Sigh. The mainstream media doesn’t appear to be learning much.

• Maybe that should be C-BS? They’re caught, again, producing a “news” segment involving bogus documents, little to no fact-chacking, and the deliberate misrepresentation of an activist’s affiliations. CBS has now admitted as much re: the activist. This cartoon about sums up the issue.

• INDC has a couple of interviews with CBS personnel about the latest scandal.

• The Justice Department has charged that a veteran New York Times foreign correspondent warned an alleged terror-funding Islamic charity that the FBI was about to raid its office - potentially endangering the lives of federal agents. Ace of Spades also links to some background re: this reporter. Note that the Times denies the charges. We’ll see.

• There seems to be one expert on the other side in the Rathergate expert scorecard now. Joseph M. Newcomer, one of the pioneers of electric typesetting, has what’s generally considered to be the definitive analysis but David E. Hailey, Jr., Ph.D says no, this can be produced on a typewriter. AllahPundit has more re: the latter. I’d like to see Hailey and Newcomer go head to head, myself… but I suspect he’ll hear from the blogosphere’s experts first.

Read The Rest…

I hope the feces are going to hit the air ventilation systems over this one. The Spanish parliament yesterday decided to consider José Couso, a Spanish camera man for TeleCinco, a victim of terrorism.

Couso was killed by American fire while filming from his balcony in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad on April 8, during the American liberation of that city. There was an investigation by the US Army, which concluded that the tank commander acted correctly. There were snipers in the area, and the lense of a camera flickering in the sun can be similar to that of a sniper’s scope or a spotter’s binoculars. The U.S. Army did apologize for the matter to Spain’s —then— Aznar government, which considered the matter closed.

Not so for the Socialists, and in their all-consuming hate for everything Aznar has done for this country, the prime directive for Zapatero’s government seems to be to revise history wherever possible. Add to this the virulent anti-Americanism present in his government, and Prime Minister Zapatero’s stance of actively undermining US foreign policy and thereby indirectly putting American GIs as well as the Iraqi population under increased threat, as well as seeking alignment with Arab dictatorships, the next low for the Spanish socialists had to be to accuse the Americans of terrorism.

The Communist left (IU) together with a regional ecological party have introduced a bill in parliament, which would consider José Couso’s death an act of ‘international terrorism’. Zapatero’s Socialists have said to support the bill, focusing for their part on the state benefits his family will receive because of this, the intention of the bill is clear: The U.S. Army are terrorists.

If they want to pay his family benefits, there’s a million different ways to do so in this Keynesian wet dream of a country.

Former Prime Minister Aznar’s Partido Popular party is against it, logically one would want to think, but in this country I sometimes get the impression that everything has been put upside down since Al Qaeda chased them out of Iraq.

I sincerely hope the United States lodge a formal complaint with the Spanish government on this.

first published at Southern Watch.

Despite the inordinate amount of time that has been spent debating foreign affairs during this election season, particularly the situation in Iraq, there is a crucial issue that hasn’t yet received the attention that it deserves. The ignored point in question is how John Kerry’s over-the-top campaign rhetoric would make it almost impossible for him to successfully deal with Iraq.

While Kerry’s position on Iraq has wildly shifted to and fro over the last couple of years, his most recent comments have been particularly outlandish and irresponsible.

Kerry has called Iraq “a profound diversion from (the war on terrorism)”, opined that the US shouldn’t have invaded in the first place, and has called it “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time”.

Also, we must keep in mind that Kerry has said he is “proud” to have voted against funding the war and has made it clear that he’s not committed to Democracy in Iraq by saying,

“With respect to getting our troops out, the measure is the stability of Iraq. [Democracy] shouldn’t be the measure of when you leave. I have always said from day one that the goal here…is a stable Iraq, not whether or not that’s a full democracy.”

So in John Kerry, we would have a vacillating Commander-In-Chief who believes the invasion was a mistake, didn’t want to fund the war afterwards, and has made it plain that he’s willing to settle for less than Democracy in Iraq.

In other words, unlike George Bush, John Kerry has no stake in Iraq and he might decide to cut and run at any time. He even has a ready made excuse; he can blame it all on George Bush! You can almost hear the speech John Kerry would make as he orders our troops out,

“Pulling out of Iraq and letting it collapse into Civil War was the toughest decision I ever made in my life. However, after thinking back to my time in Vietnam, I knew what I had to do. After all, how could I look one of our soldiers in the eye and ask him to be the last man to die for George Bush’s mistake?”

Now, how do you think having someone with that attitude in the White House would affect the morale of the troops? Do you think they’d really want to risk their lives for a cause their own Commander-in-Chief doesn’t believe in and might give up on at any time?

Would the Iraqi people trust a man like John Kerry who is now in effect saying that if he had his way, Saddam would still be in power? As if that weren’t bad enough, when Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi came to the US to give a speech to a Joint Session of Congress, John Kerry in essence called him a liar, made it clear that he doesn’t think elections will go forward in January of next year, and sent his senior adviser Joe Lockhart out to gratuitously insult Allawi by calling him a “puppet of the United States”. Were John Kerry to become President, the Iraqi people could very well become panicky and lose all confidence that the United States still intends to help them become a Democracy.

And what about the “insurgents” and their terrorist allies in Iraq? What do you think is going to give them more inspiration to keep fighting — four more years of George Bush, who has been the greatest foe of terrorism the world has ever seen — or John Kerry, a skittish candidate who might pull the troops out at any time?

Then there are our allies in the Coalition, nations like Britain, Poland, Australia, Italy, South Korea, and Japan. Many of these countries sent troops to Iraq despite tough political opposition at home and have hung in there with us through tough times, even though they’ve lost soldiers and civilians in Iraq. Are they going to be willing to stay in Iraq and fight what the new President of the United States thinks is, “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time”? How many nations that are with us in Iraq today would continue to stick in there if a man who has mockingly referred to them as part of a, “trumped-up, so-called coalition of the bribed, the coerced, the bought and the extorted” becomes President? John Kerry claims he can bring new allies into the Coalition, but it’s entirely possible that he would instead cost us many of the allies we already have in this crucial endeavor.

As John Kerry said during one of his pro-war phases, Iraq is, “critical to the outcome of the war on terror”. Getting rid of Saddam was a blow against terrorism and helping Iraq become a Democracy is vitally important to improving our image in the Middle-East, helping freedom spread across the region, & winning the war on terrorism.

That’s why it’s so encouraging to see that we are making a lot of progress in Iraq. As Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi said, “2500 schools…have been renovated”, they are working on “150 new health care centers”, National elections are scheduled for January, and the Iraqis are rapidly moving towards a day when they can handle their own security without American soldiers having to be put at risk,

“The Iraqi government now commands almost 50,000 armed and combat - ready Iraqis. By January it will be some 145,000. And by the end of next year, some 250,000 Iraqis.”

In Iraq, certainly there have been mistakes made, unexpected difficulties, and tough times, but we are going in the right direction and if we give George Bush another term, he has shown that he has what it takes to get the job done. The same can’t be said of John Kerry. To the contrary, a vote for John Kerry is likely to be a vote for failure in Iraq, which would be a huge setback in the war on terrorism, a betrayal of the soldiers who gave their lives fighting there, and the breaking of America’s pledge to help the Iraqis become a free people.

So make a wise choice in November because whether we succeed or fail in Iraq will likely depend on the outcome of the election.

(NOTE: This was originally posted on Dean’s World this weekend, when Joe Gandelman was Guest Blogger)

Has there been a quiet foreshadowing of the next conflict to come — a foreshadowing lost or downplayed by the single-focus American media as it covers the contentious Presidential campaign?

It looks that way. The issue is Iran which is emitting increasing rumblings amid a generally aggressive tone towards the United States that it intends to go full-speed ahead on its nuclear program — and develop long range missles. Note this item in World Net Daily:

Iran said today it has successfully test-fired a long-range “strategic missile” and delivered it to its armed forces, saying it is now prepared to deal with any regional threats and even the “big powers.”

Iran’s new missiles can reach London, Paris, Berlin and southern Russia, according to weapons and intelligence analysts.

This essentially would mean it is on the verge of being a major power. More:

“This strategic missile was successfully test-fired during (the recent) military exercises by the Revolutionary Guards and delivered to the armed forces,” Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani was quoted by the state-run radio as saying.

The missile is believed by intelligence analysts to be an updated version of the Shihab-3, improved with the help of the North Koreans.

So “the enemy of your enemy is my friend” is in play here…

The news comes shortly after Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards staged military maneuvers near the border with Iraq, seen as a signal to Washington Tehran is prepared to fight back against any attempts to prevent the development of a nuclear reactor that could be used to make weapons-grade plutonium.

There has been talk the U.S. could want to find some way to stop that reactor from being either built or completed. And some of the speculation has centered on perhaps the Israeli taking care of this pesky problem for Washington for two reasons: in Israel’s own interest and as a de factor U.S. surrogate. The Iranians are well aware of U.S. and Israeli desires to nip their program in the bud:

The radio said Shamkhani refused to give details about the missile for “security reasons,” but said Iran was “ready to confront all regional and extra-regional threats.”

Shamkhani last month said Iran was working on improvements to the range and accuracy of the Shihab-3 in response to Israel’s moves to boost its anti-missile capability.

Today’s announcement came days after Israel said it was buying from the United States about 5,000 smart bombs, including 500 one-ton bunker-busters that can destroy 6-feet-thick concrete walls.

Analysts say such bombs could be used to destroy Iran’s nuclear reactor before it goes online. In 1981, Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor before it went “hot.” Iran may be only weeks or months away from activating the reactor.

The 2,000 pound “bunker-buster” bombs are part of one of the largest weapons deals between Israel and the U.S. in years. The bombs include airborne versions, guidance units, training bombs and detonators. They are guided by an existing Israeli satellite used by the military.

In addition to the 500 one-ton bunker-busters, the purchase includes 2,500 other one-ton bombs, 1,000 half-ton bombs and 500 quarter-ton bombs. Funding will come from U.S. military aid to Israel.

On Tuesday, Iran defied the International Atomic Energy Agency by announcing it is producing uranium hexafluoride, the material for centrifuge enrichment.

Kurtis Cooper, a U.S. State Department spokesman, declared: “Although Iran has repeatedly asserted that its nuclear program is exclusively for peaceful purposes and its pursuit of uranium enrichment technologies are to fuel a planned civilian power program, Iran will have no peaceful use for enriched uranium for many, many years. … The rush to convert 37 tons of yellowcake into feed-stock for centrifuge enrichment has no peaceful justification. … Thirty-seven tons of yellowcake is not a test. It is a production run.”

Iran and North Korea are going to be major challenges to the next administration. The challenge Iran poses to U.S. policy makers is not simply because of test firing missles that can terrorize Europe (and the realization that if they can develop these they can develop missles that have an even longer range…that can perhaps go as far as New York or Washington DC.). It’s spills into other troublesome areas as well, plus it reflects an overall problem the U.S. has faced in dealing with this militaryily strong and sophisticated country since the fall of the Shah of Iran.

Also consider:
—A New York Times report citing classified intelligence reports in January 2002 that Iran purchased US-built Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and turned them over to a Lebanese-based terrorist organization.
—Iran last month virtually daring the U.S. or Israel to try and interfere with its programL:

TEHRAN (Reuters) - A senior Iranian military official said Sunday Israel and the United States would not dare attack Iran since it could strike back anywhere in Israel with its latest missiles, news agencies reported.

Iranian officials have made a point of highlighting the Islamic state’s military capabilities in recent weeks in response to some media reports that Israeli or U.S. warplanes could try to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities in air strikes.

Iran last week said it carried out a successful test firing of an upgraded version of its Shahab-3 medium-range ballistic missile. Military experts said the unmodified Shahab-3 was already capable of striking Israel or U.S. bases in the Gulf.

“The entire Zionist territory, including its nuclear facilities and atomic arsenal, are currently within range of Iran’s advanced missiles,” the ISNA students news agency quoted Yadollah Javani, head of the Revolutionary Guards political bureau, as saying.

“Therefore, neither the Zionist regime nor America will carry out its threats” against Iran, he said.

An attack on Iran “could only be carried out by angry or stupid people. For that reason, officials of the Islamic Republic must always be prepared to counter possible military threats,” Javani said in a statement, ISNA reported

—This analysis by Steven Weisman in the New York Times which reads in part (and is worth reading in its entirety):

With a violent insurgency mounting in Iraq, the Bush administration hardly has time for another crisis overseas. Yet a barrage of warnings from Washington about Iran seems likely to erupt into a confrontation with the Tehran government, perhaps before the end of the year.

American anxiety is focused not simply on Iran’s apparent efforts to develop a nuclear bomb. There are also signs, administration officials have said, of support by Iran for the insurgency in Iraq, which officials fear could grow if the Tehran government is pressed too hard on its nuclear program.

A parallel concern in Washington is Iran’s continued backing of Hezbollah, which the administration and the Israeli government say is channeling aid to Hamas and other groups responsible for attacks on Israeli civilians.

Israel also warns that Iran’s nuclear program by next year will reach a “point of no return,” after which it will be able to make a bomb without any outside assistance.

Complicating the American response to all these concerns, the Bush administration is in considerable disagreement with its allies over how to handle the situation without making things worse.

Britain, France and Germany are warning that a confrontation could backfire, and that positive incentives as well as punishments need to be presented to Tehran, at least at some point down the road. Threatening sanctions, such as a cutoff in oil purchases, for example, is not viewed as credible or likely to get much support, European officials say.

European views cannot be dismissed, especially after the trans-Atlantic discord on Iraq, administration officials say….

So once again a threat perceived by the United States and Israel may face demands by European allies to go slow, wait, and negotiate. Given Iran’s accelerated testing schedule,threatening pronouncements and growing threat, it’s unlikely that after the November elections any U.S. administration or Irsael will feel it has the luxury to go so slow.

PREFACE: Wait! Don’t accuse me of being a Nazi by that headline. My name is G-a-n-d-e-l-m-a-n…so you know I’m Italian.

This email is going around and was sent to me by a friend in Florida, a Jewish friend (some of my best friends — and relatives — are Jews).

I’m posting it because a)it was interesting, b)I’m interested to see if some of our sharp readers (although I am well-educated, and spent the best 20 years of my life in elementary school) can let us know if the last line about George Bush is ACCURATE. Be sure to read my comments at the end of this. Here is what is being emailed across the country:

US Presidents and the Jews

—GEORGE WASHINGTON was the first President to write to a Synagogue. In 1790 he addressed separate letters to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, and to Mikve Israel Congregation in Savannah, Georgia, and a joint letter to Congregation Beth Shalom, Richmond, Virginia, Mikve Israel, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Beth Elohim Synagogue, Charleston, South Carolina and to Shearith Israel, New York.

—THOMAS JEFFERSON was the first President to appoint a Jew to a Federal post. In 1801 he named Reuben Getting of Baltimore as US Marshall for Maryland.

—JAMES MADISON was the first President to appoint a Jew to a diplomatic post. He sent Mordecai M. Noah to Tunis from 1813 to 1816.

-MARTIN VAN BUREN was the first President to order an American Consul to intervene on behalf of Jews abroad. In 1840 he instructed the U.S. Consul in Alexandria, Egypt to use his good offices to protect
the Jews of Damascus, Syria, who were under attack because of a false blood ritual accusation.

-JOHN TYLER was the first President to nominate a U.S. Consul to Palestine. Warder Cresson, a Quaker convert to Judaism, who established a pioneer Zionist colony, received the appointment in 1844.

-FRANKLIN PIERCE was the first and probably the only President whose name appears on the charter of a Synagogue. Pierce signed the Act of Congress n 1857 that amended the laws of the District of Columbia to enable the incorporation of the city’s first Synagogue, the Washington Hebrew Congregation.

-ABRAHAM LINCOLN was the first President to make it possible for Rabbis to serve as military chaplains. He did this by signing the 1862 Act of Congress which changed the law that had previously barred all but Christian clergymen from the chaplaincy. Lincoln was also the first, and happily the only President who was called upon to revoke an official act of Anti-Semitism by the U.S. Government. It was Lincoln who cancelled General Ulysses S. Grant’s “Order No. 11” expelling all Jews from Tennessee from the District controlled by his armies during the Civil War.

-ULYSSES S. GRANT was the first President to attend a Synagogue service while in office. When Adas Israel Congregation in Washington D.C. was dedicated in 1876, Grant and all members of his Cabinet were present.

-RUTHERFORD B. HAYES was the first President to designate a Jewish Ambassador for the stated purpose of fighting Anti-Semitism. In 1870, he named Benjamin Peyote Consul-General to Rumania. Hays also was the first President to assure a civil service employee her right to work for the Federal Government and yet observe the Sabbath. He ordered the employment of a Jewish woman who had been denied a position in the Department of the Interior because of her refusal to work on Saturday.

—THEODORE ROOSEVELT was the first President to appoint a Jew to a presidential cabinet. In 1906 he named Oscar S. Straus Secretary of Commerce and Labor. Theodore Roosevelt was also the first President to contribute his own funds to a Jewish cause. In 1919, when he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts while President to settle the Russo-Japanese War, Roosevelt contributed part of his prize to the National Jewish Welfare Board.

—WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT was the first President to attend a Seder while in office. In 1912, when he visited Providence, Rhode Island, he participated in the family Seder of Colonel Harry Cutler, first president of the National Jewish Welfare Board.

—WOODROW WILSON was the first President to nominate a Jew, Louis Dembitz Brandeis, to the United States Supreme Court. Standing firm against great pressure to withdraw the nomination. Confirmation was finally voted by the Senate on June 1, 1916. Wilson was also the first President to publicly
endorse a national Jewish philanthropic campaign. In a letter to Jacob Schiff, on November 22, 1917, Wilson called for wide support of the United Jewish Relief Campaign which was raising funds for European War relief.

—WARREN HARDING was the first President to sign a Joint Congressional Resolution endorsing the Balfour Declaration and the Palestine Mandate supporting the establishment in Palestine of a national Jewish home for the Jewish people.

—CALVIN COOLIDGE was the first President to participate in the edication of a Jewish community institution that was not a house of worship. On May 3, 1925, he helped dedicate the cornerstone of the Washington, D.C. Jewish Community Center.

—HARRY S. TRUMAN, on May 14, 1948, just eleven minutes after Israel’s proclamation of independence, was the first Head of a Government to announce to the press that “the United Stated recognizes the provisional Government as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel.” Truman was also the first U.S. President to receive a President of Israel at the White House, Chaim Weisman, in 1948 and an Ambassador from Israel - Eliahu Elath in 1948. With Israel staggering under the burdens of mass immigration in 1951-1952, President Truman obtained from Congress close to $140 million in loans and grants.

—DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER was the first President to participate in a coast-to-coast TV program sponsored by a Jewish organization. It was a network show in 1954 celebrating the 300th anniversary of the American Jewish community. On this occasion he said that it was one of the enduring satisfactions of his life that he was privileged to lead the forces of the free world which finally crushed the brutal regime in Germany, freeing the remnant of Jews for a new life and hope in Israel.

—JOHN F. KENNEDY named two Jews to his cabinet - Abraham Ribicoff as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, and Arthur Goldberg as Secretary of Labor. Kennedy was the only President for whom a national Jewish Award was named. The annual peace award of the Synagogue Council of America was re-named the John F. Kennedy Peace Award after his assassination in 1963.

—JIMMY CARTER, in a number of impassioned speeches, stated his concern for human rights and stressed the right of Russian Jews to emigrate. He is credited with being the person responsible for the Camp David Accords.

—GEORGE H. W. BUSH in 1985, as Vice President, had played a personal role in “Operation Joshua,” the airlift which brought 10,000 Jews out of Ethiopia directly to resettlement in Israel. Then, again in 1991, when Bush was President, American help played a critical role in “Operation Solomon,” the escape of 14,000 more Ethiopian Jews. Most dramatically, Bush got the U.N. to revoke its 1975 “Zionism is Racism” resolution.

—BILL CLINTON appointed more Jews to his cabinet than all of the previous presidents put together.

—GEORGE W. BUSH is the first President since Herbert Hoover who has no Jews in his cabinet at all.

My thoughts and questions:

(1) Is this true?

(2) I thought John Ashcroft was Jewish. (UPDATE: That is a lame JOKE, folks!)

(3) If George Bush doesn’t have any Jews in his cabinet but invites some prominent Jews over for Chinese food, that’ll probably make up for it. Christians use 100 B.C. Jews use 100 B.C.F. (Before Chinese Food).

(4) This list leaves out people like LBJ and Richard Nixon, who was not exactly an aspiriging Bar Mitzvah boy.

(5) From my viewpoint? Even if Bush doesn’t have any Jews in his cabinet it doesn’t mean a thing to me. I do NOT believe in filling a cabinet with members of X group — even though I am Jewish (I was BORN to be Jewish AND an entertainer: the first doctor I saw as an infant took 10 percent..). This doesn’t mean or prove one iota that Bush — one of the biggest, most adamant supporters of Israel ever — is in any way, shape or form against people who are Jewish. And — again I remind you — I am NOT a Bush or a Kerry supporter.

IDEA: Comedian Jerry Lewis has been ill recently and he is slowly recuperating. Why not offer Jerry Lewis a soft job in the White House? Make him Condi Rice’s assistant. Then he can yell: “Hey, laaady!”

Al Jazeera is airing a show discussing how useful it is to behead infidels. Youssef M. Ibrahim’s piece carried on UPI has all the details — details showing, once again, that Al Jazeera is a propaganda tool for the most barbaric political behavior known to man:

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Sep. 28 (UPI) — Imagine a television talk show where the hosts debate the merits and demerits of cannibalism, discussing whether it is good to kill people to eat their flesh, liver and hearts — seriously, on the air on prime time.

Don’t give the networks any ideas for a new reality show…

This past Tuesday, Feyssal Al Qassem, the infamous anchorman of Al Jazeera’s program “Counter Direction,” or “Alti jah Al Muaakess,” went well beyond.

Al Qassem hosted an Egyptian guest who over an entire hour was allowed to advocate, with sickening insistence, the beheading of hostages in Iraq as a legitimate act of resistance to what he called “these American dogs,” regardless of whether the captives — who are of many different nationalities — are military personnel, civilians, aid workers, or spies.

They are all mercenaries, the Egyptian man screamed, as Al Qassem of the Al Jazeera network cheered him on. Truly, he who has no shame is not afraid. Arabism and Islam have nothing to do with such people.

Fortunately the writer of this piece, which originally appeared in Gulf News, doesn’t let them get away with it:

Where does Al Jazeera, and Al Qassem, think they are taking their Arabic-speaking viewers, the young before the old, when they put on a talk show tantamount to issuing a fatwa, or edict, for murder in the name of Islam and God or Arab Nationalism?

Do Al Qassem and his network appreciate how much damage they are doing to the religion of 1.2 billion Muslims, in addition to polluting the minds of many who watched him dish out this garbage?

Al Qassem — whose program is already known as vile, loud, and messy — descended further into ignominious behavior.

As the host of this unbelievable conversation, Al Qassem prompted, watched and blessed a so-called Egyptian political commentator arguing that people having their heads severed from their bodies in the most savage of ways is okay in the name of resistance to American occupation — and more important — to teach the Americans a lesson.

How about what this teaches Arab children? What will they retain when they hear gratuitous invitations to kill, slash, hate, demean and ostracize “the other”, including innocent journalists, aid workers, and United Nations officials, both men and women who came to help Arabs of Iraq?

On Al Qassem’s television show, the guest representing the opposing view, an Iraqi who argued hopelessly that such savagery is inhuman, was at a loss for words. Who would not be?

And he says it all for us when he writes this:

There is a point where freedom of expression in the media stops and advocating irresponsible bloody savagery begins. Clearly Al Jazeera and Feyssal Al Qassem have no idea where that point is. Sponsors, mainly the government of Qatar, should pull the plug on him, tell him he is fired, and then apologize to Arabs, Muslims and the whole civilized world for this smear.

Like it or not, Al Jazeera has a huge following of Arabic-speaking people. This is a public trust. If a satellite channel claims to speak in the name of Arabs, its bosses and sponsors must make sure it does not spit where it eats.

By this show alone, Al Jazeera has crossed “the line” — a line that actors, musicians, and politicians can cross in varying ways. It’s a line where you lose your credibility and reveal yourself — usually unintentionally — as an extremist or an advocate of amoral behavior. More:

Al Jazeera has absolutely no right to allow ignorant, persons and reckless anchormen to further soil the reputation of all Muslims and Arabs by debating decapitation of human beings. There are no pros and cons here.

And it is not the first time Al Jazeera has done that. For years it has given prime time to the rabid Egyptian so-called religious leader Yusuf Al Qardawi, who issued an edict allowing the killing of Americans in Iraq and wife beating. The other day Al Itihad, the Emirates Arabic daily, to its credit, denounced him as an “ignorant man” misleading Muslims. Abdelrahman Al Rashed, the manager of the competing Arabic network Al Arabiya, also to his credit, also took him on saying he is polluting minds and shaming Muslims. It is now up to the Qatari government to stop these charades.

All this comes shortly after Al Azhar, the highest authority in Sunni Islam, condemned as a crime the kidnappings and beheadings of anyone being carried out in Iraq in the name of Islam.

YES: there ARE Muslims who are condemning it — which makes Al Jazeera all the more isolated as a vehicle of extremist propaganda.

What’s worse is that in an electronic voting on the issue, a huge majority of Al Jazeera’s viewers encouraged decapitation while less than 10 percent voted against.

Unless it happened to THEIR relatives (which won’t fortunately happen because there are indeed certain values that Westerners will not suspend).

The calamity that most of those who voted for it were Arabs and Muslims living in the West with free access to the Internet, enjoying the full freedom of Western democracies.

And we wonder where Osama’s “sleeper cells” are?

What does this say? That Al Jazeera has successfully polluted the minds of millions who should think differently, or that Arabs seriously suffer from schizophrenia?

Is it a surprise that prominent psychiatrists say that 10 percent of Arab children do not sleep for 10 days after viewing such repulsive kidnap-and-behead-industry photos and images of people begging for their lives with masked men standing behind defaming the Holy Koran by holding it up high.

But that doesn’t matter since the goal is indoctrination.

If adults are confused, what are children supposed to be? A friend, a medical professional, wrote me the other day an e-mail in which she said, “We do not need nation-building. We need nation-rebuilding. This is a big, big issue.”

Indeed, as long as people such as Al Qassem are not checked, we are in trouble.

Youssef M. Ibrahim , a former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times and Energy Editor of the Wall Street Journal, is Managing Director of the Dubai-based Strategic Energy Investment Group. He can be contacted at ymibrahim@gulfnews.com

Send him your KUDOS for this piece.

It looks as if viewers are deserting Dan Rather in droves — a sign of both his damaged credibility and the intense (almost scary) polarization in this country.

The New York Post reports:

Dan Rather’s ratings in New York continue to tank in the wake of the fake-documents scandal.

The “CBS Evening News” averaged 160,000 viewers last week on WCBS/Channel 2 — down from 231,000 viewers the week before.

Rather apologized for the National Guard documents debacle on the Sept. 20 newscast, and his numbers actually rose the next two days, reaching a high of 241,000 viewers Wednesday.

In the week before Rather’s on-air mea culpa, viewership was off a staggering 49 percent.

The numbers spiraled downward since Wednesday, with Thursday’s “Evening News” pulling only 140,000 viewers on Channel 2, and a measly 108,000 viewers Friday, according to Nielsen numbers.

Meanwhile, a fourth of American adults polled for USA Today and CNN by Gallup say Rather should be fired over the story charging President Bush got special treatment during his National Guard service — but 64 percent said the anchor should not be canned.

Also, 38 percent said the CBS report was a hit job aimed at making Bush look bad, while 56 percent said it was an “honest mistake.”

Why is this happening? The controversy over the story is one thing. The polarization of the electorate — seen in the growth of two talk radio cultures (conservative and liberal Air America) and even ideological dating services for singles — is another.

But there’s also the fact that Rather has never quite been a journalism icon on the same scale as Walter Cronkite. Cronkite was to TV news what the late Ed Sullivan was to TV variety shows: he epitomized an era and had an aura. The era was the days when journalists genuinely strove for objectivity and sneered at tabloids, or even theme music on newscasts. The aura was of someone who attempted to go straight down the middle. LBJ’s now cliched comment that when he lost Walter Cronkite he knew he lost the war was true; Cronkite bent over backwards when he was on CBS to at least give everyone a fair shake.

Rather hasn’t quite been Mr. Investigative reporter, but he didn’t have that reservoir of good-will. It’s a generational thing; it seems each generation is more aggressive as we move into the 21st Century (you experience this in Road Rage, which was not the rage years ago).

So when The Great Documents Controversy broke, he had nothing to fall back on because his past clashes with Republicans had already sucked up any remaining good will to cushion his fall.

This is the same danger politicians face in this race: you can go for immediate gratification (polarization in politics, or a quick “scoop” or confrontation with a President who belongs to a political party in journalism)….but that means the feather bed won’t be there cushion you when you have an inevitable fall.

So the lesson of Rather’s decimated ratings isn’t just for TV executives: John Kerry and George Bush take note…………

JOHN KERRY: IF YOU WANT TO HAVE A CHANCE AT WINNING DON‘T READ THE NEW YORK TIMES TODAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We won’t even tell you who wrote what, but it is on the editorial page. It’s an Op-Ed piece.

Now, John, since I enjoy watching political horse races where one horse (actually, we’re talking about posteriors of horses here) isn’t totally in the lead, please do me a favor and go to another website.

We know that you and George Bush and James Carville and Karl Rove all read my blog for tidbits of political wisdom and lessons in life and political ethics and all that — and to read run on sentences written by a five foot one Jew from Connecticut.

But PLEASE. Go to another website. Here, go to this. WHOOPS! Wrong one! Go to this since it’ll be useful to you.

Now for my other reader. (Hi Mom!)

It’s actually not a bad Op-Ed column, except why would John Kerry want to listen to Al Gore on debates?

In his debates with Bush, Bush didn’t beat Al Gore — Al Gore beat Al Gore. He sighed (voters didn’t like that). He got in Bush’s face (women didn’t like that; if it had been Tom Ridge’s huge face Gore would have needed two debates to get in his face). He changed his persona with each debate. And his make up varied: first he looked bland, then so heavily made up he looked like he had just come back from gig as a mime.

And it isn’t that the advice is bad. You can read his whole piece by clicking on the link in the first line. But here’s a taste of it:

My advice to John Kerry is simple: be prepared for the toughest debates of your career. While George Bush’s campaign has made “lowering expectations” into a high art form, the record is clear - he’s a skilled debater who uses the format to his advantage. There is no reason to expect any less this time around. And if anyone truly has “low expectations” for an incumbent president, that in itself is an issue.

But more important than his record as a debater is Mr. Bush’s record as a president. And therein lies the true opportunity for John Kerry - because notwithstanding the president’s political skills, his performance in office amounts to a catastrophic failure. And the debates represent a time to hold him to account. For the voters, these debates represent an opportunity to explore four relevant questions: Is America on the right course today, or are we off track? If we are headed in the wrong direction, what happened and who is responsible? How do we get back on the right path to a safer, more secure, more prosperous America? And, finally, who is best able to lead us to that path?

ETC. It’s worth reading…for ordinary citizens (not John Kerry).

But Kerry is going to have to take inventory of Kerry, then let voters know more than his (God forbid) Vietnam record. He’s going to have to reach deep inside of himself and show what athletes call “heart,” versus rehearsed talking points. He’s going to have to question Bush — and also lay out a viable alternative that’ll peel off swing voters, (the few) moderate Republicans and (the few) conservative Democrats. He has to convince those voters he could be a credible Commander In Chief and that his criticisms are thoughtful observations versus political piffle.

Oh, John, if you haven’t taken my advice already, skip the Times and read this. Whoops! I mean this. It’s more laugh packed.

University of Maryland Political Scientist Larry Sabato’s latest issue of The Cyrstal Ball is out….and as usual it’s a provocative one.

He discusses the possibility of an Electoral College tie this year and updates what’s going on in various states. But of most interest to us is this section on Thursday night’s Presidential debates. Bottom line: if Kerry doesn’t break out in the debates he’s doomed. Here’s the section on the debates in full:

(All of this is by Larry Sabato)

Sabato’s Six Thoughts Before the Debates

Your Crystal Ball rolls around the country with great frequency to “test the waters”…or the land…a full report is coming a few days after the first debate, but for now, a few conclusions:

1. We believe Bush continues to hold the lead, though it may be tightening a bit—-just as we have predicted several times. Instead of a lead of 5-6%, Bush appears to be ahead by 4-5%. Is this a trend? Who knows? But without a breakthrough in the debates, Kerry will probably lose, whatever his final margin.

2. We believe it is essential to stress what so many television commentators seem to ignore: this election is not over by a long- shot! Don’t pull the curtain down before the show is over on November 2, especially in such a volatile year—-before the debates, further developments in Iraq and the War on Terror, and the release of the October jobs numbers.

3. Over and over again, we have been told by the elusive undecided voters (5-7% of the likely voters) that they would vote the right Democratic candidate since they desire a change, but they are unsure Kerry is “the right change”. Bluntly, they don’t like Kerry personally, and they see him as aloof, elitist, and too liberal. And they sense a lack of leadership in the man. These are the impressions Kerry MUST change in the debates if he is to win. Otherwise, Bush will garner some votes even from those who have despaired about the economy or Iraq.

4. Beware any and all polls. They greatly oversimplify what is going on just beneath the surface. And we continue to believe they may be missing some new voters who may be change-oriented, who could make the election closer than advertised. Take the “poll of polls” if you need your polling fix for the day.

5. The Bush campaign continues to run rings around the Kerry campaign on a day-to-day basis (some days excepted, of course). But the real question will remain unanswered until election day: Which party has organized the best get-out-the-vote effort? The GOTV drives will tell the tale as long as the gap between Kerry and Bush is close on November 2. After the experience of 2000, surely the Bush folks take any poll lead with a grain of salt. A pre-election lead can be lost in its entirety on election day—-precisely what happened in 2000 in key battleground states.

6. OVERALL: Bush still leads, but uncomfortably. Kerry can still win, but not without a breakthough in the debates and on one or more key issues, plus a better election-day GOTV.

You can read Sabato regularly or just explore his site by going to our link under Center Voices. You can also get The Crystal Ball sent you each week free, by email.

[By Armed Liberal]

Over the last few weeks, I’ve felt the pressure to get off the fence and declare for one candidate or the other. Commenters here, and people in my personal life, have pushed me to ‘fess up that I’m a Bush supporter, or admit that I’m too much of a Democrat to cross the line.

Thinking about this feels kind of like having a chipped tooth. Every time your tongue curls over and touches it, you get a flash of pain, and yet you keep going back and doing it again.

And then, as I wrestled with it - with Kerry’s opportunistic failure to be honest about where we stand in foreign policy; with Bush’s stream of failures in post-invasion Iraq and domestic security - I realized that there’s a much bigger issue afoot.

I remember the bumper stickers disclaiming responsibility for the Nixon/Humphrey election - “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted for McCarthy” which in today’s discourse have been replaced by bumper stickers saying “He’s Not My President” and trying to disclaim responsibility for a whole Administration.

Well, you can’t. And yes he is. And yes he will be, whoever he is.

Read the Rest…

Mahdi Obeid,the author of “The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam’s Nuclear Mastermind,” has an OpEd in today’s New York Times.

Excerpts:

[T]he West never understood the delusional nature of Saddam Hussein’s mind. By 2002, when the United States and Britain were threatening war, he had lost touch with the reality of his diminished military might. By that time I had been promoted to director of projects for the country’s entire military-industrial complex, and I witnessed firsthand the fantasy world in which he was living.

[….]

Was Iraq a potential threat to the United States and the world? Threat is always a matter of perception, but our nuclear program could have been reinstituted at the snap of Saddam Hussein’s fingers. The sanctions and the lucrative oil-for-food program had served as powerful deterrents, but world events - like Iran’s current efforts to step up its nuclear ambitions - might well have changed the situation.

Read the whole thing.

In 1946, an artist named Nikolai Getman was imprisoned in the Soviet Union’s infamous Gulag system of Siberian concentration camps. His “crime” was that he had been present in a cafe with several fellow artists, one of whom drew a caricature of Stalin on a cigarette paper. The Jamestown Foundation further notes that:

“Upon his release in 1954, Getman commenced a public career as a politically correct painter. Secretly, however, for more than four decades, Getman labored at creating a visual record of the Gulags [paintings displayed online here] which vividly depicts all aspects of the horrendous life (and death) which so many innocent millions experienced during that infamous era.

Getman’s collection is unique because it is the only visual record known to exist of this tragic phenomenon. Unlike Nazi Germany, which recorded and preserved in detail a visual history of the Holocaust, the Russians prefer not to remember what happened in the Gulags. Not a single person has been punished for the deaths of the millions who perished there. If film or other visual representations of the Soviet Gulags existed, they have been largely destroyed or suppressed. The Getman collection stands alone as a most important historical document.”

Additional links mine. These haunting, deeply evocative works of art are very much worth your time for 3 reasons. First and foremost, for their human dimension. Second, they offer us a reminder of where Russia is now in relation to its past. Last but certainly not least, they’re a searing reminder of what communism really was - despite the consistent denials and evasions from many significant figures in the Western Left, too many of whom seemed to prefer onanistic radical whines about life in the hell that was Amerikkka.

Some of them are still at it, and not just in Cuba. Last May, Winds of Change.NET had a long and interesting exchange about this pehnomenon with Armed Liberal, Michael Totten, Roger Simon, Francis Poretto and Caerdroia.

Hugh Hewitt recently interviewed Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz on the repositioning of American forces around the world. The interview originally appeared here and is reprinted with permission of Mr. Hewitt.

HH: Mr. Secretary welcome, great to have you on the Hugh Hewitt Show.

PW: Good to be with you.

HH: This is a huge change in American force structure, can you explain to the audience why it is coming about now and when it got started?

PW: It has been in the works ever since the secretary led the quadrennial defense review in the summer of 2001 when he first came into office, and at that point it was clear that we had a force structure that in many ways reflected what was left over after the Cold War rather than what we needed for the 21rst century, and that we needed force structure around the world that was better aligned with what the real threats were and that took better advantage of the extraordinary changes in U.S. capabilities that have developed over the years. The events of September 11th actually brought this home even more forcefully. We got a clear idea of how much those threats have changed. We found ourselves operating 8,000 miles away in Afghanistan in a place where if, three months before we’d even suggested we’d have an operation like that in line, people would have said you must be out of your minds. So flexibility is the name of the game, but also what we have demonstrated to is that we have enormous reach now, global reach with our forces that means you don’t have to be positioned 10 miles from the place where some trouble might happen in order to be able, very quickly, to reach out and have an impact. I guess the most important thing I’d like to emphasize is that this in no way diminishes our ability to fulfill our commitments to our friends and allies around the world. That remains a centerpiece of American foreign policy and national security policy.

HH: Dr. Wolfowitz, in the prepared remarks, the Secretary talked today to the Senate about the ability to “surge the most ready, best positioned capabilities on a global basis —across theaters.” Now I’m a civilian, but if I am a military guy reading that I’m thinking “Oh my gosh, all the lines of command are going to get jumbled up here, and everything is changing.” Truth to those concerns?

PW: Well, it is true that our commanders need to be much more flexible than they had to be during the kind of rigid periods of the Cold War, but I think they have demonstrated that kind of flexibility and they have improved it enormously in the last three and a half years. It was demonstrated already with the speed with which General Franks put together a plan for Afghanistan that drew on forces from all around the world, within an astonishingly short period of time, brought about the collapse of the Taliban regime and a major victory in the war on terrorism. And it has simply advanced over the last two or three years. yes, there are important new issues that have to be confronted about how you work across what in this department they call seams, he dividing lines, the boundary lines between one commander and another. But the terrorists work right across seams, so we have to be able to do so also.

HH: Speaking about the terrorists —the connections between Zarqawi and Zawahiri and Indonesian terrorists, how does this new force structure address this net-centric warfare, which is asymmetrical, which we are up against, where they are dealing with internet, and not being really allied with each other but kind of operating that way. I think I heard you say once that Al Qaeda doesn’t issue membership cards, and how does the new force structure address this decentralized yet netted opponent?

PW: As far as the military piece of this war —and I want to come back to that because people make a big mistake if they think this is primarily a military conflict, but the military has an absolutely critical role to play obviously— and in part what we’re trying to do with this repositioning is to make sure that our forces are in places where they can be moved quickly to where they are needed, that they are in places where they are welcomed politically, that’s very important. That they are in places that will be comfortable with their being moved someplace else. We have occasionally run into countries that seem to kind of feel that they own the U.S. forces that are there, and in a global struggle, we can’t have forces that are specifically assigned just to specific geographic regions. So that kind of flexibility is important. Also, I think we are going to see a lot of emphasis on those parts of our force which focus on dealing with computer based warfare, both in terms of defending our own computer systems which is important, but also figuring out how to prevent the enemy from making use of the internet to the extent we can. And also special operations forces which may from time tot time be deployed from the United States, from Europe, to places as far away as maybe Afghanistan or maybe the Horn of Africa or some place yet unknown.

HH: There’s a gentleman whose work I am sure you are familiar with, John Arquilla, who’s been a guest on this program, who has talked about decentralizing the ability of the military to go after immediately the terrorists when they surface, when they pop up like a prairie dog. Is that part of the force restructuring that we are seeing unveiled today?

HH: It definitely is. It definitely is. You have to bring various pieces together. You have to bring the intelligence and the military pieces together, so that the time between finding what could be a very fleeting target and the time that you take action against it is short as possible. You need to bring the political and diplomatic piece together because it may be that some very important target is in a country that is a friendly country, and if we are going to take any military action at all, it’s got to be in concert with the friendly government, so it is a very complex set of operations. I must say if I look at our success already so far in this war on terrorism, with some two-thirds of the senior Al Qaeda leadership killed or captured, hundreds of Al Qaeda members and associates killed or captured, I would say already we have shown a great ability to integrate across those different capabilities. But as you and your audience are so well aware, it doesn’t take very many of these people to cause enormous devastation and destruction so we really need to keep improving our capabilities constantly.

HH: Dr Wolfowitz, last year Secretary Rumsfeld put out a memo wondering “Do we have the metrics to judge the success of this effort?” He worried about madrassas’ enrollment and all sorts of different things. How —I know we have had victories— but how do we know we are winning?

PW: I think you can measure a lot of things that are successes. I think Afghanistan is slowly but increasingly emerging as a real success, but, by the way, success in war is only temporary if you let up before the enemy has let up. Of course the Taliban in Afghanistan are still fighting us, still fighting the Karzai government, but in spite of their best efforts to stop people from registering to vote, more than 10 million Afghans, 40% of them women, have registered to vote. It is a historic event for that country. Iraq —there is still horrible violence, but there has been enormous progress there for just a year and a half after the removal of one of the most horrible regimes that’s ever governed any country. And the killing and capturing of specific terrorists that I mentioned have got to be counted as big victories.

But I think what the secretary was getting at in that famous memo of his that unfortunately got leaked was that we also need to be about the business of persuading people, especially in the Muslim world where most of these terrorists are recruited from, that that’s not the right alternative, that there’s a better future for them, that there’s a bright future here on earth. It is kind of sickening to read things like Zarqawi’s letter or other publications by the terrorists where they express enormous contempt for people who love life and fear death. We have plenty of brave young men and women who are facing the prospect of death in Iraq but it is because they love life, not because they think there is some paradise afterwards that they want to rush their way to. And I think I would mention something —it is not something for us to claim credit for— but it is is a sign of real progress that indonesia held its second successful, fair presidential election just about a week ago, second in Otis history. Many people say that to have two fair elections in a row is the real measure of democracy. I think there are some other measures as well, but this is a country with more Muslims than any other country in the world, an they have shown, I think, an ability to move forward towards freedom and democracy, and that’s what the president was talking about when he said last fall that in addition to killing and capturing terrorists we need to show the world, and especially the Muslim world, that the better future lies in our way, not the terrorists’ way.

HH: Dr. Wolfowitz, I know you are running. Thanks for the time. I look forward to talking to you in the future.

————-
Hugh Hewitt is the host of a nationally syndicated radio show, a Professor of Law, an author of four books, an Emmy-winning tv co-host and a blogger.

I thought I’d offer quick summaries and links to all the High Holy Days posts we’ve run here on Winds this year. As we start the new year of 5765 and face the Day of Atonement, I hope they prompt some smiles, understanding, and reflection:

• Everything I Needed to Know I learned from the Road Runner. Wile E. Coyote cartoons as spiritual material? Believe it! Rabbi Brody & Joe Katzman explain.

• Yosemite Sam’s Comeuppance. Ah yes, those busybodies who always seem ready to pull out the spiritual pistols in anger and start a’shootin. One wise soul lapses into this behaviour and gets a big lesson - but has the grace to acknowledge it.

• The Barber of Sayvel. How can there be a G-d when there’s so much suffering in the world?

• True Repentance. Even the angels of heaven need to read blogs these days.

• Popeye & Bluto in NYC. A neighbourhood feud needs to end before the High Holidays do. But how? Rabbi Brody has a plan, but his secret ingredient isn’t spinach - it’s spin.

• Rosh Hashanah for Everyone! A Muslim explains what she has learned from the High Holidays.

• Zen Judaism Humour. “Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?”

• The Angel of the Yangtze Bridge. Chen Si has saved at least 42 people from certain death. How? By noticing that they “walk without spirit.” Who are you an angel for?

• Kol Nidre: Love and Fear. Amidst the awe of this day, remember Maimonides’ words - and Rabia’s, too. Remember, too, the story of the Russian Kantonist who lived them.

In his new book, Inside CentCom: The Unvarnished Truth About the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, retired Gen. Michael DeLong – the former deputy commander of the U.S. Central Command – writes about a new style of war against a new style of enemy. DeLong helped Gen. Tommy Franks plan America’s post-9/11 efforts against al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime using new weapons, a new strategy of speed and flexibility, and a new urgency to protect the U.S. homeland from terror attacks. In his
book, he explains that much of his work involved building the coalitions for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, new tactics and why the wars played out the way they did. Today, DeLong is Executive Vice President of Shaw Environmental and Infrastructure International and the President of Shaw CentCom service (LLC) for the Shaw Group – a firm doing reconstruction work in Iraq where he still frequently travels.

He spoke with Command Post Contributor Ed Moltzen about his book, the war on terror and conditions today in Iraq.

TCP: August was a difficult month for the Coalition. From what you’ve seen and heard during your visits to Iraq, how is troop
morale?

DeLong: I’m probably not going to go there much. The people I talk to over there right now are the Iraqis. I’ve been there six times in the last four months. I’m leaving again (Friday). The people I talk to are the heads of the corporations over there, the ministers of some of the different agencies over there and the tribal chiefs of the largest tribes over there.

In the book, I was kind of hard on the former military people who commented on how the war was fought, and they didn’t have the knowledge we had. And right now I’m not involved (in the military.)

I am confident in how the people of Iraq and Iran feel. I meet with them all the time. I have hired some of them as security people. I have hired former military people who are working with us and they talk to the military people over there. And from what they say, the morale couldn’t be better. If you talk to the Army and the Marine Corps, their morale could not be better. They are energized about what they are doing. They are energized about trying to help the Iraqi people. They are energized that they are there, and if they have to fight they are fighting on someone else’s ground rather than their own ground.

The civilian people, or the Iraqi leaders I talk to, their issues are different. There are groups of people coming up and they don’t want the elections: Some of the former Ba’athists, some of the Fedayeen Saddam, members of al Qaeda led by Zarqawi. With that said, about 85 percent plus of the people in Iraq, according to the people I talk to, like Americans. What they don’t like is being occupied. What they would like is free and open elections. Whether democracy will work or
not is to be seen. If they are going to elect people, they would like to elect Iraqis and not expatriate Iraqis who were not there during the hard times, during Saddam’s reign.

Will there be a civil war? That’s a possibility according to the people I talk to. It’s two civil wars. One up north – the Sunnis are concerned that they used to be the ruling group and may not be. The Kurds would like to be free and have their own country up north, Kurdistan. But they would have to fight the Turks and Sunnis.

In the south, there is a possibility of a war between the Shia and the Sunni. If that doesn’t happen, and there is some sort of security and people can vote with some sort of feeling good about themselves, there is a good chance the January election will happen.

TCP: Prime Minister Allawi said elections in Iraq will go on, as scheduled, in January. Based on what you’ve seen on the ground and what you’ve heard from the Iraqis themselves, its this realistic?

DeLong: Let me put it this way: The hope of most Iraqis is they have some sort of an election. Whether this country ends up being a democratic issue, it’s a regional issue. None of the countries around Iraq wants that country to be democratic. Why is that? If Iraq was a successful democratic country, the rest of the countries around them are not. That could cause internal failing in their countries and they don’t want that. There’s a lot going against Iraq trying to be a democratic country. It would be great if it happened.

TCP: From an infrastructure standpoint, do you believe Iraq is better today than it was before the war? Does it vary on a region-by-region basis?

Delong: It varies on a region-by-region basis. I will tell you, every region is better than before the war. Baghdad is better, and Baghdad was really the only region – well, Baghdad and Tikrit – that Saddam cared about. The infrastructure in Iraq has not been tended to since 1979. Saddam put all his money into castles and things he liked. But the water infrastructure, the power infrastructure, schools, hospitals, the port infrastructure – no money was put into that. The reason things are in the shape the are today is not because of the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf War or the second Gulf War. It’s because of Saddam not putting a nickel into infrastructure.

Things were not taken care of. Probably 70 percent of the infrastructure problems were due to neglect over the last 30 years of Saddam’s reign. Now, different contractors have gone in – I being one of them – and have built the infrastructure up. People – if they are not protected – try to destroy the infrastructure.

TCP: The Iraq Survey Group is expected to file a comprehensive report soon on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Reports indicate that it will conclude Saddam had no WMD. But you disagree with that belief. Why do you disagree and is it more likely WMD are still inside Iraq, or have they been moved?

DeLong: I think what the report will say is, just like everybody else has said, there is no proof there was WMD. There will be no definitive statement in this report. I can state, unequivocally, there was WMD in Iraq before and during the war. You have multiple-source intelligence. Also, from other Arab leaders – as Tommy Franks says in his book – King Abdullah said Saddam has WMD. President Mubarek of Egypt said you have to be very careful going in, because Saddam has weapons of mass destruction. Other leaders who have chosen not to be named said the same thing. We had technical intelligence that saw the same thing.

Two days before March 19, 2003, we saw quite a number of vehicles going into Syria. We could not go after them because we said we’d give Saddam 48 hours. A lot of (Iraqi) leaders went into Syria, and a lot of WMD went into Syria. We’ve gotten indications some went into Lebanon, and probably some went into Iran.

The size of Iraq is roughly, in square miles, the same size as California. Seven-eighths of the country is arid desert land. We’ve done calculations that you could probably bury 16 Eiffel Towers or Empire State Buildings and never find them in the desert. Just four months ago, they were digging for something out in the middle of
the desert and they hit something. It was a MIG-25 Foxbat that the Iraqis buried in the sand. We never would have found this thing.
Biological Weapons, you could put almost your whole program in a suitcase. You could probably put your whole chemical weapons industry inside a van. Yes, they did have it and right today they can’t find it. The people we’ve captured, like Dr. Germ and Chemical Ali, the murderer of the Kurds, aren’t talking.

TCP: In the book, you talk about coming face-to-face with Chemical Ali. What was that like?

Like any good commander, I was looking at the prison sites to make sure they were going well and at the time they were. I went into this one prison that held our special prisoners. The last prisoner I went to was Chemical Ali. He was dressed nicely as far as the prisoners were. He was well-taken care of. His hair was gray. (Everybody who had nice, dark, black hair during the war – they had all died their hair. They all had gray hair in prison.)

I had taken my rank insignia off, I had a jacket on. He said, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m just here to look at the prison to make sure everybody is getting taken care of.” He said, “You must be important.” He said, “Who are you? Why are people deferring to you?” He said, “All of the guards who take care of me are wonderful.”

He had a smile on his face all the time. It reminded me, working with police forces when police forces worked with serial killers. You could sit next to this guy and you would let him babysit your child. He was so nice, but he probably killed 100,000 people.

He said, “We don’t have chemical weapons.” I said, “Sure you do.”

Why is he withholding? I can’t tell you for sure, but my guess is anybody inside the Saddam inner circle who was a strong person who had strong feelings about certain things is already dead. Anybody who couldn’t keep a secret – they’re all dead. Until Saddam is killed, or executed, or whatever, they may never talk. They’ll probably never talk until they’re sure he can’t come back.

TCP: Much of your job while you were at CentCom involved building coalitions for the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. When you hear the Coalition of the Willing being referred to as a fraudulent coalition, what do you think? What’s your response? (It sounds like that’s a direct criticism of the work you did.)

DeLong: If I believed that, I would take offense. Everybody is choosing to do something they think will effect the election. If I truly believed that - you’re talking about Sen. Kerry – I’d take offense to that. There is nothing more important in today’s world than the defeat of terror, of the pressure of terrorism. As much of the
world as possible has to participate. Russia found that out, sadly, in the last two weeks. Even though they are part of the coalition, they weren’t as tough as they could have been. There are over 70 countries (at CentCom headquarters) in Tampa supporting the coalition. The police forces are going through their countries trying to root out these terrorists. The intelligence organizations of these countries are sharing intelligence like they’ve never shared before. You could go back to 2001 until today. Until this event in Russia, and until the event in Spain, the organizations in the world had thwarted somewhere…between thirty and 100-plus very large terrorist events. People were captured and killed and the event stopped because of what’s going on today.

Guess who’s in the coalition? Spain is in the coalition. The Philippines is in the coalition. Two countries that left Iraq. But if the people in power want to stay in power in their respective countries, and the people of that country don’t want them there (in Iraq), they’ve got to make that choice. But they keep their people in the coalition.

They are still contributing, but secretly. They are working in Afghanistan. France and Germany are working very heavily in Afghanistan even though their people won’t let them work in Iraq.

TCP: How difficult was diplomacy for you, as a career military man?

DeLong: It was easy. People are people. When I retired, I had 36 years and four months of service. I traveled the world. I knew every country. I read the Koran to understand how the Arabs worked. Not that I’m better than anybody in the West. (Understanding the Koran) let me let me not do some things I shouldn’t do, or do things I should do when dealing with them. I used to (coalition members) at my house one a month – all the leaders. They became friends. I could get things
done in some countries that would have taken months of red tape working through the State Department, then with the other embassy, then with their foreign ministry.

I could get it done in thirty minutes because they had access to the prime minister. That doesn’t mean it was right, but it worked. I said this in the book, and I’ll still say it today: The coalition is more important than the war on terrorism. If they hang together and they continue to pursue the terrorists, you wouldn’t have to worry
about the war on terrorism. Terrorism may become like crime. There will be some areas of the world where crime is bad, and some areas of the world where it is not bad. There will be some areas where terror is not bad.

TCP: Sen. Kerry has said more than once that President Bush let Osama bin Laden escape at Tora Bora. In your book, to say the least,
you explain it much differently.

DeLong: Sen. Kerry didn’t know what happened. He’s no more better informed than the armchair generals who went after us (on TV.) And what was going on at the time, where bin Laden was in the Tora Bora caves, there was a tribal area that was full of civilians. You couldn’t go up there with soldiers of any force – especially us
– because we would have been fighting them to get to bin Laden. Whether we would have gotten to him remains to be seen. This was a tribe on the border, and the only people who were accepted up there was the Pakistani army. You know how tough guarding a border is – with Texas and New Mexico and Arizona for example.

We didn’t kill any civilians unnecessarily up there. We know for a fact from our multiple intelligence sources that we wounded bin Laden. But yes, he did get away. If we had killed a number of civilians, our chances of getting elections in Afghanistan would have never happened. It was a diplomatic, not a political call. It was a call to get this country back together again. We knew the death or capture of bin Laden was important. But getting rid of al Qaeda and getting the country feeling good, feeling nationalistic, was important.

TCP: Just days before the Iraq war began, Gen. Shinseki told Congress he believed several hundred thousand troops would be needed for the effort. Was this a big disagreement between the war planners the Army bureaucracy?

DeLong: What happened is, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld talked to all the commanders and all the commanders running area commands around the world and said, “We have new weapons now, very highly sophisticated weapons now for land, sea and air. I’m a good steward of the American taxpayer. I want your operations plans to reflect the updated gear we have. Your plans currently look like Napoleon’s plans. Let’s see what you could do with less people, less airplanes, less ships.”

It was not a bad thing to do. That’s what everybody started doing.

We had the war planned that it was told to us by expatriate Iraqis that the army would stay in tact, the police would stay in tact, you would be able to control different areas inside the cities and prisoners would be in prison. Two days before the war went down, Saddam let between 30,000 and 50,000 of the worst people in the
world – rapists, killers and kidnappers – they were let go into the streets. On the day before we crossed the border, everyone of the police walked out of their uniforms. Now you’ve got 50,000 of the worst people in the Middle East loose on the streets and no policemen. Then the Iraqi soldiers walked out. You had no military police.

Could you use several hundred thousand troops then? Sure you could. But that wasn’t the plan. We couldn’t come in from the north – Turkey wouldn’t let us. We had to funnel our forces coming in from the sea and land (in the south). Once we got in, we got to Baghdad rather rapidly. We had built (forces) up to 200,000. We thought from that time on we could possibly – the people would settle down after the capture of Saddam or the capture of Baghdad. That didn’t happen either. We had to build up a police force and army and a national guard force.

Was Gen. Shinseki wrong? Given what happened, it probably would have been nice to have several hundred thousand (troops). Over time, where do you get several hundred thousand soldiers? Right now we have a heck of a time keeping 130,000.

Were mistakes made? Sure they were. But everybody in the United States, including Congress, had a shot: If you know what the Iraqis are going to do, tell us. If not, we’ll do the best we can.

There were other surprises. We thought they would use chemical weapons on us. That surprised us nicely that they didn’t.

TCP: What do you think will be this country’s response, long-term, to what’s happening in Iraq? Do you think there will be patience over the long haul?

That’s one of the reasons I wrote the book. It was written in novel format, and without a lot of military acronyms, to make it easy to read and for people to make their own decision. Sadly, some people have forgotten that 9/11 happened. Sadly, some people have never thought about what happens if we lose the war on terrorism.

This is not like coming back with your tail between your legs after Vietnam. This could be the downfall of the United States and the downfall of the world. You can’t afford to lose that war. The reason I was in the military for 36 years and four months was not because I was a conservative or a Republican, but that I fought and was willing to die for people’s right to dissent, or whether they want to vote or not to vote. That’s the great thing about living in the United States. What’s sad today is during the election process – it’s good to have the candidates going back and forth. It’s bad when they attack each other. The world looks at that and that’s not good.

Dissent is good. It’s always been good. It’s good for the United States in my humble opinion.

But it’s not going to be months in Iraq. It’s going to be years.

——————————-

Ed Moltzen writes at Late Final. You can read his review of Gen. DeLong’s book here.

Allahpundit has an update for you. As for Rather, he still continues to offer evasions about the documents’ authenticity, confident in his ability to get away with it while many major media outlets still speak of documents that are merely ‘controversial,’ rather than the definitive forgeries they so clearly are.

Memo to bloggers and readers: keep the pressure on. I think a strong campaign to your local media is also called for, to get the word out. You’re bloggers, which makes you interesting to your local press right now. Write them and volunteer to put the background materials together - the links in this very post will give you all you need. See also this outstanding example by Winds community member AMac, as he guest-blogs a magisterial summation of the evidence and the Baltimore Sun’s coverage.

Meanwhile, guess where this quote comes from:

“Several journalism analysts said CBS News producer Mary Mapes’ phone call to Kerry senior advisor Joe Lockhart amounts to at least a potential conflict of interest - giving the appearance that the network had assisted a candidate in the presidential race.”

Read The Rest…

Late last night I saw some footage from Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister, José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, during his speech at the 59th UN General Assembly (or Assembly Of Generals, in reference to the many dictatorships holding equal votes as democracies).

I almost fell out of my chair. The integral text (pdf) of his speech can be found here. I’ve reprinted some excerpts below (emphasis mine):

…On Terrorism in Spain:
“I am speaking on behalf of a country that has had its share of difficult experiences throughout its history. A country in which still living generations have known a civil war, a dictatorship of almost four decades and a democracy that is now 25 years old. We have also experienced the scourge of terrorism for more than thirty years. Over the last thirty years we, Spanish women and men, have learned much about and from terrorism. We soon learned
about its iniquity. We have learned what it is about. We have learned how to defy it, how to withstand its blows with courage and dignity. We have learned how to fight it.”

…On the Madrid attacks and subsequent Spanish response:
“Spanish women and men were not afraid. On the very next day after the bombings, millions of people left their homes, took to the streets and squares of the cities and towns of my country and, once again, we expressed our rejection and disgust, our unanimous contempt for terrorist brutality. From thirty years of terrorism we have learned that the risk of a terrorist victory rises sharply when, in order to fight terror, democracy betrays its fundamental nature, governments curtail civil liberties, put judicial guaranties at risk, or carry out pre-emptive military
operations. This is what our people have learned: that it is legality, democracy and political means and ways what makes us stronger and them weaker.”

…On the ‘root causes’ meme:
“Nothing justifies terrorism. It is irrational, like the Black Death, but the roots of terrorism, like those of the plague, can and must be uncovered. We can and must
rationally analyse how it emerges, how it grows, so as to be able to fight it rationally. Terrorism is insanity and death and, regrettably, there will always be fanatics who are ready to kill to impose their insanity through force. Ready to disseminate the seed of evil. The seed of evil cannot take root when it falls on
the rock of justice, well-being, freedom and hope; but it can take root if it lands on the soil of injustice, poverty, humiliation and despair. Thus, redressing the major political and economic injustices that affect our world would deprive terrorists of their popular support. The more people there are who enjoy dignified conditions around the world, the safer we will all be.”

…On Iraq and Spain’s retreat:
“In this context, I would like to speak about Iraq. But above all I would like to speak about the thousands of victims of this conflict, about the Iraqis and about the
soldiers and civilians who lost their lives. We express our permanent solidarity to them and to their countries. The overwhelming majority of people in Spain spoke out
against the war. We were not persuaded by the reasons given by those who promoted the war. We expressed this view both at the Spanish Parliament and in the streets. We spoke out loudly, we shouted. We also said that winning the war would be much easier than winning the peace. Peace must be our endeavour. An endeavour that requires more courage, more determination and more heroism than the war itself. That is why the Spanish troops returned from Iraq.”

…On the Alliance Of Civilizations:
“Peace and security will only spread over the world with the strength of international legality, with the strength of human rights, with the strength of democracy, of abidance by the law. With the strength of equality: equality between women and men, equal opportunities, no matter where people are born. With the strength of our rejection against those who manipulate or want to impose any kind of religion or belief. With the strength of education and culture: culture is always peace; let us ensure that our perception of others is coloured with respect. With the strength of dialogue among peoples. Thus, in my capacity as representative of a country created and enriched by divers cultures, before this Assembly I want to propose an Alliance of Civilizations between the Western and the Arab and Muslim worlds. Some years ago a wall collapsed. We must now prevent hatred and incomprehension from building a new wall. Spain wants to submit to the Secretary General, whose work at the head of this organisation we firmly support, the possibility of establishing a High Level Group to push forward this initiative.”

On Spain’s lessons from ‘thirty years of terrorism’ (interesting sidenote perhaps, Zapatero starts refering to ETA as terrorists from the death of dictator Franco onwards. ETA was founded in 1969. Does he think they were ‘freedom fighters’ or ‘the resistance’ before his death?), Zapatero mentions that Spain has learned that pre-emptive military operations have not worked. Excuse me? I was not aware that Spain even so much as carried out punitive military actions. Except perhaps he is comparing his Socialist predecessor’s GAL death squads with the pre-emptive military operations of a democratic nation Like the United States of America? He would be saying the same as Spain’s Attorney-General if he did imply that.

After that big slap in the face, there is more. Zapatero brings up Iraq and seeks to explain why Spain retreated in the face of a terrorist onslaught at home (something I’m sure will go down in history as The Big Frustration of this government). Basically, he says that because after the toppling of Saddam’s regime, the hard part started, the going got tough, and Spain did not want any part of that. So it wasn’t Al Qaeda, he’s just a coward in general. And the quote on the peace being an endeavour which requires more courage, heroism even, than war itself. Doesn’t that sound like “the peace of the brave”? I’m sure his Foreign Minister and Arafat-buddy Miguel Angel Moratinos was smiling contently when he said that.

The biggest shocker to me, was his suggestion the UN create an ‘Alliance of Civilizations’, including the Western World and Arab and muslim nations. It is the clearest sign to me that Zapatero has absolutely no clue as to what the War On Islamic Terror is about. It is also a word for word repetition of Irani ‘President’ Khatami’s 1997 call for dialogue with the West.

Zapatero fears that ‘hatred and incomprehension’ will cause a separation between the islamic Arab world and the West. But he’s refering to ‘hatred and incomprehension’ coming from the West, not the hatred shown in New York, Bali, Istanbul, Casablanca, Ryaad, Madrid, Beslan. A hatred which is as much directed at our lifestyle as it is against the Arab dictatorships with whom Zapatero now wants to form an alliance.

The War on Islamic Terror is not about separating the West from the rest of the world, or ‘minding the Gap’ in the words of Thomas Barnett. It is about pulling these Arab nations into the fabric of globalization, interconnected economies and free flows of information and ideas. It is about pushing them to reform, while assisting them in the eradication, pre-emptively, of their terrorists. To form an alliance on equal footing with these dictatorships does nothing but sustain the status quo. In fact, it gives them, by siding with the oppressors, yet another tool with which to supress their own peoples and to push us for more concessions on Israel, through incitement of their own populations via mosques and media. Meanwhile feeding the real source of terrorism, not poverty, but Salafist Islam.

At best, I can see Zapatero’s pro-Arab government angling for a key role in the UN’s Mideast policies, hoping to continue the center stage role under the Aznar government, albeit with a different audience.

At worst, Zapatero is moving his country towards the Arab world, literally positioning itself on the bridge between the West and the Orient. Thoughts of Al Andalus will have passed through a lot of sick minds, yesterday.

first published at Southern Watch.