Will They Never Learn?

Residents of the Gaza Strip have had quite the week, if half of the news reports are to be believed (which they are). Two excerpts that I remember from yesterday and today's evening news from reporters in Gaza:
"You can see the F-16's flying very low, and the sonic booms are deafening. The Israelis say that they're going to cover the whole strip with sonic booms through the night until they get their soldier back,"
"The Apache helicopters just left, and I'm going to ask my camera man to pan over to the PLO's interior ministry building, and you can see the smoke coming off of it."

Of course, the Israelis have also destroyed Gaza's only power plant, leaving 75% of the strip without power (the quickest it can be rebuilt is one year), blown up the bridges that connect the north to the south, and flown fighters over the Syrian president's house. This is just in the last few days.

In my opinion, the Palestinians should've quit antagonizing Israel last year after the Gaza pullout, when they were ahead. Now, Israel's just going to come back, and they won't leave this time. You just don't mess with Jews. Back in the late 40's, with no military help from any other nations (and little diplomatic help), the Jewish settlers of Palestine formed their own militia and fought off the invading armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Arabs of Palestine, earning themselves the country of Israel. Now, the U.S. has given the Jews one of the best militaries in the world, and they like to use it.

You might've noticed that I have very little sympathy for the people of Palestine. I'm sorry that they're kept awake all night, have no electricity, and find themselves staring down the barrel of Israeli artillery wherever they look, but I'm also sorry that they're too stubborn to cooperate with someone who doesn't worship Allah, and that they elect terrorists to lead them towards a solution (I'm not a hypocrite here because I didn't vote for W). What can they really expect if they're going to take jabs at Israel whenever they can? I'm surprised the people of Gaza had this much time without a real visit from the Jewish military. Usually, the two sides can't go 2 weeks without renewing the fighting.

Unless Palestinians seriously change their attitude towards Israel (never going to happen), they're going to be seeing a lot more Israeli guns pointed at them, I think. Of course, this is a situation that just keeps making itself worse: Palestinians hate Israel, so Israel bombs them, so Palestinians hate Israel...Jews have been kicked around since time immemorial, and they're still here, Arabs would do well to consider this before they pick a fight that will end in their extinction. For some reason, though, death doesn't mean as much to Muslims in that area of the world, what with insurgents in Iraq and these suicidal Palestinians.

Supposedly, Egypt has moderated a deal with Hamas to give the kidnapped soldier (the reason this all started), but Israel says they haven't heard about any deal. I think that's a lie, and they just want to have a little more fun. I say go ahead, so far nobody's died, and every Hamas member in Gaza and the West Bank is either hiding or in jail already. Nothing but good so far has come of this.

The Truth About Liberalism: #5 Torture

As many of you may have noticed, I've joined a blogroll that is supporting Torture Awareness Month (the month of June). If you've ever followed my link to that sight, you'll know why this is an important cause. Being on this blogroll has also brought a temporary spike in the number of hits I get from places that aren't Charles City and Minnesota. To be a member of Blogs Against Torture, I have to link to the sight and do a bit on torture during the month of June. I figured this would be a good opportunity for another installment in my The Truth About Liberalism series.

Any liberal or progressive worth his (or her) salt is against torture. It's inhumane, and has been illegal for many years now. In a few wars (Vietnam is what springs to my mind first), the idea that torture is wrong has been what separated us from our enemies and made us the good guys. This was because we didn't torture our prisoners, and we called out the people who did torture theirs. It's always easier to make friends when you're the good guy. The Bush administration has made us the bad guy, though. In the words of Dick C. (our other president), we've gone to "The Dark Side." Now, what credibility do we have if we say that terrorists are a threat to the world because they take hostages and torture them, when we're in fact arresting many people every day and putting them in prisons where they have a good chance of being tortured? Some people will say "But they would do the same or worse if they managed to get one of us." That still doesn't make it right. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: If you have to sink to the enemy's level to win, you didn't win.

Does this mean I (and progressives everywhere) am "soft on terror"? Of course not, terrorists torture people. I'm totally against torture, anarchy, theocracy, you name a terrorist ideal and I'm probably against it. One shouldn't find any of these things in America or being practiced by our forces abroad.

Besides the moral reasons, there are practical reasons not to torture your prisoners.

Reason #1: it makes people hate you. Imagine you've got a normal Arab guy who doesn't like to see Americans exercising their influence in his part of the world, but he also doesn't like the fact that insurgents are killing way more Iraqis than Americans. Then he hears that Americans are torturing and humiliating the guys in their prisons. This Arab decides he has a moral duty to save his fellow Arabs, so he buys an AK and goes to Iraq to join the jihad.

Reason #2: you can't believe anything somebody says during torture. If you were in excruciating pain, and you know you're captors wanted to know the location of a stash of weapons, you'd give them a generic description of an empty warehouse and tell them it was in a seedy part of town. You actually have no idea where the weapons are, and you've told them that, but they didn't believe you.

In short, torture is bad. The U.S. will be paying for it's actions in the middle east for a long time anyway, why make it worse? I encourage you all to read this fact sheet about U.S. torture practices if you haven't already. Terrorists torture, what does that make us?

Whaling

While reading a story about the first good thing George has done for the environment since he took office (that national monument in Hawaii), I followed a link to another story that took away my good mood pretty quickly.

Apparently there's an organization that most countries are a member of (the IWC, I think) that regulates whaling, and in more recent years has mostly just been a platform for certain countries to try and reinstate commercial whaling. The big pro-whaling nations would be Japan, Iceland, and Norway. This is the first year that the pro whalers are expected to have enough votes to reinstate commercial whaling. Of course, being banned hasn't stopped the big three. A loophole allows countries to kill whales for "research." Japan, therefore, does an awful lot of research, harvesting hundreds of mink whales each year, and last year they took 10 endangered fin whales (their quota this year will be 20 or 30). Still, most of the meat from these whales ends up in gourmet restaurants in Japan. I don't see how all this killing is needed for research, many American institutions are constantly learning new things about whales without killing a single one. Iceland exploits the same loophole as Japan, although not quite as extensively, and Norway openly defies this ban, not even trying to cover up it's commercial whaling expeditions.

This just makes me so frustrated, because I'd thought the world had matured to the point where we didn't need to keep killing endangered animals just because they're worth a lot of money, or an outdated cultural tradition. Americans used to have lots of destructive cultural traditions, slavery and Indian hunting among them. Over time, though, we saw that we really shouldn't be doing these things. The fact that there are three small countries that want to keep killing endangered animals (which, I'll point out, would've been hunted off the face of the earth by these three if the rest of us hadn't stopped them) is very selfish and cause for great concern.

This is an ideal situation to put good old American bullying to use. While George is still on this trip that's made him environmentally friendly, he tells Japan (and those Norskies) that under no circumstances are they going to resume whale hunts. And if they don't back down, we bring in the navy. If I was a whaling captain, being buzzed by an American fighter would be enough to make me turn around. If it's not... well, accidents happen when you run weapons checks.

I encourage you all to make a ruckus so that the American government does something to stop this. I myself will be emailing the president about it, the address is president@whitehouse.gov.

Big Setback in the War on Terror

Not really, some people would just like you to think so.

Today, a rebel group with connections to the Islamic court overthrew the warlords governing Somalia. Yes these would be the same warlords responsible for the whole "Blackhawk Down" fiasco, and the same warlords whom everybody but the White House claims have support from the U.S. This support seems to be based on the idea of "We don't care how bad you govern or how many of your own citizens you randomly kill, as long as you keep killing those Islamic wakos." All of this is on top of a provisional government based in Balad (a city a little ways north of Mogadishu), which is technically the real government, and it's not made up of warlords. If Bush really wanted to stabilize the region (which would be the best route to keep terrorists out), wouldn't he support this government intended to do just that, instead of one made up of the warlords who started the civil war 14 years ago?

But any of that's better than a country ruled by Islamic extremists, right? Well, the place hasn't been ruled by Islamic extremists in the recent past, but I'm sure this pack of warlords would give anybody a run for their money. As for the provisional government that might as well not exist, I'm sure it beats extremists hands down. This point is nullified, though, because this new group of victors aren't extremists as far as I can tell. They have connections with Islamic courts (courts that enforce the rules of Islam). I don't know how extreme these courts are, but the few news reports I've read on the issue say that Somalians are a secular people who aren't likely to allow Islamic law to be put in place.

And these guys might not end up running the country. Now, the new set of rebels takes the warlords' place at the negotiating table with the provisional government. Certain people are just getting ahead of themselves when they call this the new government of Somalia.

What I still can't get my head around is how supporting warlords who committed acts of terror against their own people (routinely) is going to help the war on terror. What it does help is the war on Islamic terror. But wait! I thought this wasn't a war against Islam, that the anti-U.S. clerics are just saying that to make trouble! Then you can understand why nobody will admit to taking this tactic to win the war on "terror." If Somalia had large oil reserves, we'd have just as much justification to invade them as we did Iraq, if not more. Saddam Hussein didn't have a government based on Islam, but he was in the right region of the world where most Americans just assume everything is Islamic. One could argue that we're a terrorist state because we supported this carbon copy of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

A group of rebels with ties to Islam wrestling control of a country out of the hands of murderous warlords is not a setback in the war on terror. Rather, it's a setback in George Bush's war on Islam.