I love Lubor Zink

"Some people maintain that Canada's basic and overriding interest is national sovereignty. Others are convinced that what really
matters is economic growth. Still others give basic priority to social justice. There are also those who believe that all
effort should be concentrated on transformation of the UN into a world government. Yet another view holds that the most
urgent problem we must tackle is pollution of natural environments. It is not difficult to find arguments in support of every
one of these positions. But that does not mean that any one of them qualifies as indisputable number one priority.

That place surely must be reserved for the historical priority of free men throughout the ages, namely preservation of freedom.
Without freedom there can be no national sovereignty, no social justice, no economic growth worth working for, no peace
and no enjoyment of life even in the cleanest natural environment. That fact that from time immemorial people have valued
freedom above life itself attests that there is no higher priority in the scale of human values. Doubts on this score can
only come from those who have inherited the blessings of freedom, take them for granted and have no notion what loss of freedom means."








"The intimate spiritual and material bonds between Canada and the US grew out of shared concepts of human life within the
framework of the highest degree of individual and political freedom ever attained anywhere in the world. No one maintains
that the socio-politico-economic system of North America, as practiced with minor variations in Canada and the US, is perfect.
Perfection in the sense of idealistic abstractions is beyond the grasp of human nature. But with all its obvious shortcomings our social
system provinces a flexible structure of unparalleled liberty and unparalleled affluence.

The Soviet system of coercive messianism, spawned by contempt of what Marx called "the miserable individual," and fueled
by organized hate, has produced a rigid totalitarian structure that cannot tolerate any of the expressions of freedom we take
for granted. At the same time, while building and enormous military machine and providing material privileges for the
upper crust of its self-appointed ruling clique, it maintains a low general standard of living in what is in effect an archaic police
state. It takes a peculiar mind to seek cordial relations with the rulers of such a society. And it takes a streak of
perversion (or perhaps, blindness) in that peculiar mind to set as a national goal the same type of intimate relations
with a totalitarian state that we have enjoyed, until recently, with the congenial democracy south of the border.

Mr. Trudeau has such a a peculiar mind. While he was exercising it in the ivory tower of the academe, the harm he could do,
though not negligible, was fairly limited. As Prime Minister, who commands a rubber-stamping majority in Parliament, he is in a position to put the country on collision course
with its vital interests. "

"One of Cromwell's Parliaments proposed burning all state records so that, having effaced all official memory of the past, life could begin afresh. Disavowel of antecedents is the quintessential revolutionary act, as Napoleon, too, understood.

When shown a genealogy of the Bonaparte family, Napoleon brushed it aside, remarking: "Je suis mon propre ancetre" (I am my own ancestor. Considering the scale of Napoleon's vanity, and the nature of that genealogy, his rejection of it was understandable. But his rejection also reflected the modern disdain for history as "the dead hand of the past."

Napoleon is the archetypal modern man of action, a bloody nuisance ricocheting around civilization, making history and orphans. He made so much history because he knew so little. He traveled fast because he traveled little, unencumbered by an educated person's sense of limitations, the sense that is the bittersweet fruit of historical understanding. Such people are tolerable, if you like history as made by Corsican bridgards and other modern world-shakers.

...

Many historians, like many other intellectuals, long to be "relevant" to the specific problems of today. Thy flinch from acknowledging that the most useful lesson of history is highly general. It is: things have not always been as they are, and will not always be as they are. This is an especially important insight for Americans, who take for granted freedom and abundance, both of which are, considered in the sweep of history, rare and shortlived phenomena.

History contains more sadness than gladness, more dreams frustrated than fulfilled. But this means that the study of history is, for many historians, unacceptably unfun and unheroic. Like many other intellectuals, many historians want to believe that they are pregnant with the future. They want to dissolve the distinction between thought and action. They are, they think, deliverers: history will yield highly practical "lessons" that will propel manking to the uplands of happiness.

Many modern intellectuals, like optimists through the ages, recoil from this truth: the best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering dissapointments.

Optimists as different as Marxists and Americans believe in History- Americans call it Progress- as a linear process leading inexorably to higher stages of life. But if historians and other intellectuals were free from Promethean pretensions, young people at school would learn the unfun, unheroic truth that history is circular, like a maelstrom."

-George Will, "Inoculation by History"

"FDR's New Deal broke with nineteenth-century liberalism (which is what passes for conservatism today) by abandoning the premise that society, as distinguished sharply from government, produces the elements of happiness in life, and that government's role is merely to maintain a framework of order in which people pursue happiness. What was new about the New Deal was the notion that government had a duty to provide people with some, and more and more, of the tangible elements of happiness.

Long and forever gone are the days when it was thought that well-bring, economic and otherwise, should be solely the result of the individual's ability to cope with society, with social forces that government could not or should not regulate. The New Deal changed, irreversibly, Americans' expectations, and the legal and psychic relationship of Americans to their government.

This year some GOP conservatives seem to be trying, again, to turn an election into a referendum on the propriety of those expectations and that relationship. It is unclear how the GOP can benefit from so straight-on a challenge to the settled habits of mind of the American majority, which accepts the Rooseveltian premise that government should supply crucial elements of happiness.

The GOP challenge is a risky tactic against Carter, who calls to mind Disraeli's recommendation: Tory men and Whig measures. Carter is an unmistakably conservative person. The values he obviously cherishes and repeatedly invokes- piety, family, community, continuity, industriousness, discipline- are the soul of conservatism, The appeal of Carter to conservatives is in his aspiration to use government vigorously in the service of conservative values."

-George Will, "Odd Man In"

"Most UN members are police regimes. Many of these regimes rule over ersatz nations. Many use their energies to pound together human elements that lack cultural affinities. To such regimes Israel, a real nation, is either unintelligible or a reproach. Regimes resting on force are bound to find fault with the rich legitimizing sources of Israel's nationhood.

Israel became a nation after the United Nations was born. But in a sense Israel is one of the oldest nations (with Egypt and China) represented there. One hundred years hence, if historians bother to remember the UN at all, they may remember it as a mob of regimes representing force without legitimacy, all power and no authority, venting their rage against one of the few nations truly represented there."

-George Will, "Zionism and Legitimacy," 1975

"As Czechoslovakia, a democratic country, was accused of mistreating the German minority in the Sudeten region, so Israel, also a democratic country, is accused of mistreating the Arab minority within Israel itself and also, of course, in the occupied territories. As the creation of the Czechoslovak state after WW1 was called a mistake by Hitler and Chamberlain, so the creation of the Jewish state after WW2 is called a crime by contemporary totalitarians and their appeasers. The insistence by the Czechs that surrendering the Sudeten regions to Hitler would leave Czechoslovakia hopelessly vulnerable to military assualt was derided, especially on the Left, as a shortsighted reliance on the false security of territory and arms; so a similar insistence by the Israelis with regard to the occupied territories is treated today with lofty disdain by contemporary descendants of those believers in the irrelevance to a nation's security of territorial buffers and arms."

-Norman Podhoretz

"In Cambodia the Communists, running true to form, are concentrating their fury on the ultimate enemy of any Communist regime, the people. The Communists have emptied the cities, driving upwards of four million people- young and old, childing mothers and newborn babies, the healthy, halt and lame- on a forced march to nowhere, deep into the countryside where food is scarce and shelter is scarcer still. Even hospitals have been emptied, operations interrupted at gunpoint, doctors and patients sent packing. The Communists call this the "purification" of Cambodia.

This forced march will leave a trail of corpses, and many more at its destination, wherever that is. But that is, according to the Communists, not an atrocity, it is a stern "necessity."

The Detroit Free Press containted a droll (I hope it was meant to be droll) sub-headline on events in Cambodia: "Reds Decree Rural Society." If one kind of society offends you, decree another. Communism, like its totalitarian sibling, fascism, is the culmination of a modern heresy: people are plastic, infinitely malleable under determined pounding. And society is a tinker toy, its shape being whatever the ruling class decrees.

To create a New (Soviet, Chinese, German, Cambodian) Man- and what totalitarian would aim lower?- you must shatter the old man, ripping him from the community that nourishes him. Send him on a forced march into a forbidding future. He may die. If he survives he will be deracinated, demoralized, pliant.

There is no atrocity so gross that American voices will not pipe up in defense of it. Today they say: it is "cultural arrogance" for Americans to call this forced march an atrocity, when it is just different people pursuing their "vision."

This is the mock cosmopolitianism of the morally obtuse. Such people say: only "ideologically blinkered" Americans mistake stern idealism for an atrocity just because it involves the slaughter of innocents. Such people will never face the fact that most atrocities, and all the large ones, from the Thirty Years War through Biafra, have been acts of idealism.

Of course, one must not discount sheer blood lust, and the joy of bullying. Totalitarian governments rest on dumb philosophy and are sustained by secret police. But they are a bully's delight. Totalitarians have never been without apologists here, people who derice vicarious pleasure from watching- from a safe distance, of course; from the meadow, with ice cream bars, if possible- other people ground up by stern "necessities." Apologists say that totalitarians only want totalitarianism for the sake of the revolution. The apologists, being backward, have got things backward.

-George Will, "Famous Victory"

It's always good to be smacked back to reality by the consummate Tory.

"The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposted on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in a long residence upon Earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings."

-Edward Gibbon, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, XV"

"In retrospect there is a quality of inevitability about the course he did puruse. But historians insist that the inevitable is inevitable only after man have made it happen."

-Teddy White, "The Making of the President, 1964"

"I just want to remind you, ladies and gentleman, of one proven fact in history, because we conservatives are always blamed for wanting to go backwards. That is not true. We just want to take a look at what has happened before we try it again. Because everything that this administration is trying today has been tried not by just our own government, but in other governments of the history of the world, and I remind you, they have never succeeded. A government that is big enough to give everything that you need and want is also big enough to take it all away."

-Barry Goldwater, 1964 campaign

"[Grits are] men...who tremble with anticipation because they have seen the rouged face of power."

-Pierre Trudeau

"But the Liberal Party is the greatest whorehouse in the western world and you know what happens when you try playing piano in the parlor of a place like that. Pretty soon, you're in the thick of the fray upstairs."

-Rene Levesque

"Quebec politicians have never been either Liberal or Conservative. They have always been simply and wholeheartedly French."

-Frank Underhill

"The philosophy of the Liberal Party is very simple- say anything, think anything, or better still, do not think at all, but put us in power because it is we who can govern you best."

-Pierre Trudeau

"The Liberal Party has no dogma. Its creed is unity- national unity and party unity."

-Michael Pitfield

"The Liberal Party is like a high-powered fraternity. It rushes the most promising young men in every generation. And then it demands their absolute loyalty."

-Wilson Parasiuk

""It's the League for Social Reconstruction all over again," they would say. "Those people will get sick of it, always sitting there on the Opposition benches yelling across the floor. There's a limit to altruism. If you can't win, you can't get any policies effected, no matter how high-minded or well-meaning they are.""

-Christina McCall

Antipathy to capitalism is of legendary proportions, especially among the classes whose status is higher under aristocracies and dictatorships: aristocrats, clergy, scholars, artists, and of course government officials. Working people tend to prefer democratic capitalism which, as the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci pointed out, quickly raises them into the middle class. Thus, even now that Marxism has been discredited as a social ideal, we may expect new forms of anticapitalism to appear. Eric Voegelin once pointed out that Marxism is a species of gnosticism, that is, a perfectionism (“the paradise of the proletariat”) access to which depends upon a privileged form of knowledge (gnosis, in this case “scientific socialism”) that makes a certain elite superior to everybody else. Gnosticism also implies a certain impatience with the human body, with imperfections, with democratic politics and the slow procedures of persuasion, with compromise, and (in short) with the human condition. Now that Marxism is no longer a credible vehicle for this underlying passion, what will replace it?

In 1990, it seems already clear that antimodern passions run high; even a passion for primitivism is again in evidence. Similar signs were present in the Romantic Movement of the nineteenth century, notably in the operas of Richard Wagner. In the origins of totalitarianism, especially in Italy and Germany, the call of the primitive was quite important, including the cult of unspoiled nature. No doubt, the passions of National Socialism are as dead as the passions of communism. But the underlying sensibility is still very much alive. Capable of assuming a great many shapes, perhaps the cult of nature will be put to creative use in the environmental movement. That movement, however, has already shown many signs of hatred for business corporations, industry, property, and even- on a different plane of reality- the idea of “progress.” Its tendency to turn on the power of the state to enforce its own passions is also manifest. One can predict with some certainty that environmentalism is likely to replace Marxism as the main carrier of gnosticism (and anticapitalism) in the near future.

This is not, of course, inevitable. Environmentalists could conclude that the new forms of awareness they are teaching the public can best be served by a free and inventive economy. Whatever the public wants, industry has an incentive to invent a way of supplying. Given the widespread desire for environmental protection now growing in the public mind, a shrewd investor might even anticipate on the part of business corporations an outpouring of new technologies, approaches, products, and processes, around which entire new environmental-minded industries may come into existence. As the public becomes willing to pay for environmental enhancement, ways to achieve it will be swiftly invented. That is already happening. The newer the factory, the cleaner in tends to be; the more recent the product, the more “environment friendly.” Meanwhile, the public as a whole will not wish to abolish the benefits of modernity- the medical benefits especially- even though some extremists might. Environmental activists will want television for their messages and please, and airplanes to carry them to international conferences. An environmentally conscious industry will thus have plenty to do; the question is only whether environmentalists will perceive it as an ally or not.

Many environmentalists are, of course, conservatives quite committed to the capitalist economy, but many others are hostile to capitalism. The latter might wish to consider two points: First, the dire state of environmental protections both in socialist and in traditionalist (third world) countries; and second, the fact that no other system is as likely to produce the wealth necessary for environmental protections as democratic capitalist systems.

Another frequently overlooked source of the anticapiatlist leaning is the ancient and medieval experience of wealth as a zero-sum game: what some gained, others lost. Wealth was then thought to lie solely in land and gold coin and precious objects, and was usually acquired by plunder, conquest, or favor. In this context such aphorisms arose as Radix malorum est cupiditas (“Cupidity is the root of evils”); “Property is theft”; and “The rich get richer, the poor poorer.”

A third strain of this anticapitalist leaning is communicated through illusions about the precapitalist system. Not much has changed in the harsh life of the poor from the time of Christ until the realities of France as described by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables. Similarly, before 1989 critics of capitalism seldom counted the moral and economic costs of socialism; they gave it the benefit of their dreams. Admittedly, the morality of democratic capitalism is low when compared with the supernatural standards of Christianity and other codes of spiritual perfection. But its daily practice in supplying opportunity to the poor is superior to the daily practice of any other historical system, traditional or socialist. It does not pretend to offer a moral paradise, only greater liberties and more flexible supports for moral living than any other system. It brings temptations, but also incredibly high moral possibilities. That is why people migrate in such numbers and with such passion toward it.

A fourth source of anticapitalist leaning is to associate capitalism solely with material things, with commodities, with objects. This is the usage of Karl Marx; it is also the usage adopted by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Laborem Exercens. To take this approach, however, is to overlook the spirit of capitalism, its dynamic principle, its central commitment to practical intellect: to invention, discovery, reasoned cooperation, and the intellectual and moral virtue of enterprise. Were the impulse of capitalism solely materialistic, the system would have long since fallen into narcissism, hedonism, and death. This was the theory of Marx; namely that the alienation inherent in the system would drive the workers to “narcissism” or, in the current Marxist lingo, “consumerism.” Instead, the spirit of capitalism seems constantly to reinvigorate itself, to work revolution after revolution in technological possibility (mechanical, industrial, and electronic), and to inspire creativity in every sphere of life. It is a system designed to arouse and to liberate, no the body, but the creative soul. It arouses even the high ideals of those who disdain the “consumerism” they think affects others.

Communism taught citizens to respect one moral principle alone: total subjection to the power of party rule. Nothing else mattered, neither truth nor fairness nor competence. However lazy, incompetent, immoral, or even criminal one’s behavior might be judged under other systems, under communism no burden of guilt had to be borne for it, so long as one was recognized as a loyal, obedient follower of the party. The polluting of the natural environment of Eastern Europe, the corruption of the moral ethos, and the relentless spending down of the capital stock of communist countries has left behind a wasteland- except for one thing. Somehow the love for liberty survived. Human nature has asserted itself, like green shoots at the end of winter. How to give moral nurture to those shoots is now on the world’s agenda. A huge moral task lies before us.

-Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

"We must remember what we have forgotton- for example, the old joke about the man who is being shown the wonderful new Moscow subway, and after a while asks, "But where are the trains?" The Russian answers, "But what about lynching in the South?" It's no joke any longer."

-Nathan Glazer

"The universe is very, very big. It also loves a paradox. For example, it has some extremely strict rules. Rule number one: Nothing lasts forever. Not you or your family or your house or your planet or the sun. It is an absolute rule. Therefore when someone says that their love will never die, it means that their love is not real, for everything that is real dies.

Rule number two: Everything lasts forever. For example, George was made up of billions of atoms, some of which had, at various times, been parts of, among other things, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a red felt hat, and some porridge. In a staggering coincidence, Claudette had a few atoms of that same bowl of porridge in her system. It had been served to Alexander the Great during his campaign in Afghanistan. He loved porridge.

Perhaps that was the key to the attraction between George and Claudette- their shared porridge molecules. It makes as much sense as anything else that goes on between men and women."

-Craig Ferguson, pg 108 "Between the Bridge and the River"

Spring Things

After finishing out a rather stressful period, I again return to my favourite form of retail therapy- renting out half the damn library. Cheap, literate, and fulfilling. I haven't even finished the last load of books. We have:

White- The Making of the President, 1964
McGinnis- The selling of the president, 1968
Flanagan- Waiting for the wave
Schlesinger- The cycles of american history
Schlesinger- The politics of hope
Clarkson- the big red machine
Davey- the rainmaker
Machiavelli- the prince
Camp- an eclectic eel

I was considering renting Black's Duplessis, but goddamn, that is one massive tome.

Uninhibited Scholasticism

Two more essays from school, about al Qaeda and then the UN.


The Rationality of Irrationality:
Analyzing al Qaeda’s Campaign of Suicide Terrorism and its Effectiveness

The terror, fear, and destruction unleashed upon the world by Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda have shaken the Western nations to their core. The Islamic group has unleashed a campaign of suicide terrorism, led by their rich and charismatic leader , aimed at Western nations and their Middle Eastern supporters. Their campaign rests on the hypothesis, best summarized by Robert A. Pape in his paper “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” that suicide terrorism is driven by a quest for territorial or political concessions from a larger nation to a smaller group, and that it is utterly rational in its effectiveness . Pape organizes suicide actions from 1980-2001 into sixteen separate campaigns . Eleven of these have concluded, with six of them ending up with territorial gains or political concessions from the stronger group to the weaker, a fifty-five percent ‘success’ rate . This is compared to ‘normal’ international actions towards coercion, through military or economic means, that succeed less than one-third of the time . Citing such campaigns as Hamas or Hezbollah versus Israel, Pape displays that a persistent campaign of suicide terrorism can force moderate concessions . Al Qaeda’s campaign has included attacks escalating in scale, from earlier bombings of American embassies and military bases, to a nightclub in Bali, to the 2005 London and 2004 Madrid subway bombings, all culminating in the horrors of 9/11 . Their usual style of large and very visible attacks, often resulting in hundreds dead and thousands injured, is unusual when compared to Pape’s other recognized campaigns, where groups such as the Tamil Tigers or Hezbollah launched numerous smaller attacks. These latter tactics were proven more effective than normal means of coercion and, logically, al Qaeda’s attacks, with their increasing scope, would then bring increased action towards their goals. However, the suicide terrorist campaign of al Qaeda doesn’t help them achieve their goals because of the sheer self-defeating scope of these goals, and the increasing resolve that al Qaeda inspires in its enemies.

Speaking in his 1996 “Declaration of Jihad Against Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Mosques,” Osama Bin Laden outlines his grievances, and the goals of his burgeoning suicide terrorism campaign that would eventually lead to the devastation of 9/11. He speaks of his desire for a Pan-Arabic Nation stretching across the Middle East, ruled by Sharia law and autonomous of Western influences, a goal harkening back to the days of the Ottoman caliphate . These concepts of Islamic nationalism and protectionism are concurrent in his declaration; however, Bin Laden usually comes down to one main theme:

“The latest and the greatest of these aggressions experienced by the Muslims since the death of the Prophet is the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places, the foundation of the House of Islam, the place of the revelation, the sources of the message and the place of the noble Kabah, the Qiblah of all Muslims. ”

American forces established bases in Saudi Arabia during the First Gulf War, to protect American energy interests in the region against the aggression of Saddam Hussein. The “Land of the Two Holy Mosques,” Saudi Arabia, is the holiest site in Islam, as it contains the holy cities of Mecca and Medina . The House of Saud’s complacency with the American government, and with Western energy corporations, allows Bin Laden to tie Islamic fundamentalism into Arab nationalism, making them an intertwined cause. These territorial grievances fit Pape’s theory of suicide terrorism campaigns existing for the sake of forcing geographical and political concessions. Bin Laden’s major motivation is shown to be freeing the Arabian peninsula, with its extreme religious relevance and its more earthly oil reserves, of American military and economic influence over the ruling House of Saud . The difference, though, between Hamas using suicide terrorism to force Israel from the Palestinian territories, and al Qaeda flying planes into buildings in their crusade against America, is the scope of the expected concession. An integral idea in Pape’s work is that:

“Suicide terrorism can coerce states to abandon limited or modest goals, such as withdrawal from territory of low strategic importance or, as in Israel’s case in 1994 and 1995, a temporary and partial withdrawal from a more important one. However, suicide terrorism is unlikely to cause targets to abandon goals central to their wealth or security. ”

Pape and Bin Laden both use as an example the American withdrawal from Lebanon in 1983 after a deadly suicide attack on an American embassy. Bin Laden trumpets it as an example of how the Americans are a “paper tiger,” of how once al Qaeda spills American blood, the Westerners will lose their resolve and leave . Though the Americans did withdraw in 1983, Pape displays that is was a humanitarian mission and success was not critical to their national security . Thus, the more important of a concession that a group are trying to achieve, the less likely it’ll occur. The goals of al Qaeda are ambitions indeed, as they want to end the reign of the House of Saud, end Western energy interests in Arabia, create a Pan-Arabic Islamic state, and force an American military withdrawal from both Arabia and Iraq. Unfortunately for Bin Laden, the House of Saud has endlessly deep pockets to support themselves, the West lives in a culture driven by petroleum where natural energy is central to living a comfortable life, the Middle East seems more interested in Shia-Sunni sectarian violence than unity, and American forces aren’t relenting from their support of Israel, and other friendly regimes in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Turkey. Al Qaeda’s goals are a far cry from the simple self-determination of a small area that both Hamas and Hezbollah campaign for. Al Qaeda has recognized the scope of their goals, and then increased the scope of their attacks to a visibility and deadliness not yet seen in the history of suicide terrorism, all in the name of forcing these massive concessions, and yet they’re no closer to achieving them than they were in 1996.

A central tenant to Bernard Lewis’ ideas about al Qaeda is that Bin Laden views his struggle as one of the underdog. Lewis theorizes that Bin Laden believes his Mujahedeen’s defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan directly led to its collapse of the Soviet regime. Viewing the Soviet Union as the stronger, both militarily and politically, of the two Cold War superpowers, Bin Laden then believes that he’s knocked off the harder of the two, so the United States wouldn’t stand a chance . However, instead of collapsing like a “paper tiger” after the horrors of 9/11, 7/7, and a myriad of other bombings, the Western world’s resolve has strengthened. The Taliban, al Qaeda’s primary supporting regime, was ousted in a shocking display of American military might. Though the Taliban still exists as a political force in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it has taken grievous losses in leadership, manpower, and influence since 9/11, and its degradation has been reflected in the ruin of al Qaeda. Still acting as an international force and influence, with many attacks carried out in Iraq, and the 7/7 and Madrid bombings claimed to their name, the organization has become more of a figurehead of religious Pan-Arab nationalism. The latter attacks, examples of the increased scope that al Qaeda works with, were carried out by semi-autonomous groups that then claimed to be part of al Qaeda. In that sense, since the logistical hammering it took in Afghanistan, al Qaeda has become more of a ‘brand name’ than a tight terrorist organization. As well, both the United States and the United Kingdom have ramped up domestic security, which Pape theorizes is the best way to combat suicide terrorism .

The effect of this is seen in the absence of domestic terrorism in these countries, since 9/11 and then 7/7, though not due to lack of effort by al Qaeda and other affiliated groups. Since increasing the scale of its suicide activities, al Qaeda has lost its primary home and training grounds in Afghanistan, and has been driven to dwelling in caves in the rugged mountainous frontiers of Pakistan.
Pape displays that suicide terrorism is a rational and often effective means of gaining territorial concessions. Al Qaeda’s goals are vast in scope and ambition, as they work towards achieving Pan-Arabic dominance in the Middle East, and autonomy for their holy Arabian Peninsula. However, their campaign of suicide terrorism hasn’t followed the usual path of such groups as Hamas and Hezbollah, as they have carried out one with more visible and devastating attacks. The reaction to these tactics haven’t been collapse, as Bin Laden believes with his ‘paper tiger’ theory, but have been the strengthening of Western resolve, of domestic security, and of foreign actions against these Islamic aggressors. The unique suicide terrorism campaign of al Qaeda has failed at achieving their ambitious goals, thanks to the very nature and scope of these goals, and the reactionary effects that their enhanced attacks have caused.





Something Rotten in the State of Denmark:
The Crucial Failings of the United Nations

The UN and its Security Council exist as an attempt to hold nation-states accountable to a multilateral, supranational legalistic system. After death and destruction choked the 20th Century world a second time, the UN was produced in 1945 as an attempt to create collective security. Unfortunately, the organization has become dangerously archaic and impotent. In Glennon’s “Why the Security Council Failed,” he writes of how the 2003 Iraq War spelled the doom of the UN, as the unilateral US ignored the Security Council, and thus made a mockery of the idea of firm international law . He argues that the idea of a multilateral council to keep the world secure has been unsuccessful in the face of reality and the power-hungry, self-serving nation-states that multilateralism empowers . The ‘hyperstate’ that is the US could ignore the Security Council and end the attempts at multilateralism that China, Russia, and France were trying to establish through the Council . Glennon’s main theory that the 2003 Iraq situation heralded the death of the Security Council’s usefulness is perhaps rather late, as it could be argued that the UN lost all legitimacy when eight-hundred thousand Rwandans died under UN watch. Tharoor, on the other hand, argues that the UN is still very relevant, and that Glennon didn’t look at the larger scale of things . He states that the 2003 Iraqi situation is only one isolated incident, and that the UN makes an easy scapegoat for the world’s ills . Tharoor emphasis that it does much good in terms of world heath and wellbeing that goes unnoticed, and that the US participates and benefits from inclusion . The core of Tharoor’s argument is that multilateralism is “a means, not an end, ” and that the inclusiveness of the UN gives its decisions and resolutions extra legitimacy. Tharoor, a UN Undersecretary-General, gives an obviously unbiased account of his employer’s uses, and his squealing about positive multilateralism only looks all the more feckless when compared to the killing fields of Kigali, Srebrenica, and Darfur. Given the Security Council’s core mandate of maintaining international peace and security, this essay will argue that the UN loses its legitimacy because of its blind inclusiveness and the failures in international security that ensue. These failures are all the more blatant because hundreds of thousands of people, hypothetically protected by the UN, usually end up in misery or dying as a result.

A business that succeeds at many small things, such as keeping its employers well stocked with staplers and fun HR games, but fails at balancing its budget and making a profit, will go down in infamy as a doomed venture. Keeping roads well-maintained and schools open are all positive things for a government to work on. However, if the government then proceeds to ruin the economy, harm millions of citizens fiscally in the process, and thus fail at its main mandate, then the government won’t be kept in office. Why should the UN be treated any differently? Glennon argues that the 2003 Iraqi situation spells the death knell of the Security Council’s usefulness; however, using just recent examples, Iraq is seen as just one in a long list of spectacular, and often bloody, failures of international security. The crucial faults are obvious to any idiot with five minutes to spare watching the news. The failings of the UN to provide security aren’t really the fault of hard-working diplomats, but exist within the very structure of the Council’s mandate. A Security Council exists where countries have permanent vetoes on issues that they themselves are perpetuating. A slow genocide exists in Darfur, yet another in what appears a wearying storm of dying central Africans (how dare that they keep dying and taking TV time away from American Idol); however, because the UN values state sovereignty above all, the Council needs the consent of either the Sudanese government to peace keep in Sudan, or of the permanent Council members so as to halt the genocide with the stricter measures enabled by Chapter XII of the Charter. The problem then is that the Sudanese government is the main backer of the genocidal militias in Darfur, and that because China has extensive interests in Darfur’s natural energy sector, they’ll support the Sudanese government. Tharoor’s glorification of inclusive multilateralism that supposedly gives Security Council resolutions legitimacy is fine until that very multilateralism starts to work against the people of the nations it represents. If a member of the Security Council is the backer or perpetrator of a gross violation of human security, then Tharoor’s multilateralism legitimizes genocidal thugs. This is the fundamental problem of credibility that the UN faces- if they can’t stop the worst human rights violations, what justifies their existence? Tharoor states that we shouldn’t radically reform the international security structure because “One would not close down the Senate (or even the Texas legislature) because its members failed to agree on one bill .” The essential difference that Tharoor misses is that eight-hundred thousand Tutsis aren’t butchered in the streets of Houston when the Texas legislature fails to pass a bill. He also states that “When the UN Security Council passes a resolution, it is seen as speaking for (and in the interests of) humanity as a whole .” That is fine and all, but the resolutions that really matter aren’t the ones passed, but the ones not being passed because of the selfish interests of individual states. These missed resolutions are the ones that result in a copious amount of human beings dead and a massive blemish on the face of the Security Council. Tharoor manages to make a number of good points in favour of the UN, though; of the humanitarian works done through such organizations as the WHO, and of how there is a long streak of peacekeeping successes . However, with multilateral programs concerning food and disease, there’s not much use vaccinating and feeding a Rwandan if he’s then going to be hacked to death with a machete a few years later. No person or organization is perfect, but when you’re dealing with the lives of millions, you’d better be damn close to perfection. The very inclusiveness that Tharoor trumpets is the major factor in the collapse of the UN in its ability to act as an effective security force in the world.

The failure of the Security Council to fulfill its mandate then leaves a vacuum for security, one that is now filled by ‘hyperstates’ in a unilateral system. The Westphalian system of clearly defined nation-state sovereignty, and multilateral internationalism that was further modeled at the Congress of Vienna, is an obsolete system. Glennon speaks of how each singular nation will use its own available options to further its goals . The US will use unilateral force to further theirs, and because France doesn’t have anywhere near as much hard power as the US, it’ll use the available methods- it’s archaic spot as a permanent member on the Security Council. France’s opposition of the US had nothing to do with ideology or ‘right and wrong,’ and everything to do with exerting long-lost influence, and propping up a fascist Iraqi regime that helpfully gobbled up French arms and weaponry. Another view on Glennon is the historical one. Europe, of all continents, has faced the horrors that unabashed nation-statism has created, of balances of power, arms races, and eventually world wars. Logically, Europe would’ve then learned from these experiences and then moved on to the view that a supranational organization such as the European Union is the best way forward for European peace. So far, it looks like they’re correct, as France and Germany seem far more interested in bashing Americans than squabbling over Alsace-Lorraine. However, these examples of supranational continental organizations aren’t rare, as we see the success stories of NATO, NAFTA, the EU, the burgeoning AU, and others. The problem that Glennon and this essay then face is how to create a successful supranational organization dedicated to true global security? When the UN Human Rights Council contains such benevolent purveyors of human rights as Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Venezuela, then it isn’t hard to see the main issue with a truly inclusive organization . Perhaps dangling a large carrot on a stick in front of nations, the carrot being inclusion to the UN, bringing all the smaller benefits that Tharoor trumpets, in exchange for acceptable human right levels, might create positive change. If being ostracized from the UN, and the international community, is what is necessary to force China to stop its harvesting of Falun Gong member’s organs, Russia’s regime to stop murdering journalists, Iran to stop stoning women to death for being raped, and Saudi Arabia to recognize that women deserve a better societal status than camels, then ostracizing is what is called for. There are many benefits to being included in the UN, as Tharoor helpfully points out, and those benefits are the best way to force change in regimes. There’s no point in inclusiveness for the sake of security if those included are the ones shattering the security. China is supporting genocidal regimes in the Sudan and Zimbabwe (hey, highest inflation and lowest life-expectancy in the world), with economic and political measures, and yet China has a voice on the Security Council equal or greater to many other nations that manage to have a basic inkling towards the inherent right’s of mankind. This kind of multilateralism, pandering to feckless thugs, brutal theocrats, and incoherent communists, and allowing them an equal voice to nations that give a fig for human rights, is contradictory to everything the UN mandate sets out to achieve. Tharoor’s idea of inclusiveness breeding legitimacy is ultimately self-defeating, as history has proven again and again, upon some dry Central African plain, or in the midst of an Asian jungle, as preventable conflicts turn into burning orgies of human despair, while the organization that tasks itself with stopping these horrors is sustained by bowing to purveyors of the same terror and fear.

Glennon’s article is a sounding for reform in the bureaucratic nightmare of the UN. Unfortunately, this call is a bit too late for a number of Africans and Europeans who have already been butchered in the name of racism, abject nationalism, and plain old rage, while the UN stands idly by. As stated before, the Security Council didn’t become outdated when a blithe US skipped by and invaded Iraq in 2003, it lost all meaning when eight-hundred thousand Rwandans were hacked to bits while Americans (paging Madeleine Albright) spent their time “ducking and pressuring others to duck, as the death toll leapt from thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. ” No nation in this world is innocent of harming international security to some extent; however, this malaise of cultural relativism has led the UN and the international community to believe that an entirely corrupt and depraved regime in China is the better of numerous Western nations that have spent their political capital desperately furthering the cause of human rights. Entrance to a supranational organization that brings benefits and true legitimacy to its members must be accountable, so that Americans ignoring the Geneva Convention in secret CIA prisons, and Chinese harvesting the organs of political minorities, are both held to a universal standard of human rights and belonging. Only through offering a large enough stick to shake, in terms of soft power and humanitarian benefit, can the UN become truly legitimate. Otherwise, more time will continue to be spent sitting back and watching the latest African crisis on CNN.