Theodore Dalrymple, the non de plume of physician Anthony Daniels, has another piece today on the decline of Britain. I have previously commented on the British teenagers’ loss of history and the loss in the entire society, which has a much longer history to remember. He places much of the blame on the educational system.
Although we spend four times as much on education per head as in 1950, the illiteracy rate has not gone down. I used to try to plumb the depths (or shallows) of youthful British ignorance by asking my patients a few simple questions. Fifty percent responded to the question “What is arithmetic?” by answering “What is arithmetic?” It is not that they were good at doing something that they could not name: When I asked one young man, not mentally deficient, to multiply three by four, he replied “We didn’t get that far.”
That’s not very far. We are not much better.
The political system isn’t doing very well, either.
It is doubtful whether any major country has had a more incompetent leader than Gordon Brown for many years. The product of a pleasure-hating Scottish Presbyterian tradition, he behaves as if taxation were a moral good in itself, regardless of the uses to which it is put; he is widely believed to have taken lessons in how to smile, though he has not been an apt pupil, for he now makes disconcertingly odd grimaces at inappropriate moments. He is the only leader known to me who combines dourness with frivolity.
Early in his disastrous career in government he sold the country’s gold reserves at a derisory price, against all advice, driving the price lower by the manner in which he arranged the sale. A convenience-store owner couldn’t, and almost certainly wouldn’t, have done worse.
This sounds familiar. Barack Obama is weak in economics although he has a high opinion of himself in almost every sphere.
For example, he was famously asked by Charles Gibson in one of the debates his policy on capital gains taxes.
GIBSON: And in each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased; the government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down.
So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?
OBAMA: Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.
And again:
GIBSON: But history shows that when you drop the capital gains tax, the revenues go up.
OBAMA: Well, that might happen, or it might not.
Yes, stuff happens and there is little reason to expect that Obama knows why.
Then we come to foreign policy. Today the Telegraph, in Britain, published this column on its web site.
Never in the history of the United States has a president worked so actively against the interests of his own people – not even Jimmy Carter.
Obama’s problem is that he does not know who the enemy is. To him, the enemy does not squat in caves in Waziristan, clutching automatic weapons and reciting the more militant verses from the Koran: instead, it sits around at tea parties in Kentucky quoting from the US Constitution. Obama is not at war with terrorists, but with his Republican fellow citizens. He has never abandoned the campaign trail.
I have to agree. His performance at the UN was depressing. I have previously expressed my concerns about this administration and its policy toward Israel.
I would suggest that Obama consider the consequences of convincing Israel that they are alone, or worse, that we sympathize with their enemies. For the consequences, you might read this report by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
He expects, writes Martin Walker of United Press International,
some 16 million to 28 million Iranians dead within 21 days, and between 200,000 and 800,000 Israelis dead within the same time frame. The total of deaths beyond 21 days could rise very much higher, depending on civil defense and public health facilities, where Israel has a major advantage.
It is theoretically possible that the Israeli state, economy and organized society might just survive such an almost-mortal blow. Iran would not survive as an organized society. “Iranian recovery is not possible in the normal sense of the term,” Cordesman notes. The difference in the death tolls is largely because Israel is believed to have more nuclear weapons of very much higher yield (some of 1 megaton), and Israel is deploying the Arrow advanced anti-missile system in addition to its Patriot batteries. Fewer Iranian weapons would get through.
The report also points out that Israel, backed into a corner, would most likely strike at its other potential enemies, including hostile Arab states. The fallout would probably mean the end of the Age of Petroleum, since the oil fields in the Middle East would be unusable for decades.
I don’t think Obama is equipped to make these judgements. He is starting down a very dangerous road with no evidence that he understands the risks. Neither did Chamberlain.
In 1939, the appeasers had the excuse that World War I was widely believed to have arisen from hasty mobilization and misunderstanding that more time and patient negotiation might have avoided. We now have the experience of that failure of appeasement, especially when dealing with an opponent who lacks historical balance or who has been mislead to believe that he runs no risk of opposition. The president of Iran has shown lack of historical balance and he represents a regime that has as a spiritual tenet that martyrdom is to be desired. Militant Islam has an unreasoning hatred of Jews dating, I believe, back to a rejection of Mohammed as he was founding Islam as a derivation of Judaism. This has now reached a psychotic stage in which a nation state of 66 million is governed by a small clique who believe that a millennium will come about by civil disaster, such as nuclear war. We have never seen as dangerous a delusion in the minds of leaders so close to the possibility of such weapons.
We see western governments that are so inept that they cannot educate the populace and they cannot understand the basic facts of economics or foreign policy.
UPDATE: This discussion of the coming financial meltdown shows just how difficult this problem is. Do not expect to see any logical discussion of this from the left.