"Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be persecuted by an unkind establishment, you must also be right."
---Robert Park
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MentalBlocks
Throwing Mental Blocks at Glass Constructions
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Thursday, April 24, 2003
A great essay from David Warren on the impact of the Iraq campaign on Arab thought processes (and, tangentially, Russian). What happens when your entire reality, the one you've been fed since you were a pup, the one which you have been taught not to question, the reality that sustained and was sustained by your deepest faith, suddenly collapses?
The reality is that in the Arab world, a vast audience that has been told and has been living in a lie, a fantasy about reality itself, has nowhere to turn. Vast numbers of people, who live in much closer-knit communities than we do, are suddenly left to think and rethink everything they know, and all by themselves. This is an extraordinary, collective, psychic disaster.
What comes of it is utterly unpredictable. We cannot guess whether this common experience will feed or quell the Arabs' accumulated anger. We can only pray that a moment has come, when the whole Arab world will begin to dismember an invisible Berlin Wall that holds it in captivity, that traps everyone in fear and ignorance and hatred and unfreedom. For the alternative must be an even more radical flight from reality, an even more desperate collective effort to deny the facts right before their eyes. (I am cautiously hopeful.)
By way of Instapundit.
10:50 AM
Wednesday, April 23, 2003
Lileks has a great eco-rant today:
Survey SAYS:
“IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 1 PLANETS TO LIVE ON”
Let’s try it again. I am a 65 year old Indian female who is giving the same responses I gave as a 44-year old Minnesota male.
IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 1.7 PLANETS TO LIVE ON
So it’s adjusted for your location, then. Being Indian rearranges several factors. Let’s give the same answers from a Saudi perspective:
IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 5.1 PLANETS TO LIVE ON
Same answers plugged into the US model:
IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 7.2 PLANETS TO LIVE ON
Ergo, it is better to be a woman in Saudi Arabia than the US?
This is why I get annoyed with the eco-scolds - they get that dial-tone expression when you suggest that “freedom” is as relevant to happiness and sustainability as the amount of time one spends riding oxen to the communal produce plot (fertilized with night soil and donkey glands). Perhaps even more so.
11 out of 10 on the read-the-whole-thing-o-meter. As usual.
2:59 PM
Wow, even Josh Marshall has to agree that the Iranians don't win by default in Shi'a territory. Don't tell me Iraqi democracy is going to be a cakewalk, too?
We're still in 'too-soon-to-tell' territory. But the democratizers in the DOD camp are concerned about the situation with the Shi'as and how ably the Iranians have been playing the situation. They do have on their side the fact that the most senior and revered Shi'a clerics are not fans of the Iranians' theocratic model. There's also the counterveiling force of Iraqi and, more broadly, Arab nationalism. But will these be enough?
1:48 PM
I just wanted to say that the looting of the Baghdad history museum is potentially a monumental loss. It's not quite on the same scale as the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria (since that library contained much, much more that was not recorded anywhere else while the Baghdad museum is fairly well documented), but it's close. It's at least on the order of the blasting of the Acropolis by the Turks. I say "potential" since many of the pieces will be retrieved over the coming years. I hope they're in good condition and that most of their archeological context has been preserved somehow.
This is a personal loss, since I am very much hoping to visit Baghdad in a few years, and I wanted to see this museum. My only brush with Mesopotamian artifacts comes from the Louvre. The most memorable thing from that visit was standing this close to the honest-to-god Code of Hammurabi--the very first yellow legal pad. The actual article, as dictated by the Lawgiver himself. That went to this lawyer's son's heart in a way that I simply cannot describe. To any citizen of the United States, a country established in law, a country midwifed by documents, this is like being able to touch the Big Bang.
1:45 PM
Before you believe the kvetching about the Iraqi reconstruction (mostly brought to you by the same people that declared "quagmire" a few days before Baghdad fell), read this account of the first meeting to establish a new Iraqi authority. It's written by Kanan Makiya, who obviously has his own take on matters, but it's a different, more informed, and more optimistic take than you will find elsewhere.
I wish them luck.
1:31 PM
Oh, and while I'm yapping, the news that the leading anti-war politician in Britain was not just paid off by Saddam Hussein, but was actually taking a cut of the Oil-For-Food money that Iraq was supposed to spend on humanitarian goods. This is the sort of cynical enrichment under the guise of human-rights causes that is doing in the left. They were in power far, far too long, and they're going to have to spend 40 years in the desert burning off their bad karma.
11:19 AM
In the Itoldjaso Dept: The SecDef reaps the benefits of being proven to be correct. A few weeks ago the naysayers were saying that Iraq was a failure because Rumsfeld was wrong. Now Phil Carter has a post about the legislation Rumsfeld sent over to Congress, which would begin the much-heralded process process of "transformation" within DoD personnel policies, including setting up "pay bands" similar to the ones used in corporate America. Rummy bet his political house on the outcome in Iraq, but he won his war, he won it his way, and now the dinosaurs in the military-industrial complex are gonna get steamrollered. Sez Phil:
Today's world requires management flexibility, especially in the Defense Department. New and emerging threats demand new management approaches, new procurement programs, new command structures, and the Secretary has to have the flexibility to move manpower and resources to meet those threats. The current system doesn't let him do that.
10:45 AM
Whoops, took a little blog-break there. I'm back now, though. Seems the 82nd Airborne arrested some people trying to blow up a Shiite mosque in Karbala. No idea why, except that they were apparently Sunni. Oh, and there's this priceless little factoid:
Five of the detainees claimed to be members of Saddam's Baath Party, and one said he belonged to al-Qaida, said Capt. Jimmie Cummings, spokesman for the Army's 82nd Airborne Division.
Baath and Qaeda wouldn't ever work together, huh?
By way of Instapundit
9:52 AM
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