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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (15752)	11/10/2003 1:07:47 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793670

I don't think al Qaida will be terrorists to the BBC until they blow up Big Ben or the BBC HQ. It would still be because they were misunderstood. BBC will never run out of sympathy for them.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (15752)	11/10/2003 4:51:26 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793670

Afghan dreams David Warren While there is something heroic in the attempt to endow Afghanistan with a modern, Western-style democratic constitution, there is also something quite ludicrous about the project. It seems certain to fail. And it seems certain to fail because of the assumptions that underlie it -- in particular, the assumption that "democracy" is possible in a society that is tribal. Yet the thing is tried because no alternative is thinkable (to the post-modern mind). This is where the heroism comes in, a characteristically post-modern heroism in which an attempt is made to create an order out of something defined only by what it is not. Example, the draft Afghan constitution -- which will be presented for amendment to a tribal congress called a Loya Jirga soon -- has been praised for specifically excluding Islamic Sharia law as a principle of order. But no alternative to Sharia is named or suggested. Will it be Roman? Napoleonic? British common law? This is not an academic question: law is a system, with its own logic, and a system based on vague notions of what feels right at the moment is not a system of law. Nor can it be invented ex nihilo to suit all contingencies. Nor can or will it replace the unwritten ancient codes of honour. Now, the paradox here is that Sharia is a system of law and justice specifically adapted, more than a thousand years ago, to a tribal social order. It would probably make more sense in Afghanistan than almost anywhere else in the world. The reason for not adopting it is because there is an intention to de-tribalize Afghanistan. But that intention is more in the nature of a vain hope than of an act of will. The constitution looks outwardly American -- no prime minister, but a president and vice president, upper and lower houses, an independent judiciary. But one in which the president -- we assume it will continue to be Hamid Karzai, if he can be kept alive -- has extraordinary power. A prime minister would provide an alternative centre of power -- not a good idea in Afghanistan. And in a country with a long history of cabinet shoot-outs, and the like, they have wisely made it impossible for the vice president to permanently succeed the president. More glaringly, a unitary state is being declared -- one without formal provinces. This is especially "heroic" in a country where the central power has, as today, seldom extended much beyond the valleys around Kabul. The real situation on the ground is a country divided along ethnic, linguistic, and religious lines into half-a-dozen major regions, in each of which a "warlord" or strongman has unchallenged authority. One can only wish, "good luck to them". The Taliban are trying to regroup -- less successfully than Western media reports would indicate. They do however enjoy free passage at most times of day across the lawless frontier with Pakistan, and have their own tribal loyalties to call upon in the Pashtun south and east of the country. Now, the warlords are needed to keep the Taliban in check. So that a scheme which requires the new Afghan army, or its foreign protectors, to remove the power of the warlords, is a scheme that advances the interests of the Taliban. A wiser course -- one which President Karzai pursues in practice but not in theory -- is to govern the country as it has always been governed, by give-and-take between the regional interests, gradually winning the warlords over to the economic advantages of free passage through their jealously-guarded domains, and letting the society "modernize" at its own pace. But we live in a world today, governed by crackpot theories, rather than by human experience. So that problems we shouldn't have must be created. davidwarrenonline.com

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (15752)	11/10/2003 9:33:31 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793670

Existential Questions Destroying Israel is not a legitimate Mideast option. By Saul Singer National Review Saul Singer is the editorial page editor of the Jerusalem Post The genie is out of the bottle. There is a thread linking seemingly disparate events: Mahathir's ovation from Muslim leaders when he called for modernizing the struggle against Israel; Tony Judt's New York Review of Books article calling for a bi-national "alternative" to the Jewish state; and Palestinian demands this week that the British apologize for the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The connection? A resurgent daring to question Israel's right to exist. Bret Stephens in the Jerusalem Post and Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic have written devastating responses to Judt's article, but as Stephens points out, once a discredited idea becomes only "controversial," the battle has, in some sense, already been lost. The question is whether calls for Israel's destruction, however politely wrapped, should be an acceptable part of civil discourse. Or as Stephens puts it, "... will the New Republic sack Judt [now a contributing editor] the way ESPN recently sacked Rush Limbaugh for making an arguably derogatory comment about a black football player?" To argue for placing five million Jews under the tender mercies of, as Mahathir Mohamad puts it, "1.3 billion Muslims," is a transparent recipe for dispersion at best, and genocide at worst. This is not one of those nice, vaguely postmodern ideas that can be harmlessly bandied about, but an old-new fantasy of the same militant Islam that is stalking America. Editors and producers should be as intolerant of such musings as they are of racism, and for the same reason: Both reek of the genocides of the last century. REST AT nationalreview.com