The stagnant Mediterranean

Short of a Muslim embrace of the modern, there’s no hope for the future

By Victor Davis Hanson

From the heights of Gibraltar, you can see Africa about nine miles away to the south — and gaze eastward on the seemingly endless Mediterranean, which stretches 1,500 miles to Asia beyond. Mare Nostrum, “our sea,” the Romans called the deep blue waters that allowed Rome to unite Asia, Africa and Europe for half a millennium under a single prosperous, globalized civilization.

Yet the Mediterranean has not always proved history’s incubator of great civilizations — Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Florentine and Venetian. Sometimes, the ancient “Pillars of Hercules” at the narrow mouth of the Mediterranean here at Gibraltar marked not so much a gateway to progress and prosperity as a cultural and commercial cul-de-sac.

With the rise of the Ottoman Empire, and before the construction of the Suez Canal, the old classical city-state powerhouses in Italy and Greece faded from history, as the Mediterranean became more a museum than a catalyst of global change. In contrast, the Reformation and Enlightenment energized Northern European culture, safely distant from the exhausting frontline Mediterranean wars with Islam.

By the early 17th century, Northern Europeans more easily and safely reached the rich eastern markets of China and India by maritime routes around Africa. The discovery of the New World further shifted wealth and cultural dynamism out of the Mediterranean.

For a while, the Mediterranean seemed to roar back after World War II. Huge deposits of petroleum and natural gas were found in North Africa. The Suez Canal was a shortcut to the newly opulent and strategically vital Persian Gulf. With the unification of Europe, and ongoing decolonization of Africa and the Middle East, there was the promise of a new, resource-rich, democratic and commercially interconnected Mediterranean.

Not now. The Arab Spring has brought chaos to almost all of North Africa. The bloodbath in Syria threatens to escalate into something like the Spanish Civil War — sucking in Lebanese militias, Iranian mercenaries, Turkey, the Sunni sheikdoms, Israel and the Palestinians, along with surrogate arms suppliers such as China, Europe, Russia and the United States.

Total surveillance society

The government claims the right to read everything

We knew this administration didn’t like the Second Amendment. We knew it has reservations about the First Amendment, and now we learn that it has dispensed with the Fourth Amendment. The only amendment the administration really likes is the Fifth. The more we learn about the government’s extraordinary ability to read emails, listen to telephone calls and track individual movements, the more frightened everyone should be. New code names, such as Prism, the National Security Agency program that directly mines all information from Gmail, Facebook and other services, have replaced Echelon and Carnivore as scare words.

The government has clearly set out to create a total surveillance society, something that in a rational world would be prevented by the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. But disclosures of the administration’s telephone-tapping schemes, frightening as they are, have overshadowed something even worse, the creation of zones within the United States where the Fourth Amendment specifically does not apply.

This is not “hype,” as President Obama called the surveillance disclosures on Friday. They’re real. Agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have been seizing and copying the contents of laptops, iPhones, iPads and other electronic devices from American citizens coming from or traveling to international destinations based on nothing more than the whim of agents who have no probable cause to believe that any crime has been committed.

In February, the department’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which is supposed to prevent abuses, issued a summary paper that purported to justify the ability of agents to “conduct border searches without suspicion or warrant,” including searches of personal laptops and smartphones. The American Civil Liberties Union then asked the pertinent question: How do agents decide whose laptop to search?

The department responded last week with a memo outlining the legal rationale for “suspicionless” searches, with the familiar Obama administration explanation: It’s a secret, and it has to remain a secret. Four pages dedicated to border-search authority under the Fourth Amendment and a page of First Amendment material were blacked out. The document concluded: “In accordance with established case law, officers may, as a matter of both constitutional law and sound policy, search electronic devices at the border without reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.”

It’s important to note that the word “border” isn’t limited to an actual border. It’s a term that arbitrarily applies to any place within 100 miles of the actual border, and includes international airports. These have become the new Constitution-free zones, and there’s no reason why the government won’t expand this beyond 100 miles when it becomes convenient. In 2010, a half-million travelers were required to endure secondary screening and groping sessions at airports, and in 383 cases, electronic devices were searched without cause in these zones.

This is done in the usual name of protecting us, yet there’s good reason to doubt that. The highly trained agents who predict crime by hunch often can’t see actual criminals stealing under their noses. Agents of the Transportation Security Administration in Orlando, Fla., were caught stealing iPads from travelers, not by the keen “sixth sense” of DHS agents but by investigators of ABC News. Two TSA airport screeners in New York admitted they stole $160,000 worth of goods from passengers.

Perhaps the latest outcry over the government’s privacy invasions will do some good. In March, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a revised “reasonable suspicion” standard should apply at the border. “International travelers certainly expect that their property will be searched at the border,” the court reasoned. “What they do not expect is that, absent some particularized suspicion, agents will mine every last piece of data on their devices or deprive them of their most personal property for days (or perhaps weeks or even months, depending on how long the search takes).”

Given the other methods of data collection available to federal agents, airport searches may become less important, but the Fourth Amendment, effectively stripped out by the government, must be restored to the Constitution. If not, it won’t be long before everyone falls into the definition of a Constitution-free zone.

Spending Cuts, Tax Increases, and Austerity

Cutting spending is never easy and engaging in fundamental structural reforms is also politically hard

By  Veronique de Rugy

The debate over the merits of austerity (the implementation of debt-reduction packages) is frustrating for two main reasons. First, the word itself is confusing because it means different things to different people. That’s because in theory a country can reduce its debt by increasing taxes, by cutting spending, or by doing a mix of both. What makes this more confusing is that not all policies meant to reduce the deficit and debt qualify as austerity measures. That is the case for growth-inducing policies such as cutting taxes (supply-side) or increasing spending (Keynesian). 

Unfortunately, the word austerity leads to a lot of miscommunications on both sides of the political aisle. On the free-market side, people will say, “Where is the austerity in Europe?” when what they mean is “Spending wasn’t cut very much in Europe, and often it wasn’t cut at all.” To that statement liberals will respond, “It is not true, austerity was implemented in Europe” while pointing to data about the size of fiscal-adjustment packages in Europe. The reality, however, is somewhere in between. Yes, austerity has taken place in Europe. Big time, actually. However, with some rare exceptions, the form of austerity that was implemented was fairly heavy on the tax-increase side and was far from involving savage spending cuts (some countries, such as Ireland and Greece, did cut spending, but others just slowed its rate of growth). I think this distinction matters because, at least until now, the general consensus in the academic literature is that fiscal adjustment based more heavily on spending cuts was much more likely to achieve successful and lasting reductions in debt-to-GDP ratio than tax-base adjustments. It is, of course, possible that this is not the case today but at least this fact should be acknowledged. 

Lies and Lying Liars

Lying as a democratic virtue of petty economists and politicians 

By Steve Landsburg

 When a politician misleads the public with distorted or flat-out fictional data, or uses eight minutes of national TV time to smear the character of the careful scholar who dared to report an inconvenient set of facts, you can always count on Paul Krugman of the New York Times to leap to the defense of truth and honesty — or, alternatively, to jump on the bandwagon if the politician happens to be a Democrat.

Here, you see, is what happened this week: Salim Furth, an economist at the Heritage Foundation (and a graduate of the University of Rochester, where I knew him to be a thoughtful and honest researcher) testified before the Senate budget committee, where he presented data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) showing that most European governments have recently increased their spending. (This isn’t surprising for several reasons, one of which is that governments often spend more in recessionary times.)

Enter Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who spent eight excruciating televised minutes lambasting Furth and questioning his honesty, by reading out OECD numbers that differed dramatically from what Furth had reported. Some choice comments:

Dr. Furth, I am very concerned about your testimony….

When I look at the graph, for instance, which you source to the OECD — did you actually look at what the OECD says?….

They’ve actually written what the numbers are. And here’s what the numbers actually are, according to the OECD….

I am concerned that your testimony to this committee has been meretricious…I am contesting whether you have given us fair and accurate information.

And then there’s another eight minutes of reading out numbers that are, Senator Whitehouse keeps reminding us actually from the OECD, as opposed to these other numbers reported by Furth, which Furth claims are from the OECD, but obviously can’t be, because Whitehouse has the actual OECD numbers right here, and look how different they are — all of this interspersed with a barrage of attacks on Furth’s character and integrity. (See the video below, if you have the stomach for it.)

Now here’s the thing: There are a couple of legitimate reasons why Furth’s and Whitehouse’s numbers don’t agree. The first is that they’re for different time periods. Furth’s are for the years 2007-2012, while Senator Whitehouse’s are for the years 2009-2016. That’s right, 2016. Which brings us to the other reason these numbers differ: Furth’s come from the historical record, while Senator Whitehouse’s come from somebody’s ass.

Putin’s Petro State Approaching Empty

No Good Options for the Kremlin

By Leon Aron

Russia faces two challenges that will affect its preeminence as an energy supplier and its ability to wield oil and gas as geostrategic tools. At stake are the stability of the regime — and perhaps even its survival.

The centrality of hydrocarbons to Russia’s economy is hardly a new issue, but it is one well worth revisiting today. One of the two largest oil producers in the world, Russia accounts for 12 percent of global output. Russia is also the top producer of natural gas, accounting for about 20 percent of the world’s total.

Russia faces two challenges that will affect not only its preeminence as an energy supplier but also its ability to wield oil and gas as geostrategic tools. New technologies are helping other countries develop their own natural resources more easily and inexpensively, threatening billions of dollars of Russian state revenue. At the same time, to maintain the current level of production, not to mention increase it, Russia must make huge investments in exploring and recovering oil from virgin deposits (“greenfields”) of the east Siberian region and the Arctic shelf. The likely result is a significant thinning of oil and gas rents — jeopardizing the stability of the regime and perhaps even its survival.

President Vladimir Putin’s commitment to oil and gas as the mainstay of Russia’s progress stems from a deep and abiding conviction about its importance to the nation’s economy. Long before he came to power, he had believed that “the restructuring of the national [Russian] economy on the basis of mineral and raw material resources” was “a strategic factor of economic growth in the near term.”

In an article published a year before he became president, he reiterated that Russian mineral resources would be central to the country’s economic development, security, and modernization. For Putin, oil and gas were also paramount politically as guarantors of the security and stability of the Russian state. As he put it, “The country’s natural resource endowment is the most important economic and political factor in the development of social production.” Furthermore, he believed the mineral extraction sector of the economy “diminishes social tensions” by raising the “level of well-being” of the Russian population.

The IMF and Greece

'Serious Errors' and 'Crying Need'

Christine Lagarde, indicating what she thinks of the IMF's rulebook. Overruled by 'crying need'.

by Pater Tenebrarum

Someone at the IMF has leaked a a document marked 'strictly confidential' to the press, which contains an internal critique of how the IMF handled the bailout of Greece. In spite of admitting to breaking the institution's own rules, the IMF's bureaucrats insist that of they 'had to do it all over again', they would break them again. This is how bureaucracies in regulatory democracies generally act. Laws and rules are not meant to be followed in 'emergencies', both real and imagined ones. In the end, no-one is ever punished for breaking the law or skirting regulations. However, that is not even the main problem in this particular case. Let us also leave aside for the moment that a free unhampered market economy using a market-chosen money would have no use for an institution like the IMF at all. Here is a summary of the recent revelations: 

“In an internal document marked "strictly confidential," the IMF said it badly underestimated the damage that its prescriptions of austerity would do to Greece's economy, which has been mired in recession for the last six years.

The IMF conceded that it bent its own rules to make Greece's burgeoning debt seem sustainable and that, in retrospect, the country failed on three of its four criteria to qualify for aid.

But the fund also stressed that the response to the crisis, coordinated with the European Union, bought time to limit the fallout for the rest of the 17-nation euro area. And while IMF officials said the lessons learned would lead them to take a tougher stance in future bailouts, they also said that there was little else the fund could have done at the time.

Gushing about America’s Energy Future

A triumph of market forces rather than government planning

By Desmond Lachman

In November, the International Energy Agency (IEA) recognized the remarkably positive developments in the U.S. energy sector of the past few years. Not only did the IEA project that U.S. oil production would exceed that of Saudi Arabia by 2020, it also projected that the United States would become virtually energy independent by 2035. However, what the IEA did not do was emphasize how much of this good news has occurred as the result of market forces rather than government planning aimed at securing energy independence.

The IEA is now projecting that U.S. oil production will increase markedly to over 11 million barrels a day by 2020. That should allow U.S. oil imports to decline to 4 million barrels a day from their present level of around 10 million barrels a day. The IEA is also forecasting that the United States will become a major natural gas exporter over the next few years.

Whether or not the IEA’s bold projections materialize, there can be little doubt that major change is underway in the U.S. energy sector. At the start of the Obama administration in January 2009, the expectation was that U.S. oil production would continue its decline of the past two decades and that oil imports would continue to increase. Instead, there has been a veritable boom in U.S. oil and gas production that has already significantly reduced U.S. energy import dependence.

Since 2008, U.S. oil production has increased by around 25 percent. This has facilitated a reduction in oil imports as a share of U.S. oil consumption from 60 percent in 2005 to around 42 percent at present. More dramatically yet, the United States has now overtaken Russia as the world’s largest natural gas producer, as a result of a boom in shale gas production. In less than a decade, shale gas production has increased from 2 percent of U.S. natural gas production to around 37 percent at present.

Energy independence has been a foreign policy goal of successive U.S. administrations since President Nixon set that goal in 1973 in response to a major Middle Eastern oil supply disruption that followed the Yom Kippur War. However, over the past four years, the turnaround in the U.S. energy sector toward virtual energy independence has been driven by market-related phenomena rather than by the implementation of a national energy plan.

Civilization and the War on Entropy

When we finally escape every need we have for cities, it will mean we’ve also finally escaped our need for civilization

by DREW AUSTIN 

“The ‘abstract’ and the ‘concrete’ from now on would have lives of their own, participating in a perpetual ballroom dance where partners are exchanged promiscuously according to design.”

                                        -Sanford Kwinter

Two threads of discourse dominated twentieth-century urbanism in the United States: the Jane Jacobs-Robert Moses dichotomy and the rise of the suburbs. The former was fundamentally a question of power. Should hyperintelligent master planners decide how cities develop, or should more agency remain at the block level, in the hands of city-dwellers themselves? The questions of how cities should function and whether they should favor vibrant street life or big business, infrastructural megaprojects and automobile throughput all followed from that primary question of power.

The suburbanization debate was slightly more one-sided and, as the trend intensified, the discussion assumed a more urgent tone. The car-dependent developments that exploded on the urban peripheries after World War II not only had their own serious social, environmental, and aesthetic problems, but they were undermining the central cities themselves by draining their residents, money, and cultural vitality without offering a satisfactory replacement. A long list of essential urbanist texts supports the argument against conventional suburbia, with few convincing rebuttals in favor of the trend.

By the 1990s, cities started making a comeback and the sense of urgency about solving the problems of suburbanization began to wane ever so slightly. It became easier for urbanists to ignore the difficult periphery and focus on the city—the Jacobs-Moses question—once again. Many continue to ponder the recent revitalization of American cities, a phenomenon exemplified by New York’s transformation into the tourist-friendly Giuliani/Bloomberg project that by now has fully matured and proven itself a model for smaller cities to emulate. Ed Glaeser and Richard Florida, among others, have made careers on explaining this phenomenon, flawed though their accounts may be. The suburban threat to the continued existence of cities had subsided—cities were back—but a nascent phenomenon had by then raised fresh doubts about the abiding need for classical urban space: the internet.

French Are Clueless About the Economy

For the past 10 years, France has had one of the highest levels of public spending in the world

By Judith Sloan

I'VE made the point before - I have a fraught relationship with France. What's not to love about boeuf bourguignon, the Riviera and Sancerre white wine? And how good are tarte tatin, the Musee D'Orsay and Carcasonne? (OK, Carcasonne is a bit tacky these days.)

But when it comes to running an economy, let's face it, the French have no bleedin' idea.

Let me pose this question: when did the French government last run a budget surplus? Here's a hint: Wyatt Roy's parents were still at school and probably didn't know each other. The answer is 1974-75.

But, boy, do they know how to run budget deficits, as the chart shows. Deficits in excess of 3 per cent of GDP are common. More recently, we have seen budget deficits above 7 per cent of GDP. The government sector in France accounts for more than half of total output and government debt is running at 90 per cent of GDP.

If you are a fully-signed up member of the Keynesian school of thought, the expectation is that, with all that continuous pump-priming, the French economy should be going gang busters. But, alas, the opposite is the case.

Unemployment in France is 10.6 per cent and rising. Youth unemployment is just over 25 per cent. The French economy is flat-lining, having been in and out of recession for the past four years.

So how did it come to this and what are the solutions to France's economic woes?

Compound Interest : Friend Or Foe?

Compound interest doesn't just only "allow" for growth (which sounds quite benign), it demands perpetual growth

By Raul Ilargi

Amid all the superficial up and down rumblings of stocks and bonds, and hyped up analysis thereof, none of which makes you any wiser (hey, I told you Abenomics can't work..), it's a good idea to look at some of the more profound workings of the financial system. I saw an interesting take on an angle into this, even though unfortunately it was by itself also superficial.

The angle in question was provided by Walter Hickey for Business Insider, in an article (originally) entitled " Compound Interest Is Responsible For Modern Civilization " (it later turned into "A Simple Math Formula Is Basically Responsible For All Of Modern Civilization", but that’s not even true: just because something can be expressed in a math formula doesn't mean it turns into that formula). It's interesting, and it's not bad, but, sorry Walter, with all respect, I don't think it's good enough.

And it made me wonder what people make of the whole compound interest notion, what they know about it, how they see it, what their intellectual or even emotional reaction is. I'd love to hear that from you. We've all grown up with it, to the extent that we probably don't give it enough thought; we view it as some kind of natural law - which it isn't - .

My own take is that while Hickey presents an interesting summary, the buck doesn't stop where the article does (at only the positive take on it); it reads too much like an Ayn Rand history lesson. In my opinion, you can't really talk, these days, about compound interest merely as "look at all the glorious things it's done for us", no more than you can talk about only the benefits of the oil industry, car manufacturing, GMO crops, nuclear energy or suburbs without providing a balancing part of your story that touches on the negatives as well. We got the brains, might as well use them.

I find it hard not to ponder the idea that even if compound interest is responsible for the civilization we know today, you can still read that in two very different ways, positive as well as negative. Or you can suggest that compound interest, even if it has perhaps been instrumental in building civilization, will inevitably also be responsible for the demise of that civilization. No compound interest story can be considered well written if it doesn't - also - touch on that part of the equation.

Our present discontents are precisely those of half a millennium ago

Taxed beyond Endurance 

By A. Daniels

For reasons neither interesting nor necessary to go into, I was reading Sir Thomas More’s History of Richard III the other day. I came across a passage that will have a certain resonance today among Britain’s taxpayers. It comes from the Duke of Buckingham’s speech to the Aldermen of London, in which he tries to raise their enthusiasm for Richard, then merely Duke of Gloucester, to be proclaimed King:

For who was there of you all that would reckon himself lord of his own goods, among so many snares and traps as were set therefor, among so much pillaging and plundering, among so many taxes and tallages, of which there was never end and often time no need, or if any were, it rather grew of riot and unreasonable waste than any necessary or honourable charge?             

So that there was daily plundered from good men and honourable, great substance of goods, to be lavished among unthrifts so extravagantly that Fifteenths sufficed not, nor any usual names of known taxes; but under the easy name of “benevolences and goodwill,” the commissioners of every man so much took, as no man with his good will would have given. As though the name of benevolence had signified that every man should pay, not what himself of his good will was pleased to grant, but what the King of his good will was pleased to take. Who never asked little, but every thing was raised above the measure: amercements turned into fines, fines into ransoms, small trespass to misprision, misprision into treason.

I could not but think on reading this of the French use of the word ‘solidarity,’ whose main meaning is now high taxation for redistribution (not least to itself) by a vast and dependent bureaucracy. 

Here I should add that Richard III promised to behave differently from his predecessor Edward IV, who had raised forced contributions from property-holders for his scheme of waging wear in France, from which in the event only a small elite of favourites around him benefitted. He called these  forced contributions ‘benevolences;’ Richard III outlawed them, but soon found himself obliged to solicit forced ‘loans.’ Whether he would ever have repaid them the Battle of Bosworth Field rendered unknowable; but it is likely that if every they had been repaid, it would have been in debased currency.

There is a strange consolation in knowing that our present discontents are precisely those of half a millennium ago.  

Why the Turn on Turkey?

Turkey’s Riots Threaten a Decade of Progress

by Eric Margolis

Western politicians and media have been scolding Turkey’s prime minister Recep Erdogan over this past week’s anti-government demonstrations in Istanbul and Ankara.

What began as a local protest over the foolish plan to raze trees in Gezi Park near Istanbul’s bustling Taksim Square quickly exploded into major protests thanks to the ham-handed response of Istanbul police, who tear-gassed and beat demonstrators. Turkish police have never been famed for gentleness.

PM Erdogan’s curt dismissal of the crowd as "looters" further inflamed the situation. In the West, Erdogan was accused of growing authoritarianism and trying to remake Turkey into an Islamic state. Even the normally sensible "Economist" magazine accused Turkey’s leader of trying to become a new Ottoman sultan.

What hypocrisy. These were the same Western newspapers and politicians who ardently backed Turkey’s former governments that were little more than sock puppets for the military. The very same opinion-makers lauded Egypt’s brutal dictator, Husni Mubarak, as a "statesman." So-called NGO’s like Freedom House and Amnesty International, cat’s paws for western governments, attacked Erdogan.

The demonstrators in Turkey’s cities were mostly young, secular and indulging in a springtime flash riot, facilitated by new social media and support from abroad. Many were rightly angered by Erdogan’s wrong-headed decision to take a lead role in trying to overthrow Syria’s government, a key trading partner for Turkey. Others, by his plans to limit public drinking and the eternal dispute over women’s head scarves.

What we have been witnessing is an attempt by anti-Erdogan secularists and far rightists, joined by members of Turkey’s long quiescent far left, to achieve what they could not do at the ballot box: ousting Erdogan’s moderate Islamic AK party from power.

Neocons are meddling all over the globe

Defund the American Comintern, and bring the outside agitators home

by Patrick J. Buchanan

A Cairo court has convicted 43 men and women of using foreign funds to foment unrest inside Egypt in connection with the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak.

Sixteen of those convicted were Americans. All but one, Robert Becker of the National Democratic Institute, had already departed. Becker fled this week rather than serve two years in an Egyptian prison.

And U.S. interventionists are in an uproar.

"Appalling and offensive," said Sen. Pat Leahy of the verdicts.

"The 2011 revolution was supposed to end the repressive climate under Mubarak," said The Wall Street Journal of our ally of 30 years whom Hillary Clinton called a family friend.

This "crackdown," decries The Washington Post, was defended with "cheap nationalism and conspiracy theories." As for Egypt's proposed new law for regulating foreign-funded groups promoting democracy, it is "based on ... repressive and xenophobic logic."

Yet the questions raised by both the Cairo and Moscow crackdowns on U.S.-funded "democracy" groups cannot be so airily dismissed.

For these countries have more than a small point.

While U.S.-funded democracy promotion is portrayed as benign, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, DNI and Freedom House have been linked to revolutions that brought down regimes in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and nearly succeeded in Belarus.

People who pride themselves on bringing about revolutions should not whine when targeted regimes treat them like troublemakers.

And who directs these "pro-democracy" groups?

Before 2011, Freedom House was headed by ex-CIA Director Jim Woolsey, who says we are in "World War IV." The IRI is chaired by John McCain, who pushed for U.S. intervention in the Russia-Georgia war and is clamoring for air strikes on Syria.

Syria Is Now Saudi Arabia's Problem

The battle for a town on the Lebanese border marks the kingdom's first attempt to lead Syria's fractured opposition

BY HASSAN HASSAN

Hezbollah can finally claim a victory in Syria. The town of Qusayr, adjacent to the Lebanese border, has fallen to the Lebanese militia after nearly a month of fierce battles with Syrian rebels. Dozens of Hezbollah's fighters have been killed, despite air cover and ground support from Bashar al-Assad's regime.

The Qusayr battle has been constantly, and wrongly, described as a turning point in the Syrian war. Why has this small town of some 30,000 residents become "strategic," as it is constantly described in the press, all of a sudden? The town had previously been run by its Sunni residents for more than a year, with little mention of its strategic benefits.

Hezbollah's open military intervention in Syria partly explains the publicity the Qusayr battle has received. As a result, the "Party of God" has lost much of its political and ideological capital in the region -- a capital the militia had painstakingly acquired from its three-decade career of "resisting" Israel.

But beyond the supposed military benefits of Qusayr, the battle for the town carried important consequences for the balance of power within the Syrian opposition. Qusayr is arguably the first battle in Syria to be completely sponsored by Saudi Arabia, marking the kingdom's first foray outside its sphere of influence along the Jordanian border. Riyadh has now taken over Qatar's role as the rebels' primary patron: In one sense, the Saudis can also claim a victory in Qusayr, as they have successfully put various rebel forces under the command of their ally in the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Chief of Staff Gen. Salim Idriss.

Although the Syrian rebels received military aid from various countries and private donors, Qatar initially emerged as the main sponsor of the opposition. Its alliance with Syria's Muslim Brotherhood helped it control the political opposition and the armed rebels' most prominent factions, including Liwa al-Tawhid in Aleppo.

Why Sweden has riots

The fault-line in Polly Toynbee’s perfect society

by Johan Norberg

‘All of them should have been very happy,’ Robert A. Heinlein begins his 1942 novel Beyond This Horizon. The material problem has been solved on this future earth, poverty and disease have been eradicated, work is optional. And yet parts of the citizenry are not enthusiastic. Some are bored, others are preparing a revolt. Why should that be, in such a utopian world?

A similar puzzlement has been the dominant reaction from commentators after riots broke out and cars and buildings were burned in heavily immigrant-populated suburbs of Stockholm in late May. Sweden? Since the standard interpretation is that violence is the only weapon the marginalised have against an oppressive socioeconomic system, it is more difficult to explain it when it takes place in ‘the most successful society the world has ever known’, as Polly Toynbee once called it.

But it hasn’t stopped some from trying. If all you have is two terms of sociology studies, everything looks like a justified grievance. Leftists abroad have blamed the rioting on the liberalisation that has taken place in Sweden in recent years, and the supposed increase in inequality and poverty. The country’s big social democratic daily, Aftonbladet, tried to point to the effects of austerity (in a country where it has not been implemented) and claimed that the kids in the suburb of Husby rioted because ‘the health care centre, the post office, the midwives’ centre and the youth centre have been wound up’.

In fact, there are three youth centres in Husby. Its old health care centre closed, but a new one took its place. The midwives moved, but just one station away on the metro. You can find postal services 14 minutes from the centre, on foot. Where I live, you need to walk for 12 minutes. One shivers at the thought of what I could have been like had I lived another two minutes away. Would I also spend Friday nights torching nursery schools?

The Swedish poverty rate may very well be too high, but at 1.2 per cent, no European country has a lower one. The average in the European Union is 8.8 per cent. If poverty is the cause of riots, almost every city on the continent should have been burned down before Stockholm’s turn came, including most of those in Norway and Switzerland.

But inequality has increased, you say. Yes, since the extremely egalitarian mid-1980s (the last time Stockholm saw large-scale youth riots, by the way). But since 2005, when Toynbee proclaimed Sweden the egalitarian utopia, it has barely moved. My country is the most equal in Europe save for Slovenia. Of course, some might argue that you need equality at Slovenia’s level to maintain social harmony. That’s unless you had heard of the series of mass protests — sometimes violent — which have rocked Slovenian cities since last November, resulting in the fall of the government.

Reality grounds together Abe and Hollande

Abe, Hollande reach deal to push nuclear technology

BY MIZUHO AOKI

French President Francois Hollande and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agreed Friday to deepen cooperation on developing and exporting nuclear power plant technologies, and to strengthen security ties.

In a joint statement following their summit in Tokyo, the two leaders agreed to arrange talks between their foreign and defense ministers, commonly known as two-plus-two talks, to discuss joint development of defense equipment as well as exporting such items overseas.

Through such talks, Japan aims to stop France from exporting dual-use items to China that could improve the Chinese military’s capabilities.

A French naval contractor sold ship-based helicopter landing systems to China, triggering concern in Japan that it will raise the potency of Chinese surveillance ships deployed around the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea.

Hezbollah’s Vietnam?

Hezbollah has entered Syria with no exit strategy

By MICHAEL YOUNG

The only thing odd about Hezbollah’s intervention in the Syrian conflict is that it took over two years for the party and its backers in Tehran to make the decision. That’s because whatever one thinks of Hezbollah, the triumph of Syria’s rebels always posed an existential threat to the party and its agenda. 

The victory in Qusayr was undeniably an important one for Hezbollah and the Syrian regime, knocking the rebels out of a swath of strategic territory in the province of Homs, linking Damascus to the coast. It now allows the Assad regime to turn its attentions to other areas from where the regime was forced to withdraw.

Attention is now focused on Aleppo, where Hezbollah combatants have been amassing recently. However, we can’t forget that the rebels have already been pushed out of neighborhoods around Damascus. And the recent deployment of Patriot missiles and F-16 aircrafts to Jordan suggests there are expectations of a regime offensive in the southern province of Deraa, considered the most likely location from where rebels could mount an attack against the Syrian capital.

Hezbollah’s deepening involvement in the Syrian war is a high-risk venture. Many see this as a mistake by the party, and it may well be. Qusayr will be small change compared to Aleppo, where the rebels are well entrenched and benefit from supply lines leading to Turkey. In the larger regional rivalry between Iran and Turkey, the Turkish army and intelligence services have an interest in helping make things very difficult for Hezbollah and the Syrian army in northern Syria, particularly after the car-bomb attack in Reyhanli in May. 

The Class Struggle Behind the 'Turkish Spring'

Keeping Islamism at bay is not a reason to support dictators

By Ian Buruma

One interpretation of the anti-government demonstrations now roiling Turkish cities is that they are a massive protest against political Islam. What began as a rally against official plans to raze a small park in the center of Istanbul to make way for a kitschy shopping mall quickly evolved into a conflict of values.

The fight appears to represent two different visions of modern Turkey — ­secular versus religious, democratic versus authoritarian. Comparisons have been made with Occupy Wall Street. Some observers even speak of a "Turkish Spring."

Clearly, many Turkish citizens are sick of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian style, his steely grip on the press, the restrictions on alcohol, the arrests of political dissidents and now the violent response to the demonstrations. People fear that Sharia law will replace secular legislation and that Islamism will spoil the fruits of Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, who strove to modernize post-­Ottoman ­Turkey.

The current unrest in Turkey is less of a religious conflict as it is a class-based one.

It would seem that religion is at the heart of the Turkish problem. Political Islam's opponents regard it as inherently anti-democratic.

But things are not so simple. The secular Kemalist state was no less authoritarian than Erdogan's populist Islamist regime. If anything, it was more so. It is also significant that the first protests in Istanbul's Taksim Square concerned not a mosque but a shopping mall. Fear of sharia law is matched by anger at the rapacious vulgarity of developers and entrepreneurs backed by Erdogan's government. There is a strong leftist bent to the Turkish Spring.

So, rather than dwell on the problems of contemporary political Islam, which are certainly considerable, it might be more fruitful to look at Turkey's conflicts from another, now distinctly unfashionable, perspective: class. The protesters, whether they are liberal or leftist, tend to be from the urban elite — Westernized, sophisticated and secular. Erdogan, meanwhile, is still very popular in rural and provincial Turkey among people who are less educated, poorer, more conservative and religious.

The All-Seeing State

The inevitable corruption of the permanent bureaucracy 

By Mark Steyn

A few years ago, after one corruption scandal too many, the then Liberal government in Canada announced that, to prevent further outbreaks of malfeasance, it would be hiring 300 new federal auditors plus a bunch of ethics czars, and mandating “integrity provisions” in government contracts, including “prohibitions against paying, offering, demanding or accepting bribes.” There were already plenty of laws against bribery, but one small additional sign on the desk should do the trick: “Please do not attempt to bribe the Minister of the Crown as a refusal may offend. Also: He’s not allowed to bribe you, whatever he says.” A government that requires “integrity provisions” is by definition past the stage where they will do any good.

I thought of those Canadian Liberal “integrity provisions” passing a TV screen the other day and catching hack bureaucrats from the IRS Small Business/Self-Employed Division reassuring Congress that systems had now been put in place to prevent them succumbing to the urge to put on Spock ears and moob-hugging blue polyester for the purposes of starring in a Star Trek government training video. The Small Business/Self-Employed Division had boldly gone where no IRS man had gone before — to a conference in Anaheim, where they were put up in $3,500-a-night hotel rooms and entertained by a man who was paid $27,500 to fly in and paint on stage a portrait of Bono. Bono is the veteran Irish rocker knighted by the Queen for his tireless campaign on behalf of debt forgiveness, which doesn’t sound the IRS’s bag at all. But don’t worry, debt forgiveness-wise Bono has Africa in mind, not New Jersey. And, as Matthew Cowart tweeted me the other day, he did have a big hit with “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” which I believe is now the official anthem of the IRS Cincinnati office.

It took Congressman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina to get to the heart of the matter: “With all due respect, this is not a training issue,” he said. “This cannot be solved with another webinar. . . . We can adopt all the recommendations you can possibly conceive of. I just say it strikes me — and maybe it’s just me — but it strikes me as a cultural, systemic, character, moral issue.”

He’s right. If you don’t instinctively know it’s wrong to stay in $3,500-a-night hotel rooms at public expense, a revised conference-accommodations-guidelines manual isn’t going to fix the real problem.