US Commits Murder--So Say The Usual Suspects

Late yesterday afternoon the White House issued a revision of the "Osama Meets The SEALs" narrative.  Almost instantly the usual suspects sprang into action with denunciations of the US as a criminal enterprise.  The High Minded and Lofty Thinking protectors of human rights ranging from the ever present UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, all the way to German ex-chancellor Helmut Schmidt and assorted human rights lawyers and activists have alleged that the US commandos engaged in flat out assassination in violation of international law.

One man, the UN Special Rapporteur for human rights and fundamental freedoms, Martin Scheinin, a Finnish lawyer who has leveled criticisms against the US and its war on terror in the past, swam against the prevailing current.  In Sheinin's view the US did not violate international law but rather strengthened it by having used a means which provided bin Laden with the possibility of surrendering.  Scheinin takes the rational position that had bin Laden "raised the white flag" he would have avoided being killed on the spot.

Scheinin is right and the others, the legions of those High Minded and Lofty Thinking folks whose hearts have been blighted by the idea that Osama bin Laden is dead, are wrong.  The SEALs are tightly disciplined and very highly trained professional warriors who would have accepted any affirmative sign of surrender on the part of bin Laden.  The mere fact that he gave no such signal--which need be no more complex than raising the hands--in the context of armed resistance by others is sufficient.  Absent a clear and unambiguous sign of submission (something at which any Muslim should be well accomplished),  the man or men present were well within the limits of legal requirement and mission briefing alike to push the delete key on the terrorist leader.

In one of the cited articles, the Asia director for Human Rights Watch demanded that "law enforcement" procedures should apply in situations such as that in the bin Laden compound.  It is unclear just what might be meant by the words chosen, but it is doubtful that any law enforcement personnel facing an identical situation with a known criminal gang engaged in armed resistance would have acted other than did the SEALs.  The HRW executive missed the point--in a context of armed resistance, when facing a man with known propensities for resistance, an individual is compelled to use deadly force unless there is a clear, unmistakable sign of surrender.

While it may bother those whose lives are so orderly and well protected that they have never had to make the sort of decisions made by either special forces troops or law enforcement personnel, the reality is as Mr Scheinin inferred in his assessment: The onus is on the person facing arrest to surrender.  In short, Osama bin Laden chose to die rather than submit, a course of action in keeping with his life philosophy and religious ideology.

Helmut Schmidt among others drew a series of incorrect analogies from history.  For example, opponents of the American action have invoked both the Nuremberg trials and that of Slobodan Milosevic as the paradigms for the handling of Osama bin Laden.  Neither is apposite.  The senior Nazi officials as well as the one-time Serbian jefe grande surrendered without a struggle.  There you have it.  Had Osama bin Laden simply held up his hands as the aforementioned war criminals did, he would be alive and well right now in US custody.

Other critics such as Geoffrey Robertson, a well known Australian human rights lawyer, alleged that justice was not done in the case of Osama bin Laden.  Mr Robertson is of the view that justice can only be done by the process of arrest, trial, conviction, and punishment.  He is wrong.  Justice came as a swift and shocking event to Osama in a way quite similar to the manner in which death came for some three thousand people on 9/11.  Actual justice would have required that Osama bin Laden experience the same horrid dread of the inevitable that afflicted the last moments of those on the doomed airliners.

One can only hope that he did.

Is The World's First "No-Sail" Zone Coming Soon?

Last year the seagoing thugs of the Somali coast took and held a record number of mariners hostage--1,016 according to the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Center.  That is up from 867 the previous year and 815 in 2008.

During the same period of time, the average duration of captivity increased.  So also did the ransom demands.  And, due to presumed impatience on the part of the pirates, the captive sailors were subjected to ever increasing degrees of deprivation as well as flat out torture.

It should be recalled that over the same stretch of time the naval opposition (to use the term generically only) to the pirates increased greatly.  It became such an in thing to do that even Iran dispatched a ship or two to operate against the skiff riding marauders of Somalia.

Despite the occasional success, occasions which have become somewhat more numerous of late largely due to the muscular efforts of some individual navies, such as that of India, the balance of power continues to favor the pirates.  There are several reasons for this, but all can be resolved to the lack of resolve on the part of the world's greater maritime powers to be deadly serious about the Somali menace to navigation.

A few weeks ago the Norwegian shipping magnate Jacob Stoll-Nielsen raised a mini-storm of disapproval when he proposed that only a "shoot-on-sight" policy would dissuade the seagoing bandits.  It seems that his approach might impair the pirates' human rights.  There was a time, not that long ago, when the general principle of law involving pirates was simple, straight forward, and universally accepted: The pirate was defined as the common enemy of mankind to be hunted down without mercy wherever and whenever encountered.  There were niceties regarding the specifics of jurisdiction; all seafaring nations were presumed to have equal claim to the pirates' bodies.

The recent tactic employed by the Somalis of using captured ships, usually fishing vessels, as "motherships" has expanded their range as far as the coastal waters of India.  This has stretched the defensive forces far beyond any reasonable limit and placed far more ships at risk.  It has also nullified the initial excuse offered by pirates and their landlubber apologists, that they were merely simple, unemployed fishermen seeking alternative sources of livelihood.  It also puts an end to the later justification: The pirates were really Somali coastguards seeking recompense for illegal foreign fishing and waste dumping.

As shipowners and operators refuse to see that their long-term interests are best served by refusing to play the ransom game and the Deep Thinkers of assorted maritime power government worry about the fine points of jurisdiction and the risks which might attend the use of more robust measures, there is another player in the game as yet unheard from.  That so far silent player is the group with the most at risk--the sailors.

An unfortunate reality is the long standing invisibility of the merchant sailor.  Even in past years when many merchant mariners were citizens of Western countries, they were ignored in the main, cast into the general darkness of dockside scum, wharf rats, transients without home, hearth, or political influence.  Shipowners and operators exploited them without end or mercy.  Even governmental bodies with legal responsibilities for their health and safety were more often negligent than attentive.

In recent years the vast majority of merchant marine personnel are from impoverished Third World countries. While officers may hail from more advanced nations, often old components of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, the rest, the men who in the days of sail would have been called, "before the mast," are from deeply poor parts of the Third World.  This means that nobody, no government, no shipowner, no ship operator, no marine insurance company, no entity of potency and influence is on the side of the guys who take the risks passing through the ever expanding area of Somali pirate hazard.

As the true tales of torture pass through the ranks of merchant sailors, there is an expectable consequence.  Men are increasingly unwilling to run the gauntlet of pirates.  They are more and more reluctant to spend days with their testicles wrapped around their throats with the fear of pirate seizure ever present.  They are most assuredly unwilling to spend months as "guests" of the marauders.

While shipowners and operators willingly, if grudgingly, submit to increased insurance premiums, they are reluctant without exception to pay an equivalent bonus to crew members.  This is typical.  Historically the owners and operators of ships have done whatever they could to reduce the manning costs of their vessels--even if such put the crew at direct physical risk.

While there may always be men desperate enough to accept any degree of hazard for the less than splendid pay which is the merchant sailor's normal state, the problems of manning vessels transiting the pirate zone are increasing--and will continue to do so.  The point is coming in the not too distant future when trade, important, very valuable trade, will be impaired significantly by a lack of crews.  The economic costs to both Europe and the Western Hemisphere will be large.  Very large if the tankers outbound from the Persian Gulf terminals are hit by crew shortages.

A forward looking policy (which has been long needed and avoided for just as long) must focus on abating the pirates for once and all.  The use of the "motherships" has, as one observer put it, "industrialized" the piracy process.  This implies that the current naval efforts must be focused upon taking out the "motherships" regardless of risk to the captive crew members on board these unfortunate ships.  The identities and locations of the "motherships" is not a mystery to the international flotilla assembled in the vast expanse of threatened ocean.  Nor do the assorted warships lack the means necessary to neutralize the offensive nautical vipers nests.

Of course, the pirates should be given the chance to surrender.  When they don't (and the probability of peaceful outcome will grow slimmer over time) they must be captured or killed.  This means the high probability of innocent victims being killed as well.  That must be accepted as unavoidable collateral damage, the same as with civilians caught in the crossfire.

A robust (which is to say, effective) approach also requires the country of the capturing warship has responsibility for providing judicial and incarceration services to the "arrested" pirates.  As international law as well as national statutes already provide for this, the only consequence of note is expense.  But, that expense must be measured against the commercial detriment of a slow down in seaborne trade.

The adoption of a robust approach should be assessed against such endeavors as the current UN sponsored operations in Libya and the Ivory Coast.  In the case of the latter country, even if the present French/UN effort to oust Gbagbo proves successful, the result will be one more failed African state.  In Libya, there is no more reason to be optimistic about the outcome in the foreseeable future.

In comparison, the successful neutralization of the pirates of Somalia will be clearcut and favorable.  The tipping point will come soon.  Either the maritime countries of the world will turn their navies loose to the detriment of the pirates, or the area will become a "no-sail" zone due to the refusal of sailors to sign on to ships transiting the hazard zone.

While the choice is between self-interest and assorted feel good propositions regarding the presumed human rights of Somali gunslingers and should be easy to make, the ground truth of today is simply that Western political leaders are too timid to prefer national interest to fending off the accusations of advocacy groups without any responsibilities or real world constituency.  Such is life in the glorious 21st Century!

Two Opposing World Views: Rights Versus Duties

"Endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights..."  In this phrase Thomas Jefferson not only proved himself to be a master propagandist but also a fine epitomizer of the Enlightenment idea which was deeply rooted not only in Christianity but the Hebraic seedbed from which the Christian tree grew.  Stop and think about the phrase for a moment for the focus on rights serves to define one side of the greatest, deepest, widest, and most unbridgeable gap between the West and Islam.

The foundational idea which emerged centuries ago in the Hebrew faith is that of free will.  The deity provided human beings with free will, the right to choose.  The right to choose, to either accept the grace, mercy, and gifts of the deity as well as the obligations imposed by the deity or, to reject the deity.  In a slightly different form, free will existed so that humans would have the ability, the right to sin as well as the right to repent.

Free will as part and parcel of the human condition has significance only insofar as the individual has both the capacity and freedom to decide, to choose.  This capacity coupled with the freedom necessary to exercise it constitutes the most basic right of all--the right to decide.

From this beginning the concept of inherent rights, rights which accrued to humans simply as a consequence of being born, grew to include not only the famed trio listed in the Declaration of Independence--life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but the plethora of rights which must exist so that humans could pursue that elusive and subjectively defined condition called "happiness."

The concept of people being imbued with rights by the deity is resident in Christianity from its earliest days.  So is the notion of happiness.  Jesus spoke of a deity who was not a remote, judgmental "father" but rather a kind and indulgent "dad" who very much wanted humans to enjoy, to have fun in the Earth over which man had been granted "dominian."  Jesus enjoyed eating.  He enjoyed drinking in the company of tax collectors and fishermen.  He went to weddings and presumably danced there along with the other guests.  In short, the behavior and words of Jesus bespoke of choosing, of having the right to pursue happiness, of having the right to liberty, the freedom to live and enjoy life.

Rights bring with them the companion necessity of duties.  Duties or obligations derive from the existence of rights, most particularly the right to choose.  When one looks at the history of law in the West, examines how the law has evolved over the generations, a conclusion is evident.  Duties emerged so as to assure that all could exercise their manifold rights freely and without fear.  Duty exists to protect the more fundamental feature of life: rights.  The rights with which humans have been endowed demand the handmaiden of duty.

Indeed the polity and its instrument, government, exist because humans have the right to choose.  Since it is inevitable that some humans will choose not to execute the duties incumbent upon them by virtue of the rights with which they have been endowed, the government must intervene to protect the rights of others against the individual's failure of duty.

Historically it was a simple and direct line: deity to free will, to right to choose, to ever broader rights all accompanied with commensurate duties and, finally, the justification of the state by the requirement that the freedom of the individual to exercise rights does not lead to license, to the absence of duty.  To the Jews, to the Christians, to the sons of the Enlightenment, the existence of rights and the direct linkage of rights with duties was not only self-evident but the sign of a deity directly involved in the nature of the human condition.

Islam has a diametrically opposed view.  The sacred literature of Islam makes clear that the deity has imposed duties on humans.  That the relationship of deity and human demands the human to submit to the duties placed upon him by the deity.  The submission is total.  Every bit as total as the breadth of Islam's authority over all aspects of human life, human society, the human condition, and the material universe.  There is no reference to endowed rights in the sacred writings of Islam.  Put bluntly but accurately, there is no such referent as divinely endowed rights resident in Islam.

While tortured arguments can and have been made which purport to demonstrate the process by which divinely imposed duties lead to rights, the logic is not as clear, simple, and accurate as the rights demand duties contention of the West.  Duties lead only to duties.  Duties also lead to doubts regarding whether or not the individual has adequately and completely performed his duties.  This second consideration can become of greatest importance when evaluating the nature of so-called "radical extremists" and the processes by which these people develop.

There was a time--centuries ago--when Islam made genuflections before the idea of free will and the right to choose.  At one time Islam maintained that the individual believer had to exercise personal judgement in matters of faith, doctrine, and praxis.  But, over time in an insensible fashion, this concept of personal judgement became attenuated.  Finally, it resolved itself to selecting which of the long established and well respected schools of theological jurisprudence one would affiliate.  This process became in practice choosing which local cleric one would follow.

There are a couple of ground truths you have to get a grip on before going further.  The first is Islam means "submission," that is, the total submission of the good slave to the will of the master, in this case the divine creator.  The will of the deity is transmitted through human instruments.  Whether the Prophet Mohammad or an established cleric or the collective of clerics, the human instrument interprets and explains the will of the deity to the community of believers.  The role of the believer is to accept and act upon the message provided by Prophet or cleric or the tradition of theological jurisprudence represented by that cleric.  Hear and obey.

All law comes from the deity through the several human instruments.  This means that insofar as the polity and its manifestation, the government, have legitimacy it is limited to passing and administering laws which apply the revealed will of the deity to a particular time and place.

The Western concept of the role of the government is antipodal to the Islamic ideal.  In the West the polity and its government are legitimate in their actions when and only when these acts serve to reinforce duties and thus protect the free exercise of the divinely imbued rights of the individual.  The government exists to backstop the general concept of rights occasioned duties to meet particular requirements of time and place as well as to accept the reality that humans are imperfect and likely to fail in fulfilling their inherent duties.  The state exists as a melancholy recognition that humans can and do choose to "sin."

OK, bucko, to summarize.  In the Western tradition derived from Hebrew and Christian roots and expanded by the Enlightenment and its follow-ons, rights are inherent to the individual but demand the performance of certain duties so that the rights of all can be exercised freely.  In Islam there is only duty.  There is only submission, total and abject obedience to the will of the deity as interpreted and set forth by human instruments.  There is no such thing as a "right" divine in origin or otherwise.  And, if there are no "rights" accruing to a Muslim, then infidels have no "rights" and even greater duties.

One more point deserves brief consideration before shifting from the general to a few specific examples of the vast gulf between Western rights and Islamic duties.  Both the Western and Islamic practice of jurisprudence rely upon applying universal principles--whether from sacred writings or human made laws and constitutions--to specific matters of fact.

A Western appellate or supreme court (or a Jewish Talmudic judicial body) makes a good faith effort to divine the intentions, purposes, and goals of the authors of the Constitution and amendments to a particular case with specific facts, facts which may have been utterly inconceivable to the original writers.  The judges and justices have some latitude in their translation effort, but are expected to refrain from exercises in creative non-fiction, that is rewriting the original document to meet the predilections of judge or the prejudices of time and place.

The judges or justices may lean to the strict constructionist pole of the spectrum of interpretation.  Or the individual may tilt to the opposite end of the continuum, the pole marked "living document."  As courts at all levels are political bodies and not immune to the winds of public opinion, the courts may veer from one pole to another as times or context changes, but overall the courts must stay within the parameters of precedent or run the very real risk of losing legitimacy in the eyes of the public.  The dynamic tension has resulted historically in jurisprudence which shifts over time but shifts slowly, cautiously, and in a way which allows stability and predictability in the application of law.

The Islamic view of jurisprudence places the greatest weight on precedent.  In a real way the several major schools of theological jurisprudence (and all jurisprudence must be theological in Islamic societies) can be characterized as strict constructionist, more strict constructionist, very strict constructionist and impossibly strict constructionist.  As a result even the most "liberal," most "living document" oriented of the schools, the strict constructionist one, does everything conceivable to "let the decision stand," which is to say fit the facts of a case into an intellectual bed of Procrustes designed and constructed in and for the ways of living in the Arabian Peninsula more than a thousand years ago.  Within the two most "conservative" schools, the temptation simply to lop off the inconvenient and unpleasant facts is irresistible.  That means repress new developments of whatsoever nature when these cannot be fitted on the ancient Arabic framework.

Whew!  That's it for the basics.  The very quick course in the roots of rights and duties in two opposing civilizations is done.  Short, even brutally short, but not inaccurate.

Now for some specifics of contrast.  Let's start with sex.  It is a good place to kick off, since all religions seem to be fixated on bodies thwacking together in a pool of sweat, other sticky liquids, and passion.

No, bucko, we aren't going to pop into the bedroom.  That is too much for the Geek's aging blood pressure.  We are going to start with the public presentation of women.  That's fair.  It is where all sex starts.

In the West a woman has the right to present herself in public in whatsoever way she believes shows her to her best advantage.  She has an untrammeled right to dress, to use makeup, to style her hair however she wants, however she believes will meet her needs and goals for the moment.  In exchange men have the right to an  aesthetic experience.  They have the right to whatever imaginings might result from encountering an attractive woman who presents herself well.

At the same time the man has a duty not to act upon his imaginings in an untoward or improper way.  He has a duty to limit his behavior, to control the hormones regardless of the visual provocation and the resultant fantasies.  If the man fails in his duty--as some will--the state has the obligation to intervene, to punish the man's failure of duty.  That is the job of the state.  It must act in order that women generally may exercise their inherent right to present themselves however they may choose.

The matter is rather different in an Islamic context, particularly one where the more austere and repressive schools of theological jurisprudence reign supreme.  In the sacred writings of Islam, the deity imposes the duty of modest dress on both men and women.  Over the centuries the more severe and austere human interpreters of this duty have defined it to mean that women must be placed in all encompassing garbage bags so as to prevent lust from bursting forth in the minds (and other body parts) of men.  The woman has the sole duty to protect men from their own presumed inability to control their twangers.  The fact that this duty reduces women to perambulating interchangeable lumps without personal identity or freedom is frankly irrelevant.

In the West a woman has the right to choose with whom she will publicly associate.  She has the right to walk down the street with a male coworker, a male friend, a suitor, or anyone (or no one) else.  Again the man, the coworker, the fellow student, the friend has an affirmative duty not to transgress the limits of the non-intimate relationship.  Even the suitor, a potential intimate, has the duty not to go over the edge of what the woman considers to be proper behavior.  Should the man fail in his duty, the government has the obligation to intervene, to punish in order that the general right of all women to select their company may be protected.

Not so in Islam.  The woman has the duty to not appear in public with a man who is not either her husband or a close relative.  She has no right in this matter only duty.

(Yes, it is true that Christianity has exhibited a similar sense of female "duty."  But that came long after the life and death of Jesus.  It was in large measure the artifact of a Church Doctor who was scared to death of his own sexual nature, his own "tumescence."  His own fears offloaded the responsibility on women and the preposterous invention of "original sin" which contended that the surrender of Eve to the smooth talking serpent constituted a rebellion against the deity subsequently transmitted like mitochondrial DNA down the generations.)

In the US as in the West generally people have the right to pursue happiness.  We have the right to have fun.  The Christian roots of the West acknowledge this, even celebrate it.  We can listen to music, participate in or watch sports.  Go to the movies.  Watch television.  Whatever constitutes "fun."

Not so in the more severe and austere parts of Islam.  As the Ayatollah Khomeini famously said, "There is no fun in Islam."  Certainly Taliban, al-Shabaab and other groups advocating violent political Islam agree.  There is a sound foundation for this in the sacred writings of Islam such as the Prophet's prohibition of musical instruments and singing.

Beyond the specific prohibition there is the general duty that all Muslims spend every waking moment possible contemplating the will of the deity, the duties owed the deity, and the requirements of being the perfect slave of the deity.  Music, sports, movies, all these other forms of fun are distractions from the basic duties of determining and obeying the will of the deity, of being the full and complete slave of the creator or the universe and all life.  The total absence of diversions is inherent to Islam--at least as interpreted by some of the deity's human instruments.

There is another, far more critical duty imposed on all Muslims, all members of the ummah.  This is the duty of perfect conformity.  Islam fears disunity.  Islam fears internal divisions.  It fears, therefore, all debate, all disagreement, all dissension.  Inherent to the sacred writings as well as the life of the Prophet, the "perfect man" is the duty to impose perfect uniformity upon all members of the faith community.

Nothing could be at a greater distance from the traditions of the West.  The right to dissent, to disagree, to oppose is a defining hallmark of the West generally and the US in particular.  The right of free expression is specified in the Constitution and well recognized by the courts.  As was true with the recent Westboro Baptist Church case, expression of even the most obnoxious and wounding sort is protected jealously.  The right to hold and express even highly unpopular and distressing views is foundational.  It is also a key to evolution in political, social, cultural, economic, and technological thought and deed.

In some Islamic contexts the dissident, the person standing in opposition to those in power, is subject to dreadful punishments as an apostate, even as one in rebellion against the deity.  Signs of discontent, of dissent, must be stomped on and stamped out lest the faith community be divided against itself.  Whereas in the West dissent and opposition are signs of positive change, in at least some Muslim contexts they are perceived as emblems of evil, refusal to be submissive to the will of the deity as interpreted by the clerics with power.

It is undoubtedly the case that the overwhelming majority of Muslims like their counterparts in Christianity and Judaism wear their religion lightly.  They follow the Five Pillars, perhaps renounce the temptations of John Barleycorn, dress modestly but reject the garbage sack, and are discrete in their sexuality but do not go the entire duty route.  Yes, it may be true, but, unfortunately for the world, it is also irrelevant.

The True Believers of Islam, the men who follow the lead of the most strict constructionist and impossibly strict constructionist schools of theological jurisprudence, the men who desperately fear the wrath of the deity, the fires of the pit, are the men who set the agenda for political Islam both violent and otherwise.  These are the men who take the duty of offensive jihad most seriously.  They are the men who are willing to die in fulfilling this duty--provided they can kill a suitable number of infidels, apostates, or the merely unfortunate in the process.  These men, the men who proudly proclaim they love death more than we infidels love life, are the fountainheads of terror, fear, war.

Their sense of duty.  Their commitment to the duty of offensive jihad like their dedication to the other duties serves to define Islam in the minds of most of us in the West.  These men are the enemy.  But what gives them a power far greater than their numbers may merit is the simple fact that they can invoke the pervasive sense of duty which is inherent to the religion.

It has often been stated that rights without duties leads to degenerate license.  That is true historically.  Equally true in the historical record is the blunt fact that duties without commensurate rights leads to fatal extremism which harms not only the target but the faith community which produces the attacks.

Rights must be balanced with duties.  So also must duties be balanced by rights.  The West has gotten the balance right.  Islam has not.  Unless and until Islam does address this reality effectively, the conflict of civilizations will continue and grow.  The responsibility rests with Muslims, particularly those Muslims who are not True Believers in the duty of offensive jihad.

Back To Playing The Human Rights Card

The Obama administration in the person of Secretary of State Hilary Clinton has moved human rights back into play in the Great Game with China.  This, of course, is a reversal of the earlier stance underscored by Ms Clinton in her remark early on in the Obama years that human rights would not be allowed to "interfere" in our relations with the Trolls of Beijing.

There is no doubt that the new emphasis on human rights pleases the folks on the Left.  In addition to the domestic benefits of rediscovering that the Trolls are willing to repress any and all dissent, raising the issue of how the Chinese regime treats its citizens allows the US to attempt the insertion of a wedge between the more or less reform minded Trolls such as prime minister Wen Jiabao and the high command of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA.)  Such a wedge may prove beneficial to American interests next year when the five year term of the rather weak and pathetic President Hu comes to an end.

While that possibility exists it is too slight a reed to support any significant US policy regarding China.  To put it bluntly but not inaccurately, the leadership of the Han tribe is not overly concerned with the views of the US or any other barbarian state in the amorphous area of human rights.

The reason for this is simple.  The cohesion of the Han tribe is the absolute centrality of Chinese society, polity, and economy.  For centuries the structural integrity of the Han has been seen as the cause of Chinese success and, conversely, any cracks in that integrity have been held responsible for Chinese failures.  The social and political compact between rulers and ruled hinges on the capacity of the rulers to insist upon cohesion and the willingness of the ruled to accept cheerfully and fully the imposed collective integrity.

A member of the Han tribe who rejects or demurs from the requirements of cohesiveness has placed himself outside the tribe if not in opposition to it.  The non-Han who happens to live in China, who perforce is a subject of the Han, has no voice in the matter.  The role of the non-Han (roughly ten percent of the population) is to accept his lot in silence, grateful for whatever crumbs fall from the master's table while showing always a willingness to obey his betters.  (Perhaps the non-Han can take some comfort from the fact that he lives within the Central Empire and not among the denizens of the outer darkness, the assorted barbarians of the world.)

The Han view is not one of recent origin.  It has typified Chinese thinking for a long, long while.  The notion of the Han as superior, of China as the Central Empire, was well developed back when the British were painting themselves blue and burning captives in wickerwork cages, since the days when Rome was a hick village on only one hill.  The idea of the Han tribe, of the cohesion of the Han as central to the success or failure of China, has a long and honored history.

It is not surprising that the constellation of ideas which comprise the concept of the Han tribe and its necessary cohesion based on a compact binding rulers and ruled in a web of collective obligations has brought in its wake a large measure of xenophobia, a larger measure of supremacist ideology, and a hefty amount of indifference to the human rights of non-Han or the Han so ill-advised as to dissent from the imperatives of the tribe.

More than any other institution in China, the PLA is the custodian of the most robust expressions of Han supremacy.  This means that the PLA is the most nationalistic as well as the most militaristic component of the Chinese state.  As is the case with all continental powers, the army is the ultimate guarantor of both nationhood and statehood.  But, this dynamic is magnified in China.  Mao recognized this in his famed dictum that "political power comes from the muzzle of a gun."

In an ideal world cohesion comes from consensus.  In the less than ideal world called reality, consensus is not always enough.  Consensus must be reinforced by coercion from time to time.  The military, today the PLA, is the instrument of coercion.  Over the two dozen centuries of China's existence as an organized polity, the fate of the Han and their ruler have depended upon the capacity of the army to coerce effectively.  The fate of the nation, the fate of the state, have waxed and wained according to the capacity of the army not only to defend borders, but, more importantly and often, to coerce effectively--to suppress dissent and force non-Han to accept subordination.

The current system of Chinese political organization came to pass because the PLA was more effective in coercing acceptance of Mao's version of Communism than was the army commanded by the Nationalists.  China exists as it does today not because the PLA outfought its armed opponents, although it did so.  China exists as it does primarily due to the efficiency with which the PLA suppressed dissent, forced consensus, and restored cohesion.

The PLA was the midwife of the Revolution.  Since then it has been the ultimate protector and custodian of both nation and state.  Had it not been for the effectiveness of the PLA in its internal security role, the wheels would have come off Mao's state during the Great Famine following the Great Leap Forward or as a result of the bloody consensus destroying excesses of the Cultural Revolution.  And, it should never be forgotten that it was the tanks and bayonets of the PLA which in 1989 crushed the pro-democracy movement and bought the regime the time it needed to pursue economic liberalization with the results we are so well acquainted today.

The PLA at the senior levels knows perfectly well that the ambitions of the Trolls for regional hegemon status as well as its lofty plans for securing a Great Power role equivalent to if not surpassing that of the US depends upon its capacities.  Likewise, the PLA command structure is well aware that the Trolls depend upon it to suppress the non-Han and squash any Han dissenters.

This implies that the level of civilian supremacy in China is not so high as Secretary of Defense Gates has pretended in public.  The actual relation between civilian government and military high command is more like a co-dominion with Trolls and military chiefs being essentially equal.

From this one can draw a necessary inference: While both President Hu and Prime Minister Wen may genuflect before the totems of reform, democracy, and other warm fuzzies, when and if push comes to shove, the PLA is secure in its belief that it can impose and enforce the necessary degree of Han cohesiveness.  As a result, the American hectoring about human rights can be ignored with impunity.

To a degree which surpasses the civilian Trolls, the commanders of the PLA are realpolitikers.  They are also ideologues.  This is a very dangerous combination.  The high command of the PLA is of the view that China is entitled to be regional hegemon.  It has a right to Taiwan.  China is the Central Empire.  These axioms mean that China must accept the probability of conflict with the US.  The set of "givens" means the PLA must be prepared for war with the US.

The massive modernization of the PLA (fueled in large part by money from US consumers) is plainly aimed at the US.  The continued acquisition of evermore sophisticated weaponry and other military equipment (some of which is the result of poorly considered co-production and similar agreements) is also aimed at the US.  There is not a single aspect of Chinese military procurement or reorganization which is not far in excess of any realistic defensive need.  Rather, each and every aspect of China's military reorientation and enhancement effort is offensive in nature.  The only credible target of an offensively oriented Chinese military is the US.

In the face of this set of very unpleasant developments, the Obama administration's putting the human rights card into play during President Hu's state visit is less than pathetic.  Rather the "new found assertiveness" promised by Secretary Clinton and President Obama is redolent of the tactics of desperation and hints at a strategy utterly lacking intellectual content.

We should consider ourselves fortunate if the Chinese president refrains from laughing.

US Foreign Policy Goes Schizophrenic Again

The long running US declared "War On Drugs" has been marked by flat out schizophrenia more than a few times. Without exception the schized out stance has been caused by the almost inevitably contradictory demands of halting the transportation of illegal drugs by armed organizations whose arsenals of weapons are equaled by satchels of bribe-ready cash on the one hand and the considerations of human rights on the other.

This time around the attack of schizophrenic policy is directed at Mexico. For the first time the State Department has exercised its authority under the legislation establishing the Merida Initiative to withhold fifteen percent of the scheduled tranche if Mexico does not meet certain required milestones in human rights protection. State announced it is cutting 26 megabucks from the allocated 175 million USD.

The "punishment" was invoked in the hope of halting the escalating number of human rights violations allegedly committed by the Mexican Army in its anti-drug operations. Additionally, the Obama administration is seeking to compel the Mexican government to try soldiers in civilian courts for any and all purported human rights abuses.

The army has been accused of an ever growing number of human rights offenses. The number of complaints lodged against military personnel has grown ninefold from 2006 (206) to 2010 (1833) with serious crimes (murder, torture, rape, and kidnapping) increasing from zero to thirty in the same time period. The serious offenses have been confirmed by the Mexican government's own Human Rights Commission, which is a generally reliable source.

Considering the nature of the conflict, the level of violence, the irrelevance of most Mexican army training to the demands of counter-drug operations, the capacity and political will of the drug cartel members, the level of human rights abuses is not overly high. As the recent shootouts between Mexican troops and cartel trigger-pullers demonstrate, the level of combat is not dissimilar with that experienced by US personnel in Afghanistan.

The conflict between cartels and government has resulted in sufficient dead bodies to be considered a very real war. It is a war which the Mexican Army did not want to fight. And, more importantly, is not yet ready to fight in a way which would both guarantee an absence of human rights abuses and the suppression of the cartels.

There is nothing in Mexican Army doctrine, training, or historical experience which would have allowed it to step into the unaccustomed role of operating in support of the civil power. When President Calderon took the step of declaring open war on the cartels, he must (or at least, should) have known the army was not competent to the task--particularly if the job was to be done without the slightest risk of any civilian having any right infringed upon in any way.

The realities surrounding the judicial and law enforcement systems in Mexico four years ago did not leave Sr Calderon much choice. Frankly, he had only two alternatives at that time or more recently. The first was arranging an armistice with the cartels allowing them to move their product through Mexico without hindrance by the government (beyond the customary bribes to local authorities.) The second was the course chosen, the assertion of government supremacy over the cartels.

The pervasive corruption which had been such an open secret for so many years that the outstretched hand of the cop was a staple of humor was exploited to the fullest by the cartels. The result was simply that no Mexican police force at any level of government was not totally compromised by one cartel or another. Anti-drug operations were known by the target(s) in, shall we say, a timely manner.

The Army was not so heavily penetrated, at least not immediately, so its operations had a level of security and surprise which brought early and impressive success. Below the surface of media reports, however, the army went further than conducting search and destroy or search and clear operations. In many areas, particularly near the US border, the army executed what locals politely called "cleansing" actions.

In short, the Mexican army did what so many other LatAm armed forces had done in earlier years--"disappeared" people associated with the cartels. These distasteful actions did have the beneficial effect of severely perturbing some--but not all--of the several cartels. By the time the central government forced an end to the "cleansing" operations, in large measure due to legitimate fear of US disapproval, the net effect had been the weakening but not destruction of the cartels.

As a result the cartels abandoned the market distribution agreement and launched their increasingly bloody fight for turf and profit. Another consequence was the development of a new level of armed competence on the part of the cartels. The Zetas, who later hived off to form a new, independent cartel, started as an enforcement and defense force.

Many Zetas were former Mexican Army personnel including former members of the country's Special Forces. This assured not only greater paramilitary capacity but a higher level of violence. The Zetas had both the skills and resolve necessary to conduct operations not only in Mexico but in the US as well.

Because the Mexican Army could not land a fatal blow in the early days of the war, the situation rapidly came to resemble that in Afghanistan after the initial American "incomplete success." The cartels regrouped, retrained, re-equipped and came back bigger and badder than before.

As the months rolled by and the bodies piled higher, the character of the violence shifted in a subtle but significant way. While much of the lethal violence was cartel on cartel and accompanied by iconic displays of ruthlessness, and another significant percentage was the result of government, primarily military, action, an increasing proportion was essentially random. In a very real sense the culture of death took on a life of its own, particularly in areas such as Cuidad Juarez, which were and had been epicenters of the drug trade.

While not yet achieving the truly Himalayan heights of lethality exemplified by Caracas, the daily body counts in Juarez show the city is less safe than Kabul or even Kandahar. Making the dynamic worse is the way in which simple murder has been transformed into a high art of terrorism. The decapitations, the dismemberments, the partial burnings, the maiming of corpses, the rolling of heads into nightclubs, the indiscriminate shootings, the ever higher chance of becoming dead simply by virtue of having been in the wrong place at the wrong time have all conspired to turn Juarez and the adjacent valley into monuments to fear, loss of confidence, failure of faith.

Faith in the government, in the military, in the rule of law, in the future, in even one's self is a rapidly eroding factor of life. Even a cursory trip (all that is possible or advisable given the realities of life and death) quickly convinces a visitor that only an ending of the violence will restore the faith in self and community without which no government can survive let alone accomplish anything.

The locals, not unlike their counterparts in Afghanistan, want an end to the fear, an end to the looming specter of violent death, an end to the display of corpses dangling from bridges, impaled on fence posts, stuffed into trash barrels, an end to the screech of assault rifles. Easy to understand one would think even for an inhabitant of Foggy Bottom for whom pervasive fear is limited to the next performance review.

The people of Cuidad Juarez lose little love for the army in their midst, but, as one put it with the bluntness of being a combat veteran, "All can be forgiven--if I'm still alive to do the forgiving." Yes, and all can be rebuilt, restored, regained if only the faith came back which will happen if and only if the violence is stopped.

Whether anyone--in Foggy Bottom or in Mexico City--likes it or not, only the Mexican Army has the slightest potential of ending the violence before the violence ends, perhaps not Mexico, but the most embattled, most blood soaked parts of the country. This means with the horrid inevitability of a boulder falling from a steep cliff that there will be more violations of human rights. Even as the Mexican Army becomes better trained, better led, better at the job of waging low-intensity internal war, the violations will continue albeit at a lower level (if all goes right.)

Whether all goes right depends in large degree on how willing and able the Mexican armed forces are to listen to American advice. How willing it is to take lessons hard learned by US personnel in the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan. That willingness is in no way enhanced by actions such as the "punishing" inflicted by the worthies of the US State Department.

The decision makers at Foggy Bottom show an alarming lack of familiarity with some ground truths in Mexico. They seem, for example, unaware that the Mexican armed forces are totally unwilling to put their personnel under the purview of civilian law enforcement and judicial systems for reasons both historical and pragmatic in nature.

On a larger level it seems the people in charge (does that include you, Madam Secretary or are you too wrapped up in the search for a Mideast peace?) are oblivious to Mexican hyper-nationalism. As has been the case in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lads and lassies at State are of the apparent view that nationalism is moot, no longer operative, a reactionary hangover from the bad old days of the past.

The Mexican government and army rather resemble what General George Patton once said of armies generally (including the American,) "like a piece of cooked spaghetti, can't be pushed, only pulled." And, that means being led, not by the nose, but by patient advice and example.

The current administration and its State Department have to decide which is more important, which is more urgent a priority: Ending the violence and restoring governance in Juraez and other war zones or forcing some Mexican snuffy to stand before a civilian bar of justice. In a world where realism had a higher value than idealism, the choice would be simple.

Realism demands that the violence and its effects be ended without delay. When that has occurred it will be both possible and utterly essential that the weight be placed on the side of human rights. Until then, it must be remembered that the most basic human right of all, the right without which no others are possible, is the right to life, life without pervasive, enervating, all destroying fear.

Iran And The Ghost Of Democracy

It has been a year since the government officials counting the vote in Iran reelected Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to a second term as the country's president. This exercise in creative accounting not only proved famed political philosopher Joseph Stalin correct when he pontificated that the people casting ballots elected no one, that was done by the folks counting ballots, but also initiated a period of protest and repression which was longer than expected but not bloodier.

Amnesty International has released a comprehensive report on the repression portion of the protest-repression dyad. It makes for searing reading. It also constitutes a severe indictment of the Iranian regime and its bully boys. In addition, in the Amnesty International methodical documentation of the human consequences of the Iranian exercise in regime maintenance exists a charge of moral cowardice directed against the US and other Western governments.

The Obama administration generally and the president specifically have maintained a discrete distance from the dance of protest and suppression. This detached approach has been justified on a number of grounds. A firm stance in support of the pro-democracy factions would be counterproductive in that it would bolster the regime's claims that the opponents of Ahmadinejad and the mullahs were foreign puppets. Any measures taken against the Iranian regime would hurt the people we intended to assist. The US had to stay on message, had to focus on stopping the Iranian nuclear program regardless of any other consideration no matter how worthy.

All of these reasons (leaving aside any consideration of the lack of internal consistency) are superficially plausible. All make sense of a sort.

But the real deal exists on a more fundamental level. Any effective support of the pro-democracy elements of Iranian society (which, it must be noted includes members of the clerical ruling class) would automatically violate the imperatives of cultural relativism. This is not an inconsiderable fact given that Mr Obama and many of his "team" are strong adherents of the notion that no one cultural, social, political, or economic system is preferable to another. The president and others of his inner circle really believe that all political, social, economic, and cultural systems are ethically equivalent, and any value judgement which holds one to be "better" than another is the product of insensitivity, chauvinism, or xenophobia.

To take on the mullahs and their frontmen would demand that the US, as a matter of policy, declare that secular, pluralistic democracy is ethically superior to clerical rule, subverted elections, and the wholesale violation of human rights by the government of Iran. Any open, effective support for the dissidents in Iran would require that the US, as a matter of policy, hold that states and institutions produced by the European Enlightenment are inherently superior, hold a moral high ground in comparison to states and institutions produced by the Prophet and his successors.

That sort of thing has been, is, and will remain a definite no-no to people such as Mr Obama for whom cultural relativism is a species of revealed Truth. The only correct course of action open to a person who is a True Believer in the dictates of cultural relativism is expressing a sort of vague distaste for the violence associated with repression surrounded by a preternatural detachment which refuses all value judgments as unacceptable "privileging" of a specific outside political position.

So people die in Iran. So people scream in the torture cellars of Evan prison. So, even the graves of those murdered by the Thugs of the Koran are desecrated. Memories besmirched. Lives destroyed. Bodies mutilated.

Through it all the US, the current administration turns the other way, eyes carefully averted as if we were some thwacking great maiden aunt suddenly confronting a vulgar drunk on the steps of the church. Averting our collective vision not for any real world concern, any realpolitik goal, but simply due to the dictates of an intellectual fad of the moment.

A similar dynamic from the same root is at work in the refusal of Team Obama to name properly the enemy we confront daily not only in distant places but here at home. It is cultural relativism which denies us the right to name the threat which confronts us, the gangsters who menace us.

To call the enemy political Islam is to explicitly exalt other monotheistic religions over Islam. To call the people who try to kill us in Afghanistan or in Times Square, Muslims, is to contravene the requirements of cultural relativism as to do so holds Muslims as occupying an ethical niche inferior to those people who do not follow the strictures of Islam.

There is only one cause for the spineless American posture regarding the Iranian election. It is the same cause as underlies the gutless and brainless refusal to call the threat facing us and the rest of the West by its real name.

The cause is not, as is often alleged, "political correctness." That is simply one more convenient excuse for avoiding the truth.

The truth is simply that at the head of this nation there is a president afflicted by a very dangerous, even fatal mental virus. Other Americans of high rank or office have the same affliction. So do many in the elites of the media and academia. The president and all the others who think as he does have caught the same mind destroying disease.

The name of the disease is cultural relativism.

Unless and until the US government can get out from under the dead hand of cultural relativism the US will continue to fail to protect not only its own core interests but also the ambitions and goals of others who would be as we are--citizens of a republic who are still more free than not. In turn this means the US has surrendered its ancient and quite honorable calling to be the "city on a hill," a shining beacon of hope for all humankind.

Google (And GoDaddy) Are Fighting Our Fight

GoDaddy, the world's largest domain name registration company has become the first new public enlistee in the stand-up-to-Beijing campaign launched by Google. It is to be sincerely hoped that more, many more, US and Western enterprises will join as well. Soon.

Up until now, until finally Google called, "Enough!" all too many businesses in the US and elsewhere have shamelessly kowtowed to the dictates of the Trolls of Beijing. Blinded by the prospects of profits to be made in the Land of A Billion Chinese, companies and the people who run them have been willing not only to ignore the multitude of unpleasant practices engaged in by the Trolls but, in essence, trade with and strengthen an enemy of the United States.

A decade and more ago when Congress was fired up to deny China most-favored-nation status due to its wholesale, recurrent abuses of human rights, the US Chamber of Commerce carried Beijing's water on the Hill, lobbying overtime to prevent the action. The Chamber and its members, all card carrying members of the League of Global Capitalism, made mighty moans about how stripping China of most-favored-nation position would cost American jobs beyond count, plunge the US into recession without end, and be generally icky-poo in the extreme.

Congress maintained its tradition of heeding those who pay and backed down. The Trolls kept on repressing and grinning all the way to the bank.

As had been the case since the days when a man of no brains named McKinley occupied the Oval, American businessmen have deluded themselves with the myth of the China market--the notion of selling widgets beyond counting to hundreds of millions of Chinese. When not chasing the hallucinatory sales of widgets, the capitalists of this and other countries have dreamed of loaning dollars in shipload quantities to China and building projects dwarfing the Great Wall in both size and expense.

American administrations of both parties have acted to facilitate these chimera chases and snipe hunts. From the Open Door policy which held China to be open to all exploiters equally right on to the "opening" of China during the days of Clinton, American leaders have assured themselves and We the People that the only consequences would be beneficial: good for China, great for the American worker and consumer, and, generally, wonderful for the world.

Throughout all, American administrations and businesses have acted as if they were the stereotyped "city slicker" and the Chinese the equally one dimensional rube, a hick ripe for fleecing. In so doing we have overlooked that in story and song alike the rube always outsmarted the slicky boy at the end.

Life has imitated art. China has won. The US and others in the West have lost. We have lost jobs. We have lost money. We have lost global status and influence. We have even lost our values, our principles, our views of what is right.

Insofar as we have lost, the Trolls of Beijing have won. They have won because they understood a basic which seemingly has eluded our political masters.

And, you ask, what might that be, Geek?

Well, bucko, the fundamental reality which has governed our economic relations with China and, all that flows from that relationship is simply this: A corporation has only one responsibility--maximize return on equity to investors. That's it. Nothing else matters unless it is specifically prohibited or required by law.

Ship American jobs offshore? Sure. It's legal. And, profitable. Gut the US manufacturing sector? Sure, why not? Heck, making things is horse and buggy thinking. What about human rights, human costs, even the long term consequences to the US, its security, its national interests? Hell, boy, that ain't in our job description! And, it isn't in the interests of our investors.

Well, what about assuring a hostile government has the ways and means to build a formidable military capacity? Hey, Geek, that isn't in our job description either. That's for the Washington crowd, not us to worry about.

The same can and is said, at least tacitly, implicitly, when the subjects of Chinese espionage or Chinese opposition to foreign policy demarches of the US are raised. Business leaders point out that this sort of matter exists in the bailiwick of government, not private enterprise.

Of course the hyper-focus of business on profits, return on equity, is both proper and justified. It is all that is required. It is what Lenin recognized when he famously said, "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." It is what the Trolls of Beijing have recognized as well.

The only difference between Lenin (and his successors) and the Trolls of the past twenty or so years is that the Trolls have done an infinitely better job of inveigling our capitalists (and administrations) into selling the rope with which we are being hung. Everything has gone in the best possible way from Beijing's perspective.

They cozened us, played the right sort of mood music as long as they needed more dollars, more investment, more "co-production," more access to our markets. As the need for dollars, for investment, for access decreased as it has over the past few years, so also has the playing of soft music and the saying of happy words. Now the Trolls demand, they yell, "Cold War thinking," when our government calls them out on a particularly egregious offense; they obstruct our foreign policy initiatives.

Until now, no one has stood up to the Trolls.

Google has good, very good--and more then simply sufficient--reason to tell the Trolls, "You have finally overplayed your hand." Google stands to lose a great deal of money by having taken a principled stand against the Trolls' censorship, hacking, and cyberespionage. Google has taken the very real risk that its competitors (including Microsoft which has the corporate ethics of the Mafia at best) will now have an open field in the very lucrative China market.

It is to be hoped (and, the Geek, being a historian, knows full well how faint this hope is) that Google's and, now, GoDaddy's decisions will shame other IT companies into following the new trail of defiance to the Trolls. It may even be hoped (an even fainter hope) that non-IT companies will be similarly embarrassed if they do not tell the Trolls that their conduct is unacceptable to a business possessing even the slightest hint of ethics. Embarrassment might just lead to action--the right sort of action.

While it is not at all in the realm of rationality to expect the Obama administration to back Google's play in the furtherance of our own national security and strategic interests, it is not quite so far over the edge to think that there is some possibility that Google's action will inspire some of us in We the People to do our small bit in slowing the Chinese juggernaut. It is not enough, not by a long way, for We the People to recognize that China is a real and growing threat to our global status as has been indicated in recent opinion polls.

The need is not for mere recognition. The need is for action. Or, to err on the side of accuracy, inaction. The inaction which is necessary is that of not buying any product of Chinese manufacture regardless of the brand and, far more importantly, price. China has seduced us, mulcted us and the businesses which service us, by the flood of cheap priced products.

That's right, bucko, it is time for us to tell Walmart and all the other purveyors of Chinese origin goods, "We aren't buying those any more." To put it bluntly, to use what the Trolls would brand as "Cold War rhetoric," it is time for us to stop trading with the enemy.

Remember Serbia, 1999

The contretemps over American use of air delivered fire in Afghanistan, which appears to be a story with undeservedly long legs, has served to remind the Geek of the worst abuse of aerial operations by the US and other NATO countries in the years since World War II. In making that assessment the Geek is in no way ignoring the arguable excesses of Linebacker I and II and Rolling Thunder. Nor is he overlooking the widespread, militarily unjustifiable use of air strikes on civilian infrastructure targets far removed from the area of combat operations in Desert Storm or in the more recent invasion of Iraq.

Ten years ago we were near the end of the seventy-eight days of air operations against Serbia and the other components of what was known then as the Federal Yugoslavian Republic (FYR). Casting even the slightest respect for either the immunity of civilians from deliberate targeting as well as the Doctrine of Proportionality into the scrap heap, the US and others of the NATO partnership waged unethical, unjustifiable aggressive war from the air against the civilian population of the FYR. At the time the MSM of the US and at least some other countries were filled with cheers for the war and nary a peep about the fate of those down range.

Like Saddam Hussein was and would be again, Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic was widely portrayed as Adolph Hitler's more evil twin. That characterisation was totally unfair--to both Hitler and Milosevic. At the same time the MSM sung hosannas onto the Clinton administration for taking firm and effective action to stop "genocide" in Kosovo. The Americans failed to see a reality quite apparent to their European colleagues. The real bloodletting in Kosovo started after the first US bombs and missiles hit Serb cities, towns, villages.

The media and politicians here ignored the impact of CBU-87/B, which delivered hundreds of sub-munitions over an area of several hundred square yards spreading awesome wounds over the "soft targets" of Serb civilians. These leaders, movers and shakers, the lot of them, blamed the parliament of the FYR for the "necessity" of the war.

The intellectually honest person then or now can only reply, "Crap!"

The responsibility for the "war" with its unending air assaults upon civilian targets (there were darn few genuinely military targets to hit) lies solely and strictly with the US and, to a lesser extent, its NATO partners. Take a look at the Rambouillet Accords which were signed shortly before Clinton and Company launched the high-tech air attack on the FYR. Specifically take a close, hard look at Annex B.

Take your time, the Geek is happy to wait. This deadly document has slumbered unexamined for entirely too long. And, too many people died wrongly, unethically, because of it for it to mould away in the archives unnoticed.

This document is in large measure the product of Richard Holbrooke, who became a legend in the Clinton years for his astute diplomacy in the morass of former Yugoslavia. He has been brought back as the American Special Envoy with a brief for Afghanistan, Pakistan and, at least implicitly, India.

Annex B constitutes an ultimatum. The demand for a NATO occupation in all but name only is clearly meant to be unacceptable to the Serbian government. It is on a par with the ultimata presented by the US to Spain before the "Splendid Little War" at the turn of the Twentieth Century, or that presented by the Dual Monarchy to Serbia which touched off the "Great War" of 1914-1918, or those handed to Baghdad in 1991 and 2003. The wording was carefully calculated in each case to provide a cause for war and a way of displacing responsibility for the effects of war later.

While the genuine motivations of the Clinton administration for desiring and provoking "war," which is to say an exercise in "regime change" before the term was coined, can be debated. And, hopefully will be.

The results are not debatable although they were not given any attention by the MSM at the time--or later. The seventy-eight days of attack by the most advanced manned and unmanned air platforms in the possession of the US (and some others) were massively employed in killing civilians and turning essential civilian infrastructure--power grids, water supply systems, roads, bridges, railroads and public buildings, including hospitals--into bloody rubble. In at least some attacks, anti-personnel munitions including the amazingly deadly CBU-87 Bravo were used on the marketplaces of small towns and villages.

All of this slaughter and devastation took place below the radar of the media and most observers, including the same human rights monitors which are so vocal today with far less cause or justification. Talking heads were bedazzled by the "gee-whiz" nature of the Pentagon's advanced technology munitions and their delivery systems. Government spokespersons gravely and falsely placed the responsibility for any collateral damage on the Belgrade regime and broke their arms patting themselves on the back for having halted genocide and prevented aggression.

Three years later the administration of George W. Bush applied the "lessons" of Operation Allied Force in the implementation of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The aerial destruction of the FYR's civilian infrastructure gave rise to the misguided "shock and awe" approach to war on the cheap of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. The prostitution of the media was continued and improved upon by the administration and Pentagon planners. Misled and bamboozled with dissent and debate disallowed by flag waving jingosim of the same sort which had sped the bombers and cruise missiles on their way in 1999, the American public stood and cheered as the unnecessary invasion and concomitant destruction of Iraq took place.

This time the human rights community was not silent. This time the advocates of the civilians caught in the crosshairs were quickly on the job. But, this time, in Iraq and even more in Afghanistan these advocates have demonstrated the sort of extreme pendulum swing that so often characterises Americans of passionate empathy. This time the human rights crew has ignored with peril to both their credibility and ultimate effectiveness the responsibility of entities other than the American military for civilian death, misery and fear.

This time around the voices which were so conspicuous by their absence during the seventy-eight days of airborne slaughter in the FYR have been equally silent about the responsibility of the Islamist jihadists for civilian deaths in Iraq and, even more, in Afghanistan. In both cases, now and ten years ago, the human rights community has acted, inadvertently or otherwise, to harm the cause of limiting war, restricting the ways in which wars are fought, sparing civilians from use as targets, shields or sacrifices.

For those of us who realise that not only are there conditions and requirements which make the waging of war a necessity of international politics or national self-defense and who are desirous of limiting the destruction and death which is a part of war, it is time to reflect on the lessons of the not too distant past.

It is time to ask ourselves: What did we do, say, think as the bombs rained down on the women and children of Serbia?

Those Darn Pesky Civilians

No matter where you look, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Gaza all you see are those doggone civilians getting in the way of a good, honest war. It's getting so a commander can't order up an air strike or an artillery stonk without some bunch of civvies getting blown up. Heck, darn near any snuffy who wants to bust caps after taking fire is going to find some local yokel standing there, picking his nose and blocking a clear field of fire.

Then there are the other civilians. This bunch wouldn't get caught dead in a combat zone. They value their butts too much for that to happen. No. With exceptional bravery this crew stays far, far away from wherever the bullets fly and bombs blow. This civilian assembly is comprised of the High Minded who worry overtime about the effects of war on civilians.

Not to oversimplfy matters, the Save The Innocent Civilians Coalition is at root the anti-war component of the Society of the Perpetually Indignant and Concerned whose wrinkled foreheads and lips ever pursed in disapproval use the plight of civilians caught in the battle zone as the tool of choice to end all wars now. They make no distinction among wars. From their perspective there is no such thing as a justifiable war, not even one undertaken in national self-defense.

The purported "humanitarian crises" which are an automatic part of all wars, and an important aspect of guerrilla, insurgent and similar conflicts provide a mediagenic cover story for the genuine goal of ending war as a feature of human experience. Ironically, one of the major consequences of the STICC campaign is to prolong war so that more civilians suffer more death, fear and misery.

Going to the videotape we quickly discover that with the possible exception of the 150 years separating the end of the Thirty Years War and the start of the Wars of the French Revolution, civilians in the form of impediments, refugees and corpses in the wake of armies have always been a feature of conflict. Civilians have often been the direct targets of military operations.

Whether Sherman's campaign against civilian morale and political will embodied in both the March to the Sea and the subsequent March Up Country, or the Prussian counter-partisan efforts in the Franco-Prussian War a few years later, the intentional targeting of civilians has been a feature of modern war. The refugee generation effects of the German advance across the Low Countries and France in 1940 and the later British firebomb raids against German civilian residential districts brought the intentional targeting of civilians to a new high (low?) in military strategy.

During World War II the High Minded were conspicuously silent in denouncing the "humanitarian crises" which characterised the war. They were equally speechless in the years immediately following V-E Day. Literal hordes of Displaced Persons (DP's they were termed by lips curled in disdain) thronged through the wreckage of Europe. The diseased and famished in the millions crowded DP camps (many of which were former Nazi KZ Lagers) with nary a whisper of concern.

The lowering of the Iron Curtain announcing the onset of the Cold War changed that. Reasons of state, the need for political stability as seen from Washington brought the plight of the Displaced Persons to the center of the stage. Humanitarian relief efforts culminating in the more or less altruistic capstone of the Marshall Plan sought to bring order, health and eventually even prosperity to the displaced, the war ravaged, the hopeless of Europe.

In a delightful exercise in cynical and self-serving politics, the Soviet Union sponsored front groups which sought to offset not only the effects of the Marshall Plan but also the American nuclear superiority with a "peace offensive" which focused on the effects of war, particularly one in which the US would use its atomic weapons on the civilians of Europe and, by implication, the rest of the world. With remarkable rapidity the High Minded signed on to the Stockholm Peace Appeal and its successors.

The rights and immunities of civilians caught in war became a new and growing focus of those who opposed war, all war under all conditions, against any enemy, even a country given to aggression. Horror stories (some of which were true) abounded as wars proliferated on the margins of the Cold War.

Credence was immediately, seemingly automatically and without question, granted to the claims by North Korea and China that the US was engaging in biological weapons in the Korean War. The patent absurdity of the North Korean and Chinese accusations met no pushback from the High Minded.

New stories of atrocities committed by the Israeli forces during the War of Independence were circulated and believed without investigation. While some of the atrocity tales were absolutely true, no mention was made of the role played by the Arab states in the movement of Arabs from the new state of Israel. Apparently the High Minded of the STICC persuasion never met a negative view of the Americans, or the Israelis which was disbelieved.

Neither did they meet a narrative of atrocious behaviour by Soviet or Soviet leaning states which they found credible. The same might be said of accounts of cruelty or human rights abuses suffered by civilians at the hands of authoritarian regimes in the Arab or Asian or African states.

During the years of American involvement in the Wars in Vietnam the US was recurrently damned for "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity" for its forces' employment of napalm or tear gas. Despite the exceptional care the US exhibited in its conduct of air operations against North Vietnam, the American fliers and those who commanded them were repeatedly accused of causing unnecessary civilian casualties and misery. The STICC camp frothed and spewed over each and every civilian casualty which might have occurred at the hands of American forces.

At the same time silence reigned over the recurrent violations of the laws and customs of land combat committed by the North Vietnamese forces or the Viet Cong guerrillas. Not a single word was made of the civilian slaughters which were repeatedly committed by the anti-Saigon forces.

The Mai Lai massacre was rightly and resoundingly condemned, not only by the High Minded it might be noted, but also by members of the American military. However, the literally dozens of Mai Lai level killings conducted by the Viet Cong or the Peoples Army of North Vietnam went by unnoticed and uncommented upon by the fine folks of STICC.

(Can we say, "Double standard?")

The double standard was at work during the long and bloody years of the Iraq-Iran War. Both the European and American members of STICC seemed to be out to a very long lunch during this exsanguinary and ultimately inconclusive effusion. Long range and highly inaccurate missiles fell on Iranian cities. The mullahs of Tehran rounded up brigades of child-soldiers and sent them into the electrified swamps as human minefield clearing units. The Iraqis used chemical munitions against unprepared Iranian troops--and their own dissident citizens.

The High Minded yawned and looked elsewhere. Only when an American warship caught in a fit of buck fever shot down a civilian Iranian airliner did the Protectors of Human Rights Everywhere sit up, take notice and shout, "War criminal!"

The US inspired coalition which waged the 1991 war to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait was relatively immune to the usual accusations of "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity." There were several reasons for this (temporary) immunity. The first and most basic was that the war was fought in deserted country. The pesky civilians were conspicuous by their absence. Also important was the obnoxious nature of the Iraqi regime. Saddam was such a totally unpleasant person that it was hard to work up sympathy for the Iraqi civilians. Finally, the war was over with quickly.

(Another, perhaps far from unimportant contributory factor was the recently concluded collapse of the Soviet Union and the confusion this engendered in the minds of many High Minded people.)

In the wars of recent years from the First Intifada through to the current affrays in Afghanistan and Pakistan, civilians, civilian corpses and the clamor of "humanitarian crisis," "crimes against humanity" and shrill denunciations of the US or Israel have become the common themes. The TV images of Israeli soldiers shooting at insult, rock and Molotov cocktail throwing Arab teenagers sensitized the eyes and minds of the world's public--particularly the opinion molding elite--to the fundamental asymmetry of the Mideast conflict.

From that beginning the double standard demanded by the High Minded of STICC has grown to monster proportions. The adversaries of the West, particularly those who oppose the US and Israel have become increasingly sophisticated in the use of civilians, their misery, fear and death, as weapons of war. Taliban, al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist jihadist horde have discovered and are effectively exploiting the key vulnerability of Western military doctrine--the use of firepower and technology to limit friendly casualties to a politically acceptable level.

In pursuing the exploitation of this vulnerability, the assorted adversaries which includes the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the pioneer of many of the use-civilians-as-weapons tactics, have been powerfully assisted by the High Minded, by the members of STICC. To put the matter simply but not oversimplified, without the force multiplier provided by the anti-war advocates working under the cover of concern for civilians and avoidance of humanitarian crises, the efforts to exploit the critical vulnerability of the Americans (and others) would have gone in vain.

It is of more than passing interest that the High Minded never, but never, demand the trigger pullers and suicide bombers and fighters who hide behind women and children to conform their tactics to the customs and laws of land warfare. There are never any calls that the fighters of LTTE or Taliban or al-Qaeda or Hamas or Hezbollah show even the most rudimentary respect for the presumed immunity of civilians from military operations.

Hamas, which acts under the color of being the de facto government in the Gaza Strip, is never denounced by the High Minded for having taken no effort to separate their fighters from the civilian population. Not even the United Nations has noticed that Hamas both allowed and encouraged the "defense forces" of the Gaza Strip to place their bunkers, fighting positions, munitions dumps, rocket launching facilities in the midst of densely populated residential areas.

Of course, Hamas wanted their trigger pullers intermingled with civilians. Naturally Hamas wanted their rocket launching teams to set off their deadly missiles from the courtyards of mosques, schools or housing complexes.

To do any thing else would be to expose their brave and fearless fighters for Palestine to the overwhelming capacities of the Israeli Defense Forces. By sticking offensive capacities in civilian centers Hamas sought to both neutralise Israeli capabilities and place a (false) onus on the IDF for any and all civilian deaths and injuries.

The High Minded played along with Hamas. This is not to the credit of the anti-war and humanitarian crisis dreading crowd. Regardless of the lofty minded nature of the goals when they climbed into bed with a criminal terrorist group, the High Minded, the STICC members, besmirched themselves and their cause.

By being in large measure responsible for the Israeli government calling off Operation Cast Lead before the military capacities of Hamas had been degraded fatally, the High Minded have assured that more civilians will die, more will live in fear, more will be miserable. They have assured the war will last all the longer. Great job, people!

Taliban and its kindred groups are doing the same in Afghanistan and Pakistan. While decrying the US air strikes in Afghanistan, no one either in Afghanistan or elsewhere in the world has demanded that Taliban stop using civilian residential compounds as bases of fire. Nor has there been any demand that Taliban call for a truce when the American or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops return their fire.

By the customs of land warfare, Taliban should call for a brief truce during which the civilian occupants of the compound can be evacuated to a place of safety. If Taliban had any ethic transcending survival and victory or even the slightest shred of genuine concern for the well-being of their fellow countrymen, they would remove the civilians before the shooting started.

It is Taliban, not the United States and its allies, which violates the doctrine of proportionality in the hills, deserts and villages of Afghanistan. It is Taliban, not the US and its allies, which seeks civilian deaths as a necessary adjunct to combat.

It is Taliban which, like LTTE and Hamas, seeks to blunt the military advantage enjoyed by its enemy though using civilian as shields. Taliban, again like LTTE and Hamas or Hezbollah, seeks victory through the exploitation of civilian corpses and the sympathy of the High Minded, the efforts of the anti-war people hiding behind the tenets of STICC.

Contrary to the innuendo of the High Minded or apologists for the Islamist jihdist groups, American military doctrine and the operations or tactical expressions of doctrine well recognise the immunity of civilians as well as the doctrine of proportionality. It is Taliban, al-Qaeda, LTTE, Hamas and the rest of that monstrous regiment that do not.

The United States must push back against the innuendo and accusations of the adversaries as well as the High Minded tergiversators of STICC in both public and private diplomacy. We must forswear apologies and explanations. Rather the necessary message the US (and others) must deliver repeatedly is this: We take all possible precautions to avoid civilian casualties, misery and fear, but we will neither place our troops at inordinate risk nor unnecessarily prolong the war in order to give our enemies an advantage.

We Americans will not play the game according to the other side's rules. We will not allow their lack of ethics, their intentional use of civilians as weapons of war give them any advantage.

To do so is to surrender to evil.

Islam(ism) And Human Rights Or Is It Man's Rights?

The tragic decision of President Obama to back down from a confrontation with the enemies of free speech at Durban II raises an important question: How many more times will the smooth-talking, nicely smiling young man in the Oval raise the white flag of preemptive surrender in the days, weeks and months to come?

How often will the US decline to confront repressive, retrogressive regimes, regimes dominated by or leaning toward Islamism?

The area of human rights is gaining importance as a venue in which American national and strategic interests are threatened. This state of affairs arises from the increasingly robust efforts by Islamists and their sympathisers to hijack the field of human rights.

Islamists are not simply brutish gunslingers and suicide vest wearers. The Islamist camp is filled with politically sophisticated men who understand how to use propaganda, cultivate allies on the political left, form coalitions with non-Islamic countries which share a policy goal with the Warriors of Allah, and use the rhetoric and institutions of the US and the rest of the West for purposes hostile to the best interests of the West.

It comes as no surprise that the Organisation of the Islamic Conference is in the process of pirating the human rights arena for the purposes and goals of Islamism. The OIC announced on the eve of the Durban II meeting that it would form an "Islamic" human rights council which would set forth an agenda and processes seeking to guarantee human rights in a way which will be fully Sharia compliant.

Now, that is one scary thought.

Even if consideration of human rights is limited to one small but very important aspect of life, the notion of a Sharia compatible doctrine of rights is very, very scary.

This one, small but central area is quite simply the integrity of a woman's, all women's genitals. To narrow the matter more, is freedom from genital mutilation a fundamental right for any and all women?

The Geek must admit he is quite uncomfortable writing on this subject. Consideration of genital mutilation, no matter how slight in nature, constitutes a subject which is inherently revolting to him. The very idea of taking a knife to a lady's most intimate and sexually defining anatomical features frankly nauseates the Geek. (And, he notes for the record, the Geek has seen more than a few things over the years that the vast majority of people would consider high on the list of sights which produce vomit.)

When the subject of female genital mutilation (FGM) emerged in academic circles a little over fifteen years ago, the Geek recalls that most of his co-workers dismissed concern over it as being misplaced. They adduced four reasons for this questionable conclusion.

First, the practice was limited to a small area in Northeast Africa centering on Somalia.

Second, FGM was not inherent to Islam but rather was an African cultural practice grafted onto the imported faith.

Third, all cultural practices were equally good, so it was improper for a person of one heritage to judge the actions of those living in another.

Fourth, since women performed the FGM it was a matter for the society of women only and since they obviously accepted the practice, it was immune to criticism.

Of course these academics were wrong. Wrong on all counts. But, that is hardly an unusual affliction for academics in recent decades.

While data are hard to acquire and often very soft when they can be found, numbers and anecdotes alike point to FGM being widespread in nature. The World Health Organisation reported in 2005 that some ninety-five percent of women between the ages of fifteen and forty-nine in Egypt had undergone some form of FGM. More recently human rights groups have claimed widespread FGM in Iraq, Pakistan and the Arab Peninsula states.

Attempts by governments either to collect hard data on or regulate the practice of FGM have met with significant resistance on the part of Muslim clerics and the population generally. Egypt is an excellent example of this. The conclusion is inescapable: while ashamed of the prevalence of FGM so that attempts to quantify it are resisted, the population or at least a sizable part of it, including leading clerics, oppose any regulation or limiting of the right to take a knife or needle and thread to women's sexual organs.

Occasionally non-clerical students of Islam will note the justifications for FGM which are found in the sacred writings of Islam. Some of these same students will also mine the vast corpus of Sharia based jurisprudence to find examples of Islamic judicial authorities supporting FGM and justifying its employment as a means of insuring social stability through controlling the presumably rampant randiness of "unfixed" women.

The widespread, not to say pervasive, existence of FGM throughout Islamic dominated countries falsifies the oft-repeated claim that the application of knife to clitoris or labia is limited to Somalia and nearby areas of Africa. The existence of a body of Islamic law condoning and justifying FGM underscores that the practice is inherent to the faith. It is not a culture graft originating outside Islam.

The third argument made by the Geek's former academic co-workers is that of cultural relativism. Without making an assessment of the merits of the cultural relativist position, suffice it to note that the basic concept of human rights, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, asserts that there are rights equally applicable to all people regardless of cultural context. Even academics should be capable of seeing the difference between cultural trivia such as costume or diet on the one hand and basic, life affirming rights on the other.

It is quite true that, even today, the primary wielders of knife, needle and thread are women. This would seem to imply a basic agreement within the society of women that FGM was, at the least, harmless. It could even be argued from this basis that women approve of continuing the sexual mutilation over generations. After all, without their performing the procedures, the procedures would not be performed. Right?

The rather recent field of evolutionary psychology would say, "Wrong." Evolutionary psychologists like their colleagues in the cognate fields of social psychology and anthropology would point out that women live on the razor's edge between the ancient requirements of effective cooperation and the even older impetus of competition over resources for the benefit of self and progeny. Far more than men experience (or even often can understand, even imagine) women for thousands of generations have worked under twin, conflicting biologically driven imperatives.

As humans, and, before them, the proto-humans emerged in a harsh and risk ridden environment, women have needed to cooperate effectively so that food could be gathered, children borne and raised, clothing fabricated and the myriad of other tasks accomplished great and small without which survival would have been impossible.

At the same time women have had to keep a man around--exclusively for the benefit of the woman and her children. Competition to get and keep this guy, this access to resources, has been at the top of the priority list. Women have fought with a single minded ferocity to get and keep the guy compared to which the fiercest combat between men pales into insignificance.

We can see (and experience) the delicate balancing act between horizontal relations and fierce competition which is and always has been a central feature of the society of women all around us. You do not have to get a PhD in anthropology or evolutionary psychology to get the picture. All you have to do (if you are a guy, women already know it all in the back of their brains) is go to a singles bar on Friday night or a cocktail party at any time.

"So, cut to the chase, Geek! I'm not getting three hours credit for this lecture, dude."

"Chill out, bucko," the Geekmo replies.

Here is the conclusion, the age old bottom line. Whatever is normative in the society of women will be followed generation after generation. If FGM is normative, it will soldier on grandmother to mother to daughter. No woman, particularly one who is older than the presumptive rival for a man, will cede a competitive advantage to the potential threat.

In the case of FGM, particularly any variant which removes the clitoris in toto or even in part, the advantage is sexual responsiveness. As any hooker (OK, for the politically correct, sex worker) can attest, a genuine commercial advantage accrues to the woman who can best feign a world beating orgasm.

Any (and all) man wants to believe himself to be Studly Hunkboy Without Equal. The greater his partner's response to his ministrations the more his ego is gratified. The combination of sexual responsiveness with sexual availability is the woman's ultimate weapon in the war to keep her guy exclusively hers.

Since the ancient misperception of Freud concerning the vaginal orgasm has been finally buried by research over the past forty years, we are certain that the fount of a woman's sexual pleasure and, thus, responsiveness is the clitoris. Removing or impairing the capacity of this small piece of nerve rich tissue assures a level playing field of low sexual response.

That's why women keep on plying the knife and other implements of personal destruction.

The inevitable question is not that of why do women endure this multi-generational alteration of personhood but why do men put up with it. The answer to this is found in the climate of fear which pervades Islam from its founding sacred writings down to the present day. Bluntly put, men are scared silly of the hidden depths of women. Their sexual depths in particular.

At the same time men are encouraged to both fear and displace responsibility for their own preoccupation with sex. As reams of research published by reinforced divisions of researchers demonstrates beyond all doubt, men spend a lot of time thinking about sex. They may not--in fact, do not--act on their thoughts often, but they do sure as hell think about what they would like to do with their wigglers a very great deal.

Religious beliefs do not alter the frequency or intensity of sexually oriented thoughts, feelings and fantasies in the slightest. However, religious beliefs can and do alter the individual's acceptance of his own sexuality.

Not unlike many other religions both past and present Islam tries to inculcate a sense of guilt over thinking about sex rather than the will of the Lord or some other approved topic. Islam is simply more successful in the guilt production area than most. It is also better than other faiths in providing a suitable displacement focus.

Hey, Abdul, it's OK. You aren't a dirty old man. It's the perpetually randy woman who makes you think that way. She is the provocateur. You have to control her rabid sexual appetite. Put her in all-concealing clothing, clothing that de-sexes completely. And, while you're at it, make sure she is a proper, faithful wife, make sure she is literally de-sexed--but still capable of having your children.

But, now, Abdul, my man, you got another problem. She doesn't want sex with you. Sure, the old FGM has made sexual contact about as enjoyable as a root canal, but she still owes it to you. You feed her, put a roof over her head. She owes you. And, even though there is a nifty away around it, Islam prohibits commercial sex. So, Abdul, you've got your needs. Whatcha going to do about them?

"Pass a law," Abdul replies sagely. "If she don't put out at least once every four days, then I don't have to feed her or something."

Fer sure, dude. That's the way to go.

But, the Geek suggests, why not look at the mutilation thing from a different perspective? Try this one out.

Neurophysiology and embryology have demonstrated that the same nerves serve the same function in both men and women. The sensory nerves which women have concentrated in the clitoris are found in and near the tip of a man's penis. The sensations these nerves feed our brains are the source of sexual pleasure for us guys.

With me so far, Abdul?

OK. Now, let's take the next step. In principle it is possible to sever these nerves in total or in part in the penis, kind of the guy equivalent of removing a woman's clitoris. The guy who has received this sort of attention will still be able of gaining an erection. He will still be able to ejaculate. Make a baby.

Now, the big question: Will he want to? Get it up. Pump away. Come like a gusher. Feel nothing. Think about it. Where is the reward for all the effort?

The Geek is entertaining the amusing picture of thousands of sex deprived Muslim women chasing nerveless men through the souk demanding sex--right now! It would be the women's turn to pass laws demanding the guys get it up at least once every so many days under penalty of going without eats.

Now to bring it home. To move from the ridiculously sublime to the real world and reality oriented international politics. Is it rational to believe, to think for even a microsecond that governments or international organisations with a majority who accept the insane barbarism of female genital mutilation as a normal and customary aspect of a religiously predicated society have anything to offer in the arena of human rights?

Islam and, even more, Islamism have only negatives to offer. They are, to quote the title of a Warren Zevon tune the "Mister Bad Example" of human rights. FGM allows, no, demands the domination of women through degradation, desexualization and objectification of women by a fearful, insecure and ultimately mendacious and hypocritical male population.

There is no justification for even listening to Islamist posturing about the rights of women, of human rights. They neither know nor accept either.

Leaving aside "honorcide," stoning women for adultery, which is often rape under another name, confining women to the harem, forcing them to dress as though they were Ninth Century pastoralists in the Arabian desert, omitting everything beyond female genital mutilation, Islamists and may observant Muslims put themselves beyond the pale in the human rights councils of the world. They have ruled themselves incompetent in the entire matter.

For us, for Americans, for people who celebrate life in all its many ways and diverse expressions the obligation is clear. We must stand in principled, continuous opposition to the Islamists and those others who align for whatsoever reason behind the Islamist banner. These anti-human, anti-rights, anti-freedom members of the Society of Fear and Hate must be opposed at every turn, in every venue.

There can be no surrender. Ever. For any reason, pragmatic or ideological. We must all remember those wise words of warning: "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to keep silent."

Speak out, President Obama. Now. Loudly. Repeatedly. That would be a change we can all believe in.