AN ESR COUP

The one-man global content provider (Steven Martinovich, May 12, 2003, Enter Stage Right)

[Q:] Noah Feldman, who's just been named head of the constitutional team with the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq -- the team's responsibility to oversee and advise on drafting the constitution for a democratic Iraq -- argues in his new book After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy that it's not unreasonable to expect a free and democratic Middle East one day. Do you share that optimism and if so, what would be your roadmap?

[A:] I do share that optimism. Liberty isn't just some white European thing. South Pacific islanders and Latin Americans and West Indians and much of Asia live in liberty, so to argue that Arabs are uniquely unqualified to do so is surely racist. I don't believe they're genetically incompatible with freedom, as I've been saying for over a year and a half now. What amazes me is the speed with which what, in October 2001, was just the ravings of a couple of glib fringe columnists has become the received wisdom. Nobody now defends the old methods - shoveling money and access at Mubarak and the House of Saud. Indeed, in some ways, precisely because of the way those regimes have grown bloated on US favours, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are the trickiest countries to fix. But look at how detailed President Bush's recent speech in South Carolina was: he's proposing a US/Middle East free trade area within the decade; Sandra Day O'Connor will be heading a forum on Middle East judicial reform.

Whether or not all these things will work in every country is debatable, but there's no doubt that Iraq is the best place to start the experiment. Just having a country with a free press, free radio stations, etc, will have an enormous impact on its neighbours. It was the knowledge of the reality on the other side of the Iron Curtain that helped tip the Warsaw Pact states, and it's much harder these days to keep your people in a hermetically sealed fantasy. A free Iraq will hasten reforms in the so-called "moderate" states - the Gulf Emirates and Jordan - and put pressure on Syria, which is already in the unusual position for an Arab tyranny of being surrounded by reasonably civilized societies - Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Israel. [...]

So that's the real "roadmap" - the one that starts in Baghdad, nudges Amman and others down the road to reform, and tips Assad and Mubarak into oblivion. What's going on in the Palestinian Authority is, by comparison, a non-scenic detour. But it teaches one important lesson: there's no point betting on a proven failure. The Sultan of Oman and the King of Jordan may be improvable, but Yasser Arafat never was: he's good at nothing but killing and corruption, and the decision to invest the entire cause of Palestinian nationalism in one worthless incompetent terrorist was the worst decision of the last 30 years. Whatever idiotic remarks Powell may make in the course of his travels, Bush knows the reality. But the bottom line is this: by 2010, Arafat, the Assads, the Ayatollahs and the loopier factions of the House of Saud will all be gone.

Congratulations to Brother Martinovich who scores an interview with the one-man Anglosphere and proud Granite Stater, Mark Steyn.

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Here's Mr. Steyn on an icon of the age, one of the early proofs that all comedy is conservative, COMEDY, INC: BOB HOPE AT 100 (Mark Steyn, May 4th 2003, The Sunday Telegraph)

If you only remember one thing about him, it?s this: Bob Hope has made more people laugh than anyone in human history. He?s the only comedian to have been, over the years, the Number One star in radio, in film, and then television, at a time when each of those media was at its highpoint. The Road pictures with Bing Crosby were the highest-grossing series in movie history till James Bond came along, his six decades with NBC hold the record for the longest contract in showbusiness, and his TV specials for the network remain among the most-watched programmes of all time. Plus he?s logged some ten million miles, playing up to 200 live performances a year until into his nineties.

Success on that scale breeds a particular kind of contempt. Younger comics who for 30 years have despised Hope as a pro-war establishment suck-up forget that he more or less invented the form they work in: the relaxed guy who strolls on and does topical observational gags about the world we live in. When he started eight decades ago, there were no ?stand-ups?; it was an age of clowns ? weird-looking guys in goofy costumes taking frenzied pratfalls and telling ethnic gags in stage dialects ? German, Irish, Negro. In the 1920s in Cleveland, Hope did as he was told and played in blackface wearing an undersized derby and an oversized red bow tie. But even then he knew enough, unlike most of the fellows he worked with, not to get trapped by the conventions.

You know how some people contend that famous folk die in threes? I have a recurring nightmare where Ronald Reagan, Boib Hope and Margaret Thatcher all die the same week--such a fate no species should be asked to bear. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 12, 2003 8:12 AM