Heritage Quote

"Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom."

-- John Adams (Defense of the Constitutions, 1787)

Apologies

I apologize for not blogging since I returned home this week. I unknowingly brought something nasty, an intestinal virus, home from Louisiana and then shared it with my family. We're all doing better now, but it was an unpleasant couple of days.

Hey, at least it's Friday . . .

America's heritage

Peggy Noonan does an admirable job of putting into words the idea that Americans are in danger of losing their unique heritage -- because of our flagging patriotism. Here is part of her conclusion:

When you don't love something you lose it. If we do not teach new Americans to love their country, and not for braying or nationalistic reasons but for reasons of honest and thoughtful appreciation, and gratitude, for a history that is something new in the long story of man, then we will begin to lose it.

It is well worth your time to read this.

I've reprinted the rest in the extended entry.

Patriots, Then and Now
With nations as with people, love them or lose them.

Thursday, March 30, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

I had a great experience the other night. I met some of the 114 living recipients of the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military award. It was at their annual dinner, held, as it has been the past four years, at the New York Stock Exchange.

I met Nick Oresko. Nick is in his 80s, small, 5-foot-5 or so. Soft white hair, pale-pink skin, thick torso, walks with a cane. Just a nice old guy you'd pass on the street or in the airport without really seeing him. Around his neck was a sky-blue ribbon, and hanging from that ribbon the medal. He let me turn it over. It had his name, his rank, and then "1/23/45. Near Tettington, Germany."

Tettington, Germany. The Battle of the Bulge.

When I got home I looked up his citation on my beloved Internet, where you can Google heroism. U.S. Army Master Sgt. Nicholas Oresko of Company C, 302nd Infantry, 94th Infantry Division was a platoon leader in an attack against strong enemy positions:

Deadly automatic fire from the flanks pinned down his unit. Realizing that a machinegun in a nearby bunker must be eliminated, he swiftly worked ahead alone, braving bullets which struck about him, until close enough to throw a grenade into the German position. He rushed the bunker and, with pointblank rifle fire, killed all the hostile occupants who survived the grenade blast. Another machinegun opened up on him, knocking him down and seriously wounding him in the hip. Refusing to withdraw from the battle, he placed himself at the head of his platoon to continue the assault. As withering machinegun and rifle fire swept the area, he struck out alone in advance of his men to a second bunker. With a grenade, he crippled the dug-in machinegun defending this position and then wiped out the troops manning it with his rifle, completing his second self-imposed, 1-man attack. Although weak from loss of blood, he refused to be evacuated until assured the mission was successfully accomplished. Through quick thinking, indomitable courage, and unswerving devotion to the attack in the face of bitter resistance and while wounded, M /Sgt. Oresko killed 12 Germans, prevented a delay in the assault, and made it possible for Company C to obtain its objective with minimum casualties.

Nick Oresko lives in Tenafly, N.J. If courage were a bright light, Tenafly would glow.

---

I met Pat Brady of Sumner, Wash., an Army helicopter medevac pilot in Vietnam who'd repeatedly risked his life to save men he'd never met. And Sammy Davis, a big bluff blond from Flat Rock, Ill., on whom the writer Winston Groom based the Vietnam experiences of a character named Forrest Gump. Sgt. Davis saved men like Forrest, but he also took out a bunch of bad guys. And yes, he was wounded in the same way as Forrest. That scene in the movie where Lyndon Johnson puts the medal around Tom Hanks's neck: that's from the film of LBJ putting the medal on Sammy's neck, only they superimposed Mr. Hanks.

I talked to James Livingston of Mount Pleasant, S.C., a Marine, a warrior in Vietnam who led in battle in spite of bad wounds and worse odds. I told him I was wondering about something. Most of us try to be brave each day in whatever circumstances, which means most of us show ourselves our courage with time. What is it like, I asked, to find out when you're a young man, and in a way that's irrefutable, that you are brave? What does it do to your life when no one, including you, will ever question whether you have guts?

He shook his head. The medal didn't prove courage, he said. "It's not bravery, it's taking responsibility." Each of the recipients, he said, had taken responsibility for the men and the moment at a tense and demanding time. They'd cared for others. They took care of their men.

Other recipients sounded a refrain that lingered like Taps. They felt they'd been awarded their great honor in part in the name of unknown heroes of the armed forces who'd performed spectacular acts of courage but had died along with all the witnesses who would have told the story of what they did. For each of the holders of the Medal of Honor there had been witnesses, survivors who could testify. For some great heroes of engagements large and small, maybe the greatest heroes, no one lived to tell the tale.

And so they felt they wore their medals in part for the ones known only to God.

In a brief film on the recipients that was played at the dinner, Leo Thorsness, an Air Force veteran of Vietnam, said something that lingered. He was asked what, when he performed his great act, he was sacrificing for. He couldn't answer for a few seconds. You could tell he was searching for the right words, the right sentence. Then he said, "I get emotional about it. But we're a free country." He said it with a kind of wonder, and gratitude.

And of course, he said it all.

---

What this all got me thinking about, the next day, was . . . immigration. I know that seems a lurch, but there's a part of the debate that isn't sufficiently noted. There are a variety of things driving American anxiety about illegal immigration and we all know them--economic arguments, the danger of porous borders in the age of terrorism, with anyone able to come in.

But there's another thing. And it's not fear about "them." It's anxiety about us.

It's the broad public knowledge, or intuition, in America, that we are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically. And if you don't do that, you'll lose it all.

We used to do it. We loved our country with full-throated love, we had no ambivalence. We had pride and appreciation. We were a free country. We communicated our pride and delight in this in a million ways--in our schools, our movies, our popular songs, our newspapers. It was just there, in the air. Immigrants breathed it in. That's how the last great wave of immigrants, the European wave of 1880-1920, was turned into a great wave of Americans.

We are not assimilating our immigrants patriotically now. We are assimilating them culturally. Within a generation their children speak Valley Girl on cell phones. "So I'm like 'no," and he's all 'yeah,' and I'm like, 'In your dreams.' " Whether their parents are from Trinidad, Bosnia, Lebanon or Chile, their children, once Americans, know the same music, the same references, watch the same shows. And to a degree and in a way it will hold them together. But not forever and not in a crunch.

So far we are assimilating our immigrants economically, too. They come here and work. Good.

But we are not communicating love of country. We are not giving them the great legend of our country. We are losing that great legend.

What is the legend, the myth? That God made this a special place. That they're joining something special. That the streets are paved with more than gold--they're paved with the greatest thoughts man ever had, the greatest decisions he ever made, about how to live. We have free thought, free speech, freedom of worship. Look at the literature of the Republic: the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Federalist papers. Look at the great rich history, the courage and sacrifice, the house-raisings, the stubbornness. The Puritans, the Indians, the City on a Hill.

The genius cluster--Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Madison, Franklin, all the rest--that came along at the exact same moment to lead us. And then Washington, a great man in the greatest way, not in unearned gifts well used (i.e., a high IQ followed by high attainment) but in character, in moral nature effortfully developed. How did that happen? How did we get so lucky? (I once asked a great historian if he had thoughts on this, and he nodded. He said he had come to believe it was "providential.")

We fought a war to free slaves. We sent millions of white men to battle and destroyed a portion of our nation to free millions of black men. What kind of nation does this? We went to Europe, fought, died and won, and then taxed ourselves to save our enemies with the Marshall Plan. What kind of nation does this? Soviet communism stalked the world and we were the ones who steeled ourselves and taxed ourselves to stop it. Again: What kind of nation does this?

Only a very great one. Maybe the greatest of all.

Do we teach our immigrants that this is what they're joining? That this is the tradition they will now continue, and uphold?

Do we, today, act as if this is such a special place? No, not always, not even often. American exceptionalism is so yesterday. We don't want to be impolite. We don't want to offend. We don't want to seem narrow. In the age of globalism, honest patriotism seems like a faux pas.

And yet what is true of people is probably true of nations: if you don't have a well-grounded respect for yourself, you won't long sustain a well-grounded respect for others.

---

Because we do not communicate to our immigrants, legal and illegal, that they have joined something special, some of them, understandably, get the impression they've joined not a great enterprise but a big box store. A big box store on the highway where you can get anything cheap. It's a good place. But it has no legends, no meaning, and it imparts no spirit.

Who is at fault? Those of us who let the myth die, or let it change, or refused to let it be told. The politically correct nitwit teaching the seventh-grade history class who decides the impressionable young minds before him need to be informed, as their first serious history lesson, that the Founders were hypocrites, the Bill of Rights nothing new and imperfect in any case, that the Indians were victims of genocide, that Lincoln was a clinically depressed homosexual who compensated for the storms within by creating storms without . . .

You can turn any history into mud. You can turn great men and women into mud too, if you want to.

And it's not just the nitwits, wherever they are, in the schools, the academy, the media, though they're all harmful enough. It's also the people who mean to be honestly and legitimately critical, to provide a new look at the old text. They're not noticing that the old text--the legend, the myth--isn't being taught anymore. Only the commentary is. But if all the commentary is doubting and critical, how will our kids know what to love and revere? How will they know how to balance criticism if they've never heard the positive side of the argument?

Those who teach, and who think for a living about American history, need to be told: Keep the text, teach the text, and only then, if you must, deconstruct the text.

When you don't love something you lose it. If we do not teach new Americans to love their country, and not for braying or nationalistic reasons but for reasons of honest and thoughtful appreciation, and gratitude, for a history that is something new in the long story of man, then we will begin to lose it. That Medal of Honor winner, Leo Thorsness, who couldn't quite find the words--he only found it hard to put everything into words because he knew the story, the legend, and knew it so well. Only then do you become "emotional about it." Only then are you truly American.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father," (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Thursdays.

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

Well thought out and well stated.

I'm back

I'm back from Sulphur, LA. I've got a lot of catching up to do around the homestead, so please excuse the light blogging for a couple of days, or so. I also did a poor job of taking pictures -- I ended up working most of the time, and didn't have the time I thought I might to take pictures.

I'll post a few of those that I did take in the next day or two.

12 Paces

Robert Avrech has a post up about great actors and actresses. He talks about how the really good ones are empty vessels:

Every great actor and actress I have worked with in Hollywood is an empty vessel. Oh, they try and fill that emptiness with celebrity, with vacuous relationships, with absurd leftist politics they can't even begin to comprehend, they go through drug phases, they try Zen, Kabbalah, Dianetics, whatever, but in the end, there is nothing there; and that is why they can take those twelve paces brilliantly, and normal people can only gaze in wonder.

It helps explain why those Hollywood celebrities are always into excess -- usually of the destructive variety.

Storm recovery work team

I will not be blogging, for a few days, because this morning I embark with eight other rugged individuals to an area near Lake Charles, Louisiana, where we will be doing volunteer work helping the residents recover from hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We are the "primarily-unskilled-but-willing-to-work-with-strong-backs-team". Heh. We will be returning Monday evening.

I am taking a camera and intend to take a lot of pictures. I will post some of them upon my return.

Heritage Quote

"Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God. I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

-- Patrick Henry (Speech to the Virginia Convention, 23 March 1775)

Jihadi alternatives, parts 2 and 3

Part 2 of Prospects of Terror: An Inquiry into Jihadi Alternatives is here.

Part 3 of Prospects of Terror: An Inquiry into Jihadi Alternatives is here.

And if you missed my earlier post, part 1 of Prospects of Terror: An Inquiry into Jihadi Alternatives can be found here.

All are long, but highly recommended reading.

Presidential press conference

Talk about a class act.

The consequences of defeat

An op-ed at OpinionJournal discusses what happens if we lose in Iraq.

First of all, we are not now losing:

More fundamentally, the coalition remains solidly allied with the majority of Iraqis who want neither Saddam's Hussein's return nor the country's descent into a Taliban-like hellhole. There is no widespread agitation for U.S. troops to depart, and if anything the Iraqi fear is that we'll leave too soon.

I've seen too many first hand accounts and cogent analyses of the progress being made there to think otherwise. The column, however, is about what happens if we Americans lose our resolve and leave Iraq prematurely.

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

What if We Lose?
The consequences of U.S. defeat in Iraq.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

The third anniversary of U.S. military action to liberate Iraq has brought with it a relentless stream of media and political pessimism that is unwarranted by the facts and threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophesy if it goes unchallenged.

Yes, sectarian tensions are running high and the politicians of Iraq's newly elected parliament are taking a long time forming a government. But the attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra several weeks back has not provoked the spiral into "civil war" that so many keep predicting. U.S. casualties are down over the past month, in part because Iraqi security forces are performing better all the time.

More fundamentally, the coalition remains solidly allied with the majority of Iraqis who want neither Saddam's Hussein's return nor the country's descent into a Taliban-like hellhole. There is no widespread agitation for U.S. troops to depart, and if anything the Iraqi fear is that we'll leave too soon.

Yet there's no denying the polls showing that most Americans are increasingly weary of the daily news of car bombs and Iraqi squabbling and are wishing it would all just go away. Their pessimism is fed by elites who should know better but can't restrain their domestic political calculations long enough to consider the damage that would accompany U.S. failure. A conventional military defeat is inconceivable in Iraq, but a premature U.S. withdrawal is becoming all too possible.

---

With that in mind, it's worth thinking through what would happen if the U.S. does fail in Iraq. By fail, we mean cut and run before giving Iraqis the time and support to establish a stable, democratic government that can stand on its own. Beyond almost certain chaos in Iraq, here are some other likely consequences:

• The U.S. would lose all credibility on weapons proliferation. One doesn't have to be a dreamy-eyed optimist about democracy to recognize that toppling Saddam Hussein was a milestone in slowing the spread of WMD. Watching the Saddam example, Libya's Moammar Gadhafi decided he didn't want to be next. Gadhafi's "voluntary" disarmament in turn helped uncover the nuclear network run by Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan and Iran's two decades of deception.

Now Iran is dangerously close to acquiring nuclear weapons, a prospect that might yet be headed off by the use or threat of force. But if the U.S. retreats from Iraq, Iran's mullahs will know that we have no stomach to confront them and coercive diplomacy will have no credibility. An Iranian bomb, in turn, would inspire nuclear efforts in other Mideast countries and around the world.

• Broader Mideast instability. No one should underestimate America's deterrent effect in that unstable region, a benefit that would vanish if we left Iraq precipitously. Iran would feel free to begin unfettered meddling in southern Iraq with the aim of helping young radicals like Moqtada al-Sadr overwhelm moderate clerics like the Grand Ayatollah Sistani.

Syria would feel free to return to its predations in Lebanon and to unleash Hezbollah on Israel. Even allies like Turkey might feel compelled to take unilateral, albeit counterproductive steps, such as intervening in northern Iraq to protect their interests. Every country in the Middle East would make its own new calculation of how much it could afford to support U.S. interests. Some would make their own private deals with al Qaeda, or at a minimum stop aiding us in our pursuit of Islamists.

• We would lose all credibility with Muslim reformers. The Mideast is now undergoing a political evolution in which the clear majority, even if skeptical of U.S. motives, agrees with the goal of more democracy and accountable government. They have watched as millions of Iraqis have literally risked their lives to vote and otherwise support the project. Having seen those Iraqis later betrayed, other would-be reformers would not gamble their futures on American support. Nothing could be worse in the battle for Muslim "hearts and minds" than to betray our most natural allies.

• We would invite more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Osama bin Laden said many times that he saw the weak U.S. response to Somalia and the Khobar Towers and USS Cole bombings as evidence that we lacked the will for a long fight. The forceful response after 9/11 taught al Qaeda otherwise, but a retreat in Iraq would revive that reputation for American weakness. While Western liberals may deny any connection between Iraq and al Qaeda, bin Laden and the rest of the Arab world see it clearly and would advertise a U.S. withdrawal as his victory. Far from leaving us alone, bin Laden would be more emboldened to strike the U.S. homeland with a goal of driving the U.S. entirely out of the Mideast.

We could go on, but our point is that far more is at stake in Iraq than President Bush's approval rating or the influence of this or that foreign-policy faction. U.S. credibility and safety are at risk in the most direct way imaginable, far more than they were in Vietnam. In that fight, we could establish a new anti-Communist perimeter elsewhere in Southeast Asia. The poison of radical Islam will spread far and wide across borders if it can make even a plausible claim to being on the ascendancy, and nothing would show that more than the retreat of America from Iraq.

---

We still believe victory in Iraq is possible, indeed likely, notwithstanding its costs and difficulties. But the desire among so many of our political elites to repudiate Mr. Bush and his foreign policy is creating a dangerous public pessimism that could yet lead to defeat--a defeat whose price would be paid by all Americans, and for years to come.

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

The consequences of cutting and running from Iraq would be paid in blood and destruction and fear inflicted on our children, and most likely their children, as well.

Do you want to support that happening?

Neither do I.

Secretary of HUD - a snapshot

The Washington Post has a good biographical snapshot of Alphonso Jackson, Secretary of Health and Urban Development.

It is worth reading about this man who overcame the odds to become a respected and successful leader.

Heritage Quote

"Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all."

-- George Washington (Farewell Address, 19 September 1796)

Civil war

No, not in Iraq . . . in Gaza:

Eyewitnesses said most of those wounded in Monday's fighting in the Gaza Strip were policemen who tried to prevent Fatah gunmen from taking over government buildings and security installations. The two sides exchanged gunfire for several hours in scenes that many Palestinians said were reminiscent of the civil war in Lebanon in the 1970s.

Press on in Iraq

Christopher Hitchins has a good column up at OpinionJournal about Iraq being the most important battlefield in our struggle against islamofascist organizations like al-Qaeda.

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

The Stone Face of Zarqawi
Iraq is no "distraction" from al Qaeda.

BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Tuesday, March 21, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

In February 2004, our Kurdish comrades in northern Iraq intercepted a courier who was bearing a long message from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to his religious guru Osama bin Laden. The letter contained a deranged analysis of the motives of the coalition intervention ("to create the State of Greater Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates" and "accelerate the emergence of the Messiah"), but also a lethally ingenious scheme to combat it. After a lengthy and hate-filled diatribe against what he considers the vile heresy of Shiism, Zarqawi wrote of Iraq's largest confessional group that: "These in our opinion are the key to change. I mean that targeting and hitting them in their religious, political and military depth will provoke them to show the Sunnis their rabies . . . and bare the teeth of the hidden rancor working in their breasts. If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war, it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger."

Some of us wrote about this at the time, to warn of the sheer evil that was about to be unleashed. Knowing that their own position was a tenuous one (a fact fully admitted by Zarqawi in his report) the cadres of "al Qaeda in Mesopotamia" understood that their main chance was the deliberate stoking of a civil war. And, now that this threat has become more imminent and menacing, it is somehow blamed on the Bush administration. "Civil war" has replaced "the insurgency" as the proof that the war is "unwinnable." But in plain truth, the "civil war" is and always was the chief tactic of the "insurgency."

---

Since February 2004, there have been numberless attacks on Shiite religious processions and precincts. Somewhat more insulting to Islam (one might think) than a caricature in Copenhagen, these desecrations did not immediately produce the desired effect. Grand Ayatollah Sistani even stated that, if he himself fell victim, he forgave his murderers in advance and forbade retaliation in his name. This extraordinary forbearance meant that many Shiites--and Sunnis, too--refused to play Zarqawi's game. But the grim fact is, as we know from Cyprus and Bosnia and Lebanon and India, that a handful of determined psychopaths can erode in a year the sort of intercommunal fraternity that has taken centuries to evolve. If you keep pressing on the nerve of tribalism and sectarianism, you will eventually get a response. And then came the near-incredible barbarism in Samarra, and the laying waste of the golden dome.

It is not merely civil strife that is partly innate in the very make-up of Iraq. There could be an even worse war, of the sort that Thomas Hobbes pictured: a "war of all against all" in which localized gangs and mafias would become rulers of their own stretch of turf. This is what happened in Lebanon after the American withdrawal: The distinctions between Maronite and Druze and Palestinian and Shiite became blurred by a descent into minor warlordism. In Iraq, things are even more fissile. Even the "insurgents" are fighting among themselves, with local elements taking aim at imported riffraff and vice-versa. Saddam's vicious tactic, of emptying the jails on the eve of the intervention and freeing his natural constituency of thugs and bandits and rapists, was exactly designed to exacerbate an already unstable situation and make the implicit case for one-man "law and order." There is strong disagreement among and between the Shiites and the Sunnis, and between them and the Kurds, only the latter having taken steps to resolve their own internal party and regional quarrels.

America's mistake in Lebanon was first to intervene in a way that placed us on one minority side--that of the Maronites and their Israeli patrons--and then to scuttle and give Hobbes his mandate for the next 10 years. At least it can be said for the present mission in Iraq that it proposes the only alternative to civil war, dictatorship, partition or some toxic combination of all three. Absent federal democracy and power-sharing, there will not just be anarchy and fragmentation and thus a moral victory for jihadism, but opportunist interventions from Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. (That vortex, by the way, is what was waiting to engulf Iraq if the coalition had not intervened, and would have necessitated an intervention later but under even worse conditions.) There are signs that many Iraqi factions do appreciate the danger of this, even if some of them have come to the realization somewhat late. The willingness of the Kurdish leadership in particular, to sacrifice for a country that was gassing its people until quite recently, is beyond praise.

---

Everybody now has their own scenario for the war that should have been fought three years ago. The important revelations in "Cobra II," by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, about the underestimated reserve strength of the Fedayeen Saddam, give us an excellent picture of what the successor regime to the Baath Party was shaping up to be: an Islamized para-state militia ruling by means of vicious divide-and-rule as between the country's peoples. No responsible American government could possibly have allowed such a contingency to become more likely. We would then have had to intervene in a ruined rogue jihadist-hosting state that was already in a Beirut-like nightmare.

I could not help noticing, when the secret prisons of the Shiite-run "Interior Ministry" were exposed a few weeks ago, that all those wishing to complain ran straight to the nearest American base, from which help was available. For the moment, the coalition forces act as the militia for the majority of Iraqis--the inked-fingered Iraqis--who have no militia of their own. Honorable as this role may be, it is not enough in the long run. In Iraq we have made some good friends and some very, very bad enemies. (How can anyone, looking down the gun-barrel into the stone face of Zarqawi, say that fighting him is a "distraction" from fighting al Qaeda?) Over the medium term, if our apparent domestic demoralization continues, the options could come down to two. First, we might use our latent power and threaten to withdraw, implicitly asking Iraqis and their neighbors if that is really what they want, and concentrating their minds. This still runs the risk of allowing the diseased spokesmen of al Qaeda to claim victory.

Second, we can demand to know, of the wider international community, if it could afford to view an imploded Iraq as a spectator. Three years ago, the smug answer to that, from most U.N. members, was "yes." This is not an irresponsibility that we can afford, either morally or practically, and even if our intervention was much too little and way too late, it has kindled in many Arab and Kurdish minds an idea of a different future. There is a war within the war, as there always is when a serious struggle is under way, but justice and necessity still combine to say that the task cannot be given up.

Mr. Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair, is the author of "A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq" (Penguin, 2003).

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

This resonates. I mean to consider it carefully.

Intel in Iraq

Robert Malley and Peter Harling have published an opinion piece at the International Herald Tribune website that discusses the importance of listening to the insurgents in Iraq.

Figuring out who the insurgents are, what they are trying to achieve, how they have evolved and what their vulnerabilities are is not a guessing game. They haven't concealed it. They've broadcast it on Web sites, Internet chat rooms, magazines, leaflets, videos and audiotapes. Given conditions under which insurgents must operate, it's safe to assume that these represent a significant part, maybe even the bulk, of their communications, whether directed at one another or at Iraqi and Muslim populations. To pore over them is to be offered a real-life glimpse into the themes insurgents consider most apt to mobilize activists and legitimize their actions, to witness their internal debates and level of coordination, and to assess their tactical or strategic shifts.

The article is fairly well-developed when discussing the necessity of developing good intelligence on the insurgents whereabouts, tactics, and plans.

What it doesn't do is give credit to the coalition forces for doing just that. Because our forces have been doing just that for quite a while now, and they get better at it every day as more and better Iraqi security forces become engaged.

And then the article discusses the authors' strategy for defeating the insurgency in Iraq:

An effective counterinsurgency campaign will require grasping the insurgents' political dimension, taking their discourse seriously and directing efforts at the sources of their popular support. That means controlling Iraqi security forces, curbing torture, halting collective punishment and other methods that inflict widespread civilian harm, and ending reliance on sectarian militias.

It means, too, making clear that America will withdraw as soon as the newly elected government requests, and agreeing in the interim to negotiate, openly, the terms of its presence and its rules of engagement. The U.S. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, has recently struck a candid and useful tone, but more proactive measures are needed.

America and its allies cannot be expected to establish a monopoly over the use of force. But they can and should be expected to establish a monopoly over the legitimate use of force - which means establishing beyond doubt the legitimacy both of the means being deployed and of the state on whose behalf force is being exercised.

So why was it that these guys wrote this article again? It almost sounds as if they are trying to convince themselves that things are being handled pretty well now in Iraq . . .

Like-minded

I have to admit that I didn't suspect Pixy Misa is a fellow Neverwinter Nights gamer.

How cool is that?!

Heritage Quote

"The Judiciary...has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society, and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither force nor will."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 78, 1788)

Topsy turvy

Deroy Murdock points out a disturbing trend among America's political Left. Here's how he starts:

The muted reaction to the murder of Virginia-based peace activist Tom Fox earlier this month highlights a puzzling phenomenon. While terrorists in Iraq -- like those who shot Fox in the head and chest and dumped his body beside a Baghdad railroad -- target the kind of people the Left champions in America, liberal Democrats stay mum while "their people" get seized, maimed, and killed over there. Rather than demand the total defeat of these butchers, Operation Iraqi Freedom's shrillest opponents instead accuse President Bush of carelessly blundering into war while brilliantly manipulating Democrats into authorizing hostilities. Al Qaeda's man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, elicits shrugs while America's true enemies, they suggest, are Guantanamo, the NSA terrorist-surveillance program, and the just-renewed Patriot Act.

Read the rest.

National Security Strategy

Michael Barone writes about the recently revised National Security Strategy document.

Those who are looking for a confession of error or a change of course will be disappointed. The March 2006 National Security Strategy -- call it NSS 2.0 -- reiterates much of the earlier document. NSS 2.0 repeats the doctrine of pre-emption: The United States "will, if necessary, act pre-emptively in exercising our inherent right of self-defense."

Go read the whole thing.

Jihadi alternatives

J.R. Dunn, over at the American Thinker has an excellent essay on grand strategy, strategy, goals, and methods of both the U.S. and the jihadists in the conflict in Iraq. Here's an excerpt:

A political solution is necessary to secure the military victories already won. This strategy will require patience, understanding, and willingness to overcome setbacks. Things are going to happen that we do not like. There will be disappointments and failures. These are not products of policy, but aspects of the human condition. None of them will be any reason to turn back or abandon the effort. Errors can corrected, failures can be overcome. And it should never be forgotten that, in the words of Churchill, the ongoing liberation of the Middle East remains "one of the great unsordid acts of history."

This is a well thought out, in depth analysis of what has worked, what has failed, and what still needs to be done in the struggle for supremacy between Western democracies and Islamofascists.

It is a long article (and it's only part 1 of 3!), but it is well worth your time. Grab a cup of coffee and settle down for a good read.

Good news from Iraq

Bill Crawford, over at National Review Online does a good job of balancing the unending doom and gloom news from major media outlets with a weekly column providing a lot of the good news about Iraq. And it is accurate information, too.

Highly recommended.

Misreporting Operation Swarmer

Thomas Smith, Jr., over at Townhall has an op-ed about how most of our news organizations mischaracterized Operation Swarmer. Here's how he starts:

The latest criticism of the war in Iraq has become so politically manipulative, so disingenuous, so over-the-top that it is undermining a critical cause that we cannot, for a variety of global security reasons, afford to lose.

Regardless of whether it was to deliberately distort the truth, or just through ignorance, the pathetically poor reporting about this operation has been widespread -- despite the accurate information about it that was supplied by the Pentagon.

Recommended.

Heritage Quote

"It is much to be wished that slavery may be abolished. The honour of the States, as well as justice and humanity, in my opinion, loudly call upon them to emancipate these unhappy people. To contend for our own liberty, and to deny that blessing to others, involves an inconsistency not to be excused."

-- John Jay (letter to R. Lushington, 15 March 1786)

Change the subject

Fred Barnes, over at the Weekly Standard, has an op-ed about the Republican strategy for 2006. Here's how he starts:

POLITICS IS PRETTY SIMPLE. If the debate in an upcoming election puts your party at a disadvantage, it makes sense to try to change the debate. At the moment, the 2006 midterm election is framed as a referendum on the Bush administration and congressional Republicans, putting Republican candidates on the defensive. Party strategists, led by chairman Ken Mehlman, want to rejigger the debate so it's about a choice between candidates, putting Democratic candidates on the defensive as well. In short, they want it to be a choice election, not a referendum election.

It's an interesting read.

Thank you

President Remarks on Third Anniversary of Beginning of Iraq Liberation.

"So, on this third anniversary, the beginning of the liberation of Iraq, I think all Americans should offer thanks to the men and women who wear the uniform, and their families who support them. "

President George W. Bush, 19 March 2006

Thank you all for your service. There are many, many of us here in America and around the world who truly appreciate the sacrifices that our U.S. troops, and their families, are making on our behalf.

God bless you and keep you.

Popular uprising in Iran?

Strategy Page has an article discussing the possibility of a successful popular uprising in Iran. It does not look very encouraging:

The moves necessary to make "People Power" work have now been turned into techniques that have been set down on check lists and presented in seminars. There's a drill that can make this happen if two conditions apply. First, most of the population must want democracy. Second, the security forces must be willing to stand down in the face of mass demonstrations. The first condition applies in Iran, the second doesn't. While the Islamic conservatives in Iran have the support of, at most, a third of the population, they do have over a hundred thousand armed men who are willing to kill to keep their religious leaders in power.

Sunday talk show round-up

Brian Phillips has a good round-up of Sunday talk shows at Townhall.

It includes General George Casey, Commander of Forces in Iraq, Senator Dick Durbin, Vice-President Cheney, Congressman John Murtha, and others. Everyone's talking about Iraq.

It makes for interesting reading.

Heritage Quote

"It is yet to be decided whether the Revolution must ultimately be considered as a blessing or a curse: a blessing or a curse, not to the present age alone, for with our fate will the destiny of unborn millions be involved."

-- George Washington (Circular to the States, 1783)

A candid peek at illegal immigration

Rich Tucker, over at Townhall has a short column about illegal immigration. Here's an excerpt:

But in the long-term supply side economics always wins out. Undocumented workers can make $500 a week or more tax-free in the U.S., and that's more than they can make at home in a month. Ironically, even if the wall worked and fewer illegals were coming across, those already here would be able to earn even more.

This article supports my opinion that illegal immigration is much more complex than most pundits have acknowledged.

New hardware

You gotta admire this new multiple grenade launcher that has recently come out for our troops.

The M-32 MGL looks like something straight out of an action movie or a weapon ginned up by designers of futuristic video combat games. It’s a bare-bones, shoulder-fired weapon with a bulging six-barreled cylinder. There’s no bones about it. This thing’s all business when the trade is knocking out bad-guys at a distance.

“You can put six rounds on target in under three seconds."

[Hat tip to Annika.]

De-feminised feminism?

Noel Stanger has an interesting op-ed at Townhall about what Feminism has become. And she asks some good questions:

When did Feminism become ridiculous (e.g. coming up with ways to make the English language more female-friendly by reworking words like "history" into "herstory")? When did feminists start defining true womanhood as anti-male, anti-family, and pro-sex? When did it stop being a noble fight to be heard and start becoming a contest in vulgarity? When did feminists start claiming to represent all women but stop listening to most of them?

Recommended.

Heritage Quote

"That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot by any compact deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety."

The Virginia Bill of Rights, 12 June 1776

Read the documentation

A peek into some recently declassified pre-war Iraqi documents has revealed that Saddam did, in fact, have WMD, and he did, in fact, have important dealings with al-Qaeda.

The released documents themselves may be found at the Foreign Military Studies Office
Joint Reserve Intelligence Center -- Operation Iraqi Freedom Documents website.

I wonder when the New York Times, the AP, and their ilk are going to hire translators and start reporting on the facts found in these documents?

I won't hold my breath . . .

Good parenting wanted

Laura Hirschfeld Hollis, Associate Director of the Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership at the University of Illinois, and colleague to several public school teachers, has published an op-ed which asserts that poor parenting and government are the reasons our children are not getting the education that we are paying for. Here's an excerpt:

When I say that "parents aren't being parents," I mean that in the most basic sense: children come to school not properly fed; their clothes aren't clean; no one makes them do their homework or go to bed at a decent hour each night; there is no discipline or organization (and children desperately need both).

Then there are the parents whose night lives (read what you want into that) send a very clear message to their children about insecurity and promiscuity - not to mention priorities. Oh, and did we mention the parents with substance abuse problems? Or those in and out of jail whose children have been passed from relative to relative or have been in and out of foster care?

And this is not a function of socioeconomic class. . .

As the husband of a veteran of over 20 years of teaching in public schools, I have heard many stories that back up the claims in this article.

Our education system in America has a two-fold problem: poor parenting (not a majority, but widespread), and an education system that tries, and fails, to compensate for poor parenting by doing the parenting itself (thus compounding the "poor parenting" problem).

I would like to add one further observation about our education system. In general, the management in public education is abysmal. The administrators generally suck. This leads to a lot of other problems and greatly exacerbates the lack of competent parental support.

When the superindendent is good, and he or she has hired a good team of administrators and principals, the teachers are able to concentrate on teaching, and the students find themselves in an education-friendly environment.

And they learn things a lot more easily as a result.

Just sayin' . . .

The economics of oil

Thomas Sowell provides us a lesson in the economics of oil.

After hurricane Katrina destroyed a lot of oil processing capacity around the Gulf of Mexico, there was -- surprise! -- less oil being processed. With less oil being supplied -- surprise again! -- gasoline prices rose.

However much economists rely on supply and demand to explain price movements, politicians need villains, so that the pols can play hero. Big Oil is a favorite villain and has been for decades.

He also talks about taxes:

It so happens that Big Government takes more money in taxes out of a gallon of gas than Big Oil takes out in profits. But apparently somehow taxes don't raise prices. They certainly don't raise indignation from the politicians who voted for those taxes.

There's more. Recommended.

Heritage Quote

"[D]emocracy will soon degenerate into an anarchy, such an anarchy that every man will do what is right in his own eyes and no man's life or property or reputation or liberty will be secure, and every one of these will soon mould itself into a system of subordination of all the moral virtues and intellectual abilities, all the powers of wealth, beauty, wit and science, to the wanton pleasures, the capricious will, and the execrable cruelty of one or a very few."

-- John Adams (An Essay on Man's Lust for Power, 29 August 1763)

Stay focused

Clifford D. May, over at Townhall does a good job of putting America's foreign policy priorities in perspective. Here's his conclusion:

For a moment, focus on the future: America cannot afford to again embolden its enemies as it did in Beirut in 1983 and Somalia in 1993 and in other places at other times. American cannot afford to leave Iraq with Zarqawi in any condition to claim credit for the departure. The reality and the perception must be that American military and intelligence forces have mastered the skills necessary to defeat their 21st century enemies.

And while no one can guarantee that freedom and human rights will prevail in a united Iraq, history should record that Americans did everything in their power to achieve that outcome.

Now go read how he arrived at that conclusion. Recommended.

OIF in retrospect

Military historian, John B. Dwyer, looks back on the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He focuses on its origins and issues, but he ends up talking about Americans:

The center of gravity, the strategic focus, for Al Qaeda is the will, the staying power, of the American people. They've made no secret of their goal to weaken and destroy it, to force President Bush to abandon Iraq. We cannot, we should not, we must not allow this to happen. We are the Americans who fought and died to gain our own independence. We are the Americans who waged a bloody Civil War to preserve our national unity. We are the Americans who defeated fascism and then totalitarianism through WW2 and the Cold War. Therefore, on this third anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom, let us triple our determination, our fortitude, and our resolve until victory in Iraq is achieved.

So, do we still have the cajones to do what is necessary to win this war?

Recommended.

Operation Swarmer

Bill Roggio, over at The Fourth Rail, has an informative summary of Operation Swarmer taking place near Samarra.

Blackhawks from the 101st Airborne Division's aviation brigade departing a military base to begin Operation Swarmer near the city of Samarra. Image courtesy of Sgt. First Class Antony Joseph, 101st Combat Aviation Brigade.

Blog-jacked!

I have been greatly concerned since Tuesday, because I could not find Betsy Newmark's blog, Betsy's Page. Finally, I've found confirmation over at Instapundit that something dreadful has happened. Glenn Reynolds received an email from Betsy and posted it:

STOLEN BLOG ALERT: Betsy Newmark emails:

Dear Glenn,

I'm writing you because you seem to have a finger on the pulse of the blogger world and maybe know some way to help me or at least to get the word out so that maybe Blogger will help me.

My blog disappeared from Blogger some time Tuesday. All I ge is a message that my blog wasn't found on their server. When I go to my Edit page, it doesn't show Betsy's Page as one of my blogs anymore. It's as if my identity was erased.

I just get this very irritating message
"The blog you were looking for was not found." It doesn't show up on my dashboard at all.
Now, somebody has started a blog using my address and hijacked it. This is not me, but it is my URL. How despicable is that?

http://betsyspage.blogspot.com/

I have been writing Blogger for the past two days and all I get are the irritating auto-generated messages. What does it take to get a personal contact from those guys?

They put up those deceptive notes on their Status Page saying that they are doing maintenance on the server and now everything is fixed.

http://status.blogger.com/

IT IS NOT FIXED. They are either deceived or are deceiving people. Viking Pundit and DJ Drummond of Stolen Thunder and Polipundit have experienced the same thing, though DJ was somehow able to get his back.

It wouldn't be so bad if an actual human being wrote me and told me what was going on and that they were working on it and when I could expect it to be fixed and what I could do if it is not fixed at that point. But they don't do that. And so people will get angry and leave Blogger and go to some other format for their blogs. And their customer service will be the reason.

I was wondering if you could put up a post telling people of my story and see if anyone has any recommendations of how to get my blog back. I hope to be back as soon as possible at either my old address or at a new address. But I would like to get to the bottom of this saga of my blog.

Any ideas?

I have an idea! Let's get Betsy to move to Munuvia!

Heritage Quote

"In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 52, 8 February 1788)

A letter to the President

Peggy Noonan, over at OpinionJournal has some questions for Prsident Bush regarding his spending habits:

Mr. President:

Did you ever hold conservative notions and assumptions on the issue of spending? If so, did you abandon them after the trauma of 9/11? For what reasons, exactly? Did you intend to revert to conservative thinking on spending at some point? Do you still?

Were you always a liberal on spending? Were you, or are you, frankly baffled that conservatives assumed you were a conservative on spending? Did you feel they misunderstood you? Did you allow or encourage them to misunderstand you?

What are the implications for our country if spending levels continue to grow at their current pace?

What are the implications for the Republican party if it continues to cede one of the pillars on which it stood?

Did compassionate conservatism always mean big spending?

Good questions.

Poverty

Author Burt Prelutsky, at Townhall does not mince words about poverty in America. Here's an excerpt:

Poverty in this country isn't a condition, it's an industry. Not only are there charitable organizations staffed by those to whom it's a lifetime career, but, without the terminally impoverished, many politicians would have nothing to talk about. Without those perennial "victims," one of the two parties would have gone the way of the Whigs long before now.

The truth is, there is nothing sacred about being poor. In a land with as much opportunity as America offers, it's virtually impossible for a person of average intelligence and even a modicum of ambition, to remain poverty-stricken.

Recommended.

From the eye of the storm

Haim Harari, Chair of the Davidson Institute of Science Education and Past President of the Weizmann Institute of Science Talk, delivered a speech two years ago about the underlying reasons for the expansion of terrorism over the last 25 years. Still pertinent today, his remarks include a wide range of regional issues that contribute to the proliferation of terrorism -- yet he does not blame Israel:

Yes, there is a 100 year-old Israeli-Arab conflict, but it is not where the main show is.

The millions who died in the Iran-Iraq war had nothing to do with Israel.

The mass murder happening right now in Sudan, where the Arab Moslem regime is massacring its black Christian citizens, has nothing to do with Israel.

The frequent reports from Algeria about the murders of hundreds of civilian in one village or another by other Algerians have nothing to do with Israel.

Saddam Hussein did not invade Kuwait, endangered Saudi Arabia and butchered his own people because of Israel.

Egypt did not use poison gas against Yemen in the 60's because of Israel.

Assad the Father did not kill tens of thousands of his own citizens in one week in El Hamma in Syria because of Israel.

The Taliban control of Afghanistan and the civil war there had nothing to do with Israel.

The Libyan blowing up of the Pan-Am flight had nothing to do with Israel, and I could go on and on and on.

The root of the trouble is that this entire Moslem region is totally dysfunctional, by any standard of the word, and would have been so even if Israel had joined the Arab league and an independent Palestine had existed for 100 years.

This is a must read.

[Hat tip to Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants.]

'Jason McElwain and respect for life'

Chuck Colson has a good op-ed about how the West, in general, fails to respect life.

No matter which side of this issue you find yourself, this is worth reading.

Heritage Quote

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined."

-- Patrick Henry (speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 5 June 1778)

Green Zone attack foiled

Al-Qaeda is still looking for the big one.

'Shop and Awe'

Kris Alexander, over at Intel-Dump has an excellent post up about an ingenious approach to winning the hearts and minds of our real and potential adversarys. Here's a taste:

Our country has not pursued a strategy that capitalizes on all our assets. We have the most powerful military in the world and have not been hesitant to use it. We also have the world's most powerful economy but haven't leveraged it into the fight. We should be pursuing policies that capitalize on the success of several private sector companies and jump start the economy's of strategically important regions helping to create a bigger middle class in the Middle East. But, myopic US and European trade policy is standing in the way of total economic commitment.

Banish Bennish

Economics professor, Dr. Walter E. Williams, has something to say about dishonesty in the classroom. Here's an excerpt:

It's academic and intellectual dishonesty when a teacher, who is supposed to be teaching geography, uses his classroom to indoctrinate relatively uninformed teenagers. Recording the teacher's comments broke neither school policy nor Colorado law. But more importantly, I believe that what teachers say in class should be subject to parental and public scrutiny.

As a parent who is married to a teacher, I agree wholeheartedly that teachers must have transparency to their lessons, and that they must keep their teaching based upon fact -- not opinion. They should be providing their students with the tools necessary to facilitate critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making.

Public teachers should never indoctrinate their students with the teacher's opinions or beliefs. All that does is show the teacher as being a close-minded, controlling, bigot . . .

Like the Taliban in 1990s Afghanistan, for example.

Reporting of good news

Another old story -- this one in late January -- but still something in my draft archive that I failed to post.

More than 2 million new jobs were created in 2005, but the broadcast networks instead emphasized such negatives as corporate layoffs and outsourcing, according to a study released Wednesday by a group dedicated to challenging misconceptions in the media about free enterprise.

Recommended.

Heritage Quote

"Promote then as an object of primary importance, Institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened. "

-- George Washington (Farewell Address, 19 September 1796)

Good quotes

NOTE: The link below is from December, but I just found it in my draft archive and want to share it because it is still pertinent - and amusing.

Paul Greenberg at Jewish World Review has a good column up with valorous quotes from our past, and one not-so-valorous from our present.

It's worth it . . .

The right thing to do

OpinionJournal published an op-ed Monday about how the U.S. did the right thing in the Balkans in the 1990s.

I've reprinted the article in the extended entry.

Balkan Ghost
No one now disputes that stopping Slobodan Milosevic was the right thing to do.

Monday, March 13, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

In the end, Slobodan Milosevic was luckier than his victims. The former Serbian leader died at age 64 in his prison bed early Saturday, apparently of a heart attack, though full autopsy results are pending. Death was his small victory over the U.N. tribunal that now can't complete the first-ever war crimes trial of a former head of state.

As Serbian leader after 1989, Milosevic unleashed the ethnic furies that sparked the bloodiest conflicts in Europe since World War II. Yugoslavia was the West's great failure for most of the 1990s. "This is the hour of Europe," proclaimed Luxembourg's foreign minister, Jacques Poos, in 1991 when the Croats and Serbs came to blows. Yet not until after Srebrenica and its 7,000 dead men and boys in 1995 did the U.S. step in and lead an ineffective Europe to stop the fighting.

For too long, U.S. officials convinced themselves the Balkan wars resulted from implacable hatreds and nationalism rather than Milosevic's autocratic ambitions. But when NATO finally used force--with U.N. support in Kosovo only after the fact--his regime fell and the furies ended.

Today the new post-Milosevic arrangements in the Balkans are imperfect, sectarian tensions are raw and democracy is fragile. Western troops are still needed on the ground in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia. But no one seriously questions whether outside intervention was the right thing to do. The tragedy of the Balkans is that it took so long for the West to generate the nerve to stop the man who died on the weekend as a largely forgotten war criminal.

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

So, tell me, does anyone see a parallel between the U.S. taking out Milosevic in the 1990s, and Hussein in the 2000s?

A wrong approach to immigration

OpinionJournal published an op-ed on Saturday about current legislative moves regarding immigration. Mostly they are wrong moves, but there is some hope for a viable, comprehensive, immigation bill.

I've reprinted it in the extended entry.

All Cops, No Economics
The House's restrictionist bill would create more illegal immigrants.

Saturday, March 11, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

The immigration debate is finally picking up some Beltway steam, which is long overdue. The problem is that it's moving in a direction that could do real damage to the economy, not to mention to the Republican Party.

Any sensible immigration reform would focus not just on keeping illegals out of the country, but also on why they're coming and how to get the estimated 11 million illegals already here out of the shadows. Yet last year the House whooped through a bill that expands enforcement and nothing else.

We doubt voters elected a Republican Congress to build walls along the Rio Grande and Canada and punish businesses for hiring willing workers. But since Representative James Sensenbrenner and other House GOP leaders have ignored President Bush's request for comprehensive reform, soberer types in the Senate will have to keep Republican restrictionists from running the party over a cliff.

---

Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter is cobbling together a bill pulled from measures previously introduced by John McCain, John Cornyn and others. And while Mr. Specter's current proposal meets the President's requirement for broader reform, it still ignores some basic economic realities and thus won't solve the problem.

For starters, the Senator's guest-worker program would require participants to leave the U.S. after six years and remain in their home country for an entire year before returning to the U.S. That kind of forced turnover could mean huge labor disruptions for U.S. businesses, and the likely result would be more illegal aliens, as some workers exit the program and enter the black market rather than returning home.

This is the same mistake the restrictionists made in 1986, when President Reagan signed a bill legalizing three million workers but didn't create a mechanism--dispensing enough green cards--for the economy to get the workers it needed in the future. Some 500,000 people continue to enter the U.S. illegally every year, and the strong economy and low jobless rate (4.8%) are evidence that these undocumented workers aren't "stealing" jobs but simply filling them.

The U.S. dispenses only about 10,000 green cards annually for unskilled workers. And by not providing enough paths to permanent residency for those who want to stay, we're setting ourselves up for another large illegal population down the road. Under current law, foreign workers in high-tech fields can extend their stay if an employer sponsors them for a green card. Why should the same rules that apply to Intel's engineers not also apply to Marriott's chambermaids and California's farm hands?

Like the House bill, Mr. Specter's proposal also includes over-the-top security measures like expanding the definition of "alien smuggling" to include church soup-kitchen operators and people who take in relatives who are here illegally. Mr. Specter would also create an army of federal agents and prosecutors to "investigate" immigration violations. But it makes little sense to start raiding businesses and driving foreigners further underground without first expanding the legal ways for the economy to get the workers it needs.

At least Mr. Specter isn't proposing to deport illegals already here en masse, which isn't practical in any case. But he still wants to create an 11 million-strong subclass of noncitizens who would be allowed to continue working in the U.S. but have little chance of ever receiving a green card. People in this new status would be subject to deportation if they're out of work for more than 45 days, which lays the foundation for all manner of exploitation. Workers need mobility and the freedom to quit unsatisfactory jobs.

In theory, Mr. Specter's proposal puts these current illegal residents on course for a possible green card. But the reality is that they would be placed at the end of a very long queue that already contains millions of people, and very few would ever see normal status in their lifetime because the annual caps make for a very slow-moving line.

As public policy, it's also hard to see the benefit of keeping 11 million largely Latino residents in permanent "conditional" status instead of allowing (and encouraging) them to become full-fledged members of American society. Relegating so many people to second-tier status sends precisely the wrong message about assimilating to U.S. norms, and which political party sends that message won't be lost on Hispanic voters.

---

The good news is that there's still time for Mr. Specter to cherry-pick better ideas from his Senate colleagues. A good bipartisan guest-worker plan introduced by Senators McCain and Ted Kennedy would allow employers to sponsor workers for green cards. As for illegals already here, Messrs. McCain and Kennedy would allow them to earn green cards and perhaps even citizenship over a multiyear period if they pay a fine, meet certain work requirements and learn English.

None of this will appease the small but vocal "no amnesty" crowd, but restrictionists put forth no solutions other than greater militarization of the border and harassment of employers, which we know from experience won't work alone. If the real goal of immigration reform is to have people "obey the rules," let's make sure the rules are sensible.

That might be too tall an order for the current Congress, which is making up policy based on the latest polls. Mr. Bush is right to insist on comprehensive reform, and we hope he backs up his rhetoric with a veto if it comes to that. He'll be doing the economy, and his own party, a big favor.

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

3.14

I would like to wish you all a Happy Pi Day!

8 Myths about Iraq

Ralph Peters has returned from a visit to Baghdad with a report on the conditions in Iraq that goes against the grain (emphasis added):

During a recent visit to Baghdad, I saw an enormous failure. On the part of our media. The reality in the streets, day after day, bore little resemblance to the sensational claims of civil war and disaster in the headlines.

No one with first-hand experience of Iraq would claim the country's in rosy condition, but the situation on the ground is considerably more promising than the American public has been led to believe. Lurid exaggerations and instant myths obscure real, if difficult, progress.

I left Baghdad more optimistic than I was before this visit. While cynicism, political bias and the pressure of a 24/7 news cycle accelerate a race to the bottom in reporting, there are good reasons to be soberly hopeful about Iraq's future.

It is well worth your time to read. Highly recommended.

Heritage Quote

"The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man."

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 10, 23 November 1787)

Heritage Quote

If there is a form of government, then, whose principle and foundation is virtue, will not every sober man acknowledge it better calculated to promote the general happiness than any other form?

-- John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776)

Hypocrisy at Yale

John Fund is taking no prisoners in his commentary about Yale welcoming a Taliban official as an honored student. He points out the inherent hypocrisy in Yale's position opposing military recruiters because of the way the military treats homosexuals, and the open-armed reception of a prominent member of the Taliban -- an organization that murdered homosexuals by bulldozing brick walls over them.

The article is in the extended entry. Recommended.

Taliban Man at Yale
University officials are embarrassed--but not embarrassed enough.

Monday, March 6, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

Are there no limits to how arrogant and out-of-touch America's Ivy League schools can get? Last week it emerged that Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former deputy foreign secretary of the Taliban, is now a student at Yale while at the same time the school continues to block ROTC training from its campus and argues for the right of its law school to exclude military recruiters. King George's troops played the music to "The World Turned Upside Down" as they surrendered at Yorktown. Perhaps the Ivy League should adopt that tune as they surrender all vestiges of common sense.

Yale's decision to admit Mr. Rahmatullah is particularly jarring given constant reminders of the Taliban's crimes--both past and present. Last week, as President Bush visited democratic Afghanistan, its TV news aired fresh footage of beheaded bodies being paraded through a street. The men had been murdered because they opposed local Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists.

Last week I described Mr. Rahmatullah's remarkable visit to The Wall Street Journal's offices in the spring of 2001. After a meeting in which he defended the Taliban's treatment of women and said he hadn't seen any evidence that their "guest" Osama bin Laden was a terrorist, I felt I had looked into the face of evil.

I walked Mr. Rahmatullah out. I will never forget how he stopped at a picture window and stared up at the World Trade Center, which terrorists had failed to destroy in 1993. When I finally pried him away, I couldn't help but think, He must have been thinking about the one that got away.

You would think Yale would feel compelled to explain its decision to admit Mr. Rahmatullah. Instead, a cone of silence has descended over the university. Yale officials didn't return my calls or those of other reporters for several days last week. Finally on Friday, spokesman Tom Conroy said the university would have no comment, citing privacy concerns that preclude it from discussing any individual student.

Almost no one will now defend Mr. Rahmatullah's presence as a special student, even though a week ago many had no such inhibitions in a splashy New York Times magazine piece, which broke the news that he had been at Yale for eight months. In that piece, Richard Shaw, Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions before he took the same post at Stanford, explained that Yale had missed out on another foreign student of the same caliber as Mr. Rahmatullah but that "we lost him to Harvard," and "I didn't want that to happen again."

Now Mr. Shaw isn't returning phone calls, and much of the reaction from Yale to the outside world is downright hostile. One faculty member told me he wasn't interested in questions about Mr. Rahmatullah and accused me of pursuing "another Journal attack on Yale's lax liberal standards." He then threatened to attack me in print as "slimy."

At the same time, many Yale alumni and students tell me they are concerned that Yale refuses to explain why it honored Mr. Rahmatullah with a prize perch when countless well-qualified Americans--not to mention other Afghans--would jump at the chance but will never get it.

---

To understand what prompted Yale to invite Mr. Rahmatullah to its campus, I interviewed several Yale students and faculty members. Here are their explanations along with my analysis.

The Taliban were a dictatorial regime, but not dramatically different from many others. Their coming to power was originally welcomed by many people tired of civil war.

It's certainly true that in 1996 the country more or less fell into the lap of the Taliban, a group of young fanatics straight out of "Lord of the Flies." After the Soviet departure from Afghanistan in 1989, the country had become an anarchic stew of feuding warlords. The Taliban consolidated power into a central government and soon had control of 90% of the country.

But as soon as they were secure in power, they revealed they were medieval fascists. Homosexuals were thrown into ditches and then had concrete walls bulldozed over them. Women caught wearing nail polish had their fingernails pulled out or in some cases their fingers chopped off. Everything was banned from television to kite flying to paper bags. Paper bags? Apparently one of the mullahs heard that bags in Kabul's market had been made out of recycled copies of the Koran, so they had to go.

Mr. Rahmatullah became an apologist for all of this during his propaganda tour of the U.S. in the months before 9/11. Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" captured one testy exchange he had with an exiled Afghan woman who told him, "You have imprisoned the women. It's a horror, let me tell you." The Afghan diplomat responded with a sneer: "I'm really sorry for your husband. He must have a very difficult time with you." Asked by the Times of London last week if he regretted that statement now, he replied: "That woman, for your information, did divorce her husband." He told the New York Times that if he had it to do over again he would have been "a little bit" softer in his 2001 speeches.

Mr. Rahmatullah now sincerely regrets serving as a high Taliban official and has rejected their hatred of the West.

He does say that some of his views have changed. "I was very young then," Mr. Rahmatullah, now 27, told the Yale Daily News last week. "At that age, you don't really have the same sensibilities that you may have later." He has told fellow students he now believes in free speech and the right of women to vote. He told the New York Times the Taliban were bad for his country because "the radicals were taking over and doing crazy stuff," implying that the early days of Taliban rule were benign. He says he believes that after graduation, he can serve as a bridge between the Muslim world and the West.

If that's true, it's time that Yale and the State Department, which issued his student visa, realize that there's evidence his views are still pretty unreconstructed and, in fact, would be rejected by most of the world's Muslims. Mr. Rahmatullah isn't giving interviews now, but last Wednesday he did talk with Tim Reid of the Times of London. He acknowledged he had done poorly in his class "Terrorism: Past, Present and Future," something he attributed to his disgust with the textbooks. "They would say the Taliban were the same as al Qaeda," he told the Times.

He shifted blame for many of the Taliban's brutal practices onto its Ministry of Vice and Virtue, even though he had defended their actions in 2001. As for the infamous filmed executions of women in Kabul's soccer stadium? "That was all Vice and Virtue stuff. There were also executions happening in Texas."

One shouldn't depend on one interview for a full picture of someone's current views. But late last year, Mr. Rahmatullah wrote an essay titled "Ignorance! Not an Option," which appeared on the Web site of the International Education Foundation, the charity headed by CBS contract cameraman-producer Mike Hoover that is sponsoring Mr. Rahmatullah's stay in the U.S. In the essay, Mr. Rahmatullah takes Americans to task for both their "xenophobic" attitudes and ignorance of the Taliban. He claims the Taliban "were too ignorant to know that their guest"--Osama bin Laden--"was harming other people." He concludes that the Taliban "honestly practiced what they had learned in their religious schools. They did what they had been taught to do. Whether what they had been taught was good or bad is another subject." If this is sincere repentance, Yale needs to acknowledge that at the school that fathered literary deconstructionism, the term has lost its meaning.

Mr. Hoover, a swashbuckling filmmaker who has worked for CBS off and on for two decades and who befriended Mr. Rahmatullah during three visits to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, also holds curious views about his former hosts. He wouldn't return my calls, but when Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity asked him Friday if the Taliban was a "brutal" regime, Mr. Hoover would say only that "parts of them were. It wasn't as monolithic as we'd like to make it out to be."

Mr. Hannity quoted from Mr. Rahmatullah's article on the International Education Foundation's Web site in which Mr. Rahmatullah called Israel a "franchise state" serving "as an American al Qaeda against the Arab World." Mr. Hoover said, "I had never heard that before." In fact, not only did the article appear on a Web site Mr. Hoover operates, but after the al Qaeda quote appeared in the Yale Daily News on Wednesday, the article mysteriously vanished--two days before Mr. Hoover claimed to be unaware of it.

Yale needs to be an international school, tolerant of the views of other cultures and willing to understand them.

Having lived overseas as a child and traveled to many developing countries, I am all for students knowing more about the world. But the arguments for accepting Mr. Rahmatullah are surreal. "If we didn't accept him and try to learn from him, how could we say we're this diverse body and institution of higher learning?" freshman Benjamin Gonzalez asked the New York Sun. "If we just dismiss him, what does that say about us?" It may say that moral relativism has such an entrenched hold on campus that some people can no longer make needed distinctions.

Some, though, are more discerning. James Kirchick, a senior who describes himself as a liberal Democrat, is appalled that campus feminists and gays trash American society as intolerant but won't protest now that "an actual, live remnant of one of the most misogynistic and homophobic regimes ever" is in their midst. "They have other concerns, such as single-sex bathrooms and fraternities," he told me.

There was a time when some at Yale summoned outrage at the Taliban. In 2000, a band of 30 protesters gathered outside Pierson College when it hosted a "master's tea" for Taliban representative Abdul Hakeem Mujahid. While the protesters chanted outside, Mr. Mujahid calmly told his audience that "99% of [Afghan] women approve" of the Taliban and that the regime was committed to elevating the status of women in society. Eli Muller, the reporter who covered the event for the Yale Daily News, was shocked that his lies "went nearly unchallenged."

After the talk, Mr. Muller observed someone approach a spokeswoman for the Taliban and invite her to give a talk at the law school on women's rights. Mr. Muller concluded in an op-ed piece entitled "Sympathy for the Devil" that the "moral overconfidence of Yale students makes them subject to manipulation by people who are genuinely evil." That year, Lynn Amowitz, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, found that 18% of the 223 women she interviewed who lived under Taliban rule had attempted suicide by drowning in local rivers, drinking pesticides or overdosing on children's medicines.

Six years later, even after 9/11, the Yale community represents the world turned upside down. Beth Nisson, a senior, writes that Mr. Rahmatullah's admission to Yale "should serve as a model for American higher education." Della Sentilles, the co-author of a feminist blog at Yale, insists one can't be judgmental about the Taliban. "As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other cultures, especially statements that suggest one culture is more sexist and repressive than another," she writes. "American feminism is often linked to and manipulated by the state in order to further its own imperialist ends."

Ziba Ayeen, a Afghan-American who fled her native land with her family in the 1980s, isn't amused by such thinking. "The irony of Yale educating an official in a regime that barred women from going to school is too much," she told me.

When I asked several people at Yale if the reaction to Mr. Rahmatullah would be different if he were, say, a former official of the apartheid regime of South Africa, the reaction was universal: Of course he would be barred. When I asked why, I was told I had no idea how liberal a place Yale was. "But what is liberal about the Taliban, then or now?" I innocently asked. Eric White, a senior, told me that many students believe that regimes run by whites, such as apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany, come out of Western traditions and are judged differently than non-Western regimes. "There's a real feeling that we don't have the right or understanding to be able to hold those regimes to the same standards."

When I asked Prof. Vivek Sharma, who briefly had Mr. Rahmatullah in one of his seminars, about this double standard, he explained, "There's a belief among many at Yale that we really have to specifically understand the Middle East because of the American occupation there and that we must understand our enemies as deeply as we can."

But if Mr. Rahmatullah's admission was motivated by a desire to understand the enemy, why was Yale mum about Mr. Rahmatullah's background for eight months, until he himself chose to reveal it to the New York Times? Nat Hentoff, a columnist for the Village Voice and a First Amendment champion, says Mr. Rahmatullah's admission might have value as a "laboratory experiment" to see how far "tolerance of anti-tolerance" might go. "But the whole thing looks fishy given Yale's reluctance to tell people about their educational prize," he told me. "Thus it looks to be more about the lasting effects of political correctness than a desire to hear other points of view."

Somebody else is responsible for Mr. Rahmatullah's admission as a Yale student.

No one is more surprised than Mr. Rahmatullah at his good fortune. "I'm the luckiest person in the world," he told the New York Times. "I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Instead I ended up at Yale." What explains his luck?

The buck-passing has been brisk the past week. Yale has privately told some people that since the State Department approved his student visa, there must not be a problem with the former Taliban official. State Department spokesman Adam Erelli says that "given what he was doing and why he wanted to come to the United States, [there were no] grounds for ineligibility" for a visa. Another State Department official told me off the record that because Mr. Rahmatullah had been accepted by so prestigious an institution as Yale the probable assumption made by lower-level officials was that he was OK.

P.J. Crowley, a former official in the Clinton National Security Council, speculated that perhaps Mr. Rahmatullah had been an intelligence asset for the U.S. and his admission was a reward for that help. But my calls to several sources turned up no hint of that. Laili Helms, a former spokeswoman for the Taliban who lives in New Jersey, claims that Mr. Rahmatullah met with officials at the CIA and the State Department during his 2001 tour and proposed the Taliban hold Osama bin Laden in a fixed location long enough so the U.S. could find and kill him. My sources at both agencies say there is no evidence such a proposal was ever made.

So the mystery deepens. Even Mr. Hoover, who frequently visited the Taliban in an effort to secure an interview with Osama bin Laden, is vague about the details of why his charity is paying for his friend to come to the U.S. Indeed, it sounds as if he is shifting responsibility. When asked why Mr. Rahmatullah is here, he told Fox News: "Those are questions for all of the people all down the chain of command that have backed him coming to the country, starting with the American generals who OK'd it for him to come, the people in Islamabad that gave him the visa and the people at Yale who decided to put him on into the campus."

As for who finances his foundation, Mr. Hoover said it was a group of friends who after finding out "about his background, and heard his ideas, they were behind helping fund him to go to Yale."

Kurt Lohbeck, who worked with Mr. Hoover as a contract reporter/producer for CBS News in Afghanistan is skeptical about the whole matter. "I worked in the region for 10 years, and there are a lot of people there who should go to Yale before Rahmatullah," he told me. As for Mr. Hoover's curious ambivalence today about the Taliban, Mr. Lohbeck said Mr. Hoover would not have been able to go back so frequently as a guest of the Taliban "unless he had kowtowed to them on the first visit. They would have had to grease the skids for him."

For all his faults, Mr. Rahmatullah is a positive influence on campus.

How good a role model could Mr. Rahmatullah be? He got into Yale with a fourth-grade education and a high-school equivalency degree. Next month, he will apply to become a full-time student working towards a degree in political science. To his credit, Harold Hongju Koh, dean of Yale Law School and a former Clinton administration human-rights official, says that before Mr. Rahmatullah is accepted, "it would be good to know more about how he came to work for the Taliban in the first place and whether he's fully repudiated their views." Mr. Koh engaged in a somewhat heated debate with Mr. Rahmatullah at Yale during his 2001 U.S. tour and only "reluctantly" shook his hand afterwards.

Mr. Rahmatullah has retained his habit of heated argument. Last year, he attended Prof. Sharma's seminar on war in Europe during the Middle Ages. "He was antagonistic toward other students and he tended to take over the class discussion," one student recalled. "He would talk all the time about life in the mountains of Afghanistan." During the last class Mr. Rahmatullah attended, Mr. Sharma says, "he interrupted me constantly." When I asked the professor to confirm student reports that he had asked Mr. Rahmatullah to leave his class, he replied "That's not quite true. I forcefully made it clear what I thought of him wanting to draw attention to himself." Mr. Rahmatullah never returned to his class, taking advantage of an opt-out provision.

Others say Mr. Rahmatullah has been better behaved, albeit sometimes brusque. Amy Aaland, the executive director of the Jewish center where Mr. Rahmatullah frequently eats dinner, has no problems with him. She told the Yale Daily news that she sees his story "as representative of Yale's rich student diversity."

---

But rather than defend their prize diversity catch, the university and the other enablers of Mr. Rahmatullah's presence there are clamming up and hoping the furor goes away. "Yale has weathered storms like this before with complete silence," one former Yale administrator told me. "It's cold game theory on their part. They've already alienated conservative alumni; they're not giving much anymore. If they can keep broader donor anger at bay, they feel they don't have much to lose."

Well, perhaps Yale does. In a column lamenting how Larry Summers was deposed as president of Harvard, the New York Times' John Tierney, a Yale graduate, reports on all the reasons American higher education refuses to change. He quotes Fred Siegel, a historian at Cooper Union, as saying "the Achilles' heel of academics is their status anxiety. The only way to attack them is with mockery."

It's been more than half a century since William F. Buckley mocked the wooly-headed thinking he found at his alma mater in "God and Man at Yale." Now we have Mr. Taliban Man at Yale. If that doesn't cry out for mockery, nothing does.

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

Myth-ing competence

Rick Moran, who blogs at Right Wing Nuthouse has a provocative opinion piece up at the American Thinker wherein he asserts that the Bush administration is being wrongly accused of incompetence. He serves up some history and covers several contemporary issues, including Iraq:

Despite all the provocations by the insurgents and al Qaeda terrorists, Iraqis from all walks of life, all sects, and all parts of the country are working together to keep civil war from happening. And while it is still an open question whether or not civil war can be avoided, this unity among so many Iraqis is a direct result of administration efforts to promote democracy. The people of Iraq have been given a stake in their own future by the government of the United States.

Whether they can take advantage of this is still open to question. But to call the policy a "failure" at this point is wrong. The Iraqis may be taking two steps forward and one back in their march to the future. But the fact is the only way for our policy to fail is if we pick up and go home. In this, both administration critics and al Qaeda terrorists have something in common.

I recommend this one -- no matter which side of the fence you stand on.

Heritage Quote

"On the distinctive principles of the Government ...of the U. States, the best guides are to be found in...The Declaration of Independence, as the fundamental Act of Union of these States."

-- James Madison (letter to Thomas Jefferson, 8 February 1825)

Another history quote

"We, the members of the New Republican Party, believe that the preservation and enhancement of the values that strengthen and protect individual freedom, family life, communities and neighborhoods and the liberty of our beloved nation should be at the heart of any legislative or political program presented to the American people."

Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911 - 2004)

History Quote

"Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say, 'What should be the reward of such sacrifices?' ... If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!"

--Samuel Adams

Heritage Quote

"I consider the war of America against Britain as the country's war, the public's war, or the war of the people in their own behalf, for the security of their natural rights, and the protection of their own property."

-- Thomas Paine (On Financing the War, 1782)

3 years ago today

And I still miss my Dad.

I remember when I was around 12 or 13, Dad gave me the "birds and bees" talk. We were sitting in the car waitng for my younger brother to finish up football practice, and Dad started talking.

I don't remember too much of what he actually said, but I do remember thinking that what he was saying was incredibly important.

You see, by then I thought I already knew about the biological aspects of a relationship between a man and a woman. Of course, I really didn't have much of a clue, but at least I was confident in my naivete.

The problem was . . . after Dad finished explaining the birds and bees to me -- in that elliptical way he used for discussing private things like intimacy -- I was more confused than I had been before.

It has taken me a while to understand what I really learned during that talk. Dad did not do a very good job explaining to me how babies were made that evening in the car. What he really conveyed was his innate sense of honor and decency. His noble character.

At the time I was too immature to recognize and learn from that. But now, looking back, I pray that I can live up to his exemplar.

Dad is no longer with us physically, but his legacy endures.

And life goes on.

Heritage Quote

"It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society. "

-- James Madison (Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, Circa 20 June 1785)

Profs need to go back to school

George Will does a good job of putting law professors in their place. Then again, Chief Justice John Roberts did a pretty good job of that, himself.

Recommended.

The strategy of terrorism

Ginny Franks, a senior communications major at UNC, has published an op-ed about how Islamic terrorists are working toward changing us. Here's an excerpt:

Terrorists are evil, but they aren't cowards. The truth is that terrorists aim to make cowards of us.

Taheri-azar didn't just want nine funerals with nine gravestones to mark his crime. Taheri-azar wanted front-page photographs of our faces in anguish; he wanted to draw us into reactions of irrational violence against Muslims; he wanted his day in court.

He wanted us to fear standing in the Pit - the spot that represents everything Islamist terrorism seeks to eradicate.

Every college campus, indeed every community in this country, has a "Pit" -- a place where a person can stand up and voice his opinion without fearing violent reprisal. The Islamofascists want to take that away as a first step toward dominating us.

Ms. Franks eloquently argues for us to stand up and fight against such an outcome. I recommend you read her words and consider your own position in this conflict.

Heritage Quote

"In politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution."

-- Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 1, 27 October 1787)

True Survivor

A tearful, joyous surprise for the survivor of a Nazi concentration camp.

This is a must-read.

[Hat tip to Sarah over at trying to grok.]

Heritage Quote

"For I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents."

-- Thomas Jefferson (letter to John Adams, 28 October 1813)

Arab perceptions

DJ Drummond, over at Polipundit has an excellent discussion about what some Arabs are saying about terrorism and the U.S.. Here's an exceprt:

I asked my Arab and Muslim acquaintances about the attitude which seems prominent among them, to allow the more radical and militant voices to speak for the whole and give the false impression, if it is indeed false, that Islam and the Arab world hate the West and America in particular, and wish to wage war against us in the name of their religion. As I expected, the general reaction to such a claim was one of angry denial in various degrees, though finding out why there is no effective push-back to the Jihadists is a long and murky process.

Recommended.

[Hat tip to Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants.]

The fiction of moral relativism

Selwyn Duke, at The American Thinker has posted a fascinating essay about moral equivalence.

If anything renders people sheep among wolves, it's when they convince themselves that every creature is a sheep. We live in an age in which one of the few sins is giving offense, one of the only virtues is a tendentious tolerance and one of the top priorities is getting along. In light of this, it's not surprising that a steadfast refusal to draw moral distinctions is all the rage.

It will make you think. Recommended.

On the ground in Iraq

Ralph Peters has another editorial about his recent experience in Iraq. In it, he reports on the Iraq Army's role in ensuring that the Samarra shrine bombing did not result in civil war.

AMONG the many positive stories you aren't being told about Iraq, the media ignored another big one last week: In the wake of the terrorist bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra, it was the Iraqi army that kept the peace in the streets.

He goes on to list some facts about last week (emphasis is the author's):

* The Iraqi army deployed over 100,000 soldiers to maintain public order. U.S. Forces remained available as a backup, but Iraqi soldiers controlled the streets.

* Iraqi forces behaved with discipline and restraint - as the local sectarian outbreaks fizzled, not one civilian had been killed by an Iraqi soldier.

* Time and again, Iraqi military officers were able to defuse potential confrontations and frustrate terrorist hopes of igniting a religious war.

* Forty-seven battalions drawn from all 10 of Iraq's army divisions took part in an operation that, above all, aimed at reassuring the public. The effort worked - from the luxury districts to the slums, the Iraqis were proud of their army.

He then went on with interviews of the Iraqi Army commander, Lt.-Gen. Abdul Qadir; one of his American advisors, Col. Tom McCool; and Brig.-Gen. Dan Bolger, the U.S. Army officer charged with "assisting the Iraqis in forming their military."

He goes on to say (emphsis is the author's):

This is a gigantic struggle for indescribably high stakes. We're trying to help a failing civilization rescue itself, to lift a vast region out of the grip of terror and fanaticism, and to make this troubled world safer for our own citizens. Don't let anyone tell you we're failing in Iraq.

Go read the whole thing. You'll be glad you did.

Heritage Quote

"We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die: Our won Country's Honor, all call upon us for vigorous and manly exertion, and if we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world. Let us therefore rely upon the goodness of the Cause, and the aid of the supreme Being, in whose hands Victory is, to animate and encourage us to great and noble Actions. "

-- George Washington (General Orders, 2 July 1776)

Villains Vanquished redux

I don't know why, but it seems as if new parents are compelled to change their decor. Anyway, go check out Phoenix's newly remodeled digs.

It seems that Apothegm Designs' highly-talented fingerprints are all over that place. Phoenix may want to make liberal use of a good disinfectant before exposing her baby to it, though!

(Actually, I'll bet she already has . . . ;)

Civil war in Iraq?

Ralph Peters, a correspondent with the New York Post, is currently riding with the 506 Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, in Baghdad, and reports his observations on the "civil war" in Iraq that we keep hearing about. Here's an excerpt:

Let me tell you what I saw anyway. Rolling with the "instant Infantry" gunners of the 1st Platoon of Bravo Battery, 4-320 Field Artillery, I saw children and teenagers in a Shia slum jumping up and down and cheering our troops as they drove by. Cheering our troops.

All day - and it was a long day - we drove through Shia and Sunni neighborhoods. Everywhere, the reception was warm. No violence. None.

And no hostility toward our troops. Iraqis went out of their way to tell us we were welcome.

This report certainly flies in the face of the media's general assertion that Iraq is fraught with sectarian violence and disdain, or even hatred, for our troops.

Go read the whole thing.

Wage war against Islam?

Jack Kelly, over at the Pittsburg Post-Gazette does a good job of discussing the real difference between "Islamists" and moderate Muslims. Alas, he is unkind to journalists, but they do seem to be part of the problem:

It is easier to find moderate Muslims who are willing to speak out than to find journalists who will pay much attention to what they have to say. Afghans, Iraqis and Lebanese struggling for liberty and democracy are given short shrift because to give them proper credit would be to give indirect credit to George W. Bush.

Recommended.

Katrina's myth-ing facts

Noel Sheppard, an economist, business owner, and writer, has an op-ed up at The American Thinker that discusses seven myths about Hurricane Katrina that were perpetuated by, but never subsequently dispelled by, the news media. He uses Popular Mechanics magazine as his resource. Here's an excerpt:

In its March issue, PM took on virtually all of the media myths and misnomers that were so drilled into the citizenry by press representatives that many have become part of the public psyche. Thankfully, its authors made it clear right in the first paragraph that they planned on pulling no punches:

“In the months since the storm, many of the first impressions conveyed by the media have turned out to be mistaken.”

Our national media should be ashamed at their pathetic reporting about Katrina.

It's an interesting read . . .

Heritage Quote

"I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil. Everything we do is to improve it, if it happens in our day; if not, let us transmit to our descendants, together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot and an abhorrence of slavery."

-- Patrick Henry (letter to Robert Pleasants, 18 January 1773)

Heritage Quote

[T]he great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachment of the others.

-- James Madison (Federalist No. 10, 23 November 1787)

Global warming cooling?

A while back I read an interesting article at 21st Century Science and Technology online magazine about the impending Ice Age, and how it will come about.

Here is the link to a PDF of "The Ice Age is Coming" by Zbigniew Jaworowski, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc. which is a much more thorough scientific treatment of the subject.

Needless to say, I don't think global warming is as universally accepted as is being depicted by most news organization.

[Hat tip to Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants.]

Espionage Act

Michael Barone, over at U.S. News mulls over whether or not newspapers should be prosecuted for violating the Espionage Act.

Here's a fascinating issue, and one of great importance for the news business: whether the government should prosecute newspapers for printing classified information and government employees for divulging it. Specifically, should the New York Times be prosecuted for its Dec. 16, 2005, story on the NSA surveillance of communications between suspected al Qaeda operatives abroad and people in the United States?

It's not as straightforward as I'd like to think it is. Recommended.

Heritage Quote

"Government, in my humble opinion, should be formed to secure and to enlarge the exercise of the natural rights of its members; and every government, which has not this in view, as its principal object, is not a government of the legitimate kind."

-- James Wilson (Lectures on Law, 1791)

Saddam's legacy

Michael J. Totten has an entry in his blog about one of Saddam's torture complexes in Kurdistan. Mr. Totten is currently in country. The subject matter is extremely unpleasant, but is directly applicable to why it was good that we deposed that monster and his evil henchmen.

Heritage Quote

"As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions."

-- James Madison (National Gazette Essay, 27 March 1792)

NOLA breach redux

Yet again, it seems as if news is being created by our journalistic brethren. This time it is a rehash of the Fed's understanding of the potential severity of flooding in New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Ed Morrisey does a good job of showing that the news media is working very hard to make the Bush administration look bad. No surprises there.

Here is Mr. Morrissey's conclusion:

The media got it wrong yet again on Katrina. The notion that the experts warned of levee breaches is nothing more than a hack job initiated by the AP and continued by the rest of the Exempt Media even after the source material has proven it false.

Go read the well-researched arguments that lead to this conclusion.

Key terrorist captured in Bangladesh

Abdur Rahman, one of the original signatories of Osama bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa declaring war against the West, is arrested.

Go read about it at Bill Roggio's blog. Recommended.

Zogby poll of our troops

Jason, over at Generation Why?, seems to have a good time in this most excellent deconstruction of the Zogby poll analysis.

Now that Kristof and the Old Gray Lady have given their marching orders, be prepared for the onslaught of coverage and endless analysis by the rest of the MSM on this "bombshell poll". I only hope I'm not the only one who spent 20 bucks to get the whole picture.

Go read the whole post -- and then thank him for spending the twenty bucks . . . and for his time in setting the record straight.

Heritage Quote

"He that goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing."

-- Benjamin Franklin (from his writings, 1758)

Constitution quiz

Phoenix, over at Villians Vanquished has posted a pop quiz about the U.S. Constitution.

I only got 19 of 25 right (the amendment-specific questions kicked my tail), but that's still passing, at least. And considering I haven't studied the subject in over 20 years, I figure I'm doing all right.

However . . . I think I'm going to spend some time getting reacquainted with the Constitution of the United States of America. After all, it's my government . . .

More on the WMD question

It turns out that Saddam Hussein liked to record conversations that took place in his office. Evidently, a whole slew of these tapes were captured during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. CNN has published an article that reports on the content of some of Saddam's tapes wherein he and his senior aides discuss deceiving the U.N. WMD inspectors -- among other things. Here's a taste:

Hussein also can be heard speaking with high-ranking Iraqi officials about deceiving United Nations inspectors looking into Iraq's weapons program, which his son-in-law, Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, oversaw.

Recommended reading.

I share Sarah's puzzlement about why this story has not gotten more press. After all, it is evidence that the U.S. intel on Iraqi WMDs prior to the invasion was not far off. So why is it not being presented with as much fervor as the "Bush lied" meme? Especially since it supports the assertion that Bush did NOT, in fact, lie.

Oh . . . maybe that is why. . .

Democracies rising

OpinionJournal has a thoughtful editorial about democracy in the Middle East -- and our perceptions of it. It starts thusly:

In the matter of Middle East elections, the results of which we don't always like: Anyone out there have a better idea?

We ask amid some recent wringing of hands following elections for the Palestinian legislature, in which the terrorist group Hamas won an outright majority; elections in Iraq, where voters cast their ballots along sectarian lines, and a strong showing by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt's parliamentary elections late last year.

The rest is in the extended entry.

I recommend it.

Democracy Angst
What's the alternative to promoting freedom in the Middle East?

Monday, February 27, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

In the matter of Middle East elections, the results of which we don't always like: Anyone out there have a better idea?

We ask amid some recent wringing of hands following elections for the Palestinian legislature, in which the terrorist group Hamas won an outright majority; elections in Iraq, where voters cast their ballots along sectarian lines, and a strong showing by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt's parliamentary elections late last year.

"For some, the promotion of democracy promises an easy resolution to the many difficult problems we face," says Illinois Congressman Henry Hyde. "But I believe that great caution is warranted here." And from the man who once gave us the "end of history," we now have the demise of neoconservatism: "Promoting democracy and modernization in the Middle East," writes Francis Fukuyama in a new book, "is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem worse."

The brilliant insight here is that democratic processes don't always lead to liberal outcomes. Actually, that's not an insight: The world has had fair warning on this score at least since Adolf Hitler came to power democratically in 1933. We can be thankful, however, that the experience of Nazism did not deter successive generations of Germans from persevering with the democratic experiment.

Still, the underlying argument deserves thoughtful consideration, and it goes something like this: Contrary to the rhetoric of the Bush Administration, the taste for freedom--and the ability to exercise it responsibly--is far from universal. Culture is decisive. Liberal democracies are the product of long-term trends such as the collapse of communal loyalties, urbanization, the separation of church and state and the political empowerment of the bourgeoisie. Absent these things, say the critics, democratic and liberal institutions are built on foundations of sand and are destined to collapse.

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This account more or less describes the rise of liberal democracies in the West. Yet simply because it took centuries to establish a liberal-democratic order in Europe, it does not follow that it must take centuries more to establish one in the Middle East. Japan took about 100 years to transform itself (and be transformed) from a feudal society into a modern industrial democracy. South Korea made a similar leap in about 40 years; Thailand went from quasi-military dictatorships to a genuine constitutional monarchy in about 20. As the practice of liberal democracy has spread, the time it takes nondemocratic societies to acquire that practice has diminished.

But, say the critics, Islamic and particularly Arab countries are uniquely resistant to change. Between 1981 and 2001 the number of non-Islamic countries rated "free"--that is to say, both democratic and liberal--increased by 34, according to Freedom House. By contrast the number of free Islamic countries remained constant at one, in the form of landlocked Mali. During the same period, the number of Islamic countries ranked "not free" increased by 10.

No doubt deep-seated cultural factors go some way toward explaining these statistics. But why seek abstruse explanations? In the same period when the U.S. was encouraging democratic openings in Eastern Europe, East Asia and Latin America--areas previously thought impervious to liberty, often for "cultural" reasons--it was supporting or tolerating undemocratic and illiberal regimes in the Middle East.

That period also coincided with the rise of al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah, the first World Trade Center bombing, the bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa and the USS Cole, the outbreak of the terrorist intifada in Israel, and September 11. Mr. Fukuyama may or may not be right that promoting democracy does not resolve the problem of terrorism in the short-term. What we know for sure is that tolerating dictatorship not only doesn't resolve the terrorist problem but actively nurtures it.

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Which brings us back to the question of what American policy should be. One answer is to retreat completely in the hopes of being left alone. This is the formula recently suggested by Osama bin Laden; those who would credit it must also entrust themselves to him.

Another answer is to encourage friendly autocrats to "modernize" their countries without necessarily creating the kinds of democratic openings through which Islamic fundamentalists could come to power. This is what the U.S. has been attempting in Egypt for the past three decades, without success. A related idea is to promote liberal democratic ideals by means of "soft power"--McDonald's, Oprah, USAID, Voice of America, Britney Spears. Soft power has much to recommend it, though generally only as a complement to hard power. Absent the latter, it is powerless to defend the very people it inspires, especially when the tanks are rolling.

Then there is the supposedly failed policy of the Bush Administration. In five years, it has brought four democratic governments to power in the Middle East: by force of arms in Afghanistan and Iraq, and through highly assertive diplomacy in Lebanon and Palestine. Mr. Fukuyama tells us that "by definition, outsiders can't 'impose' democracy on a country that doesn't want it."

Leaving aside the niggling examples of Japan and Germany, exactly how are we to know that country X does not want democracy, except democratically? Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians and Lebanese have all made their democratic preferences plain in successive recent elections. And with the arguable exception of the Palestinians (arguable because Fatah was as undemocratic as Hamas), they have voted to establish considerably more liberal regimes than what existed previously.

This is not to say democracy is a cure-all. It is also not to say that the peril these democracies face, from terrorist insurrection or ethnic or religious feuding, isn't grave. Nor, finally, is it to say that the "Hitler scenario" can be excluded in a democratizing Middle East; that possibility is always present, especially among nascent democracies.

But democracy also offers the possibility of greater liberalism and greater moderation, possibilities that have been opened with the courageously pro-American governments of Hamid Karzai, Jalal Talabani and Saad Hariri. And as we stand with them, it seems to us that America's bets are better placed promoting democracies--even if some of them succumb to illiberal temptations--than acceding to dictatorships, which already have.

Or does someone have a better idea?

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

Heritage Quote

"Each individual of the society has a right to be protected by it in the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property, according to standing laws. He is obliged, consequently, to contribute his share to the expense of this protection; and to give his personal service, or an equivalent, when necessary. But no part of the property of any individual can, with justice, be taken from him, or applied to public uses, without his own consent, or that of the representative body of the people. In fine, the people of this commonwealth are not controllable by any other laws than those to which their constitutional representative body have given their consent."

-- John Adams (Thoughts on Government, 1776)

Shrine bombing aftermath

Jack Kelly, over at Irish Pennants has an excellent commentary up about the Iraqis' refusal to participate in a civil war.

Those danged Iraqis. They continue to disappoint by failing to be disappointing. Could it be that most of them value freedom, democracy and peace as much as white Christians do?

Highly recommended.

Iraqi civil war?

Ralph Peters gives a first-person account of the conditions in Baghdad at the New York Post Online website. Contrary to many mainstream media reports, here is what he observed:

I FLEW over the streets of this city on Sunday. The calm made a striking contrast to the media hysteria. No mosques burned. No demonstrations seethed. The closest thing I saw to violence was a children's soccer game played in a suburb.

Baghdad isn't Candyland, of course. We skimmed the city at 300 feet — combat altitude — with the Blackhawk's guns up.

But it sure wasn't civil war. For now, at least, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his blood-cult terrorists haven't succeeded in pitting Sunni against Shia.

Go read the rest.

History lesson

Edward Bernard Glick provides an essay on the origins of the Hebrew-Arab conflict in Israel. Here's how he starts:

History doesn't solve problems, but it explains them, including the evolution of the intractable Israel-Palestine problem.

Recommended.

Heritage Quote

"The nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest."

-- George Washington (letter to Alexander Hamilton, 8 May 1796)

A sitrep from Iraq

David Frum has an article at the American Enterprise Institute website wherein he describes his impressions of things in Iraq that he noted during a short trip there. He also spoke of the need to finish the job:

Here's something you don't have to come to Iraq to appreciate: If an elected government can stabilize itself here--if an Iraqi army, overwhelmingly Muslim, can fight and defeat jihadist extremists--the victory will deliver a crushing blow to extremists everywhere. It's significant, I think, that Iraqis have not mounted large demonstrations against the Danish cartoons. As a matter of fact, at a dinner served by an Iraqi-owned catering company, every plate came equipped with three pats of butter prominently labelled, "Product of Denmark."

If, on the other hand, Iraq were to fail--if the insurgents pushed Iraq into chaos--the whole world would pay. I asked yet another U.S. officer: Why not just quit and withdraw? He answered, "These [jihadis] would follow us home."

Recommended.

[Hat tip to the Anchoress.]

No sympathy

Betsy Newmark is unsympathetic to the situation the press corps have managed to get themselves into.

I have to agree with Betsy . . .

Marriage quiz (with answer key)

Maggie Gallagher, author and president of the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy has a pop quiz about marriage. And then she reveals the answers. Talk about instant gratification!

But seriously, you may find some of the answers surprising . . .