An incompetent administration?

Last night I saw another background documentary on the Bush administration. The claim of this program was that there is a parallel between Bush and Nixon. Well, if you drink a bottle of wine, squint your eyes and hold your head crooked while staring into the sunset, you would see the parallel as clearly as the documentary makers saw it too.

However, several interesting people were interviewed: Gordon Liddy (yes, he did get out of jail after serving only five years of his twenty...), a liberal colleges professor whose name I forgot and Joseph Wilson, the former ambassor to Iraq and author of a report that discredited claims that Iraq was procuring so-called yellow cake uranium in Niger. Wilson is in a sort of indirect battle with the White House. In the course of this battle, the fact that his wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative was made public. That affair will cost several people their career. "Scooter" Libby was one of them.

Anyway, the journalist who compiled the documentary was not very careful in hiding his disgust with the Bush administration. As a piece of journalism it was not great, but it got me thinking about what the USadministration has achieved so far.

It turns out it is one of the most divisive governments since, well, I suppose, since Nixon. Bush c.s. have managed to go into deficit BIG TIME, they invaded Iraq without a clear contingency plan and with what became clear afterwards, poor intelligence, the invasion seems to have set a civil war in motion that looks like it will last a 100 years, they have managed to give Arab discontents a clear target, they alienated many of their allies in the world (witness the recent trip of Condoleeza Rice to the Middle East), with the open (and illegal?) tapping of thousands of citizens and the complete faillure of the rescue and rebuilding operations after Katrina hit, they are polarising American society into vocal camps of Bush lovers and haters (where is the moderate middle contingent?!?) and with Dick Cheney nearly killing a friend and major sponsor they look like stumbling fools to many.

This is the administration that right after 9/11 had enormous political capital, that could count on the unconditional support of a majority of the nations in the world. I don't think that Americans are stupid, like too many of my countrymen do. Nor do I think this administration evil. I used to that the individual members of this administration were no fools, but if you oversee all of this, I cannot help but wonder if they are competent to lead the most important and (as a US citizen I can say this) greatest nation of the world. Their track record does not look promising, to say the least...

RE: Cartoons and philosophy

The question as to why certain groups of Muslims react so violently against these cartoons mocking the Prophet has come up several times. Often, the violence of the reaction has been compared with that of -say- Catholics remaining calm when the virgin Mary is ridiculed.

One component surely is a general sort of discontent within the Arab world, as well as under Muslims outside of Arabia that the West is targeting and humiliating them. This impression may or may not be correct in general, but there is certainly something to it in the context of Danmark (or the Netherlands for that matter). Whereas before migrants from Morocco, Turkey and other Mediterranean countries were referred to as Moroccans, Turks, etc., now they are referred to as Muslims and usually in a critical or derogatory way. Migrants are lumped together by their religious indentity and it is under the heading of this identity that they are a 'problem' for these societies. So this accounts for some (small?) part of the outrage and discontent. This has been mentioned by many commentators and there probably is something to it.

However, I have not really heard or seen commentators mentioning the following consideration. When comparing the religious sensitivities of Arab Muslims with Western Catholics, one should not forget that the Western Europe there has been a period of more than 100 years of religious civil wars. The result, as you are all aware, was the birth of ideals of religious tolerance and liberal rights. However, this was not just a political result, this has had a profound influence on the Christian faith as it is practised. Christianity, in the West at least, has become politically liberal as well. Many Christians for example accept the idea that their religion is a private matter. This is not something that is inherent to their faith, but is the straightforward result of a history of religious war and living under secular and liberal institutions for many generations.

Islam, on the other hand, as far as I am aware, never seems to have gone through such an experience. As a result, Islam is not "secularized" or "liberalized" either to the manner or the degree that Christianity in the West has been transformed in the modern times. Therefore, the argument that muslims should tolerate the infamous cartoons because christians tolerate similar mocking of their faith is not valid. Islam and Christianity are not in analogous positions when it comes to such things: they are really different kinds of religion.

Whether that is a good thing or whether Islam should "modernize" so as to incorporate such secular and liberal beliefs is another matter. Some versions of the faith seem to have gone further down that road than others and I wish they all would.