Last week I reported on the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong and it appears things are getting more serious. And it is getting closer to home, last Friday I experienced an unusual but explicable case of hysteria related to SARS.

As some of you know, my main activity during the day is advising start-up companies on financing and legal issues, as well as overall business strategies. There are great start-ups all over the place, very few make it because they lack solid business management skills and that is what I provide. In any case, one of my client companies’ CEO was on a business trip in, you guessed it, China. On Friday when I was working from my home office I got a call from the lady who runs that companies’ administration, HR and related operational matters asking me what to do as some of the employees had raised the alarm over the CEO’s impending return. Some of the employees appeared to be very concerned and they suggested that the CEO should be quarantined as he had spent over a week in China, one of the more seriously affected areas. Now this falls out of my jurisdiction but I have grown quite close to this company and its people, I get involved in all sorts of things and I am always willing to help whenever they call on me. Still, I was caught off guard here, but I quickly reassembled my managerial skills and said there was no issue until next Monday as he would only arrive late Sunday and that the only thing he should do is follow whatever regulations local health authorities had implemented on Sunday at the airport. What else can you do? This CEO by the way is one of the nicest and most employee-considerate company executives that I have ever come across so the idea that he would come into the office coughing and spreading the SARS epidemic was truly absurd. The lady thanked me for the advice and relayed this advice to the staff in an e-mail which also contained some information on what local authorities had advised so far. What happened then was truly interesting and it provided me with the evidence of what I had suspected when I got the call in the first place.

Now this company has two divisions and they develop products that are somewhat similar in nature. The problem is that one division is generating good revenue and requires a lot of managerial attention (contract negotiations, equipment purchases, trips to California etc.) whilst the other is not generating a penny, yet they have a unique product with enormous potential in development. Guess where the SARS concerns came from? After my advice real hysteria broke out on the non-revenue side where accusations started to fly that the company was not acting in the best interests and safety of the employees, while at the revenue generating side humorous e-mails from people looking forward to 10-days quarantines started to drop into my mailbox. It was all a matter of attention, and the fact that the concerns of the non-revenue generating guys did not automatically translate in deep management concern and holding hands pissed them off even further, leading to some pretty unpleasant discussions at the office. I was glad that I was not there. I have seen these mechanics before and while the non-revenue generating guys have a truly great product it is so much harder to bring it to commercialization. We do everything we can to get it to that stage but for some reason it has not clicked as yet. The other division’s success and their frustration has resulted into a number of unpleasant incidents over the past year and it was always a function of the non-revenue team not getting managerial attention, influence and yes, money.

So, what happened today ? Our CEO is fine, we followed whatever instructions there were and he is back in the office. The non-revenue generating guys apologized for their overreaction, and tomorrow I will resume handholding them by going through one of their business plans. When I told them that, they already looked happier. It is all a matter of attention, really.

On days like this you always deliberate, shall I post on Arnett ? Shall I do something on De Genova? Well, the answer is apart from the little blurb on Arnett yesterday the blogosphere has come out in full force about these two sad figures that there is very little that I want to add. The same happened with Michael Moore. So, I will post on subjects that really get to me, that I know something about, that personally affect me or a combination of the three. If it so happens it applies to Arnett or De Genova type cases I will blog, but for now enough is said about them.

Good to see and hear that the pro-America rallies are gaining momentum. Even in Vancouver, Canada, a notorious hub of left coast activity a rally took place yesterday. What gave the rally momentum were some interesting testimonials, especially this one:

Ariel Tijerino, who moved to Canada from Nicaragua in 1998, had a similar view, saying in an interview that he backs U.S. action in Iraq "one hundred per cent -- one million per cent ... I'm from Nicaragua and I appreciate what the Americans did for us."

I highlight this comment because Nicaragua is so often pictured as a benchmark of US aggression by the anti-war crowd. Well, my guess is that Ariel is not the only Nicaraguan thankful for America's efforts to rid the place of the Sandinista dictatorship. Apparently more pro-America rallies are scheduled in Canada and may many more refugees speak up, they have an important message. I am just waiting to hear about pro-America rallies in Europe, when they happen I will be one of the first to let you know.

First of all, I have to thank Pejman of Pejmanesque and David Janes for all the new visitors over the weekend. Thanks. It all coincided with the Fortuyn article and a lot of people responded to that. It appears there have been few balanced publications about Fortuyn in the English language and a lot of English speakers have been looking for more information about him. I have to check whether any of his books have been translated, as you may know he wrote many. David Janes' reaction was summarized as follows:

" . a cautionary tale about what could happen if political thought is partitioned into acceptable and non-acceptable topics, as defined by a very narrow elite of the population "

Well, exactly. In the meantime the trial of Pim's murderer proceeded today and the court has determined that Van der Graaf is not mentally incapacitated and was not temporarirly insane when he committed the crime which means a life sentence is now more likely. Today he commented he felt the need to act on behalf of certain groups in society and prevent Fortuyn from becoming Prime Minister. It also materialized he had some chemical substances in his garage: "not to be used for attacks, but just to experiment with". Of course, just like we all spend some time in the garden over the weekend, it is not unusual to experiment with some chemicals in the garage. The mechanical and rational approach with which Van der Graaf perpetrated his crime is scary and not unusual for radicalized elements, it comes straight out of the universal handbook for terrorism.

The district attorney wanted to find out how Van der Graaf felt about the feelings of Fortuyn's family, but he found it too difficult to talk about feelings. The Fortuyn family suffered deeply over the loss of their beloved brother but they have not lost their unique spirit: Fortuyn's sister in law resolved to attend the trial of the animal rights activist wearing a fur coat.

Just as I had inserted some comments on the role of the media in my last post on 'hate', I came across another astonishing piece of our media at work. Peter Arnett was kind enough to clarify where he stands in this conflict by giving a helping hand to the Iraqi Ministry of Information. Beyond belief.

Well, former British minister Robin Cook has hit the news again, saying that British troops should be withdrawn from Iraq arguing that the war will lead to a “long-term legacy of hatred for the west”. Apart for the obvious reason, he is wrong on two counts. In the first place, as I have argued here before, withdrawing professional troops in the middle of a battle is counterproductive.

He is also wrong on the issue of ‘hate’. It is an argument frequently used by the opponents of the war against Iraq, trying to make the case that any action on our part will instantly create thousands of Al Qaeda recruits who will set out to harm the US, Britain and every other country that supports the war. The claim does not hold water. The Iraqi people will not hate us once this war is over. I can tell you that the Vietnamese do not hate the Americans, the Japanese do not hate the Americans, the Dutch do not hate the Germans and Indonesians do not hate the Dutch. Once a conflict is over people move on, especially in situations where the end result is positive for a vanquished country. Once the fear of Saddam and his Baath henchmen has disappeared and US trucks with food start rolling into Iraqi cities there will be very little hate.

The reason for the absence of hate is that hate is something that is mongered, something that is fomented by groups of people with ulterior motives and it so happens we are now at war with those very people. These hatemongers create hate and use it to control their audience: “Do you see them? It is all their fault! Let’s hate them!“ Sound familiar?
There has never been hate towards the west in the Arab world, maybe some levels of misunderstandings or even dislike. But hate? The radical islamists are the ones that have used the resentment of the Arab people towards their own feudal leaders to incite anti-Western feelings. And now the Iraqi leadership will no doubt attempt to do the same thing and yes, some may be susceptible to that. Just this Friday evening I was watching TV when a report came up on a spontaneous protest at the end of the Friday prayers at a mosque in Jordan. The reporters wasted no time to point out that all of a sudden a few people began shouting anti-American slogans and before everyone knew it the prayer session had turned into a huge anti-American rally. They hate us, can’t you see it? It just so happened that a TV crew was right there, in front of that very mosque and there happened to be just a few regular Jordanian townsmen who all of a sudden started to shout anti-American slogans. Everything the anti-war crowd needed, the birth and promulgation of hate against the west, right there. The report was of course beamed into every household in the Western hemisphere providing the evidence that to the extent they do not already hate us they will very soon start to hate us all and therefore this war is wrong. As I mentioned in my post yesterday about Fortuyn, the media create and shape a certain picture and there you go, the case is made and large groups of people will buy into it. They hate us, didn’t you see the telly yesterday?

Arabs do not hate us, Iraqis do not hate us, just like the Germans did not hate the Jews. You only need a few very well organized hatemongers to incite hate and fan that hate. These are the very people we are fighting right now. That is why we are at war in Iraq, Mr. Cook, and that is also why we better not pull out our troops Mr. Cook.

Earlier this week in Holland the trial of Volkert van der Graaf started, the murderer of Pim Fortuyn. Most of you will remember that Fortuyn was an up and coming conservative-libertarian who changed the Dutch political landscape with his party List Pim Fortuyn last year. He was killed 9 days before the election by an animal rights and environmental radical whose trial is now underway and I intend to follow the trial over the next few weeks. I think however it is useful to set the stage for that trial and reflect on who Pim Fortuyn really was.

Fortuyn created a political storm in Holland last year by convincingly taking the left-liberal government coalition to task for issues that had started to affect day to day life in Holland. These were issues that up to that point in time had either been covered with the veil of political correctness or had just not been adequately addressed by the ruling coalition or even the opposition. Like North America, Holland was booming in the 1990s and there was a complacent sense that the country was doing well, yet a number of developments in society were starting to eat away at the fundaments on which Holland was built. They included muslim immigration and radicalization of those very muslims, soaring crime rates and a healthcare system that had started to crack under the pressure of long waiting lists. The immigration issue was also an issue at large as Holland’s population density had increased to levels that had started to impact the quality of life in the country. Yet, Fortuyn’ agenda extended well beyond that. His frustration with the huge collective sector that so dominates life in Holland led him to actively promote far reaching privatization, his acceptance speech when he assumed his position as a professor at Erasmus University was entitled “Without Government Employees”. That to a large extent was fed by his experiences with collective, unionized or otherwise organized labor which had and has a very counterproductive grip on many institutions in Holland. Fortuyn had dealt with these issues first hand in the various roles he had before becoming a full-time politician, ranging from senior faculty member to consultant to CEO of a privatized government agency. In a way, Fortuyn was ahead of his time, he believed in a “contract society” that was governed by contracts rather than employment agreements and he believed in the ability of each of us to freely compete in a marketplace governed by these independent contracts rather than centralized top-down agreements. He believed in the flexibility of each individual to develop him or herself to the fullest in such a free society.

His socio-economic views went hand in hand with a liberal stance on sexual and cultural issues. He was openly homosexual and he had ensured that his entire private life was part of the public domain, denying any opportunity to his political opponents to use it against him during the campaign, to the extent that that is possible in Holland. Fortuyn had grown up during the 60s and 70s and was very much aware of the importance of those years for the liberation of women, gays and sexuality in general. While Holland is an extremely tolerant and liberal country, and this is something I hear over and over wherever I go in North America, these freedoms have not come without a fight and Fortuyn was one of the first people in Holland to emphasize that people should continue to fight to defend these very important and unique rights. They are not a given. This is where he clashed with muslims as he rightly became concerned over a radicalized muslim culture fueled by imams preaching in mosques in Holland. They preached the immorality of homosexuality and the belief that homosexuals were sick elements that deserved to be stoned to death. Fortuyn was not a racist, his argument was relatively simple: Holland is pretty full so let’s reduce immigration and to those immigrants that are here we say: fine, this is our country and this is our set of values, if you want to live here please respect them as you would probably ask the same of us if we were living in your country. It is here that he started to split the Dutch left and created a measure of confusion for it was the left that had always stood up for the emancipation of women and gays. Yet at the same time the left had always rejected a debate about immigration and muslim values as an examination of muslim values clashed with their culture of political correctness. Their promotion of a multi-cultural Holland ruled out any questioning of the status and values of strangers in Holland to an extent that some abuse of women, gays and children was ignored as “it was part of another culture”.

To be true, Fortuyn’s love for Holland was also a bit of a weakness. His ideas on foreign policy were not earth shattering and the hordes of foreign journalists that interviewed him had to deal with someone whose command of the English language was, for someone with his intellectual abilities, disappointing. His other weaknesses extended in the interpersonal field. He was not exactly a diplomat and many of his friends and colleagues questioned his ability to see things through to the end. He was also not a big fan of the royal family (this is an understatement), which in Holland is a surefire way to damage yourself politically. It was therefore that there were serious doubts over his ability to lead as Prime Minister, a concern he swept under the carpet with the comment that he would “lead by speech”. Dutch newspapers reported on the day that he was murdered that polls showed his party would be the largest and Fortuyn in that case would have become Prime Minister. I believe that he would have been a credible Prime Minister, and his “management by speech” vision is Reaganesque in its essence, a well-spoken visionary lays out the path surrounding himself with a kitchen cabinet of business leaders and academics with the belief and skill to implement that vision.

It was all a little too uncomfortable for the ruling elites as Fortuyn’s message caught on with the public at large. The establishment had nothing tangible to attack him with during the election campaign, on the contrary, Fortuyn convincingly came out a winner during many of the pre-election debates. So the left-liberal clan resorted to an age old routine: slander. They threw everything at Fortuyn with the idea that some of it would stick and in doing that they were given all the help they could get from the Dutch media notably the NOS, the Dutch equivalent of the BBC and some of the Dutch top newspapers. The slander ranged from calling Fortuyn “Nazi” to comparing him to Mussolini, none of which was even close to the truth, yet as it was coming from people who had long been the respected face of government some of it stuck. What was even more galling to Fortuyn was that senior politicians who had been his friends and whom he had advised behind the scenes (so to some extent he was an ‘established’ politician) started to throw the same abuse in his direction. In one interview by the NOS, Fortuyn quietly laid out some socio-economic numbers on big city populations and his concerns that middle classes were abandoning the big cities in favour of the suburbs to which the interviewer reacted; “and that is something you dare saying on TV ? “, to which Fortuyn replied: “ I am just stating an obvious fact, if I can no longer state simple facts on TV what do you want me to do ? ”. Yet it set the tone and for many uninformed viewers a very unfavorable picture was created. His impeccable dress and confident style was also something that did not go down very well with a large segment of the Dutch population, some of you will remember my comments on the need to stay with the “average mean” in Holland, if you act normal you are considered weird enough. With his bald head and self-assured rants he came across as a conservative James Carville in Savile Row suits with a Hollywood flair for publicity. In Holland, that is completely off the map, beyond comprehension.

The other day I watched a DVD with a collection of weekly interviews Fortuyn gave in the months leading up to this death and I saw a man who was growing increasingly tired and frustrated, who was hounded in a most unreasonable fashion by politicians and media that were hell bent on destroying him. Fortuyn was not always the diplomat, but he was very often, if not always, right, he did not hate, he was open and looked for a “tough debate” yet, what he got in return was hate, invective and disrespectful undeserved slander. Many filed lawsuits against him, all of which were dismissed by the courts and when asked why he did not take some of his opponents to court for hate crimes against him he simply stated that he did not feel that a political debate should be settled in court and felt his arguments were strong enough to settle the case in an open debate. In fact he felt the courts had no jurisdiction in settling political discussions. Yet it all resulted in an incredible amount of stress and the strain showed during these interviews. It hurt me to see that someone who had such a unique message was taken apart in such a vile manner and it still does. Fortuyn did not deserve that.

So the climate of hate, of demonization as some called it, was created and it is impossible to say if that has been directly attributable to his death, yet many believe it played an important role. A report from an independent government commission found that both the government’s security apparatus that is supposed to act on threats to politicians as well as Fortuyn and his associates had failed to adequately address the threats on his life. He was shot 5 times by Van der Graaf shortly after a radio interview in Hilversum, right in the heart of Holland. It appeared Van der Graaf was acting alone, yet his membership of a radical animal rights group has raised serious questions about the planning of the murder.

Politics have gone back to normal yet Fortuyn’s ideas have found their way into the platforms of most political parties. To that extent he changed the Dutch political scene. Yet he paid the ultimate price and it is sometimes depressing to see that the political establishment has gone back to its usual routine. Not too long ago former Prime Minister Kok who was in office when Fortuyn was murdered, commented on Fortuyn’s death. Kok said that he was still haunted by the events surrounding Fortuyn’s murder especially street rallies where he, Kok, was identified as someone who had contributed to the murder. Reading that you have to wonder whether Fortuyn’s death had had any impact on him, as he was apparently more concerned about being implicated in the murder than in the fact that Fortuyn was assassinated. The former leader of the Liberal Party, Dijkstal, in a recent interview was concerned over the effect of Fortuyn on the political debate in the country, “it was possible to discuss everything all of a sudden” he said with disgust. Well, isn’t that the essential part of a democracy? It really is heartbreaking to see how Fortuyn’s legacy is sometimes dealt with in the Dutch media.

For me Fortuyn will always be a symbol of a set of political values that will become increasingly important in years to come. The slow collapse and increasing irrelevance of socialism as a socio-economic model and the changing nature of the “right” has opened the way to a new conservative-libertarian route. Fortuyn was one of its visionaries and he always will be.

May justice be served, Pim.

Quite busy yesterday so I did not really have the time to finish my discussion of Drezner's arguments regarding the comments made by the US Ambassador to Canada, Cellucci. There is some good news from Canada though, the support America movement is growing and here's another site that has just gone up: Friends of America.

Last night Irene and I went to the opera, Richard Strauss' Elektra, not exactly something that will put you in a good mood, fairly depressing. It was compounded by the fact that Elektra was played by a Janice Soprano look alike.

I will check in later.

It seems I made a correct assumption the other day, Daniel Drezner has the goods on Iraqi troops fighting at gunpoint. Daniel also has some thoughts on America's ambassador blasting Canada, just scroll down. I do not agree with him, though.

Today the stock of Robert Mondavi, the winemaker, took a beating as the company reported a loss for its most recent quarter and adjusted revenue projections. I had been following the Mondavi stock for a while given its low price-to-earnings ratio and it does not really come as a surprise that wine consumption is down. Think about it, the 1990s are long over and with a war going on, is this a time to drink? I asked myself that question when Irene and I had a few glasses of chardonnay last Friday. For some reason it felt totally inappropriate to drink with scenes of war being beamed into our living room. The old Calvinist in me emerged and I felt I could not drink as long as there are troops out there fighting on our behalf. We had to suffer as well. Yet, I had a glass anyway as Irene convinced me that there was nothing wrong with it, if we had to implement a battlefield regimen at home we would have to cut back on our daily rations of food and deprive ourselves of sleep. Nonsense, life goes on, yet somehow I was not totally comfortable with the concept and I bet there are a lot of people out there that feel exactly the same way. Expect further reductions in some areas of entertainment spending and expect Mondavi’s stock to drop further.

The British have run out of parking space so they have decided to pave France, have a look here.

In addition to welcoming those who came here through Pave France I also want extend a warm welcome to visitors who have come here thanks to Jurjen, another Dutchman living in North America. He is in Washington State, not far from here and he has an interesting weblog.

Springtime is here. The sun was shining this morning and I decided to work from home in the morning and shortly before lunchtime my almost 3-year old daughter Nora and I walked to our local post office to get the mail and a newspaper. Not that the paper would add a lot since I had already digested three continents of news highlights online, but it is a routine and so there I was in front of the newspaper stand. All of the headlines focused on the deteriorating relations between the US and Canada including very detailed analyses over the speech the US Ambassador to Canada gave yesterday in which he rightly blasted the Chretien government for not supporting the US in its war on Iraq.

The fact that all the major Canadian newspapers are splashing this across their front pages tells me that many in Canada believe this is a serious issue. Public opinion is changing and it appears that a majority of Canadians now believes that their government should support the US in its war effort. It is hard to say what has prompted this move in the right direction, but I believe there is a genuine feeling that Canada should stand by the US, although there will be many people that will just look at their wallets and realize that Canadian wealth to a very large extent depends on the huge volumes of trade going back and forth over its border with the US. Hopeful signs I think, and yes, there will be “Rally for America” in Toronto next week, let’s hope other Canadian cities will follow.

Interestingly there is a very senior Canadian government minister who believes that support for the US is the way to go. His name is John Manley and he happens to be Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance. It has surprised me that he had not spoken up before on this issue because he is known to be fairly pragmatic in his dealings with the US and he enjoys a very good working relationship with his counterpart Tom Ridge, as Manley also deals with cross border security. Yet, for those of you familiar with the workings of this government (read my post regarding the old man) it is clear that Manley has been bullied into submission. But you could also argue that he has wisely shut up as he is a contender for the leadership of the Liberal party and thus a candidate to lead Canada as Prime Minister. By showing his hand now he would lose the chance to ever have a real shot at that leadership position. His main contender for the job is one Paul Martin who I can only describe as not very different from the man he seeks to succeed: sheer ambition for the top job but no vision at all. Business elites in Canada like him as he is billed as a fiscal conservative who was Minister of Finance during the boom years of the 1990s but there is scant evidence that he had anything to do with the economics of those revered 1990s. He rode the wave and benefited from the groundwork laid by his predecessors, just like Bill Clinton. None of the fiscal policies coming out of Ottawa would have been there would it not have been for the final decision maker: Chretien. I am not clear what the fascination is with Paul Martin but that is besides the point now.

The point is that if Manley starts to play his cards right he may well end up out-maneuvering Martin. Skeptics will argue that the Martin leadership is a done deal but I do not buy into that. The quest for the leadership bears a lot of similarities to the power struggle in the conservative party in Britain in 1990 when Margaret Thatcher’s days were counted. The absolute favourite to succeed her was Michael Heseltine but he stumbled just before the finish line and John Major became Prime Minister as Margaret Thatcher skillfully inserted the latter in order to dash Heseltine’s lifelong ambition of becoming Prime Minister. The same could happen here as Chretien detests Martin and does not care that much as to who succeeds him, as long as it is not Martin. This scenario could leave Canada with a pro-US Prime Minister which is good news, it could however further relegate the conservative free-marketers in Canada to the sidelines if not completely obliterate them and that is bad news. The shaping of the relationship with the US may well become a decisive factor in what Canada will look like in the future, if it isn’t already.

The other day I commented on the fact that the reign of terror perpetrated by Baath party loyalists among Iraqi troops prompted lots of them to fight on. Well, I was only partly right as some of you have pointed out. In fact there are three groups of fierce loyalists that we are facing in Iraq. We have Saddam’s Baath Party fighters and two other groups, Saddam Fedayeen and Al Quds. I believe the latter is the Arab name for Jerusalem so that will tell you what to expect from that group. In addition to terrorizing regular troops to fight on there are two other distinct reasons for fighting on, and these apply especially to the aforementioned hardcore groups. One is sheer loyalism to the Saddamite cause and the other is the fact that most of the members of these groups do not have anything to lose so they might as well die while they are at it. Again, it would compare well to the SS in the final days of World War II, loyalty until death follows.

Andrew Sullivan has for quite a while been reporting on how the BBC, Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation as he calls it, is reporting the war. In fact Andrew has been on the BBC's case for months now and with good reason. I will not go into the details of the discussion but it is interesting to note that many of my friends and relatives back in Europe see the BBC as the model for unbiased and independent reporting. In the same breath they will add that they need to get their news from the BBC as they consider CNN to be a mouthpiece of the Bush administration. Well, there you go, it all depends on where you live I guess.

Today Peaktalk can put its marker in the ground: one month in operation. It has been quite an interesting experience and I think I have done what I set out to do: discuss politics and current affairs and try to comment and analyze as well as link it back to my own personal experiences. Asparagirl nailed it a few days ago in the LA Times:

Blogs are the perfect example of "the personal is political," she thinks, because they show how one's "political reasoning" interacts with one's life and vice versa.

I really enjoy doing the posts where the personal interacts directly with the political and I hope it shows, let me know. I tried to stay away from becoming a linker, and with the war in full gear that would simply be impossible, there are many others that do an excellent job here, notably The Command Post. However when something interesting does come up, I will link. I also wanted to avoid becoming exclusively focused on the war, but that is difficult these days, yet I will keep trying to bring other interesting items up for discussion like Hong Kong’s environment the other day. The other thing that happened is that I was drawn into the blogosphere even more than before and have discovered a variety of unique blogs that I am now reading on a regular basis. A lot of the content overlaps, yet each blog puts its own spin on affairs and many have truly original stuff and interesting links. And then there are a lot of blogs that have supported this site by recently referring to Peaktalk and I am most grateful for this, in return I suggest to go and check out Mike Campbell, Lou in Queens, LordSutch, Diablogger and former Belgian Entre Nous. I also got a lot of traffic from DaghtatorBlog in Denmark after his ringing endorsement earlier this week, thanks.

In summary, I will keep at it and I hope you will all continue to visit and spread the word about Peaktalk.

The one thing I could not get out of my mind yesterday is the POW situation. Falling into Iraqi hands as a prisoner of war is a horrifying and humiliating experience. I keep reading stories from POWs from Desert Storm like this one and I try to understand how they managed to pull through. The conditions under which they were kept prisoner were appalling and the abuse they suffered was gruesome.

The one POW that I keep thinking about is Shoshana Johnson. She is a single mother with a 2-year old at home (why on earth are single parents sent off to a warzone?) and an army cook and probably not well prepared for spending time in captivity. And yes, she is a female captive and she is likely to be exposed to vicious sexual abuse. I can only conclude that she in particular is getting a very raw deal here. No one can probably imagine how someone copes in such a situation, but reading some POW accounts it is apparently a case of mind over matter. Most former POWs were able to switch off their physical being and focus entirely on their mental will to survive. I hope Shoshana and the others (James Riley, Edgar Hernandez, Joe Hudson and Patrick Miller) will muster the force to overcome their fear and physical suffering and survive this ordeal. Let’s all think about them when we have some time and hope and pray for their safe return. Make that a safe return soon.

Foreign policy is the exclusive domain of a federal or national government. That may seem to be an obvious statement but in the months leading up to the Iraqi war there were many city councils in North America that spent hours deliberating the need to go to war in Iraq and formally adopt motions that dealt with this issue. It reminded me of Europe in the 1980s when various cities and even small villages declared themselves “nuclear weapon free zones”. I happened to live in one of those nuke free cities and it infuriated me as there was of course no point for the local council to get into what was essentially the domain of the national government for if they had wanted to deploy nukes in our municipality they would have, simple as that. The basic problem was that left-leaning city councils felt it was necessary to help shape foreign policy, the mistake they made was that they were doing it in the wrong venue and at the expense of local taxpayers.

I was reminded of this when Alberta’s Premier Ralph Klein stepped up to the plate to support the US. A very admirable move as frustration in Canada about the way the federal government deals with the US and its war in Iraq is mounting but I am afraid Klein has overstepped the boundaries of his provincial domain, as much as I agree with him. If we let state, provincial and municipal entities into the realm of foreign affairs it could potentially be harmful to policy being developed at the national level. Ralph Klein is a great conservative and he should use his excellent political skill set to put together a right of the center political force in Canada that can replace the current government at the next elections. That would really help the US.

The Command Post reports that Portland Fire Bureau officials ordered US flags removed from downtown fire engines, concerned that their presence might provoke dangerous confrontations with anti-war demonstrators. Well, I thought this sort of bizarre defeatism was restricted to Europe as I reported earlier on a similar event the day before yesterday. Denying you have a flag to be proud of, denying you have military, all in order to appease the appeasers ?

One of the things Irene and I discovered is how special everything “European” is in North America. Let me give you an example. The decoration of our house is somewhat eclectic as we have a significant number of Chinese tables, chests, chairs and ornaments, but also a Mexican dinner table and a few American sofas and chairs. Yet every visitor always goes out of his or her way to comment on how European our house is. Same for our two kids, lots of Gap and Old Navy clothes, yet “they look so European”.

Nonsense. There is no other word for it. People say this because they want to see it. They do not know where to put us in their proverbial set of boxes, so since we are European and speak with an accent we are “European” and everything we do is uniquely “European”. That extends of course to the two Japanese cars in our driveway as well as the fusion food we serve together with Californian wines. All very European. It gets a bit trickier when politics becomes part of the equation as Europeans are perceived to be liberals, no question about it. This is where North American liberals go off the rails. “But you are European, you should know better !” is what I hear when I give my pro-Bush, free-market view of the world. This is usually the point where the discussion ends for they are not able to deal with the confusion I have generated by launching some conservative, republican positions with a Dutch accent. It would have been better had I been a card carrying member of the Republican party speaking with a mid-Western accent in which case they would have argued with me directly or even attacked me, but a European ? I have seen quite a few in the recent past walk away in sheer confusion over the mismatch between their stereotype and the European in front of them. I am probably not that great a "European". It confuses them. It is interesting to see, but I always bemoan the fact that the opportunity for a great political debate has once again been lost.

Access to President Bush is vital for almost every political leader and it is great that in Canada there is a Prime Minister who has exactly that, the only problem is that he left office about 10 years ago. Brian Mulroney has given his views on the US-Canada relationship and the war on Iraq and he gets it right:

Mr. Mulroney acknowledged Mr. Chrétien's policy of neutrality is popular in Canada, but he said the test of leadership is to make the right decision in Canada's long-term interest even if the public is initially opposed. He pointed to Tony Blair, who committed troops to the war against great public opposition, which has begun to melt as the British Prime Minister rallied his nation to what Mr. Mulroney called a just war.

He goes on to say that:

"You have a Liberal Member of Parliament [Colleen Beaumier] going to Baghdad and saying George Bush is worse than Saddam Hussein. You have a press secretary [Françoise Ducros] to the Prime Minister, saying the President of the United States is a moron and nobody gets repudiated, nobody gets fired,'' he said. ''Guess what the consequences of that are? The consequences are the loss of influence.''

It is probably time that Mulroney gets to speak a bit more often. Not only is he right, he has access to the White House and that could be a valuable asset when the time is there for Canada to mend fences with Washington.

I continue to trace pieces of news that somehow shaped my decision to live in North America. Yesterday I highlighted the inability of the Dutch to respect their armed forces as symptomatic for the Dutch’s deteriorated social and cultural climate, which had been one of the reasons to not go back and live in Holland, today there’s disturbing news over another place I used to live. The latest from Hong Kong tells us that the fear for respiratory disease is deepening:

“… as all public hospitals reduced non-essential services, workers and students were told to stay home if they felt at all ill and one of the two top officials handling the outbreak was himself hospitalized”

When I read this I really feel a sense of sadness and anger. Hong Kong used to be one of the most dynamic economic engines of the world, a unique model for wealth creation. And in addition, it used to be a great place to live, I doubt if I will ever live in a place that has so much to offer as Hong Kong. However that great Hong Kong engine stalled at the end of the 1990s as a result of the slowdown of Asian markets but also because it stopped being the gateway to China as mainland China became directly accessible from abroad. The big issue to me has always been that very little of the wealth generated was plowed back into making Hong Kong livable. Yours truly is probably a veritable free-market conservative-libertarian who abhors statist intervention (which is why I fitted into Hong Kong so well), but if there was ever a case to redistribute some tax revenue for the better it would have been in Hong Kong. Apart from the excessive air pollution and littering, recent years saw phenomena as the chicken flu, red tide (dead fish turning up all over the place), cases of cholera and now the pneumonia or SARS epidemic. Now, Hong Kong residents have a propensity to go over board when certain isolated incidences of a disease hit the newswires, but we can confidently assume that the pneumonia scare is the latest installment of a rapidly and seriously deteriorating living environment in the former British colony.

It is interesting to note that when I left Hong Kong in 1999, the local government sought help from the international business community in addressing environmental issues. I do not know if the advice from that community was ever put to good use, but I doubt it. The decline of the quality of life had already been set in motion during British rule; in fact, the environment had never been an issue of great concern. The reason was that too big of a price tag was attached to trying to do something about it and that was something that did not sit well with the great money making, saving and investing skills of Hong Kong and its residents. The dichotomy of generating wealth but the inability to spend some of it on improving the place where you make and enjoy that wealth has been one of the more problematic aspects of life in Hong Kong. It may actually be one of the few as it is such a great place and I really hope that they will have the resolve to fix their current predicament.

And the good news is that we have seen no scud attacks on Israel, nor any chemical or biological attacks on US troops. The pre-emption by US special operations teams in the Western Iraqi scud launch zone is a piece of first-class warfare.

Was anyone surprised to see fierce resistance from Iraqi forces over the past 48 hours? Is the Baath regime not collapsing and if that is the case why are so many willing to fight the overpowering US coalition forces? One of the reasons is no doubt the incredible levels of fear instilled in Iraqi forces. Here’s a parallel. During World War II it was evident by January 1945 that Hitler’s Germany was near defeat yet it took another 4 months to finally trounce Nazi Germany and Allied forces very often met incredibly forceful resistance during their march to Berlin. The remnants of the German forces were not only extremely loyal; they were also terrorized by SS units that actively tracked down deserters and others that were unwilling to fight. Executions of German forces by these SS units were common. Whatever happened to Saddam and sons, as long as there is a semblance that they are alive and governing Iraq, there is fear among Iraqis and that fear in turn will continue to fuel the will to fight on the battlefield. Even after Hitler’s suicide it took another 7 full days for Germany to surrender. The days and maybe weeks ahead will be very difficult as we are not up against a poorly organized and ill-equipped army; we’re up against 25 years of instilled fear and terror.

While comparing the war to the endgame with Nazi Germany one other thought occurred to me. Is there any reason to keep Iraq in its current shape and form after Saddam has been defeated? If we are looking for stability and democracy we can either carve the place up into a Shia state, a Sunni state, a free Kurdistan and give some odd bits of desert to Jordan or we can try to preserve the Iraq as is with all the ingredients for continued strife and conflict. Both options have serious drawbacks, the carve-up route will no doubt lead to some heated debate over who gets control over the oil fields and also carries the risk of some radical Shia activity, but we have to remember that Iraq was an artificially designed state in which the Sunni rulers have always been a minority. A carve-up managed by the international community deserves further investigation if only to start settling the Kurdish issue which has been dragging on for far too long.

There were two and they were both irrelevant. The first one was by Michael Moore which I missed because I working behind my PC. The second one was by Saddam which I missed because I was too tired to wait for it. I did not miss anything.

I had resolved to not longer write about anti-war and 'peace' demonstrators but yesterday I spent exactly one minute watching a report from a peace rally in the US and the stupidity and ignorance of what I saw prompted me to throw in one more post on this phenomenon.

An interviewer asked a middle aged man if he thought that rallying against the war could not be seen as unpatriotic. The man replied that he thought it would be an act of patriotism to bring the troops back immediately. This response is a piece of seriously flawed logic and I will tell you why. Not long ago I was watching a documentary on the failed rescue mission in Somalia in 1993 on which the movie "Black Hawk Down" is based and during which a significant number of American troops died. When interviewing one of the surviving servicemen the question was asked what bothered them most. One surviving task force member put it like this (and I am paraphrasing this): " The worst thing was that the political leaders pulled all the American troops out of Somalia immediately after the failed mission. We could not finish our job. All our buddies that died, died in vain."

The world has changed since Vietnam. This is no longer an army of unmotivated drafted soldiers, this a modern, professional and very committed force of troops taking its task very seriously and is dedicated to finish whatever assignment it has at hand. This is also something that former General Wesley Clark at CNN has pointed out a number of times over the past few days. If you think pulling them out is patriotic, you do not understand the professional dynamics that govern these committed soldiers. Finishing the job, that is patriotic.

Last Friday I picked up another worrying piece of news from my native Holland. Hold on to your seats, this is truly sad stuff. The Dutch Ministry of Defense has advised members of the Dutch armed forces not to wear their uniforms when traveling to or from their bases, as the war might have impacted the public's perception of soldiers, and servicemen and women may encounter negative reactions to their uniform. In other words: you're not safe wearing your uniform in public. This is by the way not new, my wife mentioned to me that she had heard stories like this well before the war on Iraq.

So if a society is no longer able to respect its troops, to support the men and women that are volunteering to stand up and fight for the freedoms of that very society, that society is in deep trouble. In fact, you may ask yourself whether a society like that will stand any chance of survival in the long run. I am a great supporter of freedoms and individualism, but in the Dutch case extreme liberalism and unfettered individualism have been undermining the very institutions that shape and stabilize a free society. For those of you who have wondered why I left the place years ago: here's one good reason.

Support is growing and rightly so, now there's a website called Canadian Friends of America. Go visit.

Good news coming out of Iraq, evidence that US forces are hailed as liberators:

"Americans very good," Ali Khemy said. "Iraq wants to be free."

and

Some chanted, "Ameriki! Ameriki!"

Hope this will continue in other parts of Iraq. It is not a surprise, many have predicted that this would happen and it further underlines that this is a just war.

There is so much news coming from all directions that it is hard to keep track of everything, I spent most of last night watching CNN but do not feel that it is time well spent. You're better of leaving the TV on and do other things, I very often find more useful information online from various news sources as well as blogs. And in the car there is of course the radio and that is how I found out about "Shock and Awe" just now. The latter concerns me, I have a feeling massive bombing is not going to do the trick, targeted "Decapitation Strikes" make a lot more sense.

A new war oriented blog-pool is The Command Post, with various contributors, another one is Back to Iraq. Have a look.

Also, I am swinging from one train of thought to the other. Last night when I went to bed I thought it would be over in a mattter of hours given the fast progress in the south and the upbeat messages of surrendering troops and the likelihood that Saddam and sons were killed, this morning I was not as upbeat when I realized that the Republican Guards may be fighting it out in street to street battles. Again, Shock and Awe does not give me any comfort yet.

Looking around the blogosphere no one really knows, I do not think CNN or FOX really know, so all we can do is digest every snippet of news, draw our own interim conclusions and hope that it will be over soon.

Lots of discussions this morning also on potential War Crimes trials: should we sent the captured Iraqi leadership off to The Hague like Milosevic and friends, court martial them on the spot or go for a hybrid Iraqi/International style court in Baghdad? Chances that anyone of them will be alive to stand trial are remote and if anyone is left: do not sent them to The Hague, do it in Iraq with local help, the Iraqi people need to purge their own institutions as a way to rebuild their country and start a process of national healing. Give them a say in it, it is their country.

I really do not want to waste too much time on the anti-war demonstrations but yesterday's rally in Amsterdam saw the return of Gretta Duisenberg. I wondered what had happened to her and thought that the avalanche of negative publicity had made her retreat from her radical and hateful posturing, but no, she's back. This time she had toned down her anti-semite rants and focused instead on "Bush's shameful behaviour" and stated that there could have been other ways in which to deal with Saddam. Yes, sure. The rally was followed by throwing paint-bombs and stones at the Spanish consulate in Amsterdam. Well, for a change they did not attack the American consulate, someone had probably noticed that Spanish PM Aznar was standing next to Bush and Blair last Sunday. At the same time a rally in The Hague got really out of hand with the burning of an Israeli flag and groups chanting "Hamas". The police subsequently arrested a few members of the Arab-European League who were behind this flag burning incident. It seems there's no longer any debate, it is just getting uglier.

Today Michael Ledeen alerts us to the fact that indeed the war on Iraq is one and the same thing as the war against terrorism: yesterday's surgical strike on Baghdad killed a Palestine Liberation Front terrorist. The focus on the weapons of mass destruction, the torture chambers and the suffering Iraqi poplulation shifted the attention away from the presence of major terror groups in Iraq. And they have been there for a long time, the infamous Abu Nidal for instance spent his last days in Baghdad. It is very clear that once Baghdad falls we will have contributed in no small part to the collapse of groups that have perpetrated the most heinous crimes in Israel and indeed all over the world. It reminds me of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communist East Germany when it became clear that the country had been a safeplace for various left-wing and Arab guerrillas. Losing support of a centrally located safehaven was a major blow for many of these terrorist groups and for some it was the end. The fall of Baghdad will be a major setback for Palestinian terrorists. I wonder how Arafat is sleeping these days.

Great atmosphere. Fresh from the BBC an update of the EC summit today in Brussels:

The French are not prepared to talk about the reconstruction of Iraq at all at the moment. People who have been at these summits and sat inside the room for many years say they cannot remember one quite as bad as this. Tony Blair and President Chirac have at least briefly shaken hands but they spent most of the time on the opposite sides of a very large room and the way they are regarding one another at the moment, it's probably a good thing.

This by the way is a great online news log service with lots of war updates.

Regular visitors will know that every now and then I will throw in a bit of Dutch news. Well, today it seems that the Dutch labour party has changed its tack and is consequently enabling the formation of a new pro-war coalition government lead by the Christian Democrats. Labour leader Wouter Bos stated that “under the new circumstances, neutrality would be inappropriate” as that would only embolden Saddam. Why did it take him so long to say that? Afraid of a backlash from the left in his party? I know Wouter as he used to be a Human Resources manager for Royal Dutch Shell in Hong Kong before he entered politics and I ran into him on a regular basis while we were both working in the former British colony. He always struck me as more of a pragmatist than an idealist, which is why I was surprised that he took so long to voice support for the war. It is probably not easy to take a pro-war stance in a country like The Netherlands but if Wouter had bothered to look across the North Sea he would have taken notice of how labour’s Tony Blair had managed to do that. Anyway, better late than never.

New feature: a "Best of Peaktalk" on your right hand side. This section will link to past postings that generated most responses from my readers and which got direct links from other blogs. I thought it was probably useful to keep them upfront, especially for newcomers.