Woops

I had forgotten that the President's veto can be overriden if two-thirds of the Congress vote in favour of troop withdrawal. That would mean that the Democrats need to rally another 15 or so votes to get the bill through. That sounds tricky, but I think this is what they should be fighting for right now. If they keep sending the same bill to be vetoed while the troops go without funding, I don't think Americans' confidence in the Democrats will stay as high as it is.

Squeamishness Is Our Weakness

In pondering the current situation in the Middle East, I came upon the realization that it would very easy for the Iraqis to drive the Americans out of Iraq and the Palestinians to drive the Israelis out of Palestine, because of a weakness that most Westerners seem to share, one that seems linked to the Judeo-Christian tradition. That weakness is squeamishness. Most Westerners see violence and carnage and either become afraid, or disgusted. This does not seem as common outside of the West.

Westerners generally don't like violence and will only condone its use if they believe it is necessary to prevent more severe violence or protect their safety. The US got away with horrible violence against countries that were very peaceful largely because the American people were convinced that it was necessary to protect them from the Soviet Union. When the American people stopped believing this during the Vietnam War, they stopped supporting it.

This isn't just true of Americans. The British pulled out of India because they saw what their own military were doing to these people that posed no threat to them. The British lost in India and the Americans lost in Vietnam because they saw and read the things that were going on and were grossed out. Eventually they were convinced it wasn't worth having to see all that nasty blood and gave up.

Trying to fight the West with violence is doomed to fail as long as the West is better armed. A far more effective strategy is to fight the West by exploiting their weak stomachs. If Arabs want to defeat their aggressors, they need to do two things: they have to show the people of the West the brutality of their treatment, and, more importantly, they need to convince Westerners that they are no danger to their physical safety.

Incrementalism Is Often the Only Way

The NDP has single handedly propped up the Harper government by voting against the Liberals' Afghanistan withdrawal bill. Layton says that he has another date in mind that would get the troops even sooner. He's awfully ballsy to think that he can get this passed before 2009. Ballsy or stupid.

It would have been much safer for Layton to take an incrementalist approach to vote in favour of the 2009 withdrawal and then pushed for an earlier withdrawal date. In fact, this seems pretty obvious. Maybe there's something I'm missing, but to put who knows how many more Canadian lives at stake to gamble on getting a sooner withdrawal date is careless and irresponsible.

Why Didn't They Think of This Before Hand?

The Democrats should have seen it as obvious that Bush would veto their war funding bill if it contained any kind of stipulation requiring the troops to come home any time soon, but it seems like it's just now that they're getting together to come up with some kind of strategy that would allow them to show that they are taking a stand against the war (which is what they were elected to do) without denying the troops of funds.

So what are they gonna do? I don't think they have the balls to send another bill to Bush that would require a pull-out, but they can't just say, "ok, here's the money" with no strings attached. Are they gonna pass another useless non-binding resolution? The Democrats have never struck me as a particularly imaginative or creative bunch, so I can't wait to see how they'll deal with this.

Those Pesky Liberals

Overblown much?

Why is it that American conservatives, who for 13 years controlled Congress, still control the White House, and who have appointed 7 of the 9 justices of the Supreme Court are always whining about how powerful "liberals" are, and how they "control everything." How can liberals, who have such little actual power control so much?

It reminds me of that joke about the two Jews in the Weimar Republic. One of them is reading a Jewish run paper and the other is reading the Volkischer Beobachter. The guy reading the Jewish paper says to the other, "How can you read that right-wing garbage?" The second guy says, "Well, if I read the Jewish papers all they talk about is how many Jews have been killed in the progroms, all the synagogues that have been burned down, and all the Jewish businesses that have been vandalized. But according to the right-wing papers we all rule the world!"

Even the Soldiers Know the Military Is full of Shit

During the early part of the Iraq War, there was a girl named Jessica Lynch who we were told was taken as a POW by the Iraqis and rescued by US troops. We heard all of these heroic stories about how she valiantly fought off her captors.

Not long after the story came out, everyone not in a delusional state of denial could see it wasn't true. She was rescued, but not by the Americans. Not long after the Iraqi military picked her up, she was left at a hospital in Nasiriya where the staff protected her from the Iraqi military and even tried to return her to the Americans, but couldn't because the US troops kept firing on her ambulance. Some Iraqis told the Americans that she was being tortured, but even Lynch herself says that was all horseshit. In fact she was treated quite well, and the "daring rescue" that was conducted when the Americans finally got her out of the Iraqi hospital was an overblown fabrication.

Today there was a hearing in front of Congress in which Jessica Lynch herself told us that the military is full of shit and just wanted to use her as a propaganda tool.

Of course, the The Crazy People are pretty silent about the whole story.

The French Election

As predicted it has been narrowed down to a runoff election between Royal and Sarkozy. As much as I think the Gaullists are potentially a danger to France in the long run, I think that given the violence that has become almost routine in France's poorer neighbourhoods, a new approach to immigration must be taken.

It is interesting to note the the American "guest worker program" is remarkably similar to the program that brought so many poor people into France to be exploited and alienated by French society.

Limiting immigration should not be solely a right-wing issue, especially considering most of the poorer people brought into Western countries are brought there to do shit jobs and not only have to put up with the racism of the West, but also their contempt for the poor. Obviously these are problems that need to be addressed as well, but given the immediate danger that mixing poor people of colour with class contemptuous racists necessitates a more radical approach. Allowing poor, unskilled immigrants into the West is as bad for them as it is for us.