RUTHFULLY YOURS

For thirteen years in a row, Business Insider – citing its standard of living, health-care system, and high life expectancy – has put Norway at the top of its annual list of “best countries to live in.” The high life expectancy is an objective fact; the other items are a matter of debate. Norwegian health care? It works admirably, unless you require an operation or treatment that the government considers too expensive or for which there’s a waiting list. Standard of living? Incomes are high, but so are taxes.

But I’m not here to argue with Business Insider’s rankings. I’m here to point out an aspect of Norwegian life that never figures on any of these “best country” lists, whether put out by Business Insider or the United Nations or whomever. I’m talking about statism – the degree to which the state is a palpable part of everyday life.

Briefly put, Norway is pretty much statism central. I’m more accustomed to it now, but when I was first living here I was acutely aware every single day of the presence of the government in my life. I’m not talking about some abstract, theoretical phenomenon. It’s a real, palpable feeling. A feeling of being a bit less of an individual and a bit more part of a collective. An awareness that your eleven-digit “person number” (which includes your birth date) comes up a lot more often than your social-security number ever did back in the U.S. A sense of being covered by an umbrella, but also surrounded by a wall.

For the last four years, to be sure, Norway has had a supposedly non-socialist coalition government, led by the Conservative Party, with Labor heading up the socialist opposition. In the September 11 elections, the governing coalition was returned to power. But the non-socialist label is deceptive: whichever party or parties happen to be running the country at any given time, the public sector is overwhelmingly dominated by Labor and other leftist parties. While in power, the so-called conservatives may pass legislation signaling a bit more support for business interests or the military, but they never do anything that significantly reverses Norwegian statism.

Now, to live under a statist system is, as it were, to live in someone else’s house, and thus to live by their rules. Nanny Norway doesn’t think it’s good for you to drink. So she doesn’t allow anyone other than herself to sell liquor, and makes buying it as costly and troublesome as possible. In my town of 12,000 people, there’s one state-owned liquor outlet. Hours are limited. The tax on (for example) a bottle of vodka is 300%. Beer is more than twice as expensive as anywhere else on earth.

Nanny Norway thinks it’s best for you to eat at home, so going out to dinner is also a pricey proposition. Lunch? Almost nobody goes out to lunch. Years ago, in a New York Times article about Norway’s high prices, I made casual reference to the matpakke, the modest packed lunch – usually a sandwich or two wrapped in wax paper or aluminum foil – that Norwegians of all socioeconomic levels take to work. After VG, Norway’s largest daily, ran an article about my article, I received hundreds of emails and text messages – including death threats – savaging me for insulting a beloved national tradition.

“It’s a match made in hell,” writes journalist Benny Avni of the nuclear weapon and ballistic missile proliferation nexus between Iran and North Korea. This international, potentially apocalyptic version of what is known as a “red-green alliance” between radical Islamic and leftist elements makes America’s often neglected missile defense efforts all the more urgent.

Various commentators have noted a “stark contrast” between the ideological natures of the Iranian and North Korean regimes. As Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies observes, the Islamic Republic of Iran is a theocracy, while North Korea is a hereditary tyranny with an anti-religious, Marxist ideology. Nonetheless, these two rogue state international outcasts, once included in President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil,” both “feel a serious threat from the United States and the West,” notes Harvard University’s Matthew Bunn.

Accordingly, Israeli analysts have observed that the “nuclear and ballistic interfaces between the two countries are long-lasting” since the carnage of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War. During the conflict, Iran internationally “was a pariah, desperate for military equipment and ammunition,” notes North Korean military analyst Joseph S. Bermudez, Jr. “If Iran has sometimes been desperate to buy arms and military technology, North Korea has always been desperate to sell arms and military technology,” given the country’s economic isolation, writes Cordesman. Thus, North Korea “needed money more than it needed anything else. Iran, which needed missiles more than anything else, was the ideal partner,” concludes the think-tank Geopolitical Futures.

The Iran-Iraq War began a relationship in which, one Israeli academic notes, “several analysts believe that Iran was the primary financial supporter of North Korea’s missile development program.” In exchange for Iranian oil wealth, North Korea provided Iran with Scud-B missiles that North Korea began producing in 1987 after having reverse-engineered them from missiles procured from Egypt in the late 1970s. By the end of the 1980s, Iran had received hundreds of Scud-B and Scud-C missiles.

Subsequently, Iran agreed in 1992 to provide North Korea with $500 million for joint nuclear weapons and ballistic missile development. As a result, North Korea fielded the Nodong missile in the 1990s while Iran deployed its clone, the Shahab-3, in 2003 after several years of testing. While North Korea’s Nodong missiles can hit parts of Japan, Representative Ted Poe (R-Texas) notes that from Iran, the Shahab-3 can strike Israel and Central Europe. North Korea’s Musudan missile, 19 of which Iran obtained sometime before 2007, has theoretically an even longer range, capable of striking from Iran targets like Berlin and Moscow.

While some analysts deny the existence of Iran-North Korea missile design collaboration or joint development, Iranian-North Korean ballistic cooperation extends beyond missiles themselves to fields such as test data exchanges. “It’s doubtful there has been a single Iranian missile test where North Korean scientists weren’t present, nor a North Korean test where Iranian scientists didn’t have a front row seat,” notes the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin. Missile test sites in Iran and North Korea also exhibit strong similarities.

Evidence concerning Iran-North Korea nuclear cooperation remains more indefinite, although both countries have used similar nuclear supply chains like that of Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. Despite numerous reports through the years of technical personnel exchanges and visits, sometimes involving hundreds of individuals, Cordesman notes that American intelligence has never confirmed such cooperation. Yet British officials on September 10 argued that the rapid progress of North Korea’s nuclear weapons development indicated foreign help from a country like Iran or Russia.

RIYADH—Saudi Arabia on Tuesday lifted the world’s only ban on women driving, removing a restriction in the deeply conservative kingdom that had become a symbol of women’s oppression.

In a royal decree, King Salman announced that women will be allowed to obtain driving licenses starting next June, after a government committee studies how to allow women onto the roads driving their own vehicles.

The decision, immediately condemned by many Saudi conservatives on social media, comes at a time of profound change championed by the Saudi monarch and his son, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who are leading efforts to relax the country’s strict social rules as they move to open up and modernize the country’s oil-dependent economy.

It also comes as the monarchy clamps down on perceived opposition: Saudi authorities have arrested dozens of people this month, from clerics to academics, in what the authorities described as a nascent antigovernment plot ahead of the king’s widely expected abdication in his son’s favor, the timing of which remains unclear.

“We refer to the negative consequences of not allowing women to drive, and the positive aspects of allowing them to do so, taking into consideration the necessary Shari’ah regulations and compliance with them,” King Salman said in the decree, referring to Islamic law.

The announcement caps a decadeslong campaign led by Saudi women to abolish a rule that drew widespread condemnation from both friends and foes of the kingdom, tarnishing its reputation internationally.

“We are very excited. We are over the moon,” said Hatoon al Fassi, a Saudi historian and one of the leaders of the campaign to let women drive. “Our struggle, the years of work have at last yielded a result, our right has been realized. It’s a historical moment. King Salman made a historical decision.” CONTINUE AT SITE