By Conrad Black

National Post May 02, 2009.

It must be said that Barack Obama tosses out apparently feckless suggestions about important matters rather flippantly. He wants to share the wealth; told a pre-election questioner that he would raise capital gains taxes even if it reduced government revenues, out of “fairness”; and has transformed the foreign visit into an itinerant, vicarious, confessional, where he seeks expiation for his country and his own predecessors, interspersed with the exchange of unlikely gifts — an iPod to the British and Commonwealth monarch of 57 years, and the “Idiot’s Bible” of Latin American socialism from Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

We will have to wait for his specific medical-care and energy proposals to be sure of what he intends, but as of now he is still proposing health care “competition,” which is a euphemism for the federal government eliminating private plans, and a movement to renewable energy sources that will be unsustainably expensive. He is still describing his proposed cash handouts to low income people as “refundable tax credits” and “tax cuts” (to people who do not pay taxes). It’s in the same category of Newspeak as that favoured by the late mayor of Montreal, Jean Drapeau, who called his city’s public lottery a “voluntary tax.”

In his foreign tours, Obama utters and endures abuse of his country, sometimes, as in an addicts’ meeting, leading the expression of opprobrium against past U.S. policy. In particular, he implicitly states that his predecessor was nasty and unreasonable.

Admittedly, few will deny that George W. Bush was a public relations disaster. It is as difficult to imagine Roosevelt or Reagan with their mouths full of food greeting Churchill or Thatcher, as Bush did Tony Blair, “Yo Blair!,” as it is to imagine anyone throwing shoes at Eisenhower, Kennedy or Nixon. But Obama could safely allow the contrast with his predecessor to be appreciated spontaneously.

President Obama’s comparative suavity and fluency are assets for his country, and deploying them is useful. But disapproving of the use of the atomic bomb by one of his party’s most admired presidents, Harry S Truman, was an astonishing (and unjust) open goal to offer to America’s enemies.

It is not clear what possessed him to refer to America’s economic performance, which carried much of the world on its back for the last 25 years, with apology if not shame on his visit to Europe last month, while praising Europe for its social democracy. Europe’s economic torpor is one of the chief ingredients of current economic problems. Economic growth and job creation are not subjects for embarrassment, and if he conducts the United States to a replication of Europe’s sluggish to stagnant growth figures, his will be a failed presidency.

It is difficult to discern what he was doing at the Americas conference in Trinidad two weeks ago. Apart from referring to political prisoners in Cuba, he sat as mute as a suet pudding while Venezuela’s Chavez, Bolivia’s Morales, Cuba’s Raul Castro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, (stuck as if in aspic in Ronald Reagan’s description of him as “the little colonel in the green fatigues” 25 years ago), flayed the United States as the source of all Latin America’s problems.

This was long the specialty of the continent’s absurdly bemedalled, Ruritanian junta-leaders as they pillaged their countries, and of the left-wing demagogues they regularly overthrew. But good government, both from the centre-left (Brazil and Chile) and the centre-right (Colombia and Mexico), is in vogue and the practice of blaming everything on the United States is now confined to the far left. Moderate Latin American regimes have been rather cowardly about attacking the human rights records of Castro, Chavez and others. This meeting was Obama’s chance to hold their feet to the fire and shake the branches for Latin American democrats, but he let the opportunity pass.

For all America’s excesses and presumptions, there are limits to how much abuse the United States has to accept from left-wing South American regimes. Washington assisted the Latin American countries in gaining and retaining their independence, liberated Cuba from Spanish oppression, gave it the best government it has had and then gave it independence. It would have been better for everyone if it had taken Cuba in as a U.S. state a hundred years ago. The day when U.S. Latin American policy was unduly influenced by exploitative corporations ended decades ago.

Obama’s relaxation of travel and some financial restrictions is a reasonable first step in reforming America’s Cuban policy. Cuba and the other leftist states in the hemisphere are no particular threat or nuisance to the United States now. They can’t export revolution, are no longer agents for intercontinental mischief as Cuba and Nicaragua were in the piping days of the Soviet Union and Cuba is desperately short of cash. When Raul Castro replied to Obama’s conciliatory gestures by saying that everything was “on the table,” he was batted down in an Internet posting by big brother Fidel. The palsied Castro despotism has been reduced to this charade of governance. It can’t fester and infect Cuba much longer, but appears to be trying to cash in on Obama’s born-again, open-pocketed notions of good neighbourliness. There is no reason, unilaterally, to end the embargo of Cuba, though a relaxation of it, in exchange for almost anything, could be justified.

So far, while in Europe, President Obama has indicted his country and his predecessors for arrogance, dismissiveness, genocide, torture and insufficient respect for the Muslim world. Does the poor old USA really deserve this, and deserve the message to be delivered by its leader in the continent that gave the world totalitarian Communism, Nazism, Robespierre’s Reign of Terror and all the pogroms and massacres of Russia, Armenia and Bulgaria? All of these have occurred in the time that the United States has been continuously constitutionally governed by 43 elected presidents and 110 elected congresses.

Obama even disparaged the era when it was “just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy” deciding the fate of nations. They were the world’s greatest statesmen, at least since Lincoln, and they saved civilization from the Nazis and Japanese imperialists while Europe was governed by Hitler and Stalin, Japan by militarist gangsters and Latin America by implausibly uniformed crooks.
Many wonder where these mad discursions will end, and what their purpose is. If Obama is confusing America’s enemies and tuning up the atmospherics as only a non-white president could do, flying trial balloons and reconnoitring, it is eccentric, but not necessarily bad, statesmanship.

If what we see and hear is what we are going to get — unilateral disarmament, preemptive concessions, socialized medicine, tax increases, windmills and solar panels from sea to sea, the auto industry run by the UAW and the wholesale prosecution of Republicans on torture charges, it is indeed time for the tea parties of protest that are taking place all over America, and for the prayerful singing of patriotic anthems, in the encircling gloom, to remind Americans of what their country once was.

Posted: January 22, 2009 by NP Editor Full Comment.

Irwin Cotler

The Israeli-Hamas conflict, with its evocative images of human suffering, has engaged the hearts and minds of people the world over. Indeed, the death of any innocent — Israeli or Palestinian — is a tragedy, and no one can fail to be moved by the human suffering and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

But the immediate cessation of violence that was declared over the weekend — and that has so far held — may not endure. If we want to prevent further tragedies, it is important to go beyond the “fog of war” — to go behind the daily headlines that cloud understanding and the cliches (the “cycle of violence”) that corrupt it — and ask some fundamental questions about the root causes of this war and the basis for its resolution.

1. Do you agree that Israel, like any other state, has the right to live in peace and security, free from any threats or acts of force?

2. Are you aware that Hamas has launched over 8,000 missiles, rockets and mortars from behind civilian areas, deliberately targeting and terrorizing the Israeli civilian population these last three years, constituting an armed attack prohibited by the UN Charter? Are you aware that despite a six-month truce, Hamas launched close to 3,000 armed attacks in 2008 alone?

3. Do you agree that Israel — like any other state — has an obligation to protect its citizens, and a right to self-defence against armed attack as set forth in Article 51 of the UN Charter?

As then-U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice put it to the UN Security Council, echoing the words of both U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel: “The situation before the current events in Gaza was clearly not sustainable. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis lived under the daily threat of rocket attack, and frankly, no country, none of our countries, would have been willing to tolerate such a circumstance.”

4. Do you agree that Israel’s exercise of self-defence must comport with the principles of international humanitarian law, including the principle of proportionality and the prohibition against the infliction of unnecessary suffering?

5. Do you agree that Palestinians in Gaza have the same right as Israelis to live in peace and security? Are you aware of the domestic repression by Hamas of Palestinian rights in Gaza, including converting the civilian infrastructure to a weapons depot and exploiting the civilian population as human shields, as is now being observed even in the Arab press?

6. Do you agree that the ceasefire must be durable and sustaining to protect the peace and security of both Israelis and Palestinians?
If so, then let us look deeper at what this conflict is truly about.

7. Are you aware that the border crossings — between Egypt and Gaza, and between Gaza and Israel — have been used to smuggle terrorists, weapons, munitions and contraband, when they should be open instead for the movement of people and trade, as set forth in the 2005 Israeli-Palestinian Agreement on Movement and Access?

8. Are you aware that Hamas is designated a terrorist entity by Canada, the United States and the European Union, and that UN Security Council resolutions require Palestinian governing authorities to deny safe havens to terrorists?

9. Are you aware that the Hamas charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews wherever they might be?

10. Are you aware that this genocidal ideology is shared not only by Hamas but also by Iran and its proxy immediately north of Israel, Hezbollah. Did you know that Iran is training, financing, supplying and instigating terrorist action by Hamas and Hezbollah to carry out this existential threat to Israel?

11. Are you aware that Hamas — not only during the present hostilities, but before them, too — has propagated a state-sanctioned culture of hate, in the mosques, in the schools, in the broadcasting system and in the summer camps and training camps, which teaches that Jews are inherently evil, a cancer, responsible for all the evils of the world, the sons of apes and pigs and the defilers of Islam?

12. Do you agree that such statements promote hatred and contempt for Jews, and constitute an obstacle to peace?

The next generation of Palestinians must be one that is capable of keeping the peace with Israel. It is in the interests of neither Israelis nor Palestinians themselves to perpetuate this false “conflict of civilizations” — and yet perpetual conflict is exactly what Hamas, by its own acknowledgment, wants, until Israel’s demise.
So then, a final question:

13. Do you agree that a comprehensive and enduring ceasefire must include: the reaffirmation — as a bottom-line commitment, as President Obama has put it — of Israel’s right to live in peace; the cessation of all acts of terror and violence against Israeli civilians, the casus belli of these hostilities; the withdrawal of Israel from Gaza; the establishment of an international protection and stabilization force to enforce the ceasefire and protect against smuggling and the manufacture of weapons; the deployment of a massive humanitarian undertaking to ensure assistance reaches those in need; the opening of border crossings; the initiation of a comprehensive program for the reconstruction of Gaza and the rehabilitation of its citizens; and the freeing of Palestinian society from the cynical and oppressive culture of hate and incitement fuelled by Hamas?

I close on a personal note. I write not only as a law professor and MP, but as one who has family in Israel and friends in Palestine, and who has lived and worked in the region and been engaged in the struggle for peace for more than 35 years.

The overriding truth of these past 35 years for me has always been clear and remains the same. I will stand with those who support the right of peoples in the Middle East — Israelis and Palestinians alike — to live in peace and security, free from any threats or acts of force, a cornerstone of UN principle and Canadian foreign policy; and I will oppose all those, like Hamas and its patron Iran, who seek the destruction of any people or state in violation of the UN Charter and all civilized norms.

National Post

Irwin Cotler is professor of law (on leave) at McGill University, the Opposition Critic for Human Rights and the MP for Mount Royal. He has written extensively on the Middle East.

Lorne Gunter, National Post

Published: Monday, December 29, 2008

Suppose you lived in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills and people from the suburb of Scarborough — about 10 kilometres away — were firing as many as 100 rockets a day into your yard, your kids’ school, the strip mall down the street and your dentist’s office.

A trip to the cleaners to pick up your shirts would be a life-risking act. Going to the grocery store would involve thinking through in your mind the location of all the shelter sites along the way, in case rockets started raining down on the road as you drove by.

Or perhaps you lived in Montreal’s Outremont neighbourhood and your children had weekly emergency drills because people who hated you — absolutely, blindly hated you and everyone from your community — were launching missiles by the score into your cul-de-sac and the nearby playground, and they had been doing it for seven years.

Or maybe you had a home in south Vancouver and militants living in Richmond were lobbing rockets every day across the Fraser River. Already they’d destroyed the homes of a couple of your neighbours, taken out the food court at the Oakridge Centre, levelled a nearby elementary school, damaged hundreds of tombstones at the Mountain View Cemetery and flattened the VanDusen Botanical Garden.

School children were no longer allowed to go outside at recess. Soccer, baseball and football leagues had all suspended play because the risk of death or injury to a young player or fan was too high, should a missile attack come during a game. Every major street corner had a concrete blast wall and you and your family knew that when the siren sounded you had about 15 seconds to find one and duck behind it or face death or dismemberment.

Since 2001, the small Israeli city of Sderot — one kilometre from the northern boundary of the Gaza Strip — has been the target of nearly 7,000 rocket and mortar attacks. That’s an average of about three a day. In the past week, the rate has been closer to 60 a day.

It’s the equivalent of extremists living in St. Boniface constantly attacking Winnipeg, or Hullois terrorizing Ottawa daily or Dartmouthians menacing Halifax year after year.

Frankly, I can’t imagine my neighbours in Edmonton bearing up so patiently with seven years of bombardments coming from the Enoch reserve on the west edge of the city or Calgarians enduring fusillades from Springbank.

It’s all well and good that we sit here in our safe and comfortable Canadian homes tut-tuting about Israel’s weekend attacks on Hamas and other Palestinian militants in Gaza. But if we were in the same position as Israelis in the southern part of that nation, who have endured daily threats for years now, I would imagine we would understand fully the sentiments of Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni: “Enough is enough. When there’s shooting, there’s a response. Any state would react that way.”

This is not some squabble in which both sides are equally to blame: Had there been no Palestinian attacks on Israel, there would have been no Israeli retaliation, period.

From 2001 to 2005, Hamas and the rest of the Gazan rocket firers insisted their attacks were provoked by the presence of 7,000 Israeli settlers within the borders of Gaza. Remove them and the attacks would stop, the Palestinians promised.

But the Israeli army removed the settlers and the rocket attacks escalated. Nearly two-thirds of the attacks on Sderot have occurred since. Without Israelis inside Gaza to fire on, the terrorists have turned their firepower on the next nearest Jews.

From June through early December, there was a sort of ceasefire in place between Hamas and Israel. Somewhat sardonically, the Israelis keep referring to this as “the lull,” because the fire never fully ceased and the Israelis had enough experience with Hamas promises to know it never would.

I am saddened by the deaths of Palestinian civilians in this past weekend’s air raids. Still, it is Hamas and the other extremists who have chosen to site their bases and missile launchers in civilian neighbourhoods, and Hamas who has provoked Israel again and again until it had no choice.

By John Thompson

There are a lot of people who seem cheered by the weakened status of the United States at the moment. They are fools and one can only hope that if their wishes come to pass, they become the first victims of the world that emerges when the Pax Americana ends. Alas, the universe simply isn’t that fair.

Peace is something whose existence we can construe from the occasional absence of war. In European history, between the creation of the modern nation state with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 (which ended the ghastly Thirty Years War) and the final downfall of Napoleon after the battle of Waterloo in 1815, there was scarcely a year without a war going on somewhere on the continent.

Peace is elusive and virtually non-existent in mankind’s more primitive societies; but there have been eras when large destructive wars between nations and empires were relatively absent for long periods of time. We are probably seeing the end of such a period right now.

Of course, peace is never perfect, and maintaining a period of peace can mean – as a part of the intrinsic paradox that so often appears in human affairs – a fair amount of fighting. However, what normally characterizes a large scale Pax is that fighting is either peripheral to a large geographic area or restricted to squabbling between elites. Large scale violent wars with wholesale death and devastation do not appear.

When one talks about big wars, there have been plenty to look at in history with death tolls in the hundreds of thousands. Millions of deaths are not a recent phenomenon either – the Thirty Years War of the early 17th Century seemingly led to 30 million deaths and some German towns had not recovered their pre-war populations until the end of the 19th Century. The Mongols slew millions of people, as did the Muslim invaders of India.

The other way to identify bloody wars in humanity’s sorry saga is to look for major invasions, widespread devastation and lots of recorded battles. The Roman Civil Wars of the 1st Century BC could be characterized this way; as could the Hundred Years War in 14th and 15th Century France.

There have been four periods when such activities were conspicuously absent for several generations over much of the planet. They are the Pax Romana of Imperial Rome, the Pax Mongolica established by the heirs of Genghis Khan, the Pax Britannica of the 19th Century, and the Pax Americana that has existed since roughly the end of the Second World War.

Some might argue that the Islamic World between the death of Mohammed and the start of the Crusades constituted another such Pax, but this was more of an ideal than a reality. One might also argue for the existence of a Pax Iberica for much of Latin America, but major interior wars have never been easy to undertake in South America. Nor were the Spanish really able to secure their colonies from attack.

For the Mediterranean World, the supremacy of Imperial Rome meant three centuries of peace, notwithstanding Rome’s frequent frontier wars on the periphery of its empire. While we remember the Pax Romana, the Pax Mongolica also provided a measure of peace and stability over much of Asia for over a century after the reign of Genghis Khan. This peace was certainly not enjoyed beyond the Mongol Empire, where the sons and grandsons of Genghis’ killers proved just as ruthless as their sires. However, on the steppes themselves, there was order and safety for the first time in centuries.

For 99 years after the downfall of Napoleon, Europe remained more or less peaceful. While there were numerous wars of limited duration and lethality; one of the main factors behind this relative peace was the power of Great Britain, with its great wealth and the Royal Navy. It says much for Pax Britannica that two of the four most lethal wars of this period were internal civil wars – that of the United States and the Taiping Rebellion in China. The American Civil War didn’t even result in a million deaths – unlike the Mfecane formation war of the Zulu realm, or the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay (1864-70). The Taiping Rebellion was in a class by itself, killing 20-30 million people before it was over.

Of course, for Britain itself during the time of Pax Britannica, there was scarcely a year in which its armed forces were not engaged in combat somewhere around the world. It would be best to remember that much of the impulse behind the creation of the British Empire was not economic greed, but rather a quest for stability. The British found, as had the Romans, that quelling the unruly troublemakers of Tribe ‘A’ only meant that you had to stay put and govern them. However, this now meant that your new tax-paying and relatively law-abiding subjects of Tribe ‘A’ were now looking to you for protection from Tribe ‘B’ who lived across your newly expanded frontier.

While many people like the idea of clear-cut dates to mark eras or epochs, change in history is gradual. What is clear is that the Pax Britannica was a going concern right up until the start of the First World War; and that Britain was the world’s leading superpower at the start of that war. Four years later, in 1918, this was no longer true; and an interim period began before the United States realized the responsibilities that came with its potentials and strength.

Some years ago, the author charted out the annual fatalities in all the conflicts and instances of political mass murder in the 20th Century, and took the average death toll as a rough measure of stability. The document is long gone, but some impressions remain and re-creating is on a ‘To-do’ list for future projects.

In the first decade of the 20th Century, the average number of deaths from political violence around the world in any given year was around 50,000 people. From 1914 until the death of Joseph Stalin and the dawn of the era of nuclear deterrence in 1954, over three million people died in the average year. Those 40 years saw both World Wars, plus the reigns of Lenin, Stalin, Chiang Gaishek, Hitler and Mao – all prodigious mass murderers (although most of the deaths on Gaishek’s account were through depraved indifference rather than actual homicide).

The establishment of the Pax Americana cannot be given one clear date, though several likely ones emerge. The United States was slow to pick up the responsibilities of a major power in the aftermath of the First World War; but the August 14th 1941 drafting of the Atlantic Charter might be interpreted by some as a ‘changing of the guard’ from an over-weakened Britain to a burgeoning United States. The Atlantic Charter also is the foundation for the framework of international diplomacy and trade that still shape the world.

During the Second World War, the first time the Japanese cabinet discussed accepting unconditional surrender was August 9th, 1945. That was the day after 1.5 million Soviet soldiers crashed into Manchuria, overwhelming the Japanese defences there. The Soviets had plenty of tanks and guns of their own, but their trucks, radios, boots and rations were likely to be American-made. Also on August 9th, the Americans dropped the second product of their massive Manhattan Project on Nagasaki. That same day, a titanic fleet with 20 aircraft carriers and 15 battleships (90% American built and crewed) appeared off the approaches to Tokyo harbor; and 1,022 carrier aircraft raided the city.

It was the massive economic and industrial might of the United States that won the Second World War. In the 63 years since 1945, one of the central facts of the world was that nobody wanted a direct confrontation with the power of the United States. The one nation that viewed itself as an ideological competitor and built up enough military power to match that of the US eventually went broke as a result. The Soviets were simply unable to update the technology of the huge military machine they built up in the 1960s and collapsed when Gorbachev attempted widespread reform.

1954 might be another year to select as the start of the Pax Americana. With Stalin’s death and the consolidation of Mao’s Communist Party dynasty in China, the pace of mass murder in the two most lethal regimes of the 20th Century was dramatically reduced. Moreover, the Korean War — which claimed some 3.5 million lives — had just finished, and there would be no more wars of such magnitude for another ten years. Both the US and the USSR had just tested their first hydrogen bombs, and it was becoming clear that the nuclear stalemate would be in place for the foreseeable future (if we were to have a future at all…)

In any event, whether the Pax Americana began in 1945 or 1954, some things are clear.

First, the world’s population has tripled since The Second World War. There were 2.3 billion people on the planet in 1940. With the abundant food and medicine made possible in the world Churchill and Roosevelt designed, massive population growth was inevitable. According to the UN (an entity which is another result of the Atlantic Charter), we will pass the 6.7 billion mark sometime early in 2009.

Secondly, while mass-murder by government still goes on, there have been no new episodes that claimed over ten million lives since the days of Stalin and Mao. There have been a few murder sprees that have claimed over a million lives. These include the reign of Pol Pot in Cambodia, the Pakistani suppression of Bangladeshi nationalism, plus the ongoing misery of North Korea and the Sudan. But in this more crowded world, mass murder is simply not as common as it was sixty years ago.

State on state warfare, once the normal ‘state’ of affairs, has likewise become exceptionally rare in recent decades. Since the end of the Vietnam War, there have only been two conflicts which have claimed over a million lives. These are the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the almost unremarked-upon multi-party squabble in the Eastern Congo (or Zaire, or whatever it is today), that has caused over five million deaths since 1995.

In October, 2008 there were no state vs. state wars being waged anywhere on the planet… a highly unusual situation when viewed through the prism of the last five hundred years, but not when considered over the last fifty.

We certainly do not live in a world free of political violence. Yet we live in a world that has been almost free of widespread and extremely destructive wars largely because of the potential threat of American military intervention.

A reader might care to consult his own family history in the past 100 years to see the results. In the author’s case, two great uncles died in uniform in the First World War and another great uncle in the Second World War. In the four families of the author’s grandparents, almost all the fit adult males signed up. One uncle flew in anti-submarine patrol aircraft from 1939 onwards, another was in the merchant marine, and a third was an infantryman who landed on D-Day. Yet, despite being in a family where military service has been common since the Second World War, no relative has been to war in 63 years. This would be typical for any family in North America or Western Europe.

There are many families of more recent arrival in our societies who can rightfully say that they came from a homeland at war… but how many have actually seen a real battle? How many have actually participated in such a thing?

The world has seen no battles on the scale of Jena, Waterloo, Sulferino, Gettysburg, the Somme, Verdun, Stalingrad or Okinawa for decades. We’ve had two entire generations of people who haven’t heard what a thousand artillery pieces lined up wheel to wheel can sound like when the barrage begins. Where have great fleets clashed at sea in the last 60 years?

We can’t miss the wars that were never waged and the battles that were never fought. Instead, the limited wars that have occurred in the last few decades are seen as American “imperialism” and the Americans are widely denounced for being belligerent for engaging in conflicts that are – when weighed on the scale of history — minor. This could be seen as preventative medicine, with the patients of the world complaining about its pain and discomfort without reflecting on the illnesses and injuries that are being avoided.

We live in a world three times as crowded as the world of 65 years ago, and yet we experience only a fraction of the warfare and mass murder that successive generations knew. So what if the Pax Americana isn’t perfect, what Pax is? What could possibly replace it? Pax Sinica? Pax Islamica? One wouldn’t know whether to laugh, weep or tremble at either prospect.

Humanity being what we are, major transitions in the international scheme of things are seldom free of war. As the United States weakens, its ability to sustain its military strength will diminish – perhaps radically. A world with the United States so weakened will be a world where war becomes much more common. It would be foolish to predict when, where, how, and who – conflicts do have lives of their own, but one can be certain that such conflicts will soon come.

Of the 2.3 billion people who were alive in 1940, 62 million (2.58%) died in the Second World War. There were 1.79 billion people alive in 1913, and 14.66 million (0.81%) died by the end of 1918. Imagine wars of similar magnitude on a world with 6.7 billion of us: There would be anywhere from 54 to 173 million dead in a few years. This could – all too easily — be the down-payment for the end of America’s military supremacy. The full price would be higher yet.

Those who wish the United States to become weaker, and believe this will bring ‘peace in our time’ are dead wrong… and perhaps some of them will become so literally. Unfortunately, the Universe simply isn’t that just. The cheering section hoping for America to become enfeebled will probably die in their beds … unlike so many others.

MacKenzie Institute Newsletter, Autumn 2008

Obama’s victory marked by a wealth of opportunity
Posted: November 15, 2008, 10:30 AM by Kelly McParland
Conrad Black, Full Comment, U.S. Politics

Having confidently predicted the victory of John McCain, and having stuck with that until his blunderbuss campaign blew up, I will offer a few thoughts to the incoming U.S. administration. Rarely have such comments been so profoundly unsolicited. Barack Obama has ignited more excitement and positive curiosity than any incoming government leader in the world since John F. Kennedy. He starts with an immense and fervent public relations honeymoon.

As one who drove with university friends in the early and mid-Sixties for a few weeks each spring in the United States, and well remembers the racial segregation even in the North, and the idle hopelessness of the sprawling, surly, black slums of the great cities of the North and Mid-West, I can only render deep homage to the reformist conscience of America.

In my remarks published here on Nov. 5, but written before the polls had closed, I referred to Obama’s tax to soak the productive elements of the country and cash out those who do not pay taxes with the piffle of “refundable tax credits” as “Marxist” because it would enact the Marxist formula of “From each according to his means to each according to his needs.” No-frills editing seems to have left the impression with some that I was calling Obama a practising Marxist. I was not, do not, and regret the confusion.

The proportions of Obama’s victory were at the mid-point of the polls: about 52% for him to 46.5% for McCain; an unambiguous and solid victory, but not an epochal tidal wave that need presage a long or deep purgatory for the Republicans.

The president-elect appears to have a mandate to make health care more accessible and affordable, but not to discourage private medicine. The public seems to want him to regulate the financial industry more intelligently, but without strangling it in Sarbanes-esque pettifogging. The people also seem to want a higher comfort level than they have now that special interests and lobbyists do not have an unhealthy influence on the federal government; and they want improved government and public relations with America’s traditional and natural allies in Europe and the Americas. There is general recognition that infrastructure requires attention if the means can be found to do it, and there does appear to be a consensus for reduction of energy imports that will survive the usual OPEC wheeze of administering the anesthetic of tactical oil-price reductions.

There is no mandate for a substantial income tax increase, or to repeal secret-ballot trade-union votes. Any such effort will not pass and will squander the new administration’s political capital. The American people are worried, but they have not taken leave of their senses to the point of wishing to water the parched detritus of the Luddite American unionized labour movement.

Building upon my track record as a political seer, I predict help for the unemployed with a Roosevelt-style public works program that would address decaying transport and other public-services needs; a financial transaction tax to raise revenue; and some sort of non-protectionist fiscal incentive to sophisticated manufacturing.

The United States remains the world’s most technologically advanced, as well as its largest, manufacturer, but it has to stop losing factories to cheaper-labour countries, and good engineering and technology careers to the over-stuffed ant-hills of make-work in the fields of law, financial-brokerage and esoteric consulting. The government can’t start dictating careers to people, but it could incentivize certain types of specialized education of greater economic and social use to the country than others.

In addition to the acquisition of preferred shares from the treasuries of banks already happening, there should be some sort of obligatory clearinghouse for the trading of derivatives so there would be reasonable knowledge of the outstanding quantum of such instruments. Estimates of the outstanding volume of underwater real estate-backed or related assets varies from $7-trillion to a financial science-fiction figure of over $50-trillion. It is astounding that the world financial markets should be in such an uninformed state, which makes the re-establishment of confidence very difficult.

Debt-leverage in the hedge-fund industry will have to be addressed through international agreement on lending ratios in the world banking system. Alan Greenspan’s profession of faith in the spontaneous prudence of the U.S. lending banks was insane, and a fire bell in the night when he said it to the Senate Banking Committee 10 years ago. There will have to be some sort of principal-residence home refinancing plan, but this is already in the works.

The American-owned domestic auto industry should be delivered to an industrialist czar such as Lewis Gerstner (IBM) or George David (United Technologies), with a five-year unlimited mandate to produce two adequately-capitalized companies, with sensible designs, industrial relations and market targets; financed by the U.S. government as a preferred shareholder, which would then make a staged retraction from the investment. This investment would net the taxpayers huge profits.

If the president-elect is serious about bi-partisanship, his alleged invitation to Robert Gates to remain as defence secretary is a good start. So would be Cabinet invitations to Colin Powell and John McCain himself, if they can reach agreement over Iraq, as well as to Hillary Clinton, who did have almost as much support as Obama during the Democratic primaries.

It should be possible to make a bi-partisan agreement over Iraq strategy, now that the need for electoral histrionics is over. Obama could emulate Dwight D. Eisenhower, (“I will go to Korea”) and Richard Nixon, (“I have a plan” for Vietnam — he didn’t), and meet early with the Iraqi leader Nouri al-Maliki. Obama has complete liberty in Iraq from his voters, and can bargain from great strength. Ideally, a comprehensive agreement could be worked out, including a long-term alliance, a substantial withdrawal timetable, a payment out of accumulated surplus by Iraq for some of the U.S. financial costs of the war and a reconstruction plan in which the U.S. would build Iraq up to a modern standard as security conditions allowed, in exchange for large quantities of oil at pre-fixed prices. This would simultaneously address the current-account deficit, energy supply and Middle East stabilization problems.

Perhaps most important in this remarkable accession is that Barack Obama has moved African-Americans from reliance on the victim culture to recognition of opportunity. He is the first Western leader who can make effectively the same point internationally, to predominantly black and to Islamic countries.

In a way that even the most gifted and benign Caucasian leaders of the United States and the other western Great Powers could not, this president will be able, without appeasement or naïveté, to encourage black African and Islamic leaders and the vast masses of people behind them, to turn to a new page of genuine co-operation and away from misgovernment slightly masked by the tired platitudes of anti-colonialism. This may be what Senator Obama meant by talking to the likes of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, without, for obvious reasons, being able to elaborate on it during the late campaign.

If so, for this, and for much else, he deserves the admiration and the goodwill of all.

Given that free advice is usually worth what one pays for it, but that ideas do sometimes drop out of the sky, I’m taking the liberty of sending this to you. It’s been on my mind.

Gwyn Dyer has recently predicted that a day will come when Euro and US powers will throw up their political hands in disgust and leave the near and middle east to its own political devices – leaving the people there to create their own nation states.

The entire area is the birthplace of Western Civilization. Its peoples have been trampled over by as many overlords as history records. Current borders were imposed by outsiders.

Rivers don’t divide, they unite like the veins of a leaf. The valleys of river systems form coherent ecosystems. Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has settled river valleys. Why not apply this reality, and historical tribalism, to new states’ borders.

The following are just idea-starters for you to ponder. From west to east:

• Create the city-state of JERUSALEM. Singapore is one – why not? It’s a holy city for three major religions. If it was an independent state, other states would be compelled to leave it alone or go to war with it! Pretty bad PR that. And think of the cachet of being able to say, “I’m a citizen of Jerusalem.”

• Talk up the Levant as a five-state region – LEBANON, SYRIA, JORDAN, JERUSALEM and CANAAN. Get rid of the language supporting the Jewish/Muslim feud about acreage. Cancel “Israel, Palestine, West Bank and Gaza” from the vocabulary and start shifting the talk toward the ancient term CANAAN as the name for a new secular state embracing it all. OR: Another option might be to merge Jordan and Israel into a new state of Canaan, as in c.1200 BCE, making the Levant a four-state region.

• Possibly retain the name IRAQ, or, rename it MESOPOTAMIA – the land between the rivers. Give it ALL the land drained by the Euphrates and Tigris river systems. Possibly create three territories – Assyria, Babylonia and Sumer – using the ancient names for those territories. The result would be a significant increase in land for Iraq/Mesopotamia at the expense of Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey and Iran.

• Enlarge Georgia to take in the Black Sea coast originally settled by Mycenaen Greeks (the Argonauts et al).

• Enlarge Armenia to take in the Lake Van area – traditional lands of Armenians.

• Enlarge Azerbaijan to take in the Azerbaijani province of northern Iran around Lake Urmia – the lake into which the biblical river in Eden flowed.

• Turkey would lose a lot of territory, but, they were enemies in WWI, unhelpful in WWII and gained their territory by conquest. Turkey has been losing territory since the 19th century – territory that they’d conquered and whose peoples were subjected to notoriously harsh subjugation. Those formerly independent peoples still under the Turk’s cruel thumb would love to escape from under it. The proposed removals would leave Turkey in possession of the provinces of the ancient region of Anatolia which, from the earliest civilizations, has been a multi-state peninsula anyway. Turkey would no longer contain hostile minorities costing zillions of bucks to control.

• A really off-the-wall notion would be to consider the longer-term possibility of creating a new state around CONSTANTINOPLE on both sides of the Dardanelles, Sea of Marmora and Bosporus. Many states in the world are no bigger!

• Eliminate Afghanistan. The Brits created this artificial state in the 19th century to serve as a buffer between Russia and the Indian Ocean. It worked! But there is no natural nation there – unless one goes as far back as Bactria. All it does is cultivate dope and terrorists. Divide it between IRAN (gives and takes territory), TURKMENISTAN, UZBEKISTAN, TAJIKISTAN and PAKISTAN. One secular government is having trouble repressing the murdering Islamist Taliban. Five ought to be able to do the job!

Tot up the territorial gainers versus losers. Start selling guys!

Charles W. Conn, Mississauga.
September 2, 2007.

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