Our Favorite Ten Lies

We are bureaucrats. We like things tidy. We like options clearly laid out -- and we don't want too many of them. Above all, we like lists; we love top ten lists. We're not too good at math so we restrict ourselves to lists with ten things. Re Math: Don't forget that according to our personnel evaluation reports in the Foreign Service 90% of us are ranked in the top 10%.

Our Acting Principal Deputy Vice Chief Diplomad for Coordination of Coordinating Coordinators and List Making has sent us his top "ten mistaken ideas people hold."
We are sure our intrepid readers can come up with more candidates for the list, but for what it's worth we present ours for your consideration.

In no particular order our list is as follows,

Top Ten Wrong Ideas that People Around the World Still Believe:

1) There's some magic "Third Way." Even one of our best allies in the world, Tony Blair, believes in this. This is a shame, because we like Blair. It was much worse when Bill Clinton was president because he believed in it, too (well, to the extent that Clinton believed in anything.) He and Blair held hands, sang Kumbaya, and preached "Third Way" to others. There's no third way that works. Communism is an obvious failure; prosperity is directly proportional to free markets. More capitalism equals more prosperity. (Note: Please remember this "Wrong Idea" as in a subsequent post we review some new UN UNsanity.)

2) Foreign Aid Helps Poor People. No. Foreign aid largely helps the High Priest Vulture Elite, airlines, restaurants, hotels, car-rental companies and other service industries that cater to the HPVE. Freedom, trade, capitalism and education help poor people. Plus it also matters that their culture teaches them a work ethic (see number 8 below). The old saw that "foreign aid is when the poor people of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country" has more than a kernel of truth. BTW, try to name any country that has been developed by foreign aid.

3) If the USA Pressured Ariel Sharon, there'd be Middle East Peace. Middle East peace will happen when the culture of violence changes on the Arab side of the equation and the Arabs drop the goal of destroying Israel. The Palestinian "right of return" is part of destroying Israel. We see Yasser Arafat's death as a good start; and Mahmoud Abbas getting elected. But let's not put a halo over his head just because he's not Arafat.

4) You can't make a country democratic by force. This is anti-Americanism and anti-Iraq-invasion thinking mixed with historic amnesia. The Brits conquered India and left it democratic. We bombed Germany and Japan to smithereens, occupied them by force and left them democratic. We invaded and occupied Afghanistan and it's on the way to being democratic. We have a better than even chance of doing the same with Iraq.

5) The United Nations is the hope for the future of mankind,and its corollary, if we didn't have the UN we'd have to invent it. If this is true, mankind has a bleak future. Anybody with an IQ larger than his shoe size (American shoe size) knows that trusting the UN with our hopes for the future is wrong; we have seen this day after day. But this idea is still out there, and accepted as politically correct and believable by large swaths of countries. It's the official line of the whole European Union, which is frightening, since some of those countries individually are good allies and have intelligent people who should know better.

6) Fidel Castro may be a dictator but Cuba has high social indicators. The first part of this is right, but high social indicators? Highest rate of suicide in Latin America. Highest rate of people leaving the country and risking their life in the process. To the extent that there may be high literacy it's a legacy from the Cuba of the 1950s which had a higher standard of living than Spain and Italy and all but two Latin American countries. Now it's a basket case.

7) A conspiracy killed President Kennedy. A profitable industry has taken individual tidbits of information, blown them out of proportion, and convinced much of the U.S. public and the rest of the world that JFK was killed by some kind of conspiracy. Take your pick: Castro, the Mafia, Lyndon Johnson, the CIA -- all later covered up by the Warren Commission. The real truth, that Lee Harvey Oswald, a nut-case, acted alone to assassinate JFK, is inescapable when you read the facts.

8) No cultures are superior to any others. If you're accused of even thinking that cultures are unequal, then you are branded as a racist, and at State you can have your career ruined. But by any objective measure of success, western civilization is superior. This is actually not racist, since Japan, Singapore, and South Korea have internalized the best of the west, and essentially joined it.

9) You know the news if you see CNN, read the NYTimes, Washington Post. These media, like Reuters, Le Monde, Newsweek, CBS News, and so much of the mainstream media are hopelessly biased towards the left. This is not so much a question of editorials or op-ed, since after all, you can read conservative columnists like George Will, Charles Krauthammer and William Safire in these media. But rather it's the slant in how they present the news and what they make news.

10) We're all going to die of global warming. We are all going to die; that part is true. But Diplomads are not too worried about global warming. We can find articles in the media 20, 30 years ago that warned of a sooner-than-expected new ice age. OK, we can be persuaded that too many cars with bad exhaust pipes can pollute the air, but not nearly as much as when a volcano erupts. It's freezing cold all over the United States this winter, with horrible snow and ice storms. Our countrymen in places like Nebraska or North Dakota are probably thinking "Boy, I sure wish those scientists were right and we could get some global warming real soon." (Note from the Chief Diplomad: Not long ago I read about the freezing winters that Mongolia has suffered. Being a charitable person, I now drive my SUV in honor of the Mongolians. Bumper sticker: Driving for Mongolia!)