January 2007
Monthly Archive
January 20, 2007
An interesting piece from Stewart Bell in today’s National Post. Bell reports that Canada has a real presence in the new government of Somalia – 18 MPs. They left their homes in Ottawa and Toronto to return to their homeland and help it emerge from anarchy. One of them, Ahmed Afra, told Bell so many are in the Somalia Parliament because of their time in Canada:
“That’s why you find so many Somali-Canadians in Parliament, because of the degrees and expertise, the knowledge they got in Canada.”
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=8cbcdfd5-bc9d-447d-b325-7f46c3f92878
January 20, 2007
Wow, I was floored to read National Post columnist Andrew Coyne declare that the grand Harper experiment with conservatism is over, fini
“After a year of Conservative rule, it is now clear, conservatism isn’t just dying–it’s dead. And it’s the Conservatives who killed it.”
“The more the party has chased the middle, however, the faster it has seemed to recede; with each abandonment of its principles, the opposition and the media, those arbiters of the status quo, simply yawn and move the goalposts a little further down the field. So that even so humiliating a climb down as the past week’s reinstatement of the very Liberal environmental programs the Tories abolished in their first weeks in office wins them no points whatever.”
Read the whole piece here:
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=e61304d2-df34-4b15-b7ef-f4aaf924215d
January 20, 2007
Conrad Black weighs in on the total superiority of Christianity over Islam. From the National Post. Read the rest, if you can.
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=e710294d-29cd-49ea-b92a-2a4044a6ed50&k=15189
“Our religious practice is a good deal more spontaneous, intellectually distinguished, and conducive to productive activity and general civility than all but the most unrepresentatively thoughtful versions of Islam. No Islamic leader has a fraction of the moral or intellectual credibility or mere market share of the Pope. Rome and all the West, secular and ecumenical, have seen off more serious challenges than this.”
Hey, is that why he was so determined to become “Lord” Black?
January 20, 2007
The Right Man For The JobI love it when I find an “expert” espousing positions that I’ve written here in the past. I had one of these joyous moments when I came across an article in this month’s Harper’s magazine by Edward N. Luttwak, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington. It came with the catchy title, “Dead End, Counterinsurgency warfare as military malpractice.” Who could pass that up?
Luttwak devotes the first several pages of the article to our Western misconception of the nature and mechanisms of insurgencies but I won’t bore you with that. What I found most helpful were his concluding remarks under the subtitle “The Easy and Reliable Way of Defeating All Insurgencies Everywhere.”
Defeating all insurgencies everywhere, everytime? Why then did the Brits lose the American revolution? Why did the French flee Indochina and Algeria? Why are the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan proving so hard to crack?
The short answer is that we are not prepared to do what is necessary to win. Our laws and culture, our very societies simply cannot abide the essence of victory. We are, at the end of the day, unwilling to turn barbaric enough to win.
Here are a few of Luttwak’s observations:
“Pefectly ordinary regular armed forces, with no counterinsurgency doctrine or training whatever, have in the past regularly defeated insurgents, by using a number of well-proven methods. It is enough to consider these methods to see why the armed forces of the United States or any other democratic country cannot possibly use them.”
Luttwak proceeds to draw upon two examples of successful counterinsurgency warfare – the Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire.
“…whenever insurgents are believed to be present in any village, small town, or district – a very common occurrence in Iraq (and Afghanistan) at present, – the local notables can be compelled to surrender them to the authorities, under the threat of escalating punishments, all the way to mass executions. That is how the Ottoman Empire could control entire provinces with a few feared janissaries and a squadron or two of cavalry. …A massacre once in a while remained an effective warning for decades.”
Luttwak notes the Romans also used inducements such as public baths and free circus shows to “de-bellicize” unruly populations. Those who still refused were killed or, if captured, sold into slavery. Towns under seige could either surrender and be accepted as peaceful subjects or the town and all within would be utterly destroyed.
“…In the first two and most successful centuries of imperial Rome, some 300,000 soldiers in all, only half of them highly trained legionary troops, were enough to secure a vast empire that stretched well beyond the Mediterranean basin, today the territory of some thirty European, Middle Eastern and North African states. …they relied on deterrence, which was periodically reinforced by exemplary punishments. Most inhabitants of the empire never rebelled after their initial conquest.”
The author points out that, despite the myths of heroic resistance, the Germans were actually very successful in using terrible reprisals to occupy lands with very few troops. The key, argues Luttwak, is to develop a willingness to out-terrorize the insurgents, the very thing Western democracies are not prepared to tolerate.
“All its best methods, all its clever tactics, all the treasure and blood that the United States has been willing to expend, cannot overcome the crippling ambivalence of occupiers who refuse to govern, and their principled and inevitable refusal to out-terrorize the insurgents, the necessary and sufficient condition of a tranquil occupation.”
There it is – we’re just too damned nice for our own good.
January 20, 2007
Kudos to Les Whittington of the Toronto Star for this piece bringing a little accountability to the wave of Tory deceit that has been spewed so freely by the Harpies. Here’s Whittington’s take on how reality fits with Tory claims.
“…even allowing for the fact that hyperbole and sweeping generalities are the common fare of public life, the federal Tories have often let their rhetoric overtake reality:
Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said his budget last May lowered taxes for Canadians.
The reality: The budget raised the lowest income-tax rate by half a percentage point to 15.5 per cent as of July 1, 2006.
On Canada’s military activities: In an interview with CBC-TV, Harper said Canada is on the front lines in Afghanistan – a role he said was in marked contrast to the traditional Canadian approach. “For a lot of the last 30 or 40 years, we were the ones hanging back,” Harper told CBC.
The reality: More than 125 Canadian soldiers have died on peacekeeping operations around the world since 1956.
In changing how equalization payments to have-not provinces are calculated, Harper said his party, if elected, “would ensure that non-renewable natural resource revenue is removed from the equalization formula to encourage economic growth.”
The reality: The provinces are convinced that Flaherty’s new formula for calculating payments to poorer provinces will include half of each province’s natural resource revenue – an expectation that is sparking stiff resistance in Newfoundland, Saskatchewan and Alberta.
On the Liberals’ gun control record: “What this last government did is that, instead of worrying about insane people or criminals, they simply went after farmers,” Harper said during question period in the House of Commons.
The reality: The Liberals’ firearms licensing and registry program – with its background checks and requirements for training and safe storage – applied to all would-be gun owners, not just farmers.
After Liberal MP and former leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff said that an Israeli air strike in Qana during the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict was a war crime, Harper responded: “This is consistent with the anti-Israeli position that has been taken by virtually all of the candidates for the Liberal leadership.”
The reality: Liberal leadership candidates denounced the remark as an inaccurate and unstatesmanlike “insult” that risked dividing Canadians for partisan political motives.
“Canada’s back,” Harper said on Sept. 20 in New York.
The reality: But Harper used a string of statistics and figures to illustrate that the return to fiscal health and economic growth in Canada began under the Liberals.
During the last election campaign, the Tories said if elected they would “stop the Liberal attack on retirement savings and preserve income trusts by not imposing any new taxes on them.”
The reality: In a surprise decision on Oct. 31, the Conservative government moved to do away with income trusts, a decision that saw more than $20 billion in value lopped off the stock market.
On climate change, Harper slammed the Liberals in a year-end interview with the Star, saying “literally nothing was done for 13 years at all on the environment, literally nothing.”
The reality: While the Liberals did not halt the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, they used their final months in power to introduce “Project Green,” an eight-year program at an estimated $10-billion cost designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 270 megatonnes between 2008 and 2012.
On child care, Harper said that during 13 years of Liberal government, not a single child-care space was created.
The reality: The Liberals’ $5-billion, five-year plan to create a national child-care program along with the provinces led to the opening of more than 5,000 new spaces in Ontario alone, with 20,000 more on the drawing board. But plans for more spaces in Ontario were slashed after the federal Conservatives announced they were cancelling the previous government’s funding for the provinces as of this year.”
January 20, 2007
Gee, Her Eyes Are RedJungle Girl, the Ultimate Survivor.
When the story broke last week, her “father” described her as “bare-bones skinny” and positively feral, scurrying around like a money, plucking grains of rice off the floor and glaring at perople with her “red like tigers’ eyes.”
When Jungle Girl, Rochom P’ngieng, emerged in front of the cameras yesterday she looked about as emaciated and wild as a nanny.
The putative father, Sal Lou, is clamming up. He’s already refused DNA testing to confirm his paternity of Rochom, if that is her name. Meanwhile the story is just getting better.
It’s now reported that Jungle Girl was seen running around naked with Jungle Boy who was wearing a similar costume. Her fella, it seems, fled into the bush when Rochom was taken. No word on where Cheeta was while all this was going on.
January 20, 2007
Hillary Clinton, to no one’s surprise, has surprised everyone by announcing that she’s going to run for president. And, of course, she’s going to make Iraq the central theme of her campaign but, then again, who isn’t?
Hilly, as I call her when we speak off the record, was as enthusiastic as a Rotarian in her support for the Iraq war, long past the point at which that was appropriate but enough of that now.
This promises to be a bruising campaign – if you happen to be an American infantryman. They’re going to get kicked from one end of Baghdad to the other over the next two years and their fate and their mission is now in the calloused hands of political fortune as read by pollsters.
The New York Times:
“Mrs. Clinton said that candidates in the 2008 race should be thoughtful and responsible when talking about war, rather than trying to score easy political points with red-meat rhetoric.
“’I am cursed with the responsibility gene.’ she said. ‘I am. I admit to that. You’ve got to be very careful in how you proceed with any combat situation in which American lives are at stake.’
“On Iraq, she has never repudiated her vote in 2002 authorizing military action. But last month she said that she “certainly wouldn’t have voted” to go to war if she had the same information in 2002 that she does now.
No red-meat rhetoric, for sure. Pork tenderloin sophistry with a mild, dijon/fennel sauce is the limit. As for Hilly’s genetic affliction, maybe they can find a cure for that in stem cell research.
Senator Clinton also had some harsh words for Iraqi PM al-Maliki:
“Mrs. Clinton was sharply critical of Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, saying she believed he had given her “lip service” during a meeting on Saturday about his government’s commitment to cooperating with the American mission there.”
Lip service? Don’t use language like that, Hilly, it reminds us of Bill.
By the way folks, Clinton isn’t exactly Canada-friendly.
January 20, 2007
It’s the hottest thing in the Middle East – nuclear technology. Israel started it, Saddam tried to get it, Iran is well on its way. Now Jordan has said it wants nuclear “energy” too.
In an interview in Haaretz, Jordan’s King Abdullah, shown here in some serious threads, says his country has a hankering to develop peaceful nuclear technology, just like Egypt and Saudi Arabia and every other jumpy Sunni Arab state worried about Iran getting its own peaceful technology first.
Whether King Ab is serious or simply doing his bit to ratchet up the pressure on the US to stop Iran isn’t clear.
January 20, 2007
Peter MacKay seems to be traipsing along in the wake of his American Idol, Condoleeza Rice. She went to the Middle East so he packed his toothbrush and hopped a flight there too. It looks like our foreign affairs minister decided to exercise some of Canada’s new found muscle on the international scene, a dollop of the enormous vat of global political capital earned for us by his highly principled boss, Stephen Harper.
So the air must have been rife with the aroma of power diplomacy when MacKay met with Palestine president Mahmoud Abbas to share a bit of Tory enlightenment with the vulgar Arab, right? Well, not exactly.
Abbas did meet with MacKay. They were supposed to have a chat this weekend but Abbas decided he’d rather be in Damascus to meet with Syrian president Haddas instead. He didn’t snub Canada though. He managed to squeeze MacKay in – and out – yesterday, somewhere between the falafel and the delicious dates.
What actually happened? Did we manage to iron the creases out of the crumpled Roadmap? Here are a few insights from The Globe:
“In an interview before the meeting, Rafik Husseini, Mr. Abbas’s chief of staff, said that because of the 10-month-old boycott, the Palestinian side knew little about the year-old Canadian government.
“Canada is not a big player in general and because, of course, of what has happened with the [economic] siege and with the no-talk policy towards Hamas, we cannot tell the difference between the old and the new government,’ he said.
“Mr. Husseini’s impression was that Canada has become less friendly to the Palestinians under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He didn’t attend the Amman talks, but said that had he been in the room, he would have confronted Mr. MacKay over Canada’s pro-Israel swing under Mr. Harper, and the fact Canada’s policies in the region are now almost indistinguishable from those of the United States.
“Following the 45-minute meeting at Mr. Abbas’s Amman residence, Mr. MacKay said he had come to the region largely to listen “and to look for ways we can make a positive contribution.” It was strikingly similar to the justification U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave for her trip to the region last week, a visit that was widely ridiculed as having created little other than some photo opportunities.”
No word yet on whether Peter’s truncated schedule is going to let him catch up with Condi but wouldn’t that be cute? Ah Peter, make the trip worthwhile – bring home some of that terrific hummus.
January 20, 2007
The Telegraph
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