A report from the Congo
A report from the Congo - The Economist
This article makes for some pretty grim reading. If there is one thing
that this and other conflicts in Africa are making ever clearer, it is
that most African countries simply weren't viable entities from their
very independence. Hardly any of them possessed the recquisite
institutions, educated manpower or infrastructure to function as modern
states, and even were all these things present, the artificiality and
arbitrariness of the borders of the new states, cutting as they did
across pre-existing ethnic boundaries, would have guaranteed that they
would fall into strife sooner or later. I suppose one might even say
that the miracle is that as little conflict has occurred as there has
been.
How is this mess in the Congo to be resolved? I am convinced that the
only real way out is to impose a United Nations mandate on the Congo,
in the manner of the old League of Nations mandates, and to send in
Western troops to forcibly occupy the country and disarm the various
factions. Those who are honest will acknowledge that the Congo simply
isn't in any kind of state to govern itself, and that there is no point
pretending that it is; but given the state of the Congo's neighbors,
none of them are in any sort of shape to play the role of benovelent
overlords either. All this points to one inescapable solution - the
Western powers must take responsibility for the Congo, and that means
more than just sending in a few soldiers to do a bit of firefighting,
only to leave things to unravel again afterwards. If Iraq needs an
interim American administration, as it surely does, why doesn't the
Congo need something of the sort imposed from outside? The reality is
that no Congolese government conceivable in the near future will have
the power, the competence or the rectitude to do anything to better the
lives of that country's citizens. If it is human suffering we are truly
concerned about, rather than mere sloganeering, then all talk of
"neoimperialism" or "neocolonialism" must simply be brushed aside, and
something along the lines of a 15 to 20 year mandate imposed, charging
the administrators with the tasks of creating the institutions and
infrastructure required for a viable state to exist on the
administrators' departure. Where this would differ from the old
colonial reality would be that this time the rulers would be held
accountable for actually fulfilling the terms of their trusteeship.
I know that these proposals will not prove popular to most westerners,
concerned as they are about the likely cost in terms of their soldiers'
lives and their national wealth, but I think such concerns are both
short-sighted and unwarranted. The invisible costs to western taxpayers
of the ongoing slaughter are much greater than they like to imagine;
established epidemics like AIDS and future threats like Ebola stem from
the Congo, and who knows what else might emerge in the future? Then
there are Congo's uranium reserves to consider - where better for
terrorists to go looking for what they need? Finally, a prosperous,
stable Congo would make a much better market for western goods than the
war-torn hellhole that it currently is.
May 29, 2003 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Giscard joins calls for vote
Giscard joins calls for vote on new EU treaty
How is Blair going to justify subverting democracy now? Obviously the
prime minister and hiis cabinet must take the British population for a
bunch of fools, if he expects that sops like excluding the word
"federal" from the proposed constitution will suffice to calm the
people's concerns. One doesn't have to be a lawyer to recognize that a
treaty can easily be drafted to create a strongly centralized
federation without ever mentioning the word "federal" anywhere in it.
This isn't the first time Tony Blair has assumed the British population
to be so stupid as to be taken in by mere gimmickry. Right up until the
introduction of Euro notes in 2002, Labour ministers were publicly
stating their certainty that all it would take to overcome the public's
scepticism would be an opportunity to see the new notes for themselves,
and that once they realized the Euro didn't cause spontaneous
combustion, Britain would simply go wild for the lovely new currency.
Of course, nothing of the sort came true; if anything, the British are more
sceptical now than they were before the introduction of the Euro notes.
In light of this reality, why does Blair expect people to fall for the
same caliber of persuasion on an equally important matter? Then there
is this to consider: if Blair is sincere in his claim to be "fighting"
to maintain Britain's soverignty (and let me say here that I don't
believe that anything of the sort is true), why would he choose to
oppose a referendum that could only strengthen his negotiating position?
On European Demographic Decline The
On European Demographic Decline
The following comments originally appeared on Brad Delong's blog, in response to a posting he made with regards to immigration from North Africa as a solution to Europe's demographic decline. To quote Brad:
The MinuteMan (Just One Minute: Pension Reform in France) wonders
what's going to happen to the social insurance state in western Europe
if birth rates don't jump soon. At the moment western European
populations look like they are shrinking at about 25% a generation.
I used to think that the answer was "North Africans": move
across the Mediterranean and get a first-world standard of living and a
real education for your children in exchange for having to pay high
payroll taxes and having to listen to your children repeat their
lessons about how "our ancestors the Gauls" had nearly defeated Julius
Caesar at Alesia (or about how "our ancestors the Lombards" had kicked
some Byzantine *** and conquered the Po Valley).
But now that the third millennium is almost 2 1/2 years old, it's no longer clear that this can happen...
Given my own background, I hate to say this, but there
is a limit to the rate at which any society can absorb immigration,
particularly when the immigrants in question have values so different
to those of the host nation.
Not being exactly another face in the crowd myself, I don't
feel the slightest bit bothered by the ethnicity of immigrants as such,
but there are some cultural differences that strike me as unbridgeable.
To illustrate, I've known very many honest and decent muslims in my
time, but having lived in a society where they constitute half of the
population, I don't have some of the romantic illusions about Islam as
a political force that a lot of westerners tend to possess.
A society in which Islam constituted a powerful enough force to
be accomodoted to any great extent is one that I have no interest in
living in, and this aversion is one I certainly wouldn't feel if it
were, say, Shintoism or Buddhism that were at issue. There is a real
clash of values between Islam and western liberalism that cannot be
brushed aside, and it means that large scale immigration from North
Africa, of all places, is not something I would ever be willing to
endorse.
Then there is the whole issue of just what sort of immigrants
one should take in; the educated ones, at the risk of being accused of
initiating a brain drain, or the unskilled sort, who will likely prove
far more unassimilable and resistant to the values of the host culture?
To be honest, this issue doesn't worry me to such a great extent -
America has shown that it is possible to successfully absorb large
numbers of relatively unskilled immigrants, given the right framework.
However, amidst all this blather, one mustn't forget that this
is EUROPE we're talking about, where 3rd generation non-white
immigrants are still regarded as foreigners, despite never having known
any cultures other than the ones they reside in. One of the strangest
things I have ever experienced is that in America hardly anyone
questioned the assumption that I was an American just like they were
(though I wasn't), while in Europe hardly anyone accepts that I am a
European (even though, on paper at least, I am). If people like myself
can't find acceptance here, who can?
Frankly, I don't see any realistic escape for Europe from the
demographic decline it is experiencing. The consequences of this are
clear: EU expansion or no, there is absolutely no chance that Europe
will be a serious military or economic challenge to American "hegemony"
in the long run. It just doesn't have the (young) men, the ships or the
money either.
Blogging in IranI'd long been
Blogging in IranI'd long been vaguely aware that a blogging
subculture seemed to be thriving in Iran, but I hadn't forced myself to
pay it more attention until recently. Now that I have, I must say that
what I have seen has been very
interesting. Certainly, reading the thoughts of young people from that
country helps to make them less of an alien quantity - one comes to
appreciate just how important it is to distinguish between the rabid,
apocalyptic pronounciations of the Ayatollahs, and the real aspirations
of ordinary Iranians for mundane things like intellectual and social
One thing that comes across clearly, though, is that however much one
comes to feel that the young people of Iran are similar to ours in many
ways, in yet other ways an unbridgeable gap remains, and is likely to
remain whatever changes for the better may occur in that country. On
matters like the role of America in the world, and particularly on the
issue of Israel's culpability in the Palestinian issue, the general
sense one gets is that young Iranians do indeed share the views of
their leaders to a great extent. Alongside the admiration for American
culture and technology, there is also a deepseated distrust of American
intentions, even when these might seem to unbiased observers to be
entirely benign. To a certain extent this attitude is understandable,
given the history of Western interference in Iran's internal affairs,
usually to the detriment of the country's people. Nevertheless, to
empathize is not to justify, and such attitudes are often a great
hindrance to those who hold them.
I intend to add a few links to some Iranian bloggers in the near
future. One thing I must say I find odd though: with the exception of Salam Pax, there seem to be no Arab bloggers of any note to be found. Doing a Google Search turns up nothing but a single comment, while a variant search
comes up with absolutely nothing. Why are there so many Iranian
bloggers and so few Arab ones? Is it something political? If so, why
aren't any Arabs living abroad involved, in the same manner that
Iranian expatriates are? Is there some subtle cultural reason behind
the difference?