Lebanon is a sovereign state. It has an executive and a military. But its military has less sophisticated weaponry than Hezbollah and its executive wields less authority over its jurisdiction than Hezbollah. In the old days, the Lebanese government would have fallen and Hezbollah would have formally supplanted the state. But non-state actors like the Hezbo crowd and al-Qaeda have no interest in graduating to statehood. They've got bigger fish to fry. If you're interested in establishing a global caliphate, getting a UN seat and an Olympic team only gets in the way. The "sovereign" state is of use to such groups merely as a base of operations, as Afghanistan was and Lebanon is. They act locally but they think globally....Unraveling the World, Mark Steyn, The New York Sun, 8/14/2006
Lost in the smugly self-righteous appeals to surmount the parochialism of the nation-state is what Mark Steyn nails in this brilliant piece in today's NY Sun, that the disintegration of the nation-state's authority has allowed radical Islamic tribalism to run rampant to chase across the global landscape as fast as the global economic, professional and political classes unravel state power. What the professional globalist ignores, be it George Soros or any of a thousand other non-representative figures, is that national loyalty matters in defending civilization from tribal barbarism. If nobody cares about boundaries and the polities responsible for them, who will defend us from psychotics whose global view encompasses mass murder of anyone not in the tribe?
Luther
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