Irving Kristol, 1920-2009

I am very sad indeed to read of the death in Washington DC of Irving Kristol at the age of 89. Kristol was one of the intellectual titans of our age, and his influence on the course of American thinking, culture and politics was simply immense. As the godfather of neo-conservatism, the philosophy which has been so much misunderstood and grievously misrepresented as the ‘war-mongering’ doctrine behind the administration of George W Bush, Kristol – along with his wife, the scarcely less intellectually formidable Gertrude Himmelfarb -- was the first public intellectual to understand and articulate a defence of western civilisation against the onslaught mounted by the moral and cultural relativism of the nihilistic left.

It wasn’t conservatism; although it embodied certain recognisable conservative instincts, it was also classical liberal thinking in that it was not reactionary but...

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Groundhog day in central Europe

Q: Who in 2009 is playing the role of the Czechs at Munich in 1938?

A: The Czechs. And the Poles. As the Associated Press reports:

Poles and Czechs voiced deep concern Friday at President Barack Obama's decision to scrap a Bush-era missile defense shield planned for their countries. ‘Betrayal! The U.S. sold us to Russia and stabbed us in the back,’ the Polish tabloid Fakt declared on its front page. Polish President Lech Kaczynski said he was concerned that Obama's new strategy leaves Poland in a dangerous ‘gray zone’

... An editorial in Hospodarske Novine, a respected pro-business Czech newspaper, said: ‘an ally we rely on has betrayed us, and exchanged us for its own, better relations with Russia, of which we are rightly afraid. ‘The move has raised fears in the two nations they are

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The Moral Inversion of Richard Goldstone

So now we can see how Richard Goldstone thinks he has preserved his judicial reputation while perpetrating a blood libel against Israel. He has produced a report which, as anticipated, finds that Israel committed all the ‘war crimes’ during Operation Cast Lead of which his Mission members had decided it was guilty before even starting their deliberations, along with the NGOs whose unremitting hostility and malice towards Israel and history of peddling Palestinian propaganda as fact did not deter the Mission from uncritically accepting their evidence as the truth, thus finding Hamas guilty of no crimes at all -- except one. That was, by an amazing coincidence, the one set of crimes it committed which the world was forced to acknowledge actually happened – the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel with the sole intention of killing Israeli civilians. By referring...

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Neville Chamberlain was a far-sighted hero compared to this

Barry Rubin says this is the big one and I agree. Obama’s decision to accept Iran’s, er, offer of talks is a mistake of simply staggering proportions. It was inevitable – and yet even so it is hard to believe that an American President can be quite this reckless.

As we all know, Obama offered Iran a hand of friendship in the hope that this would finally encourage the regime to open up its clenched fist. Months passed; Obama’s hand remained open, the Iranian fist remained clenched and Iran made good use of the precious gift of time Obama had given it to advance its nuclear programme to the point where it is now variously estimated as soon able /already able to manufacture a nuclear weapon.

As time and credibility drained away, the Obama administration announced that if Iran...

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The Goldstone show-trial

In the wake of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza at the turn of this year, the UN’s satirically named ‘Human Rights Council’ set up what purported to be an objective, fact-finding commission of inquiry under Richard Goldstone, former chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and a judge of the South African Constitutional Court.

The degree of objectivity on this Commission can be gauged from the mandate it was given by the UNHRC, which announced it was dispatching

an urgent, independent international fact-finding mission, to be appointed by the President of the Council, to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by the occupying Power, Israel, against the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, due to the current aggression, and

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The bitter legacy of 9/11

On this eighth anniversary of 9/11, a salutary rebuke by Fouad Ajami to those who drew the false distinction between the ‘war of necessity’ in Afghanistan (the good war) and the ‘war of choice’ in Iraq (the bad war):

The impulse that took America from Kabul to Baghdad had been on the mark. Those were not Afghans who had struck American soil on 9/11. They were Arabs. Their terrorism came out of the pathologies of Arab political life. Their financiers were Arabs, and so were those crowds in Cairo and Nablus and Amman that had winked at the terror and had seen those attacks as America getting its comeuppance on that terrible day. Kabul had not sufficed as a return address in that twilight war; it was important to take the war into the Arab world itself, and the despot

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