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David Warren wishes to point out some problems with the end in Libya.
One marvels, in retrospect, at the order the U.S. military brought to Iraq, wherein Saddam Hussein was brought to his trial alive and intact. For, while one may not care very much whether murderous tyrants receive all the gracious attentions of correct legal procedure, it is nevertheless impressive when the task is attempted, and even more when it succeeds.
I think the first thing to notice about the end of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, is that America has changed. Vice-President Joe Biden was quickly boasting that Gadhafi had been brought to a conclusion for just $2 billion (an unlikely estimate), and without the loss of a single American life. By extension, he mocked the Bush administration for the trouble and expense of bringing down Saddam.
The affair in Libya, we are told by liberal experts, offers a new model for “regime change,” and in his Rose Garden remarks, President Barack Obama was quick to warn (without naming) Syria’s Bashar al-Assad that he could be next. The media have been generally gloating with him, at what they interpret as a foreign-policy success.
But what is the message of Gadhafi’s demise to other monstrous tyrants? If we think for a moment, we will realize that it is unambiguous: “Do not go gentle into that good night.” The important thing, for them, is now not to relinquish power; and the faster and more decisively they apply brutal measures against their own domestic opponents, the better their chances of avoiding Gadhafi’s fate. …
Christopher Hitchens also has reservations.
… At the close of an obscene regime, especially one that has shown it would rather destroy society and the state than surrender power, it is natural for people to hope for something like an exorcism. It is satisfying to see the cadaver of the monster and be sure that he can’t come back. It is also reassuring to know that there is no hateful figurehead on whom some kind of “werewolf” resistance could converge in order to prolong the misery and atrocity. But Qaddafi at the time of his death was wounded and out of action and at the head of a small group of terrified riff-raff. He was unable to offer any further resistance. And all the positive results that I cited above could have been achieved by the simple expedient of taking him first to a hospital, then to a jail, and thence to the airport. Indeed, a spell in the dock would probably hugely enhance the positive impact, since those poor lost souls who still put their trust in the man could scarcely have their illusions survive the exposure to even a few hours of the madman’s gibberings in court.
And so the new Libya begins, but it begins with a squalid lynching. News correspondents have been quite warm and vocal lately, about the general forbearance shown by the rebels to the persons and property of the Qaddafi loyalists. That makes it even more regrettable that the principle could not be honored in its main instance. At the time of writing, Seif-al-Islam Qaddafi, one of Muammar’s sons, is said to be still at large. It will be quite a disgrace if he is also killed out of hand, or if at the very least the NTC and the international community do not remind their fighters that he needs to be taken into lawful custody. …
Just how hateful have the Turks become? Jonathan Tobin has the answer.
How determined is Turkey to repudiate its decades-long alliance with Israel? Today’s decision by the Turks to reportedly refuse assistance from Israel is a stunning indication of how far the Islamist government in Ankara is willing to go to make a point.
More than 1,000 persons are feared dead in the aftermath of a quake that measured 7.2 on the Richter scale. With workers battling to save those trapped in collapsed buildings in towns and cities near the Iranian border, it’s more than likely that Israel’s experienced rescue teams — which participated in previous earthquake relief efforts in Turkey — would be of value to the effort. But according to Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, the government of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo?an has told the Israelis they are not wanted. Erdo?an would apparently prefer to see his compatriots die rather than to allow Jews to help them. …
Telegraph, UK’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard with an upbeat look at our country’s prospects.
The American phoenix is slowly rising again. Within five years or so, the US will be well on its way to self-sufficiency in fuel and energy. Manufacturing will have closed the labour gap with China in a clutch of key industries. The current account might even be in surplus.
Assumptions that the Great Republic must inevitably spiral into economic and strategic decline – so like the chatter of the late 1980s, when Japan was in vogue – will seem wildly off the mark by then.
Telegraph readers already know about the “shale gas revolution” that has turned America into the world’s number one producer of natural gas, ahead of Russia.
Less known is that the technology of hydraulic fracturing – breaking rocks with jets of water – will also bring a quantum leap in shale oil supply, mostly from the Bakken fields in North Dakota, Eagle Ford in Texas, and other reserves across the Mid-West.
“The US was the single largest contributor to global oil supply growth last year, with a net 395,000 barrels per day (b/d),” said Francisco Blanch from Bank of America, comparing the Dakota fields to a new North Sea.
Total US shale output is “set to expand dramatically” as fresh sources come on stream, possibly reaching 5.5m b/d by mid-decade. This is a tenfold rise since 2009.
The US already meets 72pc of its own oil needs, up from around 50pc a decade ago. …
David Harsanyi thinks the Dems have some silly ideas.
… For example, Democratic Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. recently claimed that the iPad was “responsible for eliminating thousands of jobs,” you know, just like the modern-day automated loom. What, he wonders, will happen to “all the jobs associated with paper?” Surely, a remark as deeply juvenile as that one matches anything offered by those wild-eyed skeptics.
Or take President Barack Obama, who earlier this year — and not for the first time — claimed that “structural issues with our economy” have nothing to do with politicians. The problem, in his opinion, is that “a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient,” making the workforce smaller. “You see it when you go to a bank and you use an ATM. You don’t go to a bank teller, or you go to the airport and you’re using a kiosk instead of checking in at the gate.”
Those aren’t structural issues; they are productivity issues. And rather than kill jobs, efficiency drives output and growth and improves performance and the quality of goods and services — along with our lives. Perhaps if this administration weren’t busy trying to create morally pleasing but temporary and unsustainable jobs through bailouts, subsidies and “stimulus,” we could all hit that ATM more often. …
Bjorn Lomberg thinks it is wrong for the government to try to pick green energy winners.
… Make no mistake, the long road to ending reliance on fossil fuels will be littered with many technologies that fail to live up to early promise. But the danger is when politicians and bureaucrats attempt to predict which technologies will be winners and back them to build an industry.
The idea of capturing the sun’s power through solar cylinders might have been a great idea, but the government should instead have spent half a million dollars on funding researchers to investigate such technology. If the research had proved the technology successful, private companies would have jumped in and sold cheap solar power to the world. And spending one-thousandth of the amount on research means we could have studied many potentially promising technologies — because Solyndra is hardly a unique case. …
William McGurn says each new child born in the world is a blessing.
Nothing brings out the inner Malthus like a newborn baby.
That’s especially true when that baby is born to a mother somewhere in Africa or Asia. According to the United Nations Population Fund, some time this coming Monday, probably in India, the world will welcome its seven billionth person. Well, maybe welcome isn’t exactly the right word.
At Columbia University’s Earth Institute, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs tells CNN “the consequences for humanity could be grim.” Earlier this year, a New York Times columnist declared “the earth is full,” suggesting that a growing population means “we are eating into our future.” And in West Virginia, the Charleston Gazette editorializes about a “human swarm” that is “overbreeding” in a way that “prosperous, well-educated families” from the developed world do not.
The smarter ones acknowledge that Malthus’s ominous warnings about a growing population outstripping the food supply were not borne out in his day. The track record for these scares in our own day is not much better. Perhaps the most famous was Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 “The Population Bomb,” which opened with these sunny sentences: “The battle to feed all humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
The book was wildly popular, and the assertions large. India was so hopeless he advocated a policy of “triage” that would just let them die. In fact, the mass starvation he predicted never materialized, and the Indians whom he thought could never feed themselves are now eating better than ever despite a population more than twice the size it was when “The Population Bomb” appeared. …