Bent Notes

Russia threatens Poland with nuclear attack.

What I want to know is, is this stuff some kind of big surprise to our intellegence, security and diplomacy functions?

Russia and Georgia have gone to war over the breakaway province of South Ossetia.

I actually spent a week in this area some years back, in Sochi, A Russian Black Sea resort a few miles from the Georgian border.  Tea plantations on the terraced Caucasus hillsides.  Little stands on the beaches that sell fresh-picked cherries, of all  things.  Nice people, as I recall.  I don’t know enough about the ethnic balance ins South Ossetia to draw a conclusion as to whether it is more of a Georgian or Russian place, but it appears that Russia rolled its tanks and sent its fighter jets into an internal Georgian matter.  Since that’s the case, the UN Security Council will surely have to weigh in on the matter.

Then things get tricky. The EU and the civilized world generally is trying to display a unified front in the push to get new sanctions in place against Iran, and fast, and Russia has already trotted out the old “Why don’t we give them some more time” routine.

This whole area is also, let us not forget, where a whole lot of the world’s oil originates and makes its way into shipping lanes and ports.

I’ll bet there are some very interesting behind-the-scenes conversations going on among the visiting dignitaries in Beijing along about now.

Is this new Mediterranean Union a real breakthrough in mideast and southern European developments, and is Sarkozy some kind of paradigm-shifting visionary?

You do have to hand it to him.  He got Israel and Syria to sit at the same table and bandy about the term “normalization.”  The whole thing bears continued observation, and tempered optimism isn’t unwarranted.  Many questions have to be addressed, though.  Syria has much explaining to do in the mater of the string of Lebanese political assasinations over the past few years, as it does for the nuclear reactor it was building with North Korean help last year (and which Israel zapped).  And it’s still hard to see what kind of security guarantees it could give Israel that would be worth banking on should a transfer of Golan Heights possession proceed.

You do kind of have to wonder if this sudden flourishing of goodwill isn’t fueled by a motivation to be on the side with the most allies in the escalating tensions between the West (and much of the Arab world) and Iran.

It would seem so, in light of the election results which, among other things, ousted Red Ken Livingstone as London mayor.

Dare we hope for such a reawakening here before November?

 . . even though the government knows about 22,000 individuals, 200 networks and 30 active plots:

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyid=2008-04-12T211520Z_01_L12485957_RTRUKOC_0_UK-BRITAIN-SECURITY.xml

Melanie Phillips doesn’t see any good coming from the rush to recognize Kosovo’s independence.

The sequestered decade of the British imam’s daughter.

The UK’s PM says now’s the time for a major squeeze on the mullahs.

In a recent post, I wrote about the overall ledger in this world, the balance sheet that shows us the sum total of hopeful vs. ominous.  I concluded that I would light out into the world that day (I was posting in the morning) committed to finding signs confirming the hopeful side of the ledger.

Here’s another sign: the visit of new French president Sarkozy to the US and his crystal-clear conveyance of a new direction for France.  Also his understanding of a bond that goes back to Washington and Lafayette, who broke bread in the exact same space where he and W lunched this afternoon.

 . . but apparently an unvarnished truth-teller in their midst was too much to deal with.

I’ve come to an interesting assessment of the state of the world in the past few days.  There’s a lot going on, some of it encouraging, a lot of it alarming, some of it silly and sad (see post below), but none of it really surprising.  Everything that’s unfolding is the playing-out of trends that have been in place for some time.

Take this delegation representing the Arab League that visited Israel.  Actually, only two countries - Jordan and Egypt - sent officials.  Headlines are hailing this as some kind of historic event.  But get to about the third paragraph under any of the headlines and you see what they’re offering Israel:  a comprehensive Arab peace (as if they can deliver that) in exchange for Israel giving up all territory outside its original 1948 borders.  Talk about non-news.  This has been the position of every Arab entity that didn’t explicitly have Israel’s obliteration as its agenda since 1973.

Pakistan has the jitters about its prospects for stability since its Supreme Court ruled for the reinstating of its chief justice, a poke in the eye to Musharraf.  Appeals for calm have been issued.  Yet another Pakistani leader does what he can to cling to power in Islamabad while in the remote areas of the Hindu Kush, tribal leaders provide all the accomodations al-Qaeda needs to perfect its designs.  Since the late 90s, a nuclear arsenal has been at stake, which is, shall we say, noteworthy.

This Gordon Brown character in the UK is casting his nation’s lot with the rest of a fatally cluesless Europe, forbidding government officials from identifying bombing plotters as Muslim, and saying that the UK - US partnership is going to take on a different tone now.

One of our two major political parties here in the US - the one with a majority on Capitol Hill - says that the only thing left to debate is just how to get our troops out of Iraq.  This is their stance at the very time when all reports indicate that the surge is working.  This is the same party that took the same stance regarding Vietnam beginning in 1968, when the yippies, after the Grant Park riots, opted to “work within the system” - in other words, begin the McGovernization process which has continued apace ever since.

The North Korean situation - well, see my most recent post on that.  No sooner had it shut down the Yongbyon reactor than Norkor said that the US had to remove it from the State Department list of terror-sponsoring nations, and dole out a bunch of goodies.  The basic NorKor bargaining position for fifty-some years.

So there’s not a lot occurring on the world stage, or in our own halls of government, that would cause one to start a blog post with, “Hey, look at this unexpected development!”  I don’t suppose that will happen until those in a position to influence the twists and turns of history are guided by common sense rather than wishful thinking.

Sarkozy’s victory in France is official.  You’re already getting rumblings that the car-torchers will be out tonight.  Let’s hope not, but even if they are, it will just show the world that that side in the global struggle isn’t interested in preserving intitutions that build up human dignity and freedom.

UPDATE: At Victory Caucus, there’s a post about how this should be considered alongside some recent signs in the German magazine Der Spiegel that Europe in the general sense may be finally getting a clue. 

Michel Gurfinkel, in the May issue of Commentary, offers some useful perspective on the current election cycle in France.

This tidbit comes from Britain, which is looking more and more European - that is to say, less and less like part of Western civilization.  How’s that for rigorous historical scholarship?  Tippy-toeing around the sensitivities of Holocaust deniers.

 . . . you need to check this out.  Maybe someday, after Chirac is gone, we can be on the same side again, but for now, it’s part of the problem.  deTouqueville and Lafayette must be turning in their graves.

Mrs. Q and I were conversing with a friend last night who remarked that she felt a lot of gratitude here at the end of 2006, as her personal life and career were in a mode of steady improvement.  Mrs. Q and I said that each of us were having similar experiences.  It has been a good year - new magazines to write for, some really dedicated new guitar students, new musical associations for performing, this blog and my new all-purpose website, and now, the novel.

I hesitated before offering a qualifying comment, but then I went ahead and made it.  I said that it feels kind of funny to have my personal life on the uptick against a backdrop of a world the prospects for which ain’t too promising.

Mrs. Q and our friend  teamed up to counter with the optimistic view that the world’s future is the sum total if all the individual choices made by humankind for either bleakness or possibility.

The more I thought about this little exchange, the more it struck me as a microcosm of the big, basic spiritual question facing us more squarely than ever - namely, does evil have an intrinsic existence?

After years of adhering to spiritual models that posited that this is actually a perfect universe and that the problem lies in our misperception of it, I’ve change my mind.  I’ve cast my lot, broadly at least, with the two-forces-vying-for-this-realm camp.  Darkness breathes down our necks.  That’s our real choice:  Will it prevail?

Iran is going to get a nuke soon.  Just so that really sinks into your brain, let me repeat it.  Iran  is going to get a nuke soon.  North Korea has several nukes now.  The array of Islamic terrorist organizations - some Sunni, some Shiite, gathers like ants or cockroaches in failed and failing states to plot catastrophic attacks wherever they can stage them.  Recently elected Latin American socialists like Chavez and Morales are keen to align themselves with forces that hate the Untied States. 

And the part that saddens and digusts me is that the West - Europe, Israel, and, apparently even my beloved United States of America, still doesn’t grasp the gravity of the moment.  We think we have plenty of time.  We think we can squeak past this juncture without having to experience any real nastiness.  Well, if that’s the case, somebody among our cadre of bureaucrats and diplomats in their neatly pressed suits and dresses had better come up with something effective pronto.  It’s gotta be something with more pizzazz than any of the sanctions or talks or frameworks that they’ve tried to date.

What’s the likelihood that we’ll avoid seeing something heart-stoppingly ugly - something that sends civilization reeling -  in the near future? I think one’s answer to that says a lot about one’s take on the nature of this created realm.

Wonder if Ahmadinejad will have a response.

And it’s gonna be on CBS, of all places.

The Jersalem Post bends over backward to put a civil spin on Javier Solana’s utter cluelessness.   I’d have been force-feeding him the Hamas charter.