The view from over here - 2

And so to the European Union. Russian aggression would not be so bad, would not even happen if President Putin "not a particularly wise man but not stupid, either" had not sensed a basic weakness in the West and, in particular, in the European Union.

The problem, in my opinion, is one that the good Professor does not want to acknowledge as he cleaves to the US foreign policy establishment's views: weakness is inherent in the European Union because of the way it is structured and because its basic lack of real purpose in the real world. That would never be acknowledged by somebody who thinks it was the American foreign policy's greatest achievement.

Professor Mead's list of specific problems that face the EU was interesting though not every item was exactly new to some of us.

The biggest of all problems has been the shift to information economy, which, together with globalization, put great pressure on wage rates and employment. This has continued through the last few decades and has been affecting ever more parts of employment. Is this actually a problem or an opportunity? That depends on how you identify yourself.

European self-identity, particularly since the Second World War (though that event was not mentioned by Professor Mead) has been what might be termed the blue social model: a stable society, a fair amount of government control of the economy and the existence of national champions, all of which may have looked particularly inviting in the late forties and fifties but has long turned stability into stagnation. (Then again, that is precisely the model that UKIP is promoting in its policies, if one can use that word.)

This model or assumption did not allow and still does not allow for the changes that flow out of technological and informational upheavals; instead people's certainties have been destroyed and the institutions that were supposed to provide them have lost their legitimacy. Well, well, so the European project was predicated on an assumption that did not take into account inevitable changes? How many blogs did I write on that subject? How many articles in such publications as the European Journal? I have long lost count.

The second problem is the demographic transition that will require some rethinking on the subject of the welfare state and care for the old. As a matter of fact, what this does require is some rethinking, particularly in Britain about the employability of older people. While people live longer, are healthier and keep their marbles longer (assuming they had them in the first place and I do not mean the Elgin ones) employers, NGOs that call themselves charities and unions continue to exist in a world of about sixty years ago when anyone who lived for three score years, never mind the extra ten, was to be treated as one who could no longer do anything but doze in the sun.

The third problem is the poor functioning and perceived illegitimacy of the European institutions. They are far too bureaucratic, function poorly and are not well regarded by an ever growing section of Europe's population. (I need not say that this came as a complete shock and surprise to me.) At a time, added Professor Mead when no European country can cope on its own (as when could they?) it is not helpful to have European institutions that actually make that coping far more difficult.

The obvious answer is to start thinking how European countries could create links and alliances with some institutions that would strengthen them and not destroy their economy but this is not an idea that comes easily to someone who really does think that the European project was going to be one that lived by liberal ideas of law, justice and liberty. (I kid you not. That is what some American supporters of the EU quite genuinely think they had helped to bring about. Now they are, understandably, upset.)

Problem number four was that the various shifts in political and, especially, economic structures affect different countries differently. Thus Britain, German and the Nordic countries have done reasonably well while France and the Mediterranean ones have not. These tensions would have emerged even without ....

Problem number five: the euro.

Well, all I can say is d'uh! I mean, no, nobody, absolutely nobody said any of this ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. And what did we get in response from the likes of Professor Mead: oh don't worry, it will be fine, European integration is a grand idea, it will be the envy or the world. (NO, do NOT get me on to that subject.)

So, President Putin looked at this seriously dysfunctional structure with political institutions that are not considered to be legitimate and huge economic tensions and thought "hey, I could be President of that easily". No, sorry, he thought, "hey, I can invade anything I like and they will do nothing". And so he did. Well, up to a point. He invaded Crimea and semi-invaded Luhansk and Donetsk. The West did nothing and the EU, in particular, cannot decide what it should do and how to go about doing anything.

Could this have been avoided? Well, possibly, but that would have required an understanding of President Putin's mentality and of Russia's essential weakness. On the other hand, I do not agree with Professor Mead that Putin has inflicted one propaganda defeat on the Europeans and the Americans after another. In what way has he won the propaganda war? In that, apparently, he has continuing support in Russia, no matter what he does? That was to be expected. In that some people, so engrossed in their own little problems that they cannot understand what has been going on in Russia and see Mr Putin as the leader of the anti-Western world thus to be supported? Slightly more surprising but, again, not a huge achievement. But Russia is not exactly a popular country and all suggestions of her allying herself with China and Iran, creating a huge bloc of anti-Western powers fall down, as Professor Mead said, on the fact that China is not particularly interested. An alliance with Iran and what remains of Assad's Syria has considerably less cachet.

Here we should have come to the point of what is to be done with the fact that history has returned and we cannot get away from it. Unfortunately, as I mentioned in my first blog, there was no real answer. Apparently, it would be a good idea if the US and the UK would stop criticizing everything those nasty Europeans do and engage in some sort of dialogue to sort things out.

Well, to start with, we are in different positions. When the US throws up its collective hands up in horror, they do so as outsiders who feel that the wonderful structure they helped to create did not turn out all that well and they are going to have to come back to sort everyone out. When the UK .... ahem ... throws up its collective hands up in horror it is with the knowledge that we are part of this whole shambolic structure, that we have wilfully abandoned the idea of our own foreign policy in order to help create a common one, that we are among the most obedient member states.

The problem from the point of view of Professor Mead and the foreign policy establishment in the US is that for some bizarre reason of their own they saw "Europe" or the European project as something they could point to as an example to all and sundry. That makes me wonder whether they actually understand the concept of history at all. It is the history of Europe that makes the European Union an impossible proposition unless, as its founders knew full well, it is imposed rapidly and ruthlessly on the populations; but it is also the history of such areas as the Middle East or South-East Asia or Africa that makes any imitation of what Europe does unlikely. That, dear readers, is what the return of history really means.

Meanwhile, what is to be done (to quote that terrible novel and equally terrible political tract)? Well, it seems that the Yanks will have to come back.

And we won't come back till it's over, over there. 

The view from over here - 1

The lunchtime meeting today had been organized by the Henry Jackson Society, the Left's particular bugbear, in the House of Commons (luckily in one of the committee rooms where the acoustics were good and the mikes worked). The guest was the eminent academic and commentator, Professor Walter Russell Mead and his topic was an obvious riff on a once highly influential book by Professor Francis Fukuyama: The Crisis in Europe: the Return of History and what to do about it.

As one would expect, Professor Mead gave a very cogent and exhilarating analysis of the many problems the world is facing today but, as a journalist from Die Welt pointed out, we have all heard a great many depressing talks and read a great many even more depressing articles of that kind recently. What did Professor Mead think were some of the answers?

Professor Mead's main solution was (and, to be fair, we were coming to the end of the session but, to be equally fair, that was supposed to be part of the presentation) that the US should restore its interest in Europe and re-engage in a dialogue with its European partners. Or, in other words, as he said the Lone Ranger, having ridden away, should now return (no word of how Tonto might feel about  that).

The European Union, Professor Mead explained, was American foreign policy's greatest accomplishment; it had been one of the aims of the Marshall Plan (some stretching of history here), had been supported diplomatically and politically throughout its history but has, to some extent been left to its own devices in the last few years. The US underestimated the difficulties European weakness and lack of cohesion will cause to it. Having, as it thought, defeated the bad guys (twice, presumably), knocked all the European heads together, the US announced that it will do what the European had always said they wanted and that is leave them all alone. Apparently, that is not what the Europeans wanted deep down and it is time to recognize this fact.

We'll be over, we're coming over
And we won't come back till it's over, over there.

Well, that's fine, except that it would appear that it is never going to be over, over here. We saw that when Yugoslavia disintegrated into a series of wars in the nineties, the EU though the egregious Jacques Poos announced that "this was Europe's hour" only to plead with the Americans to come back and sort the mess out after all. It seems that they will have to come back again in the sense of taking greater interest in this pesky little continent and its pesky problems.

Is that really the answer? Obviously, as an Atlanticist and an Anglospherist I want to see a continuation of the existing links between certain European countries and the United States, adding Canada, Australia and New Zealand into that network. But would a greater involvement by the US in the EU's problems really help anyone? Somehow, I doubt it.

Let us go back to the beginning of Professor Mead's talk. We are, he said, facing the greatest geopolitical crisis since the 1960s with President Putin's Russia displaying the most obvious signs of naked aggression since the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. (Whatever happened to Afghanistan in 1979 and, more recently, Georgia?)

Facing this growing aggressiveness we have a West that is in some disarray, both politically and economically; in fact, in most disarray since the 1930s.

I have a problem with these shock-horror announcements because they seem to be so wobbly in their evidence. Are we facing the greatest crisis since the thirties or the sixties? Is this the biggest geopolitical upheaval since 1918, 1945, 1989 or last year?

Not long ago Legatum Institute tweeted a link to a discussion by various global thinkers, put together by Foreign Policy whose premiss was that "the world as we know it fell apart in 2014". This was said on a number of occasions at the Institute's events by no less a person as Anne Applebaum Director of Transitions Forum and author, among other books, of an excellent history of Eastern Europe in the immediate post-war period. She has also written about the Gulag. It seems to me that compared to what she described in those books makes the events of 2014 rather small potatoes.

As the presentation went on, Professor Mead narrowed down the time scale and focused on three countries that are unhappy with the world order that was established in 1989 - 91, that is after the fall of the Soviet Union, and are ready to challenge it. So we are really talking about a possible world order that is twenty-five years old. Could it be that there was no world order established in those years but that events were the beginning of the break-up of the post-Second World War order and that break-up is still going on? That is one explanation of events.

The three countries that are challenging the world order, according to Professor Mead, are China, Iran and Russia. Of these China is the most powerful and capable with the greatest long-term potential. It is, however, already interdependent with the existing world order and benefits from it greatly; therefore, its challenge is unlikely to be a particularly destructive one. There are issues on which it feels aggrieved but, on the whole, it has had less effect on the surrounding area than the other two countries.

When challenged on this subject during the discussion by a somewhat long-winded China expert, Professor Mead, defended himself robustly. China, he reiterated, has not made any real changes in the geopolitical structures close to her, partly because she faces stronger countries than Iran and Russia and partly because its leadership miscalculated in  2008 - 9: the US had not been weakened quite as much as they thought and the sudden aggressive reaction alarmed various countries like Japan who now have a far more active foreign and defence policy.

To the point that China was now the second largest economy (that keeps changing and it is never clear to me how these things are defined) Professor Mead replied that the connection between GDP and world influence is not all that straightforward, pointing to the fact that in the mid-nineteenth century France's GDP was greater than Britain's but that did not lead to French domination of the world.

Moving on to Iran, the picture is a little odd. That country has the least long-term potential of the three yet it is the one that has made the greatest changes, in its favour, in the area that immediately surrounds it. When one looks at the situation in Iraq and Syria one cannot argue with that. Turkey, Iran's rival for influence in the Middle East, has retreated. But Hezbollah is, as far as one can tell, not as strong or powerful as it used to be. For all of that, Iran has done well and that is without going into the convoluted negotiations it has been conducting for decades about its nuclear power.

To a great extent the reason is the basic weakness and unsustainable structure of its immediate neighbours (Israel being the one exception but they are satisfied with keeping a watching brief for the time being), made worse by the events of the so-called Arab Spring.

Does this affect the rest of the world? Well, not so that you'd notice at present though that may change if Iran really does develop a nuclear bomb.

That brings us to Russia, which is, according to Professor Mead betwixt and between those two. It ought to be very powerful, in possession of a nuclear arsenal (whose efficacy is not altogether clear) and in possession of a vast reserve of oil and gas. But unlike China, Russia has not been able to use these advantages to strengthen its economic base even if we ignore the various rumours and news items that indicate a greater weakness in the former than has been assumed.

Russia is alienated from the existing world order in a more fundamental way than China and that is despite the enormous efforts made after the collapse of the Soviet Union to integrate the country into that world order: G7 turned into G8, membership of G20, various agreements with NATO, membership of WTO and so on. For reasons that were obviously beyond the scope of the talk Russia has not managed to take advantage of any of it and has returned to her historic distrust of the West.

When one adds to that the obvious fact that most of the countries that border on Russia have weak governments, chaotic economic policies and, for the most party, dysfunctional structures, one can see that Russia is in a better position than China to make geopolitical changes as well as being more willing to do so.

Of course, one needs to add a few points. Russian interference in those countries has contributed to those weaknesses as well as to Russia's own stagnation. Furthermore, not all countries fall to her machinations. The Baltic States are managing reasonably well for the time being and even Georgia has recovered from the last war sufficiently well to look to the West again.

[This is becoming rather a long blog. So, I shall stop here and write up Professor Mead's comments about the European Union in a separate posting.]

Sounds somewhat familiar

Jonah Goldberg, one of the best and most entertaining right-wing journalists, writers and pundits on the other side of the Pond, author of the excellent Liberal Fascism sends out a regular newsletter to which anyone who is interested in cheerful conservatism should subscribe.

The one that hit my in-box on November 1 had this inter alia:

I was going to dedicate this entire “news”letter to gloating over the glorious, nay magisterial, fustercluck that is Obamacare. But a few factors transpired against me. No, none of those factors include the sanctimonious finger-wagging trollery we hear so much from liberals these days that it is somehow wrong to root for the failure of a law that deserves to fail.

Frankly, I don’t quite get the charge. Conservatives said the law wouldn’t work and will be bad for the country. We’ve been pretty consistent on this point (See: 40-odd House votes to repeal, 8 bajillion conservative op-eds, magazine articles, radio diatribes, tea-party protests, the 2010 midterms, etc). And now that it is going into effect and isn’t working and is proving bad for the country, we’re supposed to suddenly act as if this is terrible news? Or, as some argue, this is the moment for Republicans to work with Democrats to make this horrible law more bipartisan.

This sounds very familiar though about another fustercluck and that is the single currency and, indeed, the whole project of Economic and Monetary Union.

At the time we eurosceptics said over and over again not that they will not introduce this ridiculous idea (that was the line many self-deceiving Conservatives took) but that it will be introduced and it will be a disaster. There are thousands of words out there as well as many recordings of radio and TV appearances by this blogger and many others arguing themselves hoarse on the subject.

Well, what do you know? We have turned out to be right. And what happens? Sorrowfully, we are told by all those who were completely wrong that it is not nice of us to gloat; indeed, it is not nice of us even to say "told you so". Instead, we must all pull together to make this ... ahem ... fustrecluck work. For all our sakes.

Well, sorry. It was a bad idea then and it remains a bad idea. As, of course, is our participation in the whole European project.

Back to reality

What with one thing and another, this blog has been neglected. (Stop cheering at the back.) Time to get back to reality. There is little more I can say at the moment about the developments in Boston except to be somewhat surprised at the national identity of the suspect. I am not one of those who thinks that Moslem means by definition a terrorist and the problems of North Caucasus are very different from the problems of the Middle East. There is a strong suspicion at the back of my mind that this story will have hitherto unknown ramifications.

Furthermore, I wonder how Americans, who are more sensitive to liberty and natural rights as well as the need to oppose overweening government action will feel when the initial celebration is over, at the thought that one of their cities (and not just any one but Boston) was put under curfew by what looked like an occupying force but was, in fact, their own police, SWAT and so on, in heavy armour, riding heavy armoured cars. Is this really what America has come to? Not even our over-reacting police have done that. And in Israel, a country that is more used to terrorism than Britain, let alone the US, attitudes tend to be very different as this article explains.

In the end, as we know, the younger Tsarnayev was caught after the forces of law and order had almost given up, lifted the curfew and one home owner decided to inspect her boat that was under a tarpaulin in the back garden. Or so it seems at the moment. All too many of the stories through that night and day have turned out to be untrue, either accidentally or deliberately misleading. Incidentally, I was amused by this, a salutary warning to all of us who think that the internet, blogosphere, social media and twitterdom are superior to old-fashioned methods of communication and enquiry. Internet detectives got it very wrong, misled the investigators and caused trouble to innocent people. Almost like real journalists, in fact.

As soon as I raised the subject with some American friends I was told that there is a growing discussion about that shut-down or lock-down or, as I prefer to call it, curfew. Here, for instance. it's not so much Megan McArdle's discussion that is of interest but the comments, many of whom show real unhappiness with what had happened.

This is priceless. First it puts what happened into some perspective, then it points out who actually found the hiding fugitive while the police managed to miss fairly obvious clues, and, finally, there is the interesting piece of information that not all of Boston or, even, Watertown was locked down.

But the Boston police didn't shut down an entire city. They shut down an entire city except for the donut shops.

Here is the story on Boston.com.

On block after block of the Boston’s Financial District and Downtown Crossing, Starbucks shops went dark as the city locked down, spurred by a manhunt for the second marathon bombing suspect. Dunkin’ Donuts stayed open. Law enforcement asked the chain to keep some restaurants open in locked-down communities to provide hot coffee and food to police and other emergency workers, including in Watertown, the focus of the search for the bombing suspect. Dunkin’ is providing its products to them for free.

One would not want the police and others to go without hot coffee and their favourite sugary snack but does this mean that the danger was not quite as bad as they made out or that the lives of the Dunkin Donut shops were expendable?

The comments and debate that follow Clark's posting on Popehat are of great interest.

That having not been solved (discussions will go on for a while, especially when the cost of the whole operation, including lost business will be published) we can move on to another problem. It seems that Dzhokhar Tsanayev will not be given the usual Miranda warning (analogous to the warning the police are supposed to give here when arresting a suspect) before being questioned by the FBI, whenever that may happen as we do not know what state he is in. This is in line with changes that were made a couple of years ago in the investigation of terror suspects, as analyzed in this article at the time.

A good many people are unhappy. Miranda warnings, they think, are essential if the US is to preserve its own legal and constitutional system. Otherwise, the terrorists might be said to have won at least up to a point. Emily Bazelon's piece on Slate.com sums up the problems.

There is one specific circumstance in which it makes sense to hold off on Miranda. It’s exactly what the name of the exception suggests. The police can interrogate a suspect without offering him the benefit of Miranda if he could have information that’s of urgent concern for public safety. That may or may not be the case with Tsarnaev. The problem is that Attorney General Eric Holder has stretched the law beyond that scenario. And that should trouble anyone who worries about the police railroading suspects, which can end in false confessions. No matter how unsympathetic accused terrorists are, the precedents the government sets for them matter outside the easy context of questioning them. When the law gets bent out of shape for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, it’s easier to bend out of shape for the rest of us.

Again, the discussion is of some interest. Astonishingly so, for someone who is used to the inanities of people who comment on newspaper columns.

Errm, I was going to write about the latest adventure of the EU Foreign Policy Supremo but seem to have spent too much time on the aftermath of the Boston affair. Tomorrow then.

A missed anniversary

Once again, I have had a finger-wagging from a regular reader of the blog and I deserve it. How could I forget the thirtieth anniversary of this speech?

 

 President Ronald Reagan addressing the nation on the subject of defence. Investors.com puts that seminal speech into perspective. President Obama has just returned from his Middle Eastern tour during which his "achievement" seems to have been to allow Israel and Turkey do what they wanted to do anyway and sort out their differences. Those two countries have been allies for a long time and are both more than a little worried about Iran.

Islamofascist Iran is now, according to the White House, a year away from nuclear arms, and the "Arab Spring" Obama's apologies helped spawn has turned Egypt from a U.S. ally into a possible foe under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Compare Obama's failure to realize the havoc he was wreaking to the astonishing prescience of Ronald Reagan.

Addressing the nation, he asked, "What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?"

He knew missile defense was "a formidable technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of this century."

But by committing America to it, Soviet communism was a few years later relegated to "the ash-heap of history," as Reagan had promised the year before.

Read the whole article and weep.

As the debate goes on

Back from the Christmas break and turning my attention to guns and violence, which is entirely appropriate. Christmas, as we know from police reports and more pertinently from detective stories is the time for crime and violence. Were I to indulge in more than just verbal violence I would vent my anger (as I do my verbal spleen so often) on ASLEF and TfL who managed to make Boxing Day in London a hideous nightmare.  But enough of my problems.

On Boxing Day the Wall Street Journal had an article (which is not behind any pay wall) by Joyce Lee Malcolm about the British and and Australian experience with strict gun control and its general uselessness. As it happens I recall the dishonest campaign that followed Dunblane and the failed attempts by well-organized shooting clubs as well as knowledgeable members of the House of Lords to stem the hysteria.

I have temporarily forgotten about the Cumbrian massacre of 2010 but, living in West London, I am all too well aware about armed gangs and the high level of armed crime, which gets little coverage in the national media as it is not as spectacular in news terms as a massacre particularly of children.

The Australian experience was unknown to me but seems to agree with ours in this country. As Professor Malcolm says:

What to conclude? Strict gun laws in Great Britain and Australia haven't made their people noticeably safer, nor have they prevented massacres. The two major countries held up as models for the U.S. don't provide much evidence that strict gun laws will solve our problems.

If our society is more violent in the twenty-first century than it was in the late nineteenth when guns were readily available and most home owners kept some kind of a "shooter" then the reasons must be something else, not the presence of guns.

Catching up on Russia

I am aware of not having covered the Magnitsky saga recently and shall do so very soon, particularly as it involves the unhappy fate of the Conservative Friends of Putin Russia.

For the moment, let me just direct readers of this blog to an article in the Wall Street Journal [if the link does not work properly go through Google].

The so-called Magnitsky Law, named after Sergey Magnitsky, imprisoned, tortured and murdered for his attempts to do his duty as a lawyer employed by a British firm, is part of a larger bill to normalize trade with Russia. This piece of legislation, whose aim is to prevent specific abusers of human rights in Russia from entering the USA was passed by the Senate last week by 92 votes against 4 but is still awaiting President Obama's signature. There has already been what might be termed an  organized response from Russia.

On its Twitter account, the foreign ministry in Moscow called the human rights statute "something out of the theater of the absurd." Another tweet said, "It is perplexing and preposterous to hear human rights complaints from the US, where torture and kidnapping are legal in the 21st century." And: "This biased approach is nothing but a vindictive desire to counter Russia in world affairs."

Same old, same old.

The Kremlin has for months made vague threats of retribution against the U.S. if the Magnitsky law passed. And on Thursday Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced the law and recommended to the Duma some "adequate but not exorbitant" retaliation.

As the WSJ says:

Please fume away, Mr. Putin. Let the Russian people know that the U.S. continues to care about rights and democratic freedoms. They might have gotten the wrong impression in recent years.

They might still get the wrong impression:

Throughout the first term President Obama has pushed a "reset" in relations with Russia, muting criticism of Mr. Putin's slide to authoritarianism. The Administration tried to kill the Magnitsky Act, and in his statement on its passage Mr. Obama pointedly failed even to mention Magnitsky or the provision named after him in the new law. We can be grateful that at least Congress was willing to stand up for American values.

UPDATE: President Obama has signed legislation "granting normal trade relations to Russia, which angered Moscow by including sanctions targeting alleged Russian human rights abusers". The Magnitsky Act is now in place in the United States.

Meanwhile, in Russia

A former Russian policeman has been sentenced to 11 years in a prison camp for his role in the 2006 death of an anti-Kremlin journalist.

Friday's sentencing of Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov by the Moscow city court came at the end of a plea bargain process that qualified him for a reduced sentence in exchange for his co-operation in the case.

Pavlyuchenkov was accused of tracking Anna Politkovskaya so she could be assassinated and of giving the shooter the gun with which the journalist was killed.

Having confessed his guilt, the defendant was ordered to pay $98,000 to the victim's family.

Unsurprisingly, Politkovskaya's family is unhappy with this turn of events. They do not mind Pavlyuchenkov being sentenced (though one wonders how many of those 11 years he will serve) but they dislike the idea of the plea bargaining as that meant he did not have to testify. No testimony - no evidence about who actually was behind the killing. (Here are the previous postings on the Politkovskaya case.)

No question about it ...

... the live coverage of the hurricane is much better on Reuters than on the BBC. I am really pleased to be able to say that.

In other news; Gallup reports as John Nolte tells us on Breitbart, that among early voters Romney is up 52 - 45 per cent. I am cautiously optimistic though I know people who are considerably more optimistic.

John Bolton on the EU

It is no secret that this blog would like to see John Bolton as Secretary of State in a Romney administration. Here is another reason why it would be a good idea: He thinks that the theory behind the European Union is simply wrong. Not that things have gone wrong for some unexplained and inexplicable reason but that it is wrong. That's the sort of Secretary of State we want. Read the whole piece. Well worth it.

It wasn't the film, after all

For days people who know about the Middle East, including the Libyan President have been saying it: those attacks on 9/11 and in the subsequent couple of days may have used that wretched film that nobody has seen but were actually co-ordinated terrorist attacks.

No, no, no, said the State Department and other spokespersons for the Administration. It was that terrible provocative film and we shall lean on Google to withdraw it.

Well, what do you know? Apparently these were terrorist attacks and the State Department has now admitted it. Let us be thankful for small mercies.

UPDATE: Ex-Gitmo detainee is reported to have been involved in the attack. Oh surely not.

Taranto puts it better than anyone

Once again, James Taranto puts the arguments more coherently than anyone else. The idea that the President of the United States, the Secretary of State and many other official bodies as well as newspapers (if one may still use that term) like the New York Times should repeatedly criticize that wretched film instead of looking a little more closely at what is going on in the Middle East is nothing short of moral and political insanity.

As he points out, the rioting, even assuming it was caused directly by a little known film that has been available for a couple of months, the point is not that the mobs consider it to be "insensitive, inflammatory, intolerant and insulting" but that they consider it to be blasphemous and want any material of that kind banned across the world. Or else.

This, Mr Taranto points out, sets up an irreconcilable conflict between those advocating Islamic, that is Sharia law to be applied to all countries on certain issues, and the US Constitution, which affirms freedom of speech and which cannot tolerate anti-blasphemy laws. The President of the United States, at his inauguration, swears to uphold the Constitution.

Circumstances remain unclear

Here is the Guardian article that brings the story of the American ambassador's murder in Libya up to date, in so far as it is possible. The circumstances, they rightly say, remain unclear.

One witness told the Guardian on Wednesday that a mob fired at least one rocket at the US consulate building in Benghazi and then stormed it, setting everything ablaze. "I was there about an hour ago. The place (US consulate) is totally destroyed, the whole building is on fire," said Mohammed El Kish, a former press officer with the National Transitional Council, which handed power to an elected parliament last month. He added: "They stole a lot of things."

Kish, who is from Benghazi, blamed the attack on hardline jihadists. He said locals in Benghazi were upset by the activities of Islamist groups and would revolt against them. He also said the US consulate was not well protected, unlike the fortified US embassy in the capital, Tripoli. "It wasn't that much heavily guarded. In Tripoli the embassy is heavily guarded."

Will they revolt against the Islamist groups? Perhaps. Let us hope, this time round we stay out it all.

President Obama's Statement is exactly what one would expect in the circumstances. It is hard to know what else he could have said. The big question is, what will he do now, bearing in mind that there is this pesky election coming up.

UPDATE: Hotair quotes CBS news which tells us the unsurprising fact that it is more than likely that the Libyan security forces indicated to the extremely well armed militants (of course, none of the groups were disarmed after Gaddafi's capture and murder) where they were evacuating the American ambassador and other staff.

Wanis al-Sharef, a Libyan Interior Ministry official in Benghazi, said the four Americans were killed when the angry mob, which gathered to protest a U.S.-made film that ridicules Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, fired guns and burned down the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

He said Stevens, 52, and other officials were moved to a second building, deemed safer, after the initial wave of protests at the consulate. According to al-Sharef, members of the Libyan security team seem to have indicated to the protesters the building to which the American officials had been relocated, and that building then came under attack.

More marines have been sent to the shores of Tripoli to protect American personnel. How many were there in the first place, one would like to know.

News from around the world - 2

Meanwhile we also have news from the United States where 9/11 is a day of solemn memory and many remember what they and others were doing on that day. Candidates in the forthcoming election have pledged not to campaign on this day. To be quite precise, they seem to have pledged not to put up negative ads on the day but most people took it as a pledge not to campaign.

Well, they may have pledged but at least one broke that pledge. President Obama decided that the day was of no real importance and sent his best weapon, Bill Clinton, to campaign in Florida.

No negative ads, so that's OK. Well, not really negative. Or maybe a little negative but nothing serious.

However, this may well annoy a lot of people though not, it would appear, those who can see nothing wrong with their great hero.

It seems that both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama tweeted just once each yesterday. Romney's said:

On this most somber day, America is united under God in its quest for peace and freedom at home and across the world.

Unexciting but also unexceptionable and suitably solemn. President Obama's tweet (the only one on 9/11) was somewhat different:

The election is in 8 weeks. Sign up to volunteer: OFA.BO/s3tXFz

Well, tweeting is there to say what is on your mind without a second thought.

Another action President Obama thought essential to carry out on 9/11 was to release a special message to the Arab Forum

Obama offers thanks to the Emir of Qatar--showboating some rather halting Arabic skills in addressing "His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani"--and praising the inspiring democratic example of the Arab Spring, which happened to leave the absolute monarchy of Qatar untouched.

He also offers support for his envoys, including Attorney General Eric Holder, who is attending the Arab Forum conference as the chief U.S. representative. The Arab Forum's goal is to recover assets stolen by formerly autocratic regimes, including Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. (But not Qatar.)

Still, one has to be fair to President Obama. He may spend every waking moment on thinking about his campaign (and has done so since the day he was inaugurated) but he does not care whether he gets the Jewish vote, until now solidly Democrat, or not.

Having, in the past insulted Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel in a way one does not insult the leader of any foreign government, and certainly not His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, this time President Obama has simply refused to meet him, pleading some diary clash.

Shocking news: party leaders listen to members

Yes, I know. You must all be shocked. Because the media is shocked. I hasten to add that this is not a story about any British or European party leaders but the peculiar way the media on this side of the Pond reports the American presidential election.

There is a definite suggestion that the Republicans are going beyond the pale by challenging Obama for the presidency. The American Constitution may have proscribed presidential elections every four years but surely that was just because the Founding Fathers could not envisage a true embodiment of perfection taking that position. That, actually, is true: they could not envisage any human being, let alone a politician as an embodiment of true perfection and understood the need for a constitution that would or should control all of them. That is something President Obama and his supporters find hard to understand.

At this stage the outcome is unclear. The two candidates seem close and much depends on a few swing states as well as what the economic news might be in the next couple of months.

However, it seems certain that Mitt Romney's running mate, Paul Ryan is someone the GOP can be very pleased with, not least because he is a genuinely inspiring speaker, apparently without the constant aid of the teleprompter. His speech to the Republican National Convention  caused ructions on both the right and the left, the first pleasurable, the second somewhat annoyed.

The reaction to it on this side of the Pond was muted, possibly because it was not clearly understood or because our hacks are embarrassed by a politician of apparent conviction. Gregor Peter Schmits of Der Spiegel had no doubts: he hated Ryan's speech and everything about Ryan. The man is more dangerous than Sarah Palin, still a highly influential lady, ever was. Really? Why?

Four years ago, Sarah Palin energized the Republicans with her convention speech. This year, it is Paul Ryan who has found a common cause with the party's grassroots. His stark brand of conservatism is bad news for the socially weak.

Well, Heavens to Murgatroyd, as the great Snagglepuss used to say. Imagine that: a party leader or second to him who makes common cause with the party's grassroots. I am shocked, I tell you, shocked. As for the Romney-Ryan policy being bad for the socially weak, it comes as news to me that an economy in which unemployment is growing while the number of businesses is decreasing would be good for the socially weak.

I have been told by people who actually read the Times that Ryan's speech was reported as wanting to slash government spending and to leave people without a safety net to the vagaries of the free market, which is not exactly true. It is true that Ryan talked about cutting government spending and encouraging people to build their own businesses and make their own money without government intervention. Whether that is what will happen if Romney wins in November is irrelevant. The point is that a supposedly conservative paper like the Times that even the very suggestion of self-reliance as opposed to reliance on the government is a bad thing and Ryan by articulating such thoughts of those who are likely to support the Republicans is clearly no better than King Herod.

Meanwhile, the Evening Standard, the freebie paper handed out at tube stations and street corners in London, has added its own little screed of hatred for the Republican nominees. It seems that not only Paul Ryan but Mitt Romney himself is also pandering to his party, which has become completely unelectable. It's not clear whether that is because Romney is pandering to it or the other way round. Then again, I recall the then American correspondent of the Standard, James Fenton assuring all and sundry that the Republicans were a joke and Obama had regained whatever popularity he may have lost about a week before the mid-term elections that gave the GOP the biggest landslide in history.

One thing we must be grateful for: there is no chance of any party leader in Britain or on the Continent of falling into the heinous error of listening to the members. .

Some more entertainment

My friend John O'Sullivan, whom I mentioned in my previous posting, has produced a hilariously funny account of the American presidential election in the form of a new Bond film. How can anyone resist the title: You Only Vote Twice. Enjoy the fun.

Two reasons why a Romney victory would be desirable

The first and most obvious one is that President Obama has been a disaster for the United States and the West in general.

The second one is that there is a strong possibility that he would have John Bolton as his Secretary of State. Let me put it this way: he actually might; Obama, sure as eggs is eggs, will not.

Why do I want Bolton in that position? Well, the State Department will hate him and that is a good sign; the tranzis will hate him and that is even better; and the UN with all its myriad of sub-organizations will have a collective apoplexy. He might even start the process of dismantling that noxious and evil organization.

For sure he has no illusions about it. Here is a hard-hitting article about the World Intellectual Property Organization.

We learned last month that the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which oversees multilateral treaties involving patents, trademarks and copyrights, has been delivering computer hardware and "technical assistance" to none other than Iran and North Korea. The U.N. body's actions are in blatant disregard of Security Council sanctions on Tehran and Pyongyang, prompting House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen to call last week for freezing U.S. contributions to the organization.

Read it and weep.

We have some way to go

The Adam Smith Institute reminds us that today is Tax Freedom Day in America. Of course, in some states (the more successful ones) that day came a little earlier in the year and I am not convinced it has yet hit New York or California. The ASI says:

Today, average Americans, who have been working every day for the sole benefit of the tax authorities, can finally have a beer and rejoice that, for the rest of the year they are working for themselves. It means Americans have to work 107 days of the year to earn enough money to pay this year's federal, state and local taxes.

Well, lucky Americans. For we have a way to go before we can start working for ourselves.

Tax Freedom Day in the Britain, calculated annually by the Adam Smith Institute, does not come round for another six weeks – not until the 29th of May, to be precise. That means the average person in the UK will spend 149 days this year working for Chancellor George Osborne's tax gatherers. Including the extra Leap Year day, that is two whole days more slave labour than last year, when Tax Freedom Day fell on the 28th of May. (According to the Treasury's adjusted figures.)

We also have a government that believes that the money we earn rightly belongs to them and anything we keep is a sign of their generosity. So, I suppose, we should be grateful that we have a Tax Freedom Day at all.

Just a couple of links

It is some time since I have written about American politics, which is a great mistake as things are so much more interesting there. For the time being, here are a couple of links people might like to read.

Reuters summarizes the White House damage limitation after a week of self-created pitfalls by President Obama, particularly his extraordinary challenge to the Supreme Court, which in itself demonstrates that he could not have taught constitutional law. An American constitutional lawyer, first and foremost, knows the Constitution and the various components of it. He does not make crass comments about the Supreme Court never challenging a law passed by Congress (though, only barely, and without any Republican support). He does not drivel about people who are elected being more important than those who are not. The Legislative, Executive and Judiciary have their roles and positions and these must be fulfilled. President Obama is already regretting his outburst.

His other outburst was against the GOP budget, which, as is the case with most of these budgets, is not really all that tough but is not to President Obama's taste. So, he accused the authors of it of being "social darwinists", as nasty a slur as ever there was one. Did the media faint with horror? Did it heck. Never mind. Here is a nice piece on Cato blog by David Boaz.

Not sure what is more disturbing

1.) That the President of the United States assumes that his election is as much of a given as that of the "re-elected" President of Russia.

or

2.) That the President of the United States hastily promises things to the temporary President of Russia that are clearly not in the interests of his own country as long as he is given "space" by the real President of Russia.

or

3.) That the President of the United States is one of those dumb politicians who are incapable of checking whether the mike near them is still open when they make comments they don't want the world to hear. 

I leave it to this blog's readers to work it out. 

Big business loves big state - shock

This article is about American history and American politics but mutatis mutandis, it applies to us. Big business, as anyone who has really been involved in a fight against unnecessary regulations, of the British, the European or the joint variety, knows, loves them until they find themselves one to one against the state, having disposed of any competition through legal means. Even then various deals can be struck.

Furthermore, in the US, as here, it is assumed that developments through the unholy alliance of big corporate and state welfare are the only possibilities. Nothing else could ever have happened and that suits the statists just fine. Well, it ain't necessarily so. If we are to get out of the mess we are all in (and no, it is not as bad as the mess Russia and some other former Soviet states are in) then we need to look at various alternatives that existed or had been proposed. We might not like them but let us look at them.

Oh and while we are on the subject, I received a copy of Eamonn Butler's latest publication, Public Choice - A Primer. It will be read and reviewed.