The bit about the romanticized glamourasiton of the jihad is very true.
PARIS - The French government is faltering as the flames of urban warfare spread from Paris to over 300 towns. Schools, warehouses, gymnasiums, bus depots, restaurants and shopping malls are being sacked and burned. Journalists, ambulance personnel and firemen are being attacked. Even armour-clad riot police now fear for their lives, as some of the protesters have equipped themselves with guns.
President Jacques Chirac, supposedly recovered from a stroke suffered in August, is out of commission. His dauphin, Dominique de Villepin, makes pompous proclamations while trying to roast his arch-rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, in the flames of immigrant rage. But the plain-spoken Mr. Sarkozy did not summon this rage on his own. It has been simmering for years in the form of a steady increase in lawless, anti-social behaviour.
Until now, the angry Muslim men who constitute the bulk of the rioters have been allowed to masquerade as victims. It is a common refrain that these second- and third-generation North African immigrants have been marginalized by a racist French society. But much of what goes under the name of harassment is simply the half-hearted intrusion of the forces of order into territories that have been conquered by another system of values. In Muslim ghettoes, pimping, drug dealing, theft, terrorism and Islamic law mix and match. The block of working-class suburbs, or banlieues, in the Seine St-Denis region outside Paris, is especially lawless.
These areas are hardly dismal, dilapidated hellholes. Most of the housing and infrastructure is decent. Those who wish to pursue clean, honest lives have plenty of opportunities to do so. The insurrection spreading through France cannot be understood through the traditional Marxist prism of poverty, unemployment and discrimination. These problems exist in all nations. What is different in France's Muslim ghettoes is a tradition of hate and xenophobia, one which the state has until now either ignored or encouraged.
In June, 2004, a huge demonstration was staged in Paris to protest the arrival of U.S. President George W. Bush, who made a brief visit to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Posters depicted Bush as the world's worst terrorist. By my first-hand observation, roughly one-third of the marchers came from hard-left parties and organizations: communists, socialists and ecologists, labour unions and wilted flower people. Another third were militant Muslims, many of them with checkered kaffiyehs. The other third were raunchy nihilists high on drugs and beer, marching with pitbulls and Rottweilers, calling for death and destruction. They painted graffiti on lowered store shutters and bus stop shelters, promising "a Paris comme a Falluja la guerilla vaincra" (In Paris as in Falluja, guerrilla warfare will triumph).
The same media that are now tallying up the number of cars torched and lecturing Sarkozy on the virtues of tolerance didn't seem much put out by such displays. The hard words were aimed at Bush, after all -- so the hatred expressed was seen as unremarkable, even admirable.
In the same way, much of France ignored the cries of "death to the Jews" that went up in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations that began in 2000, and which eventually blended in with the anti-war demonstrations of 2003. Incendiary, sometimes bloodthirsty slogans against Israel and the United States became commonplace.
For five years, resentful French Muslims have been fed a steady diet of romanticized violence -- jihad-intifada in Israel, jihad-insurgency in Iraq, jihad-insurgency in Afghanistan. When they started firebombing synagogues and beating up Jews in the fall of 2000, the media dutifully reported that these thugs were products of the "frustration" felt in regard to the treatments of Muslims in the Middle East and Central Asia. France's own government was full of hectoring words for the Americans, after all. The protesters were very much on message.
In elite French society, the enemy was clearly identified: not Islamism or Islamofascism, not the stewing mobs in the Paris suburbs, not Saddam Hussein, not al-Qaeda, but the British and U.S. troops in Iraq. The burned-out cars and buildings that litter French streets are the domestic residue of the jihadi cult that these French Muslims have been drugged on through al-Jazeera, and which has been legitimized by a French intellectual class that has always romanticized resistance in all its forms.
Perhaps some of the journalists, political scientists, intellectuals and public officials who've been peddling this merchandise meant it to remain an abstract ideological diversion. France is a long way from Iraq, after all. But now that the militancy is being turned on the French state itself, they are suddenly shocked at what they've sown.
Things could get worse. Until the state can exert its authority, restore order and protect its citizens, there is a danger that images of charred bodies will replace pictures of burnt cars.
For decades, the French media and government have been painting a rosy picture of social harmony within their borders. When the truth suddenly burst out with guerrilla warfare in the streets, the public was totally unprepared, as were the police and even the army. They might all have known that this is the terrible price to be paid for turning a blind eye to those who preach violent resistance.
I only have one complaint. I'm tired of the flattering term "elites" for those who consider themselves to be the keepers of morality. I'm going to only refer to them now as the RFSP - as income/race/education really have little to do with their belief system.
By George Neumayr
Even as the French authorities downplay the role of Islam in the riots, they tacitly acknowledge it by calling on Imams to issue fatwas against the rioters. But the rioters -- recognizing that these government-approved Imams are secularized stooges in hock to French pols -- aren't very concerned. "Fatwa! Don't make me laugh," a rioter said to the press after the Union of Islamic Organizations ordered them to stop. "We don't feel represented by those people. We didn't vote for them. They're just filling their pockets."
The reliance of the French authorities on a stable of feckless Muslim mediators is an acknowledgment of the Other France -- a population of seething Muslims who now refer to themselves as living in "occupied territory." Jacques Chirac speaks grandly of "the Republic," but it is fast eroding if it exists at all, as evident in the fact that he has to address members of his own population through Muslim negotiators.
France's self-congratulatory campaign to reconcile differences between Islam and the West, undertaken in recent years to avoid "a clash of civilizations," has accelerated one. An obtuse and vain assumption had launched the campaign, namely, that the only possible clash of civilizations would be Christianity versus Islam. It didn't occur to the French secularists that another clash of civilizations was possible: their own secularism versus Islam.
The French secularists patted themselves on the back for avoiding the first one by discarding their historic Christianity. Jacques Chirac, for example, wouldn't permit a single mention of Europe's Christian roots in the European Union's Constitution. Will it now dawn on them that to avoid the second one requires surrendering their cherished secularism? French politicians are making all the right PC noises about the riots being the result of "discrimination." But they are very vague about the source of the discrimination, and for good reason: the source is French secularism itself. French Muslims say that they can't rise in a state in which secularists alone hold the privileged positions.
So will the pols chastising France's Interior Secretary Nicolas Sarkozy for calling the rioters "scum" -- Chirac said that's no way to speak to a "dialogue" partner -- promise to scrap their own secularism in the name of reducing tensions? Will they say, "Fine, wear your Muslim headscarves"? Are they ready for Burka-wearing broadcasters on their government channels? How about a Muslim president? Or a new Constitution reflecting that the de facto majority religion in France is Islam? (Ironically, France's proudly modern and secularized Constitution looks anachronistic, a relic of an expired era.)
French habits of appeasement and its commitment to secularism now cut against each other: the Vichy-style, power-sharing solution to which French pols are drawn will cost them their secularist state but could perhaps give them just enough peace to pursue their secularist pleasures. French politicians had arrogantly assumed they could delay this choice by secularizing Islam. Hence their desperate project to form and spread "French Islam." But the hopelessness of the project is obvious; instead of soothing tensions, it inflamed them, clear in the contempt Muslim rioters feel for the Imams Chirac has been trotting out as peacekeepers.
French secularism is not substantial enough to win the clash of civilizations it couldn't even recognize. And were it to try and win the clash, it would have to suspend the very tolerance that led them into it. The misapprehensions of reality built into French liberalism make it an ideology that devours itself, unleashing chaos that necessitates departing from it. This explains why dictatorships have followed its liberal revolutions. Reality-defying assertions about "liberty, fraternity, and equality" produce enough irrationality to justify a Napoleon to stop it.
France has been rewarding those who ignored the inevitable collision of Islam and its culture while punishing dissenters who merely noticed it. It fined for "hate crimes" French authors who warned that the assimilation of Muslims would prove impossible and elected preening liberals who waved the problem away. The former were "heartless" and the latter "humane," yet who's position now tempts France to draconian measures? Who's position has placed France in an insoluble crisis?
Earlier this year a French minister asked if Europe's riverbed could accommodate the "river of Islam." The question was a generation too late. French secularists made a great show of opening the floodgate, and the river of Islam gushed through the country, gradually washing away the secularism that had released it.
#1
I'll take issue with the use of the word secularism/secular, which means not bound by religous rule. I.e. The state/government is subject to or bound by a religous authority.
France's problem is not that its secular, all western states are, its problem is that it went down a road that would clearly lead to catastrophe as a result of adherence to a post modern multicultural quasi-religion. Adherence to this quasi-religion is the exact opposite of secular. It preaches as absolute and incontrovertable the PC 'truths' that we here know to be false.
After all, a "2-state solution" - which Phrawnce (among others) insists on - is supposed to be the answer to the violence perpetrated by moslems upon Israel. (At least until the moslems can warm the cockles of the Phrench heart by destroying Israel and killing all the Jews, but that's the second step.)
What's sauce for the goose, etc.
The Phrench are really just feeding the crocodile that has already moved from the distant swamp into the house and taken over the bathroom in the hopes it will eat them last.
The flaw in this "plan," of course, is that the crocodile will still eat them.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
11/09/2005 18:49 Comments ||
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Found this story at The Belmont Club. I think it explains why the French government has been so slow to crack down on the rioters. First The Guardian Oct 23:
Today Nuit Noire (Black Night) will be released at a select number of French cinemas. The controversial film, made by one of France's most respected directors, reconstructs the events of the night of 17 October 1961, when a protest against French policy in Algeria, then a colony on the brink of independence, sparked a huge police operation. Hundreds of demonstrators were killed or injured but there was no official acknowledgement at the time - or for decades afterwards.
For some, Nuit Noire is an overdue attempt to throw light on a shameful episode; for others, it is an unwarranted slur on a glorious imperial history. The bitter division reflects deep fissures in modern France, pitting the young, the left and millions of immigrants and their children against older, white, conservative nationalists.
Wikipedia provides us with some details on what is supposed to have happened. These facts are disputed, you might even say, supressed:
Posted by: Steve ||
11/09/2005 21:53 ||
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#1
For background on the war in Algeria, I recommend Wolves in the City. It gives a good perspective on the French governments policy change towards appeasing arabs and also how a few dozen dead in Paris was only a minor footnote to the slaughter in Algeria.
#4
mac, I'll try and get a copy. Its over 30 years since I read Wolves, but it made an impression on me and I think a lot of what we see today was cast in Algeria.
I'm a smuck witth no real historical knowledge, but I can assure you this is pure bullshit.
I clearly remember reading an interesting article I of course didn't memorize because I suck, but IIRC the main proponent of the "hundred of deaths/cadavers thrown in the Seine" theory has been a communist (who else) and a North Korea apologist.
You've got to understand this whole idea of victimization of the fellaghas is a marxist one, since the french communist party, which has been a party of traitors (and I do mean by their *actions*, not just by their words) in every war since 1939, was supporting the butchers of the algerian fln.
This movie is produced by Canal +, the bobo/lefists private cable channel by excellence, home of the "Guignols de l'info" puppetshow which promotes 9/11 conspiracy theories (since right after the attacks), which was gleefully making fun of the USA while the towers were still smoldering, and is the single most anti-american show on the french tv (that's quite to say).
Its sole goal is to further push this marxist narrative of the Algeria war : french = bad colonizers, pooor, pooor algerian = victims (the same narrative that has been relentlessly pushed bt gfrench national education, which is a tool of the marxist). Kinda like the israelo-arab war, or the "antiracist" view of french society... quite a coincidence, isn't it?
The number of deaths during that event is quite discussed, and the "hundred of death" is really the extreme one, and as I said pushed by marxists. *Dozens* of french cops were murdered by algerian terrorists on french soil in the preceeding months, and this demonstration was a demonstration of mostly foreigners taking the street in favor of a ruthless and duplicious ennemy whoses "soldiers" raped, tortured, mutilated,... children, women, civilians, draftees,... in an orgy of death absolutely comparable to the 90's algerian islamists (wiping out whole hamlets by slaughtering them with blades, impaling babies, gangraping 12 years girl, decapitating them and putting their head between their thighs, skinning people alive,... I'm not making this up)... and this demonstration was not authorized anyway!
How would have the USA reacted in such a case, an illegal demonstration of vietnameses communists in Washington in the middle of a viet cong terror wave especially targeting cops on US soil?
If you want to play the french-bashing game, and assume french were horrible, nazi-like armed occupiers fighting against "freedom fighters", ok, I have no problem with it. But you're wrong.
I'm really sorry I'm not more well educated or more well read.
JFM really could set this straight, he's got the background and the brain.
Again, the fln wasn't just an independence mvt, it was an arabo-islamism identitary mvt which when in power wiped out the non arab and non muslim characteristics of Algeria (a country built from scratch by France, by the way, french colonization had its brutal moments, to be sure, but it was a *positive* force for Algeria, dammit!), with the addition of a marxist economical structures.
They were beaten by the french army!
I've just read reactions to the emergency state by "french" algerian muslims who say this is a "revenge for France being beaten by Algeria". This is false! The algerian fln was wiped out by a very successful counter-insurgency war, and the fln who took power after France GAVE them Algeria were tunisian IIRC... and then they proceeded to slaughter in abominable fashion 150 000-20 000 unarmed harkis and pieds noirs despite their engagement, with french army doing strictly nothing (well, that not quite true... before that the gaullist power had the army shoots on unarmed french demonstraters, and french aviation bombs french insurgents...).
This was a very dirty, very bloody war, true, fought with much courage by the french army, despite the racist anglosaxon stereotypes (french paratroopers were supposedly idolized by other armed forces in the 60-70's, because of their efficiency during this war)... but then again the ennemy was *monstrous*, and I might add the USa too played dirty during the Viet Nam war (Phoenix operation, 20 000 illegal assassiantion which effectively wiped out the communist networks in south viet Nam).
To finish this long rant, Phil_b is quite true. To me, Algeria war never has truly ended, it has only moved from Algeria to war. "French Algeria" militants used to say that if you didn't keep Algeria french, in the long term you'd have algerian France. That's exactly what's happening. De Gaulle surrendered Algeria because he thought the demographics were against France, but in the same time he sets the french Arab Policy(tm) (which already had a looong history, true) which led to Eurabia.
Algeria still is very hostile to France, and dreams of revenge (that's why IMHO they're building their atom bomb, to neutralize french nuclear power).
As Boumedienne said something like : "some day, millions of people from the South will go to the North; and they won't go there as friends but as conquerors. You may have the atom bomb, we've got the demographical bomb. We will conquier you with the bellies of our women".
That's the whole idea.
Some links in french (can't find my links with the horrible pictures of atrocities by the fln, too bad). http://www.algerie-francaise.org/cimetiere/index.shtml http://oran1962.free.fr/ http://www.piedsnoirs-aujourdhui.com/documents.html
+++RANT MODE OFF+++
Ps : I hit the tip jar a while back, I'll hit it again in some time, for the bandwith, you know... ;-)
#6
anonymous5089,
Don't apologize again. Those days are dead and past. It's time to physically and mentally toughen up, learn to fight, and go on the offensive. The deluge (what happened the past 2 weeks is nothing) is comming to France and it's up to you and your neighbors to rise to her defense.
Posted by: ed ||
11/09/2005 9:36 Comments ||
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#7
5089 - why are you apologizing for not having a good memory? Hey, maybe I'm a little biased but I've never really seen much of a connection between the ability to recall facts and the ability to understand what those facts mean ....though it is certainly impressive when individuals can do both.
We all have our share of the RFSPs which is what these people are.
As for Nuit Noire - just another expression of angst from the self-righteous drum bangers on the left. Don't expect any movies about White Knights where a John Wayne comes in and restores a little western style justice so that ordinary good folk can go about living their ordinary lives in peace and democracy, sans the gang rapes, arsons and murders - because it isn't chic.
You had a great rant - and though I've done my share of harping on the French - please know that I understand that most real French people are just being held hostage to a government over run by the RFSP. It could have happened here in the US - but we just barely managed to beat them back in the last two elections.
On the bright side, I think the timing of the movie - Black Night - may eventually work out in your favor. Arnold Schwarzneger (sp?) once said that the thing that professional body builders feared most during competition, was peaking too soon. It may be that the release of this movie causes the RFSP to peak too soon. Instead of wringing their hands and asking where they can send checks to relieve their guilt, everyone but the RFSP, will understand WHY the massacre (or whatever) happened. Americans always felt really bad about internment of the Japanese in WWII- but since 9/11 we understand why they did it.
Anyway - please know we are wishing the best for you.
#8
and..for all you pc minders out there - my comment about Japanese internment was not attempting to imply that we should intern all Muslims ...I'm just saying that 911 caused us all to see the Japanese internment in a different light.
#9
2b : Anyway - please know we are wishing the best for you.
Thanks!... But you're waaayyy too kind; I have a very sheltered, easy life, I don't deserve it.
#15
I think a lot of Europeans (French and English) are going to be doing some serious reevaluating their own history and misplaced guilt over their empires.
Sometimes the locals really aren't spiritually pure folk in touch with the land and at peace with the world. Sometimes they are just bat-shit crazy.
#16
I think a lot of Europeans (French and English) are going to be doing some serious reevaluating their own history and misplaced guilt over their empires.
Well to begin with: what motivated the race to African colonization at the end of XIXth century? Protecting blacks against Muslim slave traders. That is how it was sold to public opinions and the fact that perhaps the motives of politicians and businessmenwere not that pure it is not a reason to not respect the Jean Dupont or John Smith who believed it was for the good of Blacks and about white man's burden to bring them to civilization
2) It was colonization who built a minimum infrastructures, drastically reduced mortality from diseases, ended heinous practices like canibalism, huamn sacrifice (that is for Mexico) and wife burning (that is for India), introduced a minimum of technology so they aren't force to live in stone age. Quite simply there would be a LOT less Africans without colonization. And when a leftist "fils a papa" tells you: "They don't need that, they were much better in their societies" answer them: "They were so happy to lose half their children in their first year of life"
#17
I agree with what you said, but can you imagine them teaching such in a school in England or France these days? I could be wrong but I have trouble picturing that.
#18
In fact it was not hundreds of demonstrators killed but 17 sure and 13 others probable. We have to account for the context: every week a couple policemen were being killed or wounded in France proper and this didn't make them Algerian-friendly. And police found itself heavily outnumbered by demonstrators (illegal demonstration by the way): 1 against twenty ie a situation where police officers could find themselves in danger. Of course not a word abnout the atrocious methods who had allowed the FLN to take control of the Algerian population.
Now let's take a look about what happenned at Setif, during VE day (1945). A demonstration pro-independency and suddenly a shot is heard and a young boy carrying a banner drops dead. There was a horrible pogrom were hundreds of Europeans were raped, tortured and killed in the most sadistic way. Then in retaliation the French local units (mostly composed of Sub-saharians) and armed French civilians killed some 5,000 to 10,000 native (with communists being as vengeful as the others: USSR had still not allied with panarabism/islamism). The interesting thing is that the Berberic web sites dispute the official version of a French comissar having shot the boy with his pistol at a distance of many tens of yards. Instead they point to a immam's confessions telling: "For preserving Islam it was necessary to put a river of blood between the French and us, people were becoming friends of the French".
I also suugest that if someoen can read French, he visits http://oran1962.free.fr/ and posts a summary of the events at Oran in 1962. A demonstration, some shots are heard and then there is a gigantic anti-European pogrom. But the demonstrators had hidden weapons upon them and the masscres started simultaneously in all the (large) city: it was premeditated just like in Setif, 1945
#19
JFM : I gave the http://oran1962.free.fr/ link in a precedent comment.
I'm not a pied noir, but theses stories and testimonies really make me sad and disgusted, like the ones in the others websites.
There was a website (IIRC something like anneedelalgerie.com/net/org) which hosted *horrific* pictures of victims of the fln, that would have made a perfect "educational" tool to put things into context for non french-speakers, but I can't find it anymore.
#20
It is anneedelalgerie.free.fr Google is your friend.
I am a very slow typer and that is why I asked someone else to give a summarized translation of the events at Oran for the education of non-french speakers at Rantburg.
This is incredible! Shiraq has sent a message of congratulation to Bouteflika at the occasion of the anniversary of the beginning of the Algeria (terrorist) war! This guy truly has lost it, or is truly hates France.
Let us now sing the qualified praises of questioning patriotism. Sunday, Mike Wallace of â60 Minutesâ fame appeared on Chris Wallaceâs must-watch show, âFox News Sunday.â Having the CBS liberal lion appear on the upstart Fox â particularly after Fox had so much fun with the â60 Minutesâ memogate story â made it the journalistic equivalent of an exciting crossover episode. You know, like when âHappy Daysâ was continued on âMork & Mindy.â The fact that Chris is the son of Mike made it simultaneously more and less interesting. The less interesting part was that the interview was fairly soft, and it probably wouldnât have taken place had not the son wanted to help Dad move his new book. What made it more interesting was that Mike Wallace felt a bit more relaxed to speak freely. To wit: Chris asked Mike, âDo you understand why some people feel such disaffection for the mainstream media?â âOh, yes,â Mike answered. âThey think weâre wild-eyed commies, liberals. Yes?â
âThatâs what they think. And how do you plead?â
âI think itâs damn foolishness,â Dad retorted, continuing, âlook, you know as well as I, reporters are in the business because they want to be â first of all, theyâre patriots just as much as any conservative. Even a liberal reporter is a patriot, wants the best for this country. And people â you know, your fair and balanced friends at Fox â donât fully understand that.â
Well, not only is that more than a little condescending. Itâs highly concentrated damn foolishness. What Wallace doesnât fully understand is that lots of people have good reason to suspect that media Brahmins like him are less patriotic than the average Joe.
Now, before everybody gets their knickers in a twist, let me be clear. Iâm not saying that journalists are unpatriotic. No. Not at all. They're just a bunch of wild-eyed commies. Commies can be patriotic, too, they just have a different vision of what's best for the country. Nor am I discrediting the argument that it is the hallmark of the true patriot to tell unpleasant or inconvenient truths. Chesterton was right when he declared: âMy country right or wrong is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, âMy mother, drunk or sober.â â
But what Mike Wallace and so many others seem to forget is that patriotism, like most any other trait, comes in varying quantities. Person A can be less nice than person B and still be perfectly nice. Joe can be more tolerant than Phil, but that doesnât make Phil a bigot. And Mike can be less patriotic than whomever and not be a traitor or a âwild-eyed commie.â Indeed, many journalists seem to believe that a certain impatience for patriotic appeals is a hallmark of good journalism. And hyperbole is a great way to mock someone else's point of view.
One such journalist is Mike Wallace. In a famous PBS-televised seminar at Columbia University, the moderator imagined a hypothetical in which the late Peter Jennings was embedded with enemy troops in a Vietnam-like war. He then asked whether, if given the opportunity, heâd warn American troops they were about to be ambushed or whether heâd hang back and simply âroll tapeâ on the slaughter.
Jennings agonized. âI think,â he said after a long pause, âthat I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans.â Mike Wallace was appalled. âI am astonishedâ that you would interfere, he said to Jennings. âYouâre a reporter!â When asked if American reporters have a higher duty to their country or fellow Americans, Wallace replied, âNo, you donât have a higher duty. No. No. Youâre a reporter.â This browbeating was enough to get Jennings to change his mind.
This is just one of countless examples of how patriotic waters run tepid in the elite media. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, ABCâs David Westin told journalism students that he couldnât take a position on whether the Pentagon was a legitimate target. Other journalists agonized about whether there was an inherent conflict between wearing a tiny American flag on their lapels and doing their jobs. In World War II, American journalists â including Walter Cronkite and the legendary Ernie Pyle â wore American military uniforms and saw no conflict.
Some of this has to do with the growing cosmopolitanism of American journalism. Elite reporters like Mike Wallace and the late Jennings think they are âcitizens of the world.â Years ago, CNN banned the use of the word âforeignersâ to describe, well, foreigners.
And some of this has to do with tendency to define good reporting as revealing or exaggerating Americaâs problems to the world. This is a needed and important trait in reporters, but like any trait, including patriotism, one can have too much of it, or too little.
DC Examiner columnist Jonah Goldberg is editor
at large at the National Review
Posted by: Bobby ||
11/09/2005 11:08 ||
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#1
Re: the Wallace/Jennings exchange - too bad someone didn't then ask Wallace the following question: You wouldn't warn American troops of an impending attack. Would that still be true if one of those troops was your son?
He's waffle and dissemble, but in the end - whether he admitted it or not - we know he'd warn them for his own son, but not for anyone else's son.
And that is precisely why I dislike/distrust the MSM.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
11/09/2005 15:51 Comments ||
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Fact: The vast majority of CIA officers overseas operate with little to no cover and have done so since the foundation of the post-World War II clandestine service in 1947.
⢠Fact: The CIA knows that most of its officers overseas are "blown" to the local security and intelligence services, and not infrequently to the more astute members of the native press in countries where a real press exists, and to knowledgeable members of the foreign diplomatic community who have firsthand contact with the country's foreign and defense ministries (where real diplomats always spend more quality time and have greater access than do spooks).
⢠Fact: Probably the vast majority of all sensitive assets--foreign agents whom the agency considers highly valuable and who might be in some trouble if exposed--have been handled by compromised officers.
If we were to use the standards suggested by Mr. Fitzgerald--"It's a lot more serious than baseball. . . . The damage wasn't to one person. It wasn't just Valerie Wilson. It was done to all of us"--we would fire the operations management, which in practice has become a barely clandestine version of the State Department. The revealing of Valerie Plame's true employer has in all probability hurt no one overseas. You can rest assured that if her (most recent) outing had actually hurt an agent from her past, we would've heard about it through a CIA leak.
Langley's systemic sloppiness--the flimsiness of cover is but the tip of the iceberg of incompetence--has repeatedly destroyed agent networks and provoked "flaps" with some of our closest allies. A serious CIA would never have allowed Mr. Wilson to go on such an odd, short "fact finding" mission. It never would have allowed Ms. Plame potentially to expose herself by recommending such an overt mission for her mate, not known for his subtlety and discretion. With a CIA where cover really mattered, Mr. Libby would not now be indicted. But that's not what we have in the real world. We have an American left that hates George W. Bush and his vice president so much that they have become willing dupes in a surreal operational stage-play. You have to give credit to Langley: Overseas it may be incompetent; but in Washington, it can still con many into giving it the respect and consideration it doesn't deserve.
#1
A serious CIA would never have allowed Mr. Wilson to go on such an odd, short "fact finding" mission. It never would have allowed Ms. Plame potentially to expose herself or become romantically involved with a high profile, US AMBO by recommending such an overt mission for her mate, not known for his subtlety and discretion.
When the day arrives that our clandestine services must rely on the likes of the Wilson family, we're in dire straights indeed. I suspect the damage assessment took all of 5 minutes and was less than a page in length. This is all a media creation.
It isn't always the strongest gust of wind that bends a branch to its breaking point. More often than not, the limb is broken by the gust that is unexpected and counter to mainstream forces. This same contravening wind is found in independent military bloggers â who, without the vast resources of the mainstream media, manage to remind that the war in Iraq is more than headlines of casualties, car bombs, and IEDs.
We approach this Friday's remembrance of veterans, past and present, with a nation bent into the gale-force winds of a story that, while not false, is far from the truth. And so, more and more are looking outside their local daily paper or nightly news for insight into the war â or they are turning it off entirely. The consequences of this culture of quick headlines and blurb news is that we see not the war, its heroes, its villains, or its predicament. Instead we are left with the nausea of casualty counts, grim milestones, and acts of terror without hope, gravity, or context. Poll numbers show the impact. Fortunately there are those who stand against these winds.
In the halls of the Capitol building today Sen. Rick Santorum and four bloggers will stand to present â in what is believed to be the first joint press conference of a senator and bloggers â We will be offering an alternative view of the war. The point is to bring the character and context of the underreported story to the forefront, to highlight the men and women in service to our nation's defense, and to broaden awareness of the larger, more vital, reality in this war: U.S. and Coalition forces are defeating the insurgency.
The non-lethal weapons of our enemy, no matter their political or religious affiliation, include our own apathy and acceptance of the media's presentation of the war. In their efforts to be objective citizens of the world, the media's oftentimes morally neutral reporting on the terrorist insurgency-in all its horror â paints an incomplete picture of what's happening in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It isn't my place to predict tipping points in the political arena or the social impact of blog going mainstream, nor would I offer advice to the mainstream media. Yet I do see in the words of the families left behind, and the soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine on distant shores that the media must be more aware of its perhaps unintended consequences in striving for ultimate objectivity. Reporting is more than stating a run of details, numbers, and facts. To convey as accurate a portrait of our efforts in Iraq as possible, the media must be willing to develop context, present the situation rather than the result of an action, and be clear that the scattered success of a car bomb or IED is far from the steady progress of coalition forces throughout Iraq, or political progress by the Iraqi people.
Concerned Americans will continue to seek alternative sources of reporting. And more political leaders will recognize that polls don't show the state of the war, only the state of our misgivings. As such, more will follow the lead of the Senate, which this past week began reading the accounts of servicemen and women in Iraq. This act is one of recognition and respect and highlights the need for all of us to remember, no matter our general awareness of the war or its status, that these Americans are our friends and neighbors, our husbands, wives, children, and parents.
The author of Ender's Game takes on Brent Scowcroft. EFL, emphasis added. RTWT.
. . . Scowcroft is the kind of strategic thinker who seems unable to grasp that it is not "peace" to postpone a war, or "statesmanship" to end a war under such terms as to generate the next one.
His strategy of leaving Saddam in place in Iraq after the Gulf War of 1991 was designed with the "realistic" goal of leaving Iraq strong enough to counterbalance Iran's growing power in the Middle East.
But at what cost? The Shi'ites of Iraq felt, correctly, that they had been betrayed, and much of their best leadership was murdered in the aftermath of Scowcroft's "realistic" abandonment of them during their revolt after the Gulf War.
And it was, in part, the flabby outcome of the Gulf War that convinced Osama that America was not serious -- that even when we went to all the trouble of fighting a war, all we aimed for was the status quo ante. We could be attacked with impunity. After all, if we didn't get rid of a monster like Saddam, whom, exactly, would we bother to get rid of?
The trouble with "realism" in foreign policy is that it only works if you actually know what "reality" is -- that is, if you can grasp the present situation so thoroughly that you can predict all possible outcomes and their relative probability.
Whenever you can't do that -- which is always -- then "realism" amounts to "putting off uncontrollable events as long as possible" and "trying to get along with monsters." In other words, realism begins to overlap quite dangerously with appeasement. When you start to think, "Better the monster we know than the chaos we don't know," you are ready to go to Munich and return triumphantly with "peace in our time," which might, with luck, last as long as a year and a half.
That was Scowcroft's genius -- to be utterly discredited by leaving the world far more dangerous than he found it. Even as he claimed to be establishing a "new world order," all he really did was cling desperately to such fragments of the old order as he could.
People who espouse "realistic" foreign policy love to talk as if the only alternative were "unrealistic" foreign policies -- and who would argue for those?
But the truth is that America is an ideological nation. Whatever the complicated origins of our revolution in 1776, our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution of 1783, with the Bill of Rights, established us as a nation with a cause. We would be a beacon of liberty to the nations of the world. . . .
. . . Americans are ashamed to act like other nations. Intellectual Brits can mock us for being cowboys -- though their empire once covered the world; the French can resent us for running roughshod over the tender sensibilities of former would-be world conquerors.
But we hate it when the world accuses us of acting only in our "realistic" self-interest, because that's not who we are, or at least not who we want to be.
We need to be the good guys.
We Americans hated watching as tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslim men were slaughtered in the genocidal war in the former Yugoslavia; that's why we sat still for Clinton's day-late-and-a-dollar-short bombing of Serbia over Kosovo.
We Americans hated ending the Gulf War in 1991 with Saddam still in power and the Republican Guard deliberately allowed to keep its military ability to slaughter Iraqis at will.
When our soldiers go off to kill and die, they had better be dying for something that actually matters or we won't stand for it. Stalemates feel like losing; realpolitik feels like we're no better than the cynical 19th-century border-drawers who got the world into such an ugly shape in the first place.
Americans will not long endure a government whose goal is a "balance of power." We don't want power to be balanced. We want to feel like our power is enormously lopsided, but that it is used exclusively for either a noble cause or our own direct national defense.
What is more, "realism" does not work. It cannot work, because the equations of power-balancing are fully readable by our enemies and opponents and rivals. When they know that we will go this far and no farther, we become predictable to them.
And when we are predictable, then our enemies are free to act as they wish within the safe, "realistic" boundaries we have laid out for them. . . .
Posted by: Mike ||
11/09/2005 05:59 ||
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#1
Excellent! This is a battle for minds, screw the hearts. And for those who don't get it, they are to be beaten back by whatever means necessary.
#4
When you start to think, "Better the monster we know than the chaos we don't know," you are ready to go to Munich and return triumphantly with "peace in our time," which might, with luck, last as long as a year and a half.
I'll take this as confirmation that we are better off decapping corrupt governments like Iran and Sudan. The chaos that follows, however difficult to predict, will be easier to contain in that those who assume power will be less well connected and not as experienced.
Better the imp we do not know than the devil we do. Kim, Mugabe, Assad and all of their vile ilk satisfy this formula quite nicely.
The story the lefties are pushing â I think it's still up on al-Jizz â is that the U.S. used white phosphorus in Fallujah, against civilians, of course. Good debunking here.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/09/2005 14:40 ||
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Good debunking but bad link (circular one to rantburg)
#1
There was Mahdist thug overhearing the conversation => it has ZERO value, both in the areas who please us (Life is better than with Saddam) than on those who displease us (Thank you Mahdi Army for distributing the money, you probably diverted from American aid).
In fact article should not have even been published or, at the very least, with more and stronger reminders. I really miss that he didn't include a second reminder at the end of teh article telling: "this was told in presnce of a Mahdist spy"
In light of the current media techniques and the burning in France this article from Dec-Jan 2004 Policy Review needs to be revisited.
"The most blatant tyranny is the one which asks the most blatant questions." so begins this very good opinion piece.
[..] There is nothing irresponsible per se about publishing oneâs opinions. In fact, government would be worse off with no pundits than with too many of them. Pundits, in one form or another, have always had a role to play in free societies. But the ongoing centralization of major media outlets, the magnification of the mediaâs influence through various electronic means and satellite printing, and the increasing intensity of the viewing experience in an age of big, flat television screens has created a new realm of authority akin to the emergence of a superpower with similarly profound geopolitical consequences.
Were Fox News, say, to make a tonal adjustment in its coverage, if only for the pecuniary motive of stealing some liberal viewers from CNN, or were the New York Times to retire one or two of its columnists for the sake of a less wearisome and screechy op-ed page, the ramifications would be not only journalistic but political as well, and sufficient perhaps to affect the outcome of a future close election.
But the media are not agents of the decentralization of authority, which implies a healthy and orderly transformation of sorts. Rather, they are agents of the weakening of it. The very cynical compromises politicians increasingly need to make in a media-driven environment further immobilize them. Politicians are weaker than ever; journalists, stronger. To be regularly mouthing opinions on television is to be, as they say, accomplished: To be an assistant or deputy assistant secretary of state, defense, agriculture, or commerce â jobs requiring much higher levels of expertise and stress management â means often to slip into oblivion, at a significantly lower salary. A journalist friend who had been a presidential speechwriter agreed that were a successful journalist to accept a typical assistant or deputy assistant secretaryâs slot, it would be as though he had gone missing for four years.
The medieval age was tyrannized by a demand for spiritual perfectionism, making it hard to accomplish anything practical. Truth, Erasmus cautioned, had to be concealed under a cloak of piety; Machiavelli wondered whether any government could remain useful if it actually practiced the morality it preached.1 Today the global media make demands on generals and civilian policymakers that require a category of perfectionism with which medieval authorities would have been familiar.
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#1
Bad link. the quoted part comes very close to my favorite part, which goes something like - thus, the media doesn't report on the 90% that's good, or even the 9% that's bad, but focuses on the 1% that's morally reprehensible.
In essence, he says the media is to the 21st century what the medieval inquisition was to the 16th century - in search of perfection, and will accept nothing less.
Fits with the witch hunts, does it not?
Posted by: Bobby ||
11/09/2005 16:06 Comments ||
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On Yom Kippur this year I had the honor of speaking at the Temple of the Arts in Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations is not pleased. They have just sent out this press release:
CA SYNAGOGUE THAT HOSTED ISLAMOPHOBE URGED TO INVITE MUSLIM SPEAKER
Hate-filled comments on speaker's website compare Muslims to animals and Nazis
(ANAHEIM, CA, 11/8/2005) - The Southern California office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-LA) today urged a Los Angeles synagogue that recently hosted the operator of a virulently anti-Muslim website to invite a Muslim representative who can offer a balancing perspective on Islam....
#2
Time we all formed a group to go after CAIR. These fanatics need to understand that we are done with listening to their bull as if it were truth. The era of PC handwring ended on 9/11.
While I offer my sympathies to Muslims who are not fanatics, if you don't begin to isolate yourself from these CAIR/terrorist sympathy wankers, don't complain when we have trouble distinguishing who is who. Actions speak louder than words
#3
Lol. Spencer's got books to sell. I'll admit that being named by CAIR trumps most of us (Dan's prolly on their shit list, lol), but that's not saying much when you think about it (sorry, Dan, lol). This is about book sales, methinks.
#8
Thanks Anonymous. Is there a pill I can take to make it go away? I'm definately suffering from the early stages of âIslamophobiaâ and the prognosis does not at all look encouraging.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
