6 Mar 2003

Let's travel back in time about 29 months and read the transcript of a speech by James Taranto about Iraq and terrorism. You may find it a bit disconcerting because it shows a very different situation than the revisionist version being hawked by the anti-war mob.

End terrorism thru Palestine?

Larry Elder at the Jewish World Review raises some good questions about the Israeli-Palestinian situation and its relationship to terrorism. Here's an excerpt:

What about Osama bin Laden? He claims to pursue jihad, at least in part, because of Palestinians. But according to "Globalized Islam" author Olivier Roy, "Abdullah Azzam, [Osama] bin Laden's mentor, gave up supporting the Palestine Liberation Organization long before his death in 1989 because he felt that to fight for a localized political cause was to forsake the real jihad . . . "

Mr. Elder reminds us of things that have been said by various Arab leaders over the years, and then he wonders:

So who's really the victimizer?

Cleaning up Kyoto

Dafydd, over at the Captain's Quarters has an interesting post about the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate -- a new way to approach global warming. Smartly. By trying to fix it through advancement of technology instead of retardation of economies. Here's how it starts out:

This one caught me totally by surprise: China, India, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and the United States (we led the effort) have just signed an international agreement, the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, to "keep climate-changing chemicals out of the atmosphere, especially carbon from fossil fuels." But rather than the Kyoto-Protocol method of setting target goals for emissions reductions that force de-industrialization among complying nations (of which there are actually very few among the Kyoto signers), this new pact aims to reduce emissions by jointly developing new pollutant-control technologies.

Here's the whole thing. I recommend it.

MSM revealed!

Michael Fumento has a surprising revelation: Mainstream media suppress Iraq optimism.

Merit pay for teachers

Joanne Jacobs has a post about different ways to provide merit pay to teachers. This is something that unions and education bureaucrats tend to disapprove of.

"Jihadist Jane"

Oliver North has a few pointed things to say about Jane Fonda's latest circus stunt.

And Cal Thomas weighs in.

I truly doubt that woman will ever grow up.

Idiot spotting made easy

"Freedom of speech makes it much easier to spot the idiots."

-- Jay Lesseig, as quoted in the 7 Feb 2005 OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today article.

I just had to post this . . .

Appeasement

Mona Charen over at townhall.com has some interesting things to say about how not to deal with a threat. Here's a taste:

Do you remember North Korea? It's the country Sen. John Kerry and the Democrats kept asserting was more of a threat than Saddam's Iraq during the campaign of 2004. Funny, they haven't mentioned it since. They've reverted to the customary Democratic methods of dealing with threats in non-election years: appeasement, bribery, denial and blame America -- not necessarily in that order.

She goes on to describe how the Clinton administration appeased North Korea by negotiating and signing the "Agreed Framework". And then she describes how Pyongyang pretty much flipped us the finger when they fired a missile over Japan.

This is the table that has been set for us. While many liberals seem to think that the greatest threats we face arise from the Patriot Act or from "Bush's lies," the truth is that bitter and evil men still seek the power to destroy as many of us as they can possibly hit.

Though she takes potshots at liberalism and the Democrat Party, she makes some level-headed observations. Go read the whole thing.

Supporters of Cosby's cause

Heather Mac Donald has an interesting, affirmative article that highlights several black leaders who agree with Cosby on what is needed (and not needed) to liberate blacks from the shackles of welfare and despair. It's a long article, but quite worth your time. Here's how it begins:

When Bill Cosby, in a speech to the NAACP last May, let fly a merciless condemnation of black illegitimacy, educational apathy, and the idea that white racism causes black social problems, political commentators dropped their jaws. They remained stunned when he vented similar frustration to audiences across the country over the next six months. Sure, “civil rights” advocates have been known, on rare occasions, to criticize self-defeating black behavior, but convention requires that after briefly denouncing, say, black-on-black crime (as if black-on-white crime would be okay), the “leader” should turn his attention to the racial injustice that allegedly causes such crime and harp on that for the next year or so. This Cosby refused to do. “It’s not what [the white man] is doing to you; it’s what you’re not doing,” he thundered in Detroit.

The reaction of black audiences was just as unexpected. Rather than take offense, they waited hours in line, in blistering heat and freezing cold, to hear Cosby deliver his impassioned plea for bourgeois behavior.

The rest of the article is about other pioneering blacks: talk show host Rapheal Adams, sheriff David A. Clarke, Republican recruiter Don Scoggins, Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, and Vietnam veteran and anti-crime organizer Olgen Williams.

I highly recommend this. And it is not racist by any means. It does run contrary to the liberal line of reasoning, though.

Gun liability

Okay. I am not Mr. NRA here. I have hunted some, but that was a long time ago. However, I've always supported (in a low-key, non-rabid way) a law-abiding person's right to own guns.

Anyway, OpinionJournal has a short op-ed about the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act that is up for a vote in Congress soon.

It's in the extended entry.

Gun Liability Control

The NRA meets the trial bar at high noon.


Wednesday, July 27, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

If we recall correctly, it was Shakespeare who wrote "the first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." That's going too far, but the Senate can do the metaphoric equivalent this week by voting to protect gun makers from lawsuits designed to put them out of business.

Senate Republicans say they have 60 votes to pass the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which would protect gun makers from lawsuits claiming they are responsible for crimes committed with their products. The support includes at least 10 Democrats, which speaks volumes about the political shift against "gun control" in recent years.

The "assault weapons ban" expired with a whimper last year. State legislatures have been rolling back firearm laws because the restrictions were both ineffectual and unpopular. Gun-controllers have responded by avoiding legislatures and going to court, teaming with trial lawyers and big city mayors to file lawsuits blaming gun makers for murder. Companies have been hit with at least 25 major lawsuits, from the likes of Boston, Atlanta, St. Louis, Chicago and Cleveland. A couple of the larger suits (New York and Washington, D.C.) are sitting in front of highly creative judges and could drag on for years.

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Which seems to be part of the point. The plaintiffs have asked judges to impose the sort of "remedies" that Congress has refused to impose, such as trigger locks or tougher restrictions on gun sales. Some mayors no doubt also hope for a big payday. But short of that, the gun-control lobby's goal seems to be keep the suits going long enough to drain profit from the low-margin gun industry.

Gun makers have yet to lose a case, but these victories have cost more than $200 million in legal bills. This is a huge sum for an industry collectively smaller than any Fortune 500 company and that supports 20,000 jobs at most. Publicly listed companies such as Smith & Wesson have seen the legal uncertainty reflected in their share price. Money for legal fees could be better spent creating new jobs, researching ways to make guns safer, or returning profits to shareholders.

Congress has every right to stop this abuse of the legal system, all the more so because it amounts to an end-run around its legislative authority. A single state judge imposing blanket regulations on a gun maker would effectively limit the Second Amendment rights of gun buyers across the nation. Liability legislation would also send a message that Congress won't stand by as the tort bar and special interests try to put an entirely lawful business into Chapter 11.

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The gun makers aren't seeking immunity from all liability; they would continue to face civil suits for defective products or for violating sales regulations. The Senate proposal would merely prevent a gun maker from being pillaged because a criminal used one of its products to perform his felony. Murder can be committed with all kinds of everyday products, from kitchen knives to autos, but no one thinks GM is to blame because a drunk driver kills a pedestrian. (On the other hand, give the lawyers time.) To adapt a familiar line, guns don't kill industries; lawyers do.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

So, what do you think?

Intel failures

What Jeff Jacoby said.

Zimbabwe's problem

An illustration of one of the very real problems in Africa.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

Ruin By Design

The U.N. misses it, but Mugabe's regime is Zimbabwe's problem.


BY CLAUDIA ROSETT

Wednesday, July 27, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

To whatever extent the recent United Nations report on Zimbabwe calls attention to the brutalities of the country's tyrant, President Robert Mugabe, the U.N. has performed a service. But as far as the report translates into nothing more than a fresh bout of aid funneled via Mugabe's regime, this U.N. initiative will only compound the suffering in Zimbabwe--where the government's latest atrocity has been to "clean up" the cities by evicting hundreds of thousands of poor people, destroying their dwellings and leaving them jobless, homeless and hungry.

In describing this scene, the U.N. report provides a wealth of horrifying detail, but takes a detour around the basic cause, which is not, as the report concludes, such stuff as "improper advice" acted upon by "over-zealous officials." The real cause is the long and ruinous rule of Mugabe and his cronies.

With a delicacy over-zealously inappropriate in itself to dealings with the tyrant whose regime has been responsible for wreck of Zimbabwe, the report starts by thanking Mr. Mugabe for his "warm welcome" to the U.N. delegation, which visited the country from June 26 to July 8. The report, issued by the secretary-general's special envoy Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, then proceeds to the usual U.N. prescription that what Zimbabwe needs is more aid, and a framework--here comes the UN lingo--"to ensure the sustainability of humanitarian response." While the report also calls for the "culprits" to be called to justice under Zimbabwe laws, Mugabe himself is somehow excused from direct responsibility.

Instead, the report faults wealthy nations for not providing more aid already, and notes that "With respect to the funding issue, some in the Zimbabwe political elite and intelligentsia, as well as others of similar persuasion around the continent, believe the international community is concerned more with 'regime change' and that there is no real and genuine concern for the welfare of ordinary people."

Apart from the problem, not mentioned in the U.N. report's comment, that after a quarter-century of Mugabe's rule the surviving Zimbabwe elite are to a great extent Mugabe's own cronies, there is the profound difficulty that in Zimbabwe's state-choked economy, Mugabe has a record of diverting foreign aid to his supporters, while starving--as well as mugging and murdering--his opposition. Aid workers themselves in recent years have lamented the difficulty of channeling aid in Zimbabwe to the intended beneficiaries. The danger with any massive, not to mentioned "sustainable" humanitarian response, is that it will most likely translate into sustainability of Mugabe's regime (generating hefty fees along the way for any U.N. agencies involved).

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What to do? Rushing aid to help the starving and homeless is an impulse common to decent people anywhere. There is no doubt that Mugabe's regime has created a crisis, to which some will be moved for the best of reasons to respond. But to downplay the role of the tyrant himself, in hope he will "engage" with humanitarian donors, and in kindly manner mend the mistakes of his reportedly wayward subordinates, is to misinterpret his methods, shore up his rule, and most probably sustain or even worsen the miseries of Zimbabwe.

Atrocities under Mugabe are nothing new. Since Zimbabwe gained independence from Britain in 1980, Mugabe has ruled with what is apparently the prime directive of remaining in power, whatever the cost. The U.N. report, in its brief history of the country's struggles, fails to mention that one of Mugabe's first moves after coming to power was to invite in North Korean advisers, to train the shock troops known in Zimbabwe as the "Fifth Brigade." In the 1980s, Mugabe dispatched this Fifth Brigade to massacre an estimated 18,000 Zimbabweans opposed to his rule--far more than the number of people slaughtered, say, at Srebenica, and more than six times the number murdered in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

The world paid no notice. Most of those who died were not members of Zimbabwe's white minority; they were black, most of them belonging to the Ndebele tribe. Mugabe then consolidated power, and was feted for years as a champion of African progress. Indeed, the new U.N. report, while omitting mention of this slaughter, describes Mugabe in admiring terms as "part of that exclusive club of African statesmen" who "fought colonialism and racial discrimination."

The report also gives an odd account of the farm invasions that from 1998 on escalated in Zimbabwe not only into the eviction of white land-owners, but the ruin of the country's agricultural base--replaced not by fair distribution of property and rule of law for blacks, but by plunder, violence, and enrichment of Mugabe's chums at the expense of millions of black Zimbabweans. The model for this was not equitable land reform, but Communist China's cultural revolution, the methods of which Mugabe and his crony "war veterans" learned in the 1960s and early 1970s at the knees of Mao Tse-tung himself. And the mobs who invaded the farms, while described as war veterans, did not consist on the ground of the aging satraps of Mugabe's elite circle--who profited from the policy. They were youth militia, unleashed by the aging Mugabe in an effort to thwart a growing opposition movement, and keep his grip on power.

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The U.N. report does warn that its findings are incomplete. But they are rather worse than that. The eviction of hundreds of thousands was not, in Mugabe's universe, a policy mistake. It was, for Zimbabwe's murderous tyrant, a success--now yielding leverage over decent people who are indeed prone to send help to those suffering in Zimbabwe. We have seen this cycle before. It is what led to the U.N. devising, albeit on a far grander scale, with a far bigger cut for its own administrative services, the now scandal-ridden Oil-for-Food program in Iraq, which fortified Saddam Hussein and helped him keep power for years beyond what many in the early 1990s expected. What must be grasped in dealing with Zimbabwe is that the problem is Mugabe himself. And whatever welcome, warm or otherwise, he may provide to visiting U.N. delegations, the true recovery can only begin with his departure.

Ms. Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Her column appears here and in The Wall Street Journal Europe on alternate Wednesdays.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

"The caliphate or death"

Arthur Chrenkoff points out what should be increasingly obvious to all of us -- jihadists want nothing short of world domination.

Too strongly worded? Perhaps.

Is it likely to happen? We don't know.

Strange men and missile launchers

Michelle Malkin describes a very real threat here in the U.S. -- terrorists with anti-aircraft missiles.

Yup, that's right. Many readers have e-mailed me about a recent report floating on the Internet that reveals military concerns about a suspicious trio of Middle Eastern men who apparently pointed a rocket launcher at low-flying aircraft near Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma earlier this month. It's authentic. Battle Staff Directive #41, categorized as "For Official Use Only," was issued at Hill Air Force Base in Utah last week to raise a red flag about the incident at Tinker AFB:

"On 14 Jul 05, three individuals were observed outside of the perimeter of Tinker AFB, OK. They were looking through binoculars, taking pictures and one appeared to be holding a large weapon at chest level. The weapon appeared to be aimed towards a low flying aircraft. The three individuals were described as being of Middle Eastern decent and left the area when approached. The weapon was later identified as a rocket launcher (MANPAD) and the low flying aircraft to be a B-1 Bomber. FBI in Oklahoma City and AFOSI [Air Force Office of Special Investigations] determined the threat to be credible."

Ms. Malkin never fails to make you think. I recommend it.

Student loans retard free-market forces

Brendan Miniter has an op-ed posted at OpinionJournal that suggests a link between student loan guarantees and the spiraling cost of higher education. He says a lot more, as well. It is an interesting read.

I have reprinted it in the extended entry.

Uncle Sam's Tuition Bill

Breaking the culture of dependency on campus.


BY BRENDAN MINITER

Tuesday, July 26, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Though parents may wonder if their kids learn anything in college economics classes, Uncle Sam certainly has gained an education in market economics from lending to them.

The federal government first got involved in the student loan business on the grounds that, left to their own devices, rational lenders wouldn't offer loans to college students. Who'd lend money to somebody with no job, no visible means of support except mom and dad, and thousands of dollars in annual expenses? Well, the answer is just about every bank out there, as credit card company reps patrolling campus will attest.

Nonetheless, based on its original miscalculation, the federal government has now become the co-signer on nearly every student loan, even paying the loan's interest while the student is in school, and guaranteeing to lenders at least 98% of their principal should the student default. The government also guarantees private banks that they will turn a profit on student loans no matter how low interest rates fall. Under President Clinton, Uncle Sam even started lending to students directly.

This year the federal government will make more than $70 billion in financial aid available by guaranteeing loans, lending money directly to students, or handing out grants. Pell Grants alone will cost more than $13.4 billion next year as 5.4 million students will receive direct government funding (a million more than when President Bush took office in 2000). Moreover, the pressure to keep upping the ante is unrelenting from Democrats and Republicans alike, who never tire as posing as the protectors of children against the scourge of rapacious tuition increases.

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Unfortunately, by footing these bills and turning higher education into an entitlement, Congress itself is primarily responsible for isolating academia from normal consumer pressure by shielding most students (and their parents) from the true cost of higher education. That's why schools can keep ratcheting up tuitions beyond what any middle class family can reasonably afford to pay--because they know taxpayers stand ready to take up the slack.

Worse, this culture of dependency doesn't even end when a student walks across the stage to receive a diploma. Yet another subsidy is available to help them "consolidate" their loans. Which brings us to the brave effort of House Education Committee Chairman John Boehner and handful of GOPers who, in a small way, are finally taking steps to impose limits on the student loan boondoggle.

Under the government's consolidation program, former students can lock in a low fixed rate while the interest rate the government guarantees to banks remains tied to the 91-day T Bill. It doesn't take an economist to figure out the problem with this scheme. When the dot-com bubble burst, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan cut short-term interest rates to historic lows in hopes of getting the economy moving again. Well, students must have learned something in their econ classes after all. Thousand moved quickly to lock in ridiculously low interest rates. Now, as interest rates are rising again, Uncle Sam is on the hook for an estimated $14 billion, not including loans consolidated in the past year.

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To make sure this never happens again, Mr. Boehner & Co. would require students either to continue paying a variable rate after they consolidate their loans or pay a premium for locking in a fixed rate, as happens in the private sector. That seems reasonable enough, as do other reforms in the House legislation that would reduce the guarantee the government extends student loans to 95% of the principal. Private lenders would have that much more incentive to do their jobs properly, making sure taxpayer-backed loans go to students who are good risks.

Still, it took a 26-20 party line vote to get the GOP bill out of committee. Expect a floor fight in the House in September, just a parents are dropping their children off at college. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has already made the administration's support of the House bill clear, leaving the Senate as the big question mark.

Congress is a long way from recognizing its own gigantic role in distorting the tuition market and driving prices out of sight. Mr. Boehner's struggles demonstrate just how difficult it is to bring even a small amount of commonsense reform to the great, unrecognized middle-class entitlement that the federal student loan programs have become.

Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Education: quality vs. spending

An interesting article about spending for education points out that spending is at an all-time high, yet little or no improvement can be attibuted to that higher level of spending. Here's an excerpt:

Education economist Caroline Hoxby explains that public schools today are doing less with more: school productivity -- achievement per dollar spent -- declined by 55 to 73 percent from 1971 to 1999. Meanwhile, private and charter schools are boosting student achievement with lower expenditures per pupil than public schools. In other words, there is no consistent, systematic relationship between education spending and student outcomes.

I agree with what is presented in the article. My theory as to why spending has increased without corresponding increases in quality revolves around my wife's experience as an educator. She has described to me an entire bureaucracy that has been built around "managing" the school district -- complete with largely unqualified managers and staff. Unfortunately, that bloated bureaucracy only incidentally addresses the real reason for the existence of a school district: the education of our children.

Sebastian Mallaby on CAFTA

Mr. Mallaby has a column up at washingtonpost.com detailing why he thinks CAFTA Deserves To Pass.

It's worth a read.

[Hat Tip to Betsy Newmark.]

Another dispatch from Mosul

Michael Yon has a new post up about the Iraqi police and their growing effectiveness. He also discusses the terrorists' adaptation and deadly resolve:

The enemy in Iraq does not appear to be weakening; if anything, they are becoming smarter, more complicated and deadlier. But this does not mean they are winning; to imply that getting smarter and deadlier equates to winning, is fallacious. Most accounts of the situation in Iraq focus on enemy "successes" (if success is re-defined as annihiliation of civility), while redacting the increasing viability and strength of the Iraqi government, which clearly is outpacing the insurgency.

Go read the rest. Yon doesn't pull any punches.

Spot on the (New)mark

Go read Betsy Newmark's post . Go to the link that she references, and read that article. Then come back and tell me that you don't agree with Betsy's summation about irresponsible journalism:

When the media hypes up and exaggerates stories of abuses of Muslims in American prisons, they are inflaming the minds of those who want to kill us. Perhaps if the media spent half as much time writing stories about how Muslims abuse Muslims in places like Syria, Saudia Arabia, etc. some of these young men will begin to realize that their enemy is not Britain or the United States but their own Muslim leaders. But it's always easier to blame Israel, America, or Britain than your own societies.

Why doesn't the mainstream media get it? Does one get lobotomized when one begins a career in journalism?

Strategy of Terror

Former governor of Delaware Pete du Pont has an insightful column posted at OpinionJournal. Here's an excerpt:

The terrorist strategy may have changed, but the objective remains the same. Al Qaeda understands that in the end the United States is what matters. The United Nations is irresolute and corrupt, and important European nations are indecisive and vulnerable. So drive the United States from the Middle East, establish control of all its nations, and then force the Western European nations to appease and accept an Islamic, theocratic global society.

Go read the rest in the extended entry.

Shoring Up the Western Front

Is Old Europe finally learning that it must join the global war on terror?


BY PETE DU PONT

Monday, July 25, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Nov. 9, 1989, and Sept. 11, 2001, each changed the modern world. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of 75 years of communism, and the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks the beginning of what may be a similar period of global Islamic terrorism.

But not all of Western civilization wants to fight this not so cold war. Turkey, fearing attacks by Muslim insurgents, ended its anti-terrorism efforts in 2003. Spain followed suit after the 2004 Madrid bombings. Then Hungary and the Netherlands also all but capitulated, even without any dramatic, world-attention grabbing, attacks on their soil. Now Italy says it will withdraw its forces from Iraq by year end.

Old Europe may be falling apart before our eyes. This is suggested by the opposition of Western Europeans to the American military action in Iraq as well as the defeat of the European Union Constitution in France and Holland last spring and the economic decline of European socialist economies. In any case, Old Europe has neither the political will nor the economic strength to combat terrorism. Without the United States, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq would be terrorist-controlled nations. Once again it will be up to America to defeat an assault on Western civilization, just as it was left to the United States to rescue Europe against Nazism and then against the global assualt of communism.

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Within the European continent thousands of trained terrorists live and travel freely. Historian Walter Laquer reports that security authorities estimate more than 600--perhaps several thousand--British residents are actual graduates of Osama bin Laden's training camps. Dr. Hani al-Siba'i, the director of the al-Maqreze Centre for Historical Studies in London was quoted as approving of the subway bombings as a great victory, for it was legitimate to target civilians since "the term 'civilians' does not exist in Islamic law . . ." The Islamic fanatic who killed Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh told the court: "I acted purely in the name of my religion," and that "one day, should I be set free, I would do the same, exactly the same . . ."

But none of this means continental Europeans or the British establishment are prepared to criticize terrorism. Christophe Chaboud, France's antiterrorism coordinator, said last week that the war against Iraq--evidently not the blowing up of Spanish or British trains--is making Europe dangerous, and the BBC forbids the use of the word "terrorist" in its coverage of the London bombings.

France, Germany and their European allies believe the welfare state economic model--high taxes and welfare benefits, shorter work weeks, strong restrictions on hiring and firing of workers, huge government subsidies for industry and agriculture, and suffocating regulation by a massive bureaucracy in Brussels--is preferable to Anglo-American democratic capitalism and will lead to prosperity. But it hasn't and it won't, and without economic strength the military strength needed to fight terrorism becomes impossible to assemble.

Simply put, Old Europe's thinking today is that of 1930s, when the Oxford Union voted "under no circumstances [to] fight for King and Country," and British PM Neville Chamberlain believed appeasement should be the policy and "peace in our time" the goal. Winston Churchill had the better understanding: "You ask what is our aim? I can answer that in one word, victory at all costs, victory in spite of terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival." He was talking of Hitler and Nazi Germany, of course, but without victory there will be no survival against Islamic terrorism either.

Meanwhile, the terrorist network has changed its focus, making the fighting of the war more complex. An al Qaeda planning document found by Norwegian intelligence in 2003 laid out its revised strategy: spectacular attacks like those of 9/11 against the United States need to be supplemented by attacks on European nations so they will withdraw their support of the Afghan and Iraqi military operations in order to increase the burden on the United States.

University of Chicago professor Robert Pape's excellent New York Times piece of July 9th lays out its specifics: attack Britain, Poland, and Spain as the most vulnerable nations. "It is necessary to make the utmost use of the upcoming general election in Spain . . . we think the Spanish government could not tolerate more than two, maximum three, blows . . . then the victory of the Socialist Party is almost secured and the withdrawal of Spanish forces will be in the electoral program." They hoped that would put "huge pressure on the British presence that Tony Blair might not be able to withstand, and hence the domino tiles would fall quickly."

The terrorist strategy may have changed, but the objective remains the same. Al Qaeda understands that in the end the United States is what matters. The United Nations is irresolute and corrupt, and important European nations are indecisive and vulnerable. So drive the United States from the Middle East, establish control of all its nations, and then force the Western European nations to appease and accept an Islamic, theocratic global society.

Combating terrorism is thus the modern version of war--no huge armies, but nevertheless a real war--and winning this war is no less important to global freedom than winning the World War II and the Cold War.

America can win the war against terrorism, but it will take time and resources and a considerable intellectual effort. The Bush administration will continue to provide military and intelligence resources, but it must also continue the intellectual debate.

Like Old Europe, liberal America is bothered by principled international positions. "The Right Nation," by Adrian Wooldridge and John Micklethwait, points out that liberals were "nervous about moral absolutes, preferring to see the world in shades of grey. After Sept. 11, liberal academics looked for reasons to explain al Qaeda: Was it the product of racism? Of economic injustice? Of American policies in the Middle East?" In his presidential campaign Howard Dean, now national Democratic Party chairman, said our "pre-emptive war is wrong for America"; and liberal leader Sen. Ted Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, said that "the U.S. presence [in Iraq] is part of the problem, not part of the solution."

President Bush better understands the reality, for as he said at West Point in 2002, "the war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy . . . the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act." He must continue to make the case, for to appease rather than oppose the enemy will lose the war against terrorism.

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The good news is we will likely have more international allies in the future. British Prime Minister Tony Blair said after the July 7th London terrorist attack that "What we are confronting here is an evil ideology . . . a battle not just about their terrorist methods, but their views. Not just about their barbaric acts, but their barbaric ideas." After the attack that came the following week, England will be making the case more aggressively.

Old Europe may currently be opposed to both democratic capitalism and a war against terrorism, but that could now change as people begin to see that controlled economies and socialist policies actually make it more difficult to fight off the terrorists who are attacking not just the United States, but them as well. Thus Angela Merkel, a free market Thatcherite and potential American anti-terrorism ally, may well defeat Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party in Germany's September elections. It is too soon to say that continental Europe has abandoned its pro-Saddam/anti-American foreign policies and socialist economic policies, but there is movement in that direction.

And that will help the world fight the global war against Islamic terrorism. The war will be long--a 50 year religious war says the father of Mohamed Atta, the terrorist who flew the first plane into the World Trade Center--and for some time America may have to fight on nearly alone. But terrorism is slowly changing European thinking, and that will help Americans and the people of the world win an essential victory in advancing the freedom that will insure a better future for people of every nation.

Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears once a month.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Media-enabled terrorism

Clipped from the Townhall.com C-Log.

You can read it in the extended entry.

Media continues to enable terrorists

By TrevorBothwell

Posted on Sun Jul 24th, 2005 at 11:24:02 AM EST

The AP still refuses to call terrorism by its name.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - A suicide attacker slammed a truck loaded with explosives into sand barriers outside a Baghdad police station Sunday, killing at least 22 people and wounding 30, police said.

The attacker detonated his charge at the Rashad police station in the eastern neighborhood of Mashtal around 2:50 p.m., said Capt. Mahir Abdul Satar.

Most of the 22 killed were civilians, police Col. Ala'a Salih said.

When the vast majority of your victims of a single attack are civilians, you're a terrorist. Pity the mainstream media refuses to acknowledge this. But make no mistake: Until the side that supposedly represents the good guys begins to act like the other guys are bad, you can expect to see these terrorist attacks continue for a very, very long time.

Our enemies are apparently "bombers" and "attackers." Just like us. Get it? You can scan the AP's report for yourself, but you won't find any reference to terrorists or murderers. These terms, you see, are reserved for their proper occasion, when U.S. troops attack.

Just for the record: These are bombers; these are terrorists.

Cynical, yes. But accurate.

Radical Islam

Joel Mowbray has an op-ed showing the relationship between terrorism and radical Islamism. Here's a taste:

Already, many have attempted to claim that the “reason” for the London attacks was Britain’s involvement in the war in Iraq. What this ignores, however, is that adherents of al Qaeda don’t need a reason to attack other than the existence of freedom—a concept that goes against the core belief in Shari’a law and the necessity of Islamic states.

In the decade before 9/11, many U.S. targets were hit: the World Trade Center in 1993, Khobar Towers in 1996, the East Africa embassies in 1998, and the U.S.S. Cole in 2000. Each time, we did nothing. Yet al Qaeda struck anyway on September 11.

An interesting read, though certainly not politically correct. And I think Mr. Mowbray is pointing to a very real tenet of Islam. It certainly was true a thousand years ago when converts to Islam were made by imposing (upon penalty of death) Islam on the peoples of conquered lands.

Scary, isn't it?

We must continue to run the course

Austin Bay has an op-ed up on the Weekly Standard entitled Nervous in Baghdad. Here's a taste:

My bet is that the Iraqis will pull it off. By the end of 2006 the Iraqis plan to have 250,000 troops and policemen in uniform.

But they won't if America wilts, and our weakness is back home, in front of the TV, on the cable squawk shows, on the editorial pages, in the political gotcha games of Washington, D.C. There, it seems America just wants to get on with its Electra-Glide life, that September 10 sense of freedom and security, without finishing the job. The U.S. military is fighting, the nascent Iraqi military is fighting, the Iraqi people are fighting, but where is the American political class?

Bullets go bang, and so do ballots in their own way. In terms of this war's battlespace, the January Iraqi elections were World War II's D-Day and Battle of the Bulge combined. But the bricks--the building of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the other hard corners where this war is and will be fought--that's a delicate and decades-long challenge.

It is well worth reading (it is a two-page article).

The long ride home

Firepower 5, the executive officer of the 191st Ordnance Battalion in Afghanistan, has a post up about the loss of the helo that had 11 SEALs on board -- and its aftermath.

The Long Ride Home

Sacrifice

Syndicated columnist Jack Kelly has a blog named Irish Pennants wherein he posts some of his thoughts.

His post for July 19 brought me up short. It made me again appreciate how much we owe the men and women who have fought and died in this country's service.

Here's the post:

Light posting today. I had to attend the funeral of Staff Sergeant Joseph Goodrich, 32, a Marine Reservist who was killed in Iraq a week ago Sunday.

Goodrich had been a cop, and the St. John Lutheran Church in Carnegie was filled to overflowing with cops and Marines who had known Joe, who apparently was a truly wonderful man.

I've been to too many of these things. At each of them I wonder at the cosmic justice that has me stumbling around alive while such remarkable young men as Joe Goodrich are taken from us. If I could have traded my life for his, I would have. But he was too busy giving his life to protect all of us here. Too bad the MoveOn crowd will never appreciate it.

Go read the comments, too.

A Soldier's Blog

Shawn Richardson, an officer in the Tennessee Army Reserve currently deployed to Iraq, and a Christian, has a weblog where he records some of his thoughts and experiences.

In this post, he celebrates his birthday half a world away from his loved ones -- at least his mortal loved ones.

It's a good read.

Saddam on trial

I haven't seen anything like this report in any US newspapers. Here's an excerpt:

A man describes how Saddam Hussein's secret police shoved a dissident's baby into a sack with a vicious cat that scratches it.

Undercover agents throw a man to his death from the roof of a building.

Iraqiya state television is reviving images of life under Saddam as a court prepares to announce his trial date.

``I wish they were here to see the day when Saddam is finished,'' a tearful woman who lost her relatives under Saddam tells viewers of Iraqiya, which broadcast footage of abuses filmed by members of Saddam security forces as they committed them.

Saddam was, and still is, one evil hombre . Then again, maybe he really is just misunderstood like some people claim . . .

I recommend you go read the rest.

Neocon maturation

Charles Krauthammer has an excellent column up at OpinionJournal that puts the Bush doctrine into a historical perspective that, frankly, is pretty darn impressive.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry. You really need to read it.

The Neoconservative Convergence

Some once famously dissenting ideas now govern U.S. foreign policy, maturing as they go.


BY CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER

Thursday, July 21, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

The post-Cold War era has seen a remarkable ideological experiment: Over the past 15 years, each of the three major American schools of foreign policy--realism, liberal internationalism and neoconservatism--has taken its turn at running things. (A fourth school, isolationism, has a long pedigree, but has yet to recover from Pearl Harbor and probably never will; it remains a minor source of dissidence with no chance of becoming a governing ideology.) There is much to be learned from this unusual and unplanned experiment.

The era began with the senior George Bush and a classically realist approach. This was Kissingerism without Kissinger--although Brent Scowcroft, James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger filled in admirably. The very phrase the administration coined to describe its vision--the New World Order--captured the core idea: an orderly world with orderly rulers living in stable equilibrium.

The elder Mr. Bush had two enormous achievements to his credit: the peaceful reunification of Germany, still historically undervalued, and the expulsion of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, which maintained the status quo in the Persian Gulf. Nonetheless, his administration suffered from the classic shortcoming of realism: a failure of imagination. Mr. Bush brilliantly managed the reconstitution of Germany and the restoration of the independence of the East European states, but he could not see far enough to the liberation of the Soviet peoples themselves. His notorious "chicken Kiev" speech of 1991, warning Ukrainians against "suicidal nationalism," seemed to prefer Soviet stability to the risk of 15 free and independent states.

But we must not be retrospectively too severe. Democracy in Ukraine was hard to envision even a few years ago, let alone in the early 1990s, and Mr. Bush's hesitancy did not stop the march of liberation in the Soviet sphere. It was the failure of imagination in Mr. Bush's other area of triumph--Iraq--that had truly stark, even tragic, consequences.

Leaving Saddam in place, and declining to support the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings that followed the first Gulf War, begat more than a decade of Iraqi suffering, rancor among our war allies, diplomatic isolation for the U.S., and a crumbling regime of U.N. sanctions. All this led ultimately and inevitably to a second war that could have been fought far more easily--and with the enthusiastic support of Iraq's Shiites, who to this day remain suspicious of our intentions--in 1991. One recalls with dismay that the first two of Osama bin Laden's announced justifications for his declaration of war on America were the garrisoning of the holy places (i.e., Saudi Arabia) by crusader (i.e., American) soldiers and the suffering of Iraqis under sanctions. Both were a direct result of the inconclusive end to the first Gulf War.

Still, the achievements of the elder Mr. Bush far outweigh the failures. The smooth and peaceful dissolution of the Soviet empire began, Saddam was stopped, and Arabia was saved. But then came the second, radically different experiment. For the balance of the 1990s, for reasons having nothing to do with foreign policy, realism was abruptly replaced by the classic liberal internationalism of the Clinton administration.

It is hard to be charitable in assessing the record. Liberal internationalism's one major achievement in those years--saving the Muslims in the Balkans and creating conditions for their possible peaceful integration into Europe--was achieved, ironically, in defiance of its own major principle. It lacked what liberal internationalists incessantly claim is the sine qua non of legitimacy: the approval of the U.N. Security Council.

Otherwise, the period between 1993 and 2001 was a waste, eight years of sleepwalking, of the absurd pursuit of one treaty more useless than the last, while the rising threat--Islamic terrorism--was treated as a problem of law enforcement. Perhaps the most symbolic moment occurred at the residence of the U.S. ambassador to France in October 2000, after Yasser Arafat had rejected Israel's peace offer at Camp David and instead launched his bloody second intifada. In Paris for another round of talks, Arafat abruptly broke off negotiations and was leaving the residence when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ran after him, chasing him in her heels on the cobblestone courtyard to induce him, to cajole him, into signing yet another worthless piece of paper.

Leon Trotsky is said to have remarked of the New York intellectual Dwight Macdonald, "Everyone has a right to be stupid, but Comrade Macdonald abuses the privilege." During its 7 1/2-year Oslo folly, the Clinton administration abused the privilege consistently.

---

Then came another radical change. By a fluke or a miracle, depending on your point of view, because of the confusion of a few disoriented voters in Palm Beach, Fla., this has been the decade of neoconservatism. Bismarck once said that God looks after fools, drunkards, children and the United States of America. Given the 2000 presidential election, it is clear that he works in very mysterious ways.

In place of realism or liberal internationalism, the past 4 1/2 years have seen an unashamed assertion and deployment of American power, a resort to unilateralism when necessary, and a willingness to pre-empt threats before they emerge. Most importantly, the second Bush administration has explicitly declared the spread of freedom to be the central principle of American foreign policy. George W. Bush's second inaugural address in January was the most dramatic and expansive expression of this principle. A few weeks later, at the National Defense University, the president offered its most succinct formulation: "The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom."

The remarkable fact that the Bush doctrine is, essentially, a synonym for neoconservative foreign policy marks neoconservatism's own transition from a position of dissidence, which it occupied during the first Bush administration and the Clinton years, to governance. Neoconservative foreign policy, one might say, has reached maturity. That is not only a portentous development, requiring some rethinking of principles and practice, but a rather unexpected one.

It is unexpected because, only a year ago, neoconservative foreign policy was being consigned to the ash heap of history. In the spring and summer of 2004, in the midst of increasing difficulties in Iraq, it was very widely believed that neoconservative policies had been run to the ground, that the administration that had purveyed them would soon be thrown out of office, and that internecine recriminations were about to begin over who lost the war on terror, the war in Iraq and indeed the reins of American foreign policy. One prominent columnist, speaking for the conventional wisdom of the moment, called the Bush project in Iraq "a childish fantasy." And this, from a friend of neoconservatism.

As for the liberals who had come on board the project of liberating Iraq, they took its perceived foundering as an opportunity to engage in a mass jumping of ship. Some justified their abandonment of the Bush doctrine on the grounds that it was they who had been betrayed--by an administration whose incompetence, mendacity, political opportunism and various other crimes had ruined a policy that would already have been crowned with success if only they had been in charge of postwar Iraq, calibrating brilliantly precise troop levels, calculating to three decimal places the required degree of de-Baathification, and overseeing just about every other operational detail according to the dictates of their own tactical genius.

Other liberals donned the guise of realists, who by the summer of 2004 were back in fashion. At the height of this new vogue, just before the November election, even John Kerry's advisers, noting that the liberal-internationalist critique of the war (namely, that it lacked international support and legitimacy) was not exactly winning converts, settled instead on a "realist" line of attack. From then on, Iraq would be known as the "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," which, translated, meant that we should be chasing terrorists cave-to-cave in Afghanistan rather than pursuing an ideological crusade in the Middle East.

If you add to this mix the classical realists, from Brent Scowcroft to Dimitri Simes, who had opposed the entire project from the beginning and were now penning their I-told-you-so's, there seemed scarcely anyone left on board the neoconservative ship. But the most interesting about-face was that of some professed neoconservatives themselves. Among these, the most prominent was Francis Fukuyama, whose lead article in the summer 2004 National Interest was a "realist" attack on the entire ideological underpinnings of the Iraq war and the liberationist idea. The article's very title, "The Neoconservative Moment," made the mocking suggestion, also very much in vogue, that neoconservative foreign policy was finished, that its moment had come and gone, that it had been done in by Iraq, by its own overweening arrogance, and by its blindness to the realist wisdom that failure in Iraq was, as Mr. Fukuyama put it, "predictable in advance."

As it happens, Mr. Fukuyama had neglected to make that prediction in advance; at the time of the war and during the months of debate preceding it, he had been silent. Moreover, from the perspective of today, even his retroactive prediction in summer 2004 of inevitable and catastrophic failure in Iraq appears doubtful, to say the least. Getting a retroactive prediction wrong is quite an achievement, but it tells you much about the intellectual climate just a year ago.

---

Today, there is no euphoria regarding the Iraq project, but sobriety has replaced panic. Things have changed, and what changed them was four elections: two in the West, and two in the Middle East. First came the re-election in Australia of John Howard, a firm ally of the administration. This presaged the re-election of George W. Bush, which reaffirmed to the world America's staying power, gave popular legitimacy to the Bush doctrine, and established a clear mandate to continue the democratic project. The refusal of the American people last November to turn out a president who, rejecting an "exit strategy," pledged instead to remain until Iraqi self-governance had been secured, was a seminal moment.

The other two elections took place in the areas of our exertion: first the Afghan elections, scandalously underplayed by the American media, then the Iraqi elections, impossible to underplay even by the American media. The latter were a historical hinge point. After a string of other important steps in Iraq that had been confidently dismissed as impossible and certainly impossible to do on time--the writing of an interim constitution, the transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government--came the greatest impossibility of all: free elections as scheduled. The overwhelming popular turnout, in what was essentially a referendum on the insurgency and on the democratic idea, sent a clear-cut message. Those who had said that the Iraqis, like Arabs in general, had no particular interest in self-government were wrong--as were those who claimed that the insurgency was a nationalist, anti-imperialist and widely popular movement.

This is hardly to say that things have not remained difficult in Iraq. The insurgency is still raging. It has the capacity to kill, to instill fear, and perhaps ultimately to destabilize the elected government. What the election did do, however, was to confirm what was already suggested by the insurgency's clear lack of any political program, any political wing, any ideology, indeed even any pretense of competing for hearts and minds. The election exposed the insurgency as an alliance of Baathist nihilism and atavistic jihadism, neither of which has a large constituency in Iraq.

And that is hardly all. The elections newly empowered fully 80% of the Iraqi population--the Kurds and the Shiites--and created an indigenous representative leadership with a life-and-death stake in defeating the insurgency. By giving that 80% the political and institutional means to build the necessary forces, the elections infinitely improved the chances that a stable, multiethnic, democratic Iraq can emerge, despite the current mayhem. As Fouad Ajami wrote in The Wall Street Journal on May 16, upon returning from a visit to the region:

"The insurgents will do what they are good at. But no one really believes that those dispensers of death can turn back the clock. . . . By a twist of fate, the one Arab country that had seemed ever marked for brutality and sorrow now stands poised on the frontier of a new political world."

The elections' effect on the wider Arab world was likewise both immediate and profound. Millions of Arabs watched on television as Iraqis exercised their political rights, and were moved to ask the obvious question: Why are Iraqis the only Arabs voting in free elections--and doing so, moreover, under American aegis and protection? The rest is so well known as barely to merit repeating. The Beirut spring. Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon. Open demonstrations and the beginnings of political competition in Egypt. Women's suffrage in Kuwait. Small but significant steps toward democratization in the gulf. Bashar Assad's declared intent to legalize political parties in Syria, purge the ruling Baath party, sponsor free municipal elections in 2007, and move toward a market economy. (Not that Assad is likely to do any of this, but the fact that he must pretend to be doing it shows the astonishing reach of the Bush doctrine to date.)

Mr. Ajami has called this (in the title of a recent article in Foreign Affairs) the "Autumn of the Autocrats." Not the winter--nothing is certain, and we know of many democratizing movements in the past that were successfully put down. There are too many entrenched dictatorships and kleptocracies in the region to declare anything won. What we can declare, with certainty, is the falsity of those confident assurances before the Iraq war, during the Iraq war and after the Iraq war that this project was inevitably doomed to failure because we do not know how to "do" democracy, and they do not know how to receive it.

In Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world, the forces of democratic liberalization have emerged on the political stage in a way that was unimaginable just two years ago. They have been energized and emboldened by the Iraqi example and by American resolve. Until now, it was widely assumed that the only alternative to pan-Arabist autocracy, to the Nassers and the Saddams, was Islamism. We now know, from Iraq and Lebanon, that there is another possibility, and that America has given it life. As the Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, hardly a noted friend of the Bush doctrine, put it in late February in an interview with David Ignatius of the Washington Post:

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

The Iraqi elections vindicated the two central propositions of the Bush doctrine. First, that the desire for freedom is indeed universal and not the private preserve of Westerners. Second, that America is genuinely committed to democracy in and of itself. Contrary to the cynics, whether Arab, European or American, the U.S. did not go into Iraq for oil or hegemony but for liberation--a truth that on Jan. 30 even al-Jazeera had to televise. Arabs in particular had had sound historical reason to doubt American sincerity: six decades of U.S. support for Arab dictators, a cynical "realism" that began with FDR's deal with the House of Saud and reached its apogee with the 1991 betrayal of the anti-Saddam uprising that the elder Bush had encouraged in Iraq. Today, however, they see a different Bush and a different doctrine.

---

The Iraqi elections had one final effect. They so acutely embarrassed foreign critics, especially in Europe, that we began to see a rash of headlines asking the rhetorical question: Was Bush Right? The answer to that is: Yes, so far. The democratic project has been launched, against the critics and against the odds. That in itself is an immense historical achievement. But success will require maturation--a neoconservatism of discrimination and restraint, prepared to examine both its principles and its practice in shaping a truly governing philosophy.

In a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute last year, I tried to draw a distinction between a more expansive and a more restrictive neoconservative foreign policy. I called the two types, respectively, democratic globalism and democratic realism.

The chief spokesman for democratic globalism is the president himself, and his second inaugural address is its ur-text. What is most breathtaking about it is not what most people found shocking--his announced goal of abolishing tyranny throughout the world. Granted, that is rather cosmic-sounding, but it is only an expression of direction and hope for, well, the end of time. What is most expansive is the pledge that America will stand with dissidents throughout the world, wherever they are.

This sort of talk immediately opens itself up to the accusation of disingenuousness and hypocrisy. After all, the United States retains cozy relations with autocracies of various stripes, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Russia. Besides, if we place ourselves on the side of all dissidents everywhere, must we not declare our solidarity not only with democrats but with Islamist dissidents sitting in Pakistani, Egyptian, Saudi and Russian jails?

But we do not act this way, and we need not. The question of alliances with dictators, of deals with the devil, can be approached openly, forthrightly and without any need for defensiveness. The principle is that we cannot democratize the world overnight and, therefore, if we are sincere about the democratic project, we must proceed sequentially. Nor, out of a false equivalence, need we abandon democratic reformers in these autocracies. On the contrary, we have a duty to support them, even as we have a perfect moral right to distinguish between democrats on the one hand and totalitarians or jihadists on the other.

In the absence of omnipotence, one must deal with the lesser of two evils. That means postponing radically destabilizing actions in places where the support of the current nondemocratic regime is needed against a larger existential threat to the free world. There is no need to apologize for that. In World War II we allied ourselves with Stalin against Hitler. (As Churchill said shortly after the German invasion of the U.S.S.R.: "If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.") This was a necessary alliance, and a temporary one: When we were done with Hitler, we turned our attention to Stalin and his successors.

During the subsequent war, the Cold War, we again made alliances with the devil, in the form of a variety of right-wing dictators, in order to fight the greater evil. Here, again, the partnership was necessary and temporary. Our deals with right-wing dictatorships were contingent upon their usefulness and upon the status of the ongoing struggle. Once again we were true to our word. Whenever we could, and particularly as we approached victory in the larger war, we dispensed with those alliances.

Consider two cases of useful but temporary allies against communism: Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. We proved our bona fides in both of these cases when, as Moscow weakened and the existential threat to the free world receded, we worked to bring down both dictators. In 1986, we openly and decisively supported the Aquino revolution that deposed and exiled Marcos, and later in the '80s we pressed very hard for free elections in Chile that Mr. Pinochet lost, paving the way for the return of democracy.

---

Alliances with dictatorships were justified in the war against fascism and the Cold War, and they are justified now in the successor existential struggle, the war against Arab/Islamic radicalism. This is not just theory. It has practical implications. For nothing is more practical than the question: After Afghanistan, after Iraq, what?

The answer is, first Lebanon, then Syria. Lebanon is next because it is so obviously ready for democracy, having practiced a form of it for 30 years after decolonization. Its sophistication and political culture make it ripe for transformation, as the massive pro-democracy demonstrations have shown.

Then comes Syria, both because of its vulnerability--the Lebanon withdrawal has gravely weakened Assad--and because of its strategic importance. A critical island of recalcitrance in a liberalizing region stretching from the Mediterranean to the Iranian border, Syria has tried to destabilize all of its neighbors: Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and now, most obviously and bloodily, the new Iraq. Serious, prolonged, ruthless pressure on the Assad regime would yield enormous geopolitical advantage in democratizing, and thus pacifying, the entire Levant.

Some conservatives (and many liberals) have proposed instead that we be true to the universalist language of the president's second inaugural address and go after the three principal Islamic autocracies: Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Not so fast, and not so hard. Autocracies they are, and in many respects nasty ones. But doing this would be a mistake.

In Egypt, we certainly have liberal resources that should be supported and encouraged. But, keeping in mind the Algerian experience, we should be wary of bringing down the whole house of cards and thereby derailing any progress from authoritarianism to liberal democracy. Saudi Arabia has a Byzantine culture, and an equally Byzantine method of governance, which must be delicately reformed short of overthrow. And Pakistan, which has great potential for democracy, is simply too critical as a military ally in the war on al Qaeda to risk anything right now. Pervez Musharraf is no bastard; but even if he were, he is ours. We should be encouraging the evolution of democracy in all of these countries, but relentless and ruthless means--of the kind we employed in Afghanistan and Iraq and should, perhaps short of direct military invention, be employing in Syria--are better applied to enemies, not friends.

What is interesting is that the Bush administration, in practice, is proceeding precisely along these lines. It pushes on Hosni Mubarak, but gently. It moves even more gingerly with Saudi Arabia, fearing what may emerge in the short term if the royal kleptocracy is deposed. And, because Pakistan is so central to the war on terror, it disturbs not a hair on the head of Mr. Musharraf.

In short, the Bush administration--if you like, neoconservatism in power--has been far more inclined to pursue democratic realism and to consign democratic globalism to the realm of aspiration. This kind of prudent circumspection is, in fact, a practical necessity for governing in the real world. We should, for example, be doing everything in our power, both overtly and covertly, to encourage a democratic revolution in Iran, a deeply hostile and dangerous state, even while trying carefully to manage democratic evolution in places like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Indeed, the behavior of the Bush administration implies that in practice, the distinction between democratic realism and democratic globalism may collapse, because globalism is simply not sustainable.

---

Another important sign of the maturing of neoconservative foreign policy is that it is no longer tethered to its own ideological history and paternity. The current practitioners of neoconservative foreign policy are George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. They have no history in the movement, and before 9/11 had little affinity to or affiliation with it.

The fathers of neoconservatism are former liberals or leftists. Today, its chief proponents, to judge by their history, are former realists. Ms. Rice, for example, was a disciple of Brent Scowcroft; Mr. Cheney served as secretary of defense in the first Bush administration. September 11 changed all of that. It changed the world, and changed our understanding of the world. As neoconservatism seemed to offer the most plausible explanation of the new reality and the most compelling and active response to it, many realists were brought to acknowledge the poverty of realism--not just the futility but the danger of a foreign policy centered on the illusion of stability and equilibrium. These realists, newly mugged by reality, have given weight to neoconservatism, making it more diverse and, given the newcomers' past experience, more mature.

What neoconservatives have long been advocating is now being articulated and practiced at the highest levels of government by a war cabinet composed of individuals who, coming from a very different place, have joined and reshaped the neoconservative camp and are carrying the neoconservative idea throughout the world. As a result, the vast right-wing conspiracy has grown even more vast than liberals could imagine. And even as the tent has enlarged, the great schisms and splits in conservative foreign policy--so widely predicted just a year ago, so eagerly sought and amplified by outside analysts--have not occurred. Indeed, differences have, if anything, narrowed.

This is not party discipline. It is compromise with reality, and convergence toward the middle. Above all, it is the maturation of a governing ideology whose time has come.

Mr. Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Washington Post and an essayist for Time. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987, and in 2003 was a recipient of the Bradley Prize. This essay, in somewhat different form, was delivered in New York City in May as Commentary's first annual Norman Podhoretz Lecture, and it appears in the July/August issue of Commentary.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Live 8 doesn't help

Jean-Claude Shanda Tonme, an international law consultant and columnist for a Cameroonian daily paper, has an op-ed in the New York Times entitled All Rock, No Action. He starts by saying:

LIVE 8, that extraordinary media event that some people of good intentions in the West just orchestrated, would have left us Africans indifferent if we hadn't realized that it was an insult both to us and to common sense.

We have nothing against those who this month, in a stadium, a street, a park, in Berlin, London, Moscow, Philadelphia, gathered crowds and played guitar and talked about global poverty and aid for Africa. But we are troubled to think that they are so misguided about what Africa's real problem is, and dismayed by their willingness to propose solutions on our behalf.

And then he goes on to propose solutions of his own:

Neither debt relief nor huge amounts of food aid nor an invasion of experts will change anything. Those will merely prop up the continent's dictators. It's up to each nation to liberate itself and to help itself. When there is a problem in the United States, in Britain, in France, the citizens vote to change their leaders. And those times when it wasn't possible to freely vote to change those leaders, the people revolted.

In Africa, our leaders have led us into misery, and we need to rid ourselves of these cancers. We would have preferred for the musicians in Philadelphia and London to have marched and sung for political revolution. Instead, they mourned a corpse while forgetting to denounce the murderer.

He concludes, cynically perhaps, that Live 8 does not help solve the problems in Africa. That, in fact, Live 8 helps to prolong those problems:

But the truth is that it was not for us, for Africa, that the musicians at Live 8 were singing; it was to amuse the crowds and to clear their own consciences, and whether they realized it or not, to reinforce dictatorships. They still believe us to be like children that they must save, as if we don't realize ourselves what the source of our problems [are].

The op-ed was originally published in Le Messager, the paper he is associated with in Cameroon. It was translated from the original French. You have to register (it's free) with the New York Times to read it, but it is worth your time.

Michael Yon's latest

Michael Yon has a very interesting post about a terrorist weapons cache. He provides a lot more than just a narrative of finding, cataloguing, and disposing of the weapons found:

Part of the persistence of the insurgency results from a staggering availability of fighting materials. There are tons of explosives and munitions here in Mosul, with more streaming in every day, though mounting evidence strongly suggests this flow is abating. For example, the street price of 60mm "mortar bombs" was about $3/shot 9 months ago. Now it’s up nearly seven-fold to over $20. Car bomb incidents in Mosul, while still causing major damage to both military and civilians, have been declining. Whether this is a temporary dip or steady trend remains to be seen. Even if the ongoing flow were completely cut off, there is still a deep well of material on hand.

There are several pictures, as well. Recommended.

Sowell on dogma vs. reality

Another astute, politically incorrect viewpoint about educating black children in America.

Kerry's downfall was the media?

James Taranto has published a column at OpinionJournal where he builds the case that the "liberal media" helped Bush get re-elected.

It's kind of long -- I've put it in the extended entry.

CAMPAIGN 2004


Kerry's Quagmire

How the liberal media helped re-elect George W. Bush.


BY JAMES TARANTO

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

What were the Democrats thinking? Didn't John Kerry have "loser" written all over him? After all, he was not only a Massachusetts Democrat but Michael Dukakis's former lieutenant governor. He was as liberal as Dukakis but lacked the inspiring immigrant background: a man who married another man's fortune, from a state where a man can marry another man. He had a haughty air, and he looked French, or so some anonymous Republicans told the New York Times in 2003. Mr. Kerry replied, "The White House has started the politics of personal destruction"--proving that he was thin-skinned as well. Yet exit polls showed that Democratic primary voters backed him because he was "electable."

Of course "electable" at that point chiefly meant "not Howard Dean," whose campaign in retrospect seems more performance art than politics. But once Mr. Kerry won the nomination, he had--or seemed to have--something else going for him: the support of the liberal media, which loathed President Bush and yearned for his defeat. "The media, I think, wants Kerry to win," Evan Thomas of Newsweek said last July. "I think they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards--I'm talking about the establishment media, not Fox--but they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and all. There's going to be this glow about them . . . that's going to be worth maybe 15 points." Mr. Thomas later revised his estimate downward, to five points.

If Mr. Thomas was right, then, Mr. Bush would have won re-election with a popular-vote margin of between 7.5% and 17.5% of the total vote--rather than the 2.5% he actually got--but for the liberal media. Yet there's a case to be made on the other side: that the liberal media actually helped President Bush, rendering the Kerry campaign ineffective by telling Democrats what they wanted to hear rather than what was true.

---

By the way, did you know that John Kerry served in Vietnam? This brief entry on his résumé--a four-month tour of duty for a (then) nearly 20-year Senate veteran--turned out to be central to the myth that the Democrats, with help from sympathetic media, tried but failed to build around Mr. Kerry.

To hear them tell it, Mr. Kerry's Vietnam stint was one of the best-kept secrets in American politics. "The U.S. senator from Massachusetts said few voters in neighboring New Hampshire even know he's a military veteran," the Eagle-Tribune of Andover, Mass., reported in October 2003, three months before the Granite State primary. "It is stunning," Mr. Kerry told the paper's editors. "That's the one thing you'd think the voters would know about me. Especially in New Hampshire. You can't take anything for granted. You have to tell people about yourself again and again."

Perhaps Mr. Kerry was traumatized in 'Nam and finds his experience there difficult to talk about. If so, it was a difficulty he managed to overcome. In July, he arrived at Boston's FleetCenter to accept his party's nomination for president of the United States. Before reading his prepared speech, he saluted and declared that he was "reporting for duty."

The media helped the Mr. Kerry campaign get out its "war hero" message. "If the Republicans had any hope of casting Kerry as some Michael Dukakis-style effete Eastern liberal, that's over," declared CNN's Bruce Morton on January 30, three days after Mr. Kerry's New Hampshire victory made him the all-but-certain nominee. "The band of brothers stands in its way."

The tone hadn't changed six months later, when CBS's Byron Pitts filed the following report in advance of Mr. Kerry's convention appearance: "The day before his speech, Kerry crossed Boston Harbor with some of his crewmates from Vietnam. His band of brothers. They have one battle left. But tonight the loner will stand alone here in his hometown one more time and look to do what John F. Kerry has nearly always done--find a way to win."

The Kerry campaign's narrative contrasted its man with Mr. Bush, whom it portrayed as a slacker who avoided Vietnam by using political connections to secure a spot in the Texas Air National Guard. Again, the media played along. In a July 22 interview on the "CBS Evening News," Dan Rather asked Mr. Kerry: "Speaking of angry, have you ever had any anger about President Bush--who spent his time during the Vietnam War in the National Guard--running, in effect, a campaign that does its best to diminish your service in Vietnam? You have to be at least irritated by that, or have you been?"

"Yup, I have been," replied Mr. Kerry. Mr. Rather, it seemed, had stumbled on a way to get a straight answer out of the notoriously nuanced nominee. (A tip of the hat to the Media Research Center for the quotes from Messrs. Morton, Pitts and Rather.)

---

Of course, the president's National Guard service proved to be Mr. Rather's undoing rather than Mr. Bush's. But long before Rathergate and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, there were reasons to doubt that Mr. Kerry's Vietnam narrative would be a winning strategy.

For one, the supposition that a military record is a key to electoral success finds little support in history. Presidents have been elected on the strength of their military service--Washington, Grant, Eisenhower--but these men were generals who led America to victory in its three greatest wars, not junior officers in an unpopular and losing conflict. Mr. Bush himself beat two Vietnam veterans in 2000: POW John McCain and Army journalist Al Gore. Bill Clinton, who evaded military service altogether, defeated World War II heroes in both 1992 and 1996. Was 2004 different by virtue of being a wartime election? But Abraham Lincoln and Richard Nixon both won re-election against dovish veterans, and wartime presidents Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR all had little or no military experience.

By constantly reminding Americans of the one war we lost, Mr. Kerry fed suspicions that his attitude toward the war on terror was a defeatist one. "The Democrats' problem isn't that Americans think they're wimps who lack personal courage," Peter Beinart, editor of the liberal New Republic, noted in December 2002. "Their problem is that Americans think, rightly, that they lack an agenda for protecting the country. Bush understands that in this terrifying new era, what Americans want from their leaders isn't heroism; it's clarity and direction." But few other liberal journalists shared Mr. Beinart's insight.

There was also something deeply weird about the way Mr. Kerry talked about his Vietnam experience. Not for him the quiet dignity of the true war hero; rather, he spoke of his combat experience with an odd combination of braggadocio and obsessiveness. In a December 2002 "Meet the Press" appearance, Mr. Kerry mentioned Vietnam nine times by Mr. Beinart's count, including in answer to a question about why he favored capital punishment for terrorists: "Just as I, in a war, was prepared to kill in defense of my nation, I also believe that you eliminate the enemy."

And Mr. Kerry's own Vietnam story was, to say the least, complicated. He first rose to public prominence not for his exploits in combat but for his leadership of the radical Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In a 1971 protest, Mr. Kerry threw what were ostensibly his own medals over a fence surrounding the U.S. Capitol; it later emerged that he had kept his medals and tossed someone else's. Earlier that year, Mr. Kerry had testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that American servicemen had committed "war crimes," including rape, murder and torture, "on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

These calumnies left many veterans angry and resentful, and they made it likely that Vietnam would prove to be the candidate's Achilles' heel rather than his silver bullet. One veteran quoted in "Unfit for Command" summed things up pointedly: "In 1971-72, for almost 18 months, [Mr. Kerry] stood before the television audiences and claimed that the 500,000 men and women in Vietnam, and in combat, were all villains--there were no heroes. In 2004, one hero from the Vietnam War has appeared, running for president of the United States and commander in chief. It just galls one to think about it."

---

The Kerry camp evidently hoped the media would gloss over the candidate's antiwar activities, and for the most part, for many months, they did. One exception was ABC's Charlie Gibson, who in April 2004 confronted Mr. Kerry about the 1971 medal incident. Mr. Kerry answered evasively, then muttered into a live microphone that Mr. Gibson was "doing the work of the Republican National Committee." This was a telling comment. Mr. Gibson was, in truth, doing the work of a journalist: asking a politician tough questions. But Democrats expect the mainstream media to treat them sympathetically--an expectation that has ample basis in experience.

Yet it's far from clear that such sympathy serves the Democrats' interests. Suppose that, once Mr. Kerry secured the nomination, the media had aggressively investigated and reported on his antiwar activities. The candidate would have been forced to respond. If he had been smart, he would have delivered a major speech in which, without renouncing his opposition to the Vietnam War, he repudiated and apologized for his decades-old slanders against fellow veterans. He might have concluded by saying of the Vietnam conflict, "I hope and pray we will put it behind us and go forward in a constructive spirit for the good of our party and the good of our country"--the words with which he ended a February 1992 Senate speech criticizing fellow Vietnam vet Bob Kerrey for trying to make Bill Clinton's draft avoidance an issue in that year's Democratic primaries.

This surely would have gone a long way to defusing the issue. Instead, Mr. Kerry bet that the media's silence would carry him through to the election--and he would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for those meddling Swift Boat Veterans. A month after the Democratic Convention, they launched their first round of anti-Kerry ads, coinciding with the publication of "Unfit for Command." The claims that Mr. Kerry had falsified his heroics in order to win medals and an early end to his tour of duty were mostly unverifiable, and fair-minded Americans probably would have been inclined to give Mr. Kerry the benefit of the doubt. But the ads goaded Mr. Kerry into responding, which in turn forced the media to pay attention. Whereupon the Swift Boat Veterans turned their attention to Mr. Kerry's antiwar activities, on which they had him dead to rights.

Then, in early September, CBS News aired its disastrous story on Bush's National Guard service. So eager were Mr. Kerry's supporters in the media to believe the worst of the president that Mr. Rather and producer Mary Mapes went to air with a report based on obviously fabricated documents, then stood by their story for an agonizing two weeks. Yet even if it had been true--or had gone undebunked--it's unlikely it would have made a difference. As the Washington Post's liberal TV critic, Tom Shales, acknowledged with hindsight in an Inauguration Day column, "It's common knowledge that Bush was a spoiled little rich boy who did not serve with any great distinction, so this story wasn't exactly a blockbuster."

The CBS debacle marked the end of Vietnam as a campaign issue. In the remaining weeks before the election, Mr. Kerry talked a lot less about Vietnam and more about matters of contemporary concern. He performed adequately in the debates, and with the help of a massive get-out-the-vote effort he avoided a landslide defeat.

After the Swift Boat Veterans and Rathergate, it must have been clear even to Mr. Kerry that campaigning on Vietnam had led him into a quagmire. If the media had treated his war-hero narrative with more skepticism in the first place, he might have reached this realization--and developed a better campaign strategy--much earlier. Conservatives love to complain about liberal media bias, and for the most part they're right. But they should count their blessings, too. Were it not for the media reinforcing the Democrats' spin, John Kerry might be president today.

Mr. Taranto is editor of OpinionJournal.com. This article appears in the July/August issue of The American Spectator.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

It's a boy!

And he's healthy. And he's due to enter this world in December!

(Sorry bro', but I couldn't help myself . . .)

Operation 'Teddy Drop'

Here's a very real indication of some of the good stuff going on in Iraq.

Stay tuned, because more and more good stuff really is happening over there -- despite the predominantly negative reporting that we get here in the States.

New HP book destroys rainforest!

Tongue planted firmly in cheek.

Mojo Medic

Here is a press release from the 256th Brigade Combat Team currently deployed in Baghdad.

It describes, in a pragmatic low-key way, the heroics of a U.S. Army medic.

It's in the extended entry.

256th Brigade Combat Team
Camp Tigerland
Baghdad, Iraq
APO, AE 09326

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 5, 2005
RELEASE 20050705-01

256th BCT Soldier survives sniper attack
Spc. Chris Foster
256th Brigade Combat Team PAO

BAGHDAD -- Being able to react to and maintain control of a situation in a combat environment can be a difficult task for Soldiers. They must be able to quickly react and assess a situation, in order to ensure their survival and the safety of those around them.

“Stay alert, stay alive” is the reminder that is driven into the minds of Soldiers since the first day of basic training and echoes throughout their military careers.

This axiom was driven home for at least one Soldier on June 2.

Pfc. Stephen Tschiderer, a native of Mendon, N.Y., and a medic with E Troop, 101st “Saber” Cavalry Division, attached to 3rd Battalion, 156th Infantry Regiment, 256th Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, was shot in the chest by an enemy sniper, during a routine patrol in west Baghdad.

While Tschiderer was relaying information to the truck commander of his M114 Humvee, an enemy sniper team prepared to engage him from inside of a cushioned silver van being used as a mobile sniper’s nest. This nest was lined with numerous bed mattresses to muffle the sound of a Dragonoff sniper rifle fired through a hole just big enough for the shooter to engage his target of choice.

Tschiderer was knocked to the ground from the sudden impact of the sniper’s bullet. The bullet only seemed to have fazed this Soldier as, adrenaline pumping, he sprang right back up in order to take cover and locate the enemy’s position.

The sniper was unsuccessful in his mission, due to the stopping force of Tschiderer’s daily wardrobe, his protective body armor, which saved his life.
“I knew I was hit, but was uncertain of the damage or location from the hit,” Tschiderer said. “The only thing that was going through my mind was to take cover and locate the sniper’s position.”

“The shot came from my 12 o’clock position from a silver van parked across an intersection about 75 meters from my location.” said Tschiderer.

After Tschiderer alerted his fellow Soldiers of the enemy location, they immediately began to pursue the terrorists.

Due to his heroic actions and quick decisions, Tschiderer located the enemy while he took cover and alerted the rest of his team on patrol. As the Saber team engaged and disabled the sniper’s position, two terrorists fled on foot, leaving a blood trail that came from the wounds of the enemy sniper.

A cordon and search was immediately set up and Tschiderer assisted his team in the search [for] the two terrorists. The driver of the silver vehicle was detained by a team from B Co. 3-156th Inf. Bn. while Tschiderer and a team from B Company, 4th Battalion, 1st Iraqi Army Brigade, continued to follow the blood trail which led them to the yard where the wounded sniper lay in pain.

As Tschiderer secured the terrorist with a pair of handcuffs, he gave medical aid to the wounded terrorist—the same one who’d tried to take his life.

Talk about a class act - I'd have wanted to kill him!

Oh, and here's a video that the terrorists were shooting of the incident.

Recruitment down some, but retention is up

Here is the rest of the "recruitment is down" story that the news media was exercising about so greatly.

It turns out that things are definitely looking up!

Lumos!

I submit this column by Rich Galen without comment.

Well, okay, with one comment.

Lumos is a cantrip that is used to provide illumination in Harry Potter's world. It's a light spell.

And one last comment: I'm such a hopeless HP fan that I just couldn't resist posting this link.

Angels with with the Deuce-Four

Michael Yon has a new post. About angels.

After seeing the damaged Stryker, and being unable to visualize how human bodies would have to be arrayed in order to fit in what was left of it, I had to ask. I found Mark Bush and asked him how they all escaped being killed.

Without hesitation, Mark looked straight at me and said: "We had angels watching us."

It's a good read . . .

Good news from Iraq, Part 31

Another installment of news of a different sort from Iraq -- good news, that is!

Here's an itsy bitsy (but extremely important) excerpt:

Despite the perception of spiralling violence, the official Iraqi count of civilian and security casualties indicates that violence has actually decreased in June. While the numbers are still high, "in June, data provided by the Iraqi ministries of defence, health and the interior showed that 430 people had died in attacks and 933 were wounded, a drop of more than one-third from May's death toll of 672 dead. The number of wounded was down by 20%."

There is a lot of interesting information about new building projects in Baghdad (among other places), advances in infrastructure, health care, security, finances, etc. It's pretty exciting to see how many encouraging reports are coming out of Iraq now.

Go read the rest!

Ali reports from Iraq

Ali, over at IRAQ THE MODEL, has posted some pictures and text about his trip to the Iraqi cities of Kirkuk, Erbil and Sulaymania. Here's an excerpt:

I've been hearing a lot about how beautiful and quiet the city (Sulaymania) is and it didn't disappoint me at all; the city is living in peace and a great degree of order.

There are several pictures posted, so this will make for a long load time for those of you on a dial-up connection.

Refuting the "breeding ground" argument

Hugh Hewitt, at The Daily Standard , has posted an op-ed discussing some misconceptions about the cause of terrorism. Here's a taste:

The long years ahead in the global war on terrorism will be spent trying to undo the damage done by allowing the Islamist radicals a safe haven from which to export their ideology and to train and deploy their converts.

His article is worth your consideration.

Cautious Congrats

OpinionJournal published an op-ed last Friday about good economic news -- and some warnings concerning our seemingly out-of-control federal spending.

I've reprinted the article in the extended entry. Please note that I was unable to find the specific chart that the author refers to in this piece.

Windfall for Washington

The deficit is shrinking, thanks to the Bush tax cuts.


Friday, July 15, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Let's see if we can get this straight: When tax revenues fall and budget deficits go up, it's bad news. But when tax revenues rise and deficits decline, it's still bad news.

At least that seems to be the way a sizable chunk of Washington is reacting to this week's report from the White House budget office that the federal deficit is down by nearly $100 billion this fiscal year, that the deficit as a share of GDP is down to 2.7% (very near its historical average), and that this is all happening because tax receipts are surging by more than 14%. Uncle Sam is having a better year so far than even Paris Hilton, but half of the Beltway is depressed.

John Spratt, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, seems especially upset that this revenue surge isn't coming from wage income, but rather from investment income--that is, the so-called non-withholding income tax collections, which have skyrocketed by some 30% this year. "These are typically taxes paid on one-time capital gains, bonuses, stock-options income that may not recur," he laments.

Well, sure, Congressman, the 2003 reductions in the tax rates on dividends and capital gains seem to be resulting in much higher tax revenues on . . . dividends and capital gains. This is called the Laffer Curve effect, and we thank Mr. Spratt for validating it. If he wants those revenues to "recur," maybe he'll even vote to make those tax cuts permanent.

This revenue surge from investment income also rebuts the mantra that the 2003 tax cuts were a giveaway to the rich. Nearly half of all Americans have some kind of stock ownership, and thus have shared in these gains in investment income. And if most of the extra tax income is coming from capital gains and dividend payments, that would have to mean that the rich in America are paying more taxes, not less, as a result of the 2003 tax cut.

By the way, we don't recall Mr. Spratt and other Democrats lamenting when a similar spike in taxes from investment income was boosting tax revenues to historic heights as a share of GDP during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, as per the nearby chart. Then it was all said to be an economic miracle; now it's a windfall for the wealthy. This selective budget criticism couldn't be related to who's sitting in the White House, could it?

---

There is a looming budget problem, but it has nothing to do with the Bush tax cuts or insufficient tax revenue. It is a government spending crisis, especially the liabilities that politicians have promised to retirees in Social Security and Medicare. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that spending as a share of our national output based solely on current promises will surge from about 20% today, to 25% in 2025 and to 34% by 2040.

In order to balance the budget at those spending totals, we would have to double the highest income tax rate to 70%, raise payroll taxes to 30%, and the corporate income tax rate would rise to twice the average of U.S. trading partners. Or if we tried to borrow to finance all this spending, our debt ratings would slip to junk bond status, according to an analysis by Standard and Poor's.

Republicans share a hefty part of the blame for creating the most fiscally unaffordable new spending program in the past quarter century: the Medicare prescription drug bill, with an unfunded liability that is larger than the GDP of every other country in the world.

But the "deficit hawk" Democrats have been equally disingenuous. Most Democrats who voted against President Bush's prescription drug bill did so because the multi-trillion- dollar plan wasn't generous enough to seniors. They have also rejected every overture by Mr. Bush to shore up Social Security's long-term finances, even a proposal to trim future benefits for wealthier retirees. Every White House proposal to cut spending in this year's budget--agriculture subsidies to upper income farmers, slight cutbacks in Medicaid payments, reductions in Amtrak subsidies, a decline in pork barrel highway projects--has been rejected by the "deficit hawks" in Congress.

So thank heaven for the tax cuts that have helped to spur the economy that is now throwing off higher tax revenues. As the chart shows, those revenues are now rising back to their modern average as a share of GDP, just as supporters of the tax cuts predicted. And if the tax cuts are made permanent, and as the economy grows and incomes continue to rise, Americans will be paying even more in taxes as they move into higher tax brackets. The real windfall here isn't for the rich but for Washington. Instead of griping, Mr. Spratt ought to be doing cartwheels.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Good news in education

Betsy Newmark has posted about better test scores for grade school students in the last few years.

It makes for encouraging reading. And also makes me wonder how we can accelerate the process . . .

Progress - one terrorist at a time

More evidence that the Iraqi troops are starting to shoulder the load can be found in the article Suicide Bomber Captured, Attack Thwarted.

Go read it. It's like seeing your own child take his or her first step!

NEA stands for . . .

No Education Allowed.

Unfortunately, the NEA has become just another union lobby group. Educating children no longer seems to be important to them anymore.

It's a shame, really. In fact, the NEA should be very ashamed.

Sowellisms

Thomas Sowell, over at TownHall.com, has an article entitled Random Thoughts.

You should read all of the article, but I took the liberty of reprinting some of his Random Thoughts here:

Thomas Sowellisms

There have always been people without judgment but this is the first era in which being non-judgmental is considered good -- though how anything can be considered good if you are non-judgmental is another puzzle.

It is amazing how many problems are caused by the simple fact that somebody could not be bothered to listen.

None of the people who said that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction -- and who said it before George W. Bush became President -- is accused of lying. Neither are foreign leaders or foreign intelligence services that said the same thing before or during this administration.

The next time someone demands a timetable for the war in Iraq, ask them to name just one war -- anywhere -- that had such a thing.

Many people are so preoccupied with the notion that their own knowledge exceeds the average knowledge of millions of other people that they overlook the more important fact that their knowledge is not even one-tenth of the total knowledge of those millions. That is the crucial fallacy behind the repeated failures of central planning and other forms of social engineering which concentrate power in the hands of people with less knowledge and more presumption.

Those of us who believe in the two-party system regard voting for a third party as throwing away your vote. However, we could use two new parties to replace the Democrats and Republicans.

Interesting Survey . . .

. . . by the Pew Global Attitudes Project :Poll Finds Drop in Muslim Support for Terrorism.

Teaching the Constitution

Cal Thomas, over at TownHall.com, urges President Bush to nominate a person for Supreme Court Justice who wants to restore the Constitution to it's "original intent". Here's an excerpt:

This is a battle worth fighting and worth winning. To restore the value and integrity of the Constitution would not only achieve a political and ideological victory, it would also serve future generations of Americans.

President Bush's opponents would be fighting the words of the Constitution and the intent of the Founders and that is pretty good company for the president to keep.

I recommend you read the whole article.

al Qaeda and publicity

Austin Bay, at The Washington Times states the obvious. Here's an excerpt:

What makes the small and anonymous appear powerful and strong? In the 21st century, intense media coverage magnifies the terrorists' capabilities. This suggests winning the global war against Islamist terror ultimately requires denying terrorists weapons of mass destruction and curbing what is now al Qaeda's greatest strategic capability: media magnification and enhancement of its bombing campaigns and political theatrics.

Obvious, and yet, the news media still seems to have missed it.

Iraq Constitution on track

Iraq: The first steps of a new nation.

Much ado about nothing

OpinionJournal has an op-ed up about current Karl Rove controversy. Yeah, the controversy about whether or not Mr. Rove "outed" a CIA operative. I've reprinted the entire article in the extended entry.

I haven't posted anything about this because, from the first, I thought it was a silly, contrived charge without a basis in fact. Maybe I missed something at first . . . but, here down the road a bit, it really has turned out to be a silly, contrived, baseless accusation. And I still don't know what all of the hullabaloo is about. Unless it's all about trying to give Bush a black eye . . .

So what's the big deal?

Karl Rove, Whistleblower

He told the truth about Joe Wilson.


Wednesday, July 13, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Democrats and most of the Beltway press corps are baying for Karl Rove's head over his role in exposing a case of CIA nepotism involving Joe Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame. On the contrary, we'd say the White House political guru deserves a prize--perhaps the next iteration of the "Truth-Telling" award that The Nation magazine bestowed upon Mr. Wilson before the Senate Intelligence Committee exposed him as a fraud.

For Mr. Rove is turning out to be the real "whistleblower" in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal. He's the one who warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility. He's the one who told the press the truth that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the airwaves. In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan trying to discredit the Iraq War in an election campaign. Thank you, Mr. Rove.

Media chants aside, there's no evidence that Mr. Rove broke any laws in telling reporters that Ms. Plame may have played a role in her husband's selection for a 2002 mission to investigate reports that Iraq was seeking uranium ore in Niger. To be prosecuted under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act, Mr. Rove would had to have deliberately and maliciously exposed Ms. Plame knowing that she was an undercover agent and using information he'd obtained in an official capacity. But it appears Mr. Rove didn't even know Ms. Plame's name and had only heard about her work at Langley from other journalists.

On the "no underlying crime" point, moreover, no less than the New York Times and Washington Post now agree. So do the 36 major news organizations that filed a legal brief in March aimed at keeping Mr. Cooper and the New York Times's Judith Miller out of jail.

"While an investigation of the leak was justified, it is far from clear--at least on the public record--that a crime took place," the Post noted the other day. Granted the media have come a bit late to this understanding, and then only to protect their own, but the logic of their argument is that Mr. Rove did nothing wrong either.

---

The same can't be said for Mr. Wilson, who first "outed" himself as a CIA consultant in a melodramatic New York Times op-ed in July 2003. At the time he claimed to have thoroughly debunked the Iraq-Niger yellowcake uranium connection that President Bush had mentioned in his now famous "16 words" on the subject in that year's State of the Union address.

Mr. Wilson also vehemently denied it when columnist Robert Novak first reported that his wife had played a role in selecting him for the Niger mission. He promptly signed up as adviser to the Kerry campaign and was feted almost everywhere in the media, including repeat appearances on NBC's "Meet the Press" and a photo spread (with Valerie) in Vanity Fair.

But his day in the political sun was short-lived. The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report last July cited the note that Ms. Plame had sent recommending her husband for the Niger mission. "Interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD [Counterproliferation Division] employee, suggested his name for the trip," said the report.

The same bipartisan report also pointed out that the forged documents Mr. Wilson claimed to have discredited hadn't even entered intelligence channels until eight months after his trip. And it said the CIA interpreted the information he provided in his debrief as mildly supportive of the suspicion that Iraq had been seeking uranium in Niger.

About the same time, another inquiry headed by Britain's Lord Butler delivered its own verdict on the 16 words: "We conclude also that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that 'The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa' was well-founded."

In short, Joe Wilson hadn't told the truth about what he'd discovered in Africa, how he'd discovered it, what he'd told the CIA about it, or even why he was sent on the mission. The media and the Kerry campaign promptly abandoned him, though the former never did give as much prominence to his debunking as they did to his original accusations. But if anyone can remember another public figure so entirely and thoroughly discredited, let us know.

---

If there's any scandal at all here, it is that this entire episode has been allowed to waste so much government time and media attention, not to mention inspire a "special counsel" probe. The Bush Administration is also guilty on this count, since it went along with the appointment of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in an election year in order to punt the issue down the road. But now Mr. Fitzgerald has become an unguided missile, holding reporters in contempt for not disclosing their sources even as it becomes clearer all the time that no underlying crime was at issue.

As for the press corps, rather than calling for Mr. Rove to be fired, they ought to be grateful to him for telling the truth.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Wouldn't it be nice if that were the end of it?

8 Myths about the Iraqi conflict

John Hawkins at Right Wing News posted this article refuting 8 arguments used by people who are against the conflict in Iraq.

He doesn't cover all of the bases, but he does clear up some misinformation that is still being touted as fact.

Perhaps the poverty . . .

. . . is one of a moral nature.

African tragedy

Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, CA, writes about why the G8 is missing the boat in regards to Africa.

[Hat tip to Betsy Newmark]

Covert (but very real) ties

This op-ed by Claudia Rosett at OpinionJournal is one of many that states what has now become very obvious -- there really was a connection between Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qaeda.

The primary collection of evidence to which Ms. Rosett refers can be found here. It is impressive.

You can read Ms. Rosett's entire article in the extended entry.

Saddam and al Qaeda

There's abundant evidence of connections.


BY CLAUDIA ROSETT

Wednesday, July 13, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

President Bush has given some good speeches lately, including his talk June 29 at Fort Bragg, N.C., in which he stressed some of the reasons for going into Iraq, and his address this past Monday at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Va., in which he talked about the role of intelligence in defeating terrorists and stressed that "the heart of our strategy is this: Free societies are peaceful societies."

But there's another speech Mr. Bush still needs to give. That would be the one in which he says: I told you so--there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

In some quarters, that would of course provoke the usual outrage. Since the U.S.-led coalition went outside the corrupt United Nations to topple the Baathist regime in Baghdad more than two years ago, it has become an article of faith that there was no such connection. Typical of the tenor in both the media and western politics is an article that ran last month in The Economist, describing Iraq as Mr. Bush's "most visible disaster" and opining that "even Mr. Bush's supporters admit that he exaggerated Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda."

---

If anything, Mr. Bush in recent times has not stressed Saddam's ties to al Qaeda nearly enough. More than ever, as we now discuss the bombings in London, or, to name a few others, Madrid, Casablanca, Bali, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, or the many bombings in Israel--as well as the attacks on the World Trade Center in both 1993 and 2001--it is important to understand that terrorist connections can be real, and lethal, and portend yet more murder, even when they are shadowy, shifting and complex. And it is vital to send the message to regimes in such places as Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran that in matters of terrorist ties, the Free World is not interested in epistemological debates over what constitutes a connection. We are not engaged in a court case, or a classroom debate. We are fighting a war.

But in the debates over Iraq, that part of the communication has become far too muddied. Documents found in Iraq are doubted; confessions by detainees are received as universally suspect; reports of meetings between officials of the former Iraqi regime and al Qaeda operatives are discounted as having been nothing more than empty formalities, with such characters shuttling between places like Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan, perhaps to share tea and cookies. Any conclusions or even inferences about contacts between Saddam's regime and al Qaeda are subjected these days to the kind of metaphysical test in which existence itself becomes a highly dubious philosophical problem, mired in the difficulty of ever really being certain about anything at all.

Certainty is then imposed in the form of assurances that there was no connection. This notion that there was no Saddam-al Qaeda connection is invoked as an argument against the decision to go to war in Iraq, and enjoined as part of the case that we were safer with Saddam in power, and that, even now, the U.S. and its allies should simply cut and run.

Actually, there were many connections, as Stephen Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn, writing in the current issue of the Weekly Standard, spell out under the headline "The Mother of All Connections." Since the fall of Saddam, the U.S. has had extraordinary access to documents of the former Baathist regime, and is still sifting through millions of them. Messrs. Hayes and Joscelyn take some of what is already available, combined with other reports, documentation and details, some from before the overthrow of Saddam, some after. For page after page, they list connections--with names, dates and details such as the longstanding relationship between Osama bin Laden's top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Saddam's regime.

Messrs. Hayes and Joscelyn raise, with good reason, the question of why Saddam gave haven to Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the men who in 1993 helped make the bomb that ripped through the parking garage of the World Trade Center. They detail a contact between Iraqi intelligence and several of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Malaysia, the year before al Qaeda destroyed the twin towers. They recount the intersection of Iraqi and al Qaeda business interests in Sudan, via, among other things, an Oil for Food contract negotiated by Saddam's regime with the al-Shifa facility that President Clinton targeted for a missile attack following the African embassy bombings because of its apparent connection to al Qaeda. And there is plenty more.

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The difficulty lies in piecing together the picture, which is indeed murky (that being part of the aim in covert dealings between tyrants and terrorist groups)--but rich enough in depth and documented detail so that the basic shape is clear. By the time Messrs. Hayes and Joscelyn are done tabulating the cross-connections, meetings, Iraqi Intelligence memos unearthed after the fall of Saddam, and information obtained from detained terrorist suspects, you have to believe there was significant collaboration between Iraq and al Qaeda. Or you have to inhabit a universe in which there will never be a demonstrable connection between any of the terrorist attacks the world has suffered over the past dozen years, or any tyrant and any aspiring terrorist. In that fantasyland, all such phenomena are independent events.

Mr. Bush, in calling attention to the Iraq-al Qaeda connection in the first place, did the right thing. For the U.S. president to confirm that clearly and directly at this stage, with some of the abundant supporting evidence now available, might seem highly controversial. But reviving that controversy would help settle it more squarely in line with the truth.

Ms. Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Her column appears here and in The Wall Street Journal Europe on alternate Wednesdays.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Still more (good) economic news

Good news on the US trade deficit: Trade gap unexpectedly shrinks 2.7 pct.

Also, good news on the US budget deficit: Sharp Rise in Tax Revenue to Pare U.S. Deficit

See my related post here.

Homicidal Maniacs

Greyhawk, over at the Mudville Gazette has a post entitled Building Small Coffins. It will make you weep.

It did me . . .

"But None Ever Cried for Me"

Read this.

Medical, dental, veterinary books needed in Iraq

Michael Yon has a post entitled The Books of Salah al Din, in which he describes some soldier's efforts to help Iraqi medical, dental, and veterinary professionals get the textbooks and journals that they so desperately need. It seems that the Hussein regime discouraged these professionals from staying current with their professional publications. And the med/dental/vet schools suffered as well.

Go read the post (I've reprinted it in the extended entry - sans pictures). And if you can help in any way, please email Dr. Gifford (whose email is at the end of the post). (I hope my sister and her husband read this!)

The successful bondage of man depends, at least in part, on equal measures of ignorance and intimidation. These are the twin towers of both tyranny and terrorism. Controlling access to information constrains the power of ideas, allowing a climate of confusion and fear to rise in the vacuum. In fields such as science and medicine, ongoing access to developing ideas and emerging technologies is essential to maintaining a capacity to deliver health care and to harness the power of unfolding developments.

In most instances, it would be oxymoronic to insert the name of Saddam Hussein in a sentence which also contained the phrase “the greater good.” Under his regime, access to information vital to medicine was constricted to the point of atrophy. The danger grows over time; the quality of health care diminishes immediately, while the capacity to educate the next generation of doctors, nurses and allied health care professionals is seriously compromised.

Poverty is not the basic problem in Iraq. A helicopter flight over cities and villages reveals thousands of satellite dishes, thousands of automobiles driving about, and power-lines crisscrossing the country. The people are starved, however, but the commodity for which they hunger is knowledge and information, particularly the kind that comes unfiltered. Yet many of the terrorists who make the misery they later feed on, wish to cut ties to the outside world.

In the months immediately following the collapse of the Saddam regime, but before the tumor of insurgency invaded the body, medical officers attached to the 4th Infantry Division met with doctors and professors of the region’s medical schools and hospitals, to assess needs and find ways to share resources to facilitate the rehabilitation of the health care system. Two of the key medical officers of the Division, LTC Kirk Eggleston, the Division Surgeon (and hence the principal medical staff officer ) and Major Alex Garza, the Division's Civil Affairs Medical Officer, visited the Medical College of the University of Tikrit.

During initial visits, they were taken aback by a discovery that Iraqi doctors and medical students were relying on photocopies of outdated medical texts for information. Initial inquiries revealed that what looked like an isolated case of an improvised library was actually the presenting symptom of a systemic deficiency--Iraq's scientific and technical resources were dangerously malnourished. All over Iraq, teachers and students were using photocopies of outdated textbooks and had been doing so for decades.

This was not about saving money; the cost of making the photocopies can be higher than purchasing books and journals. The issue was availability. Iraqi physicians and professors could not simply shop online and purchase a title for shipment to Iraq. Basic medical science textbooks as well as those relating to the medical specialties were only available as well-thumbed copies of out-of-date editions. Medical journals were similarly unavailable.

Not long after that first meeting, Eggleston and Garza shared their findings with then-Major Gifford who shared their consternation and alarm. Gifford shared his concerns about the condition of Iraqi medical education to his father, David Gifford, MD, a retired Army medical officer. To Dr. Gifford, the answer was obvious--he needed to find a way to fill those shelves. Collaborating with Army Major Alex Garza, MD, he launched a public health response in the form of an old-fashioned book drive.

The potential energy of knowledge is one of the most powerful, but unpredictable forces on the planet. When these two men set out to equip the medical libraries near Bagdad, they had no idea what they were about to unleash. Their first moves were tentative–-requesting donations from textbook distributors and publishers--and lackluster in terms of results.

After fruitless weeks of efforts, they decided to modernize the book drive by taking it onto the internet. Dr. Gifford made contact with Susan Yox, RN, EdD, an editor at Medscape, an online clearinghouse for health professionals. This was the same Dr. Yox who, in 2002, publicized requests for assistance for physicians and hospitals in Afghanistan. Dr. Garza, in civilian life, is an assistant professor at the medical college of the University of Missouri, Kansas City. In this partnership with Dr. Yox, the right people combined with the right skills, and a passion for the mission.

Doctors Gifford and Garza began a small internet campaign where they sent emails and posted notices on websites for their alma maters, asking for donations of medical text books. Almost immediately, the response outraced their expectations. Although the donations began arriving through simple channels (mostly by mail or personal delivery), as groups of students and teachers in the US learned of the program, and began to work collectively, the size of the deliveries began to be measured in tons.

Outside of formal military and governmental channels, and completely on a voluntary basis, a virtual organization consisting of both military and civilian members was born. A small but growing group of Americans, medical students and professors, ordinary doctors and nurses, medical librarians and eventually even medical publishers, created a way for colleges, hospitals, nursing schools and community clinics to fill Iraqi bookshelves with recently published texts and journals.

Because of British influences in the region after World War I, Iraq’s six-year medical program is patterned after Great Britain’s model, and the training is in English. Of course, just because there’s no detour for translations doesn’t make the road clear of all obstacles, and this journey would have more than a few.

The Books of Salah al Din

As word spread on the internet, the chatter triggered an avalanche of donations. A retiring plastic surgeon in Texas donated his professional library of texts and specialty journals. Students at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York City donated over 2,000 texts. A senior medical student at the University of Tennessee School of Medicine, took the idea and advanced it another step among his peers and faculty by using flyers and e-mail. His group accumulated nearly 4,000 texts and journals. Elsevier, an international medical and scientific publisher, donated packaging and postal costs. Evidence of the growing momentum was seen in the donation of 1,000 copies each of Scientific American Medicine and ACS Surgery from Medscape Publishers. This one collection of new texts weighed 17,600 pounds and had a retail value of $429,000. The magnitude of this donation was leveraged to rachet up the credibility and visibility of the project, culminating when Merck Canada donated five pallets of medical and scientific journals.

Swerving to Avoid Obstacles

When Doctors Gifford, Yox and Garza began the Internet campaign, using the services of the Medscape electronic bulletin board, they hadn’t really planned for success. Because their earlier efforts failed to gather any momentum after several months, they weren’t predicting success on either the scale or speed that reality was about to demand. But the response was overwhelming and instantaneous.

Donations directed to Dr. Garza began to arrive in Iraq through mail channels, while many other donations were delivered directly to Dr. Gifford’s office at the hospital at Fort Hood, TX. The first major obstacle was a regulation prohibiting soldiers from requesting donations. Cognizant of this, Garza had been careful in how the first internet messages were worded, but apparently, not careful enough to avoid an admonishment, with hints of court martial.

Things might have derailed then and there, since at the time, Dr. Garza was the sole point of contact in Iraq for the campaign. Rather than quit, he passed the load to the American Red Cross representative attached to the Army, who assumed responsibility for receiving the books.

To make the transition official, the team again turned to internet savvy military support and medical education communities. They asked for help putting the word out that future donations should be sent to the American Red Cross and packages should have the phrase “Humanitarian Medical Aid” clearly written on the outside. Since there is not a rule against accepting this type of mail, they interpreted the rules to allow the packages to pass through the military postal system.

Cartons and pallets arrived in ever larger quantities, while other shipments were too costly to send, creating a log jam. The daunting logistics could have spelled the end, and just as quickly as the initial Internet solicitations had gone out, the organizers could have pled “NO MORE BOOKS PLEASE.”

But this was not to be. Indeed, this is an instance where the bureaucracy of the U.S. Military paid dividends for the greater good. No organization in the world moves heavy loads about the earth—-into combat and disaster areas-—as efficiently as the U.S. military. Working with the Army, the Air Force cleared these large donations to be included as Space A cargo (space available) on military flights.

As the donor base grew, so did the list of persons willing to distribute texts, journals and related items in other parts of Iraq. When the donations to Tikrit began to saturate the capacity, other medical officers stepped up and began distributing materials across wider areas of Iraq.

The donors continue to come from different corners of the U.S. “The Muslim Medical Students Organization in the Chicago area is participating,” explained Dr. Gifford, “and a sidelight of this is that the predominantly Jewish medical school at Mt. Sinai, the Roman Catholic Loyola University School of Medicine in Chicago, as well as the secular schools have been equally involved. Students at Rush Medical College and UCLA are organizing book drives.”

Everyone who gets involved in this effort, from medical students to publishers, to the soldiers loading the books, all seem to get distracted by the desire to make a difference, and energized by the fact that they are. It’s doubtful that most could even imagine the impact of their contributions in Iraq.

Since the campaign was launched, there have been four separate iterations of medical personnel to maintain it, at considerable expense to their non-duty time, and risking considerable exposure to danger. From this vantage in Iraq, seeing so many Americans, Europeans, and others, pulling together to help Iraqis whom they have never met, is fulfilling, heartening, and provides a welcome respite from writing and thinking about war.

Anyone, anywhere in the world, who has English-language medical, dental, veterinary or nursing texts or journals and would like to send them to Iraq, should contact David Gifford, MD: dgifford@hot.rr.com, for suggestions about how to do so.

This is definitely a worthwhile endeavor for those who can help!

Good News from Afghanistan, Part 14

Another installment of Chrenkoff's Good News from Afghanistan.

SGT Bozik update

Blackfive has an update on Sgt. Bozik, the veteran of Iraq who married a Texas Aggie. He visited the White House. And was honored by our President.

Terrorism's Root Causes

Cal Thomas, over at JWR has an interesting column about terrorism's root causes. Here's a taste:

No amount of G8 aid to the "Palestinians," nor a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, will pacify these current and potential killers. Even if Israel were obliterated (the goal of much of the Muslim world), the terror would continue until the entire non-Islamic world is under their control.

This is not the belief of an "Islamophobic" bigot. This is what they say in their sermons and media, teach in their schools, and believe in their hearts. It matters little that "the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not terrorists," to quote a familiar Western mantra. It matters a great deal that most terrorists are Muslims. The sooner Western leaders and Western media begin stating what is obvious to most people; the quicker the real root cause can be dealt with.

The excuses given by Westerners and many Muslim clerics for terrorism are just that: excuses.

Though Thomas's tone is strident, he makes sense. It's worth reading. And thinking about.

[Hat tip to Betsy Newmark.]

Trade -- not aid

Here is an article at allAfrica.com wherein the Sierra Leone Minister of Trade and Industry Development says that trade is what is needed.

Minister of Trade and Industry Dr.Kadi Sesay said Thursday that it is only trade that can develop Sierra Leone, not aid.

In a SPIEGEL interview of another African economics expert, James Shikwati, some counter-intuitive (at least to a G8/Live 8 perspective, but not to a free market one) things were stated:

SPIEGEL: Mr. Shikwati, the G8 summit at Gleneagles is about to beef up the development aid for Africa...

Shikwati: ... for God's sake, please just stop.

At SPEIGEL's query, Shikwati expands upon his initial statement:

SPIEGEL: Stop? The industrialized nations of the West want to eliminate hunger and poverty.

Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.

Through the rest of the interview, Shikwati discusses why development aid provided by the West has been so harmful, the corruption of many African governments, and how AIDS has been overstated.

It's an informative article (in English), and one that I recommend.

Bush: End Farm Subsidies

Last Thursday, President Bush stated that the G8 was working to end farm subsidies.

President Bush said Thursday that he is seeking agreement with the European Union on a plan to eliminate by 2010 the $112 billion a year that wealthy countries spend subsidizing their farmers. "We want to work with the EU to rid our respective countries of agricultural subsidies," Bush said at a news conference in Gleneagles, Scotland, where he is attending a meeting of the Group of Eight industrialized nations.

Here's a later report:

Leaders of the Group of Eight nations agreed Friday to work toward the abolition of farm-export subsidies and reduce subsidies on all agricultural products, though they stopped short of a broader proposal from President Bush. "We have made the commitment to end all export subsides," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said at a news conference at the conclusion of the G-8 meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland. "We should set a credible end date" at the World Trade Organization’s December summit in Hong Kong, he said. Bush said Thursday that he’s seeking agreement with European Union leaders to scrap subsidies by 2010. Assistance should be ended as part of the so-called Doha Round of negotiations of the WTO, he said.

Bush’s appeal is the most farreaching yet by a political leader of a major industrialized nation, going beyond the proposals now being considered in the WTO. The EU has said it’s prepared to phase out farm-export subsidies provided more advanced developing countries make what European Trade Minister Peter Mandelson called "equivalent gestures."

Our President seems to be successfully pushing real solutions to our world's problems. Good for him.

Bush Doctrine

Remember Srebrenica?

OpinionJournal does. And they want the rest of us to recall what happened there, why it happened, and how we can avoid it happening again somewhere else.

Good points are made. It's in the extended entry . . .

Lessons of Srebrenica

About the U.N., Europe, and the Bush Doctrine.


Monday, July 11, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Ten years ago today, Bosnian Serb forces under the command of General Ratko Mladic entered the Bosnian Muslim town of Srebrenica, then being defended by Dutch peacekeepers. General Mladic made three demands: that the townsmen surrender their weapons; that all males between the ages of 12 and 77 be separated out for "questioning"; and that the rest of the population be expelled to Muslim areas. Within two days, 23,000 women and children had been deported. Another 5,000 Muslim men and boys who had taken refuge on a nearby Dutch base were also delivered to the Mladic forces.

As we now know, most of the people surrendered by the Dutch to the Serbs were slaughtered, as were more than 2,000 others, bringing the estimated tally of the Srebrenica massacre to 7,200. Yet the scale of the atrocity alone is not why we remember it. We remember because the men of Srebrenica were betrayed by their ostensible protectors, and that carries some lessons for today.

The first concerns the effectiveness of the United Nations. The U.N. began its involvement in the Balkans with an arms embargo that was supposed to apply to all sides equally, but which effectively left Bosnia's Muslims ill-defended against better equipped Serbs, who had the backing of the Belgrade government run by Slobodan Milosevic.

That was followed by the U.N.'s disastrous decision to establish "safe areas" around several threatened ethnic enclaves, including Sarajevo and Srebrenica. According to a 1993 U.N. Secretariat report, safe areas would have the benefits of limiting "loss of life and property, deterring aggression, demonstrating international concern and involvement, setting the stage for political negotiations and facilitating the delivery of humanitarian aide."

---

From the start, however, it was unclear where the U.N. soldiers to protect the enclaves would come from; then-President Clinton had ruled out the deployment of U.S. ground troops. It was also unclear whether the U.N. soldiers in safe areas were actually authorized to use force to defend the people in their care. Worst of all, the price Muslims paid for U.N. protection was to abandon their weapons, which they did within a week of the safe areas' creation.

There was also the role played by the Europeans. As the Balkans crisis took hold in the early 1990s, the foreign representative of the European Community, a man named Jacques Poos, declared that "the hour of Europe has come." This was supposed to be a new and decisive Europe, unshackled from its Cold War subservience to the U.S.

Instead, Europeans alternated between half-measures and attempts at negotiation with the Serbs, even as they exposed thousands of their own soldiers to risk in futile operations. When Margaret Thatcher, by then a former prime minister, called Serb atrocities "evil" and said "humanitarian aid is not enough," her views were dismissed by British Defense Minister Malcolm Rifkind as "emotional nonsense."

Finally, there was the Clinton Administration, which had come to office pledging to reverse the first Bush Administration's appeasement of the "butchers of Belgrade." Today, most people remember the successful diplomatic efforts to end the Bosnian war with the 1995 Dayton Accord, as well as its successful military intervention in Kosovo in 1999.

---

But Mr. Clinton allowed the Balkans to bleed for three years before he "did something." He let the U.N. and Europe take the lead and was frequently heard musing about the ancient roots of the Balkans conflict, which supposedly made it intractable and beyond the reach of the United States to repair. What's remarkable is that, when the U.S. did intervene--for example, with a limited bombing campaign in 1995--it achieved fast and decisive results. Had Mr. Clinton honored his campaign pledges, he could have saved thousands of Bosnian lives and almost certainly averted the massacre at Srebrenica.

If American policy makers want to avoid facing another Srebrenica on their watch, they must never let the U.N. determine the mission. Allowing the Europeans to "take the lead" is also a bad idea. Above all, Srebrenica is what happens when Western policy makers reject taking pre-emptive measures against gathering dangers, so that by the time the dangers are obvious it is too late to do something.

It has become trendy in certain circles to speak of "No More Srebrenicas," as well as "No More Rwandas" and "No More Darfurs." If these people really believe the slogan, then the policy to make it work already has a name. It's called the Bush Doctrine.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Learning from past mistakes is a good thing.

Living through Dennis

Boudicca, whose blog is Boudicca's Voice, has parents who live in Pensacola and a best friend who lives in Navarre (very close to where Hurricane Dennis made landfall in the States). Boudicca and her family were visiting her parents last week. Her blog is filled with entries concerning the logistics of preparing for and evacuating from a hurricane. She also reports on the situation her parents found themselves in during the hurricane.

My description does not do it justice -- you need to read Boudicca's Voice to experience it. Bou does a good job of conveying the hopes, fears, frustrations, and challenges that she has gone through since Wednesday.

Thank yous from Baghdad and Brisbane

Ali and Chrenkoff post thank you notes to the USA in observance of our Independence Day celebration last week.

From Hostage to Hunter

This post, by Chrenkoff, shows a former hostage in a new light. It turns out that the terrorists had kidnapped a wolf in sheep's clothing . . .

Something about service

New York Governor George Pataki's son, Teddy, went into the Marine Corps. He's taking advantage of Marine Corps incentives and getting his law degree before he begins his active duty.

But before you start thinking he's avoiding combat, you have to understand that, in the Marines, he is just as likely to end up as a platoon leader in combat as he is a lawyer in JAG.

Call to Action

Daniel Henninger at OpinionJournal is saying that it is time for us, as a nation, to put up or shut up about really reckoning with global terrorism.

And he is 100% correct. Here's an excerpt:

The U.S. seems to have experienced a post-9/11 fall from seriousness. As the reality fades of a September 11 in America, a resort in Bali or a train station in Madrid, it somehow seems "safe" to propose setting a deadline to remove our troops from Iraq, to close Guantanamo, to dump the Patriot Act. We in America can do any of these things, and it will still be OK. We can believe that Islamic terrorism is less than it is, and get away with it.

One more time? Should one assume that July 7 in London--the ripped-open double-decker bus, the stunned, bloody faces of those who lived--will in time fall in the queue of concerns to make it safe to argue, again, that all of this will go away if George Bush goes away?

The entire op-ed is in the extended entry. And it's a good one.

'Close Guantanamo'?

Our politics fiddles while London burns.


BY DANIEL HENNINGER

Friday, July 8, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

London's images of blood, toil, tears and sweat were seen by all the world's civilized people yesterday, and I think there is one thing they would agree on: You don't blow up the bus.

In cities everywhere men and women board buses daily for work or school, and you don't need a U.N. declaration on human rights to understand that part of the deal is that no one blows up the bus. You don't blow up the office building. You don't blow up the train. It's too easy. It is the most cowardly cheap shot one can imagine. But they keep doing it.

So maybe for starters, we don't want to close Guantanamo.

The U.S. seems to have experienced a post-9/11 fall from seriousness. As the reality fades of a September 11 in America, a resort in Bali or a train station in Madrid, it somehow seems "safe" to propose setting a deadline to remove our troops from Iraq, to close Guantanamo, to dump the Patriot Act. We in America can do any of these things, and it will still be OK. We can believe that Islamic terrorism is less than it is, and get away with it.

One more time? Should one assume that July 7 in London--the ripped-open double-decker bus, the stunned, bloody faces of those who lived--will in time fall in the queue of concerns to make it safe to argue, again, that all of this will go away if George Bush goes away?

---

Every Islamic terrorist, from bin Laden and al-Zarqawi down to the next suicide bomber, knows how politics in the West works now. They know that many people of the West react to acts of violence differently than they did in 1940 when Winston Churchill demanded "Victory in spite of all terrors. Victory, however long and hard the road may be."

But there were no cameras and satellite feeds set up on every corner of that death-strewn road. Yesterday's attack produced another new-media first: Grainy video images fed by a cell phone from a bombed subway tunnel. If the American people had seen daily the up-close reality of every battle and bomb in 1943, might we have "withdrawn" before June 1944?

For bin Laden and al-Zarqawi, the relatively small bombs they set off in Iraq or London are a second-grade weapon. Their large-bore weapons in the terror war are modern electronic news technology and, ironically, open democratic societies.

We think we're merely observers of events such as London's awful scenes yesterday or the Baghdad car bombs. No, if you watch television, you're on the battlefield. And some of us don't want to be there. Bin Laden and al-Zarqawi set off these bombs to pound the combatants at home, or in Congress, to make them put their hands on their head and, in effect, surrender. Suffering living-room shell shock, some do. The experience of seeing battlefield death or blown-up people from the couch is not normal.

What happened yesterday in London was an attack on the modern world by pre-modernists. Tony Blair said, "Our values will outlive theirs." Maybe. Ours might not, though, if against theirs of wanton murder, our answer is "close Guantanamo." But there is a better example of the fundamental inability of our politics to sustain seriousness against such a threat: the Bolton nomination to the U.N.

---

We know that Chris Dodd, Joe Biden and the Senate Democrats believe Mr. Bolton is temperamentally unfit to represent us at the U.N. Less well known is that in April 2004, the Security Council passed Resolution 1540 to prevent proliferation of "nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and their means of delivery"--what the terrorists will ultimately win with if they can get it.

Resolution 1540 outlaws A.Q. Khan-type networks, including state participation. It is a Chapter Seven action, and thus binding. It requires members to report their compliance measures in detail. It requires member states to "establish, develop, review and maintain appropriate effective national export and trans-shipment controls over such items."

We should want this if we indeed believe that a complex, globalized threat exists. Its success, however, depends on the will of the Security Council and whether its five Permanent Members will punish with sanctions any country not in compliance. Are you already ahead of me on this?

The one person in the world with the knowledge, experience and will to conceivably make 1540 work is John Bolton. At State Mr. Bolton ran the Security Proliferation Initiative, whose goals precisely parallel those of Resolution 1540. The SPI under Mr. Bolton, for example, helped to shut down the A.Q. Khan nuclear-weapon materials network.

Mr. Bolton is famous for his views of North Korea, but he is expert in the activities of one other incorrigible proliferator--Iran. Yesterday I asked a high international official, whose job is to develop global anti-terror structures, which states are still actively supporting terrorism. He said, "There are two, Syria and Iran."

If the U.S. Senate wanted to send a signal of resolve and seriousness to whoever bombed London, Democrats would join with Republicans their first day back to dispatch proven anti-terror warrior John Bolton straight to the U.N. They won't. They'll keep playing political fiddles while London burns.

The standard response to all this is that if George Bush and Tony Blair hadn't done Iraq, we'd all be as one in the war on terror. The standard response before September 11, was that if we weren't so close to terror-beset Israel, none of this would ever happen. For 30 years, the standard response to this terror has gotten many of us killed.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

I think it is time that our distinguished Senators in Washington, D.C. lay aside their petty politics, get off of their candy asses, and buckle down to the very serious long-term task of supporting the war on terrorism!

GWOT, by Captain Ed

Captain Ed, over at the Captain's Quarters, does a good job deconstructing a Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial about how to fight terrorism.

It's well thought out and well worth reading.

Efraim Halevi on the GWOT

Efraim Halevi used to be the head of the Isreali Intelligence service, Mossad. He has some pertinent things to say in a column published by the Jerusalem Post about the Global War on Terror (GWOT).

Here is a taste:

We are in the throes of a world war, raging over the entire globe and characterized by the absence of lines of conflict and an easily identifiable enemy. There are sometimes long pauses between one attack and another, consequently creating the wrong impression that the battle is all over, or at least in the process of being won.

Generally speaking, the populations at large are not involved in the conflict, and by and large play the role of bystanders. But once in a while, these innocents are caught up in the maelstrom and suffer the most cruel and wicked of punishments meted out by those who are not bound by any rules of conduct or any norms of structured society. For a while, too short a while, we are engrossed with the sheer horror of what we see and hear, but, with the passage of time, our memories fade and we return to our daily lives, forgetting that the war is still raging out there and more strikes are sure to follow.

It is well worth our time to read the words of a man who has been dealing with terrorism for so many years of his life. He makes good sense, too. And he's not afraid to call a spade, well, a spade . . .

Poverty in Africa

Can you believe that I'm linking to a Max Boot op-ed in the LA Times?

Neither can I. But this column is about the poverty in Africa and all of the aid that has been poured into it over the past five decades. Here's an excerpt:

In the last 50 years, $2.3 trillion has been spent to help poor countries. Yet Africans' income and life expectancy have gone down, not up, during that period, while South Korea, Singapore and other Asian nations that received little if any assistance have moved from African-level poverty to European-level prosperity thanks to their superior economic policies.

Money alone cannot eliminate poverty in Africa. With a fifty year track record of failure, I think it is safe to say that it just is not working. Max Boot goes on to blame corruption and extremely poor governance:

Africans continue to be tormented not by the G-8, as anti-poverty campaigners imply, but by their own politicos, including Sudanese President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who is abetting genocide in Darfur, and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, who is turning his once-prosperous country into a famine-plagued basket case. Unless it's linked to specific "good governance" benchmarks (as with the new U.S. Millennium Challenge Account), more aid risks subsidizing dysfunctional regimes.

Go read Max Boot's column. It's worth looking into.

[Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit]

Brit Grit

And now it has come to us to stand alone in the breach, and face the worst that the tyrant's might and enmity can do. Bearing ourselves humbly before God, but conscious that we serve an unfolding purpose, we are ready to defend our native land against the invasion by which it is threatened. We are fighting by ourselves alone; but we are not fighting for ourselves alone. Here in this strong City of Refuge which enshrines the title-deeds of human progress and is of deep consequence to Christian civilization; here, girt about by the seas and oceans where the Navy reigns; shielded from above by the prowess and devotion of our airmen-we await undismayed the impending assault. Perhaps it will come tonight. Perhaps it will come next week. Perhaps it will never come. We must show ourselves equally capable of meeting a sudden violent shock or-what is perhaps a harder test-a prolonged vigil. But be the ordeal sharp or long, or both, we shall seek no terms, we shall tolerate no parley; we may show mercy-we shall ask for none.

-- Sir Winston Churchill, BBC Broadcast, 14 July 1940

Amen.

Prayers for our British friends

Please pray for those who lost loved ones yesterday in the heinous, cowardly bombings in London. Pray for those who are wounded and for their families and friends. Pray for the investigators, and the clean up and repair crews. And finally, pray for the successful elimination of terrorism as a philosophy and political tool.

I suppose that last prayer would be covered by praying for the end of evil on this earth -- which would take care of a multitude of other very bad things too.

Please just keep our British friends in your thoughts and prayers.

It truly helps.

Grace under fire

This link is to an article about nurses. Specifically, about a group of military nurses who are stationed in Baghdad. It gives some insight into an aspect of the conflict in Iraq that isn't obvious, but is very much there -- people caring about people.

Reporting numbers

A wry note by Greyhawk over at the Mudville Gazette.

Class Act

Just wanted to point out what a class act I think this family is.

7/7

On 9/11/2001, millions of British citizens stood alongside all Americans to support us and pray for us during the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Today, Americans need to stand in support of our British brothers and sisters who are suffering through the same kind of horrors in London.

My thoughts and prayers go out to all of you . . .

We will never be overcome.

"Live 8" and a whiff of hypocrisy

Major K., currently stationed in Baghdad, really puts the Live 8 hoopla into perspective. Here's an excerpt:

. . . While I am sympathetic to the plight of so many of the nations in Africa and their people, this type of stuff really annoys me. I wonder how many of these musicians have even been to Africa other than Bono and Bob Geldoff. The idea of a bunch of obnoxiously wealthy, overpaid, pampered pop stars holding concerts to raise money from John and Jane Q. Public for African famine relief seems so hypocritical, especially when they spend so much time reveling in ostentatious displays of their own wealth and fame. I would be more impressed if these same musicians put down the microphones, and picked up a pen and opened their checkbooks. . .

Syria vs. Al Qaeda

Here is an article on the World Times Online website that reports on a two-day battle between Syrian authorities and terrorists bound for Iraq. Get this -- the battle took place in Syria near Damascus.

Maybe America can work with Syria in the war against terrorism, after all.

[Hat tip to Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants.]

Plame outing revisited

OpinionJournal published an editorial on July 1st that lays part of the blame for the jailed reporters in the Plame scandal squarely on the shoulders of the press corps. It also goes into why this may serve to undermine the ability of the press to protect their sources.

It's worth reading.

I've reprinted the article in the extended entry.

Jailing Reporters

The press corps unleashed a prosecutor on itself.


Friday, July 1, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

As ink-stained kvetchers ourselves, we'd love to come to the full-throated defense of our reporting colleagues now threatened with jail for refusing to reveal their sources. The truth, unfortunately, is that this is a debacle that some in the press corps have brought down upon themselves and the rest of us.

They did so by demanding, in liberal unison like the Rockettes, that the Bush Administration name a "special counsel" to find out who leaked the name of CIA analyst Valerie Plame. Under this pounding, the Justice Department obliged. But that special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, soon became a loose cannon threatening reporters with contempt if they wouldn't reveal their sources (presumably government officials who knew about Ms. Plame).

The two reporters--Judith Miller of the New York Times, and Matthew Cooper of Time--have now exhausted their legal appeals and face jail as soon as next week. Mr. Cooper's employer relented yesterday and said it will turn over his notes, and thus presumably his source's name. But New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said yesterday he was "deeply disappointed" with Time's decision, implying that his newspaper may defy the law and that Ms. Miller may indeed go to jail.

---

It should never have come to this, on either side. Mr. Fitzgerald made his bones prosecuting the mob and doesn't seem to realize that this case isn't about organized crime. It's about disorganized politics. The leak of Ms. Plame's name probably wasn't even a crime at all under the 1982 Intelligence Identities Protection Act. That statute was aimed at stopping the treasonous betrayal of secret agents in the field, not the office-bound spouse of former CIA consultant Joe Wilson, who outed himself in an attempt to assail the Iraq War and damage President Bush.

Mr. Fitzgerald has also ignored the Justice Department guidelines on pursuing source-names from journalists, which include "reasonable grounds to believe" that "a crime has been committed." And he has never publicly disclosed, even to the two reporters and their attorneys, why he needs their notes. It may be that he too has concluded that talking to the press is no crime, in which case he may by now only be pursuing a perjury rap against the leaker. If that's true, Mr. Fitzgerald will have earned a place in the Overzealous Hall of Fame.

But some in the press have been equally as willful. Liberal editorial pages were among the loudest in demanding that a special counsel be appointed to find the leaker. And only many months later, when Ms. Miller was in the dock, did New York Times editorials finally get around to admitting that the leak might not even be a crime. Their partisan loathing for Mr. Bush caused these editors to overlook the risks even to their own reporting self-interest.

---

They have also left the press more vulnerable than it was before. The First Amendment is nearly absolute in its protection of the right to publish, but it is far less categorical in protecting the news-gathering process. Courts have tried to balance media access to sources and information against other rights (say, to a fair trial) and government needs (such as grand jury probes).

Yet the Times fought this current battle as if it were a replay of New York Times v. Sullivan, the famous libel case, only to lose in court. Especially by inviting a 3-0 defeat at the hands of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Times has probably left everyone in the media less able to protect sources against future prosecutorial raids. While 31 states have so-called "shield laws" protecting source disclosure, the federal government does not.

In explaining his decision to turn over Mr. Cooper's notes, Time Editor in Chief Norman Pearlstine said, "Once the [Supreme] Court denied cert., I decided we aren't above the law." We admire Ms. Miller for her willingness to go to jail to honor a personal promise to a source. But a journalistic institution has a duty not to be cavalier about its reporter's freedom, much less the rule of law.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

From the WTC to Baghdad

Daniel Henninger posted an op-ed with the subtitle September 11 and the collapse of national unity. His words are well worth our consideration.

I've reprinted the entire article in the extended entry.

Ground Zero to Baghdad
September 11 and the collapse of national unity.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, July 1, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Fourth of July weekend begins today, and among the verities certain to occur is that every waking hour in four days people will be standing at the high wire fence near Church Street in lower Manhattan, staring at Ground Zero, at what's left of what we now call "September 11."

We know these visitors to Ground Zero will be there looking into this austere pit, because those of us who work nearby and walk past it see them there, every day. They came the moment they were allowed to on Dec. 30, 2001, at the famous viewing platform, and have come each day since, amid the disgusting cold winds of February and impossible August heat. But if their presence is a certainty, its meaning, of course, has gone up for grabs.

Nearly four years after what happened on September 11, we must now debate whether a linkage exists between that day and the war in Iraq. After President Bush associated the two several times in his defense of Iraq this week at Fort Bragg, both the House and Senate Democratic leaders pounded the linkage.

House Leader Nancy Pelosi was explicit: "He is willing to exploit the sacred ground of 9/11, knowing that there is no connection between 9/11 and the war in Iraq." Senate Leader Harry Reid said the September 11 references don't offer "a way forward" in Iraq and only remind us that bin Laden "is still on the loose." To be able to separate September 11 and Iraq into wholly unrelated realms may be possible for very smart people--but not everyone.

---

On a very warm Wednesday this past May, during Fleet Week in New York City, a passerby at Ground Zero encountered some 150 astonishingly young Marines in fatigues, wet with sweat after a run, standing at attention on the site's edge, outside the fence. They were from the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, and they appeared to be in the middle of a formal ceremony. Yesterday the organizer of the May event, Maj. Dave Anderson, explained they were laying a wreath to honor the victims of September 11, and that the three Marines chosen to lay the wreath had earned Purple Hearts while serving in Iraq. When the ceremony ended, he said, a woman came out of the crowd, crying, and grabbed his wrist to say that her brother had died in there that day, and she said to him, "When people see you Marines doing this, they'll know that you will take the fight forward."

So it is that below the level of exquisite analysis now common in our politics, some Americans do exist who credit a connection between September 11 and events in Iraq. Perhaps there will be a poll out in a few weeks that will expose their sentiment to the greater weight and rigor of statistical science.

In time even Pearl Harbor became more a symbol than the bloody reality that ultimately hurled American forces against a Germany that didn't attack us at Pearl Harbor. But time seems to pass faster today. The first Fourth of July after September 11 was a day of national unity, in sorrow but also in belief that the U.S. had to go on offense, over there, against the force that had hit us. Now there is no unity; September 11, the war in Iraq, pretty much anything George Bush does and even Afghanistan is a fair target.

After Mr. Bush delivered the speech on Iraq that many said, rightly, was overdue, David Letterman made jokes about the war. DNC Chairman Howard Dean dismissed it as the "darkness of divisiveness" and "pandering to fear." John Murtha, the party's top spokesmen on military affairs, said, "I believe they are going to cut and run." A Times reporter announced as well that "for the first time," Afghans are "feeling uneasy about the future."

The day following the president's speech, architect David Childs unveiled the latest design of the long-overdue tower intended to replace the twin towers in downtown Manhattan. If we must have an office building in this space so the Port Authority can restart its tax flows, and if it must be a "designed" 1,776-foot-high skyscraper, Mr. Childs's building is perfectly acceptable. But no, Ground Zero is first of all about one's politics now, so for the New York Times architecture critic, Mr. Childs's tall building "is an ideal symbol for an empire enthralled with its own power."

We've watched September 11 drift from unity of purpose to unhinged vituperation. The partisanship is easy to dismiss, but I believe the Bush team's deep disdain of a hostile opposition media has caused it to miss--until now--the need to organize a home front to support the remarkable sacrifice in Iraq. This failure may prove to be the one unforgivable thing.

---

As to September 11's stern symbol--Ground Zero--its place is secure no matter what New York's politics dumps into the Port Authority's 16 acres. The only true memorial that will ever be--that huge hole in the ground, that zero, a filthy, ripped and awesome aftermath--has been there to see for more than 3 1/2 years.

This is what it means to visit the memorial there now. A steel fence is on all four sides. On two of them, the Port Authority has hung simple descriptions and pictures of what happened there, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania. You can read a short history of the two towers. You can read the names of each person who died there that day. After people absorb these things, they get very close to the fence and stare into the open space. Then they take some pictures, and then they go somewhere else.

By now anyone with sufficient desire or need has come to Ground Zero. By now unfathomable numbers have seen that hole in its barest form. They have taken the experience home with them. I think September 11 is going to be properly remembered, no matter what happens in lower Manhattan now. It remains for this administration to do the same for the commitments already made to Iraq and in Iraq.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Our President's Strategy

New Sisyphus has posted an excellent essay on why our President initiated war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Here's a taste:

In sum, the short-term problem of active Al-Qaeda support was solved (to some extent) by the change of regime in Afghanistan while the long-term problem of Islamic Fascism would be countered by the democratic rise of a new Iraq, leading to the spread of the ideals of democracy and liberty in the greater Middle East. Together, both prongs, along with the aggressive use of law enforcement domestically and abroad, diplomacy, and special operations in remote theatres, make up the wider War on Terror. Both were prompted by the adoption of war goals by the President, whose judgment was largely colored by what he felt were the central lessons of 9.11.

NS puts it well. Go read it.

Gitmo, firsthand.

This is supposed to be a firsthand account of what goes on in the terrorist detention center at Guatanamo Bay. It's worth a look.

The pursuit of happiness

Darrin McMahon, a professor of history at Florida State, gives us a historical perspective about happiness in an op-ed at OpinionJournal. His column provides a different interpretation of the phrase "pursuit of happiness" that he believes would more accurately reflect our founding fathers' definition.

I've reprinted the whole article in the extended entry. It's an interesting piece.

A Right, From the Start

"The pursuit of happiness" is about more than private pleasures.


BY DARRIN M. MCMAHON

Friday, July 1, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

As Americans gather round the barbecue this Fourth of July and send their fireworks into the night, they will honor more than just the Declaration of Independence. With laughter and good cheer, they will also celebrate that document's most famous line: "the pursuit of happiness." The words continue to give voice to a great American aspiration. Yet few today even know what the Founding Fathers meant by that curious phrase.

The fault is not entirely our own. Although Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration's primary author, conceived of the pursuit of happiness as an "unalienable right" and a "self evident truth," his meaning was never immediately clear. Eighteenth-century observers themselves interpreted the phrase in various ways. By seeing where they differed, we catch a glimpse of a central tension of the American experiment: the potential conflict of competing pursuits. But by seeing where they agreed, we can also grasp how the Founders sought to reconcile that conflict through an appeal to a common assumption: the indivisibility of public and private good.

---

For anyone who went to church in the 18th century, the "pursuit of happiness" was a familiar phrase. American preachers had delivered sermons on the subject for nearly a century, teaching that a benevolent God intended human beings to seek fulfillment in this life on the way to the next. Like the pious author of the 1767 "True Pleasure, Chearfulness, and Happiness, The Immediate Consequence of Religion," they agreed that to allege that "God himself does not delight to see his creatures happy" was blasphemous. Had not Christ performed his first miracle at a wedding feast, lubricating the festivities at Cana by turning water into wine? For Benjamin Franklin that argument was conclusive. "Wine," he observed, "is living proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy."

Jefferson was well aware of such sanguine pronouncements, and he fully appreciated their novelty. In preceding times, Christians had tended to regard earthly life as an unhappy interlude before the rapture of heaven. Misery was what Adam's children reaped in the world, the rotten fruit of original sin. Now they were tilling richer soil. Jefferson himself concurred: "The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man."

Yet the impetus behind the pursuit of happiness was as much classical as Christian. Like so many of his educated countrymen, Jefferson had read widely in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. And so he knew, with the philosophers Aristotle and Cicero, that happiness was the final end of human existence, the great goal of a life well lived. To pursue happiness was not only a law of human nature but the highest human calling, attained through discipline, self-sacrifice and reasoned moderation. Those who honored authorities beyond the Bible could gather momentum from the force of these ancient pursuits.

John Locke, another of the Founders' moral teachers and an important influence on the Declaration in his own right, agreed that happiness was a natural law. But he conceived of it less in terms of ancient philosophy than in terms of modern science. A friend of Isaac Newton, Locke was among the first to employ the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" in his 17th-century "Essay Concerning Human Understanding," a work that Jefferson knew well. There Locke likened the pursuit of happiness to gravitational attraction, noting that (human) bodies are drawn by the force of pleasure and repulsed by pain. Conceding that what gives pleasure "to different men are very different things," he insisted that pleasure itself was a universal constant, conferred by providence to direct the course of human lives.

Now Locke (like Jefferson) undoubtedly considered property a pleasure-giving thing. Yet contrary to popular belief, he never employed the specific phrase "life, liberty, and property," and there is no evidence to suggest that Jefferson was tempted to do so himself. Other Americans, it is true, invoked "life, liberty, and property," including the First Continental Congress, which worked those exact words into the "Declaration of Colonial Rights and Grievances" of 1774. But Jefferson was too much of a wordsmith to have failed to say precisely what he meant. If he had intended "happiness" to mean property and nothing else, he would have written it that way.

---

Did the "happiness" of the Declaration, then, simply mean personal pleasure in keeping with individual taste? In certain respects, yes--for, like Locke, Jefferson believed that happiness was ultimately in the eyes of the beholder. Hence the need for liberty to allow individuals to follow it where they best saw fit. No government could deign to tell its citizens where true happiness lay.

And yet it is essential to appreciate that Jefferson also held strong views on what constituted the highest source of happiness, the purest pleasure of them all. "Happiness is the aim of life," he affirmed, "but virtue is the foundation of happiness." No 18th-century Founder--whether a Christian, a classicist or a cultivator of simple pleasures--would have disagreed.

Here was the common assumption--what Jefferson called a "harmonizing sentiment"--that united Americans in their differences through the magic of e pluribus unum, making one of many. For in Christian, classical or Lockean terms, virtue at its highest meant serving one's fellow citizens, working for the public welfare, furthering the public good. It followed that virtue was the indispensable means to reconcile the conflicts of individual interest. However else they might differ in their understanding of the critical phrase, early Americans could agree that by pursuing the happiness of others, they helped to ensure their own.

Jefferson's colleague Samuel Adams once observed that "we too often mistake our true happiness, and when we arrive to the enjoyment of that which seemed to promise it to us, we find that it is all an imaginary dream, at best fleeting and transitory." Lest our moments of private pleasure be as ephemeral as a rocket's red glare, we might vow this Fourth of July to pursue happiness in keeping with the Founders' full intent. Jefferson himself put it well. The best means to serve "the happiness and freedom of all," he noted in his first inaugural address, was to perform "all the good in my power." As much as the search for individual satisfaction, that too is an American way, the foundation of a truly noble pursuit.

Mr. McMahon, a professor of history at Florida State University, is the author of "Happiness: A History," to be published in January by Grove/Atlantic.

[Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.]

Posted by USAdave at 03:14 PM | Comments (0)

Independence Day

As we celebrate this nation's birth today, I ask you to consider the sacrifices and deprivations that were suffered by so many in order that this great country would remain free. Men and women, adults and children, military and civilians have all suffered so that subsequent generations would be able to enjoy liberty, peace, happiness, and self-determination. Think about the liberties and security that we take for granted every day -- all because of those people who had the faith and the courage to build and defend this nation.

The pastor of our church writes a small column in the weekly church newsletter. His words this week spoke volumes to me for some reason -- it's a God thing, I suspect. And instead of writing a lot about what I think about freedom and liberty, I thought that our pastor's words -- and those from the ultimate life application guide, the Bible -- did a much better job of putting these concepts into perspective for me.

Indulge me, please, and read the rest in the extended entry.

The fourth, our freedom and our faith ... all fit together. The fourth, our freedom and our faith ... all form our heritage. The fourth, our freedom and our faith ... all fill our lives with hope.

As Americans, the fourth of July allows us to reflect on the bounty and beauty of our land. It gives us opportunity to remember the courage and commitment of those who fought for and forged our liberty. It calls to us to reclaim the principles of justice and righteousness that are the foundations of our nation.

As Christians, the fourth of July reminds us how our history is grounded in the religious faith of our forefathers and foremothers. It summons us to look beyond our civil liberty to the source of all freedom, Jesus Christ. The scriptures tell us that "if the Son makes you free, you shall be free indeed." (John 8:36). It invites us to embrace and live that freedom -- a freedom from fear, from shame, from sin in any form -- through faith in Christ. It urges us to use our liberty not as a license for doing whatever we want, but as a freedom to forgive and love. "You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love." (Galations 5:13).

Can you imagine how much greater a superpower the USA would be if all of its citizens conducted themselves accordingly?

Here is wishing you a safe and enjoyable Independence Day. . .

The Arab Spring

Smiley, over at The Daily Demarche has posted some of his thoughts about the beginnings of democracy in the Middle East. You can read his post here.

And here is his conclusion:

It is important to remember that, the difficulties in Iraq notwithstanding, there is real movement towards democracy in the Middle East. Egypt, long considered the vanguard of the Arab world, could very well be the vanguard of democratic change in the Middle East. Naturally, there is still much work to be done, and Mubarak's willpower to change will frequently need the carrot-and-stick treatment, but if you are a fan of democracy promotion, this is definitely good news.

I think it is extremely important that we support the spread of democracy all over the world -- starting in the Middle East. Democracy is a keystone for security for the citizens of the USA -- and for the citizens of every nation throughout the rest of the world.

Bush interview

I found this interview of George Bush by the Times Online. It was a refreshingly different article that had a descriptive part preceding an edited transcript of the interview itself.

The article begins with this:

THERE has probably never been a president, there may not have been a human being, who observes punctuality with the sort of fanaticism that President George W. Bush brings to every aspect of his life.

If you are on time for a meeting with the President you are late, we were told as we prepared for our interview in the Oval Office yesterday to preview the G8 summit at Gleneagles next week.

Sure enough, a full nine minutes before the allotted time for our appointment, the door of the most famous room in the world opens and a genial President steps forward to greet us.

If you want to get a glimpse of the man behind the caricature, then this article is well worth reading.

Overdriven Rhetoric

Jeff Jacoby has a good op-ed in the Boston Globe about the rhetorical hysteria going on in today's politics. Here's how he starts:

THE MOST striking thing about the uproar over Illinois Senator Dick Durbin’s comparison of American servicemen to ‘‘Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or ... Pol Pot’’ is that his grotesque comparison even caused an uproar in the first place.

Recommended.

Mark Steyn Interview

John Hawkins at Right Wing News (Conservative News and Views) has posted an interview of Mark Steyn. Here's a small excerpt:

John Hawkins: So how successful do you think the Israeli strategy of walling off the Palestinians will be?

Mark Steyn: I haven’t spent a lot of time in “Palestine,” but, when I have, I’ve never seen any sign anywhere in Gaza or the West Bank of anything remotely resembling a "nationalist" movement. There’s plenty of evidence of widespread Jew-hatred and the veneration of death-cult "martyrdom," but not that anybody’s seriously interested in building a nation for the “Palestinian people.” So if you leave it to the Palestinians there's never going to be a state, only decade after decade of suicide bombings. One can advance reasons for this - it's no coincidence that the most comprehensively wrecked people on the face of the earth are the ones who have been wholly entrusted to the formal care of the UN for three generations now. But the fact is what Israel is doing is the only thing that will force the Palestinians to get up off their allegedly occupied butts and run a state: the Israelis are walling off what they feel they need, or what they can get away with, and it will be up to the gangsters of Arafatistan to see if they now feel like dropping the jihad and getting on with less glamorous activities like running highway departments and schools.

The interview covers Steyn's views on a variety of topics. Despite Steyn's hard-right presentation, I found the interview to be very interesting. You will too.

Oh, and I found myself agreeing with him on many of the things he said. Just FYI (in case it wasn't obvious) . . .

More (good) economic news

See what Bush's tax cuts have wrought?

According to the Treasury department, the U.S. government took in a single-day record $61 billion in tax receipts on June 15. This surpassed the previous single-day high of $56 billion set on December 15, 2000. The recent surge in tax revenues is not just a one-day event. Fiscal year to date, total government receipts are up 15.5 percent, the fastest rate of increase on a comparable FYTD basis since 1981. The difference between the growth rate of tax revenues and the growth rate of government spending has widened to 8.4-percentage points, the largest since late 2000 when the budget was in surplus.

I think there is good evidence that supply-side economics does, in fact, work on a national scale. IMO Bush is on the right fiscal track . . .