two, and endemic to collectivists: demonizing those who disagree, and agenda journalism. No matter the issue which holds collectivists in thrall of their own intellectual and moral superiority — gun control, global warming, name it — what should be straight, factual, stories are littered with questionable assertions and unsurprising elisions.

A recent WSJ article, Why our Gun Debate Is Off Target raises these points. The author is writing from the perspective of what we now call an embedded reporter.

[At the firing range I] did my best to avoid gun politics, the subject came up constantly. What came through loudest of all was that gun guys feel insulted. The caustic and routine dismissal of "gun culture" is only part of it. Gun guys look at the most strident advocates of gun control and say, "You know nothing about what it means to handle guns, but you presume to make judgments about my ability to do so."

…

A parks-and-recreation worker in Wisconsin told me he was offended by the Democrats' view "that guns are for the unwashed, the yokels." It's hard to think of a better organizing tool for the right than the left's tribal antipathy to guns.

For examples of the confiscators demonizing gun owners, the NYT in the weeks following Sandy Hook is a rich hunting ground. But why go so far as that Fort Knox of unexamined ideas when we have our own Harry Eagar and his Restating the Obvious? In a recent piece, The Infantilization of Firearms, the entire demonization menagerie, so characteristic of collectivist rhetoric, is on display:

Today, you can go to Uncle Jesse's on Maui and buy “tactical” anything. Camo underwear, for example.

How weird is that?

Silly, but a sign of a more profound delusion. Camo underwear is, in fact, the gun nut version of the Batman underwear that 5-year-olds wear.

…

I have not addressed the issue of sexual anxiety. The Bushmaster ads confirm the idea that guns are substitute penises for men who are worried their natural equipment is substandard.

A writer engaging in this kind of invective cannot be trusted to provide rigorous analysis, as the penultimate sentence demonstrates: "… disarming the population would cut out the slaughter of millions of our fellow citizens."

Going with far less antagonism, but no more forgivable for that, is a recent offering from the New York Times, To Reduce Suicide Rates, New Focus Turns to Guns, which turns a truism, guns are good at killing things, into a tendentious conclusion: the U.S. suicide rate is substantially higher than it would be without guns.

Let me demonstrate:

Suicidal acts with guns are fatal in 85 percent of cases, while those with pills are fatal in just 2 percent of cases, according to the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.

…

The national map of suicide lights up in states with the highest gun ownership rates. Wyoming, Montana and Alaska, the states with the three highest suicide rates, are also the top gun-owning states …

This is either intentional deck-stacking, or profound ignorance. How so? There is something completely germane, yet wholly unmentioned throughout this entire article: gender. Males attempt suicide mush less often than females, but are far more frequently successful. Indeed, the second sentence begs examining that possibility. After all, besides guns, the other thing that lights up in states with the highest gun ownership are also the highest Male to Female ratios; the three states listed are among only nine that have more men than women. At 108.5 and 104.1 men per 100 women, Alaska and Wyoming are the two highest, by a fair distance. Beyond that rather glaring omission, the article is also completely silent on how much higher the suicide rates are in those states.

So, the fact that suicide rates are higher in these states must be, at least in part, due solely to one of the myriad differences between men and women. Consequently, the obvious fact that guns are lethal 85% of the time is at least plausibly due to the fact that males, who intend to die, use guns and females, whose intent must be less directed, use pills. Certainly, I doubt anyone would make the case that pills, taken with real intent, are any less fatal than guns.

Nor does this article even attempt to compare and contrast the suicide rates in countries economically similar to the US. As it happens, and is quickly revealed to anyone with the search skills of a grade schooler, the UK has both very stringent hand gun restrictions, and a suicide rate practically indistinguishable from ours.

The glaring absence of these seemingly obvious considerations makes this piece, like Harry's, an unalloyed example of agenda journalism. Although, the sins here are far less forgivable than in Harry's case, because he was engaged more in opinion writing than straight reporting.

Which brings WSJ article back into view. It, too, while posing under the guise of moderation, is yet another agenda item. Granted, since it is an essay, it is bound to have a point of view. However, that is no excuse to simply sidestep the inconvenient.

To the legislatures of 27 states and the District of Columbia, the solution to both problems seems obvious: Require guns to be locked up, trigger-locked, stored separately from their ammunition, or some combination of the three. A lot of gun guys hate these laws. They argue that a gun separated from its ammunition, disabled or locked away is useless in an emergency.

Not true. I keep my handgun loaded in the bedroom, in a metal safe the size of a toaster that pops open the second I punch in a three-digit code. I bought it on eBay for $25. The gun is secure but instantly available—to me only. Many gun guys use such safes. They just don't want to be told to use them.

Neither do they want to be ordered to report a stolen gun to the police. Lots of gun guys consider it tyranny to have to tell the police anything about their guns, and they have kept most jurisdictions from passing stolen-gun laws. Only seven states and the District of Columbia make reporting a stolen gun mandatory.

The problem here is, or at least should be, breathtakingly obvious to even the scarcely sentient. How, exactly, is a requirement to lock guns up supposed to work? How, precisely, are those seven states and DC to enforce their reporting laws?

The answer is simple: either it won't and they can't, or the government must rigorously register and track all guns. And, as we all know, the government will never abuse, or lose, that information. What could possibly go wrong?

By now, the real explanation should be clear. Confiscationists are Progressives, a self-flattering term that should always be replaced with "Collectivists". Much gun violence, and all manner of other mayhem has alcohol as the primary cause. Surely, then, the answer is to eliminate alcohol. But Collectivists will not suggest that for two equally important reasons: it didn't work, and Collectivists like alcohol.

But Collectivists don't like guns, and demonize the "bitter clinger" owners. Therefore, take away the guns.

That it won't work is no deterrent to collectivism.

Allergic to Velvet

Frederick Turner says that the suicide bomber's true targets are the Velvet revolutionaries of today's emergent democracies:

Part of our difficulty in dealing with global terror directed against civilian populations is that we have not, I believe, understood what it was designed to attack. Some see it as a war between cultural blocs, others as a religious war against infidels, others as a traditionalist reaction to the social, economic, and cultural disruptions caused by globalism, others as a continuation of the liberation of oppressed peoples from colonial imperialism. There may be a grain of truth in some of these explanations, but the counter-examples to each of them are glaring.

For instance, the majority of deaths by terrorism in the last several years -- even including 9/11 and the second Intifada -- have been the result of Muslim-on-Muslim violence, perhaps even Arab-on-Arab violence, depending on what is counted. Thus we can rule out cultural and religious war as the prime motivation. Though one can at a stretch describe the Taliban as traditionalists opposing the corruptions of global market capitalism, al Qaeda is a quintessentially cosmopolitan, big-business financed, historicist, international intellectual movement, as globalist in its own way as Microsoft. As for the anti-colonialist explanation, it is hard to see how animist Sudanese farmers, Kashmiri Hindus, Sunni Kurds, Iraqi Shiites, Philippine Christians or Egyptian or Lebanese democrats, all of them targets of terrorism, could be considered colonial oppressors.

The history of warfare shows us that each new military power arises as the result of a new strategy or weapon, with a major socio-economic dimension, that effectively refutes the previous one. The disciplined citizen-hoplite infantryman of the Greek city-states answers and reverses the huge peasant armies of the Persian emperors. The plebeian Roman phalanx defeats the elite Spartan line. The Parthian cavalry archer wears out and turns back the Roman phalanx. The longbow brings down the armored knight. The swift low British man-o'-war defeats the galleon. The machine-gun stops the massed infantry attack invented by Marlborough and Bonaparte.

When the suicide bomber first emerged as the paradigm and core symbol of terrorism, it could be argued that it was exactly the weapon to counter the nuclear-armed modern democratic nation state (Israel in particular). The suicide bomb could not, by definition, be avenged or deterred; though it could not target the government, which could always democratically renew itself, it could target the population's trust in its government. Its target was, appropriately, the whole population, because in a democracy the whole population is the sovereign. The bomber could always be disavowed by his state bosses and protectors.

But as I have pointed out, the numbers of Israeli and Western dead as victims of terror are only a fraction of the total number. War is politics by other means. Why did suicide terror metastasize from Israel to the world? What is the basic political enemy of the global terrorist movement? What is it designed to attack? Though it would be tempting to say that the target is the democratic state, the evidence does not quite support it. Many existing democratic states were left alone, and coexisted with, for years before suicide terror emerged, and are so still.

I believe that the evidence points clearly to one target. Thirty years ago it looked as if the totalitarian state was solidly established, successful and immortal. Democratic capitalism had been stopped in its tracks. The nuclear-armed socialist dictatorship could not be attacked or defeated; it could at best be contained, and none of its incremental marginal conquests could be rolled back. Marvelously, however, a new strategy emerged, invented by the world's middle-class populations, that could bring down the totalitarian state: the velvet revolution. Totalitarian governments rely on elites to govern and control the people and defend themselves against outside ideas. Those elites must reproduce themselves, creating a property-owning educated class with great power but without the revolutionary ideology of their parents; and to remain economically viable the state must produce a skilled artisan class, like the shipbuilders of Gdansk, with the capacity to unionize. Out of these materials, generated by totalitarianism itself, comes the velvet revolution.

The velvet revolution (also named the orange revolution, the purple finger, the rose revolution, the cedar revolution) has swept the world. In different ways, nonviolent, non-ideological middle-class and skilled-worker mass movements have unseated tyrants and established democracies in an amazing range of countries: Spain, Portugal, Chile, Argentina, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Bangladesh, South Korea, Indonesia, the Baltic states, Mexico, Serbia, Albania, Georgia, the Ukraine, the Philippines, Lebanon, even Palestine, all fell to the regimes of popular sovereignty. China nearly fell in 1989, with the Tiananmen protest, and will become a democracy some time in the next twenty years. If there is one defining event that characterizes the end of twentieth century political modernism, it is this one.

The suicide bomb, with the mass terrorism it epitomizes, is the weapon of choice against the velvet revolution. The target is not, as well-meaning critics of terrorism say, indiscriminate: it is exact and precise. The target is any population that might organize a velvet revolution, the potential sovereigns of a democratic state. It is people who are not ideological, who are willing to let others believe what they want, who want to make a living and be independent, and who want a say in their government. Even in Israel, where it was the citizens of an already-established democratic state that were being attacked, the true target, as we are now coming to understand after the death of Arafat, was the nascent democracy of Palestine. By killing Jews, Arafat could continue to oppress and defraud Palestinians.

Global terrorism is not a revolution, but an attempt to suppress a revolution. What is being defended by suicide terror is not Islam, not traditional moral culture, not the ethnic nation yearning to be free of the colonial oppressor, but the principle of totalitarian rule -- the sovereignty of the dictator or the ayatollah, promoted as national self-identity and independence, or as the will of God. It is the last gasp, historically, of the ancient system by which the huge majority of human beings were ruled since the Neolithic agricultural revolution.

Somehow this explanation just doesn't satisfy. For one, Osama Bin Laden was himself a member of the Saudi elite, and one who by nature should have identified with the totalitarian Saudi royal family, yet he struck out against them. Those founding members of the Muslim Brotherhood who masterminded the assassination of Anwar Sadat were likewise fighting against an authoritaritarian regime which in no way was in danger of devolving into a democratic government.

Turner's reasoning contains several contradictions. Muslim on Muslim violence does not preclude a cultural or religious origin to the conflicts, as it is the influence of Western cultural ideas on Muslims that has enraged the Islamicists and made those Muslims who may be suspected of having sympathy for or neutrality toward the West targets of their ideology. His statement is equivalent to saying that there was no religious or cultural component to the Northern Ireland strife or to the 100 Year War, as both these conflicts were Christian on Christian.

Secondly, he identifies the globalist nature of the Islamist terror network as a reason that the goals of their efforts cannot be explained by reactionary traditionalism, but in the last paragraph claims that it is a movement to defend that ancient tradition of totalitarian government which has ruled humanity since the outset of the Neolithic Age.

I would say that the simplest and the most obvious reason for the Islamicist terror movement is the correct reason. It is motivated by a warped interpretation of cultural and religious traditionalism in the Islamic mold. Turner would have us believe that the terrorists are fighting to defend an abstraction, namely Totalitarianism as a governing ethos. No doubt their vision is a totalitarian one, but in a specifically Islamic and Arabic form. They would not deploy their resources to defend post-Soviet crony communism in Ukraine or Cuba. As I have pointed out in a past critique of Turner, he is in the habit of making facile generalizations without much reflection.

It used to be about the music, man!

Jeff Sharlet reviews the book "Faking It: the quest for authenticity in popular music" by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor:

Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor, two publishing professionals who have turned out their personal record collections to produce a persuasive defence of inauthenticity as the defining characteristic of great popular music, borrow the title of their book, Faking It, from a suicide note - the most authentic, and also the stupidest, genre of all. "The fact is," wrote Nirvana's singer Kurt Cobain shortly before eating the muzzle of a shotgun in 1994, "I can't fool you, any one of you . . . The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I'm having 100% fun."

Like many people of a certain age, I remember where I was and what I was doing the day Cobain died. I was in my third year of college, I was in a dorm; friends and I were drinking 40-ounce bottles of Colt 45 malt liquor, and when we heard the news, we laughed. Cobain, the gold standard of rock-star sincerity since his suicide, had long seemed to us like a joke, a poseur, a pretty-boy pop singer for the high-school teens who gathered in herds of earnest weeping within hours of the news. We slightly older boys and girls were past that kids' stuff; we listened to 1980s art-punk and traditional blues - two of the fakest musical genres ever presented to the public as revelations of the real - and it was to the forgotten pain of dead black men, Skip James and Son House and Mississippi John Hurt, that we raised our 40-ouncers.

Little did we know that these musicians had been served up to us on platters, literally, resurrected 30 years before by another generation of white college boys who had looked up and recorded the old men as stand-ins for their fantasies of the romantic savage. They had at least bothered to produce some records; all my friends and I did was listen to them and drink malt liquor, a beverage manufactured to exploit poor black people and winos of all races. For us, it was liquid authenticity.

Our choice of malt liquor and callow disregard for suicide constituted what Barker and Taylor call an authenticity "trap" - the harder you try to "keep it real", the more artificial you become. Barker and Taylor explore the trap in ten chapters ranging from 1920s blues to Nirvana's last concert, most of which pair an artist generally considered authentic with one generally considered not, often to surprising effect.

Cobain's companion is Leadbelly, a favourite of folk aficionados who to this day perceive him as a giant of "black music", even though the vast majority of his fans were white. (When white producers brought Leadbelly to New York City in 1935 to play "traditional" music, Life magazine declared in a headline: "Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel".) Cobain's swan song, performed on MTV's Unplugged a few months before his suicide, was a cover of Leadbelly's "Where Did You Sleep Last Night", about a woman who wanders into the woods after her husband is hit by a train. Cobain, so deep into the authenticity trap by then that he'd never escape, seemed to be making one last attempt not to "fake it", by reviving a song by his "favourite performer", and exiting the stage without an encore.

But Leadbelly, Barker and Taylor reveal, was by necessity a master of "faking it", a sophisticated musician of cosmopolitan taste limited to a repertoire of "Negro" songs and told by his manager to perform in prison garb. That manager was John Lomax, one of the early 20th-century giants of what has come to be known as "roots music". "The music that was, for Lomax, the most authentic," write the authors, "the most black, the most free from 'white influence', was the most primitive." That doesn't mean Leadbelly was primitive, only that Lomax and, decades later, Cobain decided to believe that he was, the better to break the bonds of artificiality they felt modernity and celebrity imposed. Leadbelly was a tool. This shifty truth comes to us by way not of postmodernism, but of old-timey Marxist analysis. In 1937, the novelist Richard Wright, profiling Leadbelly for the Daily Worker, declared his coerced performances "one of the greatest cultural swindles in history".

I like the term "authenticity trap". It sums up my opinion of the modern penchant for putting on the customs, traditions and styles of past or foreign cultures, real or imagined, in some quixotic quest to acheive a dimly imagined state of higher being-ness. As Sharlet states, it is usually the affliction of white college educated types, though it wouldn't surprise me to find that it has spread via globalization to the upper classes of non-white countries. The irony of this is that the people embarking on these quests don't see the self-defeating nature of it all. You can't acheive authenticity by choice. There is only one authentic life that you can live, and that's the one you've been stuck with by the random chance of your birth.

But in another sense there is nothing inauthentic about a modern white kid enjoying Mississippi blues or Ska or Reggae or Latin Salsa, because all these are available to him in his modern milieu. He's not experiencing the life of a southern black during Jim Crow, or a Jamaican black, but listening to all these different varieties of music is an authentic expression of the life he is living, as a cosmopolitan white kid in the Information Age.

Authenticity is like body odor. It's something you don't notice in yourself because you're around it everyday. Since you don't notice it, you imagine that you don't have it. Other people have exotic smells, so you feel like they have something that you do not. You never imagine that these exotic people might find their own ways dull, and they may actually find your way of life exotic and exciting.

My "music theory" is very simple. There is good music and bad music. There is no need to articulate the qualities that make up goodness or badness. Much like Emperor Joseph II from Amadeus, bad songs have "too many notes", or "not enough notes", or "the wrong notes". Even that level of critique is considered advanced theory in my book. I've freed myself to like what I like and dislike what I don't, no questions asked. In this way I am living the authentic life of a white Baby-Boomer male from New England transplanted to Minnesota.

You say reasonable, I say tomato

Here's another example of the disconnect between British and American attitudes regarding what actions are reasonable to take in defense of oneself or others. This editorial in the Independent blog complains of the creeping "Americanization" of Britain in the wake of the police shooting of an urban gunman:

The Chelsea and Stockwell police shootings: some questions

By James Macintyre

Questions are being raised in the Saturday papers over the Chelsea shooting by police of Mark Saunders earlier this week, and rightly so. One that doesn't seem to have been answered (or asked), is why did officers apparently spray him with bullets before throwing tear gas and stun grenades into his house, rather than the other way around? The Met, as ever, is behind the scenes heavily briefing its side of the story to the press. But the scrutiny it faces is notably enhanced since the last high-profile police shooting, that of the innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes when he was mistaken for a suicide bomber in 2005.

The repeated, point-blank-range de Menezes shooting is now being reported as the last by police before that of Mr Saunders. As it happens, one of the officers involved in the Stockwell station tragedy was reported to have shot and killed again. Either way, the Americanization of our streets, and the increasingly trigger-happy nature of our police, are justifiable matters for concern.

But other worrying questions emerge from the two cases, too: after that of Mr de Menezes, it was reported as the aprehending of a suicide bomber and - after rampant spin by police - the now disproved myth, that the Brazilian jumped tube barriers, was running and wearing a bulky coat, prevailed not for days but for years.

Later, Mr de Menezes was smeared over cocaine use - as if that somehow justified his death - in a fashion not completely different from the narrative about Mr Saunders's undoubted drinking problem. That the police is capable of spin is not in doubt, and it is worth remembering that certain leading Met bosses - apart from Sir Iain Blair who was kept in the dark - unquestionably lied to the media in an attempt to cover their terrible mistake. Should an off-the-record relationship between police and press be allowed? Perhaps.

But there is another, crucial question here. By the way things are looking, the police will not get away with the kind of lies and spin they whipped up over Mr de Menezes. This is a good thing, despite the converse fact that the latter was entirely innocent, while Mr Saunders was, apparently, at the very least firing at neighbours's houses in his residential square.

Certainly it takes a lot for the centre-right press to dare, as it has this week, to ask any questions of police officers, not one of whom - it should be remembered - has ever, despite everything, been held to account for the death of Jean Charles de Menezes.

Could it be that in modern Britain the police killing of a white, middle class barrister in Sloane Square receives more scrutiny - and more justice - than a dark-skinned foreign electrician in south London?

Macintyre's account gives few details of the situation that the police encountered outside Saunder's home that led up to their decision to storm the house. This article in the Guardian provides those details:

Mark Saunders was shot dead by police when they feared that he would kill or seriously injure an officer or member of the public if he was not stopped, the Guardian has learned.

Details of the reasoning by police when faced by the barrister who began firing indiscriminately after drinking came on the day an inquest heard he had been shot at least five times, and by more than one officer.

Sources familiar with police decision-making say people had been still trapped in their homes in Markham Square, west London, when the 32-year-old opened fire on Tuesday afternoon. Officers considered trying to evacuate all the residents in the vicinity, but decided there was a risk that Saunders would open fire on anyone he could see from his window overlooking the square. They believed he would shoot any officer trying to get people out, and any of his neighbours.

Saunders came across as drunk, the sources said, and he displayed a highly volatile mood while talking to police who were trying to convince him to lay down his shotgun and surrender.

Experts say that three of the five shots - to Saunders's head, heart and liver - would have incapacitated him, and would have almost certainly proved lethal. These shots were fired as he and police were engaged in an exchange of fire for the third time, with Saunders holed up in his flat where he had fired from his second floor window three times over a 4½-hour period.

The sources say the plan had been to wait Saunders out, after he first opened fire in the direction of his neighbours, and then again at armed police called to the scene just before 5pm.

But that plan was scrapped when the former Territorial Army soldier fired at police from his window after 9pm.

A senior source told the Guardian: "It was the strong belief that he would shoot someone, either a police officer or resident who was trapped and emerged from their house or flat."

On Thursday his father, Rodney Saunders, questioned whether police had been obliged to use lethal force.

A senior police source said that storming the flat and trying to take him alive would have been highly dangerous to the officers involved. After he took the fatal shots the flat was stormed by armed officers using stun grenades.

Nine officers believe they opened fire during the siege; in keeping with police procedure the nine have been removed temporarily from firearms duties.

Yesterday an inquest into Saunders's death opened at City of Westminster coroner's court. Coroner's officer Lynda Morris told the hearing that Saunders did not use his shotgun on himself: "The multiple gunshot wounds present are associated with severe internal damage to the brain, the heart, the liver and the main vein of the lower body. The external and internal gunshot-related damage is consistent with a minimum of five shots having hit the deceased." She was reading a preliminary report by pathologist Nathaniel Cary.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission is investigating the incident. Investigators said they were looking at various lines of inquiry, and refused to rule out the possibility he was trying to commit so-called "suicide by cop".

Somehow I think, given the circumstances of a drunk gunman firing at neighbors and police over more than a four hour period, that Macintyre's knee-jerk suspicions of foul play and the unreasonable use of deadly force are in themselves unreasonable. It is fine and proper to take the civil rights of a criminal into consideration, and to look for ways to resolve a situation without bloodshed, but never at the cost of putting the lives of the police and the public at undue risk. It is not like the British police have demonstrated a persistent pattern of deadly confrontations, yet their motives will be second and third guessed by people like Mcintyre, and they could quite possibly face charges.

These are the attitudes that prompted my comment in Human Psychology 101 about a "legal philosophy which makes the law-abiding citizen responsible for the safety and well-being of the law-breaker." Based on the facts as presented in the article, I can't say that the police acted improperly or with undue force or recklessness. I think they did their job properly.

If I were a homeowner in England who had to take drastic action to protect myself from an intruder, I would not feel in the least bit comforted if my jury were composed of people like Mcintyre. Not my definition of reasonable.

Abortion and "false consciousness"

The following rant is inspired by this sickening news story:

Artist hanged herself after aborting her twins

Last Updated: 2:03am GMT 22/02/2008

An artist killed herself after aborting her twins when she was eight weeks pregnant, leaving a note saying: "I should never have had an abortion. I see now I would have been a good mum."

Emma Beck was found hanging at her home in Helston, Cornwall, on Feb 1 2007. She was declared dead early the following day - her 31st birthday.

Her suicide note read: "I told everyone I didn't want to do it, even at the hospital. I was frightened, now it is too late. I died when my babies died. I want to be with my babies: they need me, no-one else does."
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The inquest at Truro City Hall heard that Miss Beck had split up with her boyfriend, referred to as "Ben" after he "reacted badly" to the pregnancy.

She saw her GP before the termination, but missed an appointment at a hospital in Penzance. She then cancelled, but later turned up to an appointment at a clinic at Royal Cornwall Hospital in Treliske. The counsellor was on holiday so a doctor referred Miss Beck to a pregnancy counselling telephone service eight days before carrying out the abortion when she was eight weeks pregnant, the inquest heard.

The coroner, Dr Emma Carlyon, ordered that the identities of the doctor who performed the abortion and her lead consultant be kept secret.

The inquest heard that Sylvia Beck, the victim's mother, wrote to the hospital after her daughter's death, saying: "I want to know why she was not given the opportunity to see a counsellor.

"She was only going ahead with the abortion because her boyfriend did not want the twins.

"I believe this is what led Emma to take her own life - she could not live with what she had done."

The doctor said: "I discussed Emma's situation with her, and wrote on the form, 'Unsupported, lives alone, ex-partner aware'.

"It is normal practice to give a woman the number for telephone counselling when a counsellor is not available.

"I am satisfied that everything was done to make sure that Emma consented to the operation.

She added: "We have since appointed more counsellors so there is more holiday cover."

Katie Gibbs, Miss Beck's GP, told the hearing: "She was extremely distressed by the abortion procedure, and I didn't think she ever came to terms with it.

"She had a long history of anxiety and depression. Despite my best efforts, she was not willing to see a counsellor after the termination."

Her boss at the clinic, said: "The time that can be given to a woman by a counsellor is limited in a busy hospital.

"I am satisfied everything was done to make sure Emma was consenting to surgery. I don't feel there was any gap in the counselling service.

"There were lots of individuals who would be alert to any doubts. The comments made by Emma's mother are not about a doctor I recognise."

Mrs Beck told the court: "Emma was considered a talented artist, and sold a number of paintings.

"She was pleased when she became pregnant, but Ben reacted badly to the news."

Recording a verdict of suicide, Dr Carlyon said: "It is clear that a termination can have a profound effect on a woman's life.

"But I am reassured by the evidence of the doctors here."

The last sentences should send chills up your spine. A woman who would have loved to be a mother of twins comes to the monstrous decision to abort them, and the medical system carries out her obviously troubled wish with the efficiency and dispatch of a well oiled production line. The only regret from the medical authorities seems to be that there was a slip-up on getting her the necessary counseling after the abortion instead of before, as if the reality of exstinguishing the lives of her two children was something of small consequence that could be dealt with by a few counseling sessions.

I'm using the term "false consciousness" in this regard, a term coined by Karl Marx because if that term ever had any real applicable meaning, it is to the notion that it is in women's self interest to consider abortion an acceptable lifestyle choice of no more moral import than the choice of career or hairstyle. To paraphrase, false consciousness is:

Any belief, idea, ideology, etc., that interferes with an exploited and oppressed person or group being able to perceive the objective nature and source of their oppression.

Elective abortion, it seems, hasn't liberated women at all. It has mainly benefitted men by allowing them to avoid the responsibility of supporting children that they bring into the world through their own selfish sexual activities. There was a time when society didn't care how a man reacted to the news that he had conceived children. His fatherhood wasn't an optional role that he could choose to take or leave. But feminism changed all that. Feminism has conned two generations of women into believing that they have been liberated by the choice of raising children alone with no ability to make a moral claim on the father for support, or to choose to kill her children.

Is it sexist to say that women aren't by nature killers? That they have to be indoctrinated into committing such heinous acts by a morally corrupt society? If so, then I'm a sexist.

Fantasy International

Amnesty International has published their report of the state of human rights for 2006. As usual the pretentious scolds at AI are obsessed with painting the US and Israel as the Great and Little Satan of human rights abuses, while ignoring or downplaying the most egregious offenders in the world community. To introduce a year of human rights horrors AI uses the story of the poor, pitiful Palestinian farmer who has to traverse Israeli army checkpoints to tend to his farm:

On 10 December 2006, while the world celebrated International Human ights Day, I was in Jayyus on the West Bank. The small village is now divided by the Wall – or more accurately a high iron fence. Built in defiance of international law, and ostensibly to make Israel more secure, the Wall’s main effect has been to cut off the local Palestinian population from their citrus groves and olive orchards. A once prosperous farming community is now impoverished. “Every day I have to suffer the humiliation of checkpoints, petty obstructions and new restrictions that stop me from getting to my orchard on the other side. If I cannot cultivate my olives, how will I survive?” cried one angry Palestinian farmer.
As I listened to him, I could see in the distance the neat red roofs and white walls of a large and prosperous Israeli settlement. I wondered if those who lived there believed that a Wall threatening the future of their neighbours could truly enhance their security.

Let's go over the sequence of events. Israel offers peace deal to Yasser Arafat. Arafat refuses to make peace, calls for Intifada. Palestinian suicide bombers kill hundreds of Israelis, and make life miserable for the rest. Israel builds a security fence. Suicide bombings stop. I'd say that the Israelis have a very good case for believing that the wall enhances their security.
The AI report is shot through with such exercises in moral equivalence. No attempt is made to assess the relative culpability of political actors or governments in causing or sustaining conflicts, all parties are equally guilty. Guilty of what? What does AI see as the number one crime against humanity in 2006? Is it the targeting of noncombatants for indiscriminate slaughter? Ethnic cleansing? The brutalization of women by thuggish theocrats? No, it is the promotion of Fear:

In 1941, US President Franklin Roosevelt laid out his vision of a new world order founded on “four freedoms”: freedom of speech and of religion; freedom from fear and from want. He provided inspirational leadership that overcame doubt and unified people. Today far too many leaders are trampling freedom and trumpeting an ever-widening range of fears: fear of being swamped by migrants; fear of “the other” and of losing one’s identity; fear of being blown up by terrorists; fear of “rogue states” with weapons of mass destruction.
Fear thrives on myopic and cowardly leadership. There are indeed many real causes of fear but the approach being taken by many world leaders is short-sighted, promulgating policies and strategies that erode the rule of law and human rights, increase inequalities, feed racism and xenophobia, divide and damage communities, and sow the seeds for violence and more conflict.
[...]
History shows that it is not through fear but through hope and optimism that progress is achieved. So, why do some leaders promote fear? Because it allows them to consolidate their own power, create false certainties and escape accountability

But isn't the AI report itself an exercise in fear-mongering? Why are they trying to get us so alarmed and exercised about Palestinian farmers? When fear is prompted by real acts of agression, fear is not only justified but expected of any sane, responsible populace. Do the AI activists want us to supress our fear response in the face of atrocities perpetrated against us? May as well ask us to repress our gag refles or our blink reflex. Fear is what keeps people alive. The AI fantasists would have us believe that real threats to our well being don't exist, that we only manufacture them through our fears. Tell that to the widows and orphans of 9/11.
The AI report is full of such New Age, Kung-Fu pacifist goo packaged as serious moral concern. Nowhere do the authors of the report make a serious attempt to identify actual perpetrators of human rights abuses. No names are named, only the countries where these abuses occur. It makes no differentiation between the purposes motivating the actions that are allegedly abuses of human rights, whether those actions are legitimiately in defense of the security of a free people, or whether they are motivated by a desire to extinguish the rights and security of people. Neither do the authors make a distinction between the relative innocence or guilt of the parties whose human rights are being infringed. So the detainees at Guantanamo Bay are afforded the same status as victims as are women who are killed for advocating women's rights in Iran.
The authors perpetrate another form of moral equivalence in the report. By focusing upon this abstract idea of human rights, they are pulling together a host of personal infringements perpetrated by governments that are not all morally equal. For instance, Iran is cited five times in the report. The five instances are as follows:

1. Promoting the denial of the Holocaust
2. Placing restrictions on the use of the Internet.
3. The murder of women's advocates.
4. Compelling women to wear the veil.
5. Undermining the credibility of the UN Security Council

They do not mention the supression and murder of religious minorities, the execution of women and girls for "honor" crimes or the sponsoring of terrorist movements to destabilize the governments of Iraq, Afghanistan or Lebanon. Syria is mentioned twice in the report, for resricting the Internet and for its complicity with the US in receiving the terror suspect Maher Arar for interrogation under torture. No other mention is made of their support for terrorist cells in Iraq and Lebanon.

For all their moral handwringing, the authors of the report have no serious proposals for improving the human rights situation around the globe, only Hallmark card platitudes befitting a Miss America contestant:

A FUTURE FREE OF FEAR
One can get sucked into the fear syndrome or one can take a radically different approach: an approach based on sustainability rather than security. The term sustainability may be more familiar to development economists and environmentalists, but it is crucial too for human rights activists. A sustainable strategy promotes hope, human rights and democracy, while a security strategy addresses fears and dangers. Just as energy security is best provided through sustainable development, human security is best pursued through institutions that promote respect for human rights. Sustainability requires rejecting the Cold War tradition of each super power sponsoring its own pool of dictatorships and abusive regimes. It means promoting principled leadership and enlightened policies. Sustainability requires strengthening the rule of law and human rights – nationally and internationally. Elections have drawn a lot of international attention, from Bolivia to Bangladesh, Chile to Liberia. But as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Iraq have shown, creating the conditions in which people can cast their ballots is not enough. A bigger challenge is to promote good governance, including an effective legal and judicial structure, the rule of law based on human rights, a free press and a vibrant civil society.

You got that? Make nice, and all will be good.

Richard’s Awfully Big Religious Adventure (part 1)

The inestimable Richard Dawkins – without whom, let’s face it, this world would be a duller place – has a new two-part documentary on the UK’s Channel 4, entitled The Root of All Evil.

Predictably, it’s a merciless tirade against religion. I watched a tape of the first episode last night. Here’s my review:

First, the positive news: one thing is for sure, Dawkins is certainly not afraid to enter the lions’ den and start gleefully waving juicy chunks of meat.

He visits Ted Haggard, President of the National Association of Evangelicals, at his gargantuan (12,000 people!) multi-million dollar, state of the art New Life Church in Colorado Springs, and his opening conversational gambit is to tell the pastor that the flashy hi-tech service he has just witnessed reminded him of the Nuremburg rallies.

Haggard – who is weirdly charismatic and looks like he’s been modelled in plastic based on a Thunderbirds character - laughs this one off, since he’s still in ‘Welcome to America, my quaint little eccentric English friend!’ mode. Haggard also magnanimously declares that his evangelicals approve of the scientific method. But he stops laughing pretty sharpish when Dawkins informs him that the scientific method clearly points to the Earth being about 4.5 billion years old.

Haggard then suddenly and without provocation launches into a good scoff about the notion of the human eye developing entirely by accident. Dawkins informs him that no biologist he has ever met thinks the human eye developed entirely by accident. A few minutes later, our hero is being firmly escorted from the grounds of the New Life Church with Haggard yelling at him for ‘calling his children animals’ (which puzzles Dawkins as of course he did no such thing, but it turns out to be a reference to evolution).

Having thus warmed up, the intrepid Dawkins toddles along to the Holy Land, to see if there might be anybody there whose wrath he can incur. Oh dear, thinks the viewer.

Now we all know that Jerusalem is the world’s largest outdoor lunatic asylum (with typical bluntness, Dawkins introduces it as ‘the least enlightened place on the planet’) and it doesn’t take long for him to locate and duly upset a couple of bona fide lunatics.

The most frightening of these is a young American-born Jew who migrated to the city and somehow ended up converting to Islam. Dawkins – in his own admitted naivety – arranged an interview thinking that this fellow might be able to offer ‘both sides of the story’. But just two seconds after Dawkins professes to being an atheist, the converted Muslim launches into a vicious rant in a broad American accent, praising Osama bin Laden and damning Dawkins for ‘allowing his women to dress as whores and fornicate in the street.’ Our Richard initially argues back with equal vehemence that essentially, they ain’t his whores and they dress themselves, but after a while even he has to concede that arguing with this guy is like trying to nail jelly to a ceiling, and hastily departs.

All very entertaining, but hardly earth-shattering. Dawkins wants to conclude that all religious belief is A Bad Thing because faith breeds ignorance, which breeds intolerance, which leads ultimately to suicide bombers. But his method in this episode - showing that fundamentalist lunatics are lunatics - is no more useful than Michael Moore’s trick of picking mad or senile interview targets and mocking them.

He has yet to interview, for example, a tolerant, mild-mannered, churchgoing scientist. Or any of the old ladies in my local parish. Perhaps he’ll explain how these fit into the slippery-slope to suicide-bombing in the next episode. I’ll let you know...

Vietnam Syndrome RIP 1972-2007

A strange silence has fallen over the Iraq war debate in the past month. News reports of American war deaths and suicide bombings have dried up. Calls by Democrat legislators and presidential candidates to de-fund the war effort and force a timetable for troop withdrawals have ceased. Yet no-one in the mainstream media will come right out and declare what they all know to be true: the war in Iraq is over. We won. Mission accomplished.

Bartle Bull of the Prospect has no such reticence. In an admirably concise but thorough history of the conflict he makes it clear why the conflict is essentially over, and how it arrived at that point. From his analysis it also becomes blindingly obvious why the Bush strategy to stay the course, and even to escalate the conflict with the surge of the past year was the right strategy, and that every Democrat attempt to paint the war as a Vietnam quagmire that was doomed to failure was wrong.

Iraq's Sunnis would not be needing the help of the US today had the Sunni leadership not made a historic miscalculation back in 2004. Saddam, a rational man, made an understandable but fatal misjudgement about the people he was up against, and paid for it with his throne and his neck. His Sunni supporters did not learn from this. Thinking they were dealing with the post-Vietnam America of Carter, Reagan and Clinton, they took up arms to prevent the Americans from delivering on their promise of an Iraq that could freely choose its leaders. The habit of centuries of overlordship also fed the Sunni miscalculation: to them, Shia control was unthinkable and so the insurgency was sure to succeed.

By the second half of 2004, the insurgency had had six months to show what it was capable of, and it became clear that its goal could not be the military defeat of the Americans. The Sunnis were now fighting not for a military victory but a political one, to win in the US congress and the newsrooms of CNN and the New York Times the war they could not win in the alleys and date palm groves of Mesopotamia.

With regard to violence against their fellow Iraqis, the Sunni strategy revealed itself quickly to be an effort to provoke the Shias into full-fledged communal violence and civil war. Such a conflagration would be so hot that even Bush's Americans would run for home. The key moment in this strategy was the bombing of the Shia mosque in Samarra. Until then, the Shias had shown great restraint at the stream of Sunni provocations. Shia cells targeted Wahhabis and Baathists, but mostly left the Sunni populace alone. Under the steadying influence of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, their religious leader, the Shias endured mass slaughters in markets, buses and schools throughout 2004, 2005 and early 2006 without large-scale retaliation. As the main beneficiaries from the new Iraq, the Shias could only lose from a prolonged civil war.

The Samarra bombing seemed briefly to be the final straw. The Shia death squads, most associated with the young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army, long chafing under Sistani's restraining hand, were let slip. Neighbourhood cleansing began in much of Baghdad and went on for a year until Petraeus's surge began in February. It continues in many places where his troops are not present.

The world held its breath after Samarra: here, we thought, comes the cataclysm, the civil war that many had feared and that others had sought for three years. But it never happened. The Shia backlash in parts of Baghdad was vicious, and the Sunnis were more or less kicked out of much of the city. But over 18 months later, it is clear that the Shias were too sensible to go all the way. It was never a civil war: no battle lines or uniforms, no secession, no attempt to seize power or impose constitutional change, no parallel governments, not even any public leaders or aims. The Sunnis rolled the dice, launched the battle of Baghdad and lost. Now they are begging for an accommodation with Shia Iraq.

What is the evidence for this? This summer, Maliki's office reached out to Baathist ex-soldiers and officers and received 48,600 requests for jobs in uniform; he made room for 5,000 of them, found civil service jobs for another 7,000, and put the rest of them on a full pension. Meanwhile leading Baathists have told Time magazine they want to be in the government; the 1920 Revolution Brigade—a Sunni insurgent group—is reportedly patrolling the streets of Diyala with the 3rd infantry division, and the Sunni Islamic Army in Iraq is telling al Jazeera it may negotiate with the Americans. The anecdotes coming out of Baghdad confirm the trend. The drawing rooms of the capital's dealmakers are full of Baathists, cap in hand. They are terrified of the Shia death squads and want to share in the pie when the oil starts flowing. Both Izzat al-Douri, the more prestigious of the two main Baathist leaders, and Mohamed Younis al Ahmed, the more lethal, have been reaching out from neighbouring countries to negotiate an accommodation. Since the summer, the news coming out on the Sunni front has consistently been in this one, inevitable direction.

The Shia story was different. There have been two broad tendencies in Iraq's Shia politics: the pro-Iranian camp and the nationalist camp. Iraq has two great traditional pro-Iranian Shia parties—Nouri al-Maliki's Dawa party and the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (the former SCIRI). They fought Saddam from exile and spent the wilderness years in Iran. Opposed to these two is the al-Sadr movement, which—under Muqtada al-Sadr's father Mohammad Sadeq, killed by Saddam's men in 1999—fought Saddam from inside Iraq and kept its sense of anti-Iranian Iraqi nationalism intact. Of these tendencies, only al-Sadr's rose up to fight the Americans.

Muqtada al-Sadr's announcement of a unilateral six-month ceasefire on 29th August was significant, but not for the reasons most apparent. Al-Sadr actually stopped fighting the Americans three years ago. He rose up against them twice in 2004, but since the end of his second uprising, his Mahdi army has focused its violence on Wahhabis and Baathists, with frequent clashes against other Shia factions. Al-Sadr's movement is splintered and immature. Its less legitimate fringes have been active in sectarian cleansing. Many who do have ties to his movement frequently work beyond his control. Some of these tendencies continue to direct violence against the coalition, but this is negligible compared to the force of a true Sadrist resistance, as anyone who was in Najaf or Sadr City in 2004 will attest. Since this spring, US troops have been comfortably based in Sadr City—the giant Baghdad slum that is the power base of the Sadrists.

In mid-September, the al-Sadr parliamentary bloc withdrew its support for Maliki's government, without providing a public explanation. This repeats a pattern. In April, al-Sadr withdrew his ministers from the cabinet in ostensible protest at the remaining presence of the coalition forces; while in December 2006 he did the same thing in protest at a meeting between Maliki and Bush. Each of these exercises was greeted as Iraq's latest cataclysm, but, in the latter two cases, a month or two later al-Sadr's chiefs were quietly back fronting the ministries that their minions had continued to run in their absence. The point is that having al-Sadr playing political games rather than military ones is the most positive thing that could be happening in Iraq.

Muqtada al-Sadr, Iraq's most successful, popular and important politician, has underwritten Iraq's progress towards legitimate politics since late 2004. His sense of Iraqi nationalism will never allow Iranian dominance; his fraternal stance towards the peaceful Sunni tendencies, and the sheer size and passion of his movement, make his support for the project of reconstruction and pluralism in Iraq the most important political factor in the country. Prospect readers will not be surprised to read that al-Sadr is on the right side of the key issues, and that this is helping Iraq get over its transition from 35 years of Baathism's murderous apartheid (see "Iraq's rebel democrats," Prospect June 2005). Since 2004 I have pointed out that al-Sadr, as leader of the country's largest popular movement, has more to win from a functioning electoral politics than from fighting the Americans who guaranteed the polls that liberated his people, or from fighting the Iraqi government of which he is himself the joint largest part.

As we have noted, the real al-Sadr ceasefire began three years ago. But by saying publicly, again, that his men are putting down their guns, al-Sadr is declaring in the most unequivocal way that the violence in Iraq is not in his name.

Iranian-made rockets will continue to kill British and American soldiers. Saudi Wahhabis will continue to blow up marketplaces, employment queues and Shia mosques when they can. Iraqi criminals will continue to bully their neighbourhoods into homogeneities that will give the strongest more leverage, although even this tide is turning in most places where Petraeus's surge has reached. Bodies will continue to pile up in the ditches of Doura and east Baghdad as the country goes through the final spasm of the reckoning that was always going to attend the end of 35 years of brutal Sunni rule.

But in terms of national politics, there is nothing left to fight for. The only Iraqis still fighting for more than local factional advantage and criminal dominance are the irrational actors: the Sunni fundamentalists, who number but a thousand or two men-at-arms, most of them not Iraqi. Like other Wahhabi attacks on Iraq in 1805 and 1925, the current one will end soon enough. As the maturing Iraqi state gets control of its borders, and as Iraq's Sunni neighbours recognise that a Shia Iraq must be dealt with, the flow of foreign fighters and suicide bombers into Iraq from Syria will start to dry up. Even today, for all the bloodshed it causes, the violence hardly affects the bigger picture: suicide bombs go off, dozens of innocents die, the Shias mostly hold back and Iraq's tough life goes on.

The thing to understand about Democrat defeatism, both during Vietnam and Iraq, is that it wasn't so much driven by a conviction that we cannot win, but a conviction that we should not win. The Democrat vision of America is of an arrogant power that can only make the world worse by attempting to fight for democratic principles. No matter how miserable a nation's people might be under the yoke of an oppressive cultural or political tyranny, they believe that things can only get worse by actually confronting those tyrannies with force.

I'm hoping that one of the legacies of the US victory in Iraq is that the Vietnam Syndrome is put to rest for good, and that the majority of American citizens finally realize that the US is a force for good in the world. One can hope.

Since We've Been Speaking of God, Might as Well Meet the Devil

This falls under "bad things happening to good people" and "the efficacy (or lack thereof) of prayer".

In my social circle, I'm regarded as being very laid back, quite mellow.* Over the years a couple of people have even said that I'm the calmest person that they've ever met.
However, this causes to arise within me a killing rage.

Austrian kidnap girl kept a diary

From Michael Leidig in Vienna
The Times

The Austrian girl who was snatched off the street and held captive in a cellar for eight years in Vienna kept a detailed diary of her ordeal, her family said today.

Natascha Kampusch was 10 when she was dragged into a white van as she walked to school on Rennbahnweg in Vienna, in March 1998 and was kept hidden by Wolfgang Priklopil underneath his house.

Rupert Leutgeb, a spokesman for the family, confirmed the diary was "hundreds of pages long" but said no details would be revealed until Natasha decided what she wanted to do with it.

Officers revealed today that Natascha managed to escape when Priklopil made her vacuum his car which was parked in the garden. He received a phone-call, but the vacuum-cleaner was too loud to have the conversation, so he walked away from the car, giving her the opportunity to flee.

She ran to a next-door neighbour and told her she had been held captive for eight years. [...]

Priklopil killed himself by jumping in front of a train soon after Natascha escaped. [...]

Natascha’s mother told a local newspaper that her daughter weighed only 42kg (6st 9lb) after her escape - less than she did before her disappearance, despite growing an extra 15cm (6ins) to 1.60 metres (5ft 3ins) in height.

From the dungeon into dad's arms

By Michael Leidig and Sean O'Neill
26aug06
The Australian

EIGHT harrowing years had passed, but there was instant recognition between father and the daughter who had been held captive in an underground dungeon since they last saw each other. [...]

[Ludwig Koch, the father of Natascha Kampusch], said later that at their reunion his daughter simply said: "Dad, I love you."
"And the next question was: 'Is my toy car still there?' It was Natascha's favourite toy, I never gave it away in all those years," he told the Austrian daily Kurier. "I always put out of my mind the thought that she was dead."
On Thursday, Natascha was also reunited with her mother, Brigitte Sirny, for the first time since the morning in 1998 when she was snatched off a Vienna street as she walked to school. Police have taken the family to a "secure location" to allow them some privacy, but also to give detectives the chance to piece together the story of the most astonishing crime in Austria's post-war history. [...]

On Wednesday night, when he realised that she had escaped after eight years living in an underground room in his house, [Wolfgang Priklopil], 44, threw himself under a train. Austrian media reports say Natascha received the news of his suicide calmly. Natascha, who has reportedly told police that Priklopil sexually abused her, said he had warned her that he would never be captured alive.

She was held in a purpose-built 1.8mx3m cell beneath the garage of Priklopil's house in Heinestrasse in the village of Strasshof, near Gaenserndorf, 24km northeast of Vienna. The room was equipped with a bed, a cupboard and a few children's books. The only visible clue to its existence was a 50cm-wide hole in the cellar floor.
Priklopil forced Natascha to call him Gebieter, an old-fashioned term for "master" usually only found in fairy stories. Adolf Brenner, chief of police in the Deutsch-Wagram district, said: "He seems to have made great efforts to keep her away from the outside world. She was allowed limited access to the television and radio, and sometimes she was given videos." [...]
For more than seven years, Natascha never left her cell. But a few months ago Priklopil began to allow her to spend short periods in his garden and even took her on shopping trips. He warned her, however, that any attempt to escape or shout for help would not be a good idea.

At lunchtime on Wednesday, Natascha was allowed into the garden on her own and seized her chance. [...]
Aware that she had finally escaped, Priklopil climbed into his red BMW and sped away from his home. Details of his car were circulated to police patrols around Vienna and a chase ensued. Priklopil shook off the pursuing cars and abandoned his car in a shopping centre car park. Police say he called a friend and told him he needed help because he was being chased for a drink-driving offence. The friend took Priklopil away from the area.
At about 9pm, officers received a report that a man had jumped under a train at the Praterstern Vienna North station. A spokesman said: "We found BMW keys in the pocket and he was wearing the correct clothes. We have not yet performed a DNA test but we can say with certainty that this suicide was Wolfgang Priklopil." [...]

[On March 2, 1998, the day of her disappearance], [w]itnesses saw her being bundled into a white mini-van. The vehicle had the letter G on its registration plate, indicating that it was from Gaenserndorf, the area where she was found. The owners of all such vans, including Priklopil, were traced and interviewed. He was released after officers decided that he "seemed completely respectable". As the years passed without news, the scale of the police hunt was reduced. Mr Koch, however, never gave up hope and never stopped searching. [...]
Mr Koch said: "Natascha is emaciated, with a very, very white skin and bruises over her entire body. I cannot bear to think where they came from." [...]

Austria has also been soul-searching since Natascha's escape. Priklopil's neighbours have become a particular focus of attention. They described the self-employed communications technician as "a very calm and low-key" man who never seemed to miss a day's work. He lived in a house built by his father, and next door to his uncle, but seemed to never have guests, apart from an occasional visit from his elderly mother who would come around to make him lunch. Priklopil's house was bristling with security cameras and alarms and was known locally as "Fort Knox". One local resident said he told neighbours never to pop around unannounced because he had "built a number of surprises into my house and we don't want somebody innocent to get fried". Josef Jantschek said: "I know it sounds awful now, but we had a good relationship with Wolfgang." [...]

Max Edelbaucher, who led the investigation into Natascha's disappearance until his retirement last month, said he had received "the best retirement gift I could ever have imagined". Mr Edelbaucher added: "Nobody, not me nor any other policeman, believed that she could still be alive. This is a sensation. However, it is horrible that a girl could be held in our area for eight years while being unsuccessfully searched for by thousands of policemen..."

* Rather like how the monster's neighbors describe Wolfgang Priklopil, actually.

Nothing was not an Option

[This should have been entitled "18 Months Later, Tomorrow Comes". I don't know why this took so long to get to — for me, time is no excuse — particularly because this is a subject with which I have some first hand experience]

For those who opposed the war all along, first 9/11/11, then 3/20/13 were causes for fresh waves of nearly onanistic condemnations and toldjasos. Even initially hawkish editorialists, chastened by a decade of bleak experience, have engaged in hand-wringing attempts to explain their misjudgment. NYT Op-Ed page writer and executive editor Bill Keller epitomizes the latter group, and ultimately encompasses the former. Here are some representative (and highly edited for length) pull quotes from his mea culpa:

The question is really two questions: Knowing what we know now, with the glorious advantage of hindsight, was it a mistake to invade and occupy Iraq? And knowing what we knew then, were we wrong to support the war?

Broadly speaking, there were three arguments for invading Iraq: … humanitarian; … [promoting] democracy …; … and [WMD/regional security/explicit and implicit support of terrorism].

For many of us, the monster argument was potent, even if it was not sufficient. … We were, as Andrew Sullivan put it, “enamored of [our] own morality.”

But there are plenty of monstrous regimes that we do not go to the trouble of overthrowing. It should perhaps have caught our attention that Samantha Power, who literally wrote the book on humanitarian intervention (the Pulitzer-winning “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide”) and who had endorsed armed intervention in Bosnia and Rwanda, and at an earlier time in Iraq, did not support the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“My criterion for military intervention — with a strong preference for multilateral intervention — is an immediate threat of large-scale loss of life,” explained Power, who now advises President Obama on multilateral affairs and human rights. “That’s a standard that would have been met in Iraq in 1988 but wasn’t in 2003.”

The idea that America could install democracy in Iraq always seemed to me the most wishful of the rationales for war, although some people who knew the region far better than I made that case. … The exiled Iraqi academic Kanan Makiya — a proponent of invasion who later repented — observed that Iraq’s population was so traumatized by decades of abuse that they were unwilling to take initiative or responsibility …

…

The main selling point for war in Iraq, at least for the American public, was that Hussein represented a threat to American security. But what kind of threat, exactly?

The following couple paras contain, more begged questions than there are sentences.

Iraq was not, as Afghanistan had been, the host country and operational base of the new strain of Islamic fascism represented by Al Qaeda. It is true that Hussein hosted some nasty characters, but so did many other dictators hostile to America. At the time, Iraq was one of seven countries designated as sponsors of terrorism by the State Department, and in the other six cases we settled for sanctions as recourse enough. And his conventional military — what was left of it after it was laid waste in the deserts of Kuwait and Iraq in 1991 — was under close supervision.

That leaves the elusive [WMD]. We forget how broad the consensus was that Hussein was hiding the kind of weapons that could rain holocaust on a neighbor or be delivered to America by proxy. He had recently possessed chemical weapons (he used them against the Kurds), and it was only a few years since we had discovered he had an active ambition to acquire nuclear weapons. Inspectors who combed the country after the first gulf war discovered a nuclear program far more advanced than our intelligence agencies had believed; so it is understandable that the next time around the analysts erred on the side of believing the worst.

We now know that the consensus was wrong, and that it was built in part on intelligence that our analysts had good reason to believe was cooked. … A few journalists — notably Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder newspapers — emphasized conflicting intelligence that questioned Hussein’s capabilities. But assuming we couldn’t know for sure, what would have been acceptable odds? If there was only a 50-50 chance that Hussein was close to possessing a nuclear weapon, could we live with that? One in five? One in 10?

...

In 1992, after driving the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney mused on the calculus of war. Why, he asked an audience in Seattle, had the United States not pursued Hussein’s forces all the way to Baghdad and removed him from power? Because, Cheney said, that would have committed the U.S. to an unacceptable long-term occupation, and it would have meant more American casualties. “The question in my mind is, how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?” Cheney asked at the time. “And the answer is, not that damned many.”

Of course, Cheney wasn’t so cautious the second time around. Along with the arguments that he and many others made after 9/11 came some insufficiently considered assumptions: that we were competent to invade and occupy Iraq without making an awful mess of it and that we could do it at a cost — in lives and money — that we could live with. In the end, the costs were greater than anyone anticipated because of calamitous mistakes in execution.

Just consider the numbers. In the short-lived first gulf war, 148 Americans died in battle. In the current war, the toll so far is nearly 4,500 American dead and 32,000 wounded. At least 100,000 Iraqis, most of them noncombatants, have been killed. A war and occupation estimated to cost $100 billion over two years has already cost eight times that amount.

...

Our occupation of Iraq has also distracted us from Afghanistan, furnished a propaganda point for Al Qaeda recruiters and limited the credibility of our support for independence movements elsewhere. It is worth mentioning, too, that our moral standing as champions of civil society has been compromised by the abuses of Abu Ghraib and rendition and torture, byproducts of the war that will long remain a blot on our reputation.
Where does this leave me? The world is well rid of Saddam Hussein. But knowing as we now do the exaggeration of Hussein’s threat, the cost in Iraqi and American lives and the fact that none of this great splurge has bought us confidence in Iraq’s future or advanced the cause of freedom elsewhere — I think Operation Iraqi Freedom was a monumental blunder.

Clearly, then an open and shut case that Iraqi Freedom was not only a mistake in hindsight, but in foresight, as well.

Right?

Not so fast. Despite the length of this exercise in self-flagellation, Mr. Keller, who I am using as a proxy for essentially the entire anti-war left, either is incapable of comprehending, or elides, the central, inescapable problem: nothing was not an option.

It was not a matter of Operation Iraqi Freedom or [crickets]. Yet that is precisely the notion Mr. Keller portrays. Despite his seeming expertise, he scarcely spent a moment on the status quo ante, or the various actors involved in it. The decision to depose Saddam did not have a nullity as its alternative.

My goal here is to lay out briefly, yet in sufficient detail, the status quo ante in the hope of demonstrating that, like in so many aspects of international relations, there were no good options. The choice wasn't between deposing Saddam and crickets, but more like having to pick either the devil or the deep blue sea.

The Status Quo Ante

Contra Mr. Keller, there were several reasons the US didn't extend Desert Storm to a full scale invasion of Iraq. Most obvious should be that we could do only what was politically possible, and, given the nature of the coalition, continuing the march to Baghdad probably wasn't. Beyond that, Keller failed to consider the obvious influence on decision makers at the time: it is generally pointless to kill someone who is in the process of committing suicide. Between the considerable political risks and the seeming likelihood that Saddam wouldn't long survive the Kuwaiti debacle, it seemed a fair bet to be satisfied with limited, rather than absolute, objectives.

Unfortunately, Saddam's hold on power was firmer than we imagined. Which left us with:

• Southern Watch, the long term, large scale air operation based primarily in Saudi Arabia to stop Saddam's bombing attacks on Shia in Southern Iraq.
• Northern Watch, a similar operation to protect the Kurds in Northern Iraq.
• Ongoing futile attempts to ensure Saddam's compliance with WMD inspections, which led to a series of UN Security Council resolutions promising severe consequences in the event of continued defiance.
• The Oil for Food program (OFF), which was established to stop Saddam from re-establishing his military, while not causing additional suffering among the Iraqis themselves.
• The French, Chinese and Russians were actively using OFF to undermine the sanctions.
• Massive UN corruption related to OFF was causing what had previously been thought unimaginable: further besmirching the UN's reputation.
• Saddam was actively funding Palestinian suicide bombers
• Saddam was also routinely shooting at coalition aircraft enforcing the southern and northern no-fly zones.

This list could go on, but it should be sufficient to support this conclusion: the sanctions regime and aerial occupation of the northern and southern thirds of Iraq, which had gone on for a decade, had reached a dead end — something was going to replace it. This is the critical issue that Keller (et al) never grasped: it wasn't a matter of invasion or nothing. Hand wringing over the human and financial costs of deposing Saddam is an empty exercise. Of course it cost more than nothing. Of course the knock-on effects were worse than nothing. But nothing was not an option. Some course of action had to replace the no-fly zones and the sanctions regime. It is against the other possible courses of action that the costs of invading Iraq need to be compared. The choice was binary: either invade, or quit the field. It is against the latter option, and its likely consequences, that we need to weigh Operation Iraqi Freedom. Obviously, there is no rewinding the tape and trying that alternative on for size. But when assessing almost any decision, whether a foreign policy decision or driving to the movies, we have to weigh the pros and cons of what we did against the foreseeable pros and cons of what we didn't. Fully caveated, here are some of the consequences of the only alternative on offer:

• Islamist Psychology.
  • Shortly after 9/11, bin Laden asserted to his Muslim audience that the West in general, and the U.S. in particular, had a rotten and degenerate culture that no longer had the will to fight for its own survival.
  • Similarly, (I can't recall his exact words) he also proclaimed that the Muslim world would follow the strong horse.
  • Therefore, we should expect that quitting the field would have had a profound effect on the entire Muslim world. Not only could the US and the West be defeated, the fact of its defeat meant it was ripe for further attack. "Angering the Arab Street" was practically a cliché a decade ago, but, thankfully, is scarcely heard anymore. That, supposedly, recruited terrorists. Possibly, but nothing like our defeat would have done. Also, a reasonable conjecture as to why we no longer hear the "Arab Street" cliche is that the predictions the term entailed never came to pass.

• Countries in the region.
  • Saddam would have been free to fully reconstitute his military.
  • Saudi Arabia would have been further radicalized, and we might very well have had to abandon our bases there.
  • All the countries in the region would have had to make some accommodation to the new "correlation of forces" (a term not much heard since the 1970s with respect to communism, but appropriate here). None of those accommodations would have been in our interest, because they would have meant allying themselves with either Iran or Iraq.
  • Saddam's Iraq was Iran's mortal enemy. A resurgent Iraq would have guaranteed Iran pursuing a nuclear weapons program as energetically as it possibly could, because Iraq would have been doing so itself.

The only alternative on offer to invading Iraq was bound to carry significant "correlation of forces" costs — the entire region would find itself concluding that Islamism was the strong horse. All the countries around Iraq and Iran would find themselves forced to accommodate one or the other, which would have meant turning their backs on us.

The parade of horribles gets worse. The inevitable military competition between Iran and Iraq, which must be expected to include nuclear weapons, must also have been expected to lead to yet another war. Why do I say inevitable? Because, with the inescapable shift in the correlation of forces, the US's ability to step in would have been severely eroded, if not destroyed altogether. The consequence should be obvious to anyone with the temerity to look: a Hobbesian security dilemma.

It is here where the downside risks really start mounting. Imagine a conflict that closes the Straits of Hormuz for, say, three months. The economic and human costs are almost incalculable. It is that possibility against which Keller et al need to judge whether Operation Iraqi Freedom was worth all its consequences.

Now, it is entirely possible to disagree with elements of the preceding précis, or specifics of the results, or weigh the possible outcomes differently. However, it is an illuminating exercise in journalistic incompetence and analytical malfeasance to engage in post-hoc hand wringing without once taking on board the strategic situation and the limited options it presented. Moreover, Keller et al never seem to discuss several (albeit almost certainly unintended) positive outcomes of invading Iraq, beyond Saddam's elimination:

• Until the surge, Islamists had their run of post-invasion Iraq. Their fundamentalist certainty led them to an orgy of murder that has gone some way to weakening Islamism everywhere.
• The internecine warfare between Sunni and Shia (which Saddam's rule had baked in, and would have happened eventually, regardless of our invasion) has had the consequence of reducing the extent of Muslim religious certainty. Considering what the aftermath of 9/11 was supposed to look like, it should be amazing how few, and small, attacks against the West have been. It is too early to declare victory, but there can be no doubting that violent Islamism is on the wane.
• The Islamist notion that the US is too decadent to fight is dead, and its passing must have had an impact on Islamist decisions to conduct further attacks against the West.
• Gaddafi's ceding Libya's nuclear weapons program

Strikingly, no one (well, excluding the Galloways among us), no matter how fervently they opposed Operation Iraqi Freedom, wishes Saddam still in power.

You would think they might explain in some depth why that is.

Good

Taliban Leader Vows to Resist NATO Offensive [Oh please, please, pretty please, do...]
By RAHIM FAIEZ
AP

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (March 8) - A top Taliban commander said Wednesday the group has 4,000 fighters bracing to rebuff NATO 's largest-ever offensive in southern Afghanistan, now in its second day. [...]

NATO, meanwhile, announced the capture of a senior Taliban fighter who had eluded authorities by wearing a woman's burqa. Mullah Mahmood, who is accused of helping Taliban fighters rig suicide bomb attacks, was seized by Afghan soldiers at a checkpoint near Kandahar, the alliance said. [...]

Operation Achilles, comprising some 4,500 NATO and 1,000 Afghan troops, is focused on securing lawless regions of northern Helmand - the world's biggest poppy-growing region.

The offensive follows a mission last fall that wiped out hundreds of militants who fought in formation in neighboring Kandahar province, prompting NATO spokesman Col. Tom Collins to say this week the military would welcome a repeat of those tactics. [...]

Mahmood - the Taliban commander caught wearing the burqa - was trying to leave the Panjwayi area of Kandahar province - site of the large NATO battle last fall where hundreds of Taliban fighters were killed.

"Alert (Afghan) soldiers at this checkpoint spotted the oddity and quickly arrested him," NATO said.

"The capture of this senior Taliban extremist is another indicator that a more normal life is returning to the Zhari and Panjwayi districts and a testament to the great work the (Afghan army) is achieving," said Maj. Gen. Ton van Loon, the southern commander of NATO-led troops.

In eastern Afghanistan, Afghan and U.S.-led coalition forces arrested a suspected al-Qaida bomb expert and five other terrorist suspects Wednesday...

Andrew Sullivan's neat and tidy world

Andrew Sullivan once supported the Iraq War, but went wobbly when he realized that war is a messy business of uncertainty that is won by the side that wants to win the most. Ever since then he's been in search of some neat, clean, "strategic" way of making foreign policy omelets without cracking any eggs or taking any risks. Now he is turning his wobbly sensibility on the Israelis and their ground invasion of Gaza:

I don't see how Israel "wins" in Gaza any more than I can see how the US can "win" in Iraq. Maybe this current leap into the asymmetric abyss is a necessary proof before neoconservatism really does commit suicide. The danger is: the neocons may take Israel down with them.

The only thing that will take Israel down is the perception in the Muslim world that Israel will no longer defend itself with whatever force is necessary. Hamas cannot be negotiated with, it must be destroyed, period. Gaza is not a very big place, there aren't that many places to hide. I don't see this being a very protracted affair. Round up or kill as much of the leadership as they can, find their underground hideouts and weapons stashes and destroy them. Then leave.

The Arab governments are making showy denunciations of Israel for local consumption, but secretly they want Israel to destroy Hamas.

Hamas may or may not be totally eradicated. It may grow again, or a new organization may take its place. But its cause will be set back. Israel will have re-asserted to the world that it will not allow its citizens to be attacked. That matters much more than "strategy". Israel's strategy is to outlast its enemies. In the end that is the only strategy that matters.

Thursday Evening Lyric

"War On Drugs"

She likes to sleep with the radio on
So she can dream of her favorite song
The one that no one has ever sung since she was small

She'll never know that she made it up
She had a soul and we ate it up
Thrown away like a paper cup
The music falls

The only flaw in her detailed plan
Is where she wins back the love of her man
Everyone knows that he's never coming back

He took her heart and she took his name
He couldn't stand taking all the blame
He left her only with guilt and shame and then she cracked

Won't it be dull when we rid ourselves
Of all these demons haunting us
To keep us company

In the dream I refuse to have
She falls asleep in a lukewarm bath
We're left to deal with the aftermath again

On behalf of humanity
I will fight for your sanity
How profound such profanity can be

Won't it be dull when we rid ourselves
Of all these demons haunting us
To keep us company

Won't it be odd to be happy like we
Always thought we're supposed to feel
But never seem to be

Near where I live there's a viaduct
Where people jump when they're out of luck
Raining down on the cars and trucks below

They've put a net there to catch their fall
Like it'll stop anyone at all
What they don't know is when nature calls, you go

They say that Jesus and mental health
Are just for those who can help themselves
But what good is that when you live in hell on earth?

From the very fear that makes you want to die
Is just the same as what keeps you alive
It's way more trouble than some suicide is worth

Won't it be dull when we rid ourselves
Of all these demons haunting us
To keep us company

Won't it be odd to be happy like we
Always thought we're supposed to feel
But never seem to be

Hard to admit I fought the war on drugs
My hands were tied and the phone was bugged
Another died and the world just shrugged it off

---

By the Barenaked Ladies.

Pop music, by definition, is loud and vacuous. Not this instance, though; it is both musical and evocative.

Very reminiscent of Brit's writing, IMHO.

Thanksgiving day after thoughts

I hope all of the Daily Duck regulars enjoyed a happy Thanksgiving with family and friends. Joseph Epstein offered a few unique thoughts on this unique holiday in the Wall Street Journal:

Conventional wisdom has it that Thanksgiving is the best of all American holidays. As a contrarian, I'd like to put that wisdom to the test.

Thanksgiving does have the absence of the heavy hand of dreary gift giving that has put the groans in Christmas, the moans in Hanukkah. And no one has written treacly Thanksgiving songs, comparable to "White Christmas" and "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire," which, I suspect, have helped make Christmas one of the prime seasons for suicide. Let us not speak of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," of whose travail we shall all have heard more than our fill as we ride up elevators and pass along the aisles of department stores.

For some time in America we have, of course, been living under Kindergarchy, or rule by children. If children do not precisely rule us, then certainly all efforts, in families where the smallish creatures still roam, are directed to relieving their boredom if not (hope against hope) actually pleasing them.

Let us be thankful that Thanksgiving has not yet fallen to the Kindergarchy, as has just about every other holiday on the calendar, with the possible exceptions of Yom Kippur and Ramadan. Thanksgiving is not about children. It remains resolutely an adult holiday about grown-up food and drink and football.

Well stated, Joe. Thanksgiving has always been the holiday where young children learned their true status in the pecking order through banishment to the dreaded "card table", so that grandparents, aunts and uncles could enjoy the esteemed chairs at the family table. It is one of the few remaining traditions where young children are taught to show some respect for age, and to accept some humility. I think it is a status that most children have always been happy to accept, as it removes them from the dreaded "center of attention". I don't think that today's children enjoy their elevated and unearned status as much as the Kindercrats imagine that they do. With elevated status comes elevated expectations, and as with all unearned honors, eventual disappointment.

Epstein takes a few parting shots at the militantly secular:

While secular in tone, Thanksgiving is also slightly religious in spirit. I am having Thanksgiving this year at the home of my son and daughter-in-law, and because of the slight religious nature of the holiday have asked them not to invite Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens or any of the rest of the atheist gang, all of whom seem likely, if on the premises, to put a dampening spirit onto the proceedings.

Of course anyone who would interject partisan squabbles into a family celebration should not be welcome, but it is a stretch for Epstein to tar the rest of the "atheist gang" with the bad manners of a few. Maybe Dawkins should be seated at the card table with these guys:

A few years ago, some Christians began to sound the alarm about a "war on Christmas," alleging that schools, courts, and local governments were transforming a sacred holiday into a secularized winter festival. Now, much as the 24-hour Christmas music on the radio seems to start earlier each year, a few believers are voicing their worry about the secularization of our society in November instead of December. Concerned about the eroding religious dimension of Thanksgiving, they urge a return to a more sacred holiday. If the war-on-Christmas crowd asks us to put Christ back into Christmas, these Thanksgiving religionists urge us to celebrate Thanksgiving with the emphasis on thanking God. But complaints about a secularized Thanksgiving are even less convincing than the outcry over Christmas.

As holidays go, Thanksgiving has long suffered from an especially acute spiritual identity crisis. Even the most casually religious Americans say grace or otherwise offer thanks before Thanksgiving dinner—even if the thanking is done between pie-eating binges. On the other hand, it's not as common for us to attend a worship service on Thanksgiving as it is on more obviously religious days like Christmas and Easter. So, just how religious of a holiday should we consider Thanksgiving? Some seem to want to answer that question by telling us exactly how and whom to thank.

In Christianity Today's Leadership Journal, Eric Reed decried a "thankless society" that has forgotten the holiday's putative religious significance. R. Albert Mohler Jr. of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary called the secular vision of Thanksgiving "empty and false" on the Washington Post religion blog, On Faith. And conservative Web site WorldNetDaily offers up Thanksgiving-themed magnetic bumper stickers that counsel, "Remember to thank HIM"—perhaps an admonition to those who would merely thank their lucky stars.

Now there's a cheery bunch!

I belatedly thank my lucky stars for another year of stimulating, informative and gratifying conversation with the Daily Duck staff and regular contributors. Thank you all!

A poverty of riches

What is it about resource wealth that impoverishes and corrupts nations? Less than two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has reverted to the crony dictatorship of Vladimir Putin. Federico Varese explores the social and political decay that has spread in the wake of the opening of Russia's energy markets:

Russia is one of the few countries in the world where life expectancy is declining; young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-eight have the highest mortality rate in Europe. In the 1980s, citizens of the Soviet Union had the same life expectancy as citizens of the United States. Today, the Russian male lives on average to an age of fifty-nine, sixteen years less than his U.S. counterpart. About ten million Russians are sterile as a result of bad health or abortions that went wrong. According to the Academy of Medical Sciences, 45 percent of newborns have a disease or a congenital birth defect.
...
Indeed, the majority of the ideologues from the Yeltsin era, such as the consultant Anders Åslund, considered the fall in the birth rate to be a contingent phenomenon due to the adjustments that followed the transition to a market economy and democracy. The graph for the birth rate does in fact show a fall in 1991 and a further fall in 1998, the year of the financial crisis. Yet the economy has grown uninterruptedly and at a staggering rate over the last seven years, while the population continues to die. What could be the cause?

The Russian conundrum consists, first, of a growing economy with a gross domestic product that has increased by 50 percent since 1998, a solid and reliable financial system, companies listed on the London and New York stock exchanges, thirty-three billionaires on the Forbes List in 2006, and a responsible monetary and fiscal policy that has produced a fiscal surplus since 2000. Then there are the dramatic social indicators: the suicide rate has increased by about 50 percent since the nineties; alcohol and drug consumption have soared; the AIDS epidemic is the worst in Europe; there are 120,000 new cases of tuberculosis every year; and access to hospitals under the corrupt and inadequate health system depends on bribing doctors and nurses. The political indicators are no less dismaying. The system is increasingly authoritarian: all the television channels are under direct or indirect government control; the nonaligned daily and weekly newspapers can be counted on the fingers of one hand and, in any case, have an extremely limited circulation; the president has abolished the elections for regional governors; a few politicians close to Putin have recently suggested the abolition of mayoral elections as well; and pro-government parties, which win with majorities of 70 percent, control sixty-three of the eighty-eight regional parliaments. Trade union activity is almost nonexistent because, as the American journalist David Satter has made clear, trade unionists are intimidated, beaten up, and even eliminated. The climate of fear extends to the ethnic minorities that live in the country: the most recent victims have been the Georgians, who are guilty of having been born in a country that does not accept Russian political interference. During his recent anti-Georgian campaign, President Putin added a new expression to his vocabulary: korennoi narod (“the rooted population”), obviously a reference to the Russians. He insists that the interests of this latter group must be protected against ill-defined dangers. In the meantime, the police arrest and beat up the local “blacks” (non-Russians from the South).

THE GRAPH THAT provides the best explanation of the Russian conundrum consists of three lines: the world oil price, the degree of democracy in Russia (political and civil rights) as measured by Freedom House, and the rate of corruption as measured by Transparency International. Once this graph has been drawn, the reader immediately sees illuminating correlations: every time the oil price goes up, the level of democracy in Russia goes down and the level of corruption goes up. For decades, political scientists have studied the so-called “wealth paradox” (most recently, Michael Ross, Steve Fish, and Peter Rutland); namely, the fact that countries that are rich in natural resources do not appear to be able to prosper economically over the long term. The classic example is that of Spanish colonization in the New World, which brought fabulous riches to the crown treasury but in the end produced economic decline. In the Spanish case, the American gold only produced powerful inflationary pressures.

The connection seems real enough at first glance, but it ignores the fact that those nations exemplifying the trend have never enjoyed democratic success prior to the realization of their oil wealth. The Middle East were backwards tribal fiefdoms, and Russia has had a long tradition of autocratic and dictatorial governments going back to the days of the Czars. It ignores the social and economic success of democracies like the US and Canada that have always enjoyed natural resource wealth. The more you try to explain the fate of nations through material factors, the more you realize that culture trumps all other considerations.

Update: Oil megalomaniac Hugh Chavez furthers the argument that oil riches and responsible government do not mix. This is a laugher, though:

But he also boasted of Venezuela's Russian Sukhoi jets: "When they appeared in the sky over Caracas during a parade on independence day two years ago, then we broke the fetters of dependence on the US."

Russia is all too happy to sell obsolete military hardware to this fool with money. One of our F-22 Raptors could plink his Sukhois out of the sky and be back in the US in time for lunch, and they wouldn't know what hit them.