Ron Paul's sensible farang policy

To usher in the new year, we present a brand new picture of Walt and Ed. planning future posts. Wellll... not really. Trekkies know that there are ferengi, some of Star Trek's ugliest and least lovable characters.

But most Trekkies don't know that "ferengi" is an adaptation of the word "farang", which is the term, in several Asian languages, for "foreigner". Indeed, the word "foreign" has the same Indo-Aryan root as "farang".

[Please get on with it! Ed.] Right... A reader asks how "Iraq by the numbers" morphed into a cheer for Ron Paul's advocacy of bringing American troops home from Afghanistan and other sandpits and cesspits, before the USA does any more damage to its standing in the world community.

Surely that can't be right, say presidential wannabes like "Hold `er" Newt and "Oven" Mitt. Isn't that isolationism? Isn't that what made us late to get into both World Wars? Walt says that whether 20th-century isolationism was or was not a good policy is moot. This is a new century. America and its allies have learned -- let's hope -- a painful lesson in Iraq. That's what "Iraq by the numbers" was all about. The war against Iraq was stupid, and God never told anybody to be stupid!

That was also the point of "In-laws force Afghan girl into prostitution". The oppression of women in Muslim communities was not the main point. What I was trying to say is that it's futile for us Westerners to think that we can impose our ideas of democracy, human rights -- indeed, of civilization -- on a society which stubbornly refuses to move itself out of the dark ages. Thus, there's no point whatever in spending billions of dollars and thousands of lives trying. Doing so is wasteful! Doing so is stupid!

To underline the main message, here's a line from the movie version of Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King. Peachey (played by Michael Caine) and Danny (Sean Connery) have made themselves "kings of Kafiristan".* But now it's time to go home. Danny doesn't want to return to Britain, and Peachey tries to talk him out of staying: "They're savages `ere, one and all. Leave `em to slaughtering babes, playing sticka-ball with each other's heads and pissin' on their neighbours."

* There actually is (or was) a "Kafiristan" -- a province in the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan and/or Pakistan. (Borders were not so clearly defined in those days as they are now.) "Kafir" is a local word for "infidel" or, more generally, "stranger". And that's what we Westerners are, in Afghanistan and Pakistan today -- kafirs, or, coming back to where we started, ferengi.