21 August 2005
Anti-Americanism at Ground Zero
the unthinkable may be happening... Ground Zero is at risk for policially correct edifaces.
20 August 2005
Insane Clown Posse- Iranian style
[Michael Ledeen in today's NRO with an invaluable scorecards of the fuckheads that run Iran-Is there even a question about preventing these guys from getting a nuke?]
Iran the Model
Iran moves, we don’t.
Iranian President Ahmadi Nezhad has been busy putting together a cabinet for the Islamic republic, and while all real power remains firmly in the clammy hands of Supreme Leader Khamenei, it's worth taking a look at some of the new ministers, if only because it tells us two important things: (1) The face the regime wishes to show to the world at large, and (2) the policies the regime intends to unleash on the long-suffering Iranian people.
Who's WhoLet's start with the interior minister, Hojatoll-Islam Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi. He was formerly the number-two man in the ministry of intelligence and security — where he was directly in charge of the foreign section (and thus the sorts of foreign operations now running full bore in Iraq and Afghanistan) — and, even more significantly, the man in charge of those matters in the office of the supreme leader.
Pour-Mohammadi comes from a sartorially celebrated family; his father and brother are tailors for leading clergy. Indeed, they prepared the raiments for both bin Laden and Zawahiri in their recent videos, in which their clothing was distinctively Iranian.
The minister for intelligence and security is Hojjatol-Islam Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ezhei, from Isfahan, where he acquired a reputation as a particularly vicious and barbaric head of the Islamic tribunals which regularly issued brutal sentences. He has been special prosecutor in the intelligence ministry, where he was also in charge of key personnel decisions, and at present he is judge and prosecutor for the special tribunal of the clergy.
To Mohammed-Hossein Saffar-Harandi of Tehran goes the ironically named ministry of culture and Islamic guidance. In reality, that ministry's key role is to provide cover for external intelligence operations. For a decade, Saffar-Harandi was the director of the political bureau of the Revolutionary Guards, in which he holds the rank of brigadier general, and for which he was the commander of southern Iran.
The foreign minister is Manoucher Mottaki, whose long diplomatic career (he has been ambassador to both Japan and Turkey, and deputy foreign minister) has included the sensitive role as liaison between the foreign ministry and the revolutionary guards. While he was ambassador to Ankara, numerous Iranian dissidents were murdered and others kidnapped.
And then there is the defense minister, Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar, another brigadier general in the revolutionary Guards, where he has been since its official formation in 1979. As several commentators have pointed out, he was the commander of the RG forces in Lebanon in 1983, when the Marine barracks were blown up by the Guards and Hezbollah. So we owe him one.
The mullahs have torn off their conciliatory mask in order to bare their fangs to us, the Europeans, and the Iranian people. If we had an Iran strategy worthy of the name, our confused leaders would have pointed out the remarkable interview with the chief nuclear affairs negotiator, Hossein Musavian. It was broadcast on Iranian television August 4th, and made it quite clear that the Iranians deliberately tricked the Europeans into giving the mullahs an extra year to complete a vital part of their nuclear program in Isfahan.
"Thanks to the negotiations with Europe," he bragged, "we gained another year, in which we completed...Isfahan." This was quite a coup, at least in Musavian's humble opinion: "We suspended (the enrichment program) in Isfahan in October 2004, although we were required to do so in October 2003...Today we are in a position of power: (the program) in Isfahan is complete and UF4 and UF6 gases are being produced. We have a stockpile of products, and...we have managed to convert 36 tons of yellow cake into gas and store it..."
President Chirac? Chancellor Schroeder? Prime Minister Blair? How do you all intend to answer your parliamentary inquiries? You were all gulled by the mullahs (or, to put the darkest light on the matter, willing accomplices).
Meanwhile, the mullahs are killing us. Time published a long report from Baghdad on August 14, entitled "Inside Iran's Secret War for Iraq," which lays out chapter and verse of the mullahs' longstanding efforts — often coordinated with Assad's Syria — to drive us out of Iraq. It is the first time I've seen a major publication confirm what I reported months before Operation Iraqi Freedom: planning for the terror war against Coalition forces in Iraq "began before the U.S. invaded." And Time quotes a "British military intelligence officer about the relative inattention paid to the murderous Iranian activities. 'It's as though we are sleepwalking'."
Got Iran Policy?Instead of devoting hours of prime time coverage to the ravings of a broken mother, our media would do better to ask this administration why, four years after 9/11, it still has no Iran policy.
Perhaps, although one cannot say more than that, we are paying more attention. First came the announcement that American forces in Iraq found a cache of Iranian weapons, and had also captured a truck with shaped explosives entering Iraq from Iran. Then, talking to journalists on his plane during a South American swing on August 17, Rumsfeld said that U.S. forces have found Iranian weapons in Iraq "on more than one occasion over the past couple of months."
And so? These are straws in a very strong wind, and they will be blown away unless President Bush, Secretaries Rice and Rumsfeld, and Security Adviser Hadley at long last craft a serious policy to bring the terror war to bear on Tehran, as the president should have demanded on 9/12. The list of proven Iranian actions in the terror war against us is a very long one. To take just a few: In July, Assistant Secretary of State David Welch testified to the House International Relations Committee that "Iranian cadre were training Hizballah fighters in Lebanon," which Representative Tom Lantos quite reasonably found "profoundly disturbing." Hezbollah is operating in Iraq, and its infamous operational chieftain, Imad Mughniyah, remains at large even though the US Government has put a very high price on his head for decades. U.S. special forces in Hilla last fall captured documents and photographs of known Iraqi terrorists meeting with Syrian and Iranian intelligence officers in Syria. The celebrated Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzon publicly stated that, after the liberation of Afghanistan, al Qaeda reconstituted its leadership in Iran, where they convened a strategic summit in November, 2002. One of the participants was a Syrian named Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, who is now suspected by British authorities of being one of the masterminds of the lethal terrorist attack in London. According to Spanish newspapers, "Intelligence reports from foreign agencies last year placed Nasar in Iran."
The seemingly inescapable fact is that Iran is waging war on us, we are well aware of it, and we are not responding, even though most Iranians are dreaming of the day that the United States supports them against the mullahs. Hardly a day goes by without anti-regime demonstrations in one Iranian city or another, involving students, workers, intellectuals, and even some very important clergymen. The number of Iranian dissidents on hunger strike is growing. Akbar Ganji hovers between life and death in a hospital in Tehran. Yet, aside from occasional statements of compassion, there is no hint of action from the Bush administration.
This inaction has recently been buttressed by two fanciful "estimates" from the intelligence community. The first reassuringly forecast that Iran is a good ten years away from nuclear weapons; the second insisted that no revolution is in the Iranian works. To which the only proper response is a belly laugh. I'm personally willing to bet the farm against any intel-type willing to take the wager that Iran will have atomic bombs in a period closer to ten days than to ten years. And the "no revolution in the works" prediction comes, as Eli Lake of the splendid New York Sun wrote yesterday, from the same people who made the same prediction just before the fall of the Shah and who confidently told Ronald Reagan that the Soviet Empire was here to stay. Somebody should ask the deep thinkers to name three revolutions that occurred without outside support, and when they fail, they should then be asked how they could make such an assessment without discussing the key variable: our support or lack thereof.
As if that were not enough, our expert community, in and out of government, incessantly warns that if we were to support the democratic opposition in Iran, it would actually hurt the chances of revolution, because the Iranians would be so angry they would rally around the mullahs in a blind nationalistic spasm. The deep thinkers should take a look at the mullahs' reaction to the ongoing revolt in Awaz, in Khuzistan province. The regime has blamed the whole thing on the British Government. This produced a memorable response from the British Ahwazi friendship society:
Protestors are armed with rocks, tyres and anything else they can use in acts of civil disobedience. They do not have guns. Is Asefi afraid the British are smuggling rocks into Iran to overthrow the Revolutionary Guards? Does he think Ahwazis need special training from the British in order to throw rocks?
The mullahs always blame their troubles on foreigners, and yet the Iranian people remain opposed to the regime, and many of the most popular dissidents openly ask the West, and particularly the United States, to help them.
Well, Mr. President? To use the language of one of your favorite games, it's time to call or fold. Indeed, if you're planning to stay at the table, you might even raise: President Ahmadi Nezhad was not in the American embassy in Tehran in 1979, but he was hard at work in Evin Prison, where some of the hostages were interrogated. You've got every good reason to tell him to forget about coming to New York this fall to pose at the U.N. That would send a ripple of hope through the Iranian populace, now interpreting our willingness to let him come here as a sign of acquiescence. And while you're at it, why don't you ask the Europeans to show at least some symbolic courage. They've failed to stem the Iranian nuclear program. It's obviously a wasted effort to ask the U.N. to apply sanctions, since China and/or Russia will quash it (and in fact, sanctions are the last thing we should want, since they would punish the Iranian people, not the beturbaned tyrants in power). Put the mark of Cain on the mullahs: propose that the Europeans to join with you in asking for a ban of Iran from all international athletic competition. And ask the international trade union organizations to support their brothers and sisters in Iran, many of whom have not been paid for months, despite the cascade of petrodollars.
Enough already. Let's roll.
Iran the Model
Iran moves, we don’t.
Iranian President Ahmadi Nezhad has been busy putting together a cabinet for the Islamic republic, and while all real power remains firmly in the clammy hands of Supreme Leader Khamenei, it's worth taking a look at some of the new ministers, if only because it tells us two important things: (1) The face the regime wishes to show to the world at large, and (2) the policies the regime intends to unleash on the long-suffering Iranian people.
Who's WhoLet's start with the interior minister, Hojatoll-Islam Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi. He was formerly the number-two man in the ministry of intelligence and security — where he was directly in charge of the foreign section (and thus the sorts of foreign operations now running full bore in Iraq and Afghanistan) — and, even more significantly, the man in charge of those matters in the office of the supreme leader.
Pour-Mohammadi comes from a sartorially celebrated family; his father and brother are tailors for leading clergy. Indeed, they prepared the raiments for both bin Laden and Zawahiri in their recent videos, in which their clothing was distinctively Iranian.
The minister for intelligence and security is Hojjatol-Islam Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ezhei, from Isfahan, where he acquired a reputation as a particularly vicious and barbaric head of the Islamic tribunals which regularly issued brutal sentences. He has been special prosecutor in the intelligence ministry, where he was also in charge of key personnel decisions, and at present he is judge and prosecutor for the special tribunal of the clergy.
To Mohammed-Hossein Saffar-Harandi of Tehran goes the ironically named ministry of culture and Islamic guidance. In reality, that ministry's key role is to provide cover for external intelligence operations. For a decade, Saffar-Harandi was the director of the political bureau of the Revolutionary Guards, in which he holds the rank of brigadier general, and for which he was the commander of southern Iran.
The foreign minister is Manoucher Mottaki, whose long diplomatic career (he has been ambassador to both Japan and Turkey, and deputy foreign minister) has included the sensitive role as liaison between the foreign ministry and the revolutionary guards. While he was ambassador to Ankara, numerous Iranian dissidents were murdered and others kidnapped.
And then there is the defense minister, Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar, another brigadier general in the revolutionary Guards, where he has been since its official formation in 1979. As several commentators have pointed out, he was the commander of the RG forces in Lebanon in 1983, when the Marine barracks were blown up by the Guards and Hezbollah. So we owe him one.
The mullahs have torn off their conciliatory mask in order to bare their fangs to us, the Europeans, and the Iranian people. If we had an Iran strategy worthy of the name, our confused leaders would have pointed out the remarkable interview with the chief nuclear affairs negotiator, Hossein Musavian. It was broadcast on Iranian television August 4th, and made it quite clear that the Iranians deliberately tricked the Europeans into giving the mullahs an extra year to complete a vital part of their nuclear program in Isfahan.
"Thanks to the negotiations with Europe," he bragged, "we gained another year, in which we completed...Isfahan." This was quite a coup, at least in Musavian's humble opinion: "We suspended (the enrichment program) in Isfahan in October 2004, although we were required to do so in October 2003...Today we are in a position of power: (the program) in Isfahan is complete and UF4 and UF6 gases are being produced. We have a stockpile of products, and...we have managed to convert 36 tons of yellow cake into gas and store it..."
President Chirac? Chancellor Schroeder? Prime Minister Blair? How do you all intend to answer your parliamentary inquiries? You were all gulled by the mullahs (or, to put the darkest light on the matter, willing accomplices).
Meanwhile, the mullahs are killing us. Time published a long report from Baghdad on August 14, entitled "Inside Iran's Secret War for Iraq," which lays out chapter and verse of the mullahs' longstanding efforts — often coordinated with Assad's Syria — to drive us out of Iraq. It is the first time I've seen a major publication confirm what I reported months before Operation Iraqi Freedom: planning for the terror war against Coalition forces in Iraq "began before the U.S. invaded." And Time quotes a "British military intelligence officer about the relative inattention paid to the murderous Iranian activities. 'It's as though we are sleepwalking'."
Got Iran Policy?Instead of devoting hours of prime time coverage to the ravings of a broken mother, our media would do better to ask this administration why, four years after 9/11, it still has no Iran policy.
Perhaps, although one cannot say more than that, we are paying more attention. First came the announcement that American forces in Iraq found a cache of Iranian weapons, and had also captured a truck with shaped explosives entering Iraq from Iran. Then, talking to journalists on his plane during a South American swing on August 17, Rumsfeld said that U.S. forces have found Iranian weapons in Iraq "on more than one occasion over the past couple of months."
And so? These are straws in a very strong wind, and they will be blown away unless President Bush, Secretaries Rice and Rumsfeld, and Security Adviser Hadley at long last craft a serious policy to bring the terror war to bear on Tehran, as the president should have demanded on 9/12. The list of proven Iranian actions in the terror war against us is a very long one. To take just a few: In July, Assistant Secretary of State David Welch testified to the House International Relations Committee that "Iranian cadre were training Hizballah fighters in Lebanon," which Representative Tom Lantos quite reasonably found "profoundly disturbing." Hezbollah is operating in Iraq, and its infamous operational chieftain, Imad Mughniyah, remains at large even though the US Government has put a very high price on his head for decades. U.S. special forces in Hilla last fall captured documents and photographs of known Iraqi terrorists meeting with Syrian and Iranian intelligence officers in Syria. The celebrated Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzon publicly stated that, after the liberation of Afghanistan, al Qaeda reconstituted its leadership in Iran, where they convened a strategic summit in November, 2002. One of the participants was a Syrian named Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, who is now suspected by British authorities of being one of the masterminds of the lethal terrorist attack in London. According to Spanish newspapers, "Intelligence reports from foreign agencies last year placed Nasar in Iran."
The seemingly inescapable fact is that Iran is waging war on us, we are well aware of it, and we are not responding, even though most Iranians are dreaming of the day that the United States supports them against the mullahs. Hardly a day goes by without anti-regime demonstrations in one Iranian city or another, involving students, workers, intellectuals, and even some very important clergymen. The number of Iranian dissidents on hunger strike is growing. Akbar Ganji hovers between life and death in a hospital in Tehran. Yet, aside from occasional statements of compassion, there is no hint of action from the Bush administration.
This inaction has recently been buttressed by two fanciful "estimates" from the intelligence community. The first reassuringly forecast that Iran is a good ten years away from nuclear weapons; the second insisted that no revolution is in the Iranian works. To which the only proper response is a belly laugh. I'm personally willing to bet the farm against any intel-type willing to take the wager that Iran will have atomic bombs in a period closer to ten days than to ten years. And the "no revolution in the works" prediction comes, as Eli Lake of the splendid New York Sun wrote yesterday, from the same people who made the same prediction just before the fall of the Shah and who confidently told Ronald Reagan that the Soviet Empire was here to stay. Somebody should ask the deep thinkers to name three revolutions that occurred without outside support, and when they fail, they should then be asked how they could make such an assessment without discussing the key variable: our support or lack thereof.
As if that were not enough, our expert community, in and out of government, incessantly warns that if we were to support the democratic opposition in Iran, it would actually hurt the chances of revolution, because the Iranians would be so angry they would rally around the mullahs in a blind nationalistic spasm. The deep thinkers should take a look at the mullahs' reaction to the ongoing revolt in Awaz, in Khuzistan province. The regime has blamed the whole thing on the British Government. This produced a memorable response from the British Ahwazi friendship society:
Protestors are armed with rocks, tyres and anything else they can use in acts of civil disobedience. They do not have guns. Is Asefi afraid the British are smuggling rocks into Iran to overthrow the Revolutionary Guards? Does he think Ahwazis need special training from the British in order to throw rocks?
The mullahs always blame their troubles on foreigners, and yet the Iranian people remain opposed to the regime, and many of the most popular dissidents openly ask the West, and particularly the United States, to help them.
Well, Mr. President? To use the language of one of your favorite games, it's time to call or fold. Indeed, if you're planning to stay at the table, you might even raise: President Ahmadi Nezhad was not in the American embassy in Tehran in 1979, but he was hard at work in Evin Prison, where some of the hostages were interrogated. You've got every good reason to tell him to forget about coming to New York this fall to pose at the U.N. That would send a ripple of hope through the Iranian populace, now interpreting our willingness to let him come here as a sign of acquiescence. And while you're at it, why don't you ask the Europeans to show at least some symbolic courage. They've failed to stem the Iranian nuclear program. It's obviously a wasted effort to ask the U.N. to apply sanctions, since China and/or Russia will quash it (and in fact, sanctions are the last thing we should want, since they would punish the Iranian people, not the beturbaned tyrants in power). Put the mark of Cain on the mullahs: propose that the Europeans to join with you in asking for a ban of Iran from all international athletic competition. And ask the international trade union organizations to support their brothers and sisters in Iran, many of whom have not been paid for months, despite the cascade of petrodollars.
Enough already. Let's roll.
Chuck Hagel: a man so stupid only the Left would listen to
[Chuck Hagel makes me almost give thanks for Tom Harkin (almost) - this guy is a complete idiot- I mean a "foreign policy expert" according to al-Reuters. I don't know where his elevated self-importance comes from- he's from Nebraska so I assume it's from being in DC. Perfect example a guy who can never get enough mainstream media stroke jobs.]
Republican senator calls for talks with Iran
Aug 19 12:38 PM US/EasternBy Alan Elsner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican Party foreign policy expert Sen. Chuck Hagel is calling for the United States to open talks with Iran's new president and has dismissed President George W. Bush's talk of a military option against Tehran as an empty and foolish threat.In an interview with Reuters during a trip across his home state on Wednesday, Hagel said the United States should greet the new Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a bold diplomatic stroke."You've got a new president, a new opportunity to do something bold here. Why not take that opportunity and do something bold? Iran is going to be a major influence in the future of Iraq. It already is. Who are we kidding when we think that they're not? They are."I would start engaging with American face-to-face dialogue. We're not at negotiations yet, but opening that dialogue. This is a process. This needs to work. Every side has to give something here," said Hagel, who is a member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is seen as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2008.In an interview with Israeli television last week, Bush said "all options are on the table" if the Iranians refuse to comply with international demands to halt their nuclear program, and noted that he has already used force to protect U.S. security. EMPTY THREATHagel's response to that implied threat was completely dismissive."Quite frankly, what is the military option, what are we talking about here? We lose credibility in the face of the world when we say things like, 'Well just don't forget what happened to Iraq could happen to you Iran. We could invade you, we could bomb you.'
\r\n\r\n"Oh come on now. First of all, where are we going to get the troops? Who\'s going to go with us? Where are our partners going to be with Iran?"\r\n\r\nThe United States has been working through its allies, France, Britain and Germany, in an effort to persuade the Iranians to freeze their nuclear program. This week, the Iranians resumed operations at their uranium conversion facility at Isfahan.\r\n\r\nHagel, who has also been highly critical of the Bush administration\'s Iraq policy and would like to see Washington end its embargo of Cuba, said the current policy of working through surrogates made no sense.\r\n\r\n"I don\'t understand how we think we\'re going to make progress by staying on the outside using surrogates, our allies France, Britain and Germany, to go to the table and work with them while stand back and don\'t want to get our hands dirty," he said.\r\n\r\n"You need to move toward something and what are we moving toward here? I don\'t see where we\'re moving toward anything. In fact, I think we\'re eroding a base of strength that we still have here. We have got to get inside this thing, because this is a very dangerous problem," Hagel said. "I think we\'re actually losing altitude, I think we\'re actually making it more dangerous."\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n",0]
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"Oh come on now. First of all, where are we going to get the troops? Who's going to go with us? Where are our partners going to be with Iran?"The United States has been working through its allies, France, Britain and Germany, in an effort to persuade the Iranians to freeze their nuclear program. This week, the Iranians resumed operations at their uranium conversion facility at Isfahan.Hagel, who has also been highly critical of the Bush administration's Iraq policy and would like to see Washington end its embargo of Cuba, said the current policy of working through surrogates made no sense."I don't understand how we think we're going to make progress by staying on the outside using surrogates, our allies France, Britain and Germany, to go to the table and work with them while stand back and don't want to get our hands dirty," he said."You need to move toward something and what are we moving toward here? I don't see where we're moving toward anything. In fact, I think we're eroding a base of strength that we still have here. We have got to get inside this thing, because this is a very dangerous problem," Hagel said. "I think we're actually losing altitude, I think we're actually making it more dangerous."
Republican senator calls for talks with Iran
Aug 19 12:38 PM US/EasternBy Alan Elsner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican Party foreign policy expert Sen. Chuck Hagel is calling for the United States to open talks with Iran's new president and has dismissed President George W. Bush's talk of a military option against Tehran as an empty and foolish threat.In an interview with Reuters during a trip across his home state on Wednesday, Hagel said the United States should greet the new Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a bold diplomatic stroke."You've got a new president, a new opportunity to do something bold here. Why not take that opportunity and do something bold? Iran is going to be a major influence in the future of Iraq. It already is. Who are we kidding when we think that they're not? They are."I would start engaging with American face-to-face dialogue. We're not at negotiations yet, but opening that dialogue. This is a process. This needs to work. Every side has to give something here," said Hagel, who is a member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is seen as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2008.In an interview with Israeli television last week, Bush said "all options are on the table" if the Iranians refuse to comply with international demands to halt their nuclear program, and noted that he has already used force to protect U.S. security. EMPTY THREATHagel's response to that implied threat was completely dismissive."Quite frankly, what is the military option, what are we talking about here? We lose credibility in the face of the world when we say things like, 'Well just don't forget what happened to Iraq could happen to you Iran. We could invade you, we could bomb you.'
\r\n\r\n"Oh come on now. First of all, where are we going to get the troops? Who\'s going to go with us? Where are our partners going to be with Iran?"\r\n\r\nThe United States has been working through its allies, France, Britain and Germany, in an effort to persuade the Iranians to freeze their nuclear program. This week, the Iranians resumed operations at their uranium conversion facility at Isfahan.\r\n\r\nHagel, who has also been highly critical of the Bush administration\'s Iraq policy and would like to see Washington end its embargo of Cuba, said the current policy of working through surrogates made no sense.\r\n\r\n"I don\'t understand how we think we\'re going to make progress by staying on the outside using surrogates, our allies France, Britain and Germany, to go to the table and work with them while stand back and don\'t want to get our hands dirty," he said.\r\n\r\n"You need to move toward something and what are we moving toward here? I don\'t see where we\'re moving toward anything. In fact, I think we\'re eroding a base of strength that we still have here. We have got to get inside this thing, because this is a very dangerous problem," Hagel said. "I think we\'re actually losing altitude, I think we\'re actually making it more dangerous."\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n",0]
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"Oh come on now. First of all, where are we going to get the troops? Who's going to go with us? Where are our partners going to be with Iran?"The United States has been working through its allies, France, Britain and Germany, in an effort to persuade the Iranians to freeze their nuclear program. This week, the Iranians resumed operations at their uranium conversion facility at Isfahan.Hagel, who has also been highly critical of the Bush administration's Iraq policy and would like to see Washington end its embargo of Cuba, said the current policy of working through surrogates made no sense."I don't understand how we think we're going to make progress by staying on the outside using surrogates, our allies France, Britain and Germany, to go to the table and work with them while stand back and don't want to get our hands dirty," he said."You need to move toward something and what are we moving toward here? I don't see where we're moving toward anything. In fact, I think we're eroding a base of strength that we still have here. We have got to get inside this thing, because this is a very dangerous problem," Hagel said. "I think we're actually losing altitude, I think we're actually making it more dangerous."
19 August 2005
Peggy Noonan on the Bush-Clinton friendship
[Although I thought she was way off on what I felt was on of W's greatest speeches- his Inaugural Address last January, Peggy Noonan's writing nails it every time. How she can make such common sensical connections with you while she lives in Manhattan is to her credit. She is at times corny and over-sentimental, but I wish our world was more like what she describes. Today she takes on the weird kiss-fest between the Bushes and Clintons. You know what the Clintons are about- raw ambition of possessing power- they would make nice to maybe even each other if it furthers there ambitions. But it is perplexing to say the least. Again she draws on a bygone age (which seems more and more "by") in talking about Eisenhower and when the Democrats actually took national security seriously. It was plainly before the wussy baby boomers started to throw their temper tantrums and begin to infect academia, the courts, and the media.]
Read it all here: http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110007120
Peggy Noonan
There's something unserious about Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush's newfound affection.
Key passages:
"The subject turned to the growing friendship between the Bush seniors and Bill Clinton. They had famously bonded big-time during their tsunami fund-raising efforts, and Barbara Bush is reported now to call Mr. Clinton "son." Mr. Clinton has been up to Kennebunkport this summer to play golf with his fellow former president, go boating, and have a private dinner.
In our conversation someone called the growing chumminess "creepy" and asked what I thought of it. I said I found it creepy too. What, I was asked, did I think was behind it? Why are Mr. Bush senior and Mr. Clinton so publicly embracing each other, yukking it up for the cameras and complimenting each other?
Because it serves their individual needs and interests, I said. They both get real benefit out of it while appearing to be ignoring their own interests. That's a great twofer. "
"But they're missing something, I think. It is the kind of reserve coupled with an eschewal of the merely petty demonstrated by the old pros of the past. Eisenhower supported JFK after the Bay of Pigs, but without the creepy yukking it up, and in a way that put the emphasis on the importance of the presidency and not the sweetness of Ike. The old soldier stood with the unsteady junior officer who'd been duly elected, and said he supported the president's leadership. He didn't hug him, smooch, or call him ducky. He didn't suggest he found him personally endearing. "
"What bothers me about the fervid friendship of the Bushes and Mr. Clinton--and the media celebration of it--is the faint whiff of superiority, a sense they radiate that all those slightly icky little people running around wailing about issues--tax reform, the relation of the individual to the state, the necessary character of a president--and working the precincts are somehow . . . a little below them. There is an air of condescension toward that grubby thing, belief. Those who hold it are not elevated, don't quite fit into the high-minded nonpartisan brotherhood. When in fact the people doing the day-to-day work of democracy, and who are in it because they are impelled by deep belief and philosophy, are actually not below them at all, and perhaps above them. Not that they're on the cover of People hugging, but at least they're serious. "
Indifferent to Democracy
[Excellent piece from WSJ today]
Indifferent to Democracy
Why the Arab world roots for American failure in Iraq
BY MICHAEL YOUNG
Mr. Young, a Lebanese national, is opinion editor at the Daily Star in Beirut and a contributing editor at Reason magazine.
Key passages:
Saddam's fall was welcomed by shamefully few Arabs (I recall how, on the day of his capture, a liberal Arab intellectual living in the U.S. mainly regretted that this would bolster George W. Bush's popularity ratings): The "humiliation" of seeing an Arab leader toppled by Western armies far outweighed that of seeing one of the most talented of Arab societies, the Middle East's Germany, subjected to a ferocious despotism responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. Nor was there much interest regionally in the discovery of the Baath's mass graves. One reason was the secondary concern that many Arab societies have for Saddam's foremost victims--the Shiites and Kurds; but the main cause of indifference was that Saddam's crimes, if acknowledged, threatened to imply the Arabs' inability to responsibly manage their own emancipation.
How the U.S. adventure in Iraq ends is anybody's guess. However, its repercussions will be felt, first, by the Arabs themselves. By refusing to profit from the prospective democratic upheaval that Saddam's removal ushered in; by never looking beyond the American messenger in Iraq to the message itself; by lamenting external hegemony while doing nothing to render it pointless, Arabs merely affirmed their impotence. The self-pitying Arab reaction to the Iraq war showed the terrible sway of the status quo in the Middle East. An inability to marshal change for one's benefit is the stuff of captive minds.
Read it all here: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/?id=110007128
06 August 2005
the worst hockey team name vs. the second worst hockey team name
[The good news/bad news of the new hockey team has always been this: Good News- Triple A Hockey- awesome! Bad News: your team name is the "Stars"
How does that engender local pride and fan ownership of the team? It strikes me as a bad business move by taking the parent club name vs. a local name for the team. The Barnstormers were a great example, their gear was everywhere in Des Moines circa 1995-1998. It justs seems like a lame name and logo to pass off to a market that needs to embrace the game and the team.
BUT- as ever with Des Moines we can point to Omaha to make ourselves feel better. Omaha team name: Ak-Sar-Ben Knights? Sounds like a Shriner chapter]
Stars will open Oct. 6 at home
08/06/2005
The puck drops on the Iowa Stars' inaugural hockey season two months from today.The American Hockey League released its 2005-06 season schedule Friday.
How does that engender local pride and fan ownership of the team? It strikes me as a bad business move by taking the parent club name vs. a local name for the team. The Barnstormers were a great example, their gear was everywhere in Des Moines circa 1995-1998. It justs seems like a lame name and logo to pass off to a market that needs to embrace the game and the team.
BUT- as ever with Des Moines we can point to Omaha to make ourselves feel better. Omaha team name: Ak-Sar-Ben Knights? Sounds like a Shriner chapter]
Stars will open Oct. 6 at home
08/06/2005
The puck drops on the Iowa Stars' inaugural hockey season two months from today.The American Hockey League released its 2005-06 season schedule Friday.
Register touts ethical lapse- but it's ok they're Liberals
[I love how the Register touts this obvious conflict of interest on the front page. I don't care that Vilsack does the I-Cubs play by play on the radio, but when Christy Vilsack can call up the owner of the I-Cubs (who inexplicably is also the Board of Regents President) and ask that he be given a chance to do play by play for a Christmas present doesn't that clue you in to the chummy relationship they have? In a typcial business enviornment would this type of thing be frowned upon? Yet it's idiots like this who rail about "corporate scandals" and attempt to pile on the regulations. Let them suffer through the 8 hours of web tutorials I have to complete to make politicans feel better about their asinine laws
I heard for Father's Day Christie called Bob Bowlsby and said that Tom has always wanted to call plays for the Hawkeyes and would that be ok?
Not that Michael Gartner, the deified owner of the I-Cubs has ever had any problem with questionable ethical practices. On top of all it you have the Register gaily putting this story on the front page. Rest assured according to Nancy Clark they can be trusted due to their journalistic ethos strict professional guidelines SO SHUT UP !]
Vilsack to be voice of I-Cubs for night
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
August 6, 2005
For at least nine innings, Iowa's issues with education, budgets, waterways and employment will have to wait in the on-deck circle.Gov. Tom Vilsack will trade meetings for a microphone Monday when he handles play-by-play radio coverage of the Iowa Cubs triple-A baseball game against Las Vegas at Principal Park.Michael Gartner, majority owner of the Iowa Cubs, said first lady Christie Vilsack arranged the night as a gift last Christmas."She said to me, 'You know, he would really like to broadcast a game. Could he do that?' " Gartner said. "I said, 'Sure.' She said, 'Can I give that to him as a Christmas present?' "
The game, which will be carried in central Iowa on KXNO-AM (1460), begins at 7:05 p.m.There's been no discussion about equal time for Republican versions of ground balls and base-running strategies."I made him a certificate good for doing one radio game for the Iowa Cubs - under three conditions," Gartner said. "He could not mention the Pittsburgh Pirates (his favorite team), he had to speak favorably of the Chicago Cubs, and he had to speak glowingly about the Iowa Cubs management."
On Tuesday morning, Vilsack transitions from baseball responsibilities to a more traditional duty - visiting a biodiesel plant.Iowa Cubs general manager Sam Bernabe, though, said team announcer Deene Ehlis has taken notice about the possible career change."Deene is very nervous," Bernabe said.
I heard for Father's Day Christie called Bob Bowlsby and said that Tom has always wanted to call plays for the Hawkeyes and would that be ok?
Not that Michael Gartner, the deified owner of the I-Cubs has ever had any problem with questionable ethical practices. On top of all it you have the Register gaily putting this story on the front page. Rest assured according to Nancy Clark they can be trusted due to their journalistic ethos strict professional guidelines SO SHUT UP !]
Vilsack to be voice of I-Cubs for night
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
August 6, 2005
For at least nine innings, Iowa's issues with education, budgets, waterways and employment will have to wait in the on-deck circle.Gov. Tom Vilsack will trade meetings for a microphone Monday when he handles play-by-play radio coverage of the Iowa Cubs triple-A baseball game against Las Vegas at Principal Park.Michael Gartner, majority owner of the Iowa Cubs, said first lady Christie Vilsack arranged the night as a gift last Christmas."She said to me, 'You know, he would really like to broadcast a game. Could he do that?' " Gartner said. "I said, 'Sure.' She said, 'Can I give that to him as a Christmas present?' "
The game, which will be carried in central Iowa on KXNO-AM (1460), begins at 7:05 p.m.There's been no discussion about equal time for Republican versions of ground balls and base-running strategies."I made him a certificate good for doing one radio game for the Iowa Cubs - under three conditions," Gartner said. "He could not mention the Pittsburgh Pirates (his favorite team), he had to speak favorably of the Chicago Cubs, and he had to speak glowingly about the Iowa Cubs management."
On Tuesday morning, Vilsack transitions from baseball responsibilities to a more traditional duty - visiting a biodiesel plant.Iowa Cubs general manager Sam Bernabe, though, said team announcer Deene Ehlis has taken notice about the possible career change."Deene is very nervous," Bernabe said.
05 August 2005
The difference between....
[If you remember the Super Bowl-type celebration by the Palestinians on September 11th. You'll appreciate this.]
The difference between.
Blair vows hard line on fanatics
[I admit that I used to think that Tony Blair would faint if ever he was required to actually be a leader, but thankfully I have been wrong, Blair has been stedfast and reliable. Despite his leftist tendancies he gets what we are up agaist and it's heartening to see. Maybe some Democratic "leaders" could learn something such as backbone from his example. If he follows through on this expect other European nations to do the same, and then you can say a signficant corner has been turned. Step 1: Admit you have a problem. Our Aussie allies can't be forgotten either- they get why we have to fight and they aren't rolling over.]
Blair vows hard line on fanatics
Blair vows hard line on fanatics
The Mullahs' Nuclear Timeline
[Only the Washington Post would cite our National Intelligence Estimate as an accurate source. What does our intelligence budget buy us exactly?]
The Mullahs' Nuclear Timeline
The Mullahs' Nuclear Timeline
60 Years Later Considering Hiroshima by Victor Davis Hanson
[Dr. Hanson, as usual, delivers yet again what is sorely lacking in the media- a forthright analysis of the facts of a situation with common sense perspective. This a good reminder of the logic of the traitorous left, never burdening themselves with the challenge of what it takes to make things happen, they only respond as intellectual infants, only wanting the outcome-disregarding the necessary steps to accomplish the objective.]
60 Years Later Considering Hiroshima
For 60 years the United States has agonized over its unleashing of the world’s first nuclear weapon on Hiroshima on August 6, 2005. President Harry Truman’s decision to explode an atomic bomb over an ostensible military target — the headquarters of the crack Japanese 2nd Army — led to well over 100,000 fatalities, the vast majority of them civilians.
Critics immediately argued that we should have first targeted the bomb on an uninhabited area as a warning for the Japanese militarists to capitulate. Did a democratic America really wish to live with the burden of being the only state that had used nuclear weapons against another?
Later generals Hap Arnold, Dwight Eisenhower, Curtis LeMay, Douglas Macarthur, and Admirals William Leahy and William Halsey all reportedly felt the bomb was unnecessary, being either militarily redundant or unnecessarily punitive to an essentially defeated populace.
Yet such opponents of the decision shied away from providing a rough estimate of how many more would have died in the aggregate — Americans, British, Australians, Asians, Japanese, and Russians — through conventional bombing, continuous fighting in the Pacific, amphibious invasion of the mainland, or the ongoing onslaught of the Red Army had the conflict not come to an abrupt halt nine days later and only after a second nuclear drop on Nagasaki.
Truman’s supporters countered that, in fact, a blockade and negotiations had not forced the Japanese generals to surrender unconditionally. In their view, a million American casualties and countless Japanese dead were adverted by not storming the Japanese mainland over the next year in the planned two-pronged assault on the mainland, dubbed Operation Coronet and Olympic.
For the immediate future there were only two bombs available. Planners thought that using one for demonstration purposes (assuming that it would have worked) might have left the Americans without enough of the new arsenal to shock and awe the Japanese government should it have ridden out the first attack and then become emboldened by a hiatus, and our inability to follow up the attacks.
As it was, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, General Tojo’s followers capitulated only through the intervention of the emperor. And it was not altogether clear even then that Japanese fanatics would not attack the Americans as they steamed into Tokyo Bay for the surrender ceremonies.
These are the debates that matured in the relative peace of the postwar era. But in August 1945 most Americans had a much different take on Hiroshima, a decision that cannot be fathomed without appreciation of the recently concluded Okinawa campaign (April 1-July 2) that had cost 50,000 American casualties and 200,000 Japanese and Okinawa dead. Okinawa saw the worst losses in the history of the U.S. Navy. Over 300 ships were damaged, more than 30 sunk, as about 5,000 sailors perished under a barrage of some 2,000 Kamikaze attacks.
And it was believed at least 10,000 more suicide planes were waiting on Kyushu and Honshu. Those who were asked to continue such fighting on the Japanese mainland — as we learn from the memoirs of Paul Fussell, William Manchester, and E. B. Sledge — were relieved at the idea of encountering a shell-shocked defeated enemy rather than a defiant Japanese nation in arms.
About a month after Okinawa was finally declared secure came Hiroshima. Americans of that age were more likely to wonder not that the bomb had been dropped too early, but perhaps too late in not avoiding the carnage on Okinawa — especially when by Spring 1945 there was optimism among the scientists in New Mexico that the successful completion of the bomb was not far away. My father, William Hanson, who flew 39 missions over Japan on a B-29, was troubled over the need for Okinawa — where his first cousin Victor Hanson was killed in the last hours of the battle for Sugar Loaf Hill — when the future bomb would have forced Japanese surrender without such terrible loss of life in 11th-hour infantry battles or even more horrific torching of the Japanese cities.
Hiroshima, then, was not the worst single-day loss of life in military history. The Tokyo fire raid on the night of March 9/10, five months earlier, was far worse, incinerating somewhere around 150,000 civilians, and burning out over 15 acres of the downtown. Indeed, "Little Boy," the initial nuclear device that was dropped 60 years ago, was understood as the continuance of that policy of unrestricted bombing — its morality already decided by the ongoing attacks on the German and Japanese cities begun at least three years earlier.
Americans of the time hardly thought the Japanese populace to be entirely innocent. The Imperial Japanese army routinely butchered civilians abroad — some 10-15 million Chinese were eventually to perish — throughout the Pacific from the Philippines to Korea and Manchuria. Even by August 1945, the Japanese army was killing thousands of Asians each month. When earlier high-level bombing attacks with traditional explosives failed to cut off the fuel for this murderous military — industries were increasingly dispersed in smaller shops throughout civilian centers — Curtis LeMay unleashed napalm on the Japanese cities and eventually may have incinerated 500,000.
In some sense, Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only helped to cut short the week-long Soviet invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria (80,000 Japanese soldiers killed, over 8,000 Russian dead), but an even more ambitious incendiary campaign planned by Gen. Curtis LeMay. With the far shorter missions possible from planned new bases in Okinawa and his fleet vastly augmented by more B-29s and the transference from Europe of thousands of idle B-17s and B-24, the ‘mad bomber’ LeMay envisioned burning down the entire urban and industrial landscape of Japan. His opposition to Hiroshima was more likely on grounds that his own fleet of bombers could have achieved the same result in a few more weeks anyway.
Postwar generations argued over whether the two atomic bombs, the fire raids, or the August Soviet invasion of Manchuria — or all three combined — prompted Japan to capitulate, whether Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a stain on American democracy, or whether the atomic bombs were the last-gasp antidote to the plague of Japanese militarism that had led to millions of innocents butchered without much domestic opposition or criticism from the triumphalist Japanese people.
But our own generation has more recently once again grappled with Hiroshima, and so the debate rages on in the new age of terrorism and handheld weapons of mass destruction, brought home after an attack on our shores worse than Pearl Harbor — with more promised to come. Perhaps the horror of the suicide bombers of Japan does not seem so distant any more. Nor does the notion of an extreme perversion of an otherwise mainstream religion filling millions with hatred of a supposedly decadent West.
The truth, as we are reminded so often in this present conflict, is that usually in war there are no good alternatives, and leaders must select between a very bad and even worse choice. Hiroshima was the most awful option imaginable, but the other scenarios would have probably turned out even worse.
Indian Tiger- Anglospheric alliance rising
[It has perplexed me why the U.S-India relationship wasn’t better, it's heartening to see foreign policy address this. I have worked with Indians for years and have yet to meet a single one who doesn't have admirable qualities, our nation should be thankful that we can draw this kind of caliber of people.]
Indian Tiger- Anglospheric alliance rising
By Larry Kudlow & William P. Kucewicz
In what could become the world's most significant 21st-century strategic alliance, a strengthened partnership is forming between the two largest English-speaking democracies: the U.S. and India. President Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh cemented bilateral ties in recent White House talks, paving the way for greater trade, investment, and technological collaboration. In time and with the cooperation of other friendly powers in the region — notably, Japan and Australia — this new alliance could emerge as an essential counterweight to China. Essentially, it will be an Anglospheric alliance in Asia and the Pacific Rim.
U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, commenting on the multipoint joint statement issued following the White House meeting, declared the two countries had forged "a broad global partnership of the likes that we've not seen with India since India's founding in 1947."
But it's the economic front that has the greatest potential. The world's largest democracy, peopled by an industrious and increasingly educated population, is among the fastest growing economies, with real GDP expanding at a 5.9% average annual rate, seasonally adjusted, over the last eight years, including a 7.0% gain in the 2005 first quarter. However impressive this performance may be, India's economy has had to endure some stifling restrictions — and in certain cases outright bans — on foreign direct investment. FDI, in fact, hasn't grown in at least five years, averaging around $1.3 billion per quarter since 2000. In some sectors, such as retailing, mining, and railways, FDI is strictly prohibited, while in others, like banking and telecommunications, foreign investment is permitted but closely regulated. The new bilateral accord promises to change this, and there's every reason to be optimistic. Informal links are being forged every day as large numbers of India-based firms service IT equipment and software in the U.S. In addition, India's current stock-market boom owes much to international investors. Foreign portfolio investment in India totaled $3.8 billion in the first quarter of 2005 versus $4.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2004 and $3.7 billion in the first quarter of 2004. These inflows compared with a 2000-2003 quarterly average of just $840 million.
The performance of Indian equities has been nothing short of fabulous, with many prices doubling and even tripling in the past two years. The Bombay Sensex 30 Index is up about 150% since May 2003, and the broad Bombay Stock Exchange 500 Index has gained around 175%. Particularly impressive have been the nearly 200% rise in the IT Index and increases of roughly 250% in both the Consumer Durables and Capital Goods Indexes.
A small public sector and concomitant low taxes have also aided the economy. In the 2004-2005 fiscal year ended March 31, the Union (or central) government's net tax revenue amounted to 7.9% of nominal GDP and total receipts equaled 10.8%. With expenditures running at 17.6% of GDP, last year's fiscal deficit (or total government borrowing requirement) equaled 4.5% of GDP, according to the Reserve Bank of India Bulletin.
Prime Minister Singh, as finance minister in the early 1990s, crafted many of the reforms responsible for India's economic renaissance, including lower tariffs, fewer import and forex restrictions, the lifting of industrial licensing and price controls, and a reduction in the top marginal income-tax rate from a staggering 97.5% to a more sensible 35%. Sound monetary management nowadays leaves little room for complaint, with consumer price inflation trending around 4.4% on a twelve-month basis over the past five years. Monetary stability has helped keep interest rates down, too. Since 2000, 10-year government bonds have yielded 7.8% on average, making for a mean real interest rate of 3.4% over the period. But only through an ever-increasing ratio of financial capital to labor capital will labor productivity make the gains necessary for substantial improvements in the country's overall standard of living. Capital availability will rise with the expansion of the domestic economy, of course. But more is needed. Given the immense size of its labor force, India requires massive injections of foreign capital to make the investments in technology and equipment needed to augment output per hour. So, of the panoply of potential governmental reforms, liberalizing foreign capital flows is far and away the single most important one.If India becomes a more hospitable home for foreign investment, their economy can grow 10 percent yearly for the next decade, representing an economic shot across China's bow. Embracing Anglo-Saxon market economics will strengthen both the Indian and American economies, thereby adding even more power to the new diplomatic entente.
Indian Tiger- Anglospheric alliance rising
By Larry Kudlow & William P. Kucewicz
In what could become the world's most significant 21st-century strategic alliance, a strengthened partnership is forming between the two largest English-speaking democracies: the U.S. and India. President Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh cemented bilateral ties in recent White House talks, paving the way for greater trade, investment, and technological collaboration. In time and with the cooperation of other friendly powers in the region — notably, Japan and Australia — this new alliance could emerge as an essential counterweight to China. Essentially, it will be an Anglospheric alliance in Asia and the Pacific Rim.
U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, commenting on the multipoint joint statement issued following the White House meeting, declared the two countries had forged "a broad global partnership of the likes that we've not seen with India since India's founding in 1947."
But it's the economic front that has the greatest potential. The world's largest democracy, peopled by an industrious and increasingly educated population, is among the fastest growing economies, with real GDP expanding at a 5.9% average annual rate, seasonally adjusted, over the last eight years, including a 7.0% gain in the 2005 first quarter. However impressive this performance may be, India's economy has had to endure some stifling restrictions — and in certain cases outright bans — on foreign direct investment. FDI, in fact, hasn't grown in at least five years, averaging around $1.3 billion per quarter since 2000. In some sectors, such as retailing, mining, and railways, FDI is strictly prohibited, while in others, like banking and telecommunications, foreign investment is permitted but closely regulated. The new bilateral accord promises to change this, and there's every reason to be optimistic. Informal links are being forged every day as large numbers of India-based firms service IT equipment and software in the U.S. In addition, India's current stock-market boom owes much to international investors. Foreign portfolio investment in India totaled $3.8 billion in the first quarter of 2005 versus $4.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2004 and $3.7 billion in the first quarter of 2004. These inflows compared with a 2000-2003 quarterly average of just $840 million.
The performance of Indian equities has been nothing short of fabulous, with many prices doubling and even tripling in the past two years. The Bombay Sensex 30 Index is up about 150% since May 2003, and the broad Bombay Stock Exchange 500 Index has gained around 175%. Particularly impressive have been the nearly 200% rise in the IT Index and increases of roughly 250% in both the Consumer Durables and Capital Goods Indexes.
A small public sector and concomitant low taxes have also aided the economy. In the 2004-2005 fiscal year ended March 31, the Union (or central) government's net tax revenue amounted to 7.9% of nominal GDP and total receipts equaled 10.8%. With expenditures running at 17.6% of GDP, last year's fiscal deficit (or total government borrowing requirement) equaled 4.5% of GDP, according to the Reserve Bank of India Bulletin.
Prime Minister Singh, as finance minister in the early 1990s, crafted many of the reforms responsible for India's economic renaissance, including lower tariffs, fewer import and forex restrictions, the lifting of industrial licensing and price controls, and a reduction in the top marginal income-tax rate from a staggering 97.5% to a more sensible 35%. Sound monetary management nowadays leaves little room for complaint, with consumer price inflation trending around 4.4% on a twelve-month basis over the past five years. Monetary stability has helped keep interest rates down, too. Since 2000, 10-year government bonds have yielded 7.8% on average, making for a mean real interest rate of 3.4% over the period. But only through an ever-increasing ratio of financial capital to labor capital will labor productivity make the gains necessary for substantial improvements in the country's overall standard of living. Capital availability will rise with the expansion of the domestic economy, of course. But more is needed. Given the immense size of its labor force, India requires massive injections of foreign capital to make the investments in technology and equipment needed to augment output per hour. So, of the panoply of potential governmental reforms, liberalizing foreign capital flows is far and away the single most important one.If India becomes a more hospitable home for foreign investment, their economy can grow 10 percent yearly for the next decade, representing an economic shot across China's bow. Embracing Anglo-Saxon market economics will strengthen both the Indian and American economies, thereby adding even more power to the new diplomatic entente.
03 August 2005
Washington Post laments death of War Criminal that was killing Americans
Thanks to these pussies at the Washington Post I am quite sure we will go even easier on our captives, the captured Insurgents already know that all they have to do is clam up for 3 days and the Americans have to release them thanks to the efforts of the Traitorous Left.
In this Major General Mowhoush you have effectively the modern equivalent of a high ranking SS officer- a true war criminal, who was at the time of his capture actively working to kill Americans. It would've been preferrable to get him to talk, but if your going to go "brutal" on someone General Mowhoush was a great candidate. Why don't we ask the families of the Americans he helped kill what they think of his fate?
Of course the Washington Post is merely interested in reporting this because…….why exactly?
Have to hand it to these pussies in one article they managed to 1) put the military in a negative light, 2.) put the CIA in a negative light 3) Undermine our tactics to elicit information 4) Hamper our war effort and 5) provide fresh meat to the MSM looking to undermine our war effort even further. That's the "Quinella" if I remember my Quad City Downs lingo.
Wouldn't a simple gauge to members of the MSM be: 1. Do you want the United States to win the war on terror? 2. If yes (I may presume too much) then what are YOU doing to help.
I anxiouisly await the "Justice for Mowhoush" bumperstickers from the left and a Peter Gabriel song lamenting his fate at the hands of American "brutality"
Documents Tell of Brutal Improvisation by GIs
Interrogated General's Sleeping-Bag Death, CIA's Use of Secret Iraqi Squad Are Among Details
Before you shed any tears here's what these pussies at the Washtington Post include about their cause celeb in their article
"a high-ranking official in Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard " (WW II translation = SS)
"one of a few generals whom Hussein had given "execution authority," U.S. commanders believed, meaning that he could execute someone on sight, " (WW II translation = SS)
"he had been notorious among Shiites in southern Iraq for brutality." (WW II translation = SS)
"Mowhoush was behind several attacks in the Qaim area."
"The general, they believed, had been and a key supporter of the insurgency in northwestern Iraq"
"Mowhoush had been visited by Hussein at his home in Sadah in October 2003 "to discuss, among other undisclosed issues, a bounty of US$10,000 to anyone who video-taped themselves attacking coalition forces"
"He told interrogators that he was the commander of the al Quds Golden Division, an organization of trusted loyalists fueling the insurgency with mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, sniper rifles, machine guns and other small arms."
"He did not deny he was behind the attacks"
02 August 2005
It Will Come Down to Fortitude
It Will Come Down to Fortitude
By Karl Zinsmeister
Just imagine if George Bush had predicted to us on the morning after September 11, 2001 what actually ended up happening….
Our forces will go to faraway Afghanistan and remove the Taliban within six weeks upon arrival. Democracy will follow for all Afghans…. Most of the leadership of al-Qaeda will be scattered into hiding, apprehended, or killed…. We will liberate Iraq from Saddam’s Baathist nightmare and stay on to help the long-suffering Iraqi people secure their freedom under a new democracy…. We must expose the nuclear proliferator Dr. A. Q. Khan and cease his efforts to spread nuclear weapons worldwide…. America will seek democratic awakenings in Lebanon, Egypt, and the Gulf states.... Syria must and will leave Lebanon…. Gadhafi in Libya will come clean about his dangerous arsenal…. Arafat will be shunned and his subsidies cut off. Only that way can fair elections return to the West Bank…. All American troops will leave the Saudi Kingdom...whose rogue princes have funded terrorists….
Had the President promised or even predicted such things after September 11, most of us would have dismissed him as utterly unhinged. But that is precisely what has come to pass.
—Victor Davis Hanson, Chicago Tribune, May 20, 2005
Militarily and diplomatically, an enormous amount has been accomplished across different parts of the globe since September 11, 2001. Back home, though, in our own politics and culture, much of America has been surprisingly little changed by the most deadly attack ever on our homeland.
You can see this in many places. For instance, for more than two years now I’ve been trying to gin up an article for TAE cataloguing some worthy art inspired by 9/11. Surely, I assumed, an event of this historical moment and psychological impact must have hatched lots of powerful poems and plays and pictures. I was wrong.
Here was a cataclysm whose Ground Zero was literally a stroll away from the main centers of American painting and sculpture, music composition, filmmaking, literature production, and other imaginative work. You would think the sheer magnitude of this event in their own backyards would have grabbed the imagination of many artists (not to mention editors and producers and gallery owners) and sent cadres of long-haired men and short-haired women running to their studios to produce arresting works.
Yet this hasn’t happened. There is no “Guernica” painted for 9/11. Nothing like The Red Badge of Courage, or All Quiet on the Western Front, or Slaughterhouse-Five has been written. No “Music for Prague 1968,” or anything close, is now being played. The Manhattan creative class hasn’t produced even a Forrest Gump to capture in popular form the circumstances and emotions of that searing day.
Why not? My conclusion, after watching this odd black hole spread through America’s creative communities over several years, is that most contemporary artists are unwilling to absorb the hard lessons of this event. They’d rather not face the implications.
Lord knows, the creative class mobilized their artistry in response to the AIDS epidemic. Remember the endless AIDS Quilt projects? The interminable string of Broadway plays documenting the personal horrors of HIV?
But recognizing that America has ruthless and evil Third World enemies who will kill us unless we kill them first? Umm, I think I’d rather work on my novel about the secret repression of gay pastors in Dallas, or polish my screenplay assailing greedy corporations for selling infant formula in Africa.
Where did our unity go?
I can inform you that as I spend time with American soldiers in the combat zones of the Middle East these days they tell me how surreal it sometimes seems when they compare their recent life to the behaviors of many citizens back home. “I walk through airports and cities, and you’d never know we’re at war,” one Army commander told me in May. “There are all the yellow ribbons on the cars now, and that’s kind of nice. But for part of the country at least it’s just, you know, life as usual. TV. What restaurant are we going to eat in tonight? Political bitching and moaning. Lots of people seem to have forgotten that there are folks out here who want to kill Americans. Any American, they don’t care. These killers are enterprising, and fierce. And I don’t think lots of U.S. citizens realize what could happen if we don’t stand up to them.”
Many of the shifts in American thinking that did take place after the 9/11 attacks have proven ephemeral. In his article beginning on page 28, for instance, Fred Siegel notes that “the chasm between New York City and the rest of America” was “temporarily closed” amidst the soberness sparked by the collapse of the Twin Towers. But today? The cultural gap between Manhattan Island and Manhattan, Kansas “has reopened as wide as ever.”
In his book Who Are We?, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington illustrates how fleeting some of the national unity that followed 9/11 turned out to be:
Charles Street, the principal thoroughfare on Boston’s Beacon Hill, is a comfortable street bordered by four-story brick buildings with apartments above shops on the ground level. At one time, American flags regularly hung over the entrances [but by] September 11, 2001, the liquor store flag flew alone. Two weeks later, 17 flags flew on this block….
In their surge of patriotism, Charles Streeters were at one with people throughout America…. After September 11, the flag was everywhere.... In early October, 80 percent of Americans said they were displaying the flag…. The flags were physical evidence of a sudden and dramatic...transformation exemplified by the comment on October 1 of a young woman named Rachel Newman: “When I was 19, I moved to New York City…. If you asked me to describe myself then, I would have told you I was a musician, a poet, an artist, a woman, a lesbian, and a Jew. Being an American wouldn’t have made my list…. On September 11, all that changed. I realized that I have been taking the freedoms I have here for granted. Now I have an American flag on my backpack, I cheer at the fighter jets as they pass overhead, and I am calling myself a patriot.”
September 11…sent Old Glory back to the top of the national flag pole. Will it stay there? The 17 flags on Charles Street declined to 12 in November, nine in December, seven in January, five in March, and were down to four by the first anniversary of the attacks…. Does it take an Osama bin Laden, as it did for Rachel Newman, to make us realize that we are Americans? If we do not experience recurring destructive attacks, will we return to the fragmentation and eroded Americanism of before September 11?
Recovery, and self-flagellation
In many ways, it’s astonishing that the horrendous events of 9/11 (and all that followed) haven’t left bigger ripples across America. In some sectors, of course, we can be very pleased that they didn’t. The fact that our financial and economic engines so easily shrugged off Mohammed Atta and company, for example, is gratifying. We all take America’s growth machine terribly for granted, but it’s rather miraculous that the U.S. is now 15 percent more productive (in real GDP) than it was on the day before the war on terror erupted. We’ve endured stock-exchange crashes, a collapse of travel, oil price spikes, airline bankruptcies, burdensome new defense and security spending totalling hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and many other problems—yet in spite of it all the U.S. will grow 4 percent richer this year, and robustly lead the rest of the industrial world toward continuing prosperity.
In other areas, however, one can’t help but be saddened to see how quickly the resolve that swept the civilized world in the fall of 2001 has disappeared. Many of the steely insights forged in those gruesome jet-fuel fires have now rusted away. The French editor who proclaimed “We Are All Americans” in a September 12, 2001 banner headline was backpedalling within days, and now whines about whether the prisoners’ mattresses are too thin at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
He takes his cues from America’s own critics of the war on terror. Michael Moore has popularized the idea that the main result of U.S. foreign policy in recent decades has been “bringing sadness and misery to places around the globe.” Please recall that this man’s view of the terror war was endorsed by the Democrats’ party chairman, Terry McAuliffe, and their Senate leader, Tom Harkin, and that he was seated in the place of honor next to ex-President Carter at last year’s Democratic National Convention.
Right now, the Washington establishment is completely tied in knots by news that over several years there have been five incidents at the terrorist prison on Guantanamo Bay (from which we have an interesting eyewitness account—see page 34) where guards showed insufficient respect for the Koran. For which the guards were disciplined. Meanwhile, investigators probing the issue found that prisoners themselves have physically abused copies of the Koran three times as often as the guards.
The reality is that today’s terrorist detainees are given better medical care and food than most of them have ever had in their lives, plus a panoply of prayer books, chaplains, a call to worship five times per day, guidance on facing Mecca, banishment of guards during prayer times, and other accommodations. We wouldn’t want their maniacal attachments to Islam to wither, after all! The standing procedure of the soldiers running the Guantanamo facility is actually to issue every prisoner a little sling so he can suspend the Koran in mid-air in his cell, preventing it from ever touching the ground. Talk about bending over backwards.
The claims of “abuse” at Guantanamo that are being lapped up so hungrily by anti-U.S. Europeans and Americans often center around horrors like the fact that the prisoners don’t like the food, that American military women “stand too close to them,” and that they can hear the guards’ shoes squeaking at inopportune times. Meanwhile, several of the individuals released from the facility because they were deemed to be among the least dangerous held there have subsequently turned up as fighters, kidnappers, and murderers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Where would the critics so anxious to close down Guantanamo send the 500 killers and terror masters currently housed there? Could we suggest Santa Monica? Or Nantucket? Or a Berlin youth hostel?
As the Wall Street Journal noted the day after July’s London bombings, the West’s “resolve continues to fade along with public memories of 9/11. For months the debate in Washington hasn’t been over how best to fight terrorists but how harshly we treat them. Rather than strengthen the Patriot Act, Congress wants to weaken it…. The press corps has wallowed in Abu Ghraib as the defining event of the entire Iraq War.”
Would you believe that the number of formal U.S. investigations of how terror detainees are being treated recently reached 189? What mad self-doubt and softness! Of course we need to weed out cruel or out-of-control guards, but the clear picture of the many commissions and blue-ribbon investigations is that our detainment system is pretty tight and self-regulating, that gentleness to the point of political correctness is the norm, and that rogue actions are nearly always found out and punished, usually quite severely.
Our fastidiousness in handling dangerous terrorists has reached the point of self-flagellation, and now seriously impairs our war-fighting and intelligence-gathering capabilities. In Iraq, for instance, the terrorists now know that U.S. soldiers cannot interrogate them with any intensity, and that if they keep their mouths shut our own rules require that they must be released within three days. That’s why I saw Iraqis this spring specifically request that their relatives involved in the insurgency be arrested by U.S. soldiers rather than Iraqi troops (who have less dainty ideas about detainment and interrogation).
And however unrealistically we have hamstrung ourselves on foreign battlefields, our prissiness about police profiling and other practices anathematized by civil libertarians—magnified by our lack of courage on border control—has been even more damaging back here in the homeland, according to journalist Michelle Malkin (see pages 14-17). Should enemies enter our country illegally through one of our many porous borders, avail themselves of today’s flood of fraudulent identity documents to get themselves into some critical location, exploit our refusal to allow sensible surveillance measures, background checks, and ethnic profiling, and thereby pull off a major stateside attack, we will sorely regret our lack of clarity and toughness.
Progress versus failures
It’s interesting to look back at earlier issues of TAE to see what our experts were recommending at the very launch of the war on terror, and compare that to what we’ve actually carried out. (Go to TAEmag.com for the full content of any of our installments out six months or longer.) Our very first issue after the attacks included a story entitled “How—and Why—We Must Tighten America’s Borders” (December 2001). Alas, scandalously little has been accomplished in this area in the four years since.
On the other hand, that same magazine included an article arguing that occasionally the most humane way to eradicate terror is to use commandos to pre-emptively assassinate dangerous killers. No, the 1970s-era obstacles which make it difficult for American Presidents to order such a course still haven’t been lifted. The U.S. has, however, quietly acquiesced to exactly such a policy carried out by Israel—whose preventative attacks killing terrorists from Hamas, Hezbollah, and other groups before they could strike have saved many lives, and chastened some terrorists into more accommodating behavior.
The TAE issue on homeland defense that we put together as the new cabinet department was being planned within the U.S. government (January/February 2003) points to some other disappointments. In that installment, Scott Johnson and David Harris made powerful arguments for letting police use ethnic profiling as an important security tool. Opposing elements in our legal establishment show no signs of paying attention. In a companion piece, Alan Dowd warned that if we let lawyers and international litigators interfere too much in the war on terror, we will become completely paralyzed. A prescient warning that our politicians are increasingly ignoring.
A couple of other articles in that same installment of The American Enterprise point to two genuine political tragedies from the last four years. Former Democratic Congressman Stephen Solarz argued in our pages that Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, JFK, LBJ, and other historic Democrats would have supported war against Iraq, and that modern Democrats ought to as well. Instead, Solarz’s party has swerved dangerously since 9/11 toward a kneejerk anti-war stance. Even more appalling is the sight of Europeans trying to get Oriana Fallaci—the Italian journalist who was a pioneer in warning about the dangers of radical Islam (in our J/F03 issue and elsewhere)—thrown in jail for lacking tolerance. A judge in northern Italy has ordered her to stand trial for “defaming Islam.”
Reprinted nearby are excerpts from the first TAE to appear after the September 11 attacks. The extracts focus on two issues that will be central in determining whether we eventually win the war on terror, or spend the rest of our lives cowering behind blast barriers and metal detectors:
Does the American public and political leadership have the stomach to endure a long struggle against Muslim extremists?
And will responsible Muslims help, or hide?
After four momentous years, those are both still open questions.
Karl Zinsmeister is TAE’s editor in chief.
Can You Take a Pounding?
From our pages four years ago:
Extended periods of militarism are psychologically unhealthy and poisonous to societal freedoms. War hardens hearts, eats the economy, and cramps political liberty. But the fact is, sometimes wars are necessary, and we must never lose our capacity and willingness to fight them sharply when the occasion calls.
There are times when even a gentle people must be fierce. There are moments when the police need to kick in doors and crack heads. There are seasons when our soldiers and covert agents have to plunge bayonets into cruel enemies who won’t relent.
Every strong society—ours included—needs hard, reckless men willing to rush into burning buildings, to risk death fistfighting with hijackers, to launch almighty firestorms of devastation against recalcitrant foes who dared to strike their homeland. Historically, Americans have never had trouble finding the mettle for such tasks. Our frontier was not settled by nervous nellies with degrees in Peace Studies.
But Osama bin Laden and millions of other foreigners now doubt that America still produces such men. They see us as overfed, utterly unheroic materialists. In his 1996 declaration of war on the U.S. bin Laden states, “Your problem will be how to convince your troops to fight, while our problem will be how to restrain our youths to wait for their turn in fighting. Members of the American Army are too cowardly and too fearful to meet the young people of Islam face to face.”
Bin Laden is wrong in the worst way about rank-and-file American fighting men. But not only America’s soldiers will need to be brave and determined as we fight this war against terror. Our political decision makers and—most of all—our public at large will need to hang very tough. “The citizen is more than 50 percent of our success,” the head of the Jerusalem bomb squad told us when TAE asked him how his country resists suicide bombers. The most important defensive weapon in a terror war is a bold and dauntless population.
There is no doubt that today’s America brims with education, refinement, and sophisticated talent of all sorts. Now we’ll find out if our society has also retained some older American virtues—like fearlessness and tenacity. We will need those qualities to see the current battle through to its necessary end.
I myself have no doubt the carpenters and business owners and deer hunters in the massive middle of our society will hold up in this regard. Our elites are more of a question mark. How much pounding can our news anchors and computer yuppies and professors and high-income soccer moms stand?
Excerpted from “Test of a Lifetime” by Karl Zinsmeister, The American Enterprise, December 2001.
Will Responsible Muslims Step Up?
From our pages four years ago:
Let’s recognize that we’re in a full-blown war. That (contrary to mealy-mouthed platitudes) this is indeed a war against a considerable part of Islam. And that the September 11 attacks were only the final straw in an ugly sequence that goes back 22 years to the 444-day imprisonment of the U.S. embassy staff in Tehran at the hands of Muslim militants. Long before September 11 we ought to have said enough is enough.
Hatred of America is widespread in Islamic countries. There is tremendous resentment of our economic success, military might, and cultural dominance. And there is something within Islam that makes it very easy to incubate resentment into terror.
“Among Western elites,” Owen Harries has noted, “there is the assumption that conflict between peoples is the result of misunderstanding and ignorance.” In the case of Islam, this could hardly be more wrong. Islamic terrorists actually understand us rather well; many of the most dangerous ones have lived in the West for extended periods, been educated by our schools, and even married our women. This makes them not one bit less murderous. As author Stuart Taylor writes, “They do not hate us for our flaws. They hate us for our virtues.” They hate us because we are the massive, shining alternative to Islam.
“What America needs from the Islamic world is for Muslims themselves—from the smallest mosques in New York City to the largest in Mecca—to read the fundamentalists out of Islam,” urges terrorism expert Michael Radu. Scholar David Wurmser agrees: “It is not America’s choice to decide how much of Islam it is in conflict with, or to adjudicate which branch of Islam is more ‘authentic.’ That choice belongs to Muslims.”
Followers of Islam must sort themselves into responsible and irresponsible camps. Then America must react to the choices made in the Muslim world. Clearly any Muslim who selects the bin Laden/Khomeini path has made himself our “enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life,” to quote Christopher Hitchens. That should have strong consequences.
Excerpted from “Test of a Lifetime” by Karl Zinsmeister, The American Enterprise, December 2001.
By Karl Zinsmeister
Just imagine if George Bush had predicted to us on the morning after September 11, 2001 what actually ended up happening….
Our forces will go to faraway Afghanistan and remove the Taliban within six weeks upon arrival. Democracy will follow for all Afghans…. Most of the leadership of al-Qaeda will be scattered into hiding, apprehended, or killed…. We will liberate Iraq from Saddam’s Baathist nightmare and stay on to help the long-suffering Iraqi people secure their freedom under a new democracy…. We must expose the nuclear proliferator Dr. A. Q. Khan and cease his efforts to spread nuclear weapons worldwide…. America will seek democratic awakenings in Lebanon, Egypt, and the Gulf states.... Syria must and will leave Lebanon…. Gadhafi in Libya will come clean about his dangerous arsenal…. Arafat will be shunned and his subsidies cut off. Only that way can fair elections return to the West Bank…. All American troops will leave the Saudi Kingdom...whose rogue princes have funded terrorists….
Had the President promised or even predicted such things after September 11, most of us would have dismissed him as utterly unhinged. But that is precisely what has come to pass.
—Victor Davis Hanson, Chicago Tribune, May 20, 2005
Militarily and diplomatically, an enormous amount has been accomplished across different parts of the globe since September 11, 2001. Back home, though, in our own politics and culture, much of America has been surprisingly little changed by the most deadly attack ever on our homeland.
You can see this in many places. For instance, for more than two years now I’ve been trying to gin up an article for TAE cataloguing some worthy art inspired by 9/11. Surely, I assumed, an event of this historical moment and psychological impact must have hatched lots of powerful poems and plays and pictures. I was wrong.
Here was a cataclysm whose Ground Zero was literally a stroll away from the main centers of American painting and sculpture, music composition, filmmaking, literature production, and other imaginative work. You would think the sheer magnitude of this event in their own backyards would have grabbed the imagination of many artists (not to mention editors and producers and gallery owners) and sent cadres of long-haired men and short-haired women running to their studios to produce arresting works.
Yet this hasn’t happened. There is no “Guernica” painted for 9/11. Nothing like The Red Badge of Courage, or All Quiet on the Western Front, or Slaughterhouse-Five has been written. No “Music for Prague 1968,” or anything close, is now being played. The Manhattan creative class hasn’t produced even a Forrest Gump to capture in popular form the circumstances and emotions of that searing day.
Why not? My conclusion, after watching this odd black hole spread through America’s creative communities over several years, is that most contemporary artists are unwilling to absorb the hard lessons of this event. They’d rather not face the implications.
Lord knows, the creative class mobilized their artistry in response to the AIDS epidemic. Remember the endless AIDS Quilt projects? The interminable string of Broadway plays documenting the personal horrors of HIV?
But recognizing that America has ruthless and evil Third World enemies who will kill us unless we kill them first? Umm, I think I’d rather work on my novel about the secret repression of gay pastors in Dallas, or polish my screenplay assailing greedy corporations for selling infant formula in Africa.
Where did our unity go?
I can inform you that as I spend time with American soldiers in the combat zones of the Middle East these days they tell me how surreal it sometimes seems when they compare their recent life to the behaviors of many citizens back home. “I walk through airports and cities, and you’d never know we’re at war,” one Army commander told me in May. “There are all the yellow ribbons on the cars now, and that’s kind of nice. But for part of the country at least it’s just, you know, life as usual. TV. What restaurant are we going to eat in tonight? Political bitching and moaning. Lots of people seem to have forgotten that there are folks out here who want to kill Americans. Any American, they don’t care. These killers are enterprising, and fierce. And I don’t think lots of U.S. citizens realize what could happen if we don’t stand up to them.”
Many of the shifts in American thinking that did take place after the 9/11 attacks have proven ephemeral. In his article beginning on page 28, for instance, Fred Siegel notes that “the chasm between New York City and the rest of America” was “temporarily closed” amidst the soberness sparked by the collapse of the Twin Towers. But today? The cultural gap between Manhattan Island and Manhattan, Kansas “has reopened as wide as ever.”
In his book Who Are We?, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington illustrates how fleeting some of the national unity that followed 9/11 turned out to be:
Charles Street, the principal thoroughfare on Boston’s Beacon Hill, is a comfortable street bordered by four-story brick buildings with apartments above shops on the ground level. At one time, American flags regularly hung over the entrances [but by] September 11, 2001, the liquor store flag flew alone. Two weeks later, 17 flags flew on this block….
In their surge of patriotism, Charles Streeters were at one with people throughout America…. After September 11, the flag was everywhere.... In early October, 80 percent of Americans said they were displaying the flag…. The flags were physical evidence of a sudden and dramatic...transformation exemplified by the comment on October 1 of a young woman named Rachel Newman: “When I was 19, I moved to New York City…. If you asked me to describe myself then, I would have told you I was a musician, a poet, an artist, a woman, a lesbian, and a Jew. Being an American wouldn’t have made my list…. On September 11, all that changed. I realized that I have been taking the freedoms I have here for granted. Now I have an American flag on my backpack, I cheer at the fighter jets as they pass overhead, and I am calling myself a patriot.”
September 11…sent Old Glory back to the top of the national flag pole. Will it stay there? The 17 flags on Charles Street declined to 12 in November, nine in December, seven in January, five in March, and were down to four by the first anniversary of the attacks…. Does it take an Osama bin Laden, as it did for Rachel Newman, to make us realize that we are Americans? If we do not experience recurring destructive attacks, will we return to the fragmentation and eroded Americanism of before September 11?
Recovery, and self-flagellation
In many ways, it’s astonishing that the horrendous events of 9/11 (and all that followed) haven’t left bigger ripples across America. In some sectors, of course, we can be very pleased that they didn’t. The fact that our financial and economic engines so easily shrugged off Mohammed Atta and company, for example, is gratifying. We all take America’s growth machine terribly for granted, but it’s rather miraculous that the U.S. is now 15 percent more productive (in real GDP) than it was on the day before the war on terror erupted. We’ve endured stock-exchange crashes, a collapse of travel, oil price spikes, airline bankruptcies, burdensome new defense and security spending totalling hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and many other problems—yet in spite of it all the U.S. will grow 4 percent richer this year, and robustly lead the rest of the industrial world toward continuing prosperity.
In other areas, however, one can’t help but be saddened to see how quickly the resolve that swept the civilized world in the fall of 2001 has disappeared. Many of the steely insights forged in those gruesome jet-fuel fires have now rusted away. The French editor who proclaimed “We Are All Americans” in a September 12, 2001 banner headline was backpedalling within days, and now whines about whether the prisoners’ mattresses are too thin at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
He takes his cues from America’s own critics of the war on terror. Michael Moore has popularized the idea that the main result of U.S. foreign policy in recent decades has been “bringing sadness and misery to places around the globe.” Please recall that this man’s view of the terror war was endorsed by the Democrats’ party chairman, Terry McAuliffe, and their Senate leader, Tom Harkin, and that he was seated in the place of honor next to ex-President Carter at last year’s Democratic National Convention.
Right now, the Washington establishment is completely tied in knots by news that over several years there have been five incidents at the terrorist prison on Guantanamo Bay (from which we have an interesting eyewitness account—see page 34) where guards showed insufficient respect for the Koran. For which the guards were disciplined. Meanwhile, investigators probing the issue found that prisoners themselves have physically abused copies of the Koran three times as often as the guards.
The reality is that today’s terrorist detainees are given better medical care and food than most of them have ever had in their lives, plus a panoply of prayer books, chaplains, a call to worship five times per day, guidance on facing Mecca, banishment of guards during prayer times, and other accommodations. We wouldn’t want their maniacal attachments to Islam to wither, after all! The standing procedure of the soldiers running the Guantanamo facility is actually to issue every prisoner a little sling so he can suspend the Koran in mid-air in his cell, preventing it from ever touching the ground. Talk about bending over backwards.
The claims of “abuse” at Guantanamo that are being lapped up so hungrily by anti-U.S. Europeans and Americans often center around horrors like the fact that the prisoners don’t like the food, that American military women “stand too close to them,” and that they can hear the guards’ shoes squeaking at inopportune times. Meanwhile, several of the individuals released from the facility because they were deemed to be among the least dangerous held there have subsequently turned up as fighters, kidnappers, and murderers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Where would the critics so anxious to close down Guantanamo send the 500 killers and terror masters currently housed there? Could we suggest Santa Monica? Or Nantucket? Or a Berlin youth hostel?
As the Wall Street Journal noted the day after July’s London bombings, the West’s “resolve continues to fade along with public memories of 9/11. For months the debate in Washington hasn’t been over how best to fight terrorists but how harshly we treat them. Rather than strengthen the Patriot Act, Congress wants to weaken it…. The press corps has wallowed in Abu Ghraib as the defining event of the entire Iraq War.”
Would you believe that the number of formal U.S. investigations of how terror detainees are being treated recently reached 189? What mad self-doubt and softness! Of course we need to weed out cruel or out-of-control guards, but the clear picture of the many commissions and blue-ribbon investigations is that our detainment system is pretty tight and self-regulating, that gentleness to the point of political correctness is the norm, and that rogue actions are nearly always found out and punished, usually quite severely.
Our fastidiousness in handling dangerous terrorists has reached the point of self-flagellation, and now seriously impairs our war-fighting and intelligence-gathering capabilities. In Iraq, for instance, the terrorists now know that U.S. soldiers cannot interrogate them with any intensity, and that if they keep their mouths shut our own rules require that they must be released within three days. That’s why I saw Iraqis this spring specifically request that their relatives involved in the insurgency be arrested by U.S. soldiers rather than Iraqi troops (who have less dainty ideas about detainment and interrogation).
And however unrealistically we have hamstrung ourselves on foreign battlefields, our prissiness about police profiling and other practices anathematized by civil libertarians—magnified by our lack of courage on border control—has been even more damaging back here in the homeland, according to journalist Michelle Malkin (see pages 14-17). Should enemies enter our country illegally through one of our many porous borders, avail themselves of today’s flood of fraudulent identity documents to get themselves into some critical location, exploit our refusal to allow sensible surveillance measures, background checks, and ethnic profiling, and thereby pull off a major stateside attack, we will sorely regret our lack of clarity and toughness.
Progress versus failures
It’s interesting to look back at earlier issues of TAE to see what our experts were recommending at the very launch of the war on terror, and compare that to what we’ve actually carried out. (Go to TAEmag.com for the full content of any of our installments out six months or longer.) Our very first issue after the attacks included a story entitled “How—and Why—We Must Tighten America’s Borders” (December 2001). Alas, scandalously little has been accomplished in this area in the four years since.
On the other hand, that same magazine included an article arguing that occasionally the most humane way to eradicate terror is to use commandos to pre-emptively assassinate dangerous killers. No, the 1970s-era obstacles which make it difficult for American Presidents to order such a course still haven’t been lifted. The U.S. has, however, quietly acquiesced to exactly such a policy carried out by Israel—whose preventative attacks killing terrorists from Hamas, Hezbollah, and other groups before they could strike have saved many lives, and chastened some terrorists into more accommodating behavior.
The TAE issue on homeland defense that we put together as the new cabinet department was being planned within the U.S. government (January/February 2003) points to some other disappointments. In that installment, Scott Johnson and David Harris made powerful arguments for letting police use ethnic profiling as an important security tool. Opposing elements in our legal establishment show no signs of paying attention. In a companion piece, Alan Dowd warned that if we let lawyers and international litigators interfere too much in the war on terror, we will become completely paralyzed. A prescient warning that our politicians are increasingly ignoring.
A couple of other articles in that same installment of The American Enterprise point to two genuine political tragedies from the last four years. Former Democratic Congressman Stephen Solarz argued in our pages that Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, JFK, LBJ, and other historic Democrats would have supported war against Iraq, and that modern Democrats ought to as well. Instead, Solarz’s party has swerved dangerously since 9/11 toward a kneejerk anti-war stance. Even more appalling is the sight of Europeans trying to get Oriana Fallaci—the Italian journalist who was a pioneer in warning about the dangers of radical Islam (in our J/F03 issue and elsewhere)—thrown in jail for lacking tolerance. A judge in northern Italy has ordered her to stand trial for “defaming Islam.”
Reprinted nearby are excerpts from the first TAE to appear after the September 11 attacks. The extracts focus on two issues that will be central in determining whether we eventually win the war on terror, or spend the rest of our lives cowering behind blast barriers and metal detectors:
Does the American public and political leadership have the stomach to endure a long struggle against Muslim extremists?
And will responsible Muslims help, or hide?
After four momentous years, those are both still open questions.
Karl Zinsmeister is TAE’s editor in chief.
Can You Take a Pounding?
From our pages four years ago:
Extended periods of militarism are psychologically unhealthy and poisonous to societal freedoms. War hardens hearts, eats the economy, and cramps political liberty. But the fact is, sometimes wars are necessary, and we must never lose our capacity and willingness to fight them sharply when the occasion calls.
There are times when even a gentle people must be fierce. There are moments when the police need to kick in doors and crack heads. There are seasons when our soldiers and covert agents have to plunge bayonets into cruel enemies who won’t relent.
Every strong society—ours included—needs hard, reckless men willing to rush into burning buildings, to risk death fistfighting with hijackers, to launch almighty firestorms of devastation against recalcitrant foes who dared to strike their homeland. Historically, Americans have never had trouble finding the mettle for such tasks. Our frontier was not settled by nervous nellies with degrees in Peace Studies.
But Osama bin Laden and millions of other foreigners now doubt that America still produces such men. They see us as overfed, utterly unheroic materialists. In his 1996 declaration of war on the U.S. bin Laden states, “Your problem will be how to convince your troops to fight, while our problem will be how to restrain our youths to wait for their turn in fighting. Members of the American Army are too cowardly and too fearful to meet the young people of Islam face to face.”
Bin Laden is wrong in the worst way about rank-and-file American fighting men. But not only America’s soldiers will need to be brave and determined as we fight this war against terror. Our political decision makers and—most of all—our public at large will need to hang very tough. “The citizen is more than 50 percent of our success,” the head of the Jerusalem bomb squad told us when TAE asked him how his country resists suicide bombers. The most important defensive weapon in a terror war is a bold and dauntless population.
There is no doubt that today’s America brims with education, refinement, and sophisticated talent of all sorts. Now we’ll find out if our society has also retained some older American virtues—like fearlessness and tenacity. We will need those qualities to see the current battle through to its necessary end.
I myself have no doubt the carpenters and business owners and deer hunters in the massive middle of our society will hold up in this regard. Our elites are more of a question mark. How much pounding can our news anchors and computer yuppies and professors and high-income soccer moms stand?
Excerpted from “Test of a Lifetime” by Karl Zinsmeister, The American Enterprise, December 2001.
Will Responsible Muslims Step Up?
From our pages four years ago:
Let’s recognize that we’re in a full-blown war. That (contrary to mealy-mouthed platitudes) this is indeed a war against a considerable part of Islam. And that the September 11 attacks were only the final straw in an ugly sequence that goes back 22 years to the 444-day imprisonment of the U.S. embassy staff in Tehran at the hands of Muslim militants. Long before September 11 we ought to have said enough is enough.
Hatred of America is widespread in Islamic countries. There is tremendous resentment of our economic success, military might, and cultural dominance. And there is something within Islam that makes it very easy to incubate resentment into terror.
“Among Western elites,” Owen Harries has noted, “there is the assumption that conflict between peoples is the result of misunderstanding and ignorance.” In the case of Islam, this could hardly be more wrong. Islamic terrorists actually understand us rather well; many of the most dangerous ones have lived in the West for extended periods, been educated by our schools, and even married our women. This makes them not one bit less murderous. As author Stuart Taylor writes, “They do not hate us for our flaws. They hate us for our virtues.” They hate us because we are the massive, shining alternative to Islam.
“What America needs from the Islamic world is for Muslims themselves—from the smallest mosques in New York City to the largest in Mecca—to read the fundamentalists out of Islam,” urges terrorism expert Michael Radu. Scholar David Wurmser agrees: “It is not America’s choice to decide how much of Islam it is in conflict with, or to adjudicate which branch of Islam is more ‘authentic.’ That choice belongs to Muslims.”
Followers of Islam must sort themselves into responsible and irresponsible camps. Then America must react to the choices made in the Muslim world. Clearly any Muslim who selects the bin Laden/Khomeini path has made himself our “enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life,” to quote Christopher Hitchens. That should have strong consequences.
Excerpted from “Test of a Lifetime” by Karl Zinsmeister, The American Enterprise, December 2001.
01 August 2005
Today Iowa's school boards, tomorrow the Scott County Weed Commission!
[I plan on following closely the Lost Nation school board election pitting Bob Wiser against Ralph Binny. I wonder what Michael Barone predicts in this one, Wiser has a 2 to 1 lead among registered voters who are private snow plow owners and has a lifetime 93% voting record from the right-leaning Center for School Board Excellence, but Binny has received an endorsement from the local Casey's coffee club. ]
Political group targets school boards
GOPAC's move to aid Republican candidates raises concerns about partisan influence.
By BRIAN SPANNAGELREGISTER STAFF WRITER
August 1, 2005
A national organization known for grooming Republicans for congressional and state legislative offices is pointing its efforts at Iowa's school boards.GOPAC, a Washington, D.C.-based political action committee, will offer training and possibly campaign contributions beginning this month to Iowa school board candidates who are registered Republicans, executive director John Morgan said. Thursday is the last day in Iowa to file school board nomination papers, and elections will be held statewide on Sept. 13.
"We are trying to open this to Republicans, which is an unusual step because school boards are typically nonpartisan," Morgan said.Iowa school board officials expressed concern that Republican-affiliated money and advice would inject political influence into a nonpartisan system. Some fear that could ultimately put political agendas ahead of children's education.School board elections are held annually in Iowa, and candidates run independently of political parties.
GOPAC plans to spend tens of thousands of dollars in the three states - Iowa, Pennsylvania and Colorado - it has targeted for the first phase of its School Board Excellence Project. Morgan said his group wants to make the education system more accountable.The National Federation for Republican Women, a Virginia-based political organization with a mission similar to GOPAC, has formed a partnership with GOPAC for the program.A seminar to teach Republican candidates about campaign basics is scheduled for Aug. 13 in Des Moines, and Morgan said he is looking into Iowa campaign finance laws to determine what financial aid GOPAC can give to candidates in close races. The program should be in full swing nationwide by 2006. Morgan said GOPAC will be recruiting school board candidates by that time.
Lisa Bartusek, a spokeswoman for the Iowa School Board Association, said her group opposes partisan politics entering school board races because "it can change the tenor of the election and how school boards work together.""The nonpartisan structure, we believe, lets school board members work as a team," she said, adding that this is the first time in recent history a partisan group has sought to directly influence school board elections.Officials at the Iowa Democratic Party and Iowa Republican Party said it is interesting for a national group to focus on school board elections. Neither party has spent resources on school board elections, and neither plans to do so.
"People should elect school board members based on the person who will best represent their children and Iowa's schools, not their political parties," said Erin Seidler, press secretary for the Iowa Democratic Party.Iowa has about 2,100 members on 367 school boards. Many incumbents run unopposed, but it's unclear whether that is a sign of community satisfaction or apathy, Bartusek said."It's laughable to think there is no politics in education," Morgan said. He said GOPAC's efforts will raise awareness for school board elections and attract more qualified candidates to run for office.Des Moines school board President Connie Boesen said that in her experience, members' political affiliations stay independent of their board decisions and that GOPAC is setting a bad precedent by meshing the two.
"We don't race for what is right for a party. We race for what is right for kids," she said. "If you are going to subsidize campaigns for certain viewpoints, then you have to be careful of them."Boesen, who doesn't support either party influencing school board races, said candidates have plenty of resources available to them without the help of a national organization, including guidance from former board members.Charlie Smithson, executive director of the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Finance Disclosure Board, said that while it is uncommon for partisan groups to get involved in nonpartisan races, it is not prohibited as long as they follow the state's disclosure laws.
"I think it is a relatively new phenomenon, but I think it is going to happen more often," he said.
Political group targets school boards
GOPAC's move to aid Republican candidates raises concerns about partisan influence.
By BRIAN SPANNAGELREGISTER STAFF WRITER
August 1, 2005
A national organization known for grooming Republicans for congressional and state legislative offices is pointing its efforts at Iowa's school boards.GOPAC, a Washington, D.C.-based political action committee, will offer training and possibly campaign contributions beginning this month to Iowa school board candidates who are registered Republicans, executive director John Morgan said. Thursday is the last day in Iowa to file school board nomination papers, and elections will be held statewide on Sept. 13.
"We are trying to open this to Republicans, which is an unusual step because school boards are typically nonpartisan," Morgan said.Iowa school board officials expressed concern that Republican-affiliated money and advice would inject political influence into a nonpartisan system. Some fear that could ultimately put political agendas ahead of children's education.School board elections are held annually in Iowa, and candidates run independently of political parties.
GOPAC plans to spend tens of thousands of dollars in the three states - Iowa, Pennsylvania and Colorado - it has targeted for the first phase of its School Board Excellence Project. Morgan said his group wants to make the education system more accountable.The National Federation for Republican Women, a Virginia-based political organization with a mission similar to GOPAC, has formed a partnership with GOPAC for the program.A seminar to teach Republican candidates about campaign basics is scheduled for Aug. 13 in Des Moines, and Morgan said he is looking into Iowa campaign finance laws to determine what financial aid GOPAC can give to candidates in close races. The program should be in full swing nationwide by 2006. Morgan said GOPAC will be recruiting school board candidates by that time.
Lisa Bartusek, a spokeswoman for the Iowa School Board Association, said her group opposes partisan politics entering school board races because "it can change the tenor of the election and how school boards work together.""The nonpartisan structure, we believe, lets school board members work as a team," she said, adding that this is the first time in recent history a partisan group has sought to directly influence school board elections.Officials at the Iowa Democratic Party and Iowa Republican Party said it is interesting for a national group to focus on school board elections. Neither party has spent resources on school board elections, and neither plans to do so.
"People should elect school board members based on the person who will best represent their children and Iowa's schools, not their political parties," said Erin Seidler, press secretary for the Iowa Democratic Party.Iowa has about 2,100 members on 367 school boards. Many incumbents run unopposed, but it's unclear whether that is a sign of community satisfaction or apathy, Bartusek said."It's laughable to think there is no politics in education," Morgan said. He said GOPAC's efforts will raise awareness for school board elections and attract more qualified candidates to run for office.Des Moines school board President Connie Boesen said that in her experience, members' political affiliations stay independent of their board decisions and that GOPAC is setting a bad precedent by meshing the two.
"We don't race for what is right for a party. We race for what is right for kids," she said. "If you are going to subsidize campaigns for certain viewpoints, then you have to be careful of them."Boesen, who doesn't support either party influencing school board races, said candidates have plenty of resources available to them without the help of a national organization, including guidance from former board members.Charlie Smithson, executive director of the Iowa Ethics and Campaign Finance Disclosure Board, said that while it is uncommon for partisan groups to get involved in nonpartisan races, it is not prohibited as long as they follow the state's disclosure laws.
"I think it is a relatively new phenomenon, but I think it is going to happen more often," he said.
I hate RAGBRAI
Has there ever been a more overrated event than this? I thought I got a break when Chuck Offenburger was canned from the Register and I didn't have to see his "Iowa Boy" columns talking about some such thing about RAGBRAI in JANUARY. I hate RAGBRAI largely because of the hype in the media and for the obnoxious participants. Individually they are all fine people but collectively they are the most arrogant and obnoxious group assembled (save for the University Kommissars in Iowa City) In fact bicyclists in general are irritating, have you ever tried to maneuver around a bicyclist on the road. They never get over towards the side of the pavement- they have to swing out into the middle of the lane making passing more difficult and hazardous, that's right everyone has to stay behind a bike going 15 mph to prove your superiority we are all here to bow to your will. I am sure if you participate you think they are the coolest thing and it's the highlight of your social calendar, but everyone else thinks that it is not. It's the athletic equivalent of a Star Trek convention.
Meet Orianna Fallaci
Orianna Fallaci's articles about radical Islam and the future of Western Civilization have started to get more exposure thanks to the blogosphere, If you want to find out why the thought police in the EU are so anxious to shut her up read some recent translations of her writing at MysteryAcheivement blog.
http://mysteryachievement.blogspot.com/2005/07/enemy-we-treat-like-friend-part-iii.html
http://mysteryachievement.blogspot.com/2005/07/enemy-we-treat-like-friend-part-iv.html
http://mysteryachievement.blogspot.com/2005/07/enemy-we-treat-like-friend-part-iii.html
http://mysteryachievement.blogspot.com/2005/07/enemy-we-treat-like-friend-part-iv.html
Good News from Iraq
Roundup of past 2 weeks good news from Iraq by the indispensable Aussie blogger Arthur Chrenkoff
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007042
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007042
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