by Daniel on March 9, 2008
Via Roger in comments to Chris’s post below, Michael Walzer mounts what can only be regarded as an unprovoked dawn raid on his own reputation.
The topic is the ethics of using mercenaries (or at least, that is the formal topic; at a deeper level, the topic is the same as the topic of everything Walzer’s written in the last ten years; that sadly, oh so sadly, “the left” simply doesn’t believe in its principles with the same seriousness and intellectual depth which Walzer does. It’s frankly the philosophical equivalent of “I was into your favourite band before they started to suck”, and it’s frankly becoming tedious).
[click to continue…]
by Chris Bertram on March 9, 2008
“Decent left” columnist Nick Cohen, “writing for Pajamas Media”:http://www.pajamasmedia.com/2008/03/why_brits_dont_fall_for_obama.php , and explaining the alleged fact, that, unlike continental Europeans, the British are not keen on Obama:
bq. A more convincing explanation to my mind is that European support for Obama is tied to levels of anti-Americanism, and despite all Bush has thrown at them, the British are not as anti-American as the continentals have become.
And the test of how anti-American people are? It is whether they support, retrospectively, Israel’s bombing of Saddam’s nuclear reactor:
bq. At a recent meeting in London Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer, elegantly calibrated attitudes to the US. He spoke all over North America and Europe and whenever the subject of an aggressive foreign policy came up he asked audiences whether Israel had been right to take out Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. In America, virtually everyone was in favor. Whatever their politics, they reasoned that a totalitarian regime was about to get the bomb and, obviously the West should stop it. In Germany, virtually everyone was against — “even the hawks are pacifists,” he said. In France, audiences split 80 per cent against, 20 in favor — “which was good of the 20 per cent considering Chirac had built the reactor in the first place.” In Britain, people divided evenly.
[Hat tip DW and MT.]