Jinn of Current Events

Encouraging free markets to flourish in the Arab world is the most positive policy the US can adopt. Economic liberty has a tendency to develop aspirations for other aspects of freedom. Free-market economics worked to transform Germany and Japan. On the topic, here is another good speech by President Bush: Our nation is strong. Our greatest strength is that we serve the cause of liberty. We support the advance of freedom in the Middle East, because it is our founding principle, and because it is in our national interest. The hateful ideology of terrorism is shaped and nurtured and protected by oppressive regimes. Free nations, in contrast, encourage creativity and tolerance and enterprise. And in those free nations, the appeal of extremism withers away. ... Some believe that democracy in the Middle East is unlikely, if not impossible. They argue that the people of the Middle East have little desire for freedom or self-government. These same arguments have been heard before in other times, about other people. After World War II, many doubted that Germany and Japan, with their histories of autocratic rule and aggressive armies, could ever function as free and peaceful societies. In the Cold War we were told that imperial communism was permanent and the Iron Curtain was there to stay. In each of these cases -- in Germany, in Japan, in Eastern Europe and in Russia -- the skeptics doubted, then history replied. Every milestone of liberty over the last 60 years was declared impossible until the very moment it happened. The history of the modern world offers a lesson for the skeptics: do not bet against the success of freedom. ... The combined GDP of all Arab countries is smaller than that of Spain. ... The Arab world ... is largely missing out on the economic progress of our time. Across the globe, free markets and trade have helped defeat poverty, and taught men and women the habits of liberty. So I propose the establishment of a U.S.-Middle East free trade area within a decade... Go read it all. 

Victor Davis Hanson: As long as U.N. action is predicated on the majority votes of illiberal regimes, or the single veto of undemocratic states like China, or the obstructions of envious, fourth-rate powers like France, it will remain either a debating society or a manipulative mechanism to thwart anything the United States does. It was about as effective in monitoring Saddam Hussein as the International Olympic Committee was in stopping the routine torture of the Iraqi Olympic team. While we should seek drastic reform — admitting India, Japan, and Brazil to the Security Council, promoting statesmen reputed for their defiance of authoritarian governments as candidates for the secretary-generalship, insisting on democratic government as a requisite for full voting membership in the General Assembly, and distributing France's Security Council veto across the entire European Union — we will probably have no alternative but to seek more permanent relationships with a coalition of the willing. I have yet to see evidence that the UN is a positive institution. 

Should one believe any of the anti-Coalition stories coming out of Iraq? Times Online: American investigators in Iraq have found safely locked in vaults almost 40,000 manuscripts and 700 artefacts previously believed to have been looted from the National Museum in Baghdad. The items include a clay pot from 5000 BC, an inscribed cornerstone from King Nebuchadnezzar's 7th-century BC Babylon palace and hundreds of pieces of ancient jewellery, pottery and sarcophaguses. US officials said that many items originally thought to have been looted were placed in hidden vaults, discovered inside the museum this week, for protection before the war began.