Council Winners

Council Winners have been posted for the week of June 27.

First place in the council went to South Africa's Neville Chamberlain by The Razor. It was a good post: Balanced, informed, with a strong opinion and great sourcing. And I learned some things I didn't know before.

Votes also went to The Whole Shebaa-ng by Soccer Dad, which walks the reader through some dot-connecting in the current Middle Eastern diplomacy and reaches a conclusion many, whether they like it or not, find inescapable:

Acceding to Syria's and Hezbollah's demands will only serve to strengthen them. If Israel gives in here, Hezbollah will make new demands. Better that Israel should be (unfairly) portrayed as unreasonable than that Iran's proxies should be strengthened even further.

And to More Quincy from right here, and to Warped by Joshuapundit, about a recent Nicholas Kristof column about Israel.

Dick Morris Gets One Right by Hillbilly White Trash. What he, via Morris, sees looks like this:

The Law enforcement approach equals the Word Trade Center in rubble, the Pentagon damaged and Flight 93 and its passengers scattered across a field in Pennsylvania.

The military approach equals most of al Qaeda leadership dead or captured, 20,000 al Qaeda fighters dead in Iraq, no terrorist attacks on US soil since 9/11 - and a handful of video tapes of Osama bin Laden's ravings being broadcast on al Jazeera.

Which approach to terrorism leaves you feeling safer?

Outside the council, the winner was Why You Should Apologize -- Ineffectively and Dishonestly -- For What You Didn't Do by Classical Values, which tells a family history tale that illustrates the irresolvable complications inherent in the notion of slavery reparations. [My version of that post was done here].

Votes also went to The Unconscious Roots of Media Bias by ShrinkWrapped, which takes off on the same Kristof column Joshuapundit disliked, but unfortunately doesn't seem to differentiate news coverage from editorial page work.

Other votes went to Big Gains in Iraq? by Abu Muqawama, a nice clear-headed and unbiased summation of where things stand; Obama's Lack of Ordinary Modesty by American Thinker, the mere mention of which here is likely to activate that 24-7 Obama truth squad.

Usually, wide-eyed Obama attacks leave me cold, but it's hard to not detect a certain hubris in speeches like this: "generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick, and good jobs for the jobless. This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal."

Votes also went to An Almost Unfathomable Ignorance of History by Brits At Their Best. I like this blog, in part because it has said nice things about my books. The picture it paints here is tragic, of a Britain fed up with its own Britishness and seemingly on a lemming-like march to nonidentity.

Recently, by coincidence, the serious fiction writer Nicholson Baker and the right-wing extremist commentator Pat Buchanan both published books suggesting World War II was not the good war, that it was avoidable but Churchill and Roosevelt provoked it, that the Allies committed war crimes, and that it served a few while sacrificing millions.

Reviewers -- the few who read them -- were quick to dismiss both books, sometimes even rolling them into a single article (which probably appalled the good liberal pacifist Mr. Baker; I suspect Mr. Buchanan is beyond appalling). Both books now seem consigned to oblivion.

But before they go, I would point out that -- except for the conclusion about it not being a good war -- there are kernels of truth in the individual charges made, as I understand them.

Specifically, Churchill (along with Roosevelt and others in the U.K. and U.S.) did provoke Hitler and the Japanese. Deliberately. And they put their countries on a wartime footing as fast and far as they could, in a time of peace. They thought the clash of these civilizations was inevitable, and better to start it before the enemies had built their power to too great a degree to be overcome.

Churchill was not the sort of man who would walk past a scene of the strong bullying the weak and mutter thanks to God that it wasn't him under that rain of fists. He wouldn't have stood at a safe distance and criticized the brutality but done nothing. He'd be looking for a way to get into that scrap and change the outcome.

It's that damned Anglo-American quality which so infuriates the rest of the world. The tendency to want to jump into a fight where you don't have a clear self-interest, just because it's not a fair fight or a just one, and you want to use your power and skill to set it right. What is fair and just is, by definition, your interest.

Are there other possible motives? Always. Are there likely beneficiaries among your friends? Always. Does that mean the impulse is not real or pure? No. But the rest of the world has convinced many Anglo-Americans that this quality in their culture is the main obstacle to peace in the world and must be banished.

Those who agree with that would do well to remember an earlier president with that trait strongly in evidence, and ask whether their politics aren't better suited to the accommodating James Buchanan, Old P.F., rather than the man who succeeded him.

Votes also went to The Card by Stop the ACLU (the "Card" being the race card; the players being Obama supporters); Alcoholism Progression by Dean's World, a gripping example of powerful personal blogging; and Is There A Pattern Here? If So, Is There A Name For It? by Discriminations, another Obama post.

Churchill on Iraq

No, not Ward, Winston. Speech to the House of Commons on June 14, 1921.

Broadly speaking, there are two policies which can be adopted towards the Arab race. One is the policy of keeping them divided, of discouraging their national aspirations, of setting up administrations of local notables in each particular province or city, and exerting an influence through the jealousies of one tribe against another. That was largely, in many cases, the Turkish policy before the war, and, cynical as it was, it undoubtedly achieved a certain measure of success. The other policy, and the one which, I think, is alone compatible with the sincere fulfilment of the pledges we gave during the war to the Arab race and to the Arab leaders, is an attempt to build up around their ancient capital of Baghdad, in a form friendly to Britain and to her Allies, an Arab State which can revive and embody the old culture and glories of the Arab race, and which, at any rate, will have a full and fair opportunity of doing so if the Arab race shows itself capable of profiting by it. Of these two policies we have definitely chosen the latter.

On the subject of a long-term occupation, he sounds remarkably like the current Bush Administration, eager to leave the country as soon as possible. In Churchill's day, before the opening of the oil fields and with the British Navy still largely coal-fueled, natural resources weren't a question, and Britain had few if any strategic interests in Iraq:

...I can hold out no hope that we shall be found willing to continue these direct responsibilities. Our object and our policy is to set up an Arab Government, and to make it take the responsibility, with our aid and our guidance and with an effective measure of our support, until they are strong enough to stand alone, and so to foster the development of their independence as to permit the steady and speedy diminution of our burden. ... [O]ur policy in Mesopotamia is to reduce our commitments and to extricate ourselves from our burdens while at the same time honourably discharging our obligations and building up a strong and effective Arab Government which will always be the friend of Britain and, I will add, the friend of France.

Interesting, then, to recall that the situation Americans are in in recent years with regard to Iraq is not a new one. The mix of altruistic motives and self-interest in building up a strong, stable Arab state was on Churchill's plate, too.

Our current mission has his nod of approval from beyond the veil, perhaps. But it also has the example of the failure, ultimately, of Iraq to achieve what he hoped for it.

There is another warning in Churchill's speech. At the time, he was promoting as part of British policy the family of the then-Sherif of Mecca, King Hussein, two of whose sons he eventually managed to place on the thrones of Jordan and Iraq. In doing so, he pointed to the danger from a fanatical tribe, then living miserably in a bleak stretch of Arabia. Their faith was Wahabism, and their name was Saud.

In the vast deserts of Arabia, which stretch eastward and north-eastward from the neighbourhood of Mecca to the Persian Gulf and to the boundaries of Mesopotamia, there dwell the people of Nejd, powerful nomadic tribes, at the head of whom the remarkable chief Bin Saud maintains himself. This Arab chief has long been in a state of warfare, raid, and reprisal with King Hussein and with his neighbours generally. A large number of Bin Saud's followers belong to the Wahabi sect, a form of Mohammedanism which bears, roughly speaking, the same relation to orthodox Islam as the most militant form of Calvinism would have borne to Rome in the fiercest times of the religious wars. The Wahabis profess a life of exceeding austerity, and what they practise themselves they rigorously enforce on others. They hold it as an article of duty, as well as of faith, to kill all who do not share their opinions and to make slaves of their wives and children. Women have been put to death in Wahabi villages for simply appearing in the streets. It is a penal offence to wear a silk garment. Men have been killed for smoking a cigarette, and as for the crime of alcohol, the most energetic supporter of the temperance cause in this country falls far behind them. Austere, intolerant, well-armed, and bloodthirsty, in their own regions the Wahabis are a distinct factor which must be taken into account, and they have been, and still are, very dangerous to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and to the whole institution of the pilgrimage, in which our Indian fellow-subjects are so deeply concerned.

The speech is reprinted on p.82-84 of "Never Give In," a selection of his speeches edited by Churchill's grandson and published in 2003, which I am sure accounts for this otherwise nondescript speech being in the same collection as "Blood, toil, tears, and sweat" and "This was their finest hour."

Churchill and Gandhi

Cicero is one of the poster over at Donklephant who we don't hear from often enough. Today, he's got a fine one on Gandhi and Churchill.

Here's my response to it, from the comments:

Wonderful exploration of these crucial topics. Bravo!

Some thoughts inspired by your thoughts.

As it stands, Gandhi advised European Jews to pacifism in 1938. Although it’s doubtful that Jewish behavior during the Holocaust had much to do with Gandhi’s nonviolent principles, their general pacifism in the face of a political cult devoted to their annihilation is tragic. European Jewry might’ve benefitted from having an indomitable leader in Churchill’s mold, had it been possible.

I don't think even a Churchill could have saved them. Without military might, and a nation as a refuge and bastion, they were doomed. No other nation would take them in. No other nation would risk its sons to save their lives. Isn't that the true lesson of the Holocaust? Isn't that the true reason for Israel?

Gandhian tactics work against essentially moral and democratic regimes. They rely on the ruling power's ability to feel shame and its desire to be humane. However badly such powers may behave in individual cases, their own inner light always can be touched and it will inspire them to do right. That is his essential belief. That is why he spoke of satyagraha as a weapon of the strong, not of the weak. It's the tool the loving parent uses on the child who is trying to strike him in a fit of temper.

In the application of Satyagraha, I discovered, in the earliest stages, that pursuit of Truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one's opponent, but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For, what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of Truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent but one's own self.

How truly telling, then, to learn there is a movement to influence the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to adopt the tactics of Gandhi against Israel.

One of the last foreigners to visit Yasser Arafat before he fell ill was Arun Gandhi, grandson of Indian leader Mohandas K. Gandhi. He traveled to Arafat's compound in Ramallah with a simple message: Put down the gun and adopt Gandhi's way of nonviolent resistance.

Is anyone proposing this for, say, Dutch secularists in confrontation with Islamist extremists?

[Islamist = political ideology based on a religion, not the religion itself. Not all communists live in communes.]

As for Churchill, yes I turn to him, too, and look to him as a beacon in this current war. But sometimes he scares me. It is too easy to get lost in his swirl of words and forget the ways in which that war was not like this one. Even to the degrees that the two wars are alike, he is not always our best patron saint. Not yet. Not unless things get really bad. Here's Churchill, after describing the bombing of London:

We ask no favours of the enemy. We seek from them no compunction. On the contrary, if tonight our people were asked to cast their vote whether a convention should be entered into to stop the bombing of cities, the overwhelming majority would cry, "No, we will mete out to them the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted out to us." The people with one voice would say: "You have committed every crime under the sun. Where you have been the least resisted there you have been the most brutal. It was you who began the indiscriminate bombing. We will have no truce or parley with you, or the grisly gang who work your wicked will. You do your worst - and we will do our best." Perhaps it may be our turn soon; perhaps it may be our turn now.

We live in a terrible epoch of the human story, but we believe there is a broad and sure justice running through its theme. It is time that the enemy should be made to suffer in their own homelands something of the torment they have let loose upon their neighbours and upon the world. We believe it to be in our power to keep this process going, on a steadily rising tide, month after month, year after year, until they are either extirpated by us or, better still, torn to pieces by their own people.

The time has not yet come for us to apply that attitude.

You write:

Moreover the assumption, which served Gandhi so well in dealing with individuals, that all human beings are more or less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture, needs to be seriously questioned. It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane? And is it not possible for one whole culture to be insane by the standards of another? And, so far as one can gauge the feelings of whole nations, is there any apparent connection between a generous deed and a friendly response? Is gratitude a factor in international politics?

I cannot conceive that Hitler was insane. Every decision he made was rational. Sane men can do terrible violence. John Brown was another who often is called a lunatic but was not. The tactics of the Nazis, even when they seem the most irrational, had a sound, but cruel, foundation. In April and May 1945, when anyone could see the war was lost, they kept fighting, and they made sure to fight in the towns and cities of Germany that had not already suffered. They sought to bring down Germany into utter destruction and ruin.

Why? Not because they thought they could turn around and win (though there was some faint hope of a split among the Allies and a negotiated peace with the West), but so that the surviving Germans would live under occupation in conditions of such misery that they would resent the occupiers more than the Nazis, and that a myth of heroic resistance and a Golden Age under Hitler would take root and the Third Reich would rise again in time. [See Stephen G. Fritz's "Endkampf" for a fascinating account of all this.]

And it showed signs of working in 1946 and '47. If the German people had not been so utterly worn out by war, and if some Nazis had managed to survive in an unconquered enclave, in the Alps for instance, a real insurgency might have developed. As it is, it's easy to recognize the same game being played with better success in Iraq. It's why the insurgents waste firepower on blowing up water plants and electrical substations.

It's why the U.S. infrastructure building -- yes, the work of the dreaded Halliburtons and their contracting cronies -- is a front-line battle in this war.

As a culture we tend to be blind to the great qualities of our own civilization, obsessed with past transgressions. Confronting radical ideologies like Islamofascism requires us to believe in our own civilization, in spite of its flaws. We will need to express the power of our culture to others, and why it’s something worth living and dying for. That’s what should be at the center. Western culture can endure only as long as the majority of its citizens promote and have faith in its many ideals, while addressing its imperfections.

I can endorse that wholeheartedly. It's an excellent statement of the kind of attitude we need at the center. It requires an element of "joining" and of "preaching" and of "embracing what is flawed" that makes a lot of people uncomfortable -- especially Americans, maybe, who tend to value their individualism in part precisely because it allows them to avoid making morally compromising decisions.

As for modern-day pacifists, I was raised among them, among the remnants of William Penn's Delaware Valley Quakers. I respect them, when they are true to it, and especially when they keep the sense of perspective that Gandhi, in World War II, lost. I think of an anecdote of Leonard Kenworthy, a Quaker activist in Nazi Germany at the breaking of the war.

Often, on his way to visit the U.S. embassy for recent news, Kenworthy would find himself whistling “the very catchy tune of Wenn wir fahren, wenn wir fahren, wenn wir fahren nach Engel-land, a favorite tune of the German radio broadcasts about traveling to Angel-land, a play on the world England.” Realizing this unintentional, implicit support for the war, this Quaker pacifist quickly switched to whistling God Bless America and got a “perverted sense of satisfaction from that defiant act.”