Magic Statistics

Fifty years ago today, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser seized control of The Suez Canal Company from British and French interests.  Official celebrations are low-key, but others are far more enthusiastic.  Nasser is regarded as a hero and an inspiration by Islamist opposition groups in Egypt; some even compare him with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Al-Karama, a Nasserist weekly newspaper, published a full-page picture of Nasrallah, who has led Hezbollah for the last 16 years, with the words: "Nasrallah, in Nasser's footsteps". Al-Arabi, another opposition newspaper, made a special supplement and called it: "Nasser 1956 - Nasrallah 2006: We will fight and not surrender."

"Until his last gasp, Abdel Nasser refused to be corrupted… Nasrallah is the same, he is not talking about peace but about war. He does not negotiate and seeks to recover lost national pride," wrote al-Arabi.

President Nasser grabbed the canal as retaliation against the US and Britain for their refusal to increase economic aid.  Nasser had recently forged close links with the USSR and Communist China and had also been working to undermine British influence in the Middle East and French influence in North Africa.

Britain and France, with Israel’s co-operation, responded by building up their military forces in the region and threatening to attack unless Nasser backed down.  American President Eisenhower put pressure on Britain and France to stand down while the United Nations passed a ceasefire resolution.  The UN also organised the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), its first large international peacekeeping effort.  In the meantime, however, Britain and France landed paratroopers along the Suez, Israel invaded Sinai, and the Soviet Union threatened to intervene on behalf of Egypt.  Eisenhower backed the deployment of UNEF to Egypt, and Britain, France, and Israel gradually withdrew from Egypt.

William Rees-Mogg of The Times of London sees the Suez Crisis as both an American blunder and the end of the British Empire and says, "I blame Ike".

It has been reported that President Eisenhower in his old age was asked what was the greatest mistake of his presidency, and replied, "Suez". Certainly many Americans now see Eisenhower's rebuff over Suez, which pushed Britain into the arms of the French and the Israelis, as a self-inflicted wound on American policy. That undermined the whole Western position in the Middle East, destroyed the friendly monarchy of Iraq and had a negative effect that lasts to this day.

Middle Eastern oil was as essential, in 1956 as now, to the economy and security of the United States, Europe and world trade. So long as Britain had influence in the Middle East, Britain would remain a real world power. Yet Britain could not maintain that influence without American support. Nasser's nationalisation of the canal was a direct challenge to the West.
. . .
The world community had an essential interest in the free flow of oil through the canal. That could have been secured only by joint Anglo-American action. Eisenhower decided against such action . . . The Suez Crisis was indeed the end of the Empire, but it was a blunder of American policy, for which the United States is still paying a very high price.

Another outcome of the Suez Crisis, already mentioned, was the establishment of the UN’s peacekeeping capability, the effectiveness of which has decreased precipitously in recent decades.  The UNEF deployed in Suez was the brainchild of Canada’s Minister of External Affairs, Lester B. “Mike” Pearson, for which he won the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize.

An excellent brief account of the Suez Crisis can be found here in a US State Department journal.

Two-seater “micro-cars” have been popular in Europe for many years, but in North America they are virtually unheard-of.  Sky-high gas prices may soon change that.  They’ve already started to appear in US showrooms.

A story in the Sacramento Bee focused on a ZAP dealership selling Smart cars.

Like other micro-cars, the Smart car is so compact it can park head-on to a curb and not stick out into traffic. It boasts gas mileage that ranges from 40 to 75 mpg.

And to meet safety concerns, it's built with an internal roll cage similar to those found in NASCAR race cars, designed to protect passengers in case of a crash.

ZAP says it sells every Smart car it brings into the country, even at $25,000 each. About 280 have gone to dealers in other states, and another 350 are awaiting safety and emissions modifications for the American market. ZAP said it is currently seeking authorization from California regulators to sell the cars in this state.

Within 90 days of exhibiting a U.S.-ready Smart car at a National Automobile Dealers Association show in early 2005, ZAP said it received more than $2.2 billion in purchase orders from dealers around the country.

This photo at the top, showing the StatDaughter standing beside a parked micro-car, was taken in Burford, England, on our summer 2004 vacation.  As you can see, she thought it was rather a joke; to be honest, we all thought it looked funny.  But now, with the price of gas well over $1 per litre, it doesn’t look quite so funny anymore.

via Greenie Watch.

Previous related posts:

• New Brunswick caps retail gasoline prices with predictable results
• Is anyone fooled by the 9/10th of a cent?
• Vancouver gas prices higher than — where?

Yesterday evening an Israeli Air Force bomb landed at a UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) base in southern Lebanon, killing four UN observers, one of them Canadian.  Israel immediately said it was unintentional, offered profuse apologies, and promised an investigation, but Kofi Annan was not placated.  From his hotel room over a thousand miles away in Rome, he pronounced the strike “apparently deliberate”.

Interviewed on CBC Radio this morning, Retired Major-General Lewis MacKenzie relayed information he had received in recent days via e-mail from the dead Canadian peacekeeper, saying that Hezbollah was using the UN post as cover and drawing fire from Israeli forces. Indeed, UNIFIL’s own press release today states that Hezbollah is firing from positions adjacent to several UN posts.

In describing the Lebanese conflict, Major-General MacKenzie indicated that Israel’s actions are not, as has been recently charged, disproportionate or indiscriminate.

Now please don’t think I’m being cavalier about life here; I’m not, by any stretch of the imagination.  But with the amount of firepower that’s gone into Lebanon over the last couple of weeks, the death toll is unbelievably low in accordance with the delivery of that firepower, which means that targets are being selected pretty darn closely.  Beirut’s not being flattened; Beirut’s not being bombarded.  I heard one CNN reporter say, “I’m being—This area’s being bombarded.  We’ve had six bombs in 20 minutes.”  Bombardment is six bombs a second.  I mean, that’s what bombardment is—using all the resources you have.

Major-General MacKenzie was in the news earlier this week when his appointment as a Member of the Order of Canada was announced.

CBC Radio link via Newsbusters.
UNIFIL press release via little green footballs.

Previous related posts:

• Israel: The most important foreign policy issue of our time
• Are Israel’s actions in Lebanon “disproportionate”?

The Selfish Gene, the book that made Richard Dawkins a star, was published thirty years ago.  For some, that is an occasion for celebration, but not for UCLA anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt.  He believes the book has propagated "not just bad popular science but plain bad science".

For one thing, hypothesising a genetic source for human altruism based on study of social insects—ants and bees—is misguided.  Dawkins ultimately admits the human situation is different from other animals due to culture, but then is unable to provide a cogent explanation of the origin and development of human culture.

Dawkins’ culture consists of a bundle of “memes,” learned traits that have emerged through natural selection, just like genes. That is not what culture is, nor how cultural evolution works. Cultures are the worlds of shared perceptions and feelings — the ever-changing, kaleidoscopic environments within which all humanity exists.
. . .
Yet the main task of culture  — aside from passing on information for making a livelihood  — is to create a social environment within which people can get along with each other and share resources, which means that they curb their so-called animal impulses. Biological determinists, however, talk about sex but not about love, about maternal sacrifice but not maternal care, about progeny but not about babies.

Based on anthropology as well as research of hormones, neurology and infant care, Dr Goldschmidt argues that social life does not arise from altruism at all; rather, we have a genetic need for human contact and affection.

This is a genetic need, as basic to survival as food. Freud’s “pleasure principle” has a physiological basis. Human infants arrive armed with inherent abilities to induce needed affection from mothers and other caretakers: imitation, tracking, responding with cooing, and within a few weeks, smiling. W.C. Fields notwithstanding, who among us is not captivated by such infantile wiles? Adults, too, have inherent positive responses. This ancient and universal interaction is not just the work of a couple of altruistic genes, but a complex array of inherited behavior associated with body chemicals that make us feel good.

Humans are, at one and the same time, social animals and individual independent beings.  So, there must an incentive or reward to co-operate with each other and share our lives together.  That reward, says Dr Goldschmidt, is love.  Failure to see that is The Selfish Gene's fundamental error.

Previous related posts:

• Do memes really exist?
• Richard Dawkins soon to become Christian?
• Richard Dawkins: The Illusion of Design

Peter Hitchens has written a measured yet powerful defence of Israel, including an overview of Western cultural anti-Semitism and contemporary anti-Israel prejudice.  He also documents Arab anti-Judaism in the British Mandate of Palestine between the two world wars.

Israel is by no means faultless, but the common tendency to focus on Israel's offences while ignoring everyone else's is indefensible and morally obtuse.

Alan Dershowitz, in his interesting book 'The Case for Israel', points out that Israel has done many bad things and has many faults, and deeply deserves to be criticised. But he goes on to say that these criticisms need to be kept in proportion. Yes, Israel drove many Arabs from their homes in 1948 and should be criticised for this. But no more - and no less - than the Poles and Czechs and Russians should be criticised for driving millions of German civilians from their homes after 1945; and no more - and no less - than India and Pakistan should be criticised for the horrible expulsions and massacres of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs at partition in 1947. Turkey's treatment of the Armenians in 1915, and the 'exchange of population' between Greece and Turkey after World War One were also appalling. Come to that huge numbers of Jews were cruelly expelled from Arab lands in the years after Israel was founded.

No doubt there are other episodes of this kind, several in British imperial history. If every displaced group of people on the planet had the right to demand its return home, the entire globe would be at war from New South Wales to North Dakota. But it is Israel's which is remembered longest and still kept alive as a military and diplomatic issue, and it is Israel which is subject to more condemnation than any other nation by the UN.

No doubt much of this condemnation is justified, but is it really in proportion? Arab countries oppress and kill their own people, and make war on one another. Christian Arabs face growing persecution from their Muslim neighbours. Syria's President Hafez al Assad destroyed the entire Syrian city of Hama with artillery fire (with the people in it) because they supported the Muslim Brotherhood. Gaza was under illegal Egyptian rule for 20 years and nobody cared about its cramped squalor. The West Bank of the Jordan was illegally occupied by Jordan for nearly 20 years and nobody protested about that either. Sometimes it seems as if the only people who get criticised for being cruel to Arabs, or for occupying Arab land, are Israelis.

As for the conventional suggestion that Israel must be prepared to trade land for peace, Mr Hitchens points out that past experience provides no support for the belief that Israeli territorial concessions will bring an end to armed conflict.  Most recently, the people of Gaza democratically elected as their government a party that explicitly rejects the existence of Israel.  The Palestinians do not seem to want peaceful co-existence with Israel, on any terms.

Read the whole thing.

Previous related post: Are Israel's actions in Lebanon "disproportionate"?