The latest Democratic game plan. "We Can't Just Call Him a Liar"? Why do I suspect the willpower will fail just when they need it most?

Pictures of Peace

Remember the quote from Pastor Niemoller on the holocaust?

First They Came for the Jews

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller

This is what it looks like in Turkey today after the synagogue bombings that seem to have once again killed more Muslims than Jews or Americans. At least there is some evidence the Turks may get it:

A shopkeeper near the site of one of the explosions had this to say:

"Muslim, Christian, Jewish, people are people. Today it's them, tomorrow it could be me."

It's a worldwide civil war folks -- both within the Muslim world and within the West. Those who cynically mouth words of condolences at attacks on peaceful people -- much less relief organizations -- while secretly harboring hatred and ill wishes for the West need only look in the mirror to see what corruption looks like...

No Evidence? Really?

WHOOPS!

And here's a summary if you don't have stamina to read it all. BUT YOU SHOULD! The most enjoyable commented version is here. (Hat tip Instapundit.)

And don't forget "No Evidence?"...

Borking X-rayed.

And then there's ol' laser-beam with a wicked pen Lileks -- enjoy!

I'm Norwegian, but close enough. Why I'm glad my Grand-daddies got on those boats! (As Muhammed Ali would say...)

Why They Call Him Spock, Redux

Stephen Den Beste cuts to the bone on our gulf with Bin Laden:

And that's why al Qaeda's plans seem idiotic to rationalists like Donald and me. bin Laden could not create and follow the kind of plan which we'd think was essential. If bin Laden's plan had been based entirely on temporal power and cogent strategy and real resources, and if such a plan did not rely on miracles, it would have demonstrated lack of faith. If there were no place in the plan for God, it would prove that bin Laden didn't truly believe God would help.

And it would therefore prove that bin Laden didn't deserve any help from God, because it would prove that his faith wasn't really pure. For bin Laden to create such a plan would be a heretical act.

Of course that entire issue is meaningless for an Atheist.

It isn't meaningless for a rationalist post-Enlightenment Christian, but he faces no crisis of faith in a similar situation. He can make rational plans which don't rely on miracles because his faith acknowledges that God doesn't usually work that way. Such a Christian doesn't pray for victory; he prays for the wisdom to create rational plans and the strength to carry them out.

But for bin Laden and other Islamic zealots bent on jihad, even that would be heresy. The only way to truly prove your faith is to rely on miracles, and that's what I think they're doing. I think that was bin Laden's strategy.

It's not enough for them to win or lose their crusade; they have to win it the right way, by showing the purity of their faith and by having God fight beside them. And they only can, and only should win by purifying themselves enough to once again deserve God's aid in the crusade. To demonstrate any doubt whatever in this is to prove that they are unworthy to be Soldiers of God.

And God will prove that by not aiding them, and permitting their enemies to triumph. [Emphasis added.]

The thing that amazes me about so many libs is their inability to discern this kind of stuff ... READ THE WHOLE THING. PERIOD.

And Mr. Totten weighs in with a beautiful round-house left (or was that a right?) on the jaw of Delay and crew. Nicely done!

(I sense heart palpitations in the readership. Heaven forfend -- an attack on the right in a running dog right-wing blog?)

Oh, brother -- Andrew is just rolling, rolling, rolling today ;)

Churchill again, more right than he knew again... in perpetuity... one more time... and not likely to be the last... count on it...

UPDATE: and again...

From the "When a man tells you that he intends to kill you ... believe him" De-nihilism File

The latest from the folks who only want to kill the Jews and Americans and therefore destroyed the Buddist statues at Bamiyan: (I think there's actually some problem with that sentence -- now what, oh, what could it be???)

100,000 Deaths Expected in An Imminent Attack Against the U.S.

In regard to rumors about a large-scale attack against the U.S. during the month of Ramadan, Al-Hijazi said that "a huge and very courageous strike" will take place and that the number of infidels expected to be killed in this attack, according to primary estimates, exceeds 100,000. He added that he "anticipates, but will not swear, that the attack will happen during Ramadan." He further stated that the attack will be carried out in a way that will "amaze the world and turn Al-Qai'da into [an organization that] horrifies the world until the law of Allah is implemented, actually implemented, and not just in words, on His land... You wait and see that the balance of power between Al-Qai'da and its rivals will change, all of a sudden, Allah willing."

Regarding Al-Qai'da detainees, Al-Hijazi said: "We follow their situation closely... the collaborating governments will pay the price for capturing these heroes who want to revive the glory of their nation and shake off the dust of humiliation and disgrace."

Al-Hijazi added that the "collaborating and treacherous" governments should know that Al-Qai'da has a long reach and its members enjoy popularity that will not end just because apostate governments detain hundreds of Al-Qai'da's members. "As soon as the governments detain one of our people, ten like him join us... this is no secret." [Emphasis added.]

Remember, the plan in WTC I was to topple one tower into the other with a goal of killing 250,000. Instead, the radical left laughs in racist condescension at these poor, hapless and oppressed Arabs. Apparently, the "horrifying" implementation of Sharia law is well within the bounds of rationality. Well, certainly MUCH preferable to those horrifying Christians and Jews and their hatefully repressive religions that brought us the enlightenment, democracy and scientific inquiry!

Ummm, this seems to need more research so it doesn't leak like a sieve...

Looking de-nihilism in the face -- this is why some call him Spock ... I just call him "The Best". (Good grief, of course there's a joke to be found in that comment -- surely you're adept enough to find it? It's not that hard -- I promise.)

Who is watching this as a neutral?

Darren Kaplan posts Christopher Hitchens' latest laser beam:

Since we're talking about our safety, I want to put a proposition to you," Hitchens said. "There's a tendency in these discussions, one which I very much reprobate, and one that I find a good deal in the New York Times, and also the Democratic Party, to watch this outcome as if to say, 'I wonder how it's going to work out? I wonder if Bush is going to win? I wonder if the Fedayeen Saddam or al-Qaida are going to? Some days it looks bad for one side, some days not so bad.'

"Who is daring to look at this as if they were a spectator? Who is watching this as a neutral?" [Emphasis added.]

Of course, that would be people who live in such a free country that they can literally do or say almost anything and get away with it -- all the while screaming in agony at their so-called persecution.

As my "No Kidding Sam..." post pointed out, even after WWII we didn't have our act together to even congeal a faint shadow of the punishment that should have been meeted out. If we couldn't even properly punish the Nazis then, it's almost beyond risible to claim that after more decades of swelling decadence we could meaningfully persecute the left-liberal establishment of our own society. In fact, Goebbels himself would smile at the "big lie" of using character assassination rather than rational argument against an opponent.

This is what it looked like from the master himself:

One could not understand this war if one did not always keep in mind the fact that International Jewry stands behind all the unnatural forces that our united enemies use to attempt to deceive the world and keep humanity in the dark. It is so to speak the mortar that holds the enemy coalition firmly together, despite its differences of class, ideology and interests. Capitalism and Bolshevism have the same Jewish roots, two branches of the same tree that in the end bear the same fruit.

Sound eerily familiar?

Today's Quote: "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." -- Winston Churchill

... unfortunately his enemies made sure nobody read it ... and if more of us had read it we'd actually have a clue ...

No Kidding Sam...

Another new Iraqi blog called Hammorabi by someone named Sam has this instructive post:

Lot of news coming from Iraq indicates that many of the Baath members from the previous regime appointed in important posts with the new ministries like the Ministry of Electricity and Educations.
Also some of the previous members of the secret police and inelegances like "Mokhabarat" appointed in new important positions.

We don't know what the new Ministers are doing and why there is no trials for those who committed genocides and crimes against the Iraqis and the Humanity.
S H [Emphasis added.]

My dear Sam, Iraq has more in common with World War II than people realize. For instance, check out this snippet from an article on the Nuremberg trials:

But Maguire notes that it wasn't just American isolationists who opposed Nuremberg. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas described the trials as legally unprincipled, while George Kennan dismissed efforts to re-educate Germans and said the entire tribunal should be terminated.

Amidst the criticism and red baiting, the subsequent American trials at Nuremberg concluded in 1949 with some 142 convictions. Twenty four Germans were sentenced to death and many others got prison terms. But they would not stay behind bars long. To appease West German leaders, American diplomats in command of the U.S. occupation zone formed a review board to consider clemencies.

The man who appointed the review board, John McCloy, stressed that the board was not reconsidering judgments but would examine fairness in sentences imposed by the tribunal. Many prosecutors suspected that politics were involved, though John McCloy always denied that he was acting on any political directives from Washington, according to prosecutors and historians.

"Between 1949 and 1958," says William Caming, "all of the prisoners had sentences reduced and were then released. Including, surprisingly enough, four of the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen death squads. It was a political measure. No members of the prosecution staff and none of the judges at Nuremberg were even consulted." [Emphasis added.]

The similarities mount, don't they?

And yet more Deja Vu all over again...

Keith Burgess-Jackson is now blogging -- go visit!

An out and out 'steal' from OpinionJournal perfectly illustrates why Clark is a really bad, bad, bad choice to take on Bush over Iraq:

The Dems' Savior?
Attempting to explain why liberating Kosovo was a good idea but liberating Iraq was not, Wesley Clark, in an interview with The New Yorker, reaches new heights of incoherence:

In a speech at the University of Iowa College of Law, on September 19th, Clark had declared that chief among America's mistakes was that it had gone to war in Iraq without "the mantle of authority" bestowed by United Nations approval. But hadn't the Kosovo war also been conducted without the endorsement of the U.N. Security Council? Yes, Clark allowed, and in that regard the Kosovo war was "technically illegal." He went on, "The Russians and the Chinese said they would both veto it. There was never a chance that it would be authorized."

That situation did not seem entirely dissimilar from the prewar maneuverings regarding Iraq, when France and Germany said that they would oppose any Security Council resolution authorizing an immediate war; Bush bypassed the U.N. and resorted to an alliance with Prime Minister Tony Blair's Britain and sundry lesser members of the "coalition of the willing." But there was one more important difference, Clark said: the war against Serbia was waged to stop the imminent threat of ethnic cleansing in the disputed province of Kosovo; the war in Iraq, he said, was waged under false pretenses.

Got that? It was OK to wage an "illegal" war in Kosovo because of an "imminent threat" not to America or its allies but to the civilian population there--as if Saddam Hussein didn't pose an imminent threat to Iraqis.

Oh brother! Iraq is way, way, way out in the lead in the modern "mass grave accomodations for its citizens" race and Saddam wasn't a threat to them? (Much less us who he publicly professed to hate!)

Thank You

Special thanks to my cousin Paul for his service in Vietnam and a posthumous thanks to my uncle Luther who served in North Africa and Italy in WWII. More thanks than I can ever say...

Darren Kaplan notes that Afghanistan has started a trend after all: "Al Qaeda Bombs the Saudis out of the Stone Age".

Realistic Alaa

Check out Alaa again today:

I heard that General Abi Zaid has been talking to the Elders and Community notables of the Western region. This is right, there are sensible people, they must be talked to, reasoned with and brought to their senses. This approach must be escalated at the same time as firmness against the terrorists increased. They are after all our compatriots and brothers, if they have grievances, let them air them. If they accept the New Iraq and equality, freedom, and democracy it is in their interests. There is plenty for everybody. This is destruction of their country too. And I tell you the majority are not for this wantonness, I mean the majority of these regions so called "the triangle". They are just being used and misled by people who have not the least interest in the future and wellbeing of the country. They must be won back.

So Olive branch in one hand, and Sharp Sword the other. That in my opinion is the best course.

Salaam

Alaa

[Emphasis added.] Hang in there bud! We need you -- and with clear thinking like that you can even teach us a thing or two...

Krauthammer's cookin':

Sympathy is fine. But if we "squander" it when we go to war to avenge our dead and prevent the next crop of dead, then to hell with sympathy. The fact is that the world hates us for our wealth, our success, our power. They hate us into incoherence. The Europeans, Ajami astutely observes, disdain us for our excessive religiosity (manifest, they imagine, by evolution being expelled from schools while prayer is ushered back in)--while the Arab world despises us as purveyors of secularism. We cannot win for losing. We are widely reviled as enemies of Islam, yet in the 1990s we engaged three times in combat -- in the Persian Gulf and in the Balkans -- to rescue Kuwait, Bosnia and Kosovo, Muslim peoples all. And in the last two cases, there was nothing in it for the U.S.; it was humanitarianism and good international citizenship of the highest order.

The search for logic in anti-Americanism is fruitless. It is in the air the world breathes. Its roots are envy and self-loathing -- by peoples who, yearning for modernity but having failed at it, find their one satisfaction in despising modernity's great exemplar.

On Sept. 11, they gave it a rest for a day. Big deal. [Emphasis added.]

Any questions? Ayn Rand rests quite comfortably in her grave -- she didn't miss the mark...

A Gem On Military Reality in Iraq

If you can't read the whole thing then you should at least scan and hop around in it! Well worth it... (Hat tip Winds of Change.)

A Bodyguard Quote: "Then if any one at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the State should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good. But nobody else should meddle with anything of the kind". And research project -- it should be easy for you to figure out who said it, no?

Overdue Pointer: "The Story of This War"

Interestingly, "The Story of This War" was published the same day as Bush's speech. It's a follow-up to "The Six Dilemmas of a Moderate Islamist" -- and a nice tie-in to my note to the Mesopotamian. Gotta love all these "coincidences"...

Go get your OD of semiotics, take two aspirin and don't call me in the morning ;)

Havel On Western Leftist Hypocrisy

You wonder why Havel is out of step with the West's coddled and insular leftists? Try this choice little comment regarding the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 80s:

"How much trust or even admiration for the Western peace movement can we expect from a simple yet sensitive citizen of Eastern Europe when he has noticed that this movement has never, at any of its congresses or at demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of participants, got around to protesting the fact that five years ago, one important European country attacked a small neutral neighbor and since that time has been conducting on its territory a war of extermination which has already claimed a million dead and three million refugees? Seriously, what are we to think of a peace movement, a European peace movement, which is virtually unaware of the only war being conducted today by a European state? As for the argument that the victims of aggression and their defenders enjoy the sympathies of Western establishments and so are not worthy of support from the left, such incredible ideological opportunism can provoke only one reaction -- utter disgust and a sense of limitless hopelessness." [Emphasis added.]

Sounds eerily familiar doesn't it? 300,000 mass graves and counting anyone??? But of course, personal animus has never driven the left -- or have I missed something? AND IT JUST GOT ADDED TO THE CLASSICS OVER ON THE RIGHT.

I Liked His Enthusiasm So Much ...

that I wrote a letter to Alaa:

Alaa,

Hang in there. You and Zayed are doing a great job!

Unfortunately, we in the West are experiencing something of a civil war ourselves. I apologize for both our leftists and rightists. They both let your suffering go on far too long and then when 300,000 mass graves are discerned, it's primarily only those on the right who start to get it. The left is too busy trying to twist it in some way to hurt Bush to care much about you. (It's pretty impressive how rampant Bush-hatred is in the Democratic Party.)

The irony is that we actually do have the talent to win the propaganda war, but most of that talent is on the left (a long story why but more true than I care to admit) and is sleeplessly focused on defeating Bush instead of actually putting their talent to positive use in the world.

I have also been suspicious all along of the bureacracy and incompetence of the CPA. The irony there is that given the freedom our country achieved before "big government" came into being in the middle of the last century, we have actually been somewhat content to accept this level of incompetence. It's a sort of "warehousing" of our incompetents -- most (not all of course!) of our really smart people are in the private sector, not the government bureaucracy. And the private sector is where our good "quality of life" stems from primarily.

I have linked you on my blog and will do all I can to support your cause!

My apologies for this mess and my pledge to do what I can,
Bob Gronlund

UPDATE: A very interesting comment I found on Alaa's blog:

I have faith in the Iraqi people. Six thousand years of history, the first written laws, the first writing, I don't think the first democracy in the Middle East is so farfetched.

And I would add the removal of their throats -- however tentatively -- from under one of the most horrific "metal boots" in the history of the planet! Why do you think the Eastern Europeans "got it" about Iraq far more than the Western Europeans? Could it be because they too know the clank of the metal boot? Check out Vaclav Havel for instance...

Promising New Iraqi Blog

Read it and weep:

Al Jazira, Al Arabiya and the like are still, after six months of the fall of the idol, the main sources of information in the country. The G.C. members, all accomplished speakers and orators, hardly talk to the people. They might appear occasionaly on the arab channels.

This is far more dangerous than what you think. These channels are almost directing operations of "insurgency". For instance, as soon as some information is broadcast about oil being pumped on a certain line, you can be certain it is sabotaged the next day, not to mention showing tapes from Saddam, Bin Laden, and various "resistance groups" colorfully poising for the photo holding their RPJ's and threatening every body with death and damnation. Even their method of reporting is highly subversive. For example: When IP stations are attacked, the reporter never fails to add that this is done because these are "collaborators".

An Iraqi Sattelite Station must immediately be started, and all the talented well known Iraqis who are eminently capable to run it and counter attack this massive propaganda campaign by the enemy, recalled and recruited. The Station should beam long hours and compete effectively and present the information in the flamboyant and spicy style appropriate to the mass taste of the iraqi populace. [Emphasis added.]

(Hat tip to Totten.) More illustration that our ossified bureaucracies are risibly incompetent at anything resembling a battle for hearts and minds.

Adding the Belmont Club to my links -- interesting stuff...

TODAY'S REMINDER: A holocaust survivor was asked what one lesson he had learned from those horrific events. His simple reply -- "When a man tells you that he intends to kill you ... believe him.".

Today the Israelis proved to the world that they did not learn anything from the Holocaust and are not committed to their own survival by agreeing to a hostage trade with a terrorist organization that is blatantly and loudly dedicated to the destruction of the Israeli state.

Oh, and did I mention that Hizb'Allah have the blood of at least 241 American soldiers on their hands? It's just laughable that Reagan is considered a hateful warmonger by the left when he didn't even do anything to fight back against the Marine barracks atrocity.

You may wonder why the name Mughniyah keeps popping up on this blog -- here's a summary:

Whenever someone says Hezbolla, remember this name: Imad Mughniyah- this man, and remember his name, is the head of Hezbollah's terror operations. He has a $25 million price on his head; he should, he is the most skilled terror operative in the world. Mughniyah murdered Robert Steatham on flight 847 and was the planner of a bombing attack that killed 241 US marines.

And I'll be greatly surprised if he doesn't turn out to be behind many of the largest atrocities in Iraq as well...

The other speech that day is not that long and you should read it.

Interesting panel this morning on Stephanopoulos' "thisweek" included Zacharia, Will, Perle and Holbrook. Good discussion and reasonably balanced and civil. They ended the program talking about the difficulty of building democracy in Iraq and Will pointed out analogously -- by way of illustrating the perilousness and long-term nature of the situation -- that we're still not done reforming Mississippi [in so many words].

Perle got the closing point in on the discussion: "It took a long time to reform Mississippi -- it took a war to free the slaves".

Then there's the most interesting parallel to this little meander in the discussion that drifted off into slavery: "Slavery is part of Islam". Read it and weep ... Abe Lincoln also took a "world-historical" gamble with the civil war -- he didn't have to do it and took massive grief and second guessing right up until final victory...

Just got around to reading Kagan's "Of Paradise and Power" which is primarily focused on the modern American / European relationship and how we got here. I should have promoted it in my stack a while ago. It's very much in the tradition of Aron and Bruckner. Very powerful and insightful -- probably the best book I've read this year! Watch for some killer references to start popping up...

More later...

JUST A FUN QUOTE TODAY: "They hate me because I'm paranoid." -- unknown

And read this one from Zayed also...

Careening Back to Stupid: A KristoFisk

My recent "The Bodyguard of Lies" piece had been building for a while and was pushed out the door by this little Kristof number. I'll be commenting more on the background issues raised by "The Bodyguard of Lies" in a future post but for now a good Fisking: (my comments in bold)

Op-Ed Columnist: Death by Optimism
November 5, 2003
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

On a visit to Saddam's Iraq a year ago, I wrote a column
that outraged his government. It described officials
burning a Muslim leader's beard and then driving nails
through his head.

The next day I was summoned to a government ministry and
menacingly denounced by two of Saddam's henchmen. But
neither man could speak English, and they hadn't actually
read the offending column. (Imagine officials who don't
read papers but rely on underlings for briefings!)

At that point, my government minder took my column and
translated it for them. I saw my life flash before my eyes.
But my minder's job was to spy on me, and he worried that
my tough column would reflect badly on his spying. Plus, he
was charging me $100 a day, and he would lose a fortune if
I was expelled, or worse.

So he translated my column very selectively. There was no
mention of burning beards or nails in heads. He left out
whole paragraphs. When he finished, the two senior
officials shrugged and let me off scot-free.

That episode underscored to me how difficult it was for
Saddam's government to get accurate information.
Ultimately, Saddam's rule collapsed in part because he
couldn't read Iraq and made decisions based on hubris and
bad information.

This is the very nature of totalitarian dictatorship of course! It's consequences were particularly bad for Saddam because he was a particularly egregious dictator. But Kristof can't say that because it would ruin his forthcoming point.

These days, President Bush and his aides are having the
same problem. Critics complain that they lied to the
American public about how difficult the war would be, but I
fear the critics are wrong: they didn't just fool us - they
also fooled themselves.

Which is that BUSH IS STUPID!!! (I'm having this feeling of Deja Vu all over again!) We've careened back to stupid because the liar argument kept losing traction in the face of facts. But we can't lose face by admitting that so we'll leave it implied that he's a liar also. In fact he's so stupid that he fooled himself and it splattered over on the rest of us -- the unfortunate victims.

Evidence suggests that Mr. Bush and Dick Cheney may have
actually believed that our troops would be, as Mr. Cheney
predicted, "greeted as liberators." The administration
chose to rely not on intelligence but on wishful thinking,
and it became intoxicated by the siren calls of Ahmad
Chalabi, a silver-tongued charlatan.

Yup, an unfortunate victim of the first snake-oil salesman that came along...

I wish administration officials were lying, because I would
prefer hypocrisy to delusion - at least hypocritical
officials make decisions with accurate information.

Ummm, he's not saying Bush is a liar but I sense a subliminal message developing that stupidity isn't the whole problem after all...

Policy by wishful thinking is crippling our occupation.
Initially, U.S. officials didn't restrain looting because
they regarded it as celebratory high jinks. Then, confident
that security was in hand, they disbanded the Iraqi Army.
They didn't push hard to bring in international forces.

He means the same international forces (you know, French, Russians, and Germans) that are clean as the driven snow ... no -- wait! Weren't they Saddam's chief advisors, enablers and arms suppliers? If you subtract out these supposed "allies" of ours, everyone that's a REAL ally with any troops worth a darn are ALREADY THERE HELPING US. And by the way, the Europeans still have a stinking mess in their own back yard in Bosnia and Kosovo WHERE THERE STILL ARE NO ELECTIONS years and years after things were supposedly cleaned up...

Disbanding the Iraqi Army is at least a point worthy of debate -- but in no way a slam dunk that we shouldn't have done it.

The foreign forces they suggest introducing are Turks,
which adds to my fear that administration officials have
been more deluded than duplicitous. It is a crazy scheme:
anyone who has spent time in Iraq knows that Iraqis will
never accept their former colonial power policing them.

You can't be wrong all the time even if you try -- he has a reasonable point in this paragraph. Of course, what makes up the real negotiations behind the scene is anyone's guess.

Mr. Cheney has cited a Zogby International poll to back his
claim that there is "very positive news" in Iraq. But the
pollster, John Zogby, told me, "I was floored to see the
spin that was put on it; some of the numbers were not my
numbers at all."

Mr. Cheney claimed that Iraqis chose the U.S. as their
model for democracy "hands down," and he and other
officials say that a majority want American troops to stay
at least another year. In fact, Mr. Zogby said, only 23
percent favor the U.S. democratic model, and 65 percent
want the U.S. to leave in a year or less.

He relies on Zogby who is clearly an Arab-it's-all-the-Joooos- fault-party-line partisan. You might also consider what Healing Iraq says: "According to a poll by an Iraqi agency, only 3% of Iraqis want Saddam back and less than 40% want the Americans to leave immediately. Did you even hear about these results?" SPEAKING OF WHICH, FOLLOW THE LINK AND READ ZAYED'S POST!

"I am not willing to say they lied," Mr. Zogby said. "But
they used a very tight process of selective screening, and
when they didn't get what they wanted they were willing to
manufacture some results. . . . There was almost nothing in
that poll to give them comfort."

Ummm, did someone whisper "liar" in my ear?

Sure, we're making some progress in Iraq. A hand grenade
sells for $2.50 now, compared with 10 cents a few months
ago. But U.S. troops now face 25 to 30 attacks daily,
compared with 15 to 20 in September. Last month 33
Americans were killed, twice as many as in September.

This is clearly the use of selective statistics -- one month does not a trend make and all the trend graphs on casualties have been headed down. On the the other hand, it's not at all unreasonable that we'll actually see a spike in attacks and casualties if we really are getting more aggressive in focusing forces on the "Sunni Triangle" -- which by the way IS where the vast majority of the attacks and bad guys are.

In fact, I am quite amazed that the hundreds of thousands if not millions of viscious Saddamites -- likely augmented by A-Team terrorists like Mugniyah himself -- can't make more havoc than they have! I would have thought a helicopter a day would be easy pickings.

One of Mr. Bush's strengths as a politician is his
optimistic nature, but I now fear it is also his central
weakness in governing. Reckless overconfidence led him to
adopt fiscal policies that will leave our children
indebted, and this same cockiness led us into Iraq. Brash
optimism perhaps has its roots in Mr. Bush's hometown,
Midland, Tex., an oil town that regularly rewarded hard
work with a gusher, a place where everybody you meet
displays this same hearty can-do confidence. In Midland,
Mr. Bush unfortunately absorbed the lesson that risks in
the desert pay off.

Dumb Texan. Gets up in the morning and thinks about his cajones all day long.

So the scary thing is, Mr. Bush and his aides may not be
lying when they look at Iraq and boast of a cheering
population that a Western press sourly refuses to
acknowledge. There's a precedent: Saddam Hussein.

Yup, Bush is just one of your run-of-the-mill tyrannical dictators. But look on the bright side -- Kristof finally admitted that Saddam IS a tyrannical dictator!

And don't worry, he's given up the argument that Bush lies ... or has he?

That Stupid Bush...

A WOW of a speech today! Andrew has the best short analysis and excerpts but this is a READ IT ALL. Period. You'll also discover how stupid Reagan was as well ;)

WaPo Boffo

I could hardly believe my eyes that WaPo actually delivered an apparently reasonable analysis of how Saddam miscalculated this time around. READ THE WHOLE THING -- THIS IS AN EXCELLENT CONTEXT PIECE. Just an attention-getter to get going:

Taiee, one of the former major generals interviewed by The Post, agreed that Hussein had "not expected a war." The Iraqi president had concluded that "there would be bombardment as in '98 and the regime would continue and he would be a hero. Then, in case war did happen, these promises he had received from the French and Russians -- plus the resistance he thought the army would put up, not knowing that they would go home -- this would be enough to win a cease-fire and a settlement."

But Maj. Gen. Amer Shia Jubouri, 50, a former army division commander and chief of the Iraqi war college, said in an interview that he believed "the French and Russian governments delivered very clear messages to Saddam that the war was going to happen," and that if Hussein believed otherwise, it was a result of the president's own confusion.

"He obviously misunderstood the theory of deterrence," said Jubouri. "You have to know when this theory can be successful, and when it can be disastrous." [Emphasis added.]

So let's see, we have a confused person who doesn't understand the mechanics of deterrence, feeds massive numbers of his own people into plastic shredders creating mass graves as far as the eye can see, is the only known actual user of WMD (in Halabja against the Kurds -- ostensibly his own countrymen) besides the US in WWII, is responsible for the deaths of more Arabs than any other Mideast leader in history, invaded Kuwait almost for the glee of it, created one of the largest environmental disasters in history with the burning of the Kuwaiti oilfields, tried to assasinate a former US president (the elder Bush), funded Palestinian terrorists and was linked to at least al Qaeda affiliates (see my "No Evidence?"), and:

"We have not yet found stocks of weapons, but we are not yet at the point where we can say definitively either that such weapon stocks do not exist," the leader of the Iraq Survey Group, David Kay, told Congress on Oct. 2. U.S. officials said that conclusion still holds one month later.

The investigators' most significant new discovery over the last month, officials said, was that Hussein made a secret deal to purchase Nodong missiles from North Korea (news - web sites), in addition to a previously reported clandestine deal to buy North Korean missile parts between 1999 and 2002. Neither shipment came through, however, because North Korea's government said it was under too much U.S. pressure in 2002 to risk a delivery by sea.

The substantial evidence of Iraq's secret long-range missile programs, combined with more fragmentary testimony in which Hussein reportedly asked scientists how long it might take to reconstitute chemical arms, has led some investigators to conclude that Hussein saw missiles as his most difficult challenge. In this hypothesis, Hussein wanted to build or buy long-range missiles before he took on the risks of secretly restarting banned programs to make weapons of mass destruction.

"The pattern I think we're seeing is, they were working on the long pole in the tent," the missile program, said the senior U.S. official involved in the weapons search. When Hussein asked scientists how long it would take to restart sarin and mustard gas production, he learned the timelines "were all so sufficiently short" that he could afford to hold off until the missile program was further along, the official said.

was actually not completely nuts in his approach to constituting his WMD programs. And, oh yes, as a child he loved to run white hot iron rods thru animals (see Pollack's "The Threatening Storm"). And did I mention he was at minimum in clear violation of the cease fire agreement that ended Desert Storm?

So it's really a credible argument then that someone who has been proven to not understand deterrence could be trusted with what would certainly be the quick acquisition of WMD if sanctions were lifted (which was the only real alternative to the war for anyone who gave a whit about the Iraqi people themselves)?

Oh, and given his known use of WMD as well as the massive quantities of WMD he had during Desert Storm and were discovered in the succeeding years of inspections it's just simply craven to make blanket statements that an utter sociopath like Saddam clearly didn't have WMD -- or for that matter that he hasn't already given them to terrorists. If there is a clear pattern here it's that it's quite impossible to predict the moves of someone this completely nuts!

Finally, there is a great irony. Clinton's continuing appeasements and pinprick actions may have actually provided some of Bush's best ammunition in attacking Saddam: evidence that the US wasn't serious even with an armada on his border! For that matter, Bush senior's premature end to Desert Storm contributed as well.

After Chamberlain's appeasements in the 30's failed and the war started, Neville had the presence of mind to at least fall into line behind Churchill. Credit where credit is due, while I think Clinton as all former presidents should be more retiring in their retirements, he has at least been vaguely Chamberlain-like when it was required regarding this war...

What sort of person would rather be prey?

The Bodyguard of Lies

There seems to be a lot of talking about lying going on – but no attention to the history of war, strategy and common sense. And there really is a lot of lying going on – so let’s look a little deeper.

Since the “lies of interest” revolve around the war, perhaps we should study up on the recent history of war and wartime leadership. What recent history lessons can we look to?

What about Clinton’s (NATO) attack on Serbia? Straight down the Orwellian “memory hole” with that one – it’s too inconvenient when arguing against Iraq II without U.N. sanction.

Then there was Clinton’s “Desert Fox” cruise missile attack on Saddam. How about “[terrorists] will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein.” Not bad for Clinton actually. But down the “memory hole” with it since Clinton would be a “liar” alongside Bush!

I remember Bush senior’s “this will not stand” regarding the U.N.-sanctioned Gulf War I – barely. But riveting was the Army’s “left hook” through the Iraqi desert – and then leaving Saddam in power!

Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” was powerful. But did we really win the Cold War or just a battle? And did we really do all we could to "lock down" all those Soviet nukes?

And Vietnam? That was so disastrous that to this day queries about the boat people or the domino deaths of two million Cambodians to Pol Pot’s Communist-nihilist slaughter are “memory holed” with a wicked barrage of personal attacks on the questioner.

Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs? He bungled it so incredibly that Krushchev was emboldened to embark on the Cuban missile crisis and we nearly abandoned MAD to instantiate nuclear winter together.

Better keep going in search of satisfaction.

The stalemate in Korea? The other U.N.-sanctioned war! Both times American Generals – MacArthur in Korea and Schwarzkopf in Gulf I -- were sacked or stopped short. Both resulted in totalitarian dictatorships left in power. In fact, the two large U.N.-sanctioned wars last century allowed the survival of two of the three members of Bush’s “axis of evil”. Fascinating coincidence?

Finally we arrive at World War II and – real satisfaction. Winston Churchill! Franklin Delano Roosevelt!

How about Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” WWII rationale of “Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Freedom from want. Freedom from fear.” That’s pretty good. But by the time we entered the war Japan, Italy, Germany, German-Poland, German-Czechoslovakia, German-Denmark, German-Netherlands, German-Norway and – of course -- German-France were all against us. World opinion against us as today!

Churchill’s “The Americans will always do the right thing … after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives” was the painful summation of why WWII reached tens of millions dead.

Churchill’s “If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” was a jarring lesson on wartime alliances.

Or his “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” (You were wondering if I lost my bead on lying weren’t you?)

And Winston’s eye-opening corollary, “In war time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” Allowing the bombing of Coventry after Allied cracking of the German codes leaps to mind.

Shock and awe? Or epic-historic logistics?

Quagmire? Or flypaper?

Hopefully, George Bush the Churchill-admiring history major will tell us – and the enemy -- more “strategery”-ically placed whoppers.

Managing Iraq for the Election Cycle

Ledeen gets right to the point:

As I have repeated to the point of monotony, we are particularly weak on Iran, and have been since the late 1970s. At the time of Khomeini's seizure of power, there was no full-time Farsi-speaking Iran expert on the crisis team at CIA. A few years later, when Oliver North and Robert McFarlane went to Tehran, they had to drag a man out of retirement to serve as interpreter. And even a year or two ago the agency was still claiming that Sunnis and Shiites don't work together, and denying that there was any link between Tehran and Osama bin Laden. By now we are reduced to begging for information on the numerous al Qaeda terrorists in Iran.

Second is the interplay between policy and intelligence. Over the years, the intelligence people have learned not to bring forward information that policymakers do not want to hear. At the moment, the top policy people do not want to take on another terror master, whether in Damascus, Tehran, Tripoli, or Jeddah. So the intel guys oblige by not looking very hard at the remaining state sponsors of the terror network. It's clear that the (domestic, electoral) political imperative is now paramount, and our leaders want to "manage" Iraq until the president is reelected. Then they'll see. [Emphasis added.]

WELL WORTH THE READ. De-nihilism is not owned solely by the left -- it's likely infesting the president's closest advisors if not George himself. Or things may not always be as they seem? OK, here comes...

Another sliver of light through the window. (Hat tip Glenn.)

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "Sometimes I stop to think -- and then forget to start again" -- Unknown on a T-shirt

And off in the lead for the next "Jaw Dropper" is -- who else could it be? -- but the NYeT on Iraqi debt relief! I just knew that as soon as I gave them a teensy morsel of credit they'd have a hog swaller plateload of remorse... (Hat tip Andrew.)

When you see that consternated look on Rumsfeld's face, could it be that the process is the problem?

You know, I've been thinking that everyone's really good at heart -- except for Bush and Cheney of course -- and that if we just negotiate, negotiate, negotiate then everything will be all better. But then, this line of thinking works lots better if you're careful to ignore all the facts.

The Window

A scoop from tomorrow's NYeT. (Hat tip to Glenn.) And it might even moderately resemble the truth of how the Iraqi's feel after having large numbers of their friends and relatives fed feet-first into plastic shredders just so they die the most horrible death possible.

So basically what is going on is that even though the Iraqi's have an irrational and unquenchable hatred of the Jooooooos like all the other nut cases in the Middle East, the unspeakable horror that Saddam visited gives us a "window" to work with them and take a shot at something vaguely like democracy. It may not work. But it would have been unconscionable not to try given how horrific the alternatives are likely to be...

UPDATE: Some of you may not have read this either since the major media ruthlessly supressed it...

Find out why Joooooish and Cheney conspiracy fans don't understand that "the world is correlated at 0.3". (Hat tip Andrew.)

David Brooks on why we have a burden too heavy.

The fact is, we Americans do not like staring into the face of evil. It is in our progressive and optimistic nature to believe that human beings are basically good, or at least rational. When we stare into a cave of horrors, whether it is in Somalia, Beirut or Tikrit, we see a tangled morass we don't understand. Our instinct is to get out as quickly as possible.

NOW GO AND READ THE OTHER EXCERPT I HAVE LINKED -- AND THEN CLICK THRU TO THE FULL COLUMN. The "Battle of Midway" has been joined in Iraq...

Michael Ledeen on UNPUNISHED FAILURE. To which I would for about the thousandth time re-ask the question: "Explain to me again why Tenet is still the CIA director after presiding over 911?".

Andrew has a deadly hit on the THE LEFT AND ANTI-SEMITISM to really grab your attention. That chirping sound you hear is the canary in the coal mine...

YES, it is possible for Democrats to actually be correct -- don't ever say I didn't tell you so...

A QUICK QUOTE to reinforce the last post: 'But as Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic points out in a devastating critique of Judt, "if you explain anti-Semitism as a response to Jews... you have not understood it. You have reproduced it." ' This article by Bret Stephens is well worth the read and is very thought provoking -- though I disagree with his virtual endorsement of 'Political Correctness' at the end...

The Quote of the Day -- No, Make That Week

is embedded in a WOW that not only aligns with some threads I have been nurturing but should send anyone of conscience into some deep contemplation regarding the nature of hatred and true courage.

Here's the Martin Luther King quote embedded in Sharansky's article that I'll bet 10-1 you didn't know existed:

You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely "anti-Zionist." And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God's green earth; when people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews--this is God's own truth. -- Martin Luther King

And as a Lutheran myself, Sharansky's pointing out the parallel anti-Semitism of Martin Luther (yes, the original one) and Muhammad really got my attention.

READ THE WHOLE THING -- I'LL SLOW DOWN THE BLOGGING TO GIVE YOU THE TIME :) I have some thinking and writing to do anyway...

When The Charade ...

... goes up in smoke. Some thought-provoking snippets:

THE MANY SPECIES CONSERVATION PLANS that cover the southern California region all make claims of benefit to the species they purport to protect similar to the claims in the San Diego plan. It is now perfectly obvious that "habitat conservation plans" are to species protection what Soviet five-year plans were to steel production: A vast amount of wasted ink and money, signifying only the ideology and vanity of the planners. I have been a participant in many of these discussions, as a lawyer representing landowners, and know first hand the arrogance of the agencies that issue these orders and devise these grand schemes. Don't count on any apologies coming from their direction.

...

THE MOST PRESSING QUESTION for the federal government after the fires are put out will be the number of acres of land burned which had already been set aside for species conservation purposes. Whatever that number is, it will be a challenge to the drafters of the plans to provide evidence that they had anticipated the conserved acres being charred. Of course they didn't, but that won't protect the guilty from intoning about the natural benefits of fire. In their acquisitiveness, the planners have focused only on locking up land against development, not in protecting it from devastating fire. The nakedness of their error is found in the very plans they developed, which lack comprehensive fire management programs and the means to carry them out. [Emphasis added.]

This from the same people most likely to be complaining about lack of planning for post-bellum Iraq. Don't worry though, they're much, much smarter than us ordinary people -- even if none of the facts on the ground support it...

But Don't Worry ...

... we don't have any axes to grind that might get in the way of our integrity or fact checking. Uggghhhh.

A Good Analysis ...

... of the latest VDH essay. And how can I resist pointing out Hanson's take on Euro moral superiority:

This fashionable anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism -- especially among purported intellectuals of the Left -- reveals a deep-seated, scary pathology that is growing geometrically both in and outside the West. For a Europe that is disarmed, plagued by a demographic nightmare of negative population growth and unsustainable entitlements, filled with unassimilated immigrants, and deeply angry about the power and presence of the United States, the Jews and their Israel provide momentary relief on the cheap. So expect that more crazy thoughts of Israel's destruction dressed up as peace plans will be as common as gravestone and synagogue smashing.

As always, clicking through to READ VDH'S WHOLE THING is recommended!

The More Things Change ...

... the more they stay the same! (Hat tip to Glenn.)

Weekend Reading Assignment

Two highlights from "Symposium: Islamic Anti-Semitism" [READ THE WHOLE THING -- IT JUST GOT ADDED TO THE CLASSICS LINKS ON THE RIGHT. There are a lot of good subtleties contained but not covered here such as why anti-Judaism is a better label than anti-Semitism, etc.]:

First on the relationship of Muslims and Jews:

Interlocutor: In terms of this issue, what I could never figure out was that Muslims acknowledge Abraham as one of the great fathers of their tradition. They acknowledge the prophets of the Old Testament as the founders of their own religion. They say they have great respect for Jesus. But Abraham, the prophets, Jesus etc. were all Jews. How do Muslims reconcile their supposed great respect for the Jewish origins of their religion with their anti-Semitism?

...

Phares: Muslim scholars, both mainstream and Fundamentalists ironically have one common argument with regards to the relationship to Judaism. They draw a line between the Judaic faith as descended by God on them, and Jews as a people. While they assert that the first is a component of the Islamic faith, they maintain that the people who carried it have strayed away from the right path. According to Islamic Fundamentalist thinkers, one of whom is Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, the Jews have subverted the sense of Judaism. In other words, the Islamists argue that Islam and Judaism are basically one, the latter being an early form of the new religion. They accuse the Jews of rebelling against God and his Prophets, including Mohammed. Hence, to be anti-Jewish is not in contradiction with Islam's self perceived roots in Judaism. Besides, and for the sake of clarifying the debate on the issue, Muslim theology does not "acknowledge the Prophets" of others religions as the founders of Islam, rather it consider these particular Prophets as Muslims and therefore consider those other groups as non-capable of understanding that perception. For example Abraham is considered as a Muslim Prophet, and Jesus is considered as a Prophet not as a Messiah. So, it is not about accepting the beliefs of other communities through honoring their Prophets in as much as it is claiming those Prophets for Islam itself. The nuances seem to be minimal but an iota of difference in theology could bring about dramatic differences in History. But here again, a reformation can end this saga to the advantage of religious coexistence. Till then, the theology of Islam can be easily used by Islamic Fundamentalists against Jews.

Timmerman: I’d love to believe the notion, spread by the Wahhabi lobby and other apologists of radical Islam, that Islam has “nothing against the Jews” and accepts them as “people of the Book.” The reality, on the ground, is quite different. Here is what Abdelaziz Rantissi, a top Hamas leader, told me in Gaza: “There is no room for Jews and Muslims in Palestine… Let the Jews go to America and make Israel there.”[Emphasis added.]

Second on Yasser Arafat's roots. I knew generally about al-Hussein (the grand mufti of Jerusalem during WWII) but this explains a whole lot:

Interlocutor: The Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir's recent speech brought back memories of some of Hitler's basic themes. What common denominators do Islamic and Nazi anti-Semitism share?

Bat Ye'or: Both have a racist pathological obsession with Jews, which they see as the embodiment of evil. For both, Jews focus hatred, envy and frustrations. Both share the same inhumanity and contempt for life, human rights and dignity. They spread lies and defamations that subvert the truth.

Spencer: Nazi anti-Semitism was, of course, a farrago of fanciful conspiracy theories and racist mythology, while Muslim anti-Semitism has a theological basis. But the two groups share a taste for those fanciful conspiracy theories; Muslim anti-Semites today buttress their positions with a great deal of material that the Nazis also used. The notorious forgery about the Jewish plot to rule the world, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is a prime example: it circulated widely both in Nazi Germany and in the Muslim world today. Its influence may be seen in the recent remarks of Malaysia’s Mahathir Muhammad. Mein Kampf also circulates in the Muslim world, and it must be remembered that during World War II, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, met with Hitler to ask for German help in exterminating the Jews of the Muslim world.

Phares: One, they both claim that the main problems of their nations are produced by the Jews. Two, that the Jews are a world problem. Three that Jews have diverted from Judaism . And four that a solution must be found to that problem. While under Nazism, Jews were to vanish, in the context of the Jihadist ideology, the Jewish state is the one to vanish.

Timmerman: I was stunned to learn the story of Haj Mohammad Amin al-Hussein, which I tell at great length in Preachers of Hate. Not only did he meet with Hitler in Berlin in 1941: he became the Arabic voice of Nazi Germany in all their broadcasts to the Arab world, exhorting Muslims to murder Jews and enact Hitler’s final solution. Not by coincidence, one of his greatest students is Yasser Arafat, who in moments of weakness claims (wrongly, I believe) that he is Haj Mohammad Amin’s nephew. [Emphasis added.]

The knee-bone's connected ... to Hitler!

And Don't Miss ...

This little ditty on hypocrisy of the grandest sort. (Hat tip Instapundit.)

Some snips:

You positively wriggle with delight when King Hipocrite Sean Penn gives yet another interview talking up his greatest role yet - that of anti-Bush, anti-Iraq-war peacenik. In October last year, Penn spent $56,000 publishing an open letter to President Bush in the Washington Post, putting the case against the war, before flying to Iraq and meeting the foreign minister of the genocidal, parasitical, murdering junta then ruling this unfortunate country. Is the Sean Penn who instructs the west to turn the other cheek when faced with Islamofascism the same Sean Penn, one wonders, who seems barely capable of seeing a cheek without itching to punch it?

...

Do as you would be done to; pot, kettle, black. This issue is quite delightfully simple. And if you want it to be complex, it's because you just know that your argument wouldn't stand up to the stark light of day. For the truth, as the sexy old Situationists used to say, loves nothing more than to stand naked.

Brutal -- but nicely written...

UPDATE: Andrew now covers this and says "Yes - the alliance between socialism and extreme Islam. Things are getting weirder and weirder." Unfortunately, I don't think it's weird at all -- their most extreme members both want the destruction of the West more than anything else. More later...

Cycles of Entropy: The Fall of Rome...

I found this on the web a while ago and have been tardy posting it -- well worth the short read:

I can just imagine exactly this kind of debate going on in Rome right up to the point that the Huns kicked in the gates. It strikes me that any society that has to start asking itself if it is committing “professional suicide” by ignoring the threat posed by barbarians with a completely alien world view and bent on their destruction is already beyond help. Geopolitical navel-gazing must be the last stage in the evolution of a society before it is too morally ambivalent to defend its own sovereignty. (Or, maybe it results from the unwillingness to do so?)
Let me lay it out for you…

Stage 1: We need a revolution to set us free from tyranny!

Stage 2: Hey, what happened to our colonies?

Stage 3: Oh, yeah. Uh. Colonialism is bad. Yeah. That’s it. So, that must mean any use of military force against anyone anywhere is bad. Right?

Stage 4: Oh gosh, we just need to all be more tolerant of other people. And hey, at least all those imigrants always vote our way. Besides, aren't we all really just immigrants on this big old space ship we call Earth anyway?

Stage 5: Didn't we used to have elections this time of year? Hey, where’d all the Barbies go?

Stage 6: Now repeat after the nice man with the machine gun… “There is one God and Mohamed is his prophet.”

Stage 7: GoTo Stage: 1, repeat as necessary.

Or, the alternative evolution...

Stage 5: Hey, didn't there used to be a couple of big buildings right about here?

Stage 6: Jihad? I've got your Jihad right here baby!

Stage 7: Okay, so we got a litte rough there, but they deserved it.

Stage 8: GoTo Stage 3: repeat as necessary.

So you see, all the terrorists would have had to do to take America out of the equation was leave us alone for another 50 years or so and we would have evolved into sophisticated pro-globalization pacifists all by ourselves. But, nothing sets back political entropy like a good old Pearl Harbor style sucker-punch, eh?

Posted by: Dacotti on September 25, 2003 01:07 PM [NOTE FROM BOB: The address is Dacotti -at- hot mail dot com]

More on this later too...

A Jew In Baghdad

The great irony of multiculturalism is that it is built on a kernel of truth. In fact, it takes something that everyone knows in their bones to be true and then perverts it: everyone is unique. But then we're supposed to believe that everyone and every group is of equal value. And everyone's just as rational as us westerners.

This stunning article by Jonathan Zagdanski clarifies the lie. Here's a critical snippet:

While patrolling the streets of Baghdad, I often got involved in political conversations with secular, educated, and "moderate" Iraqis about the war against Iraq, Israel, the Jews, and America. To my surprise, most of them held wildly irrational beliefs about the world. For example, most of them would swear that Ariel Sharon pressured a reluctant President Bush to go to war against Iraq [or] that the CIA put Saddam Hussein, a CIA agent, in power to allow U.S. forces to take Iraqi oil and impoverish Iraq. Finally, they were convinced that the CIA is an organization controlled by the Mossad and that powerful Zionists dominate Washington, D.C.! In fact, most Arabs in the world believe these absurdities. These beliefs are the product of years of intense brainwashing by their education[al] system, mass media and political and religious leaders. These beliefs turn educated, intelligent Arab family men into hijackers that slam passenger planes into buildings and homicide bombers that murder as may Jews as possible on Israeli buses.

We are not at war against terrorism; we are at war against an ideology. I consider this ideology to be the product of a dangerous mental disease. It is a disease that has infected millions of Arabs into believing that by destroying the enemy -- the Jew, the State of Israel, and the "Great Satan" America -- past Arab pride and glory [will] be restored. This mental illness is slowly but deliberately plunging the world into World War III.

[Emphasis added.] The only clarification I would add is that there's a fair argument that this is WW IV as James Woolsey has suggested, however there are some disturbing signs that it's just a continuation of the Cold War by other means. While there's obviously a huge element of brainwashing and creating external enemies going on here, I think it's also tied in with the grand historical sweep of residues. Reading "The Formation of Residues" is your homework assignment for the weekend -- strongly, strongly recommended. More on that later...

Ya Just Gotta Love ...

Gray Davis' firefighting priorities! If I didn't try to keep the expletives under control here your eyes would be feeling about as warm as the LA basin right now...

Wow

You can't risk missing this so here's a shameless steal from Andrew:

EMAIL OF THE DAY: "I just got back from the memorial service. This soldier had served 18 years in the Army, most of that in Special Forces. He did all the hard jobs, and spent years in desolate miserable places, helping people he didnt' know, try to improve their lives. He was a father of two young boys, a husband, and clearly a friend of many. He did more to alleviate suffering in this world than was his burden to do, more, I'd dare venture, than all of the people put together who wrote to the Democratic Underground to call for the death of more soldiers like him in Iraq. I fly up to DC tonight to be with my wife and children. We are stationed apart, she is a doctor at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and I am a simple soldier in the Third Army, "Patton's Own". My kids will likely fall asleep in their Haloween costumes so that I can see them all dressed up, since I won't be there until sometime after 11:00 pm. I pray every day that they understand that what their Mother and I do for work is not just a hardship on them, but a way to protect them, and others, for many years to come. Others will have to make this same sacrifice in the future, but it's a burden I and others share right now. I've lived in Saudi Arabia, and I've seen what Islamic fundamentalism can do to personal freedom. I will gladly fight to keep that away from my children. And I will work to keep those who think like the writers to the Democratic Underground out of power. My promise on that is as good as my 20 year promise to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. I will never forget."
- 1:40:12 PM [Emphasis added.]

Separating The Extremes ...
... is very difficult based on this. (Instapundit is hot today.)

If the far left were actually reasoned into the positions they hold in support of the second Holocaust now underway in Israel (and fast coming into view in Europe) they would develop self doubt when they found themselves in alignment with vile scum like this.

More Good News!

The Clinton-Gore economic boom continues!!! (Hat tip Instapundit.)

Johann Hari ...

... strikes again:

You might have doubts about America being a friend of Iraqi democracy - given their one-time backing for Saddam and a myriad of tyrants, all sane people should - but you can be absolutely certain that the bombers - attackers of the Red Cross - are its resolute enemy. America helped the Kurds to build democracy in Northern Iraq; neither jihadists nor Baathists have ever built democracy anywhere. America offers some hope; the bombers, none. Any possibility of a better Iraq is being shaken with every blast. Of course, we should not play their game by exaggerating the bombers' successes. 90 per cent of the attacks are happening in just 5 per cent of the country, so most Iraqis - and most coalition troops - are unaffected by these attackers.

Don't miss it!

Check Out The ...

Party line. (Hat tip Andrew.)

What? An accounting of recent foreign policy history from the left that isn't completely rabid?

Michael Totten ...

Has the kind of interpretation of "Healing Iraq" that I was about to pen -- though not that literate of course :) So I'm going to bed instead :):)

Point, Counter-Point on Iraq Reconstruction (and more)

First the serious with some excellent points though certainly with a caustic, anti-Bush slant -- then the caustic points with an excellent slant ;/

And of course, as I pointed out in a previous post, we have been here before. If you would have asked Roosevelt before the war what the plan was for reconstructing Europe you would have gotten either an acid stare or a raucous laugh.

For a while now, I have been less than impressed with the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority for Iraq) -- I think it probably is the "C" team to a large extent. We have become a soft and complacent nation -- our best people are rewarded very well to take cushy positions. Why risk your life and possibly not seeing your kids for a long time -- or ever -- when you can assign the "new hires" to work on it? (I don't mean to disparage the many fine individuals who are risking all to go over there.)

And make no mistake, our entire system operates on an exquisitely fine balance to deliver the standard of living we have. We could move Iraq along much faster if we raided a large number of the best minds in the country to do it. But then we'd be talking about sacrifice and public service and actual bravery.

We'd build a Peace Corps that had both compassion and smarts -- and guts and muscle when it became clear they were taking undeserved crap. But then we'd need the best of both ends of the political spectrum to actually compromise and work with each other -- and contribute some of their best people.

For instance, the left would have to say to the right: OK, if you give us legal rights for gay marriage then we'll stop trying to destroy traditional families and we'll help you go after the NAMBLA people like they were the KKK reincarnated.

And the right would have to say to the left: OK, if you stop the nonsense with attacking capitalism by pandering to envy, then we'll make sure that corrupt rich folks get mandatory minimums measured in decades -- and not in "nice" prisons either.

And the left would have to say to the right: OK, if you slow down the focus on techno-war, we'll stop eviscerating any possibility of building up a competent "human intelligence" capability by harping on unrealistic "human rights concerns".

And the right would have to say to the left: OK, if you admit to the brutal ignorance and anti-semitism that infests the Middle East, we'll work with you to choke off all the tyrannies there as well as the retirement gravy trains they bribe our government officials with. Maybe even make government work pay enough that corruption wasn't a constant temptation.

You should get the idea by now...

Sadly, I doubt this will happen until something really nasty happens -- and believe me, since 911 hasn't done it, it's going to be bad.

Oh yeah, see my previous post about why the Euros are very, very far from our "betters" on this topic either...

More in the future about how our "first past the post" political system has helped get us in this uncompromising mess...

Our Betters The Europeans ...

also happen to be corrupt.

Darren Kaplan

on the "Fraudulent Coalition".

More on Syrians ...

in the flypaper.

Healing Iraq Again

I continue to be impressed with Healing Iraq. (I've added him to my links.) My guess is the terrorist tempo is finally ramping up enough for it to be possible that a "big gun" terrorist like Mugniyah is involved. The key question now is whether the Iraqis line up in Zeyad's direction or fall back into being terrorized by Bin Laden and Saddam. "Flypaper" has ignited Islam's long-overdue civil war in Iraq...

Zeyad's post on how big video games are in Iraq is very interesting also -- gives me hope that they've tasted too much "forbidden fruit of the west" to fall for Bin Laden's claptrap...

Good News! The Plan for Spam

Spock has a nice post on the promise (and some fair detail) of Bayesian filtering engines in the war against Spam. It will cheer you up when you find out that the spammers may actually be in a relatively hopeless position against the newest filters like POPfile!

I would concur. My organization has recently adopted POPfile (and Outclass) with very good results. Even more interesting, I recommended POPfile to someone at church who was complaining about spam and he liked it so much he went out of his way to tell me how happy he was with it.

How 'bout that? A rare cheery morning here at We The Free...

Relativity Stops at the Family's Edge

This City Journal piece by Brian Anderson is very astute on the growing Conservative/ Libertarian tendencies of the younger generation. Check out this snippet on South Park.

One of the contemporary Left’s most extreme (and, to conservatives, objectionable) strategies is its effort to draw the mantle of civil liberties over behavior once deemed criminal, pathological, or immoral, as a brilliant South Park episode featuring a visit to town by the North American Man-Boy Love Association—the ultra-radical activist group advocating gay sex with minors—satirizes:

NAMBLA leader [speaking at a group meeting, attended by the South Park kids]: Rights? Does anybody know their rights? You see, I’ve learned something today. Our forefathers came to this country because they believed in an idea. An idea called “freedom.” They wanted to live in a place where a group couldn’t be prosecuted for their beliefs. Where a person can live the way he chooses to live. You see us as being perverted because we’re different from you. People are afraid of us, because they don’t understand. And sometimes it’s easier to persecute than to understand.

Kyle: Dude. You have sex with children.
NAMBLA leader: We are human. Most of us didn’t even choose to be attracted to young boys. We were born that way. We can’t help the way we are, and if you all can’t understand that, well, then, I guess you’ll just have to put us away.
Kyle [slowly, for emphasis]: Dude. You havesex. With children.
Stan: Yeah. You know, we believe in equality for everybody, and tolerance, and all that gay stuff, but dude, fuck you.

[Emphasis added.] As the father of two young boys, you don't really want to know what I think about pedophilia and pederasty (which was rampant under the Taliban by the way). One of my favorite quotes on what stinking garbage extreme pomo multiculturalism is comes from Richard Dawkins: "Show me a relativist at 30,000 feet, and I'll show you a hypocrite."

Darren Kaplan ...

... gets a strong vote of recommendation today also -- check this out:

I think the only answer is an unwillingness to realize that the international order is threatened by the terrorists themselves rather than the Bush Administration’s war on the terrorists. When Bush challenged to world to pick a side in that war with his “you are either with us or with the terrorists” statement, much of the world resisted and determined to find a neutral position. Resisting U.S. “hyperpower” was more important than picking a side in the fight between terror and civilization. The problem for the international community is that the terrorists are in agreement with President Bush--you are either with us or with the terrorists and the terrorists have determined that the rest of the world is not with them. That makes the rest of the world and all its neutral institutions fair game for the terrorists. As so often happens in life, when you refuse to take a side, one ends up being chosen for you.

That it took this long for the Red Cross to realize that they could become a target strongly suggests that the NGOs have failed to understand the fundamental nature of the threat. This is a war by the forces of ignorance and hate against the enlightened and merciful. It is surprising that it took the Iraqi insurgents this long to attack the Red Cross. Red Cross workers have been prime targets for the Taliban and al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan for some time. [Emphasis added.]

Uhhh -- it is a cross and not a crescent moon...

Rolling, Rolling!

Totten is on a roll today and adds fuel to my Kucinich critique in a TCS article on "The Crucial Alliance":

Four years ago during the war in Yugoslavia House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) said "The bombing was a mistake." He demanded president Clinton negotiate a "diplomatic agreement in order to end this failed policy." The policy wasn't a failure. It just wasn't finished yet. Tom DeLay is not a pacifist. But he would have halted an unfinished war in its tracks and made it a failure on purpose, just to destroy a hated president.

Now that we have a new man in the White House, some Democrats have decided to behave the same way. Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) proposes an immediate US retreat from Iraq. Stabilizing and democratizing Iraq is far more important than the intervention in the Balkans. Fighting back in the Terror War is not optional, and most honest brokers will admit that Iraq is one lynchpin within that war. But that doesn't stop Dennis Kucinich. He'll let Iraq fall apart and grant a victory to terrorists as long as it helps take down president Bush.

More than 2,000 years ago in The Art of War Sun Tzu told how to defeat an enemy's leadership. "When he is united, divide him." The lesson here is reversible. We cannot let ourselves become divided. We cannot let the crucial alliance be shattered.

Then, back on his own blog he goes for the jugular against ANSWER:

I can forgive those on the old left who once had a romance with Communism. As Leszek Kolakowski wrote, Communism is the degenerate bastard child of the Enlightenment. Vicious as it was, at least some of the ideas sounded nice. The results were horrific; engineered famines, mass graves, prison camps, and bone piles. But equality and solidarity were the rallying cries. It was an irresistible siren song for some well-meaning fools.

Fascism, though, is another matter. It isn't a bastard child of the liberal Enlightenment. It is deliberately anti-Enlightenment. Freedom, equality, and global solidarity are hardly the talking points. It is explicitly belligerent and genocidal. Look at the Baath Party and its racist ethnic cleansing campaign against Jews and Shiites and Kurds. Look at the Islamists and their brutal persecution of secularists and "infidels", their perverse dream of a global Islamic Inquisition. They would put the Jews to the sword. They promise to turn the United States into a sea of deadly radiation. They throw acid in the faces of unveiled women. The Baathists massacred ethnic minorities with chemical weapons. They fed dissidents into tree shredders.

These are the people for whom the anti-war organizers express their "unconditional support."

This isn't Marxism. It's not a "good cause" gone bad. It's fascism all over again with Islamic characteristics.

The hindsight of history gave old Communists some slack, so long as they didn't commit atrocities themselves. Supporters of European fascism didn't get off so easy. They are unsparingly damned by history.

Supporters of Middle Eastern fascism may find a similar terrible judgement awaiting them in the future. Those in the West are the 21st Century's skinheads. [Emphasis added.]

Nice job Michael...

Light Hate

I got a good chuckle from Jonah today -- about hate and guessed thoughts of those under the tinfoil hats:

I could go on. But the point is that just because I hate these people and things doesn't mean I'm wrong. Nor does it mean that my reasons for hating them are irrational or illegitimate. Indeed, we generally consider people who say they don't hate Hitler to have an incomplete or warped grasp of the facts. Conservatives believe that not hating Stalin just as much is a sign of world-historical bias for mass murderers of the Left. We don't treat people who think dried figs and blue cheese make a nice lunch as if they're crazy, but hopefully if Bush can get a few justices on the Supreme Court we'll be able to change that.

Look Inside Yourself

If you can read this story and come out the other side cheering for the terrorists then I will be sure to pray for you -- you're at least in de-nihilism. Myself, I had shivers of repulsion and the urge to retch... (Hat tip LGF.)

By the way, the Healing Iraq blog has a very apropos tagline: "It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into." -- Jonathan Swift

Look at my tag line and you'll see kindred spirits...

Of Tinfoil Hats, Dead Christians and De-nihilism...

Mark Steyn breaks the de-nihilism barrier:

I haven't really followed Sudanese current events closely since, oh, Gen. Kitchener's victory over the Mahdi at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898. But a recent story from that benighted land happened to catch my eye. Last month mass hysteria apparently swept the capital city, Khartoum, after reports that foreigners were shaking hands with Sudanese men and causing their penises to disappear. One victim, a fabric merchant, told his story to the London Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi. A man from West Africa came into the shop and "shook the store owner's hand powerfully until the owner felt his penis melt into his body."

...

There's something pathetic about a culture so ignorant even its pathologies have to be imported. But what do you expect? The telling detail of the vanishing penis hysteria is that it was spread by text messaging. You can own a cell phone, yet still believe that foreigners are able with a mere handshake to cause your penis to melt away.

Aside from its doubts in its collective manhood, Sudan is no laughing matter. Two million people have been slaughtered there in the last decade. The Christian minority is vanishing a lot faster than that fabric merchant's privates. Osama certainly found the country fertile ground for his ideology: Sudanese mujahideen have been captured as far afield as Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan. An economic basket case with a 27 percent literacy rate has managed to find enough spare cash to export revolutionary Islam to many other countries. And they've got half-a-billion dollars' worth of state-of-the-art Chinese weaponry from Iran.

A handshake-fearing guy with a cell phone is one thing; what happens when the handshake-fearers have cell phones and a suitcase nuke? It's at the intersection of apparently indestructible ancient ignorance and cheap, widely available western technology that the dark imponderables of the future lie. [Emphasis added.]

I really, really wish I was making this up. I'm going to have to come up with a term much stronger than "tinfoil hat wearer" to even get on the right planet to describe my opinion of this. Negotiating with people like this is just risible...

I'm just going to shamefully lift this from Andrew, it's too damn good to take any chances you won't click through to see it:

ORWELL ON WAR CRITICS: "It is, I think, true to say that the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." - from Notes on Nationalism. It's a helpful quote when slogging through yet another left-liberal column on why we can't win in Iraq. [Emphasis added.]

More Deja-Vu -- and more grist for upcoming posts on hatred...

A Key Point Regarding Hitchens' "Against Rationalization" Thesis

The main argument with any semblance of rationality by the Bush hater crowd against Hitchens' point:

What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. (Christopher Hitchens, "Against Rationalization")

is that it's Bush they're after -- not us nice people and not Clinton for instance.

This argument is bogus: terrorist Ramzi Yousef boasted that the goal of the WTC I bombing under Clinton's reign was to topple one tower into another with the aim of 250,000 deaths! We were tremendously lucky. And of course, there were plenty of attacks on Clinton's watch including the USS Cole, Khobar Towers and the African embassies. And Yousef was busting his butt after WTC I to simultaneously blow up a dozen airliners over the Pacific it turns out.

So basically, you would need to elect a virtual communist like Dennis Kucinich to have any prayer of success with this line of reasoning. Number 1, that just ain't going to happen in America for at least 10-20 years due to the way the two party system currently still works -- the Dems would suffer a bigger than McGovern-sized defeat.

Number 2, it would fail on the merits of course. Dopey as Kucinick is, I doubt even he would send out his KuciNazis to put bags over all our women's bodies and heads. (See, I can even say nice things about people who blind me with the reflections from their tinfoil hats.) And if he did, any nutballs who tried to enforce it would find there are still too many guns in the country to make such vile nonsense stick -- thank God!

And while he might actually succeed in temporarily damaging scitech with some sort of "plan from planet Lysenko" ("What? You say there's been a warming trend since the last Ice Age?! The gulag for you!"), if anything he would work night and day to destroy religion rather than incorporate it into the state.

Now, of course, just a moderate implementation of that might jar Christians enough to reopen their history books and remember that there were at least 3 million (and possibly as high as 12 million) Christians killed in the Holocaust alongside the 6 million Jewish victims -- and that doesn't count the tens of millions of Christians killed in the fighting of the war, of course. And out would come the guns. Not to mention that the police and military in this country are still heavily Christian and would be more likely to start giving ACLU members two year sentences for ginned-up parking tickets instead.

And if Dennis really got his tinfoil hat cockeyed and decided to institute Islam as the new American religion of state ("because, you know, we need to make up for all the enslavement of the Muslims we have done") then the last paragraph would be a way, way, way conservative estimate of what would happen...

The wife pulled off yet another b-day party extraordinaire -- smiling little faces all around!

Not Much Blogging Today ...

... with a newly-minted 5-year old in the house! Have a great day -- I know I will!

Adding a Hitch To The Classics...

I had been meaning to add Christopher Hitchens' "Against Rationalization" to the "Classics" links over on the right. Done. Here's where he absolutely rocks:

Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours.. Any decent and concerned reader of this magazine could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings--yes, even in the Pentagon.

[Emphasis added.] It's a sad commentary when I find ornery Marxists to be better in alignment with reality than the Dems. And I agree with everything I bolded including the comment on Robertson and Falwell. But damn he can write, can't he? Imagine what a treat Hitch would be if he didn't have most of his brains cells tied behind his back from the sauce...

You don't think I mean it? Here it is again:

Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours.. Any decent and concerned reader of this magazine could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings--yes, even in the Pentagon.

And again:

Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours.. Any decent and concerned reader of this magazine could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings--yes, even in the Pentagon.

Got that?