The UN, US and Iraq IV

The Right's antipathy towards "pure democracy" morphed into an interesting language switch on their part.

The Right are most apt to use "the spread of democracy" to cover what is, in their hands, corporate imperialism. So they hate Democrats but treasure the aura of the word "Democratic" with the small "d." The obvious next step was to take away from the Democrats the term "Democratic Party," which implied that Democrats have a corner on democracy. Democratic Senator. Democratic initiative. All these got lopped and became Democrat Senator, Democrat initiative, etc. Democrat Party (you know, those damn Democrats..)

If I were a PR person in the Dem party, I'd go after the Reps on term "democratic republic," which is a good term for what we wish we were, but has a built-in perception problem. It's easya to associate "republic" with war, loss of lives to protect corporate imperialism, and with the worst excesses of the Bush administration -- getting Strauss out of the intellectual closet and into the light. It would be a very effective tool here in the "red" (irony!) states where many are confused and doubtful about the reality of this administration, see it as betraying "real conservativism". Even Democrats are better regarded here than corporate tools...!

I did a little searching around on Leo Strauss, aparantly he said



Well I actually find that quite intriguing
and this on Leo Strauss and the Straussians by Karl Jahn;


er... yes Mr Jahn may your hemorrhoids and intellect for ever remain in inverse proportion

Karl Jahn has a website called the American Nationalist and there I read


What all of it?

No, just the part where that Man is, on the moon. He's the guy we have to watch out for, according to Tom Ridge.

Makes you feel like shouting "Down with extraterrestrial imperialism", "microbes of the universe unite, you have nothing to lose but recombined DNA!"

c.i. : just back from wonderful vacation in europe(germany and switzerland). i'm now trying to get back into the "battlefield of ideas". you wrote on oct. 15 ""Gels, I wonder if the remainder of my life can be lived in "peace?" 15 - 20 more yeras?"" is'nt there chinese saying like "may you live in interesting times" - of course, i'm not sure i got it right. i'd have to say that my personal life (and that of mrs. h) has been pretty good here in canada, but when i start looking around the rest of the world : middle east, large parts of africa and south-america .... i'm kind of feeling UNCOMFORTABLE - to say the least. i'll throw a few more little stinkbombs as time goes by ! ... may you live in interesting times ... ! hbg

Has everyone seen the article in the latest New Yorker by ol' reliable Seymour Hersh on "The Stovepipe" -- about the deliberate channeling of incomplete and/or erroneous intelligence to the top of the administration in order to bolster the case of those who wanted to invade Iraq?

Beg pardon if a link has already been posted: BumbleBeeBoogie has also posted the entire article for comments here: http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=13867&highlight=

hbg, I sincerely feel we are very lucky to be living during this period of human history. We have seen and experienced great leaps in technology that have enriched our miserable lives on this planet, and are able to take advantage of all the advances in health care, communications, and travel. When I was a teen-ager, we were lucky to have traveled 100 miles from home, and most of our friends never traveled outside our state. We can travel half way around the world in one day today to almost any destination on this planet, and communicate with our family and friends in most countries of the world. We were lucky enough to witness man's landing on the moon. More importantly, we were able to advance from modest backgrounds to a relatively middle-class lifestyle in one generation. Life has been good to us, and this planet cotinues to peak my curiousity and adventures. Next destination? I hope to Antarctica next year.

Thats what's so cool about a board like that! Self-appointed experts may assert this, that such and so, but there's always a horse's mouth to get the story from!

(Ehmm ... I could probably have phrased that more elegantly ...)

You may be right, Kara, that Mahathir caught some bull by its horns by pointing out the deficit of Muslim culture today in its underestimation of education and science (and openness in general) ...

(remind me to post about the new Arab Human Development Report if noone else has yet)

... but these sentences remain as humiliatingly silly as they are deviously hateful - as well as being a staggering synthesis of the cliches of european anti-semitism - its almost as if Asia is holding up some twisted historical mirror to us:

Habibi, I did not post that. But you are excused from thinking I did.

The new human rights report? From whence? I will await its posting.

Lots of stuff on NPR tonight about this report.

ladies and gents

I really STRONGLY recommend a full read of the piece on Strauss I linked just above. I got a chance to go over it today, and it is the most revelatory piece on Strauss - and on the folks driving all of this - that I've found. Truly exemplary piece...please do read.

How are we to win their minds and hearts when our every act is seen as subjugation?
It is simply not feasible to enforce christianity in a land of Islam, while denying Islam.

Civilization...
I heard some more details about the demonstration today… The whole situation was outrageous and people are still talking about it.

Ever since the occupation, employees of the Ministry of Oil are being searched by troops- and lately, dogs. The employees have been fed up… the ministry itself is a virtual fortress now with concrete, barbed wire and troops. The employees stand around for hours at a time, waiting to be checked and let inside. Iraqis have gotten accustomed to the 'security checks'. The checks are worse on the females than they are on the males because we have to watch our handbags rummaged through and sometimes personal items pulled out and examined while dozens of people stand by, watching.

Today, one of the women who work at the ministry, Amal, objected when the troops brought forward a dog to sniff her bag. She was carrying a Quran inside of it and to even handle a Quran, a Muslim has to be 'clean' or under 'widhu'. 'Widhu' is the process of cleansing oneself for prayer or to read from the Quran. We simply wash the face, neck, arms up to the elbows and feet with clean water and say a few brief 'prayers'. Muslims carry around small Qurans for protection and we've been doing it more often since the war- it gives many people a sense of security. It doesn't not mean the person is a 'fundamentalist' or 'extremist'.

As soon as Amal protested about letting the dog sniff her bag because of the Quran inside, the soldier grabbed the Quran, threw it out of the bag and proceeded to check it. The lady was horrified and the dozens of employees who were waiting to be checked moved forward in a rage at having the Quran thrown to the ground. Amal was put in hand-cuffs and taken away and the raging mob was greeted with the butts of rifles.

The Iraqi Police arrived to try to intervene, and found the mob had increased in number because it had turned from a security check into a demonstration. One of the stations showed police officers tearing off their "IP" badge- a black arm badge to identify them as Iraqi Police and shouting at the camera, "We don't want the badge- we signed up to help the people, not see our Quran thrown to the ground…"

Some journalists say that journalists' cameras were confiscated by the troops…

This is horrible. It made my blood boil just hearing about it- I can't imagine what the people who were witnessing it felt. You do not touch the Quran. Why is it so hard to understand that some things are sacred to people?!

How would the troops feel if Iraqis began flinging around Holy Bibles or Torahs and burning crosses?! They would be horrified and angry because you do not touch a person's faith…

But that's where the difference is: the majority of Iraqis have a deep respect for other cultures and religions… and that's what civilization is. It's not mobile phones, computers, skyscrapers and McDonalds; It's having enough security in your own faith and culture to allow people the sanctity of theirs…

Eh - no! That's Mahathir speaking! (Duh). Its just, because you quoted him, my quote of your post gets a "Kara wrote" over it. Lemme see if I can change that.



Here it is - I mean here they are, because a first one appeared last year already: http://www.undp.org/rbas/ahdr/

The page looks boring, but apparently the first report created quite a stir throughout the Arab world. The 168-page PDF file was also downloaded over a million times.

I havent read in it yet, just about it. From what I understood, here was a group of independent Arab thinkers expressing unheard criticism of where present-day Arab culture - and politics! - is lagging ... as a whole. And implying an ambitious future agenda for enlightenment, democracy, women's empowerment, progress.

Kinda like what the US government says it wants for the Arab world - but then authentically, and indigenously :-) - and explicitly rejecting outside force and the interests that come with it.

The newly published second report is specifically about education, more specialist thus, but seemingly no less capable of creating controversy than the first one.

I'm really curious about them. But I think they deserve a thread of their own. But I dunno when I would get round to making one ...

blatham, will do, will do.

nimh, you are correct. I had a mental disconnect.

nimh wrote


thanks nimh, I'll take that as a complement. Must go now, time for my afternoon gallop.

Trot might be healthier for you, Steve.

Dys
Dys, if I started a thread about how to crochet doilies, I'm sure Perception would find a way to attack it as being a plot by liberals and end up getting the poor innocent little doilies locked by the dreaded Hamster.

BBB

<giggles>

Rumsfeld predicts 'long, hard slog' in Iraq
Panel calls for U.N. security overhaul
Wednesday, October 22, 2003 Posted: 1:54 PM EDT (1754 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be "a long, hard slog," and the United States lacks good measures of its progress in the war on terrorism, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told top aides in a memo published Wednesday.

The memo, dated October 16, asks a handful of top military and civilian Department of Defense officials to consider several questions about the progress of the war. It says U.S. forces are having "mixed results" in the battle against al Qaeda, and that U.S. forces "lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror."

"Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas [Islamic fundamentalist schools] and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" Rumsfeld asks in the memo.

In the text, Rumsfeld cites "reasonable progress" in capturing or killing the 55 most-wanted Iraqis and "somewhat slower progress" tracking down the Taliban in Afghanistan.

"It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog," Rumsfeld wrote.

Full story