Tag Archives: Not Europe

A Brief American Interlude

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The front page of today’s Washington Post has a none-too-flattering analysis of Gov. Howard Dean, the man most likely to challenge GW Bush for the White House in 2004. It starts:

“Former Vermont governor Howard Dean stands on the brink of a remarkable achievement in American politics, having transformed himself from rank obscurity to clear favorite for his party’s presidential nomination. But rarely has a front-runner begun an election year with as many questions swirling around him as the man who rewrote the rules in presidential politics the past 12 months.”

Coming from someone whose profession is supposed to be reporting on American politics, the second sentence is rankest stupidity.
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What soldiers have in common with lawyers

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Hi folks. I’ve been off-line a bit fighting with my landlord and trying to get my new apartment straightened out. I’ve moved as of the first of December. My new Internet connection is up and running, but my workstation hasn’t been able to talk to my monitor since the move. I have to bring it in to work to get it fixed, and until then, I have limited ‘Net access. There’s a post coming one of these days on the joys of IKEA when you’re an expat.

A lot’s been going on while I’ve been offline. Chirac and Raffarin have started acting like idiots over how kids dress at school. The EU constitution looks like a casualty of rapid expansion. Jean Chrétien calls it quits – the last of the Pearson-era Liberals still in the Liberal party – and turns the reins of power over to borderline conservative Liberal Paul Martin. And, Saddam Hussein is now in American hands, which will make excuses for failing to find WMD or links to Al Qaeda just that much thinner. Go ahead and browse around here to get in contact with the lawyers you need.

Speaking of Iraq, I wanted to draw your attention to yesterday’s New York Review of Books. Especially to a piece entitled Delusions in Baghdad. If Marshall McLuhan were alive today, he could stand fully vindicated before his critics.

Very young men in tan camouflage fatigues, armed, red-faced, flustered; facing them, the men and women of the world press, Baghdad division, assembled in their hundreds in less than a quarter of an hour […] as Lieutenant Colonel George Krivo put it bitterly, to “make the story. Here, media is the total message: I now have an understanding of McLuhan you wouldn’t believe. Kill twenty people here? In front of that lens it’s killing twenty thousand.”

When the US Army starts appreciating someone like McLuhan, you know the world has changed.
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Kant for Rwanda.

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It’s not a particularly European topic, but one I simply had to report. I just received a newsletter from the European Journalism Center pointing to a BBC story about the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda handing life sentences to several radio “journalists” who had called for the genocidal slaughter of Tutsis in 1994 including communicating to the perpetrators entire lists of people to be killed.


I understand that defending someone against such charges is not easy. But the defence counselors’ argument went beyond what I would have imagined possible: According to the BBC,


“Defence lawyers … had argued that the trial was an attack on free speech and the freedom of the press.”

A different pro-war argument

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Kevin Drum says thinking about the war in Iraq: that there was a perfectly sensible case for war, and wonder why the Bush administration didn’t use it:

  • We can’t keep up sanctions forever, and they’re hurting the Iraqi people anyway.
  • Saddam’s past history is pretty unambiguous, and if we lift sanctions there’s not much doubt that he will begin developing WMDs again and might very well use them in a regional war.
  • Therefore, the only reasonable course of action is to forcibly remove him from power.
    It’s funny, that’s exactly why I (most of time) think the Iraq war was the right thing to do, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard that argument from any pundits or bloggers or the like.

    Actually, I think I know why that is.

    The government weren’t prepared to argue that way, because they would then be arguing against sanctions, which was their policy.

    Likewise, all the hawks, or rather all opponents of the far left position of simply ending sanctions were emotionally invested in defending the sanction policy, and weren’t prepared to attack it too.

    In the minds of both hawks and peaceniks, “sanctions are bad” was the peacenik argument. They “owned” it.

    It’d be cognitive dissonance.

    Also, if they would have argued along those lines, I suspect the media would have decided it was a bad argument. Simplism is the new being persuasive, to (very poorly) paraphrase Josh Marshall. The hawks may ahve made a good call in going for the “wrong” arguments. (Of course, I’m fairly certain their “right” argument weren’t this one, but PNAC’s.)

    In fact now that I think about it, I remember a writer in the NY Review of Books, raising the argument just to dismiss it by saying something like “not even the hawks have the gall to argue like that. He only raided it to mock the hawks. I’m like: Yes I have you tool, try to refute it.

    • What a day

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    As you know, today is the second anniversary of the attack on the WTC, and the 30th anniversary of the coup in Chile.

    To all victims of al-Qaida and all victims of Pinochet, to all the victims of terrorism and all victims of state terror, to all victims of war and all victims of political violence; we think of you today.