“Blind hatred instilled by militant Islam”

“The killers always allege particular gripes — Australian troops in Iraq, Christian proselytizing, Hindu intolerance, occupation of the West Bank, theft of Arab petroleum, the Jews, attacks on the Taliban, the 15th-century reconquest of Spain, and, of course, the Crusades. But in most cases — from Mohamed Atta, who crashed into the World Trade Center, to Ahmed Sheik, the former London School of Economics student who planned the beheading of Daniel Pearl, to Magdy Mahmoud Mustafa el-Nashar, the suspected American-educated bomb-maker in London — the common bond is not poverty, a lack of education or legitimate grievance. Instead it is blind hatred instilled by militant Islam.”

— Historian Victor Davis Hanson, writing in the Washington Times

Blog nauseam.

Like a lot of bloggers I’m a little nuts on the subject of blogging. I’ve been thinking about this, trying to understand my fascination (fixation?). During my radio days, I was on the air for 4 or 5 hours a day, 5 or 6 days a week. And because it was a small market station in an unrated market (and I was the program director), I could do or say pretty much anything that I wanted. Or that’s the way it felt at the time. But nobody told us who we could or could not have on the talk shows and our news guys could cover any story they chose. It was very loose and a lot of fun. As for the size of our audience? Hard to say but the signal could be heard in a hundred mile radius. We assumed every many, woman and child was listening.

In the mid-eighties I started working for a radio network that served a statewide audience. In fact, it wasn’t our audience but the collective audiences of the 60+ stations that aired the programs we produced. Big audience but very little control over how much of our stuff got on the air (and I was not on the air at all).

In radio, like other forms of MSM (Mainstream Media), a handful of people decided who gets heard (or read, or seen). That’s good or bad, I suppose, depending on whether you were did the talking or the listening. And for most of the last 30 years, I was one of the people that decided who got air time and who didn’t.

I remember getting calls pitching me on some radio program the host/producer thought would be great for the network. Overnight trucker shows; hunting and fishing shows; cooking shows; home improvement shows. And we had a little canned spiel we gave them, explaining how difficult it would be to “clear” the show and then there was the challenge of finding a sponsor and blah, blah, blah. Everything I told them was true in the context of the medium of radio networks, but I was the guy with his hand on the controls, deciding who got heard and who did not. And while I probably protected innocent listeners from a lot of bad radio, I almost certainly kept some good content from reaching an audience.

Fast forward to the late nineties and creation of what we now call the blogosphere. Anybody with an Internet connection can create a website where he or she can say any damned thing they want (with photos, audio and video). And they can reach a world-wide audience, assuming they have something that audience cares to read, listen to or watch. Maybe it’s just my sixties roots showing, but I do love that. And I have a hunch it represents a powerful shift in the power structure. That’s still unfolding. If you’re Clear Channel Communications or the Federal Communications Commission or the guy that controls all media in Russia (or Iraq), a billion bloggers (and their readers) might not seem like a good thing.

I’m reminded of all those coups in banana republics where the rebels take over the newspaper and the radio station first thing. Once that’s been accomplished, the rest is just mopping up. And, yes, they can probably find a way to kill Internet access to an entire country but that’s getting harder every day.

The recent combination of blogging and radio that has produced podcasting (Rex Hammock likes the term “blogcasting” better and I tend to agree) and things will get even more interesting.

My guess is that during the earliest days of radio there was a certain amount of, “Is this cool, or what!” And blogs, blogging and bloggers will become so common they’ll hardly be worth mentioning.

To die for

“Three decades after the U.S. defeat in what Vietnamese call the American War, and just three years since the two nations signed a bilateral trade agreement, U.S.-branded hotels such as Sheraton have opened. U.S.-based tour operators are venturing in. And today, a United Airlines jet touches down in Ho Chi Minh City (still called Saigon by many), marking the first commercial American air link to Vietnam since the war.” — USA TODAY

I think I read some where that the US now does $5 Billion in trade with Vietnam. Flash back to the bloodiest days of “the American War,” and imagine you’re a U.S. soldier being ordered to risk your life to save the South Vietnamese from a life under Communism (I think that’s why we were there). If you could have looked into the future and seen that we would one day be trading partners with Communist Vietnam, would you still have been willing to lay down your life because politicians back in Washington decided it was vital to U.S. foreign policy?

So now our young men and women (and Iraqi men, women and children) are dying for a different foreign policy (I think it’s the War On Terror). Just for fun, let’s pretend it’s 2035 and the U.S. has just signed a new trade agreement with Osama bin Laden. Seems ridiculous. Obscene. But no more impossible than the USA TODAY story above would have seemed in 1970.

Should a young man or woman be asked to lay down their life fighting an enemy that will one day be a trading partner? If we use WWII as an example, I guess the answer is “yes.” We were on the right side in that war and we do lots of business with Germany and Japan (and Italy).

But, somehow, that just doesn’t feel right to me. If I’m going to risk my life to kill the other guys, I don’t want to kiss and make up down the road. Never. Ever. That’s why I would have made a poor soldiar and an even worse Secretary of State.

Three Days of the Condor – Final Scene

I think the best answer can be found at the end of Sydney Pollack’s 1975 spy flick, Three Days of the Condor. Robert Redford’s character (Joe Turner) is talking to CIA agent Higgins (played by Cliff Robertson) about the no-longer-secret plan to invade the Middle East for oil.

Higgins: The fact is, it wasn’t a bad plan. It could’ve worked.

Turner: Jesus — What is it with you people? You think not getting caught in a lie is the same as telling the truth.

Higgins: It’s simple economics, Turner… There’s no argument. Oil now, 10 or 15 years it’ll be food, or plutonium. Maybe sooner than that. What do you think the people will want us to do then?

Turner: Ask them!

Higgins: Now? (shakes head) Huh-uh. Ask them when they’re running out. When it’s cold at home and the engines stop and people who aren’t used to hunger… go hungry! They won’t want us to ask… (quiet savagery:) They’ll want us to GET it for them.

What do George Bush and Dick Cheney dream about ?

What do George Bush and Dick Cheney dream about when they’re deep in REM sleep? James Wolcott wonders:

“Suppose there had been no Iraqi insurgency, no al-Sadr popping out from behind the curtain or Saddam loyalists prepped for guerrilla war, no car bombings or beheadings or roadside explosives. Or an insurgency so feeble and scattered it was swiftly squashed and swept up. Just imagine how different things would have been over the last year, how different they would be now.”

Why John Perry Barlow supports John Kerry

“Terrible things have happened during the last four years that should not be rewarded no matter how we feel about John Kerry. The war in Iraq alone is unforgivable. While it would be a wonderful thing to have a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, it is criminally misguided to think that we could bomb such a thing into existence. And while it has become a mandatory cliche to say that the world is safer without Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq, I wouldn’t even say this appears true at present. ” — John Perry Barlow

“A crusade for democracy is a contradiction in terms”

“Empire requires an unshakeable belief in the superiority of ones own race, religion, and civilization and an iron resolve to fight to impose that faith and civilization upon other peoples.

We are not that kind of people. Never have been. Americans, who preach the equality of all races, creeds, and cultures, are, de facto, poor imperialists. When we attempt an imperial role as in the Philippines or Iraq, we invariably fall into squabbling over whether a republic should be imposing its ideology on another nation. A crusade for democracy is a contradiction in terms.

While it would be nice if Brazil, Bangladesh, and Burundi all embraced democracy, why should we fight them if they dont, and why should our soldiers die to restore democracy should they lose it? Why is that our problem, if they are not threatening us?

If attacked, Americans fight ferociously. Unwise nations discover that. Threatened, as in the Cold War, we will persevere. But if our vital interests are not threatened, or our honor is not impugned, most of us are for staying out of wars.”

— Pat Buchanan [from The American Conservative]