The four defendants were identified as Russell Defreitas, a U.S. citizen and native of Guyana who was arrested in Brooklyn. Authorities said Defreitas was the former airport employee. 

They said two suspects were in custody in Trinidad and Tobago, and identified those two as Abdul Kadir, a citizen of Guyana and former member of its parliament, and Kareem Ibrahim, a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago.

The fourth was named as Abdel Nur, described as a citizen of Guyana. They provided no other immediate information on Nur’s whereabouts, but said Kadir and Nur were associates of Jamaat Al Muslimeen, which was behind a deadly coup attempt in Trinidad in 1990.

“Any time you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United States. To hit John F. Kennedy, wow … they love John F. Kennedy like he’s the man … if you hit that, this whole country will be mourning. You can kill the man twice [bold mine-DL],” Defreitas said in another conversation, it said.

“Even the twin towers can’t touch it,” referring to the September 11 attacks in another comment that the law enforcement authorities said was recorded last month. “This can destroy the economy of America for some time.” ~Reuters

Ross notes that we have been fortunate recently in having very stupid enemies.  I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that this Defreitas was not what you might call a fully assimilated newcomer.  If Defreitas was already a naturalised U.S. citizen, it is not hard to imagine that there are other Defreitases operating beneath the radar.  It makes amnesty seem rather foolish, doesn’t it?   

It is worth noting that the only planned attack (and it was only in the “planning stages” at that) against American targets originating from Latin America had its beginnings in Guyana and Trinidad.  These are not the normal bogeymen of interventionist fearmongering (they are both next to Venezuela, but that is about as much connection as there is).  This makes some sense, since 10% of Guyana’s population is Muslim and around 6% of Trinidad and Tobago’s population is Muslim.  (Interestingly, Guyana is also 35% Hindu–it makes sense, given the past British connection, but I confess I had no idea this was the case.) 

The much-feared “triangle” in southern South America is a border region where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet, and it is one part of the continent that interventionists have been screaming warnings about (when they haven’t been engaged in their favourite pastime of Venezuelophobia).  These would all be countries with very, very few Muslims, and this “triangle” would seem to be an area that has so far, at least as far as the public knows, not generated any threats against the United States.  Perhaps if more anti-jihadists were more focused on anti-American enemies, rather than worrying about Hizbullah fundraising, we might begin to develop some sort of coherent and intelligent policy to oppose them.

Yglesias makes the important, if obvious, point:

The news that the Islamic Army of Iraq (one of the main Sunni insurgent groups) fought a battle against al-Qaeda for control of a Baghdad neighborhood would, in a decent world, put to a rest the idea that we’re fighting some consolidated “jihadist” menace in Iraq. We’re fighting a whole bunch of people. Many of those people are fighting other people who we’re also fighting.

Also in that decent world Yglesias mentions would be a policy that recognised this divergence between different warring factions and which sought to exploit the divisions among them to American advantage.

Price Floyd traces the decline of America’s standing in the world to this moment. “Back then, the USIA transmitted American values—and this was separate from selling American policy,” he said. “The two aren’t separated now. There’s no entity that makes it possible to separate them. So, if you disagree with our policy, which is easy to do now, then you hate America, too.” ~Fred Kaplan, Slate

I take Mr. Floyd’s point, and I think he is mostly right at least as far as government activity is concerned. It isn’t as if there are no other means of communicating to the rest of the world except by way of government, but I acknowledge that he is talking specifically about how the government does or does not successfully engage in public diplomacy.

This also highlights the terrible practical problems with a “values”-driven idealistic foreign policy or anything called the “Freedom Agenda.” When you take it as axiomatic, as Mr. Bush’s Second Inaugural did, that “our interests and our values are one,” you have prepared the ground for a continual identification of interests, values and policies that supposedly seek the former and allegedly protect the latter. As far as the state is concerned, the government’s policies are the embodiment of both American interests and values. To oppose or criticise that policy is to declare that you are somehow against one or both. To claim that foreigners resent U.S. policy is, for a foreign policy idealist, to say that they resent America; to say that policy causes terrorism (which it can and does do) is to say that America by its very nature causes terrorism. The special relevance of this conflation of “values” and policy for the recent dust-up between Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani is obvious.

In this roundabout way, the idealists reason. We can understand how a foreign policy idealist probably genuinely believes that “they hate us for our freedoms,” because for him “our freedoms” involve the “freedoms” of, say, backing the Aliyev dictatorship in Azerbaijan or the “liberties” of selling munitions to Israel or the “rights” to launching aggressive wars against small, weak countries with which we have no real quarrel. Hegemony is itself an expression of freedom; our bases are extensions of our “values” and our cruise missiles the expression of our ideals.

Thanks to the invitation of Dr. Ralph Luker, in the near future I will also be starting blogging at History News Network’s Cliopatria.  It is a group blog of historians and history students, who cover all manner of topics from the strictly academic to the contemporary political scene, offering an historical perspective on current events.  I am looking forward to it.

People do not grasp the “invisible hand” of the market, with its ability to harmonize private greed and the public interest. ~Bryan Caplan

Some unfortunate phrasing, perhaps, but even so it is an interesting claim that, because most people do not see the imaginary, metaphorical force that surrounds and binds together economic activity, they thereby must have an “anti-market bias.”  More likely, these people lack the invisible hand-detectors that libertarians receive upon obtaining their libertarian membership.  Caplan continues:

They underestimate the benefits of interaction with foreigners.

Perhaps some people underestimate them, but if anyone overestimates the benefits it is surely a free-trading libertarian, who seems to see no real downside to such interaction.

Caplan again:

They equate prosperity not with production, but with employment.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but if someone lacks employment it doesn’t matter to him how outstanding the GDP has been.  If we’re talking about politics, and not what constitutes good policy, the lack of employment today is more pressing and will move more votes.  19th century liberals at least understood this and restricted the franchise accordingly to keep the electorate from expanding much beyond their base of support.  Once the electorate grew in size beyond the buergerlich urban voters that supported liberal economic policies, these new voters quite rationally embraced policies that would work to secure their interests–whether of agricultural land or labour or small artisanal workshops–rather than endorse those that tended to benefit middle-class businessmen and industrialists.  As 19th liberals were bewildered then by the choices of the mob, so, too, are libertarians today, yet like the 19th century liberal the libertarian is an interesting, eccentric and fun figure who can command no great political following.  Liberalism flourished in the early phase of industrialisation, and the effects of that same industrialisation worked to overthrow and destroy classical liberalism.  Likewise, it is not “baffling” that American labourers sought and supported the politicians that at least promised to secure them certain basic protections with respect to the length of the workday, safety and health regulations and the like.  (It is a separate question where the federal government gets any authority to do these things.)  These choices may not be optimal for maximising productivity, but that doesn’t necessarily matter to the labourer.  The interests of labour actually involve more than the compensation for work that has been done.  Voters act irrationally just as Caplan claims if you have already determined that labourers’ voting for policies that govern workplace conditions, for example, is a form of irrationality.   

If someone’s job has been outsourced to another country (there’s my anti-foreign bias!) or eliminated for the sake of efficiency (my anti-market bias is taking over), it is unreasonable to expect him to say, “That’s all right.  The economy grew by 4%!”  Voters are often irrational when it comes time to select candidates (because candidate preferences are driven by all sorts of intangibles and identity politics quite distinct from policy questions), but they are not so blindly, willfully hostile to their own self-interest that they misunderstand their own immediate economic interests.  They may very well not see “the big picture” and they may support policies that seem immediately beneficial to them (for instance, nationalisation of an industry or massive redistributionist taxation), but which have overall negative consequences for the entire economy. 

This complaint has ever been the lament of the classical liberal when confronted with a mass electorate: “Why don’t you people realise that the policies that will make me wealthier are the right ones?”   

Of course, voters are short-sighted, prone to misguided enthusiasms and vulnerable to the predations of demagogues.  I don’t like democracy.  Generally speaking, I’m against it.  It is injurious to liberty, because no mass electorate presented with the ability to control, however minimally, a huge coercive apparatus is going to endorse a platform of austerity, limited government and decentralised power.  It will abuse to some extent this power, and demagogues will encourage this abuse for the sake of concentrating more and more power in their own hands. 

No one will confuse me for a defender of the rationality and sanity of democratic politics.  However, policies aimed at shoring up or protecting domestic industry do not strike me necessarily as being at all obviously “socially harmful.”  They contribute to increased prices on imports, and often provoke retalitatory tariffs on exported goods, but is such protectionism actually “socially harmful”?  Beyond the diminished consumption of commodities that such a tariff war might cause, what exactly is the harm?

Whatever else this study reveals, it definitely explains why no one will be bending over backwards to run on a libertarian economic platform anytime soon.

Now…I do wonder why this lively debate on Iraq that Berkowitz is describing has not been evident in..where do we start…? The National Review? National Review Online? Fox News? The Weekly Standard? The Heritage Foundation? The American Enterprise Institute? The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page? Commentary? Just to name a few of the leading conservative outlets where any dissent on the war on Iraq has been silenced, and the only remaining debate is between those who want to nuke Iran and those who want to do a “regime change” there. And we can go on and on… as we focus our attention on the recent debate among Republican presidential candidates and the efforts to shut-up Dr. Ron Paul. There has certainly been more of a serious and lively debate on Iraq among Democrats and liberals. Count the number of Democratic senators who voted against the recent (modified) bill on Iraq and those Republicans who voted in favor of it. Thanks to The American Conservative and Chronicles, conservatives have been able to voice their views on Iraq and the Bush foreign policy. But please Dr. Berkowitz…there was no WMD in Iraq and there has been no conservative debate on Iraq. ~Leon Hadar

Amen to that.  I had some similar observations earlier this week, saying:

What Mr. Berkowitz fails to mention is that when it comes to conservative magazines, think tanks and other forms of institutional conservatism, the overwhelming majority remains more or less fully committed to the war.  Except for long-time opponents of the war at The American Conservativeand Chronicles, dissent in the journalist and pundit classes has come in small doses and has mostly been limited to questions of implementation and practicality.  The mainstream conservative response to Ron Paul points to a broader uniformity on foreign policy that goes beyond Iraq, and the sloganeering of the other nine presidential candidates confirm that this uniformity will not be challenged by any of the “viable” potential nominees of the Republican Party. 

I concluded:

Indeed, I can think of no area of policy debate where the right is more conformist and uninterested in a variety of opinions than on foreign policy. 

This lack of any real debate inside the “mainstream” journals and institutions of the movement–indeed, the enforcement of ideological rigidity by more than a few of these journals–explains why there are only war supporting interventionists and Ron Paul in the GOP presidential race.  There are no distinctive, remarkable “realist”candidates because antiwar “realists” are relatively hard to come by outside of academia and libertarian circles.  Among politicians, all of the “realists” more or less embrace the continuation of the war.  Their very balance-of-forces, stability-centered view of foreign affairs dictates that they support an American presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future.

In their self-declared “worst bloggingheads ever,” Ben Smith and Garance Franke-Ruta discuss the presidential fields and Paul’s performance in the second debate.  I think they either misunderstand Paul’s claim from the second debate or they do not recall the specific grievances that Bin Laden has outlined as the motivations for attacking American targets.  The sanctions and bombings of Iraq were included explicitly from 1996 onward.  Additionally, Paul has explicitly ruled out a third-party run. 

Classic quote from Ben Smith: “There is a Libertarian Party, I think, nationally.”

Sullivan reminds us that Peggy Noonan was rather more sanguine about Bush the Destroyer of Worlds immediately after the ’04 election.  Here are some samples:

George W. Bush is the first president to win more than 50% of the popular vote since 1988. (Bill Clinton failed to twice; Mr. Bush failed to last time and fell short of a plurality by half a million.) The president received more than 59 million votes, breaking Ronald Reagan’s old record of 54.5 million. Mr. Bush increased his personal percentages in almost every state in the union. He carried the Catholic vote and won 42% of the Hispanic vote and 24% of the Jewish vote (up from 19% in 2000.)

It will be hard for the mainstream media to continue, in the face of these facts, the mantra that we are a deeply and completely divided country. But they’ll try!

I suppose everyone gets a bit carried away when their side wins an election, but how Bush’s managing to break 50% proved that we are not a deeply divided country remains a mystery.  Then there is this remarkable relic from the age of Iraq war triumphalism:

The elites of Old Europe are depressed. Savor. The nonelites of Old Europe, and the normal folk of New Europe, especially our beloved friend Poland, will not be depressed, and many will be happy. Let’s savor that too.

As I have said over and over again, most people–the so-called nonelites–in “New Europe” were against the war and have no great love for Bush.  The Hungarians were liable to be depressed because we Hungarians are a depressive people, but no one was going to be dancing in the streets over Mr. Bush’s victory (and no one did dance).  The “nonelites” (a.k.a., the vast majority of the people) in “Old Europe” were stunned and vaguely horrified at Mr. Bush’s re-election.  I am always hearing anecdotes from friends and colleagues who were in Europe in 2004-05, and the constant theme was the obsession the Europeans had with figuring out how Bush won re-election.  It made no sense to them, and they were seeking to understand how something so bizarre could happen.  Indeed, I have wondered about that more than a few times myself. 

In other parts of the article, there are other embarrassing comparisons to Valley Forge and Agincourt (no, really, there are) and prostrations before Limbaugh and Hannity, but perhaps it is enough to say that Ms. Noonan has come a long way in the last two and a half years.

But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you’re a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say you’ve got to cap with a number. ~Bill O’Reilly

Now, is O’Reilly really saying that we need to defend the precious white, Christian, male power structure against a foreign onslaught, as his critics are suggesting? Or is he just saying, rather clumsily, that the “far-left” sees open immigration as a way to socially engineer America as we know it – which they perceive as dominated by a pernicious, patriarchal, Anglo-Saxon power structure – out of existence, as part of their “hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go” agenda? I think it’s ambiguous, and it seems at least as likely that he’s caricaturing lefty views as that he’s expressing his deep, dark Christofascist fantasties [sic]. ~Ross Douthat

First of all, I don’t think Bill O’Reilly would ever use the phrase “power structure” as part of his self-identification.  The O’Reillys of the world do not use phrases like “power structure” to express their own views.  “Power structure” is a phrase that academics–liberal academics whom the O’Reillys hate–would use to describe the organisation of a society.  It would be like Sean Hannity using the phrase “cultural appropriation” or Rush Limbaugh speaking about “othering” or “anomie.”  These are phrases and ideas that simply aren’t normally used by bombastic GOP talking heads, or if they are they are used ironically and with contempt.  It seems fairly clear that O’Reilly is talking here about what he thinks open borders supporters really want, and not about what he fears they want.  I say this because I don’t think O’Reilly cares much at all about said “power structure,” which is to say he’s not terribly concerned about white American Christians, their culture or their interests, but he knows that it is popular among these viewers to side with them on immigration.  

On the other hand, I don’t think it’s that strange of an interpretation of the open borders position.  Actual Republican advocates of open borders–for example, those on the right who hold the WSJ immigration and border security position–who want to declare, “There shall be open borders,” are clearly not just indifferent to whatever dominant culture exists in this country, but they are plainly hostile to any politics that espouses loyalty to cultural and religious traditions and identities that supersede or take priority over economic motives and economic efficiencies.  These loyalties can be a drag on productivity when they encourage feelings of patriotism and national identity, which can be a problem for those whose loyalties are to themselves as individuals, the moneyed interest or the profits of multinationals.  When forced to choose between the bottom line and the border, these are the people who will choose the bottom line.  As Henninger made clear earlier this week, it’s all about the money market. 

They are indifferent to what these traditions and identities are–they just know that they are annoying baggage to be dispensed with as soon as possible.  What the open borders crowd knows is that loyalties to tradition and cultural identity potentially hamper “growth,” cultivate the desire for belonging and exclusion and erect boundaries between nations that can make the free flow of goods and services more difficult.  Wherever there are cultural conservatives, they are the enemy of the open borders, globalisation crowd.  (This is why I have argued before that it is the natural conservative response to regard policies of globalisation as hostile and threatening.)  It happens that the cultural conservatives of this country are predominantly white and Christian, so this is what our latter-day Freisinnigen have decided ought to be undermined.  (Incidentally, anyone who thinks that introducing large numbers of Latin Americans into the United States threatens the existence of “patriarchy” doesn’t know what he’s talking about–those who are most keenly interested in women’s rights might reconsider importing cultural habits that tend to be inimical to women’s emancipation.) 

These open borders folks are the people who speak contemptuously of cultural conservatives for daring to want to conserve their own culture.  Retaining this or that culture, rather than just letting “creative destruction” work its magic of demographic and social upheaval, may introduce barriers to economic activity and it will certainly hinder the “free movement of labour” that economic efficiency may require.  There are other open borders advocates who are multiculturalists, who at the very least have no strong attachment to Anglo-American and/or Euro-American culture and many of whom are positively glad to introduce any number of cultures and languages into the country.  That this does and will continue to result in social and political fragmentation detrimental to everyone in the country is not their pressing concern.  These are the sorts of people O’Reilly was referring to, but what he failed to mention, probably because it is not a popular thing to say, is just how many people among American elites in business share multiculti goals in subverting the culture that white Christian conservatives are trying, however haphazardly, to protect and preserve.

And now for something completely different: here are Kajol and Aamir Khan in Chand Sifarish and Mere Haath Mein from Fanaa.