Good to read you Graystone, it's been a while.....
A memorable Mark Steyn column:
<< I see my colleague Paul Wells has compared Jean Chrétien to Spider-Man. As a friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, Canada's Prime Minister isn't especially friendly to our immediate neighbour, but that's because, like Peter Parker, he believes that "wid da great power come da great responsibility." Traditionally, M. Chrétien then spurts his webbing all over himself, but evidently in this instance he also shot a few strands over Paul's typing fingers, judging from the coherence of what followed.
Just to clarify: Most of us "war hawks" don't have a problem with the Canadian government attempting to identify the "root causes," only with the particular root cause they settled on: Poverty. The late Osama bin Laden was a wealthy man. Wealthier even than Jean Chrétien, who's spent his entire adult life in government service except for six months in the late Eighties but has happily wound up a multi-millionaire. If M. Chrétien feels he's too rich (as we must assume he does), how much more excessively rich is the late Mr. Weirdbeard? Or Saddam Hussein, whose personal fortune is estimated at US$7-billion, a career in public service in Baghdad apparently being even more lucrative than one in Ottawa. And let's not forget the representative two or three hundred Saudi princes currently accompanying King Fahd on his convalescence in Spain. A lucky London escort agency has landed the contract for servicing the Saudi swingers: The gals all have to be blonde and they're replaced every week, having been thoroughly rogered out by then.
So we could increase foreign aid. It would enable Saddam to expand his anthrax factory and the House of Saud to rotate its hookers every 48 hours. But would it do anything else? Under the terms of the Camp David accords, Egypt has been the beneficiary of the largest amount of U.S. aid apart from Israel. What's happened to it? In the 1950s, Egypt and South Korea had more or less identical per capita incomes. Today, Egypt's is less than a fifth of South Korea's.
The Liberal Party of Canada hasn't had an original idea since Pierre Trudeau took his post-resignation vacation in Siberia, and M. Chrétien, whatever his efficacy as a small-time largesse-dispensing ward-heeler, has never troubled himself to form anything approaching a political philosophy. So, ask him what's to blame for September 11th, and he falls back on that old standby — "global poverty," the growing "inequality" between rich and poor.
Let's spell it out: There's no such thing. The story of the last 30 years is the emergence of "a new world middle class," as Professor Xavier Sala-i-Martin calls them in his study The World Distribution Of Income. This class is made up of some 2.5 billion people in the developing world, whose standards of living now approach those of the West. That's to say, roughly half the people in the developing world are doing pretty well economically. As Virginia Postrel wrote in The New York Times recently, taking the world's population as a whole, in 1998 "the largest number of people earned about $8,000 — a standard of living equivalent to Portugal's."
Why hasn't the Middle East shared in this economic growth? Because they're failed states run by kleptocrats who govern by clan and corruption and whose starting point is to exclude half the population — the women — from the economic life of the country. If M. Chrétien wants to give Paul Wells's salary to President Mubarak, that's up to him but it will have zero effect on either poverty or terrorism.
This is obviously too much for our Prime Minister to take in. The last time he was in the region, you'll recall, he didn't even know where he was. But let's take his broader point, the underlying assumption that there's some kind of accommodation you can reach with these guys so that they'll cease flying planes into Manhattan landmarks. What is it the Islamists want?
In the words of Hussein Mussawi, former leader of Hezbollah: "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."?? |
