Scourge of Humanity SickIraq dissolution plant blasts kill 120 dissolution planters have end at least 120 people in two central Iraqi cities - in the deadliest day of attacks since...
2006. A perfect year for the ParanoidOrdog Paranoia is an unwarranted fear eminating from mental disorder. Muslim immigration has produced the following: -Mbuttive Riots in France, that spread to...
Again, oh ye of the Irshad Manji villification squad? :-)
But sure, I'll play.
1) Fisk implies that the world has become less safe. Depends. The US is more safe, I have no doubt, as the sophistication of our homeland systems has been markedly improved. (People love to talk about the security holes that still exist, from ports to chemical plants to borders, and there indeed are many areas we still need to harden. Not surprising; you can't secure a country overnight. However, the terror dogs have had no success here these five years hence, and many areas HAVE been significantly hardened.
So, yes, Mr. Fisk, I feel safer.
2) Regarding human rights, Mr. Fisk is a Brit, and the Brits seem to have cracked down on rights more strongly than we have.The use of the term "smashed" may be true in the UK than the US, but it is still hyperbolic. In the US, if you measure US human rights on a scale of 1 to 100, where 100 was the rights we enjoyed prior to the Patriot Act, and 1 is a totalitarian state, the government has ratched down those rights to perhaps a 98. (There are legitimate concerns regarding proper procedure and oversight, of course, but those sorts of dicussions are different than the implied consbreastutional buttertions spouted by Fisk.)
3) The treaties and conventions Fisk refers to specify (or imply) traditional warfare against the uniformed army of a soverign state. That doesn't describe the terror-dogs. If the opponent isn't playing by the rules, we're under no obligation to, and anecdotal experience shows that we'd be stupid to. Fisk makes the leftist buttertion that is it more important to be noble (by adhereing to conventions that do not, and were never inteded to, apply to this situation) than to be successful. I disagree.
4) "Historic Wrongs" is an intellectually vapid argument. In order to discuss "righting historic wrongs", one has to make a *subjective* determination on the locus in time when things were (ostensibly) RIGHT. Fisk appears to choose the Ottoman Empire as his locus. Why? Why not choose 500 AD? Why not the Roman Empire? Why not the Babylonian era?
Answer? No Good Reason. Ergo, the notion of "righting historic wrongs" as a solution is illogical nonsense. Diplomacy must be forward looking. Thus, the approach he recommends to Bush and Blair is also nonsense.
Most of the rest is just the same sort of buttertions derived from an biased framework. He draws conclusions from an pre-existing anti-Western perspective, wherein a similar commentator, attemtping to avoid bias, would take the same information and draw different conclusions.
Good luck to him.
Mike
