The Redhunter

I've Moved!

2005-06-03T20:14:00.000-05:00

I finally got the new site up and running! Go visit me at TheRedhunter.com

If you've got me blogrolled please take a moment and change that too.

Thank you to Marvin Hutchins for his invaluable assistance on explaining the mysteries of Moveable Type to me. Take a moment if you will and visit his site too.

I'll keep blogger as an emergency backup, so if the new site doesn't seem to work please come back here for an explanation.

Memorial Day 2005

2005-05-29T16:34:00.000-05:00

Thank you to all American military veterans, and those who are currently serving. We owe our freedoms to you. You uphold all that is right and true in our great nation. For that we are profoundly thankful.

One of the best expressions of the spirit of our armed forces was made by General of the Army Douglas MacArthur in a speech he gave at West Point in 1962. The occasion was his acceptance speech upon receiving the Sylvanus Thayer Award. This presigious honor is bestowed every year on "...an outstanding citizen of the United States whose service and accomplishments in the national interest exemplify personal devotion to the ideals expressed in the West Point motto, “DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY.”'

General Douglas MacArthur: Thayer Award Acceptance Address

delivered 12 May 1962, West Point, NY

"Duty, Honor, Country"

General Westmoreland, General Grove, distinguished guests, and gentlemen of the Corps!

As I was leaving the hotel this morning, a doorman asked me, "Where are you bound for, General?" And when I replied, "West Point," he remarked, "Beautiful place. Have you ever been there before?"

No human being could fail to be deeply moved by such a tribute as this [Thayer Award]. Coming from a profession I have served so long, and a people I have loved so well, it fills me with an emotion I cannot express. But this award is not intended primarily to honor a personality, but to symbolize a great moral code -- the code of conduct and chivalry of those who guard this beloved land of culture and ancient descent. That is the animation of this medallion. For all eyes and for all time, it is an expression of the ethics of the American soldier. That I should be integrated in this way with so noble an ideal arouses a sense of pride and yet of humility which will be with me always: Duty, Honor, Country.

Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.

Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean. The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation's defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid. They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for actions, not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future yet never neglect the past; to be serious yet never to take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength. They give you a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of an appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.

And what sort of soldiers are those you are to lead? Are they reliable? Are they brave? Are they capable of victory? Their story is known to all of you. It is the story of the American man-at-arms. My estimate of him was formed on the battlefield many, many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then as I regard him now -- as one of the world's noblest figures, not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless. His name and fame are the birthright of every American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give.

He needs no eulogy from me or from any other man. He has written his own history and written it in red on his enemy's breast. But when I think of his patience under adversity, of his courage under fire, and of his modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion of admiration I cannot put into words. He belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism. He belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and by his achievements. In 20 campaigns, on a hundred battlefields, around a thousand campfires, I have witnessed that enduring fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation, and that invincible determination which have carved his statue in the hearts of his people. From one end of the world to the other he has drained deep the chalice of courage.

As I listened to those songs [of the glee club], in memory's eye I could see those staggering columns of the First World War, bending under soggy packs, on many a weary march from dripping dusk to drizzling dawn, slogging ankle-deep through the mire of shell-shocked roads, to form grimly for the attack, blue-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain, driving home to their objective, and for many, to the judgment seat of God.

I do not know the dignity of their birth, but I do know the glory of their death.

They died unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts, and on their lips the hope that we would go on to victory.

Always, for them: Duty, Honor, Country; always their blood and sweat and tears, as we sought the way and the light and the truth.

And 20 years after, on the other side of the globe, again the filth of murky foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping dugouts; those boiling suns of relentless heat, those torrential rains of devastating storms; the loneliness and utter desolation of jungle trails; the bitterness of long separation from those they loved and cherished; the deadly pestilence of tropical disease; the horror of stricken areas of war; their resolute and determined defense, their swift and sure attack, their indomitable purpose, their complete and decisive victory -- always victory. Always through the bloody haze of their last reverberating shot, the vision of gaunt, ghastly men reverently following your password of: Duty, Honor, Country.

The code which those words perpetuate embraces the highest moral laws and will stand the test of any ethics or philosophies ever promulgated for the uplift of mankind. Its requirements are for the things that are right, and its restraints are from the things that are wrong.

The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training -- sacrifice.

In battle and in the face of danger and death, he discloses those divine attributes which his Maker gave when he created man in his own image. No physical courage and no brute instinct can take the place of the Divine help which alone can sustain him.

However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is the noblest development of mankind.

You now face a new world -- a world of change. The thrust into outer space of the satellite, spheres, and missiles mark the beginning of another epoch in the long story of mankind. In the five or more billions of years the scientists tell us it has taken to form the earth, in the three or more billion years of development of the human race, there has never been a more abrupt or staggering evolution. We deal now not with things of this world alone, but with the illimitable distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe. We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier.

We speak in strange terms: of harnessing the cosmic energy; of making winds and tides work for us; of creating unheard synthetic materials to supplement or even replace our old standard basics; to purify sea water for our drink; of mining ocean floors for new fields of wealth and food; of disease preventatives to expand life into the hundreds of years; of controlling the weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold, of rain and shine; of space ships to the moon; of the primary target in war, no longer limited to the armed forces of an enemy, but instead to include his civil populations; of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy; of such dreams and fantasies as to make life the most exciting of all time.

And through all this welter of change and development, your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable: it is to win our wars.

Everything else in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purposes, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their accomplishment. But you are the ones who are trained to fight. Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory; that if you lose, the nation will be destroyed; that the very obsession of your public service must be: Duty, Honor, Country.

Others will debate the controversial issues, national and international, which divide men's minds; but serene, calm, aloof, you stand as the Nation's war-guardian, as its lifeguard from the raging tides of international conflict, as its gladiator in the arena of battle. For a century and a half you have defended, guarded, and protected its hallowed traditions of liberty and freedom, of right and justice.

Let civilian voices argue the merits or demerits of our processes of government; whether our strength is being sapped by deficit financing, indulged in too long, by federal paternalism grown too mighty, by power groups grown too arrogant, by politics grown too corrupt, by crime grown too rampant, by morals grown too low, by taxes grown too high, by extremists grown too violent; whether our personal liberties are as thorough and complete as they should be. These great national problems are not for your professional participation or military solution. Your guidepost stands out like a ten-fold beacon in the night: Duty, Honor, Country.

You are the leaven which binds together the entire fabric of our national system of defense. From your ranks come the great captains who hold the nation's destiny in their hands the moment the war tocsin sounds. The Long Gray Line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses thundering those magic words: Duty, Honor, Country.

This does not mean that you are war mongers.

On the contrary, the soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.

But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: "Only the dead have seen the end of war."

The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished, tone and tint. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears, and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen vainly, but with thirsty ears, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.

But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point.

Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country.

Today marks my final roll call with you, but I want you to know that when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be of The Corps, and The Corps, and The Corps.

I bid you farewell.

This Man Should Not be a Senator

2005-05-28T12:49:00.000-05:00

If a grown man is going to blubber on the floor of the U.S. Senate it had better be over something more than how he's going to vote on a nominee to the United Nations. It you can stand it yhou can listen to him here.

Senator George Voinovich just about broke out in tears while announcing that he wasn't going to vote for John Bolton. He even managed to bring his children and grandchildren into it.

For heaven's sake, grow up.

(Hat tip Michelle Malkin for the link)

Thune's Weird Linkage

2005-05-28T12:02:00.000-05:00

Of much more importance than the emotional distress of Voinovich are Republican defections from the Bolton nomination. Now John Thune, who replaced Tom Dashle as Senator from South Dakota, has announced that he will vote against Bolton.

What's odd is the reason he gave. From the AP (hat tip Michelle Malkin):

Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said Thursday that he would vote against the nomination of John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations, hinting his vote is a protest against the Pentagon's recommendation to close Ellsworth Air Force Base.

But he did support his party on the vote that mattered most Thursday.

Republicans needed 60 votes to end the Democratic procedural delays and move to an immediate final vote on Bolton's confirmation. Fifty-six senators - including Thune - voted to end the stalling, four shy of that threshold. Now the final Bolton vote will probably not take place until June.

Thune said Thursday that saving Ellsworth is "inseparable from my work" in the Senate.

"It is part of the fabric of every day of our agenda and the things we are trying to accomplish here," Thune said Thursday. "It's something that has become a great preoccupation of mine now."

Asked whether his opposition to Bolton was because of his qualifications or the base-closing plan, Thune said dryly: "I'm concerned about our diplomatic posture as a nation, and I'm concerned about our defensive posture. These issues are not unrelated."

Thune otherwise would not say why he would vote against Bolton's nomination.

"Everyone has to come to their own decision about it, and that's the decision I have come to," Thune said. "John Bolton is not the best man for this job."

Before the base-closure list was released, in April, Thune said on the MSNBC program "Hardball" that Bolton could be good for the United Nations.

"Folks on our side I don't think have problems with where he is on policy or ideology or the fact that he is taking an approach and a style to the U.N.," Thune said. "That is much needed at the U.N."

If Ellsworth closes, about 3,800 military and civilian jobs will be lost in the Rapid City area.

From what I can figure he's voting against Bolton because Ellis Air Force Base is scheduled for closing? I keep rereading the article but can come to no other conclusion.

I checked his web site and can find no information on the matter. As of this writing his last press release was on May 25 and makes no reference to John Bolton. He doesn't want any bases closed, which is unfortunate but predictable.

Ok he're goes: We don't have military bases to serve the economic needs of communities. Many are no doubt obsolete and need to be closed or moved, and doing so would save us much money that we could reinvest elsewhere. Yes I know that Senators have to look after their constituents and no doubt he's received a thousand phone calls begging him to oppose the closings. And yes I know that people will be thrown out of work and all that. And I don't even know the specifics of the situation so can't really say if any one base should or should not be closed. I just wish that these Senators and Representatives would be a little less knee-jerk about these things once in a while.

Bottom Line: If Thune is trying to send a "message" to the administration he's choosing the worst possible way to do it. Well, he's better than Daschle so I should count my blessings.

I Got a Call this Morning

2005-05-28T11:52:00.000-05:00

... from a Republican fundraiser.

I told him that I wouldn't be giving any money until we made progress in getting Bush's judicial nominees thought.

I hated to do it but we've got to send a message. Hopefully they'll get enough replies like mine so that it registers with the national leadership.

Don't worry, I was very nice to the guy who called and thanked him for his efforts. There's no excuse for getting angry with the caller, as we should be thankful that we have people willing to donate their time.

Senator George Allen, however, will be receiving a check from me. I got one of his fundraising letters in the mail, and because he's been very strong on this issue, he will be rewarded.

Sudan, Mass Murder, and the War on Terror

2005-05-28T09:32:00.000-05:00

Nat Hentoff provides enlightenment as to why the Bush Administration has not been even more forthright on Sudan. It's basically a deal with the devil, he says. According to Henthoff, Ken Silverstein of the Los Angeles Times has revealed close intelligence ties between the two countries:

"The Sudanese government, an unlikely ally in the U.S. fight against terror, remains on the latest U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism. At the same time, however, it has been providing access to terror suspects and sharing intelligencedata withtheUnited States." The Los Angeles Times' substantially and carefully documented report makes clear that this collaboration between our CIA and the Mukhabarat, the Sudanese equivalent of the CIA, has produced very important results in our war against terrorism. For instance "A U.S. source familiar with Sudan's cooperation said, 'They've not only told us who the bad guys were, they've gone out and gotten them for us.'"

Furthermore, a Muslim intelligence agency like the Mukhabarat "can 'get firsthand information, while we get 10th-hand information,' said Lee S. Wolosky, a former National Security Council staffer in the Clinton and Bush administrations." Accordingly, in countries where barbaric jihadists organize and plan against us and where the CIA has very limited contacts, Sudan's intelligence agents can be of considerable,andpossibly life-saving, help.

Ugh.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. This is the type of thing that separates the 'real world' from pure idealism. In a perfect world we would unilaterally condemn countries like Sudan without regard to such...complications. Unfortunately it doesn't always work out so neatly.

So What to Do?

Readers of this blog will know that I've recommended strong action against Sudan in the past.
I've gone so far as to say that we ought to bomb government buildings if that's what it takes to persuade their leaders to stop their mass murders. We did it in Kosovo, why can't we do it here?

Because we would lose a valuable source of intelligence, we're told. And those who make this argument should not be dismissed. One can be a human rights absolutist like Jimmy Carter, and look where it got him: he lost Iran and Nicaragua to dictatorships worse than the ones they replaced.

But the difference was that Carter pontificated about human rights without being willing to back up his words with action. He mussled our military. All his talk achieved was to alienate traditional allies. He undermined odious regimes without providing an alternative.

George Bush has so far not made this mistake.

My Recommendation

It's easy for me to talk, since I do not have access to the intelligence that Sudan is passing us. It may be good stuff, it may not. My position is that it had damn well better be super-hot if its going to keep us from taking action against the Sudanese government for their continued mass murders in Darfur.

More on the Cave-in

2005-05-25T06:41:00.000-05:00

Yeah, some "compromise", eh? Then why are the Democrats claiming victory?

Democratic leaders claimed victory yesterday over the deal senators cut regarding filibusters of judicial nominees, while most Republicans said it violated their principles and conservative activists vowed retribution.

"Our republic stands strong. Our Constitution is solid. Our flag flies over a nation that has reaffirmed its faith in freedom," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, while Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, and Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi praised the deal for averting a crisis.

Just the people I want on my side. When the likes of Kennedy, Schumer, and Pelosi praise something you know there's something wrong.

And what exactly was this "compromise" all about? What did we agree on?

No one seems to know. The Democrats crow that they can still filibuster in "extreme circumstances", a term that was undefined in the agreement:

The primary point of contention is the definition of "extraordinary circumstances" under which the deal permits Democrats to mount future judicial filibusters without facing Republican retribution such as the nuclear option.

"The terms 'extraordinary circumstances' do not lend themselves to any easy interpretation," Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter said yesterday. "But when the Democratic leader observes that means 'occasional' and 'very infrequent,' that is very reassuring."

Within minutes of the deal's announcement Monday night, NARAL Pro-Choice America announced that "extraordinary circumstances" should include any nominees who don't state their positions on Roe v. Wade, the court case that made abortion a constitutional right. Other liberals have defined "extraordinary circumstances" as any vacancy on the Supreme Court.

And indeed it looks like they will filibuster the nomination of anyone to the supreme court but a complete milquetoast like a David Souter. What this means is that the president either cannot nominate his first choice (or maybe second or even third). Instead, we will be left with wishy-washy nominees who will do heaven know what on the bench.

Andrew McCarthy on NRO sums up the situation:

Let’s say, instead, that they simply gave us the bottom line: (a) three of the president’s nominees get an up-or-down vote (i.e., exactly three of the pending seven left standing after the Democrats — in that spirit of compromise — whittled down from the original ten); (b) the Democrats remain free to filibuster (but only on the strict condition that, uh, well, that the Democrats feel like filibustering); and (c) the Republicans, on the brink of breaking four years of obstruction, decide instead to punt (and on the eve of a likely battle over a Supreme Court vacancy, no less).

Sound familiar? Yes it does: It’s the deal that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid offered a week ago — and that was flatly rejected as paltry and unprincipled.

The deal, moreover, says, “Signatories will exercise their responsibilities under the Advice and Consent Clause of the United States Constitution in good faith.” Well, their responsibility under the “Consent” part of the Clause is to confirm or reject the president’s nominees. Period.

Ugh.

I went to Senator Warner's website this morning (I live in Virginia) and wrote him a not expressing my displeasure with him. I would encourage everyone to write their senators regardless of whether they are one of the seven who caved or not. Those who hold steadfast need encouragement also. I wrote Senator Allen a few weeks ago and will do so again later today.

You can read a copy of the "agreement" here (thanks to NRO). I won't have time this morning to go over it but will try to do so this evening.

Not one Dime

2005-05-24T18:45:00.000-05:00

Like the rest of you I am very unhappy with the Republican Senators who "compromised" (read; caved in) to the Democrats yesterday. I don't have any unique analysis here so I'll leave that to others.

Just so that you see their names again, they are

Mike DeWine of Ohio
Susan Collins of Maine
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina
Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island
John McCain of Arizona
John W. Warner of Virginia
Olympia J. Snowe of Maine.

Some of the names on the list do not surprise me; McCain, Chafee, Collins, and Snowe prominent among them. McCain loves being the "maverick", and the other three are just liberals. Graham seems to be a McCain wanna be, and I don't know anything about DeWine. But Warner surprised me. I thought more of him. I live in Virginia, and I can tell you right now that unless he changes his mind on this and votes in favor of the nuclear/constitutional option he will not be receiving my vote, much less my money. Since I can't imagine voting for most Democrats, I'll sit it out.

My other senator, George Allen, has been rock-solid. He has been very forthright in his opposition to the Democrats. I've heard him on several talk-show, including Laura Ingraham, and my admiration for him increases each time.

Last month I wrote both Senators Allen and Warner (through their websites) about both the situation with judicial nominees and John Bolton. Senator Allen (his assistant I'm sure) wrote me an email, which I reprint in part below:

The United States Senate has a very important function of confirming Presidential appointments, particularly to the federal bench. Any qualified individual nominated for a seat on a federal court should get a full and fair hearing both in the Senate Judiciary Committee and on the floor of the Senate. I believe that a vigorous debate about judicial nominees is appropriate, but the blatant obstruction of a judicial appointment is both unfair to the nominee and unfair to the process. It is the role of the Senate to advise and consent, not to delay and obstruct.

As you may be aware, recent discussion has mentioned the possible use of a parliamentary change that would allow for a vote on judicial nominees. This “Constitutional option” or “nuclear option”, as some have referred to it in the media, would allow the Senate to have a simple majority vote as required by the Constitution on a judicial nomination. Currently, some Senators are choosing to filibuster judicial nominations in order to prevent a final vote on their nominations. Under the current rules, filibusters are defeated when a motion of cloture is passed by a supermajority of 60 votes. Therefore, in order to have a simple up or down majority vote on a qualified judicial nominee, the Senate must first pass a motion of cloture which far exceeds the 51 votes required by the Constitution. The Constitutional option would permit the Senate an up or down vote following the ruling of the Senate’s presiding officer. This common-sense approach will allow the Senate to consider the qualifications of a potential judge, while still affording the minority the opportunity to make its views known.

I recognize the importance of debate within the Senate chamber and its longstanding tradition in the Senate. I support the use of the “Constitutional option” should judicial nominations continue to be flagrantly obstructed. I have always encouraged free and open discussion by my colleagues on all of the issues. While I am aware that it is their responsibility to make their views known on behalf of their constituencies, it is also important to recognize that it is our duty to the nation as the Senate to ensure that judicial nominees get a fair up or down vote.

I have yet to hear from Senator Warner.

I've got several GOP fundraising letters that I've been sitting on. Well guess what, I've now decided what to do about them. Every one of them will be sent back with a version of the following letter in them:

Dear Republican Party fund-raiser

There is no money in this envelope for you. You will not receive any money from me until Republicans in the Senate decide to end Democrat filibusters of judicial nominees. The recent "compromise" was in reality a cave-in

What is the point of a GOP majority if we're not going to do anything with it? What is all my money for if all Republican Senators are going to do is "compromise" when they have the votes to override the Democrats? I sent you my money last year so that you could elect Republican Senators who would work approve President Bush's judicial nominees. I have been let down, and until and unless Republican Senators override Democrate filibusters my money will only go to select local Republicans who have proven to me that they can be trusted.

Sincerely,

Tom Seeman

I'm going to print several copies of this letter as I have the sinking feeling that I'm going to need them for some time.

"It's Not Just Newsweek"

2005-05-22T20:25:00.000-05:00

As Michelle Malkin says in her latest column, "It's not Just Newsweek".

Michelle rocks, of course. Her TV career has taken off, too. She guest-hosted O'Reilly (again) on Friday and did an excellent job. Of course the fact that she's awefully darn cute has nothing to do with my admiration of her. But I digress.

Back to her column:

If you want to hear an earful, ask an American soldier how he feels about our news media. You will invariably hear an outpouring of dismay and outrage over antagonistic and reckless reporting. I have stacks of letters and e-mails from soldiers and their families sharing those frustrations. During the Vietnam War, such sentiments would get packed away private hurts to be silently borne for decades.

But today the Internet has allowed soldiers on the front to disseminate their viewsbreaking through the media's entrenched anti-military bias— in unprecedented ways. In the wake of Newsweek's publication of its unsourced, mayhem-inducing, and now-retracted item about Koran desecration by U.S. military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, a sergeant in Saudi Arabia immediately responded on a blog called The Anchoress (theanchoressonline.com):

I have placed my life and the life of my fellow soldiers in danger in order to achieve a measure of the freedoms we enjoy at home for the Iraqi and Afghani people. As soldiers, we all understand that we may be asked to participate in wars (actions) that we (or our countrymen) don't agree with. The irresponsible journalism being practiced by organizations such as Newsweek, however, [is] just inexcusable. At this point, because of their actions and failure to follow up on a claim of that magnitude, they've set the process back in Afghanistan immensely…
I don't regret serving my country, not one bit, but to have everything I'm doing here undermined by irresponsible journalists leaves me disgusted and disappointed.

Here, here.

There was an airshow this weekend at Andrews Air Force Base (which is just outside of Washington DC). They hold it every year, and I've been maybe fifteen times in the past twenty years. I'd have gone yesterday or today (the weather was great so it was tempting) but I just had too much else to do. Besides the pure thrill of seeing high-performance aircraft do their stuff (which like a hockey game is quite different live than on TV) I figure it's a way to show the military that I care enough and respect what they do. The pilots love to answer your questions, too. But again here I go off on a tangent.

Who's Side Are They On?

Malkin reminds us of all the lies, distortions, and misrepresentations we've had to put up with over the past few years from the mainstream media.

The members of our military are more than just an expedient means to a titillating magazine cover or juicy scoop or Peabody Award. Too often since the "War on Terror" was declared, eager Bush-bashing journalists have forgotten that the troops are real people who face real threats and real bloodshed as a consequence of loose lips and keyboards.

She then (on her regular blog) provides links to some of the other media misrepresentations. Remember these?

We heard that the military stood by while thousands of priceless Iraqi artifacts were stolen from museums. Then, oops, it wasn't really that way.

They tried to tell us that there was this big problem with desertions. But the photo that they used wasn't of any deserters.

Eight days before our presidential election they tried to tell us the we let insurgent terrorists loot a big cache of explosives because dumb 'ol Rumsfeld didn't send enough troops to invade Iraq. It wasn't true, of course. But hey, the timing was coincence, right?

Most don't even have the decency to call the bastards what they are; TERRORISTS.

Some are even more creative, they lie outright and fabricate stories about how we are targeting journalists.

Another big-name newspaper was so eager to smear the military that it fell for fake gang-rape photos.

And don't even make me bring up that windbag from CBS.

They Shoot Reporters, don't They?

2005-05-22T20:11:00.000-05:00

Check out The Fourth Rail for the link they posted to a Powerpoint presentation that the insurgent terrorists in Iraq made for their snipers.

They, uh, target reporters. Get that, Eason Jordan and Linda Foley?

A Headline You'll Never See

2005-05-22T20:06:00.000-05:00

From Dr Sanity's blog:

Here's a headline from the NY Times (I don't really care about the story, the thoroughly obnoxious headline says it all for me):

"Guantánamo Comes to Define U.S. to Muslims"

Here is a headline I would like to see:

"Beheadings and Insanely Violent Behavior Define Islam to Americans"

Do you think we will ever see that? No, I don't either.

Saudi Arabia Torture update

2005-05-21T13:24:00.000-05:00

From the Guardian;

Lawyers win right to seize Saudi assets

Mark Honigsbaum and Paul Kelso
Tuesday May 17, 2005
The Guardian

The court of appeal yesterday granted lawyers acting for three men who were tortured and detained in Saudi jails for more than two years permission to seize the kingdom's assets in this country, including Saudi commercial airliners.
The ruling follows a decision by the court of appeal last October giving the men the right to sue Saudi officials responsible for their torture in the British courts.

In October, the Saudi government decided it would not contest an order to pay the men's costs, yet has failed to do so. It has promised to take the case to the House of Lords.

Bindman and partners, lawyers for William Sampson, Sandy Mitchell and Les Walker, will now apply to the high court sheriff to seize sufficient commercial property to meet the costs, believed to be more than £100,000.

Bindman and partners have made clear they will send the sheriff in to seize Saudi property as soon as possible. They are not entitled to enter the Saudi embassy, as it is covered by diplomatic immunity and regarded as foreign territory.

However, any commercial property owned by the Saudi state in Britain is regarded fair game. That includes Saudi Arabian airlines, as well as houses and cars used for commercial purposes by Saudi officials or employees.

The Saudi embassy could not be reached for comment yesterday, but lawyers for the kingdom indicated in court that they would seek to overturn the order to pay costs by asserting immunity, setting the stage for further legal arguments.

I'll bet they didn't want to comment.

The article in the Guardian was sent to me by Mary Martini, ex-wife of one of James Cottle, one of the Britons who was unjustly imprisoned and tortured, and Ron Jones, who himself was unjustly imprisoned and tortured.

Kat over at the Middle Ground has been following this story also. Check out her blog posts here and here for additional details.

Let's keep up the pressure, folks.

For a timeline see the BBC story here.

My earlier posts:

A horror story of Saudi Arabia
Keep Quiet? Never!

Press Irresponsibility

2005-05-19T06:46:00.000-05:00

It's bad enough that Newsweek Magazine printed an inflamatory story using shoddy research, and does either not realize the damage they have done or do not care. Their sort-of apology isn't much.

But predictably many other pressies do not get it either. Take this exchange between White House reporters and presidential spokesman Scott McClellan (Drudge report, originally, hat tip Wretchard).

Q With respect, who made you the editor of Newsweek? Do you think it's appropriate for you, at that podium, speaking with the authority of the President of the United States, to tell an American magazine what they should print?

MR. McCLELLAN: I'm not telling them. I'm saying that we would encourage them to help --

Q You're pressuring them.

MR. McCLELLAN: No, I'm saying that we would encourage them --

Q It's not pressure?

MR. McCLELLAN: Look, this report caused serious damage to the image of the United States abroad. And Newsweek has said that they got it wrong. I think Newsweek recognizes the responsibility they have. We appreciate the step that they took by retracting the story. Now we would encourage them to move forward and do all that they can to help repair the damage that has been done by this report. And that's all I'm saying. But, no, you're absolutely right, it's not my position to get into telling people what they can and cannot report....

Q Are you asking them to write a story about how great the American military is; is that what you're saying here?

MR. McCLELLAN: Elisabeth, let me finish my sentence. Our military --

Q You've already said what you're -- I know what -- how it ends.

MR. McCLELLAN: No, I'm coming to your question, and you're not letting me have a chance to respond. But our military goes out of their way to handle the Koran with care and respect. There are policies and practices that are in place. This report was wrong. Newsweek, itself, stated that it was wrong. And so now I think it's incumbent and -- incumbent upon Newsweek to do their part to help repair the damage. And they can do that through ways that they see best, but one way that would be good would be to point out what the policies and practices are in that part of the world, because it's in that region where this report has been exploited and used to cause lasting damage to the image of the United States of America. It has had serious consequences. And so that's all I'm saying, is that we would encourage them to take steps to help repair the damage. And I think that they recognize the importance of doing that. That's all I'm saying.

Q As far as the Newsweek article is concerned, first, how and where the story came from? And do you think somebody can investigate if it really happened at the base, and who told Newsweek? Because somebody wrote a story.

These reporters know no shame. They don't get it. They think that the only two options are to report "how great the U.S. military is", or completely trash it. How about the truth, guys?

That one of their own is responsible for undermining the United States in one of the most vital regions of the world through shoddy reporting concerns them not at all. And they wonder why newspaper circulation is dropping off (except with the Washington Times, where it is going up!).

Then we have this in this morning's Washington Times:

(well I was going to copy the whole thing but their links are all screwed up)

Essentially the story in the Times (look under "Inside Politics" and maybe the link is fixed) is that "...Linda Foley, international president of the Newspaper Guild, has accused the U.S. military of targeting journalists for death 'in places like Iraq'"

"Journalists, by the way, are not just being targeted verbally or politically," Miss Foley said Friday in St. Louis. "They are also being targeted for real, in places like Iraq. What outrages me as a representatrive of journalists is that their is not more outrage about the number, and the brutality, and the cavalier nature of the U.S. military toward the killing of journalists in Iraq."

Yeah well what outrages me, Miss Foley, is that we have to put up with whackos like you who make wildly irresponsible charges. I don't have time this morning to research this Newspaper Guild group, and if anyone has any info please send it to me.

Don't you think that this war would be a bit easier if we had more of the press on our side? One cause, I think, is moral confusion caused by a misunderstanding of "neutrality" versus "objectivity" in reporting. I did a post on this subject on my other blog site, take a look if you have time.

Evening Update

Sometime today the Times fixed the link, so you can get to the entire story here.

Friday Update

LaShawn Barber has details on Linda Foley (hat tip Michelle Malkin). She's even nuttier than I thought. How do people like this get to be president of anything?

Worldnet Daily has the text of Foley's remarks:

According to a tape of her remarks, Foley said: “Journalists, by the way, are not just being targeted verbally or … ah, or … ah, politically. They are also being targeted for real, um … in places like Iraq. What outrages me as a representative of journalists is that there’s not more outrage about the number, and the brutality, and the cavalier nature of the U.S. military toward the killing of journalists in Iraq.”

Foley continued, “They target and kill journalists … uh, from other countries, particularly Arab countries like Al -, like Arab news services like al-Jazeera, for example. They actually target them and blow up their studios with impunity. …”

Fun Facts

2005-05-18T07:01:00.000-05:00

Readers of this blog will not normally be under any illusions as to just how terrible the United Nations has become. Nevertheless, it does bare reminding every now and then as to just why we need someone like John Bolton as our ambassador.

Ambassador Rudy Boschwitz is currently head of the delegation to the 61st session of the UN Commission on Human Rights. He was formerly a GOP Senator from Minessota from 1978 - 91. Yesterday he wrote an editorial that appeared in the Washington Times. He relayed just how antithetical at body has become to concepts of democracy and freedom around the world:

Americans must understand that the United Nations is not a very friendly forum for our country. The State Department puts out a study of voting patterns of the 191 nations that constitute the U.N. General Assembly. Only 10 of those 191 voted with the United States more than 50 percent of the time last year.

Wonderful. So that's what all of our foreign aid money is getting us.

At the six-week session of the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) this spring — a commission made up of 53 countries, including some of the worst human rights abusers — we could only come up with a consensus resolution — albeit a fairly strong one — about Darfur that did not mention the government of Sudan by name as an abuser, though the implication was pretty clear. Last year, when we insisted on a strong Darfur resolution condemning Sudan, the vote against it was 50-1 (the one being the United States) with two abstentions. The CHR membership has too many arsonists and too few firemen.

This year, Ambassador Boschwitz says, the situation on the commission was so bad that they did not even try to get any resolutions condemning Iran, Zimbabwe, China or "even Turkmenistan, where the dictator has renamed the months and days of the week after family members."

So what did the commission busy itself with?

But the commission had no difficulty this spring (or any other spring) in condemning Israel — not once but in four separate resolutions. In the last session of the 191-nation-member General Assembly, 26 human rights resolutions aimed at member states were passed. Amazingly, 22 of those 26 condemned the State of Israel.

That's nice. The one democracy in the Middle East gets all the blame. Nothing new there, unfortunately.

We're all familiar with the excreable 1975 "Zionism is Racism" resolution. What the Democrats do not seem to remember is that it was John Bolton who, in 1991, was instrumental in getting that overturned.

More reasons not only to send John Bolton to the UN, but to look for alternatives to that outfit.

About what I think, too

2005-05-17T07:02:00.000-05:00

Are you familiar with the Bratz series of dolls? If not, good for you.

Normally I don't write about this type of thing but yesterday I saw an article in my morning paper that struck me. It was originally in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and it's about the increasing sexualization of children

With their made-up eyes, pouty lips and short skirts, these girls look like real party dolls.

In fact, they are dolls. They're the Bratz, the 10-inch "girls with a passion for fashion" whose skyrocketing popularity among young girls has ignited a marketing war with Barbie, the long-reigning queen of the fashion doll world. Compared with the flirtatious-looking Bratz, Barbie looks like the scrub-cheeked -- albeit curvaceous -- girl-next-door.
As thousands of girls dump Barbie for the Bratz, child development experts worry. They see the Bratz as the cutting edge of a worrisome trend: the increasing use of sexual imagery in products marketed to young children.
They call it the "sexualization of childhood" and point to other examples: thong underwear emblazoned with sexually suggestive phrases for 6-year-old girls; "pimp" Halloween costumes for little boys; the increasingly sexually explicit content of TV shows, movies, and music CDs.

About what I've been thinking, too. And it is most decidedly not a good thing.

See, I Told You So

2005-05-16T20:01:00.000-05:00

No, I'm not doing a book review of Rush Limbaugh's second book.

I'm simply repeating what I said last month: We're winning the war in Iraq.

Last year at this time it was not so obvious. We'd stumbled the first time in Fallujah, and failed to take down mullah Sadr decisively. We seemed to be having a hard time getting our hands around the insurgency.

We turned the tide some time ago, although it was not easy to see it at the time. We rooted out the terrorists in Fallujah, and neutralized Sadr. Two elections played a decisive role; the one for the presidency here in the U.S. and the ones in Iraq to form a new government. It may sound partisan to say so, but the fact is that had Kerry won we may have lost in Iraq.

But my purpose is not to rehash our election. The second event, of course, was the election in Iraq. The Sunnis quickly realized that they made a grave mistake by boycotting it. To their credit, the Shi'is and Kurds were magnamimous in victory, inviting Sunnis into the government.

Some, of course, will claim that the current increase in terrorist bombings "prove" that it is the insurgent terrorists who are winning. Theirs, however, is a simplistic view, borne of the idea that wars somehow follow a linear trend. enI dealt with that nonsense last month.

Rich Lowry spelled out the course of events very well in an article in National Review last month, which I excerpted here.

Today, Jack Kelly has a must-read editorial that says just about everything I've been thinking recently (No I did not say that to sound like a know-it-all!). I won't bore you any more with my thoughts, but am going to reprint his editorial in full so you won't even have to click to go read it (aren't I nice):

More than 400 people have been killed in Iraq in the last two weeks, including at least five U.S. Marines taking part in Operation Matador in western Iraq.

A reader wants to know if, in light of this upsurge in violence, I still believe, as I wrote in a column Feb. 27th, that "the war in Iraq is all but won."

My answer is emphatically yes.

The body count is up because two offensives are under way. The insurgents have launched a suicide bombing campaign in an effort to destabilize the new Iraqi government. The Marines are clearing out the rats' nests in western Iraq to which insurgents fled after they were expelled from their stronghold in Fallujah last November.

The suicide attacks gather ominous headlines, but are failing in their strategic purpose. They have not diminished the willingness of Iraqis to enlist in the army and the police. Between 1,500 and 3,000 more sign up each week. And the Shia and the Kurds have not been goaded into bloody confrontations with the Sunnis.

The insurgents have to be discouraged by the headline which appeared in the Arabic newspaper al Sharq al Awsat Monday: "Iraqi Arab Sunnis head toward army enlisting posts in spite of explosions."

Until recently, Sunni religious leaders discouraged support for the government. But now that a Sunni has been appointed minister of defense, they're encouraging Sunnis to enlist.

"The Sunni involvement in the new government ...is a nightmare scenario for (the insurgents) — it means the loss of their only constituency," said the Australian web logger Arthur Chrenkoff, from whose blog I found I al Sharq al Awsat story.

"When the terrorist bombings began to kill large numbers of civilians back in late 2003, many Iraqis believed the Americans were behind the attacks," noted Jim Dunnigan of StrategyPage. "Iraqis didn't believe al Qaida and the Baath Party terrorists could be so stupid. Now, Iraqis consider al Qaida and the Baath Party terrorists to be depraved and rather clueless butchers."

The insurgency is now dominated by al Qaida. The news media describes this as ominous, as they describe every development in Iraq as ominous. But the opposite is true.

Al Qaida is coming to the fore through subtraction. Many of the"former regime elements" who dominated the insurgency are giving up. "The Baathists are secular-oriented socialists with little truck for the strict religious fundamentalism of al Qaida," noted web logger Donald Sensing, a former Army artillery officer. "They have been working together only because they each hate America and democracy, but at bottom, they hate each other, too."

Because they are Iraqis, all but the most blood-drenched Baathists have the option of quitting. Al Qaida does not.

"If they fail in Iraq, Osama and his whole crew are finished," retired Air Force LtGen. Tom McInerny told the Washington Times in a story published Wednesday.

The Marines say the insurgents they're fighting in Operation Matador are almost all foreigners, and that they're well trained, well armed, and fighting like cornered rats.

That's because they are. One has to go to blogs like Chrenkoff's, Dunnigan's, and Sensing's (One Hand Clapping) to get the information and analysis journalists ought to be providing, but aren't. Bill Roggio (Fourth Rail), Chester (Adventures of Chester), Wretchard (Belmont Club) and Scott Koenig (Indepundit), have done a superb job of describing the goals and progress of Operation Matador, complete with maps.

The Marines have established blocking positions on the escape routes into Syria, and are systematically reducing the pockets of resistance. The terrorists are fighting fiercely, because they've nowhere to run. They're dying in big bunches. The Marines are not.

The mere fact that a major offensive is being mounted in the mostly empty western desert indicates the situation in the cities is well enough in hand to spare the troops.

We don't know for how much longer the fighting will go on, or how many casualties there will be. The bloodiest battle of the Pacific war was Okinawa, the last.

But the insurgency's grave was dug militarily in Fallujah last November, and politically when Iraq went to the polls in January. The appointment of a Sunni defense minister and the success of Operation Matador are nails in the coffin.

See, I told you so.

Kidnapping in Yemen

2005-05-15T19:25:00.000-05:00

Jane of Armies of Liberation has done a fantastic job at keeping an eye on Yemen. This is yet another Arab/Muslim country where reforms are needed. They'd been making some headway, and then came the mysterious kidnapping of a Yemeni journalist, Nabil al-Wazer:

Nabil al-Wazer was kidnapped in Yemen on Tuesday. Everyone knows where he is and who’s got him. Lets see if the Yemeni government can get him back safely, and act like a normal government with the first priority of securing the wellbeing of its citizens. Or are they in on it and going to say “Woops.” (You know, like woops we bombed the civilians in Saada.)
...
Nabil al-Wazer is a civil engineer but also the treasurer of the Popular Forces Union, a Zaidi party with a secular basis. He’s also related to the party’s leader. Just like they bombed the Zaidi region (Saada), now its the turn of the Zaidi party to be attacked. Its part of the jihad against the Yemeni Zaidis (shia). Otherwise the government would go get him and return him safely to his family. Nabil al-Wazer is being held against his will by Houssain Abo Dunya in Hajja (no not Hajja) since Tuesday, kidnapped.
...
He’s kidnapped. His location is known. Since Tuesday. Not a police in sight. Nothing. The kidnapper is asking for approximately $50,000 US dollars.
So the Yemeni government can do mass arrests and arbitrary arrests, but not legitimate arrests. It can target its citizens but not protect them. It can arrest women, and boys, and old men, but not criminals.

Jane, as followers of her blog know, was on top of it. She started a campaign to find out the truth and put pressure on the Yemeni government. The msm picked up on it (she mentions MSNBC on her blog, but I can't find a story. If someone finds it please send it to me), which shows the power of a concerted effort. Many bloggers joined in her campaign. Due to other obligations, I did not pick up on this until just now.

Fortunately the situation has been resolved. However, the details remain murky. Nabil was "released", but we don't know what happened to the kidnapper(s). Were they arrested? Let's see if the government there does the right thing.

Visit her blog for the latest.

Redhunter update

2005-05-14T10:00:00.000-05:00

Note: This update post will stay at the top until my new site is completed. New posts on this blog will continue to be posted below

I'm working on two projects, so blogging will be light for a short bit.

One is moving to a new hosting provider. I'm working on the template and when it's done and I'm comfortable with the software I'll make the switch. Thank you to Marvin Hutchins for his invaluable technical help with this project.

The second is called Threats Watch. This is a collaborative project between Marvin, Bill Rice, and myself. It is not completely done yet but the basic outline is up. If you have a minute take a look and let us know what you think.

May 11 Update
(Original post May 4)

Not to worry, I'm still here, just working hard on Threats Watch and the new Redhunter sites. Take a look over at Conserva-puppies for my post on "Neutrality vs Objectivity in News Reporting" and let me know what you think.

The Islamization of Europe?

2005-05-14T09:34:00.000-05:00

"Either Islam gets Europeanized or Europe gets Islamized"

Is the choice really that stark? Perhaps so, if David Pryce-Jones has it right.

Pryce-Jones, also a senior editor for National Review, wrote an article that was published in the Decemmber edition of Commentary provocatively titled "The Islamization of Europe?" (online at another site) While some may find the idea alarmist, from what I've read recently he's hit the nail on the head.

Contemporary Islamism might be summed up as the effort to redress and reverse the long-ago defeat of Muslim power by European (i.e., Christian) civilization. Toward that end, it has followed two separate courses of action: adopting the forms of nationalism that have appeared to many Muslims to contain the secret of Western supremacy, or promoting Islam itself as the one force capable of uniting Muslims everywhere and hence ensuring their renewed power and dominance. In the hands of today's Islamists, and with the complicity of Europe itself, these two approaches have proved mutually reinforcing.
...
In its global reach and in its aggressive intentions, Islamist ideology bears some resemblance to another transnational belief system: namely, Communism. Like today's Islamists, Communists of an earlier age saw themselves as engaged in an apocalyptic struggle in which every member of a Communist party anywhere was expected to comport himself as a frontline soldier, and in which terror was seen as a wholly permissible means toward victory in a war to the finish.
...
Another has been the attempt in Britain to set up a Muslim "parliament" that will recognize only Islamic law (shari'a) as binding, and not the law of the land. Still another has been the insistence, in France, on the wearing of the hijab by girls in public schools, a practice that clearly contradicts the ideals of French republicanism and is in any case not an Islamic requirement. The tactical thinking behind such incitements was well articulated by an al-Qaeda leader who, calling upon British Muslims to "bring the West to its knees," added that they, "the locals, and not foreigners," have the advantage since they understand "the language, culture, area, and common practices of the enemy whom they coexist among."
...
The institutions that have been affected by Islamophile correctness run the gamut. In Britain, a judge has agreed to prohibit Hindus and Jews from sitting on a jury in the trial of a Muslim. The British Commission for Racial Equality has ordained that businesses must provide prayer rooms for Muslims and pay them for their absences on religious holidays.

Read the whole thing.

Pictures worth a Thousand Words

2005-05-14T09:33:00.000-05:00

On Casualties and War

2005-05-13T08:26:00.000-05:00

Just a few thoughts this morning as I'm off to work on another threat assessment for our new Threats Watch site. Then it's off to work (oh yeah, that).

Anyone who's followed the news recently knows that casualties from bombings in Iraq are up. The number of dead and wounded are almost double what they were not too many months ago.

I have no doubt that this will prompt the usual suspects to declare that all is lost and that we have failed.

Need we point out to them that casualty rates is a very poor way of determining who is winning and who is losing? Apparently so.

The most bloody battles we fought in World War II were near the end of the war. Iwo Jima and Okinawa were fought in the closing months of the war, the former in February and March, and the latter in April of 1945.

Iwo Jima cost some 7,000 Americans their lives, and Okinawa 12,000. The battle for Okinawa was a marked by mistake after mistake on our side, starting with a gross underestimation of the number of Japanese troops on the island (we estimated 65,000, it turned out the number was more like 130,000). We had no real counter to the kamikaze, which devastated our navy and support vessels.

The situation was no better in Europe. We were totally taken by surprise by a German offensive in December of 1944, in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. Many American units were completely overrun, and we only turned the tide when the Wehrmacht ran out of gas and the weather improved to where we could use our air power. As it was, we lost some 19,000 lives.

No Neat Lines

Today we have no neat maps where we can draw the "front line". The enemy does not make it easy be organizing in neat identifiable western-style military units that we can mark with pins.

No, this time we have to actually think. That's right, use our heads and try to analyze exactly what is going on. I don't have the time or expertise to do that right now, so if you want the best go to these sites, where I assure you you'll be amply rewarded:

Belmont Club
Bill Roggio
Strategy Page

Al-Qaeda Organization Chart

As promised, Bill Roggio has posted a link to an organization chart to Al-Qaeda in Iraq (link to download here)

Saudi Arabia Torture Update

2005-05-13T07:52:00.000-05:00

Some good news in the case of the Britons and other westerners falsely imprisoned by the Saudi Arabian government in 2001. I have received the following press release from Ron Jones, who was one of those falsely imprisoned and tortured;

Press Release
Ronald Grant Jones

V

Ministry of Interior Saudi Arabia & Anr

The above case has been listed for hearing before their Lordships in the House of Lords on 25th, 26th and 27th April 2006.

Best wishes for Mr. Jones in his case against Saudi Arabia. Those not familiar with the case should read my posts here and here on their ordeal. There's is the perfect example of what we get when we coddle dictators for the sake of short-term objectives, namely a secure supply of oil.

Victor Davis Hanson wrote an excellent piece that discussed very subject just last month.

I will report more on this story as updates arrive.

May 14 Update

Ron sent me a a story in the Daily Telegraph that helps to explain the situation:

A former City tax adviser who was tortured in Saudi Arabia has been told the Government will side with the Saudis against him in his fight for justice.

Ron Jones said he had a reassuring meeting with Foreign Office minister Lady Symons earlier this year at which she promised she would raise the issue at a top level meeting with Saudi ministers in February.

Lady Symons said the case would be raised again in March and wrote to Mr Jones to say she was hopeful that they could make "real progress".

But the 52-year-old has now received a letter telling him that the Government will intervene on behalf of the Saudis when the case is heard in the House of Lords.

Mr Jones, from West Sussex, is pursuing a £2.5 million claim for damages for wrongful arrest, torture, personal injury and loss of earnings.

His claim, which is seen as a test case for others, seeks to argue that the 1978 State Immunity Act is incompatible with the Human Rights Act and gives foreign states the right to shelter torturers.

His torture claims were bolstered by physical evidence found by doctors after his release following two months captivity in Saudi Arabia.
<>The Foreign Office consular division confirmed at the time: "[Mr Jones's] story was substantiated by evidence. Officials were in no doubt he was telling the truth."
...
He had been in Saudi Arabia for four months working for a petro-chemical company when he was injured by shrapnel in a bomb blast and taken to hospital where security forces dragged him from his bed and arrested him on suspicion of causing the explosion.
...
The men, who lived in constant fear of execution, spent two and a half years in Saudi jails - a year of which was in solitary confinement. They were released in August 2003.

Read the whole thing.

Stand up for Israel

2005-05-11T14:59:00.000-05:00

Maia Lazar has organized a "Jewish Blogburst". Stop over at the blogburst site where she has a list of those who participated and an excerpt from their post.

I will use this opportunity to discuss once more a topic that I believe to be vitally important; moral clarity and the Middle East.

In all of the areas of the world, of all the issues that we discuss, none is more clouded by moral confusion as that of Israel and the Middle East. It is a subject that to me seems so obvious, yet to so many others at home and abroad it is so clouded. It almost pains me to say it, but their moral confusion on this issue is evidence of problems with the entire concept of democracy, freedom, and the concept of "right versus wrong". Big stuff, but there it is.

The Confused

Here is what we hear from the confused on an almost daily basis:

Israel stole land that belongs to the Palestinians
Israel is one of the most repressive states on the planet
Zionists are racists
Israeli troops deliberately kill civilians
"The Jews" control the banks, Hollywood, U.S. foreign policy, (fill in the blank with your favorite)

On and on it goes. Of all of the repressive regimes on our planet, tiny Israel receives more venom and hatred directed towards it than all of the others put together. It is regularly attacked in the UN General Assembly. It is despised in Europe.

The fact is, of course, that those who attack Israel so venemously know perfectly well what they are doing. They are not really confused at all.

A Perfect Example

The best example of moral confusion is in regard to Israeli military actions versus terrorist actions by Palestinian and other Muslim extremists.

Israel directs it's attacks at military targets, by which we mean people who are either armed themselves or directly part of a military-type structure aimed at doing harm. Sometimes civilians are killed during the fighting. However, they civilians are not only the ones not targeted, but the evidence is overwhelming that Israel, like the United States, goes out of its way to avoid civilian casualties.

Palestinian and other Muslim extemists, however, directly target Israeli civilians.

Why this difference is hard for some people to understand is utterly beyond me. My only conclusion is that they are so enraptured by leftist ideologies that they are beyond reason.

The Settlements

We're forever hearing that the settlements are standing in the way of peace.

To which I ask; if the settlements are the problem today, what was the problem before 1967?

The usual response; silence. Of course. They have no answer.

I wrote about this at some length in a previous post. My conclusion:

The main issues preventing peace are the following

Lack of Moral Clarity. I've written on this before here. Here are two of the essential elements of moral clarity lacking in some people:
Israel is an imperfect democracy, but it is a democracy. No Arab state is a democracy. This does not mean that Israel may do anything it wishes, but it does mean that we should give them the benefit of the doubt.
Israeli forces practice discrimination in warfare. That is, they only attack military targets. Civilians are sometimes killed as a byproduct, but the civilians are not the target themselves. Arab/Muslim terrorists deliberately target civilians. Why this is hard for some people to understand is beyond me.
Lack of Democracy among the Arab States. Natan Scharansky wrote about this in his excellent book "The Case for Democracy". Simply put, democracies do not fight each other. We in the west are partly responsible for the current state of affairs, since in the past we did not pressure Arab governments to reform.
Palestinian terrorism - until the Arab states and/or the PA put and end to terrorism by organizations such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the others there will be no peace.
The expansion of the settlements should stop. Ok, I know I said earlier that "the settlements per se" are not the problem. And that is true. But it is also true that in my opinion Israel does not need new settlements, and by expanding them they give Palestinian extremists a propaganda message that is useful in recruiting terrorists.

Onwards to Democracy

There will not be a permanent peace in the Middle East until the Arab states start to embrace pluralistic forms of government. This includes the Palestinian Authority.

Natan Sharansky wrote about this in his book "The Case for Democracy". Sharansky said that agreements such as the one at Oslo were a mistake because they did not require that the Palestinians reform themselves, and I believe that history has shown him to be correct.

While some doubt that democracy is possible among Muslims, Sharansky (and I) disagree. Many once thought that democracy was not possible for people in the former Soviet Republics and Eastern Europe. History has proven them wrong.

Stand up for Israel

So in the meantime we must stand up for Israel, for to do so is to stand for democracy. We do this not because of some misguided notion of "Israel right or wrong", for Israel is not always in the right. But it is more right more often that it's enemies, far more, in fact. And we also stand up for Israel because, strange as it may sound, to do so is to stand up for democratic change in the Arab world, for they deserve to live as we do also.

Brilliant

2005-05-02T21:22:00.000-05:00

If you're not reading Belmont Club you're missing out. Wretchard says he has the flu yet still writes so brilliantly I am in awe. The comments are well worth reading also.

Join Us...

2005-05-02T14:45:00.000-05:00

...over at Conserva-Puppies where we've got a lively discussion going about Sudan, the United Nations, and China.

Casualties of War

2005-05-02T09:03:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I caught Liz Trotta for a few minutes on Fox News during their 10-12am show. The issue being discussed was war casualties. (I can't find a link to the show on the Fox site so if someone can send it to me I'd be obliged)

The question was whether the war was being "sanitized" by the mainstream media. The charge is that by not showing "enough" U.S. casualties Americans are developing a "video game" mentality towards war.

Liz thought the charge to be utter nonsense and so do I, for two reasons.

First, I think that if anything, American's have a more realistic view of war than ever before. There are several trends in our culture that I believe support this view.

Movies and Television are more violent and realistic. Movies such as Saving Private Ryan went to lengths never before imagined in showing war. Not just the "blood and guts" aspect, but the general view that from a soldier's perspective fighting is not all about patriotism and glory. It is a terrible, dirty, frightening business. Soldiers fight for their buddies.

The culture in general has "accepted" a higher level of violence. This is a bad thing, and one can argue that we have been "desensitized", and perhaps so. However the fact remains that violence per se is not unknown to Americans.

There is also my own general anecdotal experience. I just do not get the impression that Americans in general "don't know what really goes on in war." I think higher of us. I think they do.

So what about the "video game" mentality? It certainly exists. One problem with movies and TV is that they are a step or two ahead of what real show weaponry and technology can actually do. And of course it rarely shows "collateral damage". One of the most egregious examples is when people fire multiple rounds in closed environments (in a house for example) with no apparent effect on their hearing. Anyone who has actually fired a gun knows how incredibly loud they really are.

Of course, when I speak of "Americans" I generalize. Yes there are always exceptions.

Problems of the Past

I've read many times of guys who joined the military in the 50's or 60's who admitted that they had a "John Wayne" view of warfare. Then came Vietnam.

A quick perusal of the war movies of the time quickly demonstrates how such views came into being. While a few showed the horrors of war most, as I recall, really did not. Titles do not quickly come to mind, and I don't have time right now to research, but I think my statement stands up.

The Real Motive

Some who complain that our media does not show "enough" American body bags have good intentions. I'm not going to tar everyone.

There are some, however, with more sinister motives.

They want to demoralize us. They want us to call it quits in Iraq and pull the troops out. They are part of the Fifth Column that I have written about and we need to call them what they are.

These people claim that we are "hiding" our casualties. This commentary, by one Gail Vida Hamburg, linked to on antiwar.com is typical. The author claims that Italy properly honors its war dead while American "pays little attention to its war dead":

America, on the other hand, with 1,516 U.S. fatalities in Iraq as of March 16, 2005, pays little public attention to its war dead. Indeed, aside from the printed obituaries in metro sections of dailies, there is little acknowledgment by the government or substantial reporting in the media of the soldiers who perish in Iraq and the families they leave behind. We do not see or hear them. They die alone on the hot sands of Iraq and their survivors grieve privately on American soil.

The Pentagon does not allow photographs of coffins, something that bothers the author. She also condems the President for not attending the funerals of soldiers killed in action:

If he believes our military is fighting for noble ideals, if he admires, as he says, their valor and sacrifice, why must he absent himself from their funerals or prevent our witness of their final return? Why must our war dead come home like thieves in the night?

Besides the fact that she is utterly wrong in her assertion that we "pay little attention to (our) war dead", there is the question of motivation.

They couldn't care less about the sacrifices made by our military. Too many photos and reports of anti-war protestors have dispelled that notion.

No, they want to demoralize us and change public opinion. They want us to call it quits in Iraq and bring the troops home (or better yet, disband the whole military). As shown by the inaction during the mass murders committed by the communists in south-east Asia after their take-over in 1975, they also couldn't care less about the people involved. Whether the Iraqis live in freedom and prosperity or under the heal of a dictator of whatever stripe concerns them not at all.

So What Should We do?

Continue current policies.

The left wants to make a spectacle of solumn funeral services, as they do with arrivals of caskets from Iraq. They will not be allowed to succeed.

The reality is that innumerable weblogs and news reports (I see these on Fox and other msm outlets) honor our troops who have fought bravely and made the ultimate sacrifice. The idea that all this is somehow "hidden" is B.S. of the first degree.

The idea that the president should attend all funerals is also nonsense. Besides the fact that he does not have time, it would really accomplish nothing. No one in their right mind believes that President Bush (or any past president, for that matter) does not care. Of course, leftists who make these charges are not in their right mind, but we knew that already.

Resign, Kofi, Resign!

2005-05-02T08:52:00.000-05:00

So Kofi Annan has threatened to resign:

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has claimed that a "lynch mob" is out to "destroy" him in the wake of the Iraq oil-for-food debacle and other U.N. scandals.

In his first major interview since he was criticized in a report into the discredited oil-for-food scheme, which the United Nations administered, Mr. Annan refused to rule out stepping down in the fall, a year before his second term is due to end.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Maybe this new report of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers, this time in Liberia, have something to do with it (hat tip Captain Ed):

UN peacekeepers sexually abused and exploited local women and girls in Liberia and more accusations are expected, a UN spokesman said Friday.

Stephane Dujarric said a preliminary investigation by the UN mission in Liberia indicated that some allegations against its personnel could be substantiated, while others could not.

"The allegations range from the exchange of goods, money or services for sex to the sexual exploitation of minors. The peacekeeping department here in New York as well as the mission on the ground are taking appropriate follow-up action," he said.

A UN official speaking on condition of anonymity said the number of allegations could eventually total 20.

The head of the mission in Liberia, Jacques Paul Klein, is to step down when his contract expires at the end of the month, a UN spokesman announced Thursday. His deputy Abou Moussa will temporarily take over.
The allegations of sex abuse in Liberia are just the latest to be leveled against UN peacekeepers who have been accused of exploiting the very people they were sent to protect in missions from Bosnia and Kosovo to Cambodia, East Timor and Congo.

It just keeps getting worse and worse.

All the Right Enemies (and Friends!)

2005-04-29T10:34:00.000-05:00

Victor Davis Hanson says that that United States is hated by all the right people:

At the U.N. it is said that a ruling hierarchy mistrusts the United States and that a culture of anti-Americanism has become endemic within the organization. No wonder — the Americans alone push for more facts about the Oil-for-Food scandal, question Kofi Annan's breaches of ethics, and want investigations about U.N. crimes in Africa. If we are mistrusted for caring about those thousands who are inhumanely treated by a supposedly humane organization, then why in the world should we wish to be liked by such a group?
...
In short, who exactly does not like the United States and why? First, almost all the 20 or so illiberal Arab governments that used to count on American realpolitik's giving them a pass on accounting for their crimes. They fear not the realist Europeans, nor the resource-mad Chinese, nor the old brutal Russians, but the Americans, who alone are prodding them to open their economies and democratize their corrupt political cultures. We must learn to expect, not lament, their hostility, and begin to worry that things would be indeed wrong if such unelected dictators praised the United States.

Ok but what about the Europeans? Shouldn't we want them to like us?

The EU is well past being merely silly, as its vast complex of bureaucrats tries to control what 400 million speak, eat, and think. Its biggest concerns are three: figuring out how its nations are to keep paying billions of euros to retirees, unemployed, and assorted other entitlement recipients; how to continue to ankle-bite the United States without antagonizing it to the degree that these utopians might have to pay for their own security; and how not to depopulate itself out of existence. Europeans sold Saddam terrible arms for oil well after the first Gulf War. Democratic Israel or Taiwan means nothing to them; indeed, democracy is increasingly becoming the barometer by which to judge European hostility.

Who, then, likes us?

Perhaps one billion Indians, who appreciated that at a time of recession we kept our economy open, and exported jobs and expertise there that helped evolve its economy.
Millions of Japanese trust America as well. Unlike the Chinese, who on script vandalized Japanese interests abroad in anguish over right-wing Japanese textbooks, Americans — who at great cost once freed China — without such violence urge the Japanese to deal honestly with the past. After all, the Tokyo government that started the war is gone and replaced by a democracy; in contrast, the Communist dictatorship that killed 50 million of its own and many of its neighbors is still in place in China. At a time when no one in Europe seems to care that Japan is squeezed between a nuclear North Korea and a nuclear China, the United States alone proves a reliable friend. The French, on spec, conduct maneuvers with the ascendant Communist Chinese navy.

Eastern Europeans do not find the larger families, religiosity, or commitment to individualism and freedom in America disturbing. Apparently, millions in South America don't either — if their eagerness to emigrate here is any indication.

In short, we are hated by all the right people, and liked by all the right people. We should be disturbed if it was any different

Nostalgia for a Dictator?

2005-04-28T09:35:00.000-05:00

One of the things that most perplexes Americans is the tendancy of some of those who once lived under totalitarian rule, and now live under at least some freedom, to express nostalgia for the ancien regime.

Consider two stories that were in the news recently. The first one is in today's Washington Times:

"Life has changed for the worse," said Bushra Mahmoud, 40, a mother of three who was sitting in the waiting area. "There is a creeping zealousness among men and women that is really frightening. You sit on the bus and have abuse heaped on you by the fanatics because you are not wearing the hijab [Islamic head covering]. These things never used to happen."

Intimidation of women for religious reasons has become more common in the past year, and those who do not cover themselves are often the targets of kidnappers. Salons have been bombed and the Princess Salon's chief stylist, Nazar Zadayan, says he has been threatened several times.

They go on to point out that the situation for women is better in Afghanistan, where women can take off their burkas without fear. Too many religious conservatives were elected to the new legislative body in Iraq, however. While many women ran for office, only those with conservative values were elected.

The second is about Putin's recent remarks about the "glory days" of the Soviet Union (hat tip Amy Ridenour):

Russian President Vladimir Putin told the nation Monday that the collapse of the Soviet empire "was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century" and had fostered separatist movements inside Russia.
In his annual state of the nation address to parliament and the country's top political leaders, Putin said the Soviet collapse was "a genuine tragedy" for Russians.

"First and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," Putin said. "As for the Russian people, it became a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.

Such words are shocking to the majority of westerners. No matter the situation in Russia, how could anyone long for the Soviet Union? Does he not remember Stalin's terror?

I do not doubt that the fears expressed by the Iraqi women are well founded. When a country has been kept under the heal of a dictator for so long, all sorts of tensions are kept underground. Ancient hatreds and prejudices do not go away, they are simply put on hold. And when the dictatorship is removed, they spring to the surface.

It has been said by many that democracy is about more than holding elections. That has never been better illustrated by the stories above.

The German Experience

Perhaps the most famous example of a people longing for a authoritarian past and rejecting democracy occurred in Germany during the 1920's. To the modern mind, it would seem obvious that the Weimar Republic was better than Prussian militarism. Yet consider the hyperinflation that struck Germany during the early days of the Weimar Republic
(Nazi Germany: A New History, by Klaus Fischer):

Germans were caught in a vortex from which there seemed no escape. the world was upside-down: a simple penny postage stamp cost 5 million marks, an egg 80 million, a pound of meat 3.2 biullion, a pound of butter 6 billion, a pound of potatoes 50 million, a glass of beer 150 million. Prices changed from day to day, prompting people to rush to the stores armed with satchels of worthless money to buy simple necessities.

To many Germans this period seemed like an economic apocalypse....We might also add that it also seemed like the end of faith in government, its good word, and its assurance that the savings of ordinary citizens would be protected.....The savings of thrifty middle-class Germans was wiped out. It was not uncommom for German savers to receive polite letters from bank managers informing them that "the bank deeply regrets that it can on longer administer your deposit of sixty-eight thousand marks, since the costs are all out of proportion to the capital. We are therefore taking the liberty of returning your capital. Since we have no bank-notes of small enough denominations at our disposal, we have rounded out the sum to one million marks. Enclusure: one 1,000,000 mark bill." To add insult to injury, the envelope was adorned by a canceled five million mark postage stamp.

It's not a wonder why people became Nazis.

The government literally was forced to take back small denomination bills and print extra zeroes on them, and them reissue them.

A Sailor's Story

When I was in St Petersburg, Russia, in 1993, one of the sights we visited was the cruiser Aurora. After paying our fee and going onboard the ship, we were met by an old man who, in passable English, offered to take us on a tour of the vessle. Knowledgeable by now as to the ways of Russia, we realized that he was not an official tourguide but just someone who wanted to make a few extra dollars by taking westerners on tours. We agreed and he did a fine job.

As always, we made it a habit to ask the people we met about their backgrounds and their opinions of various matters. We found out that this man had been a captain in the Soviet Navy but had retired several years ago, when the country was still the Soviet Union. His pension had been wiped out by inflation, and he depended on tips from westerners to make his living. He apparently talked the officials into letting him on board to do this, probably in return for a percentage of his tips. We had encountered this situation several times before and, given the man's knowledge of naval matters, had no reason to doubt his story. We gave him something like a ten dollar tip, which was an enormous sum of money in their economy.

Given this and other stories we've all heard about Russia, is it a wonder some people say that they long for the days of Stalin? There is something in us that longs for stability and predictability. And when it seems like the world is falling apart,

Nostalgia for a Dictator?

So do the people in the stories above truely long to be ruled by a dictator? I don't think so. I think it's more a desperation that comes from living in difficult and uncertain times. The Iraqi women do have good reasons to be afraid. The Russians do have cause to bemoan their reduced status in the world. The Germans of eighty years ago did have reason to think their world had turned upside down.

It's all too easy for us in the West to talk highly of freedom and democracy, when even our Great Depression was fairly mild compared to the situations described above. Success in Iraq and Afghanistan depends as much on security and the economy as it does on elections and establishment of a representative government.

Democracy is about a way of thinking, a means of peacefully resolving conflict within society. It is the establishment of common law, of civil society, of all those things that we take for granted but which takes centuries to get right, if ever at all.

So we mustn't be overly upset when we read about a people longing for days when they were ruled by a tyrant. We should take it as a warning, as a message that we have a lot of work to do. But I'm not really worried that we don't take this seriously in Iraq or Afghanistan. One of the hallmarks of American liberation, from the Marshall Plan in Europe, to MacArthur's administration of Japan after World War II, to our liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan, has been our willingness to spend billions on reconstruction. That some on the left do not seem to recognize the importance of this investment must not disuade us from our task. We can only lose this War on Terror if we want to.

Saudi Deal with the Devil

2005-04-28T08:10:00.000-05:00

It is said that a gaff is when someone gets caught saying what they really think. If true, then the Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia certainly got caught in a gaff the other day (hat tip lgf):

"If someone knows that he is capable of entering Iraq in order to join the fight, and if his intention is to raise up the word of God, then he is free to do so," says Sheik Saleh Al Luhaidan in Arabic on the October audiotape from a government mosque, obtained by NBC News.

While Luhaidan warns Iraq is risky because "evil satellites and drone aircraft" watch the borders, he stresses making the trip to fight Americans is religiously permissible.

"The lawfulness of his action is in fighting an enemy who is fighting Muslims and came for war," says Luhaidan.

"This statement shows the real face of the Saudi government," Saudi dissident Ali Al-Ahmed of the Washington-based Saudi Institute told NBC, noting Saudi officials, including Luhaidan, publicly oppose holy war in Iraq, but send a different message in private.

"He is telling Saudis it's OK to go to Iraq and kill Americans and Iraqis and they won't be punished for doing that," says Al-Ahmed.

When a Saudi spokesman denied the authenticity of the tape, the network contacted Luhaidan himself in Saudi Arabia to play the tape.

"Yes, this is my voice," the sheik confirmed in Arabic.

But Luhaidan said he meant to convey the message that it's "not worth it for young Saudis to go to Iraq and that the Iraqis are capable of fighting on their own," according to NBC.

Yeah right.

This is the result of the deal with the devil that the ruling Saudi family has made. When the kingdom was founded in the early 20th century, the Saudis essentially told the radical Wahhibist clerics "leave us alone and we'll keep you funded."

This "worked" for some time. But eventually the radicals grew bold enough to bite the hand that fed them. The defining moment was probably the presence of American troops on Saudi Arabia during and after the Gulf War. This was what caused Osama bin Laden to decide that America and the Saudi government would be his main targets.

As a result, the Saudis have suffered a spate of terrorist attacks over the past ten years or so. The situation appeared to be getting out of hand last year, but fortunately the Saudi government took action and appear to have the terrorists on the run now.

But even so, this does not correct the essential wrong within their country; that it is ruled by a corrupt dictatorship that is resistant to reform. And as I've said many times on this blog, it is to our detriment that we supported them for so long. It is high time that we call them to the carpet and demand basic reform. Sometimes Bush appears to be doing this, but othertimes he backtracks. As of now Bush is playing nicey-nice with them trying to get them to increast production to reduce oil prices, but his efforts have been in vain. It is high time we ended this short-term policy in return for one demanding basic reform.

The Near Capture of Zarqawi

2005-04-27T10:00:00.001-05:00

It has been reported in several places that we almost caught Zarqawi in February.

ABC news has more details (Hat tip Bill Roggio)

On Feb. 20, the alleged terror mastermind was heading to a secret meeting in Ramadi, just west of Fallujah, where he used to base his operations, the official said.
Task Force 626 — the covert American military unit charged with finding Zarqawi — had troops in place to grab the fugitive, and mobile vehicle checkpoints had been established around the city's perimeter. Another U.S. official said predator drones were also in flight, tracking movements in and around the city.

A source who had been inside the Zarqawi network alerted the task force to the meeting. Officials deem the source "extremely credible."

Several points stand out.

First, the revelation that we have an agent or source "inside the Zarqawi" network is significant. Al-Qaeda is notoriously hard to penetrate. Second, sooner or later his luck will run out. His capture or death will be a tremendous psychological blow to the terrorists. Third, as a Fox News story says, we captured his laptop, which "contained valuable intelligence, including numerous photos — apparently some of which were recent pictures of Zarqawi."

We're Winning

2005-04-27T10:00:00.000-05:00

Oh yes we are.

The Naysayers have had their day. While much could still go wrong, we turned the corner some time ago and are on the way to wrapping this up. The terrorists will create trouble for awhile, but the prospect of their taking control of the Iraqi government is now remote.

And I'm not just talking about the success of the elections and formation of a new government. I'm talking about defeating the insurgency, killing the terrorists and/or chasing them out of Iraq.

Rich Lowry sums it up

If current trends continue, our counter-insurgent campaign in Iraq will be fit to be mentioned in the same breath as the British victory over a Communist insurgency in Malaysia in the 1950s, a textbook example of this form of war. Our counterinsurgency has gone through the same stages as that of the Brits five decades ago: confusion in the initial reaction to the insurgency, followed by a long period of adjustment, and finally the slow but steady erosion of the insurgency's military and political base. Even as there has been a steady diet of bad news about Iraq in the media over the last year, even as some hawks have bailed on the war in despair, even as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has become everyone's whipping boy, the U.S. military has been regaining the strategic upper hand.

Last October Lowry wrote about "What Went Wrong". His current article in National Review (subscription required to view the full article) is "What Went Right". And despite what you may hear from the msm, much has gone right.

No doubt much went wrong at first. In retrospect, it almost seems obvious that this should have been the case. When one thinks back on most American wars, from the Revolution to the Civil War (from the North's perspective) to World War II, they all follow the same pattern; initial mishaps if not diasasters, incorrect assuptions, American rethinking, and finally we get our act together and utterly defeat our enemy.

The Strategy of Public Works

We had to change our strategy:

The U.S. strategy became to use every instrument of power at our disposal (military, political, economic, etc.) to drive a wedge between the Sunni fence-sitters and the irredeemable elements of the insurgency — the criminals, the various Islamists, and the FREs. Attempts would be made to engage the Sunnis, while the other forces would be captured or killed. The strategy involved four main lines of operation — security, governance, basic services, and the economy — all of which complemented each other and had the goal of creating a legitimate Iraqi government that could look after its own security.

It was a blending of carrot and stick. There are two ways to try to keep someone from taking $200 to attack Americans: “You can raise the cost to someone of planting an IED [an Improvised Explosive Device] by making it more likely you will kill him, but also by providing alternatives that make him less likely to want to take the risk in the first place,” says an administration official. Or as an officer in Iraq puts it, “You can’t kill or capture everybody.”

That’s why infrastructure projects and other economic-development measures are so important.

Our troops became the equivalent to FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps, employing Iraqis in thousands of public works projects.

The Turning Point

The most important thing we did was to move from "occupation" to "liberation". No matter how we saw it, many Iraqis saw us as an occupation force. Many around the world shared this view, no matter what the reality. The result was that we faced a propaganda nightmare of lies and misinformation. But whatever the truth, people act on their perceptions.

Thus we had to disband the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and hand real power over to an Iraqi government. Elections had to be held as soon as possible no matter the danger. The Pentagon, to it's credit, had wanted to do this all along. It had been held back mainly by State.

It was handing power to Allawi, then, that was the turning point. It allowed Iraqis to fight for something that was their own. The elections consolidated and confirmed this transfer.

Training New Iraqi Forces

In addition, we needed to put more effort into training Iraqi police and military forces.

The police needed more military-style preparation. “We had built it on a Western, police-force-in-a-democracy model,” says a top officer in Iraq. The training now emphasizes survival skills, force protection, IED-detection, and the use of AK-47s. More emphasis has been placed on the training of units. “Individual police are important, but they can’t stand up to insurgents,” says the officer, who invokes as a model the special carabinieri units that took down the mafia in Sicily.

The End of Sanctuaries

During the Vietnam War the enemy had many sanctuaries; Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam itself. We had allowed Fallujah to become such a sanctuary in Iraq. This had to change.

We learned that you can't fight a war on a "start and stop" basis. If you're going to go in, you have to finish the job. Start-and-stop simply gives the enemy confidence that you don't have the will to win.

This time, Iraqi forces did much better. We used them to take down sensitive targets, such as Mosques and hospitals.

Our forces performed brilliantly

The performance of the U.S. forces was spectacular. Marines got shot and kept on fighting. When the battle ended, there was a rash of reports of previously ignored wounds. “Headquarters asked, ‘Why are you reporting 35 wounded so late?’” says Natonski. “We were reporting them so late because these kids didn’t report it when they were wounded. The Corpsmen bandaged themselves up and stayed in the fight. The Marines at Iwo Jima, Chosin Reservoir, and Vietnam set the bar pretty high, and they lived up to the standard.”

The Indicators

All of the indicators, Lowry says, are now moving in our direction:

If the infrastructure and economy leave much to be desired, they have improved over the immediate post-invasion conditions. Iraqi security forces are better. More intelligence is available, both from tips and because Iraqi forces — more attuned to local conditions — are in the fight. Sanctuaries for insurgents have been denied in Iraq’s cities and a little progress has even been made with regard to Syria. (“The resources aren’t flowing as freely from Syria anymore,” an administration official explains. “The people who lead the insurgency are not as comfortable. They are not sleeping in the same places at night.”) Finally, the political process is on track, even if stumbling blocks remain, and it’s not clear whether the balance of Sunni fence-sitters will participate in it.

All of this is encouraging, especially if you have realistic expectations.

Want More?

The latest from StrategyPage (April 25 post)

The terrorists have been losing popular support, as well as angering Iraqis to the point where many Iraqis are no longer afraid to resist the gangs that control many villages and neighborhoods by fear. The terrorists are usually Sunni Arabs who either supported Saddam, or are violently opposed to the idea of the Shia majority running the country. Most Sunni Arabs don't really care who runs the place, as long as it is done with less violence and corruption than Saddam used.

The suspects arrested in the downing of the Bulgarian helicoper a few days ago were turned in by fellow Iraqis, a trend that has been increasing as of late. It may not be that people have allegiance to the new government so much as they are just fed up with violence that is increasingly directed against them.

Thus the terrorists are caught in a quandary; if they attack American or coalition forces they are slaughtered, if they attack Iraqis they lose the support of the population. Revolutionary leaders from Mao to Castro depended on popular support for their success. Some, like the Viet Cong, were able to at least terrorize a politically apathetic population into acquiesence.

Faced with this difficult choice, they are attacking the target of least resistance; unarmed civilians. Unfortunately for them, these attacks are not

...encouraging Iraqis to support the terrorists, or reduce popular support for the government. The Americans are no longer blamed for the bombings, although it's still popular to blame the attacks on Islamic "foreigners."

Good enough for me.

You may be under the impression that the war in Iraq is all a case of U.S. forces sitting around waiting for a bomb to go off (punctuated by the occasional Iraqi raid), rest assured that while

Attacks are still staged, but often they are situations where it amounts to the attackers being ambushed. Such is the case in western Iraq, where American troops set up small bases in areas known to be full of anti-government forces. Soon, the local terrorists will stage attacks, which inevitably fail, with heavy terrorist casualties. The terrorists never seem to catch on to how many disadvantages they have. The Americans have extensive intelligence resources (especially electronic eavesdropping), night vision equipment and disciplined troops manning camp defenses.

Editor's Note

As you can see some of the typefonts in the quotations don't look right. As those of you who use Blogger know, sometimes when you cut-and-paste it doesn't come out right. I tried resetting the size and font to only partial success.

I am currently in the process of moving to another hosting provider and using Moveable Type, but it will take time.

Thank you

Terror in the Skies Update and The James Woods Encounter

2005-04-26T09:45:00.000-05:00

Last July (here, here here and here I wrote about Annie Jacobson, who's experience on Northwest flight 327 was the subject of her much-talked about "Terror in the Skies" article in the Women's Wall Street Journal.

At the time some say that she overreacted. I wondered, but thought it credible. Michelle Malkin, who has done great work keeping air safety in the forefront of her reporting, thinks so also. Joe Scarbough took it seriously enough to report on it on his MSNBC television show.

Jacobson's latest installment on the incident appeared a few days ago in the Women's Wall Street Journal. This one details a visit she got from the Department of Homeland Security, which took the incident a lot more seriously than did Transportation.

Here's what I find fascinating: while one arm of the government (the Federal Air Marshal Service) has vehemently maintained all along that "nothing happened on flight 327," the other, more muscular arm (the Department of Homeland Security) has been conducting a rather large investigation about it. Based on my 4 ½ hour meeting with the agents, I can tell you that not only have they been investigating what did happen during the flight, but they've also been investigating who botched the subsequent investigation as well as how it got botched.

(Hat tip Michelle Malkin).

Thank you, Tom Ridge.

The Homeland Security agents had called her to request an interview (they called her on her cell phone, which is of course an unlisted number. Interesting...) Anyway, four agents flew from their office in Los Angeles to her house in Chicago even though Jacobson had warned them that she was about to give birth so might not be available.

The first thing I clarified for the agents was that, prior to my experience on flight 327, I had never heard of a "probe" or a "dry run." For the record, I explained, I had never heard of the James Woods incident either. [In case you're not aware, the actor James Woods flew on an American Airlines flight from Boston to Los Angeles one month prior to 9/11. Alarmed by the behavior of a group of four Middle Eastern men, Woods summoned the pilot and told him that he was "concerned the men were going to hijack the plane." A report was filed with the FAA on Woods' behalf but, tragically, no one followed up with Woods or the men. A few days after 9/11, several federal agents showed up in Woods' kitchen. Woods can't talk about what was said -- he believes his testimony will be used in the trial of the supposed 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui-- but, in an interview with Bill O'Reilly, Woods revealed that his flight "was a rehearsal [for 9/11] with four men."]
Standing in my kitchen, one of the agents said, "What I can tell you is this: Mohammed Atta

was one of the passengers on that flight with James Woods." (Apparently, this information has never been made public.) With that, the agent pulled out his chair, opened his notebook and started in with his questions for me (at which point the other three agents opened up their notepads almost simultaneously).

You have got to read the whole thing.

The New Yorker also wrote a story on the James Woods incident by Seymore Hersh. Since I don't generally trust Hersh you'll have to take it for what it's worth.

This is also another reason why I don't trust Snopes, a so-called "rumor investigating" website. Their bias on the matter shows plainly in their "investigation." Over the past few months I've seen lefties quote them in attempts to say that something or another "has been debunked by snopes". But even a cursory reading of many snopes articles reveals shoddy research and an obvious bias.

Far from being an "urban legend", as snopes would have us believe, the case is not at all closed:

The agents who sat with me all morning going over the events of flight 327 seemed sincerely committed to getting to the bottom of what happened on that flight. It seemed obvious that they believe something happened. Was it a probe? A dry run? A training exercise or an intelligence gathering mission? My sense is that the jury's still out on a hard and fast answer. But flight 327 was far from a situation involving 13 hapless Syrian musicians and a case of bad behavior.

Don't let your guard down.

Prayers for Laura

2005-04-26T09:39:00.000-05:00

Radio talk show host Laura Ingraham has announced that she has breast cancer. From her website:

You know I hate Drama Kings or Queens, but I am asking for your prayers today and for the forseeable future. On Friday afternoon, I learned that I have joined the ever-growing group of American women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer. As so many breast cancer patients will tell you, it all came as a total shock. I am blessed to be surrounded by people who love me--my family, a wonderful fiance (if he thinks he's going to get out of marrying me because of this little blib, he's sadly mistaken!), my friends, and my church. I am absolutely blown away by how helpful and kind everyone has been--including total strangers who have experienced the same rollercoaster of emotions. The sisterhood of breast cancer survivors is inspiring. I am truly blessed. On Tuesday I will have an operation and within a few days will know more about the future. I am hopeful for a bright future and a "normal" life (well, scratch the "normal" part). Anyway, people have gone through much worse, and I know I'll obliterate this. I am thanking you in advance for your prayers. You are my family. And remember, I'll be back sooner than you think

My prayers and thoughts are with her for a speedy recovery.

Iran Liberty Walk

2005-04-25T20:31:00.000-05:00

Iran is going to get the bomb unless the United States takes drastic action, action that we know we are not going to take.

Some Iranian expatriates want freedom for their homeland and want to warn us of the consequences of letting Iran get the bomb. The Iran Freedom Foundation is one of those organizations. They are " made up of American and Iranian scholars, professionals, philanthropists and human rights advocates who have joined together to support the rights of the Iranian people."

Iran Liberty Walk

Dr Jerone Corsi, author of Atomic Iran: How the Terrorist Regime Bought the Bomb and American Politicians, is organizing a march from the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia to Washington DC beginning May 16.

Designed to help bring peaceful change in Iran, "The Iran Liberty Walk" will begin at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. The walk will be broadcast into Iran via radio, television, and the Internet, featuring live coverage and interviews with those participating in the event. It is estimated that some 40 million Iranians will follow the coverage of "The Iran Liberty Walk."

Corsi, age 58, says the route from Philadelphia to DC is approximately 128 miles and will take two weeks to complete. "I am 58 years old and yet determined to walk the distance. I invite all who share our purpose to join me for as much of the walk as you can."

That "40 million will follow the coverage" seems a bit optimistic to me. Nevertheless, all freedom-loving people should wish him and his followers well. While I do not know much about the group (other than a personal reference, see below), and thus cannot vouch for them, I have read their website through and they appear to be a genuine freedom group.

On a Personal Level

One of the guys I work with is an Iranian expatriot. He and his family escaped just before Khomeini's takeover in 1979. He was kind enough to introduce me to the Iran Freedom Foundation. Over the past year I've had many discussions with him about his country and American policy. He is, as you may imagine, a supporter of President Bush's policy of spreading democracy, and was quite excited by the Inaugural address and State of the Union Speech.

I'll track the march and provide updates in future. In the meantime, check out their website and sign their petition.

Not One Dime

2005-04-23T10:50:00.000-05:00

It's now about 50/50 as to whether John Bolton will be confirmed as ambassador to the United Nations. If he is confirmed, it's a step forward for reform. If he is not confirmed, the ramifications go far beyond the UN.

At this point I have to think that the GOP base is becoming upset at their Senators. As a whole they are simply not standing up for John Bolton. Even worse, they are not forcing the issue on judicial nominations like we hoped they would. "Not one Dime" - no money for the GOP - is a theme I've heard around the Internet. I don't know if contributions have fallen off or not, but I can tell you that I'm a lot more hesitant to respond to GOP fund-raising letters than I was a few months ago. And if we lose on this nomination and on judicial nominations in general, it's going to be a while before the national party gets any money from me.

And now we have Colin Powell coming out against Bolton. From what I read, it's the usual "strategic leak" campaign we've come to expect from him. Sad to say, my opinion of Powell has sunk these past few years. He was a great general, a not-so-good secretary of state, and and now is it going too far to call him a back-stabber? Ugh.

The Democrats, of course, have it all wrong on the United Nations. Their sentimentality for the institution in the face of all of it's scandals is disgusting. Bolton, however, is clear-headed about it and the role of the Secretary General

"... One should not invest excessive hope in any secretary-general. The U.N. Charter describes the secretary-general as the U.N.'s 'chief administrative officer.' He is not the president of the world. He is not a diplomat for all seasons. He is not Mr. Friend of the Earth. And most definitely of all, he is not commander in chief of the World Federalist Army. He is the chief administrative officer. Nothing less than that, to be sure, but, with even greater certainty, nothing more."

This is common sense to me. But, as Mona Charen points out,

Bolton's approach to the United Nations, which was also the approach of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, is anathema to U.S. liberals. During the confirmation hearing, Sen. Barbara Boxer played a tape of Bolton's frank description of the United Nations' top-heavy bureaucracy. "There are 38 floors to the U.N. building in New York. If you lost 10 of them, it wouldn't make a bit of difference," Bolton is heard to say.
Triumphant in her belief that she had caught Bolton out, Boxer declared: "You have nothing but disdain for the United Nations. You can dance around it, you can run away from it, you can put perfume on it, but the bottom line is the bottom line." Sen. Joseph Biden wondered aloud why Bolton even wanted the job.

They just don't get it. At this point any decent person can only but have distain for most of the United Nations. I'm not even going to recite all of the scandals and misdeeds of that institution, as I don't have time. That the left still wants to play nicey-nice shows how blinded by ideology they have become.

As for my side, I'm disappointed in them, and the next week will be telling. We'll see what our money has gotten us. If they don't perform, a google search for "not one dime" is going to bring even more returns than it does now.

The Week

2005-04-22T08:44:00.000-05:00

Apologies for the light blogging this week. Personal matters have intervened and may keep me away from the computer next week also.

If you don't see much new hear please go to my other blog site, Conserva-Puppies, where there's always a lively discussion.

John Bolton

I've read several articles about why the Democrats don't want to confirm him as ambassador to the UN and it all pretty much seems to come down to "he wasn't nice to some of his employees a few times"

It's all last-minute character assassination and we shouldn't stand for it. That RINOs like Voinovich fall for this stuff is deplorable. We need someone like Bolton to whack the scoundrels at the UN over the head and hard. Jeanne Kirkpatrick did it in the early 80's and the left hated her for it. They remember how successful she was and don't want another person like her as ambassador, which is reason enough for me that he should be confirmed.

Tom DeLay

So what exactly is it that he has done wrong? The allegations against him as so "inside the beltway" that you have to think that people around the country have no idea as to what it's all about. In fact, I can't recite them now. I'd have to look them up, which I have neither the time nor inclination to do.

The bottom line is that the Democrats are going after DeLay because he has proven to be an effective leader. They want a head to hand on their wall to go along with Bob Livingston and Newt Gingrich. It's become a tit for tat over the past ten years; first we got their Tom Foley, then they got our Newt Gingrich. We got their Tom Daschle, now they're going after our leader. Well, at least our side has real ideas and an agenda to go along with our headhunting. The Democrats are all "no, no, no" these days.

Pope Benedict XVI

Andrew Sullivan has his panties in a wad over the selection of Cardinal Ratzinger as pope. In fact, liberals in general are apopolectic. This tells me that he was an excellent choice.

I am not a Roman Catholic, so won't comment on theological matters directly. But I have seen what the adoption of leftist politics can do to church membership. As a one-time Presbyterian (PCUSA) I've seen their membership decline by 40% over the past thirty years.

Kofi Annan

Winner of the Chutzpah of the Week award, Annan claims that the Volker Commission's report exonerates him. Thankfully the Bush admistration is saying that Annan's future "is not certain", which is diplospeak for "we're mad as hell at him but can't say it directly." Too bad the Democrats seem to be missing the boat on the UN.

Rice Rocks

Is Condolezza Rice the greatest Secretary of State we've had for a long time or what? Check out these interviews (here and here) with her that Bill Rice posted on his blog over at Dawn's Early Light. Every time I learn more about her I'm the more impressed.

It's not too late...

2005-04-18T11:14:00.000-05:00

...to sign up for the next GOPUSA Issues and Action Conference

Where: Woodbridge Sheraton

When: Saturday May 14

Contact: New Jersey GOP-USA | 212-592-4176 | conference@pwrcevents.com

Long-time readers of this blog will recall that I attended one of these conferences last year when it was held in Washington DC and had a great time. If you're anywhere near the New Jersey area, please consider signing up.

Leftist Assaults on Free Speech

2005-04-18T09:30:00.000-05:00

As anyone who's followed the blogosphere recently knows, there's been a spate of incidents recently in which leftist protesters have thrown pies and other food at conservative speakers.

Is it a big deal? Michelle Malkin thinks so:

Drudge linked last night to a story and video of Pat Buchanan getting attacked by a deranged college student while giving a speech. The assailant doused Buchanan's face completely with salad dressing. He screamed, "Stop the bigotry!"before charging within inches of Buchanan and nearly hitting him in the head with the bottle as well.

If you think this is funny, you are sick. This is madness and it is chilling. Where are all the free-speech defenders when you need them? Too busy defending loons like you-know-who and trying to suppress the free-speech rights of law-abiding citizens.

These physical attacks targeting conservatives on campus and in the public square are getting more frequent. (See Kristol, Coulter, Perle, Harris, and the conservative kid who got kicked by a left-wing nut professor, for starters.) The Left continues to snicker about it. The MSM makes light of it (CBS: "A Dressing-Down For Pat Buchanan"; NPR: "What's a little pie in the face?"). And for the most part, college administrators let the thugs get away with it.
These unhinged moonbats have more thoroughly exposed the great myth of liberal tolerance than any conservative critic could. For that, I suppose we should be grateful.

I've caught a few of her campus lectures on C-SPAN, and can tell you that the left hates her with a vengence. At the ones I've seen the campus police kept the rabble-rousers out of the lecture hall, but you could hear their chants in the background.

Some will say that this is no big deal. What, after all, are a few pies? And if that was all conservatives could point too, I'd agree. But it is really just part of a larger attempt by leftists to prevent conservatives from speaking at all.

This is not something new. In the 1980s conservative speakers were regularly shouted down on college campuses by well-organized leftist mobs.

Two friends, Barbara and Lyn La Cava got to see leftist mobs up close recently at the University of Texas when they went to hear David Horowitz speak. As is the standard practice, Horowitz would make some remarks, after which there would be a question and answer period.

The event was sponsored by the University of Texas Federalist Society. Barbara, a member of the "Middle-aged Moms" provides this description of what she saw on her blog, Quid Nimis:

The group that was apparently organized to disrupt the lecture used three main tactics: holding up aforementioned cheesy signs, shouting and interrupting verbally, and using cell phones and air horns to create noise. At various times some were hustled out by campus security, some left noisily of their own accord ("Some people can't handle the truth") and some put up a fuss so that they had to be handcuffed, which is the pseudo-revolutionary's martyrdom. You get extra points if you manage to wrest your arm away from the cop long enough to hold your fist high and scream, "Power to the peopllllle!!" Such courage, such passion, such fervor. One could almost hear the the plaintive chorus of babushka-ed garment workers singing "Bread and Roses."

Having been to several Horowitz lectures in the past, and this time her and her fellow conservatives were prepared to meet the leftists head on. Lyn La Cava tells us what happened:

There were the usual tedious, hostile rampages posing as questions during the Q & A, but no threat of shutting down the lecture. This time they almost succeeded, as Horowitz rightly refused to talk over persistent cell phone ringing, air horns, shouting and signs. Aggression from the Left is intensifying. This time I wondered if I had erred by sitting front row center, in the line of fire of a pie - or worse. Yet once the rabble attacked, our group stood up against them, adrenaline and outrage trumping anxiety. It was gratifying to toss decorum aside and shout back at these thugs to shut up, go home and grow up. When they shook their fists, we shook ours back. When one charged down the aisle sputtering and shouting, we rose against him yelling “Let Horowitz speak!” among other suggestions. When some acted victimized at being cuffed and led out by police we cried, “Whaa, baby, go home!” At one point the room erupted into a cacophony of yelling from both sides about rights, fascism and free speech.

Apparently she's made enough of an impact on her blog that a few leftists have discovered it and, dispute their description of events in the comments section. I wasn't there, so I can't authoritatively say one way or the other, but I can tell you that over the years I've read so much about situations like these that Barbara and La Cava's descriptions fit perfectly.

And, indeed, a story in the Daily Texan about the lecture backs them up:

Six people, including one juvenile, were arrested Wednesday night after protesting David Horowitz's speech at Townes Hall at the UT School of Law. The Texas Federalist Society hosted the meeting and invited Horowitz, a right-wing advocate and author of the Academic Bill of Rights, to speak.

Opposition groups were holding signs and speaking out during Horowitz's speech on Wednesday, but when they were told to stop speaking, some took out noisemakers to mark their disapproval of the speaker. Three females and three males were arrested and then jailed under charges of disrupting a meeting or procession - a Class B misdemeanor. The subjects were not UT students.

People who can not or will not control themselves deserve to be arrested. The invited speaker deserves to have his or her say. Occasional cheering or booing is fine, but it should not go on long enough to prevent the speaker from continuing. There is always a Q & A period, and this is the time during which dissent should be expressed. Tough and pointed questions are fine, no one has any objections to them.

According to the Daily Texan, two of the students were arrested for using an air horn, and the other four for "verbal utterances" , described as "yelling and arguing with a speaker". Again, this to me is unacceptable behavior and they deserved arrest.

But this is not all the leftists did. Again, the Daily Texan:

"Protesters chose to disrupt Mr. Horowitz's lecture by moving threateningly toward the stage, shouting at the speaker and blowing foghorns and other noise-making devices," Breloff said in a statement.

Melissa Hotze, assistant vice president of events, was sitting in the last row of the auditorium and said she was frustrated that the protesters would not sit down until the question and answer period to voice their opinions.

In other words, they refused to follow the rules and decided that they would act like spoiled brats. That's the nicest thing I can say. The worst is that they're really a bunch of fascists but are too ignorant of history to know it.

Predictably, the left views all this as "an assault on free speech"

A speech about academic freedom turned into a "violation of First Amendment rights," according to Dana Cloud, a member of the International Socialist Organization.
...
"The irony of squelching such a protest with police on a meeting on free speech is the fact that Horowitz is part of a growing trend, the new McCarthyisms - disciplining progressive faculty," Cloud said.

No, Dana, you do not have the right to shout down speakers. You do not have the right to disrupt a lecture. If you want to make a fool of yourself go outside and march around with the stupid signs you leftists usually carry. But when you disrupt speakers, I'm going to cheer when you get arrested.

Update

I have made a few minor corrections in the above text that was brought to my attention by Lyn La Cava.

We also have some commentary on the article in the Daily Texan, provided by Quid Nimis:

The Daily Texan article was apparently written by someone who wasn't there. There is no mention of the VIGOROUS anti-protest group shouting back at the Socialists/Anarchists/Totalitarian-Welcome-Wagon Leftist Frat Boys 'n Girls. Its primary source is a Leftist professor of Communications, Dana Cloud, whom the article quotes at the beginning and end, and, secondarily, the police blotter.

[Note to self : add "Communications" to list of joke majors, along with Education and Sociology.]

Turns out there were a total of six "cuffed martyrs" who got to spend about 18 hours as guests of the police department. None of them were actually students at UT (Surprise!).

Apparently the left imports professional agitators. As I said above, these people use fascist tactics whether they know it or not.

"Discover the Network" works

2005-04-15T08:55:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post, David Horowitz has created a new website called "Discover the Network" which is a database of left-wing groups and people. It is the best single research tool for this that I have found so far.

I used it yesterday in a debate with a leftist on Dr. Sanity's website. The leftist challenged us to name "anti-America, anti-Democracy" academics. I used "Discover the Network" to list several in my reply. He (or she) was taken aback. It was, I admit, quite satisfying.

Horowitz has a new post on his Frontpagemag site in which he debates a leftist professor, who "has concerns" about Discover the Network:

FP: Prof. Timothy Burke and David Horowitz, welcome to the third and final part of our series on DiscoverTheNetwork.org. Prof. Burke, let me begin with you. What is your assessment of DiscoverTheNetwork? And can you kindly also tell us where you personally stand on members of the left who ally themselves with the enemy in our terror war?

Professor) Burke: On DiscoverTheNetwork, some of my objections have already been ably described by my colleagues. Let me mention a few of my greatest concerns.

First, I think the entire project has an almost non-existent sense of what represents a “linkage” between two separate individuals. This is the bread and butter art of intellectual or political history, the major question in the study of social networks. What is minimally needed to claim a serious or substantial connection between two people in terms of ideas they share, institutional projects they are both contributing to, influences they exert on one another? Whether you’re talking about a connection across time (some individual in the past influencing some individual at a later time) or space (some individual in one society or community influencing another), you have to define what you regard as a meaningful connection, stick to that definition, and provide evidence of it.
...

Horowitz: Professor Burke begins with a series of insults – as seems to be the norm for leftists, particularly when discussing issues with conservatives whose work they have not read. But underneath the unearned scorn poured forth in Professor Burke’s first two paragraphs lies an interesting point, in fact the only interesting point that has surfaced in the three conversations so far.

If I could rephrase this point for Professor Burke, it would be that DiscoverTheNetwork doesn’t articulate the rationale for the linkages it makes on the site in a fashion explicit enough to make clear to him and leftists like him what the rationale might be for its construction. (I notice I have received no such critiques of the linkages on DiscoverTheNetwork from conservatives of whatever persuasion. Nor have any liberals for that matter found the categories in the site suspect let alone risible.) In Professor Burke’s view – respectfully rephrased -- DiscoverTheNetwork identifies networks but doesn’t explain why anyone who shares the assumptions and prejudices of the left should take them seriously

Read the whole thing.

Best Non-Council Post

2005-04-15T08:31:00.000-05:00

My post, "War with China: 2008 - 2010" has won the weekly "Best Non-Council Post" over at Watcher of Weasels."

Interestingly, the other post that won was also about China; "China's Time Bomb's" over at The Glittering Eye. Check it out.

Thank you to everyone who read my post and thought it worthy.

Thank you especially to Marvin Hutchins, who submitted my post.

One Year Blogging Anniversary (almost, anyway), and Thoughts on Blogging

2005-04-14T10:00:00.000-05:00

This week's Homespun Bloggers Symposium question comes from patterico:

How has blogging affected your life?

By an accident of timing this question comes almost exactly one year after I started blogging. My first post was April 28, 2004. I started out hoping I would be able to stick with it, which in retrospect should have been the least of my concerns. I've been planning a one-year anniversary post anyway, so I may as well use patterico's question as my lead.

The short answer to patterico's question is that I have become almost completely addicted to it. So much so, in fact, that I am now in the process of moving off of Blogger, a free service to a paid service.

A bit of background

I started blogging with a few objectives in mind:

To help me organize and consolidate my thoughts on the issues of the day
To make me a better writer. For years I've read books by the cartload, and had innumerable discussions with people. But it's one thing to toss an idea around in your head, and quite another to put it down on paper.
I wanted to receive feedback and critique, which in turn would give me an opportunity to reevaluate my ideas.
It forces me to think things through and, hopefully, make sure that my arguments are logical.
Writing makes me a better debater. By that I don't necessarily mean "argue", although sometimes it comes down to that. Rather I've noticed that when engaged in discussion I can explain an idea better now that I've written about it.

All of these objectives have been met and exceeded. But more occured that I did not forsee.

If you're like me then you don't go around talking politics to everyone you meet. Certainly at work, where it seems we spend so much of our lives, I don't talk politics except perhaps with a - very - few trusted associates. And in daily life it's not something that get's discussed much, and when I do it's not in depth. Politics being as divisive as it is, and myself being so passionate about it, the last thing I want to do is to create unnecessary divisions and hard feelings.

Oh sure, there is always the occasional exception. But in general my intellectual experience has been confined to reading books and talking about them only occasionally with a few people.

With my family it's an entirely different matter. We talk politics almost everytime we meet. Everyone is a conservative, so any disagreement is usually over things like "how great a danger is Hillary?" or something like that. We're a pretty loud bunch, with everyone talking at once, kids running around, the whole bit. But we don't get together but once every month or so.

I've Found Them

So I don't talk politics or history with most people, but intellectually I know they're out there. After all, someone else must subscribe to National Review. Someone else must be buying Tom Sowell's books.

Sure, I read the Internet magazines like National Review Online and Frontpagemag. But when you can't really interact with the authors, it's all...distant. I don't want to say it's not real, but it's certainly not personal.

Blogging has allowed this interaction in a way I did not forsee when I started this project. The only blog I read when I started this was Andrew Sullivan and National Review's The Corner. Neither of these post comments, although you can send the author email. The level of interaction between bloggers and other people who simply comment was something that I did not anticipate at all and is the most rewarding part of the entire experience.

Finally, I've been able to meet people who share my beliefs - or most of them anyway - and interact with them in a way that I've long hoped for but was never able to realize. I've "met" some very interesting and smart people, and am much the better for it. I won't list names for fear of exclusion, but you know who you are.

My biggest problem now is finding time to do everything on the Internet that I want to do. I even co-blog on another site, Warm 'n Fuzzy Conserva-Puppies. I've accepted an invitation from Marvin Hutchens to co-author a "Threat Assessment" index in which we rank, track, and provide information about threats to our country.

I'd also be dishonest if I didn't just come right out and say that I'm darn proud of the work that I have done on my site. This thing has grown and changed in ways that I hoped it would and in ways I did not ancipate, but all of it has been good. I know it's not the best writing or analysis out there, but it's more than I've ever done before, and if I may say, some of it is pretty good. So there.

Thank you

Lastly, I want to thank all of you who are reading this now, and those of you who are regular readers. Thank you for stopping by and I hope to see you again.

The Israeli Settlements

2005-04-13T10:35:00.000-05:00

In the news on a periodic basis is the issue of Israeli settlements on two pieces of territory; the West Bank and the Gaza strip. Last week Israeli Prime Minister Sharon met with President Bush on the latter's ranch in Texas, where they discussed these and other issues. Sharon wants to "evacuate" settlers from Gaza, while expanding settlements on the West Bank.

Like everyting else in the Middle East, the technical, social, and historical details are unbelievably complex, but the moral issues are fairly straightforward.

Here is a map of Israel for those folks not completely familiar with the geography. One thing to keep in mind is how small the area concerned is. Look at the scale; one could drive the entire length of Isreal in two or three hours. You can stand on some hills on the West Bank and see the Mediterranian Ocean.

The (very) short version of the history of Israel as regards the settlements is that after the 1948 War of Independence Israel formed borders now known as the "pre-1967 borders". This is the light colored area in the map above.

While the reasons for the 1967, or "Six Day War", are, like everything else in that region of the world, complex, but essentially repeated provocations, including blockade of sea routes by Egypt and Syria convinced Israel that it had no choice but to "pre-empt" the Arabs by attacking first. On the morning of June 5 the Israeli Air Force wiped out first the Egyptian Air Force, then the Syrian Air Force, while they sat on the ground in a "Pearl Harbor" type raid. With the Arab air forces decimated, Israeli ground troops quickly destroyed their enemies.

During this war Israel captured four territories:

1) The West Bank (west bank of the Jordan river) captured from Jordan
2) The Golan Heights (a plateau in south-western Syria bordering Israel) captured from Syria
3) The Gaza Strip (now in west south-western Israel) captured from Egypt
4) The Sinai Desert (marked simply "Egypt" on the map above) captured from Egypt

Of these territorie, Sinai was returned to Egypt as part of the Sadat-Begin peace accords of 1979.

Shortly after occupying the territories the Israelis began to occupy them with civilians.

Again, the short version is that Israel captured these terrorities because their original borders were militarily indefensibe, and two, because some religious Jews cite historical and religious claims to the land. However, some Israelis have moved to the settlements for more mundane and practical reasons, such as tax incentives, cheap housing, etc.

The Settlements are Not the Issue

Today we hear from the Arabs that the settlements are the major obstacle to peace. And, if you read the papers, you can be forgiven for thinking that if only the Israelis would give up their settlements a peace could be quickly worked out. The solution, it is said, is to give the Palestinians a country on the West Bank, and to let (demand, really) that Israel live within it's pre-1967 borders.

This is not true for a number of reasons.

If the settlements are the problem today, then what was the problem before 1967? Terrorism against Israel did not begin with the end of the Six Day War. The PLO, for example was formed in 1964.
If the West Bank is such a perfect home for the Palestinians, why didn't Jordan give them this land as their country when they had the chance (i.e. before 1967)?
The fact is that Israel is willing to negotiate with the Arab countries but with the exception of Egypt and Jordan the Arab countries still refuse to recognize Israel's right to exist.
The Palestinian "right of return" must be abandoned. This is not something that you read about often (if at all) in your daily newspaper but it is one of the most important things that must be resolved. In short, during the 1948 War of Independence, some 800,000 Arabs fled the area (for reasons that are disputed). Today their ancestors demand the right to return to Israel and claim the land they left, or at least to take up Israeli citizenship. One need not be a demographer to see that these ancestors (and anyone could claim to be one as documentation would be impossible to verify) would now number in the tens of millions. They would simply flood Israel with Arabs, and, in the next election, vote the state of Israel out of existance.
In short, if the Arabs had not opposed Israel's right to exist from the beginning, had negotiated a peace, had given the Palestinians a homeland on the West Bank, stopped their terrorism, formed democratic (or at least representative) governments, the present situation could have been entirely avoided.
Further, the Security Fence that Israel is building is not preventing peace as some alledge. It is stopping terrorism, and that is a good thing. My only question is why didn't the Israelis think of it earlier. And I don't care what any "world court" has to say about it.

So "the settlements" per se are not really the issue preventing peace.

The Real Issues

The main issues preventing peace are the following

Lack of Moral Clarity. I've written on this before here. Here are two of the essential elements of moral clarity lacking in some people:

Israel is an imperfect democracy, but it is a democracy. No Arab state is a democracy. This does not mean that Israel may do anything it wishes, but it does mean that we should give them the benefit of the doubt.
Israeli forces practice discrimination in warfare. That is, they only attack military targets. Civilians are sometimes killed as a byproduct, but the civilians are not the target themselves. Arab/Muslim terrorists deliberately target civilians. Why this is hard for some people to understand is beyond me.

Lack of Democracy among the Arab States. Natan Scharansky wrote about this in his excellent book "The Case for Democracy". Simply put, democracies do not fight each other. We in the west are partly responsible for the current state of affairs, since in the past we did not pressure Arab governments to reform.
Palestinian terrorism - until the Arab states and/or the PA put and end to terrorism by organizations such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the others there will be no peace.
The expansion of the settlements should stop. Ok, I know I said earlier that "the settlements per se" are not the problem. And that is true. But it is also true that in my opinion Israel does not need new settlements, and by expanding them they give Palestinian extremists a propaganda message that is useful in recruiting terrorists.

That's my take on the whole issue, or at least all I have time to write for now. I may add to this post later.

Living Wills

2005-04-12T10:03:00.000-05:00

If you think a living will will take care of you in a Terri Schaivo-type situation think again:

For decades, we have deluded ourselves into believing that living wills would solve our caregiving problems; that healthy individuals could provide advance instructions for what to do if they became incompetent; that such a system would ensure that no one is mistreated and that everyone defines the meaning of life

for himself until the very end. But it is now clear that living wills have failed, both practically and morally.

In the March-April 2004 issue of the Hastings Center Report, Angela Fagerlin and Carl E. Schneider survey the social science data, and their conclusions are damning: Most people do not have living wills, despite a very active campaign to promote them; those who do usually provide vague and conflicting instructions; people's opinions often change from experience to experience; and people's instructions are easily influenced by how a given scenario is described. These are not problems that any reform can fix. A person simply can't grasp in the present every medical and moral nuance of his own future case.

In a post a few weeks ago I wrote how James Q Wilson's research led him to conclude much the same thing.

But scholars have shown that we have greatly exaggerated the benefits of living wills. Studies by University of Michigan Professor Carl Schneider and others have shown that living wills rarely make any difference. People with them are likely to get exactly the same treatment as people without them, possibly because doctors and family members ignore the wills. And ignoring them is often the right thing to do because it is virtually impossible to write a living will that anticipates and makes decisions about all of the many, complicated, and hard to foresee illnesses you may face.

Wilson goes on to say that a living will should be backed up with a durable power of attorney. But a durable power of attorney simply transfers responsibility to another person, and it's not clear to me thatthis is a completely satisfactory solution.

I'm not sure what we can do as individuals, but this is an issue that we need to address as a society. The legal needs to catch up with the reality of our current situation.

Bolton's Battle

2005-04-12T09:37:00.000-05:00

The Democrats have now decided that supporting the United Nations is an issue that will lead them back to majority status. As such, John Bolton is anethema and must be opposed at all costs.

This may sound rather curious. After all, aren't we talking about the same UN that is corrupt, anti-democratic, and anti-semetic? Consider this partial list of scandals and misdeeds that I posted last month:

Oil-for-Food ('nuf said there)
Sex Abuse - Peacekeepers in Congo, Somalia, Kosovo, and elsewhere raping and otherwise sexually abusing the very people they are supposed to be protecting
Tsunami Relief - Failure to provide relief to the victims of the recent tsunami, and then attackin the United States for forming a coalition of nations who were successful in bringing aid
Sudan - Failure to stop what is just about genocide in Sudan
A Security Council that will not enforce its own resolutions
A Security Council that passes an ever-increasing number of resolutions to little or no effect on the world scene
Human Rights Commission- They put the worst human rights violators on the planet in on the UN Human Rights commission
UN Committee on Disarmament - Iraq under Saddam was voted chair of the UN Committee on Disarmament
A General Assembly that, in general, is virulently anti-Semitic and shows it in their actions and speech
The World Conference on Racism, held in Durban South Africa 2001, turned into an anti-Semitic and anti-American hate-fest
Kyoto - They promote fatally flawed treaties such as the Kyoto protocol on "global warming", which would have the effect of crippling the US economy
World Court - The promotion of the World Court, whose purpose would be to prosecute Americans and Israelis, while largely ignoring third-world kleptocrats

To top it all off, Kofi Annan, the General Secretary of the UN, shows no sign of taking serious action. His plan for reform is instead a "get rich quick" scheme in which the developing nations would receive money from the developed ones in return for approving security operations.

The situation today is even worse than it was in the 1970's when the excreable Andrew Young was our ambassador to the UN and spent much of his time there apologizing for the United States. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan's appointee, had to clean up his mess. If anything, the next ambassador faces an even bigger task than the one Kirkpatrick had to deal with.

At this point a reasonable person might say that the UN needs a good hard kick in the rear. No more nicey-nice, go-along-get-along, let's-not-say-bad-things-about-each-other.

So what are the Democrats doing? Opposing John Bolton tooth and nail. As Rich Lowry put's it, they're essentially saying "Don't be mean to the United Nations."

And as Lowry further points out, Bolton has been anything but unilateral in his past diplomacy. It's just that he actually looks out for US interests first, something that seems to enrage the left.

Because the Democrats can't find any factual evidence against Bolton, they've taken to decrying his "style". Their entire argument seems to come down to saying that he has not been "respectful" of the UN. Bill Kristol:

...the assault on Bolton has been pathetic. What does it amount to? He's a longtime U.N. skeptic--appropriate, one would think, given the U.N.'s "Zionism is Racism" history during the Cold War, and its ineffectiveness (to be kind) in Rwanda in the '90s and in Sudan in this decade. But he's worse than a skeptic, the critics say: He has been disrespectful of the august body in which he will represent us. Why, he once joked, "The Secretariat Building in New York has 38

stories. If it lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference." Well, truer words were never spoken.

But it's precisely a new style that is needed. Unless the UN kleptocrats are hit over the head they'll never get the message.

If the Democrats want to propose a policy for reforming the UN that is different than the administrations, fine. I would welcome it. But as Kristol says, this is pathetic. John Bolton may or may not be confirmed (although he probably will be), but if the Democrats want to be taken seriously they need to grow up.

Update

In case you haven't gotten your fill of UN corruption, read this piece in today's Washington Post. It's a column by a legal aid worker who went to Sierra Leone in 2003, shortly after Kofi Annan released his "zero tolerance" policy on sexual harassment.

I found abuse of a sexual nature almost every day -- zero compliance with zero tolerance, as one investigator was to write. U.N. leaders had simply not expended any effort beyond lip service to carry out this zero tolerance policy.
In fact, abuse at these camps went beyond sexual violations: Injustices of one sort or another were perpetrated by U.N. missions or their affiliated nongovernmental organizations every day in the camps I visited. Corruption was the norm, in particular the embezzlement of food and funds by NGO officials, which often left camp resources dangerously inadequate. Utterly arbitrary judicial systems in the camps subjected refugees to violent physical punishment or months in prison for trivial offenses -- all at the whim of officials and in the absence of any sort of hearing.

Read the whole thing.

War with China: 2008 - 2010?

2005-04-11T10:00:00.000-05:00

In an earlier post called "The Looming Threat", I wrote that China would likely attack Taiwan sometime "before 2015". In light of better information, I am revising my estimate to say that if there is a war it will occur sometime between 2008 and 2010.

I've changed my time estimate because of two factors; first, additional research has let me to conclude that the military "window of opportunity" for the Chinese will start to close in 2008, and second I have given more thought to the meaning of the 2008 Olympic Games, which will be held in the Chinese capital of Beijing.

I. Why a Chinese Attack?

Many would dismiss a Chinese attack as improbable. The point out that from a logical standpoint, China has no need to occupy or control Taiwan. By attacking China risks throwing their economy into chaos, being isolated on the world stage if not becoming an outright pariah, risking a nuclear escallation, and even if the succeded they would lose the ability to use the issue of Taiwan to whip up popular sentiment at home. And, as the outcome of war is never certain, if they lost it might spark a revolution at home that could topple the leadership. Certainly this is enough to give the pause.

At the same time that we take these objections seriously, we must remember the fallacy of "mirror image" thinking. If we have learned nothing else since 9-11 is should be that others do not share our way of thinking. What we consider logical others see as illogical. Facts we consider important are not even in other people's mental universe. Not everyone else works off of our set of assumptions.

Let us therefore consider reasons why, in light of the above objections, China might still make a move against Taiwan:

Saving Face

The Oriental concept of "face" is very important and something that we often underestimate. The simple fact is that rightly or wrongly the Chinese feel that they were embarrassed by the West in the 18th, 19th, and first half of the 20th century and that they must recover. This is no place to recite Chinese history, but suffice it to say that during this time China was colonialized by foreign powers and her people often treated quite shabbily. The Chinese also believe that they lost several territories during this time and to regain face need to reacquire them.

The "lost territories" are Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The Chinese reacquired Tibet by force in the 1950s and Hong Kong by diplomacy in 1997. Only Taiwan remains, and by all accounts that I have come across they are bound and determined to get it back. For example, I recall an article several years ago by John Derbyshire, writing in National Review, in which he said that the one thing that struck him during a visit to China is that despite disagreement on a variety of issues, all of the Chinese people he spoke with were unanimous in their attitude toward Taiwan: "We want it back."

Isn't it the Economics, Stupid?

The biggest objection that I can find is that a military move on China, even if successful, would result in boycotts and embargoes (and maybe even a blockade) that would cripple their economy. And in normal circumstances this would keep them from attacking. However, as I will show below, there may come a time in which the leadership ignores the danger and starts to believe their own propaganda. In short, they may become overconfident.

II. Why Defend Taiwan?

It is reasonable to ask why we should defend Taiwan in the face of Chinese aggression. Some, like the libertarian Cato Institute, say that we ought to let Taiwan defend itself. This is not the place for a full treatment of Taiwan's own actions and drift towards declaring independence, so suffice it to say that I believe that we ought to defend Taiwan for the following reasons:

We have obligated ourselves to help defend the island democracy with the Taiwan Relations Act (1979). American presidents, including President Bush, have given their word that we would help to defend Taiwan. We must be good to our word or need to abrogate the treaty and speak clearly that we will not come to Taiwan's aid.

The government of Taiwan ("Republic of China") is now a democracy. We should defend democracies against tyrannies. Even when Taiwan was ruled by the authoritarian Kuomintang, it was still better than the Communists on the mainland, thus worth defending under the concept of comparative justice.

Defense of Taiwan easily meets the requirements of Just War Theory.

Taiwan will not sit still and let us do all of the fighting. They will, in fact, end up doing most of the fighting and dying. It is often forgotten, for example, that during the Korean War the South Koreans suffered more casualties than did Americans.

III. The Preparation

We are currently seeing signs that the Chinese are preparing to make a move. The preparation falls into three categories; the legal, the military, and the morale

The Legal

Last month China's rubber-stamp "National People's Congress" passed an "anti-secession law" authorizing the use of "non-peaceful means" against Taiwan. It was assumed by many analysts that China is setting the legal grounds for action against Taiwan, military or otherwise.

The Military

Under Deng Xiaoping China embarked on a modernization program. One of the "four modernizations" was the military. During the Cold War, the bulk of China's military was oriented towards the Soviet threat. When the USSR dissolved, the military threat went away also. As such, China has been free to move her forces to face new challenges. One of those is retaking Taiwan.

The Chinese are engaged in a crash program to build up their navy, the branch that would have the biggest role in an attack.

Nevertheless, as this Navy War College paper makes clear, the Chinese will not have the ability to stage a "D-Day" style amphibious invasion of Taiwan:

The most dramatic but least feasible PRC threat is an amphibious attack with hundreds of thousands of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops supported by ballistic missile barrages, aircraft, naval forces, and all manner of modified merchant ships. A host of analysts and government reports have poured cold water on this frequently discussed scenario, revealing China’s sea and airlift shortcomings, the numerous force-concentration problems associated with Formosa beach landings, and, not the least, Taiwan’s super-hardened land defenses. Piers Wood and Charles Ferguson, for example, persuasively argue that China lacks not only the amphibious assault ships to bridge the strait with enough firepower and men but also the port capacity to employ hundreds of potentially useful civilian craft.12 Their conclusion was shared by Admiral Dennis Blair, former commander of the U.S. Pacific forces, who not long ago reported that “the PLA is still years away from the capability to take and hold Taiwan.”13
By comparison, a naval blockade could bring Taiwan to its knees with relative ease and minimal international protest. A sustained interruption of key sea lines of communications would be economically disastrous for the Taiwanese economy, which relies heavily on shipping for its lifeblood trade and energy needs, some two-thirds of which are fulfilled by fossil fuel imports.14 Even a temporary closure would likely prove debilitating for the import/export-dependent economy. Shortly prior to Taiwan’s 1996 election, for example, all merchant marine traffic to Taiwan was halted for days after China fired several unarmed DF-15 short-range missiles toward the island’s two largest ports, the closest of them falling approximately twelve miles from land. Traffic into Taiwan’s northern port was similarly blocked the previous year after China lobbed six DF-15s into the strait some eighty-five miles north of the island.1

Most likely, therefore, the Chinese would force Taiwan to negotiate "at missile point" and would come away with favorable terms if not outright annexation. Amphibious invasion or airborne attack is extremely unlikely.

Another Naval War College Paper puts it in starker terms still:

Given the many weaknesses of the PLA Navy, the U.S. Navy will remain superior to the Chinese fleet for many years to come. That is not the issue. The danger, rather, is the possibility of an expansive, even bellicose, Chinese foreign policy provoking open conflict with a weaker neighboring state. Arms races and exacerbated regional tensions, on the one hand, and an entangling of American armed forces, on the other, are opposite evils to be avoided. However, the Chinese navy has markedly improved in capabilities and is clearly aiming for a blue-water capacity. It has already developed an "active defense and inshore warfare" strategy commensurate with its improving ability to deal with limited wars and regional conflicts, at the same time as the U.S. Navy is concentrating on the world's littorals in support of its own new maritime strategy. The U.S. Navy's recent white papers ". . . From the Sea" and "Forward . . . from the Sea" have changed its focus to operations near land. There is irony in the fact that while the U.S. Navy is slowly shifting away from its sea control mission, the PLA Navy is actively pursuing command of the regional waters.

Window of Opportunity

According to the authors of the first Naval War College paper cited above, the Chinese will have a "window of opportunity" that will begin to close in or around 2010:

PRC - People's Republic of China. The official name of Communist China. Typically called just "China"
PLA - People's Liberation Army. All branches of the military are referred to as the "PRC" as in "PLA Navy" or "PLA Air Force"
ROC - Republic of China. The official name for the government of Taiwan, on the island of Formosa.

...China’s military power will peak relative to that of Taiwan and the regional forces of the United States sometime between 2005 and 2008. In this window, improved naval and air capabilities—including ballistic and cruise missiles—will give China its best chance to effect Taiwan’s acquiescence. After 2008, Taiwan’s expected defensive gains and the seemingly exponential military advances of the United States will preclude a successful attack on the island.

For a full discussion of the military details see the two papers cited above.

Barring a major technological surprise, espionage action, or plain bad luck on our part, the US Navy will be able to successfully defeat the PLA Navy and Air Force, even during the "window of opportunity." We will suffer losses, perhaps serious.

But as the author of the NWC paper above stated, the question is speed; can the United States get enough forces into the area fast enough, and defeat the Chinese fast enough, before Taiwan is forced to capitulate?

The Nuclear Wildcard

One cannot discuss war between the United States and China without discussing nuclear weapons. Indeed, some have used the threat of escalation as a reason why China would not attack. This may well be so. But it also may be an example of the "mirror image" thinking that we need to avoid.

During the Cold War we adopted the theory of MAD, or Mutual Assured Destruction. MAD said that neither side would dare to attack the other because both would end up destroyed. But while the Soviets gave lip service to this theory, a review of their internal literature showed that they did not necessarily buy into it. They conducted war games with the express intent of finding a way to fight and win a nuclear war.

So it may be with China. Not that they would want to fight such a war, but they may well believe that they can "absorb" losses better than we could. During the 1950s, when the Soviets and Chinese were still on somewhat friendly terms, the former "...professed not to fear nuclear war because they did understand the force of nuclear weapons, but the believed they could afford to lose a few hundred million of their people, people being the one thing they had in abundance." (Operation Solo, p 94). Although the days of Mao's rule are long gone, his government is still in place.

Lastly, there is the October 2000 testimony by Senator Jon Kyle that in 1995 "...General Xiong Guangkai warned a visiting U.S. official that China could use military force to prevent Taiwan's gaining independence without fear of U.S. intervention because American leaders `care more about Los Angeles than they do about Taiwan.' An editorial in a military-owned newspaper this March was more blunt, warning that, `The United States will not sacrifice 200 million Americans for 20 million Taiwanese.'"

IV. The Olympics

The 2008 Olympics will be held in Beijing. Although it is a matter of national pride for any country to host the Olympic games, it assumes special importance for totalitarian regimes. One will recall that the Soviets felt more hurt by our boycott of the 1980 games than we did by their boycott of the 1984 games in Los Angeles. Likewise, the Chinese will place great importance on putting forth the best front during the games. The entire thing is a chance for them to showcase their "national greatness" and to show the world that they are not "backward".

If China makes a military move against Taiwan before the games they risk a boycott by large numbers of countries, regardless of how the war turns out. The US would certainly boycott, and would put great pressure on other countries to do likewise. Even if most countries attended despite US pressure, the games would be forever marred. Given the importance the Chinese put on "face", I cannot believe that they would allow this to happen.

I therefore do not believe that China would attack Taiwan before the 2008 games. Given the military "window of opportunity" cited above, I do not think that they can wait much after 2008 either. This leads me to the conclusion that if they move it will be between 2008 and 2010.

The Propaganda

Discussion of the Olympics leads to another observation, one about the importance of setting the stage for an attack; the importance of propaganda. China will not only use the Olympics to make themselves look good, they will use the occasion to remind us of how Taiwan should be part of the PRC. Unfortunately, there will be all too many Western journalists who will lay their critical faculties aside during the games.

The Hitler Analogy

The 1936 Olympic games were held in Berlin, Germany. Hitler saw them as an occasion to showcase his regime, which is exactly what he did. Although many Americans believe that runner Jesse Owens spoiled Hitler's plans, the fact is that is not so. Although the story of Owens winning a gold medal and Hitler refusing to shake hands with him is literally true, it was not seen as important at the time. The story did not gain prominence until the 1950s, when the civil rights movement picked up in the United States. Rather, the Olympics were seen at the time as a huge propaganda victory for Nazi Germany.

The benefit to Germany of a successful Olympics was that it raised their "self esteem" and made them feel that they could, in fact, conquer the world, or at least the European part of it. This, of course, is precisely what they set out to do.

V. The Allies

The United States had two allies in the region, Japan and South Korea. We can most likely count on the former to help us, but assistance from the latter will probably not be forthcoming.

The Japanese have shown great interest in recent years in missile defense. They are extremely worried about both China and North Korea. Their military is larger than I think is commonly believed, a fact well-known by the Chinese. Politically, they have shown the will to "step out" beyond their traditional post-World War II military isolation, sending troops to Iraq, for example.

South Korea has moved in the opposite direction. With the ageing of the Korean War generation, the youth do not feel beholden by past American sacrifices. Anti-American demonstrations have become more and more common in recent years. The South Korean government's "Sunshine Policy" towards the North is often at odds with US goals. They will likely not risk antagonizing China by aiding the US during a war.

VI. Summary and Conclusion

Here are the main points made in this paper:

The Chinese want to incorporate Taiwan into their country, and will do so by force if they believe they can be successful.
The United States should come to the aid of Taiwan in the event of a crisis
Chinese military action, if it occurs, will come by way of blockade and threat of missile attack, not by traditional amphibious or airborne attack.
The United States will be able to defeat the PLA forces, but perhaps not in time to prevent Taiwanese capitulation.
If the Chinese decide to take military action, it will occur sometime shortly after the 2008 Olympics.
The United States will have the assistance of Japan but not South Korea

In conclusion, the best way to prevent a war is to take the following steps:

State clearly and unambiguously that we will defend Taiwan if the Chinese attack.
Maintain a high level of military preparedness in the western Pacific region.
Conduct regular military exercises in the western Pacific region.
Sell Taiwan advanced weaponry, but with an eye towards not unnecessarily provoking the Chinese.
Encourage, even demand, that the Taiwanese not declare their independence. To do so would be unnecessary and might provoke Chinese military action.

Update

Be sure to check out By Dawn's Early Light's most recent post on a possible war with Taiwan. While you're there, check out his past articles on the subject too (listed in the sidebar at right). Bill takes on several issues that I have not, including "why the US will create strong alliances with India and continue to strengthen its Japanese and Australian security arrangements to avert a war over Taiwan and wait out for a democratic China."

In my post I argued that China would use the 2008 Olympics to showcase their regime and demoralize Taiwan. In the comments section to a post of his last week I asked Bill about this and he responded:

I think it is more likely that Taiwan will use the Olympics than China. What if Taiwan declares independence a month prior to the Olympics? That makes much more sense than China invading immediately before or after.

I hadn't thought of that, but it makes sense to me too.

Correction

As per Bill Rice's comment, the Taiwanese angle was actually made by Dan.

"Non-Fake, but Inaccurate"

2005-04-07T08:40:00.000-05:00

It turns out that the Schiavo "talking points" memo was not a fake, but was in fact drafted by a GOP staffer. However, it was not the "GOP talking points memo" that so many in the media told us it was.

In the words of Mickey Kaus, it is "Non-Fake, but Inaccurate"; this in Slate, not exactly a bastion of right-wing opinion:

WaPo's Mike Allen reports that the now-famous Schiavo "talking points" memo came from freshman GOP senator Mel Martinez's office. So that mystery is cleared up. The memo wasn't a fake. But Allen doesn't come off looking too good in this latest account. a) The memo was apparently not "distributed to Republican Senators by party leaders," as Allen's initial story, sent out through the Post news service to other papers, reported. It was--at least judging from today's account--handed to one Democratic senator, Tom Harkin, by one freshman Republican senator (who isn't in the party leadership); b) Allen doesn't explain why he told Howie Kurtz he "did not call them talking points or a Republican memo" when he had in fact done just that in the news service draft; c) Even the later, more "carefully worded" account Allen published in the Post itself was apparently wrong. Allen wrote
In a memo distributed only to Republican senators, the Schiavo case was characterized as "a great political issue" ...

This is almost the reverse of what Allen now reports. We know the memo was distributed to at least one Democratic senator. We don't know whether it was distributed to any Republican senator other then the senator whose staffer wrote it (although it's hard to believe it wasn't given to at least some other GOP lawmakers). Allen's story left the now-unsupported impression that Republican senators were conspiratorially reading the memo amongst themselves; d) The whole "memo" fuss, as played up by WaPo and ABC's Linda Douglass, was wildly overdone even if the memo was a GOP leadership document--as if senators never consider what is a good political issue, as if that's a no-no in a democracy.

The whole thing was suspicious from the beginning. You had the fact that the memo wasn't on official letterhead and was rife with spelling errors. It was "unsourced". Yet many seemed to take it for granted that it was an official memo distributed to all Republican Senators. In fact, as the Washington Times has reported, not a single GOP Senator had seen the memo.

Did these people learn nothing from Rathergate? "Trust us" is not acceptable from major news organizations.

And, once again, it took bloggers to set the MSM straight. As Mick Wright puts it

I should note that we would know nothing more about this if not for the blogs. As we find in today’s WaPo story, the Senate investigation had turned up nothing. The media was stonewalling. Little came of individual calls to Senate offices and emails to reporters.

If not for a handful of blogs, a few rightwing pundits and some media watchdogs, the Washington Times probably would not have published their article, in turn putting the pressure back on the Senators and the reporters who first reported on this.

If not for the blogs, we would still be under the impression that GOP party leaders drafted that ridiculous memo and that all the Republican Senators received, read and approved of it.

As I said during Rathergate, what stories over the past thirty or forty years do we "know" to be true that aren't?

Michelle Malkin has a great roundup on the issue, as does Powerline, here and here.

Pray for Peter Jennings

2005-04-07T08:34:00.000-05:00

Peter Jennings, anchor of ABC News "World News Tonight", has been diagnosed with lung cancer . My prayers are with him and his family.

Who's Winning?

2005-04-06T14:03:00.000-05:00

Are we winning the war in Iraq? StrategyPage seems to think so (from a Feb 5 post):

Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States and allies have been hunting down the leadership of al-Qaeda. Among the big fish (the "Board of Directors"), seven are dead and ten are in custody. Four members of the "inner circle" are also in custody. This is 53 percent of the senior leadership for al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden is still at large, along with Ayman al-Zawahiri (the deputy commander of al-Qaeda) and Abu Mohammed al-Masri (the planner of the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania). However, five out of the eight training camp commanders are dead or in custody.

Other statistics of note: Eighteen al-Qaeda financiers are dead or in custody. Among those still at large, though, are two of bin Laden�'s sisters, two of his brothers-in-law, and a Swiss banker by the name of Ahmed Huber. Huber also has extensive connections with neo-Nazis in Europe. The real financial resource for al-Qaeda remains untouched: the dozen or so Saudis who are called the "Golden Chain." All are at large, and all can still provide enough resources for bin Laden to regroup and strike again.

Al-Qaeda's military committee has also been decimated. One is dead (killed by a CIA Predator firing Hellfire missiles), fourteen, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef, have been captured. These include the commanders in Singapore, Java, Southern Europe, and Japan. Several are at large, including the operations chiefs in Kosovo, Tunisia, and Somalia.
...

Short version, al-Qaeda is on the run throughout most of the globe. Even Abu Musab Zarqawi, in charge of all al-Qaeda elements in Iraq, is on the run, as elements of his infrastructure are taken apart. Eight of Zarqawi's top aides are dead. Twenty others have been captured. Zarqawi was unable to disrupt the elections on January 30, a serious loss for the terrorists. Al-Qaeda is still potent, as the attacks in Madrid proved, but they are clearly reacting to the multi-pronged offensive in the United States.

Read the whole thing.

Another Liberal Myth Destroyed

2005-04-06T12:37:00.000-05:00

The left can't make up their mind about President Bush. On the one hand he's a moron, on the other an evil genius. It doesn't make sense, but that never seems to matter.

One of their favorite myths is that Bush is controlled by the evil neo-cons, primary among them Vice-President Cheney. People who are in the know, like General Tommy Franks, have said otherwise, but myths die hard.

The Wall Street Journal describes how this myth has been totally destroyed;

The Robb-Silberman panel does the enormous service of exposing all of this as both false regarding Iraq, and dangerous if it colors the future. The problem in Iraq wasn't some rogue Pentagon intelligence operation that ran roughshod over the CIA and DIA. Far from it, the problem was a "climate of conformity" across the entire intelligence community that firmly believed that Saddam still had WMD. Instead of disagreement, there was almost no internal intelligence debate at all. Everybody believed Saddam had WMD.

Including, of course, Secretary of State Colin Powell. Before he made his famous presentation to the UN in February of 2003 he demanded that the CIA "scrub" it's intelligence findings so that he could be absolutely sure that what he was telling the world was the unvarnished truth. Unfortunately, doubts about that intelligence never made it to the secretary.

This and other errors "stem from poor tradecraft and poor management" within the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community, the report adds. But "the Commission found no evidence of political pressure" to alter intelligence findings. "Analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter their analytical judgments," the panelists unanimously say.

These conclusions are all terribly inconvenient to those antiwar critics who are still promoting the Dick-Cheney-as-Rasputin fable of Iraq. And, incredibly, their response has been to imply that the Robb-Silberman panel is also in on this Big Con. A few open-minded liberals are even suggesting that no one should bother to read the report, which we suppose makes it easier to keep believing in the Grassy Knoll.

Chuck Robb is a former United States Senator from Virginia, and the left will have a hard time portraying him as a dupe. Those who insist on seeing the panel's report as a con simply expose themselves as farther and farther divorced from reality.

How did we get the intelligence so wrong?

One reason it overestimated Saddam's WMD capability in 2002-03 is because its analysts recalled how they had underestimated how far along his nuclear-weapons program had been in 1991. The agency was also surprised to discover, after the fall of the Taliban, how much progress al Qaeda had made toward gaining biological weapons in Afghanistan. Regarding both Iran and North Korea, it still knows disturbingly little.

From what I understand, the reason why our intelligence is so poor in these areas is that for the past thirty or forty years we have stressed technical methods of gathering information over human means. There were several reasons for this.

One is simply that we are very good at technology. Putting our resources into technology plays to our strength. One of the tenants of warfare is that you don't hit the enemy where they are strong (preventing infiltration) but where they are weak (technology). Asymetrical warfare works both ways.

A second reason is that much of what we needed to know during the Cold War years could be gathered more easily by technical means than with human means. We needed to count "things" like missiles, ships, tanks, and the like, and keep track of where they were. The Soviets used the same type of communications systems we did (radio and cable) so in a sense we were intercepting what we did ourselves.

A third reason is that the CIA abused their trust during the 1950s and 60s. They engaged in many practices that were questionable at best, seeming to think they were a law unto themselves. During 1975 and 1976 Senator Frank Church led the investigations that exposed wrongdoing by the CIA and FBI. Unfortunately, his recommendations went too far, and the agency ended up hobbled in it's ability to collect needed information. It was a classic case of the pendulum swinging too far in either direction.

The fourth reason is that no administration since has had the fortitude or foresight to challenge our reliance on technology and to insist that better human intelligence was needed. Hindsight is 20/20, and one can easily understand that for a president to try and change things would have led to a great outcry from the left.

The WSJ editorial sums up by saying that "The lesson of the Robb-Silberman report is that, in a world of terrorists eager to acquire WMD, political leaders have a duty to second-guess intellitgence". True enough, but they don't go far enough. We need to change our attitudes toward intelligence gathering, and emphasise human means. This has been the recommendation of other reports and investigations, and needs to be given priority.

Expanded and Recategorized "Best of"

2005-04-05T10:21:00.000-05:00

I reorganized the "Best of" section at right this morning. It's not quite finished yet but I'm getting there. The link is in the right hand column, check it out.

Book Review - "Commies", by Ronald Radosh

2005-04-04T09:10:00.000-05:00

Some of the most revealing insights into the minds of true communists can be had by reading the testimonials of those who once believed but have had "second thoughts." "Witness", Whittaker Chambers autobiography, is perhaps the best-known of this genre. It set the standard by which all others are measured. Although not at that level, "Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left, and the Leftover Left" (2001), by Ronald Radosh, makes a valuable addition to our knowledge of the communist mindset and is well worth purchasing.

Born a "red diaper baby" in 1937, he grew up surrounded by communists. He went to "commie camp", where he saw guests such as Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger perform. Among campers were the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. It was a matter of faith that the Rosenbergs were innocent victims of American fascist repression.

Radosh adopted the communist viewpoint on all political matters and became an activist at a young age. In college he helped found and write for several far-left publications. He pursued graduate studies, eventually obtaining his PhD and becomming a professor at the Queensborough Community College, part of the City College of New York.

Radosh was a member of the "New Left", which formed during the 1960's. They used this term to distinguish themselves from what they then called the "Old Left", who were the communists of the 1920's and 30's and who's primary allegiance was to the Soviet Union. The New Left had no love for the Soviets, but saw the future of the revolution embodied in states such as Castro's Cuba or North Vietnam. However, like the Old Left, and in keeping with good communist tradition, they saw their main enemies as being those who we today would call "liberals". The problem with liberals is that they wanted to reform the system, not overthrow it.

Radosh was quite active in his opposition to the Vietnam war, joining a group that advocated unilateral American withdrawal. But despite their pacifist rhetoric, their true purposes were quite different: "Our intention was never so much to end the war as to use antiwar sentiment to create a new revolutionary socialist movement at home. David Horowitz, a contemporary of Radosh and today the conservative editor of FrontPageMag.com, wrote much the same thing in his autobiography, "Radical Son".

Three events led to Radosh's break with the left. The first was his wife's experience as a professor in her women's studies department where she was a professor. Allis, his wife, believed like any good liberal that women needed their own studies department. However, while she argued that a conservative as well as a liberal or leftist could be a feminist, her collegues vociferously disagreed. Black lesbian left-wing feminists claimed to be the most oppressed, and demanded that everyone else go along. Those who did not were made to feel guilty.

The second event was a trip to Cuba he took with fellow leftists. They took the standard-government organized sight-seeing tours to hospitals and factories, all designed to make Castro's "workers paradise" look as good as possible. Many or most on the trip accepted what their guide told them, but several others, including Radosh, began to have doubts. As he relates, "over and over on the junket we saw workers accepting dreadful working conditions without any precepible complaints." They went to a psychiatric hospital where homosexuals were kept (imprisoned, really) alongside insane patients. And they could not help but to notice that their trip leader, Sandy Levinson, received extra-special treatment in her hotel room, even to the point of getting daily shipments of otherwise illegal marijuana.

The last straw was the demolishing of the myth that the Rosenbergs were innocent of espionage. This had been an article of faith among leftists. Radosh had bought into the myth, and by his own account it had preoccupied him for most of his life. When Radosh started to reseach the case himself, it was with the avowed intent to prove that they were the victims of a government frame-up. What he found shocked him to the core: that far from being innocent political victims, they were in fact spies for the Soviet Union.

Eventually he published his findings in a book co-authored with Joyce Milton called "The Rosenberg File" (1983). In the book they lay out their findings, which are essentially that although the government did act badly, their trial was not entirely fair, and their lawyer missed many opportunities, their was no doubt as to their actual guilt.

The book provoked a backlash among the left, and Radosh was essentially drummed out of the movement. He held onto some leftist beliefs for several years, initially supporting the Sandinista communists in Nicaragua, for example. Eventually, however, he came to see the truth about them and ended up supporting their overthrow.

Radosh does not make his current political beliefs clear. Unlike David Horowitz, he may not had become a conservative, although he is listed as a columnist for Horowitz' frontpagemag.com

All in all, while not a book of earthshattering insight, it makes a valuable addition to my collection and is recommended reading.

Mark Steyn on Terri Schiavo

2005-04-04T08:48:00.000-05:00

In some of my earlier posts on the issues raised by Terri Schiavo's death, I commented on the trend toward dehumanizing descriptions of those who some want to kill. Michelle Malkin has posted part of a must-read column by Mark Steyn about the case of Robert Wendland. If you found what happened to Terri Schiavo scary, you'll find this one to be an absolute horror story:

Do you remember a fellow called Robert Wendland? No reason why you should. I wrote about him in this space in 1998, and had intended to return to the subject but something else always intervened — usually Bill Clinton’s penis, which loomed large, at least metaphorically, over the entire era. Mr Wendland lived in Stockton, California. He was injured in an automobile accident in 1993 and went into a coma. Under state law, he could have been starved to death at any time had his wife requested the removal of his feeding tube. But Rose Wendland was busy with this and that, as one is, and assumed there was no particular urgency.
Then one day, a year later, Robert woke up. He wasn’t exactly his old self, but he could catch and throw a ball and wheel his chair up and down the hospital corridors, and both activities gave him pleasure. Nevertheless Mrs Wendland decided that she now wished to exercise her right to have him dehydrated to death. Her justification was that, while the actual living Robert — the Robert of the mid-1990s — might enjoy a simple life of ball-catching and chair-rolling, the old Robert — the pre-1993 Robert — would have considered it a crashing bore and would have wanted no part of it.

She nearly got her way. But someone at the hospital tipped off Mr Wendland’s mother and set off a protracted legal struggle in which — despite all the obstacles the California system could throw in her path — the elderly Florence Wendland was eventually successful in preventing her son being put down. He has since died of pneumonia, which is sad: the disabled often fall victim to some opportunist illness they’d have shrugged off in earlier times, as Christopher Reeve did. But that’s still a better fate than to be starved to death by order of the state.

Ouch. Later Steyn discusses the dehumanizing terminology that helped make her death possible:

Many people seem to be unusually anxious to pretend that this judicial murder (Terri Schiavo) is merely a very belated equivalent of a discreet doctor putting a hopeless case out of her misery, or to take refuge in the idea that some magisterial disinterested ‘due process’ is being played out — or as a reader wrote to me the other day: ‘Why are you fundamentalists so clueless? It’s the law, dickbrain. Michael Schiavo isn’t acting for himself; he’s been legally recognised as the person qualified to act for Terri in expressing her wishes based on her own oral declarations.’
Which sounds fine and dandy, until you uncover your ears and a lot of the genteel euphemisms and legalisms and medicalisms — ‘right to die’, ‘guardian ad litem’, ‘PVS’ — start to sound downright Orwellian. PVS means ‘persistent vegetative state’, and because it’s a grand official-sounding term it’s been accepted mostly without question by the mainstream media, even though the probate judge declared Mrs Schiavo in a persistent vegetative state without troubling to visit her and without requiring any of the routine tests, such as an MRI scan. Indeed, her husband hasn’t permitted her to be tested for anything since 1993. Think about that: this woman is being put to death without any serious medical evaluation more recent than 12 years ago.

How did we get to this point, and where are we going?

One consequence of abortion is that, in designating new life as a matter of ‘choice’, it created a culture where it’s now routine to make judgments about which lives are worth it and which aren’t. Down’s Syndrome? Abort. Cleft palate? Abort. Chinese girl? Abort. It’s foolish to think you can raise entire populations — not to mention generations of doctors — to make self-interested judgments about who lives and who doesn’t and expect them to remain confined to three trimesters. The ‘right to choose’ is now being extended beyond the womb: the step from convenience euthanasia to compulsory euthanasia is a short one.

... the Schiavo debate provides a glimpse of the Western world the day after tomorrow — a world of nonagenarian baby boomers who’ve conquered most of the common-or-garden diseases and instead get stricken by freaky protracted colossally expensive chronic illnesses; a world of more and more dependants, with fewer and fewer people to depend on. In Europe, where demographic reality means that in a generation or so all the dependants will be elderly European Christians and most of the fellows they’re dependent on will be young North African or Arab Muslims, the social consensus for government health care is unlikely to survive. Terri Schiavo failed to demonstrate conclusively why she should be permitted by the state to continue living. As Western nations evolve rapidly into the oldest societies in human history, many more of us will be found similarly wanting.

Follow the link from Michelle's site to the Spectator and read the whole thing.

Lined up to Support John Bolton

2005-04-04T08:29:00.000-05:00

Last week some 59 ex-diplomats sent a letter to Senator Lugar opposing John Bolton's appointment as UN ambassador. Among other things, Bolton was criticized for saying that the UN was valuable only when it directly serves the United States.

This week some 64 retired diplomats and government officials sent a letter to Senator Lugar supporting Bolton.

Former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, ex-CIA Director James Woolsey and 64 other retired arms-control specialists and diplomats are lined up in support of John R. Bolton's nomination to be U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

In a letter scheduled to be delivered today to Sen. Richard G. Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, other committee members and congressional leaders, they said the attack on Mr. Bolton is really an attack on President Bush's policies, the Associated Press reports.
...
Bolton supporters said his stance "reflects a clear-eyed necessity of the real limits" of accords with other nations that demand one-sided terms from the United States. They included Max Kampelman and Edward Rowny, arms-control negotiators in the Reagan administration

Last week's letter was usually described as "bipartisan" according to the Weekly Standard's Scrapbook column (as quoted in the Washington Times). Yet that was hardly the case.

Much of the news coverage of the letter inanely treated the group as 'bipartisan,' noting that the former diplomats had 'served in both Democratic and Republican administrations' -- as is true of any Foreign Service officer with a career of normal duration. Which is to say, this fact tells you nothing special about the political views of the diplomats. As it happens, their politics run the gamut from left to farther left, and their letter is thus an ordinary partisan swipe at the nominee of a president they dislike.

Pope John Paul II - an Appreciation

2005-04-01T22:00:00.000-05:00

He is perhaps the last of the giants of the twentieth century. His was an era of greatness, or at least of men and women who achieved great things. With his passing, which appears imminent, we will have lost someone who helped make the world a better place.

Who can not fail but to remember as he took the world by storm twenty-six years ago? We were shocked by the untimely death of his predicessor. When it was announced that Karol Wojtyla, a Pole, would be the next Pope... well, the audacity, the courage, of the Catholics to so directly challenge the Soviets took one's breath away.

Along with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and to a lesser extent Helmut Kohl, he defined an era. We in the United States were coming out of the tragedy of Vietnam and the scandal of Watergate. Carter's "malaise" seemed in full swing. The Soviets were advancing around the globe. Moreover, spirituality was at a low, the radicalism of the '60s having taken their toll. The world was ready for a breath of fresh air.

John Paul II quickly set a new tone. He immediately set out to directly minister to his flock, traveling thousands of miles all over the globe. His message was that he so truely cared about people and their spiritual health. And the people reciprocated, coming to his appearances in droves. He took the world by storm in a manner that even the most popular rock stars could not hope to duplicate.

For several years now we've seen him old and frail, and one's memory stretches to recall how dynamic, how full of energy he was in those early days. He used to go skiing. He made it cool to be Catholic.

Even though I was and am not a Roman Catholic, and even though at the time I did not really know God, I could not help but to be impressed. His message rang true with anyone who was not totally lost.

Stalin once sneered "and how many divisions does the Pope have?" Tyrannies with huge armies and secret police will have their moments on earth. They will wreck their havoc, sometimes far and wide. But in the end it is moral authority that wins men's hearts. And no tyranny, no matter how many divisions it's generals command, could stand up to the moral authority of Pope John Paul II.

Between him, Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl, they brought down the mightiest empire on earth. It was an age of giants, and we are forever in their debt.

If there were any failings in his papacy, it was that he did not adequately address the sex scandals that have plagued the church in the United States. Biographers will have to grapple with this and admonish him as they will. It would take a small mind indeed, however, to condemn him over this one issue. All great people have their moments when they fall down, and in this John Paul is no different. He is, after all, only human.

I mourn his his passing, as it appears imminent, but I celebrate his life.

Terri Schiavo Roundup

2005-04-01T09:00:00.000-05:00

John Leo has a disturbing column on the new field of "bioethics", something that most of us probably didn't even know existed until Terri Schaivo became news.

Instead of the traditional emphasis on the sanctity of life, bioethics began to stress the quality of life, meaning that many damaged humans, young and old, don't qualify for personhood because their lives have lost value. The nonpersons should be allowed to die and in some cases be killed. This explains why so few bioethicists have protested what the state and her husband planned for Terri Schiavo, who is severely damaged, but not in pain or dying, not brain dead, and in no position to protest her own execution on grounds that other people consider it best for her.

I'm going to write more about this in the future, and will try to find out how accurate Leo's description is. If he's even halfway right then we've got a lot of work ahead of us.

Michael Schiavo's lawyer, George Felos, is described as a "ghoul" by Michelle Malkin. From what I read about him, I'd have to agree. He claims close to telepathic powers in determining if someone is "telling" him that they want to die. From his book "Litigation as Spiritual Practice":

Such a deep, dark, silent blue. I stared as far into her eyes as I could, hoping to sense some glimmer of understanding, some hint of awareness. The deeper I dove, the darker became the blue, until the blue became the black of some bottomless lake. "Mrs. Browning, do you want to die ... do you want to die?" I nearly shouted as I continued to peer into her pools of strikingly beautiful but incognizant blue. It felt so eerie. Her eyes were wide open and crystal clear, but instead of the warmth of lucidity, they burned with the ice of expressionlessness

Oookay

James Taranto wonders why so many liberals, who are always talking about how "the strong have a duty to protect the weak" are not as compassionate as they claim to be. Much of it, he says, has to do with abortion politics.

The Editors of National Review write about how the language of death was manipulated by those who, frankly, wanted to see her killed:

And for that to happen, the use of words like "starvation" and "dehydration" would have to be discouraged. Those words might, after all, have reminded us that what was done to Schiavo would be criminal if done to an animal and provoke cries of "torture" and "cruel and unusual punishment" if done to a convicted capital murderer. And "killed," of course, was totally verboten. Schiavo was being "removed from life support," not denied basic sustenance. The phrase "persistent vegetative state" had to be repeated constantly — never mind that basic tests were never performed to establish this diagnosis, and such diagnoses have a very high error rate — and treated as though it meant "brain death."

Like me, they also worry that we've stepped onto a slippery slope;

Next time it will be easier. It always is. The tolerance of early-term abortion made it possible to tolerate partial-birth abortion, and to give advanced thinkers a hearing when they advocate outright infanticide.

Wesley Pruden predicts that before all this is over Terri will seem a footnote.

Morton Kondacke has a balanced, sensitive view. He experienced a similar situation with his wife Millie only last summer.

Linda Chavez intites the medical profession

So, why did the court give so much more deference to Medellin's claims than to Mrs. Schiavo's parents? It's hard to escape the conclusion it is because many people, including the judges who have considered her case, believe Terry Schiavo's disabilities render her no longer fully human. And in this judgment the medical establishment is fully complicit.

The very term used to describe Mrs. Schiavo's condition -- persistent vegetative state -- conjures up images of a subhuman, subanimal life form.

The issues raised by Terri's death aren't going to go away. In an earlier post I wondered if perhaps the pro-life side hadn't overplayed our hand. Perhaps some have. But at this point thoughts are that those who have tried to dehumanize us as we near our end have a lot to answer for, and we are beginnning to expose them.

Just War Series - Proportionality II

2005-04-01T08:50:00.000-05:00

Series:
Just War Theory - Introduction

Recourse To War - jus ad bellum

Conduct In War - jus in bello

Discrimination
Proportionality

This marks the last formal segment of my Just War Series. As it has given me much food for thought, however, I will do at least one more post on whether Just War Theory is adequate for our present day.

"The principle of proportionality with regards to conduct in war "deals not with a whole war but with a single military action in that war. The criterion requires that the good to be achieved by the action be proportionate to the damage done. Again, this means values preserved compared with values sacrificed, not a single cost-accounting of lives and dollars." (all quotes, and much material, Martino, unless otherwise noted).

We assume, of course, that all other criteria of a Just War are met. If one is violated, the entire war becomes unjust.

In Discrimination we said that one may not licitly make attacks in which noncombatants are directly intended to be killed". The question with regards to Proportion is how many civilians may be killed, even accidentally, before the action become illegitimate.

All this may seem macabre and unseemly. "How many we may kill" does make one wince, and properly so. As Herman Kahn said, however, we must not flinch from these issues, for they will arise, whether we like it or not. If we think them through before the war actually begins, at least we will have a dispassionate tool for evaluating our actions in the heat of battle. Unfortunately for me, the War on Terror is well underway, but that is something that cannot be helped. Better late than never.

Sanctuary

Our enemies, not being stupid, know full well our moral qualms. Even since Vietnam they have taken advantage of our desire to keep civilian casualties to a minimum.

The North Vietnamese "deliberately located supply dumps in the middle of populate areas, in some cases simply stacking supplies in the mains streets of villages, confident that under the ground rules imposed on our bombing missions, those sites would not be attacked." And right they were.

As everyone knows, we have a similar situation in Iraq. The terrorists routinely hide in Mosques, and use women and children as shields. They play dead, or pretend to surrender, and then at the last moment reveal weapons and fire at us. Much of the world media advance their cause, deliberately or no, by playing up each and every alleged American violation, however small, while ignoring the blatant violations of the terrorists.

All this raises the question of whether we can or should grant our enemy a sanctuary. As Martino asks, "how many casualties are those supply dumps going to cause our side? Are we obliged to protect enemy civilians to the extent of completely avoiding attacks on enemy weapons, particularly when many of those weapons will be deliberately used in indiscriminate attacks that will kill civilians on our side?" Although written in 1988, Martino's words questions are relevant today.

Giving our enemy a sanctuary is unacceptable. Yet we must not be callous and "hardcore" and simply state that any and all accidental civilian casualties are acceptable. Martino answers his own questions by pointing out that

..providing the enemy with a sanctuary violates the rights of those who will be innocent victims of whatever the enemy places in the sanctuary. At the very least, we must weigh the values lost on our own side by permitting the sanctuary with the values destroyed on the enemy side by denying the sanctuary. Beyond this, however, we must include the values threatened or destroyed on the enemy side by the installation they have placed in the sanctuary. The continued reign of injustice on the enemy side destroys values among the victims of that injustice. Shortened or weakening that reign may well preserve more values than the attack destroys.
...
We can summarize the sanctuary issue by saying that the enemy need not be allowed to protect his weapons and other legitimate military targett with innocent shields. It may well be proportionate to attack an important target that the enemy has located in a densly populated area.

To this we may add lessons learned from our recent experience from Afghanistan and Iraq

Enemy civilians may become our civilians very shortly. In Vietnam, which was at the center of what Martino wrote above, there was little or no possibility that we would occupy North Vietnam. In the War on Terror, the objective is just the opposite with regard to occupy certain enemy nations; we wish to occupy them and reform their nation and government.
Allowing one sanctuary will only lead to the development by the enemy of more and more sanctuaries. We must remember that "the enemy is an animate object that reacts" (Clausewitz, I think).

Exact numbers are therefore not the point, although they must be considered. We must keep in mind that at times the cost in civilians will be too high for traditional attack. As with Discrimination, we may have to accept a higher risk to our own troops in order not to violate Proportionality.

Budget of Values

On the one hand, a "...we have to reject the view that simply concentrating the deaths in one location makes the total disproportionate when the same total would be proportionate if it were distributed widely." In other words, concentration or dispersal of civilian deaths is irrelevant.

On the other hand, "...the total values to be preserved by going to war, the values forming the basis for the jus ad bellum proportion, amount to a budget of values." This is not to imply a precision such as one has in financial accounting. Rather, we must keep in mind that there is a "total budget" available in a war, and we exceed it we risk making the entire war disproportionate.

In other words, "...we may not attack anything and everything of some military value in the enemy nation, simply 'because it's there'". Some people, of course, would have us do just that. We must reject that extreme view.

But there will be individual instances, such as with high value targets, when we may exceed our "budget" for any one operation. For example, in Fallujah, we destroyed a terrorist base, but at great cost to the surrounding infrastructure. American policy-makers reckoned that in this case the cost was worth it. Earlier in the war, we decided not to attack Mullah Sadr as we thought the cost too high. It is important to note that there is not an exact formula, and reasonable people can disagree about individual cases, but we must try to adhere to the general concept.

No Precision

As I have said throughout this series, there is no precise formula to Just War Theory. Reasonable people can and will disagree on interpretations. But the point is to agree on a general framework for discussion.

Proportion Before and During the War

Martino:

In summary, then, the jus ad bellum criterion of proportion says one mustn't go to war unless the values to be preserved by the war exceeded the values to be sacrificed. Within the war, the jus in bello criterion of proportion says that when one takes action against enemy military units or installations, the values sacrificed in the attack must not exceeded the values that would be threatened by the continued existence of the target.

Current Events

United States and coalition actions in Afghanistan met the test of proportionality.

Proportion is not simply revenge, so talk of "they killed 3,000 of our people, we're justified in killing 3,000 of theirs" is out of place. We did not invade Afghanistan to take revenge for September 11. We did it to prevent another one. As such, we were justified in denying our enemy a sanctuary.

In Iraq we have adopted a "budget of values" approach. In Fallujah we "spent" a lot when we staged a full-scale attack on the terrorist army. In other places, such as earlier in Sadr City with Mullah Sadr, we held back our forces, believing that a full-scale attack would cost us more than we would gain. Clearly, if we had wanted to simply subdue Iraq, we could level a lot most of the country. All of the intense criticism directed at US commanders for their alleged failure to deal severely with thorns like Mullah Sadr demonstrate the restraint that we have practiced.

While it has taken some time, the full benefits of our actions in both countries are now beginning to be seen. With the success of the elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are seeing an "Arab Spring" throughout that region of the world. While of course it is too early to draw ultimate conclusions, or to say with certainty as to what the final result will be, one cannot escape the conclusion that the benefits to our invasions have been much greater than we had originally hoped.

That we did not find the WMD that we expected to find changes none of this. Contrary to left-wing conspiracy theorists, all reports indicate that the administration acted in good faith. Given the intelligence reports that they had to work with, the President and his advisors had good reason to believe that Saddam had stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions.

Next up: Summary and Reevaluation of Just War Theory

Terri Passes

2005-03-31T09:56:00.000-05:00

The news has just reported that Terri Schaivo has died. My thoughts and prayers are with her and her family, and that includes her husband.

At this point I urge those of us who wanted to keep Terri alive to temper our words and actions. As I wrote a few days ago, it is important that we not disgrace ourselves by engaging in over-the-top behavior.

Let us use the coming weeks and months to examine the system that caused her death, and the attitudes, morals, and ethics that made it possible. We should try to discover where we are headed as a nation, and whether it is in the right direction.

Another Plus for John Bolton

2005-03-30T11:30:00.000-05:00

Another reason why John Bolton should be our new ambassador to the United Nations are the reasons given for opposing him. Yesterday fifty-eight ex-diplomats sent a letter to Republican Senator Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which they urged Congress to reject his nomination. The diplomats came from both Republican and Democrat administrations, which tells us all we need to know about why we're in our current situation.

Their criticism dwelled primarily on Bolton's stand on issues as the State Department's senior arms control official. They said he had an "exceptional record'' of opposing U.S. efforts to improve national security through arms control.

I'm not sure exactly what this refers to, but I'll tell you that in my opinion pursuing arms control misses the point. The reason why there are conflicts is due to opposing ideologies and ways of thinking, which are brought to the forefront by totalitarian and dicatatorial regimes. The best way to improve national security is to spread democracy. Now, that said, certainly preventing the spread of some weapons is beneficial. But simple pursuit of arms control does not necessarily enhance our national security.

But the former diplomats also chided Bolton for his "insistence that the U.N. is valuable only when it directly serves the United States.''
That view, they said, would not help him negotiate with other diplomats at the United Nations.

Well, good. I don't want him to "negotiate", I want him to clean up the place. The old go-along-get-along-don't-ruffle-feathers attitude is what got us into this situation in the first place. Enough of the old way. We're going from Andrew Young to Jeanne Kirkpatrick here. And just as the left screamed bloody murder when Kirkpatrick went to the UN and gave them hell, they're screaming now.

Further, the problem with the UN directly serving the United States is...?

The letter tells us all we need to know about how we got to our present situation. This is the attitude that allowed so many scandals to fester unseen. This is the attitude that allowed virulent anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism to take hold. One reason why so many hate us is because they do not respect us. We appear weak to them, and weakness breeds contempt. Children respect a teacher who is strict yet fair, while they hold one who doesn't enforce rules in contempt. They may not love us once Bolton is done with them, but by heavens they will respect us.

Tellingly, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, ambassador to the UN under Reagan, did not sign the letter (or at least I can't find that she did. However, I'm sure that if she did her name would have been mentioned in news stories. I am so far unable to find the actual letter on the Internet).

If anyone can find the actual letter please post the links in the comments section. I've searched the usual big-name blogs but can't find anything on it yet.

Disposable When Broken?

2005-03-29T20:52:00.000-05:00

I admit I've never immersed myself in the details of the Terri Schiavo saga. It's not that I don't think they're important, I do. My way of looking at this is to ask where we are and where we're headed.

If some bioethicists have their way, the future's not a pretty sight:

Wesley Smith: Bill, do you think Terri is a person?

Bill Allen: No, I do not. I think having awareness is an essential criterion for personhood. Even minimal awareness would support some criterion of personhood, but I don't think complete absence of awareness does.

Smith explains the implications of his question to the bioethicist:

If you want to know how it became acceptable to remove tube-supplied food and water from people with profound cognitive disabilities, this exchange brings you to the nub of the Schiavo case — the “first principle,” if you will. Bluntly stated, most bioethicists do not believe that membership in the human species accords any of us intrinsic moral worth. Rather, what matters is whether “a being” or “an organism,” or even a machine, is a “person,” a status achieved by having sufficient cognitive capacities. Those who don’t measure up are denigrated as “non-persons.”

Allen’s perspective is in fact relatively conservative within the mainstream bioethics movement. He is apparently willing to accept that “minimal awareness would support some criterion of personhood” — although he doesn’t say that awareness is determinative. Most of his colleagues are not so reticent. To them, it isn’t sentience per se that matters but rather demonstrable rationality. Thus Peter Singer of Princeton argues that unless an organism is self-aware over time, the entity in question is a non-person. The British academic John Harris, the Sir David Alliance professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester, England, has defined a person as “a creature capable of valuing its own existence.”

Today the person in a "persistent vegitative state", tomorow the patient with advanced Alzheimer's.

Wesley Smith: If Terri is not a person, should her organs be procured with consent?

Bill Allen: …Yes, I think there should be consent to harvest her organs, just as we allow people to say what they want done with their assets.

Harvest. As if we were talking about soybeans.

On Sunday Michelle Malkin wrote about how an Associated Press story compared Terri to "Kismet", a robot:

To understand the emotional reaction to the tapes of Terri Schiavo, one need only spend a few minutes with Kismet.

People who spend time with the robot at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab walk away feeling like they've made a new friend. Kismet is nothing but a mechanical head made out of metal and plastic, but it has been cleverly programmed by scientists to mimic human social interactions.

Sit down across from Kismet and it gives you a pleasant smile. Step too close and it jumps back with a startled expression on its face. Introduce yourself and it waits patiently for you to finish talking, then replies with a few syllables of speech that sounds like a higher-pitched version of the language spoken by the teachers in 'Charlie Brown' cartoons.

Kismet is no more conscious than a dishwasher or a microwave oven...

People in persistent vegetative states are no more aware than Kismet, but they retain a handful of primitive reflexes that are naturally misinterpreted as conscious behavior.

When robots break, we discard them. Are we now to do that with people as well?

Reform at the UN - or Replacement?

2005-03-29T11:28:00.000-05:00

The other day in the paper I saw the following story about the United Nations:

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan yesterday called for an international inquiry into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, after an initial U.N. inquiry found that the Lebanese government, intelligence and police services had bungled the criminal investigation.

There may have been a time when I would have applauded this type of action, and believed that such an inquiry might get to the bottom of the matter. After all, the Lebanese police can hardly be expected to issue any report critical of Syria, the likely perpetrator. But those days are long passed.

The scandals and problems at the UN are many, so please excuse me if I miss a few;

Oil-for-Food ('nuf said there)
Peacekeepers in Congo, Somalia, Kosovo, and elsewhere raping and otherwise sexually abusing the very people they are supposed to be protecting
Failure to provide relief to the victims of the recent tsunami, and then attacking the United States for forming a coalition of nations who were successful in bringing aid
Failure to stop what is just about genocide in Sudan
A Security Council that will not enforce it's own resolutions
A Security Council that passes an ever-increasing number of resolutions to little or no effect on the world scene
They put the worst human rights violators on the planet in on the UN Human Rights commission
Iraq under Saddam was voted chair of the UN Committee on Disarmament
A General Assembly that, in general, is virulently anti-Semitic and shows it in their actions and speech
The World Conference on Racism, held in Durban South Africa 2001, turned into an anti-Semitic and anti-American hate-fest
They promote fatally flawed treaties such as the Kyoto protocol on "global warming", which would have the effect of crippling the US economy
The promotion of the World Court, whose purpose would be to prosecute Americans and Israelis, while largely ignoring third-world kleptocrats

Only in the interests of space will I stop here.

The situation has gotten so bad that even Kofi Annan has recognized that something needs to be done. As such, he has issued a 62 page proposal for reform, the text of which can be found here.

The Grand Bargain

According to the Financial Times, (hat tip Belmont Club), what Annan has in mind is a kind of "grand bargain" (the FT article is subscription only, so I'm going on what Wretchard has on his site)

Mr. Annan's officials say the package basically proposes a bargain whereby rich countries help the poor to develop, by promoting the Millennium Development Goals, while poor countries help alleviate rich countries' security concerns. In both cases, Mr Annan says, action must be underpinned by respect for human rights.

Of course this means more money from the United States, Europe, and other developed nations. Don't count on any of them to support this.

And, as Wretchard points out, by "security", Annan means the Security Council. And forget about going around it. From the text of the UN report, Annan says "The task is not to find alternatives to the Security Council as a source of authority, but to make it work better"

Without going into details, Annan proposes increasing the size of the Security Council by adding members from Africa, Asia, and the Americas. He offers two proposals, which vary by the number and term of the new seats, and whether they are permanent or rotating.

This is not a plan for action; it is an attempt to permanently prevent action. With so many competing interests on the Council, gridlock would be enshrined forever.

If would also, of course, have the effect of diluting American power. As it is today, the council would not vote to enforce their own resolutions regarding Iraq.

Even if we buy the notion of a "grand bargain", it is hard to see how and deal would work. Is Annan saying that the underdeveloped nations could attempt to "buy off" their votes each time an Iraq-like situation arose? Does anyone seriously expect such a deal to work?

Perhaps we should back up a moment. What is the purpose of the UN? In another post, Wretchard thinks that the UN can or should fill these rolls:

To set a global agenda that brings the principal concerns of the nations to the forefront. This is the function that the General Assembly is supposed to fulfill;
To keep the peace through the collective action of the Great (a function of the Security Council) and;
To provide essential international services, which nation-states would not provide otherwise, through specialized technical agencies.

Well, maybe. Or, put another way, "in a perfect world, yes." A global institution should do these things. Whether the UN ever will is, at this point I think, open for debate.

Wretchard proposes a electronic "moderated forum", by which I think he means web-based discussion group. Nice idea, but no one will buy it. Honest discussion is the last thing third-world kleptocrats want.

My Analysis and Recommendations

Fundamentals

The basic problem with the United Nations is that all nations are admitted as equals, regardless of their form of government or human rights records. Every country is simply a "member state". The UN is not immoral so much as it is amoral.

It is for this reason that it cannot agree on a simple definition of "terrorism", or for years a resolution remained on it's books equating "Zionism" with "racism". It is also why China, Cuba, Egypt, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Zimbabwe can be on its Human Rights Commission, and why Saddam's Iraq could chair it's commission on disarmament.

The Security Council

We need to forget trying to change the Security Council. The entire purpose of the Security Council is to prevent action. The founders set it up with a balance of power in mind that would prevent the most powerful nations from waging war with it's approval. And given that they had just finished a world war that left 52 million dead, this was hardly an unreasonable goal.

The Cold War may have been marked by stalemate, but it was a stalemate of which Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have approved. I also think that it was a good thing.

The world has now moved beyond the Cold War. Instead of containment, we are now properly trying to encourage and spread freedom throughout parts of the world (Reagan's "rollback" was nothing compared to what is happening today, apologies to the Gipper).

Stalemate is no longer acceptable, if we believe that Security Council authorization is necessary in order for war to be legal and just. One of the most unfortunate consequences of the Gulf War was the notion that only the Security Council can authorize war. Since I can think of no reorganization of that body that would make it act in a more responsible manner, and since I certainly do not accept the idea that only it can authorize war, I propose that we simply ignore it.

Let the left scream. It's what they're best at, anyway.

At this point we need to stop and point out the founders of the UN, most notably FDR, can be forgiven if they foresaw none of this. As I mentioned, their objective was to prevent another world war, and in that they succeeded.

The General Assembly

In the General Assembly all nations have one vote regardless of GDP or population. Fortunately it is also powerless. Nevertheless, it can be quite troublesome, especially when it passes odious resolutions such as the infamous one which equated Zionism with racism.

We cannot do much about this body, and although it is troublesome it is also powerless. My proposal is to let it be.

Peacekeeping

As C aptain Ed has noted, the UN recommendations on ending sex abuse by it's own peacekeeping troops is nothing but a whitewash. The UN "solution" is to simply transfer responsibility to the nations that provide the troops. But this would leave the foxes to guard the henhouse. The problem at the root of the sex-abuse scandal is that the governments whose armies are involved condone, tacitly or otherwise, this type of behavior. Attempts to enforce standards of behavior are not likely to succeed given the nature of these governments.

We therefore need to require that nations who wish to send peacekeeping troops meet minimum standards of democracy and human rights within their own countries. Given that
they see peacekeeping as a moneymaking enterprise (the UN pays them much more per soldier than they cost to support) they will have every incentive to reform. They will squawk loudly at first, and there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but we can succeed if we do not blink.

Financial

I believe that it is impossible to seriously reform the United Nations. I would therefore withdraw as much monetary support as we legally can and then proceed to ignore it.

Our task, then, is to build an alternative institution or institutions. It or they need not even be permanent, but may be ad hoc, that is, designed to meet a present need, and then disbanded when it's goals have been met. This institution(s) would be built around several principles:

Membership is dependent upon having some basic form of representative government
Membership is dependent upon meeting basic human rights standards
Withdrawal from the organization is an option
The organization exists for a specific purpose, and once it has achieved its goal or met its objectives it must disband or reorganize

There are some examples of these types of bodies, already, and I have posted on them before. Two that look promising are:

The Council for a Community of Democracies - founded in 2001, " a leader in the worldwide Community of Democracies, an inclusive transnational movement fostering democracy and cooperation among the world’s democracies and assistance to aspiring democracies in their transition through a new Democracy Transition Center;"
The Proliferation Security Initiative - a global effort that aims to stop shipments of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), their delivery systems, and related materials worldwide. Members of the PSI are Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Spain, the UK and the US.

It is therefore my contention that while the United Nations is incapable of real reform, we are unable to totally extradite ourselves from it. We should therefore ignore it as much as possible, and work to forming alternative organizations.

Overplaying our Hand

2005-03-28T09:31:00.000-05:00

The situation with Terri Schaivo has reached the point where I believe that there are many on the "pro-life" side who are in serious danger of overplaying their hand. By this I mean squandering public sympathy by engaging in over-the-top behavior.

It was tricky enough when the President and Congress got involved. These situations are normally resolved by the family and the courts, and one can understand why some were uncomfortable when the case was taken to their level, however necessary it was.

But the actions of some of the protesters encamped around the hospital show have gone over-the top. From the San Francisco Chronical (hat tip Belmont Club)

For days, a life-size crucifix has been dominating the growing congregation of protesters outside the Woodside Hospice. Streaks of red paint symbolizing blood stained the points of the horizontal arms of the cross. On the top of the vertical arm, where a traditional Catholic crucifix bears the letters "I.N.R.I." -- for the Latin phrase "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews" -- someone had substituted a sign that read "Terri Schiavo." ...

The protesters are comparing Michael Schiavo to Judas, who betrayed Jesus to the Romans. "Betrayed by a kiss: Jesus, Terri," read one handmade poster, apparently alluding to the fact that her husband was the first man Terri Schiavo had ever kissed. "Judas = husband," read another.
Two other posters, hanging side by side from the orange plastic mesh fence that surrounded the protester pen, likened both President Bush and his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea who allowed Christ to be crucified, citing their unwillingness to intervene more than they already have.

You get the point.

To be sure, most of those who want Terri to live are not like these protesters. But just as ANSWER definded the anti-war movement, these people are in danger of defining us. We must not allow that to happen.

People, we need to tone it down. If we overplay our hand this will come back to haunt us.

I'd write more but got a call and need to run into work early today.

All But Over for Terri

2005-03-27T21:00:00.000-05:00

For Terri Schiavo it appears to be but all over.

This should be a difficult case. If Terri had left a "living will" or something indicating her wishes, if her husband wasn't such an miserable human being, and if some on the left weren't saying such mean things, then it would be a tough one. It would be tough to see someone starve to death, alledged "persistive vegitative state" or no. It would be tough to see this happen to someone who was, by heavens, still conscious, and apparently, at least to some degree, aware of her surroundings.

But we don't know her real wishes, her husband is a miserable human, and there are so many contradictions, that I see a miscarriage of justice occuring.

If the husband was a decent upright person, and the family all agreed that the feeding tube should be removed, then we could have a debate on the issue of what to do in these cases. We could disagree but the debate would (hopefully) remain civil. More to the point, we could debate the real issues in these cases without becoming involved with personalities.

A person on death-row would be given more judicial review than Terri is receiving. Where oh where are our great civil libertarians when you really need them?

As I've said before, on the one hand I am disheartened by the multitues who seem to want to see her dead. The utter lack of compassion that some prominent Democrats showed is maddening.

On the other hand, I am heartened by the fact that so many recognize the danger of a drift towards Netherlands-style euthanasia. This case may well be the one that energizes enough people so that we examine this issue thoroughly.

The Slippery Slope

Many on the other side of this issue will dismiss this fear, but I believe it a real one. All to often in the past thirty or so years we've seen the slippery-slope effect, after having been assured by the left that no such thing will happen. A few quick examples:

Abortion - Adocates of legal abortion assured us thirty years ago that it was only for rape and incest, or for the health of the mother. Today, of course, somewhere over 90% of all abortions are because the parent(s) simply did not want a child.
Gay marriage - Twenty or thirty years ago we were told that we should "tolerate" gay people. Ok, society said. Next thing we know we're told that you're a bigot if you don't approve of gay marriage and that the Boy Scouts are one of the worst organizations on earth. And, as a recent incident at Harvard involving Jada Pinkett Smith demonstrated, if gays are allowed to marry, using the "husband" or "wife" word will become as taboo as saying "Christmas break".

Living Wills

We're told that we'd better get a "living will" so that your loved ones will know what you would want done in a similar situation. Yet as Michelle Malkin has discovered, they're not all they're cracked up to be. She links to noted scholar James Q Wilson, who last week wrote that

Some people believe that all of these issues can be resolved if everyone signs a living will that specifies what is to be done to them under various conditions. The living will is supposed to determine unambiguously when a "Do Not Resuscitate" sign should be placed on a patient's hospital chart. Terri Schiavo had not signed a living will. If she had, we would not be facing these issues.

But scholars have shown that we have greatly exaggerated the benefits of living wills. Studies by University of Michigan Professor Carl Schneider and others have shown that living wills rarely make any difference. People with them are likely to get exactly the same treatment as people without them, possibly because doctors and family members ignore the wills. And ignoring them is often the right thing to do because it is virtually impossible to write a living will that anticipates and makes decisions about all of the many, complicated, and hard to foresee illnesses you may face.

He then cites a number of examples that will cause a "living will" to be thrown out of court. A durable power of attorney is more reliable, he says, but here you're not writing out your own wishes, but trusting someone else to make good ones for you.

Judicial Tyranny

I'm just about tired of hearing that "the government shouldn't get involved. As the invaluable Tom Sowell said in a column this week; "Do they think that the judges who authorized this are not the governmen?"

And so it goes. For these people it is perfectly acceptable to have life-and-death decisions made by the courts, but heaven-forbid if representatives elected by the people get involved. Then it's denounced as "politics" and "government interference". I know, this is nothing new. The left likes rule by elites. Me, I take the William F Buckley Jr approach: I'd rather be governed by the first two-hundred people in the phone book.

The Europeans

Of course they don't get it:

The attempts by the Congress and the president to limit the damage done by a judiciary that is unresponsive, elitist, arrogant, dictatorial, self-protecting — something very much like the government of France, come to think of it — looks, to Eric Fottorino, writing in Le Monde, like proof that Bush will do anything, including rushing to the "bedside of an almost-dead person" in a "coma," to cement his relationship with the Bible-thumping, gel-haired, tele-mullahs of the right. To the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the congressional intervention was a drama of "Life, Death and Power" with a grandstanding U.S. president bestirring himself from his Crawford ranch, something the paper claims he'd never do for a crisis or a mere war. In the leftwing Independent, the slow starvation of Terri Schiavo is how the paper's correspondent describes a death with "dignity," something Americans can't get right — no doubt because of what Tony Blair described to the Daily Telegraph as the "unhealthy" American penchant for giving religion a prominent role in election campaigns. For Libération, the whole save-Schiavo spectacle was enough to merit a sneering headline on a piece or two, but nothing more.

Ok, that's it on Terri. For now.

Back to the Magic Kingdom

2005-03-27T20:01:00.000-05:00

While caught up in the tragedy of Terri Schiavo, the War on Terror, the formation of a new government in Iraq, the threat of a war with China, and about a million other news items, let's not forget the nature of the Saudi goverment, and some Britons who deserve justice.

I first wrote about this in May of 2004, and you can find a BBC timeline here, but the short version is that in 2000 Briton James Cottle and six other westerners, who were working in Saudi Arabia, were arrested on trumped-up charges. They were charged with setting off bombs in the Saudi capital as part of a bootlegger ring. After being tortured, they "confessed" on Saudi TV. Eventually they were released, and most have filed suit against Saudi Arabia for damages. The men also allege that their governments did little to help then during their captivity.

The latest in this story, sent to me by Mary Martini, ex-wife of James Cottle and his ceaseless advocate, is that British Foreign Minister Jack Straw had agreed to meet with him to discuss his case. At the last minute, however, the meeting was called off. The meeting had been scheduled for Thursday of last week. Cottle and Martini have been urging Straw to back their case.

Their case has been working it's way through the courts, for more see this October 2004 story.

The Lesson

I said it at the time I wrote first posts on this and I'll say it again: This is the fruit of our long coddling of the Saudi dictatorship. For too long we tolerated their repressive ways as long as they sold us their oil and provided military bases. We should have put them on notice some time ago that they needed to reform. After all, at this point they need us more than we need them. They cannot not sell us oil, while we do not need them for bases - anymore, at least.

To be fair, for a long time western policy makers felt they had no other choice. They remembered all too well the "Arab Oil Embargo of 1972" all too well. Determination to prevent a recurrance drove policy. And, the Saudis did, at times, provide us with valuable military bases (the 2003 invasion of Iraq would have been much harder without them).

But while we should be sympathetic to policy makers of the past, because the public would have screamed bloody murder had the oil spigot been shut off, we must call their actions short-sighted. And one terrible result of that short-sightedness was the horror of torture that James Cottle and the other unjustly accused men were put through. Neither the British nor the American government acted with the urgency and haste that they should have to get those men out of the hands of the Saudi police.

The Saudis are themselves the victims of their own repressive past, and of their own refusal to put a stop to Whahhabi radicalism. They suffered a series of terrorist attacks within their country last year that were only put down with much effort. And many of the jihadists that have come to Iraq are Saudi Arabians (not to mention the 9/11 terrorists).

President Bush has laid out a bold agenda for freedom in the Middle East. Although our efforts are concentrated on Afghanistan and Iraq, we must keep our attention on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Yemeni Journalist Freed!

2005-03-25T09:13:00.000-05:00

I'm a bit late in posting on this but Yemeni journalist Abdul-Karim Al-Khaiwani has been freed and is at home! Congratulations to Jane Novak for her campaign to get him out of prison. (visit her blog for details if you haven't been following this case)

As she reminds us, though, the battle is far from over, as there is still no freedom of the press in Yemen, or indeed in just about any other Arab country other than Iraq (hmm, how'd that happen?)

This is just one battle in a large war, but wars are won one battle at a time. Mark one up for the good guys.

The View from Fallujah

2005-03-25T08:15:00.000-05:00

Sherry at Bittersweet Me has posted a letter from one of our Marines in Iraq. He is headed home, and this is his final letter. He recently spent several days in Fallujah, which was the scene of a large battle last April. The city suffered terrible damage during the battle, yet as the Marine observes,
"... for the battle damage on all sides, the city of Fallujah had more children and a more industrious citizenry than any other I encountered here in Iraq. Almost every house had been re-occupied following the invasion, gutters cleaned of garbage, white flags flying over newly patched garden walls, “Family Inside” written in large letters in both English and Arabic. Marines control access to the city; Marines mediate civic disputes; Marines provide food, water and are protecting those who are repairing city infrastructure; Marines patrol the streets, policing both the citizens of Fallujah and the Iraqi Army who sometimes abuse their authority."
Was it worth it?
As I stood dwarfed by piles of water bottles and phone cable I realized two distinctions. The first is this: as countless millions of dollars are spent, what American citizen can truly point to the cost that this war has had on his quality of living? What a magnificent nation we live in where we can wage so massive an effort without bankrupting our citizenry in the process. The second contrast is our motive: for all the insinuations of imperialism, corporate benefit and hawkish war-mongering, the most dramatic moments I witnessed here revolved around an election not an exploitation. What other nation would spend such sums to give a people so far away self-determination? I am not advocating war. Being so far from home for so long, smelling and seeing the dead and placing Marines in harm’s way are not truly enjoyable experiences. Yet I agree wholeheartedly with the much-criticized statement by General Mattis, it IS fun to wage war against a foe who seeks only his own self-gratification, who tortures, murders and abuses the weak.
Read the whole thing.

The Left Dissected

2005-03-24T11:22:00.000-05:00

David Horowitz is one of my favorite authors. A one-time radical left-wing revolutionary, he is now a conservative. A prolific author, he not only maintains a website, FrontPage Magazine, but is the author of numerous books, including his autobiography Radical Son, Destructive Generation, The Politics of Bad Faith, and Unholy Alliance. The last of these is a must-read, as it deals with the alliance between the radical left and radical Islam.

In today's Washington Times Horowitz describes his newest project, and discusses how the mainstream media routinely refer to radical leftists as simply "liberals."

David Horowitz, a radical turned conservative author and activist, has created a Web site, DiscoverTheNetwork.org, which he describes as "a navigation tool for identifying, mapping and defining the left and its elaborate and extensive political network."

In a telephone interview from his Los Angeles home, Mr. Horowitz discussed the idea for the site:

Question: You distinguish between liberalism and "the left." Why is that distinction important?

Historically, it's very important. ... In the early '70s, Norman Podhoretz, who really qualifies as a liberal, was upset at the way his party under [1972 presidential candidate Sen. George] McGovern was opting out of the Cold War -- much as the Democratic Party today has opted out of the war for freedom in Iraq.

When Podhoretz began saying that Democrats had betrayed the tradition of John Kennedy and Harry Truman, a Marxist named Michael Harrington labeled Podhoretz and those who supported him "neoconservatives" -- that's the origin of the term. The New York Times, The Washington Post and the network news followed suit.

Soon, pro-communist leftists like Angela Davis and Tom Hayden were being referred to as "liberals" by the media, and liberals like Norman Podhoretz and Jeane Kirkpatrick were being referred to as "neoconservatives." ... So, to understand our present situation, I felt you have to try to restore accurate political labels. And that's partly what my new Web site, DiscoverTheNetwork.org, is about.

Q: You have documented the Marxist backgrounds of several leading anti-war groups and individuals. Why do you think the media have routinely ignored these connections?

A: This is the beauty of the site: On one page, you get a list of every major anti-war organization and each listing is a link to a profile of the individual group, and each group is connected to a map icon, which, if you click on it, opens up a diagram that shows all the other groups with radical agendas ... that they are connected to.

The fact that the two major peace organizations, International ANSWER and the Coalition for Peace and Justice, are headed by easily identifiable communists, was known to the mainstream media, specifically the New York Times. Because the New York Times is essentially a fellow-traveling institution of the left, it chose not to mention this fact. ...

Read the whole thing.

Bad News Today

2005-03-24T08:44:00.000-05:00

Is it just me or was the paper filled with far too much bad news today?

Terri Shaivo's Options are Running out

Her family has appealed to the Supreme Court but it's almost certain that they will refuse to hear the case. At this point it's a matter of too little, too late.

The family of Terri Schiavo appealed to the Supreme Court last night after being turned down twice yesterday by a federal appeals court, racing against the clock to save her life.

The Florida state Senate defeated a last-minute bill aimed at preventing Mrs. Schiavo's death by starvation and dehydration.

On the one hand I'm worried about the drift towards Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. On the other hand, I'm heartened that so many people recognize the danger and are doing something about it.

Bush Decries Border Project

Ok, I understand that the president cannot come out and endorse the Minuteman Project. But then I read this:

He (Bush) said he would pressure Congress to further loosen immigration law.

We're headed in the wrong direction, folks. But as Michelle Malkin says, aren't the Minutemen simply Undocumented Border Patrol Agents?

Here's how Mexico responds to the Minuteman Project:

Mexico Accused of Abusing it's Illegals

The State Department says that the Mexican government, angry that a thousand American volunteers will begin an Arizona border vigil next month, consistently violates the rights of illegal immigrants crossing its southern border into Mexico.

Many of the illegals in Mexico, who emigrate from Central and South America, complain of "double dangers" of extortion by Mexican authorities and robbery and killings by organized gangs.

Nice. The Mexican government uses our country as their "safety valve" so that they can avoid making reforms at home. They berate us for every little alleged violation of rights of the illegans who come to our country. But heaven forbid that someone attempt to enter their country. I've also read that the Mexican government is pretty tough towards people who enter their country from the south. No surprise, unfortunately.

UN Plans to Reimburse Discredited Ex-Employee

The United Nations yesterday struggled to explain why it will reimburse about $300,000 in legal fees accrued by Benon Sevan, the discredited former administrator of the U.N. oil-for-food program

Another reason why we need John Bolton at the UN.
________

Sorry, but all this just got me down today.

Moonbats on Parade

2005-03-24T08:29:00.000-05:00

You can find some of the best moonbat photos on the Internet here. (hat tip, DagneyT). Apparently the website is maintained by some guy who lives in the Berkley area and makes a habit of going to the local demonstrations to take photos. I guess if I lived there I'd entertain myself by doing the same. Whoever he is, he's done a great job. Check it out.

Fake Statistics

2005-03-22T13:27:00.000-05:00

Michelle Malkin has an excellent post on "The Myth of Black Soldier's Dying Disproportionately" in Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Iraq War.

We've all heard the claim that black soldiers are frontline fodder in Iraq and are being killed disproportionately.
In fact, as this New York Times op-chart makes clear, the truth is just the opposite. White and Hispanic soliders are overrepresented among military personnel killed in Iraq, whereas African American soldiers are underrepresented. (Blacks account for 18.6 percent of military personnel in Iraq, but account for only 10.9 percent of military personnel killed.)

The same was true in World War II, the Korean War, and the 1991 Gulf War. In Vietnam, sometimes referred to as "a war fought by black men against yellow men on behalf of white men," blacks accounted for 12.5 percent of all combat deaths versus 13.1 percent of the young male adult population of fighting age.

I've heard this before, but it needs repeating every now and then. Kudo's to the New York Times for having the courage to take this issue on.

Check out the article on Vietnam stats, it's well worth reading. Among other things, you'll learn that

The oft-cited "statistic" that one-in-three Vietnam vets suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is not even close to the truth (although PTSD is itself very much real)
Suicide, homelessness, and drug abuse rates for Vietnam vets are about the same as for the rest of the population.
The incarceration rate for Vietnam vets is lower than that for the general population.
Two-third of those who served in Vietnam were volunteers.

Fake Statistics II

Don't believe the crap you read in the liberal-left media about the number of civilians killed in Afghanistan or Iraq. The numbers they cite are mostly false. (hat tip USS Neverdock)

The Johns Hopkins study, published in the British medical journal Lancet, claimed that 100,000 civilians were killed as as result of U.S. and coalition actions in the invasion of Iraq. This is usually used in an attempt to discredit the invasion.

Slate completely debunked this study last October, and Instapundit has more last week. Both Slate and Instupundit get into details on statistical analysis that I am not qualified to comment on, but I can read plain English. And the story in Slate spells it out:

Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you, I'll spell it out in plain English—which, disturbingly, the study never does. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)
This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.

Some reader comments posted on Instapundit:

Are we honestly to believe that twice as many non-combatants have died as a result of the liberation of Iraq as were American combatants in 8 years of VietNam? In a war designed and fought to minimize civilian casualties with things like GPS guided bombs?

Please, you have the power to unleash the internet on this wholesale fabrication with a call to factual arms. This fraud cannot go unchallenged or in 30 days from now, it will simply be cited as irrefutable “fact” that “George Bush killed 100,000 Iraqis.”

and

There's no need to debunk the 100,000 civilian casualty figure being cited so often by war opponents. In progressive circles it's an article of faith that pre-war sanctions killed 5000 Iraqis per month. Cost of the war two years later? 20,000 Iraqi civilians saved! And counting...

Surely civilians have been killed. And, as I said in my post on Discrimination in Just War Theory, we are required to try and protect the lives of civilians. But we don't have to put up with fake statistics.

Terri Schiavo

2005-03-22T12:11:00.001-05:00

Like some other bloggers, I've held off commenting on Terri Schaivo, partially because it's not my type of subject, partially because others have covered it better, and partially due to the constraints of time. It is a compelling story, however, and has captivated the nation for good reasons. It is a story that deserves attention, because it may portent things to come.

Wizbang sums up the Democrats attitudes nicely

Unborn Child? Kill It.

Sick Woman? Kill it.

Convicted Murder on death row? Do every thing you can do to save it!

Just to show how convoluted this has become, the Democrats are claiming "states rights" and that the federal government is overstepping it's authority as reasons why Congress should not get involved. Since when did liberals ever care about either of those?

And where, by the way, are all the disability advocates when we really need them?

As usual Tom Sowell has some penetrating observations:

The fervor of those who want to save Terri Schiavo's life is understandable and should be respected, even by those who disagree. What is harder to understand is the fervor and even venom of those liberals who have gone ballistic -- ostensibly over state's rights, over the Constitutional separation of powers, and even over the sanctity of family decisions.

Ok, enough partisanship. It's always fun to go after liberals and Democrats but I'll hold the line here.

What worries me is the direction that we're headed. We're headed down a path towards a Brave New World, and it's not clear to me that we have a road map. They've already reached the point in The Netherlands where doctors can actively kill patients that they believe are in a terminal state. Sure, there are supposed to be "safeguards", but reports that I recall are that they are routinely ignored.

So let's see where we're at. First we decided to just kill babies in the womb. At the time of Roe v Wade, we were told that abortion was necessary because of rape and incest. Turns out that most abortions today occur because a baby would be an inconvenience to the parents. Then we have the stem-cell debate. We are told not to worry, because only "unviable" stem cells will be used, and "you do want to save lives, don't you?" Well, since we kill people at the start of their lives, why not also do it at the end? Then we can just work our way towards the middle.

One reason why I think the story has generated so much attention is that the husband, Michael Schiavo, is such a disgrace, while Terri's real family, the Schindlers, is so warm and caring.

Now let's stop and I'll lay a few cards on the table. I have a living will with a "do not resusitate" clause in it. And I do not think that people who have truely experienced brain death should be kept alive by artificial means. But that's not what's happening here. Terri Schiavo is not "brain dead." She is not being "allowed to die"; she is being killed. Every member of her family except her husband want to keep her alive. Something is wrong with that.

She may or may not come back to her old self, most but not all medical opinion says no. But it just seems to me, like it does to our president, that we should err on the side of life. Is that too much to ask?

Update

Mark Steyn nails it:

America this Holy Week is following the frenzied efforts to halt the court-enforced starvation of a brain-damaged woman for no reason other than that her continued existence is an inconvenience to her husband. In Britain, two doctors escape prosecution for aborting an otherwise healthy baby with a treatable cleft palate because the authorities are satisfied they acted "in good faith". You can read similar stories in almost any corner of the developed world, except perhaps the Netherlands, where discretionary euthanasia is so advanced it's news if the kid makes it out of the maternity ward. As the New York Times reported the other day: "Babies born into what is certain to be a brief life of grievous suffering should have their lives ended by physicians under strict guidelines, according to two doctors in the Netherlands.
"The doctors, Eduard Verhagen and Pieter J. J. Sauer of the University Medical Center in Groningen, in an essay in today's New England Journal of Medicine, said they had developed guidelines, known as the Groningen protocol."

Ah, the protocols of the elders of science. Odd the way scientists have such little regard for scientific progress. It's highly likely that many birth defects - not just the bilateral cleft lips - will be treatable and correctible in the next decade or two. But once you start weighing the relative values of individual lives, there's no end to it. Much of that derives from the way abortion has redefined life - as a "choice", an option.

"Appointment Gratification"

2005-03-22T12:07:00.000-05:00

Mark Steyn sums up my attitude completely regarding the appointment of John Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations, and Paul Wolfowitz to the World Bank. Check out his column, my thoughts, and the comments of the other puppies in my latest post over at Warm 'n Fuzzy Conserva-Puppies.

Progress In Iraq

2005-03-21T08:33:00.000-05:00

If the New York Times is reporting progress in Iraq, you know things are going well (hat tip Jonah at NRO The Corner):

Nearly two years after American troops captured Baghdad, Haifa Street is like an arrow at the city's heart. A little more than two miles long, it runs south through a canyon of mostly abandoned high-rises and majestic date palms almost to the Assassin's Gate, the imperial-style arch that is the main portal to the Green Zone compound, the principal seat of American power.
...

In the first 18 months of the fighting, the insurgents mostly outmaneuvered the Americans along Haifa Street, showing they could carry the war to the capital's core with something approaching impunity.

But American officers say there have been signs that the tide may be shifting. On Haifa Street, at least, insurgents are attacking in smaller numbers, and with less intensity; mortar attacks into the Green Zone have diminished sharply; major raids have uncovered large weapons caches; and some rebel leaders have been arrested or killed.

American military engineers, frustrated elsewhere by insurgent attacks, are moving ahead along Haifa Street with a $20 million program to improve electricity, sewer and other utilities. So far, none of the work sites have been attacked, although a local Shiite leader who vocally supported the American projects was assassinated on his doorstep in January.

But the change American commanders see as more promising than any other here is the deployment of large numbers of Iraqi troops. American commanders are eager to shift the fighting in Iraq to the country's own troops, allowing American units to pull back from the cities and, eventually, to begin drawing down their 150,000 troops. Haifa Street has become an early test of that strategy.

Read the whole thing.

Petition to free al-Khaiwani

2005-03-19T10:22:00.000-05:00

Jane Novak over at Armies of Liberation has been leading the effort to free imprisoned Yemeni journalist Abdulkarim Al Khaiwani. I'm a bit late helping her out with a post and link, but better late than never.

I'm asking all my readers to visit her site and sign the petition to free this journalist.

Jane is a professional columnist, having had her work appear in both regular newspapers and on-line publications.

She's got so many posts on this issue that I'm not going to link to any specific ones. Just visit her website and scroll down to find them.

Here's a summary of the situation:

Upon a quick trial held during judiciary leave, violating all definite legal texts, and after a rushed interrogation with Al Khawani, accused of press charges, during August 2004, a verdict was issued by the south west Sana’a primary court sentencing Abdul Kareem Al Khaiwani to one year in prison and closure of Al Shoura newspaper for six months. This verdict was issued against the law, and dishonored by the defense committee which filed an appeal immediately after the verdict in September 5th, 2004.a

In the evening of September 5th, Abdul Kareem Al Khaiwani is arrested by authorities in a humiliating and terrorizing way. Al Shoura news paper is closed and its editors were kicked out to the street in a step to access the verdict which could not be reversed till this moment.

Sana’a appeal court prolongs holding its sessions intentionally based on weak justifications aiming to keep Al Khaiwani in prison. It requests Al Khaiwani to court more than once handcuffed accompanying murderers and drug smuggling convicts.

After 5 months of intentional prolongation of procedures, the appeal court holds it first sessions in February 8th, 2005. The judge decides in a quick session without hearing to the defense discussions to suspend the case until verdict is issued in March 1st, 2005.
On that day, the judge postpones the verdict to March 22nd, 2005.

Al Khaiwani was attacked physically 5 times which risked his life and safety. The administration of central prison did not blink about it!

The Yemeni president and government ignores all demands and calls for the release of Al Khaiwani made by local, regional, and international organizations concerned with rights and freedoms.

The newspaper opened files of corruption, inheritance of power, and political reform as well as abuse of public financial resources. The charges against Al Khawani and Al Shura newspaper are “ publishing false topics and news that harm public order and infringes national unity. These topics support Al Huthi’s rebellion against governmental authorities which resulted in the incitement of tribal and sectarian discrimination as well as insulting the president publicly” according to the prosecutors. It is clear that the reason behind his arrest and imprisonment is opening the files of inheritance, abuse of financial resources of the country and political reform.

The political, legal and press media in Yemen is concerned about the severity of the verdict against al Khaiwani and the continuous closure of Al Shoura newspaper under political authoritative pressure and according to personal wishes against the publishing of facts.

In March 5th 2005, it will have been 6 months since the newspaper was first closed. Yet, the prosecutors office refuses to the request for reopening the newspaper’s office and republishing its issues.

Reform Party of Syria

2005-03-19T09:00:00.000-05:00

It may not be widely recognized, but there are freedom movements for just about every country in the Middle East. Note that I don't call them "national liberation" movements, as that smacks of the communist revolutionary movements that moved countries from the frying pan to the fire.

One of the organizations is the Reform Party of Syria. I don't know much about them, and don't have time to do a lot of research other than a quick google search which didn't turn up much. I did find a November 2003 article about them in National Review which leads me to believe that they are genuine and not a front group with some nefarious purpose. You can check out their position papers on their website and decide for yourself, but they look like the real deal to me, by which I mean committed to bringing democracy Syria.

Here's one of their recent press releases:

The Syrian pullout from Lebanon is being portrayed in the Syrian press as a victory. Not only did the Syrian people receive the army with open arms but the media has not been less enthusiastic about the event.
Although the Syrian army has been stationed in Lebanon since 1976, most of its personnel are indeed happy to return home.

In line with such events, the Syrian government has tightened its grip unto the media by closing some of the operations of non-Syrian television stations and forbidding Lebanese newspapers to be distributed in Syria unless they walk the Syrian line.

For yet unknown reasons that is stoking the fires of the rumor mill, Baschar al-Assad has been in Aleppo for sometime. Some believe it is to lead the stifling of any Kurdish uprising and some have said that he has escaped Damascus because of an internal coup carried by Ghazi Kanaan, the minister of Interior. None of this buzz has been verified but the fact that it is taking place is weakening the regime. .

Syrians in general have grown accustomed to life under duress to such an extent that most see the Lebanese situation as stifling further of their own liberties. Their sense is that the Syrian regime will certainly tighten its controls to discourage any uprising. Dissidents feel that the Lebanese momentum is being stifled by two factors: 1) There is no interest by the international community, as of yet, to call for freedom in Syria and, 2) They are afraid if they take matters in their own hands, they will be subjected to atrocities such as the ones seen in Iraq in the early nineties.

A demonstration celebrating March 8, an infamous day in the history of Syria, was met with beatings by student Ba'athists loyal to the regime. Some of the people who demonstrated were Riad al-Turk, the most popular political figure in Syria. Yet, only 100 people showed up and quickly disbursed.

In addition to fear, Syrians are hopeful that events in Lebanon will lead to their freedom. But they are not ready yet to take matters in their own hands unless they know that the international community can and will support their uprising.

I am not scholar enough to verify any of this, but it all sounds plausible. Anyway, we must support organizations that want to bring democracy to Syria and other countries, and the Reform Party of Syria looks like one of them.

"The Naysayers"

2005-03-18T10:30:00.000-05:00

Once again, Victor Davis Hanson has a brilliant article in the latest print edition of National Review (to view it on-line you'll need a subscription). He takes on the whiners, the complainers, the doom-and-gloom crowd, in short, those who say that the War on Terror is lost and that"it can't be done."

What I really like about Hanson is his sense of history. His perspective is not that of the past few years, but that of hundreds or thousands of years. For some, important history began and ended with the Vietnam War. This miopic view prevents one from understanding what is really going on in the world.

To those caught up in the headline of the day, it is easy to see every setback as evidence that we are going to lose and that we better pull back now. Successes seem minimal, and losses are magnified. It is the nature, and indeed the duty, of the press to tell us of what is going wrong. But by concentrating on this we lose our perspective. For if one goes back in history and looks at any war that we have fought from the Revolution on, they are far from glorious stories of victory where we all linked arms and marched off to defeat the enemy. In reality, they are stories of how we engaged in almost endless internal squabbling and bickering, and how our own military made mistake after mistake, often to the very end of the war. Somehow, however, we won.

More importantly, the naysayers of the time are usually forgotten. How many remember that Lincoln was considered certain to lose the election of 1864 due to how poorly the war was going, and only at the end staged a comeback? How many know of the terrible losses at the Chosin Reservoir? Democrats and other naysayers would do well to ponder this aspect of history.

On with Hanson. He reminds us of how the Old Left (their term) blamed the Cold War on the United States, and that their version was taken seriously at the time:

By the late 1940s things on the ground had changed somewhat, and the blame-America-first ideology adjusted accordingly. Now it was the turn of the old Left, which castigated "fascists" for ruining the hallowed American-Soviet wartime alliance by "isolating" and "surrounding" the Russians with hostile bases and allies. The same was supposedly true of Red China: We were told ad nauseam by idealists and "China hands" that Mao really wanted to cultivate American friendship but was spurned by our right-wing ideologues — as if there were nothing of the absolutism and innate thuggery in him that would soon account for 50 million or more of his own people murdered and starved.

Ditto the reactions to the animosity from such dictators as Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro. The Left assured us that both were actually neo-Jeffersonians, whose olive branches were crushed by unimaginative Cold Warriors and who only then went on to plan their gulags. Few seemed to think it natural that a free and powerful America would be hated by fascists and Communists — much less that it should be praised rather than castigated for earning such hatred.

How quickly some forget. More on Hanson's Right Analysis here, in a post where he concentrates on World War II.

Not all, of course, is "ancient history":

We also forget now how the Left warned us of terrible casualties and millions of refugees before the Iraq war, and then went dormant until the insurgents emerged. Then the opposition resurfaced to assure us that Iraq was lost, only to grow quiet again after the Iraqi election and its regional aftershocks — a cycle that followed about the same 20-month timetable of military victory to voting in Afghanistan.

It reminds me of the Gulf War. Recall the predictions of "tens of thousands" of American casualties? We were told how the "hardened Iraqi army" would surely fight us tooth-and-nail over every square inch of land? Peace groups like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace solemnly assured us that we shouldn't invade because if we did surely Saddam would use his WMD against us. Even after weeks of bombing, Bob Woodward assured us that air attacks were not going as well as the Pentagon had claimed.

We saw the same thing during the 2003 invasion of Iraq: The "Battle of Baghdad" that was supposed to be Stalingrad II. We were all assured that this time there would be fierce resistance. On and on it went. But being a peace activist means never having to say you're sorry.

Finally, misguided pessimists claim that the United States is alone in the world. When George W. Bush orchestrated the fall of Saddam Hussein he was said to have alienated everyone, as if our friends in Eastern Europe, Britain, Australia, and India did not matter. Yet the same was said in 1941 when Latin America, Asia, and Africa were in thrall to the Axis. Neutrals wanted little to do with a disarmed United States that had unwisely found itself in a two-front war with the world�s most formidable military powers. Indeed, the June 1941 invasion of Russia was about as multilateral as could be, with Eastern Europeans, Spaniards, Italians, and Finns all joining the invading armies of the Third Reich.

By the 1950s we seemed to have defeated Germany and Japan only to have subsequently lost Eastern Europe, as former defeated fascists became friends once-allied neutrals and Communists turned hostile. Much of Asia and Latin America deified the mass-murdering Stalin and Mao, while deriding elected American presidents. The Richard Clarkes and Joe Wilsons of that age lectured about a paranoid Eisenhower administration, clumsy CIA work, and the general hopelessness of ever defeating global Communism, whose spores sprouted almost everywhere in the form of Nasserism, Pan-Arabism, Baathism, Castroism, and various "national liberation" movements.

"You made Saddam"

Then there's the "the United States created Saddam" line. I see this one with leftie bloggers all of the time. Besides overstating matters to a ridiculous degree, it is both forgetful of history and simple America-bashing. I dealt with the history of America and Saddam in an earlier post called "History Backwards" An excerpt from what I wrote:

In order to understand U.S. policy in the 1980's we need to understand what happened in the late 1970s.

I was in my early college years when the Iranian Hostage Crisis occurred, and this is when I first really started to pay attention to politics. It was not a pretty introduction.

The sense of helplessness that most Americans felt was maddening. Here we were, a superpower, and yet we were unable to get our people back. We had just been through Vietnam and Watergate, with those humiliations fresh on our minds, and now this. Worse yet, our president was telling us that we would have to get used to a lower standard of living here at home.

I remember that my father was working in Washington DC at the time, and he'd tell us stories of the protests in the city: Protests, mind you, by Iranian "students" in support of the hostage takers. The protestors were protected by the police, whose protection they needed full well. The office workers would go out during their lunch break to observe these protests. My dad would tell us of normally calm, unsuitable men who would go ballistic at what they saw.

My point is that the anger towards Iran was intense and deep. We would have supported just about anyone who was willing to oppose the Ayatollah Khomeini and his regime.

More importantly, in the late '70s and early '80s it really did seem like the Iranians would be able to export their revolution to the rest of the area. The idea of the gulf states and Saudi Arabia falling to radical Islam was frightening indeed.

Contrary to what the left would have you believe, no one was under any illusions as to who Saddam was. We knew full well that he was a thoroughly rotten dictator.

The Lesson

We were right to support Iraq when we did, just as we were right to side with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. The threat of the Iranian revolution spreading throughout the region was quite real, and the consequences of it doing so could be devastating to the region and to our economy.

The journalist Christopher Hitchens had a response to those who use the "we created Saddam" line. He said, and I go on memory because I can't find the link: "Assuming for argument's sake that you're right, and we are responsible for Saddam, then isn't it our responsibility to correct the situation and take him out?"

The response he said he gets is "can't we talk about global warming now?"

So let's call it what it is; most of those who use the "the United States created Saddam" line are only out to bash the United States. They hate this country and are engaged in anti-Americanism pure and simple. Don't put up with this line because it's a load of bunk.

The naysayers will always be with us. Some are honest, and some are not. Either way, we must not get caught up in the "headline of the day", but must keep our perspective.

Updates

2005-03-17T11:48:00.000-05:00

No new posts today but I do have some updates to ones I made earlier this week:

Italy Pulls Out

Yesterday I reported that Italy had announced that they would withdraw their troops from Iraq. Today Berlesconi says his remarks were "misinterpreted." I guess we'll find out over the coming months

The Looming Threat

Another blogger posted a story on China with the same title almost the same time that I did. Who says great minds don't think alike? Check out Jordan's post over at The Politicker blog "The Looming Threat".

Why I don't read the Washington Post

Hugh Hewitt reports that Washington Post Managing Editor Philip Bennett says that the Chinese "The People's Daily" misquoted him. I'll take his word for it, and shouldn't have been so quick to believe the ChiCom version. Unfortunately for Mr. Bennett, his correction doesn't really change matters.

Italy Pulls Out

2005-03-16T12:11:00.000-05:00

The biggest story is that Italy has announced that they will pull their troops out of Iraq starting in September.

The war has been unpopular there for some time, and Prime Minister Berlesconi has apparently decided to bow to popular pressure.

Ok, fair enought, I suppose. And if this decision had come at a random time I'd just have the same things to say about them as I did about the Spanish; that is is a cowardly decision. They'll pay for it by having been on the wrong side of history.

But why does it have to seemingly be in response to that whacko communist journalist's lies about the United States? All this does is seeminly lend credence to her insane claim that we "targeted her for assassination"?

My heart goes out to all the Italians who must now be cringing in embarrassment at the actions of their government.

Update 3-17

So are they pulling out or not? Today's story in the Washington Times casts doubt on what was reported yesterday:

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi backtracked yesterday, saying a commitment to begin withdrawing his country's 3,300 troops from Iraq by September was subject to change and could be postponed.

"It was only my hope. ... If it is not possible, it is not possible. The solution should be agreed with the allies," Mr. Berlusconi said after his remarks on Tuesday created consternation in Washington and London.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, whom the Italian leader had named as concurring with his decision to withdraw, insisted in London that Mr. Berlusconi's remarks had been misinterpreted.

"Neither the Italian government or ourselves have set some sort of deadline for withdrawal," Mr. Blair told Parliament.

The Looming Threat

2005-03-16T11:26:00.000-05:00

Several times I've said on this blog that China is a threat that is lurking in the background. The situation appears peaceful now, but appearances are deceiving. The Chinese are bound and determined to take back Taiwan, by force if necessary. Right now they are laying low, stockpiling weapons and working to lay the political groundwork. Sooner or later they will likely force the situation, and I think this will occur sometime before 2015, though not for a few years yet.

Last week China passed a law authorizing the use of force against Taiwan if the latter declares it's independence. While China has since said that the law is "misunderstood" and is a "law for peace" it seems clear that they are laying the legal groundwork for military action.

Likewise, over the past ten or fifteen years China has become much more aggressive on military acquisitions. From the break with the Soviet Union in the late 50s to the end of the Cold War, the bulk of the Chinese military was oriented towards a war with Russia. They could not afford a two-front strategy in anything but name. When the Soviet Union collapsed, it's military came apart also, freeing the Chinese to concentrate on Taiwan.

For a more complete strategic analysis see my July 2004 post "China, Taiwan, and Concepts of Sea Power"

The other day China's "Prime Minister" held a press conference in which he laid more political groundwork for action against Taiwan. The PM gave the standard Chinese line on their view of history. John Derbyshire describes what the PM said

Tensions with Japan? Must be Japan's fault: "The fundamental problem is that Japan should correctly view history. ... take history as a mirror and face forward to the future. This year marks the 60th anniversary of China's victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan (1937-45). This part of history reminds us of the untold sufferings the war brought to the people in China..." Also, of course, a by-product of U.S. meddling: "The security alliance between Japan and the United States is a bilateral matter between these two countries. Yet we are concerned in China because it is related to the question of Taiwan..."

The anti-secession law? Why, the people of Taiwan want to be united with the mainland: "We have enacted this law to give expression of the will of the entire Chinese people, including the 23 million compatriots in Taiwan, their will to safeguard national unity and territorial integrity and oppose secession of Taiwan from the country." In any case, the law really has nothing to do with force or intimidation: "This law is meant to strengthen and promote cross-Straits relations."

And always, always, that self-righteous, self-pitying whine: "In the recent hundred of years, China was subjected to bullying and humiliation. Yet till now our country has never sent a single soldier abroad to occupy an inch of foreign land." (Ask a Tibetan about that.)

You would never know, unless you looked at the past 56 years of Chinese history, that the smooth-taliing Mr. Wen is front man for a gang of lawless cutthroats.

China the victim, you see, is only pursuing justice to right historical wrongs.

What exactly does China want? Derbyshire again:

What they want is regional hegemony. They want to be in East Asia — perhaps in all of Eurasia — what the U.S.A. has been in the Americas this past couple of hundred years. In their dreams, Russia will be their Canada: huge, underpopulated, cold, and not very consequential. India will be their Brazil.** Laos (say) will be their Guatemala (say). There are some holes in the analogy. The U.S.A. never had to contend with an offshore nation a tenth as populous yet ten times wealthier than itself, as China has to keep Japan in mind. Nor do the Indians look to be slipping quietly into their assigned role as providers of coffee, nuts, and salacious dances to the new superpower. Still, it is plain from their visible diplomatic strategy that the Chinese think they can pull it off

That's part of it, I'll agree. But it's not "hegemony" as a European or American would understand it. Not is is simply the pursuit of natural resources as was the Japanese goal some 80 years ago with their "Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere". It's a little of the latter, to be sure (witness the China-Philippines squabble over the possibly oil-rich Spratley Islands), but I think it's more ideology.

North Korea is the asian threat that dominates headlines, but my thoughts are that China is using them as a diversion. Tom Donnelly, writing in the Weekly Standard, seems to agree, chastising the Clinton and Bush Administrations for ignoring the problem:

In short, the United States continues to look through the wrong end of the telescope. We're thus blinded to a whole host of worrying developments that reveal China's progress as a geopolitical--and increasingly global--competitor. The Chinese "legislature" just passed an "anti-secession law" that not only "legitimizes" an attack on Taiwan but greater internal repression as well; the Beijing government sees secessionists everywhere. China is beginning to string together a necklace of client states in the oil-rich Middle East--Iran and Sudan, to name two--and even into the Americas, cozying up to Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez. Venezuela supplies about 13 percent of daily U.S. oil imports, and just as Beijing fears the U.S. Navy's ability to sever China's connection to international energy markets, China wouldn't mind being able to return the favor with Chavez's help.

Disturbing also are trends within our own military budget. The Navy and Air Force being starved to feed the hunger in the Army and Marine Corps for ground troops. While this helps us today in the War on Terror, a lack of Aircraft Carriers could come back to haunt us in the years ahead. Money is always finite and the business of policy is to make hard choices. Let's hope and push our politicians to make ones that keep the Chinese threat in mind.

Democrats Don't Learn

2005-03-16T11:08:00.000-05:00

From the Washington Times

Democrats yesterday said they will halt all Senate business except essential operations and national defense if Republicans use the "nuclear option" to unclog President Bush's judicial nominees.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada made the threat in a letter yesterday to Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has said he has the 51 votes needed for a parliamentary procedure that would force the nominees through the Senate on a simple majority vote.

In 1996 Speaker Newt Gingrich and the House Republicans tried much the same thing. Their beef was with President Clinton's proposed budget. After walking out of talks with the administration, they let all non-essential federal government services stop functioning.

The voters punished the GOP in the 1998 mid-term elections. Although they did not lose either house of congress, they did lose some seats and were severely chastised. Gingrich himself was forced to resign.

The Democrats today seem not to have learned the lesson of 1996; don't shut down the government. I don't think it's so much that voters are enamored of their services (although fear does play a factor with some groups) as it is just disgust at the bickering. Republicans had to learn the hard way in 1996, the Democrats will too unless cooler heads prevail.

Liberty on the March

2005-03-15T15:13:00.000-05:00

Slowly but surely liberty is moving forward in the Middle East. Consider these recent developments;

Syria-Lebanon

Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese protested yesterday in Beruit, demanding withdrawal of Syrian forces. Estimates run as high as 800,000 to 1 million participants. This was the largest political protest that has ever occurred in the Middle East. NRO's The Corner blog has some great photographs (hat tip Little Red Blog)
Syrian Intelligence is pulling out of Lebanon
Even the UN is getting in on the act, demanding a timetable for full withdrawal
Although last week there was a large pro-Syrian rally, organized by the terrorist organization Hezbollah, they appear to have lost momentum. Trends favor complete Syrian withdrawal soon if the pressure is kept up.
All of this could conceiveably lead to the fall of the Assad regime in Damascus, although it is premature to make absolute predictions. Tyrannies are always more fragile than they appear. It's imperative that we keep the pressure on.

Iraq

Iraqis raided the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad yesterday. The were angry that "...relatives of a Jordanian suicide bomber suspected of killing 125 people in the town of Hilla celebrated him as a martyr." Can't blame them. The Iraqi government also condemned the "espressions of joy" exibited by the family.
Chrenkoff has up "Good News from Iraq Part 23" Yes, Part 23. Check it out to find out how and why the MSM so often get their reporting totally wrong. You also might not have heard this elsewhere, but reconstruction is proceding despite attempts at sabatoge. You'll also find success stories of the new Iraqi army and police that you simply won't find elsewhere.
(Hat tip USS Neverdock for both Iraqi stories)