The Long View 2007-02-23: Goracle Redux; War & Sovereignty; Dan Brown Copycat
This is an interesting idea.
The serious long-term point here is that debellicized states (states that have lost the capacity to wage war) are renouncing a key feature of modern sovereignty: not the right to self-defense, but the right to be consulted about the use of force elsewhere.
If anything, the intervening twelve years have seen a decrease in debellicization, since the world has mostly gotten to be a less stable and friendly place.
Goracle Redux; War & Sovereignty; Dan Brown Copycat
The ecoSanity site on whose credibility I cast aspersions yesterday has reappeared, again displaying its Heed the Goracle banner:
.
There now: what could be fairer than that?
* * *
Meanwhile, Mark Steyn has some cutting things to say about the withdrawal of Coalition troops from Iraq:
Thus, even for reliable allies with capable militaries, the political price of marching into battle alongside the Great Satan is steep and getting steeper. This does not bode well for the general health of the planet. When the wilier Democrats berate Bush for not maintaining an adequate military, they have a sort of crude point, albeit not the one they think they're making: if the time, money and energy expended in getting pseudo-allies to make pseudo-contributions were to be spent instead on the Vermont National Guard, you'd get more troops more quickly with more capability. Yet for wealthy countries to deny Washington even the figleaf of token multilateralism is, in the end, to gamble with their own futures....[Australian Prime Minister] Howard is perhaps the last Western leader to understand this.
In this connection Pat Buchanan counsels the shortest way with dissenters:
Only the Americans are going deeper in. Aussies excepted, the "coalition of the willing" is no longer willing..... There is a larger meaning to all this, and Americans must come to terms with it. NATO is packing it in as a world power. NATO is little more than a U.S. guarantee to pull Europe's chestnuts out of the fire if Europeans encounter a fight they cannot handle, like an insurgency in Bosnia or Kosovo. NATO has one breadwinner, and 25 dependents. ...This isn't an alliance. This isn't a partnership. Time to split the blanket. If they won't defend themselves, let them, as weaker nations have done to stronger states down through the ages, pay tribute.
Well, perhaps he does not exactly counsel this. Buchanan wants the whole post-World War II alliance system dismantled. Making NATO a tribute-levying organization would just break it up all the sooner. (Also, perhaps, like many Americans, he never took on board the fact that Japan and the NATO countries cover all or most of the costs of the American bases on their territories.)
The serious long-term point here is that debellicized states (states that have lost the capacity to wage war) are renouncing a key feature of modern sovereignty: not the right to self-defense, but the right to be consulted about the use of force elsewhere.
* * *
Just in time for Lent, wouldn't you know, a documentary is about to be broadcast called The Burial Cave of Jesus:
The cave in which Jesus Christ was buried has been found in Jerusalem, claim the makers of a new documentary film. ...Jointly produced by Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici and Oscar winning director James Cameron, the film tells the exciting and tortuous story of the archeological discovery.
The story starts in 1980 in Jerusalem’s Talpiyot neighborhood, with the discovery of a 2,000 year old cave containing ten coffins. Six of the ten coffins were carved with inscriptions reading the names: Jesua son of Joseph, Mary, Mary, Matthew, Jofa (Joseph, identified as Jesus’ brother), Judah son of Jesua (Jesus’ son - the filmmakers claim).
The team of Jacobovici and Cameron are no strangers to edgy Biblical speculation. In this case, though, the evidence is less than overwhelming:
But the senior Israeli archaeologist who thoroughly researched the tombs after their discovery, and at the time deciphered the inscriptions, cast serious doubt on it.
"It's a beautiful story but without any proof whatsoever," Professor Amos Kloner, who had published the findings of his research in the Israeli periodical Atiqot in 1996, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa Friday.
"The names that are found on the tombs are names that are similar to the names of the family of Jesus," he conceded.
"But those were the most common names found among Jews in the first centuries BCE and CE," he added.
Will Time magazine make this their Easter Week cover story? I would not bet against it.
Copyright © 2007 by John J. Reilly
Support the Long View re-posting project by downloading Brave browser. With Both Hands is a verified Brave publisher, you can leave me a tip too!
Comments ()