Wolves

The new Bush-Cheney ad featuring wolves stalking through a forest has been
compared to Ronald Reagan's 'Bear' ad. Glenn
Reynolds provides a link to both of them at one place at the Daily
Recycler. But to one of Roger
Simon's readers, it evokes Louis Macneice's poem
"Wolves". The poem reminds us that there is more than one response to
a circling pack.

Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,

Join hands and make believe that joined

Hands will keep away the wolves of water

Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed

That no one hears them among the talk and laughter.

September 11 did not evoke a universal desire to strike back which President
Bush somehow "squandered". Judyth
Hill's poem, "Make Peace", described as a thing of beauty by the
pacifist movement, took a different tack.

Wage peace with your breath.

Breathe in firemen and rubble,

breathe out whole buildings

and flocks of redwing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children

and freshly mown fields.

Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.

Breathe in the fallen

and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening:

hearing sirens, pray loud.

Remember your tools:

flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.

Make soup. Hold hands. That's all you have to do.

Best of the Comments

Find out how the word "spandrel" is used in context from reader Jinderella's

comment. But here's some background in
spandrels.

"Dr. Gould and Dr. Richard Lewontin, also at Harvard, soon elaborated on
the importance of how organisms are built, or their architecture, in a famous
paper about a feature of buildings known as a spandrel. Spandrels, the spaces
above an arch, exist as a necessary outcome of building with arches. In the
same way, they argued, some features of organisms exist simply as the result
of how an organism develops or is built. Thus researchers, they warned, should
refrain from assuming that every feature exists for some adaptive purpose."

I doubt one could have "breathed in the SS Totenkopf Corp and breathed out
Wandervoggel merrily hiking thru the alps singing songs." Nor could anyone on
the doomed aircraft of 9/11 breath in an Islamofacsist thug and breath out a
flight attendant with a warmed towel before dinner. --

Rickvid

Some Are More Equal Than Others

Joshua Muravchik's essay at the American Enterprise Institute shows how hard it is to create a culturally neutral One World.

This month, the United Nations Security Council voted to condemn terrorism
...but the convoluted text and the dealings behind the scenes ...reveal is
that even after Beslan and after Madrid and after 9/11, the UN still cannot
bring itself to oppose terrorism unequivocally. The reason for this failure is
that the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which comprises
fifty-six of the UN's 191 members, defends terrorism as a right. ...

True, the

final resolution condemns "all acts of terrorism irrespective of their
motivation." This sounds clear, but in the Alice-in-Wonderland lexicon of the
UN, the term "acts of terrorism" does not mean what it seems. For eight years
now, a UN committee has labored to draft a "comprehensive convention on
international terrorism." It has been stalled since day one on the issue of
"defining" terrorism. But what is the mystery? At bottom everyone understands
what terrorism is: the deliberate targeting of civilians. The Islamic
Conference, however, has insisted that terrorism must be defined not by the
nature of the act but by its purpose. In this view, any act done in the cause
of "national liberation," no matter how bestial or how random or defenseless
the victims, cannot be considered terrorism. This boils down to saying that
terrorism on behalf of bad causes is bad, but terrorism on behalf of good
causes is good. Obviously, anyone who takes such a position is not against
terrorism at all-but only against bad causes.

The resolution itself "condemns in the strongest terms all acts of
terrorism irrespective of their motivation, whenever and by whomsoever
committed, as one of the most serious threats to peace and security". But what,
Murvachick asks, does the United Nations consider to be a terrorist act? The
United Nations
Policy Working Group on Terrorism tried to tackle the "use of
ideology (secular and religious) to justify terrorism" -- without success. The Policy Working Group's own report admits that it could reach no conclusion:

13. Without attempting a comprehensive definition of terrorism, it
would be useful to delineate some broad characteristics of the phenomenon.
Terrorism is, in most cases, essentially a political act. It is meant to
inflict dramatic and deadly injury on civilians and to create an atmosphere of
fear, generally for a political or ideological (whether secular or religious)
purpose. Terrorism is a criminal act, but it is more than mere criminality. To
overcome the problem of terrorism it is necessary to understand its political
nature as well as its basic criminality and psychology. The United Nations
needs to address both sides of this equation.

14. While terrorist acts are usually perpetrated by subnational or
transnational groups, terror has also been adopted by rulers at various
times as an instrument of control. The rubric of counter-terrorism can be
used to justify acts in support of political agendas, such as the
consolidation of political power, elimination of political opponents,
inhibition of legitimate dissent and/or suppression of resistance to
military occupation. Labelling opponents or adversaries as terrorists
offers a time-tested technique to de-legitimize and demonize them. The United
Nations should beware of offering, or be perceived to be offering, a blanket
or automatic endorsement of all measures taken in the name of
counter-terrorism.

15. The phenomenon of terrorism is complex. This does not, however, imply
that it is impossible to adopt moral clarity regarding attacks on civilians.
Terrorism deserves universal condemnation, and the struggle against terrorism
requires intellectual and moral clarity and a carefully differentiated
implementation plan.

The last paragraph is pure United Nations; and its total indefiniteness
constitutes the definite heart of the cultural neutrality problem. Under the stated criteria, acts such as the recent
Israeli missile strike against Hamas second-in-command Adnan al-Ghoul, and
his aide, Imad Abbas in Gaza could could come under condemnation just as easily as the massacre of schoolchildren in Beslan.

Oct. 21 - An Israeli airstrike in Gaza City on Thursday night killed a
leading weapons maker of Hamas who was responsible for some of the group's
most powerful bombs and its homemade rockets, Israel's military said. A white
sedan carrying the bomb maker, Adnan al-Ghoul, and his aide, Imad Abbas, was
hit by two missiles and burst into flames, according to Palestinian witnesses.
The two men were killed and four Palestinians on the street were wounded,
according to doctors at Shifa Hospital.

From a certain point of view the missile strike against al-Ghoul is an act of
terror while the beheading of British hostage Kenneth Bigley is a

legitimate act of resistance against occupation.

An Australian TV journalist who was kidnapped and freed by Iraqi militants
was under attack today for saying that the executions of British and American
hostages were understandable. ... "These guys, they�re not stupid. They are
fighting a war but they�re not savages. They're not actually killing people
willy-nilly. There was no reason for them to kill me," Martinkus said when he
arrived at Sydney airport on Tuesday. "There was a reason to kill (British
hostage Ken) Bigley, there was a reason to kill the (two) Americans. There was
not a reason to kill me," he added.

Terrorism is condemned, but the terrorist act is left undefined. With this background, point 10 of the
UN Security Council's vote to condemn terrorism reads differently. The Security Council asked the Working Group, which will almost
certainly include the Organization of the Islamic Conference, to consider how victims of the unspecified act of terrorism might be compensated:

10. Requests further the working group, established under paragraph 9 to
consider the possibility of establishing an international fund to compensate
victims of terrorist acts and their families, which might be financed through
voluntary contributions, which could consist in part of assets seized from
terrorist organizations, their members and sponsors, and submit its
recommendations to the Council;

It would be naive to assume this refers to the seizure of Osama Bin Laden's
assets to compensate the victims of September 11, or those of the sheiks who may
have bankrolled Bali, Madrid or Beslan. Depending on the eventual definition of terrorism, it could theoretically, and may eventually justify the use of Israeli or American taxpayer money to compensate Hamas or the Al-Qaeda. And why not? In a world where all causes are equal, it is impossible to insist upon a particular point of view. John Kerry
understood the inadmissability of parochial viewpoints in in the conduct of international affairs.

In 1994, discussing the possibility of U.S. troops being killed in Bosnia,
he said, "If you mean dying in the course of the United Nations effort, yes,
it is worth that. If you mean dying American troops unilaterally going in with
some false presumption that we can affect the outcome, the answer is
unequivocally no."

But how then, if this very United Nations considers all viewpoints equally
valid? How if you have a logical system in which, since no truth table is
possible, everyone is free to construct his own? Then you have a system where
every function call returns a null; where sentences start, but never end. You
have One World, as in the days when the jungle once covered the earth.

Best of the Comments New Feature!

Terrorism will remain undefined until the the World Polity -- the UN with
teeth -- arrives. Then it will be defined as "actions which threaten the
security of the state". #

We Are the World

John Kerry's defense policy is the subject of a

Washington Post article which may have been intended as hagiographic but
whose effect will probably vary with the eye of the beholder. It portrays the
candidate as a complex man; in that he sometimes agreed with Richard Nixon; in
that he believed in military persistence on occasion; in that he believed in
cutting military budgets at other times. But the one simple belief which Senator
Kerry consistently carried throughout the course of his long public life was the
conviction that America should never, if possible, go it alone.

NATO and the United Nations appear to be touchstones for the Democratic
nominee, not just the troublesome hurdles that they appear to be to President
Bush. In speeches over the years, Kerry repeatedly has denounced unilateral
action.

Kerry's belief in working with allies runs so deep that he has maintained
that the loss of American life can be better justified if it occurs in the
course of a mission with international support. In 1994, discussing the
possibility of U.S. troops being killed in Bosnia, he said, "If you mean
dying in the course of the United Nations effort, yes, it is worth that. If
you mean dying American troops unilaterally going in with some false
presumption that we can affect the outcome, the answer is unequivocally no."

This will be cause for joy among those who feel that on principle, America
should subsume its national interest to a wider set of imperatives. 'America
joins the world', 'No longer alone' is the ticket. The argument is based on a
rejection of American "exceptionalism", and indeed the exceptionalism of any
individual country or culture. If all cultures are equally valid then the US
Constitution is nothing special; simply one arrangement among many and in fact
perforce subordinate to a Universal Charter, in the way that a subset is
necessarily contained in the superset. Any distaste is written off as
sentimental attachment; a false ethnocentrism that will eventually join
anthrocentrism and geocentrism in the wastebasket of old ideas. To necessity is
added the force of inevitability. Iraq becomes a modern day Scopes Trial, the
last hurrah of an insupportable conceit.

Nor is there anything to be alarmed at, we are assured. 'One World' may be a
goal, but a distant goal, comfortably arrived at in stages. Nothing will be
missed. Nothing essential really. It will all happen so gradually as to
be imperceptible, except to bigots, who are always noticing something. The
process will consist of a slow expansion of international understandings and a
gradual diminution of individual action. Nations will habituate themselves to
deferring to a Higher Good until it becomes unthinkable to do otherwise. We can
take our time -- provided, and this is essential -- provided there are no
questions about the eventual destination. It is breathtaking as a concept, and
might be described as a second American Revolution; one we are witnessing now.

Imagine there's no countries,

It isn't hard to do,

Nothing to kill or die for,

No religion too,

Imagine all the people

living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer,

but I'm not the only one,

I hope some day you'll join us,

And the world will live as one.

--

John Lennon

The Taxman Cometh

The Strategy
Page describes the kind of levy that tax-exempt NGOs in the Third World are
eminently familiar with.

October 20, 2004: Chaos continues to be the norm in the Palestinian areas.
The only real government there consists largely of the foreign aid
organizations, especially those run by the UN and Red Cross. The aid
officials, by supplying food and other necessities to most of the population,
are largely immune to the terrorist violence. However, the terrorists, who are
now largely Islamic radicals, expect the aid organizations, which are run by
non-Moslem foreigners, to pay a form of "tax." This they do in
providing food and other good for terrorist members, and jobs for some
terrorists. The muscle in the Palestinian areas is provided by various
terrorist militias.

Payments to terrorist organizations can be accepted in kind. The Command
Post has a roundup of the kowtowing a reporter must demonstrate to keep his
life -- and keep covering a story. John Martinkus, from the left-win Australian
television station SBS was kidnapped in Iraq, but won his freedom by
demonstrating, via Google search, how unremittingly anti-American he had been.
He pointed out that he had, among other things, been a human shield and had
produced films excoriating the US military.

Martinkus was in Iraq to film another documentary for SBS, which has run an
undeclared jihad against the United States and the liberation of Iraq.

Not so undeclared, actually. Just before the war to topple Saddam Hussein,
the then SBS deputy chairman, Neville Roach, publicly begged �journalists .
. . in every article, every editorial, every report, (to) highlight the murder
and mayhem that our nation is about to release�.

So frenzied has its demonisation of this war since become that SBS this
year twice showed a French "documentary" � The World According to
Bush � that claimed US President George W. Bush was a religious crazy,
"idiot" and "political whore", who was conned into
attacking Iraq by a handful of "calculating" Jews, even while
secretly pocketing pay-offs from their Muslim enemies.

So terrorists let Martinkus go. He attributed his own survival to their
reasonableness:

"I was not hurt and treated with respect once they established my
credentials as an independent journalist who did not support the occupation,"
the SBS filmmaker told Reuters.

"These guys, they�re not stupid. They are fighting a war but they
are not savages - they�re not actually killing people willy-nilly. There was
no reason for them to kill me," he told reporters on his arrival at
Sydney airport last night. "There was a reason to kill (British hostage
Kenneth) Bigley, there was a reason to kill the (two) Americans (kidnapped
with Bigley). There was not a reason to kill me."

This kind of exaction, either in money or kind, has a name. It's called dhimmitude,
or if you prefer, protection. English is a wonderful language in that many words
can be found for one thing. 'Reasonableness' is the way strongarm men have
always chosen to put it.

Bedlam by the Euphrates

A reader sends a link to a subscribers-only article in the National
Journal, "Iraq -- Grief and Rage" by Tish Durkin. It's an account
of what will never make the headlines: the torture and mutilation of five
Shi'ite truck drivers by Sunni "insurgents", if that is the term.

The photos defy examination, let alone description: eight close-up, color
images of death, as it came on June 6 to five Iraqi men. Death came after the
men had been tortured, but before their bodies were mutilated and left in a
city garbage dump. ... Some time after that, they were retrieved by the men's
families, who took the photos for a very specific reason. "We have sent
the CDs of these pictures to all the Shiite mosques, and to the Mahdi
Army," said Sheik Faisal al-Janany a few days after the bodies were
retrieved from the morgue, "so that they can see what the people of Sunni
are doing to the people of Shia."

The pictures, even by the standard of "freedom fighter"
productions, were not pretty.

In one of the photos, Faisal's 29-year-old son, Hamad, has a head that is
so badly crushed that it resembles a smashed eggplant; skin that has been
burned a marbled brown; and a mouth that appears to be full of ash, but almost
empty of teeth. In another photo, Faisal's 27-year-old nephew, Khalad, has
several thick black stripes down his back. Perhaps, an observer speculated, he
was beaten with a red-hot whip; perhaps he had been pressed into a red-hot
metal chair. In some of the other photos, the victims are missing one forearm.

And so on. The truck drivers had just made a delivery of furniture to the
Iraqi Army when their vehicles were blocked at the Al Forat bridge in Falluja
and a crowd of shopkeepers and cigarette vendors -- armed of course, as all
cigarette vendors are -- pulled them from their vehicles. One of the Shi'ites, a
12 year old boy named Mohammed, escaped and ignoring the blows and injuries,
reached an American checkpoint, where he was treated. The uncomprehending medic
turned him over the an Iraqi policeman who promptly returned him to an insurgent
in the person of imam Abdullah al-Janaby, the preacher at the Sa'ad Aby Ibn
Waqas mosque, who directed other boys of about the same age to beat him prior to
worse. He made his escape yet again and reached the home of a friend who
spirited him away to Baghdad.

The National Journal writer concludes that incidents like these are tipping
Iraq into civil war. None of the Shi'ites she spoke to believed the truck
drivers were killed because of any connection to America; they believe they were
targeted because they were Shi'ites. One of the other truck drivers survived by
convincing his captors that he was Sunni. He had an identity card, issued by the
old Saddam regime which misspelled his name in the Sunni way.

When the blindfold was removed, he saw the Asian-featured faces of his
captors and in his mind registered them initially as Japanese. Instantly
realizing that that could not be, he figured that they must be from Central
Asia, perhaps Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, or Chechnya. There was also, he
recalls, someone who looked and spoke like an Egyptian. ... He told them that
he lived in the heavily Sunni, pro-Saddam city of Yousefia, south of Baghdad.
He told them that he had agreed to join a convoy ... strictly because he
needed the work, and that he had in his truck a dangling portrait of the Imam
Ali only because he was afraid that the Shiites would kill him if he didn't.

In an ironic way, American troops are probably the sole guarantors of
Falluja's survival. Many outraged Shi'ites want the place leveled, plowed and
then salted. In a land filled with conspiracy theories surely the most bizzarre
is the belief that the Americans are in league with Al Qaeda to kill off the
Shi'ites simply because they have not incinerated Fallujah. "'If the
Americans don't kill the terrorists,'" Abu Yas declared, "'we will
think, 100 percent, that the Americans have a relationship with Al Qaeda.'"
The theory that the United States could leave the Islamic world alone may be as
wishful as the proposition that you can leave a bomb to tick in peace.

To hear Shiites tell it, Falluja is the land of the fatally false facade:
The mosques are prisons, the holy men are criminal warriors, the police and
the courts are lackeys of the resistance, and the merchants are double agents;
at the sight of any suspicious outsider in their shop or restaurant, they dial
instantly to alert the mujahedeen. "When I went into the mosque,"
Sheik Faisal tells me, "I saw it was not really a mosque for praying.
There were many rooms inside of the mosque for people being beaten."

The road may be long and hard, but the underlying dysfunction which gave rise
to September 11 -- and the mutilation of the five Shi'ite truck drivers  --
among many similar incidents, must be addressed in some way unless we can leave
the planet.

---

There are some who believe we can put a lid on situations like these by
imposing sanctions. The more extreme might argue that a naval blockade or no-fly
zone will alter the situation on the ground. After all, that was policy for a
decade. Still others think that "diplomacy" or United Nations
legitimacy would have made a crucial difference. The more thoughtful have
suggested that if the United States had sent 50,000, 100,000 more occupying
troops or if these included a few Frenchmen the problems might have been
averted. But how do you blockade the human heart? How do you "avert"
problems 100 generations old?

Some have seriously suggested that if America pulled into a tight perimeter
around its borders such men could not reach inward to hurt children; could not
"IED" American travelers en route to Thailand or Germany; could not
"mortar" the homeland with aircraft attacks like they mortar some
military bases or the northern towns of Israel; could not infiltrate
"sleepers" into the 8 million American Muslims the way they have
infiltrated the Green Zone. Could not act abroad as they act at home. These
solutions have been advocated by men of goodwill, experience and intelligence,
but will they work?

The neoconservative assumption that Middle Eastern societies were
transformable has been described as the product of excessive hope when it is
really the counsel of despair. It is the remainder which 'however improbable, is
all that is left after all the impossibles have been eliminated'. The fact that
America, without resorting to mass murder, has kept such a fractious country
intact, that many Iraqis daily risk their lives in the effort to beat back this
darkness, is testimony to a quality of work which deserves better than the scorn
that has been heaped upon it.

In a few weeks many social liberals will feel impelled to vote as Mahatir
Mohammed suggests, for entirely different reasons but for the same man
nonetheless. Some conservatives have already accepted the idea that the only
proper reaction to the "bloody borders of Islam" is to recoil as
Ronald Reagan did once upon a time in Beirut, hoping nothing more will follow.
But there is nowhere left to run and having learned so much about the problem,
nothing really before us but our trepidation.

For being, as they say ...

From Blackfive
comes a link
to how Canadian troops in Afghanistan realized an ammo dump that had supposedly been
cleared by European troops --wasn't. Troops from the Princess Patricia Regiment
discovered a large pile of explosives ten minutes away from their camp. It
contained:

... 82 buried bunkers, each 20-metres long, housed thousands of Soviet FROG
missiles (one step down from Scud missiles), and every variety of rocket and
mortar shells. ... Some of the FROG missiles were still in their original
cases. Some heaped in the open. Some stacked to the roof in the unlocked, open
bunkers. Much of the ordnance had warheads removed to collect the explosive
for homemade bombs -- or for blasting at a nearby quarry.
"Unbelievable!" was Maj. Brian Hynes' reaction when he saw them.
"We (troops of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)) have
been here some two years, and no one knew this was at our back door.
Unbelievable."

Many of the rockets, missiles and shells had been pried open for the
explosives, which are used peacefully to blast mountain rock into gravel, and
by those who want to make bombs that disrupt Kabul. ... Littered with burned
out Soviet military vehicles, the whole area is a junk pile strewn with every
sort of live ammunition, fuses, unexploded shells, rockets, etc., all
supposedly under the authority of Belgian troops (at the moment), who ignored
it. 

The Canadian officer figured the Europeans goofed off and were trying to
cover their rears. He would show them.

"These bunkers have been known for two years but no one bothered to
check them," said Maj. Hynes. "To me, that's incompetence."

In the midst of examining the bunkers and taking photos, a Swedish UN guy,
a French major and a German colonel arrived to make a fuss and order the
Canadians to leave. The French major insisted his government had a deal with
the Afghan government for the area, and ISAF had no business being there. This
cut little ice with Maj. Hynes, who is responsible -- not to the commander of
Camp Julien, Col. Jim Ellis -- but to the ANA (Afghan National Army), which
has now moved in to secure the site.

The French major was clearly bluffing, hadn't checked the bunkers and got a
classic Canadian roasting from Maj. Hynes -- who was supported by a German
general who was also appalled at the laxity. "Now we've stirred up the
hornet's nest," grinned Maj. Hynes. "Good. Now we may get some
action."

Somehow I think someone missed the point. There is probably some perfectly
plausible reason why a Swedish UN functionary, a French major and a German
Colonel -- one civilian, two officers, three nationalities, none of who would be
in the same chain of command -- should show up at precisely the moment a
Canadian officer discovers a large number of surface to surface missiles lying
around unguarded, but it escapes me.

Now, my suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose... I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, in any philosophy.

-- JBS Haldane

The Invisible Man

A new mass grave of Saddam's Kurdish victims has been found, according to the

BBC. (Hat tip
Powerline)
It is thought to contain hundreds of victims, including "unborn babies and
toddlers clutching toys".

The victims are believed to be Kurds killed in 1987-88, their bodies
bulldozed into the graves after being summarily shot dead. ... "It is my
personal opinion that this is a killing field," Greg Kehoe, an American
working with the IST, told reporters in Hatra, south of the city of Mosul.

"Tiny bones, femurs - thighbones the size of a matchstick."  Mr Kehoe
investigated mass graves in the Balkans for five years but those burials
mainly involved men of fighting age and the Iraqi finds were quite different,
he said. "I've been doing grave sites for a long time, but I've never seen
anything like this, women and children executed for no apparent reason," he
said.

But although the bodies are there they really aren't. According to Kehoe:

Mr Kehoe said that work to uncover graves around Iraq, where about 300,000
people are thought to have been killed during Saddam Hussein's regime, was
slow as experienced European investigators were not taking part.  The
Europeans, he said, were staying away as the evidence might be used eventually
to put Saddam Hussein to death. "We're trying to meet international standards
that have been accepted by courts throughout the world," he added. "We're
putting a package together on each body removed - pictures of bones, clothes,
a forensic report."

The question is what principle is being preserved. Is it the ideal of
opposing the death penalty? Or is it, as I argued in an earlier post,

the power to regulate the recognition of a Third World citizen's death? It
is no mean prerogative and all that separates the Cambodian Killing Fields from
My Lai; Basilan from Beslan; and Darfur from Kosovo. It is a time honored
practice to enlarge or nullify a outlander's death depending on its relevance to
a political agenda.

Walter Duranty exercised his redactive discretion to great effect. The big
problem with September 11 is not that it happened but that it happened where it
could not be ignored. The central challenge facing every propagandist of a
certain type today is how to make it disappear; how to explain the datum away,
either by misdirection or plain neglect, until the cherished facade can be
resurrected in its full glory. Yet it will remain a facade; and the
matchstick-sized bones and toddlers toys will remain unquiet; forgotten by us
but if there is any justice, not unremembered.

"And he buried him in the valley in the land of Moab over against
Beth-peor: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day."