The Review

One of the best blogs going

(Review) If you haven't found the QandO blog yet, you are missing a real treat. John Henke and McQ are just putting out one heck of a blog. It's just chock-full of good, good stuff.

If I was setting up a group blog, I'd want these guys to be part of it.

Pretty much the exact opposite of Halo

(Review) Soothing, relaxing--and yet, somehow, still addictive Flash games.

Lock 'em Up and Throw Away the Key

(Review) US Soldiers are being held on charges of mistreating prisoners.

In one photograph obtained by the program, naked Iraq prisoners are stacked in a human pyramid, one with a slur written on his skin in English. In another, a prisoner stands on a box, his head covered, wires attached to his body. The program said that according to the United States Army, he had been told that if he fell off the box, he would be electrocuted. Other photographs show male prisoners positioned to simulate sex with each other.

"The pictures show Americans, men and women, in military uniforms, posing with naked Iraqi prisoners," states a transcript of the program's script, made available Wednesday night. "And in most of the pictures, the Americans are laughing, posing, pointing or giving the camera a thumbs-up."

The CBS News program said the Army also had photographs showing a detainee with wires attached to his genitals and another showing a dog attacking an Iraqi prisoner. The program also reported that the Army's investigation of the case included a statement from an Iraqi detainee who charges that a translator hired to work at the prison raped a male juvenile prisoner.

I hope the courts-martial for these guys slam them into Leavenworth for years. This is unconscionable and wrong. We are there to liberate these people, not heap abuse on them.

Now, granted, a lot of these Iraqi prisoners were Ba'athist thugs, and in a Karmic sense, probably deserved what they got. But we aren't in the business of balancing Karma. Our job is to detain these prisoners, not punish or abuse them.

Oh, and this really ticks me off, too:

"This case involves a monumental failure of leadership, where lower-level enlisted people are being scapegoated," Mr. Myers said. "The real story is not in these six young enlisted people. The real story is the manner in which the intelligence community forced them into this position."

Mr. Myers represents Staff Sgt. Chip Frederick of the Army Reserve, who has been charged in the case and who was interviewed by "60 Minutes II." He complained of a lack of training and admitted that dogs had been used to intimidate prisoners.

How about a nice hot cup of STFU, counselor? Your client is a Staff Sergeant. That means he isn't some innocent young soldier who was led astray. He's a freaking non-commissioned officer with, in all probability, at least 6+ years of experience as a Military Policeman and police supervisor. Don't give me that "innocent young soldier" crap. I was a Military Police Staff Sergeant and I know exactly what his level of experience was.

He got caught, red-handed, and now he's about to get boned by a court-martial. Cry me a river, counselor.

However, I do think we can find partial agreement on one thing. What is going to happen to the officers in the chain of command, and when do their courts-martial start?  

UPDATE: OH, and by the way, Guess what SSgt Frederick's civilian job is? He is...wait for it...a prison guard.

I hope you'll find your stay at Fort Leavenworth to be a learning experience, SSgt (soon to be Pvt) Frederick.

It appears the chain of command is in trouble, too:

Brigadier General Janice Karpinski is among seven officers being investigated following claims that soldiers under their command mistreated detainees.

Good riddance.

What the President should be saying

(Review) Victor Davis Hanson writes a speech for the President, which says everything that needs to be said. In fact, everything that needs to be said can be found in one paragraph:

What are the values for which hundreds of Americans have now fallen in Afghanistan and Iraq? They are not new or hard to fathom, nor are they the easily caricatured images of American popular culture. Rather they are the same principles for which Americans died at Valley Forge, Gettysburg, Iwo Jima, and Pusan: the guarantee of free association and expression, the tolerance of different ideas, a respect for the rule of law, and the right to enjoy equality under the aegis of consensual government. So this is what we believe in and this is what we have made it our mission to preserve.

Powerful stuff.

Debunking the Outsourcing hysteria

(Review) In a long and scholarly article in Foreign Affairs, Daniel Drezner points out the fallacies of the Chicken Littles who are, once again, predicting a "huge sucking sound" of jobs being destroyed by outsourcing.

If only the rest of the Left were like him

(Review) Christopher Hitchens. Man, that guy is good.

I continue to be amazed at the way in which so many liberals repeat the discredited mantra of the CIA to the effect that Saddam Hussein's regime was so "secular" that it not only did not collaborate, but axiomatically could not have collaborated with Islamists. If you can imagine a Hitler-Stalin pact (which, admittedly, a lot of American leftists still cannot), you can probably imagine collusion between discrepant factions with common interests.

In any case, the Saddam regime was not as "secular" as all that. The campaign of extermination waged in northern Iraq by Saddam's army was titled "Anfal" after a verse in the Quran that supposedly licenses total war. The words "Allahu Akbar" were placed on the Iraqi flag after the defeat in Kuwait. The Baath Party became the open patron of Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Palestine. The rhetoric of the Saddamist leadership was exclusively jihadist for the last decade, with special mosques built all over the country in honor of the regime. Now comes a document from the files of the Iraqi secret police, or Mukhabarat, dated March 28, 1992, and headed routinely, "In the Name of Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate." It is a straightforward listing of contacts and "assets," quite unsensational until it comes to the "Saudi front," where we find the name "Osama bin Ladin/he is well-known Saudi businessman, founder of Saudi opposition in Afghanistan, had connection with Syrian division." Of course, this is not a smoking gun.

No, and nothing we find will ever be a smoking gun. We could find secret hardcore gay video footage of Saddam and Osama fellating each other, and the Left would decry it as a digital illusion like Jabba the Hut and Jar-jar Binks. We could find buried stockpiles of VX gas, nuclear bombs, and sealed jars of botulism spores, and the Left would claim that the US had staged the whole thing.

There's just no convincing some people. Not because we don't have adequate evidence, but because they refuse to be convinced. There will always be those people for whom it is all about "Bushitler" and "American arrogance", and for whom Pat Tillman was a "Rambo" who got what he had coming to them.

These people are simply cranks. They heard Noam Chomsky once, and decided he was such a brilliant linguist that he must also be a messianically powerful political analyst. Well, you know what? You can't reason with cranks. The best thing to do is simply tell them they're cranks, then do your best to ignore them.

Breaking the Veil of Silence

(Review) I haven't blogged on Michael Jackson before. It's not the type of thing I usually take too much interest in. In fact, the only reason I'm doing it now is to repeat a Dennis Miller joke.

"Jackson has requested that, if convicted, he be allowed to serve his time in a juvenile detention facility."

Heh.

You know, it's weird how people respond when it's a celebrity that's getting hammered by the legal system. We see these celebrities all the time in movies, or on TV, and in interviews, and we become so familiar with them them that we think we know them. So, we respond often as if they were friends or family members, and we delude ourselves into thinking that we have insights into their character.

Paul Thomas, a 25-year-old student who arrived in California from London on Wednesday, said he planned to be at the courthouse by 7 a.m. Friday.

"I didn't come here to gawk at him. I just want to support him," he said. "I think he is a good role model. He has a lot of morals. You can see he's a nice person, always giving to charity."

And Adolf Hitler loved dogs. John Wayne Gacy bought joy and laughter to the children he entertained as a clown. The fact that Jackson, or anyone else, isn't completely evil doesn't mean they don't do evil things for which they should be punished. I don't see the connection that Mr. Thomas does. Is he saying that someone who gives to charity can't bugger pre-adolescent boys? I'd like to see the peer-refereed studies on that.

Oh, and I like this bit:

Thomas said he told his college he was sick for the week and estimated that he spent about $700 on the trip.

Whereupon he told his story to a news service of worldwide scope, practically ensuring his school's master back in London knows he isn't sick at all.

Good, thinking, buddy.

In any event, Mark Twain once captured the weird dichotomy between good and evil existing in the same person in a brief passage in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which, by the way, if you haven't read, you should.

Twain describes how the nobility would be prone to elaborate rituals of Christian devotion, yet were shockingly ruthless. They would kneel and thank God humbly for their victory on the battlefield, right before slitting the throats of the wounded.

People can have good and evil impulses living side by side inside themselves, and they are perfectly capable of acting on both.

The fact is that we don't know these celebrities. What we know is the face they present for public consumption. And we're fooling ourselves if we think otherwise.

Now they get all sensitive

(Review) Al Jazeera has finally found a piece of terrorist video that even they won't show.

Al-Jazeera is noted for showing some of the most gruesome scenes in TV history in reports on U.S. or Israeli military action. But since a videotape of the shooting of Fabrizio Quattrochi came into its possession on April 14, the network has withheld it on grounds of taste.

Nor would al-Jazeera give a copy of the tape to the Italian officials who were permitted to watch it. The tape reportedly shows two figures with their backs to the camera standing behind Quattrochi. One shoots after Quattrochi shouts, "I'll show you how an Italian dies" and attempts to tear off his hood.

The sudden squeamishness of al-Jazeera prevents the world from seeing a clear depiction of the Italian's bravery and defiance and the appalling cruelty and cowardice of his Arab abductors, whose voices are clearly heard on the tape.

I guess showing Westerners displaying their contempt for the terrorist cowards is to at variance with al-Jazeera's propaganda slant.

Fabrizio Quattrochi, R.I.P.

Ah, the sensitivity of the left

(Review) Observe, if you will, the exquisite compassion of Rene Gonzalez, who says of Pat Tillman:

True, it's not everyday that you forgo a $3.6 million contract for joining the military. And, not just the regular army, but the elite Army Rangers. You know he was a real Rambo, who wanted to be in the "real" thick of things. I could tell he was that type of macho guy, from his scowling, beefy face on the CNN pictures. Well, he got his wish...This was a "G.I. Joe" guy who got what was coming to him.

Ah, the Left. They just care so darn much.  

Where's Wyatt Earp when you need him?

(Review) Ralph Peters thinks it's time to show the Iraqis that we are serious.

Bring order to the streets, no matter what it takes: If you shoot plunderers and the Arab world wails, too bad. If we won't pay the price of unpopularity in the short-term, we'll fail and be despised for decades to come. Changing the direction of the Middle East is not about immediate popularity - it's about go-the-distance effectiveness.

Never interrupt an ongoing military operation for "negotiations": Finish the job, then talk. In the Middle East, strength, not chitchat, elicits respect.

Add the stick to the carrot: Stop this nonsense of trying to bribe terrorists and murderous Ba'athists to love us. Instead of pouring money into cities and town that kill American soldiers, expend development funds on the communities that behave. The present policy of rewarding those who assassinate our troops is as unacceptable as it is counterproductive.

Nice guys, especially in the Middle East, finish last. Unless we can enforce law and order, and bring security to the streets, we can forget about fostering any sort of secular democracy in Iraq. It won't happen.

All of our nice, Western concern for humane action is blowing up in our faces there. We're trying to coax terrorists and thugs who hate us to try and play nice. Instead of doing what we should be doing, which is rooting them out and shooting them down in the streets like dogs.

Victory consists of killing your enemies, breaking their will, and destroying their means of attack. Until we do that, we will never solidify democracy in Iraq.

Indeed, it may too late even now.

Of course, I am a reasonable person. I understand that for the president to allow such a realistic policy to be implemented, the wails of anguish and cries of "Fascism" from the French, the Left, and their various toadies, would be deafening. The Arab world would rend their garments and gnash their teeth as well.

But if we expect to win there, we have to understand that it won't happen through cease-fires or negotiations.

Sorry about the blogging

I haven't been feeling well today. I even took off from work. So I guess today has been pretty useless.

The excuses have already started

(Review) James Ridgeway's "Mondo Washington" column for the Village Voice is already starting to make excuses about why john Kerry lost the 2004 election.

And the election is still 5 months away.

With the air gushing out of John Kerry's balloon, it may be only a matter of time until political insiders in Washington face the dread reality that the junior senator from Massachusetts doesn't have what it takes to win and has got to go. As arrogant and out of it as the Democratic political establishment is, even these pols know the party's got to have someone to run against George Bush. They can't exactly expect the president to self-destruct into thin air.

With growing issues over his wealth (which makes fellow plutocrat Bush seem a charity case by comparison), the miasma over his medals and ribbons (or ribbons and medals), his uninspiring record in the Senate (yes war, no war), and wishy-washy efforts to mimic Bill Clinton's triangulation gimmickry (the protractor factor), Kerry sinks day by day. The pros all know that the candidate who starts each morning by having to explain himself is a goner.

So, what do the Dems do? They can already smell the week-old dead mackerel odor of defeat on his political corpse, but he has the Convention delegates locked up. Like it or not, this guy is the presumptive nominee.

And, if they do try to drop him, it makes them look like a pack of morons for not being able to figure out how to nominate a presidential candidate. Unless Kerry cooperates by dropping out of the race for "health reasons", they have to take the huge risk of publicly stabbing their own nominee in the back.

Not good strategy. It's hard to elect your guy as president when you can't organize a simple nomination.

Terry McAuliffe may now be the most hated Democrat in America among his fellow democrats. Because this all looks like his fault. The nomination process was rushed, and the game was called early. Sure, they have a a nominee, now, but the shortness of the campaign didn't give the American people long enough to take a hard look at these guys under prolonged stress. And it didn't give the other democratic contenders enough time to uncover little weaknesses among the contenders.

It was too short, the winner wasn't fully tested, and now his vulnerabilities are hanging out for all to see five months before the election. Five months for Karl Rove to play with.

So, now, the Democrats are thinking about blowing Kerry off and drafting...who? Howard Dean? Oh, God, please, please, let them pick him! Hillary? No, she's to smart to board the Titanic, and this would look too much like that. No, she's saving herself for 2008.

Yep, it's quite a pickle the democrats have got themselves in.

Rotsa ruck, guys.

All you need to know about America

(Review) Dennis Prager was talking about his Pat Tillman column today, and as he did so, he came up with a profound point. All you need to know about America and it's most deeply-held values, can be learned from looking at a coin.

On one side you will see "Liberty" and "In God We Trust", and on the other, you'll see E Pluribis Unum, which is Latin for "From Many, One". The three most important ideals that animate our society are displayed on every coin.

Says Dennis, show this to your children, and tell them that's all they need to know about America.

Mark Steyn, The Anglosphere's Brightest Treasure II

(Review) This time, Steyn ponders why the Bush-Bashing of the last several weeks hasn't weakened his standing in the polls.

In today's phony-baloney world, nuanced inertia is the simple choice, the default mode of international diplomacy, of the U.N. and the European Union. When you dig into what's holding up American resolve on Iraq, the people seem to be making more subtle distinctions than their elites.

Thus, the president's numbers aren't affected by the sob sisters of CNN's Baghdad bureau filing their heartrending reports on how thousands of Baathist apparatchiks haven't been paid since they were made redundant from Saddam's Department of Genital Mutilation and Electrode Clamping last April.

U.S. public opinion is hardheaded about this: The welfare of the Iraqi people is a bonus, but the welfare of the American people is the primary objective. That's why the United States went to war.

That's the problem for the Democrats. If ''resolve'' is the issue, can you beat it with ''nuance''? If I had to name the definitive Kerry campaign headline it would be this, from Britain's (left-wing, Kerry-backing) Guardian last week: ''Kerry Says His 'Family' Owns SUV, Not He.'' That Chevy Suburban in the yard has nothing to do with him. Who you gonna believe? A respected senator or your lying eyes?

His statement is true in the sense that his ''family'' (i.e., Teresa) also owns the house and the grounds, and indeed a big chunk of his presidential campaign. But it's hard to claim that your powers of diplomatic persuasion would have won over the French and Germans when you can't even win over your ''family.'' And do Americans want to hand over responsibility for Iraq to someone who won't even take responsibility for the car in his driveway?

Simple answer: No.

Mark Steyn, The Anglosphere's Brightest Treasure

(Review) Just read this. Savor it.

There was an hilarious piece in the Washington Post on Sunday, under the plaintive headline, "Why Did Bush Take My Job?" The author was Saeb Erekat, and the job he claims Bush has taken from him is "senior Palestinian negotiator" with the Israelis. The other day, speaking in support of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, President Bush stated the obvious: it was "unrealistic" to expect a return to the armistice lines of 1949, and there’s no point wasting time discussing the Palestinian "right of return" to what’s now Israel, because it’s never going to happen.

Mr Erekat’s real job is to look good in a suit and go on television and sound reasonable when, as on September 11, the excitable chaps in Ramallah are dancing in the street and singing the Arabic version of Happy Days Are Here Again. And he is, of course, "democratically elected", being presently in the ninth year of a five-year term. So Yasser keeps him around to do the CNN-BBC interviews when Hanan Ashrawi is washing her hair and they need someone to do the autopilot drone of "root causes", "desperation", "cycle of violence".

What a strange world the Middle East is. For 10 years, in northern Iraq, the Kurds have run a pleasant, civilised, pluralist, democratic de facto state, but external realities require them to be denied one de jure. For the same period, in the West Bank and Gaza the Palestinian Authority’s thugs, incompetents and bespoke apologists have been lavished with EU aid and transformed their land into an ugly, bankrupt Arafatist squat. But external realities require the world to defer to the "Chairman" as a de jure head of state, lacking merely a state to head.

Meanwhile, Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN’s special envoy to Iraq, has told French radio listeners that "the great poison in the region" is Israeli "domination" and told American television viewers that the Israelis "are not interested in peace, no matter what you seem to believe in America". Well, he certainly hit the ground running. A week in town and he is already sounding like any decades-old Arab despot. In The Spectator a year ago, I warned against handing over Iraq to the UN: it would simply "install as high commissioner a non-Iraqi Arab bureaucrat" who’d "effectively wind up as an Arab League minder, there to ensure that the Iraqis didn’t get any funny ideas (rule of law, representative government) which might unduly discombobulate the Egyptians, Saudis et al." But even I didn’t think they’d ship over such a walking, talking cliché of Arab League man as Mr Brahimi.

Or, as John Kery calls him, apprently under the misapprehension that he is Italian, "Mr. Brandini."

Of the Milano Brandinis, no doubt.

Kaus goes for the jugular

(Review) Mickey Kaus, who is, by the way, a Democrat, is just merciless in his savaging of John Kerry.

Which, I gotta say, makes for fun reading.

Heh. I'll bet the Democrats would be happy to have Mike Dukakis back over Kerry if they had a choice.

A close election? Hah!

(Review) John Podhoretz, like me, doesn't believe the 2004 election will be as close as conventional wisdom says.

Kerry has been the presumptive Democratic nominee for two months now. Ask yourself: Aside from fund-raising success, has he had a good day? Has he come up with a winning soundbite? Has he made a policy proposal you've heard people talking about?

Bush has had about as bad a time as he could have had these past two months, and he's not only still standing, but doing better than he was a month ago. And why? Because when he takes center stage, as he did in the press conference last week, he usually helps himself.

Not so for Kerry. To put it mildly.

Yes, he has time, plenty of time, six months' worth of time. Kerry will surely get better, but that's only because he can't get much worse.

Kerry is the kind of candidate who will either depress democratic turnout, or drive Democrats over to the Nader camp. He's that bad.

Win, or come home

(Review) Ralph Peters writes the following in the New York Post.

[W]hen the revolt began in Fallujah earlier this month, our Marines, supported by the U.S. Army, hammered the terrorists into the dirt. We took casualties - but the losses were overwhelmingly on the enemy's side, as they always should be.

The Coalition Provisional Authority's response? And the Bush administration's? They made the Marines stop well short of the goal post. Listening to Iraqi leaders who have their own personal power - not Iraq's interests or ours - at heart, our civilian leadership ordered the Marines to break off combat operations before the job was finished. We let the terrorists off the ropes, granting them time to recover for another, inevitable round.

Next, I suppose we'll establish a DMZ.

Since the cease-fire, our troops have had to endure the ludicrous charade of "negotiations" with the Fallujah city fathers - breaking the rule that we never negotiate with terrorists or their surrogates. The resulting "agreement" to turn in heavy weapons led to the mockery of sending the Marines a pick-up truck full of junk while the terrorists gained weeks to prepare their defenses, construct ambushes and organize a far tougher resistance than they could have presented two weeks ago.

Our enemies are laughing at our folly, while creating a myth of heroic resistance in Fallujah - for which we will pay dearly in the months and years ahead.

Make no mistake: There can be no compromise in Fallujah. If we stop one inch short of knocking down the last door in the last house in the city, our enemies will be able to present the Battle of Fallujah to their sympathizers as a great victory: They fought the Americans to a stalemate (with the implication that, next time, the Americans will be defeated and driven from the Middle East).

This whole Fallujah deal is starting to get me steamed. Cease fires and negotiations are a loser's game. Losers sue for peace. Losers ask to open negotiations.

Every minute we wait to flatten Fallujah makes us look like losers who don't have the stomach to win. Every minute we pause our operations is another minute the enemy has to consolidate his defenses. Every minute we wait to strike increases the number of casualties we'll eventually take attacking increasingly strong defenses.

And what do our cease-fires gain us? Increased respect from the insurgents? Goodwill from Iraqis? Hardly. The insurgents and Iraqis in general both see it as a tactic of weakness. They both wonder why we don't put an end to it.

We have to stop worrying about how we can make our enemies like us. That is both stupid and counterproductive. We didn't try to gain the respect of Germany in World War II. Instead, we simply started killing Germans, and we kept killing them until they asked us to stop by offering us an unconditional surrender.

Supposedly, one of the lessons we learned from Vietnam was that, if you use American military power, you use it all the way. You cry "Havoc," and slip the dogs of war. And you kill anyone who opposes you until they are ready to surrender, or are all dead. You fight, in other words, with no end save victory.

As far as I can tell, we are in serious danger of forgetting that lesson.

My Trip to the Zoo

This weekend, it appeared that a family emergency would require a trip out of town. As it happened, the trip fell through. The family emergency is still there, but The Lovely Christine decided that the trip wouldn't really solve the problem, so we ended up not going. Well, since we weren't going out of town after all, we decided to take advantage of the fact that we live in the city containing the best zoo in the world. So, we went to the San Diego Zoo. Here are a couple of pictures from the trip.

The Red Panda: These guys are just as cute as buttons.

Orangutan: The ugliest, yet paradoxically, the most photogenic of the primates. Well, except for Catherine Zeta Jones.

Polar Bear: The green tint is due to the exceptionally thick glass through which I took this shot.

Not only are the animals cool, but some of the flora they have is just amazing.

Gao-Gao, Panda of Amazing Virility: According to the zookeeper, Gao-Gao is about 75 pounds underweight for a male panda. But evidently, when they got the female Panda, Bay Yun, from China, Gao-Gao got busy. Pandas are notoriously hard to breed in captivity, but evidently, Gao-Gao, despite his small size, is the Don Juan of the Panda world. When they put Gao-Gao in with Bay Yun, it took about five minutes and she was beggin' for it. The result was little Hua Mei. Unfortunately, I didn't get a pic of the little tyke. In any event, the zookeeper kept going on about Gao-Gao's sexual prowess until it got a little uncomfortable and creepy, frankly. It just seemed like he was taking a little too much interest in the process.

Another flower

Tree Wallaby: Kangaroos that climb trees. Australia must be a freakish place. I think the zoo is a little boring for these guys. Even the tiniest animals in Australia are insanely vicious, so the safety of the zoo is probably pretty tame for these guys. I mean, I shot this picture at about three o'clock in the afternoon, and this guys is still yawning and scratching his belly.

Alaskan Brown Bear: They look cute, until you realize they're 10 feet tall and weigh about 1200 pounds.

Peacock: This guy was just wandering around the zoo unsupervised. Someone, a long time ago, released a buch of peacocks in San Diego, and so you see them all over the place. The Lovely Christine used to live in an apartment where there were about 4 of them wandering the property. They're great to have around, especially at about 6:30 on Saturday morning when they start with their 140 decibel banshee shrieking. You really love 'em, then.

King Buzzard: Chris got a much better shot of this guy than I did with this photo.

And now, without further ado: The Parade of the Meerkats!

Why, yes, I do like meerkats. Why do you ask?
     

I wish I could say that this was a complete satire

(Review) The Onion a publication that takes no prisoners, reports that Iraqis are gleefully preparing for their June 30 independence.

"True Iraqis know that our enemy has never been the U.S.," said Hakmed Butti, a Sunni who has been "saving my joy and weaponry" for the day America returns power to his country. "Our enemy has always been each other. It took an American invasion to teach my people that, but I do not think it is a lesson we will soon forget..."

Iraqi leaders expressed optimism about the future of democracy in Iraq.

"I am certain that this democracy will be a flash point of social and political change," said one Najaf-based Iraqi cleric who asked that his name and the location of the tanker truck he was loading with diesel-soaked nitrate-based fertilizer not be printed.

Shi'ite leader Dzhan al-Juburi said difficult days are ahead, but that the people of Iraq are "not strangers to challenge."

"The path to re-deconstructing Iraq will not be easy," al-Juburi said. "But if we remember to draw on the strength of our people and their massive stockpiles of automatic weapons, then, Allah willing, we will turn Iraq into the country it once was in no time at all."

I bring this up because of a point that McQ at QandO directs me to from Ralph Peters New York Post column.

Operation Iraqi Freedom has been, among other things, an attempt to give Arabs hope for a better future. The ultimate outcome won't be known for years, but we must prepare ourselves for the possibility that the Arabs are going to fail themselves again.

With sufficient troops, we can force Iraq's Arabs to behave. But we can't force them to succeed.

Ultimately, Iraq is not a test of the limits of American power. When necessary, we can do whatever must be done for our security and prosperity. Our use of force, in Iraq and elsewhere, has been remarkably - even foolishly - restrained.

If Iraq collapses into medieval fantasies and blood feuds, we still may be proud of having given this crippled civilization a last, great chance to heal itself. We've made mistakes, but their impact is minor compared to the unwillingness of Iraq's Arabs, Sunni or Shi'a, to build a free and civil society of their own.

In the end, whether Iraq succeeds is building a civil society is not a measure of American failure or success. We can't build a civil society for them. They have to do it.

We can help, and offer them all the assistance they ask for, but we can't force them to act peaceably toward their fellow citizens. And even if we could, we can't stay there forever.

It is Iraq's success or failure that will count, not ours. We can liberate them from a cruel dictator, and we can assist them in building the legal and constitutional structure their society will need. But it is the Iraqis themselves that will determine whether or not they will supinely allow their country to deconstruct.

That's why I think the President is right, after having given it a lot of thought, to keep to the June 30 date for transfer of sovereignty. Frankly, I've been ambivalent about it. I've veered between staying there for a decade and rebuilding the country brick by brick, turning the whole mess over to the UN, and just about everything in between.

But, at the end of the day, this is an Iraqi, not an American struggle. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him count to eight by tapping his hooves on a rock.

Or something like that.

Rangers Lead the Way

(Review) As you probably already know, former NFL star and current Army Ranger Pat Tillman was KIA today in Afghanistan.

I have to admit to a little discomfort highlighting his death. Each of the people who've died in the War on Terror is a tragedy, and an irreplaceable loss. It should also go without saying that anyone who serves in the armed forces makes a sacrifice. If you don't believe it, take a look at the military pay chart. Often, you can count on being deployed 6+ months a year away from your family. Even peacetime service is hazardous. I live in the Camp Pendleton area, and deaths through aircraft crashes or training accidents are depressingly common.

But, it has to be said that Tillman sacrificed much more than the average person. He left behind $3.5 million a year to join the army. He gave up those things that are are so weirdly honored by our society--athletic prowess, fame, amazing amounts of money--to be an Army Ranger.

That is unusual in today's America. And today, Tillman gave that sacrifice in the ultimate measure.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
---Capt. (Dr.) John McRae, MD RCAMC   

VDH Speaks

(Review) Go read Victor Davis Hanson right now.

The Disqualification of Religion

(Review) As anyone who knows me can tell you, I'm not a religious guy. Still, when I see stuff like this, it irks me.

Actor Richard Gere has joined in the chorus led by Ralph Nader and others condemning President Bush for mixing his faith with his governance. "One thing I've learned in my life is never to trust anyone who thinks that he exclusively has God on his side," said Gere to a crowd of like-minded Hollywooders.

Gere's brilliant insight followed a recent statement by perennial presidential aspirant and equal opportunity nuisance Ralph Nader lambasting Bush for not divorcing his faith from his public service. Nader was apparently disturbed by a passage in Bob Woodward's new book.

Woodward reports that when Bush was in the process of deciding to attack Iraq he prayed "for the strength to do the Lord's will." This "revelation" reportedly prompted Nader to tell the Christian Science Monitor,

"We are dealing here with a basically unstable president … a messianic militarist. A messianic militarist, under our constitutional structure, is an unstable office-holder. Talk about separation of church and state: It is not separated at all in Bush's brain, and this is extremely disturbing."

Sometimes, the weird crap the Left gets caught up in amuses me just as much as it irritates me.

First of all, the constitution is silent about whether a "messianic militarist" should hold office. I think it says that all religious tests for holding office are prohibited. Presumably that includes testing for messianic militarism.

Second, if Bush was a messianic militarist, it would mean that he perceived himself to be the messiah. That's the definition of "Messianic". My understanding, however, is that Bush considers someone else to have been the messiah.

In any event, the thing that really bugs me is the idea that so many on the Left has that the US is just one step away from turning into a Christian theocracy. Cripes, they talk about it all the time, as if we're about to install an American pope, and that Jerry Falwell is on his way to your house right this minute to start peeping into your bedroom.

That's just completely delusional and paranoid.

Turn on a freakin' TV set. Friends? Will & Grace? Queer Eye for the Straight Guy? Is this really the television of an incipient theocracy? I mean, when you can't even turn on NYPD Blue without getting a flash of Andy Sipowitz's ass, then a return to Puritan morality doesn't really seem to be in the cards.

And, by the way, who wants to see Sipowitz wagging his schlong around? Even if you like guys, you gotta prefer that hunky Ricky Schroeder, don't you? And, why do we have to look at naked guys in the first place? Why wasn't it Kim Delaney and full frontal? Or that blond chick that's on CSI: Miami, Hottie Hotterson, or whatever her name is?

But I digress.

Go take a look at the local theater, and count the ratio of G-rated to R-rated movies. Lippity-lop over to the 7-11 and take a look at the copies of Maxim, FHM, Stiff...uh, I mean, Stuff, and Maxim Blender arrayed in front of the sales counter, conveniently at eye-level for 6 year-olds. Maybe I'm going to the wrong 7-11, but I ain't seein' copies of Faith Today, Christian Living, or the Christianity Today Sunday Suit Edition displayed anywhere.

Hey, If I lived in Iran, I'd be making a whole different argument, but I gotta tell you, if you got a big concern about the US turning into some sort of Plymouth Rock Puritan society, then you're a paranoid freak.

See a professional. I mean, really.  

Bring our Boys home!

(Review) Ralph Nader is calling for a unilateral withdrawal from Iraq.

Way to go, Ralph! You keep it up, and you'll be the only genuine anti-war candidate! I'm hoping you get 10 or 12 percent of the vote, frankly.

Let's see, that would give Kerry about 37%, and Bush about...uh...

Go, Ralph!!!

Today's Big Question

Everybody's trying to figure out the answer to one question: Why has George W. Bush' poll numbers been rising, even as he's been pummeled over the past three weeks by the 9/11 commission, trouble in Iraq, Bob Woodward's and Richard Clarke's books, etc.

Jonah Goldberg Thinks it's because people think of W as a war president, but don't see John Kerry that way.

Josh Marshall thinks that it's because the public doesn't want to lose in Iraq. Or something.

Howard Fineman has a politics junkie's laundry list of reasons, all of which sound plausible.

But, really, it's not all that hard to figure. As Kevin McCullough pints out, Kerry's just not a likeable guy.

American's tend to elect people that we like, or who excites us, or brings us a vision of the future that we find compelling. But, in the end, we can usually dispense with the big vision thing, we can dispense with excitement.

But a likeability deficit? That's a hard, hard, row to hoe. Dick Nixon managed to do it, but only because the Democratic Party imploded in 1968 over Vietnam and in '72 over the Tom Eagleton fiasco. Well, actually, the whole George McGovern thing was a fiasco, now that I think about it.

It's hard to get people to vote for you when they dislike you. Kerry can't even get Democrats excited about his campaign, because, frankly, a lot of Democrats don't like him either.

So, it's not rocket science trying to figure this stuff out. Sometimes the correct answer is the obvious one.

No Photos Allowed

(Review) The Pentagon is clamping down on people trying to take photos of the flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover AFB. Pentagon policy is that any such photos are a violation of DoD Policy.

The purpose of this policy, and it was upheld by the DC Court of appeals in 1996, is that the privacy of the families should be protected.

Now, there is a lot of clamor on the left about this. The hideous Rep Jim McDermott--who, if you'll remember, went to Baghdad prior to the war with David Bonior, in order to lecture us from Iraq about the immorality of our policy there, and to give aid and comfort to one of the world's most infamous tyrants--piously declared yesterday that we need to see the pictures of dead servicemen, so we can mourn over their loss, as is our national duty.

This is as sickening as the trail of slime that McDermott leaves behind him everywhere he goes.

Because I think we all know that his primary concern isn't "mourning" over our honored dead. His primary purpose is to get those photos out there with a suitable caption, like "Our brave soldiers, murdered by George W. Bush's immoral policy in Iraq." Let's not pretend otherwise.

Pentagon policy prevents this, just as it prevents the President, or anyone else, for using photos of our fallen soldiers for political purposes.

But there are, it appears, no depths to which the Left will not sink, even to exploiting the bodies of our dead servicemen, if it helps them in their struggle to get W kicked out of office.

The perennial spoiler

(Review) Jim Glassman writes that Nader may do even better this year than he did in 2004. Which is, incidentally, a huge help for Bush.

Good article, and definitely worth the read.

What really caught my attention though, was this little, almost offhand statement:

The war [in Iraq] is not going well. In the first 18 days of April, 99 U.S. soldiers were killed, and, at that rate, another 1,000 will die before the election.

This hits me wrong, in a way that's difficult to articulate.

Mainly, I think it's because it indicates an unrealistic view of war that seems to be prevalent in America. I get the impression that Americans today thinks that every day there should be progress, and that every day we can show that we're winning just a little bit more. And, if they don't see that, they get easily discouraged.

In early April, Gallup found that 28 percent of those surveyed wanted all U.S. troops out of Iraq, compared with 16 percent in January.

That just doesn't display much constancy at all.

The truth is that war is not about constant progress. Never has been. Never will be. There are always setbacks. Our planning is faulty at times. Our intelligence misses signals about enemy intentions. It's tragic, and our boys die because of it.

And there is absolutely nothing whatsoever we can do about it. We try as best we can, but war is not predictable. We do not control our enemies actions, they do.

The situation in Iraq, it seems to me, is much like the situation the allies faced in December of 1994. The Invasion of France had been successful, and the country liberated. Montgomery was clearing the Germans out of the Approaches to the Belgian ports. Much of Holland had been liberated.

Then, all the sudden, German tanks--tanks that weren't even supposed to exist--were pushing the allies back in the Ardennes forest, kicking off the Battle of the Bulge (starring Henry Fonda and Robert Shaw).

December became a very hard month for the allies. The 101st Airborne Division was cut off and surrounded at Bastogne. German Tanks were driving toward the Scheldt Estuary, threatening to cut the allied army in two. Even worse, bad weather kept the allied air forces grounded. This resulted in many, many casualties on the allied side.

But--and this is the important bit--even though it looked like we just barely beat the Germans by the skin of our teeth, from their point of view, it was a disaster. It crushed their last reserve of tanks, and ended, for the rest of the war, Germany's ability to fight anything other than a purely defensive battle.

Yes, it was a slap in the face for those who had watched the German Army in France break down completely in August and September. It was a huge surprise to see a massive German armored assault just 60 days after it had looked the Germans were ready to collapse completely.

But that's how things happen in war. Fortunes shift. New commanders come up with innovative ideas. Old commanders fall into complacency.

Clausewitz wrote that the exercise of battle consists of doing just a few simple things, but that even the simplest of things on the battlefield is extraordinarily hard. Commanders miss information they should have. Enemy commanders do the unexpected. Things are never precisely what they seem.

I think that there is every possibility that the last month in Iraq has been the Ba'athist/Islamist "Bulge". Like Hitler, they thought they saw a chance to hit is hard and fast, and beat us by surprise. All I've heard from individual marines caught up in it, tells me that they are killing hundreds of these insurgents, and breaking their fighting strength, ending their ability to resist as organized units.

It doesn't strike me that things are going badly in Iraq. It strikes me that things are going about as well as can be expected, considering the chaotic nature of warfare, and the immense difficulty of the world-historical task upon which we are engaged.

Could the Bush Administration done some things better? Sure. So could the administration of FDR. We don't elect machines to office, we elect people. They make mistakes. They follow misguided policies. I wish it were otherwise, but there it is.

The point, however, is not to look at those mistakes, throw up our arms, and declare, "Well, it's a quagmire, just like Vietnam! We should just leave!" The point is to correct those mistakes, and complete the task we've embarked on. Vietnam became a quagmire because we made it one. IF we do not wish Iraq to become a quagmire, then we have to implement policies that lead to victory, rather than stalemate or defeat.

We have all the power--and more--to impose our will in Iraq. The only question is whether we have enough will to impose it.

And we'd better, because we simply can't quit now. A withdrawal in Iraq will do the same harm to our national interests that our failure in Vietnam did in the 1970s, when it looked like the commies would take over the world.

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-KKK) gave one of his hysterical stem winder speeches yesterday, calling on us to leave Iraq immediately. In a way he's right. It would certainly save the lives of some soldiers or marines there. But at what cost? Saving the lives of 1,000 soldiers at the cost of 3,000 or more civilian deaths in another 911 attack doesn't strike me as an economical trade.

The harsh truth--and I know it because I spent 10 years as a professional soldier--is that the purpose of a soldier is to fight, kill, and die for his country. If 1,000 soldiers must die so that 1,000 civilians can live, then, good. That's the soldier's job.

If we leave Iraq with the job unfinished, if we just turn tail and run, like Byrd suggests, then we'd better prepare ourselves for the deluge of death and destruction that will follow. Because Our enemies will see it as the start of an open season on Americans.

No, we have to stay there, and we have to do whatever is necessary to win. It's that simple. 

Taking the King's Shilling

In the interests of full disclosure, I should tell you that, as of Tuesday, I've been working for the Bush-Cheney '04 Campaign. I'm not getting paid, but I have volunteered to do surrogate writing and speaking.

So far, this isn't the most organized part of the campaign, since they're just kicking it off. For instance, on Tuesday, they asked me if I could do an Op/Ed for Earth Day. Usually, it takes more than 48 hours to place an op/ed in the paper, so the deadline was tight. But, I did it.

And, of course, they scrambled on Wednesday, trying to find a state legislator or congressman under whose name to submit the article. The thing is, they should've placed it on Monday, not less than 24 hours before deadline. Then, just before 11:00 am on Wednesday, they called me to ask if I would try to place it if they couldn't get in touch with a legislator to do so.

At that point, I gently tried to tell Camille Anderson, the Communications Director of the Bush-Cheney office in LA that it wasn't gonna happen. She apologized for being disorganized, and said they'd try to get on track better in the future.

So, naturally, the article didn't get placed. So, since the article will be dead after today, anyway, I decided to post it here.

ENVIRONMENTAL RESULTS, NOT RHETORIC
By Dale Franks

Earth Day is often a time that we focus on threats to our environment. We worry about things like biodiversity, energy, forests, and clean water. It should, however, also be a time when we celebrate the environmental progress we’ve achieved.

Over the past thirty years, we’ve made enormous strides in environmental protection and conservation in practically every area. Since the 1970s, overall air quality has improved by over 40%, and the elimination of leaded gasoline has reduced the ambient level of airborne lead particulates by 99.9%. Industrial pollution has declined substantially, leading to cleaner streams, rivers, and lakes. Since 1980, the US has seen no net loss in wetlands areas, and protected wilderness areas have increased. Recycling of paper, cardboard, plastics, and glass has also increased tremendously. More than 35% of paper products and 23% of glass products are recycled.

Yet, to note that impressive environmental progress has been made is not to ignore the fact that many environmental problems are still waiting for effective solutions. At the heart of creating these solutions, though, lies a debate about the philosophy used to achieve them.

The traditional model for US environmental regulation has been a centralized, bureaucratic model. While this may be an easy regulatory regime to implement, it has often led to too much inflexibility. Bureaucratic regulation is, by nature, a “one size fits all” type of regulation that focuses on procedures, rather than actual results. As a result, it often does not account for local environmental variables. Even worse, it can enshrine bad policy that causes, rather than relieves, environmental problems.

A perfect of example of the bureaucratic model’s failure is the lax forest management which led to the huge wildfires of 2002-2003. At that time, federal land management programs were so complex that they prevented timely action to address problems in our national forests. For example, in 1995, a severe winter storm knocked down trees on 35,000 acres of California’s Six Rivers National Forest. Federal land managers spent three years struggling with the paperwork requirements of bureaucratic regulation. By 1999, only 1,600 acres of the forest had been treated. In September of that year, a forest fire burned through the area, and also consumed an additional 90,000 adjacent acres before it could be controlled, at a cost of $70 million.

In essence, the regulatory burden on forest management prevented timely thinning and clearing operations. This resulted in exceptionally dense forest areas that were heavily overgrown with highly flammable underbrush. Additionally, damage to forests through disease and insect infestation increased the risk of fire by leaving thousands of acres of dead trees uncleared. The compliance difficulties that traditional environmental regulation placed on land managers was a major contributing factor to the nearly 11 million acres of forest that were destroyed in wildfires in 2002-2003.

In contrast, the Bush Administration has pursued a flexible environmental policy that is geared towards achieving results, rather than focusing on bureaucratic procedures. As part of this philosophy, President Bush launched the “Healthy Forests Initiative”. Since then, the Forest Service has implemented at least 46 high priority thinning and restoration projects, and the Bureau of Land Management is currently implementing more than 20 projects. In addition, the Departments of Agriculture and the Interior have improved environmental assessments for priority forest health projects.

Part of the Bush Administration’s philosophy is to provide incentives to industry to improve environmental performance. The administration has offered $4.2 billion in tax incentives for renewable energy and hybrid and fuel-cell vehicles to spur the use of clean, renewable energy and energy-efficient technologies. In addition, the administration has also requested major budget increases for a number of clean-air and zero-emissions energy programs, including the President’s Hydrogen Fuel Initiative; FutureGen, coal-fired, zero-emissions electricity generation, and fusion energy. Additionally, President Bush has increased funding for climate change-related programs by 15%, bringing total U.S. Government spending this year to $4.3 billion.

It does the environment no favors to focus more on bureaucratic procedures than on the actual goal of a cleaner environment. All too often, the primary concern of the bureaucracy is the enlargement of its budget instead of the environmental goals it is supposed to achieve. That might work out just fine for the bureaucrats, but the rest of us deserve more. An environmental policy like that of the Bush Administration, which emphasizes tangible results rather than compliance with arcane paperwork requirements, is both cheaper, and more effective.

As we celebrate this Earth Day, it behooves all of us to remember that it is, after all, the results that count.  

Judicial Filibusters

(Review) Terry Eastland writes that John Kerry could be hoist on his own petard if he becomes president, when it comes to judicial nominations.

Kerry is part of the filibuster against the president's nominees. If he's elected, he'll probably learn what it's like to be on the receiuving end of it.

And they said Reagan was the Teflon President

(Review) Richard Cohen Wonders why, despite all the bad news for Bush in the last month, the president is doing better and better in the polls. And more bad news for Bush, and he'll win by a landslide. Of course, some of that can be traced to Kerry's faults.

Money undoubtedly will matter in the presidential campaign. But what will matter just as much, if not more, is Kerry's message. At the moment, it is nowhere to be found. If anyone out there can complete the following sentence, please let the Kerry campaign know: Vote for John Kerry because.... The only thing that comes to mind is that he is not George Bush.

Significantly, in one area where Kerry is demonstrably not Bush, it works against him. Bush is minimally articulate; Kerry is downright verbose. When Kerry opens his mouth, whole chunks of paragraphs fall out and hit the floor with a clunk. He truly knows too much - a charge that cannot be leveled at Bush.

Actually, it's more precise to say he talks too much. Which isn't really the same thing at all. But when you listen to what he says, you certainly don't get the impression he knows too much. In fact, you often get the impression that he knows very little.

Of course, you don't really listen to what he says, because he says it in such a soporifically verbose way that your eyes glaze over about 5 seconds into a Kerry statement.

A competitiveness struggle

(Review) Tom Friedman beleives that the struggle against Islamofascists isn't the only thing we should be worried about. There's always the Yellow Peril.

The bottom line: we are actually in the middle of two struggles right now. One is against the Islamist terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, and the other is a competitiveness-and-innovation struggle against India, China, Japan and their neighbors. And while we are all fixated on the former (I've been no exception), we are completely ignoring the latter. We have got to get our focus back in balance, not to mention our budget. We can't wage war on income taxes and terrorism and a war for innovation at the same time.

Craig Barrett, the C.E.O. of Intel, noted that Intel sponsors an international science competition every year. This year it attracted some 50,000 American high school kids. "I was in China 10 days ago," Mr. Barrett said, "and I asked them how many kids in China participated in the local science fairs that feed into the national fair [and ultimately the Intel finals]. They told me six million kids."

For now, the U.S. still excels at teaching science and engineering at the graduate level, and also in university research. But as the Chinese get more feeder stock coming up through their high schools and colleges, "they will get to the same level as us after a decade," Mr. Barrett said. "We are not graduating the volume, we do not have a lock on the infrastructure, we do not have a lock on the new ideas, and we are either flat-lining, or in real dollars cutting back, our investments in physical science."

Well, this is certainly a problem. But the problem is not one that the Federal Government can do do much about. The problem lies in the local schools in the hearts of our communities. Our education system is doing something horrific to our children.

Kids in the first through third grades love school. They're just pleased as punch. But, by the time they get to high school, they absolutely hate it. Whatever love of learning these kids have going into school, our teachers somehow manage to beat it out of them between grades 3 and 8.

That's not a problem money can fix. That's a problem of methods and philosophy. And, a lot of it's popular culture, too, that assigns the smart kids to the "geek" category, and values popularity and looks more than intelligence.

So, no, we don't have a lot of science club geeks, compared to the the Chinese. And I'm not sure what a government "Competitiveness Strategy" can do to change that. But we don't have one, and Friedman closes by telling us that it's all the Bush Administration's fault.

But, you expect that. He does, after all, write for the New York Times.

Happy Earth Day

Once again, it's the day we're supposed to get all gooey over the environment. And, Of course, we'll hear a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Sierra Club types about how everything in the environment is going to hell in a handbasket.

In the real world, however, things simply aren't that bad.

Over the past thirty years, we’ve made enormous strides in environmental protection and conservation in practically every area. Since the 1970s, overall air quality has improved by over 40%, and the elimination of leaded gasoline has reduced the ambient level of airborne lead particulates by 99.9%. Industrial pollution has declined substantially, leading to cleaner streams, rivers, and lakes. Since 1980, the US has seen no net loss in wetlands areas, and protected wilderness areas have increased. Recycling of paper, cardboard, plastics, and glass has also increased tremendously. More than 35% of paper products and 23% of glass products are recycled.

Ok, sure, an Earth Day slogan of "Good Job, Keep it Up!" won't bring contributions flooding into the Natural Resources Defense Council, but it comes a lot closer to the truth than anything they'll be peddling today.

Hunt them down like the animals they are

(Review) At some point, you'd think that you'd be to emotionally numb to let things like this bother you.

Five homicide attackers detonated simultaneous car bombs Wednesday, targeting police stations and a police academy and killing 68 people, including 16 schoolchildren.

I'd love to see the animals who perpetrated this swinging from the gallows.

Half-Loyal

(Review) In the wake of Bob Woodward's new book, the Washington Post's Anne Applebaum--a newly hatched Pulitzer Prize winner--writes that Colin Powell has some things to answer for.

In the fall of 2002, however -- right when Bush was pushing Powell's preferred "diplomatic solution" to the Iraq problem at the United Nations -- the U.S. secretary of state was nowhere to be seen. In the run-up to the Persian Gulf War in 1991, then-Secretary of State James Baker spent weeks at a time in Europe and the Middle East, including most of November 1990. Powell, by contrast, went to Europe once in the autumn of 2002, to the NATO summit in Prague, and then only on very brief trips the following spring.

More importantly, he didn't play the role that he could have played in the European media, defending the decision to go to war. That is hardly surprising, because he opposed that decision -- and has never been shy about letting us know. His opposition would have been perfectly legitimate, of course, had he been an ordinary citizen, say, or even a member of Congress. But because he was secretary of state, his half-loyalty undermined further the diplomacy of an administration already inclined to scoff at the views of foreigners, and has continued to do so in the year since the war was launched.

I admire Colin Powell tremendously. Always have. But Applebaum has a point.

What the president needs when he is going to take the nation to war is a cabinet that is ready to give the president all the support they can. There isn't another single thing the government does that is as important as putting the lives of our citizens on the line.

Now, I don't know how Powell felt about the war. But I do know that he seemed not to be filled with urgency when it came to the task of rounding up allies.

If, in fact, the Woodward charges are true, then he simply should have quit, or been fired. And, while it says a lot of good things about the president to keep a cabinet member on who openly agrees with his policy, I think that, in the end, it's too great a liability to keep a guy like that around if you're trying to drum up international support for a war. Especially is the dissenter is the guy who bears the lion's share of responsibility for rounding up that support.

I'm sure that no one wanted to see Colin Powell ran out of the Cabinet like Al Haig. It would've looked bad. "See," the president's opponents would have said, "Colin Powell, the most trusted man in America, thinks the war in Iraq is a mistake. And Bush's firing of him is just another example of the administration's crushing of dissent!" We'd still be hearing that from John Kerry two years later.

But it's hard to see how keeping him in place, and allowing his attitude of dissent to infect the State Department does the administration any good either. It certainly makes it harder for the president to accomplish his foreign policy goals.

Look, if you can't agree with the Boss' policy, and publicly support it, then you shouldn't be on the team. If Powell did, in fact, feel that strongly about Iraq, then he should've resigned.

Pour Encourager les Autres

(Review) Daniel Pipes notes that Israel's tough respose to terrorism has gotten a lot of Palestinians thinking second thoughts about this whole terrorism thing.

In a word, Sharon's tough policies have established that terrorism damages Palestinian interests even more than it does Israeli ones. This has led some analysts deeply hostile to Israel to recognize that the ''second intifada'' was a grievous error. Violence ''just went haywire,'' says Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al-Quds University. An ''unmitigated disaster,'' journalist Graham Usher calls it. A ''crime against the Palestinian people,'' adds an Arab diplomat.

After the execution of Hamas' other leader, Ahmed Yassin, last month, 60 prominent Palestinians urged restraint in a newspaper ad, arguing that violence would provoke strong Israeli responses that would obstruct aspirations to build an independent ''Palestine.'' Instead, the signatories called for ''a peaceful, wise intifada.''

Ordinary Palestinians, too, are drawing the salutary conclusion that murdering Israelis brings them no benefits. ''We wasted three years for nothing, this uprising didn't accomplish anything,'' says Mahar Tarhir, 25, an aluminum-store owner. ''Anger and disillusionment have replaced the fighting spirit that once propelled the Palestinian movement,'' finds Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, a reporter for Knight Ridder.

I think there's a lesson there for all of us.

ur "Friends" in the "International Community"

(Review) James Lileks wonders why John Kerry--and the Left in general, really--is so enamored of the UN.

In the same interview, Kerry repeated his constant campaign theme: his intention to drop to one knee, Jolson-style, in the United Nations General Assembly and beg for forgiveness. "Within weeks of being inaugurated, I will return to the U.N. and I will literally, formally rejoin the community of nations and turn over a proud new chapter in America's relationship with the world."

It plays to the base. The left is terribly worried about what the popular kids are saying about them in the United Nations. "We've alienated the world! For heaven's sake, we've alienated China! Oh, and Free Tibet!" The right couldn't care less, but what can you expect out of a party that would rather get married to Great Britain than have an affair with France? The undecided middle -- defined at this point as "people who aren't paying attention" -- is waiting to learn why we'd be safer trusting an organization whose response to Rwanda was to send not armies, but condolences. And even that took years.

The answer, of course, is that we wouldn't be safer. The Left acts as if all the UN member states share common goals and aspirations. Well, they don't. You'd think that it would be blindingly obvious that Syria, being a one-party dictatorial state has an entirely diffeent set of interests than, say, Great Britain.

You'd think that, but evidently, you'd be wrong.

Bad day for blogging

Busy, busy, busy. My shcedule was just too jam-packed to allow for any blogging today.

Yeah, it's a rarity, but hopefully, I can be back on track tomorrow.

Air America

(Review) LA Times media critic--and liberal--David Shaw sat down to listen to a whole day of Air America, giddy at the thought of left-wing radio.

His conclusion: It sucks.

So, what else is new?

Photo: AP Photo/ NBC Meet the Press, Joe Amon

Politics does make strange bedfellows

Photo: AP Photo/J.Pat Carter

If it'll help, he'll even remove all Spanish troops from Spain

Photo: Reuters/Stringer/Spain

Defense Transformation

(Review) Military historian Frederick Kagan writes that, so far, defense transformation has mainly done nothing but transform the US armed forces from a large force into a smaller, less capable one, and that doing so has worked to our disadvantage.

In Iraq, the price has been even higher. Failure to get ground forces rapidly into the Sunni Triangle allowed more than 15,000 Republican Guard soldiers and other of Saddam Hussein's troops to melt away into the countryside -- with their weapons and expertise -- and form the nucleus of the resistance to the United States and the new Iraqi government. Failure to take immediate and full control of Baghdad permitted looting and disorder that began the process of discrediting the U.S. presence in the country. Failure to maintain adequate force levels since then has led to a failure to quell the growing insurgency and critical delays in reestablishing stability and civil society in Iraq.

All these failures flowed from a greater failure of understanding. This administration came to office with a belief that war is all about destroying targets, that ground forces are unnecessary and that technology is supreme. Much to our sorrow, we have experienced the fact that none of those beliefs are true. Wars of regime change cannot be fought mainly with missiles. Ground forces that can interact with people, perform police functions and maintain order must be present in large numbers during and after hostilities. Excessive haste in withdrawing the inadequate numbers of troops the United States sent to Iraq has only exacerbated these problems.

We must increase the U.S. presence in Iraq substantially, although we will pay a high price for that policy at such a late date. But where will the troops come from? They can come, at this point, only from keeping troops in Iraq who have already served their year there or from sending back troops who have just returned from their missions in Iraq. This policy will destroy morale and harm recruitment and retention, and it will seriously undermine training. Yet it is the only policy we can follow now.

There has been, for the last century, a constant chimera in military circles. After WWI, the craze was for airplanes. Giulio Douhet, Billy Mitchell and others believed in the superiority of aircraft with a passionate intensity. Douhet even predicted that future armies would find that ground forces had become obsolete. Wars would be fought by impersonal airplane clashes, and with bombers raining death on the population below.

Well, he certainly got the bombers raining death part right. But, as we've learned--and evidently must relearn--you don't own a piece of ground until an 18 year-old with an M-16 is standing on it. Too much of the Rumsfeld defense policy seems to me to be based on a willingness to forget that simple truth.

We are, of course, a democratic state, and, like all such states, we have an inherent reluctance to incur casualties. We want our enemies to die, and our sons to come home without a scratch. That pushes us, I think, to engage in a common human failing of expecting too much from things like airplanes, or missiles, or information technology.

All of those things are, of course, wonderful. They do make our forces more lethal, and they do make our casualties lower than they might otherwise be. But none of them are magic bullets that deliver us from the basic reality of the battlefield: people die in war.

We want our magical devices to prevent it, or to make that truth go away, but it doesn't. The second some semi-trained militia member opens up on your platoon with an AK-47, all bets are off. It doesn't matter to a casualty whether he was killed by the accurately aimed fire of a highly trained professional, or a stray round from a panicky, part-time militia soldier.

And, no matter how techy our devices become, or how well we use them, they are no substitute for that 18 year-old 11B infantryman, standing on a piece of ground and holding it from all comers. And, as I've said before, no matter how mobile and lethal your combat forces are in combat, occupying a country in a whole different ballgame. If you need two soldiers on each street corner, then the number of soldiers you need equals 2 x n, where n equals the number of street corners.

As far as I can tell, it looks like Rumsfeld didn't want to take the time to do that math. He forgot that taking a country and holding it are two entirely different things.

And Just as WWII proved that, in many fundamental ways, the early advocates of air power were to grandiose in their expectations about the airplane, so are we now learning that defense transformation isn't all that it's cracked up to be either.

Oil for food scandal

(Review) Bill Safire writes that the UN is hoping the scandal surrounding massive kickbacks in the Oil For Food program for Iraq will die a nice, quiet death.

Signs of Progress

(Review) Andrew Sullivan writes that, despite the doom-and-gloom we're getting in the media, things in Iraq are progressing. It may not be in a perfectly satisfactory manner, but it is progress.

We do not yet know the details of the battle in Fallujah. But I predict it will be remembered as one of the most critical modern battles in the war on terror. In a matter of days, the insurgents were killed in vast numbers in classic urban warfare. The ratio of U.S. casualties to insurgent casualties was roughly one to ten. What should have been done very early in the invasion - the wiping out of the Baathist thugs and their Islamicist allies - was finally accomplished. And a truce broke out. It's still too early to know how this delicate situation will resolve itself. But both sides had made their point. Iraqi extremists had made it known they would make life very difficult for American troops and try very hard to create a new Vietnam. The Americans made it clear they wouldn't buckle under and could destroy the insurgents, if push came to shove.

Enter Lakhdar Brahimi, the special United Nations envoy in Iraq. Into this truce, the U.N. could find renewed authority to negotiate the terms and membership of the new Iraqi government. What that means is that the new regime after June 30 will be far more legitimate and stable than would have been the case if the Americans had imposed it. The latest indications from Washington are that the president, rattled by his slide in the polls, will accede to Brahimi's recommendations, let go of American micro-management, and return to the critical work of training the Iraqi security forces and exterminating extremists in the run-up to elections. So the Americans look like they are conceding something while they are actually achieving what they want. And the Iraqis can construct a new government without seeming to look like American stooges. Win-win.

Well, I certainly hope so.

It will end when it ends

(Review) William Raspberry evidently woke up and took a stiff drink of reality when he wrote today's Washington Post column.

I do not believe the American people want us to abandon the Iraqis to the chaos that would surely be the result if we cut and run right now, before there is some reasonable chance at stability there. But our people are also worried over the intensifying violence against the coalition forces and even civilians in Iraq, and they want some assurance that it will soon end.

My fellow Americans: It will end when it ends, not because we have been intimidated into fleeing, but because we will have completed our work to the best of our ability. That work is to leave a country that Iraqis can run for themselves.

Wow, that just about says it all. Or rather, it would have, if Raspberry had stopped there. Being a WaPo guy, however, he couldn't resist adding:

Accordingly, we must move as quickly as possible to turn over to the international community both the "keys" to Iraq and the decision of who to hand them to in due course. If my critics have a better idea, I'd like to hear it.

It's always the "international community" with these guys.  It just irks me.

I'm not, you notice, saying he's wrong. But, I do get an edgy feeling any time the proposal pops up to allow the UN to get their hands on anything, mainly because their history is decidely mixed when it comes to handling things.

The UN is the Fredo Corleone of the world. Sure, the casino gets built, and Michael gets his cut of the action, but it's Moe Green who's doing all the actual work of keeping things on track, because Fredo is too busy boffing cocktail waitresses three at a time in the kitchen. The UN marches around screaming, "I'm smart! I can handle stuff! Not like everybody says! I'm not dumb! I'm smart and I want respect!" But you always know that sooner or later, Fredo is gonna betray the family.

But, still, sometimes, you gotta let Freda have the keys to the casino. When push comes to shove, you need Moe Green running the place, but you gotta have Fredo out there as the front man, because his mere presence lets everybody know that the Corleone family is serious about their investment.

Frankly, the way things have unfolded, we're probably going to have to allow the UN a relatively free hand in setting up a new Iraqi government. We'll probably chime in if it looks like they're going too much astray, but it might be better if we spend out time doing the background work of building an Iraqi Army and security structure that will be moderate and disinclined to take over the government the secoind we withdraw.

In short, the UN would be good political cover. But whenever you let the UN into the picture, you always wonder when they're gonna pull a Fredo.

A Fisking

(Review) McQ, at QandO blog delivers w massive, and well-deserved, fisking to E.J. Dionne 

It's not your business, governor

(Review) Former NJ governor and 9/11 Commission member Tom Kean is getting a bit uppity about calls for Commission member Jamie Gorelick to recuse herself now that the infamous 1995 "Wall" memo has been declassified.

Several commissioners rejected Sensenbrenner's call for Gorelick to step down.

"People ought to stay out of our business," said Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey.

Uh, it isn't your business, governor. It's ours. We're the folks paying for your little commission. You work for us, not vice versa. And if we want to poke our nose into what you're doing, then we we'll do it to our heart's content. 

Bob Dylan sells out to The Man

(Review) You know, it's weird, but sometimes the day's blogging has a theme. I don't try to make up a theme, it just appears spontaneously from the various things I review through the course of the day. Today, apparently, it's the undeserved arrogance and vapid self-absorption of the Baby Boomers, since I did this post earlier this morning.

Leslie Bennetts is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. And, apparently, she lives in a happy never-neverland full of fuzzy kitties.

At least, she did until she saw Bob Dylan in a Victoria's Secret ad. And they'd just finished telling their daughter how important Dylan was to The Movement, man.

Delighted at the opportunity to deliver a history lesson, her father — a passionate antiwar activist during the Vietnam years — spent the next couple of hours playing old songs and explaining Dylan's seminal role in the protest music of the 1960s. I listened as I read the morning paper, and thinking about the parallels between Vietnam and the bloodbath in Iraq against a soundtrack of Dylan songs was almost too painful to bear. How many times, indeed?

Speaking of how many times, how many times do we have to listen to these aging hippies mooning over their "courage" to stand up to Nixon--who was, in case you didn't know, the elected leader of a free and democratic Republic--doing the heavy lifting of opposing the unjust war in Vietnam? But, you gotta admire the courage of people who have the guts to complain to their elected leaders, huh? I mean, shouldn't they give out medals for that?

Note to Baby Boomers: get over yourselves. The actual bravery was shown by the young soldiers, sailors, and marines. I believe that 58,000 of them died in Vietnam.

Number of student demonstrators killed by the Nixon Administration: 0 (Although the governor of Ohio killed 4)

"Ooh, daddy, you were so brave to use a college deferment to avoid the draft, and demonstrate against a freely elected and democratic government at home that guaranteed your constitutional right to do so. I guess we're just lucky you're still with us."

Instead of being, you know, in Calgary.

Anyway, the story continues:

The next day, I was startled to see Dylan's craggy, hawk-like face glaring out at me from the television screen in a Victoria's Secret commercial. He looked angry, dissipated and possibly deranged; his eyes had that paranoid, menacing look one associates with inmates in lock-up wards. He also looked old; Dylan is 62 and, judging by his appearance, has lived hard.

He was singing a bitter song called "Love Sick" as a nubile young model writhed around in her underwear and stiletto heels. Sultry and blank-faced, she looked about as old as my daughter. Was this porno-babe supposed to be Dylan's current obsession? His fantasy? Were we meant to think this was cool and edgy?

The only edge I saw was the distasteful spectacle of a geezer sexually fixated on a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. When the man who wrote "Forever Young" starts leering at jailbait during prime time, the result looks like a recruiting tool for a pedophilia advocacy group.

Funny, I get the same reaction every time I see Michael Douglas with Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Hollywood--and the media in general--is a deeply creepy place. If I was a more cynical observer, I might suspect it something to do with hollywood being run by middle-aged men who often have access to amibitious--and, hence, willing--starlets. Where else do you see 20-something starlets hooked up with Jack Nicholson, who, when you think about it, should be approaching the age when he doesn't even have a sex drive. I mean, what is he now? 90?

But Ms. Bennetts, who back in '68 undoubtedly thought that free love was man's natural state, and who didn't want to get locked into marriage, which is like, a patriarchy thing, man, all the sudden gets Ralph-Reed-Republican at the thought of The Great Dylan leering at her daughter.

Why's she laying down this heavy, middle-class, bourgeois repression trip on our heads, man?

My daughter's counterculture history lesson notwithstanding, she will now retain the Victoria's Secret commercial as her most indelible memory of an artist who once had a profound effect on American culture. All over the country, crestfallen baby boomers are watching this ad campaign and wondering, "Why did he do it?"

Don't you love it? Dylan, it seems, has a place in the pantheon of The Movement that requires he never, ever come within arms length of The Man. He has a pure essence that must be maintained.

What a load of crap. Especially coming, as it does, from an editor of Vanity Fair, a magazine owned by a large, multinational corporation, and that is stuffed with advertising from cover to cover.

Yeah. Fight the Power, Leslie.

Oh, by the way, why does he do it? For the same reason you peddle your writing to The Man, Leslie: For money.

Oh, and to cavort around with lingerie models.

My grandfather's generation grew up dirt-poor during the Great Depression, turned 18, and were immediately shipped off to fight in frozen wastelands like the Hürtgen Forest, or hot, humid hellholes like Guadalcanal. After watching hundreds of their buddies die during those four years, they were ejected back into civilian life. They got an education or a job, or both, then went to work. For the most part, anything that had happened to them before 1945 was hardly mentioned for the rest of their lives, except, perhaps, between each other.

Their children, on the other hand, still get all mopey and misty-eyed 30 years later about a war they didn't fight in, and feel the shattering disappointment of betrayal when one of their heroes, a former pop singer, does an underwear commercial.

Any guesses about which generation of Americans I admire more?         

Are we crazy?

(Review) Victor Davis Hanson writes that it seem the US, as a nation, seems sometimes insane. If the definition of insanity is that we can hold two apprently contradictory ideas in our head, then clearly we are. At least, some of us are.

A Clinton administration that had done very little to retaliate during some eight years of terrorist attacks and provocations was now seen as less culpable than the newly inaugurated Bush team. About-face critics alleged that the latter, in its initial dozen weeks of governance, had not properly digested intelligence data, steeled its will — and, yes, preempted the terrorists by sending American troops far abroad to kill them before they could kill us. Apparently, the notoriously preemptory Mr. Bush was now to be condemned as not preemptory enough...

The price of gas skyrocketed, in part because at least some Gulf OPEC autocratic states vented by cutting production. America was shown in fact to have had little influence concerning, much less any control of, the very petroleum that lay beneath the country it now occupied and had bled for. Suddenly Mr. Kerry and other senators decried not the worry over petroleum theft but the spikes in energy prices, demanding redress from the administration. Apparently Mr. Bush, the one-time unilateralist who had turned a deaf ear to Arab entreaties and had been too tough with Arab regimes, now suddenly was not unilateral enough with such greedy despots. Indeed, he was to be condemned for not confronting those about oil whom he had already "unnecessarily" once confronted purportedly over oil...

Suddenly, supposedly invincible cells and cabals were lamenting their losses in the hundreds and seeking truces, taking hostages — anything other than continuing the fight that they had once boasted so eagerly to have wanted. The old mantra that we were not providing security against terrorists was replaced by a new one that we were killing too many terrorists. Western television crews went from filming the past scenes of burned-out humvees and bombed-out police stations to new images of the graveyards outside town, where hundreds of "civilians" were now being buried to purportedly widespread lamentation.

Still, despite all this, we are told by all both that Iraq is better off without Saddam Hussein and that the United States cannot precipitously withdraw from the country and cease its reconstruction efforts. Yet does such sentiment translate into support for the ongoing effort to bring "democracy" to Iraq? Hardly. Apparently a new exegesis has arisen that goes something like the following: The United States was wrong to go to war to take out a monster who deserved to be taken out but nevertheless should stay to ensure stability in a country that it has no right to be in.

The actual operative phrase is, I think, damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Are we crazy? I think in fact we almost are. But the tragedy is that if we are paradoxical, self-incriminatory, and at each other's throats, our enemies most surely are not. They know precisely what they want from us — an Islamic world of the 8th century, parasitic on the resources and technology of the 21st, by which all the better to destroy a supposedly soft and bickering West. And if the present chaos here at home continues, they are apparently on the right track.

Apparently.

Air America

(Review) Jonah Goldberg writes that, by trying to come up with an "alternative" talk radio empire, the Left just doesn't get it.

What the creators of Air America fail to grasp is the fact that conservative talk radio is the alternative media. It became popular because conservatives lost the battle for the political culture, not because they won it.

Conservative views - and conservatives - were, and are, unwelcome at ABC, CBS, NBC, Time, The New York Times as well as Harvard, Yale and academia in general. That's why conservatives created everything from National Review and the Weekly Standard to the American Enterprise Institute and "The Rush Limbaugh Show."

Yes, these institutions have been remarkably successful, but the fact remains that the elite media and certainly academia are still largely closed to conservatives. The posing of liberals as rebels in a conservative media environment is wishful thinking at best and sad, dishonest play-acting at worse.

In fact, FOXNews, despite all its money, is really an alternative news source. The only reason it has an audience is because it is different from CNN/NBC/ABC/CBS.

That's why every time I hear Franken or his ilk talking about the stranglehold that conservatives have on broadcasting I just want to roll my eyes.

Open a copy of the freakin' New York Times occasionally, then tell me what a conservative rag it is.

The Vietnam Generation

(Review) I must be a pretty smart guy, because Charles Krauthammer agrees with me, and, Lord knows, he has a brain the size of a basketball.

The first George Bush once said he thought the Persian Gulf War would cure America of the Vietnam syndrome. He was wrong. There is no cure for the Vietnam syndrome. It will only go away when the baby-boom generation does, dying off like the Israelites in the desert, allowing a new generation, cleansed of the memories and the guilt, to look at the world clearly once again.

That's the long and short of it right there. A substantial proportion of the country still lives in the 1960s. And, I think a lot of them are so wedded to the anti-war movement of the time because of guilt.

They got to use their college deferments or the open Canadian border to escape the draft, while their less fortunate peers got sent off to be shot at. I think that, on some level, they feel that they chickened out. I bet every time they see a car with stickers of that green and white Vietnam service ribbon or the red and gold RVN Cross of Gallantry pasted to the bumper they still get all tense and edgy.

Because they know that inside that car sits a man who went when he was called, and spent a year--or two or three--slogging through that red mud, watching the tall elephant grass, and waiting for the instantly recognizable stutter of an AK-47 (As Clint Eastwood said, "It has a distinctive sound when fired at you"). And while he was doing that, they were taking Basketweaving 204 at State U, or enjoying a rasher of back bacon and flapjacks with maple syrup in Kitchener, Ontario.

They are committed to their anti-war stance now. To ever, ever admit that they might have made a mistake, that their opposition to the Vietnam War was grounded mainly in the principle that they didn't wish to get shot at, is too difficult to do. Because if they were wrong, then maybe they did deserve the contempt of the "squares" and "baby-killers" they so derided.

So, now, every war has to be Vietnam. America always has to be at fault. Our boys always die for a shining lie. If not, the beliefs of their whole lives might be revealed as a tissue of self-serving lies.

As a result, they are sometimes downright comical.

It was inevitable that Iraq would be compared to Vietnam. Indeed, the current comparisons are hardly new. During our astonishingly fast dash to Baghdad, taking the capital within 21 days, the chorus of naysayers was already calling Iraq a "quagmire" on Day 8!

Or as RW Apple called it in Afghanistan. One week before the Taliban collapsed.

They've become the boy who cried wolf. "Afghanistan is a quagmire! Just wait! It's almost time for the Brutal Afghan Winter™!"

"Iraq is just like Vietnam! We can't win! Why, there's resistance in Fallujah, and they're just like the Viet Cong!"

"The al-Sadr militia has taken over Kut! It's just like Hue during the Tet Offensive!"

"The 7-11 is out of milk! It's just like Quang Tri in '67!"

Cripes, give it a rest.

Playing at government

(Review) Former Senator Fred Thompson, a rare exception to the "actors are morons" general rule, writes that the critics of the the Bush Administration's policy toward Iraq want to have it both ways.

The global war on terrorism is not a game from which we can simply walk away when it seems it isn't going our way. At the same time critics of the Bush administration insist it should have done more to combat al Qaeda in Afghanistan before Sept. 11 (on the basis of intelligence far weaker than that pointing to Hussein's weapons of mass destruction), they miss the more profound lesson that national tragedy should have instilled: that the only deterrent to terrorism is strength and that weakness -- real and perceived -- is an incitement to further attacks.

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.

Let there be no doubt: Every time there is a call to abandon Iraq to the United Nations or unnamed "international allies," our enemies know this is a call to cut and run. And they are heartened.

The president's critics cannot have it both ways. They cannot claim to be in favor of winning the war and also oppose fighting it, funding it and offering any coherent strategy for succeeding at it. They cannot credibly claim to be in favor of winning the war while decrying it as a "mistake" that cannot be won.

That is essentially the basic issue of this election. The Democrats like to pretend that they are all intense fighters in the War on Terror. But their suggestions so far--treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue, refusing to overturn the Taliban, or the Saddamite regime--would essentially ensure that the War on Terror wouldn't be a war at all. It would be simply the 1990s redux.

I wouldn't have a particular problem with that if 911 hadn't shown the ultimate ineffectiveness of the pre-911 policy. But we have, as they say, been there and done that. What it got us was a decade in which we could pretend everything was going swimmingly, right up to the minute that the first plane crashed into the tower.

Essentially, the 1990s were a time of pleasant illusions, the price of which was the greatest "day of infamy" in American history.

The suggestion of the Democrats is that we return to the 1990s. My counter suggestion is that we march into the voting booth on Nov 2, and we ensure the Democrats are even more marginalized, so that the adults can run the country.

Maybe, when we've strung up the last terrorist, and can relax our vigilance abroad in relative security, we can allow the Democrats to play at governing again. In the meantime, they show no indications whatsoever that they are capable of governing wisely when faced with the current level of threat.

Wrong side of the table

(Review) The editors of the Wall Street Journal are wondering why Jamie Gorelick's position on the 911 comission is that of commissioner, rather than witness.

Thank you, Spain

(Review) Is there any longer any doubt that the Spanish election results have been interpreted by al-Qaida as a major victory for their cause?

In a recording broadcast on Arab satellite networks Thursday, a man who identified himself as Osama bin Laden offered a "truce" to European countries that do not attack Muslims, saying it would begin when their soldiers leave Islamic nations.

The tape, which ran in full at more than seven minutes, also vowed revenge against America for the Israeli assassination of a militant Palestinian leader and denounced the United States as using the Iraq war for corporate profiteering.

"I announce a truce with the European countries that do not attack Muslim countries," the taped message said as the stations showed an old, still picture of the al-Qaeda leader.

Clearly, AQ thinks that the Europeans are weak-willed, and prone to running from a fight.

And why would he believe otherwise?

This is what I was afraid of

(Review) Mashal Sarraf, a deputy to Iraqi Governing Council member Raja al-Khuzai, writes that Paul Bremer and his crew in Iraq aren't gettin' it done.

I'm not even going to excerpt any of it. You have to read the whole thing.

...Duty is as heavy as a mountain

(Review) Tom Friedman makes an excellent point in his New York Times column today.

America's Baghdad boss, Paul Bremer, is absolutely right when he insists that we must turn over sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30, as promised. Why? Because we may have trained thousands of Iraqi policemen, but without a government of their own, they are defending America — which they will never do with vigor. The only thing they might defend is a government of their own. Moreover, right now many Iraqi leaders blame the U.S. for what is going wrong in Iraq. The Bush team deserves much blame, but not all. Iraq's nascent leaders will act in a concerted and responsible fashion only when they — like Hamas, Arafat and Hezbollah — have the burden of responsibility.

I'm not advocating unilateral withdrawal from Iraq. I am advocating putting every ounce of energy we have behind the U.N. effort to replace the current Iraqi Governing Council with a legitimate, broad-based caretaker government to run Iraq from July 1, 2004, until elections in January 2005. Hard, but not impossible.

After decades of colonialism and misrule, and then a traumatic dictatorship in an already tribalized society, Iraqi national identity is weak — and insecurity only weakens it more by prompting people to fall back on their tribal units. But there is an Iraqi identity. It takes security, though, for it to emerge. Even Iraqis don't know how strong it is, and they won't know until they are handed the keys.

Right now, the Iraqis have the luxury of blaming America for everything that happens there. Neighborhood's not safe? America's fault for failing to provide security. Electricity keeps browning out? America's fault for not rebuilding generator capacity. Losing your hair? America's fault for colluding with Jews and other infidels to emasculate Islamic men.

You get the picture.

It's easy to sit on the sidelines and snipe when you don't have any responsibility or authority to fix things. But when you are thrust into power, all the sudden it becomes your fault if things aren't going right. That is, at least in a consensual society, a pretty strong inducement to ensure that things go right.

But it's an inducement that the Iraqi "Governing Council" simply doesn't feel right now. Turning sovereignty over to them will make them feel it.

I Guess They'll Never Learn

(Review) Call me crazy, call me a dreamer, but I would have thought that the whole 911 thing would have taught policymakers the dangers of hamstringing our security and intelligence forces.

But, evidently not.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is quietly circulating a proposal that would ensnare clandestine U.S. military operations in the same sort of procedural restrictions placed on CIA covert actions and that contributed to the Ashcroft charges and gave rise to the Berger-Tenet misunderstanding.

An airing of this idea appears in the current issue of Foreign Affairs ("The Rise of the Shadow Warriors," by Jennifer D. Kibbe of the Brookings Institution). Kibbe warns that without CIA-like controls on special units performing clandestine missions, "administration hawks may soon start using special (operations) forces to attack or undermine other regimes on Washington's hit list."

While such restrictions on CIA covert operations — including requirements that the president report to Congress about every plan — are appropriate to protect against rogue operations, they would hamstring clandestine military ones. CIA covert operations, no matter how sensitive the plans, require a clear chain of accountability. For example, in the 1980s, it was correct to require the president to notify Congress before the CIA provided arms to the Afghans fighting the Soviets.

When it comes to clandestine military operations in Iraq and elsewhere in the war on terrorism, however, similar layers of reporting and procedure will only discourage ideas from the field and delay operations that require quick action. Most military operations are kept secret beforehand in order to achieve success through stealth and surprise. In some cases, deception plays a major part in providing this secrecy.

Indeed, it has been an integral part of warfare since well before the Greeks breached the walls of Troy by hiding in the Trojan Horse. Without the elaborate deception operation that confused the Germans about when and where Allied landings would come in 1944, D-Day might have failed.

I wonder what political party the senators who support this idea are from? No, no, don't tell me...I'm keen to guess...

Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud

(Review) Robert Samuelson muses about home prices. And it's not a pleasant musing. Home prices have been zooming upward, fueled by mortgage rates at 40-year lows. But, as the economy pick up, interest rates will rise. And who'll be buying all the pretty houses then?

We live in a hot real estate market (the median price of homes in the Washington area rose 14 percent in 2003, to $286,000, and has increased 57 percent since 2000), but we aren't all that different. Since 2000 the national median price for existing homes has increased 23 percent, to $170,000, and many gains are much larger: 31 percent in Boston, to $413,000; 64 percent in Los Angeles, to $355,000; 32 percent in Minneapolis-St. Paul, to $200,000; and 74 percent in West Palm Beach-Boca Raton, to $241,000 (all figures from the National Association of Realtors).

Speculative fever also shows up in a widespread euphoria about future prices. Economists Robert Shiller of Yale and Karl Case of Wellesley polled recent home buyers in four cities. In the next decade, these home buyers think real estate values will rise from 11.7 percent annually (Milwaukee) to 15.7 percent annually (San Francisco).

These expectations are absurd, as Shiller and Case say. Annual increases of even 11.7 percent would triple prices in a decade -- far beyond any plausible income gains. Who'd buy those homes?

I bought a house 2.5 years ago for $243,000. And it's a good thing I did, because my house now appraises at $400,000.

That's insane, and it's a problem.

First, if you have a high-priced home with an adjustable rate mortgage, that low monthly payment looks good now, but as interest rates rise, your payment will puff up like a tick. If, housing prices fall at the same time, your $300,000 home may now only be worth $250,000. Presto! You're stuck with a payment you can't afford on a house you can't sell.

Second, many people have borrowed against the value of their home. That borrowing helped the recession stay mild because it fueled a fair amount of consumer spending. But, when the value of your house declines, the cash flow from the equity line of credit get shut off by the bank. All of the sudden, rather than engaging in consumer spending, you have to tend to your balance sheet, and reduce your debt load. And, of course, if house values decline, you're again stuck with a house you can't sell, because your equity doesn't cover the difference between the sale price and the amount remaining on the mortgage.

All of that borrowing, you see, reduces the equity you have in your home. As Samuelson points out:

In 2003 homeowners' equity (the amount not covered by loans) was only 55 percent of home value, a record low. In 1990 the figure was 61 percent; in 1945, it was 86 percent.

In addition, the high price of homes has encouraged builders to get out there and build more homes. In the short term, that's great for the builders, because they can make a killing. Over time, however, it also increases the stock of housing, which puts downward pressure on prices as well.

And, of course, rising interest rates will do the same. As interest rates rise, the loan amount you can afford falls.

Consider a family with $50,000 in disposable annual income that spends 28 percent ($1,167 a month) on its mortgage, says Yun. With interest rates at 8 percent, it can afford a $159,000 loan; at 6 percent, that jumps 23 percent to $195,000.

Obviously, the reverse is true as well. If you can afford a $200,000 home right now, and interest rates rise by 2 points, you can only afford a $150,000 after the rise. Low interest rates have allowed people to trade up, or buy more expensive houses. In turn, that has helped house prices increase. But the opposite holds true. If people can't afford to buy at current prices because of rising interest rates, the price will be forced down.

Supply and demand seek equilibrium, after all, and the way they do so is through the price mechanism.

This implies that house prices are in a bubble, just like stock prices were five years ago. Downward pressure on house prices may cause that bubble to collapse. That's not good news for homeowners, who stand to watch tens or hundred of thousands in equity (on paper at least) or in personal wealth (again, on paper) simply disappear. It may also mean that you'd better really like the house you have right now, because, for a lot of you. selling it will be impossible for quite a while, since you'll be upside down in your mortgage.

Oh, and you can forget any more home equity loans.

Now, Schiller and Case evidently don't think that we have a "housing bubble" yet, and don't expect a general decline in prices, but, just looking at the price of my house...well, it looks kinda bubbly to me.

Stall! Warning! Stall! Warning!

(Review) They say that takeoff is the most dangerous time for the airplane. Evidently, that's as true at Air America as it is anywhere else.

After just two weeks of broadcasting, Air America Radio, the fledgling liberal talk-radio network featuring Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo, was pulled off the air this morning in Chicago and Los Angeles, the network's second- and third-largest markets, in a dispute over payments for airtime.

Arthur Liu, owner of Multicultural Radio Broadcasting, which owns Air America affiliates WNTD-950 AM in Chicago and KBLA-1580 AM in Los Angeles, said Air America bounced a check and owes him more than $1 million.

Well, now, you'd'a thunk one phone call to George Soros would've fixed that, huh?

But wait, it gets better...

A Chicago source familiar with the situation said a Multicultural representative showed up at WNTD's offices this morning, kicked out Air America's lone staffer overseeing the network's feed to the station from New York, switched over to a Spanish-language feed, and changed the locks on the doors.

Liu said the same thing happened at KBLA in Los Angeles.

Dude, that's cold.

Air America, on the other hand, accuses Liu of being a shifty weasel. Responding to Liu's allegations of non-payment:

"That is an outright lie," said Evan Cohen, Air America's chairman, in a statement. "Multicultural Radio Broadcasting's conduct in this matter has been disgraceful.... [I]t is a clear violation of their contractual obligations."

As Doonesbury's Raoul Duke once said, "The Chinese are an especially tricky people."

Essentially, this means that Air America is now heard in New York City, the nation's Number 1 radio market, and, well...pretty much nowhere else that's got much importance, except maybe Minneapolis. Both of which have largely Democratic listener bases.

Wow, talk about preaching to the choir.

Note to George Soros: Next time, buy the stations. Then they have to play what you tell them to play.

(Hat Tip: Instapundit)

Kerry and Iraq

(Review) John Kerry wasn't very happy with the President's press conference last night.

But after watching the president on television, Kerry said Bush "offered no specific plan whatsoever" for stabilizing the situation in Iraq. "Rather, the president made it clear that he intends to stubbornly cling to the same policy that has led to a greater risk to American troops and a steadily higher cost to the American taxpayer," he said in a written statement.

OK, fine, fair enough. So what are the specifics of Kerry's plan? Hmmm. Well, now that's a good question, because he apparently isn't offering any himself. Except of course, for the plan he offers below, which is a mix of the barely possible and the hopelessly quixotic:

Kerry said the United States must attract more international troops to serve on the ground in Iraq and urged the government to make the United Nations a full partner in developing Iraq's transition to a new government. He said Bush should also ask NATO to create a new out-of-area operation for Iraq under the lead of a U.S. commander to help the United States get more troops from major powers.

This is truly mystifying. Does Kerry think there are no NATO troops there? The majority of NATO countries already have troops on the ground in Iraq. So, what is he talking about? Does he mean, specifically, French and German troops?

And, why aren't those troops there already? It's not because there isn't a NATO mechanism for allowing them to serve there. No, if the French or Germans wanted to have troops in Iraq, they'd be there already.

So, how does Kerry propose getting them to Iraq? Is he such close friends with Jack and Jerry that they'll do a political about-face and involve themselves in Iraq? Is he saying the reason they aren't there isn't because they think it's wrong, but because they just don't like W?

Kerry acts as if the reason other countries aren't there is because W wouldn't allow it. Nothing could be further from the truth. They aren't there because they don't want to be. And John Kerry has told me absolutely nothing that indicates to me how he will make them want to help us out there.

It's easy to say "I'd internationalize the effort in Iraq."

Oh, yeah, Johnny? How? Tell me exactly what price we're gonna have to pay to get the French to participate. No, really. I'm keen to hear.

And it's funny he makes these comments on the very day that Russia calls all of its 700 contractors home because 6 have been captured. And, of course, let's not forget the UN, who absconded the second they were the victims of an attack. How's that supposed to fill me with confidence that the "international community" will have the guts to stick it out in Iraq?

Look, I'd love to have the "international community" with us in Iraq. I'd love to spread the cost in lives, blood, and treasure. I can't think of any reason why I wouldn't want to see that. In fact, I'd love to have the UN step in and take over the whole shootin' match, if I had an ounce of confidence that they'd do any better at it than they did in Rwanda or Kosovo.

Not thet they'll get the chance anyway, since UN Secretary general Kofi Anan has already piped up:

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said yesterday that the violence and anarchy sweeping Iraq will prevent the world body from re-establishing a major presence in the country anytime in the near future.

And why should we be surprised at this? Running is what the UN does best. And Kerry expects the UN to get involved in combat?

John Kerry will internationalize nothing. We are bearing the whole cost of the effort there because a) no one else can, and b) very few are willing. Frankly, I don't believe that even John Kerry thinks otherwise. 

No Half Measures

(Review) Asla Aydintasbas writes in NRO:

In the heady days soon after the collapse of the Saddam regime in Baghdad, I visited an ambassador from a formal imperial power in one of the few open embassies. Having just survived weeks of looting, "I just don't understand how Americans think they can take over a city without declaring marshal law or even a curfew" the diplomat said. Ah, I thought, this man just doesn't get it — curfews are all about the Old Middle East. This was the New Middle East where Iraq was to serve as a bastion of democracy and freedoms.

A few months later, I understood exactly the point he was making. You cannot do a half-occupation, he meant, being squeamish about projecting power and reluctant to assume responsibility. Since the beginning of the U.S. experiment in Iraq, one of problems with the American presence there has been the half-hearted half-responsible nature of its authority. There might have been a noble reason behind this. Americans are reluctant empire builders (as the president expressed Tuesday night); most Americans would rather let Iraqis run their country, and official U.S. policies in Iraq are aimed at creating a stable Arab democracy, not the colonization of new territories.

All that's fine, but an occupation is a serious business and no Iraqi was ready for the type of power vacuum Coalition troops have created there. Over the last year the American presence in Iraq often vacillated between being hands-off and an actual occupation with all that would entail. Take for example the case of Muqtada al-Sadr. Last month Time magazine presented a chilling account of the courts and prisons established by Sadr's Mahdi Army and run according to sharia principles in nine Iraqi cities. In basement dungeons, victims of Sadr's justice were delivered whippings and beatings, as plaintiffs and defendants waited in the courtyard. Unable to find a reliable authority, people seemed to take their family disputes to Sadr's mullahs. That the American authorities would allow a parallel judiciary system at a time they were negotiating the Iraqi constitution is mind-boggling. Even more mind-boggling, however, is that Sadr has been allowed to fill the power vacuum in the Shiite heartland.

With anti-American violence erupting across the Sunni and Shiite lands, one cannot help but wonder if today's nightmare is partly a result of the Coalition's particular inability to exert its political power when needed.

Once you're in something like this, you're in all the way. That means, above all, providing public order, i.e., shooting looters on sight, having Moqtada al-Sadr picked up on a murder warrant before he can really start trouble, etc., and doing it in such a way so that the occupied people know who's in charge. It means whacking anyone who even looks like starting trouble.

Once you overthrow a government, you have to fill the power vacuum created by its downfall. Because if you don't, someone else surely will. Sure, a lot of other things are important: an eventual shot at democratic self-rule, improved public services, economic development, or getting the oil flowing. Great stuff, all of it.

But the bottom line, the one thing you must have before doing any of the other good stuff, is ensuring that the only person filling a power vacuum in the country is you.

We haven't really done that. We've tried to be nice, and frankly, that hasn't worked. Even now, after all we've learned, and especially after what happened two weeks ago, we still haven't taken out the Fallujah problem. Rather than go house to house, street by street, rooting out people who, quite frankly, need to be killed, we implemented a cease-fire.

Those are the tactics of timidity. We won't win with them. It's that simple. Our problem has never been a lack of ability or power, but a lack of will. We may be able to get out of Iraq, and leave behind a quasi-democratic, quasi-free government, but we face a very good chance that it will collapse either into the chaos of civil war, Shi'ite Islamic fundamentalism, or a return to Ba'athist dictatorship.

We are trying to do something extraordinarily difficult and extraordinarily important in Iraq. Being timid in its implementation is no help in doing it successfully.

Getting Iraq Right

(Review) From the editors of the Wall Street Journal:

After 35 years of terror, and uncertain that they can depend on the U.S. in the long run, many Iraqis are also understandably wary of speaking up too loudly or too soon. More of them will begin to do so once there is more clarity about what is going to happen when sovereignty is transferred on June 30, and especially when elections are going to be held. One reason Mr. Sadr is able to exploit Shiite fears is because no one knows when or whether there will ever be an election.

Coalition officials have been trying so hard to make sure that the Sunnis of Saddam's former strongholds feel wanted that they've risked alienating the Shiite majority. Uncertainty has only fed those fears. If even U.S. regent L. Paul Bremer can't explain what is going to happen after June 30, then no wonder Shiites who have lived in fear for decades are suspicious. More clarity about the political direction is now the most urgent need beyond security.

On the politics, by the way, the White House and Mr. Bremer would do well to look to America's own experience with federalism. One legitimate Iraqi fear is that they will be ruled again by an all-powerful central government in Baghdad. The coalition might find Iraqis in the provinces more amenable to political compromise if they control things that matter, such as having a direct claim on some Iraqi tax receipts or on U.S. reconstruction aid. It's an illusion to think, as some in the CIA and coalition headquarters still do, that the way to solve the Sunni problem is by rekindling Iraqi nationalism through control in Baghdad. Moderate Sunnis are far more likely to come around to the new reality if they see that they will have some local control.

All of this is contingent on improving security, which means winning in the Sunni Triangle and against Mr. Sadr. U.S. forces clearly have the power to do so, if they are given the authority. The Marines in Fallujah were making great progress before the recent cease-fire, rolling up terror safehouses, bomb factories and foreign fighters. Allowing a respite at the request of the Iraqi Governing Council may make sense if it wins more Iraqi support for the effort, but the reality is that the remnants of the Fedayeen and Saddam's Mukhabarat have to be killed or caught. The last thing they want is a free Iraq.

Good advice.

The Breitweiser Coven

(Review) The "9/11 widows" (i.e. Kristen Breitweiser and her three friends) are getting their 15 minutes on all the networks, in order to blame the perpetrators of 9/11--the Bush Administration--for the loss of their husbands.

The answer, seared into the nation's heart, is that, like some 3,000 others who perished that day, those husbands didn't come home because a cadre of Islamist fanatics wanted to kill as many of the hated American infidels in their tall towers and places of government as they could, and they did so. Clearly, this must be a truth also known to those widows who asked the question--though in no way one would notice.

Who, listening to them, would not be struck by the fact that all their fury and accusation is aimed not at the killers who snuffed out their husbands' and so many other lives, but at the American president, his administration, and an ever wider assortment of targets including the Air Force, the Port Authority, the City of New York? In the public pronouncements of the Jersey Girls we find, indeed, hardly a jot of accusatory rage at the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. We have, on the other hand, more than a few declarations like that of Ms. Breitweiser, announcing that "President Bush and his workers . . . were the individuals that failed my husband and the 3,000 people that day."

I'm just astounded that these people are more angry at W than they are at the terrorists who actually killed their husbands.

Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda

(Review) Robert Samuelson, another Washington Post columnist who's always worth reading, explains why all the "should've" arguments about how 9/11 could have been stopped fall against an immutable law of government. Democracies, more often than not, govern by crisis. We hammer down the nail that sticks up, not necessarily the one we need to hammer at the moment.

Just as we know social security is headed for a meltdown, and do nothing about it whatsoever, we handled terrorism in the 90s. We were concerned about other things.

Clarke's right that President Bush didn't give terrorism sufficient priority. The White House's strenuous efforts to prove otherwise ring hollow. But the same was true of the Clinton administration, and efforts to deny that smack of revisionism. In late 2000 Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, wrote a long article, "A Foreign Policy for the Global Age," for the journal Foreign Affairs. Combating terrorism was not a major theme; it merited a one-paragraph discussion toward the end. In fairness, the complacency pervaded the foreign policy "establishment." The lead article in the fall 2001 Foreign Affairs was "The World Bank's Mission Creep." In the previous year, the journal hardly discussed Islamic terrorism.

Even if Bush had heeded Clarke, it wouldn't have made much difference. His proposal included more aid to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and more missions for Predator drones over Afghanistan. If his plan had been adopted, was "there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?" asked former senator Slade Gorton, a member of the Sept. 11 commission. "No," said Clarke. The Sept. 11 conspirators were already here; the FBI hadn't detected the plot. Experience since Sept. 11 confirms that greater vigilance and aggressiveness don't always suffice. Osama bin Laden remains at large. Heightened intelligence didn't avert the Madrid bombings.

Come to think of it, we didn't do much about the threat from Japan or Germany in the 1930s either. There was that nasty depression going on, and all those bank failures. Who really cares about the invasion of Manchuria or the Anschlüss of Austria?

So it was in the 1990s. We were fat dumb and happy, keenly interested in whether Congressman Condit killed that intern girl, and how much money the Olympic Committee members took from the Mormons to have the big game in Salt Lake. We spent the 90s wondering if there was any love ick on the blue dress, and what the meaning of "is" is.

And we missed it. Sure, we had warnings. But when stuff blew up, it was always in one of those countries that sound like "khkhkh" or end in "-stan", and, besides, crap is always blowing up over there, buncha freakin' maniacs...

So all the current pretending is simply silly. Or even worse, maddening. The editors of the New York Times, the freakin' Gray Lady, have the balls to put this on the editorial page:

No reasonable American blames Mr. Bush for the terrorist attacks, but that's a long way from thinking there was no other conceivable action he could have taken to prevent them. He could, for instance, have left his vacation in Texas after receiving that briefing memo entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." and rushed back to the White House, assembled all his top advisers and demanded to know what, in particular, was being done to screen airline passengers to make sure people who fit the airlines' threat profiles were being prevented from boarding American planes. Even that sort of prescient response would probably have been too little to head off the disaster.

Well, yeah, it probably would have been too little, because Howell Raines would have firebombed DC (journalistically anyway) if the president had gone out on 7 Aug 01 and announced, "Hey, we've decided that young, middle-eastern guys can't fly any more, 'cause of, you know, secret terrorist stuff."

Cripes, the NYT editorial board would have called for W to be hauled out of his office naked and screaming to be tarred, feathered, and run out of the country on a rail. I mean, they thought profiling was reprehensible after 911, so it's a little late to come over all neo-con now.

No, it wasn't Bush, or Clinton, or George H.W., or even the Ol' Gipper.

It was us. We all had other things on our minds, and we didn't want to inconvenienced, and we didn't want to see body bags being shipped back from Kaplokistan because the president decided to go to war against some Third World raghead craphole in the middle of the desert. No, we wanted our presidents to feel our pain, not cause any of it by asking us to sacrifice the lives of our sons and daughters just to kill some crazy camel-jockey hiding out in Afghanistan.

No, we had our 64oz. big gulps, and our Survivor, and our SUVs, and we were all taking a decade-long vacation from history, which was, after all, over anyway. I mean, Frank Fukuyama said so.

So, let's not get on our high horse and act like we actually gave a flying f*** about Osama bin Laden prior to about nine o'clock in the morning of 11 September, 2001.

The fact is that Bush, and Clinton before him, did know about Osama, knew he was a threat, and knew it was a matter of time before he did something so horrifically nasty to us that when it was done, we'd wish we'd never been born.

Or rather, that he'd never been born.

Whatever.

They could see it coming like the Rose Parade coming up Colorado Boulevard, and they essentially did nothing, partly because they didn't have enough information to really do anything definitive, and partly because stuff they could've done was either illegal, or would have gotten the population so PO'd it would've bought their political careers to a dead stop.

"What!? we'd have screamed, "What the f*** do you mean I can't take a nail clipper on board the plane!? What are you, some kinda paranoid Nazi freak!?" The second Ali Mohammed al-Kaploki was told he couldn't catch a flight from LAX to Cleveland, the ACLU would've had a bronze-armored, Greek phalanx marching into Federal District court to rip the Government a new one.

That's where our heads were at, and they stayed there until sometime around 9:07am on 11 September, 2001.

Oh, sure, then we were all, like, "Nuke Kaplokistan!" But right until that minute, to the very second the world changed, we were still wondering whether Gary Condit killed that girl.

Going back and pretending that we would've done a freakin' thing different is stupid. It's infantile. It's the response of a spoiled two year-old.

Snap out of it.         

Book Review

If you are any kind of science-fiction fan at all, or even if you just like reading, you simply must read The Course of Empire by Eric Flint and K.D. Wentworth. The average reader ranking for this book at Amazon is 5 stars, and it really deserves it.

The book starts 20 years after the alien Jao have conmquered the Earth, which they need as a base in order to fight against the genocidal and really alien Ekhat, who are determined to scour the universe of all non-Ekhat life. The humans, however, are sullen and resentful, made more so by the fact that the Jao governor is an absolute beast.

The book starts with the arrival of it's main character, Aille krinnu ava Pluthrak, a young scion of clan Pluthrak on his first assignment, and through whose eyes the story is mainly told. From the beginning, Aille notices that the Jao rule on this planet is preventing, rather than supporting the goal of "association" between Jao and humans. Jao are not supposed to be capricious or wantonly cruel, yet the Jao governor, Oppuk krinnu ava Pluthrak, is both.

Aille realizes that to keep the Ekhat from destroying the Earth, he must force association not only between humans and Jao, but between the clans of Pluthrak and Narvo, even if that means he must mutiny againt Oppuk, declare himself an outlaw, and pay for his mutiny with his life.

The authors do a fantastic job at building a truly alien culture out of the Jao, and creating a tense story line that keeps you wondering how it will all end.

Trust me, you really deserve to give yourself the treat this exciting novel offers. I mean, there's no way a brief precis of this book can do it justice. But you definitely won't regret reading it.

Dennis Hopper is a Republican!?

(Review) Gossip columnist Liz Smith writes in the New York Post:

DENNIS HOPPER is the "Easy Rider" star-director who grew up surrounded by Democrats. In the '60 he marched with Martin Luther King and protested the Vietnam War.

But did you know that he is now a political conservative and has been since Ronald Reagan? He says, "I liked [Bill] Clinton, but I voted for Bush Sr. And I'm definitely voting for [George W.] Bush again."

Frankly, I'm stunned.

Enough Troops

(Review) Jane Galt is asking whether our military is large enough to fight the war on terror.

When we quickly took Iraq, there was a fair amount of cackling from Democrats who were sick of hearing about this. "Looks like the Clinton army did pretty well, eh?"

Er . . . yes and no.

Yes, it can take territory; no it can't hold it. The best estimate floating around on the strength needed to occupy a country seems to be 20 troops for every 1,000 people, which would imply a force size of about 500,000.

We don't have it. Our forces our stretched to the breaking point mounting a force less than 1/3rd of that size.

What does that mean? It means that rather than fighting in two theaters, our forces can't hold one smallish, poorish country for long enough to hold elections. Saddam's behavior may have been rational; he rightly figured that we couldn't take his country. He may only have been wrong in assuming that we realized this.

And this wasn't part of some grand multilateral strategy either; the numbers the UN is talking about bringing us range from 5,000-25,000 according to the estimates I've seen; a drop in the bucket.

We are the world's policemen, like it or not. And the department is apparently grossly understaffed.

To be fair, one of the reasons that Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki's career was forced to shuffle off this mortal coil is that, when he was asked how many troops it would take to occupy Iraq, he said it would take 500,000, and they'd have to be there for 10 years.

The numbers, by the way, come from a RAND analysis. It assumes a few things though: Fir example, it assumes there are no local police/security forces, no local government, etc. It assumes that all power rests in American hands.

So Shinseki was being pessimistic, and intentionally so.

Having said that, though, I am a veteran of the Cold War US military. When I was on active duty we had nearly 4 million soldiers on duty at any given time. Today, on the other hand, we've got about half that many troops available. Obviously, there's a big difference in the missions that we could perform back in 1984-1993 when I was on active duty, and the missions that could be performed today.

In 1990-1991, starting with 0 troops in theater, in six months, we moved 500,000 people into northern Saudi Arabia, invaded Iraq, and liberated Kuwait. It would be a physical impossibility to do that today.

So, despite Don Rumsfeld's claims that having a smaller, more mobile, lighter military can get the job done, then you have to at least ask if that's true in all cases. Such a military might be hell on wheels when it comes to invading a country and defeating its armed forces. But what happens when you have to start patrolling neighborhoods to provide law and order?

No matter how light, fast, or mobile you are, if you need guys standing on the street corner every block or so to provide police protection, then the size of your force isn't dictated by how ferocious it is in combat. The required size is now based on the simple math of "number of soldiers required on each street corner" x "number of street corners".

Either that, or you've got to have the ability to create Sepoy troops and police in large numbers in fairly short order.

As it stands now, we've got neither. We're trying to fight a war with a peacetime military, and I'm just not sure how well that can be done.

Getting Iraq Right

(Review) The Washington Post's David Ignatius may not be someone with whom I agree all the time, but he's moving to the top of my "must read" list. Today, he writes about Iraq, and what must be done to prevent it from going all quagmire on us.

• Provide electricity everywhere, 24 hours a day, by the scheduled handover of sovereignty. If it takes an airlift of C-17s carrying generators, do it; if it means expensive temporary fixes, do it. The lack of electric power has been a symbol of U.S. failure in Iraq; make reliable electricity a symbol of success.

• Speed up the $18 billion in reconstruction spending the United States promised in January. That effort was supposed to deliver 50,000 new jobs by June 30. Iraqis need to see action, now.

• Put more money on the streets quickly, through crash public works projects. The coalition cleaned up Baghdad last summer by paying thousands of kids a few dollars a day to sweep streets. Do it again. Put more money into the hands of local political, tribal and religious leaders. Some of it will be wasted, but in a good cause.

A New Deal for Iraq means correcting some of the political errors that led to the current mess. The Pentagon (which failed badly at nation-building in Iraq) must give way to the State Department. Occupation czar L. Paul Bremer (a brave man who deserved better support from Pentagon civilians) will be replaced June 30 by a new U.S. ambassador. Because so much of the job will involve liaison with the United Nations, a good choice would be the current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John D. Negroponte. And surely it's time to end any remaining Pentagon subsidies to the mercurial Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi and let him fly solo in the new Iraq.

A huge gulf exists between what we said we were going to do for Iraq, and what we've actually done. The most important thing we could possibly have done was to dump money, supplies, construction equipment, etc. into Iraq, to get the trains running on time, and to get people working.

Instead, we've frittered around in the contracting phase, doling out money like it was vials of our own blood. As a result, Iraqi discontent has forced us to dole out vials of actual blood.

This is not rocket science. I've been saying this for a year. The Bush Administration--with, admittedly, the best intentions in the world--appear to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing about Iraq since the day the invasion started. 

The problem is that Iraqis have been taken over by the richest and most technologically advanced society in the world. As a result, they haven't seen their lives get any better. They're still unemployed, poor, and now, even the electricity is off half the time. But they still see plenty of foreign soldiers walking the streets. And their experience has been that men with guns usually aren't there to help you.

Don't get me wrong, we need the soldiers there. Anyone who even looks like he wants to offer armed resistance should be shot instantly. I mean, that goes without saying. Insurgent elements need to be dealt with harshly.

But you can't have all stick and no carrot. So far, the invasion of Iraq has been a completely carrot-free enterprise, and that's outstandingly stupid.

As far as I can tell, the Bush Administration's bull-headedness is endangering the whole project for a free Iraq. At this point, as much as I despise the UN, I'm starting to wonder if we shoudn't turn the whole mess over to them. They could hardly do a worse job than the Bush Administration is doing. At this rate, we aren't going to end up with a free and democratic Iraq anyway, so what does it matter if the ultimate agent of that failure is US incompetence or UN cupidity?

The Fruits of Appeasement

(Review) Victor Davis Hanson writes in City Journal about why it took us so long to respond to Islamic Terror. Great Article, lengthy, and informative, in the way that City Journal does so well.

The Stakes in Iraq

(Review) British Prime Minister Tony Blair writes in The Observer that the terrorists know that, were they to win a victory in Iraq, the consequences would reverberate far outside the borders of that country.

They know it is a historic struggle. They know their victory would do far more than defeat America or Britain. It would defeat civilisation and democracy everywhere. They know it, but do we? The truth is, faced with this struggle, on which our own fate hangs, a significant part of Western opinion is sitting back, if not half-hoping we fail, certainly replete with schadenfreude at the difficulty we find.

So what exactly is the nature of the battle inside Iraq itself? This is not a 'civil war', though the purpose of the terrorism is undoubtedly to try to provoke one. The current upsurge in violence has not spread throughout Iraq. Much of Iraq is unaffected and most Iraqis reject it. The insurgents are former Saddam sympathisers, angry that their status as 'boss' has been removed, terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda and, most recently, followers of the Shia cleric, Muqtada-al-Sadr.

The latter is not in any shape or form representative of majority Shia opinion. He is a fundamentalist, an extremist, an advocate of violence. He is wanted in connection with the murder of the moderate and much more senior cleric, Ayatollah al Khoei last year. The prosecutor, an Iraqi judge, who issued a warrant for his arrest, is the personification of how appallingly one-sided some of the Western reporting has become. Dismissed as an American stooge, he has braved assassination attempts and extraordinary intimidation in order to follow proper judicial process and has insisted on issuing the warrant despite direct threats to his life in doing so.

There you have it. On the one side, outside terrorists, an extremist who has created his own militia, and remnants of a brutal dictatorship which murdered hundreds of thousands of its own people and enslaved the rest. On the other side, people of immense courage and humanity who dare to believe that basic human rights and liberty are not alien to Arab and Middle Eastern culture, but are their salvation.

It's that simple.

Mark Steyn: The Anglosphere's priceless treasure

(Review) Mark Steyn comments in the Chicago Sun-Times:

And in the Arab world, the indifferent are the biggest demographic. They sit things out, they see which strong horse has jostled his way to the head of the pack, and they go along with him. The Turks. The British. The British-installed king. The thug who murders the king. The thug who murders the thug who murders the king.

The passivity of the Arabs, the sensitivity of the coalition and the defeatism of the media is a potentially disastrous combination. Rattling teacups gets you a bad press from CNN and the BBC. But they give you a bad press anyway. And in Iraq, the non-rattling of the teacups is received by the locals not as cultural respect from Bush and Blair but as weakness. In that cafe in Fallujah, as a parodic courtesy, the patron switched the flickering black-and-white TV from an Arabic station to the BBC, which as usual was full of doom and gloom.

The Iraqis will go with the winning side. And, though the Americans had a bad week last week, the insurgents had a worse one, losing as many men in seven days as U.S. forces did in the last year. The best way to make plain you're the winning side is to crush the other guys -- and rattle their teacups so loudly even CNN can't paint it as a setback.

But, we not only have to crush these insurgents because failure to do so makes us look weak. They also need to be killed just on general principles. The more we kill now, the fewer who'll be around to cause trouble later.

Last Chance

(Review) Fareed Zakariah has a blunt assessment of the Bush Administration's performance in Iraq to date. The picture is, at best, mixed.

America has gotten thousands of things right in Iraq. It has repaired roads, opened schools, provided food, built hospitals and introduced local self-government across the country. But nation-building ultimately succeeds or fails on the basis not of engineering but of politics. And Washington has made crucial political mistakes. Those errors, alas, have jeopardized the heroic work of thousands of American soldiers and civilians.

It is conventional wisdom that the United States should stay engaged with Iraq for years. Of course it should, but for this to work Iraqis must welcome the help. In the face of escalating anti-Americanism, U.S. involvement in Iraq will be unsustainable. For one thing, the American people are not likely to want to keep spending blood and treasure in Iraq. It will be the end of Washington's grand plans for a new Iraq, and the United States will face the dilemma that Britain did in 1920: how to get out while still saving face, maintaining stability and preserving its interests.

Zakaria brings up some very important point, and I think the Administration owes us the answers to a few questions, such as:

1) Why has Ayatollah Sistani been marginalized? He is a--perhaps the--go-to guy among the Shia if we want to keep a lid on things. Why have we continually blown him off?

2) Why did we allow Muqtada al-Sadr to build his own private army? Or for that matter, allow places like Fallujah, to fester? Was this because we didn't want to take the casualties a thorough clean-out would've required, or was it because we don't have enough troops over there to cover the whole country, or what?

3) Where is that $18 billion in reconstruction money? Any chance of seeing any of it scattered around Iraq at any time in the foreseeable future?

4) Why are we still so entranced with Ahmed Chalabi? Clearly, the Iraqis hate him. He's admitted to lying to us about a whole bunch of stuff in order to get us inclined to invade the country. Why not just dump him, now that he's outlived his usefulness?

5) Why haven't the Iraqis been provided with adequate law enforcement and security services? If people who don't feel safe in their own country it's kind of hard to win their harts and minds.

6) How many troops do we need there? Do we have enough? I know Rumsfeld keeps saying that if our commanders wanted more troops, all they have to do is ask for them. But, after watching the way Eric Shinseki got dumped, how many generals are willing to risk Rumsfeld's wrath by making the request, if--and this is only hypothetical--they think Rumsfeld wants to see a small a troop commitment in Iraq as possible?

7) Does the Administration realize that we're actually at war? Everything the administration does gives me the dominant impression that they are trying to spare American casualties to the greatest extent possible. So, is our goal to win, or to reduce our own casualties? The two goals are often mutually exclusive. America is sensitive to casualties, but we can take them with equanimity in a cause that is just, and in which we are progressing adequately. What the country won't do is waste the lives of its young men in a cause that seems pointless, or in which our leadership can't seem to use them decisively.

8) Is the UN so completely worthless that they can be allowed to do nothing in Iraq? Yeah, yeah, I know. The UN is worthless, for the most part. But, surely, there's got to be some way the UN can play a role in the reconstruction of Iraq, even if it's only to provide a political cover for us. The rejection of any UN support at all is simply baffling. Yes, I know they're a bunch of weasels, mainly, but they do sometimes have their uses.

So far, it's beginning to look to me like the Administration is not only screwing up in Iraq, which is forgivable, but continually fails to learn from its mistakes, which is not. Ideology is wonderful, and is a useful guide absent empirical evidence or experience. But at some point, the results of experience have to trump ideology.

If you keep pushing Button A, and keep getting whacked on the head with a mallet, then the way to avoid getting whacked with a mallet is to stop pushing Button A. Even if your political ideology tells you that A is the proper answer. Insanity, in fact, can be defined as repeating the same behavior with the expectation of a different result.

At first, I was well prepared to allow the Bush Administration to have its way. That is, after all, what we elected them to do. But at some point, I expect them to stop pushing button A.

We have a world-historic opportunity to improve the lives not only of Iraqis in the here and now, but future generations of people all over the Mideast. Squandering it is pure folly. 

Bush's to lose

(Review) Bill O'Reilly writes that, as I have said here many times, John Kerry can't win this election. But George W. Bush can certainly lose it.

By November, most Americans will have a Republican-driven picture of the economy. The Bush people have nearly $200 million to buy ads trumpeting their economic achievements. But Iraq is quite something else. Americans will not go for another Vietnam. A war of attrition is not going to cut it, especially since the removal of Saddam was sold as a quick, surgical action with overjoyed Iraqis at the end of the rainbow. That obviously has not happened.

So the race is on to stabilize Iraq and fast. The terrorists know Bush is up for reelection and, interestingly, it seems like they want W out. An increase in terrorist activity would signify that, wouldn't it?

The President does have a fighting chance, however. Osama Bin Laden could be caught, and the Iraqi fanatics could be beaten to their knees. If those things happen, Bush wins. But if the terrorists remain the aggressors, say hello to First Lady Teresa Heinz Kerry.

It goes without saying that half-measures in Iraq will not lead to pacification.

A Tough Week

(Review) I know the past week has seemed like a replay of the Tet Offensive. The important thing to remember, though, is that the Tet Offensive was a huge military disaster for the North Vietnamese. They--and their VC proxies--were slaughtered in the field, much like we are slaughtering insurgents anywhere they are willing to make a stand.

What we are doing in Iraq would not be easy at the best of times. It will only get harder if we lose our will. As Ralph Peters points out in today's New York Post:

But now, in the face of a Coalition victory, a cancerous danger threatens. President Bush is on the verge of making the same mistake his father made at the end of Desert Storm and that his Pentagon advisers encouraged him to make last year - stopping half-way.

Moqtada Sadr's organization must be destroyed. Sadr must be captured or killed. If he hides in a mosque, go in after him. We're not impressing our enemies with our restraint - they play the religion card as the ace that never fails.

And the parallel operations in the Sunni Triangle must be pursued to the complete subjugation of Fallujah and the defeat of any terrorist who raises a gun.

Our president must make no mistake: Any "settlement," any halt short of the annihilation of the killers who want to destroy the future of Iraq, will be read throughout that troubled country and the greater Islamic world as a resounding victory for the terrorists. They'll be viewed as having defeated the U.S. military, stopping it in its tracks.

Reality is immaterial. In the Middle East, perception trumps facts. Only uncompromising strength impresses our enemies. The president can't afford to listen to the counsels of caution.

For some reason, the administration seems to want to stop at some midpoint, without going all the way, as if they want us to be seen as the nice guys. But, the Iraqis with whom we're fighting will never see us that way, and it's a pointless effort to try and make believe it's true. All that our "cease-fires" are doing is giving the impression that we don't have the will to hunt down the insurgents and kill them.

And, apparently, they're right. 

The PDB

(Review) The top secret, super-classified President's Daily Briefing from August, 2001, has been released. The headline is "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US".

The content's, Richard Ben-Veniste's comments notwithstanding, is simply:

Clandestine, foreign government, and media reports indicate Bin Ladin since 1997' has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the US. Bin Ladin implied in US television interviews in 1997 and 1998 that his followers would follow the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and "bring the fighting to America."

In fact, it appears that the entire PDB was written by Captain Obvious. "Terrorist hates us. Wants to Blow Stuff Up Over Here." Wow. Thanks for that news flash. I think we figured that our sometime in Reagan's first term, but kudos to bringing it to our attention.

Condi was right. There's nothing actionable here. It's just a generalized warning of something we've known ever since Bin Laden went to Cloudcuckooland in '91. 

(Hat tip: marcland)

Friday Follies

"What," you are probably wondering, "have I missed in the blogosphere this week?" Here's a taste:

QandO: McQ gives you the lowdown on MOUT.

The Volokh Conspiracy (Here, here, here, and here): Eugene Volokh appears to be fascinated by porn. Well, the government's proposed crackdown on it anyway.

Sgt Stryker: Stryker passes along a message from Sen. Bob Kerrey.

Andrew Sullivan: Sullivan passes along a message home from a marine in Fallujah. Semper Fi!

Calblog: Justin sees censorship in the decision of the Vice President's wife, Lynne Cheney, pressuring a publisher not to reprint her book, Sisters. What with the government's crackdown on porn, maybe the VP's wife republishing a book full of hot girl-on-girl action isn't the most politically opportune thing to do right now.

The Mulatto Advocate: Robert suspects that the community of Inglewood will be wondering what they were drinking when the voted to tell Wal-Mart to screw off. It was the Union Koolaid©. Hope you find it refreshing when you're out looking for a job. It's not like businesses are lining up to open stores there.

The Spoons Experience: If you're an animal lover, you'll be very disturbed by the British TV commercials for the Ford SportKa. Ford rejected them, but still...

Enjoy.  

The Movable Type Empire Continues to Grow

(Review) Anticipatory Retaliation has joined the growing number of Blogger defectors--including yours truly--who've changed over to a nice new MT web site.

Go show the love. 

Outright foolishness

(Review) Somebody needs to tell Paul Bremer that the time for negotiations has passed. As a political move, this is extraordinarily stupid:

"As of noon today coalition forces have initiated a unilateral suspension of offensive operations in Fallujah to allow for a meeting between members of the Governing Council, local Muslim leadership and the leadership of anti-coalition forces," the top U.S. civilian administrator, L. Paul Bremer, said Friday.

The coalition was also letting women and children out of the city, but men of military age were to remain. But while the formal suspension was ongoing, U.S. forces were still coming under insurgent fire, so they returned it.

After dark Friday, the U.S. military called in airstrikes from AC-130 gunships.

"Should these discussions break down, the coalition military forces are prepared to go back on the offense in military operations," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy head of operations in Iraq, said earlier Friday. "At no time ... do soldiers forfeit their inherent right to defense ... if fired upon, they will fire back."

The insurgents launched more attacks after the suspension announcement, Los Angeles Times reporter Tony Perry told Fox News from Fallujah. The camp he was in came under mortar and small-arms fire, he said, "to a greater degree in those hours after that announcement than it had been in the previous week."

"If it was temporarily suspended it was one of the most temporary suspensions you can ever imagine," Perry said. "Fighting has continued all day because there's only really one party willing to agree to suspend offensive operation — that of course is the Marines."

This is not the right message to send. The right message is to show the insurgents that we will hunt them down and kill them without hesitation.

Perhaps the CPA is doing this to get as many women and children out as possible, before they raze the place to the ground, but somehow, I doubt it.

I hope I'm wrong.

A general observation

One of the key arguments we're hearing from the left is that everything is going to heck in a hand basket in Iraq. It's just like Vietnam, we're told, where all the firepower in the world won't help us.

Apart from being an outstanding display of ignorance about both modern military tactics and history, I just love the unspoken subtext: "Our boys always botch it." Our troops just can't win. They're evidently just not good enough. It's all gonna be body bags from here on out.

These are, by the way the same people who, when the invasion took a 4-day operational pause last March, immediately began pulling out the "Q" word. Good old RW Apple was certain the war was lost by D+8, about a week and a half before we captured Baghdad. And he, and others like him, were doing it a year earlier than that that, when they were assuring us that it was only a matter of time 'til the Brutal Afghan Winter™ bogged us down like Soviet conscripts.

One wonders why these people always assume, just as a matter of course, that our boys simply don't have what it takes to beat our opponents, who apparently are all nine feet tall, and have the strength of ten because their hearts are pure. BY all accounts, we've lost about 20 or so soldiers and marines over the past week. We've killed hundreds of insurgents.

Now, far be it from me to bring up the whole unsavory notion of "kill ratios", but frankly, you can't take that kind of loss ration and remain a viable force. As hard as it might be to believe, when you kill enough of your enemies, they stop fighting, even if only because they're all dead.

The simple truth is that, now that the Iraqi insurgents have crawled out of their holes, they are getting whacked left and right. It isn't being done without cost, but it is being done, and done well, by the soldiers, airmen, and marines on the ground there.

In a very real sense, it's a good thing for us that these disaffected elements have decided to stand up and fight. The end result will be that they'll cause a lot less trouble in the future.

What with being dead, and all.

Dusting off the "Q" word

(Review) Ralph Peters writes that the stakes in Iraq are higher than we realize.

Iran and Syria are at war with the United States. In Iraq. Now.

Washington refuses to admit it. The Bush administration claims that the struggle in Iraq is about the future of the entire Middle East, but won't concede publicly that other countries in the region are extensively involved. And the outcome they seek is exactly the opposite of what we hope to achieve.

The bloody combat throughout Iraq this past week didn't only involve Iraqi Ba'athist insurgents and al Qaeda. The Iranians vigorously prepared and supported killer-cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's "Mahdi" militia. Iranians are active agents in the widespread terrorism in southern Iraq. And, according to intelligence shared exclusively with The Post, approximately 30 al Qaeda executives have been allowed to operate from Teheran, feeding agents into Iraq with the collusion of the Iranian government.

To the West, Syria has been increasingly bold in its support of the Sunni-Arab insurgents in Fallujah and elsewhere in the Sunni triangle. Our Marines killed Syrians in Fallujah. They'll find and kill more. Syrian security services are deeply involved in this fight - and in murdering Americans.

The worst news is that, contrary to Washington's wishful thinking, the Iranians and Syrians - as well as various terrorist groups - are cooperating. In the Middle East, the enemy of my enemy truly is my friend. Political marriages of convenience are one of the region's oldest traditions.

Arab nations aren't upset with our action in Iraq because they think we're crusaders. They aren't edgy because they had any great love for Saddam Hussein. They hate it because it's a direct threat to the hold that their leaders have on power.

None of them had any problem with the 1991 Gulf War. Arab Troops fought alongside us to liberate Kuwait. At the time, they knew that our operations wouldn't include an occupation of Baghdad and the overthrow of the Ba'athist regime there.

Arab leaders, you see, don't actually believe the propaganda they spout for public consumption. They know the US has no designs on occupying that part of the world.

But they also know that a free and democratic Iraq is the biggest danger they face. For decades, Arab countries have been ruled by despotisms, religious and secular. If any Arab country--especially a relatively large and powerful one--can show that freedom and democracy are realistic aspirations, then the hold on power of the Iranian Mullahs, the Ba'athists in Syria, and yes, even our good Friends in the House of Saud, become suddenly more tenuous.

They will oppose us at every turn because the real danger to their power is a free and democratic Iraq that exists long after US troops come home.

Much has been made in recent days about how closely Iraq is starting to resemble Vietnam. In a sense, the critics are right. Iraq does resemble Vietnam, though not for the reasons the critics would have us believe.

After our withdrawal from Vietnam, when it became clear that the US no longer had the will to oppose soviet adventurism, the deluge began. As it turned out, the domino theory was pretty much correct after all, and Vietnam was vital to our national security.

The fall of Vietnam led directly to the fall of Cambodia, and the ensuing horrors, about which we did nothing. For the rest of the 1970s, communist power waxed greater all across the globe, in places as far afield as Angola, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan. Revolutionary movements flared across Africa and Central America, while we, sapped by our losing effort in Vietnam, sat idly by.

The withdrawal from Vietnam and the waning American power of the 1970s were not two events that occurred in isolation. The latter was the direct result of the former.

At this point, it doesn't matter why we are in Iraq. It doesn't matter if Bush lied. What matters is that a withdrawal now will send a clear message to the terror masters, a message every bit as clear as our evacuation from Somalia, that when the chips are down, we'll walk away.

By what sophistry of reason can anyone think that a withdrawal from Iraq will produce anything other than a harvest of death and destruction as the terror masters plan to strike us again and again, in utter contempt of our weakness?

The lesson of Vietnam was not that it wasn't worth the candle to fight there. The lesson was that if we were going to fight, doing it by half measures was a recipe for eventual disaster.

A similar disaster would just as surely follow a unilateral withdrawal from Iraq. To do so would be to repeat the the mistake of Vietnam, not avoid it. Yet, Robert Byrd, Ted Kennedy, et al. would have us do precisely that. 

Ignore the Critics

(Review) My newest TCS column is up, in which I advocate a more rigorous approach to our security problems in Iraq.

Clue: We're at war

(Review) Victor Davis Hanson counsels us that we need to realize that we are at war, and grasp the implications of what that means.

We are told by Senator Graham that we smashed al Qaeda only to discover that we had hit a mercury-like substance that now has hopelessly scattered. Well, yes, that is what happens when you strike back in war. The alternative? Allow this elemental terrorism to remain cohesive and united? War is not a decision between good and bad choices, but almost always between something bad and something worse — and so it really is preferable to have toxic mercury scattered than to have it concentrated and pure.

Another pundit assures us that terrorists after American action in Iraq are more active now than before. Well, again yes — in the sense that Germany was messier in 1944 than in 1933, or that Japan was more dangerous for Americans in 1943 than in 1935. Danger, chaos, and death are what transpire for a time when you finally decide to strike back at confident and smug enemies.

I think there's a lesson there for all of us.

Jobless Claims

(Review) Youmay remember that last week, after the March employment numbers came out, I said that it would be interesting to watch the weekly claims for unemployment to see if we could get a handle on whether the March number of 308k new jobs was a fluke, or signaled the start of new hiring. So, today, the jobless claims number looks like this:

First-time claims for state unemployment insurance fell 14,000 in the week ended April 3 to 328,000 — the lowest level since just before President Bush took office — from 342,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said.

The drop in claims far exceeded forecasts by Wall Street economists who had predicted a decline of just 2,000. The Labor Department said last week's weekly level of jobless claims was the smallest since 320,000 in the week of Jan. 13, 2001.

Now, this number doesn't tell us anything about hiring at US businesses, but it does tell us that retention of current workers is on the rise, and that's a good thing. The implications are very positive, anyway.

Kerry: al-Sadr "a legitimate voice"

(Review) Via LGF, I see that John Kerry still holds American soldiers in the same high regard he did 30 years ago, when he was accusing them of being a collection of war criminals.

In an interview broadcast Wednesday morning, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry defended terrorist Shiite imam Muqtada al-Sadr as a "legitimate voice" in Iraq, despite that fact that he's led an uprising that has killed nearly 20 American GIs in the last two days.

Speaking of al-Sadr's newspaper, which was shut down by coalition forces last week after it urged violence against U.S. troops, Kerry complained to National Public Radio, "They shut a newspaper that belongs to a legitimate voice in Iraq."

In the next breath, however, the White House hopeful caught himself and quickly changed direction. "Well, let me...change the term 'legitimate.' It belongs to a voice--because he has clearly taken on a far more radical tone in recent days and aligned himself with both Hamas and Hezbollah, which is a sort of terrorist alignment."

Too late for that save, John. So, I guess there's no reason for us to be upset that Sadr's people have killed several of our marines over the past few days, huh? What with him being all legitimate, and all.

Why not just surrender now, and welcome our new Islamofascist leaders?

Apparently, Dr. Rice is keen to tell her side of the story

Photo: Reuters/Mannie Garcia

Not the most fortunate pose

Photo: AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

How many lost jobs?

(Review) Tim Kane writes in the New York Times that claims of 2 million jobs lost since 2001 may be quite overblown. In fact, with 138.3 million Americans working, that 600,000 more people than when Bush was inaugurated.

Once again, the problem lies in the difference between the establishment survey, and the household survey. This article is a very good primer on the differences between the two, and the shortcomings they have in telling us the specifics about employment.

Establishing a monopoly on violence

(Review) George Will writes that the pretty phase of the war in Iraq has ended.

When Sadr's forces took to the streets, with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, many of the freshly minted Iraqi security forces took flight. It is too late for debate about being in Baghdad. And the (relatively) pretty phase of empire - the swift dispatch of an enemy army - is over. Regime change, occupation, nation-building - in a word, empire - is a bloody business. 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.

The military equation for this is really quite simple, if brutal. I know that many of you are uncomfortable in thinking in these terms, but here goes: If you want to win, you must kill the enemy until he surrenders, or until there aren't any left, then you occupy his land.

We kind of did it backwards. Since the Iraqis didn't really fight, we occupied their land, but we didn't kill enough of them to drive the lesson home. Now, we are having to teach that lesson.

You see, to truly win, your enemy has to be defeated. They have to know that they gave it their best shot, and you just kept killing them, then you killed them until you took everything they wanted. That sends the enemy a message that they have been decisively beaten.

When you don't send that message, you don't win, at least, not fully or convincingly.

In 1918, Field Marshal Hindenburg and General Ludendorf bluntly told the Kaiser that he had lost the confidence of the army. Further, they informed him that, while they still occupied great swathes of northern France, the army was about a week away from complete disintegration. The Kaiser abdicated, the German government fell, and the Wiemar Republic was created. In a few weeks, the Republic's representatives signed the Armistice at Compiegne that ended the First World War.

The trouble was that the Germans hadn't actually been beaten. Like a chess player that knows checkmate is inevitable, the German government tipped over their king, and the war was over.

But, the German Army wasn't routed. Allied soldiers commenced only a brief, token occupation of Germany. And the German people had not been beaten, nor seen their army routed--in fact, there was no real combat anywhere in Germany proper--so, it was hard for them to accept that Germany had lost the war. Almost immediately, the rumor started that Germany had been betrayed by the "November Criminals", i.e., the German representatives who signed the Armistice in November, 1918.

That dissatisfaction, which was deepened by the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles, led almost in a straight line to the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor in January of 1933, and all the horrors that followed.

So, in WWII, the allies agreed early on that this time, there would be no armistice. The war would end only when there was complete, unconditional surrender. No end save victory. And we killed as many Germans and Japanese as necessary to secure it.

But, because we didn't do that in Iraq, all to many of them failed to get the message that they had been beaten. The best course of action is to make that message starkly clear to them now.

A blinding glimpse of the obvious

(Review) Ever the clever one, John Kerry thinks that the Bush Administration is playing politics with Iraq.

Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry suggested Tuesday that President Bush may have set the June 30 deadline for turning over control of Iraq to interim government for political reasons.

Welcome to the party, Johnny. I said that last year when the Administration first announced it. And that's why I've questioned whether the Bush Administration would do what needs to be done to make a successful go at creating a democratic Iraq.

But, let's not pretend that Bush was acting in a vacuum, here. All along the way, he's faced constant criticism from Kerry, Dean, Kennedy, et al. about how the whole thing was a put-up job, how Bush was a liar, how this was all about oil, yadda, yadda, yadda.

So, Kerry's argument, as near as I can figure it, is that we shouldn't be in Iraq, the invasion was based on Bush's lies, and that we shouldn't leave until we are sure of success. In other words, nothing Bush ever does will be acceptable, since, by definition, everything he does is wrong.

Thank God the Republicans didn't have that same attitude when we were fighting the Nazis. If they had, every blog entry I make would have to approved by my local kreisleiter.

Show Trials

(Review) My newest TCS article is up. This time, I discuss the administration of "justice" at the UN, and why we should be wary of it.

When I was on active duty, we were armed with guns

(Review) This is a different combat load than I remember.

U.S. troops armed with photographs have captured a number of people in the restive city of Falluja in Iraq in a search for those responsible for an ambush that killed four American security guards there last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday.

I'm just not sure how I'd react if a squad of marines stormed in, pointing their 8x10 glossies at me.

Knocking down the wasp's nest

(Review) Larry Miller has the perfect comeback for Spain's new Prime Minister.

According to John Diamond in USA Today, Zapatero told El Pais, Spain's leading daily newspaper, that "the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was a 'great error' that has aggravated the terrorist threat."

Well, sure it has. And knocking down a giant wasp's nest in your back yard aggravates the wasps, too, but eventually it has to be done. Unless you're okay with your wife and children getting stung and screaming in pain. Again, and again, and again, and again. Or trying to reason with the wasps. Or just pretending they don't exist. Or giving up your back yard and moving.

Nice analogy. 

American Theocracy

(Review) As hard as it might be to believe, there are a lot of people on the Left who live in mortal fear that we in the US are just a few short steps from the implementation of a Christian theocracy. Mark Steyn writes that people who think that are simply unhinged from reality.

That's certainly Steyn's opinion of British satirist Alistair Beaton, who's just released a new play that portrays Bush and Blair as Christian theocrats.

One can be pro-war or anti-war, but the notion that the fundamentalism that's threatening the world is Bush-Blair Christianity is so far off the mark as to be pathological. I mean, OK, it was pretty funny when Paxman asked the Prime Minister if he and the President prayed together. Those goofy fundamentalists, eh? But then it's also pretty funny surely when Jack Straw goes to Teheran to hang with the mullahs and, even though he's not a Muslim, he's obliged to do that "peace and blessings be upon his name" parenthesis whenever he mentions the Prophet Mohammed. I mean, what's the deal with that? Anyone would think they were a coercive theocracy like Washington, right? Maybe Alistair Beaton could write a comedy song about that. Right after he moves to a secure location.

The contours of our epic clash of civilisations are clear now: Christians are a cheap laugh and in control of the Bush Administration, Jews are sinister and in control of the Bush Administration, and Muslims... whoa, best not to mention them, man. You don't want to be Islamophobic. You can sing "We're Sending You A Cluster Bomb From Jesus" because there are no "fundamentalist Christians" within 20 miles of the Birmingham Rep - or at least none that is going to be waiting for you at the stage door. "We're Sending You A Schoolgirl Bomb From Allah" might attract notice from a livelier crowd. If you're going to be provocative, it's best to do it with people who can't be provoked.

Fortunately, there are still a few genuine satirists around - for example, the chaps who put together the EU report on rising anti-Semitism. "The largest group of the perpetrators of anti-Semitic activities appears to be young, disaffected white Europeans," said the official summary, introducing us to the concept of Euromaths. If you troubled yourself to look inside, it turned out that some nine per cent of anti-Semitic attacks were by young white males. The remaining 91 per cent were by... well, let's not get into that. In the EU, nine per cent is enough to make you the "largest group". One day, there will be only one tattooed knuckle-dragging white skinhead left on the continent. But he'll single-handedly be officially responsible for the majority of anti-Semitic attacks.

The trouble with making up your own ideologically sound boogeymen is that it blinds you to the existence of real boogeymen. 

Fly the friendly skies

(Review) The New York Times' David Brooks has a wonderfula suggestion for political junkies: Politically segregated airlines.

Liberals will get their own airline...

The way I see it, every flight on Liberal Air (motto: Your Grievances Are Our Grievances) will take off 45 minutes late, or whenever people feel like leaving, with the ensuing late arrivals blamed on Karl Rove.

The planes themselves will be designed by a really interesting fuselage cooperative in Oregon. Seating will be divided between coach class, working class (mostly screenwriters in flannel shirts) and faculty.

The experience of flying on Liberal Air will be different than flying on normal airlines, and the company will be structured in different ways. For example, the frequent flier program will reward customers the less they fly, just to make things even. Airfares will be symbolic, since everything is paid for by George Soros. Pilots, who look disturbingly like Arlo Guthrie, will greet passengers at the door of the plane to apologize for the oil they are about to consume.

And conservatives will have theirs...

Right Wing Express will have a different corporate culture...The special George Bush magnetometers will check for firearms, just in case someone isn't packing, and will also peer into the soul of each passenger (Good Heart . . . Evildoer . . . Good Heart . . . Evildoer).

All passengers who pass through the membership committee will be awarded their own "Mission Accomplished!" flight suit. They will find the fares surprisingly affordable, especially if they fly up front, because first-class fares will have been drastically reduced in order to stimulate economic growth and the first-class meals will be especially lavish to give the hungry folks in coach an extra incentive to work hard and reform their lives.

All Right Wing Express flights will leave exactly on time, though for national security reasons the pilots will not reveal the identity of the destination cities...

Right Wing Express flights will not only land at airports, they will occupy airports. Passengers might sometimes find the flight attendants a tad abrasive ("You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall . . ."), but the cigarettes will be free and plentiful, and each passenger will be greeted with an appropriately conservative mantra, "Welcome to Right Wing Express, how can I help you help yourself?"

That way, he concludes, liberals and conservatives will never have to talk to each other again.

Ground Truth

(Review) McQ, of QandO blog, weighs in on what's happening in Iraq.

While any situation, such as Iraq, could become a "quagmire", it isn't there yet. What we're seeing is a country trying to sort itself out after decades of brutal totalitarian rule. They have many points of view and many methods of expressing them.

Obviously there are going to be those who want to go back to the way it was. You'll find them in Fallujah and Ramadi. And there are those who have their own ideas as to how the new Iraq should look, they're in Sadar City and in the south.

What we have to understand is this is as much a part of the process as the constitution, the interim government and the upcoming handover. But without the US presence, without the resolution to quickly and decisively take action to repel chaos or violence where ever it emerges, it could become a quagmire very, very quickly.

The way to prevent that is the quick application of overwhelming force.

McQ suggests that this might be part of the US plan. Let the bad guys "congregate and celebrate" then you can cath them all together, and whack them easily.

I doubt the US administration there has that kind of thinking going on. Apart from anything else, it's a fairly risky strategy, because it allows the bad guys to get the chance to throw off a coup, before you expect it.

Not that we appear to have prevented such a coup attempt anyway.

But, however, we got here, we're here now, so we should use the opportunity for whacking those who need to be whacked.

I love my email

A loyal reader, "walker", writes:

If brains were dynamite, 'bushies' wouldn't have enough to blow their noses. "Liberals" do not espouse entitlements. Liberals ARE freemarketeers. More so than your beloved FUHRER BUSH. Democrats support entitlements for the poor, Republicans support entitlements for the rich, Libertarians support neither. Libertarians are constitutionalists, Fuhrer bush and wilhelm ashcroft seek to burn the constitution. Go read a book and learn something.

Like what? Grammar and punctuation?

But I kid folks. I kid because I love.

Too bad he's not running the show instead of Paul Bremer

(Review) Formers Undersecretary of Defense Jed Babbin pipes in with his views on how the US should be handling the occupation of Iraq.

I won't even excerpt it here. Just read it all.

What I Miss Most About Bill Clinton

(Review) you know what I miss most about Bill Clinton. It was the sheer effrontery of the man. He could look you in the eye and declare, "I never had sex with that woman," and, even if you knew it was probably a complete untruth, you still had to grant him the ability to play it out to the end.

"That depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." I mean, even Dick Nixon didn't have that capability.

So, seeing Clinton's Washington Post op-ed piece brought it all back. The absolute chutzpah of the guy, displayed once again for us.

This month marks 10 years since the advent of the Rwandan genocide, a cruel, violent and well-organized rampage that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children and the total disruption of Rwandan society. Over the past decade, scholars and advocates have rightly reflected on the reasons that the international community and nations in Africa must share the responsibility for this tragedy. As I said during my trip to Rwanda in 1998, "We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe haven for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide."

Mistakes, in other words, were made.

Well, maybe we didn't call it genocide, but it's pretty clear that Clinton knew it was. He just didn't want to do anything about it.

And he didn't.

So, having him drone on for 905 words about his hopes that the "international community will continue to learn from our mistakes" is just a bit much, even for him. Because, if he had it to do all over again, he would have done the same thing.

But, man, he can bite that lower lip and get all shiny-eyed with sorrow at the drop of a hat.

If he'd gone to Hollywood as a young man, he'd have an attic full of Oscars by now.

The Price of Restraint

(Review) Ralph Peters has it exactly right.

On Sunday, in Baghdad, Kufa, Najaf and elsewhere, the followers of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, bolstered by his militia, rioted and killed seven U.S. soldiers and two El Salvadoran peacekeepers. It should never have happened.

Sadr's militia should have been disarmed and disbanded in the earliest days of the occupation. Sadr himself should have been arrrested for his inflammatory preaching. But we were afraid to stir up trouble.

Now we face a much greater threat than we'd have faced had we acted firmly last year. We set a precedent of timidity.

Recently, we summoned the nerve to shut down Sadr's private newspaper for formenting trouble. But our reluctance to face down the man himself has been read locally as cowardice not tolerance.

Make no mistake: Just because we view restraint as a virtue does not mean our enemies share that view. The refusal to use our power in the face of defiance only makes defiance more attractive.

When U.S. forces arrive in a troubled country, they create an initial window of fear. It's essential to act decisively while the local population is still disoriented. Each day of delay makes our power seem more hollow. You have to do the dirty work at the start. The price for postponing it comes due with compound interest.

Like I asked a few days ago, Why isn't Sadr already sittting in Guantanamo? Why are we pussyfooting around. There are certain people with whom we will never make friends. Those people should be removed from the equation.

We should also have made it clear in Fallujah last week. But we didn't. The best thing we could have done is marched that Marine battalion into town straight away, firing at anyone who even looked at them cross-eyed.

We've made the mistake of thinking that this is an accupation much like that of Germany or Japan, where the main need was for police/security and the provision of services.

The difference, though, is that in 1945, those countries had been decisively defeated on the battlefield. Their units surrendered and were taken captive, thier cities were destroyed, and all but the most basic services had been eliminated.

Conversely, in Iraq, their army disintigrated, returned home, and tried to lose themselves in the civilian population. Hence, unlike Germany or Japan, there are a large number of armed and more-or-less trained soldiers skulking about.

The way to respond when they raise their heads is not with restraint, at a time and means of our own choosing, but with immediate, overwhelming violence. The consequences of armed resistance should be stark, immediate and visibly gruesome.

The twin messages should always be that cooperation or peaceful activity will be rewarded, but the second you flash a gun anywhere, an immediate and swift response will follow, no questions asked.

The current increase in our operational tempo should have occured months ago. As far as Sadr goes, we should have sent in troops to arrest him last year when an Iraqi judge first issued the warrant for his arrest on murder charges in a case concerning a rival cleric.

All we are doing by pussyfooting around and trying to be the nice guys there are to look like patsies.

Believing three impossible things before breakfast

(Review) Mark Steyn writes that the left believes a great many things, and they're mainly foolish things.

This isn't entirely a matter of trivialities. The fads and fashions of the world aren't confined to the Billboard Hot 100. All over the planet, men in late middle age are pretending to like stuff just 'cause it's what the likes of Maureen Dowd tell them people want to hear. John Kerry pretends to like gangsta rap. Russia pretends it supports the Kyoto Accord. The European Union pretends Yasser Arafat is committed to peace with Israel. The Security Council pretends its resolutions mean something. Kofi Annan pretends the Oil-for-Fraud program is a humanitarian aid effort for the Iraqi people. The International Atomic Energy Authority pretends the mullahs in Tehran are good-faith negotiators on the matter of Iranian nukes.

And they'll continue to believe these things in the absence of any supporting evidence, and the existence of loads of evidence to the contrary.

In another context, we call this "religion".

The Long Shadow of Vietnam

(Review) Michael Barone writes that the War on Terror is being fought under the constant shadow of the Vietnam experience.

One of the lessons many liberal Americans took from Vietnam was that the United States could not always be counted on to be on the side of the good guys, and, indeed, was often on the side of the bad guys. They preferred to look away from the bloodbath that followed our defeat in Vietnam, just as today's Bush critics are not much interested in the liberation of Iraqis from Saddam Hussein's tyranny. In the post-Vietnam period, these Americans concentrated on seeking unilateral disarmament or a nuclear freeze, limiting the power of the military and the CIA, erecting a firewall between the FBI and the CIA, and seeking multilateral foreign approval for American action. All of this was informed by a sense that the Vietnam War was a paradigmatic event in American history and that its lessons should be the basis of all future policy.

Whatever LBJ or Dick Nixon did or didn't do in Vietnam has little relevance today. It's that simple.

But for some on the Left, Vietnam was just the start of a long slide toward irrationality. Mentally, they are still 19 year-old students, complaining about the system, man.

Something happened to that generation. Once they decided that the US was wrong, and essentially untrustworthy when it came to world affairs, they began to believe it, along with a number of other foolish things. It's almost as if they unhooked their minds, from reality, and refused to accept anything that didn't make them feel good.

Think about the looniness of the Left for a minute. I mean, really think about it. It's like a syllabus of idiocy.

Castro is practically a hero to the Left because, after all, unlike the corrupt American system, everyone in Cuba has free health care. Never mind that the island is essentially one big prison, where free elections, political rights, democracy, and the rest are unheard of, and you toe the Castroite line or you wind up in prison. We give our prisoners free health care, too, yet prison seems, like Cuba, to be a place everyone wants to escape from, rather than gain admittance too.

It was much the same with the Sandinistas. When the Sandys were finally forced to hold free elections through international pressure, the Left nearly had a fit when the people voted them out of office. It seems that, when given the choice between universal health care and literacy, and the freedom to live their lives without being under the thumb of government thugs, people prefer the latter.

Ungrateful bastards.

People like Kerry spent the latter half of the Cold War advocating A nuclear freeze or outright disarmament, so the USSR wouldn't feel threatened. The problem, they assured us, was our unreasonable fear of communism. Please take no notice of the 100 million or so people the communists executed outright, forced into starvation or worked to death in the gulag or the laogai. They didn't mean to do that kind of stuff. We made them do it, because of our unreasonably threatening posture.

People like David Bonior sucked up to every commie dictator who'd give them the time of day, and never mind the work camps and political repression endemic to their societies. Because it was America that was really the cause of the world's problems.

And it wasn't just politics. These are the same people who spent the 70s talking about the power in the Great Pyramid of Cheops, and the 80s praising the energy of crystals. Any religion that made them feel good, without requiring any onerous duties, that was their thing, man, because really, who needs all that righteousness and God and punishment stuff that really harshes your buzz?

I have digital cable at home, and sometimes put on one of the digital music channels on as background. Saturday, Chris and were talking, and I put the "Soundscapes" channel on. One of the songs came from an album called "Womanspirit". Imagine my surprise to learn that this composer was the Marin County chair of the 1992 Jerry Brown campaign. How perfect. New age religion and radical politics bound together in one package.

The really irritating thing about the Left is that, having been on the wrong side of the great moral struggle of the 20th century, the struggle against totalitarian communism, and seeing the gratitude with which people who lived under communism celebrated it's downfall, they have taken the first chance available to prove that they've learned nothing. They now side with the Islamofascists, or in the case of the Saddam Hussein, truly evil totalitarianism.

And, they're taking the side of people for whom they have literally nothing in common. Multiculturalism? Nope. Only approved Islamic culture. Women's rights? Don't make me laugh. Islamic fundamentalism is the antithesis of everything the West has stood for since the Enlightenment of the 18th century.

But the Islamofascists hate America, and, as Noam Chomsky assures us, America is so worthy of hatred, that they must have a point.

Usually, I try to be charitable to such people, and kindly assume that they're just vapid fools. It is, after all, much nicer than assuming the only other alternative, which is that they are simply evil, and their apologies for totalitarianism are the natural result of their desires to hold that kind of power over the rest of us.

They don't even see how deeply unserious they are. John Kerry calls the coalition in Iraq the "coalition of the bribed and coerced". That's a pretty turn of phrase. One almost wishes he would be elected president, if for no other reason, than because it would force him to grow up. He could no longer refer to our allies in such language, at least, without irreparably harming his administration's foreign policy.

But, of course, growing up is the one the thing that the Vietnam generation Left has managed to avoid.  

No Mogadishus

(Review) Mark Bowden, author of Blackhawk Down writes in today's Wall Street Journal that, unlike the Clinton Administration in Somalia, we must answer the violence in Fallujah with a response that punishes those responsible.

The worst answer the U.S. can make to such a message--which is precisely what we did in Mogadishu--is back down. By most indications, Aidid's supporters were decimated and demoralized the day after the Battle of Mogadishu. Some, appalled by the indecency of their countrymen, were certain the U.S. would violently respond to such an insult and challenge. They contacted U.N. authorities offering to negotiate, or simply packed their things and fled. These are the ones who miscalculated. Instead the U.S. did nothing, effectively abandoning the field to Aidid and his henchmen. Somalia today remains a nation struggling in anarchy, and the America-haters around the world learned what they thought was a essential truth about the United States: Kill a few Americans and the most powerful nation on Earth will run away. This, in a nutshell, is the strategy of Osama bin Laden.

Many Americans despise the effort under way in Iraq. They opposed overthrowing Saddam Hussein by force, and disbelieved the rationale offered by President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. There may well be a heavy political price to pay for the mistakes and exaggerations; President Bush faces a referendum in just seven months. But however that election turns out, and however imperfectly we have arrived at this point, the facts on the ground in Iraq remain. Saddam is gone and Iraq, thanks to U.S. intervention, is

In other words, grow up and join the rest of the adults in the real world.

Not a good weekend

(Review) It was not a good weekend in Iraq this week. Rioting Shiite followers of the radical "cleric" Muqtada al-Sadr managed to kill 8 US Soldiers and one Salvadoran soldier.

America's Proconsul, Paul Bremer, has declared Sadr an outlaw, as well as his "Al-Mahdi Army", a Shiite militia group. Declaring him an outlaw and actually doing something about it are, so far, two entirely different things however.

Al-Sadr does not hold widespread support among Iraq's Shiites, many of whom see him as too young, radical and inexperienced to lead. But he does have the backing of hundreds of young seminary students and many impoverished Shiites, devoted to him because of his anti-U.S. stance and the memory of his father, a Shiite religious leader gunned down by suspected Saddam agents in 1999.

Al-Sadr has demanded an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, and his followers have protested against U.S.-backed local officials in several towns in the south in previous months. But the cleric's political program has often been unclear.

Sadr is a problem, and he needs to be treated like what he is, a terrorist, instead of a cleric. Sadr is backed by Iran. And the Iranians are keen to have Iraq, or at least the Shiite portion of it, turned into an allied Islamic Republic, much like Iran's. The Iranians are pouring money into the radical Shiites like there's no tomorrow, which, if Iraq were to become a peaceful and democratic nation, might literally be true for the Iranian mullahs, considering the level of opposition they are facing inside Iran already. That's why Sadr's political program is unclear. He doesn't have one. To the extent one exists, it is constructed by the Iranians, not by Sadr.

Why Sadr is not already sitting in a 6x9 cell in Guantanamo a mystery to me.

Meanwhile, the Marines and Iraqi security forces are surrounding Fallujah, as part of Operation Vigilant Resolve. What kind of operation this will be is unclear, but it appears to be a house-to-house search for the killers.

Let's be honest. The Bush Administration is also screwing up by the numbers. We've been there for over a year now, and the reconstruction money appropriated by congress is just now starting to be spent. We're trying to use peacetime rules to do wartime stuff, and it's not working. Granted, the Iraqis are probably no the most reasonable people in the world, but they expected at least some material progress in getting services restored and an economy moving. So far, they've mainly got bupkis.

I said it last year: The Iraqis should have been made to feel like the American invasion was winning the lottery. Instead, we've given them nothing beyond basic security--an important thing, to be sure, but it doesn't feed hungry children. Meanwhile, that administration has been so spooked by the fear of hearing someone mutter "Halliburton", that reconstruction contracts have moved through the system like molasses in January.

People who aren't working regularly simply have too much free time on their hands. Idle hands, being the Devil's workshop, need to be put to work doing some useful tasks, so that money should've been pouring in months ago.

Frankly, I'm also getting a bit tired of the way we're handling the various extremist factions there. We're letting guys like Sadr get away with murder, literally. We don't want to inflame the population. That's just dumb. People like Sadr's supporters are already killing Americans. They can't hate us any more than they already do.

A little less of the velvet glove, and little more iron hand, please.

John Kerry is right about one thing. The Bush Administration went into Iraq with only the most half-baked plan for post-war reconstruction. It seems like a lot of this stuff could've been war-gamed out, but it never was, apparently.

Part of it is a learning problem. It's been a while since we've invaded and occupied a relatively large country like Iraq. Muslim countries in general harbor what appears to be an unusually large number of complete whackos. So, obviously, things were going to occur that wasn't in the plan.

Another part of it was overconfidence. I think there was expectation that the US would be welcomed with open arms, and that the whack jobs like Sadr would be a relatively minor problem. Not that john Kerry would have done any better, by the way, assuming he'd have invaded Iraq at all. In fact, I suspect that he'd have been even worse in handling postwar Iraq, mainly because of his temptation to fall for the problem of timidity.

Timidity, of course, is always a problem with Americans. We see ourselves as nice. We don't want to upset people or cause them problems. "Love us!" we beg. "We liberated you from Saddam! Where are all the hugs?" So, when people like Sadr started popping up, we didn't chop them off at the knees. The general attitude seems to be, "We're Americans! We're all for freedom of speech! We can't do bad things to our opponents." Wrong answer.

People like Sadr aren't "opponents". John Kerry is an opponent. People like Sadr are enemies. Opponents you can debate with. Opponents will stay withing the generally recognized parameters of political debate and opposition. Enemies, on the other hand, are not people with whom you have constructive debate. They are people you kill.

There's a difference.  

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Blog Roundup

I'm considering doing a regular, sort of blog roundup of things that have caught my eye. I don't know how often I'll do it, but, since I don't link much to blogdom, and since there is often a lot of interesting commentary out there, I thought I might try and take a measure of it on at least on occasional basis. So, without further ado...

QandO notes that there are barbarians among us, especially on the Left, whose reaction to the Americans who were killed in Fallujah is, "Screw 'em. And yes, we're questioning your patriotism.

Jane Galt brings us the liberal radio tidbit of the day.

Instapundit has a roundup over the reaction to the Lefty gloating over the deaths in Falluja kicked off by the comments on the Daily Kos (to which I refuse to link).

Ballon Juice has a nice roundup, as well.

Michael Friedman is kicking of a campaign to Kos' advertisers, mainly Democratic politicians, to sever their ad relationship due to Kos' intemperate comments, (which he has, by the way, deleted, what with being a moral coward and all). And the campaign's working.

Cobb has decided that he's Al Franken's biggest fan.

Indepundit gives us a great example of how representative democracy is supposed to work.

It's an Audrey Seiler caption contest at XRLQ!

Sgt Stryker is concerned that people who find the site through google queries may be confused. Helpfully, he's decided to answer the queries for them.

Enjoy.

Saving Europe by Leaving It

(Review) Victor Davis Hanson writes that we have to get out of Europe if we hope to save our relationship with it.

Precisely because we protect Europe, Europe will need ever more protecting, and will grow ever more weak. And because it will need the United States to defend it, it will ever more resent the United States. Without a real menace like the Soviet Union on its borders, Europe will find ever more outlets to vent cheaply and without consequences--at precisely the time it is most threatened by terrorists and rogue states.

In contrast, the withdrawal of Americans throughout Old Europe--sober analysts can adjudicate a remnant figure of about 30,000 or so, down from our present numbers in Spain, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Turkey, and Greece--will encourage Europe to rearm or face the consequences of institutionalized appeasement. That radical step--despite popular misconceptions that it is either impossible or unwise--is more a good thing than a bad one.

That way we will not be dealing with a spiteful teenager any longer, but a mature adult partner. And if--after we leave--Germany invades France or Poland a third time, then there is simply no answer to the European problem anyway. Instead we must trust in our confidence that Europeans are wise enough to settle their own affairs peacefully. Perhaps socialists who won't fight much abroad at least won't be likely to fight among themselves either.

Sounds like good advice to me.

Just like Yugoslavia

(Review) James Pinkerton thinks that the Bush Administration has made a huge mistake by trying to keep Iraq unified.

So what can Bush do? The basic mistake that his administration made - worse even than pegging the war to the elimination of non-existent weapons of mass destruction - was to think that Iraq was like some Eastern European state, just waiting to be liberated from a repressive dictatorship.

In countries such as Poland and Hungary, the day that the Soviet army left, those nations, drawing upon the strength of their long history of homogenous ethnicity, were launched on a path toward capitalistic, democratic normalcy.

But Iraq, divided as it is between long-warring Sunni, Shia and Kurdish populations, has always been more akin to Yugoslavia. That European "country" was glued together out of a hash of cultures after World War I. A series of ruthless Serbian leaders suppressed the nationalist yearnings of a half-dozen peoples until the 1990s, when a multi-front civil war erupted.

Today, the former Yugoslavia is mostly peaceful--because there is no Yugoslavia.

I like, and have always liked, the three-state solution. And, ever since the Turks tried to hold our feet to the fire over allowing the 4ID to invade Iraq from the North, I've thought we should have a free Kurdish state just to poke them in the eye.

If we aren't going to do the job right, and spend the time and money necessary to rebuild civil society there, then I think it's the best solution.

Heck, it may be the best solution anyway. Trying to get Shiites and Sunnis to live together at the best of times is practically impossible. The only way the Muslim countries can do it now is by oppressing whichever one of them happens to be in the minority in a given country. The whole Middle-Ages mindset of the Arab Muslim world mitigates against an easy installation of liberal democracy, anyway.

And, based on the half-baked job we're doing in bringing everybody in Iraq together so far, I suspect the whole thing will collapse into civil war within 5 years of our departure, anyway.

Look, don't get me wrong. We needed to go into Iraq and whack Saddam Hussein. If we hadn't, as Chris Hitchens points out in today's Wall Street Journal to which I link below, the whole country was on its way to looking like Fallujah did earlier this week. Our invasion there stopped a slide into utter chaos and destruction. In all probability, no matter what happens after we leave, it won't be nearly as bad as it would have been under Uday and Qusay at the end.

But we could have done so much better.

Perhaps we're doing the best we can, considering the domestic political opposition the president faces. One of the reasons why we could smash the Germans and Japanese in WWII was that the only real argument about how to fight the war was between "doves" who only wanted to raze both nations to ground, and "hawks" who wanted to raze both nations to the ground, and make the rubble bounce.

That's not the kind of atmosphere in which you have to worry about how Congress will respond to daylight carpet bombing of enemy cities. In all probability, Congress' response will be, "Are you sure you have enough planes?"

That's not the situation we have today, and it hampers the president's ability to do what needs to be done. But, given that, I think that we'd all end up coming to a lot less grief if we just partitioned the place. I think we'd have a lot better possibility of ending up with three relatively free, democratic states--at least by the lights of that benighted corner of the world--than we we currently have of ending up with a free democratic, and unified Iraq.

Read Christopher Hitchens now.

(Review) I won't even try to excerpt this. It's today's mandatory reading.

Three years ago, if you'd have told me I would ever think Hitch was mandatory reading, I'd have thought you were crazy.

But that was in the September 10th world.

He almost said "Vietnam"

(Review) Bob Herbert, in today's New York Times, strays very close to R.W. Apple territory.

We are mired in a savage mess in Iraq, and no one knows how to get out of it. More than 600 U.S. troops are already dead. The rest of the world has decided that this is an American show, so we're not getting much in the way of help. (Even the Saudis have been sticking their fingers in Uncle Sam's eye, leading the effort by OPEC to cut oil production.) President Bush won't come clean about the financial costs of the war. His mantra remains: tax cuts, tax cuts.

Bob doesn't, I notice, offer any helpful suggestions. Just the claim that it's a quagmire. Oh, he didn't say quagmire, but that's what he means.

In one sense, he is right. Oh, sure, his column is, as always, a collection of trivialities and silliness. Still, the Bush Administration has let the political calendar run Iraq policy. We haven't done the hard work of debaathification, as we did denazification in Nazi Germany. And, apparently we're not going to either. We are just going to turn it back over to the Iraqis.

Frankly, I expect a civil war in Iraq, starting the moment we leave, and ending when Iraq has been torn apart into three countries, or when a dictatorial strongman defeats the other factions. All the good work that we're doing will be for naught, because we aren't doing the basics of rooting out the baathists, imprisoning them or shooting them as seems indicated, and teaching the Iraqis about what the point of this whole democracy thing is. It is not, as the Shiites seem to think a way to legitimately oppress the Sunnis, now that they have the upper hand.

But, the Bush idea seems to have been that if we got rid of Saddam, and did a quick wash and brush up, we could be out of there by November 2004.

That offends me, because we could have done so much more, if we had been willing to invest the time and treasure it required.

Of course, I suspect the primary reason we weren't willing to do so is that the Democrats would have bitched and moaned about it unceasingly. "Why give money and food to the Iraqis when so many here at home blah, blah, blah..." The Democrats want it both ways. They want to vote against appropriating the money to do the job our troops need to do over there, then criticize the president for not doing what has to be done, oh, and by the way, we shouldn't even be over there in the first place.

No matter what the president does, he's automatically wrong. It's hard to do the right thing when the opposition tries to block it at every turn. That doesn't fully excuse the President, because I think there was too much confidence in the Administration about what would be needed to subdue Iraq after the major combat operations stopped.

But the Dems are doing everything possible that they can to make sure that the Bush Administration fails in Iraq, because it's to their political advantage to do so.

Frankly, I'm almost at the point of hoping that John Kerry wins the '04 election and that the Democrats take over the House and Senate. Let them run the whole show, I say.

At least that way, after Chicago disappears in the nuclear fire of a terrorist suitcase A-bomb, the Democratic Party will be permanently gelded. Perhaps then we can get on with winning the war on terror without them carping from the sidelines. That's pretty tough on the people of Chicago, but it's gonna happen anyway if we keep going on with half-measures like the effort in post-war Iraq.

Get it into your heads. We either win, or we lose. There's no second place. No consolation prizes. We either hunt down and kill terrorism, wherever it raises its ugly head, or we let them kill us. The Democrats seem to believe there's some middle way we can take that will make everybody happy, and that the world is full of fuzzy kitties.

That's the same fantasyland that Neville Chamberlain lived in, and it'll come crashing down, just like it did in 1938. 

Don't get him angry. You won't like him when he's angry...

(Review) Dick Clarke has angered Charles Krauthammer, prompting a full broadside in todays Washington Post.

Indeed, one has to admire it -- the most cynical and brilliantly delivered apology in recent memory: Richard Clarke using the nationally televised Sept. 11 commission hearings to address the families of the victims. "Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you."

Many were moved. I was not. For two reasons. First, the climactic confession "I failed you" -- the one that packed the emotional punch -- was entirely disingenuous. Clarke did the mea culpa and then spent the next 21/2 hours of testimony -- as he did on every talk show known to man and in the 300 pages of his book -- demonstrating how everyone else except him had failed. And they failed because the stubborn, ignorant, ideologically blinkered, poll-driven knaves and fools he had been heroically fighting against within the government would not listen to him.

Message: They failed you.

I have to admit, I'd never looked at it that way before. I thought the apology was always phony, and self-serving, but it wasn't until I saw this that I began to see how completely cynical it was.

Second, by blaming the government for the deaths of their loved ones, Clarke deftly endorsed the grotesque moral inversion by which those who died on Sept. 11 are victims of . . . George Bush. This is about as morally obscene as the implication (made by, among others, the irrepressible Howard Dean) that those who died in the Madrid bombings were also victims of George Bush.

This is false. They were all victims of al Qaeda and al Qaeda alone.

Bush's crime, if it can be called that, and Clinton's before him was not that they weren't vigilant, or that they didn't care about terrorism. The crime was a lack of imagination. For those of us in the West, no matter who we are, it's hard to wrap our minds around the idea that people would fly planes into skyscrapers. That they would invest the months of training to learn to fly jumbo jets, use box cutters to take over the planes, and all the rest of it...well, that's just not something that it's easy for us to think of. But our failure of imagination is not a crime.

Frankly, I'm glad we don't think like that.

The most telling remark Clarke made in the entire hearing was one that did not make the cover of Newsweek.

Former senator Slade Gorton: "Assuming that the recommendations that you made on January 25th of 2001 . . . had all been adopted say on January 26th, year 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?"

Clarke: "No."

Thus, doing everything demanded by the most hawkish, most prescient, most brilliant, most heroic, most swaggering anti-terrorism chief in American history -- i.e. Clarke, in his own mind -- would not have prevented Sept. 11. Why, then, should the administration apologize?

Indeed. What, ultimately, is Clarke's point at all? If we couldn't have stopped 911, then what's the point of Clarke's criticism, other than to sell many books, and thus ease Clarke into a secure retirement?

308,000

(Review) The sigh of relief from the White House this morning was like a mighty wind.

U.S. businesses created jobs at the fastest pace in nearly four years as hiring increased across a wide array of industries in March, the government said on Friday in a report that stunned financial markets and provided long-awaited evidence of a job market recovery.

Non-farm payrolls climbed 308,000 in March, helped a bit by the return of workers after a labor dispute at California grocery stores ended, the Labor Department (search) said. This was the biggest gain since April 2000 and well above the 103,000 rise expected on Wall Street.

The civilian unemployment rate, however, ticked up 0.1 percentage point from 5.6 percent in February. That occurred because more job seekers renewed their searches last month, but were unsuccessful.

308,000 new jobs is a nice figure, and it certainly takes some of the wind out of John Kerry's sails, at least for the next month. Every time he talks about job losses, the White House will just point to this as proof the president's economic plan is working. And, when you look at the breakdown of where the new jobs are being created, some pleasant things appear.

For instance, the only sectors of the economy where jobs were lost in the last month were in nondurable goods (-5k) and in temporary help (-2k). Frankly, I kind of like to see temporary help decline, as an indication that businesses are shifting from temp help to employee hires. But the fact that the rest of the sectors stayed positive is a good sign, because it indicates rising employment across the board (except manufacturing, where there was no change).

The areas where we see job gains are suggestive, too. 71k new jobs in construction. 5k new jobs in durable goods. 28k in Leisure and hospitality. Some of these gains, to be sure, are seasonal, as construction begins to rise with the arrival of spring, and the tourism industry prepares for summer travel. But people who are worried about the economy tend not to build new houses, plan vacations, or invest in purchases of big ticket items, so the numbers suggest that there is a fairly good level of confidence in the economy about the prospects for continued growth.

I wouldn't go so far as to say the economy's hopping on the Bush/Cheney '04 bandwagon yet, though.

The average workweek declined to 33.7 hours, a decline of 0.1 from last month. Obviously, the addition of new workers reduces this a bit, but that's about the same number we've seen for a year and a half. That doesn't indicate to me that there is a big rise in labor demand. People aren't working longer hours yet, so the pressure to hire is apparently still relatively muted.

I'd feel a lot better about this 308k figure if I saw some indication that the workweek was rising. That would indicate to me that businesses felt they had to hire more people to keep up with the workload.

So, I wouldn't be surprised at all if we saw one or both of the following: A sharp revision downward to the 308k number next month, and/or a much slower rate of job creation for April. I'm just not seeing evidence of increasing labor demand here. Not yet at any rate. I think it'll be interesting, though, to watch the initial unemployment claims number every Thursday for the next month. 

...And there's a flag on the play

(Review) Football great Paul Hornung has issued a public apology for his statements of earlier this week.

"I was wrong," the 1956 Heisman Trophy winner told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Wednesday. "What I should have said is: For all athletes, it is really tough to get into Notre Dame."

During a radio interview Tuesday night in Detroit, he told WXYT-AM that his alma mater has to "ease it up a little bit" on its standards.

"We can't stay as strict as we are as far as the academic structure is concerned because we've got to get the black athlete," Hornung said. "We must get the black athlete if we're going to compete."

Hornung, who is white, said in the AP interview that he changed his mind after being flooded with telephone calls from friends and media.

"I stood by my comments, but then when you have time to reflect you can always come up with some ideas," he said. "I rethought it, and if I had to do over again, I wouldn't."

Note to anyone speaking in public: If you're not willing to take some heat, then stay clear of race. If there is any possible way in which your statements can be construed as racist, they will be. Now, this is not an entirely bad thing. It’s a good thing to condemn racism. I think its far better for our country if we subject expressions of racism to condign punishment. I think it says much good about us that we will not, as a society, condone the type of racism that was common 40 years ago.

Goodbye, Orville Faubus. So long, Bull Connor. Good riddance.

That having been said, though, it is not possible to state the obvious, anymore. We know what the obvious is, and we can certainly think it, but to state it is to court disaster.

The obvious, of course, is that, measured as a group, black scholastic achievement as a whole is not as good as white scholastic achievement. For that matter, white scholastic achievement is not as great as Asian scholastic achievement. This is not a matter of opinion; this is a matter of verifiable fact.

Now, let us grant, first of all, that athletics and high intelligence seem not to go hand in hand. There is, after all, a reason why Harvard and Yale don't have teams in the Rose Bowl, and it's not just because they are in the wrong NCAA conference. And listening to, say, NHL players give interviews, one can't help but notice that the NHL—as lilly-white a sporting institution as remains anywhere in the world—is not going to be the source of the next breakthrough in single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft. The sun will set in a blazing red sky to the east of Casablanca before the Edmonton Oilers publish a paper entitled "Stochastic Variations in Currency Flows in US-China Trade" for publication in a refereed journal.

But when race is involved, merely to state the facts opens one up to an accusation that, because one believes black scholastic achievement is lower, one must necessarily believe that blacks are inherently less intellectually capable. I'd certainly agree that if one does believe that, one is racist.

There is not a scintilla of evidence that supports the idea that there are inherent racial differences at all in intellectual capacity, between any group. Not only is any measure of "intellectual capacity" so subjective that it cannot even be properly defined, the simple fact is that anyone of normal intelligence can do well in life through work and common sense.

Moreover, intelligence of and in itself, is not a particularly good measure of one's ability to be a success in life. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the genius and whack job Bobby Fischer. Albert Einstein was clearly a genius, yet he could hardly cross the street without a GPS locator, ground control and a 50,000:1 GC map.

Intelligence ain't all it's cracked up to be.

But, if there are no racial differences in intelligence, there must be some reason why blacks and whites show such noticeably disparate levels of academic achievement. I believe the answer lies in two areas: 1) Culture, and the values that inform it, and 2) lack of adequate schooling.

There is, in the culture of black youth, and especially inner-city youth, an idea--an extremely pernicious idea--that scholastic achievement, the use of proper English, etc., somehow mark one as racially inauthentic. Speaking properly and getting good grades often raises accusation's from a black youth's peer group that the youth is "acting white".

This is, quite simply, an outrage. It amounts to little more than a reinforcement of the idea that blacks are supposed to be dumber and less well-spoken than whites. It's hard to conceive of a more foolish idea to reinforce in the community.

In the normal run of things this wouldn't be so bad. After all, teenagers in general enforce all sorts of loopy ideas on their peer group. Teenagers, as a general rule of thumb, are extraordinarily unwise. But because of the pathology of single-motherhood and illegitimate birth that runs rampant in the inner-city black community, these children often lack the countervailing pressure from parents and family to succeed.

A friend of mine once told me that, in the Asian community the attitude toward education is radically different. Children are urged to seek knowledge with vigor. As my friend said, “We’re told to seek out knowledge even if others try to hide it from us.” That’s a pretty good meme, if you ask me.

Second, our society fails inner-city black children. Our public schools in the inner city are abject failures. The children are not properly taught, and, thanks to the educational community's "soft-racism of low expectations" too little effort is made at instilling a sense of discipline and pride in learning, and, frankly, too little effort is made in teaching these children properly. Compare the difference in the academic achievements of inner-city kids from private church schools to their public school counterparts. Black children from well-run, disciplined schools that expect high standards of achievement perform every bit as well as their white or Asian counterparts.

And don't think black parents don't know this. Blacks overwhelmingly support ideas like voucher programs, because they see in them a chance to rescue their children from the same failed public schools that they were subjected to.

Of course, public school in general is a disaster in this country. 80% of high school students can't identify their home state on a map. The whole education community seems intentionally obtuse when it comes to educating our children. Educators are full of "instilling self-esteem" and "social promotion", and they adamantly oppose any sort of teacher certification that may require that they themselves demonstrate an adequate knowledge of the subjects they teach.

And the whole load of touchy-feely, new-age, whole-language nonsense they get fed in teacher’s college doesn’t help either. You end with teachers in the class saying, “So, you think 2+2=5, Johnny? How do you feel about that answer? Are you comfortable with the process you used to get it?”

Couple that with the social pathologies of the inner city, and a lack of funds for basic books and instructional materials, and you have the perfect recipe for turning out generation after generation of black academic failure.

Hornung was right. If Notre Dame, or any school, wishes to obtain a larger number of black athletes, they will have to lower their academic standards. And why should that surprise us? We have—all of us, black and white—built a system that excuses failure among black students through a black youth culture that denigrates black academic success, and a public education system that doesn’t demand achievement.

The proper answer to Hornung is not to slam him for merely stating the obvious, but to work to ensure that black children are given to know both that high standards of achievement are expected from them, and that they are fully capable of meeting and exceeding those standards.

But, of course, that isn’t what we do. Our response to the lack of black scholastic achievement is affirmative action. Now, I understand the idea behind affirmative action is compassionate. But the measure of public policy is not the intentions of its advocates but the objective results it produces. Has affirmative action helped to foster the idea that blacks are equally capable as whites? Does it serve to decrease racial tensions? I believe the answer to both of those questions is no. “Affirmative action” has become a code word for “unqualified blacks who are placed here to fill a quota”. And, as long as the quota is filled, we can all relax, confidently assuring ourselves that we have helped our black fellow citizens, thereby relieving us of any responsibility for doing the hard work of preparing them for success. The unspoken assumption of affirmative action is that blacks are less capable, and without affirmative action, will never succeed.

That is certainly not its original intent, but the road to hell and all that…

The proper answer is to do the hard work necessary to ensure that black children not only have the same opportunities to succeed, but that we prepare them to succeed. It does a black child no favor to admit him to Harvard, when he doesn’t have the educational background to compete there. It does do him a favor to give him an education that allows him to enter Harvard on an equal footing with everyone else.

That means there’s plenty for all of us to do.

Blacks must combat the cultural pathologies of illegitimate birth and negative peer pressure in their own communities. Parents, teachers, community leaders, pastors must stress that the keys to success are obtaining a decent education, and not having children out of wedlock. Black children must be taught, at every opportunity that scholastic achievement, proper English, and all the rest are not part of acting white, but acting smart.

The rest of us must look at our school systems to seek ways of improving the quality of education that black children receive. We must stop failing our inner-city children by ensuring that they receive the best education possible. If that means voucher programs to make schools compete with each other, then we should implement them. If it means equalizing school spending to reduce the disparities in facilities and instructional materials between rich white schools like Beverly Hills High and mostly black schools like Crenshaw High, we should do that.

We have a responsibility to all children, irrespective of their color, to ensure that they have enough schoolbooks, enough teachers, small enough classes, etc. No, I’m not saying that money is the be-all, end-all cure, but a certain amount of money is a necessity to ensure that all students have the tools they need to learn properly. When some public schools have gold-plated gyms and classroom facilities, and some schools don’t have enough money to keep the toilets from overflowing, then we have a funding problem.

We often act as if our job ended with the death of Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. “See”, we say, “we’re all equal now. The job’s done. Let’s move on.” But, as long as we provide a substandard education to black children in the inner city, our job isn’t done. It’s not enough to simply say that black citizens are legally equal. We have to create a society in which black children are equal in practice. That they receive the same preparation for success that everyone else does.

Every generation of black children contains a potential Einstein or Bill Gates. By failing them, we rob not only them but also ourselves of potential improvements in science, business and technology that could reap untold benefits. By giving them the tools they need to succeed—real tools, not salves to the conscience like affirmative action—the result will enrich us all.   

Blegging

I need some help. My new book is at the publisher, and we can't seem to settle on a title.

My working title was The Armchair Economist, but that had to be abandoned because 1) there are already a couple of books out with that title and 2) it doesn't give you a very good sense of the book.

The book is a primer on basic economics, but with a funny, irreverent take on it.

The best suggestion so far has been Slackernomics, with a subtitle of "Economics for People Who Find Economics Boring.

So, since I have a fairly large number of readers, I thought I would ask. Anybody out there have any suggestions? 

Make them pay

(Review) Peggy Noonan writes that we cannot let the barbarity in Fallujah go unpunished.

We know what the men and boys who did the atrocity of Fallujah look like; they posed for the cameras. We know exactly what they did--again, the cameras. We know they massed on a bridge and raised their guns triumphantly. It's all there on film. It would be good not only for elemental justice but for Iraq and its future if a large force of coalition troops led by U.S. Marines would go into Fallujah, find the young men, arrest them or kill them, and, to make sure the point isn't lost on them, blow up the bridge.

Sounds good to me, except for the "arresting" part. We don't have to arrest anybody. By the terms of both the Geneva and Hague conventions, these people are unlawful combatants. We can--perfectly legally--round up everyone who can be identified, and simply shoot them out of hand.

If your picture shows up on video, and you're holding a gun, then that's it. We get to whack you. No questions asked.

Blowing up the bridge is a nice touch, though. I wouldn't've thought of that.