The EU have proposals under consideration that would, among other things, criminalize “xenophobic” speech. The define “xenophobia” as aversion to individuals based on “race, colour, descent, religion or belief, national or ethnic origin”.

1. Does this mean that it would be illegal for Euro politicians and activist groups to put forth their complaints about American “imperialism”, “hegemony”, etc., which are based largely in general antipathy toward the United States?
2. Does this outlaw Euroskepticism? That’s a kind of xenophobia, isn’t it?
3. Does it mean that the British would no longer be able to legally hate and make fun of the French, the French the Germans, the Austrians everyone, and everyone the Spanish?

My guess is that it wouldn’t do any of those things; they define xenophobia as aversion to “individuals”. It seems that you could still legally hate an entire nation.

The most interesting question, should this tripe actually become law, will be #3 above. If an EU citizen who speaks one language hates another who speaks a different language, is that xenophobia, or just a colorful regional prejudice, like a Londoner thinking Geordies are idiots?

I came across two interesting articles in The Guardian today, written by a Brit living in Montgomery County, Maryland. The first is about the requirement, for prospective driver’s licensees in Maryland, to attend a drugs-and-alcohol education course. The second is about Montgomery County’s attempts to regulate smoking in private homes. Both are interesting, and illustrative of why I won’t live in that state.

Aside: Santa Claus has been stricken from the holiday program in one Montgomery County town, too, after a couple of people complained that Jolly Old St. Nick made them “uncomfortable”. John Ashcroft makes me uncomfortable, can we do something about that? (Note, 3 December: Santa actually did show up in the end, and was welcomed by all. There was even some great footage on local Washington TV of several Santas attacking someone who was there spouting anti-Semitic gibberish with a bullhorn.)

According to the BBC, “Middle Eastern countries have voiced concern” that the U.S. may start bombing Iraq soon as the next move in the War Against Evil.

I think that the middle-east should just shut the hell up. In the end, bombing, the removal of Saddam Hussein from power, and the subsequent lifting of U.N. sanctions are the best things that could happen to Iraq. For the U.S. and U.N. to capitulate and lift the sanctions while Iraq remains defiant would seriously damage their credibility, and for the Iraqi government to back down now after ten years of refusing to submit to the will of the U.N. would probably be fatal. Whether the sanctions were the right course or not is another matter — but in any case it’s clear that they’re not working, and to leave them in place is probably ultimately more damaging than bombs.

The U.N and “peace” have been given, as John Lennon suggested, their chance. Unfortunately, this approach has not worked. Working through the U.N. rather than through puppet governments have not stopped middle-eastern regimes from calling for “Death to the United States.” Decades of negotiations, sanctions, summits, and study have not made the middle-east or Iraq any more stable or less xenophobic. A few years of war in the 1940s, on the other hand, set Germany and Japan on the paths that led to them becoming two of the world’s wealthiest, most powerful nations. Ten years on from V-E day, Porsche was again building Le Mans-winning cars in Stuttgart. Ten years on from V-J day, Sony was producing the world’s first transistor radio in Tokyo. Ten years on from the end of the Gulf War, Iraq is still wallowing in its own crapulence.

In her article in today’s Guardian headlined The hierarchy of death, Anne Karpf complains that too much money is being spent on identifying the dead in the rubble of the World Trade Center. Her first paragraph:

They say death is a great leveller. They’re wrong. Inequality pursues us after life too. Consider Ground Zero. While international attention has shifted to Afghanistan, the vast project of body-part retrieval in Lower Manhattan is probably the most exorbitant expenditure on the dead in our lifetime, and yet remains almost entirely exempt from criticism or debate. Ground Zero has been cordoned off, not only physically, but also politically and financially, though it’s a provocative message to the rest of the world, where death comes cheaper.

Ms. Karpf goes on to ask “How does it feel to the rest of the world to see the care lavished on the parings of American bodies in death, such as no complete third world body ever receives in life?”

Simultaneously, the article hints that it’s wasteful for the U.S. to take this kind of (expensive) care in identifying its dead, while suggesting that the same care would be nice to have in “developing” countries.

It seems to me that the “developing” countries are free to do what they like with their dead without fear of interference from the United States. If these “developing” countries have not yet found a way to make enough money to make mass DNA tests — or decent hospitals, or whatever else it is that they’re lacking — possible, perhaps that, and not some moral failing of the United States, is the problem.

Another book I’ve been reading recently is dot.bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath, by David Kuo. It’s an insider’s story of Value America. Value America, in case you missed it, was to be an on-line Wal-Mart, a purveyor of everything under the sun. It wound up crashing and burning in a remarkably short time as a result, it seems, of the founder’s inability to build and run a business of this sort.

I haven’t yet finished reading the thing, so my characterization of the company may be incorrect. What I’ve read so far certainly mirrors my experience at other 1990s startups, though. The book teaches the valuable lesson that sometimes the emperor indeed has no clothes. Corporate culture, particularly startup corporate culture, tends to revolve around this worship of the founder and CEO. In some cases, where a giant, profitable company has been built out of nothing — Microsoft is one good example — this might be justified. But a lot of the founders and CEOs being revered within their little corporate worlds for their “talent” and “vision” have neither. This is an important thing to know.

The other day, I picked up a book called Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. Amazingly, it finds that companies that focus on their products and customers produce the greatest returns for shareholders. On the other hand, companies that focus on delivering higher returns to shareholders, well, usually don’t. It’s a matter of defining your output: does the company produce widgets, or does it produce itself? Too many public companies, egged on by unrealistic demands of the securities markets, seem to regard their stock as their primary product; whatever it is they actually do in order to make money is merely an inconvenient part of the stock-manufacturing process, its costs to be cut ruthlessly in the name of short-term profits.

For some reason, this reminded me of an article by Jonathan Rauch in the New Republic a while back called Law and Disorder. The article is about Hidden Law, and how a lot of things, like sexual harassment or “hate speech”, are fundamentally ill-suited to being regulated or eliminated by formal law. Rauch’s (excellent) thesis is that these things must be dealt with by hidden law, which is really nothing more than a fancy term for mutually-agreed social convention.

In the article, on the subject of the law’s struggles to handle something it’s innately not designed to deal with, he says:

Then you get Bureaucratic Legalism: the notion that if you get the process right, the outcome must also be right. Outside of the legal system, people realized years ago that red tape, in the form of rules and hearings and paperwork, does not ensure sensible outcomes.

That’s the subtitle of an article by Malcolm Gladwell that appeared in The New Yorker in October. It’s now almost two months old, but I’ve found myself in that time referring to it in conversation a lot, so it’s probably worth a read.

Gladwell — author of The Tipping Point as well as a lot of insightful and interesting articles — explores the connection between increasing security and enforcement and the actions of those who seek to (or succeed in) getting around that security.

He does manage to fall for the How-did-terrorists-get-those-knives-on-board idiocy (remember that on September 11, carrying Stanley knives onto an airplane was acceptable), but this is not a fatal flaw.

According to CNN, Iraqi U.N. Ambassador Mohammad al-Douri has said that unless sanctions against his country are lifted, “We will not permit … weapons inspectors. We have nothing to inspect.”

It’s safe to assume that the U.S. isn’t going to think much of lifting sanctions, and it’s probably safe to assume that Iraq would still tell the U.S. to go to hell with its inspections even if sanctions were lifted.

So I’d look for a repeat of this sentiment directly from Baghdad, and bombing soon after; assuming that the dance partners face no delays due to Iran or the Saudis (see below).

Persian Gulf Prognostication

It’s been the subject of speculation ever since September 11, but now official word is starting to come out that Iraq will soon be a U.S. target.

This isn’t at all surprising or particularly interesting. For the last ten years, the United States has been fighting an extremely low-grade war against Iraq, and Saddam Hussein has been regularly sending up balloons of invective against us. What’s interesting is what a stronger and more active anti-Iraq American posture implies now about the political situations in Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Bush père was not a moron; neither were Colin Powell and the other people who ran the war against Iraq in 1991. Yet it would seem that the United States pulled out of Iraq in direct opposition to the Weinberger Doctrine (later and now called the “Powell Doctrine”). The Weinberger Doctrine, born of the mistakes of Viet Nam, calls for the U.S. to, among other things, commit massive resources, clearly define its objectives, and sustain the commitment to meet those objectives, before engaging in military action.

It therefore seems evident that a U.S. movement against the current Iraqi régime indicates imminent political upheaval in either Iran or Saudi Arabia or possibly both. Either Iraq must be dealt with and the U.S. will therefore mount covert action to mitigate the latent threats in its powerful neighbors to the north and south, or the situations in Teheran and Riyadh have shifted sufficiently that Saddam Hussein has outlived his usefulness to the United States.

Watch for U.S. action against Iraq and revolution in Iran to happen in the same week. There’s not enough information around — news from Iran has completely dried up in the last few days — for me to predict which will happen first.

There is an article in The National Review Online that echoes a lot of the things I said a couple of weeks ago about federalism. A short quote:

In August, Mr. [Drug-Czar designate Asa] Hutchinson told the Washington Post he would enforce the federal ban because he wanted to “send the right signal” on medical marijuana. In other words, the best explanation of the DEA’s war on medical marijuana is symbolism.