[Cross-posted at The Irish Trojan’s blog]

Damn, I wish I could vote for Tony Blair for president:

People in the West ask: why don’t they speak up, these standard-bearers of the new Iraq? Why don’t the Shia clerics denounce al-Sadr more strongly? I understand why the question is asked. But the answer is simple: they are worried. They remember 1991, when the West left them to their fate. They know their own street, unused to democratic debate, rife with every rumour, and know its volatility. They read the Western papers and hear its media. And they ask, as the terrorists do: have we the stomach to see it through?

I believe we do. And the rest of the world must hope that we do. None of this is to say we do not have to learn and listen. There is an agenda that could unite the majority of the world. It would be about pursuing terrorism and rogue states on the one hand and actively remedying the causes around which they flourish on the other: the Palestinian issue; poverty and development; democracy in the Middle East; dialogue between main religions.

I have come firmly to believe the only ultimate security lies in our values. The more people are free, the more tolerant they are of others; the more prosperous, the less inclined they are to squander that prosperity on pointless feuding and war.

But our greatest threat, apart from the immediate one of terrorism, is our complacency. When some ascribe, as they do, the upsurge in Islamic extremism to Iraq, do they really forget who killed whom on 11 September 2001? When they call on us to bring the troops home, do they seriously think that this would slake the thirst of these extremists, to say nothing of what it would do to the Iraqis?

Or if we scorned our American allies and told them to go and fight on their own, that somehow we would be spared? If we withdraw from Iraq, they will tell us to withdraw from Afghanistan and, after that, to withdraw from the Middle East completely and, after that, who knows? But one thing is for sure: they have faith in our weakness just as they have faith in their own religious fanaticism. And the weaker we are, the more they will come after us.

Unlike Bush & co., Blair understands that the Left, for all its flaws, is onto something when it talks about the “root causes” of terrorism. He understands that force alone cannot defeat Islamic extremism, and that we must not let our fear of “letting the terrorists win” prevent us from addressing the legitimate grievances and injustices in the world — problems that we should seek to remedy anyway, because it’s the right thing to do, not because terrorists want us to. (It’s a false choice anyway, because terrorists don’t want us to fix the problems they complain about. They are just using those complaints as a means to a very different end. What they want is a clash of civilizations — a scenario which depends on our showing arrogant disregard for “root causes.”)

But unlike so many liberals — quite possibly including, in his heart of hearts, John Kerry — Blair also understands that force, while not the sum total of the solution, is an inescapable and enormous part of the solution. He understands that we must show the terrorists absolutely no mercy, even as we simultaneously show great mercy and compassion for the innocent people whom the terrorists purport to speak for. We must make the Arab world understand that we are on their side, whereas the terrorists are not.

This is an extremely difficult task — it may even be impossible — but attempting it is our only option, and Tony Blair understands that. Bush doesn’t fully understand the first part, and I fear Kerry doesn’t fully understand the second part. Our choice in November is between two sides of the same coin, neither of which is correct without its flip side. Blair gets both sides, but unfortunately, we’re calling the shots instead of him. (And, just as unfortunately, most of the people in Blair’s own country don’t get it, which seriously imperils his ability to pull off what’s trying to pull off.)

Anyway, read the whole thing.

On a related note, this business of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqis is a very, very bad thing. It will inevitably reinforce all the negative stereotypes and misconceptions of America and our use of military power, on the anti-war left but also, much more importantly, in the Arab world. Although Bush & co. are certainly right that the actions of these few soldiers do not represent the military or the nation at large, it will be extremely difficult to repair the P.R. damage that this will do.

At the same time, though, I think our reaction to this issue also shows something very good about us, if only people would bother to notice. Here we are, the world’s unchallenged superpower, with the physical ability to do pretty much whatever the hell we want, wherever the hell we want, to whomever the hell we want, damn the consequences — and yet, when we discover wrongdoing by our own people, we own up to it, we apologize profusely for it, and we promise to bring the perpetrators to justice. And it isn’t just about scapegoating the little guy: the general in charge of the prison has been suspended, and will probably be courtmartialed. And rightfully so — that’s what accountability is all about.

Our president has expressed “deep disgust” over what occurred — again, rightfully so. None of this goes above and beyond the call of duty; it is exactly what we should do. But for those who claim that we are unaccountable, unilateral thugs out to oppress and conquer, it ought to be a pleasant surprise. Although they will probably focus on the initial misdeeds and draw vindication from them (e.g. Craig Stern’s statement, “Brilliant. Our troops are dumbasses”), they should instead pay more attention to our reaction. If we were an imperial power bent on world domination, we would not be holding ourselves accountable in this way. As ugly and abhorrent as this incident was, our reaction to it proves once again that America is, at core, a fundamentally good nation with fundamentally good intentions. And that is a very, very good thing.

Well, the American media has finally joined the war, on the other side.

All pretense of representing our national interests has been dropped in favor of driving their agenda. The continuous low-brow ridicule of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, anti-Semitic scorn for Wolfowitz, the disgraceful racial coverage of Powell and Rice, and wall-to-wall pro-Democrat reportage was not working quickly enough. So they have now taken an active role in assuring a defeat in the public’s mind, if not fact.

The American media forecast a defeat and they will not be denied schadenfreude.

ABC’s Nightline pious breast-beating while openly using the deaths of service men and women as a blunt instrument with which to beat the Bush Administration is so transparent and repulsive that it will not gain traction. It will be seen as the cheap ploy that it is, the term “media whore” comes to mind, but dishonors the world’s oldest profession.

However, CBS has crossed the line.

Their reportage of the alleged abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US military will inflame the Arab street and endanger American lives, both civilian and military in the Middle East, as anti-American propagandists such as Al-Jazeera apply their hatred to the images. This is simply aiding and abetting the enemy as our military is engaged in war.

Don’t get me wrong, US and Allied military personnel involved should be charged, tried and punished to the letter of the law, forthwith, but the dog and pony show presented by CBS denies them the fair trial to which they are entitled. The media cries crocodile tears over enemy combatants captured in battle and those who admit they plot to commit acts of terror, but US military personnel are guilty by their very existence.

Enough! It’s time for Americans to stop sitting passively by, like a herd of well-fed sheep waiting for the knackers truck. Pick up a pen, or fire off an email to ABC, CBS, and more importantly, write to the advertisers. You are underwriting these irresponsible broadcasters, if you disagree, which is our right, then say so, LOUDLY.

No one elected the media; they have no mandate to drive a private agenda. They are not privilege to briefings, classified information or events on the ground. What makes them qualified to influence the outcome of the war in Iraq? They cry “No Plan!” but how long would a plan remain viable if it were revealed to the media? Every scrap of information they can winnow, is broadcast worldwide.

Get off your ass, America or the next calamitous event CBSABCNBCPBSCNN will be lamenting as deserved retribution for our many grievous crimes against humanity may be in your town or city.

As the campaign season heats up, a Kerry surrogate, historian Douglas Brinkley, has reportedly threatened an old Kerry crewmate with a “firestorm” if he went public with his criticisms of the candidate. Via Boston.com News:

- - - - - - -

- - - - - - -

Via Instapundit.

This is a duplicate of the original post at the nikita demosthenes website.

UPDATE:

Of course, being a flack for Kerry - while posing as an “independent” historian - is bad enough. But hopefully Brinkley will not sink to the kind of hate-America-first poison that many on the left are so proud to express. This link is via the apparently quickly recuperating Andrew Sullivan. (Scroll down). Get well soon, Andrew.

Today in the U.S. Senate, New Jersy’s eighty-year-old Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg called Vice President Dick Cheney a “chicken hawk” for receiving four student deferments that kept him from being drafted into the military. Bloomberg reports that Lautenberg continued:

“Chicken hawks — they shriek like a hawk, but they have the backbone of a chicken,” Lautenberg, 80, said. “When it was their turn to serve, where were they? A-W-O-L, that’s where.”

[. . .]

“The reality is that the chicken hawks in this administration are doing a lousy job of bolstering our nation’s defense and supporting the troops,” he said.

Please! An eighty-year-old U.S. senator acting like a young elementary school child, reduced to calling the Vice-President of the United States names. At his age and with his experience, Lautenberg should be able to argue, debate, or campaign by engaging opponents in a meaningful discussion on important issues, instead of resorting to name calling about events which occurred more than thirty years ago.

At eighty, Lautenberg is certainly old enough to better.

I am sick and tired of having to listen to name calling about events from the sixties which have no relevance to the important issues which should be considered in this presidential campaign. I long for a meaningful debate on issues such as how best to defend the country, how to win the war against terror, education policy, and immigration reform.

Cross-posted from California Yankee.

[Parental discretion advised]

A previously covert organization providing support to US troops has now gone public with its own website. Operation Take One For The Country, whose members prefer the military-style acronym OTOFTC, has an unusual mission statement: “To discretely [sic] provide US troops shipping out overseas with the most sensually pleasing departure possible.”

OTOFTC leader Kelly McDonough tells how it all started:

It was back in February of 2003, when a lot of troops were leaving Ft. Benning. My girlfriends and I were partying at a bar frequented by soldiers. At some point one my friend leaves with a young soldier. The next day we questioned her and commented that the soldier didn’t seem her ‘type’. My friend just shrugged and said, ‘Hey, his unit was going to ship out in a few days, so I decided to take one for the country’, I knew right then and there that this was an incredible idea, so I started OTOFTC.

Even before it went public, however, the group aroused heated reaction from other groups. Annette Spargas of the UC Berkeley chapter of NOW spoke to newsletter author John Truman: “These women are really sick, they are prostituting themselves,” Spargas ranted; “they are objectifying their bodies to the killers of the Bush cabals war machine.”

McDonough shrugs off such criticism by pointing to well over 19 “officially unofficial batallions, as we call our groupings, across the United States.” The virtual group, or at least its notoriety, does appear to be growing fast, especially since the website and online store began operations.

a hat tip to Tim Worstall.

This is a post about Australian politics (I can here the yawns now…) But it’s also about Iraq, and the type of debate going on in many countries with troops there at the moment - including the USA.

While Australian PM John Howard has been emulating George Bush with his recent visit to Baghdad on Anzac day, the Australian opposition candidate for PM, John Latham, appears to be emulating John Kerry.

A Quote from the Labor Party’s Defence Spokesman, via The Australian :

Stepping up Labor’s attack, Senator Evans said: “Australia is not providing peacekeepers to help protect the Iraqi people - John Howard is now keeping troops there as a symbolic commitment to George Bush and the alliance.”

And from the Labor Party’s Foreign Affairs spokesman, via the Brisbane Courier-Mail :

Mr Latham also claimed Australia’s role in Iraq was becoming symbolic.
[…]
“When you’re stretching it out for political or symbolic reasons, it’s a big worry in the national interest.”

His comments appear to contradict statements by Labor’s foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd, who said on Sunday that Australia’s current role in Iraq “isn’t just an international legal nicety” but was the legal requirement of an invading force.

“It’s the responsibility Australia took unto itself when it was one of only three states invading Iraq in the first place,” Mr Rudd said at the time.

Today, we have from The Australian again :

“We support the troops,” Mr Latham told reporters in country Victoria today.

”Our argument is with the Howard government and that’s the way in which our comments have been cast.

“There are valuable jobs being performed in the tasks that have been allocated (to Australian troops in Iraq) and that’s important to recognise.

“Our mention of symbolism is political symbolism. It’s a critique of the Howard government’s policy on the political matters. We have nothing but support for the troops.”

They’re just a useless symbolic commitment doing important and valuable work. A useless symbolic valuable job, completely un-neccessary and legally required and it’s important to recognise that, with beans on toast.

I think that what he means is that he supports the troops in the field, while criticising the jerks that sent them there in the first place. The trouble is, his policy is to immediately exit from Iraq, as the troops are just there for show, to support Dubya. But they’re obviously not there just for show (having just rescued a number of wounded US Coast Guards*), so there is a “cognitive dissonance”, otherwise known as “Buried up to the nostrils in your own BS”. This happens all the time to many successful politicians. But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that when you’re in a hole like this, continuing to dig is not the best strategy.

Still, if it works for Kerry…. maybe you can fool all of the people, all of the time. Or at least, enough to get elected.

What Kerry Really Throws is B.S.

Originally published at Hog On Ice.

I am looking over the day’s news. I thought there might be something about Fallujah, but it looks like the big story right now is the one about John Kerry throwing objects over the White House fence.

Apparently, he had both medals and ribbons. A medal or ribbon is a military decoration; there is no important difference between them.* He went to the White House in 1971, sucked in his gut for the cameras, and threw his own ribbons and someone else’s medals over the fence. He kept his own medals, and I am pretty sure the ribbons were replaced later, but I may be wrong. I’m too lazy to look it up.

Anyway, I don’t really care whether he threw medals or ribbons or who they belonged to. He was a posturing liberal wack job, and he threw SOME sort of military decorations over the fence, and some of them were his. Ho hum. That story isn’t going to sell any papers. If you’re conservative, you hate him for throwing ANY decorations, and if you’re liberal, you probably hate him for not throwing MORE of them, but you’ll still vote for him, unless you’re part of the Nader Martyrs Brigade.

The fun part of the story is about the lying Kerry did later. At one point, he said he didn’t throw his own medals because he didn’t have time to go home and get them. And also the dog ate them. Okay, he didn’t say that about the dog, but he might as well have. It’s about as credible. Think about it. He’s suggesting that in order to throw his medals over the fence, he would have to make a special trip, but luckily, he carried his ribbons with him wherever he went. Not even a brownie hound like Kerry is that compulsive.

Kerry has also claimed he kept his own medals because they were important to him. That’s obviously the true story. He got three Purple Hearts for hangnails and dandruff and so on (I kid), and he got the Bronze Star and whatnot, and you don’t just throw stuff like that away if you’re an attention and glory junkie like Johnny Botox.

Does that make him look any better? Well, ask yourself this: how would you feel if you were a fellow liberal wack job, and you had a Bronze Star, and you went to the fence with Kerry and followed what you thought was his brave example by throwing your precious Bronze Star onto the White House lawn? Here’s the answer: you would be mad as hell. Kerry goes home to his mansion, and he still has his medals shining down at him from their Tiffany frame, and you go home to your trailer, where all you have on the wall is Miss January. And to top it off, the cameras focused on Kerry while he threw the bogus medals, and the reporters told you to keep your head down and get the hell out of the frame.

There’s a word that describes this. “Funny.” It’s sad, but it’s also hilarious. I just picture Kerry and all the other Angry Vets, arms linked, singing “Kum Bay Ya,” and they all think he’s a swell guy, and he’s thinking, “PUTZES.”

This reminds me of a story I’ve told here before. When I was at Columbia University, then-President Carter threatened to reinstitute the draft, and a bunch of little pukes decided to protest. One night at a birthday party, an activist named Rick Lazarus (he deserves to have his real name mentioned) told me that while he loudly advised other guys to refuse to register for the draft, he himself had registered, because he felt that the fear of being arrested would make him less effective as an agitator.

Tell me the difference between him and Kerry. Well, he can probably move his forehead. That’s one difference.

What Kerry did is a lot like welshing on a bet. The other guys show up at the poker table, knowing they may take a loss. They fully intend to honor their debts. A guy like Kerry shows up, and he’s relaxed and confident, because he knows he’s not going to lose a dime. Because he has no intention of paying.

The other wack jobs threw their own medals, and they thought Kerry was throwing his, too. Well, now they know different.

The only medal-thrower I ever heard of who deserved respect was Muhammad Ali. As I understand it, he went into a restaurant in Louisville—his hometown—with his Olympic gold medal around his neck, and he was refused service because he was black. So he went to a bridge and threw the medal into the Ohio River. That makes a lot more sense than what Kerry did. For one thing, it was HIS medal. For another, Ali’s act was a proud response to his own mistreatment by a country which had hypocritically held him forth as an honored champion. Ali didn’t wait around for a TV camera, either.

I think the Kerry medal incident and his juvenile waffling in the aftermath prove something remarkable: you can go to war and serve your country bravely and still come back a weasel. Kerry never considers answering a question honestly. He pauses while the rusty wheels turn behind the motionless forehead, and then he spits out whatever answer he thinks will score him the most points on that particular occasion. And then later, the answer returns to bite him in the ass.

Great work, Senator. Keep it up, and this time next year, you’ll be Al Gore’s teaching assistant at West Tennessee Barber College.

*The one difference of which I have been made aware is that ribbons are much more easily replaced.

The first rule of the internet, the very first one, is “don’t believe everything you hear”. That seems simple enough doesn’t it?. After all, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that something you receive in an email, see on a message board, or read on a web page with pictures of Elvis driving a flying saucer on the front page, probably isn’t something you’re going to want to bet the farm on. Only the ignorant, the gullible, or conspiracy theorists are going to be snookered by sources that dubious.

Then there are the biased sources, like Newsmax, The Village Voice, or even Right Wing News ;). Since these sorts of websites don’t try to hide their partisan leanings, the reader can consider himself forewarned that people of a different ideological stripe might have a different take on the same issues. For example, if you went to Eschaton, a left-wing blog, and saw a headline that stated “George W. Bush wants to grind up fluffy kittens to help Haliburton profit margin,” your antennae would go up — because you know this a left-wing blog — and you’d naturally take what you read with a grain of salt.

But, what gets people into trouble are the sources and articles that seem reliable, yet actually are about as trustworthy as the political info you get from your friend’s cousin’s mother’s brother after he finishes off his second pitcher of beer at Pizza Hut. And that’s where I come in.

Yes, I, your humble neighborhood blogger, am an information junkie’s information junky. For years now, I’ve been reading, analyzing, questioning, perusing, and skimming news from across the world in an effort to inform and entertain my readers. During that process, I’ve run across more than a few potholes on the information superhighway that can keep you from reaching your destination. Luckily for you, I’m going to clue you in on when you should get your antennae up so you can steer around those potholes instead plowing over them like I’ve done far too often in the past. Keep an eye out for…

Anonymous Sources: Believe it or not, people often treat quotes from anonymous sources, even controversial quotes, as MORE CREDIBLE than quotes from people who go on the record because they believe they’re getting a scoop from an inside source. But in reality, there are a bevy of reasons to concerned with the veracity of anonymous sources.

First and foremost among them is of course “why are they coming forward without revealing their names”? Are they bitter for some reason and trying to get revenge? Do they want to make an outrageous assertion that they don’t want their names attached to when it’s proven to be untrue? Could they be partisan holdovers from another administration who’d be revealed as biased if they went on the record? Heck, in these days and times when we have reporters like Jayson Blair sitting in New York bars writing “on site” stories that put them in the Mid-West, you even have to question whether the reporter exaggerated or made up the quote from the source. For the most part, anonymous sources are much more appropriate for smut rags like the Enquirer than mainstream papers.

Anecdotal Stories: It doesn’t matter if you assert that the CIA was actually behind 9/11 or that there are 100,000 Chinese troops poised on the Mexican border to invade Texas, you’re going to find at least a handful of people who’ll believe it. That’s why anecdotal stories that feature a few quotes that are supposed to be representative of a larger group are generally worthless. Actually, make that worse than worthless, because anecdotal stories are more often than not misleading.

Judging by how most of the anecdotal stories in the mainstream press seem to play out these days, here’s how you have to figure they’re put together. A reporter comes up with a theme for a story, interviews people until he gets several juicy quotes that support the point he wants to make while discarding contrary opinions, and then he writes a story implying that the people they talked to represent a majority. The mainstream media runs these sort of stories about Iraqis, soldiers, military families, 9/11 victims among others and usually the only common theme you’ll see are that the people quoted don’t accurately reflect the feelings of the group they’re supposed to represent and the articles almost always reflect poorly on the Bush administration. What liberal media, right?

Enemy & Civilian Casualties: When our troops are fighting in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, trying to get an accurate estimate of how many civilian or enemy fighters are killed is nearly impossible. Combatants dressed in civilian clothes fire at our troops from areas inhabited by civilians. Wounded fighters may crawl away after being hit or be dragged away by their compatriots. Women and children are used as human shields — sometimes involuntarily making them civilians — sometimes voluntarily making them members of the enemy force.

On top of that, opposing forces and even the Arab press commonly downplay the number of losses taken by enemy fighters and dramatically inflate the number of civilians killed. Last but not least, in the heat of combat, it’s very difficult for the members of our military to give an accurate count of how many people they’ve killed when they have bullets whizzing around their head and massive explosions going off all around them. So it’s fair to say that any enemy or civilian casualty numbers you hear from the front may be less accurate than Bill Clinton’s explanation to Hillary of why a woman answered his phone at 4 AM.

Foreign Papers: Don’t get me wrong, there are some really superb papers foreign newspapers out there like the Jerusalem Post or the Online Sun (stop sneering you elitist ;). However, there are also legions of unreliable foreign papers that play so fast and loose with the facts that you can’t trust anything you’re reading. That includes all of the government controlled press in the Middle-East, Al-Jazeera, & Russia’s Pravda.

Furthermore, it’s also worth remembering that some of the European newspapers like The Guardian & The Independent slant so far to the left that they have more in common with openly left-wing US websites like The Nation than they do left-leaning papers masquerading as unbiased sources like the Washington Post.

Internet Polls: Few things are easier than influencing the results of an internet poll. All it would take to send tens of thousands of people to a local church website to write in Satan as a choice for a new pastor would be posts on a handful of large message boards and websites. In fact, this has been done so often by the folks over at Free Republic that the word “freep” has come to mean deliberately skewing a poll. Not to say that online polls aren’t entertaining, they can be, as long as you don’t confuse them with some sort of accurate reflection of the public’s feelings on a subject.

Scientists: Understandably, most people tend to pay quite a bit of attention to articles featuring scientists talking about their fields of expertise. However, you must keep in mind that whole image that has been built up of scientists as impartial fellows only interested in the facts and whatever can be proven in the laboratory is pure bunk.

Not only do scientists have political biases that effect their opinions just like the rest of us, they may have large amounts of grant money and years worth of papers and research that can all be riding on coming down a certain way on an issue. For example, if a liberal scientist who has written a book on the existence of global warming, given countless lectures on its existence, & lives off a $250,000 grant to study the subject by an environmentalist group comes to the conclusion that global warming is incredibly overblown or doesn’t exiss, is he really going to say so? Human nature says that under those circumstances some people will come forward, but most people won’t.

Perhaps more importantly, we must remember that there’s often just as much disagreement in the fields that these scientists come from as you’ll see on a typical edition of “Crossfire”. So if you’re not hearing a scientist with a dissenting opinion, do you really know if you’re getting the whole story?

Washington Budget Numbers: Let me tell you a little story that’ll give you an idea of how dishonest the figures tossed around by Washington politicians are. Let us say that there is a proposal to raise the funding for “educating the orphaned children of patriotic Americans who also love fluffy puppies” by a billion dollars a year. But, Senator Phineas J. Taxemall votes for an Amendment to that bill that would only raise spending by 800 million a year. So the good Senator just voted to raise spending for the orphans by 800 million a year, right?

WRONG...well, at least according to the campaign ads the Senator will see the next time he’s up for the election. Those ads will say “Senator Phineas J. Taxemall voted to CUT funding for educating the orphaned children of patriotic Americans who also love fluffy puppies by 2 BILLION dollars! How can any man be so cruel”? So how would his opponent come up with those numbers? Easy. In Washingtonspeak, increasing spending “only” 800 million when you could have spent a billion is a CUT, not an increase. Then you run those numbers over say a 10 year period and sabim, sabam, there’s your 2 billion dollar cut. The same sort of hinky number crunching is done with tax raises, the deficit, & Social Security (the “trust fund” is actually an IOU), so you can’t trust those numbers either.

From The Australian :

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said today the United States must change course in Iraq in order to “be stronger abroad”.

Kerry, who panned President George W. Bush’s “unilateral” foreign policy, told supporters at a rally in his rural state: “Even if we maintain the most powerful military on the world, we need some friends and allies on this earth.

“I will restore America’s influence and respect,” the Massachusetts senator said as he promised to reach out to the world community if he beats Bush, a Republican, in the November 2 presidential election.

Oh dear. Oh deary, deary me.

Dear Senator Kerry:

I’ll try to make things simple for you.

There’s a place, not in the USA, called variously the United Kingdom, Great Britain, England (plus Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). You really should have heard of it. You can see it from Calais on a clear day. Or just go west from Hamburg till you hit land. You can fly Lufthansa - some of their most senior people navigated their way there on a regular basis in 1940-41.

There’s also another place, again not in the USA, called variously Australia, Oz, “the Arse End of the World” and so on. Just look at a Globe - you can’t miss it, it’s an Island about the same size as the USA, stuck in the South-West of the Pacific. It’s the place that Kangaroos come from. Also the Wiggles, Paul Hogan, Salt Water Crocodiles, Funnelweb Spiders, the Australian SAS Regiment and other scary things.

Now look at the definition of the word “Unilateral”. here’s Merriam-Webster’s definition:

done or undertaken by one person or party

One. Not Two, not Three, and certainly not over 60.

Now look at the definition of the word “allies”. Here’s the Cambridge definition:

(Plural of)A country that has agreed to give help and support to another, esp. during a war, or a person who helps and supports someone else

With me so far?

Now this is the difficult bit. I’ll take it slowly for you.

America is at war.

The UK is helping America, in Iraq and Afghanistan (though for that matter, even France, Germany, Canada and New Zealand are helping in Afghanistan)

Australia is helping America, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why even the Prime Minister was in Baghdad yesterday, to express his appreciation for what they’re doing.

1 + 1 + 1 does not equal 1.

And finally… if you think that ignoring our sacrifice of blood and treasure as part of the Coalition will win you our respect, then you are …… mistaken. Whether you’re deeply Ignorant, Thick-as-two-short-planks Stupid, or just contemptuous of the American voting public, and for that matter, anyone outside your coterie, I don’t know. I doubt that it’s stupid though. And you finished Primary school, so it’s probably not Ignorant either. So it must be a deliberate insult. Keep it up and even Australians will start to get moderately peeved.

A word of advice : you don’t start making new friends by pissing off all the old ones.

Of course, it was in our National Interest to de-fang Iraq, we’re just glad the US and UK were around to shoulder the majority of the burden. Much as we value your friendship, we would not have gone to war alongside you had we not perceived a clear and present danger to all of us. 9/11 was enough, we didn’t need Bali as well to make this abundantly clear.

In that spirit, I look forward to the election results, come November.Arsehole.

Regards, Your Friends and Allies in Oz.

This was written by Murray Hill and originally posted here. It is reprinted with permission of the author.

ANZAC Day

Singapore was regarded as a jewel of the British Empire and a strategically significant island much as Gibraltar and Malta. Its fall to the enemy was inconceivable. It quite simply could not happen. It was also the lynch pin of the Commonwealths defensive plans for the Pacific based around the naval base and shipyards as support for a Royal Navy fleet.

On December 7th 1941 the Japanese Imperial Navy launched the war in the Pacific with their attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor. This was followed up with attacks throughout the region and in early 1942 they landed in Malaya with the intention of capturing Singapore with its valuable naval base.

From pilots like Geoff Fisken who flew obsolete Brewster Buffalos against Zero’s and Lt. Adnan Saidi of the 1st Battalion the Malay Regiment who lead his men in a fight to the last man the fall of Singapore was marked by individual professionalism failed badly by incompetent leadership.

The brunt of the fighting was borne by the Australian’s. Though they represented only about 10% of the force they suffered 2/3 of the casualties and provided the few successes of a nightmare campaign.

At the highest level however the British Military was quite simply not equal to the task and was completely unprepared for the vigorous operation the Japanese were engaged in.

The “fleet” which was the whole purpose for the existence of the Islands force consisted of only two capital ships, the battleship HMS Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser HMS Repulse. These ships sortied from Singapore on receiving news of the Japanese landings without air cover. Whether this was because the air force was unable to provide the cover or the navy did not feel the need has been a source of debate for some time. The point is moot as the air cover would have been obsolete Brewster Buffalos and could have little influenced the outcome. Both ships were quickly sunk by determined attack by Japanese aircraft off the Malay peninsular.

This was the first major blow to the complacency of the British administration yet in a deliberate decision to “avoid panicking the population” the Military Command chose not to build additional defenses or set up roadblocks and heavy weapons positions that could have delayed the Japanese advance. The only proactive action seems to have been to issue pamphlets advising the troops of the inferiority of the Japanese fighting man.

As the Japanese advanced down the Malay peninsular they took no prisoners and murdered those that did surrender. Their brutality was not reserved to enemy soldiers. They routinely murdered civilians and non-combatants saving their worst for the Chinese.

The allied forces withdrew from Malaya to the island and was dispersed of the 70 miles of the perimeter. Again it was the Australians who faced the Japanese amphibious assault from the mainland. Already having lost over half their strength in action and spread too thinly they were unable to prevent the landings. In spite of having fresh troops in reserve General Percival elected not to provide any reinforcements.

The evacuation of the island, left far too late was a full-scale panic. Individual ships sailed without escort or air cover. There was none. Many were picked off by Japanese air units, survivors lifeboats were routinely attacked after their ships were sunk.

Within a matter of days the allied force had been pushed back across half the island and on 15th February General Percival surrendered to the Japanese. Australia and New Zealand were now wide open to the unstoppable Japanese. It was a terrible blow to British confidence and Churchill noted that it was the worst shock he suffered in all the war and he was glad that he was alone when he read the news.

The Japanese General himself was both incredulous and extremely relieved that the British commander chose to surrender at this point. The Japanese force was substantially less than the Commonwealth forces and they were extremely overextended and almost out of ammunition. Had the battle continued he has said he would have been forced to withdraw from the island.

Singapore itself is full of reminders of the events of World War Two. Air raid shelters still dotted the area inside the bases. Some peculiar place names for kids to have for their soccer field, execution row. The infamous Changi Prison. All were constant reminders of what had taken place there. The useless guns facing the wrong direction - in actuality they did engage the enemy but there was a shortage of high explosive ammunition - are now a tourist attraction. Much of the infrastructure was prewar as were the some of the staff.

Kranji is like a focus of all these daily prompts and ANZAC Day is the culmination of all that has happened and is made real by the thousands of names on the walls there.

I have attended dawn services for as long as I could remember, from the age of six I was always in one uniform or another.

At the ages of eleven and twelve I attended the ANZAC Day dawn services at Kranji Cemetery in Singapore. Many experiences of Singapore and the two years that I lived there remain vivid but none more so that those two services. For me Kranji will always be an experience more than a place.

Kranji itself is unusually small, only around 4,500 are buried there, many in mass graves. Of the graves only about 850 are named. Yet lining the memorial walls are the names of over 24,000 others who died. To put it another way, Karanji is larger than many of the Allied cemeteries in Normandy but here most of the fallen have no known graves.

The grounds are immaculately kept and on an island where space is at a premium Kranji is open, sprawling, well-boarded tress trees. It is quiet, unusually so for so crowded a country. This lends an atmosphere of peacefulness that reinforces the nature of the place. The ground rises from the gate to the memorial itself which follows the top of the ridge and from there the straights are visible.

Here lay or are remembered Indians, Chinese, Malays, British, Australian’s, New Zealander’s and Gurkha’s.

Attending an ANZAC Day dawn service here is a moving experience. Unlike the services back home that take place at every small town memorial and are attended by organizations and veterans, here the dead are in attendance. Not represented by the names on a wall or monument, but here are their remains. The memorial walls carry the names of more than twenty four thousand who have no grave. Scattered around are other particular memorials, the Chinese Memorial, the General Hospital Memorial and others. Each another chapter to the terrible story told in the simple explanations on the inscriptions.

I was used to a solemn occasion but one that was carried off with a kind cheerful disorganization that betrayed more of the holiday that would follow. Here the full impact of the meaning is inescapable. The service is carried off with military precision and dignity that is compelling. The memorial walls are lined with servicemen of three services and two nations resting on reversed arms and stay like statues. The flags flying together give a real sense of the bond our nations share, not only with each other but also with the region itself.

With tropical reliability dawn arrives and the golden star that tops the memorial is struck by the rising sun.

With the official service over we are free to move about and poppies that would normally be either laid at a memorial or lost later in the day are laid on the graves of the fallen. In some cases the children took some time to find a grave because they were seeking out an uncle or grandfather they had never known.

[Ed note: Thank you, Murray]

Here’s Alan E. Brain’s wonderful tribute from last year.

Potential Peace for a Curmudgeonly Warblogger? I don’t know. Have any of you ever heard of this guy: Prem Rawat aka “Maharaji”? Here’s a portion of an interview from Venture magazine:

- - - - - - -

In a world of accelerating change and turmoil, management theories have become increasingly complex. Bookshelves creak under the weight of books written by business gurus on how to manage a company, how to increase personal potential and to achieve success

Venture caught up with Prem Rawat during a recent return to India. “I’m here for another two and half weeks,” he told us. “Every weekend, there is an event in a different place and sometimes also in the middle of the week. I have just been to eight cities, and there are a few more to go before I return home for Christmas and my son’s birthday. In February, I will come back out to India to visit another 10 or 11 cities; then on to the Pacific, Europe, the United States, maybe South America, Africa and round the world again.”

- - - - - - -

More than a few business and lifestyle gurus claim to offer hope and inspiration, or at least a guide towards beneficial change or success. Prem Rawat’s approach differs in several key respects. “Firstly, mine isn’t just a theory; I don’t just say, ‘Sit down and think nice thoughts’. My approach is much more practical: to actually go within, to take the senses inside and discover that feeling. People have to judge for themselves if they have actually felt it, and that’s what is very, very important here. I offer inspiration, reminding people of the beauty of existence; I remind people that life itself is a gift. I encourage people to know that this is possible and to open windows of understanding, so that they can be fulfilled. I see each human being as complete. Within each one shines a sun so bright that it can make ignorance go away.”

It is a well-known theory that, to succeed in business, executives must fix on an ideal future state and use this vision as an anchor to move forward. “You have to have a vision,’ says Prem Rawat. “Vision is a wonderful thing. The vision should be very broad and as wonderful as you can make it. And in that vision you have to see the manifestation of your life, to see that the fulfilment of your life is there alongside the fulfilment of your career. If we were to say that all we need to do is x, y and z out there in this world, and we did not address anything about our own self, then it doesn’t matter what we have accomplished; something would always be going to feel empty inside of ourselves.”

- - - - - - -

Then there is this from the Prem Rawat FAQ page:

- - - - - - -

If I am interested in the techniques that Prem Rawat teaches to connect within, what can I do next?
There is a period of preparation involved. The process of preparation is not an academic one with a start and a finish, but involves each person making their own inner journey of discovery. Therefore, how long it takes varies from person to person, allowing people to learn and develop at their own pace.

If I would like to speak to someone about all of this, what do I do?
The website www.contact-info.net provides the telephone numbers of information lines in many countries where further enquiries can be made.

- - - - - - -

Here are a couple of photographs from his Inspire newsletter:

Within Each Breath: In this excerpt from an address to an audience already familiar with his message, Maharaji explains that, within each breath, it is possible to find fulfillment. He reminds people of the wealth that can be found within each breath—if one pays attention.

Joy Is Possible: After speaking to more than one million people throughout India, Maharaji held a two-day follow-up event. Each day, over 635,000 people in more than 2,100 centers phoned in more than 1,000 questions.

Any warbloggers (or non-warbloggers) out there ever heard of this guy?

This is a duplicate of the original post at the nikita demosthenes website.

Perhaps this article should be on the Iraq page. The USMC has already used AC/DC records in the battle at Fallujah. Now they’re bringing on something far, far worse. Here it is, quoted in full from the AP, via the Indianapolis Star :

FALLUJAH, Iraq — Amid the clatter of gunfire and explosions that regularly rock this city, an unexpected sound rises over the front line: bagpipes.

Dressed in Marine fatigues with his gun at his side, 1st Sgt. Dwayne Farr, 36, blows into his set of pipes. The plaintive wail is carried by the wind that whips across this dust-blown, war-torn town.

“Playing on the battlefield — I never thought that would happen,” Farr said.

Farr, an African-American from Detroit, learned bagpipes after he saw another player who didn’t match the Scottish stereotype.

“I was at a funeral, and I saw a Marine playing the bagpipes, and I thought, this isn’t a big, burly, redheaded guy with a ponytail and a big stomach. He’s a small Hispanic Marine. I said if he can learn to play the bagpipes, I can learn,” he said, chuckling.

When he is not on the front-line, Farr wears a kilt when playing, and some Marines have been skeptical about a member of one of the toughest fighting forces in the world donning what looks like a skirt.

But Farr is unfazed. He’s looking for a desert camouflage kilt he can wear in operations like these.

“Kilts are something that fighting men wore many years ago, and we know that the Marines are fighting men. So real men wear kilts. And they are pretty comfortable, too,” he said.

Among his admittedly limited repertoire is “Taps,” the tune traditionally played by the military when a service member is killed. Farr has played it several times recently in Fallujah.

Marines say the sound of the bagpipes can be a soothing contrast to the usual sounds of war.

So, any kilt-maker reading this who can get his hands on suitable MARPAT-Desert cloth…. you know what to do.

Michele and I choose to permit comments at Command Post because we believe the ability to participate in journalism is inherent to the nature of our site, and that the ability to exchange and argue over ideas is at the core of a vigorous democracy.

That said, our comments area is not a forum in which anything goes. We believe the democratic way of life, and a better understanding of humanity, are furthered not by any discourse, but by reasoned discourse. Our vision for the Command Post comments is a forum that not only permits the participation in journalism, that not only facilitates the exchange of perspectives, but that does so as a reflection of human civility.

So: We welcome you to post comments at Command Post, and we encourage you take part in our marketplace of ideas, be you left, right, or center; red, blue, or green; Christian, Muslim, or atheist. If you do, our comment policy is very simple. We welcome comments that are:

• Respectable: “Worthy of respect; fitted to awaken esteem; deserving regard; hence, of good repute; not mean.”

• Civil: “Not rude; marked by satisfactory (or especially minimal) adherence to social usages and sufficient but not noteworthy consideration for others.”

It’s a simple policy. It provides an enormous field for the exchange of ideas. It allows vigorous and heated arguments over policy or philosophy. It welcomes the familiar and the arcane, the banal and the compelling, the grave and the humorous.

It is also a policy we will enforce. We will delete comments that we feel do not meet the simple standards of respect and civility, and we will ban the IP address of those posting such comments. If you feel you have been treated unfairly as a result of this policy, we welcome your appeal via email. If your appeal is neither respectable nor civil, it is an appeal we will ignore.

What does the policy mean in application? Where we will draw the boundaries? We don’t know. We suppose our experience will be much as Justice Potter Stewart described the limitation of pornographic speech: we’ll know it when we see it. We can’t guarantee we won’t make bad calls. We can’t guarantee we won’t upset one or more of our readers. But we can guarantee that no deletion or IP ban will ever be because of a point of view; it will always be because a point of view was articulated with neither respect nor civility. We don’t want to engage in censorship, we want to engage in sense.

A commitment to respectable and civil commentary on a weblog. It may sound high minded. It may sound like not much fun. But it’s our forum, and it’s what we’ll allow. Readers disappointed in our perspective are welcome to create their own sites and maintain their own comment forums. Because we choose to believe that most people are reasonable … that they want an intelligent exchange of perspectives … that all things being equal, they’d choose not to engage in an online slugfest of slanderous rubes … we think it’s the right way to go.

So that’s what we’re going to try and create, and if we can’t do so, well, then frankly, we’d prefer not to have comments at Command Post. Because at the end of the day, this is a hobby for us. We derive virtually no economic benefit from Command Post. Our reward, and we presume the reward for our contributors, is intangible—the pride that comes from building something that others value, that is a unique first step for decentralized journalism. Command Post is something Michele and I love, and frankly it’s something of which we want to feel proud. Hateful, biting, insulting commentary does not make us feel proud. It robs us of one of the only rewards we derive from the site … our ability to say, “Look at what we made … it’s good, and it’s a model of what the online exchange of ideas and information can be.”

We will not be robbed. We have anywhere from 15,000 to 120,000 visitors a day to our corner of the blogosphere … we’re more than happy to alienate a handful if it’s the means of creating a forum of civil exchange for the remainder. And deep in our hearts, independent of the fact that such a forum is something we’ll feel better about, something of which we’ll be proud, we also believe such a forum is something the remainder will value, visit, and enjoy.

So, jump on in, but please keep it respectable and civil. It’s all we ask, and thanks for reading The Post.

HERE ARE YOUR ORDERS:

1. Go to this website.

2. Donate whatever you can.

3. Tell your friends and family to do the same.

GO! NOW! MOVE!

Why are you still here?

Not the following-orders type?

Need to be convinced?

OK – step in to my stateroom, grab a cup of joe, and we’ll talk.

Victory in the Battle for Iraq will not be achieved by force of arms alone – it will be won or lost in the hearts of the Iraqis themselves. The First Marine Division recently returned to the region with the slogan “No greater friend – No worse enemy.” We’ve seen the second part of that slogan at work in places like Ramadi and Fallujah. But what about the “No greater friend” part?

You know all of those international aid organizations that one usually finds in war-torn areas? They aren’t on the ground in Iraq – it’s too dangerous. The Marines must do it all themselves. They have to fight the war, and at the same time win the peace.

Spirit of America does not have any staff on the ground in Iraq. Their “staff” is the First Marine Division. The Marines make requests for specific aid, and SoA gathers donations to purchase the items needed. The goods are then shipped to Iraq via military transport.

Spirit of America has no paid employees, and is run entirely by volunteer labor and contributions. They have very little “overhead.” And because they are a federally registered 501c3 public foundation, all contributions are 100% tax deductible.

This organization is the real deal. Back in January, Mrs. Smash and I spent a day at Camp Pendleton, helping pack Frisbees, school supplies, and medical supplies for delivery to Iraq. Major General James Mattis reports that these donations have been very well received.

Because Spirit of America is not a government agency, there’s very little red tape involved in the process. They are able to respond very quickly to specific requests. For instance, last week an editorial in the Wall Street Journal on a Spirit of America request for $100,000 to help establish seven local television stations in Iraq to counter the negative message of al-Jazeera brought immediate results. The funds have been received, and the equipment will be shipped within weeks of the initial request.

You can’t beat that.

But there are other requests that have yet to be funded. And Spirit of America isn’t just helping the Marines, they are also supporting the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

So you want to help with the war effort? Here’s your chance.

What are you waiting for, an engraved invitation?

Or maybe you’re wondering what’s in it for me?

Well, I’ve teamed up with a coalition of military bloggers (and some of our friends), and we’re in competition with a couple of other blogger coalitions to see who can raise the most funds for Spirit of America.

Yes, I want very badly to win. I’m a competitive beast, after all. But no matter who raises the most money, the real winners will be the US Marine Corps, and ultimately, the people of Iraq.

No more yelling. You know what to do.

The headline says it all:

Poll: Terrorists May Be Winning

An AP poll run by the Ipsos News Center points to the ‘fact’ that a majority of Americans think the terrorists in Iraq are winning the war, and particularly the hearts and minds of many throughout the Middle East.

But I have to ask “What makes Americans think that?” The answer is simple:

The news media.

It’s rare that the media reports the good being done by Coalition Forces around Iraq. Instead they focus only on the fighting going on in a few cities, primarily in the Sunni Triangle. Again the media makes it sound like fighting is widespread and has popular support of the Iraqi people. But if you read the Iraqi blogs and read poll results of surveys taken in Iraq, you see an entirely different picture. Most Iraqis know that much of the fighting, particularly suicide bombings, is being done by ‘foreigners’ who could care less for the welfare of the Iraqi people. Many of these foreigners are jihadis - some working for Al-Qaeda. Others are Ba’athists from Syria. Some are Shi’a extremists from Iran. There are also a host of others with axes to grind with America and the Iraqis be damned.

With reporting like this is it any wonder why some in America think the terrorists are winning? They’re being told so by a media more interested in sensationalism than in showing both sides of the story or, heaven forbid, the truth.

Of course it doesn’t help that Arab news agencies like Al Jazeera is all but in control of groups like Al Qaeda. Remember, there have been reports of Al Jazeera reporters paying insurgents to attack Americans, possibly acting as couriers for Al Qaeda. As if the world, and particularly the Arab world, should take anything said by Al Jazeera as the truth. But too many people do, including some in the West.

Are the terrorists winning? Sorry to say they are.

They’re winning the propaganda war.

UPDATE: Here’s an interesting look at the myths of Iraq.

(Crossposted from Weekend Pundit)

In an article about changes for the worse within the American media, Cathy Seipp says:

When did being terrified of everything stop being cause for embarrassment and start being a point of pride?

This could be the opening line of articles ranging from DDT to the war on terror. In my reading of history, Spain was never a country to shrink from a fight, whether it was against Great Britain or the "godless communists". What has changed to make them turn tail and run? America's history, too, is built upon people who took pride in facing and overcoming challenges.

Imagine watching sports under the new model of shrinking away from adversity. "It's third and sixteen, Al. They don't have much of a chance for the first down. And it looks like the coach agrees! The offense is coming off the field and they're setting up to punt." Or, Barry Bonds is in the hole, 0-2. He has a decision to make. Yes! he's walking back to the dugout and will concede the out."

On the upside, I suppose it would make the games quite a bit faster, but you'd lose everything about the competition that is important. The war on terror and the conflict in Iraq are many things, but it's mostly a competition of ideas. If we take our ball and go home, as some would have us do, not only have we lost the ballgame, we've lost the core of everything we're supposed to stand for.

(Cross-posted at Overtaken by Events )

[Please see here for previous story/background details. Also note that the money for the tv station in Iraq has not only been raised, but donations have exceeded what was needed. Any money raised for SOA today goes towards many of their other wonderful projects]

Spirit of America intends to support the Coalition troops - as well as the Iraqi people - by providing the resources needed to turn enemies into allies, and helping our troops and civilians show that we are there to help the Iraqi and Afghan people build their countries toward a peaceful, independent, free future - not to colonize or conquer them. That’s what winning the peace is all about.

The challenge is OFFICIALLY underwway. Any money donated to SOA today under the name of the Victory Coalition is appreciated. Our goal is twofold; to not just raise money for a great cause, but to kick Dean (Liberty Alliance)and John’s (Fighting Fusilleers) collective butts in the challenge to see which blogger alliance can raise the most money in one day.

Please click on the banner below, which will take you to the special page for donating as part of the Victory Coalition. See Wizbang for more details and a list of who is part of our alliance.

Thank you to Kevin for taking over the reigns of the VC when I couldn’t do it. You’ve done a bang-up job, my man.

Please, spread the word. Link, write, scream, call, run through your office building naked. Get your bosses to match your office total. Tell your neighbors.

If you donate in our name today, please let me know so we can count you as a member of our alliance, and thank you properly.

The Victory Coalition and the Spirit of America team thank you in advance for your generosity.

Please remember to use this link when donating.

There has been a big hullaballoo here in the blogosphere today with the Spirit of America fundraisng campaign. Apparently there are three factions vying for your monetary attention for this more than worthy cause. These factions, The Victory Coalition, The Fighting Fusiliers of Freedom and The Liberty Alliance are comprised of a great group of guys and gals, excellent bloggers in their own right, who truly want to make a difference. Who truly want to help our Marines help others.

So I say, in the immortal words of Rodney King, “Why can’t we all just get along?” Why must we be divided? I propose to pool our resources with this very post.

If you want to donate via the Victory Coalition, click here.
If you want to donate via the Fighting Fusiliers of Freedom, click here.
If you want to donate via the Liberty Coalition, click here.

All donations go to the Spirit of America Campaign regardless, so come on, click on any of the above links and don’t even bother scanning the text, just scroll down to the pledge area and give.

Jermaine made the above comment on foreign soil - in the Middle East, no less - in Manama, Bahrain.

I suppose Jermaine’s view is that American Muslims must be horrified that, in the past decade, America and its allies have liberated well over 50 million Muslims in former Yugoslavia, and in Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Thousands of American troops have died trying to liberate Muslims from dictatorial regimes - including during the infamous fire fight in Mogadishu. Indeed, if one didn’t know better, America’s number one foreign policy priority would appear to be “conquer dictatorships in distant lands to aid Muslims who usually hate us anyway.”

I guess Jermaine’s comments are consistent with the “usually hate us anyway” part.

This is a duplicate of the original post on the nikita demosthenes website.

This one comes from the Baghdadee forum, and is cross-posted today on Winds of Change.NET:

“Saddam’s Mosqu’s Khateeb “Shiekh Ali” dies and waits in line at the “Janna” Gates. Just ahead of him is a guy in casual shalwar (the loose outfit worn in the Middle East, Pakistan, et. al.). Malak (angel) addresses this guy, “Who are you, so that I may know whether or not to admit you to Heaven?”

The guy replies, “I’m Kaka Ali, Mini Bus driver from Kefri, Iraq.”

Malak consults his list, smiles and says to Kaka Ali, “Enter into the Kingdom.”

So the Iraqi driver enters Heaven and the Sheikh Ali is next in line. He stands erect. Without being asked, he proclaims, “I am Sheikh Ali Imam of Jama in Baghdad for the last 33 years during the Saddam God bless him!”

Malak consults his list and says, “I’m sorry, you’re on the waiting list. You have to pass some tests before you get entry to the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Shikh says, “Just a minute. That man was a Mini Bus driver, and you issued him instant entry! But I have to go through more tests. How can this be? Please double check the names.”

Malak says, “Up here, Imam, we go by results. While you preached, people slept; while he drove, people prayed.”

It is the nature of men that when faced with an impending doom, they will do something, anything, to avert it, even if that brings doom down upon themselves sooner and more surely then if they had done nothing. Such was the case in ancient Greek tragedies. So it was with the World War Two Nazis and Imperial Japanese. So it is now with Iran’s Mullahocracy in their “spoiling attack” on America in Iraq.

Dan Darling, Michael Ledeen, and Wretchard of Belmont Club (here and here) have all recently gone on documenting at length the size and scope of the Iranian and Iranian hired Syrian attacks in Iraq, and in Ledeen’s case what needs to be done about it. What they haven’t done is explain the wider pattern in terms of the Iranian objectives for their spoiling attack.

Read The Rest…

Robyn:

I was a senior about to graduate from the University of Oklahoma on April 19, 1995. I had been up all night studying for an exam, and woke up around 1:30 in the afternoon that day. I later remembered being jolted awake earlier in the morning by what I assumed was a sonic boom from Tinker AFB, but quickly went back to sleep. I decided to get in a workout before work and class — so I hurriedly took a shower, got dressed, and took off in my car without watching TV — completely unaware of what was going on in the backyard of the world around me. I rarely listen to the radio, and had a mixed cassette on in my car that afternoon. I arrived at Tan and Tone America to the most somber atmosphere I had ever encountered. The TVs were all on continuous news coverage, people were crying, and no one was really concerned with their tan or their figure that day. Ironically, six years later when our nation’s next horrific event occurred, I slept through it as well. There are times now when I’m literally afraid to sleep ever again…

A tribute put up by a Catholic church across the street from the memorial [with a] stone wall contains empty recesses, one for each life lost in the bombing. Facing that wall, and turned away from the Murrah building, is a large, white statue of Jesus. His head is in his hands, and a tear marks his cheek. The inscription on the base of the statue says only: ‘And Jesus Wept’. [Time]

My kids were five and three at the time. I clung to them fiercely in the weeks after April 19th. I could not comprehend the loss of so many little lives at one time. And it’s not that I didn’t grieve the loss of the adults as well; but the children…so many helpless, innocent children ripped from their parents in such horrible, brutal manner. It was almost too much to bear.

Yet I stared at the television for days on end. I barely slept, and when I did I only dreamed of crying, dying babies searching for their parents. One night, about a week after the bombing, I dreamed that I had lost my kids in an ocean. I just kept swimming, swimming, calling their names and swimming.

I tried to image myself in the place of those parents who lost their little babies that day. I couldn’t. I could not, in a million years, image what it was like to be them, to see the lifeless bodies of their children carried out of the rubble in the arms of rescuers.

It’s been nine years. How quickly things fade from the big picture. I can find very few news articles about the anniversary. So far, nothing on tv. A Google news search doesn’t bring up much. I wonder how soon 9/11 will become the same - just another date, just another memorial service, something relegated to page 12. I understand the need to not obsess over these things - but I do not understand the need to let it go, or the need to push it away as time goes by.

I’m sure that April 19, 2004 may as well be April 19, 1995 for the families who suffered losses at the Murrah Building. I wish them peace.

Time Magazine OKC coverage
Cato has beautiful photos of the OKC memorial.
Official Oklahoma City Memorial site
National Parks Service OKC memorial site

Charles Hill has more, please read.

April 18-19 is Yom Ha’Shoah, Holocaust Day.

• Harley-riding Rabbi Lazer Brody has a few thoughts - and memories - to share.

• I’ve got a few of my own, too: Shimon’s Story.

Unknown Comic rejects offer from Hamas

BURBANK, CA (AP) - Veteran comedian Murray Langston has rejected an offer by Hamas to become the new leader of their organization in Gaza.

“They thought it was a perfect fit,” said Murray. “Unknown Comic, Unknown Terrorist Leader. But I took off the bag years ago, and people know me. And on top of that, I’ve got a wife and three baggies to think about.”

“Sure I could use the work, but the leader of a terrorist organization? I still have nightmares about Jaye P. Morgan, for crying out loud. I bomb on stage, not buses.”

When asked about Gong Show MC Chuck Barris’ alleged ties to the CIA, Langston had no comment.

Those like myself who approved of the removal of Saddam Hussein, with or without the threat of his WMD program, face a difficult question.

Where do we draw the line, when it comes to removing smelly little dictatorships?

There appears to be 4 requirements neccessary for anyone to act, at least, at the moment.

1. The Dictatorship must be obviously morally and ethically bankrupt. Mere repression is not enough, they have to engage in Mass Slaughter.
2. The Dictatorship must be a threat to the rest of the planet, either by harbouring trans-national terrorists, manufacturing WMDs for sale to the highest bidder, or invading neighbours.
3. Removal of the Dictatorship must not unduely damage the Economic interests of the remover.
4. The means must exist to do the removal without Mass Megadeath.

Saddam qualified on all 4 grounds. Mass Graves? Check. WMDs and Teerorusts? Check (though the evidence indicated existing WMD stiockpiles rather than programs). Economic Interests? In the short-term, there would be significant damage. In the long term, a stable democracy in the Middle East is vastly preferrable to a bloody tyranny controlling the Oil. So Check, the damage is not a dealbreaker. Means? Check, providing we act now and don’t wait till he has multiple nukes.

Now look at North Korea.
1. - Millions starving, gulags, death camps. Check
2. - Nuclear program, proven record of terrorust activity - Check
3. - No economic interest in Korea - Check
4. - Means - Nope. There’s no peaceful way of getting rid of Kim Jong-Il, and a war would, at the most optimistic estimate, involve hundreds of thousands of casualties, and possibly millions. Thanks to former US administrations, this Loon has Nukes.

I won’t go into Syria or Iran. There are still many people unconvinced about Iraq, a situation far more obvious than either of these two.

But what about Turkmenistan ? Here we have an odious little megalomaniac, possibly certifiably insane, with millions of people under his heel.

He hasn’t introduced Death Camps. Yet.
He hasn’t started up WMD programs. Yet.
There’s no economic interest for us there. The Russians may want a gas pipeline through there one day, but that’s about it. So that’s OK, we can go in without causing a World recession.
But not merely hasn’t he provided a “safe haven” for trans-national terror, he’s actually provided airfields to help us in our fight against them. His Terrorism is used only on his own people.
Any military action in such a remote location in Central Asia, and right next to a very touchy Russia, would be very difficult, and fraught with danger.

Only one out of the four.

So why am I wishing desperately that we had nothing to do with the obnoxious little creep, except to de-stabilise and get rid of him ASAP?

In Iraq, we’re doing what we can to give the Iraqis a freedom of choice of government, a freedom from Dictatorship. Why not the Turkamens? Where do we draw the line?

The UN has dropped the ball, and we neither have the confidence in our own Righteousness that a mandate from an electorate larger than the USA’s would bring, nor the military might of the planet, rather than a few of the most powerful nations on it.

I guess we do what we can.

(Hat Tip to Silent Running for the link)

New Hamas leader will be Halliburton contractor

DAMASCUS (AP) - In the wake of yet another assassination of a Hamas’ top manager in Gaza and the threat of a merger with the Palestinian Authority, Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal announced that he would be contracting Houston company Halliburton, Inc. for the new Gaza regional manager role.

“After years of working with locally-trained executives with decreasing success, we’re bringing in outside talent,” he said from his bunker on the outskirts of Damascus. “Despite their primarily being involved in oil services and drilling, their security division is a perfect model for our resistance operations.”

The Houston-based company agreed, and a deal was made. “We have years of experience in placing individuals in positions of high risk in the Middle East,” said a senior Halliburton executive who wished not to be named.

The exact terms of the contract were not disclosed, but they were said to number in the millions of euros.

“And if it doesn’t work out,” said Meshall, “we can always take the infidel hostage and demand ransom.”

Fred Thompson has an excellent op-ed in today’s Washington Post (reg req’d):

Even the most partisan critics of the war in Iraq insist they are every bit as determined as President Bush to secure a democratic peace there. Regardless of whether the administration’s decision to go to war was correct, they say, the United States cannot now afford to cut and run.

What is weakness? Weakness is when America’s leaders compare Iraq to Vietnam, announcing to the world a faltering resolve to see our mission through. To our allies in the Middle East and beyond, these predictions of defeat send a clear and chilling message to hedge their bets, because the United States cannot be counted on. And to our enemies, they send an equally clear message: You can win.

Kos Linkage Skyrockets After Insult to Mutilated Americans

Originally published at Hog on Ice.

I should hire someone to pat me on the back so I don’t have to do it myself all the time.

Remember the flap about The Daily Kos and the murdered contractors in Iraq? The insurgents took men who were guarding food to feed Iraqis and their children, and they killed them and then burned their bodies until they were just lumps of charred meat, and then they tore the bodies into chunks and beat them and hanged them from a bridge.

And Mr. Kos thought that was swell. “Screw them,” he said. And then he got in trouble, and he hid the post. Of course, by then, it had been preserved via screen capture by more-patriotic bloggers.

Bloggers on the Right were beside themselves with glee. Advertisers would flee! There would be a mass delinking! Kos would finally be silenced! And what did I say? I said “wrong.” And I was right.

Truthlaidbear shows something like 1900 links to Kos, compared with around 1400 before his vile entry. And he has the highest traffic numbers of any blogger. Why? Because for the Left, hatred—of America, especially—works. These people—the disproportionately powerful far-leftists—really, really do hate their own country. Ignore the “We Love Our Troops” lip service. Talk means nothing; actions are the language of the heart. Leftist nuts are supporting Kos overwhelmingly.

Kos is far from the only example of anti-US hatred on the Left. We all remember that “million Mogadishus” idiot at Columbia University. We’ve seen liberals holding banners expressing glee over the deaths of American soldiers. We’ve seen flyers supporting the terrorist idiots who are currently slaughtering our troops. We remember Patty Murray praising Osama bin Laden as a philanthropist, while criticizing the US for not equaling his generosity and kindness. And then this week, a full-page newspaper ad from the St. Petersburg Democratic Club, calling the insurgents “patriates” [sic] who want us “the hell out of their country,” and saying Donald Rumsfeld should be executed.

It’s too bad that Fox hasn’t covered the Left’s hatred and anti-American activism better. We know the liberal establishment press will never cover it. The public needs to understand how widespread and intense the Left’s loathing of America is. And John Kerry, while not quite as far-out as the worst offenders, is closer to the loony, America-hating Left than to the merely left-of-center.

Congratulations, Kos. Keep up the good work. Your public has spoken.

9-11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick was the key figure in rasing the the “wall” between intelligence services higher than required by law. This prevented the sharing of intelligence between America’s intelligence agencies.

If there is one thing that led most directly to 9-11, this was it. Gorelick should be in the witness chair. To hear her lecuture others about difficulties in obtaining intelligence is breathtaking - the difficulties were largely caused by her actions as a Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration. As noted in today’s Wall Street Journal:

- - - - - - -

- - - - - - -

Mr. Ashcroft pointed out that the wall was raised even higher in the mid-1990s, in the midst of what was then one of the most important antiterror investigations in American history—into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. On Tuesday the Attorney General declassified and read from a March 4, 1995, memo in which Jamie Gorelick—then Deputy Attorney General and now 9/11 Commissioner—instructed then-FBI Director Louis Freeh and United States Attorney Mary Jo White that for the sake of “appearances” they would be required to adhere to an interpretation of the wall far stricter than the law required.

- - - - - - -

See here for the prior posting on this topic on The Command Post, together with Congressman Sensenbrenner’s call for Jamie Gorelick to resign from the 9-11 Commission due to her fatal conflict of interest.

See lucianne.com for more discussion on the above topic.

This is a duplicate of the original post at the nikita demosthenes website.

UPDATE:

For more on Gorelick-gate, go here.

SECOND UPDATE:

Andrew C. McCarthy: Gorelick cannot sit in judgment on her own official executive branch actions. It’s “conflicts 101:”

- - - - - - -

Most sadly ironic, do you know what the rationale for the wall was? Read Gorelick’s memo: It was to avoid the appearance of impropriety. It sacrificed national security in an effort to inoculate the government from a hypothetical, ill-conceived claim that national-security wiretapping power had been used as a pretext to build ordinary criminal cases. If the mere appearance of impropriety was a good enough reason as far as Gorelick was concerned in 1995 to gamble with American lives, why is it not a good enough reason in 2004 to promote the integrity of the 9/11 Commission by making sure its work is not tainted by a patent conflict of interest?

- - - - - - -

THIRD UPDATE:

This is the topic in a front-page story in today’s Washington Times.

Given that we’re more than a year out from the start of the war in Iraq, fighting has flared up recently, and opponents of the war have been trying rewrite history to take advantage of the fact that our intelligence estimates about WMD in Iraq have proven to be inaccurate, it’s important to remind people why we went to Iraq.

To begin with, it’s important to put the war in context. We must remember that we have been trying to remove Saddam Hussein from power since the Gulf War. Here’s David Frum on that subject,

“In the 2000 election, both candidates spoke openly about the need to deal with Saddam Hussein. Al Gore was actually more emphatic on the topic than George Bush was. In 1998, Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act. Just to show how conspiratorial they were, they put it in the Congressional record. In 1995, the CIA tried to organize a coup against Saddam Hussein and it failed. The coup was secret, but it has been written about in 5 or 6 books that I know of. In 1991, representatives of President George H. W. Bush went on the radio and urged the Iraqi people to rise up against Saddam Hussein. So America’s policy on Saddam has been consistent. What we have been arguing about for years are the methods. First, we tried to encourage a rebellion in Iraq, that didn’t work. Then we tried coups; that didn’t work. Then in 1998, we tried funding Iraqi opposition. That might have worked, but the money never actually got appropriated. Then, ultimately we tried direct military power. The idea that Saddam should go has been the policy of the United States since 1991.”

So the idea that we should go after Saddam Hussein was nothing new. But after 9/11, removing Saddam Hussein suddenly became an essential part of the global strategy in the war on terrorism. Why so?

Well, after September 11th, it became apparent that simply going after Al-Qaeda was not going to be enough to prevent future attacks. First off, if you simply target Al-Qaeda, what happens if the core of group simply changes its name or groups with other anti-American terrorists? Furthermore, how can you effectively target terrorists protected by the power of a rogue state? The answer is, “you can’t”. In addition, the training, resources, & protection provided by those rogue states is the very thing that enables a group like Al-Qaeda to become capable of pulling off the sort of attack we saw on 9/11. So in order to prevent future 9/11s, you have to go after not just Al-Qaeda, but all terrorist groups with global reach and the rogue states that support them.

George Bush made that clear in his Sept 20, 2001 speech to the nation when he said,

“Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated….

And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”

Without question, Iraq was a nation that provided “safe haven” for terrorists with “global reach”. Among them were terrormaster Abu Nidal, Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the conspirators in the 1993 WTC bombing, “Khala Khadr al-Salahat, the man who reputedly made the bomb for the Libyans that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over…Scotland,”Abu Abbas, mastermind of the October 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking and murder of Leon Klinghoffer,” & “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, formerly the director of an al Qaeda training base in Afghanistan” who is now believed to be leading Al-Qaeda’s forces in Iraq. Quite frankly, any war on terrorism that didn’t tackle that nest of vipers would have been a war in name only.

Moreover, as devastating as 9/11 was, a terrorist attack featuring weapons of mass destruction could be infinitely worse. Much has been made of the fact that we have not found the stockpiles of WMD that we expected in Iraq. But, there are three points worth making about that.

First of all, there simply was no significant difference between the position the Bush administration had on Iraq’s WMD and the position held by prominent Democrats like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, or John Kerry. In short, the overwhelming majority of Democrats & Republicans in Washington believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Secondly, given the size of Iraq and the fact that Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian regime was not cooperating with the UN inspectors, there was no way, even had they been there for a hundred years, that Hans Blix and the rest of the UN inspectors could have confirmed to anyone’s satisfaction that Iraq was not producing WMD. Even a year after the war, when our inspectors have had the run of the country, access to “secret documents”, and have been able to interview Iraqi scientists without Saddam’s”minders” being present, our WMD teams have still not been able to definitively say there are no remaining stockpiles of weapons in Iraq although we certainly suspect that to be the case.

Third, it isn’t as if our intelligence agencies and the politicians citing them were totally wrong about WMDs and Iraq. As David Kay revealed, Iraqi scientists were working on weaponizing anthrax “right up until the end” and had restarted a rudimentary nuclear weapons program in 2000 & 2001. Furthermore, Kay said,

“Even those senior officials we have interviewed who claim no direct knowledge of any on-going prohibited activities readily acknowledge that Saddam intended to resume these programs whenever the external restrictions were removed. Several of these officials acknowledge receiving inquiries since 2000 from Saddam or his sons about how long it would take to either restart CW production or make available chemical weapons.”

Those are not comforting words given that an “Iraqi chemical weapons expert” told “Uday Husayn” that mustard gas could be produced for Saddam’s Fedayeen in two months.

After 9/11, anyone who doesn’t see the potential danger of allowing terrorists like Abdul Rahman Yasin & Abu Abbas to be sheltered by an America hating regime that was working on weaponizing ricin and that could produce mustard gas in two months has an insufficient understanding of the peril facing in our country in my opinion.

Furthermore, there were certainly many other reasons to go to Iraq. Saddam Hussein was an avowed enemy of America who had started two wars of aggression in the region, was steadfast in his support for Palestinian suicide bombers, and brutally oppressed his own people. That last point is especially salient since we justified sending troops to Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, and Somalia almost solely because of “humanitarian reasons”. Personally, I believe in using our military to further American interests, but if “humanitarian purposes” floated your boat in Kosovo or Haiti, I see no reason why it shouldn’t still work for Iraq.

Similar arguments could be made about the UN. The UN Security Council averaged better than a UN Resolution per year for over a decade, the last of which was approved unanimously, demanding that Saddam fulfill the obligations he agreed to at the end of the Gulf War. While I have an extraordinarily low opinion of the United Nations, there are many people who hold the UN in high esteem and regard it as an essential part of the world order. But, why should anyone take the UN seriously when even a despised dictator can simply thumb his nose at the UN year after year with no response other than impotent new resolutions?

Also, as I mentioned earlier, Iraq is an essential part of the war on terrorism. That’s not just because we were able to go after the terrorists mentioned earlier, but because terrorists are coming to Iraq to fight our soldiers. Some people see that as a bad thing, but as Christopher Hitchens recently wrote,

“(I)n my experience, dud theories die only to be replaced by new and even dumber ones. The current reigning favorite is that fighting al-Qaida in Iraq is a distraction from the fight against al-Qaida.”

Indeed, we are fighting Al-Qaeda in Iraq. And while none of us are happy that our military is risking their lives fighting against terrorists in a foreign land, it could be worse. Instead of fighting the finest soldiers in the world in Iraq, Al-Qaeda could be murdering unarmed American civilians here in the US, at a time and a place of the terrorists’ choosing. Iraq has turned out to be irresistible flypaper for terrorists and quite possibly, we here in the US may have been spared terrorist attacks because of it.

It’s also worth noting that after Saddam was gone, we no longer had a need to keep troops in Saudi Arabia, which was something Al-Qaeda had used as a recruiting tool. Furthermore, we were able to lift the sanctions which had given Saddam an opportunity to starve his political enemies to death while shifting the blame for his murderous actions to the United States. Moreover, if as expected, we can actually help the Iraqis achieve Democracy, it has the potential to be the most significant thing to occur in the Middle-East since the Mamelukes effectively ended the Crusades with their victories in 1291.

If a beachhead of democracy can be established in Iraq, there’s an excellent chance that we’ll see Democratic reforms start to sweep across the region where anti-American tyrants are keeping their populations in control by the skin of their teeth. The influence of a free Iraq could in time help lead to a free Iran, a free Syria, a free Lebanon, a free Saudi Arabia, a free Egypt, etc, etc. We’re not just shooting for an Iraqi Democracy, we’re hoping to see freedom spread across the entire region.

In summary, what we must remember about Iraq is that it’s not simply an optional war like Bosnia or Haiti, it’s an essential part of the war on terrorism and the linchpin of our efforts to help bring democracy to the Middle-East. Potentially, what we’re doing in Iraq could be as important as the work the “Greatest Generation” did in Japan and Germany after WW2, perhaps more so. The Bush administration’s decision to take down Saddam and help the Iraqi people build a better, freer country was not just the right thing to do, it is without question in America’s interests.

Some non-news commentary for a change.

No, no jello wrestling or bikinis involved. Sorry.

This morning I posted about Spirit of America raising money to help the Marines create an television station in Iraq that will serve to dispense truth and dispel the lies of al Jazeera. Read it here.

I dropped the hint that you should donate some money. Dean dropped the same hint to his readers. And a challenge was born.

Before you read further, keep in mind that Dean and I came up with this “war” together as a fun way to help raise the money for the Marines.

He’s already thrown down the gauntlet. I accept the challenge. A Small Victory and the readers of this blog will - I have no doubt about that - raise more money for the Spirit of America cause than Dean’s blog/readers.

SOA is going to be setting something up so the tally for each blog will be easy to track.

The battle will not start until Monday, so hold off your donations until then. That gives you about four full days to decide who you will align yourself with - “Howard” Dean Esmay or myself.

Of course, I’ve already got one blog signed up on my side - The Command Post and it’s posse of 20,000 or so readers.

And I’ve got you. Right? I hope you know what the correct answer to that question is.

So while the monetary tallies won’t start until Monday, the blogging alliance tally begins now. If you want to join your blog and your bevy of readers up with mine (the winning side), link to this post, give the challenge a plug and leave a comment. If you don’t have a blog but you want to join in, just sign your name in the comments.

Remember, this is all for a good cause and the alliance/money challenge is just a way to entice you all into coughing up some bucks for the Marines and their tv station.

More information will be forthcoming. If you have any questions, just send me an email.

Update: You don’t have to go with either of our alliances, you know. Feel free to form your own. The more bloggers involved, the more money for the cause!

Ten years ago this month, Rwanda plunged into bloody genocidal slaughter. As the UN’s peacekeeping force - a mere 2500 strong - dithered, and the Western world turned a blind eye, forces arrayed themselves for slaughter.

For 100 days, the slaughter continued. Premeditated and preplanned, nearly a million men, women, and children were massacred. Frontline’s episode “The Triumph of Evil” and Ghosts of Rwanda remind us that when the world said “Never Again” after the Holocaust, it was a mere platitude. The West turned its back on dying Tutsis, massacred at a rate of thousands a day. For 100 days. This is the true face of genocide. Every man, woman, and child in Rwanda carried identification cards with their ethnic heritage emblazened upon them, a leftover from their days as a Belgian colony. These cards would be the yellow stars of this genocide. Those who were Tutsi were marked for death.

In addition to the slaughter, the Hutus carried out a rape campaign against Tutsi women. This carried with it a most deadly side effect: AIDS. While I wanted to write something substantive about this for this site, hoping to turn my phrase to good use, I can only stare at the words of the article linked below, a sick feeling gripping my stomache. Go read it, and do what you can to help. We stood silently by when the genocide took place. It’s time to speak up to help those we previously ignored.

Charity says 8,000 Rwanda rape survivors need AIDS drugs

Hutu ringleaders extorted [sic] militiamen to rape Tutsi women in a deliberate plan to use AIDS as a weapon that could go on killing long after they had murdered their other victims with clubs and machetes.

Massacres also led to HIV infection as survivors hidden under body piles had their wounds exposed to others’ blood.

According to SURF, about 8,000 female survivors are known to be HIV-positive but only 22 are receiving medication.

Now the Nurse has to Skip Lunch to Tie Him Back up

Originally published at Hog on Ice.

The whole right-wing Blogosphere is up in arms about Andy Rooney’s latest “column.” I use quotation marks because I can’t bring myself to call 600 words a column. I’ve written grocery lists longer than that.

An interesting sidelight: if you cut and paste Rooney’s piece into Microsoft Word and use “Word Count,” it comes out to exactly 600 words. I think that tells you something about his attitude toward his work.

Rooney: [tap, tap, tap] Is it 600 yet?

Nurse: No, dear.

Rooney: Darn. [tap, tap, tap]

Rooney is in big trouble for saying some of our troops in Iraq aren’t heroes. Most right-wing bloggers want to gut him and set him out for the crows. What he said was clearly stupid, but I’m not all that agitated. Of course, it’s early for me, and the caffeine hasn’t done its work yet. At this stage, it may not be possible to agitate me.

I think Rooney meant that not all of our troops are gung-ho. Which is what he should have said, if you think about it. It sure beats issuing a gratuitous insult.

The weird thing is, Rooney himself served in the Army. His bio says he was in an artillery regiment in England in World War Two (not scary, I admit), and that he later joined Stars and Stripes and accompanied bomber crews on flights over Germany (plenty scary). I guess esprit de corps is not what it used to be.

Rooney implies that if you asked a whole bunch of US soldiers how they feel about Iraq, they’d tear off their fatigues, exposing MorOn.org MoveOn.org T-shirts, and loudly proclaim “Bush equals Hitler.” He wants us to think they’re over there cursing Bush day and night and writing love letters to Patty Murray.

Not true, of course. Polls suggest morale may need some punching up, but that’s about it. Name a conflict in which no soldiers grumbled. Hell, Rooney himself grumbled about working in the oppressive Rather regime at CBS, but he kept plugging along until they put his things in a box outside his office door.

Rooney cites the 23 soldiers who have committed suicide in Iraq. What he doesn’t tell you is that soldiers commit suicide in peacetime, too, and that the numbers are not that much worse in Iraq, where stress is much higher. And for all we know, the suicides had more to do with the economic problems at home than the situation in Iraq. It’s not like we have a control group to look at for comparison purposes. For all we know, more soldiers would have killed themselves if we hadn’t gone to war.

Peaceniks like to cite the suicide figures, but they haven’t been able to come up with any evidence that soldiers are killing themselves because they’re in Iraq. Where are the tormented final notes lambasting President Bush? Strange, offing yourself for a very specific reason and not bothering to let anyone know what it is.

Rooney says praising our soldiers as heroes is “an old civilian trick” intended to keep our uniformed dupes in front of the cannons. Is that right? As is so often the case, I missed the memo and failed to show up for the conspiracy meetings. I thought I was praising our soldiers because I admired their courage and their willingness to offer their lives in order to benefit the rest of us. Am I a dupe, too? Is there a second, even-more-secret conspiracy to dupe civilians like me into duping our soldiers?

I feel so violated. First, they fluoridate our water, damaging the purity of our precious bodily fluids, and now this. We are but toys for BushCo’s amusement.

Rooney also pushes the highly annoying liberal canard that the military is fundamentally a means of providing jobs and scholarships. We really need to fight this one, because eventually, it will be accepted without question, the way we have come to accept the insane notion that wealthy seniors deserve free prescription drugs. Rooney thinks the military is bad because it offers people employment and tuition money to sign up, and then it requires them to LIVE UP TO THEIR COMMITMENT TO SERVE. Outrageous! Why, who would ever think, when enlisting in the Marines or the Navy, that MILITARY SERVICE might be involved? It’s fraud, plain and simple. These kids thought they were signing up for Outward Bound.

Here’s a thought: if you don’t want to shoot people, don’t enlist in the military. Does that sound crazy? Help me out; I’m having a hard time finding the logical flaw here.

Don’t hand me that tired old BS about people having no choice. That may have been true in eighteenth-century England, where people were forced into service at gunpoint or joined because the alternative was starvation in filthy gutters. In modern America, it is the farthest thing from true.

I don’t want to get into a big argument over the definition of the word “hero,” but I am willing to state that I admire anyone who willingly joins the US military and then consents to be placed in harm’s way for the benefit of total strangers. Rooney thinks we tricked people into enlisting and then dragged them kicking and screaming into Iraq, but the facts are that our military personnel vote conservative by about a three-to-one margin, and that they generally support an aggressive stance toward foreign enemies.

We shouldn’t pay too much attention to a silly, poorly written, ill-supported, terse column scratched out by a retired humorist about three decades past the peak of his mediocrity. I would not support an outcry to have Rooney’s house burned and his odd little columns withdrawn—with great fanfare—from syndication. As I told a reader today in an email, I think the best thing would be to set them out with the trash, tell Mr. Rooney they’ve been published, and get him a nice cup of tea.

Suicide “Epidemic” Proven Nonexistent

It was already obvious to the number-crunchers among us, but in case math is not your long suit, you may wish to check out a conclusive refutation of the Operation Iraqi Freedom Suicide Myth.

As the Passover holiday comes to a close, so too must this year’s coverage at Winds of Change.NET. Like the Seder service itself, we finish in contemplation - and in hope:

“Ended is the Passover Seder, according to custom, statute and law. As we were worthy to celebrate it this year, so may we perform it in future years. Oh pure one in heaven above, restore the congregation of Israel in your love. Speedily lead your people to Zion in joy. Next year in Jerusalem!”

Cairo columnist Tarek Heggy has been a frequent contributor over at Winds of Change.NET. In the wake of his Passover greetings, I’ve been having an interesting email exchange around the story of Passover, the role of the Egytians, and one specific part of the Passover Seder: the spilling of 10 drops of wine, as the plagues visited upon the Egyptians are recited.

Why do we do that? The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if perhaps the standard explanations were missing something - something that goes right to the heart of this holiday of freedom. Here’s what Tarek wrote:

Read The Rest…

From the Spirit of America website:

US Marines seek to equip seven (7) television stations serving local communities within Al Anbar Province, Iraq. The Province includes the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi. These stations will offer information that is more accurate and balanced than existing alternatives. The goal is to improve understanding between Americans and Iraqis, build trust and reduce tensions.

Current TV news in Iraq often carries negative, highly-biased accounts of the U.S. presence. Unanswered, its effect is to stoke resentment and encourage conflict. The Marines seek to ensure the Iraqi people have access to better, more balanced information. By equipping local television stations and providing the ability to generate news and programming, the Marines will create a viable news alternative - one owned and operated by local Iraqi citizens.

Read the rest and donate.

Today, when I get home from the office, I’m going to run my normal routine: Take off the shirt and tie, throw my shoes in the closet, change to a pair of shorts. I’m going to open the fridge, pull out a beer and head out to ManCamp, my little oasis in my back yard. I will possibly cast a few out in the canal.

I’m gonna hang out with my neighbor, do a couple of things around the yard until the Mrs. gets home. When she does I’ll go back inside, listen to her day, help her prepare dinner.

After dinner I’m going to flip on the TV. But I wont be watching Law & Order tonight. Or a Marlins game, or the History Channel or TLC or any of the news channels. No. I’m going to set the TV to HBO at 8 o’clock.

Tonight I’ll be watching a famous director’s take on Fidel Castro: Oliver Stone’s “Looking for Fidel.”

I’m a bit apprehensive about it. The last thing I need after dinner is to watch the bearded bastard get patted on the back by some director who simply chooses to ignore the Cuban dictator’s crimes against his own people. I’m sure I’ll get angry. I’m sure I’ll be disgusted. I’m sure I will do some crying.

I am also quite positive I will be shaking my head in disbelief. How can anyone give Castro the limelight like this? How can anyone, in good conscience, disregard the man’s record of brutality and lack of respect for the rights of his own people?

I’ll be sitting there tonight, in my home in Miami, and remember that my grandparents are buried here. That they never got to return to their beloved country. I’ll picture my father and father-in-law surviving like animals in one of Castro’s prisons. Or my father-in-law being shot at during the Bay of Pigs. I’ll be thinking about how many Cubans have died in a desperate attempt to grasp the freedom that should be undeniable for every human being. Freedom denied by the very same man on the television screen.

I’ll remember the plane ride over. How my father had to bring his family to this new country, scared, unsure of where life would lead him. Of the unspoken sadness of that day.

I’ll be remembering all of my family’s wonderful stories of a Cuba that had no need for Fidel Castro. Of my parent’s courtship or my aunts and uncles in their youth, all living the certainty of being Cuban in Cuba. A Cuba that is now long gone.

I’ll be wondering who I would have been had this man never existed. Would I be the same person? What would my life have been like? Would I be happy being Cuban?

There is one thought, however, that will be constant tonight while I watch this movie. Fidel Castro, now old and decrepid, will die soon. And on that very day, at that very moment, the strangle hold on the Cuban soul will be gone. On that day I will rejoice along with millions of others at the death of that tyrant. I will party, I will cry, I will scream at the top of my lungs and I will proudly wave both of my flags. I will hug my parents amid sobs. Al fin, the nightmare is over. That death will be our solace.

And as God is my witness, one day very soon thereafter, I will piss on Castro’s grave.

By Val Prieto
Babalu Blog

The person responsible for the attacks was Osama bin Laden. That’s who’s responsible for killing Americans. And that’s why we will stay on the offense until we bring people to justice.

This was probably my favorite thing the president said last night, in the face of some really bad questions. It’s a simple fact, really, yet one that for some reason needs to be shoved down the throats of the rabid witch hunters of the left time and time again.

The Demorats have nerve to talk about Iraq being a distraction to Afghanistan, when the 9/11 commission is the real distraction to the war on terror at large. The partisan badgering of those in office on the day some murdering extremists struck our nation is keeping us from looking at the present and the future.

What will finger pointing do? What will all the sniping and belligerence accomplish? I say this as someone who lost friends on 9/11, as someone who, to this day, is psychologically scarred by the events of that day, as someone whose family was deeply and personally affected by crumbling of those towers.

Q Do you feel a sense of personal responsibility for September 11th?

I don’t know who asked that one, but I want to smack him across the face.

Bush is no more responsible for 9/11 than Clinton was the first WTC bombing. Let’s hold repsonsible for these actions those who committed them.

Q: Two weeks ago, a former counterterrorism official at the NSC, Richard Clarke, offered an unequivocal apology to the American people for failing them prior to 9/11. Do you believe the American people deserve a similar apology from you, and would you be prepared to give them one?

Richard Clarke’s apology was not unequivocal. It was self-serving grandstanding. It was his way of thumbing his nose at the president and his administration. I hope Bush never apologizes to the United States for the events of 9/11, because that would be admitting fault, and he has none here. None at all. Nothing in the world could have prevented those planes from swinging into the towers and the Pentagon and falling in a field in PA except for a very accurate crystal ball. As far as I know, the White House has yet to acquire one of those.

Q Thank you, Mr. President. In the last campaign, you were asked a question about the biggest mistake you’d made in your life, and you used to like to joke that it was trading Sammy Sosa. You’ve looked back before 9/11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9/11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have you learned from it?

His biggest mistake is in thinking the press wants the truth when all they want is sensational headlines, frightening ledes and Pulitizer prizes. Another mistake he made is in thinking the press is fair. They are not.

Q I guess I just wonder if you feel that you have failed in any way? You don’t have many of these press conferences, where you engage in this kind of exchange. Have you failed in any way to really make the case to the American public?

There’s obviously a reason he doesn’t have these conferences too often. When confronted with questions like these, the conferences turn more into a partisan grilling section, with the press playing like Ben Veniste on Condi. You can almost see the foam dripping from their mouths as they behave like lawyers badgering a witness.

I’m not naive enough to think that the job of the press is to make the president look good or even to make the country look good. But I do believe in a fair press, in reporters that want to the truth and not just their twisted version of the truth, where they frame their questions in such a way that there is no right or good answer.

I thought, as Americans, that we were all on the same side. I thought we all valued freedom and we would value a president who wants to spread freedom, not hatred.

Yes, there are many things going on in Iraq that worry me. Which is why I think there were so many more questions that could have been asked.

This looking for blame for 9/11 has to stop. The push to get the president to admit culpability and to apologize for something other people did has got to stop.

Somehwere in an Arab country, a bunch of militants and terrorists are watching the tape of last night’s interview, maybe even tapes of the 9/11 commisson are laughing at us, patting each other on the back and saying, mission accomplished.

When did we become at war with each other? When did the Democrats and the left become so concerned with cornering the president into admitting guilt for something he didn’t do that they have forgotten we are at war and we have a common enemy who happen to carry bombs and harbor a deep hatred for all of us, Democrat or Republican or socialist or whatever political persuasion you may present?

I thought America was supposed to stand together at times like these. Heh. Maybe I am naive. Maybe I’m a hopeless, patriotic romantic who thinks that war and the potential of terrorist threats upon our soil required that we act in concert with each other, not against each other.

If we don’t get it together soon there will be more dead soldiers, more warfronts, more buildings falling and people dying. The press has the power to pull us together. Instead, they choose play upon our differences, to make those differences more pronounced and to make a great divide even wider.

What the hell happened to us? And where is all this finger pointing and blame shifting going to get us?

The person responsible for the attacks was Osama bin Laden. That’s who’s responsible for killing Americans. And that’s why we will stay on the offense until we bring people to justice.

Repeat the above phrase over and over. You must learn.

[Transcribed questions from Ed]

Senator Kennedy’s “Iraq is George Bush’s Vietnam” speech has prompted many comparisons of the two wars. As much as I hate media sound bites and talking points, I must admit that sometimes a bullet list can bring clarity and perspective to an emotionally heated debate. Since I don’t really blog, I can’t resist offering my own “Top 12” list here, a condensed version of a comparison issued April 8th by the Senate Republican Policy Committee.

1 How many U.N. Security Council resolutions were ignored by the enemy?

Vietnam: 0
Iraq: 17

2 When were forces sent, and when was use of force authorized?

Vietnam: 1961. Congress authorized in 1964 (and repealed in Jan. 1971).
Iraq: March 2003. Congress authorized use of force in October 2002.

3 How many troops were sent, overall?

Vietnam: Approximately 3.5 million from 1964-75; about 2 million were draftees
Iraq: 466,985 as of April 30, 2003; all are volunteers

4 How many US soldiers died?

Vietnam: 58,178 (including about 20,000 draftees)
Iraq: about 719 to date

5 How many allies joined the US?

Vietnam: 8
Iraq: 30+, including 16 of 26 NATO allies

6 How many people were liberated?

Vietnam: 0
Iraq: 25 million

7 How long to liberate the capitol?

Vietnam: (Hanoi) never happened during 11 years of war
Iraq: (Baghdad) less than 30 days after war started

8 How long to capture or kill the enemy leader?

Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh was never captured
Iraq: 9 months after war began

9 What happened to the local population?

Vietnam: many fled and were murdered by Pol Pot; many others fled by boat and died
Iraq: some fled before or during the war, but almost all have returned to build democracy

10 How many ethnic & religious factions had to be reconciled, post-war?

Vietnam: the Communist government “eliminated” these
Iraq: Sunni, Shia, Kurd, Christian, Assyrian, Hebrew and others.

11 How quickly did the minority in Congress vote against funding the soldiers?

Vietnam: 9 years after Kennedy sent forces in
Iraq: 7 months after Bush sent forces in

12 Who won or lost the war?

Vietnam: Congress, when it abandoned South Vietnam after the peace treaty
Iraq: to be determined

Is Dick Morris floating an idea that may become the Kerry/DNC position on Iraq? While Morris is often dismissed as a denouement, if not joke, he is still one of the sharpest political operatives around. Morris is also the perfect focus group of one; the DNC can disavow his views and position theirs accordingly. I have never been convinced that his ties with Clinton are severed.

Morris’ appearance on Fox yesterday and his current column offers Bush advice on disengaging from Iraq.

Bush will be in real trouble if the situation in Iraq deteriorates. The reported boast of one anti-American demonstrator that he and his ilk “cannot drive America out of Iraq, but we can drive Bush out of the White House, like we did to Carter” is not far-fetched.

So what is Bush to do?

Procedurally, the June 30 deadline for handover of power to the Iraqi government looks like an essential element in the president’s escape from political danger. But behind it must lay humility and a realization of our limited means and the even more attenuated patience of the American people.

We were willing to support Bush in Afghanistan and over the Patriot Act. We backed the invasion of Iraq and agreed that Saddam needed to be removed. Even when no weapons of mass destruction turned up, the American people still supported Bush.

But last week’s polling suggests that Americans are not prepared to sacrifice their sons and daughters to assure democracy in Iraq. That nation, which has never known freedom, may or may not be able to achieve democracy. But Americans are not willing to bet our children on the outcome. Nor should Bush wager his presidency.

As long as Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist Party are out of power - and do not return - the United States will have accomplished its essential objective in Iraq. Saddam is an evil man. His villainy, coupled with his access to oil wealth, made him a potent threat to peace and freedom. He had to go.

To make sure he remains out of power, we must keep a large garrison, safely ensconced at a secure base, in Iraq once we hand over power to the Iraqi Governing Council.

In effect Morris advises abandoning Iraq to civil war while establishing a “garrison” similar to Gitmo, aka sitting ducks in an angry Arab barrel. Should we betray the Iraqi people we have lost the best, and perhaps the last chance to influence generations of young Arabs, to turn them away from isolation and theocracy to self-governance and participation in the free world.

Morris continues :

But democracy may be a bridge too far in Iraq; even peace may be elusive. We must heed the lessons of Nixon’s successful disengagement from Vietnam. As Nixon did, we must turn the war over to the locals, a process he called Vietnamization.

As today’s news headlines demonstrates this has been a disaster for Vietnam’s minority tribes.

HANOI, Vietnam - Vietnam’s Central Highlands remained sealed off Monday by police and security officials following protests by hundreds of ethnic minority Christians over Easter weekend.

Scores were arrested and injured when more than a thousand people took to the streets Saturday in Buon Ma Thuot, the provincial capital of Daklak, in what was supposed to be peaceful prayer demonstrations against religious repression and land confiscation. Most of the indigenous mountain tribes are Protestant.
[…]
Vietnam recognizes only a handful of state-sponsored religions and has clashed many times with Buddhists and Christians. International human rights groups allege some ethnic minorities have been persecuted for their beliefs and forced to publicly renounce their faith. The European Union and the U.S. State Department have criticized Vietnam for religious repression.

Vietnamization overlaid upon the Northern communist takeover produced the obvious result; a repressive majority regime. Should we adopt a similar withdrawal technique in Iraq a Shi’ite civil war ensues and a theocracy regime will take power in Iraq. The Kurds would demand and fight fiercely for independence, throwing Turkey into turmoil. Civil and territorial wars would roil Iraq and its neighbors. Ba’athists and weaponery would pour back into Iraq from Syria. A theocratic Iraqi government would be little more than Iran’s puppet. Could Saudi Arabia withstand the internal pressures of a unified Iraq and Iran?

Morris is a clever campaigner and reader of popular sentiment, but his advice in this case is poisonous to the American body politic. There is no quick fix. I do not think Bush is considering such a scheme, it goes against his grain and he has surely internalized the failure of his father to take on the task in 1990. The reason Bush 41 didn’t go to Baghdad was not because we couldn’t win as easily as a year ago, but to avoid the situation with which we now grapple.

As a nation we have asked the Iraqi people to trust us to finish what we began a decade ago and we will stand by them. That we betrayed them in 1990 is a large part why they are fearful of aiding us in rooting out the bad actors and thugs, they do not believe we will stay the course. Why would Afghani’s trust us not to do the same? The Arab world will not give western civilization another chance if we cut and run in Iraq and in effect we will have handed a small radical minority the tools to engage us in the next stage of their war, the decimation of the oil fields in order to cripple our civilization. Oh, I can hear the lefties sneering “See, I told you it was about oil”…but our society, comforts and very existence is supported by Mid-East oil, and that is an immutable fact.

What we have undertaken is the most important task since the post-WWII reconstruction of Europe and Japan. To view it through the prism of winning an election is not only exceedingly stupid, but dooms the next administration to chaos and even higher costs in American lives and perhaps the stability of our system for decades. As a nation we have always undertaken what is right, not what is easy. It’s the best part of our character.

…Why we had to go into Iraq (from A.E.Brain, the Blog)

The first 53 are detailed in this document, courtesy of USAID.

Since the Saddam Hussein regime was overthrown in May, 270 mass graves have been reported. By mid-January, 2004, the number of confirmed sites climbed to fifty-three. Some graves hold a few dozen bodies, their arms lashed together and the bullet holes in the backs of skulls testimony to their execution. Other graves go on for hundreds of meters, densely packed with thousands of bodies.

The 54th is from an e-mail sent by a friend of mine in Israel. It’s so that no-one has to hear a radio broadcast like this ever again.

Thanks to reader Ronnie Schreiber, here is a translation:

We all recognize that signal that we have just heard. This is a genuine alert. There is a missile attack on Israel. All Isreali residents should immediately put on their gas masks and should go into their sealed rooms and place their families in the room. The room should be sealed with rags and with adhesive tape. As is known and recognized, stop your normal activities, check on your children and put on their gas masks in the correct manner, and continue to listen to us. This is a genuine alert, a missile attack on Israel and we will have more details as they come in… To review procedures in the sealed room, do not sit near exterior walls or walls adjacent to the exterior walls. Stay near the interior walls. Don’t face the exterior walls. Sit on the floor…If you have a family check on your children, make sure you have the key to the lock so you can lock the door, and proceed to your sealed room. This message will be repeated in Russian.

In the comments section of “Daily Kos - Again”, Amy Alkon asks:

“…as a sort of common-sense-loving moderate…I keep waiting for somebody to offer me a reasonable explanation of the following:

The US is attacked in the most major way ever on our shores, by Osama Bin Ladin and co. We respond, not by decimating Osama and his evil followers, but by waging war on…Iraq! ….Come on — somebody answer me - not with defending the current administration in mind as you write every word - but by persuading me with the (supposed) common sense behind what we did.”

That’s an in-depth question, Amy, and it demands an in-depth answer. So let’s look at the situation as if you were in charge back in 2002. Here’s your Presidential briefing. Now consider what you want to do.

Read The Rest…

W. Thomas Smith, Jr. writes in National Review Online:

In a fight that has been compared to both Hue (1968) and Dodge City (19th century), U.S. Marines spent most of last week fighting house-to-house for control of several urban centers in Iraq. The worst of the fighting has been in the towns of Fallujah and Ramadi. There, young Marine riflemen, many less than a year out of boot camp, have been battling black-masked rebel gunmen who don’t seem to care whether they live or die.

The Marines have the advantage of superior battlefield technologies, as well as air and tank support. But in the narrow streets and alleyways, where both belligerents are closing to within yards of one-another, technological advantages are greatly lessened. The edge instead goes to the quickest, most-accurate marksmen and those who are conditioned physically and emotionally to handle the clamor and horror of close-quarters battle.

Fortunately, the Marines are winning. Unfortunately, there have been losses.

Last week, 47 American soldiers and Marines were killed, countrywide. Nearly a thousand Iraqi guerillas — both Shiite and Sunni — were killed.

The death toll spiked on April 6. That day, 12 Marines were killed and over 20 wounded when Iraqi guerillas launched a surprise attack against a U.S. base in Ramadi, just up the road from Fallujah.

Americans back home were shocked. One man compared the Ramadi casualties to the losses suffered during the initial assaults up Hamburger Hill in 1969, a battle lasting for 10 days and ultimately costing the lives of 70 American soldiers. Others have confessed they believe the Iraqi war might be spiraling out of control.

Marines in the fight, however, have an entirely different perception.

Click here for the full article.

Cross-posted at Backcountry Conservative.

A lot of headlines were written over the discussions and agreements between Hamas and Arafat’s Fateh Party over the possible admission of Hamas into the security and political roles of the Palestinian Authority.

Well, true to their root natures, they’ve found their way of cooperating:

HA‘ARETZ: Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad claim foiled attack on Netzarim

Israel Defense Forces soldiers killed at least two gunmen in the pre-dawn hours Monday as the Palestinians sought to attack the Gaza Strip flashpoint settlement of Netzarim, military sources said.

The foiled attack coincided with the last day of the Passover week, observed as a festival day.

A third gunmen may have been critically wounded or killed in the incident, military sources said.

Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, part of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement, claimed joint responsibility for the operation. The three groups have increasingly cooperated in attacks on Israelis.

A joint statement issued in Gaza in the name of the three groups said that the intended target of the operation was an IDF headquarters near Netzarim.

No soldiers or settlers were injured in the incident.

These are not political parties. These are terrorist groups using diplomacy as just another front through which to attack the enemy as well as raise money for terrorist operations.

Until the civilized world acknowledges the truth about these evil organizations, innocents will continue to die.

Opinion piece of Niall Ferguson, published in The Telegraph - exerpt:

(….)There was amazement last year when I pointed out in the journal Foreign Affairs that in 1917 a British general had occupied Baghdad and proclaimed: “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.” By the same token, scarcely any American outside university history departments is aware that within just a few months of the formal British takeover of Iraq, there was a full-scale anti-British revolt. What happened in Iraq last week so closely resembles the events of 1920 that only a historical ignoramus could be surprised. It began in May, just after the announcement that Iraq would henceforth be a League of Nations “mandate” under British trusteeship. (Nota bene, if you think a handover to the UN would solve everything.) Anti-British demonstrations began in Baghdad mosques, spread to the Shi’ite holy centre of Karbala, swept on through Rumaytha and Samawa - where British forces were besieged - and reached as far as Kirkuk. Contrary to British expectations, Sunnis, Shi’ites and even Kurds acted together. Stories abounded of mutilated British bodies. By August the situation was so desperate that the British commander appealed to London for poison gas bombs or shells (though these turned out not to be available). By the time order had been restored in December - with a combination of aerial bombardment and punitive village-burning expeditions - British forces had sustained over 2,000 casualties and the financial cost of the operation was being denounced in Parliament. In the aftermath of the revolt, the British were forced to accelerate the transfer of power to a nominally independent Iraqi government, albeit one modelled on their own form of constitutional monarchy. I am willing to bet that not one senior military commander in Iraq today knows the slightest thing about these events. (….)

Iraqi bloggers and others report that Al Jazeera and Al Arabia present many inflamatory stories. Those stations are acting as propaganda arms for the anti-American and pro-Jihadist forces.

We are dealing with people who have a value system in which pride and shame are very important. Al Jazeera et. al. play upon this to create rage.

Our first amendment rights do not extend to foreign, hostile operations. These stations are acting as enemy combatants. It is time to fix this problem.
.

We are in a war about ideologies - democracy vs. radical Islam. The middle east has long run on rumors, and the worse rumors are often the ones that spread the farthest. We can win all the battles we need in Iraq, and yet create recruits for Al Qaeda as a result of biased and inflamatory news coverage.

If we are serious about this war, why haven’t we corrected this situation with Al Jazeera and Al Arabia? We know that some Al Jazeera personnel were on Saddam’s payroll. Who knows what other malevolent forces are exerting similar influence on them.

We should be able to covertly take over those operations by the use of sufficient incentives with their host governments or standard intelligence techniques to turn their staff into our assets, by blackmail, bribery, threats, sparrows, or whatever.

In the worst case, we should block the satellite uplinks using electronic counter-measures or pressure the host governments or the satellite owners into stopping the broadcasts.

Instead, we have finally put up our own Arabic channel. It’s a good idea and long overdue, but it is not enough. Good propaganda should be able to significantly improve the situation in the middle east. It should also be able to teach about democracy, teach about the United States and other allies, and paint our ideological opponents in the worst light. It should be used to encourage the Iranian unrest. It can inform people of how to make enormous amounts of money by giving us good intelligence. It should even be able to use true Islamic scholars to attack the more militant Islamic interpretations which are used by our enemies.

Do we have good propagandists? We need people with the quality and methods of Radio Free Europe. I’m afraid we might have Voice of America types, who have never been that effective.

Gregg Easterbrook writing at TNR has posted a fascinating alternative view of what we might be reading in the papers today if President Bush had done what some people now stridently curse him for not doing in his first few months in office:

washington, april 9, 2004. A hush fell over the city as George W. Bush today became the first president of the United States ever to be removed from office by impeachment. Meeting late into the night, the Senate unanimously voted to convict Bush following a trial on his bill of impeachment from the House.

On August 7, 2001, Bush had ordered the United States military to stage an all-out attack on alleged terrorist camps in Afghanistan. Thousands of U.S. special forces units parachuted into this neutral country, while air strikes targeted the Afghan government and its supporting military. Pentagon units seized abandoned Soviet air bases throughout Afghanistan, while establishing support bases in nearby nations such as Uzbekistan. Simultaneously, FBI agents throughout the United States staged raids in which dozens of men accused of terrorism were taken prisoner.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Excuse me while I engage in a bit of family related self promotion.

My son has started his own news website. He is eleven years old.

I’m really proud of him. He finally gave up that damn Neopets crap and he’s doing something a bit more constructive with his time.

I owe it all to his teacher, who encourages his students to know what’s going on in the world around them. He spends twenty minutes every morning on current events. On Mondays, they watch a half hour mix of the Sunday news shows that the teacher TiVos together.

The teacher is a Kerry supporter, but encourages the kids in the class - like DJ - who are Bush supporters to have healthy debates about the issues.

I didn’t give DJ the idea to make this site. He thought of it himself, made it himself, and stole some of the content from Command Post all by himself.

Oh, ok. I told him he could. But the opinions are strictly his.

Anyhow, I’m proud of him, and he added some updates today, so make him (and me) happy and keep his hit counter turning.

Who knows? Maybe we’re looking at a future Mark Steyn.

(Hey, it’s the most realistic goal he’s come up with so far; playing third base for the Yankees and being a world famous rock star are probably not goals to base your life on).

Thank you for indulging this proud mom.

[The following was written by TCP contributor Joe Gandelman and originally appeared here. It is reprinted with permission of the author]

CONDOLEEZZA RICE’S BIG ADVENTURE: No matter what eventual judgment is made about National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s historic testimony before the 911 Commission this much is for sure: President George Bush’s administration is in far better shape by having her give sworn testimony on the stand than it would have been if they had refused.
—-And that’s seemingly the only thing people on all sides can agree on.
—-If Rice had not taken the stand the constant drip, drip, drip of bad publicity would have continued suggesting that the administration had something to hide about the worst attack on the U.S homeland.
—-You can read the full transcript, if you wish, but here’s our take:
—-HER STRENGTHS: Rice looked knowledgeable, generally forceful (sometimes a bit too) and an adamant defender of her administration, its policies and the President. It was a skillful enough demonstration to guarantee her future as either a future political Republican political star or a future Secretary of State(or both). But she surely didn’t win many Democratic friends and her impact on nonpartisan voters is uncertain. She came prepared and as Glenn Reynolds aka InstaPundit points out at one withering point threw one of Senator Bob Kerry’s old speeches back in his face.
—-HER BIGGEST WEAKNESS: Long answers. Although she was accused by one commission member of “filibustering” it seemed more as if Rice was trying to run out the clock — stretching out an answer to fill the time allotted to a usually frustrated (usually Democratic) commissioner. This might have played well with Republicans and automatically outraged Democrats, but with swing voters it could offset any gains she made.
—-HER STRONGEST POLICY POINTS: 1. That the U.S. was not on a TOTAL“war” footing against terrorism until after 911 —because critical changes in government structures and fine-tuning agencies’ cooperation had not yet taken place. There may have been preparations to be on a war footing, but the actual machinery to battle terrorism in its 21st Century form didn’t materialize until after 911.
—-2. Answering one of former White House terrorism Czar Richard Clarke’s most explosive allegations, that the administration was fixated on Iraq to the detriment of anti-terrorism policy. She said the administration had discussed “doing something against Iraq”, but the president’s top aides had advised against it. Now it’s he said/she said.
—-HER WEAKEST POLICY POINTS: 1. Her answers to questions about the August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing memo that had a title: “‘Bin Laden determined to attack the United States.” She claimed it was a “historical document” rather than an actual warning. The explanation sounded like Bill Clinton’s “it depends what is is” — but the matter can be solve easily enough (and reports suggest that via ongoing negotiations it WILL) if the White House declassifies and releases the memo. If the memo is as she says, it’ll bolster her case; if not, her credibility will take a tumble.
2. Her insistence that FBI offices had been warned about the danger. Commissioners said their extensive interviews have not come up with any proof they had.
—-So how did the testimony play?
—-Richard Clarke told ABC News that Rice’s testmony bolstered his claims. And President Bush called to thank Rice and invite her to Crawford TX for Easter.
—-Meanwhile, Internet reactions to the testimony varied.
—-On the left, the Center for American Progress ran the headline “Still Stonewalling” and disputed part of her tesimony, while Atrios suggested she should be prosecuted for perjury.
—-Regarding the August 6 memo, The Left Coaster asked “. If it was not a warning document, as Rice insisted, then…Why wouldn’t it be made public then?”
—-Oliver Willis on the memo:”The President gets a memo saying “Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside U.S.” on 8/6/01, hangs out on vacation - - then when the actual terror attacks happen… they think its Iraq? Stupid or deceitful?”
—-Seth Farber, The Talking Dog, wrote:

The long-awaited photo-op of our National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice took place before the 9-11 Commission today. There is actually little point in analyzing any of it, because the right wing blog world has determined that she came off as brilliant, forthright and masterfuland the left wing blog world has determined that she came off as stupid, dishonest and… condescending.

—-On the right, Powerline ran a running “live” commentary and said:

Rice did “reasonably well..but not great. Her answer were long, sometimes rambling and non-responsive, and prone to slide into bureaucratic jargon and detail…. But she was vigorous in defending herself and the administration… highly knowledgeable, and I don’t know how anyone watching her testimony could view her as anything but sincere. I doubt that she changed any minds. Dick Clarke is now enshrined as an unimpeachable expert; no effort was made to undermine his credibility. And little was done to shift the focus from what the Bush administration didn’t do in eight months, to what Clinton didn’t do in eight years.

—-
—-To Donald Sensing, the 9/11 Commission “is a farce . But the sheer ineptitude of the commission’s members is shocking. These people do not have a clue what they are doing. The idea that this is a non-partisan inquiry is unsustainable. Members of both parties are more interested in making speeches than anything else….This is not an inquiry. It is an inquisition….”
—-Citizen Smash called it “just another vehicle for insipid, juvenile partisan bickering and Monday-morning quarterbacking. This panel is both an embarrassment, and a distraction from the vital task at hand. Can we get back to the War now?
—-But, in the end, it’s going to be less important what Republicans and Democrats think than what CONVENTIONAL WISDOM emerges…and one early sign wasn’t too good: Newsweek’s Howard Fineman contends Rice’s testimony “certainly won’t help George W. Bush’s re-election chances.” If Fineman’s analysis reflects the emerging conventional wisdom then Bush & Co. may be in trouble.

Joe Gandelman is former Madrid-base Correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor

“Exposing Bush the liar, the mass murderer, the war criminal.” That’s the headline of this Pravda.ru Opinion article, which leads with:

Pravda.Ru presents the bare facts about what George W. Bush and his evil regime has done in Iraq, making the US troops and civilian workers hated among the people who were supposed to welcome them with open arms. We expose the lies and present the truth, based on media reports and eye witness accounts.

Read it all. (Via ED.)

(Reprinted from A.E.Brain, the Blog)

A quiet but crucially important revolution is occurring in International Affairs. Long-standing principles are being rapidly eroded. But you can’t understand what the situation was in the 20th century, how we got there, where we are going and why, without examining history, and especially European history. This is mainly a story about Wars, thereby illustrating the (partial) truth in Mao’s maxim : “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun”. It’s a long story, not easily condensed. Please bear with me, as I’m doing a bit of a Den Beste here.

It’s been a long-standing principle that a respect for National Sovereignty is the best guarantee for keeping the peace. One country’s Government should not “Interfere in the Internal Affairs” of another. No matter how odious matters may be in a neighbouring state, as long as borders were not violated, no International Law was broken. No military intervention was legal.

There are some good reasons for the adoptation of this principle: different states often have different and incompatible religious beliefs. Whether in Islam or Christianity, Sunni or Shia, Protestant or Catholic, Hindu or Buddhist, Communist or Capitalist, National Socialism or Socialist Democracy. The European 30 Years War of the 17th century showed what could happen when Religious War broke out. There was a backlash, and it was in the 18th century, that formal Rules of War were codified. The vast majority of a nation’s populace was hardly aware that one bunch of soldiers replaced another bunch in some province or other. War was “the Sport of Kings”, where a border principality or two might change hands now and then, but with little disruption to daily life, and remarkably few casualties to the professional soldiers. It was in everybody’s interest - everybody who counted, ie those with wealth and power, anyway - to keep the system going “as was”. The stately pavane of often bloodless manouver and counter-manouver during the 7 years war was the result.

The Napoleonic Wars on the other hand (and in one view, they started in 1776 in the USA) were wars of Ideology. On one hand, a Democratic state (that in France soon devolved into a bloodthirsty Oligarchy, then a radical modern state under a Military Dictatorship), on the other, the same old gang of Monarchs, some totally under Parliament’s thumb (the UK) , some completely Autocratic (Russia), and many somewhere in-between. Napoleon swept away the old mini-feudalities and customs-posts every 5 miles, instituted a code of laws throughout Europe, and basically founded a European Union some 200 years before the current one.

He also sent hit-squads to assassinate emigres overseas, expanded and institutionalised the old monarchist Secret Police to liquidate opponents at home, set relatives in positions of power throughout the Empire, and tore up international treaties whenever it suited him. Wherever the Grande Armee went, it had to “live off the land”. Any province it passed through two or more times in a year was reduced to a howling desert, occupied only by the corpses of the starved inhabitants. Other, less modern armies, were compelled to have an expensive, slow baggage-train that contained food, not just ammunition, so the cost more and were at a great disadvantage when it came to mobility.

After Napoleon had been finally defeated, the Congress of Vienna not only re-drew the map of Europe, but set in concrete the “old order” of the previous century. War as the “Sport of Kings” could still occur ( and did, notably in the minor wars that unified Germany - along with border provinces of Austria, France, Poland, and Denmark - under a Prussian Emperor ). Growing Alliances between major European powers meant that War became more and more costly, and therefore less and less likely. But any War would be a catastrophe, and the whole brittle edifice crashed in the bloodbath of World War I. (Which was Actually World War III, as the 7 Years War and Napoleonic Wars had action in more continents than did World War I, but I digress. )

Bear with me, I’m getting there.

Where was I… Oh yes, The Great War. The War To End All Wars.

This started as an old-fashioned Monarchic war, but soon evolved into a Religious one. Germans started fighting for King and Emperor, but soon fought for a “Place in the Sun”, a slice of the colonial cake that had been unjustly denied them by the powers-that-were. It was only when Germany invaded Belgium (with whom the UK had a treaty) that the UK became involved in the Fracas. Soon a battle for “Plucky Little Belgium” became a battle against the Beastly Hun, no respecter of Neutrals. France fought to regain Alsace-Lorraine (and French pride), Russia fought to justify Russia’s suzerainty as representative of all Slavs, the USA joined in because of general German obnoxiousness and I’m digressing again.

What is important is that the Victors in 1918 examined the cause of the war - and decided it was all Germany’s fault. Which it was (though Austria was to blame too). Bismark’s strategy of unification and consolidation through diplomacy (where he could) or short, victorious wars (where he couldn’t) had been abandoned in favour of a “Might Makes Right” philosophy.

Such mass slaughter, such a gehenna must have been the result of some monstrous evil. So it was thought, and so it was. The Evil was determined to be the concept that one Nation-State had attacked another, with no valid reason. This was the new touchstone: the doctrine of National Sovereignty, which had been evolving over the centuries, reached its final form. Within its own borders, a nation was safe from outside intervention. No country could interfere with another’s “Internal Affairs”. No act was forbidden - provided only that borders were respected. Religous disputes between nations would no longer cause Warfare in all its horror, it was a sort of universal “Freedom of Speech” for all nations. In theory, they could enslave half the population, or set up extermination factories to process minority groups into soot, soap and ashes with no legal problems. Of course, no-one would actually do such things, would they?

The first stirings of Trans-Nationalism - a Religion like any other - can be seen in Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech at the end of the war (though a Marxist could point with some justification to the Comintern as well.).

That emerging Superpower, the USA turned in on itself in an orgy of navel-gazing Isolationism, abandoning Wilson’s orphan child, the League of Nations. But the universal ( OK, European - at this point in History, White Folks were the only ones who counted ) revulsion against the Great War was such that a number of nations swore solemnly that they would “Study War No More”, at least in squabbles amongst themselves. The Treaty of Locarno established a Permanent Court of International Justice. But the final fruit of World War I was the Kellogg-Briand Pact, where (eventually) no less than 62 nations agreed to Outlaw war as a means of state policy (at least in dealing with squabbles amongst themselves).

It’s effectiveness can be judged by the fact that amongst the first signatories were Germany and Poland.

But one thing it did do, was to formally enshrine in International Law the concept of the Crime Against Peace. To quote from the charter of the United Nations,

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,

and then also adds

or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

The first part of that clause was used to hang senior German leaders at Nuremberg. The fact that they’d massacred some 6 million Jews was merely aggravating cuircumstance, it wasn’t actually illegal (except insasmuch as the Victors made up the law as they went along). And that says something for the moral bankrupcy of the “Peace at any price” brigade, so strong between the two world wars. Legally, up until Nuremberg, it was all “purely an Internal Affair” and nobody’s business but the Germans.

It’s said that Queen Victoria refused assent to a Law against Lesbianism, as she considered it impossible that such a thing could exist. Similarly, it can be argued that the fact that there was no actual law against the Holocaust (except Ex Post facto) was purely because the people writing up the Kellogg-Briand pact couldn’t conceive of, say, Auschwitz.

If so, I can hardly blame them. I drove around Hohne in Germany, I could never bring myself to visit Belsen. I’m not superstitious, but the whole area gave me a case of the screaming abdabs, something Awful and EVIL had happened nearby. Worse, the feeling overcame me long before I knew exactly where I was, the first time I explored the area.

Regardless of whether the Law existed in an unwritten or written form before 1933, or whether the Nuremberg Tribunal were trying to cloak Justice with the shabby mantle of Law after the fact, Nuremberg did establish that Genocide wasn’t just immoral, it was illegal.

To see how well that has worked, just look at the ongoing trial of Slobadan Milosovic. Or the non-trial of Pol Pot.

The Kludge to amend the doctrine of National Sovereignty was supposed to be that second clause of the UN charter. The one about “…or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”, along with Article 43 of Chapter 7 of the UN charter. Some relevant sections: First, the Nod to national Sovereignty in Chapter 1:

7. Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter; but this principle shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter Vll.

Now the Teeth in Chapter 7, article 43:

1. All Members of the United Nations, in order to contribute to the maintenance of international peace and security, undertake to make available to the Security Council, on its call and in accordance with a special agreement or agreements, armed forces, assistance, and facilities, including rights of passage, necessary for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security.
2. Such agreement or agreements shall govern the numbers and types of forces, their degree of readiness and general location, and the nature of the facilities and assistance to be provided.
3. The agreement or agreements shall be negotiated as soon as possible on the initiative of the Security Council. They shall be concluded between the Security Council and Members or between the Security Council and groups of Members and shall be subject to ratification by the signatory states in accordance with their respective constitutional processes.

Have you noticed something? The complete absence of Black Helicopters? Where is the Multinational army, big enough to take on any opponent and win, that’s supposed to be at the disposal of the UN Security Council? The fact is, that not one single soldier has ever been provided exclusively for the UNSC under this article. All “Blue-Helmet” UN forces are provided on an ad-hoc basis, and responsible to their national authority, not the UNSC.

The UN was supposed to not merely provide the teeth to enforce Justice, it was supposed to decide what Justice was, to avoid Religious Warfare and doctrinal differences (rather than truly moral ones) sparking warfare. The bar was set fairly low — as I’ve blogged about before. But the UN has failed in its obligations.

Now we come to one of the defining moments of history : 9/11.

Before that date, it was reasonable to get by with the old 1920’s world tarted up. Yes, millions died in various genocides here and there, but they were usually non-Whites, so didn’t really count to most (Western) people. As long as no borders were crossed, everything was fine. It was best expressed by Swedish premier Olaf Palme who said (after the not-exactly-terrific Vietnamese had kicked the posterior off the incomparably-more-odious Khmer Rouge):

“the fact that the auto-genocide has ended in Cambodia is probably good for the Cambodian people, but one can never excuse an intervention in a neighbouring country”.

Read that again. Such Racist, Eurocentric callousness is beyond comprehension.

That was, in fact, the world we lived in, pre 9/11. I didn’t realise it at the time. My moral sense had a blind spot, an area where I just didn’t think about things too much, it was all too hard, and the existing system was working adequately, and getting better all the time.

But then, Al Qaeda showed that you didn’t need a national army to wage war across borders. 9/11 was no “regrettable incident”, it was an act of war. The US, purely out of self-defence, can no longer turn a blind eye to hard problems, nor sit around wishing that Article 43 had meant something (and that the Security Council was trustworthy enough to ensure it wasn’t misused).

In the absence of a World Policeman both incorruptible and powerful, the US had to turn Vigilante. It gathered up a Posse of nations that could see the writing on the wall (or more cynically, decided that the US’s coat-tails were a great place to be), and took action in Afghanistan.

Iraq was in some ways a far more “legal” war - it was in violation of a number of binding UN resolutions, including ones authorising forced cmpliance, but even if it hadn’t of been, it was a clear and present danger as a “safe haven” for extra-territorial covert attack. Acts of war committed by stealth, and implasuibly deniable. Trans-border Terrorism.

I distrust Vigilante Justice. Much as I like a lot of Americans personally, and there’s much to admire in their system of Government, it’s by no means perfect. Had there been any credible alternative, I would have been against any US-dominated action. But there is no credible alternative: we must either trust the US system (which gives me a queasy feeling), or a gaggle of Kleptocrats and petty-Despots. That’s an easy choice to make. If the worst comes to the worst, the US is vulnerable to Gandhi’s tactics. But so far, they’ve done pretty well. “Dubya” has genuinely liberated 50 million people, more than anyone since FDR and Churchill. But, and this is a big But, what aout the next administration? Or the one after that? The whole world is at the mercy of that rag-tag mixture of all creeds and colours, ranging from the rational to the dotty, that is the US voting public. Not perfect, not nerely perfect, but vastly better than any of the alternatives, especially the one labelled “Do Nothing”.

The Revolution in International affairs is the abandonment of National Sovereignty as an Impenetrable defence against Righteous Retribution. A line on a map no longer defines where justice must stop and watch helplessly. It was planned back in the 40’s that the Enforcer be the UNSC, but that hasn’t worked out. Instead we have a loose coalition dominated (so far) by the US, one that may become formalised in the near-future.

OK, it took a long time to get there, sorry about that. But had I not simplified things to the point of distortion (and perhaps a bit beyond) it would have been much longer.

Background Articles :

Representing the Old Order
John Pilger : The Crime Commited in Our Name

And the New (and I’d have to say, Improved)
Dr Robert Horvath : Sovereignty can’t protect mass killers

[The following was written by frequent TCP contributor and Iraqi blogger Zeyad. The article originally appeared here and is reprinted with permission of the author.]

Sadr’s aide and head of his office in Najaf, Qays Al-Khaz’ali, has declared the latest looting and killing spree going on in several Iraqi southern cities as an Intifada against the occupation. Speaking on behalf of Muqtada, he stated that they will certainly not calm down any soon because the Quran orders them not to; “Fight those who fight against you”. And he has also made it clear that they stand united with their ‘Sunni brothers’ in Ramadi, Fallujah, and Adhamiya in the resistance.

Muqtada himself though doesn’t seem as if he has made up his mind yet. I believe the fool senses that he has blundered seriously. Earlier yesterday he issued an announcement to his followers to cease the ‘demonstrations’, and that he had left the Kufa mosque and took refuge at Imam Ali’s shrine in Najaf, typically hiding among civilians and holy sites like the coward he is. Later, however, he issued another written statement in which he reiterated his pledge to Hassan Fadhlallah, Hizbollah leader, adding to it that he will be the ‘striking hand’ for Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani. One of his aides claimed that a delegation from Sistani met with Sadr informing him that the leading Shi’ite cleric supports Sadr and his followers and that their cause is legitimate. This contradicts Shitstani’s statements yesterday, indicating that the old wizard is either suffering from senility or is playing his own dirty tricks. None of Sistani’s agents have either denied or confirmed this claim, but they say that he will personally meet with Sadr tomorrow.

Meanwhile, violent clashes continue in Nassiriya and Ammara between Al-Mahdi militiamen and coalition troops. There were reports that the militia had kidnapped two South Korean construction workers in Nassiriya. At Kut it was reported that IP and Ukrainian forces regained control of the local tv and radio station after it had been overrun by Sadr’s henchmen, but that fighting resumed later in the evening. Also, reports of fighting at Diwaniyah, which had been the only major city in the south unaffected by the recent developments up until yesterday.

Of course, Sadr has set up offices in almost every city, town, and village in the south. And I have mentioned earlier that they had assumed full control over my small village where I work in the Basrah governorate weeks ago, terrorizing IP officers, civil servants, and doctors but nobody was listening. I don’t think I will be heading back there any soon now. What surprises me is the almost professional coordination of the uprisings in all of these areas. I’m assuming, of course, that the money and equipment supplied by our dear Mullahs in Iran is being put to use good enough, not to mention the hundreds of Pasderan and Iranian intelligence officers.. sorry I mean Iranian Shia pilgrims that have been pouring into Iraq for months now.

The situation in Baghdad looks the same as it was in the couple of days before the war last year. Streets are almost empty by seven in the evening, a whole lot of Baghdadis have remained home yesterday for fear of getting cut off from their neighbourhoods in event of Americans blocking off streets or something. There was an ongoing military operation very close to our neighbourhood almost all of Monday night till midday. At one point I imagined that the Apaches were landing on our roof (that was after I published the previous post), and explosions kept rocking our house which brought back uncanny memories of last April 10th when there was a fierce confrontation between Fedayeen and advancing Americans just outside our doorsteps.

I was standing outside with neighbours yesterday afternoon gossiping when a car drove by, threw a couple of fliers at us, shouting “read them, may Allah increase your reward”. The fliers were signed by a group which called itself Saif Allah Albattar (Allah’s striking sword) at Ramadi, Fallujah, Adhamiya, and Diyala, which advised Iraqis to remain home on April 9th (the anniversary of the occupation), stating that they would not be responsible if anyone failed to do so. Someone else talked about another group called the Iraqi Islamic Army (groups like these seem to pop up every other day) which claimed its responsibility for the killings of the 4 Americans in Fallujah last week, decribing them as ‘Jews’.

Anyway, it seems that fighting is ongoing in Sadr city, northeast of Baghdad. A total of 110 Iraqis and 19 coalition soldiers killed in the last 12 hours according to Al-Jazeera, which I have never witnessed being any more hateful and provocative until this day. They keep displaying headlines like ‘Occupation forces target more women and children in Sadr city’ or ‘Resistance in Fallujah forces occupation forces to withdraw from locations’.

A couple of GC members have shyly spoken against the violence. Ayad Allawi (INA) first described the uprisings as being directed by ‘evil and dark forces who wish no prosperity for Iraqis’, then he started beseeching his ‘brother’ Muqtada Al-Sadr to stay calm (Even he is scared from Sadr’s thugs?). SCIRI leader, Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim condemned the behaviour of occupation forces in killing civilians in Najaf and called for their punishment. The Iraqi Ministry of Justice stated that they had absolutely nothing to do with the arrest warrant for Muqtada Al-Sadr. And you want us to keep hope?

No one knows where it is all heading. If this uprising is not crushed immediately and those
militia not captured then there is no hope at all. If you even consider negotiations or appeasement, then we are all doomed.

Zeyad is a dentist living in Iraq. He writes at Healing Iraq.

Although consistently a strident supporter of the Democrat Party in his daily comic strip, many feel that Doonesbury author Gary Trudeau went beyond the line of fair criticism and good taste in today’s published work.

In today’s strip, Trudeau has a fictional President Bush refer to National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice using the racial slur “brown sugar.”

Such words from Trent Lott, any Republican, or any conservative writer, would cause howls from the left - and a 3-day news cycle about the “uproar.” Once again, the left feels at ease holding itself to lower standards.

And once again, the left feels at ease treating African-Americans as an after-thought: “Oh - they’ll vote for us anyway, don’t worry what we say about them.”

This is why Chris Dodd, Democrat Senator from Connecticut, is so comfortable saying that former Ku Klux Klan member, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, would have been an excellent Senator during the American Civil War. See here and here.

Here’s Trudeau’s strip:

Gary Trudeau of Doonesbury refers to National Security Advisory Condoleeza Rice as “brown sugar”

This is a duplicate of the original post on the nikita demosthenes website.

UPDATE:

It should be noted that, at a more basic level, Trudeau is perhaps doing something worse than using a racial slur in referring to Rice. Trudeau is accepting without any examination the falsehood being peddled by Richard A. Clarke regarding National Security Advisor Rice, i.e., that she had never hear about al Qaeda until Clarke told her about it. This is a stunning lie which the mainstream press have almost entirely let slide - and Trudeau just parrots it. This ability of the left to just shamelessly lie about basic facts important to our national security is irresponsible to say the least. See this response from Rice:

- - - - - - -

- - - - - - -

I am going to state the obvious that is being ignored by the left and the right…The Bush Administration did not take sufficient measures to prevent 9/11 from happening.

That is a statement that should not be politicized, because it is tautological. FDR did not take sufficient measures to prevent Pearl Harbor and Winston Churchill did not take sufficient measures to prevent the Luftwaffe from bombing London.

The question that arises after you admit thiese basic facts—and agree that there was no conspiracy in not taking sufficient measures—is why?

I have long held (yet not blogged until now) the belief that there is an internal conflict among the Bush Administration’s National Security principals when it comes to their fundamental beliefs about foreign policy. Each of the major principals—Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell and George Bush—subscribe to a different set of International Relations theory. Balancing these divergent beliefs was and continues to be kabuki…

Condoleeza Rice is the easiest to pigeon-hole into a theoretical school of International Relations, because she wrote so much about it while at Stanford. In fact, as a student at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, I read Dr. Rice…she fits nicely into the traditionalist school of International Relations that subscribes to the belief that peace is achieved through a balance of power between nations. This focus on nation-states is likely what leads to Mickey Kaus’ Josh Marshall-inspired criticism of the Bush response in Afghanistan…it focused too much on State-sponsored Terror threats.

Colin Powell is harder to pin down but can more likely be seen as a believer in the Liberal school of International Relations. That’s the diplomacy-first, make-love-not-war, peace is achieved through humanitarian efforts crowd. Powell’s influence is greatest seen in the Administration’s approach to relations with Africa, where some of the greatest humanitarian investment has come (note that Africa seems fairly peaceful of late, too)…

George Bush, however, is a neo-marxist. I say this not because he subscribes to the ends that Noam Chomsky and other neo-marxist writers advocate, I say this because he subscribes to their basic worldviews…yet reaches a different conclusion on the policy implications of those views. “Huh?” you say?

George Bush subscribes to the concept of an international dialectic. There was an international dialectic between East and West during the Cold War which led relative stability. In the post-Cold War era, that dialectic was predicted by Chomsky et al to “shift” to create a North-South alignment. That never really happened…what we got instead were regional conflicts (Rwanda, Somalia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, etc.) and assymetric warfare. Bush’s solution: define the dialectic.

I first noticed this during the 2000 South Carolina Primary debate, when Bush said:

Our relationship with China. The current president has called the relationship with China a strategic partnership. I believe our relationship needs to be redefined as one as competitor. Competitors can find areas of agreement, but we must make it clear to the Chinese that we don’t appreciate any attempt to spread weapons of mass destruction around the world, that we don’t appreciate any threats to our friends and allies in the Far East. This president is one who went to China and ignored our friends and allies in Tokyo and Seoul. He sent a chilling signal about the definition of friendship.

When I become the president, I’m going to strengthen our alliances in the Far East. I’m going to work with the Russians to get rid of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty so we can bring certainty into an uncertain part of the world, and that’s the Far East as well.

We must say to people in that part of the world, Don’t threaten our friends. Don’t threaten our allies. So I’m going to change the relationship.

For Bush, China was the new Soviet Union. This was behind his desire to build the missile shield and was manifested early in his Presidency when China forced down our spy plane.

After September 11th, the dialectic changed for Bush, but there was still a dialectic…remember the saying, “You’re either with us or you’re against us.”? That is a classical new-marxist paradigm.

So, why, then did the Bush Administration not take sufficient measures to prevent 9/11? None of these worldviews accounted for asymetrical warfare by non-State-sponsored terrorists. Condoleeza was worried about the balance of power in Europe and the Far East. Colin Powell was concerned with making friends with other nations and humanitarian efforts. George Bush was focused on containing the threat of China as a new global superpower.

Since 9/11, we realize that these threats were not as immediate as the one that got us…but as we focus on eradicating terrorism, let’s not forget that the threats that existed before 9/11 remain today.

Related: 1943-1963-2003: George Bush’s Neo-Marxist Thinking

Cross-post from OTB

George Will makes a pretty strong case that turning control of Iraq over to, well, whoever it is we’re turning it over to, on June 30 is unwise.

Now Americans must steel themselves for administering the violence necessary to disarm or defeat Iraq’s urban militias, which replicate the problem of modern terrorism - violence that has slipped the leash of states.

For the near term, U.S. policy must flow from Napoleon’s axiom: “If you start to take Vienna - take Vienna.” We started to take Iraq 13 months ago. That mission is far from accomplished.

***

Not much else having gone as planned since the fall of Baghdad, a delay in the transfer of sovereignty, scheduled for June 30, should not be unthinkable. A delay would trigger violence. But, then, the transfer on schedule probably would be preceded by an offensive by the insurgents.

The transfer is to be from the Coalition Provisional Authority, whose authority does not extend throughout the country. A U.S. official in Baghdad says Sadr will be arrested if he appears “any place that we control.”

The transfer is to be to an institutional apparatus that is still unformed. This is approaching at a moment when U.S. forces in Iraq, never adequate for postwar responsibilities, are fewer than they were.

U.S. forces in Iraq are insufficient for that mission; unless the civil war is quickly contained, no practicable U.S. deployment will suffice. U.S. forces worldwide cannot continue to cope with Iraq as it is, plus their other duties - peacekeeping, deterrence, training - without stresses that will manifest themselves in severe retention problems in the reserves and regular forces.

Since 9/11, Americans have been told that they are at war. They have not been told what sacrifices, material and emotional, they must make to sustain multiple regime changes and nation-building projects. Telling such truths is part of the job description of a war president.

While the evidence for the “severe retention problems” surprisingly points in the other direction, the point is well taken.

Robert Robb makes the countervailing case.

Were it not for the U.S. occupation, the two rebellious groups might very well be killing each other rather than Americans.

***

Simply put, too many Iraqis still see this as a U.S. fight rather than their own.

You often hear, even from initial opponents of the war, that the United States cannot now “fail” in Iraq. But that’s not an attitude necessarily conducive to our long-term national interest.

There can be different opinions about the extent to which Saddam Hussein constituted a threat to the United States. But whatever the level of the threat, it is now gone.

Moreover, whatever emerges in the wake of Saddam is highly unlikely to poise anywhere near the threat that he did.

This is a classic Realist argument and one I might have been sympathetic to under different circumstances. Indeed, had our stated objective merely been regime change with no talk of creating a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, this may well have been the course to take—a relatively quick strike to take out the enemy and then move on to objectives elsewhere in the war on terrorists. That wasn’t the case, however, and leaving the place in chaos would be a collosal failure. It would also send a signal that democratization in the Middle East, something clearly in our interest—to say nothing of the interest of the citizenry—is unachievable.

To hear some of the media tell it, Iraqis everywhere have risen against Coalition forces. But the truth is that it’s a very small but militant minority. You’d think that the media would be able to see that for themselves, but you’d be wrong. Only a few here and there seem to get it.

Casualties are reported as if they were a sports score, but with a twist – usually only Coalition casualties are reported. The impression given is that those committing the attacks, committing the atrocities, get away unscathed. But for the most part they don’t. Were the media to take a closer look (assuming they’re brave enough to go out without military escort), they’d probably find that most of the attackers die in a hail of 5.56, 7.62, and 12.7mm rounds, backed up by the occasional 20mm chain gun or 120mm Abrams cannon rounds. They get a few of ours and we get a truckload of theirs.

One thing we don’t hear from CENTCOM is enemy body counts. That’s one legacy from Vietnam we don’t need to revive. Let the media do the counting, assuming that they’re willing to count enemy dead as readily as they count ours. But that might change the apparent dynamics of the fighting still going on in Iraq, and the media can’t have that. After all, we’re supposed to be losing in Iraq, aren’t we?

At least that’s how it appears what many in the media would like us to believe.

(Cross-posted to Weekend Pundit)

Per Chuck Harrison, a national security fellow at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government - via his commentary published in the Washington Times:

The country is in an uproar over former White House terrorism expert Richard Clarke’s recent contentions, which will continue to be debated.

Let me give some insight on my own very recent (February 2004) experience with Mr. Clarke, who teaches a class at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. He teaches this class with Rand Beers, a former government official with National Security Council experience who now works on the Democratic presidential campaign.

As a national security fellow at the Kennedy School, I attended one of Messrs. Beers’ and Clarke’s classes to discuss U.S. experiences in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti and Kosovo. I was involved in the planning or execution of each of these military operations and wrote my master’s thesis on U.S. Somalia policy while attending the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994-95.

I requested permission to sit in on the class, which Mr. Clarke cheerfully granted and told me to “pipe up” if I had anything to say, which I quickly did when I questioned his theory there were three major policy decisions during Somalia.

While we were debating U.N. actions in Somalia, Mr. Clarke incorrectly stated the U.S. military made a unilateral decision to pull forces out of Somalia. The defense secretary and the president decide deployment and redeployment of combat forces, not the military. So I questioned his statement to the contrary. I specifically asked him to clarify his statement.

He backed his contention, stating the military made the decision. He also said our participation in the U.N. mission in Macedonia proved how smooth U.N. operations could be. I reminded him of the soldiers taken prisoner by Serb forces and the ensuing crisis, but he ignored my comment.

After class, I asked him to explain who in the military ordered redeployment of forces from Somalia without permission of the president. I asked him specifically, “Who signed the redeployment order for those forces to leave Somalia?”

He finally clarified by saying “the secretary of defense.” It seems Mr. Clarke was actually referring to the desire of the U.S. military leaders to leave Somalia rather than their ordering it without administration knowledge. Why is this important?

Because he purposely misled the class into believing the U.S. military, not the administration controlling the military, made the decision to leave Somalia at a critical time in the mission.

When given a chance to correct the record, he chose not to do so. This was well before I knew Mr. Clarke had a book coming out or that he would have such a role in the current debate.

- - - - - - -

The bottom line is Mr. Clarke obfuscated the truth in my presence for some unknown reason. After this experience with him, I cannot trust his judgment. The timing of his book release, his prior silence on the topic and his close relationship with campaign advisers, coupled with my personal experience, cause me to question his credibility on this subject and I now suspect it is for political and/or personal gain.

As September 11 commission member and former Navy Secretary John Lehman has noted, it is truly unfortunate for the country that, despite Mr. Clarke’s personal knowledge and experience, he now lacks credibility. I am sorry to say I agree with that assessment.

- - - - - - -

This is a duplicate of the orignial post from the nikita demosthenes website.

By Cox and Forkum

C&F have a whole slew of links to go with this. Go read.

Or, “How To Lie With Headlines”

While doing some fact-checking on this story from the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

According to the BBC, intelligence agents have stopped a group sympathetic to Al Qaeda from releasing a dirty bomb in Britain.

(No, it wasn’t a “dirty bomb”, see the details in the relevant GWOT post)

ANYWAY… I happened to read the BBC’s front page.
Here is what the stories were at 0001 Australian Eastern Standard time (AEST) 7th April 2004 :

Heavy fighting in sealed Falluja
Fierce clashes erupt in the central Iraqi town, where US troops have launched a major operation against insurgents.
US considers reinforcements
Falluja: ‘American graveyard’
Growing Shia discontent

A Grim situation, wouldn’t you say?

Let’s take it one bit at a time, shall we? I feel a Fisking is in order.

Heavy fighting in sealed Falluja
Fierce clashes erupt in the central Iraqi town, where US troops have launched a major operation against insurgents.

Read the story, and you find lots of words about “explosions and gunfire” being heard by various people, attack helicopters being used… but no actual first-hand reports. Oh well, the place is sealed up, so all they can really report is “signs and portents” rather than facts. To continue, the next story is:

US considers reinforcements

Read the story, and you find…

The official confirmed that commanders had been asked to present such options, but said the US military did not believe it was needed.

…exactly as reported on TCP. A more accurate headline would be “US Reinforcements Not Required”. On to the next “story”.

Falluja: ‘American graveyard’

Read the story, and you find it’s about some 12-year old’s remarks when those poor guys were mutilated, several days ago. The phrase “American Graveyard” is not actually attributed to anyone, it’s the BBC’s own special contribution. From the report, the headline writer made that up. Finally, the last story:

Growing Shia discontent

Read the story, and you see this quote:

Well, the first and most important thing to stress is that this is not a general Shia uprising.

The trouble is coming from supporters of the radical young cleric, Moqtada Sadr, who has 10%, maybe 15% of Shias behind him.

But had you just read the headlines, you’d think that there was a major battle raging in Falluja (which may actually be true…), so big that the US needs reinforcements, as there are so many casualties. Oh yes, and that the US is pissing off the Shias as a whole, not battling a Tehran-funded armed minority.

The text of the reports is quite OK - I won’t say it’s unbiassed, but if so, it’s well within acceptable limits. The reporters on the ground are, by and large, doing a professional job (this was not always the case in the past…) But the editors who write the headlines are still of the ancien regime, and it shows.

But I’ll be charitable. I’ll ascribe it to a Baldrickian Cunning Plan by the BBC. Those whose knowledge of the outside world is superficial and fashionable - the “chattering classes” - will glance at the headlines and see their prejudices confirmed. Those Cowboy Americans, don’t you know. No need to actually read any of the stories, everyone knows that it’s All Bush’s Fault. Those willing to actually educate themselves and dig below the headlines will get the real meat, and end up with a reasonable appreciation of the situation. Everybody’s happy in the end.

Why has Al-Sadr chosen to stage his attempted coup now? The US forces are still there in strength, and the military situation could hardly be less propitious for a coup.

The key is the local government elections recently held. Elections in which the Fundamentalist Islamists were soundly trounced at the ballot-box. The initial support won by ground-roots Shia mullahs who helped restore order after the chaos of the war has been badly eroded. Those that won seats were often the armed Theocrats deadly enemies, the “moderates”, who want a Theocracy installed through Democracy. The danger was that a Democratic government of whatever kind would be far too strong for the armed , radical Thocrats to dominate. What they couldn’t win by the ballot, had to be forcibly taken by the bullet, or the whole Radical Shia movement would collapse, despite the aid being pumped in by elements in Tehran. (The situation is by no means as cut-and-dried as first appears, other elements in Tehran are supporting the moderates, both in Iraq and Iran)

As reported on TCP by Zayed, the preparations for the coup have been long and thorough. It was never a certainty, but always an option, a bargaining chip for negotiations. “Give us (some of) want we want, or you’ll be sorry….”

News from other cities in the south indicate that Sadr followers (tens of thousands of them) have taken over IP stations and governorate buildings in Kufa, Nassiriya, Ammara, Kut, and Basrah. Al-Jazeera says that policemen in these cities have sided with the Shia insurgents, which doesn’t come as a surprise to me since a large portion of the police forces in these areas were recruited from Shi’ite militias and we have talked about that ages ago. And it looks like this move has been planned a long time ago.
- Zayed

With the move against Fallujah (and consequent call on available US resources), it appears Al-Sadr tried to “shoot the moon”, hoping for a mass spontaneous uprising of Shias to support him in his “struggle againt occupation”. A few carefully-faked atrocities reported by sympathetic journalists early on in the piece, and The People Would Rise Up Against Their Oppressors.

It’s still a bit early to tell with 100% certainty, but it looks as if he’s miscalculated badly. His penchant for Knifing opponent clerics while they were praying turns out to have rather alienated him from the rest of the clergy, who are staying away from him in droves. The events of a year ago have neither been forgiven, nor forgotten. All the indications are that Al-Sadr is being hung out to dry, with not a single sign of populist Shia support, something that would be disasterous and possibly irrecoverable. Iraq may be “On the Brink of Chaos”, but it’s backing away rapidly.

As for the other front, Fallujah - what the Americans really don’t want is the same view-in-a-distorting-mirror that the Israelis got in Jenin. A place where only a single block was devastated (mainly by Palestinian booby-traps), and where a battle with dozens of military casualties on both sides was reported as a massacre of tens of thousands of unarmed civilians.

With the spectacular shots of Apaches plinking off unpopular Shiite militias near Bagdad, the media spotlight is off Fallujah, and military operations can proceed there unchecked. Methodical house-to-house search-and-destroy missions make poor TV (trained troops go through walls, and you’ll never see them). I don’t expect the majority of the action to be reported, just any spectacular bits whenever anyone is foolish enough to appear on the streets.

In the absence of mainstream media reports, here’s something from the Belmont Club :

The operation on Fallujah has commenced. From preliminary reports, it seems that the enemy will fight. Marines are taking mortar fire from town and have responded with air support. This will be an extremely difficult operation, and the degree of enemy entrenchment fully justifies the Marine decision not to rush into the fray. As noted in earlier posts, the enemy will use counter-siege tactics by creating incidents elsewhere to divert the Marines.

The Marines are currently trying to evacuate the town, using leaflets, loudspeakers and taking over the airwaves. Expect a fairly extended period in which no apparent progress will be made. The progress will be positional but the stresses will built up progressively within the enemy position which will be continuously undermined. From here on in, the ability to maneuver based on information dominance will be everything. The strategic goal of the enemy will be to inflict as many casualties on Americans as possible, behind a barricade of women and children. They will succeed to some extent. The basic goal of American forces will probably be to annihilate and capture the cadre of gangs which infest Fallujah, a town which is a byword in terror even to the Iraqis.

The only way the US could lose is if this is portrayed like another battle was, many years ago. A battle which destroyed a far more difficult target with more popular support, yet which was still a strategic loss for the USA. A battle called Tet.

[The following was written by frequent Command Post contributor and Iraqi blogger Zeyad. It is reprinted with the author’s permission]

Muqty is playing on his old dirty tricks again, only this time he has gone too far. Following last Friday’s prayer sermon, when he announced that he would be a ‘striking hand’ in Iraq for Hizbollah and Hamas whenever they need, and issued a veiled warning to Kurds to stop assisting the occupiers, his followers in Kufa ran amok killing an Iraqi IP colonel and after that attacked Salvadorian and Spanish troops. Spanish forces retorted by arresting Sayyid Mustafa Al-Ya’qubi, an aide of Muqtada and head of Sadr’s office in Najaf.
Meanwhile, in a display of power and defiance, Al-Sadr organised a military parade on the streets of Al-Thawra district (Sadr city), a Shi’ite stronghold, in Baghdad on Saturday where thousands of Jaish Al-Mahdi (Al-Mahdi army) militiamen in black marched along with mullahs to the horror of Iraqis who watched on tv, bringing back nightmares of Fedayeen parades under Saddam. American and Israeli flags were burnt at the parade, and large posters of Muqtada and his father Mohammed Sadiq Al-Sadr (assasinated by Mukhabarat in 1999) were carried by the demonstrators. One of the mullahs at the parade stated that “this is to show our power to the world. This army is a striking force and a time bomb that can go off any moment at the time and place our leader deems necessary”. Later that day, Sadr followers cut off roads leading to the entrance of the Convention center near the Green Zone, set fire in tires, and prevented vehicles from crossing over Jumhuriya bridge. While they were at it, they attacked Video CD stores and gaming shops in Bab Al-Sharji accusing them of selling porn movies.

Since Al-Sadr’s weekly newspaper Al-Hawza was closed about a week ago for inciting violence against the coalition, there have been daily demonstrations near the Green Zone by Sadr supporters demanding re-opening the paper and against the national reconciliation conferences initiated by Kurdish leader Mas’ud Barzani, current head of the GC. I passed through one such demonstration last Wednesday with Omar and AYS at Tahrir square and it looked dangerous, they were armed with pistols and AK-47’s.

Anyway, last thing we heard was that Muqtada Al-Sadr’s residence in Najaf was surrounded by coalition troops and that his followers clashed with Spanish troops in Kufa, 21 of them killed and 120 wounded. IP stations in Kufa were attacked, and there was news of fighting in Sadun street and Al-Thawra in Baghdad. Last word from Muqty was that he asked his followers to stop demonstrating and to resort to ‘other methods’ since demonstrations aren’t working. Al-Jazeera is having difficulties concealing their excitement and they have already coined this as the ‘start of the Shia resistance in Iraq’.

Iraqis know very well who those ‘pious’ people are. They are gangsters, rapists, murderers, thieves, kidnappers, looters, and criminals. They are only using religion as cover. I can’t even dream of what would happen if those people were left to make trouble on our streets that way without punishment. I believe that it’s now time for Al-Sadr to experience a very bad accident soon. We will be sorry for him I assure you, “Oh poor fellow, what a terrible misfortune, what a great loss” we would say to each other knowingly. It’s scenes like these that make me sometimes wonder to myself if Saddam wasn’t justified in assassinating all those clerics. Get that new Mukhabarat working.

___

You can read more of Zeyad view from Iraq at his weblog, Healing Iraq.

Imagine yourself a staunch anti-Castro Cuban exile living in Miami. You were born in Cuba the year the revolution “succeeded” and your parents, both also anti-Castro, did the same thing many other Cubans did back then. Fled to Miami to wait out the Castro storm. “He’ll be gone within months” is what they all kept saying.

After a year or so living in exile your father realizes that the only way to get his country back is by force so he joins other Cuban exiles and enlists in what would later be called the Brigade 2506. A planned is hatched, allies are made, and your father goes to train outside the country and eventually goes to war against Castro. He is taken prisoner at the Bay of Pigs and he serves more than two years under brutal conditions in Castro’s prisons.

Now, forty or so years later, you are resigned to the fact that the Cuba you left, the Cuba of your parents is long gone. Somewhere deep inside you there is always that little lingering feeling of return, even if it is to see where you were born, but you refuse to do so because you will not go to Cuba while the man who beat and tortured your father is still in power.

So your life goes on. You became an American citizen, proud and thankful for having been taken in with open arms. You were educated here. You married and have a family. You have worked your entire life to be a success. You even became a teacher and taught at a school your parents started to give something back to your community.

Then you become a real estate agent and end up working the fastest growing high end residential area in the city. You love your job and are very good at it.

One day, you sell a house in a deal worked with another Cuban realtor which you have gotten along with fairly well. You are both Cuban exiles after all. And even though that other realtor is young, only about 26 or 27, you feel a certain solidarity because you assume he shares a similar history of exiling as you.

So you sell the house, it closes on closing day and your fellow Cuban realtor asks that you pick up an escrow check at his office. You tell him that you’re extremely busy but he insists you come by his office so you can see it.

On your way home you decide to stop by the guy’s office. You find a parking spot, walk a block or so through the crowded South Beach streets and enter the building. You take the elevator up to his floor and make your way to his office.

You go in and at first glance the surroundings are beautiful. Tasteful expensive furniture, plush finishes, highly chic working environment. “What a nice office” you think to yourself.

Then, as you are being led to his office in the back, you see something hanging on the wall that at first glimpse doesn’t really register. But as you get closer you realize what it is and you get this overwhelming feeling of disgust shadowed by contempt. Up there, on the wall of this high-end, real estate office that is owned by a young Cuban man, is a portrait of Fidel Castro.

You think for a second that it’s got to be some kind of anti-Castro poster. A Warholian approach to the contra-revolucion propaganda, the same counter-revolution your father paid dearly for. But it is not. The image on the wall is an homage to Castro. Your blood begins to boil. And as you get to the front door of his private office, you notice, on an opposite wall, the same Warholian take on Che Guevara. He is there on a Campbells soup can not five feet away from you.

You enter the guys office, your body riddled with goosebumps, your ears red from the rise in blood pressure, lightning shoots from your eyes as you stare at this young Cuban man sitting behind a designer executive desk smiling.

He says hi and you just let off on him. You don’t remember verbatim what it is exactly that you barraged the guy with because the words came straight from the heart. They didnt have time to process in your mind. He’s holding up the check, you snatch it from his hand and start to walk out.

As you pass through the door he mocks you, calls you a gusana imperialista, an imperialist worm. Using the same word - gusana - that the Castro followers used to describe all those Cubans that refused to live under his jack boot and fled the island.

You make it back to your car almost in a daze. Head is spinning, blood pressure is through the roof and you start to cry.

You call your husband, also a Cuban exile, and before he can even say what’s up you tear into the story and tell him word for word, point by point exactly what you have just experienced. When you are done ranting, your husband asks you how this young guy could have such a nice expensive office on South Beach at such a young age and having come from Cuban only a few years ago. Where did the money come from? “I don’t know” you tell him.

“Well,” he says to you, “we should find out. And if it’s from where I’m thinking it came from, we are going to need to call someone.”

“Who?” You ask.

“The State Department for starters…..”

Originally posted at Babalu Blog.

We’ve all seen the kiddies at anti-war Hate-America protests holding signs and chanting alongside their activtist parents and we’ve wondered what happens to these children, are they the next generation of protesters? Sometimes they become Army Rangers.

This story in today’s SF Chronicle is maddening on so many levels that one doesn’t know where to begin:

Susan Galleymore had traveled 7,472 miles from Alameda to search for her son in Iraq and was close to finding him. The Army Ranger had urged her not to come. He wouldn’t even tell her where he was stationed. It was too dangerous, he said.

But on Feb. 1, seven days after she arrived, the 48-year-old woman was outside the U.S. military base where her son might be. Her car idled among a dozen waiting to be inspected. She stepped out, her face covered in a borrowed hijab, the traditional head scarf worn by Muslim women. She approached a gun- toting U.S. soldier as he inspected a car.

“I’m coming up behind you, I mean you no harm,” she said. She pulled out her U.S. passport. “I have business here and I want to speak to your sergeant.”

“Ma’am,” the guard said firmly, as he whirled toward her. “Get back in your car, ma’am!”

Galleymore held her ground. Six soldiers moved toward her. “I will do that as soon as I talk to your sergeant,” she said, and pulled down her hijab.

“You’re American,” one of the soldiers said.

The tension melted. Soon, she was inside the gate, hugging her son.

Doesn’t that give you the warm fuzzies? This stupid cow distracts a sentry in midst of a search and exposes herself and the men guarding the entry to an attack, yet the author purrs approval. It doesn’t seem to occur to Galleymore or the Code Pink sponsors that when they enter a war zone, should things go wrong, they needlessly risk other mother’s sons.

At wit’s end, she decided that the only way to calm her fears was to go to Iraq. She got in touch with Code Pink, which has led about a dozen parents to Iraq over the past few months. After holding a fund-raiser, which netted half of the trip’s $2,200 cost, she left for Iraq on Jan. 24.

Her goal was to interview Iraqi mothers and to find her son — even though three days before she left, he had begged her not to come. It was too dangerous; the landscape was littered with bandits and homemade explosive devices, he said.

Nick was prophetic. During their 12-hour ride into Baghdad from Jordan, one of the three cars in the convoy was pulled over and its occupants robbed. No one was hurt.

Wits end? These people are witless and selfish beyond belief.

Galleymore had done what some military parents only consider during their sleepless nights: She went to Iraq to find her son and see for herself how he was doing. And the 90 minutes they spent together, she said, was well worth the danger.

“I wouldn’t change a thing,” Galleymore said. “But I felt sad when I went home. I was going back to my safe little home, while all of these lives are being destroyed over there.”

The weeks before and after Galleymore’s 10-day visit to Iraq have been a complex transformation from the personal to the political. Her quest to find out about her son has evolved into trying to understand what Iraqi mothers, as well as other U.S. military parents, are going through.

That journey has been by turns lonely, satisfying and moving. It has cost her close friendships, given her new ones and complicated her relationship with her active-duty son Nick. Some objected to her post-trip writings about Iraqis who told her of how “jittery GIs shoot Iraqi civilians in the streets,” as she mentioned in one online essay.

Galleymore’s trip is not about her son, it’s about her politics and the useful fools at Code Pink preying on distraught military parents to further their political goals. Galleymore cannot accept that her adult son made a choice she doesn’t agree with so she pursues him as if he were a child. Failing to convince her son she uses him shamelessly, denouncing all he stands for, the mission he feels is important and necessary, as she churns out anti-war propaganda in the name of motherhood.

In one essay, Galleymore asked for others to appreciate that the soldiers are in a dilemma, “caught in a military culture that encourages the numbing of most emotions but anger. Whip up enough anger in young men emotionally isolated, denied friends, family, lovers, even civilians clothes, physically exhaust them, nourish them inadequately, expose them to extreme temperatures and violent behavior, confine them to base and portray everyone else as murderous and you create impossible stress.”

Nick told his mother that wasn’t his experience. She doesn’t know how they’ll get along when he returns.

“I don’t know if he hasn’t been responding to my e-mails because he can’t, or because of something else,” Galleymore said.

Even after meeting halfway around the world, Galleymore’s relationship with her son is in some ways as complicated as it was before he left. But she knows they’ll eventually understand each other; they’re mother and child. She hopes that Americans eventually achieve the same with Iraqis.

Not by abandoning them to the feckless thieves at the UN and the waiting Ba’athist thugs, fundemental clerics and Islamo-terrorists that will fill the vacuum. She weeps crocodile tears for the people of Iraq, her motives are for regime change here, not in Iraq.

Apparently the author knows nothing of Operation Give and other good works Americans and Iraqs are doing together. How easily he accepts Galleymore’s anti-American, anti-military point of view as the norm reveals his bias. I am sure there wasn’t a dry eye in the house this morning when this piece of slanted journalism hit the doorsteps. Tomorrow’s Letters to the Editor will run hot with outrage and applause for Galleymore, just as they have been demanding we pull out of Iraq since the savagery in Fallujah occured.

Of course the next terrorist scare at SFO or the Golden Gate Bridge, these same folks will be lighting up the phones and editorial pages demanding a quicker military response.

AP: U.S. Transit Systems Increasing Security

Greg Hull, security chief for the American Public Transportation Association, said Friday the transit systems are at “code yellow-plus” following the bulletin about a possible terror plot from the FBI and the Homeland Security Department.

Wait… what’s going on here? What the heck is a Code Yellow Plus?

Is a Code Yellow Plus the same as a Code Orange-Minus, or are they like school grades where a b- is a C+ where you blow the professor in their office?

I thought that Tom Ridge was setting these things up like musical scales, where a B-sharp is a C-flat. That way, a Code Yellow-Plus is really a Code Orange-Minus.

Code Yellow is Elevated and Code Orange is High. What is Yellow-Plus? Escalated? Aroused? Antsy?

How about the color itself? Kinda-Yellow? Mellow-Yellow? Golderod? Cornsilk? Lemon Chiffon?

I think our anti-terror efforts to protect the trains is slowly but surely coming off of the rails.

The new Al-Qaeda Hit-List has come out, and Australians are hopping mad - and we don’t mean the Kangaroos.

Typical Australian reactions:

“I’d thought we Aussies had set a new standard for tolerance, cultural diversity, and common humanity. But according to these Fascist Bigots, we still lag behind America, Britain, and even Spain. It’s a sad day for Australia.”

“What do we have to do to improve our standing? We had hoped that we’d de-throne the Poms from the coveted No 2 spot, but now we’re behind SPAIN ferkrisake. What do we have to do, become Red Sea Pedestrians or something?”

“At least we’re ahead of France.”

While Australians are unanimous in their reaction to being demoted to No 4 on the list, opinions differ on what to do about it.

“We should immediately pull our troops out of Iraq. In fact, we should put more in, then take them out, like New Zealand.” said one Labor Spokesmen, speaking on condition of anonymity. “The Spanish experience has shown that if we even appear to compromise - whether we actually do or not - we greatly increase our chances of being a target.”

“We should immediately convert to Islam” said another, “Al Qaeda’s attacks have killed far more Muslims than Jews, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists put together.”

Other commentators differ.

“You’ve got to remember these people are basically rabidly Xenophobic Psychopaths. Or to use the technical term, Stark Staring Bonkers. We’re talking Raving Nutters here, Bats in the Belfrey, not just a few screws loose, a whole machine-tool manufacturing facility. Sure, they kill more Muslims than Christians, but that’s just because they’re Dills, Drongos and Nongs, or to use the correct technical term again, Ot-nay Oo-tay Ight-Bray.”

“Guess we just have to try harder. Publicise what we do. We have troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, we liberated hundreds of thousands of people from an out-of-control pseudo-Islamic Feudal regime in East Timor, we’re helping the largest Islamic country in the world suppress these twits by providing technical assistance in computer and explosive forensics, but no-one’s heard of us. Blame the tyranny of distance.”

“Al Qaeda thrives on ignorance and poverty. They know it, and as they’ve admitted themselves, try to decrease both knowledge and wealth throughout the world to foster their brand of Islam. If we are to regain our No 3 position, and, dare I say it, even beat the Poms, we must increase educational funding, scientific research, and especially encourage business to fund it all. Beating the US in this area is a bit of a stretch, but who knows?”

Some Australians are philosophical about it.

“Spain has the Reconquista, or as Bin laden put it the tragedy of Al-Andalus on it’s side.” said one. “That’s a big handicap to overcome. Even if we did, India chucked out their Islamic Moghul overlords centuries ago, and where did it get them? Hindus aren’t even mentioned.”

The only big winners on the list appear to be Australia’s Jewish community.

“When your enemies start raving about “military diplomacy, written in blood and decorated with body pieces”, well, you know you’re doing something right. “

A Church spokesman appeared to agree. “We don’t claim that God’s on our side” she said, “we just want to make sure that we’re on Hers.”

A.E.Brain, reporting for TCP-Satire.

Here are some of the new independent advertisements for this year’s Presidential campaign.

This advertisement focuses on the booming Bush economy.

The URL is:

http://members.cox.net/macallan_the/GW/GWBush1_Start.htm

This advertisement focuses on U.S. Administration statements concerning Iraqi WMD.

The URL is:

http://flashbunny.org/content/misled.html

Watch them while you can! The next thing you know, Congress and the Supreme Court will outlaw this crazy “free-speech during politcal campaigns” stuff.

Via Instapundit.

This is a duplicate of the orginal post from the nikita demosthenes website.

[ This editorial was written by my son Matt and originally appeared here. It is posted here with permission of the author. Dan Spencer, California Yankee]

I read Wednesday about the attack on the civilian convoy in Iraq. Although details were sparse and sketchy–at the time, even who the victims worked for was unknown–I realized this would open a new avenue in the Iraq debate. After reading today’s article in The New York Times, I finally grasped the gravity of the situation.

Four Americans dead, their cars sprayed by gunfire, smashed by bricks, and set aflame. Like Somalia, corpses dragged through the streets, dismembered, mutilated, and hung from a bridge. Iraqis, likely including the attack’s perpetrators, celebrating in the streets, calling Fallujah the “Graveyard of the Americans.”

Throughout the ordeal, no response came. Not one police unit, firefighting brigade, ambulance, or soldier arrived to break up the grotesque demonstration. This isn’t Somalia–we have a large military presence and trained police forces throughout the nation–but at the moment it appears nearly identical.

I am too young to remember that ordeal. In a month, I will turn eighteen, registering to vote and for selective service. Despite the letters arriving from colleges, telling me where I can and cannot go, I am still a high school student, but I find my views sometimes strikingly different from my peers.

I supported the removal of Saddam from the outset; I still believe it was the right thing to do. I remember, when the WMD debate just began to reach the mainstream, an editorial Thomas Friedman wrote. In it, he referred to a picture appearing on the front page of the Times: a skull from a mass grave, with a group of Iraqis in the background who had relatives buried in it. In his words, “As far as I’m concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war. That skull, and the thousands more that will be unearthed, are enough for me.” I could not possibly agree more wholeheartedly. I also believe we need to help the Iraqis create a functioning state, but to do that, we must have security.

The attack itself angers me; its aftermath disgusts me, and yet it does not change my opinion. We still need to help the Iraqis transform their nation. When President Bush said there would be losses, I recognized that, as every other American should have. I also realized that, unfortunately, some of these losses would be non-military. Not in my wildest dreams, however, could I picture American civilians, at work helping to restore Iraq’s infrastructure, attacked without a response. I realize Fallujah is in the Sunni Triangle. I further realize that its political loyalties could make it the most dangerous city in the country now. I do not, however, believe the city is so lawless as to prevent Coalition soldiers or Iraqi policemen from breaking up the mob and securing the area around the demolished vehicles. Because no response was made, because those who oppose our presence in Iraq were allowed to brutally murder four civilians, then cavort through the streets with their corpses, we show the Iraqis weakness. Regardless of our actual strength, they perceive weakness.

Action needs to be taken. In the one day since the bombing, I have heard every suggestion from bombing the city into rubble to fleeing the nation altogether. I see neither as an option, but Fallujah, and the rest of Iraq, need to recognize the rule of law. Such demonstrations and acts as the one that took place April 31 cannot go unpunished. This is first-degree murder, punishable by life imprisonment for one count in courts worldwide, by the death penalty where still allowed. If citizens of Fallujah want to protest our presence in Iraq, they have every right to do so–as long as they do so peaceably.

This attack will give new ammunition to many wishing our forces removed from Iraq. I write this imploring them to reconsider. After all I have heard about Iraq, the killings and reconstruction, even the blatant murder of innocents, why do I still support this? Life is supposed to be precious; indeed, what could possibly be more sacred? Why, you may ask, does a teenager support the continued struggle to bring Democracy to the Middle East? My answer is simple, and only three words long:

Freedom. Isn’t. Free.

Live your lives to the fullest; this nation provides you that outstanding opportunity. I believe others should have it as well.

Ready for another example of media bias?

CNN: Israeli police enter holy site to quell protests

Israeli police entered a Jerusalem holy site and used stun grenades and rubber pellets to quell Palestinians throwing rocks at police and Jewish worshippers at the end of Friday prayers at the Al Aqsa Mosque, according to a police spokesman.

There were some injuries and at least 14 arrests, police said.

The mosque is located on the Temple Mount or Haram al Sharif, one of the holiest sites in Islam and is above the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism.

The entire Temple Mount is the holiest place in Judaism, not just the wall.

UPDATE:
CNN makes a correction:

The mosque is on the Temple Mount, or Haram al Sharif, a site sacred to both Jews and Muslims, and is above the Western Wall, the holiest site where Jews are allowed to pray.

The area, long a flashpoint for conflict, has been the site of numerous clashes.

Religious Jews consider the Temple Mount to be holiest site in Judaism, but the Israeli government law bans from praying on the Temple Mount to maintain the status quo between the Jewish and Muslim communities.

CNN proves once again that haste makes waste.

News Flash — Chris Matthews and Dick Clark agreed on china patterns and were last seen boarding a red-eye to SF.

I forced myself to watch Hardball last night much as one peers under a rock…you know what types lurk there. Seriously, what a waste of time. Yes, yes, I understand Matthews is a Democrat partisan, a political commentator, not a journalist, as if there is much of a distinction nowdays, but he is smart politically and often has a different spin than his journalist brethern.

Matthews appeared awe struck in the face of the brilliance that is Dick Clarke.

Treacly sycophancy is not must-see TV.

Are we through or must we witness another round of journalists and commentators verbally fellating Clarke after Dr. Rice testifies?