Lee on Aug 15 2008 | Filed under: Around the Web
Sometimes you just have to step back and gape at the truly contemptible nature of certain elements of the antiwar movement. It’s incredible how segments of an allegedly pacifist, anti-imperialist movement, have become willing, wholesale and even eager apologists for naked Russian imperialism over the course of a week.
Sphere: Related ContentLee on Jul 30 2008 | Filed under: Foreign affairs, Lee's Page, Uncategorized
(photo: Charles Roffey – Charles & Fred)
Someone once said that in Damascus you truly can get a little bit pregnant. It’s a good aphorism, because if you asked the foreign minister of almost any state in the Middle East or the Mediterranean what his government’s policy relationship was with Syria, he would automatically furrow his brow and call it “complicated.” You always seem to be about half-way somewhere with Syria. Lately that appears to be true even for Tzipi Livni. If so for Israel, doubly so for Lebanon.
Surveying it, Jihad Yazigi describes the situation that exists between the two countries as customarily “complicated”, but the dimension of complication he’s seeing is something relatively new. Where before thirty years of Syrian military occupation (and often not very covert political subversion) might be the most obvious locus, Yazigi is today talking about labor and direct investment in Syria by Lebanese:
Syria would probably not be liberalizing its economy and going through a revival of its services sector without the thousands of Lebanese managers that are running Syrian firms. Lebanese managerial know-how is being exported throughout the Arab world and Syria will continue to need it if it wants to further the opening up of its economy.
(The Syria Report)
That’s a very new economic relationship, as historically it is Syrian labor that has traveled to liberal and cosmopolitan Beirut. It is Syrian enterprise that has worked to create a paternalistic relationship between the two countries with one-way investment, generally government directed.
Sphere: Related ContentLee on Mar 01 2008 | Filed under: Around the Web
From a somewhat shocking interview of Victor Davis Hanson by Swiss newspaper Junge Freiheit, Abe Greenwald clips a portion where Hanson ferociously thrashes the contemporary European Weltanschuuang. He calls it a secularized, socialist pacifism, that has deluded a continent into a perilously ephemeral sense of pride and “arrogance.” The degree and form of the animosity exhibited by Hanson is so striking, that it is actually evocative of the antagonistic criticism of the United States we hear so often from the European intelligentsia. Because of that, one is reminded that however much Europeans bemoan American indifference or dismissal of their views and values, it is very rare indeed that anyone dishes them back some of their own rhetorical excess in such similarly adversarial terms.
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