Invade Libya, or not

Invade Libya. You know Sarkozy is talking about it with his advisors right now. Someone is calling Angela Merkel's assistant to check what she thinks. The State Department has been sounded out, they have first dibs on invading Muslim nations after all.

The initial reports are that Europe is not excluding the possibility of undertaking an humanitarian intervention:

http://www.faz.net/s/Rub87AD10DD0AE246EF840F23C9CBCBED2C/Doc~E47BBA80825954D448673557FB3778E0E~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html

NATO Secretary General, Rasmussen, states there are no plans to intervene, but with every denial comes its antithesis, and the French defense minister, Alain Juppe, has suggested taking action, in the form of sanctions, to prevent further humanitarian violations.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2011/02/libya-protests-5.html

Yet there is a cardinal rule in politics: when your opponent is self-destructing, get out of the way.

What better way to save Khadaffi than to turn him into a defender of national security. Right now his opponents are citizens of his own country and the military is wavering in their resolve to shoot. This has obviously been the key to the entire democratic movement in the Middle East: armies who do not wish to massacre the people.

Given the prospect of French, British or German ( I doubt it) troops in Libya, the situation would change dramatically. The Libyan army and air force would snap to attention and obey the commands of the supreme leader to defend the nation against colonialist aggressors using this moment of domestic turmoil to invade.

The best policy is to let the democratic revolution unfold without reviving French or even Turkish fantasies of Mediterranean hegemony. So long as Khadaffi is in power it would be madness to present him with a rallying cry for the nation. Right now he is blaming the uprising on Al-Kaeda and Nescafe spiked with Ecstasy. Better to leave him to his mad delusions than to give him a ideological lifeline.

English as an Alibi

Lots of people in Europe speak English, but what is really fascinating is why they do so. On the surface, they all learn English so that they can participate in the global economy, the internet, English pop culture, American science, you name it.

Still, behind the obvious rational reasons, lie others: The desire to preserve their own culture. A paradox, learn English so that you don't have to give up your native tongue. This is a deal that small religious groups have long had--the worldly language, the private language and the sacred language. Secular Europe has the first two.

So every worldly Dutchman learns English, but never with the thought of abandoning his native tongue. Indeed, the bond is stronger than ever. Learning English does not make Europeans less nationalistic, it allows them to quiet, discretely become more so.

It is easy to pay respect to the global behemoth, who can deny the dominance of English, but then once having done so, Europeans no longer need to learn the many other languages spoken around them.

I remember in the late eighties watching a young Frenchman speaking to a teller in a Frankfurt bank. They both were speaking awkward English to each other about some financial transaction. In another era, the German woman would have spoke some French and the visiting Frenchman some German. But in an English dominated world, they were not compelled to learn each other's language.

Now Europeans can increasingly retreat behind their native languages without imagining that they are speaking to a European audience. The Dutch are speaking only to other Dutch speakers--not to the Brits, the Germans or the French, because they can safely assume that people from those language groups are likely to only have English as their second language.

The first thing to creep back into the picture, then is nationalism, initially aimed against non-European immigrants who speak no English.

Europe and America

Getting ready to take a long trip, which always brings to mind those big differences, the ones that sound like cliches today, but someday will be the basis for sweeping historical arguments

The real difference between the US and Europe is that we spend gobs of money on defense and they do not. Instead Europeans spend money on “quality of life.” The argument being that they spent gobs of money on war earlier in the twentieth century and now would rather do something else.

The US has managed to spend on the military and keep up appearances by working longer, a system of self-exploitation. We build more houses from cheaper materials with no design effort. We work longer hours for less pay. We consider this virtuous.