President Bush Flips The Bird

THE PROBLEM that all we pajama-clad commentators share is simple. We don’t have a clue what is going on. Are we winning or losing in Iraq? We just don’t know.

President Bush emphasized that on Tuesday when he flipped the bird at everyone: at the MSM, at his critics, and at Iraq.

He told the mainstream media what he thought about them by embarking them on a bus to Camp David and then telling them that he, Bush, wasn’t going to be there. He flipped the bird to his critics by staying the course. And he flipped the bird to the Iraqis by taking over Baghdad Airport to secure it for Air Force One, and by showing up unannounced at a meeting with Prime Minister al-Maliki. Finally, he addressed a group of our military and demonstrated that he fully enjoys their confidence. It was quite a performance.

But at least when the president acts, you can read a tea-leaf or two. The announcement that, on the request of Mr. al-Maliki, combined Iraqi and Coalition forces would start sweeps of Baghdad to secure the capital, starting immediately, raises an immediate question.

Why wait until now?

The answer is pretty clear. The U.S. must have refused to help secure the capital until the Iraqis stopped squabbling and put a government in place, complete with Defense and Interior Ministers. Sorry, old chum, they must have said. We’re not coming into the capital until you guys get your act together. It must have been a powerful incentive, because the whole world was wailing like a banshee that Baghdad was descending into anarchy. Do something, they cried! Sure, said Bush. After you guys form a government.

Of course, President Bush is right. Elections, shmelections. Real legitimacy is secured by a government that can quell enemies, foreign and domestic. It does no good for the US to do everything. The new Iraqi government must prove it deserves to rule by routing the terrorists: Saddamite, Al-Qaeda, and local militias. Otherwise the mantle of political power in Iraq will fall to someone else.

But the cavalier Bush acts this week also demonstrate that, as of now, the new Iraqi government is a mere US puppet. Hopefully that will change and in a year a confident Iraqi government will tell the US to get out.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

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E. G. West, Education and the State

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