Welcome back to my blog. Let’s get back to business. Ever willing to stick my neck out, here are my predictions for 2003:

— No war in Iraq. But it depends on Saddam Hussein. I think he will blink. If he does not, he’ll be a wide-eyed witness to his own demise.

— Afghanistan implodes. Karzai gets assassinated. The warlords all have a go at each other.

— Nothing happens in North Korea. They’re just sabre-rattling because the US is busy with Iraq. They might get themselves a non-aggression treaty, and then they’ll let the nuclear monitors back in.

— Russia itself does really well economically, despite Chechnya. Putin provides the law and order, oil prices provide the kick in the ass, and the Russians provide the ingenuity.

— Even the US loses patience with Israel’s collective punishment policies in the West Bank, and nudges them in the direction of unilateral disengagement. By the end of the year, the US is telling Israel (privately, of course) to get those damn settlers the hell outta there.

— Northern Ireland flares up. It has to–my parents are moving to Dublin next month (barring a war in Iraq), and they haven’t been posted in a peaceful country since 1992.

— Sighs.com will return.

— Memefirst.com will become the site you visit most. What am I talking about? Give me another few weeks.

— My sister will get married in April in London.

— Next New Year’s will be spent in a castle on Dingle peninsula, western Ireland.

Did I miss anything?

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The New York Review of Books hits Stockholm a week late (but this is a lot better than The New Yorker, with an issue still on the shelf here I that read a month ago in New York). In the “current” issue of tNYRoB, then, is a sincere piece by Ian Buruma about the West Bank. It’s heartbreaking what is going on in Israel.

Then, thanks to that great site Arts & Letters Daily, two notable pieces from Canada’s National Post:

A Mark Steyn piece that does some worthy cutting down of apologists for Muslim extremism. Notable nut graf:

When Mr. Khalfan says that irresponsible journalists “risk provoking individuals who cannot control their spiritual emotions and cause the death of innocent people,” he’s being far more objectionable about Muslims than me, Frum and that Nigerian woman rolled into one; he’s being more imperialist than any old-school Colonial Officer: He’s saying Muslims are wogs, savages, they know no better, what do you expect? You’ve gotta be careful around them, the slightest thing could set ’em off. Might be a novel, might be a beauty contest.

Sorry, it’s not a good enough answer. If that Nigerian mob are really no more than “pious Muslims,” then pious Muslims should be ashamed. Pious Muslims can follow the murder-inciters of Bradford, the suicide-bombers of the West Bank and the depraved killers of northern Nigeria on their descent into barbarism. Or they can wake up and save their religion. Mr. Khalfan’s sophistry won’t cut it.

And finally, Rebecca Eckler puts a name to the newest NYC social meme: the sometime boyfriend. What an excellent concept, especially now that I no longer live in New York, but do plan to visit often. And what is it about The National Post’s female columnists that allows them to puch above their weight so? You’ll remember Rebecca’s good friend and colleague Leah McLaren, who could not find a great British man this summer. Blogging her elicited a record number of comments for one post on this site, I believe.

Kissinger resigns! The wily realist realized that he’d rather continue running his own private consulting practice than return to public office in this important role. And that is just the charitable version of events. The uncharitable version, let’s call it the realistic take, is that his clients are so unsavory that listing them publicly (as the ethics committee demands of all appointees at his level) would have permanently undermined his credibility. The other option, selling Kissinger Associates, was probably not feasible because—let’s face it—what the clients are paying for is his access to power, not the advice of his underlings.

But you might ask, what credibility? Chris Hitchens has been at him quite successfully, first in a book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, in which he puts the realpolitiker on trial for war crimes, and more recently in articles pointing out the absolute hypocrisy of putting this man in charge of the 9/11 committee.

Why Republicans continue to consort with him is beyond me. Well, actually, I can understand that you would give an old operative your undying gratitude for having done all your dirty work during the Cold War, but please do it behind closed doors. (For example, invite him to Bob Bartley’s retirement bash.) Public support of this man is not justifiable; the White House’s pressure on the ethics committee to let Kissinger off the hook for the vetting process is unconscionable. But it’s always about seeing what you can get away with, isn’t it?

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It was an interesting day for the law in the US. The Supreme Court hearing of a challenge to a Virginia law banning cross burning in public view made for some riveting exchanges.

A similar law—which banned the display of any symbols that were known to cause anger or resentment—was struck down in 1992 because it was found to violate freedom of speech guarantees.

But this law is aimed directly at public cross-burning rituals, because it redefines them not as protected hate speech, but as actual threatening conduct, much like somebody with a criminal past brandishing a loaded gun. Indeed, if I were black, based on past history I imagine I would feel very threatened were I to venture near a cross-burning ritual, so it is an eminently reasonable ground for banning the practice, and the Supreme Court seems to agree (we’ll see).

But there are other examples one could find of such practices. A public rally of Nazi types doing the Hitler salute? Jews (and gays and gypsies) might feel threatened by such a display of hate too.

Germany bans Nazi rallies. Why not ban them in the US? White supremacists steeped in Nazi nostalgia preparing for the revolution somewhere in Oregon seem to have more sense than the KKK, and have realized that Nazi rallies are terrible PR. As far as I know, there are no public Nazi rallies in the US. Which is probably why they haven’t been banned specifically. But if and when they happen, they should be.

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On to Trent Lott, who by staying on is helping the Democrats more than they can help themselves right now. Some more journalistic digging now has him defending racial discrimination back in the 80s.

But his arguments then contain an opinion I completely agree with:

Lott said if the Internal Revenue Service succeeded in revoking the tax exempt status of [Bob Jones] university [which banned inter-racial dating], it might have far reaching implications. “The IRS might next decide to deny exemptions to churches that refuse to ordain women,” he argued.

Yes! What a fantastic idea! I could see why the state might have tax exemptions for your non-profit organization, as long as you do not practice discriminatory policies in hiring, promotion, and conduct. If you can’t do that, feel free to associate and do whatever you want (short of cross burning), but don’t expect any special favors from the state. It’s everybody’s responsibility to contribute financially to the good functioning of society, and if you want to be an exception, your altruism better be not be at the expense of a particular group of people.

Good idea, Trent. Now, about segregation…

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I came across this quote on a Baghdad blog and it got me thinking:

“the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.”

Before we all start dissing this as anti-Western propaganda, it’s worth noting the author of that truism is Samuel P. Huntington.

It is of course entirely possible that the West won through superior use of organized violence AND that it had superior values over the “non-West”, but I think this unlikely. The claim of moral superiority, although made by the West for centuries now, is conceivably true only recently.

When was it that the west acquired these superior moral ideas? Not in 1900, when colonialism by the Europeans and a policy of hemispheric domination by the US made such a notion laughable from a modern perspective. And if elections were held then, women and minorities and the poor were disenfranchised.

Only over the past 50 years could a case be constructed for moral superiority, primarily vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. And even then ends justified the means, in Vietnam, in Grenada, in Chile… Jeane Kirkpatrick famously explained why. If you don’t agree with her, then the West became virtuous only in the last 12 years, in part also because it is opening up its markets to imports from developing countries.

It seems to me that the things we celebrate about the West are a result of a successful completion of a two-stage process. The Greeks first invented democracy, but kept the definition of citizen conveniently narrow. So which is more monumental: The notion of democracy, or the notion of democracy for everyone? The democratic credentials of the US constitution, or the humanist Declaration of Human Rights? The latter, obviously. The former, while a clever bit of thinking, was never intended to give the vote to blacks or women.

So, granted, now we have a virtuous West, but one which reached its epiphany largely at the expense of others. The unfortunate result is that a portion of the globe has decided to reject the fruits of the West’s philosophical evolution because it cannot bring itself to separate the means used to reach this achievement from the achievement itself.

And I’m not just talking about the Taliban. Talk to any French activist student or half-arsed Marxist and you get the same suspicion. They still believe that democracy and free markets are shells used by the US and Europe to achieve world domination.

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Andrew Sullivan raises a very interesting question, but inadvertently so, in the process of another rote excoriation of the New York Times. (It’s easy—link to their corrections page and proceed to foam at the mouth). Since Sullivan doesn’t archive his output (unlike the New York Times) I’m posting the relevant bit in full:

THE TIMES VERSUS ISRAEL: I pointed out in my New York Sun and Washington Times column today that a New York Times story yesterday reported the capital of Israel as Tel Aviv. Here’s the official correction:

An article yesterday about a man accused of having tried to hijack an El Al plane en route to Istanbul from Tel Aviv on Sunday referred incorrectly to Tel Aviv. It is not the capital of Israel; Jerusalem is.

Two things to note. If the Times’ editors need to, they can make a correction within a day. So why do they delay for weeks sometimes on factual matters that are just as simple? Second: how did someone make this mistake? This isn’t very sophisticated fact-checking. There are two explanations: the Times doesn’t even have basic reporting skills any more or ideological aversion to Israel was a part of the problem. Or both. And to think this was once the paper of record.

It’s fine for Sullivan to call Jerusalem the capital of Israel. Bloggers are meant to be opinionated. But it helps if they are rational. Which is why it’s a little rich to demand that the NYT behave in a manner befitting a “paper of record” but then insist that it treat as fact something that is the subject of a highly charged political debate.

For it is a fact that only three countries currently recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel: Israel; Costa Rica; and El Salvador. The US and every other western nation have wisely decided to delay their decision on Jerusalem—East, West, or Greater—as the capital of anything until final status talks are concluded. Hence the embassies in Tel Aviv.

In the US, Congress has repeatedly pressed Clinton and now Bush to relocate the US embassy in Jerusalem, most recently in the bill authorizing the State Department’s budget for 2003. But both presidents have made it clear that US policy remains unchanged.

The NYT did get it wrong when it called Tel Aviv the capital of Israel. The foreign embassies there might lead the shoddy journalist to assume this, when in fact their location is provisional, with a view to moving to Jerusalem as soon as they get the green light.

But it is the NYT correction that raises the interesting question. The paper has now stated, for the record shall we say, that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. (And you’d think Sullivan would be a little more appreciative.) If newspapers are supposed to be neutral on such matters it would have sufficed to omit the two last words of the correction. If newspapers are expected to toe the line of their own government’s foreign policy it would have sufficed to omit those same two words.

Or perhaps we should expect the US paper of record to side with the foreign government on such mattters, as a matter of policy. There is one precedent that I can think of: Burma being called Burma by the US but Myanmar by the NYT.

My own take on this is that the New York Times has decided to become the newspaper of record for Costa Rica.

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“Optimism pays” are the concluding words of Bob Bartley’s going away speech, and it is certainly true he has just given us his own optimistic first take on his 30-year tenure as editor of the Wall Street Journal.

I’d like to be charitable towards this piece. All the evidence suggests that he is a genial and personable fellow, who has honorably served the Republican cause in the marketplace of ideas all these years.

But that does not mean that the ideas he fought for are any good. And sometimes, the battles he chose damaged the credibility of the Journal—as with the decade-long Whitewater/Foster conspiracy theorizing.

But nobody has a perfect track record in the harsh light of hindsight. This is why it would have been perfectly OK for his valedictory speech to have been more explicit about where he now thinks he was wrong.

Granted, on some issues it is possible to agree to disagree:

I am indifferent to the minutiae of the arms race in the 70s, and while I think mutually assured destruction worked just fine (unlike Bartley), it is not as if we had a controlled experiment to try other approaches.

Likewise about economic policy in the 80s: Supply-side economics came at the cost of unsustainably huge budget deficits that cost the Republicans a presidency. And it is a policy the republicans are not about to try again, eventhough they now have every opportunity.

But then, in the 90s, I think Bartley mishandled the entire Clinton Presidency. And he still doesn’t know it:

President Clinton’s sin was the same as President Nixon’s: not the burglary but the lies, not the sex but the lies.

Last I checked burglary was a crime but not sex, even the extramarital variety. It’s just outlandish to continue to suggest that Clinton’s crimes are anywhere near the severity of Nixon’s. And that is why the American people didn’t support Clinton’s ouster, not because

Without the public passion aroused by the [Vietnam] war, judges and journalists and opposition politicians would never have had the stomach to unseat a sitting president. In normal times, this is not something the electorate would allow. The electorate takes the optimistic view.

Then there is Whitewater. Bartley doesn’t mention Vincent Foster, and it is a telling ommission, because it was the recurring theme of the opinion page in the 90s, one that endeared it to the orthodox among the believers, but which lost it the middle ground (let’s call them the rational readers). Bartley’s speech would have been a good occasion to admit that yes, it was all tilting at windmills; and yes, had he jettisoned the Foster obsession early on he would have had more influence to bear on issues that matter more.

But he is absolutely right about one thing. Things today are better than they were 30 years ago. And you don’t have to be an optimist to see that. But I also believe that many of the problems in 1972 were self-inflicted (let’s say 3 out of 4: stagflation, Watergate and Vietnam, but not communism, which with hindsight was a paper tiger anyway). Today’s terrorism is not a self-inflicted problem. But pollution risks becoming one in the coming decades. And unless the journal changes its tune on this issue, it will make sure it does. When it comes to the environment, there is no reason to believe optimism pays.

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I was in New York all last week, which both explains the relative scarcity of posts recently, and the vehemently pro-unfettered-movement-of-goods-and-labor stance of the next few posts.

It is time to stand up and be counted in favor of Turkey’s accession to the EU.

French ex-President Valery Giscard d’Estaing said 10 days ago that Turkey should never be a part of the EU, for two main reasons: Not enough of it is in Europe; and it does not have a Christian heritage.

What French ex-Presidents say is not usually important, for good reasons. But VGE is in charge of writing a presumptive EU Constitution, and it seems he is so intent on granting EU citizens rights via cultural and religious prerogatives that he is in danger of ensconcing the European identity in an ethnocentric, exclusive definition designed to outwit the aspirations of the Turks. To this end, he had an audience with the Pope recently, in which the pontiff and VGE no doubt patted each other on the back.

Nevermind what I think of people who should have retired from public office long ago but instead are still meddling in the affairs of a world they will not have to live in; in their rush to disbar Turkey, both the pope and VGE have forgotten their history. Turkey does have a Christian heritage, one that spans from Roman times until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. That’s a millenium’s worth of old-school Christianity, which is more than anyone should be forced to bear. But perhaps the pope maintains that it was the wrong kind of Christianity.

If VGE gets his way, the EU will define itself according to criteria which countries cannot choose themselves. Countries cannot choose a heritage. Countries cannot choose a physical location. They cannot choose a religion. But they can choose freedom of religion. They can choose freedom of speech, free elections and a market economy. These are the ideals that should define Europe—these are our successes over the past 50 years. VGE’s vision is exclusionary; a throwback, however feebly, to the old nationalist myths that sustained the fascist regimes of Europe’s past. And Le Pen approves.

Putting it more starkly: Saying that Muslim countries cannot be good European citizens is saying, not too subtly, that Muslims cannot be good European citizens. In fact, Muslims can be model European citizens.

Just last week, Turkey went out of its way to show us this. It peacfully transferred power to a democratically elected Muslim government that will continue to pursue EU membership by aligning its laws to that of the EU. The death penalty is already out. The press is newly free. Cyprus is about to be resolved (!). And now VGE wants to take away the carrot.

D’Estaing’s preference for an exclusionary stance rather than an inclusionary one is telling. It is the stance of a Europe in decline, either too smug in its arrogance or else taking a defensive posture in a world in which it feels besieged. I don’t know which it is, nor do I care, but it is an attitude I wish Europe would snap out of. The willingness of Turkey to join the EU is a massive compliment. By rejecting Turkey, Europe would be behaving as a snobbish high school clique rejecting the uncool newcomer.

But I’m afraid that Fortress Europe is an idea whose heyday is just around the corner, and as usual, a Frenchman has best verbalized the rationale for this particular odiousness.

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I’ve just come back from a hectic week in New York so it is time to catch up.

First off: That protest march in Italy. What a bunch of idiots. Avanti Saddam! But I’ve got to give it to him, he’s managed to do what no government in Europe has ever managed to do: turn fervent lefties into pro-nuclear weapons marchers. Manuel was there:

All in all, the Social Forum gave anyone with a grievance an excuse to take a roadtrip. Angry at the Italian state for supporting Fiat’s closing of the Termini Imerese plant? Come on down! Pissed at Berlusconi for supporting the war in Iraq? Come on down! Support the PLO? Come on down! Like to smoke hash in public? You must come down to Florence and march!

It was great! 500,000 people engaged in collective whining.