EVERYTHING THE US DOES IS WRONG At least according to some people. Timothy Roscoe Carter, a reader of Matt Welch's site, writes in with a brilliant listing of all of the ways we can't win when dealing with despots:
What should we do about a repressive regime?
Option 1) Military Aid. Obviously wrong. We are providing the weapons that kill the innocent. See Israel, Turkey, Columbia, Reagan-era Iraq, etc.
Option 2) Economic Aid. Wrong. We are financially propping up the regime. See Egypt, Indonesia, etc.
Option 3) Humanitarian Aid. Still Wrong. By relieving the regime of its financial duty to feed its people, we free up their money for military uses. See Afghanistan, where the US supported the Taliban by providing $43 million in humanitarian aid in exchange for the Taliban not exporting Heroin, thus sacrificing 12 million women to the alter of the failed War on Drugs.
Option 4) Trade / Constructive Engagement. Wrong. This is merely an excuse for US corporations to profit off of the regime's repression of its own people. See China and Reagan-era South Africa.
Option 5) Economic Sanctions. Wrong. The economic sanctions in Iraq have killed 6,000 people a month for the past 11 years, or nearly 800,000 victims of US foreign policy.
Option 6) Military Attack. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! See every military conflict that the United States has every engaged in. (Caveat: There may be a possible exception for the US Civil War, which will be considered obviously justified if you are talking to any white person born in the former Confederacy.)
Option 7) The Prime Directive. Wrong. It is intolerable for the most powerful nation in history to sit by and do nothing while thousands die. It probably stems from a racist lack of concern for people of color of persons of other religions. See Rwanda, Bosnia (not to be confused with Kosovo, which falls under Option 6, above).
A VICTORY: The Taliban confirms that the Northern Alliance has regained control of Mazar-e-Sharif. In the New Republic this week, Peter Beinart details what happened when the Taliban took the town in 1998:
They entered a multi-ethnic city with a substantial population of Hazaras, a Persian-speaking, Shia minority clustered near the Iranian border. The Taliban despised the Hazaras--first, because the Hazaras had fiercely opposed their rule, and second, because the Sunni Taliban considered the Shia Hazaras to be infidels.And so the conquering Taliban governor addressed the Hazaras from the loudspeaker of a city mosque. According to Human Rights Watch, Mullah Manon Niazi declared that, "Hazaras are not Muslim, they are Shia. They are kofr [infidels].... If you do not show your loyalty, we will burn your houses and we will kill you. You either accept to be Muslims or leave Afghanistan." With that, Taliban soldiers went door to door. They looked for people with Asiatic features, supposedly a Hazara characteristic. Hazaras were told to convert on the spot--and say a Sunni prayer as proof. Those who did not were killed immediately or taken to the city jail from which many were transported to the countryside and then executed. To teach the few remaining Hazaras a lesson, Manon Niazi decreed that the dead bodies remain on the streets for close to a week. Asiaweek estimated the dead at over 6,000.
We, of course, all remember how the anti-globalist Left took to the streets around the world the next day to protest those 6,000 dead Afghans...
FOOD DROP UPDATE: The humanitarian aid continues to be a big hit with hungry Afghans.
IMPOTENT FURY Unable to come up with data to combat his ideas, Bjorn Lomborg's opponents have now taken to throwing baked goods at him. He just got a pie thrown at him by environmental activist Mark Lynas in Oxford. Lynas said he "wanted to put a Baked Alaska on [Lomborg's] smug face, in solidarity with the native Indian and Eskimo people in Alaska who are reporting rising temperatures, shrinking sea ice, and worsening effects on animal and bird life." Never mind that the Arctic ice pack moved 200 miles farther south in Alaska this January than it normally does.
TALIBAN'S BAD KARMA: Hindu leaders in India say that the US strikes are divine retribution for the Taliban's destruction of the 1500 year-old giant Buddhas in Afganistan. The Taliban felt guilty about these attacks immediately after, but only because they regretted that they hadn't done it sooner. To make things right with Allah, they sacrificed 100 cows. No word on the karmic debt resulting from this slaughter of sacred cows.
SHOCKING: According to The New York Times, many people who live Off the Grid in Idaho find their routines unchanged after the recent terrorist attacks! It's typical NY-centrism to think that the rest of the country must be on edge if they are. Most Americans, even those like me who use electricity, probably haven't changed their day-to-day routine since 911.
Public Skips Florida Election Hearing It's nearly been a year, and no one cares any more what counts as a vote in Florida. No one, that is, except that weasel Jeffrey Toobin.
How 'The Simpsons' Survives Fascinating profile in the Times on America's longest-running sitcom.
GOLDEN PARACHUTES A company is selling high-rise chutes, for which there is now a pretty good market.
Wendy McElroy has a typically terrific piece on why the war in Afghanistan is not one to force American style feminism on Afghanistan:
A lasting peace is the prerequisite for improving the lives of every human being in Afghanistan. It is in that peace where Afghan women will almost certainly make remarkable advances. The global attention and money now directed at their cause almost guarantees this progress. It can occur through diplomacy, global pressure, the funding of women's rights agencies. But any "advance" for Afghan women that occurs due to a fear of U.S. or U.N. military action is unlikely to last.