A comment on my earlier post about Interventions sparked my polemic impulse:
"I believe the US works as a force of "we will help if it will is for
our own good" which can be said for all nations as far as I can see.
While this does not justify the way we, as a nation, act, it does make
it more acceptable, which is by far the most dangerous aspect of it.
But what is the answer? As you point out, getting more nations involved
through the UN will ultimately cultivate not only a fairer world, but a
just world. How do we do that?"
The short answer is that the UN should function more like the WTO. In other words, it should be a functional instrument for resolving intra-national disputes.The argument that the U.S. should function as a 'benevolent hegemon' enforcing order in the world rests on the assumption that international relations are inherently violent and chaotic. I would argue that this is not necessarily the case. Properly empowered international institutions--and I am talking here about the UN, the International Human Rights Court, and the International Criminal Court--can lessen the risk of war and provide mechanisms besides military intervention for preventing and punishing human rights abuses.
Powerful nations like the U.S. believe it is in their best interest to keep international bodies like the UN and the ICC weak and emasculated, because they do not want to see their power curtailed. By keeping these multilateral institutions impotent, they fulfill their self fulfilling prophecy: they justify military interventions and occupations on the grounds that they are the only ones strong enough to maintain order. They avoid making any significant legal concessions to international bodies on the grounds of national sovereignty.
I believe that national sovereignty is already becoming an illusion,
as a result of globalization. In the economic sphere, foreign sources
of capital, multinational corporations, and multilateral agreements
like the GATT have already encroached on national sovereignty. In the civil sphere, NGOs are doing the same thing. And in the military sphere, terrorism and even national resistance is now a global affair; groups are funded with money from expatriates and store their money in banks halfway across the world and buy their weapons on the international black market. The flaw in the current conventional wisdom about international relations is the disconnect between military issues and civil issues. Nothing illustrates this more than the American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq. Planners were largely disdainful of anything involving 'nation-building' and the result was civil chaos, symbolized by the riots and looting that followed the fall of Baghdad. Bush is now asking the international community for more support--ie peacekeeping--in Afghanistan, but it is now too late. If there had been international support from the start, things could have been better. The best way to cope with the changes globalization has brought about
is to embrace international law, because that is what is in our
long-term best interest.
I got into an argument this weekend with an acquaintance of mine about humanitarian interventions. He was arguing that the U.S. has an obligation to use military force to prevent human rights abuses. The bombing of Kosovo would be the prime example of this type of intervention, and Rwanda--and now Darfur--are held up as cases where the U.S. has failed to live up to this obligation. He was defending this 'America: World Police' meme and was kind of surprised that I wasn't buying it. I think the underlying problem is that U.S. intervention will always be selective. The U.S. sat on its hands during the worst genocides of the century. A case in point: East Timor. Before it had even shed its status as Portugese colony it was invaded by Indonesia, then under the brutal Suharto regime. Because the Indonesian government couched its justification for invasion in anti-Communist rhetoric, and because Indonesia was considered a paradise for Western investors, the American (and British, and Australian) governments turned a blind eye to the genocide against the Timorese, in which 1/3rd of the population of East Timor was murdered. These examples abound. The notion that the U.S. acts a force for good is a cruel farce to those who pay attention. Better to give up the charade and work to empower the U.N. and the Hague. The Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Convention exist for very good reasons. They are 'just pieces of paper'--but then so is the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
This video has been making the rounds. It's just so surre al, and funny in the worst way. I tried to find a link to it on YouTube that didn't have a million "bomb them into extinction" comments afterwards. This is a children's show aired on the official Hamas TV station, Al Aqsa.
[Update: while looking for photos I found this article about how Cohen's fiancee Isla Fisher slept with Borat for 10 months because Cohen had to stay in character when he was filming. That's just hot]
"Many potential jurors in the Jose Padilla terrorism-support case say they aren't sure who directed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks because they don't trust reporters or the federal government...many seem unwilling to blame al-Qaida and its leader, Osama bin Laden--the conclusion reached by the national Sept. 11 Commission and the Bush administration and widely reported by news media."
Wow, I wonder how that ties in to the percentage of people who think that Saddam and Bin Laden were BFFs. Perhaps there are less of them floating around than I thought.
"Some people say they don't necessarily believe the U.S. government's statements about Sept. 11, with many of those people citing the faulty intelligence and misinformation about weapons of mass destruction that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the toppling of President Saddam Hussein.
"It could have been Saddam Hussein. It could have been bin Laden. I really don't know who," one woman said."
There wasn't some over-arching Illuminati style '9/11 Conspiracy.' Why the administration ignored the warnings they received, and the nature of the business ties between the Bush family and the Saudis, are both fair questions, but its more an issue of incompetence/corruption on than proof of any kind of malicious and premeditated conspiracy. However, the amount of bullshit that was piled on the American public in the wake of 9/11 has helped create a 'boy who cried wolf' phenomenon in reverse. The administration lied about the Al Qaeda-Iraq connection and about the WMD threat. Those were two absolutely massive and brazen lies, and together they made possible a war that would never have gotten off the ground otherwise (cf. Operation Desert Fox ).
The fact that 9/11 itself was milked for all it was worth, invoked like a Constitutional Amendment to justify everything from invading Iraq to wiretapping to re-electing Republicans, cheapened the event and its memory to the point that it became meaningless. The RNC convention in New York City--an overwhelmingly Democratic area which the GOP would never have chosen otherwise--was the pinnacle of this infuriating exploitation. The fact that many of the actual victims' family members have spoken out against the administration since also accentuates the divide between the 'official' 9/11 narrative and the popular narrative, in the same way that the constant spin on the Iraq war created a credibility gap which became a gaping chasm. The administration has absolutely zero credibility at this point, because its officials developed some kind of bizarre allergy to the truth in the fall of 2001. At this point many people wouldn't believe Bush if he said that the sky was blue.
Potential Terror Jurors Cite 9/11 Doubts [WaPo]
Bad News for Rudy: No one Even Believes 9/11 Anymore [Wonkette]
In another sign of pressure on Mr. Wolfowitz, European officials said ministries in Germany, Spain, France, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries had warned that their parliaments were so unhappy with the bank that they might withhold future funds if he remained in office.
Not surprising but mind-numbingly frustrating. The US just really doesn't get it. What, we thought we could let the most incompetent political apparatchik come in and use the institution like a bank account to pay for pussy and the rest of the world would just keep on sending their money in? I wanna bang my head against a wall.
Committee Is Likely to Say Wolfowitz Broke Rules[NYT]
The one and only Man With a PussyTM has just released his own take on the gay cowboy genre, Buckback Mountain Personally, I am all about Buck Angel. Chicks with dicks are a dime a dozen these days. But this guy is breaking gender boundaries in a way that hasn't been seen before. I wonder if this might be more uncomfortable as a concept for men--both straight and gay--than the concept of a Woman With a Dick. The straight male obsession with trannies is sometimes explained as an attraction to a female who is possesses a phallus, the symbol of creative power and sexuality. Mr. Angel is a walking castration nightmare, except he never had a penis; he is the diametric opposite of the tranny--all of his qualities are masculine but he has preserved the ultimate symbol of femininity, the vagina. What would Alexyss Tylor have to say?
