External Bureaucracy

The supergovernment trade journal, the European Voice reports on the formation of a euphemistically named Ministry of External Affaires: "European External Action Service" or EEAS.

Omitted is a very important matter - will they consolidate their Diplomatic Services? Will nations worldwide continue to have to deal with 25 diplomatic missions, now made even-bigger by these "persons of action"? Will the miasma of pet-peeves ever develop into a single policy served by a single diplomatic corps, a single seat at the UN Security Council, a single representation at the alphabet soup talking-shops, and a single military force other than the US?

Hm?

Shhh! Everything's fine!

Cool überblogger Carine clues us in to the success of the French economic model. If it's so "humane" why are so many trying to ditch it?

RV: «Let's get the f*** out of here!»

A Book Critical of Le Monde Is Mentioned in the Daily ...Surreptitously, and …One Year After Its Publication

I have been reading Le Monde for years [writes François Jourdier]. Le Monde is always right, it is the events who are wrong.

The fact that the newspaper of reference mentions a book highly critical of it would be a lot more admirable if the mention (favorable or unfavorable) had appeared in the daily's book section or on its medias page (rather than on that of the ombudsman), and if that (first and only) mention of the book had appeared closer to the book's publishing date than almost one whole year after the book's appearance.

Self-loathing twit...

With thanks to LGF we find this supporter of a human rights travesty who's trying to hate people into loving her. Yet another proud graduate of one of the UK's Fascism Universities.

People of Ohio! Start writing those letters!

«Gentle folks at the Guardian,

In your plea to get your non-American readers to write to voters in Clark County, Iowa, you are correct that events in the US have had, and will have, effects on world events. For example, we have pulled your chestnuts out of the fire in two world wars that were occasioned by European diplomacy. Maybe you'd like a vote in which American president will oversee the next rescue. The next time you have elections in Great Britain, I shall endeavour to send names of your citizens to people in France, Iraq, India, the United Arab Emirates, Botswana, Pakistan, China and Argentina so that they may attempt to influence your election. It's only fair that everybody in the world should have a say in the selection of the prime minister.»

Here's an Idea! With elections upcoming in the UK this week, a referendum on the EU in France and The Netherlands, and a federal election in Canada, why don't all of those people who were pandered with unsolicited letters from Ohio start writing back. After all the idea was so amusingly stupid that I'm quite sure people kept the letters and still have the return addresses!

I’m not sure it matters how these folks would normally vote – I think a polite and light-hearted letter asking them to simply invert their view of the world would be sufficient to demonstrate the sanity of the original effort. Angry British leftist always know better than any one else in the world. After all, just take a look at their accomplishments over the years – Tibet is free, and catastrophic global warming is no longer a possibility…

This should prove a nice trot down memory lane:

« I just read a hilarious proposal to involve your readership in the upcoming US presidential election. At least, I'm hoping that it is genius satire. Nothing will do more to undermine the Democratic cause in Ohio than having patronising Brits wander around Clark County telling people how to vote. Just, for a second, imagine if the Washington Post sent folks from Ohio to do the same in Oxfordshire. I'm saying this as a Democrat, and as someone who has spent the last few years in the UK. That is, with all due respect. Please, please, be rational, and move slowly away from the self-defeating hubris.»

«You radical leftwingers are worse than the Taliban. I suggest you stand back and take a good hard look at yourselves.

PS: When do you propose to add Michael Moore to your staff of lunatics?»

Here’s one from one “Harlan in Kentucky”… Hm…:

«The American taxpayers have spent trillions of dollars protecting the peoples of the EU, and what do we get in return. betrayal, betrayal, betrayal. I have been to your country, the country of my ancestors, and I know why they left.
May you have to have a tooth capped. I understand it takes at least 18 months for your great medical services to get around to you. have a great day.»

This list will give the mischievous among us a way to contact the UK press the way any fisherman can.

Such as it is, anyway...

Hoowah!

I think we can finally call it the end of the beginning.


Heartening too is Vaclav Havel’s open letter to the Lebanese. An excerpt:

«Let me convey my greetings, solidarity and support to all of you who are pursuing, by peaceful and democratic means, goals similar to the ones that we in Central Europe set ourselves more than fifteen years ago: the path of freedom and independence, complete withdrawal of the occupying troops and renewal of the democratic system. What we consider important is that all this was achieved by peaceful demonstrations; by open, quiet but firm civic resistance.»

Mass grave found, European press marginally impressed

Deutsche Welle actually reports bad news about Iraqi Ba'athists with the straightforward air of actual reporting.

«Investigators in southern Iraq have found a mass grave believed to contain as many as 1,500 bodies. A US official said the victims appeared to be Kurds, the majority of them women and children. The official said they had been lined up in front of the pit and then shot. The site is near the town of Samawa, about 300 km south of Baghdad, an area targeted by former President Saddam Hussein during his crackdown on the Kurdish population. Meanwhile the death toll from a spate of car bomb attacks on Friday in Baghdad has risen to at least 29. More than 100 others were injured in the attacks targeting Iraqi security forces. No-one has admitted carrying out the attacks, but a tape purportedly from al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, calls for more attacks on US forces. »

Could it be on orders from above to repair the diplomatic damage they’ve done?

The French Military "Draw Up a Critical Evaluation" of 30 Months of American Operations in Iraq

Experts with the French military have discovered the reason for America's failings in Iraq.

It's the Protestant religion…

It's not because France didn't participate in the Iraq war that its military experts shouldn't take it upon themselves to study the manner in which the Americans undertook "stabilisation operations" from May 2003 to December 2004

writes Laurent Zecchini in his description of a special issue of the CDEF review Doctrine about Uncle Sam's "often disastrous operations". What Zecchini's piece does throughout, basically, is quote the "French experts" (who, to name only one thing, never seem to have heard of the concept of born-again Christians). "For the French military, another considerable weakness of the American military operations was…", starts a typical sentence in this piece in Le Monde (which in a separate article, referred nonchalently and self-evidently to the U.S. Army in the agonizing country [Iraq] as the army of occupation [see image 7]).

Anyway, Americans will be happy to finally understand the basic problem of the whole Iraq mess. It is their attitude and their culture:

"Faced with [the terrorist] threat, the only possible solution was complete extermination. We are thus back to the logic of the 'body count' [in English in the original] … On the one hand, it was out of the question to negotiate with 'Evil' and, on the other hand, in the Protestant logic, one is born a 'bad guy' [in English in the original] rather than one becomes one. It is therefore sufficient to use enough means to eradicate them."

Searching for Villain; Surprise! Up Comes Uncle Sam

When Google challenges Europe. Overnight, the headline in the daily Le Monde turned the popular search engine into a new villain

writes Pierre Buhler in the International Herald Tribune under the title No Google, please, we're French. (More nonsense and wasted tax-payer funds here.) The common-sense sciences-po associate professor counters that

[Google's] motives are undoubtedly commercial, but how does this translate into a "challenge to Europe?"…

To reach its target, Google must … tap heavily into works not originally written in English. The selection criteria have not been spelled out, but both logic and Google's corporate culture point toward a preference for titles that would attract the greatest number of Internet users.

Meanwhile, Elisabeth Rosenthal generalizes anti-Americanism to all Italy with the title, Italy furious as report is said to clear GIs on agent.

Tensions between the United States and Italy surged on Tuesday as Italian opposition politicians and citizens reacted furiously to leaked reports in the Italian media that a joint investigation into the shooting death of an Italian agent in Baghdad would absolve U.S. soldiers of guilt in the incident.

What this means is that the villain is already designated here — Uncle Sam. When Uncle Sam is involved, judgment and condemnation have been passed already, and nothing less than total oppobrium is deserved. The idea that the absolution might have been entirely appropriate, at least in this particular case, is an option that simply cannot be true. Needless to say, if any other country's nationals had been involved, it is unlikely that (unless perhaps they were allies of America) there would have been such an outbreak of "fury".

Oh, and before we forget: the Europeans holding these views are the same who would have Washington join their "fair and objective" International Criminal Court.

Abu Ghraib proven an overhyped story, not a whitewash

…where are the whistleblowers? There would have been a widespread outcry in the military if senior brass and civilians really were trying to shift blame for abuse onto the lower ranks

editorializes the Wall Street Journal about Abu Ghraib, which it calls an overhyped story, not a whitewash.

Yet the only military people claiming that they are taking some kind of fall are the convicted Graner and the former Abu Ghraib Commander, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was blamed for weak leadership in the original Taguba report — which, by the way, remains a thorough and insightful account of what went wrong at Abu Ghraib.

The salient and remarkable truth here is that America has punished its own for the Abu Ghraib abuses; and it has done so even before Saddam and his henchmen have faced justice for the horrors they propagated in that same prison.

Most important, perhaps, is the fact that the Bush-bashers' "wailing says more about the accusers than about any facts that have emerged in the year since the scandal broke".

We'd have thought every American would be relieved to learn that 10 major inquiries, sworn statements from 37 high-level officials, and information gleaned from dozens of courts-martial and criminal investigations have cleared most senior civilian and military leaders of wrongdoing in the Abu Ghraib scandal and other Iraq prisoner abuses. Instead, the latest Army report reaching this conclusion has induced further cries of whitewash.

This wailing says more about the accusers than about any facts that have emerged in the year since the scandal broke. The media and Congressional Democrats flogged the Abu Ghraib story for months throughout the 2004 election year, with a goal of stripping the Iraq War of moral authority and turning President Bush into another LBJ. But now that their worst chain-of-command conspiracy hypotheses haven't panned out, they refuse to admit it.

Loser-palooza

Top of the pin to Natalie Solent for calling to our attention a fine compendium of leftist cognitive over-reach: The Gallery of 'Bush = Hitler' Allusions

Enjoy it in all it's glory - the hurt feelings, the emotional projection, the invented potential crises of outcome, the dance of the moving goal posts, and the general "I still hate my parents" sickness of never being able to believe that your own society can ever be anything other than evil.

My favorite is the always unctuous Harold Pinter, written about here in The Guardian:

«The American detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where al-Qaida and Taliban suspects were being held, was a concentration camp.

The US population had to accept responsibility for allowing an unelected president to take power and the British were exhausted from protesting and being ignored by Tony Blair, a "deluded idiot" Pinter hoped would resign.»

Never mind the fact that his beloved Cuba DOES fence Cubans in like in the concentration camps.

Ever hear of someone navigating plywood-and-tire rafts TO Fidel's socialist paradise?

Today in history

Today in 1945 American soldiers of the 45th I.D. liberated the Dachau concentration camp.

60 years later: In Britain today leftist British academics can’t tell the difference between one kind on Jew and another by “boycotting” Israeli universities which are dominated by leftists as well.

Ariel Sharon… leftist sociology “perfess’r”… same thing to them, I guess. Aren’t the benefits of education marvelous?

How dare they violate the ground in the Muslim holy city of Liverpool!

It’s like a blackboard jungle...

Only in Europe where something as basic as capitalism is only understood by the few who aren’t resentful about their lives - would the successful roll-out of a new aircraft be called “an embarrassment to America”, and a “victory in a battle”.

Meanwhile, back at the chateau, the usury remains business as usual. While abject ignorance pervades. While the BBC tut-tuts about US growth “only” being at %3.1 and after a week of oil prices dropping decries it’s RISE, one is hard pressed to find data on EU-zone growth. One will find quite a bit of “future projection” of growth, but they’re about as accurate as this little figure that “misunderestimated” the cost of oil by ONE HALF.

«A further easing is assumed over the next two years, to USD 25.6 per barrel in 2004 and USD 24.1 per barrel in 2005.»

I can’t think of any other part of the world where people are generally opposed to capitalism because they think it’s oligarchal monoplism, poo-poo nationalism at home and anywhere else, but get nationalistic about their molly-coddled industries, many of which are state owned of not controlled.

Hello Lisbon, here we com!

America Is So Hopelessly Puritan

If this had happened in the United States, it's a sure bet that Europe's intellectuals and pundits would be besides themselves in bewailing, mocking, and shrieking about American puritanism and hypocrisy:

Miss France 2004, Laetitia Bléger, on Wednesday was barred from wearing her crown and sash for six months after posing half-naked for Playboy, the committee that runs the beauty pageant announced.

And then, don't forget that there is the fact that so many clueless puritans call in to complain about nudity on television, for instance during the SuperBowl spat with Janet Jackson's breast (check out "There's a few things I know for sure" and "You'll never guess who the complainers are")…

By the way: While I am in a naughty mood, you will forgive me for recounting a risqué joke that is 20 years old (but it has to do — remotely — with Ronald Reagan, so I hope I will be forgiven). If you don't like indecent language, read no further; you have been warned.

Before I begin, remember that the Miss scandal is not new, either for France or America.

Isabelle Turpeaut, Miss France 1983, lost her title after suggestively posing for Paris Match magazine.

US actress and singer Vanessa Williams, the first black woman to be crowned Miss America in 1983, was forced to resign two months before the end of her reign after photos taken of her when she was a teenager appeared in Penthouse.

Which brings us to this: A year after the soft-lesbian photos of Williams with another girl had appeared, it was 1984, and President Reagan was running for reelection with his vice-president, the current president's father. While the Democrats' Michael Dukakis was searching for a vice-presidential candidate, the joke went around that he should pick Vanessa. Why? The answer, they said, was that she would make the Democrats win the election for sure …because it was a proven fact she could lick Bush.

A pearl necklace: the passive-aggressive network behind the Oil-for-Food scandal

Il Sole 24 Ore’s Claudio Gatti writes in today’s FT on the links found between Charles Pasqua and the Ba’athists in Iraq. The UN’s Volcker inquiry, as the Canada Free Press has been exposing in numerous ivestigations, is looking like it was ginned up as a cover-up mechanism which those in the ‘axis of nuance’ are familiar with. Beginning with the publication of the Al-Mada list, information is emerging on a great many western figures and their connections with the Saddaam Hussein’s regime under the veil of the UN’s post-war terms imposed on the Iraqi regime.

«For Years French magistrates have been investigating his [Pasqua’s] financial records, probing allegations that he received bribes and illicit funds generated by influence-trafficking and other activities, including arms sales to Angola.
Mr. Pasqua has never been convicted of any wrong-doing. Indeed lad September he won a seat in the French Senate – a position which confers immunity against prosecution. »

His diplomatic advisor, Bernard Guillet figures greatly in the matter, acting as an intermediary between the top (Pasqua) and the fixer in this case, Elias Firzli, a lawyer and a Lebanese Christian currently living in the Be’qa valley, an sort of fiefdom of the Hibzallah (the ‘Army of God’).

«The documents [obtained by Phillippe Courroye, a French investigator] shows that middlemen – including a little known Christian Lebanese lawyer and commentator named Elias Firzli – received and traded a total of about 13m barrels [of crude oil]. The documents also suggest that Mr. Firzli paid more than $1m in oil-related kickbacks to Baghdad, payments that would have been in violation of French law and UN sanctions.

Mr. Pasqua’s role has come to light as separate oil-for-food investigations – one by the UN committee led by Paul Volcker, the other by the US Congress –

Mr. Pasqua has had a long history of friendly relations with Iraq as well as contacts with Iraqi intelligence.
Like many other members of the French political establishment, which saw Baghdad as an ally, he had contacts with officials of Mr. Hussein’s regime.

A spokesman for Mr. Pasqua, meanwhile, said France “made a mistake” when it joined the coalition against Mr. Hussein in the first Gulf war three years earlier and that “the time has come to return to Iraq, our natural ally in the Gulf”

Between autumn 1999 and autumn 2000 – the period in which Mr. Pasqua received three oil allocations – Mr. Firzli made payments of approximately $300,000 to a bank account in the name of Guillet. UN investigators also found also found records that suggest both Genmar and Mr. Firzli paid kickbacks as demanded by the regime from 2000. According to Somo’s records, between December 2001 and February 2002 Mr. Firzli paid more than $1.1m in so-called “surcharges” for both his own and Mr. Guillet’s allocation.

Reached by telephone in Lebanon’s Beka’a valley where he now lives, Mr. Firzli said: “[It is] my conclusion that I should not talk.”»

Derailed…

Although I have written a long essay on how to respond to anti-Americans and anti-capitalists, there are times when I have to admit I am thrown off track. …

• Everyday Meetings with Common Europeans

Thus, one day on a TGV heading south, I thought I would tell the train controller about the trouble I had on the SNCF's website and how it needs to be made more user-friendly. Basically, the problem is that you cannot get a complete overview of train departures to a certain destination the way you can with a printed timetable. The only option you have, before seeing a (limited) range of options, is choosing the (approximate) departure time beforehand, on a particular date, and (after a lot of typing) you will get the timetable for the closest departure to that time, with the next four or five departures.

It may be that most people have a very precise idea of when they are leaving, but still it would be nice to have a user-friendly overview that can — précisément — help you make that decision in the first place, the one concerning what day and what time of day you want to leave. (Even if you had planned to take a train on a Friday afternoon, say, you might want to change to Friday morning, or even to the Saturday morning departure, if, at one glance, you can determine that another option provides a more direct link with no changes; also, if you are afraid that city traffic may make you miss your train, it is nice to know that the following departure is only one hour later, rather than three or four hours later.)

Besides that, if you don't write out the (full) date in exactly the manner prescribed (with slashes and all) — nothing, not even the year, is preset for an easier reset — you don't get anywhere (on the site or by rail).

So, when I met the controller, I told him as much (and in a warm and polite tone of voice, too). The controller was also warm and polite — and with nothing but an entirely matter-of-fact attitude — when he answered:

Oh, but that's unnecessary. That would be giving the consumer too much choice. We don't want to do it like the Americans.

Speechless.

Luddism as a Hobby of the idle rich

The only “acting locally” greenies will be doing is shilling for their politicos.

«Should anyone bring up the fact that the world is a cleaner place than it was in 1970, the green alarmists will, of course, take full credit for the progress before moving briskly back to their reflexive attack on modernity and freedom.
Nothing unexpected about that. If environmentalists declare victory, it's political suicide for the movement and those who set up nice lives for themselves by braying at corporate America and the conspicuous consumption of fossil fuels.
According to the [U.S.] Environmental Protection Agency, core air quality indicators such as ozone (down 31%), nitrogen dioxide (down 42%), sulfur dioxides (down 72%), carbon dioxide (down 76%), particulate matter (down 31%) and lead (down 98%), are all well below their mid-1970s levels.
In fact, the 2005 edition of the "Index of Leading Environmental Indicators" reveals that U.S. air pollution levels have fallen to the lowest on record.

Despite the improvements, eco-activists will be all over the media today heralding an environmental cataclysm if we don't change our wicked ways. It's simply not enough that conditions are much better and the outlook is improving.»

Like the British socialists who were in power in the 70’s, their greatest complaint was that there still wasn’t enough socialism.
The population got sick of their pedantry and lack of perspective and got rid of them. Even “Labour” had to change it’s name to “New Labour” to convince otherwise. How long will it be before the part of the population that is being regulated into mediocrity and being forced to recycle for no reason does the same?

The Blunt, Bad-Tempered Republican and the Frank, High-Principled Rastafarian

John Bolton is blunt where others would be self-protective. This is bad?

wonders Peggy Noonan, while the WSJ editorial asks

Who's Afraid of John Bolton?

He is black, he is dreadlocked; guess whom Ted Hayes supports. (That's him in the Uncle Sam suit)…

Syria and its' prisons: Fearmongering like it's 1499

Scroll to the bottom of the page. Then tell me why you think the likes of A.N.S.W.E.R. are backing Syria. Hatred, pure and simple.

Lebanon still infested with Syrian spooks

Here's an unfortunate wet blanket to throw on all the orgasmic adulation of the European press wonks about Syria's military exiting Lebanon.

These two blogs, by the way, are a great way to take the temperature of Syria and Lebanon. It's safe to say that things are not as simple as simply conferring in Switzerland under the sponsorship of a UN alphabet soup operation.

Let's also not forget about Hizballah. The last militia to remain under arms.

So while people are trying to use these events to undercut Bush, saying that he should not take credit for it, which he didn't, others still are missing the ball: Hizallah and Iranian National Guards in Lebanon may have been reinforced by the Syrians on their exit, and the Syrian Intelligence Agencies still monitor everything from minute civil affairs to people's telephone records.

Opinion Journal's Best of the Web made this observation:

Yesterday we noted that critics of the Bush administration were sure to refuse to give the president any credit for the end of Syrian military occupation of Lebanon, and we quipped that we might as well just give up and congratulate Mikhail Gorbachev. Well, there's an alternative. Consider this speech:

The Bush Administration appears willing to sacrifice the prospects for an independent Lebanon in order to curry favor with Syria's dictator. . . . To acquiesce now to Syria's control over Lebanon would show disdain for our long-standing commitment to Lebanon's territorial integrity and independence. . . .

If a more representative government is formed, it should be possible for the United States to support that government and enhance is [sic] independence. . . . I look forward to working with Lebanese Americans to help make Lebanon's dream of a new era of peace, prosperity, and democracy a reality.

That was Bill Clinton--Gov. Bill Clinton, in a September 1992 campaign speech before a gathering of Lebanese-Americans. (We think that the meaning of "is" above is "its.") Thirteen years later, the Clinton policy has borne fruit!

Then, as now, leftist remain les faux culs about international affairs, thinking it has more to do with the "It's a small world after all" display at Disneyworld, rather than to try to put themselves in the position and perspective of the people that they're talking about. At least the Right knows well enough not to use it as a domestic factionalizing tool and a state-side political bludgeon.