Heritage Quote

"Without Freedom of Thought there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as Public Liberty, without Freedom of Speech."

-- Benjamin Franklin (writing as Silence Dogood, No. 8, 9 July 1722)

Quote

"What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive?"

-- Irv Kupcinet

Quotable

"Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right."

-- Oprah Winfrey, O Magazine

Wry quote

"Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards."

Robert Heinlein
US science fiction author (1907 - 1988)

Heritage Quote

"We established however some, although not all its [self-government] important principles . The constitutions of most of our States assert, that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves, in all cases to which they think themselves competent, (as in electing their functionaries executive and legislative, and deciding by a jury of themselves, in all judiciary cases in which any fact is involved,) or they may act by representatives, freely and equally chosen; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Cartwright, 1824)

Heritage Quote

"All see, and most admire, the glare which hovers round the external trappings of elevated office. To me there is nothing in it, beyond the lustre which may be reflected from its connection with a power of promoting human felicity."

-- George Washington (letter to Catherine MacAuly Graham, 9 January 1790)

Heritage Quote

"The happy State of Matrimony is, undoubtedly, the surest and most lasting Foundation of Comfort and Love; the Source of all that endearing Tenderness and Affection which arises from Relation and Affinity; the grand Point of Property; the Cause of all good Order in the World, and what alone preserves it from the utmost Confusion; and, to sum up all, the Appointment of infinite Wisdom for these great and good Purposes."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Rules and Maxims for Promoting Matrimonial Happiness, 8 October 1730)

Light posting

I will not be posting very much untill after the new year. We are on a holiday break from work and school and we're enjoying the down time together.

I hope you also are also able to R&R during this season.

Heritage Quote

"I hope some future day will bring me the happiness of seeing my family again collected under our own roof, happy in ourselves and blessed in each other."

-- Abigail Adams (letter to John Adams, 15 March 1784)

Heritage Quote

"[T]he States can best govern our home concerns and the general government our foreign ones. I wish, therefore...never to see all offices transferred to Washington, where, further withdrawn from the eyes of the people, they may more secretly be bought and sold at market."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Judge William Johnson, 12 June 1823)

Happy birthday, Jesus!

As I sit here on Christmas Eve, sipping hot tea, listening to Christmas music, and talking with my Lady and her parents, I find myself beginning -- finally -- to slow down enough to listen for the presence of God.

I know that probably sounds a little corny, but only because I have limited communication skills.

The truth is that when I became a Christian at age 18, Christmas took on an entirely different meaning and much greater significance to me. And as a parent, I have found that Christmas means so much more than it did before our girls were born. And not because of Santa -- but because I finally have begun to understand the sacrifice that God made when His Son was born as a human on Earth.

God gave us the most precious and holy Gift in the universe when he gave us His Son. And He did it because He loves us -- despite our many flaws.

It is a humbling concept.

Merry Christmas to all of you who read this. I pray that this day finds you safe and warm and amongst friends and family. May God's peace and love fill your spirit and brighten your thoughts. And, if you are away from home, I pray that God blesses you and holds you close -- and brings you home safely.

I wish you and yours a truly wonderful Christmas . . .

Heritage Quote

"How many observe Christ's birth-day! How few, his precepts! O! 'tis easier to keep Holidays than Commandments."

-- Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richards Almanack, 1743)

Mary had a little Lamb . . .

An old poem with a new twist that is very appropriate for the Christmas season.

Mary had a little Lamb,
He was born on Christmas day.
She laid him in a manger bed
To Sleep upon the hay.

Angels filled the night-time sky
And they began to sing.
Shepherds heard them all proclaim
The birthday of a King.

Wise men saw a blazing star
Up in the sky that night.
They followed it until they found
The King of love and light.

Mary had a little Lamb,
But He wasn’t hers, you know,
He was the very Son of God,
The One who loves us so.

The Father of this little Lamb
Loved the world so much
That He sent his only Son to earth
So we could feel His touch.

He came to give us joy and peace
And take away our sin.
So when He knocks on your heart’s door,
Be sure to let Him in.

Why do I love this precious Lamb?
What can the reason be?
The answer is quite plain to see,
It’s because He first loved me!

My daughter brought this poem home from our church on a sheet of paper -- without attribution. I did a search and only found one reference to it in an online sermon (which can be found here) by David O. Dykes with Discover Life Ministries.

Thank a Soldier Week

It is Thank A Soldier Week (19-23 December)!

Townhall.com is sponsoring an effort to get our words of gratitude to our troops. Click on the link to go watch a video taken at the Country Music Awards. While you're there, take the time to send an email of thanks. And there are also links to various organizations that support our troops and their families where you can donate money, knitting, and other things.

This post will remain at the top of my posts for the whole week. Scroll down to see other new posts.

Heritage Quote

"[A] good moral character is the first essential in a man, and that the habits contracted at your age are generally indelible, and your conduct here may stamp your character through life. It is therefore highly important that you should endeavor not only to be learned but virtuous."

-- George Washington (letter to Steptoe Washington, 5 December)

Iraqi electoral growing pains

Wretchard, over at The Belmont Club has a good round up of news pertaining to the irregularities with vote tabulation in Iraq.

This issue is worth watching.

Heritage Quote

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between church and State."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to a Committee of the Danbury Baptist Association, Connecticut, January 1st 1802)

President's address 12-18-2005

President Bush addressed the nation Sunday night in a speech about Iraq,the war on terrorism, and our strategy for victory. Here's an excerpt:

All who had a part in this achievement -- Iraqis, and Americans and our coalition partners -- can be proud. Yet our work is not done. There is more testing and sacrifice before us. I know many Americans have questions about the cost and direction of this war. So tonight I want to talk to you about how far we have come in Iraq, and the path that lies ahead.

And here's the 12-19-2005 press conference regarding that strategy for victory over terrorism. An excerpt of his introduction:

This new threat required us to think and act differently. And as the 9/11 Commission pointed out, to prevent this from happening again, we need to connect the dots before the enemy attacks, not after. And we need to recognize that dealing with al Qaeda is not simply a matter of law enforcement; it requires defending the country against an enemy that declared war against the United States of America.

I highly recommend that you read both articles -- then you will be able to make up your own mind about what President Bush actually said (instead of depending on someone else for that very important information).

An American soldier

Katherine Kersten, with the Star Tribune, has an article about SSG Joe Buhain and some of his experiences in Iraq. Here's an excerpt:

What do you do if you are an Army medic and you are asked to provide medical care to an Iraqi terrorist who has just killed or maimed some of your buddies? Staff Sgt. Joe Buhain of Rochester knows the answer.

This is in contrast to the endlessly repetitive (and mostly false) reports about our troops being abusive while in-theater.

I recommend it.

Heritage Quote

"No man in his senses can hesitate in choosing to be free, rather than a slave."

-- Alexander Hamilton (A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress, &c., 15 December 1774)

Study: media leans left

Independent thinkers have known this for some time, and most people realize that the media leans left but, until now, no one has proven it statistically. And this was done by UCLA, so it is not some partisan hack job.

It's worth a read. If only to validate those feelings about our news reporting that you've had all these years . . .

Improving the neighborhood

Meghan Clyne, a reporter for the New York Sun has written an article citing Freedom House's Freedom in the World 2006 report that says, in part, that the past year has brought "significant improvements in personal and political rights across the region". Here's how it starts:

As the political battle intensifies over President Bush's efforts to spread democracy to Iraq and the Middle East, an influential human rights organization, Freedom House, has found that the past year brought significant improvements in personal and political rights across the region.

Reports of increased freedom emerged from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the Palestinian territories, and observers attributed the results to the Bush administration's support of fledgling democracies worldwide.

It's a pretty positive article. And President Bush along with all of those who have supported and fought over there deserve the credit. Stay the course!

[Hat tip to Kathy over at Cake Eater Chronicles.]

Lessons learned?

Michael Barone has a op-ed up that looks at lessons of the last 25 years. Here's an excerpt:

Twenty-five years ago, in December 1980, Jimmy Carter was serving his last full month in office and Ronald Reagan was president-elect. More than 50 Americans were being held hostage in Iran--an act of war by the revolutionary mullahs. The Soviet Union was on the march in Afghanistan. The American economy was finishing a decade of high inflation and sluggish growth at best--stagflation. The past three presidents had been repudiated: Richard Nixon in 1974, Gerald Ford in 1976, and Jimmy Carter 1980.

Experts preached that America's best days were behind it, counseled that we seek accommodation with the Soviet Union, and urged nations of the avaricious North to share their wealth with nations of the deserving South. Low-inflation economic growth was no longer possible.

Now we know, with as much certainty as is possible in these things, that these experts were dead wrong . . .

Highly recommended.

Heritage Quote

"Jefferson was against any needless official apparel, but if the gown was to carry, he said: "For Heaven's sake discard the monstrous wig which makes the English judges look like rats peeping through bunches of oakum."

-- Thomas Jefferson (commenting on judges' apparel)

A hand up vs. a handout

I heard the news this morning that Bill & Melissa Gates as well as Bono were named Time's People of the Year for their philanthropy. And I applaud their efforts. But I have some reservations.

I strongly believe charity is an essential part of our society and the Christian heritage in this country. My immediate as well as my extended family practices charity in many different ways -- we've all been brought up that way, as has a great number of Americans. In fact, the proof that Americans in general believe in charitable giving is in the fact that donations to non-disaster relief efforts are not down this year despite the outpouring of donations toward relief efforts for the tsunami and hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Instead of re-directing our charitable donations, Americans ponied up more money and more time in volunteer work.

How great is that!?

There is a good way to provide charitable gifts, and there is a bad way. Betsy Newmark had this post up about giving a hand up instead of a hand out before I had sat down to post on the subject myself. As usual, she communicated her thoughts more eloquently than I could, and she provided some pertinent links. So go read her post.

I have no problems with charitable efforts in terms of disaster relief, humanitarian aid, research into diseases and medicines, and things like that. But we have to help people learn to help themselves. Instead of just buying a man bread every year, we should be buying wheat and teaching him how to cultivate and harvest it. Instead of just providing a village a doctor, we should be training villagers to be doctors and providing them with the tools to practice medicine in that village.

And I think that is what is missing in a great deal of the aid and debt-relief being pumped into Africa.

And, no, I don't really have a good answer as to how to implement such an approach. It would almost have to be continental in scope, and we'd have to somehow reduce and eliminate the rampant corruption and greed in many of the governments there.

This is definitely not politically correct to say, but maybe we should use the same approach we did in Iraq . . . after all, though there are still security issues to deal with, but economically, Iraq is doing better than it ever has, and politically, the country is progressing quite well.

(Come to think of it, the Iraqi people should get Time's People of the Year award for 2005. Just look at what they've accomplished!)

Something to think about . . .

On gay cowboys and liberal politics

Mark Steyn does a great job in pointing out the absurdities of contemporary liberal politics. Here's a taste:

Bush lied, people dyed. Their fingers. That's what this is about: Millions of Kurds, Shia and Sunnis beaming as they emerge from polling stations and hold up their purple fingers after the freest, fairest election ever held in the Arab world. "Liberal" in the American sense is a dirty word because it's come to stand for a shriveled parochial obsolescent irrelevance, of which ''Good Night, and Good Luck,'' Clooney's dreary little retread of the McCarthy years, is merely the latest example. (Clooney says he wants more journalists to "speak truth to power," which is why I'm insulting his movie.)

The rest of his piece consists of humorous, but insightful, observations regarding the historic elections in Iraq and the concentrated efforts of liberal politicians to ignore them.

Heritage Quote

"Citizens by birth or choice of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections. The name of American, which belongs to you, in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of Patriotism, more than any appellation derived from local discriminations."

—George Washington

The new Arab world

Duncan Currie discusses George W. Bush's new Arab world. Here's a taste:

But what if U.S. intervention did create "a new Arab world," as Walid Jumblatt claimed? What if it did vanquish the Middle Eastern "Berlin Wall"? And what if it saved untold Americans--and Arabs--from far deadlier wars in the future? While we mourn each and every U.S. casualty, we must never lose sight of what the American military has accomplished. Despite all the setbacks, Iraq's budding democracy continues to move ahead. So does the training of Iraq's fledgling security forces, a prerequisite for any significant withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Recommended.

On Bush and spin

Peggy Noonan has an excellent op-ed over at OpinionJournal about what she thinks is wrong with Bush's approach to public relations.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

And I think she may be right.

It's Not About Bush
Has America turned a corner on Iraq?

Thursday, December 15, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

The four-part Iraq speech cycle on which the president has embarked, and that culminated yesterday in his remarks before the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, may well mark a turning in his public leadership of the war. His arguments on the war, and his assertions about what is happening on the ground and what is desired there, were more comprehensive, seemingly more candid, and thus more persuasive than he has been in the past 12 months. Coupled with today's voting it may mark a real turning point.

One of the things I think the president communicated most effectively, if mostly between the lines, was the sense that some decisions a president faces don't promise good outcomes no matter which way he comes down. These are decisions that carry deep implications, and promise real difficulty.

And one such was: To move on Saddam or not?

Do nothing about Saddam, or nothing that hasn't been done before, and you keep in place a personally unstable dictator who has declared himself an avowed enemy of America, who will help and assist its foes at a crucial time, and who has developed and used in recent memory and against his own citizens weapons of mass destruction. Do nothing and you face the continuance of a Mideast status quo encrusted by cynicism and marked by malignancy.

But remove Saddam and you face the cost in blood and treasure of invasion, occupation and the erection of democracy. It's all a great gamble. It could end with the yielding up of a new ruling claque as bad as or worse than the one just replaced. You could wind up thinking you'd bitten off more than you could chew and were trying to swallow more than you could digest.

No matter what Mr. Bush chose, what decision he made, he would leave some angry and frustrated. No matter what he did, the Arab street would be restive (it is a restive place) the left would be angry (rage is their ZIP code, where they came from and where they live), and Democrats would watch, wait, offer bland statements and essentially hope for the worst. Imagine a great party with only one leader, Joe Lieberman, who approaches the question of Iraq with entire seriousness. And imagine that party being angry with him because he does.

Mr. Bush chose to remove Saddam and liberate Iraq from, well, Saddam. And maybe more. Maybe from its modern sorry past. Pat Buchanan said a few months ago something bracing in its directness. He said a constitution doesn't make a country; a country makes a constitution. But today, in the voting, we may see more of the rough beginnings of a new exception to that rule. News reports both in print and on television also seem to be suggesting a turn. They seem to suggest a new knowledge on the ground in Iraq that democracy is inevitable, is the future, and if you don't want to be left behind you'd better jump in. One senses a growing democratic spirit. A sense that daring deeds can produce real progress.

'Tis devoutly to be wished, and all of good faith must wish it.

---

In his speech yesterday the president said the obvious: that the intelligence received in the buildup to the war was faulty. He asserted that Saddam's past and present history justified invasion nonetheless. This left me thinking again about a particular part of the WMD story. I decided my own position in support of invasion after Colin Powell warned the U.N. in dramatic terms of Saddam's development of weapons that were wicked, illegal and dangerous to the stability of the world. It is to me beyond belief that he was not speaking what he believed to be true. And I believed him, as did others.

Later Howard Dean, that human helium balloon ever resistant to the gravity of mature judgment, said of the administration that they lied us into war. He left no doubt that he meant they did it deliberately and cynically. But there seems to me a thing that is blindingly obvious, and yet I've never seen it remarked upon. It is that an administration that would coldly lie us into Iraq is an administration that would lie about what was found there. And yet the soldiers, searchers and investigators who looked high and low throughout Iraq made it clear they had found nothing, an outcome the administration did not dispute and came to admit. But an administration that would lie about reasons would lie about results, wouldn't it? Or try to? Yet they were candid.

Wouldn't it be good if our serious journalists and historians looked into what happened to weapons that Saddam once used and once had? He abused weapons inspectors who came looking, acting like a man who had a great deal to hide. And wouldn't it be good for our serious journalists and historians to look into exactly how it is that faulty intelligence, of such a crucial nature and at such a crucial moment, came to America and Britain? It is still amazing. Oh, for journalists and historians who would look only for truth and not merely for data that justify their politics and ideology.

---

I have been thinking about what hasn't worked, in the year since the 2004, election about the president's communication of his aims and efforts in Iraq. Or rather why it didn't work, why it seemed unpersuasive, why his statements seemed more repetitive than memorable. The president's focus was fractured, and by a number of things. By ill judgment--deciding Social Security was the new No. 1 issue. By bad luck--Katrina, etc. And by tone deafness, from "You're doing a heck of a job, Brownie" to Harriet Miers. The Iraq picture got blurred. But when a political picture gets blurred, people wonder if the blurring isn't deliberate and diversionary, a way of taking everyone's eyes off the facts. Skepticism grows.

And there is I think another part. It is that this White House believes way too much in spin.

David Brooks noted last Sunday on "Meet the Press" that in private Bush aides are knowledgeable and forthcoming about the war--this is working, this isn't, we made a mistake here and are fixing it in this way--but that in public they rely too much on platitudes and talking points.

It's true. The Bush White House treats the message of the day as if it were the only raft in high seas. Hold, cling, don't let go. Their discipline seems not persuasive but panicky.

They think their adherence to spin is sophisticated and ahead of the curve, but it is not. What is sophisticated is to know that the American people have been immersed in media for half a century and know when they're being talked to by robots who got wound up in the spin shop. They are not impressed by rote repetition, cheery insistence or clunky symbolism. They see through it. When you have the president make a big speech and he's standing under the sign that says VICTORY, the American people actually know you're trying to send an unconscious message: Bush equals victory, Bush will bring victory, victory is coming. It's not so much nefarious as corny.

There is the sense sometimes with this White House that they learned more from Bill Clinton than from Ronald Reagan. What did Mr. Clinton and his spinners and handlers and media mavens and compulsive line-givers teach us? "It's all about Bill." He's the man, he's at the center, he's so brilliant. He had a tough childhood, he's building a legacy, it's Bill Bill Bill.

The Bush White House--and the president--have in the same way made Iraq a Bush drama. Bush won't cut and run, Bush has personal relationships, Bush is like Harry Truman, Bush will hold to his word. Look, he's landing on an aircraft carrier. It's all about Bush.

Modern White Houses think the man has to be the emblem of the actions. But thinking this way is not helpful, not in any serious way, and the Bush White House should stop it. Because it's mildly creepy; because it puts too much on your guy, which means he has to be lucky for everything to work, and nothing's worse to rely on in politics than luck. And most important because it's actually not about Bush, it's about America.

Ronald Reagan fought a war, but he didn't think it was about him, he thought it was about America. He didn't think it was about his principles; he thought it was about America's. He didn't land on aircraft carriers; he built them.

This war isn't about Bush, or shouldn't be, or can't be if it is to have meaning, and to end in success. It's bigger than that. It's bigger than him.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father," just out from Penguin, which you can buy from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.

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

Heritage Quote

"Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 34, 4 January 1788)

Heritage Quote

"[B]ut whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the person or property of others. On this subject they are gaining daily in the opinions of nations, and hopeful advances are making towards their re-establishment on an equal footing with the other colors of the human family."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to Henri Gregoire, 25 February 1809)

Saddam's WMD . . .

. . . is still an issue. The New York Sun has an article up about various indications that Saddam moved his WMDs into Syria prior to the US invasion of Iraq.

Saddam Hussein moved his chemical weapons to Syria six weeks before the war started, Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom says.

It's an interesting article.

[Hat tip to Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants.]

Election: Iraq -- the day after

Mohammed posts about yesterday's election in Iraq.

It was a day of happiness for Iraqis and a day of loss for the strangers who thought their camels brought them to a land void of patriots.

It is a day we will await to come again for four long years…to do the right thing again or to correct the mistake if we did one yesterday.
Anyway, I believe we left a mark on the face of history, a purple mark that will not be forgotten easily.

God bless Iraq and Iraq's friends throughout this world. It wasn't our day alone; it was your day too.

Aash al-Iraq . . . Aash al-Iraq.

We celebrate with you, Mohammed. You made history yesterday.

Heritage Quote

"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV, 1781)

Reporting from Iraq

Margaret Friedenauer, a reporter for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, a local newspaper in Fairbanks, Alaska, has just recently become embedded with the 172nd Stryker Brigade in Iraq. Her blog is called "Reporting from Iraq" and is a good source of information about what it is really like over there.

It may be worth watching . . .

Staying the course

Marine Major Ben Connable has a good article in the about the truth on the ground in Iraq, and the importance of staying the course. He is looking forward to returning to Iraq for another tour of duty there. Why? Because he believes that it is important for us to successfully complete the job of building a new democracy in Iraq.

He is realistic about his assessment of the chances, but he is worried about the western media's dangerously false portrayal of Iraq as a quagmire:

For every vividly portrayed suicide bombing, there are hundreds of thousands of people living quiet, if often uncertain, lives. For every depressing story of unrest and instability there is an untold story of potential and hope. The impression of Iraq as an unfathomable quagmire is false and dangerously misleading.

It is this false impression that has led us to a moment of national truth.

It is a good article, and well worth reading.

President's speech on 12-14-2005

President Bush made another speech outlining the reasons for and goals of our war on terror. There are similar elements in this speech to his speech on Monday, but he is fleshing out his positions and plans. Here's an excerpt:

We saw the future the terrorists intend for our nation on that fateful morning of September the 11th, 2001. That day we learned that vast oceans and friendly neighbors are no longer enough to protect us. September the 11th changed our country; it changed the policy of our government. We adopted a new strategy to protect the American people: We would hunt down the terrorists wherever they hide; we would make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor them; and we would advance our security at home by advancing freedom in the Middle East.

Sooni, an Iraqi man living in Baghdad, was able to watch the speech on television there and said in his blog that our President's speech was very encouraging, and accurately reflected the sentiments of citizens of Iraq.

President Bush really did a good job of providing more insight into his decisions and his plans for the future in our war against terrorism. Recommended -- especially after reading his speech from Monday (12-12).

Heritage Quote

"Tis well."

-- George Washington (14 December 1799)

Election: Iraq - impressions

Thomas Smith Jr. at NRO has an article about what it is like in Iraq this week. Here's how he starts:

As Iraqis queue up at polling stations, some of the scenes look more like a series of regional block parties than what most Westerners would associate with an election day. Children can be seen waving flags or playing soccer. Adults are cheering, clapping hands, beating drums, singing, dancing, and waving at passing U.S. and Iraqi military vehicles. There simply seems to have been more energy in the run-up to this election than in previous ones. And why not?

December 15, 2005, is a day of "national celebration, a day of the national unity, and of victory over the terrorists and those who oppose our march toward democracy," announced Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

He goes on to describe what our soldiers who are over there are seeing this week.

It's a well-balanced article that provides crucial information about what is really going on in Iraq during their parliamentary election.

15.5M+ voted in Iraq today!

Mohammed cited a press release by the IECI (the Iraqi electoral commission) stating that "15, 5 million+ Iraqis cast their votes in more than 30,000 stations spread nationwide." His continually updated post (with pictures) about this historic election is here.

There is a lot of news about the election in Iraq in his post. And several pictures as well.

. . . just isn't news worth featuring . . .

Thomas Sowell has an interesting op-ed up about the media's war. Here's a taste:

The doom-sayers claimed that terrorist attacks would make it impossible to hold the elections last January because so many Iraqis would be afraid to go vote. The doom-sayers urged that the elections be postponed.

But a higher percentage of Iraqis voted in that election -- and in a subsequent election -- than the percentage of Americans who voted in last year's Presidential elections.

Utter ignorance of history enables any war with any casualties to be depicted in the media as an unmitigated disaster.

It makes you think. Recommended.

Letter to an American Soldier

Vasko Kohlmayer, over at the American Thinker, has posted an open letter to our noble warfighters. Here's an excerpt:

When I kiss my little girl good night, I do so knowing that many have paid -- and many are paying still -- a heavy price so that I can partake in this wondrous moment in freedom and peace. The thought that so many laid their lives while making it possible is almost too painful to bear. Tied to you with a bond forged by your sacrifice, I acknowledge its lopsided nature -- I get the benefits while you bear the cost.

It's very much worth reading.

Heritage Quote

"When divorces can be summoned to the aid of levity, of vanity, or of avarice, a state of marriage frequently becomes a state of war or strategem."

-- James Wilson (Lectures on Law, 25 November 1791)

Mohammed on the Iraqi election

Mohammed, in his blog, Iraq the Model, has a post about the historic election that he and his fellow Iraqis are preparing for. He is excited about what the future holds for Iraq, and proud of his nation's recent accomplishments in democracy:

Tomorrow it's going to be us who decide and I can feel the greatness of the responsibility because the result will draw the shape of our future and will determine how long it will take till we can announce victory in this war; our war against the past, against the past's illusions and the past's mistakes; with our hands we can make this war last shorter . . . with our own choices.

One year ago we wanted to defeat terror and the shadows of dictatorship and tell them that we are not willing to go backwards and that we're ready to build a new Iraq where the people choose their representatives . . .

The choice didn't matter then as much as voting itself did; all we wanted to do was to go and cast our votes regardless of the choices we made.

[ . . .]

In a matter of one year questions and answers changed a lot; less than a year ago the question was “will you vote?” But now the question is “who are you going to vote for?”

We are making progress, definitely we are!

My thoughts and prayers are with our democratic brethren in Iraq.

President's 12-12-05 speech

Here is President Bush's speech in Philadelphia on Monday about the war on terror and the upcoming Iraqi elections. He also answers a few questions after the speech.

Recommended reading because you're not going to see any accurate accounts of his speech in the mainstream media. [/cynicism]

Defeat from the jaws of victory

Norman Podhoretz has an interesting op-ed up at OpinionJournal about the American panic over Iraq. He compares the panic here in 1776-77, during the Revolutionary War, to our present one:

Yet in spite of these similarities, there is also a very curious difference between the American panic of 1776-77 and the American panic of 2005-06. To put it in the simplest and starkest terms: In that early stage of the Revolutionary War, there was sound reason to fear that the British would succeed in routing Washington's forces. In Iraq today, however, and in the Middle East as a whole, a successful outcome is staring us in the face. Clearly, then, the panic over Iraq--which expresses itself in increasingly frenzied calls for the withdrawal of our forces--cannot have been caused by the prospect of defeat. On the contrary, my twofold guess is that the real fear behind it is not that we are losing but that we are winning, and that what has catalyzed this fear into a genuine panic is the realization that the chances of pulling off the proverbial feat of snatching an American defeat from the jaws of victory are rapidly running out.

Though long, this one is well worth reading. I've reprinted the entire article in the extended entry.

AT WAR

The Panic Over Iraq
What they're really afraid of is American success.

BY NORMAN PODHORETZ
Monday, December 12, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

Like, I am sure, many other believers in what this country has been trying to do in the Middle East and particularly in Iraq, I have found my thoughts returning in the past year to something that Tom Paine, writing at an especially dark moment of the American Revolution, said about such times. They are, he memorably wrote, "the times that try men's souls," the times in which "the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot" become so disheartened that they "shrink from the service of [their] country."

But Paine did not limit his anguished derision to former supporters of the American War of Independence whose courage was failing because things had not been going as well on the battlefield as they had expected or hoped. In a less famous passage, he also let loose on another group:

'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. . . . Yet panics, in some cases, have their uses . . . Their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain for ever undiscovered.

Thus, he explained, "Many a disguised Tory has lately shown his head," emboldened by the circumstances of the moment to reveal an opposition to the break with Britain that it had previously seemed prudent to conceal.

The similarities to our situation today are uncanny. We, too, are in the midst of a rapidly spreading panic. We, too, have our sunshine patriots and summer soldiers, in the form of people who initially supported the invasion of Iraq--and the Bush Doctrine from which it followed--but who are now abandoning what they have decided is a sinking ship. And we, too, are seeing formerly disguised opponents of the war coming more and more out into the open, and in ever greater numbers.

Yet in spite of these similarities, there is also a very curious difference between the American panic of 1776-77 and the American panic of 2005-06. To put it in the simplest and starkest terms: In that early stage of the Revolutionary War, there was sound reason to fear that the British would succeed in routing Washington's forces. In Iraq today, however, and in the Middle East as a whole, a successful outcome is staring us in the face. Clearly, then, the panic over Iraq--which expresses itself in increasingly frenzied calls for the withdrawal of our forces--cannot have been caused by the prospect of defeat. On the contrary, my twofold guess is that the real fear behind it is not that we are losing but that we are winning, and that what has catalyzed this fear into a genuine panic is the realization that the chances of pulling off the proverbial feat of snatching an American defeat from the jaws of victory are rapidly running out.

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Of course, to anyone who relies entirely or largely on the mainstream media for information, it will come as a great surprise to hear that we are winning in Iraq. Winning? Militarily? How can we be winning militarily when, day after day, the only thing of any importance going on in that country is suicide bombings and car bombings? When neither our own troops nor the Iraqi forces we have been training are able to stop the "insurgents" from scoring higher and higher body counts? When every serious military move we make against the strongholds of these dedicated and ruthless adversaries is met with "fierce resistance"? When, for every one of them we manage to kill, two more seem to pop up?

Winning? Politically? How can we be winning politically when the very purpose for which we allegedly invaded Iraq has been unmasked as a chimera? When every step we force the Iraqis to take toward democratization is accompanied by angry sectarian strife between Shiites and Sunnis and between Arabs and Kurds? When our clumsy efforts to bring the Sunnis into the political process have hardly made a dent in their support for the insurgency? When the end result is less likely to be the stable democratic regime we supposedly went there to establish than a civil war followed by the breakup of Iraq into three separate countries?

There has been one great exception to this relentless drumbeat of bad news. It occurred in January 2005, in the coverage of the first election in liberated Iraq. To the astonishment of practically everyone in the world, more than eight million Iraqis came out to vote on election day even though the Islamofascist terrorists had threatened to slaughter them if they did. This very astonishment was a measure of how false an impression had been created of the state of affairs in Iraq. No one fed by the mainstream media could have had the slightest inkling that these eight million people were actually there, so invisible had they been to reporters who spent all their time interviewing the discontented Iraqi man-in-the-street and to cameras seemingly incapable of focusing on anything but carnage and rubble.

But the mainstream media soon recovered from the shock. By October, on the morning after a second ballot in which the new Iraqi constitution was ratified by fully 79% of the electorate, the Washington Post ran its announcement of these inspiring results on page 13. As for the paper's front page, the columnist Jeff Jacoby would note that it

was dominated by a photograph, stretched across four columns, of three daughters at the funeral of their father, . . . who had died from injuries suffered during a Sept. 26 bombing in Baghdad. Two accompanying stories, both above the fold, were headlined "Military Has Lost 2,000 in Iraq" and "Bigger, Stronger, Homemade Bombs Now to Blame for Half of U.S. Deaths." A nearby graphic--"The Toll"--divided the 2,000 deaths by type of military service.

In sum, in the words of the Australian blogger Arthur Chrenkoff:

Death, violence, terrorism, precarious political situation, problems with reconstruction, and public frustration (both in Iraq and America) dominate, if not overwhelm, the mainstream media coverage and commentary on Iraq.

About a year ago, concerned that he might have been exaggerating when he made this assertion on the basis of his "gut feeling," Mr. Chrenkoff decided to check it out more scientifically. So he did "a little tally" of the stories published or broadcast all over the world on a single average day (which happened to be Jan. 21, 2005). Here are some of the numbers that, with the help of the Google News Index, he was able to report from that one day:

• 2,642 stories about Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearings, in the context of grilling she has received over the administration's Iraq policy.



• 1,992 stories about suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks.



• 887 stories about prisoner abuse by British soldiers.



• 216 stories about hostages currently being held in Iraq.



• 761 stories reporting on activities and public statements of insurgents.



• 357 stories about the antiwar movement and the dropping public support for involvement in Iraq.



• 182 stories about American servicemen killed and wounded in operations.



• 217 stories about concerns for fairness and validity of Iraqi election (low security, low turnout, etc.).



• 107 stories about civilian deaths in Iraq.



• 123 stories noting Vice President Cheney's admission that he had underestimated the task of reconstruction.



• 118 stories about complicated and strained relations between the U.S. and Europe.



• 121 stories discussing the possibility of an American pullout.



• 27 stories about sabotage of Iraqi oil infrastructure.

As against all this, the good news made a pathetic showing:

• 16 stories about security successes in the fight against insurgents.



• 7 stories about positive developments relating to elections.



• 73 stories about the return to Iraq of stolen antiquities.

Obviously, then, the reporters and their editors in the mainstream media have been working overtime to show how badly things have been going for us in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the op-ed pundits, the academic theorists and the armchair generals have chimed in with analyses blaming it all on the incompetence of the president and his appointees. By now, the proposition that the aftermath of the invasion has been marked by one disastrous blunder after another is accepted without question or qualification by just about everyone: open opponents of the Bush Doctrine eager to prove that they were right to denounce the invasion; Democrats whose main objective is to discredit the Bush administration; and erstwhile supporters who have lost heart and are looking for a way to justify their desertion.

But the charge of incompetence has also been hurled by strong supporters of the Bush Doctrine in general and of the invasion of Iraq in particular, whose purpose is to prod the people running the operation into doing a better job. The most authoritative such supporter, Eliot A. Cohen of Johns Hopkins, has expressed a

desire--barely controlled--to slap the highly educated fool who, having no soldier friends or family, once explained to me that mistakes happen in all wars, and that the casualties are not really all that high, and that I really shouldn't get exercised about them.

Now, this person may well have deserved a slap for being presumptuous toward a distinguished military historian, or for insensitivity in downplaying casualties when speaking to the father of an infantry officer on his way to Iraq. But at the risk of exposing myself as another highly educated fool, I must confess that I too think we need to be reminded that mistakes happen in all wars, and that the casualties in this one are very low by any historical standard.

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Before measuring Iraq in these two respects, I want to look more closely at some of the actions taken by the Bush administration that are universally accepted as mistakes, and to begin by pointing out that the main one is based on an outright falsification of the facts. This is the accusation that no thought was given to what would happen once we got to Baghdad and no plans were therefore made for dealing with the aftermath of the combat phase. Yet the plain truth is that much thought was given to, and many plans were made for dealing with, horrors that everyone expected to happen and then, mercifully, did not. Among these: house-to-house fighting to take Baghdad, the flight of a million or more refugees, the setting of the oil fields afire, and the outbreak of a major civil war.

As for the insurgency, even if its dimensions had accurately been foreseen, it would still have been impossible to eliminate it in short order. To cite Mr. Cohen himself:

If the insurgencies in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka, and Kashmir continue, what reason do we have to expect this one to end so soon?

A related group of alleged "mistakes" turn out on closer inspection to be judgment calls, concerning which it is possible for reasonable men to differ. The most widely circulated of these--especially among supporters of the war on the right--is that there were too few American "boots on the ground" to mount an effective campaign against the insurgency. Perhaps. And yet the key factor in fighting a terrorist insurgency is not the number of troops deployed against it but rather the amount and quality of the intelligence that can be obtained from infiltrating its ranks and from questioning prisoners (a task made all the more difficult for us by the campaign here at home to define torture down to the point where it would become illegal to subject even a captured terrorist to generally accepted methods of interrogation).

Finally, there are "mistakes" that were actually choices between two evils--choices that had to be made when it was by no means obvious which was the lesser of the two. The best example here is the policy of "de-Baathification." This led to a disbanding of the Iraqi army, whose embittered Sunni members were then putatively left with nothing to do but volunteer their services to the insurgency. Yet allowing Saddam Hussein's thugs to continue controlling the army would have embittered the Shiites and the Kurds instead, both of whom had suffered greatly at the hands of the Sunni minority. Is it self-evident that this would have been better for us or for Iraq?

However, even if I were to concede for the sake of argument that every one of these accusations was justified, I would still contend that they amounted to chump change when stacked up against the mistakes that were made in World War II--a war conducted by acknowledged giants like Roosevelt and Churchill. Tim Cavanaugh, in a posting on the website of Reason magazine, has offered a partial list of such blunders and the lives that were lost because of them: "American Marines were slaughtered at Tarawa because the pre-invasion bombardment of the island was woefully deficient. Hundreds of American paratroopers were killed by American anti-aircraft fire during landings in Italy--for that matter the entire campaign up the Italian boot was an obvious waste of time, resources, and lives that prevented the western Allies from getting seriously into the war until the middle of 1944. . . . In late 1944, Allied commanders failed to anticipate that the Germans would attack through Belgium despite their having done so in 1914 and 1940." In brief, Cavanaugh concludes, "On any given week, World War II offered more [foul-ups] and catastrophes than anything that has been seen in postwar Iraq."

And I would also still say, as I have said before, that the number of American casualties in Iraq is minimal as compared with the losses suffered in past wars: in World War II, 405,399; in Korea, 36,574; in Vietnam, 58,209. Similarly, the mistakes--again assuming they were mistakes rather than debatable judgment calls--committed in the first year after the fall of Saddam were relatively inconsequential when measured against those made in the aftermath of the Allied victories over Germany and Japan.

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Several Iraqi bloggers, and many letters written by American soldiers in the field that have found their way onto the Internet, paint a very different picture. Like Arthur Chrenkoff, these close-range observers do not overlook the persistence of major problems, and they do not deny that we still have a long way to go before Iraq becomes secure, stable and democratic. But they document with great detail the amazing progress that has been made, even under the gun of Islamofascist terrorism, in building--from scratch--the political morale of a country ravaged by "posttotalitarian stress disorder," in setting up the institutional foundations of a federal republic, in getting the economy moving, and in reconstructing the physical infrastructure.

The columnist Max Boot, who has himself been free with charges of incompetence, and who takes the position that we should have put more troops into Iraq, can (like Eliot Cohen) see clearly through his own reservations to provide a good summary of the situation as it now stands:

For starters, one can point to two successful elections . . ., on Jan. 30 and Oct. 15, in which the majority of Iraqis braved insurgent threats to vote. The constitutional referendum in October was particularly significant because it marked the first wholesale engagement of Sunnis in the political process. . . . This is big news. The most disaffected group in Iraq is starting to realize that it must achieve its objectives through ballots, not bullets.

Moving on to the economy, Mr. Boot (relying on a Brookings Institution report) tells us that "for all the insurgents' attempts to sabotage the Iraqi economy," per capita income has doubled since 2003 and is now 30% higher than it was before the war; that the Iraqi economy is projected to grow at a whopping 16.8% in 2006; and that there are five times as many cars on the streets than in Saddam Hussein's day, five as many more telephone subscribers, and 32 times as many Internet users.

Finally, Mr. Boot points out that whereas not a single independent media outlet existed in Iraq before 2003, there are now 44 commercial TV stations, 72 radio stations, and more than 100 newspapers.

To all of this we can add the 3,404 public schools, 304 water and sewage projects, 257 fire and police stations, and 149 public-health facilities that had been built as of September 2005, with another 921 such projects currently under construction.

As for the military front, a November 2005 report by the Committee on the Present Danger cites an example of what is being accomplished by American troops:

In the recent Operation Steel Curtain on the Syrian border, our troops detained more than 1,000 suspected insurgents. One hundred weapons caches were found and cleared. Since January, 116 of Zarqawi's lieutenants have been killed or captured.

The CPD report also notes the steady strengthening of the Iraqi armed forces, and the increasing degree of responsibility they are assuming in the fight against the insurgency:

[Since July] Iraq's armed forces . . . have added 22 new battalions, and 5,500 police-service personnel have been trained and equipped (as have some 2,000 special-police commanders). Coalition senior officers report that 80 Iraqi battalions now are able to fight alongside our troops and 36 are "generally able to conduct independent operations." More than 20 of the coalition's forward-operating bases have been turned over to the Iraqi army.

The CPD supports the campaign in Iraq. Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies is (to put it mildly) unfriendly to the Bush Doctrine and all its works. But Mr. Cordesman concurs with the CPD assessment. Citing slightly different statistics, he notes

continued increase in the number of Iraqi units able to take the lead in combat operations against the insurgency . . . progress of Iraqi units in assuming responsibility for the battle space . . . [and] continued increase in the number of units and individuals trained, equipped, and formed into operational status.

What this means in concrete terms is laid out by Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, also no great admirer of how the Bush administration has conducted the Iraq campaign:

For two years, when reporters would ask how it was possible that the mightiest military in history could not secure a five-kilometer stretch of road, the military responded with long, jargon-filled lectures. . . . Then one day this summer the military was ordered to secure the road. . . . Presto. Using Iraqi forces, the road was secured. Similar strategies have made cities like Najaf, Mosul, Tal Afar and even Falluja much safer today than they were a year ago.

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Why is there so little public awareness of these things? One young reporter, who proudly proclaims his membership in the mainstream media, has been only too happy to provide an explanation:

As long as American soldiers are getting killed nearly every day, we're not going to be giving much coverage to the opening of multimillion dollar sewage projects. American lives are worth more than Iraqi shit.

Observe, in this clever and brutal formulation, the professed concern with American casualties. From it, one might imagine that the statement is worlds away from the hostility to American military power--and to America in general--that pervaded the radical left in the 1960s and that in a milder liberal mutation came to be known as the "post-Vietnam syndrome." And it is certainly true that the antiwar movement spawned by Vietnam rarely had a tear to shed for the American lives that were being lost there. But the newfound tenderness toward our troops in Iraq does not in the least reflect a change in attitude toward the use of force by the United States. To the contrary, the relentless harping on American casualties by the mainstream media is part of an increasingly desperate effort to portray Iraq as another Vietnam: a foolish and futile (if not immoral and illegal) resort to military power in pursuit of a worthless (if not unworthy) goal.

Mark Twain once famously said that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. So it was, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, with the post-Vietnam syndrome. During those early weeks, a number of commentators were quick to proclaim the birth of an entirely new era in American history. What Dec. 7, 1941 had done to the isolationism of old, they announced, Sept. 11, 2001 had done to the Vietnam syndrome. Politically speaking, it was dead, and the fallout from the Vietnam War--namely, the hostility to America and especially to American military power--would follow it into the grave.

As is evident from the coverage of Iraq in the mainstream media, such pronouncements were more than a little premature: the Vietnam syndrome is still alive and well. But equally apparent is that the reporters and editors to whom it is a veritable religion understand very clearly that success in Iraq could deal the Vietnam syndrome a mortal blow. Little wonder, then, that they have so resolutely tried to ignore any and all signs of progress--or, when that becomes impossible, to dismiss them as so much "shit."

This, however, is at least a kind of tribute to our progress, if a perverse one. The same cannot be said of the opponents of the Bush Doctrine in the universities and think tanks, who are unwilling even to acknowledge that more and better things are happening in Iraq and the broader Middle East than are dreamed of in their philosophy.

Take Zbigniew Brzezinski, who left the academy to serve as Jimmy Carter's national security adviser and is now a professor again. In a recently published piece entitled "American Debacle," Mr. Brzezinski began by accusing George W. Bush of "suicidal statecraft," went on to pronounce the intervention in Iraq (along with everything else this president has done) a total disaster, and ended by urging that we withdraw from that country "perhaps even as early as next year." Unlike the late Sen. George Aiken of Vermont, who once proposed that we declare victory in Vietnam and then get out, Mr. Brzezinski wants to declare defeat in Iraq and then get out. This, he mysteriously assures us, will help restore "the legitimacy of America's global role."

Now I have to admit that I find it a little rich that George W. Bush should be accused of "suicidal statecraft" by, of all people, the man who in the late 1970s helped shape a foreign policy that emboldened the Iranians to seize and hold American hostages while his boss in the Oval Office stood impotently by for almost six months before finally authorizing a rescue operation so inept that it only compounded our national humiliation.

And where was Mr. Brzezinski--famed at the time for his anticommunism--when the President he served congratulated us on having overcome our "inordinate fear of communism"? Where was Mr. Brzezinski--known far and wide for his hard-line determination to resist Soviet expansionism--when Cyrus Vance, the then secretary of state, declared that the Soviet Union and the United States had "similar dreams and aspirations," and when Mr. Carter himself complacently informed us that containment was no longer necessary? And how was it that, despite daily meetings with Mr. Brzezinski, Mr. Carter remained so blind to the nature of the Soviet regime that the invasion of Afghanistan, as he himself would admit, taught him more in a week about the nature of that regime than he had managed to learn in an entire lifetime? Had the cat gotten Mr. Brzezinski's tongue in the three years leading up to that invasion--the same tongue he now wags with such confidence at George W. Bush?

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But even if Mr. Brzezinski's record over the past 30 years did not disqualify him from dispensing advice on how to conduct American foreign policy, this diatribe against Mr. Bush would by itself be enough. For here he looks over the Middle East, and what does he see? He sees the United States being "stamped as the imperialistic successor to Britain and as a partner of Israel in the military repression of the Arabs." This may not be fair, he covers himself by adding; but not a single word does he say to indicate that the British created the very despotisms the United States is now trying to replace with democratic regimes, or that George W. Bush is the first American president to have come out openly for a Palestinian state.

Again Mr. Brzezinski looks over the Middle East, and what does he see? He sees the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and by extension Guantanamo, causing the loss of America's "moral standing" as a "country that has stood tall" against "political repression, torture, and other violations of human rights." And that is all he sees--quite as though we never liberated Afghanistan from the theocratic tyranny of the Taliban, or Iraq from the fascist despotism of Saddam Hussein. But how, after all, when it comes to standing tall against "political repression, torture, and other violations of human rights," can such achievements compare with a sanctimonious lecture by Jimmy Carter followed by the embrace of one Third World dictator after another?

Then for a third time Mr. Brzezinski looks over the Middle East, and what does he see? He sees more and more sympathy for terrorism, and more and more hatred of America, being generated throughout the region by our actions in Iraq; and in this context, too, that is all he sees. About the momentous encouragement that our actions have given to the forces of reform that never dared act or even speak up before, he is completely silent--though it is a phenomenon that even so inveterate a hater of America as the Lebanese dissident Walid Jumblatt has found himself compelled to recognize. Thus, only a few months after declaring that "the killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is legitimate and obligatory," Mr. Jumblatt suddenly woke up to what those U.S. soldiers had actually been doing for the world in which he lived:

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 [in January 2005], eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.

The columnist Michael Barone has listed some of the developments that bear out Jumblatt's judgment:

[The] progress toward democracy in Iraq is leading Middle Easterners to concentrate on the question of how to build decent governments and decent societies. We can see the results--the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the first seriously contested elections in Egypt, Libya's giving up WMD's, the Jordanian protests against Abu Musab Zarqawi's recent suicide attacks, and even a bit of reform in Saudi Arabia.

Even in Syria, reports the Washington Post's David Ignatius:

People talk politics . . . with a passion I haven't heard since the 1980s in Eastern Europe. They're writing manifestos, dreaming of new political parties, trying to rehabilitate old ones from the 1950s.

And not only in Syria. As the democratic activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who, like Mr. Jumblatt, originally opposed the invasion of Iraq, told Mr. Ignatius's colleague Jim Hoagland:

Those [in the Middle East] who believe in democracy and civil society are finally actors . . . [because the invasion of Iraq] has unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon's 1798 expedition did. Elections in Iraq force the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only to fight against us. Look, neither Napoleon nor President Bush could impregnate the region with political change. But they were able to be midwives.

Nor are such changes confined to the political sphere alone. According to a report in The Economist, a revulsion against terrorism has begun to spread among Muslim clerics, including some who, like the secular Mr. Jumblatt, were only recently applauding its use against Americans:

Moderate Muslim clerics have grown increasingly concerned at the abuse of religion to justify killing. In Saudi Arabia, numerous preachers once famed for their fighting words now advise tolerance and restraint. Even so rigid a defender of suicide attacks against Israel . . . as Yusuf Qaradawi, the star preacher of the popular al-Jazeera satellite channel, denounces bombings elsewhere and calls on the perpetrators to repent.

Zbigniew Brzezinski may be wrongheaded, but he is neither blind nor stupid. Why, then, his willful silence in the face of all these signs of progress? I can only interpret it as the product of a rising panic. No less than the denizens of the mainstream media, he is desperately struggling to salvage a worldview that, like theirs, should have been but was not killed off by 9/11 and that, like theirs, may well suffer a truly mortal blow if the Bush Doctrine passes through the great test of fire it is undergoing in Iraq.

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Mr. Brzezinski's worldview is a syncretistic mix of foreign-policy realism (with its emphasis on stability and the sanctity of national borders) and liberal internationalism (with its unshakable faith in compromise, consensus and international institutions). In this he differs somewhat from another former national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, a Republican who occupied the office under George W. Bush's father and whose own commitment to the realist perspective is pure and unadulterated.

In spite of this difference, the two men are at one in regarding the war in Iraq as a disastrous distraction from the really important business to which we should be attending in the Middle East--namely, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. In an article published some months before the invasion and entitled "Don't Attack Saddam," Mr. Scowcroft wrote:

Possibly the most dire consequence [of attacking Saddam] would be the effect in the region. The shared view in the region is that Iraq is principally an obsession of the U.S. The obsession of the region, however, is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If we were seen to be turning our backs on that bitter conflict, there would be an explosion of outrage against us.

Evidently he still holds to this view. So does Mr. Brzezinski, who attacks "the Bush team" for having transformed "a manageable, though serious, challenge of largely regional origin into an international debacle," and who urges us to get out of Iraq, the sooner the better, so that we can shift our focus back to where it really belongs--"the Israeli-Palestinian peace process."

Well, whether the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is truly "the obsession of the region" or, rather, a screen for other things, it certainly is the obsession of Messrs. Brzezinski and Scowcroft, as it is of almost everyone else who looks at the Middle East from the so-called realist perspective and to whom stability is the great desideratum. Even from that perspective, however, the nonstop preoccupation with Israel would seem to be warranted only if the conflict with the Palestinians were the main cause of instability throughout the region.

This is indeed what Messrs. Brzezinski, Scowcroft, and most other members of the realist school believe. (But not Henry Kissinger, the leading realist of them all. Even though he is skeptical about the possibility of democratizing the Middle East, Mr. Kissinger favored the invasion of Iraq and thinks that victory there is essential. Nor does he believe that the war between the Palestinians and Israel is the most important problem in the world, or even in the Middle East.)

Yet the realities to which the realists are so deferential in the abstract make utter nonsense of this idea. Since the birth of Israel in 1948, there have been something like two dozen wars in the Middle East (variously involving Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Iraq) that have had nothing whatever to do with the Jewish state, or with the Palestinians. In one of these alone--the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88--more lives were lost than in all the wars involving Israel put together.

The obsessive animus against Israel goes hand in hand with the overall strategy for dealing with the Middle East that prevailed before 9/11, and to which Messrs. Brzezinski and Scowcroft are still married, heart and soul and mind. The best and most succinct description of that strategy was given by President Bush himself in explaining why 9/11 had driven him to reject it in favor of a radically different approach:

For decades free nations tolerated oppression in the Middle East for the sake of stability. In practice, this approach brought little stability and much oppression, so I have changed this policy.

And again:

In the past, . . . longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold.

We learn from Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker that, when Condoleezza Rice quoted these words to Scowcroft (her former mentor), he responded that the policy Bush was rejecting had actually brought us "50 years of peace." (What, asked James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal, "do you call someone" who can describe the many wars that have been fought in the Middle East in the past five decades as "50 years of peace"? Mr. Taranto's sardonic answer: "A 'realist.' ")

In addition to remaining convinced that the old way of doing things was right, Mr. Scowcroft is utterly disdainful of the new approach being followed by George W. Bush, which (as I like to describe it) is to make the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy. "I believe," he told Jeffrey Goldberg, "that you cannot with one sweep of the hand or the mind cast off thousands of years of history." But the despotisms in the Middle East are not thousands of years old, and they were not created by Allah or the Prophet Muhammad. All of them were established after World War I--that is, less than a century ago--by the British and the French.

This being the case, there is nothing "utopian" about the idea that such regimes--planted with shallow roots by two Western powers--could be uprooted with the help of a third Western power, and that a better political system could be put in their place. And, in fact, this is exactly what has been happening before our very eyes in Iraq. In the span of three short years, Iraq, liberated by the United States from the totalitarian tyranny of Saddam Hussein, has taken one giant step after another toward democratization. Yet Mr. Scowcroft can still assure us that "you're not going to democratize Iraq," and certainly not "in any reasonable time frame."

As with Mr. Brzezinski, so again it seems that nothing else but panic can explain so astonishing a degree of denial.

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Like the mainstream media and the theorists in the academy and the think tanks, the Democratic Party--fearing that it might be frozen out of power for a very long time to come--is also in a panic over the signs that George W. Bush's new approach to the greater Middle East is on the verge of passing the test of Iraq. Hence the veritable hysteria with which the Democrats have recently tried to delegitimize the war: first by claiming (three years after the fact!) that it had begun with a lie, and then by declaring that it was ending in a defeat. Leaning heavily on the turn in public opinion largely brought about by reports in the mainstream media and the lucubrations of the theorists, the Democrats--with the notably honorable exception of Sen. Joseph Lieberman--now joined in by clamoring openly for a withdrawal of American forces from Iraq.

A goodly number of these Democrats (party chairman Howard Dean and Rep. Cynthia McKinney, to name only two) are the "Tories" of today, in the sense of having from the very beginning stood openly and unambiguously against the revolution in foreign policy represented by the Bush Doctrine and now being put to the test in Iraq. But a much larger number of Democrats fit more smoothly into Tom Paine's category of "disguised" Tories. These are the congressmen and senators who in their heart of hearts were against the resolution authorizing the president to use force against Saddam Hussein, but who--given the state of public opinion at the time--feared being punished at the polls unless they voted for it. Now, however, with public opinion moving in the other direction, they have been emboldened to "show their heads."

Finally, we have a certain number of Democrats who correspond to "the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots" of the American Revolution. One of them is Rep. John Murtha, who backed the invasion of Iraq because (to give him the benefit of the doubt) he really thought it was the right thing to do, but who has now bought entirely into the view that all is lost and that the only sensible course is to turn tail:

The war in Iraq is . . . a flawed policy wrapped in illusion. . . . Our military is suffering. The future of our country is at risk. We cannot continue on the present course. It is evident that continued military action is not in the best interests of the United States of America, the Iraqi people, or the Persian Gulf region. . . . Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against U.S. forces and we have become a catalyst for violence. U.S. troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, Saddamists, and foreign jihadists. . . . Our military has done everything that has been asked of them, the U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. It is time to bring them home.

It seems never to have occurred to Mr. Murtha that talk of this kind could only confuse and demoralize the troops for whose welfare, and for whose sufferings, he expresses such concern. By all accounts, those troops are very proud of what they are accomplishing in Iraq. How then could they not be confounded when a respected congressman--a former Marine, no less--declares that they have been fighting for nothing, nothing whatsoever, and when for saying so he gets a standing ovation from his fellow Democrats? How could they not be demoralized to be told that there is no point in going on because their very presence in Iraq is making things worse for everyone concerned?

And how, by the same token, could talk of this kind fail to give new heart to the Islamofascist terrorists--just when they are on the run? How could they not be delighted to see the elected representatives of the American people carrying on a heated debate in which the only questions at issue are how quickly to bug out of Iraq, and whether to fix a timetable and a deadline? How could they not feel vindicated when, after being surprised by the fierce reaction of the Americans to 9/11, they now behold fresh evidence for believing that Osama bin Laden was right after all when he called us a paper tiger?

On the other hand, if (as the president intended all along, as he reiterated in his great speech of Nov. 30 at Annapolis, and as is prescribed in the recently declassified "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq") American forces are drawn down only at the rate and to the extent that they can be replaced with similar numbers of Iraqi soldiers and policemen fully capable of taking over, the joy now being felt by the Islamofascists will commensurately be replaced by dread. For no one knows better than they that, once up to snuff and on their own, the new Iraqi forces will be less inhibited than the Americans by moral considerations and accordingly much more ruthless in the way they fight.

---

Tom Paine grew so disgusted with "the mean principles that are held by the Tories," with the hypocrisy of the disguised Tories, and with the shrinking from hardship of the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots of 1776-77 that he finally gave up trying to persuade them:

I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world to either their folly or their baseness.

And so, "quitting this class of men . . . who see not the full extent of the evil that threatens them," Paine turned "to those who have nobly stood, and are yet determined to stand the matter out," and rested his hopes on them.

These hopes, we know and thank God for it, were not disappointed. And neither will be the hopes of those today who likewise see "the full extent of the evil that threatens" us; who understand the necessity of the war that our country has been waging against it; who recognize the moral, political, and intellectual boldness of how George W. Bush has chosen to fight this war; and who take pride in the nobility of what the United States, at whose birth Tom Paine assisted, is now, more than 200 years later, battling to achieve in Iraq and, in the fullness of time, in the entire region of which Iraq is so crucial a part.

Mr. Podhoretz is editor-at-large of Commentary and author of 10 books, most recently "The Norman Podhoretz Reader," edited by Thomas L. Jeffers (Free Press, 2004). This article will appear in Commentary's January issue.

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

Heritage Quote

"This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest of ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties."

-- John Jay (Federalist No. 2)

Election: Iraq

The voting has started!

An Iraqi patient shows his finger tainted with ink as mark for already casting his vote at the Central Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, Dec. 12, 2005. Iraqis began voting Monday in hospitals, military camps and prisons, ahead of general elections to be held Dec. 15, while the estimated 1.5 million voters living outside the country can cast their ballots at polling centers in 15 countries. (AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)

Iraqi soldiers celebrate after voting in the national election, at Kirkush Military Training Base, 65 km (43 miles) northeast of Baghdad December 12, 2005. Voting began at Iraq's military bases, hospitals and prisons on Monday, with security forces, detainees and the ill kicking off the country's first elections for a full-term parliament since the fall of Saddam Hussein. (REUTERS/Bob Strong)

And also to the brave Iraqi people who are forging a new nation against all odds.

Haifa Street, Baghdad

Major K. writes about a trip along the once-deadly Haifa Street in Baghdad.

We made the trip as part of our routine "battlefield circulation." (Militar-ese for checking up on subordinate units.) As we drove down the formerly infamous Haifa Street, our progress was slow, not because of the elevated threat, but because of the heavy traffic. What had been a semi-deserted shooting gallery was again a bustling business district. Kiosks and stores bursting with goods for sale and shoppers were pushed all the way to the curb.

He goes on to comment some about some of the preparations for the Iraqi election, and he ends his post with:

The overwhelming majority of Mosques are preaching participation in the election this time as the consequences of boycotting elections have been deemed to be undesireable. Both Shia and Sunni Mosques are preaching the "get out the vote" message" including several Mosques that have been virulently anti-coalition and pro-insurgency. While they are probably just "playing both sides" of the game, it is still a good thing to hear them pushing their followers to embrace the ballot rather than only the gun.

I think that we Americans are getting the best Christmas present ever this month. We are taking part in the birth of a new democratic nation of free people.

Afghanistan lost

I hope and pray that the things said in this article are not true. Here's an excerpt:

Lack of freedom is just one of the areas where little has changed. The U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom calls the present Karzai government and the new constitution "Taliban-lite." And for good reason. War lords and drug lords have strengthened their grip over large areas of the country, while opium production and exportation has boomed. There are frequent allegations that the government is involved in the drug trade, something the Afghan president does not deny. Many conservative clerics, jihadists, and war lords, even former Taliban, have gained a semblance of legitimacy as new members of parliament.

Read it and weep.

Solar Prius

This is my kind of car!

Heritage Quote

"There is something so far-fetched and so extravagant in the idea of danger to liberty from the militia that one is at a loss whether to treat it with gravity or with raillery; whether to consider it as a mere trial of skill, like the paradoxes of rhetoricians; as a disingenuous artifice to instil prejudices at any price; or as the serious."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 29, 10 January 1788)

Heritage Quote

"Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge; I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers."

-- John Adams (Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law, 1765)

The correct frame of reference . . .

. . . for Saddam Hussein's guilt or innocence is not determined by his histrionics about dirty underwear and no showers, nor is it Ramsey Clark's line of bull, it is by things like the chemical assault on Halabja that Saddam ordered. (The pictures at the link are very disturbing, so please be warned.)

The man is a monster who spent decades brutally stripping men, women, and children of their dignity, their freedom, and their lives.

Please forgive me for saying this, but I feel that the Iraqis should give him a fair trial -- while widely publicizing his murderous excesses --and then promptly execute him.

An open letter of gratitude

Congressman Tom Price has written a letter of thanks to the troops in Iraq in support of the Thank a Soldier Week (19-23 December). Here's an excerpt:

Iraq’s economy is growing and is expected to continue to grow. New businesses are forming and the GDP continues to rise. In addition, this year, the number of intelligence tips from Iraqi citizens has gone from 483 in March to more than 4,700 in September. You have clearly had a profound impact on the growth and security of Iraq.

As you lay the foundation for a prosperous and democratic Iraq, you are building more than just buildings and roads. You are rebuilding lives. In the future, Iraqi children will be able to grow up safely. They will no longer live in fear. Families will be able to live together in harmony. Children will have access to a quality education and healthcare. Most importantly, the people of Iraq will experience one of the most joyous rights that you and I experience everyday – freedom.

Thank you, Congressman Price.

Book list

Thomas Sowell shares a list of books that influenced his life. Among which, surprisingly enough, are the writings of Karl Marx.

He also remarks about his transition from political left to political right:

There was no book that changed my mind about being on the political left. Life experience did that -- especially the experience of seeing government at work from the inside.

I found his article interesting. In fact, there are now a couple of books newly added to my Christmas list as a direct result of reading it.

Heritage Quote

"Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free."

-- Thomas Jefferson (Autobiography, 1821)

Elections -- Iraqi style

What a difference ten months make!

In January, most candidates outside the dominant few parties largely eschewed campaigning, fearing they could be kidnapped or assassinated. Now, even long shots are getting into the act. One day this week, National Democratic Institute instructors explained get-out-the-vote techniques to a dozen members of the Free Iraq Gathering, a new coalition that "probably won't get many more votes than you see in that room," according to an institute employee.

Spoiled brat politics

Thomas Sowell goes straight to heart of things with his op-ed about asserting one's rights by depriving others of theirs. Here's a taste (emphasis added):

The reason there is a legal issue is that a federal law has been passed, saying that colleges and universities that forbid military recruiters from coming on campus are no longer eligible to receive federal money.

Academics are outraged. They see this law as a violation of their freedom -- including their right to violate their students' freedom. It is classic spoiled brat politics, based on the idea that what I want overrides what you want.

He also delves into property rights. Recommended reading.

Lake Charles, LA -- disaster area

Lake Charles, Louisiana is still reeling from the double devastation of huricanes Katrina and Rita.

Something like $10 billion worth of damage has been done to the area.

"We are on our knees," said Calcasieu Parish Police Jury President Hal McMillin during a recent tour of the area.

Unlike some other Louisiana state and city officials, though, Lake Charles officials have a can-do attitude, and they are steadily working to recover.

But they still need our help.

"Please don't forget us," Swift said. "We need help here."

Heritage Quote

"The prosperity of commerce is now perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth, and has accordingly become a primary object of its political cares."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 12, 27 November 1787)

A different Christmas Poem

Blackfive has posted A Different Christmas Poem. It's a moving tribute to the soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen who serve to guard us from our enemies.

I've reprinted it into the extended entry, but click on the link above to read Blackfive's comments.

A DIFFERENT CHRISTMAS POEM

The embers glowed softly, and in their dim light,

I gazed round the room and I cherished the sight.

My wife was asleep, her head on my chest,

My daughter beside me, angelic in rest.

Outside the snow fell, a blanket of white,

transforming the yard to a winter delight.

The sparkling lights in the tree I believe,

completed the magic that was Christmas Eve.

My eyelids were heavy, my breathing was deep,

Secure and surrounded by love I would sleep.

In perfect contentment, or so it would seem,

So I slumbered, perhaps I started to dream.

The sound wasn't loud, and it wasn't too near,

But I opened my eyes when it tickled my ear.

Perhaps just a cough, I didn't quite know,

Then the sure sound of footsteps outside in the snow.

My soul gave a tremble, I struggled to hear,

And I crept to the door just to see who was near.

Standing out in the cold and the dark of the night,

a lone figure stood, his face weary and tight.

A soldier, I puzzled, some twenty years old,

Perhaps a Marine, huddled here in the cold.

Alone in the dark, he looked up and smiled,

standing watch over me, and my wife and my child.

"What are you doing?" I asked without fear,

"Come in this moment, it's freezing out here!

Put down your pack, brush the snow from your sleeve,

You should be at home on a cold Christmas Eve!"

For barely a moment I saw his eyes shift,

Away from the cold and the snow blown in drifts..

To the window that danced with a warm fire's light.

Then he sighed and he said "Its really all right,

I'm out here by choice. I'm here every night."

"It's my duty to stand at the front of the line,

That separates you from the darkest of times.

No one had to ask or beg or implore me,

I'm proud to stand here like my fathers before me.

My Gramps died at 'Pearl on a day in December,"

Then he sighed, "That's a Christmas 'Gram always remembers."

My dad stood his watch in the jungles of 'Nam,'

And now it is my turn and so, here I am.

I've not seen my own son in more than a while,

But my wife sends me pictures, he's sure got her smile.

Then he bent and he carefully pulled from his bag,

The red, white, and blue... an American flag.

"I can live through the cold and the being alone,

Away from my family, my house and my home.

I can stand at my post through the rain and the sleet,

I can sleep in a foxhole with little to eat.

I can carry the weight of killing another,

Or lay down my life with my sister and brother..

Who stand at the front against any and all,

To ensure for all time that this flag will not fall."

"So go back inside," he said, "harbor no fright,

Your family is waiting and I'll be all right."

"But isn't there something I can do, at the least,

"Give you money," I asked, "or prepare you a feast?"

It seems all too little for all that you've done,

For being away from your wife and your son."

Then his eye welled a tear that held no regret,

"Just tell us you love us, and never forget.

To fight for our rights back at home while we're gone,

To stand your own watch, no matter how long.

For when we come home, either standing or dead,

To know you remember we fought and we bled.

Is payment enough, and with that we will trust,

That we mattered to you as you mattered to us.

If Pearl Harbor happened today . . .

Sacred Cow Burgers presents: "If It Happened Today" by Jay D. Dyson (12/07/2005).

It's worth the click . . .

[Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.]

Not a 'failed war'

FR8, over at There and Back Again, has a post up with his thoughts on US troops in Iraq. Here's an excerpt:

This is not, in my limited knowledge of this war, a failed war by any means. These media moguls, government “officials” and other experts have no clue about this war and what it is like on the ground. Until these people have actually looked into the face of an Iraqi when you stop thugs from robbing his home and see the gratitude, then they will understand that this is not a failed war. Also, where are the reports about all of the schools that have been opened since the fall of Saddam? Since his fall, there have been numerous schools for girls opened to provide an opportunity that was never there before. You never here about the good news stories. Maybe if a few more of these stories were being reported then maybe the American people could understand why we are here.

Oh, and by the way, FR8 is an officer in the Army and is currently deployed in Iraq (for his second time). He's also a fellow Aggie. To be honest, I find his assessment to be much more credible than Representative Murtha's on this matter.

7 Dec 1941 - Day of Infamy

Today marks the 64th anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor -- launching America into four years of war that touched every habitable continent on Earth.

Democracy in Europe and Japan florished as a result of America's involvement in the fighting during WWII, and the nation-building afterward. We are well on our way to repeating that accomplishment in the Middle East -- starting with Afghanistan and Iraq.

With all of its blemishes, America still rocks.

Heritage Quote

"In my judgement it is not only ripe for the measure, but in danger of becoming rotten for the want of it."

-- John Witherspoon (debate over the Declaration, July 1776)

Our robust economy

President Bush spoke in Kernersville, NC on Monday. Gateway Pundit talks about his speech and our Media's reaction to it.

Here is a quote from Bush's speech where he details some documented economic figures:

Just this past Friday, the latest figures show:

* Our economy added 215,000 jobs in the month of November alone.
* Our unemployment rate is down to five percent.
* Unemployment is lower than the average of the 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s.
* The latest numbers also show the economy grew at 4.3 percent last quarter.
* And it has been growing at near that average for more than two years.
* This economy of ours is on the move.
* Americans are buying homes, and that's good news for this country. We hit an all-time high in October, in terms of home buying.
* More Americans now own their homes than any time in our nation's history.
* Minority ownership -- home ownership is at an all-time high in the United States of America.
* Real disposable income is up
* Our consumers are confident.
* New orders for durable goods, like machinery, have risen sharply, and shipments of manufactured goods are up, as well.
* Business activity in our manufacturing sector reported its 30th straight month of growth.
* In the past five years, productivity has grown at some of the fastest rates since the 1960s.
* Our small businesses are thriving.
* Fortunately, I didn't listen to the pessimists about tax cuts. The tax cuts are working.
* We've cut the rate of growth in non-security discretionary spending.
* We're on track to reach our goal of cutting the budget deficit in half by 2009.

Thanks to tax relief, and spending restraint, and pro-growth economic policies, this economy is strong, businesses are booming, and the people in this country are working.

The economy is rolling along better now than it has in the last three decades -- especially if you take into account the major economic hits we took with Katrina and Rita, and the drain on the economy the war and reconstruction in Iraq is effecting.

So why do we, as a people, think that things are not doing well in this country economically?

Helping Iraqis

Thunder Six posted about a patrol last month that resulted in two injured boys being treated by US Army medics.

And it looks like limbs, if not lives, were saved in the process.

This is in direct contrast to John Kerry's characterization of our troops "terrorizing" Iraqi citizens.

Heritage Quote

"So that the executive and legislative branches of the national government depend upon, and emanate from the states. Every where the state sovereignties are represented; and the national sovereignty, as such, has no representation."

-- Joseph Story (Commentaries on the Constitution, 1833)

Sinister peace movements

Robert Avrech, over at Seraphic Secret, brings the reader a history lesson about peace movements. Here's a snippet:

Rule # 1 of Peace Movements: They cannot imagine nor confront evil.
Rule # 2 of Peace Movements: They do not care about history.
Rule # 3 of Peace Movements: They are always secretly financed and penetrated by the enemy.

He provides much more in his post. I recommend the post as well as his blog.

Quotables

Major K provides us with some interesting perspectives on current events in Iraq.

On the trial of Saddam Hussein:

-Just execute him already. Everyone knows he is guilty. Why are we keeping him alive for this unnecessary trial? The insurgency will be greatly reduced once he is dead. We should handle him like the Romanians handled Nikolai Ceausescu.

On the secret Ministry of the Interior detention facility where several detainees showed marks from being tortured:

-What is the big deal? That place was not nearly as bad as what happened under Saddam.

On the kidnapping of 4 western activists from the Christian Peacemaker Teams organization:

-They went to meet with Harith al Dhari at the Mother of All Battles Mosque and did not bring bodyguards or some other form of protection? They were asking for it.

It should be noted that these remarks were not made by Major K., but by civilian Iraqis living in Iraq . . .

Heritage Quote

Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

-- Benjamin Franklin (letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, 13 November 1789)

On Islam, Intelligent Design, and Darwinism

Mustafa Akyol has a very thought-provoking article about some seemingly unrelated things that give insight into how Muslims perceive us "Westerners".

This is a fairly long read, but he's tackling a heavy subject, and it is well worth your time.

Heritage Quote

"We have heard of the impious doctrine in the old world, that the people were made for kings, not kings for the people. Is the same doctrine to be revived in the new, in another shape - that the solid happiness of the people is to be sacrificed to the views of political institutions of a different form? It is too early for politicians to presume on our forgetting that the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 45)

Strategy Guide

[Hat tip to Instapundit.]

Heritage Quote

"The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it."

-- James Wilson (Of the Study of Law in the United States, Circa 1790)

Old news, but still pertinent

Back in September 2003, John Leo wrote an op-ed about John Burns' book describing western journalism in Saddam's Iraq. Here's an excerpt:

Eason said he knew all about the beatings and electroshock torture. One woman who talked to CNN was beaten daily for months in front of her father, then torn limb from limb. Her body parts were left in a bag on her family's doorstep. But CNN's viewers hadn't been told.

John Burns was the New York Times bureau chief in Iraq prior to providing comments for the book referred to in this article, so he has some credibility.

Saddam's regime was harder on the Iraqis than the U.S. occupation has been -- even with the terrorism going on there still.

Heritage Quote

"The law of nature and the law of revelation are both Divine: they flow, though in different channels, from the same adorable source. It is indeed preposterous to separate them from each other."

-- James Wilson (of the Law of Nature, 1804)

Democracy rising

Jim Hoagland, over at the Washington Post, has a optimistic op-ed up about the surprising spread of democracy in the Middle East.

Events in the Middle East now force political leaders to eat vows never to do certain things and then pronounce the dish tasty. Their reversals carry seeds of hope for a desperate region.

He never actually says that America's foreign policy for that region -- including the war in Afghanistan and Iraq -- could be the impetus for these very positive changes, but at least he acknowledges that some good maybe happening over there.

And he's right.

Selective reporting No. 6798

A report about a Marine's experience with the unbalanced reporting of our news media. Here's a taste:

. . . the battle of Fallujah was one of the fiercest engagements of the war. During the battle, Bowers found himself sharing a ride with an embedded reporter for the AP. He was asked what he thought of the destruction. Bowers responded that it was "Incredible, overwhelming. But it definitely had to be done." He also stressed that because the enemy had fought so dirty, tough calls had to be made. Later, he saw himself quoted in newspapers around the country to the effect that the destruction was "overwhelming" as if he could not cope.

There really is another side to the stories we hear on the nightly news and read in the daily papers . . .

Heritage Quote

"Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties, and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates... to cherish the interest of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them."

-- John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776)

Corruption

Jack Kelly has a post in his blog about Randy "Duke" Cunningham's guilty plea to accepting bribes.

He also included a column about bipartisan systemic corruption in our federal government and how best to overcome it. I've included that part of his post in the extended entry.

BY JACK KELLY

Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Cal, pled guilty Monday to accepting $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors, and resigned from Congress. He faces up to ten years in prison when he is sentenced in February.

Perhaps Duke will share a cell with Rep. Bob Ney, R-OH, identified as "Representative #1" in the plea agreement made Nov. 21st by lobbyist Michael Scanlon, who was press secretary to then House GOP Whip Tom Delay, R-Tex.

Scanlon pled guilty to bribing a congressman, and to defrauding Indian tribes of $19.7 million. He is the first domino to fall in the Justice department's investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, another associate of Rep. Delay. There will be more.

"Investigators are looking at half a dozen members of Congress, current and former senior Hill aides, a former deputy secretary of the Interior, and Abramoff's former lobbying colleagues," said the Washington Post.

Ney was the only lawmaker mentioned in Mr. Scanlon's plea agreement, which listed a series of campaign contributions and gifts made "in exchange for a series of official acts."

Democrats have been claiming that corruption in Congress is a new, and uniquely Republican, phenomenon. But among nearly three dozen lawmakers who lobbied the Interior Department to block a license for an Indian casino in Louisiana after receiving contributions from rival tribes represented by Abramoff were many Democrats, among them Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, and Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, the senior Democrat on the committee investigating Abramoff.

Democrats, among them President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, accepted illegal contributions from the Chinese government in 1996.
But there is no question that Republicans, who were swept into control of the House of Representatives in 1994 largely because of public outrage over the House banking and House post office scandals, have become what they came to Washington to clean up.

Partisans argue the other party is inherently more corrupt. But the problem is bipartisan, and systemic. Power corrupts. The greater the power is, and the longer that it is held, the more likely it is to be abused.

Systemic problems can be solved only by changing the system. There are three reforms that could break the stranglehold lobbyists have on our politics.

The first is to limit the tenure of members of Congress. If senators were restricted to two consecutive six year terms, and representatives to six consecutive two year terms, much mischief could be avoided.

The second is to give to the president the line item veto, a power currently enjoyed by all but seven state governors. Lobbyists would not go to such great lengths to have pork inserted into appropriations bills if the president could remove it with the stroke of a pen.

Both of these reforms would require constitutional amendments, and neither are sufficient to make a huge dent in the culture of corruption that pervades Washington.

Most important is genuine campaign finance reform. Special interest groups derive their power from the dependence lawmakers in both parties have on them to obtain the funds they require to win re-election. Only when politicians have been weaned from this dependency will there be a substantial reduction in political corruption.

The McCain-Feingold law and earlier attempts at campaign finance reform have faltered mostly because they have wrongly defined the problem as too much money in politics, when the real problem is where the money comes from, and the strings attached to it.

Candidates for federal office should be permitted to accept campaign contributions only from citizens of the United States who are registered to vote in the state from which they are seeking election, or from the political party to which they belong.

There should be limits on how much an individual can give, because no one should be able to own their own congressman. But they should be higher than they are at present.

A form of public financing of elections is required, because political parties cannot constitutionally be forbidden to accept special interest money except as a quid pro quo for receipt of federal funds.

Public outrage is building. If Republicans don't get serious about corruption, we can't be certain the next Congress will be more honest. We can be certain it will be more Democratic.

Trusted agent

Major K has a post up about how many Iraqis trust U.S. forces to act as mediators in disputes between Iraqis.

For a balanced view, you should go read the whole thing, but here is his conclusion:

This brings two things to mind. Firstly, the average Iraqi will often (not always) trust us more than other Iraqis outside of their family when it comes to fair and humane treatment. Secondly, for all of the people at home and in the media that think we are such a widely hated and mistrusted "occupying force," I would like to know why they think the Iraqis hate their honest broker. I have found that only the arhabi do.

The "arhabi" he refers to are the terrorists, both foreign and domestic, in Iraq.