The Gods of the Copybook Headings

What Her Armies Could Not Do...

...her cartographers have accomplished:

Egypt Air, the largest airline in Egypt, has removed Israel from the map – literally. On its website, Ynet has learned, Jordan's land reaches the Mediterranean Sea. The airline's subsidiary, Air Sinai, flies to Israel regularly, but customers seeking flights to Ben Gurion National Airport will have a hard time finding them. On the map are the names of the Mideast capitals – Amman, Beirut, and Damascus – but Israel is nowhere to be found.  

One of those telling details about the modern Middle East. Get your ass-kicked in four major wars? No problem, just pretend your victorious enemies don't exist. Even the 1930s era French recognized the existence of Germany.

Marching As To War

Daniel Hannan asks an important question:

Why is it up to Britain to intervene in Libya?

Why us? I mean, why not Ecuador or Finland? Where is the specific British interest in Libya?

My fellow Whig makes a sound point. Short answer is that Britain is among three countries in the world with - for the moment - the ability to project power globally. The other two countries are France and the United States. Having the capacity to do so leads to the expectation that Britain will, should that vague spectre "the international community" grant its pontifical consent. That's the why, not the why should.

Jeff Perren, an American Objectivist, asked a similar question about Egypt awhile back:

If there's an op-ed explaining why we should care what happens in Egypt I haven't seen it yet, and I read 12 major publications daily.

They have little oil and no nuclear weapons. They haven't been a friend of the U.S. when it counts for many years, if ever. (Even granting the dubious proposition that countries can have 'friends' rather than just strategic, and ever-shifting, alliances.)

At some basic level I understand these fine gentlemen. Let's call it the Hadrian Wall Instinct. Bunch of barbarians over the hills? Build a kick ass series of defensive fortifications, man them strongly and let the rest of the civilized world get on with daily life. Aside from the anthropologist and geographers, just leave the barbarians alone. 

What is driving intervention in Libya is a mixture of altruism and cynical calculation. The former because Gaddafi is an especially brutal ruler by North Africa standards, the latter because Europe is terrified of a collapse of the Libyan state. Intervention it is hoped would ensure that the country's new rulers will hold the country together. The country's significant - though hardly vast - oil reserves certainly make it a valuable piece of real estate, though if the interest is in keeping the oil flowing than supporting Gaddafi would be the logical move.

Contrary to the prattling of the economically illiterate Left, the West rarely fights wars over oil. Wars are messy and expensive and it is far easier to strike a deal with the tyrant on the spot. Thus the silliness - not all of it due to naivety - over Iraq being a war for oil. Saddam could have been bought on the cheap.  

Does the West have a legitimate strategic interest in what goes on in the barbarized, and semi-barbarized, environs of Africa and the Middle East? After all, we have the F-22 and they have not. Yes and for a very simple reason, there are an awful lot of barbarians and there is not much an F-22 can do to stop them.

An informal understanding has developed between the European powers, especially Italy, and the Lion of Libya that his country not be used as a conduit for illegal immigration from sub-Saharan Africa. There are 800 million people living in Black Africa and Europe has the world's most generous refugee laws, and some of the developed world's most precarious debt structures. You do the math.

The problem is as old as man. Some regions of the world develop faster than others, obtaining a temporary upper hand. No particular race or region has a monopoly on pre-emience, it shifts around every few centuries. We're at the tail end of the West's global leadership. Before us were the Arabs and the Chinese. Before them the Romans and the Chinese. The world does seem to be moving toward some type of convergence of living standards and political systems, though people thought much the same thing in the decades just before the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand's driver took that fateful wrong turn in Sarajevo.

Just as it is human for some to excel and others to lag, so it is human for the laggards to catch-up. There are two mains ways to do this. The smart way - which the East Asian nations have taken with great gusto - is to copy, adapt and improve upon the pace-setters. In a few generations, with luck, the pupil becomes a master, or even the master.

This is the civilized approach. It leads to peace, co-operation (usually) and a healthy competition among the civilized nations. The post-war Japanese make our lives much better, just as we in Europe and its former colonies make the lives of the Japanese better. While our relative positions may change, the peaceful competition and co-operation between civilized peoples improves everyone's standard of living absolutely. 

But let's say you're not too keen on the hard slough up the value chain. Your rulers are deranged psychopaths like Robert Mugabe, rather than far-sighted authoritarians like General Park and Chiang Kai-shek. The best bet might be to take what you can get through force. Outright military assault would be pointless. Simply showing up in the promised lands of western Europe makes more sense. When you are the majority, or merely a highly determined minority against a cowed majority, the politics of your adopted country will adapt accordingly.

Europe could try to seal its borders, but how? The Mediterranean is a big stretch of water, easily navigable with simple craft at its narrowest points. A few thousand crossing a month is manageable, what about a few million? Libya is a cork in a very big bottle. Europe is afraid that bottle might be opening.

 

Earthquake

I tend not to comment too much on natural disasters. My attitude is that stuff happens and as human we have to deal with it. Some of us deal with it better than others. This doesn't mean that victims of disasters don't deserve our sympathy, and when appropriate our support. My beat is the intellectual angle to current events. I'll leave the plate-tectonics stuff to the cable news talking heads. 

The Americans are rushing everything they have to Japan. In moments like these I remember the great Gordon Sinclair and his wonderful rant, The Americans. When America gets into trouble few seem to care, except for the better elements within the English speaking world. 9/11 was like a sucker punch to many Canadians, at least those of us not deranged by this country's latent anti-Americanism. It was like something happening to family.

For a few hours the rest of the world seemed to feel that too, with the notable exception of some parts of the Middle East. Then a few days later everyone got back to America hating. Yet once again the Americans are rushing in to help. Who will give them credit for their natural benevolence? Very few. There are still some Europeans, Koreans and Japanese who remember the mercy and kindness of the Americans in the wake of the great wars of the last century. They know how much of their prosperity was bought with American blood - and with Canadian, Australian and British blood too. No one likes feeling obliged. So much easier to hate.

It's horrible in northern Japan right now. Thousands of innocents dead. If you are of a religious bent, then the words passing through your mind right now are: There but by the grace of God... For us infidels, we'll just say that we're damn lucky and they weren't. At some level, however, I'm not really worried about Japan or the Japanese.

Yes their government debt is out of control. But they owe that debt to themselves - unlike the Americans - and have a historically high savings rate - again, unlike the Americans. One of the running themes of this blog is that culture matters because ideas matter. Culture is ideas in action. As a friend of mine put it to me, the Japanese are going to come back strong from this crisis. A country that required three and a half years of ass-whopping from the USMC, and two atomic bombs, to admit defeat is unlikely to give up in the wake of a natural disaster.

When a massive earthquake struck Haiti the consensus was that the Haitian people were really, really screwed. Previously they were merely screwed. What makes Haiti Haiti and Japan Japan? Culture. Japan is essentially four biggish rocks on top of a earthquake zone in the western Pacific. Haiti is a potential paradise with easy access to giant markets in North and Latin America. If nature determined the fate of men, then Tokyo should be a gigantic slum and Port-au-Prince the Hong Kong of the new world.

One of the things westerners in Japan always comment on, especially in the wake of natural disasters like this, is the remarkable civility and restraint of the Japanese people. When New Orleans was overwhelmed by Katrina the response of much of the population, including a fair number of police officers, was to loot anything than could be moved. This has not happened in Sendai. 

This is another example, to those still paying attention, that multiculturalism is the Big Lie of the modern world. In a few years Japan will be Japan again. In many decades from now, sadly, Haiti will probably still be Haiti. Japanese culture is hardly perfect - nothing human is - and is far too collectivistic for western tastes. Still, only a blind man, or one willfully blinded by bad ideas, could fail to see the difference between civilized and rational man fighting and excelling, and primitive men being overwhelmed by nature.

Are we really to believe that Japanese culture is on the same par as that of Haiti? Is not one objectively superior to the other? The sad and blunt fact is that it is better to be an earthquake victim in Japan, relying on the mercy of strangers, than living the life of an ordinary person in Haiti, even in the best of circumstances.