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Special posting today: I just heard a 3:45 video of a poignant poem set to music, "A Soldier's 'Silent Night'", composed in 2002. Let LFTC's last 2006 posting remember those who keep us all free. And may all our soldiers, the magnificent men and women of the United States military, have a safe and Merry Christmas and and a most Happy 2007.
4 posts today: (1) One Brit's True Grit--Us v. Them; (2) You and Me: Our 2006--Cyber-Serendip; (2) Sanitizing the Genocidal--MSM Murders; (4) Jim Baker Negotiates With Iran--Cyber-Serendip. LFTC goes now on holiday vacation (a nicer word than hiatus) starting tomorrow, coincidentally the Winter Solstice; days will start getting longer Friday. LFTC will return in a fortnight, on Wednesday, January 3, 2007, when the new (110th) Congress convenes.
David Pryce-Jones gives us the name of a true hero: Bryan Budd, a British SAS officer who was posted to Afghanistan, in the Afghan highlands. Corporal Budd, serving with the SAS Parachute Regiment, first rescued a comrade held hostage by storming a house and killing the captors; then Corporal Budd saved several comrades in a firefight by charging the Taliban with his weapon set on automatic. He was killed in the action. For his gallantry, Corporal Budd has been awarded Britain's highest combat honor, the Victoria Cross. Remember him come Christmas.
Time Magazine's 2006 Person of the Year is...YOU! Time's "You!" is the explosion of content creation, distributed over the World Wide Web, which includes the "blogosphere" of which LFTC is one tiny part. Now, before you get excited, remember that prior honorees have not always been so charming--Hitler, Mao, etc. Time's criterion is "most influential," whether naughty or nice by Santa's tally. Those of us born after 1940 were collective winners before, in 1966, when Time chose the under-25 generation. Women born since 1941 are three-time winners, as women collectively were the 1975 choice. A machine even won once, when the PC was selected in 1982. Also, less than flattering are the 2006 winners Time chose to highlight given in this article.
For LFTC 2006 was a year best described as unusual. First and happiest, LFTC's extended readership family expanded. Second, and sadly, LFTC was forced into a four-month mid-year hiatus for family reasons. Third, and most surprisingly, my intended two-part evaluation of where we stand five years after 9/11 grew like topsy, to ten parts and 23,000 words. Trimmed to 15,000 then roughly tripled in the past three months, and presto! It is a book that will come out early next year. During the writing of the online material I had no thought of morphing it into a book. The title is still in flux during the final editing process. The basic focus is on two wars: (1) what John Abizaid calls the "Long War"--the ideological, multi-generational component of our survival struggle with Islamism; (2) what I call the "Short War"--the race to stop Iran getting The Bomb.
Back to Time's "You!" and LFTC. In 2005 LFTC's closing message recapped major themes covered during its first year. For 2006 such a summary is less useful for two reasons: (1) Mideast wars so overshadowed other issues--dominating even the off-year elections; and (2) the four-month hiatus for LFTC truncated the posting corpus. Instead, here are a few thoughts on what LFTC has become for me, and what I hope it has become for you.
For me, LFTC authorship has forced me to sharpen my thinking and writing, prioritize issues and reconsider my own positions, as evidence and argument elsewhere comes to my attention. My positions as to what kind of wars we fight, and what to do in Iraq, for example, are by no means the same as they were even when in late September I posted the first installments of my five-year assessment. LFTC postings made possible a relatively quick creation of a book, which I hope will present LFTC's ideas to a wider audience--within and outside of the Beltway--and thus increase website visitors to LFTC.
For LFTC readers, I hope that LFTC presents issues in a way that sharpens your thinking, too, as to what is important and what, if anything, can be done about things. So we march forward, if not always in lockstep, side by side, into 2007.
May 2007 bring all of you good health and much happiness.
Time's editors said that had they picked a single person as Person of the Year they would have selected..Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose they describe in a photo essay as an "Iranian Paradox." The 14 photos presented make a magnificent montage for any politician in the West, running for elective office--a shot of young adulthood, meeting with leaders, seated in the UN General Assembly (where truly he belongs, all the time) addressing students, etc. My personal favorites are #5, #8 and #12, all taken in August 2006. It seems that Ahmadinejad had a stellar month in August 2006.
#5 shows him visiting an Iranian town, Ardabil. He is standing up in an open-top car, waving to crowds lining a boulevard. Time's caption describes him as having "fashioned himself into an Iranian Everyman"...by focusing on "economic issues" and "vowing to fight corruption." #8 shows him on the airport tarmac, after arriving by helicopter in West Azerbaijan, just, Time informs us, "after he defied the UN Security Council deadline to halt uranium enrichment." And #14, taken at a public meeting in Ardabil, shows him standing before his fellow citizens, with hand on heart, a reverential expression on his face. Time's caption tells us that at that event he "vowed to stand by Iran's nuclear work, saying the UN cannot deprive Iran of its rights."
Now one cannot expect Time to capture all the events and statements that Ahmadinejad, or anyone else, makes in a lifetime. Fair enough. But what did they miss? Well, for starters, how about MA calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map?" How about his calling for "death to America?" How about his presiding over a monster global Holocaust denial event in Tehran? Or his presiding over a Holocaust and Jew-mocking cartoon contest, also in Tehran?
In a companion interview with "Iran's agitator" (for what, social justice? global understanding and tolerance?) Time notes MA's Holocaust denial, but then says: "His denials of the Holocaust and his threat to destroy Israel cause shudders in the West but have made him an icon throughout the Muslim world." An icon. The scary part: That much is indeed true. But my favorite MA quote is this gem: "People should be talked too with reason." Gotta give it to the guy--he has a sense of humor. Of the Tehran Holocaust-denial hate-fest, asked by Time why, instead of holding the confab, he doesn't press for a "dialogue" between Israel and the Palestinians, MA responded: "As a matter of fact, this conference was in line with peace."
Let's assume that MA really intends to push economic development and fight corruption. Are those goals more important than MA's Hitlerian anti-Semitism, threats to vaporize a UN-member state, resurrection of Nazi-like demonizing and ridiculing of the Jews? In the wild, weird world of MSM, apparently so. And that bodes ill for everyone who cares about the survival of Western civilization--even for the survival of the MSM types who seek peace by sanitizing our mortal enemies to the point of hagiography.
For the truth, kudos to NRO's David Frum for pointing me me to a story in the Dec. 18 Guardian Unlimited, telling how Iranian students who vigorously protested against MA last week are now in hiding, as MA's thugs hunt for them. Freedom of dissent, it seems, is the "corruption" MA intends to root out. Meantime, the latest Mossad estimate is that Iran is 3 to 4 years away from a nuclear bomb. Ahmadinejad, in a masterpiece of timing with Time's obtuseness, proclaimed publicly today that Iran is a "nuclear power" for having completed the nuclear fuel cycle, enabling civil nuclear power generation, and a key step on fabricating bombs. Come to think of it, a nuke can rid the world of lots of "corrupt" folks (albeit, there is a collateral damage issue as to folks not corrupt, but when you make an omelette...).
LFTC readers should end 2006, a most unfunny year indeed, with a well-earned laugh. A Hollywood type, David Zucker, has placed on YouTube a hilarious two-minute video with actors showing how Jim Baker would negotiated with Iran.
5 posts: (1) Iraq: Has Bush Embraced Kagan-Keane?--Us v. Them; (2) Mideast Anti-Semitism: The Core--Us v. Them; (3) Wanted: Mideast Pinochets--Us v. Them; (4) Webbonomics Meets the Real Economy--"It's the Earth Stupid!"; (5) Publish or (Professionally) Perish--Literally--Class & Crass.
Fred Barnes writes that President Bush has embraced the plan (posted 12/18/ on LFTC) floated publicly by AEI scholar Frederick W. Kagan, which is co-sponsored by retired Army Vice-Chief of Staff John Keane. Kagan-Keane draws on the Creighton Abrams (for whom the M-1 tank is named) plan in Vietnam ("clear and hold"--which supplanted William Westmoreland's "attrition" plan); the Abrams plan was headed for military victory when Congress cut off funds. Kagan-Keane calls for a 50,000 troop "surge" operation centered on Baghdad; the military maintains that 80 percent of the violence in Iraq is within a 35-mile radius of the capital.
A "mega-question" (as John McLaughlin might put it): If Bush's current commanders (John Abizaid and George Casey) do not believe in the plan, will Bush trust them to fully implement it? In 1914, Helmut von Moltke the Younger failed to fully carry out the 1890 von Schlieffen plan, which called for hurlng all Germany's troops into a "wheel" sweep through Belgium; as the great historian Alistair Horne recounts in What Price Glory?, the younger Moltke, lacking has famed father's elan, withheld a few divisions in reserve along the Franco-German border, thus depriving the main thrust of the added punch that might have put the Germans in Paris.
Ralph Peters says send more troops only if we really mean to win; he proposes what he calls a "zero tolerance" plan that would require two years to carry out. But Fareed Zakharia argues that Bush must pull back in Iraq, else his democracy focus will be doomed in the Mideast, as Iraq is a poster-child for democracy's defects--at least, in the Mideast. In the event, initial reaction at the Pentagon has been favorable, Barnes reports. Dubya, it seems, is ready to double down on his Iraq wager. Stay tuned.
As Bret Stephens shows in his Dec. 16 column, European anti-Semitism primarily takes the form of false and malicious--and even absurd--attacks that equate Israel with the Nazis. Things like equating 60 dead in Jenin (2002) with the Warsaw Ghetto (57,000 dead). In the Mideast the forms anti-Semitism take are many. Holocaust denial, as with the noxious Tehran conference last week, is one form. But as Muslim expatriate Ayan Hirsi Ali explains about Mideast education, many Muslim are not deniers. A true denier is someone who, confronted with overwhelming evidence that the Holocaust did happen, rejects the evidence and adopts some crackpot alternate theory (staged photos, only a few hundred thousand died, mostly of disease, etc.) Most Muslims, however, are simply factually ignorant of the Holocaust. Writes Ali: "Growing up as a child in Saudi Arabia, I
remember my teachers, my mom and our neighbors telling us practically
on a daily basis that Jews were evil, the sworn enemies of Muslims
whose only goal was to destroy Islam. We were never informed about the
Holocaust. "Later in Kenya, as a teenager, when Saudi and other Gulf
philanthropy reached us in Africa, I remember that the building of
mosques and donations to hospitals and the poor went hand in hand with
the cursing of Jews. Jews were said to be responsible for the deaths of
babies, epidemics like AIDS, for the cause of wars. They were greedy
and would do absolutely anything to kill us Muslims. And if we ever
wanted to know peace and stability we would have to destroy them before
they would wipe us out. For those of us who were not in a position to
take arms against the Jews it was enough for us to cup our hands, raise
our eyes heavenward and pray to Allah to destroy them. "Western leaders today who say they are shocked by the conference of
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran denying the Holocaust need to
wake up to that reality. For the majority of Muslims in the world the
Holocaust is not a major historical event they deny; they simply do not
know because they were never informed. Worse, most of us are groomed to
wish for a Holocaust of Jews."
It is very un-P.C., to say, but as least as to the Jews, and to the West as a whole, pretty much 100 percent of what Mideast children learn is lies. Lies, period. This is of a piece with Palestinian kids going to schools that use maps which lack Israel. The UN makes this worse. A tabulation of human rights actions at the UN shows Israel by far the main target. At the 56th anniversary commemoration of the 1947 UN Partition of Palestine, the UN HQ displayed a map of the Mideast that excluded Israel. In 2001, a fortnight before 9/11, the UN held a conference in Durban, South Africa that was an anti-Semitic hate-fest of Nazi proportions. Check out these Durban confab still-images for a flavor.
In 1996 eight stages of genocide were described by scholar Gregory Stanton: (1) classification; (2) symbolization; (3) dehumanization; (4) organization; (5) polarization; (6) preparation; (7) extermination; (8) denial. Anti-Semitism grows, and grows, with half-hearted condemnations unaccompanied by serious action. And the monster grows, and grows....
LFTC on 12/14/06 published an assessment of the just-deceased Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, noting that he was less repressive than Marxist dictators, and unlike most Marxists, held an election and stepped aside upon losing. Chile today is prosperous and free. There is, suggests NRO's Jonah Goldberg, a need for an Iraqi Pinochet. By the same logic, upon regime change in Iran a Persian Pinochet would be useful, too. Why?
What the failed attempts to bring liberal democracy to Iraq, the West Bank and Lebanon show is that societies with little or no democratic tradition and with powerful extremist elements within, are poor candidates for rapid democratization. As political scientist Crane Brinton wrote in his classic study, Anatomy of Revolution (1952), after a revolution engineered by a coalition of moderate and extreme elements, the dispute that inevitably arises between them is settled by the extremists, who simply kill the moderates. Not nice, but quite effective.
Societies with dictatorial pasts often lack an essential leavening element for democracy: the existence of powerful, well-organized moderate groups. The remedy? Install a Pinochet who, as did Chile's, kills the extremists first. Then a transition to democracy can be effected. Meanwhile, clandestine assistance to moderate political parties, as was given by the CIA in Italy in 1947, helps build centers of moderate power. Extremists, by their nature, tend to be more activist than moderates, because their passions are more fully engaged. When these are wedded to gun-toting, jihadist militias, like the Mahdi Army in Iraq, the results are lethal for genuine liberal democracy.
But what if the Mideast Pinochets, if they can be found, decline to step down? Democracy is delayed, but not precluded. A revolutionary projection of power is not regime policy. We can live with that, probably more easily than with an illiberal pseudo-democracy that has the superficial form without the genuine commitment to same.
Learn more in my new book: The Long War Ahead And
The Short War Upon Us
