The Inexpert Juan Cole

Media, The Zeitgeist

When he’s good he’s very good. Christopher Hitchens demonstrates fairly proficiently that professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan—a “minor nuisance on the fringes of the academic Muslim apologist community”—cannot “decipher the plain meaning of a celebrated [Persian] statement and is, furthermore, in need of a remedial course in English.” (I knew the bit about Cole’s flawed English, of course.)

Cole, believe it or not, has denied that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or indeed Khomeini, have called for the removal of Israel from the map. The full account is here: “The Cole Report: When it comes to Iran, he distorts, you decide.”

A Chronicle of American Interventionism

America, Foreign Policy, War

In a new book, Overthrow, Stephen Kinzer chronicles America’s interventions in foreign countries. Writes Brian Urquhart for The New York Review of Books:

Kinzer describes three periods of American intervention: first the “Imperial Era” between 1893 and 1910 (in Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, and Honduras); second, the “Covert Action period” between 1953 and 1973 (in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile); and third, the “Invasions” since 1983 (in Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq). The original announced aim was to help anti-colonial patriots to achieve success, as in Cuba and the Philippines; and then, to the patriots’ surprise, the US would establish an authoritarian protectorate.

Especially startling are “The parallels between McKinley’s invasion of the Philippines and Bush’s invasion of Iraq.” As Kinzer see it:

Both presidents sought economic as well as political advantage for the United States. Both were also motivated by a deep belief that the United States has a sacred mission to spread its form of government to faraway countries. Neither doubted that the people who lived in those countries would welcome Americans as liberators. Neither anticipated that he would have to fight a long counterinsurgency war to subdue nationalist rebels. Early in the twenty-first century, ten decades after the United States invaded the Philippines and a few years after it invaded Iraq, those two countries were among the most volatile and unstable in all of Asia.

Updated: Breakthrough in Iraq?

Bush, Iraq

For what it’s worth, a government of national unity has been formed in Iraq. For the “reality based community,” what should matter are not such staged, symbolic events, but the stable, grinding reality on the ground—life is now permanently precarious for all Iraqis.

Times reports that:

More than five months have passed since 12 million Iraqis braved insurgent threats to vote for a new parliament in last December’s general election… In that time… An estimated 3,743 civilians, 942 security forces and 323 coalition soldiers have been killed, and tit-for-tat sectarian killings by rampant militias have brought Iraq to the verge of civil war.

The vote took place in the Green Zone, the only quasi-safe place in that country. That puts paid to the lie that we can now split.

Bush Answers Kennedy's Calling

Bush, Democrats, Republicans

…all immigration policy by definition amounts to top-down, statist, central planning. But the least invasive policy is one that respects a nation’s historical and cultural complexion and the property rights of its taxpayers. Bush’s batch of soon-to-be amnestied illegal aliens are voracious tax consumers, who will cost more in social services than they pay in taxes over a lifetime. By contrast, immigrants who arrived between 1870 and 1920, during the Great Migration, although poor, did not constitute a burden, because the Welfare State as we know it did not exist.
Moreover, what Bush in his dotage termed “the great American tradition of the melting pot” is no more. In previous decades, immigrants assimilated. In the spirit of the times, they are now encouraged to acculturate to the politics of petulance. As a result, too many seem to harbor a vestigial resentment toward the host society and to cling to an almost-militant distinctiveness.
Clearly, unfettered immigration and the interventionist state, as Ludwig von Mises noted, cannot coexist.

The excerpt is from my new WorldNetDaily.com column, “Bush Answers Kennedy’s Calling.”