Angelo Codevilla: America's Ruling Class

Just to let ya'll know this gent is not a tea-bagger living in Momma's basement, as the folks in the White House tend to characterize any who dare disagree.

Angelo M. Codevilla, a professor of international relations at Boston University, a fellow of the Claremont Institute, and a senior editor of The American Spectator, was a Foreign Service officer and served on the staff of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee between 1977 and 1985. He was the principal author of the 1980 presidential transition report on intelligence. He is the author of The Character of Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family, and Civility.

Codevilla weighs in this month with a long and thoughtful article on the American culture, which goes far in explaining what has happened to us.

His thesis is: America has been taken over by a ruling class, profoundly out of touch with the people they rule, and the strains are beginning to show.

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors' "toxic assets" was the only alternative to the U.S. economy's "systemic collapse." In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets' nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term "political class" came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public's understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the "ruling class." And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

It's a hefty read, but truly enlightening. Kudos to American Spectator for publishing it for our consideration.

Lest We Forget Why Chemical Ali Met Justice

OldSouth just couldn't quite form the words yesterday to say anything appropriate about the execution of Chemical Ali.

Andrew Bolt in Melbourne did find them.

 The picture he posted with his few words tells us all.

The western press mob chose to concentrate on the suicide bombings in Baghdad instead, with the subtext: 'If the government hadn't executed the mass murderer Ali, then those insurgents would not have been compelled to drive vans full of explosive into the hotel district.'

'Chemical Ali isn't morally culpable for mass murder.  The people who planned yesterday's attack aren't morally culpable. The US, UK, Australia, Italy, Spain, Poland, et al who removed Saddam and his cousin Ali from power, and made certain they could not continue to fill mass graves--those guys are the true criminals.'


This essay in the Guardian might help put things into focus a bit.

Many of the 5,000 Kurds killed that day died almost instantly as the cloud of poison gas settled upon them. Others suffered a slower, more gruesome death as the gas gradually liquidated their organs but did not actually kill them. Today, the few surviving victims suffer from their injuries; birth defects, breast, lung, skin, and other cancers, along with miscarriages, infertility and mental disorders have painted a dark, permanent, mark on their lives.

Although OS always takes Wikipedia with a grain of salt, this article seems very well-cited and gives a dispassionate account.

There are videos posted as well, you can find them easily enough, out of sight of the children.

And, yes, the West sat silent in 1988 as this crime occurred.

Iraq, lacking the ability to engineer its own plants, had indeed purchased the means from Western suppliers to make and deliver the poison gas upon its own civilian population.

And, yes, had Colin Powell not halted the troops as they had Hussein's personal regiments on the run in 1991, many thousands of lives would have been spared.

And, yes, had Bill Clinton not been chasing skirts, and Mitterand not been chasing Iraqi petrodollars,  and the UN not buried its head in the sand, many more would have been spared.

And, yes, the West stood by and watched the horrors in Rwanda.

And, no, Rwanda doesn't have any oil.

We all know the litany. We are not saints. Therefore, it's always our fault, as if people with brown skin and funny names are just not capable of ethical judgment like WeTheGuiltyOfTheWest are.

But Saddam Hussein and Ali Hassan al-Majid gave the orders for the slaughter of civilians, not just in Kurdistan, but across that country, more than once. The troops who ousted them ran upon a number of mass graves.

For all our shortcomings, and they are many, the West, on one occasion in our generation, said 'Enough is enough.' 

Al-Qeada made the choice to set up shop in the aftermath.  The Iranians made the choice to pump their own arms and zealots into the situation.

Could we/should we have forseen it, made wiser choices? Yep. But other parties chose to incite a civil war, and squander the opportunity given Iraq.

And, no, Ali's execution did not cause the mass murders in Baghdad yesterday.

Someone else made the choice to do that.