Danger is supposed to be a great unifying factor. Convening the First Continental Congress of the Thirteen Colonies to forge a common response to the the British Parliament’s passage of the Intolerable (Coercive) Acts appears in retrospect to be a natural act. Benjamin Franklin famous observation that “we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately” before signing the Declaration of Independence, an act of capital treason toward the British Crown, is easy to regard as a common sense observation.
But unity in the face of great adversity is not as automatic as commonly supposed. The word rout is defined as ‘a disorderly retreat or flight following defeat’. It expresses the natural condition following the collapse of order; it describes the primal impulse toward individual survival in the face of danger: every man for himself. Group survival may give everyone a statistically higher chance of pulling through, but it comes at the cost of requiring that some individuals assume greater risks than others. “Hanging together” is an act of group optimization. The response of the Founding Fathers toward the Coercive Acts may be much more atypical than we think.
For example, the politics of the Palestinian National Authority is one of factional, often murderous infighting. To depict it would be like playing a video of the Continental Congress in reverse: first in one room, than all over the place. The Foreign Policy Research Institute characterized its dynamics as follows:
Who will be the key players and factions in post-Arafat Palestinian politics? There are unfortunately far too many of them. Arafat’s legacy will be fought over by at least five major factions, three separate institutions, and fourteen different security agencies in his own group Fatah alone. That leaves aside the Islamist organizations and smaller PLO groups, and individual rivalries or ambitions within all these groups.
“Factions” is probably too precise a word. No real parties exist: there are no disciplined groupings or generally recognized charismatic leaders,. The structure is loose and rapidly shifting. Ideology is virtually non-existent; there is no meaningful Left, Right, and Center. In general, too, connections between local leaderships in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are weak, and there is no clear hierarchy or chain of command. Arafat’s most likely legacy will be a kind of quiet anarchy in which different groups, local warlords, and security agencies operate on their own and ignore instructions from the “top.”
One of the great differences between the War of Independence and the Intifada is that Cornwallis actually had someone to surrender to. Israel has no one to make peace with.
The high degree of entropy present in a rout is not confined to Arab or Muslim cultures. Factionalism follows in the wake of every major breakdown. The famous French Resistance, which emerged after the Nazi victories of 1940, was really a collective name for a hodge-podge of groups who fought the Germans when they weren’t fighting each other. Charles de Gaulle, despite every effort, failed to unify the Resistance. In early 1942 he parachuted Jean Moulin into France with eventual orders “to form the Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR), a difficult task since each resistance movement wanted to keep its independence”. Not long afterward, Moulin was betrayed to the Gestapo, and suspicions linger to this day that Moulin was sold out consequent to factional infighting among Resistance groups.
The fragmentation of the Resistance ended with the arrival of an external force with sufficient energy to reimpose order on the system. That force of course, was the Free French Army backed by the Western allies. The arrival of Leclerc’s armor in Paris signaled not just the end of the Nazi occupation; it marked the beginning of the end of the Resistance as the main factor in French politics. In other cases, order is reimposed only after a prolonged factional conflict, when a victorious party amasses enough power to stamp its mold upon the country. But what happens when things never settle down to the point of anything approaching normalcy?
Perhaps one of the reasons why the Thirteen Colonies unified so successfully is that they contained enough pre-existing order to form a more complex structure: the United States. In many respects, the American nation existed before it declared independence. But in the tragic case of Gaza, there is no apparent source of free energy available to produce unity — the kind of unity competent to negotiate a meaningful peace. On the contrary, it may be in the interests of foreign powers to keep the pot boiling. And until a source of energy can be found to build up its civic society, events will go from pillar to post. Leo Tolstoy opened his novel Anna Karernina with the observation that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Not everyone agrees. Robert Fulford called it “the silliest damn sentence ever set down by a great author” arguing the truth is quite the reverse: “experience and literature both demonstrate that happy families come in all shapes and sizes, but the burdens of unhappy families (emotional indifference, poverty, alcoholism, irresponsibility) are painfully predictable.”
But maybe Tolstoy got it right. Every functioning society shares with others the property that it has enough available energy to “hang together”. Every failed state has the property that it’s factions can hang each other in different ways.
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66 Comments
1. Herb:“Group survival may give everyone a statistically higher chance of pulling through, but it comes at the cost of requiring that some individuals assume greater risks than others.”
True, it also requires that each individual in the group surrender some part of his freedom to act in favor of the survival of the group, which presumes some intrinsic ‘good’ associated with the survival of the group. HAMAS and FATAH are both gangs. They operate from the individual self interests of the members of the gang, not those of the Nation (if we can call it that). The reason there are so many internal ad hoc operators inside these gangs is an indication of the lack of a cohesive force or overweening interest that animates them. The Israel Grievance supplies the focus to “unite” the people.
This may indicate the need within such a society for a dictator sufficiently ruthless to beat down any competing interest. Arafat was sufficiently cunning to get international support for his gang and ruthless enough to impose discipline on the gang. Exit Arafat and the other gang arises. Now an external power whacks HAMAS in order to advance the external power’s interests, which just so happens to advance FATAH’s. Israel would be happy to let the Palestinians eat themselves if they’d leave Israel alone.
Jan 3, 2009 - 7:41 am 2. trangbang68:When the motivating force behind your movement is blind rage and seething hatred, finding cohesion is impossible. That same hatred will eventually consume the hater. Compare Abraham Lincoln or General Lee with their magnanimity to their foes and largeness of heart and vision to the snakes in Hamas and the other Islamist groups. Killing them is too good for them.
Jan 3, 2009 - 8:26 am 3. F:As I was reading the FPRI piece the very first thought that jumped into my head was that Arafat was not charismatic. Ruthless, yes, and able to attract material aid from world powers who wanted the Cold War to simmer on, but charismatic in the sense of being attractive? Never. The man who popularized and extended suicide attacks was (at least to me) ugly, mean, petty, spiteful and megalomaniacal. (Did I leave anything out?)
It seems to me, Wretchard, that the crucial element of the American Revolution was the “pre-existing order” you mentioned in your penultimate paragraph. Contrast the ability of the colonies to form the associations of which de Tocqueville writes — political, social, economic — with the inability of the Palestinians even to agree on a common cause beyond the destruction of Israel and you see the fundamental difference between the two situations. Long before American settlers dreamed of independence they knew how to form themselves into associations to govern themselves, to see to the common good, even to deliver the mail. This seems like a small point, but it is so essential to ultimate nationhood and so lacking in the situation we are looking at here (as well as in other situations around the world).
This is a theme I wish you’d expound on some day — it’s such a crucial distinction between America’s success and other nations’ failure, yet it is so frequently overlooked. When I represented the US overseas for 27 years(all in the Third World) I was frequently assailed with a plea for financing: “America is successful because it is rich — you need to make us rich so we can succeed.” My reply was perhaps glib, but I believed in it and still do: “America is wealthy because we succeeded as a nation, not the other way around.”
F
Jan 3, 2009 - 9:09 am 4. Humboldt Squid:It helps in understanding Arafat era politics if we realize that most of this multitude of groups were secretly controlled by Arafat, and remained to fight each other after his tragically delayed death.
Jan 3, 2009 - 9:17 am 5. Utopia Parkway:I think the Hang together quote is very appropriate. Israel’s existence today is quite unlikely. It happened because of the ability of its people to hang together against its enemies.
The tribal societies that have chosen to be its enemies will always be less capable because of their infighting. Israel’s form of govt was modeled most after Britain’s. The neighboring countries that were carved out of the WWI era mandates had the same opportunity to do that but I guess the tribal mentality simply didn’t mesh well with the British form democratic govt.
Jan 3, 2009 - 9:38 am 6. Insufficiently Sensitive:Perhaps one of the reasons why the Thirteen Colonies unified so successfully is that they contained enough pre-existing order to form a more complex structure: the United States.
And in that statement lies one of the biggest conditions that faces the setting up of any democracy from some different kind of pre-existing governance.
The idea of Hamas winning an ‘election’ and running as a ‘democracy’ was a non-starter - they were at best a thuggomullahcracy based on the dear departed Sheikh Yassin and his cronies. But the election they ‘won’ was held by the PLO, which does pretend to be a democracy. Why? As a scam against the ‘international community’, which rewards them with vast wealth and the united cover of the MSM. Were they ever to gain control, these heirs to the Grand Thug Arafat would splinter like the empire of Alexander the Great, if they had enough room. Since they don’t, a Grand Shootout (or series of Lesser Shootouts) would emplace a new Grand Thug who’d enjoy more wealth from the ‘international community’ plus Iran, as long as Israel still stood.
A better vision of the setup of a new ‘democracy’ would be Yugoslavia after WW II. Of course it wasn’t, at first, but after the Tito regime had done in 100,000 of the folks it thought most likely to resist or form serious opposition groups, it settled down into a top-down regime that did allow some voting here and there in the structure, and lasted about 40 years. But its struture remained tribal, and reverted to its pre-existing condition of hanging separately after the Tito echoes faded out.
Jan 3, 2009 - 9:49 am 7. exhelodrvr:“On the contrary, it may be in the interests of foreign powers to keep the pot boiling.”
May?
Jan 3, 2009 - 9:57 am 8. marymcl:The situation in Gaza today just underscores the futility of the so-called two-state solution. When has Palestine ever been a state? In the past, it was always a geographical designation, never a political one. Even in ancient times the Jews were the only people to establsh anything there. The area has been governed by outsiders ever since and if Israel didn’t exist the Arabs would’ve chopped the place up amongst themselves already. “Palestine” is not a nation, it’s not even an ethnicity, it’s a suicide cult. It’s the apotheosis of Arab strategy against the Jewish state. Israel has held its own over the years, but time is not on her side and universal acceptance of the two-state solution is an Arab victory in this long, long war.
Jan 3, 2009 - 10:18 am 9. Cannoneer No. 4:From the Wikipedia link —
Clandestine press
The first action of many resistance movements was the publication and distribution of the clandestine press. This was not the case with all movements, as some refused civil action and preferred armed resistance, such as Ceux de la Résistance and Ceux de la Libération. Most clandestine newspapers were not consistent in their issues and were often just a single sheet, because the sale of all raw materials - paper, ink, stencils - was prohibited.
In the northern zone, Pantagruel, the newspaper of Franc-Tireur, had a circulation of 10,000 by June 1941, and was quickly replaced by Libération-Nord which reached a circulation of 50,000. By January 1944, Défense de la France was distributing 450,000 copies.[125]
In the southern zone, François de Menthon’s newspaper Liberté merged with Henri Frenay’s Vérité to form Combat, in December 1941, which grew to a circulation of 200,000 by 1944.[126] During the same period, Pantagruel published 37 issues, Libération-Sud published 54 issues and Témoignage chrétien published 15.
The underground press of France published books as well as newspapers through publishing houses such as Les Éditions de Minuit (the Midnight Press)[127] which had been begun in order to circumvent Vichy and German censorship. The novel Le Silence de la Mer was written in 1942 by Jean Bruller, and quickly became a symbol of mental resistance through its story of how an old man and his niece do not speak to the German officer occupying their house.
Jan 3, 2009 - 10:18 am 10. RWE:The Continental Congress had an underlying philosophy, or perhaps a mythology would be a better term, that men are created equal and have certain inalienable rights. This is demonstrably false but produced exceptional results when accepted as a group concept.
It is not clear that the Palestinians accept this mythology or any other, save possibly Arafat’s of “Through courage and cunning and embracing death we can drive the Jews into the sea.” And probably not even that, in reality. After all, Arafat himself did not accept it.
Aside from their mythology, the Continental Congress was comprised of individuals of character and who actually had accomplished something, rather than expecting foreign governments to use the threat of violence to separate their own people from their money so it could be sent to them.
On TV right now they are showing the IDF tanks getting into position and smoke being laid over the area they likely will enter. Are we about to see another Alamo, a new Bastogne, or Operations Cobra and Dragoon – which amounted to a drag race for the attacking forces?
Jan 3, 2009 - 10:21 am 11. Brock:Richard, do you see a relationship between the topic of this post and your observation about factions within Western civilization trying to engineer a civil society that is “just so”? Perhaps we are operating not just at the edge of our physical energy plant, but also near the edge of our civil energy plant. Was the Katrina-induced social breakdown in New Orleans a preview of what could happen at a national level in the even of a national crisis?
Granted, the “breakdown” of New Orleans was wildly exaggerated by the media, but that doesn’t negate the actuality of some “bad things” happening. Plus, the breakdown in New Orleans was averted by a considerable input of energy from outside the region, not internally generated energy or internal reserves of energy. This can be compared to the 9/11 response in NYC, where the energy to restore order was immediately available and internally generated within the NYC region.
Which parts of Western civilization are operating near the edge of their civic envelope? Which ones have deep reserves capable of responding to a social crisis? How do we know ahead of time which is which; how is this quantified; how is it improved? What margin of safety is good enough, and what is the cost of creating these margins of safety?
Jan 3, 2009 - 10:24 am 12. slade:The man [Arafat] who popularized and extended suicide attacks was (at least to me) ugly, mean, petty, spiteful and megalomaniacal. (Did I leave anything out?)
He was also gay according to intimations left by Oriana Fallaci (Interview with History).
But the point stands - the list of redeeming values in Palestinian “leaders” is not encouraging from a long-term perspective.
Jan 3, 2009 - 10:26 am 13. exhelodrvr:This seems to be the result of the “strongman” that plays a significant role in Arab culture, but when it exists in a sub-culture (Palestinians) that don’t seem to have the strong tribal structure that other groups have. Strongman keeps the underlings weak and dependent on him; he dies, everything splinters.
Jan 3, 2009 - 10:51 am 14. Whitehall:The fifty years of “refugee camps” must have stunted any political growth. If you check the UN site you’ll see an exponential growth in the Palestinian population being feed and housed in dependency to outside money.
What kind of political leadership arises in such a ghetto? They make Charlie Rangel and Jesse Jackson look like statesmen.
Better to say that Palestine has been breed to create chaos.
Jan 3, 2009 - 11:24 am 15. cjm:let’s not let the palistinian people off the hook; they seem to be a uniformly shitty group of people. good luck building anything out of them.
Jan 3, 2009 - 11:24 am 16. lc:This is the world wrought by Yasser Arafat, and it holds not just in the Middle East. Arafat, among the many things already mentioned by the astute and able commentators here, was an engineer by training with a photographic memory, who very possibly was not Palestinian but Egyptian. He, already in charge of the murderous Fatah, was appointed to lead the PLO, an already functioning, wide ranging group with banks, schools, businesses, etc under their purview, by a group of foreign leaders with no accountability to their own people, let alone the “Palestinians” (I suppose one could just as well say Philistines, or in many cases, Israeli Arabs). A bit of foreshadowing there.
The two state solution is anything but.
And, one of the things that makes the U.S. the great country it is today is that we had the good fortune to have been a former colony of Great Britain.
….my $.02.
Jan 3, 2009 - 12:13 pm 17. NahnCee:As we’ve seen in both Iraq and AFghanistan (as well as the other Middle East countries) having sex with boys does not necessarily equate to being gay. Arafat undoubtedly died of AIDS but because he had unprotected sex with other males does not make him “gay” as we understand it.
///
I thought it was the War OF Independnce, not the War ON Independence. The difference would be from an American standpoint, we were fighting a war for our own independence and were all for that idea. From an outside or British point of view, the war would have been AGAINST American independence, and therefore would have been an anti-independence war.
Jan 3, 2009 - 12:23 pm 18. NahnCee:Remembering when Palestinians held their elections, are we all agreed that they *did* indeed vote in Hamas? A majority of those nitwits voted for terrorists to run their government?
What on earth did they *expect* would happen?
Jan 3, 2009 - 12:25 pm 19. wretchard:Perhaps we are operating not just at the edge of our physical energy plant, but also near the edge of our civil energy plant. Was the Katrina-induced social breakdown in New Orleans a preview of what could happen at a national level in the even of a national crisis?
It takes a crisis to reveal which virtues are actually vices. Gaza was not just the Arafat’s creation, it was also the result of the “International Community’s” policies taken to their logical conclusion. Gaza was a social experiment; a proving ground for diplomatic concepts, a test of ideology. In that poor patch the politics of symbolism, victimhood, guilt and dependency were tried out and given free rein to work their healing magic. And what it produced was a nightmare town of uneducated people ruled by gangsters and PR men. I’m sure the social engineers will go back to the drawing board. What will they come up with next?
Jan 3, 2009 - 12:54 pm 20. wretchard:I thought it was the War OF Independnce, not the War ON Independence.
Fixed.
Jan 3, 2009 - 12:56 pm 21. exhelodrvr:Brock,
“Which parts of Western civilization are operating near the edge of their civic envelope? ”
Those parts which are too dependent on their government to provide for them.
Jan 3, 2009 - 1:21 pm 22. 49erDweet:NahnCee #18. They “hoped” to see Israel driven into the sea. They “expected” to have FATAH care for them for life. Of course neither was about to happen, but then such are the hopes and expectations of elections.
Jan 3, 2009 - 1:29 pm 23. slade:Fallaci’s Interview with History was published in 1977 when people were either straight or gay and Arafat was still hiding behind his wife (wives?) and children. Fallaci potrayed him as a closeted homosexual who hadn’t come out - sneering as only a sexy opinionated woman can do with this subtle insight. The modern understanding, after 30+ more years of history, portrays a much different picture - at least some of the socio-cultural behavior patterns are surfacing within a broader public awareness. In this context the term “gay” is not appropriate in scope to describe the kind of sexual behavior common to tribal Muslim societies extant in the Middle Eastern peninsula.
Jeez NahnCee have a cow willya?
Jan 3, 2009 - 1:48 pm 24. Achillea:The success of the proto-US compared with the failure of the Palestinians to achieve any functional unity strikes me as an excellent illustration of the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. (Bill Whittle has an excellent post on it here). He explains it better than I ever could, but in a nutshell, groups in which the members sacrifice some personal aggrandizement for group advancement are more successful than groups with an every man for himself dynamic. Internal cooperation is more effective than internal competition. The Thirteen Colonies had a tradition of cooperation, the Palestinians don’t.
Jan 3, 2009 - 2:09 pm 25. 155G:Remember the influence of Islam in all this. Islam creates a culture with an excess of poor young single men. Denied wives, denied heterosexual relations, their anger is easy to incite. The women go to the powerful. What better motivator for the young men to seek to topple the powerful and replace them. Aside survival, sex is the strongest influence on human males. Islam is a recipe for endless tribal war, and the Arabs are a perfect example.
Jan 3, 2009 - 2:13 pm 26. Achillea:A majority of those nitwits voted for terrorists to run their government?
What on earth did they *expect* would happen?
Apparently, they’re not familiar with H. L. Mencken.
Jan 3, 2009 - 2:16 pm 27. OldSalt:The major difference between the chaos of the Palestinians and order of the American 13 colonies is Islam versus Christianity. While the modern Atheist movement would strongly contest Christianity’s positive role in America’s development, but for almost 200 years this view was commonly understood by Americans and uncontested. America was successful because Americans held a common Judea-Christian world view. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and English Common law were all Christian-influenced constructs. They formed the foundation for success, common justice, and the development of wealth.
I have been skeptical from the beginning that a Iraqi Democracy could succeed absent Christianity. The closer that Iraq (or in this case, the Palestinians) draws towards Islam and Sharia law, the more murder, disorder, tyranny, and disorder will be realized. Democracy cannot evolve from an Islamic world view. This observation is as much based on history as personal conviction.
Offtopic: It’s one reason Christian conservatives are embroiled in America’s “culture war”. While we really don’t care how liberal humanists live their lives individually, unfortunately, they seem to need the validation of law to assuage their personal guilt. In other words, unless all American’s endorse humanist principles and repudiate the “superstitions” such as Christianity, the liberal humanists will not be content. From the Christian-conservative viewpoint, such anti-Christian world destroy America and everything that made American free, rich, and a successful nation.
Israel’s only option is to remove both Hamas and the Palestinians from Gaza and North Lebanon, and push it’s borders out to where Israel’s borders meets those of responsible Nation-states. Those are the only “defensible” borders possible for Israel. Israel cannot tolerate attacks by land based entities which are not accountable nation-states. Future conflicts would then become conventional. Israel would hold Egypt, Jordan, and Syria accountable for it’s actions henceforth. Second, Israel declares that if it is attacked, it will never relinquish territory gained via Israeli blood while responding to an attack. Hang out the fig leaf backed by the sword, and declare to her neighbors that they can choose peace and prosperity or war and dismemberment.
Israel sows the seeds of her own destruction and the death of many Jews, by compromising to save face with the International (and specifically, anti-Semite European) community. She cannot compromise with those who deny her right to exist. But again, Israel has history but no unifying world view (Christian or Jewish). While it’s citizens share a common history and heritage, it is not truly a “Jewish” country in the way that early American was a “Christian” country. God must be blessing the Israeli people in spite of themselves, for I see no rational way that Israel could have survived this far beset with Socialism, multiple factions, and the folly of it’s political decisions.
Jan 3, 2009 - 2:23 pm 28. E. Nigma:OldSalt comes close to what I was thinking.
In the Colonies before 1775, there was a thriving intellectual life, men of property and ideas (many European ideas, such as those of Locke and Hobbes, Adam Smith, etc.). And under the Crown, the Colonies had a chance to experiment and learn the good social habits of representative government. There had been, since Magna Carta, a history of intellectual political thought (and dissent) in the English-speaking world, and that culture came West with the colonists (as well as the Christian Bible and the beliefs that engenders). All men may not be truly equal, but if we are truly to stand before God as equals, the we can try and devise a legal and political system where all men have equal rights, under law. In short, there was “common ground” to form a country and government based on practical as well as profound ideas. It took until the Constitution of 1787 to actually work out most of the details, but somehow we did get it done, because there was a common belief that it COULD be done.
In the Arabic and wider Islamic world, there is no real political thinking or scholarship. There is only the extended polemical defense and elaboration of Islam. The only ideas that seem to supersede that (if only temporarily) are the secular authoritarian ideas from the West (fascism = baathism, and Marxism). The individual Arab can, of course, think for himself, and function in the West if he or she leaves this culture. But within this realm, little dissenting thought can be found from the standard rationalizations of authoritarian Islam, and the derivative political consequences. Arafat may have been totally secular (as was Saddam Hussein), but neither of them could thumb their nose at Islam and hope to survive. Saddam ran to Islam after the 1991 Gulf War to re-assert his political base, as many of his Baaathist plans were shattered.
Jan 3, 2009 - 3:58 pm 29. WSL:As Huntington tried to explain, culture, religion and the provincial (nationalist?) beliefs of the many DO MATTER. Until Islam changes (or permits change), they are all stuck playing the same hand of cards, world without end. They don’t form governments with the virtues that we recognize as necessary because in the political-intellectual language of their culture (and what it permits), it cannot be done.
@14(Whitehall: “The fifty years of ‘refugee camps’ must have stunted any political growth.”
Much of the world is to blame for allowing the term “refugee camp” to persist so long. In many, if not most, cases, people living there are second and third generation inhabitants of the camps. They can hardly be called refugees. If the camps were not there, much of their grievance industry could no longer extort money from sympathy organizations like the U.N. Moreover, their demands for a right of return are meaningless, since they have no claim of ownership to which to return.
Jan 3, 2009 - 4:02 pm 30. Tony:@21 Exhelo Those parts which are too dependent on their government to provide for them.
In the good ol’ USA, we lose 15-16,000 KIA to violence every year. We think there’s no war going on here. In big city govts, like Philly, the theory is that “guns cause homicide” and there’s nothing you can do about it, an absurdity. Human beings commit murder, not guns or rockets.
Perhaps Hamas is equally disorganized, anarchic, a human cancer. Like any American boy in days gone by and still can build a hot rod on his own, Palestinian hotshots can make rockets and shoot them at Israel. Like any sad lost boy, 80% of both killers and killees in America are convicted felons, perhaps any sad Pali boy feels there’s nothing to lose.
Not to sound like Charles and others, but perhaps there is such a thing as Evil walking the earth. I’m sure there’s a sociology / psychology explanation for such murderous behavior, but the behavior is deadly nonetheless. Darwinism works on behavior. This behavior can’t last forever.
Jan 3, 2009 - 4:06 pm 31. lorenzo:Under Salzman’s analysis of Middle Eastern culture (which I review here), the principle of “balanced opposition” whereby smaller groups unite to match and oppose a larger (”me against my brother, my brothers and I against my cousins, my brothers and cousins against the world” as the proverb runs) should lead Hamas and Fatah to unite against the common foe (Israel) under the aegis of either Palestinian nationalism (which Hamas subordinates to Islam) or Islam (which Fatah can not be purely in favour of without abandoning entirely it Palestinian Christian supporters).
So the problem is that Palestinian politics has never found a uniting factor other than opposition to Israel and Hamas and Fatah have no mechanism for uniting acceptable to both. Unity in hatred has collapsed into plain hatred.
The Palestinian people may be tired of it all, but they lack the power to do much about it (since their choices are Hamas’s fanaticism or Fatah’s corruption) and are probably too trapped into their cultural presumptions to break out anyway.
Jan 3, 2009 - 4:14 pm 32. NahnCee:I’m not at all convinced that New Orleans and its inhabitants are a good example of what would happen in a disaster elsewhere in the United States, and therefore Katrina shouldn’t be used as an exemplar.
For example, after Hurricane Ike, people got out their chainsaws and started cleaning up. For themselves. They didn’t seem to get into the critical mess that New Orleans allowed itself to get into in the first place, there wasn’t the sitting around waiting for the government to come help afterwards, and I’m not hearing years later that people are still homeless as a result.
I think New Orleans was a singular occasion and a singular result based upon a singular mindset of one group of people which is demonstrably NOT that of the rest of America.
Jan 3, 2009 - 4:18 pm 33. lc:From an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article (not worth linking): protesters against Israel march in front of CNN headquarters…I guess this saves CNN from getting in their cars and “driving by.”
And didn’t CNN make a deal with Saddam so they could have a station in Baghdad?
Grievance industry indeed.
Jan 3, 2009 - 5:07 pm 34. wretchard:If someone deliberately set out to create a “Quagmire” by far the best playbook to follow wouldn’t be Johnson’s strategy in Vietnam, nor Bush’s in Iraq: the all time champeen of quagmire manufacturing has got to be the Peace Process. That’s another name for the politicization of conflict; the act of converting war from a drama with beginning, middle and end into a daytime soap opera lasting decades; the gift that keeps on giving; where the cast has to be replaced as the original actors retire or die of old age.
The Peace Process is an insult to real peace, just as the award of the Nobel Prize for Peace to Yasser Arafat is one of the greatest unintentional parodies of all time. That these terms are used at all is testimony to utter debasement of modern political speech. When George Orwell coined the slogans “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” in 1984 he assumed the reader would understand the irony. Today we mean it seriously. And that’s something to worry about.
Any system which corrupts the kernel of its code, which inverts its functions, which not only lies but lies to itself is in mortal peril. The misery of the Palestinian people and the slow bleeding of Israel is inseparable from the growing madness in some sections of Western political thought. “I started a joke, which started the whole world laughing. But if I’d only seen that the joke was on me.”
Jan 3, 2009 - 5:16 pm 35. E. Nigma:There is always something “Orwellian” about intellectually bankrupt authoritarianism (is there any other kind?), and Islam is the oldest and most enduring “authoritarian” religious-political theory currently running amok on the planet. Truth and reality all eventually have to be inverted or perverted to maintain the day-to-day rationalizations that keep the individual caught up in circumstance alive, or at least from losing his or her mind (completely) and functioning. We all go a little bit crazy on a day to day basis when our notions of truth run up against the prevailing “opinions” passed down as “truth” (see Pravda on cable, aka MSNBC).
Wretchard:
Jan 3, 2009 - 5:47 pm 36. RWE:Bonus points for using the BeeGees to make a point!
The Quagmire of which Wretchard speaks relative to the Peace Process is all too common in many areas. In fact, name it and you have a similar quagmire: energy production, health care, labor and economic policies, even such supposedly ultra-scientific areas as space exploration and exploitation.
Part of this is clearly due to competing viewpoints and the New Age thinking that holds that no one is ever wrong, and ultimately that no one is ever right, either. Not being able to tell someone to sit down and shuthellup because they are stupid imposes huge difficulties.
But I think that a large part of this is a genuine desire to preserve problems, for job security purposes, if nothing else. Once an “industry” is established it is a very difficult thing to get rid of, or even affect significantly, as the Big 3 shows. This attitude is all-pervasive. A few years back I was talking to a government scientist about obtaining some sounding rocket data. We used to launch large numbers of sounding rockets but cut way back on it during the post-Cold War downsizing, having collected all the data any one would ever want. The scientist argued that the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia showed that the atmosphere had changed and that we needed to start launching sounding rockets again.
That kind of attitude includes the industries associated with managing problems – and managing to see that they don’t ever go away. We saw the spectacle of the AARP attacking Pres Bush’s modest partial privatization of Social Security, despite the fact that the organization constantly harps on “saving Social Security.”
If all the huge problems of the word were solved over the next couple of years I have little doubt that new ones would crop up right away. The UN probably would announce a hideous golf shoe shortage in outer Mongolia or some such.
Jan 3, 2009 - 5:49 pm 37. pst314:“In the Colonies before 1775, there was a thriving intellectual life”
London booksellers reported that they sold more books in the colonies than in England.
Jan 3, 2009 - 6:47 pm 38. pst314:“the all time champeen of quagmire manufacturing has got to be the Peace Process.”
It’s as if the “peace industry” is channeling Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley: “The UN is not here to create war, it’s here to preserve war.”
Jan 3, 2009 - 6:52 pm 39. esmoore5:Thunder of artillery signals ground push on Gaza
See:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090104/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_gaza_assault;_ylt=AqMjoEVy5FmQPmYeJLAr9IgLewgF
And so it begins…..
Jan 3, 2009 - 6:57 pm 40. Bob:Keep your eyes on the real winners in this game, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Mrs. Arafat, She Knows How To Play The Game
Jan 3, 2009 - 7:34 pm 41. NahnCee:It’d be helpful if people started thinking that there are more important things than peace. For a whole group of people to go around wishing “Peace be upon you” ignores everything else involved in “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
Then, if that same group of people have an end-all be-all of “peace” and “stability”, they’re really in trouble, because “stability” isn’t all that important either since it usually means “stuck in the mud”.
The problem with the “peace process” is that your being offered something that really isn’t important - peace - for something that is important - safety. To my way of thinking, that’s not a good exchange.
Jan 3, 2009 - 7:39 pm 42. lc:Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” is a must read.
Jan 3, 2009 - 7:48 pm 43. Bob:Mrs. Arafat–she’s outta there, with money in the bank.
Jan 3, 2009 - 7:59 pm 44. Bob:I hope the Israelis clean their clock, but I’m worried that missiles may start flying in from Lebanon, then who knows what might happen.
Jan 3, 2009 - 8:13 pm 45. Lifeofthemind:Somebody found Arafat attractive enough to give him Aids.
The mark of a professional army is that when under stress it groups closer, when in doubt it moves to the sound of the guns. The British were a superb military because the essential nature of teamwork had been drilled into their officer core. That is what is meant by the aphorism about the Battle of Waterloo being won on the playing fields of Eton. While we think of a barn raising as exclusively the activity of the pacifist Amish in a movie at one time every rural community engaged in such communal activities. Israel was built by Kibbutzim who built under enemy fire. Until recently they had an influence over the society vastly greater than their tiny percentage of the population.
Jan 3, 2009 - 8:53 pm 46. Dave:@NahnCee #32: Big Spring Texas, Feb 2007.
The nearby refinery blows up. Refinery crews and volunteer fire department (with full-time cadre) bring flames under control, fire extinquished by that PM.
Local radio station gives running account, often with input from observers; Request passed to lay off cell phones as firefighters etc need bandwidth. Populace complies.
Volunteers join with local police department routing traffic around town and affected area. Roads back to normal by time fire is out.
Caller to radio station says that everybody needs to pray. Station Host suggests caller leads prayer. She does, concludes with “in Jesus’ Name”. Town gives a hearty “Amen!”.
(ACLU and C Hitchens not consulted in this matter.)
Next day, schools reopens, all non-refinery life back to normal. Refinery resumes partial production within the month. Full re-build and improvements within six.
During this period of time, Army Sergeant is killed in Iraq. His family name is Alvarez.
Family requests their Pastor act as spokeman. His family name is Smith. Also, there is another widow in town. Her husband was one of the contractors in Iraq. As he was not eligible for DoD Honors, the local Congressman made a trip to town to present the widow with the flag etc. News outlets so note without being requested.
The MSM would have us believe that the underclass of New Orleans is more typical than my fellow West Texans. The MSM is obviously lying through their teeth. The fact that our country is pulling through both routine times and the usual quota of crises
Jan 3, 2009 - 9:48 pm 47. Bob:shows which is typical of our society and which is not.
In a day or two I’d bet the fighting is on two fronts.
Jan 3, 2009 - 11:08 pm 48. Lifeofthemind:@Bob,
Already is, NYC, Ft Lauderdale, Seattle, Paris, London etc is one front.
On a completely unrelated topic.
Jan 3, 2009 - 11:50 pm 49. Alexis:If the Iranian gas storage facilities go boom, accidents happen, the mullahs are going to find it hard to stay in power. Wonder if they have insurance?
It seems as though the key divide in the West isn’t so much between liberal and conservative, urban and rural, or rich and poor. The real question that divides the West is, “Can it happen to me?” It is between those who see the terrorists as real and those who see the terrorists as imaginary. It is between those who assume the West will always be free and those who assume that the West can be enslaved if nobody stops the slavers.
The Los Angeles Center for Digital Art had a recent art competition. The winners were the usual boring “avante garde” who can’t seem to tell the difference between warmed over surrealism and artistic merit. Among the second place finishers is a slave sale poster created by the Joseph Lewis III, Dean of Alfred University’s School of Art & Design.
It may be possible that Mr. Lewis created this “poster” with the intention of being ironic. Certainly, the art contest judges labeled his submission as ironic. However, I fail to see any irony in his poster at all. Such slavery is hardly implausible. Slavery does exist in America (and throughout the world) despite its illegality, and the notion that white people could be enslaved is hardly novel. Such enslavement is precisely what many people want for Americans, not the least of whom are the slave dealers from al-Qaeda. Moreover, it is very unlikely any such poster would have been perceived to be ironic in early nineteenth century American because white Americans were sold as slaves by Barbary pirates.
Such plausibility leads one to wonder if Mr. Lewis’s “slave auction” poster were not really intended as irony, but rather as Mr. Lewis’s wishful thinking.
If a white college fraternity were to promote a “slave auction” of black people, it would naturally be regarded as highly offensive, despite any claim by that fraternity that it was really making a joke. And yet, if a black college dean puts out a poster of a slave auction selling white people, he gets Second Place in an art competition at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art.
When one doesn’t take threats seriously, a statement of racist brutality can be taken as an ironic joke. It’s rather like how The Grim Reaper got treated in The Meaning of Life.
Sometimes, it is the evil regarded as the most implausible which triumphs precisely because it becomes so tolerated. All too often, it is the toleration of evil that leads to enslavement.
Jan 4, 2009 - 3:14 am 50. Alexis:It seems as though the key divide in the West isn’t so much between liberal and conservative, urban and rural, or rich and poor. The real question that divides the West is, “Can it happen to me?” It is between those who see the terrorists as real and those who see the terrorists as imaginary. It is between those who assume the West will always be free and those who assume that the West can be enslaved if nobody stops the slavers.
The Los Angeles Center for Digital Art had a recent art competition. The winners were the usual boring “avante garde” who can’t seem to tell the difference between warmed over surrealism and artistic merit. Among the second place finishers is a slave sale poster created by the Joseph Lewis III, Dean of Alfred University’s School of Art & Design.
It may be possible that Mr. Lewis created this “poster” with the intention of being ironic. Certainly, the art contest judges labeled his submission as ironic. However, I fail to see any irony in his poster at all. Such slavery is hardly implausible. Slavery does exist in America (and throughout the world) despite its illegality, and the notion that white people could be enslaved is hardly novel. Such enslavement is precisely what many people want for Americans, not the least of whom are the slave dealers from al-Qaeda. Moreover, it is very unlikely any such poster would have been perceived to be ironic in early nineteenth century American because white Americans were sold as slaves by Barbary pirates.
Such plausibility leads one to wonder if Mr. Lewis’s “slave auction” poster were not really intended as irony, but rather as Mr. Lewis’s wishful thinking.
If a white college fraternity were to promote a “slave auction” of black people, it would naturally be regarded as highly offensive, despite any claim by that fraternity that it was really making a joke. And yet, if a black college dean puts out a poster of a slave auction selling white people, he gets Second Place in an art competition at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art.
When one doesn’t take threats seriously, a statement of racist brutality can be taken as an ironic joke. It’s rather like how The Grim Reaper got treated in The Meaning of Life.
Sometimes, it is the evil regarded as the most implausible which triumphs precisely because it becomes so tolerated. All too often, it is the toleration of evil that leads to enslavement.
Jan 4, 2009 - 3:16 am 51. Alexis:It seems as though the key divide in the West isn’t so much between liberal and conservative, urban and rural, or rich and poor. The real question that divides the West is, “Can it happen to me?” It is between those who see the terrorists as real and those who see the terrorists as imaginary. It is between those who assume the West will always be free and those who assume that the West can be enslaved if nobody stops the slavers.
The Los Angeles Center for Digital Art had a recent art competition. The winners were the usual boring “avante garde” who can’t seem to tell the difference between warmed over surrealism and artistic merit. Among the second place finishers is a slave sale poster created by the Joseph Lewis III, Dean of Alfred University’s School of Art & Design.
It may be possible that Mr. Lewis created this “poster” with the intention of being ironic. Certainly, the art contest judges labeled his submission as ironic. However, I fail to see any irony in his poster at all. Such slavery is hardly implausible. Slavery does exist in America (and throughout the world) despite its illegality, and the notion that white people could be enslaved is hardly novel. Such enslavement is precisely what many people want for Americans, not the least of whom are the slave dealers from al-Qaeda. Moreover, it is very unlikely any such poster would have been perceived to be ironic in early nineteenth century American because white Americans were sold as slaves by Barbary pirates.
Such plausibility leads one to wonder if Mr. Lewis’s “slave auction” poster were not really intended as irony, but rather as Mr. Lewis’s wishful thinking.
If a white college fraternity were to promote a “slave auction” of black people, it would naturally be regarded as highly offensive, despite any claim by that fraternity that it was really making a joke. And yet, if a black college dean puts out a poster of a slave auction selling white people, he gets Second Place in an art competition at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art.
When one doesn’t take threats seriously, a statement of racist brutality can be taken as an ironic joke. It’s rather like how The Grim Reaper got treated in The Meaning of Life.
Sometimes, it is the evil regarded as the most implausible which triumphs precisely because it becomes so tolerated. All too often, it is the toleration of evil that leads to enslavement.
Jan 4, 2009 - 3:17 am 52. Alexis:[Please use the third post, as it uses proper hypertext. Thank you.]
Jan 4, 2009 - 3:18 am 53. Peter Boston:Culture trumps everything. The periods of human history when men were secure in their homes and their property by the Rule of Law and a consensual undertaking of the Public Good are strobe light flashes in a darkness of kings and caliphs.
God, Country, Family, Self is the only value hierarchy that has ever produced a sustainable civil society. Good men fight the enemy, foreign and domestic, who seek to substitute their will for this hierarchy. Complacent men make their children subjects of the nobles.
The Founders understood this. Our written Constitution is the bulwark against demagoguery that cost the free men of Rome their republic. But even our Constitution cannot protect us from ourselves when God, Country and Family are forgotten or reviled.
Jan 4, 2009 - 5:32 am 54. lc:a bit OT, but…Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”:
http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
medium length, but worth the read.
Jan 4, 2009 - 6:36 am 55. Wadeusaf:Leo Tolstoy opened his novel Anna Karernina with the observation that “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Not everyone agrees. Robert Fulford called it “the silliest damn sentence ever set down by a great author” arguing the truth is quite the reverse: “experience and literature both demonstrate that happy families come in all shapes and sizes, but the burdens of unhappy families (emotional indifference, poverty, alcoholism, irresponsibility) are painfully predictable.”
But maybe Tolstoy got it right. Every functioning society shares with others the property that it has enough available energy to “hang together”. Every failed state has the property that it’s factions can hang each other in different ways.
The difference is in where and how, happiness is found. To the unhappy family, happiness lies in being unhappy. To the happy family the decision was to never be unhappy. Some unhappy Palestinian families just never realized they could make the distinction or the decision–on their own behalf. Some did though, and they are overwhelmingly American citizens today, as opposed to PLO refuse living in Lebanese camps.
Hamas was started by KSA as a counter to the PLO and Arafat, with US (and Israeli) blessings. Best laid plans are not best when said plans are laid bare. Arafat got fat when he realized that terrorism would never buy the country the Palestinians wanted while still making him a rich man. But terrorism did make him a rich man and as for the rest…No one will give a damn about the Palestinians until the Palestinians give a damn about themselves. Thus far their politics has the same effect on their politicians that time has on cheap whores. How can anyone respect them when they act the way they do?
Jan 4, 2009 - 7:37 am 56. programmer:NahnCee concludes:
I think New Orleans was a singular occasion and a singular result based upon a singular mindset of one group of people which is demonstrably NOT that of the rest of America.
programmer concurs heartily:
IMHO, this single sentence sums up the Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans. The only “enhancement” I would suggest is to expound that the “group of people” started at the top (the state governor that had to be ordered by President Bush to start evacuation), trickled down to the city mayor (who left school buses that could have been used for evacuation purposes sitting in their parking lots), to large pools of “city”-zens that were so used to being cared for by the nanny state that they could not fend for themselves, but just sit, wait, and suffer.
The similarities between the New Orleans “victims” and the Palistineans are so stark and clear that it should send the left scurrying to hide in dark corners from the cold, clear gaze of right thinking nations and peoples. But,…that doesn’t seem to happen, does it?
Jan 4, 2009 - 8:07 am 57. slade:“Can it happen to me?” It is between those who see the terrorists as real and those who see the terrorists as imaginary.
It’s also an Us versus Them mindset - We are One, We are the World versus those of Us who tried hard not to imagine the Arafat bedroom scene. We are One People, as the starting premise, precludes violence, in fact, conflict. (Ref (via Doug) Steyn’s “An Ace is just a social construct” speech dissecting multiculturalism like a dead frog.) The first step is believing in the differences. The threats become more real. What is hard for me to imagine, let alone believe, is that this country allowed itself to become so weak. I think of Clinton’s trillion dollar relationship with the emir of Dubai. I think of the revolving door between Washington and international lobbying groups. I think of a Congress incapable of preventing the UN from giving close to a billion dollars to Iran in humanitarian aid.
While the country is entertained by channeling Madoff, Blago, Carolyn, and Sharpton as Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd doing Two Wild and Crazy Guys or Bill Murray and Gilda Radner doing Todd and whats-her-name.
Understanding multiculturalism is like deconstructing nihilism. A worthy post-modern Master’s Thesis.
Jan 4, 2009 - 9:00 am 58. NahnCee:I just read on another site that Hamas was set up and funded by Saudi Arabia and the USA, as a counterweight to Fatah. Is that true?
It seems so highly unlikely historically, and so likely that some little pimply-faced pipsqueak is showing off his false (and anti-American) erudition.
Jan 4, 2009 - 11:31 am 59. RattlerGator:Peter Boston, thanks for the reminder. Culture does drive the train,so to speak.
Jan 4, 2009 - 11:39 am 60. Lifeofthemind:Abdullah of Amman has made noises about reevaluating the peace with Israel. If he does then he falls into the position of prisoner of those forces that his father spent 40 years saving his country from. The Hashemites will fall and Israel will be able to insist on reuniting Ramallah and Amman. The winners would be the Palestinians, who would have a viable state if they wanted one. The big losers would be the Gazans and Hamas and Egypt and Syria and Hezbollah and Iran, and their enablers in Russia and the EU. Powerful set of forces working against this but Abdullah is proving much less adept than his father.
Jan 4, 2009 - 1:12 pm 61. LFMayor:Re: #56 Programmer, the left hasn’t scurried because the disaster(s) have so far been localized, but also that they have no sense of shame. They’re just not wired the same as you (us) so they don’t experience it as a decent human would, therefore they won’t spontaneously convert when simply viewing it from afar. Alas, direct application doesn’t seem to bring positive results, either. Peter Boston has it dead center.
If you hold them to the Palestinian model as you mentioned, it seems an affirmation in my belief that they cannot be brought across the line into reason/humanity/productivity.
Reminds me of this from a Pournelle paperback of compilations, from Analog, I believe:
Jan 4, 2009 - 1:32 pm 62. Eggplant:http://down.4dots.com/19814/Tribesman.rtf
In the previous thread, Rickl said:
“Nevertheless, I have lately concluded that the Left represents the most immediate threat to my liberty, rather than the Islamists. Both will have to be defeated and destroyed one way or the other if Western civilization is to survive.”
The Left has gone “all in” with Obama. Their credibility will rise or fall based upon Obama’s success. IMHO, the Left has made a really stupid bargain. Obama has no previous executive experience and has previously shown very poor judgment, e.g. Ayers, Wright, etc.
Obama is now in his honeymoon period. From now until about April, the MSM will blame the consequences of all of Obama’s bad decisions upon previous actions by President Bush. That narrative will run out of steam after April. I’ve got my fingers crossed that there will be no 9/11 type attacks between now and April. President Bush’s greatest achievement was in shielding us from follow-on 9/11 type attacks. Consequently, the next 9/11 type attack will have Obama’s name written on the side of it. The new narrative will be: “Despite all his faults, President Bush protected us from the terrorists!”
Also Obama is in a lose-lose situation with the economy. Probably the best thing the government could do now is to do nothing and let the markets sort themselves out, e.g. allow the US automobile industry to go through the Chapter-11 process. However the MSM and Obama’s constituents will not allow Obama that option. He will have to to do ***something*** and anything he does will appear to be both ineffective and expensive.
In the long wrong, Obama can’t win. Conservatives need to position themselves to fill the void after Obama’s popularity implodes. That should happen prior to 2010.
Jan 4, 2009 - 1:45 pm 63. Bigger Diggler:The never-ending and never-sucessful Peace Process is fundamentally inhuman and contrary to human nature. War is a profoundly human endevour. It is much more interesting than the normal state of affairs.
Peace is not a process, it is an endpoint. You have peace as soon as, and only when the enemy is anihilated and unequivically defeated to the point that it surrenders unconditionally.
One day hopefully we will relearn the old lessons in peacemaking.
Jan 4, 2009 - 1:47 pm 64. Wadeusaf:Nahncee @ 58 referring to my statement @ 55,
It should have read (There has been rumor that) “Hamas was started by KSA as a counter to the PLO and Arafat, with US (and Israeli) blessings. Best laid plans are not best when said plans are laid bare.”
It seems so highly unlikely historically, and so likely that some little pimply-faced pipsqueak is showing off his false (and anti-American) erudition.
I neglected somehow to include this preface to that statement. It is not my intent to misdirect nor to misinform. There is some evidence that Hamas receives much of its funding from fundies within the KSA. Thus their ability to survive the economic strangulation that Israel and the US placed upon the Palestinians after Arafat and prior to the elections. Seems to ring true but I have nothing definitive to support the claim.
They still act like whores.
Jan 4, 2009 - 2:43 pm 65. NahnCee:Wade - didn’t mean to refer to you or your comment. I had been surfing the scurvy shoals of Huffington land so I think I must have read it there. I’m glad for your update, though, that it is unlikely.
Jan 4, 2009 - 5:08 pm 66. whiskey:The most dangerous place to be is in an army facing an organized foe that has disintegrated. A force in being conducting a fighting retreat may still be annihilated, but it will exact it’s own price on it’s destructors, and might still win a space for some survivors. A rabble fleeing will create no such prudent hesitancy.
The Peace Process may be meeting such a force, as Israelis see a Muslim-raised President, who had growing up in Jakarta more anti-Semitism than anything short of a Klan or neo-Nazi community, imbibed with mother’s milk, as presaging overt action against it at worst and at best explicit abandonment.
Obama has spoken nothing about supporting Israel, instead plays golf.
Israel may seek a “Roman” solution to it’s existential Gaza problem. Because while Kassams are not an existential threat, consider short-range nuclear tipped missiles smuggled into Gaza by Iran. Israel must know at this point that it’s quite likely Obama and his administration would support such an Iranian action, might even propose it as some grand bargain.
The American protection umbrella spread over the Israeli government and people has also “stabilized” the Middle East by creating a moderation of Israeli action by inserting security guarantees that worked, mostly.
What if every Israeli is convinced Obama will sell them out to Iran in turn for some Iranian “moderation” and a Summit? What then?
Jan 5, 2009 - 1:28 amSorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.